Join Jed Rubenfeld and political columnist Matthew Continetti live today at 3 p.m. for a conversation about the legal and political ramifications of Trump’s D.C. takeover. This livestream is available for paid subscribers, so be sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

Declaring yet another emergency—this time a crime emergency in the nation’s capital—President Donald Trump has seized control of the District of Columbia’s police department and promised to deploy 800 National Guardsmen there as well.

According to Trump, “Crime is out of control in the District of Columbia” and “urgently endangers public servants,” with a “dire impact on the Federal Government’s ability to operate efficiently.” According to D.C.’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, there is “no crime emergency” in the capital, and Trump’s actions are “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.”

Are Trump’s actions “unlawful”? It may seem hard to believe that the president can take armed control of an American city. But because of peculiarities in the way the District of Columbia is governed, Trump has more power over D.C. than any other city in the United States, and he seems to be well within his legal authority—for now.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada. It has been another wild week up north, where land acknowledgments may finally have enough teeth to become eviction notices, a censorship law (that censors me!) could be on the chopping block, anti-Palestinian racism joins the ever-expanding glossary of grievances, and the Maritime provinces have quarantined the woods. Let’s jump in! 

It turns out that all those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic. They may have been advance notice.

When Canada adopted its constitution in 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau slipped in a ticking time bomb: an explicit recognition of indigenous land rights without constitutional protection for property rights for other Canadians. That constitutional clause has fueled decades of lawsuits from First Nations—Canada’s indigenous people—asserting claims to huge portions of their ancestral territories.

Last Thursday, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” to about 1,846 acres of land on the south shore of Lulu Island in Richmond, and constitutionally protected rights to fish in the south arm of the Fraser River.

This 275,000-word judgment doesn’t just affect government-owned lands. It also includes private property now owned by third parties. So if you’re a Canadian who is a property owner in British Columbia and not indigenous, your claim on what you think you own has just been superseded by indigenous claims, called a “senior” claim in legalese. Down the road, your land or house could be expropriated by the federal government and turned over to an indigenous group that claims ownership.

That has already happened in Ontario, where three northern Ontario First Nations claimed in a lawsuit last month that a 14-acre public park in Kenora called Anicinabe Park is actually unceded territory and should be returned.

On November 1, 2007, a man named Rudy Guede broke into a random home in Perugia, Italy, then raped and killed Meredith Kercher—a 21-year-old exchange student from the University of Leeds.

You might not even remember the names Rudy Guede and Meredith Kercher. But one name you will remember is Meredith’s roommate, Amanda Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle.

In the weeks and years after Kercher’s murder, the media and the prosecution concocted a narrative that Amanda, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Guede had played a violent sex game leading to Kercher’s murder.

Amanda was portrayed as a deviant sex fiend, a slut, a killer, and a psychopath. The problem is that none of it was true. Amanda had been dating Sollecito only a week. She had never met Guede. And most importantly, she was not playing a sex game that led to Kercher’s death.

Amanda would end up spending a total of eight years on trial and four years in prison for a murder she did not commit.

And Kercher’s real murderer—Guede—would never be charged with killing Kercher alone. He’d spend only 13 years behind bars for this crime. And after his release in 2021, he would be accused of committing a similar crime.

Here’s the part of the story most people don’t know: On the morning of November 5, 2007, Amanda Knox was taken into custody in Italy. She wasn’t given a lawyer or a translator. She wasn’t told that she was a suspect. She was questioned for 53 hours. She was struck by a police officer, gaslit, and pressured into signing a confession.

Now, 18 years since she was taken into custody, she has released a memoir called Free: My Search for Meaning to tell the full story of what happened in Perugia, how she fought for vindication, how the tabloids and credible news organizations villainized her, and what her life has been like since she was exonerated in 2015.

Today on Honestly, I ask Amanda Knox how she survived in prison, how she reintegrated into society, why she returned to Italy to confront the judge who put her behind bars, why she chooses forgiveness, and what it means to be truly free.

Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for an edited transcript.

Amanda Knox on surviving her sentencing and time in prison:

Amanda Knox: You’ve taken away my freedom. You’ve taken away my opportunities in life. But you can’t take everything. You can’t. The only person who can take everything from me is me. So I latched on to what I could control, and what they couldn’t take from me—which was how I was going to spend the time that I was losing, and what I was going to get out of my life. 

It’s an interesting shift in perspective because it’s not exactly a happy one—and I describe the feeling like there was a physical sensation that came along with this realization, which was cold. A chill of realization swept through me, with the hair standing up on the back of my neck. This is on me; I have to make this work in defiance of them because they’re trying to convince me that my life doesn’t matter. They’re throwing me away in a dungeon and throwing away the key completely—misrepresenting and rewriting my past, my present, and my future. A little bit of part of me was like, Fuck that. They can’t take my life from me. So I made an important shift in my brain: I stopped waiting to get back the life that I should have been living, and I started looking around me, with a more clear eye, at the life that I had available to me, and I tried to think: What can I possibly do within these set of limitations that is meaningful to me?

I like to think that I’m always a person who finds something—some opportunity, some nugget of a value—in struggle. But I don’t romanticize rock bottom. I don’t think that struggle necessarily leads to character development. I saw many people around me in the prison be utterly broken by the bad things that had happened to them. And I think my greatest fear was becoming like them. My fear was being broken by it. And so there was this sense of resistance in me, but I didn’t know how long I could endure. What I discovered about myself is that I can endure quite a bit. And that’s a great thing to know about yourself. 

On that stigma of being “Foxy Knoxy”:

AK: There are very few people in my life, even to this day, for which I am simply Amanda. From the beginning of this, I became an idea in people’s minds; I became the face and the name of a lot of people’s fantasies. One of the things that I wrote about most recently, in a Substack that just came out, was that I became a sexual fantasy. Like, it wasn’t just a fantasy of violence, it was a sexual fantasy. It was a pornographic fantasy. It was like who I was diminished into, somebody’s very macabre jerk-off session. That’s what it ultimately came down to, and it was so gross. This sexual trauma that was also imposed upon me complicated my existence in the world. I was a person who was still young and wanting to fall in love and have a life. How do you do that once you get out of prison, when you’ve been vilified as a sexual demon for your entire adult life? What do you do?

How do you regain a sense of agency when, repeatedly over years, you’ve been told that nothing you say and nothing you do matters, because it is always going to be viewed in the worst possible light? Those were the things that I was grappling with in my mid-20s. 

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity. The views and opinions expressed by guests of Honestly are solely those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or positions of Honestly or The Free Press. 

It’s Tuesday, August 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Trump sends in the National Guard to clear out D.C.’s homeless encampments. A neglected Biden-era immigration hotline may hold the key to rescuing missing migrant children. And more.

But first: Abigail Shrier on the danger of asking kids if they’re depressed.

While I was writing my book Bad Therapy, my middle school–aged son returned home from sleepaway camp with a persistent stomachache.

I took him to urgent care, where a nurse asked me to leave the room so he could administer a mental health screening tool put out by our National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Afterward, I requested a copy of the survey and photographed it. Here, verbatim, are the five questions the nurse intended to ask my son in private:

1. In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?

2. In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?

3. In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?

4. Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When?

5. Are you thinking of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.

Children across America are being asked these questions by doctors. Because this is explicit protocol from the National Institute of Mental Health: Ask parents to leave so that you can administer the following questions to kids, ages eight and up, who may have not shown any signs of mental distress.

There are so many problems with this. The main one is: Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned. Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed—How about now? Are you sure?—and he just might decide that he is.

Now, thanks to Illinois governor JB Pritzker, tens of thousands of Illinois kids will be encouraged to think of themselves as sick. Many or most will be false positives. 

Read my piece:

—Abigail Shrier

If kids are suffering from overdiagnosis, many of the homeless people on our streets—and almost one in five homeless individuals have psychotic conditions—suffer from a policy regime that allows them literally to die in plain sight.

Donald Trump thinks he has a solution. He recently signed an executive order that makes it easier to impose psychiatric care on homeless people who suffer from severe mental illness. 

Dr. Sally Satel is a psychiatrist who knows this problem intimately and says she largely agrees with Trump’s executive order if—and that’s a big if—he carries it out properly.

We got a taste of how it might play out yesterday when President Trump announced that he is putting the Washington, D.C., police under federal control and deploying the National Guard, and part of their mandate will include clearing homeless encampments. 

• Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron hired investigators to research Candace Owens as they geared up for a lawsuit against the podcaster, according to the Financial Times. The Macrons’ lawsuit accuses Owens of defamation for claiming that Brigitte is biologically male. 

• An Israeli air strike killed five Al Jazeera journalists on Sunday, including one with alleged ties to Hamas. A spokesperson for the Israeli military confirmed Anas Al-Sharif was a target of the attack and accused him of collaborating with the terror group, while Al Jazeera denied the allegations.

• A federal judge said yesterday he will not unseal grand jury transcripts from Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell investigations in a new blow to President Trump’s campaign to deflect public attention from his alleged Epstein ties. “The Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest,” Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote. “Far from it.”

• An explosion at a U.S. Steel plant near Pittsburgh left two dead and at dozens injured yesterday. In the hours after the explosion, first responders rescued one worker from the rubble of the Coke Works plant in Clairton. 

• Tropical Storm Erin formed in the Atlantic Ocean yesterday and could become the first hurricane of the season. Early models expect the storm to strengthen into a major hurricane as it nears the Caribbean later this week, though it does not pose an immediate threat to the U.S.

• A California judge heard arguments yesterday about whether the Trump administration violated federal law when it deployed the National Guard to quell this summer’s protests in Los Angeles. The trial could set the stage for more legal battles as Trump deploys National Guard troops to fight crime in Washington, D.C.

• President Trump says that Ukraine and Russia will both have to cede land to one another to end their war. “There’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump said yesterday, just days before his planned peace talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska this Friday.

• Ford will spend $2 billion to overhaul a factory in Kentucky, allowing it to produce more affordable electric vehicles while increasing profit margins. The automaker’s CEO, Jim Farley, announced the investment yesterday at the company’s Louisville plant, which will be converted to make electric cars after 70 years of producing gas-powered vehicles.

This year, the first personalized CRISPR treatment was used to save the life of a baby boy with a rare genetic disorder in Philadelphia. Pretty soon, the same technology may be used to select for traits that have nothing to do with health: intelligence, height, even personality.

For our next live debate, we’re convening four experts to tackle the ethics of gene editing in Pittsburgh. Tickets are on sale now—don’t miss this one!

When it comes to the war in Gaza, how is it that the legacy media always defers to the narrative that benefits Hamas? A recent Reuters story illuminates the problem.

Last month, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) produced an internal analysis tracking reports of waste, fraud, and abuse of humanitarian aid in Gaza. 

According to that report, between October 2023 and May 2025, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance received 156 notifications of “fraud, waste, and abuse notifications” from its NGO partners in Gaza, amounting to a loss of more than $4.6 million. The key finding was that “for all 156 incidents, partners did not provide any information in their incident reports alleging SG [sanctioned group] or FTO [foreign terrorist organization] involvement,” according to a slideshow of the findings obtained by The Free Press.

But when the analysis was leaked to legacy news organizations, they reported something completely different. 

In late July, first Reuters and then CNN reported that the analysis “found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.” ABC later reported that USAID “failed to find any evidence” that Hamas “engaged in widespread diversion of assistance.” Those news organizations didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

There is a world of difference between “notifications” of aid misuse and actual misuse.

What should be done about the homeless and severely mentally ill people on our streets? The Department of Housing and Urban Development found that almost one in five homeless individuals suffers from psychotic conditions, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. They are often, quite literally, dying in plain sight.

That question became even more urgent on Monday when President Donald Trump announced that he is putting the Washington, D.C., police under federal control and deploying the National Guard, which will be tasked with clearing homeless encampments. “We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on,” he said. “They’ll not be allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”

Last month, Trump signed a new executive order that seeks to change the status quo for homeless and severely mentally ill people in a more radical way: The White House wants to make it easier to impose psychiatric care on homeless people who suffer from severe mental illness. The July 24 order, titled Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, says that “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.” (The order also includes housing, treatment, and public health policies regarding people addicted to drugs, but I will focus here on mental illness.)

If the order is implemented—which will require cooperation from the courts, state and local governments, and others—it could spark an unprecedented mobilization of resources to bring desperately needed help to millions of the most vulnerable Americans.

Illinois intends to crop-dust its public schools with mental-health diagnoses.

Last week, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed into law mandatory annual mental-health screenings for all public school children in third through twelfth grades. “Illinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools,” the governor trumpeted on X. “Our schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help—they’re empowered to do it.”

Empowered to “ask” for help by submitting to mandatory and invasive mental-health surveys, that is. If basic literacy hadn’t already collapsed in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to Pritzker’s sales pitch.

In fact, far too many American children and adolescents without debilitating mental disorders have already been funneled into the slippery mental-health pipeline.

I know: I’ve spoken to hundreds of parents of such kids.

In 2024, I published Bad Therapy, an investigation into the surge in adolescent mental-health diagnoses and psychiatric prescription drug use. Many young people without serious mental illness nonetheless spend years languishing with a diagnosis, alternately cursing it and embracing it, believing they have a broken brain, convincing themselves that their struggles are insurmountable because of the disorder’s constraints. They meet regularly with a therapist or school counselor on whom they become increasingly reliant, losing a sense of efficacy, unable to navigate on their own even minor setbacks and interpersonal conflicts. They begin courses of antidepressants that carry all kinds of side effects—suppressed libido, fatigue, the muffling of all emotion, and even an increase in depression. Antianxiety drugs and the stimulants given to kids diagnosed with ADHD are both addictive and ubiquitously abused.

As a young man I’d been excused from the politesse of a middle-class upbringing, and found myself free to figure it out or starve. I found my day-to-day and hand-to-mouth employment among folk whose speech inspirited the hell out of me. I note: fellow cab drivers, our customers, in their infinite variety, the hustlers and thieves I met in the North Side poolrooms and poker games. 

They inspired me to write, and I did.

Two of my earliest plays—American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)—are written in the profane language of the Chicago streets. 

Critics accused me of riding buses with a tape recorder and transcribing the speech I heard. I took it as the compliment it actually was. For I was not, of course, transcribing the speech of others, but imagining myself into their situations and, like them, talking my way out of them.

Profane is Latin for “outside the temple,” meaning something unholy. And the Church traditionally appropriated to itself the power to curse and excommunicate the heretic. “May you be cursed in your Sitting and your Standing, in your sleeping and waking,” and so on.

The profanity of the streets was not used to curse, but to accentuate or embellish. “Fuck you,” in those days, was the challenge to fight. (It survives in today’s more effete “fuck you, get a lawyer.”) The F-word, of the actual folk, then and now, is a rhetorical tool. 

Deep within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) headquarters in Washington, D.C., sits the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where newly hired and appointed officials of Donald Trump’s administration have established what looks like an old-fashioned war room. Their battle: track down the locations of unaccompanied minors who illegally immigrated to the U.S. during Joe Biden’s administration, many of whom may have suffered abuse or exploitation. If they can be found, law enforcement officials will check on their conditions and current immigration status.

In the war room, hundreds of volunteers from several federal law enforcement agencies are combing through about 65,000 calls from a federally funded hotline where people reported concerns about unaccompanied children who were placed with sponsors throughout the U.S. Most of the calls came from the unaccompanied minors themselves. A majority of these children came from Guatemala, and were between the ages of 15 and 17 at the time they crossed. 

According to HHS, the backlog of calls was discovered in early February, and the effort to follow up and investigate began a few weeks later, even for immigrants who were minors when they entered the U.S. but have since turned 18 and thus are no longer part of ORR’s system.

The hotline calls now being traced piled up for about three years during the Biden administration, according to Trump administration officials. About half a million children crossed the border alone during those three years, and reports from federal watchdog agencies and whistleblower testimony indicated that some children were placed with improperly vetted sponsors. The most serious examples included children who wound up with sponsors who had ties to MS-13 gang members or human traffickers.

President Donald Trump’s team just gave China’s rulers the technology they need to beat us in the artificial intelligence race. If he doesn’t reverse this decision, it may be remembered as the moment when America surrendered the technological advantage needed to bring manufacturing home and keep our nation secure.

His advisers, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, persuaded him to lift his ban on exporting Nvidia’s powerful H20 chips to China, which desperately needs these chips to make its AI smarter. The president should have stuck with his gut.

In exchange, the U.S. government has apparently become a financial beneficiary in AI chip sales to China: Press reports indicate that Nvidia and AMD (another chipmaker) have agreed to turn over 15% of their China chip revenues as a condition for obtaining export licenses, an arrangement that effectively monetizes what was supposed to be a national security restriction.

Don’t believe the claims that these chips aren’t very advanced. Before Trump banned them from export to China in April, H20s were instrumental in China’s DeepSeek AI model that shocked the world in January. DeepSeek’s CEO publicly admitted that United States “bans on shipments of advanced chips” are his company’s biggest challenge. In May, a senior executive at Chinese tech giant Tencent said he expected the ban on the H20 to “widen the gap” the U.S. enjoys over China in AI.

China’s lack of unfettered access to U.S.-designed AI chips is America’s clearest advantage in the AI race. By reversing the ban, the White House is helping Beijing’s Communist regime close the gap.