The Free Press

The war with Iran is stalemated, in part due to a shortage of munitions available to the U.S. military. If this situation is not a full-blown crisis, it is certainly a scandal, and many observers have drawn the conclusion that these shortages would make deterring a potential Chinese effort to take control of Taiwan more difficult.

The deeper reality is even worse: The munitions shortfalls reveal that the United States was not prepared to deter China—let alone fight a war with it—even before the Iran war. If American stockpiles of defensive munitions, like Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAAD) and Patriot interceptors, and offensive weapons, like Tomahawk cruise missiles and the Army’s ballistic missiles, are running low after only five months of intermittent warfare of varying intensity with a middle power like Iran, what would happen in a broader and more intense campaign against the People’s Liberation Army?

If nothing else, the war against Iran reminds us that presumptively short wars have a tendency to run inconveniently long. Either our old war plans with China involved some magical thinking, or we simply were never serious about matching our resources to our strategic needs.

The United States is not the first nation, or even the first great power, to confront a munitions crisis. The history of modern warfare is replete with them. In recent years, Ukraine, Israel, and Russia have all faced critical shortfalls and addressed them through foreign suppliers (primarily the U.S. for Ukraine and Israel, and North Korea playing a key role for Russia) while ramping up domestic production. Israel was helped by the United States in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in yet another such crisis.

Gad Saad has lived in Canada since his family fled Lebanon in 1975 after someone showed up at their home to kill them. But last month, the professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences announced on social media that he had given up on Canada and decided to leave.

“The taxation system is astounding, rendering it nearly impossible to accumulate enough money to truly retire,” Saad wrote about the first reason for his decision. It’s true. The typical Canadian pays 70 percent more in income taxes than the typical American. The second reason is far more alarming. “The government’s open immigration policies have made it unsafe for my family to remain here (due to the exponential increase in Jew-hatred),” he wrote.

Saad said basically the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.” Saad had already taken a leave of absence from Concordia University in Montreal and will continue working as a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

Saad’s decision made it even more painfully obvious that Canada has an antisemitism problem. As of mid-July, B’nai Brith had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents so far this year, compared with 10 during all of 2025. As The Free Press’s Rupa Subramanya reported in June, Jews account for about one percent of Canada’s population of 41.6 million, but were the targets of more hate crimes reported by police in 2024 than all other religious groups combined.

Last April, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix went viral after calling a black, autistic, 8-year-old boy the N-word in a Rochester, Minnesota, park and then using the same slur against a man who confronted her about it on camera. After her identity was made public, the online far right decided to make her rich, raising over half a million dollars for her on GiveSendGo, a self-described Christian crowdfunding platform. As I reported at the time, the vast majority of comments from donors on the site were plainly racist, as were the posts on X that portrayed her as a white supremacist folk hero.

It was one of the most clarifying moments of the anti-woke era—an obvious sign that the pendulum had swung too far—and the story should have ended there. But unfortunately, it didn’t—and now, overzealous prosecutors in Rochester have turned Hendrix into a bona fide free-speech martyr.

In the days and weeks that followed the incident, local activists, including the local NAACP chapter, organized protests and town halls demanding that Hendrix be arrested and charged—despite the fact that the incident never escalated to physical violence. A few months later local prosecutors obliged, and Shiloh Hendrix was charged with two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct. Last week, she was found guilty on one count (related to her racially insulting the man who filmed her), fined $1,000, and sentenced to probation and community service. The reaction from the far right was exactly what you’d expect.

Until three months ago, Box Elder County, in northwest Utah, was one of America’s quieter places, with a handful of small towns spread across 6,700 square miles abutting the Great Salt Lake.

Then, in late April, the investor and Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary showed up and announced that one of his companies, O’Leary Digital, was going to spend up to $100 billion to build a data center the likes of which the world has never seen—40,000 acres worth—in an unincorporated portion of the county.

It would be hard to imagine a better spot for a huge data center. Unlike proposed data centers in Kenilworth, New Jersey, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, or any of the dozens of other places where data centers have become lightning rods, Project Stratos, as it’s being called, will be far from the nearest town. If it emits noise, no one will hear it. O’Leary Digital’s CEO, Paul Palandjian, says that it will be cooled using recycled water via a “closed loop” system, instead of diverting water from the nearby communities. It plans to pipe in natural gas for energy—instead of pulling from the electric grid—and it signed an agreement to pay an estimated $30 million in annual taxes, money to “support schools, emergency services, and local infrastructure,” according to county officials.

Nevertheless, as has been the case in other parts of the country, opponents of the project quickly emerged. They complained that Project Stratos would damage the environment of “our drought-ridden and wildfire-prone state,” as one X post put it. Perhaps even more upsetting, the locals had had no inkling that this massive venture was about to be dropped on them. “They tried to keep this quiet to avoid public scrutiny, but that won’t stop us!” Gabby Finlayson, the head of Elevate Strategies, a local political consulting firm, posted on May 1.

By now it’s all starting to sound like a bad joke. An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

The reality is even more repetitive. The perpetrator of Saturday’s attack was a 21-year-old called Abdul Ballout. Born in Germany, of Lebanese parentage, last year he reportedly went to Lebanon to try to get to Syria in order to join ISIS. Arrested in Lebanon, he served three months in prison for a range of offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.

Substack is providing a new service, called Scan for AI (using Pangram), to estimate the prevalence of AI-generated writing in a Substack post. I suspect they are afraid of losing readers, since many people do not like reading the AI text, or at least they think they do not like it.

I too have read many a Substack essay, impressed by the knowledge and scholarly chops of “the author,” only to realize after a while that it was not written by a human after all. After being burned a few times, I am now usually aware by the second or third paragraph. So I can understand the demand for such a service.

But do I wish to eschew AI writing for the rest of my life? Absolutely not. Most of all, I want AI writing to get better, so it does not irritate me with its clichés and all too obvious identifying marks. I want AI writing that can fool me, and maybe sometimes I am already getting it.

It’s not exactly news to Free Press readers that Anthony Fauci got a lot wrong during the pandemic.

The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and the government’s leading authority during the Covid crisis—Fauci led the call for lockdowns and school closures. Wrong. He said that it was “extremely unlikely” that people who had been vaccinated could transmit the virus to others. Wrong. He said that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Wrong. He argued that the virus had emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, jumping from an animal to a human—and shut down any suggestion that it could have resulted from a leak in a laboratory that was engaged in “gain of function” research.

As for those who disagreed, Fauci had an astonishingly arrogant response: “They are really criticizing science because I represent science.”

Back when both the public health establishment and the mainstream media hung on Fauci’s every word, Republican Senator Rand Paul was one of the few in a position of power willing to criticize him—going so far as to say that Fauci should “go to prison” for “his dishonesty” in dismissing the lab leak theory. Paul has long been convinced that the virus did indeed result from a lab leak, a position that is no longer viewed as heresy but is taken seriously by a number of officials in the intelligence community. And he has never stopped trying to get to the bottom of it. Paul has subpoenaed Fauci to testify at a hearing his committee is holding on Wednesday. Fireworks are guaranteed.

Everyone knows there is a gender double standard when it comes to physical appearance. And to this, I say, “Thank God.”

When my wife and I got married, 35 years ago, she said that embracing me—I was 6′2″ and 142 pounds at the time—was like hugging a coatrack. (Today, she says that cuddling up to my 60-something gym-rat body is more like spooning with a leather sack of ropes.)

But, of course, she still married me. And sure enough, while women’s physical attractiveness plays a significant role in men’s mate preferences—particularly at the beginning—behavioral science shows that for men it confers only a modest advantage in permanent pair-bond mating (what you civilians call “marriage”). Other factors, such as dependability, hard work, and character, are much more predictive of mating success.

In other words, at least I am a leather sack of ropes with good character.

Some observers claim this double standard is changing. If you’re following new trends on social media, you can’t avoid hearing the word “looksmaxxing,” a practice based on the idea that, because fleeting first impressions are everything, a man’s physical attractiveness is his most important attribute if he ever wants to get a mate. The trend has “soft” variants that involve skin and hair care, teeth whitening, and muscle building, and an alarming “hard” type that encourages cosmetic surgery, fillers, steroids, and even “bonesmashing” to get a better facial structure.

It’s Monday, July 27. 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 president gives diplomacy with Iran a chance—again. Why the story of an AI model going rogue really is as unsettling as it seems. Former labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on being fired by Trump and whether a pro-union GOP is possible. All that and much more.

But first: The inside story of how the Democrats lost the working class.

“On Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric.”

These are the words of Evan Barker, writing in our pages on November 9, 2024. A lifelong Democratic operative from a working-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, Evan spent her career getting progressives elected. Then, as she put it, the Democratic Party “turned its back on me and my family.” At the time, Evan’s story captured a trend playing out across the country: The working class, once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, was drifting away from the party.

Now, with the progressive wing ascendant and the midterms approaching, that shift has only become more consequential. But how exactly did it happen? And what do Democrats need to do to win back the voters they lost?

Evan is better positioned than most to answer those questions. That’s exactly what she does in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which hits shelves tomorrow. In today’s exclusive excerpt, she pulls back the curtain on the transformation of the modern Democratic Party, from a rare vantage point: inside the belly of the beast.

—The Editors

• A car plowed into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride parade Saturday, killing one person and injuring 29 in what German authorities are calling an Islamic terror attack. The suspect, a German citizen with Lebanese heritage, had prior convictions for ISIS-related activity and was shot and killed by police Sunday after charging at officers with a knife.

• President Donald Trump attended a rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner Friday, three months after the original event was cut short due to an assassination attempt. Trump sparred with reporters throughout the night, joking, “When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke,” and putting on a “Trump 2028” hat.

• Wildfires raging across France and Spain have forced more than 300,000 people to flee their homes in what French authorities are calling one of the largest evacuation operations since World War II. Soldiers and firefighters from across Europe are working around the clock to contain the blazes, while Spain recorded its first wildfire death of the season near Valencia.

• A federal appeals court upheld a ruling Saturday blocking President Trump’s executive order to create a national list of eligible voters and restrict mail ballot delivery to people on that list in 23 states. The courts found the order unconstitutional, ruling that states and Congress—not the president—have the authority to set election rules.

• Maine Democrats selected Troy Jackson as their Senate nominee Saturday, replacing Graham Platner after a sexual assault allegation led to his resignation from the race. Jackson, a former state Senate president and Bernie Sanders ally, will face Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will visit the White House tomorrow to meet with President Trump, as Russia intensifies its bombardment of Ukrainian cities. Zelensky is also in Washington to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had visited Kyiv shortly before his death and was among Ukraine’s biggest advocates in Congress.

• A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts touched down in Kazakhstan on Sunday after eight months aboard the International Space Station. American Chris Williams, who was on his first spaceflight, conducted two spacewalks during the mission.

Jillian Michaels has spent 30 years as one of America’s most recognizable fitness experts, but what makes her an interesting guest is not just her expertise.

Michaels describes herself as a classical liberal, and this conversation is in part about how that worldview has been tested over the past decade. Watching the Democratic Party embrace policies that…