With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

It’s Wednesday, April 29, and the United Arab Emirates has announced its departure from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As the group’s third-largest producer, the move is monumental. By way of comparison, it is akin to a permanent member of the Security Council leaving the United Nations—except, of course, the world actually cares about what OPEC has to say.

To understand why this has huge implications, here’s some context.

OPEC was formed in 1960 by Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, ostensibly to ensure the global stability of the oil supply, but fundamentally to act as a cartel to fix the price of oil at a level that benefited the members. As their charter states:

“The principal aim of the Organization shall be the coordination and unification of the petroleum policies of Member Countries and the determination of the best means for safeguarding their interests, individually and collectively.”

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan looks at the “Hessians” as they headed for America 250 years ago. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

The French have a term for the feeling that naturally follows from reading recent newspaper headlines about Germany “reinventing” its economy around manufacturing weapons for Europe. The term is déjà vu, and it’s not just about the two world wars. Long before unifying into a nation, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire made a business of supplying their European neighbors with not just arms but also entire armies.

As April 1776 gave way to May, American patriots were discovering the specifics behind reports that King George III of Great Britain had outsourced some of his fight against them to foreign troops. Though hailing from several different German states, these soldiers would go into the history books under the shared name of “Hessians,” for the principality that furnished most of their numbers: Hesse-Kassel. The first of the approximately 30,000 who served in America during the Revolutionary War set off across the Atlantic around this time 250 years ago.

It’s Wednesday, April 29. 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 the problems with the Comey indictment. Will Rahn talks to the retired Navy admiral who is convinced that aliens are real. Emmet Penney has the details of the Trump administration’s plans to make nuclear power great again. Rafaela Siewert talks to Rachel Goldberg-Polin. And much more.

But first: Ben Shapiro on how to fix American institutions.

There was once a time in American society when fierce political differences didn’t preclude a shared moral foundation. Our core, foundational ideas—that violence is bad, that freedom of speech is paramount—were unquestionable, baked into the ethos of our nation.

It’s getting harder to argue that we still live in that kind of society. As we’ve written in recent days and weeks, the divisive tenor of public discourse seems to be reaching a fever pitch—with increasingly severe consequences.

The latest reminder of that came this weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

How did this climate take shape?

Ben Shapiro’s answer is simple: “Our institutions are failing.” In his piece today, adapted from a recent speech at the University of Austin, he explains how plummeting trust in what were once the foundational pillars of American life—church, government, academia, science—is at the root of our social unraveling.

Read Ben’s essay for his view on what went wrong—and what Americans can do to fix it.

• A New York Times investigation revealed this week that the U.S. Mint’s “100 percent American” gold coins may actually contain gold sourced from cartel-controlled mines in Colombia. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he will investigate.

• The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday it is exiting OPEC after more than 50 years in what will likely be a blow to the powerful alliance of big oil producers. The departure comes amid souring relations between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and will make it tougher for OPEC to control output and prices.

• Per new Gallup data, 55 percent of Americans say their financial situation is worsening. That’s the largest percentage in the last 25 years, including during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

• The cheapest cars in America may soon vanish from showrooms. Foreign automakers including Nissan, Hyundai, and Toyota have privately warned the Trump administration they may withdraw their most affordable models from the U.S. market if the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal favoring foreign car production in North America, is not renewed or materially weakened. Trump’s tariffs charge 25 percent on the non-U.S. content of vehicles that previously qualified as duty-free, making entry-level models unprofitable.

• The Justice Department announced criminal charges Tuesday against Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former top aide at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), accusing him of suppressing information about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The indictment alleges David Morens boasted he had “learned the tricks” to disappear emails and skirt public information disclosures from a friend who ran the NIH FOIA office.

• Amid tensions between the U.S. and UK over the war in Iran, King Charles urged cooperation before Congress, calling the story of the two nations “a story of reconciliation, renewal, and remarkable partnership.” A loud bipartisan round of applause erupted when Charles mentioned “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

“There is nothing like the feeling of putting someone you carried for nine months inside of your body into the ground wrapped in white fabric. I was burying part of myself. Not just my DNA and my soul, but my essence, my identity, my Before, my mouth, my personality, my breath, my rest of my life. Me.”

These are the words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin in her new memoir, When We See You Again.

Many will recognize Rachel as the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was abducted by Hamas from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

Hersh survived 328 days in captivity. And during that time, Rachel and her husband did everything in their power to bring him home—traveling to Davos, meeting with Pope Francis, addressing the UN, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, and making countless trips to Washington, D.C.

And still, after nearly a year in captivity, Hersh was murdered, shot six times at close range by Hamas. There was gunpowder in his hair when he was found.

“And after all of that torture, misery, agony, burning, searing, battering, and torment,” Rachel writes, “I now found out: that had been the good part. He had been alive. . . . Hersh let me prove how much I loved him by letting me go into the arena to battle without training or armor, just with my tiny fists of primal love. He gave me hope that I could save him by wrestling with the world. He kept breathing so that I would be motivated; he kept me motivated so that I would keep breathing. I was, and I still am.”

I sat down with Rachel to discuss her new book, a firsthand account of her fight to bring Hersh home and the grief that followed. In it, she reflects on why she is grateful for the days she spent fighting for her son; what it meant to grieve so publicly; what she learned from former hostage Or Levy, who met Hersh in the tunnels; and how her faith deepened after Hersh’s death.

This is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

After its first indictment of James Comey was dismissed in November, the Justice Department is back for another round. This time they are charging the former FBI director with two counts related to threatening the life of the president.

That may sound like a grave accusation. But the actual “crime” described in the indictment is a joke. The indictment says Comey posted a photo on Instagram “which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47.’ ” The indictment then says a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret [this] as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

For University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, Iran is winning the war. Never mind the decapitation of its military and political leadership or the destruction of the country’s navy, air force, and nuclear program, and of much of its defense industrial base. Like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all of these military victories are mere flesh wounds for the Islamic Republic. The real story is that when the fighting stops, Iran will emerge as the fourth major world power alongside America, China, and Russia.

This was Pape’s argument in an April 6 op-ed for The New York Times. He writes that Iran does not rival the other great powers economically or militarily. Rather, “its newfound power derives from its control over the most important energy choke point in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz.”

America built the first civilian nuclear power reactor in the world in three years. We started on it in 1954 and were done by the end of 1957. Half a century later, just doing the paperwork to get a reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government body responsible for overseeing this process, took the company trying to build Georgia’s Vogtle reactors nearly four years. That means it took longer to finish the approval paperwork for nuclear power than it did to pioneer it. What happened? Regulatory bureaucracy throttled nuclear. But it’s a new day for the atom. If the Trump administration and a surprisingly bipartisan coalition in Congress have their way, a nuclear renaissance will begin.

Last week, the Trump administration announced the first part in what will be a broad new regulatory scheme that will unleash American nuclear power (again), with new rules on how the NRC approves new projects for so-called “microreactors,” small-scale atomic power plants that, rather than powering a whole region, are small enough to power things like a military base or remote area. These smaller nuclear reactors are a sensible place for the administration to start. They are easier to find sites for and have more applications, and so with the administration poised to roll out a game-changing suite of new regulations over the coming months—undoing the old regime that kept America from building nuclear power for half a century—it’s starting with simple, safe microreactors.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people as I try to figure out what everyday Americans should make of the UFO phenomenon. Most of them try to hedge a little bit and say we need to wait for hard evidence before we make any firm conclusions. But retired rear admiral Timothy Gallaudet is not one of those people.

Gallaudet is a man with serious credentials. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he is the former head of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, has worked on anti-submarine warfare, ran the Naval Observatory, and eventually became the acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He’s also one of the most outspoken proponents of the idea that not only are UFOs real, but the government is hiding the truth about them. “We’re being visited by some kind of higher-order intelligence that we don’t understand,” Gallaudet told me. “And it’s happening often, frequently, in our airspace and in our water and in space.”

Gallaudet recalls participating in a naval exercise off the East Coast in 2015 and finding that pilots flying off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier, were not only seeing UFOs but getting so close that officers like him became worried about a midair collision. These sightings produced the famous GoFast video of a UFO, which the Pentagon later said was an object that appeared out of the ordinary due to an effect called motion parallax.

Gallaudet, who says his correspondence about the object was mysteriously wiped from his computer, is far from convinced by that explanation. And he’s particularly curious as to why so many UFOs appear to be flying over water and in some videos, appear to be disappearing beneath the waves. “If they want to remain unseen,” he told me, “that’s the place they would be.”

As you’ll see, Gallaudet is sincere in his beliefs. He’s testified before Congress about what he’s seen. He and his wife, a fellow oceanographer, are still on the lookout for more proof that UFOs are real. They are true believers, and Gallaudet is not at all shy about expressing his convictions. He says what the government has disclosed so far is “a fraction of the tip of the iceberg of what we’re really seeing day to day.”

In this episode, we also talk about former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who told Congress he regularly encountered UFOs while flying his F-18 fighter jet, as well as the accounts of other military whistleblowers like former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, former Army Colonel Karl Nell, and former Department of Defense officials Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo.

Now, this episode does get a bit freaky. We do discuss, for example, the possibility that Atlantis is not just real but findable. If you want to hear from someone who is a good deal more incredulous about this phenomenon than Admiral Gallaudet, be sure to check out my interview last week with professional skeptic Michael Shermer. You can also watch my interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

But, again, Gallaudet is a serious man and a former flag officer in the U.S. Navy. And he’s coming out with a new memoir about his experiences, Holding Fast in Heavy Seas: Leadership for Turbulent Times. He is worth listening to as we try to get to the bottom of all this ahead of President Donald Trump’s promised disclosure of UFO documents. Watch the video above, or check out a condensed and edited partial transcript of the interview below.

This is an excerpt of Ben Shapiro’s remarks at the University of Austin—you can watch Ben’s full speech here.

Why do we seem to hate each other so much here in the United States? Why do so many people seem obsessed with conspiracies, steeped in anger, and ready to spend large segments of their day fulminating on the internet about people they don’t know, on topics that they know nothing about?

There’s a simple answer: Our institutions are failing.

Trust in American institutions—in the media, in church, in the scientific establishment, in government and, of course, in academia—is at an all-time low. And because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another.

You might think that it would be the opposite—that we mistrust one another, therefore we mistrust our institutions—but that’s not the case. If you grow up in a religious community, going to church helps shape you. Likewise, the people you hang out with shape you, the institution of your family shapes you, your school shapes you, your university shapes you. Once we lose faith in the capacity of these institutions to shape us, we become incapable of coming together anymore.

After the Department of Justice released the latest round of Epstein files in January, a barrage of high-powered individuals named in the documents lost jobs, resigned from boards, and were otherwise ushered out of public life. And yet, one of the women most closely entwined with Jeffrey Epstein, his executive assistant, Lesley Groff, has faced limited scrutiny. In her latest Epstein investigation, Free Press reporter Tanya Lukyanova dives into the remarkably normal life of the woman Epstein once said he could not lose. This is a story about who has paid a price for their connections to Epstein, who hasn’t, and why. —The Editors

On March 2, Daniel LaGattuta rose to speak at a meeting of the New Canaan Republican Town Committee (RTC), a group dedicated to electing GOP candidates at both the local and national levels. He wanted to discuss what he called the “Lesley Groff problem.”

Groff, 59, is a longtime resident of New Canaan, Connecticut, an upscale suburb of some 20,000 people. She had also spent much of her career as Jeffrey Epstein’s executive assistant. She kept the convicted sex offender’s schedule; managed his day-to-day, overseeing everything from his haircuts to his daily massage appointments, many of which were code for “sex,” according to victims; and made the arrangements for the young women Epstein took to his Caribbean island and his ranch in New Mexico. Groff was so plugged into Epstein’s affairs that her name appears over 150,000 times in the recently released Department of Justice files. Only Epstein’s name appears more often.

In New Canaan, Groff and her husband, Ike, had a long history of donating to the RTC and Republican candidates, a fact that greatly troubled LaGattuta. The Groffs had paid $1,000 to attend a local fundraiser in October 2023, and another $1,000 for an RTC gala seven months later. And they made campaign contributions, as well. On several occasions, LaGattuta told the RTC that taking political donations from someone so close to Epstein was going to cause problems for the New Canaan Republican Town Committee.

Hoping to rally his fellow Republicans, LaGattuta laid it all out at the March 2 meeting. Groff, he pointed out, was listed as a suspected co-conspirator in the un-redacted FBI files that were released by the DOJ. She was a key member of Epstein’s inner circle, he said. She was even the reason New Canaan was mentioned more than a thousand times in the Epstein files. Associating with Groff, he concluded, was “morally abhorrent and a political catastrophe.” If they had any sense, he said, New Canaan Republicans would renounce her contributions and donate the money to an organization for victims of sexual abuse.

Groff was so plugged into Epstein’s affairs that her name appears over 150,000 times in the recently released Department of Justice files.

But once again, New Canaan Republicans, many of whom were friends of the Groffs, ignored LaGattuta.

Ever since the release of more than three million pages of Epstein emails and documents in January, many powerful people—figures like Larry Summers, Leon Black, Bill Gates, Peter Mandelson, and former Prince Andrew—have been ostracized and punished professionally because of their association with Epstein. (All of them have denied wrongdoing.) We’ve seen high-profile person after person issue the standard apology for ever being in Epstein’s life before taking the obligatory step back to reflect, whether or not they were complicit in unlawful or even just unsavory acts. For some, a mere email correspondence with Epstein cost them their job. Yet the woman who sat in the office next to his for nearly 20 years has somehow managed to resume her life in New Canaan as if Epstein had never been a part of it. In the sweeping Epstein reckoning, Groff is an anomaly. She doesn’t just make political donations—she goes to parties, hosts game nights, and dines at upscale restaurants with her friends and family.

Which makes one wonder: Does anyone in New Canaan even care?

Groff has long maintained her innocence. In a statement to The Free Press, her lawyer Michael Bachner insisted that throughout her tenure with Epstein, Groff “never witnessed or was told of anything illegal related to these massages.”