The Free Press: Ben Meets America

Have San Francisco’s ‘Harm Reduction’ Tactics Worked?

Ben Kawaller — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:59:23 GMT

We asked police, addicts, and residents to weigh in—while people appeared to overdose in front of our eyes. With politicians considering mass arrests, the city may be at a turning point. Ben Kawaller reports.

WATCH: Is San Francisco Ready to Govern Again?

Ben Kawaller — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 22:46:32 GMT

A lot can change in four years.

Take, for example, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which operates as a city council. Back in 2021, “equity” was the board’s guiding principle. At its inaugural meeting in January of that year, the word was uttered nearly two dozen times. “Equity and racial justice are the issues that matter,” Catherine Stefani, a f…

Should Fifth Graders Learn What It Means to Be Transgender?

Ben Kawaller — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:29:40 GMT

When most Americans hear “sex ed,” the first thing that likely springs to mind is learning about the human reproductive system and how to avoid making use of it.

That’s exactly the kind of cis-heteronormative belief—the invidious notion that, normally, people are neither transgender nor gay—the National Sex Education Standards (NSES) and its advocates ar…

Ben Kawaller Asks New Yorkers: Is Luigi Mangione a Hero or a Villain?

Ben Kawaller — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 02:10:19 GMT

When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on a New York City sidewalk at dawn on December 4, certain pockets of the internet rejoiced.

TikToks and tweets celebrated the alleged murderer, Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, for what some called an act of resistance against a perversely incentivized healthcare industry. Comments ranged from …

WATCH: Steve Bannon Talks Luigi Mangione, Racial Representation, and America’s Seething Anger

Ben Kawaller — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 02:25:13 GMT

On Sunday night, members of New York’s Republican elite gathered at Cipriani Wall Street and raised a collective champagne flute to economic populism.

Speaking at the New York Young Republican Club’s 112th annual gala, guest of honor Steve Bannon delivered a gleeful, vengeful, triumphant indictment of Democrats, mainstream media, and corporate America. He also congratulated the audience on being a part of the movement that elected Trump: “Each and every one of you have changed the direction of this country by showing that populism is inclusive.”

His celebration of inclusion might be surprising to readers of The New York Times, which once equated Trump’s former campaign adviser with “racism, sexism, antisemitism, and nativism.” But Bannon—now free from his four-month prison stint for defying a January 6–related subpoena and seemingly undaunted by his looming trial in February for “Build the Wall” fundraising fraud—was happy to mingle with what he called the “multi-ethnic,” “multiracial” crowd behind Trump’s latest victory.

Meanwhile, his populist message has remained firmly intact. “You’re going to have to raise taxes on the wealthy,” he announced to the attendees, who paid as much as $4,700 per ticket to attend the gala.

WATCH: Matt Walsh Talks DEI, Division, and Robin DiAngelo

Ben Kawaller — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 18:32:10 GMT

What If the Most Notorious Murder of a Gay Man Wasn’t a Hate Crime?

Ben Kawaller — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 10:01:51 GMT

Douglas Murray’s Things Worth Remembering column is taking a brief summer hiatus. The man deserves a break! He’ll be back in your inbox next Sunday, we promise.

But today we have something really important for you from Ben Kawaller.

This month—Pride month—he headed to the site of the most infamous anti-gay hate crime in American history. In October 1998, …

WATCH: Kicked Out of a Climate Rally

Ben Kawaller — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:35:01 GMT

I spent a chilly Sunday afternoon in April trying to interview members of the New York City chapter of the international environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion, or “XR.” Known for their disruptive tactics, the activists may be familiar to readers for their recent disruptions to a Broadway play, the U.S. Open, and the flow of traffic.

On the day I t…

WATCH: Ben Kawaller Tries to Ruin the Kentucky Derby

Ben Kawaller — Tue, 21 May 2024 21:48:00 GMT

I was raised in a wealthy, liberal area of Brooklyn, which means that I did not grow up worrying about money, and that I atone for this sin by feeling terrible about it. I come from the milieu that produced the iconic image of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the 2021 Met Gala wearing a designer dress that demanded “Tax the Rich.” Like the Democratic congres…

WATCH: Is America Racist? Reggae Fans Aren’t So Sure

Ben Kawaller — Tue, 14 May 2024 20:56:59 GMT

I arrived at last month’s Dallas Reggae Festival in a state of near-total ignorance, as is typical. I can name exactly one reggae artist (Bob Marley), who I am fairly but not completely certain is dead. As for reggae culture, all I knew was that it is about “one love,” which I thought had something to do with our common humanity. That’s in fact what dre…

WATCH: An Atheist Finds Faith Among the Mormons

Ben Kawaller — Wed, 01 May 2024 11:07:12 GMT

As a gay teen in the early aughts, raised atheist in Brooklyn among folks who could handle a bit of sexual deviance, I neatly divided people into good and evil based on whether or not they supported gay rights. So if you’d asked me back then what I thought of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’d probably have trashed the lot of them. It …

WATCH: The California Progressives Trying to Cancel Affordable Housing

Ben Kawaller — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 13:17:11 GMT

I have lived in or around West Hollywood since 2012. Founded in 1984 atop the twin pillars of rent control and gay rights, the city has become a haven for the un-landed and the non-gender-conforming, both of which describe me, insofar as I own no property and fail that most basic test of manhood, heterosexuality.

If I sound a bit self-loathing, maybe it…

WATCH: ‘This Is My First Rodeo’ | Ben Meets America

Ben Kawaller — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:01:25 GMT

Last month I attended The American Rodeo in Arlington, Texas, a city of around 400,000 souls situated between Dallas and Fort Worth. This was my first rodeo, and it did not take me long after entering its host venue, the gargantuan Globe Life Field, to realize that I did not know what a rodeo was. If you’d asked me six weeks ago to define the term, I would have said something like, “It’s when you watch someone career around an enclosed pen on an animal.”

Which is actually not too far off. But what I hadn’t realized is that a rodeo is actually a sporting event.

You see, some people are especially good at bending these animals to their will, and if you are one of those people, you can win competitions for things like making the animals run very fast, or tying the animals up very quickly, or not dying while trying to sit on one of the animals.

Of course, I wasn’t really there for the games; I was there to talk to the crowd about what makes our society so divided. If you’re tuning in for the first time to my new series—“Ben Meets America”—I was born and raised in progressive Brooklyn, I now live in West Hollywood, and I will admit to being soft in some fundamental way. Suffice it to say I get a more transcendent high from watching a torch song than I do from watching a man hurl a small cow to the ground.

But, in fact, theater and rodeo have their similarities. If you’ve been to a play in recent years, you will have suffered the degradation of a “land acknowledgement.” This is when the audience is told before the show—either in an announcement or in the program notes—that they’ve gathered on land stolen from whatever Native American tribe existed there years ago. My sense is that some of this is rooted in the idea that America itself is fundamentally illegitimate. Whatever’s behind it, the inclusion of a land acknowledgement has become de rigueur.

I did not think conservatives did land acknowledgements, so I was surprised when the Native American actor Mo Brings Plenty appeared before the start of one of the competitions and performed a minute or two of indigenous wailing. I believe the intent of this was to, well, acknowledge the fact that Native American bloodshed was central to the expansion of the American West. What I did not expect was the incongruence of what came after. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. I’m still puzzling over its significance.

In the end, however, I decided I prefer the conservative version of a land acknowledgement. Unlike the inane liberal sacrament, it appears to be capable of expressing two truths at once: that oceans of indigenous blood were spilled in the creation of this country, and that we live in one of the greatest nations on earth.

Even if one of our favorite spectator sports is man versus cow.

Only paid subscribers can see Ben’s video on The American Rodeo. Become one today and scroll down to watch.

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WATCH: RFK Jr.’s Supporters Made Me Doubt the Truth

Ben Kawaller — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:02:09 GMT

Last week I was in Oakland, California, where the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. officially announced his running mate, the lawyer and technologist Nicole Shanahan.

RFK Jr., as I’m sure you’ve heard, is a man who believes our institutions have been utterly corrupted by corporate influence, and that he is the only candidate who c…

Ben Meets the Lady Lowriders of California

Ben Kawaller — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:08:20 GMT

A few weeks ago I attended an extralegal assembly of classic-car fanatics hosted by a Southern California–based society called the Lady Lowrider Car Club. The members had overtaken a Pasadena thoroughfare in celebration of International Women’s Month, which is the month we’re currently in, if you’re wondering why you’ve been seeing so many women lately.

…

It’s Harder to Hate the Other Side When You Come Face to Face

Ben Kawaller — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:01:34 GMT

We all know the stereotypes of one another. The Bud Light–protesting Republican NASCAR fan. The they/them-pronouned museum worker unionizing for three months off during summer.

But aren’t these quick sketches all a little tired? Is this what you actually see in the world? Isn’t there more to say? I feel like I get enough of these caricatures reading the…

WATCH: Ben Kawaller Learns to Be a Real Man

Ben Kawaller — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:01:22 GMT

VIDEO: Peace Is for Suckers

Ben Kawaller — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 18:00:19 GMT

I went to my first Free Palestine protest this month. I’ll start with the good news: at no point did I, a poster child for the Ashkenazim, feel unsafe. Sure, one of the speakers, Frank Cardenas of the Peace and Freedom Party, drew cheers and applause with the line, “Do I condemn Hamas? Hell no!” But he also assured the crowd that the current conflict wa…

VIDEO: The Free Press Meets the Democratic Socialists of America

Ben Kawaller — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 10:01:15 GMT

When I went to Chicago last month to cover the Democratic Socialists of America convention, my main worry was that some brilliant socialist would run circles around me. I’m still traumatized from a collegiate brush with Karl Marx, who I found impossible: our time on this beautiful earth is short, and I need to be hooked by page one.

My fear of being expo…

VIDEO: Pork Chops! Politics! The Free Press Goes to the Iowa State Fair.

Ben Kawaller — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 10:02:52 GMT

I do not have terribly agrarian instincts. My primary interest as a kid was musical theater; I think the closest I have come to cultivating anything was when I was briefly the owner of a Chia Pet.

But this past weekend, I spent my time surrounded by a radically different type of human: people who, it would seem, have bent the land—or at least some anima…