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“As the social scientific outlook has gained legitimacy in the West during this century, it has cast a pall upon the exercise of liberty by subtly suggesting to us all that deliberative politics – the loud, messy, inefficient and imperfect process of self governance – is a lesser alternative, and that the other option – the neutral scientific manager – can do the same work only better and more efficiently and smoothly.”
— Yuval Levin, The Tyranny of Reason, 2000.
“Our politics does not consist of friends and enemies. It consists of fellow citizens who share a future in common and disagree about how best to shape that future. Those disagreements are serious. But no resolution to them could be absolute or permanent. Our political adversaries will still be here tomorrow; they will be part of any future we build. Any politics not premised in that reality will be dangerously delusional and can only point us down.”
— Yuval Levin, The Free Press, September 25, 2025.
« The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. »
— James Madison from The Federalist № 47 (30 January 1788).
The father of the US Constitution was clear about the separation of powers and keeping too much power from accumulating in the hands of a single branch. Though Madison was clear that Congress should be the focal point of constitutional government. The legislative branch has pride of place in the US Constitution, it takes up Article I.
Sadly, Capitol Hill Republicans have been cravenly ceding power to Donald Trump because they are too cowardly to fulfill their constitutional duties.
Conservative scholar Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute wrote about Congress abdicating its responsibilities at The Atlantic.
Our Constitution created a republican form of government, and Madison was right to insist that, in such a government, the legislative power necessarily predominates. As long as Congress declines to at least try to predominate, though, our system will not work as intended. [ ... ] So for all that we will rightly worry about presidential power in the next few years, we cannot break out of our constitutional bind without looking down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Anyone contemplating where to seek change or how to direct reformist energies should take notice of a counterintuitive yet inescapable fact: Addressing the overreach of the judicial or executive branches requires first changing what members of Congress want.
The publication has lost its way and is radicalizing the more sophisticated right
Matt Johnson at The UnPopulist:
When Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times in 2020, she wrote an open letter to her boss, A.G. Sulzberger, explaining why she felt compelled to quit. Citing bullying from liberal colleagues for her “wrongthink,” and depicting the culture of the paper as one of self-censorship and ideological conformity, Weiss also previewed her next project. As “once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles,” she wrote, “Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere.” Six months later, Weiss started Common Sense, a newsletter that subsequently became The Free Press, one of the largest and fastest growing digital media outlets today. The Free Press’ mission statement reads like an updated version of Weiss’ open letter, and it describes the publication as a recovery of the journalistic virtues of “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence”—this last quality arguably being the site’s main selling point. “We don’t allow ideology to stand in the way of searching for the truth,” Weiss said. But The Free Press’ insistence that ideological considerations don’t affect its journalism is at odds with its track record. In fact, The Free Press embodies the very ideological captivity that Weiss’ open letter railed against—just in the opposite direction. Weiss’ instinct that many American news consumers were looking for something different was correct. But the publication, which was valued at $100 million last September, has found success not because it singularly embodies Weiss’ high-minded description of what once made journalism great. Rather, The Free Press has amassed a huge following by being a more artful and less shrill version of the anti-woke alarmism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem. The publication has always had a clear editorial slant: opposition to the woke left. No matter how bad the right gets, the site’s editorial stance remains firm: the left is worse. While The Free Press occasionally publishes articles critical of Donald Trump and the right more broadly, its overarching message is that the MAGA movement isn’t as bad as the lying liberal media would have you believe—and that the errors of Trumpism are largely a reaction to the much more serious sins of the left. When The Free Press hit 1 million subscribers in December of 2024, Weiss wrote in her personal reflection on the milestone: “From day one, we’ve had a single guiding principle: Pursue the truth and tell it plainly. No shortcuts. No exceptions.” But a closer look reveals that, even as it rails against the pervasive bias of the mainstream media, The Free Press’ work often strains to reach its predetermined slant, inevitably compromising the quality of its journalism.
The Anti-Anti-Trump Publication
One reason for The Free Press’ popularity is that it offers intellectual reassurance to legions of anti-anti-Trump readers—sophisticated conservatives who may be uneasy about Trumpism, yet want to believe that wokeness and other left-wing excesses are the primary threats to Western civilization. Trump’s trade war and the ensuing market meltdown might give them some pause, but they’re desperate for intellectual ammunition to convince themselves and others that the administration’s crusade against “wokeness”—and associated initiatives like DEI—was necessary even if it meant trampling our democratic institutions. Ideologically sympathetic outlets like The Free Press convince a wider swath of Americans that the Trump administration’s culture-war agenda is justified. Precisely because it pretends to be governed by journalistic values like objectivity and fairness, The Free Press helps sustain the society-wide hysteria over wokeness while downplaying the country’s descent into authoritarianism.
Consider just one headline after Trump issued his directive purging executive agencies of alleged DEI hires: “EXCLUSIVE: Inside the U.S. Mint’s Scramble to Conceal DEI Personnel.” The article highlights a “whistleblower” who busted his colleagues at the U.S. Mint for what he described as a “sloppy attempt to hide their behavior,” such as removing references to DEI in job descriptions so that they’d be “rehomed” elsewhere. The Free Press listed the names, titles, and combined salaries of “five former DEI staffers” at the Mint, in case the Trump administration needed any help finding and firing them. The Free Press apparently believes that this effort by scared and hapless federal employees to hang onto their jobs is a bombshell scandal, demonstrating that the publication is happy to support the Trump administration’s initiatives when doing so suits its purposes—even as it accuses the mainstream media of serving Democratic administrations. The far bigger scandal—certainly the one that a publication committed to free speech and free thought should find more troubling—is that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaign has been a vindictive and scattershot effort to create an ideologically compliant federal workforce that smacks of contemporary McCarthyism. The Free Press does throw in an occasional thoughtful essay willing to scrutinize Trump, such as Yuval Levin’s “You Can’t Run Government Through Retribution.” But the publication relies on such articles to grant license for its steady stream of anti-anti-Trump commentary, such as Eli Lake’s contention that a bunch of young software engineers gaining access to some of the most sensitive systems and data in the U.S. government is not so worrisome in historical context. In “The Boys of DOGE,” Lake writes: “[B]efore you reach for the Valium, it’s worth considering that this is by no means the first time twentysomethings have helped lead a revolution inside the nation’s capital.” According to Lake, the DOGE takeover of the federal government is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan relying on young speechwriters, as if the relevant issue was age alone and not the potentially illegal and unconstitutional actions of Musk and his youth brigade. Instead of emphasizing the unilateral destruction of entire agencies by a bunch of interns at Musk’s companies, The Free Press trumpets “Two Cheers for DOGE” and declares that “this White House, in the course of six weeks, has done the seemingly impossible: They have found the waste, the fraud, and the abuse.”
The publication’s soft-pedaling of Trumpism isn’t confined to its DOGE coverage. In November, Vinay Prasad authored an article about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that promised to “take a look at some of his most controversial opinions” but ended up sane-washing him. Remarkably, Prasad failed to mention Kennedy’s insistence that Wi-Fi causes cancer; tap water may be turning kids gay; Jews had more freedom during the Holocaust than the unvaccinated had during the Covid-19 pandemic; and HHS (the agency Trump chose him to run) helped to orchestrate a coup during the pandemic that destroyed the Constitution and turned the U.S. into a totalitarian surveillance state. Instead, Prasad discussed a few of Kennedy’s more defensible positions—such as the idea that the Covid lockdowns went too far—and argued that Kennedy’s “hand-wringing” detractors were treating him “unfairly.” Though Prasad mentioned RFK Jr.’s belief that childhood vaccines cause autism—the axis around which his “public health” advocacy has rotated for many years—he doesn’t think this is disqualifying for an HHS secretary. The Free Press later ran an article critical of RFK Jr. by Jeffrey S. Flier. But publishing the first (much more popular) piece that provided a completely distorted picture of RFK Jr.’s beliefs, while omitting the most salient and objectionable ones, is tantamount to journalistic malpractice. This is true even if one overlooks the deeply irresponsible editorial decision to “both-sides” an antivax crank who was being considered for the role of the nation’s top public health official.
The Personal Ideological Journey Formula
If there was a Free Press pitchbot, it could hardly come up with a better headline than the one affixed to columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s article last week: “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.” The headline gives the impression to an unfamiliar reader that Ungar-Sargon’s conversion is something new, when she has been a dependable Trump cheerleader for years. Most recently, she’s been claiming that Trump’s tariffs will reverse not just America’s manufacturing but also, preposterously, its masculinity crisis. In her MAGA conversion piece, she describes Trump as “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers.” The “socially moderate” Trump has pushed countless baseless panics originating from the extremes of right-wing discourse and chose a radical ideologue as his number two. The “anti-interventionist” Trump wants to seize control of the Panama Canal and annex Greenland, and he just bombed Yemen. The president “committed to America’s blue-collar workers” imposed by fiat a sweeping tariff agenda that would be devastating to the working and middle classes (he only backed down when the self-inflicted market crisis threatened to spiral out of control). Ungar-Sargon writes: “Democrats also support censorship, while the GOP now touts free speech.” Trump is waging war on the media through lawsuits designed to suppress dissent. He has expelled major media outlets from the Pentagon, inserted ideologically sympathetic outlets into the White House press pool, and limited access by major agencies like the Associated Press. ICE agents are arresting legal residents for writing op-eds and expressing opinions the administration doesn’t like.
[...]
To be sure, The Free Press isn’t a purely partisan outlet. Deputy managing editor Joe Nocera was refreshingly critical of the Trump DOJ’s decision to suspend bribery and fraud charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. An editorial appropriately challenged Trump’s claim that Ukraine is somehow responsible for the war. The Free Press republished Matthew Yglesias’ informative Slow Boring essay on the trouble with tariffs. But the overwhelming thrust of the outlet’s coverage has been reliably sympathetic to Trump and critical of his political opponents. This was particularly clear before the election, when the outlet had to make editorial decisions about which candidate to criticize and which to promote. My own analysis of The Free Press’ political coverage in the six months leading up to the election found that it was overwhelmingly tilted in favor of Trump and against the Democrats. Of the articles published in the U.S. Politics section of the site between May 6 and Nov. 5, 70 were supportive of Trump or critical of Democrats, while just 14 were supportive of the Democratic candidate (Harris or Biden) or critical of Trump. But those rough estimates don’t capture the full picture. The Free Press’ selection of issues to cover—such as the destructiveness of pro-Palestine campus protests and the excesses of “trans ideology”—was overwhelmingly right-wing coded. Even weakly anti-Trump or pro-Democratic articles were crammed with caveats about how the mainstream media is biased in favor of the Democrats, the left is problematic as well, and so on. Articles that criticized Trump did so from the standpoint of sympathy toward him and hostility toward his Democratic opponents. The framing went something like this: Why is Trump making mistakes x, y, and z when Harris is such a disaster who is unfit to serve? Why is the right indulging nativism, which is just like the identity politics on the left?
The Free Press, a right-wing website run by Bari Weiss, has moved further to the right (aka the Anti-Anti-Trump Right), likely in order to stay in good graces with MAGAworld.
Yuval Levin joins us to discuss what larger meaning may or may not attach to the horrific mass murders afflicting the United States
This means conservatives should think about preserving the pre-conditions for moral living in terms of building cohesive, attractive, moral subcultures in those mediating layers of society, rather than just struggling for control of the old institutions of a once-consolidated 'mainstream' culture. It means focusing inward and close to home. And it means the right must take note of the ways in which the distinct problems of our age are as much challenges of dissolution as of concentration, and therefore that the conservative struggle against the scourge of statism should more frequently employ a vocabulary of middling communitarianism rather than of radical individualism."
Yuval Levin
Success and failure often feel exactly the same while they are happening.
Yuval Levin
Some on the contemporary right have declared "the common good" to be their aim, and have insisted that this distinguishes their conservatism
