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Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher? Plus. . . Oliver Wiseman
It’s Thursday, December 12. And yes, as you’ve probably noticed, we’ve had a bit of a glow-up. But don’t worry, you’re in exactly the right place. 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: Angela Merkel’s legacy, what “sex work” really means, and much more.
But first, meet Kemi Badenoch—the new leader of Britain’s Tories.
“I like fixing things that are broken,” says Kemi Badenoch in her interview with Bari on the latest episode of Honestly. Badenoch, 44, was elected as the new leader of the UK’s Conservatives last month. And luckily for her, there are a lot of things that are broken.
One of them is her party.
In July, after fourteen years in office, the Tories were unceremoniously booted from power. They lost more than 250 of their Members of Parliament in the biggest electoral defeat in the party’s history. On the long road back to power, Badenoch must contend not only with a Labour government with a huge majority in Parliament, but also Nigel Farage—the Brexit-backing populist is on a mission to supplant the Conservative Party as the main alternative to Labour.
If Badenoch somehow manages to fix her party and return to power, she must then figure out a way to fix Britain—a country where wages have stagnated for a generation, public debt has ballooned, and there’s widespread anger at high rates of immigration. As another Brit, Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, put it recently in these pages: “Lately it seems that mine is a country with a death wish.” (Read his full account of what ails the UK here.)
In other words, Badenoch has a daunting in tray. And yet many—including Niall—are bullish on Badenoch, who he believes could be a “black Thatcher.”
As a woman in charge of the Conservative Party, Badenoch was bound to be compared to the Iron Lady. But in this case there are undeniable parallels. Much like Thatcher, Badenoch mixes steely determination with charm and charisma. She also, like Thatcher, knows what she believes. Her diagnosis of her party’s problems is straightforward: It has strayed too far from the values that have historically made it—and Britain—so successful.
And while Thatcher and Badenoch’s backgrounds are very different—one grew up in provincial England, the other spent most of her childhood in Nigeria—they are both self-made women with an appetite for hard work. Badenoch’s own story, and her family’s, is central to her politics. “I know what it is like to be wealthy and also to be poor,” she says today on Honestly.
There’s one other Badenoch–Thatcher parallel: the circumstances in which they took over their party’s leadership. Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975—then, like today, a malaise had descended over the country, one that would lift during her time in office. These comparisons may be unavoidable, but does Badenoch welcome them? Bari asked her that in their conversation. “She is a heroine of mine. So it’s very flattering,” said Badenoch. “But it’s also quite heavy and she’s a different person. I admire her. But I want people to recognize that I’m not a pastiche of this person, that I am my own person.”
That much you’ll soon realize when you watch or listen to her wide-ranging and illuminating conversation with Bari. To watch, hit the play button below. Or you can listen to their discussion on the Honestly feed wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to read an edited transcript of the interview, you can do that here.
As Badenoch sees it, she is fighting not just for her party or her country, but for a way of governing and a kind of society that is under threat across the West. “Liberalism has been hacked,” argues Badenoch in a speech of hers we are publishing today.
She describes “classic liberal values—not left-wing progressivism, but the classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law” as “a precious inheritance.” And those values, she says, “have been hacked by ideologues operating on the inside. But if we can spot their trick, we can stop them from destroying the freest societies in the history of the world.”
For more on what Badenoch believes, read her full speech: “How Liberalism Got Hacked.”
The Not-So-Marvelous Mrs. Merkel
This time eight years ago, with the world still in shock after Donald Trump’s victory, many in the West, including many in America, crowned Angela Merkel as the new de facto leader of the free world. “She’s all alone,” lamented Barack Obama after his final meeting with the German chancellor.
Fast-forward eight years, and how things have changed. Trump is riding high and heading back to the White House. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s legacy lies in tatters. Far from being the savior of the West, Merkel has become an emblem of its failure. Whether it’s the migrant crisis, or energy dependence on Moscow, or economic dependence on China, the German leader sowed the seeds of her country’s—and Europe’s—present drift.
Now Merkel has published, in English, her memoir, titled Freedom. How does she justify the decisions that proved so disastrous? And just how bad are things in Germany? Yascha Mounk tackles these questions in his essay for The Free Press today.
Read Yascha on “The Not-So-Marvelous Mrs. Merkel.”
What Does Sleeping with 100 Men in One Day Do to the Soul?
For a recent publicity stunt, an OnlyFans model slept with one hundred men in one day. A new documentary captures the before and after of this extreme act. River Page reports that the inadvertently harrowing film undermines the glib, sloganized idea that “sex work is work,” and “interrogates sex work to a devastating conclusion. . . that selling the body means leaving it, if you want to survive.”
Read River Page’s full column: “What Does Sleeping with 100 Men in One Day Do to the Soul?”
The Outrageous Adoration of Luigi Mangione
Yesterday, River Page summarized the strange case of Luigi Mangione—including the weird hero worship of a killer by so many Americans. On the latest Free Press Live, Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon went deeper on this disturbing trend in a conversation you won’t want to miss. Watch them on the outrageous adoration of Luigi Mangione below:
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Mystery drones flying over New Jersey are from Iran and being launched by a “mothership” off the East Coast, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) speculated on Fox News yesterday. Van Drew, who sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, did not say where he got his information but said this was “the real deal” and from “very high sources.” It comes after days of reports of strange sightings over New Jersey. But the Pentagon denies Van Drew’s claims. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones toward the United States,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.
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In other, less serious Garden State news—in fact, maybe the most New Jersey news of all time—Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer has been caught doctoring his Spotify Wrapped list to seem like a bigger fan of Bruce Springsteen than is really the case.
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A pro tip for anyone in public life: Don’t follow denunciations of murder with a “but.” The latest person to ignore this advice is Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, who said in relation to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson that “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the healthcare to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.” This is nothing short of a rationalization of murder by a U.S. senator. Remember when everyone got mad because Trump warned of a “bloodbath” for the auto industry?
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Just two in ten Americans approve of Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter. A plurality (38 percent) of Democrats approve of the move. Speaking of the perks of having a president for a father, we couldn’t help but notice that Don Jr. stepped out in Palm Beach with his new squeeze the same day Don Sr. announced Kimberly Guilfoyle—to whom Don Jr. has been engaged since 2020—as his pick to be the ambassador to Greece. Coincidence, or responsible dynasty management?
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Biden is poised to block the acquisition by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, of the once mighty, Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel. Steelworkers themselves are divided on the acquisition—some say it would save thousands of union jobs in the Rust Belt. But the deal is a rare point of agreement between Trump and Biden. Last week Trump said he intends to block the deal.
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Donald Trump is set to recognize the new nation of Somaliland, a self-governing and strategically vital northern region of Somalia. Establishing Somaliland’s sovereignty could pave the way for U.S. intelligence operations in the historically unstable area. It would enable the U.S. to monitor weapons and commercial movement through the Gulf of Aden and keep track of China’s growing influence in East Africa. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. While we’re on the subject of Somaliland, read Armin Rosen’s 2021 dispatch for Tablet: “An Almost-Country in the Desert That Doesn’t Care About Your Understanding of Politics.”
Meet the Free People of The Free Press
The Free Press exists because of you. People like Emily the Alaska gold miner, Father Jonah the Greenwich Village priest, and Tracy the Pennsylvania farmer. Today we want to introduce you to Jordie, a UX designer from Washington, D.C.:
If you, like Jordie, value what we’re doing, consider becoming a paid subscriber today. And if you can think of someone who might want to become part of The Free Press community, forward them this email, encourage them to sign up, and help us get to one million Free Pressers.
Oliver Wiseman is an editor and writer at The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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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