Joe Biden Was Never a Moderate. Plus. . .

It’s Monday, January 13. 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 “Slender Man” stabber is released; Maduro’s tyranny gets a third term; a Free Press Live conversation about a shocking misdiagnosis; and what happens when the girlboss sleeps with the intern.

But first: Joe Biden was a radical president.

Today is the first day of the last week of Biden’s presidency. If you’ve forgotten, don’t feel bad: according to the president’s aides, he isn’t so great at remembering things either. Last week, the White House announced that Biden will deliver his farewell address to the nation this Wednesday—strange, given that he is technically president until January 20.

It’s a good time to take stock of the past four years. Looking back, you could argue Biden was one of the most progressive presidents in American history. He leaves the U.S. with trillions in debt (and the inflation to prove it); an immigration crisis fueled by the highest number of border crossing arrests in American history; and a controversial push to allow transgender athletes to compete with biological women in sports, despite 69 percent of Americans saying they’re against the practice. In short, even though he campaigned as a moderate, Biden has governed as a radical. As the sun sets on “Scranton Joe’s” administration, it’s worth asking what happened.

Ruy Teixeira, a Free Press contributor who has dissected the Democrats’ post-election disaster in forensic detail, has the full autopsy on Biden’s presidency.

Read his new piece: “What Happened to Joe Biden the Moderate?”

Night Falls in Venezuela

Last summer, Jonathan Jakubowicz reported for The Free Press on Venezuela’s contested presidential election, in which authoritarian Nicolás Maduro disqualified his opponent, María Corina Machado, on spurious charges, including corruption. In her place, she recruited Edmundo González Urrutia, a little-known diplomat who went on to win by a landslide, according to numerous independent exit polls.

That didn’t matter to Maduro. He claimed victory—and enormous crowds rushed to the streets in protest—tearing down statues of Hugo Chávez and calling for free and fair elections.

But none of it mattered. On Friday, Maduro was inaugurated for a third six-year term. Machado now lives in hiding. Urrutia has exiled himself to Spain.

We asked novelist Roberto Ampuero, one of South America’s leading public intellectuals, to capture the national mood. Today in The Free Press, he writes an elegy to a nation that was once among the continent’s richest—and is now a crumbling state more than eight million people have fled. Read his searing piece, “Night Falls in Venezuela.”

An Alzheimer’s Misdiagnosis—and What It Reveals About Our Broken Medical System

Just over a week ago we published an essay by Free Press writer Sean Fischer about his mom’s Alzheimer’s misdiagnosis.

Sean’s story struck a chord with so many of you—dozens of readers wrote to tell us about their experiences falling through the cracks of the medical system. And it also left you with questions: How could highly trained professionals make a mistake like this? If you’re a patient who thinks something’s not right, how do you advocate for yourself? How will healthcare change when Donald Trump is sworn in next week?

We wanted to get answers for you, and we thought: Who better to ask than Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor of medicine—among other things—at the University of California, San Francisco, and a practicing hematologist-oncologist? Last week, he joined both Sean and Nellie Bowles to talk about how patients are failed when doctors are “just going through the motions.”

The conversation—and the recording of it—is available only for paying members of The Free Press. If you aren’t yet a paid subscriber, consider becoming one today.

And click here to find out what prompted Nellie to say, “Reddit is my most trusted source of information.”

Boulder High School senior Korben Smart walks down a dingy hallway dressed as Slender Man. (Jeremy Papasso via Getty Images)

• The death toll due to California wildfires has risen to 24, as the inferno continues to savage Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. So far, victims include a disabled former child star, a woman who stayed behind with her pets, and a grandmother. Click here to catch up on The Free Press’s coverage of the historic disaster as well as our latest column, by Leighton Woodhouse, who argues that progressive politicians aren’t to blame for the widespread destruction—L.A. was built to burn.

• On Friday, Trump was sentenced to “unconditional discharge” in New York for his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to pay hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election. The decision means Trump won’t have to serve any jail time or probation, or pay any fees. Basically, his only punishment is that he can no longer buy a gun in Florida and his political enemies get to call him a convicted felon.

• Israeli security and policy chiefs arrived in Qatar to discuss a proposed ceasefire in Gaza that would see remaining Israeli hostages released before president-elect Trump’s inauguration. Biden has been pressing for the deal as a final Hail Mary for his legacy. Disagreements remain on several key points, including the timing and extent of Israel’s redeployments and withdrawal from Gaza, and its willingness to end the war.

• On Thursday, a federal judge in Kentucky issued a nationwide block to the Biden administration’s Title IX rewrite, which made “gender identity” a protected characteristic under the education amendment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and would have required schools and colleges to give trans-identifying biological men access to women’s sports, spaces, and scholarships. “When Title IX is viewed in its entirety, it is abundantly clear that discrimination on the basis of sex means discrimination on the basis of being male or female,” wrote the court in its ruling.

• UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch says Tulip Saddiq should be sacked as the Labour anti-corruption minister, because she ironically faces allegations of corruption. Saddiq was recently named in an investigation into claims that her family embezzled up to £3.9 billion (roughly $4.8 billion) from infrastructure spending in Bangladesh. The current leader of Bangladesh has said she should apologize for living in London properties linked to her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, the recently deposed Bangladeshi PM who is at the center of a corruption probe in that country. Saddiq says she’s done nothing wrong.

• Morgan Geyser, the 12-year-old Wisconsin girl who tried to sacrifice her middle school classmate to an internet boogeyman called Slender Man in the woods near Waukesha ten years ago, has been released from a mental hospital at age 22. Three medical experts testified that Geyser has made significant progress and is no longer a threat to society. Peyton Leutner, her victim, survived the attack by crawling to the side of a road, where she was found by a bicyclist who called 911. Geyser’s accomplice, Anissa Weier, was released in 2021. My advice to these young women: Stay logged off. The internet hasn’t gotten any saner since you left it.

Provocateur or Predator?

New flick Babygirl, which hit theaters in the final days of 2024, follows the adulterous affair between a middle-aged CEO and a 25-year-old intern. Yet another harrowing #MeToo tale of workplace sexual exploitation, you say?

Not so fast: The CEO is a woman, played by Nicole Kidman.

In her latest for The Free Press, Kat Rosenfield explains why this fact matters, but shouldn’t. “What equality truly demands of us,” she writes, “is not just the license to behave just as badly as men, but to be held to the same standards of human goodness.” Read Kat’s piece, “The Girl Boss is Sleeping with the Intern.”

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