The Good Fight, 03/21/26
Source: Yascha Mounk
“Shashank Joshi on Why the War in the Middle East Won’t End Anytime Soon.” (03/21/26)
Trump Himself Is the Trump Movement’s Iraq War
Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman
“As the Iran War has metastasized, a number of conservative intellectuals who strongly supported President Trump have started jumping ship. … A common thread is the comparison of the Iran war to George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, and a belief that, by pursuing a similar war of choice for regime change in the Middle East, Trump is betraying the intellectual foundations and the clear and specific policy goals of the movement he started. I rejoice when any public intellectual admits error, something that happens far less often than it ought to do. But I’m not sure they’ve identified their error correctly, because their analogy isn’t quite right. The Iran War isn’t the right event to analogize to the Iraq War. Rather, Trump himself, and the whole idea of using him as a vehicle for transforming America from the top down, is what is analogous to the Iraq War, and was from the beginning.” (03/20/26)
https://gideons.substack.com/p/trump-himself-is-the-trump-movements
This Is a Lawless War
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“The case against the Iran war is not the $200 billion that Secretary of Don’t You Dare Call It a War Pete Hegseth is asking for to fund U.S. operations in Iran. … Nor should we be persuaded by sentimentality about the loss of the lives of U.S. troops. … the entire military enterprise is based on the assumption that lives will be lost. … The case against this war is that it is illegal — whatever Secretary Jägerbomb has to say about it, this is a war, and it is being conducted with no congressional authorization in a haphazard, chaotic, ad hoc way by a president who is profoundly corrupt, nearly 80 years old, and unable to write an ordinary English sentence, surrounded by a constellation of grifters, addicts, and incompetents unrivaled by anything in Washington since the days of Franklin Pierce.” (03/20/26)
Grand Delusion
Source: Unpopular Front
by John Ganz
“There is a word for being perpetually behind. A little slow. Not quick on the uptake. As a society, we have largely decided that it’s not one that civilized people should use: it’s cruel and denigrates the genuinely vulnerable among us. But what else can you call it when it has only just dawned on certain people that something might be a little off with this Trump guy?” (03/20/26)
Canada: A secularism law some women say makes them “feel like outsiders” heads to top court
Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“Since 2019, a secularism law in Quebec has barred some public sector workers, like judges, police officers and teachers, from wearing religious attire at work. Now, the country’s highest court is preparing to consider its future. Lisa Robicheau describes her life as ‘stuck between a rock and a hard place’. The 41-year-old single mother of two, who wears a hijab, works in Montreal’s English-language school system as a contract support worker for students with disabilities – a job she loves and where she is exempt from the current law. But Robicheau can’t help feeling anxious about her future and whether she will be able to continue working in a public school while being visibly Muslim in Quebec. The uncertainty has led her to enroll back in university, hoping to find a different job—or even leave the province.” (03/22/26)
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, 03/20/26
Source: The Weekly Dish
“Matt Goodwin On The Earthquake In UK Politics.” (03/20/26)
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/matt-goodwin-on-the-earthquake-in
What Cognitive Science Tells Us About AI Warfare
Source: Persuasion
by Tim Requarth
“In the intricate standoff between the Pentagon and Anthropic over the use of AI in weaponry, it was easy to be distracted by the strange bedfellows-aspect of the struggle – with OpenAI becoming a willing partner of the Pentagon even while Anthropic established itself as a darling of the #Resistance. But, more importantly, the standoff represents a significant turn of the wheel in how the debate around AI has entered into cultural space. It’s no longer Big Tech behemoths one-upping each other with upgrades. It’s about the vibes, man. And the future of AI may well be a kind of extended ELIZA effect — with consumers and contractors choosing between different AIs sort of as if they were sports teams, with the competing AIs corresponding to different sides in the culture wars.” (03/20/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/ai-is-about-the-vibes-now
FCC Chair Carr’s Threats to Punish Broadcasters Are Unconstitutional
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by David Greene
“EFF joined other digital rights and civil liberties organizations in calling out the unconstitutionality of Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s recent threats to punish broadcasters for airing statements he disagrees with. Carr’s recent threats, like his past threats, are unconstitutional efforts to coerce news coverage that favors President Donald Trump. He wrongly claims that the FCC’s ‘public interest’ standard allows him and the commission to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who publish news that is unflattering to the government is anathema to our country’s core constitutional values.” (03/20/26)
Cuba: Power grid collapses for third time this month
Source: National Public Radio [US state media]
“Cuba’s power grid collapsed Saturday leaving the country without electricity for a third time in March as the communist government battles with a decaying infrastructure and a U.S.-imposed oil blockade. The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island without initially giving a cause for the outage. The union later said the blackout was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camagüey province.” (03/22/26)
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/22/nx-s1-5756288/cubas-power-grid-collapses
TAC Right Now, 03/20/26
Source: The American Conservative
“Joe Kent Discusses His Resignation over the Iran War.” (03/20/26)