By The Free Press | Created at 2024-12-18 11:17:17 | Updated at 2024-12-18 14:00:48
2 hours ago
It’s Wednesday, December 18. 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: Abigail Shrier is vindicated; Syrian Kurds say they feel betrayed; Steve Bannon explains why he’s a populist, not a conservative; and more.
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.”
