Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

April 29, 2025

ANSWERS TO 21st CENTURY QUESTIONS: The Truth about Drone Deliveries! (Video.)

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2025

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS (OR THE LACK THEREOF): The Junior Anti-Sex League Gets Results!

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Actual headline (still up) at The Atlantic — Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.

Three weeks later, The Week reported that the Mull’s dark dreams fortunately did not come true: We should be grateful for good news in Georgia.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Atlanta is not burning. Bodies are not piled up in the streets. Hospitals in Georgia are not being overwhelmed; in fact, they are virtually empty. There is no mad rush for ventilators (remember those?). Instead, men, women, and children in the Peach State are returning to some semblance of normal life: working outside their homes, going to restaurants and bars, getting haircuts, exercising, and most important, spending time with their friends and families and worshipping God. The opening that began more than three weeks ago is continuing apace.

Oh, my apologies, you were waiting for bad news? Sorry, I forgot, we were actually not supposed to be rooting for the virus. Despite the apparent relish behind headlines like “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” one assumes that most Americans, even the ones most committed to omnidirectional prophecies of doom, were actually hoping this would happen. While it really is a shame that we do not get to gloat about the cravenness and stupidity of yet another GOP politician, I think on balance most of us will be glad to hear that Gov. Brian Kemp was not badly wrong here.

What is happening instead of the widely predicted bloodbath? Confirmed cases of the virus are obviously increasing (though the actual rolling weekly average of new ones have been headed down for nearly a month) while deaths remain more or less flat. This is in fact what happens when you test more people for a disease that is not fatal or even particularly serious for the vast majority of those who contract it, for which the median age of death is higher than the American life expectancy.

How was this possible? One answer is that the lockdown did not in fact do what it was supposed to do, which is to say, meaningfully impede transmission of the virus. In fact, data both from states like Georgia and from abroad suggests that the lifting of lockdowns is positively correlated with a decrease in rates of infection. This could be because lockdowns are inherently ineffective at slowing down a disease whose spread appears to be largely intrafamilial and nosocomial.

Georgia’s Republican governor earned bipartisan attacks when he wisely reopened his state in late April: Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior.

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Of course, by 2023, Trump was far from the only former official distancing himself from the debacle of 2020: Anthony Fauci Says Don’t Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns and School Closures.

Amanda Hull of the Atlantic’s about-face was much faster, taking only a month: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2025

HEY, IT’S AN EASY MISTAKE TO MAKE. COULD HAPPEN TO ANYBODY: Nike is getting hammered for ‘tone-deaf’ ad at London Marathon: ‘Heads need to roll.’

The company issued an apology over the ad.

Nike’s latest advertisement at the London Marathon was lambasted as tone-deaf and completely disrespectful.

The red-colored sign read, “Never again. Until next year.” It was supposed to refer to the spirit of runners finishing a trial and returning the next year, but many took it as an insult to the victims of the Holocaust.

Among the critics was billionaire investor Bill Ackman.

“The idea that @Nike would make light of the holocaust using Hitler-red imagery in a post-October 7th world is stunning. Heads need to roll. WTF Nike?” he posted.

“I assume that this was unintentional, but it is hard to imagine that there was no one at @Nike, on the marketing team, at their advertising firm, banner manufacture etc. who didn’t know or who didn’t think to Google the words ‘Never again,'” he added in a second tweet.

“I’m guessing it’s not super fun in the halls of @Nike right now. So many unforced errors. Never again? WTAF was this marketing person thinking?? A purge of mid level marketers must be underway. Plus some high level ones,” replied XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey.

“What on earth was @Nike thinking? They posted this enormous billboard in London for the London Marathon, just days after Holocaust Remembrance Day, but not for Holocaust Remembrance Day,” wrote pro-Israel author Aviva Klompas.

How many of layers of executives had to sign off on such a campaign?

Flashback to 2019, when Nike issued a pair of Betsy Ross-flag embedded sneakers, likely only so that uber-woke Nike endorser Colin Kaepernick could dunk on them, to coincide with the Fourth of July. In Nike’s collective mind, this is evil and “offensive:”

But “Never Again. Until Next Year,” on a red background, is perfectly acceptable to Nike. Also, pay no attention to who makes the corporation’s sneakers. Or as Deadspin deadpanned in 2020: “Nike would very much like to keep its slave labor, thank you.”

Related: Meet the Nike Marketing Specialist Who Says Israel, Not Hamas, Is ‘Massacring Civilians.’

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2025

April 28, 2025

A LONG TIME AGO, IN THREE-MARTINI LUNCHES FAR, FAR AWAY:

Of course, there are many precedents for those who bet quite wrong on emerging technologies. In 1977, Arthur C. Clarke described the skepticism in many quarters regarding the arrival of the telephone on the centennial anniversary of its invention:

Man is the communicating animal; he demands news, information, entertainment, almost as much as food. In fact, as a functioning human being, he can survive much longer without food — even without water! — than without information, as experiments in sensory deprivation have shown. This is a truly astonishing fact; one could construct a whole philosophy around it.

So any major advance in communications capability that can be conceived can be realized in practice, and that same advance will come into widespread use just as soon as it is practicable. Often sooner; the public can’t wait for “state of the art” to settle down. Remember the first clumsy phonographs, radios, tape recorders? And would you believe the date of the first music broadcast? It was barely a year after the invention of the telephone! On April 2, 1877, a “telegraphic harmony” apparatus in Philadelphia sent “Yankee Doodle” to sixteen loudspeakers — well, soft-speakers — in New York’s Steinway Hall. Alexander Graham Bell was in the audience, and one would like to know if he complimented the promoter — his now forgotten rival, Elisha Gray, who got to the Patent Office just those fatal few hours too late…

Gray was not the only one to be caught out by the momentum of events. When news of the telephone reached England through Cyrus Field’s undersea telegraphic cable, the chief engineer of the Post Office was asked whether this new Yankee invention would be of any practical value. He gave the forthright reply: “No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone — but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”

In 1998, nine years after Tim Berners-Lee created the When the World Wide Web, soon-to-be Enron advisor Paul Krugman was succinct: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

SPOILER ALERT: THEY WON’T. The media must admit to covering up Biden’s decline.

The media’s role in deflecting from Biden’s decline started in January 2020. John Hendrickson wrote at the Atlantic, “His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.” However Biden was not battling a stutter and had said he overcame it as a child.

The “stutter” line would serve as the fallback excuse for almost the entirety of his presidency. Jake Tapper, Thompson’s co-author, attacked then-RNC chairwoman Lara Trump when she said Biden was clearly in a state of cognitive decline. Tapper used the stutter line. Tapper’s entire book appears predicated on the idea that neither he nor any of his colleagues had any idea about Biden’s state until Tapper saw it at the debate he moderated. It’s worth nothing that CNN hired Kate Bedingfeld, the Biden White House communications director, in 2023.

NBC’s Jonathan Allen is currently promoting his book about the 2024 race and the behind-the-scenes scheming to force Biden out of the race. But it was also Allen’s network who said Republicans were floating a “quiet conspiracy” that Biden would not be on the ticket. One of the authors of that piece, Dasha Burns, is now White House bureau chief at Politico. MSNBC’s flagship program Morning Joe boldly declared Biden to be in the best shape of his life, just three weeks prior to calling on him to withdraw. Neither Joe Scarborough nor Mika Brzezinski have offered an explanation or apology as they attempt to distance themselves from the Biden family and advisors.

In October of 2004, with the presidential election a month away, fellow network anchormen Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings immediately circled ranks around Dan Rather, even as his career was imploding. Beginning a decade or so ago, CNN’s Brian Stelter made him a regular guest on his Orwellian-named Reliable Sources Sunday show. But Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes were two people. Virtually the entire DNC-MSM apparatus protected Biden from attack. They hoped that a second Biden inauguration, followed quickly by Kamala replacing Biden would provide sufficient time and cover for the American public to forget their role in carrying Biden over the finish line. Today, they’re hoping that their nonstop attacks on Trump will do the job. Hillary famously invented “the vast right-wing conspiracy” in 1998. But we’ve seen the real thing in action on the left attempting to protect Sundown Joe. As Stephen Miller concludes, “Until journalists volunteer the truth about how, exactly, they worked with the Biden White House, their books should be written off as attempts to cover their asses.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH ELECTRICAL DECOMPOSITION! Blackout risk ‘made worse by net zero.’

A reliance on net zero energy left Spain and Portugal vulnerable to the mass blackouts engulfing the region, experts said last night.

In what is believed to be Europe’s largest power cut, tens of millions of people were left without electricity, while flights were grounded, trains halted and whole cities were left without power, internet access or other vital services.

The cause of the initial fault in the region’s electricity grid is still being investigated, and the EU has insisted that there were no indications that it was a cyberattack.

However, energy experts have blamed a heavy reliance on solar and wind farms in Spain for leaving the region’s power grid vulnerable to such a crisis.

A state of emergency was declared in Spain, while in Portugal, water company EPAL said supplies could also be disrupted.

Queues formed at shops of people seeking to purchase emergency supplies like gaslights, generators and batteries.

Thanks to the EU, AlGore, Greta, and the “Just Stop Oil” crowd, the European mind cannot comprehend the existence of reliable electrical power:

Posted at 4:41 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: Fiery, But Mostly Peaceful Protests.

The New Hotness? David Brooks: Judge Dugan’s Actions Were Illegal but Also ‘Heroic.’

NYT’s David Brooks doesn’t “know the specific details” of the Judge Dugan case — but says she was “heroic.” “If the federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, that is two things…” “One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic.” Un. Freaking. Real.

* * * * * * * *

Are judges and criminal illegal aliens above the law? The shock emanating from elected Democrats makes it pretty clear that many on the left expect them to be. The fact that the Trump administration refuses to play along is blowing their minds. Here’s Tom Homan saying, in so many words, no one is above the law.

Much more like this, please.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

PAPER BALLOTS, EH?

Flashback: Paper ballots are hack-proof. It’s time to bring them back.

—Glenn in USA Today, June 30th, 2017.

And: Paper Ballots.

—Glenn at Tech Central Station, November 5th, 2002.

(I hope I was correcting a typo and not stepping on a joke. — Charlie)

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT: 60 Minutes Host Scott Pelley Calls Out Paramount In ‘Shocking’ On-Air Attack On CBS’ Parent Company.

“Bill [Owens] resigned Tuesday — it was hard on him and hard on us,” Pelley said in his closing remarks on the show he has worked on for more than 20 years.

“But he did it for us — and you,” he told viewers — then unexpectedly suggested that Owens’ exit could end the era of coverage being “accurate and fair.”

“Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger,” he said, noting that it needs approval from the Trump administration.

“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” he said.

Pelley said that while “none of our stories have been blocked,” Owens “felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Please let me know when CBS’ era of “independent journalism” begins; for the last 60 years, its “reporting” has moved entirely in lockstep with the DNC.

Related: CBS 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley blasted for biting the $5million hand that feeds him in bold on-air outburst.

‘When you work for wages, you ride for the brand. Don’t like what you’re doing, quit. Scott Pelley bit the hand that feeds him and should be frog marched from the studio,’ one person said.

‘This show has been nothing but fraudulent the past eight plus years. This editorial by Scott Pelley jumps the shark,’ said another.

‘Find someone who loves you the way Scott Pelley loves himself,’ a third person said.

‘If Pelley believed a word of this then he should resign. He won’t though because it’s all nonsense. He knows it and we know it,’ added a fourth.

Others called out Pelley for failing to address the other recent scandals 60 Minutes and CBS have been involved in.

You’re gonna need a much bigger blog: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

SHEDEUR SANDERS, ICARUS DESCENDING:

Oh, the promotion. The hype. Shedeur Sanders walked into the NFL Draft a legend in his own mind — literally. He built the hype, using daddy’s money to set up a bespoke “draft room,” decked out in anticipatory bling-filled celebration of his inevitable first-round pick. (The shelf of teams hats, from which he was going to pick one for the cameras, was a nice touch.) “LEGENDARY” and “PERFECT TIMING” went the slogans written on the wall behind the couch where he was to sit. He appeared conspicuously in public to be photographed wearing an enormous silver chain necklace emblazoned “$$2,” his brand nickname. (The dollar signs look like the letter “s,” get it?)

And then he went undrafted in the first round. And then he went undrafted in the second round. And then he went undrafted in the third round — by which point the first night’s events had concluded and the world was agog. The next day Sanders again went undrafted in the fourth round, which is when social media began pulling out its most brutal jokes.

Finally, the drama reached its gloriously disgraceful denouement in the fifth round: Shedeur Sanders was drafted as the 144th pick by the Cleveland Browns. For those unfamiliar with the reputation of the Browns franchise, this is as if God decided Dante hadn’t added enough circles of hell to the Inferno; Cleveland is a notorious graveyard for football talent, and particularly for quarterbacks, who tend to resemble torn, leaky sacks of flour after a year behind the Browns O-line. (The list of “Famous Cleveland Quarterbacks” makes for even shorter airplane reading than the “Famous Jewish Sports Legends” leaflet.)

Deion Sanders himself once opined, back in 2018, that anyone selected in the draft by the Browns ought to refuse to play. So let’s see what his son does here! Needless to say, the world has sent both Shedeur Sanders and his father a message: Shedeur’s talent — as groomed and shielded and questionably represented by his father — is nowhere near good enough to sustain either his or his father’s ego. Deion Sanders himself was truly a special talent in the game (I had many explain this to me over the weekend), and the only thing that truly ever held him back was an equivalent level of self-regard. Shedeur — as his father’s son — shares an apparently similar level of self-regard. (He refused to attend the NFL combine and apparently flunked every interview with various franchise officials.) He does not share his father’s talent level. NFL teams will tolerate Deion levels of self-promotion and hype only from those with Deion-level talent — and not a second longer once they begin to slip. Shedeur never had a chance.

Related: Shedeur Sanders Finally Gets Drafted, and Then His Dad’s Old Tweets Surfaced.

“Look, I’m not here to endlessly dunk on the guy, but there’s a lesson here. NFL teams are professional organizations. They don’t care what ESPN says or how much Stephen A. Smith rants and raves. Shedeur Sanders thought he was bigger than the process, and he paid the price. Perhaps this will humble him and help him have a good career. We’ll see.” Shedeur Sanders infamously said, “Don’t get me if you ain’t trying to change the franchise or the coach.” Well, here’s your chance to both prove dad wrong and singlehandedly jumpstart the most moribund franchise in the NFL.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

ANSWERS TO THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism.

When Lauren developed his own retail palaces in the 1980s, he chose properties like the former Rhinelander mansion of the Upper East Side of Manhattan that applied the same principle on a grander scale. Lauren’s restaurants, including the Polo Bar in Midtown Manhattan, are popular partly because they create a tiny stage on which his style of dressing looks appropriate, rather than for any merits of the cuisine. It’s said that Lauren even provides a location-appropriate wardrobe for visitors to his residences around the world. Nothing could be farther from, say, John Fetterman’s insistence on dressing for the Senate floor as if he were joining a pickup basketball game.

Lauren is fond of insisting that he’s not interested in trends. Actually, the details of his products are less consistent than this claim suggests. Lauren got his start as an independent operator selling napkin-width neckties that were a striking contrast to the slim lines of the Mad Men era. As admiring observers recognized, it was brilliant marketing strategy that allowed Lauren to build up a full product line. Once you bought a fat tie, you needed a new shirt with a taller and wider collar. A shirt like that wouldn’t look right under the tubular “sack” coat then favored by American men. So you also had to buy a new suit featuring broader shoulders, wider lapels, and more shape around the waist. Lauren launched his career, in short, as a vendor of the kind of 1970s gear that is still the butt of jokes. An unintentional revelation of Ralph Lauren: In His Own Fashion, a 2019 coffee table book by the clothier Alan Flusser, is just how trendy some of this stuff was.

The days of lapels that touched the shoulders passed, and Lauren had worked the exaggeration out of his look by the 1990s. Although it receives less attention in authorized chronicles of the Ralph empire, this was also the period when Polo was adopted as the aspirational brand of hiphop, then emerging as the world’s dominant popular music.

Lauren jettisoned his fat tie phase by the end of the 1970s. In 1991, Tom Wolfe discussed why this was a trend that didn’t really catch on in the boardroom in an interview with his longtime editor, Clay Felker, for M Inc. in their January 1991 issue: 

TW: I ran into Richard Press—this must have been about 1970, I guess. He was telling me how finally at his stores, J. Press—against all of his better instincts—he started stocking these big lapels and all the rest of it. He said they just died there on the rack, and he said finally it dawned on him that “the reason we can’t sell these things is that executives in New York were tired of looking like their messengers.” That’s the real problem with these innovations. You’re going to be picked up by messengers and other groovy-looking people. You’re not going to have that status demarcation between upper and lower.

* * * * * * * * *

CF: As you look at what people are wearing now, do you see anything interesting or do you have any comments about international style?

TW: You see American casual clothes everywhere. Just the triumph of jeans alone, it’s another example of something else we were talking about—what a tremendous victory the United States has won, not just in the political area with the collapse of Communism, but in the cultural area. The Berlin Wall came down and all these pictures on television of young Germans climbing the wall, they looked like Akron. Everybody’s got on these sneakers and their jeans and the wind-breakers-the American windbreakers-and all the rest of it. Ben Wattenberg makes a point which is rather nice, I think, that we’re always wringing our hands because we’re driving Japanese cars and all our young people think that Toyota is the basic American car and we use Japanese computers to transmit all our most vital information. We watch television on Japanese sets, we run with Japanese Walkmans planted to our skulls, we watch movies on Japanese VCRs-as does the rest of the world. He says, what movies are they watching? He says, how many Japanese movies does anybody around the world watch on these things? They’re all watching American movies. On the Walkman, they’re all listening to American music. He says if you have to choose, if you can only choose one, if you can only dominate either the hardware or the software, he says for God’s sake dominate the software. This, I think, is true in casual clothes. That’s the American triumph, but it’s still the English that won the battle of formal clothes.

It was Lauren who created a more stylized version of what could be found at Brooks Brothers and brought it to the masses. But eventually, as Samuel Goldman writes at Compact, Lauren’s company eventually went back to the future:

After its Ron Burgundy phase, Polo settled on a relaxed, grownup silhouette that acquired shape from the drape of the cloth rather than the wearer’s physique.

Popular in the ’80s and ’90s, this cut was an outlier to the preference for very slim proportions that took over around the turn of the 21st century. Without abandoning the old inspirations for fabric or color, Ralph Lauren products shrank until they could be worn successfully only by teenage ectomorphs. The constrictive results made an unfortunate contrast to those classic advertising campaigns orchestrated by the photographer Bruce Weber. The key to the success of Weber’s images wasn’t so much the beauty of the models, although that was considerable. It was that they looked so relaxed in the soft textures and accommodating proportions.  

Plus ça change.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 28th, 2025

April 27, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN DEI:

UPDATE: Bombshell new report reveals who made fatal mistake that caused Black Hawk to collide with jet and kill 67.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 27th, 2025

April 26, 2025

BRIAN KRASSENSTEIN: Are We Going to Start Arresting Farmers Now Who Help Illegals Evade Arrest?

I hope so!

Such actions would be very much approved by leftist icon Cesar Chavez, a staunch foe of illegal immigration.

[H]is views on border control would be a perfect fit in the Trump administration.

As a child working with his family in the California fields, Cesar quickly learned the reason farmworkers were paid so little and treated so poorly: As his biographer Miriam Pawel writes, “a surplus of labor enabled growers to treat workers as little more that interchangeable parts, cheaper and easier to replace than machines.”

Chavez acolytes today try to explain away his hawkish pro-border views as coming from a different historical context, applicable only to specific strikes and the strike-breakers that farmers tried to import. But this is false.

In fact, even before he started the union and fought against illegal immigration, he was opposed to the bracero program, which legallyimported cheap, disposable labor from Mexico at the expense of American citizens (of Mexican and other origins) who had been working in the fields. Pawel quotes Chavez as saying, “It looks almost impossible to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros.”

Congress ended the bracero program in 1964, and the next 15 years were the salad days, as it were, for farmworkers — until illegal immigration became so pervasive (despite Chavez’s efforts) that workers lost all bargaining power.

But during those 15 years, Chavez fought illegal immigration tenaciously. In 1969, he marched to the Mexican border to protest farmers’ use of illegal aliens as strikebreakers. He was joined by Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Senator Walter Mondale.

It’s time topple some statues, and rename many, many streets: The 21st-century left would view all of the above as quite fascist-y, Cesar, Ralph and Walter.

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 26th, 2025

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: The Bay Area and Detroit rank similarly on a very unfortunate list.

Particle pollution, which includes dust, dirt, soot and smoke, “gets into your lungs because it’s so fine,” said Ruacho, adding that it can also end up in your bloodstream. The impact of particle pollution translates to asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, with prolonged exposure increasing people’s likelihood of developing lung cancer.

In terms of ozone, the San Francisco Bay Area ranked 14 on the list of worst places in the country this year. “That’s an improvement,” said Ruacho, “because last year it was 12.” In the 2024 report, the Bay Area ranked fifth worst for particle pollution. This year, it improved slightly and ranks sixth, a spot it shares with the Detroit metro area.

The Frisco-Detroit singularity is proceeding apace.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 26th, 2025

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

Heh, indeed. Here’s the underlying article by the Bee: 

The young man had previously had his sights set on earning a degree from a prestigious educational institution before coming to the realization that he could save a fortune by teaching himself how to hate Israel at home.

“I was all set to go to university, but I realized I could just learn all about hating Jews from people on the Internet,” Doulton said. “It’s really saved me a lot of time and let me start hating Jews faster than all my friends.”

For those who followed Candace Owens’ many zigs and zags through conspiracy theory land, the last sentence of the Bee’s article is a hoot.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 26th, 2025

PURE HOSS: Theodore Roosevelt Championed Individual Virtue And Adventure.

Roosevelt’s politics and political thought are bounded by the twin principles of promise and performance. For individual and country alike, promise is bound to an understanding of civilization and virtue. The educated, civilized individual has a duty to engage in public service for the advancement of society toward greater development of its civilized life. This requires individual virtue, or character, as Roosevelt would often refer to it, and the premier virtue was courage. It is courage that inspires the individual to throw his hat in the ring to do his duty, and which supports him through the challenges that such public service presents. Likewise, the country is also to fulfill its duty in the service of civilization or else suffer the justifiable and deserved reprobation of those countries made of sterner stuff. The country, like the individual, brings to its task the fruits of its ancestry. The race characteristics, as Roosevelt termed them, of any country, are of great importance to its effort to fulfill its duty and to shoulder its share of worldly burdens. The dissolute individual and country will both face the prospect of losing ground absolutely as well as in relation to those that strenuously pursue their duty to civilization.

Roosevelt believed that the United States of his time was abundantly endowed with the attributes of promise: an energetic, free, and virtuous citizenry dedicated to noble Anglo-Saxon ideals and principles. Fulfillment of its promise, however, required prudence in selecting the means through which the country could perform at a level commensurate with its promise. Domestically, the country had to maintain, if not improve, its level of virtue, which required opposition to political tendencies toward either utopianism or plutocracy. Roosevelt consistently pursued policies intended to improve education and virtue while at the same time restricting anarchist and socialist pursuit of utopian ideals, and regulating the plutocratic influences of wealth and big business.

Teddy was the definitive Great Man of history. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that the eunuchs of the 2020-era left wanted to cancel him and tear down his statues: Adieu, Teddy Roosevelt.

I think it is a pity that the Traveling Racism Outrage Mob (TROM) has it in for Teddy Roosevelt. I agree with President Trump who, when he heard the news, tweeted “Ridiculous, don’t do it!” Quite right. For one thing, TROM could learn some useful life lessons from Teddy Roosevelt. Although there is much in his progressive politics with which I disagree, I greatly admire him for his character and determination. A sickly boy, plagued by asthma, he nonetheless devoted himself to the “strenuous life” and achieved great things. Above all, he did not whine.

That is one thing our professional anti-racists and identity-politics ideologues — especially feminists — could learn with profit: stop whining about how unfair life is to you and do something to improve your lot. You would thus make everyone around you happier, and you would be happier yourself.

Teddy Roosevelt also had a deep social-political message that our generation, especially paid-up members of TROM, should rediscover. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

He was thinking of the habit of calling recent immigrants Italian-American or Irish-Americans or German-Americans. He was dead set against this practice of coining “hyphenated Americans.” He would not have been surprised to discover that the lowly hyphen was a potent weapon in the divisive armory of multiculturalism and identity politics. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean “American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.” It means “only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.”

And of course, no “Progressive” journalist ever confronted Hillary Clinton about her longtime allegiance to the man the Year Zero far left attempted to toss down the memory hole in 202o-2021:

● Shot: “I think that Teddy Roosevelt was a great American.”

—Hillary Clinton in a May 1, 2008 interview with Bill O’Reilly.

● Double-Shot: “It’s time to take a page from Teddy Roosevelt’s book and get our economy working for Americans again. That’s what I’ll do as president.”

—Hillary, as quoted in an October 28, 2015 Dow Jones Marketwatch.com article titled “Hillary Clinton wants to be Teddy Roosevelt.”

● Hangover:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 26th, 2025

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP: Why Democrats Should Hate (And Republicans Should Love) Barack Obama, the Foundational MAGA Warrior.

Obama was reportedly telling people that it “made the most sense” for Biden to only serve one term rather than “test fate again at eighty-one years old,” according to Allen and Parnes. As president, Biden was obsessed with outshining his former boss. He would celebrate perceived accomplishments by saying, “Obama would be jealous.” Biden was hardly alone in his resentment of Obama and his minions. His inner circle, including Dr. Jill, was just as driven by their spite. According to Whipple, by the time Biden was forced out of the race in July of last year, “almost everyone” in the president’s camp “blamed Barack Obama.” Perhaps the main reason why Biden decided to quickly endorse Kamala Harris after dropping out was because he knew how much it would annoy Obama, who had “deep misgivings” about the VP and favored a “mini-primary” he was sure Harris would lose. “[T]he most satisfying aspect of his decision to endorse had little to do with Harris,” Allen and Parnes report. “‘It was a fuck-you to Obama’s plan,’ said one person close to both men. ‘At that moment, you have very few things you control, and that’s the one thing he had control over, and he chose to stick it to Obama.'”

As a result, Democrats were stuck with a candidate who was arguably even worse than Hillary Clinton. Trump sailed to victory and even won the popular vote, paving the way for America’s restoration and a new Golden Age. Thanks, Obama. Few have done more to ensure Trump’s success, which is also America’s success. He might never have run if Obama had been more respectful in 2011. He might not have won in 2016 if Obama hadn’t picked such a terrible successor, and he might not have won so easily in 2024 if not for the petty feud between Obama and Biden, a pair of raging narcissists. This turned out great for America, so perhaps it’s time for Republicans to start appreciating Obama’s contributions to the cause. On the other hand, if you are an obnoxious Democrat who despises this country and thinks Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, you should probably hate the guy.

In his classic 1993 American Spectator article, P.J. O’Rourke explored “100 Reasons Why Jimmy Carter Was a Better President than Bill Clinton:” before concluding, “100. And let us not forget that Jimmy Carter gave us one thing Bill Clinton can never possibly give us—Ronald Reagan.”

Our 21st century Jimmy Carter concluded his second and third terms by securing the presidency of Donald Trump. Perhaps Barry sees him as much more of a kindred spirit and showman than either Hillary or Sundown Joe:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 26th, 2025

IT’S COME TO THIS: How Did Having Babies Become Right-Wing?

I suspect it was because I’m visibly pregnant.

On my way into the hall, I encountered ten protesters wearing surgical masks, all apparently in their early 20s. They were holding signs that declared, “NO Nazis in Austin!” and “Natalism Nazism,” and when they saw me approaching, several members screamed at me: “Nazi!”

When I clarified that I was not a Nazi, but a reporter, they calmed down, but I did wonder if it was my bump that had riled them up. I asked what they were doing here, and they identified themselves as members of Austin Students for a Democratic Society. The organizer of the protest, Arishia Papri, 20, was dressed in a fedora, purple suit, and bow tie; I asked him, “Is it fair to shout at attendees who have young children with them?”

“I think everyone who came to this, who’s coming to this, knows what they are here for,” he replied. “This is a conference of neo-Nazi, eugenic, racist, pseudoscientific ideologies.”

This was not, as it turned out, an accurate description of NatalCon, though it was certainly representative of the left’s reaction to it.

Established in 2023 by Kevin Dolan, a Mormon father of six and a conservative influencer, NatalCon is a response to the fact that, in America—as in dozens of nations across the world—the birth rate has fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. In 2023, U.S. fertility hit a historical low of 1.62. The strange thing is, it’s not that Americans don’t want babies: Men and women, of all demographics, consistently report wanting more kids than they ultimately have.

Isn’t everything right-wing these days?

According to the Grauniad, fitness is definitely right-wing:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 26th, 2025
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