The Free Press

Until a few weeks ago, Eric Adams was the mayor of New York City. Now that he’s out of power, he isn’t wasting any time figuring out what to do next. Earlier this week, Adams launched a meme coin, the proceeds of which he claimed would fight “anti-Americanism” and antisemitism as well as help teach children about meme coins. Adams announced the coin with a splashy Fox News interview. How the meme coin was supposed to provide money for any of its goals was unclear.

What was clear is that hours after the coin launched, somebody involved in its creation—we really don’t know who, because everything is done with anonymous digital currency wallets—took out $2.5 million from the pool of cash that investors had put in to buy the coins. Then, for reasons that are equally mysterious, another $1.5 million was put in (maybe because the creators thought they’d given away the game too early).

The transactions had the hallmarks of what in the meme coin business is known as a “rug pull.” This is when a new coin launches, its backers sell millions of dollars worth, then take out the money and make the coin worthless. We’ve seen it before with Haliey Welch, or “Hawk Tuah girl,” who hawked her meme coin and closed up shop after collecting a marketing fee. There was Caitlyn Jenner, who was sued over the $JENNER, which Business Insider pegs as the first celebrity meme coin. There are many others.

After Adams’ meme coin imploded, I tried to figure out precisely how it was supposed to work in the first place. How would his token provide money to fight “anti-Americanism”? How precisely was money transferred from the buyers to the creators? What exactly did Adams mean when he promised in a promotional video that his NYC Token was “about to take off like crazy?” After the whole fiasco, Adams released a statement on X saying that he did not move the funds, or profit from the launch. So if anyone made money from this, who was it?

In a little more than three months, Vivek Ramaswamy, the 40-year-old billionaire biotech entrepreneur, will almost definitely win the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Ohio.

He’s been inching toward victory for the better part of a year, first picking up the endorsement of the state party and then from Donald Trump—who called Ramaswamy “something special.”

One by one, his Republican rivals have dropped out of the race.

Then, last week, Ramaswamy announced his pick for lieutenant governor: Rob McColley, the well-regarded state senate president.

There was only one important Republican in Ohio who had yet to join Team Ramaswamy: Governor Mike DeWine.

Mara is 36, living in London, highly educated, professionally successful, and six years into a stable relationship. She has thought about having children—carefully, repeatedly, and for a long time. And she has decided not to.

She told me that she would like to make one thing clear: She is not confused. “It’s not that I don’t have reasons,” she told me. “It’s that I have too many. If you knocked one down, I’d just give you 10 more.”

When I asked her for a one-word explanation for why she is skipping out on motherhood, she laughed. “One-word answers always make me wish that English worked like German,” she said. “There should be a word that means ‘would completely ruin everything I like about life.’ ”

In a world where AI can re-create our voices, half the internet thinks the moon landing was staged, and every group chat has a cousin who’s “just asking questions,” the perceived line between fact and fantasy has never been blurrier.

On February 9 at the Comedy Cellar in New York City, Coleman Hughes will sit down with Michael Shermer—historian of science and author of Truth: What It Is, How to Find It & Why It Still Matters—for a live conversation. Together they’ll dig into why smart people believe strange things—from conspiracy theories and moral panics to post-truth politics—and how skepticism, evidence, and reason can still help us figure out what’s actually real. Is truth the only antidote to our world of cynicism and confusion?

After the conversation, we’ll head to a nearby bar for an informal meetup with Michael, Coleman, and fellow Free Pressers for drinks, discussion, and the rare pleasure of arguing in good faith. (Location will be shared with ticket holders only.)

Paid Free Press subscribers get exclusive presale access until Friday at 9 a.m. ET, when tickets go live to the general public. To get early access, become a paid subscriber now.

This New York City event is intentionally intimate and will sell out quickly. Don’t delay.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

This piece was originally published in Tablet.

At the start of 2026, Donald Trump should have the wind at his back as he sets out to assure America’s future.

For his recent election, he assembled the broadest multi-faith conservative coalition in modern American politics. A twice-divorced casino magnate who bragged about his sexual exploits to interviewers, rarely attended church, and once identified as pro-choice hardly embodied the “family values” that had defined the Religious Right since the late 1970s. Yet despite violating the moral norms religious voters championed, he drew more unified, enthusiastic support from them than any Republican in the modern era. Churchgoing white evangelicals gave him historic margins, but so did Orthodox and observant Jews. Traditionally-Democratic Catholics swung hard to the GOP. And in a twist almost no one predicted, in 2024 thousands of Muslim voters in Michigan—long considered a Democratic lock—crossed over to vote for him.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani promised at his inauguration to govern “expansively and audaciously.” In practice, that promise means governing expensively, too, and paying for it would require higher taxes on both individuals and corporations. Individuals can dodge Mamdani by moving to Florida, and some undoubtedly will. When it comes to taxes, though, corporations are largely stuck—for reasons that have gotten little attention in Mamdani’s rapid political ascent.

Depending on your perspective, that makes corporations either a tempting target or an unfortunate victim.

The hurdle for Mamdani’s agenda—from universal childcare to fare-free buses to city-owned grocery stores—is a lack of funds. Mamdani must rely on Democrats in Albany to come up with a substantial part of the money. While New York governor Kathy Hochul has resisted tax increases, the populist wave may have pushed her into an uneasy alliance. And just last week, Hochul promised $500 million in funding for the New York City mayor’s planned childcare program for 2-year-olds. Though she has opposed higher personal income taxes, Hochul hasn’t ruled out raising the state’s corporate income tax. That would have ripple effects throughout the state’s economy.

The reason corporate income taxes are hard to escape is that both the state and the city tax corporations on the basis of how many of their sales are generated locally. They don’t take into account how many people the corporations employ locally or how much property they have locally. If a corporation has half of its sales in New York City, half of its profit will be subject to state and city income taxes, end of story. (This system of corporate taxes is typical; 35 states tax corporations in this way.)

I first heard of Scott Adams in July 2017, just after he’d been dubbed America’s “smartest Trump supporter.” The accolade had been bestowed upon him by the audience of author Sam Harris’s podcast, then titled Waking Up; Adams, best known as the creator of the brilliantly funny Dilbert comics, had appeared on the show to argue that the mainstream media had been taking Donald Trump literally and as a result, misunderstanding him.

At a time when America’s elites (myself very much included) were struggling to understand Trump’s appeal, Adams strode onto the scene as a kind of “Trump whisperer.” Drawing on his longtime study of the art of persuasion, Adams took what he’d learned and applied it to Trump, arguing that statements which often looked lunatic at first glance were in fact evidence of elite persuasion skills.

I don’t think I bought Adams’s thesis at the time, but when I heard yesterday’s tragic news that Adams had died after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer, it occurred to me that whatever my disagreements with him, Scott Adams influenced the way I think—for the better.

Here’s how Adams’s thesis worked in practice: During Trump’s first presidential run, Adams considered his promise to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it an absolute masterstroke of persuasion—precisely because it was so overly simplistic and technically inaccurate. Fact-checking outlets destroyed Trump’s idea on the basis of all of the financial and technical details—pointing out, for instance, that a solid wall didn’t make sense for many kinds of terrain—and for legacy media, the wall became Exhibit A in proving that Trump was both a racist and a total moron. But for Adams, the avalanche of criticism Trump provoked was a feature, not a bug. Here is how Adams framed it in his 2017 book, Win Bigly:

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan remembers how another president responded to a crisis in Venezuela more than a century ago. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

The Venezuelan leader’s “outrageous treatment of foreigners who had made investments in Venezuela and his refusal to pay their just claims had led the governments to institute a blockade of Venezuelan ports.” Easy as it is to imagine a U.S. president saying those words, the surprise is which one actually said them: not Donald Trump in 2026, but Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago.

With Trump’s intervention in Venezuela being dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”—Donroe instead of Monroe, get it?—it’s worth recalling a forgotten crisis that engulfed Venezuela 123 years ago this winter and that ultimately inspired Roosevelt to put his own spin on the famous Monroe Doctrine with the so-called Roosevelt Corollary.

Between December 1902 and February 1903, it was not American ships blockading Venezuela but German and British ones that their governments had sent to collect debts that the South American country owed. With the self-enriching Venezuelan dictator Cipriano Castro (no relation; it’s just a common name) refusing to meet conditions for payment, Americans worried that the British and especially the upstart Germans would seek compensation through alternative means: seizing territory. If allowed to carve up Venezuela, the European powers would make a mockery of the Monroe Doctrine.

It’s Wednesday, January 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The bloodiest massacre in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Patrick McGee on the race between China’s robots and America’s chatbots. Will the Supreme Court let states bar trans athletes from public-school teams? Plus: Sanjana Friedman asks: Why is San Francisco doing reparations? And much more.

But first: Olivia Reingold joins ICE watch.

When the news broke last week that an ICE agent had shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old “ICE observer” in Minneapolis, one question soon came to the fore: What exactly is an “ICE observer”?

For the past 72 hours, I’ve been getting to the bottom of that as a member of their secret world. And by “world,” I mean a series of clandestine Signal chats, in which Minneapolis activists go by usernames like “Pissed Off Old Lady” and discuss things like whether ICE agents can hack their AirPods. I even gained access to a meticulously maintained database of license plates they claim are “confirmed ICE” vehicles.

The few that would speak to me told me that they are undeterred by the death of Good, and that they’re more determined than ever to monitor and interrupt ICE. As the Trump administration continues the largest immigration enforcement operation in ICE’s history, read my dispatch on the groups determined to resist it.

—Olivia Reingold

On Tuesday morning, a shocking figure was presented to the world: 12,000. That’s the number of protesters who have been killed by the Iranian regime in recent days, according to reporting by London-based Iran International. This number isn’t a guess, says Iran International executive editor Mehdi Parpanchi. It is a leaked figure from inside the regime. “This is a full massacre,” Parpanchi tells Tanya Lukyanova. Watch her harrowing report on the Iranian regime’s bloody crackdown.

Iranian journalist Roya Hakakian reaches a similar conclusion to Parpanchi, and estimates the regime has murdered at least four times as many people as were killed during the 1979 Islamic revolution. Roya explains that this brutal strategy is the regime’s tactic of last resort—and argues that the Iranian people need urgent help from overseas. Read her piece:

Skeptics of foreign involvement in Iran point to the past as an argument against U.S. or Israeli action in the coming days. In particular, they cite America’s role in the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh as a cautionary tale for the present. But the story is a little more complicated than that, writes Eli Lake. He dissects the half-truths and fake history distorting our debate on how to respond to the violent crackdown:

• The Trump administration is ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for several thousand Somalian refugees living in the U.S. in the wake of a $9 billion fraud operation allegedly perpetrated by Somalis in Minnesota. Somali migrants with TPS must leave the country by March 17, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News yesterday.

• Six Minnesota prosecutors have resigned following a Department of Justice push for a criminal investigation into the widow of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed last week by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Among them is Joseph Thompson, who oversaw the sprawling fraud investigation in Minneapolis.

• President Trump and Zohran Mamdani have become unlikely text buddies, Axios reported yesterday. According to two sources familiar with their conversations, the two men who once lobbed accusations of “fascist” and “communist” at one another have privately communicated often since they exchanged phone numbers during their November meeting.

• Bill and Hillary Clinton may be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify in a House Epstein probe, according to James Comer, the Kentucky Republican leading the investigation. “We have tried to give you the little information we have,” the Clintons wrote in a letter to Comer. “No one’s accusing Bill Clinton of anything, any wrongdoing,” Comer told reporters yesterday. “We just have questions.”

• Gen Z is leading the charge to “unplug” from smartphones daily, a new survey found. Data from Talker Research found that more than half of Gen Z and 43 percent of millennials now carve out dedicated screen-free time in their day, compared with 33 percent of Gen X and 22 percent of Baby Boomers.

• Uganda’s government has shut down internet access across the country in advance of a national election where President Yoweri Museveni is up for a seventh term after four decades in office. The Uganda Communications Commission told service providers to turn off public internet in an effort to tamp down on “misinformation, disinformation, electoral fraud, and related risks,” Reuters reported yesterday.

• Mike Tomlin stepped down as the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers yesterday after 19 seasons with the team. Prior to his resignation, he was the longest-tenured active head coach of any major American professional sports team.

CORRECTION: A previous version of The Front Page said Mike Tomlin was the “longest-tenured head coach in any major American professional sports team to date.” There have been longer-tenured head coaches in American sports in the past. The Free Press regrets the error.

The history of modern Iran is a story of revolution and regret, of a people torn between the ideals of constitutional democracy and a centuries-old tradition of Persian kings. The latest chapter of that story is playing out on the streets of Iran right now. If you want to understand the backstory behind the Iranian protests, listen to Eli Lake’s two-part Breaking History epic on the birth of modern Iran. Catch it wherever you get your podcasts, or hit play below to listen to Part One:

In our pages today, Eli dives into one chapter of that history, and how it is being used—and abused—in debates about how the West should respond to the ayatollah’s ruthless crackdown on protests in Iran.

President Donald Trump is deciding how far the U.S. will go to intervene on behalf of Iran’s people as its revolution heats up, but American noninterventionists on both the left and right are horrified by the idea of any U.S. involvement. The critics are haunted by memories of the 20th century—specifically by a widely misunderstood power struggle that pitted Iran’s nationalist leader against a young, inexperienced monarch more than 70 years ago.

The episode is the 1953 fall of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalized Iran’s oil industry and is remembered as a hero by the anti-imperialist left. In the forward to his influential book, All the Shah’s Men, journalist Stephen Kinzer sums up the events as follows: “If the United States had not sent agents to depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, Iran would probably have continued along its path toward full democracy.”

No wonder Mossadegh briefly trended on X this week. Senator Bernie Sanders said the current regime is “itself a product of Western-backed intervention,” citing the fall of Mossadegh.