It’s Friday, April 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on being targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Why Trump’s pressure on Iran is working. And much more.
But first: The moral inversion of The New York Times.
Strange though it may sound, you can trace the start of The Free Press back to the publication of a single article.
In June 2020, I was part of a team of editors at The New York Times Opinion page who published an essay from Senator Tom Cotton. It argued that the rioting, looting, and violence (he called it a “carnival for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements”) was a move toward anarchy, and that the president had the authority to take action against it by sending in the National Guard.
I’ve already recounted how this all played out, but suffice it to say that many, if not most, Times staffers erupted against the premise of the piece—a call for restoring order in cities—and the paper’s decision to “platform” it. Running it, they said, put lives in danger. (Never mind that more than half of the polled American public agreed with Senator Cotton’s position.)
Disagreement over that article would ultimately lead to my defenestration from the paper. Bari Weiss left the Times that same summer, because of the same broken newsroom culture that led to the uproar over the Cotton essay.
“If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired.”
Another thing Bari said in that note was this: “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
Six years on, the charge stands.
Consider, for example, the latest episode of the New York Times Opinions podcast, featuring the left-wing provocateur Hasan Piker, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and an editor named Nadja Spiegelman. The episode’s title: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” In the conversation, the panelists endorse and admit to theft (or “microlooting,” as Spiegelman calls it), celebrate looting, and excuse the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
There are more important things happening in the world than three out-of-touch media figures babbling in a podcast studio in New York. You can read about those here, here, and here, and in the other stories in our lineup today.
But a New York Times podcast about murder, theft, and looting is worth lingering over. Why? Because it is symptomatic of a deep moral crisis in America, where profoundly antisocial (and criminal!) behavior is put on a pedestal and valorized in our broken media.
The episode is what moral inversion looks like. The paper that saw it unfit to publish a United States senator on the rule of law now hosts a gleeful conversation about theft, looting, and the murder of a corporate executive and frames it as moral courage. And you can expect no internal revolt, no lengthy review or editor’s note. The point they are making is this: Stealing is laudable if you are stealing from the right people. Maybe even murder, too.
Today we have two must-read essays on this conversation, by Suzy Weiss and River Page. Read them to understand how some of the top voices in the media came to embrace criminality.
The Free Press was founded because there was an urgent need for an alternative. For an outlet that could still see the difference between right and wrong, and was committed to telling the truth—even if it is uncomfortable, even if it flies in the face of whatever ideas happen to be fashionable at that moment in time. That is as urgent and necessary today as it was on day one.
—Adam Rubenstein
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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)’s hate group list has long been followed eagerly by the media as the ultimate black mark for unacceptable opinions. This week, the SPLC was indicted on 11 counts linked to paying its network of informants. For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had to live in fear and hire security as a result of being placed on its “hate list,” this news is personal. “There is a lesson here for donors and journalists alike,” writes Ayaan. “Those who claim the loudest to be fighting hatred deserve scrutiny proportional to their claims.”
Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, is the billionaire who built the world’s largest crypto exchange. He also went to jail for violating anti-money-laundering rules, then, last year, he received a pardon from Donald Trump. Today, the richest former inmate in U.S. history sits down with Rafaela Siewert to discuss giving crypto seminars behind bars, who he believes Satoshi Nakamoto really is, why he was pardoned by Trump, and more.
The Iran war has entered a strange new phase. Trump extended the ceasefire this week, but Tehran and Washington are at an impasse and further talks are on hold. So where do things stand? And what will happen next? For answers to those questions, read Michael Doran’s latest.
If you haven’t heard, Suzy Weiss has a podcast. It’s called “Second Thought,” and every week, she and her co-host Dan Ahdoot dissect the culture with a different guest. On the latest episode, they talk to comedian and media mogul Claudia Oshry, host of her own podcast—“The Toast”—about everything from Blake Lively and GLP-1s to how motherhood changed her relationship to internet fame, and of course, this week’s top pop-culture headlines.
EDITORS’ PICKS
The literary world has a new obsession: Gaza. Not the reality of life for Palestinians there, however. But a fantasy of Gaza that serves ideological ends. In an essential essay published this week, Matti Friedman delved into a new literary genre he calls “Gazology.” He read these books so you don’t have to.
AI could change everything—including our politics. Right now, a big fight is bubbling up across the country. It’s over data centers, and whether or not local communities will allow them to be built. These vast structures are the physical infrastructure on which the AI revolution depends—and the target of a populist backlash against the technology. Frannie Block went to one of Ohio’s poorest counties, where local politicians and residents are battling over a huge Google data center planned for their town. Is it a much-needed shot in the arm for a struggling part of the country or “the next exploitation of Appalachia”?
“Why do I do this to myself?” That’s the question Free Presser and Mets fan Will Rahn was asking himself this week as he suffered through his team’s brutal 12-game losing streak. The answer, Will wrote in his ode to America’s pastime, is because the sport breaks his heart in a way he can handle. Baseball is undergoing a renaissance right now—and Will thinks most of the explanations for that comeback completely miss the point.
Untangling the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t easy. In an essential guide to the charges against the nonprofit, Jed Rubenfeld weighed the facts and the government’s theories in the federal charges against the nonprofit.
What’s the matter with Gen Z? That was the question at the center of our latest Things That Matter debate. Liberal commentator Harry Sisson and conservative Isabel Brown—two of the sharpest voices of their generation—joined us to hash out what young people argue over, from climate change to healthcare to religion, family, and the meaning of success itself. Don’t miss their debate on modern feminism, the rise of looksmaxxing, and whether or not ordinary middle-class Gen Zers will ever be able to own homes.
How long before June of 2020 had Adam Rubenstein and Bari Weiss worked for the New York Times? If it was for a significant period of time before June of 2020, was the New York Times really all that different then? Surely what Rubenstein calls aptly the moral inversion of the NYT began long before June of 2020, when they seemingly did not have have any problem being employed by that organization. Though they deem themselves as wanting to provide an "alternative' to the NYT, nevertheless one wonders if there is a such stark contrast of the Free Press with the NYT. For example, my hunch is that most of the Free Press journalists are not all that bothered about the invasion of millions of illegal aliens into America during the Biden Era and do not support the attempt of Trump and ICE to deport them. That is, the Free Press seems, on the whole, rather comfortable with an anti-Trump liberalism that the NYT would applaud.
The NYT carries an opinion piece which is a thinly veiled critique of Bill Maher having dinner with Donald Trump called My Dinner with Adolf. Now they fall all over themselves interviewing the American Adolf, Hasan Piker. BTW try to micro-steal copyrights from the NYT and see how their attitudes change. The interviewer Nadja Spiegelman especially reminds me of the pigs in the book Maus.