The Free Press

The beginnings of media empires are seldom smooth. The Free Press began on Substack, when Bari and Nellie created an account using crappy airplane Wi-Fi. But after that, it was like we were News Corp. Just kidding: There was endless confusion about everything from incorporating (hello, Delaware!) to office kitchen-cleaning politics (ceramic coffee cups are a privilege, people!) to office leases on both coasts (thank you, Craigslist!).

Dave Portnoy knows all about what I’m talking about. He started Barstool Sports, the bro-tainment juggernaut that pumps out sports articles, gambling picks, podcasts, and fodder for internet drama at an industrial scale. People, especially young men, just can’t seem to get enough of Barstool and of Portnoy, a brash-talking Boston kid who, somehow, became the Rupert Murdoch of people who spend weekends shotgunning beer.

Below, in an exclusive excerpt from his upcoming memoir, “Cancel Me If You Can,” Portnoy lays out exactly what the beginning of Barstool Sports looked like: broken-down vans, drunk contractors, Hooters ads, and all. Portnoy was a recent Michigan grad (Go Blue!) with a deadening sales job and a hunch about what guys really wanted to read, and the gambling companies that might take an interest on the ad side.

There was chaos, but it worked, and Barstool grew and grew. Portnoy eventually sold a stake of his company, which netted him millions. But what didn’t change was his commitment to Barstool, then a print newspaper, having “the tone of a real sports fan.” From the first edition of the paper: “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing, and chasing short skirts.”

Read about Barstool’s humble beginnings from the man himself, below. And long live the bro. —Suzy Weiss

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to work for myself. To try my own thing. The motivation was simple: I didn’t want to wake up every day and dread going to work. If I could have found a job that I enjoyed doing more than working for myself, it wouldn’t have mattered; in fact, Barstool Sports probably wouldn’t exist. But I couldn’t find that dream job.

It didn’t help that the only two things I liked were sports and gambling—not exactly the easiest fields to break into. By the time I was looking for jobs, after graduating from college in Michigan in 1999, I was essentially like every other white middle-class dude in the world with a liberal arts degree. I had no real skills. So I did what everybody else like me does: I took a sales job.

It was the height of the dot-com boom, the economy was firing on all cylinders, and any idiot could get a job selling anything. So I moved back to Boston, where I grew up, and landed at a technology research and consulting firm called Yankee Group. Every day I woke up and dragged myself to this job that I was good at but didn’t care about. I was making $80,000 a year, which seemed like an ungodly amount of money at the time. But I was bored out of my mind.

It’s Friday, June 26. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Jonathan Rosen on how antisemitic obsessions came to dominate our politics. Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what the Montreal shooter really believed. Jed Rubenfeld unpacks the Supreme Court’s landmark asylum ruling. And much more.

But first: Why was the man who co-founded Wikipedia just banned from the site for life?

Twenty-five years ago, Larry Sanger co-founded what is arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia, which now has millions of entries on every topic imaginable, was designed to be a hub of free and unfettered knowledge, built by and open to the public.

So why was Sanger, earlier this week, permanently banned from the site he helped found?

He tells that story for us today. It’s one that starts back in 2001, with the admirable, game-changing goal of democratizing information. But after Sanger left the project in 2002, he “watched in dismay as the site I’d created began to drift from its founding mission.” Ideological bias took hold; pages were whitewashed; left-leaning outlets came to dominate sourcing; and a small group of administrators grew “beholden more to each other than to any constitutional framework.”

Last week, Sanger launched an effort to reform Wikipedia from within—only to be met with a coordinated effort to ridicule, discredit, and undermine it, culminating in a lifetime ban on Monday. “I knew Wikipedia’s disciplinary processes were bad—but I had never experienced them myself,” he writes.

Read Sanger’s account of how one of the miracles of the internet age has abandoned truth and evolved into an emblem of our censorious age, and what his ban reveals about the culture that allowed it.

—Jillian Lederman

What happens when the fringe becomes mainstream? For years, many of the ideas now coursing through our politics—socialism, antisemitism, the division of society into oppressors and oppressed—were largely confined to campus radicals and the darkest corners of the internet.

That’s now changed. According to Jonathan Rosen, few things illustrate this shift more clearly than Tuesday’s New York City primary, in which three far-left candidates toppled establishment Democratic incumbents. The victors, Jonathan writes, “had indistinguishably progressive platforms from those they defeated, with one key difference”: a virulent hatred for Israel and its supporters. And they’re not alone. From Mayor Zohran Mamdani calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “monsters” to coffee shop workers harassing a Jewish congressman online, radical antisemitism is becoming an organizing principle of American political life. At threat? “America’s understanding of history and the country’s founding principles.” Read his piece to understand why these developments spell danger not only for American Jews, but for the entire country.

“Rhetoric has a way of becoming policy, or something worse,” notes Jonathan in his piece. On Monday, a gunman proved that very point when he opened fire in a Montreal neighborhood with a large Jewish community, killing an Israeli man and a police officer. Initial coverage of the shooting focused on the suspect identifying as an incel. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali read the 104-page manifesto he left behind and argues that such a label badly misses the point. Read Ayaan on what the shooter really believed—and the disturbing lesson from his lethal attack.

In honor of America’s 250th birthday, we’re spending every weekday until July 4 celebrating the people who made this country what it is. Today, veteran sportswriter Peter Richmond remembers Muhammad Ali, the greatest heavyweight to ever live—but whose most courageous fights, Peter writes, had nothing to do with boxing.

The big story of this week was the political earthquake in New York. And if you look at the platforms of the three Mamdani-backed candidates who stormed to victory in New York City, one thing stands out: More than any other issue, they are united by their opposition to Israel and U.S. support for the Jewish state. Above, Jonathan Rosen lays out the stakes of this reality—but where did it come from? How did a tiny country across the globe become such a toxic litmus test for the Democratic Party? To answer that question, we turned to veteran political journalist Mark Halperin, whose piece this week examined the structural forces, foreign money, and social media algorithms that together fuel a defining framework of modern politics: “People crave villains almost as much as they crave heroes. Once a person, institution, or country is assigned the role of villain, facts often become secondary.”

For a primer on who these candidates actually are, Olivia Reingold has you covered. This week, she laid out the beliefs of Claire Valdez, who instructs supporters to “Abolish ICE. Free Palestine”; Brad Lander, who has accused Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and “forced starvation”; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, a prison abolitionist who refused to condemn Hamas and in 2020 referred to the U.S. as a “fucking disgrace.” With all three almost certain to be elected to the House this November, this is your one-stop guide to politicians you will be hearing a lot more about.

Political turmoil didn’t discriminate this week, as our neighbors across the pond were roiled on Monday by the resignation of British prime minister Keir Starmer. His successor will become the seventh British PM in just 10 years. In the wake of the resignation, Douglas Murray examined the failures that brought the UK to this point: a succession of leaders who fumbled Brexit, mishandled immigration, and proved consistently deaf to the people they were meant to represent.

Starmer’s resignation came at a fitting time: one day before the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum that made political instability a mainstay of British politics. But why has Brexit failed to deliver? And how does that question help us understand Starmer’s exit? Niall Ferguson’s piece this week took the long view, arguing that all the drama is thanks to a Victorian political system buckling under the weight of crises it was never designed to survive.

From one fight to another. Of all the heated debates consuming the momosphere, sleep training surely ranks near the top. The practice—by which parents selectively ignore their babies’ cries at night to allow them to “self-soothe”—has pitted pediatricians who say sleep training is safe and necessary against neuroscientists who call it a form of emotional neglect. Then there are the mothers stuck in the middle, not knowing who to trust. Madeleine Kearns, a new mom herself, spent months interviewing experts on both sides of the debate, as well as exhausted moms in desperate search of an answer to one of parenting’s most loaded questions: Is sleep training bad for your baby?

As deputy director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, Josh Smith oversees one of the largest prison systems in the world. But before that, he spent five years as an inmate in federal prison on drug charges. This week, P.G. Sittenfeld profiled the man President Donald Trump pardoned and then tapped to reform the agency from the inside, who says he’s guided by a single animating question: “How do we make prison a place of transformation?”

Finally, in case you missed it, this month’s inaugural Free Press Supper Club drew more than 2,000 subscribers across 28 cities together to do something increasingly rare: sit down with strangers and have an open, unfiltered conversation. Olga Moriarty, our head of community and events, was at one of those very tables, and this week she wrote all about it. If you missed out on the fun, don’t worry! Our next Free Press Supper Club is July 15, and the theme is America at 250. Reserve your seat now to join us for a birthday dinner for the country, Free Press style.

“Breaking news: Supreme Court Allows Trump to Block Asylum Seekers at Border.” That’s how The New York Times heralded the court’s decision Thursday in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado. It’s a good example of how the media, through a misleading headline, can distort what people believe about the court, since most readers are unlikely ever to read its actual opinions.

In reality, the decision upheld an immigration policy first adopted and practiced by the administration of Barack Obama. That little fact doesn’t exactly jump out from the Times’ headline. On the contrary, the article’s framing suggests that the Supreme Court has once again kowtowed before a controversial Trumpian measure—and that’s an unfortunate misimpression to leave people with.

Here’s what the case is actually about.

Back in 2016, a surge of illegal aliens claiming asylum overwhelmed the capacity of immigration authorities at ports of entry along the Mexican border. Back then, migrants who were not trying to sneak across the border would enter the U.S. at an official entry point and present themselves to a U.S. immigration officer behind a counter or desk. Those with a visa or other lawful admission papers would be allowed through. Otherwise, they were turned away and forced to return to Mexico. But there was one exception: By law, an alien who has “arrived in” the U.S. cannot be turned away if he claims asylum.

Asked during his own primary campaign for mayor if he would visit Israel, Zohran Mamdani shrewdly told the moderator that if elected he would stay in the city “standing up for Jewish New Yorkers” wherever they might be, and “delivering on their concerns.” He said nothing about making the disavowal of Israel, and the demonization of its supporters, the litmus test for political participation in the city with the largest Jewish population in the country. That, however, is what he has done, though it was Democratic voters who proved the strategy a success, sweeping a trio of Mamdani-endorsed candidates to primary victory, with support from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A number of the victorious candidates in Tuesday’s primary had indistinguishably progressive platforms from those they defeated, with one key difference. This had less to do with policy than rhetoric: a willingness to speak about Israel and its supporters in the eliminationist language Mamdani showcased at a rally for his chosen candidates last week. Calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “monsters,” the mayor accused the American pro-Israel lobbying organization not only of unpatriotic disloyalty to America but also of a murderous commitment to the slaughter of innocents so great that the only thing the organization found “more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars.”

Monday’s horrific shooting in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood left innocent people dead. An Israeli man and a local police officer lost their lives. Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as 25-year-old Seth Hatfield.

Initial press coverage focused extensively on the fact that Hatfield identified as an “incel,” effectively blinding the public to the perpetrator’s deeper motivations. The label minimizes the killer as a solitary, pathetic misfit. It frames his violence as the exclusive by-product of private sexual frustration and the dark corners of the internet.

The suspect’s actual manifesto adds several missing layers to that simple narrative. Although the text discusses “loneliness, isolation, and social degradation,” they aren’t the main focus of his complaint. Rather, they serve as the baseline for a warped worldview that directly echoes the anti-Western dogmas embedded within our mainstream institutions.

Hatfield uses the precise dialect of far-left radicalism to justify his actions. He launches a sweeping ideological assault on the economic foundations of liberal democracy, denouncing capitalism as a system engineered not to benefit the common working-class male, but one “designed by the bourgeois class towards their own benefit.” He goes further, demanding that readers reject “residual notions of Western advancement or ‘superiority,’ ” while openly praising communist alternatives and requesting that his tract be translated into Arabic, Farsi, and Mandarin, where he believed his ideas would be better received. Most disturbingly, his bitter resentment of modern society and economic power ultimately takes a familiar, sinister turn into pure antisemitism. “The influence of Zionist Jews upon the Western bourgeoisie is in fact so strong,” he writes, “that in my other works I sometimes refer to the Western ruling class itself as the Judaeo-bourgeois class.”

A Guatemalan national previously convicted of sexual battery claimed a 14-year-old unaccompanied migrant child was his sibling. He then got custody of her in 2023 in Ohio and subjected her to sexual abuse.

Cases like that one, which is now the subject of a federal indictment, prompted the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to overhaul its vetting policies for sponsors of unaccompanied alien children (UACs), the federal government’s term for minors with neither legal status nor a legal guardian to care for them.

HHS is expected to publish a new proposed rule on Friday codifying new policies for vetting the sponsors of migrant children, implemented by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The proposed rule would require potential sponsors to meet a higher standard for proof of income, and identity, along with more stringent background checks. It’s part of the administration’s broader crackdown on fraud related to the sponsors of migrant children, which has become widespread in recent years.

This week’s proposed rule also follows a series of news reports in The Free Press and other outlets detailing the backlog of hotline calls that mounted during the Biden administration involving thousands of children who were illegally trafficked, suffered sexual abuse, or went missing while in custody of sponsors. Many of those unaccompanied children have never been found or have turned 18 since they were reported missing.

Twenty-five years ago, I co-founded Wikipedia, arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. On Monday, I was indefinitely banned from the site. The story of what happened to me is, in many ways, the story of our censorious times, in which independent thinking is seen as a threat rather than a virtue, and punished as such.

Let me back up.

In early 2000, the internet was a very different place than it is today. It was much freer—tools of censorship weren’t nearly as advanced—but it was also harder to use, and finding information took much longer. The need to make the internet more user-friendly was clear to those of us who spent a lot of time online. We needed a free, fair storehouse of knowledge: an encyclopedia built by, and open to, the public.

It was exhilarating to build Wikipedia at that time. Never before had a global, volunteer-written encyclopedia been shown to work. We applied the principles of open-source software to knowledge: All users would have a seat at the table, everyone would edit each others’ work, and the results would be free for all.

Dr. John Mitani, professor emeritus in the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan and recipient of the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award, joins School of War to discuss the violent chimpanzee civil war he documented among the Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda. What caused one of the world’s largest chimpanzee communities to turn o…

Hello, and welcome to TGIF. We sent Nellie Bowles to the reflecting pool this week, and she sadly ingested too much green algae, which landed her in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed. We keep her in our prayers. I’m Will Rahn, filling in and ready for you to roast me in the comments.

Here’s a quick reminder to head to our merch shop to pick up one of our fast-selling America 250 T-shirts and Free Press golf balls. Now let’s do the news of the week!

→ The mini Mamdanis: Just a year after his stunning victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani completed his first round of purges this week.

Mamdani’s three handpicked candidates for the U.S. House all won their primaries Tuesday night, effectively doubling the number of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members in Congress over the course of an evening.

So how did that happen? Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump? Were they standing in the way of the mayor’s “affordability” agenda? Were they moderates in any real, practical sense? Did a salacious tryst with Sydney Leathers come to light?

Pfft. Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough, silly. “Free Palestine” is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters. They’ve given up on global warming. Do Black Lives still Matter? Unclear. Abortion, tax hikes, gun control, nationalized healthcare: All now take a backseat to Israel and AIPAC, an American group that funds pro-Israel candidates, and the big, bad bogeyman on the left. A generation after Pat Buchanan was drummed out of the GOP for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” the vanguard of the left has decided that Ronald Reagan’s onetime communications director was right, actually.

You don’t need to be Bibi Netanyahu’s number-one fan to conclude that this has all become totally deranged. Criticize the Israeli government all you want. Stand against the settlements. Plenty of Israelis certainly do so. But why was the Sunrise Movement—a supposedly environmentalist organization—gleefully posting photos this week of some poor woman who apparently elected to get a “FUCK AIPAC” tattoo on her forehead?

Call me old-fashioned, but I associate face tattoos with meth, mental illness, and Mike Tyson. Not. . . anti-Israel political posturing?

And what’s this lady going to do when the left inevitably moves onto its next cause du jour? I’m not a big fan of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the two Weather Underground leaders who had plum seats at the opening of Barack Obama’s ugly-as-hell presidential center last week. Yes, they were communists who carried out a bombing campaign against the government. Yes, Dohrn was a big fan of the Manson Family’s murder spree. But at least they had the good sense not to get “VICTORY FOR THE VIETCONG” tattooed on their foreheads. Such a thing might well have cost them their post-terrorism posts in snobby academia.

Seriously, where are you going in life with a FUCK AIPAC tattoo, other than, perhaps, you know, Congress?

On the night of March 1, 1932, a ransom note was left on a nursery windowsill. Nobody saw who wrote it, licked the seal, and placed it there. The envelope has never been tested for DNA. Scientists say they could now easily extract forensic evidence that might provide answers. Kurt Perhach is trying to make that happen—and the state of New Jersey is figh…