The Free Press

Douglas Murray, journalist and author of On Democracies and Death Cults, joins School of War to discuss the assassination attempt that we both witnessed in person at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday. Was there a lapse in appropriate security? Is political violence being normalized? Can it be contained?

Ben Sasse takes questions on his faith, his experimental treatment, American healthcare, and more in our latest Things That Matter town hall.

Chase Rowan used to jump out of planes for a living. At the age of 21, he became an Army Ranger, trained to parachute behind enemy lines to capture or kill insurgent fighters. He went on his first combat tour, to northern Iraq, in 2005.

“There’s a lot of times you think you’re not going to come back,” Rowan told me. “But you do it for your buddy sitting next to you. And because you don’t want to be that little bitch.”

He completed over 150 combat missions in hostile territory without a hitch. But two months after he got back from Iraq, while he was working at Fort Benning Army base in Georgia, an airborne training exercise went horribly wrong.

It was the middle of the night. The plane was 800 feet up. Rowan jumped, as he had so many times before—and his parachute didn’t fully deploy. His body was going 60 miles an hour when it hit the runway.

Miraculously, Rowan survived. But he had broken several bones and sustained a traumatic brain injury. In a Veterans Affairs hospital, a doctor gave Rowan a Percocet pill for the first time, and so began a lifetime of addiction.

For the first year after his injury, Rowan struggled with chronic headaches and struggled to keep his balance while standing or walking. But even after the symptoms subsided, Rowan continued to ingest any opioid he could get his hands on: oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl. In the past decade and a half, he’s crashed two cars while high and cycled in and out of rehab. In 2010, in the middle of his first child’s birth, he snuck out of the maternity ward to go get a fix. When his wife finally left him with their two kids in early 2023, Rowan admitted, “It was long overdue.”

A few months later, Rowan said, he was ready to end his life.

In April 2023, Rowan told me, he was sitting on his living room couch, beside a small stack of suicide notes, watching Eminem music videos. He was planning to hang himself from a pull-up bar the next day, when something caught his eye in the suggested videos tab: a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan was interviewing U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer—Medal of Honor winner, savior of 36 lives in Afghanistan—about an experimental post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment that, Meyer said, made him feel like “my soul had gone through a workout, just an ass-kicking workout,” and cured him of weekly anxiety attacks. It was then that Rowan heard a word he had never heard before: ibogaine.

“It gave me my life back,” Meyer said to Rogan in the interview.

When Rowan heard those words, he froze. He paused the interview. Then he played it over again. And again.

“It was God, really, telling me, ‘Chase, this is it. This is for you. This is what you need,’ ” Rowan said.

Four months later, he was on his way to Mexico to receive ibogaine treatment.

“Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

So said a self-critical report published this month by Yale University, bemoaning the lack of intellectual diversity at their own college and most of the nation’s other leading campuses. Well, duh, readers of The Free Press might respond. To you, this report, which also cited problems in higher education including ballooning tuition fees, opaque and unfair admissions criteria, and grade inflation—may sound like a master class in the obvious.

But to many in academia, this is not obvious. Despite decades slipping into an ideological monoculture, many academics still don’t see a problem. Amid increasingly widespread scrutiny, they don’t understand why so many elite colleges have squandered public trust.

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 Monday, April 27, and it’s happening again. In 2013, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid joined forces to demand an end to Haredi draft exemptions, forcing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to exclude the ultra-Orthodox from his coalition. In 2021, they teamed up a second time to build a short-lived government that successfully forced Netanyahu into the opposition. Now, this final alliance is intended to finish the job and expel him from politics for good.

Last night, the two leaders officially merged their factions into a new joint party called Beyachad (“Together”). With Lapid’s backing, Bennett is now the undisputed prime ministerial candidate set to challenge Netanyahu at the ballot box this October.

I am not a big drinker by most people’s standards. I don’t do shots. I rarely drink alone. But a few times a week, usually over dinner or a long conversation with a friend, I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer. And over the years, I’ve noticed that those moments have a quality that’s hard to replicate any other way. Friendships that started over drinks i…

It’s Monday, April 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Jed Rubenfeld on the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Kara Kennedy on Britain’s smoking ban. Abigail Shrier on stay-at-home dads. And much more.

But first: The dinner and the gunman.

One of the values that informs everything we do at The Free Press is a belief in the American project. Here’s how we explain what we mean by that on our website:

Our reporting and opinion can be harshly critical of our country and its leaders, but that is because we believe deeply in America and its promise. We make no apology for making distinctions between good and bad, liberalism and illiberalism, the rule of the law and mob rule, freedom and unfreedom—and we advocate forcefully for the former.

We were reminded of those distinctions on Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. The evening was supposed to be a lighthearted affair. Instead it became a near-tragedy that threw those distinctions, once again, into sharp relief. Good versus bad. Liberalism versus illiberalism. The rule of law versus mob rule. Freedom and unfreedom.

Today, we offer five stories on the latest incidence of political violence in America and the permission structures that make it possible. What happened, why, and how to respond.

First, in case you missed it, read the editorial we published the morning after the thwarted attack. It’s about what it takes to stay free. “The shooting,” we wrote, “is a reminder that the First Amendment alone cannot uphold free speech.” Check it out, in full, here:

The Free Press’s culture editor Freya Sanders, a native of Great Britain, was at the event and was expecting a deeply American experience. She got that—just not exactly in the way she expected. Read her reckoning with America’s unique ailments for a perspective on what Saturday night’s ordeal looked like to an outsider.

How did the shooter get so close? That’s the question Elliot Ackerman, a Marine veteran, seeks to answer in his firsthand dispatch. “The security arrangement itself was riddled with holes—holes that, as the proximity of the gunshots to the ballroom revealed, could very well have ended in catastrophe,” he writes. Read his report:

But as with any calamity, the WHCD shooting had its unsung heroes. And for Suzy Weiss, that’s men like Ackerman, who kept the people around him—in particular the young women—calm as they ducked and covered. The security teams and Secret Service agents did their jobs. But today Suzy salutes the people in the ballroom, many of them veterans, who didn’t miss a step and stayed collected amid the chaos. In short: Dudes rock.

Finally, Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik has written extensively about the spate of political violence that has rocked America over the last few years—including diving deeply into the biographies of the young men who take such despicable and disastrous action. Read his latest on what appears to have driven the man accused of storming the dinner:

—The Editors

• Senator Thom Tillis announced Sunday he would drop his hold on Kevin Warsh’s Fed nomination after the Justice Department closed its criminal investigation into outgoing Fed Chair Jerome Powell—the inquiry that had led Tillis, a Republican, to block Trump’s pick in the first place. Tillis, a Trump critic who is retiring from the Senate when his term concludes next year, had been the White House’s major roadblock in replacing Powell. The Senate Banking Committee is now expected to allow Warsh’s nomination to advance.

• Following Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump renewed his push for his $400 million White House ballroom, calling the Washington Hilton “not a particularly secure building” and posting that the attack “would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House.”

• Trump called off Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s diplomatic mission to Pakistan over the weekend, where the two were set to sit down with Iranian negotiators. Trump said Tehran’s latest proposal wasn’t up to par, though he claimed a stronger offer arrived shortly after. Iran wants the U.S. naval blockade of its ports to end immediately, while Washington demands the removal of uranium stockpiles from the country.

• Iran has caused an estimated $5 billion in damage to U.S. military bases across the Gulf region—far more than publicly acknowledged—hitting runways, radar systems, aircraft hangars, and command infrastructure across six countries, NBC News reported Saturday. Briefings for lawmakers on the full costs of the war have been scant. “No one knows anything,” one congressional aide said. “And it’s not for lack of asking.”

• Russia’s state-owned pollster recorded President Vladimir Putin’s approval rate dropping to about 65 percent—the lowest since before his invasion of Ukraine and a 12-point slide since January. This comes as Russians grow weary of the prolonged war, a cratering economy, and tightening internet restrictions.

• Al Qaeda–linked militants simultaneously attacked targets across Mali on Saturday, claiming to have taken control of two major cities while bombing military headquarters outside the capital of Bamako and leveling the defense minister’s home. Experts say it is a sign that the group is now a force capable of nationwide warfare.

• Democrats’ prospects of flipping the Senate this November have gone from unlikely to competitive, fueled by Trump’s eroding approval ratings and widespread unease about the economy. New polling shows voters now trust Democrats more than Republicans on economic issues for the first time in 15 years. Democrats are targeting open or vulnerable seats in Maine, North Carolina, Alaska, and Ohio, while Republicans see Michigan as their best chance to go on offense.

• Trump announced he will coat the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in “American flag blue”—ditching a $301 million granite replacement for a $1.5 million fix sourced from his personal pool contractors. “You’re going to end up with a beautiful, beautiful reflecting pool,” Trump said, adding it will be ready well before July 4.

We are being engulfed by a terrible upside-downness. This is the most important lesson of Saturday night’s near-calamity at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in Washington, D.C.

The things that were, until recently, obviously off-limits—adhere to the law, not shoot the president of the United States—are no longer off-limits.

Not everywhere, of course. Not to most Americans.

To most of us, the old constraints still apply.

But the new radicalism, the new ethos, is bubbling up up up, seeping into all our many nooks and spaces.

Last week, thanks to The New York Times, we learned all about the glories of “microlooting” and why it’s good to steal from Whole Foods or the Louvre, and why we need more “cool crimes.”

If church and state must be separate, how close are they allowed to come? The Supreme Court may soon have to draw a line in that great, never-ending debate.

Almost half a century ago, in a case called Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public schools. The law’s evident purpose, said the Court, was “to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

Last week, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, decided the identical issue but came out the other way. By a 9–8 vote in Nathan v. Alamo Heights, the Fifth Circuit upheld a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools.

I’m an admirer of many judges in the majority, and when a circuit court splits nine to eight, it’s clear that reasonable people can differ. Nevertheless, I think the Fifth Circuit went profoundly wrong.

Under Nathan, the city of Dearborn, Michigan, could pass an ordinance requiring every public school there to display signs reading “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

How did the Fifth Circuit go so wrong? Let’s begin with the fact that the majority chose to ignore Supreme Court precedent, which is pretty surprising in itself.

It was raining Saturday night in Washington, D.C. Given the heavy police presence outside the Washington Hilton, my wife Lea and I needed to walk the last two blocks to the entrance of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I gave her my tuxedo jacket, which she held over her head as we passed a dozen or so chanting protesters, flanked by security.

We reached a metal gate at the hotel entrance. A woman working the event checked our invitations, which we received via email. The invitations were JPEG email attachments stating that they were “strictly nontransferable.” They were not marked with our names.

Given the rain, I was glad that’s all it took to get inside. Looking back now, maybe I shouldn’t have been. A screenshot of that email could have gotten anyone in.