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The Great Scramble Peter Savodnik

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Shelle Lichti sits behind the wheel of her truck, The Rainbow Rider, on December 10, 2023 in Joliet, IL. Lichti voted for Trump, then Biden, and now isn’t sure. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

In 2016, Shelle Lichti voted for Donald Trump. She got tons of blowback from other gay people who thought she’d betrayed them.

She was 45 at the time, and she’d been doing things her own way since she was 11, since she was adopted by the big Mennonite family in Missouri, and ran away, and came out, and became a trucker, hauling beef and pork across the American hinterland in a rainbow-painted eighteen-wheeler. 

It had been tough being a woman. And a lesbian.

But she’d forged a new life for herself. 

She had built a portable home in the back of her truck—with the kitchenette, the curtains, the warm little lights, the generator, and her bed on the lower bunk, and all her clothes, first-aid gear, and dry goods in the top bunk—and she’d traversed an array of politics and religions. (She was into Buddhism—the calm, the focus. “I choose to say I have faith, but I’m not religious,” Lichti said.) She liked to listen to audiobooks—she was into Nora Roberts, the romance novelist—and she loved to turn up Sia when she was “laying down some miles,” which meant going for hours and hours, not stopping, pushing on to wherever she was going.

“Everybody is on their own ride,” Lichti tells The Free Press. “We have to respect that.” (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

What she had learned from riding around the country in her little home in her big rig was you never knew as much as you thought you did about other people. “Everybody is on their own ride,” she said. “We have to respect that.”

Over the years, she noticed the homophobia had waned, but it had gotten harder to make a living, mostly because of the influx of truckers, most of whom were from Somalia and the Middle East.

“I don’t have a problem with them—they’re out here making a living for their families,” Lichti said. But with the new truckers, it was harder to get a raise. “When I started”—in 1993—“I made 19 cents a mile. Now, I barely make double that.”

Shelle Lichti works on her truck, The Rainbow Rider, on December 10, 2023 in Joliet, IL. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

It wasn’t just Lichti who was struggling. It seemed to her like the country was falling apart. “A lot of roadside motels and hotels look like crack houses,” she said. “Not enough people coming through.” On top of that, she said, Main Streets everywhere had been devoured by Walmart, Costco, Amazon. “The billboards on Route 66”—the 2,500-mile highway connecting Chicago and Los Angeles—“are mostly gone.” 

Then, in June 2015, Trump announced his presidential bid, and the bluster, the fireworks, the who-gives-a-fuck about sticking to your talking points—that was refreshing in the face of all the decline.

A lot of her gay and lesbian friends thought she’d gone crazy. “I was like, ‘If you want to unfriend me because of my beliefs, then you’re no better than the people that hate on us,’ ” Lichti said.

But after Trump got into office, Lichti started to see the world differently yet again. Trump seemed too nasty in his rhetoric, like a “toddler,” she said. 

Then, she learned her son was transgender, and it seemed like a dangerous time to be trans or Muslim or Mexican. “My son’s own twin brother has blown him off,” she said.

Then came Covid, George Floyd, the riots. And Trump didn’t seem to make life any better for truckers, Lichti said. “It got even worse.” 

By Election Day 2020, she said, “I wanted anybody but Trump.” Lichti voted for Joe Biden.

More than three years later, she doesn’t know what to believe. She says she feels unmoored. She considers Biden a “seat-filler.” She doesn’t care for Democrats. She kind of cares about climate change, and she’s pro-choice, and she’s heartbroken about the people dying in Ukraine and Gaza, but she doesn’t think it’s America’s problem, and she can’t stand the kids in the LGBTQ+ movement with their “20 zillion acronyms.”

She said she isn’t a “conservative” or “progressive,” and definitely not a Democrat or Republican. 

“Our society has made it to where we’re supposed to fit in a certain mold,” she said. “A lot of us, you know, well, it’s like taking a plus-size girl and trying to squeeze me into a size 2. Just not gonna work.”

Lichti rejects labels like “Democrat,” “Republican,” “progressive,” and “conservative.” “Our society has made it to where we’re supposed to fit in a certain mold,” she said. “It’s like taking a plus-size girl and trying to squeeze me into a size 2. Just not gonna work.” (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)

Shelle Lichti is hardly alone. 

Nearly half of Americans now identify as independent—not necessarily because they’re centrists, or moderates, but because neither party reflects their views.

That’s because, over the past several decades, the parties have switched places, leaving tens of millions of voters unsure about what they stand for or where they belong, Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of A Time to Build, about reviving the American Dream, told me.

Levin described two axes in American political life—one right-left, and the other insider-outsider. Traditionally, the party of the right has been the party of the inside—the establishment—and the left has fought for those on the outside—the poor, the disenfranchised.

“But in the twenty-first century, they’ve switched sides,” he said. “Democrats are the elites, and Republicans feel like they’re fighting the establishment.”

One way to think about it, said Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, was geographic: “From Lincoln to Reagan, New England, the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes, and the western states were the Republicans, and now they’re the Democrats—while the interior was all the Democrats, and now they’re the Republicans.” 

This switch has “created a huge amount of confusion, because it’s happened without either party recognizing it,” Levin added. “Republicans have gotten pretty comfortable with it, while Democrats are very uncomfortable being the insider party.”

That’s because it’s “political suicide” to acknowledge you’re the party of the elite, Thomas Edsall, a New York Times columnist who has reported on national politics for a half-century, told me. 

“Democrats are elite, but they can’t say it,” Edsall said.

Consider that, in 2016, the median home price of a Hillary Clinton voter was $640,000, while that of a Trump voter was $474,000. In 2018, Democrats took control of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the country—all of them on the coasts, mostly in New York and California. Of the top 50, they held 41. 

And, increasingly, Democrats recruit their future leaders—their ideas—from a handful of universities that cater to the American elite.

From 2004 to 2016, 20 percent of all Democratic campaign staffers came from seven universities: Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Berkeley, Georgetown, Columbia, and Yale. By contrast, the University of Texas, Austin; Ohio State University; and University of Wisconsin–Madison provided the most Republican staffers.

The reasons for the Great Scramble are legion and stretch back decades, if not longer: the breakup of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, the end of the Cold War, globalization, the internet, the decline of organized religion and the two-parent family, the forever wars, the opioid and fentanyl crises. 

“Things are definitely in flux,” Michael Lind said.

What I know for sure is that I first glimpsed it on Election Night 2022, at a “victory party” in Phoenix for Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

Lake’s supporters seemed to fall outside the old left-right construct. Racially, economically, ideologically—they didn’t fit the preconceived categories. 

My surprise was obvious when I interviewed a Latina in her fifties in an Iron Maiden t-shirt. 

How was it, I asked, that she supported a candidate who had run against more Latinos coming to America? Had she not seen Lake’s campaign manager’s “racist tweet” a few weeks before? 

That’s when she started lecturing me about “gangbangers coming here” and then “Big Tech” and “Big Pharma,” but also her friend’s biracial daughter and Martin Luther King Jr., and why Washington should “pump trillions” into the rural parts of the country decimated by fentanyl and cheap overseas labor. 

Our conversation wasn’t that dissimilar to a conversation I had several months later with a Democratic bundler in Brentwood—he’s worth, I’m told, about $400 million—who was going on about how “the climate and AI are everything” (he thought the former was the end of us, and the latter was our salvation), and how he was “scared shitless about the gender stuff.” When I asked him whether he’d be supporting Biden in 2024, he said, “Of course,” but then he added, “As for the other fucktards”—he meant younger, more progressive, down-ballot Democrats—“no way, no can do.”

There were other weird signs: the Democratic poll, in November, showing that the base of the party—including blacks, Latinos, college women, and millennials—prefers Trump to Biden; GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley saying government shouldn’t bar minors from transitioning; Senator John Fetterman, once lionized by progressives, insisting “I’m not a progressive,” while touting his support for Israel and calling for tougher border controls—prompting Helen Qiu, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for New York City Council, to call Fetterman a “Christmas Miracle.”

Compounding our confusions about the Great Scramble is the language we use to talk about politics—to describe the country we want to live in.

“Our language is impoverished, left over from the French Revolution, with us just saying ‘right’ and ‘left’ and what we think we mean by that,” Oklahoma City attorney Jason Reese, who has spent 25 years in GOP politics, told me. 

In the 1980s, when he was a kid, Reese was a Reagan Republican. He believed in capitalism, and thought the Soviet Union was evil, and the unions, like liberals and high taxes, were a relic. His mom called him “Alex P. Keaton,” after the Family Ties character.

But in 1992, just as conservatives were triumphing over everyone—with the USSR now dead, and China and India embracing market economics, and the Democrats, under Bill Clinton, morphing into moderate Republicans—the movement suffered its first shock. So did Reese.

“Ross Perot was the catalyst for this,” he said, referring to the third-party candidate blamed by many Republicans for President George H.W. Bush’s loss to Clinton. “He broke up that old Republican coalition.”

It was Perot who suggested there was a contradiction baked into Reagan’s GOP: while the party embraced free trade and free markets, he argued those policies threatened working-class voters who had recently flocked to it. 

Perot was especially upset about the North American Free Trade Agreement, which, he said, would lead to a “giant sucking sound going south”—as blue-collar jobs moved from the United States to Mexico.

That proved prophetic.

Reese saw the political shift happen in his own extended family, in Kentucky and Texas. In the early 1990s, he said, they cared a lot about abortion. By the 2010s, they were talking nonstop about jobs and immigration.

That colored his own thinking. Today, Reese said, he’s an “economic nationalist” who backs tariffs and a higher minimum wage, and a “foreign policy realist” (meaning, no more wars unless they must be fought), and he’s skeptical of capital punishment. 

This confusion also extends to the left, which includes “liberals” and “progressives” and people who believe in minimizing economic disparity and people who think talking about economic disparity is racist. 

Obama was the “perfect distillation of liberalism,” Tyler Harper, a comparative literature professor at Bates College who has written on politics and identity, and supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid, told me. 

“Progressives,” Harper said, are the people who think racial identity reigns supreme and have no serious objection to capitalism.

“I don’t think they’re left-wing in any substantive sense at all,” Harper said of progressives. He saw progressivism and “corporatism” as “natural allies.”

Exhibit A: the $8 billion U.S. companies spend yearly on DEI training. 

“We desperately need a new vocabulary,” he said.

Priyanka Wolan first realized she wasn’t on the left when she started homeschooling her daughters. (Jenna Schoenefeld for The Free Press)

That is how Priyanka Wolan feels—unsure of how to describe herself or what she believes. 

She had immigrated to the United States from India with her family when she was eight, and she had always leaned Democratic. 

It’s not that she doesn’t know what she believes. She is definitely pro-choice, but she also wants to curb “unauthorized immigration.” She thinks the new gender politics is insane, but she believes strongly in defending civil liberties. And she’s giving her four daughters a traditional homeschool education that includes Latin and classical music. 

The trouble is that all of these things do not fit together into one party or camp or label.

We were having dinner at the house in the hills of Los Angeles that she and her husband, Alan, share with their daughters. My 9-year-old and hers had become friends in an after-school math program.

“The present-day conservative movement doesn’t align with my life experience in the way I used to think the Democratic platform did, but the Democratic Party no longer aligns with that either,” Wolan said. 

“The first time I realized I wasn’t on the left was when I started homeschooling, and people were like, ‘This isn’t supporting public education, what’s wrong with public education?’ ” she said. “That’s when I started to see, ‘Oh, I’m not falling into line.’ ”

But then, in 2019, she started to feel the tug of identity politics, and it was like a whirlpool. She and Alan, who is Jewish and 18 years older, had always been “sparring partners.” Now, it felt more personal, as if she, a “brown woman,” were facing off against whiteness and the patriarchy.

During the summer of 2020, “it became really difficult for us to have a conversation,” she said. He thought defunding the police was idiotic, and worried about illegal immigration and crime. “I remember saying at one point,” she continued, “ ‘You know what, let’s not talk politics. You’re never going to understand me, because you’re white, a man, privileged’—all the jargon.”

Priyanka Wolan at her home in Los Angeles, CA. (Jenna Schoenefeld for The Free Press)

She added: “At one point, I remember my dad saying, ‘You’re not doing a service to yourself or your kids when you’re constantly thinking in terms of your identity. We didn’t come to America for you to think this way.’ ”

It was other moms who made her rethink things, albeit unwittingly. They didn’t approve of what she was teaching her girls: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, the poetry of Robert Frost, Mozart sonatas.

“At the height of the decolonization narrative, people would say, ‘Why are you teaching them this? This is the Western canon,’ ” Wolan, 42, said. She was surprised. She wanted her daughters, as she said, to “have it all”—the most rigorous liberal-arts education that would not only get them into a top college but enable them to think critically.

It wasn’t that her views had changed. She mostly believed in the same things she always had. “I’m liberal in the old sense of the word—the not believing whatever you’re told to believe,” Wolan said. 

When I asked Wolan whether it was hard being politically homeless, whether it would be easier to join one of the available tribes, she half-smiled and said it wasn’t so tough fending off criticisms of homeschooling or deciding who to vote for. (She can’t vote for Biden again; she’d probably vote for Vivek Ramaswamy, if he wins the GOP nomination.) The hard thing was getting comfortable with people knowing her husband supported a candidate who everyone she knew thought was evil.

“I didn’t want people knowing he was for Trump,” Wolan said of Alan. “It took me a while to get to the point where I thought, ‘You know what, he’s allowed to have whatever opinions he wants.’ ”

Brian Lasher, a retired Navy commander and high-school history teacher in Erie, Pennsylvania, could not care less whether people know he plans to vote for Trump. Not that he’s excited about it. He thinks Trump’s “an asshole.” 

But he has to vote—he hasn’t missed an election since he first voted, in 1980—and he doesn’t believe in voting for protest candidates. He wants his vote to count. (In 1992, he voted for Ross Perot. “That’s a vote I regret,” Lasher said. “Clinton is the best Democratic president of my lifetime.”)

His father came from a family of Calvin Coolidge Republicans—“He refused to have an FDR dime in his pocket”—and his mother was religious and liberal. 

He was raised Lutheran, and he is pro-life, but he thinks there need to be exceptions, and he is worried about inflation, and he thinks we have to stop illegal immigration—“human trafficking is grotesque”—but he supports legal immigration—“some of the best students I’ve had were immigrants”—and it is obvious the poles are warming, but it is also obvious we shouldn’t do away with oil and gas. “That’s just suicidal,” Lasher, 62, told me. 

During the lockdowns, he’d watched his students disappear into their screens. The school couldn’t make them turn on their cameras, so almost all turned them off. Usually, he had no idea whether they were even there.

Anyway, the “institutional rot” was everywhere, he said, and everything that came out of D.C. reflected as much—not only the Covid protocols and deficit spending, but Russiagate, which he called “bullshit,” and the corruption. He meant the Clinton emails, the Hunter Biden pay-to-play thing, all of it.

If it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running for the White House as an independent, might win Pennsylvania, he’ll vote for him.

But generally he’s pessimistic about things. “We’re seeing extremes in both parties drive America toward an abyss,” Lasher said. 

He recalled Christmas 2007. He was in Baghdad with the Navy, and he was at dinner in the mess hall at Saddam Hussein’s old Republican Guard Palace, and General David Petraeus’s chief chaplain was talking about the new “religious reconciliation initiative.”

Lasher was asked to be the chaplain’s note-taker, and the two of them spent the next six months hopscotching around Baghdad meeting Shiite and Sunni religious leaders talking about why they hated each other, and what could be done to stem the violence. 

“We were at the house of a sheik, he was a Shiite, and he was explaining the differences between the Iranian Shiites and the Iraqi Shiites.” The sheik said he was going to Iran in three weeks, and he asked, “Is there some message you want me to deliver to the Iranians?” 

After a moment, Lasher recalls saying, “I told him to tell the Iranians that our symbol is the American eagle. In its talon are either arrows or the olive branch. The choice is theirs. ‘Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.’ He responded, ‘Yes! Yes! This is what I have been preaching all my life. I will tell them this.’ ”

Later, after Iraq, after he came home, after the polarization and anger in America seemed to billow out of control, he would often remember that night in Baghdad, the competing forces. 

“We have far more that brings us together than separates us,” he said. 

Sometimes that’s hard to remember. He wants to be hopeful. He’s a big fan of Catherine Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention. George Washington’s “Farewell Address” is his favorite speech.

But those stories, those pieces of the sacred American past, feel far away. People no longer listen to each other, he said. “We’ve tuned each other out.” It’s like everyone is shouting into a Tower of Babel, unaware of who they’re shouting at, or what they’re angry about. 

“A lot of that, I fault the media for,” he said. “They’re not being honest about the people they report on.”

Rory Fleming, 23, is majoring in history at Yale University. He said college and Covid have pushed him politically to the right. (Christopher Capozziello for The Free Press)

Rory Fleming, a 23-year-old senior at Yale, agreed that no one really knows who they’re screaming at.

“Ever since 2016, it’s been like whiplash,” he told me. 

In 2016, he was in high school, and he knew a lot of kids from Guatemala and Venezuela and Paraguay, and he understood why they felt targeted. He found Trump noxious.

But then he got to Yale, which “has been the opposite experience,” Fleming said. “It’s pushed me to the right.”

The big thing was Covid, the lockdowns, how the university went all in with masking and shutting down campus life. 

For Fleming, just like Shelle Lichti, everything came into focus in the summer of 2020. That was when the upside-downness revealed itself.

“I really felt that for the first time in July 2020, when my friend and I took this 45-day, cross-country road trip,” he said. “New York was shut down, and I remember getting to North Dakota, where there were ‘no mask’ signs everywhere. They were reacting against what they felt was authoritarianism, and they weren’t wrong. There was something about the Democratic reaction that was authoritarian.”

Rory Fleming thinks the United States needs to be strong, and he respected that Trump “carried a big stick.” (Christopher Capozziello for The Free Press)

Post-whiplash, it was hard to know where he belonged. 

Fleming believes the government should be spearheading the “green revolution”—starting with renewable projects in places like West Virginia—and he is pro-choice, and pro-civil liberties, and he thinks the United States needs to be strong. “That was something I did respect about Trump’s presidency,” Fleming said. “He carried a big stick. We shouldn’t have Houthi rebels with drones firing missiles in the Red Sea. Terrorists should fear the United States, and I don’t think they are right now.” 

He recalled his semester abroad, in Dublin, and being at a pub with friends, all foreigners, and someone making fun of the United States. “I remember saying, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are that it’s us, and not China or Russia running the world,” he said. 

No one argued with that.

What’s confusing, Fleming said, is that so many Americans don’t get this. 

Lichti agrees.

“Politics is so confusing right now,” she said. “The people that stay in their camps, that pretend or don’t know it’s not confusing—they’re the ones who are really confused. For me, saying you’re confused is being honest.”

Peter Savodnik is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Read his last article, “I Was Wrong About John Fetterman,” and ​​follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @petersavodnik. Kiran Sampath contributed reporting to this article.

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The ‘Wild, Wild West’ of the American Egg Donor Industry Rina Raphael

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How the U.S. Fertility Industry Preys on Female Egg Donors

Kaylene Breeding, who has donated her eggs six times and is now facing fertility issues. (Amanda Lucier for The Free Press)

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.


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A Chinese national, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million Judd Legum

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Justin Sun, founder of Tron and CEO of BitTorrent, speaks on November 4, 2015 in Beijing, China. (Getty Images/Visual China Group)

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.

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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.

 

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Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya. Plus. . . Joe Nocera

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Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya. Plus. . .

Jay Bhattacharya speaks at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York City on December 5, 2023. (Anthony Behar via AP Images)

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.

Joe and Hunter Biden in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on November 29, 2024. (Mandel Ngan via Getty Images)
  • 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.”

  • 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.”

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