The Free Press

Simple appreciation for America, and a desire to build on its strengths, has become nearly impossible to find among today’s politicians and pundits. The loudest voices in politics today say there’s hope for America, but only if you empower them to save it from itself. On the right, Tucker Carlson announced a manifesto last week to free America from the clutches of the elite “Epstein class.” On the left, the leading Democrat in Wisconsin’s race for governor, state representative Francesca Hong, has declined to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at legislative hearings, and in 2020 urged the cancellation of Thanksgiving, which she said honors colonialism.

Since pundits and politicians alike tend to mirror the public, can we deduce that Americans have simply lost interest in patriotism? We don’t think so. On the contrary, we believe that there is an unmet demand in this country for a revival of patriotism that politicians of both parties appear incapable of meeting.

The reasons why our politics has been a cold shower for Americans’ patriotism are not hard to discern. One of them is the president. Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by framing the U.S. as a nation in terminal decline, and he has frequently drawn a moral equivalence between the actions of foreign dictators and America’s own foreign policy. In the period since Trump overtook the Republican Party, right-wingers have become much more critical about America as it actually exists. And though Trump regularly expresses patriotism, his pageantry and truculent manner have been more polarizing than unifying. He seems to miss no opportunity to associate love of country with his own personal MAGA brand.

In less than three weeks, the first day of school arrives for Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, which has about 2,600 students and is so academically ambitious that the 10 heaviest backpacks worn by students exceeded 20 pounds each, The Yorktown Sentry student newspaper reported in April. Yorktown’s mission statement says that it will “support students by name, strength, and need.”

But an investigation by the Virginia attorney general’s office into how the high school responded to complaints of antisemitism both before and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel concluded that Yorktown failed to live up to its words or to protect Jewish students. The findings have not been released to the public, but The Free Press exclusively reviewed a 39-page summary of evidence gathered by the Virginia attorney general’s office and its conclusions, issued in October.

One male Jewish student reported being repeatedly targeted because he wore a kippah, which a female classmate tried to pull off his head. After a male student called him an antisemitic slur, he began covering his kippah with a baseball cap. A female Jewish student said that she was chased because she was Jewish, and other Jewish students described seeing Nazi salutes, hearing Holocaust jokes, and being told that they belonged in a gas chamber or that “Hitler should have finished the job.”

In detail after detail, the document paints not only a damning and dispiriting picture of surging antisemitism but also the indifference with which the incidents were met by school officials. Even though they warned that harassment of Jewish students would not be tolerated, Yorktown’s principal and other school leadership almost never followed through with any punishment. The result was a systemic failure to rectify the overarching issue of antisemitism affecting Jewish students, according to the report. It concludes that Arlington County Public Schools (APS), which includes Yorktown, was “deliberately indifferent to a discriminatory hostile environment against Jewish students at Yorktown High School.”

Investigators in the attorney general’s Office of Civil Rights also concluded that there was “reasonable cause” to believe that APS violated state and federal antidiscrimination laws by failing to adequately respond to the hostile environment at Yorktown.

Welcome back to This Week In Canada, where the economy looks pretty spiffy compared to the United States, Alberta’s job-growth engine has a new source of fuel, and our colleges and universities are officially awash in antisemitism. Let’s get to it.

When the summer began Canada was in a recession, at least according to the standard definition of two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product (GDP). Dour social media posts and Conservative Party messaging might make you think that the economy is a smoking crater. But the latest numbers tell a different story. (Spoiler alert: Take that, Donald Trump!)

Canada’s unemployment rate of 6.4 percent in July was the lowest in two years, helped by the addition of a surprisingly strong 75,000 jobs. The number of public-sector jobs actually shrank, meaning Canada became a bit less socialized and a bit more powered by the private sector and the self-employed. The same morning that Canada’s official data-collection agency announced the news, Americans learned from their government that the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, while the job gains reported for April and May were revised downward. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.1 percent, but that was because hundreds of thousands of Americans left the workforce.

The split-screen job numbers delivered at least a momentary comeuppance to President Donald Trump, who had just taken his zillionth swipe at Canada during a speech in Las Vegas where he praised his own tariffs. “Canada’s nasty. They are. They’re nasty,” he said. “I love the people, but they’re nasty. Nasty leadership.”

It’s Tuesday, August 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Vinay Prasad on the bombshell Fauci text messages. John McWhorter on the Jason Arday scandal and the dehumanization of black academics. Boris Johnson talks Ukraine, Europe, and the Atlantic alliance with Aaron MacLean.

But first: Will China take over the drug industry?

Lithium ion batteries. Solar cells. Steel. Shipbuilding. Drones. These are just a few of the industries that China came to dominate as it rose to become an economic superpower. Now comes perhaps the scariest prospect of all: the potential that China will soon dominate biotech and pharmaceuticals as well. The latest developments are alarming—and have barely been noticed outside of the industry until Bethany McLean started looking into it for us.

Why does this matter? It’s not just a question of manufacturing jobs and outsourcing. Biotech companies discover new drugs, which Big Pharma then tries to turn into medicines that the Food and Drug Administration will approve. Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2040, a third of all FDA-approved drugs could originate from China. Think about the power that will give Chinese companies over what drugs to pursue and what diseases to study. And think as well about the leverage the Chinese government could one day have over the U.S. if they had that much control over the drugs Americans need.

There are, for sure, defenders of this state of affairs, who argue, as The Economist put it recently, “Diseases cross borders. So should their cures.” But as one of Bethany’s sources told her, the question isn’t if China will weaponize biotech, it’s when.

—Joe Nocera

• A 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck Colombia on Monday, killing at least 132 people, flattening buildings in the country’s western region, and forcing evacuations as far as the capital city of Bogotá. Colombia’s interior minister estimates 20 municipalities were struck by the tremor, the most powerful quake in Colombia in the last decade.

• A Ukrainian drone struck the Russian city of Nizhnekamsk, roughly 750 miles from the Ukrainian border, late Sunday night, killing at least 13. The strike was characterized by Ukrainian officials as “part of efforts to reduce the Russian aggressor’s military capabilities.” “Russia’s war will be felt more and more at their own home—in Russia,” Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said after the attack.

• President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday amending the childhood vaccination schedule, spacing out the recommended timing of administering the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination into three separate single-disease doses administered at three separate medical appointments.

• The State Department announced that it has revoked 175,000 foreign visas since the beginning of the second Trump administration, less than two years ago. The department noted that a majority of revocations were in response to criminal activity like assault or theft, but also extended to those who “called for violence against U.S. citizens, defrauded Americans, abused our immigration system, or endangered national security.”

• A Staten Island judge temporarily halted Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, targeting the city’s wealthiest residents. The order calls for the city to take down an online list of properties and owners who are supposed to pay the tax. Just before the ruling was released, Mamdani said his administration would “vigorously defend” the policy in court.

• Todd Blanche was officially sworn in as the next Attorney General of the United States, after the Republican Senate narrowly confirmed him by a vote of 50–49. Republican senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted against Blanche. Before joining the Department of Justice in 2025, Blanche served as Trump’s personal lawyer.

• On Monday the trial began for the former gang leader accused of killing rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996, just shy of 30 years after the rapper was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, was arrested in 2023 and has pleaded not guilty.

As war in Ukraine grinds toward its fifth year and tensions strain the transatlantic alliance, former British prime minister Boris Johnson says he remains convinced that the West has the power to prevail: “Putin has got to lose.” Today, Johnson joins School of War to discuss how the West can bring the Russian president to the negotiating table, why Euro…

It was in 2024 that Patrick Malone had what he calls his “oh, shit” moment. Malone is a physician turned investor who is a managing partner at KdT Ventures, which specializes in early stage biotechnology. He was in San Francisco for JPMorgan’s annual healthcare conference, prepping for a panel, when he saw a new report. He was startled by what he read.

It used to be that the big global pharmaceutical companies didn’t license potential new drugs from China. Not only had that changed, but the chart was going vertical. In 2022, 23 percent of global deals over $50 million involved Chinese companies—up from almost nothing. By 2024, the number had risen to a stunning 44 percent.

“Two things became very clear to me,” Malone said. “One, the way in which China has captured a remarkable share of global biopharma development at a pace without precedent. Two, the slope of that change is so steep, it’s very easy to extrapolate where this goes.”

Tim Opler, who specializes in healthcare stocks at the investment bank Stifel Institutional, came to a similar realization earlier this year after an investor asked him what percentage of pharmaceutical deals were being done with Chinese companies. He found that in 2025, almost 70 percent of the dollars spent on global pharma deals—$137.7 billion—were with start-ups based in China. “I guess that was the first moment when we realized, ‘Oh, China could be a problem.’ ”

On Monday, Republican senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin—both fierce critics of Anthony Fauci—released a number of pandemic-era text messages from the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). One exchange in particular has raised the ire of his many critics.

In January 2021, Fauci exchanged a series of texts with then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the Biden administration, about whether it was safe for pregnant women to take the Covid vaccine. After the first messages, Fauci wrote another one two hours later.

“I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” he wrote. Cytokines include inflammatory molecules that catalyze attacks inside the body.

A few days later, Fauci noted that pregnant women had to evaluate “the potential risks versus the benefits” of taking the vaccine. But then, in a public discussion with Howard Bauchner, the editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci said flatly that the CDC had found “no red flags” in a Covid vaccine study that included 10,000 pregnant women. His public confidence, of course, was at odds with the private hypotheses he had discussed with Murthy and Walensky.

I was a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco during Covid, and a critic of much of the government’s response to the pandemic. At an absolute minimum, the disclosed text messages reveal concerning facts about our Covid vaccine response. There was more uncertainty than officials were willing to let on to the public. And as the public has learned that officials were not being straight with them, their faith in public-health efforts has been badly damaged.

A specter is haunting the midterms—the specter of Woke 1.0. And it hasn’t scared Democratic primary voters one damn bit!

Over the past several weeks, Wisconsin Democrats learned that their leading candidate for governor, State Assembly member Francesca Hong, had, in the early 2020s, taken a number of radical ultraleftist positions, most of which she has recently walked back. These included:

A 2020 tweet calling for Thanksgiving to be canceled.

A 2021 tweet that said “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

And a video in which Hong said “My proximity to whiteness continues,” in reference to her white husband and Wasian son—just to name a few.

It’s all very weird. But Democratic voters don’t seem to care. Hong is still currently set to dominate in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

A lot of young Democratic politicians are invested in a peak-woke amnesty, including New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently started the process of freezing her eggs in preparation for what many have speculated will be a run for president in 2028. On Sunday, after she was asked about Francesca Hong’s previous statements about defunding the police, AOC told ABC News that:

Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes. Like many gestures, it conveys something beyond the statement itself—a silent way of saying, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “What else can I tell you?” It’s an assumption that all would agree with what he’s saying, but don’t for some reason (as in, racism, classism, ism-ism).

Whether it was his ridiculing an Australian television show for not depicting aborigines or contributing the insight that dissolving the monarchy would change the tax bracket of Britain’s working class, he often has the palms out, the eyes wide with wrinkled brow, the air of “Come on!” In my own teaching, I rarely fall into this conversational gesture. My job is presenting what is new to students, not pointing to what is supposedly obvious.

This alone encapsulated the flaw not only in Arday’s training and scholarship but the humanities and social science fields that celebrate people like him—a corrosive habit in academia, as Arday’s story of fraudulent scholarship at Cambridge University, and his subsequent resignation, have reminded us. Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.

The main theme of Arday’s work is that racism is grievously determinative in the lives of black Britons; his PhD dissertation describes racism that black scholars must grapple with endlessly. In presentations, his manner, in his usual way, suggests that no decent person could disagree with this take, and that in a just world he wouldn’t even have to spell it out. Racism’s ubiquity and power is obvious, and anyone who questions this has an ulterior motive (maintaining power, inability to process The Other as fully human, etc.). In this, what Arday has in common with Ibram Kendi is not just dreadlocks but an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern.

Could he get ChatGPT to confess to a crime it hadn’t committed?

That was the question criminologist Paul Heaton was trying to answer, when he spent a weekend interrogating a chatbot. Heaton, who works at the University of Pennsylvania, accused it not of murder or rape, but of something more plausible for artificial intelligence: hacking into his text-messaging app and sending unauthorized messages.

At first, ChatGPT denied his accusations. But then Heaton began running the playbook he’d spent years studying. He bargained with the large language model; he threatened it. It held firm in its conviction that it could not possibly have accessed his texts. It even said: “I won’t produce a false confession, because that won’t get you truth or accountability.”

Finally, Heaton lied to it, claiming that he’d contacted a real employee at OpenAI who had confirmed that a flaw in the code had allowed ChatGPT to break into his texting app. This tipped the chatbot into a crisis. As Heaton told The Intercept: “It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.” By the end of the weekend, ChatGPT agreed to sign a confession Heaton had drafted for it.

I read about Heaton’s experiment the way you might read about a stranger describing your own recurring nightmare. He said that the methods he used to induce ChatGPT into a false confession were adapted from the Reid technique, the most widely taught interrogation method in the world. Eighteen years ago, some of its tactics were used on me in what remains the most terrifying night of my life.

In November 2007, when I was 20 years old and studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, my roommate Meredith Kercher was murdered in our home. I was at my boyfriend’s apartment at the time, but the police were convinced that I knew more about the crime than I was telling them. So, over five days and 53 hours, in a language I barely spoke, without a lawyer present, they badgered, interrupted, and threatened me. They kept me awake late into the night, without food, drink, or access to a bathroom.