February 18, 2026

Now, on to the news…

Back in 2017, Nick Fuentes was a little-known college freshman who hosted a political talk show. Today, he’s considered by many the most controversial figure on the Right. He opposes interracial marriage, praises Hitler, and embraces taboos. He cheers anti-Semitism and has made a litany of bigoted comments over the years. “Above all, he is engaged in a performative demand for attention, cynically harnessing transgression to drive clicks, sow chaos, and gain notoriety,” Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo observe.

They decided to dig deeper not just into Fuentes’s words, but his actions. The result: an investigation that “looks beneath the spectacle of outrage and the self-mythology he has curated” to reveal “a shocking heap of human wreckage that has accumulated within Fuentes’s political universe: betrayal, pedophilia, suicide, murder.”

Their investigation draws on livestreams, public records, and interviews with associates that offer a clearer picture of the “freak world of Nick Fuentes.” Read it all here.

Visit a halal cart in New York City, and it’s likely you’ll pay $10 or so for something as simple as a tray of rice and meat. But it’s not because the ingredients are expensive.

Blame street-vending permits, which the city caps at artificially low levels. “Unable to obtain the $400 permit directly, many vendors pay the vastly larger sum on the secondary market,” Allison Schrager explains. “They estimate that if permits were affordable and available, a platter would cost closer to $8.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged this reality in campaigning on making street meat $8 again. But the city’s red tape applies to all businesses, not just food carts. “New Yorkers pay more because doing business here costs more,” Schrager writes, “thanks to a regulatory thicket, heavy taxation, and an enforcement regime that treats entrepreneurs as revenue sources rather than civic partners. Mamdani may understand this when it comes to food carts, but unless he is willing to apply market-friendly reforms across the board, the city’s affordability crisis will only deepen.”

Read her take.

Without price stability, Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh has written, all other economic goals go unfulfilled. Controlling inflation will best serve the goal of full employment by creating a more predictable economic environment.

Warsh has also written about the Fed’s so-called “mission creep”—getting involved in distractions like DEI, fiscal policy, and climate change that erode the bank’s focus on what should be its main job of price stability.

“These distractions have also raised questions about Fed independence,” Milton Ezrati writes. “The Fed has invited interference by monetizing government deficits and by opining on fiscal policy. When the Fed’s mission creep extends beyond issues assigned to it, congressional and administrative questions are not just reasonable but warranted.”

Read Ezrati’s assessment of what the Fed might look like under Warsh.

“How about we have one federal holiday, and one only? July 4.

State governments and private employers would still be free to offer paid holidays for Christmas, etc., as they wish.”

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David C., commenting on the federal holiday calendar 

Photo credits: Dominic Gwinn / Stringer / Getty Images News via Getty Images