The Free Press

This week, Tennessee GOP Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”

Those familiar with Ogles’s career wouldn’t have been shocked. In an X post last summer calling for Zohran Mamdani to be deported from the country, he referred to New York City’s current mayor, who is Muslim, as “little Muhammad.” Last Thursday, Ogles said “America and Islam are incompatible,” and called for a “Muslim ban.” In an interview published the same day, Ogles told Fox News: “Mass Islamic immigration, legal or illegal, has transformed America and brought destructive consequences.”

Ogles is not alone. Last week, Georgia GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde posted to X: “No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”

Nearly 47 years ago, Iran became the Islamic Republic. I was in New York City when the shah’s reign collapsed, clearing the way for Ruhollah Khomeini to return from exile to dismantle the old world. My loved ones begged me not to go back to Iran. As Googoosh, a 28-year-old pop star, I was a walking symbol of everything the new regime despised. But I chose the risk of a quick death at home over fading away in a foreign land. I wasn’t killed. I was silenced.

After going back, I remained in Iran for 21 years, banished from the stage while sharia law reshaped our society and reduced women to half citizens. I watched my country bleed through eight years of war with Iraq. I finally left in 2000 to reclaim my voice, but my heart remained. For all these years, I have watched helplessly from thousands of miles away as those who claimed to speak for God slowly destroyed the country I love. Now, this regime seems to be gasping for its last breaths.

Elizaveta “Liza” Grinenko had a hunch her name might appear somewhere in the so-called Epstein files that the Justice Department released earlier this year.

A Ukrainian actress based in Kyiv, now 31 years old, Grinenko never met Epstein or interacted with him in any way. But a former close friend of hers had worked as his assistant for several years—and during that time, occasionally offered Liza a position with her boss.

Yet when Liza found her name among the millions of pages that the government posted online in late January—and read the emails in which she was mentioned—she was astonished at what they said. “I felt sick to my stomach,” she told me.

“MAGA Is Split,” Bloomberg tells us. “Will MAGA Forgive Trump’s ‘Betrayal’?” The Week asks.

According to the Associated Press, “cracks” have appeared in “Trump’s MAGA base” over the war in Iran. “Some MAGA Voices Warn Iran Backlash Will Only Grow the Longer the War Lasts,” ABC News adds.

These articles—and others like them across the mainstream media—all take the same basic shape. They all mention Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two former Fox News hosts who have now remade themselves as anti-war crusaders in independent media. Several name-drop Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene as well. As a counterweight, Laura Loomer, a MAGA activist who supports the war, is frequently invoked.

“Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing.”

So said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday. The country’s “neighbors, and in some cases former allies in the Gulf,” he added, “have abandoned them, and their proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, [are] either broken, ineffective, or on the sidelines.”

The assessment deserves more attention than it has received. Hegseth described Iran’s isolation as a military outcome, but it was in fact a structural inevitability—one confirmed when U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz announced on Wednesday that Washington stood with its Gulf Arab allies in a unanimous Security Council vote condemning Iran for its attacks on civilians across the region. By accelerating a regional realignment already underway, Operation Epic Fury has handed Washington a rare strategic opportunity: the establishment of an Abraham Accords 2.0, elevating normalized relations between Israel and the Gulf States from diplomatic symbolism into an integrated security architecture.

Since the start of the Iran-Israel-U.S. war, there has been reasonable criticism of how the war is being conducted as well as questions about the clarity—and viability—of its end goals. At The Free Press, we have published a range of voices reflecting many sides of that debate.

Then there are the people who take it a step too far. Conspiracy theorists ha…

Forty miles northeast of Austin, Texas, in the town of Thrall (population 898), Friday night football begins with a ritual. As the local crowd waits for the Tigers to take to the field, a Thrall high school student ascends the stairs of the metal bleachers to the press box, and leads everybody in a prayer. As the student starts praying, farmers remove their hats, some people close their eyes, and small children are hushed. When the student finishes, a murmured “amen” ripples through the crowd.

This pregame prayer has been happening for as long as anyone can remember—and will continue without a hitch next fall when football season resumes, despite the fact that on January 31, Thrall’s school board voted unanimously not to introduce time for prayer into the school day.

Hosting a debate about God in 2026 might seem like a strange thing to do.

We’re living in an age of artificial intelligence, gene editing, and research missions to Mars. In the past century, we’ve doubled our lifespans, dramatically reduced violence, and lifted billions of people out of poverty, building some of the most prosperous societies in history, many of them increasingly secular.

Today, nearly a third of Americans claim no religious affiliation, which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

But the story of religion in the West is much more complicated than simple decline. In the past few years, we’ve entered what feels like a religious revival, or at least a leveling off in the decline of faith. Even as our society becomes more technologically advanced, many people are searching more intensely for meaning, purpose, and moral clarity. In other words, the question of faith hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it is even more urgent.

For years, intellectuals predicted that as religion receded, society would become calmer, more rational, and more scientific. Shed religious superstition, the theory went, and we would inherit a more enlightened public life. Instead, many societies haven’t become less fervent so much as differently fervent—driven by conspiracy, tribalism, and forms of moral conflict that often feel almost cosmic in intensity.

The premise of our Things That Matter debates, sponsored by Bank of America, is simple but essential. We want to revive the tradition that has long made the United States exceptional: our ability to argue openly across deep divides while still remaining part of the same civic community. Disagreement does not have to mean contempt. And since religion is one of the most politically charged topics in public life, it felt fitting to begin here.

Where does morality come from without God? Are our ideas of human dignity, moral obligation, and human rights ultimately grounded in a transcendent reality—or are they products of human reason alone? Are the apparent benefits of religion simply the community and rituals it nurtures, rather than the truth of its claims?

To explore these questions, we brought together two formidable public intellectuals: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

The debate was sharpened by questions from our live audience. Carlos Egaña reflected on growing up in Venezuela, where Catholicism felt imposed—and wondered why religion can feel stifling in deeply religious societies yet oddly liberating in more secular ones. Chloé Valdary asked how Christians should reckon with the cruelty some people experience in God’s name, including rejection over sexuality. Anthony Gross wondered: If our faith is often an accident of birth, how can anyone step outside of their upbringing and evaluate it honestly?

These are not abstract questions. They get to the heart of how we understand ourselves and the civilization we are trying to build together.

We hope you enjoy the debate.

Subscribe now

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.

There’s a famous story about communism that often gets referenced as an illustration of the absurd. It goes like this. In 1937, after Joseph Stalin delivered a speech at a Communist Party conference, the hall erupted in applause. Party officials jumped to their feet and began clapping enthusiastically. But after a few minutes, an awkward problem emerged: Who would dare stop first? No one wanted to be the first to sit down and risk appearing disloyal. And so the applause continued—for 11 full minutes.

Dictatorships, in their rituals of loyalty, have a habit of slipping into the comic.

Iran had its own comedic moment this week when a life-size cutout of Mojtaba Khamenei, held together with tape, was carried onstage to roaring crowds at the Tehran allegiance rally in Revolution Square. State media broadcast regime loyalists hailing and swearing allegiance to a cardboard Khamenei.

According to Iranian state media, Khamenei sustained leg injuries in the initial U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran. The injuries must be quite serious if a cardboard ayatollah cuts a more commanding figure than a wheelchair-bound Khamenei.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at how the nullification crisis brought former president James Madison back into the fray. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

Judging by the recent Supreme Court decision on tariffs, James Madison, whose 275th birthday is March 16, remains as relevant as ever. His name appears in the decision almost two dozen times—in the opinions of both the justices who struck down President Donald Trump’s preferred method of imposing tariffs and those who would have upheld it.

During the winter of 1832–33, Americans had the good fortune of not having to guess which side the “Father of the Constitution” would take amid the so-called nullification crisis when South Carolina raised a very different challenge to the constitutionality of protective tariffs. Of all the Constitution’s signers, Madison was the only one still alive to give his opinion.