Archive for 2026

March 8, 2026

GEOENGINEERING: The audacious plan to refill the Great Salt Lake. “No terminal saline lake — the term for a lake in which water flows to a basin with no exit and accumulates salt and other minerals — has ever been fully restored. And right now, the region has a dismal snowpack, which could again drive the water level to near record lows in the fall.”

Pipeline to the Pacific, baby.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

FILE THIS UNDER “NO SH*T, SHERLOCK”: The shift towards socialism similarly mirrors the Democratic party’s leftward shift, but a deeper look reveals that those favoring “socialism” have no understanding of what it actually means. Just The News reported that:

“The shifting sentiment towards socialism may not necessarily reflect fuzzy feelings for its ideals, but rather a lack of understanding of what those ideals are, according to professor of political science, Nicholas Giordano. “Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation. People are gravitating toward socialism because they’ve never really been taught what socialism is,” Giordano told Just The News.

 

 

Posted at 1:49 pm by Charles Glasser on Mar 8th, 2026

OH NO, SOMETHING NEW TO “INFURIATE LIBERALS!” Gwen Stefani’s ‘Maga Barbie’ transformation has infuriated liberals.

Thirty years ago, an edgy new pop star looked set to take over the world. With her peroxide blonde hair, camo trousers and rebellious spirit, No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani seemed like a breath of cigarette-smoke-tinged air: cooler and sexier than Britney Spears, but not quite as chaotic as Courtney Love; an artist who appealed to both rock and pop fans.

No Doubt’s third album, Tragic Kingdom (1995), sold more than 16 million copies, earned the band two Grammy nominations (for best new artist and best rock album) and spawned the colossal hit single Don’t Speak. Stefani’s decision to go solo in 2004 catapulted her to the A-list, with number one singles, sold-out tours and countless magazine front covers. She was the US’s favourite cool girl, whose empowering songs formed the soundtrack of millennial adolescence. Until she wasn’t. Two decades later, Stefani has found herself with a very different identifier: enemy of liberals everywhere.

Leftists with far too much time on their hands spent Trump’s first term trying to decode hidden Nazi symbolism out of everything Taylor Swift did, until moving on to Sydney Sweeney last year, and now I guess it’s Stefani’s time in the barrel. But as the London Telegraph concludes, “One imagines Stefani isn’t too bothered by the drama. She has a net worth of $160m (£120m), a secure marriage and three healthy children. In May, No Doubt will begin their summer-long residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, following in the footsteps of U2, the Eagles and the Backstreet Boys, after netting $10m to reunite at Coachella in 2024.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL! NY Times Discovers Woodrow Wilson’s Racism to Smear Trump; Defended Him in 2010.

New talking points ahoy! The liberal New York Times now condemns former Democratic and “progressive” President Woodrow Wilson, founding father of the modern-day liberal state, for his deep racism and segregationist policies he pushed as president of Princeton University and president of the United States from 1913-1921.

But that permission applies only to woke Democrats and reporters using Wilson to smear President Trump — no credit is given to conservatives for initially pushing the anti-Wilson argument into the mainstream. In fact, the paper mocked conservatives for speaking that truth, including in an infamous New York Times symposium reacting to Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book Liberal Fascism and his thoroughly researched condemnation of the racist Wilson.

White House correspondent Erica Green unloaded her hysterical 1,800-word hit job in Thursday’s paper under the headline “Trump Says He Is the ‘Least Racist’ President. But His Term Echoes a Grim Past.”

As Byron York wrote on September 24th of 2008, “Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase ‘God damn America.’”

It took the Times a year to “break” the story of Andrew Cuomo hiding the Covid death toll in nursing homes after the Daily Caller initially reported it in May of 2020, and Scott Bessent rhetorically asked Timesman Andrew Sorkin in December, “You had what was one of the greatest scandals of all time… Joe Biden’s diminished capacity and the cover-up. Where was the New York Times?” 

But of course, we know the answer to that:


No word yet if David Frum will re-reversing his opinion on Wilson now that the 28th president been finally rendered doubleplus ungood by the Gray Lady: “Frum’s article, ‘Uncancel Woodrow Wilson,’ appears in the March 2024 issue of the Atlantic. How perverse a choice is it to write on this now?” Particularly so when Frum himself correctly noted in 2013 that “Wilson was also the most disdainful racist to hold the presidency since Andrew Johnson in the 1860s.”

Flashback: The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson. “I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Politico founder plots new Washington newspaper war.

One of Washington, DC’s biggest media investors plans to revive one of the US capital’s great historic rivalries with a direct attack on the limping Washington Post.

Robert Allbritton, who founded Politico and NOTUS and whose father owned the Post rival Washington Star, has discussed taking advantage of the Post’s large-scale layoffs and damaged brand by significantly expanding NOTUS, a public-spirited and education-oriented source of government coverage, into a full-scale news operation, potentially even under a different name, three people with direct knowledge of the conversations said.

NOTUS Media in February filed an application to trademark a new name — The Washington Sun — according to filings.

The Politico founder and NOTUS editor-in-chief Tim Grieve have aggressively privately pursued many of the top remaining names at the Post, hoping to peel off a significant number of top journalists to help the publication become an immediate player in DC.

Allbritton and Grieve have approached senior congressional correspondent Paul Kane, White House bureau chief Matt Viser, chief economics correspondent Jeff Stein, tech reporter Drew Harwell, White House reporter Dan Diamond, and columnist Carolyn Hax, among others.

The publication could replicate some of the success of Politico by launching an events and pricey subscription business. The DC billionaire — his family owned and sold Riggs Bank and WJLA, as well as selling Politico for about $1 billion to Axel Springer in 2021 — has told people that he is willing to invest a significant amount of money on the venture for years in order to stand up the publication.

As for Germany’s Axel Springer, besides owning America’s left-leaning Politico and Business Insider, they’ve just acquired the nominally center-right London Telegraph: Axel Springer Will Buy The Publisher Of UK’s Daily Telegraph For $766 Million.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: Unconditional Surrender: When Wars Are Fought to Win.

“There are decades where nothing happens,” Vladimir Lenin is supposed to have said (but didn’t), “and there are weeks where decades happen.” Welcome to the beginning of March, Anno Domini 2026.

One week ago, on February 28, the United States and Israel commenced an attack on Iran. At first, it seemed to be merely a ramped-up continuation of Operation Midnight Hammer, the raid conducted last June when the United States, following up on Israel’s preliminary attacks, destroyed (“completely and totally obliterated”) three key nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. It was an extraordinary operation, in which four B-2 bombers, having flown for 30 hours from the United States, mounted an astonishing precision strike with fourteen 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, together with submarine-fired Tomahawk cruise missiles.

But Midnight Hammer was merely a preliminary salvo compared to Epic Fury, the pulverizing assault that the United States and Israel (under the name “Roaring Lion”) launched last Saturday. The world has not seen anything like this since 1945, when the United States and its allies crushed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Having learned from the aftermath of the Great War that armistice is often but another name for false victory, President Trump adopted as his motto the phrase that definitively ended World War II: “unconditional surrender.”

In the meantime though: Iran Has a New Supreme Leader, but They Won’t Tell Us Who It Is.

Unexpectedly:

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026

TRIBAL SOCIETIES UNDERSTAND TRIBAL WARS BETTER THAN “CIVILIZED” ONES DO:

Posted at 10:52 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

IT’S NOT A JOKE, IT’S OPEN, DELIBERATE PROPAGANDA:

Related:

Posted at 10:23 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

IT’S GOOD TO SINK THE ENEMY DURING A WAR:

Posted at 8:58 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

LIFE AMONG THE LAPTOP CLASS:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: Unconditional Surrender: When Wars Are Fought to Win.

Within just four or five days, virtually all of Iran’s senior leadership has been eliminated. Then its replacements were eliminated. “Their army is gone,” President Trump said a few days ago. “Their navy is gone. Their communications are gone. Their leaders are gone. . . . Their Air Force is wiped out. . . . They have 32 ships. All 32 are at the bottom of the ocean. Other than that,” he quipped, “they’re doing very well!”

The assault is not just continuing; it is ramping up. Just a few days ago, Israel destroyed a massive underground complex in the center of Tehran from which the (late) Supreme Leader Khamenei had planned to conduct the war. As retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg told Fox News, President Trump is “going after everything. . . . There’s a huge target list out there, and there’s no restrictions.” Kellogg, noting that he had never seen an operation like this, said that it’s not “whack a mole” but “whack a mullah. . . . This is a massive win for the United States.”

It’s also a massive win for the Iranian people. Just a week ago, the populace was cowed by the mullahs, their immoral “morality” police, and the murderous Basij thugs who terrorized the population. Remember, in January, they maimed and murdered tens of thousands of protesters. Tens of thousands. Now, a popular game in Iran is sneaking up behind Islamic regime clerics and knocking off their turbans. I like to see it. Around the world, exiled Iranians—often alongside Israelis and other Jews—are demonstrating in favor of President Trump. In London, a group of Iranians held a vigil, replete with candles and singing of the American national anthem, to honor the six American troops killed in Kuwait by an Iranian drone strike.

It helps to be the strong horse.

Posted at 8:28 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

R.I.P. THE MODERATE DEMOCRAT:

Here we go again. Minnesota’s elected officials have proven that the extreme progressives are in charge in the North Star State, beholden to the radical progressive activists who crawl out of every nook and cranny of the Twin Cities’s prestigious, white, liberal suburbs and exurbs.

If you thought this was still the land of the milquetoast, “Minnesota Nice,” I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

In the aftermath of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation that began last summer and ramped up as the White House began cracking down on widespread fraud, Minnesota has been ground zero for purity tests of the far-Left regime. Now, there’s a horse race for the Democrat Farmer Labor candidate for Minnesota’s Senate seat, after current Senator Tina Smith announced her retirement at the end of this term.

The race to the Left — or the bottom, depending on which way the political winds are blowing — is between current Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Rep. Angie Craig. Both women flash their “girl power” bone fides at every chance, except when they’re appealing to the trans-affirmative activists who claim sex is a social construct, or to the abortion rights radicals who endanger women’s health and applaud the death of baby girls up to the moment of birth.

The latest show of extreme views comes from Craig, who, in a commentary in The Minnesota Star Tribune, writes of her “regret” in voting for the Laken Riley Act, the first bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in his second term.

Related:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026

WELL, PEOPLE PROFIT BY NOT HAVING THE SWITCH PRESSED:

Related:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

JULIE BURCHILL: Mary Beard: a feminist for Islam?

Two-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-seven people were murdered on 9/11, including more than 400 first responders (among them 343 firefighters and paramedics) and hundreds of plane passengers. Many more have since died due to illnesses linked to toxic exposure at the site of the Twin Towers. They came from 77 different countries – truly ‘diverse’, as opposed to their 19 killers. Colm Tóibín wrote an excellent letter to the LRB about Beard’s essay:

‘Over the past 25 years in Ireland I have made a point of asking anyone who was at school with members of the IRA, the INLA, the UDA and the UVF what these people were like at the age of 10. All have agreed that each child displayed a nasty early sign of terrorism long before he had a “cause”. Had a cause not come their way, these people would have beaten their dogs or their wives and children, attacked one another at hurling matches or taken out their resentment on a long back garden. Would Mary Beard refer to these actions as “extraordinary acts of bravery”?’

As if it couldn’t get worse, AI tells me that Beard is ‘celebrated for her sharp insights, especially on Roman life, women in history and bringing classical studies into mainstream culture, making her a “national treasure”’. Of course she is. The watchwords of NT-ism are ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ – but the approved views on everything from breakfast to Brexit, penises on women to Palestine, must be held. NTs are the cuddly face of the enemy within, part of the never-ending war against anyone who dares think differently from their betters and wetters. Many are little more than peppy propagandists, there to make us swallow through the medium of sport and entertainment what we have already choked on and vomited up when it was fed to us straight. The UK National Treasure gang can easily embrace a woman who, if she saw her best female friend being ‘done’ by a member of Hamas at one end and a member of Hezbollah at the other, would probably ask the poor woman what she said to provoke them.

As Mark Steyn wrote 20 years ago, “our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026

WHAT CHANGE LOOKS LIKE:

They can both be right, you know.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 7:17 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2026

ILYA SHAPIRO: Two Decades in the Swamp.

On Election Night, you could barely think over the sound of people rushing to update their résumés. Uber drivers found themselves doing more therapy than driving. George Washington University administrators scrambled to set up “support rooms” with puppies and crayons. Democrats resumed questioning the legitimacy of presidential elections.

Trump entered office promising to “drain the swamp,” which, in practice, meant hiring half of it, firing a quarter, and leaving the rest to leak confidential information to cable news. He governed like someone live-tweeting a traffic accident he was also causing. Every 3 am post was an experiment to see how much chaos the bond market could absorb before breakfast.

Then came the Russia investigation—America’s performance-art piece about alleged collusion with ex-Commies. Half the city believed that the Kremlin had written Trump’s speeches; the other half believed that the deep state had orchestrated the whole thing to relive Watergate and get book deals. The only clear winners were white-shoe law firms that now had “Special Counsel” on speed dial.

The opposition rebranded itself as the “Resistance,” though having the media, universities, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the federal bureaucracy on its side didn’t make much of a case for heroism. Women’s marches filled the city with pink hats, while cable news operated on the premise that every Trump tweet was a constitutional crisis—even as the Mueller Report landed like overcooked lasagna at Cafe Milano.

The Right discovered it liked having a brawler in the White House. Years of media bias, bureaucratic overreach, and cultural condescension had primed GOP voters for someone who would punch back. Trump supporters flocked to the Trump International Hotel, which served as a kind of embassy for Red America.

In 2018, Trump seated a Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, after confirmation hearings that began like a poorly conceived political drama and ended with protesters in Handmaid’s Tale costumes. He would appoint two more justices who’d also read The Federalist Papers. Combined with tax reform, deregulation, and a deep bench of originalist judges, the Court picks were his most durable achievements. My book on the politics of judicial nominations, Supreme Disorder, came out four days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. The timing was morbidly auspicious, but my publisher claims he has an alibi.

At home, our first child arrived just in time for that crazy 2016 election. Our second commemorated the 2018 midterms. Nothing sharpens your view of public policy like strapping toddlers into car seats as you listen to a podcast about the Administrative Procedure Act. And the boys’ earliest memories of civic life involve adults shouting about collusion, impeachment—something about a phone call to the Ukrainian president and a possible Netflix pitch—and whether the president had been too harsh to a CNN correspondent.

Then came 2020.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026
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