Substacks
How to Watch Our Sold-Out Debate. The First of Many. Bari Weiss
When we decided to rent a theater with 1,600 seats for our first-ever live debate, most of our friends looked at us with a mixture of pity and concern.
Never mind the fact that we would have to fill all 1,600 seats. The theater we’d booked was in Los Angeles—not exactly a city known for its culture of public debates. And not just in L.A., but smack in the middle of downtown, where after-hours can look a little bit like San Francisco during the day. To make matters worse, we had only managed to get the place on a Wednesday night.
We did it anyway. And we sold every seat in the house.
What did we learn? A few things.
The Free Press Isn’t Just a Newsletter. It’s a Community of Curious People.
The line was wrapped so far around the block that we had to start 30 minutes late. People were begging the box office to find them just one seat minutes before the debate began. Moms emailed us asking if the theater would allow children under five so they could attend but keep to their breastfeeding schedule. (There was at least one mother with a very well-behaved newborn strapped to her chest; jury’s out on how he feels about the sexual revolution.)
People came from all over. I met Free Pressers from Vancouver, Seattle, New York, Nevada, Montana, and so many other states.
Someone drove a retrofitted school bus down from San Francisco to hold an after-party for whoever wanted to come. There were three young priests who drove many miles to see the action, and at least one porn star who took a flight.
Also: libertarian frat bros in suits; e-girls with Elf Bars; trad boys who wondered aloud if the concession popcorn had seed oil; dads who had to run out to check in with the babysitter; actors from your favorite TV shows; comedians you’ve never heard of; writers you hate to love; angry Catholics; resigned atheists; closeted Trump voters; Mormons who saved themselves for marriage; young gay couples in crop tops; feminists; anti-feminists; and a whole lot of podcasters.
We had a sense of how diverse—in all ways—this community was. But no comments section is a substitute for actually being with you guys. And holy shit, was it exciting.
Debate Isn’t Dead
We live in an upside-down moment in which disagreement is too often taken as dislike. A culture in which it’s too often deemed heresy to consider the other side of an argument. A culture in which speech itself too often considered a kind of violence.
At The Free Press, we simply don’t believe any of that.
We believe that you can wrestle with complicated ideas without being contaminated by them. We believe that you can survive being a little bit offended. And that it’s actually really good for us.
What’s so gratifying is that you think so, too.
One of our takeaways from this inaugural debate is that this community is hungry for healthy disagreement (ideally with drinks!), and we’re already hard at work planning more of them in a city near you.
We Make News
And not just with our reporting.
The very fact of this event generated coverage ranging from the excoriating (hello, LA Times!) to the elevating (thank you, Blocked and Reported and Megan Daum).
We made news in the old outlets (New York magazine) and in the new ones (Rob Henderson; Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em; Jessica Reed Kraus, we are grateful). Right-wingers were pissed off (The Carousel), but then again, so were lefties (LA Review of Books). If you read one of these pieces, please make it Emily Jane Fox at Vanity Fair.
It’s probably not a good sign about the state of our country that a group of people getting together to debate is a major news story. We live in fear that the mainstream media might think of something crazy like this. Until then, we’re happy to be your purveyor of wild, shocking events in which several people publicly disagree. (Please note that at present, we do not provide pearls to clutch.)
So, What’s Next?
We’re going to do more of these things. We’re going to throw big after-parties for those of you who schlep to town. And we’re going to aim to do at least a handful of these in 2024—a year that will be full of empty, make-believe debates—on subjects that actually matter to our lives and to the future of our country.
We’re also going to make it easier for all 450,000 of you (and growing) to be a part of it.
It felt right, as a news organization focused in part on what the digital age has done to us and our relationships, to hold a debate that required participants and audience members to really look at and hear each other. The electricity of that interaction cannot be created via Zoom.
But too many of you are in far-flung places, and we want those of you who weren’t able to make the trek to L.A. to be able to grapple with this important subject.
That’s why we’re releasing the full film of the event this coming Thursday, only to subscribers of The Free Press.
You can get a taste of what you’ll see on Thursday right here:
So if you want to watch, become a paid subscriber today by clicking right here. It’s the price of a decent sandwich!
And to those who have been longtime supporters, thank you. I’m blown away by what this has become.
Last week, Hurricane Helene swept across the southeastern United States, killing more than 130 people and causing up to $160 billion in property damage. When devastating natural disasters strike, people often look for explanations. In the evangelical church where I grew up, it was taken as near-gospel that 2005’s Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of punishing New Orleans for being, well, New Orleans. In 2012, conspiracy theorists suggested that President Barack Obama created Hurricane Sandy using a military research program to boost his reelection odds against Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, an army of “experts” have blamed climate change for virtually every adverse weather event in the past decade, including this most recent one.
But now, from the biblical destruction of Hurricane Helene, a new theory has arisen: The storm, guided by unseen, anti-racist spiritual forces, deliberately ravaged “sundown towns.”
In Jim Crow–era United States, sundown towns were all-white municipalities that got their name from signs that directed black people to leave by nightfall under the implicit threat of lynching. The unfounded idea that such places still exist has been floating around the internet for years.
It reared its head most recently when numerous people used Hurricane Helene as an opportunity to argue online that sundown towns still exist. In this TikTok, which has nearly 100,000 views, a self-professed Hurricane Katrina survivor says that sundown towns “are still out there,” before saying: “I feel like people are brushing it under the rug because it’s a tragedy, and I get that, but the facts of the situation are that a lot of these places were sundown towns.”
In this TikTok video, which has 20,000 likes, a guy argues that the hurricane veered off the course it was supposed to take and instead hit “a bunch of sundown towns.”
“The ancestors are not playing. They need to destroy all those towns just like they came in and destroyed ours,” said one commenter on X.
“God said no VENGEANCE! is better than his,” said another.
As evidence that sundown towns still exist, users often cite a crowdsourced map maintained by Tougaloo College, a historically black university in Mississippi. To put it mildly, the map is a mess. Although it implicitly takes the position that sundown towns still exist—if you click on a location, one of the categories is “Still Sundown?” (I was unable to find a place that fell into this last category.) But the map itself displays only how the unnamed contributors regard each town’s historical status as a sundown town: Probable, Possible, Surely, Don’t Know.
But since the map doesn’t make this clear, people can reference it and claim that hundreds if not thousands of sundown towns still exist today—as this white, left-wing TikToker did earlier this year in a video that has over 4.5 million views.
Beyond the map’s misleading layout lies a lot of vilifying conjecture. For example, the upscale resort town of Orange Beach, Alabama, is listed as a “probable” sundown town in the past, but if you click on it for more information (and many won’t), you will be redirected to another page, with a section labeled “Still Sundown?” The answer? “Probably not, although still very few black people.”
This gives black people the indication that they should be somewhat uncomfortable in Orange Beach, a pleasant little resort town less than 40 miles from my house. I can assure you that black people can still be found there after sunset—typically on vacation and having a good time.
So, people have nothing to fear from communities like Orange Beach that were possibly never sundown towns. But what about those places that definitely were? Of these, the most frequently cited is Vidor, a rough little town in East Texas that played host to Ku Klux Klan marches and desegregation orders as recently as the early 1990s. On TikTok, a white gentleman warns “black and queer people” not to visit Vidor, lest they be “lynched.” (He’s clearly never been there himself because he mispronounces the town’s name.)
This ignores the incredibly overt recent efforts Vidor has made to atone for its past. In addition to explicit efforts by city leadership to rehabilitate Vidor’s reputation—such as the chief of police apologizing for the town’s racist past and swearing in a young black boy who was battling cancer as an honorary cop—Vidor’s residents, who are still mostly white, led a proportionally well-attended Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. Three years later, residents ran a small group of visiting neo-Nazis out of town. (The group requested a police escort because they—the racists—felt unsafe.)
In addition to disparaging Hurricane Helene’s victims, the recent insistence that sundown towns still exist causes people unnecessary paranoia. Take this TikTok, created by a black woman who believes she lives in a sundown town and that the sirens she hears in her neighborhood are messages that black people need to go inside. She reports getting this information from “a white girl on TikTok” who also claims to live in a sundown town.
That so much of the misinformation about the continued existence of sundown towns seems to originate with white leftists is infuriating but not totally unexpected. They want to feel special and signal that they are different and better than other white people, which is easier to do if you erect a vision of contemporary America where thousands of American towns are filled with racists waiting to lynch black people after nightfall. People, some black and some white, virtually all left wing, want to believe towns like Vidor haven’t changed. They don’t want to accept that overt racism is an exceedingly rare phenomenon in America confined to a small fringe that even East Texas rednecks in a former “sundown town” won’t abide.
River Page is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow him on X @river_is_nice and read his piece “Stop Saying Florida Isn’t Safe for Gay People. It’s Fine.”
And to support more of our work, become a Free Press subscriber today:
More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen’s Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.
Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.
Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.
In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.
When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”
Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned.
The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.
Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there.
The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.”
Vance responded: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.”
There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S.
Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.”
Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don’t care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”
It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.
It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!”
Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/01/dock-worker-strike-jobs-pay-automation/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/business/us-port-workers-strike-tuesday/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/politics/fact-check-vance-walz-debate/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/oct/01/election-vance-walz-harris-trump-vp-debate
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