March 18, 2026

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

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: Mamdani’s 15 mph speed limit isn’t about safety, it’s a money grab.

At a time when New Yorkers are already struggling with affordability, the mayor’s proposal risks becoming something else entirely: another automated toll on drivers.

Let’s start with the obvious question critics have already raised: Why would school-zone limits apply 24 hours a day?

Kids aren’t walking to school at midnight.

They aren’t crossing streets at 3 a.m.

Yet drivers could still be ticketed in the middle of the night for exceeding the limit in an empty school zone.

That’s not a safety policy. It turns speed cameras into toll booths.

And the money involved isn’t trivial.

New York City already collects hundreds of millions of dollars each year from speed-camera tickets, according to city reports. Expanding enforcement to thousands of locations means dramatically increasing the number of places where those cameras can issue fines.

One way or another, New Yorkers will be made to pay for Mamdani’s schemes.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

PAST PERFORMANCE DOES NOT GUARANTEE FUTURE RESULTS…:

…but I wouldn’t bet against Elon, either.

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

SOCIAL MEDIA — OR AT LEAST X — IS THE PLACE TO GIVE THEM THE ATTENTION THEY DESERVE:

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green

BIPARTISAN HOUSE BILL WOULD BOOST SPENDING TRANSPARENCY: A potentially landmark bill requiring faster public disclosure of federal spending is being introduced today by Republican Representatives Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Chip Roy and Michael Cloud of Texas, Clay Higgins of Louisiana and Nick Begich of Alaska, plus Democrat Jimmie Panetta of California. Check out my exclusive story in The Washington Stand.

Posted at 10:50 am by Mark Tapscott

MAKE IRAN ZOROASTRIAN AGAIN: Defiant Iranians celebrate ancient fire festival despite war.

As dusk falls across Iran on Tuesday, bonfires, fireworks and street gatherings take place to mark Chaharshanbeh Suri, an ancient fire festival that has also become a public act of defiance, this year unfolding under war, heavy security and fears of bloodshed.

Iranian authorities have issued stark warnings ahead of Chaharshanbeh Suri, pointing to what they describe as wartime conditions and the risk of unrest.

Nevertheless, Iranians celebrated the festival.

I guess stark warnings don’t mean much right now.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE?

Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

China is a problem. But certain parts of the intel community are a bigger and more immediate problem.

Posted at 9:53 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Man in Iran Tacitly Admits He Had a ‘Minder’ Who Informed Regime.

CNN had repeatedly insisted that senior international correspondent Fred Pleitgen and the network maintained “full editorial control” about what they reported when the former was in inside Iran. But, in an interview with the U.K.-based newspaper The Guardian, which was less of an interview and more just answering prompts, Pleitgen asserted that he and his cameraman didn’t have a “minder” lurking over them. Yet, when he described who guided him around and what he was allowed to see, it very much sounded like a minder.

“Did you have a minder? Were you taken around by someone?” asked Guardian’s media and power reporter Jeremey Barr. A minder in this case being someone who worked with/for the regime who would shadow or guide a foreign journalist, who would only show them what the regime wanted, or to be a constant reminder the regime was in control over their stay and life.

Pleitgen initially suggest they CNN didn’t have a minder, but they did have “a guy” who showed them around and translated. He began to say the guy “obviously” had some sort of duty before cutting himself off and noting that the regime had asked the guy not to show them certain places.

Read the whole, and remember that this kind of thing is nothing new for the network: How CNN hid the truth about Saddam and betrayed the world.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

NIFTY:

Although I’d be surprised if the Pentagon (and Israel, too) hadn’t already figured this one out.

Posted at 9:22 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I SO Did Not Have ‘Gayatollah’ Khamenei on My Bingo Card. “Please believe me, dear readers, that I desperately want to be more mature about this story because this is a newsletter, after all. Then again, I am the snarky opinion guy around here and you’re all familiar with my observational peculiarities. Please know that my tongue is being figuratively bitten to avoid any fanciful pictures I might want to paint about a mullah bath house that pipes in Adam Lambert music all day.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

BLUE STATE BLUES:

Posted at 8:51 am by Stephen Green

THE MACHINE HASN’T QUIT PROTECTING THE LEFT:

Posted at 8:38 am by Glenn Reynolds

DON SURBER: The Little Orange Rooster “’Not I,’ said the NATO nations who forgot 102,839 Americans died protecting freedom since World War II.”

What are the odds that Trump puts a tariff-like “security fee” on all oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz? . . .

Posted at 8:37 am by Glenn Reynolds

DON’T LET UP NOW: ‘Worst of the worst’: Latest ICE roundup nabs murderers, pedophiles.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday announced the arrest of several violent criminals, including convicted murderers and pedophiles, as part of its latest “worst of the worst” roundup.

The “worst of the worst” series is part of an effort by DHS to highlight the criminal nature of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) priority targets amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

“Yesterday, ICE arrested criminal illegal alien murderers, pedophiles and sex criminals – the very definition of depraved,” acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said. “Under President Trump, if you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will find you and arrest you. There is nothing that will stop ICE from putting American families, American children and American lives FIRST.”

Trump has set a goal of deporting as many as 22 million illegal aliens from the country. As of January, DHS stated that roughly 3 million had left the country through a combination of physical deportations and voluntary exits.

Topping the list was Sergio Colin-Aviles of Mexico, who was convicted of homicide or manslaughter.

Dems want to keep them in the country, free-range.

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

MORE FALLOUT FROM 2020:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll