The Free Press

It’s Wednesday, January 28. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Rachel Goldberg-Polin reflects on what comes after “Bring them home.” Tyler Cowen on how AI will change religion. River Page on a TV show about closeted gay hockey players that has caused a “mass psychosis event.”

But first: Olivia Reingold reports from Minneapolis.

“They messed with the wrong city,” Mary Irene Slatt, a 48-year-old realtor, told The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold in Minneapolis yesterday.

Slatt is one of the many protesters who have opposed the massive federal deportation operation in the city in recent months—and who now, four days after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, sees signs that the Trump administration is reversing course.

Another is Kevyn Burger. “They will never say we won,” Burger said of ICE. “But we know it.”

In her dispatch today, Olivia reports on how things have changed in Minneapolis since the killing of Alex Pretti—and what the city’s residents think will come next.

—The Editors

• Senator John Fetterman asked President Trump to fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem yesterday amid the controversy over her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis over the weekend. “Americans have died,” Fetterman wrote to Trump on X yesterday. “She is betraying DHS’s core mission and trashing your border security legacy.”

• TikTok settled a lawsuit in California court Tuesday. The suit accused the company of intentionally addicting teens to the social media platform. The Chinese-owned app is the first major tech company to settle such a case, as similar lawsuits continue against Meta, Alphabet, and Snapchat, alleging their platforms cause psychological harm.

• The chief judge of Minnesota’s federal court ordered acting ICE director Todd Lyons to appear in court to explain his failure to comply with previous court orders related to Trump’s immigration crackdown. “The Court’s patience is at an end,” Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote.

• UPS will cut 30,000 jobs and shut down 24 facilities in 2026 as part of a shift away from low-margin Amazon shipments, the organization said yesterday. After cutting 48,000 jobs last year, the world’s largest package delivery company targeted about $3 billion in savings.

• The death toll from Winter Storm Fern, which hit the eastern and southern U.S. last weekend, rose to at least 34 amid continued power outages and below-freezing temperatures. Half a million Americans are without electricity as forecasters monitor the possibility of another significant winter storm hitting the East Coast this weekend.

• The U.S. sent a delegation from ICE to provide security at the Winter Olympics in Italy, prompting confusion and outrage among locals who disapprove of the agency’s activity in Minneapolis. “They don’t do immigration enforcement operations in a foreign country, obviously,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Tuesday.

• Neil Young is offering free streaming of his entire discography to residents of Greenland amid tensions between the U.S. and NATO over control of the Danish-owned land mass. “I hope my music and music films will ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government,” Young wrote on his blog yesterday.

• U.S. population growth slowed to one of its lowest rates in history, according to numbers released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday. Over the past year, America’s population increased by only 1.8 million as immigration plummeted by more than 50 percent from 2024 amid President Trump’s increased focus on border security.

• Russia is offering cash bonuses to citizens who agree to fight in Ukraine, along with commuted sentences for prisoners, and a fast track to citizenship for foreigners. So far, some foreign nationals from South Asia have reported being swindled into enlisting by Russian military recruiters who promised them non-combat jobs.

Kevyn Burger, 69, is tearing up as she watches mourners lay bouquets and notes along the scene of Alex Pretti’s death—a curb near a bus stop and Malaysian restaurant.

It’s Tuesday, three days after Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, in South Minneapolis. He’s almost the same age as Burger’s son, who just died of cancer. “I look at him, and I go, ‘I know that guy.’ It could’ve just as easily been one of ours.”

Burger says at least something good came of Pretti’s death.

“They will never say we won,” Burger said of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “But we know it. They will go slipping away like the slimy creatures they are.”

Just as artificial intelligence is changing every other part of our lives, so it is changing religion. Spiritual leaders have taken note: Pope Leo XIV has warned of how AI could deaden our emotional lives. The Mormon church, by contrast, has embraced AI as a tool for religious learning, as long as it doesn’t supplant the connection with God. Secular observers (and I am one) should be equally interested.

Believers have always come to religious leaders with questions about their personal lives, Church doctrine, the Bible, or just for general everyday advice. But the current generation of AIs know more about the Bible, Quran, and other religious texts than most human specialists do. And AIs are very good at answering questions.

When Columbia University reached a $221 million deal with the federal government last summer to resolve allegations of antisemitism on campus, it came with the stipulation to create a monitorship.

The monitor, Bart M. Schwartz, a veteran compliance consultant and the co-founder of Guidepost Solutions, was tasked with overseeing Columbia’s adherence to th…

I tried to ignore it.

Heated Rivalry, a steamy new show about closeted gay hockey players, dropped on HBO late last November to great fanfare, especially online and especially among women. Girls were making memes and fancams. They were making their boyfriends watch it with them. Celebrities raved. In due time, magazines like the The New Yorker, which drew questionable parallels between Heated Rivalry and classic works of gay fiction like E.M. Forster’s Maurice, were hard at work manufacturing an intellectual framework by which people could justify watching a tawdry little TV show about furtive gay sex, which I suppose is what some people needed.

Around this time, when my editor asked me to write about Heated Rivalry, I said I’d pass. Sure, Heated Rivalry is basically softcore gay porn, but it’s softcore gay porn written by and for women, not me (an actual gay man). Who was I to report on this? More importantly, I figured it wasn’t worth the time. Like a flash in the pan, or more aptly, a cheap orgasm, Heated Rivalry would disappear from the cultural consciousness the minute the last episode aired, everyone came to their senses, and put their pants back on with a bit of dignity still intact.

Clearly, I was wrong.

Readers of The Free Press are well aware that pediatric gender medicine has too often been championed by progressive leaders without proper scrutiny—with disastrous consequences for young patients.

New York attorney general Letitia James is among the most gung ho: telling hospitals that they must provide radical treatments to comply with state law; leading a multistate lawsuit against federal restrictions; even creating a path for out-of-state minors to come to New York to access the drugs and surgery required to transition.

It’s been hard for Glenna Goldis to watch.

Until last week, Goldis was an attorney in James’s bureau for consumer fraud and protection. As a lesbian who worked on progressive causes, she has always passionately believed in protecting gender nonconforming children. And so, during her four years working for James, she tried to sound the alarm about a practice she believes is a danger to them.

In response, she received multiple warnings to stop writing and speaking critically of pediatric gender medicine—until, on January 22, she was unceremoniously fired.

When we reached out to Goldis’s former employer about her claims, they issued a statement:

The Office of the Attorney General has rules and protocols for employees who engage in activities that can impact the work, operations, or integrity of the office. This employee’s flagrant and repeated disregard of these rules and protocols disrupts and undermines our efforts to protect the rights of all New Yorkers.

Scroll down to read Goldis’s side of the story.

—The Editors

On January 15, New York attorney general Letitia James—who was, at the time, my boss—accused me of engaging in “disruptive public speech.”

What had I done to deserve this charge? I had repeatedly spoken and written about my concerns regarding pediatric gender medicine—that is, the practice of blocking children’s puberty, administering cross-sex hormones to teens, and subjecting them to breast and genital surgery.

As a lesbian, I care passionately about the safety of gender nonconforming youth. I am also experienced in identifying consumer fraud, and I am troubled by how vulnerable patients in psychological distress are being misled.

I open my eyes and I am confused.

Normally, the first prayers I utter in the morning, before even putting a foot on the floor, include, “And please let Ran come home today.” But this morning—on Tuesday, January 27—I stop.

Each day, when I come into my living room on the way to the kitchen, I first go out onto my porch to change the number wheel reflecting the days it has been since my former life stopped—marking the number of days, since October 7, 2023, that hostages have been held in Gaza. Today, I do not need to change the numbers. I have to take the numbers down.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where we are still talking about that standing ovation in Davos, there is no escape from geography, and China feels a little too close for comfort. Let’s get to it!

It was not that long ago when Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau corrected a woman in Edmonton for saying the word mankind instead of peoplekind, and wore Bollywood-style clothes during an official visit to India. Compare those cringe-inducing moments with Mark Carney’s visit to the World Economic Forum last week. Very few speeches in Davos end with a standing ovation. Mark Carney’s did.

The prime minister opened his speech with a story from Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel wrote about a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who put a sign in his shop window—Workers of the world, unite!—even though he didn’t believe it. Like everyone, he did it to avoid trouble. And that, Havel argued, was how the system survived: not just through force, but through millions of small, daily acts of going along with something everyone knew wasn’t true.

It’s Tuesday, January 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Simon Sebag Montefiore and Suzane Lentzsch mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Sebastian Junger on how the Democrats lost men. Why did Xi fire his top general—and could the leader himself be next? Arthur Brooks on Brooklyn Beckham and the dangers of family estrangement. All that and more.

But first: Trump’s tactical retreat.

In the first 24 hours after the killing of Alex Pretti by border patrol agents in Minneapolis, Trump administration officials were hyperbolic, inflammatory, and dishonest in their responses to the tragedy. On Monday, amid widespread outrage over the incident and the administration’s reaction, Trump struck a very different tone.

When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Monday about the characterization of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” by Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and others, Leavitt said she hadn’t heard the president describe Pretti that way. Trump, meanwhile, said he had “very good” conversations with Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey—who not long ago he accused of “inciting insurrection.” “We actually seem to be on the same wavelength,” Trump said of Walz.

In other signs of a climbdown, border patrol chief Greg Bovino has reportedly been demoted and will leave Minneapolis today. Border czar Tom Homan is being dispatched to Minneapolis. He has favored a deportation strategy focused on people who are criminals and national security threats, rather than the blunt approach agents have taken in the city so far.

Minneapolis remains at a boiling point, but yesterday, at least, the president seemed not to want to raise the temperature further.

Driving this change in direction is criticism from some of the places you usually expect to have unwavering support for the administration’s approach to deportations. Gabe Kaminsky has that story today. Read it here:

Meanwhile, Jed Rubenfeld untangles the legal and political questions at the heart of the Pretti case—and the tactics used by the Department of Homeland Security more generally. Read his latest column here:

—The Editors

The last witnesses to the Holocaust are dying. As British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore writes today, that makes the war over the meaning of the Holocaust more important than ever. And yet, at this crucial moment, “Holocaust denial, distortion, inversion, and perversion, combined with an eliminationist antisemitism, have made a spectacular comeback.” Read his full essay on how to fight back against these abuses of history.

In a personal reflection, Suzanne Lentzsch recounts her unlikely relationship with Elie Wiesel, whom she treated as a doctor in New York. Raised in Germany in the shadow of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Lentzsch found herself caring for one of the most acclaimed chroniclers of the Nazis’ crimes. Read about their relationship:

• The massive winter storm that dumped more than a foot or more of snow in at least 19 states was blamed for at least 22 deaths. Over 700,000 homes and businesses were without power on Monday, and travel chaos is expected to last through at least Tuesday.

• At least six people were killed in the crash of a private Bombardier Challenger 600 jet during takeoff at Bangor International Airport in Maine on Sunday night, government officials said Monday. It wasn’t clear if the snowstorm was a factor in the crash.

• European Union regulators launched an investigation of Elon Musk’s X, alleging that it failed to curb Grok-generated sexualized deepfakes, including of children. The investigation escalates the broader U.S.-Europe clash over online content regulation and free speech.

• Israel said it recovered the remains of the last hostage still unaccounted for in Gaza, Master Sergeant Ran Gvili. He was killed while fighting Hamas militants. The recovery could allow ceasefire talks to move into their next phase.

• Anti-Muslim rhetoric is surging among some Texas Republicans in statewide races, with candidates like Aaron Reitz making opposition to Islam a centerpiece of their campaigns. According to The Texas Tribune, Muslim civil-rights groups warn the messaging is more coordinated and extreme than in past campaigns, and could fuel real-world discrimination.

• Ye (formerly Kanye West) bought a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal to apologize for antisemitic outbursts and other recent behavior, attributing it to an undiagnosed brain injury from his 2002 car crash and bipolar disorder.

• An unpublicized black-tie White House screening of the new documentary Melania included monogrammed popcorn tubs and a military band playing movie tunes, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The event was hosted by the First Lady and director Brett Ratner. The Amazon-funded film opens Friday.

On Saturday, China’s top general, Zhang Youxia—long perceived to be one of Xi Jinping’s greatest and most trusted allies—experienced a stunning fall from grace. The 75–year-old vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) was removed from his post and accused of corruption. Even worse, Chinese authorities say they suspect him of betraying Xi himself.

In another stunning revelation soon after his removal, The Wall Street Journal reported that Zhang is being accused of leaking secret information about China’s nuclear program to the United States.

Zhang is perhaps the most prominent, and most surprising, figure to fall victim to Xi’s ruthless anti-corruption campaign, long viewed by sinologists as the Chinese leaders’ thinly veiled approach to purging his political rivals.