The Free Press

It’s Friday, July 24. 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 Saudis are going nuclear. History isn’t dead. Zohran Mamdani’s millionaire working-class comrades. The history of the Navy SEALs. And more.

But first: What the Trump administration gets right about sex.

Ask the millennial woman in your life: What’s the craziest thing you were taught in sex ed?

Having been born in 1995, I was fortunately informed that I could get pregnant from sitting in a hot tub 24 hours after a guy—it could be a man I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW and he could be OLD and CREEPY—contaminated it.

At the time, the culture was reeling from the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic and spiraling from a spike in teen pregnancies. In the first year of the ’90s, there were a million of them in the U.S. Last year there were about 125,000. Teenagers just aren’t having that much sex anymore, for reasons we’ve explored plenty of times in these pages.

So you might think it’d be logical, and uncontroversial, for our Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), charged with helping Americans flourish, to stop putting quite so many tax dollars into preventing teen pregnancy. The money’s probably better spent elsewhere.

And yet, when it was reported this week that HHS was doing just that, sworn enemies of the administration saw not a sensible fiscal decision but a sinister plot to promote the idea that a woman’s womb must, at the earliest opportunity, be yoked into generating fresh new American citizens.

In today’s essay, Kat Rosenfield cuts through the hysteria and argues that the new guidelines for sex ed are a course correction designed for the challenges actually facing teenagers right now, in a world where girls aren’t taught what the contraceptive pill actually does and boys aren’t taught how porn might affect their minds and bodies.

May the next generation of young women be saved from believing that a hot tub can ruin their lives.

—Freya Sanders

Reading and sharing The Free Press is the best way to show your support for our mission—but wearing FP swag might be a close second. Check out our three new merchandise items, which are available for a limited time and perfect for the summer, especially if you’re a TGIF or Tough Love with Abigail Shrier fan. And if you’re still feeling grateful for America’s 250th, grab some limited-edition A250 merch—there’s not much left!

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to make Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a criminal in the eyes of the city, and Douglas Murray argues that the mayor’s ire extends way beyond one man. In Mamdani’s latest speech, Murray says, the mayor rehearses a long list of lies about all of Israel: “genocide,” “maiming of children,” and more. His campaign against Netanyahu is only the latest step in the left’s recent hard turn against the Jewish state.

Abolishing prisons. Ending the Supreme Court. No more private rental market. We know the policies of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that will send several favored candidates into Congress next year. But what drives their radical vision? This week we got an answer from Jake Altman, a former member of the group. He says their goal is nothing less than the destruction of the American way of life.

#MeToo is back—and it has a new face. Olivia Reingold profiled Cheyenne Hunt, a 29-year-old lawyer-turned-progressive-influencer who helped bring down Senate candidate Graham Platner and forced Representative Eric Swalwell out of Congress and the California governor’s race after allegations of sexual misconduct. Now, with a new nonprofit targeting powerful men, Hunt says she’s “just getting started.”

Those who live by brutality deserve to meet a brutal end. The ancient Greeks believed this, and in a review of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey, Spencer Klavan praises the director for not shying away from that truth. Amid the sea of moral relativism that defines so many modern works, audiences can benefit from a film that confidently portrays the meting out of rough justice in the epic’s famous final act.

On Wednesday evening, the media erupted when the Trump administration announced that it would be signing a 30-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. would export nuclear materials to the Saudis and support the development of a civilian nuclear power program, prompting alarming headlines about how this might pave the way for Saudi Arabia to pursue uranium enrichment—and potentially develop a nuclear weapon.

Then, on Thursday morning, President Donald Trump revealed that the deal was contingent on Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords. In other words, Saudi Arabia would have to establish diplomatic ties with the state of Israel—an objective long desired by the Trump administration—if it wanted access to U.S. technology and expanded security and economic cooperation.

The possible deal would accelerate the profound reorientation of the Middle East that is already underway. Since the war with Iran began on February 28, Arab countries have learned the hard way where they stand within the U.S.-led security order. As Iranian missiles rained down on their capitals, governments that had invested in military cooperation with Washington and Jerusalem benefited from years of integrated intelligence, early warning, and missile defense. Those that preferred strategic ambiguity discovered the limits of that approach.

The lesson was not lost on Washington. President Trump’s negotiating position over the past few days reflects a broader strategic objective: to build a regional order in which U.S. allies reinforce one another through intelligence sharing, integrated air defense, advanced technology, and energy cooperation such that the system functions even when American attention turns elsewhere. Saudi-Israeli normalization is the missing keystone to that goal.

“Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die” is an iconic line from Mean Girls. It is also a devastatingly accurate portrayal of American high school sex education in the decade or so leading up to its 2004 release—a moment when society was still reeling from the twin epidemics of AIDS and teen pregnancy, and a plurality of people still held to the now-quaint opinion that sex outside of marriage was the purview of sinners and sluts.

As an elder millennial who attended high school in the 1990s, I remember these classes well. There was one of those infamous demonstrations in which people who had sex were equated to lint-covered pieces of Scotch tape, and another in which we all spent an afternoon “exchanging fluids”—in the form of cups containing a sodium hydroxide solution—at the end of which everyone, save the “abstinent” kids who had kept their cups unadulterated, was revealed to have metaphorical chlamydia. There was the pervasive sense, reinforced by every adult authority figure, that just looking at a penis without protection—for the penis, for your eyeballs, or both—would be enough to get you pregnant and give you AIDS. And the sexism! Oh, the sexism: Boys, we were told, wanted to have sex because they enjoyed it; for girls, on the other hand, sex was something they did because they didn’t respect themselves and just wanted guys to like them.

Clearly, things have changed. This week, I found myself perusing the YouTube offerings of a nonprofit called Fact Forward, a youth health organization in South Carolina which partners with school districts, healthcare providers, and the juvenile justice system to offer sex education classes for young people. The video that caught my eye is called Burn, which tells the story of two teenagers, James and Melissa, who meet at a movie night hosted by a mutual friend. Both have been thoroughly evangelized-to about the importance of using protection (“You last so much longer!” says one of James’s friends), and there are condoms literally everywhere; Melissa, apparently a notorious slut, has been warned by her friends that James is a jerk and a cad, and gifted a box of Trojans specifically for this occasion. But nevertheless, and despite having met five minutes ago, the pair have unprotected sex on their friend’s kitchen counter (rude!), after which James flees into the night, leaving Melissa devastated, even though she was explicitly warned of this exact outcome less than 24 hours ago.

Hello, and welcome back! We have new TGIF T-shirts in the shop.

Classic, soft, screen-printed. I sleep in mine. In my community, we consider this lingerie. But enough about me and what’s being called “the T-shirt of the summer.” Let’s talk about the news.

→ Andrew Tate finally arrested: The war in Iran is back on. Plus, we’re helping Saudi Arabia develop nuclear power now, I guess. Don’t think too hard about it. But for our purposes, the top news in the world is that the wildly popular influencer Andrew Tate has finally been arrested in the U.S., with plans to extradite him to his former home, the United Kingdom. Tate, the man your sons and grandsons are probably obsessed with, is charged with rape, sex trafficking, it goes on for a total of 42 counts of that kind of unpleasant stuff. In bonny England he will, I assume, face a tribunal run by bitter, exhausted professional women (my girls!). This is only so interesting because Andrew Tate had been investigated before, suspected of trafficking and rape in Romania, and was barred from leaving that country. But then, in February of last year, seemingly after pressure from someone in the Trump administration, Tate was allowed to leave and took a private jet from Romania to, where else? Florida. (It seems as though Barron Trump was a fan.) When asked if Trump would intervene this time, Karoline Leavitt gave an emphatic “No.” Anyway, it’s also interesting because it gave us a photo of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan being arrested. And I don’t know how to explain to you that these men are considered to be the pinnacle of masculinity by right-wing American Zoomers. This is the hardened male that they aspire to become. He has over 10 million followers on X alone.

The purple silk “shirt”—legally, I feel a shirt must cover the nipples—matches the purple transition lenses. There are the capris, the slip-on shoes. It looks like they’re dragging him out of Fire Island. Put a wig on this person and she’s late for her mimosas at Club Med. Put a wig on and it’s my quirky drunk aunt Annie Tate whose bra is always showing. His brother Tristan, in a three-piece suit and a hat that is both too big and too small, is almost as bad. Andrew Tate and his brother are actually a return to the male animal as a flamboyant, colorful thing, the brilliant male mallard next to the dull brown female. In that way we’re actually made for each other, as I, in Tevas and with limp hair, am a return to the female duck. Andrew, call me.

→ Wow, we eventually won Iraq, didn’t we: U.S. companies signed roughly $60 billion in agreements and partnerships with Iraq late last week, including deals to build alternative oil shipping routes bypassing the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing U.S.-Iran war. Goddammit, Dick Cheney, you lunatic, you did it. Credit where it’s due. Mission accomplished.

→ Just a strange, random clerical error: A totally silly little software glitch happened at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission over the course of a year. There, when folks explicitly marked a box saying they were not U.S. citizens, it registered them to vote anyway. We’re told it’s only about 6,600 individuals, and only 400 of them actually voted after that. Here’s New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill announcing the simple “software error”:

Last week I learned that a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024, almost three years prior to my taking office. These individuals answered “no” when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway.

It’s just like a computer to do that, right? When you click no on a form, beep boop mistake, it registers you to vote. It also accidentally votes up and down the ballot for Dems. Beep beep error alert, sorry, I don’t know why it keeps doing that. Ah, it withdrew $93 and donated it to the Democratic Socialists of America. Brrrk-k-k-k-k, this machine is always broken. Can someone turn it off and on again?

DMVs: Crank on.

→ Sounds fun!:

Wow, that sounds like some silly fun! Fireworks on the Plaza! America 250 ain’t over till it’s over! Thank you, NBC News! What really happened, since we seem to have clear video of it: Someone set off incendiary devices and poured a bucket of gasoline onto the stairs of a federal building and lit that puddle on fire. Apparently it was an anti-ICE thing. Like we said, just some kids doing fireworks! I remember those days. . . 

The history of the Navy SEALs reveals not only how they were built but also how they must continue to evolve.

Ben Milligan, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, Bronze Star recipient, and author of By Water Beneath the Walls: The Rise of the Navy SEALs, joins School of War to discuss the origins and evolution of one of America’s most storied special operations forces. How did the Navy SEALs grow out of the Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II? What does it take to become a SEAL? How did the Vietnam War shape the institution into the force we know today? And what role should the SEALs play as the U.S. military shifts its focus from the War on Terror to great power competition?

In this episode, Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot unpack this week’s very important culture news and spotlight the bizarre stories you probably missed.

They examine Tom Brady’s increasingly strange post-divorce reinvention and his latest publicity stunt with Logan Paul, asking whether the GOAT is in the throes of a midlife crisis. They dig into the legal challe…

Last week in The Free Press, Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin argued that history is being defeated by algorithms and artificial intelligence—a framework that led Ferguson, a historian, to conclude, “I failed utterly.” Nine writers then answered him in these same pages, some sharing his despair, others disputing his diagnosis.

This debate speaks directly to my life’s work. As the director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, I document the point at which the normalization of antisemitism becomes operational—where the chant becomes a plot to action, and the plot becomes the basis for a federal complaint. I am also a historian from Mosul, in northern Iraq, who did not merely study the death of history but stood inside it, wrote about it under a death sentence, and spent the years after the war unearthing the deepest erasure my city ever suffered: the deletion of its Jews.

One of my credentials belongs to the world Ferguson is warning about. The other belongs to the world he believes is already lost. From where both meet, I can report that his alarm is justified, and his conclusion is wrong.

In a recent New York Times interview, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s socialist mayor, struggled to define “working class.”

He was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”

Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.”

After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year.” I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women, yet—and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line—can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.

This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.

Thousands of parents across the nation have put their children on buses and planes in recent weeks, sending them far from home for the first time ever for that most American coming-of-age experience: camp.

One of those parents is our very own Peter Savodnik, who writes today about getting the “I don’t know anyone” text from the wilderness—how it reminded him of what it felt like to be 10 years old, tucked in the top bunk surrounded by kids he’d never met.

A version of that now-familiar feeling has returned throughout his career, his travels, his life—and, he writes, though it’s always uncomfortable, camp prepared him for it. —The Editors

Last week I deposited my 11-year-old daughter, Josephine, at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and she flew to Minneapolis alone, then boarded a bus and was driven five hours north to the sleepaway camp where she will be for the next month.

Before she left, Josie was excited to go: Her oldest cousin is a counselor at the camp, and she had heard stories about canoe trips and polar-bear plunges and late-night campfires, and she was eager to get away from her little brother, always bouncing on her bed, and her parents, always telling her to clean up her room or clear the dinner table or practice her violin.

After I watched Josie board her plane I shuffled off, feeling empty and kind of rudderless. Then I grabbed a coffee, picked up a rental car, and drove up to Portland, Maine, to report on the Senate race there. I reassured myself that, however much I missed her, she wouldn’t miss us. She would be distracted, having fun.

That evening, after having spent the better part of the day interviewing people demonstrating against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who had fatally shot a Colombian man in Biddeford, I was about to grab a pizza and a beer when I felt my phone buzz. It was Josie calling on the flip phone we had given her for her birthday. By this point, I figured, she should be nearing camp after a long day.

Hi! I’m Freya, the editor of Tough Love, and today I have not one but two exciting announcements.

First: We have merch! A limited number of Tough Love tees have landed in the Free Press store. Click here to order yours today—and if they sell out fast enough, I promise I’ll campaign to add Tough Love caps (and totes and journals??) to the mix.

Second: Do you really want to get your letter in front of Abigail? Well, next week—for one hour only—I’ll be giving advice on how to do just that.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Abigail gets way too much mail to be able to read it all herself (you know she’s writing another book, right?) So it’s my job—and my privilege—to go through the Tough Love inbox every week, and pick a handful of letters to send her way. Abigail then chooses who she’ll reply to. I can’t always predict her decision, but if you have questions about getting your letter to her, post them on this thread, in The Free Press Forum. I’ll be answering as many as I can—live!—at noon ET on July 30.

The Forum, like Tough Love, is just for paying subscribers. If that’s not you yet, click here! And if you’re planning to write in, thank you. As I often say to the readers whose letters we publish, the column couldn’t happen without the Free Pressers who are willing to share their deepest worries—and hear some hard truths.

But now, without further ado, it’s time for this week’s installment, in which Abigail politely asks an uncertain man: “Is it possible that you’re just a tad self-involved?” Onward! —Freya Sanders

Abigail,

I have been dating a lovely, nontoxic, 34-year-old woman for six months. Unlike other women I’ve dated in the past, she doesn’t have any apparent red flags. She is an overall wonderful partner. She gave me a mind-blowingly amazing gift for my 40th birthday, the type of gift I’ve always dreamed of: She had contacted all my friends and family (some of whom she didn’t know) and put together a beautiful book with all their nice words about me. She is there for me when I need her. She legitimately wants to hear about my life. She is, objectively, the best partner I’ve ever had. She is also family-oriented, wants children, and shares many of the same values that I do.

So why do I always feel so exhausted and depressed after we hang out?

I sometimes feel like our conversation doesn’t flow as easily as I want it to. I am easily triggered when I say something—anything—that doesn’t get an immediate response, or when we are cooking dinner together and I try to banter but am met with mostly silence. She tells me she needs to focus, that she wants the output of anything she does to be top-notch (and that if we talk too much, it won’t be). But I feel unseen and unheard when my words aren’t being met with more words. I feel the energy spiraling out of me, and I leave our interactions often more depressed than I was before they started.

I want to get married. I want to have a family. I’m nearly 40. But I’m afraid of being trapped in a marriage where I feel like I can’t express myself in the way I typically like to—with consistent conversation. I wonder if I could find someone who would make me happier, who I’d feel more comfortable with. I’ve had that in the past, but other, worse red flags doomed those relationships.

I know I might be the problem here, but I also wonder if getting out is the better strategy. And yet I also worry I will just find a woman who gives me the type of communication I’m looking for but has other challenges—and then I’ll go through the same cycle, all over again.

What should I do?

—Daniel, 39

Daniel,

Allow me to admit: We’ve all been there. We have all said good night to a perfectly good person at the end of a perfectly fine date, wondering why the thought of him elicits less excitement than the prospect of a fresh manicure or the vision, through a store window, of a brightly colored purse. The heart wants what it wants—or else it does not care, as Emily Dickinson once wrote to a friend.

So much voguish relationship lingo swirls inside your head, Daniel. The “nontoxic” girlfriend who presents with no “red flags,” a “wonderful partner,” who also makes you feel “triggered” and “unseen and unheard.” None of it clarifies anything important about your need for love. All of it adds to your confusion.

It brings to mind Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” in which the speaker describes proofs and figures “ranged in columns” before him, all “charts and diagrams,” overexplaining everything but illuminating nothing. The solution? Leaving the lecture and staring up in silence at the stars.