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| By The Free Press |
It’s Wednesday, July 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Jed Rubenfeld on Joe Biden’s autopen and the real scandal; Ruy Teixeira on how progressives abandoned progress; join Bari and Nellie for the first Free Press town hall; and more.
But first: The new right’s bad history.
President Trump is MAGA. Or at least, that’s the line.
But if anything other than President Trump is a bellwether for Trump’s movement, it’s Turning Point USA, the activist group for young conservatives founded and run by Charlie Kirk. The organization planned to spend no less than $108 million for Trump in the last election. It sent thousands of volunteers door-knocking for Trump in battleground states. And Kirk himself is close to the president and his circle.
In other words, what happens at TPUSA doesn’t remain there—it comes to define the right.
Which is why it was alarming to see what was on display this past weekend at their annual summit for college students.
Among the lowlights: Tucker Carlson, speaking about Jeffrey Epstein, said: “It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government.” He went on: “Now, no one’s allowed to say that foreign government is Israel, because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty.” As if criticizing Israel is taboo these days in American life. At another point, he said: “There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF. They should lose their citizenship.”
Candace Owens took a break from her regular programming of blood libels and an obsessive fixation on Brigitte Macron to praise Carlson’s remarks at the conference, writing, “Tucker is a real one.”
Kirk himself hosted a debate between comedian Dave Smith and conservative author Josh Hammer about U.S. support for Israel. During the debate, Smith said: “The level of Israeli control over our politics is frankly pretty undeniable." Hammer came prepared with Smith’s attacks on the president, among them that Trump “is a war criminal who should spend his life in prison,” and that Trump might be “the most impotent bitch of a leader imaginable.”
Which raises the question, one Hammer asked, about why Smith was onstage at a MAGA event in the first place. Why did the pro-Trump group invite an anti-Trump activist to debate Israel?
One answer, according to Rebeccah L. Heinrichs in today’s lead essay, is that there is a growing coalition of crazy on the revanchist right that is seeking to develop a new postwar consensus: The use of force abroad is bad for the world and even worse for Americans; that Jews have too much power or are insufficiently loyal to America; that our shared history is a lie; and that our heroes are suspect.
She calls it The 1939 Project.
Just as The New York Times and its 1619 Project sought to redefine America’s founding, Rebeccah argues that this faction on the right “seeks to discredit America’s role in World War II and the postwar international order it shaped.”
It’s a twisted vision of the past designed to undermine the foundations of the present.
This worldview is not going away. It is growing in its power. And we ignore it at our peril.
—The Editors
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LIVE TODAY: Off-the-Record Conversation with Bari and Nellie
This evening, Free Press co-founders Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles will take questions in our very first video town hall, available exclusively to premium subscribers tonight at 7 p.m. ET.
It’s a rare chance to have an unfiltered chat with Bari and Nellie about anything—from who at The Free Press is most likely to nod off during an afternoon meeting to the big events shaping the world right now. No scripts. No agenda. Just your questions. They’ll take as many as they can.
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