StephenKMackSD's Blog

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 20, 2026

What reader who confronts the almost evolution, to near political respectability of James Kirchick, as a possible New York Times replacement for David Brooks? History may disabuse that reader?

James Kirchick

James (“Jamie”) Kirchick is a fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a contributing editor at the New Republic. A former writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Kirchick has also contributed to various rightist outlets like the Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog, as well as numerous mainstream publications, including the Los Angeles Times and Politico.[1]

On Anti-Semitism

Like others of his ideological kin—such as Lee Smith, also at FDD—Kirchick has wielded accusations of anti-semitism in an effort to sideline those who are critical of hardline Israeli polices and one-sided U.S. support for them. In a February 2012 op-ed for Israel’s liberal Haaretz, Kirchick defended “pro-Israel” U.S. writers like Josh Block—a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and former AIPAC spokesperson—who had been criticized for arguing that progressive, Democratic Party-affiliated organizations like the Center for American Progress (CAP) allowed their writers “to say borderline anti-semitic stuff.” Kirchick misleadingly claimed in the article that Block was “ultimately vindicated” when CAP criticized use of terms like “Israel-firster” in its publications.[2] However, it was Block who was forced to back off his anti-semitism claims, telling a reporter that anyone “suggesting” the he thinks CAP is anti-semitic is simply trying “to distract from what I am actually saying.”[3] Kirchick apparently missed this retraction from Block.[4]

According to Kirchick, the real back story to this episode is what he calls a growing “leftist McCarthyism” aimed at “questioning the loyalties of American Jews.” To support this claim, Kirchick argued—without providing any supporting evidence—that big-name scholars and journalists in the United States have recently experienced success in their careers precisely because of their willingness to criticize Israel. He wrote: “Figures ranging from University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer to journalists Peter Beinart and Andrew Sullivan have all seen their careers blossom as a result of their harsh and unrelenting criticism of Israel. Indeed, obsessively attacking Israel is a bona-fide way to resuscitate one’s career, not destroy it.” He concluded: “Since the 1950s, liberals have routinely accused conservatives of ‘McCarthyism. Now the tables have turned, and it is leftists questioning the loyalties of American Jews.”[4]

…

Editor: Note the political depth of this revelatory document, that casts a serching light on James Kirchick’s political evolution. If that even begins to describe his trojetory, that now rests in the hands of The New York Times editors and readers?

Newspaper Reader

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 20, 2026

Home

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 20, 2026

Venezuelan democracy cannot be defended through military intervention

Maduro was committing crimes against humanity — but nothing about the US’s history in Latin America suggests deploying the military there is the right solution.

Buenos Aires Herald

January 3, 2026

Buenos Aires Herald editorial (versión en español a continuación)

In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, 2026, the United States once again claimed to be “defending democracy” as it captured Nicolás Maduro in a military intervention in Venezuela.

Yet, this false premise is merely a way of sugarcoating the gravity of turning the armed forces into the gatekeepers of democracy in a foreign country.

Not only do these actions violate Venezuelan sovereignty, they also hark back to a long history of military coups in Latin America that have resulted in serious violence and human rights violations.

For at least a decade, the Maduro government itself has been committing atrocities that organizations including the United Nations have classified as crimes against humanity.

However, there is little reason to believe that the U.S. sending in its military and “running the country,” as President Trump said they will do, will bring the lasting peace and restoration of rights that Venezuela needs.

U.S. military intervention in Latin America has always spelled disaster. Perhaps its most egregious interference was the support it lent to a joint campaign of political repression launched in November 1975 called Operation Condor.

The initial phase saw the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay come together to coordinate the persecution of political activists opposed to the dictatorships of those countries regardless of borders.

Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru would later join, between 1976 and 1978. The operation entailed coordinated kidnappings, disappearances, and child appropriations all across the region. Many perpetrators of these crimes have been tried and convicted in Argentine courts.

Democracy can only be defended at the ballot box by guaranteeing citizens can freely decide who their leaders will be. The armed forces should never get involved.

As we stated in an editorial in August 2024, Venezuela has in recent years experienced such an acute humanitarian, economic and political crisis that around a quarter of the population has left the country. The disputed election results, the persecution of political opponents, and the dire economic crisis undoubtedly required a political solution.

The actions of the Maduro regime have caused a years-long humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, which has been worsened by U.S. sanctions that have hit the civilian population. International organizations and human rights activists have long denounced the government’s abuses and called for aid for the civilian population.

The solution to these serious problems, however, must be institutional, never military. Respect for international law must never be set aside, as it opens the door to further instances of mass human rights violations.

Trump said on Saturday in a press conference about the operation that his country will govern Venezuela to ensure an orderly transition.

He avoided giving details of how long this period would last, but did say that it would be linked to the reconstruction of the country’s oil infrastructure, which he claimed had been “stolen” from U.S. companies. Interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs seems to be the excuse for doing business with the backing of the US government.

Almost 50 years after the 1976 coup that brought the deadliest military dictatorship Argentina has ever experienced, institutions and rights defenders here have shown that the answer lies in the judiciary and respect for due process. Only by going this route can respectable political processes that protect people’s rights be built.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 19, 2026

On the witness stand

On Wednesday, I woke up and went through my unofficial routine. Though it’s a habit I don’t like to admit, I started my day by opening Instagram and mindlessly scrolling until I willed myself to stop and press play on a podcast instead.

That podcast opened with an ad for Instagram’s “Teen Accounts” feature, promising safeguards for kids and peace of mind for parents. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I was getting ready to head to Los Angeles Superior Court, where Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Instagram’s parent company, Meta, was set to testify in a landmark trial over whether social media is addictive and harmful to young users.

I first posted on Instagram at 16. Though I’m not quite the social media native that my Gen Z peers are, I’ve been a longtime user of the photo-sharing app and have wrestled with that question. Now, it was central to a high-stakes legal battle that could result in billions of dollars in potential damages. And I would be among the few in the room to watch Zuckerberg take the stand and answer how Instagram was designed, how it captured and retained users, and whether it caused them harm, with a particular focus on teenage girls.

This was a years-in-the-making moment. Lawyers have long been building their case against Meta, as well as Alphabet’s YouTube, Snap and TikTok — though the latter two are no longer participating after reaching confidential settlements before the trial began. The case centered on a woman named Kaley, who was on Instagram as early as 9 years old, and on claims that the app fueled years of her mental health struggles.

Inside the courtroom, the air was tense and quiet, sprinkled with grieving family members who say they lost children to the harms of social media, and reporters. In the first row was Kaley, who had so far been absent from the trial. Now 20, she sat directly in the line of sight where Zuckerberg would soon testify.

When the CEO and fifth-richest man in the world arrived, many in the room failed to notice. Dressed in a dark blue suit and gray tie, Zuckerberg looked somber, subdued. As he approached the stand, nerves broke through. He fidgeted with a water bottle and took a deep breath.

This was the calm before the storm.

For six hours, Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his company’s effort, or lack thereof, to protect young users on Instagram and Facebook. He was pressed on internal communications in which employees pleaded to shore up safety measures, and lamented the toll social media took on children. He was questioned about Meta’s focus on increasing the amount of time users spent on its platforms, and the company’s knowledge that a broad swath of pre-teens were on the apps despite stated restrictions for those younger than 13. He was made to look at a banner depicting an unfathomable number of selfies Kaley had posted throughout her youth. And pressed on choices he made about beauty filters.

Though Zuckerberg has faced challenging inquiries from Congress and federal lawyers before, this was the first time he testified about social media’s impact on mental health before a jury. His responses were slow, often quiet, acknowledging past practices, while promising many had changed. He spoke of balancing guardrails with his north star of free expression. He noted that teens currently account for just 1% of the company’s revenue, given their lack of disposable income, but suggested he still wants to deliver them “value,” which he claimed was necessary to keep them on the platforms for the long term.

The day was an exhausting back-and-forth, where Zuckerberg was dealt some blows and scored some wins. By the end, he appeared tired: checking his watch, flickering his eyes, and responding in a muted tone unlike the one I’ve heard at company conferences, on earnings calls, or across his own social feed.

Zuckerberg’s testimony didn’t settle the question of whether social media is addictive, for Kaley or any of its users. But it did thrust into the spotlight the different choices that could have been made. Meta could have done more to enforce its age requirements, for example, or realized earlier on that optimizing its product for “time spent” was a bad idea. Zuckerberg said the company has evolved on both fronts, but I wonder if that evolution happened too late.

Those questions will continue to loom over the trial as it moves forward into next month. And it could prove a critical test not only for Meta, but for the thousands of similar cases winding through courts across the country; cases that could shape the future of Instagram itself, the app so many of us still reach for before we’re fully awake.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-19/mark-zuckerberg-offers-subdued-defense-in-trial-claiming-social-media-harms-kids

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 19, 2026

Mr. Myers is always worthy of the readers time and attention, even though that reader might disagree! Best regards: StephenKMackSD!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 18, 2026

Populist nationalism always lives locally; so it has a situationally specific context.

The common factors. The populist nationalists in both Europe and America share the common feature of being “left behinds” in a state of deep resentment against the cosmopolitan elites that dominate much of their respective societies. Resentment is always the rocket fuel to populist angst.

Most of the resentment is economic and further fueled by the social distinction that goes with higher economic circumstances originating from superior education and/or being born into more privileged circumstances.

Another base of resentment is race and identity grounded in fear of ethnic displacement–the cathedral or church steeple is about to be replaced by the mosque. Underneath religion are the dark dragons of racial resentment; in American reactionary elites have used racial rivalry between left-out whites and excluded African-Americans for centuries. Recent Moslem immigration into Europe shows that culturally distinct foreign immigrants assimilate unevenly and that inclusion must be a concerted public and open process. Education and skills have to be shared so that the vistas of opportunity are perceived as available to all — people care about their children’s prospects.

The Trumpista MAGA group is currently mixing traditional American racism against African Americans and Asians with new anxieties about immigration of non-European-like groups from everywhere with any skin complexion at all (Indians are the new source of anxiety) into one discriminatory stew. One senses the Trumpistas are really overplaying their hand in modern America which is indeed a multicultural society (the Bad Bunny brouhaha just emphasized this). The Republicans are increasingly making Representatives Ilan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into latter day American Joans of Arc, attractive faces of tomorrow’s better America.

A big international factor. For about a half a millennium, a major threat to a pluralistic Europe of many nationalities has been a monolithic, despotic and expanding Russian empire. If one dislikes reigning European elites, simple one-stop shopping will send the disaffected to St. Petersburg or Moscow. No one consistently challenges European reigning elites like a despot in the Kremlin; that has been a constant for centuries except for a brief holiday in the 1990s between the last Communist and the rise of Putin. No one impinges and subverts European governance and with such consistency and intensity as Putin and his regime; that is what they have organized themselves to do. The Ukraine war has always been about more than just Ukraine; it is about Europe and its freedom from predation from the east.

The recent articles in the FT and elsewhere discussing fertility rates way below replacement highlight the emerging hardest of realities — Europe becomes more inclusive or Europe disappears like a declining statistics. Europe has to start making European things work.

But Europe has everything in place to be a growing and more successful Europe. It just has to choose through voting to be a more and better Europe; Victor Orban and the AfD do not offer that pathway at all. Atavistic Russian revanchism is hardly a credible alternative for Europe.

Orban has simply been for sale; he and his clique have just been playing a political arbitrage game using Russia opportunistically to sustain an authoritarian “illiberal” regime inside an institutionally democratic Europe. He and his clique have always been in it for the wealth extraction possibilities intrinsic to state capture. This is a very old game.

https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa

StephenKMackSD.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 18, 2026

https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa

Newspaper Reader offers ‘A Janan Ganesh Cornucopia’!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 18, 2026

Headline: Maga will regret embracing Europe’s hard right

Sub-headline: Nationalists on the continent have historically opposed America more than anything else

https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa

Some selective quotation from Ganesh’s essay, for want of a better descriptor!

…

This wariness of the US only intensifies as we cross from Gaullism, which was and is well within the political mainstream, to the harder right. Today’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) has a pro-Russia bent in what has been a deeply Atlanticist country since the war. Viktor Orbán of Hungary, also “eastern” in his orientation, might be China’s best friend in Europe. Still the anti-China world of Maga extols him like no one bar Trump himself. It is the single oddest thing about an odd movement.

…

For the second consecutive year, a Trump delegate to the Munich Security Conference has given succour to Europe’s far right. Marco Rubio did it with more tact (and to the extent that we can ever know these things, reluctance) than JD Vance did last year. Even so, his allusions to “civilisation” and “Christian faith” amount to coded praise for Orban, who was Rubio’s first stop after Munich. It is natural that European liberals detest these interventions. It is bizarre that American nationalists don’t. Which is likelier to obey Washington’s will over a given period: a garden-variety German federal government or an AfD-inflected one?

Even if these parties did not nurse an existing mistrust of the US, they would have to feign one to win and retain power. None of them wants to gain the reputation of subservience to Trump that was so fatal to the Canadian and Australian right in 2025. How telling that Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally in France, has deplored America’s “imperial” menaces towards Greenland.

In the end, though, this electoral incentive won’t be needed. There is enough underlying prejudice against the US in these political movements. It traces back to the anglophobia of previous centuries: the continental conservative view that Britain was too commercial and scientific a nation to represent real Kultur.

It is hard to know how the US has got itself into such a self-defeating caress with people who dislike it. One possible answer is pig ignorance. Maga, like its leader, is not stupid but seldom lingers over details. It might just not know the rich pedigree of anti-Americanism among continental rightwingers: their perception of the US as not so much a nation as a well-integrated market with a flag on it. European politics can be confounding to an American eye as the hard right overlaps with the hard left in a way that is much less true of the US. Both extremes tend to mistrust the free market, for example. If Vance wants Europe to be a “vibrant economy again”, he is daft to put hope in parties as hostile to competitive reforms as the National Rally and Nigel Farage’s ill-named Reform UK have been.

The other possibility, of course, is that Maga just doesn’t care. Easing hard right parties into office in ancient European capitals would cause pandemonium, and that is an end in itself. Pointing out the awkward implications for American grand strategy is for dorks.

A decade on from its electoral breakthrough, my abiding impression of populism is that commentators take it more seriously than populists themselves do. Calling them “fascist” does not just cheapen what happened in the 1930s and 1940s but grants an unearned seriousness to people who regard politics as just a smashing indoor sport. If they are moved by an -ism, it is nihilism. The love of Orban, whose mistrust of America has not escaped the CIA’s vigilant eye, could not exist in the mind of a sincere America Firster.

In the end, even De Gaulle only bucked the US so much. He was a realist who knew how to set limits on even his most vainglorious schemes. The jingoes of today’s Europe might not show the same restraint. America’s willingness to find out is bizarre. As ever, the best criticism of the Trump government is that it is not even good at selfishness.

---

Editor: A Janan Ganesh cornucopia!

---

Janan Ganesh in The Financial Times: ‘The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below’

Posted on October 16, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Oct 04, 2025 Opinion Life & Arts The war against the quite good The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below Janan Ganesh https://www.ft.com/content/0fc44c6b-277c-4472-a235-65f59a9195f3 Editor: Janan almost pulls out all the stops, for his … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh as Madame Arcati? Political Cynic comments.

Posted on September 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Posted on February 3, 2021 by stephenkmacksd stephenkmacksd.com/ Aug 29, 2025 Title this ‘The Enlightenment of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ ? Mr. Ganesh doesn’t need to dust off his Madame Arcati shtick, he uses C-Span to demonstrate that Bill Clinton’s utter … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh of the ever changing registers of ‘thought’?,’political convenience’ & always wraped in self-congratulation!

Posted on February 10, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader. stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 10, 2025 Editor : For those of us who have not read this Stendahl novel, here is Penguin Random House to the rescue: The Red and the Black Reader’s Guide By Stendhal https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298093/the-red-and-the-black-by-stendhal/9780140447644/readers-guide In Stendhal’s The … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh abandons Tom Wolfe for Shahrazad?

Posted on January 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Jan 02, 2025 Headline: Things have to get worse to get better Sub-headline : Voters can’t be sold on change until their nation is in acute trouble https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8d92a-0c1d-424e-83be-c3469c370c19 Editor:The Reader of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh never diappointes?

Posted on December 22, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Newspaper Reader follows the convoluted politics of a Financial Times Mandarin! stephenkmacksd.com/ Dec 22, 2024 Opinion: Populism Headline: Economics can’t explain all the anger of voters Sub-headline: If it did, the US should have much healthier politics than Europe Janan … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh in the Life and Arts section of The Financial Times, where he belongs!

Posted on November 4, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Ganesh proclaims: ‘We will be living in Trumpland for decades’ stephenkmacksd.com/ Nov 03, 2024 Editor: Mr. Ganesh begins his essay with this ‘The paragraph that follows is the most reluctantly written of my career.’: what might The Reader make of … Continue reading →

…

The World is full of Surprises, but not in Janan Ganesh World: it’s a Crowd Scene pretending to be an essay! via a 1966 Black & White Photograph.

Posted on August 18, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Cynic thinks of the long dead American Poet Frank O’Hara! The opening paragraphs are not exactly replaced, but a black & white photo of three long dead American literary figures : John Updike, John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller at an …

…

Political Observer can’t resist Janan Ganesh political embroidery, or all that Royal Icing on Miss Haversham’s wedding cake ?

Posted on August 16, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer shares his thoughts! What does Miss Haversham’s wedding cake have to do with Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay? Telling question? Miss Haversham was left at the alter, and her life ended is a moment of betrayal, that metastasized into … Continue reading →

…

Political Observer confesses: I can’t resist Janan Ganesh chatter, @FT !

Posted on August 15, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Just look at the political actors, players, walk-ons in Ganesh’ s latest Historical Re -Write its like crewel embroidery aided by gusts of Hot Air . Editor: Paragraph 1: …the American left…, …Defund the Police…,…White Fragility…, Politics being downstream of culture,…, Dave … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on ‘the demand for a bolder Starmer’ is about a: ‘journalistic euphemism for “left wing” ‘

Posted on June 7, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer wonders where that ‘left wing’ might be? Not at The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The New Statesman.* The regular reader has to wince at Janan Ganesh’s latest political commentary, that now places him … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on: ‘The shock of the old’, ‘low birth rates’, ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’& a Mitt Romney 47% pastiche!

Posted on June 7, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer opens a door? Mr. Ganesh’s ‘politicking’ reaches into the the most unlikely places, and chooses unlikely persons to make his arguments! Wedded to self-congratulation about his imagined victory about ‘low birth rates’ and the underserving retirees: ‘old people will have to remain productive … Continue reading →

…

It’s almost a pleasure to read Janan Ganesh @FT?

Posted on May 23, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer comments. After this May 17, 2024 opening paragraph: When I was two or three, I went walkabout and wasn’t found until some time later at a local mall. What a close brush with disaster, readers will think. What … Continue reading →

…

Is it possible that boulevardier Janan Ganesh offering a ‘Mulligan Stew’, instead of his usual… his readership might miss his proffered rhetorical ‘Caviar and Blinis’ ?

Posted on April 12, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Cynic comments Opinion Populism Headline: The west is suffering from its own success Sub-headline: Smartphone addiction, culture wars and low birth rates are byproducts of wealth https://www.ft.com/content/74918df2-6911-4087-8add-c11df2811129 A sampler of this ‘Mulligan Stew’ that Ganesh prepares for his readers is helpful: … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on ‘The welcome demise of big-government Toryism’…

Posted on January 10, 2024 by stephenkmacksd

Political Commentator wonders, where the Homeless & Hungry might fit into ‘Ganesh World’? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… January 11, 2024: In my haste to comment on Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay, I commented about the Hunger and Homelessness in Britain. I failed in my … Continue reading →

…

Professional boulevardier Janan Ganesh diagnoses ‘The American Problem’, while ignoring the Genocide in Palestine… any surprise?

Posted on December 19, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Political Reporter comments. Opinion US society America’s cultural supremacy and geopolitical weakness The notion of ‘decline’ is too crude to capture what is happening to the US in the 21st century. https://www.ft.com/content/dce07860-f39e-432b-a0f6-1a2124e4e1a3 The Reader has to wonder at the opening of … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh plunges his Silver-Fork into the Crisis of The West.

Posted on October 24, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Philosophical Apprentice comments. Note that Janan Ganesh is part of the Silver Fork Tradition of writers, even though that might seem an odd qualification, for a Financial Times ‘expert/technocrat’ on ‘Geopolitics’ ? Headline: Don’t flatter the west’s enemies as an ‘axis’ Sub-headline: Democracies should tease out … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh reads an Economist map…

Posted on October 5, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Political Observer wonders at this political intervention. Recall the ascent and reign of Janan Ganesh, of another time? Those apt quotations from an obscure L.A. restaurant critic ? Or even a quote from American Silver-Fork gargoyle Tom Wolfe? In his latest essay … Continue reading →

…

Janan Ganesh on Mitt Romney and Rory Stewart.

Posted on September 20, 2023 by stephenkmacksd

Philosophical Apprentice & Political Cynic collaborate! Headline: Mitt Romney, Rory Stewart and the tragedy of politics Sub-headline: In public life, unlike in business, there is no reward for being right https://www.ft.com/content/511ea709-a921-4ec2-9a36-34fa1b0216e9 Did Janan Ganesh read David Brooks’ essay in praise … Continue reading

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 17, 2026

Editor:

Civilization

by Roger Osborne

A New History of the Western World

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/362231/civilization-by-roger-osborne/9780099526063

---

Marco Rubio gave a speech Saturday to the Munich Security Conference in which he extolled an ideal that’s supposedly long out of fashion.

“We are part of one civilization: Western civilization,” the U.S. secretary of state told his largely European audience. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

The speech got, and deserved, a standing ovation.

…

What, exactly, is Western civilization? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that not one of America’s top colleges and universities had a required survey course in Western civ and only 32 percent even offered it as an elective.

…

What many universities do offer (even more so now than when the N.A.S. issued its report) is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civ: the examination of all the ways in which Western civilization is, purportedly, an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental despoliation, misogyny and white supremacy and phobias of every kind.

This pedagogy in civilizational self-loathing — some of it justified and overdue, much of it distorted by factual fudging and decontextualized historical judgments — has done three kinds of damage.

…

First, it helped spawn a generation of self-certain progressives, notably the pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses during the Gaza war, who only dimly seem to recognize that they are the very people they are being taught to hate. Who, after all, is more of a settler-colonialist — a Protestant, white, English-speaking undergrad in Los Angeles or a Jewish, Mizrahi, Hebrew-speaking one in Jerusalem? And does a typical Hamas militant despise a fervent Christian evangelical any more than he despises an anti-Zionist trans activist?

Second, it fueled a reactionary conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. I have in mind people like Alexander Gauland, a founder of Germany’s fascist-leaning Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” I’m also thinking of JD Vance, our cynical vice president, who last year met with an AfD leader after scolding an audience in Munich for refusing to respect free speech or accept the results of an election.

But the worst damage is to normal citizens in modern democracies who, unless they’ve sought it out for themselves, lack a clear idea of what the West stands for: It’s what Robert Maynard Hutchins called, in 1952, “The Great Conversation.”

…

Editor: Reader first aquainte yourself with Harry S. Ashmore’s biography of Robert Maynard Hutchens.

And the Robert Maynard Hutchins: American educator at Britannica Editors https://www.britannica.com/topic/University-of-Chicago

…

Hutchins was active in forming the Committee to Frame a World Constitution (1943–47), led the Commission on Freedom of the Press (1946), and vigorously defended academic freedom, opposing faculty loyalty oaths in the 1950s. After serving as associate director of the Ford Foundation (from 1951), he became president of the Fund for the Republic (1954) and in 1959 founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Santa Barbara, California) as the fund’s main activity. The Center was an attempt to approach Hutchins’s ideal of “a community of scholars” discussing a wide range of issues—individual freedom, international order, ecological imperatives, the rights of minorities and of women, and the nature of the good life, among others.

From 1943 until his retirement in 1974, Hutchins was chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica and a director for Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. He was editor in chief of the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World (1952) and coeditor, from 1961 to 1977, with Mortimer J. Adler, of an annual, The Great Ideas Today.

Hutchins’ views on education and public issues appeared in No Friendly Voice (1936), The Higher Learning in America (1936), Education for Freedom (1943), and others. Later books include The University of Utopia (1953), Some Observations on American Education (1956), and The Learning Society (1968).

---

Mr. Stephens attempt the shoehorn Hutchins whose ‘Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions’ was liberal, as Ashmore’s biography makes plan. I read Ashmore’s biography when it was published! Mr. Stephens’ wan attemp to lay claim to the Hutchins legacy is a execise in Straussian mendacity!

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 17, 2026

Newspaper Reader.