The Free Press

I recently caught a couple of clips from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes—originally published last October. And something odd struck me: the body language. Here was a man who once commanded an audience of five million adults on the biggest show in cable news, sitting across from a 20-something shock-jock, channeling the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends. See how cool I am? See how I’m not afraid to go there?

For example, an hour and a half into the conversation, Carlson paused to justify why he’d agreed to do it at all: “Everyone’s going to be like, you’re a Nazi just like Fuentes. . . . But I don’t think Fuentes is going away. . . he’s bigger than ever.” He also told Fuentes he was “more talented than I am, for sure, as a talker.”

Earlier, when Fuentes explained that he became “radicalized on race” by listening to Fox News host Mark Levin, Tucker responded, “Amazing.” When Fuentes mentioned he admires Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Carlson told him they would circle back. He never did.

Culture commentator Jon Gabriel put it well on X at the time: “Jon Stewart embracing Zohran, Tucker embracing Nick. Two aging hosts desperate to impress the young and scared of being left behind.”

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Tuesday morning as his 8 p.m. deadline for a deal with Iran approached. The post followed his Easter Sunday message calling on the Iranian regime to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. — JUST WATCH!” He was extremely clear about what that would entail. If no deal was reached, he promised to bomb Iran’s bridges and power plants.

Trump’s escalatory rhetoric has resulted in a flood of criticism, both at home and abroad. French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot pleaded for restraint, saying attacks on civilian infrastructure “are barred by the rules of war, international law.” Two former Judge Advocate General’s officers, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham, wrote, “Such rhetorical statements—if followed through—would amount to the most serious war crimes—and thus the president’s statements place service members in a profoundly challenging situation.” This is because service members are required to refuse illegal orders.

What constitutes an illegal order?

Under the laws of war, especially the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law, you cannot intentionally target civilians or civilian objects. This includes infrastructure like power plants, bridges, and water systems. Infrastructure can be attacked if it is being used for military purposes; for instance, it could be lawful to strike a bridge being used to move missiles. Experts say that Trump’s orders are likely illegal because targeting broad categories of infrastructure—as he’s done by declaring Tuesday “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran”—violates international law.

Shawn still remembers where he was when he saw it: the little blue doodle that ended his career.

It was the spring of 2022. After 20 years of developing software, Shawn had worked his way up the ladders of Silicon Valley to a senior engineering position with a $150,000 salary. He was coding for the next big thing, the metaverse—a new version of the internet that existed as a virtual world people could enter with headsets. Shawn had reached the point in his career at which you should be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

But as he sat at his desk that day, something caught his eye: OpenAI had gone live with a special demonstration of their first model that could code. He clicked the link—and, in the span of five seconds, he watched as all his assumptions about what his future would look like came crashing down.

The men doing the demonstrating, a group that included Sam Altman, “just spoke commands—Draw a square on this HTML page, and color it in blue—and then the language model just did it,” Shawn said. “It took me five seconds of going through the whole range of emotions before I was like: Okay, my career is cooked.”

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.

At the end of the Passover story, there is a scene that might be familiar. Standing on the edge of the Red Sea, with the Egyptian army approaching, the Bible records that many Israelites wanted to turn back. According to rabbinic sources, one leader of the Jewish tribes, Nachshon ben Aminadav, stepped forward, throwing himself into the water, at which point the sea miraculously split. This is the miracle Jews will celebrate tonight during the last nights of Passover.

While rabbinic sources place the time of this historical event at midnight, this year’s point of no return will occur at 3 a.m. in Israel, when Donald Trump’s ultimatum to open the Strait of Hormuz—or incur his wrath—expires.

It’s Tuesday, April 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Coleman Hughes on Ibram X. Kendi’s latest provocations. New York City claims 5 million of its residents can’t afford to live there. And much more.

But first: Frannie Block reports from Mission Control.

Yesterday, three Americans and a Canadian traveled farther from Earth than any human has gone before—and then carried on. The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission circled the dark side of the moon, a part of the solar system few people have ever laid eyes on, where they lost touch with Mission Control for 40 minutes. It’s a triumph for the world’s greatest space agency.

It’s strange to think that less than a week ago, all four astronauts were in Florida. They launched into space from Cape Canaveral last Wednesday evening. I was watching from the beach, with hundreds of other Americans who had traveled across the country; it was the first time I’d ever seen a rocket launch, and it blew my mind. As the Orion spacecraft disappeared into the universe, I wanted to know: What’s next for NASA?

So two days later, I flew to Mission Control—which is, of course, in Houston, Texas—to talk to the man best placed to answer this question: the guy who leads NASA, Jared Isaacman.

A high school dropout who became a billionaire businessman, he’s wanted to be an astronaut since he was a toddler—so he used his riches to finance and command two SpaceX ventures, before his controversial nomination to be NASA administrator in December 2024. The right was suspicious of his donations to Democratic candidates; the left was suspicious of his relationship with Elon Musk. But Isaacman’s eyes are on the prize: He wants NASA to achieve “the near impossible.”

“Ten years from now, we’ll have, like, our Uber and Lyft fleets on the moon doing wild things,” he told me.

But for all Isaacman’s futuristic talk, the Mission Control that I saw seemed stuck in the past. There’s a very ’80s mural on the wall that looks distinctly like the title cards of Back to the Future—the female astronauts have perfectly permed hair, and the spacesuits look decidedly retro—and at one point the elevators broke down.

How’s Isaacman planning to bring this calcified, crumbling agency into the 21st century—and beyond? Read my report to find out:

—Frannie Block

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blueprint for how to regulate and tax AI yesterday, responding to worries about AI disrupting society, labor, and privacy as we know it. The document went live within hours of a New Yorker investigation into Altman’s professional conduct, in which critics repeatedly called him “sociopathic.”

• On Monday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Department of Justice to dismiss a criminal case against Steve Bannon, who had been accused of defying a congressional subpoena during the investigation of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. The Trump ally’s lawyer said the order was “a welcome correction.”

• A federal judge dismissed 10 of 13 claims actress Blake Lively brought against Justin Baldoni last week—including claims of sexual harassment. Three claims will proceed to trial; they relate not to Baldoni’s behavior on set but his response to Lively’s accusations. (For more on the bitter fight between two former co-stars, read Kat Rosenfield’s piece, “Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Art of the Smear.”)

• The Nigerian army rescued 31 Christians from an attack on a church in northwest Nigeria on Easter Sunday, according to military officials. Earlier this year, Madeleine Kearns spoke to the wife of Nigeria’s president, who is Christian; to understand religious persecution in the nation better, read her profile: “Is the First Lady of Nigeria Scared?”

• Sixty-four days after her mother’s disappearance, Savannah Guthrie returned to Today. In February, camera footage showed a masked man on 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie’s front porch. Police are investigating the case as a kidnapping.

• Trump endorsed the British American Republican Steve Hilton for California governor on Monday. (For more on the crowded race, in which two GOP candidates sit improbably atop the polls, read Peter Savodnik’s piece: “Could a Republican Win the California Governor’s Race?”)

• Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service have struck a new tentative agreement on package delivery. Amazon had warned it would reduce its USPS shipment volume by roughly two-thirds by this fall, but under the new deal, that reduction has been scaled back to just 20 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Sal Mercogliano, associate professor of history at Campbell University and host of the What’s Going on with Shipping YouTube channel, joins School of War to discuss the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz, highlighting the complexities of navigating the Strait under normal and elevated circumstances. The conversation looks at the impact of the …

Since the Supreme Court banned the use of racial preferences in college admissions in 2023, Harvard president Alan Garber has promised repeatedly that his school “will follow the law.” If so, why are they still hiding the data? Harvard and dozens of other schools are withholding records from the Trump administration that would show whether they have actually stopped discriminating. And at least some of the courts are on the schools’ side: A federal judge ruled Friday that public universities in 17 states don’t have to turn over their records. So much for the Supreme Court—racial preferences are going to die hard.

The current chapter of the saga began three years ago, when a group of unlikely allies finally beat affirmative action in the courtroom. A group called Students for Fair Admissions, led by founder Edward Blum, partnered with Asian students and parents to form an alliance that held together for a few critical years to seek what became one of the great landmark decisions of this generation.

Blum, who had previously lost two Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action at the Supreme Court, reconsidered his strategy before his third try. His loss in Fisher v. University of Texas in 2013 convinced him that the usual arguments against racial preferences in schools—academic mismatch, civil rights, lack of merit in admissions—just weren’t compelling enough to sway the justices. His previous poster child for the cause, Abigail Fisher, was a white woman who wasn’t able to show that her rejection by the University of Texas had been caused by racial discrimination.

For those wondering what New York’s social democrat mayor has actually been doing since taking office in January, Zohran Mamdani provided an answer this week. His staff has been reviewing every single city service, and indeed the city’s history since its founding, through the lens of racial equity.

The mayor’s office on Monday released a report titled “New York City Preliminary Racial Equity Plan.” New York’s city council mandated racial equity reports in 2022 in response to the 2020 death of George Floyd and the spasmodic racial reckoning that followed. But the supposedly mandatory reports were ignored by the previous mayor Eric Adams, a black former police officer who was less devoted than his successor to a left-wing view of race relations.

Mamdani’s City Hall is compensating for that oversight, to say the least. The report identifies a history of race-related problems that must now be addressed in every city department, from garbage collection (“disparities in cleanliness and environmental safety”) to the “Office of Media and Entertainment,” in which, we are told, “systemic racism continues to shape both representation and opportunities.”

For benighted New Yorkers who take pride in the city’s history of allowing immigrants of all backgrounds to improve their lot, the mayor offers a correction. “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression,” the report says. “The land New York City stands on today once belonged to the Lenape people, who were forcibly displaced through settler colonialism. From the era of Dutch colonization to modern times, systemic racism has shaped the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other communities of color.” (Note the absence on that list of Jews who, prior to a 1948 Supreme Court decision, were targeted by deed restrictions that barred “Hebrews.”)

HOUSTON, TX — If Jared Isaacman’s 15-year-old self could see him now, he’d scoff: “Thaaat’s bullshit.”

That’s what 43-year-old Isaacman, who is the administrator of NASA, told me—and if you look at his biography, it’s easy to see what he means. Isaacman is a billionaire who, after dropping out of high school in New Jersey, built a credit card processing company that’s now valued at nearly $3.5 billion. In his early 20s, he earned his pilot’s license. In his late 20s, he started another business—this time a defense company, which uses its fleet of privately owned fighter jets to train the U.S. military for aerial combat.

But what Isaacman had always dreamed of being was an astronaut—ever since he was a toddler, and his eldest brother brought home a telescope. “I remember in kindergarten, holding a picture book of the Space Shuttle and telling my teacher that I was going to be an astronaut someday,” he told me. “And I remember her saying: ‘I’ll be sitting in my rocking chair watching when it happens.’ ”

In his late 30s, it happened. His first company, Shift4, powers the payment system for SpaceX’s internet service, Starlink, and Isaacman said that at the end of a business call with them he made an offhand remark about how much he dreamed of going to space. That’s how he ended up financing and commanding two SpaceX missions. With the first, Inspiration4, he raised more than $240 million for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Three years later, he commanded a second, Polaris Dawn—and became the first civilian ever to walk in space, using a brand-new, lightweight space suit.

Rich Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Garrett Exner, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, join the show to break down the dramatic events of the weekend and take a look at the road ahead in the Iran war. We discuss the American F-15E shot down in Iran, and the subsequent rescue of its crew by special operatio…