◼ President Donald Trump seems satisfied with the course of the war against Iran, but few seem to share his confidence. Sporadic though Iranian attacks on Gulf shipping may be, the Strait of Hormuz remains too hazardous for any vessel not bound for an Iranian ally. Energy markets are spiking; constrained trade of other commodities, such as fertilizers, could contribute to higher food costs. Combined with Iranian attacks on energy-producing facilities across the Gulf region, the Islamic Republic’s plan to spread the pain of this war around seems to be working. But Gulf states are not backing down. The United Arab Emirates and some others “have come to view Iran’s theocracy as an existential enemy,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command announced that it had used massive penetrating bombs to destroy a bunker that housed Iran’s fearsome anti-ship missiles along the coast, whereas U.S. strikes have eliminated most of Iran’s warships and its naval mine-laying vessels. Iran can’t keep this up forever. The United States and Israel have much more room to run.

◼ A stunning image, as if composed by a painter from the Dutch Golden Age, shows Mahmoud Khalil as a guest at Gracie Mansion with the ever-smiling Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his stylish wife, Rama Duwaji. Khalil gained fame as a keffiyeh-bedecked leader of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas encampments and agitation at Columbia University. Last year, the Trump administration attempted to revoke his permanent residency and deport him, alleging that he had lied on his green card application. He’s still here. The Gracie Mansion meeting followed revelations that Madame Mamdani had liked pro–October 7 social media posts that called the rapes of Israeli women by Hamas a “mass hoax” and had celebrated the terrorist group’s mass-murder rampage as an act of “collective liberation.” More revelations were to come: Duwaji, a freelance illustrator, had worked on a book by a writer who hailed the October 7 attacks as “spectacular” and who has been spewing antisemitic rhetoric both classic and novel. During New York Fashion Week, the New York Times wrote about “the complicated balancing act that Ms. Duwaji is facing as she assumes her new role as the de facto hostess of the city.” Evidently, part of her role is to host terror supporters.

◼ Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest of the war against Iran. Anyone unnerved by the abdication of a key national security official during a war, especially one against an adversary that doubles as the world’s chief exporter of Islamist terrorism, should be heartened by Kent’s resignation letter. In it, he insisted that “Iran posed no imminent threat” to America, and that Israel filled Trump’s head with lies about the ease with which he could achieve victory. Those were the same lies “the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War,” he wrote. They may be the same lies that drew America into a “manufactured” war against ISIS, Kent closed. The former director is allowing his biases to fill the gaps in his understanding of the historical record. The Israelis lobbied George W. Bush against a war in Iraq, preferring that he devote his focus to Iran instead. The Israelis did not manufacture the region-wide Arab Spring revolts that flowered into the Syrian Civil War, in which Barack Obama only reluctantly intervened. And Israel did not drag the U.S. into a war against an adversary with which we have been in a constant state of conflict for 47 years. If these are the faulty assumptions Kent took with him into government, Americans should breathe a sigh of relief that he’s taking his talents elsewhere. Liberals touted Kent’s letter as proof that Iran posed no threat to us. Trump greeted the resignation by saying, “I always thought he was weak on security,” which raises the question of why he put him in a top security job.

◼ Kent’s claims demonstrate the pervasiveness of anti-Israel conspiracy-theorizing on the right. In his introduction to William F. Buckley’s 1991 essay “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” National Review’s John O’Sullivan described antisemitism as “almost invariably a left-wing phenomenon.” But Buckley’s subsequent work attested that those confines had long loosened. One of his magazine’s own writers, he conceded, as well as leading figures in the conservative movement such as Patrick Buchanan, appeared “inclined to anti-Semitism.” The denunciation was an extension of the work that Buckley and NR had done for decades, imposing hygiene on the movement during its grubbier moments. NR’s symposium on antisemitism, held in partnership with the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, D.C., endeavored to continue that noble work. NR luminaries and other thinkers were joined by Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Jim Banks to denounce the immiserating persecution complex that is overtaking the fringes of American political life. This work, alas, is never done.

◼ The SAVE America Act pursues two worthy goals: establishing voter ID requirements and preventing noncitizens from registering to vote. Dubiously, it seeks to federalize these requirements rather than safeguard the power of states—the primary administrators of elections—to require them. More troublingly, Trump and some other proponents of the bill are insisting that the usual Senate practice of requiring 60 votes for cloture be evaded or abolished in order to bring the bill to a floor vote. Abandoning or watering down the Senate filibuster would rob conservatives of a vital defense against bad national legislation: a defense that we have needed before and will need again. The legislative filibuster promotes federalism, allowing states to be the primary lawmakers on most issues that don’t produce a consensus among three-fifths of the Senate. There’s a reason why leftists are so eager to destroy the filibuster; we should not give them this gift in exchange for the comparatively modest benefits of this bill. It is said that Democrats will abolish the filibuster at their next chance. Perhaps they will, but they should have to pay the political price for their radicalism. Last time they tried, they drove former Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema out of their party, the former from a seat they won’t soon get back. After Harry Reid scuttled the judicial filibuster in 2013, Democrats lost nine Senate seats, only one of which they’ve recovered. Because Democrats can build a majority only by winning seats in purple and red states, they will always face this challenge. Senators should have the self-respect to defend their prerogatives, and Republicans should have the savvy to avoid doing Democrats favors.

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◼ Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to punish television news networks that “are running hoaxes and news distortions” in their coverage of the war with Iran. In a post on X, Carr declared that broadcasters “must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.” This was music to the president’s ears. The day after Carr’s announcement, Trump took to Truth Social to celebrate. He praised Carr for cracking down on “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.” The press’s Iran coverage has had errors of emphasis and fact. But the government cannot establish itself as the arbiter of publishable truth. The fog of war ought not be compounded by the fog of censorship.

◼ Probably every lawmaker in Washington has disagreed with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul at one point or another. But Trump’s nominee to be the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, was out of line last month when he said in response to Paul’s voting against one of his amendments, “Rand Paul’s a freaking snake.” Moreover, Mullins said, “I understand completely why his neighbor did what he did.” This was a reference to an attack in 2017 that left Paul with six broken ribs and a damaged lung. Paul brought up those remarks during Mullin’s confirmation hearing. “I was shocked that you would justify and celebrate this violent assault that caused me so much pain,” he said. “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.” Paul gave Mullin ample opportunity to retract or apologize, which he refused to do: a poor sign about whether the nominee has the necessary judgment for the position he seeks.

◼ The Justice Department is continuing its manifestly pretextual investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., issued a pair of subpoenas to the Fed; James Boasberg, the Obama-appointed chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., recently quashed them. In a 26-page memorandum opinion, Judge Boasberg noted that the president has run a campaign to pressure Powell to lower interest rates and to step down so Trump can replace him—a campaign that has, naturally, involved social media trash talk. Powell’s term as chairman will expire soon, and Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh to replace him, but Powell’s term as a member of the Fed’s board does not expire until January 31, 2028. Trump clearly wants Powell out while a Republican Senate majority is in place to confirm his preferred board member. The investigation has made that scenario less likely. This is abusive; it is also folly.

◼ Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, is spending quality time with Kim Ju-ae, his teenage daughter and heir apparent. He’s only 42 or 43, but it’s a hazardous line of work. Best have a plan. The pair recently attended a live-fire test of ultraprecision rocket launchers. They also planted trees, shot pistols at the range, and watched a military parade in matching leather jackets. The girl, probably 13, made her international debut in Beijing last September. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service believes that she’s already involved in policymaking. Nepotism is the least of their problems—and ours, where the Democratic People’s Republic is concerned. At least we have the Western media headlines to look forward to when the glass ceiling of the communist totalitarianism industry is finally shattered.

◼ Jürgen Habermas was the philosopher laureate of the post–World War II German left. He had been a student of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt School critical theorists who believed that the Enlightenment was a failure. Habermas disagreed. Postmodern cynicism was fashionable then, as it is now. Throughout his seven-decade career, Habermas the meliorist maintained that modernity is a work in progress. Often accused of naïveté, and sometimes guilty of it, he proposed that “communicative reason”—sincere, uncoerced, good-faith debate—can lead to political consensus. Like many (perhaps all?) German philosophers, he struggled with opaque, turgid prose and inflicted it mercilessly on his readers. But he was clear-eyed and well-spoken regarding Israel’s response to Hamas after October 7, 2023: “The standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” Leftist academics were baffled, irate. Their intellectual insincerity made a good case for the absence of and need for rational debate. Dead at 96. R.I.P.

◼ Paul Ehrlich never repented. The longtime professor of biology at Stanford University became the most famous academic proponent of the hypothesis of catastrophic overpopulation. The modern Malthusian’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, posited that Earth had a finite “carrying capacity” and that it would slough off its excess population with violence. About 100 to 200 million people would die over the course of the 1970s, he predicted. Instead, about a billion people emerged from extreme poverty in the wake of the Soviet Union’s implosion—a fact he refused to recognize. He insisted in one of his final interviews that the “kind of civilization we’re used to” will end within the “next few decades.” Any minute now. Ehrlich’s recipe for depression immiserated his many followers, some of whom confessed to forgoing family formation based on his claim that reproducing was for the selfish and ignorant. He never admitted his folly or repudiated the coercive population-control schemes he inspired and championed. The world Ehrlich lived in but refused to recognize served as rebuke. Dead at 93. R.I.P.

◼ Lewis Lehrman helped turn a family-run chain of grocery stores into Rite Aid. After that feat, he ran for governor of New York in 1982, losing narrowly to Mario Cuomo and spending the astonishing sum of $10 million. (This century, that is what a Michael Bloomberg campaign spends on carfare.) He was then free at last to return to his first love, American history. (He had been a teaching fellow at Yale and earned a master’s from Harvard.) Together with his friend and fellow philanthropist Richard Gilder, he amassed a collection of historical documents and made them available—via traveling exhibits, booklets, online links, and scholars’ lectures—to tens of thousands of teachers and students nationwide. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is like having the Library of Congress in your classroom with Gordon Wood to show you around. He was a lifelong admirer of Washington and Lincoln, and of Walter Scott’s lines, learned in middle school: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said / This is my own, my native land!” Dead at 87. R.I.P.