The Free Press

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where we choose sides in the Iran war, are mired in a productivity problem, and finally find a family doctor. Let’s jump in!

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney created some confusion when he used the phrase new world order in January to describe the shifting global landscape marked by President Donald Trump’s disruption of traditional alliances and trade norms. But after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, Carney’s allegiance was crystal clear.

“Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” the prime minister said in a statement. Carney also reaffirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself and to ensure the security of its people.”

Gone for now, at least, is all the talk about Canada’s recent pivot toward China, the rancor about Donald Trump’s painful tariffs on key sectors of the Canadian economy—such as steel, aluminum, and the auto industry—and the lingering bitterness from the U.S. president’s musings of making Canada merely the “51st state.”

It’s Tuesday, March 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The deep male instinct to “monitor the situation.” Arthur Brooks and Charles Fain Lehman push back against the AI doom and gloom. And more.

But first: The war with Iran shows no sign of slowing.

“The hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday afternoon. Earlier in the day, Donald Trump said the war could last four or five weeks, adding that it “could go far longer.”

Meanwhile, Iran continued its counterattack against a range of Arab targets in the Gulf as well as Israel. The strikes in cities like Doha, Dubai, Tel Aviv, and Manama were mostly intercepted. The U.S. embassy in Riyadh was struck by drones, Saudi officials said, while Qatar said it shot down two Iranian jets. In Lebanon, Israel relaunched strikes against Hezbollah.

Our coverage of this war continues today with stories on the situation in Israel and the American veteran helping Americans stranded in the Middle East. But first, Eli Lake on the schism in the Trump administration, and the silence that speaks volumes from the vice president.

J.D. Vance is not generally one to bite his tongue, but he said nothing publicly about the strikes for two and a half days. He broke that silence Monday, with an interview on Fox News. Eli reports on the gap between what the vice president has said publicly and what he has been up to behind the scenes—and what that says about a schism on the right that could break the MAGA coalition in two.

On Monday, the State Department urged Americans to leave the Middle East as soon as possible. That same day, Madeleine Rowley spoke to someone whose job is to help people do so. Bryan Stern is the combat veteran who runs Grey Bull Rescue. Stern’s outfit spirited Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado out of the country. Now Grey Bull is bringing back Americans stranded in the Middle East. Of Grey Bull’s 804 rescue missions, Stern himself has led 794.

For Israelis, the Iranian missiles and incessant sirens of the last few days are all too familiar. Seth J. Frantzman reports on the national mood in the country, where residents are back in bomb shelters. Read his dispatch on life under rockets.

For all the ink spilled over AI spiking unemployment, crashing the stock market, and causing mass psychosis, there is a much likelier, less-written-about scenario, argues Arthur Brooks: an AI-driven happiness explosion. At some point, maybe soon, we will solve all of the problems AI can solve, come to relish the struggle with the uniquely human ones it can’t, and feel gratified at having had the wisdom to know the difference. For an antidote to the AI doom, read his latest column:

It might take a while for AI to increase human well-being. But in the meantime, Charles Fain Lehman has more reassuring news. If you’re one of 90 million Americans who work a white-collar job, then you’ve been told repeatedly that you’re probably going to get screwed. But that doesn’t match our experience with technology. “While some people will lose their jobs, the vast majority will end up richer and more productive,” Charles writes. Read the historical case for taking an AI chill pill.

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• France is planning to increase its nuclear stockpile and, for the first time ever, dispatch nuclear-armed aircraft to its allies, president Emmanuel Macron announced yesterday. “To be free, one needs to be feared,” Macron said of the initiative aimed at bolstering Europe’s military independence.

• In an unsigned 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court blocked a California policy that largely barred school employees from telling parents if their children were changing their names, taking on new pronouns, or otherwise transitioning genders. The court ruled that parents objecting to the policy were likely to succeed in their argument that the state’s policy violated their right to raise their children in accord with their religious beliefs.

• Vermont senator Bernie Sanders unveiled a proposed $4.4 trillion tax on billionaires yesterday that could soon become a political litmus test for Democrats in the 2028 presidential primary. Revenue from the tax would flow toward a slew of social programs, including $3,000 cash payments for people earning less than $150,000 per year, a minimum $60,000 salary for public school teachers, and an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care.

• Oil prices jumped amid mounting concerns that the Iran war will gum up the global flow of crude and cause inflation to spike. Prices are already up at gas pumps across America, according to GasBuddy, a price-tracking app, which reported the national average had risen to $2.96 per gallon.

• Insurgents raided a village in South Sudan over the weekend, killing at least 169 with a spate of violent attacks threatening to plunge the country into civil war. The UN Mission in South Sudan said in a statement on Sunday that around 1,000 people sheltered at its base after the violence.

The MAGA coalition has always contained multitudes. Donald Trump won the last presidential election with a tent wide enough for nationalist hawks; neo-isolationists; free traders; anti-globalists; evangelicals who love Israel; and Groyper shitposters obsessed with the Jewish state.

For the first 13 months of the second Trump administration this new Trump party has hung together, more or less. But the second Iran war is tearing MAGA apart, and that has put Vice President J.D. Vance in a bind. Vance, who is usually impossible to keep off social media, went radio silent throughout the weekend.

On Monday evening he went on Fox News with Jesse Watters to explain that Donald Trump did not authorize Operation Epic Fury on behalf of the Iranian people or Israel’s safety. The president went to war to “make sure Iran would never have a nuclear weapon.” In other words, this was not the kind of endless war that Trump and Vance campaigned against in 2024.

“A short while ago, the IDF identified missiles launched from Iran toward the territory of the State of Israel,” the Israeli military said on Monday afternoon, three days into a new war with the Islamic Republic.

The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and in Jerusalem, the sky was clear as it turned from blue to red to black. As Israelis know all too well, there is a routine when ballistic missiles are launched toward them. There is the familiar, stomach-churning wave of tension as 10 million people wait to see which areas of the country are under fire.

Like all of my countrymen, I was waiting. Most people in Israel have spent the first days of the Iran war inside. Schools are closed. Festivities for the Purim holiday on Tuesday are mostly cancelled. Very few stores are open, and Israel’s Home Front Command guidelines instruct people to remain near bomb shelters and not gather in groups.

If you’re one of the 90 million Americans who works a white-collar job, then in the past few months you’ve received a clear message: You’re probably going to get screwed. AI will take half of all white-collar jobs in the next four years, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei; expect 20 percent unemployment. “Nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term,” wrote AI investor Matt Shumer in a viral post. Last week week a viral scenario from Citrini Research projected a “human intelligence displacement spiral” caused by AI within two years.

But if doom is coming, no one’s told the bosses. A recent survey of 6,000 chief executives across four countries found that they expect AI to cut employment by just 0.7 percent over the next three years. Another recent analysis of over 12,000 European firms found that so far, AI adoption increases workers’ productivity without having any impact on employment. Research from late last year, meanwhile, found that more AI-exposed industries experienced either the same or more employment than less-exposed industries—not job losses.

There is a famous quote attributed to Leon Trotsky to the effect of: “You may not be interested in the war, but war is interested in you.”

Leon, buddy, let me stop you right at that comma. If you have been watching the social media feeds of dudes (including mine) since early Saturday morning—the beginning of what we now know is called Operation Epic Fury—you will know that there is no chance that we are not interested in the war, which we can watch play out in almost alarming detail in near–real time on the internet.

When there’s modern military conflict, men are, as the self-deprecating but unusually sincere internet meme now goes, “monitoring the situation.”

Bryan Stern, the combat veteran who leads Grey Bull Rescue, made headlines in December for rescuing Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado using a getaway car, two boats, and a private plane. Now the Tampa, Florida, nonprofit organization is being inundated with pleas from Americans who need help evacuating from places like Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran.

Grey Bull Rescue is made up of military special operations and intelligence veterans who are ready to activate and conduct rescue missions around the world. Stern called me via a shaky Starlink satellite connection from a chartered plane flying from Mexico to the Middle East. He said he had just rescued a couple that was stuck in cartel territory.

When asked if he was nervous during the operation despite having over 25 years of service in the U.S. Army and Navy, Stern did not hesitate. “Every minute,” he said. The next mission is to evacuate Americans stranded by the war on Iran.

While his plane flew over the Middle East, Stern told me what those rescues might look like. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Three events, three continents, one week. A parliamentary by-election in Greater Manchester, England; a thunderous war and the death of a tyrant in Iran; and a terrorist attack in Austin, Texas. They seem unrelated. They are not. Together, they tell you where political Islam has got to—and more urgently, where its most committed adherents are heading next.

On February 26, the UK’s Green Party won a parliamentary seat in Gorton and Denton that the Labour Party had held for decades. The Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, secured nearly 15,000 votes. Matt Goodwin, the candidate for the conservative populist Reform party, came in second with about 10,500, while the Labour candidate slipped to third. The obvious question is how a party associated with bike lanes, green energy, and rewilding managed to seize a Labour stronghold in Greater Manchester.

The answer has nothing to do with climate policy.

It may be the first time that a work of fiction has tanked the stock market.

Last week, a viral blog post from Citrini Research titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis outlined a scenario in which, two years from now, artificial intelligence has progressed to the point that it eliminates jobs on a mass scale in nearly every industry. In Citrini’s doomsday alternative reality, this leads to a cratering of consumer spending, more AI adoption to cut costs, deeper unemployment, a stock market crash, mortgage defaults, and so on.

This “thought experiment” sounded realistic enough to investors that last Monday, all the major stock indexes opened sharply lower, and fell further over most of the day. Hardest hit were companies specifically mentioned in the memo, such as American Express, which lost nearly 8 percent.

It’s Monday, March 2. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why the strikes against Iran are really about China. How Western obituaries soft-pedaled the blood on Khamenei’s hands. Tyler Cowen explains the real meaning of the fight between the Pentagon and Anthropic. And more.

But first: What happens if the war against Iran goes badly?

Since the strikes against Iran began Saturday morning, we’ve focused our coverage on the strategy behind the bombing that led to the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the prospect of regime change, and what that could mean not just for Iran but the Middle East. This morning, we start with two pieces that focus on how the war is playing here in the U.S.

First up is contributing writer Elliot Ackerman, who, as a Marine, fought in the Iraq War. He notes that according to a recent Reuters poll, only one in four Americans supports the strike against Iran. In terms of domestic politics, Ackerman writes, “Trump has little margin for error.” And in his view, the chances of an error—of this war going wrong, as happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan—are high. As he put it, “It is possible to imagine [Trump’s] strategy going right. . . . It is also possible to imagine all of this going wrong.”

Elliot makes the case against the war, and his sober analysis deserves a thoughtful read:

While Elliot’s view is informed by America’s attempt at regime change in Iraq, Niall Ferguson argues that all the signs show 2026 will not be a rerun of 2003. If you missed his initial essay on the strikes, read it here:

Meanwhile, Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age and a member of the dovish wing of the conservative movement, dissects how the strikes are playing—and are likely to play—with the president’s base. Noting that some of Trump’s prominent MAGA supporters feel the president has abandoned his “America First” stance, he asks: “Will Republican voters in November’s midterm elections be as willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt as Republicans in Congress are? Or will they feel as ill-used as many of MAGA’s online influencers do?” Read his answer here:

Up next: the media wringing its hands over Khamenei’s death—and the Iranians celebrating.

When the U.S. and Israeli strikes took out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the world had one less tyrant. His legacy is drenched in blood—the blood of Israelis who died at the hands of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, the blood of Americans killed in Iranian attacks on U.S military facilities, and most of all, the blood of his own people who were killed by the thousands when they rose up in protest. But some of the obituaries in the Western press told a very different story. Maya Sulkin writes on how Khamanei’s obituaries whitewashed a terrorist’s legacy.

While the media wrung their hands, Iranian Americans could not have been happier that Khamenei was killed in an Israeli strike. In cities across the U.S., thousands flooded the streets to celebrate his death, and voice their hope that freedom for their country might finally be at hand. Jonas Du hit the streets of Washington, D.C., to hear their harrowing stories and witness their relief firsthand.

• Three U.S. troops were killed and five were seriously injured as Iran countered the U.S. strikes this weekend with strikes of their own on U.S. bases and facilities in the Middle East. President Trump said Sunday that the conflict could last “four weeks or so,” and might result in further casualties.

• A mass shooting in Austin, Texas, killed three and injured 14 others at a popular bar early Sunday morning. The FBI is investigating whether the shooting was an act of terrorism. According to an AP source in law enforcement, the shooter was wearing clothes with an Iranian flag design and declaring “Property of Allah.”

• President Trump announced Sunday that he is willing to speak with the new leadership of Iran, following the death of Khamenei. “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner,” the president said.

• The Treasury Department said Friday that they have terminated union contracts for all IRS and Bureau of the Fiscal Service workers. The move signals an escalation of the federal government’s push for increased control over the departments.

• U.S. Senate candidates in Texas made their final push on the campaign trail this weekend, ahead of Tuesday’s primary. The race between U.S Rep. Jasmine Crockett and State Rep. James Talarico will be watched especially closely, as the Democrats look to topple Republican dominance of the Lone Star State.