The Free Press

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…

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. Here’s Amit’s daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

Israel has beheaded the snake, again. In a strike that before February would’ve been unprecedented, the Israeli Air Force has reportedly eliminated senior regime figures: the head of the paramilitary Basij forces, his deputy, and most prominently, Ali Larijani—Iran’s most senior military official.

For nearly a year, Larijani has headed the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s highest security body. Israel promoted him again last month, eliminating most of his superiors and leaving him as the highest-ranking security official still standing. Since that day, he had been viewed as one of, if not the most powerful man in the regime left alive.

It’s Tuesday, March 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Batya Ungar-Sargon on the podcasters who claim to speak for MAGA, but don’t. Gabe Kaminsky on the enigmatic billionaire who persuaded Trump to buck decades of Republican thinking on marijuana. Arthur Brooks on why you’re in an abusive relationship with politics—and how to break free. And much more.

But first: America’s weapons crisis—and the people trying to fix it.

This week, Israel told the U.S. that it is running critically low on ballistic missile interceptors—and America’s own reserves aren’t far behind. With stockpiles across the U.S. and among its Gulf allies dwindling faster than they can be replenished, the Trump administration has discussed invoking the Defense Production Act to force defense companies to increase manufacturing.

As war in the Middle East rages, a familiar debate has returned: Can the American weapons industry keep up with demand?

Sean Fischer spoke with the founders of one of the new defense technology companies trying to make sure the answer to that question is yes. Castelion is focused on hypersonic missile technology—and it’s trying to help the U.S. catch up with Russia and China in this important field.

Read Sean’s story on the entrepreneurs who think America’s preparedness suffers from two problems: a lack of modern warfighting tools, and an inability to manufacture them at volume.

Though America currently lags behind China and Russia in missile technology, it has many advantages. One of them: Our software is second to none.

Today, in an exclusive excerpt of the new book Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar and his colleague Madeline Hart argue that for the U.S. to remain the most powerful nation in the world, we need an industrial revolution—with the help of the Silicon Valley.

—The Editors

• Several U.S. allies declined Trump’s request yesterday to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, prompting the president to complain about ingratitude. “We’ve protected them from horrible outside ​sources, and they weren’t that enthusiastic,” Trump said at a news conference. “And the level of enthusiasm matters to me.”

• Cuba’s electric grid collapsed yesterday, leaving around 10 million without power. The island nation’s grid operator said on social media it is investigating the latest blackout, part of a series of outages, the latest of which triggered a rare violent protest in Havana over the weekend.

• The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in a pair of cases challenging Trump’s attempt to end temporary protected status (TPS) for refugees from Haiti and Syria. The eventual ruling will also affect the 11 other countries whose nationals stand to lose TPS, a program that grants temporary work authorization and shields recipients from deportation.

• One in five college students in the United Kingdom would not want to live with a Jewish person, a new study has found. The same report also found that half of the students surveyed reported having seen Hamas or Hezbollah glorified on campus.

• A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule and his appointments to a federal vaccine advisory committee yesterday. “HHS looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing,” spokesman Andrew Nixon said.

• The Kennedy Center’s board of directors voted Monday to suspend operations for two years after this summer’s July 4 celebration. The widely anticipated move follows a string of resignations and cancellations during Donald Trump’s second term, though the president has cited urgent renovations as the reason for the shutdown.

Could the U.S. run out of weapons in wartime?

It’s a question that most civilians—living with the distant memory of the American manufacturing might that helped win World War II—have not had to seriously ponder.

But speak to defense industry insiders, who, facing dirt-cheap enemy drones, geopolitical foes with manufacturing capacity exceeding our own, and a tepid U.S. industrial base, and they’ll tell you: It’s a real worry. And it has propelled many pro-defense tech titans to found companies that they believe can resurrect the Arsenal of Democracy.

In the face of a rising China, a hot war in Iran, and an assertive Russia, this new defense tech class sees America’s preparedness for war as suffering from a twofold problem: a lack of modern warfighting tools, and an inability to manufacture those tools at the volume needed to guarantee victory. And they’re trying to do something about it.

Last month in Toronto, at one of the largest synagogues in North America, I stood in the back of a dimly lit auditorium and listened to law expert Natasha Hausdorff speak at length about Israel, antisemitism, and threats to Jewish life in Canada. To attend the event, guests had to pass through a police checkpoint, wait in freezing temperatures to get an entry badge, and then go through metal detectors. The venue was teeming with security both inside and out.

This has become the norm in Canada, and for good reason. Just weeks later, that same synagogue, along with two others in the city, was riddled with bullets. Then, in what police are calling a “national security incident,” two suspects shot at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, leading to beefed-up protection for U.S. and Israeli diplomatic buildings in the city.

If you spend too much time on X or get your news from the liberal mainstream media, you may have gotten the impression that the president’s supporters are abandoning him in droves over Operation Epic Fury, his war on Iran’s nuclear program. This is Israel’s war, not ours! according to any number of podcasters, far left and far right. The president has been dragged into this war against his will by the nefarious Netanyahu, the podcasters claim, and he has betrayed everything he once stood for! Young people know it! they claim. It’s just the old fogies, the Boomers, the neocons, the Israel First crowd who support Trump now.

“Younger generations. . . are very much against this war,” former congresswoman turned X personality Marjorie Taylor Greene told CNN today, supplying the network with the content they most crave—“proof” Trump voters might defect for the Democrats. “It’s 100 percent a betrayal to what MAGA was supposed to be.”

Alas, this narrative is complete fiction.

PALM BEACH, Florida — Howard Kessler drew a box on a piece of paper and scribbled lines shooting out from all four sides. “When I dealt with banks, in one meeting, I remember this guy said, ‘Look, Howard, I’m in here. You’re all over there!’ ” Kessler told me. “I think outside of the box. I think differently.”

Kessler’s way of thinking helped make him an architect of affinity credit cards back in the 1980s. Sponsored by airlines, colleges, department stores, unions, and other organizations, affinity cards paved the way for airline frequent-flyer programs, credit card perks, and the rise of a cashless society. He became a billionaire—and bought a mansion here for $30 million in 2001.

No one had ever paid so much for a home in Palm Beach, including Kessler’s friend, Donald Trump. “Donald thought I was an idiot for paying that much,” Kessler said as we sat in the main house that overlooks the ocean, not far from his two swimming pools, a green clay tennis court, a greenhouse, gazebo, and guesthouse. “It’s worth 10 times more now,” he added.

There is a website where ordinary Iranians can geotag key military facilities directly onto the map of their country. The site works even during regime-imposed internet blackouts. And since at least the start of the war, Israeli intelligence has been using it to help identify targets such as missile launch sites.

“There are many things we’re told about the Iranian people,” an Israeli security operative told The Free Press. “Nobody ever said they are fools. To the contrary, they’re smart and brave. Most Iranian citizens are against the regime, so when you report a location, and then the thing you report disappears, you know what you’re doing.”

Mahsa Alert was created by Ahmad Ahmadian, 35, an Iranian American whose activism saw him detained and imprisoned in solitary confinement before he came to the United States in 2011 as a political refugee. Named after Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian woman who was arrested in 2022 for wearing her hijab improperly and died after severe beatings in custody, the app was launched on the heels of last summer’s 12-day war.