The Free Press

If its first days are anything to go by, 2026 may end up the most pivotal year in geopolitics since 1989, a hinge point that began in a moment of geopolitical calm but ended with the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Within a few years the Soviet Union had fallen, the European Union had been born, and an era of hyper-globalized trade took off on the wings of NAFTA and the WTO (World Trade Organization). This year could be equally pivotal—only this time with a vaster range of possible outcomes for world order.

It is possible to hear echoes of the late Cold War, and imagine regime change in Tehran, Caracas and Havana—which would strike a heavy blow to the ambitions of Beijing and Moscow. It is also possible Donald Trump will detonate NATO unity by coercively annexing Greenland, and that Beijing will wage war to subjugate Taiwan and seize its semiconductor plants, toppling a century of American-led Western technological dominance.

Last week, comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, hosts of the popular podcast Las Culturistas, were accused of perpetuating racism and sexism against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic firebrand running for U.S. Senate in Texas.

Here’s what they actually said:

“Anytime a politician is making it too obviously about themselves, I’m already done,” Rogers said during a recent episode, urging his listeners not to “waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett.”

Yang, his co-host, a Saturday Night Live alumni, concurred. “I must agree.”

I’ve seen the footage of Renee Nicole Good’s final moments a dozen times by now. So have you, probably, whether you wanted to or not. Maybe it presented itself unbidden in your timeline and you couldn’t look away; maybe you sought it in an effort to make sense of the act of violence captured there. Maybe it’s the shooting itself that fascinates you, the physics and logistics of the moment it all went to hell: When did he pull his gun, and why? How fast was the car moving when it struck him—or did it? Which way were the wheels turned?

As for me, I haven’t watched the video of Good’s death anywhere near as many times as I’ve watched the ones in which she’s still alive. Because the part that fascinates me, and haunts me, happens earlier: that final, fleeting moment just before the car moves forward and the shots ring out. It’s the last thing Renee Nicole Good would have heard, apart from the crack of the gun: a familiar voice, raised in a defiant cheer.

“Drive, baby, drive!”

After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed in September, Donald Trump vowed retribution against groups that he said have done “tremendous damage to our country.” The president directed his administration to prosecute anyone engaged in political violence and called antifa—a decentralized, far-left movement—a “domestic terrorist” group. Vice President J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, threatened to go after the tax status of major liberal philanthropic foundations.

Four months later, these pronouncements have clashed with reality. No widespread crackdown has arrived, and some outside allies of the White House have been left disappointed. “We’re not seeing the full force of government deployed at dismantling left-wing extremist networks and their funders, including antifa,” said Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project, a conservative nonprofit in Washington. Howell added that it seems like officials “are just playing whack-a-mole” without real results.

“With limited exceptions, it’s been slow and lackadaisical,” said another conservative activist about the push for investigations. The activist has briefed federal officials on liberal groups, including the philanthropy of George Soros, a Democratic megadonor and longtime foe of the right.

Is the West experiencing a revival of Christianity? It’s a question we often ponder here at The Free Press. We’ve covered the rise of a religious podcast with millions of female fans, the boom of an app that’s making people better Christians, the packed Gen-Z churches in New York City, and the renaissance of a monastery on a remote island off the coast of Scotland.

But the revival is uneven. It’s happening online, and in many Catholic churches, and some Orthodox traditions. At the same time, across America, mainline Protestant churches—think American Baptists, Episcopalians, evangelical Lutherans—are dying. Sanctuaries once full of people worshipping side by side, without concern for political or cultural differences, now sit half empty. And political scientist and American Baptist pastor Ryan P. Burge has a theory about why.

In his brand-new book, The Vanishing Church, which is out January 13, Burge argues that the political polarization of American society has seeped into the pews, causing many to leave the kinds of churches long known for welcoming doubters and rejecting dogma. The consequences for the country, he warns in the following excerpt, could be catastrophic. —The Editors

Nine. There were nine people in the room, including myself. As I sat facing the congregation, listening to the pianist begin the service with a short prelude, I counted again. I didn’t want anyone else to know what I was doing—a pastor counting heads on a Sunday morning is never a good look—so I tried to bounce my eyes quickly around the room. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to count to nine. After I was satisfied that I hadn’t missed anyone hiding in the corners, the realization washed over me: It was the first Sunday we hadn’t broken double digits.

This was just over two years ago, at the end of 2023. By that point, I’d been the pastor at First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, for 17 years; when I began at age 24, it took two deacons to help me serve the bread and grape juice during Communion. Even a few years earlier, 30 faithful members would gather in this small room each Sunday to sing hymns, hear me muddle my way through a sermon, and recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed together. They were worshipping in the same building where many of them had seen their children baptized or said final goodbyes to spouses. The vast majority had gone through every life stage in that building on the north side of town. It was the one permanent thing in their lives.

But all these people had either died or moved away, and no one was coming in their place. Hence why, that Sunday morning, it was all too easy to find a seat. It only took about 90 seconds for me to make sure everyone was served the body and the blood.

Less than a year later, the church would hold its final worship service.

First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon wasn’t an anomaly. From 1972 to 2022, the share of Americans who belong to mainline Protestant churches—of which mine was one—declined from 31 percent to just 9 percent.

Iran is in the midst of its largest nationwide uprising in years—and the ayatollah’s regime has answered with a brutal crackdown. Authorities have shut down the internet and opened fire on their own people. More than 2,000 protesters have reportedly been killed in the last three days.

Even as the regime still commands loyal security forces, it is weaker …

The biggest split in America’s housing debate isn’t left versus right—it’s between people who understand supply and demand and people who don’t. Most researchers, from free-market economists to left-leaning urban planners, agree that the best way to reduce housing costs is to reform regulations that limit the supply of homes. But these days, politicians in both parties are pushing the opposite message, saying that the way to slash costs is to punish landlords and investors.

President Donald Trump embraced the populist approach last week when he pledged to limit corporate investors from buying single-family homes. “People live in homes, not corporations,” he said on Truth Social, suggesting that buyers such as private-equity giant Blackstone have driven up prices and pushed the dream of homeownership out of reach for young families. Trump is preparing an executive order to implement the new restrictions and says he will ask Congress to codify them further.

Covering the left flank in the assault on landlords is New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. The 34-year-old democratic socialist pledged in his campaign to “freeze the rent” of certain buildings, which would depress investment and drive overall rents upward. Yet in his first week in office, Mamdani announced an even more destructive policy. He revived the previously shuttered Office to Protect Tenants, and committed to bring more buildings under permanent public ownership by pressuring landlords to sell distressed properties.

President Donald Trump mused about his own power recently when a reporter asked him what, if anything, could restrain his actions overseas. “There is one thing,” he replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Days later, the Trump administration attacked one of America’s most important and most delicate domestic institutions, making clear that the president’s limitless mindset applies equally at home. The Justice Department on Friday served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, indicating that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of Fed chief Jerome Powell. The investigation puts Powell at the mercy of prosecutors who are accountable to Trump, and it could curb his ability to steer monetary policy independently.

The probe ostensibly investigates Powell’s statements to Congress last year about renovations of Fed buildings. Those renovations ran over budget, with the cost growing from about $1.9 billion to $2.5 billion. That kind of ballooning in construction costs is surely familiar to a real estate developer like Trump, yet Trump threatened last summer to fire Powell over the renovations, until White House advisers urged him to back down. The reemergence of the issue suggests that Trump wasn’t swayed for long, and that he had bigger reasons to target Powell than supposedly misspent construction money.

There are many reasons to fear that the protest movement in Iran could end badly. The regime could once again decide to crack down on its own citizens, killing dozens or hundreds or perhaps thousands of them in the process. (Indeed, according to eyewitness reports, it has already started doing so.) Power might shift from the ailing ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, perhaps lifting some restrictions on the country’s women but frustrating the broader political and economic aspirations of the population. Even a transition to democracy need not bring lasting results, as the failed experiments with democratic rule from Egypt to Tunisia prove.

But 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. And yet, across the West, there has been a deafening silence in the face of these historic protests.

This silence has been evident in mainstream media outlets, from the British Broadcasting Corporation to National Public Radio, that have been oddly slow to grasp the importance of this moment. Worse, when those outlets did deign to cover the events, they often downplayed the significance of the protests; in a few especially egregious cases, reporters even seemed to harbor sympathies for the country’s brutal regime. (At the outset of the protests, The Guardian even published an op-ed by Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister.)

The silence has been even more deafening in the left-wing newspapers and magazines of the anglophone world. On Saturday morning, I searched the principal publications of the American left for any mention of Iran. There was nothing on the websites of The Nation or The New Republic or Jacobin or Slate or even Dissent.

It’s the second week of 2026. Have you kept your New Year’s resolution?

For many, the answer is probably no. Perhaps you are reading this sentence while, filled with self-loathing, you eat something you vowed to forgo in 2026. Or maybe, despite resolving to quit putting things off, you’re reading this article to procrastinate from the task you ought to be tackling. Contrary to what you might have been told—or the thoughts that may be circulating in your head—this is not evidence that you are a pathetic loser. Rather, you just made a lousy New Year’s resolution: one that is doomed to fail.

And you’re not alone. Of about half of all Americans who make New Year’s resolutions on January 1, 22 percent have failed at the end of week one; 50 percent at three months; and 81 percent after two years. Knowing this, you might conclude that New Year’s resolutions are stupid. That would be a mistake. Resolutions are very good, in fact: They are a sign that you want to improve your life in tangible ways, which is healthy and positive. People need something in their lives that’s worth striving for. You just have to be smart about how to make your resolutions.

I would know. When I was in my mid-twenties, I told a friend that I really wanted to quit smoking. I’d picked up a penchant for tobacco at 13. People ask me today why I did so, and all I can say is, “Because it was wonderful.” Well, until it wasn’t. I used to wake up each night around 3 a.m. and light up a coffin nail right there in the bed. (Hey, don’t judge me, smoking for me was a relationship.) But one night at age 26, when I was engaged to be married, I fell back asleep with a lit cigarette, and woke up later with 10 holes burned in the sheets. It occurred to me that it was one thing for the cigs to kill me, but quite another for them to kill the future Mrs. Brooks.