The Free Press

I first read Catcher in the Rye a mere 71 years ago, or four years after its initial publication in 1951. I was blown away by it. I was an uninterested student, like J.D. Salinger’s hero, Holden Caulfield, who, as the novel begins, has just flunked out of his fourth prep school. Like Holden, I prided myself on my street smarts. With him, you might say, I could identify.

At 17, Holden’s age as the novel begins, he was better read than I. He is already reading Isak Dinesen, enjoys Ring Lardner, and admires the novels of Thomas Hardy. My own chief reading during my teenage years was of novels about working-class young men attempting to get a hold on life: Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes; Harold Robbins’s A Stone for Danny Fisher; Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door. The motto of the hero of Knock on Any Door is “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” On page 129 of The Amboy Dukes (if, after all these years, I remember that page correctly), female breasts are described as “jugs,” a small porno touch for the day. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden calls them “knockers.”

Not that Catcher in the Rye is in any way pornographic, though its language is risqué; lots of “pain in the ass,” “goddamn,” and the occasional “fuck you.” The word moron comes up a lot. Holden also uses the word flit—a new one for me—for homosexual. But the one word without which the novel would cease to exist is phony, which appears at least 300, perhaps 400, times throughout.

A coalition of Catholic healthcare providers filed suit in federal court in Albany on Friday, arguing that New York’s new assisted dying law would force them to choose between their faith and their ability to provide care for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of New York, names 13 plaintiffs, including multiple congregations of nuns such as the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Diocese of Rockville Centre and Catholic Health, a network of five Long Island hospitals, are also named.

New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act, signed into law in February and set to take effect August 5, allows terminally ill patients with a prognosis of six months or less to request drugs to end their lives. Governor Kathy Hochul called it a matter of bodily autonomy when she signed the bill. “New Yorkers deserve the choice to endure less suffering, not by shortening their lives, but by shortening their deaths,” she said.

The offices of Attorney General Letitia James, Health Commissioner James McDonald, and the State Board for Professional Medical Conduct did not respond to The Free Press’s requests for comment.

The law works in tandem with an existing New York statute, the Palliative Care Information Act, which requires doctors and nurse practitioners to inform terminally ill patients of all their end-of-life options. Now that assisted dying is one of them, medical professionals must proactively raise it with patients—whether or not the patient asks.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, the financial writer Peter Coy reflects on Douglas Hofstadter’s famous book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” He first read the 777-page masterpiece as a young journalist in 1983, when its mysteries seemed to reveal something profound about the human mind. Decades later, in the age of artificial intelligence, he returns to the book and finds both it and himself changed.

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In 1983, four years out of college, I was living in Rochester, New York, covering part of western New York for the Associated Press. I had a meager social life, which left time for serious reading. That year, I bought a book that challenged and thrilled me. It was Douglas Hofstadter’s 777-page Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

I read Gödel, Escher, Bach closely and patiently. When I got stuck on a complicated passage, I powered through it; there was no other option. I entered Hofstadter’s world and didn’t leave it until I got to the last page.

GEB, as its fans call it, is about the miracle of consciousness: how our sense of “I” can arise from the workings of neurons and axons that are individually unintelligent. Hofstadter said systems (including brains) gain awareness when they become self-referential in a certain way. According to him, the emergence of “I” comes from a “strange loop,” where you traverse levels of a hierarchy and wind up back where you started. To get the tricky idea across, he appealed to M.C. Escher’s hands, which draw each other into existence; Bach’s fugues, which loop back on themselves, as though the music were listening to itself; and the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who cleverly manipulated formulas into making statements about their own provability.

The sentence “I am a liar,” for example, is self-referential and paradoxical. If you really are a liar, then you must not be a liar, whereas if you’re really not a liar, then you must be a liar. GEB is filled with this kind of material.

One of the most infamous lines in Supreme Court history, “I know it when I see it,” was written in 1964, by Justice Potter Stewart. It was during the adjudication of a case, between the state of Ohio and a movie theater owner who had been arrested for showing a French movie with a sex scene, over what counts as obscene material, which isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Potter was describing, by not describing, hardcore pornography. Little did the justice know about the porn-soaked world that would come to be over the subsequent 60 years after he wrote his opinion; now, everyone knows it when they see it, because they’re bombarded with it all the time.

Pornography accounts for millions of online searches every day, and tens of millions of hours of it are watched worldwide every day. OnlyFans, a platform that allows adult creators to produce and distribute their own explicit material from their bedroom, has exploded; the British company made over $7.2 billion in 2024, and the highest earners on the site—including a former special education teacher—are raking in millions, an X-rated rendition of the American dream. A whole language—there are gooners and pay pigs, findom, and sugaring—has risen up to describe all the various features of this new culture and economy. In short, we’re in the pornverse.

And lately, some U.S. states have tried to put the genie back in the bottle by requiring mandatory verification that those who want to watch adult content are over 18. A proposed bill in Congress declares that “shielding minors from access to online pornographic content is a compelling government interest.” And earlier this month, the Supreme Court voted to uphold age-verification laws, which are on the books in 25 states. Laws like this are already a reality in the UK.

But even if we can all probably agree that it’s bad for kids to watch porn—does that mean it’s just fine for everyone else?

On one hand, it’s hard to argue adults shouldn’t be allowed to make it, or watch it. On the other hand, it objectifies and can exploit women, can show violence or degradation, and may leave viewers coarsened when it comes to the opposite sex, and with their pleasure centers shot. And that’s to say nothing of how exactly a woman comes to decide to have sex in front of a camera for money.

Lowbrow and hush-hush subjects, like porn, are the purview of Allie Rowbottom, an author and my guest on this week’s episode of Second Thought. Her first novel was about plastic surgery, and the fraught psychology of the women who avail themselves of it, and her new novel, Lovers XXX, is about the adult entertainment industry. Specifically: the so-called “golden age of porn,” in the 1980s, in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. “I just wanted to go back in time,” Rowbottom told me. Her book is high-’80s: There’s plenty of lamé, blue eye shadow, and cocaine. But she didn’t want to give the reader a rose-tinted view of the past, even though nostalgia is in vogue, and there is an argument that it was the internet that ruined porn, since before the world wide web, porn cost money, and as Rowbottom puts it: “The bodies were more natural; there were scripts; there was more of an artistic flair to the production.”

Still, “I wouldn’t want to say porn reached its apex of empowerment in the ’80s,” Rowbottom said. The book follows two friends, Jude and Winnie, who chase each other into the high-octane world of porn, power, fame, and drugs in LA as they compete for the trophy of being a Video Vixen: the girl on the cover of the hardcore VHS tapes. She wanted to get into the porn stars’ heads, she said, since “that’s what’s compelling now, especially when there’s so much artifice to everything.”

I love Rowbottom’s writing because she refuses to present neat answers to thorny questions. I asked her if porn is empowering, and she told me she couldn’t tell me, despite writing a whole book about it. “I’m going to look at it from a couple different perspectives,” she said. “But I think it’s ultimately unanswerable.”

You can watch my interview with Allie here, or listen here:

For a look into porn’s pre-digital golden age, check out the new documentary about Robin Byrd, who had a sex-themed variety show on New York’s public access television through 1998. It’s a love story disguised as one about sex, and it gives you a peek into a short-lived, liberated moment in time, before AIDS, and a subsequent moral panic made it all go away. “The human body is not indecent,” Byrd, now 71 but no less bubbly, says in one interview. “What is indecent?”

If Byrd represents the tail end of free love, Justin McLeod represents the dawn of the algorithmic era of romance. McLeod started the ubiquitous dating app Hinge about 15 years ago, and he announced this week that he’s working on a new AI-based matchmaking company, called Overtone, which he says will be “less like a social platform, more like the experience of working with an all-star personal matchmaker,” adding that “we’re at an inflection point where we can move beyond refining the existing model.” Refining existing models? Are we talking about the assembly line at a Ford plant or falling in love? Justin, please, spare us your gifts this time. No one wants to be assigned their soulmate by a large language model. For singles who aren’t convinced that AI should choose their mate, try Free Press Cupid.

I am not brave enough to see horror movies in theaters; there are too many dark corners. But since Obsession is available for streaming this week, and I could watch it at home with the lights on, I decided to give it a try. It was great, with only a few truly jarring moments—sort of like The Substance but for men. Instead of What if I could be young forever?, it’s What if the object of my affection loved me back? Go for the premise, stay for the dark drama between the sexes.

You may know Rahm Emanuel as the former mayor of Chicago and, more importantly, the former Honestly guest, who may or may not be eyeing a presidential bid. But does he have a chance? Read Andrew Zucker on the Emanuel brothers—one of them, Ari, is a Hollywood superagent who counts MAGA darlings like Joe Rogan, Dana White, and Elon Musk as associates—and how their worlds may converge for the 2028 race.

While looksmaxxers like Clavicular are concerned with looking chiseled, former tech bro Bryan Johnson has gone viral for committing his life to living forever by any means possible. Now, his girlfriend, Kate Tolo, is joining him in his quest. “I’m not a wellness person,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “I’m really doing it because I think that this is our path toward women being understood in the world and being seen.” Godspeed!

Every week I read a letter that a Free Presser writes to Abigail Shrier, and I think, Surely, this person has been wronged so fully, or is righteous enough, that Abigail will take their side in this. It never happens. This week, a scorned woman whose wife left her for a life of “self-indulgent therapeutic bullshit” gets leveled by the great Abigail, dispenser of the best advice, and definitive ender of pity parties. Long may she reign.

The best parts of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey are the parts in which he simply tells the story of Homer’s original poem. This may seem like a low bar. It’s not. Over the years, it has proven oddly difficult for contemporary filmmakers to adapt this thrilling epic without distorting it, emptying it of its charm, or offering a modern “take.” The legend of Odysseus’s 10-year journey home from the Trojan War is so well-beloved and oft-retold, so unabashedly heroic in its proportions, that modern directors have sometimes seemed embarrassed to give The Odyssey its full due without undercutting it or putting an ironic spin on it.

Nolan doesn’t do that. He takes plenty of departures from the source material, but he stays pretty true to its overarching structure and spirit. To his great credit, his blockbuster film adaptation—released in theaters worldwide on Friday—largely lets Homer be Homer.

What does it take to start a business? Most entrepreneurs usually accumulate some real-world experience—a consultant, maybe, or working in a big company—before daring to strike out on their own.

Ronnen Harary begs to differ. Harary co-founded Spin Master, the company behind blockbuster brands like PAW Patrol and Bakugan, less than a year after graduating from college while still living at home with his mother in Canada. And in his new book, No Experience Necessary, released last week, he argues that the absence of the very qualities we tend to see as prerequisites for success—experience, wisdom, credentials—may actually be a competitive advantage for young entrepreneurs. So why, he asks, in the following exclusive excerpt, do we encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to wait until those very advantages have disappeared? —The Editors

A few months ago, while on vacation in South Africa, I hired a 21-year-old tennis pro to give me some lessons. On one of our breaks, he asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was the CEO of Spin Master, the toy company that created PAW Patrol and Bakugan, he almost fell off his chair. “Bakugan?” he said. “I loved Bakugan. That was my favorite toy growing up.”

At our next lesson, he showed up with a box containing his whole collection of Bakugan. He had about 30 of them, and as he went through them, telling me stories about each one, he got emotional. It hit me that he knew Bakugan better than I did. He grew up playing with them for hours on end, fantasizing about how these characters grew to a hundred feet in size. My business partners and I had brought Bakugan into the world, but for this kid, for a few magical years, Bakugan had become his world.

Everyone who dreams up a bold new idea and goes into business hopes to have that kind of impact on the world. Yes, you want to achieve a measure of financial success, but more than that, you want your vision to be seized and embraced by the public. That’s why the journey from start-up to success is the main subject of half the how-to business books in your average bookstore.

It’s Friday, July 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Pete Hegseth’s plan for high-testosterone troops. Don’t believe what you read about Chinese electrical vehicles. Batya Ungar-Sargon on J.D. Vance’s strange tirade against Israel. The hunt for Odysseus’s hometown. And much more.

But first: Was President Donald Trump’s elections speech a “bombshell,” or bluster?

Before Trump’s prime-time speech Thursday night, the White House promised a bombshell revelation about election interference. Did the president deliver? Absolutely—if you take him at his word.

Trump described a vast, well-funded conspiracy by the Chinese government to sway the 2020 presidential election in the U.S., and he called the related data breach a “nightmare.” That includes theft of voter information, attempts to manipulate journalists, and even the manufacture of fake ballots.

And the president’s boldest claim is that Joe Biden’s administration saw some of the evidence for this, and chose to suppress it.

So should Americans be alarmed? Perhaps not just yet. As Eli Lake explains, the burden of proof lies with President Trump. And he’s made himself hard to trust on this particular issue.

Instead of brushing off Trump’s claims like much of the press did, Eli examines them in detail. Where exactly did the new revelations come from, and is there any reason to trust the intelligence behind them?

—Mene Ukueberuwa

Free Press historian Niall Ferguson has admitted defeat. In the not-so-distant past, the best response to antisemitism was the truth—but today, the weapon of truth has been dulled to the point of uselessness, thanks to a combination of social media algorithms, artificial intelligence-generated content, and irony-poisoned Generation Z humor. In an essay co-written with AI researcher John-Clark Levin, Niall traces how America’s technological and cultural revolutions built our post-truth era, and explores “a remedy, if there is one.”

As much as people of all political stripes claim to value the truth, sometimes it’s no match for a good story. In the latest example, California congressman Ro Khanna this week turned a brief confrontation in the West Bank into a national controversy. Khanna lied about being “detained” by “violent” Israelis, argues Haviv Rettig Gur. But the real story runs deeper than lies, or even exaggerations. Underneath Khanna’s theatrics lies a dark revelation about the place Israel occupies in the political imagination of the American left.

Last weekend, we lost South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who is remembered for his sense of humor, bipartisan friendships, and unwavering belief in American power as a force for good in the world. Catch up on our coverage of Graham’s life and legacy, as well as the rumors that dogged him throughout his life and after death.

In other news, a cruise ship called the Scarlet Lady carrying 2,000 homosexual passengers and Patti LuPone was barred from docking in two Islamic countries. Much of the press framed the refusal as part of a “broader global trend,” implying that President Trump’s right-wing populism has birthed widespread hostility toward gays all over the world.

But there’s something missing from the story—the obvious cause of the ship’s rejection. You can read more about the big gay scandal at sea in Douglas Murray’s latest column.

Each year, a growing number of intensive care unit patients receive at least part of their care via telehealth—from physicians who never set foot inside the hospital. That was the case for one 26-year-old Connecticut man, Conor Hylton, whose family is now suing the hospital that treated him, alleging that Hylton’s death resulted from negligent care.

As Tanya Lukyanova investigated Hylton’s tragic death, she wanted to know: Is telehealth offering a higher standard of care to more people, or is it just a cost-saving measure that, when implemented incorrectly, can actually increase risk to patients?

For a few minutes on Thursday evening Donald Trump sounded like a refreshingly generic American president in the run-up to a midterm election. The economy is humming. America is winning the war in Iran. “We have the strongest and most powerful military by far,” he said. Could our long national reality show be coming to a close?

Of course not. All of the boasting was just a prelude to the big announcement. The Trump administration will be releasing long-suppressed intelligence “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” Trump said. Our voting system is ripe for “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” he argued.

The details, as he presented them, were alarming. The Chinese government, starting in 2020, illicitly acquired election data on 220 million Americans. “This data loss presents an unprecedented election [data] security nightmare,” Trump said. It gets worse. The American deep state conspired to keep the Chinese meddling from the American public and the president himself, Trump claimed. China sought to influence prominent American journalists and business leaders to turn against Trump in 2020, Trump said the declassified documents showed. Raw intelligence collected by the FBI, Trump claimed, showed that China even tried to manufacture illegal ballots in 2020 for Trump’s general election opponent, Joe Biden.

Is this a real scandal? In 2021, Biden’s National Intelligence Council released an assessment that explicitly stated: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”

With the speedometer reading just over 152 mph, the 1,150-horsepower, $130,000, ultra-luxury electric vehicle known as the Denza Z9 GT decided to turn the steering wheel directly toward the steel barrier next to us.

The Denza Z9 is a Chinese electric vehicle (EV), manufactured by the country’s biggest EV maker, BYD, and I was taking it for a test spin on the autobahn in Alsfeld, Germany. There was no obvious reason for the car’s sudden suicidal ideation; I hadn’t moved the steering wheel a millimeter, there wasn’t any crosswind to speak of, and I knew the road well from driving other test cars that same day. Thankfully, however, I was prepared, having been warned by a German auto writer that the expensive Chinese car “had some crazy steering ideas.” I also have a couple decades’ worth of experience as a racing driver, so I was able to get the Denza under control and down to a sedate 120 mph in the space of a few reasonably exciting seconds.

I am used to strange high-speed behavior when testing prototypes and other experimental vehicles. But it has probably been a solid 45 years since any mainline European, Japanese, or American car was an active hazard at autobahn speeds. Stability in these conditions is as well solved a problem as the power tailgate. The Denza’s inability to handle safely a speed its prodigious power can reach in a matter of seconds was my first indication, in a week of testing cars in Europe, that Chinese EVs aren’t yet ready for prime time. But it was hardly the last.

Chances are you’ve read and heard quite a bit about the inevitable triumph of Chinese EVs. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern “fell in love” with a Xiaomi after driving it for a few weeks. Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said that China’s top EV brands are “the best in the business.” “Americans Crave Low-Cost Chinese EVs,” Bloomberg authoritatively intoned. USA Today not only agreed but said that the U.S. needed to bow to the wishes of the public and allow China to begin selling its cars in America.

Hello, and welcome back! This is TGIF, where we insert bias into news stories. This is also where I do my editorial meddling. As the onetime co-owner of The Free Press, this is my corporate interference mission-control station. It’s great to have you here in the nerve center of the media cabal. Let’s get to it.

→ Trump election integrity speech: I think he’s losing his showman touch because, for me at least, the president’s big election integrity address Thursday night was a little boring. He said that China obtained 220 million voter files with personal information, which I’m sure did happen, but they probably just googled it (or whatever CCP-friendly search engine they have over there). Like, I bet I could obtain 220 million voter files tonight pretty easily. Then he went after the noncitizen voter situation. The White House take: “According to a DHS review of state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” I always assumed it was more than that, so this is only good news to me. And Trump went back to Michigan 2020, like I go back to Burning Man 2010—formative times for each of us. From the clean transcript they posted: “The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registrations for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to the number of applications they produced.” At this point I was assuming a big speech would have some new plans. Are we going to war with China? What about war with Georgia? If not, why are we staying up so late, honey? Even Trump knew it wasn’t his most exciting spin at the podium. His usual four-hour speech format was a brisk and crisp hour.

→ Anyone know how this new Trump scam works?: I’m curious about a new scheme from our White House. I’m not mad; I’m just legitimately curious (this is usually my opening line in a fight, but this time I really mean it). It’s called Freedom Fuel. It’s a new network of gas stations that sells gas below market rate. It came out of nowhere and was registered as an LLC in Delaware on June 23, and you just know whoever buys gas there is getting extorted in some way. It’s being promoted by Trump, who wrote on July 1:

As we approach America’s 250th Birthday, I am pleased to announce that a VERY smart Retailer, located throughout the Northeast, is stepping up, and wishing the People of Philadelphia a “Happy Birthday!” On July 3rd, the Freedom Fuel Network will be lowering gas prices at 25 “FREEDOM FUEL” Stations across the Greater Philadelphia Area. This Retailer is taking the lead, and others should follow. They are doing this because they love the U.S.A.

Hmm. Readers, my question: What’s the scam here? How does it work? Literally no one knows. If you get gas from a Freedom Fuel station, does it steal your routing number? Is the station a money-laundering front to help wash the $MELANIA coins?

Every explanation brings only more questions:

Just tell me—I promise no one’s going to jail (clearly).

In mini-scam news, a White House teleprompter operator made $100,000 betting on the contents of Trump’s speeches because well, he had those speeches early. So he’d go onto Kalshi with it. You know what I say: Good for him! These aren’t public stock markets. Why not let people barter their information tidbits (I’m sure there are a million reasons, like pilots betting on plane crashes or something, but my heart says let freedom ring). A little subtle inside info is what bigwigs move on all the time. Leave the teleprompter guy alone.

→ Joe Biden’s memoir: Joe Biden this week announced his new memoir coming out in November, called Promise Me, America. I keep repeating the title out loud to sort of understand the tone. I guess it’s supposed to be like, promise me you’ll do good. Like a “keep your head up, kid, I’ll be watching from the sky.” But it reads more like, “America was promised to me on my Christmas list.” Anyway, he released a video announcing the book, and it’s very sad to watch. Biden has declined further, as happens in life. The camera cuts every two seconds. His voice is slurred and hushed. Some of his longer words are barely intelligible. After 80, why even be on camera? Who is the one saying “we need him to be doing more on-camera stuff”? And why do I feel like Dr. Jill is gearing up to get him onto Dancing with the Stars?

I don’t say this to be mean. The brutal hands of time come for all of us, if we’re lucky. I say this because the mainstream American media tried to convince us that Biden was completely capable of serving a second term, and that it was conspiratorial and ageist to question it. Does anyone else remember Robert Hur’s report and how brutally he was dragged for it?

Please, Bidens, let this man retire from public life. He’s earned his cantaloupe, and to eat it in peace.

→ J.D. Vance and Joe Rogan, just two guys guessing: Vice President J.D. Vance went on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week to bat around ideas. Just two bros, hanging out, theorizing, gaming out which governments are controlling ours, maybe sharing a bison steak afterward.

Here’s our vice president on Jeffrey Epstein: “He clearly had connections to the upper—the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence. . . . I’ve asked, ‘Were there documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein directly to our intelligence agencies or anybody else’s?’ And the answer is no. But if that shit existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.” Okay, so the implication is that Epstein was an Israeli-American spy and we destroyed the evidence. Next up!

On the war with Iran, here’s the maybe future president, the guy who would replace the current, 80-year-old one: “There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely. Again, not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.” And there is a “very discreet, extremely well-funded. . . literal foreign-influence campaign being funded to tank” a deal with Iran. Right. I get the gist.

I don’t think J.D.’s all bad—I loved his memoir, and I love Usha, and I love chickens. Sorry! But I have no doubt that he knows what he’s doing here. As president, J.D. would be our Conspiracist in Chief. It would be bad for the Jews, probably, and bad for liberals and cat ladies certainly, but it would also be bad for things like Wi-Fi. It would be bad for moon landing museums and for planes that leave water vapor behind in the sky. Every day under Trumpo brings a new scamo. Every day with J.D. would bring an interesting new conspiracy. There’s a chance that once he was elected we would lose him in various secret presidential archives, never to be seen again in public, driven mad over JFK photo analytics. I’m very susceptible to conspiracies once I hear about them, so I’d be there, probably boiling my toothpaste by the end of his presidency. Speaking of guys who like vibing about stuff. . .

→ Nick Fuentes and Hunter Biden collab: Hunter Biden, son of Joe, sat in a motel room for a high-level policy discussion with far-right commentator Nick Fuentes and moderated by journalist Andrew Callaghan, TMZ reports. Here they are, two antiheroes of the realm:

This is Hunter Biden, who until very recently was sitting in on White House meetings with his father. And he’s in a motel room with Nick Fuentes, an open white supremacist, a tiny elf in stature, a figure previously considered wildly radical and out of bounds. But it’s all quiet on the New York Times and BBC front. Nothing to see here. Crickets. All of their rage is saved for slightly more moderate libs or normie conservatives. Nick Fuentes is just for fun! And who doesn’t love a good time? ¡Fuentestico!

→ Gender-affirming care for all: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced that the government is now going to provide testosterone replacement therapy to troops. He’s calling it “The High-T Department of War.”

“I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members.” And: “This initiative, it’s not about artificial enhancement. It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities.” Injecting yourself with testosterone cypionate or enanthate is not artificial enhancement. It’s just rediscovering your natural self, says our chief war man. Also: Breast implants are not artificial, they are a repair; they are the large, perky tits you were supposed to have at age 50 but modern life and evil feminists took from you. We’re simply going back to the natural order of things—and restoring your natural capabilities. Botox is required now too, since you can’t be expected to wage drone warfare with crow’s feet.

Honestly, I support this. I’m pro-optimizing! Give ’em the drugs. Boost up, baby. I’m too lazy and beautiful for plastic surgery, personally, but when I see someone nipped and tucked I salute them. I think to myself: That’s another valiant soldier fighting certain death. We have one life to live—why not risk it all for an extra whistle or two at a construction site? I’m serious. God be with you, I think, when I see a 60-something woman with pillowy, billowy lips. Mine are two pieces of linguini, soon spaghetti, eventually angel hair. In our new, optimized future, people like me will look like Día de los Muertos costumes here for a haunting.

Speaking of aging. . .