The Free Press

Last Saturday, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Sarah Rogers—under secretary of state for public diplomacy—was sitting next to congressional leader Steve Scalise when she heard “shots fired” through the radios of Scalise’s protection detail.

Cole Tomas Allen—a teacher from California—had stormed a security checkpoint and, heavily armed, was headed for the ballroom and President Donald Trump when he was apprehended by the Secret Service. Rogers recalls how “armed men—law enforcement—charged into the room toward where we were sitting and, for about 45 seconds, I was legitimately terrified.”

Despite the obvious ways political violence “endangers free speech,” Rogers told me that Trump’s defiant response on that evening was just right. “We should not let bad, sick people change the course of our country or dictate how we live our lives,” she said.

Fighting attempts to silence free speech is also Rogers’ day job.

At 43, blonde, striking, and social media–savvy, you might say she’s the poster girl of the Trump administration’s diplomacy. She’s also been nicknamed “America’s free-speech czar.” In the coming months, the Senate will consider her nomination for a secondary role, CEO of the U.S. Agency of Global Media, which runs government-sponsored media like the Voice of America radio programs. That means she’s careful what she says—though she’s never been one to be too careful.

Her vision is still as bold as ever. The State Department is releasing a new Public Diplomacy Strategic Plan. Shared exclusively with The Free Press, the department identifies “digital freedom”—encompassing online free speech—as a foreign-policy goal for the first time, per Rogers. The strategy also links support for freedom of speech with the rejection of political violence, and explicitly opposes “policies that fuel social strife” in Europe, including “illegal and mass migration.”

Three of America’s largest cannabis companies were accused in a class-action lawsuit filed on Monday of systematically advertising their products as medicine capable of treating mental health, pain, and other disorders while knowing that the science didn’t support those claims and that their products could even worsen the conditions they claimed marijuana could treat.

Patrick Kenneally, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said in an interview that the lawsuit’s aims are twofold: hold the cannabis industry accountable for “years of misrepresentation” of their products’ health benefits, and force them to “warn consumers about the well-known, obvious, and scientifically validated dangers of cannabis.”

The suit was filed in federal court in Illinois on behalf of consumers in 12 states. It could eventually include millions of plaintiffs. Between possible civil penalties, punitive damages, and even allegations that each company functions as an organized criminal enterprise, the stakes are enormous.

Winston Churchill may never actually have said that “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” But the aphorism has stuck in public memory for a reason. Its logic appears to apply perfectly to the Donald Trump administration’s attitude toward Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where at last the United States appears to be in the beginning stages of forcing things open. Intense Iranian retaliation on Monday, including strikes on the United Arab Emirates and attacks targeting the U.S. Navy and shipping in the strait, suggests that this effort may come at the cost of ending the tenuous ceasefire in place since April 7. But it will be worth it—the current stalemate was economically untenable in the long run.

On Sunday, President Trump announced that the United States will “guide” the ships of other countries trapped in the Persian Gulf out via the strait. He dubbed the exercise “Project Freedom”—not an “operation,” mind you, but a “project”—language designed to avoid trouble with Congress and the War Power Resolution’s 60-day clock.

Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Garrett Exner, adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute, return to School of War to discuss the complicated news out of the Strait of Hormuz. What is President Donald Trump’s new plan, “Project Freedom”? Does it put the ceasefire at risk? What’s really happening in this critical waterway?

You’ve no doubt heard about the “manosphere,” a loose, online community of men, typically single ones, who are dissatisfied with their dating options (or lack thereof), promote a hypermasculine lifestyle, and criticize progressive gender dynamics. These men frequently complain about modern women, whom they accuse of seducing high-status men for self-serving reasons such as excitement and money, and who will purportedly discard a lower-status mate with little remorse. Men, the manosphere participants reason, must look out only for themselves.

Like so many ideas propagated as fact on social media and the internet, this belief gives a wildly distorted picture of the desires and needs of the vast majority of both women and men today. The best data on what young adults are actually looking for comes from data collected by think tanks such as the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute, which together have recently published a report titled “State of Our Unions 2026: The Dating Recession.”

It is true that, according to the report’s survey, only 21 percent of single young adults today are satisfied with their dating options. But contrary to the idea that young women are solely after good times and resources, the researchers find that 83 percent strongly endorse a dating culture focused on forming serious relationships and creating emotional connections. And lest you think that young males simply seek short-term hookups, the corresponding numbers for men are 74 percent (relationships) and 76 percent (connections).

It’s Monday, May 4. 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 Iran-backed group behind attacks on Europe’s Jews. Hollywood doesn’t understand George Orwell. The quest for Viagra for women. And much more.

But first: The civilizational ambition of SpaceX.

This spring or early summer, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is going to go public. It is set to be the biggest IPO in history and, as Patrick McGee writes today, the “most consequential financial event this year.” Already the pundits are pouring cold water on the move. They say only blinkered Musk fanboys would believe that an unwieldy network of satellites, rocket launches, and vague plans to go to Mars could be one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world. One Atlantic story described SpaceX as “a huge meme stock.”

But they said that about Tesla, too, didn’t they? In his lead story today, Patrick examines Musk’s gargantuan SpaceX wager, which is as much a bet on human ambition as it is on any one technology. In fact, it might just be the most audacious bet in business history. But will it pay off? That’s the question on everyone’s lips as SpaceX prepares to go public, and it’s the one at the heart of Patrick’s story.

—Mark Gimein

For years, big pharma often overlooked and neglected women’s health. That is changing, with billions being spent, and made, catering to female customers in new ways. The change brings promise—and peril. Today, two stories about that paradox.

First: perimenopause, a term that is suddenly everywhere on the internet. From celebrity confessions by Drew Barrymore and Katherine Heigl to influencers pushing “Perimenopause Is Hot” merchandise, the hormonal transition into menopause has become a cultural touchstone.

How did perimenopause wind up in the spotlight? Kara Kennedy explores how a once-taboo topic transformed into a highly marketable obsession—and why perimenopause is not the catchall explanation it’s sold as.

Meanwhile, a new documentary is out addressing a different kind of hormonal question: Why isn’t there “Viagra for women”? While The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control blames medical sexism for the rocky rollout of the libido pill, Jennifer Block argues that the truth is more complicated. Read her full take on how what really brought down the “female Viagra” was weak data and worrisome side effects.

• Spirit Airlines shut down at 3 a.m. Saturday after its bondholders rejected a bailout proposal including up to $500 million from the federal government. All Spirit flights were canceled and about 17,000 direct and indirect employees lost their jobs. The Biden administration blocked a Spirit merger with JetBlue in 2024, and the Trump administration turned down a deal that would have given the government a 90 percent stake in the airline.

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asserted that the indictment of former FBI director James Comey relies on more than his spelling out “86 47” using seashells in an Instagram post. “This is about a body of evidence that [prosecutors] collected over the series of about 11 months,” Blanche said on Meet the Press, which he said he was not “permitted” to share.

• A search and rescue operation is underway for two U.S. service members missing off the coast of Morocco. The soldiers were participating in the annual African Lion training exercise with troops from over 30 countries in the Sahara Desert.

• President Trump said Iran’s latest peace proposal was “not acceptable.” The plan sought a 30-day timeline to end hostilities, demanded the U.S. lift sanctions and withdraw regional forces, and included a 15-year uranium enrichment freeze, rejecting the U.S.’s demand to dismantle nuclear infrastructure.

• Former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is in critical but stable condition, his spokesperson said. The statement did not say why the 81-year-old was hospitalized.

• Danco Laboratories, one of the manufacturers of the abortion pill mifepristone, filed an emergency appeal asking the Supreme Court to restore telehealth and mail access to the pills. On Friday, an appeals court granted Louisiana’s request to reinstate a requirement for abortion pills to be dispensed in person.

• The Trump administration has fast-tracked $8.6 billion in emergency arms sales to Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, bypassing standard congressional review and drawing criticism from Democratic lawmakers. The State Department cited national security needs amid the war with Iran.

• Almost 45 percent of Americans say they are cutting back on driving in response to high gas prices, and a similar percentage say they are cutting household expenses in response, according to a Washington Post and ABC News poll. A third say they have changed their travel and vacation plans.

• At the 152nd Kentucky Derby, Cherie DeVaux made history as the first woman trainer to win the legendary race. Her horse, Golden Tempo, pulled off a stunning upset at 23-1 odds. Despite trailing in last place for most of the run, the colt charged past 17 horses to beat the favorite, Renegade, by a neck.

On one of the most polarizing questions in American foreign policy—U.S. support for Israel— historian and geopolitical expert Walter Russell Mead argues that nearly everyone has the story wrong.

The standard explanations focus on lobbying power, campaign donations, and media influence. But, as Mead explains, this ignores the fact that American interest i…

There are only two industrial actors in the world attempting to vertically integrate electric vehicles, batteries, chips, robotics, and artificial intelligence. One is China. The other is an industrial conglomerate overseen by a single person: Elon Musk.

Try to keep this in mind as Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, prepares for the most consequential financial event this year: its public listing. Expected as soon as next month, it is expected to be the largest IPO in history by a long shot, raising roughly $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. By conventional measures, that number can sound nuts. But Elon is anything but conventional.

Will we ever have a pink Viagra? NASA has sent a woman around the moon, yet we still don’t have a reliable pharmaceutical to send us over the proverbial moon, at least nothing like the launchpad men have.

I’ve been covering women’s sexual health for 20-plus years, almost as long as pharma has been trying to create such a drug—one that triggers desire, arousal, and orgasm (or at least two out of the three). Now, a new documentary, The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control, streaming on Paramount+ (a division of our parent company), asserts there is a female answer to Viagra. It’s called Addyi, and the film treats the story of its bumpy road to approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 as a major front in the ongoing fight for female sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy.

You’ve heard of Viagra and its many spin-offs. So why have you never heard of Addyi? The film has an answer: sexism. “Just think to yourself: What if the pill had been blue?” Cindy Eckert, the co-founder and CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, whose sole product is Addyi, tells viewers. Her point is both literal and metaphorical—Viagra has long been known as “the little blue pill.” And the film uncritically adopts this framing.

The story it tells is one of feminist triumph over sexist regulators who put unreasonable demands on the company because they took the sexual needs of women less seriously than those of men. Never mind the drug’s lackluster performance and concerning side effects. Bias was at the root, and Eckert was determined to expose it. “Not on my fucking watch,” she tells the camera.

Yet there is another narrative to the Addyi story that isn’t about sexism but about which drugs get approved and why. While Sprout did recognize a legitimate need, it also leveraged a public lobbying campaign to influence an agency that is supposed to be driven by science.

If you’re a woman who speaks English, it sometimes feels like you can’t spend time on the internet without being bombarded with all the ways in which your body or your mind could be just a little broken. A few years ago, Instagram was full of women talking about attention deficit disorder, and lo and behold: From 2020 to 2022, the percentage of women (between the ages of 23 and 49) newly diagnosed with it nearly doubled. Not long ago, premenstrual syndrome was all the rage, with the algorithm pushing videos that explained why it’s okay to fly off the handle once a month. These days, the word perimenopause is everywhere.

Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines. “Perimenopause is having a millennial moment. Here are 7 ways to cope,” says The Washington Post. Or perhaps you’ve seen Apple TV’s glossy drama Your Friends & Neighbors, which is back for its second season; the female protagonist Mel is explicitly perimenopausal, and in the first season, she keyed a car for no apparent reason. She’s played by Amanda Peet, who talks about being perimenopausal in real life (“God knows I’ve wanted to key a lot of cars in the last three years,” she’s said.) In fact, it sometimes feels like every celebrity interview with a forty- or fiftysomething woman requires her to open up about what’s going on with her hormones. Drew Barrymore joked on CBS Mornings that when she found out how long perimenopause can last, she thought she’d “never make it 10 years like this.” Katherine Heigl told Business Insider that “whoever designed it so that women would be going through perimenopause while raising teenagers should be sent a strongly worded letter.”

At the same time, influencers who talk about perimenopause seem to have cropped up out of nowhere with something to sell you, causing people online to wonder where this all came from. It’s trickled down from Instagram to tchotchke shops, which sell fridge magnets that say “Perimenopause Is Hot.” You can buy a T-shirt that proclaims “Perimenopause Made Me Do It!” My mom, who is 48, started uncontrollably shaking her leg at night a few years ago. “It’s perimenopause,” she told me when I complained about how annoying it was.

But what exactly is perimenopause—and why are we all talking about it all of a sudden?