Substacks
The Front Page: ‘I Was Forced to Marry. In Iraq, Nine-Year-Old Girls Could Share My Fate.’ Plus. . . Madeleine Kearns
It’s Thursday, September 12, and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today’s offering is brought to you by my brilliant colleague Madeleine Kearns, and it includes Bill Barr on the chaos at Columbia, Biden in a MAGA cap, the truth about one of the craziest-sounding claims in Tuesday’s debate, and more. But first, she explores the hypocrisy of “luxury feminism” and the misogyny it tolerates. —Olly Wiseman
Earlier this summer, our friend and Free Press contributor Ayaan Hirsi Ali identified a pernicious strain of thinking she calls “luxury feminism.” It’s a nod to “luxury beliefs”—an idea coined by another Free Press writer, Rob Henderson.
Like any useful concept, once you hear about luxury feminism, you suddenly see it everywhere. This all-too-common school of thought is vague, alarmist, and detached from reality. Vague in that it trades in neat slogans. Alarmist in its overblown warnings about the imminent arrival of some Handmaid’s Tale dystopia here in America. And detached from reality in that it prioritizes dubious concepts like “gender identity” over the discrimination and biological issues faced by the female sex across the world.
For all the pussy hats and inflatable IUDs, luxury feminism has some serious blind spots. The biggest? “This feminism ignores Islamic misogyny in the developing world—and, increasingly, on Western shores,” says Ayaan—who knows of what she speaks. She was born in Somalia, where she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Later, she would have been forced to marry her distant cousin, had she not escaped to live a free life in the West.
Another woman acutely aware of the hypocrisy of luxury feminism is Yasmine Mohammed. She was born and raised in Canada to Muslim immigrant parents. One day, her abusive stepfather hung her upside down by her ankles for spelling her name with a J—which he interpreted as her attempt to be more “Western.” And when she was 19, she was forced to marry a terrorist. “If I had been a blonde, blue-eyed child with a German family, or an American one, I might have been protected. But because it was an Egyptian man who was subjecting me to unspeakable acts of violence, the abuse was apparently acceptable to the Canadian state. I had to endure it,” writes Yasmine in her piece for The Free Press today.
Yasmine says two groups of girls and women are let down by this double standard. The first are the women in the West who have experienced similar lives to hers—and Yasmine says she has spoken to hundreds of such women. The second are in places like Afghanistan—where the Taliban recently added speaking in public to the long list of rights women no longer have. Or Iraq, where lawmakers have taken the first step in legalizing child marriage for girls as young as nine. As she writes, these abuses go unchecked “because of cultural relativism, the progressive ideal that we shouldn’t hold other cultures to our own standards, even when those standards are the law.”
Read Yasmine’s full essay: “I Was Forced to Marry. In Iraq, Nine-Year-Old Girls Could Share My Fate.”
Bill Barr on Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia
Speaking of luxury beliefs. . . readers will remember the tale of the multimillionaire anarchist protester who clashed with staff at Columbia earlier this year. In May, Free Press reporter Francesca Block spoke to Mario Torres, the custodian who tried to fend off James Carlson, a 40-year-old trust fund kid with a $2.3 million townhome, who was part of the mob that attempted to storm a campus building. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” Torres told Francesca. Now, with students back on campus, The New Yorker reports that more Columbia workers say the university is not doing enough to protect them from the latest wave of anti-Israel protesters.
Writing in The Free Press today, Bill Barr, the former U.S. attorney general and Columbia alum, reveals that his law firm is representing two custodians who were physically assaulted by protesters in April. He writes that the plight of the school’s workers is a reminder that Columbia’s antisemitism problem “is a danger to all members of the Columbia community, as it will not—and has not—stopped with Jews.” And, Barr argues, the school has a long way to go in rooting out the problem.
Read Bill Barr on “Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia.”
Can Women Be Drag Queens?
Chappell Roan has become a pop sensation. Her hits “My Kink Is Karma” and “Femininomenon” are all over TikTok. Her concerts boast record-breaking crowds. Last night, she performed at MTV’s Video Music Awards. And she just made the cover of Rolling Stone. The 26-year-old appears in chalk-white foundation, dark, exaggerated eye shadow, bright red lipstick, and a curly orange wig—a look in keeping with her overall drag-queen aesthetic.
Today, my colleague River Page today writes of her appeal and her aesthetic, noting that: “Perhaps most interestingly, Chappell Roan isn’t a real person. She’s the drag alter ego of a 26-year-old woman from Missouri named Kaleigh Amstutz.”
Chappell’s rise has led River to wonder about the growing rise of female drag queens, and the controversy they’ve caused on RuPaul’s Drag Race—and beyond. It’s led River to ask a question you’ve probably never asked yourself . . .
“Can a Woman Be a Drag Queen?”
Sixty-seven million people watched Tuesday night’s debate between Trump and Harris, a big uptick from the 51 million who tuned in to watch the June debate that sank Joe Biden’s reelection hopes. Yesterday, Trump said another debate “probably won’t happen.” Harris’s team says they’re on for round two.
The overwhelming consensus among pundits after the debate was that Harris was the winner. The election, however, will be decided by swing voters, not pundits. And a Reuters focus group of 10 undecided voters who watched the debate yielded intriguing results. Six came out in support of or leaning toward Trump, while only three were team Harris. Half felt that, after 90 minutes, they still didn’t have a clear idea of the vice president’s policies.
Household incomes rose in 2023 for the first time since the pandemic, according to census data published this week. Inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4 percent from the 2022 estimate of $77,540.
When Harvard defended its admissions policy before the Supreme Court last year, it warned of a precipitous fall in the number of black students enrolled if it lost the case. Well, the first post–affirmative action numbers are out, and they show only a modest fall in the number of black first-year students at Harvard: 14 percent, down from 18 percent last year.
China is providing Russia with direct support for its assault on Ukraine, U.S. officials warned this week. U.S. deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell said China is sending Russia “component pieces. . . to help sustain, build, and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine.” The claim comes soon after reports that Iran has sent ballistic missiles to Russia—a move U.S. officials have called a “dramatic escalation.”
Joe Biden donned a “Trump 2024” cap during a 9/11 visit to a Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fire station yesterday. A White House press secretary cast it as a show of unity, not an embarrassing mistake. Maybe. Definitely not a show of unity: The company Donald Trump kept on Wednesday. Far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was in Trump’s entourage in New York—a day after she flew with him to the presidential debate. Pro tip for any presidential candidates reading this: Don’t invite 9/11 truthers to 9/11 commemorations.
The Truth In Trump’s Transgender Prisoner Claim
At the presidential debate on Tuesday night, Trump said of Kamala Harris: “She did things that nobody would ever think of. Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
Too crazy to be real, right? A figment of Trump’s imagination or the product of the far-right fever swamps, yes? A lot of people seemed to assume as much.
If only.
As CNN reported this week, when Harris was running for president in 2019 she was asked by the ACLU whether she supported state-funded gender transition surgeries for “transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention.”
Harris’s reply? Yes. “I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.” So yes, “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” sounds insane. But it’s also something Kamala Harris said she supported in 2019.
For more reaction to the debate, catch the latest episode of Honestly. Michael Moynihan, Batya Ungar-Sargon, David Faris, and Peter Savodnik try to make sense of the meaty issues discussed on the debate stage, like foreign policy, the economy, and. . . cat-eating? Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, readers, Olly here. I am writing this message on my phone with one hand as I am locked in The Free Press stocks right now. Interns are hurling rotten vegetables at me as I type. Why? Because I muddled up the names of maybe the two most famous men in America in a version of The Front Page sent to some readers yesterday. I regret this very stupid error. (Julia, can you let me out now? Please.)
Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor for The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns.
To support The Free Press, become a paid subscriber today:
And if you’re enjoying The Front Page, consider forwarding it to someone else you think might like it.
Former Republican representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming joined Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage hung with red, white, and blue bunting and signs that said “Country Over Party.” As Cheney took the stage, the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Liz!” The two were on the campaign trail today in Ripon, Wisconsin, the town that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was in that then-tiny town in 1852 that Alvan E. Bovay, who had recently emigrated from New York, called for a new political party to stand against slavery.
The idea of a new party took off in 1854 when it became clear the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting the westward expansion of human enslavement would become law. When they met in February of that year, people in Ripon were early participants in the movement of people across the North to defend democracy. Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control.
In the face of this existential threat to the country, party divisions crumbled.
Pundits have described today’s event as a component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans, and in part, it is. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, is bearing fruit as in an open letter today, two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz. “We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”
Lately, there have been indications of what returning Trump to office might mean.
On Tuesday, Trump suggested that the U.S. soldiers who sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) when Iran attacked an Iraqi base where they were stationed were not truly injured, but simply had “headaches.” Trump’s statement brought back to light a 2021 CBS report by Catherine Herridge and Michael Kaplan that found the injured soldiers had not been recognized with a Purple Heart, awarded to service members wounded or killed in the line of duty, despite qualifying for it. This slight meant they were denied the medical benefits that come with that military decoration.
The soldiers told Herridge and Kaplan that they were pressured to downplay their injuries to avoid undercutting Trump’s attempt to keep the casualty numbers in that incident low. With the story back in the news, Kaplan posted that after the report, the Army awarded the soldiers the Purple Hearts they deserved.
Journalist Magdi Jacobs recalled the argument of Trump’s lawyers before the Supreme Court that Trump could not prod a SEAL team to assassinate a rival because service members would adhere to the rules of their institutions. The Army officers’ bowing to Trump’s political demands proved that argument was wrong and set off “[m]ajor alarm bells,” Jacobs posted, suggesting that the military would not stand firm against Trump in a second term, especially now that the Supreme Court says a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of official duties.
Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank of Politico’s E&E News covering energy and the environment reported today that two former White House officials said that Trump was “flagrantly partisan” when responding to natural disasters. One said that in 2018 Trump refused to approve disaster aid after wildfires to California, perceiving it as a Democratic state. To get disaster money, the aide showed Trump polling results revealing that Orange County, which had been badly damaged in the fires, “had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”
Defending the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters in 2021 gave a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow owner Mike Lindell to enable him to breach the county’s voting systems in an unsuccessful attempt to find evidence of voter fraud. A jury found Peters guilty of four felonies related to the scheme. Today, District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison.
But there are other stories these days of what the government can accomplish when it is focused on the good of all Americans.
About 45,000 dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike Tuesday when the union could not reach an agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping just as the areas hammered by Hurricane Helene desperately needed supplies. Dockworkers wanted a pay increase of up to 77% over six years and better benefits, as well as an end to the automation that threatens union jobs.
President Joe Biden reiterated his support for collective bargaining despite the threat to an economic slowdown from the strike. The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated Biden and the union, saying: “President Biden wants unions to have extortionary bargaining power, and he’s getting a demonstration of it on election eve. Congratulations.”
But today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement.
The government’s power to make things better is also on display amid the rubble and ruin left behind by Hurricane Helene. Yesterday evening, after taking an aerial tour of western North Carolina to survey the damage and receiving a briefing in Raleigh, President Biden thanked both “the Republican governor of South Carolina and the Democratic governor of North Carolina and all of the elected officials who’ve focused on the task at hand. In a moment like this, we put politics aside. At least we should put it all aside, and we have here. There are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans. And our job is to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can and as thoroughly as we can.”
Biden explained that the federal government had 1,000 first responders in place before the storms hit, and that he had approved emergency declarations as soon as he received the requests from the governors. Yesterday he directed the Defense Department to move 1,000 soldiers to reinforce North Carolina’s National Guard to speed up the delivery of supplies like food, water, and medicine to isolated communities, some of which are accessible now only by pack mule.
He has already deployed 50 Starlink satellites for communication, and more are coming.
Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are offering free temporary housing, as well as delivering food and water. They are helping people apply for the help that they need.
While Trump and MAGA Republicans insist that Biden is botching the response to Helene, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted that the response has gotten bipartisan praise. Republican governors Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia both thanked Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.
So today’s bipartisan event in Ripon suggests far more than Democratic outreach to Republicans. It appears to be a commitment to a government that advances the interests of ordinary people, and protects the right of everyone to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government. Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles.
“The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”
“In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump.
“And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president. I know…that…a president Harris will be able to unite this nation. I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law, and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children—and if I might say so, especially our little girls—to do great things. So help us right the ship of our democracy so that history will say of us, when our time of testing came, we did our duty and we prevailed because we loved our country more.”
—
Notes:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-liz-cheney-joins-harris-campaign-rally-in-ripon-wis
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-cheney-wisconsin-trump-89396853e5521c3870a3c88e04cbfd99
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/02/adam-kinzinger-republicans-colin-allred-texas/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4914462-colorado-county-clerk-sentenced-election-breach/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/03/port-strike-over/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/politics/fact-check-trump-biden-hurricane-response/index.html
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-north-carolina-mules-aid
X:
ColinAllredTX/status/1841962653721493560
mkaplantv/status/1841299299994423466
magi_jay/status/1841522714357408136
Acyn/status/1841260936595652920
Acyn/status/1841260936595652920
atrupar/status/1841976647731347632
atrupar/status/1841972668267925537
atrupar/status/1841963353566068778
October 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
October 7, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
Reminder to Update Your Bitcoin Wallet’s Firmware
This is What Happens When You Try to Report Dirty Cops
THE IRON-CLAD PIÑATA Seymour Hersh
The Russell Brand Rorschach Test Kathleen Stock
RARE VIDEO: 1987 DC Hearing – NBC Warns Against Removing Fairness Doctrine – Learn Why It Matters
WATCH: CSPAN Caller Call Out the Resending of the Smith-Mundt Act – Learn Why That’s IMPORTANT
WATCH: 1975 Church Comitee Hearings on the CIA Mockingbird Media
-
Awakening Video1 year agoThis is What Happens When You Try to Report Dirty Cops
-
Substacks7 months agoTHE IRON-CLAD PIÑATA Seymour Hersh
-
Substacks1 year agoThe Russell Brand Rorschach Test Kathleen Stock
-
Substacks1 year agoA real fact-check of Trump’s appearance on Meet the Press Judd Legum
-
Substacks11 months agoLetter to the Children of Gaza – Read by Eunice Wong Chris Hedges