It’s Tuesday, March 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Madeleine Rowley interviews the men behind the White House meme team. Aaron MacLean asks: Are boots on the ground in the cards? Amit Segal on why Trump reversed course in the Strait of Hormuz. And much more.

But first: Cuba calls its best defenders.

Today the lights are off in Cuba for the third time in a month, and the communists in charge are having a hard time explaining it away. President Miguel Díaz-Canel deployed the regime’s perennial excuse over the weekend, blaming U.S. pressure for the entirety of Cuba’s woes. He said President Donald Trump is “cruelly squeezing energy resources,” referring to the blockade that has kept Venezuelan oil out since the U.S. seized that country’s strongman in January.

With protests roiling Havana and Trump’s sights set on the island as his next target, what can Cuba’s rulers possibly do to save themselves? The answer is to rely on progressive influencers. Like many anti-American regimes before it, the government Castro built is betting that friendly publicity in the Western press can save it like no weapon or subterfuge could.

Cuba helped bring in left-wing journalists, influencers including streamer Hasan Piker, ex-politicians like former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the Irish band Kneecap, to defend them from Trump and sing the praises of the Castros. James Kirchick describes the absurd spectacle of Cuba’s useless idiots in his column for us today. Read his piece on an island with no electricity—and the stars of the international left-wing internet who arrived to save Cuba with their posts.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to stare down the Cuban dictatorship and hasn’t blinked yet. Martin Gurri believes that an attempt at regime change is inevitable, and the only questions are how and when. On one hand, Cubans are more than ready for a change—more than 20 percent have fled in the past five years alone. But the regime won’t fold as easily as it did in Venezuela, due in part to an anti-American zeal that has festered for decades.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

And ICYMI, watch Coleman Hughes, MLK biographer Jonathan Eig, and civil rights legend Ambassador Andrew Young in conversation in Atlanta on “Nonviolence in a Violent Age.”

• Leonid Radvinsky, the reclusive billionaire owner of OnlyFans, died at 43 on Monday after a battle with cancer that he kept secret from the public. The Ukrainian American entrepreneur acquired the platform in 2018 and was reportedly in talks as recently as last year to sell a majority stake of the porn-driven company.

• ICE agents lent a hand to TSA at more than a dozen airports across the country Monday, including New York City’s JFK and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, as a weeks-long partial government shutdown has left 50,000 TSA officers working without pay and thousands calling out sick. Border Czar Tom Homan said the agents will handle crowd control at entrances and exits—rather than screenings—though it remains unclear whether they will also conduct immigration sweeps.

• Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni conceded defeat Monday in a national referendum on judicial reform, marking a major blow to her right-wing coalition. Around 50 magistrates packed a Naples courthouse to watch the results come in, and broke into the anti-fascist resistance anthem “Bella Ciao” when it became clear the government had lost.

• Two pilots were killed and more than 40 people injured Sunday night when an Air Canada jet collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. Air traffic control audio from the incident reveals a controller clearing the truck to cross the runway before, seconds later, admitting: “I messed up.”

• The Trump administration installed a statue of Christopher Columbus over the weekend on the White House grounds—a replica of one toppled and thrown into a harbor in Baltimore by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” a White House spokesperson said.

• Prediction market Kalshi will ban athletes, coaches, and politicians from betting on their own sports and campaigns, respectively, Axios reports. The planned crackdown comes on the heels of a lawsuit against Kalshi filed in an Arizona court last week alleging the platform operates an illegal gambling business.

Last weekend, hundreds of left-wing activists and politicians from around the world descended on Cuba. As participants in the Nuestra América Convoy, they brought with them some 20 tons of humanitarian aid ostensibly to help a population suffering under President Donald Trump’s merciless oil embargo. Because the Cuban people apparently haven’t suffered enough, high-profile delegates included former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Ryan Grim of Hamas-friendly Drop Site News, the shrieking harpies of Code Pink, the ubiquitous internet streamer Hasan Piker, and Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

There’s a good chance you’ve already heard about the convoy due to the ample social media activity of its members, who spent more time broadcasting their exploits to millions of followers than doing anything that might actually help the average Cuban. A highlight of the trip was a motorized tour through downtown Havana during which guests could take pictures of destitute Habaneros and Habaneras as if they were zoo animals. The same day as a “humanitarian performance” by Kneecap—an Irish rap group named after one of the Ireland Republican Army’s grislier forms of punishment and known for holding a Hezbollah flag at one of their performances last year—the country’s electrical grid went out. Luckily, the luxurious Gran Hotel Bristol Meliá Collection, where some comrades reportedly spent the weekend, was one of the few buildings on the island to maintain power, a telling fact that appeared not to have made an impression on anyone.

“I’m gonna bomb the shit out of ’em,” Donald Trump said in a campaign speech in 2015, sending a warning to ISIS terrorists. After Operation Epic Fury began, the same line appeared in a TikTok video posted by the official White House account. Set to the Migos rap song “Walk It Talk It,” the president salutes Marines near his helicopter before the post cuts to clips of air strikes, displaying the caption “Can’t say he didn’t warn them.”

The post has been liked, shared, saved, or commented on 4.6 million times.

No one who has ever been in charge of the White House’s social media accounts has used them to deliver as much shock-and-awe provocation—or as often—as the social media team in Trump’s White House. The White House’s social media accounts are dense with pop culture references and images. These memes, said one White House official, are the essence of the digital communications strategy. And they are making people look, and then look again, often with glee or horror, depending on who is looking. The 24,000 comments about “bomb the shit out of ’em” range from “This is beyond embarrassing” to “Whoever runs this page needs a raise.”

If you remember the trash compactor scene from the original Star Wars, then you’ll understand the predicament faced by Cuba’s communist rulers: Slowly, but inexorably, they are being crushed by massive external pressures on one side and rising internal instability on the other. Their revolutionary zeal is gone with the wind. Charismatic leaders are in short supply. Few care about Cuba’s fate—even leftist governments in Latin America would be relieved to see this embarrassment of a regime vanish from history. All that is left in the toolbox of the regime is naked repression. For the first time in 67 years, however, it isn’t clear whether that will be enough.

The external threat has a face and a name: President Donald J. Trump. Trump seems determined to erase what he considers to be the strategic mistakes of the post–Cold War era. Venezuela first, now Iran, tomorrow Cuba. By spiriting Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro from his bedroom to a detention center in New York, Trump deprived the Cubans of their strongest ideological patron and primary supplier of energy and hard currency. In the wake of what happened in Venezuela, Cuba’s communist economy, already moribund, has virtually collapsed. The government can’t feed its people, keep the lights on at night, or collect the mounds of garbage accumulating on the streets.

On this episode of School of War, Rich Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Garrett Exner, executive director of the Public Interest Fellowship, break down what’s really happening behind the Iran war headlines—from covert strikes on nuclear sites to the fragile possibility of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. How are …

On Monday morning, London woke to the news that four ambulances belonging to a Jewish organization had been firebombed. In an attack that police are treating as a hate crime, a group of men can be seen on security cameras, breaking into the vehicles and setting them ablaze. An Islamist group claimed credit. The incident was quickly condemned, but British Jews were once again reminded of the world in which they now live.

Hatzolah is a Jewish charity operating in cities around the globe—they fundraise for ambulances and medical equipment to serve the communities in which they’re based, helping Jews and non-Jews alike. They are remarkably popular. And now, in London, they find themselves on the front lines of a war against Britain’s Jews.

Though firebombing and ambulance-attacking are a somewhat novel addition to the voluminous playbook of antisemitic crime in Britain, nobody here is really that surprised. We weren’t after two people were killed in a synagogue in Manchester last Yom Kippur either. Devastated, yes, heartbroken too—but not surprised.

During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the wave of campus protests since, I have been struck by how far modern activism seems to have drifted from the strategies and philosophies of the civil rights era—which, in my opinion, should have remained the model. In the 1950s and ’60s, political change was pursued with discipline, pre…

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.” The freedom of assembly (protest) joins the freedom of speech, the freedom to petition, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of religion as the five essential freedoms granted to every American citizen. In the 20th century, it was the Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent protests that finally made America a true democracy. Today, in the 21st century, it is violent protests that threaten to return it to autocracy.

Invoking Dr. King in any conversation about the act of protesting is appropriate because he is the Henry Ford of protesting. Of course, Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did Dr. King invent protesting. But Ford taught the world how to efficiently build a car by applying his assembly line idea to the process. Similarly, Dr. King taught Americans how to properly protest by applying his philosophy of nonviolence to the act of resistance.

The last few years have seen a potent number of protest movements sweep America: Black Lives Matter, the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, the “Free Palestine” movement, the “No Kings” rallies, and the ongoing protests against the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All claimed to be acting in the great spirit and grand tradition of Dr. King. But the only thing these have in common with the protest demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement is that they gathered a crowd of people together.

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

It seems that after securing concessions over the Panama Canal, President Donald Trump has developed a fondness for critical waterways. Israel and the United States have now settled on a new war goal: ending the conflict with the Strait of Hormuz under American control—not just temporarily.

The operation appears to have two parts. The first is seizing Iran’s most valuable card—the small island in the Persian Gulf that processes over 90 percent of its oil exports: Kharg Island. The second is securing the strait itself.

It’s Monday, March 23. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Sam Harris talks to Coleman Hughes. Niall Ferguson and Aaron MacLean on the latest in Iran. Eli Lake on the death of Robert Mueller. Tyler Cowen cheers on the billionaires giving up the “Giving Pledge.” And much more.

But first: Olivia Reingold investigates the billion-dollar experiment in paying ex–gang members to keep the peace on Chicago’s streets.

This fall, a Chicago headline caught my eye: A man who had posed with Governor J.B. Pritzker at a “Peacekeepers” anti-violence event had just been charged with murder.

The man was part of a state-funded program designed to prevent gang violence by paying locals—often former gang members—to mediate conflicts on the street. About a week after appearing with the governor, prosecutors say, the man participated in a smash-and-grab robbery of a Louis Vuitton shop. In the chaotic getaway, another man was killed: Mark Carlo Arceta, whose son was born the next day without a father.

The story raised obvious questions: What exactly is a Peacekeeper? And how often do people in this program end up back in cuffs?

The local press quickly moved on. I started digging.

After three months of Freedom of Information Act requests, door-knocking, and speaking with ex–gang members, I answer those questions in today’s story.

The Peacekeepers program is just a single piece of an experiment in crime-fighting that has attracted around a billion dollars. It also is a program that a growing chorus of city leaders, law enforcement officials, and even one donor now say doesn’t work. One city alderman called it a “scam.” A member of the mayor’s own public safety team told me it is a “revolving door” for gang members.

Read my investigation, and watch our video report, on whether the Peacekeepers really keep the peace on Chicago’s streets.

—Olivia Reingold

• On Saturday night, President Trump said on Truth Social he would give Iran 48 hours to “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz,” or else the U.S. would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS.” Meanwhile, European leaders are sounding the alarm after an Iranian missile aimed at a U.S.-UK base 2,500 miles away signaled that the regime has the capability to attack major European cities.

• The Senate narrowly rejected a measure that would have banned transgender athletes in women’s sports. The proposed amendment to Title IX required 60 votes and failed along party lines, with 49 Republicans in favor and 41 Democrats opposed.

• Last week, President Trump said he thought he’d have “the honor of taking Cuba.” This week, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister shot back on Meet the Press that his country “would not accept to become a vassal state or a dependent state.” The nation is currently in its second nationwide blackout in a week amid a fuel shortage. Meanwhile, far-left activists from Code Pink and podcaster Hasan Piker visited Cuba to paint a friendship mural.

• The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in a case about whether mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrive after polls close can still be counted. A 5th Circuit panel previously ruled that “election day” refers to the day the ballot must be in the hands of officials, striking down a Mississippi law that allows ballots to be counted if received within five business days.

• Switzerland has blocked new arms sales to the U.S., citing a long-standing policy of neutrality toward countries involved in armed conflict. In 2025, the U.S. bought $120 million of military goods from Switzerland, including guns used by the military and law enforcement agencies.