It’s Thursday, September 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Bishop Robert Barron on the pioneering priest who could become America’s next saint. Masih Alinejad on the women who were blinded by the Iranian regime, then found their voice. Joe Nucci meets his AI therapist. All that and much more.
But first: The brawl over the most famous bar in America.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Three friends walk into a “Covid-cautious, gender-inclusive, anti-carceral, anti-profit lesbian bar.” It’s no joke. It’s an actual bar, specifically Last Ditch in Greenfield, Massachusetts. It’s also the subject of a viral article in The Boston Globe about a smear campaign by patrons who claim that the bar betrayed its mission and morals.
What was the bar’s crime? Relaxing its mask policy so that the queer ladies who come to Last Ditch to, um, drink can do so sans face coverings for one night a week. This is one of those stories that truly must be read to be believed. It includes a three-hour community meeting, accusations hurled by someone named Moss, and the phrase “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS.” To understand what it all means, you will need Katie Herzog, who delves deeply into Last Ditch in her podcast Blocked and Reported.
“When Last Ditch announced this policy change online,” Katie writes for us today, “you would have thought from the comments that they had lubed up their stripper pole with the blood of particularly cute baby seals.” Lately, I’m hearing that woke is over, since some champions of way-out-there progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are now waving off that era like it was just an embarrassing teenage phase. “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” AOC told ABC’s This Week last month.
Not so long ago, even using the word crazy might have been seen as ableist and an insensitive microaggression against the mentally ill. But what happened at Last Ditch shows that Woke 1.0 never ended in some parts of America. It just got crazier.
—Suzy Weiss
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
-
Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced on Wednesday to 15 years in prison for his criminal sexual assault conviction last year. At the sentencing hearing, a former production assistant said that she “often felt like I was the one on trial.” Weinstein repeated his claim that he is innocent.
-
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian called Iranians “victims of terrorism” in a defiant address at the United Nations General Assembly. After seven months of war, Pezeshkian said that Iran was “ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations” but would never “bend the knee.”
-
A federal judge seemed skeptical of the White House press ban during a hearing on Wednesday, but didn’t immediately strike down the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. He said he would rule as soon as possible. In 2018, the same judge threw out the White House’s ban of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.
-
Only 26 percent of Americans said Trump was right to impose new tariffs on Canada last month, according to a Politico poll. Fifty-six percent of Americans and 83 percent of Canadians said the move was wrong. Canada responded to the tariffs with its own tariffs earlier this month.
-
The son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States was in critical condition on Wednesday after a car-ramming attack in the West Bank denounced by his father as terrorism. Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said that his son Neria, who was serving as a reservist, “needs a miracle” to survive. Neria’s oldest brother also was a reservist when he was killed in Gaza in November 2023.
-
“Packaged kratom” was found during the investigations of two University of Mississippi students who may have died as a result of drug overdoses. Kratom, an herbal drug with opioid-like effects, is banned in Oxford, Mississippi. Fraternities and sororities warned their members about cychlorphine, a synthetic opioid that isn’t detected in fentanyl test strips.
