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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, May 6. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large.
Today: The Trump administration does the opposite of draining the swamp; a woman gets canceled for using the n-word and the far-right rewards her with cash; Tyler Cowen asks if classical liberalism is for losers; Suzy Weiss watches the Met Gala red carpet with Elliot Ackerman; and more.
But first: The president just spilled his secrets and nobody noticed.
On Sunday, Matthew Continetti emailed me to say he wanted his next column to be about a commencement speech Donald Trump had just given at the University of Alabama.
I admit I was a little skeptical at first.
Trump speeches are a dime a dozen, and from what I’d read in the press, this one looked unremarkable. According to my X feed, the president had made a good joke about Harvard—“The next chapter of the American story will not be written by The Harvard Crimson. It will be written by you, the Crimson Tide”—but otherwise, the speech seemed like standard Trump fare.
Not so, said Matt. He’d watched the event and said the media had missed the story. Trump had given his most revealing speech in a long time. A man not prone to self-reflection, he offered a room of new graduates the kind of life lessons expected from a commencement speech, and in doing so provided a rare insight into his personal philosophy. It was, as Matt puts it in his column, “a self-portrait in motivational guise.”
And whatever you think of Trump, “why not ask what makes him tick?”
Matt was right, I was wrong: The speech was worth writing about. And Matt’s column on the distilled wisdom of Donald Trump is very much worth reading. —Oliver Wiseman
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She Called a Kid the N-Word. The Far-Right Is Making Her Rich. | |||
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How did America become a place where a woman who screams racial slurs at a child in a public park gets financially rewarded for it? Minnesota mom Shiloh Hendrix went viral last week after she was caught on video repeatedly using the n-word. The left doxxed her, the far-right celebrated her, and then she set up a crowdfunding site. It’s raised over $670,000.
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Tyler Cowen: Is Classical Liberalism for Losers? | |||
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The new right mocks them as weak, feckless, and out of touch. But before we bury classical liberals, Tyler Cowen urges us to ask: Who gave us the American Revolution and Constitution? The abolitionist movement? The fall of communism? No other philosophy has had more success building free societies and keeping tyranny in check.
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