2026 IS GOING PRETTY WELL:
Maduro gone, oil flowing, beaches open, nightclubs bumping, flights landing, commerce happening, beating America in baseball…what an absolute unreal Q1 for Venezuela
— Robby B (@bobrockmn) March 18, 2026
March 18, 2026
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.
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:
Modern movies just don't stick like they used to. We won't remember ANY of the Oscar winners 5 years from now. Honestly, we won't remember any of them 5 days from now. Everything is so ephemeral and single-serving, these days. When you saw the Matrix, it haunted you for months.… https://t.co/rrMyZXoe0p
— Mann Made Cinema (@Hotshot_Movie) March 18, 2026
Combining poor product with TDS is a recipe for disaster, Christian Toto writes: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.
OCTOBER 7 DID NOT WORK OUT AS INTENDED: Israel Is Now the Regional Hegemon Iran Wanted to Be.
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:
But now his views on illegal immigration are inconvenient and his inability to defend himself is convenient. https://t.co/a91gGu9uhT
— @instapundit (@instapundit) March 18, 2026
UPDATE: Torpedo aimed at Trump circles back yet again:
So, Democrats spent more than a year stirring up dubious claims about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and, it appears, this scandal-mongering inspired victims of a late Democrat hero to come finally forward and speak out. Ironic boomerang! https://t.co/LPMeuxowmv
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 18, 2026
THIS IS A SPECIES OF CORRUPTION:
This is a demonstration of "unity" by district judges with their colleagues in other districts who have an actual dispute.
It is a disingenuous effort to demonstrate "non-partisanship" in the judiciary. https://t.co/Tn2KY5aY67
— Shipwreckedcrew (@shipwreckedcrew) March 18, 2026
From the replies: “Yet Chief Justice Roberts backhands the President, whilst doing nothing to stop political activists masquerading as Judges.”
Related:
Activists in black robes cosplaying as presidents aren’t judges
They’re imposters—subverters of the constitutional order—pretending to be something they’re not
They have earned every bit of the “hostility” hardworking Americans feel toward them https://t.co/fMfKyY23s7
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 18, 2026
Moral authority is the judiciary’s real currency, and they’re embarrassing drunken sailors with their reckless spending.
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.
PAST PERFORMANCE DOES NOT GUARANTEE FUTURE RESULTS…:
Media said Tesla would fail.
Today, Tesla is worth $1.25 trillion.
Media said SpaceX would fail.
Today, SpaceX is dominating the space industry.
Media said 𝕏 would fail.
Today, 𝕏 is the #1 source of News.
Now they are saying Grok will fail. 👀
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) March 18, 2026
…but I wouldn’t bet against Elon, either.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: TurboTax Deluxe Desktop Edition 2025, Federal & State Tax Return. #CommissionEarned
SOCIAL MEDIA — OR AT LEAST X — IS THE PLACE TO GIVE THEM THE ATTENTION THEY DESERVE:
The way many American commentators and even elected officials are rooting for the US to lose, sometimes subtly, sometimes rather obviously, is not getting enough attention. https://t.co/L4OJgpXGZX
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) March 18, 2026
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.
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.
IT HAD TO HAPPEN: New university committee to study why there are so many committees.
CHANGE?
Kat Abughazaleh loses the Illinois 9th.
Junaid Ahmed loses the Illinois 8th.
Kina Collins loses the Illinois 7th.
Joey Ruzevich loses the Illinois 6th.
Robert Peters loses the Illinois 2nd.
Progressivism loses in every race in Illinois.…
— Angela Van Der Pluym (@anjewla90) March 18, 2026
CHANGE… OR SOMETHING: Cuban Chaos: What’s Real and What’s Speculation.
Biometric Gun Safe for Pistols 3-Ways unlock Fingerprint. #CommissionEarned
THE ENEMY WITHIN:
Reminder that China was caught directly funding Democrats in the 1996 elections and we never got to the bottom of it because, unlike Trump after 2016, Bill Clinton refused to allow an independent counsel despite his FBI Director demanding one.
— Everybody is Insane (@colorblindk1d) March 18, 2026
China is a problem. But certain parts of the intel community are a bigger and more immediate problem.
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.
NIFTY:
The U.S. military is always terrified that the GPS system (which is 12K miles away) can be jammed/spoofed.
Interestingly, researchers at Ohio State University discovered they could use Starlink’s signals as a stealth navigation system. Cos Starlink satellites are in Low Earth… https://t.co/bfMcvFicIn
— Parimal (@Fintech03) March 18, 2026
Although I’d be surprised if the Pentagon (and Israel, too) hadn’t already figured this one out.
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.”
BLUE STATE BLUES:
🚨The Owners of Formula 1 Have Filed to Leave Delaware for Nevada
In the proposal, Liberty Media ($8.84B market cap) is citing "substantial cost savings" and "reducing the risk of opportunistic litigation" as its reasons for the move.
Another billion-dollar company looking to… https://t.co/7UBS9edOqg pic.twitter.com/QuzBR5voVV
— Leave Delaware (@LeaveDelaware) March 17, 2026
THE MACHINE HASN’T QUIT PROTECTING THE LEFT:
🇭🇺 EXCLUSIVE BREAKING: FACEBOOK RESTRICTS ORBÁN POSTS WEEKS BEFORE HUNGARY’S ELECTION
As Hungary heads toward a crucial April election, Facebook is reportedly restricting posts from the country’s Prime Minister.
The move followed a call by an opposition party (Tisza Party)… pic.twitter.com/WXgVOJpQKx
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 18, 2026
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? . . .
