By The Free Press | Created at 2026-08-25 10:26:04 | Updated at 2026-09-03 16:43:46
1 week ago
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It’s Tuesday, August 25. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks on the Facebook groups enabling a new, more extreme era of helicopter parenting. Why Trump would make a great mayor of D.C. Aaron MacLean on how the U.S. military can build the drones it needs—without China’s help. And much more.
But first: Will America ever trust AI?
So much of what we do at The Free Press is try to make sense of a world where trust is broken. What many see as a crisis of trust we think is, first and foremost, a crisis of trustworthiness. From government and the media to education and medicine, institutions that fought hard to earn the public’s trust have squandered it.
That change is the story of our time, and once you understand it, you recognize it everywhere—including in two of the most contentious debates out there right now: over data centers and Flock surveillance cameras.
We’ve covered both of these fights, and at root, they point toward a question even more existential than how we view AI, crime, and privacy. Once that trust is lost, can it ever be earned back?
Today, Erick Erickson traces the collapse in trust back to March of 2020 and the months that followed. His essay is unsparing in its assessment of who, on both sides of the aisle, is responsible for the crisis, and clear-eyed about what it will take to win the public back.
Who should we trust to write the rules for a technology transforming our world at such a rapid pace that the government can’t keep up? That’s the question Tyler Cowen tackles in his column today. He sketches a proposal that he says strikes a balance between overregulation and an AI Wild West: a private, not-for-profit regulatory body for AI companies. “The concrete truth,” Tyler argues, “is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.”
Read his column on how this regulatory body would work, and why we need it.
—The Editors
Nicholas Clairmont • Culture and Ideas
Over the weekend, the IndyCar race that zoomed around Washington showed what Trump is good at: spectacular and kitschy fun of the most public and American sort. Say what you will about his presidency, writes Nicholas Clairmont—Trump is a damn good master of ceremonies. Read Nick’s dispatch from the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, and his argument for why the president should consider a turn as mayor of Washington.
Arthur Brooks • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks
Somewhere in between Covid and the advent of the male loneliness crisis, “a heretofore unseen level of helicopter parenting” has taken hold in Facebook parents’ groups, writes Arthur Brooks. He unpacks what’s really going on in these forums, uncovers what they reveal about today’s parenting culture, and peeks into the psychology of the moderators, who “run the groups tyrannically, as virtual fiefdoms in an effort to make members feel like terrible parents.”
Maya Sulkin • The Free Press Interviews
Sabrina Joy Stevens spent two decades as a progressive activist and communications strategist for left-leaning clients. But in 2020, the gap between her movement’s rhetoric and reality became too wide to ignore, and she walked away. On the latest episode of “Confessions,” Sabrina joins Maya Sulkin to pull back the curtain on what she saw from the inside: the pressure to conform, inconvenient facts her colleagues ignored, and the personal cost of leaving. She also explains why she draws a direct line between the ideology she left behind and the rise of political extremism on the left today.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
The Supreme Court handed Trump a win on Tuesday in his effort to restrict mail-in voting in this fall’s midterm elections. The decision will allow Trump to continue implementing a March executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create and monitor lists of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.
The State Department announced plans to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 asylum seekers, the Associated Press reported on Monday. The move would be the largest single visa revocation in U.S. history and will target B1 and B2 visas issued within the last decade for people who claimed to be short-term visitors, but then applied to stay permanently.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a sanctions warning to countries still doing business with Iran: They will soon be cut off from the U.S. dollar, a death sentence for most foreign banks. The warning, however, offered few concrete actions and a clarification that there would be a “cure period” before the sanctions are imposed.
Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah will return to the paper after an arbitrator found that the Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate her employment over posts about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Attiah told The New York Times she is “willing to go back” to the Post.
A coalition of grocery store and deli owners sued New York City on Monday in an attempt to block Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s five planned city-run grocery stores. The complaint argues the city skipped certain legally required reviews, and the group’s president said that the subsidized stores would constitute harm to minority businesses.
Jed York, owner of the San Francisco 49ers, was arrested Sunday in a prostitution sting at an Ohio trailer park where he allegedly answered an online ad and arranged to pay $140 for sex. On Monday, he pleaded no contest to reduced charges of disorderly conduct and possessing “criminal tools”—his phone—and agreed to pay $1,150 in fines.
In Alaska, Dan Sullivan has endorsed Dan Sullivan against Dan Sullivan. Last week, former Anchorage mayor Dan A. Sullivan backed incumbent GOP senator Dan S. Sullivan over retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan—whom Republicans accuse of being a Democratic plant to confuse voters. The primary winner will face Democrat Mary Peltola in November in a toss-up race that could decide Senate control.
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