It’s Thursday, August 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tucker Carlson says he’s not an antisemite. Don’t believe him, says Rod Dreher. Aaron MacLean on Trump’s Iran indecision. Eli Lake and Olivia Reingold on the political earthquake in Michigan. All that and more.
But first: The medical authorities who still silence dissent on gender care.
It’s no secret that The Free Press has extensively covered the scandal of youth gender medicine, and the related story of how, over the last decade, the ideology that enabled it captured institutions of medicine, education, and beyond. We were early to the story, and we stayed on the scent.
We’re proud of all these stories, many of them edited by the formidable Emily Yoffe. They are exactly the sort of stories The Free Press was founded to cover: ones the mainstream press had tried to ignore. Then, in late 2024 and early 2025, something changed. As Abigail Shrier—who was fearless in her work on this issue, and whose brilliant book on the subject activists tried to have pulled from Amazon and Target—put it in our pages, “The Gender Fever Finally Broke.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped her pronouns from her Twitter page. European governments banned puberty blocker prescriptions for children. Even The New York Times started to report more honestly on the issue. Trump, back in the White House, signed an executive order “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.”
With all these changes, we found ourselves wondering how many more stories we would need to write about doctors, professors, and others who faced professional consequences for blowing the whistle on what they came to view as a scandal.
But here’s the thing: The vibes have shifted only so far.
Just look at the low-boil row over WNBA star Sophie Cunningham, who dared to voice her opinion on boys in girls’ sports last month. As Kat Rosenfield argued last week, her dissent is tolerated in a way that it perhaps wouldn’t have been only a few years ago. And yet, she is the country’s only active professional female athlete who has stated publicly that she does not believe biological males should participate in women’s sports. (This is a view that a large majority of the American public agrees with.)
Here at The Free Press, we kept finding evidence of gender ideology’s enduring hold over medicine, and hearing from people who paid with their jobs for opposing “gender-affirming care.” The tales of cancellations and witch hunts are by now so familiar to us that we have on occasion found ourselves asking: How many more stories can there be on this?
The answer is many.
Today we bring you the latest, a brave firsthand account by Dr. Karla Solheim. If you read it and think it sounds familiar, that’s because many of these stories follow the same chilling pattern. We won’t stop telling them until someone like Karla can speak honestly without being ostracized by her profession.
—Oliver Wiseman
Tucker Carlson insists that he is not antisemitic. But this week, he welcomed back Darryl Cooper, a podcaster and Hitler apologist. This time, Cooper described the United States as an “American Zionist Empire” and recommended the work of a self-described Nazi. Rod Dreher makes the case that Carlson has become one of the most sophisticated mainstreamers of antisemitic tropes in American media. Watch enough of Carlson’s content, Rod writes, and you will reach “the inescapable conclusion that at the very least, this guy has a big problem with Jews.” Read his column on why Carlson’s denials no longer hold up.
The Trump administration appears to be closing in on a new deal with Iran—one that would hand Tehran substantial control of the Strait of Hormuz and leave the regime in a stronger regional position than before the war began. Aaron MacLean argues that such a deal would be a strategic defeat, and counts at least five occasions when the president has backed down from threats against Iran. “These are not the actions of a president who feels he is operating from a position of strength,” he writes. Read Aaron’s latest column on the best path forward.
What if the policies that politicians sell as ways of helping ordinary Americans actually make things worse? Economist Noah Smith has a word for it: slopulism. From New York’s proposed 10 percent discount for self-checkout, which would get cashiers fired, to tariffs that have cost manufacturing jobs rather than create them, Noah walks through policies that look like populism, but aren’t. Read his piece on why slopulism has become a bipartisan disease, and what it means for American politics that neither party even seems to care.
The new Free Press Forum Book Club is here! What book should we read first? Cast your vote now for East of Eden, Lonesome Dove, or A Gentleman in Moscow. You decide!
ICYMI: Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary yesterday, beating moderate Rep. Haley Stevens by just one percentage point, despite leading by double digits in the polls. It took all night to declare El-Sayed the winner, and his victory might matter as much for the Democratic Party as it does for the race to win the general election in Michigan in November.
Olivia Reingold spent the last week in Michigan, talking to voters and activists who powered El-Sayed’s campaign. Read her dispatch from Detroit on the movement that fueled his rise.
Meanwhile, Eli Lake asks what it says about the Democratic Party that El-Sayed ran openly with the support of Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who has praised Hamas and said America deserved 9/11. Read Eli’s column on what El-Sayed’s victory reveals about the party’s growing anti-American turn.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
Jason Arday, celebrated as the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history, resigned hours after the university opened an investigation into his scholarship, which has come under fire for alleged plagiarism. Arday has denied any wrongdoing, writing that his resignation should not “be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.” (Read Yuan Yi Zhu’s piece on how Arday got away with it for so long, and who enabled him.)
A stray SpaceX rocket booster slammed into the moon at roughly 5,400 miles per hour, carving out a crater that could stretch 100 feet wide and 16 feet deep, scientists estimate. The impact was confirmed through a debris plume spotted by a telescope in Chile. Scientists say this is a rare opportunity to study how the lunar surface responds to collisions.
The Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a near party-line vote of 51–44, giving the agency its first confirmed leader in nearly a year. Virginia’s Tim Kaine was the only Democrat to back Schwartz, as critics questioned whether she would be willing to push back against directives from Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina dropped his reelection bid Wednesday after the House Ethics Committee recommended that he be censured for what it called “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.” Two other House members resigned earlier this year amid separate sexual misconduct allegations.
Four people were stabbed in London’s Covent Garden, with police arresting a woman at the scene and saying that early indications point to a mental health–related incident. All four victims were hospitalized, and none of their injuries were considered life-threatening.
The head of a Russian military drone factory was critically wounded when his car exploded near Yekaterinburg, killing his driver in the second attack targeting a Russian drone maker within a week. No one has claimed responsibility, though Russia has blamed Ukraine for previous strikes.
Billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz is offering up to $150 million to organizations with the best ideas for turning around San Francisco. Proposals can come from anyone, anywhere, as long as they primarily benefit the city—with up to three winners each receiving as much as $50 million.
It says everything that the news is reporting the story as though Sophie Cunningham is the one with the controversial position.
I am not given much to a "shock and awe" approach to public debate, but since the view has become so entrenched that it is Cunningham's position that is controversial, it's time we had it out. Really.
I want an NBA all-star team to go head to head with a WNBA all-star team. My guess is that the former could hold the latter virtually scoreless.
Ditto every other sport until the point is made objectively and not hypothetically.
There are a few sports where it doesn't matter. Equestrian, auto racing. And in those sports men and women already compete openly.
We need to have it out once and for all. And not some silly Billy Jean King exhibition against a never-was.
We need to demonstrate once and for all the fantasy world the LGPTQ world is demanding we accept.
Victor Davis Hanson on Iran (he's more optimistic than most):
https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/08/04/hanson-situation-ground-in-iran/