February 17, 2026

February 16, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SONNY BUNCH: Robert Duvall, R.I.P.

It’s impossible to single out a lone defining performance by Duvall, who died Monday at 95 in his Middleburg, Virginia, home. He was in so many of the greatest films of all time that one loses track trying to count them. Where do you start? With To Kill a Mockingbird, I suppose, though his turn as Boo Radley doesn’t really give you a sense of what was to come. He’s one of those actors who had to age ever so slightly, who had to grow into that weathered face and earn that wry smile that suggested so much hidden knowledge.

That smile serves him well in the first two Godfather films, as consigliere to Don Corleone. The first time you see the movie you don’t know what it means when he grins at the mogul’s seamless transition of ethnic slurs, from guinea goombah to his “kraut-mick friend,” but you know it can’t be good. Duvall was lucky enough to have fallen in with that whole crew a decade into his career—Coppola, Lucas, and the other filmmakers who would change the world as we know it—so you have to mention The Conversation and THX 1138 and, of course, Apocalypse Now. Has there ever been a more quotable character with less screen time than Lt. Col. Kilgore? “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”; “Charlie don’t surf”; “Bomb them into the Stone Age, son.” He’s in the movie for maybe ten minutes and they’re all unforgettable, which is probably why he got his second Best Supporting Actor nomination for the role.

And then there’s Network, a movie I spent a lot of time with last year in the midst of all the drama surrounding CBS News and governmental pressures exerted on the broadcast networks and film studios alike. Duvall’s Frank Hackett is a vision of the future, the amoral corporate hatchet man whose only worry is getting the spreadsheet numbers up a few percentage points to make the shareholders happy at the annual meeting. If that means degrading the news division, fine. If it means killing the news division’s lead anchor, well, who is to say what’s right and wrong in this crazy world of ours? Of all the actors in that film—and there are a number of all-time greats, including Faye Dunaway and William Holden—I’ve always felt as though Duvall adapted best to the overlapping, rhythmic dialogue deployed by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky in this film.

Also in 1976, Duvall played the Nazi colonel who set in motion the plan to kidnap Winston Churchill in The Eagle Has Landed, easily holding his own next to Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Anthony Quayle and Donald Pleasence.

UPDATE:

That clock’s been ticking for a decade now on rock stars, just as it was 50 years ago for big band-era stars.

Posted at 9:24 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS JUST IN: BILLIE EILISH ENDORSES ICE! Aussie Influencer Says Pop Star’s Mansion Joke Got Him Booted From the U.S.

An Australian influencer has lashed out at pop star Billie Eilish, claiming she got him “deported” from the United States after he mocked her Grammy Awards “stolen land” speech by launching a crowdfunding effort to “move into” her multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles.

To be fair, Eilish’s speech—in which she declared that nobody is illegal on stolen land—ranks among the dumbest celebrity remarks yet about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations launched by the Trump administration to remove criminal illegal aliens. No one stole this land. People conquered it. Those are not the same thing.

What the celebrity class refuses to confront is the obvious follow-up question: if the United States returned the land to Native Americans, which tribe would receive it? Tribes constantly fought each other over territory. No one can definitively determine original ownership. Conquest decided the matter. End of story. And by Eilish’s own logic, her mansion sits on “stolen land,” meaning she should either open it up to illegal aliens or hand it over to a Native American tribe.

That outcome seems unlikely. Virtue signaling costs nothing. Practicing what you preach costs everything. Hence, you’ll probably never see someone famous actually doing what they demand everyone else do.

“Billie Eilish got me deported from the US—I think her legal team contacted DHS,” Drew Pavlou wrote in a post published Sunday on X. “I spent 30 hours at LAX immigration trying to explain that my s—posts were just a joke and that I didn’t actually plan to personally move into her mansion.”

Conquest’s First Law of Politics: Everyone is conservative about what he [or she] knows best.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ED MORRISSEY: Too Dumb to Check: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be AOCs.

Ocasio-Cortez tried to take a swipe at Marco Rubio, whose speech in Munich received broad acclaim and enthusiastic responses. She attempted to fact-check a gracious reflection on how much Europe has influenced American culture and heritage by … exposing her utter ignorance of history.

Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to Western culture. My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain. I believe the Mexicans and descendants of African slave peoples would like to have a word on that.

What did Rubio actually say in his speech? “The entire romance of the cowboy archetype,” Rubio noted in his speech, “that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain.”

And he is absolutely right.

Not only did the cowboy archetype originate in Spain, so did the horses they rode in on. Literally. Horses had gone extinct in the Americas for thousands of years before the first Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Spanish explorers reintroduced horses in the 15th and 16th centuries in their efforts to settle the Americas, as well as the cattle ranching that had long been part of the vaquero culture in Spain.

The Daily Wire offers a brief history lesson: