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The Free Press Goes to the Movies The Free Press
We at The Free Press love a good party—especially one that pretends to be about culture. So when we heard the Golden Globes is airing tomorrow (catch it on CBS at 8 p.m. ET), we rushed to the movies to check out some of the most talked-about films of the year. Or at least, the ones we talked about most.
The U.S. box office boomed in 2023, grossing more than $9 billion, the most since the pandemic started. Thank you, Taylor Swift. And the Barbenheimer juggernaut, which we dissected in July—Suzy Weiss fell big time for Barbie; Oppenheimer blew Elliot Ackerman’s mind. Then, after the summer hitfest came a slew of buzzy releases, like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a favorite to win the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and a movie that became a family triumph for Free Press contributor Nancy Rommelmann. And don’t forget the boom in religious flicks; movies like Jesus Revolution racked up better numbers than most of last year’s Oscar nominees.
Below you’ll find TFP’s own slate of superlatives. Sit back, grab the popcorn, and scroll down to hear our takes on some of the best films of the moment. And cast your votes for best drama, worst comedy, most erotic movie musical, or whatever else you saw this year, in the comments.
Best Erotic Musical: Maestro by Ben Kawaller
I was wary of Maestro. This is, after all, a film about Leonard Bernstein, the composer of the greatest musical of all time (West Side Story, if I even have to say this). I feared the Bradley Cooper biopic, in constantly reminding me of Bernstein’s most towering achievement, would fail that most basic of tests: Would I rather be watching. . . West Side Story?
Wisely, Cooper has limited the use of the WSS score to one well-placed sample that cheekily highlights the film’s central conflict between Bernstein’s long-suffering wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan, breathtaking), and his ardent homosexuality. He practiced the latter, the film suggests, at a level far exceeding his compositional output. At one point, an existentially frustrated Bernstein confesses, between drags of his ever-present cigarette, “Actually, when you add it up, there’s not much that I’ve created.”
Cooper—transformed by a prosthetic schnoz—is transfixing as Bernstein, and his screenplay, co-written with Josh Singer, is a swiftly moving, often devastating chronicle of a life (two lives, really) both audacious and unshakably confined by mid-century morality. It’s also an unsparing depiction of the ruthlessness of time: one image, late in the film, of a far-too-old Bernstein at a nightclub, still utterly in thrall to youth, drugs, and sex, ranks for me among cinema’s most crippling sequences. To be fair, I’m not sure if anyone else in the theater let out an audible sob.
Interestingly, that moment follows a scene, perhaps intentionally calling to mind 2022’s Tár, in which a 1980s Bernstein coaches a young (black) student in conducting. The film’s audience holds its breath: Are we about to watch an egomaniac decimate a mere mortal?
It gives little away to reveal that no, we are not. Like Lydia Tár in the moment of her undoing, Bernstein is uncompromising, teasing, and affectionate (very affectionate, it turns out). Unlike Lydia Tár, he gets away with it. The mutual warmth, Bernstein’s palpable joy in teaching, and the unremarkable fact that his students view him as a master, turn the scene into a eulogy for a bygone era. And the junior conductor’s obvious delight in Bernstein’s sexual touch, despite how pathetic it all looks, is just one of the film’s many contradictions that add to its depth.
Is Cooper’s film as good as West Side Story? Well. . . nothing is as good as West Side Story. But Maestro, which ingeniously incorporates some of Bernstein’s other most iconic compositions, is a brilliant work of art in its own right. It gutted me.
And the soundtrack is, of course, transcendent.
Best French Film with American Accents by a British Director: Napoleon by Oliver Wiseman
I was told I had to review a film about a megalomaniac bent on world domination. But when I discovered that Wonka breaches my ban on watching musicals, I was forced to go in another direction. And so Napoleon it was. Instead of Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of a ruthless master of the chocolate universe, it’d be Joaquin Phoenix as a misunderstood man of the people.
Most critics loathed Napoleon. So did the public, judging by its 59 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The haters are half right. Is Napoleon perfect? No. But Ridley Scott’s historical epic is a valiant and entertaining attempt at the almost impossible task of depicting the man Hegel described as “world history on horseback.”
A frequent complaint about this much-anticipated movie is that it strays too far from the truth. To be sure, the film’s historical inaccuracies are many and flagrant. Napoleon was not there when Marie Antoinette was beheaded. He did not meet his wife Joséphine at one of the bals des victimes held to celebrate the end of the Reign of Terror. He did not order his troops to blast cannonballs at the Egyptian pyramids.
To these complaints, Scott’s response has essentially been Who cares?
And he’s right.
Historical drama is not history. His job is to tell a story, not report the facts. If you expect a history lesson at the movies, that’s on you.
What you’re guaranteed is the epic satisfaction of big-budget battle scenes, Joaquin Phoenix working his mesmerizing, if slightly predictable, magic (who knew the Joker, Johnny Cash, and Napoleon were so similar?), and a surprising number of laughs.
One final, important data point: the French hate Napoleon. They were never likely to take well to a British director getting Hollywood A-listers to shout “Vive la France” in American accents. Oh well. Most offensive to the French, however, is the fact Scott portrays Napoleon as a flawed leader and—quelle horreur!—bad in bed.
All this Gallic whining is a very good sign; it’d be far more worrying if Scott had made a movie the French actually liked.
Best Bad Romance: May December by Emily Yoffe
May December is a movie about sex that’s not sexy. Instead, director Todd Haynes has made a movie about making movies.
Before seeing May December, it helps to know the real events that inspired it. It’s based on the life of Mary Kay Letourneau, a married elementary school teacher and mother of four, who in the 1990s began a sexual relationship with her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau, when he was twelve years old and she was thirty-four. She went to prison, gave birth to Fualaau’s two children, and after her release, they married. Letourneau died in 2020 of colon cancer at age fifty-eight.
In May December, Letourneau becomes Gracie (played by Julianne Moore) and her husband is Joe (played by Charles Melton). When the movie begins, they are more than two decades into a marriage that has produced three children, the youngest a pair of twins ready to graduate from high school. The film takes place during a visit by an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who has come to study Gracie. Elizabeth, who is the age Gracie was when she embarked on the relationship with Joe, is hoping her portrayal of Gracie will propel her from television star to serious film actress.
Although the Letourneau scandal is the scaffolding of May December, Haynes’s focus is the psychological interplay between the two women. We watch Elizabeth’s efforts to embody Gracie, a process both enabled and resisted by the older woman. This doppelganger effect is one of many references to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 classic Persona, about a similar relationship between an actress who has fallen silent and the nurse sent to tend her.
May December unfolds as a series of set pieces filled with simmering tension and subtext—only occasionally do emotions spill over. Portman plays an actress who is not a good enough actress to hide her voraciousness and ambition. Moore’s Gracie is invested in a daily portrayal of domestic bliss, even if at night she descends into crying jags her husband is tasked with comforting.
Both women—especially when interacting with Joe—are master manipulators. As Joe, Charles Melton gives a breakthrough performance, as he comes to realize he sacrificed his childhood first to Gracie, and later to his own children. He delivers a potent performance of pathos and loss, giving emotional weight to a movie that often feels like it’s keeping the viewer at arm’s length.
Throughout the film, lest you start getting drawn into the story, Haynes jolts you into awareness that you’re watching a movie through the loud, staccato, and intrusive score. That’s intentional. The music is taken from the mostly forgotten 1971 film The Go-Between, another story about sexual violation, deceit, and a sensual older woman’s exploitation of a schoolboy.
Best Eye Candy: Wonka by Kiran Sampath
I initially thought Wonka was going to be a 2023 remake of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. But Paul King’s Wonka isn’t a remake at all. It’s Willy Wonka’s origin story—the musical version. Who asked for that? I don’t know. But I loved it.
The story follows young Willy, a broke orphan raised in the jungle who, like every other person on the damn planet, dreams of becoming a chocolatier in the big city. During his first night on the town, Willy—who is illiterate because he “focused his studies almost exclusively on chocolate”—ends up enslaved in an innkeeper’s basement.
That’s where he meets his best friend, called Noodle. Noodle dropped down the laundry chute as a baby and also ended up a captive of the innkeepers. She’s “damaged” and upset because nothing rhymes with her name. (She’s so upset, she sings about this—although later they discover some rhymes.)
With the help of Noodle and Co., Willy manages to create a market for his chocolates. The city delights in his confectioneries made from the “mallow marshes of Peru” and the “bittersweet tears of Russian cloud.” But then the local chocolate cartel gets threatened by its peasant competition. Mrs. Bon Bon calls the police. The police chief, who is bribed by the cartel, orders all his officers to ban Willy from making chocolate.
Everyone, from the cartel to the chief of police to the church monks, wants Willy to fail. They fine him for daydreaming, dishearten him, disgrace him. They extort him—offering to bail his friends out of slavery in exchange for his exile to the North Pole. And then, there’s a try at homicide.
But this is America—or at least, somewhere like it—and sometimes an illiterate orphan born in the jungle really does make it.
For an hour and 56 minutes, I was charmed by a world where it rains gumballs and commoners eat giraffe-milk macaroons. Where Hugh Grant is an orange Oompa Loompa nicknamed Shorty Pants and Timothée Chalamet is brought back to his theater-kid roots, earnest and endearing, singing and dancing like a pro.
The movie is a sugar rush for the eyes and a reminder for the soul: hold on to your imagination. That’s where paradise is.
Best Fairy Tale-Turned-Horror Show: Priscilla by Margi Conklin
Watching Priscilla is like being trapped for two hours in an uncomfortable box. That’s likely how director Sofia Coppola wants us to feel, watching the story of an innocent teenager who became a kept woman, imprisoned by a king in his castle.
When Priscilla Beaulieu is cherry-picked by Elvis Presley at a party on a German army base, she is just 14 to his 24. And seeing Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla—all tiny, fragile, and doll-like—next to Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, a six-foot-five hunk of burning machismo, is enough to make you squirm.
But I couldn’t turn away. This hypnotic movie had me transfixed.
If, like me, you don’t know Priscilla’s backstory, it’s a shock. When she’s 16, her parents allow her to leave the family home and live on the grounds of Graceland. While he tours the world and beds other women, she goes to Catholic school by day and wanders the halls of his mansion by night, alone and friendless, pining for her man.
Her life is a monotony until Elvis comes home, and then it’s a whirlwind of drugs and guns and shopping and heavy petting (he won’t have sex with her until their wedding night). He is often lonesome and moody and cruel to Priscilla, choosing what she wears, telling her to dye her hair black, forcing her to stay sequestered when he goes off to Hollywood to shoot movies.
Finally, they marry and Priscilla makes love to her man. But after she gets pregnant on their wedding night, he spurns her almost immediately.
You know why she puts up with it. She’s stuck, and in love with a god. But Elvis, a man loved by every woman on the planet at one point, could never truly love her, the movie suggests, because he never loved himself.
Based faithfully on Priscilla’s memoir, Elvis and Me, the fairy tale is actually a horror show, first wrapped up in creamsicle colors, then turning sharper and more realistic as she wakes from her dream, faced with a grim choice.
Ultimately, the movie is about Priscilla’s liberation from Elvis. The final scene is a triumph and you root for her. But at the same time, it fails to satisfy when we all know this isn’t the ending for real-life Priscilla, who will forever be known as Elvis’s wife and never break free from the Presley curse.
Best Foreign Porn: Saltburn by Suzy Weiss
Saltburn is a story about coveting thy neighbor’s sick castle.
It starts in familiar territory: an awkward but brilliant boy, Oliver Quick—played tightly by Barry Keoghan—dropped onto the groomed grounds of Oxford, is desperate to fit in with the sparkly crowd. Their king, Felix Catton, languid and at home in the world, played by an eyebrow-pierced Jacob Elordi, takes a liking to Oliver. After Oliver regales Felix with a trauma tale of his drug-addled parents and poor upbringing, Felix invites him to stay at his posh family’s stately manor for the summer.
The next two hours are at turns sinister, dreamy, voyeuristic, homoerotic, and regular erotic, but never boring.
Felix’s mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) gets the best lines of the movie: when a character commits suicide, she quips, “She’d do anything for attention.” Or after Oliver is surprised to learn her daughter has an eating disorder: “Well, exactly! Hasn’t even helped. Complete waste of time.”
Oliver, meanwhile, is obsessed with Felix and his dreamy life in all its hedonism and pomp (his family wears black tie for weeknight dinners). But the tables are turned when Felix takes Oliver on a surprise trip to see his poor, downtrodden mother, and discovers that Oliver has kept a shocking secret.
“Look, I just gave you what you wanted. Like everyone else does,” Oliver says to Felix during a confrontation at his birthday party. “Doesn’t this just prove how much of a good friend I actually am?”
There’s been a lot of nit-picking over character believability and plot holes in this movie, which is probably valid. But director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) has delivered something shocking, original, and fun.
For all the talk of blue bloods being cold-blooded, Saltburn is about the hot-blooded outcome when envy and desire become one.
Worst Propaganda Film: Leave the World Behind by Olivia Reingold
My happy place is in bed with an apocalyptic thriller on my laptop (yes, I’m a cord-cutting millennial with no TV). The bleaker, the better.
But the genre has been dead for a while.
We sadists could only be tided over by HBO’s (now Max) sublime The Last of Us for so long. So when the holidays came, and we were surrounded by our families—puke—we needed an apocalyptic pick-me-up more than ever.
The only thing on offer is Leave the World Behind, the new Netflix drama about the end of the world—if it is indeed ending (its major innovation is to keep you guessing on that front). But beggars can’t be choosers, so I reluctantly watched the film on the lowest volume possible, careful not to wake my three-year-old nephew asleep in the next room.
It’s an okay way to spend two and a half hours. If you’re a junkie for this stuff, you’ll take anything. But it’s not the good stuff—it’s no Children of Men or Cloverfield. The parts I like show the characters trying to figure out how this is all happening—who could be attacking us and how do we get medicine now? It’s worse when it veers into social commentary, like the time a young black character (played by Myha’la) bristles at a comment a white New Yorker (Julia Roberts) makes about her hair. I grit my way through a few scenes that have the dynamic of a Karen-BIPOC showdown. And a handyman, played by Kevin Bacon, gets the QAnon treatment, although it accidentally flatters him, since he’s the only one who knows what the hell is going on.
Perhaps it makes sense that the film is a product of Barack and Michelle Obama’s production house, Higher Ground, which is dedicated to “elevating new and diverse voices in the entertainment industry.”
Obama, if you’re reading, please don’t let the social justice warriors come to the apocalypse next time. I’d like to think that if the world is burning, no one cares about microaggressions anymore.
In 2024, I’d like movies to take us back to apocalypses in which groups decide whether or not to team up with strangers based on how many cans of beans they have, not if they’re people of color.
Keep the wokes out of my culture. Make the apocalypse scary again.
Worst Movie to Watch with Your Grandparents: Poor Things by Francesca Block
Few things are cringier than watching graphic sex scenes in a movie theater while sitting next to your grandma, but that’s where I found myself when I jovially invited my family to join me for a viewing of Poor Things, the sci-fi comedy nominated for seven Golden Globes.
The film is based on a 1992 book of the same name by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, which I now have no intention of reading.
It features Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the body of a socialite who has been implanted with an infant’s brain, as she discovers herself (and her sexual desires) in a fantastical version of what I think is Victorian-era London.
Willem Dafoe plays the surgeon/mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (who the characters aptly refer to as “God”), whose face looks like a patchwork of skin grafts sewn together like a rag doll. God enjoys melding together different animals and body parts, and Bella is his next, most unpredictable, project.
Bella starts out as a child—portrayed in black and white film—stomping around the mansion, throwing tantrums and giving in to her bodily impulses. But she quickly grows up, learning 15 new words a day and discovering that there is an outside world she wishes to explore.
Despite God’s trepidations, Bella joins Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, who sports a fabulous mustache and an accent I couldn’t place) on an adventure full of saturated colors and constant sexcapades (which Bella calls “furious jumping”).
Bella encounters the world as it is: whimsical and warm, full of adventure and opportunity, but also pessimistic and cruel. Her naivete is at times refreshing, her boldness admirable and amusing. It’s oddly satisfying to watch her break free from the control of others—as long as you can suppress the strange voice in your head telling you this film appears to be glorifying pedophilia and convincing you that sexual promiscuity is the only path to true enlightenment.
This movie wasn’t my cup of tea, and I have no intention of ever seeing it again or recommending it to anyone I know.
But to my surprise, when the credits started to roll, my grandma turned to me, her eyes wide and bright, and declared it “genius,” even “Machiavellian.” The woman with blue hair sitting behind us in the theater agreed, and then told me she just loves Mark Ruffalo. Make of that what you will.
Best Period Thriller on the Edge: The Zone of Interest by Peter Savodnik
The best part of The Zone of Interest is what you don’t see: the Jews, the selections, the gas chambers. You can hear it and you can listen to other people talking about it. But you can’t quite make it out.
If Schindler’s List was an attempt to recreate in granular, mawkish detail the experience of the Holocaust, the unstated thesis of The Zone of Interest is that that experience cannot be recreated, that any attempt to do so reduces the suffering.
Instead, director Jonathan Glazer parachutes us into the bucolic world adjacent to the world of Auschwitz-Birkenau: the villa inhabited by commandant Rudolf Höss; his wife, Hedwig; and their five children. The lovely two-story house; the garden; the pool. The surreality of an upper-middle-class German family doing ordinary things—eating dinner, going to school, going to bed, having a drink—while an extraordinary evil is perpetrated next door. We can’t see the horror. We are confined to the penumbra of it.
Of course, that’s where the interesting things happen.
Inside the inferno is pure darkness. Outside, far away, is innocence or, at least, plausible deniability.
But along the edge of evil, inside the proverbial zone of interest, in which characters close their windows to prevent the ashes of dead Jews from leaving a film on their kitchen counter—that is where the inner tumult, the fear of what will happen to one’s soul, plays out.
The commandant and his wife—dubbed “the Queen of Auschwitz”—maintain the steeliness we expect. They seem incapable of any human impulse. Rudolf Höss, played brilliantly by Christian Friedel, oversees the world’s most efficient killing machine. Hedwig Höss, played by the charmless and very believable Sandra Hüller, pretends not to know what her husband does while letting on that she knows exactly what he does. At night, after the kids are in bed, he has sex in his office with Jewish women who may soon be gassed, and then rinses off in an underground bathroom.
But there are barely perceptible wrinkles: Höss’s mother-in-law, while visiting, glimpses a smokestack in the distance billowing flame and smoke; soon after, she leaves without a word. Höss, toward the end of the movie, appears to glimpse the future—in which being a Nazi is the worst thing anyone can be—and then retches. (This anticipates Höss returning to the Church at the end of his life and apparently suffering an existential crisis—shortly before his execution.)
There are, as Glazer knows, as Martin Amis, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, knew, many “zones of interest.” None are as cinematic as the paradise that Höss built. All are shot through with the same wonderings and nightmares. They are the places on the outside, but really, they are where the action takes place. They are where we discover who we are
Best YA Prequel Adaptation: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Julia Steinberg
I first read The Hunger Games as a teenager—the same age as the children (called “tributes”) who fight to the death in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Now I’m 21 and still enthralled by the series.
The latest film from the franchise, which takes place 64 years before the first Hunger Games installment, is the prequel story of Corialanus “Coryo” Snow, who becomes the president of Panem, the dystopian successor to the United States, and is the antagonist of the original series.
Snow, portrayed by 28-year-old Tom Blyth, is the heir to one of Capitol’s aristocratic families, which is now in decline. The prequel explores his rise to power as an Academy student who plans on returning his family to their former wealth and glory. Instead of using test scores to decide who will receive a prestigious scholarship to the university, Capitol leadership tells 24 top students that their mentees’ performance in the 10th annual Hunger Games will determine who receives the award.
Snow, who has the highest grades but no money to afford the university, is determined to win, despite being paired with the tribute with the greatest odds of losing—Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). In classic YA fashion, the two fall in love, though the relationship is facilitated by Snow’s ambition.
Snow is successful because he realizes that spectacle is everything. He earns the ear of Head Gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) by proposing that, to boost falling viewership in the Capitol, the audience must have a connection with the tributes. For example, Snow coaches Lucy Gray to sing to gain the attention of Capitol viewers in exchange for gifts sent to the arena.
But Snow’s attachment to Lucy Gray reminds us that this handsome schemer is responsible for the deaths of thousands both through his role as a gamemaker and through his eventual leadership of Panem. As the audience roots for Snow’s success, we are alienated from his future crimes—it’s hard to root against a hot young actor versus an old man (with apologies to Donald Sutherland, who plays Snow in the original film series).
Ultimately, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes falls into the very trap that Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins masterfully highlighted in her trilogy. While her series offered a postmodern reflection on spectacle, the movie never steps far enough away from its own fireworks to make the same critique. But, if you want to lean into the spectacle, it’s a great way to spend two and a half hours.
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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.
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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.”
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Over the holiday weekend, President-elect Trump continued to name the people he wants in his incoming administration. His picks seem designed to destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump.
Congress—which represents the American people—designed governmental institutions like the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Defense to support the mission of the Constitution, which is the fundamental law of the United States of America. The Constitution is not partisan, and in 1883, after a mentally ill disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress passed a law requiring that the people who staff government offices be hired on the basis of their skills, not their partisanship.
The people who work in governmental institutions—and therefore the institutions themselves—are rather like the ballast that keeps a ship upright and balanced in different weathers. Nonpartisan government officials who clock in to do their job keep the government running smoothly and according to the law no matter whom voters elect to the presidency.
It is precisely that stability of the American state that MAGA leaders want to destroy. In their view, the modern American state has weakened the nation by trying to enforce equality for all Americans, making women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities equal to white, Christian men. But they have been unable to persuade voters to vote away the institutions that support the modern state.
Even in the 2024 campaign, voters so hated the blueprint for destroying the modern government and replacing it with a super-strong president who would impose Christian nationalism that Trump and his allies ran away from that blueprint: Project 2025.
Now, though, with Trump having won the 2024 presidential election by a razor-thin margin, MAGA leaders are claiming a mandate to destroy the American state and replace it with an authoritarian government staffed with partisans whose most obvious quality is their loyalty to Trump.
Russian specialist and military scholar Tom Nichols of The Atlantic notes that the Russians talk about “power ministries,” which are “the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity.” Nichols notes that in the U.S., those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community, all of which Trump is attempting to destroy by placing unqualified loyalists at their head.
For the crucially important post of attorney general, who is responsible for overseeing the enforcement of the rule of law across the nation, Trump first tapped former Florida representative Matt Gaetz, whose association with drug use and sex trafficking forced him to withdraw, and then named Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who has insisted that the legal cases against Trump are proof that the justice system has been “weaponized” against Trump.
To head the FBI, the bureau Trump has long insisted was persecuting him through its investigation of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—ties that Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have confirmed in detail—Trump has tapped loyalist and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, who has vowed to use the FBI to exact revenge on those Trump considers his enemies.
That Patel’s appointment is designed to destroy the FBI is clear not least because installing him would require Trump to fire current FBI director Christoper Wray. FBI directors serve ten-year terms precisely so they are not tied to any administration, and Wray was Trump’s own appointee in his first term. Indeed, the idea that the FBI is insufficiently right wing for Trump’s new administration speaks volumes: in its entire history, the FBI has never had a Democrat in charge of it. Under Patel, the nation’s chief law enforcement agency would be a tool of the president.
For director of the CIA, Trump has tapped unqualified loyalist attack dog John Ratcliffe; for director of national intelligence, the person who oversees all American intelligence agencies, Trump has tapped former representative Tulsi Gabbard, whose ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad make her loyalties suspect. Taken together, Trump’s appointments to these powerful departments amount to an attempt to destroy the nation’s fundamental institutions.
As Charlie Sykes points out, Trump’s appointments are not only a “[m]assive Fuq U to institutions…[b]ut also a huge FU to the Supreme Court because Trump doesn’t think they will be a check on his campaign of lawless retribution.”
The Atlantic’s Nichols told MSNBC today that Trump’s appointees are “there to build an authoritarian cadre and to put themselves beyond the reach of the rule of law.”
With loyalty trumping ability and merit under an autocrat, the quality of government officials plummets. This pays off for an autocratic leader because those appointed to serve in an autocratic government are usually unemployable in a merit-based system, making them fiercely loyal to the leader who has elevated them beyond their abilities.
Autocrats start by rewarding family, and Trump has certainly followed that suit. After years in which Republicans went after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was never a government employee, over the weekend, Trump announced that he intends to appoint his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, as ambassador to France. In 2004, Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 federal crimes and served time in prison before Trump pardoned him in 2020. Trump also announced that he will appoint his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Lebanese-born billionaire Massad Boulos, as White House senior adviser on Arab and Middle East affairs.
This weekend, an email from the mother of Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, came to light. Written in 2018, when Hegseth was in the middle of a divorce from his second wife, who filed for divorce after Hegseth got a co-worker pregnant, the email told Hegseth to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” Writing “[o]n behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way,” Penelope Hegseth said: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Penelope Hegseth has since praised her son.
Meanwhile, those loyal to a rising regime attack public servants to make others afraid to speak out. On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk posted on X that Alexander Vindman, former National Security Council director for European affairs, is “on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.” Vindman was a key figure in Trump’s first impeachment after being on the phone call in which Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear the Democratic opponent he considered most dangerous to his reelection prospects, then–former vice president Joe Biden, before Trump would release money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russian incursions.
But Vindman, who famously told Congress that he had assured his father that he was safe speaking up against the president because “here, right matters,” wasn’t taking such an attack quietly.
“Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics,” Vindman posted back. “That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason?
“Let me help you out with the facts: I don’t take/have never taken money from any money from oligarchs Ukrainian or…otherwise.
“I do run a nonprofit foundation. The HereRightMattersFoundation.org to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s unprovoked attack on Feb 24, 2022. I served in the military for nearly 22 years and my loyalty is to supporting the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. That’s why I reported presidential corruption when I witnessed an effort to steal an election. That report was in classified channels and when called by Congress to testify about presidential corruption I did so, as required by law.
“You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated.”
As Trump sets out to turn the government into an instrument for his own power and vengeance, President Biden tonight pardoned his son Hunter Biden. Laying out the history of Republicans’ persecution of Hunter to weaken his father, the president said in a statement, “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong…. [A]nd there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough…. I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice…. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-project-2025.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/30/donald-trump-charles-kushner/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c079y0r1j8po
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/pete-hegseth-mother-email.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/kash-patel-principle/680838/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/us/politics/trump-kash-patel-fbi-republicans.html
X:
AVindman/status/1861912067508257069
Bluesky:
sykescharlie.bsky.social/post/3lc7eq6wkbs22
georgetakei.bsky.social/post/3lcb4qzephe2j
rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social/post/3lcbjzqytg225
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