It’s Tuesday, March 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Greenland goes to the polls. Would FDR have done a minerals deal with Ukraine? Why Spotify is to blame for Lady Gaga’s incoherent new album. And much more.
But first: A new front in the war over antisemitism and free speech on campus.
On Saturday, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born activist, at Columbia University, after the State Department revoked his green card for leading anti-Israel protests in the midst of that country’s war with Hamas.
Late yesterday afternoon, a federal judge in New York blocked Khalil’s deportation, as the court weighs a filing against his arrest and planned removal from the country. A hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.
Trump said on Monday that arrests of other foreign anti-Israel activists are imminent, and the State Department reportedly plans to use artificial intelligence to locate foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas” on social media and revoke their visas.
Foreign nationals who are in the U.S. on visas have no protected right to support designated terrorist organizations like Hamas. But is this new White House policy just? Or a dangerous threat to a culture of free speech?
In an exclusive Free Press report, Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin speak to a White House official who says that Khalil posed a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States”—and that his case is a blueprint for more arrests.
Mark Goldfeder, a constitutional law expert, told The Free Press that Khalil and others could be deported on several legal grounds—most notably Turner v. Williams, a Supreme Court case from 1904, which set the precedent that aliens can be deported if they are engaging in specific dangerous activities or if they have certain dangerous views that those “who hold and advocate them would be undesirable additions to our population.”
But other civil libertarians aren’t buying it. Our reporters spoke to representatives of free speech organizations on the left, right, and center, who described Khalil’s arrest as “disturbing” and “a chill on protected political expression.”
Read the full report: “The ICE Detention of a Columbia Student Is Just the Beginning.”
Meet Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s Highest-Ranking Whistleblower
Sarah Wynn-Williams spent nearly seven years at Facebook (now Meta), and until roughly 72 hours ago, her whistleblowing memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism was a closely guarded secret in the publishing world.
Today, it’s out—and already driving headlines all over the world.
The publication coincides with the news that Wynn-Williams has filed an SEC complaint against the company, alleging that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the U.S. in the hopes that it would help convince Beijing to allow Facebook into China.
On the latest episode of Honestly, Bari talks to Sarah about her explosive book, the gap between the idealistic way Facebook sold itself to the world—and the reality of what it means to grow at any cost, including by attempting to cooperate with authoritarian regimes like China’s.
To listen to their conversation, hit the play button below, or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts:
Would FDR Have Done a Minerals Deal with Ukraine?
Ukrainian and American negotiating teams will meet in Saudi Arabia today as part of a fresh push to patch things up after last month’s disastrous Oval Office spat between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. A key part of negotiations between the countries—which Kyiv hopes will lead to America renewing its military aid and intelligence sharing—is a mineral deal that would see the U.S. gain control of some of the country’s rare earth minerals. The deal has been controversial, with critics asking questions like: Is this extortion? Expropriation? Imperialism? Would Franklin D. Roosevelt ever have asked something like this of Churchill?
The answer to the last question, according to Ed Conway, is “Very possibly, yes.”
Today in The Free Press, Ed dives into a surprising chapter of World War II history and explores the quite onerous demands FDR made while negotiating support for Britain’s fight against the Nazis. Here’s just a taste: We could have had Hong Kong!
Read Ed’s great essay: “Is Trump’s Mineral Deal Unprecedented? Not Exactly.”
Tina Brown on Meghan Markle’s “Unerring Instinct for Getting It Wrong”
It’s been half a decade since Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle left the UK in a huff, embarking on an extended “please respect our privacy” tour. This involved, among other things, a new exhibitionist memoir by Harry, the Duchess of Sussex telling Oprah that the royal family is racist, and the chaotic launch of a “lifestyle brand” that is mostly just condiments.
The couple’s latest move? A Netflix show that strives for fake perfection at a time when the zeitgeist has turned hard against it.
And who better to dissect this latest royal misstep than the indomitable Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the author of The Palace Papers. In The Free Press today, Tina argues that the self-exiled royals’ big mistake is to think that they are interesting people.
“What Harry and Meghan forgot,” Tina writes, “was that the great thing about being royal is you can be as boring as fuck for as long as you live and still be treated as the most important person in the room.”
Read the singular Tina Brown on “Meghan Markle’s Buzzkill.”
Put Your Paws Up. . . and Pray for a Dying Art Form
On Friday, millennial pop diva Lady Gaga released her sixth studio album, Mayhem. Mayhem, indeed. A weird mix of disco, mom rock, dance pop, and singer-songwriter ballads, Gaga’s latest is completely incoherent, with no consistent thesis, theme, or sound. There’s a reason for that.
In my latest for The Free Press, I explain that nobody buys albums anymore, and increasingly, artists don’t really make them, either. All of which poses a question: Can the album survive the Spotify era?
Read: “Lady Gaga and the Mayhem of Modern Music.”
All three major U.S. stock indexes continued to fall on Monday in a sign of growing economic pessimism and concern over the impact of Trump’s tariffs. The president’s top economic advisers downplayed the slump: “There are a lot of reasons to be extremely bullish about the economy going forward. But for sure, this quarter, there are some blips in the data,” White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC, putting a positive spin on the numbers. “What’s going to happen is the first quarter is going to squeak into the positive category, and then the second quarter is going to take off as everybody sees the reality of the tax cuts.” (Amid Republican infighting, the tax cuts in question have not yet been passed.)
Today, China implemented a 10–15 percent tariff on a wide array of U.S. agricultural products including corn, soybeans, beef, and more, in retaliation for Trump’s move to raise tariffs to 20 percent on all Chinese goods. As the tit-for-tat escalates, China watchers say the communist government is urging the United States to come to the negotiating table. Unlike the leaders of Canada and Mexico, Trump has not directly spoken with Chinese president Xi Jinping since taking office. But The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that officials are mulling a summit in June.
Greenlanders are going to the polls today to elect a new government, and Trump—who wants to annex the icy, partly autonomous Danish territory—is looming large. Prime Minister Mute Egede, who leads the democratic socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit party, has stressed that Greenland is “not for sale.” His government has banned campaign donations from foreigners in response to Trump’s offers to buy the territory, and is expected to maintain enough votes to remain in leadership. Meanwhile, Naleraq, Greenland’s largest opposition party, has expressed receptiveness to exploring closer ties with the United States. All three parties support independence from Denmark, which would allow the territory to make its own foreign policy decisions. Theoretically, this would include the option of becoming an American state or territory—but I wouldn’t hold my breath. A recent poll found only 6 percent of Greenlanders support joining the U.S.
The National Endowment for Democracy announced today that it has regained access to congressionally appropriated funds that were frozen by the Trump administration in January. The funding freeze had left NED unable to meet payroll and basic overhead, as The Free Press’s Eli Lake first reported last month. Explaining their decision to sue last week, NED’s leadership told Eli that “it became clear to us that if we did nothing, NED would completely collapse.”
Jamie White, a reporter for Alex Jones’ conspiracy website Infowars, was killed outside his apartment in Austin late Sunday night. Police have called his death a homicide and are investigating the incident as a shooting/stabbing, but have yet to name a motive or any suspects. White’s boss has laid blame at the feet of the local district attorney, the Democratic Party, and George Soros. “They are the ones that administratively cut the police, prosecuted the police, and even cases that are hundred percent clear to be lawful, legal activities,” Jones declared in a heated and emotional video posted on Monday. “These are sick, degenerate, evil people that know what they’re doing and they aided and abetted. They are accomplices to the murder of a great American and Infowars longtime veteran reporter Jamie White.”
Trying to get the timeline right. From what I've read, Khalil arrived in NYC in 2022 working for UNRWA and attending Columbia on a student visa for graduate degree. (Did Columbia have to sponsor him or did the UN?) He lives in student housing on campus, becomes protest organizer and meets an American girl, gets married in 2023, applies and gets Green Card, gets wife pregnant in July 2024 then graduates in December and is still living in student housing in March 2025. Is this right?
Why are we seeing undocumented immigrants on TV that couldn't get legal status for years of applying? Was he fast tracked and if so by whom? Was he aided in getting through the red tape for a reason? Was he sent to be an agitator?
I am all for the first amendment rights for Americans but something about this guy is suspicious.
There's something very primal in democrats' affinity for fire as a tool for persuasion.