The Free Press

A recent poll found that among Democrats under 50, Iran is viewed more favorably than Israel—a data point that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and one that demands explanation. The Iran war has revealed that a surprising contingent on both the left and right express sympathy—or even open support—for the Iranian regime. Even professors of anthropology, such as Alireza Doostdar at the University of Chicago, have intoned that “the best and only hope for peace is the power and durability of Iranian missiles.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) harbors explicit genocidal intentions against both Israel and the United States, famously branding these allies as the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan.” It pursues nuclear weapons in service of those aims and presides over one of the world’s worst human-rights records. How is it possible that a regime defined by repression of freedoms at home—subjugating women, dissidents, LGBT, and others—and genocidal incitement abroad, could become an object of admiration among people who claim to advocate for human rights?

A recent study we carried out at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—an organization that gathers data on how malicious narratives propagate in digital contexts—in collaboration with the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab found that “participants who expressed greater agreement with anti-Israel ideology more strongly endorsed Soviet and Nazi propaganda that featured both generic antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel tropes, had more left-wing (“progressive”) authoritarian attitudes, and rated the human rights records of some of the world’s worst human rights violators more favorably than those who expressed lower levels of agreement.”

Anti-Zionism, a worldview that casts Israel as the pinnacle of injustice while presenting itself as moral resistance, predicts what we call Moral Inversion Syndrome: a pattern in which the perceived human-rights standing of Western democratic states declines relative to that of authoritarian regimes. The study asked a representative online sample of Americans to rate the human-rights records of various countries and correlated those ratings with traits measured by validated psychological scales. According to our data, the more one expresses essentialist prejudice against Israel, or Jews, the more distorted one’s moral judgment becomes in general.

That distortion may show up first as a moral equivalence that many respondents draw between liberal and authoritarian states. Those with strongly anti-Zionist attitudes (as well as traditionally antisemitic ones; the two attitudes were correlated though not identical) often place oppressive regimes such as Iran, China, or North Korea on the same moral plane as liberal-democratic states like the United States or Australia. And Israel is seen as the worst of the worst.

The more one expresses essentialist prejudice against Israel, or Jews, the more distorted one’s moral judgment becomes in general.

Since 1948, anti-Zionists have formulated their cause as an inversion of the moral and legal right of the Jewish people to self-determination, which was recognized by the United Nations at Israel’s founding. Beginning with early efforts by the Arab League to promote a Palestinian “right of return” for refugees displaced in Israel’s war of independence—not to a future Palestinian state alongside Israel, but inside of Israeli territory, so as to dismantle the Jewish state—Israel’s very essence has been cast as immoral, unjust, and opposed to the post–WWII international order.

But our data clearly shows that anti-Zionism is an ideology that violates the human-rights order it claims to defend. By turning Israel into the scapegoat for modernity’s most foundational crimes—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—it in fact undermines the very architecture that was constructed to prevent those crimes.

Moral inversion is not a new phenomenon. In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah warned of those who “call evil good and good evil.” The author George Orwell described how language can be used to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Time and again, movements proclaiming liberation have carried out terror, from the Rwandan genocide against Tutsi “colonizers” to the Cambodian genocide against urban elites and “pro-American imperialists.” Even the founding father of 19th- and 20th-century antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr, defended his anti-Jewish agitation as “no more than a cry of pain from one of the oppressed.” Across the archive of mass atrocity, totalizing ideologies have inverted moral reality, recasting victims as oppressors and oppressors as righteous victims.

Recent work by scholars of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has emphasized how contemporary anti-Zionist libels often reproduce Soviet propaganda slogans—such as “Zionist colonialism” or “Zionists are Nazis”—disseminated globally after the 1967 war, when the Soviet Union sought to mobilize the third world against “international Zionism,” a canard that recast Jewish political rights as a global conspiracy against the rights of others.

Consistent with this pattern, our study finds that when respondents were shown Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda images—depicting Israelis as Nazis or linking the Star of David with dollar signs and swastikas—those who more strongly endorsed the images were more likely to make morally inverted human-rights judgments.

In 1975, the Soviet-Arab bloc passed the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations—something the U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said “reeked of the totalitarian mind.” The resolution recast “Zionism” as the inverse of the emerging anti-racist and human rights order, a construction that, after the Cold War, reentered the Western left through the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Unsurprisingly, our study also finds that anti-Zionism and moral inversion correlate with “left-wing authoritarianism”—attitudes aimed at dismantling established hierarchies and norms in order to impose ostensibly “progressive” ends.

In the present day, the UN can hardly bring itself to condemn Iran’s targeting of Israeli civilians using cluster munitions, yet has no hesitation in establishing commissions to accuse Israel of genocide, collapsing the distinction between civilian casualties and the intentional destruction of a group.

Our study puts hard data onto this phenomenon of political and moral confusion, and its connection to anti-Zionist ideology. The study also suggests that the problem goes beyond just how Israel is perceived.

If anti-Zionism—whether in its left-wing form or in the increasingly visible right-wing variant promoted by figures such as Tucker Carlson—constructs Israel as an all-encompassing symbol of political evil in the contemporary order, then the Iran war takes on a more fundamental meaning. It begins to appear as a confrontation between the possibility of moral judgment and an ideology in which the very distinction between right and wrong has been turned upside down.

If you’re trying to keep up with the latest in the Iran war, you’d be forgiven for being a little confused. Just this weekend, we went from Donald Trump declaring on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS” to accusing Iran on Sunday of violating the ceasefire by firing in those same waters. Hours later, U.S. forces reportedly seized an Iranian-flagged vessel attempting to cross the strait, with Trump signaling that it’s “highly unlikely” he’ll extend the two-week ceasefire—set to expire Wednesday—without a deal.

It’s a head-spinning sequence of events. And it raises a basic question: How much of what’s being said online—including by the president—tracks with what’s actually happening on the ground? For an answer, we turn to historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. In today’s Big Read, he examines the widening gap between Truth Social and reality—and what that space in between tells us about where this war is headed. —The Editors

President Barack Obama was fond of the phrase the arc of history. His supporters, he said on the evening of his first election in 2008, had voted to “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

I have long doubted that history has an arc any more than it follows predictable cycles. Obama was, in fact, adapting something the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in a sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral in 1968. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” King declared, “but it bends toward justice.”

In 1960, many Americans worried that if John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was elected president, our national motto would go from “In God we trust” to “In the pope, we hope.” Millions feared that the world’s most important religious leader would hold sway over the world’s most powerful man.

No one worries about that today. And not just because Donald Trump is not Catholic; rather, because he goes out of his way to criticize the pope as if the pontiff were just another political opponent. Most recently, after Pope Leo XIV condemned the war in Iran, President Trump responded on social media that the Vicar of Christ is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” The administration went on to pull millions in aid from Catholic Charities, which supports migrant children. It justified the decision by claiming that the number of children in need is “significantly lower” than it was under the Biden administration.

In an era of rank partisanship and binary ideological choices in America, this might seem to put traditional Catholics—like me—in a bind. Am I Team USA or Team Vatican?

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 20, and according to Donald Trump, talks with Iran are scheduled to resume tomorrow, although the Islamic Republic has stated it will not send a delegation. Despite the posturing, a senior official confirmed to me that a six-point outline is currently under discussion between the United States and Iran.

The proposed framework includes:

1. A 15-year suspension of enrichment. The United States originally demanded a 20-year freeze, while Tehran pushed for significantly less; the two sides eventually settled on 15.

On this episode of Second Thought, Suzy Weiss sits down with Dan Ahdoot to talk about the big stories of the week, including Justin Bieber’s Coachella performance, the supposed unmasking of Satoshi Nakamoto, and whether $40 is too much to pay for half a rotisserie chicken.

It’s Monday, April 20. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Iran’s hard-liners take control. Elise Stefanik on Ivy League rot. Jed Rubenfeld on the real problem with the “shadow docket.” And much more. Plus: Tune in to our newest podcast, Second Thought, with Suzy Weiss.

But first: Will Americans pull the plug on AI?

A small Ohio community and a big tech proposal. It’s a local fight that’s still unfolding.

In Scioto County, Google has proposed a large data center campus that includes hundreds of acres, major tax incentives, and the promise of jobs and long-term investment. Local officials framed it as an economic turning point for a region that has struggled for decades.

But opposition has grown steadily, as Frannie Block learned when she arrived to investigate. Some residents say the process moved too quickly and lacked transparency. Others question whether the tax breaks are too generous, or whether the long-term benefits will match the scale of the project.

With tech firms racing to build the infrastructure of the AI revolution, similar disputes are happening in towns across the country. The campaign to stop them is expanding on the left, with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing to freeze new construction until they can impose nationwide regulations.

As the politics of AI begins to take shape, what’s happening in Ohio is part of a larger question: Who bears the costs—and who decides—when the infrastructure of the digital economy moves in? Read Frannie’s dispatch from the front lines in one of the most important political fights of the moment.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

The cessation of hostilities between the U.S. and Iran is set to formally expire on Wednesday, but the region has hardly been quiet. On Friday, the Iranians effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz just hours after President Trump announced they had agreed to reopen it. Two India-flagged commercial vessels were fired upon on Saturday, and the U.S. Navy interdicted an Iranian-flagged vessel on Sunday.

Trump announced Sunday that he is green-lighting a second round of negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan. Before the Americans jet off, Eli Lake writes, the president should probably figure out who is actually running Iran, a country that has kept the status of its leadership obscured—only to its advantage. Read Eli’s latest reporting on who America is negotiating with, and what the biggest challenges are ahead of possible talks this week.

If negotiations prove fruitless or the ceasefire expires without an extension, that will tee up a possible resumption of the war—a war that, as Michael Doran argues in a sweeping essay today, is badly misunderstood. Michael examines the seven myths that have clouded and misrepresented the logic and progress of Operation Epic Fury. If you want to understand why the cognoscenti keep getting this conflict wrong, read this piece.

Last week, a Yale University committee published a report acknowledging that American colleges in part have themselves to blame for declining trust in higher education. That may seem like a statement of the obvious to a Free Press reader, but it was a strikingly honest confession from inside the ivory tower.

So are America’s top schools finally getting it? And what, if anything, can they do about their many issues? One person who has spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which American colleges have lost their way in recent years is Rep. Elise Stefanik. The Republican congresswoman played a key part in exposing campus antisemitism after October 7—including by grilling former Harvard president Claudine Gay and other college presidents. Now she’s written a book about higher ed, called Poisoned Ivies. She sat down with Maya Sulkin to discuss it as well as what the future holds for higher education, the GOP, and her own career as she departs Congress.

It’s not just radical politics. American colleges face a litany of threats—from financial pressure to AI. So is higher education’s decline terminal? That’s the question at the heart of Tyler Cowen’s latest column. Read Tyler’s predictions for the future of college:

• Eight children are dead after a “domestic issue” turned into a mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana, early Sunday morning, according to local authorities. The victims, seven of whom were the suspected shooter’s children, range in age from 1 to 14 years old. Police killed the suspected shooter after he stole a vehicle and fled from the scene.

• President Trump signed an executive order on Friday to make certain psychedelic drugs more available to treat mental health conditions. The order provides federal funds to make them more accessible and orders the Food and Drug Administration to fast-track a review of drugs such as psilocybin and ibogaine.

• Former president Barack Obama and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani led a sing-along and read to preschoolers at a local childcare center on Saturday. It’s the first time the former president and the mayor have met during Mamdani’s term, and comes days after Trump said Mamdani is “DESTROYING New York” with tax increases and threatened to yank federal funding for the city.

• Two U.S. Army soldiers based in Anchorage, Alaska, were injured after a brown bear attacked them during a training exercise on Friday, CBS News reported. “Both individuals sustained injuries and are currently receiving appropriate medical care,” read a statement provided by the 11th Airborne Division. Both soldiers were able to ward off the bear using bear spray.

• Oil prices surged Sunday after tensions in the Strait of Hormuz intensified over the weekend. Futures on crude oil deliveries spiked nearly seven percent. Oil prices had seen a 11 percent plunge on Friday before the weekend close.

• Former Bulgarian president Rumen Radev and his party, Progressive Bulgaria, won a landslide victory on Sunday, likely securing a parliamentary majority of the NATO country. Radev has been an outspoken opponent of providing aid to Ukraine and is likely to pursue closer relations with Russia.

• Six-time NBA champion and Hall of Famer Michael Jordan’s NASCAR Cup Series team, 23XI, is dominating. Tyler Reddick, one of three 23XI drivers, won at Kansas Speedway on Sunday, securing his fifth win this year in the first nine races, the first driver to do so since Dale Earnhardt did the same in 1987. “When you win, it’s always fun,” Jordan said after the race.

I have noticed firsthand the way that Wikipedia—the internet’s encyclopedia, widely treated as an objective reference—can become, in small but persistent ways, an ideological battleground. After I testified to Congress against reparations for slavery, my own Wikipedia page became a site of competing edits. At one point, an editor removed the fact—well-d…

Occasionally, parties ask the Supreme Court to immediately reverse or stay a lower court’s decision without full briefing or oral argument, hoping to skip over potentially years of litigation—and sometimes skipping over the appellate courts entirely. When I was a young lawyer, most appeals of this kind were considered almost frivolous, because the Court so rarely granted them. Today they are much more common, and they have a new name: the “emergency docket” or, more darkly, the “shadow docket.”

On Saturday, The New York Times published 10-year-old leaked emails and memos the justices wrote one another before issuing what many now regard as the pathbreaking ruling that gave birth to the modern shadow docket—a 2016 one-paragraph order that stayed President Barack Obama’s attempt to force power companies away from fossil fuels, something he did without congressional approval.

The biggest challenge facing American negotiators this week as they head to Islamabad will not be wrangling over the removal of enriched uranium trapped beneath Iran’s destroyed nuclear facilities. It won’t be setting the terms for opening the Strait of Hormuz. And it won’t be trying to end the regime’s support for terrorist proxies in the Middle East.

As important as all of those issues are, the primary question now for the team led by Vice President J.D. Vance is understanding exactly who is calling the shots in Tehran.

Only a week ago, the Trump administration believed that the Iranian regime was run by a committee of five senior officials that included the two men leading their delegation in the Islamabad negotiations: Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Last week, Michael Doran wrote for Tablet about what the Iran war’s critics have been getting wrong—in the immediate aftermath of the Islamabad peace talks collapsing and President Trump announcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports. In the week since, Iran has opened, then re-closed, the Strait of Hormuz; its navy has fired on commercial vessels attempting passage; and the U.S. has seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman. The two-week ceasefire expires this week, and a second round of talks remains unconfirmed, with Iranian officials denying any agreement to negotiate.

Contrary to a tide of commentary from both the progressive left and isolationist right, Doran argues that the American-Israeli campaign against Iran was the foreseeable consequence of decades of failed diplomacy. He dissects, one by one, seven myths that have shaped opinion on the war. With the situation still unresolved, his argument is as important now as when he first wrote it. And so we’re republishing it in our pages today.

—The Editors

Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine.

Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves.

Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events. Tehran’s “successful” war-fighting tactics supposedly forced Trump to accept a ceasefire. Onlookers were then baffled when the United States walked away from talks in Islamabad and took steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to the strategic detriment of China and the benefit of U.S. energy producers.