The Free Press

Dear Abigail,

I am the mother of an 18-year-old daughter who is about six years into her declaration of transgenderism. (I will spare you the background, but suffice it to say: pandemic, Discord chat rooms, peer group.) All this time, my husband and I have walked the tightrope of maintaining a loving relationship with her while maintaining strict boundaries. We fought with the school relentlessly about her name. We forced her to use her real name when she got a job, telling her it was linked to her bank account and doing otherwise would be too confusing. We told her we would only pay for her music lessons if she used her real name at the studio. We told her that if she wanted to use another name with her friends, that was fine: That’s what nicknames are for. For us, the line we did not want her to cross was asking adults to use another name, because it was not appropriate. (We know she broke this rule, but at least we tried.) And, of course, we prayed. We prayed this would resolve itself before adulthood.

This spring, she graduated high school. She has chosen a gap year at home (with us, imagine?) instead of college. Now, I am not sure what lines we are supposed to hold onto and which we can let go. We have been clear that, for this gap year and possibly beyond, she is welcome to stay home and we will financially support her, just as if she was off at school, as long as she holds down a job and has a plan. So far, she has held up her end of the bargain well: She has two paying jobs, plus a few irons in the fire related to her interest in music. (She plays gigs with a band, and is starting to intern as a student teacher giving lessons.)

Also, we continue to pay out-of-pocket for her “therapist” ($185 every other week). I put that in quotes because the therapist—an intelligent, progressive, married gay woman—intentionally let her license lapse so that she was no longer beholden to the guidelines of her profession, which dictate that therapists must unquestioningly affirm patients’ understandings of themselves. We chose and trust this woman, and if we stop paying for her, our daughter will likely find a harmful therapist, which concerns us.

She’s a good kid—driven, smart, and fierce in her beliefs. However, despite being visibly fine with us calling her by her real name and referring to her as our daughter at home, outside of the house she is increasingly using her other name (and pronouns). She is using it at her job and playing gigs in the area with her band. She is now using it at the music school where we used to pay for her lessons.

My daughter is a very progressive individual, and our family is very conservative. Her father, brother, and I attend Catholic Mass every Sunday. (I attend daily Mass myself.) Her brother is an altar server and attends a Catholic high school. We’re pro-life. We love America, fly a flag, and shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. My daughter makes signs in her bedroom, attends protests, and recently joined an anti-war organization. I’m not against her expressing herself (nor am I “pro-war”), but she takes every opportunity to show her disdain for our life choices. For example, during the cyclospora outbreak I was complaining about washing lettuce, and she said, “Well, you voted for this.” (My response was to ask, “I voted for diarrhea?” and laugh it off.) I am sure I should be lecturing her on respecting our views, but she’ll play her trump card, which is that we do not respect her truth as a transgender man. She holds all the cards.

And Abigail, I’m tired (and, frankly, my husband is losing his patience). I’ve spent the last six years fighting the establishment, holding my breath, walking on eggshells. I am still dancing around pronouns and avoiding using the “names” of any of her friends because they are all fake. I have surrendered her soul to the Lord, which has helped tremendously, but how does that translate to my daily life? Is it okay to . . . not care anymore? To just let her dig herself deeper into whatever hole she’s creating? The mom in me says: No, she’s only 18 and still very much a child who needs our help and our attempts to set boundaries. The human in me says: Ugh, go ahead and dig away until you uncover a natural consequence. And the human voice is getting louder. Help!

—Angela

Dear Angela,

Eight years ago, public health researcher Lisa Littman amassed evidence that peer contagion explained the sudden spike in trans identification among teen girls. In 2020, I helped bring her work to a large audience with my book Irreversible Damage. In the years since, the craze has received enormous attention. But one aspect of the phenomenon remains under explored: Why were girls from politically progressive families especially vulnerable to this destructive social contagion?

Maybe it’s because they lived in deep-blue school districts, where teachers, school counselors, and therapists were particularly enthusiastic about liberating girls from their feminine bodies. Maybe their parents felt so obligated to support anything “LGBTQ,” they failed to see the harm posed by “T” (medicalization) until it was too late. Maybe their insecurity over maintaining their progressive bona fides scrambled their defenses.

But there is something else, too. Progressive parents—many of them highly educated—were beholden to fashionable parenting theories that eschewed the thing kids most needed: parental authority. Not cold or unloving parenting. Just “these are my rules, and we’re not debating them” parenting. Conservatives were more comfortable with this sort of authority. Progressives, far less so.

It’s Thursday, September 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Bishop Robert Barron on the pioneering priest who could become America’s next saint. Masih Alinejad on the women who were blinded by the Iranian regime, then found their voice. Joe Nucci meets his AI therapist. All that and much more.

But first: The brawl over the most famous bar in America.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Three friends walk into a “Covid-cautious, gender-inclusive, anti-carceral, anti-profit lesbian bar.” It’s no joke. It’s an actual bar, specifically Last Ditch in Greenfield, Massachusetts. It’s also the subject of a viral article in The Boston Globe about a smear campaign by patrons who claim that the bar betrayed its mission and morals.

What was the bar’s crime? Relaxing its mask policy so that the queer ladies who come to Last Ditch to, um, drink can do so sans face coverings for one night a week. This is one of those stories that truly must be read to be believed. It includes a three-hour community meeting, accusations hurled by someone named Moss, and the phrase “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS.” To understand what it all means, you will need Katie Herzog, who delves deeply into Last Ditch in her podcast Blocked and Reported.

“When Last Ditch announced this policy change online,” Katie writes for us today, “you would have thought from the comments that they had lubed up their stripper pole with the blood of particularly cute baby seals.” Lately, I’m hearing that woke is over, since some champions of way-out-there progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are now waving off that era like it was just an embarrassing teenage phase. “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” AOC told ABC’s This Week last month.

Not so long ago, even using the word crazy might have been seen as ableist and an insensitive microaggression against the mentally ill. But what happened at Last Ditch shows that Woke 1.0 never ended in some parts of America. It just got crazier.

—Suzy Weiss

• Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced on Wednesday to 15 years in prison for his criminal sexual assault conviction last year. At the sentencing hearing, a former production assistant said that she “often felt like I was the one on trial.” Weinstein repeated his claim that he is innocent.

• Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian called Iranians “victims of terrorism” in a defiant address at the United Nations General Assembly. After seven months of war, Pezeshkian said that Iran was “ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations” but would never “bend the knee.”

• A federal judge seemed skeptical of the White House press ban during a hearing on Wednesday, but didn’t immediately strike down the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. He said he would rule as soon as possible. In 2018, the same judge threw out the White House’s ban of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.

• Only 26 percent of Americans said Trump was right to impose new tariffs on Canada last month, according to a Politico poll. Fifty-six percent of Americans and 83 percent of Canadians said the move was wrong. Canada responded to the tariffs with its own tariffs earlier this month.

• The son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States was in critical condition on Wednesday after a car-ramming attack in the West Bank denounced by his father as terrorism. Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said that his son Neria, who was serving as a reservist, “needs a miracle” to survive. Neria’s oldest brother also was a reservist when he was killed in Gaza in November 2023.

• “Packaged kratom” was found during the investigations of two University of Mississippi students who may have died as a result of drug overdoses. Kratom, an herbal drug with opioid-like effects, is banned in Oxford, Mississippi. Fraternities and sororities warned their members about cychlorphine, a synthetic opioid that isn’t detected in fentanyl test strips.

The most famous bar in America, as of this week, is Last Ditch—a small, failing lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with $10 Negronis and a masking policy more fit for a CDC containment lab than a bar.

The reason for Last Ditch’s sudden infamy is an article published by The Boston Globe on Monday—an article that reached the sort of stratospheric virality that most journalists (and bars) could only dream of.

The simple, straightforward headline, “Greenfield Lesbian Bar Last Ditch Faces Mask-Rule Backlash,” did not adequately describe the crazy within. With lines like “Customers fondly remember a raucous opening night with a (clothed) simulation of a lesbian sex act—masks in place,” it’s not hard to see the appeal. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that the story has already netted the Globe 1,000 new subscribers.

The article, by Annalisa Quinn, was the first that most of America, and the internet, had heard of the Last Ditch, but I’ve been covering this particular drinking establishment for weeks on my podcast Blocked and Reported. And while I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting it, after years of covering idealistic, politically progressive, and often queer institutions that collapse under the weight of staff or customers’ demands, to me, the story of Last Ditch is a familiar one.

When I was living in Iran, someone gave me a copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I read it the way we read dangerous things in Iran: quietly, quickly, keeping the cover hidden. The world Atwood built, a theocratic republic where women’s bodies are state property, did not feel like science fiction to me. It felt like a warning I had already been living inside my whole life.

Then I moved to America, and I discovered that millions of Americans loved this story as a story. They watched it as a television series. They dissected it in book clubs. They wore the red cloaks to political marches as a metaphor. And I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and say: This is not a metaphor for us. For us, it is Tuesday.

There is a detail in Atwood’s world that I read and moved on from when I first encountered it: The regime blinds the women it wants to punish. I accepted it as the dark logic of dystopia and turned the page.

Then, almost exactly four years ago, in the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, the Islamic Republic shot Kosar Eftekhari in the face and blinded her. And Farideh Salavatipour. And 580 others.

This Thursday is a big day for American Catholics. The first beatification to take place on U.S. soil in almost 10 years is happening in St. Louis, Missouri, in the afternoon. For those not familiar with the Vatican’s lexicon, a beatification is the penultimate step on the path to sainthood. To qualify, a person must have performed at least one miracle. (For canonization, the final step, two miracles must be verified.)

The man to be blessed this week is Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, who grew up a couple hours north, outside of Peoria, Illinois, where he was ordained a priest in 1919. By the ’50s, he was a household name. Whereas other preachers looked with suspicion on the new forms of evangelizing offered by the 20th century—namely, radio and television—Sheen embraced them.

He also, years later, inspired the man who is now one of our own era’s best-known multimedia bishops. It’s a pleasure to welcome Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Catholic media empire Word on Fire, back to our pages, to reflect on why Fulton J. Sheen could be on his way to becoming America’s next saint. —The Editors

From the very beginning of my work in evangelization through the media, Fulton J. Sheen—whom the Church is declaring “Blessed” this week—has been my model and inspiration. At Word on Fire, he is one of our principal patrons and heavenly friends. Yet I first discovered his pioneering work on radio and television in a rather roundabout way—and thereupon hangs a tale.

Sheen was born on May 8, 1895, in El Paso, Illinois, about 30 miles east of Peoria, and less than 200 miles north of St. Louis, where his beatification takes place on Thursday. After entering the seminary and being ordained to the priesthood, he was dispatched for further studies in Washington, D.C., and, later, Belgium. But despite his intellect, he was not destined for a long career in academia. In 1930, he began to host a nationally broadcast radio program called The Catholic Hour. That cultural outreach expanded in 1950, when Sheen was approached for a prime-time program on network television. Life Is Worth Living, which aired throughout the 1950s, was born.

At the height of Sheen’s powers, he had an audience of 30 million viewers every Tuesday night and was competing against the likes of Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, and Jackie Gleason. I remember once, when I was young, Sheen came up in conversation, and my father—an ardent Catholic and taciturn man—said from his chair, “I like what he said. I like the way he said it.” That laconic observation summed up how many Catholics of that generation felt about this great evangelist and intellectual. They looked at him with a great sense of pride and admiration.

I have a confession. I did something that many medical and mental health professionals do in their private lives, but rarely admit publicly. I ignored my own advice. Even though I have literally published a book with chapters warning people against the perils of self-diagnosis, I recently diagnosed myself and turned to artificial intelligence for treatment. What happened next really surprised me. As I’ve reflected on the experience, I think it’s vital to speak publicly about what happened, especially given the recent news that U.S. health officials are piloting AI to provide psychotherapy.

Earlier this year, I was assaulted. Afterward, I believe I was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. I couldn’t stop ruminating. I had feelings of self-blame and horrible insomnia. When I did sleep, I had nightmares. As a licensed and practicing psychotherapist, I knew it would be helpful to seek mental health treatment, but I just didn’t want to do that. Quality psychotherapy is expensive and time-consuming, so I kept putting it off.

One night, as I waited for sleep I knew would never come, I impulsively opened my laptop and told Claude Fable 5.0 everything. I brain-dumped the whole timeline of events, shared screenshots of relevant material from my phone, and asked if it agreed that my distress could best be described as PTSD. While it gave me a familiar disclaimer that it could not technically diagnose me, it implied that my self-assessment was correct. I asked what type of treatment I should seek out and it suggested cognitive processing therapy, otherwise known as CPT.

Shareholders of The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the paper’s parent company on Wednesday morning, arguing the paper has failed to meet its obligation: to tell readers the truth and correct itself in a timely fashion when it doesn’t.

The suit, filed by the State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) in New York County Supreme Court, asks a judge to force the Times board of directors to hand over internal records the company has refused to produce for four months, the majority of which pertain to the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

The suit includes the testimony from a whistleblower, a former Times employee who is Jewish and spent nearly a decade on the paper’s video desk. According to the suit, the whistleblower raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on her desk at least 15 separate times between 2019 and her March 2026 departure, using every channel the company makes available to employees, including her managers, the standards desk, and human resources.

In an exclusive interview with The Free Press, the whistleblower said, “The public deserves a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved.” She asked to remain anonymous over concern for her family’s safety. She is not named in the suit.

It’s Wednesday, September 23. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Aaron MacLean glimpses the future of war in the Baltics. Maya Sulkin reports on the union that’s “dismantling oppression,” unless you’re Jewish. Allison Schrager asks: What happened to our frontier spirit? All that and much more.

But first: the Xi-Trump meeting, and Pastor Ezra Jin’s message to the world leaders.

Today, Chinese President Xi Jinping will land in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with President Donald Trump.

On the agenda will be some of the most important issues of our time: artificial intelligence, critical minerals, trade, and Taiwan.

But many are hoping one critical issue won’t be left off: human rights. Particularly, the cases of political prisoners still being held behind bars in China for the crimes of advocating for democracy and practicing their faith.

When the two leaders met in May, President Trump raised a case I had been following closely for months: the detention of Chinese pastor Ezra Jin. I wrote about his imprisonment, and the Chinese Communist Party’s long war on his Zion Church, in my investigation for The Free Press earlier this year, “China vs. God.”

After the meeting, Trump said he was hopeful Jin would be released, and two months later, that’s exactly what happened. But Jin was not the only member of his church who was detained by Chinese authorities. And while he is now free, and reunited with his family in the United States, eight of his colleagues remain in Chinese prison. So, too, are other prisoners of conscience, including Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai.

Today, Pastor Jin writes in our pages that this week’s meeting between the leaders of the world’s two largest powers is “a unique opportunity” to free the members of his church still behind bars, and “begin a new chapter for China’s Christians.”

If his freedom is any indication, sometimes miracles are possible.

—Frannie Block

Six months ago, Hezbollah supporter Ayman Ghazali rammed a truck full of ammunition into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed responded by saying “Hurt people, hurt people.” That comment, and El-Sayed’s staunchly anti-Israel stance, have scrambled the politics of this liberal congregation.

The synagogue was forced to shut for repairs, but reopened earlier this month in time for Rosh Hashanah. Olivia Reingold went to meet its congregants, who have found themselves at the center of the state’s closely watched Senate race. Watch her talking about the story below, and click the link to read the piece.

• President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly yesterday that he will either make a deal with Iran soon, or “annihilate the Islamic Republic.” This week will likely put that promise to the test, as world leaders congregate in New York.

• The U.S., Greenland, and Denmark agreed to a new deal expanding and bolstering the United States military’s presence on the island on Tuesday. The agreement marks a key step for the Trump administration, which has been eyeing the territory for months. (For more on America’s relationship with Greenland, read our editorial here).

• Republican senator John Curtis is calling for an investigation into Donald Trump Jr. The move comes after a recent disclosure revealed that Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding after-party was financed by a Russian businessman tied to the Kremlin.

• Vice President J.D. Vance’s task force is removing 760,000 Obamacare enrollments that the administration has deemed fraudulent. The decision marks one of the task force’s biggest crackdowns yet, and it says the move could save American taxpayers $2.2 billion.

• A grand jury found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the death of Mississippi teen Nolan Wells. Wells was found dead earlier this summer, after his friends returned from a Fourth of July boat trip without him.

• Cornell University issued a more-than-200-page report calling out the crisis in American higher education on Tuesday. The document echoes recent statements from Vanderbilt and Yale which expressed a need for widespread institutional reform across our universities.

• Country artist Ella Langley’s hit single “Choosin’ Texas” has officially broken the record for longest-running No. 1 hit. The song has now reigned for 23 nonconsecutive weeks, surpassing Mariah Carey’s previous record for “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

Kenneth Deardorff lives in a cabin in McGrath, Alaska, where he day-trades put options. Around 80, he has a special place in American history because he represents the end of one era and the start of a new one. Deardorff was awarded the last Homestead Act patent, granting him what was once called frontier land. He got it in 1988, after nearly a decade of paperwork. His patent marked not only the official closing of the American frontier but a radical shift in our relationship with risk.

Homesteading was a uniquely American experiment. If you were willing to risk your life, your family’s life, and your limited means, not to mention bears, moose, and disease, the government rewarded you with the most meaningful asset of the 19th century and most of the 20th: land to call your own. Giving people the chance to take a risk and be rewarded for it was the role of government back then. Risk-taking was something people once aspired to, but don’t seem to anymore. By the time Deardorff, a boomer from Southern California, sought to homestead in Alaska, it was considered an eccentric choice.

I was introduced to Deardorff through people I know from my own time in Alaska. More than 25 years ago, I spent a summer in a small fishing village where I sold incense and worked on a food truck grilling halibut. In the 1990s, college-age students often went to Alaska seeking a summer of adventure. Carrying a tattered copy of Into the Wild, we arrived with no plan, and worked all sorts of odd jobs, usually in the fishing industry. The frontier was gone by then, but we at least got to experience this frontier-like adventure for a summer before most of us pursued more conventional and safer lives. I am told even this is rare now. Migrants work the fish canneries, and if young adults do come to Alaska, it is part of an organized program where everything is prearranged and they get college credit.

In July, China freed Pastor Ezra Jin after he spent nearly nine months in prison for the crime of running a church and practicing his faith. This “miracle,” as he calls it, came after President Donald Trump visited China in May and raised Jin’s imprisonment directly with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

But while Jin is now with his family in America, other political prisoners in China remain. Eight of them are the pastor’s colleagues from Zion Church, who continue to face charges of running an illegal business and illegally disseminating information online in connection to their work with the church. Other church leaders, including Pastor Gao Quanfu and his wife, Pang Yu, of Xi’an, are behind bars, with their cases likely to go to trial soon and each facing a sentence of more than a decade in prison. Jin writes about his colleagues in his piece for us today.

Perhaps the best known of China’s political prisoners is Jimmy Lai, founder of “Apple Daily,” the largest pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong. Lai, 78, was sentenced in February to 20 years in prison after being convicted of collusion with foreign forces under the Chinese Communist Party–imposed National Security Law in Hong Kong. Lai has already spent more than five and a half years in solitary confinement, and now with his health waning, he faces the possibility of dying in prison.

Trump has long promised to free Lai—first saying on the campaign trail in 2024 that doing so would be “easy.” But the effort has not proven so. In May, when Trump visited Beijing, he raised Lai’s case to Xi. But upon returning home, Trump’s outlook was bleak. Lai’s freedom, Trump admitted, was a “tough one” for Xi.

Jin’s release shows that international cooperation is still possible, and that pressure from foreign leaders can help attain freedom for prisoners of conscience. It’s in the United States’ best interest—and China’s too. —The Editors

It’s hard to describe exactly what freedom feels like. But for me, I can capture it in a single moment.

I was arrested last October when the Chinese government conducted coordinated raids on members of the church where I serve as lead pastor. They arrested nearly 30 of us, and later charged 18 of us with manufactured charges such as illegal use of information networks and illegal business practices. It was one of the largest raids on China’s underground churches in four decades.

I spent 266 days in prison, convinced I would be there for at least a decade. Until one day I was unexpectedly whisked away from my cell and transported to an airport. There, I was told to board a plane, where I found myself next to an official from the United States of America. I found out that President Donald Trump personally raised my case with Chinese president Xi Jinping and negotiated for my release. I was in complete shock. Is this what freedom felt like?