March 23, 2026

March 22, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HIROO ONODA BELIEVED IN HIS CAUSE. For Tay-Tay, it’s just performance art:

 

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GREAT MOMENTS IN OMNIPOTENT TOURIST SYNDROME: Left-Wing Activists Descend on Crisis-Stricken Cuba, Enjoy Luxury Hotels, Ride AC Buses.

The convoy includes a mix of activists, political figures, and organizations from across the global Left. Among them is leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who broadcast from Havana to his large social media following while promising to produce additional “content” from the trip.

Other participants include international political figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and representatives from leftist parties across Latin America and Europe.

Some of the groups involved, such as The People’s Forum and Code Pink, have previously drawn scrutiny from U.S. officials over alleged ties to foreign influence networks.

The effort has also been linked to Mariela Castro, daughter of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, underscoring the close coordination between activists and the Cuban government. Organizers say the convoy delivered solar panels, food, and medical supplies, including cancer treatments, to help alleviate the island’s crisis.

Cuba has also received aid shipments from countries including Mexico, Brazil, and China in recent weeks, as concerns grow over a potential humanitarian emergency. Still, questions remain about how the convoy’s aid will be distributed, and whether it will reach ordinary Cubans or be funneled through government-controlled channels.

Such efforts often double as political theater, bolstering the regime’s narrative while doing little to address systemic issues. The images coming out of Havana this weekend highlight a jarring divide: foreign activists documenting their “solidarity” tour with reliable electricity, comfortable transport, and direct access to top officials. Meanwhile, millions of Cubans live through daily blackouts, food shortages, and a collapsing economy.

Reliable electricity, comfortable transport, direct access to top officials, and an Internet connection to the outside world for me, but not for thee:

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED:

The Moo Hotness? The Cowgorithm!

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

COLUMBUS RISES AGAIN: Toppled Statue Now Reborn at the White House.

On Sunday, a new statue of Christopher Columbus was installed on the White House grounds, as part of the run-up to this summer’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The best part? The new statue incorporates parts of another Christopher Columbus statue damaged by rioters in the 2020 “Summer of Love” riots.

A new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer that protesters destroyed six years ago. 

The 13-foot, one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 – then dumped into the city’s inner harbor – was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

The statue has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Artists retrieved shards of marble belonging to the wrecked statue from the harbor that were used in the recreation – and reached out to the White House after officials in Baltimore refused to put the new monument up, according to the organization.

More here: White House installs Christopher Columbus statue made from remains of toppled sculpture. “President Trump signed a proclamation last year hailing Columbus as an American hero. ‘Columbus Day — we’re back, Italians,’ Trump declared after signing the proclamation. ‘We love the Italians.’”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPEAKING TRUTH TO COMMUNIST POWER:

Posted at 7:36 pm by Glenn Reynolds

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