The Free Press

It was just after noon on a Monday in Minneapolis and dozens of anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activists were on a joint call on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. A woman was describing a Nissan she’d been trailing on Hiawatha Avenue when a user named “Chickpea” interrupted.

“Folks at 35th and Park report that ICE hit a man with their vehicle,” Chickpea said, breathless. In the background, I heard a cacophony of whistles, jeers, and sirens.

Suddenly, two different Signal chats lit up, notifying hundreds of members of a large ICE presence of “at least 20 agents” at East 35th Street and Park Avenue. Soon after, one ICE watcher called in to report that at least 200 observers had turned up to witness the scene.

“Yeah, let’s not crowd that anymore,” said a dispatcher going by the username “John Longpants,” instead directing the caller to 35th and Columbus.

In the last six weeks, Minneapolis has become the site of the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history. Thousands of city residents have responded by joining various Signal groups whose main purpose is to find and disrupt ICE.

Allowing biological males to compete in women’s and girls’ sports is no longer a partisan issue in America. According to recent surveys, some 75 to 79 percent of Americans oppose it. Even two-thirds of Generation Z oppose it. The NCAA and other major sports organizations now oppose it as well.

In other words, the madness of letting biological men and boys compete against—and sometimes physically injure—women and girls is now widely recognized. Yet two federal appellate courts held in 2024 that states are unable to stop this madness. These courts enjoined laws passed in Idaho and West Virginia that barred biological boys from competing on girls’ sports teams.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in those cases Tuesday and looks poised to reverse the appellate rulings. That makes sense because, putting ideology aside, the legal arguments lean so heavily in favor of Idaho and West Virginia. But a sharp line of questioning opened up by Justice Elena Kagan complicates the matter.

The plaintiffs are biological boys who transitioned. They assert a right to play on girls’ sports teams. Their constitutional argument is twofold.

First, the plaintiffs say that Idaho and West Virginia are discriminating against them based on their transgender status. This is a very weak argument.

Our world is in the midst of the greatest expansion of technology and the greatest concentration of wealth in human history. The center of the earth is now Silicon Valley. The central players in this story are a mere handful of companies—Apple, Google, OpenAI, Tesla, just to name a few—that dominate the markets and touch every part of our lives. Its epicenter may be on America’s West Coast, but the full technology story stretches across the world, too, defining our relationships with Europe and especially with China, our strongest geopolitical adversary.

To help us make sense of this world of technology, we’ve tapped Patrick McGee to join The Free Press as a contributing writer. Patrick’s reporting across the tech world has cut through the corporate claims and received wisdom of the tech industry. He is one of the world’s top experts on Apple, and his book Apple In China is an essential guide to the fraught relationship between the tech industry and the country it relies on to make its products. Patrick brings insights drawn from both corporate boardrooms and factory floors, and an eye for the truth behind the rhetoric. Here in his first column for The Free Press, he takes on the big ambitions of American AI—and how China could blow them up. —The Editors

The biggest risk with artificial intelligence is that it’s humanity’s last invention: We build “God in a box” and it decides to wipe people from the planet. This is the bleak scenario envisioned by the AI doomers and books like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Give some thought, though, to the less existential but far more likely risk: that America’s grand bet is outgunned by China’s more mundane and pragmatic AI strategy. While American companies concentrate resources on a moon shot—investing in frontier models to create a superintelligence to tackle every problem—Chinese companies are rapidly applying “good enough” AI to leverage their existing superiority in manufacturing and logistics.

For the average American, AI means chatbots. Big Tech firms are pouring unprecedented sums into chips and data centers to accelerate “deep learning”—the technique behind training neural networks that gave rise to ChatGPT. In China, the emphasis is more on deploying similar deep learning networks into every nook and cranny of the economy, giving machines increasing autonomy. AI algorithms are being used to guide robotic arms in factories, screen patients in hospitals, and eliminate defects on the production line.

The U.S. has framed AI as a race, with a single winner emerging into what a White House report last year called “a new golden age of human flourishing.” Top AI executives in the U.S. routinely talk about how deep learning will lead to what they call artificial general intelligence (AGI), in which AI models will master every subject in the human domain. To get there, American companies are promising to spend more than $1 trillion on data centers alone by 2030.

On Monday, a letter from a doctor inside Iran was posted online by Tavaana, a U.S.-based educational nonprofit. “I’m writing this so you can urgently share it wherever you can,” it read. “What we hear from BBC, Iran International, and other satellite networks shows that the reality in Iran is still not understood. They keep saying security forces are hesitant or weaker than before, and that mass killing hasn’t happened. The truth is exactly the opposite.”

Three days ago, the Iranian regime sent security forces to brutally crush the thousands of demonstrators who have taken to the streets to protest the Islamic Republic. Reported estimates of casualties vary wildly: HRANA, an Iranian human rights group, says it is several hundred. The regime’s own officials say 3,000. London-based organization Iran International says 12,000.

If the evidence from a clip posted Monday on X is any guide, that last estimate may very well be accurate. The clip, which is only six minutes long, appears to show “at least 262 instances of gunfire and sustained automatic shooting” fired on protesters in Tehran. And if 12,000 is indeed the true death toll, it means that in the span of just a few days, the regime has murdered at least four times as many people as were killed during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Given the internet and phone blackout imposed across the country, it is impossible to know the full extent of the toll the protesters have incurred thus far. Yet the news trickling out—primarily from medical professionals whose clinics and hospitals have been overrun by wounded protesters—paints a terrifying picture. One doctor, who treated the injured for days before fleeing Iran, gave an interview describing his experience. His quotations are harrowing: “The trauma cases I saw were brutal, shoot-to-kill”; “This was treated as a wartime situation—go and suppress by any means”; “You did not need to be a protester to be shot. You could just be passing by.”

When the man who exploited me for years made his final demand, I didn’t doubt that he meant it. After I’d spent years as his victim, my sex trafficker told me that my unexpected pregnancy could end one of three ways: abortion, my own death, or fleeing everything I knew.

I’d been groomed, raped, and abused throughout my childhood, and at 18 I turned to prostitution because I was homeless and needed a place to stay. I was raped by three men, one of whom became my trafficker. He took me to a different city, put me on the sidewalk by the truck stops, and gave me a quota to make by a certain time each day if I wanted to stay out of trouble.

My days were filled with verbal and sexual abuse, physical and emotional torture, death threats and prostitution. Basic needs like sleep, breaks, and relationships were denied to me and used as bargaining chips for my compliance. Every day, I strove to make enough money to avoid death threats or abuse, and I fearfully submitted to all my traffickers’ commands, never dreaming I could leave.

But I wanted my son to live. So I fled across America, hoping for a new life.

I knew there were shelters and centers meant to help desperate women, but all I found was closed doors. Nearly 30 domestic violence shelters across several states refused to help me because my situation was “too severe.” Finally, one shelter offered to help me, and connected me with a local New Hampshire pregnancy center.

There is a difference between a revolution and a counterrevolution. It is a recurrent mistake of the American media to conflate the two. That is because the success of 1776—the 250th anniversary of which we celebrate this year—predisposes us to sympathize with revolutions. I can think of no better explanation for the naivete of much liberal commentary on subsequent revolutions: France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Nicaragua in 1979, Egypt in 2011 and, most relevant to today, Iran in 1979.

Let it never be forgotten that, in The New York Times on February 16, 1979, the Princeton professor Richard Falk confidently asserted: “The depiction of [the Ayatollah Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” Moreover, “the key appointees” in the new revolutionary government had “a notable record of concern for human rights and seem eager to achieve economic development that results in a modern society oriented on satisfying the whole population’s basic needs.”

“Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics,” Falk gushed, “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third‐world country.”

Nope.

It turns out the commentators Falk was refuting were right. Khomeini really was “fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices.” They were also right to associate him “with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent antisemitism, and with a new political disorder, ‘theocratic fascism,’ about to be set loose on the world.” As there is no accountability whatsoever for liberal professors, Falk was subsequently appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. The Iranian people, meanwhile, have endured close to 47 years of theocratic fascism.

Why did San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie, whose campaign platform emphasized sensible fiscal policy, sign legislation shortly before Christmas to create a “reparations fund” for black residents of the city? The measure was initially drafted during the tenure of Lurie’s predecessor, London Breed, at the request of the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC), a small group of activists convened soon after the George Floyd riots to propose remedies for past injustices against the local black community. The committee’s almost 400-page list of final recommendations included financing “comprehensive debt forgiveness,” $500,000 down payment loan assistance grants, and—most notoriously—a reparations fund offering a “one-time, lump-sum payment of $5 million” for every qualifying black resident of the city.

In a press release, Lurie emphasized that the legislation did not actually allocate any money to the fund and said he was signing the bill merely “in recognition” of AARAC’s work and of the Board of Supervisors’ unanimous vote in support of the fund. The statement suggested that he was unaware of the broader context of cronyism from which the reparations push emerged. Yet in fact, on the campaign trail, Lurie levied multiple bracing attacks on then-mayor Breed for enabling “blatant corruption” through precisely this kind of identity-based grant program.

The point Lurie made back then stands. As I reported at the time, the Breed administration funneled nearly $100 million a year to a handful of activist-staffed departments that functioned largely as make-work and vote-buying schemes. I called it the city’s “DEI-industrial complex.” These city-funded fiefdoms included AARAC, but also the city’s Human Rights Commission, Department on the Status of Women, Office of Transgender Initiatives, and Office of Racial Equity. Under Breed, these departments ran programs offering thousands of dollars in monthly “guaranteed income” payments for select people who identify as black or transgender, with plans to expand to other groups, such as women with criminal records.

The camera pans across a large, brightly lit auditorium lined with dead bodies. Hundreds of them fill the room. Many more are being stacked outside, in the open air, because there is no space left in the hall.

This is one of many harrowing videos recently sent from Iran to Mehdi Parpanchi, executive editor of Iran International, a Persian-language televi…

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where we’re wondering again if America will try to swallow us whole, Jewish Canadians are targeted because of their military service, and Grok is trouble for more than just the reason you think. Let’s get to it!

It was easy to treat all that “51st state” talk by Donald Trump as him just trolling Canada. Mark Carney would calmly respond that Canada “is not for sale,” and everyone would move on.

But Canadians are starting to think about something they haven’t seriously considered for a long time: Could the United States actually try to take us over? You can read my reporting on Canadians who would like Canada to become the 51st state and those who say they’re ready to take up arms if the Yanks ever came north.

When you add a growing separatist movement in resource-rich Alberta, it feels less and less like Canada will be an independent country with the same borders that it has today.

The United States president has repeatedly mused publicly about Canada becoming the newest U.S. state, even saying he would be willing to use “economic force” to push Canada into a political union. He usually moved on to musing about something else.

It’s Tuesday, January 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Pastor Ryan P. Burge on why the pews are empty; Kat Rosenfield on the dangerous illusions that led to Renee Good’s death; Gabe Kaminsky on Trump’s botched crackdown on nonprofits. Plus: River Page asks, “Is woke back?” All that and more.

But first: Why 2026 could be a turning point in world history.

“What President Trump will do next, only he knows. The world will have to keep waiting and guessing. I’m not gonna broadcast it.”

So said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday. She was answering a question on Iran, and how the president would respond to Tehran’s bloody crackdown on protesters. (And later in the day, the president made his latest move: a 25 percent tariff on all countries doing business with Iran.) But Leavitt could have been talking about any number of foreign-policy questions when she said that “the world will have to keep waiting and guessing.”

Trump’s decisions have driven world events so far this year, and a great deal rests on what the president will do next. That’s always true—but especially at the start of 2026.

In our lead story today, Matt Pottinger, who worked as deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term, and Roy Eakin argue that 2026 could prove to be the most consequential year in world history since 1989. They survey the world’s flashpoints, from Tehran to Taiwan, and ask: Will 2026 mark the start of a new era? And will that era bring peace and prosperity—or disorder and conflict?

—Oliver Wiseman

For the latest on the situation in Iran catch up on our Monday livestream, featuring three experts on the country: Michael Doran, Roya Hakakian, and Behnam Ben Talebu. They talk to host Rafaela Siewert about what is unfolding in Iran, what will come next, and whether the U.S. will take action.

And for a look at a troubling truth about how the Iranian protests are being viewed in the West, read the latest from Yascha Mounk. “The sympathies of every single person who believes in freedom and equality and the basic rights of women should be with those courageous millions in Iran,” writes Yascha. “And yet, across the West, there has been a deafening silence in the face of these historic protests.” Read his full op-ed:

• The man who allegedly started a fire at a Mississippi synagogue over the weekend admitted to targeting the building because of its “Jewish ties,” the FBI said yesterday. No one was injured other than 19-year-old suspect Stephen Spencer Pittman. “We’re all devastated, but we are ready to rebuild,” said Michele Schipper, a former president of Beth Israel Congregation.

• The White House is considering a trade deal with Taiwan, which could be announced as soon as this month. The deal would reduce the tariff rate on exports from the island nation and require its largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, to commit to building more semiconductor factories on U.S. soil.

• Nearly 15,000 New York City nurses are on strike, demanding higher wages, more favorable staffing ratios, and more hospital security staff to curb violent incidents. In anticipation of the strike, some hospitals contracted travel nurses and reserved hotel rooms, while others canceled surgeries and sped up patient discharges, The New York Times reported.

• Financial stocks sank yesterday after President Trump proposed a 10 percent interest rate cap on credit cards. The American Bankers Association warned that a cap would hurt consumers and small businesses by shrinking credit access.

• Miami Beach’s Fisher Island unseated Atherton, California, as the most expensive U.S. zip code, according to a PropertyShark analysis. The island community has a median sale price of $9.5 million, a onetime $500,000 membership fee, and is accessible only by ferry, yacht, or helicopter.

• The federal government is sending around 1,000 additional agents to Minneapolis in the wake of last week’s fatal ICE shooting, CNN reported. The increase is a part of Operation Metro Surge, which federal officials said was conceived to target undocumented Somali immigrants in Minnesota. For our on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil in the Twin Cities, read Olivia Reingold’s report.

• Senator Mark Kelly sued the Defense Department over the decision to cut his retirement pay because of a social media video in which he urged servicemen to “refuse illegal orders.” In a letter of censure to Kelly, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the video “seditious” and “clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline.”

• Mattel debuted a Barbie with autism, adding to a collection of medically diverse dolls including Barbies with Down syndrome, blindness, and type 1 diabetes. Each autistic Barbie will come with a fidget spinner, noise-canceling headphones, and a pink tablet based on the devices some nonverbal autistic people use to communicate.