Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 20, 2026

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Saudi Arabia threatens strikes on Iran.

Saudi Arabia has threatened to strike back at Iran after attacks on oil and gas sites across the Gulf caused prices to surge across the globe.

Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign minister, warned on Thursday night that patience with Tehran was running out after an oil refinery was hit and eight Iranian ballistic missiles targeted Riyadh.

“This pressure from Iran will backfire politically and morally and certainly we reserve the right to take military actions if deemed necessary,” he said.

Related:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 20th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE CAPTAIN OF THE SOMALI PIRATES:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 20th, 2026

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO MEMORY HOLE AN INCONVENIENT HISTORIC LEFTIST ICON:

The @nytimes is being lavished with praise by the virtue-signaling brigade, but there are very basic problems with their Cesar Chavez story…

-The “evidence” doesn’t come close to the threshold for such a devastating claim, especially against a man who has been dead for 33 yrs

-We don’t know for sure that the 2 children who are now claimed to be his, via 2 “rapey” encounters, are biologically his, partly because his accuser had 4 kids with his BROTHER, which the NYTimes somehow left out of the story (along with the fact that she had at least 11 children with at least 4 men)

-We somehow don’t even know the names of the two kids that were allegedly fathered by Cesar -The NYTimes ignored the numerous very positive recent public statements by Dolores Huerta about Cesar, including a YouTube video created during the #MeToo panic where she praised him for his protection of women against sexual harassment

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: Why Cesar Chavez Suddenly Became Politically Inconvenient to the Left.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 20th, 2026

March 19, 2026

THE OSCARS’ APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE:

UPDATE:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

JOHN NOLTE: Why Cesar Chavez Suddenly Became Politically Inconvenient to the Left.

You see, this year is the 99th anniversary of Chavez’s birth (he died in 1993), and celebrations had been planned for this event all over the country. Next year, though… Wow. One-hundred years. That’s the biggie, and you can bet that were it not for New Media, the left planned to feast on that anniversary.

There is just one inconvenient fact about the left’s secular saint…

Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration every bit as much as Donald J. Trump. Chávez understood that illegal aliens undermined the wages of legal migrant workers and their union bargaining power.

Cesar Chavez was so opposed to illegal immigration that, just like Minuteman Project of 2004, which was widely smeared in the legacy media as racist, Chavez put together his own militia to stop illegals from crossing the border. There are credible reports that violence was used as an example to others.

To form his United Farmworkers Union (UFW), it was Chavez versus the growers, and for obvious reasons,  the growers loved the open border.

For just as obvious reasons, Chavez did not.

And there you have it.

That’s why it was time to take Chavez down. The left feared, and not unreasonably, that as Chavez once again entered the public consciousness through these milestone birthday celebrations that New Media would co-opt him as a powerful symbol of the truth: that illegal immigration is devastating to the working class and benefits the rich and powerful.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Austin leaders want to rename Cesar Chavez Street in wake of abuse allegations:

The city of Austin is considering renaming Cesar Chavez Street after allegations emerged that the late civil rights leader sexually assaulted women and girls.

Chavez died in 1993. Shortly after his death, Austin renamed First Street — which stretches from MoPac Expressway through downtown to U.S. 183 — in his honor.

Local nonprofit El Concillo Mexican-American Landowners de East Austin led the movement in the early ’90s to name the road after Chavez. The group is now pushing to rename the street again in the wake of the allegations.

“We as El Concillo, who initiated through petition the renaming of the street, for Cesar Chavez, feel compelled that we have to be accountable and be respectful of the women victims who were part of this experience,” said Gavino Fernandez Jr., a spokesperson for the group. “It is not in the best interest of our organization to be affiliated any longer with him.”

Council Member Vanessa Fuentes told KUT News on Wednesday that the city should respond quickly.

Fortunately, Iowahawk and his X followers are on it!

UPDATE:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

DOUGLAS MURRAY: The latest Guardian attack on Nigel Farage is desperate stuff.

In general, Nigel Farage seems to me to be a man of pretty sound judgment. But he obviously does not share my intensely suspicious, not to say gloomy, Celtic nature. And so it seems that when he was out of the front line of British politics, Farage did indeed sign up to do personalised videos for Cameo. He appears to have been rather good at it, as I would have expected him to be. And in fact I can imagine a certain type of person who would have been thrilled to get a personalised video of Nigel raising a pint for their friend’s birthday or something.

But now the Guardian newspaper has tried to use this interregnum in Farage’s career to do a number on him of the type I had feared for myself. Some fearless – and presumably bored – Guardian journalists have trawled through a remarkable 4,366 clips that the Reform UK leader has made for Cameo since joining the platform in 2021. The short videos he has sent fans and supporters have included personalised messages wishing people a happy birthday, happy Christmas or even (and I do think this a bit odd) a happy Valentine’s Day.

Of course, the Guardian being the Guardian, they trawled through all of these innocuous greetings in the hope that at least some of them would be videos celebrating Hitler’s birthday, mourning the German defeat at Stalingrad, or sending Valentine’s Day good wishes to David Irving.

* * * * * * * *

Finally, there is also a clip where Farage appears to have become irritated with the technology he is using and swears. Or, as the article puts it, it shows ‘a side to him that contrasts with his amiable public persona’. I am sure that Guardian journalists only ever say sweet things when they have a problem with their iPhone.

And their bakery shops.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

RUY TEIXEIRA: Democrats Don’t Have a Growth Program;  they’re not even interested.

Democrats once understood the importance of economic growth. That’s because growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. Democrats sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. They believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare.

Democrats’ 21st century project has, at its core, been dedicated to other goals. They now prize goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth. For example, the “Deciding to Win” report analyzed word frequency in Democratic Party platforms since 2012 and found a 32 percent decline in the appearance of the word “growth” compared to a 150 percent increase in the word “climate,” a 1,044 percent increase in “LGBT/LGBTQI+,” a 766 percent increase in “equity,” an 828 percent increase in “white/black/Latino/Latina,” and a 333 percent increase in “environmental justice.”

This is remarkably short-sighted. The key to substantially rising living standards for the working class—once the Democrats’ prized goal—is precisely more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth. You cannot make up for that by redistribution nor by simply spending more money on government programs. A fast-growth economy provides more opportunities for upward mobility, generates better-paying jobs, creates fiscal space for priorities like infrastructure projects, and, as Benjamin Friedman has argued, has positive “moral consequences” by orienting citizens toward generosity, tolerance, and collective advance. Slow growth has the opposite effects.

I’m glad to see that Teixeira has noticed, but this isn’t all that new a development: Welcome Back My Friends, to the Malaise that Never Ends.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

“NOT JUST A PEOPLE OF DEATH, BUT A CULT OF DEATH:”

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

HOLLYWOOD R.I.P.: A eulogy for the Dream Machine.

Hollywood’s last signs of life came earlier this year, with the masterly first half of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Not satisfied with its stunning depiction of the rural African American South, the film turned itself into a routine vampire flick, driving a stake through the heart of the ailing movie business. The Wicked franchise’s spell proved unable to revive the patient. One Battle After Another, intended like the recent Killers of the Flower Moon as an auteurist booster shot, showed merely that a once-great director could fashion a bloated, cringeworthy wokeist epic.

When seen through the rearview mirror, there’s something grotesquely ironic—and maybe appropriate—about how Hollywood embraced specifically anti-Jewish politics in this era. In September 2025, a petition circulated by Film Workers for Palestine garnered 5,000 signatures from directors, actors, and studio employees. The petition called for a boycott of Israeli artists and companies, essentially a new blacklist which, like the old one, targeted Jews. The Jews were the citadels of Hollywood’s old priorities; once it couldn’t live up to those anymore, the best way to burn it all down was to betray the very people who built it in the first place.

The seductive power of classic Hollywood can still be experienced, if you can find a theater that shows 35 mm or 70 mm prints. The colors still gleam, the black-and-white shadows still beckon, and the faces of the deities called stars still loom in the darkness. The monumental directors, actors, and filmworkers, nearly all of them now dead, will shine forever. It was the pictures that got small.

We think that just because a creative industry was around for our entire lives, it will be around forever. But Renaissance painting was once a creative industry—it had artists and assistants and patrons and audiences, a whole functioning creative economy. It doesn’t exist anymore. We still have the paintings, just as we’ll still have Citizen Kane and Vertigo and Goodfellas, but the life-world that made them—and that could ever make anything else like them again—is gone.

As someone who truly loves movies, it feels genuinely sad to see an industry DEI such a painful death:

If this isn’t the death knell, it means that a very different industry is emerging: Forget Tilly Norwood … Here Comes A.I. Val Kilmer.

Director Coerte Voorhees, with the approval of several members of Kilmer’s family, will use generative A.I. to insert the star’s likeness and voice. His character, a Native American spiritualist, will be seen at various stages of his life.

That’s no problem for A.I., which can use the endless array of images and video of the star  to capture him at various ages.

This won’t be a glorified cameo, like the late Peter Cushing appearing in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” The role is considered a significant part of the film, a project co-starring Wes Studi, Tom Felton and Abigail Lawrie.

Speculation over this kind of digital stunt casting isn’t new. Modern stars must wonder how their likenesses might be used in projects after their passing.

That reality is here, but will it actually grace theaters? Could an uprising over the digital casting force the film’s creators to reconsider?

Back in the 1980s, Arthur C. Clarke predicted 21st century digital recreations of the stars of Hollywood’s golden age such as Bogie and John Wayne. But how will audiences react to an AI recreation of a man who passed away quite recently?

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Zohran Mamdani’s Wife Celebrated Palestinian Terrorists, Including Plane Hijacker, In Social Media Posts From Early Adulthood.

 

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

TRUMP CALLS RELUCTANT ALLIES’ BLUFF ON THE STRAIT, GETS BIG RESPONSE FROM NATO CHIEF:

As we reported, President Donald Trump asked our NATO allies and others to help contribute to a coalition of escort ships to help ensure safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz.

But he was rebuffed by some of the NATO allies, like Germany, who said that they didn’t start the military action, so why should they be involved? These are some of the same folks who thought the United States should pay endlessly for Ukraine, despite that not being “our war.’

They had a bit of a karmic wake-up call when the hotel where their European Union Advisory Mission is housed was hit by an Iran-backed drone in Baghdad.

But now Trump is also calling their bluff, because the bottom line is that the U.S. ships very little through the Strait — it’s far more important to others. So Trump posted on Truth Social that if allies want to play the weak-kneed weasel game, maybe the U.S. should just not provide any escorts, and just let the countries that use it be responsible for it.

Read the whole thing, which is a reminder who’s who in our relationship with Europe:

It’s also a chance for other nations to step up:

John Bolton has some related thoughts:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF ANTISEMITISM? Harvard Won’t Explain Historic Decline in Jewish Enrollment. Harvard is emptying its campus of Jews, enrolling the smallest percentage since before World War II.

Tweet continues, “‘Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate enrollment stands at 7 percent today, the lowest level recorded since before World War II and the lowest of any Ivy League institution with reliable data. That is roughly half what it was a decade ago, and less than a third of the 25 percent share Jewish students held for much of the latter twentieth century. Among well-documented peer institutions, no school has seen a steeper recent-decade decline.’ In the hearing heard around the world from 2023, I pressed Harvard’s former president Gay on this matter and it was essentially shrugged off as you can see from this testimony. I strongly believe the antisemitism does not just impact students on campus at Harvard; it shapes admissions. Worth a rewatch.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

HEH, INDEED:

Similarly, remember when leftists lost it last year when Pete Hegseth ordered the USNS Harvey Milk renamed? Hegseth Orders Navy to Strip Name of Predator Harvey Milk From Navy Ship.

Earlier: Winston Smith Smiles, as Cesar Chavez is Getting Obliterated From History in Real Time.

Finally, an evergreen headline from America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 19th, 2026

March 18, 2026

WINSTON SMITH SMILES, AS CESAR CHAVEZ IS GETTING OBLITERATED FROM HISTORY IN REAL TIME:

 

In a touching display of intersectionality, Fresno State breaks out the burka for an apparently transitioning Chavez statue:

But why now? Here are two possible explanations — and of course, there’s always “the healing power of and:”

 

Earlier: Gentlemen, Start Your Airbrushes! Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE GRAUNIAD’S FATWAH ON A LONDON BAKERY: The real reason the Guardian is so hostile to Gail’s.

Nothing good has ever followed the words ‘we need to talk’, ‘terms of service update’, or ‘by Jonathan Liew’, and the evidence is really piling up on the third one. The Guardian columnist has written a piece about Gail’s, the bougie coffee shop and bakery chain, and it vents hostility from every sentence like steam from an espresso machine. If you’re wondering how anyone – even a Guardian columnist – could get worked up over pricey lattes, Liew makes sure to tell us Gail’s was ‘founded by an Israeli baker in the 1990s’.

Yeah, it’s exactly what you think. Actually, it’s worse.

Gail’s has become a target for people The Spectator’s lawyers would probably prefer me to call ‘anti-Zionists’. People who have called for boycotts of the bakery over Palestine and what its opponents (because bakeries have opponents now) claim is its role in ‘gentrification’. The rationale for the Palestine-related boycott is that Bain Capital, Gail’s parent company, invests in cybersecurity firms based in Israel. As for the gentrification business, the vilification of Gail’s as a symbol of affluent outsiders who don’t belong here certainly seems to dovetail with the anti…Zionism.

Exit quote: “Jonathan Liew writes like someone who wants to be liked, keen to hit all the right notes so that people he regards as high-status regard him as one of them. It’s hardly the gravest sin. Most people want to be liked. The error of judgement here is on the part of the Guardian. A good editor would have read this and refused to let Liew embarrass himself or the paper.”

How it started:

How it’s going:

UPDATE: Guardian amends ‘antisemitic’ opinion piece about Gail’s bakery.

A note from the readers’ editor sought to clarify the perception that the article had condoned previous attacks on branches of Gail’s. “A comment contrasting activism that is capable of influencing global events with ‘small acts of petty symbolism’, which was not intended to minimise local vandalism but rather to suggest its misdirected futility, has been removed to avoid misunderstanding,” it read.

The article’s standfirst was also removed. It had read: “A smashed window here, a provocative sticker there. In an age when protest feels increasingly meaningless, it’s no wonder that acts of petty symbolism are on the rise.”

Gail’s has become a target for protesters because of concerns about the impact of gentrification on small business owners and its ties to Israel.

The Archway branch was vandalised with smashed windows and red anti-Zionist graffiti twice within a week of its opening. The Metropolitan Police are investigating the incidents as hate crimes.

However, the amendment has not been universally welcomed, with some Jewish staff said to remain “shocked and angry” that it was published in the first place.

One staff member said: “Large parts of the editorial staff are horrified by stuff like this, but basically nobody ever raises it with the management. People fear for their jobs.”

A second journalist, who recently left the Guardian newspaper group, said polarising opinion pieces on Israel drove engagement, subscriptions and donations, even when they were “poisonous” and “fulminating”.

Which is why they keep happening at the Grauniad.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

A HUNDRED MILLION HERE AND HUNDRED MILLION THERE, AND SOONER OR LATER, YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT REAL MONEY: California’s unfinished wildlife ‘bridge to nowhere’ tops $100M.

In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC), a project featuring an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California.

At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to “complete the job within another $10 million,” before seeming to hedge on whether that final sum would do the trick.

Officials projected a 2025 completion date for the overpass, and estimated that the entire project — which includes the bridge and other ancillary developments — would cost $92 million, some of it coming from private philanthropists.

Nearly four years after the ceremony, the bridge is past due and the project some $21 million over budget. What was supposed to be the world’s largest wildlife crossing has become a jobs program for environmentalists, with taxpayers on the hook for what WAWC leader Beth Pratt told us is an overpass “for everything from monarch butterflies to mountain lions.”

Pratt, a cougar-sweater-wearing environmental activist who serves on WAWC’s Partner Leadership Team, is the program’s public face. She is also a regional executive director of the national Wildlife Federation. In 2021, the group received a $25 million grant from “Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation” for the bridge that bears the late philanthropist’s name.

Related: Bridges and Cougars and Butterflies, Oh MY! Chris Rufo Exposes Yet ANOTHER Gavin Newsom Boondoggle. “If you are asking yourself why butterflies could possibly need a bridge, then you are a sane person who is in no way qualified for elected office in California…Now we know why his cringy social media team is so mad at Nick Shirley.”

UPDATE: David Barron, call your office:

 

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Russian Election Interference.

The New Hotness? US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies, memo says. “Dr. Barry A. Zulauf, a member of the Senior National Intelligence Service reported that others in the intelligence community said ‘I don’t want my intelligence going to the White House where it will be used by that vulgarian in the Oval Office to support policies against China with which I personally disagree.’”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

IN THE WORDS OF CURTIS LEMAY, IF YOU KILL ENOUGH OF THEM, THE REST STOP FIGHTING: Iranian Intelligence Minister Who Led Assassination Plots Against US Officials Eliminated In Israeli Strike, IDF Says. “Israel on Wednesday killed Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmaeil Khatib, during an airstrike in Tehran, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Khatib orchestrated the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year and ran an agency that attempted assassinations against U.S. officials.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

HMMM: American Diner Gothic.

You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see.

You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.” A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle.

These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.

The term came to me when I was trying to identify what had, over the past decade, silently washed over the 95 percent of America that lived outside of the superstar cities. Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural “alt” aesthetic with a post-nerd fandom orientation that’s become a new mainstream. Queerness but casual and prole-ified. Dinergoth: “diner” for provincialism, “goth” as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.

These tendencies are correlated. Something is making them happen together in the places previously considered to be the most normal. A new quirk of 2020s America is that geek equals goth equals left-behind American.

Dinergothdom exists as both a concentrated archetype and a mass-cultural wave. The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.

While we’re on the topic: I’m a Furry. My Community Has a Violence Problem. An insider’s account of how online fandom culture can spiral toward extremism. “Within insular online communities, political narratives can spread quickly and go largely unchallenged. Friend groups often reinforce those narratives rather than question them. Over time, identity politics and extreme ideological positions have become increasingly common in certain parts of the fandom. Criticism of those beliefs is often interpreted not as disagreement but as a direct attack on personal identity. And that reaction makes sense if you understand how identity works within furry culture.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

BREAKING: Rolling Stone has Mild Disagreement with Trump’s FCC Chairman, Forgets Mild Disagreement with Trump’s First Term FCC Chairman:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

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:

Combining poor product with TDS is a recipe for disaster, Christian Toto writes: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

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:

UPDATE: Torpedo aimed at Trump circles back yet again:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

MORE FALLOUT FROM 2020:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Hollywood Dodges a Bullet.

The pleasantly surprising news that Paramount, not Netflix, came out on top in the Warner Bros. sweepstakes will turn out to be one of the great cultural bullet-dodges of all time… like Neo on Agent Smith’s roof big. Most everyone here in town understands this on a gut level, though few will say so out loud because as the drama dragged on, much of Hollywood decided that known cinephile Ellison was the bad guy in this particular story.

Perhaps now that the WB derby is over and the good guys won, someone in this accursed town can cash in on that signal and begin to reverse Hollywood’s grand mistake. Because in the recognition and reversal of that mistake lies a profitable way forward for the theatrical movie business, and for those of us who still love the art form and wish to see it endure for another generation of moviegoers, that would be great news indeed.

Netflix’s perilously woke management proved to be their undoing:

 

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026
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