Substacks
Free Speech on Trial. SpaceX’s Man-Made Miracle. Plus. . . Oliver Wiseman
On Monday morning, Jay Bhattacharya was feeling optimistic. The Stanford professor of health research policy was in Washington, D.C., to listen to oral arguments in the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. He is one of the plaintiffs in the case looking at the Biden administration’s efforts to police speech relating to the pandemic and the 2020 election on social media. Last year, Jay’s side won in a lower court. (You can read his op-ed about that victory in The Free Press here.)
Thanks to his dissenting views on everything from lockdowns to masks, Jay was censored by Big Tech during the pandemic. The question for the justices is whether the government violated his First Amendment rights by urging social media platforms to take down certain posts Jay wrote. A lower court ruled that the Biden administration’s requests to remove content were coupled with threats of punishment through heavier regulation—and therefore amounted to unconstitutional coercion.
Jay expected things to go well in the Supreme Court, not least because of the three pro–First Amendment justices appointed by President Trump. But, as he told me when we spoke on Tuesday, “some of the justices showed almost no regard whatsoever for the free speech rights of Americans.” For example, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said her “biggest concern” is that the case uses the First Amendment as a means of “hamstringing the government in significant ways.”
As Jay points out, “That’s the very purpose of the First Amendment: to restrict the government from violating basic speech rights.”
Brown Jackson, a liberal justice appointed by President Biden, was always going to be skeptical of Jay’s side of the case. But most Supreme Court reporters agreed that even the court’s swing votes weren’t swinging in a pro–First Amendment direction.
Jay said that after a day of legal argument he “left feeling deflated.” His lawyer, Jenin Younes, wasn’t so gloomy. “It went about as I predicted it would,” she said, sketching out what she saw to be the dynamics on the bench, with three sympathetic justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas), three swing votes (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts), and three skeptics (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Brown Jackson).
The court will hand down its decision by June—and so Jay and his legal team have plenty of time to read the tea leaves.
Meanwhile, Murthy v. Missouri is only one in a series of First Amendment cases being heard by the Supreme Court this session. The others are:
The Netchoice cases, which deal with laws in Texas and Florida that limit the freedom of social media companies to moderate content on their platforms. The cases pit the free speech rights of those companies against the rights of their users.
A case concerning whether a New York official violated the National Rifle Association’s First Amendment rights when, after the 2018 Parkland shooting, she urged banks and insurance companies to stop working with the group.
A case looking at whether public officials can block you on social media. (This week, the court has already decided, unanimously, that they cannot.)
All these cases apply the First Amendment to the social media age, but the first two are most important. With Netchoice, the court will decide whether social media companies should be treated as publishers—or as a modern-day public utility. And with Jay’s case, the court will decide whether the powers of the counter-disinformation complex—through which so much modern censorship occurs—are legitimate, or if those powers need to be checked.
As for Jay, he is still working through the mixed emotions he felt in the courtroom on Monday. “As an immigrant to the United States, I had tingles when I walked into the court,” he said. “I never imagined I would be in the middle of something that, I think, will go down in American history.
“But also, I felt a lot of sadness,” he told me, because his work relies on the First Amendment. “As a scientist and a professor, the heart of my job is to speak. And I have to look over my shoulder and worry whether the government is going to censor my speech. That’s just shocking.”
The Man-Made Miracle of SpaceX
For a media obsessed with Elon Musk, nothing brings more schadenfreude than a SpaceX rocket going up in flames. Except all the gloating over SpaceX’s experiments misses the point. What the press has reported as failure is really its winning formula: learn from your mistakes and iterate quickly until you can repeat success.
Finally, last week, SpaceX notched up a big win when its Starship rocket made it to space.
It was the most exciting moment for American space in years, writes Max Meyer in The Free Press. Yes, the Starship’s Super Heavy booster disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, but not before it managed to connect to SpaceX’s satellite internet network and livestream its flight to millions of viewers. Don’t listen to the haters, argues Max. SpaceX is innovating at breakneck speed, reopening the frontier and inspiring the rest of us to do crazy and hard things because they are crazy and hard. And if they figure out a way of colonizing Mars, that’d be cool too.
Here’s Max on the man-made miracle of SpaceX:
Ten Stories We’re Reading
Just 29.8 percent of New Yorkers rate the quality of life in New York City as “excellent” or “good,” compared to 51.2 percent in 2017. It’s up to you, New York. (CBC Resident Feedback Survey)
Joe Biden ruled out supporting Israel’s operation in Rafah in a call with Bibi Netanyahu on Monday. Israel is sending a delegation to Washington to discuss alternatives. And negotiations between Hamas and Israel are back underway in Qatar. (WSJ)
Donald Trump said that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion, they hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves.” (The Hill)
How Trump embraced the January 6 prisoner movement. Please stand for the J6 Prison Choir. (Semafor)
Companies are finding new ways to store energy—in balloons. Is this a climate change game changer? (NYT)
Now’s the time for austerity. Washington, tighten your belt! (Matthew Yglesias)
Europe’s soldiers keep quitting—just when NATO needs them. (Politico)
Protesters in Cuba decry power outages and food shortages. The regime has blamed America. Because of course. (CBS)
Iranians are dancing in the streets—and breaking the rules doing it. (FT)
They praised AI at SXSW—and the audience started booing. (Ted Gioia)
“White Rural Rage” and the Demonization of the Countryside
Remember that brief period of introspection after 2016 when liberal journalists and academics actually showed some curiosity about why, exactly, Donald Trump was so popular—especially among rural, working-class voters? Well, needless to say, we are in a different era now.
The elites have swapped their copies of Hillbilly Elegy for less sympathetic studies—like the book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. For his piece today, Sohrab Ahmari cracks the spine of this new look at the MAGA faithful and finds it to be exactly as nuanced and fair-minded as its title suggests.
Sohrab finds that the Washington book du jour—which the authors have been plugging in condescending segments on cable news—uses shoddy data to paint a negative picture of the antidemocratic barbarians who lie just beyond the city gates. It’s typical of today’s progressive contempt for rural America, he writes.
Read Sohrab’s full argument here:
If you like what you read, come and listen to Sohrab Ahmari argue that America should shut its borders in our Free Press debate on immigration on April 11 at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas. For tickets and further details, click here.
Chicago Takes Action on the Migrant Crisis. But Are the Voters Any Happier?
In January, Free Press staff writer Olivia Reingold met the Chicagoans furious at their city’s handling of the migrant crisis.
(Read her dispatch: “They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants.”)
Two months on, Chicago’s progressive mayor Brandon Johnson has finally shown signs that he is listening to the voters who say the city is struggling to handle the strain of new arrivals.
This week, Chicago began evictions to enforce a new 60-day limit designed to get migrants out of city-run shelters and into permanent housing. The new policy will see more than 2,000 migrants evicted by the end of April. (Approximately 11,000 migrants are currently housed in city-run shelters.)
Is the eviction policy easing voter anger? Or will the immigration issue continue to turn voters in this deep-blue city red? Olivia made a few calls to find out.
(Trigger warning: if you’re reading this in the White House and don’t want to be in a bad mood for the rest of the day, you may want to skip the next few paragraphs.)
Thomas Simmons is a 70-year-old retired city commissioner who says he “used to be a true Democrat.” He told The Free Press that the new 60-day limit is “full of bull. If you’re going to evict them, why not just send them back?”
Simmons, who is black, says the migrant crisis has forced him to reconsider his political allegiances: “It made me more open to Trump. When he wins, he’s going to send them back. . . . Honestly, I’m going for Trump.”
Roland Dates, a black, 62-year-old lifelong Democrat from Chicago’s West Side, says the migrant crisis keeps getting worse. Speaking to The Free Press the day before the Illinois primary, he said, “I’m going to go straight Republican. . . I’ve got to go with the lesser of two evils.”
Dates is skeptical that the 60-day eviction policy will really change how the city handles migrants. “That’s a game,” he says. “They say that, but they’ll just get an extension and another extension.”
Of his voting intentions come November, he says: “I guess Trump’s the man.”
Letters to the Editor: Lockdown Edition
On Saturday, we ran the latest installment of our Prophets series, which pays tribute to thinkers from the past who predicted our current moment. For his entry, Joe Nocera wrote about D.A. Henderson, the epidemiologist credited with eradicating smallpox who warned against shutting down the world to combat a pandemic.
Joe’s article prompted a response from someone who actually knew Henderson, who died in 2016: Donald G. McNeil Jr., the former New York Times science correspondent and author of a new book on pandemics, The Wisdom of Plagues. Here’s his letter:
Joe Nocera suggests that D.A. Henderson, were he alive today, would agree with the premises of Joe’s new book, The Big Fail, particularly the idea that lockdowns were the wrong response to the Covid pandemic.
Unlike Joe (I suspect), I actually knew D.A. Henderson. I interviewed him frequently and I wrote his New York Times obituary—from which Joe quotes. When presented with new facts, D.A. would change his mind. I gave examples of that in the obit. While Joe is correct in saying that Henderson warned that closing down society to stop a pandemic would have unpleasant consequences, that does not mean he would have backed the absurd idea advanced in the Great Barrington Declaration that we should have just let the virus rip through the population (while somehow—they never explained how—magically “protecting the vulnerable”). That was a ridiculous, dangerous idea, and the Great Barrington epidemiologists—and their acolytes, like Scott Atlas, a member of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force—kept insisting that the end of the pandemic was just around the corner, thanks to their theory that it would stop when 30 percent of the population had been infected. They were wrong. As early as the late summer of 2020, Atlas was insisting that the epidemic was fading away. At the time, about 200,000 Americans were dead; another 900,000 more would die after he made that statement.
Joe cites Sweden as a model we should have emulated. It’s an article of faith among lockdown skeptics that Sweden did great during the pandemic. It did not. It became famous in the spring of 2020 for taking a laissez-faire approach. Before the year ended, the country—including the king and the epidemiologist who came up with the laissez-faire policy—admitted that it had failed because so many Swedes had died (mostly in nursing homes). Lockdowns and school closures, much like those in the rest of Europe, were imposed. By the time the pandemic was over, Sweden had a far higher Covid death rate than any of its neighbors (about 2,700 deaths per million vs. 1,200 for next-door Norway). It had more deaths per capita than Germany and was on a par with Spain and France. In other words, it did just about average in Western Europe.
And the U.S. did terribly, with a higher Covid death rate (3,600/million) than any Western European country. In my book The Wisdom of Plagues I, like Joe, argue that we failed terribly in the face of Covid—but because we reacted too slowly, too incompetently, with too much political fragmentation. And that ultimately, the most important reason for our high death rate was vaccine rejection.
I’ve been denounced as a totalitarian for arguing in favor of a rapid, aggressive, Pentagon-like response to epidemics, for closing borders, restricting travel, ending home quarantine, ending religious exemptions, and imposing rigorous vaccine mandates (and, yes, brief but rigidly enforced shutdowns and mask mandates if testing data suggest that they will keep local hospitals from being overwhelmed—not to please teachers unions). I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid. And I think that if we don’t get better at this, we’ll lose more Americans next time.
And I’m pretty sure D.A., were he still alive, would agree with me rather than with Scott Atlas.
—Donald McNeil
And here’s Joe’s response:
Donald McNeil spent most of his career as an infectious disease reporter for The New York Times, so it’s not a surprise that he advocates for the Covid mitigation measures championed by his public health sources. But that also causes him to share the same blind spots—overlooking important factors that Henderson pointed out in his 2006 paper.
The first is that a “rapid, aggressive, Pentagon-like response” doesn’t take into account a hugely important factor: human behavior. You simply can’t lock people up in their homes, shut down their businesses, eliminate every venue for human contact and enjoyment, and expect people to put up with it indefinitely. China took exactly that approach, and its citizens ultimately revolted. When the government finally relented and allowed cities like Shanghai to open up again, a lot of people died.
Second, Henderson understood, as I quoted him in my story: “You have to be practical, and you have to be humble, about what public health can actually do, especially over sustained periods.” The person who recalled that quote for me was Dr. Tara O’Toole, Henderson’s longtime number two. I venture that she knew him even better than McNeil. And much of what McNeil calls for, such as travel restrictions, simply don’t work. We know now that most of the masks people used during the pandemic didn’t stop the virus either. Lockdowns? The evidence is overwhelming that lockdowns did not ultimately save lives.
Third, McNeil fails to make important distinctions—distinctions that are key to understanding the rationale behind the Great Barrington Declaration. As Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of that document, told me, “There is an enormous age difference in the risk of mortality—a thousandfold difference between the old and the young.” The elderly were highly vulnerable to the virus, but as you went down the age scale, people were less likely to die from it. And the number of children who died of Covid was miniscule. McNeil doesn’t mention the harm done to children by lengthy school closings, but it was far worse than any harm inflicted on them by the pandemic. On the flip side, of the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, some 200,000 were nursing home residents. McNeil scoffs at the idea that society could protect the elderly while letting the rest of society function, but of course we could. We just chose not to.
McNeil’s view that D.A. Henderson would have turned his back on his lifelong beliefs, based on real-world experience, seems pretty unlikely. So much of life requires balancing risks versus rewards. Pandemics are no different. As bad as the virus was, public-health experts made a grievous mistake overselling the risks to the exclusion of all else. That is why they have so little credibility today. That’s what Henderson understood, and McNeil doesn’t.
—Joe Nocera
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Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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Tesla, as a publicly traded company, does not exist to serve the interests of Elon Musk, its CEO. Rather, it must act in the interests of all its shareholders.
The electric car company ran into some trouble in this regard when it agreed to a massive compensation package for Musk in 2018. The deal resulted in Musk being awarded more than $50 billion in stock options, which, combined with his existing shares of Tesla and other assets, made him the richest person in the world.
Musk’s pay was approved by the board of directors and a vote of shareholders. It also required Musk to meet ambitious growth and profitability targets. But in January, Delaware Chancery Court Chief Judge Kathaleen McCormick invalidated the whole thing. In a 201-page decision, McCormick sided with Tesla shareholders challenging Musk’s pay. She found that the company’s board of directors breached their fiduciary duty by granting Musk excessive compensation and failing to be transparent with shareholders.
McCormick noted that the scope of Musk’s pay package was unprecedented — “250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation plan and over 33 times larger than the plan’s closest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation plan.” Further, Musk enjoyed “thick ties with the directors tasked with negotiating on behalf of Tesla, and dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan.”
Ira Ehrenpreis, who chaired the compensation committee, is a longtime friend of Musk who has invested tens of millions in Musk’s companies and bought the first Tesla Model 3. Another committee member was Antonio Gracias, a friend and business associate who regularly vacations with Musk. The shareholders who sued to void Musk’s pay package noted that these board members were described to shareholders as “independent” prior to the vote on Musk’s pay. (Another Tesla board member is Musk’s brother, Kimball.)
Tesla General Counsel Todd Maron, “Musk’s former divorce attorney… whose admiration for Musk moved him to tears during his deposition,” also played a key role in the process. But the reality was that there wasn’t much of a process at all. Musk proposed the amount and structure of his pay, and the board approved it. During the legal proceedings, Gracias admitted there was no “positional negotiation.”
How has Tesla’s “independent” board responded to a mortifying legal defeat? Has it proposed changing its governance structure to create genuine independence from Musk? Has it proposed a more reasonable level of compensation for its CEO? Nope. Instead, the board voted to award Musk the exact same pay package a court just decided was unfair, retroactively. And now, they are asking Tesla’s shareholders to approve the plan on June 13 — or early by proxy vote.
The Tesla board has created a dedicated website, SupportTeslaValue.com, to encourage shareholders to give Musk $50 billion. Originally, the pay package was supposed to incentivize Musk to work hard for the company. This never made much sense since Musk, at the time, already owned more than 20% of the company and was incentivized for Tesla to succeed. Before the 2018 compensation package, every time Tesla’s value increased by $50 billion, Musk earned $10 billion.
Now, this argument makes even less sense because the company is compensating him for work that has already been done. So, the board chair Robyn Denholm asks shareholders to approve Musk’s pay package reactively as “a matter of fundamental fairness and respect to our CEO.”
Denholm, who became board chair in 2018, is incentivized not to rock the boat. In 2021 and 2022, Denholm cashed out over $280 million in Tesla stock options. She described the wealth she has achieved at Tesla as “life-changing.” Meanwhile, the “average total compensation for board members in the largest 200 U.S. companies was $329,351 in 2023.”
It’s a team effort. On X, Musk is rallying his supporters to approve his massive pay package.
2024 is not 2021
In the company’s proxy statement, Tesla urges current shareholders to retroactively award Musk $50 billion to recognize the “stockholder value” that Musk delivered as CEO. But not all current Tesla shareholders have benefited from Musk’s leadership. On November 5, 2021, the price of one share of Tesla stock was $407.36. Current shareholders who bought their stock that day have lost nearly 60% of their investment. Since the beginning of the year, Tesla stock has lost almost 30% of its value. Musk himself has unloaded about $39 billion in shares.
Musk would not be entitled to his full compensation package based on the company’s current valuation. He was awarded about 1% of Tesla’s outstanding stock each time the company’s value increased by $50 billion, up to $650 billion. Tesla’s current market value is less than $550 billion. The Tesla board voted to compensate Musk as if the company was still worth $650 billion.
Tesla’s future prospects are also much less rosy than three years ago. Global demand for electric vehicles is slowing, and Tesla faces increased competition from nearly every global automaker. Tesla’s core vehicle lineup is dated. And its one new entrant, the CyberTruck, has been a bust. Plans to build a less expensive model, seen as a key to future growth, were scraped. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla reported “its first year-over-year decline in quarterly deliveries since 2020.”
Musk’s embrace of far-right politics and bigoted conspiracy theories appears to have damaged Tesla’s brand. Today, just 31% of people in the United States would consider buying a Tesla, down from 70% in November 2021.
Increasingly, Musk is staking the company’s future on his plan to make Tesla’s fully autonomous. The “Full Self Driving” product currently “requires drivers to pay attention at all times and doesn’t make cars autonomous.” Musk first claimed that Teslas would be fully self-driving in 2016. Since then, he’s repeatedly announced that his vision was just around the corner but failed to deliver. In 2019, for example, he said that Tesla robotaxis would begin operating in 2020.
Tesla “forecasted the robo-taxis would last 11 years, drive 1 million miles and make $30,000 gross profit per car annually.” At the time, Musk said it was “financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla.”
Now, Musk is promising a robo-taxi by August 8.
But robo-taxis already exist — they just aren’t operated by Tesla.
Musk is also hyping Tesla’s Optimus robot, claiming it “will be able to perform useful tasks in the factory by the end of the year and could reach the market by the end of 2025.” Musk says the Optimus is “more valuable than everything else [at Tesla] combined.” One analyst called Musk’s claims about Optimus “utter nonsense and borderline investor fraud.”
$50 billion is not enough
Denholm says Tesla stockholders should give Musk $50 billion so Musk “will continue to be driven to innovate and drive growth at Tesla.” Today, running Tesla is not Musk’s full-time job. He is also CEO at SpaceX (his privately held aerospace company) and CTO at X. Musk also helps run xAI (his artificial intelligence company), Neurolink (which recently implanted a microchip into someone’s brain), and the Boring Company (which makes tunnels for transportation).
And Musk has already made clear that restoring his $50 billion pay package isn’t enough to keep him interested in Tesla. Musk said he is “uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control.”
To achieve that, the Tesla board and shareholders, after giving Musk $50 billion, would need to provide Musk with another massive stock grant. And, unlike in 2018 when the compensation package was tied to future growth targets, Musk appears to be demanding an immediate increase in his ownership without conditions. Musk would own more stock currently but sold a significant portion of his holdings to finance his acquisition of Twitter.
Almost all shareholder resolutions proposed by the company are approved. But whether or not Delaware courts will allow the reinstatement of Musk’s 2018 package — or an even larger future compensation package — is far from certain. So, in addition to a $50 billion payment to Musk, the Tesla board is also proposing to move Tesla’s state of incorporation to Texas. In her message to shareholders, Denholm says “the board and I are increasingly troubled by the growing uncertainty of Delaware corporate law.” But “we believe that the Texas legal system is strong and fair.”
Denholm does not mention that she and other board members were sued in Delaware for awarding themselves excessive compensation and agreed to a settlement where they “collectively agreed to return more than $735 million to the electric car maker’s coffers in combined options, cash and stocks.” Denholm and the other board members did not admit to any wrongdoing.
My work husband Olly Wiseman is in the Old World, drinking tea in London and probably wearing a fascinator while those of us here in the New York newsroom are breaking news. . .
On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Eli Lake on Katherine Maher’s congressional no-show; Joe Nocera on another Boeing whistleblower; Francesca Block on Columbia; three more Lonely Hearts looking for love in all the right places; and yours truly on Tom Brady and the return of fun.
But first, our lead story. Polina Fradkin spoke to Jewish singles trying to hook up and find love on dating apps, only to find that since October 7, their matches have opted for cross-examination and political litmus tests.
Here’s Polina:
Not too long after October 7, Itamar Edelman, a 34-year-old artist who lives in Los Angeles, matched on Hinge with a pretty woman named Lina.
On his profile, Edelman’s ethnicity is set to “Middle Eastern” (he’s Iraqi Israeli), and his religion to “Spiritual/Jewish.” He’s been looking for “sparks of connection,” he tells me.
“Hey, Lina,” he messaged a few months ago. “Happy Friday!”
“Hey!” Lina wrote back. “This is unfair because I don’t throw this question to everyone on Hinge but. . . thoughts on IDF?”
Jake Williams, a 32-year-old ad salesman based in New York, matched with a guy on Grindr called Eric. The two chatted a bit through the app and soon exchanged numbers. Williams sent Eric a selfie—his Star of David necklace clearly visible.
“Do a lot of people ask you about Palestine?” Eric immediately texted. “What’s your opinion?”
Harry Markham, a 24-year-old student in London, refers to himself as a “charming Jewish boy” on the apps. Since October 7, he says, about half of his matches have grilled him on the Jewish state: “They say, ‘Before we go any further—are you a Zionist?’ ” Continue reading.
Who’s really behind the encampments? Read Park MacDougald’s deep dive into the charities, radicals, and “progressive dark-money networks” propping up campus chaos. We were jealous of this one. (Tablet)
Representative Jamaal Bowman has a personal YouTube account called Inner Peace, where he follows a pu-pu platter of conspiracy accounts promoting theories like the earth is flat and the government is harboring aliens. (The Daily Beast)
French businesses are being encouraged to sign a “hospitality charter,” otherwise known as a “Don’t be so rude to the tourists” contract, ahead of this summer’s Olympics. (The Washington Post)
Just 13 percent of college students say the war in the Middle East is important to them. They are much more interested in healthcare reform (40 percent), education funding and access (38 percent), and economic fairness and opportunity (37 percent). (Axios)
Joe Biden said in a CNN interview Wednesday that if Israel invades Rafah “I’m not supplying the weapons.” (WSJ editorial: “Biden Slaps an Arms Embargo on Israel”)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims a parasite crawled into his brain, ate part of it, and then died there. Doctors contacted by the Times guessed it was a “pork tapeworm larva.” More alarming is RFK Jr.’s admission that he contracted mercury poisoning from eating so many tuna fish sandwiches. (The New York Times)
Former KKK poster boy and son of a former Grand Wizard has whipped off his white hood to reveal that they are now transgender. (Daily Mail, natch)
A year into the experiment, British Columbia is reversing course on drug decriminalization, making it once again illegal to do heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamines in public. (The New York Times)
Mike Johnson will remain Speaker of the House, despite attempts from Marjorie Taylor Greene to oust him. (Politico)
The cicada swarm is coming—and with it, a question Americans can always be trusted to ask: Can we eat it? Next came the recipes: Tempura Cicadas, anyone? Or pizza? (CBS News)
On Sunday, A-listers from Kim Kardashian to Ben Affleck brutally mocked former NFL quarterback Tom Brady (and each other) for three hours, live on Netflix.
The Roast of Tom Brady was scorched earth. Tony Hinchcliffe joked about cotton picking and said Brady “looks like a Confederate fag.” He said the football player’s ex-wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, took after him—because she was out “draining balls right now.” He also threw this barb at comedian Jeff Ross: “Jeff is so Jewish he only watches football for the coin toss.” UFC’s Dana White ragged on Netflix for giving him so little time on the mic: “You guys gave me 60 seconds? My name is Dana! Is that not trans enough for you liberal fucks?” Former New England Patriot wide receiver Julian Edelman even managed to make fun of Aaron Hernandez’s suicide in the middle of a dick joke.
You know what happened. The Washington Post called it “misogynistic” and “cruel.” Gisele Bündchen is said to be “deeply disappointed” by the show—and wanted the world to know that she is currently focused on her charity work.
But guess what? No one cared.
Because the roast—raunchy and crude and totally politically incorrect—was fun.
It felt like a throwback to a simpler time, before Hannah Gadsby made us feel sorta bad about comedy, and SNL fired Shane Gillis for saying a rude word before his first day on the job.
And it’s not the only thing that feels old-school and alive in the best way.
The rap beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar is vicious and, in the parlance of the decade, homophobic, misogynistic, and ableist. There’s wordplay about Parkinson’s; talk of “ho shit”; and gay-tinged put-downs. (Kendrick called Drake’s crew “dick riders.”) It’s not quite family-friendly, but it’s very, very entertaining.
Streams don’t lie, nor do laughs: The Roast of Tom Brady is in Netflix’s Top Ten and the song in which Lamar called Drake a pedophile broke streaming records. Woke scolds and Keffiyeh Karens are still screaming their heads off, but normal people are just tuning them out.
There are other clouds of fun rising up like vapor through the grates. The wellness regime of daily workouts and endless supplements and dietary restrictions—which always felt puritanical and smug—has been vanquished by Ozempic, a cheat that allows you to eat whatever you like, just less of it. Even the fact that Sweetgreen announced it’s now serving steak—cue the Times’ ceremonial hand-wringing over red meat’s carbon footprint—feels like an unbuckling. Pop music, and there is so much of it, is a Technicolor dreamscape tinged with Americana. Taylor Swift is dating a cool jock who dressed like Al Capone for the Kentucky Derby. JoJo Siwa is letting her freak flag fly. The Kings of Leon’s new album, set to release in two days, is called Can We Please Have Fun. Yes!
The band’s last album, from 2021, was called When You See Yourself. It came at a time when we were all meant to reflect, check ourselves, dig deep, do the work, and most importantly, do better. Now? It’s the Morning After the Revolution. It’s time to let loose.
→ NPR CEO hides from Congress: Where the heck is Katherine Maher? The NPR CEO has not made a single public appearance since April 9, when The Free Press published an exposé by Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran at the network, alleging ideological bias at the institution.
Even yesterday, when Maher was summoned by Congress to give testimony about whether NPR’s news reporting was “fair and objective,” she was a no-show.
Her excuse? The night before the hearing, she announced she could not attend because of. . . a previously scheduled board meeting. Instead, Maher submitted written testimony drafted in the prose style of brand management consultants. According to Maher, NPR is “bringing trusted, reliable, independent news and information of the highest editorial standards” to tens of millions of listeners.
Berliner had sounded the alarm internally at NPR for years over the public’s loss of trust in the network before coming forward with his story in The Free Press. He wrote that “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience,” he continued, “but for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.” A New York Times investigation later showed that NPR’s weekly audience has dropped from an estimated 60 million in 2020 to about 42 million today.
Now Berliner, who has since resigned from the network, is questioning whether Maher is the best person to lead NPR.
“Why isn’t she there? Is she the right person for the job at this time?” he asked, adding that her written statement “sounds like a pledge drive.”
Continue reading the full story from Eli Lake.
→ Another Boeing whistleblower is dead: Boeing whistleblowers are starting to seem like zombies in a horror movie: even if you kill off a few of them, there are plenty of others right behind. Last week Joshua Dean, a 45-year-old whistleblower who worked for Spirit AeroSystems, which makes fuselages for Boeing, died after contracting a mysterious virus. His death came two months after another Boeing whistleblower, John Barnett, was found dead in his truck with a gun in his hand. It was officially labeled a suicide, but a lot of people had trouble believing he had taken his life, including his own lawyer.
Unfortunately for Boeing—but fortunately for the rest of us—there are at least 10 more whistleblowers represented by Brian Knowles, a South Carolina attorney who was also the lawyer for Barnett and Dean. One of them, a Boeing engineer named Sam Salehpour, told a Senate committee a few weeks ago of the 787 Dreamliner, “They’re putting out defective airplanes.” His specific issue was that sections of the fuselage were being jammed together in an unsafe manner. Although Boeing denied Salehpour’s specific complaints, the company later told the Federal Aviation Administration that it had discovered that some employees had falsified certain key tests. The FAA is now investigating.
Why are so many Boeing employees coming out of the woodwork to highlight the company’s problems? “They’re raising concerns because people’s lives are at stake,” Knowles told the New York Post. Keep those whistles blowing, fellas. —Joe Nocera
→ Fighting words from Columbia students: In an anonymous forum called Sidechat, which is available only to college students, Columbia students joked that the custodians who were trapped inside the campus building in the middle of the night when a mob of protesters broke in and barricaded themselves inside “need to grow a pair.”
“They cannot be serious,” reads one message. It was posted with a picture of a quote from Lester Wilson, one of the three custodians, in which he said, “I could have been killed in there.”
Wilson, Mario Torres, and Jesse Wynne all told The Free Press that the events of that night have left them “traumatized”—and that over a week later, they still refuse to go back to the building, Hamilton Hall, where it happened. One student called the “narrative” pushed by the Columbia employees “BS” and another seemed to challenge Torres to a fight at a landmark in the center of campus. “I’m free tomorrow at 2 p.m. Go talk to Mario Torres and let’s meet at the sundial.” —Francesca Block
Another week, another trio of Free Pressers looking for love. First up, The Free Press’s own Kyra N., followed by another young New Yorker, then an outdoorsy Canadian. Best of luck to all, and if you’re ready to meet your match, you know who to call!
Kyra N., 29, New York/San Francisco
My name is Kyra, from Brooklyn, NY, and San Francisco, CA (I can’t make up my mind which city I like to live in more!).
I am not looking for someone to be with. . . I am looking for someone I don’t want to be without. If that someone is tall, quick-witted, athletic, curious, preferably self-made, politically open-minded, and, above all else, kind and doesn’t fear someone who doesn’t settle. . . bring them on!
I am an online-dater hater. I long to have a crush on someone I have met “naturally” at an event, party, or through work. That slow burn of hoping he will be there. The thought of picking out a guy on an app feels like ordering a sandwich: “A slice of ham, not too cheesy, a decent amount of bread, very fatty mayo, full of spicy mustard, light enough to want another.” When facing my 29th birthday, I decided to change my mind and give Hinge a try. Maybe I will find only a bit of bologna, a sour “kraut,” or a turkey on “wry,” but for now, or until I get responses to this, I will give it a try!
Philip Alfred Wolf, 25, New York City
I am looking for someone kind, caring, and positive. I firmly believe that attitude is a little thing that can make a big difference. It’s contagious. I want to be with a woman who sees the world as full of opportunity and potential, and not jammed with thorny issues and sharp angles. I hope to spend time with someone who, like me, instinctively believes that most people are inherently good.
A person’s political views are a deal-breaker only if they are fixed in dry cement. I was raised in a home with a mother who worked in Republican politics and a father who had always been a registered Democrat, so I thrive on discussion, debate, and conversation. I believe that listening is as important as speaking and in looking for someone who believes the same. And for me to truly fall in love, she must also enjoy tacos, margs, and rom-coms.
Lauren Straub, 53, Regina, Canada
Hello, world! I currently live a peaceful and blessed life with my rescue pup Lily. She is a lovely companion who reflects me well: always up for an adventure and then happy to recharge in silence.
I am grateful to have been raised on a prairie farm; my roots go deep into the earth, giving me a solid foundation to explore the vastness beyond. I can have fun almost anywhere and love to laugh, explore, learn, dance, and dream. I’m proud to say I’ve kept my small business afloat during these bananas times. My tribe consists of beautiful and grounded folks who are passionate about the future of humanity.
I see a future that is bright, and I would love to share this with a man who is up for weaving with me a shared vision filled with joy, kindness, and abundance for all. And having a lot of fun in the process!
Suzy Weiss is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss.
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Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers.
Microsoft has also partnered with Gateway Technical College to train and certify 200 students a year to fill new jobs in data and information technology. In addition, Microsoft is working with nearby high schools to train students for future jobs.
Speaking at Gateway Technical College’s Racine campus, Biden contrasted today’s investment with that made by Trump about the same site in 2018. In that year, Trump went to Wisconsin for the “groundbreaking” of a high-tech campus he claimed would be the “eighth wonder of the world.”
Under Republican governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin legislators approved a $3 billion subsidy and tax incentive package—ten times larger than any similar previous package in the state—to lure the Taiwan-based Foxconn electronics company. Once built, a new $10 billion campus that would focus on building large liquid-crystal display screens would bring 13,000 jobs to the area, they promised.
Foxconn built a number of buildings, but the larger plan never materialized, even after taxpayers had been locked into contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrading roads, sewer system, electricity, and so on. When voters elected Democrat Tony Evers as governor in 2022, he dropped the tax incentives from $3 billion to $80 million, which depended on the hiring of only 1,454 workers, reflecting the corporation’s current plans. Foxconn dropped its capital investment from $10 billion to $672.8 million.
In November 2023, Microsoft announced it was buying some of the Foxconn properties in Wisconsin.
Today, Biden noted that rather than bringing jobs to Racine, Trump’s policies meant the city lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs during his term. Wisconsin as a whole lost 83,500. “Racine was once a manufacturing boomtown,” Biden recalled, “all the way through the 1960s, powering companies—invented and manufacturing Windex…portable vacuum cleaners, and so much more, and powered by middle-class jobs.
“And then came trickle-down economics [which] cut taxes for the very wealthy and biggest corporations…. We shipped American jobs overseas because labor was cheaper. We slashed public investment in education and innovation. And the result: We hollowed out the middle class. My predecessor and his administration doubled down on that failed trickle-down economics, along with the [trail] of broken promises.”
“But that’s not on my watch,” Biden said. “We’re determined to turn it around.” He noted that thanks to the Democrats’ policies, in the past three years, Racine has added nearly 4,000 jobs—hitting a record low unemployment rate—and Wisconsin as a whole has gained 178,000 new jobs.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have fueled “a historic boom in rebuilding our roads and bridges, developing and deploying clean energy, [and] revitalizing American manufacturing,” he said. That investment has attracted $866 billion in private-sector investment across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs “building new semiconductor factories, electric vehicles and battery factories…here in America.”
The Biden administration has been scrupulous about making sure that money from the funds appropriated to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing base has gone to Republican-dominated districts; indeed, Republican-dominated states have gotten the bulk of those investments. “President Biden promised to be the president of all Americans—whether you voted for him or not. And that’s what this agenda is delivering,” White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian told Matt Egan of CNN in February.
But there is, perhaps, a deeper national strategy behind that investment. Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.
“When folks see a new factory being built here in Wisconsin, people going to work making a really good wage in their hometowns, I hope they feel the pride that I feel,” Biden said. “Pride in their hometowns making a comeback. Pride in knowing we can get big things done in America still.”
That approach might be gaining traction. Last Friday, when Trump warned the audience of Fox 2 Detroit television that President’s Biden’s policies would cost jobs in Michigan, local host Roop Raj provided a “reality check,” noting that Michigan gained 24,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and May 2023.
At Gateway Technical College, Biden thanked Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and Racine mayor Cory Mason, both Democrats, as well as Microsoft president Brad Smith and AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler.
The picture of Wisconsin state officials working with business and labor leaders, at a public college established in 1911, was an image straight from the Progressive Era, when the state was the birthplace of the so-called Wisconsin Idea. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the country reeled under industrial monopolies and labor strikes, Wisconsin governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his colleagues advanced the idea that professors, lawmakers, and officials should work together to provide technical expertise to enable the state to mediate a fair relationship between workers and employers.
In his introduction to the 1912 book explaining the Wisconsin Idea, former president Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, explained that the Wisconsin Idea turned the ideas of reformers into a workable plan, then set out to put those ideas into practice. Roosevelt approvingly quoted economist Simon Patten, who maintained that the world had adequate resources to feed, clothe, and educate everyone, if only people cared to achieve that end. Quoting Patten, Roosevelt wrote: “The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. He demands measurable results and reaches them by means made available by economic efficiency. Only in this way is social progress possible.”
Reformers must be able to envision a better future, Roosevelt wrote, but they must also find a way to turn those ideals into reality. That involved careful study and hard work to develop the machinery to achieve their ends.
Roosevelt compared people engaged in progressive reform to “that greatest of all democratic reformers, Abraham Lincoln.” Like Lincoln, he wrote, reformers “will be assailed on the one side by the reactionary, and on the other by that type of bubble reformer who is only anxious to go to extremes, and who always gets angry when he is asked what practical results he can show.” “[T]he true reformer,” Roosevelt wrote, “must study hard and work patiently.”
“It is no easy matter actually to insure, instead of merely talking about, a measurable equality of opportunity for all men,” Roosevelt wrote. “It is no easy matter to make this Republic genuinely an industrial as well as a political democracy. It is no easy matter to secure justice for those who in the past have not received it, and at the same time to see that no injustice is meted out to others in the process. It is no easy matter to keep the balance level and make it evident that we have set our faces like flint against seeing this government turned into either government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. It is no easy matter to give the public their proper control over corporations and big business, and yet to prevent abuse of that control.”
“All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote in 1912.
“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”
—
Notes:
https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/WIReader/WER1650-1.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/14/business/manufacturing-jobs-biden/index.html
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