With war raging on the other side of the globe, things don’t stand still at home. This week we have airports in chaos, social media companies losing in the courts, Cuba inundated by the worst of humanity, a great icon of the Left being posthumously canceled, and Tucker Carlson becoming more bizarre by the day.

Iran

Is Donald President Trump looking for an offramp from the war against the Islamic Republic? Is Trump negotiating with Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Ghalibaf? Is the 82nd Airborne about to take over Kharg Island? Will we see widespread troop deployments? Who knows? What we do know is that we are witnessing classic Trump bluff, bluster, and misdirection designed to keep his opponents on the back foot.

Meanwhile, the United States (US) military, led by General Dan Cane and Admiral Brad Cooper, is delivering blow after devastating blow to the Iranian military infrastructure. As Bret Stephens lays out in The New York Times, the US military is achieving considerable successes with unprecedentedly limited casualties. The outcome of this conflict is, of course, unknown, and perhaps the full ramifications of this war will not be known for ages, but already declaring it a failure, as so many Trump opponents are keen to do, is surely premature.

Travel Chaos

While the US military is fighting abroad, at home travelers are facing excruciatingly long delays at airports thanks to a Democratic Party attempt to achieve reforms to immigration enforcement. The large reconciliation bill, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law last July, provided more than $170 billion for immigration enforcement. With the controversial roundups of suspected illegal immigrants, the Democrats have been demanding changes to immigration policy.

Not included in the reconciliation bill was funding for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Eager to find some way of exerting pressure on the Trump Administration to change immigration enforcement practices, the Democrats have used their power in Congress to withhold funding for the TSA, which manages all security at US airports. Without any appropriated funding, TSA workers have been working without pay for two months, and as a result, they increasingly are calling in sick or resigning altogether.

On average, there are around 30 000 commercial flights every day in the United States. Air travel is relatively cheap, and given how large this country is, for many people it is the only feasible travel option. According to the Houston Chronicle, travelers at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport queued for around four hours just to get through security, and similar scenes have been witnessed across the country. The Trump Administration has now posted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel to airports to assist the few remaining TSA agents. To some degree, these ICE agents are helping to alleviate the delays, and the move is proving to be popular with travelers. Ironies abound, as ICE was the primary target of the Democrats’ ire. One proposal from Republican lawmakers is to remove the expedited TSA lines for Congressmen until the Democrats authorise TSA funding. Sounds like a good idea to me.

As your correspondent was about to submit this week’s dispatch, news broke that the US Senate was voting on a bill to fund the TSA and hopefully resolve this mess. What this episode exposes, however, is the ruthless way the Democrats have been using government shutdowns to try to achieve policy goals. This will likely continue, with Republicans doing the same when the shoe is on the other foot.

Meanwhile – and apologies if this all sounds a bit dull – the prospects for a second reconciliation funding bill this year look good. (Reconciliation bills do not require the 60 Senate votes that a normal bill requires, if they are revenue-neutral.) This is important because the White House and the Republicans need to authorise supplemental Pentagon funding, to the tune of at least $200 billion, for the war against the Islamic Republic. Republicans think that they can find the money to fund the war by removing waste and fraudulent spending from a host of welfare programs. Every year, the federal government spends upwards of $3 trillion on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If lawmakers cannot find savings of around 6% there, we’re in deep, deep trouble.

Social Media Addiction

A jury in a Los Angeles County Superior Court recently found Meta and Google, which own Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, guilty of intentionally designing their apps to addict people and of failing to warn users about potential harms, like anxiety and depression. A similar case was argued in New Mexico.

The facts of this case matter. The plaintiff in the Los Angeles case, who is now 20 years old and was awarded $6 million by the jury, started using social media and watching YouTube videos when she was six years old. Just a few years later, she was producing her own social media content. She came from an abusive and broken home. Did Facebook make her depressed and anxious, or did her family circumstances? One could ask what the parents were thinking – or not thinking – by allowing the child to use social media at such a young age.

There are legitimate questions to be raised about the design of these apps, but increasingly social media companies are adding features aimed at protecting minors. Your correspondent is concerned about the way this decision absolves parents of their responsibilities to police their own children’s behaviour. The verdict will be appealed, so the final outcome is uncertain, but what is certain is that there will now be many more such cases, and trial lawyers will be making off like bandits, having found a rich new source of revenue – just as the tobacco companies provided back in the day.

Immoral Morons Descend on Cuba

As we discussed on the latest Makin Sense podcast, Greta Thunberg, that most peculiar Swedish activist, fresh off her terror-supporting flotilla to Gaza, has arrived in Cuba with some of her friends, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Irish rock band Kneecap. They are apparently delivering humanitarian supplies to the rapidly collapsing island. Communism has all but destroyed Cuba, but its recent descent is ostensibly caused by the Trump Administration blocking the flow of free Venezuelan oil, on which the island had been surviving.

What these activists are doing is attempting to protect and defend the ruling elites. In Gaza, they were defending the terrorist leadership, and in Cuba, the communist dictators. They seem indifferent to the fact that the Cuban regime abuses the basic human rights of its population. They don’t seem to care about endemic racism and bigotry among the Cuban dictatorship, as exposed by Amnesty International. They don’t seem to care about Cuban sex trafficking, as exposed by the Human Rights Foundation. They don’t seem to care that Cuba sends its own doctors overseas, treating them as indentured servants or slaves. What they care about is opposing the United States and the West more generally.

There should be some special and particularly horrible corner in hell reserved for Western activists who enjoy all the wealth, privilege, and freedoms afforded to them by Western civilization and then use their power to deny freedoms to those suffering under brutal dictatorships. And can we reflect for a moment on the profound irony of Greta Thunberg, who made a name for herself by screaming about climate change and fossil fuels, now demanding Cuba get more oil. How dare she!

Et tu, Cesar?

Cesar Chavez, a labor activist and founder of the United Farm Workers Union, and an iconic hero for the Left, has fallen. Recent revelations in an extensive investigation by The New York Times credibly claim that Chavez, who died in 1993, sexually molested teenage girls and engaged in inappropriate sexual relations – including rape – with coworkers and others.

It’s hard to overstate how important Chavez is as a symbol of leftist, pro-worker union politics. There are more than 100 schools named after him, as well as hundreds of streets and highways, mostly in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. California observes Cesar Chavez Day on his birthday, 31 March, when government offices close and schools hold special events. And now we learn we have been honouring a rapist and child predator.

While there are furious efforts across the country to remove the Cesar Chavez name from all manner of buildings and institutions, Nick Gillespie at Reason reminds us that we had known for many years just what a dubious and corrupt character Chavez was. While elevated as a hero of the common worker, he was, in fact, gouging farmworkers and the taxpayer alike. No one should weep over the removal of Chavez’s name from institutions, but he should never have been elevated in the first place.

Tucker Says What Now?

Hopefully your correspondent doesn’t come across as someone obsessed with Tucker Carlson, but his trajectory from being a respected centre-right journalist and opinion maker to a rancid antisemitic crank is fascinating. Tucker recently went on a long and confusing rant about the descent and loss of self-confidence in the West, accompanied by great praise for how good, tolerant, and diverse life is in the Gulf states. He pointed out that Muslim extremism, as seen with Al Qaeda and and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is the result of “collapsed, pathetic societies dominated by colonial powers. They have been degraded, and that’s why they are so angry.” Ok, so it’s the former colonial powers that are responsible – not, you know, a belief in 7th-century Islamic teachings.

He went on to harangue banks, saying we should treat “the people who get rich from usury like the criminals they are and make them suffer…” Tucker then advocated for collective action and for anyone with credit card debt to refuse to pay their bills. Sounds like a great plan, Tucker … what could possibly go wrong?

This same Tucker Carlson recently visited Israel, where he lied about being detained at the airport, and then is reported to have said that the country is one of the ugliest places in the world and that nothing of beauty has been built there since 1948. Tucker must have had his eyes shut the entire time he was in Israel, for it is far from ugly. He certainly didn’t visit the beach in Tel Aviv, which could be mistaken for a Sports Illustrated swimwear model casting call. But in any event, if Tucker is looking for a place where the population has self-confidence, optimism, and social cohesion, along with a growing economy and population, then Israel is that place. Sadly, Tucker’s hatred of the Jews means he cannot see that … preferring the likes of Qatar. Oh well.