It’s Wednesday, March 18. 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 Joe Kent’s resignation. Josh Kaplan investigates whether there’s a moral panic about the “manosphere.” The foreign money behind anti-war protests. Liel Leibovitz explains why he’s proud to call himself a Disney adult. And much more.
But first: The alarmist eco-warrior who never admitted defeat.
Imagine getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to biologist and professional eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich, who died this week at 93. Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his bestseller The Population Bomb. It predicted an explosion in humankind, draining the planet’s resources and triggering a near apocalypse.
Thankfully, Ehrlich would be proven wrong—stunningly wrong—by events. But even if Ehrlich lost the argument, his Malthusian mindset still won him award after award and, in many ways, became conventional wisdom.
Today, we’re bringing you two pieces on Ehrlich’s ideas and why they matter.
Up first, the British science writer Matt Ridley details the callous policy proposals Ehrlich’s thinking led him to support—including forced sterilization programs that Ehrlich called “coercion in a good cause”—and the policymakers who listened to him.
Up next, Larissa Phillips. She was born to parents beholden to Ehrlich’s theories. In fact, she says, she almost wasn’t born because of them: Her parents were trying to model their own family planning on his prescription for zero population growth. Thankfully, they didn’t quite get it right. Ehrlich’s death caused Larissa to contemplate not just the impact of his ideas on her family but also where the line falls—where idealism becomes pretentious, or pessimistic, or harmful.
—The Editors
For opponents of the war in Iran, director of National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent, who resigned on Tuesday, is a dissident. He accused Trump of being duped into a war by Israel. But is he a reliable witness on Iran policy? Eli Lake dives into the claims in Kent’s resignation letter, and where his departure leaves the MAGA debate over this war.
Reports of the manosphere’s sinister influence on young men are greatly exaggerated, writes Josh Kaplan. Nothing has laid this bare quite like the latest film by British documentarian Louis Theroux, “Inside the Manosphere,” an exercise in hand-wringing that stokes an outsized concern about the threat of figures like Andrew Tate radicalizing a generation of boys. “It’s patronizing and infantilizing to assume that just because boys watch these things, they think it’s a perfect and true representation of the world and will act accordingly,” writes Josh.
Strikes on Iran have opened up a new military front abroad and an old one at home, with protests on the streets of American cities that bear striking similarities to recent protests against ICE, in support of the Cuban regime, or against Israel. Part of the reason why is because the organizers’ funding network is the same. Tal Fortang and Stu Smith follow the money.
This Sunday, it wasn’t a canned Oscar acceptance speech that captured the hearts of Americans. It was a 30-second, tear-jerking ad for Disney Cruise Lines, showing a father and son taking the same moonlit walk on a cruise ship deck, year after year. It touched Liel Leibovitz, too, who writes that in a world hellbent on delivering the next shiny new thing, Disney “understands that there’s something far, far greater powering the American experiment: tradition.” Read Liel on why the ad worked—and why he’s proud to be a Disney adult.
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At least 75 people died Monday night in a Pakistani air strike on the Afghanistan capital of Kabul, the deadliest attack so far in an escalating violent conflict between the two nations. Pakistan, once a backer of the Taliban, is now accusing Afghanistan of harboring Islamist terrorists who carried out hundreds of attacks on Pakistani soil in recent years.
The SAVE Act, Trump’s legislation aimed at tamping down noncitizen voting, appears to have little chance of attaining the 60 Senate votes required to pass. In a procedural vote yesterday, Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican who voted with all 47 Senate Democrats against the bill.
Arizona is bringing criminal charges against online betting giant Kalshi for allegedly operating an illegal gambling business. “These are the first criminal charges of any kind filed against Kalshi in any court in the United States, but it will likely be the first of several,” Daniel Wallach, a sports and gaming lawyer, told Bloomberg.
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani likened the plight of the Irish to the “genocide” of Palestinians during a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast honoring Irish New Yorkers at Gracie Mansion. “Who can better understand those who weep than those who have been made to weep for so long?” Mamdani said.
He has two first names and one tricky task: Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, must balance MAGA’s deportation demands against criticism of the president’s immigration crackdown. Mullin is expected to be confirmed by the Senate’s GOP majority today.
A federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted all nine members of what prosecutors said was an antifa militant group last week in the first federal antifa terrorism trial in U.S. history. Jurors found the defendants guilty of providing material support to terrorists, attempted murder of a police officer, rioting, and using and carrying explosives in connection with an attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4, 2025.
And Good Riddance to Kent 👉💨
Is nothing about Al Gore original, same story crafted for modern times.
This could easily could have started with... "Imagine getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to politician and professional eco-pessimist Al Gore. Gore shot to fame in 2006 with his film An Inconvenient Truth."