The Free Press82%
The Chaos in Ceuta and Another European Migrant Crisis. Plus. . . 41%
By The Free Press39%
7/31/2026, 8:18:55 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Negativity Bias, and Anecdotal, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 21.6% saturation with 164 hits. Analysis detected 1,429 faulty-reasoning hits from 759 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39.4% and a BS Rank of 41% (16,165 of 27,323 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.20% of the article peer group.
It’s Friday, July 31.
This is The Front Page , your daily window into the world of The Free Press —and our take on the world at large.
Today: The meaning of the Salman Rushdie verdict.
Should you skip your annual physical?
How Markwayne Mullin drew the ire of President Donald Trump on July 4.
Is Ukraine turning the tables on Russia?
And much more.
But first: The chaos in Ceuta.
Sixty thousand.
That’s how many people local authorities estimate have crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta over the past 24 hours.
It is, by any measure, an extraordinary figure, coming close to the territory’s total permanent population of nearly 84,000.
Also extraordinary: the footage of the crossings.
Droves of mostly young men jumping out of trucks at the border, swimming around breakwaters, clambering over fences, sprinting down streets.
At least 18 people have died during the chaos, and the Spanish government has deployed the army to Ceuta.
The scenes recall the peak of Europe’s migrant crisis a decade ago—and underscore how little Europe’s elites have done to address the problem in the intervening years.
Rod Dreher recently returned to the U.S. from living in Europe, where he watched as political leaders repeatedly refused to tackle the issue, and Europeans only grew angrier.
In our pages today, he reacts to the dystopian scenes from Ceuta, and asks: What will it take to break the immigration taboo? — The Editors
All across the country, Americans are angry about data centers.
They’re too big, they say, too noisy, and too costly for the communities that have seen their electric and water bills rise.
But data centers are also inevitable, and absolutely essential in the coming age of AI.
Joe Nocera lays out a “peace plan” that will allow for the continued build-out of data centers while mollifying the concerns of local communities.
It includes transparency, improved construction technology—and plenty of money.
In early July, when Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham said that women shouldn’t have to play sports against biological males, America more or less shrugged.
When, a week later, reporters gave her the opportunity to walk back her remarks, she doubled down: “I said what I said.
I think it’s kind of common sense.”
This, says columnist Kat Rosenfield , is a sign of progress.
Not so long ago, there would have been howls of outrage and attempts to cancel Cunningham.
What has brought on this sea change?
Kat’s thesis: “Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass.”
Who can doubt it?
For years, Laura Loomer, the MAGA influencer, sided with Russia in its war against Ukraine, even contributing articles to Russia’s state-run network, RT.
But after visiting Ukraine, and meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials, she concluded she had been on the wrong side.
On Tuesday, from her hotel room in Ukraine, she spoke to Eli Lake about her change of heart, and tells him she now considers Zelensky “an essential ally.”
Notes Eli: “By the looks of things, so does the president.”
When Alex Berenson ’s 81-year-old mother got a tax bill for $55,048 she was baffled.
She had lived in her New York City townhouse for 30 years—and she knew she didn’t owe that kind of money to the city.
The answer, it turns out, was Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “pied-à-terre” tax, which is designed to dun out-of-towners who own fancy New York apartments but whose primary residence is elsewhere.
The incident leads Alex to muse on everything from inept city bureaucracy to Mamdani’s socialism, to the heartlessness of social media.
“Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax isn’t just about pied-à-terres,” he writes.
“It’s about stoking resentment toward an ever-expanding list of class enemies.”
Every six months, Tanya Lukyanova spends a few weeks in Moscow, where she was raised and where she still has friends and family.
Since 2022, when the war against Ukraine began, she never saw the effects of the war in Russia’s capital, as the government sought to keep it insulated.
But this visit was different.
Tanya reports that she saw long lines of people waiting for their ration of gas, heard people talking about seeing drones and hearing explosions, and discovered a bitterness about the war that she hadn’t experienced in earlier trips.
“Nobody can explain what we’re fighting for,” said one man after a few drinks.
“Why do people die every day?
To what end?”
Speakers
3speakers8.3%attributed speech696writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageKat Rosenfield
32 attributed words51% of attributed speech74% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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