The Free Press
On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: An EU bureaucrat threatens Twitter. Sally Satel on a therapist blacklist. H.R. McMaster on Ukraine’s big breakthrough. Rupa Subramanya on violence in Bangladesh. Caitlin Flanagan and Suzy Weiss dish on Honestly. And much more.
But first, our lead story.
To some, Madison Campbell is a feminist icon who stands to revolutionize our broken criminal justice system. To the attorneys general of New York and Pennsylvania, she is a latter-day Elizabeth Holmes albeit on a smaller scale: a fraud who, in Campbell’s case, exploits the confusion and desperation of rape victims.
They say that Campbell’s crime is “misleading” victims of sexual assault into thinking they could one day get justice using her innovation: at-home rape kits sold under the name Leda Health. The attorneys general say the evidence collected by her kits will never be admissible in court, and therefore, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James, is “illegal, fraudulent, and deceptive.”
But Campbell says that just because this hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.
The government, she says, does a poor job of getting justice for rape victims—only an estimated two percent of sexual assault perpetrators are convicted of felonies nationwide. And to obtain justice, victims usually have to undergo an in-person exam, in which a medical professional swabs, photographs, and prods their genitals. Even if a survivor goes through that “traumatizing” experience, Campbell says, there’s still a chance the evidence could be thrown out by a judge.
“We cannot guarantee the admissibility of our kits because you cannot guarantee the admissibility of any kit,” she told Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. “All we want is to be held to the same standard of any other piece of evidence.”
Is Campbell a feminist icon, or is she a #MeToo Elizabeth Holmes? Click here to read Olivia’s report on the woman trying to disrupt our criminal justice system.
Earlier this year, a therapist on a professional listserv in Chicago passed on a request by a potential patient seeking a therapist who was “a Zionist,” because the patient was dealing with feelings about the “current geopolitical climate.” Many mental health practitioners rely on such online groups to make and accept referrals for patients. It’s common for the request to indicate a preference for a therapist of a particular ethnicity, gender, religion, or age range.
But what happened after this request was made on the Facebook group Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists was not at all common. When therapists responded by putting their names forward on the listserv, one member took action. She announced to the group: “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to.” The listmaker, Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh, added: “Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.”
Contribute to this blacklist they did.
The events in Chicago have riven the therapeutic community and also exposed a dangerous new trend that threatens to undermine the very principles that should govern psychological treatment, writes Sally Satel for The Free Press. “There are two stories here,” she argues. “The first, no less troubling for being obvious, is that trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel—or are Jewish, or have Jewish-sounding names—from treating patients constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics. Interfering with the work of colleagues for political reasons is unconscionable.
“But the blacklist is also part of a larger drama unfolding within the world of psychotherapy as more and more clinicians insist that psychotherapy is, foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise. It is a trend that I, a psychiatrist, find alarming.” To read Sally’s full report on the campaign to blacklist Zionist therapists, click here.
As the Covid-era crime wave recedes, homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults in U.S. cities have dropped by 6 percent across 69 cities in the first half of 2024. The fall was notably steep in some major cities, like Miami and Washington, D.C., where violent crime fell by 29 percent. (Axios)
Israel put its military on high alert Monday with an Iranian attack expected any day. The Pentagon also announced it is moving a guided-missile submarine to the region. “We are in the days of vigilance and readiness,” said Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant. (Wall Street Journal)
In August 2023, Rachel Morin went hiking along a trail near her home in Maryland and never came back. The 37-year-old mother of five was raped, strangled, and beaten to death by a suspect who had fled to the U.S. illegally after murdering another woman in El Salvador. Reporter Catherine Herridge found that the suspect’s DNA was linked to a previous burglary. And “if DNA was collected at the border as required. . . we would have known who we were looking for,” said Fred Wynn, a Homeland Security whistleblower. (Catherine Herridge via X)
Is online voting secure? Hackers from across the globe traveled to Las Vegas to find out. In a small conference room, they competed for $10,000, the cash prize to be shared among those who could successfully identify flaws in the next generation of election systems. The only problem? The full report detailing the vulnerability findings will be published in the coming weeks, and in any case, will likely come too late to make any fixes before November 5. (Politico)
David Neuberger, a former UK Supreme Court president who sits on Hong Kong’s highest court, has been widely condemned after he upheld prison sentences against pro-democracy activists including newspaper tycoon and British citizen Jimmy Lai. Judges should be “defenders of the liberty of the subject,” another former UK Supreme Court wrote in June. Something Neuberger seems to have forgotten. (Times of London)
New polling suggests that Democrats’ attacks on J.D. Vance are working. Surveys by Democratic pollster Blueprint, which is funded by LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, show that Vance’s net favorability fell from -7 to -11 in the two weeks after Trump picked him to be his running mate. Responding to the survey, a Vance spokesman said, “The only thing this poll shows is that left-wing hacks paid by Big Tech super-donors will say anything if the price is right.” (Semafor)
How did Wikipedia lose its way? And what does that mean for information on the internet? Dr. Larry Singer, co-founder of the platform, has some thoughts. He says a place that once “allowed people to work together and represent a global array of perspectives on every topic” now just takes “the establishment’s view.” (Pirate Wires)
Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than ten years ago, when the LGBTQ group had serious money issues. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019, “fix it or shut it down.” Too bad she didn’t choose the latter, argues James Kirchick, who thinks the organization has been “flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage.” (The Atlantic)
Taking a leaf out of Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, British writer Decca Aitkenhead got some teens to swap their smartphones for basic phones for a month. She then sent the group—her two sons, aged 13 and 14, along with eight friends—on an unsupervised two-day camping trip. The results were thrilling. (After Babel)
Self-loathing American columnists keep complaining that other Americans are ruining Europe. Ben Dreyfuss says the premise of all these articles is the same: “Europe is a lovely place filled with lovely people and history, and loud, ugly Americans keep popping over and treating it like shit.” But guess what? “Europe is a shithole,” Dreyfuss concludes. (Read his argument in Calm Down, which is both the name of Dreyfuss’s Substack and good advice for Dreyfuss himself.)
You Have Questions. Caitlin Flanagan and Suzy Weiss Have Answers
We’re living in an advice desert. Weekly columns like Dear Abby and Ask E. Jean have vanished. Our own amazing Emily Yoffe no longer offers wise weekly counsel in Dear Prudence. And what’s replaced their sage guidance ranges from finger-wagging to straight-up bad tips. Like, say, telling a woman worried about her daughter’s relationship with a married man to “read up on polyamory” (we’re looking at you, New York Times).
In short, we need good advice more than ever.
Fortunately, we have the perfect team to answer all your questions!
Tune in to the latest episode of Honestly, where Free Press reporter Suzy Weiss and Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan tackle. . . well, everything, from relationships to politics to children to animals (yes, animals)!
Hit play below to listen to their conversation on Spotify or catch it wherever you get your podcasts.
Suzy and Caitlin have much more advice to dispense. If you’d like to benefit from their pearls of wisdom, call 805-387-2530 and leave them a message.
→ The presidential candidate, the tech entrepreneur, and the EU bureaucrat threatening to censor them. Thierry Breton is not a governor, a senator, or a member of Congress. He is the digital commissioner of the EU—in other words, an unelected bureaucrat who has no business weighing in on American politics.
But on Monday afternoon Breton did just that when he sent X CEO Elon Musk a letter. In it—and it’s worth reading the whole thing—Breton said he was writing to “remind” the owner of X of his “due diligence obligations” to ensure that “all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming.”
The note from Breton—which dropped hours before Musk was scheduled to interview Donald Trump on X—was a jumble of bureaucratic jargon and legalese, but the threat was clear: nice tech company you’ve got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it. More: he implied that the EU might pull the plug on the interview depending on what Trump and Musk said. “Any negative effect of illegal content” could cause the EU to “make full use of our toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect EU citizens from harm.”
“With great audience comes greater responsibility,” said Breton in a post on X (where else?) accompanying the letter.
On one level, the healthiest response to an unelected French bureaucrat making such a threat against an American-built social network, one of America’s most important entrepreneurs, and a candidate for the American presidency is to thank God for the First Amendment, laugh, and perhaps post a meme or two.
Except for the fact that many influential people in the United States see Europe’s attempts at censorship and, rather than breathing a sigh of relief, turn green with envy. People like the Washington Post reporter who yesterday asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre what Joe Biden might consider doing to stop “misinformation” on X ahead of Musk’s conversation with Trump.
Last we heard, “democracy dies in darkness,” so we were eager to tune in to the conversation—if only to stick it to Breton.
As for the interview itself? There were technical glitches—as in, it took more than thirty minutes to get underway—but ultimately more than a million people logged on. Trump rambled; Musk (who has endorsed Trump) mostly agreed with him. It was raw and unfiltered, and a strangely intimate format—I look forward to Kamala Harris’s upcoming freewheeling chat with Musk.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Europe slept soundly, knowing that Mr. Breton was there to keep them safe from all that unruly American speech.
→ “This is like Washington crossing the Delaware,” says H.R. McMaster of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive. There hasn’t been much good news out of Ukraine lately. This summer, Russia had been making steady advances in the east and has hit civilian sites, including a children’s hospital, in major cities. Combine that with Ukraine’s depleted forces, and a feeling of grim inevitability has hung over the Ukraine-Russia war in recent months. But last week, Ukrainian forces caught the Russians by surprise with an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. On Monday, Ukraine’s top military commander said that his forces now control 386 square miles of Russian territory.
According H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser and now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the breakthrough is “very significant.” When we spoke on Monday, he told me that the Ukrainian gains matter not just because of the battlefield advantages they bring with them—such as the ability to target Russia’s long-range weapons systems—but also because they “demonstrate the profound weakness of the Russians and give lie to the mantra of de-escalation.” The way you win a war, says McMaster, is by “seizing and retaining the initiative,” adding that “the idea the Ukrainians could achieve a favorable settlement out of a cease-fire or negotiation without first being able to achieve military gains is ridiculous.”
For years, Ukraine’s Western allies have opposed major attacks on Russian soil. But Washington and Berlin have not objected to this push into Kursk, a change McMaster welcomes. “I just think that the Biden administration has been laboring under the idea that you can manage wars instead of trying to win them. The self-limiting nature of our support for Ukraine has actually been self-defeating.”
Until now, Western Ukraine policy was built on a miscalculation of Russia’s strength and a misunderstanding of its leader, he says. “The misconception about Putin since he took over in 2000 is that all we need to do is allay his security concerns.” But “Putin’s aspirations go far beyond just being a reaction to what we do.” Far better than a policy of “de-escalation” is a display of strength. “What deters Putin and what can prevent Putin from continuing his aggression is strength. What provokes Putin is the perception of weakness.”
McMaster urges Western powers to help Ukraine seize the initiative with more support after this breakthrough. “I see it as analogous to Washington crossing the Delaware in December of 1776,” he explains. “That didn’t end the war, but it was a critical step in regaining the initiative when everyone thought the cause was lost.”
→ Rupa Subramanya: Anti-Hindu violence is met with a shrug. A student-led protest in Bangladesh that began last month over a quota system for government jobs culminated last week in the downfall of Sheikh Hasina, the world’s longest serving female politician. On August 5, as crowds stormed her residence, Hasina fled to India. Bangladesh’s army backed the formation of an interim government, with the economist and Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus tapped to serve as its head.
Hundreds died as Hasina’s government sought to silence the protesters, and now the collapse of the Hasina government has led to further disorder and violence as police refuse to patrol the streets. The country’s dwindling Hindu minority, who are perceived by many Bangladeshis to have been loyal to Hasina’s government, have been the target of much of that violence. Many have fled the country, understandably fearful of the possibility of further Islamist violence against religious minorities. According to the official data, two Hindus have died. But there is reason to believe the true number is higher.
Disturbing images have surfaced, showing Hindus being lynched, stoned to death, and their homes set on fire, with many trying to escape the violence by fleeing into India. But the targeting of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority has not received anything like the attention it deserves. If not for X, the full extent of the violence might never have come to light. The mainstream media’s coverage of the violence against Hindus has been scant and dismissive.
Al Jazeera condemned coverage of the violence against Hindus in Bangladesh as “Islamophobic,” and the AFP seemed more concerned about “misinformation” over the scale of the violence than the violence itself. The New York Times ran with the headline, “Hindus in Bangladesh Face Revenge Attacks After Prime Minister’s Exit.” The word revenge was later removed.
“We stand against any racially based attacks or racially based incitement to violence,” said a spokesperson for the UN’s secretary general, avoiding any specific mention of the violence targeting Hindus by Islamists.
The takeaway—painfully obvious to Hindus in Bangladesh—is that political violence is treated differently depending on the victims in question. And in this case, with Muslims committing violence against Hindus, the world has met terrifying scenes with a shrug. —Rupa Subramanya
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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The Honestly advice episode with Suzy and Caitlyn was great. Better than I expected.
The wider western world has absorbed a few too many idiotic ideas from France, thanks to Foucault, Derrida and others of that ilk. I suggest that Thierry Breton put a sock in it and go back to napping on the public dime. The adult world doesn't need his halfwit supervision.