It’s Friday, May 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: What the Democrats’ “autopsy” of the 2024 elections accidentally reveals. Peter Savodnik profiles progressive LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. Plus: Martin Gurri asks, “Is the Cuban regime about to fall?” and Niall Ferguson joins Aaron MacLean to make sense of the new world disorder. All that and much more.
But first: Is the “doping olympics” the future of sports?
This weekend in Las Vegas, athletes will gather for the inaugural Enhanced Games. It’s like the Olympics, except performance-enhancing drugs aren’t banned—they’re encouraged. Competitors are juiced with testosterone, anabolic steroids, peptides, and all sorts of other chemical formulations banned in regular events.
Over 40 world-class athletes will compete in track, swimming, and weight lifting. Many are retired Olympians looking for another shot at glory, albeit with the help of drugs administered by doctors at a clinical trial and training camp in Abu Dhabi. Critics say the event is a gimmick designed to sell supplements. The games, which cost $31 million to put on, will certainly be a splashy event, complete with a closing ceremony headlined by The Killers. But is all that spectacle enough to attract sports fans who despise steroids and look down on the athletes who use them?
The company behind the event—which just went public, received early investments from both Peter Thiel and a firm tied to the Trump family, and is worth about $665 million—is betting the answer to that question is yes. Enhanced Group Inc. also says it will eventually make more money from supplements and over-the-counter drugs as from the events themselves.
In our lead story today, The Free Press’s Noah Bernstein delivers the inside scoop on how it all came together. He speaks to athletes and executives to understand whether the juicing Olympics are the future of sports—or an embarrassing disaster for all involved. Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.
—Will Rahn
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The Democratic Party’s long-suppressed “autopsy” of its 2024 failures was finally released on Thursday, and it’s easy to see why they wanted to keep it under wraps. Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin correctly noted that the error-filled report “wasn’t ready for primetime.” But it also reveals a party that’s still unwilling to come to grips with how they lost the White House to President Donald Trump twice. Evan Barker, a former Democratic operative who left the party at the last election, takes a close look at the autopsy and asks: Have the Democrats learned anything?
Nithya Raman won her City Council seat in Los Angeles with the help of the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in 2020. Now she’s running as the progressive alternative to Democrat mayor Karen Bass. But as the nonpartisan “jungle primary” approaches on June 2, Raman’s on the verge of losing a runoff spot to Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican running on a message of radical change. So how did Raman go from the would-be Zohran Mamdani of LA to a potential also-ran? Peter Savodnik reports that question out in his profile of Raman for us today.
Since the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Cuba has been effectively on its own, with its economy in ruins. President Trump has made it clear that he would like to remove the regime in Havana, and the Justice Department has issued an arrest warrant for Raúl Castro, the brother of Fidel and a central node of its ruling Communist Party. So is Cuba next? Martin Gurri explains why, unlike in Caracas, Trump can only do so much to bring about the collapse of the regime in Havana.
Niall Ferguson joined Aaron MacLean on stage for a live taping of “School of War” on Tuesday in New York. They discussed the perilous position of the free world and how history offers a guide for how the West can still succeed. Along the way, Aaron and the inimitable Niall discussed everything from Iran, Russia, and China to the profound ignorance of many popular podcasters and influencers. If you want to understand the world at such an uncertain moment, you don’t want to miss this episode.
EDITORS’ PICKS
On Monday, we ran a rigorous examination by federal judge Roy K. Altman of Nicholas Kristof’s inflammatory piece in The New York Times that alleged Israeli prison guards use sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners as a matter of “standard operating procedure.” Altman found that Kristof’s piece is a travesty on multiple levels, and one that undermines “the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.” It is perhaps the most damning critique of Kristof’s much-criticized piece out there—and a must-read if you want to understand how the American media lost its way on Israel and much else.
Have you heard about the cottage-food boom? All across the country, Americans are selling homemade foods like cookies and cake and making good money in the process. These often-delicious treats are a financial lifeline for growing families. So why, Suzy Weiss asks, are local governments trying to throttle the cottage-food industry? And is the bipartisan push to regulate kitchen-made goods really a question of whether we can still trust our neighbors? Read her eye-opening look at how the battle over cottage foods became a microcosm of American life in the 21st century.
The Trinidadian poet and author Jamir Nazir just won the extremely prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The only problem is that the story he submitted, about a rural farmer’s romantic longings, might have been written by artificial intelligence. Or at least that’s the accusation leveled by some AI experts. And while we might never know for sure whether Nazir wrote his story or outsourced it to a large language model, Novi Zhukovsky writes, the notion that we can no longer distinguish between brilliant writing and AI slop raises a number of uncomfortable questions about where literature—and our culture at large—is heading. Read this story if you want to understand just how fraught the questions of trust and authenticity are going to get in the age of AI.
In 2022, Tyler Cowen made the case that “wokeism” had peaked. It was a counterintuitive argument at the time, but it looks prescient in hindsight. In his column this week, Tyler updated his argument. The problem, he wrote, is what replaced it, which he calls “a new culture of anger and resentment.” So what does that look like? Everything from California’s unworkable proposal to levy a new tax on billionaires and the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and, of course, the startling rise of antisemitism. Read Tyler to understand what’s coming—and why he hopes it’s not too late to change course.
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Is nellie home making potato salad for a memorial day picnic? asking for a friend. fridays are not the same without her.
I just finished watching the Niall Ferguson discussion.
History repeats itself.
Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it!
The Professors admonitions are prescient, unnerving & profoundly depressing.
So where is the Greatest Generation when they're needed?