The Free Press

It’s Wednesday, March 18. 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 Joe Kent’s resignation. Josh Kaplan investigates whether there’s a moral panic about the “manosphere.” The foreign money behind anti-war protests. Liel Leibovitz explains why he’s proud to call himself a Disney adult. And much more.

But first: The alarmist eco-warrior who never admitted defeat.

Imagine getting almost everything wrong and still transforming the world with your ideas. That, more or less, is what happened to biologist and professional eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich, who died this week at 93. Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his bestseller The Population Bomb. It predicted an explosion in humankind, draining the planet’s resources and triggering a near apocalypse.

Thankfully, Ehrlich would be proven wrong—stunningly wrong—by events. But even if Ehrlich lost the argument, his Malthusian mindset still won him award after award and, in many ways, became conventional wisdom.

Today, we’re bringing you two pieces on Ehrlich’s ideas and why they matter.

Up first, the British science writer Matt Ridley details the callous policy proposals Ehrlich’s thinking led him to support—including forced sterilization programs that Ehrlich called “coercion in a good cause”—and the policymakers who listened to him.

Up next, Larissa Phillips. She was born to parents beholden to Ehrlich’s theories. In fact, she says, she almost wasn’t born because of them: Her parents were trying to model their own family planning on his prescription for zero population growth. Thankfully, they didn’t quite get it right. Ehrlich’s death caused Larissa to contemplate not just the impact of his ideas on her family but also where the line falls—where idealism becomes pretentious, or pessimistic, or harmful.

—The Editors

Summer bodies might be made in winter, but summer loves are made in spring. And we’re here to help! We’ve had many fabulous, single Free Pressers write to Cupid, including a semiretired geologist, a librarian who loves to laugh, and an engineer in Virginia who says that he is “more MAHA than MAGA.” If you’re looking to date and hate the apps, check out The Free Press Cupid personal ads. And if you’d like to be included in the next batch, send a note to [email protected].

• At least 75 people died Monday night in a Pakistani air strike on the Afghanistan capital of Kabul, the deadliest attack so far in an escalating violent conflict between the two nations. Pakistan, once a backer of the Taliban, is now accusing Afghanistan of harboring Islamist terrorists who carried out hundreds of attacks on Pakistani soil in recent years.

• The SAVE Act, Trump’s legislation aimed at tamping down noncitizen voting, appears to have little chance of attaining the 60 Senate votes required to pass. In a procedural vote yesterday, Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican who voted with all 47 Senate Democrats against the bill.

• Arizona is bringing criminal charges against online betting giant Kalshi for allegedly operating an illegal gambling business. “These are the first criminal charges of any kind filed against Kalshi in any court in the United States, but it will likely be the first of several,” Daniel Wallach, a sports and gaming lawyer, told Bloomberg.

• New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani likened the plight of the Irish to the “genocide” of Palestinians during a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast honoring Irish New Yorkers at Gracie Mansion. “Who can better understand those who weep than those who have been made to weep for so long?” Mamdani said.

• He has two first names and one tricky task: Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, must balance MAGA’s deportation demands against criticism of the president’s immigration crackdown. Mullin is expected to be confirmed by the Senate’s GOP majority today.

• A federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted all nine members of what prosecutors said was an antifa militant group last week in the first federal antifa terrorism trial in U.S. history. Jurors found the defendants guilty of providing material support to terrorists, attempted murder of a police officer, rioting, and using and carrying explosives in connection with an attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4, 2025.

When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she probably went through the same agonizing checklist as any woman facing an unexpected pregnancy.

Could she and my dad afford it? They were in their late 20s with two little kids already, squeezed into a small apartment on Manhattan’s still-seedy Upper West Side. They had no extra money. My father was just starting an unstable career doing things like raising money to build wells on Indian reservations. My mom had quit her job teaching English at a private girls’ school after the second baby. They were too close to turning 30 to be hippies, but it was 1968 so they had shaggy hair and they drove a red Volkswagen bus around the city, and they went to protests, and they really, really believed that the world could become a better place.

The final numbers haven’t been released yet, but if online chatter is any indication, something like nine Americans tuned in Sunday night to watch the Oscars: three hours and 45 minutes of actors accepting awards for films no one bothered seeing, and delivering political rants no one wanted to hear.

By the same delightfully imperfect yet deeply resonant metric, approximately 40 billion Americans have watched the new online ad for Disney’s cruise line. It’s an exaggeration, but not much of one: You couldn’t really tune in to a podcast this week without hearing some long and impassioned analysis of the ad and its larger cultural meaning.

In case you’re one of the very few carbon-based life forms who hasn’t yet had the pleasure, here’s a brief summary of this one minute, 29-second masterpiece: A young family struggles to fall asleep in their snug room on a Disney cruise ship. The father takes his baby boy and goes out for a stroll on the deck. The ship is empty. The moonlight washes everything in a pale, otherworldly glow. In the background, sweet music, a cross between Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, makes the heart grow softer.

Opponents of the Iran war see Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned on Tuesday, as a dissident. He quit his post to protest an unjust war. That’s what the populist podcaster Tucker Carlson told The New York Times in a piece that emphasized Kent’s principled resignation. Carlson said Kent “is the bravest man I know” and warned that “the neocons will now try to destroy him.”

Some of Carlson’s allies were not so brave. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence who has long opposed attacking Iran, defended the president in a statement without bothering to refute Kent’s main charge: that Trump was hoodwinked by Israel and its supporters into thinking Iran was an imminent threat to the U.S. “After carefully reviewing all the information before him,” Gabbard posted on X, “President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.”

Paul Ehrlich, the butterfly biologist turned rock star eco-pessimist, has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable because in 1968, he forecast that within the coming decade “at least 100–200 million people per year will be starving to death” and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” Furthermore, he warned that by 1980 the life expectancy of the average American would have fallen to 42 years as a result of cancer caused by pesticides.

Ehrlich’s life debunked his own statistics. He survived a half-century longer than the average life expectancy he predicted. He also spent his last years as one of more than eight billion people, in an era in which global life expectancy has increased by more than seven hours day since he forecast that it would collapse.

The California Republican Party is imposing what it calls a “vetting process” on candidates in local elections to block the influence of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes within the party.

According to a memo dated February 19 that was sent to all 58 of California’s county Republican parties and seen by The Free Press, party leaders should “refrain from recruiting, supporting, or endorsing candidates” who “espouse,” “promote,” or “campaign” on Fuentes’s ideas. The memo also instructed local GOP leadership to “review organizational bylaws” and ensure that those bylaws empower leaders to purge members aligned with Fuentes.

The American strikes on Iran have opened both a new military front abroad and an old front at home. Mere hours after the bombs began to fall, leftist activists took to the streets with signs and chants denouncing American “imperialism” and demanding “Hands Off Iran” and “No New U.S. War in the Middle East.”

It’s no coincidence that these protests bear similarities to the anti-ICE, pro-Cuba, anti-Israel, and pro-Maduro rallies that have dotted the country in recent months. Behind many of these disruptions is the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), an umbrella organization composed of various far-left groups.

A close look at ANSWER’s operations reveals a demonstration-industrial complex—a coordinated ecosystem in which organizations lean in to their respective strengths and complement others’ infrastructure, messaging, or reach. These organizations are, in turn, closely linked with hostile foreign actors, raising questions not only about their propriety, but their legality.

ANSWER did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

I grew up in the early 2000s, in the dying days of the Marilyn Manson moral panic, when parents across the land sincerely believed that heavy metal music inspired Satan worship. After that came the dawn of the “Grand Theft Auto will destroy our boys” phenomenon, in which tabloids and radio hosts railed against violent video games, arguing that the mere simulation of violence and criminality would herald the end of Western civilization by encouraging hordes of young men to become philanderers, drug dealers, and cop killers.

“We are training our kids to be killers, and we are training our sons to treat women like whores,” ranted talk-show host Glenn Beck on CNN in 2008, at the peak of this mania. “Whatever happened to Pong?”

Maybe it’s because March Madness is upon us, but in recent days our leaders in Washington, D.C., have taken a surprising amount of time from more pressing concerns—Iran war, anyone?—to kvetch about the state of college sports. To put it bluntly, they’re not very happy about it.

At a big meeting at the White House on March 6, which included athletic directors, conference commissioners, and several famous ex-football coaches (Nick Saban and Urban Meyer among them), President Donald Trump decried the fact that a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in 2021 made it possible, for the first time ever, for college athletes to be paid for their “name, image, and likeness.” Some star athletes, like Texas Tech’s new quarterback Brendan Sorsby, are now getting millions of dollars. (Sorsby has a $5 million deal.) “A lot of really bad things are happening,” Trump said, claiming that rising athletic costs were going to put some schools into bankruptcy if something wasn’t done. “Everybody was happy” with the old system, he added, “and now you’ve got yourself a mess.”

A few days later, at a Senate roundtable to discuss the same issue, Tommy Tuberville, the former head football coach at Auburn University—and now an Alabama senator—described the current state of affairs as a “disaster”: “Are we gonna be an educational institution or are we gonna be pro sports?”

Zineb Riboua, research fellow with Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, joins Aaron MacLean on School of War to talk about the ongoing U.S.-Israel war with Iran, focusing on China’s interests and involvement. How dependent is China on the region’s energy resources? How does China project power in the Middle East and in Af…