The Free Press

I’m at Bill Maher’s house, waiting for him to finish a podcast recording. Across the room is an anatomically correct sex doll of comedian Whitney Cummings. She gave it to Maher, his producer told me, because it creeped her out too much to have in her own home.

Now I’m being ushered into the guest seat in Maher’s studio. The room is still pungent from the joint he smoked during the last recording. “There’s just nothing you can do that’s more fun than getting high with me,” he tells me. I believe him. But because of the weed, he doesn’t want one drink—let alone two.

We’ve reached the end of a very dark week. On Saturday, a gunman opened fire at Brown University, killing two students and injuring nine more. He then, according to law enforcement, traveled 49 miles to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he murdered an MIT professor. On Sunday, legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death in their home.

It took five days for the authorities to find the Brown University shooter.

Late Thursday night, police identified Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a 48-year-old from Portugal, as the man who opened fire in the campus engineering building, killing two students, Ella Cook, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, and injuring nine.

Valente, who dropped out of Brown in the early 2000s after two semesters as a physics graduate student, was found in a warehouse in Salem, New Hampshire, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Law enforcement believes he is also behind the Monday murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Today, we can all rest easier knowing that the killer has been found. But we must not ignore something vital: The response to the shooting was utterly abominable. It was a tale of confusion and missteps from start to finish, an institutional incompetence so great that an army of online social media accounts tried to do the work of the police themselves—and, for the most part, failed spectacularly.

I stood up extra-straight on the doorstep of a little white house in Federalsburg, Maryland. I wasn’t sure if I should knock or ring the bell or just walk in, since I had never been to my mother’s house before. I had no idea who she really was. But here I was, as ready as I’d ever be. I had shaved my face clean that morning, for the first time in months, figuring it would help me look more like the baby she gave away 50 years earlier.

I knocked, dogs barked, the door opened, and my fragile mother looked me up and down. “My god, you’ve changed!” she exclaimed, and threw her bony arms around me.

I was 4 months old when I was adopted, which seemed very young until I had babies of my own. It’s not that young, really. A great deal happens in those first 3,000 hours. We learn to be fed and bounced and burped, to hear laughter and lullabies, to feel settled and protected in somebody’s arms.

Welcome back to A Man Should Know, a weekly column from Elliot Ackerman about how today’s lost boys can become tomorrow’s good men. This week, as Christmas nears, Elliot reflects on the quiet power of good hospitality and how even the smallest gestures can brighten your guests’ lives.

In June 2005, the Taliban discovered a team of Navy SEALs on a reconnaissance mission deep in the mountains of Afghanistan. A multi-hour firefight followed. The Taliban wiped out the team, save for a lone survivor named Marcus Luttrell. Luttrell fled to a nearby Afghan village inhabited by Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group, where he was offered asylum in the home of a local man, known simply as Gulab.

When the Taliban came looking for Luttrell, Gulab refused to hand him over, citing the Pashtun custom of nanawatai, a traditional form of hospitality whereby sanctuary is offered to a person to keep them from their enemies. This incident was later celebrated in Luttrell’s 2007 memoir, Lone Survivor, and, later, in Peter Berg’s 2013 movie of the same name.

Years later, when I was stationed at the American base where the incident occurred, people still talked about it with admiration. For us Americans, one lesson was clear: Afghans take hospitality seriously.

Welcome to Second Thought, the Free Press guide to what’s going on in the culture, both online and off. First up: I spent some time with the fantasy franchise that just won’t die.

I didn’t have high hopes for the third Avatar movie. And still, it shocked me with its terribleness. Watching it was like falling asleep while someone plays a video game next to you.

I’ll admit to liking the first Avatar, when it came out in 2009. I ate up all of those behind-the-scenes videos of actors wearing spandex suits. The movie was epic. Set on a faraway planet that’s rich in some mineral that greedy human corporations want to suck out of the ground, it followed a Marine, Jake Sully, who defected to become part of the planet’s indigenous group—the Na’vi—whose holy sites are being ruined by the evil colonizers.

Basically, it was a mash-up between Pocahontas and Ready Player One. And the ending is conclusive. When the sequel (Avatar: The Way of Water) came out, I thought: What more could there possibly be to say? I didn’t bother seeing it; but when the third installment, Avatar: Fire and Ash, dropped this week, my curiosity got the better of me. I regret that.

Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our weekly series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Jay Neugeboren, 87, explained why, at his age, “routine is a condition of survival.” This week, Joe Nocera, 73, writes about why it took him so long to get Christmas right.

If you want to receive Ancient Wisdom directly in your inbox every week, sign up here.

When I recall the Christmases of my childhood, I can’t help but wince a little. It’s not that they weren’t magical; they surely were. I can picture in my mind’s eye coming down the stairs—no, racing down the stairs—with my eight brothers and sisters, all of us pushing our way into our small living room, and looking for a piece of white cardboard with our name on it.

That’s where our individual stack of presents would be: bicycles and wooden trains; toy trucks and Play-Doh; Hula-Hoops and Lincoln Logs and cowboy and Indian getups, complete with cap guns. (Hey, it was the 1950s.) The lights on the tree would be on, and the cookies left for Santa half eaten. We would scream with delight as we ripped open each present, and then show them to our “surprised” parents, who beamed with their own delight. We kids fought a lot growing up, but never on Christmas morning.

So why do I wince now? Partly, it’s because I understand what it took for my parents to make Christmas happen for us. Until we fell asleep Christmas Eve, the living room was bare but for the tree. The next morning, all the toys had been assembled, and wrapped, and placed into nine separate, labeled piles. I doubt they got an hour’s sleep that night.

On Sunday, two gunmen murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

It was the latest in a string of attacks over the past several days. Just this week, a Jewish family’s home displaying Hanukkah decorations was fired on more than 20 times in California; a Hanukkah concert in Amsterdam was disrupted by thousands of protesters; an…

Welcome back to TGIF. Our events team says the local Free Press Meetups sold out fast—please tell us how they went! There’s no TG next week. Then we’re back with a fury in the new year. And we’re expanding the Where I TG game. It can be photos of you reading anything in The Free Press, not just TGIF. There’s so much good stuff, and I can’t hold you hostage. Email pics to [email protected].

→ I love Susie Wiles: Members of President Trump’s close team met with Vanity Fair at the White House. I don’t know why they did this, but that’s not my job. Among the interviewees was one Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, my instant favorite of the lunch bunch. She said Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” and that Elon Musk is an “avowed ketamine [user]” and an “odd, odd duck.” J.D. Vance? That old queen? He’s been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” says Suz. Talking to Susie Wiles sounds exactly like talking to about half a dozen older women in my life, like I swear to you if you called my mother-in-law today this what she would say about me. It’s as though all women, at a certain age, converge on an omnipolitics in which there is no left and right, there are only odd ducks, kooks, out-to-lunchers, and real sick puppies. Susie Wiles, please come over for dinner, you remind me of my Yaiya; your wisdom is deep, your judgment is final. The Trump team, after being absolutely roasted by Susie Wiles, all came out in support of her, saying she’s great and no one should overreact. Which is exactly what I would do to defend the grandmothers in my life, too. We stand with and for Susie Wiles. Please come roast The Free Press anytime.

→ Is that you, DOGE? The only thing that’s given me a glimmer of happiness in the last several years is the idea of DOGE. The dream of DOGE. That smart young people could make our government ultra-efficient, that America’s working class could get the same services while giving less of their paycheck to D.C., that we could have half the federal workers if they all just agreed to use email instead of fountain pens and couriers. We know how my dream turned out (shattered, bloody, ruined, false). But lo, what’s this?

This comes from an official Trump account, so it’s probably all fake data. I don’t know. You don’t know. But I dream a dream. Of paying normal taxes, and then in return getting someone who isn’t asleep in the FAA tower. This is the promise of America.

This is adapted from a speech The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro delivered Thursday night at AmericaFest, an annual conference hosted by Turning Point USA. The speech follows remarks Shapiro made on Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation, where he argued that conservatives must denounce influencers that proffer conspiracy theories.

It’s an honor to be here at Turning Point USA.

It’s even more of an honor to follow Erika Kirk, a heroic figure and a true American patriot. Erika and her children are in all of our hearts.

And of course, this is a bittersweet moment. It’s absolutely bitter because of the murder of our friend Charlie Kirk—an irreplaceable human being. But it’s also sweet to see the number of people who continue to remember Charlie each and every day, and to carry on his mission.

Today, I want to talk about the future of the country.

And the future of the country relies on the future of the conservative movement.

It relies on what TPUSA defines as its core mission: “freedom, free markets, and limited government.”

And it relies, most of all, on truth.