The Free Press

This is an excerpt of Ben Shapiro’s remarks at the University of Austin—you can watch Ben’s full speech here.

Why do we seem to hate each other so much here in the United States? Why do so many people seem obsessed with conspiracies, steeped in anger, and ready to spend large segments of their day fulminating on the internet about people they don’t know, on topics that they know nothing about?

There’s a simple answer: Our institutions are failing.

Trust in American institutions—in the media, in church, in the scientific establishment, in government and, of course, in academia—is at an all-time low. And because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another.

You might think that it would be the opposite—that we mistrust one another, therefore we mistrust our institutions—but that’s not the case. If you grow up in a religious community, going to church helps shape you. Likewise, the people you hang out with shape you, the institution of your family shapes you, your school shapes you, your university shapes you. Once we lose faith in the capacity of these institutions to shape us, we become incapable of coming together anymore.

After the Department of Justice released the latest round of Epstein files in January, a barrage of high-powered individuals named in the documents lost jobs, resigned from boards, and were otherwise ushered out of public life. And yet, one of the women most closely entwined with Jeffrey Epstein, his executive assistant, Lesley Groff, has faced limited scrutiny. In her latest Epstein investigation, Free Press reporter Tanya Lukyanova dives into the remarkably normal life of the woman Epstein once said he could not lose. This is a story about who has paid a price for their connections to Epstein, who hasn’t, and why. —The Editors

On March 2, Daniel LaGattuta rose to speak at a meeting of the New Canaan Republican Town Committee (RTC), a group dedicated to electing GOP candidates at both the local and national levels. He wanted to discuss what he called the “Lesley Groff problem.”

Groff, 59, is a longtime resident of New Canaan, Connecticut, an upscale suburb of some 20,000 people. She had also spent much of her career as Jeffrey Epstein’s executive assistant. She kept the convicted sex offender’s schedule; managed his day-to-day, overseeing everything from his haircuts to his daily massage appointments, many of which were code for “sex,” according to victims; and made the arrangements for the young women Epstein took to his Caribbean island and his ranch in New Mexico. Groff was so plugged into Epstein’s affairs that her name appears over 150,000 times in the recently released Department of Justice files. Only Epstein’s name appears more often.

In New Canaan, Groff and her husband, Ike, had a long history of donating to the RTC and Republican candidates, a fact that greatly troubled LaGattuta. The Groffs had paid $1,000 to attend a local fundraiser in October 2023, and another $1,000 for an RTC gala seven months later. And they made campaign contributions, as well. On several occasions, LaGattuta told the RTC that taking political donations from someone so close to Epstein was going to cause problems for the New Canaan Republican Town Committee.

Hoping to rally his fellow Republicans, LaGattuta laid it all out at the March 2 meeting. Groff, he pointed out, was listed as a suspected co-conspirator in the un-redacted FBI files that were released by the DOJ. She was a key member of Epstein’s inner circle, he said. She was even the reason New Canaan was mentioned more than a thousand times in the Epstein files. Associating with Groff, he concluded, was “morally abhorrent and a political catastrophe.” If they had any sense, he said, New Canaan Republicans would renounce her contributions and donate the money to an organization for victims of sexual abuse.

Groff was so plugged into Epstein’s affairs that her name appears over 150,000 times in the recently released Department of Justice files.

But once again, New Canaan Republicans, many of whom were friends of the Groffs, ignored LaGattuta.

Ever since the release of more than three million pages of Epstein emails and documents in January, many powerful people—figures like Larry Summers, Leon Black, Bill Gates, Peter Mandelson, and former Prince Andrew—have been ostracized and punished professionally because of their association with Epstein. (All of them have denied wrongdoing.) We’ve seen high-profile person after person issue the standard apology for ever being in Epstein’s life before taking the obligatory step back to reflect, whether or not they were complicit in unlawful or even just unsavory acts. For some, a mere email correspondence with Epstein cost them their job. Yet the woman who sat in the office next to his for nearly 20 years has somehow managed to resume her life in New Canaan as if Epstein had never been a part of it. In the sweeping Epstein reckoning, Groff is an anomaly. She doesn’t just make political donations—she goes to parties, hosts game nights, and dines at upscale restaurants with her friends and family.

Which makes one wonder: Does anyone in New Canaan even care?

Groff has long maintained her innocence. In a statement to The Free Press, her lawyer Michael Bachner insisted that throughout her tenure with Epstein, Groff “never witnessed or was told of anything illegal related to these massages.”

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 Tuesday, April 28, and Iran is beginning to crack. Vindicating Donald Trump’s weekend claim that Iranian officials could “come to us, or they can call us,” Iran has reportedly presented a new proposal, offering to “reopen” the Strait of Hormuz and end the current hostilities, provided that U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations are postponed to a later date.

Trump responded that while this offer is “much better” than previous proposals—which demanded Iranian sovereignty over the strait—it remains “not enough.” It goes without saying why surrendering Washington’s primary point of leverage over the regime before securing ironclad guarantees on the nuclear issue is a nonstarter.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where trade talks are getting saucy, we have a nursing emergency, and two political opposites have more in common than they care to admit. Let’s jump in!

Things had been unusually quiet on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade front. But quiet sometimes means that someone is about to flip over the table. And that is exactly what U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did last week.

At a conference in Washington, D.C., he mocked Canada’s negotiating posture on the upcoming review of USMCA, the trade pact governing most of North American trade. A key July deadline looms over whether Canada can preserve the deal’s current exemptions—or face a more protectionist framework.

It’s Tuesday, April 28. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks on why universities have a conformity crisis. The Ivy League president who bucked the trend and held the line. Was a sub–two-hour marathon inevitable? The philosophical case for getting drunk. And much more.

But first: The shooter in D.C.—and our fraying social contract.

Cole Allen, the alleged shooter at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, is the only person responsible for his actions in the Washington Hilton. But it is impossible not to see the thwarted attack in the context of our increasingly upside-down culture, one in which political speech is derided as violence and political violence is tolerated, excused, and even celebrated.

If that sounds hyperbolic to you, we suggest sitting in on a seminar at any number of Ivy League schools with the words anti-colonial or indigeneity in the course title. Or just head down to Washington Square Park and ask the New York University students and twentysomethings if they think murder is ever an appropriate political tool.

Our Tanya Lukyanova did just that yesterday. Watch for yourself:

In our latest editorial, we dive into the culture that creates permission for political violence, and why it is incumbent on all of us to restore the guardrails upon which free speech and American democracy depend.

Douglas Murray was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. He joins Aaron MacLean for the latest episode of the School of War podcast to discuss the events of that night and the dangerous moment we find ourselves in. You can watch their conversation below:

You can also read Douglas’s view in the below text, adapted from the episode. He covers the scene in the ballroom, why excuse-making for political violence is so evil, and why the suspect’s manifesto sounds so familiar:

One group of people whose job has been made immeasurably harder by the growing threat of political violence is the Secret Service. Former agent Bill Gabe talks to Tanner Nau about what went right and what went wrong on Saturday night, and how the Secret Service is handling the job of protecting the “most threatened president in U.S. history.”

—The Editors

Better late than never, the toniest institutions in higher education are coming around to the realization that “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship,” as a Yale University report put it earlier this month. Today, we have two looks at the Ivies’ about-face.

First, Arthur Brooks reflects on Yale’s admission about campus groupthink (what took so long?), the evolutionary biology behind the human impulse to conform, and how the ideological straitjacket on academia was put on in the first place.

Second, Jonas Du heads to Dartmouth College, which has set itself apart from other elite schools under president Sian Beilock. Dartmouth took a very different approach to the post–October 7 campus disorder, and is the only college in the Ivy League not to be investigated by the Trump administration for allegations of campus antisemitism.

Beilock quickly had protesters arrested, defied faculty, and now says American universities lost their way. Today, she talks to Jonas about why she thinks schools have a choice: Fix themselves, or “someone else will try and do it for us.”

We have three exciting open roles on our social and video team: Director, Editorial and Social Video, Social Media Manager, and Social Media Video Producer. If you consider your screen time less “doomscrolling” and more “professional development,” consider applying at the links above. Even better, send your best pitch to [email protected].

• Florida governor Ron DeSantis is advancing a new congressional redistricting map that would add four Republican seats. It is the latest move to redraw a state’s voting boundaries to favor one political party over the other. Meanwhile, the Virginia Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in a GOP challenge to a voter-approved measure that would allow a similar gerrymander favoring Democrats.

• Iran proposed reopening the Strait of Hormuz and postponing formal nuclear negotiations yesterday in its latest offer to the Trump administration. Iran said the U.S. would have to agree to end the war and stop its blockade.

• The Supreme Court appears poised to rule that police must obtain a warrant before accessing location data from tech companies. So-called geofence warrants are controversial because they allow law enforcement to request data on all devices present in a given area during a specific time window, often pulling in thousands of individuals with no connection to a crime.

• Microsoft announced Monday that it is ending its exclusive right to sell OpenAI’s models, leaving OpenAI free to distribute its products on rival cloud platforms. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed that it will soon make OpenAI’s models available on Amazon Web Services.

• Republicans are seeking to attach federal funding for a Trump-proposed White House ballroom to upcoming legislation, citing security concerns following Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

• Donald and Melania Trump urged ABC to take action against Jimmy Kimmel after the late-night host said the First Lady had the glow of “an expectant widow.” Kimmel made the comment on Thursday. On Monday, Melania Trump said “people like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.”

• Taylor Swift’s company filed three trademark applications in an apparent attempt to protect her voice and likeness. The move follows a similar strategy by Matthew McConaughey. Swift’s likeness was used without permission in AI-generated deepfakes, including pornographic images and a fake political endorsement shared by Donald Trump in 2024.

• Twenty-two monks were arrested in Sri Lanka after customs officials discovered 242 pounds of cannabis, including 11 pounds of Kush, a potent form of the drug, hidden in false compartments of their luggage. The monks were returning from a four-day trip to Thailand. Police said they might not have known what was in their bags.

This text is adapted from the latest episode of School of War, hosted by Aaron MacLean. To watch Aaron’s conversation with Douglas Murray, click here. You can follow School of War here or wherever you get your podcasts.

My Saturday night began the same way it did for most attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: being harangued by protesters outside the venue. As I walked up to the hotel, one woman in a keffiyeh screamed at me, “How could you possibly have dinner with a child rapist?”

That was the tenor going in.

The event itself was the normal run of things: pre-parties, pre-drinks, everyone filing into the hall. I sat with my colleagues from the New York Post, along with United Nations ambassador Mike Waltz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and others. When the president came in, there was great excitement—it was the first time Trump had attended one of these dinners. We were looking forward to him roasting the media, which was what everyone expected.

And then it happened.

Cole Allen, the alleged shooter at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, is the only person responsible for his actions in the Washington Hilton. But it is impossible not to see the weekend’s thwarted attack in the context of our increasingly upside-down culture, one in which political speech is derided as violence and political violence is tolerated, excused, and even celebrated.

If that sounds hyperbolic to you, we suggest sitting in on any seminar at any number of Ivy League schools with the word anti-colonial or indigeneity in the course title. Or just head down to Washington Square Park and ask the NYU co-eds and twentysomethings if they think murder is ever an appropriate political tool.

Our Tanya Lukyanova did just that yesterday. Listen for yourself:

If you think education provides inoculation against such moral perversion, it’s exactly the opposite. According to one survey, 40 percent of Americans with graduate or professional degrees—compared to just 23 percent of Americans with no education beyond high school—agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change.”

Sunday was a remarkable day in the history of long-distance running. Sabastian Sawe, a 31-year-old Kenyan, won the London Marathon with a staggering time of 1:59:30, making him the first person to run a sanctioned marathon in under two hours. Second-place finisher Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia also broke the two-hour barrier, finishing just 11 seconds behind Sawe.

A sub–two-hour marathon has long been the Holy Grail of long distance running, and it got us wondering how Sawe pulled it off—and whether we can expect this to become the new normal among marathoners.

For answers, we turned to Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and the author of The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. Nick, an extraordinary long-distance runner himself, recently set a U.S. record for running 31 miles among men over 50, with a time of 3:10. Our interview has been edited for clarity and length.

HANOVER, New Hampshire — Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock was 16 years old and a star goalie on an Olympic development team when she played the worst soccer game of her life, ending her dream of making the United States national team. That failure fueled Beilock’s academic career as a cognitive scientist studying why people collapse under pressure, including the book she wrote titled Choke.

It also helped Beilock avoid the outrage from congressional lawmakers that cost the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs for failing to control anti-Israel chaos and antisemitism on their campuses after the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas.

Beilock, now 50, didn’t choke this time. Two hours after Dartmouth students pitched an encampment on the Green in May 2024, she called in the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested.

In an interview earlier this month in her office overlooking the same spot, Beilock told me without even a hint of equivocation, “Setting up an encampment on a shared space and declaring it for one ideology, where certain people can’t be or walk through—that’s disrupting someone else’s free speech.”

When Bill Gage heard that a shooter tried to barge into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and open fire inside the ballroom, one of his first thoughts was: That could have been me.

Gage was a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including as a special agent in its Washington, D.C., field office, and worked at the very same event multiple times. Much of what Gage saw Saturday night reminded him of the best of the Secret Service, including the officer who was shot while trying to stop the would-be assassin from reaching President Donald Trump.

But America’s growing political violence problem has made the Secret Service’s job much harder, Gage told me. Trump “is the most threatened president in U.S. history,” Gage said, and “the pressure is almost unbearable for a lot of agents, because they know what’s at stake.”

I asked Gage to explain what went right and wrong with security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, what changes should be made if the event is rescheduled, as Trump has said he wants, what morale is like inside the Secret Service, and how much safer the new White House ballroom would really be. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.