The Free Press

History is no stranger to surges of antisemitism. The world’s oldest hatred has resurfaced in every generation since antiquity—including our own.

But this time is different: In the past, the best, and indeed the only, response to antisemitism was the truth. Myths of Jewish malevolence were confronted and debunked by those who knew better. But today’s technology—in particular the algorithm and artificial intelligence—has changed that. Today, truth is being sacrificed on the altar of spectacle.

What that means, says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, is that historians like him have utterly lost the battle. In today’s Big Read, he joins AI researcher John-Clark Levin to examine how this technological frontier has enabled antisemitism to spread and fester—and, in their words, to offer “a remedy, if there is one.” —The Editors

As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat. When the two of us met at Harvard 15 years ago, one was a professor teaching modern history, and the other was an undergraduate interested in the future of artificial intelligence. The elder of us had published a succession of books concerned with one of the most important and intractable questions of the 19th and 20th centuries: Why did the successful economic and social integration of the Jews after their emancipation or westward emigration produce such a vitriolic backlash?

I (Ferguson) had written a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty and a biography of Siegmund Warburg. I had studied the German hyperinflation of 1923 and its corrosive impact on the Weimar Republic. I had written books about the two world wars, one of which—The War of the World—offered a novel interpretation of the Holocaust as one (the worst) of a series of episodes of mass murder. I not only lectured on these issues at Harvard and other universities, but I also sought to reach the widest possible audience by engaging in journalism and broadcasting, producing more than 30 hours of documentary television for PBS, and Channel 4 or the BBC in Britain.

My animating goal was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history—including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized. Popular and influential conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) crowd now tolerate traffickers in Nazi revisionism. And the poison being peddled to young conservatives by radicalizers such as Nick Fuentes is even worse than traditional Holocaust denial. They don’t so much deny the Holocaust as mock it and celebrate it.

It’s Wednesday, July 15. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Douglas Murray on what happened when a gay cruise ship tried to dock in Egypt. Will Democrats try to impeach Trump for the third time? Tyler Cowen on the rise of the “AI maniacs.” Kat Rosenfield on “The Invite.” And much more.

But first: The ICU without a doctor.

In August 2024, 26-year-old Conor Hylton was about to begin his second year of dental school when he came down with what his family assumed was a particularly nasty stomach bug. That night, he checked into the hospital.

The following morning, he was dead.

Later, state and federal investigators reached a striking conclusion: From the time Conor was transferred to the ICU until he went into cardiac arrest roughly four hours later, no physician ever examined him at his bedside.

How is that possible?

The search for an answer led me deep into one of the most consequential transformations of American healthcare today: the rise of the tele-ICU, where critically ill patients are monitored by physicians working from remote command centers, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Over the past few months, I have spoken with the architects of the tele-ICU program at the hospital where Conor died as well as leading advocates and critics of remote critical care, to understand just what this transformation means. In the process, I have been able to reconstruct, minute by minute, exactly what happened inside the hospital that night.

This isn’t only a story about one grieving family—it’s about a healthcare system under financial strain, and what is lost when the doctors responsible for the sickest patients in the hospital are nowhere near their bedsides.

—Tanya Lukyanova

• The U.S. inflation rate was 3.5 percent in June, down from 4.2 percent in May and below economists’ expectations of 3.8 percent. The decline is apparent across most sectors of the economy, though some fear renewed hostilities in Iran may reverse the trend.

• The U.S. military reimposed its blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, even as President Trump reversed his earlier pledge to charge a 20 percent fee on cargo passing through the strait. This comes amid further U.S. strikes on Iran, as tensions in the region continue to escalate.

• New York governor Kathy Hochul announced a statewide moratorium on data centers on Tuesday. The ban is the nation’s first and would pause the construction of all data centers for one year, as the AI infrastructure becomes increasingly unpopular among Americans.

• The Trump administration has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to suspend most vehicle raids, except when executing a criminal warrant or operating alongside another agency. The move comes after ICE officers fatally shot two motorists in the past week.

• Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan testified before Congress Tuesday morning, fielding questions about the rise of the “shadow docket,” political criticism of the court, and the court’s $228 million budget request—which includes nearly $15 million for security. This marks the first time Supreme Court justices have appeared before the legislative branch since 2019.

• Spain defeated France 2–0 in the World Cup semifinal on Tuesday afternoon, advancing to the World Cup final. The team will compete against either Argentina or England, who will face off later today.

Shortly after 5 a.m. on August 15, 2024, William Hylton stood at the foot of his son’s hospital bed, gently stroking his leg.

Around him, the intensive care unit at Bridgeport Hospital Milford Campus had erupted into chaos. Nurses and doctors pumped on 26-year-old Conor Hylton’s chest, shouting instructions and working frantically to resuscitate him. A breathing tube protruded from his mouth. Dark, lumpy, blood-clotted vomit stained the sheets and pooled on the floor.

“It’s just a very chaotic scene, as you can imagine,” William recalled. “You just want your child to survive. You start trying to make deals with God.”

Across the hallway, William’s wife, Betsy, sat hunched over a trash can, sick with fear.

Then, at 6:11 a.m., a doctor’s voice cut through the commotion.

“Is his family there?”

The voice came from a large monitor mounted on the wall. There, on-screen, was the physician directing the resuscitation efforts. He was 12 miles away, working from Yale New Haven Health’s headquarters in the tele-ICU hub.

Talk about a big gay scandal. This week brought news of a gay Virgin cruise ship called Scarlet Lady, which, by my count, is at least a triple entendre. In recent days, the ship was barred from docking in both Turkey and Egypt. To make it even more of a gay hate crime, the Scarlet Lady was carrying not just 2,000 gay Americans but also Patti LuPone.

The mainstream media, and what remains of the gay press, swiftly framed this as a pattern-example of anti-LGBT discrimination. Indeed, CNN ran the story under the headline: “Twice-Rejected American Cruise Puts Spotlight on Rollback of LGBTQ Rights, Passengers Say.”

The story CNN and others ran with was drawn in part from the testimony of one Kyle Olsen, the owner of an LGBT travel company who claimed that the ban reflected a “broader global trend.” He added that “We’re seeing a rise in right-wing governments and increasingly conservative political movements, and in many places LGBTQI+ rights are being rolled back as a result.” According to Olsen, “The decisions by Turkey and Egypt don’t exist in isolation.”

The strong insinuation of these reports is that the spurning of Scarlet Lady is a result of a world in which Donald Trump has been reelected and right-wing populism is on the march worldwide.

If the Democratic Party is united on one issue, it is opposition to President Donald Trump. Yet despite their shared desire to impede the president’s policies and reclaim the White House in 2028, Democrats are deeply divided about how far to go in fighting Trump in the meantime. A struggle among Democratic factions could determine whether Trump will be impeached for a third time.

This debate is playing out behind closed doors. Back in March, House Democrats gathered in Seattle for a policy retreat organized by the party’s campaign arm. At one point, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warned his colleagues that impeaching Trump again would be a mistake—and could backfire on the party politically. Most people in the room applauded, according to two people who attended.

For Smith, the political calculus is straightforward. Polls consistently suggest that Democrats will claim a House majority after this year’s elections and regain the power to launch impeachment proceedings. Yet doubters such as Smith believe that impeaching Trump a third time wouldn’t make him go away; it would only rerun a failed political playbook that previously benefited Republicans. “We impeached him twice last time; both times he got stronger after we did it,” Smith said in a recent interview with The Free Press.

I call them “the AI maniacs.” You probably know a few. They’re worth understanding, because they’re about to wield incredible influence over nearly every aspect of life.

An AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models. They try out new models as soon as they can, they spend hours and hours trying to master them, and they use them to regulate both their workflows and their personal lives. I know one person who has his AI agent text him if he is not drinking enough water, for which he’s placed cameras around his house. One online anecdote tells of a man who canceled a date to spend more time playing around with Claude Fable 5 after Anthropic (where I am a member of the economic advisory board) extended the model’s availability for a few days.

Many AI maniacs are using AI tools to start companies of smaller size, and thus of smaller expense, than ever before. For those companies, the humans must set in motion and then monitor a large number of AI tools and agents. Those individuals then stand to reap outsize profits as their companies grow and succeed. Stripe, the payments company, recently issued customer data showing that the number of single-person companies earning $10 million or more has doubled in the past two years. There is no firm estimate how much of that improvement is due to AI, but it stands to reason that AI is a main driver of the trend.

Just over a year ago, I stayed up until 2 a.m. editing a story, because the deadline was harder than most: The writer, Madeleine Kearns, was on the brink of giving birth. And the story in question was about what she had gone through to bring her baby into the world. Many of you read—and loved!—that story, but for those who didn’t: After struggling with pain and infertility, which no mainstream doctor could conclusively explain, Maddy sought out something called “restorative reproductive medicine” in order to conceive her daughter.

It’s a branch of medicine that’s often misrepresented in left-leaning outlets as conservative quackery, because it was pioneered by Catholic surgeons as an alternative to in vitro fertilization (IVF), to which the Church is opposed. Just last week, it was characterized in “The New York Times” as “an approach that many medical experts argue may give false hope to couples who have not been able to have children.” But for Maddy, it felt like her only hope.

And it worked. Her daughter was born exactly a year ago tomorrow. (Happy birthday to her!) At the time, Maddy and I spoke a lot about how, even though she sought the treatment because she’s Catholic, it could help so many women who aren’t, for whom IVF isn’t an option. But in her piece today—a response to the “Times” article—Maddy argues that politicizing this treatment could deter people from seeking it. —Freya Sanders

The left-leaning press is wildly suspicious about the medical intervention that allowed me to become a mother.

“A faction of Christian conservatives and MAHA-heads have joined forces to advocate for ‘restorative reproductive medicine,’ ” warns The Cut, explaining that its proponents operate “on the flawed assumption that infertility can be treated with lifestyle modifications like diet, exercise, and cycle charting.”

Meanwhile, The Guardian wonders if it is “the right’s path to limiting IVF.”

And, just last week, The New York Times described it as “an approach that many medical experts argue may give false hope to couples who have not been able to have children.”

There’s a certain type of horror story that begins with a knock at the door.

A stranger stands on your threshold, waiting to be asked in. And so you invite him to enter your home—which makes you at least partially to blame for what happens next, when your visitor reveals himself as some kind of monster, with some kind of monstrous proposition to make. A vampire, dangling the lure of immortality—a devil, ready to fulfill your darkest desires for a price.

Or perhaps, the he is actually a she: a sexy polyamorous psychotherapist who expertly applies just a bit of pressure to every existing crack in the foundations of your marriage . . . then steps back, smirking, to watch the whole thing collapse.

This last scenario is the premise of The Invite, a new comedy by Olivia Wilde. In theaters now, the film stars Wilde along with Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton as four San Franciscans having the world’s most terrible dinner party. Not the kind where someone gets murdered, but worse, the kind where a murder would be a welcome development, given how socially awkward and sexually fraught the dynamic—and that’s before the tequila comes out.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where one freight train delivers the end of an era, the death penalty is not so dead to Canadians anymore, and Air Canada finally solves its French-language problem. Let’s get to it!

Last week in San Diego, I noticed a long freight train that looked like it was making its way north toward major rail hubs in Los Angeles. From there, the freight probably headed to destinations across the United States and into Canada.

One railcar carried the slogan “Union Pacific Building America.” Others bore the names Canadian Pacific Kansas City, Canadian Pacific Railway, and CN, all giant companies that knit together supply chains across North America, hauling everything from auto parts and oil to grain and finished goods.

They were painted with graffiti, and those railcars struck me as the perfect symbol of the world’s most integrated trading relationship. For nearly four decades, Canada and the U.S. have steadily built what is, in many ways, a single economy. Goods cross the border so often that manufacturers barely think about where one country ends and the other begins.

Watching the train slowly roll by, I wondered if I were looking at the high-water mark of that economic integration. A flurry of recent headlines suggests that I might have been.

Toyota announced on July 6 that it will spend $3.6 billion to expand its San Antonio, Texas, manufacturing facility, adding a second vehicle assembly line and 2,000 jobs. The Japanese company said it remains committed to Canada, which has three Toyota plants, and to Mexico. But its next big bet is in America.

President Donald Trump hailed the announcement as proof that his tariffs are working. “They’re moving into the United States. . . because if you build your product here, you pay no tariff,” he said. Trump also predicted that Toyota’s growing facility in San Antonio would become the largest car plant in the world.

It’s Tuesday, July 14. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: America’s abandoning a crucial ally. Arthur Brooks on how the self-help industry can survive AI. Prince Harry’s much-needed life lesson. And much more.

But first: What’s going on with Iran?

The on-again, off-again war against Iran is very much back on. Consider yesterday’s developments alone:

• Trump ordered U.S. forces to “reinstate” a blockade on Iran in the Strait of Hormuz and proposed a 20 percent toll on all cargo that travels through the strait;

• The White House sent a letter to Congress, dated July 10, declaring a resumption in hostilities with Iran beginning July 7;

• The U.S. conducted a third consecutive night of strikes on Iran to “impose a heavy cost on Iranian forces and degrade their ability to attack shipping in the strait”;

• The UAE said that Iran had struck two of its tankers in the strait;

• Oil futures saw their largest single-day gain since April;

• Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the U.S. might strike the Iranian nuclear site at Pickaxe Mountain with “a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” and that the U.S. would hit Iran “very hard” Monday and Tuesday.

Free Press columnist Aaron MacLean saw much of this coming last week, when he argued that the reality of the president’s predicament pointed to him reinstating a naval blockade to take control of the strait. That now appears to be the administration’s strategy. But will it work? And at what cost? To make sense of the flurry of Iran news over the last 24 hours, read Aaron’s latest column.

And for more on the conflict, don’t miss the latest episode of School of War. He talks to Mike Doran about the state of play in the Middle East, just how weak the Iranian military actually is at this point, and whether or not the conflict’s end is in sight.

• A federal judge ruled Monday that President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for “improper purpose.” The Obama-appointed judge claimed the IRS settlement with Trump was an exercise in self-dealing. She did not explicitly void the deal that created the $1.776 billion legal defense fund for alleged victims of Biden DOJ lawfare, though she recommended disciplinary action for one of Trump’s lawyers.

• A federal immigration enforcement officer shot and killed a man in Maine on Monday. Senator Angus King said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him the motorist, a 26-year-old Colombian national, attempted to use his vehicle as a weapon against ICE agents.

• Fergie Chambers was arrested Friday morning in Spain on a U.S. extradition request for alleged money laundering, among other offenses. The heir to the Cox family fortune has spent the last decade funding radical left-wing causes and has worked alongside anti-Israel activists like Calla Walsh. (Read Suzy Weiss’s profile of Fergie Chambers: “He’s Got $250 Million to Spend on Communist Revolution.”)

• Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline Graham Nordone will serve out the remainder of his term in the Senate after South Carolina governor Henry McMaster formally appointed her on Monday. President Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly indicated their support for Graham Nordone in advance of her appointment.

• Twelve state attorneys general are attempting to block Paramount’s $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court, alleges the combined entity would control almost a third of theatrical films and basic cable assets in the United States. Paramount, The Free Press’s parent company, says the suit “distorts settled antitrust law and is based on a misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today.”

• Madonna’s latest album, CONFESSIONS II, hit number 1 on the Billboard 200 this weekend. The record, a spiritual successor to her 2005 dance-pop hit Confessions on a Dance Floor, marks the 10th chart-topping album in her four-decade career.

• Sam Neill, Jurassic Park’s leading man, died Monday at 78. The actor starred in more than 150 movies and TV shows during his five-decade career. His family announced his death via Instagram on Monday, though the cause of his death remains unknown.