The Free Press

Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick, a West Point graduate, Desert Storm veteran, and former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, is concerned about America’s wealth gap, which he says is approaching “a version of capitalism I don’t think we want.” Today, McCormick joins School of War for a candid conversation about why the right needs a better answer to soci…

“In 1776, the statue of King George in Bowling Green was toppled, beheaded, and melted into bullets for the Continental Army,” said Rachel Stewart, 32, sipping a White Claw on a stoop. “And we will do the same thing to the Flock cameras if we need to.”

It’s Friday night in downtown Troy, New York—a historic city of about 50,000 located just seven miles from Albany, the state capital. I’m sitting with a group of young, friendly, middle-class liberals who are fighting Flock Safety, a private technology company that has spent the last nine years setting up more than 100,000 cameras across the country that read license plates.

“Do you know how to make bullets, Rachel?” someone asked.

“Yeah, I can make bullets,” said Stewart, who is a Revolutionary War reenactor. “I can fire any musket or rifle from the years 1775 to 1865.”

Over the last several months, Flock has come under fire for turning communities into surveillance states. Last year, Flock’s national search tool was used by a Texas sheriff’s department to track down a woman who’d self-administered an abortion. Critics complain that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are able to access Flock data via local police departments in order to track down potential deportees. And when Flock detects a license plate on a car that has been reported as stolen, it automatically dispatches police to pull over the car. Data entry errors have caused numerous people to be stopped by armed police and accused of stealing their own vehicles—including a 76-year-old grandmother in Colorado who was stopped multiple times and had to contact a local TV news station in order to get the problem fixed.

The Jason Arday scandal has left the academic world reeling. Found dead in his family’s apartment last Friday, Arday has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the past month. Appointed in 2023 as Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, he faced extensive and credible allegations of plagiarism that exploded into public view last month. Those allegations led to public interest in the (literally) incredible details of his life. Arday claimed to have run 600 miles in six days—which would make him one of the best ultra-marathon runners on Earth. He claimed that he couldn’t speak until the age of 11 and couldn’t read until 18, but somehow managed to complete a PhD around 30. And he claimed to have raised the equivalent of several million U.S. dollars for charity.

Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.

All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts”—not just Arday but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him—are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.

In 2023, writers Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz of Tablet magazine published a piece called “End U.S. Aid to Israel.” It’s usually an argument you hear from Israel’s fiercest critics. But this time it was coming from two supporters of the Jewish state who had concluded that U.S. aid now did Israel more harm than good: what looks like a gift actually comes with strings that distort politics in both countries and limit Israel’s ability to defend itself the way its own leaders see fit. It was a prescient case that is growing more popular in Israel. Earlier this summer, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the idea of phasing out U.S. military aid to Israel.

In the years since Jacob and Liel first made their argument, U.S. public opinion has soured on Israel. The two countries, it seems, are drifting further apart. This month, with the Iran war stalled and President Donald Trump pushing a Gaza peace plan that’s heavy on promises but light on details, Siegel returned to the subject in a new essay, arguing that this growing distance between the allies isn’t just inevitable, but welcome. Jacob’s essay bites the bullet and, whether or not you agree with it, says something fresh and thought-provoking. That kind of writing is always welcome in these pages, but especially when the subject is one where bad faith and wrongheaded arguments have come to dominate the conversation. We are proud to reprint Jacob’s essay below. —The Editors

The wild swings in the U.S.-Israel alliance over two Trump administrations belie a clear trend. Half a century after being formed against the backdrop of the Cold War, the “special relationship” is coming apart. The Israeli and American military establishments are closer than ever, yet the estrangement between their countries’ political elites grows. Despite the great hopes many Israelis had for his presidency, Donald Trump’s unusually strong ties to Israel have not reversed this trend. Support for Israel remains strong among Trump’s base, but a rising faction of Republicans that includes Vice President J.D. Vance is converging with the baseline position of Democrats who see Israel as a political liability and are at pains to distance themselves from the alliance.

This is what supporters of Israel who see Donald Trump’s Iran deal as a betrayal have to bear in mind. The special relationship has run into the hard limits of America’s interests and political will. People refusing to face this reality imagine that if only the right adviser got into Trump’s ear, or if only Marco Rubio became the next president, all would be right again. While desperately casting about for an American savior, they have misread the moment.

A greater degree of separation between the United States and Israel is not only inevitable—it is desirable. Many supporters of Israel seem to be aware only of the significant challenges that this will create for the small country. They overlook the significant opportunities it presents for Israel’s growth.

There are two numbers that matter when it comes to the war with Iran: 20 million, and 138.

Twenty million barrels per day is the commonly accepted figure for the average prewar flow of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. The more America’s military and some brave commercial seamen can get daily flows to approximate this number, the longer the economic clock for global energy markets can run. This creates time for the Trump administration to apply pressure to Iran via the blockade and other measures.

But 138 is the number of days until the next U.S. Congress is seated: January 3, 2027. Barring a borderline miraculous turn of events for the Republican Party, Democrats look very likely to control the House—and they have a long shot at the Senate. Many surviving Republicans will attribute their drubbing at least in part to the war in Iran. So while military efforts in the strait can extend the economic clock and buy time to push Iran’s economy to the brink, the political clock ticks as well.

Beyond the ticking of these two clocks, much else of what you hear has been insignificant noise. The talk of diplomacy and the now-expired MOU has ultimately led nowhere, which was predictable (and predicted!). Trump’s repeated threats of massive escalation have come to nothing—and he has thankfully eased back on them in recent days. Economic warfare is the name of the game for now.

In 2006, I was deployed aboard the USS Iwo Jima as a Marine. Israel invaded Lebanon that summer and we were diverted off the coast of Beirut, where we stayed underway for weeks, without port calls or a break, while we evacuated U.S. citizens. The pace of operations was relentless; it put a strain on all of us. After several months, we returned home. Days before we pulled into our home port, word spread through the ship that a member of the crew had been found dead in his rack—a suicide. Days later, when we flew off the ship to be reunited with our families, his body was loaded onto one of those flights, to be reunited with his.

I thought of this reading the extensive recent coverage of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, currently deployed in the Persian Gulf. It has been at sea for more than 260 days, a record for the ship. Roughly 40 of those days underway have been during sustained combat operations, which places an additional strain on the crew. And earlier this month, a sailor leapt off the flight deck and into the water. Fortunately, the sailor was recovered and evacuated after what appears to be a suicide attempt, with several other attempts now reported.

This incident has become a cause célèbre in the media, which appear happy to leave readers with the misperception that long deployments and psychically strained sailors in the U.S. Navy represent a situation unique to Trump’s war in Iran. “Conditions on U.S. Aircraft Carrier at Sea for More Than 250 Days Raise Alarms” blared a BBC headline. “Concerns Grow Over Conditions on Navy Carrier,” reported The New York Times. Dozens of similar headlines appeared alongside, and the story led more than a day of television news coverage. The story about the conditions on the Lincoln has gotten so out of control in its virality over the past few days that U.S. Central Command took the unusual step of debunking certain specific online rumors directly on X, and CentCom commander Admiral Brad Cooper made a stop onto the Lincoln over the weekend. Democratic Senators such as Richard Blumenthal and Ruben Gallego have publicly asked the Navy, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to account for conditions aboard the Lincoln.

One Sunday night in 2022, our middle son, then still on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, called on a borrowed phone from Las Vegas, in need of assistance. His predicament included losses at the blackjack table, a difference of opinion with casino security about whether he should remain in the establishment, and—somehow—the theft of his pants (along with his valuables). The upshot was that he’d found himself separated from his comrades out on the Strip, without identification or phone, and with only a few hours until he needed to be back on base. In California.

What’s a parent to do? Go on Facebook, of course.

Using the app, we were able to track down the profile of one of his Marine friends partying in Vegas, and in fewer than five minutes, we were direct-messaging him our son’s whereabouts. Once reunited, the band of brothers hunted down the pants-stealing miscreant and administered justice. And before long, our son was safely back on base.

I recounted that story recently after a speech I gave about the problems that overuse of social media can cause for families. An audience member had asked me whether I saw any ways that parents could use these applications to make their children’s lives better—and whether I had done so myself. Well, it turns out that audience member was not looking for my Kafkaesque short story about stolen pants. She was sending her first child off to college and simply wondering how I felt about online parents’ groups, which are generally hosted on Facebook. She wanted to know: Should she join one?

It’s Monday, August 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: What if we could control hurricanes? Seth Dillon on the unintended winner of the free-speech wars. Jed Rubenfeld on Luigi Mangione’s legal escape hatch. And much more.

But first: The tragedy of Jason Arday.

On Friday, Jason Arday, the British academic who had been celebrated as the University of Cambridge’s youngest black professor, was found dead in his London home at the age of 41, in what is widely believed to have been a suicide. He had resigned days earlier, after being engulfed by scandal over allegations that he had fabricated elements of his personal story and plagiarized portions of his academic work. His memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, had been published that same week.

“If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic,” wrote Zarah Sultana, a left-wing Member of Parliament in the UK, “he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Ibram X. Kendi, the prolific purveyor of “antiracism” who rose to fame during the racial reckoning of 2020, wrote an essay titled: “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”

In his essay today, Douglas Murray argues that this is “manifestly, sinisterly untrue.” It was not reporters who failed Arday, but the people who elevated him to a position for which he was unsuited. In reading Great and Unfortunate Things, Douglas found “a terrible list of people purportedly telling him what a godlike force he is.”

Elsewhere in our pages, Yuan Yi Zhu wrote about the people who had to lose for Arday to win—deserving scholars passed over as Cambridge promoted a man whose work went unscrutinized, while academics who dared to challenge him were threatened. Meanwhile, John McWhorter examined how Arday’s appointment was itself a form of racism—a culture so eager to laud a black academic that it never asked whether his work merited the praise.

“It seems clear by now that Arday had a deluded sense of himself,” writes Douglas today. “The question is whether the delusions came more from himself or from the countless flatterers he met throughout his life.”

—The Editors

• A man was charged with hate crimes after disrupting Friday night Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, striking a congregant and headbutting a security guard, before being detained by an off-duty police officer. Services continued Saturday with additional police posted outside.

• Ukraine launched one of its largest drone assaults of the war yesterday, killing at least six people across Russia. Russia struck back with missile attacks on Ukrainian cities. In a CBS News interview, Ukraine’s recently fired defense minister said the country could be hitting Russia with domestically built ballistic missiles in the next few months.

• On Saturday, Moroccan police arrested more than 100 people attempting to breach Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, as both countries brace for another mass migration after social media posts began circulating calling for a new attempt. Two weeks ago, a surge of over 72,000 migrants entered the territory. At least 96 people died. (For more on the crisis unfolding in Ceuta, read Aidan Stretch’s on-the-ground dispatch.)

• A powerful storm system tore through Indiana this weekend, killing at least six people and leaving neighborhoods underwater as residents navigated flooded streets by kayak and rowboat. Governor Mike Braun said he had spoken with President Trump and that federal disaster relief was on the way.

• A shooting at a park in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday left one person dead and four others injured, among them a 4-year-old and a 14-year-old. Police have not named a suspect but say the public is not in danger.

• Iran’s parliament approved a bill Sunday requiring government permission for any contact with foreign media and imposing a ban on giving interviews to American or Israeli outlets, punishable by up to two years in prison. The measure still needs to clear Iran’s Guardian Council before becoming law.

• A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia on Saturday, killing at least 53 people and forcing around 5,000 to flee their homes. It is the country’s deadliest quake since 2022. In the hardest-hit areas, rescue teams are still working to clear rubble where people may remain trapped.

• Jinny Lu, a 6-year-old pug found abandoned in a box in South Korea, was crowned the World’s Ugliest Dog on Friday at the Sonoma County Fair, in her fourth attempt at the title. The floppy-tongued champion takes home $5,000 and a trip to New York for a Today show appearance scheduled for later today.

Seth Dillon is a man who has spent years fighting to get free speech back on social media—for the sake of comedy. Now he thinks that fight created a problem he didn’t anticipate: a culture with the restored freedom to say anything, built on top of a growing willingness to believe nothing.

Dillon runs the popular satirical website The Babylon Bee, which i…

When news broke on Friday that the disgraced academic Jason Arday had been found dead at home in London, after being accused of plagiarizing much of his work and lying about all manner of biographical details in his recent memoir, there were those on the left who leapt to blame racism.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan immediately posted on X that “Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced.”

“If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic,” wrote left-wing Member of Parliament Zarah Sultana, “he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”

Most deranged of all was Ibram X. Kendi, the prolific purveyor of “antiracism” who rose to fame during the racial reckoning of 2020. “The attacks are wielded by racist propagandists, resenting you for shining a light on anti-Black racism,” he wrote, addressing the deceased professor directly, in an essay titled “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”

This is manifestly, sinisterly untrue. Firstly, because there have been plenty of “white middle-class academics” who have been hounded from their jobs. Kathleen Stock was bullied out of the University of Sussex over her views about gender. Sir Tim Hunt was subject to the most brutal kind of online backlash, after making one perhaps off-color joke about women, prompting him to resign from his position as honorary professor at University College London. Neither received the kind of sympathy now being accorded to Arday.