Sep 14, 2025
Reader recall? Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique? Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” (1970), Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes (1970), Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949)? Gloria Steinem was/is the respectable bourgeois version of ‘Feminism’! She fits more than comfortably in ‘NYT World’!
Queer Atheist
Sep 13, 2025
On The Theopolitics of Reinhold Niebuhr by Political Observer
Posted on May 24, 2012 by stephenkmacksd
I’ve just finished a Reinhold Niebuhr biography by Richard Fox published in 1985. That I find Mr. Niebuhr repugnant as person and Christian Moralist is a statement of my prejudice, without apology. I felt that I wanted to understand who the man was and where he came from. Those questions are answered in some detail in Mr. Fox’s biography, although Mr. Fox seems to be satisfied with hagiography rather that critical engagement with Mr. Niebuhr as theopolitician. Niebuhr appears to be a religious and political conformist swept along from Socialism to Cold War Liberalism: always a little too anxious to prove his patriotism, his Americaness. Niebuhr has become the object of a cult headed by President Obama, perhaps because of the tough minded moralizing represented by Christian Realism: which could be more accurately named Christian Imperialism. It has something in common with the Protestant Christian Politics of Woodrow Wilson, with an emphasis on the necessary use of violence, to reach political ends deemed important enough to warrant it. In the name of the greater political good, even as necessary to emancipate, if only temporarily, man from his natural sinful and irredeemable self-hood. This cliché of the Christian Tradition reeks of the self-hating Augustine, and his successors, who institutionalized the persistent, morally destructive Christian anti-humanism. Imperial Politics with a thin veneer of carefully cultivated piety is an American tradition. I would call Niebuhr hopelessly Middlebrow: more about the care and maintenance of bourgeois political respectability and the self-exculpatory, as key to ex post facto rationalizations identified as ‘Philosophy’ . I was impressed, and moved by one person’s character in Mr. Fox’s biography of Reinhold, and that was the love, devotion and steadfastness of his brother Richard. Engaging with the ‘Philosophy’ of Mr. Niebuhr using the valuable historical frame provided by Mr. Fox will enrich my further reading.
Political Observer
Sep 13, 2025
Headline:Lachlan Murdoch, media’s newest mogul
Sub-headline:Fox’s decades-long succession battle is finally over
Editor: The Reader just has to wonder at the Economist chatter about the ‘Investiture of Lachlan Murdoch’. These Oxbridgers get all caught in Royalist Politics, of various hues, in 950 words. Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal are the the voises of a deeply reactiony Politics! Reaganite dullwit Peggy Noonan was Comic Relief, in the Wall Street Journal!
The thirty-year job interview has concluded at last. On September 8th the Murdoch family announced that it had resolved a decades-long dispute over who will control its television and newspaper empire when Rupert Murdoch, who is now 94, dies. The upshot of a complicated deal is that Lachlan Murdoch, the third-eldest of six Murdoch children, will inherit a controlling stake in Fox and News Corp, the family firms. Their combined market value is $42bn; their combined influence—with brands including Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal—is greater still. The agreement, announced on Mr Murdoch’s 54th birthday, makes him one of the world’s most powerful people for decades to come.
His ascension to the inky throne has been half a lifetime in the making. A gap-year stint at the printing presses in Sydney marked Mr Murdoch’s entry to the family firm. After graduating from Princeton University, where his dissertation was on Immanuel Kant’s ethics, he went to work for the Murdoch newspaper business in Australia. He later moved to Fox in New York. After falling out with Roger Ailes, the late, since-disgraced head of Fox News, he quit in 2005 and moved back to Australia to pursue his own investments. James, his younger brother, moved into pole position.
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Editor: This Economist pseudohistory demands vigoious pruning!
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Though born in London and raised in New York, Mr Murdoch has said that he considers himself Australian. He moved to Sydney with his wife, Sarah Murdoch, a former model and presenter on one of the Murdochs’ Australian networks, and their three children in 2021, though he reportedly still sometimes works to American hours. He is more blokeish than his brother, with an interest in rugby and rock-climbing. But he is less frugal than his father. Whereas Rupert Murdoch amused Hollywood executives in the 1980s with his Walmart shirts and habit of walking the four miles from his home to the Fox lot, Lachlan recently bought himself one of the most expensive homes in California, Chartwell Mansion, a ten-acre Bel Air pile.
He appears to share his father’s political flexibility. In the 1950s Mr Murdoch Sr had a bust of Lenin in his student rooms at Oxford. His British newspapers switched their support from the Conservatives to Labour on the eve of the latter’s victory in 1997. He initially despised Donald Trump, but swung behind him when MAGA’s momentum became clear. Lachlan seems similarly pragmatic. In 2023 his family foundation gave A$1m ($660,000) to Qtopia, a gay museum in Sydney (whose recent exhibitions include “Kylie Minogue & Queer Devotion”). In 2016 he had loo-roll printed with Mr Trump’s face in his home, according to a book by Michael Wolff, a journalist. But these days he sees Mr Trump as good for business. “Because of the election results, many advertisers have sort of rethought their positioning in this country and understand that the Fox News viewer really does represent middle America,” Mr Murdoch told investors in March.
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Editor: In the final paragraphs The Reader is given wan Oxbridger speculation: in sum chatter!
What now? With the rebel siblings bought out, Fox and News Corp will surely continue on their profitably conservative path. As long as the threat remained of a family rebellion, some analysts predicted the possible break-up of the firms. That no longer looks likely. The odds of News Corp spinning off REA, as some activist investors urge, also appear to have lengthened.
Instead, the settling of the family feud could open the door to more expansive moves. One might be to combine the two companies into one. Rupert Murdoch attempted to do this in 2022 but was opposed by shareholders, including James. Some analysts think that Lachlan may give it another go.
Another option would be for Fox to bulk up. Hollywood is ripe for consolidation, as smaller streaming services struggle to reach the scale needed for sustainable profits. John Malone of Warner Bros Discovery told the Financial Times last week that last year he had discussed with Rupert Murdoch the possibility of merging Fox and Warner. David Ellison, another Hollywood nepobaby, has recently taken over Paramount and seems to have ambitions to grow. With the succession question answered at last, the Murdoch empire may be ready for more dealmaking.
Political Observer.
Sep 13, 2025
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/seeing-double/
Philosophical Apprentice
Sep 13, 2025
Political Observer.
Sep 12, 2025
It’s like this Political Rag missed the utter RASISM of Charlie Hebdo, while celebrating Political Hysteric Allan Bloom ! Call it an Historical Re=Write!
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The intolerance on college and university campuses is nothing new, of course. It goes back at least several decades, as shown by Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987.
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Martha C. Nussbaum takes Bloom apart November 5, 1987 !
Political Cynic.
Sep 12, 2025
United States | Beyond debate
Charlie Kirk challenged liberals until the day he was murdered
The activist embodied a fiery style of conservatism and energised young voters
A selection : This reader longs for Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, almost!
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Mr Kirk’s influence also stemmed from his reputation as a tribune of the right, someone who was unafraid to defend conservatism against an imagined horde of blinkered libtards.
Editor: The Oxbridgers at The Economist are not above using the slang of blinkered libtards ! To add a certain zest, to an onterwise wan apologetic for an American Political Hysteric: A Type that has metaticised since the Birth of The Tea Party!
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He believed that “wokism” threatened to destroy the country. America would be saved not at the ballot box but in the crucibles where culture is forged, like college campuses. A devout Christian, he wanted to carry on travelling from campus to campus, ripping the blinkers off liberal students’ eyes, educating them about the evils of critical race theory and gender ideology and urging them to start families and reclaim America for Jesus Christ.
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These have included an arson attack targeting Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania; a thwarted plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan; and another to kill Brett Kavanaugh, a Supreme Court justice. In 2022 a man broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, the then speaker of the House of Representatives, and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer. In June a state representative from Minnesota and her husband were murdered at home. Mr Trump was lucky to survive being shot at an open-air campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
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“People who are looking for a purpose, who want to claim a historical mission, are moved by a public conversation that says ‘you’ll get attention, you’ll be lauded if you hurt someone in a public way’,” notes Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank.
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Editor: The Economist Fellow Travelers apply the anodyne political medication, via Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University.
Two factors tend to influence support for political violence. When elites condemn it, citizens listen: people have a follow-the-leader instinct, says Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University. A second factor is partisans’ perception of what the other side thinks. Both Democrats and Republicans hold exaggerated ideas about how much their rivals tolerate violence when in fact both sides mostly abhor it. This fuels misperceptions all around.
Approval of political violence is not high in absolute terms, but it is still too high, says Mr Willer. Fixing that comes through engagement. Mr Kirk acknowledged this himself. Once a woman frostily asked him why he had come to her campus. He replied firmly, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.”
American Writer.
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