New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says the city will resume clearing makeshift homeless encampments , promising to take a more humane approach to a practice he previously criticized.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism and questions from advocates for homeless New Yorkers after abruptly reversing his policy pledge to end homeless encampment sweeps.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani conceded Wednesday that the Big Apple does need homeless encampment sweeps — but vowed that his administration will have "better outcomes" than his predecessor.

Irreplaceable. The post Stevie Wonder and the heartbreaking impact of Prince’s death: “Why him?” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

There’s a giant controversy brewing this week. It’s so big that I had to push back my planned skewering of Gavin “Slow Learner” Newsom for his massive self-victimization gaffe involving Ted Cruz a couple of days ago (maybe I’ll get to it as an addendum to this column; read to the bottom and we’ll see). It’s about dogs. And Muslims. And Randy Fine. You’re probably already aware of who Fine is — he’s a congressman from Florida who tends to get himself into controversies from time to time. Fine is Jewish, and the antisemites absolutely can’t stand him, but he gives as good as he gets. He’s a Republican. I notice there’s an element out there who really, really don’t like Jewish Republicans. I notice that an element of that element is often Jewish Democrats, who are the majority of Jewish folks. And they’ll treat Jewish Republicans a little like black Democrats treat black conservatives — especially if the heterodox offenders get too loud. Which Fine does. We’ve got a Spectacle Podcast segment on the latest controversy Fine got himself into — a Fine mess, you might say — which is up today. But more has happened since Melissa and I recorded that segment. So here’s the whole thing. It starts off with the fact that New York City is run by utter buffoons who are capable of absolutely nothing in the way of providing city services. Among those would be snow removal; when that big winter storm blew across the country a couple of weeks ago, snow piled up everywhere. And New Yorkers being New Yorkers, when the snow piled up, a lot of the city’s dog owners just let their canines poop in the various snow piles on the sidewalks. Apparently (I’m from Louisiana; we get snow in Baton Rouge once every four or five years and if it stays on the ground more than a day we think it’s the beginning of a new Ice Age, so I’m ignorant of these practicalities), it’s a royal pain to do the poop-bag pickup routine in the snow. That led to this, when the snow melted: NYC is looking pretty… s#!%*y… lately.@CBSNewYork @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/0bdO35THXM — Ali Bauman (@AliBaumanTV) February 18, 2026 Although: There’s no excuse for not picking up after your dog , but are you unaware that a lot of these droppings are from humans who now use the streets as their bathrooms ? We see it every day. — Maureen Van Zandt (@MVZaGoGo) February 18, 2026 And because this is New York we’re talking about, the idea of addressing this outside of politics and Big Government is long gone. It’s a crisis, and it must be addressed by the nanny state in some retributive and correctional way. Which led to a moronic statement by a terrible human being. Nerdeen Kiswani is one of the Palestinian activists who have roiled New York’s universities with anti-Israeli riots, and she’s apparently influential within the circles of the new Muslim mayor of the city, Zohran Mamdani. Kiswani decided that rather than address the real problem, which is the stunningly poor performance of the city’s sanitation department in getting the snow, and its embedded filth, off the sidewalks in a timely manner, she’d attack the dog-owning infidels instead with something she later asserted was a joke. And to be fair, this almost certainly was a joke. And as jokes go, not a terrible one. Except Nerdeen Kiswani doesn’t get much benefit of the doubt. This is somebody whose organization, Within Our Lifetime, is partially responsible for violent demonstrations that left Jewish college students trapped in buildings. They don’t believe in a two-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians; they want to literally drive the Jews into the Mediterranean (which is what From The River To The Sea means). This is a genocidal maniac with an openly Islamicist ideological bent, and you can’t escape this obvious fact just by scrolling through her X account. That post rankled, not just because of its author but because in Europe there is a growing problem of dog owners being harassed by aggressive Muslims who think it’s haram for people to keep dogs as pets. Kiswani’s joke is a reference to the fact that the more sharia law creeps into a society, the more contentious and inconvenient it’s going to be for dog owners in that society. I can attest to this myself. Years ago, I had a neighbor who was Egyptian, and he was outright hostile not just to my dog but to the other dog owners as well. So much so that after he threatened to kill a beagle puppy who’d gotten out and made his way into the Egyptian’s yard, the police were called, and, I’m told, he commenced much caterwauling over the level of offense the dog’s presence gave to his religious sensibilities. He got off with a warning. He also didn’t last long in the neighborhood. And this is where Fine comes in: If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. — Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026 And boy, did he come in. Especially when the various luminaries of a certain political party were aghast at his suggestion: Islam is not a race, moron. It is a religion. One where some of its New York leadership is calling for the abolition of dogs. Good luck bringing that to California. @HarmlessYardDog for the image. https://t.co/pmgq35Dqx5 pic.twitter.com/aiMdPtTgmn — Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 16, 2026 He even fended off Dan Goldman, who decided to blame Fine and his stance on dogs for antisemitism in America: I’d think your New York constituents would want to keep their dogs. https://t.co/Ke567lEbKe pic.twitter.com/sZyF8rRRwt — Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 17, 2026 And then he got a little more serious about why this was more than just a hubbub about a dumb joke… Sharia law is a clear and present threat to the United States. The call to prayer is being blasted in New York City. Muslim activists are calling for dogs to be killed. Giant mosques are popping up all over Texas and Florida. We have to do something about this threat, and… pic.twitter.com/qwHTVlpqPC — Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 17, 2026 As I said, there seems to be a special amount of opprobrium leveled at this Jewish Republican congressman by Jewish Democrats. First Goldman and then this guy, for example: If they force us to choose between calling for the resignation of imbecilic bigots or normalizing hateful religious incitement, that’s not a tough one. This fanatic should spare his constituents any further embarrassment and resign. pic.twitter.com/0ZPjPu7oaZ — Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) February 18, 2026 What Randy Fine is doing is playing the Democrats’ politics right back at them. What he did to Nerdeen Kiswani was performative, in bad faith, and over the top, certainly — but performative, in bad faith, and over the top is the sum total of what Democrats have to offer the public today. If every single left-wing activist can accuse Donald Trump as a pedophile based on obvious lies — if there was proof of this in the Epstein files they’ve had more than a decade to air it when it would have done them good politically and yet it wasn’t done, the vast majority of the malfeasors outed in those files are Democrats, and we’ve now got proof that as far back as 2006 Trump had called the police on Epstein and fed them information about his activities, AND if you voted for Joe Biden, you are utterly disqualified from feigning outrage about child molestation, as it obviously isn’t a dealbreaker for you — then Randy Fine can raise Muslim distaste for dogs as a good reason to disfavor the spread of Islam. Because when Fine says he’d rather have dogs than Muslims, it’s not a secret what he’s talking about. He’s talking about a choice between an America where everybody is perfectly free to have a furry canine providing joy and companionship in their household — though we’d all agree that picking up after your pooch when taking him for a walk isn’t too much to ask — or an America where the sensibilities of a tiny minority of aggressive Muslims who are bent on imposing their will on the rest of us begin rapidly impeding the rights of dog owners. Which has already happened in countries not that different from ours. Fine is one of several members of Congress who are doing more than just starting fires on X. He’s part of the anti-sharia caucus in the House, which the foreign-influence group CAIR, which is the Sinn Fein to Hamas’ Irish Republican Army, has now called a hate group: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today announced the designation of the House of Representative’s so-called “Sharia-Free America Caucus” as an anti-Muslim hate group. This is the first time in CAIR’s 32-year history that the organization has designated a congressional caucus as an extremist organization. In the designation published today, CAIR noted that the caucus is advancing legislation that, if enacted, would effectively render the practice of Islam illegal in the United States. CAIR also noted that the caucus’ most prominent member, Rep. Randy Fine, has expressed support for the destruction of all “mainstream Muslims” and recently compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs. The caucus has 40 members from 19 states, with Texas (7), Florida (6), and Arizona (3) leading in representation.  “Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship,” said CAIR Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor.  “These legislators have put cancel culture on steroids, applying it to an entire faith. The bigoted rhetoric used by this caucus resembles the hatred that anti-Catholic politicians once unleashed against Irish Americans. Saylor added, “Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years. No one who wrote the Constitution or enforced it since has empowered these legislators to pick which religions get to exist in America.” Islam is such an American faith that Thomas Jefferson obtained a copy of the Qu’ran and read it, and then declared America’s first foreign war against the Barbary pirates. You don’t have to like Randy Fine. He can be a heavy lift at times. But he is correct that this is a very lopsided issue. And that raising it as a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats, when not a single Democrat has come out in favor of limiting sharia’s reach in America, for the sake of the dogs if not the people, is a quite sane thing to do. Even if it results in his being pilloried as a bigot. Rejecting bad ideas is not bigotry. They’d like you to believe otherwise, of course. It’s imperative for them — all they have is bad ideas. I know, I know. I didn’t get to Newsom. Check back tomorrow and we’ll do that.

On President’s Day, the American Conservative, a journal founded by Patrick J. Buchanan, one of the all too few remaining Richard Nixon loyalists, published a piece by Alan Pell Crawford about the demise of the Washington Post that waxes lyrical about Bob Woodward and celebrates the takedown of one of our greatest presidents. Crawford reverently recalls Aug. 8, 1974, when he was an intern at the Post, as an editor told a hushed newsroom that Nixon would resign the next day. It was, he writes, a day of “historic importance” and “the Post newsroom had a lot to do with it.” Indeed, they did. The British historian Paul Johnson was close to the truth when he called Nixon’s downfall a “media putsch.” Crawford, you see, accepts the conventional view of Watergate portrayed in the movie All the President’s Men. He encourages readers of the American Conservative to “get nostalgic about the world of the Post’s heyday” by watching the movie. He admits to watching it “countless times,” presumably to bring back his fond memories of his journalistic heroes uncovering the supposed scandal of the century. One wonders if Crawford has read anything about Watergate since the movie All the President’s Men hit the theaters in 1976. There is, to say the least, a lot to read — much of it that calls into question the Hollywood portrayal of Watergate. Perhaps Crawford should begin with Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda, which came out 10 years after Nixon’s resignation and provided some evidence that Nixon’s downfall was orchestrated by what is now called the “deep state.” Hougan’s book was followed by Silent Coup: The Removal of a President by investigative reporters Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, which furthered the deep state narrative in Nixon’s removal from office, including showing Woodward’s ties to a Pentagon whose military leaders were spying on the White House. But the coup de grace to the Woodward–Bernstein version of Watergate was delivered by Geoff Shepard, who was a young White House counsel during Watergate and who has written a series of books and articles and starred in a documentary that tell a disturbing tale of Watergate special prosecutors secretly meeting ex parte with judges and conspiring with Democratic congressional staffers to develop a “Road Map” to remove Nixon from office. Perhaps Crawford should also read Shepard’s devastating takedown of Woodward and Bernstein published in The American Spectator. It paints a rather different picture of Crawford’s journalistic heroes who printed “leaks” from a disgruntled, anti-Nixon FBI deputy director without revealing his motives, and ignored information that special prosecutors were secretly meeting with other participants in the Watergate drama (in this instance, the special prosecutor was secretly meeting with the federal judge assigned to the Watergate cases). So much for “investigative reporting.” It turns out that the real investigative reporter who should be applauded for his coverage of Watergate is Geoff Shepard. Very few nostalgic Watergate articles tackle the larger subject of the consequences of Nixon’s removal from office. Watergate removed a president who, in Hugh Sidey’s words, “understood the men, the ingredients, the glory, the brutality, the action and reaction of power as well as anyone else of our time.” Nixon’s triangular diplomacy with China and the USSR, his outreach to Romania and other Soviet satellites, and his diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East that greatly reduced Soviet influence there set the stage for the Reagan presidency’s successful policies which brought about the downfall of the Soviet empire. Nixon had saved Israel during the Yom Kippur War and promised to come to the aid of South Vietnam if the North violated the peace agreements. Watergate doomed South Vietnam to communist rule, and led to the election of Jimmy Carter as president, the fall of the Shah of Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua, and a Soviet geopolitical offensive that included advances in the Third World and the invasion of Afghanistan. Maybe Crawford, like an aging movie star who repeatedly watches old movies he or she starred in to relive the golden years of Hollywood, just wants to relive the golden years of journalism when newspapers like the Post didn’t have an ideological axe to grind and CBS’ Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. But the Post then, and still today, is a paper of the ideological left, and Cronkite, as we later learned, was always a lefty who was anti-Nixon, pro-liberal Democrat, and who had an “agenda-driven approach to the news” that put a lie to his famous phrase “and that’s the way it is,” which ended each of his news broadcasts. Instead of celebrating Bob Woodward and the Washington Post on President’s Day, Crawford and the American Conservative should celebrate Richard Nixon. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Anchors Away: The Perils of Our Shipbuilding Imbalance The End of Atlanticism Michael Anton and the Fate of the Republic

In their zeal to use the government to protect jobs and enhance workers’ benefits, California’s unions have repeatedly ignored the law of unintended consequences. Their efforts — backed by lobbying, grassroots organizing, and loud rallies by activists — often succeed in the Capitol or the ballot box given their fearsome political power. But they never make life better for workers. Their successes can never stop the march of progress, although they do make a mess of things. The most notable modern example was their successful passage of Assembly Bill 5 in 2019. The goal was to sideline the rideshare industry (Uber and Lyft) by forbidding companies from using contractors as their main labor pool. The measure also targeted most types of freelance work and independent contracting, thus leading to massive job losses in the midst of pandemic shutdowns. As usual, union plans to help workers hurt ordinary workers while carving out special protections for union members. As I reported regularly for The American Spectator, it all blew up in their faces after the pushback forced the Legislature to exempt more than 100 industries from restrictions. Then the rideshare companies secured passage of an initiative that exempted their drivers. But that hasn’t dissuaded unions from continuing along their Luddite path. In 2022, state unions backed Los Angeles’ Measure ULA, which imposed punitive transfer taxes on the sales of “mansions,” although the tax also applied to apartments and commercial buildings. Once again, that ironclad law of unintended consequences struck. LA’s apartment building ground to a halt, thus harming the housing market and destroying jobs for union contractors. It quashed property tax collections, which has made it harder for LA’s city government to pay for its huge armies of government bureaucrats. And now the labor federation, led by former Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego (and author of AB 5) is back at it. The group and the AFL-CIO are trying to pressure Gov. Gavin Newsom to impose far-reaching restrictions on artificial intelligence. What could possibly go wrong this time? As CalMatters reported this month, the unionistas went right for the jugular by vowing not to support Newsom’s likely presidential run if he doesn’t sign additional anti-AI measures. “I don’t think you’re going to have a lot of motivation to walk precincts for somebody who won’t engage working class voters on the very things that are taking away their jobs,” Gonzalez said, according to the publication. Newsom has signed some AI regulations, but — to his credit — has vetoed the worst ones. For instance, in September 2024 the governor vetoed Senate Bill 1047, which, per the Senate floor summary, “requires developers of powerful artificial intelligence models and those providing the computing power to train such models to put appropriate safeguards and policies into place to prevent critical harms. This bill establishes a state entity to oversee the development of these models.” The measure would have required, under the threat of severe penalties, AI firms to predict ways in which their models could cause a variety of “harms.” AI algorithms are something of a black box and it’s unrealistic — and damaging to the growth of the industry — to create a new government agency with broad powers to second-guess every decision. As the Chamber of Progress wrote in its official opposition, the bill “forces model developers to engage in speculative fiction about imagined threats of machines run amok, computer models spun out of control, and other nightmare scenarios for which there is no basis in reality.” Yet the labor groups insist now that Newsom back something similar in the Legislature this year. Newsom also vetoed a child protection AI bill that was equally vague and far-reaching in its restrictions that attempt to prevent any conceivable harm from AI to children. Newsom is smart enough to realize that anything that quashes growth in the industry threatens the state’s endless big-spending plans. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office offered the following explanation in its November analysis of the state’s budget (which is highly dependent on the stock market): These strong income tax collections are being driven by enthusiasm around AI, which has pushed the stock market to record highs and boosted compensation among the state’s tech workers. With so much exuberance surrounding AI, it now appears time to take seriously the notion that the stock market has become overheated. History suggests that the stock market is prone to overreact to major technological advances, even if the technology itself turns out to be revolutionary. Our steeply progressive tax system relies on the success of homegrown AI companies. California is home to 32 of the top 50 AI companies, per state statistics. Furthermore, if Newsom is serious about reaching the White House, then he probably doesn’t want to be the governor running with large budget deficits and top companies bleating about the state’s anti-tech climate as they hightail it to Texas or Florida. And whatever one thinks of him, Newsom is rather savvy on the tech issue, as illustrated by his long veto message of SB 1047. Here’s a snippet: Adaptability is critical as we race to regulate a technology still in its infancy. This will require a delicate balance. While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an Al system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data. Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology. He did sign a less restrictive, but less than ideal measure (Senate Bill 53) that focused on transparency and some others. Meanwhile, some supporters of that vetoed child-oriented bill (Senate Bill 1064) are circulating a statewide petition to place before voters an AI regulation on the November ballot. That and an onerous measure for a wealth tax, which he opposes, could give Newsom fits on the campaign trail.  The Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation could actually do Newsom a big favor by shifting the debate from state capitols to Congress. That makes the most sense given that AI developers will struggle to conform to an ever-changing number of AI restrictions coming from all 50 states. Regardless of politics, the sooner Congress takes on this mission, the better it will be for the industry, the economy, and consumers. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. Image licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This morning, February 17, I awakened to hear on my radio that Jesse Jackson had died. I have known Mr. Jackson as a colleague and close friend for 40 years. I worked with him since 1984 to help him as the “ghostwriter” of his autobiography. Mr. Jackson had been the first black man to give it a serious go-over. He was an intelligent, well-read Democrat. He won 11 primaries across the nation. For a time, it looked as if he were going to be the main national candidate to run against the GOP standard-bearer. My experience working with Jesse Jackson was eye-opening. Like the preacher he was, he told the young people in his audience that they could complain and march, but if they simply learned to plumb a house or lay in electrical lines, they would be able to pay for their kids to go to college. Mr. Jackson told his friends that their lives would be comfortable if they laid in a stock of knowledge — they would pay for their future better than if they were able to shout and scream. He was a realist, and he loved the next generation better than anyone else ever would. I learned a lot from Reverend Jackson and I am still learning from him. Praiseworthy TV Ads In the last few months, I have been watching the most TV I have ever watched. For reasons that any TV watcher will understand immediately, I mostly watch a show that’s been on for decades called COPS. Many of the episodes are decades old, and some are recent. The recent ones are sponsored largely by products and services aimed at African American viewers. There are ads for black family vacations, black family savings accounts such that the viewers will be able to send their children to college, ads for weight loss meds, and ads for black families playing games together. To me, what’s most compelling is that the ads show black families with caring, loving fathers in the home with their sons and daughters. That is, these ads tell black people that the norm is for black men who have children to stay home with their offspring. This is super powerful and super needed medicine for our beloved America. We have a giant crisis in this land in and about non-white families. (We also have many crises in and around white families, but it’s considerably worse in and around non-white families.) If we as a nation can harness the mighty power of Madison Avenue to preach togetherness, Madison Avenue will have done a super good deed. Let’s give praise where praise is due.

My little sister died not quite 46 years ago, killed in a car accident at the age of 20. Early one winter morning, she and her new husband set out to visit my parents, even as a sudden ice storm rendered the roads around Atlanta treacherous. Where their side road crossed the main highway, a slick patch sent them sliding into the middle of the intersection. An oncoming car, larger and traveling too fast for the conditions, smashed into the passenger side door of their car, driving it into a ditch, riding up and over the roof of the smaller car, crushing my sister and severely injuring her husband. One searches for small blessings after something like this. As a family, we found solace knowing that she died instantly. We joined with her husband’s family in praying for his survival, passionately willing his eyes to open as we took turns at his bedside. This was far from a sure thing, the doctors told us. It became an exercise in endurance as he lay for many weeks in a coma, only to awaken with profound amnesia and years of struggle to rebuild a life shattered in a single instant. For the family members, the shared bedside vigil gave at least some small meaning in the midst of heartbreak, something to fill the overwhelming emptiness that had invaded our lives. Willing his survival, praying and hoping, pretending that a fluttered eyelid or a spasmodic hand movement promised his awakening — these things mattered in ways that, looking back over the distance of decades, I can scarcely recapture. In the midst of shared hope, the nights grew long with painful reminders, bitter ironies pressing in on our emotions at every turn. My sister had only been married for a few weeks — the leftover wedding cake stared back whenever we opened my parents’ refrigerator. And while we were assured that she’d died instantly, she was actually only pronounced dead in the emergency room of the nearest hospital — the very same hospital where she’d been born. Closure? I’m not sure that any of us ever found it. Life went on, its daily demands insistent. This, we came to understand, was a kind of blessing. Sometimes in the midst of death, it’s good to be overwhelmed by life itself, by the little joys and big crises that push grief into the dark hours when sleep won’t come. I don’t know how my parents made it surrounded in their home by reminders of her. They bore this with a quiet dignity, but their sorrow lurked beneath the surface for the rest of their lives. This past year, my little sister would’ve turned 65. Increasingly with the passage of years, I find myself wondering what her life might have been like had she lived. She was warm-hearted and outrageously talented. I suspect he might have accomplished a great deal with her life. I also wonder at the nieces and nephews I might have had, and not just the children. My older sister is also my great friend, and has been the whole of my life. What might I have gained in friendship over a life with the other sister, the one who died so young? Thinking about death is so deeply uncomfortable that modern Americans now try to avoid it altogether. One of the cruelties of my little sister’s death was its irredeemable banality — a traffic accident on an icy road. In the year of her death, 36,398 others died in traffic accidents. Even in the little town where I grew up, one came to expect at least one such fatality per year. One sometimes began the school year wondering who would be gone by year’s end, for my high school years witnessed the traffic death of a schoolmate almost every year. One searches for a meaning that sheer statistical cruelty denies — after all, since the dawn of the automobile era, nearly four million people have been killed in automobile accidents. One can craft meaning out of such things as the steady improvement in automobile safety, much of it inspired by our appalling history of traffic deaths, but it’s hard to translate this into genuine solace that a family can cling to. It’s been decades since I’ve returned to the scene of my sister’s death, and I’m told that the intersection now has a traffic light, but that scarcely fills the hole left in our family. But this is an essay about death and families, not traffic safety. I’ve written more than once recently about other needless deaths, deaths not simply needless, but vile in their cruelty. Iryna, Logan, Bethany, Sarah — these are just the ones of whom I’ve written, young women murdered by men who should never have been out on the street, victims not simply of their killers, but of our “progressive” elites’ hopelessly misguided concepts of social justice. The list is actually much longer — one could go on, name after heartbreakingly unfamiliar name. One can find their names if one looks hard enough, but even with such notable cases as Laken Riley, one has to look very hard — her killer, after all, belonged to one of the Left’s favored classes. One has to look beyond the legacy media narrative, wherein the wrong kind of victims are memory-holed in favor of the left’s favored victim du jour. Sometimes it goes beyond narrative indifference, all the way to active and deliberate erasure. One thinks of how flyers depicting young women raped and murdered during the Oct. 7 pogrom were ripped down and trampled on by Hamas sympathizers on U.S. college campuses. Or the systematic and insistent depiction of the Gaza conflict as a genocide inflicted by Israel upon innocent Palestinians. One struggles to identify the most egregious actors, although the BBC and Al Jazeera certainly come to mind — but they have their rivals across the U.S. media landscape. These inversions of the truth are bad enough for society as a whole, but they are unconscionably brutal when it comes to the families of the true victims. Worse, what the media ignores or treats with veiled contempt, the internet magnifies into sadistic hatred. Sarah Beckstrom, for example, didn’t deserve the vitriol directed her way on social media simply by virtue of having been assigned to patrol the streets of D.C. with her National Guard unit. “Hate has no home,” however, apparently was suspended in Sarah Beckstrom’s case — the wrong kind of victim, you see. For the Left, hopelessly enthralled by the victimhood narrative, controlling the treatment of victims has become an imperative. Only potential left-wing martyrs need apply. Others need to be torn down, their deaths stripped of anything resembling a positive meaning. This matters, if not for the dead than for those loved ones left behind. Long ago, mankind learned that death is made more bearable for the living when invested with at least some semblance of an uplifting message. One need not indulge in notions of “sweetness,” the dulce et decorum est of dying for one’s country — the death of young soldiers is never “sweet.” But it can be invested with something beyond the randomness of an automobile accident, or a murder perpetrated by a mentally deficient drug addict. It can give families something to cling to, something to fill at least partially the space in empty hearts. One should resist over-generalizing the workings of solace. To paraphrase Tolstoy, “while all happy families resemble one another, each grieving family grieves in its own way.” But I’ve known many grieving families, above all my own, and I truly believe that death’s meaning matters, and that a special kind of cruelty follows from an absence of meaning. The emotional imperative within a grieving family is absolute. Herein, perhaps, lies yet one more of death’s lessons for the living. With “wars and rumors of wars” everywhere on the horizon, we must remember that the most important single measure of a nation’s military capability is neither technical superiority nor tactical skill. Amidst the marvels of modern warfare, it’s sometimes easy to forget that soldiering, at its simplest, is all about death and dying, whether suffered or inflicted. The Ukraine war has offered many lessons, but the fact that it continues reflects nothing so much as the willingness of Ukrainians to go on fighting — and, when necessary, dying, to preserve their freedom. We often read of wargames involving a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and, with a crisis point looming in 2027, it’s wise for our generals and admirals to ponder the range of scenarios. But the most important question defies strategic or tactical analysis — we simply cannot know if our country will accept the casualties such a war would entail. The same is true of virtually any other potential conflict on the horizon. Taking Nicolas Maduro was measured as a success not only because he was taken into custody, but also because this was accomplished without the loss of a single American life. This also might be said of the bombing that crippled Iran’s nuclear program. Great gains, in both instances, important geopolitical victories. But would we view them differently if a B-2 bomber had gone down, or if a dozen Delta Force operators had died in a firefight? How much meaning do we now require as a nation? A Pearl Harbor, or a 9/11. Those who would commit this country to war must keep the question of purpose, of meaning, of existential need, clearly at the forefront of their thinking. The same might be said of those who increasingly traffic in the language of “civil war,” without pause to reflect on what this might truly entail. Reflecting on what she called “The Republic of Suffering,” historian Drew Gilpin Faust concluded that the blood-soaked legacy of our Civil War — some 600,000 dead, the equivalent of more than six million casualties in today’s population — created a profound need, a national imperative, to find a meaning within a slaughter that touched virtually every family. This need shaped not one, but several generations, and it particularly required the commitment of veterans willing to embrace each other across the vast chasm of wartime hatred. Thinking about death is so deeply uncomfortable that modern Americans now try to avoid it altogether. What death means for the dead themselves is a matter for theology or philosophy and beyond the ken of this essay. The meaning for families is a big enough topic for now. As I write these words, however, half the country is in the grip of a massive snow and ice event, and, as I look out my window, the street past our house is glazed with ice. Forty-six years ago, I lost forever the ability to look with simple joy at the whiteness of a winter wonderland. I still yearn for a meaning that I’ll never find in this life, and I pray that every family’s loss may be accompanied by at least some of the comfort that even the simplest shred of meaning can provide. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Time to Stand With the People of Iran The New York Times Keeps Getting It Wrong on Nigeria Arresting Maduro: Not a ‘Green Light’ to Xi or Putin James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His latest novel, The Zebras from Minsk, is the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.