Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

April 14, 2026

KURTZMAN-ERA STAR TREK CONCLUDING: Sadly, The End Of Star Trek Is Now Official.

During the 53rd annual Saturn Awards in March, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds executive producer and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers said that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ sets were in storage, giving hope that the spinoff about Captain James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley), Star Trek: Year One, could happen. Those hopes are now dashed with the Enterprise sets being torn down.

Meanwhile, an online petition to save Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has topped 42,000 signatures. Unfortunately, the USS Athena’s sets being torn down means that there’s no chance Paramount+ could reverse course and greenlight Star Trek: Starfleet Academy season 3.

42,000 signatures, huh? Fewer Than 40,000 People Watched Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Paramount recently canceled Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the final Star Trek series still in production. Most assumed it was due to low ratings, but no one guessed just how low those ratings were.

Mike Stoklasa, noted YouTuber and friend of Rich Evans, recently revealed during a Red Letter Media re:View that he has a source close to the production of Starfleet Academy. According to Mike, his source told him the series has only been viewed 400,000 times. That’s 400,000 views in total for the entire series.

There are ten episodes of Starfleet Academy. 400,000 divided by ten is 40,000. That means the entire show was watched by fewer than 40,000 people.

“I heard from my source… The entire first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, not individual episodes, the entire season total views, about 400,000. Not per episode. Cumulatively, the entire series. About 400,000 views. Which is an average of maybe 40,000 views per episode.” – Mike Stoklasa

If Mike’s numbers are correct, not only does it mean that Starfleet Academy is one of the most colossal failures in the history of streaming, it also means that most of the show’s defenders are bots. It means that the petition to resurrect the show is also fake, since it has 10,000 signatures. Unless you’re willing to believe 1/4 of all the people who watched the series actually found out a petition exists and then went through the trouble to sign it.

Exactly. At the end of the original Star Trek’s second season, despite averaging about eight million viewers a week, NBC “received some 114,667 [snail mail] letters between December 1967 and March 1968, including 52,151 in February 1968 alone,” pleading for another season.

Found via Ace of Spades in this post, which is well worth a read: DEI Actress: DEI Has Become a Bad Word in Hollywood and We Have to Use Different Words Now to Push Our DEI Grift.

Posted at 8:37 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

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

JONATHAN TURLEY: Disaster Tourism: California and Other Blue States Become Go-To Destinations for Econ Sightseers.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the “first partner” of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), is under fire for stating that she takes her children to conservative and Republican states so that they can see misogyny and racism firsthand.

Putting aside her hellscape phantasm, California may be a draw for a different group: curious economists in the mood for disaster tourism.

Just as people travel to Hawaii to see volcanic explosions in real time, they can visit California to see economic implosions. California is a laboratory for students to see what happens when you ignore basic economic principles outside of the classroom.

California is now the leader in the economic race to the bottom, as its politicians drain away what remains of decades of accumulated social capital, revenue and residents from their state.

Exit quote: “Beyond these politicians who find success in failure, the only group looking at a rosy future in California is the rising class of robotic workers.”

Make sure to decorate your luggage appropriately when visiting California for a little disaster tourism:

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

GOD AND HASAN AT YALE: I Think TPUSA Is Making a Mistake In Not Letting Their Enemies Make Theirs.

“Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.” — Napoleon

Charlie Kirk’s organization, TPUSA, is a fantastic one that has done a lot of good for this nation. Probably more good than many people understand, but as great as it is, I do think it’s perfectly capable of doing the wrong thing. For instance, I think it’s making a strategic blunder by opposing Hasan Piker speaking at Yale.

For those who need a refresher, Hasan Piker has become the left’s it-boy. He famously said America deserved 9-11, and recently said that someone should kill Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).

Piker is known for his extremist rhetoric, which finds its home on the streaming platform known as Twitch, where he enjoys being above the rules.

Exit quote: “We deny ourselves a gift by trying to silence Piker or, at the very least, not allowing him to speak where the general public could see. At the end of the day, the only people Piker’s words are dangerous to are himself, so let him say them.”

Related:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

THE FALLOUT FROM HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER:

Posted at 12:31 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

QUESTIONS ASKED: “I would have to ask his holiness very frankly: You had 30,000 people gunned down in Iran just a few weeks ago, we heard nothing from the Vatican on that at all…You have a terror, a government, close to a nuclear weapon. Is it acceptable for the Catholic church to look away from that?”

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

RIDE THE PAPAL RECURSION!

 

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

MARKER LAID DOWN:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

HOW DO YOU STALL FOR TIME WHEN YOUR ASSETS HAVE BEEN DECIMATED?

Monty Python’s Black Knight plans to wriggle around on the ground limbless until January of 2029?

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

THE IRGC THOUGHT THEY COULD PARTY LIKE IT’S 1979 FOREVER:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 14th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE: The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril.

This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”
USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannett that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They’re able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they’re blocking access,” Graham says.

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

USA Today Co. spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton emphasized that “this effort is not about specifically blocking the Internet Archive” but instead part of the company’s broader efforts to block all scraping bots. Robert Hahn, the Guardian’s director of business affairs and licensing, says that it has been in conversation with the Archive over “concerns over potential misuse by AI companies of content sets crawled for preservation purposes.”

Now, individual reporters are pushing back on this trend. This week, advocacy organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future rallied journalists around the Wayback Machine’s cause. The coalition collected more than 100 signatures from working journalists who recognize the tool’s value and presented a letter of support to the Internet Archive. Signatories range from television mainstay Rachel Maddow to independent reporters like Spitfire News’ Kat Tenbarge and User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz.

While Lorenz wants to keep the Wayback Machine open as a tool, ironically enough, she herself is an unperson there:

Here’s a working link, and it does indeed show Lorenz as “excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

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

April 13, 2026

TO SERVE MAN: The Left’s Favorite Food Is Other Leftists.

Sabrina Carpenter is just another industry elitist who checked almost every leftist box she could on the way up the fame ladder. She puts on hyper-sexualized displays during her concerts, consistently degrading and hating on men, and is constantly curating leftist support. You’ll recall she “bravely” stood up to the Trump administration when they used her song in a post showing off ICE’s success.

Something that the White House turned around and used to promote ICE further.

Yet, during one of her concerts, Carpenter made the mistake of disliking someone doing the Arabic zaghrouta, which is the celebratory sound you hear Islamic women make whenever an Islamic terrorist successfully kills Israelis or Westerners. You’ll recall that sound being heard quite a bit in videos after 9/11.

Someone was doing that at Carpenter’s set during her Coachella performance, which Carpenter didn’t like at all. Even after someone told her that this was a part of her culture, Carpenter responded by saying she didn’t like it.

As you can imagine, the piranhas have begun to swarm.

But the damage is done.

I don’t think it’s going to destroy her career, and I’m pretty sure there are going to be industry reps and their friendly outlets working overtime to sweep it under the rug, but as it stands, Carpenter’s being roasted alive, and there will be a solid chunk of her audience that doesn’t forget or forgive. They can’t, because they have too much to gain by hating on her for her “racism.”

As Steve spotted earlier, in a post headlined, “Now That’s One Well-Played Historical Reference,” there was another path for Carpenter:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

BAD NEWS: Alarming study reveals the universe will end much, much sooner than previously estimated.

It’s the end of the world as we know it — a lot sooner than we think.

A team of researchers have drastically scaled back the going estimate of how long it will be until the universe ceases to exist.

Previously, scientists believed it would be 10¹¹⁰⁰ years until the very last objects in the cosmos would disappear forever — that’s a 1 followed by 1,100 zeroes, in layman’s terms.

But a new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics by a trio of researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands posits the real figure as closer to 10⁷⁸ years, or a 1 followed by just 78 zeroes, Science Aim writes.

Make no mistake, 10⁷⁸ years is a long, long, long time. But the difference between 10⁷⁸ years and 10¹¹⁰⁰ years is so enormous that it’s unfathomable to the human mind.

Some exceptions, such as Alvy Singer, apply:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

THE FUTURE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT – ROBOCOP ROBODOG! Robot Police Dogs Powered by AI Take Over Atlanta’s Streets.

Four-legged robot dog, powered by AI have been patrolling the streets, apartments, parking lots and construction sites in Atlanta as a move to up security. However, the addition of this automated security has raised concerns about the increasing use of private technology by law enforcement agencies.

A video of one such surveillance robot dog walking in Atlanta has gone viral on social media, leaving onlookers in awe as they drive past it.

When someone honks, the robot stops immediately and looks at the person recording it, producing noise that resembles a dog. The robot dog then waves, something that the car’s occupants find adorable.

The caption suggests that the robot dog has been developed by Undaunted, a company that offers such autonomous security to various industries. The robot dog follows a predetermined route for surveillance, judging its path through cameras.

This isn’t creepy or dystopian at all (language alert if you’re playing the video in public):

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

TRUMP HAS DEMS IN A ‘STRAIT’-JACKET:

If President Donald Trump really wants to drive crazed Democrats off a cliff, he would burn an Iranian flag on the White House lawn while chanting “Death to Iran.”

That would get the doomsday Democrats and the messianic mullahs in Tehran talking. The two allies could hold a joint press conference to impeach Trump.

They could use the event to add to his alleged “war crimes,” which include threatening to wipe a nuclear armed Iran off the map, something the U.S should have done seven presidents ago.

It could have happened in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter when revolutionary Islamic “students” invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage.

Or it surely could have taken place under President Ronald Reagan when the Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah killed 241 U.S. marines and sailors with a truck bomb in Lebanon in 1983. It was the largest number of marines killed in one day since Iwo Jima.

While the two Bush presidents—George H.W. Bush and Georg W. Bush—invaded Iraq, which had no nuclear weapons, a couple of times, Iran, which was developing one got a pass.

Besides the Dems, Trump has another far-left totalitarian regime in a “Strait”-jacket as well: “A broken Iran means China has to buy American, and any plans to pose a threat to Taiwan were put on indefinite hold. The Iranian regime keeps doubling down on this nonsense. Because what else can they do?”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

SWALWELL’S BLANKET PARTY:

The Dems depantsed the repulsive Eric Swalwell over the weekend in an attack with something like the Pearl Harbor effect. It swiftly sunk Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign. We followed the depantsing, but without quite the humorous detachment of Wall Street Journal Free Expression editor Matthew Hennessey. There are several interesting angles to the story and he inflicts glancing blows on most of them. He doesn’t expressly mention the apparent knowledge of members of the press about Swalwell’s way with women.

But what will become of Swalwell’s campaign merch? Heh, indeed:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS:

I know, Sandy! I was thinking exactly the same thing back in 2019.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

MR. KISS KISS FANG FANG CRASHES OUT:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: The Rising Tide of Anti-AI Violence.

The attempted firebombing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home should be a wake-up call. Had the attacker, who also reportedly made threats against OpenAI’s offices, hit a window rather than the side of the house, against which his Molotov cocktail merely “bounced” off, the event could have been far more horrific.

Just a couple of days later, two men were alleged to have fired on Altman’s house, which should have set the conditions for a national conversation about the horrifying prospect of revivified, violent Luddism.

To its credit, the Washington Post editorial board tried to start that very conversation last week when its members raised alarms over a violent attack on an Indianapolis-based lawmaker’s house — an attack in which 13 bullets were fired at his home. “The gunman left a note on the lawmaker’s doorstep,” the Post observed, “NO DATA CENTERS.”

The editorial linked that act of violence to a broader hostility toward the construction of data centers, which facilitate modern marvels like video streaming services, cloud data storage, and, yes, artificial intelligence. “It wouldn’t be the first time in history that deranged Luddites turn to violence to fight the advancement of frontier technology,” the Post’s editors note.

Note that the attack wasn’t just aimed at Altman; “other AI CEOs were also on his hit list:”

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 13th, 2026

April 12, 2026

NOT WITH A FANG FANG, BUT WITH A WHIMPER: Eric Swalwell drops bid for California governor after sexual misconduct allegations.

One more resignation to go?

Earlier: “The Democrats are doing to Swalwell what they did to Clarence Thomas. And Donald Trump. And Brett Kavanaugh. And who knows how many others. In other words, they may have fabricated another Christine Blasey Ford to come at Swalwell. Don’t put it past them—the California governor’s seat is important enough to throw one of their own under the bus.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:20 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 12th, 2026

WE’RE BLOCKADING IRAN, NOT THE STRAIT:

In the short term, China will have an incentive to lean on whoever is left in the regime to open the Strait. In the meantime, we aren’t destroying Iran’s petroleum infrastructure, merely preventing it from selling any oil. That means that Iran’s supply will be added to the global total before long, one way or another, and if the Iranian people are able to throw off the yoke of Islamic tyranny, they will take over an intact oil infrastructure.

And Trump is making the IRGC “play by their own rules:”

Meanwhile, the man who wrote the “Axis of Evil” speech for GWB has strange newfound respect for the CCP:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 12th, 2026
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