It’s Thursday, July 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Niall Ferguson on how Holocaust denial made a comeback. What the discourse around Lindsey Graham’s death reveals. Ro Khanna’s Israel struggle session. And much more.
But first: New York’s war on the future.
Data centers have shot to the center of American public life this year. From town meetings to the Senate floor, the debate over the physical infrastructure needed to power the AI revolution has become a political powder keg. Polls show that building them is an unpopular policy. And now politicians are acting on that public anger.
This week, New York became the first state in America to ban new data center construction. Governor Kathy Hochul sold the yearlong moratorium as a pause to protect the power supply and control energy costs. But Josh Wolfe, a venture capitalist focused on emerging technologies, argues that Hochul’s election-year gambit is a stunt that will fail her state.
AI, he argues, is just the latest technology that will benefit everyday Americans and level the playing field, giving people “with below-average means above-average superpowers they could never otherwise afford.” But we won’t get there without the construction of the essential physical infrastructure powering AI, which is the data center.
The case for data centers may not be politically fashionable right now. But Wolfe makes it forcefully, arguing that the biggest losers from Hochul’s policy will be the very people she claims to be protecting.
—The Editors
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The ‘Gay’ Attacks on Lindsey Graham Are All About Politics |
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Within hours of Senator Lindsey Graham’s death last weekend, social media was flooded with comments about his sexuality. James Kirchick, who wrote a book about the history of gay D.C., has been asked for years whether he thought Graham was gay, and he always gives the same answer: that we will likely never know. More important than the answer to the question, James writes, is what those who obsess over it—on both the left and the right—reveal about themselves. | |
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Ro Khanna’s Rude Awakening |
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Once a supporter of Israel, California Rep. Ro Khanna has spent the past year reinventing himself as one of the Jewish state’s leading opponents, and made headlines last weekend for claiming he was detained by the IDF in the West Bank. This week, on a podcast with the anti-Israel outlet Drop Site News, Khanna got a rude awakening about his new ideological bedfellows. Read Eli Lake’s column on the extraordinary exchange, and what it says about the Israel debate on the left. | |
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The Death of History |
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For generations, the best response to antisemitism was simple: Confront the lies with the truth. As a historian, Niall Ferguson has spent his career doing exactly that. And, as he admits in his latest essay, co-authored with AI researcher John-Clark Levin, “I failed utterly.” Antisemitism and ignorance are rising—turbocharged by algorithms and artificial intelligence. What, if anything, can be done to fight back? That’s the question Niall and John-Clark tackle in this essential piece. | |
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