March 18, 2026

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

Posted at 3:03 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.

These celebrity galas often feast on anti-Trump lectures, be it those “ICE out” pins or mocking the First Family. The messages may differ, but the target is typically the same.

President Trump.

And, as a result, Hollywood, Inc. watched awards show ratings slump.

Their ratings stabilized somewhat during the Biden years, but with Trump back in office, the ratings decline resumed. Just look at the just-released Oscar numbers.

Also, Hollywood largely stopped making (and awarding) movies people want to see. Trump or no Trump, why tune in to see which movie you never even heard of won Best Picture?

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: Russian Election Interference.

The New Hotness? US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies, memo says. “Dr. Barry A. Zulauf, a member of the Senior National Intelligence Service reported that others in the intelligence community said ‘I don’t want my intelligence going to the White House where it will be used by that vulgarian in the Oval Office to support policies against China with which I personally disagree.’”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

IN THE WORDS OF CURTIS LEMAY, IF YOU KILL ENOUGH OF THEM, THE REST STOP FIGHTING: Iranian Intelligence Minister Who Led Assassination Plots Against US Officials Eliminated In Israeli Strike, IDF Says. “Israel on Wednesday killed Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmaeil Khatib, during an airstrike in Tehran, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Khatib orchestrated the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year and ran an agency that attempted assassinations against U.S. officials.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

UM…:

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

HMMM: American Diner Gothic.

You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see.

You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.” A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle.

These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.

The term came to me when I was trying to identify what had, over the past decade, silently washed over the 95 percent of America that lived outside of the superstar cities. Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural “alt” aesthetic with a post-nerd fandom orientation that’s become a new mainstream. Queerness but casual and prole-ified. Dinergoth: “diner” for provincialism, “goth” as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.

These tendencies are correlated. Something is making them happen together in the places previously considered to be the most normal. A new quirk of 2020s America is that geek equals goth equals left-behind American.

Dinergothdom exists as both a concentrated archetype and a mass-cultural wave. The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.

While we’re on the topic: I’m a Furry. My Community Has a Violence Problem. An insider’s account of how online fandom culture can spiral toward extremism. “Within insular online communities, political narratives can spread quickly and go largely unchallenged. Friend groups often reinforce those narratives rather than question them. Over time, identity politics and extreme ideological positions have become increasingly common in certain parts of the fandom. Criticism of those beliefs is often interpreted not as disagreement but as a direct attack on personal identity. And that reaction makes sense if you understand how identity works within furry culture.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

BREAKING: Rolling Stone has Mild Disagreement with Trump’s FCC Chairman, Forgets Mild Disagreement with Trump’s First Term FCC Chairman:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BLUE STATE BLUES: Virginians At More Risk Thanks to Soros-Funded Prosecutors. “At the exact moment Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and a Democrat-majority legislature are ramming through additional gun control measures restricting the Constitutional rights of law-abiding Virginians, those responsible for putting bad guys who break the law behind bars are instead going easy and putting peaceful Virginians at risk. That includes the risk of getting murdered.”

More details at the link than I would have imagined.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK:

Posted at 12:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“DON’T DRONE ME, BRO.” The picture says it all.

Posted at 12:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds

2026 IS GOING PRETTY WELL:

Posted at 12:33 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MAKING IT PERSONAL:

The attacks hurt rank-and-file morale and drove some security forces to begin sleeping in their vehicles, mosques or other sports facilities, Israel’s assessment said.

Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence officials began placing calls to individual commanders, threatening them and their families by name if they didn’t stand aside in the event of an uprising, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Journal reviewed the contents of one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.

“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.”

“OK,” the commander said in the recording.

“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. “And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?”

“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”

Stay tuned.

Posted at 12:31 pm by Glenn Reynolds

EVERY BEST PICTURE OSCAR-WINNER, RANKED:

90. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023)

Daniels Kwan and Scheinert’s tiresome comic drama about parallel dimensions and roads not travelled tries to be everything to all audiences: a piercing portrayal of the immigrant experience, plus disquisition on generational trauma/neurodivergence/insert-issue-of-the fortnight-here, with Power Rangers fights, superhero franchise tropes, and homages to Wong Kar-wai.

Should have won: Top Gun: Maverick or Tár

89. Gandhi (1983)

Everyone felt it was important to like Gandhi – and agreed that Ben Kingsley was tremendous in it. Richard Attenborough enlisted a pedigree supporting cast (Trevor Howard, John Gielgud, John Mills, Michael Hordern) and ranks of extras (300,000 for the funeral procession alone), but the net result is a Western-centric, sanitised view of a complex life. It also goes on forever.

Should have won: Even Attenborough admitted that E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was robbed.

Flashback: “The Gandhi Nobody Knows,” Richard Grenier 1983 Commentary article, one of the greatest film reviews/demolition jobs ever written.

UPDATE: I had forgotten a lot of the newer titles on the above list, and as it turns out, I was far from alone:

Combining poor product with TDS is a recipe for disaster, Christian Toto writes: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR AIRBRUSHES! Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

The Atlantic attacked Chavez in 2011, with an article headlined, “The Madness of Cesar Chavez” which noted that Chavez’s last days were chaotic, to say the least:

To understand Chavez, you have to understand that he was grafting together two life philosophies that were, at best, an idiosyncratic pairing. One was grounded in union-organizing techniques that go back to the Wobblies; the other emanated directly from the mystical Roman Catholicism that flourishes in Mexico and Central America and that Chavez ardently followed. He didn’t conduct “hunger strikes”; he fasted penitentially. He didn’t lead “protest marches”; he organized peregrinations in which his followers—some crawling on their knees—arrayed themselves behind the crucifix and effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His desire was not to lift workers into the middle class, but to bind them to one another in the decency of sacrificial poverty. He envisioned the little patch of dirt in Delano—the “Forty Acres” that the UFW had acquired in 1966 and that is now a National Historic Landmark—as a place where workers could build shrines, pray, and rest in the shade of the saplings they had tended together while singing. Like most ’60s radicals—of whatever stripe—he vastly overestimated the appeal of hard times and simple living; he was not the only Californian of the time to promote the idea of a Poor People’s Union, but as everyone from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the Black Panthers would discover, nobody actually wants to be poor. With this Christ-like and infinitely suffering approach to some worldly matters, Chavez also practiced the take-no-prisoners, balls-out tactics of a Chicago organizer. One of his strategies during the lettuce strike was causing deportations: he would alert the immigration authorities to the presence of undocumented (and therefore scab) workers and get them sent back to Mexico. As the ’70s wore on, all of this—the fevered Catholicism and the brutal union tactics—coalesced into a gospel with fewer and fewer believers. He moved his central command from the Forty Acres, where he was in constant contact with workers and their families—and thus with the realities and needs of their lives—and took up residence in a weird new headquarters.

Located in the remote foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, the compound Chavez would call La Paz centered on a moldering and abandoned tuberculosis hospital and its equally ravaged outbuildings. In the best tradition of charismatic leaders left alone with their handpicked top command, he became unhinged. This little-known turn of events provides the compelling final third of Pawel’s book. She describes how Chavez, the master spellbinder, himself fell under the spell of a sinister cult leader, Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon, which began as a tough-love drug-treatment program and became—in Pawel’s gentle locution—“an alternative lifestyle community.” Chavez visited Dederich’s compound in the Sierras (where women routinely had their heads shaved as a sign of obedience) and was impressed. Pawel writes:

Chavez envied Synanon’s efficient operation. The cars all ran, the campus was immaculate, the organization never struggled for money.

He was also taken with a Synanon practice called “The Game,” in which people were put in the center of a small arena and accused of disloyalty and incompetence while a crowd watched their humiliation. Chavez brought the Game back to La Paz and began to use it on his followers, among them some of the UFW’s most dedicated volunteers. In a vast purge, he exiled or fired many of them, leaving wounds that remain tender to this day. He began to hold the actual farmworkers in contempt: “Every time we look at them,” he said during a tape-recorded meeting at La Paz, “they want more money. Like pigs, you know. Here we’re slaving, and we’re starving and the goddamn workers don’t give a shit about anything.”

Chavez seemed to have gone around the bend. He decided to start a new religious order. He flew to Manila during martial law in 1977 and was officially hosted by Ferdinand Marcos, whose regime he praised, to the horror and loud indignation of human-rights advocates around the world.

By the time of Chavez’s death, the powerful tide of union contracts for California farmworkers, which the grape strike had seemed to augur, had slowed to the merest trickle. As a young man, Chavez had set out to secure decent wages and working conditions for California’s migrant workers; anyone taking a car trip through the “Salad Bowl of the World” can see that for the most part, these workers have neither.

That didn’t stop his bust being displayed in the Oval Office during President Obama’s third term. But apparently, it’s now time to banish Chavez to the memory hole:

UPDATE: Torpedo aimed at Trump circles back yet again:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS A SPECIES OF CORRUPTION:

From the replies: “Yet Chief Justice Roberts backhands the President, whilst doing nothing to stop political activists masquerading as Judges.”

Related:

Moral authority is the judiciary’s real currency, and they’re embarrassing drunken sailors with their reckless spending.

Posted at 11:55 am by Stephen Green