April 14, 2026

Now, on to the news…

Photo credit: Pool / Pool / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Earlier this month, Rolbert Joachin, a Haitan illegal migrant, killed a woman at a Florida gas station after repeatedly bludgeoning her with a hammer.

Last week, President Trump shared the surveillance camera video on Truth Social, writing, “This animal was allowed to stay here because the Biden Administration granted him, and all Haitians, ‘Temporary Protective Status,’ a massively abused and fraudulent program which my Administration is working to terminate.”

To the New York Times, the real scandal isn’t the horrific murder but Trump’s social media post about it. “Trump Shares Video of Graphic Attack and Rails Against Haitians,” the paper headlined its online story. Trump, the Times maintained, “has made disparaging comments about Haitian immigrants for years.”

“It isn’t until nine paragraphs into the article that the Times  gets around to saying what Joachin actually did,” Heather Mac Donald writes. “The Times quotes no victims’ rights groups or families of innocents mauled and maimed by immigrants and their progeny. Instead, it trots out the usual boilerplate about the allegedly lower crime rates of immigrants.”

Read her take on the media reaction.

In 1995, New York City’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal laid out a framework for which “substantially rehabilitated” properties could be exempted from rent stabilization. For a renovation to count as “substantial,” it had to replace at least 75 percent of “apartment systems”—staircases, plumbing, roofs, and so on. And prior to renovation, the building had to have been deemed “substandard”—and any building at least 80 percent vacant would be considered as such. “When the building met these two conditions, the law allowed a developer to proceed without a declaration from DHCR,” Adam Lehodey explains.

In 2023, though, DHCR removed the 80 percent rule, and the state passed a law requiring DHCR to sign off on substantial rehabilitation for projects that began after January 1, 2024. DHCR “began challenging substantial renovations on the ground that the vacancy presumption was no longer sufficient—even for buildings completed before this rule change,” Lehodey writes.

Read about the lawsuits that ensued, and how DHCR’s actions are part of a pattern of targeting developers.

Earlier this year, the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board rejected the application for authorization of Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School. Ben Gamla’s board sued in federal court, arguing that its exclusion violates the First Amendment. That argument should be obvious, Jesse Arm argues. “When a state creates a charter program and invites the full range of private organizations to participate—environmental-themed schools, language-immersion schools, arts academies, schools rooted in Native American culture—but singles out religious organizations for exclusion,” he writes, “it is engaging in targeted discrimination.”

But not everyone agrees. Rabbi Daniel Kaiman of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, for example, opposes religious charter schools based, he claims, on his belief in the separation of church and state. Never mind that in 2021, he turned his synagogue into a State Department-designated refugee resettlement agency, touting it as a way to express Jewish values. For Kaiman, Arm writes, separation “is a principle that operates in only one direction: against traditional religious groups seeking access to public programs on equal terms with everyone else.”

New York City’s private sector added just 13,000 jobs last year—a significant drop from 2024, when the city added more than 95,000 jobs. Health care and social assistance added 9,300 jobs; finance, insurance, and real estate added 9,000 jobs; leisure and hospitality added 3,600. Meantime, construction and manufacturing lost 8,000 jobs, while professional and business services lost 600 positions.

“With the state budget and related legislation still under negotiation, the new jobs data highlight the potential negative effects of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed city tax increase,” Eric Kober writes. “New York City is not immune to the effects of a hostile business environment, and growth cannot be taken for granted.”

Read more here.

Is MAGA’s base in revolt?

Spend some time on social media, and it appears to be. In a strange turn of events, figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have joined forces with liberal media outlets to speak out against the Trump administration’s policies. The result: stories about a supposed right-wing civil war.

But the data don’t support this impression. Time and again, polls reveal that Republican voters still overwhelmingly support President Trump and his administration.

“Durable partisan identity—what voters say when asked in surveys—has proved far more stable than the daily churn of online outrage,” Jacob Siegel writes. “But in an era when political warfare has become indistinguishable from information warfare, what matters operationally is not only settled opinion but the highly pressurized bursts of attention that can be manufactured around particular controversies.”

Read more.

“Cops were never not cool. Look to the continued popularity of Law & Order or Blue Bloods, etc.

Policing was a victim of propaganda by a small minority of relatively protected people and their political and cultural enablers.

It’s the boomer instinct to try to befriend the children by agreeing with them, instead of guiding them, that caused the massive cultural shift.”

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LaotianDave, commenting on a pro-policing trend