Two horrifying incidents shocked the nation this September. On September 10, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University—a politically motivated assassination for which 22-year-old Tyler Robinson has been charged. Five days earlier, the Charlotte Area Transit System had released surveillance footage of the late August stabbing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail train. The video captured the killing in all its senseless violence, enraging the public, especially when the suspect’s many prior arrests became known.
Online reaction to Kirk’s murder underscored the poisonous climate that made it possible. On social media, some progressives justified—or even cheered—the killing, insisting that Kirk “had it coming” because expressing conservative ideas on campus amounted to a form of violence. This inversion—that words are weapons and argument is assault—turns free inquiry into a provocation. American universities have incubated this logic. Small wonder, then, that some disordered individuals, like Robinson, believe that violence is justified against those with the “wrong” views. Once speech is redefined as violence, the path to authoritarianism opens wide. That has become a real possibility in Britain, where citizens now face police scrutiny, and sometimes arrest, for posting “offensive” comments online, as Theodore Dalrymple explains in “Speechcrime.”
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Zarutska’s death underscored the need to remove violent offenders from society, an imperative thwarted by lax liberal crime policies. In “Incarceration Works,” Tal Fortgang revisits political scientist James Q. Wilson’s 1975 classic Thinking About Crime, which argued that crime is concentrated among a small group of repeat offenders—making their incapacitation a crucial way to protect public safety. In his companion essay, Charles Fain Lehman notes that Wilson also saw how crime control depends on strong communities and social norms to enforce order.
With New York’s November mayoral election approaching, polls show Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani leading comfortably. As Nicole Gelinas details in her cover story, Mamdani’s sweeping affordability agenda—universal child care, fare-free buses, rent freezes, and municipal grocery stores—would require steep new taxes on corporations and high earners, which could destabilize the city’s already-fragile tax base. On crime, Mamdani has moderated earlier antipolice rhetoric, but his plan leans heavily on social services rather than enforcement—a risky bet, given the city’s still-elevated crime rate. Gelinas argues that the direction of a Mamdani administration may hinge on constraints imposed by Albany, fiscal limits, and political self-preservation.
What would unconstrained socialism look like in Gotham? Martin Gurri’s “Socialism with a New York Face” offers a thought experiment. Drawing on Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, he shows how promises of equality and “popular control” would collapse into centralized planning, coercion, and rationing, with a technocratic elite supplanting landlords and markets. Gurri’s narrative illustrates how the pursuit of absolute equality erodes freedom. In “Scandinavia on the Hudson,” Stephen Eide argues that New York City already resembles the social democracy that many reformers envision—and that the result is a system that burdens workers and fails to deliver what its advocates promise.
New contributing editor Sanjana Friedman’s “San Francisco’s (Partial) Comeback” charts that city’s tentative revival after years of dysfunction. Under new mayor Daniel Lurie, San Francisco has stabilized its budget, boosted police funding, and begun tackling open-air drug markets while reassuring the business community. Yet stubborn downtown blight and an unresolved struggle between pragmatists like Lurie and an entrenched Left make the city’s recovery still precarious.
—Brian C. Anderson
