Editor: My patience with Mr. Brooks ‘morlizing chatter’ is exhausted by his self-congratulation: Even his unremarcable ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ of 2003 which brought him to The New York Times, was a shopworn amagamation of War Mongering, via its feckless protaganist ‘Joey Tabla Rasa’! I will limit my commentary some select portions of his essay! Mr. Brooks re-writes his Own History in the first three paragraphs of his essay!
Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I think back on the elections we had in the before times — when, say, Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama or John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. I try to figure out why politics and society in general felt so different then.
It’s not because we didn’t have big disagreements back then. The Iraq war kicked up some pretty vehement arguments. It’s not because we weren’t polarized. Pundits have been writing about political polarization since at least 2000 and maybe well before.
Politics is different now because something awful has been unleashed. William A. Galston defines this awful thing in his fantastic new book, “Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.” Even before the Charlie Kirk assassination it was obvious that the dark passions now pervade the American psyche, and thus American politics.
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Editor : What Reader of Mr. Brooks present essay will recall his War Mongering chatter via ‘‘Joey Tabla Rasa” ?
I will post this as of 9:02 AM Pacific Time 9/19/2025 and will add to its later in the day. ?
The very notion that Jimmy Kimmell represent A Clear and Present Danger to what remaines of the American Republic, is on its face BULLSHIT! Look to The New Democrats i.e. The utterly Corrupt Clinton’s Bill & Hillary, Pelosi and Old Money Pretty Boy Newsom. With political hysteric and Zionist Stooge Adam Schiff bringing up the ass end ! Not to forget ‘Lets put this all behind’ and Simpson/Boles of Obama, and the millions who lost Homes to the reinvigerated Neo-Liberal toxic Fiction.
The Tea Party was about ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ that Obama embodied.
In France look to the gilets jaunes as the expression of that ‘Rebellion’ that still animates French Politics.
Political Cynic on Zionist Shill Schiff & Patel as FBI Stooge: The exchange of insults is revelatory and entertaining: The Gentlemans Club of the Senate is now dead?
On behalf of the undersigned organizations representing millions of Americans, we strongly urge you to oppose Kash Patel’s confirmation to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the nation’s principal criminal investigation agency.
Mr. Patel lacks both the professional experience and temperament to lead a federal agency charged with investigating a range of civil and human rights violations, including hate crimes, voter intimidation and election-related crimes, human trafficking, and police misconduct. Unlike previous FBI directors, Mr. Patel has no senior-level law enforcement experience, nor has he ever held a Senate-confirmed position.[1] His incendiary comments, including those directed at perceived political rivals and civil servants, could endanger American lives if acted upon.
The threat posed by Mr. Patel is not merely hypothetical — it is grounded in historical reality. The FBI possesses tremendous law enforcement authority, and as the nation’s primary criminal investigative agency, the FBI is deeply consequential to civil rights, public safety, and the integrity of our democracy. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI conducted a covert and illegal operation known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program)[2] targeting civil rights groups and leaders, including the anti-Vietnam War movement and the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.[3] This program, intended to surveil, infiltrate, and sabotage civil rights movements, is now widely regarded as one of the agency’s most significant overreaches. It led to widespread abuse of power and prompted a series of reforms, including the creation of permanent U.S. House and Senate Intelligence Committees[4] and the establishment of term limits for FBI directors.[5] Despite these changes, the FBI continues to monitor religious communities and civil rights movements. The FBI developed a system of “ethnic mapping,”[6] infiltrated mosques following the 9/11 attacks,[7] and surveilled Black Lives Matter protesters and tracked protest activity after the murder of George Floyd.[8]
In the federal government’s law enforcement structure, the FBI is the chief investigatory agency with the broadest authority. This tremendous authority has, at times, led to serious abuses of civil rights and civil liberties. For example, in 1975, the Senate formed the Church Committee in part to investigate wide-ranging FBI abuses, including planting informants in civil rights organizations, surveilling and threatening Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and keeping files on 1 million Americans.
The Church Committee’s shocking findings led to reforms at the FBI, but today it now wields significant investigative and surveillance powers, including under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law allows the FBI and other agencies to engage in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications. Although Section 702 requires the government to direct this surveillance at people outside the U.S., in practice, it ensnares Americans who are communicating with those targets. Notably, targets need not have any connection to criminal activity or terrorism; they can be journalists, human-rights workers, or businesspeople discussing U.S. foreign affairs. After acquiring these communications, FBI agents across the country routinely search for Americans’ communications in their Section 702 databases — again, without a warrant.
Our democracy hangs in the balance because of initiatives like Project 2025. Read our memos outlining what each presidential candidate means for…
Over time, Section 702 has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool. FBI agents use Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications, including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress. While the number of these warrantless queries has declined in recent years, they’re still happening far too frequently and without the judicial approval the Constitution requires.
Powers like this are even more concerning given President-elect Trump’s expressed desire to investigate and prosecute his perceived “enemies” — journalists, civil servants, and government officials — based on their political views or activities. For example, President-elect Trump has vowed, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” He expanded this sentiment to include “all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & [sic] country itself!”
What William Buckley and Charlie Kirk had in common
As George Will noted, both made ‘politics fun’ (to be sure, even while disparaging equal rights).
William Buckley, we were told in a Washington Post column last week by the venerable George Will, “would have recognized the 31-year-old [Charlie] Kirk as a kindred spirit.” Writing in the wake of Kirk’s horrific assassination, Will noted that Buckley, “like Kirk, had a talent for making politics fun.”
Working within the iron cage of the 750-word Post opinion column, however, Will lacked the space to document many of the myriad similarities between Buckley (particularly the young Buckley, to whom Will devoted most of his consideration) and Kirk. Allow me, then, to add some specifics to Will’s glowing generalities.
Among the deeply held beliefs that Kirk and the young Buckley shared was a staunch opposition to the federal government’s striking down the Southern laws that mandated race-based segregation. In 1957, when Buckley was the same age as Kirk was when he was cruelly struck down, he authored an editorial in his magazine, National Review, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” In the wake of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, in which Blacks won the right to sit where they wished on public buses rather than in the last few rows, and at a time when the leader of that boycott, Martin Luther King Jr., had called for legislation enabling Blacks to win the right to vote in Southern states, Buckley wrote:
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race … The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.
As Buckley saw it, “the claims of civilization,” collectively personified by the white South, did indeed trump those of universal access to the ballot. For which reasons, Buckley would oppose both the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mandating an end to racial discrimination in public institutions and employment, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, mandating an end to the Southern states’ effectively prohibiting Black voting.
Buckley doubled down on these views many times in the years following. In 1961, for instance, he answered a question posed in a 1961 Saturday Review symposium—“Desegregation: Will It Work?”—with an all-caps “NO,” going on to disparage King’s call for an end to Jim Crow by terming King “more sensitive, and so more bitter, than the average Southern Negro, and hence unqualified as a litmus of the Southern Negro’s discontent.” With the passage of time, however, Buckley eventually reconciled himself to desegregation.
During the past couple of years, Kirk began sounding remarkably like the Buckley of the 1950s and ’60s. In a December 2023 speech to the annual conference of Turning Point, the organization that Kirk founded and led, he said, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” according to a story published in Wired (whose particulars, when Wired ran the text by him, Kirk confirmed). Kirk went on to term Martin Luther King “awful. He’s not a good person.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, of course, banned racial discrimination in public facilities and hiring; it did not institute affirmative action policies. King himself, as he made clear many times, particularly by his support for the 1966 “Freedom Budget,” called for the extension of universal, as explicitly counterposed to race-specific, social and economic rights. Given those well-documented historical facts, it’s clear that Kirk’s sweeping condemnation of King specifically and equal rights generally really does extend to the law banning racial discrimination in facilities like restaurants.
In that better world where we can still imagine Kirk dining with his good friend JD Vance on a cold winter’s evening, then, we can call up the happy image of their supping, free from the dictates of an intrusive federal government and its bureaucratic mandates, in a congenially whites-only restaurant, and their graciously braving the snow to venture out of doors to bring food to Vance’s shivering wife and children—all warmed, despite the weather, by the glow of good fellowship and civil discourse.
Critics on the left might quibble with the actual doctrines that Buckley and Kirk so articulately advanced, and their real-world consequences. But that would require ignoring the palpable joie de vivre they brought to their bold endeavors, to their capacity, as Will put it, for “making politics fun.”
Editor: the opening paragraph of Mr. Turleys rant is well past its sale date!
Below is my column in the Hill on murder of Charlie Kirk, the latest victim of our age of rage. The evidence of Antifa scribblings and indoctrination of the shooter came as no surprise. For months, some of us have been warning Democratic leaders about their dangerous rhetoric and how it would be received by the most radical elements in the Antifa movement.
Editor: Mr. Turley in his political despraraion to diagnose the toxic American Political Moment, reminds this reader of Arlen Spector , Edward Jay Epstein, The Warren Report, and Walter Cronkite and CBS News constrution of tower in Dealey Plaza, that failed to reach Texas School Book Depository window, from which Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy! That trusty World War II Mannlicher-Carcano was Oswald’s weapon.
The Respectable Bourgeois Lawyering Trade follows the lead of an utterly corrupt and mendacious cadre, that is the American National Security State! In its many iterations, and its confererates and partners with a global reach! Jonathan Turley is just one of the cogs in this toxic machinery, who warn of impending political/moral collapse from secure Academic Positions. Reader think of Norman Finkelstein, as one of the most egrious examples of the fate of the Academic Dissenter!
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’!
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.
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.
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