The Second Death of Charlie Kirk

By Yair Rosenberg

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

At the close of 2025, just a few months after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, thousands of his followers came together in Phoenix for AmericaFest, the annual convention of Turning Point USA. A casual observer might have expected this gathering to serve as an opportunity for conservatives to regroup, celebrate Kirk’s legacy, and recommit to his fight against the left. Instead, one by one, MAGA’s leading lights took the stage and began shivving one another in public.

 

“Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger,” warned Ben Shapiro, a co-founder of The Daily Wire. He lambasted right-wing “charlatans” who “traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” And he named names. Shapiro slammed Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most popular conservative commentator in America, for mainstreaming pro-Nazi sentiment, and dubbed the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon “a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein,” the convicted sex criminal (fact-check: mostly true). “These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time,” Shapiro said. Awkwardly, several of those people were scheduled to speak after him.

 

“Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads,” retorted Bannon the next day from the same podium. “I just got here, and I feel like I missed the first part of the program,” quipped Carlson, who went on to accuse Shapiro and his allies of practicing “the style of debate where you prevent the other side from talking or being heard,” conflating the latter’s criticism of his conduct with censorship.

 

When Kirk was killed, conservatives believed that his death would galvanize his cause. “Millions of Charlie Kirks were created today,” declared Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. But as it turned out, Kirk’s assassin didn’t kill just one man; he destabilized the entire Trump coalition by removing a pivotal person who had been holding it together. In doing so, the killer helped unshackle dark forces—chief among them anti-Semitism—that now threaten to overtake the conservative movement.

 

***

 

Before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet, Charlie Kirk was trying to save the conservative coalition from turning on itself. To liberals, the late activist was known for debating left-wing students on college campuses. But on the right, Kirk was waging another battle, against people on his own side.

 

For years, Kirk was dogged by the overtly racist followers of the young white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. An avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, Fuentes sought to subordinate racial, religious, and sexual minorities to white Christians. “The problem is that Jews run America,” he said in a representative livestream. “And the only reason we have Muslims here is because Jews are letting them in.” His supporters, known as “Groypers,” badgered Kirk with anti-Semitic and other bigoted questions at Turning Point events. “Charlie Kirk is a fake patriot, a fake Christian, and he hates his people, he’s anti-white,” Fuentes told his online audience.

 

Kirk recognized that this crude conspiracism was poisonous to his project of popularizing the conservative cause. When a caller to The Charlie Kirk Show asked why he wouldn’t debate Fuentes and his faction, Kirk responded: “We succeed—we win; they blame the Jews.” But Kirk also saw that Fuentes had real appeal, especially among disaffected youth, and so he tried to split the difference, repeatedly rebuking the Groypers themselves while partially co-opting some of their talking points. “If you are blaming less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population for all of your problems, that is not going to be good for your soul,” Kirk said shortly before his death. “Any young person that goes into this hyper-online brain rot, you are serving yourself over to your own demise.” Before he was killed, he drafted a now-best-selling book about the benefits of observing the Jewish Sabbath. But Kirk also blamed “Jewish donors” for being “the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.”

 

An exchange during one of Kirk’s final campus tours illustrates the tenuous nature of this balancing act. At Illinois State University last April, a man confronted Kirk to claim that the U.S. government had been “infiltrated by the Jews.” He proceeded to blame pornography, “the transgender movement and the LGBT community,” and the 9/11 attacks on Jewish culprits. For 16 minutes, Kirk deconstructed these and other conspiracy theories, patiently demystifying complex aspects of Judaism such as the Talmud and the biblical Noahide Laws before attempting to explain his fundamental disagreement. “I actually think the people who control our government are secular leftist Marxists in the deep state,” he said. “The people actually controlling our country are not ‘the Jews’”—at this he made a mocking gesture with his hand. “It’s a combination of people that want to see the United States of America cripple and fall.” But before Kirk could finish the sentence, his questioner emphatically interjected, “The Jews.”

 

Kirk similarly tried to walk a tightrope when it came to Israel. Despite pushback from Zionist members of and donors to his own organization, including prominent evangelical Christians and conservative Jews, he hosted debates about the merits of American political and military support for Israel at Turning Point events. And he continued to invite Carlson to participate in them, even after the former Fox News host began airing Hitler apologetics alongside his critiques of the Israeli state. Toward the end of his life, Kirk himself became more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership; he publicly opposed U.S. strikes on Iran and, according to his podcast producer, wanted the Gaza war to end. In this way, Kirk sought to decouple criticism of Israeli policy from anti-Semitic conspiracism, and to contain conflicts over Jews and their state within the conservative tent, rather than allow those arguments to collapse it.

 

But when Kirk died, so did the hope of a brokered MAGA consensus on this and other incendiary issues, because no one else had the credibility or charisma to sustain one. A frantic scramble for control of the Trump coalition commenced—and all of the tensions that Kirk had tried to tame were unleashed. Bit by bit, the conservative kingmaker’s former friends began dismantling his life’s political work.

 

Candace Owens, a popular far-right podcaster whom Kirk once hired and raised from obscurity, began claiming that he had been murdered not by Tyler Robinson, the man detained by authorities, but by an Israeli conspiracy that included Kirk’s own lieutenants in Turning Point USA—and possibly his wife, Erika Kirk, now the organization’s CEO. “Candace Owens Honors Charlie Kirk’s Legacy by Doing Everything in Her Power to Destroy It,” cracked The Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative publication.

 

In his speech at Kirk’s funeral, Carlson blamed Jews—sorry, people “eating hummus”—for killing Jesus, and insinuated that a similar cabal killed Kirk. Days later, Carlson began releasing The 9/11 Files, a five-part video series that suggests Israel had foreknowledge of the al-Qaeda attacks but withheld the information from the United States. “‘Israel did 9/11’ is a rather anti-Semitic thing to say,” Kirk had told the questioner who had suggested as much at Illinois State.

 

Carlson put the final nail in Kirk’s coffin seven weeks after his death by inviting Fuentes, the activist’s nemesis, onto his show—perhaps the most popular podcast on the American right—for a cordial conversation. Over the course of 138 minutes, Fuentes praised Joseph Stalin and railed against “organized Jewry,” all while his host largely failed to challenge his Nazi-adjacent views.

 

Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was not only a betrayal of Kirk’s memory—it precipitated the very MAGA meltdown that Kirk had worked so hard to avert. Conservative institutions quickly came under pressure to condemn Carlson for his softball sit-down with the David Duke of the digital age. This proved too difficult for Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the most influential right-wing think tank in Donald Trump’s Washington. In a video posted online, Roberts denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and defended Fuentes’s right to free speech—without using his own to substantively criticize anything that either man had said.

 

The reaction to the video was seismic. “No to the groypers,” Shapiro declared on X. “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.” Shapiro released a special 41-minute episode of his podcast detailing Fuentes’s career of calumnies against Black people, Indian Americans, Jews, and women—and called out Carlson’s refusal to confront the young white supremacist about any of it. “If this is the Republican Party, or this is what the Republican Party becomes, then I’m not part of it,” Ace of Spades, a pseudonymous pugilist who once won the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Blogger of the Year award, wrote. “I did not sign up for this bullshit. I will not become a Nazi to ‘own the libs.’”

 

“In the last six months, I’ve seen more anti-Semitism on the right than I have at any time in my life,” Senator Ted Cruz told the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November. “It is growing. It is metastasizing. There are about a half-dozen vocal apostles, and it is in particular finding purchase with the young.” Soon after, the Princeton professor Robert George, once dubbed “the reigning brain of the Christian right,” resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s board. Dozens of staffers reportedly left the organization. One month later, Turning Point’s flagship conference descended into recriminations over the very controversies and conspiracies that its founder had endeavored so assiduously to suppress.

 

***

 

On one level, this conflict is about Jews and Israel. But on another, this debate is downstream from something much bigger: a power struggle over who will define and control the MAGA movement once Trump is gone. By painting rivals as tools of the Jews, hard-right influencers such as Carlson and Bannon hope to delegitimize the competition not by besting their ideas, but by slurring their loyalties and identity.

 

For years, Carlson has assailed Shapiro, the country’s most prominent Jewish conservative, casting him as a foreign subversive opposed to the national interest and “hostile toward White, Christian men”—even as Carlson himself has whitewashed anti-American authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin on his show. “I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America,” Carlson said of Shapiro in 2023, “because he doesn’t, obviously.” Carlson also recently insinuated that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is controlled by Netanyahu. Bannon, similarly, regularly labels his critics as “Israel-first”—including in disputes that have nothing to do with Israel.

 

Kirk sought to construct a conservative populism that did not get mired in the morass of anti-Jewish conspiracism. He did not succeed. But many of those who have rushed to assume his mantle have no desire to try. They see anti-Semitism not as a weakness to be avoided but a weapon to be wielded against ideological opponents—including the president.

 

These far-right actors hold no love for Trump and see his iron grip on the Republican base as an impediment to their ambitions. Indeed, Carlson has privately called the president “a total piece of shit” and a “demonic force.” Bannon repeatedly derided the president in text messages to Epstein. Fuentes refused to endorse Trump in 2024. Implying that Trump is controlled by Israel or his Jewish donors is a convenient way to drive a wedge between him and his supporters. “Pushing that anti-Semitic button in far-right Republican politics is a way for some MAGA-aligned figures to try to create a version of MAGA that Trump doesn’t control,” the historian Walter Russell Mead told a Tablet magazine podcast. For Carlson and company, anti-Semitism is a means to an end, and Jews are simply collateral damage.

 

Men like Bannon, Carlson, and Fuentes represent a small, internally divided faction that cannot itself win national elections and repels many of the voters needed to do so. But they are able to extort the broader conservative coalition by threatening to sabotage or leave it. Politicians such as Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and any other contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, will have to decide whether to accommodate or anathematize the coalition’s anti-Semites.

 

Some of those pushing anti-Jewish invective on the right are opportunists. Others are true believers. But the outcome is the same: a conservative politics that is more fractious and more overtly anti-Semitic, in which the place of Jewish people in American public life is openly up for debate.

 

Charlie Kirk tried to avoid exactly this. He aspired to forge a broad conservative coalition that could outlive Trump and bridge the traditional Reaganite GOP with the rising new right. As Kyle Spencer, the author of Raising Them Right, a book about Turning Point’s ascent, put it: “Charlie Kirk arrived on the scene as a kid who just graduated from high school in 2012, saying, ‘I have a vision. It is possible. This party is stodgy. It’s outdated, it’s old white men. We need to attract young people, Black people, Latinos.’” In 2024, when Kirk quarterbacked the Trump campaign’s ground game, it looked like he had finally pulled that off: The former president made major gains among nonwhite and low-propensity voters, and he finally won the popular vote.

 

Today, the president’s hold on his MAGA base remains ironclad, but Kirk’s dream of a broader coalition is slipping away. Last month, polling released by The New York Times found that “the major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back.” In fact, the paper continued, “young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his support among older and white voters.” That same month, Carlson welcomed his show’s first guest of 2026, a conspiracy theorist named Ian Carroll who, after Kirk was killed, told his 1.3 million X followers that “Israel just shot themselves.” The real plot against Kirk’s legacy and work—perpetrated in part by the two men in the studio—went undiscussed.

The Reaper Visits the Washington Post

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

The day of reckoning finally arrived for the Washington Post. It has been known for weeks that D.C.’s primary newspaper was set for major layoffs, as it desperately seeks to reposition itself in a rapidly mutating (and shrinking) news industry. This morning, during a remote Zoom call — no sense coming in to work if you don’t have a job, after all! — it became official: The Post is axing a third of its staff, including the entire Sports department and Books section, as well as most of the people at the International and Metro desks. One way or another, the Post’s news horizons are shrinking.

 

The reactions — from all sides — are thuddingly predictable. My readers are doubtless shedding few tears, and I know for a fact that some of them are outright celebrating. (I know this because I talk to them.) I’ll admit I find that in poor taste; a man’s got to put food on the table, after all, and celebrating the job losses of others feels a bit like carelessly tossing a dangerous karmic boomerang into the darkness. (I’m not above a little grim sarcasm, however: “All those DoorDash bills are really going to sting now,” emailed one veteran politico, and I’m quoting him because most of the other reactions I received included curse words.)

 

Needless to say, journalistic wails are keening across the online landscape. Since the media world has been on notice that this would happen for well over a week, the disgusted postmortems have already been prewritten; this morning the Atlantic was out with 4,000 anguished words from a former Post reporter about “The Murder of the Washington Post.” (Give it credit at least for its subtle opening line: “We’re witnessing a murder.”)

 

Over at the New York Times, Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker passed judgment with the sort of intense smugness that comes from airtight job security: “No struggling newspaper ever saved itself by becoming a worse and less essential product. But what’s happening today at the @washingtonpost is not just the latest devastating contraction of the news industry; it’s the gutting of an American institution vital for a healthy society.” Easy enough for him to say, knowing he’ll never be forced to walk the gangplank of his wooden ship.

 

But the longest lament came from former Post editor Marty Baron: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” he began in a statement that ran three pages. Baron blamed, among other things, a “gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election” and owner Jeff Bezos’s “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump” for the Post’s travails.

 

It’s understandable that Baron, who slapped “Democracy Dies in Darkness” onto the masthead of the Washington Post back in 2017 — and turned the paper into an explicit journalistic organ of the “Resistance” — would cry like a man seeing his pet taken out behind the barn and shot. After all, it’s his vision that is being rejected here. But Baron remains, even to this day, seemingly in complete denial about his role in all of this. He is the man who directed the Post down a blind alley at 70 miles an hour and turned them into the all-politics-all-of-the-time one-note organ they became. It wasn’t under the current leadership that the Post’s Sports, Style, and Metro sections all withered and died; that slow fade was already underway during Baron’s tenure (2013–2021), and only accelerated during that time.

 

And when the Post’s brand became inextricably intertwined with the politics of “Resistance,” its fortunes became enslaved to the fickle (and mindlessly partisan) demands of that audience — an audience noted for its intensity but also its relative smallness in absolute size. The Baron-era Post picked up those readers — and in chasing them so intensely, shed many more.

 

That kind of readership has all the characteristics of a mob: Baron laments that the paper lost thousands of subscriptions when it declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, and never for a moment does it occur to him to ponder what that says about the position he left the paper in: dependent on a petulant, childish readership that demands it be flattered above all else.

 

The Post has a host of larger problems: It is competing in a media environment where newspapers are becoming defunct, as the Old Media world of print essentially centralizes around the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a few smaller survivors. But its proximate problem is its brand, a brand toxified by nearly a decade under Baron’s stewardship. For a brief period, its readership was swollen — not by people with any interest in evenhanded or well-reported news coverage of the Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. area, but by blue-state progressives who demanded a certain kind of coverage. By chasing that transient high, the Post drove away its core subscribers; now that they wish to pivot, they find that rank partisans are only interested in rank partisanship, and the rest of us moved on long ago.

Resist the Temptation of Woodrow Wilson

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

First Things editor R. R. Reno made an unusual choice recently to write an ode of sorts to Woodrow Wilson. As the author of “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson” (an ongoing series), it is my sworn duty to respond.

 

But respond to what? As often seems to be the case with “postliberal” arguments, Reno is vague and euphemistic in exactly how he wishes to present Wilson as a role model other than to promote a general sentiment in favor of strongman government. We need “solidarity,” he writes, and “our history has . . . been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew and buttress solidarity,” a process in which “Woodrow Wilson played a central role.” Wilson and FDR “sought to renew American solidarity, which required taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of illiberalism.” This is, in unspecified ways, a good thing because the past gave us the present, and this makes it good. And we ought therefore to repeat the past:

 

We are living in a similar period. Immigration, economic vulnerability, globalization—the American people are anxious. Once again, a powerful, energetic executive presses against liberal norms, as did Wilson and FDR. I don’t wish to commend any of the particular measures taken by the present administration, although some strike me as wise and necessary. My point is more fundamental. . . . We’ve been here before as a nation, and we have had statesmen who addressed liberalism’s failures so that the American ideals of liberty could be renewed and reshaped for new circumstances. In 2026, we would do well to study the methods of Wilson and FDR and weigh their achievements as well as failures. For we need something of their innovation and daring to navigate our present crisis.

 

What methods of Wilson and FDR, other than intimidating the Supreme Court with threats of Court-packing, does Reno have in mind? The Palmer raids? Jailing dissenters? Segregating the federal government? Forcible sterilizations? German and Japanese internment? Covering up the president’s incapacitation? Or simply bureaucratic micromanagement of American commerce?

 

Reno’s account of Wilson’s “innovation” is not entirely accurate. He allows that “conservatives accuse Wilson and Roosevelt of favoring the direction of society from above, inaugurating an illiberal tyranny of technocrats,” and “there’s something to these criticisms” given Wilson’s academic writings attacking the American constitutional system. But, he assures us, “when Wilson entered politics . . . he did not attain his goal by altering the Constitution.” In a formal sense, this is untrue. The Constitution was amended three times during Wilson’s presidency — plus a fourth, regarding the income tax, being supported by Wilson and ratified after his election. Granted, the direct election of senators also passed Congress in 1912, before Wilson took office, and the last two (women’s suffrage and Prohibition) passed with only tepid support from Wilson. But there is no question that the first two of those amendments worked irrevocable structural changes to our system.

 

More to the point, Wilson and FDR changed the American constitutional system less by formal amendment than by usurpations that the judiciary and Congress either connived in or were cowed into accepting. The vast administrative state, the great expansion of federal power, and the shriveling of basic economic liberties against the federal leviathan resulted in a government that would have been shocking to the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution. By the end of the era of Wilson and FDR, the country was unrecognizable in many ways, and many American traditions were put to rout. To imitate this is a species of envy utterly unmoored from the sense of responsibility that we ought to feel toward what we leave to our posterity.

 

Reno argues that “none of [Wilson’s] signal achievements were reversed when Republicans assumed control of government in 1920.” While it is sadly true that he succeeded in entrenching a lot of his economic policies, there’s also some survivorship bias in defining Wilson’s “signal achievements” only as those things that didn’t get undone. (Wilson himself considered the League of Nations more important, and Congress repealed the Sedition Act of 1918 before he even left office.) And if we are going to regard Wilson as a role model for Trump-era Republicans, it is worth noting that Wilson was able to attain permanence for the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission because they were enacted into law by Congress — not handed down by executive orders. Wilson’s abuses of executive power were more easily undone by Warren G. Harding. Harding also spent much of the first two years of his term dealing with the economic wreckage (notably runaway inflation in the aftermath of a world war and a pandemic) that Wilson left behind.

 

Choosing Wilson as a model also ignores the fact that the American people hated Wilson’s works. He was elected in a three-way race and never won a national popular majority. In 1918–20, Republicans gained 16 Senate seats, 87 House seats, and eleven governorships, dealt Democrats the biggest margin of defeat in the history of the popular-vote era, and consigned Wilson’s party to twelve years in the wilderness, from which nothing short of the Great Depression could rescue them.

 

All of this, Reno appears to argue, was worth it because Wilson offered more “solidarity” among Americans. Really? The Red Scare, a wave of domestic terrorism, a huge upswing in lynchings and other racial violence including the notorious attack on Tulsa’s Greenwood district, and the political resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan all happened on or shortly after Wilson’s watch. There was a reason why so many Americans flocked to Harding’s simple message of restoring “normalcy.”

 

George Orwell understood why appeals to nebulous social values such as “solidarity” are necessary to prop up what collectivism really looks like in practice:

 

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things . . . can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. . . . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so”. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

 

“While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

 

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.

 

The temptations of the strongman’s power, and his ability to overawe the mere liberties of the ordinary citizen, will always be with us. They will often come couched, as Orwell reminded us, in appeals to a high level of theoretical generality. But that is all the more reason to resist them.

The God-Awful Homeless Deaths in Mamdani’s New York City

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

‘This new age will be one of relentless improvement,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised last November as voters handed him the keys to the city. But that was before the temperatures truly dropped.

 

In his inaugural address, the incoming mayor said, in one particularly tortured passage, “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty.” Together, he added, New Yorkers are “warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.” Through communalism, “we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

 

Unfortunately for mentally ill and addicted New Yorkers wandering the streets this winter, all the “warmth” that Mamdani said would flow from the city that’s being subjected to his socialistic experiment was entirely metaphorical.

 

So far, the prolonged cold snap that has settled over much of the eastern half of the United States has claimed the lives of no fewer than 13 homeless people on the streets of New York, according to the mayor’s office. In its own defense, a Mamdani administration spokesperson claimed that it had secured over “800 placements” for the homeless, but too many people continue to resist public services despite the risk of deadly exposure.

 

When pressed to explain why the city simply allows the noncompliant homeless to expire on the sidewalks, Mamdani explained that the city uses a variety of metrics to gauge an individual’s level of risk to themselves. “I think we can find some of this criteria also in how an individual is clothed,” he said, “whether they are deemed to actually be warmed in those settings.” Their “behavior” is also key to judging whether an individual is fit for street life.

 

“Involuntary confinement” remains a “last resort,” Mamdani explained. It’s a tool that city officials sometimes use. Still, the mayor expressed how proud he was of the city workers who “are continuing to canvas people again and again,” begging them unsuccessfully to avail themselves of the city’s facilities.

 

In fact, according to Mamdani, the problem isn’t so much the deaths of the homeless but, instead, how we interpret those deaths. “Too often, this is a crisis that is distilled only into statistics,” Mamdani continued. Sadly, those who engage with the homeless on an individual level will often “learn of how they have been failed by the city for years.” Indeed, the mayor expressed a note of solidarity with the recalcitrant homeless who reject city services “because of what their experience has been in the past.”

 

In reality, these are people who, by and large, are incapable of rationally calculating their interests. Of the 13 deaths so far — a figure that is expected to rise as the various agencies that compile such data report their findings — most victims suffered from mental health issues and substance-abuse problems. The city’s permissiveness toward them and their self-endangerment is mindless and morally bankrupt.

 

As the New York Post observed, the mayor steadfastly refused to “break up homeless encampments,” denouncing the practice pursued by his predecessor as cruel and a poor substitute for simply providing housing to those who can’t care for themselves. The solution to the problem of homelessness, he told the New York Times last year, involved “strengthening rental assistance, increasing transitional and supportive housing, expanding respite residences, tripling city-produced affordable housing and fully funding eviction-prevention services.” But each of these initiatives assumes that the city’s homeless want shelter. Not all do, even if that puts their lives at risk.

 

The mayor whom Mamdani succeeded in office, Eric Adams, understood the nature of the problem much better. “There is nothing ‘progressive’ about leaving people to freeze in makeshift encampments,” Adams wrote last year in opposition to Mamdani’s pledge to leave the homeless encampments in place. “It harms residents and dehumanizes the very people who need help.”

 

The god-awful deaths on the streets of New York City were foreseeable and preventable, and they’re unlikely to be the last foreseeable and preventable disaster under the new mayor.

Slop or Bust

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

The second-most esteemed newspaper in America all but destroyed itself this morning. As fingers point and blame is laid, we shouldn’t overlook the role that one group played in the calamity—namely, you. Dispatch subscribers.

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

The Washington Post’s executive editor announced mass layoffs in a call with staff on Wednesday. Management intends to “end sports coverage ‘in its current form,’ close its book section, suspend its Post Reports podcast and shrink its international footprint,” per Semafor. Its popular Metro section, which it initially planned to eliminate as well, will be restructured. Its foreign desk, an engine of prestige for any major newspaper, might also be kaput.

 

The Post’s brand had been dying for a year. Its influence over national news slipped behind the New York Times’ in 2024 per one metric referenced by Nate Silver, but not until Donald Trump returned to office last January did a yawning gap open between the two. Blame Post owner Jeff Bezos for that (and for a lot more): Evidently fearing that our vindictive new president would punish his most lucrative asset, Amazon, if the Post made itself an enemy of his administration, Bezos began looking early on for ways to make it more of a friend.

 

He killed the editorial staff’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before it was published and announced that the Post’s editorial page would pivot to supporting a more rightist (although not Trumpist) agenda of “personal liberties and free markets.” Meanwhile, he had Amazon pay $1 million in tribute to Trump’s inaugural fund (like practically every other Big Tech company in America, in fairness) and another $40 million for the right to produce a glamorous “documentary” about the first lady, more than twice the next-highest bid.

 

Post readers noticed. A quarter million digital subscribers, some 10 percent of the paper’s base, canceled their subscriptions in protest after news broke about the Harris endorsement being quashed. By last summer, the Post’s daily average print circulation had dipped to 97,000, the lowest number in 55 years and a decline from 250,000 five years earlier.

 

To all appearances, Jeff Bezos looked at the results of the 2024 election, drew an inference about the trajectory of America’s political zeitgeist, and concluded that the market (not to mention the Trump-run federal government) would reward a somewhat more right-wing Washington Post. Not far-right, to be clear: Even now, the news desk continues to break stories that discomfit the president while the opinion section features plenty of coruscating criticism about his foibles from the likes of George Will. The Bezos Post isn’t Fox News, let alone Newsmax.

 

But having kissed off its sizable hardcore “Resistance” readership, the Post is no longer really competing with the Times at this point, either. It’s neither fish nor fowl, an entity in search of a centrist readership that’s receptive enough to right-wing politics to appreciate its new editorial direction yet also intellectual enough to appreciate the thoughtful commentary for which a newspaper of the Post’s caliber is known.

 

That’s a fool’s errand, at least for a publication of that size. You and I should know.

 

Slopaganda.

 

It’s too soon to tell what CBS News will look like once Bari Weiss is done making renovations, but writer Matt O’Brien has a hypothesis. “Bari is about to … do to CBS News what Bezos did to the Washington Post,” he wrote recently, “alienating your slightly left-of-center audience in search of a right-wing audience that either does not exist (for written media) or won’t watch you (for video media) because it prefers insane slopaganda.”

 

The modern mainstream right-wing audience does prefer insane slopaganda, it must be said—and has been said. The Bezos Post isn’t offering them slop. So with whom, exactly, did it expect to replace the left-leaning readers it alienated?

 

Last March, Pew Research conducted a survey that offered Democrats and Republicans a menu of 30 news outlets and asked which they used as a regular source of news. Only seven drew a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats; of those seven, five were slopagandistic right-wing outfits like Newsmax and Breitbart. (The right-leaning New York Post and Joe Rogan, who supported Trump in 2024 but whose politics are heterodox, were the other two.) Some 57 percent of Republicans said they get their news regularly from Fox, easily the highest share among either party for any of the 30 outlets tested. The next-biggest draw among GOPers was ABC News at 27 percent.

 

Despite Jeff Bezos’ ongoing makeover efforts, the Washington Post drew just 7 percent of Republicans. That was smaller than the share of righties who said they watch MS NOW (then known as MSNBC). With precious few exceptions, if you’re hoping to build a big audience that tilts right, it’s slop or bust. The Post, by not offering slop, chose “bust.”

 

That’s only half the story, though. O’Brien is exaggerating when he says there’s no mass right-wing audience for written media, but not wildly.

 

The largest share of Republicans in the Pew Research survey who said they get news regularly from a predominantly print outlet was a measly 12 percent, tied between Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. (And even Shapiro’s site is known mainly for its podcasts at this point, so maybe that shouldn’t count.) That was slightly less than the share who said they get their news from … the BBC. Right-wingers, in other words, are more likely to turn to a famously left-leaning foreign news channel that produces predominantly video content than written media in their own country that shares their biases.

 

That problem isn’t entirely partisan. In the Pew poll, Democrats who got news from video outlets also consistently outnumbered Democrats who got news from print. The largest share of lefties who named a print outlet as a source of information was 31 percent, who said so of the Associated Press; almost every broadcast news network and cable news network (except Fox) drew a higher share of Democrats than that.

 

We live in a post-literate society. The newspaper industry knows it. Our own site isn’t immune to those pressures.

 

But the problem is plainly worse among the modern right, and how could it not be? The education gap that has emerged between the two parties, with college graduates migrating left and non-college voters migrating right, was destined to influence the two sides’ media habits. College grads are far more likely to read books than those who didn’t go to college—and, more to the point, they’re overrepresented among the audience for print news media while being underrepresented among the audience for video news platforms.

 

Which helps explain why, despite 20 years of growth, online right-wing media still has yet to produce a serious, successful journalistic enterprise to serve the populist grassroots. Tucker Carlson tried with The Daily Caller more than a decade ago—but within no time at all, he was posting “side-boob slide shows” to make money instead.

 

The reason right-wing slopaganda exists to begin with is because the audience to which it caters despised and distrusted left-leaning establishment media like the Washington Post, the paper that brought down Richard Nixon. And so the Bezos Post’s task in attracting Trump-era Republican readers isn’t a mere matter of providing content that might tear them away from the latest Tucker interview with a Holocaust revisionist or whatever. Its task is to overcome a degree of fear and loathing of the mainstream media that’s downright foundational to the modern right’s identity.

 

How was that supposed to happen, exactly? A mostly rural populist movement that doesn’t read much and holds hating “the MSM” as more sacred to its politics than conservative dogma was never going to mass-subscribe to a newspaper based in Washington, D.C., of all places, just because it promised to be a little nicer to Donald Trump. Who was the Post rebrand ultimately for?

 

Well, dear reader, I think it was probably for you. Which is why you’re partly to blame for all this.

 

A problem of scale.

 

Bezos’ plan “was not dissimilar to trying to do The Dispatch at a bigger scale,” one of my colleagues observed this morning, “but the audience is not big enough to sustain a paper of the Post’s size.”

 

Pretty much, no? Personal liberties! Free markets! Center-right political opinion, but an order of magnitude more thoughtful than whatever the latest conspiracy slop circulating in mainstream right-wing outlets might be and several orders of magnitude less Trumpy. It’s the Steve Hayes/Jonah Goldberg dream in full flower!

 

Praise Jesus, there’s still enough of a demand for that viewpoint in America to support a small-ish (but growing!) publication and its hard-working commentariat. But there isn’t nearly enough demand, it seems, to support a large-ish one with steep fixed costs like the Washington Post. Their office is only two blocks away from ours, you know—but they pay a lot more than we do.

 

So Bezos’ failure is really your fault, Dispatch subscriber. There aren’t enough of you. Go forth and multiply.

 

In the meantime, we’re left to wonder how one of the most successful businessmen to ever crawl out of the primordial soup misjudged his market so badly. Bezos could have gone full slop by firing the many MAGA critics on staff, replacing them with Jack Posobiec and Candace Owens, and positioning his paper as a sort of Fox News for the barely literate. Or he could have gone the other way, quenching the left’s insatiable thirst for Resistance-style content by leaning into skeptical coverage of the Trump administration—although that obviously would have caused problems for his other business holdings. Either would have attracted an audience, though.

 

Instead, he tried to grasp his way to a spot somewhere in the great, mostly vacant middle. It can be done, as you and I know—but not at the scale required to sustain the Post. Not in a country like the one ours has become.

 

We’re also left to wonder about this question, to which I have no answer: Why doesn’t Bezos just sell the paper instead?

 

Losing $100 million per year is no joke, but if anyone could comfortably bear that cost, it’s the god-emperor of Amazon. (Charles Foster Kane could afford to operate at a loss for 60 years; Bezos can go a few millennia.) But if doing so was too distressing for him, or if the newsroom occasionally angering the president was too risky to Amazon’s sway in Washington, he could have sought a buyer for the princely sum of $1. Or better yet, created a nonprofit with a generous initial endowment to run the paper while inviting contributions from other civic-minded billionaires to help keep it afloat.

 

Or he could have done the opposite, going all-in and throwing money around to lure away the most talented reporters around the country to staff the Post. Owning the paper only makes sense as a matter of prestige, after all: It would barely affect Bezos’ bottom line even if it were profitable, in which case the only reason for him to hold onto it is for the gravitas that comes with controlling a major news-breaking, taste-making information platform in America. Elon Musk has Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg has Facebook, the Ellisons have CBS News and TikTok, Bezos has the Post: You’re nobody in the new Gilded Age without your own showcase media property.

 

Except that, by wrecking the paper and damaging his own business—and civic—reputation along with it, Bezos has destroyed the stature he doubtless hoped to gain from ownership. (Ruining an august institution by trying to vampirically leverage its prestige feels … familiar.) So why doesn’t he sell it? Is there no one with the means and desire to blow nine figures per year on controlling the most influential newspaper in the capital of the most influential nation on Earth?

 

I bet some sleazy Salafist consortium in the Persian Gulf would take it off his hands for a few bucks. Those guys aren’t above paying $500 million bribes to the president; for far less, they could gain control of the Post and impress the White House by turning it into a clearinghouse of information about how the three greatest forces for peace on Earth are Donald Trump, the Saudi royal family, and Qatar.

 

A lot of right-wing grifters would happily apply to work there. Tucker Carlson, being deeply committed to the new mission, might even contribute for free.

 

But for reasons I don’t understand, Jeff Bezos has preferred to ride this rocket into the ground rather than hand off the controls to someone else before it crashed. Perhaps it’s an ego thing for him, not wanting to admit that his vision for the paper failed. Perhaps it’s something else. History will note the bitter irony, though, of a man who grew fabulously wealthy off of Americans’ appetite for long-form reads being undone in the newspaper business in part by their disappearing appetite for even short-form ones. You should have embraced the slop, Jeff. Soon it’ll be all that’s left.

The Russo-Ukrainian Cease-Fire Trump Sought Is Already Over

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

From the outset of his second term in office, the president and his subordinates committed themselves to a peace offensive aimed at securing, if not a durable modus vivendi, at least a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. On Friday, he got one, but it barely survived the weekend. If you missed it, it’s already over.

 

Late last week, Trump announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “agreed” to stop bombing Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, which Putin had been doing to make the Ukrainian people suffer as much as possible in the unusually frigid temperatures that have lingered for weeks in Eastern Europe.

 

That truly generous dispensation from Moscow expired after about 96 hours. Today, Moscow “broke the truce” with renewed strikes on civilian targets, including apartment blocks and energy infrastructure such as thermal power plants:

 

Undeterred by one failure after another, the administration is promoting the outlines of yet another cease-fire plan hashed out between U.S. and European officials and their Ukrainian counterparts. In exchange for Ukrainian capitulation in the country’s east, at least, the plan is to secure Ukrainian sovereignty through NATO-member-state military commitments.

 

“Under the plan,” the Financial Times reported, “a Russian ceasefire violation would trigger a response within 24 hours, beginning with a diplomatic warning and any action required from the Ukrainian army to halt the infraction.” If hostilities continued, European Union members, as well as Turkey, Norway, Iceland, and the U.K., would be deployed to turn back Russian forces. “If the violation turned into an expanded attack, 72 hours after the initial breach, a coordinated military response by a western-backed force involving the US military would take effect,” the FT report continued.

 

Moscow is unlikely to agree to anything like this, and Kyiv is certainly going to be skeptical of any Western commitment to engage in direct hostilities with Russian forces. It’s almost as if we’re negotiating against ourselves.

The Egregious Haitian-Immigration Decision

National Review Online

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the U.S. District Court for D.C., has apparently decided that she would very much like to be the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In a long and hyperbolic decision, written more for those in the cheap seats than to be taken seriously at the Supreme Court, Reyes ruled that the Trump administration may not, for now, terminate Haiti’s long-held temporary protected status. Judge Reyes based this decision on two far-fetched determinations: first, that DHS’s recission violated the procedural requirements of the statute; second, that the manner in which the decision was made violated the Fifth Amendment. Neither of these conclusions passes the smell test.

 

Notably, the statute in question sets a high bar for judicial review. Not only does it make clear that temporary protected status is a discretionary act of clemency that, as its name implies, is supposed to be “temporary,” but it explicitly forbids the judiciary from weighing in on the substantive matters at hand. “There is no judicial review,” the law confirms, “of any determination of the Attorney General with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.” That being so, the only question that can be assessed by a judge is whether the Ts were crossed and the Is were dotted. That is almost certainly why the Supreme Court last May stayed the similar order of a district judge in San Francisco, who sought to enjoin DHS Secretary Kristi Noem from stripping the TPS granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans by the Biden administration; the justices’ reasoning was not explained in their one-line order, but they did curtly reaffirm the stay in October after the judge defiantly sought to reinstate the Venezuelans’ TPS.

 

According to the statute’s plain terms, the executive is obliged to render its decision legally effective by publishing a “notice in the Federal Register of the determination” and waiting “60 days after the date the notice is published” before it begins executing the new rule.

 

Annoyingly for Judge Reyes, the Trump administration did just that. Indeed, as Reyes notes in her opinion, “Secretary Noem then issued a decision, published on November 28, 2025, to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026. See 90 Fed. Reg. at 54733.” Legally, this should have been the end of the story. As the law required, the executive had made its nonjusticiable determination, and it had complied with the niceties of contemporary administrative law.

 

But Judge Reyes had a clever trick up her sleeve: namely, the reclassification of policy objections as procedural inadequacies. All told, Reyes offers five such objections. She claims that, because the Trump administration’s DHS has rescinded a TPS each time it has looked into it, its conclusion was preordained. (One wonders whether Reyes would apply this logic to her own, unidirectional rulings.) She proposes that the DHS secretary did not spend enough time consulting other agencies before she made her decision. She disagrees with DHS’s characterization of the conditions in Haiti as “concerning” and provides her own descriptions in lieu. She dissents from DHS’s evaluation of the “national interest” issues at stake. And she argues that DHS’s assessment of the economic questions is wrong, because Haitians here under TPS pay taxes. Naturally, all five of these critiques are substantive, not procedural, and are thus not within Reyes’s rightful remit under the law.

 

On a roll, Reyes then shows off her mind-reading abilities, contending that the Trump administration is guilty of violating the Fifth Amendment because it has an ugly heart. The “plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants,” she writes. “This seems substantially likely.” She therefore decides that DHS’s decision must be stayed pending appeal. Like many rulings that turn on motivations rather than powers, this is a one-way ratchet designed to disempower Republicans without limiting the use of the same powers by Democrats, especially given that nobody would have legal standing to challenge a DHS secretary who preordained all extension decisions out of a solicitude for some shades of immigrant.

 

This, of course, is all rather silly. The unequivocal presumption undergirding the TPS system is that those with temporary status have it temporarily and will be returned home, rather than stay indefinitely. For a judge to decide that the execution of this presumption is arbitrary and capricious defies belief. In effect, Judge Reyes is attempting to recalibrate the system in such a way as to ensure that the federal government may let in anyone it wishes without oversight but only remove those same figures after having run an impossible gauntlet. Until her decision is reversed, she will get away with this ploy, but this is no way to run a republic, and, as the Supreme Court will undoubtedly soon confirm, her outrageous conduct is not synonymous with the majesty of the law.