It’s Monday, October 20. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: A climate catastrophist on why he changed his mind, what a leaked group chat says about the right today, Gad Saad talks to Coleman Hughes, Zohran Mamdani’s questionable connections—past and present—and much more.
But first: The family targeted in China’s crackdown on Christians.
Grace Jin Drexel hasn’t heard from her dad, the Chinese underground church leader Ezra Jin, in over a week.
The last thing he sent her was a text message two Fridays ago informing her that Wang Lin, one of the pastors in his church, had been detained by Chinese officials, and asking her to pray for him.
“I kept Pastor Wang in my prayers as I went about my morning, waking up my kids and getting ready to head to work in Washington, D.C.,” recalls Grace in her piece for The Free Press today.
What she did not realize at the time was that Pastor Wang’s arrest was the start of a crackdown on the Zion Church, a congregation of more than 1,500 that her father leads. Nor did she realize that the crackdown would come for Grace’s father, as it soon did when he was arrested on spurious charges of “illegally using information online.”
“It has been more than a week, and my dad is still in prison. We haven’t been able to talk to him,” writes Grace.
Some 30 members of the Zion Church have now been detained this month, a major escalation of the Chinese Communist Party’s war on Christians’ freedom to practice their religion. Today in The Free Press, we hear from the family on the front line of a fight for religious freedom—and against totalitarianism.
—Oliver Wiseman
Not so long ago, Ted Nordhaus thought that climate change was an existential threat to civilization. Now he thinks that was dangerous hyperbole. The interesting thing, he writes in his essay today, isn’t that he changed his mind. It’s how many people still fall for the doomsaying.
The racist, antisemitic, violent, and authoritarian musings that were leaked from a group chat for young Republicans last week were waved away by Vice President J.D. Vance as the stupid jokes of young boys. River Page isn’t buying it. Writing for The Free Press today, he argues that, thanks to younger conservatives spending far too much time online, the right has a real problem with rising extremism.
In the heat of the New York City mayoral primary earlier this year, the media went wild over the news that Zohran Mamdani had had a previous career as a rapper. But no one, it seemed, bothered to listen to Mamdani’s lyrics especially closely. If they had, writes Ashley Rindsberg, they’d have heard the mayoral front-runner’s troubling tribute to the “Holy Land Five,” a group found liable in a 2004 federal trial for the murder of a Jewish boy from New York outside Jerusalem.
But are Mamdani’s troubling connections all in the past? Not if Olivia Reingold’s latest story is anything to go by. Olivia reports that on Friday, Mamdani appeared beside imam Siraj Wahhaj—once named by prosecutors as a possible co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—praising him as “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders.”
The Supreme Court has kicked off its new term with two extremely important but difficult cases involving sex, race, and partisan power in Congress. One is a First Amendment case dealing with “conversion therapy,” plunging the Court once again into trans issues. The other deals with redrawing House districts along racial lines and could determine which party wins the 2026 midterms. Jed Rubenfeld is here to make sense of both cases.
Tune In: Dr. Gad Saad on Conversations with Coleman
It’s uncontroversial to say that empathy—considering others’ feelings and experiences—is a social good. But in his new book Suicidal Empathy, evolutionary psychologist Dr. Gad Saad argues that there can be too much of a good thing.
Gad joins Coleman on the latest episode of his podcast to discuss the evolutionary and psychological roots of what he considers our society’s hyperactive empathy, and whether compassion has begun to override reason in American life.
Has empathy gone too far? And what do we lose, both individually and as a society, when moral sentiment replaces moral judgment? All that and more on the latest Conversations with Coleman. Press the play button below or tune in wherever you get your podcasts.
LIVE in New York City: Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss on Reclaiming Childhood in an Online World
This Wednesday, October 22, Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss are having a live conversation in New York City about How to Parent in the Digital Age. There are still a few tickets left for this discussion about raising kids in 2025—and how we might be getting it all backward. Get yours while you can!
Large crowds marched in No Kings protests across the U.S. on Saturday. More than 2,600 rallies had been planned, with organizers denouncing what they see as President Trump’s authoritarian overreach amid a government shutdown. The peaceful demonstrations drew top Democrats, while Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called them “hate America” rallies.
Israel announced the resumption of the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip late Sunday after a lethal attack by Hamas on IDF troops earlier in the day, and a wave of retaliatory Israeli strikes on 20 targets in Gaza threatened the uneasy peace that has been in place since last week’s deal.
An artillery shell prematurely detonated during a live-fire demonstration for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton in Southern California on Saturday, officials said, with fragments of the shell reportedly dropping onto vehicles that were part of Vice President J.D. Vance’s detail. California governor Gavin Newsom had shut a 17-mile stretch of freeway over safety concerns, a move that was criticized by the White House before the event.
Three masked men used a freight lift under renovation to access the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre and steal nine pieces of jewelry of “inestimable heritage and historical value,” in a brazen daytime heist Sunday morning. One of the items, a crown that belonged to Napoleon III’s wife, was found broken on the ground nearby.
Donald Trump boarded Air Force One using smaller stairs amid increased security measures at Palm Beach International Airport Sunday. The precaution comes after Secret Service agents found a hunting stand with a clear line of sight to the president when he boards or exits the plane.
The bodies of hostages Ronen Engel and Sonthaya Oakkharasri were returned from Gaza on Saturday, nearly two years after they were killed in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. The return of the remains of dead hostages, which Hamas agreed to as part of the ceasefire deal, has become a contentious issue in the ongoing truce.
Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to an immediate ceasefire Sunday after more than a week of deadly border fighting, following mediation by Qatar and Turkey. The truce ends the worst violence between the neighbors since the Taliban’s 2021 return to power.
President Trump commuted former congressman George Santos’s seven-year prison sentence for fraud and identity theft Friday, freeing him after just three months behind bars. Asked about whether Trump had abused his power, Santos said: “I’m pretty confident that [if] President Trump pardoned Jesus Christ off of the cross, he would have had critics.”
Jesus H. Santos - you are a free wad of crap once again!
If Trump were a king or a dictator or a fascist tyrant, those rallies never would have happened.