The Free Press

For over two years, the world has been subjected to an undignified debate over whether there even was any sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Doubt was poured onto those who had clearly and obviously suffered unspeakable tragedy. The furor and implausible skepticism about an event that was in horrifyingly large part documented in real time by its perpetrators, using live feed cameras, carried the familiar undertone reserved for both crimes of sexual violence and Israeli victims: uncertainty and doubt.

Now, after more than two years of meticulous investigation drawn from survivor testimony, witness accounts, forensic analysis, visual materials, and the preservation of evidence in a secure archive, the record is no longer fragmentary. It is painfully established.

Early in 2022, I argued that wokeism had peaked. At the time, that suggestion was met with a mix of skepticism and hostility, as wokeism still seemed to be rising to many people. Corporate boards were still adopting racial equity audits, for example, and young employees were pressuring companies to adopt progressive stances.

But if we fast-forward to May 2026, my prediction seems pretty good. Wokeism is hardly gone, as a visit to most universities still can demonstrate, but it does seem to have peaked in 2022 or so. President Donald Trump has been reelected, and the Republicans hold a trifecta in government. Universities have retreated from cancel culture and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, and shifted its content sharply to the right. The media in general have moved right, which includes a more libertarian Washington Post and the rise of The Free Press.

A new six-part podcast series from The Free Press, hosted by Joe Nocera, is coming May 19.

Veteran reporter Joe Nocera investigates a 94-year-old crime that deserves a second look: the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr.

Nicholas Kristof’s recent essay about supposed Israeli sex crimes against Palestinian detainees is a travesty—not simply because it’s wrong as a matter of fact, or because it regurgitates long-debunked blood libels against the Jewish state at a time of rising antisemitism around the world.

It’s a travesty because it embraces the erosion of democratic norms at an inflection point in our history. Since our founding, the American political experiment has entrusted everyday citizens with the revolutionary power to choose. We choose the men and women who represent us. We choose how to balance the intimate relationship between a free people and its government. We choose whether to send a member of our community to prison.

For decades, my students have been split approximately 50-50 between Americans and those from abroad. As a behavioral scientist specializing in happiness, I pick up on the dispositional differences between the two groups. Early in my career, many of the international students seemed to me to have a certain weariness about them that the Americans did not. My Spanish wife saw it, too: Young Americans were relaxed, happy, and innocent by comparison.

That has reversed in the past decade. Now, I see a greater edge in the American students—more cynicism, less laughter. Today, it is the Asian and South American students who smile more easily. Even the jaded, cosmopolitan Europeans seem happier than my young compatriots. The only ones who seem to be able to give us a run for our gloom are the Brits and the Canadians.

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 Monday, May 18, and both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are hinting, through statements and actions, that they are preparing for the renewal of American strikes in Iran. Tehran has just submitted its latest diplomatic proposal: a commitment of highly questionable value to refrain from producing nuclear weapons. Conspicuously absent from the document is any mention of halting uranium enrichment or opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Diplomacy appears to be faltering, but before the next potentially Lion-themed operation, it is worth assessing the success of the last campaign.

Yesterday, Major General Tamir Hayman, executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies and a former head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, published an article with several previously unknown details about the course of the war. Along with the revelations, Hayman gives an assessment: “Despite tactical achievements, the campaign’s two main centers of gravity—the Iranian regime and the nuclear project—remain essentially unchanged.”

It’s Monday, May 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: the architect of a genocide who died without facing justice. How teachers’ unions became political big spenders. Did MAHA just sink a senator? Plus: Michael Shellenberger joins Conversations with Coleman.

But first: the Jewish prosecutor yanked from a case against campus protesters.

Last week, I got a video call from Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeffrey Rosen. It was late, and he looked tired. When I asked how things were going, Rosen smiled wanly. Earlier this month, a judge removed Rosen from a high-profile case because he had been a vocal opponent of antisemitism.

Rosen’s father emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust to seek a better life in America. He achieved that in Los Angeles, and for decades, it felt as if the family had escaped forever the backwardness of the Old World. That started to change when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. In June 2024, anti-Israel protesters broke into the president’s office at Stanford University. Rosen and his team were tasked with prosecuting them.

But now Rosen has been barred from finishing that job.

I wanted to talk to Rosen about what has happened to him, and about how much the world that Rosen thought he knew, the world that his father created here in America, has turned dark and uncertain.

—Peter Savodnik

• The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency following an outbreak of a rare variant of Ebola in Congo and Uganda. Health officials have tracked over 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths as of Sunday. The outbreak claimed 50 lives before being detected by health officials, with the first known death in late April. The WHO has not declared it a pandemic.

• Ukraine carried out deadly drone strikes on Russia on Saturday, including one of the largest attacks on Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s defense ministry said that over 1,000 drones were shot down or jammed. The strikes were seen as retaliation for a Russian drone attack that killed 24 people in Kyiv last week.

• Two Navy jets collided in midair at an air show at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho on Sunday afternoon. All four pilots successfully ejected before their Boeing EA18-G Growlers crashed, about 50 miles outside of Boise. The pilots were unharmed.

• Cuba has been discussing plans to use drones to attack the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay and even the Florida Keys, according to classified intelligence described by Axios. The Cuban government now has over 300 military drones, Axios said. On Sunday, the Cuban embassy in the U.S. said Cuba “has the right to defend itself against external aggression.”

• “Our rights do not derive from the government. They come from you, our creator and heavenly father,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson in a prayer gathering on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sunday. The event was promoted as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”

Are our country’s teachers’ unions actually just political fundraising machines?

A new report out today accuses both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) of spending tens of millions of dollars on electing Democratic political candidates, and prioritizing politicking over the needs and interests of their union members.

The report, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), Gevura Fund, and Rutgers University, among others, found that of the NEA’s $450 million annual disbursement budget from fiscal year 2025, less than $46 million, or 10 percent, was spent on activities directly representing the union’s constituents.

“You read a stat like that,” said Tova Plaut, a New York City teacher and a member of both the NEA and AFT, “and you start to wonder, Where is all that money going?”

The NEA and the AFT are the two largest teachers’ unions in the country, representing around 4.6 million members across the country.

Michael Shellenberger is the kind of person with the intellectual honesty to change his mind. He’s a former progressive activist who changed his tune publicly on nuclear energy, homelessness, and a bunch of other issues where the left-wing consensus turned out to be wrong. He’s also the author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and runs Public, one …

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seemed to be shaky—or even teetering. Last week, MAHA ally Marty Makary was forced to step down as head of the Food and Drug Administration by President Donald Trump. Trump himself caused fury with an executive order expanding agricultural usage of the herbicide glyphosate. And a poll by Politico found that nearly half of voters who call themselves MAHA supporters believe the Trump administration “has not done enough to make America healthy again.”

But this weekend’s trouncing of Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana in the Republican primary sent a very different signal. As the votes were being counted on Saturday night, I finally heard back from Tony Lyons, a staunch supporter of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and co-president of MAHA PAC, a political fundraising machine. Lyons had little to say to me during the campaign, when polls showed that Cassidy would probably advance to a runoff. According to the most recent Federal Election Commission filing, MAHA PAC spent $584,000 opposing Cassidy and supporting Julia Letlow, a two-term Congresswoman who entered the GOP primary for the Senate seat after Trump publicly encouraged her in January.

But Lyons was more vocal as soon as it was obvious that Cassidy, 68, would become only the second incumbent Louisiana senator to lose reelection since 1932. “Senator Cassidy defended big pharma and the broken medical establishment against the health and welfare of American families,” Lyons told me. “Voters across the country are joining the MAHA rebellion against the corruption that allowed companies to poison their children.”

Letlow, 45, won 45 percent of the primary vote, while Louisiana treasurer John Fleming received 28 percent. Cassidy finished last with just 25 percent.