It’s Tuesday, November 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Former Democratic fundraiser Evan Barker tells all, one year after voting for Trump. Apple’s openly gay CEO becomes an awkward enabler of China’s anti-gay crackdown. Suzy Weiss says body positivity is dead—but will anyone miss it?
But first: Niall Ferguson vs. Tyler Cowen on whether AI is a bubble.
Yesterday in our pages, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson issued a warning: The AI boom, he wrote, “is a house of cards.”
That’s an alarming conclusion to reach, given that the promise of AI is now the principal driver of the stock market and the U.S. economy. And if the reader wasn’t already worried enough, Niall then draws an ominous comparison between today’s AI gold rush and the frenzy that preceded the great crash of 1929. (He also finds a way to get Dr. Seuss into his argument, but I won’t try to explain that here.)
It’s a sobering argument, but is he right? Another Free Press columnist, economist Tyler Cowen, isn’t so gloomy. He writes that it is “premature to write off current AI valuations as a ‘bubble.’ ” Tyler reaches for a more recent historical analogy—the dot-com bubble—and draws encouragement from Amazon. Its stock crashed along with the likes of Pets.com and Webvan, then soared to heights beyond anyone’s expectations.
“The lesson is clear: If you see an investment that looks steady, sometimes the best thing to do is to jump on it,” Tyler writes. “No one can know when the market bottom is going to come, and either way, it’ll probably spike again fairly soon.”
He goes further: Perhaps all this talk of a bubble is really a security blanket, because the alternative—that the AI hype is real—is even more unsettling. Read two of the sharpest thinkers taking either side of perhaps the biggest economic question in the world right now.
—Rick Brooks
Former Democratic operative Evan Barker rocked the internet last year with a viral Free Press essay titled “I Raised $50 Million for the Democrats. This Week, I Voted for Trump.” Fast-forward a year, and many of her friends now ask her if she regrets her vote. Evan answers that question in her latest essay for us, and reveals the price she paid for “coming out” to her liberal San Francisco friends.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. “All About That Bass” singer Meghan Trainor—known for her 2014 hit song about fat acceptance—is the latest celebrity to debut a shocking GLP-1 weight-loss transformation. “Trainor is far from the only previously ‘big-boned’ celebrity who has gone down a jeans size or two lately,” writes Suzy Weiss, who traces how we went from “heroin chic” to “fat activism” and back again—and why the body positivity movement “probably won’t be missed.”
When China says “jump,” Apple says “how high?” Just last week, the tech giant removed two popular gay dating apps from the Chinese App Store. So why is an American company with an openly gay CEO helping to facilitate Beijing’s ongoing anti-gay crackdown? To find out, River Page spoke with “Apple in China” author Patrick McGee. They discussed Cook’s concession, Apple’s pivot to India, and the growing tensions between the American tech giant and its authoritarian landlord.
Live with Will Rahn and Sam Tanenhaus: Conservatism in Chaos
The conservative movement is at a fork in the road. Fringe figures like Nick Fuentes are being mainstreamed, Tucker Carlson has taken a conspiratorial turn, and the MAGA coalition is at war with itself over Jeffrey Epstein. Few people know the history of this moment better than Sam Tanenhaus, whose long-awaited biography of conservative impresario William F. Buckley was published earlier this year. Sam joins Free Press senior writer Will Rahn for a livestream conversation today on the state of the right—from the Groypers to MTG—and how we got here. They’ll map the movement’s new fault lines and what conservatism might look like after Trump. Don’t miss the livestream conversation at 5 p.m. ET, available to paid subscribers only. Click here to tune in.
Jonathan Haidt: Kids Don’t Need Phones
You probably know Jonathan Haidt as the guy trying to save your kids from smartphones and social media apps. Bari sat down with the Anxious Generation author in front of a live audience in New York City to talk about how we got to this point—and where we go from here.
President Trump said he will not rule out putting troops “on the ground” in Venezuela as a part of his anti-narcotics military campaign in the region. So far, the U.S. Navy has deployed about a dozen warships off the coast of Venezuela and in the Caribbean Sea.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia is visiting the White House today for the first time since he ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Salman is expected to discuss normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May for his first major international trip of his second term.
David Richardson, the acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), resigned yesterday following months of criticism surrounding his handling of July’s Guadalupe River flood in Texas. During the flood, which killed more than 130 people, Richardson was unreachable for “hours and hours,” one official told The Washington Post.
Robert P. George resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation Monday. The public intellectual said he could no longer remain part of the organization without a “full retraction” of Heritage president Kevin Roberts’ video statement defending Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes.
France will send 100 warplanes to Ukraine over the next 10 years, according to a deal signed by the two European allies on Monday. The deal will also include anti-aircraft defenses, munitions, and drones.
Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death for using lethal force to quell student protests last year. Over 1,400 protesters were killed. Hasina called the verdict “biased and politically motivated,” while families of the victims cheered and other people knelt and prayed.
President Trump said he will provide $2,000 “tariff dividend” checks to “individuals of moderate income, middle income” by mid-2026. But the checks would require congressional approval, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and their total cost could exceed this year’s tariff revenue.
Chile’s presidential election is heading to a runoff between its two leading candidates: communist and former labor minister Jeannette Jara and pro-Trump conservative José Antonio Kast. Some voters criticized Jara for calling Cuba a democracy, while others have compared Kast’s hard-right stances on immigration and crime to those of former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The United Nations Security Council approved a resolution to deploy an “international stabilization force” to disarm Hamas and facilitate the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces from Gaza, a key tenet of President Trump’s Gaza peace plan. “This will go down as one of the biggest approvals in the History of the United Nations,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Rapper Nicki Minaj will speak about the persecution of Nigerian Christians at the UN’s headquarters in New York City today. “The Barbz & I will never stand down in the face of injustice,” Minaj wrote on X, referring to her fans. “We’ve been given our influence by God. There must be a bigger purpose.”
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I actually will miss the body positivity thing, it'll be sad when everyone looks the same.
Please, please TFP, could you put some kind of “bookmark” in your programming? Whenever I read an article and have to stop for a moment, when I try to go back to finish it, TFP opens it exactly where I left off. I appreciate that. Could you please do that also for comments? When I start reading comments and stop for a second or two for RL issues, it takes me forever to figure out where I left off. I have to scroll and scroll and reread..and even when I’m interested I sometimes just say. “Forget it.”
Please add an optional bookmark for comments. Pretty please.