It’s Wednesday, October 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: World Trade Center bombing survivors recoil at Zohran Mamdani’s photo op with a terror-linked imam. How political violence became commonplace. And is it possible to actually “break the internet”?
But first: Inside Palantir’s enigma machine.
Few companies raise as many questions as Palantir does. Did it help kill Osama bin Laden? Is its software being used to watch all of us? Why does it help the feds identify illegal immigrants?
The company has become a lightning rod for people across the political spectrum, partly because Palantir is secretive and complex. That only fuels the sense that it must be up to something nefarious. So, in an effort to shed a little light on the secretive firm, I asked Palantir employees a simple question during a visit to their office in Washington, D.C., recently: What do you do for a living?
The answers were almost all metaphors. One engineer told me to think of Palantir as capable of finding a moving needle in a haystack the size of a small country. Another began his answer by asking me to imagine a tangle of hoses in the backyard.
It’s true that the company’s software is hard to understand, but Palantir’s leaders say their mission is simple. “We’re pro-West,” CEO Alex Karp told me. “For us, the West is led by America, but also includes allies, including Israel.”
I spoke to dozens of people inside and outside Palantir to understand the criticisms of the company. Which are fair? Which aren’t? And, to return to the question at the heart of it all: What does Palantir actually do?
—Maya Sulkin
Death threats against public figures aren’t just escalating—they’re becoming all too normal. In the past two days, a pardoned January 6 rioter was charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and another man was arrested for threatening conservative commentators, including Free Press contributors Seth Dillon and Josh Hammer. In our latest editorial, we argue that every act of political violence is an attack on all of us.
After a photo surfaced of New York mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani smiling beside a Brooklyn imam once named in a terrorism probe, survivors of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing are demanding answers, Olivia Reingold reports. For people like Michael Macko—who lost his father in the attack—the image didn’t sit well: “If I were going to vote,” he said, “he would’ve just lost my vote.”
When we don’t know something, we google it—or ask AI. But what do we lose in the process? More than we realize, argues Ben Schott. After years studying the secret codes shared among diamond dealers, cabbies, and baristas, Ben explains what the machine can never replace: “No algorithm can collect the shouted slang of a crowded kitchen, or the subtle signs of a soigné dining room. Such terms turn work into kinship and create systems of trust that transform colleagues into co-conspirators. They are proof that shared experience always outruns scraped data—and that belonging depends not on computational heuristics but on intimacy.” Read his fantastic piece below.
What would you do if the internet stopped working? Millions had to answer that for themselves on Monday morning when the largest cloud database provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experienced an outage, effectively shutting down most of the internet. Everything from United Airlines to T-Mobile to Snapchat to Fortnite was down. Tanner Nau talked to Mehdi Daoudi, an expert in internet security and resiliency, about the alarming vulnerabilities of the digital world—and the damage they can do to the real one.
LIVE in Chicago: Would America Be Safer Without the Second Amendment?
We are nearly sold out for our latest installment of The Freedom Debates, where Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch will tackle whether the right to bear arms today is at odds with the common good, or if it is as necessary now as it was in 1791. Bari Weiss will moderate their conversation on November 5 in Chicago. Get your tickets today.
Vice President J.D. Vance traveled to Israel on Tuesday to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza after the IDF exchanged fire with Hamas. Vance told the press the ceasefire is going “better than I expected” and that he is “confident that we’re going to be in a place where this peace lasts.”
The Marine Corps is investigating a mishap that occurred during a live-fire military demonstration that inadvertently rained shrapnel on a Southern California highway. The highway was shut down prior to the demonstration and no injuries were reported. Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were in attendance.
Sixty-two percent of Americans believe the federal government has too much power—a record high, according to a new Gallup poll. More Democrats believe the government has too much power than Republicans for the first time since 2007. Forty percent of Americans, however, believe the government should do more.
A resurfaced video of a shirtless Graham Platner, a left-wing Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, showed a Nazi logo tattooed on his chest. Platner denied being a “secret Nazi” and says he drunkenly got the tattoo while he was deployed as a Marine in Croatia. Platner is facing Maine governor Janet Mills in a Democratic primary to unseat longtime GOP Senator Susan Collins.
President Trump reportedly plans to demand the Justice Department pay him $230 million as compensation for Biden-era indictments and investigations, according to The New York Times. The paper reports that any compensation would have to be approved by Trump’s own DOJ leadership.
A group of researchers has developed a blood test that can detect up to 50 diseases from just a blood sample, according to a recent study. The test was able to detect early signs of cancer and identify which organ the cancer resided in with a 92 percent rate of accuracy.
We have a packed season of conversations, debates, and live events. Here’s what’s coming up:
Reclaiming Childhood in an Online World with Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss
New York, NY • October 22, 7 p.m. • ❌ Sold OutWould America Be Safer Without the Second Amendment? Featuring Alan Dershowitz, Dana Loesch, and Bari Weiss
Chicago • November 5, 7 p.m. • 🎟️ Tickets on sale here
And you have proof of your claims that he a muslim cleric who supports Mamdani is a Hamas terrorist? Waiting breathlessly to see it.
Where is the article about the federal government shutdown? Where is the editorial outlining the opposing positions? The options? The shutdown impact on average Americans? It's been over three weeks!!
Is that because any time logical people discuss the shutdown the democratic party looks (again) like a bunch of confused lunatics?
Has TFP already sold out and is now just another MSM stooge?
God I miss Charles Krauthammer....well, back to Joe Rogan.