The Free Press

It’s Tuesday, October 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: Tyler Cowen applauds African immigrants. Ashley Rindsberg on the tony California school that is driving away Jewish families. Jay Solomon on Carlos the Jackal—and his present-day heirs. And more.

But first: Why livestreaming an execution is a very bad idea.

Last week, Pete Hegseth announced that the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who carried out the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, would be livestreamed. According to Charles Fain Lehman, there is no question that Hasan deserves to be executed. Walking into a processing center on the Texas base shouting “Allahu Akbar,” he opened fire on soldiers waiting for medical screenings, killing 14 people, including a pregnant woman, and wounding more than 30 others. In explaining why he wanted a public execution, Hegseth said, “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

It’s not the only execution forcing Americans to confront how America puts people to death. Last month, Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike for the murder of a classmate 30 years earlier, but she survived two doses of pentobarbital and is now back in prison. That case set off a debate over whether the government can carry out executions competently. Hasan’s case raises a different set of questions: What does livestreaming an execution do to the nature of the act itself? And what does watching one online do to the rest of us?

Charles is a firm supporter of the death penalty. Its purpose, he argues, isn’t to deter future criminals or rehabilitate the condemned, but to deliver justice for crimes so heinous that prison alone can’t answer for them. But precisely because he believes in the death penalty, Charles thinks livestreaming Hasan’s execution is a grave mistake. Read his column on why.

—The Editors

• The Iran war has cost the average U.S. household nearly $2,000 since the conflict began on February 28 this year, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s. Driving the cost are higher energy prices, higher interest rates, and the billions needed to pay for military operations.

• Iran’s Revolutionary Guard corps were “almost certainly” responsible for a suspected plot to attack an air force base in the UK where U.S. bombers were located, British prime minister Andy Burnham said yesterday. The announcement followed the arrest of several dual British Iranian citizens suspected of planning the attack on the base last month, and the evacuation of a dozen B-1 bombers from the base following intelligence warning of a possible Iranian drone attack.

• Russia struck at least six Ukrainian energy infrastructure targets despite Trump’s announcement that the two warring countries had agreed not to bomb each other’s energy systems. “It is increasingly evident that Russia is unwilling to accept an energy ceasefire proposed by the United States and intends to continue its terrorist air attacks against our people and communities,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on X. Ukraine retaliated by launching a series of drone strikes on at least two Russian data centers.

• Most Americans oppose betting on U.S. elections, military actions, and other government policy decisions using prediction markets, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday. Though companies like Kalshi and Polymarket claim to have safeguards to prevent insider trading, some 69 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans said they opposed use of prediction markets to bet on elections.

• Two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, stolen from a museum in southern France last month, have been recovered, prosecutors said on Monday. The discovery of the works, which were hidden behind a cinder block wall in a home in the town of Clermont-l’Herault, led to the arrest of six people, Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone told reporters.

• A GOP ad buyer accidentally spent nearly $25,000 on ads for Maine senator Susan Collins in Portland, Oregon, rather than in Portland in her home state of Maine, NBC reported on Monday. Cross Screen Media, the ad buyer, said in a statement on Monday that the gaffe was “100% our mistake,” and noted that they had refunded the GOP super PAC who paid for the ads.

In the Baltics, war with Russia is no abstraction. Putin could take Lithuania’s capital if he achieved surprise, the nation’s army commander told Aaron MacLean. This week, Aaron travels through Lithuania and Latvia to speak with Brigadier General Nerijus Stankevičius, Lithuanian defense Minister Robertas Kaunas, and Latvian foreign minister Baiba Braže …

I have been pro-immigration since I first started thinking about the subject in the 1970s, but in recent times a new issue has come to the forefront: large-scale immigration from Africa, and specifically sub-Saharan Africa. The president recently has helped inflame this debate, posting on Truth Social last week that Minnesotans should “fight back” against Somali immigrants he says have “taken over” the state. It seems to be a good time for a fuller accounting of what immigration from Africa will mean for America, at scale and over time.

First, consider that the U.S. is likely to draw proportionately fewer newcomers from more familiar regions in the near future. Immigration to the United States has come from all over historically, most recently from Mexico, as America now has up to 40 million ethnic Mexicans. Yet that migration pattern is unlikely to continue, if only because Mexico has such low fertility rates, 1.2 children per woman according to one very recent measurement. Latin American nations now frequently have, on a nation-to-nation basis, lower fertility rates than the United States. So peak Latino migration likely lies behind us.

In contrast, most African nations still have above-replacement fertility rates, even though rates are mostly falling. In populous Nigeria, for instance, the total fertility rate is estimated at 4.4 per woman. Africa is also a relatively poor part of the world, which can translate into a desire for migrants to leave for wealthier and also more democratic countries.

At some point the world’s wealthier countries will have to decide: Do we shrink in population, or do we admit sizable numbers of migrants from Africa?

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was 20 years old when he arrived in Beirut in 1970 and made his way to the offices of al-Hadaf, a weekly Arabic-language newspaper. Deputy editor Bassam Abu Sharif welcomed the young Venezuelan, but they didn’t discuss feature stories or a reporting job.

Abu Sharif was also a senior operative in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and he was looking for recruits to help the Palestinian terrorist organization advance its wars against Israel and several Arab states, which it accomplished through assassinations, bombings, and airplane hijackings.

“I want to fight the enemy,” Ramírez Sánchez assured Abu Sharif with steely confidence during the interview, according to The Jackal, a new biography by veteran Washington Post investigative journalist Joby Warrick about the man who became known to the world as Carlos the Jackal.

“Who is that?” Abu Sharif pressed.

Ramírez Sánchez replied: “The Israeli capitalist imperialists.”

On a summer morning in 1936, thousands of people packed the streets of Owensboro, Kentucky, to watch a man hang. Rainey Bethea had been convicted of rape and murder, and his execution drew a crowd that treated it like a circus. Vendors sold hot dogs and drinks near the gallows. “Spectators jeered throughout, even while Bethea prayed,” legal historian Stuart Banner writes in The Death Penalty: An American History. In its aftermath, the condemnation of the affair by newspapers effectively ended the practice of public execution in America, with the press widely denouncing the spectacle as a “carnival of sadism.”

Nearly 90 years later, the federal government is preparing one. On December 3, Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who murdered 14 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be executed by firing squad at the same base. And, the Pentagon says, the world will be able to watch online.

On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army major, entered the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, bowed his head in prayer, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and then opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol. Among the dead were a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Another 32 were wounded. Hasan was apprehended after a firefight that left him paralyzed from the waist down. At his court martial, he admitted to the murders, saying that before the attack, he had been “on the wrong side [of] America’s war on Islam,” and that he was “an imperfect Muslim trying to establish the perfect religion of Almighty God as supreme on the land despite the disbeliever’s hatred for it.” On August 28, 2013, he was sentenced to death, a sentence stalled for 13 years by appeals and the need for presidential approval.

In the spring of 2024, a Jewish student at San Francisco University High School (UHS) told his parents that something alarming had happened in a ninth-grade class. Instead of a lesson about African colonialism, the teacher denounced Israel, Zionists, and what he called “colonizers,” according to parents.

The teacher was suspended for the rest of the spring, but some students staged a sit-in in his support. The following fall, at the first all-school assembly, he was reintroduced to the school with full privileges. UHS faculty rose in a standing ovation. “The Jewish kids looked at each other in horror,” said one parent whose child was in the room.

The incident was just one of many over the past three years that parents at the school say show how the antisemitism that erupted on American college campuses after Hamas attacked Israel also took hold inside one of the country’s most selective private schools, and a longtime feeder to the Ivy League.

In interviews, the school’s own emails and letters, a police report filed with the San Francisco Police Department, and formal inquiries conducted by Jewish civil-rights groups, families allege that UHS allowed its classrooms and hallways to turn hostile to Jewish students at the most charged moment in recent memory. Since October 2024, at least 10 Jewish families have withdrawn their children from UHS, or about 5 percent of the current enrollment of 543 students. At least one family left the state. According to some parents, enrollment by Jewish students has dropped to a trickle.

That all this took place at one of the most progressive high schools in San Francisco speaks to the tremors of antisemitism rippling through America’s political left. UHS belongs to a small, hypercompetitive tier of prep schools, and it is sometimes described as a Horace Mann School of the West Coast. UHS’s tuition and fees total $68,895, and more than a third of its graduates go on to the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, according to outside estimates. Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and the University of California, Berkeley, appear on the matriculation list published by UHS.

“The most French thing I’ve ever seen” was a couple sipping wine in a sidewalk café, probably discussing Jean-Paul Sartre, while a fire started by protesters raged on the other side of the boulevard. Disappointingly, the video posted on X was from three years ago, but it suited the moment last week.

As their national anthem contains the phrase, “Aux armes, citoyens!,” don’t be surprised if, quite regularly, young French people decide to reenact revolutionary scenes. As I write, French schools are burning—set ablaze by high schoolers who say they want more investment in education but for some reason think they can achieve this by filling the streets with garbage, setting it on fire, waving Palestinian flags, and clashing with the police. The latest reincarnations of the sans-culottes are out in force—though, as in 1968, their attire is quite chic. As a cynical friend observed, what the first Communion is for a young Roman Catholic, so the first manifestation is for a young Parisian: a rite of passage.

And yet it’s not just France. The kids are out in the streets of Madrid, too, incensed (they claim) about a growing housing crisis. In Brussels the burning issue is government budget cuts.

So what’s going on in Europe?

No, I don’t think it’s the beginning of Eurozone Crisis 2.0. Those with good memories will recall that the first Eurozone crisis began in 2009 with a Greek debt crisis that spread to other countries. As we shall see, the recent wave of protests has indeed coincided with a French debt crisis that also threatens to spread to other members of the Eurozone. However, if the European Central Bank (ECB) learned anything from the events of 2011–2012 it was that it must stand ready “to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro”—the immortal words of ECB president Mario Draghi in July 2012. If French bond yields go up much higher—say by another 100 basis points (1 percent)—then the ECB has the tools to intervene and stabilize the market.

It’s Monday, October 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: Helen Andrews on what the Cornell case reveals about the great feminization. Arthur Brooks says you’re chasing the wrong kind of happiness. The TikTok lawyer taking on Mamdani. And much more.

But first: The question El-Sayed won’t answer.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed is known for having a short fuse when speaking with reporters and TV hosts who pose questions he doesn’t want to answer. I got a taste of that myself during a press gaggle last week. I asked him whether he regrets saying during a private campaign strategy call earlier this year that “I just don’t want to comment” on the assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today” about his death.

Before I could even finish my question, he cut in to insist he is “just not interested in this dog and pony show” about leaked audio that is “not relevant to people’s lives,” even though he spends so much of his time on the stump talking about foreign policy related to Israel, AIPAC, and the Iran war. “Ask smart questions,” he admonished me.

Behind our exchange is a serious issue concerning El-Sayed’s reticence to engage with reporters’ foreign policy questions. It could make or break one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. Read my story on our testy back-and-forth, and the bigger picture in this crucial contest.

—Audrey Fahlberg

• Houthi rebels hit Riyadh’s main airport again yesterday, a day after a strike on the same passenger terminal killed at least 12 people, including an American, and injured more than 300 in the deadliest attack on Saudi soil in over a decade. The Iran-backed group says it’s retaliating for a Saudi-led offensive against it in Yemen.

• A gunman killed eight people, including two children and a pregnant woman, in a residential neighborhood of Erie, Pennsylvania, on Friday evening before apparently taking his own life. All but one of the victims were his relatives, and investigators have not yet identified a motive.

• Pope Leo XIV announced Sunday that he will have surgery this week to remove a small lesion doctors found on his lung. The 71-year-old said it was caught at an early stage, and the Vatican expects his recovery to take about a week. He still plans to travel to South America in November.

• President Trump said Friday that Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to send millions of tons of diesel onto world markets in the coming months, with the U.S. temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian energy to allow it, as the price of diesel hovers above $6 a gallon amid the Iran war. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the move, saying any sanctions relief would only bankroll more Russian aggression.

• Christa Pike has left the hospital and returned to the Nashville prison where she’s been held for three decades, her lawyers said Saturday, less than two weeks after she survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her. Pike is now walking with help and regaining use of her arms. Her attorneys are pressing the governor to commute her sentence to life in prison.

• At least four people died and hundreds of thousands lost power after Hurricane Isaias tore into the Florida Panhandle, ripping roofs off homes and toppling trees throughout the region. The storm weakened quickly over land, but its remnants unleashed flash flooding as far as North Carolina over the weekend, and close to 390,000 customers in Florida and Alabama were in the dark as of Sunday.

Megan Phelps-Roper spent her childhood on picket lines with the Westboro Baptist Church—the hate group her grandfather founded—holding signs condemning gay people and Jews. She’s spent the years since trying to understand how people like her get swept into conviction and how they get out of it, work that’s taken her everywhere from her own memoir to hos…

GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — Few things seem to infuriate Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed more than questions about the Iranian regime.

During a press gaggle last Thursday afternoon in Grand Rapids, I asked him whether he regrets comments he made on a private campaign strategy call in March. That’s when he said, according to The Washington Free Beacon, that “I just don’t want to comment” on the assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today” about his death.

Before I finished my question, he cut in to insist that the topic is completely “irrelevant” to the Senate race. The leaked audio, he explained, is “not relevant to people’s lives,” and he’s “just not interested in this dog and pony show” solely intended to create media “clicks.”