MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: In Which I am Replaced by a Robot. Maybe.
August 13, 2026
JOHN PODHORETZ: New York Magazine’s evil ‘Habibi City’ cover sends a message: Jews aren’t welcome in Mamdani’s NYC.
New York Magazine this week dubbed our town “Habibi City” to mark the rising prominence of Middle Easterners and Muslim immigrants united by fun, frolic — and a consuming hatred of Israel and Jews.
It’s a familiar formulation, harking back to 1966, when newly elected Mayor John Lindsay declared New York to be “Fun City.”
Yes, such fun! Lindsay’s two terms drove NYC into civil and budgetary collapse.
A crime tsunami rotted neighborhoods across the five boroughs, and feckless budgetary policies emptied the city’s coffers.
And the population of Lindsay’s “Fun City” declined by half a million people.
Facing a government that didn’t seem to care what happened to them, much of the middle class voted with their feet.
Something similar may happen in Habibi City, but this time the effort to make life unbearable for some New Yorkers is entirely intentional — and aimed at a specific minority.
Lindsay was incompetent, but he certainly didn’t want respectable taxpayers to leave.
Not so the subjects of New York Magazine’s current cover package, and their beloved Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
At The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz adds: New York Is Not ‘Habibi City.’
[Zaina] Arafat, whose book You Exist Too Much won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, herself attempts an answer, embodied in the name of one of her favorite SWANA-ese publications: it’s called Bidoun, meaning “without,” which is a name “meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.” In other words, because SWANA is really a state of mind, we must make sure America becomes its forever home.
It’s a perfect manifestation of a specific grad school sensibility, light on logic and high on pretense and self-importance. But it also captures the real tragedy—and threat—at hand: For Habibi City to be born, New York City must die.
A question like “what is New York” is too complex, too weighty, and frankly too annoying to discuss in brief. But if you’re looking for a solid working definition, it goes something like this: New York is the gorgeous, impossible, maddening rock upon which dreamers from all over the world crash in the desperate, ridiculous, and absolutely sublime hope of changing their fortune by harnessing themselves to the great American engine of reinvention. It’s why the greatest movie ever made about immigrants in New York, The Godfather, begins with the battle cry that, for centuries, quickened the pulse of every newcomer to this city: “I believe in America.”
Tell that to Arian Moayed, an actor who tells Arafat, with unveiled disgust, how terrible it felt to walk around Times Square in the aftermath of September 11 and see everything, and everyone felt so. . . patriotic. Tell that to Arafat herself, whose vision of life in America consists exclusively of SWANA loyalists railing against “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.” Or, for that matter, tell that to New York magazine, once the epitome of New York cool and sophistication and now the organ of Third World feeblemindedness masquerading as radical chic.
Which is all the more ironic, because Tom Wolfe introduced the phrase “radical chic” via a 1970 article he wrote for a very different iteration of New York magazine. Long after Wolfe moved on, I still used to like that version of New York magazine, and would pick up a copy when I lived in New Jersey and took the train into Fun City during the Ed Koch and David Dinkins era.
But that was then. Today, as Ira Stoll writes at the Washington Free Beacon, “James Murdoch just demonstrated that Rupert Murdoch sure was right to fight a protracted legal battle to prevent him from taking over the Wall Street Journal and Fox News:” Under James Murdoch, New York Magazine Tilts Toward Hamas.
TURNING ON THE DSA:
Excellent job, maybe one of my center-left followers is interested. https://t.co/q402jsm97x
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) August 13, 2026
P.R. GUY SCOTT PINSKER: How Republicans Plan to Defeat Abdul El-Sayed — and Why We May Regret It.
POLLS THESE DAYS ARE EQUAL PARTS INEPTITUDE AND PROPAGANDA:
All of the Wisconsin polls were horribly, catastrophically wrong but the polls for other stuff are all surely correct. Polling is a science! https://t.co/3rGMuYuw39
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) August 12, 2026
Okay, maybe not equal.
FROM C. CHANCY: Pearl of Fire.
Bombs, fire, and murder….Caldera City. Stronghold and refuge, built by faith and elemental power in the heart of a volcano; surviving through magic, tactics, and a daring alliance with dragons. For Allen Helleson, Caldera was an escape from the lives ruined by his family’s hardline traditions; now he walks the streets as an Inspector for the Caldera Watch, defending the city other nations see as a pit of hell. For Shane Redstone, Caldera was the home she risked life and soul to defend as a Flame – until enemy curses blinded her, sending her away from the front lines forever.The war has come home again….Together they survive the first bomb. But Caldera’s enemies never stop with just one. Now a scarred yet deadly ex-soldier and a spirit-reading Inspector have to find and stop the bombers… before Wards fall, dragons die, and the caldera erupts in flame. One wrong move, and the city burns.
TO FORGET HISTORY IS TO BE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT: Anthony Fauci: What He Knew, When He Knew It – His AIDS Fearmongering All Over Again.
F REPUBLICANS DESPAIR AND FAIL TO TURN OUT THE ELECTION RESULTS ARE CERTAIN: Election Analyst Throws Much-Needed Cold Water on the Panican Vibes Ahead of the 2026 Election.
NOT THAT HE’LL ADMIT, AT ANY RATE (I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN JOE WAS ‘CONSERVATIVE’): Not Even Joe Scarborough Could Believe What the DSA Co-Chair Said About Hamas and October 7.
IF DEMOCRATS CLAIM CONGRESS IN NOVEMBER THE HUNT FOR FRAUD WILL END STOP FINDING IT: The Initiative That This Top House Republican Said ‘There’s No Excuse for Delay’.
ARE THERE ATTACKS ON OUR FOOD SUPPLY, OR JUST REALLY BAD SUPPLY CHAINS? Salmonella Linked to Jalapeño Peppers Sickens Over 300 Across 27 States.
IT WAS PAST TIME TO TAKE THE LEFT’S TACTICS BACK TO THEM: Another Brick in the Wall.
LOOK, THERE IS A REASON FOR THIS: FLAGRANT Racial Violence: You Still Haven’t Seen the Most Shocking Thing in the Cunningham Foul — It Is Carrington’s Flabbergasted Reaction to Being Found Guilty (Video).
American schools have been telling kids for a generation (at least) that white people are out to get black people. That whites hate blacks so much the invented slavery to attack them. And then 2020 and BLM told them that white people want to kill black people. All the time. And do it. And get away with it. All the time. And you’re surprised that black people act insane and like they’re under siege? WHY?
It’s time to clean the education/indoctrination complex. Now.
THIS IS A FANCY WAY OF SAYING THAT THE LEFT LIVES IN A FAKE REALITY ENTIRELY IN THEIR OWN MINDS: The Computational Core of the Left-Right Distinction. Culture is downstream of mathematics. Left and Right are separated by a phase transition.
IT’S BECOME A DERANGED OBSESSION. THEY THINK THINK THEY CAN BUY WOMEN WITH THIS: This is the Leftist Endgame. The Holy Sacrament of Abortion.
THIS HAS BEEN OBVIOUS FOR A WHILE NOW: Laundering Our Tax Dollars.
YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE IT’S BEEN: Don’t Take the Black Pill.
ON WEDNESDAYS MY ASSISTANT RUNS A BLAST FROM THE PAST ON MY BLOG: Some of these are… enlightening. The Masks are coming Off.
August 12, 2026
HARSH, BUT NOT UNFAIR:
The Party of College Educated White Folks Craving Swarthy Foreign Guys — it’s not really about health care policy or “affordability” or whatever. @TheDemocrats are now a BDSM cult organized around some kind of weird masochistic Mandingo fetish. https://t.co/N9wYA1fF8W
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) August 12, 2026
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: In Which I am Replaced by a Robot. Maybe.
OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.
