Substacks
A Professor Quits MIT. China’s Bullying Goes Global. Haley Surges. Oliver Wiseman
Today from the Free Press. . . a modest proposal for top profs, a Chinese intimidation campaign, updates from the campaign trail, and The Guardian worries that war is bad for the environment.
But first, our lead story. . .
Computer scientist Mauricio Karchmer was an MIT lecturer for four years. He loved his job—until Hamas’s attack on October 7. In the weeks that followed, Mauricio, who was born in Mexico to a Jewish family, encountered the “pervasive antisemitism on MIT’s campus.”
How pervasive?
“On November 14, one of the Israeli PhD students in my department confided to me that he was taking a few weeks off from the semester to return to Israel—an active war zone—because he needed to escape the toxicity of MIT’s campus. This week, he told me he is considering leaving MIT without completing his PhD.”
In his essay for The Free Press, Mauricio writes that he resigned because he cannot teach “those who lack the most basic critical thinking skills or emotional intelligence. Nor can I teach those who condemn my Jewish identity.”
Read his piece here:
For professors like Mauricio who are fed up with the politics of their elite students, Free Press columnist Ben Kawaller has an idea: “Why not trade the anxious, rebellious spawn of Democrats for the sunny, docile children of Republicans?”
Ben himself is most definitely not docile. Nor is he a Republican. “I have nothing against Republicans on an individual level—some of my best Twitter followers are Republicans. But I don’t have the temperance for conservatism. I do not conserve; I spew. Liberally. But you know what’s nice about Republicans? They raise happy, obedient kids.”
“It’s a nice fantasy, no?” he writes. “The idea of Steven Pinker ditching Harvard and taking off for Brigham Young, that bastion of free speech? Look, at least when you’re dealing with Republicans, the fascism comes from above, the way God intended.”
Britain Bends the Knee to China
Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong newspaper proprietor who has been in prison for more than 1,000 days and is currently on trial before a kangaroo court in Hong Kong, is one of the great examples of courage in our time.
As the Beijing-backed authorities tightened their grip on Lai’s pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, which they seized in 2020, Lai could have fled to the safety of one of his homes overseas. That is one of the luxuries of being a billionaire. Instead, he stayed to make a stand for free speech and shine a light on censorship in his once-liberal city-state. “I’m a troublemaker,” said Lai of his decision not to flee. “I came here with nothing, the freedom of this place has given me everything. Maybe it’s time I paid back for that freedom by fighting for it.”
Lai’s trial has shown how far authorities in Hong Kong will go to clamp down on free expression in Hong Kong. They are now taking their intimidation global.
As part of their case that Lai is guilty of “collusion with foreign forces,” prosecutors last week named international “co-conspirators.” One is a Brit called Luke de Pulford, an activist who runs the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. De Pulford has been dragged into the case because he once worked with Andy Li, who is expected to be a key witness for the prosecution.
A pro-democracy campaigner, Li was arrested and tortured after trying to escape Hong Kong in 2020. “After his torture, Andy started to cooperate with authorities,” said de Pulford, who explained that Hong Kong prosecutors plan to use Li’s coerced testimony to tie Lai to the pro-democracy movement.
“Andy never met Jimmy Lai, ever. So it is completely false. It is totally confected.”
You might think that the intimidation of a British citizen would trigger instant condemnation from de Pulford’s own government. But there has barely been a peep out of London.
I spoke to de Pulford shortly after he was named in the trial. He was frustrated but unsurprised by his government’s inaction. “Part of the reason that Beijing believes it can go after foreign nationals is because the pushback from democratic countries has been really weak,” he said.
Under the agreement through which the UK returned the colony to China, Beijing promised to preserve freedoms and judicial independence until 2047. But Beijing has not kept its promise and, de Pulford says, “The UK has done nothing at all to hold Beijing to account for the complete destruction of the joint declaration.”
On Tuesday, former British prime minister Liz Truss wrote a letter to foreign minister David Cameron calling for “robust action” after the naming of de Pulford and another British national, Bill Browder, as co-conspirators. Truss warned that the move marked “the first time foreign nationals have been named in this way and represents a clear escalation.” She called for an “urgent and unequivocal statement of support” of de Pulford and Browder.
De Pulford has been advised by British authorities not to travel to countries with extradition treaties with China, such as Spain and France. He said he isn’t wearing the “co-conspirator” label as a badge of honor. Rather, he sees the whole affair as “unspeakably sad.”
“This is happening as a result of the torture of a very good friend of mine. I don’t want to be pulled into it, nor do I want to dwell on myself,” he explained. “I live in a free country, and my freedoms aren’t massively curtailed by this. It is not to be compared to people like Jimmy, who will die in jail. Or people like Andy, who was tortured to ensure that Jimmy would die in jail.”
Stumbling toward the White House. . .
→ Haley-mentum: A new CNN/UNH poll shows Nikki Haley trailing Trump only by single digits in New Hampshire. In the latest sign that the former UN ambassador has real momentum, the survey puts Haley at 32 percent to Trump’s 39 percent. (Chris Christie is in a distant third with 12 percent.)
Haley’s 12-point surge since the last CNN/UNH poll in November is the latest sign that she has real momentum and is the candidate best positioned to stop her old boss from securing the GOP nomination for a third time.
Haley is absolutely loathed in MAGA world. They see her as nothing more than an establishment stooge (nevermind that the actual Republican establishment has skewed the rules of this primary to help Trump) and were terrified by recent reports Trump was considering her as a veep pick. In its own way, the mainstream media has chosen a similar framing, focusing on the donor class and the Haley-Trump psychodrama, or painting Haley as a throwback to a bygone era who just doesn’t get today’s politics. Missing from all of this: the actual voters for whom Haley is a compelling option. If the polls are right, there are a lot of them.
→ Not that keen for Dean: I admit to having a soft spot for Dean Phillips. The Democrat taking on Biden in the primary seems like a nice guy (he’s from Minnesota, after all), and whether or not you agree with his milquetoast politics, the guy is giving it his best shot and refusing to toe the party line. Hard work, independence, and good hair: these are Free Press values, folks!
And so I felt a pang of sadness yesterday when I saw a picture of a lonely-looking Phillips sitting in the freezing New Hampshire winter at a campaign event to which no one showed up. Per CBS’s Jake Rosen, Phillips said: “Sometimes if you build it, they don’t come.”
Keep your chin up, Dean. The night is always darkest just before the dawn and all that. After your inauguration next year, we’ll hang this image in the West Wing as a reminder of how far you’ve come; right next to the “Bartlet for America” napkin.
→ It’s his party and he’ll bail if he wants to: In another example of the many petty humiliations of life as a presidential candidate, RFK Jr. had to bail on his own birthday fundraiser gala. A bunch of celebs were slated to attend, but then Martin Sheen, Dionne Warwick, Mike Tyson, and Andrea Bocelli all backed out. And so RFK decided it was his party and he’ll stay home if he wants to. The Camelot scion evidently knows that the only thing worse than no party is a party where no one shows up.
→ Democracy for me but not for thee: Everything is going to be just fine come November. No need to worry about a bipartisan crisis of democratic legitimacy. No need to doubt that everyone is going to respect the process this year. No need to put too much stock in a new poll from YouGov, which finds that 81 percent of Democrats think states should take Trump’s name off the ballot.
Also on our radar. . .
→ Chabad lads: It was a war between black hats and blue badges at a synagogue in Crown Heights—perhaps the most famous one in the world, where the Lubavitcher Rebbe lived and worked until he died—when students tried to block an illegal tunnel that they had dug from being sealed off with cement trucks. Apparently, the young Jews jumped in the tunnel and started praying, and fighting with Chabad leadership, and the NYPD was called, and a mini riot broke out; the students could barely lift the long tables to throw them at the cops, so it was more of an attempted riot.
TFP tips our hat to anyone who tries to cut through bureaucratic red tape and snag a few more square feet of real estate in the most expensive city on earth. But it’s probably best to leave the general contracting to the pros. And while the memes have been great, the far-right, Simon of Trent-style conspiracies about Jews running a subterranean child trafficking ring have not.
→ Hipsters for Houthis: The Houthis are cool now. Here’s a crowd in London this weekend chanting in support of the Yemeni terrorists attacking civilian ships in the Red Sea: “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! How many ships have you turned around?”
→ But think of the emissions!: The human toll of the Israel-Hamas war is impossible to ignore. From the atrocities of October 7 to the suffering of the Palestinian people, it’s hard not to be moved by what is happening in Gaza. But one thing I am most definitely not worried about is the conflict’s carbon footprint. It’s a different story over at The Guardian, where the paper’s “climate justice” reporter brings readers an alarming exclusive: war is bad for the environment. Turns out that air strikes are quite carbon-intensive. We have not yet reached carbon neutrality when it comes to modern urban warfare. Who knew?
Whining Wolverines
As you probably know by now, Michigan’s football team beat Washington on Monday to win their first national championship in 26 years. Free Press intern Evan Gardner rains on their parade.
As the Michigan Wolverines were celebrating their championship win on Monday night, with blue and maize confetti raining down on the field, Coach Harbaugh told reporters, “There’s a story in every one of those pieces of confetti.” MVP running back Blake Corum struck a similar note: “When we faced adversity we just looked to our right, looked to our left, and knew we couldn’t let our brothers down, and that’s what we did.”
For those of you who don’t follow college football, the “adversity” Michigan had faced was the revelation they had stolen opponents’ play-calling signals. The controversy led to a settlement and a three-game suspension for Harbaugh.
It wasn’t enough for Michigan to win. They had to turn their victory into an inspirational battle against the odds. The cheating wasn’t awkwardly ignored. It became the team’s origin story. It was Michigan against the world, and they pulled it off.
Nevermind that Michigan is a well-funded football powerhouse. Never mind that these underdogs are backed by the college sports equivalent of super PACs, called “collectives,” that pay their players, often under the guise of charity.
Persecution complexes are everywhere in American public life today, from the football field to the campaign trail. A victimized odds-on favorite that inspires a cult-like following, bankrolled by super PACs and claiming to wage a righteous crusade against the powers that be. Sound familiar?
That’s right: Michigan is the Donald Trump of college football.
And now, a rebuttal from our resident Michigan alum, Suzy Weiss.
Stolen signals, super PACs, a victimhood mindset—all I have to say, and all there’s really left to say, is Hail to the Victors and Go Blue forever!
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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Shortly after midnight last night, the Justice Department released special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The 137-page report concludes that “substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump…engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”
The report explains the case Smith and his team compiled against Trump. It outlines the ways in which evidence proved Trump broke laws, and it lays out the federal interests served by prosecuting Trump. It explains how the team investigated Trump, interviewing more than 250 people and obtaining the testimony of more than 55 witnesses before a grand jury, and how Justice Department policy governed that investigation. It also explains how Trump’s litigation and the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprising determination that Trump enjoyed immunity from prosecution for breaking laws as part of his official duties dramatically slowed the prosecution.
There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.
It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.
Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.
The report explains why the Justice Department did not bring charges against Trump for insurrection, noting that such cases are rare and definitions of “insurrection” are unclear, raising concerns that such a charge would endanger the larger case.
The report explained that prosecuting Trump served important national interests. The government has an interest in the integrity of the country’s process for “collecting, counting, and certifying presidential elections.” It cares about “a peaceful and orderly transition of presidential power.” It cares that “every citizen’s vote is counted” and about “protecting public officials and government workers from violence.” Finally, it cares about “the fair and even-handed enforcement of the law.”
While the report contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies. There was no evidence that he won the 2020 election; to the contrary, all evidence showed he lost it. Even he didn’t appear to believe he had won. And yet, by the sheer power of repeating the lie that he had won and getting his cronies to repeat it, along with embellishments that were also lies—about suitcases of ballots, and thumb drives, and voting machines, and so on—he induced his followers to try to overthrow a free and fair election and install him in the presidency.
He continued this disinformation after he left office, and then engaged in lawfare, with both him and friendly witnesses slowing down his cases by challenging subpoenas until there were no more avenues to challenge them. And then the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.
The report calls out the extraordinary July 2024 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States declaring that presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts. “Before this case,” the report reads, “no court had ever found that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal immunity on the President.” It continued: “[N]o President whose conduct was investigated (other than Mr. Trump) ever claimed absolute criminal immunity for all official acts.”
The report quoted the dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noting that the decision of the Republican-appointed justices “effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”
That observation hits hard today, as January 14 is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the independence of the United States from Great Britain. The colonists had thrown off monarchy and determined to have a government of laws, not of men.
But Trump threw off that bedrock principle with a lie. His success recalls how Confederates who lost the Civil War resurrected their cause by claiming that the lenience of General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States toward officers and soldiers who surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 showed not the mercy of a victor but rather an understanding that the Confederates’ defense of human slavery was superior to the ideas of those trying to preserve the United States as a land based in the idea that all men were created equal.
When no punishment was forthcoming for those who had tried to destroy the United States, that story of Appomattox became the myth of the Lost Cause, defending the racial hierarchies of the Old South and attacking the federal government that tried to make opportunity and equal rights available for everyone. In response to federal protection of Black rights after 1948, when President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military, Confederate symbols and Confederate ideology began their return to the front of American culture, where they fed the reactionary right. The myth of the Lost Cause and Trump’s lie came together in the rioters who carried the Confederate battle flag when they breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is adamant about restoring the names of Confederate generals to U.S. military installations. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee began today.
The defense secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion. Hegseth has none of the usual qualifications of defense secretaries. As Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare pointed out today, he has “never held a policy role…never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers…never been elected to anything.”
Hegseth suggested his lack of qualifications was a strength, saying in his opening statement that while “[i]t is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years…as President Trump…told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’…and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
The “dust on his boots” claim was designed to make Hegseth’s authenticity outweigh his lack of credentials, but former Marine pilot Amy McGrath pointed out that Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis and Biden’s defense secretary Lloyd Austin, both of whom reached the top ranks of the military, each came from the infantry.
Hegseth has settled an accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’ nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”
When Hegseth was in the Army National Guard, a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations. Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”
Wittes noted after today’s hearing that “[t]he words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up. The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed. By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’”
Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) spoke today in favor of Hegseth, and Republicans initially uncomfortable with the nominee appear to be coming around to supporting him. But Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee, and they made it clear that they will not make the vote easy for Republicans.
The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) said he did not believe Hegseth was qualified for the position. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) exposed his lack of knowledge about U.S. allies and bluntly told him he was unqualified, later telling MSNBC that Hegseth will be an easy target for adversaries with blackmail material.
Hegseth told the armed services committee that all the negative information about him was part of a “smear campaign,” at the same time that he refused to say he would refuse to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs or refuse an unconstitutional order.
After the release of Jack Smith’s report, Trump posted on his social media channel that regardless of what he had done to the country, voters had exonerated him: “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” he wrote, lying about a victory in which more voters chose someone other than him. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
It’s as if the Confederates’ descendants have captured the government of the United States.
Notes:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0026-0004
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation–the-cult-of-unqualified-authenticity
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/pete-hegseth-books-trump/680744/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/politics/pete-hegseth-confederate-generals-military-bases/index.html
Bluesky:
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X:
amymcgrathky/status/1879162507992215694
If you want to know what a post-woke military might look like, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Pentagon just gave America a preview.
At his nomination hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Pete Hegseth pledged that he would direct his secretary of the Navy to focus on rebuilding the fleet instead of climate change. His secretary of the Army would focus on making war more lethal and effective, instead of figuring out how to build tanks that don’t run on gasoline. And the standards for military promotion would be based on merit, not a person’s skin color, sexuality, or gender.
Hegseth said that under his leadership, he would take steps to reverse the Pentagon’s decision to fire tens of thousands of service members who refused to take the Covid vaccine. “In President Trump’s Defense Department they will be apologized to. They will be reinstituted with pay and rank,” the nominee said.
It was a contentious hearing, as Democrats attacked Hegseth for everything from allegations of his marital infidelity and sexual assault to his lack of experience managing an organization as large and complex as the Pentagon. But the Republicans made Hegseth out to be the real victim, and by the time the hearing ended, it seemed like a near lock that he’ll be confirmed.
American lawmakers are about to determine the future of pornography, or they’re trying, at least. In recent years, nineteen states—most of them Republican-led—have passed legislation that requires any site with a significant amount of adult content to prove all its users are over 18. Most recently, on New Year’s Day, a new law called HB 3 took effect in my home state of Florida, where porn sites now face fines of up to $50,000 for every violation. But this week, such laws could be found unconstitutional.
This is all thanks to the Free Speech Coalition, a sort of NRA for pornographers, which has sued Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a religious hard-liner, over that state’s age verification law. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear FSC’s case, which argues that these porn laws undermine free speech, infringe on privacy, and hurt American companies, while doing nothing to block foreign and fringe sites that don’t comply with U.S. laws.
The rationale behind the laws is understandable: Studies have shown that pornography consumption by teenagers can lead to misogynistic attitudes and increased sexual aggression. It’s also linked to mental health problems and increased rates of unsafe sex. More to the point, most parents are uncomfortable with the idea of their children having access to terabytes worth of hardcore pornography at the touch of a button.
But these laws are fundamentally pointless. First etched into mammoth tusks 40,000 years ago, porn predates the written word. It is inevitable—and in the internet age, infinitely accessible—even in places where so-called “porn bans” have been enacted.
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