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Mar 23, 2025

Headline: Abundance is the new buzzword on the US left. Now it’s coming here

Sub-headline : The US left’s focus on redistribution is failing. A new approach, emphasising economic growth, is gaining traction — but faces big hurdles

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/abundance-is-the-new-buzzword-on-the-us-left-now-its-coming-here-b5rxrj25c

Editor: Colvive can hardley contain his glee via the use of the US Left in his headline and sub-headline! The Reader need only read Bari Weisse’s column of March 18, 2025 in the The Free Press to find the source of Colevile US Left fixsation.

Headline: Can Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Save the Left From Itself?

Sub-headline : The Democrats desperately need a new vision. Two prominent liberal journalists are offering one.

The Free Press

Can Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Save the Left From Itself?

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic…

Listen now

5 days ago · 124 likes · 533 comments · Bari Weiss

Editor: To put it bluntly Bari Weisse is the very bottom of the Neo-Conservative Intellegencia! Neither Ezra Klien nor Dereck Thompson are Liberals: Klien is at The New York Times and Derek at The Atlantic, a Neo Conservative publication. And Bairi Weisse lives in an Imagined World!

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic.

Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power.

To get out of the political wilderness, they say the Democrats need a new vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home or voted red for the first time this past November.

While other progressives are doubling down on zombie ideas, afraid to confront a country that has moved decisively to the right, Ezra and Derek are willing to face reality. They see that blue states are functioning similarly to the DMV—and, as a result, losing people to states like Texas and Florida.

In their new book, Abundance, they offer a blueprint for winning them back—to cities like San Francisco and New York, but also to the Democratic Party.

The thesis is simple: To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.

While conservatives and libertarians might say, Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek insist that the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and bureaucratic thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.

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Editor: Colvile as a Thatcherite attacking the Left is a civic, political duty!

The US elections were brutal for the Democrats. But here’s the most brutal fact: the places that swung hardest against them were those where they’d been in power for longest — New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles. And the people there aren’t just voting against left-wing rule but increasingly leaving it behind: one of America’s great demographic trends has been migration from blue states to red.

What’s the problem? In their new book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make a simple argument: the left has been awful at governing. In particular, it has prioritised keeping its coalition of interest groups happy over getting stuff done — and brought in a raft of rules, not least on environmental protection, that make it too hard to build or invent things that might give those voters a better life, whether that be homes, high-speed railways, solar farms or life-saving medicines.

When this approach has, inevitably, produced a gap between supply and demand, the solution has been to throw subsidies at the problem — for affordable housing or childcare, say — rather than to actually tackle the blockages.

Klein and Thompson’s book is filled with chilling examples: the ghastly failure of cities like New York to build housing; the California high-speed rail project that makes HS2 look like a model of prudent procurement; the steady decline of risk-taking in science. But it is also filled with inspirational stories: the reforms that enabled the construction of cheap housing for the homeless in San Francisco; the Pennsylvania governor who repaired a bridge half melted by a crashed oil tanker in days rather than weeks; the warp-speed development and deployment of Covid vaccines.

Why does this matter? Partly because the authors are pretty influential — celebrated writers at The New York Times and The Atlantic respectively. But mostly because it represents one of the first serious attempts to chart a course for the Democrats that doesn’t involve doubling down on progressivism or shouting about the nasty orange man.

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Editor: The final paragraph compares Abundence with Foundations written by three of his friends? Or just three of his employees?

But there is one final problem, which is that many voters, particularly on the right, do not want abundance at all. They are the people who decry the desecration of the green belt, who want new power cables buried underground (at billion-pound expense), who complain about tower blocks being built on car parks. And Labour’s planning reforms — which I largely support — will give them more ammunition, in particular via the hugely contentious plans to expand compulsory purchase of private land.

Indeed, the whole reason the Tories did not take up the abundance agenda while in power — despite my and others’ best efforts — was that they had become almost exclusively focused on protecting the privileges of pensioners, including the delightful views from their windows. Because, as I’ve pointed out before, it is OAPs that hold the electoral whip hand.

Abundance is one of those books that matter. Like the UK-focused essay Foundations — written by three of my friends — it explains that the scarcities that afflict our economies are scarcities we have actively chosen. Making it easier to build, making better choices, will enable us to build a better future. But it is a future that needs to be not just argued for, but fought for.

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Mar 19, 2025

Headline: ‘Europeans are going to have to relearn to be angry’

Sub-headline: In an interview with ‘Le Monde,’ Pierre Wunsch, Governor of the National Bank of Belgium, believes that Europe, built on the single market and open trade, is ill-adapted to the fragmentation of the world.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/03/19/europeans-are-going-to-have-to-relearn-to-be-angry_6739303_19.html

Editor: I will attempt to provide The Reader- this reads almost like an Official Document, or even like the self-congratulatory tone of The Financial Times?

Pierre Wunsch, Governor of the National Bank of Belgium, has a 25-year-old son who recently asked him if World War III was on the horizon. “I thought it was excellent news that he asked me,” he said to Le Monde. Not that the central banker welcomes the possibility of war returning, obviously, but because he sees it as a sign that public opinion is really worried. “[Russian president Vladimir] Putin, represents a real threat and we absolutely must invest in our defense. But my big fear is that people won’t accept that, that they’ll say we should spend on something else,” he said. For him, procrastinating on European rearmament would represent a far greater risk: “If we’re not strong enough against Putin, that’s when there could be a risk of global escalation. Europeans are going to have to relearn to be afraid, relearn pride and, from time to time, relearn to be angry.”

Wunsch is not a military expert but a central banker (at the National Bank of Belgium since 2011, governor since 2019). Previously, he worked for nearly a decade at the Suez Group and served in right-wing ministerial cabinets. When he speaks out on tensions with Russia, it is through the prism of economics. The Russian threat and the potential abandonment of American protection will require heavy budget spending in Europe. “But there’s no such thing as free money falling from the sky,” he said. He therefore believes that very difficult budgetary choices are looming just about everywhere in Europe and that people need to be prepared for them: “We’ll either have to cut spending, or raise taxes.”

Editor: Its not as if this sentence is of no interest : ‘Pierre Wunsch, Governor of the National Bank of Belgium, has a 25-year-old son who recently asked him if World War III was on the horizon’ as a kind of bridge, yet what follows reads like a confession of impotence, tinctured in the despondency of a banker!

Similarly, rewriting European rules to cope with this law of the strongest is proving tricky. “The single market operates with clear, predictable rules… Now we’re entering a more complex equilibrium, with industrial policy in certain areas, strategic autonomy issues… The question then becomes: who decides?” Should these powers be transferred to Brussels, at the risk of a democratic deficit? Or leave them to the member states, risking a cacophony of ideas? Wunsch warns that we need to face reality head-on: “We’re going to have to relearn how to do ‘power politics,’ to be transactional, to show… that we’re also becoming a political power.”

Despite this worrying diagnosis, he refuses to turn the European Central Bank (ECB) – of which he is one of the 26 members of the Governing Council – into the armed wing of the “power politics” he is calling for. He warns that the monetary institution will not support the financing of governments.

Editor: Pierre Wunsch engages in what Americans used to call ‘letting off steam’ although of a very high order! Enter stage-right Christine Lagarde:

Christine Lagarde, the ECB’s president, has already said that “participating in the financing effort is not the ECB’s raison d’être.” Wunsch pointed out that the ECB has the “exorbitant privilege” of being independent of the political powers. In the name of respect for democracy, to avoid entering the political arena, he believes it is essential to respect to the letter its mandate, defined in the European treaties: to ensure price stability.

Editor: The Wunsch’s final telling comment, refracted through Eric Albert:

Wunsch will not comment and remains open to the idea of pausing the interest rate cut at the next meeting on April 17. “We’ll see what the economic data are like between now and then,” he said. Under these conditions, governments’ budgetary choices are likely to be even more difficult.

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Mar 18, 2025

Reader consider that Ezra Kline writes for The New York Times, whose support for Netnayahu’s Gaza Genocide and Zelensky’s Ukraine War is reaching its many murderious denouments. Or that Thomas Friedman, David Brooks & Bret Stephens are all rabid Zionists! Or that Derek Thompson writes for a News Magazine whose editor is a former Israeli prison guard, who tortured Palestinians.

Editor: Bari Weisse rewrites History and Facts at her self-serving whim. She never surprises because she invents at will! Neo-Cons and ‘The Noble Lie’ are constant companions!

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic.

Editor: the above sentence makes no sence except to The Straussian

Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power.

Editor: Above Bari Weisse imagines what Klein and Thompson cannot.

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Editor : Reader you will need to pay a fee for the remaining portions of the essay!

To get out of the political wilderness, they say the Democrats need a new vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home or voted red for the first time this past November.

While other progressives are doubling down on zombie ideas, afraid to confront a country that has moved decisively to the right, Ezra and Derek are willing to face reality. They see that blue states are functioning similarly to the DMV—and, as a result, losing people to states like Texas and Florida.

In their new book, Abundance, they offer a blueprint for winning them back—to cities like San Francisco and New York, but also to the Democratic Party.

The thesis is simple: To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.

While conservatives and libertarians might say, Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek insist that the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and bureaucratic thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.

How do we build a government that’s less like the DMV and more like the Apple Store? How can it actually deliver for Americans and solve our most pressing problems—in housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare? And, how do we reverse government’s long march into total incompetence?

Ezra and Derek have a lot of ideas on how we can get there. Today on Honestly, we hear them. This was an excellent conversation and I’m eager for you to watch or listen.

The Free Press

Can Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Save the Left From Itself?

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic…

Listen now

11 hours ago · 57 likes · 290 comments · Bari Weiss

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader offers other prespectives!

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Mar 17, 2025

Editor: The Telegraph’s Headline and Sub-headline frame this execercise in political hysteria.

Headline: Mahmoud Khalil is a test case for the survival of Western civilisation

Sub-headline: Europe seems resigned to not deport foreigners with hostile views. The United States should be different.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/03/14/mahmoud-khalil-test-case-for-survival-western-civilisation/?WT.mc_id=e_DM538066&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_USD_New&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_USD_New20250317&utm_campaign=DM538066

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Editor: Simon Hankinson is a Neo-Con, in fact, a defacto Straussian. What does that mean? Leo Strauss re-wrote the History Of Philosphy, that just didn’t advocate The Noble Lie, but inshrined it as an execise of Elite Power : a methodolody of the control of the lesser beings, by that self-appointed Elite! Reader Peter Thiel offers his ‘The Straussian Moment’!

https://lite.evernote.com/note/46c636b6-b404-45df-ab0a-1f84c6fdc8c2

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Summary

THE POLITICS OF LYING

Socrates’ introduction of the Republic‘s notorious “noble lie” comes near the end of Book 3 (414b-c). “We want one single, grand lie,” he says, “which will be believed by everybody – including the rulers, ideally, but failing that the rest of the city.” Grand lie? Noble lie? G. R. F. Ferrari has a good note on the issue: “The lie is grand or noble (gennaios) by virtue of its civic purpose, but the Greek word can also be used colloquially, giving the meaning ‘a true-blue lie,’ i.e. a massive, no-doubt-about-it lie (compare the term ‘grand larceny’).” This is not the only point on which there might be argument about the translation. Some prefer to “lie” the more neutral “falsehood” (which need not imply deliberate deception), others “fiction ” (perhaps trying to prescind from questions of truth and falsehood altogether). Cornford had “bold flight of invention.” I think “lie” is exactly right. But the argument for that will emerge later, in section II.

The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato’s good city: a myth of national or civic identity – or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city’s differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). If people can be made to believe it, they will be strongly motivated to care for the city and for each other.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-platos-republic/noble-lie/F04B78C5546C7FB5E331248F35068F76

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Editor: M.F. Burnyeat offers isights on the Straussian Methodology:

Strauss, of course, wants his “gentlemen” readers to form the opposite conviction, about the Republic and about politics in general. What persuasions can he muster? There is the frail comparison with Shakespeare. There is the consideration that Socrates is a master of irony and “irony is a kind of dissimulation, or of untruthfulness.”

But to show in detail that Plato means the opposite of what Socrates says, Strauss resorts to a peculiar mode of paraphrase which he evidently learned from the tenth-century Islamic philosopher, Farabi.

The technique is as follows. You paraphrase the text in tedious detail—or so it appears to the uninitiated reader. Occasionally you remark that a certain statement is not clear; you note that the text is silent about a certain matter; you wonder whether such and such can really be the case. With a series of scarcely perceptible nudges you gradually insinuate that the text is insinuating something quite different from what the words say. Strauss’s description of Farabi describes himself: “There is a great divergence between what Farabi explicitly says and what Plato explicitly says; it is frequently impossible to say where Farabi’s alleged report of Plato’s views ends and his own exposition begins.”

The drawback with this mode of commenting on a Platonic dialogue is that it presupposes what it seeks to prove, that the dialogue form is designed to convey different meanings to different kinds of readers.

Ifthere is a secret meaning, one might concede that Maimonides’ instructions show us how to find it and that Farabi’s mode of commentary is the properly cautious way to pass it on to a new generation of initiates. But Strauss has not yet shown that Plato does conceal his opinions, let alone that they are the opposite of what Socrates explicitly says. Hence his use of techniques adapted from Maimonides and Farabi is a vicious circularity.

It would be tedious to follow up all the perversities, both literary and philosophical, of Strauss’s reading of the Republic. I shall pick on one central statement Strauss makes about the Republic: “The philosophers cannot be persuaded, they can only be compelled to rule the cities.”

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Sphinx Without a Secret

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Editor: Mr. Hankinson opening paragraphs!

There’s an old joke among US immigration officers: “the case ain’t over ‘til the alien wins”.

It long reflected the truth: that absurd interpretations of the law and endless appeals made it rare for non-citizens (“aliens”) to ever be deported, even if they had committed fraud or other crimes.

But the United States now has a president committed not only to securing the country’s borders, but to enforcing the law and deporting those ordered to be removed. Trump has said that those “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity” will be held to account.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of New York City’s Columbia University, is a test case: can the United States remove non-citizens with views that appear to be antithetical to its very existence, or will the courts force us into pathological levels of tolerance?

Khalil was arrested on March 8 by immigration agents. He is reportedly of Palestinian heritage and from Syria, arrived on a student visa, and then, apparently based on marriage to an American citizen, obtained lawful permanent residence status, aka a “green card”.

There is much evidence that Khalil has been at the centre of anti-Israel protests on campus – perhaps even organising them. He has been described as belonging to Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and reportedly led students from its campus Gaza Solidarity Encampment in negotiations with administrators.

Under leaders who are at best feckless and at worst sympathetic to the protesters, Columbia has endured two years of disgraceful events, including assaults on Jewish students, sequestering staff, occupying buildings, pro-Hamas propaganda, blocking classes, and vandalism.

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Editor: Mr. Hankinson last paragraph offers Trump as the final arbiter. What Hankinson offers the reader is incomplete: The Executive, The Legislative and The Judicial share the powers as civic equals! Though the vexing question remaines how far will Trump go?

In Europe, defiant, possibly unassimilable immigrants seem to have the upper hand. In the US, the Trump administration has not only declared them unwelcome, but taken action to send them packing.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/03/14/mahmoud-khalil-test-case-for-survival-western-civilisation/?WT.mc_id=e_DM538066&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_USD_New&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_USD_New20250317&utm_campaign=DM538066

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader: A case of bad judgement or someting else?

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Mar 16, 2025

The historian Niall Ferguson has denied being an “gay-basher”, claiming that his friendship with the prominent homosexual blogger Andrew Sullivan showed that he could not be homophobic.

Following days of criticism about his comments on the sexuality of economist John Maynard Keynes, the Harvard professor sought to clear his name with an open letter to The Harvard Crimson, the university’s college newspaper.

The British academic had already apologised for claiming that Keynes did not care about the future because he was gay and had no children, but said he owed it to his students to “make it unambiguously clear” that he was not homophobic.

In the letter, Ferguson, 49, said: “In my writing and teaching, I have laboured long and hard to expose precisely what was wrong about the theories that condemned homosexuals, Jews and others to discrimination and death.” As evidence that he was not a “gay-basher as some headline writers so crassly suggested” he pointed out that Sullivan , a US-based political commentator, gave a reading at his wedding and is a godfather to one of his sons.

Explaining his remarks last Thursday which sparked the row, he said: “Not for one moment did I mean to suggest that Keynesian economics as a body of thought was simply a function of Keynes’ sexuality.” But he added it could not be true that the economist’s sexuality “is totally irrelevant to our historical understanding of the man”.

Ferguson also used the letter to condemn “vituperative online critics” for their knee-jerk response to his original comments – adding that for the “self-appointed inquisitors of internet, it is always easier to accuse than seriously to inquire”.

But judging by the online comments, many students remain unimpressed, with several questioning his “some of my best friends are gay” defence, and others questioning his role as the Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard.

Newspaper Reader.

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Old Socialist offers a selective commentary!

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Mar 16, 2025

Headline: Is this a bonfire of red tape — or yet more smoke and mirrors?

Sub-headline If Keir Starmer is serious about cutting the costs of regulation, he needs to get serious about measuring them

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/bonfire-red-tape-keir-starmer-labour-pcwmfvhnf

Editor: The Reader has to give Mr. Colevile some credit for his first paragraphs.

Keir Starmer is the last person you can imagine going on Stars in Their Eyes. But in his big speech on Thursday he did a pretty convincing impression of Elon Musk. The prime minister complained that Whitehall was harbouring a “cottage industry of checkers and blockers”; that it’s too hard “for the most enterprising people in the country to just get on with the job”. But no more! Under Labour, compliance costs for business will fall by a quarter. Yes, a full 25 per cent.

It’s an admirable ambition. Every poll of businesses, large and small, finds that compliance and admin are an ever-growing burden. In the City, for example, the ratio of regulators to workers has roughly quadrupled since 2011 — having already risen almost 40-fold since 1980. And God knows our economy needs an injection of dynamism: the latest GDP figures have us shrinking once more, after year on year of stagnant growth.

Editor: what follows is an etiolated diagnosis framed by ‘But there are a few small problems.’ The Reader just needs to focus on Colevile as the head of a Think Tank, that employs a cadre of technoctats, yes small t, who can and will supply the boss with the most pertenent idiological information. These two pargagraphs are alive with the hard work of his underlings. Not forgetting that Starmer is the a low-rent version of Tony Blair! The Reader might look at the Prime Misterships of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak as a collection of mendacious political incompetents.

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The Reader now finds herself in a position of confronting the remaining 998 words of Colvile’s political argument. I’ll supply a selection of his political chatter.

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Musk and Donald Trump are targeting whole categories of compliance — DEI, ESG, AML, KYC. Hell, Trump has even said it’s OK to bribe foreigners again.

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The second is that, as Dominic Lawson points out, Starmer is simultaneously increasing the regulatory burden, via Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill — a package of pro-union, anti-business measures so detested by the private sector that the government cannot name a single small firm that supports it

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Only one department, Defra, has a full list of the regulations it has imposed. Even when the government was deciding which European rules to keep after Brexit, there were no costs attached.

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But that system is utterly unfit for purpose.

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Editor: under the manner of Self-Congratulation

Last year I co-authored a report for the Centre for Policy Studies think tank examining the impact assessments attached to every piece of legislation from the 2010s. We showed that the Tories’ promises to lower the burden of regulation were bunkum — in fact, the official estimates demonstrated that costs rose by £6 billion a year.

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Editor: ‘by the most junior people’ in sum not worthy of attention/consideration. Not to speak of ‘Class Bias’!

It was clear from the assessments, and from conversations within Whitehall, that the estimates were too often done at the last minute, by the most junior people in the office, to justify decisions that had already been made.

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Editor: to the Grenfell matter, see the italics of the second sentence!

Or what about the second staircase rules brought in after Grenfell to make evacuation easier? A noble and necessary measure, you might think.

Except that the Grenfell inquiry did not actually recommend second staircases. And the impact assessment could not find evidence of a single life, anywhere, that would have been saved — not least because fire brigade practices in buildings under 50m tall “are effective to the point that mass evacuation via the stairwell is an extremely rare occurrence”. Yet the Tories not only introduced the requirement but unilaterally lowered the height limit for second staircases from 30m to 18m.

But this, too, isn’t the end of the story. Because the impact assessment included the cost of building the additional staircases. But not of the floor space, and flats, that would be lost to make room. It glibly claimed the towers could be made wider or taller. Which is not, to say the least, how our planning system works.

In truth, once you ran the numbers properly, the estimated annual cost of £268 million was closer to £2 billion. But there was no way for builders to challenge the figures. The result has been fewer new homes, an effective ban on the construction of traditional mansion blocks over that 18m threshold — and long months of frozen construction, across England, as the consultation dragged on.

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Editor: Colevile self-congratulation is the perpetual ! An expression of ‘Progressive Thatcherism’ ?

That means, as our report set out, a complete transformation of how Whitehall thinks about regulation — putting the costs front and centre, getting independent estimates rather than letting departments mark their own homework, and much more. It means eliminating scams like the plastic bag trick, in which civil servants rebadged the obligation for customers to save the planet by paying for their shopping bags as a deregulatory measure — think of the savings for the supermarkets! — and magically met their targets for slashing red tape as a result.

Above all, it means changing how ministers think — and what they are rewarded for. Because the problem is not just over-mighty regulators, but politicians whose positive headlines — and cabinet careers — depend on being seen as legislative dynamos, constantly responding to the latest clamour that something (anything!) must be done about the problem of the day, whatever the cost.

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Editor: The Eternal Mirage of Growth as expressed by both Starmer and Colevile. Note the Colevile tag line in italics!

Starmer is absolutely right that Britain’s addiction to regulation is a drag on growth. But his government has done nothing but increase the burden on the private sector — with disastrous economic consequences.

As for making a speech promising to cut compliance costs on the same day that his party blithely votes through a massive hike in them without even pausing to get an accurate estimate? There’s a word for that. But not one I can use in print.

Old Socialist.

Political Observer: Free Speech used to be a Constitututional Guarantee, indeed a Right?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 15, 2025

I’ve been a regular suscriber of the Manhattan Institute’s newsletter for some time, yet nothing quite preparred me for this collectively hysterical post. The soft-sell of Eric Adams has been abandoned as not quite enough?

Yet the reader might consult Heinrich Meier’s book demonstrates a certain political prorpinqiuty between these two thinkers:

The ‘Crimes of Mahmoud Khalil’ are enumerated and then expanded upon by the cadre of paid propagandists! Reader note that this attack on free speech and political action can be traced, in it’s Television Iteration, to the re-write of Phillip Roth’s ‘Plot Against America’ that debuted as a Television Series, written David Simon and Ed Burns under the supervision of Roth!

Reader prepare yourself to the toxic marriage of Judaism and Zionism as a political/moral singularity!

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/ March 13, 2025

Good morning,

On Saturday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator for students during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the university’s campus last year. President Trump praised the arrest Monday and said Khalil is the “first arrest of many to come” among those “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” He is accused of harassing Jewish-American students on campus and distributing pro-Hamas propaganda.

The arrest is a direct consequence of President Trump’s January 29 Executive Order combatting antisemitism on university and college campuses. Khalil, who has described himself as a Palestinian refugee born in Syria and is a legal resident of the U.S., is serving as a Rorschach test for American lawmakers and the national media on the Trump administration’s willingness to combat antisemitism and impose order on elite American campuses.

Hannah E. Meyers, MI’s director of policing and public safety, writes in City Journal that Khalil’s detention is not only justified, it is a necessary signal that anonymous violence is unacceptable.

And adjunct fellow Tal Fortang warns in City Journal that “civil terrorism is a dangerous manifestation of a simmering battle for the West.” Masked criminals who subject law-abiding Americans to harassment and an unending flow of physical and economic danger are trying to destroy America and the West, not save it.

At the Manhattan Institute, our scholars have long sounded the alarm on the rise of antisemitism on campuses across the country and the network of progressive and anti-American organizations sowing civil disorder. This newsletter highlights some of our recent work on the issue, especially Hannah E. Meyers, Ilya Shapiro, and Tim Rosenberger’s model legislation to ban masking for the sake of intimidation.

In other news, senior fellow Roland Fryer writes in the Wall Street Journal that MEI—“merit, excellence, and intelligence”—is the latest hiring trend among American corporations, sidelining DEI. Thank goodness for that. But, in UnHerd, Paulson policy analyst Neetu Arnold warns opponents of DEI that, as they roll back racialist programs, they must remember that there is a difference between regulating conduct and regulating speech, with the latter protected by the First Amendment.

This week we launched a video series to promote the work of MI scholars in a new and sharable format. The first installment features Leor Sapir, director of MI’s Gender Identity Initiative, who reveals how interventions like mastectomies and gender transition surgery on minors are based on ideology—not science.

Finally, MI scholars published two new research papers this week. Senior fellow Eric Kober evaluates the mass of contradictions that make up the Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan recently proposed by the NYC Department of City Planning. He also offers recommendations for improvement. And MI’s director of Cities, John Ketcham, co-authored a report with Jack Santucci proposing a new set of electoral reforms for big cities. They explain how party-list proportional representation, which is neither inherently conservative nor inherently liberal, could end the era of one-party domination and open up space for local coalitions to focus on issues that do not track with national politics.

Continue reading for all these insights and more.

Kelsey Bloom
Editorial Director

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Political Observer

Old Socialist confronts the revelatory Cast of Characters! But the full scale Anti-Russian near hysteria is really the central attraction!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 14, 2025

Editor: The Reader has to wonder at the employment of the use of ‘peaceniks vs. hawks’ in the the year 2025? The desperation for a compact solution, for a title that won’t eat up too much space?

Europe | Rearm fast!

Europe’s other front: peaceniks vs hawks

Not all voters favour rearming. Hardly any like paying for it

https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/03/13/europes-other-front-peaceniks-vs-hawks

Editor: the cast of characters is a place to start the inquirery into this 1050 word monstrocity?

Wendela de Vries, The ReArm Europe, NATO, Mette Frederiksen, Mette Frederiksen, Donald Tusk, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Pal Jonson, Pauli Aalto-Sepala, The Left party, AfD, Social Democrats (SPD), Friedrich Merz, Ralf Stegner, Geert Wilders, Emmanuel Macron, National Assembly, Five Star Movement, far-left groups , Alessandro Marrone, the Institute of International Affairs, Giorgia Meloni, YouGov!

Editor: the final paragraph of this Propaganda:

That will leave politicians scratching their heads. And spending money is only part of what European countries must do to defend themselves. They must also recruit soldiers—and in most countries few young people are interested. (The Nordics are in better shape: they conscript.) Countries must consolidate their fragmented defence industries, though perhaps not too much: research in Romania by Eoin Power of the University of Texas at Austin shows that voters are more likely to support defence spending that creates jobs in their own country. Above all, they have to convince their citizens they need stronger armed forces. Many Europeans accept that message; fewer are willing to pay for it.

Editor: The Reader might contemplate what the possible final disposition of this manucatured war in Ukraine might be? A possible denoument of this political melodrama might be: the dissapearnce of Zelenskyy from the center of contoversy, as he and his minions decamp?

Old Socialist

Newspaper Reader confronts his short, willful, erratic, & heedless final paragraphs!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 12, 2025

….

What team Trump has achieved is the opposite: A Russia that sees even less reason to settle, a Europe that sees more reason to go its own way, a China that believes America will eventually fold and a once-again betrayed Ukraine that will have even less reason to trust international guarantees of its security.

There’s more of this: Sunday’s arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia, may even get pro-Israel civil libertarians to defend his rights while making a martyr of him on the far-left. But the pattern is clear. Ignoring the political corollary to Newton’s Third Law of Motion — that every action has an equal and opposite reaction — the administration will now reap precisely what it should avoid.

Trump’s critics are always quick to see the sinister sides of his actions and declarations. An even greater danger may lie in the shambolic nature of his policymaking. Democracy may die in darkness. It may die in despotism. Under Trump, it’s just as liable to die in dumbness.

Newspaper Reader.

Newspaper Reader: please note my highlights:

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 12, 2025

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The discovery that Trump is electoral halitosis isn’t the only thing diminishing his golden facade. Shortly before the president’s inauguration, George Osborne spoke of the mood among Democrats he encountered in Silicon Valley: “There is a real feeling, and it’s quite a contrast to what’s happening in Europe and in the UK, that the animal spirits of capitalism have been fired up, that deregulation is coming, that further growth is coming, that this is, as he himself describes it, a new golden age for America.”

How, you might ask, is that working out? Since Trump entered office, US economic growth forecasts have been slashed (Goldman Sachs projects growth of just 1.7 per cent this year, down from 2.4 per cent) and stock markets have plummeted. The tech billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have collectively lost $209bn since his second term began. A majority of the US public (52 per cent) now disapprove of his performance to date – always an uncomfortable position for a populist to be in.

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Editor: For those who cant resist the New Statesman’s Neo-Liberalism, offered as ‘New Times, New Thinking’, there is so much more to chew on! George’s Oxbridger Education reveals itself in the first quoted sentence, followed by the Osborne’s comment.

Newspaper Reader.