It’s Thursday, August 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: Tucker Carlson says he’s not an antisemite. Don’t believe him, says Rod Dreher. Aaron MacLean on Trump’s Iran indecision. Eli Lake and Olivia Reingold on the political earthquake in Michigan. All that and more.

But first: The medical authorities who still silence dissent on gender care.

It’s no secret that The Free Press has extensively covered the scandal of youth gender medicine, and the related story of how, over the last decade, the ideology that enabled it captured institutions of medicine, education, and beyond. We were early to the story, and we stayed on the scent.

We’re proud of all these stories, many of them edited by the formidable Emily Yoffe. They are exactly the sort of stories The Free Press was founded to cover: ones the mainstream press had tried to ignore. Then, in late 2024 and early 2025, something changed. As Abigail Shrier—who was fearless in her work on this issue, and whose brilliant book on the subject activists tried to have pulled from Amazon and Target—put it in our pages, “The Gender Fever Finally Broke.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped her pronouns from her Twitter page. European governments banned puberty blocker prescriptions for children. Even The New York Times started to report more honestly on the issue. Trump, back in the White House, signed an executive order “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.”

With all these changes, we found ourselves wondering how many more stories we would need to write about doctors, professors, and others who faced professional consequences for blowing the whistle on what they came to view as a scandal.

But here’s the thing: The vibes have shifted only so far.

Just look at the low-boil row over WNBA star Sophie Cunningham, who dared to voice her opinion on boys in girls’ sports last month. As Kat Rosenfield argued last week, her dissent is tolerated in a way that it perhaps wouldn’t have been only a few years ago. And yet, she is the country’s only active professional female athlete who has stated publicly that she does not believe biological males should participate in women’s sports. (This is a view that a large majority of the American public agrees with.)

Here at The Free Press, we kept finding evidence of gender ideology’s enduring hold over medicine, and hearing from people who paid with their jobs for opposing “gender-affirming care.” The tales of cancellations and witch hunts are by now so familiar to us that we have on occasion found ourselves asking: How many more stories can there be on this?

The answer is many.

Today we bring you the latest, a brave firsthand account by Dr. Karla Solheim. If you read it and think it sounds familiar, that’s because many of these stories follow the same chilling pattern. We won’t stop telling them until someone like Karla can speak honestly without being ostracized by her profession.

—Oliver Wiseman

Rod Dreher • Antisemitism

Rod Dreher: Tucker Carlson’s Antisemitism

Tucker Carlson insists that he is not antisemitic. But this week, he welcomed back Darryl Cooper, a podcaster and Hitler apologist. This time, Cooper described the United States as an “American Zionist Empire” and recommended the work of a self-described Nazi. Rod Dreher makes the case that Carlson has become one of the most sophisticated mainstreamers of antisemitic tropes in American media. Watch enough of Carlson’s content, Rod writes, and you will reach “the inescapable conclusion that at the very least, this guy has a big problem with Jews.” Read his column on why Carlson’s denials no longer hold up. Read story ›

Aaron MacLean • International

Aaron MacLean: Mr. President, It’s Time to Make Up Your Mind About Iran

The Trump administration appears to be closing in on a new deal with Iran—one that would hand Tehran substantial control of the Strait of Hormuz and leave the regime in a stronger regional position than before the war began. Aaron MacLean argues that such a deal would be a strategic defeat, and counts at least five occasions when the president has backed down from threats against Iran. “These are not the actions of a president who feels he is operating from a position of strength,” he writes. Read Aaron’s latest column on the best path forward. Read story ›

Noah Smith • U.S. Politics

Welcome to the Age of Slopulism

What if the policies that politicians sell as ways of helping ordinary Americans actually make things worse? Economist Noah Smith has a word for it: slopulism. From New York’s proposed 10 percent discount for self-checkout, which would get cashiers fired, to tariffs that have cost manufacturing jobs rather than create them, Noah walks through policies that look like populism, but aren’t. Read his piece on why slopulism has become a bipartisan disease, and what it means for American politics that neither party even seems to care. Read story ›

The new Free Press Forum Book Club is here! What book should we read first? Cast your vote now for East of Eden, Lonesome Dove, or A Gentleman in Moscow