It’s Monday, December 15. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why are UK censors coming for TGIF? Is the age of reading well and truly over? Coleman Hughes interviews one of the first “Never Trumpers.” And much more.
But first: The bloodshed at Brown and on Bondi Beach.
What an awful weekend.
At 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, a gunman burst into a classroom at Brown University and started shooting. Two students are dead. Eight more are in the hospital.
For 13 hours, the campus was on lockdown. One of the students who spent the night hiding from the killer was Victoria Zang, a senior who barricaded herself in her dorm alongside her classmates. The police detained a person of interest on Sunday morning, but released him that night. The manhunt continues.
Victoria writes about a terrifying Saturday night, and how she and her school are changed forever, in The Free Press today. “I’m used to reading about shootings in the news,” writes Victoria. “Every single time, I pray first for the students, and then that my school is not next. I can’t pray for that anymore.”
Read her full firsthand account in our pages:
Victoria was still locked down in her dorm in Rhode Island when, on the other side of the world, two gunmen, a father and son, opened fire at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Their target was Australia’s Jewish community, and a celebration of the first night of Hanukkah.
The attack lasted some 10 minutes. By the time the terrorists were stopped, they had killed at least 16 people and injured dozens more. It was the most lethal terror attack in Australian history, and the deadliest attack targeting Jews since October 7, 2023. The victims include a rabbi with five children, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl.
We have four pieces to help you make sense of this horror this morning.
First, Ayaan Hirsi Ali declares that the intifada has arrived in Australia and writes about how we should respond. “Love without courage doesn’t stop hatred,” she writes. “Unity without truth dissolves into denial.” In this essay, Ayaan writes with the moral clarity that makes hers such an essential voice, now more than ever. Read it here:
The Australian Jewish author Julie Szego writes that, of all the emotions she has grappled with since the attack, the most complicated is a dark sense of vindication. “Now do you believe us?” she imagines screaming at the country’s progressive intelligentsia—who she says have downplayed and looked away from the explosion of antisemitism in Australia since October 7. Read Julie on the platitudes of Australia’s political class—and the uncomfortable reality no one in Australia can deny any longer:
Sometimes, the most important thing to do after an atrocity like the Bondi attack is to speak straightforwardly about what just happened. That is what Brendan O’Neill did in an essay published very soon afterward. Read his reaction to “a pogrom on a beach”:
Adam Louis-Klein has written brilliantly for us recently on the illusory distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The Bondi attack, he argues, is an appallingly vivid illustration of the problem. “This is not about a political opinion that ‘crosses the line’ into antisemitic violence,” he writes. “We are dealing with anti-Zionist violence itself: the targeting of Jews as ‘Zionists,’ legitimized by specific anti-Zionist libels.” Read his long history of this dangerous strain of thinking—and violence:
And for more on the Australia attack, catch up on the most recent Free Press livestream, hosted by Rafaela Siewert.
The weekend’s horrors made two things we already had planned grimly apposite.
The first is Bari’s town hall with Erika Kirk, which aired on CBS on Saturday. Kirk’s husband Charlie was assassinated in September, and she spoke to Bari about grief, political violence, conspiratorial thinking, and much more. Watch it on our site:
The second is a powerful essay by Rachel Goldberg-Polin on her son and his fellow captives commemorating their final Hanukkah in the tunnels under Gaza. Rachel writes about newly released footage that shows them lighting a makeshift menorah. As she puts it, they were sending a message to their captors, and now the rest of the world: “We are Jews and this is what we do on this holiday.”
We edited Rachel’s essay before the news broke out of Sydney. The evil at Bondi only gives her words more force. Read them here:
—Oliver Wiseman
Books had a pretty good run. For at least a quarter of a millennium, they were the dominant cultural form. But that is now changing, says Tyler Cowen. We are moving from a literary culture to an oral one—dominated by YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and audiobooks. Tyler charts the best- and worst-case scenarios in this brave new world.
On Friday morning, UK readers of TGIF were met with a demand for age verification after the newsletter was flagged because of the country’s Online Safety Act. Why was Nellie Bowles censored? And what does it say about the state of free speech in the UK? Read our editorial on the incident to find out.
On Conversations with Coleman: Why Tim Miller Thinks Politics Can’t Come Back from Trump
Tim Miller, host of the anti-Trump conservative platform The Bulwark, has a rare vantage point on the transformation of the GOP. A longtime Republican operative, Miller became a prominent “Never Trump” critic after 2016, before leaving the party entirely in 2020. This week, he joins Coleman Hughes on the podcast to discuss the current administration’s greatest controversies—and to explain why American politics, now irreparably warped by Trump, are never going back.
Instagram Teen Accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.
A Hong Kong court has found the media tycoon and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai guilty under the territory’s illiberal national security laws. Lai’s family says his health is deteriorating as he is being held in solitary confinement. A date for his sentencing has not been set. (Read our past reporting on Lai’s case: “He Fought for Freedom. Then He Chose Prison.”)
President Trump promised a “very serious retaliation” against ISIS after two American soldiers and one civilian were killed by gunfire in Syria on Saturday. “The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Ukraine is willing to drop demands for NATO membership in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday as peace talks in Berlin began. He called for “Article 5–like guarantees,” referring to the NATO provision that states an attack on one member nation is an attack on all.
Belarus freed 123 prisoners on Saturday, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner and an opposition leader, in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions on Belarusian potash. Trump’s envoy John Coale said it’s possible that around 1,000 of the remaining political prisoners in Belarus could be released in the coming months.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has slowed or ceased action on more than 60 percent of crypto cases that were ongoing when Trump returned to office, The New York Times found, including for firms with financial ties to Trump. The SEC said it was pivoting its focus for legal and policy reasons and that Republican commissioners had always disagreed with the charges. (For more on Trump’s crypto empire, read Joe Nocera’s piece: “Inside Trump’s Crypto Cash Machine.”)
Israel killed Raed Saad, a top Hamas commander, in Gaza on Saturday, the most significant assassination in Gaza since the Trump-brokered ceasefire began in October. Hamas accused Israel of violating the ceasefire, while Israel said Saad recently “operated to reestablish Hamas’s capabilities.”
In states where sports betting and online casinos are legal, both tax revenue and calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline rose. Those states also saw higher bankruptcy, debt collection, and alcohol consumption, overwhelmingly affecting young men.
A trailer for an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm is drawing criticism online for seeming to deviate from the book. Instead of being an allegory about the dangers of totalitarian Marxism, as Orwell’s book was, the film, set for release next May, appears to focus on the dangers of capitalism and corporate corruption.
Our politics is broken? What drivel. So all it took was a no nonsense NY business man who was a Democrat before 2015 to break it? Good! DJT simply acted like an American, not a politician, and pulled down the pants of the entire rotten political house of cards. He did this while leaving the lights on and the blinds open. America's allies were and are horrified that their own populations will do the same to them, thus we have all the censorship and banning of political opponents for wrong think and everything else. Who stands where?
I listen to the front page every day with my daughter, as I am taking her to high school. Today the audio is not available. Can you please fix this in the future. Thank you