The Free Press

Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder.

This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage. Part of this comes from how Clancy’s case has been understood: Her defense argues that she was in the grips of postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, and has pointed to the many medications prescribed by different doctors to treat her depression symptoms in the months leading up to the killings. To the moms of TikTok, an overwhelmed and overmedicated mom practically begging for help is something, maybe an extreme version, of what they see in the mirror. Which is why Clancy has been claimed as a martyr, rather than a monster who acts as a cautionary tale.

Last week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland offered a preview of the Democrats’ game plan for the coming year. As the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, he announced that he intends to launch a formal probe into what he calls the Justice Department’s “sham investigation” of antisemitism at taxpayer-funded universities.

Partisan oversight investigations are nothing new in Washington. But this one is uniquely cynical.

By Raskin’s telling, the Donald Trump administration decided to investigate antisemitism at Harvard University, Columbia University, Brown University, and Cornell University based on a single New York Post article from January 2025, which highlighted antisemitic incidents at medical school graduation ceremonies. According to a Justice Department whistleblower, the initial investigation did not yield any Title VI violations, so the administration went “on an open-sea fishing expedition” in search of antisemitism, using it as a “pretext” under which to “harass and intimidate universities on utterly false, tendentious, and distorted grounds” and “strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants.”

This completely rewrites history.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Chris Christie explains why men love “The Godfather.” Suzy Weiss argues that Lindsay Clancy is “O.J. for white women.” Kat Rosenfield on the strange case of “dog racism.” And more!

But first: Harry and Meghan get mugged by reality . . .

And so farewell, America’s prince.

This week, Meghan Markle and Harry Mountbatten-Windsor announced that, after six years making jam and reality shows in a Montecito mansion, they’re moving back to the United Kingdom, a country they once characterized as a racist hellhole.

“This, at a moment when progressives are laughing off the deranged things they said in 2020,” writes Kara Kennedy in today’s lead essay, “is the ultimate example of getting mugged by reality.”

When they left England in 2020, Prince Harry claimed it was because of the media’s “ruthless campaign” against his mixed-race wife. “The UK press is bigoted,” he told Oprah Winfrey. Meghan, meanwhile, said she wanted to live in a country where reporters wouldn’t take pictures of her kids. “That doesn’t make me obsessed with privacy,” she said. “That makes me a strong and good parent protecting my child.”

In America, Meghan tried to become a podcaster, and failed. Infamously, she started selling jam. Meanwhile, Harry spent a lot of his time flying back to the UK to appear in various courtrooms, where he waged a very expensive legal battle against several newspaper groups he claimed had invaded his privacy.

The last of these battles ended last month, when a judge threw out the prince’s allegations about the Daily Mail. This week, he was one of the claimants ordered to pay the paper $13 million in compensation. Happily, at almost exactly the same moment—perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not—it was reported that “sources say” Meghan has a “top secret” acting job lined up in England.

Still, why are these crusaders, these good, strong parents, coming home at this moment? In her essay, Kara argues that it’s nothing to do with their values and everything to do with cash. “They’ve exhausted their Hollywood handouts,” she writes. “In the end, it didn’t matter what the Sussexes’ mission statement was: standing up to racism or straightening out the press or turning the whole creaking shell of the monarchy on its head. When the money stops coming in, they can’t afford to be principled.”

Read the full piece here:

Why has TikTok decided that Lindsay Clancy, the woman who has admitted to strangling her three children to death, must be protected at all costs? Because, says Suzy Weiss, this exhausted mother has become “O.J. for white women.”

With her co-host, Dan Ahdoot, Suzy also has her say on rumors that the president is having an affair with his executive assistant, Natalie Harp (otherwise known as “the human printer” because she prints out nice online comments about Donald Trump to show him), plus Matthew McConaughey’s meeting with the pope, and the Kentucky family who turned down $26 million from a company that wants to build a data center on their land, because Jesus preaches we should occupy the land we’re on.

You won’t want to miss this episode. Watch it below—or listen wherever you get your podcasts!

This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote an essential piece about Lindsay Clancy; Carrie McKean reported on the Texans fighting against a border wall in paradise; and Arthur Brooks explained why women prefer it when men make the first move . . .

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a grandpa in Montana or an adventurous mother of three in Philly. Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked Nick Clairmont for his recommendations . . .

📚Read . . . Shop Class as Soulcraft by the “philosopher-mechanic” Matthew Crawford. When this book came out in 2009, it was one of those freakishly runaway bestsellers that the world of nonfiction publishing sometimes spits out, talked about over dinner tables and named on Notable Books lists. Not to be a popular nonfiction hipster, but books like that are often crowd-pleasing because they’re finding some kind of lowest common denominator in readers’ demands, and many should, in my opinion, be ignored. Imagine my surprise when, on a recent read, this book turned out to be deeper, more well-written, and a lot more fun than it had any right to be. And given that it’s about the satisfaction of manual work in a digital world, it’s maybe even more timely today, in the age of AI.

📺Watch . . . Silo, on Apple TV, is currently approaching the end of its third and penultimate season. If you feel like there is a bewildering array of underground bunker–based televisual content these days (Fallout, Paradise), I get where you’re coming from. Maybe it’s because it’s a way to portray modern life with a plausible and out-of-sight reason why the characters aren’t looking at their phones all the time. I don’t know; I’m not a producer. I just know this one has me hooked. It’s smart, interesting to look at, and, if you start now, you’ll be caught up when the final season runs. It’s always good, after all, when a puzzle-box show actually has a scheduled end, so it doesn’t go all Lost on us.

🌳 Eat . . . Pawpaws! America’s own large fruit, which is native to the East Coast and can grow, usually near water, from the Great Lakes on down to Florida. These tropical-tasting, soft, yellow, mushy delights are most prevalent in the mid-Atlantic region and Appalachia, where I live, and they start getting ripe right around . . . now. In late August on the Shenandoah, you can see kayakers and canoers leaning awkwardly toward the bank, picking this most American fruit, which is sort of like a banana and a mango and something else you can’t name had a baby.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

Imagine, for a minute, that everyone in your neighborhood is paying your rent, and then, one day, you accuse them all of being racist bullies and move away. Imagine you accused your own family, too. You’re a grown man, and you tell your brother, who’s got three kids under the age of 10, that he wasn’t supportive enough. You complain because your father won’t let you use his credit card anymore. Back home, the neighborhood whispers that you left because your elderly grandmother’s late, beloved husband was a bigot—and you let everybody believe it.

You’re gone five years, and in that time your grandmother dies, your brother’s wife has cancer, and so does your father. You have two kids. In your glamorous, expensive new community, you keep telling everyone how terrible your family treats you, how unhappy you were in your old neighborhood, and how unsafe it was. You try to start a high-flying career, but it’s harder than you thought. People start laughing at you. In the beautiful place you tried to make home, people are whispering that you’ve got no talent, and you don’t belong.

So, what do you do? You pack your bags. You announce you’re coming home, to the place you rejected.

This week, it was reported that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are returning to live in the United Kingdom. After six years, mostly spent trying to make reality shows nobody liked in Montecito, California, they are putting an end to “Megxit.” “Harry and Meghan will make a shock return to the UK at the end of August for ‘an extended period’, with kids Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, enrolling at school here,” The Sun newspaper reported. King Charles III, who after two years is still being treated for cancer, “was told on Sunday,” giving him three days notice, despite their “non-royal residence” already being picked out.

“The myth of the pit bull is a lot of bullshit. Pit bulls don’t attack. It’s just racism. It’s just dog racism.”

So said the actor Jon Bernthal recently on The Howard Stern Show, setting off a fresh round of the cursed conversation cycle known as “pit bull discourse.” A bit silly? Sure, but if you’ve been around for previous iterations of this cycle, you’ll know that this is a nice change of pace from the usual reason pit bulls end up in the news, which is that one of them has mauled someone to death.

Another summer, another high-profile trial for everyone to lose their mind over. There was Boston’s Karen Read in 2024, Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s battle over who abused who worse a few years before that, and now, there’s the case of Lindsay Clancy.

Clancy, whose legal team says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, strangled her three children to death in the basement of her Massachusetts home in early 2023, and neither she nor her lawyers deny that. The murder trial that’s taking place now is to ascertain whether Clancy should spend the rest of her life in prison, or in a mental institution. But on some deep and feminine corners of the internet, there is a chorus growing who believe that Clancy is innocent, and allege that her husband, Patrick, is the one who committed the unspeakable crime.

And then there is a wider, concentric circle of women who believe that Clancy did the murders, but want to stand in solidarity with her. “I could have been Lindsay. Any one of us could have been,” wrote one woman in her defense, echoing a recurring theme. I don’t actually think that’s true; most people are not actually capable of, or at risk of, doing what Clancy did.

The whole Clancy phenomenon has me thinking about the trial of the decade, which happened the year I was born. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman after a trial that caught the world’s attention. Back then, there was a race divide about the trial: In one survey, 70 percent of white people thought O.J. did it, while a proportional share of black respondents, 70 percent, said he didn’t. In 1995, the O.J. case became a lightning rod for arguments about race and the criminal justice system; today, Clancy is becoming a proxy for one about gender—specifically, the burden we put on mothers, and how we deal with it when they break.

Dan Ahdoot and I talked Lindsay Clancy, plus Open AI boss Dario Amodei’s mysterious wife, during this week’s episode of Second Thought. You can listen to it here, or watch below:

President Donald Trump’s dramatic escape from Turkey—Air Force One was under threat from Iran, so Trump got spirited to a military jet, via a catering cart—has minted a new celebrity within the POTUS-verse. Her name is Natalie Harp. She was with Trump in the cart in Turkey, and also hustling across a golf course in Scotland and tucked into the trunk of his SUV on his way to the courthouse in New York. In fact, it seems that she’s by his side every other minute of his second presidency.

The 35-year-old’s official titles include both special and executive assistant to the president but she’s also informally known as “the human printer” since she’s tasked with handing the president printouts of positive news articles about him. West Wingers report that she’s his most loyal aide and that if you want to get to the president, you gotta go through Natalie.

As I’ve noted before, Melania seems not very interested in performing the duties of the First Lady. And who could blame her? No one wants to be picking at a Continental breakfast with the Finnish ambassador when you could be doing damage to the Amex at the boutiques in Palm Beach. So it would seem Harp is a good match for Trump, except for the fact that she’s sending him weird notes about “I want things to always be right between us,” and she had infatuations with other presidents, like George W. Bush, according to her brother, Preston.

“Trump is everything that my mom taught us to respect,” Preston told CNN. He’s in a trucker hat, with long hair and an anti-war poster on his wall. His message to Natalie was: “I love you. I hope that you change and wake up and realize that everybody on this earth is part of the human family, and no country is better than any other country.” Huh?

I’m always fascinated by siblings who go, with the same force, in totally different directions. It begs the question: Where are Mr. and Mrs. Harp in all of this?

Everyone seems to be traveling, all the time. To Japan, the Hamptons, the Berkshires, everywhere in Europe. Scroll on any social media and you’ll be hit with stunning views, perfect meals, and charming cobbled streets; all evidence, we’re meant to understand, implicitly, of a summer well spent.

Instead of a leisure activity that people find fun, traveling has become a virtue in and of itself and a rite that more and more people are availing themselves of, boomers and Gen Zers alike. Italy and Spain are reportedly stretched to their tourism limits, and locals all over Europe are incensed by the glut of American visitors and their very blue jeans and green cash.

But just as travel is becoming easier than ever, the experience of being in a foreign country has been hollowed out. There’s barely such a thing, in the internet age, of a truly exotic, untouched place. Translation apps vaporize the language barrier, and social media makes it so your itinerary is written before you arrive. Hotels are insanely expensive; getting a reservation is a catfight, and on top of that, you have to brave the airports and janky flights just for the chance to elbow someone out of the way to see a sunset. In how many zip codes must you sample the hamachi crudo?

Even the movie of the summer, The Odyssey, is about an intractable journey—the most infamous shlep around the Mediterranean that’s ever occurred—though certainly not the only one that took place over the last few months.

I tried to do my own summer jaunt, to Napa Valley. While I can’t deny the wine was great and the views beautiful, hours after I was wandering a vineyard, I was trudging through the Hilton lobby on an unexpected layover in Chicago, begging an AI agent to help me book a hotel. And I was thinking to myself, Was all this even worth it?

More often than not, I think the answer is no. Not least because a lot of the things we travel for—good food, an opportunity to connect with people you love, having fun outside—are all available at home, sans high expectations and inevitable disappointments. Let me know where I should go to cure myself of my aversion to traveling in the comments.

For more on the case of the summer: Kat Rosenfield smartly broke down what’s happening on both the berserk left and right when it comes to Lindsay Clancy, and why women are wont to deny the true parts of true crime. “The temptation is understandable to imagine this woman as an innocent victim, be it of a plotting husband or a diabolical disease—and yet, to indulge it is to elide the opportunity of true empathy,” writes Kat.

What if America went completely dark? That might sound like the stuff of science fiction—or a horror movie, but it could be closer than we think. Grid technologists are sounding the alarm about the weaknesses inside our infrastructure, specifically the handmade transformers that are the “industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg.” My prediction? A big wave of prepping—for an AI apocalypse, rolling blackouts, communication failures, you name it—and soon.

Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, are waging a war against data centers in their small town of Maysville, Kentucky. They just turned down an AI company’s $26 million offer to buy their land, telling them to quote, “kick rocks.” Some of their neighbors are enraged that the two refused a boost to their community’s economy—but they’re holding the line in the name of Jesus. “He said to occupy, wherever you’re standing, you occupy until he returns,” Bare said. “If I step off of this piece of property and it becomes something for an AI hub, then I have failed to occupy and I can be held accountable for that on the Judgment hour.” Rock on, ladies.

How many times have you been at a dinner with friends and overheard someone, while talking about work, say, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”? How many times have you stood at an Italian bakery and heard two customers joke, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli”?

Nearly 55 years after Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic, The Godfather, premiered, it is still everywhere.

I first watched the film at age 14—now 50 years ago. I had heard about the movie from some of my friends and regularly pestered my dad to see it. After my 14th birthday, he finally relented and watched it with me. We popped it into the VCR, and as the face of Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) came on the screen, I felt my stomach tighten in anticipation. I winced at the violence, shook my head at the murder of Sonny “on the causeway,” and found myself fully immersed in the drama of every scene. After the movie, Dad and I went to get ice cream, and I talked his ear off about how much I loved the movie. I left that ice cream parlor feeling like a man.

Since then, I have watched The Godfather dozens of times. That makes me like most men in America; just ask them. You may wonder why. Or, in the words of Meg Ryan’s character in the famous 1998 film You’ve Got Mail, “What is it with men and The Godfather?”

It’s Friday, August 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Ro Khanna, race hustler. Niall Ferguson on the sci-fi prophet who predicted our AI future. Gary Saul Morson on the disease of political violence. And more.

But first: the inside story of how anti-Zionism took over the Democratic Party.

What does it mean to be a progressive today? Support for universal healthcare and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement are among the articles of faith. But as we’ve been reporting over recent months, one issue has increasingly become a defining litmus test for the left—particularly among the Democratic Socialists of America: Israel, a country far removed from most Americans’ day-to-day lives.

It wasn’t always this way. Joel Rubin would know. In early 2020, he joined Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign as its Jewish outreach director, tasked with building a home for Jewish Democrats who supported both Israel and Sanders’s progressive agenda. He quickly discovered that would be harder than expected. Many activists surrounding the campaign weren’t looking for a candidate who supported a two-state solution; they opposed Israel’s existence altogether.

Six years on and the picture has gotten even worse. “Anti-Zionism,” Rubin writes today, “is no longer one position among many in the Democratic Party; it has increasingly become the boundary marker separating the politically acceptable Jew from the politically suspect one.” And Sanders is at the center of all of it.

Read Rubin’s piece for the inside story on how this happened—and why he now believes that “my former boss, and the broader left-wing activist infrastructure that surrounds him, are actively fueling antisemitism in this country.”

—The Editors

The big story at the beginning of this week was the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier deployed in the Persian Gulf. After more than 260 days at sea, reports emerged of severe and mounting stress aboard the ship, including a sailor’s suicide attempt, prompting much of the media to attribute the crisis to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. But according to Marine veteran Elliot Ackerman, who lost a shipmate to suicide during a 2006 deployment, the episode exposes a crisis that long predates the president. Read his piece on the media cynicism at play—and the consequences of their decision to pretend away reality.

Last Friday, Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor at the center of a plagiarism scandal that captivated the world, was found dead in his family’s apartment. It was the tragic culmination of weeks of public scrutiny that, wrote Coleman Hughes, “has revealed many unflattering things about academia.” But one point stands out: White liberals want so badly to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual “that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.” The thing is, he continued, “we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives.” Read Coleman on the great irony at the heart of the Arday affair. Then check out Sarah Ditum’s piece on the narrative that has emerged since his death: that the media is to blame. “Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press,” she wrote. But the real fault lies with the institutions that elevated him without properly vetting his work in the first place.

If you’re on the dating market—or know anyone who is—you’ve probably heard of Bumble, an app that made its name by requiring women to message first. But last week, the company changed course after an internal survey found that two-thirds of female users don’t want to make the first move. “Good for the company, I say,” wrote Arthur Brooks, a scientific adviser to Bumble. Read his piece on why the reversal is a win for human nature, and why the “age of chivalry” remains as relevant as ever.

With left-wing candidates ascendant across the country, the only thing missing for progressives is an obvious presidential candidate to carry the banner. Enter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This week, Mark Halperin examined how the savvy New York congresswoman, and the face of the Democrats’ left flank, might actually win the nomination—and how her success would upend our national politics.

Finally, front pages across the nation were plastered with images this week of Lindsay Clancy, a mother who strangled her three children to death three years ago. In her trial, which began a few weeks ago and is being watched live by hundreds of thousands of people, her defense team argues that she was so incapacitated by postpartum depression that she cannot be held accountable for murder. Online, the case has prompted an outpouring of both support and disgust, but the reactions share one flaw, says Kat Rosenfield: They oversimplify a very, very complicated truth. There is a difference, she wrote this week, “between understanding and exoneration, between a reason and an excuse.” Don’t miss her column.

These days, Representative Ro Khanna seems to swing from one political stunt to the next without stopping to catch his breath. In the past few months, the California Democrat and 2028 presidential hopeful has revived discredited theories surrounding the Epstein files and tried to spin a clash with Israeli settlers into a full-blown international incident. His latest trick touches the oldest, most sensitive spot in political culture—and shows the depths to which unscrupulous pols are willing to drop to chase the next viral moment.

Khanna posted a video on X Monday, announcing his dismay with a supposed dark trend. “Across the country, black families are sounding the alarm about the unexplained deaths of their loved ones, including a disturbing number of black Americans found hanging from trees.” He listed a pair of deceased victims he said fit the bill: Juliana Nzita, who was found hanging from a tree in a North Carolina churchyard in May, and Tasia Fortune, discovered in August outside an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi. He also included Nolan Wells, who drowned in July in uncertain circumstances after a boat outing with three white friends on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

In early 2020, when I told members of a group called Jews for Bernie that Bernie Sanders’s position on Israel was a two-state solution, they were genuinely surprised.

More accurately: They were disappointed.

I had just joined the Sanders campaign as his Jewish outreach director, and I was excited about the opportunity. I’d long resonated with Sanders’s progressive positions on healthcare, the economy, and social issues as well as his support for American diplomacy abroad. And I was hopeful that I could help elect the first Jewish president in American history.

The reason I was hired was clear to me. The campaign understood that Jews—who have long voted overwhelmingly for Democrats—were an important constituency for Sanders, and they worried that anti-Zionist voices in his coalition would jeopardize his Jewish support.

But very quickly after joining, I realized there had been a profound misunderstanding on the part of the campaign team: Many of the activists trying to get Sanders elected—and who the campaign depended on—were not looking for a candidate who supported Israel’s existence. That I did was a letdown for them, but one that they had to swallow.