The Free Press

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 Thomas Jefferson’s decision to take on the Barbary pirates. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

The despotic and desperate regime clung to power by terrorizing ships on one of the world’s most vital arteries of trade. It seized foreign vessels, enslaved and held hostage their crews in the name of Islam, played European powers off one another, and demanded the United States pay extravagant sums for peace as part of deals that would inevitably be broken.

Two hundred twenty-five years ago this week, the American president had enough. At a cabinet meeting on May 15, 1801—just a couple months after delivering his first inaugural address (discussed here)—Thomas Jefferson made the decision to dispatch a naval squadron to the Mediterranean Sea after the ruler of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, threatened to renege on a treaty and declare open season on American ships. It was the beginning of the Barbary Wars. Though very different from the struggle against Iran today, America’s first fight in the Islamic world is worth remembering.

It’s Wednesday, May 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Suzy Weiss asks, you’re shocked by Sydney Sweeney? Really? Joe Nocera speaks with Alex Berenson after his free-speech victory. Peter Berkowitz on the right-wingers opposed to America’s founding values. And more.

But first: Trump’s meeting with Xi.

President Trump lands in Beijing today for his first visit to China in his second term. The agenda could hardly be more consequential. On the table: the war in Iran, trade, AI, political prisoners, and Taiwan. This morning we have two stories on the summit’s stakes.

The first comes from two people for whom the summit could determine their father’s freedom. Sebastien and Claire Lai’s father, Jimmy, is the 78-year-old Hong Kong publisher convicted of sedition and colluding with foreign forces for publishing a pro-democracy newspaper. He has spent years in solitary confinement, his health deteriorating and his family limited to 30 minutes of visitation per week. Today, they appeal directly to the president who they believe can free him. “When Air Force One lands back in the United States,” they write, “we pray our father is on that plane.” Read their message in full:

Perhaps the most important item on the agenda in Beijing is Taiwan. Tanner Nau asked four China experts about that all-important issue and what this week’s talks might change. Their answers range from cautiously hopeful to seriously alarmed. Read their takes here:

—The Editors

• Food and Drug Administration commissioner Marty Makary resigned yesterday—days after Trump had reportedly signed off on a plan to fire him over disagreements on vaping, abortion, and drug policy. “It was really Secretary Kennedy himself who made this decision,” an administration official told Politico. Kyle Diamantas, the agency’s former top food official, will succeed Makary in an acting capacity.

• The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors Tuesday in a 51–45 mostly party-line vote, setting up a vote on his nomination as Fed chair to succeed Jerome Powell, whose term ends Friday.

• Inflation rose to its highest level in three years in April, with the consumer price index reaching 3.8 percent over the past year according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Energy prices, driven by the ongoing war in Iran and effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, accounted for more than 40 percent of the increase.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced tough questioning on Capitol Hill Tuesday over the Iran war’s rising price tag—now pegged at $29 billion, up from $25 billion two weeks ago—and the depletion of U.S. weapons stockpiles, though Hegseth insisted inventories were “absolutely” secure and that the military had “won every component of what we’ve fought in this conflict.”

• The U.S. and Ukraine have drafted a memorandum laying the groundwork for a defense deal that would open the door to joint drone manufacturing and Ukrainian military technology exports to the United States. Kyiv’s drone output has surged far ahead of Washington’s—one Ukrainian manufacturer alone plans to build more than 3 million units this year, compared to the 300,000 the U.S. produced in all of 2025.

• Ahead of Trump’s visit to China this week, a Chinese think tank reportedly tried and failed to gain access to Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos AI model—withheld from public release over cybersecurity fears—after approaching Anthropic officials at a Singapore conference last month. U.S. officials believe the overture was approved and directed by Beijing.

• The Justice Department charged the operators of the cargo ship that crashed into and brought down Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in 2024, killing six construction workers, with 18 counts including conspiracy to defraud the United States and misconduct resulting in death. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it “a preventable tragedy of enormous consequence.”

• A new drug called daraxonrasib may be on the verge of transforming how doctors treat pancreatic cancer—a disease that has long resisted virtually every therapeutic advance. The pill targets a protein long thought to be beyond the reach of medicine, and in clinical trials it nearly doubled how long patients survived. The FDA has fast-tracked its review, and approval could come before the end of the year.

Of the many important issues on the agenda when Trump and Xi meet in Beijing this week, among the most important is Taiwan.

The questions of whether China will attempt to take back the island, and what America and its allies could do to stop it, loom over the summit.

And they have grown only more urgent in recent months. In December, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted its “Justice Mission 2025” military drill, which choreographed a maritime blockade of the Taiwan Strait and the island’s key ports. That same month, the Trump administration announced an $11 billion arms deal with Taiwan, but it hasn’t been approved by Congress. And while Trump was emboldened by the audacious capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January, the president is now busy fighting a war with Iran.

We asked some experts on the power struggle between the U.S. and China to tell us how Trump and Xi might take on the fraught subject of Taiwan this week. Their responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.

—Tanner Nau

There Is No Real Deal to Make on Taiwan
By Peter Mattis

What is really stopping the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from launching an invasion is the decision-making of Xi Jinping. It’s the only voice that matters. For the last 70 years, the PLA has been incapable of launching an effective invasion of Taiwan due to a lack of military capability. Today, while the PLA still may not have the ideal set of capabilities for launching a massive amphibious invasion and airborne air assault, could someone present Xi Jinping with a plan to make that happen? Yes.

“When I went to bed last Thursday night,” Alex Berenson told me, “I was sure we didn’t have a deal. The government offered money, but they weren’t willing to admit what they had done. And I wasn’t going to agree to a settlement without that acknowledgment. But the next morning,” he added, “my lawyer texted me with the news that they had agreed to the language. So we made the deal.”

If you don’t know what Berenson is talking about, well, you can hardly be blamed. The mainstream media has studiously ignored Berenson v. Biden, even though it has enormous implications for the First Amendment. That “language” that Berenson insisted upon—and that the government finally agreed to include in the settlement? Let me quote some of it:

The United States Government. . . has acknowledged and conceded that the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantive coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.

Oh, yes, Berenson’s victory last Friday is a victory for anyone who cares about free speech.

On the solemn trek home a few weeks ago from a festive White House Correspondents’ Dinner cut short by the violent intrusion of alleged attempted assassin Cole Tomas Allen, I received a text from a worried friend. I called her to say that I was fine and that near as I could tell no guests had been injured, evacuation of the enormous Washington Hilton ballroom had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the chilly evening air suited the night’s chilling events. Before hanging up, I expressed the worry that while the nation had dodged a catastrophe, the shots ringing out in the ballroom foyer that evening would exacerbate the fever gripping both parties.

Soon I was walking by the National Zoo, where on any given day one can casually mingle with Washingtonians of diverse classes, races, ethnicities, and political affiliations. How remote was that taken-for-granted civic achievement, I thought, from the crush-and-destroy mentality currently favored by the political class and the dark narrative of American depravity, pouring fuel on the partisan fires, routinely promulgated at our colleges and universities.

Later in the evening, not long after my private musings about the sources of civic strife in America, President Donald Trump held an impromptu and surprisingly conciliatory press conference at the White House. The president appeared composed, focused, and determined. Instead of faulting hotel security for allowing the heavily armed intruder to charge the ballroom, he lavished praise on the Secret Service’s and law enforcement’s response. And rather than exploit the occasion to denounce Democrats and the left, he praised constitutional principles that citizens of diverse persuasions should share.

Is it even a week in America if everyone isn’t losing their minds over something Sydney Sweeney said, sold, promoted, or performed? She’s the Helen of Troy of 2026, the woman that launched a thousand takes.

This week, the uproar is about what Sweeney’s character is up to in the new season of HBO’s lightning rod of a show, Euphoria. Given that its first two seasons introduced the characters as a disturbed bunch of high schoolers who were addicted to drugs, sex, revenge—you name it!—viewers might’ve expected to be shocked by the third. And yet, somehow, the latest season is the one that’s been met with the most pearl-clutching.

Are Israeli prisons deploying trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners? According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the answer appears to be yes.

In a lengthy column published Monday, Kristof recounts a sordid tale from a source he identifies as a “Gaza journalist.” He writes that on one occasion, the journalist “was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”

Kristof is not the first reporter to level this charge. Some news outlets like Al Jazeera and the BBC have also reported anonymous victims claiming to have witnessed or experienced rape or abuse by dogs in Israeli detention centers. The allegations gained momentum last month when the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released a report that claimed the practice was systemic based on interviews with anonymous victims. “Israeli forces have also employed animals, particularly trained dogs, to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, aiming to violate their dignity,” the report says.

All of this looks like another moral scandal for the Jewish state, which has been falsely accused by academics, journalists, and activists since October 7, 2023, of committing a genocide in its war against the perpetrators of that atrocity. Critics have specifically focused on Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who oversees Israeli prisons in his role as national security minister.

No place better exemplifies China’s totalitarian turn than Hong Kong. Once a bustling bastion of democracy and economic opportunity, Hong Kong today shares little independence from its ultimate ruler, the People’s Republic of China.

And no person better represents this spiral toward authoritarianism than Jimmy Lai—the wealthy publisher of Hong Kong’s once-largest pro-democracy newspaper, who has spent the last five years in prison. In February, Lai, 78, was given a 20-year sentence after being convicted of sedition and colluding with foreign forces. His real crimes, say his children and those advocating for his freedom, were nothing more than the act of practicing journalism and standing up for democracy.

This week, as Donald Trump prepares to meet Xi Jinping in Beijing—the first trip of a U.S. president to China in nearly a decade—I spoke with Jimmy’s children, Sebastien, 31, and Claire, 29. They’ve dedicated their lives to trying to free their dad, and they believe Donald Trump may actually be able to do it. —Frannie Block

By the time Donald Trump lands in Beijing Wednesday for a historic summit with Xi Jinping, it will be five years and five months since our father, Jimmy Lai, was first imprisoned in Hong Kong.

He was sentenced to an additional 20 years in February for supposed crimes stemming from the Beijing-imposed national security law. Our father, a self-made man who founded the largest pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, was convicted of sedition and colluding with foreign forces. These charges were levied against him because of his journalism and his peaceful campaigns for freedom and democracy in Hong Kong.

That sentence is effectively a death sentence for our 78-year-old father. He has spent the majority of his prison time in solitary confinement and has developed heart conditions due to the harsh conditions. As family members, we are granted only 24 hours of visitation a year—which comes out to less than 30 minutes each week. He has diabetes, and has lost over 20 pounds in the last year alone. His skin is pale from going months without seeing the sun.

It’s Tuesday, May 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: Kat Rosenfield on the lethal price of suicidal empathy. The congresswoman who wants to shoot sea lions. Frannie Block’s deep dive into the persecution of Chinese Christians. Aaron MacLean and Dan Blumenthal preview the Trump-Xi summit. And more.

But first: What did Harvard’s slavery reckoning achieve?

Four years ago, Harvard University committed $100 million to what it called the “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” an excavation of its historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Harvard was hardly unique among American universities in launching a racial justice self-examination, but the scope and price of Harvard’s undertaking were extraordinary.

And so was its failure, writes Novi Zhukovsky. Checking in on the project four years later, Novi discovered “a cascade of institutional embarrassments: high-profile resignations, the dismissal of an entire research team, a string of HR complaints, and a rebuke from Antigua’s ambassador to the United States.” Most damning of all: “Its signature effort—to find descendants of people Harvard had enslaved and then do something for them, presumably financially—has so far failed miserably.” How did America’s most prestigious school get it so badly wrong? Read Novi’s story to find out.

—The Editors

And for more on suicidal empathy, be sure to catch Rafaela Siewert’s conversation with the man who coined the phrase, Gad Saad. He explains to Rafaela why he thinks the West is on a suicide mission.

• President Trump said on Monday that the U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement is on “life support,” calling the latest Iranian proposal to end the war a “piece of garbage.” The president did not rule out the possibility of a deal but reiterated that the Iranian leadership is “very dishonorable.”

• A gunman opened fire on a busy Cambridge, Massachusetts, street near the campuses of MIT and Harvard on Monday afternoon. The suspect, 46-year-old Tyler Brown, was quickly shot by a law enforcement officer and a civilian and taken into custody. Two men were struck by gunfire and are currently hospitalized for life-threatening injuries. In 2020, Brown was charged with trying to kill police officers.

• Seventeen American passengers and a dual British-U.S. citizen evacuated from the cruise ship that was struck with a hantavirus outbreak arrived in the United States on Monday. Most were transported to the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha, Nebraska. Two other passengers were flown to Atlanta, where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is based. One passenger has tested positive, while another is showing symptoms.

• The man accused of last month’s assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner pleaded not guilty in federal court Monday. Cole Tomas Allen, 31, is facing four federal charges, including attempting to assassinate the president and assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon.

• Six people were found dead inside a Union Pacific railroad boxcar Sunday afternoon in Laredo, Texas. Local officials confirmed that the bodies of five men and one woman were recovered, with preliminary medical examinations determining that the cause of death was heatstroke.

• President Trump endorsed a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax in an interview with CBS News on Monday. “When gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” he said. The average price of gas is $4.52 per gallon, up from $3 per gallon before the U.S.-Iran war began. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon.

• Virginia Democrats filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, asking it to halt a Virginia Supreme Court ruling that struck down a redistricting measure. The redistricting all but gave Democrats four more congressional seats. “The Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment,” wrote Virginia attorney general Jay Jones and lawyers for the state Democratic Party.

Dan Blumenthal, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins the show to discuss the president’s upcoming summit in Beijing with President Xi Jinping. What are President Trump’s goals? How will war with Iran affect the meeting? And what do these discussions mean for the future of conflict in the Indo-Pacific?