The Free Press

President Donald Trump’s second term may go down in history as the moment Washington decided that white people have civil rights under the same laws designed to protect racial minorities. It’s been clear for at least a decade that whites often face discrimination in hiring—sometimes barely concealed, sometimes openly celebrated. Investment banks announce plans to divide up job offers by race and gender, and tech companies issue updates on how much they increased minority leadership.

The Trump administration is addressing the most egregious instances of this trend, taking up discrimination cases on behalf of white workers and applicants the same way the government has done for other groups for the past 60 years. They are also ensuring that white and Asian applicants aren’t illegally penalized in college admissions. And so far, they’re doing it in a way that seeks to apply the law impartially rather than stoke further racial tensions.

This week has featured two major actions in this federal campaign. The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it had determined that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is discriminating against white and Asian medical school applicants by deliberately admitting less-qualified blacks and Hispanics.

“My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.”

This is the money quote from the opening chapter of Yesteryear, an exceptionally buzzy new novel by debut author Caro Claire Burke.

It is also, as readers of the book discover very shortly thereafter, a total lie.

Natalie Mills, the book’s protagonist, is a tradwife influencer who lives with her family on a farm in Idaho—which is to say, she is perfect at looking perfect through the intermediary of a screen. Her reality, on the other hand, is a failure fest. The elaborate dinners she posts on Instagram take so long to make that her five children often fall asleep hungry; the farm where they live is a money-losing, dairy-cow-killing vanity project funded by her husband’s parents. The husband himself is an infantile incompetent who can’t even maintain a proper erection, a disappointment under any circumstances, but a particular problem when his wife has made fecundity into a personal brand.

And this is before the story even unveils its central conceit: One day, Natalie awakens to discover that she’s been inexplicably transported back in time to 1855—where the Little House on the Prairie–style life she’s been pretending to live as an influencer is now, suddenly, her everyday brutal reality.

For those of us following the story of growing antisemitism across the world, this week’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL) 2025 audit report came as something of a shock. For the first time in five years, the U.S.’s foremost antisemitism watchdog reported a decline in the total number of incidents.

On the face of it, we should celebrate this news. But it also feels counterintuitive, particularly after a year in which we saw the killing of Jews across America, from Washington, D.C., to Boulder, Colorado. And the truth is, we’re not turning a corner on the rising tide of Jew-hatred. While individual incidents of antisemitism may be falling, the prejudice is getting more violent. Let me explain.

In 2024, the ADL recorded 9,354 incidents of anti-Jewish hate, its highest ever total. In 2025, this number dropped to 6,274. That can largely be explained by the cratering of antisemitic incidents on college campuses. 2024 was the zenith of the protest movement that swept across American universities. Since then, a combination of lawsuits, Trump administration threats, and congressional hearings seem to have drummed into the heads of college administrators a desire to take the problem of antisemitism seriously. That’s not to say this problem is gone; as the ADL notes in its report: “Incidents on college campuses remained almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021.”

That early April jaunt around the moon was supposed to represent a first step toward building a lunar base, where small crews of people would be confined for long stretches of time. Eventually, that base could expand into a scientific and industrial center, but the first crews would live in extreme isolation.

For all the enthusiasm a moon base has generated at NASA and the Trump administration, it’s hard to imagine more difficult living conditions for an astronaut. The moon is a thousand times further from Earth than the International Space Station—making trips back and forth vastly more complicated.

The rugged, pockmarked surface is also much harsher than the orbit of the space station, which is partly protected by Earth’s magnetic field. A moon base would have to account for 300-degree temperature swings, showers of deadly radiation, and flying dust particles. On a moon base, you wouldn’t be able to just stomp out if you had a tiff or needed to blow off steam—which you can do (though not easily) at another pretty isolated place, the South Pole.

And that’s just the physical environment astronauts would face. There are also potential interpersonal issues. Serious problems can arise when crews of six to eight people are confined for months at a stretch. In a 1999 mock Mars mission, a New Year’s celebration led to some drinking, and a male Russian cosmonaut tried to convince a female Canadian astronaut to kiss him. When she refused, he yanked her away from the cameras and did it without her consent. On that same mission, a fistfight reportedly broke out, and one astronaut quit early.

Ben Kawaller just flew to South Korea to inject salmon sperm into his face.

On this week’s episode of Second Thought, Suzy Weiss, Dan Ahdoot, and Ben unpack the bizarre rise of the male beauty economy. Ben recounts his surreal trip to Seoul, where he underwent a series of cutting-edge cosmetic procedures—including “Crowtox,” laser treatments, and the inf…

First: Free Press Sunday Comedy is back on May 17, with Judy Gold as emcee and a great lineup: Casey Balsham, Drew Dunn, Andy Haynes, Ian Lara, and Mike Yard. Doors open at 3:30 p.m. and close at 4:00 p.m. sharp—and you’re out by 5:30. Afternoon comedy at the Comedy Cellar and then you’re in bed by 8 p.m.? What’s not to love? Grab your tickets here.

And if your tastes skew less “ha ha” and more “drop and give me 50”: Aaron MacLean and historian Niall Ferguson are bringing the School of War podcast to the iconic New York Historical on May 19 for a special live recording. If you want to steal some talking points to elucidate on “the war,” this is your chance. Tickets here.

Let’s get to the news.

→ Iran was two weeks away from killing you: As schoolchildren gathered around to witness President Donald J. Trump reinstating the Presidential Physical Fitness Award to celebrate kids and athleticism, Trump gave some remarks.

Here is what the president said, as those kids stood around ready to accept a Sharpie, or be given two minutes to climb a very high rope:

“We just broke every record and now we’re gonna take a hit, because we have to make a journey down to Iran to take the nuclear weapon. They would’ve had a nuclear weapon within two weeks. Remember, we sent that beautiful B-2 bomber in? We blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated, for those that are not aware. To a point where it would take ’em weeks to dig down, and we wouldn’t let ’em dig down. We have our eyes on there all the time. But it was a very important thing. So, we would’ve had an Iran with a nuclear weapon, and maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now. I can tell you the Middle East would’ve been gone, Israel would’ve been gone. And they would’ve trained their sights on Europe first and then us, because they’re sick people. These are sick people. And we’re not gonna let lunatics have a nuclear weapon. The power of a nuclear weapon is something I don’t even want to talk about. It’s not gonna happen.”

Okay, kids, back to class now! You met the president. It went very well, didn’t it? I think so.

This week, a few news stories caught my attention.

Former congresswoman Katie Porter said she supports taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants during the Democratic California governor’s candidate debate.

Closed-circuit television cameras helped catch two men who violently attacked a 77-year-old man in Seattle, undermining Mayor Katie Wilson’s c…

Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, joins School of War to discuss global population decline. What does a shrinking and aging population mean for the United States? What does it mean for China, whose demographic crisis may be even more severe? How could population decline reshape economic …

“1:30! 1:30!” GG Gilbert-Soto called after her boyfriend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as he ducked onto the street to head to the office. She turns back to me. “He’s going to be late.”

Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, who goes by GG, and Brin were in town for the Met Gala. I met her on the morning of the event at The Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side, where she was staying alongside a bevy of A-listers including Anna Wintour, the Kardashians, and Cardi B. Outside, die-hard K-pop fans gathered along police barricades in the hopes of snagging an autograph, and clothing racks overstuffed with tan Valentino garment bags were being rolled through side entrances by stylists. On a nearby couch, an assistant snarled into her cell phone, “She’ll have the salad with steak, mee-dee-uhm rare.”

Beside me, Gilbert-Soto was wearing Agolde jeans, a white long-sleeve shirt, and white Loewe flats; she’d accessorized with a black handbag, Celine tortoiseshell sunglasses, and a glass Evian that she’d mixed with a packet of Nectar-brand electrolytes. “They’re super clean,” she told me, “and you can get them on Amazon.”

Not so long ago, when she was in college at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, Gilbert-Soto interned for Kris Jenner’s management company, Jenner Communications. That night, she’d be clinking champagne alongside Jenner at a $350,000-a-table fundraiser on the arm of her boyfriend of three years, who is, this week, the third-richest man in the world. Brin has a net worth of nearly $300 billion.

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the monuments in Washington, D.C., will feature prominently—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the country’s legacy is not made of marble. The Founders erected monuments of ideas, and none is so central to our republican government as the idea of civic virtue grounded in religious belief and community. Few religious practices are more deeply enshrined in our founding heritage than the Sabbath: the weekly refuge from ambition, appetite, and noise.

Earlier this week, President Trump paid homage to this heritage when he included in his Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation a call for American Jews to “observe a national Sabbath” from May 15 to 16 to coincide with religious celebrations around the nation’s 250th birthday. This is an invitation worth taking seriously.

For much of the 20th century, a powerful school of thought treated the Founders as though they intended religion and state to be hermetically sealed spheres set apart by Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation.” That view captured part of the American story, but not the whole of it. The Founders prohibited religious tests and the federal establishment of religion, but also opened public proceedings with prayer, appointed chaplains, and came from states with laws that protected the Christian Sabbath. Their aim was not to rid public life of religion, but to prevent the state from coercing conscience.