Ready for America’s new golden age? Well, stay ready ’cause it ain’t here yet. The U.S. economy grew by just 1.4 percent (annualized, inflation-adjusted) in the fourth quarter of 2025. That’s significantly less than 2.5–3 percent economists had predicted, and way behind last summer’s 4.4 percent rate.

A big reason for the slower growth was the record-long government shutdown. Government spending counts directly into GDP, so less spending means less growth. But there are knock-on effects, too—all those employees who aren’t getting paid are spending less money, and so on and so on.

And, oh, yeah, also the tariffs and the deportation of large parts of the workforce. Could be those had something to do with it, too. Happy Friday.

The Season of Light and Darkness

by William Kristol

Minneapolis, Minn.—“It is safer,” the political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote in 1965, “to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is.”

I’ll follow Strauss’s guidance and begin with the high.

Here in Minneapolis yesterday, some of us from The Bulwark spoke with local citizens who mobilized over the past months to try to deter and monitor assaults on civil liberties. We met with others who had organized themselves to help their neighbors under assault.

We also paid our respects at their unofficial memorial sites to the memories of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. At the Pretti memorial, I was particularly moved by a hand-made placard with the words of the Lord to Joshua (Joshua 1:9): “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

We will not soon forget the examples we saw of Minnesota strong, and Minnesota courage.

When I got back to the hotel, I caught up on the news of the arrest in London of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and on announcements in other European countries of criminal probes into the complicity of their nationals in the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I thought of the heroic efforts of the Epstein survivors and of those who stood with them