The Automatic Earth

Odilon Redon Sunset 1902

BREAKING: President Trump just told 450 million Europeans: sign my deal by Thursday or I cut your gas. And if you think this is impulsive, you are not paying attention. This is the most calculated energy play in American history.

Qatar’s LNG is offline. Force Majeure. Ras Laffan… pic.twitter.com/WOvyAYkYjG

— Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ (@shanaka86) March 23, 2026

THOMAS JEFFERSON: "It was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged the Mahometan's authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoner." pic.twitter.com/ZREdSfN4jx

— The Conservative Alternative (@OldeWorldOrder) March 23, 2026

Is their confidence justified that they will take over Britain, or is it the extreme confidence of the really stupid https://t.co/RjhRdvArKw

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) March 23, 2026

Paris, Barcelona and Brussels are the most dangerous cities in Europe.

On the other hand, Prague, Warsaw and Budapest are really safe, even for women at night.

How did this happen? pic.twitter.com/IvJ9G8T7Iw

— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) March 23, 2026

The Dictator of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/kWsf0thMG1

— Bryce M. Lipscomb (@BryceMLipscomb) March 24, 2026

Bonus for whoever thought of it.

• ICE at the Airports Is One of Trump’s More Brilliant Moves (Stephen Kruiser)

As we rush headlong towards what will probably be some very weird midterm elections, I firmly believe that the Republicans should be running as the party of law and order. The Democrats have been squirrelly on that issue ever since the Obama years, but have gotten really weak about it in the last year. They have to oppose everything President Trump and his administration do, of course, which includes getting violent scumbags off the streets and out of the country. A key part of that opposition has been the ongoing, deliberate demonization of the agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Democrats praise criminals and treat ICE agents as if they’re the lawbreakers.

It truly is an exercise in insanity over there on the left. This is from something Matt wrote yesterday: “As PJ Media previously reported, over the weekend, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on CNN and literally claimed ICE agents would kill people at airports. “The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or, in some instances, kill them,” Jeffries said. And he wasn’t alone. Senator Richard Blumenthal piled on with his own apocalyptic vision, claiming, “ICE agents at airports will only aggravate delays & lines—disrupting checks, interrogating travelers, dragging parents from children, detaining citizens, brutalizing families, shooting & even killing.”

I don’t know who the Democrats think this is a good look for. It’s as if all they want to do is stir up the voters who are already voting for them. Joe and Edna Swing Voter in Flyover, USA probably aren’t down the idea that federal agents want to kill them. When President Trump first said that he would deploy ICE agents to airports to fill in gaps left by unpaid Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, Democrats immediately began falling all over themselves. The president is always thinking four steps ahead of the Democrats and all they’ve got is reactive flailing. They have been trying to keep travelers miserable and blame Republicans for the lack of TSA funding, but everybody has internet and the Dems are not that great with messaging anymore.

This is from Victoria: “Only Trump can find leverage in the Democrats’ TSA defunding — turning those broke, unpaid TSA agents and the disastrously long lines at the nation’s airports into a teachable, brilliant, GOTCHA moment to behold. When Democrats figure out what hit them, they’ll be so tattooed with this disaster, even the leftist screechers will lead the effort to restore TSA funding. Things will change soon because local media in the woke cities are covering the increasing freak out by leftists because Donald Trump is replacing missing, unpaid, TSA agents with paid, and perhaps even masked, ICE agents to help process passengers.

This should play out like another instance of Trump playing 4-D chess while the Democrats are just learning checkers. Despite all of the lying about the president by the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media, the Trump 47 administration doesn’t let any of the false narratives get legs. This is because they are proactively doing things that are good for the country while the Democrats can only keep reassuring people that they hate President Trump. That’s the only policy they have now. It’s a lot of fun watching President Trump make the Democrats dance. Reading about it in the MSM is always an intense exposure to pathological denial. The dystopian fiction that the leftists are living in is intensely awful. Thankfully, none of it is real.

“ICE is funded separately from the rest of DHS, including TSA, which is why Dems can’t attack immigration enforcement directly.”

• ICE Saves Lives — and Air Travel (Daniel McCarthy)

Democrats who want to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement aren’t getting away with the political hostage-taking they’re using to do it. They’re trying to hold the Transportation Security Administration’s funding hostage until their demands for weakening ICE are met. That means they’re also subjecting millions of air travelers to added anxiety, and worse, as security-line wait times stretch into hours. According to CNN, “Half the nation’s busiest airports had more than a third of (TSA) agents call out Saturday.” At LaGuardia on Sunday, passengers were in line for up to three hours — not because of the Air Canada accident late that evening but because TSA was understaffed all day. What’s President Donald Trump doing about this mess?

He’s called the Democrats’ bluff. Instead of gutting immigration enforcement, he’s sent ICE into more than a dozen of the nation’s busiest airports to make up for TSA’s missing manpower. Democrats, predictably, are furious — and fearmongering to the nth degree. “The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country, potentially to brutalize or to kill them,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries frothed on CNN’s “State of the Union.” What about the Americans brutalized and killed by illegal-alien criminals? If Jeffries and his party succeed in chipping away at ICE, more Americans like 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman will die.

The man charged with her murder is a Venezuelan national who was breaking the law just by being in this country — yet the enforcement necessary to keep killers like him out, or send them back promptly if they do get through our borders, is what Democrats aim to dismantle. Illegal alien criminals, not law-enforcement officers, are the threat to ordinary Americans’ lives and well-being, but Jeffries and his fellow Democrats choose to demonize ICE. They’re beholden to a left-wing activist base that wants little less than open borders, as the immigration crisis brought about by the last Democratic administration showed.

Voters repudiated that agenda, but the election of Trump on a platform of serious immigration enforcement hasn’t chastised Jeffries or his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer — they’re determined to take the country back to the Joe Biden era, when the likes of Gorman’s killer could enter with ease. Yet what Dems didn’t foresee is that Trump would repair their sabotage of America’s transportation security by using the very agency Jeffries and company are trying to destroy.

ICE is proving to be doubly invaluable now — for its primary task of immigration enforcement but also as a fallback for TSA when Democrats play shutdown games with Homeland Security. The only risk to travelers is that leftist provocateurs will attempt to manufacture conflict to besmirch ICE — a strategy they employed to deadly effect in Minneapolis. Yet the country can’t give in to intimidation if innocent lives like Gorman’s or Laken Riley’s are to be saved. Jeffries and Schumer may not plot their tactics over the phone with anti-ICE street activists, but they’re working from the same playbook: create tense, frustrating, even dangerous situations, then channel the resulting outrage against law enforcement.

It’s true ICE agents can’t substitute for trained TSA personnel in providing for all an airport’s security needs. But they can cover the basics, while remaining TSA employees — whom Democrats refuse to pay during the standoff — handle the specialized work. And if Jeffries and Schumer still won’t budge? How long before even the most selfless TSA worker can’t afford to eat, or pay rent, because of the Democrats’ stunt?

ICE is funded separately from the rest of DHS, including TSA, which is why Dems can’t attack immigration enforcement directly. And ICE is set up to hire quickly — so if Democrats keep Homeland Security and TSA shut down, Trump might have another way to rescue the travelers and government workers who are all Schumer’s hostages. The president could hire the best TSA workers straight into ICE, immediately acquiring the skills necessary for the enforcement agency to run airport security indefinitely.

ICE is still part of the government.

• Democrats Predicted ICE Would Terrorize Airports (Margolis)

Democrats just can’t help themselves. Give them a microphone and a crazy talking point, and they’ll say anything if they think it hurts President Donald Trump. This time, they tried to convince Americans that President Donald Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports would lead to violence, abuse, and even death. They couldn’t have been more wrong. As PJ Media previously reported, over the weekend, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on CNN and literally claimed ICE agents would kill people at airports. “The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or, in some instances, kill them,” Jeffries said.

And he wasn’t alone. Senator Richard Blumenthal piled on with his own apocalyptic vision, claiming, “ICE agents at airports will only aggravate delays & lines—disrupting checks, interrogating travelers, dragging parents from children, detaining citizens, brutalizing families, shooting & even killing.”, Blumenthal adde. “Brutal, lawless tactics common in communities across the country by masked, unidentified agents, violating basic rights—no way to help TSA or travelers.”= If you took these guys at their word, you’d expect airports to resemble war zones by now. Travelers cowering. Families torn apart. Agents running wild. Death and mayhem. So what actually happened?

At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport—one of the busiest in the world—things initially looked rough. Lines stretched out the doors, and wait times reportedly hit as long as nine hours. A mess, no question. And then ICE showed up. And instead of chaos, something very inconvenient for Democrats occurred: things got better. A lot better, actually.CNN’s own Ryan Young was on the ground covering the situation, and his report completely undercut the panic narrative. “Finally, we can take a deep breath here. The numbers have dropped off. The lines are getting shorter. I think the average wait time now is under 40 minutes, so if you have a flight to catch today, it’s a good time to come to Hartsfield-Jackson International.”

Young even described what ICE agents were actually doing—and it wasn’t anything close to the horror stories Democrats were predicting. “Talking about those ICE agents, you can see a few behind me right there. And then I’m gonna walk you this direction, and you can see some more of them gathered over here. This is what they’ve been doing for the most part today, is doing the patrols around the airport, uh, talking and gathering, uh, not really helping the public in the sense of they’re, they’re not taking tickets from anybody. They’re not interacting with the public we’ve seen so far. They’re not checking anyone’s ID.”

How Mossad got its war.

• Israel’s Mossad Promised It Could Ignite Regime Change In Iran (MEE)

Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had a plan to ignite public protests that would lead to the collapse of Iran’s government, the New York Times has reported. David Barnea, Mossad’s chief, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu days before the US and Israel began their war on Iran and told him that the agency would be able to galvanize Iranian opposition in order to bring about regime change. Barnea, according to the report, which cites interviews with US and Israeli officials, also presented this proposal to senior US officials during a visit to Washington in mid-January.

The plan was then taken up by Netanyahu and Trump, despite doubts among some senior American officials and Israeli military intelligence. Mossad’s promises were, according to US and Israeli officials, used by Netanyahu to convince the US president that collapsing the Iranian government was possible. In the plan’s conception, the war would begin with the killing of Iranian leaders, followed by a “series of intelligence operations intended to encourage regime change.” This could, Mossad believed, lead to a mass uprising that would bring about victory for Israel and the US. As the war began, Trump’s public messaging reflected this. In an eight-minute video statement he said:

“Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand…when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” But talk of regime change quickly evaporated. Less than two weeks in, US senators came out of a briefing on the war to say that overthrowing the Islamic Republic was not one of its goals, and that in fact there was “no plan” at all for the military operation. The CIA’s own assessment of the situation is that the Iranian administration will not be overthrown. In fact, the US intelligence agency had said that if Iran’s leaders were killed, a “more radical” leadership would take power.

Israeli intelligence sees Iran’s government as weakened but intact. “The belief that Israel and the United States could help instigate widespread revolt was a foundational flaw in the preparations for a war that has spread across the Middle East,” the NYT report said. While Netanyahu has remained bullish about the prospect of putting troops on the ground in Iran, he is said to be frustrated that Mossad’s promises to bring about an uprising have not come to fruition.According to the NYT, Netanyahu said in a security meeting days after the war began that Trump could end the war at any moment if Mossad’s operations did not bear fruit. Allegations that the White House went in the direction of ‘optimistic’ Israeli assessments over US intelligence consensus:

Another example of that high-value intelligence we get from Israel, I guess. The CIA doubted that a war would quickly lead to a democratic uprising against the Iranian regime. But Israel's Mossad was optimistic it could spur regime change. Trump listened to the Israelis. https://t.co/knLLHpzSyw

— Andrew Day (@AKDay89) March 23, 2026

Mossad’s promises were, according to the report, disputed by many senior US officials and analysts at the Israeli army’s intelligence agency, Aman. US military leaders told Trump that Iranians would not take to the streets while bombs were falling, while intelligence officials assessed that the chances of a mass uprising were low.

Go talk to Elon about plants on the moon.

• International Energy Agency Pushes Rationing (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

The International Energy Agency in Paris has released a new and urgent document that it wishes all nations with energy struggles to adopt. Many are doing that now. The website even maintains a spreadsheet updated daily to celebrate the countries that are following its plan for controlling energy use. Before explaining why none of this will work, let’s look at what they are suggesting. Seeming out of nowhere, the head of the IEA, Dr. Fatih Birol, is being quoted in the highend press as the world’s expert. His Wikipedia page says that he is from Turkey but works closely with China on the “energy transition.” Indeed, he has been a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering since 2013. Inspired by the manner in which governments were able to control communication and people during the COVID crisis, the IEA advises the following:

1. Work from home where possible. You read that right: we are back to languishing at home and consuming entertainment through laptops. Some governments (Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Philippines) have already adopted this policy loosely, with new measures such as four-day work weeks. IEA comments: “Displaces oil use from commuting, particularly where jobs are suitable for remote work.”

2. Reduce highway speed limits by at least 10 km/h. That means lowering all speed limits by 6-7 miles per hour, which is really nothing more than a method to create an annoyance. The IEA says “lower speeds reduce fuel use for passenger cars, vans and trucks,” but is that even true? Not always. Boggy traffic creates more stop/start situations that cause more gas consumption.

3. Encourage public transport. That exhortation has been the dream of city planners for probably 50 years. Not everyone can do this of course and a mandate like that will cause many just to stay home. In this case, IEA is probably correct: “A shift from private cars to buses and trains can quickly reduce oil demand.” But not for the reason you might think. It just means more staying at home.

4. Alternate private car access to roads in large cities on different days. Now we are getting to a policy that drove an entire generation batty in the 1970s. In those days, even/odd license plates were allowed access to gas but this is more intense. Alternating access would require a massive policing effort, one that is without precedent. IEA comments: “Number-plate rotation schemes can reduce congestion and fuel-intensive driving.”

5. Increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices. This is easily done in the same way police enforce HOV lanes. You cannot drive alone. You must have other passengers if you are going to be out on the road. One can imagine a future in which people routinely grab a family member or friend to sit in the passenger seat for compliance purposes. IEA comments: “Higher car occupancy and eco-driving can lower fuel consumption quickly.”

6. Efficient driving for road commercial vehicles and delivery of goods. Here we get to the old essential/nonessential divide. Commercial deliveries are allowed because we have to live somehow but driving to the park for a picnic or visiting friends and families is not.

7. Divert LPG [Liquefied Petroleum Gas] use from transport. This is the planner’s vision to preserve propane for “essential needs.”

8. Avoid air travel where alternative options exist. You will surely notice that this is already happening. My recent flight bookings have doubled in price. Because of the limited government shutdown, airport security lines can be 2-3 hours. People miss flights or simply bail out and go home. This is also causing connections to fail. Events this weekend that relied on travel are a bust. IEA comments: “Reducing business flights can quickly ease pressure on jet fuel markets.”

9. Where possible, switch to other modern cooking solutions. Earlier we saw an exhortation to save propane for cooking but here we see that this is not recommended either. We are supposed to switch to electric appliances. IEA comments: “Encouraging electric cooking and other modern options can reduce reliance on LPG.”

10. Leverage flexibility with petrochemical feedstocks and implement short-term efficiency and maintenance measures. This advice is directed toward energy plants to switch from one source to another to conserve oil. This suggestion reaches deep into industrial planning and would require draconian enforcement.

What a weasel.

• The Late Robert Mueller, Bill of Rights Executioner (James Bovard)

Obituaries on eminent Washingtonians usually omit the dreadful precedents they set that will vex Americans long after their death. Not this piece. Former FBI director Robert Mueller died last week at the age of 81. The New York Times eulogized him as a “button-down, lockjawed, rock-ribbed exemplar of a vanishing caste.” In reality, Mueller was simply a twenty-first century version of J. Edgar Hoover, trampling the Constitution and seizing new power on any pretext.

Mueller took over the FBI one week before the 9/11 attacks and he was worse than clueless afterwards. On September 14, 2011, Mueller declared, “The fact that there were a number of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools here is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case, we would have—perhaps one could have averted this.” Three days later, Mueller announced, “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.” His protestations helped the W. Bush administration railroad the Patriot Act through Congress, vastly expanding the FBI’s prerogatives to vacuum up Americans’ personal information.

Deceit helped capture those intrusive new prerogatives. The Bush administration suppressed until the following May the news that FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had warned FBI headquarters of suspicious Arabs in flight training programs prior to 9/11. A House-Senate Joint Intelligence Committee analysis concluded that FBI incompetence and negligence “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists.” FBI blundering spurred The Wall Street Journal to call for Mueller’s resignation, while a New York Times headline warned: “Lawmakers Say Misstatements Cloud F.B.I. Chief’s Credibility.”

But the FBI was off and running. Thanks to the Patriot Act, the FBI increased by a hundredfold—up to 50,000 a year—the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) it issued to citizens, business, and nonprofit organizations, and recipients were prohibited from disclosing that their data had been raided. NSLs entitle the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” The Washington Post noted. The FBI can lasso thousands of people’s records with a single NSL—regardless of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches.

The FBI greatly understated the number of NSLs it was issuing and denied that abuses had occurred, thereby helping sway Congress to renew the Patriot Act in 2006. The following year, an Inspector General report revealed that FBI agents may have recklessly issued thousands of illegal NSLs. Shortly after that report was released, federal judge Victor Marrero denounced the NSL process as “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.” Rather than arresting FBI agents who broke the law, Mueller created a new FBI Office of Integrity and Compliance.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation, after winning lawsuits to garner FBI reports to a federal oversight board, concluded that the FBI may have committed “tens of thousands” of violations of federal law, regulations, or Executive Orders between 2001 and 2008. President George W. Bush, scorning a unanimous 1972 Supreme Court ruling, decided he was entitled to impose warrantless wiretaps on Americans. At an April 2005 Senate hearing, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) asked Mueller, “Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?” Mueller replied, “I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens.”

” Paul Clement, was asked by Justice Sonia Sotomayor if his position on Election Day’s meaning meant the 2000 election — Bush v. Gore — was bogus. Clement was not only ready for that turd of an argument; he polished it and handed it back to the notoriously radical justice.”

• The Supreme Court Seems Ready to Make ELECTION DAY Great Again (Victoria Taft)

There’s a reason reporters capitalize the words Election Day in their stories, why Election Day is on every American calendar, and why it is emblematic of a single day by which you must deliver your ballot to the vote counters. The problem is, a dozen U.S. states have all sorts of cockamamie rules for when voters must get their ballots into the elections office, and it turns out that Election Day is not that day. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to be leaning in favor of making Election Day great again — or at least making it a day again.

Oral arguments were heard on Monday that both embrace and reject the notion that there’s a day on the books in America called Election Day. The nine justices heard from both sides, and while there was the usual partisan Democrat cheerleading from Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and to a lesser extent Justice Elena Kagan, throwing shade on that old-fashioned idea about Election Day, based on the reactions of the more conservative members of the court, Americans may not have to endure seemingly never-ending election days again, based on those conservative court members’ questions for lawyers.

Justice Sam Alito asked lawyers what Election Day means. He also noted that getting “radically different” vote tallies in the days after Election Day undermines the confidence people have in the integrity of elections. The elections in Nevada and Arizona in 2020 come to mind.

We know why the left has systematically changed Election Day deadlines throughout the country. If they could, they’d start the next election period the day after the previous election. They want as much chaos and confusion over the election results and want Americans inured to the idea that, for some reason, there sure seem to be a lot of election-changing ballots turned in after Election Day. There was a time in this country, like present-day Florida for example, when you could have election results on Election Day. But with the chaos surrounding what passes for an election these days, it’s hard to sort out legitimate votes from stuffed ones.

During the 2020 election, Pennsylvania Democrats staged a last-minute lawsuit, winning a three-day extension of Election Day. States such as Mississippi have five days to get their mail-in ballots counted. That’s why the U.S. government, voter integrity organizations, and others are fighting to retain a semblance of an orderly Election Day and asked the Supreme Court to disallow any votes coming in afterward. Among the plaintiffs bringing this election integrity lawsuit is Judicial Watch, which wants the Supreme Court to affirm a Fifth Circuit Appeals Court ruling declaring Mississippi’s five-day-after-Election Day deadline unlawful. Judicial Watch’s and the GOP’s lawyer, Paul Clement, was asked by Justice Sonia Sotomayor if his position on Election Day’s meaning meant the 2000 election — Bush v. Gore — was bogus. Clement was not only ready for that turd of an argument; he polished it and handed it back to the notoriously radical justice.

U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument on Mail-In Ballots – LIVE at 10am ET on C-SPAN https://t.co/r9mtq7tzrE

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 23, 2026

“This is all bad news for India. There’s no question that all Indians understand that this war is disastrous for India..”

• Russia ‘Clearest Winner’ In US-israeli War On Iran – John Mearsheimer (RT)

Russia is the “clearest winner” in the US-Israeli war on Iran, international relations expert John Mearsheimer has said on RT’s New Order show. Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, added that India stands to be “a big loser” from the Middle East conflict despite having good relations with all sides. “The clearest winner is Russia,” Mearsheimer said, referring to the waiver of sanctions on Russian oil and gas by US President Donald Trump. On New Delhi’s diplomatic trajectory as the conflict escalates, Mearsheimer said, “The only interesting question at this point in time is how big a loser it’s [India] going to be.”

“This is all bad news for India. There’s no question that all Indians understand that this war is disastrous for India,” Mearsheimer added. New Delhi’s pain points include inflation, cost of gas, fertilizers, and food production, according to the expert. Mearsheimer said Trump and Israel believed in a quick and decisive victory, and that the Gulf nations and countries such as India also did not see a long war. “So what happened was that India did not protest. The Gulf states did not protest,” he added. New Delhi did not condemn the US-Israeli assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, choosing instead to later offer condolences.

On the complexities of dealing with the Trump administration, Mearsheimer said India has done a decent job. “[Prime Minister Narendra] Modi is aware of the danger of getting too close to the United States,” he stated. “The United States is basically a rogue elephant, and if you get too close to a rogue elephant, it may trample you.” He said the countries that have benefited the most from the Iran war are “clearly Russia and China, and they’re both members of BRICS. But at the same time, I think a lot of the BRICS countries are going to be badly hurt. India is one of them. Indonesia may be another.” Mearsheimer said the end result is that the war will cause those countries to rethink their relationship with the US.

“…about 4,000 kilometers [nearly 2,500 miles]..”

• Iran’s Flex Of Long-Range Ballistic Missiles Vindicates Trump (JTN)

With Iran’s launch of two long-range missiles on Friday, putting nearly all of Europe in striking distance, the regime showed that it possesses a capability that President Donald Trump previously cited as a key justification for the U.S. conflict with the Islamic Republic after years of denying it publicly. Iran fired the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the joint U.S.-U.K. airbase on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from Tehran, on the same day that the British government gave the United States the green light to use the facility to launch strikes on Iran.

“It could probably hit Paris, maybe London,” security expert says
Neither missile struck the base. One failed in flight and a U.S. warship fired an interceptor missile at the other, though the U.S. military did not say whether the interception was successful. “This whole conflict changed when Iran fired intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, proving that it could probably hit Paris, maybe London,” Fred Fleitz, former Chief of Staff of Trump’s National Security Council during the president’s first term, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday. Besides its nuclear program, Iran’s conventional missile program was one of the primary motivations for the Trump administration’s decision to strike Iran earlier this year. In his State of the Union Address just days before the military action, the president told Congress that the regime is developing missiles that would one day be able to reach the United States.

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said in February. “They were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular nuclear weapons.” Though U.S. intelligence assessments show that Iran is about nine years away from developing a missile that could reach the United States, officials allege that Tehran’s growing space program provided the vector for achieving such a breakthrough.

Before the ballistic missile launch targeting Diego Garcia on Friday, Iranian leaders claimed their arsenal was limited in range and primarily for the purpose of deterring other countries rather than strikes abroad. In an interview with NBC News earlier this month, the regime’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran had intentionally limited the range of its ballistic missiles to below 1,250 miles “because we don’t want to be felt as a threat by anybody else in the world.”

Much further than the previously estimated ranges
But, after firing two missiles at the airbase, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency reported that the missiles were fired at the base on Friday. “Iran’s targeting of Diego Garcia, about 4,000 kilometers [nearly 2,500 miles] away from Iran, implies its missiles have a greater range than Tehran has previously announced,” Mehr News Agency reported. “Iran’s targeting of US faraway military base demonstrates its missile capability in targeting long-range positions.”

Indeed, the range touted by the state-backed outlet would be much further than the previously estimated ranges of Iran’s missiles, excepting the Simorgh rocket — a space launch vehicle for satellites — if it were repurposed as a ballistic missile. Neither the U.S. nor the United Kingdom provided information about how far the Iranian ballistic missiles flew. However, if the Iranian regime-backed news outlet can be trusted, such a range would place most of Europe within the radius of the IRBMs, including the more than 38 U.S. military bases on the continent. Members of the European NATO alliance host the U.S. European Command (Stuttgart, Germany), strategic air and naval bases, and U.S. forward-deployed nuclear weapons.

“It’s sort of amusing to look back now, carried by arms control experts and European leaders that we know Iran doesn’t have missiles that can fire more than 2000 kilometers, because the Supreme Leader said that they wouldn’t do that. Well, that wasn’t true,” Fleitz said. “They have missiles with at least a range of 4000 kilometers, which can almost get to Paris. And for all we know, the missiles can go even further,” he added. Though many European leaders have been hesitant about becoming overtly involved in the conflict, there are signs that their tune may be changing after Iran’s attempted long-range strike last week.

A rock and a hard place.

• EC Postpones Publication of Ban On Russian Oil Imports (TASS)

The European Commission cannot yet set a precise date for the publication of a draft ban on Russian oil imports for EU countries, European Commission Spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said at a briefing in Brussels. “I don’t have, first of all, a definite date to give. What I can reassure you of is that we remain committed to making this proposal. What the President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen – TASS) has been very clear about is that going back to importing Russian energy would be repeating a mistake of the past,” she said. Initially, April 15 was discussed, but the ban clause has now disappeared from the European Commission’s agenda. Itkonen noted in this regard that the EC’s agenda is “preliminary” and the European Commission is “looking for a new date.”

Earlier, von der Leyen stated that the European Commission does not intend to allow EU countries to import Russian energy resources, even in the event of power outages in Europe. Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said that the EU would not “import as much as one molecule from Russia.” All this is happening against the backdrop of Brussels’ conflict with Budapest and Bratislava. On January 27, Kiev blocked Russian oil supplies via the Druzhba pipeline to Hungary and Slovakia. In response, both countries blocked €90 billion in military financing from Europe to Ukraine, as well as the 20th package of sanctions against Russia.

“The bloc backs the country’s opposition and is attempting to smear government parties ahead of a key election, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has claimed .. “

• Hungary Blasts ‘Fake’ EU Accusation (RT)

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has denied and condemned claims that he leaked the details of EU meetings to Moscow. The allegations were reported by the Washington Post and Politico some three weeks prior to the Hungarian parliamentary election scheduled for April 12. On Friday, the WaPo cited security officials claiming that Szijjarto had made regular phone calls during breaks at EU meetings to provide Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with “live reports on what had been discussed.” On Sunday, Politico echoed the allegations, citing unnamed diplomats and officials who said Brussels had begun limiting the flow of confidential material to Hungary, forcing leaders to meet in smaller groups amid concerns that Budapest might leak sensitive information to the Kremlin.

“Instead of spreading lies and fake news, come to Budapest to support the opposition! Last time it worked… for us,” Szijjarto said Sunday in a post on X, responding to a comment by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who argued that the new allegations “shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.” The Hungarian foreign minister earlier stated that Tusk was “the star speaker at the opposition rally” four years ago, stressing that back then Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party had won the election by 20%. Szijjarto also criticized his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, over a similar remark, accusing Warsaw of “spreading lies to support the [opposition] Tisza Party and install a pro-war puppet government in Hungary.”

Orban has been at odds with Brussels over his criticism of open-border migration and what he calls a “suicidal” plan to admit Ukraine to the bloc. Hungary’s prime minister and Vladimir Zelensky are involved in a standoff over the Ukrainian leader’s claim that he is unable to send Russian oil to Hungary. In return, Orban has refused to green light a €90 billion debt facility Brussels wants for Ukraine.

Orban is Trump’s friend.

• Hungarian Foreign Minister Wiretapped By EU Spies – Orban (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has ordered an investigation into the alleged wiretapping of Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto by at least one EU member state. The operation was aided by a Hungarian opposition journalist. The probe was announced on Monday, after the Washington Post and Politico published reports claiming that Szijjarto phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during breaks in EU meetings to give Lavrov “live reports on what had been discussed.” The reports cited unnamed “European security” officials.

Szijjarto dismissed the claims as “lies and fake news,” but Hungarian conservative outlet Mandiner revealed on Monday that Szijjarto’s contact details had likely been passed to EU security officials by Szabolcs Panyi, an opposition journalist in Hungary. In an audio file released by Mandiner, Panyi can be heard telling a source how he gave Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country.” Panyi then explains that once the agency he spoke to has a person’s phone number, they can extract “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”

In a Facebook post on Monday, Panyi confirmed that he was the person on the recording. He said that he was asking his source whether she knew of any alternate numbers used by Szijjarto or Lavrov, so that I could compare them with information received from the national security service of a European country. “We are dealing with two serious issues”, Orban stated on Monday. “There is evidence that Hungary’s foreign minister was wiretapped, and we also “have indications of who may be behind it. This must be investigated immediately.”

Later in the audio file, Panyi tells his source that he is a “quasi-friend” of Anita Orban, a member of opposition leader Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, and Magyar’s pick to replace Szijjarto as foreign minister, should Tisza win next month’s parliamentary elections. Panyi suggests that he has close links to Tisza, and would be in a position to recommend “who should stay or be removed” if Magyar takes power. Panyi is an editor with Vsquare, and leads the outlet’s Budapest office. Vsquare is funded by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, and two EU-financed journalism funds. Earlier this month, Vsquare claimed to have uncovered evidence that “election fixers” with Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, were working in Budapest to swing the upcoming elections for Orban.

And even then…

• There’s A Heretic In The Heart of The EU And He Wants To Talk To Putin (Amar)

]Ideally, policy debates should serve to bring together the fullest information, the brightest minds, and the sharpest arguments in order to find solutions. That is, the optimum combination between what is best and what is feasible. In the real world, shaped by ordinary human fallibility and the extraordinary egotism of professional politicians, that is usually not what happens. But the EU is still special in just how atrociously, hopelessly, for crying-out-loud bad it is at the solution game. Because it is not just playing it badly, it’s not playing at all.

Instead, in the upside-down, white-is-black, Israel-is-defending-itself-and-Iran-is-just-so-damn-mean alternate universe of the EU, the space where policy debates should take place has long been fully clogged up by three pernicious weeds of swamp-á-la-Brussels. First, those elaborately underhanded backroom deals that eliminate even the faintest remains of transparency and accountability. For a fresh – if also foul – example, just check out the recent double-dealing between the EU parliament’s oh-so-democratic Centrists and the at-least-not-so-hypocritical far right. A deal so obviously perfidious, even Berlin doesn’t like to be associated with it – in public, that is.

Secondly, there is that old bureaucratic panacea: hyperactive lethargy. If you can’t devise a rational solution to a public need to find broad support with most of 27 national governments (not to speak of their voters who matter little anyhow), just keep churning out inefficient non-solution papers, strategies, and plans that everyone can at least agree to keep talking but do very little about. That’s the pattern in which the EU is currently not addressing, for instance, its quite possibly medium-term-lethal problem of decaying competitiveness.

And finally, there is the doctrinally most demanding way of shutting down genuine policy debate: the hammer of the Brussels inquisition. That, of course, is not a specific office but a pervasive attitude of narrow-minded conformism always ready to promptly pounce on any heretic who offers alternative views on reality and plausible courses of action. Those, clearly, would be an essential ingredient of any productive debate and decision-making process. But that’s not important for the EU. No divergence from the party line, please, we are Europeans! And down with all rebels!

That is what is currently happening to the Belgian prime minister Bart de Wever, and not for the first time. He is already notorious for having almost single-handedly kept the EU (and Berlin) from fully plundering Russia’s frozen sovereign assets in the EU. With unheard of audacity, De Wever insisted on protecting Belgium’s national interests first.

In an interview with his country’s L’Echo newspaper that has been widely reported from the Financial Times to the Guardian, De Wever has painted a target on his own back by acknowledging the obvious and concluding the inevitable. The obvious being that the current EU policy of waging a proxy war against Russia by way of Ukraine is not working and will never work, and the inevitable that when you can’t win your ill-conceived war, then you must settle for a compromise with your opponent.

And once you have to make peace, you might as well do so in a way that offers economic benefits. In the EU’s case, the most obvious – and most urgently needed – would be in trying to regain access to Russian gas and oil. Moreover, if the EU sticks to its policy of, in essence, total obstruction, then it will only make sure not to be part of the solution once a way back to peace is finally found. Not at that table, it will have to accept an outcome that will be disadvantageous to its interests. And all for playing hard to get. De Wever’s points are simple and compelling, right?

Among the reasonable, yes. And among the morally normal as well, because even on the EU’s own, misguided terms, it is perverse to continue a war that is allegedly waged on Ukraine’s behalf but has always been unwinnable, bleeds its people dry, can be ended with a reasonable settlement, and is encountering ever more popular opposition.

There is a reason why Kiev is running a de facto authoritarian regime and the Ukrainian military has turned to massive and brutal forced mobilization. But the response from both Brussels and national governments is to try to push even those Ukrainian men who had made it out back into the proxy war meatgrinder.

Those setting the tone in the EU are neither reasonable nor humane. That is why even De Wever’s decidedly realistic arguments cannot make a dent in their monotonous group think. De Wever, after all, is not a Russophile. Witness, for instance, his recent appearance on a Davos World Economic Forum panel, led, as it happened, by uber Cold War Re-enactor Gideon Rachman from the Financial Times. There, De Wever was clear about his view that the EU has to keep aiding Ukraine, on this occasion to the tune of $90 billion, to “keep [it] in the fight.”

They know better than some geezer from the 17th century. Rewrite him!

• Shakespeare’s Birthplace to be “Decolonized” (Turley)

William Shakespeare’s birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the ‘greatest’ playwright ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’In Hamlet, William Shakespeare famously wrote, “To thine own self be true.” The problem is when others want to present a different “truth” long after you are gone. Shakespeare is under an unrelenting attack in the United Kingdom from trigger warnings to censoring his prose. Now, Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust has announced that it will “de-colonise” the Bard. In the name of creating “a more inclusive museum experience,” the Trust is moving away from Western perspectives to avoid the dangers of “white supremacy.”

A prior research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins at the University of Birmingham raised concerns over just praising the writer. Even recognizing Shakespeare’s genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy.” The new push at the Trust follows The Globe Theatre’s previous move to “decolonise” Shakespeare’s famous plays. Again, while many of us denounce this type of revisionism, it appeals to this community of cultural overlords. It is personally advancing for these academics and experts to seek to change or cancel such works. The same voices are being heard in the United States. As we previously discussed, in a column in the School Library Journal, Minnesota librarian and journalist Amanda MacGregor questioned why teachers were even still exposing their students to this harmful influence:

“Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir.” Lorena German, National Council of Teachers of English Anti-Racism Committee chair and a co-founder of the Disrupt Texts forum, insisted “everything about the fact that he was a man of his time is problematic about his plays. We cannot teach Shakespeare responsibly and not disrupt the ways people are characterized and developed.”

It is time for the dwindling population of sane Brits to step forward and fight for their culture and heritage. These advocates have used academia and the media to attack the foundations of British culture. It is not enough to foster diversity in other areas, they must change and reframe how historical figures and works are presented. They recognize this as a culture war, but have met little resistance. It is time, as the Barb himself wrote, to “Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war.”

“The view from Flyover Country is that Hollywood committed suicide, and that Newsom and Bass just added a few shovels of dirt on top of the coffin.”

• Who Killed Hollywood? Or Did it Kill Itself? (Stephen Green)

“The Hollywood industry is dying,” comedian David Spade told Fly on the Wall cohost Dana Carvey last week, specifically calling out California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. “Dude, I’m so old,” he said. “I was on the lot at CBS Radford when we were doing Just Shoot Me… It was the greatest lot. Of course, [the lot] just filed for bankruptcy. Terrifying in L.A. Thanks, Karen Bass. Thanks, Gavin.” Earlier this year, the storied production facility — Seinfeld shot there, too — was turned over to creditors after Hackman Capital Partners defaulted on a $1.1 billion mortgage. “Studio owners have struggled to lease space due to a sharp downturn in film and TV production volume since 2022,” Variety reported in January.

“Survive Until 2025” was Hollywood’s mantra in 2024, but last year brought zero relief from post-COVID TV and movie production woes. L.A.’s entertainment industry job losses amounted to 40% or more of 2022 highs. IBT reported last week that local studios “logged only 19,694 days of filming in Los Angeles in 2025, compared to 36,792 in 2022.” It’s the production crews who suffer most from Tinseltown’s downfall, and by and large, they aren’t woke Hollywood progressives. They’re workingmen and women who tend to be far more centrist or even conservative than the stars and studios they work for.

And Another Thing: I always liked Spade, but only recently learned that he’s no Hollywood wokester, either. “I don’t want half the crowd tuning me out,” Spade told Variety in 2019, explaining why he didn’t jump on the TDS bandwagon with the rest of the industry. “When people do things, I think it’s fair game to make a few jokes, and then you move on – not too personal, of course.” Some say the economics of streaming — particularly Netflix — are to blame, but as Carvey told Spade on the same podcast, “The amount of productions is dying, and so they have to do something so more production comes back, and that starts with negotiating with the union and also subsidizing the industry tax breaks to compete with Romania.”

California and L.A. stopped competing for big-ticket productions, which is why studios decamped to Georgia, the U.K., and, yes, even Romania. But there’s more to the story than just California’s business-hostile environment driving filming out of state. Whether filmed in Los Angeles or Timbuktu, Americans increasingly won’t buy what Hollywood sells. Netflix largely produces “second screen” content that people kinda-sorta watch while scrolling on their phones, and will pay for on an all-you-can-eat basis. But streamers produce very little that would otherwise draw people into theaters. What struck me most about Project Hail Mary — which hit the big screen on Friday to great reviews and awesome ticket sales — is how rare that kind of good-natured hit film is.

I hope Project Hail Mary goes on to earn a gazillion dollars, and maybe even remind Hollywood that you don’t need capes, a sequel, or a reboot to produce a winner. Just a really good story that almost anyone can enjoy will do. We still love going to the movies, but Hollywood only sometimes remembers anymore how to get us to go. Alas, the summer slate is filled — you guessed it — capes, sequels, and reboots. And, of course, more second-screen algorithm-pleasing slop from the Netflix content firehose. The view from Flyover Country is that Hollywood committed suicide, and that Newsom and Bass just added a few shovels of dirt on top of the coffin.

Elon Musk’s Terafab announcement is so ridiculously ambitious it should actually scare you — these numbers are straight-up mind-blowing:

•The factory will pump out 70% of TSMC’s entire global capacity (10 GW) and scale all the way to 1 terawatt at full build-out.
•Two AI chips… pic.twitter.com/5OelOA2pG0

— XCorpHub (@XCorpHub) March 23, 2026

Elon Musk: "Optimus will be the world's best surgeon within three years

There will probably be more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth" pic.twitter.com/ZUAZsKjhEp

— Mars University (@MarsUniversityX) March 23, 2026

Jensen Huang just reverse-engineered why Elon Musk operates at a speed no one on the planet can match.

Three traits.

The first is deletion.

Huang: “He has the ability to question everything to the point where everything’s down to its minimal amount.”

Most engineers solve… pic.twitter.com/XBW0TJXEmi

— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) March 23, 2026

Tesla Cybertruck is the only pickup to be awarded top safety+ https://t.co/ogIHiYw7Tc

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2026

TERAFAB unveiled. $20–25B. Not a side project.

A trillion watts of compute per year. Yes, trillion. Matching the U.S. electricity grid’s output.

AI data centers in orbit. Robotaxis. Optimus.

When the grid caps out, you go to space.@Tesla @SpaceX @xAI https://t.co/Vh3YCQoOca pic.twitter.com/8CWPXWq0XU

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 24, 2026

Here's my conversation with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable & one of the most influential companies in the history of human civilization. It is the engine powering the AI revolution.

This was a fascinating & inspiring conversation, in parts super-technical on… pic.twitter.com/RJ6aOgHY4O

— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) March 23, 2026

As a medical school professor, I teach about APOE4 — the gene that makes you 2.5x more likely to develop Alzheimer's. We've told patients there's nothing they can do about it.

A new JAMA Network Open study of 2,157 adults just proved us wrong.

Higher meat consumption… pic.twitter.com/I1rGFXSxgV

— Robert Lufkin MD (@robertlufkinmd) March 24, 2026