The Free Press

Donald Trump’s way with words was on display on the morning of April 7 when he posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Sarah Yager of Human Rights Watch accused him of planning “a war crime, plain and simple.” Agnès Callamard of Amnesty International saw something worse: “a threat to commit genocide.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington heard “the rantings of a bloodthirsty lunatic.”

Trump’s post, however, was deliberate strategic communication. It placed before the regime in Tehran a stark choice: Surrender your nuclear weapons program or face the destruction of Iran’s electricity and transportation grids—legitimate targets under the laws of war. Before nightfall, Trump had decided not to trigger the apocalypse. Instead, he announced a two-week ceasefire. His forbearance failed to mollify the critics. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez spoke for many on both sides of the Atlantic when he said, “The government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.”

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, on Tuesday issued an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC funneled more than $3 million of donors’ money to members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Movement—groups it simultaneously condemned in fundraising letters and press releases. To move the money, the SPLC allegedly used fictitious business names.

For many of us who spent years on the receiving end of the organization’s lists and labels, the indictment itself was no surprise. What surprised us was that it took until 2026 to arrive.

I was placed on an SPLC blacklist in October 2016. The document was called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” My name appeared beside Maajid Nawaz, a reformed radical who ran a counter-extremism organization, and an array of figures also dedicated to combating Islamism and antisemitism, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. The list handed journalists a ready-made roster of 15 people whose views were to be seen as toxic. But to call it a mere reference guide is to understate what it was.

When one of my sisters was a tween, she was walking down the street with my grandparents when some change fell out of her purse. She didn’t turn back. “It’s just pennies,” she announced. “It’s worthless. Who cares?” My grandfather had her turn around and pick up each one. We don’t just throw away money, and we don’t act with casual indifference to things of value, even if they’re of small value, he explained. He didn’t take this stance because he worshipped the almighty dollar, nor because he grew up very poor—though he did, living above another family’s garage with his widowed mother—but because he considered it careless and fundamentally ungrateful.

I thought back to this bit of family lore this morning, when I watched New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and the socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker debate the merits of microlooting, a made-up word that just means committing theft but feeling good about it. The conversation was hosted by The New York Times Opinion section, and took place in a tastefully decorated whitewashed loft.

Piker is a proud champagne socialist; he sported designer sunglasses on a propaganda trip to Cuba, an island he says has been “asphyxiated” by the U.S., while Tolentino is the cultural critic for the internet age: photogenic and constantly virtue signaling. She, of The New Yorker and a New York Times bestseller, is from the old media world—while Piker is the king of the internet stream, appealing to disaffected young men. But they’re both getting at the same thing.

The headline of the interview, interestingly, is: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” The subhead: “Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” It is worth watching the whole thing for a glimpse into how the very online left—for which Piker and Tolentino are avatars—is responding to the much-discussed death of woke. Answer: a litigation of the Ten Commandments, one by one. According to the very polished, perfectly comfortable class avengers: Murder is up for debate. So is stealing, provided that it’s not from a Zohran Mamdani–sponsored grocery store.

The host, Nadja Spiegelman, began the conversation by establishing her guest’s theft threshold: “Would you share your Netflix password?” “Would you steal from the Louvre?” “Would you steal from Whole Foods?”

Apparently a lot of people steal regularly from Whole Foods. Just a few small things, here and there. They’re even getting thrown in the store’s mini-jail for it. It’s a trend, I think, for two reasons. One is that Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who is the third richest man in the world, and whose name has become a synonym for rapacious capitalism. The second is that Whole Foods sells upscale organic groceries and supplements for people who want to boost their collagen.

Meaning, those microlooting Whole Foods are probably not destitute mothers stealing formula for their babies. They are more likely graphic designers stealing probiotics. People who studied “studies” at Seven Sisters colleges. They are disenchanted magazine writers and casting directors who use their parents’ HBO log-ins. In other words, they are downwardly mobile brats who can afford it. And they are telling themselves that by taking without paying—a behavior known to the rest of us as stealing—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.

When asked if she’d ever done this, Tolentino said “yes,” and “on several occasions.” But don’t worry, it was for an elderly neighbor called “Miss Nancy,” who she shops for as part of her neighborhood mutual aid group, which Tolentino has been in since 2021, thank you very much. She said she stole four lemons for Miss Nancy, though we’re never told if anyone checked with Miss Nancy over whether she was cool to receive boosted goods. Piker dutifully reported that he is “pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.”

And, in general, Piker continued: “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.”

Rock on, brother—anyway your burger’s up!

Those microlooting Whole Foods are probably not destitute mothers stealing formula for their babies. They are more likely graphic designers stealing probiotics.

Perched atop deep, white armchairs in business casual, the three nodded knowingly to each other as they found even deeper agreement in the fact that “the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action.” In other words: It’s good, actually, that more people are becoming thieves. “Everyone, try it. See what happens,” Tolentino trilled. “Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go,” Piker added, when presented with the idea that if everyone were to steal from Whole Foods, the prices would go up.

At the very least, Piker is clear about what he’s going for: He wants the government to run all the grocery stores, and he thinks that sowing chaos is the surest path there. And by that logic, if stealing leads to nationalized grocery stores, then murder might just lead to universal healthcare! Piker doesn’t endorse the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, but he points out that Thompson was engaged in “a tremendous amount of social murder” through “the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty.” Here’s when I would normally change train cars. Of the people who have to deal with Byzantine insurance companies, and with medical debt he said, “For them, that is murder; for them, that is torture.”

In Piker’s morally inverted world, the assassin putting a bullet in someone’s back is a hero, and the guy getting killed is the real murderer. In Tolentino’s world, which is the same one, blowing up a pipeline “should be okay” but getting iced coffee in a plastic cup is “profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action.” (Yes, she says this.)

Stealing has to do with you, and whether you are a good or bad person, and your community, and whether you want to live in one where all the shampoos at the CVS are kept in tiny jails.

And what about the man who burned down the Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Canada to protest low wages? “Do I think that some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful?” Tolentino rhetorically asked herself. “Yes.”

What is the threshold for some sort of fire, and how can we make sure it doesn’t get mixed up with the bad, hot destructive kind? Which store sells the hypothetical frames?

Stealing from Whole Foods doesn’t actually have to do with billionaires, or how much they pay in taxes. The logic that says slipping a magazine or a chocolate bar into your tote might equal one less orchid at the Bezos wedding is ridiculous. Stealing has to do with you, and whether you are a good or bad person, and your community, and whether you want to live in one where all the shampoos at the CVS are kept in tiny jails.

The Times conversation ended with the same line of questioning it began with from Spiegelman. “Steal from Whole Foods?” Both Tolentino and Piker responded with my grandfather’s least favorite word: “Sure.” He despised sure. He thought it made the speaker seem like they can’t be bothered to give you a straight answer. Like they’re doing you a favor. That deep down, they don’t actually care at all.

Dear Abigail,

To get right to the point: Are men meant to build empires, and women meant to change diapers?

My wife and I have four children under 7. We work very flexible 40-hour weeks, and financially we’re very comfortable. Our nonwork hours are filled with family activities that we either do together or divide up more or less evenly. On good days, it’s delightful and rewarding. On bad days, it’s aggravating and draining.

I’m writing because my work is currently taking a back seat to family. I’m well-known in my field, and I often feel that I could really “put a dent in the universe” if I went all-in with my career. My three sisters have all married men who put their own career goals far above children and family. Nothing is more important than their work: They rarely attend our family holiday gatherings, barely change diapers, and if their kids are sick—well, that’s too bad, but my sisters better figure it out, because there’s an unmissable investor meeting in Dubai.

I know there are voices in the modern conservative movement who would say all is right with their arrangement: They are “men being men,” valiant warriors on the bloody battlefield of commerce. And my sisters, left with all the family responsibilities, are “women being women.”

I vacillate between two extremes. My brothers-in-law aren’t exactly Andrew Tate, but I often think they are self-absorbed jerks who will regret their priorities later in life. But on, say, my fourth day staying home from work with a vomiting toddler, I’m deeply envious of them. It seems to me that my sisters have sacrificed so much for their families, but their husbands get to do whatever they want, as long as they’re “grinding.” They get to enjoy roaring professional success, jet around the world, and be absolved of essentially all tedious childcare responsibilities. What a hack!

I think about the pretty substantial things I could accomplish if I devoted myself to work like they do. And I wonder: Have I been poisoned by progressive gender ideas? Have I emasculated myself by limiting the hours that I work, and spending most of my free time doing sing-alongs and playing football with my kids? How does a man think about—and weigh—the impact they could have on their families versus the impact they could have professionally?

I’m not a very woke person, but I know there’s no shortage of right-wing influencers who would call me a “pussy” or worse, a “cuck,” because I’m playing dress-up and cooking with my daughters at 5 p.m., and I’m not out there crushing it every day. Maybe my brothers-in-law see me this way as well. Does a “real man” toss the kids to his wife, jump on a plane, and set his sights on building an empire?

Thank you so much.

Martin, 44

Dear Martin,

Hundreds of thousands of American GIs marched off to World War II with a copy of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn buried in their rucksacks. The coming-of-age story—let’s face it, a girls’ book—was a favorite among our male troops because 11-year-old Francie Nolan’s loneliness and grit touched them deeply, filling their hearts with the simple beauty of family life.

The young men who dog-eared those pages would go on to defeat the Third Reich in Western Europe and liberate Dachau and Buchenwald.

Like a lot of Americans my age, both of my grandfathers fought in the war—one in the Army Air Corps and the other in the U.S. Navy. Both were proud and eager to serve a country they loved—and returned to my grandmothers as adoring and attentive husbands and dads. They helped the kids with their homework. Neither was ever caught bragging about how many women he had slept with or how much weight he could bench-press.

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 Thursday, April 23, and the war with Iran is no longer about oil or gas; it is a battle over a single resource: time. The questions that will determine the fate of the Middle East are who controls the clock, who can afford to wait, and who is simply out of time?

Currently, the ayatollahs boast that their dictatorial regime will allow them to hold out indefinitely, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz imposes an expiration date on U.S. aggression. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump claims to be in an equally comfortable position: Iranian ports are blockaded, some commercial ships are still navigating the strait despite the closure, and fresh U.S. military assets are on their way.

The question is, who’s bluffing?

It’s Thursday, April 23. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on why Trump’s Iran deal is nothing like Obama’s. Charles Lane on the scourge of partisan gerrymandering. Will Rahn asks: What should smart people think about UFOs? And much more.

But first: Did the Southern Poverty Law Center break the law?

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice issued an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC raised millions on a promise to combat hate. Except, according to the indictment, the SPLC was secretly funding the very groups—including Ku Klux Klan affiliates—that it claimed to be fighting.

Like so much in our politics today, the case quickly became a Rorschach test.

To the left, it was yet another example of the Trump administration’s targeting of its political enemies. As we reported in our pages last year, the White House had been planning a crackdown on liberal nonprofits.

To the right, a pernicious organization was getting its just deserts. Once upon a time, the SPLC worked to overturn the wrongful convictions of black men. Today, it smears conservative organizations like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty as “hate groups.”

But what about the actual case? What the DOJ calls “funding” of hate groups, SPLC says was payment to informants, whose information they then funneled to law enforcement.

To get to the bottom of this politically explosive case, we turned to our legal columnist Jed Rubenfeld. The moral case against the Southern Poverty Law Center is strong, he says. But what about the legal argument? Read Jed’s verdict.

—The Editors

• David Scott, a Georgia Democratic congressman whose health had significantly declined in recent years, has died at age 80. Scott was seeking a 13th term in his deep-blue district where he faced a raft of Democratic challengers.

• Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced yesterday that it had taken control of two freight vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, adding to the tension around the ceasefire that President Trump had extended just a day earlier, shortly before it was set to lapse. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News that the president does not consider Iran’s actions to be a breach of that agreement.

• A chemical leak at a West Virginia silver recovery plant killed two people and left 30 hospitalized yesterday. The incident was the result of a “violent” reaction of several chemicals, a local official said at a news briefing.

• Kalshi has suspended three candidates for public offices from its site after discovering that they were betting on their own races, in violation of its terms. The prediction market said that the three individuals—Virginia Senate candidate Mark Moran, Minnesota congressional candidate and current state senator Matt Klein, and Texas congressional candidate Ezekiel Enriquez—were also fined. They will not be allowed back on the platform until 2031.

• The low-cost airline Spirit, on the verge of its second bankruptcy in two years, is seeking a $500 million loan from the government, according to Bloomberg, which added that the deal could result in the government owning up to 90 percent of the company. Spirit has not turned a profit since 2019.

• The FBI launched an investigation into New York Times journalist Elizabeth Williamson after she published a story about FBI director Kash Patel’s alleged use of agency staff to provide security and travel services for his girlfriend. According to the Times, the FBI was pursuing a potential stalking case against Williamson. The agency acknowledged to the Times that “while investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking,” it had decided not to pursue a case.

• Stanford University is awarding more money to the Muslim Student Union—$175,000—than all Christian student groups combined, The Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday. A student-led vote on activities funding also resulted in a campus drag troupe receiving five times more university funding than an undergraduate veterans association.

Young Americans are struggling. Roughly 70 percent of Gen Z reports significant financial anxiety. About two-thirds of parents say their adult Gen-Z children still rely on them financially. More than 40 percent of Gen Z reports having been diagnosed with a mental-health condition—the highest rate of any generation in modern American history.

But why? Tha…

The Department of Justice on Tuesday issued a stunning indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a public interest law firm representing purported victims of discrimination.

The indictment charges the SPLC with secretly funding some of the very “hate groups,” including Ku Klux Klan affiliates, that the SPLC tells its donors it is fighting against. According to the government, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid over $3,000,000—laundered through bank accounts registered to fictitious entities—to insiders at those groups, often people in leadership positions.

Supporters of the SPLC will see the indictment as yet another vindictive Trump prosecution of a left-wing adversary. Haters will see it as overdue justice finally coming to a radical left nonprofit that worked with the Biden administration to target conservative parents and to call right-leaning Catholic organizations domestic terrorists.

But the question many will have is why—why on earth would the Southern Poverty Law Center, which all agree is sharply left-leaning, fund right-wing entities the SPLC itself calls hate groups?

The indictment offers no answer at all.

Michael Shermer is a professional skeptic in the most literal sense. In addition to founding his own society for skeptics, he also founded Skeptic, a magazine dedicated to pushing back on false or unverifiable claims. So naturally, as part of my project looking into the UFO phenomenon ahead of President Donald Trump’s promised disclosure of government files on the subject, I was eager to talk to him.

Agree with him or not, Shermer is a thoughtful and often friendly critic of UFO enthusiasts. He’s even part of the Galileo Project, which is Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s effort to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. He’s also out with a new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It & Why It Still Matters, in which he ably explains or debunks beliefs and theories he finds unconvincing. Whether you’re a believer or not, the book is well worth your time.

In this interview, which has been edited and condensed, we talk about the possibility of space aliens visiting Earth, why he’s so unconvinced by the UFO evidence we currently have, and why he expects the coming disclosure won’t reveal much of anything. We also discuss the case of the 11 missing scientists that the FBI is investigating, the existence of God and the role of religion in society, and even his own ghost story.

Will Rahn: Let’s get the first question out of the way, the one I’m asking everyone: What should smart people think about UFOs?

Michael Shermer: I start by distinguishing between two different questions. Are they out there somewhere? And have they come here? Almost everybody confuses these two.

When I say I have my doubts that they’ve actually come here to Earth, people tell me, “Oh, this vast universe of trillions of stars and planets, you’re saying we’re alone?”

No, that’s not what I’m saying. They’re probably out there somewhere. But the distances are literally astronomically vast, and the chances of them finding us at the right time and place—it’s just very, very, very unlikely. And the evidence that they’ve already come here is just not very good.

If democracy and rule of law mean anything, it is that certain norms and principles cannot be violated even for what you consider a good cause. If you had to reduce all illiberal thinking to a single sentence, it would be: “The ends justify the means.”

And yet this ugly sentiment is becoming the unofficial credo of the country’s two political parties.

That is the lesson of Virginia’s ballot measure Tuesday, in which voters approved a Democratic plan for mid-decade congressional redistricting that turns a fair and balanced map into what The New York Times calls “as extreme a gerrymander as exists in the United States.” Instead of favoring Democrats in six of 11 districts, as the current bipartisan plan does, the new one gives Republican voters—as much as 46 percent of the electorate, based on the 2024 presidential election results—the edge in just one district. It does so by linking blue strongholds in the Washington, D.C., suburbs with culturally, economically, and geographically remote patches of the GOP-dominated Virginia countryside.

Some say one misshapen district resembles a crab; the one residual red district, a lobster claw. One thing is certain: This is not what democracy looks like. By Wednesday evening, a judge had sought to block the new map, suggesting that the process that birthed it was void from the start. But that only means we’re in for months of bitter feuding and appeals, after which the map may stand.