Substacks
January 2, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
The new year has hit with news flying in from a number of quarters.
At home, minimum wage increased in nearly half of U.S. states; it has been 14 years since the last increase in the federal minimum wage, the longest stretch since 1938 according to the AFL-CIO. NPR correspondent David Gura quoted Goldman Sachs’s chief equity strategist to note, ”The S&P 500 index returned 26% including dividends in 2023, more than 2x the average annual return of 12% since 1986.”
Representative Bill Johnson (R-OH) today submitted his resignation, effective January 21, to become the president of Youngstown State University. This shaves the Republican majority in the House of Representatives even thinner. With the recent expulsion of George Santos (R-NY) and resignation of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republicans will control just 219 seats, permitting them a margin of only two seats to pass legislation when the House returns on January 9.
The Republican House has been one of the least effective in history, and it has its work cut out for it in the new year. The first phase of the continuing resolution Congress passed in November to fund the government expires on January 19, ending funding for transportation, housing, energy, agriculture, and veterans’ affairs. The second phase expires on February 2. Much of the 2018 Farm Bill that covers food and farm aid expired in 2023. As of yesterday, January 1, the items usually covered in farm bills fall under a hodge-podge of fixes, with some old provisions from the 1930s and 1940s going back into force.
Also outstanding is the measure to provide supplemental funding for Israel, Ukraine, and the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico, as well as providing humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
House Republicans refused to pass that measure unless it included their own extreme anti-immigration measures, but they have refused to participate in efforts to hash out legislation, clearly preferring to keep the issue hot to use against the Democrats in 2024. Since President Joe Biden took office, he and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have asked Congress for additional funding for Customs and Border Patrol officers and additional immigration courts, but despite Republicans’ own demand for such legislation, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote to Biden in December demanding that he impose stricter immigration rules and build a border wall through executive action. Today, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) echoed the idea that Biden, not Congress, should deal with the border.
Meanwhile, Emily Brooks and Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill reported today that about 60 House Republicans are planning to visit the border in Texas to emphasize the issue. They are also preparing to impeach Mayorkas on the grounds that he has failed to meet the requirements of the Secure Fence Act, “which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country.” As Brooks and Beitsch point out, “not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection.” House Republicans plan to hold hearings on impeaching Mayorkas, but Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) has suggested to the Fox News Channel that the articles of impeachment are already written.
At the intersection of domestic and foreign affairs, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), whom federal prosecutors have already indicted for using his office to work for Egypt, was charged again today with using his political influence to work for the government of Qatar. This is a big deal: at the time, Menendez was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a key position in the U.S. government. Two Republican operatives are pleading guilty to evading lobbying laws in their own work for Qatar; their activities appear to have been much more limited than Menendez’s.
The turn of the new year has also produced lots of news in foreign affairs.
On February 4, 2021, just after Secretary of State Antony Blinken took office, Biden spoke at the State Department and said “the message I want the world to hear today” is that “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” In a New York Times article from December 31, Peter Baker, Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, and Isabel Kershner emphasize that Biden and his team have been engaged constantly in diplomacy with Israel, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Since the October 7, 2023, attack by Iran-backed Hamas on Israel, Biden has spoken with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu 14 times and visited Israel; Blinken has traveled to the region three times and visited Israel five times.
On December 22, in the Christian Science Monitor, Arab political journalist Taylor Luck and correspondent Fatima AbdulKarim reported that Arab Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, the U.S., and the European Union have created “[a] massive postwar reconstruction plan…for the besieged Gaza Strip.” The plan is to “rebuild the coastal strip, unite and overhaul Palestinian governance, and create a Palestinian security force in Gaza to ensure Palestinian and Israeli security.”
Arab diplomats insist the reconstruction of southern Gaza, including alleviating suffering, rebuilding housing and infrastructure, and restoring jobs, must be “rapid”; Gulf states have set $3 billion a year for ten years as the first budget. The plan calls for a “revamped and revitalized” Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza and the West Bank with current president Mahmoud Abbas as a figurehead and an apolitical unity government running affairs.
The plan is still developing, but already the main obstacles are Israel’s governing coalition, led by Netanyahu, who refuses the ideas of a two-state solution and of a Palestinian Authority in charge of Gaza, and Hamas, which Gulf states as well as the U.S. reject as a participant in the future governance of Gaza. Other Iran-backed militias also oppose such a solution.
From the beginning of the Hamas-Israel war, the Biden administration has been very clear that its first goal was to make sure the conflict didn’t spread, with Lebanon’s Iran-allied Hezbollah and other proxy militias joining in fully. Biden immediately sent two carrier groups to the region and promised “to move in additional assets as needed.” On October 10 he warned: “Let me say again—to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.”
The New York Times piece by Baker, Wong, Barnes, and Kershner revealed that Biden and his national security team, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, also warned Netanyahu against launching a preemptive strike on Hezbollah. Israel and Hezbollah have been attacking each other with drones, missiles, and air strikes along the countries’ border.
Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen have attacked ships in the Red Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, handling about 12% of global trade and about 8.2 million barrels of crude oil and oil products every day. On December 31, four small boats attacked the Hangzhou, a container ship from the Danish shipping giant Maersk sailing under a Singapore flag, and then fired on the U.S. Navy helicopters that responded to the Hangzhou’s distress call. The helicopter crews sank three of the boats, killing their crews; the fourth fled.
Today, Iran sent a naval frigate to the Red Sea, and Maersk announced it would stop using the Red Sea route until further notice. Hezbollah media said that an Israeli drone strike in Beirut, Lebanon, killed Saleh Arouri, the deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of its military wing. Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate.
Also today, in response to calls from Israeli cabinet members for the resettlement of Palestinians outside Gaza, the U.S. State Department issued a “rejection” of both the language and the idea. “We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.”
And in today’s Washington Post, Lebanon’s former prime minister Fouad Siniora and former Lebanese lawmaker Basem Shabb noted that “[d]espite the ferocity of the bombing and the great loss of innocent civilian lives in Gaza, the conflict remains largely contained to an Israeli-Palestinian confrontation—and more specifically, is broadly understood in the Arab world to be a conflict with Hamas, a non-state actor,” but warned the conflict must not spread. They noted that in November, “[i]n a first, 57 Arab and Islamic countries…called for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on a two-state solution,” the same concept embraced by the Biden administration.
“In response to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the Arab world responded with denunciation—but, more importantly, with diplomacy. No military threats were issued by any of the Arab states toward Israel,” the Lebanese lawmakers pointed out. They urged Israel to embrace the two-state solution “and, in doing so, usher in a new era in the Middle East.”
Lots of pieces moving around the board on this second day of January 2024.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/12/houthis-rebels-yemen-israel-ships/
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-would-red-sea-attacks-affect-gas-shipping-2023-12-19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/us/politics/us-israel-hamas-war.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/02/fara-barry-bennett-douglas-watts-qatar/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/nyregion/robert-menendez-qatar-influence.html
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4373378-gaza-death-toll-20000/
https://www.threads.net/@aflcio/post/C1m_NwQR8Nx/
https://www.threads.net/@davidgura/post/C1maRGWu_9w/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4382103-house-gop-to-begin-2024-with-focus-on-border/
Twitter: senronjohnson/status/1742234228736119067
https://www.politico.eu/article/iran-warship-red-sea-suez-canal-yemen-houthi/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/02/arab-israeli-peace-palestinians-gaza/
Substacks
The ‘Wild, Wild West’ of the American Egg Donor Industry Rina Raphael
Kaylene Breeding was always driven by a desire to help other women. In her twenties, she spent years volunteering at women’s charities. That’s when an idea she had considered since high school—donating her eggs—seemed like the “next step” in her volunteering. She would be helping a family in the “utmost way possible,” she recalls thinking.
Breeding, now 36, first heard about egg donation when she was a teenager and her local radio station in Oregon constantly aired commercials inviting young women to become donors. Breeding told me that when she reached her late twenties and wasn’t ready to have children, she decided to do something good with her eggs in the meantime.
Breeding donated her eggs six times. Twice these were “altruistic egg donations,” meaning she was paid by the recipient only for her medical and travel expenses. Her payment for the other donations was between $7,500 and $9,000. Out of all these donations, only one resulted in children. That was a set of twins born to a gay male couple in Israel. All she knows about the children is that they were born.
Today, Breeding, who has no children of her own, is struggling with her own compromised fertility. She is facing a hysterectomy because of severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, debilitating conditions in which endometrial tissue grows where it shouldn’t. She’s in chronic pain during exercise, ovulation, and sex.
Breeding’s doctors believe this is the result of donating her eggs, which required pumping her body with sky-high levels of estrogen. Believe is the key word here, as they can’t quite confirm it. There is little research on the long-term medical consequences of egg donation.
By now Breeding, who works in the aviation industry, knows a lot about those consequences. She is a moderator and administrator of We Are Egg Donors, a private Facebook support and advocacy group that counts over 2,000 past and current members. She reads many stories similar to hers of post-donation medical conditions. “Nobody wants to do the research because, frankly, I’m assuming they’re afraid of what we would discover,” she told me.
Substacks
A Chinese national, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million Judd Legum
Chinese Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $6.2 million for a banana — sold by Sotheby’s as conceptual art — and then ate it last Friday.
The banana is not Sun’s most notable recent purchase.
On November 25, Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump. Sun said his company, TRON, was committed to “making America great again.”
World Liberty Financial planned to sell $300 million worth of crypto tokens, known as WLF, which would value the new company at $1.5 billion. But, before Sun’s $30 million purchase, it appeared to be a bust, with only $22 million in tokens sold. Sun now owns more than 55% of purchased tokens.
Sun’s decision to buy $30 million in WLF tokens has direct and immediate financial benefits for Trump. A filing by the company in October revealed that “$30 million of initial net protocol revenues” will be “held in a reserve… to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve is met, a company owned by Donald Trump, DT Marks DEFI LLC, will receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.”
So before Sun’s purchase, Trump was entitled to nothing because the reserve had not been met. But Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve, so now Trump is entitled to 75% of the revenues from all other tokens purchased. As of December 1, there have been $24 million WLF tokens sold, netting Trump $18 million.
Sun is also joining World Liberty Financial as an advisor, making Sun and the incoming president business partners.
While Trump has the cash, Sun’s tokens are effectively worthless. To comply with U.S. securities law, WLF tokens are “non-transferable and locked indefinitely in a wallet or smart contract until such time, if ever, [WLF tokens] are unlocked through protocol governance procedures in a fashion that does not contravene applicable law.” The only thing that Sun can do with his tokens is participate in the “governance” of World Liberty Financial. Right now, the only thing World Liberty Financial does is sell tokens.
Any foreign national paying an incoming president $18 million weeks before entering the White House should raise red flags. Sun’s purchase is even more alarming because the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently prosecuting him for fraud.
The SEC’s ongoing prosecution of Sun
On March 22, 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three companies he owns. The SEC accused Sun of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token “through extensive wash trading.” Wash trading involves “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.” In other words, according to the SEC, Sun made it seem like there was a lot of interest in crypto tokens he issued when much of the trading was fraudulent and manufactured by Sun.
The SEC also charged Sun with “orchestrating a scheme to pay celebrities to tout” his crypto tokens “without disclosing their compensation.” Federal law requires people who endorse securities to “disclose whether they received compensation for the promotion, and to specify the amount.” The celebrities involved included Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy.
Lohan paid $40,000, and Paul paid about $100,000 to settle the charges against them without admitting liability. Soulja Boy did not respond to the lawsuit, and a default judgment was issued against him.
Sun posted on X that he believes the SEC “complaint lacks merit” and complained that “the SEC’s regulatory framework for digital assets is still in its infancy and is in need of further development.”
The litigation against Sun is ongoing, with a federal judge considering a motion by Sun’s attorneys to dismiss the charges. The current SEC Chairman, Gary Gensler, who announced the charges against Sun, will step down when Trump takes office in January. A new SEC commissioner appointed by Trump could settle or dismiss the charges against Sun.
How Trump can use the power of the presidency to unlock hundreds of millions in profits for himself
Through World Liberty Financial, Trump can reap massive personal profits from creating a more permissive regulatory environment for crypto ventures.
In addition to his 75% share of revenues over $30 million, Trump’s company was also awarded 22.5 billion WLF tokens. At the current sale price, these tokens are worth more than $300 million. That is more than 20 billion tokens being offered for sale publicly. (This makes the “governance” value of WLF tokens, which was already questionable, effectively worthless. No matter how many tokens you own, Trump will always be able to outvote other token holders.)
Right now, Trump’s tokens — like those purchased by Sun — are worthless because they cannot be transferred. But Trump could appoint a new SEC chairman who is friendly to the crypto industry and who would create new rules allowing the WLF tokens and similar crypto assets to be legally traded. If the price of the tokens increases when they hit the open market, which is a possibility for a crypto token backed by the President of the United States, the value of Trump’s tokens could be in the billions.
That appears to be exactly the path Trump is taking. WIRED reports that Trump is “asking the crypto industry to weigh in on potential picks.” Among the leading contenders is Paul Atkins, a former SEC Commissioner, who, since leaving the agency in 2008, has run a consulting firm that works with crypto companies. Atkins is also co-chair of the Token Alliance, an initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the lobbying group for the crypto industry. He is also a member of the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s Board of Directors.
Another top contender, former SEC General Counsel Robert Stebbins, has said that the SEC should “pause most of its crypto lawsuits while clearing a path for the firms to do business without the overhang of litigation.” But Stebbins’ candidacy underscores the need for Sun to forge a favorable relationship with Trump. Stebbins acknowledged that, even if it takes a more permissive view toward the crypto industry, it may want to consider continuing to pursue litigation involving fraud.
Major media outlets obsessed with banana, ignore Sun’s payment to Trump
A foreign national under federal fraud prosecution making a purchase that results in $18 million cash payment to the president-elect has all the makings of a major scandal. But it has been virtually ignored by several major media outlets.
The New York Times, for example, has published five articles about Sun’s purchase of the banana but none about Sun’s $30 million purchase of WLF tokens and his business partnership with Trump. The Washington Post has published three articles about the banana, but its coverage of Sun’s purchase of WLF tokens was limited to one short paragraph in a larger editorial about the crypto industry. (The paragraph does not explain how Trump personally profits from Sun’s token purchase.) The Wall Street Journal did publish a short piece about Sun’s token purchase on its “Live Update” blog, but the piece was not viewed as significant enough to be included in the print edition. The paper published two articles, plus a video, focused on the banana. One of the Wall Street Journal articles about the banana was published on the front page of the paper.
Substacks
Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya. Plus. . . Joe Nocera
It’s Monday, December 2. 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: Biden pardons Hunter, is Tulsi Gabbard really a Russian asset?, a migrant gang member robs a New York prosecutor and smiles about it, plus much more.
But first: Karma comes to the National Institutes of Health.
If you’re a regular reader of The Free Press, you know Stanford University scientist Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s pick to run the NIH, is someone we admire. In 2020, when most scientists who doubted lockdowns and school closings were the right response to Covid-19 were too afraid to speak up, Bhattacharya was fearless in his dissent. In October 2020, he was one of three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed a strategy of protecting the most vulnerable but otherwise reopening the country. For suggesting such “heresy,” Bhattacharya was attacked by the media and dismissed by many of his fellow scientists. He and his co-authors were also the target of fury inside the NIH, with its then-head Francis Collins calling for a “take down” of the declaration’s ideas.
Shamefully, in a country that claims to value free speech, Bhattacharya was also censored by the big social media companies. As we note in an editorial today, “the company now known as X put Bhattacharya’s account on a Trends Blacklist, which dramatically suppressed the visibility of his posts. YouTube, meanwhile, censored a video of a public policy roundtable with Bhattacharya and Florida governor Ron DeSantis because the Stanford scientist suggested—correctly—that the evidence for masking children was weak. Google, Reddit, and Facebook also censored mere mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration.”
We now know that the three authors of the declaration had it right all along. So it feels like poetic justice that a man who was smeared and censored by the country’s medical establishment has been nominated to run the very agency that called for his takedown. The critics are still howling, but we’re convinced he’s the right man for the job.
Read our editorial, “Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya.”
The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful
In the days and weeks to come, Team Trump will announce more nominations, and we will cover the major ones. Today, along with Jay Bhattacharya, we’re looking at the case of Tulsi Gabbard, who was nominated last month for director of national intelligence—a role that will put her in charge of the entire intelligence community.
In the midst of two hot wars and more trouble brewing across the globe, this appointment could not be more important. Consider what’s happening now in Syria, where rebels have overtaken much of Aleppo, the country’s largest city, and continue to make inroads elsewhere in the country amid fierce fighting. It doesn’t inspire confidence that, while serving as a member of Congress in 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad—the man who killed hundreds of his own people, including children, with chemical weapons four years earlier. Furthermore, after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, rather than rebuking Vladimir Putin for his aggression, Gabbard announced in a video message that “It’s time to put politics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha.”
For Gabbard’s critics, this proves she not only holds contrarian foreign policy views, she’s a full-on Russian asset. Meanwhile, our columnist Eli Lake is having none of it. As he points out in his piece today, Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and a patriot who should be given the chance to explain her beliefs in a confirmation hearing. “If she persuasively clarifies how her views have developed, then she should have the chance to serve,” he writes. Read Eli’s piece on why the smears against Gabbard are “unfounded, unfair, and unhelpful.”
“No Wonder He’s Smiling. He’s Gotten Away with It So Many Times.”
Brandon Simosa is one of the nearly 215,000 migrants New York City has taken in since spring 2022—a result of the Biden administration’s lenient border policies. On November 19, the 25-year-old Venezuelan was arrested for robbing a woman in her apartment building and masturbating in front of her while she stood terrified, cowering in the corner of her stairwell.
It gets worse. Simosa is a member of Tren de Aragua, the violent Venezuelan cartel that is sparking a crime wave across the U.S. And even though he arrived in the city only last June, Simosa had previously been arrested six times. Each time, he was set loose upon the city to wreak more havoc.
But this time, Simosa chose the wrong victim. The woman he robbed, who has not been identified, works for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, the man whose job it is to put criminals like Simosa in prison. And yet here, the irony is extra thick, because Bragg isn’t locking up as many criminals as his predecessors did. In fact, that’s exactly what Bragg set out to achieve. After he took office on January 3, 2022, he explicitly stated that several crimes, like prostitution and resisting arrest, would get a pass on his watch.
Now, New York City “is a great place to set up shop for a criminal,” said Hannah Meyers, a former counterterrorism officer for the NYPD who is now the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute. She says the case of Simosa is “a striking parable of how completely we’ve ceded law and order in this city.” Read Olivia Reingold’s piece on Simosa and the Big Apple’s big problem with migrant crime.
-
On Sunday, with just 49 days left in his presidency, Joe Biden broke a promise to the American people: He issued a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son Hunter even though he vowed he would never grant him clemency for his crimes. This month, Hunter was due to be sentenced for three gun and tax felonies, for which he faced a total of 42 years in prison and $1.35 million in fines. Instead, Hunter will face no punishment for any offenses “he has committed or may have committed” from January 1, 2024 through December 1, 2024. Explaining his reasoning behind the pardon, Biden used an argument straight out of the Donald Trump playbook: He said his son was “treated differently” by the Justice Department. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” Our own Eli Lake, who has written extensively about the use of lawfare against Trump, believes that Hunter has actually been the beneficiary of the opposite treatment: favoritism. Case in point: The Justice Department hit Trump advisers with charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act during the bogus Russia hoax scandal, but Hunter was never charged with any wrongdoing under that act even though he made millions lobbying foreign countries when his dad was vice president. As news of the pardon hit, even the Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, said he was “disappointed” by Biden’s decision to “put his family ahead of the country.” In a tweet late on Sunday, Polis wrote that he understands Biden’s “natural desire to help his son by pardoning him,” but “this is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
-
One year after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 and taking over 250 hostage, 63 remain in captivity in Gaza. On Saturday, it was confirmed that 20-year-old Israeli American Edan Alexander is among them, after Hamas released a propaganda video showing him speaking out for the first time. In the video, Alexander begs Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president-elect Donald Trump not to forget him and his fellow hostages. Afterward, his mother Yael told thousands at a Tel Aviv rally that “My Edan, my love, we miss you so much.” She added that Netanyahu called her and “assured me that now, after the deal in Lebanon, the conditions are ripe to release you and bring you home”—referring to the 60-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah that has ended 13 months of armed conflict. Israel’s war with Hamas continues unabated for now.
-
Former presidential candidate—and newly appointed government cost-cutter—Vivek Ramaswamy slammed New York City for spending $220 million to turn the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan into a migrant shelter. The hotel, dubbed the “new Ellis Island,” has been housing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers in its 1,250 rooms since May 2023. In dire need of repair, the hotel is owned by the Pakistani government, which is using the $220 million in rent to avoid defaulting on its international debt, part of a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund.
-
Donald Trump’s latest controversial nomination, Kash Patel for head of the FBI, is getting early support from Republican legislators. In an announcement on Saturday, Trump cited Patel’s efforts to expose “the Russia hoax,” as the president-elect calls it, as an example of his commitment to the Constitution and agency reform. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one, and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”
-
Pro-Trump columnist Scott Jennings is joining the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times amid the paper’s post–Election Day reckoning. The paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, extended the invitation to Jennings after announcing his intention to make the newsroom more balanced. Jennings’ appointment follows the public resignations of three board members in the wake of Soon-Shiong’s decision not to endorse either presidential candidate.
-
After months of heated debate, the United Kingdom’s parliament voted to allow medically assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. However, some disabled people are afraid the new law is not neutral, and could put pressure on vulnerable patients to end their lives—creating a slippery slope toward future bills sanctioning euthanasia for the disabled, the poor, and the depressed. For a deeper dive into the national conversation on this bill, read Madeleine Kearns’ piece, “Should a Government Help People Die?”
-
Russian and Syrian forces launched air strikes yesterday on rebel territory in northwest Syria, leaving more than 300 dead, including 20 civilians. The rebels, who captured Aleppo in a surprise attack, now control a broad stretch of land in the west and northwest of the country. Their breach of Aleppo has reignited the Syrian civil war and given insurgent militias the first upper hand since their nadir in 2016, when Assad’s government recaptured the part of the city controlled by rebels.
-
In one of those annual rituals that rank right up there with Groundhog Day, the Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, has announced its word of the year: brain rot. According to the BBC, “It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word’s usage saw an increase of 230 percent in its frequency from 2023 to 2024.” Other contenders included demure, dynamic pricing, and romantasy (romantasy?). We do have one question: Isn’t brain rot two words?
The Making of America’s Most Famous Cheerleaders
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders aren’t just a famous pom-pom squad. They’re an American icon that has performed live with Dolly Parton and the band Queen, and danced to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” for more than 41.8 million viewers at home. Wannabe members face a lower acceptance rate than most Ivy League schools. But it wasn’t always this way.
Back in 1991, one woman transformed the DCC from a dance team burning through cash into a fully-fledged operation with the brand recognition of a Fortune 500 company.
That woman is Kelli Finglass, the director of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who is somewhere between a drill sergeant and a mama bear. In a new episode of Honestly, Bari met with Finglass and asked her lots of burning questions, such as: How did she create a team culture of dedication and precision? What’s the line between compassion and hard-nosed management? And how does she retain America’s best dancers when any of them could easily achieve TikTok stardom overnight?
“I personally like people that want to be a part of a team and aren’t just trying to get followers,” Finglass told Bari. Click below to hear their full conversation.
Last Call to Save 25% on Your Subscription!
Finally, just in case you missed it (and honestly, how could you have missed it?), The Free Press is offering 25% off a yearlong subscription to all our great content. For just $60, you can access all our journalism—Nellie’s TGIF, Douglas Murray’s Things Worth Remembering, and much more. Plus, you’ll get the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping build a journalistic institution worthy of your trust. Click here to grab this deal before it ends today.
Joe Nocera is the deputy managing editor of The Free Press and the co-author of The Big Fail. Follow him on X @opinion_joe, and read his piece, “How a French Whale Made $85 Million off Trump’s Win.”
If you’re enjoying The Front Page, consider forwarding it to someone else you think might like it.
The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
-
Awakening Video1 year ago
This is What Happens When You Try to Report Dirty Cops
-
Substacks9 months ago
THE IRON-CLAD PIÑATA Seymour Hersh
-
Substacks1 year ago
The Russell Brand Rorschach Test Kathleen Stock
-
Substacks1 year ago
A real fact-check of Trump’s appearance on Meet the Press Judd Legum
-
Substacks1 year ago
Letter to the Children of Gaza – Read by Eunice Wong Chris Hedges