Posts on Wednesday, February 4, 2026

The Washington Post is announcing mass layoffs Wednesday morning, dealing another big blow to a storied media company and a newsroom that has reached a breaking point. Executive Director Matt Murray and human resources chief Wayne Connell sent an email to staffers Wednesday morning instructing employees to "stay home today" but attend an 8:30 a.m. ET meeting via Zoom during which the Washington Post's leadership will announce "significant changes across the company." Those actions include shutting down almost the entire Sports section, closing the Books section and cancelling the daily Post Reports podcast, sources at the newspaper said.

The European Commission's coercion of Big Tech to censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee staff report released Tuesday concerning an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the U.S.. (snip) The EC's supposedly "voluntary" and "consensus-driven" regulatory initiatives are neither (snip.) One particularly farcical section from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum shows tech companies were expected to moderate content from "populist rhetoric" and "anti-elite" censorship to "political satire" and "meme subculture."

Nashville Electric Service (NES) CEO Teresa Broyles-Aplin on Tuesday appeared to contradict the details of the municipally owned utility’s annual report she signed for 2024, which reflects a $7 million cut to its budget for contracted vegetation management, which helped drive a 6 percent decrease to its operating expenses. Instead, the top executive claimed the amount of spending actually increased. Broyles-Aplin was asked repeatedly about the cut reflected in the 2024 report by reporters during a press conference held days after The Tennessee Star first reported the $7 million cut, prompting the apparent denial the company made the cuts it reflected in the report.

A University of Minnesota student group has emerged as a leader behind illegal—and sometimes violent—anti-ICE agitation gripping Minneapolis. It's a significant shift for the school's Students for a Democratic Society chapter, which roughly one year ago stormed a campus building in an anti-Israel raid, trapping employees inside and causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage. The group, known as UMN SDS, organized a Jan. 28 protest outside a hotel located on campus that was allegedly housing ICE agents. Dozens of agitators swarmed the Graduate by Hilton and rocked police barricades, pounded on drums and pans, set off noisemakers, and shouted "F**k ICE" at local and state law enforcement.

Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Jorge Ventura said Monday that left-wing activists assaulted him and a colleague when they documented an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checkpoint in Minneapolis. (snip) "They actually caused my right hand to bleed. They attacked the photo journalist I was with" (snip.) "This was called a filter blockade. It was essentially makeshift checkpoint in Minneapolis," Ventura said. I honestly couldn't believe it was still up after 24 hours. I didn't see any law enforcement when I arrived." Minnesota law allows only authorized persons to direct traffic. "[I]t really seems the whole city is working together."

The Left’s fervent anti-ICE rhetoric continues to rain down, even though it’s incited progressives around the nation to commit acts of violence — or get caught in deadly incidents themselves, like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Each day, you think they can’t get any worse, not after miscreants like Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz continue to liken Trump administration officials to Nazis and compare ICE agents to Third Reich SS forces. Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY-12), though, wants to get some publicity of his own, and on Tuesday, he laid out a disturbing scenario where it would be totally justified for

Today I’m going to give you a pill. It’s not the red one or the blue one. It may look like the black one, but it’s not saying ‘give up’. Welcome to the Bleak Pill. The Bleak Pill tells you that things are very, very bad and that despite Trump being President, despite the UN being in financial trouble, and despite some notable successes we are still losing. Most particularly, we are losing in the sense that the capacity of the other side to commit crimes and encourage evil, but worse their capacity to make more and more people support evil, isn’t reducing. It’s increasing.

After years of inflation shocks and policy-related uncertainty, the U.S. economy may finally be on the cusp of a growth cycle. Rising investment commitments and renewed business confidence are creating expectations of stronger expansion in the coming months. At such a pivotal moment, economic leadership matters. With Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent guiding fiscal policy, attention now turns to monetary policy, where the Federal Reserve under Jay Powell has struggled to provide clear direction. President Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh to lead the Fed is, therefore, a welcome move. Warsh understands that sustainable growth and price stability must go hand in hand, making him a strong choice at a critical moment

Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election because America suddenly became meaningfully more Republican. He won because voters, many of them independents and crossover Democrats, many of them young, had lost trust in the system and believed he was willing to confront it. In our (Rasmussen) final 2024 polling, 42% of Trump’s electorate came from independents and Democrats. That is not a MAGA monoculture. It is a fragile coalition built on one thing: accountability. Voters did not elect Trump to manage decline. They elected him to fix things that were not working. That is why DOGE mattered.

Melinda Gates reacted to the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails involving her ex-husband Bill Gates, including horrific allegations Epstein made such that Bill was attempting to dose her with antibiotics to fight an STD without her knowledge, by saying Bill and other Epstein associates “need to answer to those things.” I think we’re having a reckoning as a society,” Melinda Gates told NPR’s Wild Card podcast host Rachel Martin on Tuesday. “No girl should ever be put in the situation that they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with all of the various people around him.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is onto something. And the right people are terrified. As my colleague Bob Hoge reported, after Gabbard appeared on the scene at the operation to secure the multi-year crime scene that is the Fulton County, Georgia, Election Hub and Operation Center (see FBI Raids Fulton County Election Hub Days After Trump Vows Prosecutions for 2020 Election - Here We Go – RedState and 700 Boxes of Ballots Seized After FBI Executes Fulton County Warrant, Dems Try to Develop ‘Legal Plan’ – RedState), she was the subject of thinly sourced, scurrilous "leak" —

With nothing else to run on, Democrats appear to think that demonizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will be enough to win them control of Congress come November. “In their campaigns, Democrats across the country are responding to the anger felt by many communities over the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations,” reports CBS News. If they can sustain today’s anger, the argument goes, voters will turn out in droves to clip the Trump administration’s wings in his last two years in office. But there are a multitude of reasons why this strategy

President Donald Trump’s Small Business Administration (SBA) is stopping the issuance of small business loans to foreign nationals, requiring that a business be 100 percent owned by a U.S. citizen or U.S. national to receive such a loan. This week, the SBA published a memo requiring that, beginning next month, applicants for the agency’s primary small business loan be American citizens or American nationals. “… effective March 1, 2026, SBA hereby revises Standard Operating Procedure 50 10 8 Lender and Development Company Loan Programs guidance related to businesses owned by non-U.S. citizens,” the memo states:

So far, we have not heard any statements from Delhi on this issue,” Peskov told reporters on Tuesday. We respect bilateral U.S.-Indian relations, but we attach no less importance to the development of an advanced strategic partnership between Russia and India,” he said. “This is the most important thing for us, and we intend to further develop our bilateral relations with Delhi,” he said, signaling that Russia would not lash out at India for whatever agreement it has made with the United States. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday that “we’re only seeing public statements” about the U.S.-India agreement, and “we’ll see how the situation develops.”

The Army of Mohammed (Jaish-e-Mohammed — JeM), one of Pakistan's too-many-to-count jihadist terrorist groups, recently launched its first-ever women's wing. JeM chief Azhar claims that since its launch, the women's wing [which runs indoctrination courses that include specialized training for combat and suicide missions] has recruited 5,000 members. According to journalists who analyzed his audio message, Azhar explains how these women are now recruited, trained, and integrated into his long-term "global jihad" mission, mirroring the structure of JeM's long-running male training program. Azhar promised that any woman who joins the group "will go straight to paradise from her grave after death."

The prevailing wisdom in Washington is that Republicans are all bark and no bite when it comes to channeling their disdain of Obamacare into action. The truth is, the GOP actually has a pretty good story to tell. It’s not often that you hear Republicans discuss what they’ve done to prevent some of Obamacare’s most harmful provisions from coming to life, but GOP lawmakers have quietly chipped away at the law for years. During President Trump’s first term, Republicans eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate, repealed its “Cadillac tax,” terminated the law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and axed its medical device tax.

The U.S. shot down an Iranian drone targeting the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, and a U.S.-flagged ship evaded an attempt by armed Iranian gunboats to force it to stop, as tensions escalated Tuesday in the Persian Gulf. The Lincoln was sailing about 500 miles from Iran’s southern coast when an Iranian Shahed-139 drone “unnecessarily maneuvered toward the ship” and continued flying toward the carrier even after U.S. forces took steps to de-escalate, spokesman Capt. Tim Hawkins said, without specifying the steps. An F-35C fighter from the Lincoln then destroyed the drone, which caused no damage, Hawkins said.