Park MacDougald

In the early days of the war, we expressed the view that one of Israel’s war goals should be to de-internationalize the conflict to the greatest extent possible. That clearly hasn’t happened, in part because the IDF has made abundantly clear that it wants as minimal a role as possible in occupying and governing Gaza. We’re skeptical that all the Emirati money in the world is going to “deradicalize” Gaza or make it a haven for “investment.” But of all the possible outcomes for a U.S.-brokered peace deal, splitting Gaza into a Hamas-controlled “West Gaza” and an Israeli-controlled “East Gaza” and focusing the reconstruction efforts on the latter doesn’t strike us as half bad.

The American character is perpetually torn between a desire for peace and a desire to kill the bad guys. Rubio and Vance are differentiating themselves on this question.

Trump’s trade hardball with the Europeans, much criticized in April (except by us), has had the effect of aligning the European Union more tightly with Washington against Beijing. Whatever they say in public, European leaders understand that their security still depends on the United States and that any economic “rebalancing” toward China is a recipe for deindustrializing Europe. In the Middle East, the United States and Israel took China’s principal ally in the Middle East and one of its main sources of oil, Iran, off the regional chessboard. Now Washington is setting its sights on China’s outposts in the Western hemisphere.

If there’s one thing we’ll miss about the Gaza War, it’s all the great comedy it gave us.

Since 2019, Mackenzie Scott has donated $19 billion of her ex-husband’s money to various nonprofits. For context, George Soros, the arch-bogeyman for critics of the NGO Blob, has donated a total of $32 billion since 1984, meaning that Scott has given more than half as much money in one-eighth the amount of time.

In the face of Trump’s first victory, the uniparty attempted to overturn the election and remove Trump from office. Now, in the face of his overwhelming second victory, it is attempting to co-opt MAGA by rebranding its priorities as “America First,” even as it denigrates real Trumpism as a subversive foreign (i.e., Jewish) import.

Thus far, Carlson’s sponsors in the Trump administration have been content to ignore his relentless attacks on their colleagues, their policies, their boss, and large swathes of their base. We suspect they hope that Carlson will spontaneously come to his senses, and that the problem will somehow solve itself without them having to do anything uncomfortable. It won’t. Indeed, all evidence thus far suggests the opposite: that the more Carlson gets away with, the worse he gets.

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The only thing that makes this young man different from those who were calling on Kirk to be killed or celebrating his killing after the fact is that Robinson, unlike his comrades, decided to do something about it himself.

Kirk was also a relentless advocate for free speech, debate, and dialogue, even with those with whom one violently disagrees, and his murder strikes us as a terrible omen of things to come. We do not yet know the motive behind the shooting, but we cannot help but suspect that it is merely the latest manifestation of the same political hatred that killed Yaron Lischinsky, Sarah Milgram, Brian Thompson, and Corey Comperatore, and that nearly killed Donald Trump.