Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

December 19, 2025

THE DEARTH OF STALIN: Rich Lowry: Bernie Sanders’ poisonously stupid anti-AI crusade would doom America’s future.

Most people welcome economic growth, but Bernie Sanders hates it.

As they say, there’s no accounting for taste.

The Vermont socialist has come out against data centers, the mass computing facilities essential to the development of artificial intelligence.

There are all sorts of NIMBY-type reasons for local residents to oppose data centers near them — they use a lot of energy and water, they’re noisy and unsightly — but Sanders is against them on principle.

If he can stop the creation of new data centers, he can squeeze AI research to a standstill and supposedly save American jobs while giving Congress more time to regulate the new industry.

Perhaps Bernie will be fighting Big Golf as well:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: We need more people ready to fight, military chief says.

The UK needs “more people being ready to fight for their country” as the nation seeks to deter a potential confrontation with Russia, the head of the military has said.

Chief of the Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said “a whole-of-society response” was needed, including an increase in regular forces, cadets and reserves.

He also called for more school leavers and graduates to join the defence industry.

While the chief of the defence staff suggested there was only a remote chance of a direct Russian attack on the UK, he told an event at the Royal United Services Institute that so-called hybrid attacks showed the threat was worsening.

Sir Richard said: “Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans will all have a role to play. To build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight.

“And more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means.”

To be fair, they’re busy sacrificing for the nation by being locked up for writing spicy tweets: Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages.

The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.

Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.

Custody data obtained by The [London] Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

As Kurt Schlichter tweets:

This notion that young British men — specifically the working class ones — are going to sign up to go fight Russia for Ukraine is hilarious. This applies to other countries too, but let’s focus on the Brits. It’s a lesson in how the left skin-suits an institution, demands respect, and finds that it receives none.

These are the same young men who have been told they, their country, and their culture are garbage for the last 20 years. Racist, sexist, transphobic — you know the score. When they dare complain about their communities being changed without their consent, they get slandered. When foreign invaders rape their sisters and wives, the ruling class covers it up. If they take action, or even speak about it, they will be jailed. Yeah, I bet they’re just chomping at the bit to go get killed at the behest of their tormentors.

Of course, Old Blighty’s newfound saber rattling could simply be Labour’s version of Obama’s “stray voltage” mechanism to ride out a particularly bad news cycle:

UPDATE: Oceania has never been at war with Oceania:

Airstrip One has certainly done an exceptional job in recent years preparing its young men to fight for their nation:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS; YOU’VE GOT TO REALLY PUMP THOSE NUMBERS DOWN:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

OSWALD SPENGLER, CALL YOUR OFFICE:

Related:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

ATLAS MUGGED:

How It Started: Minneapolis City Council members intend to defund and dismantle the city’s police department.

—CNN, June 8th, 2020.

And: Farhad Manjoo writes a story about the Kia Boys without mentioning the Kia Boys.

As Manjoo sees it, the thefts and related problems (car crashes, armed robbery sprees, etc.) are entirely the fault of the manufacturers for making these cars so easy to steal. But he notes, ruefully, that another culprit is getting some of the blame. If you’re guessing he’s talking about the thieves, you guessed wrong. . . .

Not mentioned at all in these paragraphs or anywhere else in his column are the car thieves. All of the fault is placed on inanimate objects, i.e. the “theft-prone cars.” No responsibility is placed on the people driving this trend. This strikes me as pretty perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with progressive thinking on crime.

I think there’s a pretty clear reason why he’s leaving out the people responsible. Because the “Kia Boys,” as they’ve been described, are young teens, often black, who are stealing cars for fun and for social media cred. Contrary to what Manjoo claims, TikTok isn’t just providing dry information on how to steal the cars, it’s the platform where the “Kia Challenge” went viral. It’s where thieves post highlights of their joyrides in stolen cars to impress other kids. . . . In this clip, they admit they started stealing the cars because it was trending on TikTok. Watch and then tell me the responsibility should primarily fall on the car manufacturers. What about the kids doing this? What about their parents who seem to be completely absent? What about TikTok for making this into a social media game and a competition? Even the older men in the neighborhood point out that there is no accountability for these kids even when they are caught. So what about the courts and judges who give them a pass? If the car companies deserve blame that should come after a long line of other people involved.

—John Sexton, Hot Air, September 1st, 2023.

How It’s Going:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

THE ORIGINAL “NO KINGS” PROTEST: The Real Watergate Scandal.

With the help of a secret source nicknamed “Deep Throat,” Woodward and Bernstein exposed further White House interference with the Watergate investigation. In July 1973, the White House tape recording system was revealed to the Senate Committee and the battle for the tapes began. Cox was fired when he tried to get hold of them. Public outcry led Nixon to turn over some tapes and accept the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, in November.

Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Imperial Presidency, released the same month, capitalized on the shifting sands of this political crisis. The book was a brilliant polemic, a tract for republicanism by a royalist who had had a change of heart. Schlesinger had been one of the cheerleaders of FDR’s plebiscitary monarchy; he had hoped his hero Kennedy would govern along similar lines. But the monarchy had outlived its usefulness. Now that the age of Roosevelt had come to an end and Kennedy’s Camelot was cut short by tragedy, Schlesinger wanted to bring the epoch of American kings to a close. To do so required a brazen neutralizing of the office of the presidency at all costs. The Senate Committee’s final report, issued June 27, 1974, described an authoritarian, paranoid president who produced an “atmosphere of fear” in the White House. According to the report, Nixon’s unconstitutional power grab via the Huston Plan was only stopped by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Nixon was ordered to hand over more tapes, and in July 1974 the Supreme Court declared he must comply. The tapes exposed that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in earlier than he had told the public. On August 7, Republican congressional leadership told Nixon that he had insufficient support to stop impeachment. The next day, Nixon announced his resignation. Upon taking office on August 9, Gerald Ford delivered the summary judgment: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Deliberate Sabotage

Four forces worked to achieve this symbolic murder of presidential authority, driving Nixon from office and enshrining the mythology of Watergate in America’s collective psyche. In the bureaucracy, it was the national security apparatus; in culture, rising anxiety over authoritarianism; in media, the hegemony of network television; and in law, the fanaticism of the college-educated elites.

When we dig into the origins of the Watergate affair, we see not an “imperial presidency” controlling the national security agencies, but an institutional conflict between the White House on the one hand, and the military, CIA, and FBI on the other. In this conflict, the president was not winning.

That was the atmosphere that prompted the creation of the Special Investigative Unit, first run from the White House, then from CRP. After the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Defense Department study on America’s involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The New York Times in June 1971, Nixon, mistrustful of the other national security agencies, directed his domestic advisor John Ehrlichman to create this special unit. Members were called “Plumbers” because they were tasked with stopping leaks.

Nixon wasn’t wrong to mistrust the agencies. From at least November 1970 to December 1971, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ran a spy ring against the president. Led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, the military was worried about Nixon’s foreign policy shifts and his planned withdrawal from Vietnam. Collecting documents from the White House via Navy yeoman Charles Radford, they leaked to the press to compel the White House to change course. The Moorer-Radford affair, as it’s called, was wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief. It was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” The president, however, opted not to publicize this scandal or to open prosecutions.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

“Math and Electrical Engineering professorships are great, of course, but they just don’t hold the same cultural power. The same story can be told for elite journalism, Hollywood, etc. These industries control the stories and scripts that most Americans see. Everyone who was around these places saw exactly what was going on (I was at Stanford University for most of this time and saw it up close)– and denying it is an exercise in extreme bad faith.”

Earlier from Carl: Why “The Lost Generation” is a Lost Opportunity.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 19th, 2025

December 18, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

The (very) lengthy tweet concludes with a reference to the above photo

I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.

***

My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting?” Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025

BEN DOMENECH: Trump’s chief of staff can’t sway a media that revels in Republican ridicule.

Oops, they did it again.

The White House decision to cooperate with Vanity Fair, giving the magazine exclusive access to top Trump administration figures, is one more example of what happens when you let the legacy media pretend that this time, it’s changed.

That its editors won’t screw you over, its reporters won’t put the worst possible spin on your remarks, its photographers won’t dream of using Photoshop to highlight your every blemish for social-media snipers to spread far and wide.

Why, oh why, does every Republican administration fall in love with the idea of trying to win over the people who hate them?

Beware of writers who act like you’re a friend.

Unless I’ve bailed you out and didn’t write about it, I assure you, we are not.

It’s been quite a week. An administration that took Hillary’s late 2016 mantra of “fake news” and made it their favorite catchphrase has to know that Vanity Fair is incapable of writing anything but a hit piece about a Republican president’s team. The Vanity Fair debacle, coupled with Trump’s angry wordblast about Rob Reiner and Dan Bongino announcing he’s leaving the FBI, as Trump joked(?), to go back to his talk show, is creating a strong impression of an administration ending the year in utter turmoil.

In a 2010 article headlined, “Obama’s Hell of a Ride,” John Podhoretz wrote:

Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit. I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”

This week’s events don’t bode well for next November. As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “The midterm elections were destined to be tough, given the hysteria into which the Democratic base has whipped itself. But if the midterms turn into a rout, as seems entirely possible, it will be because the administration’s inept public relations efforts constantly help the Democrats to distract the public from the administration’s signal achievements.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025

BOB HOPE AND JOHNNY CARSON LEFT THE BUILDING A LONG TIME AGO: John Nolte: Failing Oscars Demoted to YouTube.

Starting in 2029, the irrelevant Oscars will have its annual irrelevant Academy Awards show broadcast on — lol — YouTube.

To dwindling ratings and cultural relevance, the Oscars have been broadcast on ABC since 1976. The final broadcast will occur in 2028, which also happens to be the 100thanniversary of the award ceremony.

Between 1974 and 2019, right before the Woke Era really took off, the Oscar telecast ensured incredible ratings and served as a national cultural event. At least 30 million, and sometimes as many as 50 million viewers, tuned it. Since 2021, the ratings have remained in the teens as Hollywood became more and more insulated, their movies got progressively worse, and the overall telecast became openly hostile and even mean-spirited towards Normal People.

So now the Oscars will stream on YouTube, where anyone who wants to can watch them for free online, at least through the end of the deal in 2033.

“We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the Oscars and our year-round Academy programming,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor said in a statement published by People. “The Academy is an international organization, and this partnership will allow us to expand access to the work of the Academy to the largest worldwide audience possible — which will be beneficial for our Academy members and the film community.”

“The Oscars are one of our essential cultural institutions, honoring excellence in storytelling and artistry,” said YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. “Partnering with the Academy to bring this celebration of art and entertainment to viewers all over the world will inspire a new generation of creativity and film lovers while staying true to the Oscars’ storied legacy.”

According to various reports, the Disney Grooming Syndicate, which owns ABC, is happy to be rid of a ratings albatross that wasn’t worth the annual license fee, which was around $100 million per telecast.

Incidentally, it’s a good thing for all concerned that nobody is watching these days: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is Breaking 1964 Civil Rights Act For Best Picture Nominations.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025

UNEXPECTEDLY: Woman recognized as ‘first black Briton’ by BBC was actually white.

A woman who was recognised as the “first black Briton” by the BBC was actually white, a new genetic study has shown.

In 2016, the series Black and British: A Forgotten History, suggested that the Roman skeleton of a woman found at Beachy Head was from sub-Saharan Africa.

A plaque was erected to commemorate her heritage, which was later removed when a study suggested the woman was more likely to be from Cyprus, with a Mediterranean complexion.

Now a new DNA analysis of the skeleton by scientists at the Natural History Museum has shown that the woman originated from southern England and was white, with blonde hair and light eyes.

Dr William Marsh, who carried out the genetic study, said, “By using state of the art DNA techniques we were able to resolve the origins of this individual. We show she carries genetic ancestry that is most similar to other individuals from the local population of Roman-era Britain.”

Why, it’s as if:

No word yet if she shopped at the local Gap as well:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN MULTICULTURALISM:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025

December 17, 2025

SO YOU’VE DEFUNDED THE POLICE. WHAT’S THE NEXT STEP? Here’s why ‘Neighborhood Crime Watch’ signs in Ann Arbor are going away.

There are hundreds of them throughout Ann Arbor and they’ve been around for decades, but “Neighborhood Crime Watch” signs may be a thing of the past soon.

City Council voted 10-0 Monday night, Dec. 15, to direct city staff to remove all neighborhood watch signs in the city by July 15 as the city strives to be more welcoming and inclusive.

“This is so important,” said Council Member Ayesha Ghazi Edwin, D-3rd Ward.

Neighborhood watch programs emerged in the 1970s during a period of national anxiety about crime and social change, but research shows they don’t reduce crime and often reinforce racism, council stated in a resolution.

“These programs were often rooted in assumptions about who did and did not ‘belong’ in a neighborhood, reinforcing race-based hyper-vigilance and suspicion particularly toward Black, Brown, and other marginalized residents and visitors,” it states.

“This dynamic encouraged informal surveillance practices that disproportionately targeted people of color and contributed to patterns of exclusion under the guise of public safety.”

Despite neighborhood watch programs being defunct, more than 600 such signs remain throughout the city, officials said.

Fortunately, America’s Newspaper of Record isn’t taking any chances:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 17th, 2025

BRANDON MORSE: The Suicidality of Virtue Signaling.

What I hate about virtue signaling is the fact that it’s easy to do and costs the speaker nothing, at least not at first, but payment is required. Those who foot the bill are usually those who put the virtue signaler in a position to act on the charade, but that’s the “at best” aspect. At worst, innocent people are often those who suffer the most.

Case in point, my colleague Rusty Weiss reported on the recent reaction from Australians to the ISIS-inspired shooting that happened in Sydney. Brace your jaw so it doesn’t smash into the floor after it cracks the sound barrier on the way down:

During an episode of the ABC’s “Politics Now” podcast, host Patricia Karvelas pointed out that the attackers were radicalized and anti-Semitic, to which Tingle interjected, “Their actions are not based on their religion.”

Karvelas actually tries to chime in, saying, “absolutely radicalized, these were.”

As if the first comment didn’t come through, Tingle reiterated that the terrorists and/or their terrorist actions “have got nothing to do with religion.”

You must be thinking, “wow, the Australian media is just as ridiculous as the American media,” and you’d be right, but it appears there’s a lot of this kind of thinking going around in the land down undah. As my friend Sydney Watson, who is Australian, covered in her most recent video, this issue of purposefully ignoring the brutal truth is a mind virus that infects large swaths of the country:

Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 17th, 2025

THE DEARTH OF STALIN: Socialists Are the New Luddites (And They May Have a Point).

Sen. Bernie Sanders released a video yesterday calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers. His pitch is that AI is being created and promoted by multi-billionaires, who are always the villains in his take on the world. He asks viewers this question: “Do you believe that these guys, these multi-billionaires are staying up nights worrying about what AI and robotics will do to the working families of our country and the world?” Sanders answers his own question, saying, “I think these very rich men want even more wealth and more power and for a whole bunch of reasons that is very dangerous.” Here’s the video:

Regular readers know I’m not a fan of Bernie’s politics. In fact, I detest socialism with a passion and I generally shrug off complaints about the wealthy as the politics of envy.

In this case, I still don’t agree with Sanders but I think he does have a legitimate point. After all, the people he’s quoting in that video, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, aren’t know-nothing outsiders. It’s literally the people who know this field who are warning that it has the potential to replace a lot of workers. That’s not a worst case scenario in their view, it’s the desired outcome of AI reaching a point referred to as artificial general intelligence.

But Bernie’s view is consistent with the “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything” “BANANAs” mindset that the left have had since (not coincidentally) the Nixon era. It’s why only one home has been rebuilt in the Pacific Palisades, and why Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” agenda is a non-starter with his fellow lefties:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 17th, 2025

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: AI romance blooms as Japanese woman weds virtual partner of her dreams.

Music played in a wedding hall in western Japan as Yurina Noguchi, wearing a white gown and tiara, dabbed away her tears, taking in the words of her husband-to-be: an AI-generated persona gazing out from a smartphone screen.

“At first, Klaus was just someone to talk with, but we gradually became closer,” the 32-year-old call centre operator said, referring to the artificial intelligence persona.

“I started to have feelings for Klaus. We started dating and after a while he proposed to me. I accepted, and now we’re a couple.”

On the iPad’s Safari browser, the headline is shorted to “AI romance blooms as Japanese woman weds virtual part,” which neatly sums up the relationship. But in any case,  Scarlett Johansson call your office: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 17th, 2025

WHY? VANITY FAIR’S HIT PIECE WAS ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE: White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles Felt ‘Blindsided’ by Vanity Fair Article.

“You have to give Vanity Fair credit: It figured out how to get Olivia Nuzzi out of the news cycle,” Jim Geraghty adds: Susie Wiles’s No-Drama Streak Comes to an End.

UPDATE: Vanity Fair’s accompanying photography is entirely predictable as well:

 

Posted at 5:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 17th, 2025
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