The Free Press

It’s Friday, April 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. If you missed TGIF, catch it here. Today: Much ado about a draft. Could dolphins reopen the Strait of Hormuz? (Yes, really.) Is peace possible between Israel and Lebanon? And much more.

But first: The trials and tribulations of the girlboss.

Pity the girlboss. She’s been blamed for so very many of America’s problems. The rise of the toxic workplace. The malaise of young men. And, of course, the falling birth rate.

But what if the girlboss is actually a scapegoat? What if she did nothing wrong?

In today’s piece, Patrick T. Brown tackles that third narrative: that America’s birthrate is falling because women have become too career-orientated. “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE,” Katie Miller, wife of top Trump staffer Stephen Miller, recently warned on her podcast—before explaining that women’s “biological destiny is to have babies, not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.”

But, writes Patrick, the birthrate isn’t actually falling that much among professional women. “A typical girlboss is not having as many kids as her grandmother,” he writes, “but she’s having, on average, as many as her mom, or is getting quite close.” The recent plunge in the birth rate can be pinned on low-income women without a college degree—although even that feels unfair.

Because it’s not that they don’t want kids; in surveys, they consistently say they’re childless struggling to find a guy “who will treat them with affection, provide for them, and upon whom they can depend.”

Read Patrick’s whole piece here:

Still, we must pity the girlboss. For though she’s more likely to end up married—she invariably seems to make a miserable wife.

If you’ve ever glanced at The New York Times, you’ll have read that working women are often saddled with more domestic chores, more childcare, more emotional labor than their gainfully employed husbands—whose careers will always take precedence.

This cultural anxiety runs deep, and it’s explored in the buzzy new Peacock show, The Miniature Wife, which is all about a couple bitterly fighting for space inside their own marriage. Our critic Kat Rosenfield just finished watching it, and was left with a question: What happens when we normalize the idea that you can’t be married to someone without resenting them?

She answers it here:

—Freya Sanders

The backlash to artificial intelligence has turned deadly, fast. Last week, a young man threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, authorities alleged, and went on to attack the AI giant’s headquarters. Journalist Andy Mills spoke with the suspect months before the violent outburst, and saw the roots of the hatred that spawned it. Read Andy’s account of the conversation for a view of the extremism spreading among AI’s most radical online critics.

Has the government been lying about UFOs—and if so, what is it actually hiding? Whistleblowers have testified before Congress, Barack Obama has said aliens are “real,” and even lawmakers in D.C. seem convinced the government isn’t telling the whole story. Will Rahn sits down with journalist Michael Shellenberger in the first of a four-part series to make sense of what we know—mapping out the full landscape of unexplained incidents, cover-up theories, and why none of the explanations quite add up.

Few institutions have attracted the wrath of the president like the Supreme Court. After the Court struck down some high-profile administration decisions, some worry that Trump’s broadside against the coequal branch will weaken it. Not so fast, writes Sarah Isgur, author of the new book, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court. She says that attacks on the Court only make it stronger.

Hampshire College, a venerable liberal-arts school in Massachusetts, announced this week that it is closing its doors. Michael B. Horn believes these closures will keep coming. Colleges have countless problems these days, from politicized classrooms to lost government funding. But shrinking enrollments are what’s sending them spiraling.

According to Donald Trump, Israel and Lebanon are on a path to “Lasting PEACE.” That is how the president described a 10-day ceasefire he announced in a Truth Social post on Thursday. In another post, he wrote, “Both sides want to see PEACE, and I believe that will happen, quickly!”

Trump’s optimism is due largely to this week’s direct meetings between representatives from Israel and Lebanon hosted by the State Department. The final communiqué for those talks expressed America’s hope that the meeting would be the first step toward a “comprehensive peace deal.”

All of that sounds like welcome news. The problem is that Israel is not currently at war with Lebanon; rather it’s fighting a war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy militia that has for more than 20 years been the most powerful armed faction inside of Lebanon. Hezbollah began firing rockets and missiles at Israel on March 1, two days after the U.S.-Israel war commenced against Iran.

It’s unclear whether Hezbollah, the terror group that operates mostly but not exclusively in Lebanon, will abide by the ceasefire. Trump has said it will. But a statement from the group did not say whether it recognized the agreement. “A ceasefire must include a comprehensive halt to attacks across all Lebanese territory, with no freedom of movement for Israeli forces, and a return to the situation prior to March 2,” the statement said.

That is not how Israel sees the ceasefire. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said that Israeli forces would remain in southern Lebanon and that “quiet will beget quiet,” meaning Israel reserves the right to strike Hezbollah if Hezbollah fires at Israel.

Ezra Klein has a new video out, and it’s getting traction. His argument: There is already a “one-state reality” stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—and it’s time Americans wake up to it.

Fair enough. That’s a serious claim. It deserves a serious engagement. So I listened.

I expected a hard conversation. I was hoping for a challenge. Israelis need to have a serious conversation about the millions of people living under our military rule. Yes, this issue defined our politics for a generation—but that was years ago. And the problem, with all its moral and political consequences, has only deepened. There are plenty of explanations for how we got here, many of them valid and important. Some of my own essays and videos on the subject have been widely consumed over the years. But none of them make the daily reality of occupation vanish.

So I expected to sympathize with a call not to look away, with an honest grappling with the fact that millions of Palestinians have lived under Israeli military rule for decades. With a call to reshoulder the task of finally ending this wrong.

I even expected to sympathize with an outsider telling us: Enough with the history—look at what is.

Instead, I found a man hiding from the very realities he claims to expose. Klein markets himself as the king of difficult conversations—and this particular difficult conversation has been the backdrop of my entire life, so let’s have it.

But it was not to be.

What I heard from Klein wasn’t a man talking about real people, but about an imagined moral journey he wants Americans to take, a performance of American moral awakening that manages to avoid discussing the hardest realities facing Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese—and that even included a familiar sleight of hand: insisting that an issue dominating American discourse has somehow been ignored until his intervention.

As violence against Jews skyrockets across the globe, we’ve launched a new weekly newsletter, This Week in Jew-Hate, to track and make sense of the speed and severity of this virus. You can sign up here to receive it.

In this week’s installment, in response to yet another attack on a synagogue in the United Kingdom, we’re leading with an essay by the newsletter’s editor, Josh Kaplan. He lives in London and has witnessed firsthand the sharp rise in anti-Jewish hatred and violence, from arson attacks and vandalism to relentless online abuse. Over time, he has watched public reaction shift from shock and outrage to fatigue—and, in some cases, acceptance.

For some of Britain’s Jews, the conclusion is obvious: It’s time to leave. But for Josh, and many others living through it, that answer is unacceptable. Today, he reflects on what he’s seen, how it has reshaped his country, what it reveals about the West’s values, and why the Jewish diaspora has to endure. —The Editors

Last year, I flew to Israel from my home in London. In one of the now seemingly rare lulls in the war, I went to explore how the country’s tourism industry was trying to bounce back. I came with endless questions about what life was like, how people were coping, and what, if anything, could entice Westerners to visit. But time after time, the only thing Israelis wanted to discuss was “How can you still live in the UK?”

With millions of followers and billions of views to his name, Casey Neistat was one of the first people to understand, back in the early 2000s, that YouTube would change everything. It certainly changed his own life.

On this episode of Second Thought, I ask Neistat about riding the wave of the YouTube tsunami, his love of old technology, and how his care…

Welcome back to TGIF. I’m writing this week from sunny San Diego, where I had the pleasure of speaking at the ASU+GSV Summit. I rarely leave the kids for a night, so this was real exciting for Ol’ Nell! Now to the news.

→ Trump as Jesus himself: President Donald J. Trump posted a picture to Truth Social of himself as Jesus. It depicted him draped in white and a red shawl, hands glowing with divine light, healing a sick patient as a soldier, a nurse, and others looked on in awe. The Christian community did not particularly enjoy the image, and Trumpo got a rare rebuke from his base. The next day, outside the White House, after receiving a McDonald’s delivery, Trump explained that he “thought it was me as a doctor.” Do doctors wear red shawls usually? Anyway, he deleted it. Fine! Then, why not, he posted another Jesus meme, this time showing Jesus hugging Trump. Because they’re all good now, him and JC. Here’s the Yahoo! News summary of all this:

→ Quote of the week: “I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be. . . . My kids waited patiently in the car.” Who else could it be? It’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For those of you who might be freaked out by the admission, don’t worry. Bobby was cutting off the genitals of a dead raccoon apparently to “study them later.” It was research, heard of it? He’s a budding zoologist. It’s called primary sources. Onward.

Aviv Shapira, the co-founder and CEO of XTEND, joins the show to discuss his journey from competitive drone racing to building groundbreaking defense technology. How are drone swarms changing warfare? What are the ethical implications of AI weaponry? What happens if this technology falls into the wrong hands? What comes next?

In the wake of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s landslide election defeat, populist conservatives and other thinkers in the “heterodox” intellectual space have been mounting a curious defense of the outgoing leader.

Through a 16-year process of extreme gerrymandering, the weakening of checks and balances, and the dragooning of independent media, Orbán transformed Hungary into what he called an “illiberal democracy.” His strongman tactics and confrontational rhetoric earned the country, a land of almost 10 million people on the periphery of Europe, an outsize role in international affairs, eliciting opprobrium from a Western liberal establishment that portrayed him as an autocrat. But according to his quasi-defenders, Orbán’s voluntary relinquishment of power proves that he was never the authoritarian, much less the out-and-out dictator, his critics claimed him to be.

“It seems commonsensical to say that if an ‘autocrat’ loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all,” my friend Mike Pesca wrote in The Free Press. Rod Dreher, one of the many conservative intellectuals whom the Orbán government welcomed to Budapest, posted sarcastically, “But. . . but. . . but, I was told by so many experts and journalists in the West that this would never happen, that Orbán is a fascist dictator who would never surrender power!” And New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asserted that “strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”

As news sites like Military Times first reported last week, the government is moving ahead with a proposal to start automatically registering American men ages 18–26 for the draft starting this December.

In practice, all this actually means is that men in that cohort will lose a chore: They were already required by law, under penalty of up to five years in prison, to sign up for the draft and to notify the government of any changes of address within 30 days. The system was instituted in its current form by the warlike Jimmy Carter on July 2, 1980. So for the last 46 years, we’ve had a situation where many young men routinely committed a serious federal crime every time they move.

Making draft registration automatic rather than something that requires filling out a form, then, is really a minor good governance reform by the Trump administration. It means the country can maintain its theoretical reserve stock of draftable men bureaucratically organized without, as a function of that, threatening millions of Americans with prosecution if they forget to do paperwork properly.

American fertility rates are falling and some right-wingers know who to blame: the much-derided “girlboss.”

Katie Miller, a podcast host and the wife of top Trump staffer Stephen Miller, warned her followers that “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE,” saying that women’s “biological destiny is to have babies—not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” Emma Waters, author and policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, posted that “Girlboss feminism has a body count—in birth rates.” At First Things, Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum argued that the rise of the professional woman is the result of taxpayer subsidies and policies that discriminate against men. Get rid of those “unjust incentives and penalties,” she suggests, and more women will pursue “traditional family life.”

These critiques of professional women are part of a broader shift in attitudes about how young women choose to live. The age of millennial feminism, which emphasized work as the core of one’s identity, was dominant from about 2008 to 2020. But that era is coming to a close with few defenders. Take the reaction to a new memoir by the writer Lindy West, a leading light in the movement whose recent defense of polyamory was greeted by a near-universal shrug of disinterest, even disapproval. Many women are now searching for a better balance of work and home life—some satisfying middle ground between the sourdough-baking trad lifestyle and the 60-hour-a-week grindset mentality.