The Free Press

It’s Tuesday, February 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Mike Pesca on why he’s rooting against Eileen Gu. Tyler Cowen proposes a simple test for what people really think about immigration. Arthur Brooks on why you should take risks to find love. And more.

But first: The world is going electric—without America.

A lot of people think they know the story of Detroit’s failure in electric cars: Under pressure from Tesla’s success, and the Biden administration, they bet big on an electric transition only to find out that Americans don’t want the cars. That’s become the conventional wisdom on Detroit’s $50 billion worth of electric vehicle losses.

But it’s just not true. So argues Michael Dunne in The Free Press today. Michael is one of the most perceptive experts on America’s auto industry, and he walks through the series of mistakes that have led to America’s electric vehicle fiasco. Buyers in the U.S., just like in other countries, wanted electric cars. But Detroit didn’t know how to build the cars that they wanted, and created chaos as it tried to adapt its gas-powered lineup.

Read Michael’s report on why America is losing this vital economic race—and why it matters. —Mark Gimein

On March 9, join The Free Press’s Coleman Hughes for a special conversation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—the church led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Together with MLK Jr. biographer Jonathan Eig and civil rights pioneer Ambassador Andrew Young, he’ll explore what King’s legacy can teach us today, at a time when America seems to be reaching a boiling point. This event brings together three extraordinary voices in a legendary venue for an unforgettable conversation. It’s our first-ever event in Atlanta, and one you won’t want to miss.

Get Tickets Now

• A nuclear power plant took flight for the first time in American history over the weekend as the military transported a miniature reactor from an Air Force base in California to a base in Utah. President Trump has pledged to get at least three nuclear reactors up and running within the U.S. by July 4.

• Robert Duvall, the Oscar-winning actor known for his roles in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, died peacefully at his Virginia home on Sunday, aged 95. He won an Academy Award for his role as a country singer in 1983’s Tender Mercies and received six other nominations, including for his performance as Lieutenant Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, famous for the line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

• A partial government shutdown continued yesterday after lawmakers failed to make a deal with the White House to fund the Department of Homeland Security through September. Most DHS employees are working without pay as Democrats push for changes to immigration enforcement.

• The Food and Drug Administration will act on a citizen petition to overhaul federal regulations of ultra-processed foods, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CBS News’ 60 Minutes in an interview Sunday evening. The petition, started by scientist and former FDA commissioner David Kessler, calls for the FDA to cease classifying artificial sweeteners such as corn syrup as “Generally Recognized as Safe.”

• The Pentagon may soon end its relationship with AI company Anthropic over its insistence on limiting how the military uses its models, Axios reported. The clash comes after months of disagreement between the government and the AI pacesetter, whose AI technology was reportedly used by the U.S. military in operations like the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

• As a motive for the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie remains unknown, the FBI is analyzing DNA from a glove found near Guthrie’s home that appears to match one worn by a suspect recorded in doorbell camera footage. In an interview with the New York Post on Sunday, President Trump said he would urge the Justice Department to seek the death penalty if the 84-year-old mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie is killed.

• The FBI is refusing to share evidence in the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month, Minnesota’s top investigative agency said yesterday. The state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said the refusal to cooperate is “concerning and unprecedented.”

The latest product that China has ripped off, refined, and resold to the United States is not a knockoff AI, or Shein leggings, or a $99 Temu tablet. It is Olympic freestyle skier Eileen Gu.

With a reported income of $23 million last year, Gu is the fourth-highest-paid woman in sports and the highest paid Olympian at this year’s games. She earned more than tennis star Naomi Osaka and basketball phenom Caitlin Clark. It’s not hard to understand why. With on-camera virtuosity to match her on-slope acrobatics, Gu is among the most poised and skilled athletes in the world. Oh, and beautiful too.

Gu, 22, was born and raised in San Francisco and attended Stanford University. Her American father is a Harvard graduate, and her mother is a Chinese national and successful businesswoman who has lived in the U.S. for decades. In the early part of her career, Gu skied for the U.S. but in 2019, she switched sides and became a competitor under the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Skiing for China, Gu won two gold medals and one silver in the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. She added a silver last week in the freeski slopestyle competition and another on Monday in the freeski big air. She has another chance in Cortina this week to add to her—and China’s—medal haul.

And yet, outside of circles portrayed as jingoistic knuckle draggers, Gu barely faces even the mildest breeze of criticism.

In a recent New York Times profile of Gu, the only condemnations came from the mouths of those not given much credence by the paper’s readers. “Right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, then at Fox News, described her choice [to compete for China] as ‘dumb’ while the channel’s co-host Will Cain said she was ‘ungrateful’ and had ‘betrayed America,’ ” reported the Times.

When it comes to electric vehicles, Detroit was in denial for too long. Then it panicked and launched a flurry of flawed initiatives and hurried Hail Marys. That knee-jerk reaction is now costing the auto companies—and America—a fortune.

In December 2025, Ford announced a $19.5 billion write-down on its electric vehicle investments—one of the largest charges in corporate history. Ford killed the F-150 Lightning, the electric truck its executives not too long ago compared to the Model T. Days later, General Motors disclosed a $6 billion charge of its own. Just last week, Stellantis, the owner of the Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge brands, announced its own colossal hit, taking a $26.5 billion write-down on its EV investments. In total, that is 50 billion dollars gone.

As debates over immigration rage around us, I would like to propose a simple metric for resolving disputes over whether immigration benefits a particular region or city. It is an imperfect standard, but it has the virtues of being measurable and quantitative and weighing pluses and minuses against each other.

I suggest looking at whether real estate prices in a particular locale have been rising or falling. If immigration is “ruining” a particular city, we would expect homes and other property values in that place to become much cheaper.

Home values have historically served as a strong indicator of the health of a city. Consider Detroit. It was one of the premier American cities in the mid-20th century, but the region lost a lot of its automobile industry to foreign competition, and crime rose precipitously. The city also was poorly managed. The result in real estate markets was a collapse in prices. If anyone asked you to point to quantifiable evidence for the decline in Detroit, it was easy to do so.

Detroit has undergone a renaissance since its nadir. New businesses have opened, crime rates have fallen, and the city feels more lively again. And since that turn of fortune, often dated around the 1990s, Detroit real estate has made a major comeback, putting aside the price collapse of the Great Recession in 2008. Home prices are not a perfect measure of how the city is doing, but they do pick up major and radical trends, both on the downside and on the upside.

Happy Presidents’ Day from The Free Press. We’re marking the holiday by publishing an essay by one president about another: George W. Bush on George Washington. This essay was first published by “In Pursuit,” a project by More Perfect, a bipartisan alliance of over 40 presidential centers and more than 100 organizations working together to protect and renew American democracy as the nation celebrates 250 years since its founding. Once you’ve read George on George, read the latest installment of Jonathan Horn’s newsletter, This Week in American History. It’s on why we should call Presidents’ Day what it really is: Washington’s Birthday.

—The Editors

As America begins to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m pleased to have been asked to write about George Washington’s leadership. As president, I found great comfort and inspiration in reading about my predecessors and the qualities they embodied. Abraham Lincoln’s resolve, Harry Truman’s decisiveness, Ronald Reagan’s optimism, and others reminded me of the challenges America has faced—and of the values that have helped us overcome them.

Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility. I have studied the corrupting nature of power, and how retaining power for power’s sake has infected politics for generations. Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to. In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to. His life, with all its flaws and achievements, should be studied by all who aspire to leadership. Washington’s humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics.

After leading the United States to victory over Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, Washington was at the height of his power. Some suggested that he should become king. Instead, General Washington resigned his military commission in 1783. When King George III of Great Britain learned of his vanquisher’s intentions, he reportedly said that if he did, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” What Washington did on that cold December afternoon in Annapolis, Maryland, shaped the foundation and future of American democracy. And he was just getting started.

Washington’s path to greatness wasn’t always easy. His father died when he was 11. Rather than receiving a classical education in London like his older half-brothers, young George had to help his mother on Ferry Farm, where he learned the value of hard work. His father’s death and his own lack of education bred an insecurity. That insecurity, in turn, led to an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Largely self-taught, he became a voracious reader.

With Valentine’s Day this past Saturday, romance is in the air. Well, perhaps for some people. In case you haven’t seen it, there’s a new study that’s been making waves online over the past few days. Americans, it found, now spend more on the subscription-based pornography platform OnlyFans than they do on The New York Times and ChatGPT—combined.

It’s a dispiriting statistic, and one that encapsulates so many things going wrong in American society: People are spending more time alone and depressed, and are increasingly addicted to porn. The ubiquity of the internet has exacerbated many of these trends, as young people abandon the ups and downs of real life for the anonymity and instant gratification offered by a screen.

And so, even as artificial intelligence takes over the world, and The New York Times remains the most subscribed-to newspaper in the country, OnlyFans leaves both companies in the dust. As journalist Ed Elson reported, there are 378 million global OnlyFans users, who spent a total of $7.2 billion on the site in 2025. The top OnlyFans creator—usually meaning porn star—makes $43 million a year. Nelson summed it up well: OnlyFans “benefits from the only trend more impactful than AI right now: loneliness.”

It’s Monday, February 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Marco Rubio’s wake-up call to Europe. The shifting debate over youth gender medicine. Why you may no longer be the smartest type of thing on earth. And much more.

But first: Is the Epstein story spiraling out of control?

All the Epstein files have been released. That was what Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy Todd Blanche said in a letter to Congress on Saturday. The list of names caught up in the Epstein story is long. Some have suffered embarrassment; others have faced far more serious consequences. And while many are getting their long overdue just deserts, is that true of everyone embroiled in the saga?

No, says Joe Nocera, who, in his essay for The Free Press today, argues that the Epstein fallout is spiraling out of control.

Consider the case of Casey Wasserman. On Friday, the Hollywood mega-agent and chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee put his agency up for sale. Why? Because his clients had been fleeing in recent days after he became part of the Epstein story. But there’s no evidence to suggest Wasserman had anything to do with Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell after their criminal conduct came to light. The story, Joe argues, is “a big, fat nothingburger.” And it is far from the only example of “guilt by association” in the Epstein saga.

Has the righteous hunt for justice for Epstein and his enablers descended into something else? Read Joe on how “distinctions between the truly culpable and those who are merely bystanders are being lost in the lust to point fingers.”

—The Editors

• The investigation into the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie has entered its third week with no arrests, as the FBI awaits DNA results from gloves that “appear to match those worn by a masked person outside her front door in Tucson the night she vanished.” Investigators are treating the case as a kidnapping, asking nearby residents for surveillance footage while analyzing blood and other DNA evidence linked to the scene.

• A $5.8 billion Ford-backed battery plant in Kentucky has been idled just months after opening, leaving 1,600 workers unemployed, with the company citing slowing EV demand amid Trump’s elimination of EV tax credits. Governor Andy Beshear blamed the president, saying, “Those are 1,600 Kentuckians that lost their jobs solely because of Donald Trump pushing that big, ugly bill.”

• Iran says energy, mining, and aircraft deals are being discussed as part of renewed nuclear negotiations with the U.S., signaling flexibility on its nuclear program while insisting that any agreement must deliver “economic benefits for both sides.” Talks are set to continue in Geneva amid rising military tensions, with Washington favoring diplomacy but preparing for military escalation if negotiations fail.

• Former president Barack Obama said on a podcast with YouTuber Brian Tyler Cowen that aliens are “real, but I haven’t seen them.” While he did not clarify what he meant, he dismissed long-running conspiracy theories in a subsequent statement, saying there’s no hidden alien facility, “unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

• Between one and three inches of snow are expected to hit the New York City area Sunday evening through Monday morning, as the eastern U.S. has seen one of the most frigid seasons in recent memory. On the other coast, two powerful Pacific storms are expected to slam California starting Sunday night, bringing days of heavy snowfall, strong winds, flooding risks, and up to eight feet of snow in the mountains.

• The United States currently ranks third in the Olympic standings with 17 total medals—5 gold, 8 silver, and 4 bronze—as the Winter Games enters its second and final week. Norway leads the medal table with 26 medals, followed by Italy with 22.

Throughout his career, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has put forth ideas that challenge the consensus. He famously criticized billionaires for evading taxes while speaking at Davos to an audience of billionaires. In his book Utopia for Realists, he advocated for policies like a 15-hour workweek, open borders, and universal basic income, years before UB…

The “Epstein fallout.”

That’s the phrase headline writers all used on Friday when Casey Wasserman announced that he was going to sell his eponymous talent, music, and sports agency. The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, the BBC, NBC News, The New York Times, and others: They all told the story in the same way. The “Epstein fallout” was forcing Wasserman, 51, whose “powerhouse” agency (as the Times described it) employed some 4,000 people around the globe, to unload his creation. Otherwise, it might not survive.

The body blows had been coming fast and furious for Wasserman since the release of the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails. Among the first to defect was the soccer star Abby Wambach, who issued a scathing statement. “I read Casey Wasserman’s correspondence in the Epstein files,” it read in part. “I am following my gut and my values,” she said as she cut ties with the agency.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pulled off a minor diplomatic miracle. He managed to win over a room full of senior European leaders on their own territory while slaying many of the continent’s most sacred cows.

On Saturday, he received a standing ovation while giving a speech at the Munich Security Conference, the annual confab of senior European defense officials. It was a striking feat, given that the speech sounded like an intervention where Rubio was the frustrated patriarch who had just learned his family fortune was being frittered away by his dilettante children.