The Free Press

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.

After the weekend of America’s 250th, I wanted to sit down with someone who could do more than celebrate or condemn our nation. The 250th birthday of this country feels like a moment that demands genuine and serious reflection, and when I thought about who I most wanted to have that conversation with, the name Cornel West kept coming up.

I’ve known Dr. W…

In 2026 America, even fairy-tale romances are lawyered up. The massively publicized wedding of pop star Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce this past weekend was accompanied by what is thought to be the “most sophisticated” prenuptial legal agreement in history. This was to protect their respective fortunes—which is obviously less about Kelce’s $70–$90 million than Swift’s $2 billion—in the unfortunate case that the union goes south in the coming years.

The newlyweds are a famous example of an exploding trend. Whereas in 2010 only about 3 percent of Americans said they had a prenup, by 2023, 47 percent of millennials and 41 percent of Gen Zers who were engaged or married had these agreements in place. In a similar trend, married couples are increasingly likely to keep separate bank accounts—up from about a sixth to almost a quarter since 1996, according to the Census Bureau.

This boggles the average Boomer or Gen Xer mind. Negotiating your divorce before your wedding and making sure your spouse can’t touch your savings seems to many like a terrible strategy to build trust and intimacy. But hey, maybe the young folks are onto something. Come to think of it, when my wife, Ester, and I combined our households in the late 1980s, we had a resource asymmetry very similar to Swift and Kelce’s: I had two cardboard boxes of belongings and 50 bucks in my checking account; she had at least five boxes of stuff and a cool $250. She’s just lucky I wasn’t marrying her for her money.

Conventional wisdom regarding the war in Ukraine tends to swing like a pendulum, generally in tandem with the fortunes of the war. That means today’s optimism regarding Ukraine’s improved strategic prospects, while in many ways justified, is missing some balance.

First, the good news for Kyiv. After a bitterly cold winter made worse by Russian strikes against its power grid, Ukraine is now imposing pain in return through strikes not only on the battlefield but deep into occupied territories like Crimea and, often spectacularly, in Russia itself. As ably described by my CBS News colleague Aidan Stretch, these medium- and long-range strike campaigns have created military difficulties for Russia, and an energy and political crisis in Crimea, where authorities recently imposed a state of emergency.

An energy crisis also looms in the Russian heartland, with dangerous political implications for Russian president Vladimir Putin. Daring strikes on energy targets as far afield as St. Petersburg—more than 500 miles from the border—have shown Russians that much more of their country is exposed to the risks of war than was the case in 2022. Consequences are being felt at the gas pump, where prices are high and severe shortages are appearing, a result of the Ukrainian targeting of Russia’s refineries.

Will the real America please stand up?

This Fourth of July weekend, in between barbecues and fireworks and celebrations galore, the country was treated, naturally, to two speeches by our headliner politicians: New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump. The speeches were built up by pundits as a political doubleheader, offering twin visions of America present, past, and future, one from the left and the other from the right.

But if you were to judge the weekend by their blustering words, you’d find, lamentably, that the land of the pilgrims’ pride was nowhere in evidence as we celebrated the semiquincentennial of this great and godly nation. Instead, we got two tumescent orations, vastly divergent in tone and content, yet both reminding us just how much work we’ve ahead of us as we struggle to live up to the Founders’ sacred vision.

First, Hizzoner.

Sounding very much like a Temu Barack Obama as he spoke from City Hall on Friday night, Mamdani delivered a speech thick with Grimace-purple prose that read like someone prompted an AI chatbot to pull heavily on the heartstrings.

Ezra Jin, the pastor of one of China’s largest underground churches, is free after spending 266 days in Chinese prison for the crime of practicing and preaching his faith.

On Friday, July 3, Jin arrived in Los Angeles, where he reunited with his family, including his wife, Anna Liu, and daughter and son-in-law, Grace and Bill Drexel.

The family says Jin’s release, on the eve of America’s 250th birthday, is a “miracle.”

“We are feeling so overwhelmed with joy. We thank God for this tremendous miracle,” the Drexels wrote to The Free Press in a statement.

It was the first time in eight years Jin saw his wife, and the first in six years he saw his daughter. His family members began leaving China in 2018, following a previous round of arrests of Christians, but Jin stayed behind to continue leading his church. On his arrival in America, Jin also met his grandson, who shares his name Ezra, for the first time. Grace and Bill’s baby was born exactly one month ago, on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing—the same event which inspired Jin’s initial conversion to Christianity.

To all our readers: Happy Independence Day! This week we’ve published a handful of essays about how much we love this country: Nikki Haley wrote about the speech Calvin Coolidge gave on America’s 150th; Rod Dreher explained why he’s moved back here from Europe; and Caitlin Flanagan reflected on loving her country even when it troubles her. There’s no Weekend Press today, because we want you to spend as much of today as possible celebrating the U.S. But make some time, between the grill and the Popsicles, for Larissa Phillips’s latest essay. It’s about how her patriotism was challenged in an unlikely place: her own classroom. Larissa runs a reading group for adults, and her students are immigrants—middle-aged women who crossed oceans to become U.S. citizens, but have lately come to believe their country is taking away their rights. Hearing their complaints, Larissa bristled. Then she asked: Have any of you ever read the Bill of Rights? They said no, and the rest is history. —The Editors

“We don’t have any rights!” said one woman.

“That’s true,” another woman agreed. “They’ve taken all our rights away.”

“And they’re not done,” another added. “Everything is getting worse. They’re going to bring us back to Jim Crow.”

This might sound like the rhetoric of activists, but we weren’t at a rally or on a college campus. This was an online reading group I lead, attended by usually middle-aged adults who are studying to pass the GED. The women in the class were mostly legal immigrants from African and Caribbean countries, who have become American citizens through naturalization. The majority came here in search of a better life for themselves or their children—or both. They’d grown up hearing stories from friends or relatives who’d moved to America and came back home to visit with suitcases bursting with gifts for everyone—sneakers and jeans and sweatshirts.

Now, they’re the ones expected to bring home presents. “They think you’re making so much money, but they don’t know how expensive it is to live,” one woman said wearily, during a recent discussion.

These women have been nannies or nursing home employees throughout the boroughs of New York City. They clearly believe in the necessity of hard work, and also believe in themselves enough to come to classes night after night in their quest for the thing that gets you ahead in America: education.

I’ve been working with immigrants since 2006, when I randomly fell into a job in an adult literacy center (work that eventually led me to start the Volunteer Literacy Project.) I was immediately moved by this self-selecting crowd of make-it-happen types. Their optimism, stoicism, and toughness—on the part of the women, especially—even inspired me to face some of my own demons. How could I quail at life’s challenges when surrounded by people who face them with such resolve?

On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, we wanted to hear from someone who has spent his career thinking about what comes next. Scott Nolan helped build propulsion systems at SpaceX, became a partner at Founders Fund, and then founded General Matter, a company working to enrich uranium in America. Today, he looks forward at what the next 250 years could bring, what they will demand of us, and why getting it right matters. This piece was originally published in Packy McCormick’s Substack, Not Boring, and we are pleased to republish it today. —The Editors

To imagine what America might look like 250 years from now, a good place to start is what life was like in the colonies that would become the United States of America 250 years ago, on July 4, 1776.

In 1776, we did not have running water, light bulbs, electricity, or gas stoves in our homes. We had no insulin, no penicillin, and no X-rays. We did not have cars, and we certainly didn’t have planes. We didn’t have trains or even horse-drawn streetcars.

In 1776, there was no anesthesia. Instead, you were held down and fully conscious during surgery. Surgeons didn’t realize that they needed to wash their hands, and the average American was most likely to die from an infectious disease. We didn’t understand blood types, and blood transfusions could not be safely performed. Infant and maternal mortality were extraordinarily high.

There was no synthetic fertilizer with which to grow food—we used animal manure—and no refrigeration to store it once harvested. Food supply was limited by season and geography, stretched with salt or smoke or ice.

There was no telegraph. Paul Revere used a horse to warn that the British were coming. Storms arrived with even less warning; there was no weather forecasting. Because there was no real-time coordination across even modest distances, there were no standardized time zones. Every town kept its own time by the sun.

It’s Friday, July 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today we’re devoting our newsletter to America’s 250th birthday, including Caitlin Flanagan on the Pledge of Allegiance, Rod Dreher on coming home after years abroad, Nikki Haley on the life her immigrant parents built in America—and much more.

Two hundred fifty years ago, 56 men gathered in Philadelphia and signed a document that changed the world—a declaration that all men are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and entitled to govern themselves. Amid all the gloom and division that often dominates the headlines today, it’s worth remembering this: Our Founding Fathers would be astounded at the country this has become. They would also, we think, be proud that the foundation they built has been so enduring. That the democracy they first envisioned has been copied around the world. That America has been blessed by great statesmen and survived incompetent leaders. It has shaken off the scourge of slavery and witnessed the triumph of the civil rights movement and the defeat of the Nazis. The America they created is today a land of 342 million people bound by a set of common values and self-evident truths that the Founders first put forth in that sacred document.

We’ve run plenty about the ideas and history worth celebrating this year (more on that in a second). But as we close in on this very special Fourth of July—America’s semiquincentennial—we asked our favorite writers and columnists to describe one thing they love about America. And did they ever! Bari Weiss celebrates risk. Nellie Bowles makes the case for air-conditioning. Douglas Murray toasts our vast wilderness. Read all 11 of them here.

Caitlin Flanagan was a second grader in Berkeley, California, in 1968, a year when the country felt like it might come apart, when she learned the Pledge of Allegiance. Today, she writes about what it meant to say those words every morning, how it helped instill her deep feelings of patriotism, and why, for all her grumbling about America’s general decline, she still believes an American passport is the best thing you can have in the world. “When I see our flag flying,” she writes, “it means that America is still steady, that the world is still in its place.”

What does America look like to someone who’s just come back? After four years living in Europe, Rod Dreher returned to sticker shock at the grocery store, yes, but also magnolia trees and dive bars, and a South he’d almost forgotten how much he missed. Today, he reflects on what it’s like to see your own country with fresh eyes.

With America’s 250th birthday tomorrow, we are publishing the last installment of our Great Americans series: our columnist Niall Ferguson on Henry Kissinger.

In what other country could a penniless Jewish refugee become the secretary of state? Ferguson asks in his inspiring essay. He argues that Kissinger’s journey from shaving brush salesman to the center of American power captures something no other country could have produced. Only in America, he writes, could such a story have unfolded—“not only because he was an immigrant, but because his path to Harvard and academic success led through the battlefields of Nazi-occupied Europe.”

For the past month, we’ve enlisted a handful of writers to celebrate their favorite Great Americans. They’ve been a joy to read, from Colin Quinn on Martin Scorsese and Joseph Epstein on Sandy Koufax to Colleen Shogan on the heroes of Flight 93. Today, to wrap up the series, we’ve handed our readers the pen. The nominees who emerged from The Free Press Forum were David McCullough, the historian who spent his life bringing America’s story to life; Calvin Coolidge, the president who respected the limits of his office better than any before or since; and Louisa May Alcott, the woman behind one of the most beloved American novels ever written.

America has always been a country in motion. For a year now—across essays, interviews, and debates for America at 250—we’ve traced that motion through individual lives: from rags to riches, from fear to courage, from unfreedom to freedom. These are the journeys that stayed with us.

Last July 4, Larissa Phillips traced her own arc—from a progressive Brooklynite uneasy about her kids reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to a farmsteader flying giant Stars and Stripes over her land upstate. “Yes, America is imperfect,” she writes. “But so is everything: family and work and life. This is my country—the only one I’ve got—and I believe in it.”

At age 7, in a village in northern Iran, Masih Alinejad learned to chant “death to America.” Decades later, her reporting on the regime forced her to flee to the very country she’d been taught to hate—which then had to save her life, foiling multiple assassination attempts on American soil. It’s the story of an immigrant and the country that gave her a new life and, twice, saved it.

Some of America’s most fervent believers were born elsewhere. Last fall we ran two very different immigrant stories side by side: legendary New York restaurateur Keith McNally, and Cheikhou Niane, a Senegalese busboy at McNally’s own Balthazar. Both begin in a yellow cab; both are bound by a faith in hard work and the American dream.

A year ago, Free Press founder Bari Weiss revisited a cartoon created by Benjamin Franklin more than 250 years ago that still resonates today. It’s message: Join or die.

Finally, don’t miss these blockbuster America at 250 essays from writers who need no introduction.

Welcome to the final installment of Great Americans. All month, we’ve been counting down to our country’s 250th birthday by bringing you writers we love on Americans they love. Yesterday, we turned the series over to you, in a special edition featuring nominations from The Free Press Forum, our new space for debate, discussion, and discovery, open exclusively to paid subscribers. Today, we conclude with our columnist Niall Ferguson, who pays tribute to the penniless Jewish refugee who rose through the ranks to become this nation’s secretary of state: Henry Kissinger. —The Editors

In which other country in the world could Heinz Alfred Kissinger—born in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923—possibly have become secretary of state? Such an ascent, from penniless Jewish refugee to the center of power, could have happened only in the United States.

Kissinger’s was the quintessential American success story not only because he was an immigrant—his first job was in a shaving brush factory in New York City and his path to Harvard and academic success led through the battlefields of Nazi-occupied Europe. But equally American has been the bitter controversy engendered by his eight years at the helm of U.S. foreign policy.