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After Assad Oliver Wiseman

Published

1 month ago

December 9, 2024

People celebrate at Umayyad Square in Damascus after the fall of Assad. (Louai Beshara via Getty Images)

It’s Monday, December 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: why preemptive pardons are a bad idea, letters to the editor, our next live event, and more.

But first: the fall of Assad.

A despotic dynasty came to a dramatic end over the weekend, when Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, reportedly for Moscow. It is, as foreign correspondent par excellence Dexter Filkins put it in a Free Press Q & A yesterday, “a pivotal event in the history of the modern Middle East.”

The regional ramifications are huge. As Dexter explained in his exchange with my colleague Adam Rubenstein, with Assad’s fall, “the Iranian project lies in ruins.” It’s a loss for Vladimir Putin, too. Assad has gone from being one of Moscow’s most important allies to its newest resident. And a bad weekend for the self-styled “Axis of Resistance” is a good weekend. Period.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of reason to fear what might come next. Among them: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the former al-Qaeda militant who leads the dominant rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and now rules Damascus. Al-Jolani says his hard-line Islamist days are behind him. CNN has described his journey “from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary’.” Let’s see about that. You hardly need to be a cynic to doubt that a beautiful multiethnic, multi-faith Syrian democracy is about to blossom, like a rose in the desert (to borrow the headline of maybe the most regrettable article in the history of Vogue). Less cheery possible outcomes include repressive Islamist rule, feuding warlords, and the disintegration of the state of Syria.

Western powers are evidently hoping for the best while planning for the worst. In recent days, Israel has conducted air strikes against military sites linked to Assad’s chemical weapons and ballistic missile programs. IDF troops have moved into Syrian territory in a step Benjamin Netanyahu characterized as a “temporary defensive position.” And the United States struck ISIS camps in Syria on Sunday.

And yet how can the images out of Syria not spark some optimism? Ordinary people toppling statues and dancing in the streets, political prisoners—including, impossibly, a toddler—liberated from Assad’s notorious prisons. A tyrant’s palace ransacked. An evil man sent packing.

“It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutal tyranny of the House of Assad without feeling joy,” writes the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore in our lead story today. “But this is the Middle East,” he continues. “Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse. And anyone who studies history knows that predictions are for fools.”

To really understand what just happened—and what might happen next—Simon argues that you need to go back further than the start of the Syrian civil war, or the start of the Assad family’s blood-soaked half-century in power.

Read Simon Sebag Montefiore on the long, messy history behind this weekend’s dramatic news—and what comes next.

Book Now: A Live Recording of Honestly with Simon Sebag Montefiore

We’re thrilled to announce that—as well as writing this insightful piece on Syria for us—Simon Sebag Montefiore will appear alongside Bari at an in-person Free Press event in New York next month. Bari and Simon will discuss Jerusalem for a live recording of Honestly. Simon recently updated his brilliant “biography” of the city for a new edition—and events in the Middle East make this conversation about a city that has endured so much as timely as ever.

Join Simon and Bari on the evening of Wednesday, January 22, at the Streicker Center in New York City. For more information and to reserve your tickets before they sell out, click here.

Preemptive Pardons Are a Terrible Idea

In the final days of the Biden administration, some of the president’s closest advisers are debating whether he should issue preemptive pardons for Democrats and other public figures against whom Trump has threatened retribution. Blanket pardons like this would be an extraordinary, unprecedented step. And a mistake, argues Eli Lake. Far from protecting public life from our downward spiral of lawfare, Eli thinks it’d be the latest example of one side using the other’s bad behavior as an excuse for their own breach of important norms. And that, he writes, is how republics unravel.

Read Eli Lake’s full take on the problem with preemptive pardons.

And for more on presidential pardons, watch Batya Ungar-Sargon’s latest Free Press Live monologue:

Letters to the Editor

We tackle some weighty issues on our letters page this week. “I’ve watched someone I love die,” explains one reader, as he makes the case for legalized assisted suicide. Another reader responds to Charles Fain Lehman’s recent report on the fight to legalize psychedelics. And a third argues that, by learning how to kill and butcher the meat she eats, Free Press writer Larissa Phillips has more in common with vegans than she realizes.

Read the letters here.

And if you have a unique perspective on a Free Press story, why not write a letter of your own? Drop us a line at letters@thefp.com.

“I Need You to Protect Me”

Gazelle Sharmahd’s father Jamshid was born in Iran, raised in Germany, and lived in America for twenty years. He used his expertise as a software engineer to help Iranian dissidents and opposition figures circumvent the regime’s repression. And for that, he became an enemy of the mullahs. In 2009, the regime sent assassins to the United States to kill him. The plot was foiled by the FBI. Then, in 2020, he was kidnapped in Dubai and taken back to Iran, where he was imprisoned on trumped-up terrorism charges. This October, Jamshid—a German Iranian dual citizen and a longtime U.S. resident—was executed.

In this Free Press video, we hear from Gazelle Sharmahd about her father, and what the media gets wrong about the regime that killed him. Watch her interview below:

Notre Dame reopened Saturday, five years after a fire destroyed its roof—and came close to destroying the whole cathedral. The great and the good were in attendance for the ceremony to reopen the spiritual heart of Paris, which was a master class in French pageantry. My favorite moment? The Archbishop of Paris “awakening” the cathedral’s organ after half a decade of silence.
The ceremony was also a return to the world stage for Donald Trump, who you just know wasn’t going to miss a show like this. And European leaders didn’t miss the opportunity to grab some face time with the last and next leader of the free world. And he seemed to have a great time. He ordered a Coke (regular) from Emmanuel Macron. He told Prince William he was doing a “fantastic” job. And, more importantly, he reportedly had a constructive conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky. Also in attendance: Jill Biden, who was snapped in some friendly-looking pictures with Trump. (Trump later used one photograph to sell his new line of perfumes and colognes, “Fight, Fight, Fight.”)

Joe Biden said that he believes that Austin Tice, the American journalist who went missing in Syria in 2012, is alive. “We will want to get him out,” said Biden at a press briefing at the White House Sunday. “We have to identify where he is.” Tice’s family said they had fresh evidence that he is alive, but on Friday expressed their frustration with the Biden administration’s handling of Austin’s case.

Donald Trump said he would not fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell before the end of his term. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t see it,” said Trump on Sunday’s Meet the Press. Powell’s term is up in 2026 and last month, he told reporters that it is “not permitted under the law” for the president to fire him, and that he would not step down if Trump asked him to. Trump appointed Powell to the post in 2017, and frequently applied public pressure to him regarding interest rate decisions in 2018 and 2019.

The University of Michigan will no longer ask for diversity statements when considering candidates for hiring, promotion, and tenure, according to an official statement. This announcement arrived last week on the heels of a New York Times investigation that revealed the Big Ten school spent more than a quarter-billion dollars on diversity, equity, and inclusion over a 10-year period—more than half of which went to salaries for DEI staff.
Nearly half of Harvard students mentioned race in their college application essays, according to a survey of Harvard’s first freshman class since the Supreme Court ruled against race-based admissions. And one in four students said they felt pressure to mention race in their applications. We sympathize with these students and their race anxiety, though it surely is not as punishing as the pressure to humbly admit they “went to college in Boston.”

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor at The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

The Free Press earns a commission from all qualifying purchases made through book links in this article, including as an Amazon Associate.

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

5 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

8 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

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Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/