It’s Friday, August 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Ro Khanna, race hustler. Niall Ferguson on the sci-fi prophet who predicted our AI future. Gary Saul Morson on the disease of political violence. And more.
But first: the inside story of how anti-Zionism took over the Democratic Party.
What does it mean to be a progressive today? Support for universal healthcare and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement are among the articles of faith. But as we’ve been reporting over recent months, one issue has increasingly become a defining litmus test for the left—particularly among the Democratic Socialists of America: Israel, a country far removed from most Americans’ day-to-day lives.
It wasn’t always this way. Joel Rubin would know. In early 2020, he joined Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign as its Jewish outreach director, tasked with building a home for Jewish Democrats who supported both Israel and Sanders’s progressive agenda. He quickly discovered that would be harder than expected. Many activists surrounding the campaign weren’t looking for a candidate who supported a two-state solution; they opposed Israel’s existence altogether.
Six years on and the picture has gotten even worse. “Anti-Zionism,” Rubin writes today, “is no longer one position among many in the Democratic Party; it has increasingly become the boundary marker separating the politically acceptable Jew from the politically suspect one.” And Sanders is at the center of all of it.
Read Rubin’s piece for the inside story on how this happened—and why he now believes that “my former boss, and the broader left-wing activist infrastructure that surrounds him, are actively fueling antisemitism in this country.”
—The Editors
These days, Representative Ro Khanna seems to lurch from one political stunt to the next—from reviving theories about the Jeffrey Epstein files to trying to turn a clash with Israeli settlers into an international incident. His latest touches one of the most sensitive fault lines in American political culture: race. On Monday, he posted a video on X decrying a “disturbing number of black Americans found hanging from trees” and suggesting their deaths could be evidence of a resurgence of anti-black lynching. But as our editors write today, Khanna “failed to mention any of the evidence that casts doubt on whether the deaths he invokes were caused by racism.” Read the full editorial on the corrosive effect this kind of politics has on the country—and the discernment it demands from all of us.
What kind of future will AI bring? It’s one of the most resonant, and terrifying, questions of our time. And if you want to know what’s coming, historian Niall Ferguson argues that the past won’t be much help; instead, we should turn to science fiction. But which sci-fi work is the best guide to the near future? That’s the question Niall tackles in his essay for us.
It’s hard to ignore political violence these days: a healthcare executive gunned down on the streets of New York City, Charlie Kirk assassinated on a college campus, state legislators murdered in cold blood. But where does the idea that political violence is justified come from—and how does it take hold? Gary Saul Morson, an expert in Russian history, has spent decades studying that very question. This week on “School of War,” he joins Aaron MacLean to explore what Fyodor Dostoyevsky understood about the terrorist mind, how ordinary people come to rationalize extraordinary violence, and what we lose when we stop teaching the history of communism.
EDITORS’ PICKS
The big story at the beginning of this week was the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier deployed in the Persian Gulf. After more than 260 days at sea, reports emerged of severe and mounting stress aboard the ship, including a sailor’s suicide attempt, prompting much of the media to attribute the crisis to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. But according to Marine veteran Elliot Ackerman, who lost a shipmate to suicide during a 2006 deployment, the episode exposes a crisis that long predates the president. Read his piece on the media cynicism at play—and the consequences of their decision to pretend away reality.
Last Friday, Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor at the center of a plagiarism scandal that captivated the world, was found dead in his family’s apartment. It was the tragic culmination of weeks of public scrutiny that, wrote Coleman Hughes, “has revealed many unflattering things about academia.” But one point stands out: White liberals want so badly to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual “that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.” The thing is, he continued, “we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives.” Read Coleman on the great irony at the heart of the Arday affair. Then check out Sarah Ditum’s piece on the narrative that has emerged since his death: that the media is to blame. “Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press,” she wrote. But the real fault lies with the institutions that elevated him without properly vetting his work in the first place.
If you’re on the dating market—or know anyone who is—you’ve probably heard of Bumble, an app that made its name by requiring women to message first. But last week, the company changed course after an internal survey found that two-thirds of female users don’t want to make the first move. “Good for the company, I say,” wrote Arthur Brooks, a scientific adviser to Bumble. Read his piece on why the reversal is a win for human nature, and why the “age of chivalry” remains as relevant as ever.
With left-wing candidates ascendant across the country, the only thing missing for progressives is an obvious presidential candidate to carry the banner. Enter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This week, Mark Halperin examined how the savvy New York congresswoman, and the face of the Democrats’ left flank, might actually win the nomination—and how her success would upend our national politics.
Finally, front pages across the nation were plastered with images this week of Lindsay Clancy, a mother who strangled her three children to death three years ago. In her trial, which began a few weeks ago and is being watched live by hundreds of thousands of people, her defense team argues that she was so incapacitated by postpartum depression that she cannot be held accountable for murder. Online, the case has prompted an outpouring of both support and disgust, but the reactions share one flaw, says Kat Rosenfield: They oversimplify a very, very complicated truth. There is a difference, she wrote this week, “between understanding and exoneration, between a reason and an excuse.” Don’t miss her column.
All the news that’s sad to read today! Regressives continue to destroy Western society, civilization.
The Democrat Party must rid itself of the Progressives that have hijacked the party. This isn't our father's Democrat party anymore.
Gone is the party that supported the poor and the middle class. That spoke for the blue collar worker, the farmer or rancher, the union men and women.
That supported Israel, and spoke out against the antisemitism that now infects our schools and universities. That opposed Socialism with the same resolve as the Republican or the Independent party.
I used to vote Democrat, but as Ronald Reagan once said, "I never left the Democrat party, they left me."