Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 15, 2026

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Graham Platner’s Face Now Too Toxic for National Dem Ads — Even as Maine Dems Keep Riding Psycho Train.

If he makes it past the primary, I’m sure he’ll be in plenty of the other side’s national ads.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Ian McKellen Says He Imagined Destroying Mar-a-Lago While Filming Avengers: Doomsday.

The actor rose from his seat to reenact the moment for the audience, explaining that the Russo brothers wanted him to appear even angrier as Magneto unleashed his powers.

“They told me to look more furious — make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying,” said McKellen.

That’s when the actor came up with his own motivation for the scene.

“So I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!’ ” he said, referring to President Donald Trump‘s Florida estate.

How much is McKellen acting when he plays a cartoon supervillain? Flashback: Defacing the Bible because of Homosexuality.

In an August 10 interview on New Zealand’s TV1 Close Up program McKellen was confronted by the interviewer questioning the truth of the rumor “He’s the one, that when he stays in hotels rips the part of the Bible out that criticizes homosexuality.”

“Yes it is true,” responded McKellen in even tones. “It’s Leviticus 18:22 that I object to, or is it 22:18, I’ve always got to look it up. Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman, it is an abomination. And they, I think the punishment for an abomination was being stoned to death,” he said.

McKellen added, “I think it’s rather obscene and pornographic, and shouldn’t be there, so I remove it.”

Asked how many Bibles he has vandalized, McKellen replied, “I have no idea, but other people do it as well, people send me evidence that they have been removing that.”

McKellen has been vandalizing Bibles in the same fashion for at least a few years. He first admitted publicly to the activity in 2004 in an interview with the UK Telegraph.

It seems odd then that McKellen imagines himself destroying the property of someone who’s been a gay rights proponent for decades.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: It’s the Age of Sanders, Too.

Indeed, in one respect, Mr. Sanders’s achievement is more historic than Mr. Trump’s. Not that his electoral record is better. Not that his proposals have become law. What makes Mr. Sanders significant is his novelty. He alone is responsible for bringing socialism into the political mainstream.

By contrast, Mr. Trump swims in the deep currents of American life. Populism predates 1776. Nationalism is rooted in our history. America is the exemplary capitalist nation. Mr. Trump has been a fixture in popular culture for 40 years. He embodies aspects of U.S. identity: glamour, spectacle, volume, braggadocio, success and excess.

Nor did Mr. Trump build his movement from scratch. He seized an opening. He used political tools that others had left to rust: immigration restriction, tariffs, traditionalism, confrontation over gentility, social media, tentpole rallies that married Tea Party populism with the concerns and attitude of blue-collar Reagan Democrats. Mr. Trump’s genius was to bring these tropes and tactics under his inimitable personality. The Republican Party wouldn’t be the same.

Mr. Sanders’s task was harder. His socialism put him at odds with the Democrats, a party to which he has never formally belonged. In 2010, according to Gallup, 50% of Democrats had a positive view of socialism. President Obama distanced himself from the term.

Mr. Sanders’s campaigns tapped a reservoir of youthful antagonism toward the American system. When acolytes took up his message, they found that hostility to Mr. Trump was driving the Democratic base to the left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ousted a 10-term Democratic incumbent in 2018. She formed the socialist “Squad” with Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley.

Mr. Sanders’s causes—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Abolish ICE—set the party’s agenda. In 2020, Joe Biden had no choice but to absorb Mr. Sanders’s movement into his campaign and presidency. The rest of us had to live with the consequences.

Some much more so than others: A Bernie Bro Shot Steve Scalise.

Scalise was the victim of a Democrat terrorist who, inspired by the apocalyptic rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, that millions would die and the planet was in peril because of Republican policies, shot up a Virginia baseball field full of Republican lawmakers in June of 2017.  Scalise spent six weeks in the hospital fighting for his life after the Bernie Sanders–supporter decided to save humanity by shooting Scalise and other Republicans.

A few years later: Bernie Bro with Van Full of Guns and Explosives Plotted to Assassinate Biden. Media Buries the Lede, as Usual.

What was Treisman’s motive? He must be one of those evil Proud Boys or crazy QAnon freaks we keep hearing so much about, right?

Wrong. But to find out the actual motive, you have to go all the way down to paragraph 15 of the WaPo story (emphasis mine):

The 19-year-old’s focus on Biden started in the spring, according to the order… Days after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suspended his presidential campaign, Treisman, who had suggested in a Reddit post that he had to “save bernie,” posted a meme with the caption questioning whether he should kill Biden.

Oh. He’s a Bernie Bro. He wanted to kill Biden to somehow help Bernie.

 

And then there’s the man who’s a Totenkopf stan: “Mr. Platner’s success is a reminder that Mr. Trump and MAGA aren’t the only actors in this drama. Running parallel to the Trump Era has been the Sanders Era: The rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from socialist gadfly to Democratic Party kingmaker.”

Actually, as Kevin Williams noted a decade ago, Bernie signed his own personal Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact long ago: Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED: Will Keir Starmer’s under-16 social media ban actually work?

Saying under-16s should be banned from certain tech is easy to do. Actually keeping them off it – as the Australian precedent shows, not to mention, hem hem, the situation in my own house – is a bit tougher to enforce. Online harms come in many forms, not all of them through social media, which is in any case hard exactly to define. Is WhatsApp social media? And though we can imagine some sort of passport scan or facial recognition mechanism to verify identities for the big individual sites (with all the privacy/data-harvesting issues that will raise), the mechanism for this curfew is difficult even to imagine. And what, meanwhile, of start-ups, unregulated Android apps, browser-based services and so on that will offer an even less secure environment than the horrors of Meta and TikTok and X?

Pause should certainly be given, I think, by the fact that Ian Russell, the father of a teenage girl who died by suicide after viewing self-harm content online – and who has campaigned for years to hold Big Tech to account for online harm – doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He says it makes more sense to implement existing laws than to use “sledgehammer techniques like bans.”

At present, then, we have a headline, not a policy. Until we learn exactly how it is to be implemented, how enforced and how insulated from the law of unintended consequences, it will remain no more than a headline. But I won’t be alone in thinking: what a pretty headline.

BluSky is currently a bit of Schrödinger’s app at the moment:

However, at BluSky itself, there are reports that it will be banned for under-16s in the UK:

Screenshot

In any case, as Joanna Williams of Spiked writes, “there is little evidence to suggest a social media ban will work. Research from Australia suggests that six out of 10 children aged between 12 and 15 who had accounts on now-banned platforms had maintained access to at least one of their sites of choice. This non-compliance matters, not because teens will be harmed by spending time on TikTok, but because they learn that the law is not to be complied with but to be worked around, mocked and, ultimately, ignored. So why is Keir Starmer backtracking? Partly, because it is easier to acquiesce to the panic-mongers than it is to reason with hysteria. And, like other prime ministers before him, Starmer is discovering that bans are the last resort of politicians with nothing else to offer.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 3:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

BILL MAHER: Vote for the Guy with the Nazi Tattoo!

Politicians are prone to hypocrisy on steroids. So watching Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Jewish Democrat, rally behind a dude with an 18-year-old Nazi tattoo is something to behold but expected.

That faux forgiveness shtick doesn’t have to extend to comedians like Maher. They can call balls and strikes and still look at themselves in the mirror come Monday morning.

Except Maher just let partisanship get in the way of common decency. We expect that from the Kimmels and Stewarts of the world.

Et tu, Maher?

I would still urge the folks in Maine to vote for him, for two reasons…One, we need to restore balance in our government, and a Democratic Senate would help a lot with that.

Why? Maher suggests Platner reflects modern America, so it’s only natural that he not only is allowed to run for office, but he can actually defeat Collins come fall.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Four months it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. Oh cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving totenkopf-tattooed breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Platner.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

YOU WILL BE MADE TO CARE: On Pride Night, some Giants add reference to Bible verse to hat.

On Pride Night at Oracle Park, with the San Francisco Giants wearing special edition hats to represent the LGBTQ+ community, multiple players wrote Bible verses next to the team’s rainbow logo, while one chose to forgo wearing the cap entirely.

Starting pitcher Landen Roupp and reliever JT Brubaker wrote the Bible verse Genesis 9:12-16 on the caps they wore Friday night, the same passage that has been displayed by other players on their Pride Night hats during games.

“Kind of what the verse says, the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant to us and us as believers stand firm in that,” Roupp said.

Former Giants shortstop Nick Ahmed wrote the verse on his hat in 2024, while retired Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw inscribed the same verse on his hat last year.

On Friday, reliever Sam Hentges opted out of wearing the pride hat, instead donning San Francisco’s usual black and orange cap.

You don’t want to wear the ribbon? You must wear the ribbon!

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: The Roku Box.

The New Hotness? The Roku-Fox: Fox to buy streaming pioneer Roku in a $22 billion deal.

Fox Corp. has agreed to buy the streaming pioneer Roku in a cash-and-stock deal valued at approximately $22 billion, including debt.

Roku will continue to be run as an open, partner-friendly platform, the companies said Monday, and there appears to be no immediate changes that customers will see. Fox and Roku said that the combined company will become the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing.

Media reports had surfaced on Friday that Roku was looking at its strategic options, including a possible sale. Speculation was rampant as to which companies might be interested in an acquisition. Aside from Fox, names being tossed about as potential buyers included Netflix, Amazon, Comcast and Disney.

The deal will give Fox access to more than 100 million global households, along with the Roku channel and its first-party data. Fox oversees a massive sports, news and entertainment network, as well as Tubi, which it acquired in 2020.

Roku founder Anthony Wood had initially worked within Netflix in the early 2000s as that company attempted to make the seismic shift from renting DVDs, to streaming.

While technologically inevitable, that’s worked out about as well for Hollywood as the death of CDs did for the music industry: The death of DVDs and how it has damaged Hollywood.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Coming Soon: Humanity’s First Outpost in Deep Space.

What once seemed like science fiction is now within reach, as NASA looks to establish an enduring human presence on the Moon in the next decade.

NASA’s Moon Base is on track to become the first permanent human settlement in the solar system by the early 2030s.

“This will be humanity’s first outpost in deep space,” Carlos García-Galán, program executive of Moon Base, told National Review. “It is a huge step forward in our capabilities to live and work and basically be able to push the boundaries in space.”

Located 238,855 miles from Earth, Moon Base will serve as a center for scientific research and technological development. The mission’s initial all-robot crew could launch as soon as fall 2026.

García-Galán sees the base as a critical step toward developing the technology required for missions to other planets, notably to Mars.

“I’ve helped build the Space Station. I’ve helped design the Orion spacecraft,” he said. “But this will take us to the next level.”

NASA’s plans for Moon Base were first announced on March 24, presented as an effort to establish the country’s leadership in space and pursue President Trump’s National Space Policy. In his December 18, 2025 executive order, the president said that taking the lead in space exploration was a vital symbol of “national vision and willpower” and a way to better promote America’s security and longevity. A lunar outpost was the top objective listed in the order.

The Moon Base mission focuses specifically on the South Pole of the moon because it is best for NASA’s specific scientific objectives. Beyond simply illustrating American achievement, these goals include testing advanced space exploration technologies, working with unique natural resources, establishing a center for scientific research, creating a permanent location for human settlement, and preparing to send a crew to Mars.

This is much more like the 21st century I was promised as a kid. Speaking of which, whatever you do, don’t put Martin Landau in charge of the base, if you want to keep it around:

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

USA! USA! USA!

Canada certainly doesn’t: Snowbirds aerobatic team grounded until early 2030s while new planes purchased.

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

NOW THAT SPENCER PRATT IS OUT OF THE RACE, CNN CAN SAFELY TELL YOU HOW FUBAR L.A. IS:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

MEK WARS:

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

“THE SPORT VENUE INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE US MOGS EVERY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH AND IT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE:”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 15th, 2026

June 14, 2026

THE TRAGEDY OF JOHN CLEESE:

I’d like to draw your attention to an anonymous post on the forum website 4chan, which forms the basis for what I have titled the Tragedy of John Cleese. It goes:

“He was a Progressive, Liberal degenerate in 1960s uber-white uber-polite Britain. He could take the p*** out of the people he saw as uptight and repressed while enjoying the clean, safe streets and quiet little hamlets full of those same uptight, repressed, polite-to-a-fault, helpful, white Christian Englishmen.

“The best part was that those same British conservative Anglos were generally pretty humorous about themselves. So, when you made fun of them, they laughed along with you and shook their heads saying ‘Ha! You know, Margie, he’s got a point!’ It was heaven on earth for him, to be a popular counter-culture icon loved by conservatives and liberals alike for being hilarious, but also enjoy the benefits of a strong, stable and homogeneous culture.

“Now, he’s an old man, staring at a desolate wasteland where in London, Britons are now in the minority. Everyone is suspicious, the hamlets and villages are economic dead-zones. Every week, there’s a new group you’re not allowed to make fun of, no one has a sense of humour anymore. Little girls are being sold as sex slaves, women are harassed in the street and the men are suspicious and surly over their lowered living standards. The sinking realisation that the world he made fun of, but loved more than anything, is gone forever and will never come back. The horrifying conclusion that his own counter-cultural irreverence may have helped to kill it. So, he impotently gripes on Twitter and wonders where the laughter went, when did the jokes stop? Where are those wonderful, repressed and uptight conservatives?”

Cleese is far from alone, of course:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

OH, THAT ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY:

Flashback: War Factories: YouTube Documentary Series Explores How the Allies’ Assembly Lines Pulverized the Axis.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

THE ASIAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE GLORIES OF AMERICAN AIR CONDITIONING:

Even in the hottest summers, we always take light sweaters to our favorite restaurants in the DFW Metroplex, just in case.

UPDATE: Needless to say, the European mind cannot comprehend the glories of American air conditioning, either:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

OH, THAT OIKOPHOBIA: CNN Is Surprised The South Is Welcoming Foreign World Cup Tourists.

[CNN sports analyst Christine Brennan] conceded, “That is so fun. That’s the flip side of the conversation we were just having, is that these tourists are still coming. The ones who can, certainly Europeans, people who love soccer way more than the United States. It’s been a part of their lives for, you know, ever where for us, as Coy was saying, it’s a newer game on the women’s and men’s side.”

It is not just Europeans. Another viral sensation has been Algerians experiencing Kansas hospitality.

However, things kept going downhill when Brennan continued, “And so, that—I’ve looked at those tweets from him just, he’s having a delight, and Americans are loving that too. And I saw some conversation, Wolf and Pamela, about how the rest of the world is looking at the United States and feeling that we are—it’s a foreboding image and that we are inhospitable.”

Returning to Freddy, Brennan concluded, “And here is a German tourist, and others as well, now on social media saying, ‘No, no, the Americans are great.’ So, what a shame that that’s the image that the world has. Many have of us. But how wonderful again, that sports can bring people here and show people that the United States and, you know, the South is welcoming a German tourist in a way we would never have anticipated.”

Well, it’s not like CNN’s founder grew up in Georgia, went to prep school in Tennessee, and the original headquarters for his channel was in Atlanta or anything.

Related: The Japanese have discovered Texas Roadhouse:

UPDATE: Big Ten’s decision to play football signals darkest day in conference’s sports history.

—Christine Brennan, USA Today, September 16th, 2020.

Which seems odd as by then, plenty of people had been taking part in mostly peaceful but “unexpectedly” fiery protests without an enormous death count. But then, in the summer and fall of 2020, some mass gatherings were worthy of praise, and as Brennan tut-tutted above, some weren’t:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE ENORMITY OF THE LONE STAR STATE:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Some exceptions do apply:

We’re Americans, we don’t do soccer, thank you very much: Why America is still immune to the soccer virus.

The only reason we’re at all interested this year is to see where Freddy from Germany will be dining next in America:

More on that here: World Cup fans fall in love with American culture, comfort food classics.

 

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

“CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE MADE ABOUT ALEX SOROS:”

Perhaps the Oystergruppenführer can bring Peenemünde to Portland, Maine:

 

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

CHINA’S COLLAPSING JOB MARKET:

Flashback to November of 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.

Posted at 1:19 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN, I SHALL BECOME MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026
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