The Free Press

“Honest oysterman” is a phrase that must enter the lexicons of political reporters and consultants. It will refer to an appealing but deeply flawed candidate whose limitations are temporarily obscured by nonstop counterprogramming about his other, less troubling qualities. Like fresh oysters themselves, the tactic has a short half-life, and yet it never loses its appeal to eager candidates.

Katie Porter was the honest oysterman of the California gubernatorial primary; she was known for her whiteboard and straight talk about family budgets, but anyone even tangentially connected to her state’s politics knew that her treatment of staff makes 2016 Amy Klobuchar look like an Earth Mother. It was only a matter of time until someone came up with a video.

Kamala Harris was the honest oysterman of the last presidential election. There were so many good things to say about her: former U.S. senator, former California attorney general, vice president of the United States. But even at the height of Brat Summer everyone knew that she couldn’t answer a tough question to save her life, and eventually someone was bound to ask her one.

And now, we have Graham Platner, the literal oysterman, who the Democratic Party was hoping would flip a Senate seat in Maine, but who became the butt of scandal after increasingly dreadful scandal, most recently on Monday, when we learned that a woman had told Politico that he had broken into her house in a “blackout” state of drunkenness and forced nonconsensual sex on her while they were in a relationship. Platner says any claim of nonconsensual sex is “categorically untrue.” He’s holding all calls and taking a couple of days to “reflect” on his campaign.

It’s Tuesday, July 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen explains why socialism hurts the young. Josh Kaplan on how Trump’s FIFA interference makes the U.S. a true soccer nation. Audrey Fahlberg talks to the woman likely to become Washington, D.C.’s first socialist mayor. And much more.

But first: Is this just the beginning of the socialist surge?

If you look at the areas where democratic socialist candidates have surged to victory in recent weeks, you’ll find they all share one thing in common: The districts are deep, deep blue. Which raises a question: Shocking as these results are, is this all just a flash in the pan, limited to the most progressive enclaves of the United States?

No way, says Evan Barker, a former Democratic Party fundraiser who spent years training the progressive activists now leading the DSA wave. She knows exactly where this moment came from: a Democratic establishment that in 2018 decided to blacklist operatives working for progressive candidates, pushing them to build the ruthless campaign infrastructure proving so effective today. Read Evan’s piece to understand why “this far-left earthquake is only the beginning”—and what she believes Democrats must do to stop it.

Much of the power fueling this movement comes from young people, who are significantly more favorable toward socialism than older generations. But if you ask Tyler Cowen, those voters are embracing policies that will ultimately hurt them—in particular, by stifling the medical innovation they’ll depend on most. Read his analysis of why a movement promising young people the world may ultimately give them anything but.

But if this movement really is here to stay, who are these people anyway? What do they truly believe? Stu Smith, an investigative journalist at City Journal who has covered the DSA extensively, argues the organization has lurched so far leftward that a majority of its governing board now “openly identifies with Communist ideology.” Today, he explains what that means—and why he thinks “the DSA’s official name isn’t a reliable guide to the ideological makeup of its current leadership.”

—River Page

• A woman who dated Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate from Maine, says he drunkenly forced her to have sex with him almost five years ago against her repeated objections. Platner said Monday afternoon that he is “taking time to reflect on the best path forward” after originally denying the claims as “categorically untrue.” Since then, reports have emerged that he is set to drop out of the race.

• Russian strikes bombarded Kyiv and its suburbs early Monday morning, killing at least 28 people. The attack exposed Ukraine’s shortage of U.S.-made missile interceptors, prompting President Volodymyr Zelensky to plead for Trump to help replenish the country’s stock.

• The United States, after losing to Belgium 4–1 Monday evening, fail to advance to the World Cup quarterfinals.

• Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party is surging in popularity among Israeli voters, threatening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection bid as the country prepares for its first national elections since October 7, which must be held before October 27 of this year. The military general joined Netanyahu’s coalition after the Hamas attacks but resigned eight months later, accusing the prime minister of prolonging the war and putting hostages’ lives in danger.

• The entire island of Cuba lost power on Monday, the latest outage to expose an aging and rapidly deteriorating electrical grid. The state-run Electric Union announced the blackout in a post on X, claiming investigators are working to determine its cause.

• The Chinese navy launched a long-range test missile in the South Pacific yesterday, its first in two years, drawing criticism from neighboring countries. “Australia has been clear with China that we regard this as destabilizing to the region,” Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong told reporters in Fiji in response.

• A weeklong hearing for Tyler Robinson, the man who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk, began yesterday. Kirk’s parents and wife Erika attended the first day of the hearing, marking the first time his family appeared in the same room as the accused killer.

David, a U.S. military veteran who has been fighting voluntarily alongside Ukrainian forces, joins School of War to discuss how four years on the front lines have transformed modern warfare. How has combat in Ukraine changed since Russia’s 2022 invasion? Why have first-person view drones become the defining weapon of the war? What misconceptions does th…

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington last week, President Donald Trump warned that many Democratic Socialist candidates “are not social democrats. These are hardcore, godless Communists. . . . This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” Trump’s remarks sparked a wave of condemnations, including from CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who said that “socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism.”

Statements like Collins’ highlight how little attention the press has given to the Democratic Socialists of America and its national leadership. The majority of the DSA’s governing board, the National Political Committee (NPC), openly identifies with Communist ideology.

Self-avowed Communists were not always so well represented in DSA’s leadership, but the DSA’s leftward shift has helped turn it into a vehicle for a wide range of organizing beyond electoral politics, attracting Marxist-Leninist tendencies in particular. To dismiss the DSA as simply “not communism,” as Collins does, is wrong. Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership, and the organization is an increasingly attractive vehicle for bringing together a wide range of left-wing movements, many of which profess to be Communist.

Amid the wave of primary victories by candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, President Donald Trump now has to worry about a socialist in his own backyard. That would be Janeese Lewis George, the Democratic nominee for mayor of America’s capital.

“Janeese Lewis George, the Communist who is almost certainly going to be elected Mayor of Washington, D.C., has stated that she wants to empty the prisons, make D.C. a Sanctuary City, oppose ICE, welcome Criminal Illegal Aliens back into our beloved Capital, resist Anti-Crime Crackdowns, Defund the Police, continue and expand Cashless Bail, and so many other Capital destroying ‘things,’ ” the president wrote on Truth Social. Lewis George won the Democratic primary in the deep-blue city last month, putting her on a glidepath to become the capital’s first socialist mayor.

The notion of disorder in the District of Columbia concerns the White House because beautifying the city has been a signature project of Trump’s second term, notwithstanding the mishaps surrounding the restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Other White House efforts have led to cleaner parks and fountains and the clearing of homeless encampments, sometimes backed by National Guardsmen patrolling the streets. The White House has done some of it in uneasy coordination with retiring three-term D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser, a more conventional Democrat scorned by progressives for her standoffs with the city’s left-wing council and who enjoys a grudgingly civil relationship with Trump amid his federal takeover.

The democratic socialist surge of the past several weeks has stunned the nation. From left to right and everywhere in between, people are asking: How did we get here? What does it mean? And will the Democratic Party survive it? The prevailing reaction has been shock.

But I wasn’t surprised.

From 2018 to 2023, I was a Democratic operative, working for a slew of progressive candidates. I taught DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network. I chart this story in detail in my forthcoming book, Nothing Left, a dispatch from the inside of the left’s rise and takeover of the Democratic Party.

In late 2024, I decided to leave the party, disillusioned by a leadership class that I had watched drift further and further from the working-class Americans they purportedly represented. But my history means that I have worked directly with the people behind almost every victory in the recent socialist sweep, including New York City’s Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros.

How does socialism hurt the young? More than a century of experience should make the answer obvious. The record of capitalist democracies is strong, whereas socialist countries such as Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea have floundered economically and failed to protect individual rights.

Yet a rising generation of Americans has managed to unlearn this lesson, and are backing a spate of candidates who will reinject socialist ideas into the political mainstream. Antipathy toward Israel and so-called “oligarchs” are the animating issues of these campaigns. But once elected, these voters and candidates will push the Democratic Party to enact programs such as Medicare for All, adding a thick layer of centralization and redistribution to the top of the U.S. economy. In the long run, the brunt of this economic damage won’t be borne by the billionaires who are so often the targets of socialist attacks. Instead, it will fall on the young enthusiasts of socialism who are driving the trend.

Nowhere is the risk of socialist harm to the young clearer than in healthcare—the very issue on which so many progressive voters are demanding radical reforms. That’s because we are currently in a boom of medical and pharmaceutical innovation, and when radical innovation is emerging, capitalist economies outperform socialist ones by even more than usual. This was true for the information technology revolutions of the 1980s, when America outpaced the Soviet Union, and it is proving true today as healthcare becomes more about innovation, AI, and information technology.

The first time I encountered the term death doula was in a news story about how Nicole Kidman had decided to become one. Kidman’s mother passed away in 2024, a heartbreaking loss made worse by the fact that Kidman wasn’t by her side when it happened—and the distressing knowledge that her mother had often been lonely at the end of her life. While processing her grief, and her guilt, the actress felt called to embark on a second career as one of these end-of-life caregivers, who provide holistic, nonmedical support to dying patients and their families.

“I’d love to learn that role,” Kidman said, speaking at an event at the University of San Francisco in April. “Loneliness is a big part of our world now, particularly for people in that stage of life. I want to be there.”

At the time, I found this fascinating and not a little bit funny, in the worst and most macabre way. Imagine being terminally ill, slowly losing your functions, your faculties, your dignity, your bladder control—and there at your bedside, fluffing your pillow and slipping ice chips through your pale, parched lips, is the star of Eyes Wide Shut.

But Kidman is not alone in her interest. In an overstressed, understaffed system of care for dying patients, a new and growing cohort of caregivers has emerged who hope to reintroduce some humanity into a process made sterile by corporate influence. It’s not unlike the recent boom in birth doulas, who similarly advocate for expectant mothers.

Researchers who study trends in end-of-life care have noted that death doulas are a fast-growing category in the field, and where numbers are available, they tell a compelling story. Between 2019 and 2024, membership in the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance—a dues-paying organization for death doulas and those who train them—grew from approximately 260 to over 1,600. On social media, posts from death doulas rack up thousands of views; topics range from environmentally friendly funeral practices to what a death rattle really sounds like. The popularity of this content is proof not only that a market exists for the services that death doulas offer, but so too does a hunger for a more expansive cultural conversation around the topic of death itself.

There’s a viral video clip that I love to watch whenever the subject of American soccer fandom comes up. Shot on a blurry camera phone in 2016, it features a dandyish man against a cloudy Pacific Northwest backdrop, a scarf twirled around his neck, screaming for his team, the Seattle Sounders, to “Fight and win”—only to be met with silence, coughs, and chuckles from a disinterested crowd.

For years, it was the perfect metaphor for American soccer: well-meaning, polite, subdued and, above all, a pale imitation of football culture in the rest of the world. In England, where I’m from, American soccer fans have been the butt of the joke for years. In the U.S., soccer fanatics are a rounding error in opinion polls, an aberration in a sports landscape dominated by the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Sports pundit Jim Rome declared that he’d rather give his son “ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse” than let him play soccer. This was not a minority opinion.

But the times, they are a-changing. This summer, America has become a soccer country. It began a few weeks ago, when states across the country began welcoming teams from across the globe. In a peculiar turn of events, the Algerian national team ended up in a small Kansas town, 40 miles outside of Kansas City. And what did the good people of Lawrence, Kansas, do? They commissioned artwork to support the team; they learned the national anthem; they swarmed in the thousands to cheer the players on at training camp, learning everything they could about a small country 5,000 miles away. The energy felt different—and it’s only gotten better. For weeks, brands and politicians and Americans of all stripes have followed along as the German fan “Freddy” travels through the country, falling in love with Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops and the vast beauty of the American interior. Meanwhile, U.S. jerseys are sold out everywhere, and bars are packed to the brim. It feels like the USA has dipped its toe in the soccer culture that all of us abroad already know and love.

It’s Monday, July 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Frannie Block on the Chinese pastor finally set free. Arthur Brooks on why Taylor Swift’s prenup won’t protect her marriage. Aaron MacLean on whether Ukraine is winning the war. Dr. Cornel West on Conversations with Coleman. And much more.

But first: Two takes on the 250.

America is officially 250 years old. For the past year, we have been counting down to the semiquincentennial of the greatest nation on Earth—and it delivered.

Across the country, Americans poured into stifling heat, decked head to toe in stars and stripes. They flocked to the annual hot dog eating contest in Coney Island; lined the streets for parades in Ohio; reenacted the Revolutionary War in Boston; watched fireworks over Los Angeles; and, in Philadelphia, lowered a time capsule into the ground for our descendants 250 years from now to discover: a snapshot of America in 2026.

It was brash and joyous. In other words, it was American.

Which means it wasn’t complete without politics. Over the weekend, Americans were also treated to a series of speeches from elected officials. Two speeches—by President Donald Trump and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—were “built up by pundits as a political doubleheader,” writes Liel Leibovitz today, “offering twin visions of America present, past, and future, one from the left and the other from the right.” So what did these two addresses say about our politics? Liel’s verdict: Anyone hoping either would offer an accurate, let alone inspiring, account of American exceptionalism would have been sorely disappointed.

Read Liel’s piece to understand why our leaders got it so horribly wrong—and what he says is the truth about American exceptionalism at our 250-year mark.

—Jillian Lederman

On July 4, 2026, I woke up to learn that Ezra Jin, a pastor who had spent more than eight months in a Chinese prison, was free—and in the arms of his family members in America.

The Free Press’s Frannie Block has covered Ezra’s story tirelessly since his arrest on October 14, 2025, when Chinese police executed a series of raids across China, rounding up nearly three dozen pastors and church leaders. They were charged with illegally disseminating religious information online.

Ezra’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, worked endlessly for her father’s release. “The Chinese Communist Party will never be able to put God in a box,” she told The Free Press in October, adding that she would do “everything in my power to bring attention to his story” and to fight for his freedom.

Fight she did. She traveled the globe—from Geneva, London, Rome, Berlin, and Brussels—to tell her father’s story and put pressure on both the U.S. and Chinese governments to consider his case, speaking twice in front of Congress. The case made it onto the negotiating table when Trump met Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing in May; after the summit, Trump announced that the leader was “seriously considering” releasing Jin.

The Drexels believe that Ezra Jin’s release on the eve of the Fourth of July is a “miracle.” It surely is. But it is also the result of months of determined work to raise his case to some of the most powerful decision-makers in the world, including both the president of the United States and China’s president. It is a testament to the power of advocacy, international pressure, and to one family’s resolution to never give up even in the face of the most daunting obstacles.

Read the latest news here:

And don’t miss Frannie’s agenda-setting deep dive into this case, and Beijing’s war on Christianity, “China vs. God”:

• Tens of thousands of people flooded into Tehran this weekend for the funeral services of the former Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. One of the attendees was former child political star turned Islamist Calla Walsh, whom we’ve reported on extensively; you can read our full investigation of her descent into radicalism here.

• Michigan Democrat Mallory McMorrow withdrew her Senate bid this weekend. During her candidacy, McMorrow tried to strike a balance between the establishment candidate Rep. Haley Stevens and the hard-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed; her departure could leave El-Sayed with an easier path to victory.

• President Trump pardoned 11 people on Friday, most of whom were convicted of violating the Clean Air Act. He also pardoned Adam Kidan, a key Republican donor, raising questions about potential biases. (For more on the pardon industrial complex, read Gabe Kaminsky’s investigation.)

• The Trump administration piloted a new program providing investment accounts to millions of American children on Saturday. The so-called “Trump accounts” will start these children off with a $1,000 deposit, and families and employers will have the option to contribute more funds over time.

• A marine heat wave is sweeping the Pacific Ocean, extending across an area over eight times as large as the United States. The temperature change could signal a rise in intense storms and heat waves in the coming weeks, after this weekend’s storms took out power grids across several states.

• Team USA’s top scorer Folarin Balogun had his controversial red card repealed on Sunday. The decision reportedly came after Donald Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, and makes Balogun eligible for today’s match against Belgium, which will kick off at 8 p.m. ET.