306 avsnitt • Längd: 65 min • Veckovis: Torsdag
The most interesting conversations in American life happen in private. This show brings them out of the closet. Stories no one else is telling and conversations with the most fascinating people in the country, every week from The Free Press, hosted by former New York Times and Wall Street Journal journalist Bari Weiss.
The podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss is created by The Free Press. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Yesterday, The Free Press had a major scoop: The State Department is launching the biggest shake-up in decades in an effort spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Today, Rubio joins us on Honestly to discuss his goals for restructuring the Department and also how the U.S. is responding to manifold crises at home and abroad, from controversial deportations to the American attempt to end the war in Ukraine to the possibility of a new Iranian nuclear deal.
In his confirmation hearing, Secretary Rubio talked about how the postwar global order is obsolete. The question is: what replaces it?
We asked that and more of the man who has been charged with overseeing one of the most transformational shifts in our relationship to the world in American history.
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In the past few weeks, Bari has done two episodes on religion—one asking, “Do we need a religious revival?,” and then a follow-up conversation with Ross Douthat asking how people who grew up in the secular West can actually find faith.
Today, we have the last installment of this intellectual and religious inquiry, and we are asking a new question: What is the role of religion as a political force in this country?
Our guest today, Jonathan Rauch, says: “Christianity is a load-bearing wall of American civic life.” In other words, the success of liberal democracy depends on a healthy Christianity to support it—and if Christianity falters, our American project will falter too. We get into why that is in this conversation.
It’s a fascinating position for a person who happens to be an atheist, Jewish, gay man.
And Jonathan doesn’t just say we need to embrace Christianity, he goes a step further. He says that Christians need to look in the mirror and reconsider how Jesus would approach American politics today.
Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and he just wrote Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.
Bari asks him about the breakdown of religion. She asks about the religious and political forces that have shaped our present moment, like MAGA, the evangelical movement, and their marriage to President Donald Trump. And, she asks about the rise of Christian nationalism and the threat it poses.
And, most importantly, she asks how we can restore health in political life.
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You may have noticed on this show that Bari Weiss is always asking her guests, “Do you believe in God?,” “What is your favorite biblical character?,” or “Do we need a religious revival?”
And you might be wondering why she keeps knocking on this door?
It’s partly because we’re curious about people’s metaphysical beliefs. But it’s also because we think something profound has gotten lost in our society, as we’ve lost traditional religion.
You can argue that we are starting to see the beginnings of a religious revival, and even if you don’t believe in God, many think that the practice of religion—keeping Shabbat, going to church—has clear benefits like a community or a moral code. Religion, in other words, is a good program.
Our guest today, Ross Douthat, has a different perspective. Ross makes the case that we should be more religious—not in order to cure society’s many ills—but because it is the best way—the most accurate way—to understand the world around us. Belief in God, he says, is entirely rational.
Ross is a best-selling author, a columnist at The New York Times, and the host of a new podcast called Interesting Times. His newest book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The release is perfectly timed to our strange moment of “plagues, populism, psychedelic encounters, and AI voices in the air,” as Ross writes.
Ross says it’s not enough to argue that religion is simply good for society, or that we must be religious to sustain our civilization. Ross argues that it’s time for people to actually become religious. Bari presses him about this distinction.
And this week, as billions of Christians gather for Holy Week—the sacred days leading up to, and including, Easter—we are wondering if this return that Ross suggests is even possible. And if yes, will it fix our problems?
Today on Honestly, Bari sits down with Ross to understand why he thinks belief in God is the most logical way to understand our world, how he rationalizes and justifies faith, and how he thinks readers can move from doubt to belief.
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In 2025 it seems like there are two types of people—those who are insanely diligent about health, the people who learn everything there is to know about ingredients, the people who run every beauty or cleaning product through the EWG Working Group (a database where you can check for the presence of alleged toxins in household ingredients)—And then there are the rest of us. The people who go about their daily lives trying to do the best they can when it comes to health.
The problem is—as hard as most try—the world around us is laden with processed foods and chemicals. Their exact impact on the body is under intense debate. But there’s no question that America is facing a crisis of chronic illness. You don’t have to be a scientist or a doctor to see that.
There are countless experts out there—and we’re using the term “expert” loosely—with advice about what you should or shouldn’t eat. This advice, however, is often geared toward people who have more time and resources. So today we have someone who can thread the needle and give practical health advice.
Dr. Mark Hyman is one of America’s most famous doctors. He’s written 15 books, and he hosts a hit podcast called The Dr. Hyman Show. He is also an entrepreneur—and his new company, Function Health, is focused on empowering people to understand what is going on in their bodies, through lab testing.
Hyman’s fundamental insight is that rather than treating the sickness, which is the way Western medicine has typically been practiced, we should look at the root cause and focus on preventative care. To do that, he says we need to go upstream, to look at the way our food is farmed, processed, and how we approach the grocery store. He calls it functional medicine.
Today on Honestly, Bari asks him how we got so sick and how to eat better. She asks about sleep, stress management, environmental toxins, community, and loneliness. And if the solution is at the individualized level or at the policy level—and if policy change is even possible. And most importantly, she asks how we can all live better.
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.
This episode of Honestly is presented by POM Wonderful.
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If your head has been spinning since Donald Trump walked into the White House Rose Garden and declared “Liberation Day” last Wednesday, we don't blame you. And not just because it was nauseating watching the stock market or your 401(k) crash down, but because it wasn't clear what exactly we were looking at.
As our guest today, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, wrote in our pages last week:
"Depending on your worldview, you probably think Trump’s tariff blitz is one of two things. Either a committed protectionist is trying to Make America Great Again by killing “globalism,” ending “forever wars,” and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Let’s call this Project Minecraft. Alternatively, an unhinged demagogue is crashing both the world economy and the liberal international order, mainly to the advantage of authoritarian regimes…But here is what is actually happening: The American empire that came into existence after the failed autarky and isolationism of the 1930s is being broken up after 80 years. Despite Trump’s imperial impulses—wanting to annex Greenland, calling for Canada to become the 51st state—he is engaged right now in a kind of wild decolonization project."
Whether or not you agree with Niall’s conclusion, there’s no question that the real story here is not about the particular tariff rate for Cambodia or Taiwan; rather, it’s fundamentally about reordering America’s place in the world.
Over the past decade, there’s been an intense debate over what role America should play on the world stage, in geopolitics, in trade, and in technology. Trump has made a very clear set of decisions on that question. And that’s the case whether or not most Americans understand the consequences.
So what are the consequences when the U.S. acts unilaterally to upend the global trading system? What is the outcome when the U.S. weaponizes its own economic power? What happens when the world order, as we know it, is upended? Will these actions embolden our adversaries, or weaken them? Will this ultimately make us poorer, or better off? Has the American empire reached its end? And, was this inevitable or self-inflicted?
One note: While Bari and Niall were recording this conversation, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs. Notably, there’s no pause on the tariffs for China. In fact, it went up to 125 percent. But the point remains. And the face-off between America and China has only heated up. What does that mean? Is the twenty-first century destined to be ours, or China’s? All these questions and more with Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson.
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Depending on who you talk to, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are either the swampiest of swamp creatures—the epitome of all that is wrong with political journalism—or, alternatively, two of the most interesting, successful entrepreneurs in the new media landscape.
In 2006, VandeHei left The Washington Post to co-found Politico, where he was executive editor. His first hire was Mike Allen, then of Time magazine.
Politico turned into a massive hit, with Allen as its star writer. During the Obama years, Allen was so well-sourced that he became, in the words of Mark Leibovich at The New York Times, “the man the White House wakes up to.”
But then, in 2017, Mike and Jim decided to start something new—a website called Axios, which, in the beginning, was really a newsletter Mike wrote every day. They delivered news straight to your inbox and kept it short, snappy, and heavy on emojis. They called it “smart brevity.”
Their emails are filled with invocations to “go deeper” and “be smarter.” And at the end of the day, they send you an email called “Finish Line” that’s essentially life advice for young professionals on the make. A recent one advised millennials nearing middle age to begin something new, like ice skating, while another advised readers to ditch Google Maps to keep their brains sharp. It’s like MAHA for D.C.’s professional-managerial class.
They were, in a sense, pioneers of a new kind of online journalism. Long before seemingly everyone had a Substack, they were using one of the oldest internet applications—email—to get news to subscribers.
So Mike and Jim are big deals in journalism and have been for a long time.
But in case you haven’t noticed, and we don't know how you would have missed this if you listen to this show, journalism is in deep trouble. This is in large part because Americans have lost faith in journalists. According to Gallup, roughly two-thirds of Americans had a great deal of faith in the news media in 1970. Today, only 31 percent of Americans say the same—while 36 percent say they have no faith in the news media at all.
How can that trust be rebuilt? Are we destined to live in a world of different realities and alternative facts? Should the mainstream media apologize for all they have ignored or covered up or gotten wrong over the past few years?
To boil it all down: Does real, honest journalism have a future in America?
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John McWhorter is one of the greatest living experts on the English language—and many others, too. He’s an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, a columnist at The New York Times, and he’s an unsung Broadway aficionado. He once told us he could not do an interview because he was busy rehearsing a cabaret show for his bungalow colony. It all sounds like a scene out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
But in his day job, he is thinking about words, language, and—the not-so-controversial topic of pronouns. John is a true independent mind. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of liberal excess—his last book was called Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. But now? Now he’s taking a position that we suspect will provoke the other side.
In his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words, John makes the provocative case that the English language evolves in ways that don’t always make sense. But, he says, that’s okay. And he takes it a step further—saying the wide adoption of they/them in the singular, instead of he/him or she/her, works.
What are the stakes of these little words? For example, as a society, are we disrespecting women (and men) when we fail to acknowledge, in our language, who has dealt with the challenges of womanhood or manhood and who has not?
And what are the consequences of letting children adopt they/them pronouns, especially if it pushes them toward medical transition? At the same time, how do we create a society that is kind and inclusive but also reflective of reality? And can we even have both?
The broader context of this language conversation is about what can and cannot be said. We talk about this broader context—the state of the woke left, but also the rise of the woke right.
Bari puts all of these questions to the premier linguist and culture expert John McWhorter on this episode of Honestly.
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A few years ago Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor—a medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. Then Covid hit, the lockdowns began, and “Doctor Jay”—as he is known—became a pariah in the medical community.
That’s because, along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether the lockdowns were a good idea. They did this in an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. And this idea, in the madness of that period, was considered so dangerous by federal health and Big Tech that Jay was not only smeared, but censored. His words—on platforms from Reddit to Twitter to Facebook—were suppressed.
But here’s the thing: The lockdowns were pretty disastrous. We’re still dealing with their effects—the loss of childhood learning, the cancer screenings that were skipped, the inability of those with special needs to see the people who help them, the separation of families—just to name a few consequences. And it’s still unclear if those lockdowns were worth it.
Many powers tried to silence Jay, but he persisted. And today Jay is the new head of the National Institutes of Health. If you’re skeptical of karma, this turn of events may lead you to believe in it.
He’s leading this massive federal agency, sometimes called “the crown jewel of American science”—it’s the largest public funder of medical research in the world—at a moment when public health authorities need to rebuild trust.
But here’s the wrinkle. Jay has two bosses: President Trump, who initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop a Covid vaccine in his first term. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, who is also the most famous vaccine skeptic in America.
Walking the line here will inevitably be tricky for Dr. Jay. So, how can he do it? How does someone who believes that vaccinating your kids for diseases like polio and measles also confront the idea that large swaths of Americans have fear around vaccinating their kids? And how will he navigate an HHS that’s empowering discredited antivax crusaders — a move that, as The Wall Street Journal recently argued, is already vindicating Kennedy’s critics.
That’s among the many, many things Bari asks him in this conversation.
Jay has lived a remarkable life. And we get into all of it. His conversion to Christianity as a teenager and how his faith allowed him to stick to his values—and even to pray for Francis Collins, the former NIH director who called his ideas dangerous. The chutzpah it took to fight the entire medical establishment. How he ultimately triumphed against his critics. How he wants to put the National Institutes of Health on the frontline in the war against chronic illness in America.
And, most importantly, how can public health authorities make America healthy again? Today on Honestly, he tells us all about how he plans to do it all.
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For the last quarter century, an Italian macher from New Jersey has been one of the most powerful people in the United States. If you’re a certain type of nerdy, obsessive, legally inclined conservative, he’s basically Taylor Swift. But most people don’t know who he is because he doesn’t want them to know.
He has never held or sought political office. He does not hail from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. He is not a writer, pundit, or political aide. He rarely does interviews. And yet his influence is hard to overstate. People in power—particularly presidents—trust and listen to him.
I’m talking about Leonard Leo, the animating force behind the Federalist Society and the key node of a growing network of conservative groups aiming to reshape the culture and the country. Whether you’ve heard of him or not, he has no doubt directly affected your life in some way.
Leo is the person who counseled George W. Bush to appoint Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He had an arguably even greater influence on President Trump. Trump was new to Washington when he first became president. Leo, on the other hand, knew everyone in town. Leo counseled Trump and helped pick and prepare Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for confirmation.
And that’s just the Supreme Court. Leo has cultivated talent across every level of the judicial system.
Leo understands the levers of Washington. He understands how Congress works, how the press works, and most importantly, how the courts work. He is, in a sense, the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — the one that overturned Roe v. Wade. Which means he has changed American history—for better or worse, depending on your worldview.
Today on Honestly, Bari asks Leo about all of it: his relationship with Trump, their falling out (though he disputes this characterization), how he understands the divide on the right between the old guard like himself and the new characters like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Bari asks about his so-called dark money groups, the $1.6 billion-dollar gift he was given, and the criticism he gets for wielding power and influence of this magnitude.
She asks about Trump’s willingness to defy the courts, and if Leonard sees it that way. They discuss Trump’s controversial moves like sending accused gang members to El Salvador and reinstituting TikTok. She asks why MAGA has recently rejected Amy Coney Barrett, and if gay marriage is a settled matter.
And most importantly, in a moment of institutional crisis in American life, Bari asks whether the Supreme Court can remain above the fray.
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The morning of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was detained at his apartment in New York City. Khalil is a 30-year-old Algerian citizen. He was born in Syria and is of Palestinian descent.
He came to this country on a student visa in 2022, married an American citizen in 2023, became a green card holder in 2024, and finished his graduate studies at Columbia University in December 2024.
Mahmoud was also the spokesman and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that says it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and which played an active role in the rioting that took over Columbia buildings last spring.
He has not been charged with any crimes—at least not so far. But the White House wants to deport him on the grounds that he poses a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went as far as to post on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
Many of us believe that Khalil’s ideology is abhorrent. He enjoyed the United States’ educational system—attending one of our most prestigious universities—while advocating for America’s destruction and for a group that seeks the genocide of the Jewish people.
At the same time, the case for his deportation is not clear-cut. Here’s the divide:
Some say this is an immigration case. As Free Press contributing editor Abigail Shrier has put it: “This is an immigration, not a free speech case. It’s about whether the U.S. can set reasonable conditions on aliens for entry and residence.” But others say this is, in fact, a free speech case that cuts to the heart of our most cherished values.
To figure all this out, we’re hosting three of the smartest legal minds we know. Eugene Volokh is an expert on the Bill of Rights who is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He’s also a contributor to Reason magazine, where he runs his own blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder is a practicing lawyer and the director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center. Just yesterday, he filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the Southern District of New York against Khalil and several others for material support for terror. Jed Rubenfeld is a Free Press columnist and a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School.
This case is one we have written about extensively in The Free Press—and one that we are actively debating in our newsroom. So we were thrilled to be able to bring together some of the smartest people on this complicated issue.
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The other week Bari traveled to Austin, Texas, to host a debate on a simple little topic: religion and whether we need more of it.
There’s a line from Proverbs that has guided believers for at least the past 2,000 or so years. It goes like this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But for most of our lives, this message has been turned on its head.
We can’t entirely blame the so-called New Atheists, who dominated the American intellectual scene in the first part of this century, for the death of God—for that, we’d need to go back to Nietzsche or Darwin or the Enlightenment. But the point is that for people of Bari’s generation and cohort, to be an educated, sophisticated, respectable person was to be an atheist. Or at the very least, an agnostic.
The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian fell from 90 percent in 1972 to 64 percent in 2022, while the religiously unaffiliated (the so-called “nones”) rose from 5 percent to 30 percent in the same period, according to Pew Research.The shift toward secularism has been even more pronounced across the Atlantic. Among Europeans ages 16 to 29, 70 percent say they never attend religious services.
But after years of decline, this trend may be starting to reverse. A massive new Pew survey found that the share of Americans identifying as Christian has, after many years of decline, finally started to rise again. And the share of Americans identifying with other religions is actually increasing.
So are we better off with or without God?
The other night in Austin Bari sat down with Ross Douthat, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Shermer, and Adam Carolla. They came together to debate the following resolution: Does the West need a religious revival?
Ross and Ayaan argued yes. Ross is a New York Times opinion columnist. His most recent book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ayaan is an activist and best-selling author of many books including Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.
On the other side, Michael Shermer and Adam Carolla argued no, we do not need a religious revival. Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. He, too, is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers on science, psychology, and faith. Adam Carolla is a comedian, actor, radio personality, TV host, and best-selling author. He currently hosts The Adam Carolla Show.
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic.
Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power.
To see their way out of the political wilderness, the Democrats need a vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home, or voted red for the first time, this past November.
While other liberals and progressives are doubling down on zombie ideas, afraid to come face to face with a country that has moved decisively to the right, Ezra and Derek are willing to face reality. They see that blue states are functioning—as Bari likes to say—similarly to the DMV. And as a result, people are fleeing to places like Texas and Florida.
If you’ve lived in a city like L.A. or San Francisco in the past decade, it’s pretty difficult to sell the idea that the government is working effectively. It’s why so many people are cheering for DOGE.
But while DOGE is taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy, Ezra and Derek are reformers who believe it can be fixed. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and liberal thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.
They just wrote a new book about all of this called Abundance. Their thesis is simple: To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.
While conservatives and libertarians might say: Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek think the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it.
So how do we build a government that’s less like the DMV and more like the Apple Store? How will this government actually deliver for Americans and solve our most pressing problems—in housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare? And, how do we reverse our government’s long march into total incompetence?
Ezra and Derek have a lot of ideas on how we can get there. Today on Honestly, we hear them. This conversation challenged us, and we hope it challenges and surprises you too.
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Alex Karp is many things: a cross-country skier, a long-range shooter, a tai chi expert who might be the only man who knows how to wield a sword but doesn’t know how to drive. He’s also a collector of extremely prestigious degrees. His PhD thesis was called “Aggression in the Life-World: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression by Describing the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.”
Since 2003, he has also been the CEO of Palantir, a software and data analytics company that does defense and intelligence work. Simply put, it’s a company that stops terror attacks—while also helping make sports cars go faster and pharmaceutical companies build better drugs.
Bari sat down with Alex Karp at UATX to discuss his new book, The Technological Republic, which offers a vision of how Silicon Valley lost its way and how the future of America and the West hinges on it finding its way back—fast. It just debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list.
They also discuss Barnard students occupying a campus building, the religious nature of woke culture, and DOGE.
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Each one of us has a different conception story. For some parents, it’s a romantic night out, maybe over a candlelit dinner. For others, like Bari and Nellie, it involves a trip to a fertility clinic in a mall that doesn’t even validate parking.
And of course, for some it’s a long, challenging, emotional process involving needles, hormones, and many false starts. We know a lot of our listeners can relate to that.
Now, the topic of infertility often seems like the purview of a doctor’s office or a self-help book, or maybe a women’s health column. Where you might not expect to hear about it in painstaking detail is in Andrew Schulz’s new Netflix special. Schulz’s special is vulnerable, obviously funny, and a look into the taboo topic of male infertility. It’s called Life, and if you haven’t already seen it, blow off your plans tonight and watch Life instead.
Now, the last time we had Schulz on this show was three years ago. It was in the thick of the woke culture storm, and Schulz was about to release a comedy special on Amazon. But when the streamer asked him to do what a lot of people at the time were being asked to do in comedy—censor his jokes—Schulz said no. He bet on himself and released the special independently. As he tells Bari today, he ended up making five times what he would have made with Amazon.
We’ve been talking a lot on this show about the vibe shift that’s come for politics and tech. And it’s obviously come for comedy. But actually, we think you could make the argument that comedy created the vibe shift that we’re seeing in so many other parts of the culture. And perhaps that’s because comedians with podcasts have become like the Walter Cronkites of American culture. Theo Von is almost Barbara Walters at this point. And Andrew Schulz has found himself right in the thick of it.
Last October on his podcast, Schulz sat down with then-candidate Donald Trump as he was running for president, for a candid 90-minute conversation. You can imagine the type of response he got for that.
Today on Honestly, Bari asks Schulz about that interview with Trump and whether there are certain people who are beyond the pale. They talk about his difficulty conceiving, what it meant for his masculinity, and she asks about the decision to put his—and his wife’s—vulnerability on camera. And finally, she asks how to resist audience capture.
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You may have never heard of Sarah Wynn-Williams, but that’s about to change.
She’s written a memoir about her nearly seven years at Facebook, the company that has since rebranded as Meta. In doing so, she’s become the company’s highest-ranking whistleblower.
Until around 72 hours ago, the book’s existence itself was a secret. Wynn-Williams, a onetime New Zealand diplomat, was effectively the company’s top envoy to governments around the world. She traveled extensively with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg—the company’s two top leaders during her time—and her experiences with them often read like pure comedy, a mix of Succession and The Office.
The book, however, is a lot more than that. It’s a shocking insider’s account of working at one of the world’s most powerful companies at the highest level, and the gap between the idealistic way it sold itself to its employees and the world.
It’s called Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. And it coincides with the news that Wynn-Williams has filed an SEC complaint against the company, alleging that Zuckerberg agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the U.S. in the hopes that it would help convince Beijing to allow Facebook into China.
On today’s Honestly, Bari and Wynn-Williams discuss her bizarre experiences, her thoughts on the future of Facebook, the pushback she’s already received, and why she wrote this book—despite the risk of taking on a corporate behemoth like Meta.
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Earlier this week on Honestly, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, and Christopher Caldwell shared their views on President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s showdown with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and on the Russia-Ukraine war more generally.
Simply put, Batya and Chris made the case that Russia is not an American adversary in the way China is and that Trump’s seeming sympathy toward Russian president Vladimir Putin is actually a strategic play to pull Russia away from China and into our orbit.
The conversation is provocative. It provoked many of us here at The Free Press. Not all of our listeners agreed with what they heard either. For some, it was frustrating or even angering to hear this perspective. Yes, contrary to popular belief, we do read the comments.
And there’s been a tremendous amount of debate inside our newsroom about America’s new posture regarding Russia and Ukraine, just as there is on all of the most important topics of the day.
We think that’s our strength. We believe in listening to arguments, in good faith, from people we respect. And if our panel show earlier in the week was dominated by a perspective sympathetic to Trump, today we want to offer a very different perspective from Eli Lake, Free Press reporter and the host of our new podcast, Breaking History.
In this episode, Eli explores how a different Republican president—Ronald Reagan—spoke out against Russian aggression. And how his words inspired dissidents from across the Soviet bloc, like the Czech playwright Václav Havel, to lead their own countries to freedom.
This is a show that looks to the past to illuminate the present, and we think this episode is especially important right now. So today, Eli Lake on Breaking History.
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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It’s been four days since the diplomatic earthquake went down in the Oval Office between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian president Zelensky. The world is still feeling the aftershocks.
In Europe, leaders have been jolted into action. Ukraine’s European allies, including British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, met in London on Sunday to forge their own peace plan and agree on additional support for Kyiv.
In Moscow, officials are celebrating Trump’s approach to the conflict—and his foreign policy more generally. “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision,” said a Kremlin spokesman. Russian state TV described a new world order with Trump in the White House.
In Washington, administration officials have made it clear that it is up to Zelensky to apologize and patch things up if there is any chance of a U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal. “The president believes Zelensky has to come back to the table and he has to be the one to come and make it right,” one official told NBC News.
The Zelensky-Trump bust-up—and the war in Ukraine in general—is one of those important subjects where people we respect (including inside The Free Press newsroom) passionately disagree. There are plenty of other outlets that will give you only one strongly expressed view. But it is our conviction that the only way we can get to the truth is by seriously considering multiple perspectives.
The differences of opinion start with the question of what, exactly, we all watched on Friday.
Were Trump and Vance bullying a besieged ally in public? Or were we watching the White House finally stand up for American taxpayers?
Then there are the bigger questions: Is Trump’s Ukraine policy a long-overdue acknowledgment of the limits of American power? Or an unforced error that endangers not just America’s allies but America itself? And what are the chances of peace with honor for Ukraine?
Today we’ve brought together a group of people who answer those questions quite differently: Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, Democratic fundraiser and strategist Brianna Wu, and special guest Christopher Caldwell, author of multiple books, including The Age of Entitlement.
Both Batya and Christopher have pieces up in The Free Press right now:
“Zelensky’s Trumpian Trick” by Christopher Caldwell, and “What Average Americans Think of Trump’s Showdown with Zelensky” by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Other must-reads in The Free Press:
"Trump’s Foreign Policy Revolution" by Matthew Continetti
"J.D. Vance’s Fighting Words—Against Me and Ukraine" by Niall Ferguson
"A Fiasco in the Oval Office" by Eli Lake
"Ten Reasons for the Zelensky-Trump Blowup" by Victor Davis Hanson
"What Zelensky Can Learn from Netanyahu" by Michael Oren
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Have you ever gone on the internet and stumbled onto this combo of words, or perhaps non-words?: “Dogecoin.” “Shiba Inu.” “Hawkcoin.” “Bored Ape NFT.”
If that sounded like gibberish, don’t worry—we’ll explain. And also, time to start learning, because these terms come out of a new financial ecosystem—the world of crypto, a market that started 15 years ago and is now worth about $3.3 trillion.
This new world has caught the attention of none other than President Donald Trump. Since coming to office, Trump has appointed a crypto czar and floated the idea of a national crypto stockpile. And shortly Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin—as did Melania. Trump’s coin has reportedly generated $100 million in trading fees so far.
And to top it all off, Trump is taking calls from the biggest names in the business. One of whom is our guest today—Brian Armstrong. Brian is a 42-year-old San Jose native who changed the nature of commerce not only in America but all over the world. He co-founded a cryptocurrency platform called Coinbase in 2012. Now, it’s the largest crypto exchange in the US.
To some, he’s doing something as revolutionary as building rocket ships to Mars. To others, he’s growing an industry riddled with scammers, grifters, and criminals.
Armstrong says those stories are the sideshow and that Bitcoin—or perhaps another cryptocurrency—will prove itself to be as essential as the dollar.
Today on Honestly, Bari asks Brian why he thinks crypto is the way of the future, how he navigates eager regulators, why he’s been so politically active, how MAGA’s "America First" ethos gets along with the borderless, decentralized crypto zeitgeist, and if crypto is really as dangerous as some make it out to be.
We also talk about the DOGE, his recent meeting with Trump, and how he once stuck his neck out against the far-left mob.
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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Over the past year, right-wing parties across the West have been sweeping elections. Donald Trump in the United States, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and now Germany.
On Sunday, 83 percent of Germans went to the polls—the highest turnout since the Cold War.
The Christian Democrats, the country’s center-right party led by Friedrich Merz, won. But that’s not the big story. The big story is that the right-wing populist party, the AfD, came in second place with nearly 21 percent, the strongest showing since WWII.
There is a single reason why. It’s not the economy. It’s not the war with Russia. It’s not climate change. It’s immigration. And I’m not talking about jobs or wage deflation. I’m talking about the fact that over the past decade, Germany has seen a net migration of 5 million people, with more than 1 million of the new arrivals coming from Syria and Afghanistan.
And the rifts have been palpable. And here, I’m choosing two examples from just last week: An Afghan migrant suspect rammed a car through a crowd of people. Thirty-nine people, including several children, were injured. Just the day before the election, a Syrian migrant became the lead suspect for a stabbing outside of the Holocaust memorial. This all fundamentally tests the limits of assimilation and multiculturalism.
The dynamic here is the same that has characterized many Western nations. The center-left and the left have ignored the problem. And the right has named it—and filled the vacuum. As Michael Sandel has put it: “Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.” If there’s a line that captures the politics of our era, it is that.
Last week, the very question of whether migrants can adopt pluralism and Western ideals was also put to Australians, after two Sydney nurses went viral when caught on camera saying that they would kill Israeli patients that came into their hospital. One nurse was an Afghan refugee.
Here to unpack it all is Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, Democratic fundraising powerhouse Brianna Wu, and the founder of Quillette, Claire Lehmann.
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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I’m sure you remember the images of Kfir and Ariel Bibas.
They were just nine months and four years old when they were kidnapped by Hamas along with their mother, Shiri, on October 7, 2023. It was impossible to look at the image of her shielding them, her eyes full of terror, the children clinging to her, and not think of the Holocaust.
For more than 500 days, people around the world prayed for the safe return of these babies. Our hopes were raised on February 1, when the fourth member of the family—Yarden Bibas—was liberated after 484 days in Hamas captivity.
But as this episode goes live, Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas won’t be returning home alive. Hamas instead will hand over their remains.
How can Israel live alongside an enemy that kidnaps and murders babies? And what does it mean for us to live in a world, where people in the West tore down posters of the Bibas children.
My friend, Commentary magazine senior editor Seth Mandel, explains why in The Free Press:
“In a better world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. . . . The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West. . . . It is impossible for the rest of us to pretend that we didn’t see a chunk of society, whether in person or online, rush to cross that line and cheer on the people who kidnapped two babies . . . .Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence. Kfir is the dividing line. In a better world, there’d be no one standing on the wrong side of it.”
Before the devastating news of the Bibas children broke, Bari sat down with Matti Friedman, Free Press correspondent in Jerusalem. They happened to talk on the very day that Kfir and Ariel’s father, Yarden, was released after being kept in unimaginable conditions. Now Yarden confronts the nightmare that his entire family was murdered.
Bari and Matti talk about the toll of this war, why returning the hostages is so fundamentally important to the future of Israel, about the rise of anti-Jewish hate, and about how to be American, Jewish, and Zionist all at the same time, and how Jews are waking up to a new reality in 2025.
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 lot of people are wondering if things in LA would look different if Rick Caruso had won the mayoral race against Karen Bass in 2022. If he had been mayor when devastating fires began in the city last month, would he have prevented them from consuming about 40,000 acres, which is more than twice the area of Manhattan?
At the time he ran, many quietly supported the billionaire real estate mogul—scared to come out publicly against the candidate backed by Barack Obama and celebrities like Shonda Rhimes and Arianna Grande. But now many in LA are texting me, saying they wish he had won. Indeed, some of these lifelong Democrats are now saying that they are Republicans, or the very least they’re whatever Karen Bass isn't.
Caruso may have lost then, but he’s acting now like a de facto public official, launching and funding a nonprofit he calls Steadfast LA. He’s leveraged his connections to get companies from Netflix to Amazon to J.P. Morgan to help restore critical infrastructure in the city, he’s worked on how to quickly rebuild homes with the help of AI, and he’s figuring out ways to use America’s most advanced technology to prevent future fires.
Now, everyone in California is watching to see what Caruso does next. Will he run for mayor again? Or perhaps even governor of California? And most pressingly, can Caruso figure out a way to save Los Angeles?
We also talk about ethical issues around inmates and private-sector firefighters, and about hot-button topics in California—like Trump's plans for immigration, or how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and trans issues are affecting public schools.
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Running The Free Press is Bari’s hobby, but her true passion is being a yenta. And one thing Bari has learned from talking to young singles is that there is a total breakdown of sexual relations these days between men and women.
Some blame social media, dating apps, or the alleged feminization of men. But Louise Perry blames the sexual revolution. In 2022, Louise wrote this for The Free Press: “The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It’s a story about the triumph of the playboy.” This argument is the crux of her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which has just been adapted for young adults—called A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century: The Young Adult Adaptation of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’.
This Valentine’s Day, Louise is here to explain how we went wrong as a society on dating, sex, porn, and marriage; how it is impacting women and men differently; how and if we can get back on track; how to date effectively in 2025; and how a revival of Christian sex ethics might be the answer.
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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It’s Trump’s third week in office and there is no shortage of news to report. Last week, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard advanced in their congressional confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services secretary, FBI director, and Director of National Intelligence, and criticisms of Gabbard resurfaced over her meeting with former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and over her defense of Edward Snowden—who she refused to call a traitor.
Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States, making him the first foreign leader invited to the new Trump White House. At a press conference with President Trump, he looked like the dog that caught the car when Trump announced that the U.S. would take control of Gaza, and that the 1.7 million people living there would be resettled elsewhere.
Trump also issued an executive order imposing a 90-day pause on foreign aid programs, which totaled around $70 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Kanye has gone nuts again; Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble; and the vibe shift came for the Super Bowl.
To unpack it all today is Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon and political fundraising powerhouse Brianna Wu.
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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Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then out of nowhere, an unknown Chinese start-up turned the American stock market—and that assumption—on its head. DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available open AI products. And they did it despite America’s prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China.
America was caught flat-footed, asking how did this happen? And could we actually lose this tech war?
Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the term hard drive, don’t worry. Today on Honestly, Bari has two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, who are going to break it all down for you. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog, Marginal Revolution. He is joined today by Geoffrey Cane, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.
Today, how this happened and what it means. And can America win the AI war with China?
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Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots?
Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pages that you cannot put down.
Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature.
While most of Sebag’s books are biographies of people, Jerusalem is a biography of a city—a city, as he writes, that is “the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice in heaven and on earth.” The book takes you through Jerusalem’s 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, and it has just been reissued in paperback.
With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel and with Trump a few weeks into his second presidency, we could not think of a better person to talk to than Simon about this moment and how to understand it.
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Fourteen years ago, Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It was received less like a book and more like a nuclear bomb. Here are some headlines from the time: “Why I Will Never Be a Tiger Mom.” “Why Amy Chua Is Wrong About Parenting.” “Amy Chua Is a Circus Trainer, Not a Tiger Mother.” “The Human Race Needs Elephant Mothers, Not Tiger Mothers.” “Amy Chua's Recipe for Disaster and the Externalized Cost of Book Sales.”
Then, just as the publicity around Tiger Mother died down, Amy came out with The Triple Package, about why some ethnic groups succeed. People called her racist. Then she came out in support of Brett Kavanaugh's court nomination in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (before he was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford). Afterward, people accused her of misogyny and grooming. And she was almost forced out of Yale for it.
Then, in 2021, she was accused of hosting boozy dinner parties during COVID lockdowns and “dinner party-gate” was born. Yale punished her by barring her from teaching her “small group” first-year student contingency.
Fast-forward to 2025. And the tables have turned.
Being a strict “tiger mom”? In. Free speech? In. Wokeness and hypersensitivity? Out.
Covid lockdowns? Definitely out. Vicious character assassinations at Senate confirmations? Out. As Free Press reporter Peter Savodnik just wrote: “The ideas that Chua was pilloried for are suddenly back in fashion.”
Just a few weeks ago, she attended the inauguration of the incoming president and vice president—one of whom happens to be her former student and mentee.
It’s easy to be a weather vane—to go where the wind blows. It's hard to be Amy Chua—to stand up for your beliefs even when they are not popular, even when it means personal consequences. On today’s episode, live in D.C. during inauguration weekend, Chua explains how and why she won—and what it feels like to be vindicated.
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It’s President Donald Trump’s second week in office, and he has wasted no time being the wrecking ball he promised his voters he would be.
On Tuesday, he issued a memo freezing trillions of dollars in federal funding, in his attempt to purge the government of “woke ideology,” which was followed by chaos and confusion—and ultimately blocked by a federal judge. Earlier in the week, Trump convinced Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro to accept deported Colombian migrants—who Petro had turned away from his borders only a day earlier—after Trump threatened a 25-percent tariff on Colombian imports to the U.S.
Back in Congress, the Senate narrowly confirmed Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense in a dramatic tie-breaking vote cast by a hurried J.D. Vance who showed up just in the nick of time. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is currently having his highly anticipated confirmation hearing to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Just as that began, Caroline Kennedy—the only surviving child of John F. Kennedy—came out Tuesday with a bombshell public denunciation of her cousin, calling him unqualified, “a predator,” and a hypocrite. She also alleged that he used to “put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his hawks.” Can’t say we had that on our 2025 bingo card…
Finally, the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek sent tech stocks plummeting on Monday (to the tune of more than $1 trillion) after it rolled out a new app on the U.S. market that is a fraction of the cost of American AI competitors. All of which brought up questions—and panic—about our brewing AI war with China.
To talk about it all, Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik is joined today by Brianna Wu and FP investigative reporter Madeleine Rowley, who spoke to Hegseth this week about his plans to end diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military.
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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There has been a cultural sea change over the last year when it comes to health in America. It is shepherded by an unexpected coalition of nutritionists, longevity experts, wellness influencers, holistic and functional medicine doctors, moms wearing babies and natural deodorant, mushroom shamans, and some vaccine skeptics. They’ve gathered under the banner of Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA, and they’re here to tell us that plastic cutting boards, Diet Coke, and pasteurized milk—all things that once seemed perfectly normal in American life—are actually killing us.
A decade ago, if you read that list of personas you would think MAHA is some woo-woo, hippie progressive movement. But here we are in 2025, and this is the same group that helped usher Donald Trump to power.
What does MAHA stand for? What does it look like when it marries itself to power? And what will MAHA actually be able to accomplish over the next four years, under their fearless leader—and risky Health and Human Services nominee—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
Live in D.C. during inauguration weekend, Calley Means, Jillian Michaels and Vani Hari explain. Calley is the founder of Truemed and co-author of Good Energy. Jillian is America’s original fitness expert and the author of nine books. Vani is the founder of Truvani, and you probably know her from her blog Food Babe. She also got Subway to remove “the yoga mat chemical” from its breads. And, the fact that there was a yoga mat chemical in its bread is the whole purpose of this conversation.
Today, the three MAHA whisperers explain why this movement just might be the most powerful political force in American life.
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President Donald Trump was inaugurated on Monday, and he came out swinging. On his first day, he signed 26 executive orders and rolled back about 80 of former president Joe Biden’s executive actions. (For comparison, Biden signed nine executive orders on day one; in 2017, Trump signed one; in 2013, Obama signed zero, and in 2009, just two.)
Trump was making good on the promises he campaigned on. On immigration, he’s trying to end birthright citizenship. On diversity, equity, and inclusion, he’s saying, “You’re fired” to federal DEI employees. On trans issues, he signed an order that declares only two genders. And on “America First,” he’s saying goodbye to the “Gulf of Mexico” and hello to the “Gulf of America.”
Trump also announced Stargate, gave TikTok a second life, pardoned about 1,500 January 6 rioters, and pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.
Suffice it to say, there is much to discuss. Today, Bari Weiss is back with Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, and Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik to unpack Trump’s first week in office and what they think about…Elon’s arm.
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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Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball, a middle finger, the people’s punch to the Beltway’s mouth. And while this populist moment feels “unprecedented,” it’s not. The rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA.
We have seen populist leaders like Donald Trump before. He stands on the shoulders of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, Alabama governor George Wallace, and Louisiana legend Huey Long. There have been populist senators, governors, newspaper editors, and radio broadcasters.
But only rarely has a populist climbed as high as President Trump. In fact, it has happened only once before.
The last populist to win the presidency was born before the American Revolution. He rose from nothing to become a great general. His adoring troops called him Old Hickory, and his enemies derided him as a bigamist and a tyrant in waiting. His name was Andrew Jackson, and he’s the guy who’s still on the 20 dollar bill.
On today’s debut episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake explains how Andrew Jackson’s presidency is the best guide to what Trump’s second term could look like.
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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Credits: Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency; PBS
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Being the Republican House leader is a little like marrying Henry VIII. At some point, you’re getting your head cut off.
But for now, Mike Johnson remains not just physically intact—but in a position of incredible power.
Two weeks ago, Johnson was reelected Speaker of the House on the first ballot. Despite having only the narrowest of House majorities—the Republicans control the House by four votes, 219 vs. 215 Democrats—Mike Johnson was able to unite the Republican Party’s warring factions—moderates, the Freedom Caucus, the Raw Milk caucus, libertarians, hawks, doves, and whatever Lauren Boebert is—behind him.
It was tough to pull off, as it would’ve taken only a couple of No votes to send him off to that Republican Valhalla where John Boehner chain-smokes and chugs merlot, Paul Ryan does push-ups, and Kevin McCarthy throws darts at a photo of Matt Gaetz.
Now, Donald Trump will become president of the United States and Mike Johnson will have the task of shepherding his agenda through Congress. And because the Republicans control the House by only four seats, the Speaker might have to get very close to some moderate Democrats—particularly those with constituents itching for a tax cut.
Today on Honestly, Speaker Johnson breaks down this challenge. He talks about how the party moves forward with two different visions for America; why he thinks Biden was “the worst president ever”; he recalls an eerie experience with Biden in the Oval Office; and he even gives us a taste of his uncanny Trump impression.
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Very few people have worked closely with President-elect Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him.
But former national security adviser to Trump, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster is an exception.
In his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump’s first administration: the good, the bad, and the unexpected.
Last week, McMaster sat down with Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for an in-person Free Press Book Club event to discuss it all. They talk about his moments of tension with Trump, his understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, and how Trump’s rhetoric toward adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press. And also, as McMaster puts it, Trump can be “so disruptive, he often interrupts his own agenda.”
They also get into the president-elect’s current cabinet picks—ones who McMaster sees as good, like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, but how good picks do not ensure a harmonious administration. They discuss Trump’s options for handling Russia, Iran, and Hamas in his second term, and why McMaster is surprisingly and cautiously optimistic about Trump 2.0.
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.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institute in Washington, D.C. FDD’s experts conduct in-depth research, produce accurate and timely analyses, identify illicit activities, and provide policy options—all with the aim of strengthening U.S. national security and reducing or eliminating threats posed by enemies of the United States and other free nations. Learn more at FDD.org.
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Trump’s inauguration is right around the corner, and there is so much to cover about the new White House. In the coming weeks, we’ll have key figures in the Trump administration on Honestly to talk about what they are planning.
But, we all know that if Trump 2.0 is anything like Trump 1.0, there are going to be a lot of twists and turns here. And we want to analyze and break down each development that unfolds in Trump’s new administration.
Starting today and for the next few months, we’re going to bring you weekly episodes with two of my favorite guests: Batya Ungar-Sargon and Brianna Wu.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is a Free Press contributor and the opinion editor at Newsweek. Brianna Wu is a Democratic fundraiser and activist, and in her past life, a video game developer. If you’ve heard them together on Honestly before, you know that these two come from different sides of the political spectrum, but we really value hearing both of their perspectives, even—or especially—when they disagree. We think you will too.
Today, we’re going to cover the L.A. fires and their political implications, the civil war inside the MAGA movement between the nationalist populists and the free marketers over H-1B visas, and Mark Zuckerberg’s red pill moment and changes at Meta—and the pair give us their predictions for confirmation hearings beginning this week.
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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It’s the biggest crime—and cover-up—in British history. And most people, at least until recently, haven’t even heard of it.
Thousands of young girls, mostly children, were systematically groomed and raped by immigrant gangs across the UK over a period of decades. Police turned the girls away. Detectives were discouraged from investigating. Politicians and prosecutors did their best to sweep it under the rug. Journalists skipped the biggest story of their lives. A culture of silence enveloped the United Kingdom. Why?
Today, we talk to two women who spoke out years ago about what was happening while nearly everyone looked the other way: the British feminist and author Julie Bindel, and the author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both took tremendous risks in highlighting the story while the legacy press largely looked away. Bindel is the author, most recently, of Feminism for Women and writes a popular Substack column. Hirsi Ali, a Free Press contributor, is the author of numerous books on radical islam, including Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, which helped bring attention to the grooming gangs scandal in 2021.
Julie and Ayaan explain today what happened, how these rapes and murders were covered up in the name of preserving “social harmony,” how it’s still happening, why Elon Musk is suddenly tweeting furiously about it and how Britain’s ruling class is being forced to reckon with a scandal it had, until recently, successfully ignored.
It’s a story about “tolerance” run amok, and how a civilized country can convince itself to accept the most uncivilized crimes imaginable.
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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If you haven’t heard of Bryan Johnson or watched the new Netflix documentary about him, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, Bryan is a person who has given his life—and his body—over to the science of longevity. That means that he has essentially turned himself into a human lab rat, undergoing hundreds of tests and studies on every human marker imaginable in order to discover the best ways to stop the process of human aging.
What he’s found is unconventional, to say the least: He eats dinner at 11 a.m., he has swapped blood with his 17-year-old son, and he measures his nighttime erection lengths—just to name a few of the hundreds of things that you probably have never heard of a person doing in the name of health and longevity.
But it’s not just that Bryan wants to reverse aging and live forever. He also thinks we’re at the bleeding edge of a new kind of reality. He believes he’s akin to Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton, and that he’s on the frontier of something big—something that will change everything about humanity as we know it.
In that way, this conversation is not just about wacky exercise routines and unusual supplements. It’s a philosophical discussion about the meaning and purpose of life, and what we’re all doing here on this planet.
Today on Honestly, Bryan Johnson tells us about why and how he’s not going to die.
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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There is something so delicious about a single, tight joke in one headline that captures the political moment, or even just the banality of our lives. Here are some examples: “Drugs Win Drug Wars”; “Nation Throws off Tyrannical Yoke of Moderate Respect for Women”; “I Have Decision Fatigue, Says Woman Whose Only Decision in the Last 7 Years Was Not Going to Law School.” These headlines are from satirical news sites like The Onion and Reductress. Both are on the political left. For most of Bari’s life, the big political comedy came from the left. Until The Babylon Bee, which launched in 2016.
The Bee is a Christian conservative satirical news site, which may sound like an oxymoron. It did to us. Until we read it and discovered, it’s funny. Often really funny. While everyone else was busy criticizing and mocking the right, the Bee found success by filling a void. The Bee’s distinctive tagline is “Fake News You Can Trust.”
Here are a few recent headlines: “Biden Cancels Aid to Syria After Finding Out Needy Americans Live There”; “Canadian Dentist Now Offering Euthanasia as Alternative to Cavity Filling.” The crazy thing about the Bee is that the headlines are often not just satire, but prophetic. Here’s an example, in 2020, the Bee posted: “Democrats Call for Flags to Be Flown at Half-Mast to Grieve Death of Soleimani.” And now Ivy League students are flying Hezbollah flags and mourning the death of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In 2021, The Bee published the headline "Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double Mask." One day later, CNBC featured a graphic highlighting the higher efficacy of triple-masking.
While the Bee has garnered fame or infamy depending on who you ask, they do try to be equal opportunity critics, poking fun at the right too. Here’s a 2016 headline about Donald Trump: “Psychopathic Megalomaniac Somehow Garnering Evangelical Vote.” And “Shocker: European Supermodel Who Married Billionaire Reality Star Might Not Actually Be Conservative.”
Still, in the past few years, The Babylon Bee has been the target of online censorship, deplatforming, and media scrutiny. Twitter suspended the Bee’s account in 2022, after it made a joke misgendering Admiral Rachel Levine, President Biden’s head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The Bee was later reinstated when Elon Musk took over Twitter, who said, “There will be no censorship of humor.” These days, The Babylon Bee still gets fact-checked by Snopes and USA Today, which perfectly encapsulates our internet age: a parody page getting its jokes fact-checked because people really can’t distinguish between truth and humor.
Today on Honestly is the CEO of The Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon, to talk about it all: the Bee’s Twitter suspension, how he views content moderation and censorship in 2025, the concept of punching down in comedy, and the growth of antisemitism on the far right. Seth also shares how he’ll keep being funny during the Trump presidency and why he believes “if it’s a joke we’re not supposed to make, it is probably the one we should be telling.”
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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This past year was not easy. But 2024 certainly was eventful. Joe Biden dropped out of the race at the eleventh hour, and Kamala Harris’s swift anointment brought us the joy of Brat summer. There was not one, but two assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the continued wars in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon; the sudden and surprising fall of the Assad regime in Syria; the murder of a CEO (and Luigi Mania); mystery drones over New Jersey; and finally, Trump's decisive reelection to the White House.
On a cheerier note, 2024 was also the year of breakdancing at the Paris Olympics; Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard; SpaceX’s first commercial spacewalk; and Israel’s epic spy-thriller, pager-explosion attack on Hezbollah—not to mention they took out Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar as well.
So, what will 2025 bring?
We are starting the year, as we did last December, with a special 2025 predictions episode of Honestly. We called up some friends of the pod—people we trust in their fields—to get a better sense of what’s in store for the year ahead.
Political analyst and former spokesperson at the Department of Justice Sarah Isgur tells us what we can expect in the Trump 2.0 White House. Linguist John McWhorter looks at new words and how language will evolve in the coming months. Our very own Suzy Weiss talks us through the cultural calendar. Stylist Leandra Medine clues us in on fashion trends in 2025, and last but not least: Historian Niall Ferguson tells us, as he did last year as well, whether or not we’re right to have nightmares about World War III—but for real this time.
Some guests cheered us up, whereas others freaked us out. All of them were a pleasure to talk to. We hope you enjoy these conversations with some of our favorite people.
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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This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.
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Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and the resurrection, or whether you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity are among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen.
Within four centuries of Jesus’s death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—half of the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world.
How and why did Christianity take off, and how did it change the world in such radical ways?
Here to have that conversation is historian Tom Holland. Tom is one of the most gifted storytellers in the world, and his podcast, The Rest is History, is one of the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history's most interesting characters and sagas. I can't recommend it more highly.
Holland's book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind chronicles thousands of years of Christian history, and it argues that Christianity is the reason we have America. That it's the inspiration to both the French and the American Revolutions. That it's the backbone of wokeness as an ideology, but also the liberal forces fighting it.
Today, Tom explains how and why the story of Christianity won, how it shaped Western culture and values, and if he thinks our vacation from religion might be coming to an end.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
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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This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.
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Merry Christmas, Honestly listeners! We hope you’ve been enjoying the parties, the spirit of charity, the lights, the tree at Rockefeller Center, the schmaltzy movies, and of course, the infectious Christmas music everywhere you turn.
But did you know that the Americans who wrote nearly all of the Christmas classics were . . . Jewish?
Indeed, many of the writers of your favorite Christmas jingles were the children of parents who had fled Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920. Sammy Cahn, the son of Galician Jewish immigrants, wrote the words to “Let it Snow!” and was known as Frank Sinatra’s personal lyricist. There is also Mel Torme, the singer-songwriter responsible for composing the timeless “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His father fled Belarus for America in the early 20th century. Frank Loesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, wrote the slightly naughty “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He was born into a middle-class Jewish family, his father having left Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s military. Johnny Marks, the man who gave us “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”—yes, he was also one of the chosens.
Then there’s the greatest American composer of them all, Irving Berlin. His “White Christmas” is one of the biggest-selling singles in the history of American music. Berlin’s earliest memory was of watching his family’s home burn to the ground in a pogrom as his family fled Siberia for Belarus before emigrating to NYC in 1893.
Today, Free Press columnist Eli Lake explores why and how it was that American Jews helped create the sound of American Christmas. We hope you enjoy this delightful and surprising jaunt through musical history. Happy holidays!
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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Just a few years ago, as AI technology was beginning to spill out of start-ups in Silicon Valley and hitting our smartphones, the political and cultural conversation about this nascent science was not yet clear. I remember asking former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Honestly in January 2022 if AI was just like the sexy robot in Ex Machina. I literally said to him, “What is AI? How do you define it? I do not understand.”
Today, not only has it become clear what AI is and how to use it—ChatGPT averages more than 120 million active daily users and processes over a billion queries per day—but it’s also becoming clear with the political and cultural ramifications—and the arguments and debates—around AI are going to be over the next few years.
Among those big questions are who gets to lead us into this new age of AI technology, what company is going to get there first and achieve market dominance, how those companies are structured so that bad actors with nefarious incentives can’t manipulate this technology for evil purposes, and what role the government should play in regulating all of this.
At the center of these important questions are two men: Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And if you haven’t been following, they aren’t exactly in alignment.
They started off as friends and business partners. In fact, Sam and Elon co-founded OpenAI in 2015. But over the years, Elon Musk grew increasingly frustrated with OpenAI until he finally resigned from the board in 2018. That feud escalated this past year when Elon sued Sam and OpenAI on multiple occasions to try to prevent the company from launching a for-profit arm of the business, a structure that Elon claims is never supposed to happen in OpenAI—and he also argues that changing its structure in this way might even be illegal.
On the one hand, this is a very complex disagreement. To understand every single detail of it, you probably need a law degree and special expertise in American tax law. But you don’t need a degree or specialization to understand that at its heart, this feud is about something much bigger and more existential than OpenAI’s business model, although that’s extremely important.
What this is really a fight over is who will ultimately be in control of a technology that some say, if used incorrectly, could very well make human beings obsolete.
Here to tell his side of the story is Sam Altman. We talk about where AI is headed, and why he thinks superintelligence—the moment where AI surpasses human capabilities—is closer than ever. We talk about the perils of AI bias and censorship, why he donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund as a person who has long opposed Trump, what happens if America loses the AI race to a foreign power like China, and of course, what went wrong between him and the richest man on Earth.
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 week marked a historic turning point in Syria. Rebel forces seized control of the nation, toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad and ending his family’s brutal 50-year stranglehold on power.
For decades, the Assad dynasty ruled through unimaginable violence—launching chemical attacks on civilians, silencing dissent with mass imprisonment and torture, and presiding over a civil war that killed an estimated 600,000 people and drove 13 million into exile.
In cities across the world, jubilant Syrians have celebrated the regime’s downfall, having deemed it to be one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships.
But not everyone is celebrating. Or at least, some people are saying there is reason for caution.
That’s because the coalition of rebel forces taking control of Syria now is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a militant Islamist organization which originated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Its leader is a Saudi-born Syrian who calls himself Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. A 21-year-old al-Jolani left Syria for Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda and fight against America. There, he was captured by the U.S. and put into Bucca jail, which housed some of the most notorious al-Qaeda prisoners.
But since emerging on the world stage in the last week, al-Jolani has indicated that he is a reformed man, leading a moderated organization. He insists his al-Qaeda days and their methods—the detentions and torture and forced conversions—are over, and HTS is not going to persecute religious and ethnic minorities. But is it… true?
Few people in the West might know that answer as well as journalist Theo Padnos. In October 2012, Padnos ventured from Turkey into Syria to report on the Syrian Civil War. There, he was captured by HTS (then known as Jabhat al-Nusra) and held captive for nearly two years.
Throughout his captivity, Padnos endured relentless torture at the hands of his captors. He was savagely beaten until unconscious, given electric shocks, and forced into severe stress positions for hours at a time. All of this is to say nothing of the psychological torment inflicted on him.
Today, he joins Michael Moynihan to discuss his harrowing experience, the psychology of jihadists, and what the future of Syria will look like under the leadership of his former captors.
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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Kemi Badenoch just became the first black woman to lead the UK’s Conservative Party, the oldest in British politics, colloquially known as “the Tories.” She’s also 44, has three children, grew up in Nigeria, actually worked at McDonald’s (unlike some American politicians who have claimed to), didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, and has a master’s degree in computer engineering. Not exactly your typical Tory party leader profile.
But it’s Kemi Badenoch who has just inherited a Conservative Party that has dominated British politics for decades until Labour Party leader Keir Starmer became prime minister earlier this year. The Britain that Starmer inherited—the Britain that Conservatives like David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak left behind—is a country with enormous debt, a shrinking GDP, a huge immigration challenge, and arguably a national identity crisis. Or as Free Press columnist and British historian Niall Ferguson has bleakly put it, “it seems that the UK has a national suicide wish.”
Can Kemi Badenoch, the woman who has been compared to Margaret Thatcher, turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? How will the rising star in British politics offer something different than the past five Tory leaders who served before her? And can she beat out not just the Labour left but also the growing threat from a very energized hard right?
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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Democrats once seemed to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures of cabinets at the old office filled with “#StayWoke” T-shirts.
But just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines, so is the tech capital of the world. In 2024, many of the Valley’s biggest tech titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump. There was, of course, Elon Musk. . . but also WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini; VCs such as Shaun Maguire, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and today’s Honestly guest, one of the world’s most influential investors and the man responsible for bringing the internet to the masses—Marc Andreessen.
Marc’s history with politics is a long one—but it was always with the Democrats. He supported Democrats including Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But over the summer, he announced that he was going to endorse and donate to Trump. Public records show that Marc donated at least $4.5 million to pro-Trump super PACs. Why? Because he believed that the Biden administration had, as he tells us in this conversation, “seething contempt” for tech, and that this election was existential for AI, crypto, and start-ups in America.
Marc got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which is said to have launched the internet boom. He then co-founded Netscape, which became the most popular web browser in the ’90s, and sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion.
He later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook. And in 2006, when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion, Marc was the only voice saying: don’t. (Today, Facebook has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.)
He now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in small start-ups that they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. And their track record is pretty spot-on: They invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft, and Oculus—to name a few of the unicorns. (And for full disclosure: Marc and his wife were small seed investors in The Free Press.)
Marc has built a reputation as someone who can recognize “the next big thing” in tech and, more broadly, in our lives. He has been called the “chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” a “cultural tastemaker,” and even “Silicon Valley’s resident philosopher-king.”
Today, Bari and Marc discuss his reasons for supporting Trump—and the vibe shift in Silicon Valley; why he thinks we’ve been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and why it’s finally cracking; why he’s so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter-elites; how President Biden tried to kill tech and control AI; why he thinks AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship; why technologists are the ones to restore American greatness; what Trump serves for dinner; why Marc has spent about half his time at Mar-a-Lago since November 5; and why he thinks it’s morning in America.
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.
This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.
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In the 2010s, Ryan Holiday was the head of marketing for the controversial clothing brand American Apparel, and the sought-after media strategist for people like the womanizing blogger Tucker Max. Then he wrote an exposé called Trust Me, I’m Lying, which lifted the veil on his world of media manipulation.
Now, he is an advocate of the ancient philosophy of stoicism, which he roughly defines as the idea that we do not control what happens but we do control how we respond, and that it’s best to respond with four key virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice.
His series of books on stoic virtues have sold over three million copies worldwide. His latest book, Right Thing, Right Now, is about the necessity of living justly—even when it is hard.
Today: why power corrupts, how ego can destroy you, whether we should remain loyal to people even when they do abhorrent things, the limits of free speech, and how to treat people in our everyday lives.
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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This week marked a dramatic escalation in Syria’s 13-year civil war. Rebel factions launched their most audacious offensive in years, capturing Aleppo, the focal point of the war for over a decade. This marked the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s government and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in nearly a decade.
Syrian and Russian forces are currently unleashing joint air strikes in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. Iran has thrown its weight behind al-Assad, promising increased support to shore up his faltering grip on power.
But Syria is just one piece of a much larger—and far more dangerous—puzzle.
The Middle East is on a knife’s edge. Just last week, Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the Lebanon border, but tensions remain high. In Gaza, Israel has continued its operations against Hamas, who still hold 63 hostages. And then there’s Iran—the architect of much of the region’s instability—whose escalating provocations make it seem like a direct war with Israel is no longer a question of if, but when.
These conflicts are deeply interconnected, and the fall of one domino could set off far-reaching consequences. The potential power vacuum left by a weakened al-Assad regime could reshape alliances and alter the balance of power in ways that reverberate from Tehran to Tel Aviv, and from Moscow to Washington.
To help us make sense of these rapidly unfolding events and their implications for the region, Michael Moynihan is joined today by Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior analyst at The Times of Israel and one of the sharpest minds on Middle East politics.
In this conversation, they unpack what’s going on in Syria, the root causes of tribal war and dysfunction across the Arab world, the ceasefire in Lebanon, what comes next in Gaza, the weakening of Iran, and what all of this means for Israel and the United States.
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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As you’re recovering from indulging in stuffing and pecan pie, we wanted to bring you a special bonus episode we put together in collaboration with our friends at StoryCorps.
If you haven’t heard of StoryCorps, it’s an organization that has been gathering individual stories from across the country for over 20 years and collects them in the U.S. Library of Congress. StoryCorps’s online archive now has the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered.
Today, we wanted to play seven stories about gratitude. There’s one about a man’s deeply held appreciation for his father, a story about a mother who forgave the man who killed her son, and one about a busboy who prayed over Robert Kennedy right after he was shot in 1968. There’s a story about a first love, an unexpected friendship, and being yourself.
We know it sounds cheesy, but these stories made us laugh and cry, and we think you’ll love them, too. And as StoryCorps’s founder Dave Isay tells us, “Don’t forget about the beauty in poetry, and the grace in the stories of our loved ones and neighbors hiding in plain sight all around us.”
Thank you so much to Dave and StoryCorps for partnering with us for this episode. If you want to have a conversation with a stranger across the political divide, sign up at One Small Step. If you want to honor a loved one over the holidays with a StoryCorps interview that goes straight from your phone into the Library of Congress with one tap, participate in their Great Thanksgiving Listen. And, of course, if you want to support one of our favorite nonprofits, you can donate here.
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Happy Thanksgiving, Honestly listeners! If you’re anything like the rest of America, you’ll be spending the day with family, cooking turkey, eating sweet potatoes, and. . . watching football.
Whether or not you’re from Texas, the game on most American TVs on Thanksgiving Day will be the Dallas Cowboys. But just behind the players are the real stars of the show: blue and white pom-poms accenting sparkly white cowboy boots dancing to the sound of “Thunderstruck” for 41.8 million viewers at home.
We’re talking, of course, about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders—who you may have seen in the viral Netflix documentary, America’s Sweethearts—which is what today’s episode is all about.
Why, you might ask, would we talk about cheerleading on Honestly? Because as we watched the documentary, we realized that the show is about a lot more than cheerleading, football, faith, patriotism, and quintessential American culture. Yes, it’s about those things—and yes, it’s a reality show about making a very competitive dance team—but really, it’s a master class in leadership and excellence.
So today, we’re talking with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ director, Kelli Finglass. We ask her how she became the master operator she is today, leading an organization just as well as—or perhaps better than—a Fortune 500 company, how she created a culture of dedication and precision, and most importantly, what it takes today to build a phenomenal team.
It’s a different kind of episode than you’re used to these days—no talk about Matt Gaetz or Elon Musk—but it’s an all-American conversation for an all-American day. And it couldn’t be more fitting and fun. We hope you enjoy it.
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Peggy Noonan does what we try to do every day at The Free Press: tell the truth, make sense of things plainly and without pretension, frame the news in a way that helps the reader make sense of things, and put things in a historical context that gives the day-to-day depth and meaning.
The very annoying thing about Peggy Noonan is that she makes the thing that we know is so very hard look so very easy. And she does it week after week after week in The Wall Street Journal—which adds up to more than 400 columns over the last 25 years.
In her newest—and ninth—book, A Certain Idea of America, she collects 80 of her best columns published over the last eight years. Now, the idea that old newspaper columns might be good fodder for a book sort of seems like a weird idea, given that newspapers are most famous for being the next day’s fish wrapper. But somehow this book feels urgent and timeless. Which means that Peggy Noonan’s old columns are better than most people’s brand-new ones.
That’s probably because she knows a thing or two about rhetoric and American politics. She was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. She helped President George H.W. Bush get elected. She consulted for the TV show The West Wing.
In today’s conversation, we talk about how Peggy understands Trump’s win and the political revolution that we’re living through, what it feels like to lose in a values war, and what it feels like to defend things like civility and decency in 2024. We also talk about Trump’s appointments so far, Peggy’s first meeting with Trump, and how, despite our troubles, America remains a good and great country—and why it’s so important for young people to know that.
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.
This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly.
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Throughout the election, we heard one warning, repeated ad infinitum: A Donald Trump victory would precipitate a fascist dictatorship, and the United States would soon resemble Nazi Germany.
But Democrats didn’t take up arms to defend the ramparts of democracy. They didn’t repel Trump’s storm troopers who descended on Washington. Instead, something more. . . traditional happened. President Joe Biden welcomed Donald Trump to the White House, congratulated him, and promised a “smooth transition.” (A courtesy, we should note, that Trump did not extend to Biden in 2020.)
But now that Democrats have lost power—both in the White House and Congress—what changes should they make to regain it?
Here to answer that question today are Freddie deBoer and Ruy Teixeira. Freddie is a writer, self-described Marxist, and longtime critic of “social justice” identity politics. Ruy is a political demographer, Democratic strategist, and co-author of the book, Where Have all the Democrats Gone?
We talk about how Democrats became the party of elites, whether Kamala Harris’s loss is the death knell of identity politics, why abortion wasn’t enough to save the Democrats, and whether the party will learn any significant lessons from this historic defeat.
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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Trump’s gains among working-class voters of all races—according to exit polls, he won the majority of Latino men at 55 percent—represent the ongoing realignment of the Republican Party. What was once Reagan’s party of free trade, low taxes, and limited government seems to be shifting toward a multiracial working-class party that celebrates economic protectionism and credibly courts unions.
But what will this shift mean for the future of the party. . . and American politics?
Trump’s cabinet appointments so far don’t paint a clear picture. His nominee for secretary of state, Florida senator Marco Rubio, has some clear neoconservative instincts. But Trump also tapped as director of national intelligence former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who has thundered against the “neocon” influence on her new party.
So what is this new Republican Party? Is it still the party of Reagan? Is it still even a party of conservatism?
Here to discuss it all today are Sarah Isgur, Matthew Continetti, and Josh Hammer.
Sarah Isgur is a columnist for The Dispatch. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as Justice Department spokeswoman during the first Trump administration. Matthew Continetti is a columnist at Commentary, founding editor of The Free Beacon, and author of a new book: The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. And Josh Hammer is senior editor at large at Newsweek and host of The Josh Hammer Show.
Today, they join Michael Moynihan to discuss Trump’s appointments, the significance of J.D. Vance, the roots of MAGA and where the movement fits into the history of the Republican Party, and the uncertain future of the American right.
And 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 Tuesday night, president-elect Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new initiative in the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”
Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed in the White House—Dogecoin is a memecoin—more importantly, what the announcement solidifies is the triumph of the counter-elite. A bunch of oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. And they are about to reshape not just the government but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine.
And there was one person I wanted to discuss it with. He is the vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel. People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms. He’s been called the most successful tech investor in the world. A political kingmaker. The bogeyman of the left. The center of gravity in Silicon Valley. There’s the “Thielverse,” “Thielbucks,” and “Thielists.” To say he has an obsessive cult following would be an understatement.
If you listened to my last conversation with Thiel a year and a half ago on Honestly, you’ll remember that Peter was the first guy in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016. That year, he gave a memorable speech at the RNC, and many in his orbit thought it was simply a step too far. He lost business at Y Combinator, the start-up incubator where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel’s endorsement of Trump “one of the most dangerous things” he had ever seen.
Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics—at least publicly. He didn’t donate to Trump’s 2024 campaign. There was no big RNC speech this year. But the bigger change is a cultural one. He’s no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump.
On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but, in this conversation at least, still seems to venerate the way that the Ivy Leagues are an indicator of intelligence.
But perhaps that’s the secret to his success: He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own. And why wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel’s investments—in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few—have paid off big time.
His most recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected as senator and then on the Trump ticket as vice president—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be.
Today: Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; and why the Trump 2.0 team will be better than last time, with antiestablishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. We talk about the border, trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what we might face in a dreaded World War III.
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Even your most optimistic Mar-a-Lago member didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote and taking all seven swing states. He even came within five points of taking the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey!
So, what on earth does the Democratic Party do next?
They can stay the course and resist. It’s what they did the last time Trump won.
In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. Every time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms, and the Democratic Party responded in kind. Being a mere opposition party—at least at that moment for the Democrats—was not strong enough for this situation they believed. Instead they needed to become a resistance.
And while Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately did not work. Democrats spent a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat, yet Americans didn’t care. The Democrats’ goal was to scrub Trump from future history. Instead, he now controls it.
Democrats need to look inward if they want to have a shot at winning in 2028. They need to act like an opposition, not a resistance.
Today, Ei Lake explains why this will require a different approach, but one for which there is already a template. He tells the story of how a few centrist renegades saved the Democrats from oblivion 40 years ago. In 1984, after Ronald Reagan’s 525–13 Electoral College landslide over Walter Mondale, the Democrats were not just in disarray—they were on life support. And yet, eight years later, they found their savior: a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. And they remade their party.
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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Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. . . again. It was a historic political comeback for a candidate rejected by the people just four years ago. But this time, Trump took almost every coveted state: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. And he leads in Nevada and Arizona. The entire blue wall. . . turned red. And unlike 2016, this was not just an Electoral College victory. Surprising pollsters and betting markets alike, Trump also won the popular vote. To top it off, Republicans took control of the Senate, gaining four seats, and maybe more by the time this episode airs. Simply put, it was a red landslide.
It is extremely rare in our history for a president to come back after losing a reelection bid so badly. In fact, Trump's rebound is bigger than Nixon's—bigger than Napoleon's in 1815.
And yet it happened on Tuesday night with the most flawed candidate American politics has ever seen. How did he do it?
If you were only watching cable news over the last few years, you would be shocked by the outcome. But if you had been reading The FP, you probably were not surprised. Yes, Kamala had the support of Beyoncé, Oprah, Taylor Swift, and almost every A-lister with a pulse. She outraised Trump by around $600 million. She was endorsed by industry leaders in science and economics. But it’s been clear for some time now that the Democrats do not have the buy-in or trust of the American people. FP senior editor Peter Savodnik said it best: “They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.”
Still, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, CNN and MSNBC tried to explain away Trump's appeal, and the profound failure of the left, with accusations that the American people are the ones to blame.
But those explanations are not right.
As exit polls came in, Trump showed strength with black and Latino voters. CNN exit polls showed he won about 13 percent of black voters (up from 8 percent in 2020) and 45 percent of Latino voters (up from 32 percent last election). It shows a massive pickup. He won among voters who make less than $100,000. And compared to 2020, Trump improved in cities, in rural areas, in suburbs. . . . as CNN's John Berman put it: “It’s kind of an everywhere improvement.”
Here today to make sense of it all is FP contributor and Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, pundit and political powerhouse Brianna Wu, and FP Senior Editor Peter Savodnik.
We reflect on why Democrats lost so dramatically and decisively; how Trump’s comeback happened, despite an impeachment, being found guilty of sexual assault, and 116 indictments; how Trump found success with black and Latino voters; what the next four years might look like with Trump returning to the White House; and if this will be a wake-up call for Democrats.
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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Our newsroom reflects our readers: We aren’t voting in unison. Today, Bari Weiss explains how The Free Press is handling Election Day inside the office.
Read Bari’s full essay.
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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Bullshit is an American tradition. Think the theatrics of P.T. Barnum, miracle products sold ad nauseam on television in the 1980s and, of course, politicians. Who can forget President Bill Clinton saying “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is” during his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal?
And then there’s Donald Trump. He presents as a man with no fact-checking filter, someone happily buying his own convenient bullshit. That’s not quite the same thing as lying.
That isn’t to say Trump doesn’t lie. He’s a politician, after all. But he exists outside the binary of truth and lies. It’s the netherworld of flimflam, hyperbole, sales pitches, and ad copy delivered with all the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt contest. Donald Trump is a very modern artist, weaving a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real statistics, gossip, and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter.
Democrats have tried to paint Trump as an American Hitler, a Russian agent, a man consumed with evil and hatred. But what they fail to understand is that Trump’s casual relationship to the truth is an echo of past politicians. He is hardly the first bullshitter to ascend to the White House; he’s just the best ever to do it. He paints a picture of a reality he would like us to see, not as it really is.
In this respect, Trump is the crack cocaine variant of many of his predecessors. Ronald Reagan was a folksy, sentimental bullshitter, a president as a Hallmark greeting card. Bill Clinton was a slick bullshitter, perfect for spinning stories at the dawn of the cable news era.
Today, Eli Lake explores the soft spot that Americans have for bullshitters like Trump, and their disdain for liars like Richard Nixon. He argues that if you want to understand why Trump may be on the verge of winning the White House again, you have to reckon with our country’s relationship to the pungent brown stuff. It pervades everything from our economy to our culture. Bullshit is dangerous when it comes to science. But in politics, bullshit is sadly essential.
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Need a break from political programming? Well, today we have a special treat: It’s The Free Press’s scary movie Halloween special!
It’s that time of year: changing leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, animal costumes with sex appeal and, of course, gory, bloody, nightmare-inducing horror movies.
We all remember the first horror movie that we were allowed to watch—or maybe that we weren’t allowed to watch, but saw anyway: Silence of the Lambs, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Jaws, Carrie, Halloween, or The Shining. For today’s host Suzy Weiss, it was 20 minutes of the movie It—the TV miniseries from 1990, not the 2017 remake. Suzy remembers seeing Pennywise the Clown on the screen and thinking, This will take me years to get over. She still sometimes checks the drain!
Year after year, horror movies are consistently profitable—more so than dramas—but they are snubbed when it comes to award shows and critical acclaim. But here at The Free Press, we value and love horror, so much that we’ve gathered our scariest FP writers—Suzy Weiss, River Page, and Kat Rosenfield—to analyze four new horror movies.
River, Kat, and Suzy will review MaXXXine, set in grimy and glamorous 1980s Hollywood, about a night killer who targets a porn star who herself is targeting big-screen stardom. Apartment 7A, a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby, about a woman taken in by an unassuming family. Longlegs, a serial killer story about an FBI agent trying to crack the case. And The Substance, about a woman who takes the latest anti-aging elixir, but at a harrowing cost.
They talk about what they loved, what they hated, and how they think each movie relates to our current social ills. We’ll also note this episode has spoilers, so let this be a warning!
Happy Halloween, folks!
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There are no perfect candidates. But what do you do when both candidates are not just imperfect but deeply flawed, and seen by many as unqualified for the job?
We are just one week away from a presidential election that will decide if the next four years are helmed by Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump. I know many people who are still undecided. Some of them work at The Free Press.
These undecided voters have just one presidential debate to reference, and as my friends at Open to Debate said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “I can confidently state that we haven’t yet seen a real presidential debate this year. Debates have devolved into political theater, with combative candidates, biased media, agenda-driven moderators, and a fixation on social-media sound bites. This structure fails to deliver the substance voters need.”
So today, we are here without the pageantry, makeup, or muted mics, to host not Trump vs. Kamala—though the invitation is still open—but instead two very smart people who represent each side of the choice that we are going to make a week from today.
Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and host of the podcast Making Sense. Today, he will explain why he is voting for Kamala Harris. Sam has spoken passionately and consistently on this issue since Trump came onto the scene; Sam calls him “the most dangerous cult leader on Earth” and highlights Trump’s character flaws. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse; he mocked a disabled reporter; he said John McCain wasn’t a hero; he called veterans “suckers and losers”; if we kept going with examples, we’d be here all day. Sam’s biggest issue is January 6 and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Sam writes, “The spectacle of a sitting president refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, culminating in an attack on the Capitol, remains the most shocking violation of political norms to occur in my lifetime.”
On the other side, Ben Shapiro—lawyer, co-founder of The Daily Wire, best-selling author, and host of The Ben Shapiro Show—will explain why he is voting for Donald Trump. Ben argues that we were a better country under Trump and that his policies make us safer and more prosperous. There were no hot wars, no inflation crisis, and less traffic at the southern border with Trump as president. He makes the case that Trump will not be abandoned by the experts who advised him during his first administration, and he will delegate responsibilities to capable and trustworthy policymakers. He also argues that Kamala is an “incompetent and unqualified vice president” and that “radicalism defines her.”
I suspect if you’re listening to this show, you know these two names and have listened to their shows before. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ben and Sam are two of the smartest, most influential, and most insightful voices on the American political scene. That’s one of the reasons we’re so thrilled to host this conversation today. The other is because it’s exactly the kind of conversation we need more of in this country, especially at this moment. I challenge you to think of one debate you heard during this election that was passionate and provocative, but also civil and respectful, between a Trump supporter and a Harris supporter. I can’t think of one. That’s why we put this together. And we really think you’re going to appreciate what you hear.
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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We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’re standing at the precipice of what could be a third world war. At the very least, the thing that we refer to as the “Free World” is burning at its outer edges. Just a few weeks ago, Iran launched its largest-ever ballistic missile attack against Israel, while its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to wage war against Israel, making use of the steady flow of weaponry and funding from Iran—which is ever closer to having nuclear weapons.
The war in Ukraine continues to rage, with both sides engaged in intense fighting across multiple fronts. After over a year and a half of relentless Russian bombardment, Ukraine is barely holding the line as the grinding war of attrition drags on. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than one million people on both sides of the border have been killed or injured.
And then there’s China, which has lately been attacking Philippine and Vietnamese vessels in the South China Sea, terrorizing international waters with impunity as the world watches anxiously.
Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran have solidified a new axis of autocracy, united in its goal to unravel the Pax Americana and undermine American dominance. The question on our minds tonight is: What should America do about it?
Many Americans are saying they don’t want the United States to continue leading the world order. A 2023 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey revealed that 42 percent of Americans think that the U.S. should stay out of world affairs, which is the highest number recorded since 1974.
It is easy to talk about foreign policy as an abstract idea because war, for us, is thousands of miles away. But foreign policy is a matter of life and death. Not just for people around the world, but for the more than two million Americans that serve in our armed forces.
It’s conventional wisdom that American voters don’t prioritize foreign policy. But this year, given the state of the world, that might be different. Which is why we hosted a debate, live in NYC, on this very topic.
Arguing that, yes, the U.S. should still police the world is Bret Stephens. Stephens is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and editor in chief of Sapir. As a foreign affairs columnist of The Wall Street Journal, he was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. And he is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.
Bret was joined by James Kirchick, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, writer at large for Air Mail, and contributing writer for Tablet. He is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. He is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Arguing that no, the U.S. should not still police the world is none other than Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is a journalist, the founder of Racket News, and the author of 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Matt was joined by Lee Fang. Lee is an independent investigative journalist, primarily writing on Substack at LeeFang.com. From 2015 to 2023, he was a reporter for The Intercept.
Be it resolved: The U.S. should still police the world.
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Gad Saad was born in Beirut in 1964 into one of the last Jewish families to remain in Lebanon. But the country that was once called “the Paris of the Middle East” began to turn.
Saad remembers one day at school when a fellow student told his class that he wanted to be a “Jew-killer” when he grew up. The rest of the kids laughed. By 1975, Lebanon descended into a brutal civil war and Saad said death awaited him at every millisecond of the day.
Even through the danger and turmoil, his family thought, This will pass over. We will be fine. Until someone showed up to their home in Lebanon to kill them, at which point his family fled the country and rebuilt their life in Canada.
In 2024, many of us in Western democracies find ourselves saying the exact same things: This will pass over. We will be fine. Even as Hamas flags and “I love Hezbollah” posters wave in cosmopolitan capitals across the West. How worried should we be? And, is there a way to roll back admiration for anti-civilizational groups? Those are just some of the questions we were eager to put to Saad in today’s conversation.
Saad said that witnessing the Lebanese Civil War gave him a crash course in the extremes of identity politics, tribalism, and illiberalism. He argues that immigrants like himself, who have lived without the virtues of the West—freedom of speech and thought, reason, and true liberalism—uniquely understand what’s at stake right now in Western cultural and political life. It’s no coincidence, Saad said, that the most prominent defenders of Western ideals are immigrants, people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and Masih Alinejad.
Saad is a professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences, and if you’re on X, we suspect you know his name. Unlike most professors, he has a million followers, and a knack for satire—so much so that Elon Musk seems to be one of his biggest fans.
Outside of his X personality, he’s been teaching at Concordia University in Montreal for the past 30 years. But he’s now having second thoughts. Concordia is today widely regarded as the most antisemitic university in North America. Saad is now a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan. He said he can’t bear the possibility of returning to Concordia given the antisemitism on campus.
All of this, he argued, constitutes another war: a campaign against logic, science, common sense, and reality here in the West, which he explains in his book: The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
Today, Bari Weiss asks one of the most insightful and provocative thinkers about the risks of mob rule and extremism on the left, where these “parasitic ideas” came from and why they’re encouraged in the West, if progressive illiberalism is waxing or waning, and if these trends are reversible.
And 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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In the last year, we’ve witnessed a disturbing trend among some on the fringe left, who cheer those they think are resisting Western imperialism. Even when those anti-imperialists are. . . designated terrorist groups. This misguided support was on full display on the anniversary of October 7, when protesters marched through London chanting, “I love Hezbollah”, and in New York, where they flew flags for the Iran-backed militia group flags and carried “New York for Hezbollah” signs.
It was a remarkable sight, but unsurprising when you consider the distorted lens through which these extremists look at the war in the Middle East. To them, Hezbollah, the group responsible for killing 241 Americans in a 1983 terror attack and for murdering 85 innocents in Argentina in 1994, is simply a resistance group defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression.
But is that how the Lebanese see Hezbollah? An armed Shia group as the defender of Lebanon, a country of many different religious and cultural communities? Defender of Beirut, a city that one Lebanese journalist recently called “a tolerant and diverse cosmopolitan center”?
On today’s show, Michael Moynihan sits down with three people with intimate knowledge of what Hezbollah really is: a totalitarian force in Lebanon, an occupying force in Syria, the perpetrators of narco-terrorism and sex slavery, and the foot soldiers of Iran’s imperial project in the Middle East.
Joseph Braude is an expert on Arab culture and politics, and the founder of The Center for Peace Communications, which partnered with The Free Press to produce the animated series Hezbollah’s Hostages. Hezbollah’s Hostages, which you can watch on The Free Press’s YouTube channel, interviews the victims of the terrorist group in Lebanon and Syria, who have spoken out at great personal risk. Episodes have covered the story of a Lebanese fighter’s indoctrination from childhood, the account of a Syrian woman abducted and forced into sex slavery, and the enlightening narrative of a Syrian who became a drug smuggler for the organization. Please check the series out, if you haven’t already.
Makram Rabah is a history lecturer at the American University of Beirut and, through his frequent appearances on pan-Arab television, a fierce and courageous critic of Hezbollah. Makram lives in Lebanon, where his life is routinely threatened.
Finally, Hanin Ghaddar is a Lebanese journalist and author of the book Hezbollahland: Mapping Dahiya and Lebanon's Shia Community. She is a leading expert on the group’s history and its role within Lebanese society.
We discuss the history of Hezbollah, its function as an Iranian proxy, its unpopularity in Lebanon and in the broader region, the group’s criminal activities, like drug and sex trafficking, and the path forward for Lebanon now that Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah’s military capabilities.
And 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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It would have been unthinkable for Brianna Wu to have appeared on Honestly a decade ago (if the show had existed back then). But Brianna isn’t most people. I actually can’t think of anyone else quite like her.
She’s a trans woman who advocates passionately for trans healthcare, but thinks many trans activists have alienated women and feminists. She’s a progressive who once called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “one of the best politicians in America,” but is today a staunch supporter of Israel. She was cyber-attacked by an alt-right mob during Gamergate, but now thinks the political left acts just like that mob.
Brianna says her politics haven’t actually changed. Instead, it’s the Democratic Party that has morphed. And she says they’ve become unelectable. But Brianna is not sitting idly by while it runs itself into the ground. She wants Democrats to get back to common sense, kitchen table issues, which is why she’s launched a political action committee and is fundraising big time in the 2024 election cycle.
At The Free Press we cover a lot of people whose politics have shifted over the past few years. But very few have experienced that evolution in public in the way that Brianna has. On today’s episode, Brianna tells us how Gamergate changed her life, the story of her political evolution, why she is a staunch supporter of Israel, and a critic of niche left causes, and what Democrats risk if they continue to alienate voters.
***
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A few weeks ago, we had Sarah Longwell and David French, two prominent conservatives, on Honestly to explain why they’re supporting Vice President Kamala Harris this presidential election.
There are a lot of people like them—conservatives who are so staunchly never Trump that they are supporting the Democratic candidate. What’s less common—or, at least, less talked about—are the Democrats who are voting for Donald Trump. Maybe there are fewer Democrats crossing the aisle to vote for Trump in 2024, but I’d guess that there are more who are just not willing to speak up because of the stigma.
Today, we are talking with three people, all of whom have spent their lives identifying as liberal or progressive and are voting for Trump this year—and are loud and proud about it.
Shaun Maguire is a partner at the VC fund Sequoia Capital and has previously started five companies himself. In 2016, he said he was terrified of Trump winning and actively supported Hillary Clinton. But this year, Shaun gave Trump $300,000, saying he believes that “the Biden administration has had some of the worst foreign policy in decades.”
Maud Maron is a lifelong progressive. She’s dedicated her career to those causes. She was a Planned Parenthood escort and worked for Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther and professor, who called Maud her “excellent research assistant.” She worked for many years as a public defender at The Legal Aid Society until she was canceled by the organization for “wrong think.” Maud ran for NYC’s City Council in 2021 and then for Congress in 2022 as a moderate Democrat. She says she’s no longer a Democrat and will vote Republican for the first time in a presidential election because of, among other things, the Democratic Party’s fixation on race over merit.
Shabbos Kestenbaum is a recent graduate of Harvard, who’s currently suing his alma mater for its failure to combat antisemitism. He says he disagrees with former president Trump on most issues, but on the most important ones, he’s in lockstep with him. Shabbos supported Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman in the past, but has moved right because he has seen firsthand how the excesses on the left have impacted college campuses—and particularly Jewish students—for the worst.
There are a lot of people who are deeply dissatisfied with the options in this year’s presidential race, and are planning to write in someone on that line of their ballot. Shaun, Maud, and Shabbos are not doing that. They’ve gone the full 180 and are supporting the candidate they once hated. Why?
On today’s episode, how these three former Democrats got so disaffected with their party, how they grapple with the antisemitism on the right, how they contend with Trump’s questionable character, how they square Trump and J.D. Vance’s comments on Ukraine with their hawkish foreign policy views, and much, much more.
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We all know the horrid tale of what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. Waves of gunmen attacked families in their homes and young people attending a music festival. The marauders filmed their murders on GoPro cameras. They burned families alive in their safe rooms; raped, and mutilated their victims; and took hostages back to Gaza on golf carts. Why did they do it?
For many critics of Israel, the horrific violence of October 7 was the predictable response to the “occupation”—never mind that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. To them, October 7 was a jailbreak from what progressives often call “an open-air prison.”
But for the belligerents, in their own words, this war is for the defense of a mosque on top of a mountain. They called their massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood,” named for one of the two mosques that sit atop what is known to the Jews as the Temple Mount. This is where King Solomon’s temple once stood, and at its base is the Western Wall, where Jews have prayed since its construction in the second century BCE. It’s also known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, a noble sanctuary. It’s where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven in a dream. An October 10 Hamas communiqué justified their attack as resistance to thwart “schemes and dreams of Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.”
This reveals something very important about the Israel-Palestine conflict: That it is not a territorial dispute. It’s a holy war, with roots in an ancient city with significance far beyond its 2.5 miles of limestone walls. The world knows it as Jerusalem. The Palestinians call it Al-Quds.
Hamas claims there is a plot by Israel to destroy Al-Aqsa—the mosque atop the Temple Mount that sits in the center of Jerusalem—and build a third Jewish temple where it now stands. It’s a lie. A lie that goes back a century. The man who first began to spread the libel was from one of Jerusalem’s great families that traced its lineage back to the prophet Muhammad himself. He was a seminary-school dropout, a fanatic antisemite, and a Nazi collaborator. His name was Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
Today, Eli Lake tells the story of al-Husseini, the origins of the 100-year holy war, and why it persists to this day.
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We’ve released a few episodes on Honestly for the anniversary of October 7. Today, we’re bringing you one more conversation with someone who has been breaking news on the ground every single day of this war: journalist Trey Yingst.
On the morning of October 7, Trey was in Israel’s south, reporting on the massacre as it unfolded. He saw bodies dragged into vehicles, mothers trying to save their children, and the bloodshed—unlike anything he had ever seen—in the communities and kibbutzim. He reported these stories live on Fox—in many instances while rockets rained down on him and his crew, who often didn’t have time to take shelter. He remembers those early hours and days as “a true horror movie.”
That was just the beginning of his reporting on the unfolding war, which has taken him into Gaza and more recently on an embed with Israeli troops into southern Lebanon. He tells these stories in his new book Black Saturday, which chronicles his reporting over the last year and the very real human stories of this war, both from the perspective of Israelis and Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Trey is the chief foreign correspondent for Fox News. He has reported from the front lines in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and since 2018, he’s been based in Israel. He says he tries to talk to everyone involved in the conflict, and he’s gone a long way toward doing so. He’s interviewed the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and he’s sat down on the Israeli side with everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to Yoav Gallant.
If you’re someone listening who holds stereotypes about what a Fox correspondent might sound like, Trey will surprise you. Trey has unconventional and strongly held views about the future of the region, about whether Hamas can ever be defeated, and about what should happen next in the war. Most of all, he has an unwavering commitment to a kind of old-school journalism that tells stories of human beings in times of war, whatever side of the border they fall on.
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We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.
Today on Honestly, Bari Weiss’s reflections on the anniversary of October 7. Plus, one of our most memorable episodes of the last year.
A quick note: Since the earliest hours of October 7, 2023, we have published more than 150 reports, features, essays, podcasts, and videos, many from on the ground in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and more recently, Lebanon and Syria.
In The Free Press, you’ll find all of those presented in one place as a resource, a historical record, and a reminder of the kind of journalism you are supporting when you support The Free Press.
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When Emily Oster was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms.
That experience of playing outside unsupervised in the dark—or walking a mile home from school in kindergarten—is very different from her own children’s experiences, even though they’re growing up in a very similar environment, with very similar parents. They aren’t leaving the house every day after dinner. If Emily had suggested that they walk home from school in kindergarten, even though it’s only a couple of blocks, there’s no chance that would have been met with the school’s acceptance.
Since 1955, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to engage in free play, away from adult intervention and control. In 1969, 47 percent of kids walked or biked to school, whereas in 2009 that number had plummeted to 12 percent.
How did we get here? What are the consequences of hypervigilant parenting? On kids’ happiness? On their well-being? Their mental health? And on their ability to grow into independent, self-sufficient, and successful adults? And, maybe most importantly, how can we alter this trajectory before it’s too late?
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce our new podcast series: Raising Parents with Emily Oster
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When we planned the conversation you’re going to hear today—a live conversation with Douglas Murray—we thought it would be a searching conversation that we’d release on the anniversary of October 7th, looking back at a year of war from a slightly quieter moment. You’ll hear some of that today. But the moment is anything but quiet.
As we prepared yesterday afternoon for this conversation, the war that Iran has outsourced to its proxies for the last year finally became a war being waged by Iran itself, as it launched over 100 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled into bomb shelters, while missiles rained down on their homes, with a handful making direct impact. As of this recording, two people were injured, and one person was killed—that person was a Palestinian man in Jericho. Just before that onslaught, at least two terrorists opened fire at a train station in Jaffa, Israel, killing at least six people and injuring at least seven others.
For many people, this war has been all we can think about since October 7th. But I fear that for many Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it isn’t. This is also a battle for the free world. As my friend Sam Harris put it in the weeks after October 7th: “There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil in our world, but this is one of them.” It is a war between Israel and Iran, but it is also a war between civilization and barbarism. This was true a year ago, and it’s even more true today. Yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.
To choose just a few examples from the last week: at the UN, 12 countries—including the U.S.—presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Rashida Tlaib tweeted “our country is funding this bloodbath” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who The New York Times described as “beloved,” a “towering figure,” and a “powerful orator.” It read like a letter of recommendation. At Barnard, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all our martyrs we salute.” In Ottawa, protestors shouted, “Oh Zionists, where are you?” and targeted a Jewish residential street filled with schools and senior living homes, simply because the street is filled with Jewish homes and institutions. During the UN General Assembly, U.S. taxpayer dollars provided personal security for Iranian leaders, so that they could walk the streets of New York and speak before the UN—the same Iranian leaders who are plotting to kill senior American leaders.
No one understands the moral urgency of this moment better than my friend and guest today, Douglas Murray.
Douglas Murray isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members. And yet it is Douglas Murray who understands the stakes of this war and the moral clarity that it requires.
Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, to Israel. Douglas remained in Israel for months as he reported back with clarity, truth, and conviction. Douglas is the best-selling author of seven books, and is a regular contributor at the New York Post, the National Review, and here at The Free Press, where he writes our beloved Sunday column: “Things Worth Remembering.”
There is no one better to talk to in this moment, as we watch in real time as the Middle East—and the world as we know it—transforms before our eyes.
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Megyn Kelly cut her teeth in the mainstream media and became one of the most influential voices in the political debate. From her meteoric rise at Fox News to her stint at NBC, Megyn Kelly has been a central figure in American journalism for over a decade.
You might recall her contentious exchange with then-candidate Donald Trump during a Republican presidential debate in 2015. Kelly asked him about the names he’d called women—such as “fat pigs” and “dogs.” Trump’s response, in part: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.” He later went on CNN and accused Kelly of having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.”
Kelly has since abjured the mainstream—she now hosts a podcast on SiriusXM and YouTube that has fast become one of the most popular political shows in the country. Her success captures the broader media shift away from brands like Fox and NBC to more personal, one-on-one relationships between commentator and consumer. (For example, she’s let her audience know she plans to vote for Trump, despite their past quarreling.)
People are hungry for unbiased, unfiltered information. And in the last few years, there has been an explosion of independent media: outlets like ours here at The Free Press, podcasts like this one, Substack newsletters, Twitter feeds, YouTube shows—all promising an alternative to the mainstream.
But is independent media always trustworthy? Does it need some of the guardrails and editorial processes that were once common at legacy outlets? Because if one peers into this independent—and often right-wing—media landscape, one cannot help but notice the frequent descents into conjecture and conspiracy theory, from commentators like Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, and Bret Weinstein.
While Megyn is normally the one doing the grilling, today it’s her turn in the hot seat. Michael Moynihan and Kelly discuss the role of conspiracy theory in our current discourse, where she stands politically these days, how the legacy press is handling the presidential election, how she says she avoided “Trump Derangement Syndrome” even as some of Trump’s most die-hard supporters showered her with threats, and her guiding principles as a journalist.
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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.
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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)!
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
And yet, Summers is somehow the skunk that everyone–particularly the very administration he’s been critical of–wants to stick around.
Summers has been a force behind the scenes on the Inflation Reduction Act—the massive climate, health and tax bill signed into law by President Biden this week. He also worked behind the scenes to get Joe Manchin—who earlier this summer said he would not vote for the bill—to reverse course. (Read more about that here.)
Today a conversation with Larry Summers about the state of the economy, how we can turn it around, and whether or not the new law will actually reduce inflation. He also sounds off on the future of higher education and what he calls “the new McCarthyism.”
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We live in a culture in which many people believe that words are violence. In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the first fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, and with Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old who stabbed the novelist in the neck on a stage in Western New York.
Today, as Rushdie recovers from his injuries, reflections from Bari on the profound impact that the words are violence crowd has had on our culture.
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Tim Scott is a rare bird: He is the only black Republican in the Senate. But the quality that makes him arguably more unique at the moment is his optimism.
Much of 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 from South Carolina.
Scott is frustrated at all the pessimism, including from inside his own party— and he’s frustrated at the notion that America is in decline. Or that perhaps we are heading for some kind of crack up. Or civil war. He makes the case for optimism in his new book: America, A Redemption Story.
I hope Scott is right. But also, as you’ll hear in our conversation, I see very, very good reasons for Americans to be fed up with the state of the union and deeply worried about the future of our democracy.
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It’s hard to think of an invention that has been more transformative to women than the birth control pill. Suddenly, American women possessed a power that women never before in history had: They could control when they got pregnant. They could have sex like . . . men.
The pill—and the profound legal, political and cultural changes that the sexual revolution and feminism ushered in—liberated women. Those movements have allowed women to lead lives that literally were not possible beforehand.
But here we are, half a century later, with a culture in which porn and casual sex are abundant, but marriage and birth rates are at historic lows. And many people are asking: Did we go wrong somewhere along the way? Was the sexual revolution actually bad for women?
The debaters:
Jill Filiopvic is an author and attorney who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and many other publications. You can follow her writing on her newsletter.
Louise Perry, based in London, is columnist at the The New Statesman. She is the author of the new book: “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.”
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There is no organization that’s done more to fight for freedom of speech on American campuses over the past 20 years than FIRE, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. If you care deeply about the First Amendment and a robust culture of free speech, FIRE is the kind of organization you hope will go out of business.
Unfortunately, as our friend Andrew Sullivan has perfectly put it, we all live on campus now.
As the culture of campus has become the culture of the country—one in which ideological conformity is enforced by mobs that wield the weapons of shame and stigma—it should not come as a surprise that 62% of Americans say they hold views they are afraid to share in public.
All of which is why FIRE is radically expanding its scope and its ambition. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is now The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And the organization has announced a goal of $75 million in order to pick up the flag the ACLU has put down by becoming the premier civil liberties organization in America.
Today: a conversation with the president and CEO of FIRE, Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff is also the author of “Unlearning Liberty” and the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
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Denying the outcome of elections has become alarmingly popular these days.
In one corner, Democrats are claiming that gerrymandering has made our elections illegitimate, that the Senate is anti-Democratic and so is the Supreme Court. The White House Press Secretary has claimed that Trump stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.
In the other corner, a majority or close to a majority of Republicans (depending on what polls you look at) believe that Trump was cheated out of a fair election in 2020. Here’s how the Texas GOP put it last month: “We hold that acting President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
Today, a roundtable about how worried we should be about the state—and future—of American democracy. With guests: Jonah Goldberg (founder of The Dispatch and author of Suicide of the West); Jeremy Peters (New York Times reporter and author of Insurgency) and Kristen Soltis Anderson (pollster and author of The Selfie Vote).
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There’s a tried-and-true playbook for comedians who want to make it big: hit the road, get in front of as many audiences as possible, and try to grab the attention of the TV executives who decide which comics are lucky enough to get a special.
But Andrew Schulz and his generation of comics has something those guys didn’t: The internet.
In 2018, one of Schulz’s self-published specials went to number one across Apple Music, Google Play and Amazon. That led to sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall and, eventually, a four-part series on Netflix.
This summer, right as he was about to release his newest special with another big streamer, he was told he’d need to edit out some of his offensive jokes. Instead of censoring his work, he bought back the rights to the show and is going to release it on his website this weekend.
We talk about why he feels so confident betting on himself, the state of comedy in an era of censoriousness, and why a healthy society needs people who are willing to be offensive.
Check out his new special on July 17th at: https://theandrewschulz.com/
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In Bari’s view, Freddie deBoer is one of the best writers in the country. It’s not because she always agrees with him. Hardly. Freddie is a self-described Marxist.
What she appreciates about him is that he is unflinching about criticizing “his side.” Freddie is one of the most trenchant critics of what he calls “Social Justice Politics”—which he argues distracts the left from the real issue of class.
He is also unflinching in his views about mental illness and the way it is being glorified in our culture right now. Freddie knows about this subject intimately. He has severe bipolar disorder, and has been institutionalized in the past when he was on the verge of violently acting out.
Today: a conversation about “the gentrification of disability,” how sickness became chic, and how our society should handle the epidemic of mental illness.
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There are nearly 4000 universities in the U.S.. Many of them have billions of dollars in endowments and histories that go back to well before the country's founding. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that it would be a bit ridiculous to try and compete with those Goliaths.
But that's exactly what the new University of Austin or UATX is doing. The premise, of course, is simple, and it goes like this. While the brand name schools have the money, they no longer have the mission. They have fundamentally abandoned the point of the university, which is the pursuit of truth. The good people at UATX, where I'm proud to be on the board, are not waiting for the broken status quo to change. They're not sitting around criticizing or whining. They are doing.
Just a few weeks ago, UATX opened its doors to its first students at its inaugural summer school. I was blown away by the students that I met there, and I was honored to lecture alongside teachers like Neil Ferguson, Kathleen Stock, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rob Henderson and Thomas Chatterton Williams. And today I wanted to share with all of you the talk that I gave at the old parkland in Dallas to that first class of students. It's about the broken moment that we're in as a culture and a country, but more it's about what I think is required of us to meet this moment.
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No writer stokes more consistent envy among Common Sense editors than Walter Kirn. Two of his essays from last year—The Bullshit and The Power and the Silence—got our vote for the best of 2021. But we never miss anything he writes.
You might know Kirn’s name from his novels, including “Up in the Air” and “Blood Will Out.” We hope you’ll love his debut piece for us as much as we do.
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With everything going on here at home you can be forgiven for not focusing on what’s going on in Mariupol or Hong Kong.
But what’s going on in those faraway places has a profound impact on us. For evidence of that truth, look no further than Wuhan. Or at the current price of gas.
The point is that there is little distinction between domestic and foreign politics. If you are the world’s superpower—and at least for now we still appear to be—they are profoundly connected.
That’s the case former CIA head and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo makes in my conversation with him today. In this wide-ranging and frank conversation, Pompeo answers my questions about China, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iran. But also: the stop the steal movement, the future of the GOP and whether or not he’s running for president.
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Few decisions could inspire so much anger and sadness in one group of Americans—and so much joy and relief in another—than last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Depending on where you sit, the Court just rolled back women’s rights by 50 years, or corrected an egregious instance of judicial overreach.
Today, a deep and honest conversation about the Dobbs decision with two women–both mothers–who represent the pro-choice and pro-life sides of this debate.
Katherine Mangu-Ward is the editor in chief of Reason Magazine. Bethany Mandel is the editor of the children’s series “Heroes of Liberty.”
Joining them is the head of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, who the LA Times called the nation’s most influential legal commentator.
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If you watched the Super Bowl this year, it was hard not to notice that cryptocurrency had fully arrived. Even Larry David was hawking crypto.
But over the past several weeks, the crypto markets, like other markets, have been melting down. Some coins have completely imploded. Some crypto banks have shut their digital doors, refusing to give customers access to their money. And companies like Coinbase are laying off workers. Crypto winter has arrived.
Today: a debate. Is crypto really the future of money? And is this blip just a normal hiccup in an otherwise exciting, transformational technological advancement? Or was crypto always more hype than reality?
Anthony Pompliano is a crypto believer. He’s an entrepreneur and investor and a former lead at Facebook. He's also the host of the Pomp podcast and the writer of a crypto newsletter called Off the Chain.
Michael Green is a major crypto skeptic. He has been an investor for more than 30 years. He recently joined Simplify, where he's introducing new innovations in ETFs. He's previously, among other jobs, been at Thiel Macro, where he managed the personal capital of Peter Thiel.
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If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was.
This Friday, we bring you an Honestly special: TGIF! This time built just for your ears and brought to you by America’s favorite lesbians: Nellie and dear friend of the pod, Katie Herzog.Featuring: drag queens, inflation, prosecutors who just won't prosecute.
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We live in a culture that is driven by nay-saying. In one corner, people insist that the individual stands no chance against structural and systemic maladies. From the other, people say that we are in inexorable decline as a civilization and that decadence is everywhere we turn. Both wind up arguing against risk-taking, against the possibility of creating new things and new worlds.
How can we recover the adventurous, optimistic, forward-thinking, risk-taking attitude that has made America the most innovative country in the history of the world?
Today, the venture capitalist (and former journalist) Katherine Boyle explains how. She makes the powerful case that that spirit of building is very much alive in America—just not in the places that we once assumed we’d find it.
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Tulsa. Buffalo. Uvalde. Philadelphia. Chicago. And that’s just the past few weeks.
If you’re like me, you’ve had too many despairing conversations about the epidemic of gun violence in this country to count. This isn’t that. This is a conversation about what can actually, practically be done.
David French is a senior editor of The Dispatch and the author of “Divided We Fall,” among other books. David is a veteran. He is also, as you’ll hear, a gun owner.
Rajiv Sethi is a professor of economics at Barnard College at Columbia University who has been researching gun violence and writing about innovative solutions to the problem—even in a country with a robust Second Amendment.
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When Marianne Williamson stood on the presidential debate stage in 2020 and spoke about the “dark psychic force” unleashed in America, she became an instant meme. But these days—with our epidemic of loneliness and addiction, rising crime and violence like the kind we just witnessed in Uvalde, Texas—can anyone deny the existence of this darkness?
Long before others were willing to name the anti-human, anti-social sickness in our culture, Williamson was warning of it. She is one of the most beloved self-help authors in the world, having sold more than three million copies of her more than a dozen books.
If you are heartsick about the state of the country and find yourself asking how it can be made right, this episode is for you.
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We are living through a seismic political realignment. The parties and the political movements that fuel them are being dramatically redefined—and are up for grabs in ways that would have been unthinkable even two decades ago.
Today, we are focusing on “the right” side of that divide: what the right has meant historically; what it means today; and what it might look like a decade or a century from now.
My guest is Matthew Continetti, author of the new book: “The Right: The Hundred-year War for American Conservatism.” We talk about Donald Trump, of course. But more so we talk about whether or not he was a departure from conservatism or a return to something deeper in American history that the movement’s elites had long kept at the periphery. We talk about the gap between those elites and the base. And we talk about the emerging group known as the “New Right” and whether or not they represent the future of American politics.
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There is no subject—not Trump, not abortion, not immigration, not taxes-–that is more contentious than the one we tackle today: parenting.
This subject has particular urgency because my wife is pregnant! As are two of my producers. But you don’t need to be pregnant to be curious about the following: What is the right way to raise kids who become good, responsible, kind adults? Can we blame our problems as adults on our parents? What about Or do parenting styles not really matter? Is it nature that determines just about everything? That–and a thousand more questions–are what we discuss on today’s show.
So today: a debate with three parenting experts who have radically different ideas about raising kids. Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason, is the author of “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.” Michaelleen Doucleff is a NPR global health correspondent and the author of “Hunt, Gather, Parent.” And Carla Naumburg is a clinical social worker and the author of “How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids.”
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Akhil Reed Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale university, where he’s been teaching constitutional law since the ripe old age of 26. He is the author of more than a hundred law review articles and several award-winning books. Amar’s work has been cited in more than 40 supreme court cases—more than anyone else in his generation—including in the shocking draft opinion by Justice Alito that was leaked to the press last week.
What may be confusing about that is that Amar is a self-described liberal, pro-choice Democrat. So why is Alito citing his work in an opinion to overturn Roe? Today, Amar explains why he, in fact, agrees with Alito, what overturning Roe might mean for the country, what the leak says about the culture of American law, and what supporters of legal abortion, like himself, should do now.
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If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was.
Today, we bring you: Everything you need to know about this week's Supreme Court Leak, the new singing-and-dancing truth czar, revelations about youth gender transition and signs of change in the Republican party. Plus some attempts at tasteful humor. TGIF!
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In 1989, Andrew Sullivan wrote “Here Comes The Groom,” an essay making the conservative case for gay marriage. Less than four decades later, the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.
How did that happen in such an amazingly short time? Why were gay rights won so quickly? Was there something about the nature of that movement that made it so successful?
Today, a provocative conversation with Andrew Sullivan about what we can learn from the history of gay rights, how gay became LGBTQIA+ . . . and why he doesn’t support gender ideology.
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The average American adult spends over three hours a day staring into their phone. If you’re a teenager it’s even worse – seven hours. What’s really troubling is that in study after study, people say that they want to be looking at their screens less. They just don’t know how. They’ve lost control.
Johann Hari interviewed over 200 of the world’s leading experts on focus and attention for his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. What he found was that your attention didn’t collapse. It’s been stolen from you. So on today’s episode, while everyone is busy debating what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, Johann explains what Twitter is doing to all of us.
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If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was.
This Friday, we bring you an Honestly special: TGIF! This time built just for your ears and brought to you by America’s favorite lesbians: Nellie and dear friend of the pod, Katie Herzog.
Featuring: The end of the mask mandates, Biden and fellow aging American leaders, the end of CNN+, Libs of Tiktok, and finding some hope in unity around... balls. It's a strange world, but it's our world.
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If you’re confused about what is happening with the economy right now, so are we. Why is inflation up 8.5%? Who’s to blame? Is it the Democrats? Or everyone that’s been pushing easy money?
What should we do in the long term? The short term? Should we be renting? Buying? Good time to get into the market? Or should we be putting a couple thousand away under the mattress? Or into crypto?
Today, Tyler Cowen is here to answer all of your burning questions about the economy. Cowen is a professor at George Mason, runs one of the most useful blogs on the internet (it’s called Marginal Revolution), and is widely considered one of the most influential economists in the country. Cowen, as always, reminds us that conversations about money are often much bigger than money – that at the heart of the conversation about the state of the dollar are fundamental questions about institutional distrust and broken cultural incentives. Cowen helps us answer those questions, too.
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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 on the eve of Passover—and to take us on a tour of the way the Exodus has been used throughout American history—Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who teaches at Yeshiva University and helms the oldest synagogue in the United States.
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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Perhaps you’ve noticed that the thing we call “social media'' is deeply antisocial—the thing that promised to unite us has done precisely the opposite.
A lot of people have tried to explain why. They blame Mark Zuckerberg. Or Jack Dorsey. Or the attention-stealing algorithms of TikTok. Or capitalism. Or human nature.
But the best explanation I have read to date was just published in the Atlantic by my guest today Jonathan Haidt. It is a must-read essay, as are Jonathan’s books, “The Righteous Mind” and “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
Our conversation today, fitting the importance of this subject, is long and deep. It spans the advent of the like button–and how that transformed the way we use the internet–to Jon’s argument that social media is making us unfit for democracy. And that unless we change course we stand to lose everything.
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If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was.
This Friday, we bring you an Honestly special: TGIF! This time built just for your ears and brought to you by America’s favorite lesbians: Nellie and dear friend of the pod, Katie Herzog.
Featuring: Elon Musk v. Twitter, BLM corruption, inflation, “don’t say gay,” plus special guest Jeff Ross, America’s Roastmaster General, on jokes about alopecia. Including his own.
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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 new book Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.
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David Sacks is a paradox. The entrepreneur and venture capitalist helped lay the foundations of the digital world we now live in: He was one of the members of what's known as the PayPal Mafia, alongside people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Max Levchin. He’s also been an early investor in some companies you may have heard of: Airbnb, Facebook, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber.
At the same time, he is something of a whistleblower from inside the world of tech. He believes that Big Tech has far too much power. He argues that the fact that a handful of billionaires get to decide what we are (and aren’t) allowed to say in the new, digital public square is something that the Framers would have been repelled by—and that all Americans should oppose.
Today I spoke to David, now a general partner at Craft Ventures, about the rise of America’s social credit system and how we can defend our civil liberties in the age of the Internet.
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Today we are republishing Bari’s appearance on Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge Podcast, hosted by Peter Robinson.
Peter Robinson is probably best known as a speech-writer for President Ronald Regan. He was the guy who wrote the famous line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Bari and Peter talk about the social movements shaping our culture, how the personal has become political, anti-semitism and the future of the news media.
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It’s been a month since Russia invaded Ukraine. About a fourth of Ukraine’s population has been displaced. Thousands, if not more, have died. And still, ordinary Ukrainians – professors, engineers, ballerinas – are taking up arms to defend their homes and their land. Why do they stay? And do they think the fight can be won?
Today, I talk to three people who have become inadvertent war correspondents in what they call “the fight against evil.” Katerina Sergatskova reported from Kiev and Lviv. Vladislav Davidzon has reported from many of the border crossings as well as from Odessa and Lviv. And Maria Avdeeva remains in Kharkiv. I talk to them about what they’ve seen and what the war has revealed to them about themselves and about their country.
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What if I told you that all the brokenness in our society—from the increased rates in suicide and addiction to the decreased rates in marriage and sex to the crisis of faith in everything from the CDC to political leaders to our democratic elections—weren’t a series of separate catastrophes but symptoms of one underlying condition?
That’s the argument of my guest today, Yuval Levin.
Yuval is a journalist and academic. He has served as a congressional staffer and as a domestic policy staff member under President George W Bush, he’s the author of several books including The Fractured Republic and “A Time to Build.”
I think of him as one of America’s most insightful political philosophers. I learned so much from this conversation and I hope you do, too.
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For the past three weeks, we have watched the people of Ukraine and their president breathe life into virtues that many of us thought were dead or on life support: duty, sacrifice, responsibility, leadership…and courage. Unbelievable courage.
The Ukrainian people know what they’re fighting for. Do we?
Today, no interview. Instead Bari speaks about what we can learn from watching President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people. To read the full text, please go to: bariweiss.substack.com
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Russia’s war against Ukraine has been raging on for almost two weeks now and Ukraine is in crisis. President Zelensky has been begging the United States, together with their allies, to enforce a “no fly zone,” to save innocent lives and help Ukraine win a war they seem likely to lose otherwise. The U.S. has refused. So has NATO. Why?
On today’s episode, Eli Lake and Damir Marusic explain the benefits and risks of imposing a no fly zone over Ukraine, and what’s at stake—for Ukraine, for the U.S., and for the world.
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Lia Thomas is a transgender woman who has, in one year, become the star athlete of the women’s swim team at The University of Pennsylvania. When she competed on the men’s team, she was seeded no. 462 in the NCAA. Now, she’s seeded No. 1 and expected to beat Olympic gold medalist Katy Ledecky, widely considered one of the greatest female swimmers of all time, later this month at the NCAA championship.
Thomas won’t stop there. She recently told Sports Illustrated that she has her sights set on the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
What does the rise of Lia Thomas mean for the future of women’s sports? Suzy Weiss reports from the Harvard pool, where Lia Thomas recently smashed Ivy League records.
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Air raid sirens have been ringing out over the capital of Ukraine for the past week. Russian troops have laid siege to Kharkiv, the second biggest city in the country, and the city of Kherson in the south has already fallen. More than a half of a million Ukranians have fled their homes, with little more than a suitcase or two. Hundreds have been confirmed dead, and surely that number is just the beginning.
Why did Putin invade Ukraine at this moment? What is his endgame—and what is the West’s? Does this war augur the beginning of a new era? Perhaps even a new Cold War?
Today, Niall Ferguson, Walter Russell Mead and Francis Fukuyama discuss whether or not America is up to the task of truly, as Biden said at the State of the Union address, defending freedom from tyranny.
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Zoe Strimpel on the collapse of Western authority, self and geopolitical understanding— and the predictably catastrophic results of our politics of retrenchment, appeasement and pacifism.
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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is one of those pioneering American leaders whose story is for the history books. Born in the segregated south in the 1950s, Rice couldn’t step foot in certain movie theaters and restaurants when she was a little girl. By the time she stepped foot in the White House as a National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, she was one of the most powerful people in the world—and the highest ranking black woman in the history of the United States.
On today’s episode, a conversation with Secretary Rice, who now serves at the Director of Stanford's Hoover Institution, about the most pressing issues facing the country: the future of the GOP, the continued popularity of Donald Trump, the state of our democracy, the culture wars on race and identity politics, immigration, the rise of China, possible war in Russia … and much more.
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Right now, the Winter Olympics are underway in Beijing. But for the Chinese Communist Party, the 2022 Games are an opportunity not simply for athleticism, but for authoritarianism.
Athletes at the Games are subject not just to official Olympics rules, but also the heavy hand of the CCP. They are being spied on—and they have been warned, including by Nancy Pelosi, not to criticize the injustices China is committing in plain sight.
Why is America participating in an Olympics in a country committing genocide? What does it say about our relationship with China? And will historians remember these games in the way we remember the 1936 Berlin Olympics?
Josh Rogin is a foreign policy columnist for The Washington Post, the author of “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century,” and a favorite Honestly guest. Today he breaks down what you aren’t seeing when you tune into this year’s Olympics.
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Eric Scmidt has been a pioneer at every chapter of the tech revolution… from the very beginnings of the internet to helming Google for more than a decade. Now, he’s focused on the next iteration of our digital world: artificial intelligence. His most recent book, written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocker, is called “The Age of AI: And our Human Future.” It investigates how AI is transforming the very foundations of what it means to be human.
Today, our quick question to Google’s former CEO is this: how long do we have until the robots take over?
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Ever since the end of World War II, America has been the dominant world superpower. We have been ready to use that power to defend our national interest. Or to defend a certain set of values. Or both.
But there has always been a tension in this country between isolationism and interventionism. Between those among us who think we should maintain an active role in world affairs—and those who want to pull back and focus on our myriad problems here at home.
That long standing debate is being reignited right now on the Russian-Ukrainian border.
So for today, a debate between Bret Stephens and Matt Taibbi on American Power. When should we use our might? And has recent history proven that we do more harm than good?
Bret Stephens is author of America in Retreat. Matt Taibbi is the author, most recently, of Hate Inc.
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The Covid vaccines are medical miracles. During the pandemic they have been literal life-savers; I’ll never forget the relief I felt after getting that first shot.
Despite the conspiracy theories in some corners of the web or on Fox News, there is simply zero evidence that they are killing people; that they are harming people in large numbers; or that this is all some malicious plot by Big Pharma. There is overwhelming proof that these vaccines prevent serious illness.
Like all medical interventions, though, vaccines can have side effects. And in the case of mRNA vaccines—those from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna—there is a small but real risk for young people, especially young males. The need for an evidence-based discussion about the wisdom of requiring boosters is urgent.
But that’s easier said than done.
Over the course of this pandemic, the public has been told that pronouncements from federal health officials represent “the science.” Distinguished medical experts, including some from our nation’s most elite institutions, who have questioned official Covid recommendations and policies—on everything from lockdowns to masking to vaccine mandates—have often been demonized and sometimes silenced.
And so healthy debate about scientifically complicated and morally complex subjects has been shut down, both by censors and by self-censorship.
David Zweig has been one of those rare journalists who, from the start, has challenged the accepted narrative on Covid. He has published a stream of investigations for New York Magazine, the Atlantic, and Wired—from questioning the wisdom of closing schools, to hospitalization metrics, to masking children—that initially were maligned or ignored, only to be accepted by legacy media and acknowledged by health officials months later.
Today, he reads an article he wrote for Common Sense that tackles the knotty subject of boosters and myocarditis.
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It’s hard to think of an institution in American life that’s more broken than higher education. As universities have abandoned core liberal principles like free speech, bending to students’ demands for censorship, perhaps the most striking feature of all has been the cowardice and silence of tenured professors.
Yale Law professor Amy Chua is not one of them.
Since Chua wrote her bestselling parenting memoir Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother in 2011, she has been no stranger to controversy. She wrote a book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, about why certain cultural groups succeed—and was accused of “cultural racism.” She refused to recant her support for Brett Kavanaugh—and was accused of misogyny. The list goes on.
None of this has stopped her from speaking her mind.
Today, why Amy Chua remains an optimist in the face of unprecedented political tribalism; how her students continue to inspire her even as she’s lost faith in Yale; and why she did, indeed, threaten to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t practice her piano perfectly.
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As a boy growing up in Turkey, Abdullah Antepli thought hating Jews was normal. He read Mein Kampf before he was 15. His parents gave him a children's version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He burned Israeli flags.
Today, he is an imam, a professor at Duke University, and, as he puts it, a recovering antisemite. Imam Adbullah has been fearless about blowing the whistle about rising antisemitism in the Muslim community. In the wake of the recent hostage-taking at the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, he tweeted: “Houston, we have a problem!” He wrote, “we need to honestly discuss the increasing anti-semitism within various Muslim communities.”
Today, on Holocaust Remembrace Day, a conversation with a man who has paid a heavy personal price for working to eradicate Jew-hate and to promote peace between Muslims and Jews. Learn more about Imam Abdullah’s work here.
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At this point in the pandemic, one group of Americans generally gets to show their faces. The other still does not. One group orders groceries from Amazon, while the other packages it. One group enjoys take-out. And the other delivers it in the rain.
Today, in part two of my conversation with ProPublica journalist Alec MacGillis, we unpack the ways the pandemic has exacerbated the already enormous divide between the haves and the have nots. MacGillis discusses his recent book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and how Democrats became such a big part of what he calls “the Amazon coalition.” We also talk about how the stubbornness of our political and media class—and their insistence on doubling down on short-sighted policies—is already reshaping our politics and culture.
If you haven’t yet listened to part one of the conversation, you can do so here.
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As we approach the third year of this pandemic, it’s become painfully clear that the stringent measures we took to mitigate against the virus had all kinds of unintended consequences. For mental health. For the economy. For our cities. And, especially, for our kids.
Today, award-winning investigative journalist Alec MacGillis helps us understand the morally urgent costs of school shutdowns on our youngest generations, and how pandemic policies contributed to the crime surge plaguing so many American cities.
MacGillis reported on these hidden costs with rigor, diligence and empathy well before the rest of the country caught up and said: hold on, these costs may be too high. (You can read many of those stories here.) Today’s episode is part one of my conversation with MacGillis. Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll talk about his recent book about Amazon, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and how Big Tech and progressive policies are accelerating the inequalities that were already running rampant in America.
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Have you hit a wall with Covid? We have.
The irrationality of the current policies and conversations surrounding Covid—guidelines that are coming from our public health authorities; rules coming from our schools and our workplaces; and information coming from our media—is making skeptics out of even the most compliant.
What gives? Why do things seem so nonsensical? Who should we trust? How can we get back to normal—or at least some semblance of normal? And how can we do it responsibly and safely?
To answer these questions, we brought together three doctors who have been islands of sanity in a sea of misinformation and confusion.
Dr. Vinay Prasad is an associate professor of epidemiology at UCSF. Dr. Stefan Baral is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. And Dr. Lucy McBride is a practicing internist in Washington D.C., and author of a popular COVID-19 newsletter.
This was a live subscriber-only Zoom event, and the thousands of listeners who tuned in had the chance to ask the panelists their most pressing and burning COVID questions. If you want to be able to participate in events like this one in the future, head over to bariweiss.substack.com and hit subscribe.
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We are living in an era in which Americans–especially younger ones–say they are increasingly traumatized. In one recent study, 82% of Gen Z respondents said they regularly felt so sad that nothing could cheer them up. And that was before the pandemic.
What is happening? Are things really worse now than they were for the generation that lived through the world wars? Or the Great Depression? And why does it feel–at least in some parts of the culture–that victimhood grants us status?
George Bonanno has thought deeply about these questions. He’s a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, where he heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotions Lab, and he has studied the nature of human resilience for over 30 years. Bonanno’s work with war veterans, 9/11 survivors and more provides an antidote to the idea that humans are fragile or helpless in the face of loss, challenge and grief. Instead, Bonanno claims, when people are exposed to violent or life-threatening events, those events are only “potentially traumatic” and that “a good part of the rest of it is up to us.”
His new book is called The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD.
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A year ago today, something big happened in Washington. Was it a coup? Was it an insurrection? Was it “the worst attack on our democracy since the civil war,” as Joe Biden said? Who is responsible? Should the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, face criminal charges?
Few Republican leaders have been clearer in their answers to those questions–and none have paid a higher price–than Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney.
Because of her decision to impeach the president, Rep. Cheney went from being the highest ranking Republican woman in Congress to being shunned by her own party and stripped of much of her power. Figures on the left that once called Cheney a “warmonger” and worse are now praising her as a hero.
Today, a conversation with Rep. Cheney about why she’s made the choices she’s made, the future of her political career, where the GOP goes from here, and what’s at stake for American democracy.
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As the year ends, we want to share where this podcast began and replay our first episode.
What does the public shaming of Palestinian immigrant Majdi Wadi — and the boycott of his Minneapolis business — say about who we are becoming?
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The abortion debate is top of mind as we enter 2022, with a pending supreme court decision that could radically change the legality and availability of abortion in this country. So, we thought we’d revisit my conversation with writer Caitlin Flanagan.
The most honest thing I’ve ever read about abortion is by Caitlin Flanagan. It’s called “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate: Why We Need to Face the Best Argument From the Other Side.” You can read it here.
Read all of Caitlin’s work for the Atlantic here.
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Over the next few days we are going to be replaying some listener favorites from the last year, starting with what was without a doubt our most provocative and popular episode: a re-examination of the Central Park Karen.
Amy Cooper was not the internet’s first “Karen” — the pejorative used for a demanding, entitled white woman. But as the Central Park dog walker who went viral for calling the police on a black birdwatcher last year, she quickly became the paragon of the archetype.
Within 24 hours, Amy Cooper had been doxxed, fired from her job, and surrendered her dog. She wound up fleeing the country. She hasn’t spoken publicly since last summer. Until now.
In a wide-ranging interview with Kmele Foster, friend of Honestly and co-host of The Fifth Column, we revisit the story of what happened in the park that day. We show what the media intentionally left out of the story. And we examine the cost of mob justice.
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Abigail Shrier, the author of the bestselling book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” was recently invited to speak at Princeton. But this being a college campus in 2021, you can imagine what happened next. The event was moved off campus. It was limited to 35 people. And the police had to be called in because of threats.
But despite the limited audience, Shrier’s message that night was loud and clear: don’t buckle in the face of the mobs. Don’t become a sock puppet to your institution or employer or social circle. Tell the truth. Speak your mind. Reclaim your freedom.
It’s a speech that deserves to be heard by as many people–especially young people–as possible. So today, we share it with all of you.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/abigail-shrier-on-freedom-in-an-age
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Just when we think we have Kim Kardashian pinned she adds another hyphen. She’s a reality star, until she owns Instagram. She’s an influencer, until she becomes a business mogul. She’s the sexual icon of a generation, but also a mother of four. And now, this week, she’s one step closer to being a lawyer.
Somewhere between 2007, when “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” first premiered and now, she mastered media in a way that has transformed it forever. She was in digital while we were still in analog. So: what’s it like to be the first one living in the metaverse?
We ask that–plus: Trump, Kanye, cancel culture, cultural appropriation, beauty, TikTok, and her favorite cast member on SNL–and much more on today’s episode.
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In 2019, Jussie Smollett’s hate crime allegations captured the nation. The actor and singer claimed that two men beat him, poured bleach over his head, and tied a noose around his neck—all while shouting homophobic and racial slurs.
Many pointed to his story as proof that our country, even in liberal cities like Chicago, is still plagued by the most evil forms of racism. But a few weeks later, we got news that his story was a complete lie. And today, a jury found him guilty of just that.
Why did he do it? On today’s episode, political scientist Wilfred Reilly, author of “Hate Crime Hoaxes,” explains why people like Jussie Smollett are willing to risk everything to gain the status of a victim.
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Eccentric economist and brilliant thinker Tyler Cowen answers our questions about the confusing state of the economy. We talk about: inflation, the stock market, “The Great Resignation”, billionaires, income inequality, crypto, Texas vs San Francisco, the metaverse, good food, working remotely, what states like Virginia swinging back toward the right might mean for national politics and more.
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Desmond Shum knows well the cost of doing business in China. Born to a humble family that was marginalized during the Cultural Revolution, he became a wildly successful entrepreneur, along with his ex-wife Whitney, to the tune of billions of dollars. But just as quickly as the Chinese Communist Party elite helped enrich the couple, it tore them down.
In 2017, Whitney disappeared, not to be seen or heard from for four years. She reemerged only on the eve of Desmond’s new book, Red Roulette. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the CCP routinely disappears people who fall out of the Party’s favor. Most recently, tennis champion Peng Shuai vanished after accusing a high-ranking official of sexual assault.
Today, Desmond Shum talks about how all of this happens, as well as his personal experiences during China’s economic boom, how companies like Blackrock both support and fall for CCP propaganda and more.
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If your family is anything like mine, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to take a break from work, to bask in one others’ presence, and to fight savagely over the hottest political issues of the day.
And nothing is more contentious than Covid: mask policies; vaccine mandates; whether kids should be confined to the backyard; and, most urgently, whether we can safely--and finally--call time on the pandemic.
To answer those questions and more, I called up Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health of nearly 20 years and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Makary has published over 250 scientific articles and is the author, most recently, of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care and How to Fix It.” He offers a no-nonsense approach to the two pandemics he sees plaguing the country; the coronavirus and the “pandemic of lunacy.”
Veteran Honestly listeners will notice that this episode may sound a bit different. We’re piloting a new format, which we’re calling “Quick Question.” So email your burning ones-- even if they’re not quick--to [email protected]. Please include “QQ” in the subject line.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse in the last days of August 2020: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020 he had done just that: killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out, I was mostly wrong. And if you relied on the mainstream media when it came to Kyle Rittenhouse, you would have been too. Today, a conversation with Jesse Singal, one of the independent journalists who got this story right, and about why so many got it so wrong.
Follow Jesse’s work at jessesingal.substack.com
Read my full column on the Rittenhouse trial: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse
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First, Andrew Yang ran for President, and he could barely get mainstream media’s attention. Then, he ran for Mayor of New York City, and suddenly, his every move was being scrutinized.
Following those two failed campaigns Andrew announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party altogether and announced the formation of a new third party, Forward, this past October. Today, a conversation on how, and why, Yang plans to take on the two-party system, and what last week’s elections tell us about the political temperature of the country. Plus, universal basic income, Dave Chapelle, open primary voting, establishment politics, The New York Times, the left wing of the Democrats, cryptocurrency, and Confederate statues.
Andrew’s new book is called, “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy.”
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It’s been three years since the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the most lethal attack on Jews on U.S. soil. That day was, for me, as it was for so many others, a watershed event. The country I knew was changing. While anti-semitic incidents in America had been climbing for a few years, this was different. Jews were afraid, and no longer felt safe. After Pittsburgh, there were countless other disturbing incidents: from a shooter at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey to a man with a machete at a Hanukkah party in Munsey. This past spring, antisemitic attacks skyrocketed, and even in a year where George Floyd’s killing and attacks against Asian Americans rightly captured our attention, Jews are still the number one victim of hate crimes in America.
But what’s most shocking is that in an era where we worry so much about hatred and bigotry and exclusion, Jews don’t seem to count; Jews don’t seem to make headlines. My guest today, Dara Horn, whose book ‘People Love Dead Jews’ is a brilliant explanation of anti-semitism in 2021, joins us for a conversation about how most of the world thinks about Jews, and how the future of America, and the future of American Jews, may be one and the same.
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"Defund the police" or "healthy at every size" or "marriage is just an oppressive institution of the patriarchy" - these are just a few of the ideas that are becoming common doctrine among American elites. And Rob Henderson has described these new orthodoxies as “Luxury Beliefs.”
He says, much like second homes on the beach or Bentleys, luxury beliefs are thoughts that can only be afforded by people whose wealth shields them from the very harm those beliefs can cause to the rest of us. Henderson, a graduate of Yale and a PhD student at Cambridge, should have been susceptible to the very ideas he now criticizes. But the reason he remained immune to the groupthink of academia is because he was, in many ways, an outsider looking in. He grew up in a kind of chaos and suffering that most people shouting about white privilege and the evils of the musical Hamilton could never understand. And that’s why he is able to so accurately observe the indulgence and hypocrisy of our elite class, and call it out for what it is: a luxury.
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If you’ve just heard of the word “TERF” (it stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) it was probably because of Dave Chapelle’s new Netflix special, “The Closer.” The comedian declared himself “Team TERF.” But what does that really mean?
Julie Bindel would know. She has been physically attacked; her work has been banned; and she’s been disinvited from lectures all because of the accusation that she is a TERF.
Bindel isn’t new to the culture wars. The self-proclaimed radical feminist has been active in the movement since 1979. Today she breaks down the battle raging inside the feminist movement and makes me wonder: am I a feminist?
Her new book, endorsed by J.K. Rowling, is called “Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation.”
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Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist, a father of four, an author . . . and also someone who lives with a tremendous amount of pain. Ross has been battling chronic Lyme disease since 2015. It's a disease that doesn’t officially exist, but it managed to bring this otherwise healthy man to his knees.
This is a conversation about something we all have or will experience: pain. How pain can distort, but also how it can clarify and humanize. In Ross's telling, pain has proven a deeply powerful teacher.
Ross is one of my favorite thinkers and writers, so we also covered some of his core topics: Catholicism, populism, the future of the political right and left, the internet, and, of course, decadence.
You can buy his new book, "The Deep Places," here:
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Places-Memoir-Illness-Discovery-ebook/dp/B08Y1BFFWC
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Last week, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, confirmed what we already felt; that big tech platform’s algorithms are manipulating our sense of reality, and ourselves, and in doing so enriching themselves.
Jaron Lanier, the technologist, philosopher, and virtual reality pioneer has been warning us about the dangers of the internet for years. Today, a conversation with Jaron, from his home in California, about the dangers of groupthink, digital maoism, ideology sluts, censorship, capitalism, universal basic income, Facebook, robots, billionaires, wokeness and losing yourself in the ambiguity of the internet’s fake reality.
Can the problems of the Information Age be fixed by more regulation? Or will it take a fundamental shift in how we structure our society, and our relationship to emergent technologies to reclaim our humanity?
In addition to being an author of the internet, he worked at Atari and Microsoft in the early days, Jaron wrote, ”Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” and “Dawn of the New Everything.” He appeared in the movie “The Social Dilemma.”
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The most honest thing I’ve ever read about abortion is by Caitlin Flanagan. It’s called “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate: Why We Need to Face the Best Argument From the Other Side.” You can read it here.
On today’s episode, and in light of the new law in Texas, which effectively bans abortion, a conversation with my friend Caitlin. We talk about the best arguments on both sides of this issue, the reality of life before Roe v. Wade, the state of feminism and more.
Read all of Caitlin’s work for the Atlantic here.
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Four decades ago, Glenn C. Loury became the first tenured black professor of economics in Harvard’s history. Ever since then, he has made waves for his willingness to buck the elite intellectual establishment; for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality; and for his incisive cultural criticism.
He is a man of seeming contradictions: he rails against the divisiveness of woke politics from his post at Brown University, one of America’s most left wing campuses. He worries about what the death of God means for the country -- though he calls his own past religious beliefs a “benevolent self-delusion.” In the 80s, Glenn challenged his fellow black Americans to combat the “enemy from within,” while he himself battled demons like adultery and addiction.
But Glenn’s ability to re-examine his positions and look at his own past with clear eyes is hardly a fault. Glenn is a man who, in a time of lies told for the sake of political convenience, strives to tell the truth even when the truth is hard. Or complicated. Or an affront to our feelings. Or contradicts what we wish were true.
In today’s conversation: race, racism, Black Lives Matter, school choice, standardized tests, crack, sexual infidelity, Christianity, the Nation of Islam, neoconservatism, Harvard, groupthink, and pretty much every other hot-button subject you can imagine. Plus, Glenn’s own remarkable life story.
Glenn's own podcast, "The Glenn Show" is available through Substack and in video form on his new Youtube channel.
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So much of the conversation about Covid-19 is angry and full of finger-pointing. Dr. Vinay Prasad has consistently been able to cut through the noise, the confusion, and the endless bickering. He does this by consistently avoiding the blame game and following the data wherever it leads.
Dr. Prasad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. His writing, videos and tweets have been among my most reliable sources for information throughout the pandemic. His positions are nuanced, well-considered, and show exactly the kind of level-headedness and evidence-based decision-making that you want from someone you’re trusting your health to.
The conversation covers what the pandemic has revealed about the state of scientific research; policy questions like masking, vaccinating children, and vaccine passports. And, most importantly, vaccine hesitancy. Dr. Prasad explains why shaming, blaming, and censoring the unvaccinated is a losing strategy -- and what might be a better one.
Follow Vinay on Twitter, if you like: https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
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It’s been a month since the fall of Afghanistan. And Black Hawk helicopters and Humvees aren’t the only things we left behind. Trapped in a country now controlled by the Taliban are hundreds of thousands of America’s Afghan allies. These are the interpreters, advisers and others who worked with the U.S. government and with American organizations--and who we promised we would never abandon.
Their chance at freedom — at life — now relies on normal Americans who are determined to right what the White House has gotten so terribly wrong. They are a rag-tag group of military veterans, human-rights activists, ex-special forces, State Department officials, non-profit organizers and private individuals with the kind of resources necessary to charter planes. And they have formed a 21st-century Underground Railroad.
In time, history books will be written about these Americans and the Afghans they saved.Today, the story of one of them. A 15-year-old girl in Kabul named Rahima. And a woman called Esther in East Moline, Illinois, who stepped into the vacuum left by the U.S. government.
To learn more about the Underground Railroad: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/inside-the-underground-railroad-out
f you are interested in helping people like Rahima please consider supporting: https://nooneleft.org and https://afghanevac.org
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Peter Boghossian is the first one to tell you: he's no victim of cancel culture. The philosophy professor has long had a taste for stoking debate, questioning orthodoxies, and exposing the brokenness of an academic system that values identity-based grievances over scholarship. He did that, in part, by writing phony papers like "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" and getting them published by respected, peer-reviewed journals.
That project and others painted a target on Peter’s back on Portland State's campus, where he was subjected to endless investigations and harassment.
This week, Peter resigned in a letter writing to the school's provost: “The university transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a social justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only output was grievance and division.”
In this episode, a frank conversation about the culture of higher education, and how to fight back against radicalism without becoming radicalized yourself.
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Abigail Shrier is a lawyer, a reporter and author of Irreversible Damage. One way to describe her book would be: controversial. She has been accused of spreading misinformation by GLAAD. A prominent ACLU lawyer called for her book to be banned. A favorable review of the book in Science-Based Medicine ignited an online mob, which led to the journal disappearing that first review and replacing it with a negative one. Amazon and Target have also been pressured to stop carrying Shrier's book.
But it hasn’t worked. Despite being ignored by outlets like the New York Times Book Review, Irreversible Damage is an enormous bestseller. Some readers felt so passionately about this book that they took out billboards advertising it on their own dime.
Both the subject that Abigail writes about and the treatment of her book deserve your attention.
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Between the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, an endless pandemic, a broken education system, and competent leaders nowhere in sight, it can feel like America is in a constant state of meltdown.
On today's episode, renowned historian Niall Ferguson answers the big questions: how did we get here? Is American decline inevitable? And if not, what can be done to renew the culture and the country?
Niall is the author of nearly 20 books. His latest is: "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe."
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In Part II, a diagnosis of the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party with Josh Rogin. Josh explains how U.S policy mistakes in the 20th century handed more power to China in the 21st, how the Chinese government wields power over Big Tech, Hollywood, and higher education on U.S. soil, and whether we’re headed for another Cold War.
“The global scale of the China challenge is not just about China’s rise, it’s not just about the genocide,” says Josh, “It’s about what kind of world we want to live in.”
Plus, a call with Josh to discuss the American withdrawal of Afghanistan, and how the execution of that withdrawal creates a power vacuum for China to fill.
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When the pandemic began eighteen months ago, anyone who dared suggest that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China, was dismissed as a crank, or otherwise accused of racism, xenophobia, and refusing to “believe science.” Why was this highly plausible theory unsayable?
On today’s podcast, Josh Rogin, a foreign policy columnist for the Washington Post and author of “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century” answers that question. He makes the powerful case that it all comes back to the power of the Chinese Communist Party, which he likens to the Gambino crime family. If the Gambinos, that is, were running one of the richest countries in the world.
Josh is a phenomenal guest and we couldn’t contain our conversation to just one episode. So today, in Part One, a look into what went down in Wuhan and Washington during the fateful month of January 2020. We show how the “Lab Leak Theory,” due in big part to Josh’s reporting, went from a fringe conspiracy theory to a credible explanation for the virus that continues to ravage the planet. Also discussed: Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Peter Daszak, Xi Jinping, Elaine Chao, Henry Kissinger.
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How did this happen? How did we spend 20 years, over 2 trillion dollars and over 2,000 American lives to wind up losing Afghanistan to the Taliban in under two weeks? Was the mission doomed from the start? Was it political incompetence? Or was it the fault of the military brass who refused to be honest about what it would take to win?
Today, a frank and wide-ranging conversation with H.R. McMaster, former National Security Advisor and three-star general. We talk about Obama, Trump, Biden; the corruption and incompetence of our elites; rising isolationism; and why he’s still bullish about America.
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For several months, the journalist Katie Herzog has been talking to some of the country's top doctors and professors—not about COVID, or vaccines—but about a new, creeping orthodoxy that’s taken over the hospitals and medical schools where they work. Those doctors say that whole areas of research are off-limits. They say that top physicians are treating patients based on their race. That professors are apologizing for saying ‘male’ and ‘female’ and that students are policing teachers. And in more than a few alarming instances, politics has come before patients. As one doctor put it: “Wokeness feels like an existential threat."Today, Katie joins us to discuss the ideological purge happening within American medicine, where the stakes could not be higher.
If you haven't read her newsmaking stories, published in our newsletter, we highly recommend checking them out
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Amy Cooper was not the internet’s first “Karen” — the pejorative used for a demanding, entitled white woman. But as the Central Park dog walker who went viral for calling the police on a black birdwatcher last year, she quickly became the paragon of the archetype.
Within 24 hours, Amy Cooper had been doxxed, fired from her job, and surrendered her dog. She wound up fleeing the country. She hasn’t spoken publicly since last summer. Until now.
In a wide-ranging interview with Kmele Foster, friend of Honestly and co-host of The Fifth Column, we revisit the story of what happened in the park that day. We show what the media intentionally left out of the story. And we examine the cost of mob justice.
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Why are men the way they are? Are they naturally more aggressive? And is it fair for transwomen to compete in sports separated by sex? Is it possible to overcome our animal instincts?
And why has it gotten so hard to ask these questions out loud? To admit that there are any differences between men and women?
On today’s episode, a deep dive into these subjects and more with Carole Hooven, the author of “‘T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us." The book was named one of the WSJ’s ten best.
Carole is an evolutionary biologist and lecturer at Harvard, where she focuses on behavioral endocrinology and sex differences. Here, she explains the science of T, the misinformation about sex, and the importance of telling the truth, even if it makes you unpopular.
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Maud Maron is the picture of a passionate progressive. She was a Planned Parenthood escort; a research assistant for a Black Panther leader; a Bernie voter; a public school parent; and, most significantly, a public defender who worked for many years at Legal Aid.
But fellow progressives, including her colleagues at Legal Aid, now insist that Maud is racist, that she supports segregation, that she is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a modern version of Bull Connor.
How did this happen? Why is Maron being lied about so flagrantly? And why did she recently decide to sue Legal Aid, the institution to which she dedicated her career?
You've probably never heard of Maud Maron. But I think you will be shocked by her story -- and inspired by her decision to stand up to a tsunami of lies.
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One year after her resignation from the New York Times, Bari sits down with author (and America's most famous Stoic) Ryan Holiday to talk about how the media broke and who is to blame for breaking it. Holiday knows about fake news: In his 2012 bestseller, “Trust Me, I'm Lying,” he explains how he manipulated the media on behalf of himself and his clients, including Tucker Max and Dov Charney of American Apparel. Holiday is also the author of "Conspiracy," the story of how billionaire Peter Thiel brought down the gossip site Gawker. We discuss the unintended consequences of Thiel's success, the economics of outrage, Stoicism, opening a bookstore during COVID, and much more.
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All of a sudden, the phrase "Critical Race Theory" seems like it's everywhere. If you are confused by the phrase, or wonder how everyone seems to have an opinion about it, you aren't alone. Despite what some in the mainstream media insist, you do not need a PhD or a law degree to understand this subject. Today, we clear up what it means. We explain why parents across the country are showing up at school board meetings to voice their opposition to it. And we host a debate between Chris Rufo and David French about what the government ought to do about it.
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A recent study from the American Medical Association found that one-third of men between the ages of 18 to 24 reported having no sex at all in the previous year — and that was before the COVID lockdowns. Meantime, the marriage rate and the birth rate are both at historic lows.
What’s at a historic high is online porn. In 2019, more than five billion hours of porn were watched on Pornhub alone. That’s 500 thousand years worth of time.
My guest today has been at the forefront of this change.
Meet Aella. She has been doing sex work online and in real life for the past decade and she’s now killing on a platform called OnlyFans, where she charges for her followers for her explicit content. It’s like Substack. Sort of. Whatever preconceptions you have about porn stars I assure you she will challenge them.
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For 14 years, Winston Marshall was the banjo player and lead guitarist of the massively successful band Mumford & Sons. Last week, following a viral incident over a tweet, he quit the band: "I could remain and continue to self-censor but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience. I’ve already felt that beginning." On today's episode, Winston speaks exclusively with Bari about why he chose to walk away from the band he loved.
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For 26 years, the swash-buckling, pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily was a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party. This week, after its offices were ransacked, its founder was jailed ,and five of its executives were arrested, it printed its very last edition. The paper's death marks the death of Hong Kong's free press.We hear from a dogged young reporter who takes us inside the newsroom to the last days of Apple Daily, and hear her explain why what is happening to her and her colleagues is not only a threat to them, but to us all.
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Why does every institution feel so broken? Why would newspapers sacrifice their credibility to suppress something like the lab leak theory? Why does it feel like small differences of opinion so quickly turn into hate? Martin Gurri saw it all coming. The CIA analyst predicted Trump, Brexit, WallStreetBets, BLM, the Yellow vests, and believes all of these movements are connected by a single force: THE INTERNET. The printing press transformed humanity in the 1400s, but Gurri argues that we are now living through a more radical transformation. One that is just beginning. Gurri's prescient book is recommended by our host more than any other. If you haven't read it, don't wait.
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The billionaire entrepreneur on the ProPublica tax report, capitalism, corporate cowardice, the Chinese Communist Party, crypto & more
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What the public shaming of Palestinian immigrant Majdi Wadi — and the boycott of his Minneapolis business — says about who we are becoming.
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The most interesting conversations in American life now happen in private. This show is bringing them out of the closet. Stories no one else is telling and conversations with the most fascinating people in the country, every week from former New York Times and Wall Street Journal journalist Bari Weiss.
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.