Material Contribution

Douglas McAllister MP writes:

On a recent visit to an elderly care home in Golders Green, Andy Burnham made an important observation about the long-running assisted suicide debate. Before we rush into providing drugs for terminally ill patients to end their lives on the NHS, he asked, shouldn’t we first aim to provide the care that they need to live out their last days well?

This is precisely the right question to ask, as Parliament soon returns from recess with yet another assisted suicide bill before it for a vote on 11 September. If this feels familiar, it’s because the same Members of Parliament have already spent numerous hours debating this issue during the last parliamentary session. During that time, the earlier version of the Bill, proposed by Kim Leadbeater, did not pass through the House of Lords. If Lauren Edwards’ almost identical Bill passes Second Reading, we once again face months debating the same issue that dominated headlines and divided colleagues and communities last year.

I opposed the Bill last time because I was not persuaded that the safeguards within it were strong enough to prevent vulnerable people from ending their lives due to feeling like a burden on either caregivers or the state. My concerns have not gone away. But the Prime Minister has made a broader point that should resonate beyond those of us who voted against the legislation.

Labour was elected on a manifesto promise to “rebuild our country”, with a strong emphasis on restoring broken public services. We promised to strengthen the NHS and tackle the social care crisis, restoring confidence that government stands alongside people when they are at their most vulnerable. The scale of the challenge is clear. Data from Hospice UK shows that two in five hospices had to plan on service cuts this year due to serious funding pressures. Meanwhile, two-thirds of people in rural and island communities are impacted by a postcode lottery as they struggle to access vital palliative and end-of-life care close to home.

It is difficult to talk about genuine “choice” and “autonomy” over death if people weighing up a potential suicide cannot access specialist palliative care; or if disabled people must still fight for the support that allows them to live independently. Andy Burnham is right: before Parliament changes the law, our first responsibility should be to fix the care system.

This is not just an abstract argument. One of my constituents, mother-of-four Michelle Anna Moffatt, died in June after becoming one of Scotland’s leading voices against assisted suicide. Following a catastrophic spinal injury that left her wheelchair-bound, Michelle believed her life was over. At her lowest point, she saved money to travel to Dignitas to end her life at Switzerland’s infamous clinic. Thankfully, she never went.

With the support of a GP who helped her combat her suicidality, a community at Spinal Injuries Scotland that helped her rediscover purpose, and a family determined not to give up on her, Michelle slowly rebuilt her life. She became an advocate for disabled people and inspired many by throwing herself into community life, raising four children, fundraising for charity, and even canoeing down the Zambezi River.

If Michelle could have been offered an assisted suicide at her lowest moment, she told friends she would have certainly taken it, cutting her life short by six years. Though her spinal injury itself was not “terminal”, in many jurisdictions where assisted suicide is permitted, she could easily have made herself fit the category required by the legislation. Indeed, it’s frighteningly easy to do so. If an anorexic refuses to eat; if a diabetic refuses insulin; if a paralysed person like Michelle refuses to change a catheter and invites infection that she refuses to treat, anyone could make themselves fit a very loose definition of “terminal”. Similar cases have already happened in places where assisted suicide is legal. But thanks to the law prohibiting assisted suicide at the time, Michelle emerged from that period of despair, grateful that she had been helped to live rather than helped to die.

Her experience reflects concerns repeatedly raised by disability organisations throughout this debate: that vulnerable people suffering coercion, depression or feelings of being a burden could be pushed into an early death under this proposal. The Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have echoed Burnham’s analysis: you can’t offer death to those who might have made a different choice if their care needs (be it palliative care, adaptive housing, mental health support or practical assistance) had not gone unmet.

Scotland has already wrestled deeply with these questions. When Holyrood considered Liam McArthur’s assisted suicide Bill earlier this year, a proposal very similar to the legislation now returning to Westminster, 85% of Scottish Labour MSPs opposed it, and the Bill ultimately failed. Their decision demonstrated Labour’s core values: support for the marginalised and safeguarding the vulnerable.

Being an MP in Scotland, I know how carefully Labour has sought to balance a shared UK-wide identity with the distinct political traditions that exist north and south of the border. Dragging the party, and the country, back into another divisive assisted suicide debate risks reopening divisions at precisely the moment when we should be unitedly focused on delivering for people.

Andy Burnham has offered Parliament a sensible way forward. When he says we should address hospice funding and strengthen social care before revisiting assisted suicide, he is reminding us what government is for. We should be remembered as a party which secured better help and care to those in need, not the party that simply offered them death.

The First Lord of the Treasury needs to clean his own house, as Maddison Frost writes:

HM Treasury ‘materially contributed’ to the suicide of its employee Chloe Moffat when she took her own life following an anonymous complaint at work.

In announcing her conclusion of an inquest into Moffat’s death at Surrey Coroners’ Court, assistant coroner Anna Crawford found that the Treasury did not follow its disciplinary procedure in informing Moffat that the outcome of the allegation, if true, would be a written warning and not dismissal.

Crawford said there may be a “wider issue” in government and that she would send a Prevention of Future Deaths (PFD) report to the civil service, Treasury and Acas. Recipients of a PFD report must provide a written response within 56 days.

Moffat, 26, worked as a personal assistant for nearly three years and had been on track for promotion. After the Treasury received a number of anonymous complaints, managers invited Moffat to a meeting. The complaints alleged that Moffat had informally shared information about her colleagues, which Moffat denied.

The court heard that when Moffatt asked if she would be losing her job, a senior manager told her she “couldn’t predict any outcome of any potential investigation”.

Moffat had her job responsibilities temporarily changed and access to her manager’s diary – despite the meeting being described as “informal”.

Crawford said that, instead of calling Moffat into the meeting, attended by her line manager and the Treasury’s head of global issues, she should have been given details of the allegations in a letter.

She added that Moffat’s state of mind, being afraid that she would be dismissed, likely contributed to her decision to end her life.

The inquest heard that following the meeting on 19 May 2025, Moffat sent a text message to her friend that said: “I am going to be fired”. The next day, Moffat was found dead by her father.

The court heard that the Treasury managers had followed advice given by HR, but the way the complaint was handled was not in line with policy.

The Treasury’s policy, which is in line with Acas guidelines, states that serious misconduct allegations have to be handled formally, so that the person is “not deprived of their rights”.

The coroner said this includes having a third party present during meetings, receiving five days’ notice of meetings, and providing information on a likely outcome if allegations are upheld.

Treasury staff previously described the meeting as “informal” and “fact-finding”, but internal emails revealed that they had already considered the level of misconduct as “serious”.

‘Sufficient information’

Crawford told the court that she believed the reason for the meeting was to see if Moffat would admit to the allegations so they could move to a formal disciplinary.

She added that before the meeting on 19 May, there was “sufficient information” available to determine the level of potential misconduct.

Ms Crawford said: “HM Treasury materially contributed to Ms Moffat’s death by not applying their written discipline policy and procedure in that they did not inform her that the likely penalty, if the allegations were proven, was a written warning and not dismissal.”

Crawford ruled that Moffat’s death was a suicide and that she was satisfied in finding that Moffat had intended to take her own life.

In a statement, Moffat’s parents said: “Chloe was a bright, caring and talented young woman who loved her family, her friends and her work. She had an exemplary employment record, was highly regarded by those who worked with her, and had a promising future ahead of her. As her family, we remain immensely proud of everything she achieved in her short life.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “We continue to mourn Chloe’s passing as a colleague and friend. Our thoughts remain with her family and friends. We take the coroner’s concerns extremely seriously and recognise it is important to act quickly. We are now considering the findings carefully.

“We have introduced improvements to guidance, support and wellbeing arrangements, but recognise we must continue to take action to prevent this happening again.” 

Disciplinary code of practice

Last month, Acas launched a consultation on a new draft Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures that places a much stronger emphasis on resolving workplace concerns informally before they escalate into formal processes.

The revised code, the first full update since 2009, seeks to encourage employers and workers to address concerns early through informal conversations, with Acas arguing that effective informal resolution can reduce costs, improve workplace relationships and prevent unnecessary conflict.

Commenting on the Moffat case, an Acas spokesperson said: “This is an extremely distressing and upsetting case and our thoughts are with Chloe’s family. Acas has a disciplinary and grievance code of practice that sets out good practice advice for employers on how to handle disciplinary cases.

“Revisions to this code are currently being consulted on with a deadline for responses of 23 September. Our proposed revisions to the code include a new advice section for employers on how to handle concerns informally. We welcome any feedback on the revised code and will consider any recommendations for Acas from the coroner’s report.”

In July, the UK’s Faculty of Public Health argued that poorly conducted workplace investigations cause such harm that they should be seen as a threat to public health. By putting formal ways of handling workplace issues ahead of staff wellbeing, employers could be causing “unintended harm” where investigations are “poorly conducted or applied excessively”, it said.

The faculty called on policymakers, employers, HR, and public health professionals to recognise how disciplinaries can be a detriment to workforce wellbeing and ensure there are safeguards in regulation and policies.

Who Do Boys Like They’re Girls, Who Do Girls Like They’re Boys

The thirtieth anniversary of my A-level results has me in a mid-Nineties mood.

Valerie Strivers writes:

There’s a telling moment in one of the social media videos shared by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez documenting her egg-freezing journey. The congresswoman sits on her sofa, about to give herself a hormone injection. She takes a deep, nervous breath in preparation. She then pulls up her shirt, pinches her stomach flesh, and gives herself the injection, looking incongruently vulnerable and alone. The moment will spark sympathy in many mothers: it’s a lonely, vulnerable process, and despite or because of generations of feminism, it hasn’t become any easier.

AOC is 36 years old and, for her, egg freezing is an insurance policy in case she wants to reproduce later. Her decision to do so in public has been widely lauded as normalising such decisions and bringing visibility to a taboo aspect of women’s reproductive health. The supporters aren’t wrong: all aspects of women’s fertility and reproductive choices remain difficult to discuss, even in a culture of overexposure. AOC’s decision to go public may be a PR stunt, but it will still resonate, making many women feel less alone with their choices. In the videos, viewers see the politician confidently fitting a process that many women find opaque and challenging into a brisk, professional life.

Since she posted the videos, it has come to light that the congresswoman split from her long-term fiancé Riley Roberts months before she began the egg freezing process. In this respect, she is even more representative of a category of women who could use support, as she faces a dwindling fertility window without a partner.

Statistically speaking, however, egg freezing isn’t an insurance policy but instead the end of the road. In contrast to glowing photos of happy celebrities who froze their eggs and now have babies, a UCLA study from 2025 revealed that from 2014-21 only 5.7% of women returned to use their frozen eggs within five years. The numbers are slightly higher for women who froze eggs between the ages 38-42, with around 8% returning. An unknown percentage of those who freeze eggs conceives naturally, of course. Numbers are also hard to come by on how many of the 8% who do return end up becoming mothers; at age 36, the chance of pregnancy per IVF cycle in general is around 30-40%.

For many women, then, the decision to freeze their eggs is really a decision not to have children at all. We can assume, possibly, that they didn’t really want to: an insurance policy in case you change your mind on the off-chance is really on the off-chance. Perhaps most brisk, confident fitters-in of children among other priorities don’t change their minds. But it’s also hard not to see that the narrative of brisk, confident fitting-in is inimical to the motherhood project, which is messy and totalising, even when you “do it all”. The real cultural demand revealed by AOC’s videos is for an appreciation of that vulnerability, and an encouragement of a woman’s willingness to risk it. This could be fostered by greater support for motherhood — and by a partner in the frame.

And Chuck Palahniuk writes:

Philadelphia, 2019. An Uber is hauling me to the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and I ask the driver to name the best parts of Philly. A twenty-something black guy, he says, “I don’t think there are any good parts.” He clocks me in the rearview mirror and asks, “Are you the writer?” The young man pulls out his phone and hits a number, saying, “You have to talk to my mom. Her favourite movie is Fight Club.” He hands the phone to me in the backseat. 

In 2019, the film was already two decades old. This year, the book turns 30.

In 1999 the head of publicity at Twentieth Century Fox had told the director, David Fincher, “You’ve made a movie with so much male nudity that no man will want to see it, and so much blood that no woman will. You’ve made a movie that’s impossible to market.” Yet here I am laughing away with a middle-aged mother and her son who both came to love the story.

Maybe it’s because the story gave them permission to disregard all of the consumption and status static. “You are not your job.” “You are not your khakis.” These were memes before memes, and they flew in the face of a million Gap commercials. Lines like “May I never be perfect and complete” broke the stranglehold of demands the culture put on young people.

Maybe “self-improvement” as dictated by well-meaning cookie-cutter guidance councillors and college advisers never was the answer. Maybe “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” snapped readers out of the self-esteem messages they’d been force fed all their lives. Maybe they saw how such constant reassurances kept them from moving forward, and how emotional handholding came to stink of a lifelong panacea. Maybe “Deliver me from clever art” saved people from drowning in the era’s flood of David Letterman snark and irony and hinted that “clever” wasn’t enough.

National Public Radio once hosted me on a panel discussion where black academics and female academics dismissed Fight Club because it didn’t directly address the lives of racial minorities and women. Yet here I was in a car listening to a mother and her son who loved the story.

Another possibility? Fight Club was one of the few stories that told young people they’re mortal. You’re going to die. And the story didn’t just state that truth the way The Dead Poets Society took a bunch of prep school students and showed them old photos and declared, “These boys are all now food for worms.” No, Fight Club dropped us into the support group world of the Aids era, an age of mass dying, and made that sadness the “meet cute” of an old-school rom-com. The hero and heroine meet at the edge of an open grave, staring death in the face. Not since Harold and Maude had we seen Eros and Thanatos so romantically entwined.

To put all of this in a larger context: way back in 1949, the mythologist Joseph Campbell had given us the concept of “the hero’s journey”, the blueprint for so many movies, including Star Wars. Among Campbell’s concepts was the “secondary father”, the coach or teacher or boss or drill sergeant. After the first father, who must love and nurture the child, the secondary father can more sternly mentor the child toward greatness. For an example of the secondary mother, just watch The Devil Wears Prada and see how women fulfil the same role.

So Campbell gave us Star Wars and The Karate Kid, and, in 1990, Robert Bly gave us Iron John, the dry, sober seed for so much of the humourless men’s movement. Yet by the mid Nineties, Bly had thrown up his hands in surrender. Men were unruly, as were people in general nowadays, so in 1996 Bly wrote The Sibling Society to explain how all hierarchies of authority had broken down. No one stood above anyone else in the culture, and all teaching was now done peer-to-peer. Mind you, this is still a few years before social media, but Bly was already predicting “influencers” and “looksmaxxing” and the manosphere in general, where the flattened landscape of faceless “likes” does the teaching.

The year 1996 was also when W.W. Norton published Fight Club. It was the world of Maxim and Loaded magazines, football hooligans, Trainspotting and Snatch. So-called “lad culture”. In her 1991 book Backlash, Susan Faludi had described a male pushback against feminism, including a scene where she depicts Robert Bly as a cold tyrant, reinforcing traditional gender roles and abusing an elderly female acolyte of his. In 1996’s Sibling Society, Bly attacked Faludi’s version of events, and a public pissing match was on.

That was Nineties lad culture: the rowdy, moshing Backlash world became the kind of playpen that doesn’t want a stern secondary father. What the uncouth Sibling Society needed was… a trickster. We needed a Loki or Coyote or Hermes or Puck or Pan. And not the androgynous Pan of Disney’s Peter Pan, or a Pan played by tiny Mary Martin, what we needed was a reckless, wild, Dionysian Pan who could scare the pants off of you if you ventured into the forest at nighttime. 

Enter Tyler Durden. What my Uber driver and his mom loved was Tyler and his messaging and the knight’s errands of “homework” he assigned. Tyler was a buddy, not a father, and he acted on impulse. He spoke in memes, not the endless lectures of a Campbell or a Bly. Still, he nurtured without “mothering”, and he lived without the world’s approval and endless self-censoring. Tyler’s minions were the nameless “space monkeys” who were tired of aimless lives as atomised self-loving snowflakes. They no longer wanted to each be “beautiful and unique”. What they wanted was to be part of something.

In the Uber, on my way to Alcoholics Anonymous, laughing with the driver and his mom, didn’t I also want to be part of something? Clearly, drinking in my hotel room no longer worked. I wanted to surrender my will to a greater power.

Often, people most love the aspects of a story they can’t articulate. Years ago, for example, I asked the writer Ira Levin if his masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby wasn’t actually a metaphor for the generation of infants born deformed by Thalidomide? Wasn’t the horror people expressed in fact the horror they could not express over how the medical establishment had misled and mis-medicated so many trusting pregnant women? In the book, the baby is even described as having the classic features of a “flid”, as people shaped by Thalidomide often call themselves.

Levin was cagey. How could he answer truthfully? And perhaps he didn’t know what he’d written until after it was in print; often the best writers don’t. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, only a genius can combine the conscious and the subconscious. “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal… that is the genius in the man of genius.”

Which brings us to the oldest trick in the book, so to speak. A trick American readers adore, but only if it can be reinvented. Let’s call it the “martyr-murder-witness” trick. Of three main characters, the most obedient must commit suicide, the most rebellious must be killed, and the witnessing character must reject both those options and leave the scene to begin a new life. Think of Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, throwing herself in front of Gatsby’s speeding car. Myrtle is Jennifer North in Valley of the Dolls who overdoses, who is Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest who cuts his wrists, who is Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind who knows that birthing another child will kill her but gets pregnant anyway. The Good Boy or Girl always commits suicide. And that includes the doctor’s obedient son in The Dead Poets Society who shoots himself. Or the misled waif Terry Gionoffrio in Rosemary’s Baby, who leaps from a seventh-floor window.

Americans recognise this pattern and love it.

Immediately after the suicide, the most robust character is murdered. Sometimes, particularly when that character is female, she is banished, as Scarlett O’Hara and Neely O’Hara are banished in their stories, and the teacher played by Robin Williams is banished in Dead Poets. However, in most cases, the rebel, be he Jay Gatsby or Randle Patrick McMurphy or Edward Hutchins — or Tyler Durden — is murdered.

This leaves the witness to tell the tale. Nick Carraway hightails it back to the Midwest. Big Chief journeys back to his tribe. Rosemary Woodhouse embraces her strange-looking infant. For a heartbeat she weighs the idea of leaping from the window with the newborn, but finally surrenders herself to the cards she’s been dealt.

Whatever the case, Americans love the martyr-murder-witness formula, just so long as you tweak it to keep it fresh. And who can blame Americans? In a two-party political system, you’re either slave or master, so you’d better get accustomed to playing either. Those who can’t adapt to swift changes in power, they either kill themselves or they are killed. The magic in Fight Club was to distill this three-character formula down to a single character. The Good Boy narrator kills himself, thus murdering the Bad Boy, and leaving the fully integrated Witness.

A reconcilement of the external with the internal. The genius in the man of genius.

Maybe it’s that age-old formula — albeit tweaked — that’s made the book and film a classic. Whatever the case, it was a slow climb to the pantheon. Of the original five thousand hardcovers printed in 1996, most hadn’t sold by the time the film premiered in 1999. The film itself had a dismal theatrical run. Then 9/11 happened, and the image of skyscrapers crumbling cut too close to the bone. All puckish pranking and horseplay withered under the watchful eye of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The transgressive story, be it Fight Club or Trainspotting or The Monkey Wrench Gang, simply fell out of fashion.

Not that Fight Club resonated with everyone. On my first book tour in 1996, live on the radio, a male NPR host asked me, “Having written this book, Fight Club, what can you tell us about the state of the American woman in the world today?”

Colour me flabbergasted. I was silent for an eternity in live radio time. What did I know about being female or being black? My goal had been to write about the common experience of all my friends who were navigating into adulthood without either secondary mothers or fathers. The goal of Fight Club was never to depict an organisation that perpetuated its own power. Instead, I wanted to show how this little machine could create stronger individuals before the machine itself imploded. If just one person remained, stronger, more free, more self-determined, that would be worth all the Sturm und Drang.

The book was always about helping the individual. The little machine of Project Mayhem would be the secondary father.

In this world of constant poverty and addiction and injustice, to borrow a phrase, “I don’t think there are any good parts.”

But be that as it may, we can’t surrender to hopelessness or lash out in rage. That night in 2019 there were the three of us, this mother, her son and I, connected by a story. Each of us was doing their best, and we all had an imaginary friend in the form of Tyler Durden.

Maybe trickster Tyler is still around 30 years later to show us we always have options. If you’re reading this, you are still not dead.

Sounding The Alarm

Ed Pilkington writes:

Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as its 5,000 sailors and marines endure a record-breaking deployment at sea tied to the war with Iran.

Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.

Worried families vented their anxieties about loved ones onboard the Lincoln at an emotional town hall meeting with navy leaders in San Diego last Thursday, Stars and Stripes reported. One spouse among the 200 or so family members said that her husband had texted her that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”.

The families’ worries were expressed directly to navy leadership, represented at the town hall by the acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, and other top officials.

A woman at the meeting told Cao that the navy had “broken trust between us and the leadership”, the paper reported.

The Navy Times gave details of thwarted suicide attempts onboard the aircraft carrier during the current deployment. Annabelle Loma told the outlet that her husband had tried to jump overboard after his spell at sea kept being extended.

“He’s scared. He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out his 13-year career is ruined, just like that,” she said.

The paper quoted another sailor’s wife whose husband was involved in a separate incident onboard the Lincoln in which he prevented a fellow crew member from jumping, grabbing them and bringing them back on deck.

Mike Levin, a Democratic member of Congress from California, has sounded the alarm over conditions onboard the warship, which is in its fifth month of combat operations against Iran. He described the lot of the crew on X as “moldy showers, broken toilets, laundry down for weeks, long stretches with no hot water, a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. No soap, deodorant, or toothpaste.”

Jason Crow, a Democratic Congress member from Colorado who is a former army ranger having served in Afghanistan and Iraq, has warned that the strain on service members and their families on the Lincoln is “building week by week”.

The current crunch has been months in the making. The warship left San Diego on 21 November and was originally intended for the Pacific but was redirected to the Middle East once the US-Israel war with Iran began.

Since then, MS Now revealed, the 5,000-plus crew has had only two days on land, in Guam in December and Oman in July. The deployment was scheduled to end in May but has been extended a couple of times amid the ongoing war.

In April, there was a flurry of public criticism about dire conditions onboard the carrier. Photos emerged of poor-quality and rationed food, and there were reports of water shortages, moldy showers and broken laundry machines.

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, dismissed the accounts as “more fake news”.

Levin responded to Hegseth’s remark this week. He said: “These men and women signed up to serve their country. The least their country owes them is hot water, a working toilet and a real meal. Hegseth cannot even manage that, and he has the nerve to look their families in the eye and call them liars.”

The Guardian contacted the US navy for its response to reports of attempts to jump overboard. After this article was published, a navy official responded, saying that they were aware that “extended deployments place a significant strain on our service members and their families, and we are grateful for the resilience and sacrifices they make”.

The official said that the health and wellbeing of every Lincoln sailor was a priority: “Based on information available to the command, we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship.”

Religious, medical and mental health professionals were available as part of a “comprehensive support network” that included “onboard deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains”. The official recognised that the war had disrupted traditional supply hubs, but added that “current reports from the ship confirm continuous access to clean water, functional AC and healthy meal options”.

The mental health challenges faced by active-duty US navy personnel are well known. A study from last year looked at the unique stress factors faced by sailors on deployments and found the most common included loud noises, lack of rest, and inadequate mental and physical healthcare.

The researchers conducted a survey of deployed sailors and found that almost half complained that they were not receiving adequate help in coping with stress at sea. The study concluded that “given the high rates of military suicide, including within the navy, efforts to improve healthcare access on ships are urgently needed”.

And Larry C. Johnson writes:

The Guardian published an article on Wednesday reporting that multiple sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln have attempted to jump overboard as the ship’s deployment stretches into its ninth month and over 260 consecutive days at sea. According to the article:

Military families and Congress members are sounding the alarm about an intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as its 5,000 sailors and marines endure a record-breaking deployment at sea tied to the war with Iran.

Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, are reporting that there have been multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stresses on the Lincoln reach the breaking point. The crew is in its ninth month at sea, and has spent 250 days consecutively without making land – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times.

Pete Hegseth, the clown serving as Secretary of War, dismissed the complaints of the Navy families as “fake news.” The only liar here is Hegseth.

The Guardian article elicited a response from a good friend who recently retired from the Army. Here is what he sent me:

And finally the truth. This is making the rounds. If the Lincoln has 5,000 people on it and it hasn’t seen land in 38 weeks… they are starving, no packages, rationing coffee, waiting to die from a fucking Iranian hypersonic. They say the number is 6 attempts. Nearly a year at sea no land, etc. the real number of attempts is likely 5-fold or 10-fold.

You have more attempts at suicide on a NORMAL carrier operation. It’s just normal, a factor of statistics. That’s BEFORE being sent to your death on a purely political mission from someone who openly hates military members and thinks they are pussies for getting hurt or dying.

Six attempts sounds like a lot, but that number is WAY WAY too small. As an officer, like them, I have had to do a number of Army Regulation 15-6 Command Investigations on Soldiers committing suicide. All officers have, it’s a normal function. Suicide is a very real and stable number, too. And that’s while you are still in. They have no clue what’s waiting for them the first night they return home (or wherever) and they have time to spend alone thinking about it ALONE WITH NOTHING TO DISTRACT YOU EXCEPT YOUR ONLY FRIENDS JIM AND JACK (i.e., Jim Beam and Jack Daniels whiskey), Did you know they do roving patrols on all Navy ships called “fire-guard”? That term has become blanket use for all services. It means a rotating schedule to monitor the perimeter to make sure there are no…”fires”. Wrong…the guard is to prevent people from trying to kill themselves on the spot. “Fire guard” still happens today, in Army basic training, when you go to the field, when you go on exercise or deployment etc. it has nothing to do with a fire. Suicide is a part of daily life in the military.

Here’s another example: in the big units, such as 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne…if the unit makes it 82 or 101 days without a DUI everyone gets a 4 day weekend. Well, they never got over 3 weeks without one, regularly. So they had to increase the denominator to…suicides. Everyone gets a long weekend if we make it to 82 days without a suicide in OUR OWN UNIT. Guess how many days off there were? None. Had to change the denominator again…honestly. I think the new denominator was actually drugs. We may have made it to 82 days without someone CAUGHT AND CHARGED with using drugs in the barracks or whatever. Couldn’t make it to 82 days without a DUI or a suicide though.

I participated in initial invasion of Iraq on 26 March 2003. I just turned 44 and left active duty over a year ago. 44-20=24.

44 years old minus 20 equals 24 years of PTSD (from actually killing people…Wild West in those days) of divorces, a few loose suicide attempts, mostly big wave surfing in Hawaii where you don’t really expect to come back in. Granted I was an enlisted soldier in the invasion of Iraq, but then attended West Point and started an entire successful officer career AFTER THAT, including more combat deployments.

As I have mentioned before I am the class president of my West Point class and have been for 20 years or whatever, and so I have the numbers of dead from day 1 of West Point until now. Committing suicide at West Point is very regular. The preferred method since everyone is in pretty good shape and runs a lot is a run to Bear Mountain Bridge and then jumping. We had at least 5 commit suicide I think while I was there. And keep in mind they could have just quit and gone home for the most part. And then we lost some in combat particularly from 2009-2012 when everything heated up again post surge etc. but we have lost many more due to suicide, as officers. With families.

You know what one of the more “fun” decisions I get to make as class president? Where their names go and how they are placed on the class list. We have 3 demographics of dead classmates. Combat, suicide or non combat injuries (helo crash in training, etc).

I get to listen to and deal with everyone single one of my dead classmates’ families argue about should their name be on the list of “fallen in combat” if the majority either killed themselves while deployed in combat, killed themselves shortly after coming home from combat or many years later. You can imagine how emotional those conversations are.

Only 6 suicide attempts of 5,000 on an aircraft carrier that is a tinderbox of rage, frustration, and waiting on death? Multiple by 5, minimum. Eventually they end up just telling direct line supervisors if your sailor or soldier kills themself, it’s on YOU.

I also heard from the mother of a sailor who served on the USS Tripoli. She wrote:

I believe I told you I’ve been worried about the mental health of these sailors & marines aboard the navy ships at war. Why? Because they removed all chaplains off my sons ship, the USS TRIPOLI. They kicked them off in Diego Garcia, right before their last leg of trip to entering CENTCOM. This pisses me off. I called so many politicians and raised those alarm bells about their removals. I asked how many other chaplains were removed on other ships??? Again nobody would call me back or email me these answers. And here we are, sailors trying to commit suicide at war. Good GOD, Hegseth NEEDS TO BE FIRED! I guarantee you many military families aren’t aware that their loved ones chaplains were removed before going to war. This is a critical asset to have a chaplain while at war!!! They see so many gruesome things (casualties, kids and friends blown up) that is hard for any human to deal with. This infuriates me!!! Who the hell can get this message to blast on all news, Hegseth had NO business in removing those chaplains. Politicians need to demand his firing and immediately place chaplains back on every navy ship, especially at war.

This crisis is real and Donald Trump and his lame Secretary of War are doing nothing to address the problem.

The Wreckage Extends

They have lost even the Financial Times, in which Raya Jalabi and Aditi Bhandari write:

For three days in early January, Fadia Bazzi’s house in the southern Lebanese border town of Bint Jbeil was filled with laughter as her family gathered to ring in the new year.

When they all departed, Bazzi realised she had never photographed the house into which she poured her life’s savings. But that afternoon, looking at the glass walls that wrap over the rolling hills, she felt certain she was seeing it for the last time.

Halfway down the road, she turned, raised her phone and took a picture. Soon after, war returned to Lebanon, engulfing Bint Jbeil and emptying the town of its 30,000 residents.

Bazzi now fears that photo is all she will have left. Like most other towns along the de facto Israel-Lebanon border, Bint Jbeil has been devastated — first in clashes between Israel and Hizbollah and then by the Israeli forces who now occupy swaths of Lebanon’s south.

Scattered around the country, Bazzi and Lebanon’s nearly 1mn displaced people have been reduced to studying satellite imagery for glimpses of their homes. But from the haunting remove of the sky, Bint Jbeil and other border areas look like dusty grey scars across hills once dense with centuries-old villages, traditional stone houses and olive groves — a moonscape of pulverised concrete.

“We see nothing but destruction, the colour of ash,” Bazzi, who was displaced from Bint Jbeil by Israel as a child in the 1980s and longs to return for good, said from her rented Beirut apartment. She is still unsure of the extent of any damage to her house. “We have become prisoners of satellites, prisoners of maps, waiting.”

An FT visual investigation with journalism non-profit Lighthouse Reports found systematic destruction across Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, including tens of thousands of homes, schools, farmland and forests.

Analysis of satellite imagery, open-source data and verified footage shows that much of the damage occurred after Israeli forces established control over emptied villages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas uninhabitable, destroying systems needed for civilian life, from water and energy infrastructure to medical care, a tactic rights groups and legal experts say appears designed to prevent residents’ return.

“It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at rights group Amnesty International. “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”

Southern Lebanon has long borne the brunt of Israeli bombings and invasions, including before the rise of Shia militant group Hizbollah and the threat it posed to Israel’s northern communities.

But weeks into the latest conflict, defence minister Israel Katz invoked a different approach, one used with devastating consequences after Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack: the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model”, a reference to Israel’s wholesale levelling of cities in Gaza. “All homes in Lebanese villages near the border will be destroyed,” Katz said.

By July, Katz claimed his threat had been carried out. “Twenty-four Lebanese villages, hundreds of years old, we destroyed all the buildings,” he said, boasting that up to 20,000 homes had been demolished. “Not house by house, but entire villages.”

Israel presents its campaign as defensive: an effort to dismantle Hizbollah infrastructure, prevent the group from rebuilding near the frontier and protect communities in northern Israel. It has said its troops will continue to occupy a “security zone” and act against any threat for as long as the group remains present.

The Israeli government and military did not respond to requests for comment.

The war began on March 2, when Hizbollah fired on Israel in support of Iran days after the US and Israel launched their war against the Islamic republic. More than 4,300 people in Lebanon and more than 30 Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed in the fighting, according to local authorities.

Israeli evacuation orders forcibly displaced some 1.2mn people in the war’s first 10 days, the vast majority from Hizbollah-dominated southern Lebanon, as Israeli forces advanced.

Fighting raged for weeks, but most of the destruction documented by the FT and Lighthouse came after an initial Israel-Lebanon ceasefire on April 17. While the truce did not hold and some clashes have continued even past the latest ceasefire in June, Israeli forces — who had already established control over many emptied villages — continued to lay waste to the south through air strikes, controlled detonations, bulldozers and the use of white phosphorus.

Scrolling map of damage detected in the Israeli occupied zone along the border. Before the first ceasefire the damage was scattered throughout the region, focused on a handful of key towns. But after that ceasefire the damage spread to almost all population centres in areas under Israeli occupation.

Israel’s occupation is now deeply entrenched, the area under its control demarcated by what it calls “the yellow line”. The zone covers about 6 per cent of Lebanese territory and stretches roughly 10km inland from the two countries’ informal border.

Yet on the ground, it is a nebulous boundary with no official demarcations, and only one formal checkpoint on the coastal highway near Naqoura. Israel last week ordered residents of a village above the line to flee, before shelling it — the first such warning in weeks.

Israeli flags and Hebrew signs dot the area below the yellow line, while new outposts of the Israel Defense Forces have expanded in recent weeks.

On a trip to one stretch of the occupied area in late April, the FT saw entire villages with barely a building left standing: historic markets, squares and winding streets reduced to a sea of concrete. The sound of blasts, apparently from building demolitions, continued through the day.

According to Lebanese public research institute the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), 62 villages and farms fall inside the yellow line, with about 270,000 residents barred from returning.

Most communities within the zone are Shia, although a handful of sparsely populated Christian and Sunni villages remain. They have been less heavily damaged, though their residents have also reported killings, detentions and threats.

But long-neglected Shia towns such as Bint Jbeil, which became bastions of support for Hizbollah, have borne the brunt of the Israeli destruction.

Earlier cycles of Israeli invasion and occupation drove Bazzi’s family from the town to Beirut, leaving the town fixed in her memory as “the dream that did not grow up with me”. She would later write a novel drawing on her experience.

Returning in 2000 as Israel withdrew from its 18-year occupation, she found the family home left uninhabitable but the town’s dense weave of stone houses and alleyways largely intact.

After another conflict in 2006 reduced its centre to rubble, she and others nevertheless persuaded themselves that this would be “the last war” between Israel and Hizbollah, and poured their hopes into rebuilding.

This was despite the rise of Hizbollah as an increasingly dominant force, which narrowed the political and cultural diversity for which Bint Jbeil had been known. Bazzi, a journalist, ran unsuccessfully against the group in municipal elections in 2008 to highlight the town’s independent voices like hers.

On family land, Bazzi began building a house that she had painstakingly saved for. With large glass windows that overlooked the town and the hills beyond, it became a haven for her and her family.

Her dream is now being dismantled. She has watched countless videos of the destruction, some posted by the IDF, others sent by people in nearby villages. Last month she recognised her parents’ neighbourhood being blown up in a controlled detonation. Their house lay outside the frame and she does not know whether it survived.

“Israel is not only destroying stone,” said Bazzi. “Every shell and every air strike is killing part of our soul, part of our memories, part of our childhood, part of our history.”

Bazzi’s childhood home was left damaged and uninhabitable after the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation, her grandmother’s home was destroyed in the 2024 war and her Bint Jbeil home, which appears to be standing but she is unable to assess the extent of any damage.

CNRS estimates that almost 85,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed in the south — likely an undercount as at least 20 to 30 per cent of buildings have yet to be assessed amid ongoing Israeli attacks.

Satellite analysis by the FT and Lighthouse across Khiam, Taybeh, Bint Jbeil and Haddatha found clearance beyond isolated buildings and town centres, encompassing almost entire municipalities. In some areas, the damage radiated outwards over time.

The FT has found evidence of controlled detonations and demolitions by Israeli forces and civilian contractors in dozens of border communities.

Verified footage shows heavy machines and excavators clearing areas — machinery produced and sold by companies including Caterpillar and Volvo, according to FT analysis and the CNRS. Caterpillar did not respond to a request for comment, while Volvo said it had limited control over how its products were ultimately used but worked to prevent their “misuse”.

Israel has also done extensive damage to historic monuments and Unesco-listed sites, including 16th-century mosques, 19th-century libraries, religious shrines, ancient Roman ruins and Crusader castles.

“It is an attempt to make the areas unrecognisable . . . to sever people’s connection to their land and their history,” said Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly of Biladi, an organisation dedicated to preserving Lebanon’s cultural heritage. “How can they rebuild their communities if everything is gone?”

The Israeli campaign builds on methods used during a previous war with Hizbollah in 2024, when Israeli forces carried out air strikes and controlled demolitions despite a ceasefire that nominally brought the conflict to an end.

This time, they have been applied across a wider area and on a far greater scale, targeting not just the roofs over people’s heads but the water, energy, roads, schools, agriculture and healthcare needed to sustain communities. Lebanese authorities are operating under the assumption that anything below the yellow line has been completely destroyed.

That includes at least 2,500km of the infrastructure used to collect, store and carry water to homes and businesses, from pipelines to boreholes, according to figures from the local authorities and the CNRS.

Some were directly struck; others damaged by nearby blasts, according to officials, engineers and NGOs. Solar panels that power water systems have been targeted directly on several occasions, such as those that support the community well in the Christian village of Debel on April 26.

“Water is the most important element for life to return to south Lebanon,” said Sonia Ben Salem of Action Against Hunger, which has verified damage done to hundreds of sites via satellite. “Without it, we cannot see a massive return to those areas.”

Israel has also destroyed all of the bridges over the Litani river — only two of which have been partially repaired since — and laid waste to agricultural areas. More than 20 per cent of south Lebanon’s farmland and forests have been destroyed, according to the agriculture ministry, which has also accused Israel of removing trees.

The country’s ancient olive groves have been worst affected, officials say. They have long sustained both identity and economy in southern Lebanon, which produces about 40 per cent of the nationwide harvest. Tens of thousands of trees need replanting.

Lebanon’s environment ministry and rights groups have documented Israel’s widespread use of white phosphorus — an incendiary chemical that triggers fires and can leave contamination in soil and water — in both populated and agricultural areas. Israel says it uses white phosphorus lawfully to clear brush and create smokescreens, but use over populated areas can violate international law.

The ministry has also accused Israel of spraying herbicides over 2,000 hectares of agricultural land throughout the past three years of conflict, based on soil samples gathered in border areas — acts it says amount to “ecocide”.

The destruction has also hollowed out medical care, with dozens of healthcare facilities damaged or destroyed by air strikes.

Lebanon’s health ministry says 135 healthcare professionals have been killed on duty, many in so-called double-, triple- and quadruple-tap strikes. These target the same location minutes or hours after the first attack, often hitting medics and civilians who arrive to help victims.

Insecurity Insight, which tracks attacks on healthcare globally, documented more than 30 such incidents. The FT and Lighthouse Reports verified and geolocated footage of 10 of them.

Israel says it does not target healthcare workers or facilities but alleges that Hizbollah uses ambulances, hospitals and other healthcare sites for military activity. But officials, diplomats and NGOs say Israel rarely provides evidence for specific allegations.

“The law is very clear on this,” Insecurity Insight’s director Christina Wille said. “Paramedics going about their business saving the wounded . . . are protected from intentional attack,” even if they are affiliated with Hizbollah. “The only moment where they lose their protection is when they conduct acts harmful to the enemy.”

Since October 7, Israel has seized about 1,000 sq km from neighbouring Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, relocating populations and creating wastelands within these so-called buffer zones.

One rightwing Israeli newspaper has called its approach the “rubble doctrine”.

This doctrine “depends on its ability to act proactively and without restraint against threats before they’ve fully emerged, especially outside its borders”, said Nathan Brown, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University.

“This is a new approach which has meant . . . reconfiguring territories and populations through military action rather than seeking diplomatic arrangements,” Brown said.

In Lebanon, the wreckage extends beyond combat damage or sites Israel claims are Hizbollah infrastructure to the broad clearance of villages under Israel’s effective control. This type of destruction would be governed by the more restrictive law of occupation, said Janina Dill, an Oxford university expert on the law and ethics of war.

Under this, an occupying power may destroy civilian property only where required by “imperative military necessity”. A general claim that Hizbollah might return and use civilian structures in the future would not be enough, Dill said: “It’s deeply implausible that imperative military necessity applies to every house in a particular village.”

Preventing the return of civilians who have been forcibly displaced would also amount to a war crime, said Amnesty’s Beckerle. More than 400,000 displaced people have returned south, according to Lebanon’s government, but many remain displaced and others were “staying with friends, family or in damaged structures with lacking services”, Beckerle said.

For months, Lebanon and Israel have been engaged in US-brokered talks, with an ostensible goal of IDF withdrawal and eventual peace. But these have made little difference on the ground, as Israeli forces continue to demolish villages and set orchards ablaze, unfettered.

The negotiations have also enraged many Lebanese, who feel the state is helpless to stop the destruction of their homes. Bazzi, meanwhile, is still waiting to learn how much remains of hers.

“Our people used to say long ago: ‘If only a bird would bring me news,’” she said. But “even the birds are no longer there above the south and above Bint Jbeil. There is no one left to bring us news.”

And over in The Guardian, William Christou writes:

Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing.

Environmental groups said the fires in recent weeks were part of a longstanding Israeli practice of targeting Lebanon’s natural environment.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped flares in a wooded area outside Khiam, in south Lebanon, sparking blazes. When firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, a drone struck close by, forcing them to withdraw, said the head of the civil defence in the Nabatieh region, Hussein Fakih.

“Most of our missions are now related to fires,” Fakih said. “There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30-40% of the land has been affected by fires.”

The Israeli military has caused fires across south Lebanon, in particular in olive groves and on agricultural land, according to videos and testimony from emergency services, in the nearly two-months since the 17 June ceasefire that mostly ended fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

“They started doing this right after the ceasefire, and there have been incendiary bombs every day,” Fakih said. “Small drones come out and drop incendiary materials, [white] phosphorus shells are fired at the woodlands, in addition to illumination flares that they drop during the daytime so the vegetation catches fire.”

Firefighters and residents of other areas in south Lebanon describe similar blazes being started by Israeli munitions and drones in dry scrub and woodlands. On Friday, Israeli munitions created large wildfires in two heavily forested areas, in Kfarchouba, close to the border, and between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley.

The civil defence station chief in the area, Samir Hardan, said a fire was started near Kfarchouba on Friday afternoon after a drone dropped a munition in woodlands. After battling blazes overnight and extinguishing them on Saturday, a second drone started another fire on Sunday, Hardan said.

Firefighters are required to coordinate their movements with the Lebanese army, which relays their request to a “deconfliction” group that includes the Israeli military. They were given permission to fight the fires at only two spots, and not other areas where fires were raging.

According to environmental groups, the fires are part of a pattern of Israeli attacks against Lebanon’s environment that threaten the country’s woodlands and the biodiversity they support.

Hisham Younes, the founder of Green Southerners, a Lebanese conservation organisation, said: “These are long-established woodlands, dominated by productive stone pine alongside oak. They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds.”

Younes called the Israeli attacks an ecocide. “It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate and sustain life. When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.”

Since fighting started on 8 October 2023 when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in solidarity with the Hamas-led attack a day earlier, Israel has repeatedly targeted Lebanon’s woodlands.

The Israeli military has said in the past that Hezbollah used these forested areas as cover for its fighters and its tunnels.

Ecologists and rights groups have said fires and other forms of widespread environmental destruction will have wider effects on civilian populations.

Asked for comment on each of the recent wildfire incidents, the Israeli military said its operations were “conducted while taking precautionary measures to mitigate harm to civilians and the environment”.

It is not the first time Israeli forces have been reported to have set fires deliberately. In the summer of 2024, Israeli troops used trebuchets – medieval catapults – to fling flaming debris over its border wall with Lebanon, while the Lebanese army published photos of Israeli drones that carried hoses that doused forests in flammable materials.

Health and environmental experts raised the alarm in February when Israeli planes dropped herbicides linked to cancer on farms in south Lebanon.

Besides the environmental and health consequences of these fires, residents of south Lebanon have mourned the loss of the green spaces in the villages where they grew up.

On 1 August, displaced residents of the border village of Yaroun found their olive and fruit groves, as well as their homes, had been set ablaze by occupying Israeli troops. People living in the nearby Christian towns of Rmeich and Aïn Ebel, among the few villages near the border not emptied out by the Israeli military, sent pictures of the fires.

Hafez Ghasham, the mayor of Yaroun, said: “They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees – large groves, with very old olive trees. They started there, then the fire spread along the outskirts of the village.”

People in Yaroun had already watched in previous months as all but 20 of the 900 houses in the village were bulldozed by the Israeli military. They pooled resources to buy expensive satellite imagery of the village during their displacement.

Ghasham said: “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village.

“They are trying to make the land uninhabitable. They are erasing our entire history, our entire culture, all our memories. Maybe the idea is that after some time, it will look as though nobody had ever lived here.”

Common Good Conservatism

Conn Carroll writes:

It was just two words in a 6,500-word magazine piece. But they reignited a growing disagreement among conservatives about the direction of the Republican Party.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to the New York Times, is now promoting the “common good” over “individual liberty.”

“How you approach the common good will tell you where you are on today’s conservative spectrum,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary associate professor Andrew T. Walker said, responding to the story on X. “The thicker one’s conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing.”

Over 260,000 people have since viewed Walker’s post.

Later, at the Daily Wire, Walker expanded on his two sides of the conservatism debate.

“On one side stands what I’ll call ‘drag queen conservatism,’” Walker wrote, “the view that a genuinely free society will inevitably produce things many of its citizens find repugnant, and that tolerating them is the price of liberty.”

“On this account, the state’s job is to maintain the playing field, not referee it,” Walker continued. “Neutrality is the highest political good; government lets its citizens order their lives however they want, and any political movement that seeks to advance a substantive vision of virtue eventually migrates into authoritarianism.”

He contrasted that with what he called “social cohesion conservatism,” “the view that government can, at some level, administer a thicker vision of human flourishing from the top down; that government exists to make possible the conditions in which the good can be achieved equally by all.”

Walker’s framing of “drag queen conservatism” versus “social cohesion conservatism” is a little unfair, but he has hit on a growing dividing line among conservatives. A fairer framing might be “autonomy conservatives” versus “common good conservatives,” and the issues that divide them extend far beyond drag queen story hours.

The Daily Wire’s own editor-in-chief, Brent Scher, for example, supports online gambling and apparently believes conservatives should generally permit activities that voters decide are “fun.” Scher does draw lines. Meth and child pornography are out, according to him. But pornography and online gambling are apparently acceptable exercises of adult freedom.

This position has a long and proud history in the conservative movement, and Milton Friedman gave it its most intellectually serious expression. Like Scher, Friedman supported the legalization of gambling, drugs, and pornography, framing his philosophy as “the maximum freedom for each individual to follow his own ways, his own values, as long as he doesn’t interfere with anybody else who’s doing the same.”

The difficulty with this principle is that many of the gravest social harms do not take the form of one person directly injuring another. They accumulate gradually, across millions of nominally voluntary choices, until the institutions on which liberty itself depends begin to weaken.

When your guiding principle is “maximum freedom” for the individual “as long as he doesn’t interfere with anybody else,” it becomes difficult to justify government coercion against industries whose harms are real but diffuse.

Gambling, pornography, and drugs can all be defended as voluntary transactions between consenting adults. Yet the cumulative consequences of those transactions can reach far beyond the people immediately participating in them.

Online gambling is a good example. It is especially harmful to young men, who are disproportionately prone to problem gambling. Legalization is associated with lower savings and investment, more credit card debt and overdrafts, declining credit scores, and increases in bankruptcies and loan delinquencies. The damage is greatest when betting is available instantly online, turning every smartphone into a 24-hour casino. For young men who should be building savings, careers, and families, online gambling instead encourages addiction, debt, and financial instability.

Marijuana use, particularly when begun young, is associated with impaired attention and memory, cannabis-use disorder, and increased risk of serious psychiatric problems; young men with cannabis-use disorder appear especially vulnerable to schizophrenia.

Pornography use, meanwhile, is associated with depression, anxiety, loneliness, lower life satisfaction, and sexual problems, although researchers caution that some of these relationships are associative rather than clearly causal. Like online gambling, both industries exploit instant digital access to turn potentially habit-forming behavior into an always-available product, encouraging young men to retreat from work, relationships, and family formation rather than invest in them.

The common-good argument is not that every unhealthy behavior should be prohibited. It is that government may legitimately distinguish between ordinary private vice and commercial industries whose business models depend upon cultivating addiction, exploiting weakness, and undermining institutions that the state has an independent interest in preserving.

Gambling, porn, and pot are not the only reasons record-high numbers of young men between the ages of 18 and 44 are not married, but they are a big factor. And our nation’s record-low marriage rates are the reason fertility rates are also at record lows. Collectively, we are simply not projecting ourselves into the future.

Autonomy conservatives can lament these trends, too. But autonomy conservatism has no satisfying political answer to them. If each individual choice producing a decline in marriage and family is presumptively beyond the reach of government, collective decline becomes little more than the aggregate expression of private preference. And if some young men are too weak to avoid the dangers of gambling, porn, and pot, that is an acceptable outcome for autonomy conservatives — we can just import more young men through mass migration, which Friedman also supported.

Our Founding Fathers took a different approach.

“The aim of every political Constitution is or ought to be first to obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 57, “and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”

John Adams made the same principle explicit in the Massachusetts Constitution: “Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man.”

Adams also understood that the common good depended upon institutions that existed long before government. “The foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families,” he wrote in his diary. “In vain are Schools, Academies and universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years.”

The founders were deeply suspicious of concentrated government power over conscience and religion. The Constitution prohibited religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment denied Congress the power to establish a national religion. But none of this meant that the founding generation regarded government as neutral between virtue and vice. Their political thought assumed that republican liberty depended upon habits and institutions — especially family, religion, and civic virtue — that government could legitimately protect.

Nor was this merely abstract philosophy. Governments throughout the early republic routinely regulated conduct they believed threatened public morality and social order. States restricted gambling, alcohol, prostitution, obscenity, and commercial activity on Sundays. Marriage itself was heavily regulated because it was understood not merely as a private contract between two autonomous individuals but as a social institution essential to the raising of children and continuation of society.

When pornography became a mass commercial product, Congress restricted its distribution through the mail. Gambling was also heavily regulated. Although many of the original states authorized lotteries for particular public purposes, private gambling was restricted in various ways, with Virginia limiting it in certain establishments and Massachusetts prohibiting forms of dice and card gambling.

The founders may not have supplied a precise formula for defining the common good, but they plainly rejected the idea that maximizing individual autonomy was the highest purpose of government. Where private appetites threatened family stability or social order, they understood government to have a legitimate role in restraining them.

That does not mean common-good conservatism supplies an automatic answer to every political question. Nor does it mean that every vice should be outlawed or that government can manufacture virtue from Washington. Prudence, constitutional limits, and the dangers of state power all still matter.

But the disagreement becomes unavoidable when private choices impose diffuse social costs. Drugs, gambling, pornography, commercial surrogacy, marriage penalties, and immigration all force conservatives to confront the same underlying question. Autonomy conservatives begin with a strong presumption against coercion and generally demand evidence of direct harm to others. Common-good conservatives are more willing to ask whether an industry, institution, or policy strengthens or corrodes the social conditions upon which ordered liberty depends.

The question dividing conservatives, then, is not whether liberty matters. It is whether liberty is the highest political good, or whether it must sometimes yield to the conditions that make a free society possible in the first place: strong families, social order, and a people willing to reproduce themselves.

The founders understood that distinction. Conservatives today should, too. A conservatism devoted only to maximizing individual choice may succeed in protecting liberty from government while allowing the social institutions that make liberty possible to disappear.

It’s A Third World After All

Alex Bronzini-Vender writes:

Wokeness is dead. Or rather, per the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, it is “morphing into something else.” But what? Few are better positioned to say than Rufo, who led the conservative campaign against “critical race theory.” That “something else,” he wrote in March, is “third worldism.” Whereas wokeness was, as he warned several months later, about “changing white psychology” and “redistributing mostly emotional goods and services to oppressed groups,” Third Worldism has a “harder, more classically Marxist edge”—namely, “coerced direct wealth transfers from the bad guys (e.g., middle-class white families) to the good guys (e.g., impoverished Third World immigrants).” The left, in other words, has moved on from demanding you confess to your privilege. Now it demands restitution.

Rufo, who admires El Salvador’s gangbusting strategies as templates for American law enforcement, might think twice before diagnosing anyone else with fetishism of the third world. Still, he is far from the only right-wing intellectual to have settled on Third Worldism as the next front in the American culture war. “Years ago I worried that wokeism might be followed by something worse yet,” writes the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in Bari Weiss’s Free Press. And now, sure enough, “the ideology of ‘third worldism’ is on the rise.” The Manhattan Institute’s Daniel Di Martino concurs, though his definition of the term is more idiosyncratic: In his view, “Third Worldism is the belief that you’re entitled to use public spaces without any responsibility to care for them.” And a report from Marco Rubio’s State Department, an apparent effort to manufacture a casus belli against the Republic of Cuba, deems Third Worldism “a formal pillar of Cuban state ideology” and “a deliberate foreign policy strategy.”

The right cannot quite agree on what Third Worldism means. Is it a synonym for urban disorder, in Di Martino’s sense? A successor to wokeness? Are Third Worldists seeking to reconfigure American domestic policy, or foreign policy, or both? Are they sincere or cynically using the Palestinian cause to manipulate gullible liberals? They can scarcely agree upon how to render the term: Is it “Third Worldism,” “third worldism,” or “Third-Worldism”? If the phrase were meant to do what critical race theory did—persuade and mobilize voters—that incoherence would be fatal. But persuasion may not be the point.

Trump has spent his second term inventing epithets for his enemies (“dumbocrats,” “panicans,” and the like) that reveal little beyond his contempt for them. But Third Worldism, for all its incoherence, is the first true culture-war coinage of the second Trump era. The defining project of this administration is to collapse the distinction between the right’s domestic and foreign enemies, and to construct a single threat that can be pursued at home and abroad with equal ferocity. Domestic Third Worldists are, in Rubio’s telling, nothing more than local agents of a global conspiracy. And an enemy that is foreign in origin can be treated with the same tools usually reserved for enemies beyond America’s borders. Rubio has promised terrorist designations of left-wing groups “soon”; the White House has pledged to treat “far-left extremism” with “the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.” Whatever its persuasive power—and that seems limited—the term can be expected to play an increasingly prominent role in American political discourse.

The State Department’s report defines Third Worldism as a quasi-Marxist ideology in which the “revolutionary agent” is “no longer the industrial proletariat, but the colonized nations and peoples of the Global South.” But the most prolific champion of the term as an instrument of abuse, for now, is Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute. In October 2025, she wrote her first missive on the subject, a Substack post dissecting Zohran Mamdani’s then-ongoing rise to power. Mamdani, Riboua writes, is neither a socialist nor an Islamist. Instead, he’s something more exotic: an heir to “Third-Worldism,” the anti-colonial academic tradition of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. “Third-Worldism,” according to Riboua, is “a postcolonial moral project” that “recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.” And Riboua, who is Moroccan and Berber, claims a special ability to spot the ideology, having grown up “amid the lingering echoes of decolonization.” Armed with this diagnosis, Riboua finds Third Worldism everywhere in Mamdani’s politics. His housing agenda stems from his view that landlords are colonizers and tenants the colonized; his (alleged) opposition to policing, from his view of the NYPD as colonial occupiers.

Above all, there is Israel. Hatred of Israel and of America, she thinks, “precedes and shapes” the economic grievances animating the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Mamdani hates Israel, moreover, because he hates America. “Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project,” she wrote in January. And “when politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice.” For this reason, “the decolonial imagination cannot register October 7 as an atrocity on its own terms.” Riboua, the anti-woke pundit, is clearly indebted to her intellectual enemies. “The decolonial imagination” is a stock construction of academic prose, lending an air of theory to whatever fills in the blank. It’s a conveniently empty phrase: Who, exactly, is doing the imagining? Certainly not Mamdani, who called October 7 a “horrific war crime.” But then, that’s the beauty of attributing a belief to an abstraction: Abstractions never talk back.

The evidence Riboua marshals for this thesis can be strikingly thin. “Even yesterday,” she offered on a podcast interview with the president of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “he was siding with Egypt against Argentina”—in a World Cup match, that is. “As a mayor you have so many problems, especially in a place like New York,” she continued. “But the fixation is constantly towards these either foreign conflicts or symbolic conflicts, because it’s a tool to politically mobilize people.” Even the mayor’s rooting interests, it seems, betray an anti-Western moral creed.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp observes, Riboua’s imagined Mamdani—a crusader against America itself—bears little resemblance to the real Mamdani, whose Fourth of July address this year included paeans to our “grand experiment in self-governance.” And it’s difficult to read Mamdani’s mayoralty as one where a monomaniacal focus on the Middle East “precedes” a socialist economic agenda. Mamdani chose to reappoint Jessica Tisch, a standard-bearer of New York’s pro-Israel establishment, as police commissioner. Why? Almost certainly because power brokers in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul chief among them, had recommended that he do so. Mamdani seems to believe that conceding on his pro-Palestinian agenda strengthens his hand in Albany, where he needs to negotiate his economic program. (The mayor of New York City lacks authority to impose new taxes on the wealthy, a campaign promise.) Mamdani might just as easily have conceded on the economics to push harder on his pro-Palestinian agenda. But he’s done the opposite—not what you’d expect of a Third-Worldist mayor obsessed with foreign conflict.

Rufo’s account is, to his credit, supple enough to accommodate Mamdani’s moderation. He disagrees with Riboua about the Third-Worldist project’s sincerity. Leftists, he thinks, are cynically harnessing the Palestinian cause to win domestic political power. “The ultimate Third Worldist ambition,” he writes, has little to do with Palestine itself. “Palestinians are mostly a tool for manipulating domestic politics” in far-left cities. In the end, it’s “fundamentally about money.”

But Rufo, too, seems unsure who or what he’s actually aiming at. The point of Third Worldism, he says, is to “secure a wealth transfer, or lifestyle subsidy” in “expensive cities.” Yet the abortive Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, whom Rufo named in March as one of the project’s chief evangelists, won nearly every county of America’s second-least-urbanized state in June’s primary. How did the champion of an urban project get nominated by a coalition of rural Democrats?

Even on Rufo’s terms, it’s hardly a coherent story. “Whereas woke was about culture, ideology, and aesthetics,” he writes, “Third Worldism champions coerced confiscatory taxes, wealth transfers, and race-based reparations.” But the word “reparations” appears six times in his 2023 book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Even Rufo’s sympathizers will find little that is new in what he presents as the most alarming recent developments on the American left.

The basic patterns of the campaign, selecting an obscure academic term and presenting it as telos of the American left, call to mind Rufo’s earlier campaign against critical race theory. Still, Third Worldism wasn’t conjured from nothing: It’s a real tendency on the American left, if a marginal one. Where the State Department’s report takes inventory of the Third-Worldist presence in America, such as it is, it finds a handful of tiny groups. There’s the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the oddball micro-party whose presidential candidates tend to draw a few hundredths of a percent. There’s Code Pink, an antiwar group, which figures among the “Third Worldist organizations” that “serve as natural (and often willing) vectors for subversive foreign influence.” But the group’s most recent filings report just seventeen employees, $2.9 million in expenses, and just $1.79 million in revenues. Then there’s the National Lawyers Guild, “one of the most persistently relevant—and insidious—organizations in Cuba’s US network.” In 2024, its most recent filing, the group reported $827,926 in revenues against $1,097,397 in expenses. These groups, the report alleges, “collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” If Havana really is buying the American left, it’s getting a bargain.

The closest analogs to Third Worldism are Bush-era coinages like “Islamofascism” or the “Axis of Evil,” terms conservatives set aside in the 2010s in favor of enemies closer to home. But Third Worldism is more ambitious than any of its predecessors. Where wokeness named a domestic enemy and the Axis of Evil a foreign one, Third Worldism collapses the distinction entirely. And what the term collapses in theory, the administration has collapsed in practice. Last autumn, immigration agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter onto the roof of a Chicago apartment building, marching its zip-tied residents out in various states of undress. Months later, the administration arrested a foreign head of state, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, under U.S. criminal law. The administration polices American cities as though at war, and makes war abroad as though it were policing—a formation the historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls the “Homeland Empire.” Third Worldism supplies the Homeland Empire with its ideal enemy, one that lives here but answers to puppet masters abroad.

Across a hundred pages, Rubio’s report on Cuba recasts the domestic spread of Third Worldism as no homegrown development at all, but the product of a sixty-seven-year-long Cuban campaign to “turn Americans into instruments of their own nation’s undoing.” “The George Floyd riots,” “the rise of Antifa,” and the “explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses” can each “be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.” It traces sympathy for the Palestinians, in particular, to Havana: An “affinity for the cause of ‘Palestinian liberation,’” the report explains, “was embedded in the founding anti-imperialist and anti-Western creed of the Cuban Revolution itself” and flows into the United States through the regime’s network of left-wing organizations and their partners in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.”

It’s an attractive story. If Israel’s waning popularity in the United States is really just the product of Cuban influence, conservatives are relieved of the harder questions: Why has Israel’s standing declined among the young, among a growing share of American Jews, and even among Republicans themselves? Its believers are excused from reckoning with Israel’s conduct. In the view of the State Department, the children of the West have simply been seduced by Cubans and Iranians into “turning against their own inheritance.”

There’s another reason to expect the term Third Worldism to stick around: The right needs it. In the first year of his second term, Trump invested much of his political capital in the shock-and-awe campaign against the imagined cores of liberal power: the administrative state, higher education, media, big law, and so on. That campaign extracted substantial concessions from liberal institutions but fell well short of snuffing out liberalism writ large. Instead, the American left seems more energetic than ever. Left-wing insurgents have romped through Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., New York, Colorado, and Michigan. To admit that campaign largely failed would be to admit the second Trump presidency has itself been a failure. So either Trump failed to defeat the enemy—unthinkable—or the enemy has found new, foreign patrons to replace its defeated domestic ones.

Since the Soviet Union’s global power began waning, the right has missed nothing so much as a credible story about foreign interference in American life. Visions of sallow men in Moscow pulling the strings of the civil rights movement kept conservatives energized for decades. But by the eighties, as the Soviet Union visibly struggled to project power even within its own territory, such theories grew implausible. And while some American conservatives recognized the need to modernize their conception of the enemy, others struggled even more valiantly to keep the foreign-influence story alive.

As the writer John Ganz observes, Rubio’s Riboua-inspired campaign against Third Worldism bears an uncanny resemblance to the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, formed by Strom Thurmond in 1981. The committee, chaired by freshman senator Jeremiah Denton, set out to prove that the American left was an appendage of the Soviet Union, with Cuba’s intelligence service as the crucial intermediary between American left-wingers and their international handlers. Its star witnesses were the journalist Claire Sterling, whose book The Terror Network posited a Moscow-directed web of global terrorism, and Arnaud de Borchgrave, an ex-Newsweek correspondent who had come to believe that his own firing was evidence of KGB penetration of the American press.

De Borchgrave told the subcommittee that the whole terrorist enterprise had been set in motion at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana—a claim, Ganz notes, that Rubio’s new Cuba report recycles almost verbatim. According to a 1981 New York Times opinion piece, De Borchgrave also predicted, citing unnamed sources, that Castro and Arafat were planning to destabilize American inner cities through their “racial assets”; the Rubio report’s attempt to tie Black Lives Matter to Cuban intelligence is much the same prophecy.

The makings of a “little red scare,” Ganz observes, were in motion. But the project ultimately flopped. The most knowledgeable witness the subcommittee called, former CIA director William Colby, testified that “the Soviets are not directly directing the orchestra.” When the Johnson administration went looking for the foreign puppet masters behind the antiwar movement, he recalled, its own intelligence agencies reported back that there weren’t any.

The paleoconservative and white supremacist intellectual Sam Francis was a staffer on the subcommittee, and the failure of this effort to renew the culture war led him to conclude that theories of foreign influence were a dead end for the right. The right’s true enemies, he decided, were closer to home: the credentialed, college-educated managerial elite. It was this project, locating the enemy domestically, that animated Rufo’s campaign against wokeness in the early 2020s. Now, though, the right is unlearning the lessons of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism.

These theories of third-world influence, Ganz writes, failed even when the Soviet Union was there to make them plausible. Today’s go-around is even less likely than its predecessor to convert anyone beyond the already faithful: The framework’s proponents can hardly define their noun. And if Rufo expects Third Worldism to move voters the way critical race theory did, he’ll be disappointed. In February, for the first time in the quarter century that Gallup has asked the question, more Americans said their sympathies lie with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Barely three in ten approve of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. And the shift has reached the right’s own ranks: 57 percent of Republicans under fifty now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points over the last year.

Still, Third Worldism may not need to persuade anyone at all. Rubio’s report struggles with the question of what, but not with the matter of who. It contains striking detail on the various organizations it alleges are complicit in the Third-Worldist conspiracy: Code Pink, the National Lawyers Guild, the DSA, and The People’s Forum, a Manhattan community center, and many more. (The report finds the latter group to be not just “pro-Cuban” but “anti-Trump.”) Already, the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed the community center, alongside BreakThroughNews, a China-friendly—though First Amendment-protected—news outlet. The campaign to cleanse Third Worldism from American life is beginning. It’s an ironic turn. If the right succeeds, American institutions will come to resemble nothing so much as those of the Third World the right has invented.