StephenKMackSD's Blog

Political Cynic.

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Sep 12, 2025

Political Cynic.

SKM.

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Sep 12, 2025

American Writer winces!

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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!

…

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.

…

“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.

…

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.

The surge in inflation in recent years is still being felt, fueling frustration among France’s ‘just-getting-by’ population. Falling unemployment has not stopped the poverty rate from rising.

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Sep 11, 2025

Footnote:

Americans will not find the plight of the French Under-Class as even worthy of comment or concern!

StephenKMackSD

Queer Atheist comments briefly !

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Sep 11, 2025

Editor: Like William F. Buckley Jr. , Stephens is an Oil Man’s Brat! And from the above former ‘a editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post’ , but more that just that!

Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. At The Jerusalem Post, he oversaw the paper’s news, editorial, digital, and international operations, and wrote a weekly column. Stephens is the author of “America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder,” “The Dying Art of Disagreement,” and “Has Obama Made the World a More Dangerous Place?

Editor: From the final paragraphs of Stephens’ Sept. 9, 2025 essay:

An excess of fear can lead to serious mistakes, and we’ll find out soon if Israel’s strike on Hamas’s leaders in Qatar was one of them. But if Israel’s usual critics can’t be bothered to appreciate the seriousness of the threat Israelis face daily — from Houthi drones, Palestinian gunmen, Hezbollah rocket fire displacing tens of thousands of Israelis or Israeli women being raped and slaughtered by Hamas — they will have no influence over Israeli thinking or behavior. In their one-sided vehemence, they write themselves out of any meaningful conversation about the Palestinian future.

So what effect do anti-Israel gesture politics actually have?

From Montreal to Paris to Melbourne, diaspora Jews are living through the worst era of open antisemitism since the 1930s. Leaders like Canada’s Mark Carney, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Australia’s Anthony Albanese are no doubt sincere in condemning this. But they are also contributing to a climate of anti-Jewish demonization by treating Israel as a quasi-pariah state whose presumptive supporters can be viewed as guilty accomplices. In their virtue-signaling foreign policy, they are inflicting genuine harms on their own Jewish citizens.

Long term, the Jews will survive this — as we always have. The history of governments that sought to win political favor by harming the Jews is usually a story of disgrace and decline.

Editor: Bret Stephens is more than a Zionist Apologist, but the voice of the Toxin of the Gaza Genocide, in all it’s criminal iterations! Which Mr. Stephens attempts to papers over, with an amplified Jewish Victimhood narrative!

Queer Atheist.

The surge in inflation in recent years is still being felt, fueling frustration among France’s ‘just-getting-by’ population. Falling unemployment has not stopped the poverty rate from rising.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Sep 11, 2025

American Fellow Traveler.

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Sep 10, 2025

American Fellow Traveler.

American Observer.

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Sep 09, 2025

…

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/09/08/french-journalist-alain-duhamel-we-are-facing-both-a-crisis-of-government-and-a-crisis-of-society_6745137_5.html

American Observer.

American Reader.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Sep 09, 2025

Act 1:

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Once a star on the international stage, dubbed the “French Obama” in the US and “Wunderkind” in Germany, Macron is now described as one of the architects of the French decline: a phenomenon seen as a source of concern for some and of schadenfreude for others. The self-proclaimed reformer has “self-destructed,” summarized the magazine Der Spiegel on Friday, mocking the “grotesque discrepancy between words and deeds: So far, Paris has only granted Ukraine a total of €6 billion in military aid, less than countries like Denmark, the Netherlands or Sweden, which would never claim to play a role on the international scene. France is now a great power only in its president’s speeches.”

The incident also comes 15 days before the United Nations General Assembly, held in New York on September 22, at which the French president is due to recognize the State of Palestine. Macron hopes to revive the two-state solution, at a time when Israel is continuing its relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Israeli officials have criticized Macron and seek to undermine his initiative, describing it as being led by a president who “doesn’t matter” anymore.

…

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/09/09/macron-weakened-on-world-stage-after-bayrou-government-s-collapse_6745212_4.html

Act 2 :

Emmanuel Macron, a certain idea of power

By Raphaëlle Bacqué, Ariane Chemin and Ivanne Trippenbach

Published on December 18, 2024, at 7:01 pm (Paris), updated on December 20, 2024, at 6:27 pm

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/12/18/emmanuel-macron-a-certain-idea-of-power_6736228_5.html

Investigation: ‘The Two Emmanuel Macrons’ (Part 1/4). The French president’s decision in June to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale provoked a major political crisis in France. Le Monde looks back in a series of articles at the leader’s puzzling evolution.

On November 16, 2016, a couple, she in sunglasses and leather pants, he in a slim-fitting black suit and thin matching tie, slipped incognito under the central gate and archways of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Just after declaring his candidacy for the presidential election in the nearby Paris suburb of Bobigny, Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by his wife Brigitte, slipped away to secretly visit the tombs of the 43 kings of France. In the winter light filtering through the rose window of the south arm, the future president caressed the white marble of the recumbent sculpted figures.

For all those who take power, there’s an original scene. Saint-Denis is the crucible of France’s royal past, a key place in the national narrative. Other presidential candidates, lovers of history, had preceded Macron in drawing a piece of legitimacy from this magnetic pole of monarchical ambitions: François Mitterrand in the autumn of 1980; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, more quietly, in 2012.

On that day in November 2016, journalists and the embedded writer Philippe Besson, then busy writing his book Un personnage de roman (“A character from a novel”), missed Macron’s escapade. But on the way back, he confided to one of his early admirers, the journalist-blogger Bruno Roger-Petit, the meaning of his visit to Saint-Denis: Amid the “stones that speak,” he found himself “alone in his destiny.”

…

Editor: In the 3,522 words of the first part of their political essay, have Raphaëlle Bacqué, Ariane Chemin and Ivanne Trippenbach decided to rehabilitate Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel? Though their collective prose style seems mannered to an American Reader !

American Reader.

Newspaper Reader.

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Sep 08, 2025

Headline: Bayrou ousted as French PM, Macron to appoint successor in ‘next few days’

Sub-headline: After just nine months in office, François Bayrou will have to hand in his resignation. His fall leaves President Emmanuel Macron searching for his seventh prime minister.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/09/08/francois-bayrou-ousted-as-french-pm-after-losing-confidence-vote_6745163_5.html

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https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/09/08/francois-bayrou-ousted-as-french-pm-after-losing-confidence-vote_6745163_5.html

François Bayrou was ousted as prime minister on Monday, September 8, after losing a vote of confidence in the Assemblée Nationale. Bayrou and his government lost the vote by 364 votes to 194, with opposition parties uniting against him. He will submit his resignation to French President Emmanuel Macron early Tuesday, sources close to him told Agence France-Presse. The Elysée Palace said Macron will name a new prime minister “in the next days.”

Bayrou, who was on the job for just nine months, blindsided even his allies by calling a confidence vote to end the lengthy standoff over his austerity budget. He had unveiled his budget plan in July, which sought €44 billion in spending cuts over three years, including reductions in pension and healthcare spending. The proposals had triggered weeks of tense debate in Parliament and strong public criticism.

Bayrou was the sixth prime minister under Macron since the French president was first elected in 2017. Bayrou’s ousting leaves Macron with a new domestic headache at a time when he is leading diplomatic efforts on the Ukraine war.

Before the vote at the Assemblée Nationale, Bayrou defended his decision to call the high-risk confidence vote, telling MPs: “The biggest risk was not to take one, to let things continue without anything changing (…) and have business as usual.”

Describing the debt pile as “life-threatening” for France, Bayrou said his government had put forward a plan so that the country could “in a few years’ time escape the inexorable tide of debt that is submerging it.” “You have the power to overthrow the government,” but not “to erase reality,” said Bayrou.

…

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2025/09/08/francois-bayrou-ousted-as-french-pm-after-losing-confidence-vote_6745163_5.html

Newspaper Reader