For 50 years, Dennis Prager, one of the most important and influential conservative thinkers of the 21st century, has made a single core argument: Without God, there is no good and evil—only opinion. He advanced it on the radio, in five volumes of biblical commentary, in more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civil…

It’s Thursday, March 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Are we on the brink of an Abraham Accords 2.0? The Joan Didion novel that explains the Oscars. Reports of MAGA’s divide on Iran are overstated. A fight over prayer time in Texas schools. The GOP has an anti-Muslim problem. And much more.

But first: What happened when a Ukrainian woman found her name in the Epstein files.

Nearly seven years after Jeffrey Epstein died in a prison cell, we are still learning the full extent of his dark empire. It spanned multiple continents and relied on a web of enablers, co-conspirators, and alleged victims turned recruiters—young women who were pressured, or persuaded, to bring in others.

For anyone still wondering how a scheme of such scale could operate in plain sight for so long, and how so many women kept getting pulled into Epstein’s orbit, my story today offers part of the answer. But this is not another harrowing account of abuse. Instead, the tale of Elizaveta “Liza” Grinenko, a Ukrainian actress, is about a young woman who narrowly escaped Epstein’s grasp—and realized how close she came to a very different fate only when she searched her name in the Epstein files.

—Tanya Lukyanova

• Amid market disruptions tied to the war in Iran, the International Energy Agency said its member governments agreed to an unprecedented release of 400 million barrels of oil from emergency reserves—the largest joint release in its history. Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has plunged to less than 10 percent of normal levels. Member nations will immediately release supplies to stabilize markets and protect energy security.

• The Pentagon has told Congress that the first week of the Iran War cost more than $11.3 billion. The figure was presented to lawmakers in a classified briefing on Tuesday.

• A preliminary military inquiry has reportedly found that U.S. Central Command’s February 28 strike, which killed at least 175 people at an Iranian elementary school, relied on outdated data. The school was misidentified as a military target because it was once part of a naval base used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. After initially blaming Iran, Donald Trump said yesterday, when asked about the report, “I don’t know about that.”

• Health and Human Services secretary RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisory panel scrapped a proposal to halt recommendations for Covid-19 mRNA vaccines after GOP pollsters warned further changes to vaccine policy could be “politically risky” ahead of midterm elections. For now, there are no new changes to federal guidance. The CDC’s September update already moved away from recommending Covid shots for everyone 6 months and older, instead advising Americans to consult with their healthcare providers about whether vaccination is right for them.

• A new report released yesterday revealed that about 40 percent of nonorganic fruits and vegetables grown in California contain “forever chemicals.” The analysis, based on a review of the state’s own testing data, detected PFAS residues—chemicals linked to cancer, immune suppression, and reproductive damage. “PFAS pesticides went from being the exception to now they’re the rule,” Nathan Donley, environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Los Angeles Times.

• The Department of Homeland Security has relaunched its Global Entry program after a two-week pause due to the ongoing partial government shutdown over immigration funding. The halt exposed airport vulnerabilities as Customs and Border Protection staff were redirected from kiosks to manage long security lines, causing major travel delays. A House-passed DHS funding bill has stalled in the Senate, meaning the partial shutdown will continue until a compromise is reached.

• Columbia’s graduate student workers’ union voted to authorize a strike as negotiations with the university over compensation and anti-Israel demands stall. Over 90 percent of the union’s members voted to approve the measure, and if union leaders decide to strike, hundreds of classes could be canceled. (For more on the strike, and why it matters, read Jonas Du’s report for The Free Press.)

The perfect book to read before the Oscars this weekend? Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays.

In this episode, Shilo sits down with Peter Savodnik to discuss Didion’s 1970 novel—a book that seemed to anticipate everything ugly about Hollywood, celebrity culture, and the spiritual emptiness that we now take for granted on the red carpet and on social media.

T…

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty, joins the show to talk about the origins, evolution, and possible future of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What forces produced the 1979 revolution, and how did it reshape Iran’s political …

Why are we at war with Iran? The Trump administration has so far botched its rationale for Operation Epic Fury.

For several days after the initial strikes two Saturdays ago, Trump officials’ explanations were vague. Then, last Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “We knew that there ​was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we ​didn’t preemptively go after them before they ​launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

These comments triggered an almighty political argument—and the administration quickly tried to walk them back. But the bigger problem was legal. Though the Trump administration has claimed that Iran posed an imminent threat, it has not publicly provided detailed evidence for that claim; Rubio’s comments remain the most concrete explanation offered so far. If what Rubio said was true, and Israel did force America’s hand, the administration is relying on a shaky interpretation of the Constitution to wage war.

In one weekend, the U.S. used Anthropic’s AI to fight a war—and blacklisted it from any further government work. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has borne the brunt of the blame for starting a conflict between the military and the leading-edge AI developer. Really, though, this fight started when Anthropic demanded the right to set the terms on which the military would use its technology.

That’s not a confrontation that a private company should be getting into.

I founded and run a defense AI company. I’ve been working with AI language models long before almost anyone outside tech had heard of them, but my life has been dominated by defense since long before that. My father flew A-10s. My brother is a brigadier general. My dissertation was on algorithms used in war. When I watch an industry I work in debate whether the military should have access to AI tools during an active conflict, I’m thinking about the people in my life who depend on those tools to keep all of us safe.

This week, Tennessee GOP Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”

Those familiar with Ogles’s career wouldn’t have been shocked. In an X post last summer calling for Zohran Mamdani to be deported from the country, he referred to New York City’s current mayor, who is Muslim, as “little Muhammad.” Last Thursday, Ogles said “America and Islam are incompatible,” and called for a “Muslim ban.” In an interview published the same day, Ogles told Fox News: “Mass Islamic immigration, legal or illegal, has transformed America and brought destructive consequences.”

Ogles is not alone. Last week, Georgia GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde posted to X: “No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”

Nearly 47 years ago, Iran became the Islamic Republic. I was in New York City when the shah’s reign collapsed, clearing the way for Ruhollah Khomeini to return from exile to dismantle the old world. My loved ones begged me not to go back to Iran. As Googoosh, a 28-year-old pop star, I was a walking symbol of everything the new regime despised. But I chose the risk of a quick death at home over fading away in a foreign land. I wasn’t killed. I was silenced.

After going back, I remained in Iran for 21 years, banished from the stage while sharia law reshaped our society and reduced women to half citizens. I watched my country bleed through eight years of war with Iraq. I finally left in 2000 to reclaim my voice, but my heart remained. For all these years, I have watched helplessly from thousands of miles away as those who claimed to speak for God slowly destroyed the country I love. Now, this regime seems to be gasping for its last breaths.

Elizaveta “Liza” Grinenko had a hunch her name might appear somewhere in the so-called Epstein files that the Justice Department released earlier this year.

A Ukrainian actress based in Kyiv, now 31 years old, Grinenko never met Epstein or interacted with him in any way. But a former close friend of hers had worked as his assistant for several years—and during that time, occasionally offered Liza a position with her boss.

Yet when Liza found her name among the millions of pages that the government posted online in late January—and read the emails in which she was mentioned—she was astonished at what they said. “I felt sick to my stomach,” she told me.

“MAGA Is Split,” Bloomberg tells us. “Will MAGA Forgive Trump’s ‘Betrayal’?” The Week asks.

According to the Associated Press, “cracks” have appeared in “Trump’s MAGA base” over the war in Iran. “Some MAGA Voices Warn Iran Backlash Will Only Grow the Longer the War Lasts,” ABC News adds.

These articles—and others like them across the mainstream media—all take the same basic shape. They all mention Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two former Fox News hosts who have now remade themselves as anti-war crusaders in independent media. Several name-drop Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene as well. As a counterweight, Laura Loomer, a MAGA activist who supports the war, is frequently invoked.