The Free Press
It’s Monday, January 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Suzy Weiss on why all of Congress is an old age home, a new report on TikTok’s indoctrination of U.S. kids, and the parade of skeletons on the red carpet.
But first: Campus antisemitism is back with a vengeance.
It’s been over a year since three Ivy League presidents lost their jobs for refusing to respond appropriately to the explosion of antisemitism on their campuses.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik didn’t get grilled by Elise Stefanik at that hearing. She resigned suddenly in August. But her school is arguably the worst of all.
Last year, in addition to the infamous takeover of Hamilton Hall during which 112 people were arrested, Jewish students reported being chased out of dorms, spat on, and pinned against walls. One was told to “go back to Poland.” (Read about all of that and more in this 90-page report.)
But if you thought this year was calmer, think again.
Take a recent exhibit at Columbia, named “Hind’s House” after a 5-year-old Gazan girl, Hind Rajab, who was killed in Israel’s war with Hamas. At the two-day event in November, hosted by a campus-affiliated, pro-Palestianian group called Alpha Delta Phi (ADP), Columbia students showed off the tools and plans behind their occupation of Hamilton Hall.
Wrenches, hammers, ropes, and wire cutters were treated like a museum exhibit, next to the message: “DO NOT GET YOUR FINGERPRINTS ON THESE!!”
One wall was covered with artworks calling for Ceasefire Now, with some pieces merging Jewish imagery with violence, including a blood-spattered Jewish star.
On November 14, four days after the Hind’s House event, two Jewish students at Columbia filed a Title VI complaint, which The Free Press is reporting today for the first time. In it, Shoshana Aufzien and Alon Levin describe the “terrorist propaganda and antisemitic tropes” displayed “in such a blatant manner” that it made them “feel targeted and unsafe.”
Find out what else they saw at the exhibit, along with video of a speaker calling for a “Zionist-free NYC,” by reading Maya Sulkin’s exclusive report: “Inside Columbia University’s ‘Museum of Terror’.”
China’s “Indoctrination Isn’t Hypothetical. It’s Real.”
On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of TikTok v. Garland. The suit explores whether the government can force a ban or a sale of the immensely popular social media platform—something that must take place by January 19, thanks to a law passed in April with bipartisan support. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, argues that the congressional intervention restricts the speech rights of Americans. But a lower court rejected that argument, citing national security grounds.
Now, a new peer-reviewed report by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), provided exclusively to The Free Press, documents how TikTok brainwashes young Americans to support China. “The Supreme Court hearing now isn’t about whether or not we’re dealing with a hypothetical threat,” Joel Finkelstein, director and chief science officer at NCRI, told The Free Press’s Jay Solomon. “The Supreme Court hearing is about whether we’re going to allow this continued indoctrination.”
Read Jay’s piece about the report and its implications, “New Report: TikTok Brainwashed America’s Youth.”
The Senate: Our National Nursing Home
It’s a running joke that the U.S. Congress has become a federally funded nursing home. While Texas Rep. Kay Granger recently disappeared from Congress to secretly get treatment for dementia, Suzy Weiss remembers her time as a Senate page, and says many of its elected leaders were frail, forgetful, and even incontinent. “Aides,” Suzy writes, “would drop off congresspeople at meetings with a packed lunch, giving their elbow a squeeze before they left, letting them know when they’d be back to pick them up. Watching Harry Reid, who was tall and bony, walk down the marble hallway elicited the same feeling as when my grandmother treads over an icy sidewalk. Please don’t let me see something violent today.”
As per usual with Suzy, when you read her article, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Try both. Check out her piece: It’s Not Just Kay Granger. All of Congress Is an Old Age Home.
As he prepares to leave office, President Biden has been making arms deals with allies. On Friday, the State Department announced it had approved the sale of $3.6 billion worth of air-to-air missiles with Japan. Then, on Saturday, Biden’s State Department notified Congress of its plan to approve $8 billion worth of arms to Israel, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells. It’s one of the largest new arms sales since the war in Gaza began. The deal will have to be approved by committees in both the House and Senate.
A new propaganda video shows that 19-year-old Israeli hostage Liri Albag is alive. In the video, released by Hamas, Albag places sole responsibility for her plight on the Israeli government and army. Her parents have called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seal an immediate ceasefire deal that allows the return of living hostages and the bodies of those who died while in captivity.
China is experiencing a new outbreak of human metapneumovirus (HMPV), a little-known respiratory virus that causes flu-like symptoms. As it did with the Covid virus, the Chinese government is downplaying the outbreak, saying in this case that it is an annual winter occurrence. According to health authorities, the virus circulates seasonally in many parts of the world, including the United States. Let’s hope that this time, China is right.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni paid a surprise visit to president-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday. The two reportedly watched a screening of a Trump-friendly documentary about John Eastman, a lawyer who was criminally indicted for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Addressing a crowd at the residence, Trump called Meloni a “fantastic woman” and said she has “taken Europe by storm.”
On Saturday, President Biden awarded 19 people the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Biden’s picks included billionaire investor and progressive megadonor George Soros, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and Bono, the U2 frontman who devotes himself to humanitarian causes in the developing world. Less controversial awardees included actor Michael J. Fox, whose Parkinson’s foundation has raised some $2 billion in leading the effort to find a cure for the disease, and basketball legend Magic Johnson. Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, who inspired Meryl Streep’s villainous character Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, also received the award, presumably for putting First Lady Jill Biden on the cover twice.
Yesterday, New York City became the first in the country to introduce congestion pricing. From now on, most drivers entering Manhattan on 60th Street or below will be charged $9. But combined with the cost of crossing into the borough by tunnel or bridge, and depending on whether one has an EZ Pass or uses toll by plate, it could be more like $27, and even higher for trucks and larger vehicles. The plan was approved in 2019 as part of the state’s budget but was subject to further delays. Governor Kathy Hochul waited until after the November 5 election to move forward with the unpopular charge. Small business owners, firefighters, and plumbers told the New York Post that the pricing is deeply unfair and amounts to being “taxed to work” in Manhattan.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of nationwide student test scores found that “girls have lost ground in reading, math and science at a troubling rate.” For instance, in 2019, eighth grade girls scored a math average of 517 and boys 514 on a scale of 0 to 1,000, but by 2023 this had dropped to 481 and 495, respectively. Boys have been losing ground as well, but not as fast as girls, who have traditionally outperformed boys in the classroom. Though the reason for the gender gap isn’t well understood, experts think it may be that girls have had a harder time recovering from the learning losses caused by school closures during the pandemic.
The world’s oldest person, Tomiko Itooka, died last Sunday at the age of 116. The Japanese woman was born on May 23, 1908, and she lived through the sinking of the Titanic, the invention of penicillin, two world wars, six British monarchs, and 21 American presidents. She was married to her husband for 51 years until his death in 1979, and spent 45 years as a widow. She is survived by two children and “an unknown number” of her five grandchildren. The title of world’s oldest person now goes to 116-year-old Inah Canabarro Lucas, a Brazilian nun born on June 8, 1908.
Heroin Chic Is Back
At the Golden Globes last night, The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, and Baby Reindeer won the major awards, but the biggest winner was host Nikki Glaser, whose 10-minute monologue, poking gentle fun at many of the celebrities in the audience, was pitch-perfect. She began by describing the evening as “Ozempic’s biggest night,” and Paula Froelich couldn’t agree more. As Paula writes in her latest for The Free Press, “with Ozempic, most Americans who have the money and means now have a choice about whether to be fat or thin, and no one is choosing the belly rolls.”
That goes double for the VIPs on the red carpet last night, many of whom celebrated the so-called “body positivity movement,” which took off in the ’90s as a backlash against rail-thin body standards. Three decades later, have we finally come full circle? Read Paula’s new piece on how Ozempic reveals our nation’s truth: The body positivity movement was a farce.
Please make the font bigger in the emails.
Lost what badly.I didn't run for election. I don't even vote POTUS election. Only state/local. So, actually I "won bigly."
Run with that 1.2% Popular vote margin, though.
I'm going to enjoy EVERY second of these next 4 years :)