Instagram Teen Accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.
It’s Wednesday, November 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on why Donald Trump owes Bill Clinton. Should Iryna Zarutska’s schizophrenic murderer face the death penalty? And much more.
But first: Lonely young men, past and present.
In recent weeks, the American right has gone to war with itself because of the mainstreaming of a once-fringe figure: Nick Fuentes. The white supremacist livestreamer built a cult following among the “Groypers,” a group of isolated young men who subscribe to some of the most noxious ideas out there. More recently, his interviews with Tucker Carlson and others have brought him in from the periphery. Now, as Gabe Kaminsky and Tanner Nau report, Fuentes plans to capitalize on his moment in the limelight. How? By using a revamped nonprofit to “infiltrate politics” and steer the direction of the Republican Party.
Is Fuentes serious, or is it just a troll? And can he really sway today’s GOP? Gabe and Tanner talk to Republican insiders about the man who has their party in his crosshairs.
David Samuels finds an unsettling echo of the present in the Vienna of more than a century ago. There lived a lonely young man named Adolf Hitler. David revisits a forgotten account by “the single and exclusive friend of Adolf Hitler” in Vienna and finds a portrait that is “eerily familiar, and even sympathetic, in a way that continues to give me nightmares.”
David flew to Austria to find out more about the city Hitler claimed had shaped him. He discovers an Adolf that looks uncannily like certain young American men today.
Back to today—and the ructions on the right. On the latest Free Press livestream, Will Rahn was joined by Sam Tanenhaus, whose biography of William F. Buckley was published earlier this year, to talk about the ongoing fight for the soul of American conservatism. Watch their conversation and read an edited transcript here:
—Oliver Wiseman
On Tuesday, the House voted 427–1 to release all remaining files—emails, transcripts, recordings—that the federal government still has pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein. We’re at a dramatic moment in a scandal built for our populist moment. And yet one of the mysteries of the Epstein scandal is why it isn’t an even bigger deal. In a grimly ironic twist, the answer lies in the scandals involving two men who were once friends with Epstein: Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Eli Lake dives into the pasts of two presidents to explain our tawdry present.
This August, DeCarlos Brown Jr. stabbed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in the neck on a light rail train in Charlotte. She was pronounced dead within minutes after the horrific attack. Now there is a push to remove legal hurdles that would prevent the use of capital punishment in the case. But does Brown, a diagnosed schizophrenic, deserve to die? No, says psychiatrist Sally Satel. Not because the death penalty is immoral per se, but because “no civilized or lawful purpose is served by executing severely mentally ill defendants whose psychosis distorted their moral logic.”
Last week on “Breaking History,” Eli Lake traced the roots of punk music 2,400 years to Socrates, the father of philosophy. In a bonus episode of the pod, Eli is joined by “Reason” editor-at-large and fellow punk obsessive Nick Gillespie to identify a few more punks, including Thomas Paine and Steve Jobs. To listen to this bonus episode, become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today.
Before the pandemic, Laura Osnes was a Broadway star, landing the lead role in “Grease” at just 21 years old. But she suddenly became a villain in 2021 when she dropped out of a performance because she was not vaccinated. You might think that four years later everyone had moved on. You’d be wrong. Zac Bissonette reports on the long tail of a cancellation.
“Things happen,” President Trump said about the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi during a meeting with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday. In bin Salman’s first visit to the U.S. since the killing, Trump said the crown prince “knew nothing about it,” contradicting a 2021 U.S. intelligence report that concluded he approved the killing.
A federal court blocked Texas from using a gerrymandered congressional map for next year’s midterm elections, ruling that it is likely racially discriminatory. Republicans were banking on the map to flip five Democratic House seats red.
The House of Representatives passed a resolution rebuking Democratic Representative Chuy García of Illinois for his ploy to handpick his successor. García announced his retirement after the filing deadline, and his chief of staff filed her own paperwork to run just hours before the deadline. All Republicans plus 23 Democrats voted for the resolution, authored by fellow Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Read Gabe Kaminsky’s profile of Perez: “The Democrat Fighting the Gerontocracy.”)
A county judge in Tennessee temporarily blocked the deployment of certain National Guard troops in Memphis, citing concerns over using “the state’s military forces for domestic law enforcement purposes.” The ruling affects troops deployed by Republican governor Bill Lee, not the approximately 150 soldiers dispatched by the Trump administration to support federal law enforcement efforts.
An outage at the internet service company Cloudflare took a large swath of the internet offline for four hours yesterday morning, including X, ChatGPT, and Spotify. The company, whose services are used by approximately 20 percent of all websites, said the cause was a single configuration file that got too big. (Read our autopsy of a similar outage at Amazon Web Services last month.)
President Trump said he delayed a strike on an Iranian nuclear facility during the Iran-Israel war in June by two days because the military “saw a lot of unbelievable activity going on at the McDonald’s next to the base where they take off.” Speaking at the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Monday night, he said it was a “nice story” for the fast-food chain but “not a good story for us. So I canceled it.”
By many metrics, Gen Z is doing better than past generations. While housing costs and student loan debt are higher than they have been for previous generations, the unemployment rate among Americans 16 to 27 is the lowest in 50 years. In 2022, the median wealth of Americans under 35 was the highest on record, and the median 25-year-old made 50 percent more than a Boomer did at the same age. (For another perspective, read our Q&A with Peter Thiel: “Capitalism Isn’t Working for Young People.”)
Who the Fuck is Nick Fuente?
Anyone paying the slightest attention to the right has known about Nicholas Fuentes for at least the past five years. The chorus of "why is the Free Press covering him??" is an attempt to deny the neo-Nazi/white supremacist problem on the right by blaming the messenger. In addition to calling for the extermination and deportation of Jewish Americans, he is effectively splitting the Republican party with less than a year to go before the midterms. But yeah, the Free Press is the problem for reporting on it.
He and his neofascist followers, which by all accounts number in the millions, are just as bad as the Islamist and Marxist scum on the left. Ignoring this punk won't make him and his followers go away. Would the "Free Palestine" chuds go away if we just ignored and didn't cover them?