The Free Press

This week, the epicenter of Jewish hate in the world is, once again, the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday, in my home city of London, two men were injured in a knife attack in broad daylight. The video footage is jarring; the fact that it happened at all is much less surprising. It’s the latest attack on British Jews among dozens of others in the past few weeks alone.

Growing up in Britain in the early 2000s, we never thought of our country as a place where this type of violence could happen. When incidents would happen on the continent, we would offer our pity to Europe, all the while thinking of our home as somewhere safer, more accepting—more similar to America than Europe.

But the events of the past few years have shattered that illusion. These are, of course, not novel observations. I’ve made them before, including in these pages. But the incidents have not slowed down—indeed, they’ve only grown worse. As one British rabbi, who was touring Auschwitz with a school group when he found out the news from London, put it yesterday: “There are Jewish communities that have been decimated and don’t exist anymore, and one day, in 80 years’ time, am I or my children going to take our grandchildren down the streets of Golders Green, Hendon, Edgware, Stamford Hill, any Jewish community in the UK, and they’re going to say, ‘Look at that marking on the wall. There was once a Jew here.’ ”

While the Jewish community’s heartbreak is profound, the reaction from those in British society at large has remained the same: total apathy. This indifference feels like it is becoming one of the defining features of life for Jews in the UK in 2026.

Here’s a Jewish joke for you. When I had kids a decade ago, I decided not to raise them where I grew up, in the U.S., for the supremely neurotic but not entirely crazy reason that I didn’t want to worry every day about them being killed by a school shooter. No, I decided, better to raise them in London, with its reassuring aversion to guns and generally calmer news cycle.

Well, as the Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans, God laughs.” Because while it’s true that I don’t have to worry about my children being shot at school, I do have to worry about them being attacked by terrorists every time we go to synagogue, or when I drop them off at Hebrew school. Which, okay, is not Annie Hall levels of funny. But you have to admit, that’s a heck of a Jewish joke.

Calm and reassuring are not words any Jew would use to describe life in Britain today. In the past two weeks, two synagogues near me in northwest London have been firebombed. On Monday, the Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, just 10 minutes up the road, suffered a suspected arson attack. On Wednesday, two Jews were stabbed on Golders Green’s main high street, near the much beloved Kosher Kingdom supermarket that every Jew in London knows.

Hello, TGIFers. Cole Tomas Allen, if you’re reading this, you didn’t get me this time. How’d that carpet taste? America’s most glamorous assassination attempt. If all this drama seems fun, well, join our team. We’re looking for a Social Media Manager and a Social Media Video Producer. Both roles are full-time and on-site in New York. You can fill out the formal application or email a great letter to [email protected].

Next, on May 17, we’re back at the Comedy Cellar for a Sunday afternoon of stand-up, emceed by Judy Gold. The only thing bigger than the laughs she gets are her glasses. And on May 19, School of War host Aaron MacLean sits down with historian Niall Ferguson for a live conversation at the New York Historical, covering the Middle East, China, military deterrence, the future of American power, and the compatibility of their astrological signs.

To the news.

→ White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Is it even big news anymore when people try to assassinate Donald Trump? It’s a blip. Happens so often. I’ll scrape the back pages of America’s newspapers to find tidbits. Okay, so: It appears that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was derailed after a crazed left-wing gunman allegedly stormed the hotel lobby to try to kill Trump. Shots were fired. Then he was stripped and rolled up in a tinfoil wrap like a little burrito (our copy editor tells me it’s a Mylar blanket). The only times a person gets wrapped in tinfoil are if they try to shoot the president or if they finish a marathon. Quite a delta between those endeavors, but the same outcome. And the dinner was canceled. Nothing to worry about.

When journalists walked out of the ballroom, they were met by normal, run-of-the-mill protesters who carried signs reading: DEATH TO ALL OF THEM (a Wendy Williams reference). And DEATH TO TYRANT (the singular makes it more aggressive, I think). Everything is good. There is no relation between the protester holding a sign that says DEATH TO ALL OF THEM and the gunman inside trying to bring. . . death to all of them. He’s just mentally ill, I’m sure. There is no popular movement encouraging people to slaughter their political enemies en masse.

Photos via Katie Pavlich of what she saw as she left the assassination-attempt dinner. No big deal, purely symbolic, no need for the mainstream media to cover any of this:

When I logged into Bluesky and Threads to check the temperature, some normal-seeming media figures were arguing the shooter himself was an inside job to garner sympathy for old Trumpo. But the dominant energy was bloodlust. Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of the progressive magazine Mother Jones (I like her a lot), tried to calm down her followers on Bluesky: “People here are being really shitty, including at fellow journalists who’ve been traumatized, and you will regret those posts. Or should. Also this does not help your political cause, whatever that might be.” But blood was what they wanted. Blood had been denied. She had to turn off replies.

Some interesting context from last month is that nearly half of Dems think the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Trump was faked. A Manhattan Institute poll found that 47 percent of Democrats believe “the July 2024 assassination attempt on Trump was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.” Half! Half of Democrats think Trump supporters organized for someone to shoot at the president’s ear and kill a random father in the stands.

From The Hills to Glee to the rise of girlboss media—Sophia Rivka Rossi has seen and shaped our culture from the inside out.

Today, she pulls back the curtain.

On this week’s episode of Second Thought, Sophia joins Suzy Weiss to unpack the machine behind reality TV, the secret sauce behind Ryan Murphy’s dominance, and what happens when you finally stop ou…

Lance R. Blyth, command historian of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), joins School of War to discuss the evolution of North America’s air defense. How has NORAD adapted to shifting threats over the decades? Are today’s threats manageable? Are we in a new Cold War? And what can the comm…

David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union, a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns to defend freedom of speech. The organization will soon publish a new report examining allegations against the political network Labour Together, and linked to figures associated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Rose joins me t…

At a bar lined with indoor golf simulators in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Nalin Haley is posing for pictures with a procession of starstruck twentysomethings in blazers.

It’s a humid evening in late March and we are at the kickoff event for the Tri-County Young Republicans, the organization that Nalin, the 24-year-old son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, launched in February. Featured guests include gubernatorial candidate Ralph Norman and state senator Wes Climer. Several have driven hours to get here. And Nalin appears to be the main attraction.

“He’s a rising star,” Matthew Carlyon, a 21-year-old campaign staffer for Norman, told me. “I think he’s going to get into politics one day.”

A day earlier, Nalin assured me that wasn’t on his mind: “People who plan that far ahead are kind of psychotic.” But in the past year, while working a finance job outside Charlotte, he has quickly become a poster boy for the young, post-Trump right that believe the system is rigged and the old guard has failed.

In November, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and argued, among other things, that naturalized immigrants should not be able to hold public office and that dual citizenship should be illegal. A little more than a week later on Fox & Friends, he urged Republicans to reject “free market neoliberalism” to win over Gen Z. A recent X post, calling for a shift away from foreign wars to domestic spending, amassed 29,000 likes. (He has over 42,000 followers on the platform.) Even former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino is a fan.

Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old Caltech graduate who tried to attack the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, acquired his weapons legally, years ago, according to the Justice Department. He trained. He took a three-day train ride to transport them to Washington, D.C., apparently without fear of detection. He checked in to the hotel hosting the dinner, President Donald Trump, and his cabinet, at 3 p.m. the day before. He methodically used his intellect to get close to the dinner, and then he rushed a secure area so full of Secret Service agents that he had no hope of reaching the door, much less crashing through it. What was the point of all that reconnaissance and forethought when there was no way to effect an assassination?

I’ll go with President Trump’s description of Allen. He’s a whack job. A whack job with an impressive level of intellect culminating in climactic stupidity.

Trump attracts assassins. At his black-tie briefing later last Saturday night, the president seemed to revel in this fact a bit, saying that assassins shoot only at the impactful presidents, Gerald Ford and James Garfield excepted. Then Trump laid some statistics on us about race car drivers having safer jobs than presidents. Exaggerated, but four presidents assassinated out of 45 is actually a pretty high percentage.

I got the news on New Year’s Day. Dan Grossman was dead at 81.

Dan was a longtime friend and mentor, the man I jokingly called my “Jewish dad.” I’d known him since my early 20s, when we met at a political event in Washington. Over three decades of lunches, always with dessert, he coached me through building a business, navigating personal crises, and thinking seriously about the world. A few days before Christmas, we met one last time at his usual table in the back of his usual restaurant. We caught up, joked around, and swapped advice.

“How do I get people to stop nagging me about my health?” he asked.

I didn’t know that would be our last conversation. Or maybe, deep down, I did.

Dan was born in 1944, on the outer edge of the baby boomer generation, part of a cohort now entering its 80s. His death was personal, but it felt epochal. The Long Boomer Farewell, I realized, had begun.

That’s what I’ve come to call it: the roughly 20-year period, from now through the mid-2040s, during which the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history.

Sleepwalk into this era and we’re looking at decades of gerontocratic drift, fiscal implosion, and a younger generation that inherits a country stripped of the investments it needed. Get ahead of it and we have a genuine shot at renewal. Almost no one is treating it as the civilizational reckoning it is.

To understand why this generation’s passage will be different—harder, slower, more disorienting—it helps to remember the last one.

Perhaps you too can pivot to AI.

You might have heard the sneaker company Allbirds is trying exactly that. This once-highly touted company that made shoes out of wool for tech bros was valued at $4 billion soon after it went public in 2021, but the main business lines failed and the assets ended up worth a tiny amount of the peak total.

So Allbirds sold those assets for a pittance, and said it will rebrand as “NewBird AI.” The company also announced it had raised $50 million, supposedly for hardware to train advanced AI models. The stock rose rapidly from $2.49 to a close of $16.99, with the price later falling again, and now trading in the range of $6 to $7.

What is going on? One issue is that some underinformed investors may have been out there, looking to snap up any stock issue that appears related to artificial intelligence, given the current boom. In all likelihood, most of these investors will end up burned, but in the meantime some of them can flip it for higher value, as many did during the recent price run-up.

This part of the story is not new; during the dot-com boom of 1999–2000, we saw some businesses try to rebrand as internet companies. Sooner or later, corporate earnings—or the lack thereof—have a way of imposing reality.