The Front Page: ‘I Was Forced to Marry. In Iraq, Nine-Year-Old Girls Could Share My Fate.’ Plus. . .

It’s Thursday, September 12, and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today’s offering is brought to you by my brilliant colleague Madeleine Kearns, and it includes Bill Barr on the chaos at Columbia, Biden in a MAGA cap, the truth about one of the craziest-sounding claims in Tuesday’s debate, and more. But first, she explores the hypocrisy of “luxury feminism” and the misogyny it tolerates. —Olly Wiseman 

Earlier this summer, our friend and Free Press contributor Ayaan Hirsi Ali identified a pernicious strain of thinking she calls “luxury feminism.” It’s a nod to “luxury beliefs”—an idea coined by another Free Press writer, Rob Henderson. 

Like any useful concept, once you hear about luxury feminism, you suddenly see it everywhere. This all-too-common school of thought is vague, alarmist, and detached from reality. Vague in that it trades in neat slogans. Alarmist in its overblown warnings about the imminent arrival of some Handmaid’s Tale dystopia here in America. And detached from reality in that it prioritizes dubious concepts like “gender identity” over the discrimination and biological issues faced by the female sex across the world.

For all the pussy hats and inflatable IUDs, luxury feminism has some serious blind spots. The biggest? “This feminism ignores Islamic misogyny in the developing world—and, increasingly, on Western shores,” says Ayaan—who knows of what she speaks. She was born in Somalia, where she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Later, she would have been forced to marry her distant cousin, had she not escaped to live a free life in the West.

Another woman acutely aware of the hypocrisy of luxury feminism is Yasmine Mohammed. She was born and raised in Canada to Muslim immigrant parents. One day, her abusive stepfather hung her upside down by her ankles for spelling her name with a J—which he interpreted as her attempt to be more “Western.” And when she was 19, she was forced to marry a terrorist. “If I had been a blonde, blue-eyed child with a German family, or an American one, I might have been protected. But because it was an Egyptian man who was subjecting me to unspeakable acts of violence, the abuse was apparently acceptable to the Canadian state. I had to endure it,” writes Yasmine in her piece for The Free Press today. 

Yasmine says two groups of girls and women are let down by this double standard. The first are the women in the West who have experienced similar lives to hers—and Yasmine says she has spoken to hundreds of such women. The second are in places like Afghanistan—where the Taliban recently added speaking in public to the long list of rights women no longer have. Or Iraq, where lawmakers have taken the first step in legalizing child marriage for girls as young as nine. As she writes, these abuses go unchecked “because of cultural relativism, the progressive ideal that we shouldn’t hold other cultures to our own standards, even when those standards are the law.”

Read Yasmine’s full essay: “I Was Forced to Marry. In Iraq, Nine-Year-Old Girls Could Share My Fate.”

Bill Barr on Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia 

Speaking of luxury beliefs. . . readers will remember the tale of the multimillionaire anarchist protester who clashed with staff at Columbia earlier this year. In May, Free Press reporter Francesca Block spoke to Mario Torres, the custodian who tried to fend off James Carlson, a 40-year-old trust fund kid with a $2.3 million townhome, who was part of the mob that attempted to storm a campus building. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” Torres told Francesca. Now, with students back on campus, The New Yorker reports that more Columbia workers say the university is not doing enough to protect them from the latest wave of anti-Israel protesters.

Writing in The Free Press today, Bill Barr, the former U.S. attorney general and Columbia alum, reveals that his law firm is representing two custodians who were physically assaulted by protesters in April. He writes that the plight of the school’s workers is a reminder that Columbia’s antisemitism problem “is a danger to all members of the Columbia community, as it will not—and has not—stopped with Jews.” And, Barr argues, the school has a long way to go in rooting out the problem.

Read Bill Barr on “Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia.” 

Can Women Be Drag Queens? 

Chappell Roan has become a pop sensation. Her hits “My Kink Is Karma” and “Femininomenon” are all over TikTok. Her concerts boast record-breaking crowds. Last night, she performed at MTV’s Video Music Awards. And she just made the cover of Rolling Stone. The 26-year-old appears in chalk-white foundation, dark, exaggerated eye shadow, bright red lipstick, and a curly orange wig—a look in keeping with her overall drag-queen aesthetic.

Today, my colleague River Page writes of her appeal and her aesthetic, noting that: “Perhaps most interestingly, Chappell Roan isn’t a real person. She’s the drag alter ego of a 26-year-old woman from Missouri named Kaleigh Amstutz.”

Chappell’s rise has led River to wonder about the growing rise of female drag queens, and the controversy they’ve caused on RuPaul’s Drag Race—and beyond. It’s led River to ask a question you’ve probably never asked yourself . . .

“Can a Woman Be a Drag Queen?” 

• Sixty-seven million people watched Tuesday night’s debate between Trump and Harris, a big uptick from the 51 million who tuned in to watch the June debate that sank Joe Biden’s reelection hopes. Yesterday, Trump said another debate “probably won’t happen.” Harris’s team says they’re on for round two.

• The overwhelming consensus among pundits after the debate was that Harris was the winner. The election, however, will be decided by swing voters, not pundits. And a Reuters focus group of 10 undecided voters who watched the debate yielded intriguing results. Six came out in support of or leaning toward Trump, while only three were team Harris. Half felt that, after 90 minutes, they still didn’t have a clear idea of the vice president’s policies. 

• Household incomes rose in 2023 for the first time since the pandemic, according to census data published this week. Inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4 percent from the 2022 estimate of $77,540. 

• When Harvard defended its admissions policy before the Supreme Court last year, it warned of a precipitous fall in the number of black students enrolled if it lost the case. Well, the first post–affirmative action numbers are out, and they show only a modest fall in the number of black first-year students at Harvard: 14 percent, down from 18 percent last year.

• China is providing Russia with direct support for its assault on Ukraine, U.S. officials warned this week. U.S. deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell said China is sending Russia “component pieces. . . to help sustain, build, and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine.” The claim comes soon after reports that Iran has sent ballistic missiles to Russia—a move U.S. officials have called a “dramatic escalation.” 

• Joe Biden donned a “Trump 2024” cap during a 9/11 visit to a Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fire station yesterday. A White House press secretary cast it as a show of unity, not an embarrassing mistake. Maybe. Definitely not a show of unity: The company Donald Trump kept on Wednesday. Far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was in Trump’s entourage in New York—a day after she flew with him to the presidential debate. Pro tip for any presidential candidates reading this: Don’t invite 9/11 truthers to 9/11 commemorations. 

The Truth In Trump’s Transgender Prisoner Claim 

At the presidential debate on Tuesday night, Trump said of Kamala Harris: “She did things that nobody would ever think of. Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” 

Too crazy to be real, right? A figment of Trump’s imagination or the product of the far-right fever swamps, yes? A lot of people seemed to assume as much.

If only. 

As CNN reported this week, when Harris was running for president in 2019 she was asked by the ACLU whether she supported state-funded gender transition surgeries for “transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention.” 

Harris’s reply? Yes. “I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.” So yes, “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” sounds insane. But it’s also something Kamala Harris said she supported in 2019. 

For more reaction to the debate, catch the latest episode of Honestly. Michael Moynihan, Batya Ungar-Sargon, David Faris, and Peter Savodnik try to make sense of the meaty issues discussed on the debate stage, like foreign policy, the economy, and. . . cat-eating? Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Hi, readers, Olly here. I am writing this message on my phone with one hand as I am locked in The Free Press stocks right now. Interns are hurling rotten vegetables at me as I type. Why? Because I muddled up the names of maybe the two most famous men in America in a version of The Front Page sent to some readers yesterday. I regret this very stupid error. (Julia, can you let me out now? Please.) 

Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor for The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns. 

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