By The Free Press | Created at 2024-09-30 10:05:49 | Updated at 2024-09-30 13:22:17
3 hours ago
It’s Monday, September 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: The media does reputation management for Nasrallah; Hezbollah’s Hostages Episode Three; the “porn professor” is fired; Giorgia Meloni’s vision for the West; and much more.
But first, Tiger Reed, partner of Free Press transgender-care whistleblower Jamie Reed, says: “I’m detransitioning.”
One of the most impactful stories we’ve run at The Free Press was the tale of Jamie Reed, a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital who blew the whistle on what she called the “morally and medically appalling” treatment of children at that clinic. Within 24 hours, Missouri’s attorney general announced an investigation into the hospital, and this helped lead lawmakers in Missouri and other states to pass bans on the gender transition of minors.
Part of what made Jamie’s story so powerful was that she was a “queer” woman, “to the left of Bernie Sanders,” who had “believed in and fought for transgender rights” for as long as she could remember.
Another extraordinary part of the story was the fact that Jamie’s partner, Tiger, is a transgender man. Tiger, a 44-year-old librarian and parent to five children, was born a woman but has lived as a man for the last 13 years. Now, over a year after Jamie Reed blew the whistle, Tiger Reed is detransitioning.
“I know there isn’t a lot of sympathy for those of us who transition as adults,” says Tiger. “People assume you made your choice, and you knew what you were signing up for.” But, Tiger says, “No one I consulted prepared me for the emotional consequences of transition—for how the hormones would change not only my appearance but how I felt about myself and the world.”
Tiger is telling her story because “I want people like me who have complex and nuanced reasons for their gender distress to be part of the conversation. I want people to know there are more options than medicalizing their bodies for the rest of their lives.”
Read Tiger Reed’s full account of the decision to detransition: “I Spent 13 Years Living as a Man. But After My Wife’s Exposé, I’m Detransitioning.”
Hezbollah’s Hostages: A Drug Mule Tells His Story
Perhaps you’ve heard the tragic news by now: Israel killed a charismatic and beneficent man of peace in Beirut on Friday. Okay, not exactly.
I am referring to Hassan Nasrallah, the butcher who led Hezbollah, a ruthless terror organization, for 30 years. But to read some of the obituaries published since his death is to be left with a very different impression.
The New York Times made Nasrallah sound a bit like Bob Marley, telling readers he “maintained there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews, and Christians.” The Associated Press went with “charismatic and shrewd” in the headline of their obit. And missing from NPR’s story: the words terrorist or murderer. Though they made sure to say that “his organization also provides social services.”
Our new video series Hezbollah’s Hostages exists as an antidote to exactly this kind of revisionism. A production of the Center for Peace Communications and The Free Press, the series aims to expose the truth about Hezbollah’s crimes by giving voice to those whose lives it has turned upside down. In the latest episode, out today, a young man tells how he unwittingly joined Hezbollah’s drug trade out of desperation to feed his younger brothers. Watch Episode Three, “The Jihadist Drug: A Hezbollah Smuggler Tells His Story,” below. Click here for the accompanying article. And catch up on the previous episodes here and here.
And for more analysis of the extraordinary latest developments in Israel, read The Free Press’s Eli Lake on “The Killing of Nasrallah—and the Virtue of Escalation.”
Porn Professor Fired
In June, Olivia Reingold reported on the case of Joe Gow, who lost his job as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse after it emerged that he and his wife had posted pornographic videos of themselves on OnlyFans. When he spoke to Olivia, Gow was fighting to avoid being stripped of his tenured professorship. “People say they’re for free speech, but it’s only when it’s speech they agree with,” said Gow.
On Friday, that fight ended in defeat for Gow, who has been fired by the University of Wisconsin. In a 17–0 vote, the school’s Board of Regents disagreed with Gow’s claim to a First Amendment right to make porn, and dismissed him. “This isn’t a Board of Regents,” Gow said. “It’s a board of hypocrites.”
Click here to read Olivia’s full update on the “porn professor” fired by his college.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene has risen to at least 89. Officials expect that figure to continue rising after devastating flooding and landslides in western North Carolina. The state’s governor, Roy Cooper, declared Helene “one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of North Carolina.” The South Carolina office for the U.S. National Weather Service said the storm was “the worst event in our office’s history.”
A new poll shows that Democrats’ long-standing advantage with Hispanic voters continues to shrink. According to the NBC survey, Harris leads Trump by 54 percent to 40 percent nationally. That may sound like a healthy lead, but in 2020, Biden won the Hispanic vote 63–27. For more on the Harris campaign’s efforts to win back Latino voters, read Olivia Reingold’s recent Free Press dispatch from Pennsylvania: “The Campaign to Win Over the ‘Latino Belt’.”
There was a college football theme to campaigning this weekend: Tim Walz went to watch Michigan beat Minnesota at the Big House, while Trump was in Tuscaloosa with Kid Rock and Hank Williams Jr. to see Alabama beat Georgia. And as for the less enjoyable, and almost as important, contest that is the presidential election, all signs still point to a very close battle. They are neck and neck in Wisconsin and Michigan, and Nate Silver has the race at 56–44 in Harris’s favor right now.
Israel’s air force struck sites in Yemen Sunday that it said were used by Houthi forces. It is the second Israeli strike on Yemen—the first was in July—and it came a day after Israel shot down a missile fired by the Houthis. The terror group said the missile had been intended for Benjamin Netanyahu’s plane, which had just landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.
The very youngest voters in America are more conservative than the cohort immediately older than them, according to the latest Harvard Youth Poll. Twenty-six percent of 18- to 24-year-olds identify as conservative, compared to 21 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds.
John Kerry complained that the First Amendment “stands as a major block to the ability to hammer [disinformation] out of existence,” in a recent appearance on a World Economic Forum panel. We say: That’s the point, sir. Read friend of The Free Press James Kirchick in The New York Times on the perils of censoring disinformation.
In other “threats to free speech” news, Trump says he will prosecute Google for “election interference” for “illegally us[ing] a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump.”
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: Why the West Is Worth Defending
Giorgia Meloni might just be the most interesting leader on the world stage right now.
Not long ago the Italian prime minister was a fringe figure: the head of a small political party called the Brothers of Italy, which has its roots in the country’s postwar neo-fascist movement. But in the seemingly permanent turmoil of Italian politics, Meloni emerged as the leading right-populist in the country. After the right-wing coalition she led won a majority in 2022, she became the first woman to serve as Italy’s prime minister.
Before Meloni took power, The Atlantic headlined her rise as “The Return of Fascism in Italy.” Most of the legacy press agreed, viewing her as akin to other European populists they have characterized as threats to liberal democracy.
That’s not quite how things turned out.
During her two years in office, Meloni has proven to be a pragmatist as well as a populist. She is a bigger Ukraine hawk than just about any other Western leader—and she’s besties with Zelensky. She has, by all accounts, worked well with the Biden administration. And she recently welcomed Britain’s new Labour prime minister to Italy to offer advice on how to tackle illegal immigration. (Meloni’s government has overseen a big drop in boat crossings from North Africa to Italy.)
As the author of a recent profile in The Guardian acknowledged, “Meloni has worked her way out of the neo-fascist pigeonhole in which her critics tried to confine her.”
Last week, Meloni was named this year’s “Global Citizen,” an award handed out by the Atlantic Council, an avowedly liberal, internationalist, and establishment think tank. If you want to understand why Meloni has so many fans, look no further than the speech she gave when accepting the award, which we are publishing in full. (You can also watch the video version at the end of the story.) We’re printing this speech because it is a distillation of an important and interesting leader’s worldview—and because it offers the kind of clarity missing from the words of so many contemporary leaders.
Click here to read or watch Giorgia Meloni’s full speech on the future of the West.
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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