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.
SLOPULISM VERSUS SOLIPSISM……..
One is “made up” and the other is its antithesis in part.
Another short one.
If you research solipsism, you will find that the leftdemcomms have a simpatico with it. They act and speak in relation to “self” only. The reality of the “self” despite reality. No world exists outside of his/her own reality because they fail to challenge their promise of Utopia on reality testing. Human nature. History. They eschew reality - science, economics, history, law, history - and base Utopia on what he or she really feels should be the way of things. What do I mean?
Think about it. Why do I have to work? Why don’t I have a fancy car? Why does that person have and I do not? Why can’t I have a home given to me? Why do I have to pay for groceries? Why do I have to pay rent? Why do I have to pay for my student loans? Why do I have to pay for health insurance? Why are there taxes? Why do I have to pay them? Why do criminals deserve prison? Why don’t we all live together in peace and love? Why is there war? Why do we need a defensive way to protect our security? Why is there a defense department? Why do I need to work for anything? Why do I have to follow the law? Why does there law exist? Why does my neighbor have more than me? Why are their prisons? Why do we have borders or locks on doors?
EXISTENTIAL LAZY-NESS……………
This is their owned experience. This is insight into the thinking of the lazyleftdemcomms. They are solipsists. The world does not exist outside of their own lazy selves. Full stop. Since they rarely have any experiential knowledge about how the world works because they don’t have any real work experience such that it would be considered RIGOR, they EXPECT. THEY DO NOT ASPIRE. Too much work.
For all of us who consider REASON and EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE to be worthwhile endeavors and the basis for strategic planning for our own lives, and that of our country, leftdemmcomms eschew this idea because they are devoid of REASON. Why?
Their pie in the sky utopias are not based in this world’s reality and HUMAN NATURE. Therefore, they are SLOPULISTS TO BE SURE. None of their desires or promises are REALITY TESTED. Why? Most of the leftdemmcomms have NO EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE OR DO THEY BASE THEIR PROMISES ON HISTORICAL REALITY.
UTOPIA DOES NOT EXIST. IT NEVER WILL. HARD WORK IS HEALTHY. THEY CRINGE AT THE THOUGHT.
Saoirse Mates
Gender affirming care is a misnomer. There is nothing caring about it. Especially for a child. And the fact that so many still do not oppose it publicly is the issue. Why? Because they don't want the leftist mob at their door, the same with Palestinianism. Because we allow the hecklers veto instead of standing up for the truth, look at the congressman who said he voted against arms for Israel because of threats to his family and staff (btw he should resign for being such a spineless coward.). But its funny because whose rights get destroyed by both ideologies? Women and Jews. Both who had a set place in society for thousands of years and both who refused to stay in that place so the world has found a reason to attack them. The "caring" people in the world have decided that neither women nor Jews are allowed in their safe spaces. Funny how that works.
And talking about Qatarlson, why we needed another article about why he is an antisemite. He is. Its plain and simple. Tucker says he's not an antisemite, well remember Eichmann also said he wasn't an antisemite.
I am so disgusted by what is happening in Iran. What a shitshow and what a coward Trump turns out to be. He has single handedly grabbed defeat out of the jaws of victory. He said that the last attack was called off because MBS asked him to. Really? Who knew our foreign policy is made in Riyadh and by ARAMCO. And this psycho behind the resolute desk keeps thinking that the mullahs can be bargained with? That they will keep their word? They are hanging teenagers daily in the public square because they either protested or let protestors into their apartment. The mullahs are barbarians. What imbecile takes the word of a barbarian? Oh wait Trump already did in Gaza. He took the word of the mass murderers, rapists, and baby stranglers of Hamas- an arm of the Iranians.
Fix SanFrancisco? I have the idea. Its called law and order. You arrest people breaking the law, put them in jail, or get them the help they need, do not allow homeless encampments and rampant drug use. Make it so the law abiding average person can walk down the street and enjoy public places. When you let the progressive left run a city you end up living in a 3rd world hell hole. It doesn't take 150 million dollars to figure this out.