It’s Monday, December 16. 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: Why is political violence on the rise? Why are Georgians protesting? Why was Caitlin Clark named Time’s athlete of the year? Plus: Sebastian Gorka on MAGA foreign policy, Ben Kawaller asks New Yorkers: murder, for or against?, and much more.
But first, a reminder of a miracle vaccine we take for granted.
Maybe the most serious complaint about RFK Jr.’s suitability to run the Department of Health and Human Services is his long campaign against various vaccines.
For example, he has long pushed the debunked idea that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. Perhaps the most worrying of his vaccine views are the ones relating to polio. In an interview last year, Kennedy claimed that the polio vaccine—which is required in all 50 states—has “killed many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” Last week, The New York Times reported that Aaron Siri, a lawyer close to Kennedy and someone he wants to bring with him into government, has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the polio vaccine.
In our lead story today, my Free Press colleague Jana Kozlowski writes that “For my family, the prospect of halting polio immunization—or even convincing the public that the lifesaving vaccine is unsafe—is horrifying.”
When Jana’s mother was eleven, she found a photo in the attic of two small children who looked like her. When she asked her mother who they were, she replied, “Those are your two brothers. They died of polio.”
“Are they in heaven?” asked Jana’s mother. The reply stayed with her: “No, they are in the ground.”
Polio caused Jana’s family unimaginable pain. Her grandmother was pregnant when her sons died, and was so traumatized that she couldn’t care for her new baby.
And then, with the advent of a polio vaccine, all this pain was suddenly a thing no future families would have to worry about. It was—and still is—a miracle. And one that would be the height of stupidity to undo.
Read Jana’s full story: “Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril.”
Political Violence Is Back. Why?
If the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is proven to be what it looks like—an ideologically motivated murder—it will be the latest in a string of political attacks in recent years. From riots like the BLM violence of 2020 and January 6, to the attempts on Donald Trump’s life and now the UHC shooting, political violence is back.
What explains this resurgence? For The Free Press today, Charles Fain Lehman searches for an answer in another era when political violence wracked America—the late ’60s and early ’70s. Then, as now, Charles writes, violence was “excused, defended, and sometimes even celebrated.”
In other words, political violence happens because we let it. Read his full argument here.
And for a look at how the killing of Brian Thompson is being celebrated, watch this video from our Ben Kawaller. He hits the streets of New York to ask a question to which you’d think the answer was obvious. Murder: good or bad?
Taking to the Streets with Georgia’s Pro-Western Protesters
Georgians have been on the streets of Tbilisi every night for more than two weeks. Reporter Ani Chkhikvadze has been there with them. In her dispatch for The Free Press, she talks to protesters beaten and tear-gassed by the police, and explains why a political fight over whether the country would pursue European Union membership has turned into a battle for the country’s soul.
Read Ani’s dispatch: “Taking to the Streets with Georgia’s Pro-Western Protesters.”
Caitlin Clark’s Conundrum
Caitlin Clark has just been named Time magazine’s athlete of the year. Given Clark’s hand in transforming the WNBA, you might think the league’s players and owners would be thrilled to have one of their own on the cover of Time. You’d be mistaken. Players and owners have complained that Clark’s race is a big part of her popularity. “It boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is,” A’ja Wilson, the league’s MVP, told Time. Nothing is ever simple when it comes to Clark, says Joe Nocera. Except for the fact that she’s a truly transcendent talent fully deserving of the mantle “athlete of the year.”
Read Joe’s column: “Caitlin Clark’s Conundrum.”
FP Live: Sebastian Gorka on Trump’s MAGA Foreign Policy
Sebastian Gorka is a MAGA stalwart and a fiery conservative media pugilist. He’s a controversial figure. He will also be working in the next Trump administration as the president’s senior director for counterterrorism. He joined Batya Ungar-Sargon and Michael Moynihan on the latest installment of The Free Press Live.
Come for Gorka’s (rather humorless) admonishment of Moynihan for using the word comrade; stay for the description of John Bolton’s “porn mustache.” And between all that, you might find some clues as to what Donald Trump’s “peace through strength” foreign policy might look like.
For more from FP Live, don’t miss Dexter Filkins tell the story of the time he met Assad and explain how October 7 backfired on Iran.
The Biden presidency has been a roaring success—you just don’t realize it yet. That’s the gist of a memo written by White House communications director Ben LaBolt laying out Biden’s final few acts in office. “A presidency is not measured just in weeks, months, or four-year terms alone—rather its impact is evaluated for years and decades to come,” writes LaBolt. Just wait until those EV charging stations finally get built! I have my doubts, Mr. LaBolt. (The memo promises last-minute action on AI, environmental protections, and further commutations and pardons.)
Kamala Harris’s inner circle is debating what the vice president will do once she skips town on January 20. According to CNN’s Edward Isaac-Dovere, advisers are torn over whether Harris should run for California governor in 2026 or not. They think that race would be a layup. So why not? Because it’d be hard to run for president again if she has just been sworn in in Sacramento. Yes, really. Apparently, Kamalaworld is fired up about another presidential election. Per CNN: “Some believe a repeat run, after quickly improving her reputation and raising more than $1 billion over her surprise 100-day race, should be hers for the taking.” Okay.
Half of all faculty say that mandatory DEI statements—which have become commonplace at American colleges in recent years—are “rarely” or “never” acceptable, according to a new FIRE survey of American academics. The same poll found that two-thirds of academics support institutional neutrality for colleges, that 47 percent of conservative faculty say they feel unable to voice their opinions because of how others might react, and that a third of all faculty say they self-censor their written work. The percentage who admit to self-censorship is four times the number of social scientists who said the same thing at the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
Spare a thought for “bartender Joseph.” He’s one of the liberal restaurant workers quoted in a Washingtonian story about the “clashes” that “are coming for Trump officials dining out in D.C.” The piece is full of waitstaff worrying about having to serve someone with different politics to them. (The horror!) But Joseph feels particularly stressed because while “on a personal level” he’s dreading the incoming administration, “from a bartending perspective, he sees it as good news. In his experience, Republicans tip more and are generally lower maintenance guests than Democrats.”
Speaking of the coming shake-up in D.C., Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are rolling up their sleeves and getting ready to fix the federal government. The small-government aficionados at the Cato Institute are understandably excited about the initiative and have some advice. They call for constitutionally limited government, reduced regulation, smaller bureaucracy, spending cuts, and simplified tax code. If the initiative achieves even ten percent of what Cato proposes, it’ll be the best news out of Washington for libertarians in quite some time.
Amid a growing “secret war” between Russia and NATO powers in Europe, The Wall Street Journal reports that Western powers have had close brushes with the Russian navy in the Baltic Sea lately. In a hitherto unreported incident in November, a Russian warship shot flares at a German helicopter that had been dispatched from a frigate to investigate suspicious activity near a Danish island.
Harvard president Alan Garber, who was appointed after Claudine Gay’s resignation at the start of the year, has said all the right things about returning the university to its tradition of academic freedom. Vinay Prasad has a good suggestion for an “actionable way” for Garber to walk the walk: Reinstate Martin Kuldorff as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Kuldorff was fired for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates during the pandemic. As Prasad puts it in an open letter to Garber: “Martin was right, and Harvard was wrong. It’s just that simple. Please do the right thing.” Kuldorff was a co-signatory, with Jay Bhattacharya, of the Great Barrington Declaration. Read our editorial on Bhattacharya’s appointment to run NIH: “Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharaya.”
Honestly, I expect better journalism at the FP vs what I see at the NYT. This is sad. To say that RFK’s lawyer, Siri, “has petitioned the FDA to revoke the polio vaccine”, is just lazy. I knew nothing about Siri until yesterday, when I also read the NYT headline from Friday about him. So I spent *5* minutes looking into it and discovered that huge context is required. 1) it’s not “the” polio vaccine — there are 6 IPV drugs on the market. He’s petitioning to get 1 removed. And he only wants it removed until it can provide more data from its safety testing. 2) Why? Oh, good question. Because the Sanofi drug had 3 (!) days of clinical trials prior to its approval by the FDA and none of that was double blinded or vs a placebo, while all the others went through much more scrutiny. Are we good with this? It’s takes 7 years to get most drugs to market, but this one was pushed through. I have no idea why, but his FOIA revealed it to be true and the FDA doesn’t deny it. 3) That Sanofi drug has had lots of safety issues and is not allowed in a number of European countries, which is the reason it caught his team’s eye in the first place.
I actually haven’t yet researched whether RFK actually said that more people have died from the vaccine vs polio or not, but given that you were so flippant about 1 of your 2 claims leading into this story, I’m guessing you didn’t scrutinize that one either, so I don’t believe you. Sorry.
I *hate* when the media does this. Can we stop and think? Would someone really just want to bring back Polio? Or, maybe, since they’ve dedicated their entire lives to reading the fine print inside pill bottles, they know a thing or two about what they’re talking about. On one hand we all complain that America has the worst health in the world, yet we spend the most on healthcare and no one knows why. But this guy is trying to take on that challenge and we all laugh and point meanwhile knowing *nothing* ourselves about it or the behind-the-scenes of the pharmaceutical industry. And then, our media makes up fake headlines or provides no context, so we turn to the FP who just does the same lazy reporting.
This LAZY! I subscribed because I thought the FP was better. Cut the bs please and stop scaring people. Maybe, instead, do the real story that the NYT isn’t telling you and report on THAT.
“The polio vaccine….It was—and still is—a miracle. And one that would be the height of stupidity to undo.”
It takes years to perfect vaccines, and so was the case of polio, that did kill many people when initially rolled out.
Dr. Malone recently posted a guest post from Sofia Karstens who said:
“In 1954, a woman called Bernice Eddy was a lab scientist at NIH performing safety tests for the Polio vaccines. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was a killed-virus vaccine to be used in a massive national vaccination program. After testing the vaccines on monkeys, she and her team discovered that the vaccine contained residual LIVE polio virus, resulting in the monkeys showing polio-like symptoms and paralysis. These findings pointed to a flawed vaccine manufacturing process. Eddy reported her findings, and she was immediately dismissed from the polio research and given what we today call ‘whistleblower treatment.’”
We need people like RFK, Jr. who ask valid questions, and not people who roll over for the $$.