The Free Press

Tucker Carlson has a podcast. But it increasingly seems as though he doesn’t just want you to watch it. He wants you to vote for it.

Why else would he have spent recent weeks suggesting that America needs some kind of third party to save itself? The founding members, seemingly, would be an Avengers-style team consisting of Tucker, former representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, former counterterrorism director Joe Kent, and some of their spouses. To show he means business, he devoted an interminable (technically, 98-minute) episode this week to his 10-point plan to save America.

Some people have suggested that Carlson is clearly lining up to run for political office. Others who have known him for years point out that Carlson has neither the discipline nor the patience required for a political run. We now have some fresh evidence of that: He seems to lack the patience to write down 10 points without boring himself.

The Carlson plan to save America includes the following list of aims he believes our country must pursue: fairness, sovereignty, productivity, beauty, health, honesty, optimism, wisdom, decency, and unity. Like many lists created by Carlson’s erstwhile opponents on the socialist left, these are slogans that are meant to be unopposable. Or to put it another way, as a logician taught me many years ago, there is no point in uttering a phrase the opposite of which would be uttered only by a madman.

The Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, led by GOP senator Rand Paul, voted Thursday morning to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions at last week’s hearing. Many legal experts have argued that Fauci is in the clear. They’re wrong.

A subpoenaed witness commits contempt of Congress if he refuses to answer any pertinent question posed to him by a committee. That’s a criminal offense. If Congress refers a contempt finding to the Justice Department and a prosecution ensues, a conviction is punishable by up to 12 months in prison. Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon served four months for contempt in 2022.

But a witness can avoid a conviction if he’s found to have validly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. So the critical legal question is whether Fauci validly pleaded the Fifth. The answer seems to be no.

Fauci supposedly pleaded the Fifth because he and his lawyers believed the hearing was a “perjury trap”—an attempt by Senator Paul and other Republicans to coax Fauci into lying under oath about his record as the top federal virologist during the Covid pandemic. Perjury is a live risk for Fauci because his famous pardon, issued in January 2025 by President Joe Biden, does not absolve him of any crimes committed after that date.

Dear Abigail,

My 8-year-old daughter is a delight. She is talented, sociable, and generally thriving. But she is struggling with what appears to be serious and escalating anxiety.

While she has always been nervous about new situations, her behavior has recently shifted from avoidance to shutdown. Whether it is dance, swimming, or piano—activities she genuinely enjoys—she often reaches a breaking point where her shoulders slump, she becomes nonverbal, and she stops participating. Usually this happens when the instructor asks her to do something she views as challenging.

I have tried many different ways to get her back up and moving. But once she has shut down, she is too stubborn to even attempt a task. The only thing that seems to work is moving on to the next task or activity.

This year, the behavior extended to school. She went from being a model student to refusing math homework, and a few months ago, she started disengaging when asked to do some writing. This “freeze” response is now significantly affecting her education. I am feeling overwhelmed and unsure of the best way to support her. I am ready to seek out professional help, but my husband (who is a big fan of your work) does not approve of therapy for children. He believes they only need time and love.

How do we tell the difference between a normal childhood struggle and something that requires professional intervention? And if it is time for professional intervention, how do we choose the right therapist—one who will really help, and challenge her to graduate out of therapy, instead of just validating her feelings? I am very reluctant to consider medication, but might it be a helpful tool—or something to refuse point-blank? If therapy is not the immediate answer, what other strategies can I use? How can I provide a loving, supportive environment while still encouraging my daughter to face challenges independently?

When is it time to give her some tough love?

Sincerely,

Anxious Mama, 47

Dear Mama,

On the day that the Challenger took off, a teacher wheeled a television cart into the multipurpose room of my elementary school. We’d spent weeks learning about the astronauts.

I had written a report on Judith Resnik, an electrical engineer who was the first Jewish woman in space, and molded a clay bust to go along with it. Most girls were more excited about Christa McAuliffe—poised to become the first teacher in space!—but I could not figure out why space needed a social studies teacher.

We sat “Indian style” in clusters by class on the vinyl floor. A teacher cut the lights. We got quiet. Seconds after takeoff, all the American heroes we’d learned about became a fiery starburst, then nothing.

Somebody flicked the lights back on, and we were ushered quickly back to class. To the best of my recollection, no one offered a word of explanation.

It’s Thursday, August 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tucker Carlson says he’s not an antisemite. Don’t believe him, says Rod Dreher. Aaron MacLean on Trump’s Iran indecision. Eli Lake and Olivia Reingold on the political earthquake in Michigan. All that and more.

But first: The medical authorities who still silence dissent on gender care.

It’s no secret that The Free Press has extensively covered the scandal of youth gender medicine, and the related story of how, over the last decade, the ideology that enabled it captured institutions of medicine, education, and beyond. We were early to the story, and we stayed on the scent.

We’re proud of all these stories, many of them edited by the formidable Emily Yoffe. They are exactly the sort of stories The Free Press was founded to cover: ones the mainstream press had tried to ignore. Then, in late 2024 and early 2025, something changed. As Abigail Shrier—who was fearless in her work on this issue, and whose brilliant book on the subject activists tried to have pulled from Amazon and Target—put it in our pages, “The Gender Fever Finally Broke.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped her pronouns from her Twitter page. European governments banned puberty blocker prescriptions for children. Even The New York Times started to report more honestly on the issue. Trump, back in the White House, signed an executive order “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.”

With all these changes, we found ourselves wondering how many more stories we would need to write about doctors, professors, and others who faced professional consequences for blowing the whistle on what they came to view as a scandal.

But here’s the thing: The vibes have shifted only so far.

Just look at the low-boil row over WNBA star Sophie Cunningham, who dared to voice her opinion on boys in girls’ sports last month. As Kat Rosenfield argued last week, her dissent is tolerated in a way that it perhaps wouldn’t have been only a few years ago. And yet, she is the country’s only active professional female athlete who has stated publicly that she does not believe biological males should participate in women’s sports. (This is a view that a large majority of the American public agrees with.)

Here at The Free Press, we kept finding evidence of gender ideology’s enduring hold over medicine, and hearing from people who paid with their jobs for opposing “gender-affirming care.” The tales of cancellations and witch hunts are by now so familiar to us that we have on occasion found ourselves asking: How many more stories can there be on this?

The answer is many.

Today we bring you the latest, a brave firsthand account by Dr. Karla Solheim. If you read it and think it sounds familiar, that’s because many of these stories follow the same chilling pattern. We won’t stop telling them until someone like Karla can speak honestly without being ostracized by her profession.

—Oliver Wiseman

ICYMI: Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary yesterday, beating moderate Rep. Haley Stevens by just one percentage point, despite leading by double digits in the polls. It took all night to declare El-Sayed the winner, and his victory might matter as much for the Democratic Party as it does for the race to win the general election in Michigan in November.

Olivia Reingold spent the last week in Michigan, talking to voters and activists who powered El-Sayed’s campaign. Read her dispatch from Detroit on the movement that fueled his rise.

Meanwhile, Eli Lake asks what it says about the Democratic Party that El-Sayed ran openly with the support of Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who has praised Hamas and said America deserved 9/11. Read Eli’s column on what El-Sayed’s victory reveals about the party’s growing anti-American turn.

• Jason Arday, celebrated as the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history, resigned hours after the university opened an investigation into his scholarship, which has come under fire for alleged plagiarism. Arday has denied any wrongdoing, writing that his resignation should not “be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.” (Read Yuan Yi Zhu’s piece on how Arday got away with it for so long, and who enabled him.)

• A stray SpaceX rocket booster slammed into the moon at roughly 5,400 miles per hour, carving out a crater that could stretch 100 feet wide and 16 feet deep, scientists estimate. The impact was confirmed through a debris plume spotted by a telescope in Chile. Scientists say this is a rare opportunity to study how the lunar surface responds to collisions.

• The Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a near party-line vote of 51–44, giving the agency its first confirmed leader in nearly a year. Virginia’s Tim Kaine was the only Democrat to back Schwartz, as critics questioned whether she would be willing to push back against directives from Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina dropped his reelection bid Wednesday after the House Ethics Committee recommended that he be censured for what it called “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.” Two other House members resigned earlier this year amid separate sexual misconduct allegations.

• Four people were stabbed in London’s Covent Garden, with police arresting a woman at the scene and saying that early indications point to a mental health–related incident. All four victims were hospitalized, and none of their injuries were considered life-threatening.

• The head of a Russian military drone factory was critically wounded when his car exploded near Yekaterinburg, killing his driver in the second attack targeting a Russian drone maker within a week. No one has claimed responsibility, though Russia has blamed Ukraine for previous strikes.

• Billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz is offering up to $150 million to organizations with the best ideas for turning around San Francisco. Proposals can come from anyone, anywhere, as long as they primarily benefit the city—with up to three winners each receiving as much as $50 million.

Peter Berkowitz has been warning about the ideological capture of American universities long before most people were willing to listen. His new book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America, out next month, makes the case that the crisis is real, and existing institutions aren’t going to save us. He joins me this week to get into all of it.

The story he …

For a president who frequently criticized Barack Obama for the 2013 fiasco of the unenforced “red line” in Syria, Donald Trump has failed to enforce the aggressive ultimatums he put to Iran at least five times since March. And for all of Trump’s fervent opposition to the weaknesses of Obama’s deal in 2015 with Iran, from which Trump withdrew in 2018 during his first term, the president is now investing his hopes in a diplomatic process that can only hand substantial control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran.

These are not the actions of a president who feels he is operating from a position of strength, however tough his rhetoric. These are the actions of a president who is attempting to surrender with dignity to the Iranians, the better to move on to other issues. But while the Iranians might accept a surrender in the Strait of Hormuz, they will not grant Trump his dignity. Iran’s leaders have either concluded that the regime can survive another round of major American strikes, just as it survived the worst in March and April, or they think that Trump’s threatened escalation against Iran will never come.

Iran’s leaders might ultimately be wrong that Trump won’t escalate, but such a belief would not be irrational. Remember that back on March 21, President Trump wrote on social media, “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Two days later, he backed down, writing, “I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD” because of “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” with Tehran.

When those conversations turned out, two weeks later, to be less productive than Trump seemed to have hoped, the president wrote that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Two days after that, on April 7, after writing just that morning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump suspended his threats for “a period of two weeks,” which he said was at the request of Pakistan’s leadership and “subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”

More than a few people have asked me, “Why do you say Tucker Carlson is antisemitic? It seems to me he’s only criticizing the state of Israel.”

Let’s stipulate that it is certainly possible to criticize Israel and its government without being antisemitic. Heck, Jews do it all the time. (Just read an Israeli newspaper.) From time to time, Carlson says openly that he is not antisemitic. At last December’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest convention, Carlson responded to previous speaker Ben Shapiro’s criticisms:

“Let me just affirm one final time. Not only am I not an antisemite—and I would say so if I was—I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason,” Carlson told the crowd. “Not because it’s unpopular, or my donors don’t like it. I don’t have any donors. I’m not an antisemite because antisemitism is immoral in my religion. It is immoral to hate people for how they were born.”

It is worth noting that Shapiro had not called Carlson an antisemite, or brought up Jews or Israel at all. He had accused him of remaining silent when Candace Owens suggested that Charlie Kirk’s widow might have played a role in her husband’s assassination and accused TPUSA of a cover-up, and of uncritically hosting “a Hitler apologist Nazi-loving anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes” without challenging someone “who said that the vice president of the United States is a quote, fat gay race traitor married to a jeet.” He called out Carlson for giving a similar welcome to “pornographer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate” and for “mainstreaming fake historian and pseudo Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper.”

Carlson says he’s no antisemite, so why doesn’t that settle the issue?

Would you like to see an example of a badly conceived policy? Here you go:

The bill to require discounts for self-checkout will probably not pass. But what’s notable is that if this bill did pass, it would have exactly the opposite of the effect its creators want. The stated justification is that customers are doing unpaid labor by scanning and bagging their own groceries, and that this discount would compensate them for that effort. But the bill is part of a more general effort to disincentivize automation in the retail industry, in order to protect working-class jobs. Rhode Island’s Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act, which requires grocery stores to have “a minimum of one manual checkout station in operation for every three self-service checkout stations,” takes effect at the start of 2027, and similar bills have been proposed in other states

The standard objection to this bill, I suppose, would be that self-checkout already gives shoppers a discount, because it allows stores to save money on hiring human labor, and that these savings get passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. That argument is correct as far as it goes, but it means the debate ends up as one of technocracy versus populism—protecting the livelihoods of a few cashiers versus giving a huge number of consumers very slightly lower prices. There’s no simple or easy conclusion to that debate.

But in the case of New York’s proposed self-checkout discount, the problem is that the bill would actually make grocery stores fire human cashiers in favor of more self-checkout.

I’m a board-certified obstetrician, a lesbian, a mother, a lifelong Democrat, and up until recently, someone who placed immense faith and trust in the institutions that guided my profession.

I served as the chair of the Iowa section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) for a year and a half, where I dedicated my time to expanding women’s health access to rural areas in my state.

But in March, one of ACOG’s vice presidents called me into a meeting and told me I had a choice: resign from my position as chair, or stop publicly criticizing ACOG’s endorsement of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender medical care.

I had come to realize that our profession was not doing the right thing by encouraging medicalization and surgery for transgender patients, when robust evidence that these treatments provided long-term health benefits did not exist.

The choice was easy.

On Wednesday at 9:54 a.m. Eastern time, the Associated Press officially called the Michigan Democratic Senate primary for Abdul El-Sayed.

The result took hours longer than expected. In the final polls, El-Sayed—a member of the party’s ascendant left wing—was leading moderate Representative Haley Stevens by double digits. Now, with 99 percent of the votes counted, he has edged her out by just 1 percentage point.

But while the race was tight, the significance of the result is difficult to overstate. Today, we bring you two pieces unpacking exactly what it means.

First, Olivia Reingold reports from the ground in Michigan, where she has spent the past several days speaking with voters, activists, and candidates about the coalition that propelled El-Sayed to victory.

“There were keffiyehs as far as the eye could see,” she writes from his watch party on Tuesday night. “Keffiyehs on heads, keffiyehs as belts, keffiyeh-printed phone cases.”

Read her dispatch from inside the movement that powered El-Sayed’s rise—and the currents fueling the Democratic Party’s populist turn.

Next, Eli Lake examines what El-Sayed’s victory reveals about the Democratic Party’s ideological shift. There was once a time, he writes, when progressive politicians had to distance themselves from anything that hinted at anti-Americanism. No longer. El-Sayed has repeatedly campaigned with progressive influencer Hasan Piker, who has praised Hamas, said America deserved 9/11, and, in Eli’s words, “represents a strain of American politics that demonizes the republic.”

Read Eli’s piece to understand the new ideological boundaries reshaping the Democratic Party.