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The Three Adults Who Abandoned Me—And Taught Me Life’s Most Important Lesson Oliver Wiseman

Published

11 months ago

February 20, 2024

Rob Henderson, age 7. (Image courtesy of Rob Henderson)

Today from The Free Press: Ten headlines you need to know. Sam Quinones on the latest teen overdose and the fentanyl epidemic. Plus: The Democrats’ vibe shift on Joe Biden, and more.

First, we are proud to share an exclusive excerpt from Free Press columnist Rob Henderson’s stunning new memoir, Troubled. In it, he describes his heartbreaking childhood—and how it taught him the most important lesson of his life.

Here’s Rob on “The Three Adults Who Abandoned Me”:

My full name is Robert Kim Henderson.

Each of my three names was taken from a different adult. Robert was the name of my biological father, who abandoned my mother and me when I was a baby. I have no memory of him. In fact, the only information I have about him is contained in a document given to me by the social worker responsible for my case when I was being shuffled around to different foster homes in Los Angeles.

My middle name, Kim, is from my birth mother. It was her family name. She succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born, rendering her unable to care for me. I have only two memories of her. I haven’t seen her since I was a child.

And my last name: Henderson, which comes from my former adoptive father. After my adoptive mother separated from him, he severed ties with me to get back at her for leaving him. He figured that this would hurt me, and that my emotional pain would transmit to my adoptive mother. He was right.

These three adults have something in common: all abandoned me. None took responsibility for my upbringing. When I was in foster care, doctors, psychologists, social workers, and teachers would often use the word troubled to describe me and the other kids who were overlooked, abandoned, abused, or neglected.

I grew up poor, encountered the middle class in the military, and later found myself surrounded by affluence at Yale. In Troubled I describe what it was like to come from a deprived and dysfunctional background and move up the American status ladder. I have learned a lot about those who sit at or near the apex of that ladder, which led me to develop the concept of “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting damage on the lower classes. Ideas such as monogamy and marriage are outdated, or that we should “defund the police.”

The people who get damaged are the ones I grew up with. Two of my childhood friends landed in prison, and another one would have, but he was shot to death first. Studies indicate that in the U.S., 60 percent of boys in foster care are later incarcerated, while only 3 percent graduate from college. This is the story of how I became part of that 3 percent.

To keep reading, click here.

Ten Stories We’re Reading Now

Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia, said he was murdered by Putin, and vowed to continue his work building a free Russia. (Scroll down for her full statement.)

Trump-supporting truckers have vowed to “shut New York City down” in a protest against the $355 million fine the former president has to pay in his civil fraud case. (New York Post)

The Houthis say they shot down a U.S. drone and that a ship they hit may sink. (Reuters)

More than 100 Yale faculty members called on the school to make teaching distinct from activism. (Yale Daily News)

Polyamory is the latest elite fad. (The Atlantic)

Having flirted with the idea for months, Joe Manchin says he won’t run for president. (Semafor)

Julian Assange could be extradited to the U.S., where he would face charges under the Espionage Act. That would threaten press freedom, argues Assange critic (and Free Press friend) James Kirchick. (NYT)

Are you asexual. . . or on antidepressants? (Freya India)

The largest-ever study on the Covid vaccine finds links to heart-related inflammation and an increased risk of a certain type of blood clot in the brain, among other conditions. (Bloomberg)

The dissident right is going woke. (Konstantin Kisin)

Also on Our Radar. . .

→ The Democratic vibe shift on Biden’s age: Last year, Joe Biden privately called David Axelrod a “prick” for suggesting that Biden might not be the nominee in 2024. Last September, fellow Obama alum Jim Messina compared those fretting about Biden’s reelection chances to “fucking bedwetters.” Well, there are many more pricks and bedwetters now in the wake of that Justice Department report and THAT presidential press conference.

Now 81, Biden’s age has been an obvious (and legitimate!) concern for average Americans for some time. And the media and Democratic elites have been talking about the problem for a while. But suddenly those private conversations are happening in the open. Talking anonymously to Puck’s Dylan Byers, members of the White House press corps admitted they haven’t covered the story as robustly as they should have done. “The amount of time we spent talking about it versus the time we spent reporting on it was not the same,” said one unnamed journalist. “There should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier.”

Then, liberal favorite Jon Stewart used his return to The Daily Show last week to perform a “wellness check” on our two “chronologically challenged” presidential candidates. Of Biden, he quipped: “If you’re telling us behind the scenes he is sharp and full of energy and on top of it and really in control and leading, you should film that. That would be good to show to people.”

On Saturday, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dropped a 4,000-word audio essay explaining why he thinks that “Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero.” Obama speechwriter turned podcast bro Jon Favreau shared Klein’s piece on X, adding that “a LOT of Democrats share his exact concern.”

When left-leaning VIPs openly muse about a Democratic president’s ability to run for reelection, it makes their stock defense—that the whole thing is a nothingburger confected by the media—even less tenable.

I agree with Nate Silver: It’s time for the White House to put up or shut up.

→ A death on campus and America’s overdose nightmare: Marco Troper, a 19-year-old Berkeley freshman and the son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, died in a dorm room in a suspected drug overdose last week.

The family are awaiting the results of a toxicology report, but Troper’s grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, told a local outlet that “teenagers and college students need to know that drugs today. . . are often laced with fentanyl.”

The synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and the leading cause of overdose deaths in America. And the crisis eclipses any drug epidemic in U.S. history; last year, 112,000 Americans died of a drug overdose—a record high. In many cases, victims are unknowingly taking the drug after it has been cut into a different substance like cocaine, counterfeit painkillers, and even weed.

The tragic death of Troper, the son of one of the country’s most high-profile tech execs, is a reminder that there are no racial, geographic, or socioeconomic boundaries to the overdose crisis. For help understanding how deeply the fentanyl crisis has penetrated the nation, I spoke to Free Press contributor Sam Quinones, the author of The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, and an expert on the damage wrought by this drug.

Sam says of fentanyl: “It’s the deadliest drug we’ve ever seen. The idea that we live in a time of risk-free, recreational drug use is now over. There’s no line of cocaine in America that you can trust to not contain fentanyl and there’s no pill on the street that you should ever take. Most of it has fentanyl in it.”

Sam told me that the current fentanyl-fueled crisis dates back to around 2016. That was the point Mexican cartels stopped importing fentanyl from China and instead brought in the “precursor” chemicals for the drug so they could make it themselves “in quantities that just boggle the mind.” Since then, Sam says, the supply has been relentless.

“This one drug is both creating demand and extinguishing demand, by killing people. There’s no such thing as a long-term fentanyl user. Some people take a lethal dose immediately. Other people get addicted, become slaves to fentanyl, and then eventually, if they don’t get clean, they will die.”

Read Sam’s latest dispatch for The Free Press: “Opioids Decimated a Kentucky Town. Recovering Addicts Are Saving It.”

And finally. . .

For a study in courage, watch Julia Navalny speak about her husband’s death and the fight for a free Russia.

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

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WATCH: H.R. McMaster on Trump—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Michael Moynihan

Published

2 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Very few people have worked closely with Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him.

But Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Trump, is an exception.

In his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, he gives an honest account of working in Trump’s first administration: the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Last week, McMaster, 62, sat down with Michael Moynihan at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for a live Free Press Book Club event to discuss it all. They talk about his moments of tension with Trump, his understanding of Trump’s foreign policy, and how Trump’s rhetoric toward adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press.

They also get into Trump’s current cabinet picks—ones who McMaster sees as good, like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, but how good picks do not ensure a harmonious administration. They discuss Trump’s options for handling Russia, Iran, and Hamas in his second term, and why McMaster is surprisingly and cautiously optimistic about Trump 2.0. —BW

Dynamics within the first Trump White House:

Michael Moynihan: It’s very clear in your book that you see your job as somebody who has to implement the president’s agenda. But it’s also clear that you see people around you who have their own agenda that they’re trying to foist upon the president.

H.R. McMaster: Absolutely. The first group are people who don’t want to give the president options. They want to manipulate decisions based on their own agenda, not the president’s agenda. Then there were the people in Donald Trump’s administration who defined the president as an emergency or a danger to the country or the world, who had to be contained. And so the problem with those groups of people is that nobody elected them.

MM: There are a couple of people in the book that say, We’re afraid that Donald Trump is dangerous, right?

HRM: Absolutely. It just made everything harder. But at least for my 30 months, we transcended it. We got things done anyway. But every element of that friction just wore us down a little bit—and the other tactics they employed undercut us.

Nobody was as surprised as Donald Trump when he won the 2016 election. So there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation in terms of who’s going to come into many of these positions. He didn’t have any kind of trust built up with a lot of the people. Now it’s going to be somewhat different. He’s had a lot more time to prepare deliberately for this, and he’s selected his people. It was easy to kneecap me, because I didn’t have a history with him. Now it’s going to be harder to do that with Michael Waltz and Marco Rubio. Although they will come under attack because there are still going to be different camps in the new administration based on different motivations.

The president is the most powerful person in the world, so people are going to try to ingratiate themselves to him and try to use him to advance their agenda. People know how to push his buttons. I’ve described my first meeting in the Oval Office as an environment of competitive sycophancy. It was unbelievable. Things were said like, “Your instincts are always so good, Mr. President” and “You’re so wise.” I was like, “My gosh, are these people serious?”

MM: Does he fall for that?

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

7 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

—

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/