Honestly with Bari Weiss The Free Press

At the start of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The capital, Buenos Aires, was known as “the Paris of South America.”

A lot can happen in a hundred years. Argentina today is in grave crisis. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, and a few months ago it faced an annualized inflation rate of over 200 percent—one of the highest in the world. What happened?

Today's guest, Argentina’s new president, says it’s pretty simple: socialism.

When Javier Milei took office in December 2023, he became the world’s first libertarian head of state—and maybe its most eccentric. During his campaign he made his intentions clear: “The [political] caste is trembling!” “Let it all blow up, let the economy blow up, and take this entire garbage political caste down with it.” Which is exactly what he’s doing now. He’s eliminating government ministries and services, cutting regulations, privatizing state-run companies, and purposely creating a recession to curb the out of control inflation.

This is also why people voted for him: change. They saw someone who could shake things up in a way that could turn out to be lifesaving—even if it meant short-term economic pain. But will it work? Not all Argentines think so. And not everyone is willing or able to wait for things to improve. In April, with food prices rising and poverty up 10 percent, tens of thousands of Argentines took to the streets to protest Milei’s aggressive austerity measures.

Milei is a strange and idiosyncratic creature. There are the obvious things: he says he doesn’t comb his hair (and he doesnt appear to). He has four cloned mastiffs that he refers to as his “four-legged children,” and which he’s named for his favorite free-market economists. He was raised Catholic but studies the Torah. He used to play in a Rolling Stones cover band. And he has been known since grade school in the ’80s as El Loco, on account of his animated outbursts, which would later bring him stardom as a TV, radio, and social media celebrity.

But what really makes him unusual is that he is the ultimate skunk at the garden party. In a world of liberals and conservatives, he is neither. He has ultra-liberal economic views but right-wing, populist rhetoric. He is anti-abortion but pro-legalization of sex work. He wants to deregulate the gun market and legalize organ trade. 

He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, which basically means that he believes the state, as he told me, is “a violent organization that lives from a coercive source which is taxes.” Essentially. . . he’s a head of state who really doesn’t believe in states. A few months ago Milei showed up at Davos, the Alpine mountain resort that hosts the annual World Economic Forum. This is a place where, historically, people who all think the same way go to drink champagne and tell each other how smart they are. Milei arrives, flying commercial, and blows all that up: “Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.” 

All of this is why we were eager to talk to Milei—and put some of these questions to him: How long will it take for things to look up in Argentina? Why does he believe the Western world is in danger? What’s the difference between social justice and socialism? Can the free market really solve all of our civic problems? What is the state actually important for? And how does he feel about being the skunk at the garden party? (Spoiler: he loves it.)

And despite having called journalists “extortionists,” “liars,” “imbeciles,” “freeloaders,” “donkeys,” and “ignorant”—for some reason, he agreed to sit down with us.

Note: The interview was conducted in Spanish with the help of

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of several books—including the 2006 autobiography Infidel—as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution She runs a foundation focused on human rights and, yes, she has a Substack. But Ayaan comes from a very different world from most of the people who inhabit our think tanks and ivory towers. Unlike those of us in the West who grew up with everything, Ayaan grew up in Somalia with. . . nothing. 

No liberty, no rule of law, no system of representative government, no pluralism, and no toleration for difference. 

Ayaan knows what it is like to live without those ideals, which is why she also has a particular instinct for when they are under attack. And that is exactly what she sees happening—all over the West.

Today, you’ll hear Ayaan read the epochal essay she published this morning in The Free Press. She explains how subversion—the act of undermining a country from within—works gradually and sometimes invisibly, but can ultimately explode and destroy a society. And she argues that what’s at stake in our inability to see the threat plainly is nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.



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Fifteen years ago, Vice was the envy of the media industry. While other outlets were shrinking, the edgy multimedia organization with a knack for virality was growing. At its peak, Vice had a reported value of $6 billion.

At one point, Disney offered to buy the company for $3.4 billion. The CEO said no. Something even bigger was on the horizon.

Except. . . it never came. No one else approached with another offer and the company started to collapse. Last year, Vice filed for bankruptcy.

The media narrative of what happened at Vice was that they simply made a series of business mistakes and the economic model of the business crumbled. But Michael Moynihan says that’s not the whole story. 

Michael—who Honestly listeners know as a frequent guest host here—is a longtime journalist who spent a decade at Vice. He was a correspondent for Vice’s flagship series on HBO. 

Today, he published a revealing insider story in The Free Press about how Vice really lost its way. Spoiler: apologizing for the gonzo journalism that fueled the business to begin with, and caving to an identity politics–obsessed staff of twentysomethings, isn’t exactly a recipe for success.

Vice didn’t just bleed cash. It also bled its backbone and its ethos. And the thing that replaced it? Well, no one wanted to consume it. 
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The first episode of Seinfeld aired in 1989. Thirty-five years later, the show remains at the apex of American culture. People speak in Seinfeld-isms, they flirt on dating apps over Seinfeld, they rewatch old episodes of Seinfeld when they’re feeling down. And, in the case of the Weiss family, Lou still watches it every night from 11 pm to 12 am on the local Pittsburgh station before he goes to sleep. People around the world even learn English watching Seinfeld!
It is not hyperbole to say that Seinfeld is one of the most influential shows of all time.
Seinfeld was supposedly a show about nothing, but that’s what made it so universal. Everyone can relate to trying to find your car in a parking garage. Everyone knows the feeling when their book is overdue at the library and they don’t want to pay the overdue fee. Everyone can relate to the frustration of waiting for a table at a restaurant. If you didn’t—or don’t—laugh during Seinfeld, something was wrong with you. 
All of which is why it was a bit strange and unexpected when a few months ago Jerry Seinfeld suddenly became “controversial.” In early October, Jerry—along with 700 other Hollywood stars—signed a letter condemning Hamas and calling for the return of the hostages. For that crime—the crime of saying terrorism is bad and innocent people should be released—crowds started protesting the events he was attending, the speeches he was giving, and heckling him in public.
A few weeks ago, when Jerry gave the commencement address at Duke University, some students walked out in protest. Then, his standup set was disrupted by protesters, to which Seinfeld quipped: “I love a little Jew-hate to spice up the show.” The crowd applauded.
Jerry Seinfeld made the most successful show about a Jew to ever exist. This was no small feat. In fact, one NBC executive, after watching the Seinfeld pilot for the first time in 1989, didn’t think it should even go to air. He said it was “too New York and too Jewish.”
And yet…it worked. And as Seinfeld spent years making Jewishness an iconic part of American pop culture, Jerry says he experienced not a drop of anti-Semitism.
But now, during a time that is supposed to be the most inclusive, the most sensitive, the most accepting, and the most tolerant time in human history, Jerry Seinfeld is targeted for being a Jew.
Jerry often says that the audience is everything. That’s the whole point of comedy. There is no joke if nobody laughs. But today on Honestly, we ask Jerry if he still trusts the audience in an age where the audience can start to feel like a mob?
You’ve probably heard or seen Jerry somewhere recently—from The New Yorker to GQ to… every podcast in the world. That’s because he has a new movie out called Unfrosted, which you should definitely go watch on Netflix. It’s hilarious, heartwarming, and you will love it.
But today’s conversation with Jerry is unlike the ones you’ve heard. He’s unfiltered. He’s emotional. And he’s speaking his mind.
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A few weeks ago, there was an awesome event in Brooklyn in partnership with UnHerd called Dissident Dialogues. It was exactly what it sounds like: debates and discussions on the most pressing questions facing our society today. Questions like: Have we reached peak woke? Can universities be saved? Can liberalism be saved? Is government censorship justified? Is this the end of mainstream media? and What is the future of feminism? So basically, just the light stuff.

But probably the most contentious debate of the weekend was: Is Israel’s war on Hamas a just war? 

This is not an easy debate. Emotions run hot, the stakes are high, people’s morality is called into question, and there are a lot of competing narratives. Which is all the more reason to debate the topic in public, something we always advocate for at The Free Press.

Arguing no, that Israel’s war on Hamas is not a just war, are Briahna Joy Gray and Jake Klein. Briahna was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and is host of the Bad Faith podcast. Arguing alongside Briahna is Jake Klein. Jake is a content creator for the Foundation for Economic Education, and he is a co-founder and editor at The Black Sheep.

Arguing yes, that Israel’s war on Hamas is a just war, are two of our very own Free Pressers, Eli Lake and Michael Moynihan. Eli is a columnist at The Free Press and a longtime journalist covering foreign affairs and national security. And Michael Moynihan, who you’ve heard guest-host Honestly, is a veteran journalist, having spent years at Vice, The Daily Beast, and Reason magazine. He is also a host of The Fifth Column podcast.

The debate is moderated by the one and only Russian British satirist, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, and Free Press contributor, Konstantin Kisin.

Facebook: Dissident Dialogues
Instagram: @dissident_dialogues
X: @diss_dialogues
YouTube: @dissidentdialogues-qm3gm?si=f-hldBmIK9CnGqRn
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Nellie Bowles wasn’t always the TGIF queen you know and love at The Free Press.

In fact, Nellie was, for a very long time, deeply embedded in the progressive left. 

Before Bari and Nellie met—and fell in love, blah blah blah—in 2019, Nellie was nothing short of a media darling. She had the right ideas, she wrote the right stories, and NYT readers ate it up. 

But Nellie is a reporter. And being a reporter—a great one—forced her to confront the gap between what an increasingly zealous left claimed were its aims. . . and the actual realities of their policies. 

People don’t usually change their minds. At least not on big-stakes political issues, and not when their jobs are at risk, or their social acceptance is on the line. And people certainly don’t change their minds publicly. 

Nellie did. And she chronicles that change in her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

The book is a collection of stories from her reporting during the years she started to question the narrative. These were stories people told her not to write. People said, Don’t go to Seattle’s autonomous zone; there’s nothing to see there. They said, Don’t report on the consequences of hormone therapy for kids; it’s not important. 

But as Nellie writes, “I became a reporter because I didn't trust authority figures. . . . As a reporter, I spent over a decade working to follow that curiosity. It was hard to suddenly turn that off. It was hard to constantly censor what I was seeing, to close one eye and try very hard not to notice anything inconvenient, especially when there was so much to see.”

That curiosity is what got Nellie kicked out of the club. But it gave her a place in a new club, the one that we at The Free Press think that the majority of Americans are actually in. 

On today’s episode: What does it mean to walk away from a movement that was once central to your identity? How does it feel to be accused of being “red-pilled” by the people you once called friends? How did the left become so radical and dogmatic? Why do people join mobs? And how did Nellie come back from the brink?
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