The Free Press

The job of secretary of Homeland Security is a fraught one in Trump’s second term, with immigration enforcement being among the most controversial issues in the country. But recently installed DHS chief Markwayne Mullin may have made life even harder for himself. Brought in to calm the department after its tumultuous first year, he has made several moves that caused tension within the administration, including between himself and President Donald Trump.

One early clash surrounded the “Salute to America 250” in Washington, D.C. The White House spent the months leading up to this year’s July 4 celebration promoting the administration’s National Mall festival as one of the grandest events in American history. “We are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,’ ” Trump wrote in a June 15 social media post.

Then came a directive from his own secretary of Homeland Security that the festivities, including Trump’s planned remarks and the massive fireworks show that followed, should be called off because of weather conditions.

On Thursday, shocking footage spread online of droves of primarily young male Moroccans storming Ceuta, a small Spanish territory on the North African coast. Thousands of them swam around breakwaters and climbed fences to enter the tiny enclave. An estimated 60,000 people are believed to have arrived in Ceuta—where the permanent population is 84,000—in 24 hours. Eighteen immigrants have died during the crossings. Meanwhile, local bars and shops are closed for fear of looting. The chaos has caused the leader of Ceuta to appeal to Madrid to send in the army.

The Spanish government has done so, but it should never have come to this. It was bound to, though, because Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist, oversees one of Europe’s most permissive migration regimes. In January, Sánchez announced a blanket amnesty program to regularize the immigration status of half a million migrants living illegally in Spain. In a New York Times op-ed published in February, Sánchez characterized the move as both humane and economically necessary, and contrasted his policy to the restrictive ones of “MAGA-style leaders” (read: Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán).

By summer, applications had soared to over one million—this, in a country whose migrant population is estimated to be at around 15 percent of the national total. Granted, the beneficiaries of this program are mostly Latin Americans, who, owing to a shared language and cultural similarities, are relatively easy to integrate.

Hello and welcome back! This week has brought us many special funny treasures, and I’ll be honest, they’re mostly concerning a man called Anthony Fauci. Buckle up, buttercups.

→ HRH Fauci!: Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, kept a journal. A diary filled with love notes to himself. Which I’ve literally never heard of a man doing, but that’s beside the point. I guess he also did it on his work computer, because Senator Rand Paul obtained and released it. I’m not sure where to begin. First, let’s get a sense of the tone. He carefully documents all the glitzy celebrations of himself, lists all the “movie stars and athletes” he has a Zoom call with, and carefully logs all the celebratory news stories about himself. It’s like an Excel spreadsheet of compliments. For a sense, here’s Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:

Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson in the world. (Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt me since I am so busy . . . seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it is all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.

He loved being a celebrity. The thing about it is, he really was being worshipped! There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci. He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system. Also: no diaries, ever, certainly none in Google Docs. I write my grocery lists on Signal, and you should too. Love letters via email have been forbidden until further notice. I will be dragged up in front of Congress one of these days, but so help me God, they aren’t going to know about one brunch I attended. Next up, the lab leak:

→ No one ever thought it was the wet market: In his diaries, Anthony Fauci clearly thought a lab leak was possible or even probable. Even as the whole elite intelligentsia made belief in wet-market origin a litmus test for being a good person for God knows what reason. Here’s Anthony Fauci in his journal in 2020:

It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human-to-human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.

And Fauci himself thought it could definitely be tied to the gain-of-function research he knew was happening with Covid viruses in Wuhan. GOF is gain of function, which is basically when scientists give a virus a new trait (or “function”) so they can see how it behaves. Again, here’s Anthony Fauci:

There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this. This is expected of him since he was the original GOF person with Yoshihiro Kawaoka. Also, Christian Drosten was with Ron; the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and given the fact that Dr. Shi Zhengli at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.

To remind everyone: Suggesting that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research on Covid in Wuhan was considered slightly insane at the time. But in 2016 there was literally a Wuhan-linked coronavirus researcher writing: “This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our gain-of-function research funding pause has been lifted.” The only reason I knew about any of this earlier was by reading a lunatic blog called ZeroHedge, that was like, Hey, there’s a Covid-making lab in Wuhan. In 2021, The New York Times’ global health reporter posted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” Racism is the cudgel that will hit you if you question why we have to wear a hazmat suit to walk to the mailbox. (She apologized amid backlash.) Never mind how it’s maybe more racist to say the Chinese gave us this disease from weird animals they eat and not from a sophisticated laboratory? Anyway, here’s NPR, again after Fauci’s own writing that gain-of-function research in Wuhan was a possible source of the virus:

Oh, also? Fauci knew in February 2020 that Covid’s case fatality rate was pretty low. He wrote, “This is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility,” and that the fatality rate is “more like 0.2-0.3 percent rather than 2.0 percent.” Schools were closed. Careers were lost. Suicides spiked. I had to give birth—literally go through labor!—in a face mask (try it sometime). And in the end, it was exactly what the baddies always said it was: a bad flu. The case fatality rate for the normal flu was about 0.1 percent.

All of these revelations will only very lightly be reported on. There’s currently a TV news blackout on the story, except on Fox News of course, per this one analysis.

That 0.5 percent is why everyone’s so upset about CBS News getting any tiny bit of intellectual complexity. How dare CBS News air that 0.5 percent on Fauci. This is the fascist takeover we warned you about.

And why do you care so much about relitigating Covid anyway? It’s in the past! Let it go. You didn’t like all those TikTok dances and making banana bread and the fact that your toddler regressed, your grandpa died alone, and you considered walking out on your spouse?

In this episode Suzy Weiss sits down with journalist Amy Chozick, who has spent her career covering some of America’s most polarizing women—from Hillary Clinton and Stormy Daniels to Elizabeth Holmes and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

They explore what these wildly different women have in common, why they’re judged so harshly, and what the public gets wrong about them. Then they turn to Chozick’s new novel, With Friends Like You, and the growing wave of books exposing the darker side of motherhood and why it feels like part of you dies when you have children.

Plus: a stirring defense of Lorena Bobbitt.

For months, it was conventional wisdom among large swaths of the American right that Ukraine would inevitably have to cede its Donbas region to Russia to end the war. Now, with Russian morale flagging, “that assumption is just no longer true,” says Aidan Stretch, a CBS News international reporter based in Kyiv. Today, Stretch joins School of War to disc…

Hadi Matar will likely spend the rest of his wretched life in jail. On Wednesday a federal jury in Buffalo, New York, found the 28-year old Lebanese-American man guilty of acting on the orders of Iran’s regime and providing support for Hezbollah when he nearly murdered author Salman Rushdie four years ago as he was giving a talk at the Chautauqua literary festival.

Matar was already serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted of attempted murder last year in a New York court. But the federal case against him is important because it demonstrates the threat Iran poses not only to our republic, and our republic of letters, but to the liberties of a free society.

You know the feeling. You take off hours from work to go in for your annual physical exam, and then sit on the hard, paper-covered table while answering the same questions you answered at last year’s physical. After a few minutes of gentle poking and prodding, your doctor tells you you’re in good shape. See you next year, he says. But that reassurance isn’t necessarily justified, for it only gives you a momentary snapshot, rather than a real sense of where your health is headed in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

I recently met a 55-year-old patient, an athlete his whole life, thoughtful about food and sleep. He wants to feel excellent and live well for a long time. For years, his cholesterol panel had been looking increasingly abnormal, but his doctor had shrugged it off as not yet urgent enough to act on. Eventually, he had to get more advanced cardiac testing, which found significant coronary artery disease. Since learning he had plaque in his arteries, he has struggled to tolerate different lipid-lowering medications and felt frustrated by how little control he seems to have.

I encourage all my patients to keep their own spreadsheets of lab results, since trends tend to tell stories that snapshots miss. Once my patient pulled together his records, a decade of results emerged. Buried in them was a letter after his 2014 annual physical: Your cholesterol panel is abnormal. The recommendation would be to eat healthy, exercise, and sleep, which are all things you are already great at. See you in a year! What followed was a decade in which closer monitoring, a more individualized assessment of risk, targeted lifestyle changes, and medication could have been considered.

Just a couple weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made conservatives cheer when he delivered a sharp rebuke to communism not only for the atrocities committed in its name, but for the picture of human life underlying it:

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive toward, without—a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.

Communism, according to Rubio, would not be laudable if only we could make it work, because making it work would mean an end of great individual accomplishment and of the striving that brings romance and meaning to our lives.

The trouble is, as I was reading this, it did sound like a depiction of a very live ideology that is one of the most powerful forces in the United States today. I refer not to communism, but to the ideology of technological succession, or transhumanism, that is guiding our AI entrepreneurs. Every word of Rubio’s castigation of communism could apply even more fully to the views of an industry to which his administration is extremely close.

“In the end,” the omniscient narrator of 1984 explains, “the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”

So it goes when the unstoppable force of political ideology crashes into the immovable object of the god’s honest truth. It doesn’t matter if you know the former thing to be false; you have to believe it. And not only that, you want to, if only because you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t, and so you know what a profoundly cold comfort it would be to maintain your grip on reality when tribal belonging demands you let go. The people who guard the door to the clubhouse have declared that two plus two is five, that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and—to borrow from another cautionary tale about the dangers of conformism—that the emperor is not, I repeat, not parading around with his wiener out, but rather wearing a pair of pants so innovative they are beyond the ability of ordinary people to comprehend or even perceive.

This is what all right-thinking people believe—and now all the right-thinking people are looking at you, because you are one of us, aren’t you?

Aren’t you?

Aren’t you?!!

For a certain amount of time, in certain political climates, this will be enough to produce the appearance of a consensus. But even the most successful campaign of forced conformity to falsehoods cannot last forever—which brings me to the curious case of Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham.

Hi! Freya here, the editor of Tough Love. Thanks so much to all the readers who sent me questions this week about what goes on behind the scenes of this column. If you missed my recent Ask Me Anything in The Free Press Forum, you can catch up here. You’ll find my answers to queries like “Are there any questions that Abigail intentionally won’t answer?” and “Sometimes I get the impression that Abigail is responding to something that we the readers aren’t privy to . . . is that a possibility?” (The Forum is just for paying subscribers; if that’s not you, sign up here!) And now without further ado, Abigail’s latest, in which she tells a man who’s desperate for his wife to forgive an affair: “You’re asking her to make you feel better while she continues to writhe.” —Freya Sanders

Dear Abigail,

Almost 20 years ago, when we were relatively newly married, my wife and I moved overseas, so I could go to graduate school. She was miserable there, and I was one cause of that misery; I worked too much, and I didn’t spend enough time with her. Ultimately, she decided she needed to go back to the States for her own happiness, to which I agreed. In her absence, I had an affair with a co-worker, which continued until I came back to the U.S. a year later. I didn’t tell my wife.

Since then, my wife and I have had three wonderful daughters. (They’re now 13, 11, and 6.) Until recently, we were both happy in our marriage. I felt guilt and shame about my misdeeds, but I tried to channel it into being a better husband. Then, 18 months ago, my wife asked me point-blank what had happened when I was in graduate school. I confessed everything to her and begged for her forgiveness. I also confessed to my priest and did penance. We have each been seeing a separate therapist ever since the disclosure, and have also been attending couples therapy.

I’m writing because all these months later—despite my earnest and often desperate commitment to both the advice we have been receiving and what my wife says she needs from me—she hasn’t been able to forgive me. She is frequently miserable around me, seems constantly plagued by obsessive thoughts about the affair, and suffers from insecurity because of what I did. She frequently rejects my sincere expressions of remorse, love, and commitment, leaving me in despair. Not infrequently, she lashes out loudly, often within earshot of our children. They don’t seem to have caught on, and they continue to be happy and well-adjusted, but I’m constantly worried they’ll hear my awful sins recounted in one of her outbursts.

I still love her deeply, and at times, I can still see glimpses of the happy couple we used to be. She has always said she believes she will eventually be able to forgive me. But we’ve been struggling for so long, and I honestly don’t know if we’re making any progress. She becomes angry whenever I beg her for forgiveness, because she feels judged for not having granted it yet. She says she is working through things with her therapist and that forgiveness is a “journey.” But I look at where we are now compared to a year ago, and it’s not clear that this journey is going anywhere good.

I am determined to be the husband she deserves, which I wasn’t before. But it seems clear that I make her miserable—and how can I love her if I make her miserable? I’m really in a bind here, and I don’t know what to do.

Sincerely,

Hopeless in the Midwest, 44

Hopeless,

What is the ideal romantic relationship? What sort of marriage do you want? I’ve now interviewed over a hundred young people on the subject, and they invariably recite some version of this: two people, each completely happy and fulfilled in their own pursuits, coming together to face hard times without ever sacrificing their independence.

They strive to avoid “codependency,” as uncountable TikTok influencers and Instagram therapists advise. They see dependence as pathological, signaling an unhealthy or even “toxic” relationship. They don’t realize they are importing a term from addiction recovery and misapplying it to all close, interdependent romantic relationships. They don’t know that organizing your life around each other is often a telltale sign that you are in love.

You and your wife did well when your lives were knit tightly in interdependence—when you rejoined her after grad school and built a family. You fell apart each time you behaved as our culture insists you should: like two totally independent people, each with private goals and needs, pursuing them sometimes together and sometimes apart. That’s the deepest problem here, Hopeless. Deeper even than the affair, because it created the conditions for it. At critical moments, the two of you behave like you aren’t married at all.