On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Eli Lake makes sense of Iran’s Trump hack—and the media’s decision not to publish its findings. Madeleine Kearns reports on the association of surgeons casting doubt on “gender-affirming care.” Plus: Meet another Free Presser.
But first, our lead story.
Remember Khymani James, the Columbia junior who was one of the leaders of the school’s anti-Israel encampment? He told his social media followers that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that they should be “grateful” he wasn’t “murdering Zionists.”
Back in April, James was a PR headache for Columbia, which banned him from campus and began formal disciplinary proceedings against him. But now, with the new fall semester around the corner, school administrators won’t say whether or not James will be allowed to return to campus to see out his senior year. The Washington Free Beacon reports that “signs indicate that James, who served as a leader of the unlawful tent encampment that disrupted university life at the close of the last academic year, is poised to return.” In other words, Columbia may have decided to tolerate James’ hateful threats toward Zionist students—even as American campuses have become places of absurd, almost unimaginable oversensitivity in recent years.
The double standard is clear. And it exposes the twisted values of higher education today.
Another example of that double standard comes in today’s lead story, by Francesca Block. Last year, Francesca reported on how Stanford waged war on its own students for minor infractions, sending them into full-blown depression or even suicide. Today, she reveals how administrators at the University of Maryland shut down Greek life and interrogated 150 students all because of a few anonymous complaints, even as violent pro-Palestinian protesters roiled campuses across the nation, committing criminal acts including trespassing and breaking and entering—and got off scot-free.
Wynn Smiley, the CEO of Alpha Tau Omega, one of the fraternities investigated by University of Maryland, told Francesca that the differing treatment of pro-Palestine protesters nationally and fraternity members at his college reveals “two very different sets of rules. . . depending on who you are affiliated with.”
“Based on rumors, Greek students were targeted, and yet, after everything that the university did, they found none of the initial allegations to have merit, and they took all these students through this process needlessly,” Smiley said. On the other hand, there are protesters who “are not only breaking university rules in many cases but also state laws. And those folks—the university seems to turn the other way and give them permission to just go ahead and do whatever. No punishment issued.” Read on for more from Frannie on the double standard on campus today.
Pennsylvania is “the most important battleground” in this election. In 2016, Trump carried the state by a margin of one percentage point; 2020 saw a similarly narrow victory for Biden. One critical bloc is made up of “heavily Catholic voters in old industrial regions” who historically voted Democrat but are open to Trump. (Compact)
California governor Gavin Newsom has urged schools in the Golden State to “act now to restrict” cell phone use in classrooms while he works “with the Legislature to further limit student smartphone use on campus.” At least there’s one thing Newsom and Florida governor Ron DeSantis can agree on. (CBS)
Contrary to the claims of many in Western media, Israel is winning its war in Gaza, argues Andrew Fox. He says that dismantling the terror organization was never going to be an overnight job: “It’s a long war against a consolidated and tenacious terror army. IDF sources I spoke to predicted another six to 18 months to finish the job, assuming no cease-fire is agreed.” (Tablet)
Emails obtained under the FOIA appear to show close coordination between the U.S. government, academia, and social media platforms in their approach to disinformation in the 2020 election. An “FOIA library,” which includes correspondence from University of Washington and Stanford personnel, “illustrate the synergies between the ‘anti-disinformation’ industry and the national security state,” writes James Rushmore. (Racket News)
While campaigning to be governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz called Muslim cleric Asad Zaman a “master teacher.” The problem? Zaman openly celebrated October 7 and has promoted a pro–Adolf Hitler film called The Greatest Story Never Told. The Harris-Walz campaign has previously denied that Walz had a “personal relationship” with the imam after it was reported that the Democratic vice-presidential nominee had repeatedly hosted Zaman at events as governor. Seems. . . weird. (Washington Examiner)
Sex-selective IVF is banned in most countries. But not in the U.S., where it brings in an estimated $500 million annually for clinics. And it’s no longer all about locking in a male heir. One study showed white parents pick female embryos 70 percent of the time. What’s wrong with boys? “Toxic masculinity,” apparently. “For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good.” (Slate)
Doctors are getting very good at saving very premature babies. In the hospitals with the most experience resuscitating those babies, children born at just 22 weeks now have a 67 percent survival rate. But many hospitals don’t try to save babies born that soon, and parents aren’t made aware of the potentially lifesaving care sometimes available just a few miles away. (Wall Street Journal)
Some 40 percent of the major infrastructure projects in Joe Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act legislation have been delayed or paused indefinitely, a Financial Times investigation has found. They report that “the delays raise questions around Biden’s bet that an industrial transformation can deliver jobs and economic returns to the U.S.” (Financial Times)
Is Ozempic a wonder drug? FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity, GLP-1 drugs mimicking a hormone the body releases when eating appear to be a promising treatment for everything from addiction to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. “We’re going to have an exciting next few years,” writes Scott Alexander, who remains cautiously optimistic. (Astral Codex Ten)
Anxious? There are drugs for that. But new research suggests you may not need them. Mindfulness-based interventions (think breathing, stretching, and attention exercises) are as effective as escitalopram, an anti-anxiety pill, according to a study in JAMA Psychiatry that tracked 208 participants for eight weeks. (The Washington Post)
→ Eli Lake: The difference between the Clinton and Trump hacks. What a difference eight years makes. In 2016, emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee were pilfered and publicized by Russian hackers, and the press couldn’t stop writing about it. In 2024, alleged Iranian hackers infiltrated the Trump campaign’s computers and the three media outlets who were sent the goods declined to publish.
Depending on one’s politics, this is either an example of a double standard in favor of Republicans or the evolution of the media’s own norms when it comes to publishing hacked materials. But such easy comparisons are not apt. The Trump hack of ’24 and the Clinton hack of ’16 are two very different things.
To start, the emails Russians stole from the Clinton campaign and the DNC in 2016 were not leaked to a news outlet. They were first published on WikiLeaks and a website created by Russia’s GRU to publicize the material known as DCLeaks. Today the web page displays a warning: “DCLeaks.com was operating as a front for Russian intelligence.” Media outlets that wrote about the hacked Clinton emails were not the gatekeepers for the stolen information. They were playing catch-up with the rest of the internet.
Furthermore, the hacked material on Clinton contained newsworthy information mixed in with irrelevant personal details about some of the campaign’s staffers. Reporters had to dig through the trove to find the gems. But there were gems, such as a devastating memo outlining how the Clinton Foundation was at times a scheme to soak donors for pricey speaking fees for the former president and consulting contracts for Clinton aides.
By contrast, the hacked Trump material thus far seems like a dud. Politico, one of the three outlets approached by an anonymous source with the internal campaign documents, said the source included a vetting document for J.D. Vance and a partial vetting document for Marco Rubio, who was a finalist to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee.
“These vetting reports are a synthesis of public information, press clippings, financial statements, etc.,” one Trump campaign official told The Free Press. “The campaign has been very disciplined, and so has the RNC, about the efforts of bad actors to hack us. The most damning stuff about us would be on texts and Signal.”
All of this raises the question of whether the press should ignore tips from hackers if they suspect a foreign country is trying to influence our election. That was the lesson many learned in 2016 and it led to an overcorrection. Social media companies began with the reasonable step of labeling foreign propaganda on their platforms in 2017.
But by 2020, Twitter and Facebook were shadow banning accounts suspected of spreading health disinformation about Covid. And then a few weeks before the 2020 election, the sites took the extraordinary step of initially blocking users from sharing a New York Post exclusive about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the evidence of his own buckraking contained within it. This was based on the false claim, amplified by the Biden campaign, that the laptop leak itself was Russian disinformation.
Perhaps it’s time to accept that in a digital world, foreign election interference is inevitable. Instead of trying to gatekeep nefarious actors’ ill-begotten hacks, the media should get back to verifying whether the information is true and relevant.
You know, what we used to call journalism.
→ Madeleine Kearns: American Society of Plastic Surgeons casts doubt on “gender-affirming care.” We have reported many times in these pages on the dangers of “gender-affirming care” for minors. Young people suffering from gender distress are being handed puberty blockers and even undergoing radical surgery without first receiving necessary mental health screenings, sometimes leading to devastating outcomes. New analysis by the Manhattan Institute has found evidence of 5,288 to 6,294 “gender-affirming” double mastectomies for girls under 18 between 2017 to 2023, including 50 to 179 girls who were 12.5 or younger when they had their breasts removed.
This is happening even as European countries are turning away from this laissez-faire approach to medicine. Gender-affirming care is no longer the standard in Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. But finally, one esteemed American medical association is breaking from the orthodoxy on this issue.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) is now stating that there is “considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions” in minors and “the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty,” according a piece this week by the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir. “The U.S. consensus now appears to have its first big fracture,” Sapir writes.
That the association “representing the vast majority of plastic surgeons who actually do these surgical procedures is saying, ‘Wait a second, the evidence is, in fact, low quality,’ ” is a significant development, Sapir tells The Free Press.
But challenging the medical consensus on “gender-affirming care” remains an uphill battle in this country, as activists and members of the media continue to argue in its favor—no matter what’s happening elsewhere.
On Tuesday, The New York Times’ Lydia Polgreen claimed that opposition to medicalized transition for minors is “against the consensus of the mainstream medical science.” Sapir said her reasoning is circular.
“It’s like Polgreen is saying, ‘Because gender transition is evidence-based, any doctor or researcher who says otherwise is, by definition, not an expert,’ ” Sapir explained. “It’s a ludicrous approach.”
Sapir says the “rank and file” of the U.S. medical profession can no longer afford to ignore the concerns of their European colleagues. “I’ve been hearing quite a lot of chatter among surgeons like, you know, we’re so thankful that ASPS is saying this,” he said. All it takes is a few more brave doctors to break the silence.
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Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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