Honestly with Bari Weiss

Last week, a man armed with an assault rifle was apprehended on a southern Florida golf course. He was planning to murder Donald Trump on the links. It was the second near miss in two months. It seems likely that the shooter, Ryan Routh, was acting alone. But he is not alone in the hatred he has for Trump. He shares that with millions of Americans. In many people’s eyes, the 45th president of the United States is an existential threat to our republic. And ever since Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, his opponents have treated him as such. 

They were shocked because Trump broke many of the rules of modern politics. From the minor to the unprecedentedly major. This dynamic between Trump and his haters has changed the chemistry of American politics. In 2016, Trump shocked the country when he led rallies where his adoring fans chanted, “Lock her up.” Eight years later, crowds chant “Lock him up” at Kamala Harris’s rallies. In this respect, Routh is part of a larger problem that is tearing our country apart. When the other side vying for power is considered so beyond the pale, the norms of political decorum and fairness are worth breaking to stop an opponent that threatens our very system. You hear it from both parties. Trump is an “extinction-level event.” If Kamala wins, our country will become “Venezuela on steroids.” 

One escalation begets the next, until the old customs and rules of our politics have changed forever. We take it for granted today that we settle our elections with voting and not shooting. But republics don’t last forever. And when they fall, violence almost always follows. 

What leads a republic to choose the gun over the ballot? Because it doesn’t happen all at once, at least if history is any guide. In ancient Rome, the rule-breaking of one man—and the response of his enemies—created a crisis from which the Roman republic never really recovered. His name was Tiberius Gracchus. And while they were different in many ways, he was the Donald Trump of his day. 

Tiberius, like Trump, was an elite who turned on the elites, a class traitor who channeled the resentments and anger of the common man against a system rigged against him. Both men disregarded the unwritten political rules of their era. And, in turn, those norm violations prompted their enemies to disregard the rules themselves. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed and eventually the death of the republic itself. 

In America, we remain a republic, for now, but the cycle of escalations between Trump and his opponents strains our foundations like no political crisis since the civil war. Today, Eli Lake explains what the beginning of the end of the Roman republic tells us about the fate of our own republic.

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If you’re a listener of this show, then you’ve probably heard of the horseshoe theory. It’s basically this idea that when you go far enough to the left and far enough to the right, the voices start to sound pretty similar. This is certainly the case when you listen to sound bites of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump talk about trade and tariffs. 

But during this time—what my colleague Peter Savodnik has called our great political scramble—some voices don’t seem to fit in anywhere, voices like that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Senator Paul is a bit of an anomaly on the American right. He’s traditionally libertarian, pro free trade, pro market, and anti subsidy. He’s a deficit hawk and criticizes both Trump and Biden on spending, and he is one of just seven senators who still refuses to endorse Trump. He says it’s over the $1.9 trillion deficit.

Senator Paul says to lower the deficit we’d need to cut military spending, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, and cut Social Security. But neither Republicans nor Democrats will go near those sacred cows these days. 

All of these attributes make him an endangered species in a party that is less fiscally conservative, more protectionist, and increasingly anti immigration—all positions that are antithetical to Rand Paul’s libertarian worldview. At the same time, Senator Paul is having somewhat of a renaissance when it comes to his foreign policy outlook. The new right and the MAGA movement are the opposite of the Reagan-era neocons skeptical of our ambitions abroad, and firmly against the “forever wars.” All stances Senator Paul agrees with. 

Today, we talk to Senator Paul to find out how he fits into the new right, when Republicans stopped caring about balancing the budget, why he wants to cut military spending, and cut aid to Israel. We ask if the U.S. can remain the world’s hegemon, while spending less, and if that’s even still a worthy goal, and finally, how Donald Trump and J.D. Vance totally lost the plot.

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On Tuesday, hundreds of encrypted pagers in Lebanon and Syria began exploding at the same time. Lebanon’s health minister said Tuesday that at least nine people were killed and 2,800 were injured. The tiny country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering from burn wounds, blown-up hands, and groin injuries. The pagers belonged to members of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. 

Then, just 24 hours later, a second wave of thousands more explosions again went off simultaneously in Lebanon: This time not only pagers, but also walkie-talkies all belonging to Hezbollah terrorists. 

It was the stuff of spy movies—an incredibly sophisticated and precise operation unlike anything we’ve seen before. And while Israel has not officially taken responsibility, this kind of imaginative sabotage has Mossad written all over it. Hezbollah has vowed retaliation against Israel. 

This comes after almost a year of Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel. Since October 7, the constant barrage of attacks has forced some 100,000 Israelis to flee their homes on Israel’s northern border. Nearly a year later, they still cannot return. 

All of this, of course, is part of a much larger, more dangerous game being played across the region—Israel’s shadow war with Iran, its most formidable adversary. For years, Israel and Iran have avoided direct conflict, preferring to fight through Iran’s regional surrogates—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen. All of them fueled by Iranian money, weapons, and ideology.

Will Israel’s alleged tactical brilliance this week—jokingly dubbed as Operation Below the Belt on social media—deter Hezbollah from continuing to launch the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for Israeli citizens to return home? Or is military intervention—a ground invasion—inevitable?

As Eli Lake wrote in The Free Press today, “Israel cannot defeat its enemies by waging war only in the shadows.” 

Today, I sat down with journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dexter Filkins to talk about all of it. Dexter has been covering wars in the Middle East for decades for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and has been called “the premier combat journalist of his generation.” 

In our conversation, we discussed the state of the war, political divisions within Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear program, the viability of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, and the difficulties for the United States of disengaging from Middle East conflicts. 

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The American dream is the most important of our national myths. It’s the idea that, with hard work and determination, anyone in this country can achieve middle-class security, own a home, start a family, and provide the children they raise with a better life than they had. Is that still true?

On the one hand, our economy is the envy of the world. We are the richest country, leading the pack when it comes to innovation. And more people choose to move here for economic opportunity than to any other nation.

And yet, everywhere you look in this country, there is a growing sense of pessimism. A sense that you can work hard, play by the rules, even go to college, and still end up saddled with debt and unable to afford the basics, like a home.

Americans were told that higher education would be their ticket to the good life. Now, there’s more than $1.7 trillion dollars in student loan debt hanging over a generation. Americans were told that free trade would make everyone prosper. But try telling that to the 4.5 million people who lost their manufacturing jobs in the last 30 years.

Perhaps all of this is why a July Wall Street Journal poll found that only 9 percent of Americans say they believe that financial security is a realistic goal. And only 8 percent believe that a comfortable retirement is possible for them.

Now, do those numbers reflect reality? Or just negative vibes?

Last week, we convened four expert debaters in Washington, D.C., to hash out the question: Is the American dream alive and well?

Arguing that yes, the American dream is alive and well, is economist Tyler Cowen. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He also writes the essential blog Marginal Revolution. Joining Tyler is Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian Reason magazine and co-host of The Reason Roundtable podcast.

Arguing that no, the American dream is not flourishing, is David Leonhardt, senior writer at The New York Times and the author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. David has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Joining David is Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.

Before the debate, 71 percent of our audience said that yes, the American Dream is alive and well, and 29 percent voted no. At the end of the night, we polled them again—and you’ll see for yourself which side won.

This debate was made possible by the generosity of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. If you care about free speech, FIRE is an organization that should be on your radar.

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Last night was the much-anticipated presidential debate between incumbent vice president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. There was no live audience, but the bashing and accusations, one against the other, were all the same. 

Trump called Kamala a Marxist. Kamala called Trump a liar. Kamala said Trump is for America’s wealthiest. Trump said Kamala is for killing babies at term. Trump said Kamala “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” And Kamala said Trump is simply a disgrace.

Of course, they went head-to-head on the normal issues: the economy, tariffs, abortion, China, fracking, policing in America, January 6, foreign policy, and—eating cats!? Not so normal. 

If you didn’t watch the debate, if you’re not on social media, or if you didn’t receive memes from your family group chat, let me explain. First, Kamala baited Trump on a question about his campaign rallies.

It got under his skin. He fell for it. Which then led him into a long rant about immigrants, which brings us back to the cat thing. Because in his words, immigrants are crossing the border, settling in Ohio, and stealing—and eating—our pets.

The moderator fact-checked him: “We have talked to the city manager of Springfield, and there are no credible reports of pets being taken and eaten.” To which Trump responded: “But I saw it on television!”

All Kamala needed to do was stand there and smile. As the debate went on, Trump reaffirmed that he thinks he won the 2020 election; He doubled down on the idea that doctors are executing babies after they’re born; and he referred to the January 6 rioters as “we.” He also quoted Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. And again, all Kamala needed to do was stand there and keep smiling. 

So what does it all mean? What impact will it have? Will independent voters, or swing-state voters, change their mind based on Kamala and Trump’s performance? Did Kamala clarify her policy positions and provide the substance that voters want to hear from her other than “joy” and “vibes”? Did the muted mics limit Trump’s abrasive demeanor? And most importantly, who won the debate? The answer seems pretty clear.

To discuss all this and more is Free Press contributor and opinion editor at Newsweek, Batya Ungar-Sargon; contributing writer at The Week, Newsweek, and Slate, David Faris; and Free Press writer and editor Peter Savodnik.

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Tucker Carlson is perhaps the country’s most influential conservative commentator; his eponymous podcast is routinely among the most downloaded shows on the internet. Despite his endless fulminations against the mainstream media, Carlson has an impeccable mainstream media pedigree. He’s hit for the cycle on cable news, having hosted shows on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. After he was fired from Fox News in 2023, under circumstances that are still hotly disputed, Carlson quickly reconstituted his career on his own—free of corporate shackles, with no institutional guardrails, and with a professed willingness to explore topics that his former mainstream media colleagues wouldn’t touch.

Last week on his show, he did just that, airing an interview with a man most people in the mainstream won’t touch: a podcaster named Darryl Cooper, who Carlson called “the most important historian in the United States.”

In reality, Cooper is an amateur historian with no publishing record—no books, no academic articles. He produces a popular history podcast called Martyr Made, in which he does deep dives into subjects like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the cult of Reverend Jim Jones, and the trials of Jeffrey Epstein. He has previously described his personal politics as those of a “non-racist fascist.”

On Carlson’s show, Cooper demonstrated some of those fascist tendencies when he identified Winston Churchill—not Adolf Hitler—as the “chief villain” of World War II. He wasn’t a hero at all, Cooper argued, but a “psychopath” who forced Nazi Germany into a war that it didn’t want. And what of the Holocaust? Cooper doesn’t speak of Jewish victims, but vaguely of “prisoners of war" who the Nazis “just threw. . . into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.” 

In September 1941, a mere week after Nazi troops occupied the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, that city’s Jews were ordered to congregate for “resettlement.” Under threat of severe punishment, they obliged. . . and were loaded into trucks to be transported a short distance to Babi Yar, a ravine just north of the city. In a two-day orgy of violence, 33,000 Jews ended up dead. Innocents, not prisoners of war; children forced to lie on top of those pushed into the pit before them, then executed with a bullet in the back of the head. This is how they ended up dead.

Tucker Carlson, who has the ear of millions of conservatives, including Donald Trump, and who secured a prime time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention, said nothing in response to Cooper’s revisionism. No pushback. Not an arched eyebrow. Just unalloyed praise for an extremist autodidact, America’s “best” historian.

Cooper defended himself on Twitter by assuring his critics that Hitler was indeed desperate to make peace and was also willing to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” Jewish problem was not in quotes. When another user pointed this out, Cooper responded: “Was there not a problem involving the Jews in Europe at the time?”

Hitler apologia and antisemitism packaged as brave historical inquiry is not new. We’ve heard versions of these arguments from extremists on the left and right for decades. But why is there a sudden resurgence of these odious ideas on the American right? 

Today, we talk to Victor Davis Hanson to help us answer this question. Hanson is a classicist and historian, the author of two dozen books, including the critically acclaimed The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. And for years, Hanson was a weekly guest on Tucker Carlson’s television show. We discuss his relationship with Carlson, the accuracy and derivation of Darryl Cooper’s claims about the Second World War, and why so-called “anti-elitism” often drifts into antisemitism.

If you want to learn more, read Bari Weiss on the rise of anti-history here.

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Last year, at colleges across America, students etched themselves into history, or infamy, with the most dramatic campus protests in a generation.

In preparation for the fall semester, some major universities—from NYU to UCLA—have implemented new rules and decided to enforce old ones to protect Jewish students from activists who had declared sections of campus no-go zones for Zionists. Universities that turn a blind eye to the Tentifada phenomenon now risk violating federal statute. 

Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning. At Temple University, protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance against their colonizers.” Last week, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a glass bottle on the University of Pittsburgh campus outside the school’s “Cathedral of Learning.” Meanwhile at the University of Michigan, four agitators were arrested during a “die-in.”

So clearly the danger is not yet over entirely for campuses, even though some of the steam may be leaving the movement. The Democratic National Convention, for example, was supposed to be the exclamation mark of rage, but the protests barely registered as a tussle. 

But history teaches us that it takes only a few student true believers to make quite a mess once they decide that boycotts and sit-ins aren’t making a difference. 

To understand this moment and the risk these student protesters pose, Free Press columnist Eli Lake looks at America’s history with Ivy League domestic terrorists. More than 50 years ago, campus unrest also spilled into the streets and moved off the grid as a small and lethal group of radicals called the Weather Underground took the plunge from protest to resistance. But the Weather Underground railed against the establishment. Today’s campus protesters are supported by it. Call them. . . the Weather Overground.

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A few weeks ago, at the much-anticipated Democratic National Convention, we witnessed the coronation of Kamala Harris. It was a star-studded event. We got the Obamas, the Clintons, Mindy Kaling, Kerry Washington, Kenan Thompson—and Oprah! Basically every Democratic A-lister you could think of came out in high fashion. (Kamala came out in a Chloé pantsuit.)

And then there were the Republicans: Mesa, Arizona mayor John Giles, former Trump White House staffer Olivia Troye, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, and former U.S. representative from Illinois Adam Kinzinger.

The purpose of their speeches was not only to warn Americans about the dangers of Trump—a message we’ve heard over and over again since 2016—but to give other conservatives permission to do the same. To not just oppose Trump, but to vote for the Democrat.

Two of those conservatives are here with us today: David French and Sarah Longwell.

David is an evangelical, pro-life conservative. He’s a former attorney who has worked on high-profile religious liberty cases. He was a staff writer at National Review, a senior editor at The Dispatch, and now he’s an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

Sarah is a political strategist and founder of Republicans Against Trump (now called the Republican Accountability Project). She’s also the founder and publisher of the Never Trump opinion website, The Bulwark.

The policy positions Sarah and David hold are not in lockstep with Kamala’s, not even close. So I ask them: Why is Kamala worthy of their vote? What do they think about the chasm between their political positions and Kamala’s? And do they support Kamala because she’s not Trump, or do they actually see something in her?

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In the past few weeks, there’s been an increasing number of threats to freedom of speech around the world.

In France, authorities arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov for failing to adequately moderate content and prevent criminal activity on his platform. 

In the UK, since the outbreak of anti-immigration riots, police have arrested individuals merely for posting comments online. The Labour-led government has suggested expanding measures to remove “legal but harmful” content. 

In Brazil, President Lula’s administration has proposed new regulations requiring social media companies to monitor and remove “harmful content,” and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice just banned X altogether in the country. The ruling came after the platform missed a deadline to name a new legal representative there.

From Hungary to Pakistan, the right to speak your mind, particularly on the internet, is more precarious than ever. 

Even in the United States, with our free speech rights enshrined in the Constitution, polls suggest an entire generation has grown up thinking it should be illegal to say something inaccurate or hateful. Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz said as much: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

So how did we get here? And, where is this all going? 

Today, Michael sits down with the intrepid journalist Matt Taibbi, who knows this issue inside out. When The Free Press launched, he reported the Twitter Files with Bari Weiss, and together they exposed how government agencies had pressured Twitter to censor undesirable information, including skepticism of Covid lockdowns and opposition to Covid-related public school closures. 

In this conversation, Matt and Michael talk about what’s happening in Europe, Brazil, and here in the U.S. They discuss the factors that precipitated the so-called “misinformation wars,” from 9/11 to Brexit and Trump’s election, that convinced elites of the need to enforce restrictions on speech. And they talk about why these efforts are doomed to backfire. 

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John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, is one of the most consequential American entrepreneurs of our time.

Whole Foods began in 1980 as a small hippie health food store in Austin, Texas. Under Mackey’s leadership, it grew into the largest organic foods supermarket chain in the United States, selling to Amazon in 2017 for nearly $14 billion. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the company revolutionized the food industry, mainstreaming health-consciousness for a mass market. 

Despite the company’s crunchy progressive brand, Mackey is a staunch capitalist and a steadfast defender of free markets. He popularized the term “conscious capitalism,” which marries capitalism and social responsibility, and and emphasizesinges the role of businesses in creating a sustainable and ethical impact on society at large. 

Today, a conversation about what it takes to build a company like Whole Foods, what it is like to have enormous wealth, the role of unions in the American economy, and why he kicked his own father off the board of the company.

And to read Mackey’s full story, check out his new book, The Whole Story. 

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It’s that time of year again–reliably bumming out students and parents alike… it ’s back to school! But back to school is also a time to reflect on the state of education in this country… and it’s not all that great. 

America is one of the richest countries in the world. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at our education statistics. We’re 16th in science globally. In Math, we scored below the average and well below the scores of the top five countries, all of which were in Asia. And in 2018, we ranked an astonishing 125th in literacy among all countries according to the World Atlas. 

As we tumble down the international tables, public schools around the country are getting rid of gifted and talented programs. They’re getting rid of standardized testing. All while trying to regain ground from COVID-related learning loss…

So how did we get here? Why have public schools deprioritized literacy and numeracy? What role have teachers’ unions played in advocating for public education in this country and also in holding kids back by protecting bad teachers? How is socioeconomic segregation hurting academic performance? And what kinds of books should really be taught in public schools? 

Today, we're diving deep into these questions and more with three experts who bring diverse perspectives to this debate:

Richard Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project and Director of Housing at the Progressive Policy Institute. His many books and essays have focused on addressing economic disparities in education. Maud Maron is co-founder of PLACE NYC, which advocates for improving the academic rigor and standards of K-12 public school curricula. She’s also the mother of four kids in New York City public schools. Erika Sanzi is a former educator and school dean in Rhode Island. She is Director of Outreach at Parents Defending Education, which aims to fight ideological indoctrination in the classroom. 

We discuss the misallocation of resources in education, the promise and perils of school choice, and how we can fix our broken education system. 

And if you like this conversation, good news! All week this week at The Free Press—as summer ends and kids return to class—we’re pausing our usual news coverage to talk about education. We’ve invited six writers to answer the question: What didn’t school teach you? 

With elite colleges peddling courses on “Queering Video Games,” “Decolonial Black Feminist Magic,” and “What Is a Settler Text?,” there’s never been a better time to go back to the proverbial school of life.

To get those essays in your inbox every morning from today until Saturday, go to thefp.com and become a subscriber today. 

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In the 1972 presidential election, Democratic candidate George McGovern was soundly defeated by Richard Nixon. It was a bloodbath. He lost 49 states, a result widely attributed to his positions being “too liberal” for the American mainstream.

Four decades later, in a more liberal America, McGovern released a book called What It Means to Be a Democrat, outlining core values that define the Democratic Party. Because, he argued, in his day, during the “1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. . . it was obvious that a spirit of wide embrace was missing both inside and outside the convention hall.” The party had “splintered” into warring factions. This, McGovern argued, could never be allowed to happen again.

Here we are again, 50-plus years later, back in Chicago, back at the Democratic National Convention. There’s the version that’s inside. And there’s the one that’s outside, with left-wing demonstrators in the streets demanding the party forcefully oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, beseeching Democrats to somehow precipitate an end to capitalism and support various other identity-related progressive causes.

They marched and shouted, faces swaddled in N95 masks or tightly wrapped with keffiyehs, beneath a sea of Palestinian flags, punctuated by the occasional hammer and sickle. There was only one American flag to be found—a prop to be doused in lighter fluid and set alight. 

Inside the convention hall, we passed countless people in red, white, and blue dresses and jackets and hats, while volunteers handed out signs that simply read “USA.” And while all those stuffed into Chicago’s United Center seemed energized by the Kamala coronation, we found divergent views on what it means to be a Democrat.

At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, there were no divergent views. No Never-Trumpers. No holdout Nikki Haley supporters. No contingent of free-traders, tax-cutters, or libertarians. The MAGA faction had fully purged the dissenters.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that while 86 percent of registered voters said they knew what Donald Trump stood for, that number fell to 64 percent when the same question was asked about Kamala Harris. Some of this can be attributed to her many policy flip-flops, some to her decision to avoid almost all interaction with media. . . and some to the Democrats’ emphasis on vibes over policy. 

So we came to Chicago to ask the question: What does it mean, in 2024, to be a Democrat? 

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Most humans are cautious by nature. We naturally like to do what’s comfortable and safe. But comfortable and safe don’t usually lead to. . . well, success. In fact, the most successful people in the world share something in common: They love risk. 

That’s true of the best poker players, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and crypto traders. All of these people consider statistics; they embrace uncertainty; and they make bold predictions that ultimately pay off for themselves—and sometimes for humanity. 

How do they do it?

Our guest today, Nate Silver, has a theory on what drives successful people, how they think, and how they achieve enormous success—or, at times, catastrophic failure.

He just wrote an entire book about it. On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything analyzes these types of people and the principles that guide their risky decision-making—which, he argues, is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy.

Nate, one of the most sophisticated thinkers on risk and uncertainty, is a statistician, sports analyst, professional poker player, and the founder of FiveThirtyEight, a website that revolutionized political reporting with its data-driven election predictions. 

Today, Nate discusses why it’s important to take more risks, and how he sees the current election playing out. 

If you hear statistics and data and probability and analytics and roll your eyes, we get it. But this is a conversation that goes beyond all that. Nate explains what frustrates him about his critics, why he is happy to no longer be affiliated with FiveThirtyEight, and how his biggest passion—poker—helped him become one of the world’s most famous prognosticators.

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A few months ago, we learned about a young man whose name we’re withholding, which is something we very rarely do, because he insists it’s for his safety. 

This young Palestinian man is from a small village in the West Bank, and he grew up there with limited access to water and without a regular supply of electricity. Most of the kids he grew up with dropped out of school and went into manual labor. But this young man chose a different path. He won a scholarship to study abroad for college. He earned three degrees in three different countries. And then he landed a tech job with an Israeli company, of all places. (For context, among the 360,000 workers in the Israeli tech sector, there are only a few dozen Palestinians from the West Bank.)

His story is one of setbacks, hardships, and discrimination, but also of hard work, perseverance, unlikely friendships, and in the end—against all odds—success. 

But then his life was ruined. . . by a social media post. On October 7, he woke up in his home in the West Bank to the news of the massacre happening inside Israel. While some people in his community celebrated, he was horrified. He posted how he felt online: “What sad and horrible news to wake up to and out of words and unable to digest what’s going on right now. I’m Palestinian and firmly stand against this terror. I pray for the safety of my friends, colleagues, their loved ones, and everyone else affected.” He continued to post about how he felt—six posts in total.

Suddenly, he says, 500 people unfollowed or unfriended him on social media sites. People blocked him on WhatsApp and, in real life, people just stopped speaking to him altogether. 

And then, people started calling him a “traitor.” And as he said in this interview, the word traitor means something in the West Bank. “It means they are going to kill you.”

Since that day, he hasn’t been able to commute to Israel to work. The crossings are closed and the work permits for Palestinians have been suspended. He stays home with his family, and he doesn’t go out because he says it’s just too dangerous. He feels isolated, unsafe, and scared for himself and for the safety of his family. 

I often talk about courage, and about the courage to speak your mind even when it’s unpopular or dangerous. I often reference my personal heroes, people like Natan Sharansky or Masih Alinejad. But so few people are willing to walk in their footsteps in real time, in real life, when the stakes are the highest imaginable.

My guest today is one of those people. Today, he explains where he gets the strength to speak up, even if it means risking his life, and why remaining silent in the face of the atrocities of October 7 would have made him no different from those who committed the crimes.

One final note: if you’re a listener of this show, then you will understand how much this person needs our help. So, if you have a job opportunity that can provide sponsorship, please email [email protected].

And if you want to contribute to his relocation effort, you can support his GoFundMe.

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Never before have people felt more comfortable weighing in on other people’s lives.

What diet to do, what to wear, how to make yourself attractive to the opposite sex, whether or not you should put money into that new crypto coin, if you should let your kids self-soothe, and on and on—but most of it, this endless supply of advice, is actually pretty bad.

Weekly popular advice columns, like Dear Abby and Ask E. Jean, have vanished. And in their place is finger-wagging, political posturing, and straight-up bad tips.

A New York Times reader sought advice on how to deal with her daughter, who is in a polyamorous relationship with a married man. She wrote, “My daughter tells me she would like to bring this man on our family trip to Greece this year. It may be petty, but I don’t want to foot the bill for another woman’s husband. And I don’t see any way this relationship can lead to my daughter’s happiness. Should I lay out my boundaries and risk my daughter not joining me on vacation?”

Instead of saying what any sane person would, which is: “Get this man as far away from your daughter as possible,” The New York Times advised the mother to shut up and do better. “This is about respecting your adult daughter’s choices. As a show of respect, read up on polyamory before you broach the subject with her.”

The thing is, we’re in an advice desert, but we’ve never been in greater need of good advice.

Some people consult friends, therapists, or tarot readers when they need direction in life. Other people pray or go to confession. Many people seek the advice of a mentor.

But at The Free Press, we like to visit this woman who lives on a hill in Pasadena and makes a mean onion dip. Her name is Caitlin Flanagan. You may have read her writing in The Atlantic, or you may have read her book Girl Land or On Thinking for Yourself. Caitlin is someone who has her finger on the pulse. Whether you’re reading her essays, her books, or her Twitter feed, she is just always right.

So today, Free Press reporter Suzy Weiss and Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan are here to answer your questions about. . . everything, from relationships to politics to children to animals (yes, animals)!

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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A few weeks ago, very few people outside of the Beltway and niche media circles had ever heard the name Tim Walz. Almost overnight, the relatively obscure governor from Minnesota started to gain traction thanks to a viral clip where he called J.D. Vance “weird.”

It resonated with a lot of people. He came across as direct, plainspoken, and affable. And on Tuesday, August 6, Vice President Kamala Harris officially announced him as her running mate. 

The conventional wisdom was that Harris would pick a moderate Democrat. But is Walz a true moderate? Because if you go online, there is a split screen reality about who Tim Walz actually is.

On one side: Midwestern nice guy Democrat who grew up in a small town in Nebraska, is a National Guard vet, was a high school teacher, a football coach, a congressman, governor, and to top it all off, a gun owner and a hunter. Policy-wise, he’s worked with Republicans to pass infrastructure investments. He cut taxes for working families. He passed a law to provide paid family and medical leave to Minnesota families.

But on the other side: he’s as radical as radical progressives come. Here are some policies cited to support that argument: during the pandemic, Walz set up a phone line so Minnesotans could report their neighbors for violating Covid rules. He allowed Minnesota’s health department to ration lifesaving Covid drugs based on race. Walz made Minnesota a “trans refuge state,” signing a law that allows the state to take custody of a child whose parents refuse “gender-affirming care.” He also established a council to implement DEI training in statewide agencies. And after George Floyd’s murder, he said: “My administration will use every tool at our disposal to deconstruct generations of systemic racism in Minnesota.” This, as the city was burning.

Then, there is the secondary story of Tim Walz, which is not about Tim Walz at all.

Until Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro appeared to be the frontrunner as a charismatic, handsome, and moderate governor from a key battleground state the Democrats need to win. Why didn’t Kamala choose Shapiro? Did anti-semitism play a role?

To explain all of this are three of my favorite writers and thinkers: Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik, and Free Press columnist Joe Nocera (or, as he likes to be called, our in-house-liberal). Suffice it to say, they all have very different opinions on Walz.

Today: Who is Tim Walz? Why did Kamala Harris land on him? What does this choice say about the state of the Democratic Party? And in the race toward the White House, does it even matter?

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Last month, we ran an episode here by one of our amazing reporters, Eli Lake, that took us back to the tumultuous year of 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson dropped out of his own reelection race, and the resulting turmoil at the Democratic convention that followed that summer in Chicago. At the time of that episode, of course, Biden was still in the race, and Eli was guiding us through that history lesson in order to help us make sense of the present moment, and to indicate what might happen next. 

Today, Eli is back on Honestly to do what he does best: look back in time and help us make sense of our baffling present.

VP Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. She has the wind at her back, though she hasn’t given a single interview, and every day someone else announces they’ve been coconut-pilled.

But in her anointment to the top of the ticket, there’s been a strange and silent rewriting of history by the press and party loyalists with the support of a lot of tech companies, who together are changing our collective understanding of the present and of the very recent past. Eli argues this has happened before. And not in America. . . but in the Soviet Union, and also in the works of brilliant writers like Milan Kundera and George Orwell, who imagined something, he argues, like what we’re seeing right now.

While that might sound like hyperbole, listen and decide for yourself. Because whether you agree or disagree with Eli’s conclusions, I’m confident you will learn so much from listening to this episode.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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On Monday, the markets had one of its worst trading days since the 2008 financial crisis. Stocks tumbled around the world, with a global sell-off, amid fears of a recession. The VIX (an index often called “Wall Street’s Fear Gauge”) was at times today as high as we saw it when the economy was shutting down for Covid. 

This comes on the tail of a pretty insane news cycle: a presidential assassination attempt, Joe Biden dropping out of the race, the coronation of a new Democratic nominee, a stolen election (actually) in Venezuela, a Middle East on the brink of war. . . should I go on? But the most pressing issue to most Americans is and always has been the economy. 

And with everything else going on, many of us have been paying far too little attention to the economic story here at home, and the policies that may have brought us to this moment we find ourselves in today. 

To explain how we got here is Larry Summers. Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, and he was the director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. He was president of Harvard for five years. And he is one of the world’s most prominent economists. 

Today: What is going on in the market? What caused it? Was it avoidable? What happens next? And what are the long-term repercussions? 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to thefp.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Today, we have a special story from two friends and former Free Pressers, Andy Mills and Matt Boll. They have a new podcast, Reflector, that I think you’re going to love, and we’re sharing an episode where they look at some of the hidden truths and misconceptions about alcoholism and how to treat it.

Alcohol consumption increased more during the Covid years than it had at any time in the past 50 years. In fact, Americans were drinking so much that from 2020 through 2021, there were approximately 178,000 alcohol-related deaths, which is more deaths than from all drug overdoses combined, including opioids.

And yet most Americans with a drinking problem never speak to their doctors about their drinking, and fewer than 6 percent of them receive any form of treatment whatsoever.

Today, a woman named Katie tells the story of her self-experimentation with a little-known but highly effective drug to combat her alcohol addiction.

It’s not only an incredibly moving story of one woman’s journey but it also gets to the bigger question of why these types of medications aren’t widely used in America, and it challenges everything we know about alcoholism and how to treat it.

Check out Reflector wherever you get your podcasts, or by going to reflector.show and becoming a subscriber. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com/subscribe and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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On Saturday afternoon, a Hezbollah rocket fired from southern Lebanon struck a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams in Israel’s north, slaughtering 12 children.

For the last 10 months, many have warned that Israel is on the brink of a major war with Hezbollah. But the truth is that Hezbollah has been fighting—and winning—in Israel’s north since October 8. For the past 10 months, Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy terror group that controls southern Lebanon, has essentially redrawn the northern border of Israel by pummeling the border towns daily with rockets, leaving 225 square miles unlivable for Israelis and displacing around 80,000 Israeli citizens.

Israel—pounded by Iranian proxies from all directions—now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history. The prospect of an all-out war with Hezbollah, which could very well spread to a larger, more dangerous regional war—perhaps directly with Iran—seems closer than ever. 

What is Israel going to do? Will Israel choose to confront Hezbollah, or will they respond in a more limited way to avoid the regional escalation that the Americans so fear? How does U.S. policy, and the upcoming presidential election, influence Israel’s strategic calculation? Is Kamala Harris equipped to bring calm to the region? Or are Israelis just waiting for Trump to return to office? Is America’s current policy—which is the containment of Iran—backfiring and inadvertently creating a regional crisis? Most importantly, should we be thinking about the war with Gaza and the war with Hezbollah as discrete fights, or are they all part of a broader war that’s already underway between Israel and Iran?

Answering those questions today is Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv is a journalist and writer for The Times of Israel, and he is one of the most important and insightful thinkers of our time on Israel and the Middle East.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com/subscribe and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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Most of the media-verse right now is focused on a handful of serious and important questions: Kamala’s VP pick, if Democrats have been anti-Democratic, if Kamala can receive Biden’s campaign money without a legal battle. And whether or not China will see the opportunity of our lame-duck president to make moves against Taiwan.

But today we aren’t here to talk about any of that. Today we’re here to talk about memes and whether or not Kamala Harris is “brat.”

On Sunday, July 21, we found out that President Joe Biden was stepping down from the race because he posted a letter on X. Then, 23 minutes later he endorsed Kamala Harris as the nominee and that was it. 

Days went by, and we didn’t see him or hear from him. And we’re all supposed to accept that as normal. And in his absence something really strange happened. Kamala Harris became a Gen Z icon. Kamala became “brat.”

And if you’re anything like me, you’re not exactly following. So, let us explain: the singer Charli XCX posted Sunday on X that “Kamala IS brat,” a reference to her new album called Brat. Which, for those who don’t know, according to Gen Z, is this summer’s official vibe and aesthetic. Don’t worry, if you still aren’t following, neither are the talking heads on CNN or Fox.

But whether they understand it or not, Kamala’s campaign does. Her staff changed her campaign’s X page to the brat chartreuse color (the album’s theme color), with the words “Kamala HQ” to match the Brat album cover. 

The internet went crazy. Just take the video of a group of men in Fire Island in chartreuse crop tops that say “kamala” in the brat font. The caption on the tweet: “BRAT Kamala shirts already on Fire Island. The gays move SO FAST.” And it wasn’t just brat that went viral, we’ve also seen a repacking of viral clips overnight: the coconut quote, Kamala loving Venn diagrams, and a whole lot of Kamala laughing.

As the internet was off to the races, mainstream politicians were forced to make a choice: embrace the Twitter-sphere or ignore it. And most chose the former. Hawaiian senator Brian Schatz endorsed Kamala on X simply by posting a photo of himself climbing a coconut tree, the caption reading: “Madam Vice President, we are ready to help.” Colorado governor Jared Polis simply posted a tweet with a coconut emoji, a palm tree emoji, and an American flag emoji. Senator Mazie K. Hirono posted a photo with Kamala with the brat chartreuse filter on it.

Clearly a unique consensus has emerged. As Katherine Boyle wrote for The Free Press this week, “The online and offline are finally merging.”  

It’s fun, it’s trippy, it’s campy, it’s weird, but the question remains, will any of this translate to actual votes? 

To help us better understand are two Free Press writers—River Page and Kat Rosenfield. This week for The Free Press, River explained how the phrase “Twitter isn’t real life” has never seemed less true and that “Twitter is now the center of the country’s political universe. For better or worse.” And Kat made the case that Kamala is brat, but not in the way we think, and she’s not so sure it’s a good thing. 

The internet moves fast, but River and Kat move faster, and they’re here today to help us dissect it all: the meme-ification of politics, brat, and how internet culture is rewiring election norms. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com/subscribe and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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The United States locks up nearly two million people, the highest number of prisoners for any country in the world. That represents about 20 percent of the world’s prison population, even though the U.S. makes up only around 5 percent of the global population.  

It's not surprising that over the past two decades, more and more people have embraced the idea of criminal justice reform. In 2020, there were calls around the country to defund the police and divert money to programs meant to address the root causes of crime. Voters embraced reforms in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and beyond. Progressive prosecutors in many blue cities pledged to reduce sentences, stop prosecuting lower level offenses, and address police misconduct.

But crime has become, once again, a major issue for American voters. Sixty-three percent of Americans said that crime was “extremely or very serious” in the country, according to the annual Gallup survey on crime released in November. And many believe that criminal justice reform initiatives have exacerbated the problem. 

That’s why The Free Press brought together four expert debaters last month in San Francisco—a city where everything from shampoo to gum is under lock and key at Walgreens—to ask: has criminal justice reform made our cities unsafe?

Arguing in the affirmative are Seneca Scott and Michael Shellenberger. Seneca is a labor leader, a community organizer, and founder of Neighbors Together Oakland. He ran for mayor of Oakland in 2022, focusing on solutions to homelessness, drug tourism, and violent crime. Michael is the founder of Public News and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Arguing that, no, criminal justice reform has not made our cities unsafe are Kmele Foster and Lara Bazelon. Kmele is a commentator and co-host of the popular podcast The Fifth Column. He is a founding partner at Freethink, the award-winning digital media company. Lara is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the criminal and racial justice clinical programs. Lara is a former federal public defender and a former director of the Project for the Innocent, at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. 

Before the debate, 87 percent of our audience said that, yes, criminal justice reform has made our cities unsafe. At the end of the night, we polled them again—and you’ll see for yourself which side won.

To watch the debate in full, go to thefp.com/watch.

Finally: lucky for you, we have more live debates in store. Our next debate will be on the state of the American dream, and it will take place in Washington, D.C., on September 10. Get your tickets at thefp.com/events 

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Tonight, President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee. After weeks of speculation, criticism of his candidacy, concern about his health, and withdrawal of donors, President Biden finally said: “It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

What comes next? With the Democratic National Convention less than a month away, Michael Moynihan went live on X with Free Press contributors Walter Kirn, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Eli Lake, and Olivia Reingold, as well Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips (who challenged Joe Biden during the primaries), to discuss this historic turn and how it will impact the election.

Follow The FP on X to stay tuned for more livestreams.

Note: this episode was originally a livestream on X, and there were a few audio glitches, but we loved this conversation and think you will too.

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For the past few decades, it’s been conventional wisdom in D.C. that “demographics are destiny.” That the increased share of immigrants, young people, and racial minorities across the country would build a bulletproof coalition for the Democratic Party, swelling their ranks and keeping them in power forever.

Those who deviated from this expectation could expect to be called sellouts, race traitors, and Uncle Toms. Recall Joe Biden’s infamous interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God, when he said: “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.”

But in the past year, Donald Trump has been winning over more minority voters than any Republican in decades. Recent polls have consistently shown that Trump has reached a shocking 20 percent support among black voters. That’s compared to the 8 percent he got in 2016. And Biden’s polling with black voters has dropped dramatically.

This is a monumental, and to many, unexpected turn. And it was noticeable at the RNC. When Michael Moynihan went to the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland, the audience was more monochromatic. While certainly not as racially diverse as the Democratic coalition, the convention in Milwaukee felt younger and less white.

Monday night, Amber Rose opened the proceedings. Tuesday night, Madeline Brame, the mother of a murdered veteran, gave a thunderous speech explaining why she’s supporting Trump. She said: “Our eyes have been opened, just like so many other poor minorities across America. Donald Trump shares our values, love of God and family and country. He’s been a victim of the same corrupt system that I have been and my family has been.”

What’s behind this shift? Why do Biden and the Democratic Party seem to be losing their edge with black voters? And could this end up making a real difference for the 2024 election?

Last night, Michael Moynihan went to an event at the RNC put on by the Black Conservative Federation to ask them why they think that MAGA conservatism is appealing to black voters.

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A lot happened in American politics last night: the Biden interview, the Vance unveiling, Trump’s RNC entrance—his first public appearance since Saturday’s shooting. And there, to help you all make sense of it, was The Free Press team in our first-ever live video on X. To be honest, we weren’t sure how it was going to go. We were blown away by the response.

There were some 350,000 of you watching this experiment, in which we had the kind of panel we wish were assembled on cable news, or as host Michael Moynihan put it: “the Traveling Wilburys of political panels.”

Monday night’s supergroup included Newsweek editor and Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Puck correspondent Tara Palmeri, Red Scare co-host Anna Khachiyan (chain-smoking, of course), legendary pollster Frank Luntz, Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam, author and Free Press contributor Rob Henderson, and journalist James Pogue. This is a group of people you just cannot find anywhere else.

Today, we’ll play that live conversation for you. And stay tuned for more live! Follow The FP on X.

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As you now well know, at 6:11 p.m. on Saturday evening, shots rang out at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person, a 50-year-old man named Cory Comperatore, was killed. Two others, David Dutch and James Copenhaver, were gravely injured. Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet.

Before the 45th president was whisked away by Secret Service, he emerged defiant with his fist pumping in the air, blood on his ear and face. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he yelled at the crowd, to which they chanted back: “USA! USA! USA!”

As we would later learn, one of the bullets pierced the top of Trump’s right ear, flying just a hair’s breadth away from his head. One inch. One inch and we would be having a very different conversation. As Niall Ferguson wrote in The Free Press:

“An inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin’s hand, an unexpected move by the former president—for whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day.”

Saturday’s attempted assassination has already shifted the course of this election. How will it shape our politics and our country? And was this violence the inevitable outcome of our painfully divided country, and who is responsible for those divisions?

Those are the subjects of today’s episode. This is an episode in two parts.

The first part is about the unspeakable events that took place on Saturday. Then in the second half, you’ll hear our initial conversation that took place last week about political brokenness, the crisis of trust between the American people and our elected officials—and how to fix it with some help from the Constitution. In light of what happened over the weekend, it feels even more poignant.

The guest in both halves of this episode is Yuval Levin, one of the greatest political analysts and explainers of our time.

Yuval has even been called the “the most important voice in the political culture.” He worked on domestic policy in the George W. Bush administration. He’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress, the presidency, the courts, the Constitution, and American political life.

He’s the author of several books including The Fractured Republic and A Time to Build. And he just published American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. It gives us a road map to how the Constitution can bring the country together to solve our political troubles.

What I particularly love about Yuval is that when everyone around us seems to be taking the black pill, Yuval is clear-eyed. He’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Yuval is just realistic, informed by a deep sense of American history that gives him a perspective on what’s happening now while motivated by a true love for this country.

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Yesterday, Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A few minutes into the rally, a gunman opened fire, and a bullet pierced the former president’s ear. He ducked to the ground, the Secret Service piled on top of him, supporters screamed, and chaos erupted through the crowd.

Trump suffered a superficial wound, but one rally attendee was killed and two others were critically injured. Moments after the shooting, images of Trump flooded the internet—fist clenched, blood running down his face, mouthing “fight” to a dazed crowd. It was the first time in over 40 years that an elected president was wounded in an assassination attempt. The gunman was immediately killed. He was later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

The internet was, of course, soon overrun with speculation, conspiracies, over-the-top rhetoric, and the assignation of blame—most of which demanded that the shooter share responsibility for his evil actions with certain aspects of the media or certain politicians. It’s all a stark reminder of the deep polarization of our politics, and that political violence is something of a constant in American life.

On the ground at the rally, watching the mayhem unfold, was Salena Zito. Salena is a reporter for the Washington Examiner and a contributor to The Free Press. She was standing four feet from the president when the first shots rang out.

Today, we discuss what she witnessed at the rally. We discuss her interactions with President Trump immediately before the shooting, the shooter’s possible motive, what it means for the 2024 election, and more importantly, what it means for the country.

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A few weeks ago, fresh from being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Niall Ferguson officially joined The Free Press as a columnist. His first piece was rather provocatively called “We’re All Soviets Now.” He argued why he thinks today’s United States resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re physically unwell, heavily in debt, run by an out-of-touch gerontocracy, and subjected to a bogus ideology pushed by elites.

This was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Since then, Niall has only doubled down. He argued in his most recent column that the reason our system only offers up an embarrassing blowhard and a senile old man lies in contemporary America’s similarities to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, these provocative arguments drove some people crazy. We’d scarcely updated the homepage with that first column before the rebuttals came pouring in. But none were quite as passionate and thorough as the one written by Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, who devoted an entire column to pushing back on Ferguson. In “No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America,’ ” Goldberg conceded some of the basic facts presented by Ferguson, but aggressively objected to the idea that the United States was in any way similar to late-stage Soviet communism. “Do we have problems that have some superficial similarities with the Soviets? Sure. But. . . come on.” Goldberg continued: “The Soviet Union built a wall to keep its subjects trapped inside their evil empire. Many Americans understandably believe we need a wall to keep millions of people desperate to live here out.” Because at the end of the day, Goldberg argued, “America is simply not like the Soviet Union.” 

Ferguson fought back on Twitter in an 18-part thread, in which he accused Goldberg of “pure cope.” And back and forth they went for days.

We’re happy to announce that they agreed to hash it all out on this very podcast. . . today. 

The debate we ended up having was much bigger than merely whether the U.S. can accurately be compared to the USSR. It got to the heart of a core disagreement on the right in recent years about the health of American democracy—and whether the nation is still exceptional, albeit flawed, or if the country is in a state of inexorable decline. 

It’s a fitting conversation to have right after the Fourth of July and as pundits and politicians fill airtime and columns with questions about our leader’s fitness for the job, presidential transparency, and whether it’s undemocratic to replace Biden on the election ticket. Because today’s conversation gets to the heart of how the American project is faring, and what we should do to save the country we all love before it’s too late.

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As some of you know, Nellie and Bari are having another baby—any moment now—maybe even by the time this podcast is published!

Going from one kid to two is no small challenge, so we’re doing something a little different on the podcast today. In an attempt to quell the nerves, we decided to call up some of our favorite parents to give Nellie and Bari advice before they become a family of four. We ask Bethany Mandel about the importance of birth order; Elon Gold about how to protect your marriage as your family expands; Amy and Lou Weiss (yes, those Weisses) about the best part of having kids; and Mary Katharine Ham about how they should prepare for raising a boy in a household of girls.

Bari and Nellie learned a lot of parenting wisdom making this episode, and we think you will too.

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On our nation’s 248th birthday, Joe Biden faces the wrath of a thousand pundits. The whole world watched the elected leader of the world’s oldest republic befogged, slack-jawed, and mentally vacant in a debate he had to win. A recent poll from CBS showed that after Biden’s performance last week, 72 percent of registered voters believed the man lacked the cognitive ability to be president. 

Even his closest friends and sycophants are pleading for the old man to hang it up. The New York Times editorial board. Former advisers to Barack Obama. Columnist and Biden’s personal friend, Tom Friedman, said he wept in a hotel room in Portugal while watching the debate. They’ve seen enough. Joe Biden, for the good of your country, step down. 

And yet, Biden’s White House is shrugging it off. It was just a debate, they tell us. Don’t let 90 minutes define years of accomplishments. 

But it was not just a debate. It was indelible and undeniable proof that the leader of the free world lacks the stamina and acuity to do the job for four more months, let alone four more years. 

As Biden weighs his decision, he may well think back to when he was a young man and then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson found himself in a similar position. Johnson was losing the country, and in the middle of the primary he decided to bow out. 

Today, Free Press writer Eli Lake hosts a special episode about what happened in 1968 when President Johnson decided he was not fit for reapplying for his job. He listened to his critics and backed away from the White House, allowing the Democrats an opportunity to stage an open convention to choose their next candidate for the presidency. But why did the party want him gone so badly? And how did this seismic decision work out? It’s a tale of murder, war, and riots that culminated in the most explosive convention in the history of America.

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The past few days have been perhaps the most dramatic political spectacle since November 8, 2016. Ever since President Biden’s disastrous debate performance last Thursday, there has been a panic around the country. Can he still be on the Democratic ticket in 2024? And who has actually been running the United States for the past four years? 

Every minute, another shoe drops. Another grim poll, another devastating leak. All of which suggests that Biden has to throw in the towel. But the White House insists he’s in it for the long haul. “I am running. . . . No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win,” Biden told DNC staff on a call Wednesday. 

On today’s special *emergency* episode of Honestly, Bari sits down with Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson to help make sense of what is going on and what comes next. Thompson has covered President Biden for years and is one of the few reporters, long before last Thursday night, who dared to report on the subject of Biden’s age and mental acuity. There’s no one better situated to break down how the Biden camp is dealing with the fallout since the debate. 

They discuss Biden World’s calculus for staying in the race, who might replace Biden if he ultimately drops out, what is going on with Democratic donors, why the media missed this story for months, and what this could all mean for the future of the nation.

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In January, I was announced as a 2024 TED speaker in Vancouver. Predictably, a small group of very loud people were angry—mostly on Twitter. Then, five TED fellows resigned. They wrote a letter to the head of TED, Chris Anderson, titled: “TED Fellows Refuse to Be Associated with Genocide Apologists.” They pleaded to disinvite me, plus a few others who had been asked to speak, and take us off the program.

A strange thing considering that TED is devoted to curiosity, reason, wonder, and the pursuit of knowledge, without an agenda: “We welcome all who seek a deeper understanding of the world and connection with others, and we invite everyone to engage with ideas and activate them in your community.” In the end, TED didn’t disinvite me. But I wondered if I should actually go.

For some people, being invited to TED probably is the most exciting thing in the world. And at one point I would have felt that way too. But I knew they were inviting me to be their token dissident voice, to prove that they are not a monolith. And on the one hand, I appreciated that effort. On the other hand, if I’m your representation for ideological diversity, if I’m your most radical speaker, then you’ve already lost.

In the end, I decided to speak. I felt like they were genuinely trying to right the ship, and shouldn’t I support that effort?

When I arrived, I was sequestered in a group with people like Bill Ackman, Avi Loeb, Andrew Yang, and Scott Galloway, and TED called our portion of the conference “The Provocateurs.” But as I looked around at my little group of five, something felt very obvious: none of us are all that provocative. Or at least we shouldn’t be. The biggest irony of all is that that was the very topic of my speech I came to Vancouver to give.

The talk is about how normal ideas and issues are often crowded out and overshadowed by boutique issues such as whether Bari Weiss should be allowed to speak at TED. It’s about how a few small voices end up adjudicating which voices are morally righteous and which ones are not. It’s about how common-sense positions became transgressive and polarizing overnight; how our ability to disagree is our freedom, and, most critically, why it’s so important to stand with conviction in our beliefs even when it means standing out in the cold.

Today, you’ll hear my talk, titled “Courage, the Most Important Virtue.” Afterward, you’ll hear a conversation I had with the head of TED, Chris Anderson, about victimhood, about how words are misinterpreted as violence, and about the paper-thin line between civilization and barbarism.

Thanks to the TED Talks Daily podcast for letting us share this episode of their show with Honestly listeners today. And if you want to hear more talks like mine, check out TED Talks Daily. Each day, the show brings you a new idea that will spark your curiosity and just might change the future, all in under 15 minutes. You can find TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts.

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There was no raucous audience cheering and jeering last night in Atlanta, but the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump was a painful affair. Even the most steadfast Biden partisans were devastated, panicked, and dazed, many of them waking up this morning saying the quiet part out loud: we can’t possibly run this candidate in November.

Here to break it down this morning are Mary Katharine Ham and Ben Smith. Mary Katharine is a Fox News analyst and the co-host of the podcast Getting Hammered. Ben Smith is the co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor, a former media columnist for The New York Times, and the host of the new podcast Mixed Signals. 

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In April 1997, Ellen was on the cover of Time magazine declaring, “Yep, I’m Gay.” Then a few weeks later, her sitcom alter ego came out on TV. It was watched by 42 million people. The next year, in 1998, Will & Grace premiered on NBC.

This was a watershed moment for gay representation. Then came: The Pursuit of Happiness, Mad About You, Spin City, Chicago Hope, Melrose Place, NYPD Blue, My So-Called Life, Fired Up, The Crew, Profiler, and High Society—which all started to include gay characters.

The whole decade consisted of landmark moments for gay rights. In May 1996, the Supreme Court decided in Romer v. Evans that Colorado's 2nd Amendment, which denied gays and lesbians protections against discrimination, was actually unconstitutional, and in May 1998, Bill Clinton signed an executive order that made it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation in federal workplaces. The gay-rights movement in America was making real progress. 

Then, something horrific happened. On a late October night in 1998, in a little town called Laramie, Wyoming, a 21-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was killed.

The details of the murder were brutal. He was pistol-whipped 18 times, beaten, tied to the bottom of a split-rail wooden fence in a remote part of town, and left there unconscious to die. When he was found, it was said that he looked like a scarecrow. One of the first responders said Matthew’s face had so much blood that the only place you could see his skin was where the path of his tears had fallen and washed away the blood. He died a few days later in a nearby hospital.

In the weeks and months that followed, a narrative took shape. Matthew Shepard was killed by two men who he did not know—Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson—because he was gay. It was a hate crime, and it was deplorable.

As the news spread, celebrities and politicians around the country spoke out. President Clinton told journalists at the White House, “In our shock and grief one thing must remain clear: hate and prejudice are not American values.” The story of this anti-gay hate crime came to represent the very thing that many gay Americans feared America was at its worst: a place of deep bigotry, where violence against gay people is rampant, where a young man could be targeted and killed simply for being gay, and a country where there are whole cities and towns, maybe even whole regions, where gay people aren’t safe.

The death of Matthew Shepard became the most notorious anti-gay hate crime in American history. “Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement,” as New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney said.

But what if the story wasn’t true? What if Matthew Shepard wasn’t murdered for being gay, but rather for something more common—though equally tragic? And why did so many people refuse to believe it when investigative journalists discovered the truth? 

Those were the questions on reporter Ben Kawaller’s mind when he went to Laramie earlier this month, where he interviewed residents, journalists, and former detectives who have a lot to say about the Matthew Shepard case and what really happened. Today, the real Matthew Shepard story and why the full truth is still important.

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When Hamas attacked Israel eight months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s war goals were threefold: one, destroy Hamas; two, free all of the hostages; and three, ensure that Gaza can never threaten Israel again.

More than 250 days later, some 120 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, both dead and alive. Two Hamas battalions remain, consisting of somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 fighters. More than 300 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and thousands wounded, 135,000 Israeli civilians are still displaced, and the war seems to have no end in sight.

Why? Israel is supposed to be the greatest military force in the Middle East. So why haven’t they achieved their war goals? Are their war goals even viable? And, can Israel win this war?

Here to help answer these questions today are Seth Frantzman and John Spencer.

Seth Frantzman is the senior Middle East correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post. He has reported on the war against ISIS, several Gaza wars, and the conflict in Ukraine. And, he is an Adjunct Fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He thinks Israel can and should win this war, but he thinks the past eight months have been dismal and that Israel is at risk of losing and losing disastrously.

John Spencer is a military expert who has served in the army for 25 years, including two combat tours in Iraq. He is now chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He was recently asked if the war was winnable for the IDF, and he said: one hundred percent. But he thinks it is contingent on a total defeat of Hamas.

Today, we discuss what has actually been accomplished by the IDF in the last eight months, why they haven’t achieved “total victory” yet and if that’s even possible, the fate of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, how the U.S. has restrained Israel and if that restraint has been good or bad for Israel, what hope there is for the remaining hostages, whether the idea of Hamas can be defeated, what a “day after” plan could look like, the war with Hezbollah heating up in the north, and, most importantly: why October 7 did not wake up the West.

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It’s been a little over a decade since cannabis was first legalized recreationally in the United States. As of today, recreational weed is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia, and Americans have never been more pro-weed. In a Gallup poll from last November, 70 percent of U.S. adults said they support the federal legalization of marijuana, up from 50 percent in 2013 and a mere twelve percent in 1969. 

In May, the Biden administration moved to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I, where it sits alongside heroin and LSD, to Schedule III, a category of drugs that the DEA says have a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” States with legal marijuana report economic benefits, a reduced burden on the criminal justice system, and positive health outcomes for patients with chronic pain and epilepsy.

But is legal cannabis really such a no-brainer? A recent study found that marijuana use—whether through smoking, edibles, or vapes—is associated with a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. Other studies have consistently shown that so-called “high-potency cannabis” increases the risk of psychotic episodes in young users. 

Today, a debate with two leading advocates both for and against the legalization of marijuana: has decriminalization worked? Or should it be reconsidered with more sober eyes? And is the most widely used and most socially acceptable illicit drug in the world, actually. . . dangerous? 

Dr. Peter Grinspoon is a physician and medical cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Seeing Through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth About Marijuana.

Kevin Sabet was a drug policy adviser for presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. He is the co-founder of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, an advocacy group that has emerged as the leading opponent of marijuana legalization in the United States. He is the author of Smoke Screen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.

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Steven Pinker is a world-renowned cognitive psychologist, and is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. His work delves into the complexities of cognition, language, and social behavior, and his research offers a window into the fundamental workings of the human mind. 

Pinker, who is the author of nine books including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, approaches his work with a kind of data-driven optimism about the world that has set him apart from the chorus of doomer voices we hear so much from in our public discourse.   

Today, we talk to Pinker about why smart people believe stupid things, the psychology of conspiracy theories, free speech and academic freedom, why democracy and enlightenment values are contrary to human nature, the moral panic around AI, and much more.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links.

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Last Saturday, stunning news broke out of Israel: four hostages had been rescued by the Israel Defense Forces in a daring daylight operation in central Gaza. Noa Argamani, 26; Almog Meir Jan, 22; Andrey Kozlov, 27; and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were liberated after 245 days in captivity.

The first name, Noa Argamani, was one that many people recognized immediately. Everyone remembered the footage of Noa being kidnapped on the back of a motorcycle on October 7 from the Nova Music Festival, a look of terror on her face, reaching for help. Eight months later, it was hard not to see the footage of Noa’s reunion with her father, crying in his arms, as anything short of a miracle.

But it wasn’t a miracle. It was the result of a complex and historic military operation that many are comparing to the raid on Entebbe in 1976. Not that you would have known that from the headlines. One BBC article was headlined: “Noa Argamani released.” A CNN chyron said the same. A UN official posted: “Relieved that four hostages have been released.” It was as if Hamas just handed them back to Israel and that was that. Other headlines focused on the Palestinians killed during the rescue, without mention of who started the gunfire, how many Hamas militants were killed vs. true innocents, who was holding the hostages, and of course, blindly quoting numbers given by the Hamas-run “Ministry of Health.”

Reading many of the headlines over the last few days—or the Twitter posts claiming that the hostage raid was some kind of decoy for the IDF to kill Palestinians—felt like nothing new from the last eight months: more distortions of reality, more spinning of words, more half-truths or outright lies. The day after the news broke, thousands of protesters encircled the White House waving Palestinian flags and calling for the death of Zionists. “Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now.” “Stand with Hamas,” read one poster. Another sign read “LGBTQ—Let’s Go Bomb Tel Aviv Quickly.”

How did this come to be? How is it that progressives are openly siding with Iranian-backed terrorist groups and against the country trying to stop them? And why are so many people shocked by this moral inversion?

Those are some of the questions Sheryl Sandberg has spent the past eight months asking.

As Sheryl watched the horrors of October 7 unfold, she was sure that everyone would rally against these unspeakable atrocities—particularly after the reports of sexual violence and rape committed by Hamas started coming in. When she saw that people did not, in fact, rise against it, and worse—when people began denying that it even happened—she was stunned. Sheryl was particularly stunned that many of her would-be allies—prominent feminists and progressives in this country and around the world—stayed silent.

This led her to make a documentary about the sexual violence of October 7 called Screams Before Silence. Sheryl described the film as the most important work of her life, which is saying something considering her substantial résumé. 

When people think of Sheryl Sandberg, they think of a girlboss, corporate feminism, and coastal politics—wearing a power suit and campaigning for Hillary Clinton. She is, in other words, a normal Democrat. A normal liberal. But as major parts of the left side against Israel, and downplay or ignore or actually foment antisemitism, a lot of people who consider themselves normal liberals are asking themselves: What happened to liberalism? 

The position that Sheryl finds herself in is relatable to many Americans, people who feel betwixt and between in a post–October 7 world where the very people they thought were their friends are proving themselves to be just the opposite. Today, Sheryl talks about this very fraught moment we are living in. She talks about her film, the silence from so many women’s organizations and feminists, the denialism, how antisemitism is thriving in America, her changing Jewish identity, whether she feels politically homeless, and much, much more.

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When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it was the largest military attack on a European country since World War II. Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by, but U.S. intelligence officials estimated last year that as many as 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed in the conflict, with an estimated 15–30 million refugees. 

Congress has allotted $175 billion in aid for Ukraine since the war began. 

But Ilya Ponomarev says that cash and defensive weapons alone won’t liberate Ukraine or impede future Russian aggression. He insists that Vladimir Putin must be deposed by force. And he is actively working to do just that. 

Ilya Ponomarev was a member of Russia’s Federal Assembly (Russia’s national legislature) from 2007 to 2016. He was the only member to vote against Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Exiled to Ukraine since 2016, he is the political head of the Freedom of Russian Legion, a paramilitary group made up of Russian dissidents and defectors fighting for Ukraine. He argues that nonviolent resistance is not enough and that radical steps are needed to overthrow Putin. 

In today’s conversation, Ponomarev talks about his life as a dissident and what it is like being a target for assassination, his previous relationship with Putin, and why democracy has failed to take root in Russia.

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On May 30, former president Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels. His sentencing has been scheduled for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention. He faces a possible sentence of four years for each count.

If you were on Twitter or Instagram or your social media platform of choice that historic Thursday afternoon, then you will have noticed two diametrically opposed reactions. On one side, people celebrated like it was the very best day of their entire lives, as justice, at last, was served. On the other side of the space-time Twitter-uum, it was a very, very somber day for the country. 

So. . . which is it? Did Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg at long last rightly and justly prosecute Trump for felony crimes? Or was this an obviously political witch trial and an abuse of the U.S. justice system? In other words: Have we crossed the Rubicon in American politics? After all, District Attorney Bragg campaigned on a promise to bring charges against Trump.

And either way, the reality is that the presidential front-runner is now a convicted felon. What does that mean? For voters? (Spoiler: it made them want to give him. . . more money.) For future elections? And for this country?

To debate these questions on Honestly today are Sarah Isgur and Mark Zauderer.

Sarah is a columnist for The Dispatch and an ABC News contributor. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as the Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration.

Mark is a veteran New York litigator who sits on a committee that screens applicants for the same court that will hear Trump’s appeal.

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At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America.”

A lot can happen in a hundred years. Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent—one of the highest in the world. What happened?

Today's guest, Argentina’s new president, says it’s pretty simple: socialism.

When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state—and maybe its most eccentric. During his campaign he made his intentions clear: “The [political] caste is trembling!” “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it.” Which is exactly what he’s doing now. He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out of control inflation.

This is also why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving—even if it meant short-term economic pain. But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.

Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: he says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesnt appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children,” and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic but studies the Torah. He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.

But what really makes him unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he is neither. He has ultra-liberal economic views but right-wing, populist rhetoric. He is anti-abortion but pro-legalization of sex work. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize organ trade. 

He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means that he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes.” Essentially. . . he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. A few months ago Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is a place where, historically, people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrives, flying commercial, and blows all that up: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.” 

All of this is why we were eager to talk to Milei—and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to look up in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? What is the state actually important for? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: he loves it.)

And despite having called journalists “extortionists,” “liars,” “imbeciles,” “freeloaders,” “donkeys,” and “ignorant”—for some reason, he agreed to sit down with us.

Note: The interview was conducted in Spanish with the help of a translator. Watch the video version of this interview at thefp.com

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of several books—including the 2006 autobiography Infidel—as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution She runs a foundation focused on human rights and, yes, she has a Substack. But Ayaan comes from a very different world from most of the people who inhabit our think tanks and ivory towers. Unlike those of us in the West who grew up with everything, Ayaan grew up in Somalia with. . . nothing. 

No liberty, no rule of law, no system of representative government, no pluralism, and no toleration for difference. 

Ayaan knows what it is like to live without those ideals, which is why she also has a particular instinct for when they are under attack. And that is exactly what she sees happening—all over the West.

Today, you’ll hear Ayaan read the epochal essay she published this morning in The Free Press. She explains how subversion—the act of undermining a country from within—works gradually and sometimes invisibly, but can ultimately explode and destroy a society. And she argues that what’s at stake in our inability to see the threat plainly is nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.

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Fifteen years ago, Vice was the envy of the media industry. While other outlets were shrinking, the edgy multimedia organization with a knack for virality was growing. At its peak, Vice had a reported value of $6 billion.

At one point, Disney offered to buy the company for $3.4 billion. The CEO said no. Something even bigger was on the horizon.

Except. . . it never came. No one else approached with another offer and the company started to collapse. Last year, Vice filed for bankruptcy.

The media narrative of what happened at Vice was that they simply made a series of business mistakes and the economic model of the business crumbled. But Michael Moynihan says that’s not the whole story. 

Michael—who Honestly listeners know as a frequent guest host here—is a longtime journalist who spent a decade at Vice. He was a correspondent for Vice’s flagship series on HBO. 

Today, he published a revealing insider story in The Free Press about how Vice really lost its way. Spoiler: apologizing for the gonzo journalism that fueled the business to begin with, and caving to an identity politics–obsessed staff of twentysomethings, isn’t exactly a recipe for success.

Vice didn’t just bleed cash. It also bled its backbone and its ethos. And the thing that replaced it? Well, no one wanted to consume it. 

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The first episode of Seinfeld aired in 1989. Thirty-five years later, the show remains at the apex of American culture. People speak in Seinfeld-isms, they flirt on dating apps over Seinfeld, they rewatch old episodes of Seinfeld when they’re feeling down. And, in the case of the Weiss family, Lou still watches it every night from 11 pm to 12 am on the local Pittsburgh station before he goes to sleep. People around the world even learn English watching Seinfeld!

It is not hyperbole to say that Seinfeld is one of the most influential shows of all time.

Seinfeld was supposedly a show about nothing, but that’s what made it so universal. Everyone can relate to trying to find your car in a parking garage. Everyone knows the feeling when their book is overdue at the library and they don’t want to pay the overdue fee. Everyone can relate to the frustration of waiting for a table at a restaurant. If you didn’t—or don’t—laugh during Seinfeld, something was wrong with you. 

All of which is why it was a bit strange and unexpected when a few months ago Jerry Seinfeld suddenly became “controversial.” In early October, Jerry—along with 700 other Hollywood stars—signed a letter condemning Hamas and calling for the return of the hostages. For that crime—the crime of saying terrorism is bad and innocent people should be released—crowds started protesting the events he was attending, the speeches he was giving, and heckling him in public.

A few weeks ago, when Jerry gave the commencement address at Duke University, some students walked out in protest. Then, his standup set was disrupted by protesters, to which Seinfeld quipped: “I love a little Jew-hate to spice up the show.” The crowd applauded.

Jerry Seinfeld made the most successful show about a Jew to ever exist. This was no small feat. In fact, one NBC executive, after watching the Seinfeld pilot for the first time in 1989, didn’t think it should even go to air. He said it was “too New York and too Jewish.”

And yet…it worked. And as Seinfeld spent years making Jewishness an iconic part of American pop culture, Jerry says he experienced not a drop of anti-Semitism.

But now, during a time that is supposed to be the most inclusive, the most sensitive, the most accepting, and the most tolerant time in human history, Jerry Seinfeld is targeted for being a Jew.

Jerry often says that the audience is everything. That’s the whole point of comedy. There is no joke if nobody laughs. But today on Honestly, we ask Jerry if he still trusts the audience in an age where the audience can start to feel like a mob?

You’ve probably heard or seen Jerry somewhere recently—from The New Yorker to GQ to… every podcast in the world. That’s because he has a new movie out called Unfrosted, which you should definitely go watch on Netflix. It’s hilarious, heartwarming, and you will love it.

But today’s conversation with Jerry is unlike the ones you’ve heard. He’s unfiltered. He’s emotional. And he’s speaking his mind.

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A few weeks ago, there was an awesome event in Brooklyn in partnership with UnHerd called Dissident Dialogues. It was exactly what it sounds like: debates and discussions on the most pressing questions facing our society today. Questions like: Have we reached peak woke? Can universities be saved? Can liberalism be saved? Is government censorship justified? Is this the end of mainstream media? and What is the future of feminism? So basically, just the light stuff.

But probably the most contentious debate of the weekend was: Is Israel’s war on Hamas a just war? 

This is not an easy debate. Emotions run hot, the stakes are high, people’s morality is called into question, and there are a lot of competing narratives. Which is all the more reason to debate the topic in public, something we always advocate for at The Free Press.

Arguing no, that Israel’s war on Hamas is not a just war, are Briahna Joy Gray and Jake Klein. Briahna was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and is host of the Bad Faith podcast. Arguing alongside Briahna is Jake Klein. Jake is a content creator for the Foundation for Economic Education, and he is a co-founder and editor at The Black Sheep.

Arguing yes, that Israel’s war on Hamas is a just war, are two of our very own Free Pressers, Eli Lake and Michael Moynihan. Eli is a columnist at The Free Press and a longtime journalist covering foreign affairs and national security. And Michael Moynihan, who you’ve heard guest-host Honestly, is a veteran journalist, having spent years at Vice, The Daily Beast, and Reason magazine. He is also a host of The Fifth Column podcast.

The debate is moderated by the one and only Russian British satirist, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, and Free Press contributor, Konstantin Kisin.

Facebook: Dissident Dialogues

Instagram: @dissident_dialogues

X: @diss_dialogues

YouTube: @dissidentdialogues-qm3gm?si=f-hldBmIK9CnGqRn

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Nellie Bowles wasn’t always the TGIF queen you know and love at The Free Press.

In fact, Nellie was, for a very long time, deeply embedded in the progressive left. 

Before Bari and Nellie met—and fell in love, blah blah blah—in 2019, Nellie was nothing short of a media darling. She had the right ideas, she wrote the right stories, and NYT readers ate it up. 

But Nellie is a reporter. And being a reporter—a great one—forced her to confront the gap between what an increasingly zealous left claimed were its aims. . . and the actual realities of their policies. 

People don’t usually change their minds. At least not on big-stakes political issues, and not when their jobs are at risk, or their social acceptance is on the line. And people certainly don’t change their minds publicly. 

Nellie did. And she chronicles that change in her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

The book is a collection of stories from her reporting during the years she started to question the narrative. These were stories people told her not to write. People said, Don’t go to Seattle’s autonomous zone; there’s nothing to see there. They said, Don’t report on the consequences of hormone therapy for kids; it’s not important. 

But as Nellie writes, “I became a reporter because I didn't trust authority figures. . . . As a reporter, I spent over a decade working to follow that curiosity. It was hard to suddenly turn that off. It was hard to constantly censor what I was seeing, to close one eye and try very hard not to notice anything inconvenient, especially when there was so much to see.”

That curiosity is what got Nellie kicked out of the club. But it gave her a place in a new club, the one that we at The Free Press think that the majority of Americans are actually in. 

On today’s episode: What does it mean to walk away from a movement that was once central to your identity? How does it feel to be accused of being “red-pilled” by the people you once called friends? How did the left become so radical and dogmatic? Why do people join mobs? And how did Nellie come back from the brink?

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There’s a new $6 billion-dollar industry. Its global market size is expected to increase to $100 billion within the decade. No, it’s not a fancy new app or a revolutionary gadget: it’s weight-loss drugs.

Just a few years ago no one had even heard the word Ozempic. Almost overnight, the drug previously used to treat type 2 diabetes became a household name. Healthcare providers wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for Ozempic and similar drugs in the last three months of 2022 alone. By the end of the decade, 30 million people are predicted to be on it. For comparison, that means that Ozempic is on track to do as well as birth control pills and Prozac—a blockbuster medication. 

A little over a year ago we had a fiery debate on Honestly about these revolutionary weight-loss drugs and our cultural understanding of obesity. On one side of the debate, people saw Ozempic as the golden answer we’ve been searching for. After all, obesity is the second biggest cause of cancer. It causes diabetes, and it’s linked to dementia, heart disease, knee and hip problems, arthritis, and high blood pressure, which causes strokes. In short: when you crunch the numbers, drugs like Ozempic seem to be lifesaving.

On the other hand was another argument: Why are we putting millions of people on a powerful new drug when we don’t know the risks? Plus, isn’t this a solution that ignores why we gained so much weight in the first place? In other words: Ozempic is not a cure for obesity; it’s a Band-Aid.

A year later, all of those questions are still up for debate. Our guest today, journalist Johann Hari, has spent the last year trying to find answers, traveling the world investigating weight-loss drugs, and. . . taking them himself.

In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Johann investigates what we know and what we don’t know about how these drugs work, their risks and benefits, how our food system sets us up to fail, and how movements like “fat pride” and “healthy at any size” have completely altered the conversation.

So on today’s episode: How do these new drugs impact our brains, our guts, and our mood? What are the hidden risks? Are they really a permanent solution to the obesity crisis? Or are they merely a quick fix that do little to address the root causes of obesity? With over 70 percent of Americans today classified as overweight or obese and the average American adult weighing nearly 25 pounds more today than they did in 1960, how did we get here in the first place? And why aren’t we addressing that problem, too?

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The news lately has not exactly been a walk in the park. Iran launched hundreds of rockets at Israel, creating the prospect of World War III; we have Trump’s ongoing criminal trial; a TikTok ban; a war in Ukraine; and much of the Ivy League is now co-opted by Hamas. Should we go on?

Today’s episode isn’t about any of that. Because sometimes we just need a breath of fresh air. Cue the one and only David Sedaris—America’s favorite humorist, or at the very least, our favorite humorist.

You might know David from one of his bestselling books like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Calypso. His words are frequently in The New Yorker, and he’s also just come out with a children’s book called Pretty Ugly, which he says has “no message.” 

David was on Honestly a few years ago—if you haven’t heard that interview, please check it out; it’s a highlight of this show—and he’s here again today to read an essay he wrote for The Free Press, where he imparts his thoughts on the underappreciated joys of small talk. We hope you enjoy.

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The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. It is a truism that everyone who lives here at some point came from somewhere else. At the same time, debates about who and how many people to let in have roiled the nation since our very founding.

And in the past few years, things have heated up to a new level.

That’s no surprise, considering that unlawful attempts to cross the southern border hit a record high of about 2.5 million last year. In the past four years, nearly 5 million attempts to cross the border illegally occurred in Texas alone.

We’ve all seen the videos of mothers with babies shimmying under barbed wire, of migrant caravans marching toward Texas, of young men charging Border Patrol agents.

It’s why immigration is the top issue for voters in the 2024 election. Indeed, the influx has made even progressive cities, which previously declared themselves immigration sanctuaries, sound the alarm. Last May, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot said “we’ve reached a breaking point,” while declaring a state of emergency in her city. In September, New York mayor Eric Adams said the influx of migrants “will destroy New York City.”

All of this is the subject of our first live debate of 2024, which took place in Dallas, and that we wanted to share with you on Honestly today. The proposition: Should the United States shut its borders?

Arguing in the affirmative are Ann Coulter and Sohrab Ahmari. On the opposing side, arguing that no, the United States should not shut its borders, are Nick Gillespie and Cenk Uygur.

They also cover questions like: Is mass immigration is a net gain or a net loss for America? How do we balance our humanitarian impulse with our practical and economic needs? Do migrants suppress wages of the already strained working class? Do they stretch community resources impossibly thin? Does a porous border impact our national security? And what does a sensible border policy really look like?

We hope you listen, share, and discuss. 

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President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent ByteDance—or else face an outright ban. The measure was included in a bill providing a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. 

Proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giants, collects piles of user data—and if requested by the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance is obligated by law to share that user information. Critics also worry about political influence operations on the platform—a dictatorial foreign adversary turning our kids into little Manchurian candidates.

Opponents of the bill argue that forcing a TikTok sale under the threat of a ban is a blow to users’ free speech rights and represents an overreach of government authority. They insist that the government should not dictate which apps Americans can use, especially on opaque grounds of national security. 

Today, a debate: Is American national security at risk from an Orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian regime? Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form, a government-created moral panic fueled by dubious threats of misinformation? 

Arguing that the TikTok bill is a logical extension of our current laws—and a necessary countermeasure to authoritarian meddling—is Geoffrey Cain. Cain is the author of The Perfect Police State and senior fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University. 

On the other side, arguing that the bill is a dangerous overreach justified by flimsy evidence of an alleged threat, is Walter Kirn. Kirn is a novelist, Free Press contributor, editor-at-large of County Highway, and co-host of the podcast America This Week. 

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This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators told Jewish students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety. 

Demonstrators on these campuses shouted: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” In one chant at Columbia, the protesters were heard saying “Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.” and “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”

These campus activists are not simply “pro-Palestine” protesters. They are people who are openly celebrating Hamas and physically intimidating identifiably Jewish students who came near. We published the accounts of two of those students—Sahar Tartak and Jonathan Lederer—today.

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.) It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. 

The institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of truth have not only abandoned their mission—they have stood by and done nothing meaningful to condemn students who support terrorism, or to stop the horrific scenes of the past 48 hours. 

In fact, at Columbia they have done quite the opposite: on Monday morning the president announced that she is moving classes online. If that’s not cowering to the mob, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, the NYPD has offered to help secure the safety of Jews on campus, but so far the president of Columbia has refused to let them on campus.

Since the very founding of America, this country has been a unique place for the Jewish people. That is because of America’s exceptional ideals and our willingness to defend them. 

But in the past six months these core American beliefs, once deemed immutable, have been challenged in ways that were previously unimaginable, as a rising wave of antisemitism and illiberalism have swept the country—a wave that was put on full display over the last few days, at the country’s most elite and prestigious universities.

Jews around the world are about to celebrate the holiday of Passover—otherwise known as the festival of freedom. But what does it mean this year to commemorate our freedom, when our freedom feels like it is contracting before our eyes? How can we defend the original principles that underpin our society? How can we find the courage to do so?

A few months ago, I gave a speech at the 92Y called “The State of World Jewry,” where I addressed these very questions. I argued that the state of world Jewry depends on the state of the free world. Right now, its condition is in jeopardy. Our holiday from history is over.

For those celebrating Passover, Chag Sameach. And as we say at the Passover seder, “Next year, may we all be free.”

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It was November 30, 2021, when Nicole Avant got a call in the middle of the night from her husband. The unthinkable had happened. Her otherwise healthy mom, Jacqueline Avant, was in critical condition at the hospital. She had been shot.

Nicole would soon find out that her mother had been having an ordinary evening at her home in Beverly Hills when a man broke into her home in an attempted robbery. He shot Jacqueline, and then fled the scene.

She died later that night in the hospital. Jacqueline was 81.

It was an unspeakable tragedy that would leave most people paralyzed, enraged and probably seeking revenge. But Nicole’s response surprised a lot of people. She decided that she’s not a victim, and she would forgive her mother’s murderer. 

She shares this radical sentiment in her new book: “Think You'll be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude.”

For those unfamiliar with Nicole, she is someone who wears many hats. She served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under President Obama—and she was the first black woman to hold this seat. She's been a force in political fundraising. She raised more than half a million for President Obama in one night in 2012, and she was part of a fundraising team that raised $21 million for him in 2008. She's also a movie producer, which isn’t exactly surprising considering she was born into black Hollywood royalty—her father was Clarence Avant, the legendary music mogul who managed artists like Bill Withers, Sarah Vaughan, and Freddie Hubbard.

Today, she finds herself again a part of Hollywood royalty, just of more recent vintage. Her husband is Netflix Co-Ceo Ted Sarandos.

But unlike the British royals, Nicole Avant doesn’t put her views through a PR machine. She says what she thinks, and she doesn’t have time for bullshit. All of which is why we were so eager to have her on Honestly today. 

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In the late hours of Saturday night 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles barreled toward Israel. It was a direct and unprecedented strike on Israel from Iran.

Extraordinarily, Israel—with the help of the Americans, the British, the French, and even the Jordanians and the Saudis—were able to intercept 99 percent of the missiles. 

Iran said the attack was a response to Israel’s hit on a consular building in Syria earlier this month that killed high-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. Many analysts and journalists have also framed the attack the way Iran had: as a “retaliatory strike.”

But it’s a strange way to describe the historic onslaught considering Iran’s war of aggression since October 7. After all, it was Iran that trained and armed Hamas to come and butcher 1,200 Israelis. It was Iran that trained and armed Hezbollah, whose attacks on northern Israeli communities have kept tens of thousands from their homes. 

Free Press columnist Matti Friedman nailed it when he wrote that this weekend’s attack was Iran coming out of the shadows for the first time: “like a flash going off in a dark room, the attack has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East.” 

Walter Russell Mead wrote on Twitter Saturday night: “By any reasonable standard, a state of war now exists between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The questions now are how fast and how far does it escalate, who will be drawn in, and who will win.”

Today, Michael Moynihan speaks with Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States about these questions—and what comes next in this unprecedented moment in history.

While the U.S. was instrumental in helping Israel defend itself over the weekend, Biden has been clear with Israel: he does not want Israel to respond. He is reported to have said to Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win.” But if Israel doesn’t respond, will that only embolden Iran further? Isn’t that the sort of appeasement that got us here in the first place? And if Israel is compelled to respond for the sake of its country, can it do so without American support?

As Michael Oren wrote for The Free Press: “The story of America can end only one of two ways: either it stands up boldly against Iran and joins Israel in deterring it, or Iran emerges from this conflict once again unpunished, undiminished, and ready to inflict yet more devastating damage.”

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Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at NPR. In his 25 years with NPR, his work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others.

Today, we published in The Free Press his firsthand account of the transformation he has witnessed at National Public Radio. Or, as Uri puts it, how it went from an organization that had an “open-minded, curious culture” with a “liberal bent” to one that is “knee-jerk, activist, scolding,” and “rigidly progressive.” 

Uri describes a newsroom that aimed less to cover Donald Trump but instead veered towards efforts to topple him; a newsroom that reported the Russia collusion story without enough skepticism or fairness, and then later largely ignored the fact that the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion; a newsroom that purposefully ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story—in fact, one of his fellow NPR journalists approved of ignoring the laptop story because “covering it could help Trump.” A newsroom that put political ideology before journalism in its coverage of Covid-19. And, he describes a newsroom where race and identity became paramount in every aspect of the workplace and diversity became its north star. 

In other words, NPR is not considering all things anymore. 

On today’s episode: How did NPR lose its way? Why did it change? And why does this lone journalist feel obligated to speak out?

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On Election Night 2016, many of us thought we knew who would be the next president of the United States.

We were blindsided when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Legacy media quickly scrambled to explain what had happened. They ultimately arrived at an explanation: Trump’s voters were racist, xenophobic conspiracy theorists, and possibly even proto-fascists.

That wasn’t quite right.

My guest today, Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, has been on a journey for the past eight years to understand how Trump won the White House in 2016 and how the left fundamentally misunderstood the American working class. She eventually came to the conclusion that the most salient feature of American life is not our political divide. It’s “the class divide that separates the college-educated from the working class.” 

Democrats have historically been the party of the working class. But for the better part of the past decade, Democrats have seen their support among working-class voters tumble. Policy wonks and demographic experts kept saying just wait: the future of the Democratic party is a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition. But that didn’t pan out. 

Instead, in 2016, Trump carried 54 percent of voters with family incomes of $30,000 to $50,000; 44 percent of voters with family incomes under $50,000; and nearly 40 percent of union workers voted for Trump—the highest for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Meanwhile, in 2022, Democrats had a 15-point deficit among working-class voters but a 14-point advantage among college-educated voters.

In order to understand how and why this happened, Batya decided to spend the last year traveling the country talking to working-class Americans. Who are they? Do they still have a fair shot at the American dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life? 

She collected these stories in her new book: Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. What she found is that for many of them, the American dream felt dead. 

Today, Batya discusses who really represents the working class; why she thinks America has broken its contract with the working class; how we reinstate our commitment to them; and what will happen in 2024 if we don’t.

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If the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam to fundamentally change the nature of work, the current industrial revolution—the disruption of automation, information, the internet, and now AI—is transforming everything about the way we work, connect, and interact with the natural world. 

These changes have largely been regarded as a net good. After all, poverty across the world has fallen precipitously in the last 100 years. Life expectancy has nearly doubled. Literacy is four times higher. Hunger, malnutrition, war—all down. All good things.

But today’s guest, writer Paul Kingsnorth, thinks that the way in which this progress has been achieved is detrimental not only to the environment but to our own mental and physical well-being—and that underneath the extreme wealth built by human society is a massive sense of human and spiritual loss.

Paul is someone who has gone through a profound transformation over the past decade, and in a very public way. He was once considered one of the West’s most radical and prominent environmentalists—even chaining himself to a bridge in protest of road construction and leading The Ecologist, a left-wing environmental magazine. But he became disillusioned with an environmental movement that he says became obsessed with cutting carbon emissions by any means, and getting captured by commercial interests in the process.

Paul and his family eventually left urban England to live off the land in rural Ireland, where they currently grow their own food and the children are homeschooled. 

One more thing of note this Easter week: Paul converted from a practicing Buddhist and Wiccan to an Orthodox Christian—which is about as traditional as it gets.

As you’ll hear in this conversation, Paul explains why he intentionally “regressed.” In short: in our modern, hyper-connected, tech-obsessed world—what he calls “the age of the machine”—Paul and his family are trying to live wildly. We talk about what that looks like for him, and for any of us trying to be free; we talk about how the left has strayed from its original principles; why the West has abandoned God; and how to fight every day to live. . . simply.

And for more of Paul’s work, check out some of our favorite essays: “The Cross and the Machine,” “The View from the Cave,” and “The Vaccine Moment, Part One” and “The Vaccine Moment, Part Two.”

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been explaining the human condition to us better than anyone else. He first did it with his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which explored why people were so passionately divided over politics and religion, and argued that people are fundamentally religiously inclined creatures. Then, he did it again with The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which laid out why kids today—especially on college campuses—have become so intolerant of opinions that conflict with their own.

Now, he’s done it once more with his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. This time, Haidt explains what so many parents have been confused by for the last decade: Why are kids today more anxious than ever, more depressed than ever, more risk-averse than ever, lonelier than ever, and less social than ever?

It’s pretty simple, Haidt argues: We changed childhood.

The mass migration of childhood, Haidt says, from the real world to the virtual world has completely changed what it means to be a kid. By replacing free and independent play and quality time with friends with the isolation of screens and phones, we instigated what he calls the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” What resulted, he argues, is a childhood that is “more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.”

Today, Haidt explains how this massive change happened, its detrimental effects on kids, and what actions we can take—both in our own lives and legislatively—in order to reverse course and free the anxious generation.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.

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Today, we close out the Israel series with a conversation with the journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who is one of the most important and insightful writers of our time on Israel and the Middle East.

We talk about many things, including: the uncertain future for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Jews around the world; the larger fight happening within Islam that this war represents; what progressives in the West don’t understand about that fight, or about the Middle East more generally; and why ordinary Americans need to understand that history has not ended—and that we’re still very much living inside it.

Today, Part 3 of The Free Press in Israel: The Gathering Storm.  

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When we went to Israel, we tried tirelessly to get into Gaza but Israel’s counteroffensive made it impossible for us to go to the strip during those days. Instead, we spent time in and around the West Bank. First, we went to the Qalandia checkpoint, one of the biggest in Israel, where tens of thousands of Palestinians cross from the West Bank into East Jerusalem daily. Then, we went to the key Palestinian political and cultural center of Ramallah.

We wanted to hear the unfiltered voices of ordinary Palestinians and ask them what they think about October 7, about the ongoing war, and about the prospect of two states between the river and the sea. If you grew up attached to the idea of a two-state solution, what you'll hear is surprising. Over and over, people told us they supported the events of October 7.

At the same time, our week in Israel revealed something else surprising about this place, and that’s how cohesive Israeli society has become, even and including among Israel's 20 percent Arab minority. 

In this episode, you’ll hear from both Palestinians in the West Bank as well as one extraordinary Muslim Israeli Arab woman, who sits on the fence between these two very different worlds—and from that unique vantage point, offers a hopeful vision for the future.

Today, Part 2 of The Free Press in Israel: Shattered Illusions. 

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What happens when a country has to ask its citizens the unthinkable: What are you willing to die for? 

It’s a question that feels so outside the current American experience. When was the last time you asked yourself, What would I do if I had to fight for my home, my family, my nation?

When the citizens of Israel were confronted with the worst disaster imaginable, what emerged was a level of civic obligation, duty, and sacrifice that they themselves didn’t think they were capable of.

Today, Part 1 of The Free Press in Israel: Running Toward Fire.

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A few weeks ago, a team of Free Press producers and reporters arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The energy was somber and still, almost like the country and its people were frozen in time. As one mother of a hostage told us, “Every single second of our lives is trauma.” And as the journalist Gadi Taub told us, “People don’t even begin to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel.”

Since the earliest hours of October 7, we’ve been reporting on the war in Israel. We’ve published no fewer than seventy articles about it, and more than ten Honestly episodes. In other words: when we arrived in Israel, we thought we already knew all about what happened that day. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually, and actually standing in a killing field. 

The events of October 7—and the ongoing war between Israel, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies—isn’t just about another war in another faraway place. This is about the difference between democracy and tyranny, between freedom and unfreedom—in a world that seems to have lost the ability to make a distinction between the two. 

As one reservist told us, “We’re doing this for the world. Hamas is an idea. It looks at you in L.A. as the enemy, not just us in Israel. We just happen to be their neighbors.” 

So over the next few episodes, we’re going to bring you The FP in Israel: a special limited series about our time reporting on the ground. We hope you listen. And for more of our content from Israel, subscribe to The Free Press at thefp.com, and check out our YouTube channel, where you will find additional videos and documentaries.

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American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an alarming 14 percent. 

What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children.

Take, for example, the biggest parenting trend today: “gentle parenting.” Parents today are told to understand their kids’ feelings instead of punishing them when they act out. This emphasis on the importance of feelings is not just a parenting trend—it’s become an educational tool as well. “Social-emotional learning” has become a pillar in public schools across America, from kindergarten to high school. And maybe most significantly, therapy for children has been normalized. In fact, there are more kids in therapy today than ever before. 

On the surface, all of these parenting and educational developments seem positive. We are told that parents and educators today are more understanding, more accepting, more empathetic, and more compassionate than ever before—which, in turn, makes wonderful children.

But is that really the case? Are all of these changes—the cultural rethink, the advent of therapy culture, of gentle parenting, of teaching kids about social-emotional learning—actually making our kids better?

Best-selling author Abigail Shrier says no.

In her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, Shrier argues that these changes are directly contributing to kids’ mental health decline. In other words: all of this shiny new stuff is actually making our kids worse. 

Today: What’s gone wrong with American youth? What really happens to kids who get therapy but don’t actually need it? In our attempt to keep kids safe, are we failing the next generation of adults? And, if yes, how do we reverse it before it’s too late?

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Two years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The costs of this war have been unbelievably high. Half a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been either killed or wounded. In terms of cost, the U.S. alone has spent $113 billion on the war. And an aid package that includes another $60 billion for Ukraine is stuck in Congress.

Americans’ changing sentiment about the war has certainly contributed to that package being in limbo. Two years ago, there was broad support for the war: 66 percent of Americans thought we needed to help Ukraine. But that view is no longer the consensus. Several polls have indicated that the majority of Americans oppose additional funding to support Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka fell to Russian forces last weekend. The Biden administration says it’s a direct consequence of congressional inaction.

Today on Honestly, a debate: Where is all of America’s aid to Ukraine going? Is Ukraine really such a clear-cut cause? Even if you believe that it is, what has all of this sacrifice gotten Ukraine—and the U.S.? Can Ukraine even win this war? What’s the endgame? And is victory in Ukraine really as important to America as many politicians claim that it is?

Bret Stephens is a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist for The New York Times. His book, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, foresaw much of today’s world. Bret worries that the world is on the precipice of World War III. Isolationism, he argues, only contributes to global instability.

Elbridge Colby is co-founder of The Marathon Initiative think tank. He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under President Trump, and he is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Colby believes the United States must make difficult defense choices in an era of great power competition. Ukraine, he argues, is not the top priority.

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Last week, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny joined a long line of ordinary and noble people who were and are the victims of Stalinist tyranny and now Russian authoritarianism. 

Just 10 days prior, Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin, Navalny’s nemesis—and soon to be murderer—in a two-hour conversation at the Kremlin. The name Alexei Navalny never came up.

Then, when Carlson appeared onstage at the World Government Summit in Dubai and was asked why he hadn’t pressed Putin about Navalny, he replied: “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”

Carlson went on to talk about how wonderful the Russian capital was, how it was “so much nicer than any city in my country.” (All onstage in a country that runs on indentured servitude and sharply curbs freedom of expression, mind you.)

Today, Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik explains why Tucker Carlson—and so many on the American right—are confused about Putin’s Russia, and about what Navalny—a hero of our darkening century—died for. Putin is a warden of the deepest of deep states. So why does Carlson and his lot believe he’s worthy of admiration? And how did so many on the American right succumb to the same idiocy and myopia that grip so many progressive identitarians?

The way the left and the right arrived at their own brand of anti-Americanism was different, Peter argues. But the outcome is the same: this is exactly what the Kremlin wants.

For further reading on Navalny's death, check out:

Alexei Navalny Lived and Died in Truth, by Bari Wiess

Navalny’s Letters from the Gulag, by the Free Press

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Today, we’re thrilled to bring you not Honestly with Bari Weiss, but maybe something even better: Blocked and Reported with Suzy Weiss!

If you haven’t heard of Blocked and Reported, it’s one of my very favorite shows hosted by two of my favorite journalists, Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal. The tagline for the show is “a podcast about internet nonsense,” but that undersells it. Katie and Jesse do a lot of good journalism on this show—it’s just swathed in humor and irreverence. 

This week, Free Press reporter (and yes, my little sister) Suzy Weiss filled in for Jesse. You’ll remember Suzy from the Oberlin episode she reported for Honestly a while back or, more recently, from the 2024 Predictions episode she was on a few weeks ago, where she told us 2024 is going to be the year of “porridge food” and cheating. I’m biased, but anyone familiar with Suzy’s work knows that it’s funny, gonzo, and feels like something you used to read in an excellent magazine but don’t anymore. You’ll learn a lot more about her on today’s episode, including that she was the subject of controversy when she was a teenager and the freedom that experience gave her down the road.

The title of this episode of Blocked and Reported is The Red House on Mississippi—in this case, the Mississippi isn’t the river, but a road in Portland. The house has been part of a movement to prevent a black family from eviction. Katie and Suzy also talk about dating while problematic and the spread of polyamory, and Suzy argues in favor of good, old-fashioned cheating—the perfect Valentine’s week topics.

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A little over two years ago, in the pages of The Free Press, Pano Kanelos announced that he was starting a new university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. The headline was stark: “We Can't Wait For Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.” I was one of the founding trustees.

The announcement generated a lot of headlines. As expected, a lot of people dunked on it. They said, “why in a country with thousands of colleges and universities do we need a new one?” They said it was fake; they said we didn’t have real students. They said it was a “cancel culture grift.” 

Two years later, not only is UATX a very real university but in 2024, the school will accept 100 students in the inaugural class—students who won’t just be consumers but founders.

To get a sense of what this school—and this cohort—is all about, there is no better thing to do than to listen to today’s episode: a conversation with Harvard economist Roland Fryer, recorded live last weekend in front of these prospective students.

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard's history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate. 

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did. 

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases. He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

This conversation was inspiring, courageous, and long overdue. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

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For this week’s Honestly, we’re sharing a favorite episode from a favorite podcast, one you may not have heard of: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers.

UnHerd’s mission is similar to ours: to push back against the herd mentality, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people, and places.

On this episode, host Freddie Sayers talks to Andrew Sullivan, one of America's best known political observers and writers, about something very few public intellectuals are willing to talk about: what he got wrong about Trump.

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There’s increasing concern that as scary as this period feels—between Russia’s two-year war in Ukraine and Hamas’s ongoing war with Israel—that all of this will come to be seen as the calm before the storm. Should China decide to move against Taiwan in some way, then we’ll have war in three regions, and U.S. involvement in all three. Or perhaps by then it will not seem like separate wars, but a single global one. 

Most Americans in the last fifty years, and certainly since the end of the Cold War, have lived in the luxury of safety. We live in a place where peace and security—crime and riots aside—are generally taken for granted. But a lot of Americans had a serious wake-up call after October 7, when a country with a high-tech security fortress was overwhelmed by terrorists on motorcycles and trucks and paragliders.

Could this happen here? Who is actually coming over our border? If we had to fight for our country, who would actually show up?

Today’s Honestly guests had that wake-up call long before the wars in Ukraine or Gaza. They’re investing their time, money, and resources into building a better American defense. And in the past few months especially, their work has come to be seen as prescient.

Palmer Luckey is a 31-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur. At the age of 19, Palmer founded the virtual reality company Oculus, which was originally supposed to be sold on Kickstarter as a virtual reality prototype for VR nerds and enthusiasts. Instead, it was acquired by Facebook for more than $2 billion. Then, when he was 25, he founded Anduril Industries, an $8.5 billion company that develops drones, autonomous vehicles, submarines, rockets, and software for military use.

Katherine Boyle is a Washington Post reporter turned venture capitalist; she is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founder of the firm’s American Dynamism arm, which invests in companies that build to support the national interest. 

Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder of Palantir (along with Peter Thiel and others) and founder and general partner of the firm 8VC, which backed Anduril in its early days. 

They are each attempting to disrupt the defense marketplace, bring Silicon Valley’s speed, creativity, and innovation to defense, advance our national security, and, you know. . . save America.

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Today, Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo debate the origins of DEI and the right way to fight the illiberal orthodoxy that has consumed our schools and institutions.

Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential. 

Yascha is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University. He thinks that while DEI—and woke ideology more broadly—is concerning, he doesn’t think the answer to its illiberalism should come in the form of bans and legislation.

They both recently published books that investigate the changing cultural trends of the American left. Yascha is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. And Christopher’s book is America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

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It’s been four years since the first American death from the coronavirus.

Four years since we were told that wearing masks—even cloth masks—were essential to keeping us safe. The same goes for lockdowns and social distancing. Any inconvenience to society was outweighed by the lives saved. 

And remember what President Biden told us after Covid vaccines were rolled out a year later?

“The CDC is saying, they have concluded, that fully vaccinated people are at a very, very low risk of getting Covid-19,” Biden said in a Rose Garden press conference.

We now know that so much of what we were told in those years was wrong. (Last week, Anthony Fauci admitted in closed-door congressional testimony that the six-feet apart rule was “likely not based on scientific data.”) And if the guidance wasn’t flat-out wrong, it was certainly debatable. But debate was not only discouraged—it was shut down. Respected dissident scientists were dismissed as fringe scientists. They were deplatformed on social media.

For most of us, all of this seems like a lifetime ago. But the problem is that here we are, four years later; millions of Americans suffered, more than a million died, and it’s not clear we have any better understanding of what exactly went wrong. How was it that our leaders—and our economy—were so brutally underprepared for a global pandemic?

That’s what today’s conversation on Honestly is about.

Guest host Michael Moynihan talks to The Free Press’s own Joe Nocera about his new book, co-authored with Bethany McLean: The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.

The Big Fail takes a critical look at what the pandemic uncovered about our leaders, our broken trust in government, and the vulnerability of the biggest economy in the world. Nocera also investigates the perverse incentives (and devastating effects) of hospital systems and nursing homes run by private equity firms. All this makes him ask: Does capitalism have its limitations when it comes to healthcare?

Most importantly: Are we able to learn our lesson from the Covid pandemic and do better when the next emergency hits us?

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One hundred days ago, the world changed. October 7 has proven to be many things: the opening salvo in a brutal war between Israel and Hamas; an attack that could precipitate a broader, regional war; the beginning of a global, ongoing orgy of antisemitism; a wake-up call regarding the rot inside the West’s once-great sensemaking institutions; a possible realignment of our politics.

One of the things it has also been is a test. A moral test that many in the West have failed. That test of moral conscience is a continuing one considering there are still 136 hostages in Gaza. Two of them are babies; close to 20 of them are young women.

Across the Western world, these hostages have faded from view. And when it comes to the fate of the many young women abducted by Hamas and taken to Gaza, the silence from some corners has been deafening.

Today on Honestly, Bari argues that the groups you would expect to care most about these women and hostages—the celebrity feminists who are always the first to speak up in times of crisis, the prominent women’s organizations who protested loudly when it came to #MeToo, Donald Trump, or Brett Kavanaugh, and the international, supposedly “nonpolitical” human rights organizations—have said and done next to nothing about the murder, kidnap, and rape of Israeli girls.

What explains their silence—or worse, their downplaying or denial? 

When Michelle Obama, Oprah, Malala Yousafzai, Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian—and the rest of the civilized world—saw the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria by Boko Haram in April 2014, within days they took to Twitter and demanded “Bring Back Our Girls.”

Why isn’t the world demanding the same now? 

It’s been one hundred days in captivity: bring back our girls.

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We're less than two weeks out from the first Democratic Primary in New Hampshire, and the mood among Democrats is grim. Joe Biden is polling behind Trump in almost every national poll. And the feeling among Democrats is well, there’s just nothing we can do about it.

Enter Dean Phillips: the one lone soldier Democrat trying to make a last ditch effort to stop the 2020 rematch from hell.

Dean is a moderate Democratic Congressman from Minnesota. He has political experience, but not the baggage of a long career in DC. He’s known as an incredibly bipartisan politician. He’s a philanthropist, a business magnate (who makes gelato of all things), a husband, and a father. But maybe, most importantly, he's a spry 54. By many metrics, he has what everyone claims to want in a Democratic presidential nominee.

He also offers an alternative for the American voter who feels alienated by both parties. As Peter Savodnik reported this week in the FP, “nearly half of Americans today identify as independents—not necessarily because they’re centrists, or moderates, but because neither party reflects their views.” Dean believes he can win over those voters. He’s already proven he will buck the Democratic party establishment, at great personal and professional cost. (As James Carville said, Dean’s bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles from here on out.)

So, why is he doing this? And, can he actually pull it off?

On today’s episode, a conversation with Dean Phillips about his uphill battle to knock his own party’s nominee out of the way, his motivations for running in the first place, and how the Democratic Party has gotten to this pass. We also cover his positions on issues like the border crisis, education, policing, healthcare, Israel, China, his Jewish identity and his improbable friendship with Rashida Tlaib. 

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Last year was certainly eventful. It brought spy balloons, Donald Trump’s indictments, the coronation of a king, the fall of a crypto prince, and no shortage of chaos in Washington, from the ousting of Kevin McCarthy to the farcical George Santos scandal. Oh, and then there’s the small matter of two major wars, one in Gaza and one in Ukraine. Plus, ongoing tension between the U.S. and China. On a cheerier note, 2023 was also the year of Barbenheimer, the year it felt like AI really arrived, and the year the 90s were finally cool again.  

But, as crazy as last year was, will the next twelve months prove that it was actually just the calm before the storm? 

For many of us, 2024 begins with a distinct feeling of dread. 

The Middle East grows increasingly unstable, the war in Ukraine is not going Kyiv’s way, and Xi Jinping’s rhetoric gets more bellicose by the day. Here at home, there’s the small matter of the election from hell, in which American voters face the unappetizing prospect of once again having to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. 

To try and figure out whether things will really be as terrible as we fear, today on Honestly Bari Weiss and Free Press editor Olly Wiseman are calling up some of our favorite experts to get a better sense of what’s coming down the pike. 

The great Tyler Cowen looks into the economic crystal ball. Leandra Medine Cohen clues us in on fashion trends in 2024. Our very own Suzy Weiss talks through the cultural year ahead. Linguist John McWhorter looks at language. Doctor and longevity expert Peter Attia tells how to start the year healthy. Eagle-eyed political observers Nate Silver and Frank Luntz try to forecast the election. And historian Niall Ferguson tells us whether we’re right to be having nightmares about World War III. 

Some guests cheered us up, others freaked us out. All of them were a pleasure to talk to. Welcome to 2024!

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Over the last six months, we’ve run two essay contests in The Free Press.

The first was for high schoolers; we asked them to write about a problem facing American society—and how to fix it. 

The second contest was for an older generation—70 years and over—and we asked them to tell a story about an event that shaped their life and helped give them wisdom or a fresh perspective. 

Today, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of both of those contests. Voices of wisdom exactly 60 years apart.

First, you’ll hear 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca read her winning essay, “A Constitution for Teenage Happiness.” As you’ll hear, her happiness guide involves less phones (in fact, she doesn’t own one) and more old books, less TV and more memorizing poems. Ruby is a homeschooled senior. She told us she entered the contest because she believes in our mission of finding “the people—under the radar or in the public eye—who are telling the truth.” 

Then, you’ll hear Michael Tobin—a 77-year-old psychologist living in Israel—read his winning essay, “A Love Song for Deborah.” It is about grappling with his wife’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and nearly giving in to despair—until he found the one thing that awakened her. 

We hope you enjoy today’s episode, and that it moves, uplifts, inspires—and all of those other holiday spirit verbs. It sure did for us.

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Over the last month, America has been witnessing one of the biggest abortion battles in the country since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Today, Bari shares her thoughts on the case of Kate Cox. She explains why it’s an appalling example of the cruelty of near-total abortion bans, and a tragic rebuttal to the pro-life claim that exceptions to these bans allow for a doctor and patient to make decisions in the woman’s best medical interest. And, Bari explains why she still grapples with the other side of the abortion debate—and why we all need to.

For more Honestly on abortion, please listen to:

Caitlin Flanagan on Why You’re Wrong—and Right—About Abortion

Akhil Reed Amar on The Yale Law Professor Who Is Anti-Roe, But Pro-Choice

Bethany Mandel, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Jeffrey Rosen on America After Roe: A Roundtable 

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On October 7, Hamas terrorists stormed into the home of Hadar and Itay Berdichevsky in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the Israeli communities along the Gaza border. Hadar and Itay— both 30 years old—were butchered in their own home.

Miraculously, their 10-month-old twins survived. The babies were found—rescued by the IDF—14 hours later, crying in their cots. Their parents’ bodies lie in pools of blood around them.

Today on Honestly, we’re talking with the twins’ aunt and uncle, Maya and Dvir Rosenfeld, who are now helping raise their orphaned twin nephews. Maya and Dvir also survived the massacre on Kfar Aza that day. They hid in their safe room for more than 24 hours with their own baby boy—holding their hands over his mouth to keep him quiet—as they heard the terrible sounds of their neighborhood being turned into a slaughterhouse around them.

Maya and Dvir flew to L.A. last week to share their family’s story. They’re doing this—even in the midst of mourning the loss of family, even while trying to recover from this unspeakable terror and tragedy—because they cannot understand how there are people who either don’t know, don’t believe, or simply don’t care about what happened that day. Or about the 130 remaining hostages in Gaza.

There are so many stories from October 7 that need to be told. We’ve told some of them on this show. And still, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what happened that day, of the thousands upon thousands of stories—individual, human stories of horror and tragedy—each one deserving of being shared with the world. 

This one today represents a little light in a sea of darkness. These innocent babies—who will not remember the terror of October 7—represent both senseless tragedy and unbelievable bravery. Both pain and hope. Both ultimate despair and miracle beyond belief. Both death. . . and life.

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How did the congressional hearing on antisemitism last week go so awry?

Was the resignation of University of Pennsylvania’s president just another cancellation, only this time on the other side of the political aisle? 

How can we fix our broken universities? And what’s at stake if we don’t?

Bari’s thoughts on these questions and more on today’s episode.

For further reading on these topics, please check out the following pieces in The Free Press:

The Ouster of Penn’s President Won’t Fix the Problem by Peter Savodnik

The Treason of the Intellectuals by Niall Ferguson

Even Antisemites Deserve Free Speech by Nadine Strossen and Pamela Paresky 

The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7 by Mathias Döpfner

Claudine Gay Is Why I Never Checked the ‘Black’ Box by Eli Steele (first appeared in Newsweek)

Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins by Ilya Shapiro 

Law Students for Hamas by Aaron Sibarium

How American Colleges Gave Birth to Cancel Culture by Rikki Schlott and Greg Lukianoff

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One of the words that’s become utterly void of meaning in the last few years because of its overuse and misuse is privilege. White privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, gender privilege, heterosexual privilege, even hot privilege. In these contexts, privilege is a stain, a kind of original sin meant to guilt the offending party into repenting for it at every twist and turn in their life. “Check your privilege” became a common refrain of the past decade. What all of this has done is confuse and undermine the idea of real privilege—real advantage that some situations produce over others—which, of course, really exists in this country. 

But the ultimate privilege in America is not being born white or straight or male. The ultimate privilege, as Melissa Kearny argues, is being born into a household with two parents.

Melissa Kearney is an economist at the University of Maryland and her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, argues that declining marriage rates in America—and the corresponding rise in children being raised in single parent households—are driving many of the country’s biggest economic problems. In the 1950s, fewer than 5 percent of babies in this country were born to unmarried mothers. Today, nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. Most surprising—and worrisome—is how this trend is divided along class lines, with children whose mothers don’t have a college degree being more than twice as likely—as compared to children of college-educated mothers—to live in a single parent home. Kearny asserts this is widening the economic gap in opportunities and outcomes and rendering already vulnerable populations even more vulnerable. 

Many of the arguments that Kearney makes in her book are what you might call commonsensical. And yet the book has received criticism, including from those in our culture who don’t dare make judgments on issues of home and family life, perhaps because that’s long been considered to be the domain of social conservatives. But as celebrated economist and our friend Tyler Cowen said of Melissa’s book, “this could be the most important economics and policy book of the year… it’s remarkable that such a book is so needed, but it is.”

The word privilege, as Melissa Kearney uses it, is not a dirty word. It is not a judgment that some people are intrinsically better or worse than others. It’s not a word meant to guilt or shame a group of people. Quite the opposite. It’s an aspirational word. It’s meant to inspire policies, programs, and changes in our social norms to even the playing field so that we can do better for all of our children. So that every child in America has the best possible chance for flourishing. That is what every child in this country deserves.

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In the past few decades, the Democratic Party has undergone a seismic shift. Kitchen table issues like the economy and public safety have been overshadowed by more elitist topics like identity politics, gender ideology, defunding the police, climate change, and the vaguely defined yet rigidly enforced ideology of anti-racism, which sees white supremacy as the force behind every institution in America.

But while activists, lobbyists, and pundits were busy reshaping the Democratic Party, ordinary voters—including the working class, middle-class families, and ethnic minorities—were simply leaving. All of which has stranded a large group of Americans on an island, voters in the center of nowhere.

Two people who have spent years thinking about how the Democratic Party lost its vision are our guests today, political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Judis. Their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, offers up a map to help us understand how liberals lost their way. On today’s episode, guest-hosted by Michael Moynihan, Teixeira and Judis trace the influence of big money forces behind what they call the Democrats’ “shadow party,” and offer a path forward away from the radical cultural issues embraced by party elites and back to core economic issues that matter to the working class, a group that Democrats need to win back if they want to win in 2024.

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It’s Thanksgiving week, which for many of us means eating too much turkey and pumpkin pie. For others, it means getting into arguments with your Gen Z cousin who, in a fit of righteous rage, calls you a settler colonialist and storms out of the dining room. 

Whatever your holiday may bring, we here at Honestly wanted to bring you a drop of delight from none other than the most delightful man on planet Earth: David Sedaris. 

Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best-selling books: Calypso, Theft by Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Barrel Fever. . . and most recently, Happy-Go-Lucky, which I had the privilege of talking to him about last December. It’s probably my favorite episode of all time.

What makes David’s writing so unforgettable is his ability to find something meaningful and true in the utterly mundane; the way he finds humor in the most horrific moments in life; and his commitment to the lost art of making fun of ourselves. 

So for today’s episode, we are thrilled to have David here to read an essay he calls “Punching Down.” It is funny, it is frank, and fair warning, if you are a parent of small children, it might also be a little bit offensive. Happy Thanksgiving.

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When The Free Press decided to rent a theater with 1,600 seats for our first-ever live debate a few months ago, most people looked at us with a mixture of pity and concern. We would have to fill all 1,600 seats. The theater we’d booked in L.A.—not exactly a city known for its culture of public debates—was smack in the middle of downtown, where after-hours can look a little bit like San Francisco during the day. To make matters worse, we had only managed to get the place on a Wednesday night.

We did it anyway. And we sold out every seat in the house.

People came from all over: Vancouver, Seattle, New York, Nevada, Montana. Someone drove a retrofitted school bus from SF to hold an after-party for whoever wanted to come. There were three young priests who drove many miles to see the action, and at least one porn star who took a flight.

Also in attendance: libertarian frat bros in suits; e-girls with Elf Bars; trad boys who wondered aloud if the concession popcorn had seed oil; dads who had to run out to check in with the babysitter; actors from your favorite TV shows; comedians you’ve never heard of; writers you love to hate; angry Catholics; resigned atheists; closeted Trump voters; Mormons saving themselves for marriage; young gay couples in crop tops; feminists; anti-feminists; and a whole lot of podcasters.

The point is: that night, we got a sense of how diverse this community is, and holy shit, was it exciting. We learned that The FP isn’t just a newsletter and that Honestly isn’t just a podcast. We have built a community of curious people.

And most importantly, we learned that debate isn’t dead.

So for today’s episode, we wanted to share the full debate from that evening for those of you who couldn’t be in the theater. The proposition was this: has the sexual revolution failed? 

With the hindsight that comes with half a century, four brilliant women—Sarah Haider, Grimes, Anna Khachiyan, and Louise Perry—debated whether the movement that promised women sexual equality and liberation has fulfilled its promises, or whether it has failed women. . . and maybe men too? Listen and decide for yourself.

Special and huge thanks to FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, without whom this event would never have been possible. If you care about free speech, and if you believe that it’s worth defending, FIRE is an organization that should be on your radar.

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Months ago, I was asked to give a lecture at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention. It was a surprising invitation for a number of reasons. First, I am not a lawyer. Second: I am not a member of the Federalist Society—the prominent conservative and libertarian legal organization. (If the name rings a bell it’s probably because you’ve heard of it in the context of the hearings of any of the conservative justices who currently sit on the court.) 

Third: If you look at the people who previously gave this particular lecture—Supreme Court Justices, Attorney Generals, people like Bill Barr, Don McGahn, and John Roberts—the idea that I would be on that list seemed nuts.

But I accepted. Mostly because I was being asked to give the Barbara K. Olson lecture. Olson was 45 years old, a lawyer and a political commentator at the top of her game when she boarded American Airlines flight 77 on September 11, 2001.

She was flying to Los Angeles that day so she could appear on Bill Maher’s show Politically Incorrect, and because she had changed her flight to have a birthday dinner with her husband, Ted. Barbara was murdered along with 3,000 other Americans that day. She managed to summon the composure, courage and clarity to call her husband twice in those horrifying moments before the plane slammed into the Pentagon. 

Her husband, Ted Olson, has among the most impressive resumes you’ll find. But most important to me and my family: he argued in support of gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court.

I had many ideas for this lecture before October 7. But after the world-transforming events of that day, I felt there was only one thing to talk about: the fight for the West.

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For today’s episode, we’re thrilled to share the most recent episode of our friend Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense. 

Moral confusion is plaguing this moment like never before. It’s everywhere: from college campuses to congress. Sam, better than almost anyone, is able to speak to that confusion, with facts, nuance and moral clarity. Importantly, he doesn’t just visit this topic with the narrow lens of this particular war between Hamas and Israel, but with a bird’s eye view of history. But according to Sam, it’s not the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that matters so much right now, but rather the history—and enduring global problem—of jihadism. And that’s what this episode is about.

The episode, aptly titled, The Bright Line Between Good and Evil, is sobering, illuminating and well worth your time. Please listen.

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For the longest time, when you thought about the most powerful person in the world, the person who probably came to mind was the president of the United States, the leader of the free world. But in 2023, the person who comes to mind for most people these days isn’t an elected official at all. Instead, a lot of people picture a 52-year-old civilian who, through his own determination, ambition, and sheer will, has amassed an enormous amount of wealth—more than any other person on this planet—and also an enormous amount of influence over many of the most important industries in the world, especially as we look to the future.

Elon Musk’s biography is difficult to summarize, but that’s exactly what our guest today, Walter Isaacson, has spent the past two and a half years doing: outlining Elon Musk’s life to the tune of about 700 pages, in a new book simply titled Elon Musk. Isaacson is an award-winning biographer of luminaries including Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, and Jennifer Doudna. But this recent undertaking has no doubt been his most complicated one to date. That’s because the man he wrote about has a story that’s very much still unfolding. In fact, when Walter Isaacson started writing the book, Musk hadn’t even purchased Twitter yet. 

One of the questions that underlies the entire biography is this: What does it mean for a single man to have so much singular power? And though Walter doesn’t answer the question explicitly, we’ve all had a glimpse into exactly what it means for the world during this past month.

Take, for example, how when Israel briefly cut off the internet inside of Gaza as part of their war strategy to eliminate Hamas, Elon announced that he was going to provide it himself through his company, Starlink. After widespread criticism, he posted an exploding head emoji. Then, when a commenter suggested that he must have felt pressure to provide the coverage, Elon simply responded, “yeah,” with a frowny face. Musk apparently then met with the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and announced that he would, “double check with Israeli and U.S. security officials before enabling any connections.” The point, as my friend and writer Jacob Siegel put it, is that “non-state kingmakers are redefining the scope of warfare through direct intervention.”

Of course, there’s also Elon’s newfound power over the information that all of us consume on X, Twitter’s new brand. It’s hard to imagine under Twitter’s previous regime that we would have had access to the raw, brutally violent footage from Hamas’s October 7 massacre. Elon’s version of Twitter, which is less censorious than the previous guard, has allowed millions of people across the globe to see—with their own eyes—exactly what Hamas did. And yet, with those loosened rules, there’s also so much genuine disinformation spread at a pace like never before. Scores of people, including elected officials like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are posting horrifying photos and videos of crying children from Gaza, when in reality they are photos and videos from Syria in 2013. 

It has never been clearer that one man wields an enormous amount of influence over everything from social media to warfare. And the question is, should he? That’s the theme of today’s conversation. 

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There are a lot of experts that you may have heard on the news in the past few weeks. People who know a great deal about Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or China or Russia—regional experts. There are also many subject matter experts who can tell us about cyber warfare or decolonization or, for example, the way that foreign governments have influenced higher education in America. All of those stories are important, but each one of those topics gives you only a slice of the whole story. What if you want to understand the whole thing?

That’s when you turn to Walter Russell Mead.

Mead, who is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College, and the author of many profound books, is able to connect what can seem like disparate dots and pull them together to show us the big picture. That’s especially critical right now. Because despite what you read in the headlines, this isn’t just a war between a terrorist group called Hamas and a small Jewish country called Israel. This is the bleeding edge of something much more widespread that has the potential to touch the lives of every American. 

Right after we recorded this conversation with Walter, Yemen declared war on Israel—with Houthi rebels firing missiles at the city of Eilat—and, in a major provocation from China, Israel was removed from Baidu Maps, China’s digital maps, late on Monday night. Though I didn’t get to talk to Walter about these discrete developments, in many ways they confirm exactly what Walter expresses in this conversation: that this war isn’t just a regional conflict. That it is representative of a world, as he puts it, “spinning out of control.”

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It’s been almost three weeks since Hamas attacked Israel. And there are three questions that, despite having reported on it so much over the last 20 days, many people are still asking. The first is what exactly happened that day, minute by minute, and what were the battles across the south of Israel like? There are so many accounts of civilians waiting in safe-rooms for hours on end for the IDF to arrive—what happened? The second is how did it happen? How did thousands of terrorists cross a border wall that cost more than a billion dollars to carry out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? And the third question is what comes next in this already horrific war?

Over the next two episodes of Honestly, we will answer those three questions by talking to three different people. You’ll first hear from Nimrod, a special forces reservist, who fought Hamas at several locations in the south of Israel on the morning of October 7—not because he was called by his unit to go there (he wasn't), but because he knew he needed to go save innocent civilians. His account helps paint a picture of what happened that day in Israel along the Gaza border, from a person who saw it up close and took the brutal fighting into his own hands before the army even arrived.

Then you’ll hear from Avi Issacharoff, a prominent Israeli journalist who’s also one of the creators of the hit TV series Fauda, which is based on his own experience as a member of an elite undercover counterterrorism unit of the IDF. My conversation with Avi helps explain how the most fortified and militarily sophisticated country in the world could have been overtaken in the most horrific way by thousands of Hamas terrorists.

In our next episode, you’ll hear from Walter Russell Mead, who I think of as one of the most prophetic foreign policy thinkers of our time. There’s no better lineup than these three people to help us make sense of what happened, how it happened, and where Israel, and the world, go from here. You’ll want to listen. 

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If you’ve been following our coverage at The Free Press, you’ve noticed that we’ve been covering the war in Israel nonstop since it began. We’ve never produced this much content in this short of a time about a single subject. Some of you might be thinking, why? 

On October 7, we saw the single biggest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But unlike the Holocaust, in which Germans tried to hide their war crimes, here we have the terrorists streaming it in real time on every social media platform across the internet. When the reports, and the videos, started circulating, we thought: surely this amount of blood and horror will be enough to shake the world awake. 

And yet it wasn’t. Internationally, some of the most educated people—including students, professors, and administrators at the most elite universities in the world—have either equivocated or remained silent in the face of mass atrocities. Others, by the tens of thousands, have taken to the streets to rejoice in the terrorist attack, screaming “resistance is justified” and “glory to the martyrs.” 

That is why this story matters. Because this is not just a war in a faraway land. It’s a battle for civilization. As my friend Sam Harris recently said, “There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.” 

This war should matter to everyone—not just Jews—who care about the future of civilization. Because if there is one lesson from history, it’s that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. And societies in which the Jewish people are persecuted are societies in which no one is safe. 

And that is why we will continue to report on this war with such urgency. 

On today’s episode, we feature some of that reporting. You’ll hear just some of the stories of the more than three dozen Israelis we have spoken to. We talk to a woman, Shaked, who tells us that eleven of her family members—including her three- and eight-year-old niece and nephew—were taken hostage by Hamas. We talk to survivors of the Nova music festival, like Amit and Chen, who miraculously escaped—some by hiding in bushes for hours—as they watched their friends get killed, “like sheep to be slaughtered,” just next to them. We talk to a father whose son was kidnapped from the music festival, and to a mother whose daughter was killed there. We talk to a grandmother who hid in the safe room of her home for hours with her 10-day-old grandson as terrorists shot at the door. 

These stories are difficult to hear. But we will keep reporting them.

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In the early hours of Saturday morning on October 7, Israel was invaded by Hamas terrorists by land, air, and sea, which The Free Press has been covering all week in detail. With over 1,300 Israeli civilians dead, hundreds taken hostage into Gaza, and many more in critical condition, this catastrophic and barbaric attack has been labeled “Israel’s 9/11.” 

This is something former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knows something about.

After all, Secretary Rice led our nation as national security advisor on September 11. As one of the most powerful people in the world at a turning point in American history, Secretary Rice knows firsthand about leadership amid unthinkable crises. She also knows firsthand about the intractable conflicts Israel has faced for decades, having served in both her national leadership roles through five Gaza wars and crises. 

Today, Secretary Rice discusses why this war is different than anything she has seen before in the region, whether the prospect for a two-state solution is over, what Iran’s role was in aiding Hamas, what Israel seeking normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia had to do with it, why America cannot afford to retreat from the world, and why Israel—and the world—will never be the same.

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Given the war in Israel, we’re going to do something different on Honestly for a bit. Over the next few days—maybe weeks, depending on how the war develops—we’ll bring you firsthand stories from the ground as well as interviews with experts, like we did yesterday with Michael Oren. (If you haven’t yet heard that conversation, please listen.) We’re doing this so you can understand what is happening in Israel, and what the ramifications are for the region and the entire world.

For today, I want to share the story of one mother who is desperate for help. Her two children, ages 12 and 16, were taken from their home by Hamas terrorists and are now being held hostage in Gaza, in God knows what conditions. 

This is the story of just one mother. There are untold numbers of other mothers and fathers—and children and grandchildren, and brothers and sisters—like her right now in Israel. Hundreds of people are missing, including from her kibbutz, where, as you’ll hear, the terrorists came and took women, children, elders, and just disappeared them into Gaza.

Please share this story. Share it widely. All this mother wants—all any Israeli wants right now—is to bring their loved ones home.

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On October 7, Hamas terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, on foot, by motorcycle, and even on paragliders. Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds. 

The official numbers as of this writing: 300 Israelis killed and 1,590 wounded. And dozens—maybe many more—taken hostage into Gaza. They include women, elders, and children. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyuahu called it a “black day.” He said that “what happened today has never been seen before in Israel.” Think about 9/11 and the kind of shock and terror we felt. That is the level of devastation Israel is now experiencing. 

We are left with so many questions: How did this happen? Who is to blame for this catastrophic security failure? How will Israel respond? How will Israel save the hostages in Gaza? What was the extent of Iran’s involvement in this sophisticated operation? Will this change the Biden administration’s policy toward the Islamic Republic? And so many more.

Some of those questions will be answered in the coming days and weeks. For today, historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren helps us make sense of the unfolding crisis.

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James Carville, America’s best-known Democratic political consultant, has been on the scene for a very long time and has worked on just about a thousand campaigns—he’s almost 80. But his most prominent victory was Bill Clinton’s successful run for the presidency in 1992, which was documented in the incredible D. A. Pennebaker documentary War Room. Some people watch Notting Hill as a comfort movie. For me, it’s War Room.

So you can imagine my excitement when I met Carville at The Texas Tribune Festival and noticed that he was wearing the exact same iconic purple, gold, and green striped LSU polo that he wore in War Room. It was actually quite fitting, and symbolic: a whole lot has changed in American politics over the last 30 years. Carville’s style—blunt, charming, unconventional, and usually right—has not. 

The people closest to Carville have other ways of describing the political icon. His former business partner, Paul Begala, has said that “James lives in a border town between genius and madness. Now that he’s rich and famous, he’s eccentric. I knew him when he was just crazy.” His wife, Mary Matalin, who is a Republican Party consultant, has said: “He really is a nut.”

Our conversation—which was recorded in a room full of three hundred Rachel Maddow die-hards—covered a range of political commentary, criticism, and diagnosis: whether or not he thinks Biden is too old to run again, why he thinks Kamala Harris is treated unfairly by the press, the direction of the Democratic Party, why he thinks wokeness “is over,” and, of course, Trump and the future of America. 

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On Wednesday night, Fox Business and Rumble hosted the second Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in beautiful Simi Valley, California. Bari Weiss and The Free Press’s very own Peter Savodnik watched live in the spin room as the seven candidates—Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, and Doug Burgum— took the stage to spar over questions about union strikes, inflation, income inequality, the cost of childcare, the border, China, crime, policing, drugs, gun violence, education, Russia, Ukraine. . . really, nothing new.

But of course, the man they really wanted to spar with and the man leading the polls by a landslide still refuses to play ball. So, we sent TFP reporter Michael Moynihan to check in on the elusive Donald Trump, who spent his night on the other side of the country speaking to a crowded room, which he claimed would be full of striking auto workers. (Though, Moynihan had a hard time finding them.) Trump’s Detroit visit came just one day after President Biden went to the picket line in Wayne County to march with union members outside a General Motors plant—an unprecedented move by a sitting president.

On today’s episode, as the two likely 2024 candidates battled to portray themselves as the voice of blue-collar Americans, what were the seven GOP hopefuls hoping to achieve by squabbling at the Reagan Library instead of marching with striking auto workers? Who were the biggest winners and losers of this very strange tale of two cities? And with nearly 60 percent of GOP voters backing Trump, is anyone emerging as a viable Trump competitor, or is it time to face the fact that we’re tumbling toward a 2020 rematch between two very old men that no one really wants to see happen?

Music in this episode by blue dot sessions

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As we tumble toward 2024, anxiety among Democrats is beginning to simmer. It’s easy to understand why. Just look at what happened last week: Biden was giving a press conference in Vietnam about upgrading the country’s diplomatic ties when he started rambling: “The Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier!’ Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming.” Then he said, on mic, that he was going to go to bed. A voice suddenly emerged and jazz music started to play. Biden tried to answer another question, but they cut off his mic.

According to a recent CNN poll, 56 percent of Democrats are seriously concerned for Biden’s current level of physical and mental competence. Sixty-two percent of Democrats said they are seriously concerned about Biden’s ability to serve a full second term. Another poll, by AP-NORC, found that 69 percent of Democrats surveyed think Biden is too old for a second term.

Among the people not yet convinced that Biden needs to be in a nursing home is Atlantic staff writer Frank Foer. Foer’s new book, The Last Politician, tells the behind-the-scenes story of Biden’s first two years in office. Foer says he started as a Biden skeptic. The incoming president was, in his estimation, a bloviator who dangerously fetishized bipartisanship. But he emerges some 400 pages later with a rather more charitable view of the president. Biden is “the father figure of the West,” someone deeply experienced in foreign policy and racking up policy victories at home. Biden, he writes, “is an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human. He will be remembered as the old hack who could.”

But. . . why doesn’t that come through to the public? Will Americans buy that narrative of Joe Biden in 2024? What of Hunter Biden’s legal troubles? The impeachment inquiry? What should we make of the many Biden alternatives eagerly waiting in the wings, and what would it take for one of them to step forward? And is America’s gerontocratic elite a fundamental challenge for American democracy? Those questions, and more, on today's episode, guest hosted by Michael Moynihan.

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In 1973, Leonard Cohen announced he was done with music for good. The same year, in October, war broke out in Israel.

The Yom Kippur War would become the bloodiest in Israel’s young history—and Cohen was there to witness it. As the war broke out, he left his home on the Greek island of Hydra to fly into the warzone.

Leonard Cohen never said much about why he went to the front. What we know is that in the months that followed, he would write “Who By Fire.” Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echoes of this trip.

So what was it that happened in the desert in October of 1973 between this depressed musician and these too young soldiers going off to battle? How did it remake Leonard Cohen? How did it transform those who heard him play? And how did the war transform Israel itself?

Those are just some of the questions Matti Friedman explains in his beautiful book Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.

This episode aired last year on Honestly, and we’re thrilled to reshare it with you today, as we approach the 50 year anniversary of the war that remade a country—and one searching folk star. 

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This week, while our audio team is on summer break, we’re featuring an episode from one of our favorite podcasts: Conversations with Tyler, hosted by the wonderful Tyler Cowen. It’s a conversation with philosopher Amia Srinivasan about her book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. They debate questions such as: do we have a “right” to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? How should we address falling fertility rates? What did women learn about egalitarianism during the pandemic? Why, according to her, progress requires regress. And much, much more. . . 

The episode received a lot of attention and reactions, for reasons you’ll understand when you listen to it. Most importantly, it’s contentious yet respectful in a way that I think is increasingly rare in public life. As Tyler wrote at the time, on his blog Marginal Revolution, about the conversation: “You have to learn to learn from people who bother, annoy, or frustrate you. If you do, they will not in fact bother, annoy, or frustrate you.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, this conversation between Tyler and Amia was a big inspiration for our first-ever Free Press live debate, which is happening next week in L.A. The proposition: has the sexual revolution failed? If this conversation inspires you too, please consider buying a ticket to the event: Wednesday, September 13, at the Ace Theatre in downtown L.A.

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The team’s on vacation, so for this week’s Honestly, we’re sharing a favorite episode from a favorite podcast, one you may not have heard of: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers.

UnHerd’s mission is similar to ours: to push back against the herd mentality, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people, and places.

On this episode, host Freddie Sayers talks to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins about God, people’s distrust in science and vaccines, cancel culture, aliens, romantic poetry and more.

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On Wednesday night, Fox News and the streaming platform Rumble hosted the first Republican presidential debate with the eight GOP hopefuls who made the cut: North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, former governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Missing from the stage was Donald Trump, who refused to attend the debate. Instead, he sat down Tucker Carlson—a move that allowed him to flip the bird to the RNC and allowed Tucker to do the same to Fox, who fired him a few months ago. Trump’s interview with Tucker aired exclusively on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and more than 74 million people tuned in.

Here at The Free Press, we love a good debate night, and we were up until the wee hours discussing it all. So today on Honestly, TFP reporter Olivia Reingold, TFP senior editor Peter Savodnik, and Newsweek’s opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon are here to discuss who emerged on top? Who fell by the wayside? And did the elephant not in the room still somehow manage to dominate?

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If you’ve been listening to this show for the past few months, maybe even since the 2022 midterms, you probably think I sound like something of a broken record when it comes to my advice for politicians today. Again and again, I’ve said the following: elections right now are Republicans’ to lose. Biden’s approval numbers are low—41.2 percent-—which is lower than every president at this stage of their term in the last 75 years, other than Jimmy Carter. 

It seems to me that all Republicans need to do is stand still and be normal, and they’d win. (Instead, the GOP often seems more focused on Bud Light and books about gay penguins with two moms.)

So when former Texas congressman Will Hurd announced he was running for president last month, I thought, at long last, a normal Republican candidate. And not just that—one with an impeccable pedigree and reputation. A Republican who has never bent the knee to Trump. A Republican who is sensible, sober, and highly respected for his bipartisanship. The kind of textbook candidate that will set your heart aflutter if you count yourself among the legions of the sane and moderate.

So. . . why is Hurd polling in last place? Has my advice over the last few months been misguided? Is the Republican Party just too far gone, too changed at this point for someone as normal as Will Hurd? On today’s episode, I ask him. 

Hurd spent nearly a decade as an undercover operative for the CIA in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, during the height of the war on terror. In 2010, he left the agency to start his political career and in 2014, he was elected to Congress, becoming the only black Republican on the House floor. For three consecutive terms, Hurd represented one of Texas’s most sprawling districts, a district that is two-thirds Latino and covers much of the border with Mexico, from San Antonio to El Paso. 

In a profile of Hurd in The Atlantic last year, appropriately titled “Revenge of the Normal Republicans,” the reporter Tim Alberta wrote this: Will Hurd knows that “a leader can’t emerge without a movement, and a movement manifests only with the inspiration of a leader. He also knows that some people view him as uniquely qualified to meet this moment: a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation. What Hurd doesn’t know is whether America is ready to buy what he’s selling.” 

So which is it: Are Americans ready to buy what Hurd is selling? Or has that ship simply sailed?

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Colin Campbell says that the way our society treats grief—and people in grief—is cruel and backward, and it needs a radical reimagining. 

He, of all people, would know.

Four years ago, Colin, his wife Gail, and their two teenage kids were driving to Joshua Tree, when they were T-boned by a drunk and high driver going 90 miles an hour. Colin and Gail survived. Their two children, Ruby and Hart, did not.

How do you live after that nightmare? How do you support a friend, a colleague, a brother or sister, who literally does not know how to go on?

Colin’s new book, Finding the Words, attempts to answer those unimaginable questions. It tells the story not only of his own pain in the weeks and months following Ruby and Hart’s death, but also breaks down our society’s misconceptions about grief, which he calls the “grief orthodoxy,” and it provides practical advice for a different kind of approach to grief—one that is more truthful, real, and connected.

People say to the grieving “There are no words” because they’re scared to confront the hard conversation. As Colin writes, it “acts as a perfect conversation killer. This empty phrase immediately ends any chance of a dialogue about loss and mourning. It encapsulates all that is wrong with how our society handles grief.”

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Vivek Ramaswamy, at 37 years old, is the first ever millennial Republican presidential candidate. He graduated from Harvard, then Yale Law School, and worked as a partner at a hedge fund before starting a successful biotech company, where he made millions.

It’s an impressive background. But he lacks any political experience, so he’s not someone pundits think has a shot in the already crowded GOP primary field. And yet, somehow, his name is in the news almost every single day. His tweets are constantly going viral. And recent polling suggests that he’s hitting a nerve with the American people: it’s only August and Vivek is polling in third place, ahead of established politicians and a former vice president. 

On today’s show, Vivek explains he thinks he can win the nomination and the presidency—by beating Trump by going further than Trump, and by being a kind of Trump 2.0. He talks about why he thinks we’ve lost our soul as a nation, and why he thinks we need a “second American revolution.” And—from immigration to foreign policy to dismantling the Department of Education—what a President Ramaswamy, with all of his radical proposals, would do for the country. 

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Recently, Walter Russell Mead wrote an outstanding article in Tablet titled “You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times.” It’s about the paradox—and great dangers—of technological progress: “Human ingenuity has made us much safer from natural calamities. We can treat many diseases, predict storms, build dams both to prevent floods and to save water against drought, and many other fine things. Many fewer of us starve than in former times, and billions of us today enjoy better living conditions than our forebears dreamed possible. Yet if we are safer from most natural catastrophes, we are more vulnerable than ever to human-caused ones.” 

Today on Honestly, Walter talks about that significant vulnerability, and why human-caused catastrophes are the most serious threat to humanity today. Walter also explains why he believes we have definitively entered a pre-war era, and what he thinks needs to change in order to get us out of it.  

Walter Russell Mead is a fellow at Hudson Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College. He’s written numerous books on foreign policy, including last year’s excellent book on Israel titled The Arc of a Covenant, and he is the host of the brand-new podcast What Really Matters.

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Last week I found myself in Sun Valley, Idaho, at a conference with a lot of big wigs. Among them was Larry Summers—an economist, the Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, and a former president of Harvard University. The timing was fortuitous.

Last month, Harvard went before the Supreme Court to defend its race-based admission policies—and lost the case, thus overturning the legality of affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that those admissions programs quote, “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.  

This ruling has led to a debate in American life about the future of higher education, and it’s caused many to question another admissions policy that numerous American universities have long taken for granted: legacy admissions, the policy of giving preference to college applicants whose family has already attended the school. In light of the Supreme Court ruling, legacy admissions have been scrapped at top schools including Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and just this week at Wesleyan University.

So I wanted to sit down with Larry Summers to talk about the future of American higher education, whether eliminating legacy admissions actually goes far enough, what he thinks admission departments will do in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, and what he might have done differently as president of Harvard if he could go back in time. And lastly, what makes American higher education worth saving in the first place.

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Peter Turchin is not like most historians. 

For starters, he has an unusual background as an evolutionary biologist studying lemmings and mice. He says that analyzing the complexities of the natural world has allowed him to understand the most complex system of all: human society. He has pioneered a field of history that he calls cliodynamics that applies hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of historical data points to a mathematical model in order to understand the present and to predict future trends.

Using these tools, Peter and his team published an article in the journal Nature in 2010 making a bold prediction. They said that economic, social, and political instability in the United States would hit a “peak” in or around the year 2020. Many of Turchin’s critics said he was crazy to make such a speculation, that it’s too hard to predict how history will progress, that the study of history is more art than science. But then came 2020.

It turned out to be a massively turbulent year, one that would bring outbreaks of political violence that the U.S. hadn’t experienced in decades. It felt like complete chaos, between Covid lockdowns, mask and vaccine protests, BLM riots, and then, only six days into 2021, the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. 

What did Peter see that everyone else missed?

Peter is the author of over 200 articles and eight books, and his fascinating new one is called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. It argues that societies operate cyclically, going through golden ages and end times. And he says that we’re currently looking at the telltale signs of an imminent revolution. 

On today’s show, Peter talks to us about how he studies history, what American history can tell us about our current moment, why 2024 is going to be a year to watch, and what individuals can do to change the direction of history.

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Last month, Britain’s National Health Service made major news when they announced that they were banning the use of puberty blockers for children, except for those enrolled in a tightly regulated clinical trial. The decision was made after an independent review found there were “significant uncertainties” surrounding the long-term effects of these drugs, which had previously been touted as totally reversible.

The announcement followed another major decision that the NHS made last year on the same subject, which was to close Britain and Wales’ only treatment center for children with gender dysphoria: the Tavistock Gender and Identity Service. The NHS found that the care provided at Tavistock, which has operated for nearly 35 years, was “not safe or viable as a long-term option for the care of young people with gender related distress.”

These decisions bring the UK in sync with countries like Sweden and Norway—which have also made similar policy decisions when it comes to gender care for children. But all of those countries seem light-years away from how the United States approaches these issues. 

My guest today, Hannah Barnes, has reported on this topic for years. Indeed, her reporting was the catalyst for many of these new changes. She’s here to explain what happened in the UK, and why the U.S. is so out of step with one of our strongest allies.

Hannah is an award-winning investigations producer at Newsnight, one of the BBC’s flagship news programs. Her new book, Time To Think, follows the story from Tavistock’s inception to its imminent closure. It investigates how a clinic can open its doors to thousands of young patients at their most vulnerable, how it can operate for more than three decades without oversight or regulation, and how—in the words of some of the clinic’s own staff—this “medical scandal” unfolded. 

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Last week, the Supreme Court handed down, as they usually do as the term comes to an end, a flurry of highly anticipated major decisions. Two of them made a lot of news: one effectively ended affirmative action in American higher education, and another ruled that a Colorado web designer could refuse to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple. 

The mainstream media’s prevailing sentiment over the last week has been that these are the sorry consequences of a conservative majority court. This court overturned Roe v. Wade last year in a major setback to women’s rights; now they’ve undone decades of precedent that helped historically disadvantaged students have a chance at the American dream, and they’ve weakened gay rights. 

When President Joe Biden was asked at a press conference last week whether or not this is a “rogue court,” Biden basically said yes. He muttered, “This isn’t a normal court.”  

Is that true? Is this court “not normal”? Or do these decisions actually reflect a legitimate reading of the Constitution? 

To help separate signal from noise and fact from hyperbole, today we have three legal experts from different sides of the political aisle to hash it out. Harry Litman is an attorney who has clerked for two Supreme Court justices, Thurgood Marshall and Anthony Kennedy. He is also a host of the podcast Talking Feds. Jeannie Suk Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School and writer for The New Yorker. She clerked for David Souter. And Sarah Isgur is a columnist for The Dispatch and an ABC News contributor. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as the Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration.

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In 2016, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was one of 17 Republicans in a crowded field trying to beat Donald Trump. We know how that movie ended. One of the hard won lessons of that primary, especially among Republicans, was that it was foolish not to unite right away behind the strongest candidate. If they had done that, perhaps Trump wouldn't have been the nominee and then the president.

Yet here we are in 2023 and we seem to be watching the same movie play out in real time, with 13 Republican candidates trying, once again, to outperform Trump in a crowded field.

One of those people, once again, is Chris Christie. But this time, he insists, he can write a new ending. Christie not only believes that he could win the nomination, but he believes he can win it by going toe to toe with Trump.

Christie's brand is the brash, straight-talking Jersey guy, and he's more than living up to his reputation. He's been absolutely brutal in his attacks on the former president, calling Trump a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog,” a “petulant child,” a “bitter, angry man,” and “the cheapest S.O.B I’ve ever met.”

This, as one would expect, has made him a liberal darling of sorts. At the same time, a lot of people think, too little, too late. For a long time, Christie was very much a Trump cheerleader. After Christie dropped out of the 2016 race, he was the first establishment Republican—and the first of any of the Republican governors or senators—to endorse Donald Trump, which a lot of people say helped launch Trump to the nomination. During Trump’s presidency, Christie said things about Trump like, “he’s not only a strong leader, but a caring, genuine and decent person” and “when he makes a promise, he keeps it.”

On today's show, I ask Governor Christie to explain himself. I ask him why he supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 and what finally led him to break ranks. I also ask him about whether this kind of rejection of Trump can resonate with a Republican base who doesn't seem to have moved on from Trump or Trumpism. And last, I ask him why he wants to be president of the United States in the first place. 

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Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is the rare Kennedy who hasn’t yet joined the family business. But at age 69—after a long career as an environmental lawyer and activist, and many years advocating against lifesaving public health programs like childhood vaccinations on the unproven claim that they cause autism—he has decided to run for President of the United States.

Many voices in the mainstream have dismissed RFK Jr. as a distraction. The New York Times called him a “crank” and a “high-profile circus act.” But the polls don’t seem to agree. RFK Jr. is polling as high as 20 percent among Democratic-leaning voters. And according to one recent poll from The Economist and YouGov, RFK Jr. has the highest favorability rating among all major candidates, including Trump and Biden.

A challenger to the incumbent has never won the primaries in modern political history, and RFK Jr. doesn’t seem poised to break that historical precedent. But that he’s doing this well so early tells us a lot about the current state of American politics. Namely, people are dissatisfied with the options on the table—especially Democrats, who are desperate for a Biden alternative.

It also tells us something deeper about American culture right now, and what fits into the realm of acceptable conversation. RFK Jr. says things—whether about vaccines causing autism, SSRIs leading to school shootings, or the CIA killing his dad and uncle—that are described by mainstream media as disinformation and ideas that are simply beyond the pale. But his high polling suggests that many Americans are tuning in to what he has to say. And perhaps they think that we have drawn the lines of debate too narrowly.

Last week, I went to Mr. Kennedy’s house to ask him why he thinks he has hit a nerve among American voters, and how he thinks he can win the nomination, and ultimately, the presidency—all without any political experience and while hanging on to the kooky opinions.

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Happy Father's Day! For today's episode, a conversation about fatherhood with three dads who have thought a lot about parenthood, masculinity and being a dad in a world stripped of convention. Richard Reeves is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the book Of Boys and Men about why boys and men are falling behind in so many aspects of American life. Ryan Holiday is a writer, bookstore owner, Daily Stoic and Daily Dad podcast host. Ian Rowe is a Senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute where he works on issues surrounding education and upward mobility, family formation, adoption. He’s also Chairman of the board at the Spence-Chapin adoption organization, author of the book, Agency, and cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based International Baccalaureate high schools in the Bronx.

Along with guest host Eli Lake, the four dads talk: fatherhood, marriage and if it matters anymore, what's up with "toxic masculinity," being a role model for boys, adoption, if the rules and traditions of gender are hurting today's dads or if they offer wisdom we need to re-embrace, and much more.

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On May 1, 2023, a 30-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely boarded the F train in New York City. Neely appeared to be in the midst of some kind of mental health crisis, as witnesses describe him acting aggressively, screaming that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn’t care if he went to jail or died. A few witnesses describe feeling threatened by Neely’s behavior. Soon, a 24-year-old man named Daniel Penny, who we later learned is a former Marine, jumped forward and put Neely in a chokehold. Minutes later, Neely was dead. 

Neely’s death once again stoked our culture wars and our debate about crime, homelessness, and mental illness in American cities. Was Jordan Neely a casualty of white supremacy? Was he another example of a criminal justice system that has stopped enforcing crime, thus encouraging people to take matters into their own hands? Was Jordan Neely a victim of a mental health system that has failed both its patients and society? How could we have prevented this tragedy? And how should we prevent it going forward? 

To dive into these questions and more, today on Honestly we have Rafael Mangual, Jonathan Rosen, and Kat Rosenfield. Mangual is a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. Rosenfield is a novelist and a columnist for Unherd. And Rosen is the author of the book The Best Minds, which examines his childhood friendship with Michael Lauder, a graduate of Yale Law School who suffered a schizophrenic break and killed his pregnant fiancée. (You can check out our previous conversation with Rosen about that tragedy here.) 

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It’s almost hard to believe, but in the 1950s doctors were frequently portrayed in TV commercials for. . . cigarettes. That’s because smoking wasn’t just seen as cool and glamorous, but as an actual health-enhancing activity. 

Fast-forward to today, and Americans have been sold on a dizzying number of health trends: from grapefruit diets and Weight Watchers to Pelotons and yoga. The health industry churns through information and fads faster than anyone can possibly keep up. As soon as you’re gearing up to start a juice cleanse or go on a Costco rampage for keto-friendly ingredients, a new diet, a new drug, a new piece of equipment shows up to tell you out with the old, in with the new: here is the real key to your health. 

One person who consistently cuts through all that noise is Dr. Peter Attia. His new book, Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, is a blueprint—based on the best available science and data—for what really matters to live a healthy life. And not just a healthier one, but a longer one.

Attia is a Stanford- and Johns Hopkins-educated, NIH-trained physician who is at the forefront of some of the most important conversations around health and longevity in medicine today. His work is at the center of a new industry that has been booming in Silicon Valley for the past several years. Tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Larry Page, and Brian Armstrong have poured billions into start-ups that research human life extension.

But Attia doesn’t think this is only for the elites of Silicon Valley. He thinks there’s a well of everyday changes—from what we eat, how we move, and how much we sleep, to scans, blood tests, and other early interventions, to our emotional health—that can give people extra years to the very short life we have here on earth.

On today’s episode: what’s possible in the uncharted science of longevity? And—from our broken medical system to our truly unhealthy lifestyles—what are the major factors preventing us from living longer, healthier lives? And what makes a life worth living anyway?

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Earlier today, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott entered the race for President. That makes him the sixth Republican candidate to get into the race, in a crowded attempt to beat the current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump. 

So for today’s episode, a rerun of my conversation with Tim Scott from last summer. As you’ll hear, Scott’s approach is fundamentally different from many of his fellow republicans in that he’s the ultimate optimist. In part, that optimism comes from his own story. Scott’s grandfather picked cotton in the segregated south. He never learned to read or write. Within two generations, without money or connections, his grandson became a U.S. senator, and today, throws his hat in to become President of the United States.

Scott told me he is frustrated at all the pessimism, including from inside his own party — and he’s frustrated at the notion that America is in decline. Though I hope Scott is right, you’ll hear that I challenge him on that idea. I see very good reasons for Americans to be fed up with the state of the union and deeply worried about the future of the country.

We also talked about Trump, the state of the GOP and what it’s like to be the Senate’s only black Republican.

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Seventy-five years ago this week, the Jewish community of Palestine (known as the yishuv) gathered in the art museum of Tel Aviv—then a city of less than 200,000 inhabitants—in order to perform a resurrection. Thirty-seven people—36 men and one woman—were about to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which would reestablish Jewish political sovereignty in the Holy Land for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple 2,000 years ago.

They gathered in that museum just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, just three years after six million Jews were murdered in Europe, to establish Israel as a place where the Jewish people could at last control their own fate and destiny and safety. More than that, in the land of Israel, there was a sense—not just among religious Jews, but all Jews—that they were finally going home.

The Israel of the early days—poor, socialist, secular, where food rationing was the norm— feels so far away. Now, Israel is an economic superpower, a world leader in high tech. And the socialist left that built the country has given way to a political right that dominates the Jewish state. But throughout its 75 years, Israel has always prided itself on being the world’s only Jewish democracy. A liberal democracy in a sea of undemocratic regimes.

Now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are worried that that identity—an identity that Israelis pride themselves on and have defended since its existence—is in danger. They’ve been taking to the streets, night after night for the past five months, with Israeli flags in their hands chanting and demanding one thing: “democratya.” Democracy.

One of those people is my guest today, Daniel Gordis: rabbi, academic, American Israeli, and author of eight books, including the just published Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams?

On today’s episode, Danny helps us make sense of this complicated, tumultuous, beautiful, often indecipherable place: What did Israel’s founders want for the country? Has their promise been fulfilled? How did the Jewish people manage to become a world economic powerhouse after two in every three European Jews had been slaughtered? And in light of the ongoing political turmoil, what does the future of this small, miraculous country—both Jewish and democratic—hold?

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A few years ago, writer and cartoonist Tim Urban started becoming troubled by what he saw going on in the world around him. He noticed that while technology was progressing in unbelievable ways—people were going to space on private rocket ships and computers were the size of Starbucks coffee cups—it seemed like people were unhappier than ever before. We were petty. We were turning against each other. We were tribal. And he noticed that the very things that had allowed for unbelievable technological progress—things like democracy, liberalism, and humanism—were under siege.

Why was everything such a mess? When did things get so tribal? And why do humans do this stuff to each other? Urban’s new book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies, is an answer to those questions and more. Like his other work on his blog, Wait But Why, Urban uses comically simple drawings, stick figures, and charts, to make the most complex and profound questions that humans face tangible and affecting. In this book, Urban looks back at hundreds of thousands of years of history and explains how we are now living through more change, more rapidly, than at any other time—the stakes of that are almost too high to comprehend—but what he argues is that the danger we face in the end is not global warming. It’s not an asteroid racing toward Earth. It’s not an impending alien invasion. It’s ourselves.

On today’s episode, Tim Urban explains how we got ourselves into this mess, and how we can also get ourselves out of it.

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Peter Thiel doesn’t shy away from taking big bets. From Facebook (he was the company’s first outside investor) to Gawker (he successfully conspired to put the website out of business) and, of course, to Trump (he threw his support behind the nominee in 2016).

Unlike many in the Silicon Valley set, who often say the popular thing in public and the thing they actually believe behind closed doors, Thiel has used his voice and his fortune to steer the country in the direction he believes is right—despite tremendous blowback. That was true in last year’s midterms, when Thiel threw his support behind two anti-establishment Republican candidates: Arizona’s Blake Masters and Ohio’s JD Vance. 

But the billionaire entrepreneur and investor tells me in this conversation that he’s changing course. When I asked him who he’d back in 2024, he demurred. He says he’s decided to step away from supporting select politicians and instead is urging the political right to shift its focus from the culture wars to issues he believes matters more: like economic growth and tech innovation. 

We cover a lot in this conversation. Why does Thiel believe that Democrats are the evil party and Republicans are the stupid party? Why is our infrastructure so far behind other nations? And why are Americans so impressed by the apps on our phones instead of dreaming of the next Sputnik?

Also: A.I., China, TikTok, Twitter, the right way to defeat what Elon Musk musk calls the “woke mind virus” and what Thiel’s going to bet on next.

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Just six months ago, few outside of Silicon Valley had heard of OpenAI, the company that makes the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Now, this application is used daily by over 100 million users, and some of those people use it more often than Google. Within just months of its release, it has become the fastest-growing app in history. ChatGPT can write essays and code. It can ace the bar exam, write poems and song lyrics, and summarize emails. It can give advice, scour the internet for information, and diagnose an illness given a set of blood results, all in a matter of seconds. And all of the responses it generates are eerily similar to those of an actual human being. 

For many people, it feels like we’re on the brink of something world-changing. That the technology that powers ChatGPT, and the emergent AI revolution more broadly, will be the most critical and rapid societal transformation in the history of the world to date. If that sounds like hyperbole, don’t take it from me: Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said AI’s impact will be more profound than the discovery of fire. Computer scientist and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said AI is the new electricity. Some say it’s the new printing press. Others say it’s more like the invention of the wheel, or the airplane. Many predict the AI revolution will make the internet seem like a small step. And just last month, The Atlantic ran a story comparing AI to nuclear weapons.

But there’s a flip side to all of this optimism, and it’s a dark one. Many smart people believe that AI could make human beings obsolete. Thousands of brilliant technologists—people like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—are so concerned about this software that last month they called for an immediate pause on training any AI systems more powerful than the current version of ChatGPT. One of the pioneers of AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky, claims that if AI continues on its current trajectory, it will destroy life on Earth as we know it. He recently wrote, “If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”

Which is it? Is AI the end of the world? Or the dawn of a new one? To answer that question for us today: Sam Altman. Sam is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, which makes him arguably one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, and if you believe the hype about AI, the world. I ask him: is the technology that powers ChatGPT going to fundamentally transform life on Earth as we know it? In what ways? How will AI affect our basic humanity, our jobs, our understanding of intelligence, our relationships? And are the people in charge of this powerful technology, people like himself, ready for the responsibility?

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Jonathan Rosen has spent the last few years trying to understand the story of his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor. 

Michael Laudor was, by all accounts, a genius. Maybe even a prodigy. Academically, he excelled beyond belief. Things that are hard for most young students, like reading and comprehending large volumes of material, came easily for him. His charm was infectious, and seemed to immediately attract the attention of any room he entered. As he navigated young adulthood and college, and eventually law school at Yale, one thing was clear: everyone was drawn to Michael.

Then Michael did something unimaginable: he killed his fiancée.  

The tragedy of Michael’s story is captured in Jonathan’s new book, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. It’s a breathtaking account of friendship, the harrowing and insidious nature of mental illness as it takes over someone’s life, and most of all, it investigates the invisible forces—cultural, political, and ideological—that shaped Michael’s terrible fortune, and America’s ongoing failure to get people like Michael the help that they so desperately need. 

On today’s episode, Jonathan shares this personal story of extreme tragedy. Which is also, as we discuss, an American tragedy.

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The Exodus—the story of the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian slavery 3,000 years ago—is the ultimate story of freedom. And not just for Jews. But for people seeking liberation from subjugation in so many other times and places. Including here in America. 

From the founding fathers, to abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, to presidents like Lincoln and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, the themes and symbols and moral truths of the Exodus story have been at the core of how Americans seeking freedom from tyranny have seen themselves. One could argue that without the Exodus there might be no America.

To make that case last Passover—and to take us on a tour of the way the Exodus has been used throughout American history—we talked to Rabbi Meir Soloviechik, who teaches at Yeshiva University and helms the oldest synagogue in the United States. We loved the conversation so much that we wanted to share it again this year.

You don’t need to be a believer to love this episode. You just need to be concerned with how divided we have become, how we have lost a shared sense of reality, a shared sense of ethics, and shared stories from which we can draw universal meaning and inspiration.

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New York City has had a rough few years. It lost nearly four percent of its population during the pandemic. There was a historic crime surge, particularly violent crime. Buildings were empty as people continued to work from home. Pundits all over the world declared New York City “over.”

Into that breach, last year, stepped a new mayor: Eric Adams.

He’s the kid raised in a rat-infested tenement in Bushwick, beaten up by police as a teen, who later became a cop himself. He’s tough on crime, but also critical of police brutality. He’s the health nut who makes his own vegan ice cream, but who also likes to go out on the town. But above all else, he’s the mayor who’s tried-and-true New York City. 

Adams was elected on the promise of not just bringing back New York, but of reviving an old kind of Democrat that today feels like an endangered species: a practical, personable, no-bullshit type of politician. As one congressman put it: “He’s an antidote to the party’s likeability problem.” More than a year in: has Mayor Adams lived up to the hype?

Today, has Mayor Adams fulfilled his promise to make the city safer? How will he address massive educational setbacks in public schools? Does New York City risk becoming like San Francisco? What does he really think of AOC? And is his brand of politics winnable nationally for the Democrats? 

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People don’t usually think about Adele in the same breath as Johnny Cash. The Beastie Boys in the same breath as Jay-Z. Justin Bieber and Slayer. Neil Young and Lady Gaga. The Dixie Chicks and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But all of these iconic artists have a single person in common: producer Rick Rubin.

Ever since Rubin created Def Jam Recordings from his college dorm room forty years ago and helped launch the global phenomenon that is hip hop, Rubin has produced some of the world’s most popular records. If you look at his discography, it’s almost unbelievable. Rubin works on up to ten records a year, and has become something of a high-priest of popular music. 

Today, I talk to Rubin about his new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. We talk about what it means to be creative, how to trust your own gut, separating the art from the artist, what he thinks of growing self-censorship in our music, art and culture, and what it means to listen in an era of non-stop distraction.

And to follow Rubin’s next projects, you can visit tetragrammaton.com

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The last time economist Tyler Cowen was on Honestly about a year ago, inflation was the highest it had been in 40 years, gas prices were nearly $7 a gallon in many parts of the country, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine was leading to a lot of fears about breadlines and nuclear war. A lot has changed since then. Especially in the last two weeks.

Today, Cowen is back on the show to once again explain: what the heck is going on with the economy!? We talk about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the psychology of bank runs, whether or not we’re seeing a larger banking crisis, recession anxiety, persistent inflation, a beleaguered tech industry, the seduction of crypto in this moment and the potential salvation of AI. Plus, how many hours Tyler spends on ChatGPT each day, what he thinks of his interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, how altruism is a form of power and why Silicon Valley is a scapegoat.

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When most people think about war, they think about senseless killing, brutality, violence and horror. But when journalist Sebastian Junger thinks about war — even though he has witnessed firsthand how war is all of those things — he also thinks about meaning, purpose, brotherhood and community. It's why, he posits, so many veterans actually miss war when they return home. As Junger argues, war gives people all of the things that religion aspires to impart to people and often fails. War, he says, delivers.

Junger was a war correspondent for many decades. His reporting on the front lines of Afghanistan was captured in his best-selling book, War, and was made into an Academy Award winning documentary, Restrepo, which follows a platoon of U.S. soldiers in one of the bleakest, most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. Through his raw, unfiltered, on the ground reporting, perhaps no one has done more to illuminate the full picture and reality of war.

One of those realities is that men seek and need danger. They have a deep desire to prove their valor. They find community and meaning in crisis. And yet, much of the Western world lives without any kind of high-stakes, high-risk danger at all. It is, of course, a great blessing we don't live in constant crisis. But our comfort, safety and affluence, he argues, come with unexamined costs.

So for today, a conversation with Sebastian Junger about reporting from the most dangerous regions of the world, his new book Freedom, what it means to be human, and how danger is inextricably tied to living a meaningful life.

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Honestly presents Chapter 1 of The Witch Trails of J.K. Rowling

Host Megan Phelps-Roper writes a letter to J.K. Rowling—and receives a surprising invitation in reply: the opportunity for an intimate conversation in Rowling’s Scottish home.

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Last month, Nikki Haley announced she is running for President. Haley is someone who has consistently proven doubters wrong: she was the first female governor of South Carolina, she has never lost a race, she’s self-made, and she survived as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during a turbulent, chaotic Trump White House without so much as a scrape.

For the latter, some see her as a savvy, smart player of politics. Others see her as having dodged an important question, as she allied herself with Trump enough to stay in his good graces, but also stayed away from him just enough to appease his critics.

Her position on Trump is just one of many challenges that Haley will have to face in the Republican primaries. The other big issue is that in a post-Trump political landscape, can Haley’s oldschool Republican worldview resonate with the base of the party, which is increasingly isolationist and populist? On the flip side, perhaps Haley can be a breath of fresh air for the Republican party: a normal candidate who – as the Midterms seemed to prove – voters are more than ready to support. 

On today’s show, a conversation with Nikki Haley about why she’s running for president, who the Haley constituency is, how she responds to her fiercest critics (Don Lemon, we’re looking at you), her vision for the future of the country, and why she thinks she has what it takes to be the next President of the United States. 

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For the past two weeks, tens of thousands of people, most of them college students, poured into a small chapel at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. Some drove from South Carolina and Oklahoma. Others flew in from Canada and Singapore. They waited in line for hours to stand next to people they share nothing in common with except for a single conviction: God was visiting a two-stoplight town in Kentucky.

Religion has been on the decline in America for years. But last year, for the first time in American history, house-of-worship membership dropped below 50%. And nowhere is the decline in religion and faith more dramatic than when you look at our youngest generation. Gen Z is the most likely generation ever to say they don’t believe in God, and they are the least religiously affiliated and the least likely to attend church.

Zoomers are also a generation riddled with anxiety and depression, and inundated with nihilistic and fatalistic messages – TV shows, movies, pop songs – throughout the culture. In poll after poll, they are the generation with the least positive outlook on life. The CDC recently published a report stating that “almost 60% of female students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year.”

And yet, in this tiny chapel in Kentucky, God, faith, meaning and hope have been on full display.

What moved so many young people to nonstop prayer – more than 250 hours – at a moment like this? How did this revival come to be? And why is it happening now? Today, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold explains from the chapel at the Asbury Revival.

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Ozempic, the brand name drug for a medication called semaglutide, is one of the most popular drugs on the market right now. Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, the injectable drug has recently boomed in popularity for its off-label use to help people lose weight... fast. Celebrities and public figures have admitted they're taking it. Instagram influencers are showing off remarkable before and after photos. It's been called "TikTok's favorite weight loss drug." As one doctor said, "we haven't seen a prescription drug with this much cocktail and dinner chatter since Viagra came to the market."

But alongside the rise in Ozempic prescriptions come many questions still unknown: Who should be taking it? Is it safe for longterm use? Who is it safe for? Should children be prescribed it to treat childhood obesity, as the American Academy of Pediatrics recently advised? Is Ozempic a permanent solution to the obesity epidemic? Or is it more like a bandaid, a quick fix that does little to address the root causes of obesity? And, to that end, what is the root cause of obesity? Is it a "brain disease," as one Harvard doctor recently declared on 60 Minutes that warrants medication? Or do diet, exercise, willpower and other behavioral lifestyle choices still matter?

These are questions that my guests do not agree on. Dr. Chika Anekwe is an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and a professor at the University of California San Francisco. His most recent book is Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer. And Calley Means is a former consultant for food and Pharma companies who now works to expose their practices and instead incentive healthy food as the foundation of health policy.

Today, Dr. Anekwe, Dr. Prasad, and Means debate: will Ozempic solve obesity in America?

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For many parents, the last few years have been eye-opening, as they saw the education system in America crumble under the weight of the pandemic. School closures that went on far too long, ineffective zoom school for kids as young as kindergarten, and other stringent policies that we’re still just beginning to understand the devastating effects of. But like many things during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with. 

Nowhere is that more clear than in our episode today about why 65% of American fourth grade kids can barely read. And about how during the pandemic, parents, for the first time, came face to face with just how bad and ineffective the reading instruction in their kids’ classrooms is and started asking questions about why.

That is the subject of Emily Hanford's new podcast from American Public Media, Sold a Story, where she investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a flawed idea and a failed method for teaching reading to American kids. It’s an expose of how educators across the country came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended. 

Today, guest host Katie Herzog talks to Emily about her groundbreaking reporting and what we can do to make things right. 

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Over the last decade, the internet has devolved into a playground for influencers who sell and show off anything and everything you could ever imagine. But my guest today, Helen Lewis, says it isn’t all just superficial TikTok stars telling you how to properly contour your face to look like a Kardashian. Helen argues that the internet has actually become a digital revival tent, and that it’s full of new gurus. In fact, she says, we’re living in a golden age of gurus. 

Helen Lewis is a writer for The Atlantic and the host of the new podcast for the BBC, The New Gurus, which explores what it means to be a 21st century guru and how the internet got completely overtaken by them. She profiles productivity hackers, dating coaches, wellness influencers, crypto bros, diversity experts, and heterodox intellectual heroes, all of whom are making a living captivating millions of people with their unconventional ideas (like drinking your own urine to get healthy or paying $5000 to go to a dinner where you’ll be told you’re racist.)

So today, a conversation with Helen about why these figures are so appealing right now, what it is about our current moment that is so ripe for people to believe in the most outlandish ideas, the limits of individual experts, why we still need institutions, and what, if anything, she’s learned about fighting our worst instincts that the internet makes so easy to indulge. 

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Ken Burns is the most famous documentary filmmaker in America. He has made 35 films over the past 5 decades on historical and cultural subjects like the Civil War (which is the most streamed film in public television history), baseball, jazz, the Roosevelts, Jefferson, Vietnam, Benjamin Franklin, the Statue of Liberty, Muhammad Ali... and many, many more. But of his most recent film, The U.S. and The Holocaust, he said: "I will never work on a film more important than this one."

Even if you've seen many movies or read many books on the Holocaust, Burns' new film, which focuses on the U.S.'s response to the worst genocide in human history—what America did and didn't do, could have done and didn't, and the way the Nazis derived inspiration from ideas popular in America at the time—is bound to both horrify and surprise.

So today, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I talk to Burns about why a filmmaker of American history takes on the Holocaust and what this dark period of history tells us about the chasm between America's ideals and our actual reality. And later, we get into an intense and rich discussion about the responsibilities of telling American history, the uses and misuses of the Holocaust as a political metaphor, and what pitfalls we face when drawing parallels between history and now.

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The debate about immigration brings out some of the deepest anxieties and biggest disagreements in America. And right now, all of it feels like it’s coming to a head. In 2022, there were over 2.76 million illegal migrant crossings at the Southwest border. That’s roughly the population of Chicago, America’s third largest city. To address this unprecedented surge, President Biden recently announced tougher restrictions and made a show of visiting the border himself. 

But unlike a decade or two ago, when the immigration debate was mostly about economics, today it’s an issue that’s subsumed by the culture wars and our polarized discourse. Republican governors bus migrants to sanctuary cities and they’re called “xenophobic” and “cruel” by the left. But what happens when a Democratic governor does much the same thing, bussing migrants from Colorado to New York City and Chicago? Is it still a heartless political stunt? Or is all of this just an inevitable consequence of our broken immigration system? 

So today: a debate moderated by guest host Kmele Foster between Alex Nowrasteh and Jessica Vaughan. Are current levels of immigration helping or hurting America? How do we balance humanitarian concerns with America’s economic and security needs? Should we be trying to enforce more or less restrictions at the border? And what exactly should we do to fix our immigration policies?

Alex is the director of Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Jessica is the director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that describes themselves as “pro-immigrant but low immigration.”

While Alex and Jessica couldn’t be more opposite in their approach – Alex favors free immigration, while Jessica argues for restrictionist policies – today on Honestly we look for common ground, debate the facts, and search for solutions

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From Biden getting on board the classified documents train to the raw milk revolutionaries who are skeptical of Big Dairy, today we bring you a roundtable to discuss, debate and pull apart the news of the week beyond the headlines.

New York Sun columnist Eli Lake hosts this week's conversation with guests Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and writer at The Atlantic, and Honestly's very own Bari Weiss, with a special appearance by Free Press columnist, Suzy Weiss.

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When my wife Nellie was pregnant last year, we became obsessed with Economist Emily Oster’s book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know. Amidst a barrage of conflicting and confusing pregnancy advice, Oster laid out the data on everything we needed to know. Despite what doctors said, sushi, cheese, and the occasional glass of wine were all okay during those nine long months. It gave us the much needed calm we needed during a time of so much uncertainty. 

With her two subsequent books Cribsheet and The Family Firm, Oster popularized a new phenomenon that has defined our generation of parents: data-driven parenting. It ditches the long lists of paternalistic rules, and instead examines peer-reviewed evidence and lets parents make their own informed decisions about their kids based on risks and tradeoffs.

Nowhere was the Oster mentality more front and center, and more divisive, than during Covid. She argued very early on in the pandemic for less draconian and more nuanced policies. She wrote pieces in the Atlantic like, Schools Aren’t Superspreaders and Your Unvaccinated Kids Is Like A Vaccinated Grandma, when those words were considered heresy. And while she made quite a few enemies on the left over the last few years, recently she wrote Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty, and earned herself some enemies on the right as well.

Today, my wife Nellie Bowles joins me to talk to Oster about why a Harvard-educated economist at Brown University decided to become a parenting guru, how she used her parenting framework to become a leading expert on pandemic policies, and the unwinnable position of… actually following the science.

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David Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best selling books: Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Holidays On Ice, Barrel Fever… just to name a few. He’s also one of my favorite writers of all time. 

What makes Sedaris – who got his start on NPR back in 1992 with his, now famous, Santaland Diaries essay about the time he worked as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s – so mesmerizing and funny, is his ability to find something meaningful and true in the utterly mundane, the way he finds humor in the most horrific moments in life, and his commitment to the lost art of making fun of ourselves. 

Nowhere is that more clear than in his newest book, Happy-Go-Lucky. Like most of his writing, it’s a book about his beloved and crazy family. But it’s also a book about some of the most contentious societal issues of the last few years. For the writer who so many think of as a public radio darling, the pages of Sedaris’ new book are not like what you find on today’s member stations. He writes about observing Black Lives Matter protests and COVID lockdowns with such candor – and without agenda or moral ideology – which results in something not only hilarious and relatable, as usual, but also extraordinarily refreshing. 

So for today, if you find yourself tuning in from an overcrowded plane, a car full of bickering cousins, or maybe you miraculously get a quiet moment to yourself on a long and snowy walk, this is the perfect episode for you… and, hopefully, the perfect holiday escape.

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Ro Khanna is a progressive congressman representing California's 17th District, the wealthiest Congressional district in the U.S. He's the Silicon Valley congressman, and his constituents are the coastal elites of the elites. But if you didn't know any of that, you might think Ro Khanna is a congressman from a place like Indiana. He wants to revitalize American industry, bring manufacturing back home, and really sound the alarm on who the digital revolution has left behind.

In fact, when you hear Ro Khanna make the case for the dignity of working people, the negative effects of globalization, and campaign with slogans like “​​make more stuff here,” and “buy American,” he kind of sounds like… Donald Trump.

That tells you everything you need to know about our current political moment and how the old rules about what is left and what is right, and which party represents the working class is totally up for grabs. And Khanna thinks that Democrats should be dominating on these issues.

On big tech, Khanna’s policies are not exactly the ones you'd imagine coming from the congressman whose neighbors are the creators of the next Googles and Facebooks. Not only does he think big tech needs to be broken up, but he also was one of the only Democrats to diverge from his party's censorious impulses, when he reached out directly to Twitter in 2020 to criticize its decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, as we reported in the Twitter Files story.

In an era where the Democratic Party and big tech often seem to be marching in lockstep, Khanna says, hold on. Maybe we should be skeptical of this kind of corporate power. And isn't that the core of what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about? And if not, when did that change and why?

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For the last month, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been all over the internet with his conspiratorial, antisemitic tirades. Most recently, he went on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show with White Nationalist Nick Fuentes and said things like, “I love Nazis” and “I see good things about Hitler.” 

Last month, there was also Kyrie Irving sharing a link to a video that claimed that blacks are the real Hebrews and the Holocaust didn’t happen. There was also the Black Hebrew Israelite march outside of Barclays Center that got almost no media coverage. All of this, took place in a country where Jews still suffer the largest total number of hate crimes, year after year. 

What’s happened over the last month isn’t about one celebrity or basketball player. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and I talked about recently, the antisemitic ideas we’ve seen in the news lately are not new in America. Especially not in black America. 

Black-Jewish relations in America have a long and dynamic history, from the shared struggle during the Civil Rights movement to the horror of the Crown Heights Riots in 1991. Throughout all of it, it’s hard not to think about the outsized influence of Louis Farrakahn, often dubbed the most popular antisemite in America. 

So today, an honest conversation with guests Chloe Valdary, Bret Stephens, Eli Lake and Kmele Foster about the history of these two communities in America, and how, as a society, we should respond to public figures who spew antisemitism.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a polarizing figure. For some, he's the ultimate defender of the State of Israel, willing to do whatever he thinks it takes to protect the one Jewish state located in the most volatile region of the world. For others, Bibi symbolizes everything that's wrong with 21st century Israel: the state's rightward turn and its never ending conflict with the Palestinians. His supporters chant “Bibi, King of Israel!” at his rallies, while at protests, his enemies call him “crime minister.”

Bill Clinon said: “you should never underestimate him.” Barack Obama said he was “smart, canny, tough” but that they “did not share worldviews.” And Trump called him “the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with” but then later, infamously “f— him.”

But there's one thing that everyone can agree on: Benjamin Netanyahu is the reigning master of Israeli politics. And despite being ousted from the Prime Ministership just over a year ago, Bibi is back. For a third stint.

Why is Benjamin Netanyahu the man that Israelis just can't quit? And what does it mean for Israel that he's attempting to form a government with some of the most radical, far-right parties in Israel? 

Today, an interview with Prime Minister Netanyahu on the eve of his return to power and on the occasion of the publication of his book, Bibi: My Story, an autobiography about his evolution from soldier to statesman. We talked about how he draws moral lines as a leader, about the prospect of peace with the Palestinians and the prospect of peace with the Saudis, and about how he plans to uphold Israel's delicate balance between Judaism and democracy as he steps in to lead his country once more. 

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A few months ago, I had writer Freddie deBoer on the podcast for an episode we called, “Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?” We talked about his experience living with severe bipolar disorder and the dangerous ways in which mental illness has gotten wrapped up in our growing cultural obsession with identity politics. It’s almost like sickness, he argued, has become chic.

We spent some of the conversation talking critically about a New York Times article by writer Daniel Bergner about a movement away from medication and more towards acceptance. A movement that replaces words like “psychosis” with “nonconsensus realities.” This article, in Freddie’s view, was exemplary of the very phenomenon he was calling out. 

A lot of people responded extremely positively to my conversation with Freddie. Others, not so much. One of those people was Daniel Bergner. So I invited him on the show.

Today’s episode is not just a debate about how society should handle the epidemic of mental illness. It’s a model for how to disagree with someone productively, respectively, honestly. It’s a reminder not only that it’s okay to come out of a conversation strongly disagreeing with someone, but that it’s of vital importance.

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Last week, Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson from the Russians. It was one of the most stunning victories for Ukraine since the war began eight months ago. And yet, the road ahead is long and uncertain. Just this week, Putin unleashed a heavy bombardment of missiles across Ukraine, in an attempt to destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. The stakes of this war are already high for Ukraine, but they are made exponentially higher – for countries across the globe – because of the looming danger of nuclear war. 

Today, three star Lieutenant General HR McMaster returns to Honestly to talk about the chance of nuclear escalation, what plans our military has in place in the case of a nuclear attack on Ukraine, what a realistic end to the war might look like, how concessions will only embolden Putin, and why McMaster believes America needs to remain actively invested in this war until Putin is finally convinced that he has been defeated.

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With inflation soaring, the worst crime wave in decades, and Biden’s approval rating at a pitiful 41%, everyone predicted last night’s midterm elections would be a bloodbath. It wasn’t. The red wave the Republicans were hoping for did not arrive. In fact, it was barely a red trickle. While results are still coming in, it looks like Republicans will narrowly win control of the House, and Democrats will remain in control of the Senate. 

What happened? Today, journalists Mary Katharine Ham, Josh Kraushaar from Axios, Batya Ungar-Sargon from Newsweek, and Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine – all of whom didn’t sleep a wink last night – discuss the stunning results of the 2022 Midterms. 

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Less than a week out from election day, and more than 20 million people have already cast their votes – a record number of early voters for a midterm election. But it isn’t so surprising when you consider the stakes: inflation at a 40-year high, economists saying we’re heading towards a recession, and the largest crime surge across America in decades. Just to name a few small issues voters may be thinking about.

Midterms are typically hard for the party in power, but President Biden’s approval numbers are among the worst for a first-term president. Given this, many are predicting a red wave. And yet, Republicans have problems of their own: candidates who spent their primaries trying to out-MAGA each other and continue to pedal election denial conspiracies, others who seem entirely unfit to serve, and, of course, since Roe v Wade was overturned this summer, many young voters, especially women, are particularly motivated this election cycle to vote against the GOP.

So what’s going to happen on Tuesday? Will Democrats keep control of the Senate? The House? What races should we be watching? Could Oregon go red for the first time in decades? Today, as voters head to the ballot box, a roundtable with Mary Katharine Ham, Josh Kraushaar, and Batya Ungar-Sargon.

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Over the past two years, the United States has experienced the largest crime surge in decades. Aggravated assaults went up. Shoplifting went up. Domestic violence went up. Homicides went up. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose 30%, the largest single year increase in recorded U.S. history. And yet, the most dominant voices in the last few years, are the ones that believe our attempts to mitigate crime have been too punitive, and that the solutions lie in less people in prison and less police on the streets. 

Today, guest host Kmele Foster moderates a debate with Lara Bazelon and Rafael Mangual about the state of criminal justice in America. Bazelon has spent her career advocating for criminal defendants, directs The Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic and The Racial Justice Clinic at the University of San Francisco School of Law, and was a federal public defender in LA. Mangual, author of Criminal Injustice, is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he's the head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative.

While Foster, Bazelon and Mangual all agree that the criminal justice system is, in many ways, broken, today they debate the particular defects, the scale of the issues, the root causes, and ultimately what we ought to do about it. 

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Let’s talk about the state of men in America: For every 100 bachelor degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men; among men with only a high-school education, one in three is out of the labor force; mortality from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related illnesses are almost three times higher among men than women. The list goes on.

The reality is that boys and men are falling behind. And we need to do something about it. So for today, Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, on his new book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.

Guest host Mary Katharine Ham and Reeves talk about the three biggest areas where men are floundering (education, work, and home) and why truly caring about gender equality means fighting not just for women, but for men too. 

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In a world where the personal has become political, and politics has swallowed everything, the stakes of changing your mind can feel really high. To change your mind is to risk betrayal – of your people, your culture, your tribe. But there may be nothing more important to a functioning democracy than to be able to influence each other, and be influenced ourselves, on the basis of conversation.

So for today’s episode: the neuroscience of belief change. It’s an interview that aired last year on The Making Sense podcast, hosted by Sam Harris.

Sam Harris is a lot of things: a best-selling author, a neuroscientist and a meditation teacher. In this conversation, Sam talks with cognitive neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan about how we can be more amenable to persuasion, why we mistake emotion as evidence, wishful thinking, and how we can become more critical of ourselves as we form new opinions. 

As Sam has said many times before, we only have two choices to resolve conflict as human beings: violence or conversation. To change your mind, or to be open to changing your mind, is to choose the latter.

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Last month, a 22 year old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested in Tehran by the Islamic Republic's so-called morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly. Three days later, on September 16th, she died in their custody. Her death ignited a movement, as Iranians took to the streets across the country to demand change, women cutting off their hair in public and lighting their hijabs on fire. The protesters, many of whom are teenagers, have been chanting: “women, life, and freedom” and “death to the dictator.” 

Perhaps no one has been a louder and more forceful voice for change in Iran than Masih Alinejad, a journalist and activist who has spent her entire adult life fighting for human rights in Iran and exposing the regime’s brutality. For this, she has paid a heavy price. The regime has accused her of being a spy for western governments. They’ve targeted her family – they arrested her brother, interrogated her mother, and forced her sister to denounce her on state television. And most recently, they tried to kill her on American soil. She has been living in a safe house ever since.

None of this has deterred her. As she wrote last month, “I am not fearful of dying, because I know what I am living for.” Today, guest host Mary Katharine Ham talks to Masih about all of this – the young woman’s death that sparked the protests, what the U.S. should do to support the protests, whether or not this could really be the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic, and why the Iranian regime wants Masih dead.

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Today’s episode is borrowed from the feed of the great podcast The Fifth Column. Usually hosted by Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, this episode, which aired in July of 2022, features Kmele and two guests who have become elder statesmen around the persistent issue of race in America: John McWhorter and Glenn Loury. 

Over the past few years McWhorter, Loury and Foster each have written, discussed and lectured exhaustively on anti-racism, the role race plays in America, and the changing meaning of the word “racism” itself. In this episode, they talk about the inadequacies of regarding people solely by their racial category, the dignity of the individual and what a future might look like if we were to abolish race all together. While all three men bring a contrarian streak to this discussion, you’ll find that they have disagreements when it comes to questions of race abolition and the so-called “Racial Reckoning” of 2020. 

Loury is an economist and professor of social science at Brown University. You can listen to his interview with Bari here. McWhorter is the author of numerous books, including Talking Black and Woke Racism. He's also professor of Linguistics, Philosophy and Music at Columbia University, and a columnist at The New York Times.

Since 2015 Kmele Foster has been a prominent voice in a number of discussions about race in America, including his reporting challenging the mainstream media’s verdict on Amy Cooper, better known as the Central Park Karen.

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Last year, The New York Times dropped a bombshell headline: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” As other outlets picked up the shocking story, marches, protests and riots erupted across Canada. One former Canadian minister called it Canada’s George Floyd moment.

But according to my guest today, the bombshell story about a mass grave… wasn’t true. Today, a conversation with journalist Terry Glavin about “the year of the graves,” and what the mainstream media got so, very wrong.

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Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of talk about the obesity epidemic. In 2008, Michelle Obama started a government program called “Let’s Move!” that sought to reduce childhood obesity. You might remember the First Lady teaming up with everyone from Beyonce to Big Bird to promote exercise and better eating habits. Unfortunately, the program was largely a failure. And the obesity statistics continued to rise.

74% of Americans today are either obese or overweight. And yet, we’re no longer talking about it. The national conversation around health and weight has turned away from things like good nutrition, weight loss and the importance of physical fitness, and instead adopted phrases like “fat acceptance” and “healthy at any size.” In some circles, there’s even blanket denial that there is anything unhealthy at all about being obese. 

Shaming people for being overweight is unequivocally wrong. But in our attempt to not offend, we’ve lost sight of the very real fact that there’s a problem. Americans are heavier than ever, sicker than ever, dying earlier than ever, and... it's all preventable. So today, a conversation with Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford trained physician who left the traditional medical system behind to solve the one problem that she says is going to ruin us all: bad food.

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If there is a headline to the past half-decade, it’s this: liberal democracy is under threat across the West and populist movements are on the march. There’s Brexit in the UK. There’s Viktor Orbán in Hungary. There’s Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. And in the United States, of course, there’s Donald Trump.

So today: a debate. Should we be fighting to preserve liberalism, the system that prizes our individual rights and the very foundation upon which America was built? Or is the system itself the problem?

It’s a high-stakes debate—the future of America and liberal democracy—and we couldn’t have two better people for this conversation: Political Science Professor and author of the book, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen; and New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens.

Both Bret and Patrick are what people would label “conservatives,” but there is likely more disagreement between the two of them than between the average Democrat and Republican. Bret believes the problems we see today are happening because we have lost too much of our individual freedom. Patrick, on the other hand, believes that having so much freedom has actually damaged us– that our problems are caused precisely by the system that puts individual liberty on a pedestal.

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On November 9, 2016, the day after Trump was elected president, three students from Oberlin College were caught shoplifting wine from Gibson’s Bakery, a local staple that had been around for 137 years. Allyn Gibson, who was running the register that night, and who is white, called the cops on the three students, who were black. They fled, he chased them outside of the store, a brawl ensued and the three students were arrested. 

The next day, students, along with Oberlin administrators, began protesting outside the bakery, accusing them of racism. There were signs, and a Student Senate resolution, and articles in the paper, and then, the college canceled its orders with the bakery.  

Months after the three students pleaded guilty, with their business wounded and their reputation destroyed, the Gibsons decided to sue the college for libel. All said and done, the Gibsons were awarded $36 million. 

So far, the school hasn’t paid a penny, continuing to appeal the decision and deny any wrongdoing. This Tuesday, the supreme court of Ohio declined Oberlin’s last appeal, which means that they can either pay, file an appeal for reconsideration, or appeal, again, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Today, an exclusive sit down with Lorna Gibson, the matriarch of the bakery, about what happens when a powerful college decides to go to battle with your family.  

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Attorney General William Barr is only the second person in American history to lead the Justice Department twice: first under President George HW Bush and then again, three decades later, under arguably the most divisive president we’ve ever had.  

Today, we talk about . . . all of it. Why he took the job in the first place; his time in the chaotic Trump White House; Russiagate; whether he regrets how he handled the Mueller investigation; and what finally pushed him to break away from the president.

We also talk about January 6; the raid on Mar-a-Lago; whether he thinks Trump will be indicted; and what he calls Trump’s “extortion” of the GOP.

Later, we discuss the rise in violent crime under his tenure; how he squares his Catholicism and his conservatism with the death penalty; why he sees militant secularism as the biggest threat to freedom; and what makes him optimistic in the face of American decline. 

A frank conversation you don’t want to miss.

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Larry Summers is one of the most important economists in the world. He’s been the chief economist at the World Bank. He was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. He was director of the National Economic Council under Obama. And from 2001 to 2006 he was president of Harvard.

But perhaps more than anything on his resume, the thing Summers is most well-known for is his willingness to speak his mind—even if it means being the skunk at the garden party, warning about inflation when everyone else was downplaying it and publicly criticizing the Biden administration’s spending policies.