The Free Press

The conservative writer and radio host Erick Erickson has long spoken out against what he sees to be the growth of dangerous and illiberal ideas on the American right, ideas that undermine the very values at the heart of conservatism. This week, he published a deep dive into how proponents of these extreme views are funded. We believe it’s an important piece of journalism, one that shines a light on shadowy behind-the-scenes players trying to build a new Republican Party in their image. We invite you to read this lightly edited and condensed version of Erick’s piece. —The Editors

A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even have some standing with the vice president of the United States.

Some of them believe America is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths.

It begins with shampoo.

Is America really worse than al-Qaeda? It’s hard to imagine that any serious person could answer yes. But that is the sincere view of Hasan Piker, the wildly popular left-wing Twitch streamer who has been elevated by many Democrats and progressives during the 2026 midterm elections as a way to attract Gen Z men.

“Pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes,” said Piker in response to Axios reporter Alex Thompson in an interview clip released Thursday. Piker went on to claim that America sows terror all over the world. For example, during the opening strikes of the Iran war in February, a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile hit an Iranian girls’ school in Minab, collapsing a main building. “If you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror,” Piker added in the Axios interview.

Hello, and welcome back! This is our news roundup, told with an extremely niche bias. Today the great Chelsea Jacobson deserves a byline because she did most of the work, but alas there’s no room for two names. Software glitch.

Two pieces of housekeeping:

First off, if you haven’t already, check out Suzy Weiss’s pop culture podcast Second Thought, co-hosted by the hilarious Dan Ahdoot. One time they called George Santos. This week, they go over the latest Sydney Sweeney controversy and try a $60 loaf of bread. Of course I condone none of this, and have yet to listen to a podcast in my life because I respect myself, but some people would probably enjoy it. Maybe you.

And if you’re in need of wisdom, our resident advice columnist Abigail Shrier is here to help with her column Tough Love. They won’t let me write an advice column over liability concerns, but Abigail has been given free rein. But be warned, we don’t call it Tough Love for nothing. Write in for advice and a chance to be featured. And now, onto TGIF!

→ Mitch McConnell’s handlers need to be arrested: They are doing elder abuse. Where is his wife? Arrest her too, for letting him get wheeled around like that in front of their townhouse. There’s no garage entrance? In case you missed it, Mitch McConnell, 84, made his return to the Senate after three months of recovery from a health incident. Now wheelchair-bound, he just looks extremely frail and out of it. I won’t add a picture because it feels mean, but also, he’s not a vulnerable little kitten— he’s a U.S. senator, so I should be allowed to be harsh! Our elected officials are all about to shuffle off their mortal coils, so anytime you criticize them it’s like oh my god, how can I bring up politics with this poor, dying man. It’s a trap! Because really, he doesn’t need my snark; he needs to be wrapped in a warm shawl. And I need to be able to pick on someone my own age. In the same way Dianne Feinstein was dragged around till the end, it’s not right. It’s degrading. Don’t get me started on the idea that Biden could serve as president for another four years. Free Mitch McConnell! Let him watch his shows and eat dinner at five p.m., he has earned it and so have we.

→ We’re really doing South America colonialism again: A few days after then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem met with Ecuadorean president Daniel Noboa, a prominent Noboa critic was deported back to Ecuador to be imprisoned. It was a reversal of the earlier ruling that he could stay, and it was fast-tracked. I’m sure it was just a coincidence? Nope! Noboa posted pictures of the deportation and wrote: “We said it, we did it.” You meet with a Trump official, you give them a list of enemies—and I’m sure some cash—and they handle the rest. It’s like how Venezuela is a new vassal state of ours. One interesting thing: Marco Rubio is bringing back old-fashioned colonialism. Soon Kristi and Marco will be striking deals for cinnamon and saffron and collecting levies from Argentina for defense spending.

→ Ed Sheeran debacle: Ed Sheeran decided to have Macklemore as his tour opening act, and the rapper took the stage to give a “Free Palestine” speech, like he was kicking off a course at Columbia or something. In the long debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, Macklemore leaves little doubt, in that he once performed wearing a fake beard and an oversized prosthetic nose in what was widely seen as a Jewish caricature. Anyway, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft then pressured Ed Sheeran’s promoters to drop Macklemore, and Macklemore was dropped. You can imagine what happened next. Macklemore has become even more of a hero, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, bringing more attention to the cause. All of Ed Sheeran’s other opening acts backed out of the tour, as did his own backing band. For a sense of the public tone, comedian Mike Recine posted: “Robert Kraft is a pedophile and someone should kill him.” So it’s all going really well, temperature’s nice and low out here. Recine deleted his initial, um, joke? and posted: “Hey everyone I’d like to apologize for the post I made last night when I said ’Children deserve to have legs.’ I didn’t realize that statement was offensive to the Jewish community and I will choose my words better moving forward.”

The idea here being, I guess, that Jews love to kill children, or at least blast their legs off, so telling people to assassinate Robert Kraft is the same as saying you want to save children. So, by extension, then, being pro–Robert Kraft’s life equals wanting to remove Palestinian children’s legs.

This week—and every week—America can’t take its eyes off Sydney Sweeney. In the latest controversy, she poses nearly nude while advertising for the sports gambling platform Novig, and female athletes aren’t happy about it. In today’s episode of Second Thought, Suzy and Dan break down her salacious scandal and explain why the real victims are too smitten…

John Boyd was one of the most influential military thinkers of the 20th century, and the intellectual godfather of the U.S. Marines’ military strategy. Today, as artificial intelligence continues to transform battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East, author and retired Marine officer Ian Brown argues that Boyd’s ideas are more relevant than ever. Tod…

My head was bowed in prayer when I heard something strange coming from the pulpit.

A friend of mine was standing in front of our church’s congregation of 200 people, praying over the day’s offerings. His words bore the marks of AI writing that made me wince: “It’s not X—it’s Y” and a conspicuous preference for lists of three.

After the service, I confronted my friend. Immediately, he admitted the prayer had been written by AI. “I just asked Chat to write me a short offertory prayer,” he told me sheepishly. In my Presbyterian church, it’s customary for congregants like my friend to stand at the pulpit and give the call to worship or the offertory prayer. He was a nervous public speaker, he said, and AI writes well enough.

Since then, I’ve started to question whether other prayers I’ve heard have been written with the help of, well, a higher power.

For 123 years, the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence, a small Catholic religious order based in Kentucky, ran The Jeanne d’Arc Residence in Manhattan as a way to give young women who were new to the city an affordable, safe place to live. Members of the order staffed it themselves until 2021, when the pandemic and a shrinking, aging community of sisters finally forced its closure—one of many such convent boardinghouses squeezed out by rising costs and dwindling vocations to religious orders. Just a handful still exist across the city.

Faced with unaffordable repairs that forced them to make a hard decision, the sisters sold the residence in 2024 for $22.5 million to Red Apple Group, led by John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket magnate and former Republican candidate for New York mayor, who plans to redevelop the site into apartments. But there was one catch. Under state law, a charity can’t sell a major asset without approval from the state attorney general or a court, a rule meant to ensure that sale proceeds remain tied to the not-for-profit’s original charitable purpose.

After reviewing the deal, New York attorney general Letitia James approved the sale of Jeanne d’Arc, plus the payment of $2.7 million to the religious order for “carrying costs and expenses” it had covered on Jeanne d’Arc’s behalf and nearly $446,000 for state property taxes and real-estate broker fees and services.

But James refused to release the remaining $19.3 million in sale proceeds—and still hasn’t more than two years later.

Why not?

KYIV, Ukraine — I did not take it personally that a Russian drone destroyed the train behind ours as we neared the Polish border with Ukraine on Sunday. Indeed, I wasn’t aware of what had happened until a few hours later. I had taken it for granted that going to Ukraine amid a relentless aerial bombardment would have its risks. But I had also assumed that I’d probably be all right if I was traveling with such luminaries as the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, the former director of the CIA David Petraeus, and multiple current or former leaders of Scandinavian and Baltic states—not forgetting the editor of The Economist.

I don’t think the Russians intended to hit our train. I do think they intended to send us all a message. And it is the same message that aggressors have been sending since the earliest days of siege warfare: Be afraid. It says much about the war in Ukraine that President Vladimir Putin believes he can send such a message to eminent Westerners with impunity. He is probably right about that. It dovetails with his current strategy of drone incursions, sabotage, and cyberattacks directed at multiple NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) members.

Dear Abigail,

When does one let politics dictate the end of a friendship?

A few months ago, one of my best girlfriends began posting things on social media related to Israel, Palestine, Erika Kirk, and much more. Much of this was content from figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, among others. There have also been posts alluding to 9/11 being an inside job done by Bush and Israel.

I believe that people shouldn’t let politics end friendships, since, as we all know, it’s a far too common phenomenon happening in our country, especially in my age bracket. I have friends that I disagree with politically, and largely, we don’t talk about it. If we do, we walk away respecting one another nonetheless.

So I am deeply conflicted about the recent argument my friend and I had. I had started to notice that more of her posts were increasingly focused on Israel and anti-Zionism, which in itself are not things I would end a friendship over, even though I disagree with her opinions. But there was one post in particular that alarmed me. She is Greek Orthodox, and she shared a quote from a leader within the Orthodox Church: “As Orthodox we are anti-Zionists. That is, we are against international Zionism, which has transformed the religion of the Old Testament into Satan worship.” She and I talked at length about this; I shared my concerns and my position and she hers.

She assured me she holds no ill will toward the Jewish people, and she also expressed hurt that I could think she would harbor hateful beliefs. I explained that I do not think of her as a hateful person, but that I was struggling to understand why she would therefore share this post (and a few others she’d shared) that perpetuated antisemitic stereotypes. She told me the only reason I took that position is because my husband is Jewish.

Am I in the wrong? I’ve never been one to carelessly make accusations of bigotry. I’ve never been in such a serious and heated argument with a friend over politics before. I don’t think I misunderstood the post in the way she said I did. But what if I’m throwing away a friendship that was once a big part of my life? More generally, where does one draw the line at “agreeing to disagree”?

I need your brutal honesty.

With gratitude,

Leah, 27

Leah,

Two years ago, a wellness influencer popped up in my X feed, claiming to have “exposed” the Talmud. In photographs, she posed in spandex workout clothes; she didn’t strike me as the Talmudic type. I reached out to her, curious to hear more. To my surprise, she responded immediately, hoping I wanted to discuss her views on “the transgenders.”

As it happens, I know a little bit about the Talmud—far less than most yeshiva students, but more than your average wellness influencer. And no, the Talmud isn’t a “book” as this woman insisted to me when we spoke. Nor is it “a second Bible” to the Jews, informing Jews “how they’re supposed to treat us, and what they think of Jesus.” Nor is it a text that gives Jews license to engage in pedophilia, as she claimed.

It’s Thursday, September 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: Douglas Murray asks, why do we allow terrorists to die of old age? The American nonprofits backing Hamas. A conversation with Dara Horn and Coleman Hughes. And much more.

But first: inside the unlikely coalition warning that AI may kill us all.

Last week, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon made headlines around the world after saying that he had resigned from Anthropic because he believes AI might cause human extinction—and his co-workers do, too. Unlike the rest of us, potentially, the story just won’t die.

The Pro-Human Assembly, a conference held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., about the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, couldn’t have come at a better time—or with a more eclectic coalition.

The Archbishop of San Francisco was there. So was Steve Bannon, screaming about the Chinese. Bernie Sanders did a quasi-dramatic reading of messages posted to an online forum by rogue AI agents. Ashley Judd paraphrased a graphic Andrea Dworkin quote for reasons that remain a mystery to me still.

It was odd. People in the AI industry have talked openly about the possibility of this technology causing human extinction for years, but it hits differently in the wake of the Hugging Face incident. If you don’t know what that is, all the more reason to read my dispatch today.

As the doomers see it, the best-case scenario is a future in which humans are basically kept as pets: well cared for, but with zero autonomy. The worst-case scenario, obviously, is the everyone dies thing.

What should be done? I heard lots of ideas but no easy answers. There are currently zero federal regulations on AI, which is sort of strange even to think about. After all, we regulate microwaves, and the people running the microwave industry have never once refused to rule out the possibility that their products will end all human life on Earth.

What I saw in D.C. left me even more convinced that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes nothing should be done. You know, except for President Trump.

— River Page

On Monday, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and a group of other NFL owners banned Macklemore from performing at their stadiums after the rapper delivered a “Free Palestine” speech while opening for Ed Sheeran. Kraft cited the rapper’s “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Once multiple venues refused to host shows with Macklemore on the lineup, the tour’s promoter officially dropped him.

Today, Josh Kaplan says that the move was counterproductive, arguing that though well-intentioned, Kraft’s decision turned an irrelevant footnote into a martyr. “You cannot cancel people into liking you,” Josh writes. Read his column on what a better response to Macklemore would have looked like.

This raises the question: What actually works against antisemitism? On the latest episode of Conversations with Coleman, recorded in front of a live audience in New York, Dara Horn joins Coleman Hughes to talk about her new book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. She argues that antisemitism is a script that has repeated itself across countries and ideologies, and that most people don’t understand that well enough to fight it. Don’t miss their conversation.

For decades, the Middle East has shaped American foreign policy and loomed large in the public consciousness. Few understand its influence on our politics better than Simon Sebag Montefiore, who argues that America’s quagmires in the Middle East stem from a deep misunderstanding of the region—on both the left and the right. Join him October 1 as he sits down with Bari Weiss live in New York City to kick off his U.S. book tour for The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

Get Tickets Now

• The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point, its first hike since 2023, signaling that another increase could follow as the central bank tries to bring inflation under control. President Donald Trump fired back by demanding that rates be cut sharply, though he stopped short of criticizing Fed Chair Kevin Warsh by name.

• The Houthis fired drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, including a major oil port on the Red Sea, and Saudi jets struck back with air strikes across Yemen in an escalating front of the Middle East war. (For more on the Houthis, read Zineb Riboua’s column from earlier this week.)

• A sweeping Russia and Iran sanctions bill passed the House in a 262–159 vote and is now heading to Trump for his signature. Named after the late senator Lindsey Graham, the legislation would hit countries that purchase large volumes of Russian oil and gas with tariffs of up to 100 percent, and is aimed at cutting off revenue that funds Russia’s war in Ukraine.

• European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed making Canada the European Union’s first-ever “associate member,” drawing a standing ovation from European lawmakers. The proposal, framed as a response to a world grown more hostile, faces an uncertain path as EU member states would have to approve it, and one diplomat said that “nobody really ​knows what it means.”

• The House voted unanimously to send billionaire Leon Black a criminal contempt referral after he defied a congressional subpoena to testify and hand over documents related to his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Black chose to fight the subpoena in court rather than comply.

• Charlie Kirk’s family filed a wrongful death notice Wednesday against Utah Valley University, alleging that a series of security failures left him exposed to a rooftop sniper. The notice is a required legal step before the family can sue.

• Merriam-Webster added 1,400 words and definitions to its dictionary, including looksmaxxing, vibe coding, and cuffing season. The publisher said the new entries offer “a window into the world today.”