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“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.

It’s Thursday, July 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on Anthony Fauci’s trip to Capitol Hill. Will Rahn on why the kids can’t stop “Nixonmaxxing.” Jed Rubenfeld asks: Could Bibi sue Mamdani? And should he? All that and much more.

But first: Is a home for the canceled incentivizing hate?

Gabe Einhorn, a tech entrepreneur, took to X last month to share his dismay after an Ivy League student refused to interview with him, citing a single reason: The student was “not interested in working for a Jew.”

At the time, Einhorn blurred out the applicant’s name; but internet sleuths quickly discovered that he was a 19-year-old Cornell University student named Austin Franco, and circulated his bio across the platform.

In the old days, that might’ve spurred a cancellation campaign; instead, it’s made Franco a minor celebrity. This week he was interviewed on Piers Morgan’s talk show, where he doubled down on his bigotry in front of countless live viewers. Now, online fans have raised over $25,000 to fight his “unlawful doxxing”—and they did it through a platform called GiveSendGo, which has emerged as a more permissive crowdfunding alternative to GoFundMe.

GiveSendGo has helped the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny raise funds to clear their names after they were banned from other platforms. But it has also become a place for the likes of Franco to raise money off of their offensive views. In our lead feature today, Novi Zhukovsky talks to the founders of GiveSendGo and investigates whether this home for the cancelled is also incentivizing hate.

Last year, River Page reported on another GiveSendGo case: that of Shiloh Hendrix, the white woman who, after screaming racial slurs at an autistic 8-year-old on a playground, received over half a million dollars in donations. At the time, he marked it as a dark sign of a rising “woke right.” Last week, Hendrix was found guilty of disorderly conduct for the incident. But all that conviction has done, River writes in his latest piece, is turn Hendrix into a First Amendment martyr.

—The Editors

• The U.S. said it intercepted an Iranian missile barrage on Wednesday, as it collaborated with Saudi armed forces to strike local militias in Iraq. The renewed attacks came the same day as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House for the first time since the war began in February.

• Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times, was convicted of aiding a foreign terrorist group and carrying out the orders of the Iranian government on Wednesday. The ruling leaves Matar facing life in prison.

• More than 1,000 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta signed a statement asking the U.S. government to support international efforts to “deliberately pace” AI development. The call, including from some of the companies’ senior leadership, comes after an unreleased OpenAI model went rogue during testing last week.

• President Donald Trump and the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to toss an $83 million defamation verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll, arguing Trump can’t be sued for comments he made while president. The move comes shortly after the Justices refused to hear the appeal of a separate $5 million verdict against the president last month.

• Russia charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism, accusing him of failing to remove channels allegedly used to coordinate Ukrainian attacks in Russia. The popular messaging app responded on X with a photo of Durov flipping off the camera, adding a dose of drama to the controversy.

• James Comey’s defense counsel alleged that federal officials misled judges, submitted false statements, and withheld key facts during their investigation into his “86 47” seashell post. The motions filed late Tuesday seek the dismissal of the case, which charges the former FBI director with threatening President Trump on social media.

• President Trump unveiled a $22 billion renovation of the Washington Dulles airport Wednesday afternoon, alongside United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The plan includes four new concourses at the capital’s international gateway, which handled a record 29 million passengers in 2025. (For more on the president’s renovations of D.C., read Suzy Weiss’s report.)

The anti-Trump resistance has settled on its Anthony Fauci narrative. The Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday was a witch hunt. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who deeply influenced the restrictive guidelines during the Covid pandemic, had no choice. The good doctor had to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

It’s a nice story, but the camera doesn’t lie. More than an hour into the proceedings, Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, exposed the stone wall strategy. He requested those in the audience to stand up if they had paid a professional, legal, or personal price for dissenting from Covid orthodoxies during the pandemic. The senator then asked Fauci to turn around and look at them. Fauci refused.

Then Moreno told the story of a family in Ohio who attended a high school football game in the middle of the lockdowns. “They went to the stadium. They sat alone, far from anyone else. They didn’t feel they needed to wear masks because it was stupid and they were outside. Dr. Fauci, do you know what happened to . . . that family?” Fauci responded with the line he must have repeated more than a hundred times in the hearing. “On the advice of counsel I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution,” he said.

Moreno went in for the kill. “They were dragged out of that stadium and arrested,” he said. “Those policies were put in place because you had moronic politicians that listened to the words of a megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people.” Fauci just sat there, stone faced, without emotion.

On June 9, Gabe Einhorn took to X to share his dismay at a message he’d received from a potential new hire, who explained he wouldn’t take an interview at VryfID, Einhorn’s real-estate start-up, because he was “not interested in working for a Jew.” Though Einhorn, 24, blocked out the applicant’s name, it wasn’t long before online sleuths registered the culprit as Austin Franco, a 19-year-old Cornell University student, and blasted his name across the internet.

As various CEOs publicly vowed never to hire him, Franco was embraced as a cause célèbre by trolls eager to “tell the truth” about the Jewish people. His newfound fame was followed by newfound fortune: an online fundraiser set up on GiveSendGo to help Franco fend off the “unlawful doxxing” and backlash from his “liberal university.” In the week since, it has raised more than $25,000—a quarter of the fund’s $100,000 goal.

“It was set up really quickly. I thought it was a joke at first, to be honest,” Einhorn told me. He shared his surprise that the fundraiser wasn’t removed by the site. “Shouldn’t they be monitoring what’s going on?”

But this wasn’t the case of a bad apple that slipped through the cracks—it was reviewed and greenlit by GiveSendGo. A case like Franco’s is what distinguishes GiveSendGo from its more timorous crowdfunding counterparts, including GoFundMe, the industry leader, which removes campaigns promoting “intolerance of any kind” and reserves the right to disable any page it deems “unacceptable or objectionable.”

Ever since Zohran Mamdani’s recent televised speech accusing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a war criminal, there’s been little discussion about a pretty obvious legal move Netanyahu might make: suing Mamdani for libel.

That may have to do with what happened—or rather, didn’t happen—in May, when Netanyahu threatened to sue The New York Times over columnist Nicholas Kristof’s unsubstantiated allegations of prisoner abuse. I wrote in these pages at the time that Netanyahu had no case. Kristof didn’t say Netanyahu was personally responsible, and American law doesn’t recognize libel against a government or nation. Netanyahu never brought that case.

But Mamdani’s diatribe is different. Mamdani specifically named Netanyahu and explicitly accused him of heinous crimes, including genocide and the maiming of children. As a result, while Netanyahu v. Mamdani would be an uphill battle, it could be won.

Here are the major questions surrounding such a suit.

Can a sitting mayor be sued for libel?

Richard Nixon is back, in vibe form.

Multiple mainstream outlets have reported on young conservatives’ admiration for the disgraced 37th president. Because this is the summer of 2026, the phenomenon has unfortunately been dubbed “Nixonmaxxing.”

This new push to rehabilitate Nixon isn’t so much about his actual record. There aren’t hordes of young conservatives posting about the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, or the decision to embrace the People’s Republic of China. Instead, Nixon’s comeback in recent months has been heavy on Zoomerfied social-media hype videos, many of them churned out by the Richard Nixon Foundation. One emblematic example shows Mad Men protagonist Don Draper noting his similarities to Nixon, then switches to Nixon footage as a Drake song blares in the background.

If you’ve seen these videos, you might be wondering what on Earth is going on. One answer comes from the writer and conservative activist Chirstopher Rufo. “The right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies—some good, some bad—but about the aesthetic, the attitude, and the narrative of the self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the silent majority, and was taken down in a deep state coup,” he explained on X.

That “coup” is better known as Watergate, in which an inept Nixon White House goon squad tried to bug the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1972 only to be caught by a security guard working the graveyard shift.

Last week, my 81-year-old mother called me with some news: She had been coughing up blood.

Fortunately, it had stopped a couple hours before, she said. My mom seemed flustered, but not panicked. She handles the vagaries of aging with a bemused resignation that healthmaxxing fools like Bryan Johnson would do well to emulate. So she called her doctor and was told that the office would call back with an appointment time.

But the next day, she called me again. This time, she was shaken.

She had received a letter from New York City demanding $55,048 in property taxes on the townhouse in Midtown Manhattan where she has lived since 1996. It was weird, she said, because she didn’t owe $55,048 in property taxes. She asked if I could help her figure out the letter.

The answer turned out to be the city’s new “pied-à-terre” tax, the latest make-good on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise to “tax the rich.” Approved by the New York State Legislature in May, the levy is an extra annual property tax of 0.8 percent to 6.5 percent on high-end apartments and townhouses owned by people whose primary residence is not in New York City.

It’s Wednesday, July 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large.

Every once in a while, it feels like world events converge on one spot. Yesterday was such an occasion, which is why we’re doing something a little different with today’s Front Page: focusing on the one story that we think matters most, and helping you make sense of it with some of the voices we trust the most.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu both found themselves in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The two men are among the most consequential figures in the world, and they were in town to meet with the most consequential: President Donald Trump. Both lead a crucial and controversial U.S. ally. Both have hot and cold relationships with Trump. And, in Oval Office meetings ahead of the funeral of the late U.S. senator Lindsey Graham, both had similar requests: for continued American backing in their fights on the front lines of the West.

A few days earlier, Ukraine’s war with Russia, and Israel and the U.S.’s war with Iran, had become connected more directly than ever before, when Ukraine struck an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea that it said was carrying military equipment between Iran and Russia.

So where do these two vital alliances stand? And what came of yesterday’s meetings? For answers to those questions, we turn to Elliott Abrams, who was the Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela in the first Trump administration, supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for George W. Bush, and served in the State Department during all eight years of the Reagan administration. Read his piece to understand not only the fateful relationships between Trump, Bibi, and Zelensky, but the strategic big picture that they are so central to.

If you believe the conventional wisdom, the biggest constraint on American support for its allies—and the U.S. war effort against Iran—is practical. Trump officials blamed America’s thin munitions stockpile for the president’s pause on Iran over the weekend. But Park MacDougald argues that there is more to the story, and that the dovish views of the people sounding the alarm give away more than the shortage does. He also follows the munitions debate to its darkest end: the nightmare scenario in which America finds itself fighting a third war, against a much more formidable foe.

From the war in the Middle East to the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. The Ukraine war, which began in February 2022, shows no sign of slowing. The Free Press’s Tanya Lukyanova has been periodically traveling back to her hometown of Moscow since the start of the conflict. Today she reports on her latest trip, and a big change in the Russian capital: from gas-ration lines and drone stories to flat stares, she finds Muscovites more awake than ever to the cost of Vladimir Putin’s war. “Nobody can explain what we’re fighting for,” one person told her. “Why do people die every day? To what end?’

And in Kyiv, a convert who finally saw the light. MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who once insisted Ukraine started the war, has seen the front lines and now says she “was bamboozled by Russian propaganda.” Eli Lake spoke to this Trump World thought leader about why she changed her mind.

—The Editors

Calling all Abigail Shrier fanatics: Submit your questions for an AMA with Tough Love editor Freya Sanders. On July 30 at noon ET, Freya will coach you on how to get your letter into Abigail’s inbox—and answer your questions live. Only paid subscribers can submit questions via this thread—become one today for access to the Free Press Forum, Tough Love, livestreams, and much more.

• A teenage school shooter in Georgia will serve life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing four people in 2024 at Apalachee High School. Colt Gray, now 16, received an unusually heavy sentence for a youth on account of his apparent lack of remorse. “You do not seem to be tormented by what you did,” the judge told him.

• Ebay will pay nearly $50 million to a Massachusetts couple who claimed former company employees threatened them and sent them anonymous packages containing live insects and a bloody pig Halloween mask, according to settlement details released Tuesday. The victims founded and ran a newsletter covering the e-commerce industry, and their lawyer said in a statement that the settlement sends “a warning that attempts by big business to suppress speech and the press will not be tolerated.”

• A major earthquake rocked southwestern Japan on Tuesday, causing a partial structural collapse at a shopping mall where some are trapped inside and others are presumed dead. The Japanese military dispatched 3,600 personnel to help with quake relief, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said yesterday.

• An Airbus test flight landed yesterday in France after flying 24 hours nonstop from Australia. The A350 airliner with an expanded fuel tank is expected to debut with Qantas’ new nonstop Sydney–London route in 2027.

• The Trump administration will sunset a Medicare drug subsidy program this year, resulting in higher costs for some seniors, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The program, which currently provides an estimated $3.6 billion in premiums relief, encouraged insurers to raise rates knowing the government would cover the difference, according to one Trump administration official.

• America’s blood supply is “alarmingly” low and could delay medical treatments that depend on blood transfusions, the Red Cross said this week. The nonprofit organization said it has “less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood,” which is the most in-demand type for blood transfusions.

• Two Amazon data centers in Bahrain were damaged in Iranian missile strikes, Bloomberg confirmed via satellite imaging Tuesday. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took responsibility for the attacks, claiming the centers were targeted on account of Amazon’s support for U.S. military operations.

• A group of New York City business owners are preparing to sue the Big Apple, alleging Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to open government-run supermarkets will create unfair competition for market-rate stores. Mamdani’s $70 million plan, which he announced this week, will entail a 30 percent discount on basic items such as milk, cheese, produce, meat, and bread.

Laura Loomer’s headline-generating visit to Ukraine is a perfect bookend to the Donald Trump era. That epoch began with a moral panic in liberal America about Russian influence over the 2016 election. Ten years later, one of the Trump movement’s leading influencers is warning about the poison of Russian propaganda.

For Loomer, this is quite the change of heart. She had once accused President Joe Biden of funding “Nazi death squads” in Ukraine. And she had even contributed her own writing to Russia’s state-run network, RT. Today, she gushes about the heroism of the Ukrainian people and the land’s natural beauty.

“I think a lot of people don’t want to admit when they are wrong; it’s not exactly a comfortable thing to do. It’s also hard to do,” Loomer told me in a telephone interview from her hotel in Ukraine Tuesday. “I take responsibility for the content I consumed. Looking back, I consumed a lot of content that was clearly propaganda. I see now how RT has become a full-time clipper account for the woke reich,” she said. “It made me reevaluate some of the content I have consumed on RT.”

The news here is not the realization that Russia’s state-run media operation is a lie factory. Rather, it’s that Loomer has now accepted that America is itself in an information war, and many foreign actors—Iran, Qatar, China, and Russia—are fighting to influence American opinion.