Why is this coming back as null? Thats wrong. There is one post

I have a category, called events. It is assigned to one post. So I created the following loop:

$args = array ('category_name' => 'events', 'posts_per_page' => 4, 'order_by' => 'date', 'order' => 'DESC' );
$category_posts = new WP_Query($args);

if ($category_posts->have_posts()) {
  while ($category_posts->have_posts()) {
    $category_posts->the_post();
    var_dump($category_posts->the_post());

    ?>
      <div class="col-md-6">
        <?php $category_posts->the_post_thumbnail(array('class' => 'events-image')); ?>
      </div>
      <div class="col-md-6">
        <h4><?php echo $category_posts->the_title(); ?></h4>
        <span class="date"><?php echo date('M j, Y', $category_posts->get_the_date()); ?></span>
        <p><?php echo implode(' ', array_slice(str_word_count($category_posts->the_content(), 2), 0,120)); ?> [...]</p>
      </div>
    <?php
  }
}

Notice the var_dump($category_posts->the_post()); it comes into here and does this var_dump but the Output is NULL. wtf?

Whats confusing is it has posts, its get into the while statement but the $category_posts->the_post() is null? This makes little to no sense at all.