The Free Press

It’s Thursday, July 23. 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 the Trump administration’s latest First Amendment faux pas. Matt Taibbi on how the government controls your feed. Alex Berenson on why the cyclospora panic is more media fever than public-health crisis. And much more.

But first: Is #MeToo back?

In a matter of months, Cheyenne Hunt, a lawyer, influencer, and progressive activist, has become the face of a new #MeToo movement. The 29-year-old Democratic activist—who uses her online platform to find and help victims of sexual misconduct—was involved in two of the biggest political takedowns this year, claiming both Graham Platner’s and Eric Swalwell’s scalps.

Now Hunt plans to build on that success with a new nonprofit, Reckoning Action, and has named new targets: three Republican lawmakers. Many have called Hunt’s work “revolutionary.” But not everyone’s on board. Some, like Democratic heavyweight James Carville, worry that the same miscarriages of justice that happened with 2017’s first #MeToo will appear again. And Gloria Allred, the famed attorney who’s represented multiple Harvey Weinstein victims, warns that this brave new world, where people can fire off accusations with a simple social media post, may come back to bite some women. Can Hunt deliver the reckoning she promises while avoiding the excesses of the first wave of #MeToo? That’s the question at the heart of Olivia Reingold’s profile of Hunt. Don’t miss it.

—The Editors

• President Donald Trump threatened Wednesday to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant for each ship Iranian shoots at in the Strait of Hormuz. The threat comes at an especially tense moment in the conflict, as the U.S. prepares to bury four service members who were killed by Iranian strikes this month.

• The White House announced Wednesday that President Trump has signed a 30-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that will create a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom. The deal opens the door for uranium enrichment, which is a key step in developing a nuclear weapon.

• The House passed a bill limiting Congressional stock trading by a 232–198 margin. Most Democrats opposed the legislation, citing its light restrictions and the inclusion of a voter ID provision.

• President Trump reportedly wants FIFA president Gianni Infantino to serve as the United Nations’ secretary-general. The suggestion, coming just weeks after Infantino granted Trump’s request to reverse Folarin Balogun’s red card during a World Cup match, will likely raise questions about corruption among his critics.

• New York City landlords sued the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, seeking to overturn a rent-freeze policy that affects one million apartments. The complaint accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of pressuring the panel, despite its status as an independent governing body. (For more on the rent-freeze battle, read landlord Matt Miller’s excellent piece.)

• An independent autopsy found an undetermined cause and manner of death for Mississippi teen Nolan Wells. Wells was found dead two days after a July 4 outing to an island with friends, who returned without him. His case remains a mystery.

• The Louvre reopened the Apollo Gallery to the public for the first time since thieves stole $102 million worth of crown jewels last October. While visitors will be able to walk through the room again, it will not display any exhibitions; instead it will serve as a ceremonial space, as it did in the 17th century.

When Alex Jones was removed from every major platform in a single coordinated sweep in 2018, most of the press cheered and moved on. Matt Taibbi didn’t. He wanted to know who made the call, how it was coordinated, and what it meant for everyone who wasn’t Alex Jones. That curiosity eventually led him to the Twitter Files and a yearslong investigation in…

On July 8, within minutes of Graham Platner abandoning his campaign for U.S. Senate, a 29-year-old Democratic activist named Cheyenne Hunt took to X to declare that his downfall would not be the last.

“What happened in Maine should serve as a clear message: The days of women being sacrificed at the altar of our elections are over,” she wrote of Platner, who was accused of sexual assault.

You may not have heard of Hunt, but you are almost certainly familiar with her work. A lawyer and progressive content creator, Hunt worked with Platner’s accusers to help orchestrate the media rollout that ultimately drove him to call off his campaign.

And he wasn’t Hunt’s first political knockout. In April, the lawyer-turned-influencer played an instrumental role in surfacing sexual misconduct allegations against Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman and leading candidate for California governor. The resulting backlash drove Swalwell, a seven-term lawmaker who has denied all wrongdoing, to step down from Congress and suspend his gubernatorial campaign.

Remember when the Trump administration pretended to care about free speech?

Cast your mind back to January 20, 2025, when, on his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Or recall how Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration for its collusion with social media companies to shadowban and deplatform so-called purveyors of misinformation.

Well, all of that stirring rhetoric looks hollow a year and a half into Trump’s second term. The latest outrage is a subpoena issued in the investigation of an alleged national security leak this month that landed on the front page of The New York Times. The story disclosed that the last-minute decision to fly the president and his entourage on the old Air Force One from the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, two weeks ago was in part because the new plane, a gift from the Qatari government, lacked the security features to defend against an attack.

It was no bombshell. The Times had already reported concerns that the new Qatari-gifted jet would not be properly retrofitted with the security gear necessary in the timeline the president had demanded to start using it. Nevertheless, the latest piece prompted the Justice Department to pull out all the stops. Not only did the DOJ subpoena the phone records of the Times reporters themselves, it also subpoenaed the phone records of two spouses of the reporters and one of the journalist’s mothers. The mother is a mental-health professional who has a right to keep her clients private. One of the spouses is a general counsel for a major law firm.

As you’ve heard by now, cyclosporiasis is a nasty bug.

A parasite called cyclospora that spreads in fecal-contaminated water and food causes—in the words of the Cleveland Clinic—“watery, and sometimes explosive, diarrhea and other stomach problems.”

As you’ve also heard, the United States is having a major cyclosporiasis outbreak, with over 10,000 confirmed and probable cases, centered largely in Michigan and Ohio. (Go Big Ten!) A privately held, California-based produce company called Taylor Farms, which has over $7 billion in annual sales and 25,000 workers, appears to be the center of the outbreak, which is suspected to have started with lettuce imported from Mexico.

Now, naturally, legacy reporters are doing everything they can to connect this outbreak to their favorite colostomy bags: President Trump and his secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Trump’s CDC cuts fueled a cyclospora perfect storm,” CNN reported on Monday, joining a slew of similar headlines.

But, as is so often the case, the legacy media narrative turns out to be full of watery (and sometimes explosive) reporting. Problems with American food safety, including outbreaks from contaminated meat and produce, long predate the current administration.

Sometimes you wonder why a person went into politics. Other times, you know exactly why they did. For Zohran Mamdani, yesterday was a case of the latter.

On Tuesday evening he released a two-minute video of himself, seated behind a desk, flanked by the flags of the United States and New York. He had arranged this posture—for posture it was—to announce a development in the case of Zohran Mamdani vs. Benjamin Netanyahu, otherwise known as Mamdani vs. the State of Israel. Attacks on Israel have been central to Mamdani’s political rise. He has spent his life marinating in postcolonial politics, Third Worldism, and anti-Zionism, and brings agitation, certainty, and ignorance to debates about the Middle East.

On the campaign trail, Mamdani repeatedly promised that if he were elected mayor, he would have Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he ever set foot in the city.

Several things were obvious to any casual observer. The first is that the United Nations General Assembly occurs each September in New York. Therefore, there was always going to be an opportunity for a showdown. The second is that the mayor of New York does not have any right to run U.S. foreign policy out of Gracie Mansion.

Reed College agreed to require antisemitism training, ban faculty from canceling classes or offering incentives for students to attend protests, and make other changes to settle accusations that it failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. The harassment included, in May 2024, the destruction of a mezuzah belonging to a female student, who also was struck in the head by a rock thrown through her dorm-room window while she was sleeping.

The settlement by the prestigious liberal-arts college in Portland, Oregon, was announced Wednesday and resolved two federal Title VI complaints filed against Reed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Title VI, part of the Civil Rights Act, prohibits discrimination by recipients of federal financial aid. The Brandeis Center and ADL said that the comprehensive reforms promised by Reed amount to a national model for responding to antisemitism on college campuses, which surged after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.

On November 9, 2023, protesters on the Reed campus marched behind a banner that said “INTIFADA EVERYWHERE” and chanted an anti-Israel slogan. The protest was led by Reed’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and occurred on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews by the Nazi regime. The SJP chapter claimed that it did not schedule the protest to coincide with the anniversary, according to The Reed College Quest, Reed’s student newspaper. Four students were arrested after the protest spread to downtown Portland.

It’s Wednesday, July 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why Bernard-Henri Lévy won’t surrender history. Debating the DSA’s insurgency. A letter to the former head of PEN America. And much more.

But first: How Fergie Chambers landed in a Spanish jail.

Back in August 2023, I traveled up to the Berkshires to meet Jim Chambers, known as Fergie, an avowed communist and an heir to the Cox family fortune. Fergie had just taken a massive advance on his inheritance, to the tune of a quarter-billion dollars, and he was gaming out how to distribute it: to the fight against a police training campus in Atlanta, to set up a dojo of sorts for young Marxist-Leninists, and generally to undo the empire that had brought his family such stupefying fortune.

Since I spent a day and a half with Chambers—driving around his gorgeous properties in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, picking up weed, listening while he lectured his daughter about the importance of class struggle, that sort of thing—a couple of things have changed.

First, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and with it, Fergie found his ultimate cause. After a year or so of anti-Zionist campaigning stateside, which included getting arrested at a protest and footing the bail for his acolytes, like the radical activist Calla Walsh, Fergie became a Muslim and moved to Tunisia.

Then, this week, he was arrested in Ibiza at the request of the U.S. government, which has allegedly charged Chambers with funding terror groups. He is awaiting extradition in a Spanish jail. I’ve been keeping tabs on Chambers via Instagram. He seemed to be settling into his new life in Tunisia—funding a local soccer team, going to pray, and posting on his Instagram about how eager he is to see the imperial core fall.

His arrest—Spain has 40 days to decide whether to honor America’s extradition request—may be the only thing that could have stopped Chambers’ endless, wild campaign both to reinvent himself and bring everyone else along for the ride. Read Jay Solomon’s deep dive into Fergie Chambers’ strange journey in the months after I profiled him, and what might happen next.

—Suzy Weiss

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine asked Congress for approximately $70 billion in additional Iran war funding, as Hegseth revealed the conflict has now cost an estimated $37.5 billion, up from $29 billion in mid-May. Senate Democrats made clear they have no intention of supporting the request.

• President Donald Trump met Lebanese president Joseph Aoun at the White House on Tuesday as his country and Israel held rare direct talks in Washington over the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. Trump also announced the U.S. will resume direct flights to Lebanon for the first time since 1985.

• New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill said Tuesday that 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state by a malfunctioning DMV software system, and that 400 of them cast ballots in recent elections. Sherrill said the problem had been identified under her predecessor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, but never publicly disclosed.

• The Trump administration is withholding more than a billion dollars in Medicare funding from California and Minnesota—$867 million from California and about $200 million from Minnesota—citing suspected fraud in both states’ public health programs. The Democratic governors of both states called the move politically motivated, while the administration said it would release the funds once the states proved the funds were legitimate.

• Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk filed a suit against Eli Lilly in federal court, accusing its rival of running misleading ads claiming its weight-loss drugs outperform Novo’s treatments for obesity and diabetes. Lilly said it would fight the lawsuit.

• A federal appeals court rejected Joe Biden’s attempt to block the publication of interviews he gave his biographer in 2016 and 2017, finding disclosure “is likely to advance the public interest.” A final decision has been pushed to August 3 while Biden’s attorneys weigh further appeals.

• An independent review commissioned by the Gates Foundation found that Bill Gates and foundation staff held roughly 30 meetings with Jeffrey Epstein between 2011 and 2014, including visits to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, despite internal concerns about the reputational risk. The review found no evidence of illegal activity or payments to Epstein.

• France’s parliament passed legislation that would ban social media access for users under 15 and prohibit cellphones in the nation’s high schools. President Emmanuel Macron has backed the measures.

• Tropical Storm Bertha is bearing down on the Gulf Coast, threatening heavy rain and coastal flooding from the Florida Panhandle through Louisiana into Thursday. The storm is expected to lose strength throughout the week.

• New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who said repeatedly on the campaign trail last year that he would order the NYPD to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, admitted Tuesday that he did not have the power to do so. The admission came at the end of a two-minute video in which Mamdani repeatedly denounced Netanyahu as a “war criminal.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story referred to a property owned by Fergie Chambers as being in upstate New York. It is in Massachusetts. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.

In November 2023, Fergie Chambers, the self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist and anti-imperialist crusader, convened a meeting of his closest advisers at his New England commune. Their mission was to map out how to spend the roughly $250 million he’d inherited as an heir to the Cox Enterprises business empire.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas’s terrorist attack on southern Israel a month earlier was breathing frenetic new life into the anti-Israel movement globally. And Chambers, now 41, wanted it known that he had established a financial vehicle through which to spend his millions on Palestine and other far-left causes.

“We are the Babochki Collective,” Chambers proclaimed on his Facebook page on November 9, 2023, giving a name to his investment fund. Babochki means butterflies in Russian, and he said it was “a cadre collective focused on revolutionary funding, propaganda and political education, direct action/legal support, and the open proliferation of a steadily stronger anti-imperialist united front.”

Joining Chambers that day was a coterie of young comrades, a number of whom would go on to make names for themselves by launching protests and sabotage operations against companies and institutions seen as aiding Israel. These associates included teenage activist Calla Walsh and Paige Belanger of Palestine Action U.S., a sister organization to the British group that the UK government designated as a terrorist entity last year. Also present were Mirah Wood and Jorge Rocha of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) International Committee.

In the span of just a couple of weeks, Democratic voters across the country did something that establishment strategists claim voters never do: They threw out safe, entrenched incumbents for candidates far to their left. Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier swept New York’s House primaries after New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned hard on their behalf. A week later in Colorado, Melat Kiros ousted a 15-term congresswoman.

More races like these are coming. In Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed is ahead in the polls heading into the state’s Senate primary in two weeks. If he wins the nomination in a swing state carried twice by Donald Trump, it will be the clearest signal yet that this movement can succeed beyond deep-blue districts.

On the Fourth of July, President Trump warned of a “resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” calling it “a mortal threat to American liberty.” Democrats, meanwhile, are divided over what to call it. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York has unveiled a pledge opposing the party’s leftward drift, while others are wearing the socialist label proudly.

We have covered this story closely because the ground is shifting beneath American politics. Is this communism, as the president says? Or democratic socialism, as the rising candidates say? Or something else entirely—Third Worldism, generational economic grievance, an identity crisis?

We asked some important contributors to make sense of what we are seeing. Though they might not agree on a name for it, all of them agree that what’s happening now will define the Democratic Party’s future. Read on to see where they land. —The Editors

In his speech marking America’s 250th anniversary, Trump warned of the return of communism, pointing to the results of the Democratic primaries. At first glance, this may seem like nothing more than a cheap scare tactic. Yet, as Soviet dissidents used to joke: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that no one is following you.