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https://www.thefp.com/p/daniel-penny-the-killing-of-jordan-neely
The Killing of Jordan Neely: An Honestly Special
When homelessness, mental illness, and vigilantism collide on the subway.
ELI LAKE
New Yorkers attend a vigil for Jordan Neely, who was fatally choked on the subway by former Marine Daniel Penny. (Spencer Platt via Getty Images)
It has been six weeks since Jordan Neely, a homeless man suffering from severe mental illness, was choked to death on a subway car by a former Marine named Daniel Penny. Many on the car were terrified of Neely, who had been threatening commuters. Penny, responding to a scene that has become all too familiar in New York’s subway system, restrained him in a chokehold that ultimately ended his life.

Those are the basic facts of a story that’s still fueling a cultural war across the country. To progressives, Neely, who was black, is another victim of systemic racism. His killing was a lynching. His killer, who is white, is a murderer. To others, Neely’s fate is a parable. When the police won’t stop aggressors, vigilantes will fill the void. When psychotics stalk the subways, they argue, what do you expect?

In the latest episode of Honestly, I moderate a conversation that explores a third narrative to explain the death of Jordan Neely. Here was a man suffering from severe mental illness, and who had been flagged by the city’s public health system. He was on the list of 50 New Yorkers of most concern to the police. At the time of his death, there was a warrant out for his arrest.

My guests today have all thought deeply about the failures of our mental health system and how it connects to Jordan Neely’s fate.

Jonathan Rosen is the author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. This memoir charts Rosen’s friendship with a brilliant young man who slowly succumbs to the ravages of schizophrenia and eventually murders his pregnant fiancée. In the course of the book, Rosen also explains how national, state, and local mental health policy has allowed many of our most disturbed citizens to slip through the cracks.

Novelist and journalist Kat Rosenfield recently wrote in Unherd about the mixed signals we receive in modern society about when to call out breaches of social decorum and when to look the other way. What is the right response to a dangerous man on a subway who appears to have made a break with reality?

Rafael Mangual, a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, argues that many of the policies progressives favor as an alternative to incarcerating the mentally ill failed Jordan Neely.

There are no easy answers. A few things, however, are clear. Neely was known both to the police and to New York’s public health system. He was considered a danger to himself and others. And yet none of the safeguards and early warnings worked. In today’s discussion, which you can listen to below, we attempt to find out why.
What Jordan Neely’s Death Tells Us About Mental Illness and Vigilantism
The Free Press

FP Behind the Scenes: The Parents Saying No to Smartphones
Join us this Wednesday for a subscriber-only event. Plus: watch the recording from last week’s event about the sorry state of high school debate.
THE FREE PRESS JUN 6 2023
∙By age 12, seven out of ten American kids own a smartphone. They also spend about eight hours online a day. But after a pandemic that forced America’s youth to spend all day long on their screens, a small but growing minority of parents are finally refusing to put the internet in their children’s pockets. Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold spoke with these moms and dads for her recent piece “The Parents Saying No to Smartphones,” which struck a chord with many of you.
MORE https://www.thefp.com/p/fp-behind-the-scenes-parents-say-no-smartphones?

https://www.thefp.com/p/outlive-living-forever-longevity-peter-attia?
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977, lifting weights at Muscle Beach in Venice, California. (Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images)
Dr. Peter Attia on How to Live Longer and Feel Younger
A conversation with the longevity expert about his new book 'Outlive'—and what makes life worth living in the first place.
By Bari Weiss
June 3, 2023
It’s almost hard to believe, but in the 1950s doctors were frequently portrayed in TV commercials for cigarettes. Back then, smoking wasn’t just seen as cool and glamorous—it was positively health-enhancing

Fast-forward to today, and Americans have been sold on a dizzying number of health trends: from grapefruit diets and Weight Watchers to Pelotons and Pilates. The health industry churns through information and fads faster than anyone can possibly keep up. As soon as you’re gearing up to start a juice cleanse or go on a Costco rampage for keto-friendly ingredients, a new diet, a new drug, or a new piece of equipment shows up promising to be the real key to your health.

One person who consistently cuts through all that noise is Dr. Peter Attia. His new book, Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, is a blueprint—based on the best available science and data—for what really matters to live a healthy life, and a longer one.

Attia is a Stanford- and Johns Hopkins-educated, NIH-trained physician who is at the forefront of some of the most important conversations around health and longevity in medicine today. His work is at the center of a new industry that has been booming in Silicon Valley for the past several years. Tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Larry Page, and Brian Armstrong have poured billions into start-ups that research human life extension.

But Attia doesn’t think longevity should be the purview of the wealthy. He says there are so many everyday changes—from how we eat, move, and sleep, to our emotional health—that can add years to all of our lives.

I spoke to Attia about the major factors preventing us from living longer, healthier lives, emotional health, and about the question that underlies this whole subject: what does the good life look like?

Listen to the whole conversation here, or read an excerpt from our chat below. — BW
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/1vbXfMzfe2XrpsnwpPMyeO

https://www.thefp.com/p/hr-mcmaster-the-soldiers-i-remember

H. R. McMaster: The Soldiers I Remember
If we are to honor all those who’ve died in our names, we must remember each individual soul. On this Memorial Day, I pay tribute to Private First Class Joseph Knott.
H.R. MCMASTER
MAY 29
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
In World War II, America lost 291,557 military lives in combat. But, as Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rick Atkinson wrote, “each death is as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. The most critical lesson for every American is to understand, viscerally, that this vast host died one by one by one; to understand in your bones that they died for you.”

Perhaps back then, it was easier for more Americans to feel that reality in their bones. These days, with a relatively small all-volunteer force, the American people are more distant from those who fight in their name.

Combat veterans suppress dreadful memories of battles, but never forget their comrades who fell alongside them one by one. Their countenances, often smiling or laughing, flash before our mind’s eye. I see them unexpectedly. Sometimes they come in waves.

This Memorial Day, in between the backyard barbecues and parades, Americans might hear statistics of our fallen soldiers, like the approximately 650,000 who died in battle since the beginning of the War of Independence 240 years ago. They might know that 7,054 American military personnel died in the most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But most are unfamiliar with the stories of individual soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice. That is a shame.

To help our fellow Americans appreciate such a sacrifice, we who served alongside those heroes should tell the stories of our fallen comrades as we lost them: one by one.

Today, I would like to share my memory of Private First Class Joseph Knott, the first trooper killed in action after the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment returned to Iraq for its second combat tour of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Even now, I still see Joseph, smiling, in my mind’s eye. Just 21, from Yuma, Arizona, he was the very model of a cavalry scout. In fact, his photo, in silhouette standing guard in the gunner’s station of his Humvee as the sun set behind him, was selected for the cover of our regimental magazine only a week before his death.

The date was April 17, 2005. As always, I briefed our security detachment—really a small scout platoon—before we departed our base in Iraq. Six of the battalion’s soldiers had been wounded the day before. I made sure I met and shook the hands of every soldier in the battalion task force that had been attached to our regiment.

Our mission that day was to assess the situation in the so-called “triangle of death” area south of Baghdad so we could refine our plans to defeat the enemy. The area—filled with infiltration routes, or “ratlines,” from Syria along the Euphrates river valley—was well-suited to al-Qaeda terrorists. Narrow roads paralleling the canals that crisscrossed the area made our forces easy to spot and vulnerable to attack. It was the perfect place to manufacture bombs and suicide vests for attacks in Baghdad. And al-Qaeda needed to behead only a few people in the small towns before all the locals understood that they were to see nothing and hear nothing about the explosive device factories the group had established there.

Halfway through the patrol, I switched places with our Command Sergeant Major, John Caldwell, a charismatic and courageous larger-than-life man whose bad back would have more than justified him forgoing another combat tour. But “Big John’s” dedication to his soldiers overwhelmed the constant pain he endured to lead our troopers back to Iraq.

Our eight-vehicle convoy of six armored Humvees and two Bradley fighting vehicles headed out on the Mullah Fayad Highway—a narrow, two-lane road lined by tall reeds alongside a canal. Caldwell’s vehicle, containing three other soldiers including Joseph, was positioned in the center of our column.

Suddenly I sensed that tingling feeling at the back of my neck. The evil presence of al-Qaeda was palpable. From the front right seat, I grabbed the hand mike and pressed the transmit button, instructing our troopers to “be vigilant and stay low.”

A moment later, fifty yards in front of me, a large explosion washed over Caldwell’s Humvee. A cloud of black smoke and debris obscured the road.

“Punch through it!” I told the driver. We drove to the far side as I reported the attack, requesting medical evacuation at a secured landing zone just ahead of us. Then I jumped out and met our platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Matt Hodges, at Caldwell’s Humvee. Sergeant First Class Donald Sparks and our interpreter, Mr. Kamel Abbo, were injured, and Caldwell was seriously wounded. We treated him and got him to the landing zone just as the medevac helicopter landed. But we were unable to save his gunner, Private Joseph Knott. I held Joseph’s hand and said a prayer. Hodges and I folded his arms across his chest and covered his body.

Two days later I eulogized Joseph, surrounded by his fellow cavalry troopers at our base in Baghdad. I wish that more Americans could witness combat memorials to the fallen so they could understand how fortunate we are to have selfless young men and women willing to fight and sacrifice in our name. Eighteen years later, I welcome Free Press readers back to that ceremony, with the speech I gave about Joseph.

We are here to honor and say goodbye to one of our Brave Rifles brothers, a great cavalry trooper and a fine man, Private First Class Joseph Knott. Private First Class Knott, like all of you, volunteered to serve his nation in time of war. On 17 April during operations in the South Baghdad area, he made the ultimate sacrifice to bring peace to this difficult region, defeat the forces of terrorism and hatred, and permit children, both in Iraq and in our own nation, to live free of fear. Our thoughts and prayers are with him and with his family—his father Jerry, his mother Pamela, his sisters Susan and Sheela, and his brother Jerry.

I then shared the reminiscences of Joseph from soldiers in our platoon. Grief shared is grief divided.

Corporal Dillard recalled how “he strived for excellence in everything he did and always kept the morale of his fellow troopers high.”

Staff Sergeant Hodges, who I know has the highest standards, described Joseph as an “exemplary soldier. . . motivated and disciplined.”

Specialist Bruce recalled that “everything he did, he put all of his energy into it and made sure it was done right.”

Sergeant Braxton recalled that “he was the type of person who would do everything he could to help the next person.”

PFC Ryan said that PFC Knott “was always the one to make us laugh. He was always singing or looked like he was posing for a picture and smiling.”

Sergeant Harris said “he always had a smile on his face and served our country proudly.”

Military units conduct memorial services to renew their commitment to each other and the mission as well as mourn the loss of their comrades. I went on to highlight our responsibility to Joseph and his memory:

We should also draw strength from Joseph Knott’s example. I, for one, will do my best to follow his example—to put fellow troopers before myself, to do my very best to win this fight against terrorists and the enemies of freedom, to maintain my sense of humor and enjoy the company of my fellow troopers. If I could sing, I would sing louder. Today we honor PFC Joseph Knott with words as we pray for him and his family. I ask that tomorrow we all do our best to honor PFC Knott with our deeds as we continue to serve our nation in this great Regiment.

Our troopers did honor PFC Knott and others who fell alongside him in South Baghdad and in western Ninewa Province as they defeated modern-day barbarians while demonstrating compassion for the Iraqi people. As the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment departed Iraq a year after Joseph’s death, the mayor of the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, Major General Najim Abed Abdullah al-Jibouri, wrote the following to the families of our fallen troopers:

To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead, but alive, and their souls hovering around us every second of every minute. They will never be forgotten. . . . We see them in the smile of every child, and in every flower growing in this land. Let America, their families, and the world be proud of their sacrifice for humanity and life.

Combat memorial ceremonies help military units, which take on the qualities of a family, communalize grief and resolve to continue the mission. At the end of the ceremony, soldiers kneel one by one, or with their squad, in front of the fallen soldier’s boots and helmet, which sit on top of an inverted rifle. The soldier’s ID tags dangle from the trigger housing. At the end of the ceremony, each soldier grasps the ID tags for a moment to pay a personal, silent tribute to their brother or sister.

I wonder if, on this Memorial Day, all of us might imagine reaching out, holding those ID tags for a moment, and pledging to live well, strengthen our Republic, and treasure the freedoms that Private First Class Joseph Knott and all of our fallen warriors fought to preserve.


H. R. McMaster was the 71st Commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and served as an officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years.

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Things Worth Remembering: Lord Byron’s Zest for Life
The great Romantic poet lived fast, died young, and scorched it all onto the page.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
MAY 21
(Getty Images)
Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read this week’s work, from Lord Byron’s “Don Juan,” click below.

LISTEN NOW · 1:41
If Stephen Spender, my subject from May 7, had any group of poets in mind when he wrote about the truly great, then it was most likely the poets we now refer to as the Romantics.

How do we know that Spender had poets like Keats, Shelley, and Byron in his mind? Most of all because of those final lines that summon the image of Icarus. Those who travel toward the sun, burn up, yet leave the air “signed with their honor.”

Such was not the habit of all poets throughout history. It wasn’t even the case with all the Romantics (certainly not if you include Wordsworth), but it was with most of them. If anyone burned bright, aimed high, and burned up, then it was the great English poets of the early nineteenth century.

Among them was perhaps the only poet who could equal the Earl of Rochester in terms of reputation.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was an infinitely greater poet—indeed one of the greatest pyrotechnicians in the history of poetry. Still, every bad reputation that a poet can acquire he acquired in remarkably short order. After a pretty dissolute childhood, he grew into an even more dissolute man, becoming famous overnight with the appearance, in 1812, of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

After that, he set about developing his celebrity in a way that now seems rather modern, though it would scandalize our current era perhaps even more than it did his own. I once lived at the same address as Byron in London, and can’t deny that I enjoyed the loucheness that came even from such posthumous proximity.

For Byron had that desire—described in the film Dead Poets Society—to suck out all the marrow of life. He did everything: he pursued sex, whored, fought, gambled, swam, sought to break every barrier and capture life in full, and then scorch it onto the page...

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https://www.thefp.com/p/the-fbi-trump-durham-report
The FBI Didn’t Persecute Hillary. It Protected Her.
That’s the big reveal in the 306-page Durham report.
ELI LAKE
MAY 19
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For the last seven years, conventional wisdom has told us a singular story about the FBI and Hillary Clinton. That story had a clear headline: the FBI was out to get her.

Let’s go back to 2016, when the FBI was investigating both major presidential candidates in the run-up to the election.

At the time, the bureau was looking into Donald Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia as well as Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

In July of 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced that no charges would be brought against the Democratic nominee. Then, eleven days before the election, he said that in light of new information having surfaced, the Clinton investigation had been reopened. Finally, on November 6, two days before Election Day, Comey announced that the matter was closed—again.

To this day, Democrats remain convinced that Comey’s second to last announcement—which, we can all agree, was ham-handed—cast a pall over the campaign, tipping the scales in favor of the Republican nominee.

It’s a neat story. But it’s only half of it.

That’s the big reveal in Special Counsel John Durham’s 306-page Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns, which came out late last week.

If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect Clinton’s campaign while launching a full investigation into Trump’s campaign on the thinnest of pretexts. In other words, the FBI was not really the Clinton campaign’s persecutor, as so many insisted over the past few years, as much as its protector.

“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” the Durham report observes, referring to the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign, “reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.”

Consider the bureau’s approach to Clinton.

The Durham report notes that, in early 2016, a confidential FBI source arranged for a sizable donation to Clinton’s campaign from a foreign country. Instead of taking steps to learn what might be in the works, the bureau eventually instructed the source to stay away from the Clinton campaign. Then, it offered Clinton’s lawyers what is known as a defensive briefing, so Clinton was aware of the foreign country’s efforts to help her.

The double standard is unmistakable: Trump was never offered a defensive briefing when the FBI began probing his campaign, whereas the bureau gave Clinton not one but two such briefings between 2014 and 2016.

On a separate occasion, the report points out, FBI agents strongly suspected another foreign government of planning to contribute to Clinton’s campaign—hoping to curry favor with the person they expected would be the next American president. But when the FBI field office requested sign-off on a surveillance warrant application for a non-U.S. citizen suspected of having been in contact with Clinton, headquarters demurred. “They were pretty ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President,” an FBI official told Durham.

Possibly the most egregious example of special treatment was the FBI’s probe of the Clinton Foundation, a charitable organization that raised money from foreign governments—even when Hillary Clinton was a senator and, later, secretary of state. By the beginning of 2016, three FBI field offices were investigating the Clinton Foundation.

Eventually, headquarters got involved. At a meeting chaired by Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, at the end of February of that year, he initially urged the three field offices to close the investigations. Only later, according to the Durham report, did he back down—partially. The G-men were instructed that any “overt investigative steps” would require sign-off from McCabe. Durham quotes one FBI agent expressing frustration on the straitjacket placed on his investigation.

Then, in May of 2016, a Comey aide called the New York field office to ask that the investigation cease and desist, citing an “undisclosed counterintelligence concern,” according to the report. Eventually, the three investigations were consolidated in New York, but U.S. attorneys declined to issue any subpoenas—effectively ending the probe before the 2016 election.

Then there was the bureau’s approach to Trump.

This point is best illustrated in the launch of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign. The probe was opened in response to a memo from the government of Australia to the U.S. embassy in London. It was based on two casual meetings that involved a Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos. The first meeting was with Australian diplomats and the second was with the country’s former foreign minister, Alexander Downer.

That memo was deliberately vague. It said that Papadopoulos “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama).” This is hardly a smoking gun. And yet, this memo alone was the sole justification the FBI used to open a full investigation of a major presidential candidate during an election year.

Consider that the bureau did not even bother to interview the Australian diplomats before launching the probe. Nor did the bureau check with other intelligence agencies, the State Department, or its own analysts to find out if there was any other information to suggest Trump or his campaign had been in contact with senior Russian officials. As it turns out, not a single U.S. government agency or bureau had any evidence corroborating the theory that Trump and his campaign were colluding with Russia, according to the Durham report.

Stranger still, the FBI opened a “full investigation” instead of a “preliminary” one or an even less intrusive “assessment.” These may sound like insignificant, technical distinctions. They’re not. A full investigation gives the bureau more resources and options to use intrusive investigative techniques, such as deploying informants to record conversations with suspects. Again, this stands in contrast with the restrictions that FBI leaders placed on investigations into Clinton and her campaign.

Finally, the bureau more than once relied on information generated by Clinton’s own campaign. Case in point: its spy warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. To obtain the warrant, the Justice Department’s inspector general earlier disclosed, the bureau relied on the infamous Clinton campaign-financed Steele dossier—named after former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele—alleging Trump’s campaign was engaged in a “well developed conspiracy” with Russia to cheat in the 2016 election.

After BuzzFeed, in January 2017, first published the Steele dossier, many journalists rushed to portray it as the work of a world-class spy. It turned out to be junk. The alleged intelligence was collected not by Steele but by a Russian national, Igor Danchenko.

At first, the bureau did not even try to corroborate the dossier. It passed on the dossier’s claims to a secret federal court overseeing government requests for surveillance warrants—without bothering to check their veracity. In late January 2017, shortly after BuzzFeed published the dossier, the bureau finally interviewed Danchenko, who walked away from its most explosive claims over the course of several months.

Nonetheless, the bureau decided to pay Mr. Danchenko as a confidential source, even though Durham discovered that Danchenko was himself the target of an unresolved 2010 FBI investigation for being a Russian agent. The FBI dropped that investigation after it wrongly concluded that Danchenko had moved from the U.S. to Russia. He hadn’t. In any event, when FBI agents subsequently interviewed Danchenko in connection with the Steele dossier, they did not bother to resolve the earlier investigation into whether Danchenko was a Russian spy.

To say the least, this was sloppy tradecraft. The Durham report notes that “it appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele—which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports—was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation.” That is an extraordinary indictment. Two of our country’s leading opponents of so-called disinformation—the FBI and the Democratic Party—helped inject what may have been Russian disinformation into the American political discourse.

All of this is a black eye for the FBI. The bureau is supposed to be above politics. Its leaders are supposed to show fidelity to the law and act without partisan favor. Comey, McCabe, and their deputies were guilty of a confirmation bias so severe it led them to embrace partisan falsehoods to get their man, and the republic is still paying the price for their failures. To this day, millions of loyal MSNBC viewers and most Democrats in Congress still act like it’s 2017, and Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent.

It was a hoax six years ago. It’s a farce today.


Eli Lake is a columnist at the New York Sun. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake.

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-therapists-became-social-justice-warriors?
How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors
‘They are training people who will not be able to see half the population as human beings who need compassionate treatment.’
By Lisa Selin Davis
May 17, 2023
If you read The Free Press, you know that one subject we cover with particular doggedness is the way critical institutions of American life have been hijacked or corrupted by ideological orthodoxy.

We have documented the takeover of American medicine and the law. We have exposed how many of our schools are indoctrinating children rather than educating them. And we have reported on legacy news organizations that put politics ahead of the public they purport to serve.

Today, Lisa Selin Davis tackles the important subject of therapy. She documents how American psychologists—once trained to listen without judgment—are using sessions to proselytize their politics. As one therapist in training tells Davis: “My concern is that we’re not helping people heal. We’re just helping people live in their victim mentality.”

We think it’s in the public interest for stories like this never to appear behind a paywall. But stories like this also take real investment and time to report. So if you think it’s valuable—and want to help us do more—please become a subscriber today. —BW


Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon.

But the culture in which she was steeped began to take a toll on her mental health. As a white person, she felt responsible for America’s racist legacy of slavery, and worried about her relationship with her Asian American girlfriend. “I felt like I was hurting her, harming her, just by being white,” Cooney told me.

Though she knew she was a lesbian, she began to identify as nonbinary, a result of her understanding that being a “cis woman” was “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.”

One day in June 2020, she found herself suddenly unleashing a tirade against the next-door neighbor of a friend, a white man who said he supported BLM but had cops in his family whom he supported, too. “I had this moment afterwards where I was like, ‘This is not how I want to behave. I don’t want to be a person who just screams at people because they’re white.’ ”

Anxious and depressed, she had trouble concentrating on work. “I started just going a little crazy,” she said. She decided she needed therapy to work on both her “internalized white supremacy,” her “white guilt,” and to “become a better person.’ ”

In January 2021, Cooney sought help from a black therapist in Portland she found through a therapy database, who agreed to work with her around issues of race and gender.

Initially, they practiced mindfulness and self-compassion techniques, from forgiving oneself out loud to the “butterfly hug,” crossing arms and tapping the chest. The therapist even cried with her when she cried about sexual assault or feeling unsupported in relationships. Cooney felt supported and eventually, more in control, more accepting of herself as female.

Then something unexpected happened. The stronger and more mentally healthy she felt, the less Cooney viewed the world through the lens that had informed her activism—a binary perspective that split all people into categories: white and black, oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim.

“I care about equality, I care about racism, I care about homophobia, I care about trans people being safe. I just don’t want to walk around in the world where everyone’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are dictated by their identities,” she said.

Cooney wanted to share her newfound realizations, but feared being canceled and ostracized—by her friends, fellow activists, perhaps even her girlfriend. The burden weighed on her, and therapy seemed the place to address it.

When she first tried to do so, in June, 2022, Cooney’s therapist reacted badly. She told Cooney that critiquing cancel culture was giving in to “white supremacy culture,” and said Cooney was making her feel “unsafe” as a black woman. By the end of the session, the therapist had given her an ultimatum: they could continue to work together and keep cancel culture discussions off the table, or “the relationship was over,” Cooney said.

Cooney continued with the therapist for six more months, but her therapist seemed to emphasize Cooney’s victimhood, reiterating that other people were responsible for her oppression as a gay woman. “She said, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’ ”

Cooney began pushing back, expressing views the therapist had declared taboo such as not wanting to categorize people based on their identities, or asserting that too many people were being shamed and punished for minor supposed transgressions. Finally, her therapist told Cooney their relationship was finished.

Ultimately, the thing she had feared the most—being canceled for her views—had happened, by the person with whom she was supposed to be able to share her deepest secrets. “I was just totally in shock, just kind of dead inside,” Cooney told me.

Cooney is not alone in finding therapy overtaken by the same kind of social justice ideology prevalent in schools, medicine, and the law. I spoke with more than two dozen therapists and clients who painted a disturbing picture of what happens in the treatment room when therapists make the tenets of this ideology central to their work, instead of offering empowering approaches that help patients make better choices and take control of their lives. Some patients, like Cooney, have also found themselves “fired” for expressing unacceptable thoughts.

I spoke to new therapists, some still in training, who describe a profession that teaches the ascribing of oppressor or victim categories to patients, based on their innate characteristics, instead of seeing them as individuals. Several sources said their applications to graduate schools required them to make a written commitment to anti-racism. Some said they’d been penalized for asking the “wrong” questions in class, detailing how this ideological encroachment damages their own mental health.

I reviewed mission statements and other documents released by professional organizations in recent years, revealing how this revolution has transformed the central tenets of the therapeutic process.

And I talked to psychologists and others fighting back. They described their alarm at how the very people who are supposed to help ease trauma become the source of it, as therapy sessions transform into ideological struggle sessions. British psychotherapist Val Thomas told me “the reason this happened is that activists captured the institutions and professional bodies of counseling and psychotherapy.”

At a time when as many as 90 percent of adults believe there’s a mental health crisis in this country, parts of the mental health profession are in crisis too.

An Overcorrection

There is no doubt that, historically, the fields of psychology and psychiatry—founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries by men like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and others—made many mistakes and did people serious harm. Bookshelves are filled with volumes on the mistreatment of women. In the early 20th century the field embraced eugenics, leading, especially in America, to appalling treatment of black people. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973.

In recent decades, the profession has sought to address its bad treatment and historic wrongs. This led to the development, in the ’80s, of “cultural competency”—an awareness of one’s own biases and a commitment not to impose them onto clients. Subsequently, as psychiatrist Sally Satel describes in a recent article, the idea that therapists required specific training to treat minorities expanded. By the early ’90s, the American Psychological Association (APA) had updated its ethics code, requiring therapists to behave in “culturally sensitive” ways and appreciate “the worldview and perspectives of those racially and ethnically different from themselves.”

“The whole point of understanding cultural differences was that you didn’t walk in and assume,” says Christine Sefein, until recently a professor of clinical psychology at Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus. But over the past decade—spurred by the rise of social media, Trump’s election in 2016, and George Floyd’s murder in 2020—Sefein, like many in her profession, began to see the mission change to something more insidious: imposing the bias and framework of Critical Social Justice (CSJ)—the term some psychologists use to refer to social justice ideology.
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When Motherhood Requires Lifting a Whole World Off Its Axis
I spent years desperately trying to solve the mystery of my son’s illness. A chance encounter with another mother changed my life—and is now poised to change his.
ALANA NEWHOUSE
MAY 13
GUEST POST
A boy sits inside his mother's plastic raincoat as they wait to cross at a traffic light during a rainstorm in Beijing, China. (Kevin Frayer via Getty Images)
Maybe you are lucky and you have a friend like Alana Newhouse. If you’re even luckier, you have a mother like her.

Alana has spent the past seven years trying to solve the mystery of her son’s illness. As she writes below: “If parenting a child with special needs is like pushing an enormous boulder up a treacherous mountain, parenting a child with special needs and no diagnosis is like pushing an enormous boulder up a treacherous mountain wearing a blindfold. And the boulder is covered in Vaseline.”

What I have watched Alana do for her child is awesome in the truest sense of that word. Perhaps you have borne witness to a mother like her. If so, you have seen unconditional and unrelenting love. In Alana’s case, as you’ll read below, that labor of love is now bearing fruit.

This year marks my first Mother’s Day as one. And each day I’m more impressed, and more grateful, for all the mothers—Hi, Mom! Hi, Nellie!—in my life.

An early Happy Mother’s Day to all of you.

—BW

For years before becoming a mother, I thought I knew how to help a child through life. I had so many ideas—about learning and emotional development and religion and nutrition and relationships and when to start wondering about a career and where to live and how to pick a mate and more. I had spent years trying to understand the world and how it worked, and I was excited to be able to use this knowledge to help a little human navigate it better than I had.

What I did not know was that the circumstances of my son’s life, in ways both small and very specific to him as well as enormous and relevant for hundreds of millions of people, were radically changing. The America we are in is an America in a period of massive, comprehensive change, with whole swaths of it decaying and falling apart and new things trying to be born and built. (They often don’t tell you this in science class, but molting is an inherently dangerous process.)

All of which meant that the storehouse of knowledge I had amassed by the time my son was born—the thoughts I had about where he would go to school and how he would learn about life, how children make and keep friends, how to maintain good health. . . really my ideas and assumptions about almost every aspect about his future—was all, at best, inadequate. At worst, it was useless.


On a muggy night in September 2017, I found myself at the open house of my then–three-year-old son’s new preschool. I took a seat in the auditorium next to the mother of a girl in Elijah’s class, whom I had first met because our kids shared an occupational therapist. She told me that her daughter had a rare genetic disorder called Angelman syndrome, which I remembered distinctly because it was the very thing I had diagnosed Elijah with at 18 months, based on an internet search of the digestive and developmental symptoms he was experiencing.

I mentioned my concerns about a genetic condition to our then-pediatrician, who picked up Elijah and shook him. “No, his muscle tone is good,” he said, ticking off a hallmark symptom. To assuage my fears, he did a basic genetic test, which came back negative. I pressed on, and started asking people about Angelman syndrome specifically. A second doctor noted that Angelman syndrome is marked by a universal lack of speech, but Elijah was babbling and even saying words. (When I peered over that doctor’s shoulder, I saw a Google search for “Angelman syndrome” on the exam room computer.) I went to a third pediatrician and asked about more extensive genetic testing: “Oh no, Alana,” she said. “I have Angelman patients. Elijah is phenotypically very different.”

It was a relief, mostly. No one wants their loved one to have a rare disease or disorder. But there is a unique terror in knowing something is wrong with your child, and being unable to figure out what it is—for years. I’m sure you’ve heard the adage about infants, that all they have to be able to do is eat, sleep, and poop. Elijah wasn’t able to do any of these properly, and the problems only got worse as he got older.

When school orientation ended that night, I walked my new acquaintance to the subway. On the way, she relayed her daughter’s story, which felt so cut-and-dried compared to Elijah’s. I told her about how he torqued his body on my chest after birth, the massive reflux that started day one, the inability to sleep more than 45 minutes at a time (for almost three years), the terrible constipation. But he was also a profoundly related child—knowing, focused, funny. He was delayed physically, but not profoundly—he was sitting at nine or ten months, walking and even jogging by a year and a half. When, at that age, I took him to our first neurologist, the doctor said: “Well, the good news is, it’s not autism, and it’s not genetic. Hopefully, he’ll grow out of it.” The best guess anyone could give was a small prenatal stroke, or some kind of “birth trauma.”

My subway walking partner then asked if I ever considered a developmental pediatrician, a specialist with training in the physical, emotional, behavioral, and social development of children. I had. In fact, I made an appointment with one of the exclusive, hard-to-schedule ones, and as the months wore on, my anxiety ballooned. I was desperate for an answer. But not only did this developmental pediatrician have none; she acted as though it were pathetic of me to have ever fantasized that anyone would. I asked about more complex genetic testing, and whether it might provide us with some hope. “If you do find something, which is unlikely, it probably won’t help him,” she said, “but it will help science.”

My new friend sighed. “That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said, as we neared the subway station. “And it’s not true. There is so much hope.”

Suddenly, my face got hot. I was so embarrassed. How could I have relayed that statement to someone who, unlike me, was the parent of a child with a genetic problem that was very obviously unfixable? I felt awful.

As I walked home, I thought about that movie Sliding Doors. Do you remember it? Gwyneth Paltrow plays an ad executive who is fired from her job and rushes out to catch a train—at which point the movie shows two different scenarios. In one, she catches an early train and comes home to find her boyfriend cheating with another woman. She dumps him, finds hope and a new man—and eventually happiness. In the second scenario, she misses the train and arrives only after the other woman has already left; over time, she just lives with suspicion and doubt—stuck in misery, and unable to make her life any better.

In my mind that night, I was the Gwyneth who got on the first train, lucky to have escaped a future of stagnation and misery, whereas this other mother tragically ended up on the second one.

What I didn’t realize was that the exact opposite was true. My companion was on a train headed somewhere; she was the one who possessed a crucial piece of knowledge on which to build a better life.

I, on the other hand, was stuck in the dark, and would be for four and a half more years. Four and a half years of not knowing how to help our son. Four and a half years of EEGs, MRIs, blood tests, tens of thousands of dollars in uncovered doctors’ appointments, medications, and supplements, national and international trips for therapy of all kinds, of waking up every two hours each night while maintaining two full-time careers. If parenting a child with special needs is like pushing an enormous boulder up a treacherous mountain, parenting a child with special needs and no diagnosis is like pushing an enormous boulder up a treacherous mountain wearing a blindfold. And the boulder is covered in Vaseline.


Wild with frustration and pain, I became obsessed with the systems that seemed incapable of spitting out a definitive answer about my son’s condition—the endless conga line of impressively credentialed, often fantastically insensitive doctors; the black abyss of insurance companies into which we throw enormous sums of money only to receive more bills in return, along with confusion (on their part, and often, soon, also on yours) about whether the procedure is really necessary in the first place; our schools, which torture the best teachers and elevate the worst ones, like some sort of distillery from hell. There was something about motherhood that enabled me to see the fullness of our society’s rot more clearly.

In the late fall of 2021, when Elijah was seven years old and still struggling, we decided to redo all of his testing from the beginning—regardless of what any doctor said, and regardless of what insurance would cover. New blood tests, new EEGs, new MRIs, new comprehensive genetic testing. As my husband and I sat in the waiting room during the MRI, recovering from having wrestled our son down long enough for the anesthesiologist to knock him out, I could barely speak. “The good news is, this MRI is very likely going to show nothing, just like all of the other ones,” my husband said.

I became enraged. “What’s the point of all of this, then? Of all this technology, all of these systems? Why shouldn’t we just check out of modernity, out of whatever idea of America we have?” My question was rhetorical, but I didn’t get the argument back that I wanted.

“Not a bad idea,” he said.


You might be able to predict what happened next, though I’d ask you to imagine how surreal the moment was for me. The MRI was normal but the genetic test came back positive for a mutation on chromosome 15: Angelman syndrome. My son may be different from many others with the disorder, but, like everyone else with AS, his body does not produce enough of a protein known as UBE3A. If my husband hadn’t witnessed all of the doctors’ appointments, phone calls, and emails over the course of eight years, I would have had a mental breakdown.

What you couldn’t guess, though, is what happened in the Zoom meeting with the geneticist who told us the news. After going through the results, my husband asked whether there were any advancements in treatments. “Yes,” she said. “You should look up an organization called FAST; they’re behind some very exciting work being done in this space. In fact, I’d almost say that, if you’re going to get any diagnosis in 2022, this is the best one to get.”

As she talked, I went on the FAST website, and nearly burst into tears. The chief science officer was none other than my subway walk companion from all those years before: Allyson Berent-Weisse. In the time since that conversation, while I was palming around aimlessly in the dark, she was using that kernel of knowledge, and her love for her daughter, to turbocharge a cure—work that is now poised to change the life of so many, including my son.

In the universe of drug development, there is something known as the Valley of Death—the chasm between when a treatment is discovered, which often happens in a university lab, and getting it into the bodies of humans, which is primarily the purview of pharmaceutical companies. Innumerable treatments, including promising ones, don’t make it over that canyon, often because they don’t have advocates who know both worlds and who can shepherd them from one to the other safely and effectively.

In a dazzling turn of fate, Allyson’s day job, from long before her daughter was born, was as a veterinarian and interventional radiologist who designed medical devices for animals that could then be used in children. She is what’s known as a translational scientist—or, as I’ve come to think of her, a canyon-jumper—someone who has spent decades learning how to push treatments through the development pipeline, from concept to application for patients.

And she was right about everything the night we first met, including the reasons for hope. There have always been ways to change nearly everything, including how our brains work. Now there are also ways to change our genes. What will it look like to fix a genetic mistake in a person who’s already lived and developed for years with it? We don’t know, but we’re about to find out. In AS, we have four treatments already in clinical trials, and more on the way. In fact, thanks in no small part to Allyson, our little rare disease is poised to change the trajectory of a host of neurogenetic disorders.

If you’ve found yourself in conversation with me at any point over the past five or six years, I probably gave you an earful about the brokenness of our systems. My recent experiences have not upended these ideas. If anything, they’ve given me more fodder for the argument. Here, for example, is a horror story scarier than any Nightmare on Elm Street, in which a cure for a rare and fatal disease somehow made it through all of the stages of discovery, clinical trials, and regulatory approval, and was in the process of successful administration to patients—only to be shelved by the biotech company that had been awarded the exclusive license to it. Why? Not because of any concerns about safety or efficacy, but for “ ‘business reasons,’ meaning that it wanted to invest instead in treatments for more common diseases with more potential for profits.” Broken, broken, broken.

Still, my aggressive challenging of America’s systems is ultimately because I am so invested in them. My son’s life is going to be saved by some combination of universities, pharmaceutical companies, and the federal government—the very entities whose opacity and brokenness I’ve written so much about. They are broken, in many ways, as is this country right now.

But what I didn’t account for in my original diagnosis was. . . motherhood. I didn’t realize that being a mother wasn’t about transmitting some fixed repository of knowledge onto a static landscape; it’s about balancing tradition and the past and investing in what’s here with a willingness to imagine a radically different future, and then breaking or building anything that will bring that about.

Earlier this month, Allyson was invited to give grand rounds at Yale. For an hour, I watched as a room full of pediatricians and geneticists absorbed how far along the research and drug development had gotten, and marveled at the way a group of parents had managed to lift the whole world off its axis in an effort to cure their loved ones. I mentioned to a few doctors that, in the year since our own diagnosis, I’ve heard some parents sniff that Allyson is “just a vet” (if you’ve never been part of a rare disease community, they’re generally a mix of the most intense and incredible friend group you ever had and a Mexican telenovela). The doctors burst out laughing. “She occupies the exact space that is the scientific linchpin in the drug development pipeline!” one of them said. “It’s incredible to have an actual translational scientist so invested in your disease.”

Another doctor standing to the side piped up: “What’s really incredible is that she’s a mother.”


For more on motherhood, check out Bethany Mandel’s essay on going from never wanting kids to having six of them. Listen to economist and parenting guru Emily Oster on Honestly, or our debate on the best way to raise good people (by the end, you’ll know!).

Mother’s Day usually means breakfast in bed and then probably a sink full of pans to clean up. Instead of cold waffles, give your mom—or any woman in your life—the gift of independent journalism. We’re offering 15% off for a one-year subscription to The Free Press:

https://www.thefp.com/p/king-peter-pan-iii?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
King Peter Pan III
Britain’s monarch, the 40th to be crowned at Westminster Abbey since William the Conqueror in 1066, travels with his own bed and toilet seat.
TANYA GOLD
MAY 6
(Daniel Kalisz via Getty Images)
If you want to understand King Charles—who became king in September, when his mother died, and today is being formally invested with his monarchical duties—you need to understand something about the town he created. It’s called Nansledan, and it sits on a hill above the sea in Cornwall, a duchy in the far west of Britain, where Charles was duke before he became king. (It has now passed to his son Prince William. The Duchy of Cornwall always belongs to the heir to the throne.)

Nansledan is Charles’s vision, built on his land to his exact specifications. I spent three days there in January. It is perfect and strange and unreal; like Disney World, if it had been designed by a person with an obsessive interest in English domestic architecture and ancient farming methods. It is a make-believe place—a tapestry with elements of every century from the twelfth (slate walls) to the nineteenth (suburban-style villas for early commuters who travelled by horse)—but updated for comfort.

There are mini-mansions and rows of tidy cottages—ice-pink, ice-blue, mint—surrounded by fruit trees. There is an orchard, a meadow, and holes in every roof for the nesting birds. When it is fully built out, it will be home to 4,000-plus happy families squeezed onto 540 acres (less than one square mile). The shops—a chocolatier, a florist, a hatter—align with the new king’s ideals. They must be environmentally friendly and support local artisans. There is no big-box, mass market grocery store.

The good people of Nansledan, who must paint their doors colors that Charles approves of, can’t believe their luck. This is their little slice of royal nirvana. They are the gilded middle classes—the type who wash their cars on Sundays—though a third of the homes are reserved for people on low incomes. “There’s a lovely sense of community apart from the keyboard warriors and the people who are a bit cliquey,” Clare Anderson, a Methodist minister, told me. “Because the duchy has got a design code, it’s almost a stick to beat people with.”

In Nansledan, Charles has built for everyone to see the place, the snow globe he wished he’d come from. In Nansledan, there is order, and tight-knit families, and a feudal sensibility. Everyone believes in the divine right of their king, who is also their landlord. The tragedy for the farmer-king is that he cannot live there.

It is impossible to imagine Queen Elizabeth II building a town of her own, because she inherited a realm at the age of 25. Who needs another town? Also, Windsor Castle—her favorite English home—is a few miles from Legoland, so she already had a nearby theme park. More to the point, Nansledan is all about the former Prince of Wales sharing himself with the world—and Elizabeth was not a sharer.

Elizabeth never really spoke outside tightly scripted speeches, so Brits could imagine her as their loving, stolid, traditional, respectable, relatable, everywoman queen. She was our Rorschach monarch.

Of course, this was a lie—she could be spiky in private; she called one snobbish noblewoman “too grand for us”—but it was a lie we loved. In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry said the queen was, in fact, capable of feeling all species of emotion. “She just knew better than the rest of us mortals how to control them,” he explained.

She fixed a Paddington Bear stare to her face for almost a century, and she had superb manners. At the silly Diamond Jubilee Pageant in 2012, when 670 boats gathered on the Thames in bad weather for her inspection, she stood, at 86 years old, for four hours in the rain on a river cruiser. She spent Millennium Eve at a party in the Millennium Dome, Tony Blair’s folly, looking cross. (She refused to cross arms for Auld Lang Syne). In 1953, at age 27, she left her young children with nannies—for six months—to travel through the Commonwealth, to visit her subjects across the globe.

She did what was expected of her. She did her duty.

Charles? Charles is the anti-Rorschach monarch. We don’t get to project our desires onto him, because we already know who he is. Indeed, we know far too much...

https://www.thefp.com/p/what-your-country-can-do-for-you?
What Your Country Can Do for You
By abandoning its old standards and appealing to more selfish ends, the military has exposed itself to the likes of Jack Teixeira.
ROB HENDERSON
APR 25
An induction5 officer swears in a group of new recruits at New York City’s Whitehall Street induction center during the Berlin crisis, July 27, 1961. (via Getty Images)
Toward the end of the 1982 movie An Officer and a Gentleman, drill instructor Emil Foley challenges his recruit Zack Mayo to a fight, and brings him to his knees.
“You can quit now,” Foley, played by Lou Gossett Jr., tells the bloodied Mayo.
It’s one of many hurdles the recruit, played by Richard Gere, endures on his long road to becoming a Navy pilot. And while the scene is brutal to watch, the audience understands that the experience is—in a way—necessary for him ultimately to achieve success.
Today’s armed forces are different—with the Pentagon now faced with a predicament:
The military can’t meet its recruitment goals. Too many young people are too fat, do drugs, or have a criminal record. This has been a problem for years. It’s now approaching a crisis.

To address the recruitment shortfall, the military has reduced previous standards for entry, allowing men to be 6 percent fatter (and women, 8 percent). It is also trying hard to lure recruits by appealing to their self-interest, with a video of individual soldiers speaking to the camera, encouraging candidates to find “the power to discover, to redefine yourself, to improve yourself, to challenge yourself” and “to realize there’s more in you than you ever knew that you could do.” Recruits can also win up to $50,000 bonus money for enlisting.

But this strategy carries a big risk: young adults tend to be less loyal to organizations with lowered standards that target their personal motives. Study after study has shown as much.

As the University of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom has written, “If entering the group required a thumbs-up and a five-dollar entry fee, anyone could do it; it wouldn’t filter the dedicated from the slackers. But choosing to go through something humiliating or painful or disfiguring is an excellent costly signal, because only the truly devoted would want to do it.”

In other words, by lowering the barrier to entry, the military has opened itself up to more recruits like Jack Teixeira.

No one knows exactly why Teixeira, 21, the Massachusetts Air National Guard airman, allegedly leaked classified information about the CIA, exposing our intelligence on Russia, South Korea, Israel, and Ukraine. He is now cooling his heels in prison, charged with violating the Espionage Act for spilling state secrets on the gaming platform Discord.

The Tucker Carlson right and the Glenn Greenwald left have come to a similar conclusion: that Teixeira is a kind of folk hero. Greenwald recently stated that, much like Edward Snowden, Teixeira aimed to “undermine the agenda of these [intelligence] agencies and prove to the American people what the truth is.” And it’s hard to imagine any Republican ten years ago making the argument that Marjorie Taylor Greene did—that the “Biden regime” considers Teixeira an enemy of the state because he is “white, male, [C]hristian, and antiwar.” Regardless of their specific reasons, this bipartisan agreement that Teixeira should be applauded is emblematic of a broader lack of confidence in the American government and our military.


(MPI via Getty Images)
In recent years, support for the military has plummeted more than in any other American institution—with 45 percent of Americans voicing trust in the armed forces in 2021 versus 70 percent in 2018. This decline is almost entirely due to younger Americans: among those 18 to 44, confidence in all the branches of the military is in the low- to mid-40 percent range; for those 45 and up, it’s in the 80 percent range, according to a 2022 YouGov survey.

This decline in support for the military coincides with declining patriotism among young Americans: 40 percent of Gen Zers (those born from 1997 to 2012) believe the Founding Fathers are more accurately characterized as villains, not heroes, according to psychologist Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations.

You might think that the young Americans serving in the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines are immune to these opinions, that their decision to enlist implies a deeper bond with America and the military sworn to protect it.

You’d be wrong.

The evidence is in the advertising employed by the military itself. Recruitment campaigns seldom appeal to higher values, or to the history of the United States and its innumerable achievements. Rather, they appeal to the self. More and more young people are asking not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do for them.


(via U.S. Army)
I saw it myself when I enlisted in 2007. Even amid two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiters from all military branches boasted of enticing benefits, career advancement, and the chance to acquire new skills. There was scant talk of patriotism or service to the nation.

That said, I sensed at the time that service members were more patriotic than the general population.

But that gradually changed. In 2013, there was a huge outcry when the military suspended tuition assistance, which had previously covered 100 percent of college tuition fees for active duty members who took night classes. One of my coworkers proclaimed, “Why the fuck did I even join?” This was perplexing to me; we already had the GI Bill. For many people, that wasn’t enough.

By the time I left the military in 2015, I noticed a subtle difference among new members, who seemed most interested in pay raises, the chance to travel the world, and other benefits.

This has been building for a long time.


(via Getty Images)
For both World Wars I and II, Uncle Sam famously pointed his finger at potential recruits and declared, “I want YOU for the U.S. Army.” The noble ideals of the time were ones of service and self-sacrifice.

Then, starting in 1980, in the wake of Vietnam, the Army shifted to “Be All You Can Be.” That lasted until 2001, when the slogan was updated to “Army of ONE.”

In January 2020, The New York Times reported on the Army’s latest marketing campaign, which spotlights its generous tuition benefits (especially alluring to young people crushed by student debt), and the opportunities that an Army stint would lead to in medicine and tech. Its messaging also stresses that most jobs are nowhere near a combat field, according to the Times.

In March 2023, the Army reinstated the slogan “Be All You Can Be.” (Although the Army did release a commercial, “Overcoming Obstacles,” that touts the military’s major historical achievements, it was yanked after its star, actor Jonathan Majors, was swept up in domestic abuse allegations.)


(via U.S. Army)
Nevertheless, the idea was (and is) clear: the goal of the military is not to defend something bigger and more consequential than any one person. It is to achieve yourself.

Self-interest might work in the short term to boost recruitment numbers, but it is misguided if the aim is to recruit properly dedicated people. The requirement to overcome self-interest is what cultivates loyalty and weeds out unserious candidates.

In his 2022 book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas argues that the number of difficult requirements imposed by a community correlates with a longer life span of the group. In short, the higher the price of membership, the longer the group survives. This is one reason why sports teams, fraternities, and militaries are hardest on their newest members. Imposed suffering builds bonds and filters out potentially disloyal members.

We shouldn’t be lulled into complacency by our current military dominance. As Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has noted, military power tells us only so much about how strong we are as a nation. Exhibit A: the Soviet Union, which, Gaddis observed, enjoyed its greatest military power at the very moment it was falling apart, in the early nineties. The problem, Gaddis explained, was the country had lost its sense of conviction or purpose—and the loyalty of its citizens.


(The New York Historical Society via Getty Images)
If people no longer believe in the country, then its future is finished.

To state the obvious: we want more Zack Mayos and fewer Jack Teixeiras—more recruits who have to fight to fit into and rise up through the military, and fewer who are simply using the military to get ahead. More recruits who will strengthen the body politic, and fewer who will endanger it. (As we learned Friday, Teixeira had, in fact, been leaking classified documents to a wider audience and for longer than originally thought—stretching back to the start of the Ukraine war, in February 2022.)

Ultimately, the United States cannot rely on money and military power alone to sustain itself. Our nation’s strength depends on the unwavering commitment and unity of its people.

How I Mistook Freedom for Feminism
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-i-mistook-freedom-for-feminism?
Mary Harrington once believed that individual liberty is the highest good. Then she got pregnant.
MARY HARRINGTON
APR 27
A Daytona Beach bikini contest in 1998. (Evan Hurd via Getty Images)
In the cultural arguments around what it means to be a feminist—or, for that matter, a woman—author Mary Harrington asks: If individualism, domestic emancipation, and sexual freedom are the happy spoils of the last forty years of feminism, why do so many women feel like something is missing?

Raised in 1990s Britain, bathing in the Thatcherite glow of market-driven solutions, Harrington ran smack into critical theory and postmodernism at Oxford. After graduating, she spent her 20s as an anti-capitalist, gender-querying warrior in London’s tech start-up culture. Marriage and motherhood, as you’ll read below, marked a profound shift in her views.

Harrington’s outspoken opinions on sexuality, gender, and marriage—she calls it “reactionary feminism”—have landed her in controversy. Last week, the April 26 launch party for her new book, Feminism Against Progress, was canceled by its Manhattan venue in response to a tweet she posted about gender reassignment surgery, but Harrington isn’t backing down. The party, co-hosted by Compact and First Things, has moved to a new location, and is still taking place at 7 p.m. on April 26. (For further details, RSVP to info@compactmag.com.)

Meanwhile, in this adapted excerpt from her new book, Harrington looks at her own life for answers to how and why she thinks feminism got so far off track.

As always, we want to know what you think. See you in the comments.

I was born the year Margaret Thatcher came to power. My first political memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reverberations, followed by glasnost and perestroika, marked the decade of my teens.

For an average middle-class girl in 1990s Home Counties Britain, the big battles seemed to have been won, and the great disagreements of history settled. Progress was the backdrop to all we did; relative material comfort and safety could be taken for granted. And I firmly believed in feminism’s capacity to bring about continued progress: after all, over the period between my grandmother’s birth in 1914, and my own in 1979, women’s lives had changed immeasurably for the better.

Studying critical and queer theory as an English Literature undergraduate at Oxford both confirmed and radically scrambled my faith in progress. At Oxford I was taught that language itself helps to shape meaning—and, worse, that every “sign” can only be defined in relation to other signs. In other words, we have no way of experiencing truth directly or objectively. How this related to the material world—the pressures of survival or the demands of physical life—was unclear.

This mental shift sent me (to say the least) a bit loopy. Overnight, the hallowed buildings of Oxford University stopped looking like an expression of ancient traditions where I could find my place. Suddenly they were hostile incursions by something phallic, domineering, and authoritarian. I told a friend that I experienced the “dreaming spires” as “barbed penises straining to fuck the sky.”

I wish I could say this paranoid state passed swiftly. After I graduated, I carried a visceral aversion to hierarchies, a fierce defensiveness against anything that felt like someone trying to wield power over me, and a determination to make the world a better place. All this made me a less than ideal employee.

I drifted through low-paying jobs, wrote unreadable novels, and tried my hand at anti-capitalism. This extended to my views on women. I’d read Judith Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble, in which she argues that neither sex nor “gender” exist pre-politically, but instead are social constructs that we “perform” in a system that’s imposed on us, and that we reimpose on ourselves and others by participating in it.

Disrupting this system seemed possible, perhaps for the first time, thanks to technology. In the heady early years of social media, it suddenly was easy to find others with similar interests. I experimented with drugs, kink, and nonmonogamous relationships. It felt possible to reimagine our genders and create supportive communities to realize our inner lives. I changed my name to Sebastian for a while. I pondered whether I really was female. It felt liberating, revolutionary, and unambiguously like the “progress” I’d always dreamed of.

With friends, I founded a web start-up that aimed to disrupt education the way eBay had disrupted auctions. We hoped to make the world a better place and make ourselves a whole lot richer. And we somehow made it to first-round funding in East London’s febrile “Silicon Roundabout” community.

Yet every egalitarian commune I drifted through turned out to be full of interpersonal power games. One likely common factor was me. Real egalitarian utopias may have been possible, just without me and my issues. But I don’t think it was just me. Increasingly, too, I found the shifting constellations of romantic entanglements unsatisfying, and longed for a more enduring partnership. But I was skeptical of the political ramifications of doing so with a man. Would that not represent selling out?

In 2008 our start-up imploded (much as in the communes, I was a major contributing factor in the implosion), and so did the global economy, puncturing my fantasy of social challenges being solved through the creativity and dynamism of markets. I lost my social circle, my career, most of my convictions, and the majority of my identity. It took years to reassemble something like a workable worldview from the smoking ruins of my anti-hierarchical idealism. By the time I emerged in my mid-thirties, I was married to a man, no longer lived in London, and had qualified as a psychotherapist.

And: I had a baby. Up to the point where I got pregnant, I’d taken for granted that men and women are substantially the same apart from our biology, and “progress” meant broadly the same thing for both sexes: the equal right to self-realization, shorn of culturally imposed obligations, expectations, stereotypes, or constraints.
The experience of being pregnant, and then a new mother, blew this out of the water. ..

https://www.thefp.com/p/essays-from-hollywood-russia-and?
Essays from Hollywood, Russia, and Beyond
A screenwriter on the upcoming strike. The most important natural resource in the world. Plus: a Putin critic shows us how to live in truth—even from inside a Russian cage.
BARI WEISSA PR 19

One of the best requests we’ve ever received came from a reader named Nicole Jones. (Hi, Nicole.) Here’s what she said:

I wish y’all had like a “Best Essays of the Week” section or something. Because if there’s anything I want from y’all, other than more and more content, it’s for y’all to also edit the internet for me. Collect the best. Be my algorithm.

Be my algorithm! It’s a phrase that stuck with us.

We’re having an ongoing debate about the best way to be your algorithm—the best way to save you time so you don’t have to spend all day scouring the web. (We love reading the internet. Yes, we’re a bunch of masochists.)

We’re batting around different ideas. Would you like a daily collection of links? A weekly digest summarizing the best pieces of the week? (Tell us at: tips@thefp.com.)

For now, we are trying out something simple: reprints of the best journalism you might have missed.
So for today:
Rob Long, the executive producer of six TV series (including Cheers), writes about the upcoming writers strike—and how, though he comes from a long line of union-busting industrialists, working in Hollywood has turned him into an unlikely union man. (Originally published in Commentary.)

Ted Gioia, whose newsletter The Honest Broker has fast become one of our must-reads, on the most important natural resource in the world.

And last: what does it look like to live in truth, even when you are inside a cage? Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced Monday by a Moscow court to 25 years in prison for criticizing Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, shows us how in his powerful, final speech. Read this one to your kids.

Enjoy. And, as always, tell us what you think in the comments.


Essays from Hollywood, Russia, and Beyond
A screenwriter on the upcoming strike. The most important natural resource in the world. Plus: a Putin critic shows us how to live in truth—even from inside a Russian cage.
BARI WEISS
APR 19

One of the best requests we’ve ever received came from a reader named Nicole Jones. (Hi, Nicole.) Here’s what she said:

I wish y’all had like a “Best Essays of the Week” section or something. Because if there’s anything I want from y’all, other than more and more content, it’s for y’all to also edit the internet for me. Collect the best. Be my algorithm.

Be my algorithm! It’s a phrase that stuck with us.

We’re having an ongoing debate about the best way to be your algorithm—the best way to save you time so you don’t have to spend all day scouring the web. (We love reading the internet. Yes, we’re a bunch of masochists.)

We’re batting around different ideas. Would you like a daily collection of links? A weekly digest summarizing the best pieces of the week? (Tell us at: tips@thefp.com.)

For now, we are trying out something simple: reprints of the best journalism you might have missed.

So for today:

Rob Long, the executive producer of six TV series (including Cheers), writes about the upcoming writers strike—and how, though he comes from a long line of union-busting industrialists, working in Hollywood has turned him into an unlikely union man. (Originally published in Commentary.)

Ted Gioia, whose newsletter The Honest Broker has fast become one of our must-reads, on the most important natural resource in the world.

And last: what does it look like to live in truth, even when you are inside a cage? Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was sentenced Monday by a Moscow court to 25 years in prison for criticizing Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, shows us how in his powerful, final speech. Read this one to your kids.

Enjoy. And, as always, tell us what you think in the comments.



How Hollywood Is Making Me a Union Man
ROB LONG
APR 18
How Hollywood Is Making Me a Union Man
Show business is in the middle of a systems-wide panic attack. Executives are beleaguered and terrified. Shareholders are starting to ask nettlesome questions about profits (such as When will they start coming?) and losses (such as When are they going to end?).

Even the great and powerful Amazon was forced to reveal that Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—a series it spent nearly $1 billion to produce and market—has mustered only a 37 percent completion rate among its audience. In other words, about two-thirds of the people who started watching the most expensive filmed entertainment product in history got bored and went on to something else.

Clearly, something isn’t working in show business. And now the writers show up and start complaining? Of course we are.

That’s what we do when we get together. We complain. Some of it, of course, is timeless—raging against agents, managers, executive notes, residual payments, that sort of thing. But a lot of it is new.

Read full story
Living in Truth—Even Inside a Russian Cage
THE FREE PRESS
·
APR 18
Living in Truth—Even Inside a Russian Cage
In their last statements to the court, defendants usually ask for an acquittal. For a person who has not committed any crimes, acquittal would be the only fair verdict.

But I do not ask this court for anything. I know the verdict. I knew it a year ago when I saw people in black uniforms and black masks running after my car in the rear-view mirror. Such is the price for speaking up in Russia today.

But I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will evaporate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when it will be officially recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who fostered and unleashed this war will be recognized as criminals, rather than those who tried to stop it.

Read full story https://substack.com/profile/114101724-the-free-press


We’re in Danger of Losing Our Most Important Resource
TED GIOIA
·
APR 18
We’re in Danger of Losing Our Most Important Resource
Here are some news stories from recent days. Can you tell me what they have in common?

Scammers clone a teenage girl’s voice with AI—then use it to call her mother and demand a $1 million ransom.

Millions of people see a photo of Pope Francis wearing a goofy white Balenciaga puffer jacket, and think it’s real. But after the image goes viral, news media report that it was created by a construction worker in Chicago with deepfake technology.

Twitter changes requirements for verification checks. What was once a sign that you could trust somebody’s identity gets turned into a status symbol, sold to anybody willing to pay for it. Within hours, the platform is flooded with bogus checked accounts.

Officials go on TV and tell people they can trust the banking system—but depositors don’t believe them. High profile bank failures from Silicon Valley to Switzerland have them spooked. Over the course of just a few days, depositors move $100 billion from their accounts.

The missing ingredient in each of these stories is trust.

Everybody is trying to kill it—criminals, technocrats, politicians, you name it. Not long ago, Disney was the only company selling a Fantasyland, but now that’s the ambition of every tech empire.
The trust crisis could hardly be more intense.
Read full story
If you’re hungry for more great content, check out these recent Free Press stories, including an illustrated guide to self-censorship, the story behind a timeless love poem, and why teenagers have given up on driving...

Open in app or online
Weekend Reading: Putting Three New Books on Your Radar
The hypocrisy of the American elite, the dangers of AI, and tech’s dirty secret—in our first-ever Saturday digest.
BARI WEISS
APR 15

Hello, readers! Bari here. Today, we’re trying something different. We’ve cherry-picked three new books that we think will be up your alley, and we’re giving you a taste of each, with links to keep reading more on our site. (Which we hope you’ll come to more often!)

First up is an excerpt from a new memoir by Yeonmi Park, who grew up in North Korea believing Kim Jong-il was so powerful he could read her mind. She survived a famine that killed nearly three million people, eating dragonflies to survive. At age nine, Park witnessed the public execution of her friend’s mother, who was put to death for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie. Almost no one escapes the Hermit Kingdom. Yeonmi Park did. Last year, as she wrote in The Free Press, Park became a U.S. citizen.

In her national bestseller, “While Time Remains,” Park writes about her experience among America’s most celebrated, wealthy elites—and the moral corruption she found at their conferences and on their Gulfstreams. Check out her story below.

We also bring you a searing interview with Siddharth Kara, the author of Cobalt Red, the book that exposed the suffering bankrolled by Big Tech (and, frankly, anyone who owns an iPhone). And finally, tech guru David Auerbach—the man behind the smiley emoji and the new book, Meganets—tells us just how worried we should be about the future of AI.

I’m curious to hear what you think of this format. Does it work? Are there ways to improve? We hope you write to us: tips@thefp.com—and have a wonderful weekend.

—BW


From Slavery in North Korea to Jeff Bezos’s Gulfstream
YEONMI PARK
·
MAR 22
From Slavery in North Korea to Jeff Bezos’s Gulfstream
In October of 2014, I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum when I received an invitation from some guy named Jeff Bezos from a company called Amazon. I had never heard of either, so I replied that I was going to be busy (even though I wasn’t!).

I was also invited to speak at several conferences, including Women in the World hosted by Tina Brown, the founding editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. At Women in the World, I was scheduled to speak right before Hillary Rodham Clinton—a name I was familiar with from news coverage in South Korea when she was secretary of state. Other speakers there included Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, the actress Meryl Streep, and other political figures like Samantha Power, then America’s ambassador to the United Nations.

This conference was a watershed moment for me and my understanding of the world. Until that point, I thought that the international community had neglected to do anything for the North Korean people because they didn’t know what was going on there. After all, only about two hundred North Korean defectors have made it to America legally in the past seventy-plus years, and no one inside North Korea can communicate with the outside world.

After accepting the invitation to speak at the conference, I resolved to share with the esteemed audience what was actually going on in North Korea, so that Americans and Europeans with real money, power, and influence would feel inspired and empowered to do something. At the very least, I was sure that they would help spread the word about the modern-day holocaust taking place in North Korea, about the fact that it is being aided and abetted by the Chinese Communist Party, and that tens and even hundreds of thousands of mostly female North Korean defectors are being sold, raped, and otherwise harmed in China.

In a word, that isn’t what happened.

Read full story
https://www.thefp.com/p/from-slavery-in-north-korea-to-jeff?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-college-kids-who-unionized-amazon?
The College Kids Who Unionized Amazon
Officially, the activists with degrees don’t exist. Unofficially, the “salts” helped lead the only successful revolt against the world’s most powerful tech giant.
MARY KAY LINGE
APR 13
Christian Smalls (in sunglasses) with three Amazon “salts”—Justine Medina (in red top), Julian Mitchell-Israel (in pink cap), and Madeline Wesley (in blue top)—as they celebrate the April 1, 2022, vote for the unionization of the Staten Island warehouse. (Andrea Renault via Getty Images)
One year ago this month, the American labor movement scored its greatest victory in a generation: Amazon employees in Staten Island voted to organize their warehouse under the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). It was the first—and remains the only—of Amazon’s 110 active U.S. fulfillment centers to unionize.

Workers from the massive JFK8 fulfillment center shouted for joy on a Brooklyn sidewalk outside the office of the National Labor Relations Board when the results—2,654 for 2,131 against—were announced. ALU leader Christian Smalls popped champagne as photographers snapped away.

But the rapturous press coverage of Smalls—a character known for his distinctive do-rags and shades—mostly omitted mention of the decidedly non-working-class stiffs pictured next to him.

It turns out the ALU’s rise was made possible by college-educated true believers, three of whom—Madeline Wesley of Wesleyan University, Julian Mitchell-Israel of Oberlin, and Justine Medina of Marymount Manhattan—appeared front and center in the famous photos of the union’s win.

“When I tell workers I have a college degree, they’re always like, ‘What are you doing here?’ They’re just in shock. They think I’m crazy,” Cassio Mendoza, 24, told me, laughing. “I’m like, ‘You know, I’m just here trying to make sure the union goes through.’ ”

Mendoza, a self-described socialist film producer, grew up in Los Angeles and earned a communications degree from Northwestern University in 2020. After Mendoza met Smalls at a protest outside Bezos’ L.A. mansion, the union leader invited him to join the movement—and the recent grad relocated to Staten Island. He soon became the ALU’s director of communications, making flyers, producing its newspaper, and using his filmmaking expertise to create viral TikTok videos that elevated the union’s profile.

Mendoza is a “salt,” an activist who seeks work in a nonunion shop expressly to organize it—like Amazon’s warehouses, where workers complain of dehumanizing conditions that push annual turnover to 150 percent. This means that, if you take a job at a fulfillment center, one year later everyone you started with will be gone. Half the people who replaced them will be gone, too.

“It was extremely easy to get a job at Amazon,” Mendoza said. “You fill out an application, and two weeks later, you’re hired. If you have a beating pulse, you’re good to go.”

Officially, the salts don’t exist. “It’s not something the union is part of,” ALU spokesperson Evangeline Byars said. “People like that, they’re not able to connect with the workers.”

Unofficially, it’s another story.

“It was very impactful,” said Dana Miller, who helped launch the union in April 2021 but left on bad terms with Smalls. “The ALU organizing committee that won was, in the end, about half comprised of salts.”

Jason Anthony of Brooklyn, another Staten Island ALU founder and ex-committee member, said, referring to the salts: “We thought, they’re really committed to the cause if they’re willing to move across the country. So we were like, ‘The more the merrier.’ ”

Smalls’ attitude toward the salts, meanwhile, is hard to pin down.

In a May 2022 interview with The Dig, a podcast put out by the socialist magazine Jacobin, the head of the ALU said: “We have some dedicated salts. We need them. With the bargaining unit we have, we’re talking 8,300, it’s not going to come from just workers.”

But in the same interview Smalls also distinguished between salts and real Amazon employees. “Their task,” Smalls said, referring to the salts, “was and is to support the workers.”


A worker pushes a trolley as he walks between racks of goods stored inside an Amazon fulfillment center. (Chris J. Ratcliffe via Getty Images)
The term “salt” stretches back to the nineteenth century, and refers to how mine bosses “salted” their own mines with gold dust to make them appear more valuable to investors. A group of construction unions in Rochester, New York, appears to have pioneered the tactic in the 1860s. More recently, salts have helped the organizing of Starbucks baristas, Chipotle dishwashers and burrito-makers, and of course, Amazon fulfillment center associates.

The new salting movement has been fueled by young, left-wing activists: Young Democratic Socialists of America, the campus branch of DSA, preaching the gospel at colleges; Jacobin declaring that salting “built the early American labor movement” and “can revive it today.”

Last year, according to an internal survey, thousands of DSA members voiced interest in salting—targeting an array of industries and corporations. A March 2022 video of Gianna Reeve, a Starbucks organizer, confronting Starbucks founder and then-interim CEO Howard Schultz went viral—energizing many would-be salts. (Reeve is not a salt, but was subtly nudged into unionizing by a group of them.)

Those persuaded to join the Amazon cause not only had a college degree but, in many cases, came from well-off families.

Among those who joined was Madeline Wesley of Davie, Florida, daughter of a prominent labor lawyer and power company executive. Wesley graduated in 2020 from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut—where tuition, room, and board run $82,202, more than twice the salary of the average Amazon warehouse associate. She came to the ALU by way of Seth Goldstein, an ALU attorney; the two had met while involved in an effort to unionize Wesleyan staff. In early 2022, a GoFundMe campaign Wesley launched for the ALU raised nearly $442,000.

Brett Daniels became the ALU’s director of organizing after arriving in Staten Island from Chandler, Arizona. As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, he was the student government’s executive diversity director, and had been an organizer, later, with the “Fight for $15” movement in Tucson.

Mat Cusick of Sacramento dropped out of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at the New School, in New York City, for a warehouse job, in 2021. He was the union’s communications lead during the JFK8 vote.

Julian Mitchell-Israel, who grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and attended Grace Church School—where parents pay nearly $60,000 annually to ensure their children will matriculate at Ivy League universities—reportedly sent a résumé to Smalls after graduating from Oberlin College with a political science major.

Mitchell-Israel had worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign while still in high school and assisted Madeline Wesley on the ALU’s failed union vote at a second Staten Island warehouse, LDJ5, in May.

“[U]nionizing Amazon is a rekindling of the labor movement around the country,” Mitchell-Israel told The Oberlin Review. “This movement is building worker power for worker power’s sake.”

In an exuberant Facebook post she published after the JFK8 victory, Justine Medina said she “was lucky to be recruited into this effort as a salt by the [ALU’s] Worker Organizing Committee because of my organizing experience with the YCL [Young Communists League].” While a senior at Marymount Manhattan College, she attended an Occupy Wall Street demonstration with a professor.

“We can have the revolution we deserve, and we can win a better world, a free socialist world for everyone,” Medina wrote. Like most of her fellow salts, she did not respond to requests for comment from The Free Press.

https://www.thefp.com/p/get-serious-about-purpose?
Get Serious: About Purpose
We have become a treatment-resistant Prozac Nation. But the practice of believing in something—anything—can pull us out.
KATHERINE BOYLE
APR 8
The Harlem Boys Choir performs at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church. (Robert A. Sabo via Getty Images)
The most memorable business pitch I ever attended began with a young man crying. His company was raising a modest amount of capital to build drones that could protect American troops in battle. The pitch was unremarkable in the first few minutes, until the founder mentioned his family and friends who had served in Iraq. He then stopped speaking, was quiet for a few seconds, and started to sob uncontrollably.

I was in grad school at the time and had been instructed by a female professor never to offer to make men coffee, because women don’t do that anymore. But when he exited the room to compose himself, the rest of us sat in silence for what must have been 30 seconds, until I spoke—to ask if anyone needed a fresh cup. When the founder returned, he did a forceful presentation of the business, even though he left without funding that day.

None of us ever discussed what happened—even immediately after the meeting—until I bumped into the founder almost a decade later, and he alluded to “the worst pitch he ever did.”

“No, no,” I responded. “It was the best.”

That company now employs several hundred people and is valued at a couple billion dollars. I was an intern on the sidelines that day, but unlike any meeting I’ve ever witnessed, I remember the details of that one. The chair I squirmed in. The time of day: one p.m. The patterned blouse I stared at when looking down as he sobbed. Because even though that day ended with a rejection email, it was clear that this entrepreneur didn’t care what anyone thought. He knew his calling. His purpose.

Purpose is on the decline these days. A recent Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the constants that used to define our national character—have eroded in importance in the last 25 years. Only 38 percent of poll respondents said patriotism was very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998. Of religion, 39 percent said it was very important, down from 62 percent.

Beyond God and country, a desire to have children and community involvement plummeted by double digits, too. Meanwhile, the once universal value of “tolerance for others” has declined from 80 percent to 58 percent in the last four years alone. We’re replacing “Love thy neighbor” with “Get off my lawn.” The only “value” that has inflated in recent years is the one that can be easily measured: money.


Pollsters described the findings as “surprising” and “dramatic.” Twitter found them dire, an acknowledgement of America’s great sadness. Some researchers responded with disbelief, saying the poll must have been flawed to yield such swift changes.

But do these plunging red lines really come as such a surprise?

It’s not hard to see why Americans are losing a sense of membership in any kind of mutual enterprise, especially since 2020, when the steepest drops in sentiment occurred. Between global lockdowns, a fentanyl epidemic, school shootings, seemingly inevitable great-power wars, and a looming recession, Americans are losing hope. It’s the sort of poll that if America were your best friend or your child, you’d urge her to seek help.

The decline in traditional values isn’t particularly new. The things that make people feel as though their presence matters, such as civic-mindedness and religious observance, have declined in tandem. From Bowling Alone in the late ’90s to Coming Apart in 2012 to a slew of recent “End of America” essays from every major publication, researchers believe these trends are accelerating further. This decline in civic belief and religiosity predated the mobile internet. We can’t blame the phones this time.

For a while, we tried in vain to replace the default traditional values with something equally noble or even more sophisticated. Classical liberalism, which upheld individual rights and liberty until we started hating half of the individuals in this country. New Atheism had a good run until “trust the science” became a meme. There was meditation. Yoga retreats. Eating clean. Worshipping politics and politicians. Chasing influence.

But it turns out none of those things filled the national void either. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t see story after story about teenage depression and midlife crisis depression and deaths of despair. We have become a treatment-resistant Prozac Nation.

Increasingly, the void is being filled with. . . you. A relentless focus on the self that tells us you are enough. When I asked ChatGPT for the origin of the phrase “You are enough,” it told me the saying is so ubiquitous it can’t give me an answer.

I’m not an expert in purpose, but I am in the business of finding it, in determined individuals who have a deep sense of why they’re put on this earth. I meet entrepreneurs at the earliest stage, often when they have only a team and a pipe dream. Sometimes, it’s a new type of satellite or a viral app; other times, trust me, it’s the most boring idea you’ve ever heard.

But if you talk to the most storied investors about what they’re searching for in the people who will build the Disneys or the Apples or the Teslas of the future, they’re not interviewing the person. Often they’re not even listening to the idea. They’re testing for how deeply—how obsessively—someone believes in something greater than themselves. This sense is so profound that sometimes it makes you uncomfortable. It makes you squirm in your chair. But it makes you feel something.

With this type of purpose—a calling—comes action. Practice. Silicon Valley’s infectious optimism is not because the ideas are all that mind-blowing. Many solid companies have mundane missions: software that helps salespeople sell stuff! Cybersecurity companies that stop phishing attacks! And yet, that practice of building, of doing and believing in something—anything—gives people the purpose that pulls them out of the malaise that is modern life.

And maybe that’s the secret of purpose. You don’t need to build a billion-dollar company. You don’t need to employ hundreds of people. You just need to act, and with that action comes purpose—a reason to get out of bed in the morning and build.

For too long, we’ve been told we can be anything, do anything, and that all criticisms of that anything are an attack on our identity and very being. That self-love and self-care are all we need to thrive. And yet, we’ve never seemed more miserable, never been more lost, and never less confident in what we stand for.

Maybe one day the all-knowing AI will tell us the truth:

Find a purpose outside yourself. You are not enough.


Read Katherine’s last column about suffering here.

If you appreciate essays like this one, support The Free Press by becoming a subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/stanfords-war-against-its-own-students?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Stanford’s War Against Its Own Students
A first-generation student. A star soccer player. And the ominous emails from all-powerful administrators.
FRANCESCA BLOCK
MAR 23
GUEST POST
Decker Paulmeier grew up working nights and weekends in his family’s barbecue restaurant in South Carolina. He took his first double shift when he was eight years old, and eventually hustled his way up from bussing tables to mixing drinks behind the bar.

Like a lot of people who went to Bluffton High School, the medium-sized public school in his South Carolina Lowcountry town, Paulmeier was a working-class kid and the grandchild of immigrants (his mother’s parents immigrated to America from the Philippines).

He considered himself a slacker in middle school, but he wanted to go to college. He thought about going to a place like Georgia Tech, where he could study something cool like aerospace engineering and still have time to play club lacrosse and join a fraternity.

But after a family visit to San Francisco brought him to Stanford’s expansive campus as a high school sophomore, Paulmeier said he was hooked. He shaped his next two years around getting into the elite college—taking every AP class available to him and pursuing leadership opportunities wherever he could, whether it was as captain of the lacrosse team or as president of the National Honor Society.

“If I didn’t get into Stanford, I probably wasn’t going to go to college,” he told me.

He ended up getting into the school, which rejects 96 percent of its applicants.

At first, Paulmeier loved Stanford. He built strong friendships, pursued a philosophy major, and worked on an independent research project for the college’s Ethics in Society Honors Program on how to “close the inequity gap in the college admissions system,” he said.

After a gap year during the Covid lockdowns, he returned for his junior year in the fall of 2021 hoping to salvage a sense of community and camaraderie after a long period of social isolation. And what better way, he thought, than to host a party at his fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where he was now president.

Paulmeier, now 23, planned the bash at Kappa Sigma for April 15, 2022. But first he had to get approval.

For the past several years, Stanford has required students to adhere to a Student Party Policy, which includes a highly detailed “Harm Reduction Plan” mandating multiple sober monitors and designated alcohol service areas, and prohibiting the serving of any hard liquor.

Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications.

Paulmeier met all the requirements, and the party was approved. He said student IDs were checked at the door, nobody had to be transported to the hospital for drinking too much, and the music ended by midnight.

“If anything, it was one of the more stable, risk-managed events,” he told me.

He never thought of it much afterward. Then, on April 28, 2022—the Thursday before midterms week—Paulmeier woke up to a frantic string of texts from his fraternity’s vice president and an email from the university’s Office of Community Standards, also known as OCS.

He let out a sigh, typed in the required passcode to view the message, and saw the words at the top: PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

“Christ,” he remembers thinking to himself, “this is bad.”

The message went on to state that OCS was investigating Kappa Sigma for three “concerns.” First, an allegation of hazing after a fraternity member suffered a panic attack. Second, a claim that students under 21 were served alcohol at Kappa Sigma’s April 15 party. Third, an incident on April 24 in which a Kappa Sigma member consumed too much alcohol and had to go to the hospital. In the meantime, OCS said it was placing Kappa Sigma on probation, meaning they could not host or be involved in any parties on or off campus.

“Failure to adhere to the interim Probation with Restrictions will result in additional sanctions and will delay the completion of this process,” the letter, signed by OCS Associate Dean Tiffany Gabrielson, read.

Within the hour, a dozen other Greek organizations’ presidents were texting Paulmeier, saying they, too, had been placed on probation, according to Paulmeier and one other source.

“This just nuked social life on campus for the rest of the quarter,” Paulmeier told me.


Stanford University’s campus. (Marlena Sloss)
Paulmeier knew OCS had a reputation for being harsh—punitive, even.

The campus had been devastated by the suicide, on February 28, 2022, of his friend Katie Meyer. Meyer was a 22-year-old senior, captain of the Stanford women’s soccer team, and a star campus athlete. On the night of her death, she received an email, also drafted by Tiffany Gabrielson, that informed her she was being charged with a conduct violation alleging she had deliberately spilled coffee on a Stanford football player. This letter was open on her computer when she killed herself in her dorm room.

According to a wrongful death suit filed against the university by Meyer’s parents, the five-page, single-spaced letter attached to the email contained “threatening language regarding sanctions and potential ‘removal from the university.’ ”

Paulmeier is normally calm and deliberate in the way he speaks, often trying to show empathy to the university when telling his story, even after months of dealing with bureaucratic red tape. But when the conversation turned to Meyer, Paulmeier’s “deep-seated anger” toward the college bubbled over.

“The fact that just such a fucking flippant email. . . ” Paulmeier said, trying to calm his rage over the letter he claims caused his friend’s death.

“Yeah, it’s one email,” he said again. “But what does one email from Stanford mean if you’re a Stanford student? One email could mean the end of any kind of life that you had spent every fucking day for years working towards.”

Paulmeier said emails about his own investigation appeared in his inbox for the next seven months—first from OCS, and then lawyers from an outside law firm hired by the university to conduct the investigation into Stanford’s fraternities.

The OCS letter from Gabrielson was stern: “Finally, I want to remind you of the policy of Fraternal Organizations Housed on Campus. . . which provides for a review of fraternity and sorority housing eligibility when a Group is found responsible for ‘one major’ or ‘three minor violations’ of university policy within an academic year. Each of these concerns could be considered either a minor or major violation under that process.”

She didn’t state outright that the fraternity would be kicked off campus, but Paulmeier felt it was implied.

The lawyers from Stanford’s outside firm were friendlier, Paulmeier said, thanking him for his cooperation. But regardless, he woke up every morning and checked his inbox with “worry and dread.”

“Every time I would get those letters, I couldn’t help but think of her,” he said of Katie.

As his own investigation continued through the summer of 2022 and into the start of his senior year, Paulmeier said he worked five to ten hours a week trying to piece together the fraternity’s defense, and met personally with Stanford’s lawyers at least four times to be interviewed about the case. He decided not to hire an outside lawyer for his defense because he said he was confident the allegations were nothing more than misunderstandings. But as the investigation dragged on, he said he found himself navigating legal landmines and wondering whether he should have asked for help.

“I’m sitting in two-hour-long interviews on Zoom with lawyers who are trying to verbally and rhetorically trap people,” he said. “I had young kids that were 18, 19 years old who are international asking me, ‘Hey, can I talk to this attorney and tell them I drank a beer, or am I going to get my visa revoked?’ ”


Paulmeier in his room. (Marlena Sloss)
Eventually, Paulmeier passed his presidency on to another fraternity member. In December, OCS officials emailed the fraternity saying they were found at fault for serving alcohol to at least one person under the age of 21 and for hosting a party in violation of university policy. The fraternity accepted responsibility and agreed to participate in what’s called a “Resolution Through Agreement,” or an RTA.

But the real punishment, Paulmeier says, aren’t the mandatory trainings or the months-long probation.

Dealing for months with lawyers and campus investigators drove Paulmeier, typically enthusiastic and motivated, into what he calls an “exhausted, burnt-out depression.” He told me he had gone through “a state of mental and physical exhaustion and collapse.”

Paulmeier was doing graduate-level coursework before the investigation. But by the end of spring 2022, he ended up with three incomplete classes. Normally a student who earned mostly As and Bs, he said he started his senior year in the fall by failing a class for the first time in his life.

His grades dropped so precipitously he was placed on academic probation and was in danger of failing out. Worst of all, one of his academic advisors wrote him a sympathetic letter urging him “in the strongest terms” to withdraw his honors thesis, which explored how elite colleges can reform their admissions processes to attract more students like him.

And all along he felt a nagging sense of guilt. He worried that complaining would make him appear ungrateful for the chance to attend a school like Stanford—an opportunity his family had sacrificed so much for him to achieve.

After being notified of Kappa Sigma’s charges in December, Paulmeier typed out an email to Gabrielson and other OCS staff: “I did everything I could to prove to this institution I was good enough to be here. But now I walk around this place and can’t help feeling physically defeated and discarded.”

“This investigation has disillusioned me from loving this place I used to think of as my home,” he wrote. “I hope that my statements in this letter aren’t perceived as character attacks on any individual. The overall effect of this investigation on my health wasn’t from one person, or even several, but a system.”

Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqis Were Killed in the War. One Was My Brother.
But I don’t share the conventional wisdom that the U.S. invasion, which began 20 years ago this week, was a colossal failure.
FAISAL SAEED AL MUTAR
MAR 21

U.S. troops in Baghdad. (Chris Hondros via Getty Images)
My eldest brother, Samir al Mutar, was born in August 1980. He was a talented computer engineer who led a company that, to this day, installs and builds internet databases across Iraq.

One day in November 2007, on his way to work with a couple of his friends, he was stopped at an al-Qaeda checkpoint. His friends fled. My brother was never seen again.

That day was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry. I will never forget the sleepless nights that followed, listening to my mom’s sobs while I tried to study for my final high school exams. I knew then that I needed to finish school so that I could one day build a life far away from the danger.

My parents tried everything possible to reach my brother or even meet with his kidnappers. After weeks of trying, the U.S. military showed them a picture of my brother that confirmed he had been killed. We still don’t know exactly what happened to him, and we have never been able to recover his body.

By the time Samir disappeared, I’d become desensitized to death. The war had been raging for four years, and the civil war triggered by the war (and, more proximally, the destruction of a Shia mosque) had been going on for a year. I was used to seeing dead bodies tossed in the street mere feet from where the school taxi picked me up. Many days, I had to step over corpses on my way to school in the Al Khadra district.

So when I heard about my brother, I could barely express any emotion. This still haunts me.

My brother’s murder led me to start fighting against al-Qaeda in West Baghdad—as much as a 15-year-old could. Sunnis, in close conjunction with U.S. forces, had organized a small army called Awakening Forces, and a friend recruited me. They gave me a cell phone, which I used to send coordinates of al-Qaeda forces to our commanders. I was part of a larger operation to rout al-Qaeda from the city. We succeeded.

But that made me a collaborator in the eyes of al-Qaeda, and there was a target on my back now. Two years later, in 2009, when the U.S. started withdrawing from Iraq, al-Qaeda began picking us off one by one. The day I received a letter containing a bullet I knew I had to flee.

Soon after, my brothers managed to get to the United States. I escaped to Lebanon, and from there, I made it to Malaysia, where I applied for refugee status. In 2013, I finally arrived in America. Today, my family is spread across the United States and the UK.

For all that, for all the chaos, for all the dislocation, for the grief that will never leave me, I don’t harbor any ill will toward America. I don’t share the conventional wisdom that the U.S. invasion—this week marks two decades since American forces poured into Iraq—was a colossal failure. I believe that the invasion was the necessary beginning of a long, tortuous and still uncertain road out of a very dark past.


On April 2, 2003, I was at home, in a middle-class neighborhood of West Baghdad, when the Americans arrived. Samir, the oldest of our family’s five siblings, called for us to watch the tanks descending on the city, rolling past our kitchen window.

We were surprised to see the Americans: Iraqi state media had been telling us the Western imperialists were being crushed in the south.

In the opening days of the war, the Iraqi Army had turned my elementary school, a block from our home, into a makeshift military base. The Americans bombed the hell out of it, and our house shook every time a rocket detonated.

Iraqi soldiers often ran to our home for safety from incoming fire. I recall my brother’s friend, Hassanian, who was in the army, showing up at our front door to tell us that the Iraqis were being routed and that the war would end soon. That was the first hint that what we were being told on television was a lie.

Then again, our reality was strange.

One moment, I saw our neighbor Hisham outside our house carrying flowers to American soldiers, and the next, I was staring at a severed limb in our backyard that was thought to have belonged to an Iraqi soldier.

Underlying our fear and uncertainty was a hint of optimism. We thought that, if the Americans destroyed Saddam Hussein’s regime, we might have a better life.

I had been thirsting for freedom as early as elementary school. My headmaster was an outspoken Ba’athist, and my dad, an underpaid orthopedic surgeon who had been trained in England, would warn me not to repeat anything we spoke of in our home—the horrors perpetrated by the regime, and my dad’s hopes that one day Iraq would embrace Enlightenment values.

The two of us would listen to Radio Sawa, which is broadcast across the Middle East and funded by the United States, under cover of nightfall. Our family friends had satellite television, and similarly had to hide the receiver. If anyone was caught with unapproved radio or television devices, their arrest was almost inevitable. It was like this pressure always bearing down.

This was the same regime that had invaded Kuwait, in 1990, to acquire oil reserves and nullify its debt. The same regime that had actively supported terrorist groups and the families of suicide bombers in the Palestinian territories. (Say what you will about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paying young people to blow themselves up was barbaric.)

Saddam was the symbol of an ideology that was hateful and warlike and opposed to any kind of self-government. His sons were known for picking out women at weddings, raping and killing them, and sending their corpses to their families—who would be killed if they complained.

These were the people who ruled over my family and 30 million other Iraqis.

After the Americans arrived, despite all the chaos, you could feel the pressure lifting. But it was not an easy time. Far from it. You could never be sure what was coming. And as the war stretched across the spring and summer of its first year, many people who used to live in my neighborhood started leaving, mostly for Jordan. Their once-occupied homes became vacant and quiet, with shrubbery growing over the doors.

We stayed. My dad didn’t want to go. He felt it was his duty, as an educated person, to help his country and his people.


Faisal Saeed Al Mutar in New York City, 2021. (Courtesy of the author)
Two decades after this event that put in motion the events that reshaped my life and the life of everyone I love—the U.S. invasion of Iraq—the conventional wisdom is that the invasion was an unmitigated failure. America spent nearly $2 trillion on the war—far more than the roughly $700 billion that is often reported and significantly more than the $50 billion to $60 billion the Bush Administration projected. The U.S. lost nearly 4,500 soldiers. Almost a half-million Iraqis were killed.

And for what? Today, Iraq is struggling to rebuild itself. Iran and ISIS remain a serious threat. The Americans hoped to build a Jeffersonian republic in the heart of the Middle East, and failed. The whole thing seems like a horrible, tragic mistake.

I disagree.

Maybe that sounds crazy to you. I lost my country. I lost my beloved brother. I lost friends and neighbors. My family was uprooted and is now separated by an ocean.

And yet.

It is hard to express what it means, if you have lived under an authoritarian regime, to experience freedom. Those who have grown up with the privilege of liberty are lucky not to understand it—and the heavy price you are willing to pay for it if you have lived without it.

But having the chance to elect your leaders is better than having zero say in who governs you for life.

Having the chance to speak freely—the barbarous casualty count notwithstanding—is better than being hunted down for the sin of wrongthink.

Having the chance to defend yourself, as the people of Kurdistan have shown—the seemingly insurmountable obstacles notwithstanding—is better than a people so utterly subjugated they lose the will to fight.

Having the chance to pursue an education to the fullest extent of one’s intellect—persistent gender inequality notwithstanding—is better than consigning an entire population to illiteracy of anything beyond the books dictated by the regime.

Having the chance to make others laugh—potential persecution for doing so notwithstanding—is better than a life entirely devoid of humor.

Something I learned from my dad early on is that no regime can take that away from you—that questioning of official truths, that ability to think critically.

This is why, despite everything, despite all of the experts and the conventional wisdom and the unpopularity of my views, I remain optimistic that one day, I will be able to travel back to my old neighborhood. To go back to my old home. To revel in the memories I shared with my family there. Especially with Samir.


For further reading about the 20th anniversary of the war in Iraq. . .

When you get 20 minutes, check out this op-doc from the New York Times featuring veterans of the war: Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: ‘I Don’t Know How to Explain the War to Myself’

For an enormously powerful firsthand account, read this essay by Will Selber, who spent 1,500 days downrange in Iraq and Afghanistan: Moral Injuries

Some startling images: The Start of the Iraq War 20 Years Later in Photos

If you’ve never read Dexter Filkins’s book, The Forever War, we highly recommend it. (Start by reading an excerpt here.)

Finally, the latest episode of Honestly, with war reporter and author Sebastian Junger, is about why men seek danger—and perhaps even need war. If you haven’t listened, its one of our favorites so far:

Why Men Seek Danger

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Episode

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Tom Cruise Deserves An Oscar for ‘Saving Hollywood’s Ass’
Our last great film star should get his first Academy Award—not just for producing ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ but for bailing out the movie industry.
TITUS TECHERA
MAR 11
Tom Cruise in the 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick. (Paramount Pictures via Alamy)
Tom Cruise turned 60 last summer, just as Top Gun: Maverick was becoming the biggest blockbuster of 2022. Maverick brought audiences back to movie theaters after the pandemic years, giving them the joy of a cathartic military and moral triumph. It also gave Hollywood hope for the future, even as it lost more than 2,000 movie screens during the lockdowns and $14 billion in gross revenue last year alone.

Maverick handed Cruise the greatest box office success of his career, rivaling the superhero movies that have dominated Hollywood for the last 15 years. It made more than $700 million in the U.S., the fifth greatest box office in U.S. history, and a worldwide total of almost $1.5 billion. Its smash hit status arguably makes Cruise the most successful movie star ever in America.

Of course, Cruise has been too busy to celebrate. He’s been working on his next movie, the seventh Mission: Impossible extravaganza, flying motorcycles off cliffs in breathtaking landscapes and then parachuting his way back to Earth, all for your viewing pleasure. Tom Cruise has been a celebrity for four decades. In TikTok time, that's 10,000 trends.

Eat your heart out, MrBeast!

Top Gun made Tom Cruise a star in 1986. (Paramount Pictures via Getty Images)
Now, you might not believe it, but after a career spent on-screen saving America, civilization, and even the world, from the Cold War to the era of digital technology, Tom Cruise has never won an Oscar. It’s as though Hollywood were ashamed of him.

It’s not so elsewhere. Maverick screened at the Cannes Film Festival, where Cruise was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or for his career, continuing a French tradition of honoring Hollywood talent more than Hollywood itself does. Barton Fink, Wild at Heart, and Sex, Lies and Videotape all won the Palme d’Or too, but none of them got an Oscar nod for Best Picture. You’d think the Academy would have learned its lesson by now.

Well, tomorrow, the Oscars have the opportunity to do justice to Cruise’s indefatigable efforts and, though he isn’t nominated as a star, they can give him the statue as a producer, since he’s nominated for Best Picture for Maverick. It would be a fitting victory, too. No other actor has produced his own career with more care and professionalism.

Steven Spielberg, the father of the blockbuster film and America’s beloved techno-magician for an entire generation, seems to be the only guy who gets it. He congratulated Cruise on Maverick’s success at the recent Oscars nominee luncheon, declaring: “You saved Hollywood’s ass. And you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously. Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry.”

Not everyone feels this way. Hosting the Golden Globes, comedian Jerrod Carmichael mocked Cruise for returning his Golden Globe statue in 2021 in protest against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s lack of ethnic and gender diversity. Carmichael reminded the audience that Cruise is a Scientologist with a joke about Shelly Miscavige, wife of David Miscavige, Chairman of the Board of that cult. (Shelly has not been seen in public since 2007.) And at the Directors Guild of America Awards, Judd Apatow pilloried Cruise for being short and doing dangerous stunts at his age, calling that an “ad for Scientology,” and reminding everyone that Cruise once embarrassed himself by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch.


Cruise with his second wife Nicole Kidman, who co-starred with him in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 arthouse classic, Eyes Wide Shut. (Pool Lenhof via Getty Images)
It’s true: Scientology is a crazy cult, and it should not have tax-exempt status. But no one would accuse all Hollywood actors of being especially sane, or, I’m guessing, paying their fair share of taxes.

The Oscars are supposed to reward art more than entertainment, and that’s another reason for a Tom Cruise win. No other star has tried so hard to work with the most talented directors in Hollywood.

After Risky Business made him a celebrity in 1983, Cruise signed up to work for Ridley Scott, who had just made Blade Runner. The result, 1985’s Legend, a fairy tale about princesses, unicorns, and devils, is one of Scott’s weaker movies, but it was an artistic risk, not a crowd-pleasing money grab. More importantly, Cruise was undeterred by failure. After his sensational success with Top Gun in 1986, helmed by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony, Cruise made The Color of Money with Martin Scorsese. Cruise played a pool hall hustler with his usual cocky charm, but without the advantages of heroism. It’s a movie that shows what made him a star, since it trades dazzle for the romance of poverty.

Cruise kept up this pattern: Rain Man was a blockbuster and Oscar success in 1988, and in 1989 he signed up for Oliver Stone’s Vietnam drama Born on the Fourth of July. Cruise got his first Oscar nomination for the portrayal of a veteran who turns to drugs and then anti-war protests because he cannot make sense of his crippling injuries. Like other talented directors, Stone saw the intensity behind the handsome smile and pretty features and brought it out to amazing effect.

Then in 1996, Cruise became a producer and star of Mission: Impossible, which turned into a multibillion-dollar franchise that is now almost 30 years old. After Spielberg introduced Cruise to Brian de Palma, the actor was so amazed by the filmography of the master of horrors and thrillers, he hired him to helm the first film. De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was a big success, making almost half a billion dollars worldwide. It was also the most stylish espionage thriller of that decade, proving that great cinematic talent can also draw huge audiences.


Cruise’s Mission Impossible franchise is almost 30 years old. He is now 60—and shows no signs of stopping. (Murray Close via Getty Images)
The ’90s were full of hits for Cruise—Interview with the Vampire and Jerry Maguire (another Oscar nomination) on the romantic side, A Few Good Men and The Firm on the thriller side. For most of that decade, Cruise showed a gift for playing underdogs defined by moral earnestness—the staple of American cinema since Frank Capra pioneered it.

He also continued to work with impressive directors. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) earned him his third Oscar nomination for playing a guru whose misogyny—retailed as self-help to weak guys confused by third-wave feminism—turns out to be a self-loathing fear going back to his childhood. Who else but Cruise could show that charm and vulnerability, that aggression and fear, and turn it into the will to succeed?

Stanley Kubrick’s last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, came out the same year—an art movie that made more than $100 million internationally, showcasing Cruise’s subtlest performance. He plays a striving Manhattanite, devoid of the advantages of celebrity, showing his weakness to temptation when faced with a Jeffrey Epstein–style mystery, which could be anything from rich people indulging in prostitution to a cult. Cruise shows all over again why he became a star, bringing fear of failure back into his performance, this time without playing on the sympathy of the audience.

In the second part of his career, Cruise transformed into the action hero we now know—indeed, the last action hero. His best artistic achievement in the genre is Steven Spielberg’s 2002 science fiction thriller Minority Report, the movie that brought Cruise closest to the noir hero, and to tragedy. Cruise plays the champion of an order that aims to replace humans with robots in the name of safety—until he becomes its victim. Eventually, he learns to love all-American freedom and to endorse it over the surveillance state.

This is the career the Oscars should honor. And the Best Picture award is the prime opportunity. Top Gun: Maverick is the pinnacle of Cruise’s career as an entertainer—and as an icon who has uttered some of cinema’s most memorable lines. Back in 1996, playing Jerry Maguire, he declared his undying love to Renée Zellweger by saying, “You complete me.”

Nor would American cinema be complete without Tom.

Will Hollywood say it back?

Titus Techera is a film critic, the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, and host of the ACFmovie podcast. Don’t miss Walter Kirn’s essay on how Top Gun: Maverick brought the holy anarchy of fun back to cinemas.

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https://www.thefp.com/p/why-nikki-haley-is-running-for-president?
Why Nikki Haley Is Running for President
A wide-ranging conversation with the woman who believes she can beat Trump. Plus: the latest episode of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.
THE FREE PRESS
MAR 8

SAVE
▷ LISTEN

Nikki Haley takes the stage at CPAC on March 3, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)
Last month, Nikki Haley announced she is running for president. Haley is someone who has consistently proven doubters wrong: she was the first female governor of South Carolina; she has never lost a race; she’s self-made; and she survived as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during a turbulent, chaotic Trump White House without so much as a scrape.

Some see Haley a savvy, smart player of politics. She allied herself with Trump just enough to stay in his good graces—but stayed away from him just enough to appease his critics.

Her position on Trump is just one of many challenges she will have to face in the Republican primaries. Another big issue: In a post-Trump political landscape, Haley’s old-school Republican worldview might not resonate with the party’s base, which is increasingly isolationist and populist. On the flip side, perhaps she can be a breath of fresh air for the GOP: a candidate promising the kind of normalcy who—as the midterms seemed to show—voters are more than ready to support.

While speaking to the conservatives assembled at CPAC this past week, Haley delivered a message of national unity, saying: “If you’re tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation, and if you want to win—not just as a party, but as a country—then stand with me.” Does she stand a chance?

That’s one of the many questions we asked Haley on the latest episode of Honestly. Listen right here—and scroll down to get a taste of the conversation.



Why Nikki Haley Is Running for President

The Free Press

Episode

On foreign policy and a growing isolationist movement on the right:

BW: You’re someone who believes that America needs to play its role on the world stage as the policeman, using force if necessary, and many in the GOP base seem to be asking why. They see a president going to visit Zelensky rather than going to East Palestine, Ohio. What do you say to the Republicans, or the independents, or even the Democrats that you meet on the campaign trail, and certainly the ones you’ve met over your political career, that have said, “Why aren’t we putting America first?” What do you say to the Republican base that’s pivoting away from the neoconservative consensus and going back to its more isolationist roots?

NH: East Palestine and Ukraine are two different things. Biden needed to be in East Palestine. I have dealt with my share of crises in South Carolina, and I know that when your people are hurting, you drop everything and you are there with them. I think that if Biden had gone to East Palestine, you wouldn’t hear so much criticism about him being in Ukraine.

When it comes to Ukraine, though, it’s our job to let people know why they should care about this. I don’t think Biden has done a good job communicating that, but I’m going to continue to remind people that this is a national security issue for America, because if you let Russia get away with this, guess what? Taiwan’s next. China’s watching everything. China is watching sanctions. China’s watching what we’re doing militarily. China’s watching how the rest of the world is responding to the U.S. Everything we do matters, and I think it’s up to us to continue to tell people: standing with Ukraine is standing for America.

I don’t think that we need to be the policeman of the world. What I do think, though, is that you have the backs of your allies and you hold your enemies to account. When we speak, the world listens. When we act, the world follows who we are.

On Donald Trump:

BW: Within the Republican Party in the years since the Trump presidency, some have gone the way of Liz Cheney, and others the way of Trump, and a very small number tried to stay out of it. That’s you, I think. Do you think that strategy has worked? And how long do you think you can actually sustain this kind of avoidance when you’re running against Trump? How long do you think you can have your cake and eat it too?

NH: It’s so funny that everybody thinks that I’m avoiding anything. I’m actually being very true to who I am. So first of all, do I agree with Trump on 100 percent of things? No. Do I disagree with Trump on 100 percent of things? No. I don’t agree with my husband 100 percent of the time either. I think there were a lot of policies that President Trump had in his administration that were great. I’m always going to praise him for that. I’m always going to tell him that I think there are things that he did that were detrimental. I have always called him out on that. People don’t understand how I do both. But isn’t that how we deal with everybody? That’s how I see it. So is there a day he’s going to call me a name? Maybe. Do I care? No. And am I going to continue to say what I think? Absolutely. And I’m going to be honest about it.

On identity politics:

BW: You’ve spoken out against identity politics, and yet in your campaign announcement, you emphasized your identity as a minority woman, as the daughter of Indian immigrants. In that same announcement, you emphasized your femininity: “When you kick back,” you said, “it hurts them more when you’re wearing heels.” To me, it’s a kind of Lean in, you go, girl play that’s typically reserved for Democrats. How central is your identity as a woman, and particularly a woman of South Asian descent, to your candidacy? Do you draw a line between a sort of inclusive identity politics and exclusionary identity politics?

NH: When I was bullied, when I was younger, my mom would say to me, “Your job is not to show them how you’re different; your job is to show them how you’re similar.” I think that’s a lesson for all Americans. Don’t let people divide you based on what you look like. Instead, show them how similar you are to them.

I think it also helps people understand me more when I talk about being a woman. I’m proud of being a woman. I’m a feminine girl. I love that. I don’t deny what people can see, which is that I’m a brown woman. That’s fine. I have fun with it. If you’re going to criticize me for those things anyway, I’m going to lean into it and have fun. It’s not identity politics; it’s just loving who you are. I love being a woman. I love my heritage. I love how I was raised, and I love how it has made me who I am today.

Identity politics are when you divide people based on what you are. I’m not dividing people based on what I am. I’m trying to show people that we are all more similar than we are different.

And (drumroll please…)

The fourth episode of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” is out now. It’s called TERF Wars. It’s about why J.K. Rowling became a feminist—and the tensions that arise when the aims of the transgender and women’s rights movements collide.

Listen to it here:
Chapter 4: TERF Wars

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Is Gain-of-Function Research a ‘Risk Worth Taking’? Or ‘Insanity’?
Plus, Rob Henderson on why eliminating the SAT hurts poor kids. And Olivia Reingold's dispatch from CPAC.
THE FREE PRESS
MAR 7
Hello dear readers! Bari here with a very welcome problem: We are producing too many good stories. But we don’t want to clog your inbox with tons of emails.

So today we’re trying an experiment: our first-ever digest, where you’ll get a taste of the three pieces we published today, plus links to keep reading them on our site. (Which we want you to visit more regularly!)

First up is the science writer David Zweig with the definitive guide to gain-of-function research. The stakes on this could not be higher. As one professor of genetics says to Zweig: “I’m talking with you because I believe your life is in danger.”

Then we have Rob Henderson on Columbia University’s decision to scrap the SAT in the name of “equity.” Henderson, who grew up poor and in foster care, argues that this move will hurt working-class students most of all.

And our own Olivia Reingold reports from CPAC, where Trump remains the main event but young conservatives whisper to her about wanting to move on.

Check out all three stories below.

I know this crowd needs no encouragement to tell us what you really think, but I’m especially curious to know what you think of this format. Does it work? Ways to improve? Write to us: tips@thefp.com—and have a wonderful week.

—BW


Virologist Shi Zheng-li, left, works with her colleague in 2017 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some believe Covid-19 originated. (Photo via Getty Images)
Is Gain-of-Function Research a ‘Risk Worth Taking’? Or ‘Insanity’?
A lab leak in Wuhan may have led to the outbreak of Covid. So what were scientists doing there? And why?

By David Zweig

For years, our officials—from Anthony Fauci on down—maintained that Covid-19 probably originated from a natural pathway in Wuhan, China. Bats in a wet market, some said.

But according to a new report, the U.S. Energy Department believes the virus likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology before going on to kill millions around the world. The FBI and a number of prominent scientists also think Covid may have leaked from the lab, where researchers were allegedly conducting “gain-of-function” experiments on coronaviruses, potentially making them deadlier.

Before the winter of 2020, most people had never heard of this type of research, which goes on in labs around the world. But over the past few years, experts have made the compelling argument that it is so risky it could endanger humanity.

And yet, the Biden administration remains supportive of gain-of-function research “to help prevent future pandemics” as long as it’s done safely and with transparency, according to John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications.

What gives? If the U.S. was funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, why did Fauci say otherwise? Can any of this research ever be done safely or transparently? Is it worth the risks?

As a longtime science writer, I have investigated much of the evidence—or lack thereof—behind health officials’ claims during the pandemic. In this story, I can tell you what I’ve learned about gain-of-function research—what it does, where it’s happening, why it’s happening, and why I don’t feel any safer knowing the answers.

Continue reading David Zweig’s story here.
https://www.thefp.com/p/is-gain-of-function-research-a-risk?

High school students take a standardized math test. (Martin Shields via Alamy)
Dropping the SATs Hurts Poor Kids
Columbia is the first Ivy League university to abandon standardized tests in the name of ‘equity.’ It’s disadvantaged students like me who will suffer.

By Rob Henderson

Suppose you’re a poor teenager in a dysfunctional environment.

You have to work a part-time job to help make ends meet. Your parents are absent or completely checked out. So you have to help take care of your younger siblings. You’re smart, but you’re not in a position to devote much time to homework or to getting top grades in every class. But you set a few hours aside in an afternoon, and receive an outstanding score on the SAT. Suddenly, options become available to you.

Our ruling class is doing all they can to prevent this possibility.

To read the rest of Rob Henderson’s defense of the SAT, click here.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep


Supporters of former president Donald Trump attend the Conservative Political Action Coalition in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 4, 2023. (Roberto Schmidt via Getty Images)
Trump Dominates CPAC. But Young Conservatives Whisper ‘We Want Someone Else.’
‘I like Nikki Haley,’ one 18-year-old attendee quietly confided to me.

By Olivia Reingold

Audrey Riesbeck is in line to hear former president Donald Trump speak, sandwiched between women in t-shirts declaring “Fake media is the virus” and men chanting “Meatball Ron”—a dig at Trump’s would-be challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

An 18-year-old high school valedictorian from near Dayton, Ohio, sporting a pink power suit, Riesbeck looks around to make sure no one is listening before leaning in and whispering to me: “I like Nikki Haley.”

Riesbeck was one of thousands who showed up to the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, last weekend. Some, like her, hoped to discuss the future of the Republican Party only to find that most attendees had already made up their minds: Trump or bust.

Although DeSantis has not officially declared his candidacy for president, donors are already flocking to him. This past weekend, a group of fiscal conservatives with deep pockets hosted the governor and other 2024 hopefuls at a Palm Beach retreat meant to assess the party’s torchbearer. Trump did not get an invite there but made up for it at CPAC, where an adoring crowd silenced anyone who tried to raise the question: Is it time we moved on?

The crowd’s overwhelming answer to that was no—the audience heckled Nikki Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador and one of two Republicans who’ve so far announced a bid against Trump. (The other, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, also spoke and received cheers for his pledge to shut down the FBI and the Department of Education.)

There’s a reason why one CPAC attendee I spoke with accidentally referred to the conference as a “Trump rally.” This was a crowd in which even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who once supported QAnon, was not considered conservative enough.

To get the rest of Olivia’s dispatch from CPAC, click here.
https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-dominates-cpac-but-young-conservatives?

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-took-up-arms-to-defend-israel-now

I Took Up Arms to Defend Israel. Now I March Against Its Government.
Anyone who loves the Jewish state should be speaking out against its proposed judicial reform. Matti Friedman writes.

By Matti Friedman

March 6, 2023

Matti Friedman, the author of today’s essay, is among Israel’s most articulate and insightful writers. Perhaps that’s because the Jewish state is his chosen country.

Friedman immigrated from Canada as a teenager in 1995 and served in the military, as he outlines in his magnificent book Pumpkinflowers. In the years since, in other books and in countless essays—this one was particularly prescient—he has done two things perhaps better than anyone of his generation: defended Israel and deepened our understanding of a young country whose identity is still emergent. His writing tends to cut through the political hysteria that surrounds events in Israel, and suggests context and perspective often lacking elsewhere.

So it is a very rare thing to have him write with such alarm, as he does below, about the Netanyahu government and the country’s spiraling political crisis.

The government’s moves—particularly with regard to the country’s legal system—have driven hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets and has the current president of the country, Isaac Herzog, warning: “I am anxious we are on the brink of an internal struggle that could consume us all.”

This is an important subject—and a contentious one. At the bottom of Matti’s essay, we have further reading from those on all sides of this issue. —BW


A protester faces off with a police officer. (Eyal Warshavsky via Getty Images)
It’s not clear at first why the current political situation in Israel feels so different, so much darker. In coverage abroad, events here are being described as an argument about legal reform, which is a bit like describing World War I as a dispute about an archduke.

I moved here from Canada at the age of 17, hoping to find a home in a country I found irresistible, one where I wouldn’t have to live as a minority. In nearly 30 years since then, through controversial peace plans, waves of Palestinian terror attacks, and wars, I’ve seen crises come and go. I’ve been at more protests than I can count. But I’ve never seen politics seep so alarmingly into the psyches and private lives of my friends, or so many people losing sleep, seized by fear that the country they love won’t make it.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister, as he has been for most of the last decade and a half. The peace process is dead, as it has been for more than 20 years. The political left is nearly extinct, the center is amorphous, and neither of those things are new either. So what’s going on?

On one level, what’s going on is simply that we had an election in November. A coalition led by Netanyahu won, and a blitz of right-wing legislation ensued, drawing protests from liberal Israelis.

But what’s actually going on was best expressed this week by a friend of mine, a career army officer, religiously observant and a political centrist. “I’ve had governments I disagreed with,” he said, “but never one that was out to get me.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Israelis are used to being surrounded by enemy states. But right now, for the half of Israel’s citizens who didn’t vote for this government, our own country is starting to feel like one

https://www.thefp.com/p/things-worth-remembering-w-h-audens?
Things Worth Remembering: W. H. Auden’s Poignant Embrace
One stanza of poetry captures the pleasure of holding another person.
DOUGLAS MURRAY
MAR 5

W. H. Auden at Oxford University in 1972. (Alamy)
Welcome back to our new Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, in which Douglas Murray shares poems and passages he’s memorized and how they’ve brought meaning to his life.

To listen to Douglas recite this week’s work—the first stanza of W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby”—click below.

LISTEN NOW · 1:06
One of the odd things about poetry is that people head to it in times of crisis or unusually heightened emotion.

Poetry is not especially useful when describing the state of the traffic heading downtown. It is not required for summing up the pleasures of shopping. But there are moments when only poetry will do—as the most distilled form of communication possible. Consider how people not just read but often try to write poetry upon the death of someone they love. Or when they are falling in love—especially for the first time.

There seems something important about the fact that even people who don’t know they care for poetry instinctively know it is somewhere they can go to in extremis. Other art forms—music, in particular—may do similar work, but sometimes only poetry will do.

Which brings me to the only other person, apart from Eliot and Shakespeare, who will crop up here more than once over the next year: W. H. Auden.

There was a time when Auden loomed almost as large as Eliot—one of the great Faber poets of the mid-twentieth century. But Auden has come to seem slightly smaller in the rearview mirror, while Eliot has overtaken him. There is a reason, which is that after the starburst of his early success, Auden’s poetry became harder. And not always in a rewarding way. There is nothing wrong with having to work to understand a poem, but the reward has to be worth it. As he grew older, Auden somehow calcified. Not only did the memorable rhyme schemes of his early poems go out the window—it seemed, at times, as though he was trying to be difficult.

The critic Clive James even wrote a poem titled “What Happened to Auden.”

One thing that happened was that he left England for America—just as England looked likely to be attacked by Hitler. Some people in his home country never forgave him for fleeing.

Still, the only way to judge an artist is by his art, and by that standard, the Auden of the 1930s should be judged very highly indeed. In modern terms, he wrote hit after hit.

“As I Walked Out One Evening” is full of memorable lines, though rereading it recently I realized that I had forgotten two of its greatest stanzas:

‘O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

Then there’s Auden’s poem on the death of W. B. Yeats. The rhyme scheme and rhythm are what make them lodge in the memory. Though what really makes this stick is the thing that makes the sticking worth it—the content. Consider this:

Earth, receive an honored guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

Or the final stanza, the last couplet of which is inscribed on Auden’s memorial stone in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

These are wonderful lines. If Auden had never written anything else, lines like these would have meant he remained known. But if I were to select one poem from Auden’s early work which I enjoy having in my head the most, it is the love poem “Lullaby,” published in 1937.

It is tricky to get the whole thing by heart, but the first stanza can be held onto quite easily, and it is the one most worth treasuring. It is utterly, wholly rhapsodic—about the joy of holding another human being.

Of course, the worm enters, as it must. Does the arm have to be “faithless”? Do we have to be reminded that the loved one will go to the grave? The answer, of course, is “yes.” Because the moment of unalloyed rapture is dense with meaning—in part, because we know it cannot last. The losing is part of the holding on now. Auden invites us to savor the moment, in the hope that by doing so the moment is not only heightened, but remembered.

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral:

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

Douglas will be back in your inbox with another poem next Sunday. His last column was about T. S. Eliot.

And if you appreciate Things Worth Remembering, please become a subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-crime-and-punishment?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=106120431&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

TGIF: Crime & Punishment
Murdaugh’s a murderer. Lightfoot’s a loser. Ghislaine goes hungry. Plus, the l
Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and son on Thursday. (Photo via Twitter)
Suzy here! Nellie’s on a work trip this week, so she has let me out from the closet under the stairs that I am very lucky to call home so that I could step into the TGIF spotlight.

You know that part in Cinderella where she finally gets to go to the ball? This is like that but we just talk about myocarditis for a bit and then I get to go back to sleep. Let’s get started. (And yes, I promise Nellie will be back next week.)

→ The lab leak gets the stamp of approval: The Department of Energy, The Wall Street Journal reports, has concluded that Covid-19 most likely emerged from a lab, flying in the face of nearly all the mainstream reporting on the subject from 2020, which called it a “fringe theory” and a “conspiracy.”

A slew of other agencies—the National Intelligence Council, the Central Intelligence Agency—continue to hem and haw over their confidence levels when it comes to lab leak versus zoonotic (that’s the wet market one) origins, but you know who is always at a very-high, never-been-wrong confidence level? Everyone online.

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan explained quite bluntly why the lab leak had to be verboten among polite society: right-wingers made him do it!

Twitter avatar for @mehdirhasan
Mehdi Hasan
@mehdirhasan
The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ *theory* is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists.
Twitter avatar for @NateSilver538
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.

https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-real-science-on-masks-they-make?utm_nce on Masks: They Make No Difference
Face coverings do nothing to reduce the spread of Covid, according to a new, gold standard scientific review.
JOHN TIERNEY
FEB 27
∙
Cashiers wear protective masks in a grocery store in New York City on April 2, 2020. (Stephanie Keith via Getty Images)
We now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero. The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses.

This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask mandates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the rest of the public health establishment to forsake “the science”—and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as determined as ever to ignore actual science.

Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed little or no benefit from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like flu and colds. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and other national public health agencies did not recommend masking the public. But once Covid-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed. Officials ignored the previous findings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked.

The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and other nations’ health agencies, it’s an international network of reviewers, based in London, that has partnerships with the WHO and Wikipedia. Medical journals have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.”

It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature on masks, including trials during the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals and in community settings. The trials compared outcomes of wearing surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also wearing surgical masks versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness.

It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly—and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs.

Whatever theoretical benefits there might be, in clinical trials the benefits have turned out to be either illusory or offset by negative factors. Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.”

This lack of evidence would be enough to keep any new drug or medical treatment from being approved—much less one whose purported benefits had not even been weighed against the harmful side effects. As the Cochrane reviewers disapprovingly note, few of the clinical trials of masks even bothered to collect data on the harmful effects on subjects. Most public health officials and journalists have ignored the downsides, too, and social media platforms have censored evidence of those harms. But there’s no doubt, from dozens of peer-reviewed studies, that masks cause social, psychological, and medical problems, including a constellation of maladies called “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.”

Yet public health officials, in violation of the first-do-no-harm principle, continue recommending or mandating masks without good evidence of their effectiveness or any pretense of cost-benefit analysis. Masks are still required in many hospitals and other institutions. Despite all the data showing that Covid-19 poses virtually no risk to healthy children, the CDC continues to recommend masking all students in communities where infection rates are rising. While the WHO advises against masks for children under five, and the European Union advises against them for students under 12, the CDC cruelly recommends masking everyone from age two on up.

The CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, remains determined to ignore the best research on masks, as she made clear in a congressional hearing earlier this month. “Our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time,” she said, when asked how the new review from Cochrane would affect the agency’s policies. “This is an important study,” she conceded, “but the Cochrane review only includes randomized clinical trials, and, as you can imagine, many of the randomized clinical trials. . . were for other respiratory viruses.”


Children wear masks while playing in Central Park on May 24, 2020. (Ira L. Black via Getty Images)
It was a statement remarkable for its chutzpah as well as its scientific incoherence. One of the worst mistakes of the CDC and other lavishly funded federal agencies was the failure to conduct randomized clinical trials to determine whether their policies were effective. The Cochrane review had to rely on pandemic mask trials conducted in other countries—and now Walensky has the gall to complain that other countries didn’t do enough of the research that U.S. agencies shirked. She’s right that some of the trials involved other viruses, but why dismiss them as irrelevant to the coronavirus? And while one can always wish for more studies to include in a meta-analysis, that’s no excuse to ignore the best available evidence in favor of the shoddy science peddled by her agency to defend its policies.

Early in the pandemic, the CDC justified its newfound enthusiasm for masks in a press release hailing “the latest science” from a case study of a hair salon in Missouri. “[W]earing a mask prevented the spread of infection from two hair stylists to their customers,” the CDC proclaimed, a preposterously sweeping conclusion to draw from a small observational study that lacked a control group and had other obvious limitations (most of the salon’s customers were never even tested for Covid).

On national television, Walensky touted another study, of schools in Arizona, as proof that masks dramatically reduced the spread of Covid, but the study’s methodology was so clearly flawed—and the results so out of line with rigorous studies—that other Covid researchers dismissed it as “ridiculous” and “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”

Instead of sponsoring—or at least heeding—clinical trials, the CDC kept searching for confirmation from less reliable research. It repeatedly cherry-picked observational data, crediting masks for a short-term reduction in Covid rates in some localities while ignoring contrary data from more systematic analyses, such as a study that tracked infection rates nationwide over the entire first year of the pandemic—and found that neither mask mandates nor mask usage correlated with infection rates.

Can anything persuade the maskaholics in the public health establishment and the public to give up their obsession? Some researchers, echoing Walensky, concede that the Cochrane review is the gold standard but argue that the clinical trials so far haven’t been extensive enough to rule out the possibility that masks might do some good. But that vague possibility is no reason to force masks on people: a public health intervention is supposed to be based on solid evidence, not wishful thinking.

In his book Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates, data analyst Ian Miller devotes an entire chapter to graphs exposing the CDC’s statistical malfeasance. He also prepared a graph for a previous City Journal article that is worth showing again, because it’s a visual confirmation—from nationwide data, not clinical trials—of the conclusions in the Cochrane review. The graph tracks the results of the natural experiment that occurred across the United States in the first two years of the pandemic, when mask mandates were imposed and lifted at various times in 39 states.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-secrets-in-our-skies?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=104901744&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
The Secrets in Our Skies
We shot down four objects floating over U.S. airspace, but gave up looking for three. What were they exactly—and what is the government not telling us?
ADAM POPESCU
FEB 25

SAVE
▷ LISTEN
The first spy balloon, which entered U.S. airspace on January 28, was shot down over the Atlantic on February 4. (Chad Fish via AP)
The secrets of the mysterious crafts floating across America are now buried forever under the sea ice of northern Alaska, the wilds of the Yukon, and the choppy, gray-white waters of Lake Huron.

Amazingly, it was too cold, and the weather conditions too harsh, for the United States military—which had no trouble blasting the balloons out of the sky—to keep looking for their debris. Late last Friday, the U.S. Northern Command, part of the Department of Defense, called off the search.

So we’re left not knowing—for sure—where they came from, or what they were looking for, or what they found. We can’t even confirm whether they were all Chinese or all balloons.

The only clue to the objects that descended on us from out of the blue is two words uttered by the president of the United States: private companies.

Last week, President Biden told the world the balloons are probably “tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”

“[N]othing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

Which suggests it could be any old company from Peoria or Stockholm or wherever doing something anodyne like researching wind patterns or sending fried chicken into the stratosphere.

What the president didn’t say is that the balloons were likely dispatched by a Chinese company that’s not at all a company in the way Americans imagine them, but really, an extension of the Chinese military intelligence regime.

First things first—what are the odds China is behind all this?

High.

Consider that there is a lot of stuff up there from countries around the world, including the United States—mostly balloons that collect topographic data, gauge weather patterns, and enhance our communications.

In 2022, that stuff included 366 unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, floating above the United States. Most of them were perfectly innocuous, but 171 could not be explained.

Still, the United States Air Force chose not to fire a missile (pricetag per missile: $400,000 to $450,000) at any of those. (Or, at least, there were no reports of that having happened.)

Not this time.

That’s because right before the three recent mysterious UAPs turned up, there was another UAP—and pretty much everyone now agrees that that one was a Chinese spy balloon. On February 4, an F-22 blew it up off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

“We detected a Chinese balloon, and then we opened the scope and found more,” said Ryan Graves, a former F/A-18 Super Hornet Navy pilot who recorded more than 100 encounters with UAPs while patrolling the Eastern Seaboard of the United States a decade ago. “It’s certainly tied together.”


A U.S. Air Force pilot looks down at the first flying object, a Chinese surveillance balloon, before it was downed earlier this month. (US Department of Defense via Getty Images)
Is there any chance the three mystery crafts were not spying on America?

I asked Miles Yu, the China-born director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center, whether he thought there is a world in which the mysterious flying objects were not working for Chinese intelligence.

“Impossible,” Yu told me. “The Chinese government can and does exert significant influence over any private enterprise, far beyond what the U.S. could do.”

Retired U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, added: “In China, there is a very close nexus between commercial companies at every level and the People’s Liberation Army.”

Graves, the former Navy pilot, noted that the United States has already gathered a lot of information about the balloons—and our decision to take them out suggests that whatever we know isn’t good.

“We have gun-camera footage, radar, other information about what this was,” Graves said. “That’s true even if we don’t find objects on the ground.”

Mira Ricardel, a principal at The Chertoff Group who was deputy national security advisor under John Bolton, said, referring to China: “It’s not like they have companies over there that say, ‘Hey, we’re going to fly objects over the U.S. like SpaceX.’ This is not a democracy.”

Ideally, said Mary Kissel, a senior adviser under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the balloon saga would wake up the country. “Beijing is not our friend,” Kissel said. “This is not the action of a friend. France would not fly a spy balloon at 60,000 feet above us.”

So what, exactly, were the balloons looking for?

Ricardel suspects the point of launching the balloons was “to see what the U.S. response will be.”

The Chinese are especially adept at sending balloons into “near space,” Yu said. “If you fly a balloon at 60,000 feet, it’s much easier to take lateral images of ground installations rather than use a satellite hundreds of miles off the ground,” he said.

Balloons are cheap, fast, easy to use, and can be equipped with infrared cameras “to see what’s happening beneath the clouds,” said Anastasia Quanbeck, a spokesperson for Aerostar, an aerospace company based in Sioux Falls that operates stratospheric balloons worldwide.

They can also stay airborne—around 80,000 feet—for years at a time, all the while broadcasting data back home in real time. Like TikTok hoovering up our data, but from a very high altitude.


Only the first object was recovered. The other three crafts—and their secrets—will likely be buried forever below ice. (Chad Fish via AP)
So why didn’t the president just tell us the whole, unvarnished truth?

A few possible reasons.

One is avoidance. In Washington, Yu argued, “the guiding philosophy is to avoid a direct conflict with China.”

That’s an odd approach, he said, given that China “uses confrontation to extract cooperation”—meaning it creates problems to force the United States to ease up on other fronts. Sure, we’ll call off the balloons, as long as you stop yapping about intellectual property rights or Uyghurs or Taiwan.

Ron Garan, a former NASA astronaut who spent six months in space and another three years leading a high-altitude balloon company, believes the flying objects were “rogue balloons.”

The balloons’ operator, in China, probably lost control of them, and then their self-destruct mechanism failed, Garan said. He was amazed by Beijing’s response to the whole saga. First, the Chinese expressed regret; then, after we blew up balloon No. 1, they became angry; then, they went off about all the spy balloons the U.S. has sent to China—all of which exacerbated our already tense relations. “China couldn’t possibly think they could get away with it,” Garan said.

Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves said that the federal government’s silence on this story reflects a broader reticence to communicate plainly and candidly about national security, American airspace, or UAPs.

Graves said that he had become something of a pariah in his old Navy circles for speaking publicly about UAPs. “No one likes sticking their neck out there,” he said. “My former commanding officer—I was in touch with him via a friend I ran into. He was on FaceTime and said, ‘Look who’s here.’ I was wearing my alumni hat, and the officer said, ‘Take that fucking hat off.’ In his opinion, I was an embarrassment to the squadron.”

What does China likely make of our response to its flying objects?

The most important data the crafts provided was America’s reaction to it—further confirmation, in the eyes of the Chinese, of our national decline.

“China sees this as a way to erode our unity, and that gives them an advantage,” Elliot Ackerman, an author and former Marine, told me.

Mary Kissel said the balloons had cast a spotlight on a gaping hole in our national discourse. “There are a lot of gray areas of warfare that we really, as a nation, have not confronted,” Kissel said. “There’s a lot of stuff floating in the air above us at 60,000 feet all the time and we have not come up with a coherent policy to deal with it.”

Instead, there was the predictable partisan sniping—Republicans accusing the president of being weak, Democrats insisting the president acted prudently.

Worse than that, there was hysteria. We glimpsed a few balloons traipsing across the skyline, and suddenly we imagined hundreds, thousands of balloons with cameras crisscrossing the American heartland, gazing into our nuclear silos and our bedrooms, and there was talk of UFOs—sorry, UAPs—descending upon us from outer space. We imagined this was the opening act of Red Dawn or worse yet, Independence Day. We wondered what the White House wasn’t telling us.

“When you sprinkle a few kernels of doubt on what the government is telling you, that in and of itself is a win,” Ackerman said, alluding to the Chinese and the spy balloons we will never find. “It’s got everybody’s imaginations going, like the beginning of a spy novel.”

This is the first piece by Adam Popescu, who recently joined The Free Press as a Senior Reporter.

Read our story about how China got our kids addicted to ‘digital fentanyl’ here. And if you’re looking for more thoughtful coverage on world events, become a Free Press subscriber today: