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Why The Free Press Exists, in Three Stories Bari Weiss

Published

11 months ago

September 6, 2023

(Photo via Getty Images)

I want to tell you three stories.

Three short stories from these last days of summer that explain better than any pitch deck why The Free Press exists—and why the work that we’re doing matters.

The first is about Jamie Reed.

Perhaps you’ll remember that name. Six months ago, we published an explosive story by Reed—an insider account about the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Reed was a former employee of the clinic, and she came to The Free Press to blow the whistle.

What Reed described was alarming. She wrote of vulnerable teenagers with multiple mental health problems who were rushed into life-altering treatments that included possible sterilization. The situation was, in her words, “morally and medically appalling.”

Reed did not have an ax to grind. Quite the opposite: she identifies as queer, her partner is a trans man, and politically she is “to the left of Bernie Sanders.” She has spent her entire career working to help vulnerable people.

Still, Reed knew what would likely happen to her as a result of speaking out. “I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused,” she wrote. “I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.”

And that is exactly what happened.

Jamie Reed was demonized and disavowed. Meanwhile, Missouri’s attorney general announced an investigation into the gender clinic the day after we published her piece. But prominent journalists, instead of following up on this important news, denounced us.

Cut to August.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times substantiated Reed’s account, citing patients who sought to reverse their transition, and young people with complex mental health problems being put on powerful drugs. (The New York Post graciously took notice of the “vindication” with this editorial.)

It’s professionally gratifying to have our reporting followed.

But this isn’t just any story. It’s the kind of story that the mainstream has actively avoided telling because it is morally knotty and because, as Jamie Reed learned, those who pursue it are punished.

We exist to pursue exactly these stories—the ones that others are afraid to touch. The ones that everyone quietly wonders about—how did this become the medical consensus? And can teenagers really consent to decisions they can’t fully grasp?

By covering these hard topics in a sober, fair way, we force others to follow. And in doing so, slowly, we believe we are changing the conversation in the culture and the country.

This isn’t the first or only time this has happened. Far from it.

Nearly a year after we broke the story of the cancellation of David Sabatani, a world-renowned cancer researcher, the Boston Globe Spotlight team followed our reporting.

Three months after we took you to Lia Thomas’s swim meet, the legacy press followed.

Two months after we covered the battle at the Audubon Society, the legacy press did the same.

Several months after we took a deep dive into the consequences of the nation’s Adderall shortage, others took notice.

And perhaps the darkest example: last year, there was growing outrage over a story about mass graves of indigenous children found in Canada. The Washington Post and The New York Times covered this credulously. Flags in Canada were lowered to half-staff for the longest period in that country’s history. Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church, which operated over 70 percent of Canada’s residential schools for indigenous children. (Meanwhile, dozens of churches across Canada were burned in apparent retaliation for the church’s sins.)

But the facts were stubborn. And so was journalist Terry Glavin.

Terry appeared on our podcast, Honestly, to report that the story was a hoax—that despite the intense and even violent reaction the story had inspired, there was not, in fact, any physical evidence that it was true.

Again, we were pilloried. Again, we stood by the story. And again, we were proven right.

When we say that The Free Press has a special mission to run after the stories others are afraid to touch—and to do so in a way that’s honest and fair—this is exactly what we are talking about.

We also pride ourselves on setting the record straight.

That’s what Terry Glavin did. And that’s what Free Press reporter Rupa Subramanya did when she visited a certain bluegrass singer. . .

Like every other outlet in the country, we were dying to get an interview with the man of the moment: “Rich Men North of Richmond” singer Oliver Anthony, who emerged from the woods of Virginia with a song that captured the nation.

While the GOP presidential candidates were being asked about the song’s resonance at the first Republican debate, our Rupa Subramanya was flying from Ottawa to Virginia to show up at Anthony’s concert and see about an interview.

She got him—not just first, but best.

Among the revelations in Rupa’s profile are that the song’s politics—and Anthony’s own—are far more complicated than those vilifying him on the left or lionizing him on the right would suggest.

That’s just what The Free Press is about: nuanced, fair, and allergic to the convenient stereotypes that flatten the complicated reality of actual human beings.

The last story is about hope—and about the future.

It’s no secret that The Free Press also began as a reaction.

What we learned, very quickly, is that telling you what’s wrong with the country and the world is insufficient.

It’s crucial to expose the brokenness all around us—that’s how we make decisions about where to live, about where to send our children to school, about who to trust, and about who not to. But we also have to elevate the voices of those who are busy building the world anew.

That is what three teenagers did so beautifully last week in these pages, in response to our first-ever high school essay contest. Isabel Hogben with I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. Caleb Silverberg with Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax. And Ruby LaRocca with her winning essay: A Constitution for Teenage Happiness.

We were gratified at the outpouring of responses.

David French wrote about Isabel’s “powerful essay with a provocative title” in The New York Times. Arianna Huffington wrote at length about Ruby’s essay in her newsletter: “It’s actually a great guide for all of us, proving that, contra (another great essayist) Oscar Wilde, wisdom doesn’t only come with age.” Most importantly, deans from schools across the country have reached out to us asking to get in touch with these promising young students.

And though none of these essays were behind a paywall, you all understood their value. Hundreds of you became paying subscribers, and many of you told us why. Mike R. wrote: “I am upgrading to a paid membership because of the teenage essay competition, which was tremendous. It gives me great hope for the future. Thank you for sponsoring such a meaningful exercise.”

The Free Press began as a question: do Americans still want real journalism? Fearless, fair, independent journalism that treats readers like adults? Journalism that presents the facts—even the uncomfortable ones—and allows people to draw their own conclusions rather than serving them premasticated mush?

Not to drag the metaphor too far but: could Americans still chew?

The answer from nearly 450,000 of you has been a resounding yes.

And that number grows every day.

But the work we do takes real investment. Hiring the most talented reporters and editors in the country; putting people on planes so they can talk to sources face-to-face; hunting down archival tape for our podcasts; paying our interns a fair wage—we need your support to do those things.

So if you read our stories or listen to our podcasts and say: yes.

That speaks for me.

Or: that provoked me.

Or: that elevated me.

Or: that woke me up.

Or: that surprised me.

Or: that was important to read, even though I disagreed. . . subscribe.

If you believe that free people deserve a Free Press, join us today.

Our work here is just beginning.

Subscribe now

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

6 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

13 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641