The Free Press

In February 2019, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri promised that the platform would ban any graphic content depicting self-harm.

“It won’t be in search, it won’t be in hashtags, it won’t be in recommendations,” he told a reporter for the BBC.

Beginning in the 2010s, the company had come under scrutiny for its perceived role in a growing teen mental health crisis. Then, in 2017, a 14-year-old girl in the United Kingdom named Molly Russell committed suicide after being fed self-harm content on Instagram. Russell’s death spurred an international reckoning on teenage social media usage.

But nearly a year after Mosseri assured the public that Instagram was taking action, executives for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, appeared to admit the algorithm was still pushing self-harm and eating disorder content.

Twenty-six days ago, Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother, Nancy, was kidnapped from her bed. Authorities have yet to find her. This week, Savannah’s family announced a million-dollar reward for the recovery of their mother.

Every person with internet access and a moral conscience has sympathy for Savannah Guthrie. But few people actually understand what she’s going through.

I’m one who does.

Last year, President Donald Trump appointed us—a Catholic and a Jew—as legal advisers to the new Religious Liberty Commission (RLC). Our mission is to “offer diverse perspectives on how the federal government can defend religious liberty for all Americans.”

Since it was established by the president last May, the committee has held hearings on a number of key issues, including the rights to practice religion freely in the military and in our schools.

Earlier this month, the RLC held its fifth public hearing, dedicated to the issue of antisemitism. Many of the witnesses provided compelling testimony of how they suffered humiliating discrimination in recent years because they were Jews, and how the rise in antisemitism has affected their ability to keep Jewish people safe.

Every hearing held by the RLC passed without incident. Except for this one.

PLATEAU STATE, Nigeria — Dirt tracks slice through rivulets of trash. Stagnant water pools in open gutters and bakes in the sun. The stench is thick in the air, both sour and sickly sweet. It catches in the back of my throat, making me gag.

And everywhere you look, there are the children: playing in the dirt, kicking half-deflated soccer balls, laughing in groups, and begging for food. Women carry babies in their arms or strap them to their backs, their bellies swollen with yet more children, or malnutrition, citizens of a young country that is itself swelling and growing.

This is Mangu in Nigeria’s Plateau State, and with its bustle, poverty, and endless human drama, it is a typical sub-Saharan African town. But it’s also something else: a front line of one of the world’s bloodiest religious conflicts. Just beyond its edges lies a countryside where Christian communities are being destroyed and driven from their land.

I needed to get home in time to be arrested by the FBI.

Federal agents were going to be in my driveway at 9 a.m. sharp on the morning of Thursday, November 19, 2020, and I was told not to be late.

Home was Cincinnati, but I would be starting the day in Cleveland, four hours away. My wife, Sarah, was finishing her medical residency at the Cleveland Clinic, and we were frequently back and forth between the two cities.

In order to not cut it close, I set my alarm clock for 3:30 a.m.

But setting my alarm didn’t matter. I never fell asleep. How could I? I had no idea what the feds were saying I had done—or what would happen next.

A week earlier, a member of the Cincinnati City Council had been indicted on charges of accepting cash bribes from undercover FBI agents in exchange for support of a project to redevelop a large blighted downtown building on Elm Street. I was also on the city council, and was a big supporter of the Elm Street project. And in 2018 and 2019, I had been in frequent contact with those same undercover agents, who were posing as out-of-town investors.

During that time, they had made legal contributions to my political action committee—donations that any citizen could look up. They had proposed the donations, not me, and not a cent had ever gone into my own pocket. I couldn’t imagine that their political donations could be construed as a bribe. The redevelopment that they were pretending to be involved with was one I had supported since before I had met them and was clearly in the public interest.

What was I missing?

Sex shows up everywhere in American culture. Think: the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders; popular sex icons from Madonna and Britney Spears to Tate McRae and Sabrina Carpenter; the 75-foot Calvin Klein billboard on Houston Street in New York; the millions of “thirst traps” flooding social media; and popular TV shows, from Sex and the City to Heated Rivalry. …

A few days after New Year’s 2020, my phone pinged with a news alert: The United States had killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike. I was still on Christmas holiday with my wife, and we were at dinner with friends. At the time I was deep into a book project, a collaboration with retired Admiral James Stavridis, the former commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As our table discussed the news of Soleimani’s death, my phone rang. I excused myself from the conversation, saying simply, “It’s the admiral.” This elicited several serious looks, as I would surely now hear the straight scoop on what this strike meant for our country and perhaps the world.

But that’s not exactly what happened. “Well,” said the admiral as I answered his call. “This completely screws up our second chapter.”

Dear Abigail,

My mid-20s daughter is overweight. She wasn’t always. She grew up playing sports and dancing. She more or less avoided the “freshman 15” when she went off to college. But I think the stress of grad school contributed to the gain.

She has since moved far away for a job, and distance is a barrier to heart-to-heart talks about any subject, much less about her weight. I find that when we are together, I can’t bring it up, because I don’t want to ruin our time together.

I raised my daughter to make healthy decisions but did not always succeed in modeling that behavior myself—my weight has fluctuated, and I seek comfort foods in times of stress. So I know how it feels, and I worry about her.

I feel that as her mother I should be able to talk to her about this and encourage her to actively lose weight, but I am unable to find the words and say them out loud.

I am braced for your tough love. Thank you in advance!

—Philippa, 55

Philippa,

When my twin boys were toddlers, my husband and I took them one Sunday morning to a park near our home. I was pregnant with our daughter at the time and a little muddleheaded. I looked over at the woman pushing a little boy in the swing next to mine and recognized her as the wife of an old classmate of my husband’s. We chatted for a bit.

Then, I did something from which I will never recover.

I said, “When are you due?”

The beat she took to register my question still resides, on ice, in my spinal column.

“I just never lost the baby weight,” she said.

To this day, on the rare occasions when I run into her, it is all I can do not to leap behind a hedge. I had thoughtlessly violated one of the ironclad rules of social engagement: When is the right time to ask a woman if she’s pregnant? Never. Never is the right time.

It’s Thursday, February 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Suzy Weiss on how Olympic hockey was hijacked. Bethany McLean on how a blog post spooked markets. Rod Dreher on Jesse Jackson’s true legacy. Yuval Levin asks if Trump has run out of ideas. Plus: Why The Brothers Karamazov is the perfect book for Lent.

But first: Epstein’s world, through the eyes of law enforcement.

It’s been a month since the release of the latest—and, according to the Department of Justice, final—tranche of Epstein files. Yet the fallout shows no sign of slowing. In the past day alone, Larry Summers resigned from Harvard over his association with Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Gates apologized to staff at his foundation about the time he spent with Epstein.

Today, The Free Press is publishing a new set of videos that are buried deep in the government’s trove of data. Earlier this month, we published 14 hours of footage seized from Epstein’s electronic devices. Today’s release contains 12 hours of footage gathered during more than a decade of efforts by law enforcement to investigate Epstein. Tanya Lukyanova scoured the files and found footage of police searching Epstein’s mansion, clips from depositions, and even covert footage of an FBI sting operation to retrieve his infamous “little black book.” These videos show Epstein’s life from the viewpoint of people who tried to bring him to justice—down to the jail in which he died. Watch them here:

—The Editors

• Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general and an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared before the Senate yesterday for her confirmation hearing. Hoping to focus on nutrition and “frankenfoods,” Casey drew fire from both sides of the aisle for her skeptical views on vaccines.

• A whistleblower said that an FBI response team was delayed in reaching the site of a mass shooting at Brown University in December because of director Kash Patel’s government jet use, MS NOW reported. Patel had taken one of the FBI’s two available planes to Florida and ordered the other to be held for a team that would not ordinarily respond to that kind of shooting.

• SpaceX’s decision earlier this month to shut down Starlink satellite internet service for the Russian military caused a communications and operational breakdown for Russian forces occupying Ukraine, Politico reported. Ukraine recaptured over 70 square miles in the days after the shutdown.

• The federal government may not search a Washington Post reporter’s devices seized as part of a national security leak investigation, a federal judge ruled. Giving prosecutors access “is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” the judge wrote.

• The prediction market platform Kalshi fined and reported an employee of top YouTube creator MrBeast to federal regulators for insider trading. Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, traded around $4,000 on markets related to the content creator and had “near-perfect” success, according to Kalshi.

• The Trump administration declined to share intelligence with Congress related to a whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, citing executive privilege, The Wall Street Journal reported. The information involves a conversation between two foreign nationals about Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

• A researcher found that the most common AI models decided to deploy nuclear weapons 95 percent of the time in war game scenarios. Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at King’s College London, pitted Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini against each other, and said they showed “little sense of horror” at the prospect of nuclear war.

• Dunkin’ 48-ounce coffee buckets sold out after being tested at select locations in New England. The buckets came with a handle and giant straw, sold for $8.89 and up, and could be filled with iced coffees, lattes, and refreshers.

A coalition of Jewish parents and civil rights organizations have filed the first antisemitism lawsuit against a U.S. state, accusing the California government of failing to protect Jewish students from a surge of antisemitic harassment, violence, and propaganda in the state’s public schools. The filing accuses the state of offering only “toothless remedies” to the scourge of antisemitism through a “glacial and opaque administrative process.”

The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs on behalf of several Jewish families. Defendants include a number of state agencies, among them the California Department of Education.

The lawsuit comes more than two years after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, which the Brandeis Center alleges triggered an unprecedented wave of antisemitic incidents in California’s schools that has never been adequately addressed. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, antisemitic incidents reached their highest-ever recorded levels in the United States, with violent assaults on Jewish people increasing 21 percent compared to the previous year.

California is one of the few states with a constitutional provision explicitly guaranteeing an equitable and free education, according to Marci Lerner Miller, the director of legal investigations with the Brandeis Center. The lawsuit explicitly cites this provision in arguing that pervasive antisemitism in California’s public schools has “deprived [Jewish students] of equal access to educational benefits and opportunities.”

In the last year there have been many lawsuits filed against universities, accusing them of failing to combat antisemitism and prompting the federal government to freeze billions of dollars in college funding. But now, concern is being raised that antisemitism originates earlier, before students even set foot on a college campus. Elementary school students in Brooklyn, for example, have been taught about the Middle East using a map that entirely excluded the state of Israel, as part of a classroom program funded by the Qatari government. In Queens, a high school teacher had to flee from a mob after her students discovered she attended a protest in support of Israel. In California, under the guise of “ethnic studies,” high school teachers are telling students that “Zionists,” or anyone associated with the state of Israel, are “oppressors” and settler colonialists. In one particularly shocking instance, students at a high school in Silicon Valley were asked to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change as part of a physics assignment.

This worrying trend in schools is what caused the Brandeis Center to act. The complaint details incidents across more than a dozen California school districts, citing instances of student-on-student harassment and violence, teacher-led antisemitism and biased curricula, and the systematic segregation of Jewish students who complain about antisemitic instances in their respective schools.

Now, concern is being raised that antisemitism originates before students even set foot on a college campus.

“The parents who are in the complaint, they’ve done everything right. They’ve gone through the proper steps. They filed these complaints with the district. Some of them have appealed the decisions. They’ve waited months, years in some cases, and some have never gotten decisions,” Miller said. “They’ve gone through the process that they’ve always assumed would protect their children, and it hasn’t done that.”

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Melissa Alexander, said her 12-year-old son now “refuses to speak about his Jewish heritage and wear his Jewish star anymore at school” due to the way he was treated by one of his teachers.

The suit claims the teacher, whose public social media accounts were allegedly “filled with virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel content,” allegedly targeted the student with fabricated misconduct allegations because he wore Israel-related T-shirts and a Star of David necklace to school. The complaint also alleges that the teacher accused him of being too loud in class, telling the 12-year-old that he had done something “egregious and dangerous.” When Alexander asked what her son had done, the teacher allegedly told her “it did not matter.” Alexander’s son received “Unsatisfactory” grades in the class, and was told that he might not be able “to matriculate to eighth grade.”

“None of [the child’s] other teachers raised concerns about his behavior, and aside from the class with this teacher, [he] was a straight-A student,” the claim alleges.

The school never took action against the teacher, according to the complaint. “Watching my son navigate these challenges has broken my heart,” Alexander said.

In another striking example, a third-grade girl at Kester Elementary School in Los Angeles—identified in the complaint as Student B—planned to perform in the school talent show in 2024, singing a song by an Israeli Eurovision contestant and carrying a poster that included the Israeli flag. Before she could take to the stage, a teaching assistant allegedly stopped the 9-year-old and told her that “Israel is a racist apartheid state, and by supporting Israel, you are being racist.” The lawsuit claims she was barred from performing with her poster. The family has since moved her to a different school.

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Melissa Alexander, said her son now “refuses to speak about his Jewish heritage and wear his Jewish star anymore at school.”

Two more plaintiffs in the case, Dawn and Michael Rosenthal, allege that in 2024, their son, B.R., transferred to Daniel Pearl Magnet High School—named for the Jewish journalist murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002—specifically to escape antisemitism at his previous school, Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies. At Sherman Oaks, his peers allegedly called him “shitcan Jew,” and taunted him with “Heil Hitler” salutes. As a solution, administrators allegedly suggested he eat lunch alone in a segregated space rather than with his classmates. In November 2022, during a physical education class, a group of students chased him around the track yelling “Let’s get the Jew,” tripped him, and beat him until he lost consciousness. The school did not suspend a single attacker. Some were placed back in B.R.’s classes, according to the complaint.

Daniel Pearl Magnet was supposed to be a fresh start. Instead, the complaint alleges, it became another incubator of antisemitism. B.R.’s honors chemistry teacher repeatedly displayed a “Free Palestine” poster and refused a principal’s request to remove it. On October 7, 2025—the two-year anniversary of the Hamas massacre—the teacher allegedly wrote on the whiteboard: “Oy vey, it’s free,” with an arrow pointing to “FREE PALESTINE.” When the Rosenthals complained, the school offered to pull B.R. from the class entirely and enroll him in a solo online course through a credit-recovery platform, costing him both in-person instruction and his honors designation. The teacher was ultimately removed, but not for any of this—he was arrested on felony charges after stapling a student’s arm.

Beyond individual incidents of harassment, the complaint also devotes substantial attention to what it describes as the infiltration of “antisemitic propaganda” into the classroom.

It focuses particularly on an unauthorized curriculum created by members of the Oakland Education Association, which was used in a December 2023 teach-in that reached students across grade levels, including kindergartners.

The curriculum’s materials included a read-aloud of the children’s alphabet book P Is for Palestine, in which “I is for Intifada,” and is defined in the book as “rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grown-up.” The complaint notes that the word intifada refers to two periods of sustained violence in which more than a thousand Israeli civilians—including children—were killed in suicide bombings of buses and cafés carried out by Palestinian terrorist organizations.

A worksheet included in the same curriculum asked elementary school children to draw “the Zionist leaders of Israel receiv[ing] money and support.” Another worksheet referred to “Zionist bullies” who are “”always scaring” and “arresting” Palestinian children.

Despite widespread public reporting about the teach-in at the time, and the Oakland Unified School District’s own statement that it was unauthorized, the complaint states that no teachers who participated were ever disciplined.

One parent who raised the alarm about this curriculum, Ivy Chesser, alleges in the suit that when she raised concerns to the administration, she was “ignored, dismissed, or offered only paltry solutions that reflect a tolerance for antisemitism.”

“I chose to be a part of this lawsuit,” Chesser said, “because I am afraid for the future my children will face after generations are allowed to be indoctrinated with antisemitism and anti-Americanism in our classrooms.”

“The California education system is teaching the state’s children that Jewish Americans and Israelis are racists, white supremacists, oppressors, and baby-killers who should be shunned,” said Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center and a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. “The result is not surprising: Jewish children and children perceived as Jewish are bullied and excluded by their peers and harassed by their teachers, who silence, mock, and even segregate them if they speak out.”

The lawsuit is seeking widespread changes to how the state of California prevents and addresses antisemitism, including “by investigating and addressing past acts of misconduct, taking proactive measures to stop future discrimination, and forbidding California’s schools from being commandeered as centers of antisemitic indoctrination.”

“We’re hoping to give Jewish students the same opportunities as every other student in California to a free and equal public education, which is their guaranteed constitutional right,” said Miller. “Unfortunately, we have to do this through the lawsuit, because all of the other methods the parents and we tried have not been enough to accomplish that.”