It’s Tuesday, October 1. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: In praise of being an asshole, Megyn Kelly on Honestly, Kat Rosenfield on a superstar who said “I do” on the bayou, and more. But first, Matt Taibbi makes the case for free speech.
We spend a lot of time reporting on the state of free speech here at The Free Press—from the war on “misinformation” and the hostile environment on college campuses, to the censorship of lockdown skeptics and the rise of hate-speech legislation across the West. Free speech isn’t just an important story for us. It underpins everything we do. Without the freedom to publish what we want, we may as well not show up to work in the morning.
Few reporters understand the importance of free speech more than Matt Taibbi, the founder of Racket News. Matt teamed up with The Free Press to report on the Twitter Files back in 2022, helping expose the conspiracy between Big Tech and the government to silence inconvenient speech. Since then, his work on the insidious new threats to free expression have established him as one of the country’s most essential voices on the subject.
That’s why we’re bringing you a speech Matt delivered at the “Rescue the Republic” event in Washington, D.C., over the weekend. We loved Matt’s speech for its defiance, its wit, and ultimately, its optimism. Free speech isn’t something given to us by the government, explains Matt. It’s an eternal truth. “This is what censors never understand,” he says. “Speech is free. Trying to stop it is like catching butterflies with a hammer, stopping a flood with a teaspoon. . . choose your metaphor, but it’s a fool’s errand.”
The way to push back on the busybody, the prohibitionist, or the snoop who tries to silence speech, Matt says, is simple defiance—a thoroughly American trait. “I’m not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority,” says Matt. “I’m encouraging you to defy authority. That is the right word for this time.”
Read Matt Taibbi on “How to Fight Back Against the Censors.”
Megyn Kelly on Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Life After Mainstream Media
In his speech, Matt argues that free expression is hardwired into the American system because “every American has a little bit of asshole in him.” By that, he means a determination to “stand up straight and give it back.”
Someone who regularly does just that is Megyn Kelly, the guest on today’s episode of Honestly.
The former Fox News host was already a household name before she turned into an alternative media superstar who now hosts one of the most popular shows in the country on SiriusXM and YouTube. While Megyn is normally the one doing the grilling, it was her turn in the hot seat. Michael Moynihan asked her about swearing on air, why her new brand of journalism is so successful, and what she thinks of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Kamala Harris.
She tells Michael the reason she’s succeeded in independent journalism is “I’m genuinely honest.” And when asked who’s getting her vote on Election Day, she serves her opinion straight, no chaser: “Honestly, I shudder to think of Trump losing. I have said openly that I’m going to vote for Trump.” She added that she’s a one-issue voter: She’s entirely opposed to the gender ideology pushed by the Biden administration. “I said it the day that Biden pushed through his Title IX changes and just rolled out the red carpet for men and boys to go into our daughters’ locker rooms and bathrooms and beyond and try to redefine what a woman is with his pen.”
To hear Megyn’s unbridled thoughts about identity politics, immigration, and why her greatest enemy “goes by the letters N-B-C,” listen to her conversation with Michael Moynihan below or wherever you get your podcasts, and click here to read an edited transcript.
On Monday, President Biden said “they’ve never seen anything like” Hurricane Helene and suggested asking Congress for additional relief funding. Since Thursday, the Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds has claimed the lives of at least 130 people across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Another 600 are as yet unaccounted for as power outages have disrupted communication.
Ryan Routh—Trump’s second would-be assassin—pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance on Monday. The roofing contractor turned failed foreign legion fighter had staked out Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach for a month prior to the attempted assassination. Routh’s plea is complicated by a note he left at a friend’s house months before that read: “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you.”
Throughout his career, Tim Walz has emphasized his many trips to China as proof of his deep knowledge of a crucial world power. But his campaign now acknowledges that he lied about the number of times he visited China. He has claimed 30 or so trips in the past, but it’s more like 15. Or, as Minnesota Public Radio put it in their reporting, Walz was “so proud of his extensive experience abroad that he occasionally used to exaggerate it.” Sure. For more on the VP candidate’s fickle relationship with the truth, read our recent investigation: “Is Tim Walz Guilty of Stolen Valor?”
Israeli special forces carried out targeted raids into southern Lebanon Monday ahead of an expected broader incursion that could come any day now. Yesterday also saw heavy Israeli shelling and the withdrawal of Lebanese forces from the border. For more on Israel’s gambit, read Walter Russell Mead on “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Triumphal Week.”
UNRWA—the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees—confirmed that Hamas’s leader in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif, was one of their employees. Sherif, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon on Monday, was put on administrative leave in March amid “allegations. . . about his political activities,” UNRWA noted.
The Energy Department has approved a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help restart a shuttered nuclear power plant in Michigan. The decision, coming soon after the news that Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen, is the latest indicator that nuclear power is back.
Austria’s parliamentary elections brought victory to its most right-wing party. The Freedom Party (FPÖ) came first with 29.2 percent of the vote, followed by the center-right People’s Party with 26.5 percent and the Social Democrats with just 21 percent. As with other European countries, the rightward shift is toward a party promising tighter borders and, as the Freedom Party puts it, the “remigration of uninvited foreigners.”
Kamala Harris’s campaign had planned to fly a plane carrying a banner that read “Trump Punting on 2nd Debate” over Saturday’s Georgia-Alabama game, where Trump was in attendance. In the end, the trollish stunt was called off because of bad weather. However, there was a bigger problem that Harris’s team reportedly failed to consider: The airspace around the stadium had been closed by the FAA at the request of the Secret Service. Oops.
In Praise of Lana Del Rey’s Very Normal Wedding
Lana Del Rey could have married anyone. The singer is gorgeous, famous, talented, and loaded. But rather than snagging a celebrity husband, the 39-year-old pop star tied the knot last week with a normie: 49-year-old alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene. It was a low-key affair. The couple said “I do” by the water in Des Allemands, Louisiana, with Del Rey wearing a floor-length white gown. Kat Rosenfield has more to say on this refreshingly down-to-earth love story:
Lana Del Rey is officially off the market. The singer-songwriter got married this weekend in LA—as in Louisiana, not Los Angeles. The lucky groom: an alligator tour captain named Jeremy Dufrene, who is not only not famous but basically the flannel shirt–wearing, airboat-driving platonic ideal of the American non-celebrity.
Their own wedding was like an exercise in keeping it low-key: The bride wore an elegant dress, and the ceremony took place on the bayou, where the couple met cute on one of Dufrene’s airboat tours several years ago. (No word yet on how many of the wedding party were alligators in tuxedos, but one assumes the answer falls somewhere on a scale of “a few” to “all of them.”)
If it makes me a sap to admit being charmed by this, fine: I think it’s goddamn adorable. In a world where the average celebrity wedding is a multiday, star-studded extravaganza (involving weirdly specific prenuptial agreements), Del Rey’s I-dos on the bayou with a 49-year-old boat guy are an absolutely delightful performance of normality—except better, because I don’t think it is a performance.
When the two were spotted at a restaurant in New Orleans the day after the ceremony, Del Rey reportedly declined to pose for selfies with fans because her husband doesn’t like having their dates interrupted, which is one of the most relatable things I’ve ever heard in my life. Once there’s a jambalaya in front of me, I’m not putting the fork down for anything, don’t even ask.
Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor for The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns.
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TFP comments about Tim Walz’s relatively innocuous lies is stunning by its non contrast to Trump’s constant, dangerous, hateful, regurgitated lies…
Seems TFP frolics more & more into MAGAland…more bias, less balanced reporting/opining
I had to laugh when I read Mike Taibbi's very a propos summons to "Defy authority!" The tables have truly turned: back in the Vietnam/"Summer of Love" era, some of today's most insufferable senior censors and haters were free-speech absolutists proudly sporting "Question Authority!" tee-shirts at Woodstock, shouting "Make Love, Not War" to limbless vets. Their pot-addled brains have not aged well.