Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 8, 2026

WE’RE DOOMED, RIGHT? Rat-borne virus outbreak not the start of new pandemic, says WHO.

The outbreak of a rat-borne virus on a cruise ship is not the start of a new global pandemic, health officials have said.

A global hunt is underway to trace 29 passengers of 12 nationalities who left MV Hondius last month before it continued its journey to Cape Verde.

Their departure came before the first case of hantavirus was confirmed and isolation measures were introduced, sparking fears they could have spread the deadly disease around the globe.

Among the passengers who disembarked were seven British nationals, two of whom are currently self-isolating at home and do not have symptoms.

Four more are being “monitored” on St Helena, sources told The Telegraph, while officials are trying to track down the seventh, who is likely a dual national.

However, the World Health Organisation played down fears of a wider outbreak.

“This is not the start of an epidemic. This is not the start of a pandemic,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention director. “This is not Covid.”

Still though, why take chances?

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

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: “Spencer Pratt grew up in a California that delivered all of the public services in the background without much fuss, and consequently, one could live out the California archetypes of the surfer, the burnout, or the party animal, and it was more or less as depicted in the movies…Pratt has a better understanding of the California Dream than a rigid, humorless apparatchik like Nithya Raman, who views the state as raw material for an ideological formula.”

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2024 regarding Chicago’s Mayor Daley:

Daley was a real New Deal-style liberal, but he would have no use for Shorism or Lakoff-ism. He barely spoke American. He once declared he was proud to welcome the “poet lariat” of Chicago. He complained of his enemies, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” He famously defended the Chicago police (which, we should concede did some indefensible things) by saying “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But he knew how to get snow cleared.

Again, I’m not trying to romanticize Daley, but I guarantee you a great many current residents of Chicago (or New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) would be far, far, happier to pay taxes for Daley-style government than to pay for what they have now—even if you convinced people that taxes are really just membership fees.

Democrats in Los Angeles would similarly accept a lot of corruption in their local government — if it still delivered basic services, such as putting out fires and repairing roads:

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

LIKE A HURRICANE:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 8th, 2026

May 7, 2026

DEMS’ DATA CENTER FREAK-OUT:

“We already have a lot of data centers in the United States. It’s not 1992. This is how most of the internet works.

“I think those who are opposed to the construction of data centers would do much better to focus their energies on good zoning regulations,” says Charlie [Cooke]. “That is to say, to make the sort of demands of the construction process that they would make of an airport or a factory or a railway station or what you will. . . .

“What worries me about this,” says Charlie, “is that these sorts of moral panics, when they capture the imagination, are quite difficult to dispel. And we need to maintain our advantage here. This is what we are good at. This is what we have been good at for a very long time. The United States leads the world technologically and has since the end of World War II. . . . We do not want China to overtake us in AI or in anything else.”

But alas, Bernie wouldn’t mind:

Posted at 4:42 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

TOO FUN TO CHECK: Kamala Demands Release of DNC’s 2024 ‘Autopsy.’

If this autopsy confined itself to other matters, such as messaging or organization, [DNC chair Ken Martin] would have published it immediately and used it to frame the 2024 loss and distract from the corruption at the core of the Democrats’ campaign.

The most amusing part of the NBC report isn’t about the autopsy, though. It’s about Al Sharpton’s advice to Harris:

She recently asked the Rev. Al Sharpton for his advice on her next steps, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Sharpton told her that she has nothing to prove, having been the first woman and the first woman of color elected to the vice presidency, according to a person who detailed their conversation. In her 2024 bid for the White House, brought on by the late withdrawal of President Joe Biden, Harris collected more votes — 75 million — than any previous runner-up.

Her legacy is secure, Sharpton told her. But he also admonished her that she should consider the possibility that it might be diminished if she were to run and lose again.

Did I read this correctly? Did the Reverend Al, race-baiter supreme, tell a black woman to retire from politics? Time to order even more popcorn …

So she’s definitely running in the 2028 primaries. Strength through joy! Brat summer! Or whatever the next slogan her army of consultants will be generating.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

PORSCHE CRASHES:

Exit quote: “This is bigger than Porsche. It is a warning to every foreign company that built its long-term growth assumptions around China. Because the old China growth model is breaking down in real time. Consumer confidence has weakened. Property wealth has deteriorated.”

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

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

SPENCER PRATT ISSUES A CHALLENGE IN LA MAYORAL DEBATE THAT NITHYA RAMAN WILL NEVER ACCEPT. “Last night, Pratt called Raman out on her alleged expertise about the homeless, issuing a challenge to her that she will never accept. Watch:”

“They’re a team:”

Related: Can AI make Spencer Pratt mayor?

It cannot really be said that videos like these lower the tone of public life. Traditional political broadcasts are already awful and people go to great lengths to avoid seeing them. The most famous spot of the 1960s showed a little girl being blown up by a nuclear bomb. AI videos are effective in politics for the trivial reason that you can create whatever scenarios you like for rhetorical purposes. In Curran’s clip Kamala Harris is drinking vodka straight from the bottle, and Mayor Bass has her face made up like the Joker – in a pre-AI age the only way to depict this would be to animate it, which would take much too long. “Storytelling” is meant to be the secret to political communications and AI lets one do this in a much more literal sense. Donald Trump’s famous 2024 ad told viewers that “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” but here Gavin Newsom is simply made to say that “if you were a transgender migrant I could get you a free pussy.”

No doubt the medium has its limits, some of which we can see in the video. AI-generated images and videos tend towards the style of Thomas Kinkade: every surface glistens too much, every shadow is too accented, everything seems to glow with a sort of insane light. In Curran’s video the wood-paneled walls of the dining room look like they have been covered with ten coats of varnish. The effect is dense and headache inducing; combined with the human voices that AI tends to generate, which are best described as a monotone bellow, it is easy to see how these kinds of ads could become exhausting to watch if overused – just as the spots showing a candidate dressed in plaid petting a friendly Labrador have become exhausting. It is perhaps telling that Trump, the master of all mediums, only uses AI for jokes rather than for actual communiques to the public.

I’d say “we’re witnessing the future of political advertisements,” but that future, for better or worse, is now here:

More:

Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

YES YOU CAN Support Obama’s Hideous Vanity Complex With These Inspiring Gift Shop Items.

The Barack Obama Presidential Center won’t be open to the public for another few weeks, but the gift shop is already up and running. All proceeds will support the Obama Foundation and its mission to “inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world.” The foundation is also responsible for funding and operating the new presidential center, which has been described as a “hideous eyesore” befitting the colossal vanity of a tinpot dictator.

So, what are you waiting for? You can help fund Obama’s brutalist monstrosity right now by purchasing some of the inspiring items for sale on the center’s website.

This gorgeous lapel pin ($30) This “unique accessory” was designed by Sameera Chukkapalli Holmes, a former NYU professor of ethical leadership and an architect who specializes in sustainability and social equity. It allegedly represents the “intersection of bold design and global leadership.”

The New York Post adds that “Many weren’t impressed with the pricey pins — with some comparing them to chewing gum, pregnancy tests and blobs of toothpaste. ‘It looks like chewed gum or an eraser that a third grader has been mutilating,’ one user on X wrote.” Wow, that’s just churlish, and rude. Why, it’s as if a Murdoch-owned publication has a grudge with the Lightworker.

And vice-versa:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

OKAY, GROOMERS: Border Patrol Raids Disney Cruise Ship, Finds Every Parent’s Nightmare Lurking on Board — This Is What Dems Want Defunded.

A group of alleged child predators were arrested after they’d been working around children and families aboard a Disney cruise.

They were apprehended by the same immigration agents Democrats want to defund.

KNSD reported Wednesday that a Disney cruise docked in San Diego after a trip with stops in Ensenada, Baja California, as well as Catalina Island, where federal agents took several employees into custody.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Sandra Grisolia released a statement about the raid:

“On April 28, HSI San Diego arrested twenty-three crewmembers from multiple cruise ships at the Port of San Diego as part of Operation Tidal Wave. The arrests targeted individuals suspected of involvement with Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), based on information received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

APOCALYPTO II, FIRST WORLD BOOGALOO:

 

If only Aztec Batman had been better at his job: Trailer: Warner Brothers reveals Aztec Batman, where evil white Europeans come to destroy the peaceful natives.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on May 7th, 2026

May 6, 2026

NICK GILLESPIE IN 1995: Terrible Ted Turner.

As I suggested earlier, this may not be entirely the Goldbergs’ fault. They don’t help matters with ham-handed lines such as, “Half visionary, half crackpot, and allAmerican character, Ted Turner is a genuine original,” or “Using second-string producers, third-rate correspondents, and recycled network programming, [Turner] has gone about his task with a singleminded determination.”

But beyond the Goldbergs’ often labored prose, Turner himself seems capable of only the most banal thoughts and insights. In the 1980s he became convinced that he would be shot by an assassin, and told his then-mistress what he would say to his killer: “Thanks for not coming sooner.” At another point, he boasted to a reporter, “I want to set the all-time greatest personal achievement record, greater than Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison, Napoleon or Alexander the Great.” Or consider this deep conversation Turner reports having had with Fidel Castro in 1982: “After three drinks with rum … I said [to Castro] ‘Are you interfering in Nicaragua and Angola?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you are, too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re the United States. We’ve got every right to be there.’ And he said, ‘How come?’ I said, ‘Because we’re right, we’re capitalists. We’ve got a free country.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what about people that don’t agree with that?’ I went back and scratched my head. I never even thought there was another side to the picture.”

The secret shame of Ted Turner may be that, like much of the programming for which he became famous, he just isn’t very smart or interesting. Indeed, by the end of Citizen Turner, the protagonist seems less reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane and more like another great fictional millionaire: Jay Gatsby. Turner, now in his fifties, has been spared Gatsby’s tragic fate. But just as Gatsby turned out to be less real than imagined, so too does Turner seem unmasked as more shallow than deep.

QED:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does The Odyssey confirm that Christopher Nolan is camp?

We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey-ho. Damon rocks a beard of varying lengths and grayness, and wears an expression of becoming seriousness. At various points in the trailer, he makes it clear that he wants to go home. This is becoming a trait of Mr. Damon. He has also made this clear in Saving Private Ryan, The Martian, Interstellar (another Nolan jaunt) and Elysium. Looked at dispassionately, Mr. Damon is the actor who seems keenest to go anywhere, least of all Hollywood.

Well, he’s been lucky with The Odyssey. And the fact that he has slimmed down to near-skeletal proportions suggests that he has committed to the bit. As, indeed, has his co-star Robert Pattinson, playing the villainous suitor Antinous. I am a great admirer of Pattinson, who was the saving grace of Nolan’s solitary misfire Tenet, but I would suggest that no actor alive could deliver the line, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard”.

Spider-Man vs Batman (Pattinson vs Tom Holland): how could audiences possibly resist? But whatever happens, there is the suspicion that Sir Christopher has let loose after his earlier exercises in Sturm und Drang and offered audiences a film that they will want to see in some quantity. It’s budgeted at $250 million – some reports suggest that it ended up costing even more – which will make it by far the most expensive film of his career. Oppenheimer was a relatively cheap $100 million, and that featured the biggest bang of them all. Studio Universal no doubt hopes it is his biggest hit yet.

Speaking of camp: The Hollywood Reporter on The Odyssey: Everybody Using American Accents Is Definitely a Choice.

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan‘s adaptation of Homer’s timeless epic set in ancient Greece. An operatic, fantastical tale of Odysseus, Telemachus, Antinous and Athena. “Not just a story,” as director Christopher Nolan declared at CinemaCon, “but the story.”

And also: Dude. Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.

On Tuesday, Universal dropped the latest and most footage-filled trailer yet (below) for the highly anticipated film. Fans are impressed by the film’s scope and compelling star-studded cast. They’re also a bit thrown by one choice: The characters sound American and use contemporary-sounding language — more Ithaca, New York, than Ithaca, Greece. At one point, Matt Damon’s Odysseus leads a battle charge by crying, “Let’s go!” Even stars Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, who are English, sound American.

The choice is a striking departure from the unwritten Hollywood rule of characters in historical epics employing British accents — from The Ten Commandments to Ben-Hur to Gladiator to HBO’s Rome. Obviously, The Odyssey characters speaking the various dialects of Homeric Greek, Attic and Hellenistic Koine wouldn’t make for a very accessible film. But the modern British accent is traditionally considered universally pleasing and “just foreign enough” to convey a timeless quality (even though it’s only existed in its current form for 250 years or so).

The actors in ’50s Hollywood bible-themed epics such as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur often spoke with transatlantic accents, since that was a popular choice in Hollywood ever since talkies came into vogue at the end of the 1920s. But I don’t recall Edward G. Robinson speaking with a British accent in The Ten Commandments: 

Or John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told: 

I’m happy that Stanley Kubrick had his entirely American cast speaking with their regular accents in 1957’s Paths of Glory rather than having to endure a film of Inspector Clouseau-wannabes. I’m glad that David Lean avoided his mostly British actors doing Mr. Chekov impersonations in Dr. Zhivago. In the 2008 Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, the director cast several supporting actors who had been in earlier WWII-themed movies such as Kenneth Branagh in 2000’s Conspiracy and Christian Berkel from 2004’s Downfall. Everybody spoke with his local accent except for the actor who played Hitler, who was dubbed by another actor with a terrifying Austrian accent. That seemed like a far better compromise than having Cruise and his supporting actors all sound like they had all stepped out of a Hogan’s Heroes episode.

Earlier: The Critical Drinker on The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

MARK HAMILL POSTS IMAGE OF PRESIDENT TRUMP DEAD IN A GRAVE WITH CAPTION “IF ONLY:”

Mark Hamill is under fire after sharing a graphic image depicting President Trump dead in a grave alongside the caption “If Only”. This comes just weeks after the latest reported assassination attempt involving the President.

The post appeared on Hamill’s verified Bluesky account and quickly began spreading across social media due to both the disturbing imagery and the timing surrounding it.

The image itself shows President Trump lying seemingly lifeless in dirt beneath a gravestone reading “DONALD J. TRUMP 1946–2024.” Across the bottom are the words “If Only.”

Hamill then added his own commentary to the post:

“If Only,” he said, repeating the words from the photo. “He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes. Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore. #don_TheCON.”

In 2024, VDH explored, “Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left:”

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

Or should we deplore the use of telescopic scope imagery, given that the Left blamed Sarah Palin for once using bullseye spots on an election map of opposition congressional districts, claiming that such usage had incited the mass shooting by Jared Lee Loughner?

In 2009, VDH wrote, “Welcome To The New Rudeness:” 

Over the last three decades, we saw vicious attacks on Ronald Reagan and on Bill Clinton, and their tough replies in turn. But recently the vicious rhetoric has escalated far beyond anything in the past. The smears seem reminiscent more of the brawling on the eve of the Civil War, or the nastiness during the 1960s that took decades to heal.

No one knows what the rules of engagement are now. Republicans have not forgotten that Democratic legislators loudly booed Bush during his 2005 State of the Union. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic party, not long ago boasted, “I hate Republicans!” Around the same time, The New Republic magazine published an article entitled “Why I Hate George W. Bush.”

Major politicians such as former vice president Al Gore, Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.), and former senator John Glenn (D., Ohio), have compared George W. Bush or his supporters to Nazis or the brown shirts. A major publishing house released a novel about killing President Bush; a movie won a prize at the Toronto Film Festival with the same theme. Bush Derangement Syndrome was no joke.

Today at the Corner, Noah Rothman plays “That Same Old Song:”

For Democrats, the last version of the GOP, the Republican president out of power, or the late conservative lawmaker are forever better than what they have to deal with now. Take former Senator Mitt Romney.

“He’s the modern voice Republicans need,” said onetime Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prior to his death in 2021. “I like him.” That’s quite the turnaround from when Reid baselessly accused Romney of felony tax evasion, later explaining the lie away as an instrument of political utility. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reid later said of his own mendacity.

Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a change of heart when it came to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now? Oh my God,” she mused in 2019 as Romney contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were president of the United States?” How odd. Either the man she accused of being “kind of sexist,” a liar, and a racially hostile bigot somehow managed to burnish his reputation with the former speaker in a relatively short period, or she never meant a word of her criticisms in the first place.

Even Obama got in on the act. When the acute political imperative was to attack Trump, Romney served as a useful foil. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he told one interviewer in 2016. Trump, by contrast, was “unfit” for the office. That’s quite the reversal from four years earlier, when Obama had cast Romney as a “bullsh***er.” Obama’s running mate had said that Romney wanted to bring slavery back, and his campaign accused the GOP nominee of being guilty of negligent homicide.

For Democrats, the Republicans who are dead and gone are always somehow better than whatever we have today. It’s a trite political tactic that reflects less on its subjects and more on those who deploy it.

Given that the Kamala campaign aggressively sought the endorsements of Dick Cheney and Dubya in the fall of 2024, the left’s rehabilitation of the man Hamill wishes dead in the next decade will be astonishing to watch.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

JAMES KIRCHICK: The Strange New Respect for Jew-Haters.

By far the starkest example of the budding alliance between the far-right and the far-left is the strange new respect some progressives express toward Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Like Greene, it wasn’t so long ago that Carlson was a hate figure for progressives, and one of his biggest haters was a man named Cenk Uygur. Founder of a progressive media company called “The Young Turks,” Uygur denounced “fake” progressives who praised Carlson as late as 2022. “Tucker Carlson doesn’t agree with us at all,” Uygur declared. “He uses the fact that most of the country agrees with progressives as a tool to sheep-herd them into right wing talking points.” In 2019, Uygur attacked Carlson for displaying a graphic on his Fox News show depicting then–CNN head Jeff Zucker as a puppet master. “That is a deeply antisemitic trope, it goes back in history a long time, of the Jews being puppet masters,” he said.

Uygur felt similar disgust for Owens, the comically deranged podcaster who claims that Brigitte Macron is a man and who recently alleged that “satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress.” For spreading disinformation about Covid-19 in 2021, Uygur screamed, “I said it, Candace Owens, you’re the worst of the worst! You’re a sellout! You’re scum of the earth!” Uygur went on, “People like Candace Owens lead pathetic lives because they’re paid to sell their own identity out.” In 2024, Uygur accused Owens of deploying “over-the-top antisemitic tropes.”

Fast-forward a year, and Uygur has changed his mind. “No, I’m not going to denounce Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens!” he declares. “We don’t have to denounce her at all. Don’t come at me about denouncing Candace Owens until you denounce Jared Kushner.” Last year, accusing Israel of “proudly doing a genocide”1 in Gaza, Uygur beseeched Carlson, Owens, and Greene to join forces with him and other progressives to “stop this.” He reached back in history to convey the gravity of the situation. “I would hope to god that if I was around in the 1930s and 1940s that I would have said, ‘Work with any right-wing populist and any left-wing populist or anyone period to stop that Holocaust,’ to save one more person,” he said, apparently unaware that it was the right-wing populists who were “doing” the Holocaust. In January, Uygur appeared on Carlson’s show, extending the hand of cooperation. “We’ve been taught by the media to hate each other and to have a tribal brain,” he said.

Carlson has also been gaining fans among Muslims, a proposition that would have shocked anyone who knew him personally or listened to his commentary over the past quarter century. “Democratic leadership has no idea how many people are being won over by Tucker Carlson and MTG right now over Israel,” the left-wing Substack writer Wajahat Ali tweeted, linking to a three-and-a-half-minute video in which the editor of the Economist tried unsuccessfully to get an answer out of Carlson on the question of whether Israel “has a right to exist.” Addressing speculation that Carlson might run for president, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “If it was [Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro vs. Tucker, I could imagine a significant number of progressives, young people, Arabs, and Muslims sitting it out or actually voting for Tucker.”

Not surprisingly, Megyn Kelly is also jumping on to this trend: Bills to Pay? Four Months Ago vs. Today: Megyn Kelly’s Head-Spinning Shift on Radical Islam (Watch).

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…

Certainly some interesting directorial choices being made by Christopher Nolan:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

BACK AND TO THE LEFT. BACK AND TO THE LEFT: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Isn’t Radical Enough for Graham Platner and the ‘New’ Democratic Party.

The Democrats are doubling down on crazy, and they show no sign of moderating their radical social and cultural agenda any time soon.

Last week, 78-year-old Maine Gov. Janet Mills bowed out of the primary contest for senator. Mills used traditional Democratic fundraising conduits to raise an impressive $5.4 million in two quarters. This isn’t a big haul for a large state, but it is pretty good for Maine.

Meanwhile, the infamous oyster farmer, Graham Platner, the man with the Nazi tattoo, raised $12.5 million. Mills woke up last week and realized there was no way she could compete with a juggernaut like that. Besides, Platner had awoken something in the usually staid and sensible Maine Democrats. He was leading by 30 points in some polls.

Sen. George Mitchell served three terms as a Democratic Senator from Maine. He was the Majority Leader of the Senate from 1989 to his retirement in 1995. Mitchell was the last elected Democrat to serve in the Senate (Angus King is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats).

Mitchell was a poster boy for Democratic Party moderates. He was a consummate Senate insider who put getting things done ahead of partisan bickering. His kind is gone now. They’ve been shoved aside by hysterical radicals whose grasping for power presages a dark period in U.S. political history.

How dark? This dark: Antisemitism Is The Litmus Test for Democrats in 2026.

Antisemitism is a mental disease, in the way that Trump Derangement Syndrome is.

Neither is based primarily on political or ideological affiliations, although each correlates highly with partisan affiliations and ideological commitments.

That correlation does have a causal relationship, but the opposite of what is generally assumed. The antisemitism comes first, then the ideology and the partisanship. First, the antisemitism, and only then the political decisions. That’s why you see the “right” coded antisemites flocking to the Democrats, as I wrote yesterday, and the Democrats gaining a “strange new respect” for former Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and right-coded Nick Fuentes.

That same sorting is happening with current and former Democrats, who are so appalled by the antisemitic outbreak in their party that they are flirting with becoming Republicans, or at least praising their clear-sightedness on this issue.

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which former(?) self-admitted communist Van Jones is a voice of sanity:

Tweet continues, “It just shows you how nutty things have gotten that someone who wants to stick up for Israel and doesn’t want an open border now has to be a Republican.”

Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record is once again doing straight-up reportage:

(Though as Frank J. Fleming wryly noted, “Leftists: ‘If Graham Platner is a Nazi, then why does he hate Israel so much?’”)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:

 

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Team Mamdani Kills Page Celebrating New York’s ‘Unique Ties to Israel’ and Large Jewish Community From Official City Website. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made no secret of his hostility to Israel, and it’s starting to bleed into New York City’s government.

Related:

More:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SUES NYT FOR ALLEGEDLY DISCRIMINATING AGAINST WHITE, MALE EMPLOYEE:

[EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas,] who has been involved with the EEOC since President Donald Trump’s first term, was promoted to chair of the federal watchdog group in his second administration. Her goal as chair is to dial back corporate DEI policies.

As chair, Lucas’s EEOC has gone after a Coca-Cola distributor for hosting a two-day networking event, specifically for women. The group is also investigation Nike, after allegations the company discriminated against white workers in an attempt to exemplify its DEI efforts.

“No matter the size or power of the employer, the EEOC under my leadership will not pull punches in ensuring evenhanded, colorblind enforcement of Title VII to protect America’s workers, including white males,” Lucas said in a statement.

The Times’ editorial product has for years endorsed a left-wing identitarian approach to race and gender. Use of the words “racist” and “racism” increased by 700 percent in the Times from 2011 to 2019, according to an analysis by Tablet. In 2018, the Times editorial board hired the writer Sarah Jeong despite her lengthy history of denigrating white people on social media. The Times’ focus on race only increased during the moral panic around race and identity that gripped the country in 2020, with the New York Times Magazine publishing the 1619 Project, which sought to reframe America’s founding around the arrival of slaves in the new world.

Earlier: Even New York Magazine Writers Don’t Bother To Read New York Magazine.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

HOW IT STARTED:

Fast-forward to the 1970s. Kenner’s a division of General Mills. It makes Easy Bake Ovens, and tops wish lists with its Six Million Dollar Man merchandise based on the day’s hit cyborg-action series. (Television shows, not movies, was where it was at for the toy industry.) Then one day a filmmaker shows up with an oddball proposal. Corky Steiner paints the scene: “A number of toy companies passed on [this] unusual presentation with funny names… These names are ridiculous. [People thought,] ‘This guy must be nuts.’”

“No, he’s not nuts,” Kenner’s research-and-development team says of Lucas and the pitch for his unseen film, Star Wars, per Steiner. “Everything we think we see in this script is a toy. This is a bonanza.”

—“The First, Worst Star Wars Christmas: A Look Back at the ‘Brilliant,’ Toy-less 1977 Holiday Season,” Yahoo, December 14th, 2015.

How It’s Going:

Tweet continues, “So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with.”

As John Nolte wrote in 2023, “Disney went woke and killed what even the stillborn Lucas prequels couldn’t kill: the magic of Star Wars.”

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

WE’RE NOT BEING SEXIST HERE. IT’S NOT THAT LOOKS MATTER PER SE. IT’S JUST THAT BEAUTIFUL WOMEN ARE ALWAYS ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF SOCIAL TRENDS:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026

MORNING IN AMERICA:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 6th, 2026
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