Politcal Observer: His Cast Charasters is like, in its own way, those dreadful Cecil B. DeMille Biblical Epics, we watched as children at the Arden Theater, and also as re-runs on * The Fabulous 52 !
Editor: As usual Mr. Stephens ignores the myriad crimes of the Zionist State! He was the editor of the Jerusalem Post, the propganda arm of the Zionist State! Stephens is not just a Fellow Traveler, he is an integral part of the internal propaganda aparatus within the American State:
Larry Ellison: Co-founder of Oracle Corporation and consistently ranked among the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Co-founders of Google (Alphabet Inc.).
Mark Zuckerberg: Co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms (Facebook).
Steve Ballmer: Former CEO of Microsoft and current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team.
Michael Dell: Founder and CEO of Dell Technologies.
Michael Bloomberg: Co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., former Mayor of New York City, and a major philanthropist.
Miriam Adelson: Physician and publisher, who, with her late husband Sheldon Adelson, built a casino empire (Las Vegas Sands Corporation) and became a significant political and philanthropic donor.
Leonard Blavatnik: A Ukrainian-born, British-American investor and the founder of Access Industries, with significant stakes in chemicals and media companies like Warner Music Group.
George Soros: Investor, business magnate, and founder of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations.
Jan Koum: Ukrainian-born American co-founder of WhatsApp.
Marc Benioff: Co-founder of the software giant Salesforce.
Jim Simons: Renowned hedge fund manager and founder of Renaissance Technologies.
Bill Ackman : founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, an investment management company.
Editor: I have foreshortened Stephens Cast of Characters:
Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Senator Ted Cruz, The Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, William F. Buckley, American Mercury, National Review, Pat Buchanan, Leo Strauss, Christianity, Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “The Road to Serfdom.”, Now it’s the New Testament,Charlie Kirk, MAGA, Kishinev-born grandfather, Who actually killed Christ, brought on the bubonic plague?, Or got America embroiled in unnecessary wars in the Middle East?, replaces American workers with cheap immigrant labor?,
Editor: Mr. Stephens a full hysterical screech!
Jews don’t have the luxury of being indifferent to either threat. The tsunami of progressive antisemitism that hit after Oct. 7 is being followed by another wave, just as tall.
Political Observer.
* Film students and movie buffs everywhere are searching for the lost music and history compositions of The Fabulous 52.
The Fabulous 52 aired each Saturday night (11:30) on KNXT’s Channel 2 ( late 1950s/Los Angeles) showing its big, bold title superimposed upon the well-lit, KNXT/CBS studio. Who can forget the spot-aerial lights that stretched out into the starry night skies? A beautiful orchestra flaired ” The High and the Mighty” an unforgettable, classical, opening.
For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?
I was born into the “Cold War” era, and most of my career as a columnist was in the “Post-Cold War.” The latter era — those decades since 1989 characterized by American unipolar dominance — ended in the 2020s with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which exploded Europe’s Cold War and post-Cold War security architecture, followed by China’s emergence as a true peer economic and military rival to the U.S.
My initial thought was that we should call this new epoch the “Post-Post-Cold War,” but that made no sense. No, we have arrived at a moment that is much more than the aftermath of a largely bipolar superpower rivalry born in the mid- to late 1940s. It’s the birth of something novel and highly complex to which we all must adapt, and quickly — but what to call it?
Many climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or now the “Artificial Intelligence Age.” Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as the historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back.”
But none of these labels capture the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. Artificial intelligence is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.
As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations,as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan.
I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms.
At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.”
It was a neologism — a word he just made up on the spot and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek “poly,” meaning “many.” But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where — thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity — every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale.
So, welcome to the Polycene. It’s been an interesting ride getting here.
Better Than Any Human
My journey through the phase changes that led me to Polycene began in the summer of 2024, two years after ChatGPT was first released, when I sat down with Mundie for a series of tutorials on artificial intelligence. I have been very fortunate over the years to have developed a network of experts on different subjects, whom I call tutors. They have become both cherished teachers and friends, and Mundie, originally a supercomputer designer, has been my go-to person on computing since 2004.
One of the first things he explained to me was that the holy grail of the A.I. revolution was creating a machine capable of “polymathic artificial general intelligence.” This would be a machine that was able to master physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, philosophy, Mozart, Shakespeare and baseball better than any human could, and then reason across all of those disciplines at a high dimensional level, higher than a human ever could, to produce breakthrough insights that no human ever could.
While some skeptics believe that we will never be able to build a machine with truly polymathic A.G.I., many others, including Mundie, believe it is a matter of when, not if.
This is a remarkable phase change in cognition that we are going through: We are moving from programmable computing — where a computer could only ever reflect the insight and intelligence of the human who programmed it — toward polymathic A.G.I. That is where you basically describe the outcome you want, and the A.I. melds insight, creativity and broad knowledge to figure out the rest. We are shifting the boundary of cognition, Mundie argues, from what humans can imagine and program to what computers can discover, imagine and design on their own. It is the mother of all computing phase changes — and a species-level turning point.
The Microchip Evolution
All of this was made possible by microchips evolving from binary to poly. In the binary era, chips processed data serially — toggling between 0s and 1s to execute one instruction after another. In the poly era, chips can compute in parallel — with thousands of smaller tasks processed at once, each aware of and interacting with the others.
The big advance in parallel processing in the early 2000s is what made today’s A.I. possible. It enabled computers to ingest huge amounts of data into their “brains” — their neural networks — and train themselves using billions of tiny settings, called parameters. As an A.I. system learns, it keeps adjusting these settings — like turning little dials — so it can recognize patterns, weigh alternatives and iteratively get smarter over time.
I have been tracking this change in computing for years from one of my favorite vantage points. When I want to understand how power is shifting in the world, my first call is rarely to the Pentagon or the State Department. Instead, I visit Applied Materials in Silicon Valley. Applied makes the precision machines and materials that allow companies like Nvidia, T.S.M.C., Intel and Samsung to manufacture the latest generations of microchips. So very often Applied can see before anyone else which companies and countries are pushing the technological frontier and which are lagging.
My most recent tutors there have been the chief executive, Gary Dickerson, and the chief of staff, Tristan Holtam, who for years have been showing me how our ability to generate polymathic A.I. has been enhanced by the creation of more polymorphic chips.
“We’ve gone from monolithic designs to disaggregated ones — breaking up the chip into ‘chiplets,’ each with its own specialized role and then recombining them into one integrated system,” explained Holtam. This, he added, “allows a single ‘system in a package’ to contain many different functions — logic, memory, communications, graphics — coexisting and cooptimizing together,” resulting in much more computing capability with less energy consumption.
And when designers ran out of room to add more features in two dimensions, they moved into three. Chips are now built vertically, stacking up many layers of circuitry — tiny parking ramps of transistors and memory cells stitched together by miles of microscopic or even nanoscopic wiring. Each new layer sharply increases the chip’s capacity for learning, predicting and decision-making.
Put it all together and you have the silicon foundation for the Polycene — multiple intelligences, seamlessly networked, co-improving and co-evolving in real time.
From Climate Change to Polycrisis
About a week after the A.I. tutorial in 2024 with Mundie, I got an email from my favorite environmental tutor, Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the world’s premier earth system scientists. Rockström said that he and his colleague Thomas Homer-Dixon, the executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, were convening a seminar in New York for climate week and could I help moderate?
I told him, “I’d be happy to — but what’s it about?”
“It’s about polycrisis,” Rockström said.
I thought: “That’s interesting. My A.I. tutor is talking about ‘polymathic artificial general intelligence,’ my microchip tutors have been talking about poly chips — and now my environmental tutor is talking about ‘polycrisis.’ What’s up with all the polys?”
The term “polycrisis” has been around for decades but has been recently popularized by the Columbia University historian Adam Tooze to highlight how one crisis, like Covid or the Ukraine war, can increasingly trigger multiple crises across the globe.
Rockström and Homer-Dixon have been mining the same concept, but with a particular focus on how cascading environmental crises were breaching what Rockström calls our “planetary boundaries.” These are interconnected life-support systems — like the stability of our climate and the health of our oceans, forests and soils — whose integrity we need to maintain to keep humanity safe and the natural world resilient.
For decades, when we spoke about climate change, the narrative was simple and rather binary: more warming bad, less warming good.
The thinking about climate change, though, has undergone a phase change of its own. In Rockström’s view, climate change becomes the spark that ignites cascades of interlocking crises. Together, they put the whole earth in a state of polycrisis — where self-reinforcing events like the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of the Amazon, two giant regulators of the earth’s temperature, propel us toward higher and higher temperatures, even without human fossil-fuel burning. This triggers more droughts, floods, wildfires, crop failures and sea-level rise, which in turn unleash economic shocks, mass migration, the collapse of fragile states and the breakdown of trust worldwide.
Two factors are propelling us in this direction, Rockström and Homer-Dixon wrote in a Nov. 13, 2022, opinion essay in this newspaper: “First, the magnitude of humanity’s resource consumption and pollution output is weakening the resilience of natural systems, worsening the risks of climate heating, biodiversity decline and zoonotic viral outbreaks,” and second, “vastly greater connectivity among our economic and social systems” means that what happens in one country or community can quickly tip into others, with no regard for borders.
I reported on the mini-version of this dynamic firsthand from Syria in the years just before its civil war erupted in 2011. A once-in-a-century drought — made more intense by shifting climate patterns — wiped out crops, drove hundreds of thousands of rural Syrians off their farms and forced them into the outskirts of cities like Aleppo and Damascus. There, they collided with soaring food prices, joblessness and longstanding ethnic and sectarian grievances. Then Syrians got on their cellphones and watched the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, prompted in part by rising food prices. And then they blew the lid off Syria.
A Geopolitical Transformation
Needless to say, this combination of fracturing states and fracturing Cold War alliances is combining to make geopolitics in general more polyamorous.
In 2011, the historian Walter Russell Mead observed that after the 1990s revolution that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians had a saying that today would apply to more than a few other countries: “It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
From Europe to the Middle East to Africa to Latin America, a lot of aquariums are being turned into fish soup full of sectarian, tribal or networked, super-empowered militias. It is no accident that it took President Trump so much time and energy — and arm-twisting — to herd all the different states, armies and militias into a simple cease-fire in Gaza. It could take him the rest of his time in office to herd them into peace — maybe.
At the same time, when I started in journalism in 1978, the world was largely defined by a set of binaries — East-West, Communist-Capitalist, North-South. Most countries at the time fit into one of those clubs. Today, it has become a free-for-all square dance of shifting partners. Iran is aligned with Russia against Ukraine. China is supplying technology for drones to both Russia and Ukraine. Israel is aligned with Muslim Azerbaijan versus Christian Armenia.
“The diffusion of power is not only about the U.S., Europe, China or Russia,” the national security experts Robert Muggah and Mark Medish wrote on the geopolitical risk site SecDev. “Middle powers — Brazil, India, Türkiye, the Gulf states, South Africa — are practicing what diplomats now call ‘multialignment.’ They seek advantage issue by issue rather than binding themselves to one camp. India buys discounted Russian oil while courting Western investment and tech transfers. Brazil expands trade with China while floating mediation ideas with Beijing and talking climate finance with Washington and Brussels.”
Warfare today is also much less binary — your front line against mine — with much more “hybrid” attacks coming from everywhere. Because the front line has become poly.
Vladimir Putin is fighting Ukraine on the attack surface of Ukrainian territory, and at the same time, he’s fighting Western Europe using the attack surface of cyberspace, where everyone is connected but no one is in charge. On that front, Putin’s shadow warriors are believed to be behind numerous disinformation campaigns in E.U. elections, unattributed drone incursions into Western European airspace and even, in August, jamming the GPS system of the plane carrying the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, while flying over Bulgaria, forcing the pilot to dig out paper maps to land safely.
From Binary to Polymorphic Communities
When I was growing up in Minnesota in the 1950s, the social landscape was extremely binary. Generally speaking, you were either white or Black, a man or a woman, straight or gay, a Christian or a Jew. You were either at work or at home or at home or in school. My congressmen were mostly liberal white Republican men in a Democratic district — not unusual in Minnesota back then. The categories were pretty rigid, and the boundaries policed by culture, law, prejudice, income and habit. Diversity certainly existed, but it was limited and rarely celebrated.
Not anymore!
Today, my hometown, St. Louis Park, once the beating heart of Minnesota Jewish culture, synagogues and delicatessens, has a 29-year-old Somali Muslim woman as mayor, Nadia Mohamed, who graduated from my high school and is part of the influx of Somalis to frigid Minnesota.
If I still lived in my old neighborhood, my representative in Congress would be Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress. I am told that more than 30 languages are spoken in the elementary school near my old house — roughly 29 more than when I grew up there.
Last week, St. Paul elected a Laotian Hmong immigrant, Kaohly Her, as its first Hmong American and female mayor — after she defeated the incumbent, Melvin Carter, the city’s first Black mayor.
It’s no wonder: Global migration has roughly doubled in number since 1990. It has become so multidirectional — workers moving from South Asia to the Persian Gulf, students from Africa to China, Sudanese and Eritrean refugees to Israel, Polish workers to Britain and refugees from Syria, Venezuela and Ukraine to everywhere — that communities once defined by a single ethnicity or faith are now polyglot, polychromatic and polyreligious.
The news about those communities has also moved from binary — largely top-down news generated by mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks — to poly: news generated side-to-side on social media and bottom up by bloggers and podcasters.
When the Trump administration recently tried to shield from view as much as possible its destruction of the White House East Wing, noted CNN’s Brian Stelter, “One of the most striking views of the demolition came from a passenger on a plane flying out of National Airport yesterday. It was reshared on X and other sites millions of times.”
Poly-Economic Networks
When Adam Smith laid out the foundational principles of trade in the 18th century, he imagined a relatively simple world of binary relationships: I make cheese, you make wine, and by specializing in what each of us does best, we both end up better off. That insight was revolutionary and still underpins our view (except for President Trump) that trade can be a win-win proposition.
But if Smith were alive now, watching how iPhones, mRNA vaccines, electric vehicles or advanced microchips get made, he wouldn’t just update his theories — he would have to write a new book.
What’s changed? In a word: complexity. Today’s economy is no longer primarily built on bilateral trade of discrete goods between countries with clear borders and self-contained industries. Instead, Eric Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, another of my tutors, points out that we now operate more and more inside global ecosystems, what he calls dynamic, “interdependent webs” of knowledge, skills, technology and trust.
That explains why most trade today involves more than two countries. In summarizing a report it released in June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said global supply chains now “account for about 70 percent of international trade, as services, raw materials, parts and components cross borders — often multiple times.” That weaves a complex web, where products are designed in one country, sourced with components from multiple others, manufactured in still a different place, assembled in yet another country and tested in one more.
Smith famously identified the division of labor as a huge productivity booster — you can make more pins with fewer workers if you divide up the labor correctly. “That was great,” Beinhocker remarked to me in a column in February. But today, in the Polycene, “the more powerful engine is the division of knowledge.”
When knowledge and capabilities are pooled, we are able to make complex things that solve complex problems cheaper and faster than any country could do alone.
Think about the chip in your smartphone. It was imagined in California, designed using software from the U.S. and Europe, manufactured in Taiwan using Dutch lithography machines and materials science innovations from Japan and Silicon Valley, all assembled in China and delivered by a global logistics network.
I always chuckle when I recall what Don Rosenberg, a former general counsel for Qualcomm, once told me about Qualcomm’s relationship with the Chinese tech behemoth Huawei — because it perfectly sums up today’s poly-economic world: “Huawei is our customer, our licensee, our competitor, our shared standards setter, and we are suing each other!”
The world, at its best, no longer runs on the equation “my finished product for yours.” It runs on 21st-century networks of collaboration built on trust, not bullying.
How to Govern in the Polycene
This kind of explosion of diverse new players is hardly without precedent in the history of our planet. While we often think of evolution as slow and incremental, the fact is that world history has been punctuated by massive bursts of new species and new designs — but this is not true only in nature, Beinhocker said to me.
Human civilization has also followed a similar pattern of big bangs, he explained, “each dramatically amplifying the complexity of human life” by expanding the number of empowered actors, connections, interactions and feedback loops in human society.
Think, Beinhocker said, “of how the shift from hunter-gatherers to settled civilizations” — with farmers and peasants and artisans and kings — “complexified life.” Think of how the printing revolution broke the monopoly on information held by religious and royal elites, and how the Industrial Revolution amplified human and machine power, enabling much more global trade and connectivity. Now we have artificially intelligent machines and robots joining the play, adding exponentially more nodes, networks and combinations of actors.
Many industrial democracies eventually concluded that the best way to govern in the industrial age was with some form of welfare state and two-party political systems based on a fixed left-right grid. I just don’t see how that works much longer in a world where most of the problems we face do not have “either/or” answers: they have “both/and” answers. Key actors must be able to occupy multiple states, and hold competing ideas in tension, at the same time.
I am a both/and person by nature. On immigration, I am for a very high wall, with a very big gate — secure borders and a welcome to both high-energy and highly skilled legal immigrants. On policing, I am for more police and better police. On economics, I am for growing the pie and redividing the pie. On education, I am for well-funded public schools but also for charters and independent schools; competition makes everyone better.
On foreign policy, I am for diplomacy but always backed by a strong military. On trade, I am for free trade with transparent rules — but also reciprocal treatment: Whatever China imposes on us, we should impose on it. On energy, I am for natural gas with carbon/methane capture, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, fission, fusion — any solution that can provide energy that is reliable, affordable and will diminish the odds we enter into a climate polycrisis. During the Covid pandemic, I was for balancing saving lives and saving livelihoods.
It’s not because I can’t make up my mind. It’s because I have made up my mind — that in the Polycene, the best answers live in the synthesis, not on the edges.
But because so many traditional left-right parties have hardened into political silos — incapable of operating in multiple modes at once — they are either fracturing under the stress of reality or devolving into identity tribes bound together by shared grievances, ethnicities and economic fantasies, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to real-world problem-solving. That’s not sustainable.
The most adaptive, resilient and productive communities in the Polycene will be those that can assemble dynamic coalitions across issues — what I call complex adaptive coalitions. These bring together business, labor, government, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, innovators, regulators and educators to solve problems through synthesis rather than by postponing them with binary mutual vetoes. That is the only way to move fast andmake things.
“Our old basis of shared association does not work anymore,” observed Dov Seidman, the business philosopher and founder of the HOW Institute for Society. “But the imperatives to live together, work together, cooperate with one another in ecosystems and belong together — not turn on each other — have only intensified.”
“Interdependence is no longer our choice,” he added. “It is our condition. We will either build healthy interdependencies and rise together or suffer through unhealthy interdependencies and fall together.”
Whichever way we go, though, we’re going there together.
That’s the inescapable truth of the Polycene, even if many leaders in Washington, Beijing and Moscow still haven’t grasped it. It will be the first era in which humanity must govern, innovate, collaborate and coexist at a planetary scale in order to thrive. Only by doing so can we capture the best and cushion the worst of everything from A.I. to nuclear power to climate change. It will take everyone, everywhere, rowing together.
“The decisive test of our age,” Beinhocker remarked to me, “is whether we will recognize this in time.”
I left scool at 16 and drifted, and watched too much television! But that became part of my education! I watched The Today show with Hugh Downs that featured Aline Saarinen as Arcitecture Critic, Judith Crist as Movie Critic, and Cleveland Amory in his ‘Who Killed Society?’ phase. He even scooped Truman Capote, and his adoration/ degradation of his ‘Swans’ in his La Côte Basque !
I watched Mort Sahl and on KTTV television in Los Angeles, and his revelaitions the Kennedy Assassination, with Mark Lane, and Roger Hilsman book ‘To Move a Nation, The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy’
In a trip to visit one of my brothers, who now were in trouble for ditching school, the crime of truency of the time. I saw a copy Gourmet Magazine of Christman 1960. Lucius Beebe and Henri Soulé’ Le Pavillon opened up to me, but of more importance was Edna Lewis writing about Free Town:
Robert M. Hutchins played a major part in my political explorations.
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, nonprofit educational institution established at Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1959 and based in Los Angeles from 1988. The educator Robert M. Hutchins (q.v.) organized the centre and headed it and its parent corporation, the Fund for the Republic (chartered in New York in 1952), for 25 years. The purpose of the centre—to clarify the basic issues confronting a democratic society—was served through discussion and criticism, publications, and public meetings. Scholars, public officials, and leaders of thought and action from many countries often met with a small resident staff to discuss and to try to understand the causes of contemporary problems. Topics included, among others, modern technology, ecological imperatives, responsibilities and control of the mass media, minority and constitutional rights, and world peace.
The centre had experienced financial difficulties off and on during its history, and in 1979 it was reorganized under a new parent organization—the University of California Santa Barbara Foundation—and became a “center of independent thought and criticism” on the university campus. In 1988 the centre was again reorganized when it moved to Los Angeles, where it absorbed the Institute for National Strategy and took over the publishing of New Perspectives Quarterly.
Mort Sahl also recomemded The New York Review of Books, which really began my political/intellectual/moral awakening! Yet when Robert Silvers provided space for Neo-Conservative Timothy Snyder, that was the end of my respect for this publication and its once …
Reader note who Snyder now associates with Neo-Con Bill Kristol !
Anne Applebaum through her publications in the Atlantic and most recently in her book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, has articulated a perplexed disappointment with Republican politicians and colleagues endorsing Trumpism. She poses a series of questions in her recent Atlantic article History Will Judge the Complicit: why have Republicans abandoned their principle in support of a dangerous and immoral president. How could “Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better”? How can the fear of a Twitter tirade silence members of once honorable elite, men like John Bolton and Paul Ryan, from intervention against the slide to totalitarianism. Her Atlantic article, Laura Ingraham’s Descent into Despair, begins with puzzlement of how a deeply idealistic iconoclast could evolve into an end-of-days Trumpist, stoked by fatalism over American decline, by liberal deracination, and from Catholic unlapsing. How indeed?
Applebaum begins her article on the transformation of Laura Ingraham, the Fox News professional racist and COVID-19 denier, by describing a celebratory Georgetown cocktail party of the neo-conservative elite in 1995. There the recognition of American exceptionalism and its appropriate distillation throughout the world was seamlessly enunciated. In attendance were David Brock (in his Clinton tormentor phase), David Frum, Danielle Crittendon, David Brooks, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, William Kristol, Dinesh D’Souza, and James Atlas, and Laura Ingraham. The reader can best decide whether this group is more aptly characterized as a self-congratulatory rogues gallery or post-Reaganite translators of the language of anti-totalitarianism, personal liberty and property rights, and American exceptionalism. In Anne Applebaum’s astigmatic eyes, focused by Eastern European analogies, the assumptions and simplistic confidences of the American liberal left about labor rights and wealth distribution may have seemed, unserious if not contemptible. The neo-conservative world view was curious. A modest level of irony, if not humility, might have led to pondering how a self-appointed elite became the intellectual center of the modern Republican Party. Here was a new conservative generation of columnists and editorial writers who overnight became public intellectuals and political theoreticians without ever having produced disciplined work on policy, or having achieved formal academic accomplishment or even having had extensive experience with legislation. And yet, William Kristol et al., could later credit themselves with the identification of and selection of Sarah Palin as a potential president. The totalistic adoption of an ideology and its self-appointed spokespersons might have recalled for Applebaum the permutated trans-slavism of the Comminform, given her affinity for analogies to sovietized Eastern Europe. It did not.
Reader consider that my commetarry can never quite match the unbrideled toxic egotism of Norman Podhoretz ‘Making It’! And his moment of trumph of self-reporting, by telling Jacqueline Kennedy ….
Headline: A Rising Democrat Leans Into the Campus Fight Over Antisemitism
Sub-headline:Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the proudly Jewish leader of a battleground state, has dived headfirst into subjects that have wrenched apart his party.
Editor: In the wake of the win of Zohran Mamdani, propelled by New York Jewish voters, in record numbers, puts Mamdani in the drivers seat? Binyamin Appelbaum’s essay recapitulates the essay in the New York Times of May 11, 2024! Josh Shapiro now becomes the politician to watch, as the check against the political toxen of Mamdani. Binyamin Appelbaum’s political essay is the companion piece to perpetual hysteric Jonathan Greenblatt’s ‘Mamdani Monitor’, that now becomes a political cudgel of choice in the defamation of Zohran Mamdani.
Newspaper Reader.
11/9/2025 8:50 A.M.
In my haste to post my comment, I forgot these two telling paragraphs of Binyamin Appelbaum comments on Zohran Mamdani!
…
Tuesday’s election results have supercharged the debate among Democrats about whether the road to political recovery runs toward the middle or the left. The reason the argument persists is not because the answer is unclear but because, for many Democrats, the clear answer is unpalatable. The party will not return to the White House, nor reclaim Congress, until it learns to embrace centrist politicians like Mr. Shapiro.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York does not demonstrate the viability of progressive candidates outside of a few big cities and coastal states. Nor can Democrats solve their problems by wrapping the same ideas in better paper. The party has marginalized itself so thoroughly that even Mr. Trump’s unpopular presidency isn’t doing much to make Democrats more popular. Everything Democrats want to accomplish is downstream from figuring out how to persuade voters in places like Pennsylvania — and in a bunch of places where the Democratic brand is held in even lower regard — that the party deserves another chance.
Editor: Zanny Menton Beddoes is that dredful combination of Neo-Conservatine and Neo-Liberal: In sum the double reincarnation of Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek! Name her a Politica/Moral Toxin! So the latest diateribe fashoned by her minions can’t surprise its readership! Women must put their Working Lives first. The apperance of Zohran Mamdani, is just well, kismet?
Headline: Universal child care can hurt children
Sub-headline: Its growing popularity in America is a concern
Across the rich world, parents of young children face a problem. In America, one of many countries with few subsidies, a household with two working parents and two young children can spend as much on child care as on housing. This pushes families to space out or have fewer children to avoid financial ruin. High costs also keep women out of the labour force, as it can be uneconomical to return.
Politicians are scrambling to respond. In America, the right is full of talk—J.D. Vance, the vice-president, has argued in favour of lower tax rates or cash handouts for families to help mothers stay at home—but, so far, little action. Instead, it is Democratic lawmakers making moves. On November 1st New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, expanded free child care to all families with children, starting from six weeks of age (it had previously been available only to poor and middle-class ones). Zohran Mamdani, who will be sworn in as mayor of New York at the start of next year, plans to follow in Ms Grisham’s footsteps. States including Vermont and Washington have recently made child-care subsidies much more generous.
American legislators are not alone in their enthusiasm. In Australia access to subsidised day care will be broadened next year. During the school term, Britain now offers 30 hours of free child care a week to parents who bring in less than £100,000 ($130,000) after tax. Since July middle- and low-income parents in New Zealand have been able to claim rebates for 40% of child-care fees, up from 25% before. The likes of Ms Grisham and Mr Mamdani are unusual, however, in believing that the state should bear the entire cost of care for families of all income levels, starting near birth.
Editor : Beddoes just cant let go of Michelle Lujan Grisham nor Mr Mamdani, as the vipers in this Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservative near Biblical pastiche!
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Editor: The final paragraphs of this diatribe
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The kids aren’t alright
A need for lots of adult interaction implies there are few economies of scale to be found in the care of babies and infants. By school age, an adult can oversee 20 to 30 children. At pre-school, they watch 12 or 15. In the best nurseries a carer looks after two or three. Subsidised centre-based care is of high enough quality in Finland that when a stipend was introduced to pay Finnish mothers to stay home after ten months, child development and female incomes suffered. But to reach such standards the government spends much more than the OECD average. Although New Mexico is funding its generous programme with levies on oil and gas extraction, fiscal room is more limited in New York and other states, which spells trouble.
Ultimately, child care is expensive. It is expensive for parents in America, it is expensive for the Finnish government and it is expensive—in the long run—in places that try to do it on the cheap. These costs are paid either via exorbitant sums handed over to day-care centres, forgone career progression, high taxes or by undermining children’s development. None is palatable. Yet the worst are the extremes: that mothers should forgo work for years or that families might be incentivised to place babies into an underfunded mode of care ill-suited to their needs. What a pity that those are the solutions American politicians seem most determined to seek.
Editor: The very notion of this collection of propagandists, stepped in the Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservative milieu, headed by Zanny Menton Beddoes, straines credulity to the breaking point!
Headline: Emmanuel Macron lays claim to the mantle of de Gaulle
Sub-headline : Like the general, the French president aspires to rule above conventional politics
As always the headline and sub-headline at The Financial Times, are the all important rhetorical/political framing for its Neo-Liberal Apologetics, Mr. Jonathan Fenby’s Macron Press Release being its latest example. It will not disappoint the regular readers of this newspaper! His essay makes all the requisite historical comparisons with de Gaulle: the commonality between both leaders is in the exercise of megalomania, with the proviso that de Gaulle had an actual record as War Hero, and political leader. While Macron’s particular politics are defined by the exercise of the arrogance of a political arriviste. The proof of that statement, the idea and practice of a Jupiterian Politics. Note, that one of the cornerstones of Neo-Liberal political fraudulence is the idea/construct that the Left/Right divide cannot just reach some consensus, a modus vivendi, but can be subject to a political/economic emancipation. The Civic dimension is consigned to the scrapheap of the Neo-Liberal Counter-Revolution: The Free Market determines the whole of the human aspiration and endeavor!
Absent from this celebration of the arrival of Neo-Liberalism à la française is the record of spoiled ballots and abstentions- for a full report on the unaddressed questions of Fenby’s unsurprising hosannas to Macron, read this enlightening report from CNN’s on the French vote (Updated May 8 2017):
Headline: A record number of French voters cast their ballots for nobody
(CNN) Emmanuel Macron’s triumph over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election has been hailed as a landslide victory for the centrist candidate and a widespread rejection of his rival’s far-right platform.
But Macron’s mandate may not be as overwhelming as it seems. A record number of French voters were so dismayed by their options that they either skipped the election or cast their ballots for no one at all.
The so-called “ballot blanc,” or white ballot, has a long history as a protest vote in France, going all the way back to the French Revolution. This time around, nearly 9% of voters cast blank or spoiled ballots — the highest ever since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
For now, the votes, which are counted towards the turnout, are largely symbolic. But there is a movement underway for the blank ballots to count as a share of the overall election vote. According to a recent Ifop poll, 40% of French voters said they would cast a blank vote if it were recognized under French law.
In the graph that CNN provides, that I cannot reproduce here*, the percent of both ‘white’ and ‘spoiled ballots’ stands at 33.4%. Nothing like a mandate for ‘reform’ ! Except to the editors and writers of The Financial Times.
Mr. Lawrence was Representative Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2005 to 2013.
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Editor: How much APIAC money did Pelosi take?
Representative Nancy Pelosi received approximately $618,120 from pro-Israel sources between 1990 and 2024. These funds are a combination of contributions from various pro-Israel groups, not solely from AIPAC, and have been disclosed through campaign finance filings.
Total amount received: $618,120 from 1990-2024.
Source of funds: The funds are from various pro-Israel sources, not exclusively AIPAC.
Time period: The data covers the period from 1990 to 2024.
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Pro-Israel Recipients – OpenSecrets
Representative Nancy Pelosi received approximately $618,120 from pro-Israel sources between 1990 and 2024. These funds are a combination of contributions from various pro-Israel groups, not solely from AIPAC, and have been disclosed through campaign finance filings.
Total amount received: $618,120 from 1990-2024.
Source of funds: The funds are from various pro-Israel sources, not exclusively AIPAC.
Time period: The data covers the period from 1990 to 2024.
Editor: Recall that The Mahattan Institute wasn’t just ethisiastic advocates of Eric Adams and his Restaurateur Cadre! Posted below is some valuable information as what this ‘Institute’ stand for!
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research – Bias and Credibility
These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Right Bias sources.
Overall, we rate the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Right Biased based on editorial and policy positions that routinely favor a conservative perspective. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to a lack of transparency with funding, the use of poor sources, and a failed fact check.
Bias Rating: RIGHT Factual Reporting: MIXED Country: USA Press Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Organization/Foundation Traffic/Popularity: Medium Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY
History
Founded in 1978 by Antony Fisher and William J. Casey, The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is a conservative American think tank established in New York City. The primary focus is on economics and law enforcement. Its message is communicated through books, articles, interviews, speeches, op-eds, and the institute’s quarterly publication City Journal.
In review, the Manhattan Institute’s website links to research topics, publications, and projects. News items provide a snippet from an external source a member has contributed to and then a link to their site. Some sources they link to are mostly right-leaning, such as The Dispatch, City Journal, and the New York Post. Under the category of research topics, they cover Urban Policy, Education, Energy & Environment, Health Policy, Legal Reform, Pubic Sector, Economics, and more.
Editorially, the Manhattan Institute favors free-market capitalism such as this Saving Capitalism. Regarding science, they do not outright deny human-influenced climate change but disagree with government solutions: Empty Theatrics on Climate Change. Reporting on President Trump and his handling of the economy is often favorable such as this Trumped-Up Budgets.
Overall, we rate the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Right Biased based on editorial and policy positions that routinely favor a conservative perspective. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to a lack of transparency with funding, the use of poor sources, and a failed fact check. (D. Van Zandt 7/16/2016) Updated (03/24/2023)
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