The Free Press

In this episode, Suzy Weiss sits down with writer Freya India to discuss how the internet, influencer culture, and therapy-speak have made adolescence more miserable than ever for girls.

India’s new book, Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, examines how algorithm-driven platforms push young users toward extremes in beauty, body im…

Sir Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and columnist at The Free Press, joins the show in front of a live audience to discuss the perilous moment we find ourselves in and how it all relates to history. What is the status of the Iran war? What is influencing President Donald Trump’s policymaking? How do we defeat a dan…

Fidel Castro strode triumphantly into Havana in January 1959. That’s 67 years ago—two generations and change. The Cold War, in which Castro played such an outsize part, ended 35 years ago with the fall of his Soviet patrons. Enfeebled by age, the old totalitarian turned the regime over to his brother Raúl in 2008 and died in 2016. Raúl, the last link to the old generation, himself retired in 2021. He is now an unsteady 94.

The Cuban revolution has become detached from its own history yet continues to grind on, mechanically, as a sort of theme park of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism. It’s the land of animatronic revolutionaries, where tourists, to their amazement, can experience the political repression, economic misery, and infrastructure collapse invariably produced by this system. The parades and slogans are still there, but the feeling has died.

A 31-year-old woman, blond and beautiful and fantastically rich, announces she is pregnant, two years into her marriage. There’s nothing unusual about this—the median age at which a middle-class white woman becomes a mother has hovered between 30 and 31 years old for a few decades now—but online certain people are losing their mind. Because the 31-year-old woman in question is Alex Cooper, the self-described “slut” and host of the wildly popular Call Her Daddy podcast, which has been telling millions of young American women how to give blow jobs since 2018.

The supposed problem is that Cooper has not practiced what she has spent years preaching on the podcast, which is raunchy in a Carrie Bradshaw millennial girl boss kind of way. The premise of the show is that women should spend their 20s sleeping around and finding themselves. Alex tells women to have sex on the first date, not to settle down, and that men are trash. She urges her female followers to embrace and partake in ghosting potential partners, and to use men before they use you.

Her content is wildly popular with young women—her podcast, between deals with Spotify and SiriusXM, is now worth around $185 million—but now, people are calling her a hypocrite.

“She has opened the trap door and escaped at least some of the consequences of her lies by doing the very thing she profits from encouraging women not to do: getting married and becoming pregnant right away,” wrote Ashley McGuire of the Institute for Family Studies. “These two things are luxuries for young, beautiful, educated, and wealthy women still in their fertile years. But unfortunately for the countless women who follow her advice, when the bill comes, they will have nothing but heartache and regret.”

Dear Abigail,

My sister has chosen to have a baby on her own using a sperm donor. I am excited to have a niece or nephew, and for my children to have a cousin.

My parents, who are in their late 70s, are stepping in to help co-parent with my sister. While she has a very good job, she is moving in with my parents indefinitely. She says she needs my parents’ support because she has to maintain her social life. She can’t take a baby on a date, she told me.

My parents have not babysat for my kids since my youngest was born, almost three years ago. I live an hour from them. When I asked them to watch my kids last year so my husband and I could celebrate our anniversary, they said no. They were just too busy.

My parents paid for my sister’s fertility treatments. To make it fair, they gave me the same amount of money. This was appreciated, since paying for day care eats up most of my salary. But why do I receive help only when my sister needs something?

I don’t understand why my sister would want to move back in with my parents, or why my parents are encouraging her to do so. I don’t understand why my parents would help raise my sister’s child when they are not willing to even babysit mine.

How do I get past this? My sister and I have always been very different people. I don’t want the same things she wants, so why does it matter what my parents are giving her? I have a great life. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to feel like a stranger in my own family.

—Megan, 41

Megan,

Which one of your kids is your favorite?

Think hard and tell the truth. Which one do you love the most?

You know, as well as I do, that these are absurd, unanswerable questions. You have the kid who shares your sense of humor, the one you can tease. The one who is easily affectionate and the one who’s full of earnest complaints. The one who is proudly self-sufficient and the one who comes to you with puppy eyes. The one you worry about and the one who puts you at ease. And the descriptions shift their referents on a merry-go-round and none of it corresponds to the measure of your love.

What kind of hatred motivated the teenage San Diego mosque shooters, who killed three men and died in a murder-suicide before capture? Well, take your pick.

According to the 75-page unfinished manifesto left behind by Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the pair hated Muslims, Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,” liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.

Oh boy, did they hate women. “After the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman,” wrote Vazquez, in his contribution to the two-part document. He identifies himself as a short man on the autism spectrum. This, he believed, is why women ignored him.

“Being short, especially now more than ever, is nothing short [of] a torturous humiliation ritual. As someone who’s been short my whole life, trust me, I know from experience and they’ve never let me forget it.”

“When a girl is shy or introverted it’s cute, but I, as a guy, for being the exact same, am seen as weird and awkward,” he continued. “When a girl is autistic it is seen as quirky, but I, being an autist as a guy, am treated like a retard.”

The manifesto reads like what you might expect teenagers marinated 24/7 in intersecting currents of internet hate to produce: crude, stupid, self-pitying, and overflowing with rage at all the people these self-described National Socialist Ecofascists identify as the Enemy. Clark calls himself a Christian, but Vazquez, who is Latino, said, “my religion is the white race.” In fact, Vazquez acknowledges that some will consider him a Latino who pretends to be white, “but that’s honestly fine and I could care less.”

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.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is a reputational arsonist. Yesterday’s fire set by him involved the minister visiting an Ashdod detention center holding the latest batch of Gaza flotilla activists.

In a video posted on social media by Ben-Gvir himself, he paraded around bound and bowed detainees, waved the Israeli flag, and blasted the national anthem—shouting “Welcome to Israel” in Hebrew. It immediately caught the attention of Israel’s enemies, as well as friends and even those at the top of the government. On social media at least, the response was almost entirely negative, with rebukes from the foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, and even Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who described the treatment of the activists as “not in line with Israel’s values and norms.”

It’s Thursday, May 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Shilo Brooks sits down with Amy Coney Barrett. Liel Leibovitz on why “Podcastistan” resembles North Korea. A Stanford professor on his school’s war against the Western canon. Charles Lane reflects on the legacy of legendary congressman Barney Frank. And much more.

But first: Is the president losing his political footing?

It must be a disorienting time to be Donald Trump. On one hand, his grip on his party has never been firmer. In recent weeks, he has ousted one Republican critic after another from elected office by backing their primary challengers. That includes five Indiana lawmakers who defied Trump’s redistricting plans, along with two of the president’s critics in Congress, Senator Bill Cassidy and Rep. Thomas Massie.

On the other hand, Trump is losing the pulse of the nation at large. His approval rating has been sliding for months, and recent polls show his unpopularity reaching a level not seen since the last days of President George W. Bush.

According to Ruy Teixeira, Trump is in a quandary of his own making. Americans reelected him to revive the economy, and they still rate it as their top issue, yet Trump recently said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” while addressing the rise of gas prices amid his war with Iran. There’s an irony to Trump’s position, says Ruy: He’s repeating the mistakes of his predecessor that landed him back in the White House. Read Ruy on the echoes of the Biden presidency in Trump’s mistakes, and why the president seems not to realize where things are headed.

Trump’s popularity may soon sink even further, if Democrats follow through on their new midterm strategy. The Free Press’s new Washington correspondent, Audrey Fahlberg, reports on Democrats’ plan to paint the administration as one giant grift at the public’s expense, from crooked crypto deals to shady executive pardons. There’s more at stake than the midterms, she writes. If Democrats regain the House, they’ll use investigations to cripple the administration and taint the GOP brand in 2028.

—The Editors

• Federal prosecutors unsealed a new indictment against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and five others on Wednesday. The murder and conspiracy charges are connected with the Cuban military’s downing of two planes in 1996, and come amid increasing tensions between the U.S. and the island nation.

• Media investor James Murdoch has purchased New York magazine, the Vox news website, and the Vox Media Podcast Network on Wednesday. The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but some estimates report that Murdoch has now acquired up to half of the Vox Media brand.

• Meta began laying off thousands of employees Wednesday morning, as the company continues to restructure around artificial intelligence. The company says the layoff will affect up to 8,000 employees, and 7,000 more will be reassigned to AI-focused roles.

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Wednesday that they will respond to any new attacks on Iran with an escalation of the war beyond the Middle East. The threat came shortly after President Trump delayed a “very major” attack on Iran, and will likely raise the stakes of future peace talks.

• On Tuesday, the Senate advanced a bill that would force President Trump to end the war with Iran. Senate Democrats have been pushing the resolution for months, but it received a major boost this week after Republican senator Bill Cassidy switched sides, following his ouster in this weekend’s primary.

• According to a new report from AAA, the average gas price is now above $4 per gallon in all 50 states. The rise in prices comes amid increasing volatility in the oil market due to the Iran war. (For more on oil prices, read Tyler Cowen’s “Why Oil Price Spikes Could Spark a Global Recession.”)

• On Wednesday, Harvard University faculty overwhelmingly voted to cap the number of A’s that can be earned in any undergraduate class. The move signals a return to increased competition among the school’s classes, after critics accused the university of rampant grade inflation. (For more on this, read Arthur Brooks’ “Grade Inflation Won’t Make You Happy.”)

• OpenAI is reportedly preparing to file an initial public offering, potentially as soon as this Friday. The move would come at a pivotal moment for the company, just one week after CEO Sam Altman triumphed over Elon Musk in a jury trial. Musk’s company SpaceX also filed paperwork making their finances public on Wednesday, as it races toward its own IPO. (For more on SpaceX, read Patrick McGee’s “SpaceX Is the Riskiest, Biggest Tech Bet in History.”)

In this special episode, taped live at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, Shilo sits down with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for a wide-ranging interview on the law.

They discuss Barrett’s lifelong love of reading, her tumultuous confirmation process, the Constitution and what it should take to amend it, how she approaches cases where her …

President Donald Trump has a high opinion of his own persuasive power and political instincts. That is not without justification. Despite massive derision from pundits, he’s managed to win two out of the last three presidential elections. Clearly, there are some things he understands about American voters that establishment politicians and commentators do not.

But lately his political star has been falling, as is vividly illustrated by a new, widely cited poll from The New York Times and Siena College, which measures Trump’s approval rating down at 37 percent. Democrats’ lead on the generic House ballot, by the same poll, is up to 10 points. That means Trump’s approval is now below President Joe Biden’s in the first polls after Biden’s disastrous July 2024 debate, when he froze and babbled repeatedly in front of millions of American viewers, causing him to drop out of the race for reelection.

And these are not outliers; both figures are only a bit worse than rolling averages calculated by various poll aggregators. Trump’s descent in the polls refutes a claim made by many of his supporters, who long have argued that the polarizing president had both a “low ceiling” of support but also a “high floor.” So much for that—Trump is now down in the Biden basement.

What’s behind this disaffection with Trump and his administration?