It’s been almost three weeks since Hamas attacked Israel. And there are three questions that, despite having reported on it so much over the last 20 days, many people are still asking. The first is what exactly happened that day, minute by minute, and what were the battles across the south of Israel like? There are so many accounts of civilians waiting in safe-rooms for hours on end for the IDF to arrive—what happened? The second is how did it happen? How did thousands of terrorists cross a bord...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 13 min
If you’ve been following our coverage at The Free Press, you’ve noticed that we’ve been covering the war in Israel nonstop since it began. We’ve never produced this much content in this short of a time about a single subject. Some of you might be thinking, why? On October 7, we saw the single biggest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But unlike the Holocaust, in which Germans tried to hide their war crimes, here we have the terrorists streaming it in real time on every social me...
Oct 18, 2023•1 hr 16 min
In the early hours of Saturday morning on October 7, Israel was invaded by Hamas terrorists by land, air, and sea, which The Free Press has been covering all week in detail. With over 1,300 Israeli civilians dead, hundreds taken hostage into Gaza, and many more in critical condition, this catastrophic and barbaric attack has been labeled “Israel’s 9/11.” This is something former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knows something about. After all, Secretary Rice led our nation as national securi...
Oct 13, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Given the war in Israel, we’re going to do something different on Honestly for a bit. Over the next few days—maybe weeks, depending on how the war develops—we’ll bring you firsthand stories from the ground as well as interviews with experts, like we did yesterday with Michael Oren. (If you haven’t yet heard that conversation, please listen.) We’re doing this so you can understand what is happening in Israel, and what the ramifications are for the region and the entire world. For today, I want to...
Oct 09, 2023•28 min
On October 7, Hamas terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, on foot, by motorcycle, and even on paragliders. Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza wh...
Oct 07, 2023•53 min
James Carville, America’s best-known Democratic political consultant, has been on the scene for a very long time and has worked on just about a thousand campaigns—he’s almost 80. But his most prominent victory was Bill Clinton’s successful run for the presidency in 1992, which was documented in the incredible D. A. Pennebaker documentary War Room. Some people watch Notting Hill as a comfort movie. For me, it’s War Room. So you can imagine my excitement when I met Carville at The Texas Tribune Fe...
Oct 04, 2023•1 hr 6 min
On Wednesday night, Fox Business and Rumble hosted the second Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in beautiful Simi Valley, California. Bari Weiss and The Free Press’s very own Peter Savodnik watched live in the spin room as the seven candidates—Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, and Doug Burgum— took the stage to spar over questions about union strikes, inflation, income inequality, the cost of childcare, the b...
Sep 29, 2023•52 min
As we tumble toward 2024, anxiety among Democrats is beginning to simmer. It’s easy to understand why. Just look at what happened last week: Biden was giving a press conference in Vietnam about upgrading the country’s diplomatic ties when he started rambling: “The Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier!’ Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming.” Then he said, on mic, that he was going...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 12 min
In 1973, Leonard Cohen announced he was done with music for good. The same year, in October, war broke out in Israel. The Yom Kippur War would become the bloodiest in Israel’s young history—and Cohen was there to witness it. As the war broke out, he left his home on the Greek island of Hydra to fly into the warzone. Leonard Cohen never said much about why he went to the front. What we know is that in the months that followed, he would write “Who By Fire.” Five decades later, on Spotify and in sy...
Sep 17, 2023•1 hr 22 min
This week, while our audio team is on summer break, we’re featuring an episode from one of our favorite podcasts: Conversations with Tyler, hosted by the wonderful Tyler Cowen. It’s a conversation with philosopher Amia Srinivasan about her book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. They debate questions such as: do we have a “right” to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? How should we address ...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 11 min
The team’s on vacation, so for this week’s Honestly, we’re sharing a favorite episode from a favorite podcast, one you may not have heard of: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers. UnHerd’s mission is similar to ours: to push back against the herd mentality, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people, and places. On this episode, host Freddie Sayers talks to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins about God, people’s distrust in science and vaccines, cancel culture, aliens, romantic poetr...
Aug 31, 2023•58 min
On Wednesday night, Fox News and the streaming platform Rumble hosted the first Republican presidential debate with the eight GOP hopefuls who made the cut: North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, former governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Missing from the stage was Don...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 4 min
If you’ve been listening to this show for the past few months, maybe even since the 2022 midterms, you probably think I sound like something of a broken record when it comes to my advice for politicians today. Again and again, I’ve said the following: elections right now are Republicans’ to lose. Biden’s approval numbers are low—41.2 percent-—which is lower than every president at this stage of their term in the last 75 years, other than Jimmy Carter. It seems to me that all Republicans need to ...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 19 min
Colin Campbell says that the way our society treats grief—and people in grief—is cruel and backward, and it needs a radical reimagining. He, of all people, would know. Four years ago, Colin, his wife Gail, and their two teenage kids were driving to Joshua Tree, when they were T-boned by a drunk and high driver going 90 miles an hour. Colin and Gail survived. Their two children, Ruby and Hart, did not. How do you live after that nightmare? How do you support a friend, a colleague, a brother or si...
Aug 10, 2023•1 hr 27 min
Vivek Ramaswamy, at 37 years old, is the first ever millennial Republican presidential candidate. He graduated from Harvard, then Yale Law School, and worked as a partner at a hedge fund before starting a successful biotech company, where he made millions. It’s an impressive background. But he lacks any political experience, so he’s not someone pundits think has a shot in the already crowded GOP primary field. And yet, somehow, his name is in the news almost every single day. His tweets are cons...
Aug 01, 2023•2 hr 40 min
Recently, Walter Russell Mead wrote an outstanding article in Tablet titled “You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times.” It’s about the paradox—and great dangers—of technological progress: “Human ingenuity has made us much safer from natural calamities. We can treat many diseases, predict storms, build dams both to prevent floods and to save water against drought, and many other fine things. Many fewer of us starve than in former times, and billions of us today enjoy better living conditions t...
Jul 27, 2023•2 hr 34 min
Last week I found myself in Sun Valley, Idaho, at a conference with a lot of big wigs. Among them was Larry Summers—an economist, the Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, and a former president of Harvard University. The timing was fortuitous. Last month, Harvard went before the Supreme Court to defend its race-based admission policies—and lost the case, thus overturning the legality of affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that those admissions programs quote, “cannot be...
Jul 21, 2023•44 min
Peter Turchin is not like most historians. For starters, he has an unusual background as an evolutionary biologist studying lemmings and mice. He says that analyzing the complexities of the natural world has allowed him to understand the most complex system of all: human society. He has pioneered a field of history that he calls cliodynamics that applies hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of historical data points to a mathematical model in order to understand the present and to predict futu...
Jul 19, 2023•1 hr 15 min
Last month, Britain’s National Health Service made major news when they announced that they were banning the use of puberty blockers for children, except for those enrolled in a tightly regulated clinical trial. The decision was made after an independent review found there were “significant uncertainties” surrounding the long-term effects of these drugs, which had previously been touted as totally reversible. The announcement followed another major decision that the NHS made last year on the sam...
Jul 12, 2023•1 hr 11 min
Last week, the Supreme Court handed down, as they usually do as the term comes to an end, a flurry of highly anticipated major decisions. Two of them made a lot of news: one effectively ended affirmative action in American higher education, and another ruled that a Colorado web designer could refuse to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple. The mainstream media’s prevailing sentiment over the last week has been that these are the sorry consequences of a conservative majority court. This...
Jul 07, 2023•2 hr 42 min
In 2016, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was one of 17 Republicans in a crowded field trying to beat Donald Trump. We know how that movie ended. One of the hard won lessons of that primary, especially among Republicans, was that it was foolish not to unite right away behind the strongest candidate. If they had done that, perhaps Trump wouldn't have been the nominee and then the president. Yet here we are in 2023 and we seem to be watching the same movie play out in real time, with 13 R...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is the rare Kennedy who hasn’t yet joined the family business. But at age 69—after a long career as an environmental lawyer and activist, and many years advocating against lifesaving public health programs like childhood vaccinations on the unproven claim that they cause autism—he has decided to run for President of the United States. Many voices in the mainstream have dismissed RFK Jr. as a distraction. The New York Times called him a “crank” and a “high-profile circu...
Jun 21, 2023•2 hr 30 min
Happy Father's Day! For today's episode, a conversation about fatherhood with three dads who have thought a lot about parenthood, masculinity and being a dad in a world stripped of convention. Richard Reeves is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the book Of Boys and Men about why boys and men are falling behind in so many aspects of American life. Ryan Holiday is a writer, bookstore owner, Daily Stoic and Daily Dad podcast host. Ian Rowe is a Senior fellow at America...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 1 min
On May 1, 2023, a 30-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely boarded the F train in New York City. Neely appeared to be in the midst of some kind of mental health crisis, as witnesses describe him acting aggressively, screaming that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn’t care if he went to jail or died. A few witnesses describe feeling threatened by Neely’s behavior. Soon, a 24-year-old man named Daniel Penny, who we later learned is a former Marine, jumped forward and put Neely in a chok...
Jun 07, 2023•58 min
It’s almost hard to believe, but in the 1950s doctors were frequently portrayed in TV commercials for. . . cigarettes. That’s because smoking wasn’t just seen as cool and glamorous, but as an actual health-enhancing activity. Fast-forward to today, and Americans have been sold on a dizzying number of health trends: from grapefruit diets and Weight Watchers to Pelotons and yoga. The health industry churns through information and fads faster than anyone can possibly keep up. As soon as you’re gear...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 18 min
Earlier today, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott entered the race for President. That makes him the sixth Republican candidate to get into the race, in a crowded attempt to beat the current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump. So for today’s episode, a rerun of my conversation with Tim Scott from last summer. As you’ll hear, Scott’s approach is fundamentally different from many of his fellow republicans in that he’s the ultimate optimist. In part, that optimism comes from his own story. Sc...
May 22, 2023•56 min
Seventy-five years ago this week, the Jewish community of Palestine (known as the yishuv) gathered in the art museum of Tel Aviv—then a city of less than 200,000 inhabitants—in order to perform a resurrection. Thirty-seven people—36 men and one woman—were about to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which would reestablish Jewish political sovereignty in the Holy Land for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple 2,000 years ago. They gathered in that museum just three yea...
May 17, 2023•2 hr 36 min
A few years ago, writer and cartoonist Tim Urban started becoming troubled by what he saw going on in the world around him. He noticed that while technology was progressing in unbelievable ways—people were going to space on private rocket ships and computers were the size of Starbucks coffee cups—it seemed like people were unhappier than ever before. We were petty. We were turning against each other. We were tribal. And he noticed that the very things that had allowed for unbelievable technologi...
May 12, 2023•1 hr 16 min
Peter Thiel doesn’t shy away from taking big bets. From Facebook (he was the company’s first outside investor) to Gawker (he successfully conspired to put the website out of business) and, of course, to Trump (he threw his support behind the nominee in 2016). Unlike many in the Silicon Valley set, who often say the popular thing in public and the thing they actually believe behind closed doors, Thiel has used his voice and his fortune to steer the country in the direction he believes is right—de...
May 03, 2023•1 hr 21 min
Just six months ago, few outside of Silicon Valley had heard of OpenAI, the company that makes the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Now, this application is used daily by over 100 million users, and some of those people use it more often than Google. Within just months of its release, it has become the fastest-growing app in history. ChatGPT can write essays and code. It can ace the bar exam, write poems and song lyrics, and summarize emails. It can give advice, scour the internet for in...
Apr 27, 2023•1 hr 10 min
