The Free Press

In this special episode, Shilo Brooks is joined by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham at the Jack Miller Center’s annual summit on civic education.

They took the stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the perfect setting for a discussion about one of Meacham’s favorite books: The Winds of War. Written by Herman Wouk and publ…

More than 30 years after Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, was convicted on charges related to his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a man who testified as a defense witness in the terrorist mastermind’s trial is now on a glide path to Congress. Democratic leaders paid little heed to Adam Hamawy before his primary win on Tuesday. Now, they will have to decide whether his past dealings with a terrorist cross a red line.

Hamawy, a plastic surgeon and retired Army doctor, won a crowded Democratic primary for New Jersey’s safely blue 12th congressional district this week and is widely expected to win the seat in November. Hamawy was never charged or convicted on terrorism charges. And prior to his plastic surgery career, he served more than 20 years as a medical doctor in the U.S. Army, where he worked overseas and provided medical care that saved now-senator Tammy Duckworth’s life.

But the anti-Israel candidate’s youthful association with the Blind Sheikh has drawn scrutiny from Republicans who are skeptical about his fitness for Congress while raising new questions about how far the Democratic Party’s tent stretches.

Hi. My name is Hoan Ton-That, and I’m addicted to Claude Code. I’m a lifelong programmer and the founder and former CEO of Clearview AI, the country’s first major facial recognition company that used AI, and where I wrote the first version of our software myself.

When I started Clearview, it ended up landing on the front page of The New York Times in January 2020 with the headline “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” We had built a groundbreaking facial recognition technology, which allowed law enforcement to search billions of public images just by uploading a photo of a face. The technology helped law enforcement solve crimes involving children, human trafficking, and financial fraud.

The reaction to our new technology raised concerns from privacy advocates and the public. Today’s simultaneous fear and excitement around AI coding tools remind me of what I went through with Clearview, and what any new technology goes through.

Two months ago I started using Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had programming, and I can now build software that used to take months in a matter of days.

Last week, Candace Owens, the linguistically challenged podcaster best known for florid conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk and the First Lady of France, announced to her audience that she was taking a family trip to Russia.

Russia? Even for adventurous travelers, Russia is not at the top of many must-see lists in the summer of 2026. It is under heavy Western sanctions. Its major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, have been subject to semi-regular drone attacks in recent weeks. The State Department advises Americans not to travel there, and warns them that if they do go anyway, they will have their electronic devices hacked and may be kidnapped and held for ransom by the country’s all-powerful security services. So why visit?

Qatar’s giant investment fund owns a $200 million piece of the Washington Wizards, Washington Capitals, and Washington Mystics sports teams—and Qatar even spent $100,000 to keep the Metro open for an extra hour after a Capitals playoff game in 2018.

Qatar also owns nearly $15 billion of gas pipelines across Texas, part of the Empire State Building, and at least three condominiums in Trump World Tower near the United Nations headquarters. And it has invested as much as $800 million in businesses tied to top officials in the Donald Trump administrations, including former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and special envoy Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

The list of examples showing how Qatar has leveraged its tremendous wealth goes on and on—and has provoked worry and outrage for years about its influence over America’s most powerful people and institutions. A new report suggests the scale of the spending is even bigger than anyone realized.

According to an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Qatar, long a refuge for leaders of Hamas and a financier of Islamist terrorists, has poured over $400 billion into the United States since 2010. Those calculations build off of an investigation by The Free Press last year, which uncovered almost $100 billion in spending by Qatar over the past two decades. The Free Press analysis included six sectors where Qatar has spent money, while the FDD examined over a dozen.

In Tuesday’s primaries in California, the outsiders were on the rise: Republican Steve Hilton vaulted to the top of the governor’s race with nearly 28 percent of the vote, ahead of expected front-runner Xavier Becerra. And in Los Angeles, former reality star Spencer Pratt looks set to finish second in the mayor’s race, edging out far-left city councilmember Nithya Raman and setting up a fight with incumbent Karen Bass. What do the results say about the state of the Golden State? That’s the subject of today’s Big Read, by Peter Savodnik.

Before you dive into Peter’s dispatch, we have two videos worth watching. In the first, Peter joins Free Press columnist Caitlin Flanagan and writer Michael Shellenberger to talk through what happened and why. In the second, Free Press video editor Austyn Jeffs goes inside the viral AI ad machine fueling Pratt’s unlikely rise, and meets one of the men behind it. — The Editors

In California’s jungle primary, it’s the Revenge of the Bourgeoisie.

With 62 percent of the statewide vote counted as of Wednesday afternoon, Republican Steve Hilton leads the pack of would-be governors, and with 69 percent of the city vote tabulated, Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt is closing in on Mayor Karen Bass and outpacing über-progressive Nithya Raman.

The message from a growing and very vocal contingent of voters is crystal clear: They want the crazy to stop.

The homeless encampments, the meth heads, the ancient infrastructure, the plummeting test scores, the stratospheric cost of everything—they’ve had enough. They hate that this place that they love, which was once the epicenter of the bold and the new, feels like a rusting, bloated, zombified shadow of its former self.

“It’s not just Republicans,” Hilton told me a few hours before the election returns started coming in last night. He was in Huntington Beach, just south of LA. “It’s a lot of Democrats and independents. Something’s happening in California. People are done with it. They’re done with the chaos and the crime and the squalor. There’s a level of rage that is very, very palpable.”

And they want a return to the old swagger, the old Ray-Ban cool, the California that imagined big and built big and knew that the rest of the world was dying to come here.

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, Joe Nocera wrote about Louis Armstrong, the father of that most American of art forms: jazz. Today, Daniel Akst pays tribute to Elisha Otis, the godfather of the American skyline. —The Editors

America was going places in the first half of the 19th century, and thanks to Elisha Otis, the booming young democracy got serious about going up.

Elisha Otis, born in 1811 in Vermont, was a farm boy more interested in agricultural equipment than in raising crops. At 19, he took his mechanical instincts off to Troy, New York, an important node in the second American revolution, this one industrial. There he set up factories for manufacturers, and everywhere saw opportunities for improving the world. He was, in the words of historian Jason Goodwin, “a stern and righteous churchman, and his Puritan God gave him a furious sense of imperfection. Almost everything he saw could be done better—faster, cheaper, more accurately—and he went at it with the energy of a man possessed.”

Yesterday, Californians went to the polls in primaries that could change the face of the state.

They are still counting the votes, but as we tape early Wednesday morning, Steve Hilton, the Republican and former British political strategist, is leading the governor’s race with nearly 28 percent of the vote, more than 2 percent ahead of expected front-runner Xavier Becerra.

And in the LA mayor’s race, Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star, came in a close second behind embattled Mayor Karen Bass, and outpaced the uber-progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who was described as LA’s answer to Zohran Mamdani. Pratt has done all this by waging an unorthodox, even Trumpy, war of common sense. As of now, Bass has 35 percent of the vote, Pratt has 30 percent, and Raman has 22 percent.

With many Angelenos frustrated by the current state of their city, former reality star Spencer Pratt has become the unlikely voice for LA’s discontented. Running an upstart campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, Pratt has tapped into a nerve, inspiring a grassroots movement and filling Angelenos’ social media feed with fan-created AI content.

From animated music videos set to Latin beats to superhero videos featuring Pratt as the city’s savior, these creations are popping up faster than ever, and helped ensure his second-place finish in the primary.

But who’s behind all of this? Video reporter Austyn Jeffs spent a day with AI creator Alex Leibow, who has helped make Pratt’s campaign messaging go viral. Leibow originally moved to LA for a career in the traditional TV and film industry, but after his Pacific Palisades home burned down, he found himself pulled into politics by Pratt. Now he spends his days trying to help Pratt turn the city around.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan writes about Richard Henry Lee and his resolution declaring the colonies free and independent states. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. 
—The Editors

With all the buildup to the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it’s easy to forget that the real suspense in Philadelphia 250 years ago was not over whether the Continental Congress would approve the document drafted by Thomas Jefferson but over whether the delegates would approve a resolution written by another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee.

Though Massachusetts delegate John Adams believed Congress had essentially declared independence in mid-May when it narrowly approved the statement that he had written calling for the authority of King George III to “be totally suppressed” in all 13 colonies (see our newsletter from two weeks ago), there was still considerable resistance to making independence official. It was Lee who forced the issue on June 7, 1776, when he introduced the following resolution: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Born just weeks before George Washington in the same Virginia county (Westmoreland), Lee belonged to one of colonial America’s most powerful families. John Adams would remember the Lees as “that band of brothers—intrepid and unchangeable—who like the Greeks at Thermopylae, stood in the gap, in defense of their country, from the first glimmering in the Revolution, in the horizon—through all its rising light, to its perfect day.”

Five of Lee’s brothers reached adulthood, and four found their way into leadership roles in the American Revolution. Younger brother Francis Lightfoot Lee served with Richard Henry in the Continental Congress (they’d both eventually sign the Declaration of Independence). Baby brothers William Lee and Arthur Lee carried out diplomacy in Europe. Meanwhile, older brother Thomas Ludwell Lee led the way in Williamsburg at the Virginia Convention, when it voted on May 15, 1776, to instruct its delegates to the Continental Congress to propose a resolution of independence. It was in obedience to those instructions that Richard Henry Lee introduced his resolution.