The Free Press

As the clouds gathered in Europe in 1938, Winston Churchill summed up British policy toward Germany in a letter to an associate, writing, “We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”

You could say the same thing about the Trump administration’s approach to Iran and, in particular, the need to secure the Strait of Hormuz. Its stubborn refusal to confront reality on this issue led directly to the deeply flawed memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed just three weeks ago—and now, to that agreement’s predictable collapse.

The next presidential campaign is formally in hibernation at this point, at least until the day after the midterms. While that might be a relief to exhausted news consumers, that has not stopped a slew of political professionals, wannabes, and contenders from jockeying for position and seeking to influence the contours of the race. On the Republican side, the conversation is focused on two possible candidates: Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Many take it as given that the future of the party rests in one or the other man’s hands, and Vance isn’t doing anything to dismiss the conventional wisdom about the coming GOP contest.

“I have no doubt that the president of the United States is going to be very supportive of anything that I ultimately decide to do,” Vance told me recently in a CBS News Sunday Morning interview at the vice-presidential residence. “But we really just haven’t talked about what that thing will be.”

The two perceived front-runners have different styles and appeal to separate, if often overlapping, parts of the GOP base and conservative movement. The vice president is generally favored by the populist wing of the right, including many young activists and media figures; he already sports the endorsement of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk, who is now leading Turning Point USA. Rubio is more popular among some traditional conservatives and in hawkish corners of the foreign-policy establishment.

Yet they are both definitional political insiders in President Donald Trump’s Washington. From their nearly adjacent West Wing offices, both have advanced the agenda of the president, maintained his good favor, and readied themselves to potentially carry on his MAGA movement once he leaves office.

A year and a half into Donald Trump’s second term, some of the president’s biggest immigration allies are now skeptical that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is delivering on his flagship 2024 campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history—and they’re making it known.

Many immigration hawks are losing patience with the administration’s lack of transparency regarding deportation figures and accusing it of inflating the numbers. A nonprofit called The Oversight Project is suing the Department of Homeland Security to release updated deportation figures, The Free Press has learned.

Eight months ago, we invited the historian Jonathan Horn to take us week by week through the personalities, battles, events, and ideas that led British colonists in the New World to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in the glorious cause of becoming Americans. Along the way, Jonathan has illuminated other parts of our history, too. And now, having reached the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, he signs off with one more great column about one of the most famous acts of iconoclasm in American history. Thank you, Jonathan. —The Editors

Among the many excuses offered for the mobs of monument topplers during the summer of 2020 was that our Founders had done no less. It was popular to point out that on the night of July 9, 1776, some of George Washington’s own troops had scaled the iron fence surrounding Bowling Green in New York City, thrown ropes up over the two-ton equestrian statue in the middle, and pulled down the gilded-lead horse and its rider, King George III.

Conveniently left out of certain tellings of the story was what happened afterward: Washington rebuked the vandals for, as he explained in his orders the next day, “the appearance of riot and want of order.” With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence behind us, the fate of the king’s statue serves as a reminder of what Washington hoped the American Revolution wouldn’t become.

Unlike many of the statues taken down in 2020, the one of George III by the English sculptor Joseph Wilton wasn’t much of a historical relic. It had stood for only six years. At its unveiling in New York in the summer of 1770, soldiers had paraded through the city to cheers. “Our loyalty, firm attachment, and affection to His Majesty’s person was expressed by drinking the king’s health and a long continuance of his reign, under a discharge of 32 pieces of cannon,” wrote New York’s lieutenant governor after the ceremony.

It’s Wednesday, July 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Can Rahm Emanuel thread the needle on Israel? Kat Rosenfield on how the Graham Platner scandal became a turning point for progressives. Suzy Weiss on what the “Jackass” films mean for a generation of risk-averse young men. And much more.

But first, Douglas Murray asks: Will the truth win out at Tyler Robinson’s trial?

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a grave national tragedy: a prominent political figure killed while exercising the First Amendment rights on which American freedom depends.

What has happened since Kirk’s killing may not be as shocking as the shooting itself, but it is just as disturbing. Over the last 10 months, some of the most prominent podcasters and influencers on the internet—including people who were once Kirk’s friends—have peddled deranged conspiracies about who killed him. This week, the baseless theorizing of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and others finally collided with reality in a Utah courtroom. That’s where the main suspect in the case, Tyler Robinson, will stand trial once a judge rules that the evidence against him is strong enough for the case to proceed.

At a hearing on Monday, Kirk’s family, including his widow Erika, came face to face with Robinson for the first time. It’s also where these noxious conspiracy theories will be met again and again with actual evidence. The stakes could not be higher, which is why we asked Douglas Murray to tackle this important case in his latest column.

—The Editors

• Iran is the prime suspect in recent strikes that hit three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, which prompted the United States on Tuesday to revoke a license authorizing the sale of Iranian oil. The Islamic Republic did not claim responsibility for any of the attacks.

• President Donald Trump hinted at the possibility of allowing Turkey to purchase American fighter jets at a NATO summit in Ankara on Tuesday. The move would go against the wishes of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who on Friday asked Trump not to sell modern air force technology to Turkey, citing escalating anti-Israel rhetoric from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

• Marine Le Pen announced on Tuesday that she will run for president of France in 2027. The announcement came after a French appeals court ruling that upheld Le Pen’s embezzlement conviction, but reduced her sentence to one year of house arrest and lifted an immediate ban on her running for office.

• Prince Harry has lost a long legal battle against the publisher of the Daily Mail over claims that the tabloid unlawfully gathered information about him through phone tapping and impersonation, according to CBS News. While a UK high court dismissed the prince’s latest claims, the publisher of The Sun in 2025 settled a similar snooping suit with Harry, paying him “substantial damages.”

• Nokia is no longer making cell phones—the company is now manufacturing critical data center infrastructure, and has seen its stock price surge 90 percent this year. The Finnish corporation is “basking in the glow of the AI halo,” according to one analyst, selling software and equipment to route data traffic between servers.

• Argentina made one of the greatest comebacks in World Cup history with its defeat of Egypt on Tuesday. Trailing 2–0 with time running out, Argentina scored three goals in 14 minutes, won 3–2, and advanced to the World Cup quarterfinals. The reigning World Cup champion’s next opponent will be Switzerland, who defeated Colombia on penalty kicks.

Rahm Emanuel, in his quest to become president of the United States, is in Israel to deliver a withering speech Wednesday on the future of U.S.-Israeli relations—and, more importantly, to communicate to progressives in America that he’s the kind of Jew they can trust.

“I flew here from Chicago to tell you directly where things need to head if we are going to maintain the historic alliance that binds our two democracies,” Emanuel is set to say at Tel Aviv University, according to an advance copy of the speech provided by Emanuel’s spokeswoman. “Without question, the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been. To maintain the strength of our ties, we need significant changes and a new direction.”

The message Emanuel will deliver is that Israel can no longer count on America’s support. If it wants our love, it had better stop with the needless war-making, the decimation of Palestinian lives. It had better rejoin the international community and find a new prime minister, one who does not think Emanuel is a “self-hating Jew.” Emanuel loves to remind voters that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in 2009—called him a self-hating Jew (which may be the only kind of Jew that American progressives will stomach in 2028). He does so in the advance copy of his Tel Aviv speech, and he did so—twice—when we spoke Tuesday.

“A lot of other people never went toe to toe with the prime minister,” Emanuel told me by phone. He was in a car heading from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. “I did it 18 years ago, and I didn’t need a war to do it. And I’m going to do it right here.”

What I love about the final scene of the 1959 classic Some Like It Hot—apart from how funny it is—is how it’s one of the greatest cinematic portrayals of a man trapped in a sunk cost fallacy of his own creation.

The man in question is Osgood Fielding III, a rich and eccentric bachelor who owns a speedboat upon which the main characters, Joe and Jerry, make a daring escape after disguising themselves as women to avoid capture by members of the Chicago mob. Osgood is besotted with Jerry’s lady alter ego, Daphne, and has big plans to marry her; he’s already called his mother to give her the good news. Jerry, still in drag, is trying to convince Osgood to call off their engagement with a series of increasingly frantic confessions.

“I’m not a natural blonde!” he says. “I smoke! I can never have children!” But Osgood just keeps grinning, blithely dismissing each objection, until Jerry whips off his wig.

“I’m a man!” he shouts.

Osgood doesn’t miss a beat.

“Well,” he says, “nobody’s perfect!”

It looks like we may be about to see a conspiracy theory fall apart in real time.

It was clear the day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of a crowd of 3,000 people at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, who the main suspect was. Surveillance footage showed Tyler Robinson getting down from the rooftop where the fatal shot appeared to have been fired. He had already penned a handwritten confession and a set of texts to his lover admitting the crime. The next day, Robinson’s mother recognized her son from a photograph released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and his parents arranged for him to speak to a family friend who was a retired sheriff’s deputy. The family friend convinced Robinson to turn himself in on September 11.

Of all the shocking things that happened in the immediate aftermath, perhaps the most shocking was how hard some online commentators tried to ignore everything about the case. Instead, they blamed almost everyone but Robinson for the shooting. At various times, the accused have included the Israeli government, Egyptian spy planes, Kirk’s colleagues at Turning Point USA, his widow, and people in the crowd that day who were wearing maroon-colored shirts.

Worse still is that two of the people who have diverted attention from the actual effort by prosecutors to put Robinson on trial for Kirk’s murder are Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who were once close to Charlie Kirk. For almost a year, both Owens and Carlson attempted to poke every hole they could imagine in the government’s case and point the finger at anyone other than Robinson, whose preliminary hearing began on Monday in a Provo court. A judge will decide whether the evidence against Robinson is strong enough to proceed to a trial. Robinson has not entered a plea in the case.

My first celebrity crush was not a traditional heartthrob, like Twilight star Taylor Lautner, or a pop star like Jesse McCartney, or any of the One Directions. It was the lovable moron Steve-O, from the documentary prank show Jackass.

Steve-O might seem like an odd crush for a tween girl, or for anyone. The hyperactive problem child of a high-up executive at PepsiCo, Steve-O graduated from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College before he turned to gross-out stunts and made a career of getting hit in the nuts in various creative ways. But to me, he was reckless and dangerous. He looked like Alfred E. Neuman if he spent time in a state penitentiary, but in a good way. You could tell that the party was wherever Steve-O happened to be, and that he would do anything for a laugh—or a gasp. And together with the rest of the cast of Jackass, Steve-O made one of the best TV shows and movie series of the early aughts.

So I knew I would see the most recent Jackass installment, which debuted in theaters on June 26, and probably love it. Best and Last, the allegedly final installment of the franchise, brings together the old Jackass crew, with some newer, younger additions, performing stunts, pranks, and dares that range in complexity and vulgarity. These are interspersed with iconic old videos as well as unseen clips from previous years and new material.

The first scene in this last movie is a clip of the first ever Jackass stunt—the Big Bang of the Jackass universe—performed in 1998 by Johnny Knoxville, who would become the group’s ringleader, on assignment for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother. The premise is that he offered to review self-defense equipment by testing it on himself. In the video, he and friends drive into the California desert so he can shoot himself with a .38-caliber revolver while wearing a bulletproof vest stuffed with, for whatever reason, a bunch of copies of Hustler magazine.

Graham Platner’s Senate campaign is all but over. The progressive Maine Democratic Senate candidate with enough skeletons in his closet to fill a cemetery announced Monday that he’d be “reflecting” on the best path forward after an ex-girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, accused him of rape.

We’re bringing you two stories about Platner’s downfall and what it means. Scroll down to read our editorial, in which we unpack how Platner lasted so long, and the troubling double standards this story has revealed in the media and the Democratic Party. But first, read Caitlin Flanagan’s proposal for a new, Platner-inspired entry into the political lexicon: The Honest Oysterman. —The Editors

The journalists and politicians who brought you the slogan “Believe Women” are making themselves awfully hard to believe. That’s because they’re so fickle about the women they choose to credit and the others who they tarnish as liars, all depending on their politics. The downfall of Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is a case in point.

Platner’s Senate campaign is all but dead after Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated Platner on and off for more than two years, told Politico that he raped her in 2021 after entering her home uninvited and heavily intoxicated. Within hours of the Politico story’s publication, senior Democrats—including some of Platner’s most loyal champions like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—had rescinded their endorsements. Platner has denied the allegations but is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who leads the main Senate campaign arm, promised to withhold funding if Platner stayed in the race.

The entire party is lining up to denounce Platner, and their stern condemnations are meant to show off their credentials as defenders of women’s dignity. Mainstream journalists are taking the latest allegations seriously. Yet both the politicians and the press sounded very different only weeks ago, when the first allegations of sexual impropriety from a former partner of Platner’s were reported. That’s because the principal claims came from a woman who happens to be a Republican.