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The United States is the “fourth Reich” and the “Epstein empire,” Israel is “the most dangerous threat to humanity,” and both countries are run by “Zionist pedophiles.” The idea of selling weapons to Taiwan is like “Hitler arming Robert E. Lee while he’s posted up in the breakaway state of South Florida.” Elon Musk is “a valid military target,” and Sam Altman is “a human shield.”

These aren’t just the online rants of some anonymous troll. The man behind these posts is Eric Hovagim, who has said he helped film or edit three primary campaign videos for Zohran Mamdani—and posed with the future New York City mayor in an Instagram post in June 2025. In April, Hovagim helped produce popular far-left internet streamer Hasan Piker’s mini-documentary about the trip he took to Cuba in March along with hundreds of activists, politicians, and other assorted props of the regime.

Hovagim calls himself a “geopolitical commentator and video producer,” and he has over 150,000 followers or subscribers on TikTok, YouTube, and X, plus whatever secondhand influence he reaps through making content for Piker, who has 3.1 million followers on the livestream platform Twitch. Hovagim’s videos meander from topic to topic but echo positions of the Democratic Socialists of America and often hinge on three themes: conspiracy, anti-Americanism, and glorifying political violence, often connecting all three.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss drinks with pro-pied-à-terre-tax socialite Julie Macklowe, whose politics have made her the skunk at Hamptons garden parties. Spencer Klavan remembers a fallen Irish folk hero. River Page on living in a secular sharia state. And more!

But first: Frannie Block meets the 25-year-old who’s saving local news.

My first job out of college was working the night shift as a cops and crime reporter at The Des Moines Register. I’d sit at my desk listening intently to the police scanner, and hop in my car as soon as I heard a whiff of action and drive straight to the scene. I loved this paper and still do—the people I worked with are among the most dedicated, smart, and kind colleagues someone could ask for.

But while I was there, I knew I was watching a business model failing in real time. In six months, I had survived two rounds of layoffs, watched the boss who hired me take a voluntary buyout to save our jobs, and found out I was getting furloughed for a week over Christmas. My new editor managed more than a dozen writers on his own after the shrinkage.

With fewer and fewer reporters, our owners, Gannett—the largest newspaper chain in the country—told us to shift our focus from long, in-depth investigations to shorter stories with catchier headlines to try to boost our online presence. At weekly staff meetings, we’d brace ourselves for the latest signs of a business in free fall.

By the time I left, I’d seen a Pulitzer Prize–winning paper once lauded for its biting political coverage depleted into a shell of its former self.

The state of local media in America today brings me great sadness, but when I heard about Evan Newton in Monticello, Georgia, I felt a twinge of hope.

Newton is 25 years old, and two weeks ago, he emptied his savings to purchase his local newspaper from its longtime owner to save it from being bought by a conglomerate or shutting down altogether. Young and ambitious, Newton told me he couldn’t just “sit on the sidelines” and watch the paper he grew up reading wither away. So I hopped in the car again and drove to the office he’s now running—to meet someone brave enough to identify a problem in his community and take a risk to fix it.

“I’ve never owned a business,” said Newton cheerfully, who admitted he barely graduated from college. And yet, he’s got a plan. . . —Frannie Block

The journalist Amy Chozick specializes in women who spike the blood pressure of the body politic. Hillary Clinton. Lauren Sánchez Bezos. The Kardashian sisters. She’s profiled them all—and in this week’s episode of Second Thought, she talks about their messy realities with Suzy Weiss. They also chat about Amy’s brand-new book, With Friends Like You—which is about what happens when a girlboss becomes a mom.

“Our generation of women was raised on, ‘You can do whatever a guy does,’ ” Amy says, “I don’t think men were raised to be like, ‘You can do whatever a woman does. You can load the dishwasher and cook every night and do the grocery shopping.’  ”

Watch their conversation below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And to read Suzy’s reflections on their chat, don’t miss her newsletter!

A new batch of ads from single Free Pressers is live on the site. Click here to meet a student of Brazilian Zouk dancing; a Philly sports fanatic; or a shih tzu mom “partial to a dirty martini with a rare steak.” Your special someone could be just one email away! If you’d like to take a chance at Free Press love, write a paragraph that defines you, including your age, where you live, and what you’re looking for, and send it over to [email protected].

This week, Kat Rosenfield wrote about Sophie Cunningham—the professional basketball player who said “young girls in sport shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and didn’t get canceled. Arthur Brooks reflected on the tragedy of looksmaxxing. And River Page complained that the internet forces us to live in a secular sharia state. . .

How should you spend the rest of your weekend? We asked our reporter River Page for his recommendations…

📺 Watch… The New World. Although hated by many audiences and critics upon its release, Terrence Malick’s 2005 take on the Pocahontas story is perhaps the greatest movie about America ever made. Malick doesn’t whitewash conflict between the settlers and natives, but he doesn’t spend a great deal of time moralizing about it either. His main interest is the pure strangeness and curiosity of two completely different societies with no previous knowledge of each other meeting for the first time—a phenomenon nobody in the globalized world will ever truly experience again.

📚Read… A Feast of Snakes, by Harry Crews. It’s one of the few novels that documents the transition from the old South to the new. Set in the small town of Mystic, Georgia, it follows Joe Lon Mackey—a former football star turned alcoholic wifebeater—as he prepares for the town’s annual Rattlesnake Roundup, a festival wherein locals hunt, kill, and eat the town’s snake population. This book has everything: castration, crazy agoraphobic women, adultery, dogfighting, and, of course, murder. And it’s a quick read.

💰Buy… Things on eBay. Almost nothing is made well anymore—from particleboard furniture, to cheap clothes, to AI-slop wall art—but thankfully, whatever it is you’re looking for, no matter how niche, there is a boomer in Wisconsin with a hoarding problem who has a version of it that’s stood the test of time in their garage, and who now wants to sell. Half the decor in my house and a decent portion of my clothes have come from these heroes—and none of it has immediately broken or fallen apart in the way that Amazon trash will. So the next time you want to redecorate, or want to find a vintage wool sweater for $15 (like I did last winter), log on and enjoy the journey. (Author’s note: Ebay isn’t paying me to say any of this, but it should!)

Last but not least: When we asked our creative director Clara Grusq for the most beautiful thing she’d seen this week, she told us that she just rewatched the late ’90s classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley—and she couldn’t get enough of this sun-soaked Mediterranean shot.

That’s all, folks! Have a great weekend.

“Most people have had anal sex. Don’t look so surprised.” Those two sentences, spoken by a heavy-drinking, drug-using high school teacher to her students in a short story, never caused professor Vinita Prabhakar any trouble. She’s been teaching it for nearly a decade.

But in February, a staff member apparently complained about the assignment, and the story was forwarded to South Florida State College (SFSC) president Fred Hawkins, a Republican former Florida House member who is an ally of Governor Ron DeSantis. “I don’t ever want to see this story again,” Prabhakar said she was told by Hawkins, adding that he wouldn’t want his college-age daughter reading it. The college president also said the story was “political.” The next day, she was suspended and told that her contract wouldn’t be renewed.

On Wednesday, Prabhakar sued SFSC and Hawkins in federal court. She alleges that what happened violates Florida’s Campus Free Expression Act, signed into law by DeSantis in 2021. The law says that state colleges in Florida “may not shield students, faculty, or staff from expressive activities” and protects “faculty lectures, writings, and commentary.” Prabhakar is seeking to get her old job back, as well as compensatory and punitive damages, and is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Hawkins and SFSC could not be reached for comment.

The short story “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh is certainly racy but not expressly political, and Prabhakar says that she taught it for three years at SFSC before the spring semester class that led to her removal from the classroom. But the lawsuit is yet another collision between free speech and DeSantis’ campaign to excise concepts of sexism and racism from the curricula of public schools, including higher-education institutions. In early July, a federal appeals court struck down the higher-ed provisions of one of DeSantis’ weapons in that fight—the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, signed into law by the governor in 2022.

Evan Newton is one of the youngest newspaper owners in the country today. The 25-year-old took over The Monticello News, a small weekly newspaper in southern Georgia, two weeks ago. But by the looks of his desk, you’d think he’d been running the show for years.

There are half-filled reporter notebooks, an old film canister, a walkie-talkie, and a half-burned candle used to offset the smell of the office cats—including a black tabby named Typo who got her name from sitting on people’s keyboards. The landline rings while Newton is in the middle of editing a story about the town’s softball team. It’s a subscriber calling: Her paper didn’t show up on the doorstep last Thursday. Newton realizes her subscription has lapsed, and helps her renew it.

“I’ve never owned a business,” said Newton, who admitted he barely graduated from college. Now he’s managing a three-person staff, plus a handful of freelancers and contract delivery people. “This is all learning in real time.”

What comes to mind when you think about Elizabeth Holmes? What about Stormy Daniels? Lorena Bobbitt? Lauren Sánchez Bezos? Kim Kardashian? How do these women make you feel?

Amy Chozick, my guest on Second Thought this week, specializes in women who spike the blood pressure of the body politic. Amy is an author and a former political reporter who’s covered some of the most controversial figures of our age, including Harvey Weinstein and erstwhile WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. But perhaps no one has been more divisive, or earned more of Amy’s spilled ink, than Hillary Clinton, who Chozick covered during her 2008 and 2016 campaigns; her first book, about those years, is called Chasing Hillary.

Since then, Amy has taken a step back from political writing and moved to LA. But her interest in complicated, infuriating women persists. Her recent profile of Mrs. Bezos with the headline “Someone Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos?” went viral. “She triggers people,” Amy told me. “I think her perspective is, ‘Why should I pretend to be miserable?’ ”

We’re in an elite-hating moment, and that includes elite women. “There’s so much vitriol toward billionaires that’s driven by inequality. I think a lot of these women I cover, the perception of them has so little to do with who they actually are. They become a prism for all of our feelings about powerful, sexualized women and wealth.”

And now she has a new book out, her first novel, With Friends Like You, about those very themes: powerful women, wealth, and motherhood. It’s a thriller about two women who used to be friends, and about the wildly different paths their lives take before crashing back into each other. I don’t want to give away the plot, or too much from our conversation, but something I’ve been thinking about, ever since we spoke about it, is how jarring motherhood can be for women who were told to focus on their careers before having a family.

“Our generation of women was raised on, ‘You can do whatever a guy does,’ ” Amy said. “I don’t think men were raised to be like, ‘You can do whatever a woman does. You can load the dishwasher and cook every night and do the grocery shopping, and actually you can stay home with the kids.’ They weren’t raised like that.” It’s a fair point—one we get into in this week’s Second Thought.

Speaking of women going on the record, Julie Macklowe, a New York City socialite and entrepreneur, is more than happy to. The wife of real-estate heir Billy Macklowe, she’ll dish about her least favorite restaurants, her fake Birkins, and, above all, her fellow millionaires, whom she calls “cheaters” for avoiding New York taxes.

I caught up with Macklowe recently. We talked local government, jewels, prescription drugs, and why she came out in favor of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial pied-à-terre tax—a move which earned her plenty of “dirty looks” at Hamptons parties.

Macklowe, who voted for Trump three times, pointed out, “I’m not pro-taxes. I think New York could be better run, I think our government’s terrible. There’s 1,000 things we could do—to better balance our budget; clean up our subways . . .”

Read my Two Drinks with Julie Macklowe here:

The monied Massachusetts enclave of Nantucket has a new cause banning influencers from its stores. “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” said John Sylvia, an antiques store owner with a “No Influencers” sign stuck on his door. The influencers, with their legions of followers, aren’t going down without a fight.

Justin Lester, a 37-year-old pastor at a California church, has built an AI twin, fully equipped to spread the good word to his congregants even when he’s unreachable. As he sees it, “It’s a digital version of my mind” that’s always available to serve; but some fear it could be a bit more complicated than that. Read Freya India’s piece about what happens when faith becomes just another app on our screens.

Ebay and three former executives have agreed to pay $55.7 million to resolve claims that the company had stalked and terrorized journalists who critiqued it. When I say stalked, I don’t just mean eBay pestered them; according to the plaintiffs, the company sent them live insects, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath. Beware the e-commerce mafia!

Last week, a married partner at a Manhattan law firm went viral after he was caught making out with a junior colleague on a Central Park bench. As my colleague River Page wrote this week, the real scandal is far bigger: What happens when our society turns into a nonstop surveillance state where anyone with an iPhone can turn your life into a reality show? As River put it, we’re knee deep in “secular sharia.” My tip: Don’t ever raise up your phone to film anything but your children or a sunset.

As we learned from the recent U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding (MOU), such documents can rapidly become memoranda of misunderstanding in the Middle East. That is likely to be the case with the U.S.-brokered agreement on Hamas’s disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

“Today, the Board of ‌Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza,” President Donald Trump triumphantly declared on Truth Social on Thursday. The Board of Peace, presided over by Trump and including Turkey and Qatar among its members, was charged with funding and implementing the administration’s September 2025 20-point peace plan for Gaza. This provided for a permanent ceasefire and the return of all of Hamas’s Israeli hostages, living and dead. But the fulfillment of the subsequent points—Gaza reconstruction, deradicalization, and long-term efforts for peace—was contingent on Hamas disarmament.

Once it commenced, the disarmament process, including the mapping of Hamas tunnels, would set in motion a gradual Israeli military withdrawal to the so-called Yellow Line and eventually from all of Gaza. Verifiably demilitarized, Gaza would then be secured by an International Stabilization Force, composed of troops from multiple countries, and administered by Palestinian technocrats of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). “This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” Trump exulted this week, referring to Hamas’s pivotal willingness to disarm.

Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Suzy Weiss sits down with Julie Macklowe, the thrice-Trump-voting socialite who shocked the New York elite by supporting Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax—then found out this week that she was erroneously expected to pay it. “Maybe the mayor should spend less time on TikTok and more time figuring out how to run a portal,” she says.

Julie Macklowe, in her Gucci tank top, Louis Vuitton sneakers and load-bearing Hemmerle diamond earrings, has some bones to pick. We’re at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Four Twenty Five restaurant in Manhattan, and we’re drinking—what else?—cocktails made from Macklowe’s own line of single malt whiskey, the “first luxury, and only luxury, American single malt,” she tells me. The blond mom of two and New York society fixture is having a lemonade and a few fingers of Macklowe Gold, which retails for nearly $300 a bottle; I’m sipping a Manhattan, made with her rye.

Not long ago, Macklowe—a loyal Donald J. Trump voter—made headlines by coming out in favor of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, an annual levy on second homes worth over $5 million that took effect July 1. “You have people popping in from Palm Beach and throwing galas,” she says. “They don’t even pay New York taxes, and they’re chairing it.”

Macklowe tells me she’s gotten “dirty looks at parties in the Hamptons” and a few people being “asshole-y,” but says her approach is: “Deal with it. And if you can’t, I don’t care.”

The images were unforgettable. More than 60,000 migrants entered the tiny Spanish territory of Ceuta from Morocco over the course of 24 hours.

It’s arguably the most vivid illustration we’ve ever seen of the migrant crisis that has transformed the face of Europe in one decade and that continues to consume the continent’s politics. And no one saw it all coming more clearly than our own Douglas Murray. His 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, chronicles the errors of judgment that led Western leaders so carelessly to open their doors to unlimited migration.

Will the brief storming of Ceuta prompt a reckoning among European elites, or will the crisis linger on, with the same denials and failed solutions from the leadership class? Read Douglas’s take on what comes next. —The Editors

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, Europe was experiencing a migration wave that threatened to make the continent buckle. In the space of a matter of weeks, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East made their way into Europe, principally by crossing to the islands of Greece and Italy: “the soft underbelly of Europe.”

As various European countries started to panic, it was German chancellor Angela Merkel who decided to control the day. “Wir schaffen das,” she said in August 2015. “We can do this.” Merkel and some of her counterparts in the EU effectively suspended normal immigration procedures and opened the borders of Europe to anyone who wanted to come.

In those days, the route into Europe via Spain was relatively quiet. That was because the option of getting into Europe via Central and Southeastern Europe had been opened up, so there was less need for migrants to use the Spanish option. There were also effective agreements with the Moroccan authorities—unlike those in lawless Libya, for instance—which saved Spain from the most challenging of the 2015 waves.

Still, Spain remained uniquely vulnerable. Not least because, like Greece and Italy, the country had an accident of geography. This was the fact that, as well as being a remarkably short sail from North Africa, Spain has two territories actually in Northern Africa: the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, after musician Glen Hansard’s death at the age of 56, Spencer Klavan revisits the work that made Hansard internationally famous—the movie “Once”—an emblem of authenticity and artistic genius in a realm increasingly consumed by digital slop.

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Glen Hansard was, first and foremost, a live performer.

The Irish folk rock legend’s life was tragically cut short this week at the age of 56 in a motorcycle crash. But the accomplishments of his career will long outlive him. At 13, Hansard quit school and started busking, playing covers of Van Morrison and Bob Dylan on the streets of Dublin. Seven years later, in 1990, he founded The Frames, a band named for his habit of keeping friends’ broken bicycle frames strewn about his backyard until he got around to piecing them back together.

Then, in 2007, he became an international celebrity—somewhat ironically, for a film.

Once, a sad and shabby little masterpiece shot for €112,000 (just under $250,000 in today’s dollars), features Hansard as a part-time busker referred to in the script simply as the “Guy,” pining for his ex-girlfriend while working for his dad fixing vacuum cleaners. His counterpart is Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová, who plays the “Girl,” a classically trained pianist with a young daughter and an estranged husband back in the Czech Republic. “Guy” and “Girl” quickly bond over their love for music, falling in love as they write and record together. As well as starring in it, Hansard co-wrote the music and lyrics for the film’s songs.

It’s Friday, July 31. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The meaning of the Salman Rushdie verdict. Should you skip your annual physical? How Markwayne Mullin drew the ire of President Donald Trump on July 4. Is Ukraine turning the tables on Russia? And much more.

But first: The chaos in Ceuta.

Sixty thousand. That’s how many people local authorities estimate have crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta over the past 24 hours. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary figure, coming close to the territory’s total permanent population of nearly 84,000. Also extraordinary: the footage of the crossings. Droves of mostly young men jumping out of trucks at the border, swimming around breakwaters, clambering over fences, sprinting down streets. At least 18 people have died during the chaos, and the Spanish government has deployed the army to Ceuta.

The scenes recall the peak of Europe’s migrant crisis a decade ago—and underscore how little Europe’s elites have done to address the problem in the intervening years. Rod Dreher recently returned to the U.S. from living in Europe, where he watched as political leaders repeatedly refused to tackle the issue, and Europeans only grew angrier. In our pages today, he reacts to the dystopian scenes from Ceuta, and asks: What will it take to break the immigration taboo? —The Editors

All across the country, Americans are angry about data centers. They’re too big, they say, too noisy, and too costly for the communities that have seen their electric and water bills rise. But data centers are also inevitable, and absolutely essential in the coming age of AI. Joe Nocera lays out a “peace plan” that will allow for the continued build-out of data centers while mollifying the concerns of local communities. It includes transparency, improved construction technology—and plenty of money.

In early July, when Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said that women shouldn’t have to play sports against biological males, America more or less shrugged. When, a week later, reporters gave her the opportunity to walk back her remarks, she doubled down: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.” This, says columnist Kat Rosenfield, is a sign of progress. Not so long ago, there would have been howls of outrage and attempts to cancel Cunningham. What has brought on this sea change? Kat’s thesis: “Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass.” Who can doubt it?

For years, Laura Loomer, the MAGA influencer, sided with Russia in its war against Ukraine, even contributing articles to Russia’s state-run network, RT. But after visiting Ukraine, and meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials, she concluded she had been on the wrong side. On Tuesday, from her hotel room in Ukraine, she spoke to Eli Lake about her change of heart, and tells him she now considers Zelensky “an essential ally.” Notes Eli: “By the looks of things, so does the president.”

When Alex Berenson’s 81-year-old mother got a tax bill for $55,048 she was baffled. She had lived in her New York City townhouse for 30 years—and she knew she didn’t owe that kind of money to the city. The answer, it turns out, was Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “pied-à-terre” tax, which is designed to dun out-of-towners who own fancy New York apartments but whose primary residence is elsewhere. The incident leads Alex to muse on everything from inept city bureaucracy to Mamdani’s socialism, to the heartlessness of social media. “Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax isn’t just about pied-à-terres,” he writes. “It’s about stoking resentment toward an ever-expanding list of class enemies.”

Every six months, Tanya Lukyanova spends a few weeks in Moscow, where she was raised and where she still has friends and family. Since 2022, when the war against Ukraine began, she never saw the effects of the war in Russia’s capital, as the government sought to keep it insulated. But this visit was different. Tanya reports that she saw long lines of people waiting for their ration of gas, heard people talking about seeing drones and hearing explosions, and discovered a bitterness about the war that she hadn’t experienced in earlier trips. “Nobody can explain what we’re fighting for,” said one man after a few drinks. “Why do people die every day? To what end?”