The Free Press

Less than 20 years ago, in 2008, voters in deep-blue California passed a proposition outlawing same-sex marriage. California was not an outlier: Only 40 percent of Americans in 2008 believed same-sex marriage should be legal. Just seven years later, in May 2015, 60 percent did. A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. That’s about as fast as cultural change gets.

Identities and behaviors changed along with attitudes. For a decade, an increasing number of Americans—especially young adults—identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and more reported same-sex behavior. Recently, however, some of those trends have begun to reverse. But the reversal is not as broad as it first appears: It is mostly due to a steep drop among bisexual young women. Patterns of behavior diverge even more: Women report much less same-sex activity in the last two years, while men report slightly more.

So what’s going on?

When I was writing my book Generations a few years ago, I was curious whether there had been any changes in people’s self-reported sexual orientation and in their sexual behavior. Would more people identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB)? And would more people have sex with someone of the same gender?

How does a 21-year-old from Cambridge end up on a U.S. government watch list and living in a Hezbollah-controlled neighborhood of Beirut, making pro-Iran propaganda? That’s the question investigative reporter Jay Solomon set out to solve when he started looking into the disturbing case of Calla Walsh late last year. Her story might not be typical of her generation—thankfully, there aren’t many American teens who become radicalized as fully as Walsh. But the activist’s descent into extremism, and the forces driving it, get at some of the most urgent issues in America today. —The Editors

In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, perhaps no American has more aggressively and publicly rallied behind the Islamic Republic than Calla Walsh. From her new base in Lebanon, the 21-year-old Cambridge-raised activist has taken to social media and left-wing podcasts to incite her fellow countrymen and women to sabotage U.S. and Israeli defense contractors wherever they can find them. On March 3, she mocked four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” She attached pictures of the dead Americans. In recent days she reposted a list of missile-production sites inside the U.S.

“We have a duty to escalate,” Walsh told her host on the Psychic Militancy podcast last Saturday from Beirut, noting that “lockdowns” of weapons factories and vandalism alone are “not sufficient at this point.”

She added: “And as the genocide and these wars of aggression continue to escalate, much more is demanded of people in the West.”

Walsh looks every part the art-school hipster, with her thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair. But she’s a chameleon of terror. Five years earlier, as a 16-year-old, Walsh was fawned over by The New York Times for being a young, social media-savvy activist who was helping to shake up the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. But as a monthslong investigation by The Free Press shows, she’s thrown her allegiance squarely behind the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance, which includes the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The U.S. government has placed her on a suspicious persons watch list for her expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran, U.S. officials told me, as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.

Over the past few years, Walsh’s radicalization has played out in real time on X and Instagram. She quickly moved from political organizing for the Democrats to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to conducting guerrilla-style raids on Israeli defense companies in New England, for which she received jail time in 2024. She has regularly called for the assassinations of Israeli officials and their allies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In October, she formally relocated to Beirut, The Free Press learned, where she has established herself as a regular contributor to Iranian state media, particularly the English-language site of Tehran’s Press TV on which Washington has imposed sanctions. She is actively engaging in propaganda and information-warfare operations on behalf of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which is fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon.

In early February, Walsh traveled to Iran as part of a regime-backed media delegation aimed at galvanizing international support for the Islamic Republic in the face of the looming U.S. and Israel attacks on the country. She was also there to whitewash Tehran’s January massacre of thousands of protesters by framing the regime as a bulwark against imperial and Zionist aggression.

According to U.S. counterterrorism officials I spoke with, any financial or operational ties Walsh has established with blacklisted organizations—whether in Iran, Cuba, or Lebanon—means she could be indicted for providing material support to proscribed groups. Walsh’s latest trip to Tehran places her in even greater legal jeopardy if she ever returns home.

“I’ve never seen someone who’s done jail time so publicly integrate herself into terrorist infrastructure,” a senior national security official told me. “She’s totally exposed now.”

Walsh’s family in Boston, including her three siblings, have expressed growing alarm about a daughter and sister who just years ago appeared to be an emerging force in Democratic politics. “We love Calla deeply and absolutely,” the family wrote in an emailed statement to me. “And we have serious, fundamental political disagreements with her.” They declined to comment further. Neither Calla Walsh nor her attorney, Jeffrey Odland, responded to multiple requests for comment from The Free Press.

Walsh’s story, in some ways, sounds familiar: a Zoomer who became politically active in the years when Covid-19 raged and nationwide protests subsumed college campuses after George Floyd’s death and Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Walsh has written that she initially embraced activism to combat the climate crisis and America’s racial divide.

But Walsh’s rapid turn toward revolutionary agitation is a cautionary tale about how foreign intelligence services, domestic extremist groups, and political grifters are preying on American youth, counter-extremist experts in the U.S., Europe, and Canada told me. At the age of 17, just months after appearing in The New York Times and authoring a 2021 piece in Teen Vogue on the DSA, Walsh was invited to Cuba by an organization the U.S. government long tied to the Castro regime’s intelligence services. She would go on to make four visits to the island nation between 2022 and 2024.

Her radicalization continued after she dropped out of Canada’s McGill University after only one semester. She began consorting with Fergie Chambers, a self-styled millionaire Marxist organizer and heir to the Cox Communications empire. Her left-wing activism then led her into contact with the information warfare departments of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist organization sanctioned by the U.S. in 1997 for terrorism. With every step, her proclamations grew more radical and extreme.

“I’ve never seen someone who’s done jail time so publicly integrate herself into terrorist infrastructure.”—Senior national security official

Officials tracking Walsh worry her trajectory could mirror those of other female leftists and self-proclaimed revolutionaries who emerged in the 1970s and early ’80s to fight American imperialism and support the Palestinian cause. These include Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin of West Germany’s Red Army Faction; Chicago-born Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground; and Assata Shakur, a Black Panther who found exile in Cuba after murdering a New Jersey state trooper. Some counterterrorism officials nicknamed Walsh “The Little Drummer Girl,” a reference to the female protagonist in the 1983 John le Carré novel who is brainwashed by Israeli spies into carrying bombs for Palestinian terrorists.

Things didn’t end well for most of these women. Meinhof and Ensslin committed suicide in a German prison, while Dohrn and Shakur spent years on the run and in hiding.

Experts in radicalization told me they fear Walsh may already be at the point of no return.

“To understand her is much easier than to get her off her path, because we don’t have the power to change her realities, her experiences,” Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and expert on extremism, told me. “She’s extremely strong on this quest for significance, and all that she does is a way of getting this significance.”

Calla Walsh grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the liberal university town on the Charles River sometimes referred to by locals as the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

Her parents are members of Cambridge’s literati. Her father, Chris Walsh, is an associate professor of English at Boston University, and her mother, Mary Sullivan Walsh, teaches fiction writing at Harvard’s Extension and Summer Schools. Chris was a longtime secretary and teaching assistant to the Nobel Prize–winning author Saul Bellow, who spent his last 12 years in Boston. Mary writes novels for young teens.

Walsh said she’d regularly engage in intense political debates with her family on the evils of capitalism and inherent and pervasive racism inside the U.S. law enforcement system. “I think, generally, I’m able to persuade them on issues. Like they vote how I tell them to vote,” she told the Boston magazine writer Tom McGrath in a 2021 interview, a tape of which he shared with me. “They support the candidates because they know I follow closely.”

“It is the greatest honor of my life to be visiting the Islamic Republic of Iran right now.”

These were the words of Calla Walsh, a 21-year-old American from Cambridge, Massachusetts, while standing in the IRGC Aerospace Exhibition in Tehran last July.

She continued: Iran “is under genocidal siege by the United States, by the Zionist entity. It is a great…

If the arson attack on four ambulances run by a Jewish charity this week in London were an isolated incident, it would be bad enough. It isn’t isolated, unfortunately. It is part of a pattern in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

Last year in the UK there were more than 3,700 incidents of antisemitism, with a sharp increase in attacks on visibly Jewish people and public figures, including the attack on a Manchester synagogue in October.

France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands have seen similar spikes in antisemitic attacks and incidents following the October 7, 2023, terrorist assault on Israel.

Each high-profile incident is followed by ritualistic condemnation by political leaders. I have no doubt they mean what they say. But their words haven’t stopped the attacks.

Dear Abigail,

Lately I have been wondering if I am making a mistake by deciding not to have kids—usually after reading an essay in The Free Press about how important kids are and how no one is having kids anymore! I really don’t think I’ve been influenced by a larger societal trend or the economy or millennial climate fears or the desire to put my career over motherhood. I have never connected with the idea of having kids; even as a child, I never saw it as something in my future. Getting married—definitely, but not kids. The idea has always given me an instant feeling of panic.

I’m not particularly career motivated, so that hasn’t been a factor in my decision. My partner feels equally ambivalent about kids. We have friends and family with kids, and I’m always happy to spend time with them, unlike the child-free people I see on Reddit who seem to hate children. But even after spending time with my favorite kid, I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I think my partner and I will have a fulfilling life pursuing our hobbies and careers. I do worry about being lonely in older age or being alone if, God forbid, something happens to him. But having kids just to have company when I’m old seems selfish!

I also have lifelong mental health struggles and a family history of mental health struggles, which also makes me worry about postpartum depression or subjugating a child to having a mother with spells of depression. But overall, when it comes down to it, I’ve just never wanted kids! I keep waiting for something to change, but it never does.

Now that my partner and I will get married soon (probably 2027), I’m worried I’m overlooking something. I’m also worried I will change my mind at some point, and he won’t. Or vice versa! I wouldn’t want to leave him; I think I would choose him over kids. I want to figure this out before we get married. I have talked to my partner, but he isn’t stressed about this, like I am. Have I fallen for some sort of liberal propaganda? Am I making a huge mistake?

Thank you,

Childless, 29

Dear Childless,

In any high school class, there is a small subset of girls who always knew they wanted to be mothers. You know the sort: They immediately notice any small child in the vicinity, and engage him breathlessly, often at eye level. They often get married principally to have children—almost any nice guy will do. Unsurprisingly, many of these women become teachers.

There are also the girls who know, from a young age, that family life isn’t for them—a far smaller subset.

And then there is a vastly larger category: Those of us who assumed we’d have a family one day, but mostly, we wanted to fall in love and get married. It was only after we did those things that any vague sense that we wanted kids turned acute. Only after we had a husband we loved did we want to give him children, a family, a legacy. Only then did we begin to envision him with a child propped up around the back of his neck, tiny hands gripped gently by his giant palms.

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.

As we approach the weekend, the U.S.-Israel-Iran war has come to a crossroads. Donald Trump has three paths available:

Continue with his current direction, and we end this war with a negotiated settlement,

Return to his original plan, and we continue pounding the regime,

Or walk away altogether, and there’s a unilateral ceasefire.

Let’s look down the path of negotiation.

It’s Thursday, March 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block unpack the landmark Meta lawsuit. Coleman Hughes reacts to his debate with Glenn Greenwald, and tackles the myth of the all-powerful Israel lobby. Arthur Brooks sits down with Shilo Brooks to tell us how to live a meaningful life. And much more.

But first: What will it take to finish the job in Iran?

“They’re talking to us, and they’re talking sense.” That’s how Donald Trump explained his pivot to negotiations with Iran on Tuesday. Just days earlier, he had threatened strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure—then delayed them “based on the fact we’re negotiating.” But on Wednesday morning, Iran rejected a 15-point peace plan delivered through Pakistani intermediaries, and continued its air strikes across the Gulf region.

Can diplomacy end the Iran war? Or will the violence have to escalate before it concludes? Today, we bring you four pieces grappling with those questions.

Up first, former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant argues that with the Strait of Hormuz closed and the global economy floundering, negotiations aren’t enough. The U.S. must seize Iran’s greatest choke point: Kharg Island. Read his piece to understand why that goal isn’t only within reach—it must happen right now.

According to Aaron MacLean, Trump is following a familiar playbook: “maximum pressure, followed by diplomacy.” But while the pattern echoes his first-term approach to North Korea, the conditions are different. Aaron explains what North Korea 2017 teaches us about Iran 2026—and why “we may get a new version of ‘fire and fury’ after all.”

Next, Eli Lake on why divisions over how to end the war run just as deeply inside the Trump administration as outside it. Joe Kent, former chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, has been claiming Israel manipulated Trump into demanding Iran cease all uranium enrichment—killing any chance of a deal. But Eli says the opposite: that it was bureaucrats like Kent who quietly tried to soften a line Trump has held since 2018, and are now blaming Israel for their failure.

Finally, as Iran’s terms for entering negotiations grow increasingly untenable, the regime has adopted a new tactic: offering Trump gifts. The gesture, writes Amit Segal, suggests the Iranians “clearly understand their audience”—a dynamic that “doesn’t bode particularly well” for how the war ends.

—The Editors

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• Israel launched another round of air strikes into Tehran on Wednesday as the Islamic Republic continues its strikes across the Gulf region. The persisting violence raises doubts about an end to the war, despite President Trump’s claim on Tuesday that it “has been won.”

• On Wednesday, a House committee held a hearing on the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, now nearing its 40th day. The hearing came amid growing public frustration over unprecedented airport lines nationwide, driven by high callout rates among Transportation Security Administration agents working without pay. (For more, read this firsthand account from a TSA agent.)

• Democrat Emily Gregory, a first-time candidate, defeated Republican Jon Maples in a special election for an open state House seat in Florida. The district is home to President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, an especially symbolic victory for the Democratic Party ahead of November’s midterm elections.

• Police in London arrested two men accused of setting fire to ambulances parked outside a synagogue last week. The men, ages 45 and 47, will face charges of arson with intent to endanger life, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

• Trump appointed the first 13 business leaders to his new tech panel dedicated to advising the president on AI regulation and other policy matters. The list includes Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Jensen Huang, among other major business and tech leaders.

• OpenAI announced on Tuesday that they are shutting down Sora, their flagship video creation app. The platform had just announced a licensing deal with Disney last December.

For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, CLICK HERE and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount.

Life is short. How do we live it well?

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks has spent years studying happiness. In this episode, he joins Shilo to explore what neuroscience, faith, and philosophy reveal about how to live a happy …

Ruth Wisse was born into a dangerous world in a dark time: Romania in 1936. She grew up in Montreal, “a land of peace and prosperity where a child could work to become anything she reasonably wanted,” as she wrote in her beautiful memoir, with its characteristically bold title: Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation. As a writer, scholar, and professor—first at McGill, then at Harvard, where she held the first endowed chair in Yiddish literature, and where she taught Yiddish and comparative literature from 1993 until 2014—freedom has often been her great theme. The freedom Wisse celebrates is “a rooted freedom,” as she calls it in her memoir, which must be cherished if it is to be defended, and defended if it is to be transmitted to the next generation.

Wisse was an inspired choice to deliver this year’s Jefferson Lecture, which the National Endowment for the Humanities, its sponsor, calls “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” The Free Press is honored to publish her words below.

Steeped in gratitude, Wisse’s talk is a love letter to her adoptive country, but also a warning to her fellow citizens, issued by someone “increasingly protective of what can only remain the land of the free if we are determined to conserve it.” —The Editors

It is a great privilege to be giving the Jefferson Lecture. There have been many far more distinguished speakers in this series, but I think none has been older, and no one more grateful. As an adult immigrant who loved this country from afar long before I became a citizen, I bless the United States for its bounty and for the freedoms it guarantees us. The more I cherish all the good that it does, the less I understand those who take it for granted. This makes me increasingly protective of what can only remain the land of the free if we are determined to conserve it.

We all know what it’s like to scroll endlessly on our phones, swipe after swipe, trapped in an infinite content loop. Sometimes, it can feel like a puppet master is keeping your thumb scrolling even when you know it’s best to stop.

That puppet master is, of course, the algorithm: the means by which social media companies make sure you’re served exactly what you need to see to stay online.

Whether or not this algorithm is causing harm to preteen and teenage users—and whether two Big Tech behemoths, Meta and YouTube, were negligent about that harm—have been the questions before a Los Angeles jury over the past few weeks.

On Wednesday, after nine days of deliberations, the jury found that Meta and YouTube were indeed negligent in the design of their algorithm and that they should have known their product was causing harm toward users like Kaley, the 20-year-old plaintiff identified in court records by her initials, KGM. The firms will have to pay a total of $6 million in damages. Also this week, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for violating the state’s consumer and child exploitation laws.