→ Oh, Joe Biden: He’s still the sitting president, so we begin here. Another week brings us yet more details on how far Biden has been falling mentally, this time coming from The Wall Street Journal, where a team of reporters describe an insulated, out-of-contact Joe, beginning when he took office. Over his presidency he’s had very, very little contact with people you’d think of as important top figures in the government. We already know he didn’t do evenings, but he wasn’t great in the mornings either. But the 40 minutes in the middle of the day after his nap and before his IV drip? That’s the gold right there. Right at 2:20–3? That’s when America is Online.

“[I]n the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.”

Ahead of the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, key government figures couldn’t get in touch with Joe. As inflation crushed consumers, then–Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was on her own.

Here’s Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: “I really had no personal contact with this president.”

Biden was the cozy vessel. He was the comforting smile, a flirty wink that said, I’m normal and you’re safe. In the background, up very early and also very late, were busy bee staffers with a very different vision for the country: opening the border on Day One; $175 billion for student loan forgiveness; plus, for good measure, his presidential proclamation recognizing Trans Day of Visibility (what about lesbians, Joe!). Any given day, staffers just put on the Joe Biden bodysuit and did something absolutely bananas and then said, “Whoa, whoa, are you calling Joe Biden a communist?”

Anyway, this is me reading tea leaves, but Biden this week chose the leftist magazine The American Prospect to publish his farewell essay. Obama chose The Economist, a stately bugle for intelligent globalists such as myself. Which is all to say: Joe Biden was never a moderate president. From the day he got in, his mind was slipping and his policies were wild, and in polite, elite society we were all supposed to pretend otherwise because he does give a moderate vibe with those shades and the ice cream cones. And he flirted with a biker chick once—doing a little inappropriate flirting does feel moderate. I do regard that as being politically aligned with me.

→ Budget battle: President-elect Elon Musk, along with a conservative influencer based in Florida (Donald Trump), successfully prevented Congress from passing a big new budget, even though Speaker Mike Johnson was good with it. Speaker Johnson, who looks and talks like a Boy Scout, had made it just perfect, he thought: The budget had enough handouts for red states and for blue states. It was perfectly seasoned with scams, delicately balanced with corruption. The ears were marked. It was ready to go.

Then these hooligans came in and threw it in the air. “Congress should only get a raise when the budget is balanced,” posted President Musk, amid rapid-fire replies to various right-wing X accounts of varying levels of insanity— which is now just called the legislative process. The new trend for Republican members of Congress is posting pictures showing how many pages the budget is and pretending they’re reading it. And it is a lot of pages (1,500)! Vivek says he will read the whole thing. This is becoming the ice bucket challenge but for Congress, and I promise, guys, you don’t need to do this, just as no one needed to post wet T-shirt videos and pretend it was for whatever the ice bucket challenge was for. We, the taxpayers, know that you, our representatives, do not know what you’re voting for. And that is the sacred bond of democracy.

While Elon, the President-Elect-by-Vibes, is successfully revamping the entire U.S. government’s budget, Donald Trump is also doing important things.

Brilliant activity for him, guys. The perfect Trump quagmire topic. This involves so many parties. It’s both important to everyone and important to no one. I’m pretty sure he means “make daylight saving permanent,” but whatever. Elon’s going to be in a complex transaction with Xi Jinping, trading Maine for a new city in Heilongjiang province, while Trump is still just Truthing hard about daylight saving time.

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Today, as Syrians and human rights organizations sift through Assad’s prisons and torture chambers, his regime’s atrocities are being compared to the depravity of the Nazis’ war crimes. But these parallels are no coincidence, three outside investigators told me this week. They say that Brunner played a direct role in developing the Assad regime’s police state during its early years, advising on surveillance, interrogation, and torture methods, including tools like the “German chair,” a stretching rack used to torture a victim’s spine.

“Brunner was Eichmann’s right-hand man, and he didn’t get justice. . . . He lived a long, long, long, long, too long of a life,” Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based group that is investigating Assad’s crimes, told The Free Press. “Brunner was advising [Bashar’s father] Hafez al-Assad, the architect of the system that his son used to kill a million people.”

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I cringe listening to that now because today, in the waning days of 2024, not only has it become clear what AI is and how to use it—ChatGPT processes over a billion queries per day—but it’s also becoming clear what the political and cultural ramifications—and the arguments and debates—around AI are going to be over the next few years.

Among those big questions are: Who gets to lead us into this new age of AI technology, what company is going to get there first and achieve market dominance, how will those companies be structured so that bad actors with nefarious incentives can’t manipulate this technology for evil purposes, and what role should the government play in regulating all of this?

At the center of these important questions are two men, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And if you haven’t been following, they aren’t exactly in alignment.

They started off as friends and business partners. In fact, Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015. But over the years, Musk grew increasingly frustrated with OpenAI until he finally resigned from the board in 2018. That feud escalated this past year when Musk sued Altman and OpenAI on multiple occasions to try to prevent the company from launching a for-profit arm of the business, a structure that Musk claims is never supposed to happen in OpenAI. He also argues that changing its structure in this way might even be “illegal.”

On the one hand, this is a very complex disagreement. To understand every single detail of it, you probably need a law degree and special expertise in American tax law. But you don’t need a degree or specialization to understand that, at its heart, this feud is about something much bigger and more existential than the business model of OpenAI, although that’s extremely important.

This is really a fight over who will ultimately be in control of a technology that some say, if used incorrectly, could very well make human beings obsolete.

Here to tell his side of the story today is Sam Altman. We talk about where AI is headed, and why he thinks superintelligence—the moment where AI surpasses human capabilities—is closer than ever. We talk about the perils of AI bias and censorship; why he, a person who has long opposed Trump, donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund; what happens if America loses the AI race to a foreign power like China, and, of course, what went wrong between him and the richest man on Earth.

Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation:

On the state of AI technology:

BARI WEISS: The last time we spoke was in April of 2023. ChatGPT had just launched, and people were just at the beginning of trying to figure out what this technology was and how it might transform their everyday lives. Sitting here in December of 2024, ChatGPT is a household name. And people all over the world are using AI tools every single day to do everything from math tutoring for their kids to drafting emails to debugging code. Tell me about how ChatGPT and AI technology has changed since we last spoke, and whether or not it’s where you expected it to be today.

SAM ALTMAN: The technology itself has gotten way better. If you think about the AI we were excited about back in April of 2023, it was so primitive, relative to what we have now, and the things that the technology is capable of are pretty mind-blowing to me.

If we come back in another 18 months and talk about what it can do, I think it will feel as big or even bigger than the gap from April 2023 to December 2024.

The other thing that’s happened is it’s really integrated into society. Back then, it was still a curiosity. People really use it now a lot for their work, their personal lives. I’ve never seen a technology become widely adopted this fast. That part of the adoption curve happened much more quickly than I thought.

BW: How are you using the tool that you have helped create in your daily life?

SA: I use it in all sorts of ways, but a few months ago, we released search integration, and now ChatGPT can search the internet for real-time information. That doubled my usage all at once. And since then, I must have still used Google for something, but I can’t remember what it is. I switched ChatGPT to be my default search in Chrome, and I have not looked back. Now when I remember the way that I used to search, it feels like that was like a pre-iPhone kind of equivalent.

On his feud with Elon Musk:

BW: You’re in a very public battle right now with your original OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk. OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit. In a blog post introducing OpenAI to the world in December of that year, you wrote, “OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”

In 2019, OpenAI moved to what it called a hybrid model with a for-profit arm that got a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft has poured something like $13 billion into the company.

Elon’s relationship with the company soured over time because he disagreed with that shift, and he eventually left the company and stepped down from the board. This past year, Elon has sued you and OpenAI on several different occasions, arguing that you are in some kind of contract violation by putting profits ahead of the public good in the move to advance AI. Then, last month, Elon asked the District Judge in California to block OpenAI from converting to this for-profit structure.

Did I summarize it properly and is there anything crucial that I left out?

SA: You mostly summarized it properly. But it was Elon that most wanted OpenAI to be a for-profit at one point, and had made a bunch of proposals—like OpenAI being part of Tesla—mostly just to create a new for-profit that he was going to be in control of. So other than that, I think a lot of the summary there is correct.

BW: What is the fundamental conflict between Elon Musk and his various allies—Meta being one of them—and you guys?

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But first: Ruy Teixeira, our newest Free Press columnist, helps navigate the Democrats’ self-inflicted political crisis.

For most Democrats, Trump’s win was a shock. For Ruy Teixeira, it was unsurprising. A political scientist and lifelong Democrat, Ruy has been warning for years that the party was prioritizing ideological purity over popular appeal.

His 2023 book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, could have been a wake-up call for the party. One wonders how the election might have gone if the Harris campaign had read it carefully.

Ruy’s writing has been prophetic on the exact questions Democrats are grappling with as they try to find their way out of the political wilderness. Questions like: Why did so many working-class Americans abandon the party? What happened to the promise of a multiracial Democratic majority? And how should the party pick itself up, dust itself off, and put together a winning coalition again?

These questions are set to be a major theme of our politics in 2025 and beyond, and we can think of no better guide than the man who saw so much of it coming. That’s why we’re thrilled Ruy is now joining The Free Press as a contributing writer.

Every other week or so you can find Ruy right here, helping us make sense of the future of the Democratic Party and the left as they try to figure out how to handle a second Trump term—and how to win in 2028.

Today, Ruy argues that Democrats are still in denial about why they lost the election. In fact, he writes, many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues, such as trans athletes in women’s sports and critical race theory taught in schools, to be real issues. But voters disagree. In one postelection survey, the top reason among swing voters not to vote for Harris was the perception that she was more focused on cultural questions like transgender issues than helping the middle class. Another poll tells a similar story.

Read Ruy’s piece, “Voters Sent Democrats a Clear Message. They Don’t Want to Hear It.”

Become One in a Million—and Win Free Press Swag!

You may have heard, even though we’ve been pretty subtle about it, that we’re gunning to get to a million Free Press readers by year’s end. And we are very, very close and decided to sweeten the pot. The one millionth subscriber to The Free Press, whoever he or she may be, will be rewarded with a free lifetime subscription and a tote bag filled with all of our (new and improved!) merch, and all the glory that one person can handle. There will be other surprises for our millionth subscriber. Not a chocolate factory. But something great.

If you’re already a subscriber and want to give the gift of fearless, honest journalism to someone in your life, click here. You may be giving subscription number one million!

A ‘Loco Gringo’ Takes On the Mexican Cartels

The Biden administration’s policies have led to a surge in illegal immigration. President-elect Trump has promised change, but many local authorities say they can’t afford to wait.

That includes Sheriff Roy Boyd of Goliad County, Texas, who Maddie Rowley profiles in her latest immigration report for The Free Press. Boyd and his deputies have been battling Mexican cartels and human smugglers on a daily basis since 2021. One day, he decided to think outside the box about the problem, launching Operation Lone Star Task Force, which has already wiped out a cartel that was smuggling 100,000 people a year into his state. Why did it work? Read Maddie’s report to find out.

Why Is Trump Suing the Media?

Emboldened by his recent $16 million defamation settlement with ABC News, president-elect Donald Trump has found new targets: Pollster Ann Selzer and her Iowa-based polling firm; The Des Moines Register, which published her work; and Gannett, the newspaper’s parent company. His accusation? Consumer fraud, after Selzer’s poll wrongly predicted a Harris victory in a state Trump went on to win by 13 points.

But this latest iteration of what appears to be “a broader strategy of Trump’s to sue the pants off media companies” is absurd, argues Eli Lake in his most recent column. And, if successful, it could “potentially create a backdoor way to regulate political speech.”

Read Eli’s piece on the president who has been the victim of politically motivated lawfare now using the same tactic against news outlets.

And for more analysis of the Trump lawsuits, don’t miss Michael Moynihan in conversation with Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), about the potential implications for press freedom, and why a tough standard for public officials in defamation cases is “actually exactly what you want.”

The Sugar Plum Sisters

Nothing says “Christmas in New York” like the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker. The show, which runs through January 4, 2025, features some of the best ballerinas in the world. Last week, M.J. Koch spoke to two of them.

The pair, Olivia and Mary Thomas MacKinnon, are not only world-class ballerinas, they’re also sisters. Originally from Alabama, the siblings spent their childhoods dreaming of the big stage—and now they’ve finally arrived there. They talk about sibling rivalry, brutal training, and the gift of following their dreams.

For more on the highs and lows of twinkle toes, read M.J.’s piece on the sisters who are always en pointe.

• The Federal Reserve cut rates yesterday but signaled a more-hawkish-than-expected long-term outlook, which sent the markets tumbling. The S&P 500 fell by 2.9 percent Wednesday, while the Dow Jones posted its tenth straight day of losses. The historic slump marked the worst downward market streak since an 11-day slide in 1974.
  

• On Tuesday, a Manhattan grand jury indicted the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione for murder “in furtherance of an act of terrorism.” Prosecutors argued the murder was “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” and to “affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder.” But some legal experts argue the terrorism charge is a stretch.

• On Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to take up TikTok’s appeal against a law forcing it to be sold to an American owner by next month. Oral arguments will be heard on January 10. TikTok, which is currently owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, argues that the law violates the First Amendment rights of its American users. But the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected that argument, ruling that “Congress’s decision was considered, consistent with longstanding regulatory practice, and devoid of an institutional aim to suppress particular messages or ideas.” The legislation sets a deadline of January 19 for the app to find a seller in the U.S. or face a ban. The clock is TikToking.

• On Wednesday, a British court ruled that police could seize more than £2 million ($2.5 million) from self-proclaimed misogynist influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate to settle unpaid taxes. The brothers, who are currently in Romania facing charges of human trafficking and rape, allegedly used a “complex financial matrix” to hide their online business revenue from UK tax authorities. Andrew might have been undone by his own big mouth. At an earlier hearing, police quoted an online video in which he said, “When I lived in England, I refused to pay tax.”

• Teenagers are abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana in record numbers, according to an annual national survey led by the University of Michigan’s Richard Miech. The survey, which uses responses from 24,000 students in grades 8, 10, and 12, found that roughly two-thirds of 12th graders hadn’t used the substances in the past 30 days, and neither did 80 percent of 10th graders. This might be welcome news for kids’ physical health, but what’s driving the change isn’t necessarily positive. Experts reckon that the rise in abstinence may reflect an increase in mental health disorders, risk-averse behavior, and a resistance to in-person socializing. Read Kat Rosenfield on why the kids need to drink alcohol, make friends, and accidentally say I love you.

• Just five days ago, former football star and former Senate candidate Herschel Walker—who dropped out of college four decades ago to join the NFL—graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Housing Management and Policy. Was he hoping Trump would name him Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? Maybe, but the president-elect had a much chiller gig in mind for the Heisman Trophy winner: ambassador to the Bahamas. Put down those Section 8 plans, Hersch, it’s piña colada time!
  

• House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul said Tuesday he believes the unidentified drones reported over New York and New Jersey are from China, echoing comments made by a former Trump national security official to The Free Press last week. Believes is the key word here. McCaul told reporters he wants concrete answers but so far, the only one he’s received from federal agencies is “we don’t know.” Biden, for his part, says there’s nothing to see here. On the latest Free Press Live, we spoke to one expert who thinks the whole thing is mass hysteria. Watch the interview with here.
  

• The House Ethics Committee reportedly voted in secret to release its findings on the conduct of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz earlier this month. The Panhandle bad boy has been accused of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, showing his co-workers nude female pictures on the House floor, campaign finance violations, and accepting bribes, among other things. Classy! The report will be published after lawmakers leave Washington for the holidays, so go ahead and dust off your old printer—this could be a great stocking stuffer for the resistance lib in your life.

And finally. . . Bitcoin recently hit the once unimaginable valuation of $100,000. And if you’re anything like me, your response to the news was deep, deep regret that you never bothered to actually learn what Bitcoin was and maybe even buy a few. Instead, here I am slaving away over this newsletter. Well, it’s never too late to educate yourself. And I’m going to start with Michael Moynihan’s FP Live interview with prominent cryptocurrency analyst and founder of Into the Cryptoverse, Benjamin Cowen.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

TikToks and tweets celebrated the alleged murderer, Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, for what some called an act of resistance against a perversely incentivized healthcare industry. Comments ranged from …

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The rivalry mounted between the two girls—Mary Thomas and Olivia, then 10 and 6—until seconds before curtain call, when they came to an agreement: They’d share the role. The audience and ticket sellers went wild.

“The living room floor was our first stage,” Olivia, now 29, told me with a laugh.

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Trump won the election. But the incoming president can’t just satisfy himself in the knowledge that he defeated an incumbent administration and that in the process, he gave the legacy press that despises him a good, swift kick as well. The wildly inaccurate Iowa poll published on the eve of Election Day is, in Trump’s mind, evidence of an elaborate fraud on the American people.

“Before this astonishing sixteen-point polling miss Selzer brazenly claimed: ‘It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,’ ” read Trump’s complaint, which was filed in Polk County, Iowa. “However, as Selzer well knew, there was a perfectly good reason nobody ‘saw this coming’: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.”

Normally, this would be—and, indeed, should be—the stuff of Truth Social posts and op-eds. But this time it’s the opening salvo in a lawsuit against Iowa’s leading newspaper and a woman long known as the state’s most respected pollster. And it appears that it is part of a broader strategy of Trump’s, to sue the pants off media companies. Trump already has active suits pending against Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and CBS News.

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On the highway, Boyd passed a white pickup truck and noticed fingers from many different hands sticking out from underneath a sheet of plywood that covered the truck bed. He knew immediately: Migrants were being smuggled into the country.

He quickly called dispatch, but no deputies were available at the time.

“Hold on,” said Boyd, turning to his son. “We’re gonna have to stop them, and they’re gonna run.”

Boyd flipped on his police lights, and the truck suddenly appeared in his sights. He chased after the truck until it veered into the brush and crashed through a fence, its doors flying open as a dozen or more illegal immigrants scattered in different directions.

“Stay down!” Boyd yelled to the handful of men who hadn’t gotten far. Outnumbered, he handed his semiautomatic AR-15 to his son so he could handcuff about seven men until reinforcements arrived.

“My kids were raised with guns,” said Boyd. “So my son knew how to handle it.”

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A political scientist and lifelong Democrat, Ruy has for years now been warning that the party was prioritizing ideological purity over popular appeal.

His 2023 book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, could have been a wake-up call for the party. One wonders how the election might have gone if the Harris campaign had read it carefully.

Ruy’s writing has been prophetic on the exact questions Democrats are grappling with as they try to find their way out of the political wilderness. Questions like: Why did so many working-class Americans abandon the party? What happened to the promise of a multiracial Democratic majority? And how, once Democrats have picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, should they go about putting together a winning coalition again?

These questions are set to be a major theme of our politics in 2025 and beyond, and we can think of no better guide than the man who saw so much of it coming.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Ruy is joining The Free Press as a Contributing Writer.

Every other week or so, you can find Ruy right here, helping us make sense of the future of the left and the Democratic Party, as they try to figure out how to handle a second Trump term—and how to win in 2028.

In his first column as a contributing writer, Ruy argues that Democrats are in denial about why they lost the election. — The Editors

In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.

Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.

Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.

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We received hundreds of submissions, with high schoolers from California to Kenya to West Virginia to Finland all writing in to share their most pressing thoughts on Gen Z and its place in the world. Agustin, an 18-year-old living in Nashville, argued that “I see my generation as a continuation of the 1960s. Rebels fighting with a cause. Burdened by the wars, poverty, and mistreatment.” Owen, a 15-year-old from Miami, wrote that “we need to bring back the Karen . . . someone willing to bluntly tell the truth and sternly say, ‘You can’t cut the line.’ ”

From questioning whether they would have been friends with their parents, had their ages overlapped, to reflecting on the pressure of being the generation that’s expected to save the world from climate change, these high schoolers captured the Gen-Z zeitgeist in every possible way.

But one essay stood out.

Today, we’re thrilled to publish a piece by Mallory Valis, a 16-year-old from Toronto, Ontario, with a penchant for literature and photovoltaics. And that’s not the only new word she’ll teach you, because Mallory’s essay is about a defining feature of Gen Z: internet slang. “Rizz,” “sus,” “cap:” Mallory argues that these words should be respected, because they unite Zoomers across the world, no matter their life experiences.

Granted, as anyone who has sat across from a Gen-Z family member at Thanksgiving knows, their slang can be confusing to an outsider. So to help you out this holiday season, we’re also publishing a Zoomer glossary at the end of the essay. We urge you to try a few words out on your niece who can’t stop saying, “These cookies slay.” —Maya Sulkin

Bro, this intro is high-key gonna slap. Just let me cook.

Oh wait, I should be more formal.

Uhh. . . . Henceforth I commence my righteous thesis. Yeah.

In the eyes of older generations, Gen-Z slang besmirches the Sacred English Language™ with its base, loose, and astonishingly convoluted wordplay. By now, you’ve heard it before. Words sprouting like weeds in conversations with friends or wriggling through Instagram comment sections: rizz, fit check, girlboss, slay, simp. . . the list spirals downwards into a pit of sacrilege.

As my generation enters the workforce, articles have appeared to show adults how to decode our cryptic tongues. Meanwhile, The Washington Post points out that much of our slang is appropriated from black culture.

It’s giving . . . sus. (That’s Gen Z for suspicious.)

Gen Z is not exactly a champion of our own slang either. Our language has a preordained silliness that piles up into brain rot, an expression summarizing internet culture’s sigh-inducing effects on our intellectuality.

Besides, why should anyone care what words we use? ChatGPT has swept up the dilapidated student into its arms and the two have ridden off into the sunset. Gen Z is free to speak in vapid internet jargon as we scroll through Instagram Reels and let the machines do the brute work. So there mustn’t be anything meaningful to our slang, right?

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Back in 2022, the Rochester Community School District settled a lawsuit for nearly $200,000 with another mom who accused the district of keeping a “dossier” on parents critical of Covid lockdowns. Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents. So she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.

A few weeks later, she heard back from the district’s FOIA coordinator: Her request had been granted. All she had to do was pay $33,103,232.56. That’s right. More than $33 million.

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But first: Jesse Singal joined Bluesky because he was fed up with X. Then the death threats started.

Bluesky, the social network that is supposed to be a “nicer” version of X, has seen a massive influx of users since the election. Its user base has more than doubled in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, with mostly left-wing exiles from X looking for a place that leans in their direction, the way Twitter used to.

Last month, out of curiosity, I created an account too. What I found was, in effect, the Twitter of 2019 in suspended animation: a place where hyper-progressive politics flourished, with almost no dissenters, who had presumably been canceled from the platform.

“I am done with begging white Monster Romance authors to hire sensitivity readers,” reads one of my favorite posts on the site. “At this point I’m just going to assume their [sic] racist until proven otherwise.”

Bluesky is the sort of place where you can say things like this without being made fun of, a nature preserve for the sort of political animals who thrived in Twitter’s former leftist censorship environment, protected from poachers armed with Pepe the Frog memes. Watching this ecosystem can be fun, sort of. You can almost hear David Attenborough in the background.

The trouble is that even in nature preserves, the mood can instantly shift from pleasant to vicious when the predators sniff their prey.

Just ask Jesse Singal.

Jesse is a center-left journalist who joined Bluesky because he felt X had become “a hostile, hateful place,” one whose tech was increasingly broken. Almost immediately after signing up, Jesse was set upon by a throng of deranged activists. They made violent threats—“Jesse Singal. 2 to the chest. 1 to the forehead a little less than [an] inch above the nasal bridge,” read one post—and they published what they thought was his home address.

What had Jesse done to deserve this? The short answer is his job. The long answer is that he has published groundbreaking journalism on youth gender transition. And so, he is an enemy of some of the most unpleasant people in American public life.

This would be bad enough for a social network committed to being nice. But at least its proactive moderators came to Jesse’s aid, right? Fat chance.

As Jesse writes in The Free Press today, the supposed moderators kept these threats—as well as the address the activists thought was his—live on the site. “Bluesky was aware of an account that has threatened to shoot me—that has specifically described where on my body he would shoot me—and posted what he thought was my address. Those actions weren’t enough to ban him,” Jesse writes, “despite the fact that this wasn’t his first time being suspended, according to his own posts. The original attempted doxxing post was still up as well. It was still up as of this afternoon.”

Jesse says he is more worried about others than himself, fearing one of Bluesky’s many “dysregulated users” might throw a brick through a window they assume to be his, or attack his very similar-looking brother on the street. At the very least, his ordeal has exposed Bluesky’s promise of a kinder way of doing social media as a lie.

Read Jesse on Bluesky’s death threat problem.

Abigail Shrier Was Vilified. Now She’s Been Vindicated.

It isn’t just Jesse who has faced intimidation for his reporting on transgender issues. Like Jesse, Free Press contributing editor Abigail Shrier was reporting on the scandal of child gender transition long before the issue entered the mainstream. And like Jesse, she was targeted, threatened, and vilified for years for the crime of doing her job.

But as we note in our editorial today, her work—including her brilliant 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters—has been borne out by recent developments. From the UK’s “indefinite ban” on puberty blockers, to similar bans in half the states, to the legacy press finally writing skeptical stories about youth transgender medicine, the world is finally waking up to what historians will likely judge to be one of the greatest medical scandals of our time.

“If making friends or getting people to like you were the job, I’m not sure I’d be suited to it,” Abigail told The Free Press. Thankfully, it isn’t.

Read our editorial on the vindication of Abigail Shrier.

Will America Abandon the Kurds—Again?

In the wake of the Assad regime’s fall, the Kurds, America’s most loyal allies in Syria, fear they are about to be ethnically cleansed by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), a collection of Islamist militias armed, paid for, and sponsored by Turkey’s intelligence service.

Ilham Ahmed, a Kurd who serves as the de facto foreign minister for the North and East Syrian administration, tells The Free Press’s Eli Lake that Biden’s efforts to stop the SNA from a seemingly imminent invasion have gotten nowhere. And so, she is making a direct appeal to Donald Trump.

“Your decisive leadership can stop this invasion and preserve the dignity and safety of those who have stood as steadfast allies,” Ahmed says in a letter to the incoming president obtained by The Free Press.

Ahmed fears America will betray the Kurds, and not for the first time, as Eli points out.

“We feel defeated and betrayed, in our hearts,” says Ahmed.

Read Eli Lake’s latest report on the Kurds’ expected invasion by Turkish proxies.

Steve Bannon: It’s Either Populist Nationalism or Violent Revolution

On Sunday night, Ben Kawaller put on a tux and headed down to Cipriani Wall Street for the New York Young Republicans annual gala. There, he interviewed a charmingly underdressed Steve Bannon, the evening’s keynote speaker. Click below to hear Ben’s conversation with the MAGA Machiavelli on everything from why he’s a populist, not a conservative, to his thoughts on the last scene of American Dharma, the 2018 documentary Errol Morris made about him.

Watch Ben’s one-on-one interview with Steve Bannon.

• On Monday, the head of a U.S.-based Syrian advocacy group reported the discovery of a mass grave outside of Damascus containing, by a “conservative estimate,” 100,000 bodies of people murdered by the Assad regime. “We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Stephen Rapp, an international war crimes prosecutor, told Reuters yesterday. Meanwhile, deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, speaking from exile for the first time since his government toppled, said he had planned to “continue fighting” before the Russian military evacuated him.

• A tech start-up is launching a new real estate platform that will show homebuyers the political leanings of their future neighbors. CEO Huw Nierenberg says his app will help shoppers find out if nearby residents are people they’d like to have over for dinner—presumably to talk about politics, a famously polite thing to do at the table. The new software will first be available in New York City and South Florida. The Free Press is eagerly anticipating the rollout in these areas, as we remain especially stumped by the political leanings of those living in Park Slope and near Mar-a-Lago. If you’re still unsure of how to tolerate your neighbors’ political opinions, read Larissa Phillips’s piece, “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.”

• On Tuesday, a senior Russian general was blown up by a bomb-strapped scooter left outside his Moscow apartment building, just one day after Ukraine’s internal security agency opened criminal charges against him. Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov was chief of the Russian military’s nuclear, biological, and chemical protection forces. His assistant was also killed in the blast. An official with Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said that the agency was behind the attack, and one official justified the blast by calling Kirillov “a war criminal and an entirely legitimate target.”

• On Monday, a Manhattan judge rejected Donald Trump’s bid to ditch his hush money conviction after the president-elect argued the recent Supreme Court immunity decision had rendered it moot. Judge Juan Merchan ruled that the evidence was related to Trump’s private conduct, which is not protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling in July. Silver linings for the incoming president: Trump can’t be sentenced once he takes office.

• Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Supreme Court justice to star in a Broadway musical this week, when she had a cameo in & Juliet, a “queer” retelling of Shakespeare’s classic in which Juliet decides not to kill herself and instead runs off to Paris with a nonbinary character. Supreme Court justices serve for life, which probably makes KBJ the most job-secure theater kid to have ever lived. Next time, we want to hear her sing.

• More on the judicial front: Polling from Gallup, released yesterday, shows that Americans’ confidence in their country’s judicial system dropped to a record low of 35 percent this year. In the past four years, it’s dropped 24 percentage points. It’s almost as if political prosecutions are a terrible way to repair trust in the judicial system.

• Three people have been confirmed dead following a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, including a teacher, a student, and the shooter, Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, a 15-year-old girl who attended the school and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Six others were injured. Madison mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway bristled at the idea that reporters would want information on the victims, saying in a press conference it was “none of y’all’s business” who was killed in the shooting. A purported manifesto has been circulating online, though police say that they cannot confirm its authenticity and are working to determine a motive.

• In 2020, the average American city experienced a homicide rate spike of around 30 percent. Some have claimed that the rise was caused by a “police pullback” following the death of George Floyd in May of that year. But new research from the Brookings Institute suggests that murder rates were already rising and that Covid policies, which left young, poor men unemployed and out of school, might have had more to do with it.

• More than $140,000 has been crowdfunded for the legal defense of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan earlier this month. The funds are unsolicited, and Mangione’s lawyer has said he would “probably” not accept money from donors. But it’s the latest sign of the disturbing affection so many clearly have for the alleged killer. Meanwhile, a new Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of respondents under 30 find the shooting of Thompson “acceptable.”

Speaking at the New York Young Republican Club’s 112th annual gala, guest of honor Steve Bannon delivered a gleeful, vengeful, triumphant indictment of Democrats, mainstream media, and corporate America. He also congratulated the audience on being a part of the movement that elected Trump: “Each and every one of you have changed the direction of this country by showing that populism is inclusive.”

His celebration of inclusion might be surprising to readers of The New York Times, which once equated Trump’s former campaign adviser with “racism, sexism, antisemitism, and nativism.” But Bannon—now free from his four-month prison stint for defying a January 6–related subpoena and seemingly undaunted by his looming trial in February for “Build the Wall” fundraising fraud—was happy to mingle with what he called the “multi-ethnic,” “multiracial” crowd behind Trump’s latest victory.

Meanwhile, his populist message has remained firmly intact. “You’re going to have to raise taxes on the wealthy,” he announced to the attendees, who paid as much as $4,700 per ticket to attend the gala.

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While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.

But given what I’ve learned about Bluesky’s “moderation” over the last week, I feel compelled to inform the site’s users—and potential users—about its staggeringly negligent policies toward violent threats and doxxing.

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and The Economist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

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Shrier is the author of the groundbreaking 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. It is a meticulous, humane, and harrowing account of the sudden and explosive rise in teenage girls declaring themselves to be males. The book is also an examination of a new branch of medicine that has encouraged, and profited from, swiftly putting these distressed girls on powerful hormones, and performing double mastectomies and other surgeries on them.

In working on the book, Shrier found that the claims that daughters could be, and should be, turned into sons was reckless, and that transgender medicine was functioning more like a cult than a scientifically based specialty. The truth of what she revealed has been comprehensively substantiated.

She documented how devastated parents were lied to and coerced. A favorite tactic of gender clinicians was to tell parents that if they didn’t consent to life-altering treatments with a long list of side effects, including sterility, their girls were likely to commit suicide. Parents were routinely asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”

This kind of rhetoric was not limited to fringe activists pushing an extremist agenda. Over the past decade, it became the standard trope—from human rights organizations, to the legacy press, to the Democratic Party. President Biden himself declared: “Affirming a transgender child’s identity is one of the best things a parent, teacher, or doctor can do to help keep children from harm.” Numerous federal documents encouraged medical intervention.

All this is how the transition of minors came to be seen as a necessity that could not be questioned. Those who dared challenge this orthodoxy risked social and professional ostracism.

Which is exactly what happened to Abigail Shrier.

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“We feel betrayed,” Ilham Ahmed, a Kurd who serves as the de facto foreign minister for the North and East Syrian administration, told The Free Press in an interview arranged through The Center for Peace Communications on Monday. “We feel defeated and betrayed, in our hearts.”

Ahmed expects an invasion of Kobani any day now by the Syrian National Army, a collection of Islamist militias armed, paid for, and sponsored by Turkey’s powerful intelligence service. When I caught up with her, she had just concluded a round of negotiations with Turkish officials to forestall this invasion—and she was despondent. ​​“All diplomatic talks with Turkey have failed. They have no conditions, they just want to invade,” she said.

A letter sent to Trump—and obtained by The Free Press—on behalf of the Kurds in the North and East Syrian province, pleaded with the president-elect: “From across the border, we can already see Turkish forces amassing, and our civilians live under the constant fear of imminent death and destruction.” It went on to say, “Your decisive leadership can stop this invasion and preserve the dignity and safety of those who have stood as steadfast allies.”

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Where does all of this come from? The best explanation we’ve read comes from historian and Free Press contributor Simon Sebag Montefiore, in a story that originally ran in The Spectator in 1997. (You can see Simon talk about Jerusalem—the city and his excellent book of the same name—with Bari Weiss in New York next month; get your tickets before they sell out.)

Here, with a new prologue to his original article, he introduces a much-neglected episode of Irish history—and his own family story.

When I was young, my Irish aunt used to talk about a long-distant childhood trauma in Ireland. I never quite understood what she was talking about—but when she was happy, she had quite a strong Irish accent.

Much later, I started to research the story of my family: the escape of my great-grandparents and their children from Vilna, in what is now Lithuania and was then a province of Tsar Nicholas II’s Romanov Empire. From there, their short stay in Limerick, where they were attacked and forced to leave for England, and what it all meant.

Now, more than 25 years after I researched this history—which is also my own—the Irish government has become the most active and noisy critic of the Jewish state in the entire Western world. It is much more hostile than much of the Arab world itself.

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But the glow-up is just one aspect of the new and improved Free Press.

Over the past year, we’ve been listening hard to you—in our comments section, of course, but also in surveys and in countless real-world conversations. And Free Pressers are nothing if not honest about what they want.

Our new site was built by our killer product team with you—all 975,000 of you!—in mind.

I want to explain the revamped Free Press experience:

• The website is not just more beautiful. It’s also far easier to navigate because it’s topically organized, making the content you care the most about much more accessible. If you want to dive into the TGIF archive, for example, click right here. If you want to catch up on all of Douglas Murray’s Things Worth Remembering columns, click right here. If you’re a fan of our international coverage, yes, click right here.

• There are dedicated spots where you can always find our in-house podcasts and videos.

• Keep up with all of our events with a dedicated page.

We love the site, and we hope you make it your default home page. But most of you prefer to read The Free Press right in your inbox, so your email experience just got a whole lot better, too.

But the most important change: You can personalize your Free Press. If you want to receive every story on a particular topic in your inbox right when it’s published, now you can do that. Want to make sure you read everything we publish, the moment we publish it, on education? Done. On foreign policy? Done. Want to opt out of TGIF? You can! (Nellie will yell at you, but you can.) We want you to be able to prioritize the stories that matter most to you.

So head over to https://www.thefp.com/newsletters to curate your own personalized edition of The Free Press. And don’t worry: We’ll make sure you still receive all of our most important pieces, no matter what.

We have ambitious plans for 2025, and this is just the beginning. We founded The Free Press with a simple goal: to build a journalistic institution worthy of your trust. To help us meet that goal, and for unlimited access to all of our content, become a paid subscriber today.

Subscribe now

Yours,

Bari

But first: A Christmas behind bars for the Americans wrongfully detained abroad.

This past Thanksgiving, a nightmare came to an end for the families of three Americans who had been imprisoned by China. John Leung, an FBI informant who was detained in 2021; Kai Li, a New Yorker detained since 2016; and Mark Swidan, a businessman held for more than a decade on charges no one believes, were all released in a prisoner swap. They are home for the holidays.

The same cannot be said for dozens of U.S. citizens wrongfully detained overseas. People like Marc Fogel, a then–60-year-old husband and father of two who used medical marijuana to alleviate back pain, and was arrested in 2021 when he landed at an airport in Russia. For this crime, Fogel has been sentenced to fourteen years in a maximum security penal colony. “It’s a death sentence,” Fogel’s family’s lawyer tells The Free Press’s Madeleine Kearns.

Fogel is just one name on a long list of the Americans behind bars overseas when they should be at home—and free. It’s harder than you might think to know exactly how long that list is. The U.S. government doesn’t publish one themselves, and some families do not make the detention of their loved one public. But Maddy has compiled the closest thing possible to a full list of publicly identified wrongfully detained Americans. Today, we publish that list of names, and Maddy’s accompanying story.

Read both of them here: “Detained Americans Face Another Christmas in the Gulag.”

Is Trudeau About to Topple?

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is hanging on by a thread. His finance minister—and until recently, his closest ally—Chrystia Freeland resigned yesterday. In her resignation letter, Freeland cited differences over how to handle the “grave challenge” posed by Trump’s threat to impose a tariff of 25 percent on Canadian goods. It’s the latest and biggest blow to Trudeau’s premiership. Why is Trudeau in so much trouble—and for how much longer can he hang on? Rupa Subramanya looks at whether Trudeau can tough it out. Read her full report here.

Mass Hysteria. Iran. China. The U.S. Military. How the Leading Drone Theories Stack Up.

Last week we reported on the sudden spike in the number of drone sightings above New Jersey—and spoke to lawmakers who speculated that they might belong to hostile foreign governments, such as Iran and China. Since our report, the drones haven’t abated, public interest in the mystery has grown, and we are no closer to understanding what is going on. On Sunday, DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted that the government has not seen “anything unusual.” But New Jersey lawmaker Chris Smith calls that an “insult to our intelligence.”

So what the hell is going on? Mass hysteria? Foreign government? The work of our own government? Madeleine Kearns digs into the possible explanations, and weighs their strengths and weaknesses. Read the latest on the various theories here.

They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.

With the rebels in control of Syria, the world is wondering whether the dominant rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, means it when they say their days of hard-line Islamism are behind them. Al-Jolani is a former al-Qaeda fighter, and HTS began as an al-Qaeda offshoot.

Few people in the West are better placed to judge whether al-Jolani and HTS are telling the truth than the American journalist Theo Padnos. He was kidnapped by HTS (then known as Jabhat al-Nusra) in 2012. In almost two years as their prisoner, Padnos was tortured with beatings and electric shocks. Today, he discusses this harrowing experience on Honestly.

Padnos talks to Michael Moynihan about the psychology of jihadists, and what the future holds for Syria now that it is run by his former captors. Watch their conversation by clicking the play button below, or catch it on the Honestly feed wherever you get your podcasts. And for an edited transcript of the episode, click here.

• It’s not just Canada’s government that is on the ropes. On Monday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a parliamentary confidence vote, mirroring the fall of France’s government earlier this month. As Europe’s largest economy heads for a snap election in February, Friedrich Merz, leader of Angela Merkel’s centrist Christian Democratic Union, is leading polls and will likely be the next chancellor. “You are leaving the country in one of the greatest economic crises in postwar history,” Merz said to Scholz. For more on the bleak backdrop to Germany’s political crisis, read Yascha Mounk’s recent Free Press essay, “The Not-So-Marvelous Mrs. Merkel.”

• Last week, CNN ran a jaw-dropping package from Damascus in which journalist Clarissa Ward appeared to discover a terrified prisoner under a blanket. In what Ward called “one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed” in twenty years of reporting, the Syrian man claimed he did not know the Assad regime had fallen and that he had not seen sunlight for three months. However, according to Syrian fact-checking organization Verify-Sy, there’s a problem with the story. The man featured in the report wasn’t an imprisoned opposition fighter, but a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence accused of multiple war crimes. “We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity,” said CNN.

WATCH: We sent our own cameras into Assad’s notorious Sednaya prison. Here’s what we saw.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to purge corrupt officials from his inner circle, imploring party officials to “turn the knife inward,” in a newly disclosed exhortation. On Monday, the CCP’s flagship policy journal Qiushi published Xi’s call to action nearly a year after he gave the directive in a January meeting. Just last month, a top Chinese military official and former Xi loyalist was suspended and placed under investigation for corruption.

• For the first time since he entered politics, Donald Trump has a positive net approval rating, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Though Trump’s approval ratings ticked up after the 2016 election, he never made it into the black. As the former president returns to office, he does so with the confidence of just over half of the American people. For the first time. And after two impeachments, four indictments, a conviction, and two assassination attempts. But how long will it last?

• Columbia University professor Lawrence Rosenblatt announced his resignation after learning that Joseph Massad, a professor at the college who called Hamas’s October 7 massacre “awesome,” will be allowed to teach a class on the “history of the Jewish Enlightenment in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism through the current peace process.” Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres compared the situation to getting former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to teach a course on antiracism.
  

• TikTok has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and delay the forced sale or ban on the app, which is due to come into effect on January 19. Trump, who takes office the next day, supported a TikTok ban in his first term but then changed his tune during the presidential race. He was noncommittal Monday. “We’ll take a look at TikTok,” he said during a press conference.
  

• Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is slated to become America’s highest-ranking gay official. But his nomination has been met with a curious silence from the gay advocacy organizations whose fanfare welcomed Pete Buttigieg’s historic cabinet nomination in 2020. Why the radio silence from GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign? We feel for you, Mr. Bessent. Consider this an open invite to come on Honestly and spill the tea to independent media’s highest-ranking gay official, Bari Weiss.

For decades, the Assad dynasty ruled through unimaginable violence—launching chemical attacks on civilians, silencing dissent with mass imprisonment and torture, and presiding over a civil war that killed an estimated 600,000 people and drove 13 million into exile.

In cities across the world, jubilant Syrians have celebrated the regime’s downfall, having deemed it to be one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships.

But not everyone is celebrating. Or at least, some people are saying there is reason for caution.

That’s because the coalition of rebel forces taking control of Syria now is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a militant Islamist organization that originated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Its leader is a Saudi-born Syrian who calls himself Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. A 21-year-old al-Jolani left Syria for Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda and fight against America. There, he was captured by the U.S. and put into Camp Bucca, which housed some of the most notorious al-Qaeda prisoners.

But since emerging on the world stage in the last week, al-Jolani has indicated that he is a reformed man, leading a moderated organization. He insists his al-Qaeda days and their methods—the detentions and torture and forced conversions—are over, and HTS is not going to persecute religious and ethnic minorities. But is it true?

Few people in the West might know that answer as well as journalist Theo Padnos. In October 2012, Padnos ventured from Turkey into Syria to report on the Syrian civil war. There, he was captured by HTS (then known as Jabhat al-Nusra) and held captive for nearly two years.

Throughout his captivity, Padnos endured relentless torture at the hands of his captors. He was savagely beaten until unconscious, given electric shocks, and forced into severe stress positions for hours at a time. This is to say nothing of the psychological torment inflicted on him.

Today, he discusses his harrowing experience, the psychology of jihadists, and what the future of Syria will look like under the leadership of his former captors.

Watch the interview here:

You can also click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation.

Michael Moynihan: You were a captive of Jabhat al-Nusra [today known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a militant Islamist organization that originated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda], and you were released in 2014. So the people who are doing the liberating of Syria are the same people that held you captive.

Theo Padnos: Yes, I see them on TV.

MM: You’ve actually seen on video people in Damascus who are now in control of Syria that held you and tortured you?

TP: Yes. The people who are in charge of the nation right now—when I knew them, they were terrorists and sadists. Now they’ve rebranded. They’re comporting themselves relatively decently at the moment. But they’re taking prisoners now, as we can see across Twitter, on video. They take the enemies of God, and they put them in jail. And most of them they’re going to kill, because they believe a lot of their enemies are beyond redemption.

On getting captured in 2012:

MM: You’re on the border of Turkey, trying to get into Syria at pretty much the beginning of the civil war. And you get across the border. Tell me what happens when you get into Syria.

TP: I met some people in Turkey, and they said, “Listen, we are fixers for journalists.” I eventually made friends with these guys on Facebook.

MM: Did you know their affiliation?

TP: No. They did not say, “By the way, we’re from the al-Qaeda system.” But they were journalists for Jabhat al-Nusra. They were doing the promotion for Jabhat al-Nusra.

When we crossed the border, we slept in an abandoned house. They set up a scenario with cameras and microphones, and they’re like, let’s do an interview. And in the midst of this interview they came over and jumped on me and started kicking me, and then they put a gun in my face. And during that assault, they handcuffed my hands behind my back. Later, when I regained consciousness, my face was covered in blood. The guy was pointing a gun at me, and he goes, “You’re our prisoner now.” And they said, “We belong to the al-Qaeda organization, and you killed our sheikh Osama bin Laden, and furthermore, you people are imperialists.”

I slept in the same bed with the chief kidnapper. He handcuffed me to his wrist. And in the morning when they wake up for the dawn prayer, I go, “Hey man, this handcuff is, like, a little tight on my wrist. Can you just loosen it up?” He goes, “No problem.” He loosened it up a little bit, went back to sleep. And as he was sleeping, I pulled my hand out of the handcuffs, and then I was free. I was lying next to this terrorist, and there was a terrorist in another room, and they all had guns. So I stood up, and I walked very carefully to the door, opened the door, and I ran out into the street like a madman. I had never been so frightened in my life.

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