The Free Press

VILNIUS, Lithuania—I’m sitting on a park bench with the commander of the Lithuanian army, Nerijus Stankevičius, talking about the day Russia will attack his country. He calls it “D-Day”—referring not to World War II, but, using its military definition, the day when a combat operation occurs.

In downtown Vilnius, birds are chirping. Tall, good-looking Lithuanians —all Baltic citizens are tall and good-looking—walk to work.

“When D-Day comes, we need to mobilize the reserve forces and fill the structure.” When, not if: That is the clear expectation of the Lithuanian security officials. General Stankevičius, a trim and youthful 49, runs through the requirements of the war in the clinical tone your father might use to discuss how the family needs to get ready for a big vacation trip.

“So, one challenge is that our capital is close to the Belarusian border,” he says. Indeed, to the east, Vilnius is only about 15 miles from a hostile frontier—so close that old-fashioned artillery could fire from the other side and strike us. And to the west? “We have Kaliningrad Oblast, where we have this kind of Russian enclave with huge military forces over there, so . . .threats from both directions.”

In Lithuania’s south these two territories approach one another, squeezing the friendly border with fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member Poland—leaving only a 40-mile-wide gap, in the midst of which sits the Polish town of Suwałki. It will be a busy place should war begin. Add to these terrestrial concerns the fact that, in a major crisis, Russia would activate air defense bubbles centered in Kaliningrad to the west, Belarus to the east, and St. Petersburg to the north. The result will be that, thus surrounded, Lithuania and its two smaller Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, will not see the cavalry come to their rescue anytime soon.

Rob Weisskirch’s office at California State University, Monterey Bay, where he is chairman of the Department of Human Development and Family Science, has been decorated with union memorabilia ever since he began paying dues to the California Faculty Association (CFA) in 2001. He even went on strike in solidarity with Monterey Bay’s unionized faculty in 2024.

That all changed earlier this month. On September 11, Weisskirch resigned from the CFA and cleared out every union hat, button, sign, and award from his office, including his “2019 Unionist of the Year” trophy. He couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.

How Weisskirch reached this point is a story of persistent, entrenched antisemitism within the faculty ranks at colleges and universities—and a union’s apparent refusal to afford Jewish members the kind of representation granted to other groups.

WEST BLOOMFIELD, Michigan — Elise Otis and Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed agree on just about everything, she said—from abortion rights to DEI to taxing the rich. There’s just one thing standing in the way of her casting a ballot for him: what Otis alleges is “his hatred of Jews.”

“Everything else I 1,000 percent agree with,” said Otis, a 55-year-old Jew and lifelong Democrat. “But I can’t support someone I don’t think will keep my family safe.”

Otis is one of more than a dozen members of Temple Israel, one of the largest Reform synagogues in the country, who told me they will not be voting for El-Sayed this November. The synagogue, which sits about 30 minutes outside of Detroit, has historically been home to a liberal congregation—performing gay commitment ceremonies as early as the ’90s—and a bastion of Democratic support. And yet, a member of the temple’s leadership said she expects about 70 percent of congregants to vote for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent Mike Rogers on November 3. Some of the Temple Israel members I spoke with have never voted for a Republican in their lives. A few, including Otis, are still considering whether to vote at all in the Senate race.

“I’m nowhere near a Republican,” said Otis, who shared that she will likely vote for Rogers, the Donald Trump-endorsed former House representative. “He’s the lesser of two evils.”

She added: “He will help keep the Jewish population safe, and I have to support that because I’m raising Jewish kids.”

Six months ago, Otis, a teacher at Temple Israel, was putting her classroom of toddlers down for a nap when she heard a bang so loud she thought the roof had caved in. Instead, Hezbollah supporter Ayman Ghazali had rammed a truck loaded with ammunition, $2,000 worth of fireworks, and 35 gallons of gasoline into a side entrance beside the synagogue’s day-care program. One hundred forty children were inside. The attacker’s truck became wedged in the hallway, preventing him from exiting his car. Ghazali exchanged gunfire with security guards, one of whom suffered a shattered leg in the attack. Then Ghazali shot himself in the head as his car caught on fire. Smoke billowed down the hallways, and sprinklers drenched every crevice.

No one else died that day. But for many congregants at Temple Israel, the attack was a wake-up call. Several told me they thought antisemitism was largely a relic of the past—something that had happened to their grandparents or in other places, not in America.

A second trauma, some congregants have told me, was how 41-year-old El-Sayed, a staunch anti-Israel advocate, responded to the attack in the aftermath.

“Hurt people, hurt people,” El-Sayed said in a video message uploaded to YouTube the day after Ghazali’s assault.

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Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Europe will be a tough sell for many Canadian businesses, national power is nothing to be embarrassed about, and more. Let’s jump right in!

HockeyStickMan sells—you guessed it!—hockey sticks. And one of the men who runs the Ontario company, Joey Walsh, is grappling with what to do now that President Donald Trump has imposed new tariffs of 50 percent on hockey sticks and more than 500 other products made in Canada. HockeyStickMan is one of the largest online hockey retailers in North America, delivering items to American shoppers from a fulfillment center near Buffalo.

The possibility that Canada will become the first “associate member” of the European Union also raises the notion that an economic relationship that has long been secondary for Canada and its many industries might become far more consequential.

But that future seems far away for Walsh and HockeyStickMan. The reason: Roughly half of the company’s business comes from the U.S. and is built from relationships he has spent 15 years developing. Europe simply cannot replace them, he told me.

Walsh described himself as a “very big supporter” of Canada’s efforts under Prime Minister Mark Carney to stand up for itself, become less dependent on the U.S., and fight back with the “dollar for dollar” counter-tariffs that began two weeks ago. Walsh is deeply critical of the Trump administration’s trade negotiating tactics, but draws a distinction between the administration and Americans.

“I know that this is not an expression of Americans,” Walsh said, adding that he still believes in the U.S. and thinks the country will eventually “correct this.”

It’s Tuesday, September 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Alex Berenson on why he’s fearful of AI—and what we can do about it. Jed Rubenfeld on the three media outlets suing Trump for shutting them out of the White House. Arthur Brooks on why relying on AI writing will make you unhappy. And much more.

But first: Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school experiment.

In 2014, Nikole Hannah-Jones made a decision: She would send her daughter Najya to a bad school. The New York Times journalist, who would later become known as the face of the newspaper’s 1619 Project, explained in an essay soon after that she was doing so to help fight inequality and segregation. On Sunday, Hannah-Jones published an update on her experiment, which has been a disaster by her own admission. The education Najya, now 16, received at multiple schools was appalling, and it left her furious and feeling betrayed by her mother.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she yelled at Nikole on one occasion. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

It’s tempting to kick an ideological opponent when they’re down, writes Coleman Hughes of the admission, but it’s far better to learn from their mistakes. What, then, are the takeaways from Hannah-Jones’ decision to put ideology ahead of her daughter’s best interests? Coleman breaks that down in his piece for us today.

—Oliver Wiseman

I read Alex Berenson’s writing pretty closely, and why wouldn’t I? He’s someone who thinks for himself and has been proven right on the problems with cannabis, why public health wildly overreacted to Covid, and why mRNA vaccines were not the silver bullet they were sold as. So when I saw him laying out his fears of AI, I wanted to better understand his thought process. I asked him to write a piece for us about why he has gone from an AI skeptic to someone who worries about the harm it could cause. The piece he turned in is lucid, thoughtful—and, to my thinking, persuasive. I think you’ll agree. —Joe Nocera

• Bari Weiss and Simon Sebag Montefiore. Live in New York City. Thursday, October 1, at 7 p.m. Tickets here—selling fast!

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• The United Nations General Assembly will begin today in New York City, bringing together hundreds of world leaders and foreign diplomats. President Trump is scheduled to meet today with the leaders of Persian Gulf nations to speak about the future of the Iran war, two officials told CNN.

• Paramount Skydance has reached a deal with a group of U.S. states, addressing antitrust concerns and clearing the way for its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount, the parent company of The Free Press, threatened last week to leave California amid antitrust lawsuits from 12 state attorneys general. The new deal, which settles those suits, bars Paramount from closing its studios in Los Angeles for at least five years.

• Thousands of flights were delayed or canceled on Monday across several major airports on the East Coast due to a telecommunications error. The loss of connection was caused by a circuit failure in a Philadelphia air traffic control center and prolonged by the accidental severing of a backup fiber line in New Jersey, one FAA official said.

• A jury on Monday found a Vermont man guilty of attempted murder in the 2023 shooting of three Palestinian students who were walking in his neighborhood. The verdict rejected the assailant’s insanity defense, which hinged on claims that he believed he was doing the bidding of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.

• An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Sunday shot and wounded a man in Austin, Texas, who had illegally entered the U.S. and “had a final order of removal,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. The man is in stable condition and “in federal custody pending removal,” officials said.

• Cindy Crawford’s son Presley Gerber died on Sunday at 27 in a rehabilitation facility following a yearslong struggle with substance abuse and mental health issues, the Associated Press reported. A cause of death has not yet been determined, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.

• Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers have requested an investigation of the lone juror who wanted to convict the Massachusetts mother of murder in the deaths of her three children. The motion, made public Monday, asks the court to probe the juror about alleged cell phone use during deliberations and his truthfulness on a questionnaire filled out during the jury selection process.

Could Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey form a “Muslim NATO?” Pakistan has the nuclear arsenal, Saudi Arabia has the wealth, and Turkey has the NATO-trained military—“you put these three together and it becomes a pretty formidable force,” says CBS News senior foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tyab. Today, he joins School of War to discuss whether the pact c…

It is a sad reality of the modern era that when an ideological opponent admits they made a terrible mistake, most people are tempted to kick them while they’re down. This exact situation has arisen with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ latest essay in The New York Times Magazine, which returns to a decision she wrote about a decade ago in a viral piece called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, she explained why she was sending her black, 4-year-old daughter, Najya, to a bad public school when she could have sent her to a good one, or even to a private school. Now she’s telling a different story about how that choice played out.

At the time, Hannah-Jones’ rationale was that bad schools are caused by a lack of upper-middle-class parents. Those parents, she argued, have the resources and connections to lobby on behalf of the entire student body (including poorer students from dysfunctional families), raise additional funding, and generally improve the quality of the education for all. As an upper-middle-class parent herself, Hannah-Jones—best known as the face of the Times’ 1619 Project—felt she had an obligation to be part of the solution, which meant sending Najya to a bad school. On the progressive left, her experiment read as noble. To everyone else, it was madness.

Ten years later the results are in, and the skeptics have run the table. By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged down her daughter, and barely seemed to notice she was there.

When Najya was in third grade, Hannah-Jones decided to visit her school at lunchtime and found that kids were sitting there with “no lunch and no adult supervision.” Other kids were “running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” At a private school this would be an emergency that led to immediate firings. At a dysfunctional public school, it’s just another day. Hannah-Jones was left trying to lobby an absentee principal who “regularly wouldn’t engage with [her] or wasn’t in the building at all.”

You may know me (if you know me) as the guy who was kicked off Twitter in 2021 for saying mRNA Covid shots didn’t stop infection. (They didn’t.)

Or the guy who was called an ageist psychopath in 2020 for saying Covid lockdowns were wrong and schools should be open. (Conventional wisdom now.)

Or the guy who was called a racist in 2019 for saying cannabis causes psychosis, and legalizing it wasn’t a great idea. (It wasn’t.)

Yeah, I’m that guy. The Covid Contrarian, the Pandemic’s Wrongest Man (hee-hee). My opinions aren’t always popular, particularly with the liberal and journalistic elite. I don’t care. I do my own research (uh-oh) and work out what I think for myself, not for clicks or controversy but because I like to write the truth, or near as I can get to it. It doesn’t mean I’m always right, but I do my best.

So, as the fight over the risks of artificial intelligence explodes, you might think I’d be in the AI-doom-is-hyped, Anthropic’s-just-looking-for-a-bailout crowd, like many other contrarian/conservative thinkers.

You’d be wrong.

President Trump announced last week that three news organizations—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—would be banned from White House press briefings because they are “Fake News Media Outlets” publishing “one-sided,” “never good,” “purposely negative stories” about him. Over the weekend, reporters from those outlets were denied entry to the West Wing. On Monday the three organizations sued Trump, claiming the ban is unconstitutional. Now the rest of the press is chattering about the prospects of that suit.

Take it to the bank: The media companies will win. My guess is that the district court will enjoin the ban within a week.

Here’s why I’m so confident. The case was filed in the federal District Court for the District of Columbia. That court is required to follow decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. And that appeals court has confronted this issue several times in the past and has expressly, repeatedly held that this kind of ban violates the First Amendment.

What was the basis for the D.C. Circuit’s rulings? After all, the ban doesn’t prevent the affected news organizations from publishing whatever stories they like. Trump’s defenders argue that news organizations have no constitutional right to enter the White House, nor to receive any briefings from White House staff. And they’re correct about that. The president could put a complete stop to all press briefings if he wanted. He could limit White House access solely to government personnel, barring all newspeople completely, and there would be no constitutional violation.

Different rules apply, however, once the president has chosen to have his press team conduct briefings open widely to Washington’s press.