If your head has been spinning since Donald Trump walked into the White House Rose Garden  and declared “Liberation Day” last Wednesday, we don't blame you. And not just because it was nauseating watching the stock market or your 401(k) crash down, but because it wasn't clear what exactly we were looking at. 

As our guest today, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, wrote in our pages last week: 

"Depending on your worldview, you probably think Trump’s tariff blitz is one of two things. Either a committed protectionist is trying to Make America Great Again by killing “globalism,” ending “forever wars,” and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Let’s call this Project Minecraft. Alternatively, an unhinged demagogue is crashing both the world economy and the liberal international order, mainly to the advantage of authoritarian regimes…But here is what is actually happening: The American empire that came into existence after the failed autarky and isolationism of the 1930s is being broken up after 80 years. Despite Trump’s imperial impulses—wanting to annex Greenland, calling for Canada to become the 51st state—he is engaged right now in a kind of wild decolonization project."

Whether or not you agree with Niall’s conclusion, there’s no question that the real story here is not about the particular tariff rate for Cambodia or Taiwan; rather, it’s fundamentally about reordering America’s place in the world. 

Over the past decade, there’s been an intense debate over what role America should play on the world stage, in geopolitics, in trade, and in technology. Trump has made a very clear set of decisions on that question. And that’s the case whether or not most Americans understand the consequences.

So what are the consequences when the U.S. acts unilaterally to upend the global trading system? What is the outcome when the U.S. weaponizes its own economic power? What happens when the world order, as we know it, is upended? Will these actions embolden our adversaries, or weaken them? Will this ultimately make us poorer, or better off? Has the American empire reached its end? And, was this inevitable or self-inflicted? 

One note: While Bari and Niall were recording this conversation, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs. Notably, there’s no pause on the tariffs for China. In fact, it went up to 125 percent. But the point remains. And the face-off between America and China has only heated up. What does that mean? Is the twenty-first century destined to be ours, or China’s? All these questions and more with Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Depending on who you talk to, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are either the swampiest of swamp creatures—the epitome of all that is wrong with political journalism—or, alternatively, two of the most interesting, successful entrepreneurs in the new media landscape.

In 2006, VandeHei left The Washington Post to co-found Politico, where he was executive editor. His first hire was Mike Allen, then of Time magazine.

Politico turned into a massive hit, with Allen as its star writer. During the Obama years, Allen was so well-sourced that he became, in the words of Mark Leibovich at The New York Times, “the man the White House wakes up to.”

But then, in 2017, Mike and Jim decided to start something new—a website called Axios, which, in the beginning, was really a newsletter Mike wrote every day. They delivered news straight to your inbox and kept it short, snappy, and heavy on emojis. They called it “smart brevity.”

Their emails are filled with invocations to “go deeper” and “be smarter.” And at the end of the day, they send you an email called “Finish Line” that’s essentially life advice for young professionals on the make. A recent one advised millennials nearing middle age to begin something new, like ice skating, while another advised readers to ditch Google Maps to keep their brains sharp. It’s like MAHA for D.C.’s professional-managerial class.

They were, in a sense, pioneers of a new kind of online journalism. Long before seemingly everyone had a Substack, they were using one of the oldest internet applications—email—to get news to subscribers.

So Mike and Jim are big deals in journalism and have been for a long time.

But in case you haven’t noticed, and we don't know how you would have missed this if you listen to this show, journalism is in deep trouble. This is in large part because Americans have lost faith in journalists. According to Gallup, roughly two-thirds of Americans had a great deal of faith in the news media in 1970. Today, only 31 percent of Americans say the same—while 36 percent say they have no faith in the news media at all.

How can that trust be rebuilt? Are we destined to live in a world of different realities and alternative facts? Should the mainstream media apologize for all they have ignored or covered up or gotten wrong over the past few years?

To boil it all down: Does real, honest journalism have a future in America?

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John McWhorter is one of the greatest living experts on the English language—and many others, too. He’s an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, a columnist at The New York Times, and he’s an unsung Broadway aficionado. He once told us he could not do an interview because he was busy rehearsing a cabaret show for his bungalow colony. It all sounds like a scene out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

But in his day job, he is thinking about words, language, and—the not-so-controversial topic of pronouns. John is a true independent mind. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of liberal excess—his last book was called Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. But now? Now he’s taking a position that we suspect will provoke the other side.

In his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words, John makes the provocative case that the English language evolves in ways that don’t always make sense. But, he says, that’s okay. And he takes it a step further—saying the wide adoption of they/them in the singular, instead of he/him or she/her, works.

What are the stakes of these little words? For example, as a society, are we disrespecting women (and men) when we fail to acknowledge, in our language, who has dealt with the challenges of womanhood or manhood and who has not?

And what are the consequences of letting children adopt they/them pronouns, especially if it pushes them toward medical transition? At the same time, how do we create a society that is kind and inclusive but also reflective of reality? And can we even have both?

The broader context of this language conversation is about what can and cannot be said. We talk about this broader context—the state of the woke left, but also the rise of the woke right.

Bari puts all of these questions to the premier linguist and culture expert John McWhorter on this episode of Honestly.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Ground News - Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A few years ago Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor—a medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. Then Covid hit, the lockdowns began, and “Doctor Jay”—as he is known—became a pariah in the medical community.

That’s because, along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether the lockdowns were a good idea. They did this in an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration. And this idea, in the madness of that period, was considered so dangerous by federal health and Big Tech that Jay was not only smeared, but censored. His words—on platforms from Reddit to Twitter to Facebook—were suppressed.

But here’s the thing: The lockdowns were pretty disastrous. We’re still dealing with their effects—the loss of childhood learning, the cancer screenings that were skipped, the inability of those with special needs to see the people who help them, the separation of families—just to name a few consequences. And it’s still unclear if those lockdowns were worth it.

Many powers tried to silence Jay, but he persisted. And today Jay is the new head of the National Institutes of Health. If you’re skeptical of karma, this turn of events may lead you to believe in it.

He’s leading this massive federal agency, sometimes called “the crown jewel of American science”—it’s the largest public funder of medical research in the world—at a moment when public health authorities need to rebuild trust.

But here’s the wrinkle. Jay has two bosses: President Trump, who initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop a Covid vaccine in his first term. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, who is also the most famous vaccine skeptic in America.

Walking the line here will inevitably be tricky for Dr. Jay. So, how can he do it? How does someone who believes that vaccinating your kids for diseases like polio and measles also confront the idea that large swaths of Americans have fear around vaccinating their kids? And how will he navigate an HHS that’s empowering discredited antivax crusaders — a move that, as The Wall Street Journal recently argued, is already vindicating Kennedy’s critics.

That’s among the many, many things Bari asks him in this conversation.

Jay has lived a remarkable life. And we get into all of it. His conversion to Christianity as a teenager and how his faith allowed him to stick to his values—and even to pray for Francis Collins, the former NIH director who called his ideas dangerous. The chutzpah it took to fight the entire medical establishment. How he ultimately triumphed against his critics. How he wants to put the National Institutes of Health on the frontline in the war against chronic illness in America.

And, most importantly, how can public health authorities make America healthy again? Today on Honestly, he tells us all about how he plans to do it all. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the last quarter century, an Italian macher from New Jersey has been one of the most powerful people in the United States. If you’re a certain type of nerdy, obsessive, legally inclined conservative, he’s basically Taylor Swift. But most people don’t know who he is because he doesn’t want them to know.

He has never held or sought political office. He does not hail from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. He is not a writer, pundit, or political aide. He rarely does interviews. And yet his influence is hard to overstate. People in power—particularly presidents—trust and listen to him.

I’m talking about Leonard Leo, the animating force behind the Federalist Society and the key node of a growing network of conservative groups aiming to reshape the culture and the country. Whether you’ve heard of him or not, he has no doubt directly affected your life in some way.

Leo is the person who counseled George W. Bush to appoint Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He had an arguably even greater influence on President Trump. Trump was new to Washington when he first became president. Leo, on the other hand, knew everyone in town. Leo counseled Trump and helped pick and prepare Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for confirmation.

And that’s just the Supreme Court. Leo has cultivated talent across every level of the judicial system.

Leo understands the levers of Washington. He understands how Congress works, how the press works, and most importantly, how the courts work. He is, in a sense, the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — the one that overturned Roe v. Wade. Which means he has changed American history—for better or worse, depending on your worldview.

Today on Honestly, Bari asks Leo about all of it: his relationship with Trump, their falling out (though he disputes this characterization), how he understands the divide on the right between the old guard like himself and the new characters like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Bari asks about his so-called dark money groups, the $1.6 billion-dollar gift he was given, and the criticism he gets for wielding power and influence of this magnitude.

She asks about Trump’s willingness to defy the courts, and if Leonard sees it that way. They discuss Trump’s controversial moves like sending accused gang members to El Salvador and reinstituting TikTok. She asks why MAGA has recently rejected Amy Coney Barrett, and if gay marriage is a settled matter.

And most importantly, in a moment of institutional crisis in American life, Bari asks whether the Supreme Court can remain above the fray.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Go to fastgrowingtrees.com/Honestly and use the code HONESTLY at checkout to get 15% off your first order. Spring starts here.

Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and stay fully informed on today’s biggest news stories.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The morning of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was detained at his apartment in New York City. Khalil is a 30-year-old Algerian citizen. He was born in Syria and is of Palestinian descent.

He came to this country on a student visa in 2022, married an American citizen in 2023, became a green card holder in 2024, and finished his graduate studies at Columbia University in December 2024.

Mahmoud was also the spokesman and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that says it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and which played an active role in the rioting that took over Columbia buildings last spring.

He has not been charged with any crimes—at least not so far. But the White House wants to deport him on the grounds that he poses a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went as far as to post on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Many of us believe that Khalil’s ideology is abhorrent. He enjoyed the United States’ educational system—attending one of our most prestigious universities—while advocating for America’s destruction and for a group that seeks the genocide of the Jewish people.

At the same time, the case for his deportation is not clear-cut. Here’s the divide:

Some say this is an immigration case. As Free Press contributing editor Abigail Shrier has put it: “This is an immigration, not a free speech case. It’s about whether the U.S. can set reasonable conditions on aliens for entry and residence.” But others say this is, in fact, a free speech case that cuts to the heart of our most cherished values.

To figure all this out, we’re hosting three of the smartest legal minds we know. Eugene Volokh is an expert on the Bill of Rights who is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He’s also a contributor to Reason magazine, where he runs his own blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder is a practicing lawyer and the director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center. Just yesterday, he filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the Southern District of New York against Khalil and several others for material support for terror. Jed Rubenfeld is a Free Press columnist and a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School.

This case is one we have written about extensively in The Free Press—and one that we are actively debating in our newsroom. So we were thrilled to be able to bring together some of the smartest people on this complicated issue.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Visit fastgrowingtrees.com/Honestly and use code HONESTLY for 15% off your first order—spring starts here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The other week Bari traveled to Austin, Texas, to host a debate on a simple little topic: religion and whether we need more of it.

There’s a line from Proverbs that has guided believers for at least the past 2,000 or so years. It goes like this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But for most of our lives, this message has been turned on its head.

We can’t entirely blame the so-called New Atheists, who dominated the American intellectual scene in the first part of this century, for the death of God—for that, we’d need to go back to Nietzsche or Darwin or the Enlightenment. But the point is that for people of Bari’s generation and cohort, to be an educated, sophisticated, respectable person was to be an atheist. Or at the very least, an agnostic.

The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian fell from 90 percent in 1972 to 64 percent in 2022, while the religiously unaffiliated (the so-called “nones”) rose from 5 percent to 30 percent in the same period, according to Pew Research.The shift toward secularism has been even more pronounced across the Atlantic. Among Europeans ages 16 to 29, 70 percent say they never attend religious services.

But after years of decline, this trend may be starting to reverse. A massive new Pew survey found that the share of Americans identifying as Christian has, after many years of decline, finally started to rise again. And the share of Americans identifying with other religions is actually increasing.

So are we better off with or without God?

The other night in Austin Bari sat down with Ross Douthat, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Shermer, and Adam Carolla. They came together to debate the following resolution: Does the West need a religious revival?

Ross and Ayaan argued yes. Ross is a New York Times opinion columnist. His most recent book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ayaan is an activist and best-selling author of many books including Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. 

On the other side, Michael Shermer and Adam Carolla argued no, we do not need a religious revival. Michael is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. He, too, is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers on science, psychology, and faith. Adam Carolla is a comedian, actor, radio personality, TV host, and best-selling author. He currently hosts The Adam Carolla Show.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

FIRE knows free speech makes free people. You make it possible. Join the movement today at thefire.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic.

Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power.

To see their way out of the political wilderness, the Democrats need a vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home, or voted red for the first time, this past November.

While other liberals and progressives are doubling down on zombie ideas, afraid to come face to face with a country that has moved decisively to the right, Ezra and Derek are willing to face reality. They see that blue states are functioning—as Bari likes to say—similarly to the DMV. And as a result, people are fleeing to places like Texas and Florida.

If you’ve lived in a city like L.A. or San Francisco in the past decade, it’s pretty difficult to sell the idea that the government is working effectively. It’s why so many people are cheering for DOGE.

But while DOGE is taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy, Ezra and Derek are reformers who believe it can be fixed. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and liberal thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.

They just wrote a new book about all of this called Abundance. Their thesis is simple: To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. 

While conservatives and libertarians might say: Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek think the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it.

So how do we build a government that’s less like the DMV and more like the Apple Store? How will this government actually deliver for Americans and solve our most pressing problems—in housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare? And, how do we reverse our government’s long march into total incompetence?

Ezra and Derek have a lot of ideas on how we can get there. Today on Honestly, we hear them. This conversation challenged us, and we hope it challenges and surprises you too.

Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Listen to Unpacking Israeli History: https://link.chtbl.com/DmS_bFpl

Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and stay fully informed on today’s biggest news stories.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Karp is many things: a cross-country skier, a long-range shooter, a tai chi expert who might be the only man who knows how to wield a sword but doesn’t know how to drive. He’s also a collector of extremely prestigious degrees. His PhD thesis was called “Aggression in the Life-World: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression by Describing the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” 

Since 2003, he has also been the CEO of Palantir, a software and data analytics company that does defense and intelligence work. Simply put, it’s a company that stops terror attacks—while also helping make sports cars go faster and pharmaceutical companies build better drugs.

Bari sat down with Alex Karp at UATX to discuss his new book, The Technological Republic, which offers a vision of how Silicon Valley lost its way and how the future of America and the West hinges on it finding its way back—fast. It just debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list.

They also discuss Barnard students occupying a campus building, the religious nature of woke culture, and DOGE. 

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each one of us has a different conception story. For some parents, it’s a romantic night out, maybe over a candlelit dinner. For others, like Bari and Nellie, it involves a trip to a fertility clinic in a mall that doesn’t even validate parking. 

And of course, for some it’s a long, challenging, emotional process involving needles, hormones, and many false starts. We know a lot of our listeners can relate to that.  

Now, the topic of infertility often seems like the purview of a doctor’s office or a self-help book, or maybe a women’s health column. Where you might not expect to hear about it in painstaking detail is in Andrew Schulz’s new Netflix special. Schulz’s special is vulnerable, obviously funny, and a look into the taboo topic of male infertility. It’s called Life, and if you haven’t already seen it, blow off your plans tonight and watch Life instead. 

Now, the last time we had Schulz on this show was three years ago. It was in the thick of the woke culture storm, and Schulz was about to release a comedy special on Amazon. But when the streamer asked him to do what a lot of people at the time were being asked to do in comedy—censor his jokes—Schulz said no. He bet on himself and released the special independently. As he tells Bari today, he ended up making five times what he would have made with Amazon. 

We’ve been talking a lot on this show about the vibe shift that’s come for politics and tech. And it’s obviously come for comedy. But actually, we think you could make the argument that comedy created the vibe shift that we’re seeing in so many other parts of the culture. And perhaps that’s because comedians with podcasts have become like the Walter Cronkites of American culture. Theo Von is almost Barbara Walters at this point. And Andrew Schulz has found himself right in the thick of it. 

Last October on his podcast, Schulz sat down with then-candidate Donald Trump as he was running for president, for a candid 90-minute conversation. You can imagine the type of response he got for that. 

Today on Honestly, Bari asks Schulz about that interview with Trump and whether there are certain people who are beyond the pale. They talk about his difficulty conceiving, what it meant for his masculinity, and she asks about the decision to put his—and his wife’s—vulnerability on camera. And finally, she asks how to resist audience capture.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices