The Free Press

In late 18th-century Europe, you knew trouble was brewing when your son started wearing yellow pants.

This was a sign he might be suffering from the “Werther Effect,” so named for the main character in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The story revolves around a romantic youth with signature yellow trousers who, spurned by his true love, takes his own life. Young men in several countries, overcome by amorous fervor after reading the book, would emulate the protagonist in manner and dress, seek out their soulmates, and audaciously declare their love. And when the objects of their affection were women totally out of their league who were unswayed by maudlin displays and yellow trousers, these men would, like Young Werther, do themselves in.

The yellow pants were the uniform of mass despair caused by the novel—a sartorial case of social contagion. When this type of social contagion becomes a mass phenomenon, behavioral scientists have a name for it: a psychogenic epidemic, or one in which mental or physical suffering spreads widely and quickly, especially among adolescents and young adults, despite lacking any obvious biological origin.

Psychogenic epidemics are still common today, although they are not usually as bizarre as the Werther Effect. The 2026 equivalent of yellow pants is, I would argue, the hunched-over posture of a population addicted to the screens in our pockets.

Let me explain.

It’s Monday, February 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: Will Rahn pays tribute to America’s hockey heroes. Are aliens real? We asked Tyler Cowen. Jed Rubenfeld, Kenneth Rogoff, and Rupa Subramanya on where the tariff fight goes next. Plus: How Tehran whitewashes its crimes. And much more.

But first: Tucker, Trump, and the right-wing war over the Jews.

On Friday, Tucker Carlson released a three-hour interview with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. The podcaster who, in recent months, has thrown white nationalists and Holocaust deniers softball questions subjected the ambassador to a grilling.

The interview ruffled feathers—on the American right, in foreign capitals, and beyond. But according to Michael Doran, it also laid bare exactly what Tucker Carlson is playing at. In an important, if disturbing, essay, Michael reveals how—and why—perhaps the most powerful media figure on the right today is trying to persuade Americans that Israel, and the Jews, are to blame for the problems we face. Read it here:

Carlson’s Huckabee interview—which featured extensive debate over scripture—made clear that the fight over antisemitism on the right isn’t just a political clash. It’s also religious. In his latest Free Press dispatch, Peter Savodnik reports on the divides among Christians over Israel and the Jews, and talks to those trying to fight back against the rising tide of hate. Read his report on a Christian civil war:

And where is the president in all this? Eli Lake reports on how the White House is navigating surging antisemitism and Tucker’s growing hostility to Trump’s policies. For a long time, Trump tried to skirt questions about Tucker. But that appears to be getting harder. Eli’s sources tell him that Trump spoke to Tucker about Israel. But if they hoped Tucker’s Huckabee interview would be a chance for a reset, they would soon be disappointed. Read Eli on Donald Trump’s Tucker Carlson problem:

—The Editors

In the first blockbuster of its term on Friday, the Supreme Court finally decided the tariffs case—and it struck them down. It’s a major rebuke of President Donald Trump’s signature policy, and its effect will extend to every corner of the economy. But does last week’s ruling really mean the end of the tariffs? Our columnists, correspondents, and contributors help you make sense of the law, the economics, and the on-the-ground impact of the decision.

Up first, our legal columnist Jed Rubenfeld explains how the Court left the door open for a tariff revival—and how President Trump is capitalizing on it already. Read Jed on what will happen now:

Despite the controversy, Friday’s ruling hasn’t moved markets much. But as leading economist Kenneth Rogoff argues today, the economic impact is only a secondary story here. Read his piece to find out why the ruling against tariffs is really a bigger battle over the future of American institutions:

And third, Rupa Subramanya talks to a soybean farmer whose business has been hit hard by the tariffs. She asked him about how the ruling would change his bottom line:

• An armed man was shot and killed at Mar-a-Lago Sunday, after he breached its secure perimeter in his vehicle. The president was at the White House when the breach occurred.

• The Mexican army killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, or “El Mencho,” in an operation on Sunday. The high-profile killing plunged the region into chaos, with reports of shots fired at the local airport, and many airlines suspending flights to the region. The State Department advised Americans in the area to remain in a safe place given the disorder.

• Blizzards began to sweep the East Coast on Sunday. The National Weather Service warned that snowfall could reach between one to two feet. Several states declared emergencies this weekend while New York City and New Jersey have issued travel bans.

• President Trump said on Saturday that he plans to raise global tariffs to 15 percent. The announcement came just a day after a Supreme Court ruling struck down part of his tariff plan.

• A new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finds that six in 10 Americans disapprove of President Trump ahead of the State of the Union address on Tuesday. The speech comes soon after the president’s tariff defeat at the Supreme Court, and with U.S. forces amassed in the Middle East as Trump considers whether or not to strike Iran.

• Russian drones and missiles attacked Ukraine’s power grid on Sunday, killing at least one man in Kyiv. The strikes came just before Ukraine was set to mark the fourth anniversary of the war on Tuesday, and following another round of failed peace talks.

• Centerview Partners settled a wrongful termination lawsuit from a former analyst who alleged she had been fired for demanding more sleep. The plaintiff claimed that her mood and anxiety disorders required at least eight hours of rest per night, and initially sought $5 million in damages.

Debates over crime policy are often driven by emotion. People argue based on their feelings about police presence on their streets, or narratives about the social conditions they believe produce criminals. But Jennifer Doleac, an economist who focuses on criminal justice, contends that emotion shouldn’t be the basis of this conversation. Like sound econ…

Donald Trump has a Tucker Carlson problem. Since January, the president has privately urged the popular podcast host to end his battle with prominent pro-Israel MAGA influencers, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations.

People close to Trump have routinely brought Carlson’s attacks on Israel to his attention. And they have warned, as one Republican fundraiser close to the White House said, that the split Carlson was creating in Trump’s coalition was “destroying the chances of winning the midterms and the next election.”

The interview that Carlson aired on Friday with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, could have been a chance for Carlson to create a reset. But instead of marking a truce, Carlson used the combative three-hour interview to open up a new front.

Since the October 7, 2023 massacre, Carlson has condemned Israel’s response, and claimed that the Jewish state exercises a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy. He has mused that Iran obtaining nuclear weapons would actually be a “stabilizing” force in the Middle East. Since last year, he has been engaged in a pitched battle with conservative media influencers like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, one that Carlson himself started in the spring when he lobbied the White House to block Israel from attacking Iran.

Tucker Carlson snookered Mike Huckabee. “When I sat down with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday,” the American ambassador to Israel reflected on X, “I was expecting a thoughtful conversation and that he would ask questions and give me the opportunity to actually respond.”

Huckabee entered the studio for what he thought would be an interview led by a man of good faith. Carlson conducted something closer to a cross-examination. But Carlson turned the exchange into political theater—a one-sided grilling framed around the loss of American dignity to foreign priorities. From the outset, he framed Huckabee as the courteous emissary of a foreign-policy establishment that, in Carlson’s telling, has subordinated American citizens to the priorities of Jews worldwide. Carlson cast himself as a polite but angry citizen refusing to defer to a captured member of a corrupt elite.

A single organizing question ran through every exchange: Does the United States government still belong to its citizens, or does it serve a transnational elite, dominated by the Jews?

It was there when Carlson detailed his own alleged humiliation by Israeli officials and the U.S. embassy’s supposed deference to them. It was there when he grilled Huckabee on meeting Jonathan Pollard, the convicted spy who betrayed America for Israel. It was there when he pressed on why accused American sex offenders find refuge in Israel, or why Epstein files mentioning Israeli figures remain sealed.

“Are aliens real?” a podcaster asked former president Obama earlier this month.

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said, smiling. “And they’re not being kept in Area 51.”

As you might guess, a former president suggesting even jokingly that aliens might be among us gets attention. Obama soon walked back his remarks, clarifying that he’d seen no evidence “that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.” While “the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote, he felt it was unlikely aliens had visited us across the distances of space.

Still, unlikely isn’t impossible. And the alien question is getting plenty of life these days, with Trump announcing last week that he had directed the government to release any files on aliens or extraterrestrial life.

NASHVILLE — It had been five days since Miss California-turned-Catholic crusader Carrie Prejean Boller had been booted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission for demonizing Jews, and Patricia Heaton, whose sister is a nun, was fretting about the future of her faith.

Lashing out against her fellow Catholics who crave “a medieval version of Catholicism,” Heaton, who became famous playing Debra Barone on the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, told me: “It’s the Spanish Inquisition—you know, calling Jews the ‘perfidious Jews’ and all that.”

We were in a conference room on the second floor of the W Hotel, where a large crowd of Israel supporters—the newly created Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress—was about to have dinner. Attendees included former NFL star Nick Lowery, former Auburn University basketball coach Bruce Pearl, and former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation head Johnnie Moore. Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty and former Department of Education secretary Betsy DeVos turned up the next day.

The conference was meant to strengthen the bonds between Jewish and Christian Zionists—and, more importantly, to remind the wider public why those bonds exist in the first place. They exist, conference attendees repeatedly said, because the West is engaged in a “civilizational struggle” against radicals, Islamists, and their financiers in Qatar and Iran. Worse yet, as far as attendees were concerned, just as that struggle is nearing an inflection point, just as Israel is successfully pushing back against the forces of barbarism in Gaza and Lebanon and Yemen, and the pro-democracy demonstrators are taking to the streets in Iran, Democrats as well as Republicans are sounding increasingly unsympathetic to the Jewish state. Both parties seem, as so many attendees told me, “confused.”

It was the best hockey game in a generation. And America won.

Sunday’s gold medal game between Team USA and Canada could have easily been a lopsided affair. The Canadians had built perhaps the best team ever to grace the ice. They were undefeated heading into Sunday’s matchup. But so, too, were the underdog Americans, who clinched the win in overtime.

The victory capped off a fantastic Winter Olympics for Team USA, bringing the final gold medal haul to 12, a new American record, behind only Norway’s 18. And it erased some sour moments when U.S. athletes found themselves mired in political controversy.

In late December and early January, as Iranians took to the streets to protest the country’s economic malaise, the Islamic Republic quietly began seeding onto social media its own narrative of events, in preparation for a brutal crackdown. The uprising wasn’t organic or homegrown, according to posts by state-backed media accounts, but the shadowy work of the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency. “The enemies, particularly the United States and Israeli regime, are focused on fueling insecurity in Iran by making use of the tools of soft warfare,” state-controlled Fars News Agency proclaimed on January 5, citing the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.

In the days that followed, particularly January 8 and 9, Iran’s security forces mowed down thousands of ordinary Iranians in an operation that is widely seen as the bloodiest in the country’s modern history. Twinned with this crackdown has been a sophisticated, state-backed information offensive.

For the Islamic Republic to rely on claims of U.S. and Israeli involvement to justify its repression isn’t new. The difference between this campaign and the Iranian regime’s frequent efforts to smear dissidents and protesters as foreign agents is that the push launched by the regime this time was not designed only, or even mainly, for domestic consumption. It was directed just as much at ideological allies and supporters abroad, inserting the Islamic Republic’s propaganda into global political discussions and seeking to whitewash the massacre of Iranian protesters.

Friday’s Supreme Court ruling nullifying President Donald Trump’s signature tariff policy is an encouraging step toward protecting the balance of power between the executive branch, Congress, and the courts. The justices chose to rein in the president after many past decisions when they had allowed him to expand his power. But what will the ruling mean for ordinary Americans and for the economy?

Notably, stock and bond markets barely shrugged. Perhaps markets were indifferent because, although the Supreme Court took away Trump’s favorite tariff tool, the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, it left the door wide open for him to impose tariffs several other ways. These are all slower and make tariffs less of a one-man show. But taken together, the alternative paths to hiking tariffs can potentially take Trump to a similar worldwide tariff level. Indeed, Trump has already announced a new across-the-board 15 percent tariff to replace some of the levies.

Perhaps the other reason markets did not get more excited is that, for all the distortions tariffs cause in theory, and despite any upward pressure they put on prices, the U.S. economy has largely been rolling along. We’ve had decreasing inflation and robust growth since the second half of last year, punctuated modestly by government shutdowns.