The Free Press

It’s Tuesday, June 30. 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 on why our future will resemble small-town America. Madeleine Long speaks to the detransitioner whose case could change the legal game for gender surgery medical malpractice lawsuits. Spencer Klavan on the scientific breakthrough that deciphered a 2,000-year-old scroll. And much more.

But first: The Christians held hostage by the Iranian regime.

Inside Iran, a quiet war has been waged against the country’s Christian community for decades. Pastors have been assassinated, Farsi-language Bibles are banned from print, and many Christians are forced to practice their faith in secret. Muslims who convert are treated as national security threats.

An estimated 1.2 million Iranians have converted to Christianity anyway, making Iran the fastest-growing Christian nation in the Middle East by some counts. They worship in living rooms, apartments, and underground house churches, trying to stay out of sight of a regime that sees their faith as an act of subversion.

The regime had always refrained from going after the oldest Protestant church in Iran out of fear of what America might do in retaliation. But according to the sources I spoke to for my latest story, that fear is gone. They say that Iranian officials showed up last week at St. Peter’s Evangelical Church in Tehran, threatening church leaders and telling the families living there to leave. The Iranian government said that it is seizing the property.

“I will tell you the literal words they used,” Sasan Tavassoli, an Iranian Presbyterian pastor in the U.S. with direct contacts at St. Peter’s, told me. “We were concerned about America all these years. America came. They slapped us on the face. We slapped them on the face back. And then America withdrew. So we are no longer afraid of America.”

I spoke with a former pastor of St. Peter’s, who now lives in exile and advocates for the Iranian Christian community in the West, about why the regime sees Christianity as an existential threat and its strategy for exterminating other churches in Iran. Read my story for a sense of how high-level geopolitics is changing the lines for some of the most vulnerable Iranians.

—Maya Sulkin

Robert H. Jackson was the last justice of the Supreme Court not to have finished law school. He grew up milking cows in upstate New York, had no college degree, and still went on to become one of the chief legal minds behind the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Robert H. Jackson was the greatest jurist America has ever produced, argues Matthew Walther, and the world that made him no longer exists.

• President Trump said American and Iranian negotiators are set to meet in Qatar on Tuesday for a new round of talks after striking and targeting each over the weekend. But Iran’s deputy foreign minister said that its officials only planned to work through mediators to prod the U.S. to honor its side of the ceasefire.

• The Supreme Court broadened presidential powers in a ruling Monday that said Donald Trump can fire most independent regulators, including a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission. In a separate case, Trump was blocked for now from firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. The justices did not clearly explain the legal basis by which Trump could get rid of Cook, who was accused of mortgage fraud last year. She has denied wrongdoing and said Monday that the ruling affirms the need to protect the central bank from “political interference.”

• The Supreme Court also allowed states to count mail-in ballots received after Election Day and declined to consider President Trump’s request to overturn the civil ruling that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. The nation’s highest court is poised to hand down multiple blockbuster decisions on Tuesday as its term ends, including on birthright citizenship.

• A record-setting heatwave continues to scorch Western Europe, killing over 1,300 people so far. Some French mortuaries have run out of storage space for bodies.

• The official death toll from last week’s earthquakes in Venezuela rose to 1,719 people. The total is expected to climb as more people are found under the rubble. Several countries have sent emergency workers and financial support, including the United States.

• Chris Johnson, 40, a former NFL running back, lost his voice to ALS after being diagnosed with the disease last year. He announced the diagnosis on Monday in an interview with Good Morning America, speaking with assistance from a computer-generated reproduction of his voice. (Read Maya Sulkin’s piece about Neuralink, a start-up company that helps ALS patients restore their voices.)

Something shifted in New York City politics this month, and it didn’t just happen overnight. When Zohran Mamdani’s allies swept three congressional primaries, the temptation was to chalk it up to a perfect storm of anti-establishment anger and Mamdani’s considerable personal charisma. Harry Siegel, one of the canniest observers of New York City politics…

For years, the Iranian regime held back from seizing Tehran’s St. Peter Evangelical Church, the oldest Protestant church in Iran. The regime was afraid of what America might do in retaliation, according to three Western Christian leaders with ties to Tehran’s Christian community as well as Sargez Benyamin, executive secretary of the Synod of the Evangelical Church of Iran in Diaspora and former pastor of St. Peter. That fear, these sources say, is now gone, with Iranian officials recently threatening the church’s leaders.

“I will tell you the literal words they used,” Sasan Tavassoli, an Iranian Presbyterian pastor in the U.S. with direct contacts at St. Peter, told The Free Press. “We were concerned about America all these years. America came. They slapped us on the face. We slapped them on the face back. And then America withdrew. So we are no longer afraid of America.”

Last week, the regime told the 20 families living at St. Peter that they have just weeks to vacate. Most of the families are low-income and have lived at the compound for years, Benyamin said.

The Iranian regime said it is seizing the property through EIKO—the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order, a state-affiliated organization—and issuing a new deed in its own name through the Islamic Revolutionary Court, according to a letter written by Benyamin that was addressed to the international Christian community.

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Scott Wheeler paid tribute to master of the Broadway musical Stephen Sondheim. Today, Matthew Walther remembers Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who went from pitching hay on a farm to prosecuting Nazis in Nuremberg. —The Editors

Robert H. Jackson was the last justice of the Supreme Court not to have finished law school; he didn’t even earn a bachelor’s degree. It is something of a paradox that one of the great representatives of the old frontier class of jobbing lawyers was also perhaps the most urbane and morally serious jurist this country has produced.

A moderate, temperamentally conservative New Dealer who owed his public career entirely to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jackson refused to join in the pogrom utilitarianism of Korematsu v. United States—where the Court upheld the executive order that led to the internment of around 70,000 American citizens of Japanese descent—producing one of the most bracing dissents ever sent down from the high court. He sided with the majority in Brown v. Board of Education but had serious misgivings about legislating from the bench, even in a good cause. Most significantly, at Nuremberg, where he served as the American chief of counsel, Jackson provided the philosophical basis for the International Military Tribunal, wrongly described by the late Antonin Scalia as an exercise in victor’s justice. Jackson’s verticordious arguments—beautifully phrased, necessarily grounded in an appeal to transcendental moral standards—are probably the only writings by a Supreme Court justice that would be recognizable to the great jurists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the products of a unified Christian civilization. That his own faith largely consisted of a coolly vestigial Protestantism combined with what he politely called a “sort of disdain” for low-church uplift makes this achievement all the more remarkable.

You probably know the story: In 79 CE, the great Mount Vesuvius erupted, engulfing the people of Pompeii in deadly debris. Centuries later, their silhouettes were found cast in plaster as eerie figurines, relics of one of history’s most tragic, spellbinding catastrophes.

What you may not know is that there was another, less famous town caught up in the disaster: It was called Herculaneum, and it had its own mesmerizing treasures. One was the Villa dei Papyri, a villa full of papyrus scrolls excavated by agents of King Charles VII of Naples in the 1750s. It probably belonged to the statesman Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

When Charles’ men started digging up the villa’s archives, the breathtaking scale of the discovery soon became apparent. So did the maddening complications it presented. The scrolls were carbonized and caked shut, keeping some of their writing intact but leaving them hair-raisingly brittle. There might be lost plays by Euripides packed in those folds, or a Latin epic by the long-neglected father of Roman literature, Quintus Ennius. But one careless slip of the fingers, and all that glorious text would crumble to powder and be gone for good.

Imagine slowly realizing that you think a doctor, who made decisions about your care when you were young and vulnerable, might have left you damaged for life. And then imagine realizing that there is nothing the law can do to help you.

This is an experience countless detransitioners are having, right now, in America. When they were children, medical professionals affirmed that they were born in the wrong body and recommended that they undergo life-altering surgery. When they grew up, they regretted what happened to them, but couldn’t hold anyone accountable—because the window they had to pursue medical malpractice claims had closed.

In Texas courts, for instance, the statute of limitations is two years. But last week, the state made a historic decision that could give many detransitioners reason to hope.

On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in favor of Soren Aldaco, a 24-year-old detransitioner who, in July 2023, sued the therapist she says enabled the double mastectomy she had at the age of 19 by writing a surgical recommendation letter. Two lower courts had dismissed Aldaco’s claims as time-barred, holding that Aldaco’s clock to bring a case started the day her therapist wrote the letter in February 2021. But the Texas Supreme Court disagreed. It ruled that the clock started only when the therapeutic relationship ended about three months later, meaning that Aldaco’s case was brought within two years of the alleged malpractice—and she can therefore pursue it.

If you read certain accounts, you’d be under the impression that last night’s presentation of the Mark Twain Prize—to comedian Bill Maher—was actually all about Donald Trump.

The Daily Beast: “Donald Trump Humiliated with Wild Epstein Joke at Kennedy Center.” The New York Times: “Even Absent, Trump Takes the Spotlight at a Night Celebrating Bill Maher.” The Washington Post: “President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center, but on Sunday night, he was all anyone at the performing arts venue could talk about.”

This is all, to use a certain president’s favorite term of art, fake news.

Sal Mercogliano, professor of history at Campbell University and host of the What’s Going on with Shipping? YouTube channel, joins the show once again to discuss Iran’s renewed attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Why is the ceasefire already beginning to unravel? What is Iran trying to accomplish by asserting control over the Strait?…

With the exception of Israel, sub-Saharan Africa, and a few other spots, worldwide fertility rates are low and falling. And one viral economic analysis published this month suggests that smartphones are driving the decline. What will the world be like if the number of humans shrinks as a regular and ongoing trend?

That is only half of the equation I’m interested in. Technology may or may not be driving the fertility decline, but it will certainly define our experience of it. As humans dwindle, artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent. Even if we cannot count the number of individual AI systems out there, it is like having “tens of millions of geniuses” on the scene—as the technology is often described—and the number will eventually run into the billions. In other words, the ratio of AIs to humans is rising rapidly. Imagine, for instance, a world in which countries have a fraction of their current populations and continue to shrink, yet there are billions of AI agents.

The first and most obvious result is that the relative financial returns to being human will go up. Humans still will be needed for many jobs, especially if those jobs require manipulation of the physical world in complex or idiosyncratic ways, or if they require the expression of human charisma and persuasion. Entrepreneurs, entertainers, politicians, and gatherers of original data are still likely to be humans.

It’s Monday, June 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Mene Ukueberuwa reveals what Americans really think about racial progress, DEI, and fairness in America. Rod Dreher bids Hungary farewell. Joshi Herrmann explains why Britain’s new prime minister may be even blander than its last. And much more.

But first: The triumph of anti-Israel Democrats.

On Friday evening, California state senator and Democratic congressional candidate Scott Wiener was on his way to a trans-led Pride Shabbat service in San Francisco—an event he’s attended for 22 years. On his way in, protesters surrounded him, screaming: “We fucking hate you.” “You do not belong here.” And: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Wiener is a Jewish gay man. He left the event, fearing that staying could endanger him or his staff.

One would struggle to honestly describe Wiener as an Israel supporter. He has accused the Jewish state of genocide in Gaza, and called for a ban on U.S. military aid to the country.

It’s a stark example of something increasingly difficult to deny on parts of the left: No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you don’t entirely fall in line with a hard-line anti-Israel stance, you risk being ostracized. And in Wiener’s case, it’s hard not to conclude that the fact he is Jewish is part of the reason he was targeted.

The incident is also the latest indicator of a democratic socialist wing of the party emboldened and aggressive in its efforts to bring the rest of the party to heel.

The confrontation in San Francisco came days after the triumph of three Zohran Mamdani– and DSA-endorsed democratic socialists, all staunchly anti-Israel, in congressional primaries in New York City. In the coming weeks, two more Democratic candidates, every bit as radical and anti-Israel, are running in primaries in Colorado on Tuesday and in Michigan on August 4. Congressional candidate Milat Kiros is five points ahead in Colorado. Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate, is the current favorite in Michigan.

Take all this together and it feels like something that has been bubbling up for a while is suddenly spilling over.

How did we get to this explosive, unpredictable moment?

Commentary editor John Podhoretz answers that question for us this morning.

If you’ve wondered how it is that a progressive San Francisco lawmaker who has accused Israel of genocide could be harassed for being pro-Israel, or how a congressman in New York—still the most populous Jewish city on Earth—can get ousted for supporting Israel by Democratic Party voters, John’s essay will help you make sense of it all.

—The Editors

Today’s great American is Stephen Sondheim, the man who reinvented the Broadway musical with shows that were psychologically complex, musically original and, more often than not, profound. And also, argues Scott Wheeler, funny. “Throughout his musicals,” Wheeler writes, “Sondheim used comedy to lay bare our ambivalence, rationalization, self-justification, and general cluelessness.”

• The United States military launched air strikes at Iran on Saturday, after the Iranian military struck Bahrain and Kuwait. The exchange of fire comes at an especially fragile time, as the countries continue to try to negotiate a permanent peace deal.

• An earthquake in Venezuela killed over 1,450 people this weekend. Rescue teams are still searching for missing people, and aid workers from across the globe are arriving to help.

• The U.S. military officials said Sunday that they are still searching for a Marine who went missing off the coast of California. The Marine disappeared during a training exercise on Thursday, making him the second missing Marine in the past six weeks.

• President Trump nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, to become the new ICE director on Saturday. Schroyer is an adviser to Markwayne Mullin, whom President Trump appointed as DHS secretary earlier this year.

• Anthropic’s powerful new AI model Mythos is reportedly on track to become available again soon. The model has been offline for over two weeks, after the Trump administration deemed it a threat to national security. The two sides are said to be close to reaching a new deal.

• Bill Maher received the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center on Sunday night. While Maher has been known to skip award shows, he appeared onstage last night alongside fellow comedy legends, including Louis C.K. and Jay Leno.