March 24, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NOW IT’S A PATRIOTIC SONG? Bruce Springsteen Lets ACLU Use America Trashing “Born in the USA” for Birthright Citizenship Case Ads.

Trump-hating rocker Bruce Springsteen is allowing the American Civil Liberties Union to use his iconic, if often misunderstood, America trashing Vietnam War anthem “Born in the USA” for the ACLU’s ad campaign promoting the leftist group’s birthright citizenship case set for an April 1 Supreme Court hearing challenging President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order restricting who is eligible for birthright American citizenship.

The use of Born in the USA as a patriotic song is a 180 degree reversal for Springsteen who has long downplayed the notion the song is patriotic.

When Born in the USA was released in mid 1984 as an album title and later a single, both promoted with Springsteen in front of a large American flag, it was embraced by conservatives, including President Ronald Reagan and columnist George Will, for it’s boisterous chest pounding chorus.

The song’s theme of a disgruntled Vietnam veteran who was used, abused and forgotten by his countrymen, ending up in prison, was overshadowed at concerts by the blaring stadium rock anthem arrangement and singalong chorus that audiences in the U.S. and around the world proudly sang: “Born in the USA!!! Born in the USA!!!”

Flashback: ‘Born In the USA’ Now Fits The Conservative Message.

It’s a trenchant commentary on the failures of the Great Society and radical environmentalism.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: Who Was Cesar Chavez—and Who Will He Become?

So, the Left is on the horns of a dilemma. It was one thing to erase a liberal jurist like Earl Warren or a progressive president like Woodrow Wilson, given that they were white guys whose alleged sins came from their “privilege” as white males.

But what does the Left do in these cases of intersectional conflicts of interest, when a noble male of color is accused of violating noble women of color, and there is not a white male oppressor to be found amid this sordid mess?

In the case of the civil rights giant Martin Luther King Jr., it had long been alleged by his close aide Ralph Abernathy that King watched—and did not intervene, perhaps even egging on the attacker—when one of his subordinates raped a woman in a hotel room. And his biographer David Garrow has reluctantly chronicled the dark side of Reverend King as a promiscuous serial adulterer who, again, allegedly got violent with some of his liaisons.

Yet for the Left, the world retains a Manichean divide between all the noble oppressed, now defined by their innate race, gender, and sexual orientation, and all the evil oppressors, mostly white, male, and heterosexual.

Leftists toppled or removed statues of genuine heroes like Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Washington; what, then, will they do with Chavez, who, as a figure of the modern age, was well aware of the norms, mores, laws, and customs of the late twentieth century?

The Left has ended any talk that a person’s life is a sum of good and bad, to be weighed somehow one against the other. In their past record of blanket ostracism, they were incapable of assessing anyone outside their ideological circle as a terrible private person, but one who, nevertheless, as a public figure, did some good things, much less consider the context of the times in which the fallen hero had lived.

But will they then apply that reductionism to Chavez or King, or even to John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton?

It’s a sort of negative intersectionality — Chavez’s #metoo violations and doubleplus ungood comments on illegal immigration meant that he became an unperson last week virtually instantly:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE? Niall Ferguson: Brace Yourselves. A Recession Is Coming.

Investors should be used to the whiplash by now. The pattern ought to be familiar: The president makes a bold pro-Israel military move in the Middle East. Israel’s principal adversary retaliates by restricting the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. The economic consequences look so grim—the nightmare combination of stagnation and inflation—that the president hastily switches to diplomacy.

I want nothing to do with the juvenile journalistic debate about whether, by postponing on Monday his threatened attacks on Iranian power plants, Trump “chickened out” the way he rolled back the tariffs in April last year—the way he always chickens out. Please. He doesn’t always chicken out. He carries out roughly half of the threats he makes, which is a pretty effective strategy in game theory, so long as your adversaries are risk averse, which most of them are. Trump most certainly is not. (When the guy who used to run George Soros’s hedge fund says that Trump has “a very high risk tolerance, much higher than mine,” that’s telling you something.)

The reason the pattern of the past four weeks should be familiar is that something very similar happened in 1973–74. The catalyst was Richard Nixon’s decision to airlift a colossal military aid package to Israel—the counterpart to Operation Epic Fury in 2026. Nixon wanted to tilt the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in Israel’s favor following the Arab states’ surprise attack on Yom Kippur, October 6. The retaliation took the form of oil price hikes by the Middle Eastern oil producers, culminating in an embargo on oil exports to the United States imposed on the orders of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia on October 17. The ultimate effect was to nearly quadruple the price of oil on the world market.

Nixon, Kissinger, and other senior officials in the administration had been warned that this might happen. As Martin Indyk showed in his excellent 2021 book, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, they had ignored those warnings. Kissinger was dismayed at the situation he now found himself in. As he complained to his staff on October 26, in the 19th century, the Western powers would simply have invaded Saudi Arabia and carved up its oil fields. “The idea that a Bedouin kingdom could hold up Western Europe and the United States would have been absolutely inconceivable,” he fumed. Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger even drew up a plan to occupy the Arabian oil fields “as a last resort.”

Stunned by the economic consequences and their likely political costs, Nixon instructed Kissinger to get the embargo lifted. The secretary of state made his first trip to Riyadh on November 8. For all Kissinger’s skill as a negotiator, and for all the shuttle diplomacy he undertook, it took more than four months to get the embargo lifted, on March 18, 1974. By that time, the energy supply shock had been enough to push the U.S. economy—and much of the rest of the industrial world—into recession. Is something similar happening right now as a result of Trump’s war?

Related: “Goldman Sachs just bumped its U.S. recession probability to 30% from 25%, underscoring how quickly things are moving.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE: Volkswagen to shift from cars to missile defense in deal with Israel’s Iron Dome maker.

Volkswagen is in discussions with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems regarding a deal that would convert one of the German automaker’s factories from car manufacturing to missile defence production, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

The plan involves transforming Volkswagen’s Osnabrück plant to produce components for Rafael’s Iron Dome air defence system, according to the report. The Israeli state-owned company’s system would be manufactured at the German facility under the proposed arrangement.

The deal aims to preserve all 2,300 jobs at the Osnabrück site in western Germany, which has faced potential closure. The two companies plan to market the defence systems to European governments.

The German government is actively supporting the proposal, according to the Financial Times report.

As Noah Pollack, channeling Norm Macdonald:

Related: Volkswagen Could Start Building Military Vehicles. The beginning of the lede is a riot:

Volkswagen is no stranger to the military sector, and the automaker is now exploring the possibility of producing military vehicles at its Osnabrück factory in Germany.

Just don’t mention the war…

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I’M STILL NOT TIRED OF WINNING:

Posted at 7:07 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA to spend $20 billion on moon base, cancel orbiting lunar station.

Isaacman, who was sworn in at the agency in December, made the ⁠announcement ‌at the opening of a day-long ⁠event at NASA’s Washington headquarters at which he outlined a raft of changes he is making to the agency’s flagship moon program Artemis.

“It should ‌not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on ​infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface,” Isaacman told delegates at the event.

The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built by contractors Northrop Grumman
and Vantor, ⁠formerly Maxar, was meant to be a space station parked in ‌a lunar orbit. Repurposing the craft for ‌a lunar surface base is not simple.

“Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and ⁠international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives,” Isaacman ⁠said.

Lunar Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station for astronauts to board moon landers before descending to the lunar surface.

The Lunar Gateway never made much sense, except as a multibillion dollar kludge to cover for SLS not having enough lift to make Artemis work. The real solution was to cancel SLS and Lunar Gateway, and work with SpaceX to get Starship up and running.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green