March 22, 2026

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: 

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

Posted at 6:26 pm by Stephen Green

GIVE ‘EM HELL, HAIRY: Truman Begets Roseannadanna.

A great president in many ways, Truman befouled American rhetoric by his casual use of the word “fascist.” In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, “fascism” referred to a specific mostly-European political/economic philosophy. The term was sometimes applied to Americans who, by and large, were actual fans of actual fascism (e.g., Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund). But in 1948, Truman bleached the meaning out of the word in order to make it an all-purpose left-of-center term for “people we don’t like.” Just before that year’s presidential election, the New York Times ran a headline:

“PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … REPUBLICAN VICTORY WILL THREATEN U.S. LIBERTY.”

Tom Dewey had been a hard-hitting prosecutor and bane of organized crime, but by 1948, he was a bland, inoffensive, Eastern Establishment Liberal Republican. His greatest contribution to American politics was engineering the 1952 Republican candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower—whom Truman had attempted to recruit for the Democratic nomination in 1948. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, labeled the mustachioed Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake.” Post-election, the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote:

“No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.”

Such was the existential threat of Truman’s fevered diatribe.

Truman’s invective simultaneously immortalized the insult and stripped it of meaning. Shamefully, he called Dewey a fascist while the corpses of those slaughtered by actual Fascists and their Nazi allies were still rotting in mass graves. But, with the precedent set, Truman’s successors applied the fascist label to, among many others, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. (Truman narrowly won over Dewey, so perhaps the fascist ploy worked for him.)

Read the whole thing. This clip of Angela Davis in 1972, employing massive amounts of vocal frrrrrryyyyyy, imagines Richard Nixon’s first term as the twilight of Weimar Germany, rhetoric that would be repeated by Kamala Harris in 2024 and early 2025, while simultaneously seeking the endorsement of two previous Hitlers, Dick Cheney, and the aforementioned Dubya: (Davis was and is a big of fan of totalitarian international socialism, of course.)

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY:

How far left is The Nation? This far: 

The magazine was also supportive of the new Soviet Union. It published a eulogy of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin by Russian writer Maxim Gorki, who called the Soviet leader “the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present.”5

During the Cold War, the magazine became a home for some Soviet apologists. In 1946, Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief who won the Pulitzer Prize but later became infamous for having covered up the famine in Ukraine orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, praised Stalin’s purges in the pages of The Nation. He called them “a general cleaning out of the cobwebs and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.”6

The magazine praised Stalin when he died in 1953.6 The magazine also contributed to efforts to exculpate Alger Hiss, a State Department official convicted of perjury related to his activities as an agent of the Soviet Union. Even after the declassification and publication of decrypted intercepts that proved Hiss spied for the Soviets, then-Nation publisher Victor Navasky continued to assert Hiss’s innocence.7

The Soviet Union was not the only communist state for which The Nation offered cover. Its pages covered up the crimes of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and his new People’s Republic of China. An editor, Maxwell Stewart, was the chairman of a communist Chinese front group.6

During the Greek Civil War, The Nation’s editor, Freda Kirchwey, praised the Greek communist guerillas. During her tenure, The Nation also endorsed friendship with the Soviet Union and opposed the Cold War.6

But it was not until the 1970s that The Nation published its most infamous example of “whataboutism”—dismissing Communist crimes by claiming American misdeeds–of a communist regime. In 1977, it published “Distortions at Fourth Hand” by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In the article, both men denied that a genocide was taking place in Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia even as evidence from refugees was indicating killings on a mass scale.8 Estimates of the death toll from the genocide exceed 1.5 million people.9 The United Nations would ultimately conclude that the Khmer Rouge regime had committed genocide, and a joint UN-Cambodian tribunal would sentence three surviving Khmer Rouge officials to life imprisonment.10

“Unexpectedly,” The Nation is also Dan Rather-approved: Dan Rather to Headline $200-a-Person Fundraiser for The Nation Magazine.

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CAPTAIN!

Posted at 3:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HOW THE SBC GOT PLAYED: The Left’s Woke Gospel has been moving decisively within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in recent years, and none of it was accidental or unplanned, including especially the allegations of protecting sexual abusers within the leadership of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Rod Martin puts forward “How The SBC Got Played,” a devastating 41-minute expose of how the Left did it.

Posted at 2:27 pm by Mark Tapscott

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Schools Named for César Chavez Face Renaming Debates After Assault Allegations.

Education Week on Wednesday contacted a dozen districts and charter school networks with schools named for Chavez. None had a firm position on renaming, but many acknowledged that conversations were already taking place in their communities.

States including California, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, Utah, and Washington recognize César Chavez day on the leader’s March 31 birthday. By Thursday, some had already committed to renaming the holiday. Several districts that have the day off said it’s too late to change their calendars. Others that planned commemorations during the school day have canceled their plans.

The San Francisco school district, which has an elementary school named for Chavez, said it “shares in the community’s concerns” regarding the allegations. The San Francisco school board faced pushback when it voted to rename 44 of its 117 schools in 2021 because of concerns their namesakes were tied to racism and oppression. Schools flagged under the plan, which the district later abandoned, included those named for George Washington, Paul Revere, and former U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein.

Elsewhere in California: San Bernardino school moves to remove Cesar Chavez’s name amid sexual abuse allegations.

A San Bernardino middle school named after Cesar Chavez is taking steps to remove the labor leader’s name after bombshell sexual abuse allegations surfaced this week.

In a statement posted on its website, the San Bernardino City Unified School District said it is “taking initial measures” while they continue to gather information and assess next steps.

The school, currently known as Cesar E. Chavez Middle School, opened in 2005 and was named to “honor the enduring contributions to the farmworkers’ labor movement.”

“Effective immediately, the district will begin removing or covering external signage bearing the school’s name and will pause the use of the name and logo across official district and school platforms, including websites, social media and printed materials,” the district said.

During the interim period, the school will be referred to as Middle School #318.

A couple of years before Jerry Orbach passed away in 2004, the veteran actor was “named a ‘Living Landmark’ by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with his Law & Order co-star Sam Waterston. Orbach quipped that the honor meant ‘that they can’t tear me down.’”

But as we found out in 2020, they can tear you down – and in a frighteningly quick fashion, to boot.

Speaking of actors, there’s a remarkably simple solution to California’s current dilemma:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S COME TO THIS:

 

After declaring “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” Nietzsche wrote that Europe wasn’t going to like what comes next. “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming,” Nietzsche warned Europe in 1885′s Also sprach Zarathustra, “he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man…The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WALTER DURANTY CALLED, AND SAID YOU MIGHT WANT TO DIAL THE DECADENCE BACK A BIT:

UPDATE:

And all in service to the Omnicause:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

A NATION CAN DECLINE FOR A LONG TIME:

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

INSECT-IFYING HUMANITY: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy.

Far from suffering rising death rates, the world is healthier than ever before. By the reckoning of the U.N. Population Division, global life expectancy has leapt since 1968: from under 56 years to over 73 years. Indeed, worldwide life expectancy today is roughly three years higher than was America’s when The Population Bomb came out.

But then again, Ehrlich wasn’t great at forecasting the American future, either: Among his more memorable howlers was a 1969 conjecture that overuse of pesticides might drive down U.S. life expectancy at birth to just 42 years by 1980.

One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, indeed, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight.

For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in the cost of food. By 2024, the inflation-adjusted prices of the main cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—were less than half as high as when The Population Bomb came out. This means that food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller.

Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications about the human future were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is really very simple. Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population: It’s just that he studied butterflies.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

In “Paul Ehrlich’s Unexploded Ordnance,” James Lileks begins with a flashback to the doomsday-obsessed 1970s before concluding:

The subhead of Ehrlich’s New York Times obituary was amusing: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature. As in, “It’ll surely happen eventually, and we hope so because people are a pestilence and Mother Earth weeps every time a baby is born.” Optimism, of course, is for fools who just don’t know how bad things are — and who can actually close their eyes at night without thinking about microplastics.

As populations crash all over the world, the specter of numberless hordes clashing over the last pack of peanuts no longer haunts the leftist imagination. It might occur to them that societies could suffer from population decline, particularly in places where the system is set up to extract money from one small group and give it a much larger one. Well, if it comes to that, we can just turn to incompatible cultures and import grand quantities of sullen dudes who are disinclined to adapt. If they vote correctly, what’s the downside? Okay, well, some of them might blow themselves up at a Christmas celebration, but that’s the price you gotta pay. The metaphorical Population Bomb was horrible! The literal population bomb, well, we can work with that.

Governor Walz and Mayor Mamdani chuckle and shrug their shoulders.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

Related: Julia Ioffe, who in 2018 said that Trump was radicalizing more people than ISIS, was asking “Is Trump Headed for an Iran Quagmire?” on March 2nd, the day after the first US and Israeli bombs and missiles were launched.

And as a result:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA FIRST:

Posted at 12:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds