Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

July 28, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 8:32 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Plagiarism or jealousy? Youngest black professor in Cambridge history set to publish extraordinary life story — including how he couldn’t speak, read or write during childhood — as he’s now accused of copying others’ work.

Spy magazine used to call this “Logrolling in Our Time” back in the late ‘80s.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

NEW MICHAEL CRICHTON NOVEL JUST DROPPED:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

TAPPER TO GO VETCON ONE?

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:50 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Back to the ’70s in Burnham’s Britain?

He has talked positively about introducing a land value tax (LVT) to replace the local government council tax, which is levied on an outdated valuation of real estate, and stamp duty on house sales. But LVT would create losers as well as winners. It would also be complicated and costly to administer and might raise little in the short term.

Britain’s fundamental problem, everyone agrees, is the lack of economic growth. Increasing GDP is the only way to pay for better public services, reduce welfare dependency and increase remuneration for those in work. But we have yet to discover where this wealth creation is to come from under Burnham’s not-so-new deal. The public sector is maxed out and the private sector is flatlining, thanks to the recent increases in corporate taxes, the national minimum wage, and employers’ National Insurance.

Meanwhile, the cost of servicing Britain’s £3 trillion of public debt remains an immense burden. Commentators on the right say that Burnham is taking Britain back to the 1970s, when a previous Labour government had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to manage a sovereign debt crisis. We are not quite there yet. But keen observers of fashion trends may have noticed that flared trousers and wide lapels are coming back.

In his recent appearance on the Triggernometry podcast, Peter Hitchens, age 74, had this exchange with his much younger hosts:

HITCHENS: Predictions are easy in general, but they’re hard in terms of how it’s going to take.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What I’m getting at something else, which is my hope, and I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what’s likely to happen, is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the conditions for recovery. Not necessarily recovery, but the conditions from which recovery is possible.

HITCHENS: That’s very Marxist.

KISIN: Tell me more.

HITCHENS: All my comrades in the late 60s and early 70s were rather hoping for a collapse out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right. Kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions and so nothing worked. Blackouts? Fantastic! He was great; I remember that the recruits pouring into the international socialists in the early 70s about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism and Leninism, but in the end, he let us all down, by losing an election.

KISIN: I mean, I am not hoping for [this].

HITCHENS: No, no, no, I know. I’m just telling you, this is the formula. I don’t myself believe that the catastrophe is justifiable, Or desirable or even, or even, conscionable. I think you have to say, if it looks as there’s going to be a catastrophe, do whatever you can to prevent it and warn against it.

KISIN: But Peter, you and I have to be honest, we have all been making these arguments. We’ve been trying to say, we’re heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they’re much more comfortable spending money we don’t have. So they’re not going to listen to us — we are going off the cliff.

HITCHENS: I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it by some kind of baptism of a fire a better world than the one that was before.

Speaking of which, just as leftist New Yorkers yearned for the bad old days of Fun City in the 1970s during the reforms of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg (and thus, hizzoner Mamdani), leftist Brits like Andy Burnham want to take their entire nation back to its postwar nadir in the 1970s. True socialism has never been tried before!

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION? TOO SOON TO SAY:

As Jim Geraghty wrote on Sunday, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

July 27, 2026

SGT. FAUCI’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

META GLASSES BANNED BY COMIC-CON PROMOTER AFTER ‘SECRET FILMING:’

The promoter behind some of the biggest comic and entertainment conventions in the UK has banned Meta glasses from its events to stop “secret filming” of guests and attendees.

Monopoly Events said a number of guests had told the company they would be reluctant to appear at Comic-Con shows again after cases of recordings taking place without their knowledge.

The ban is applicable to Meta glasses and any other “wearable recording devices”.

Attendees caught using the devices will be asked to leave the convention, but some fans on social media warned the move could negatively affect disabled attendees.

Devices like Meta glasses feature an almost invisible camera in the frames, with small speakers in the arms.

Wearers can record video or take a photo by touching the frame – usually activating a light on the glasses in the process.

In a social media statement, Monopoly Events said: “After a consultation period we can no longer permit the wearing of any recording device at our events.

But how will the Kenyans who review the photos taken by Meta Glasses be able to virtually attend Comic-Con?  Meta Glasses Send Nude, Bathroom Photos Unknowingly to Kenyan Workers for Review.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

VDH: Dr. Fauci and Mr. Science.

The Fauci files reveal not just a sociopathic narcissist, but also a pathological schizophrenic.

For years, Fauci was assuring the public of Covid narratives that he either knew were untrue, or knew little about.

He posed as a non-partisan, even as he collaborated with the leftwing cable news grandees and liberal columnists to hound his enemies and magnify his godhead.

From the virus’s origins and effects of the lockdowns, to the efficacy of the mRNA vaccinations to the always changing 0/1/2 masks wearing protocols, Fauci used his massive government agency, and sycophantic media, to promote his always fluid narratives by punishing enemies and rewarding friends—on the basis of their loyalty to Dr. “I represent science”.

He seemed to be obsessed with firing White House Covid advisor Scott Atlas, and demonizing Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff—for the crimes of questioning the Fauci party line. These critics were not radical “let it rip” herd immunologists as the Fauci camp caricatured them, but circumspect, cost-to-benefit doctors and savvy health policy analysts. Their views, if embraced, might have avoided a multibillion-dollar global shutdown that wrecked economies—especially derailing the booming 4th quarter 2019 Trump economy—increased the death toll, destroyed millions of livelihoods, harmed perhaps permanently the education of millions U.S. children, and was hardly based on the “science”.

But why wouldn’t Fauci have wanted a wrecked economy in an election year?

Tweet concludes, “While he was going on TV saying the opposite to terrify the public into shutting down the economy. It was all a lie designed to take out Trump’s most formidable weapon for reelection: his booming economy.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Odyssey Translator Emily Wilson Slams Christoper Nolan’s ‘Abysmal’ Screenplay: ‘I Would Be Ashamed to Have Written Any Part of This Script.’

Christopher Nolan cited Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of “The Odyssey” as an influence on his own interpretation of Homer’s epic poem while on the press tour for his latest blockbuster. Wilson is not returning the favor. In a negative review of Nolan’s “The Odyssey” for the London Review of Books (via The Guardian), Wilson criticized Nolan’s adaptation for lacking “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.” The author, who is also a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, added that Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has “nothing convincing to say.”

“I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But ‘The Odyssey’ features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants,” Wilson’s scathing review reads.

She adds: “Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

Exit questions:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

TWO FAUCIS IN ONE, PART DEUX:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

TWO FAUCIS IN ONE! Fauci, CNN Condemned ‘Small Household Gatherings’ Week Before Fauci-Tapper Dinner.

Related:

Tweet concludes, “While he was going on TV saying the opposite to terrify the public into shutting down the economy. It was all a lie designed to take out Trump’s most formidable weapon for reelection: his booming economy.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

HEH: Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!

And that is the ultimate lesson here. We do not need a new Coppola. We need a new Robert Evans. We need a studio head constructed out of parties and vice, with infinite taste and style. Someone artists feared and loved, who may not have had a soul, but had the genius to find the people who did.

So this is what we need you to do with your elite MBAs and high SAT scores: Get back to being a meritocracy. Drop the affectations. Best, most profitable idea wins. Hire crews and staff based on excellence, not what your favorite Harvard admissions counselor would love. Build movie stars. Learn what the poors want — people in flyover states who make less than $300,000 a year. Make sure those movie stars do not offend those poors by insulting Jesus or Tom Brady.

You are part of a great legacy. The Movies. You know: the great American cultural export created by Jewish Eastern European garment tradesmen. Honor them by wearing expensive clothes, making expensive movies, entertaining as many people as possible and selling millions of electric Hulk toothbrushes.

The executive’s job is to be the brilliant, greedy, tasteful money animal who funds the dream, and pretending otherwise is what broke the business. The business forgot it is supposed to be a hit-driven, star-driven, spectacle-driven machine, not a lifestyle brand for coastal creatives.

They have been calling you a suit like it is an insult.

It isn’t.

It’s the job.

Wear the suit. Be a suit.

Beginning in 2010, Hollywood rejected lucrative DVD and Blu-Ray sales for streaming, ending the ability for movies that didn’t make at the box office to earn a second chance in home distribution. From 2017 to 2019, powerful Hollywood execs were routinely #metoo-ed into oblivion. In 2020, Hollywood shutdown the movie business to curry favor with Fauci and Birx. In 2022, L.A.’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures tossed the Jewish founders of Hollywood right down the memory hole.  Then in 2023, the Writers Guild went on strike. The product became increasingly weird and woke. Going to movies went from being a near-weekly experience to something families did once or twice year to see event movies such as Top Gun: Maverick, “Barbenheimer,” and The Odyssey. No matter how big of a schmuck he is, the Hollywood asshole has his work cut out for him to turn the industry around.

UPDATE: The movie industry is broken. “Last year, just three studios – Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal – accounted for nearly 70 percent of domestic box office takings. Hollywood’s share of what Americans actually watch is around 95 percent plus in theaters (by revenue) and 85 to 95 percent in streaming viewing time. They own your butt and your eyeballs and that’s not changing anytime soon. But behind the rosy headlines and inside the plush boardrooms in Beverly Hills and Century City and Burbank, the hope of 2026 looks more like cope. A lot is going wrong all at once, and a huge transition is not-so-quietly under way. The agent did not mince words. ‘Streaming has ruined the business. It’s the reason Shari Redstone sold Paramount for peanuts. It’s why Warner Bros. was forced to sell. It’s why Comcast is looking to exit streaming.’”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

FAUCI’S NEWLY RELEASED COVID DIARIES REVEAL BIZARRE FIXATION ON FAME AS PANDEMIC DEATHS MOUNTED:

Newly released diary entries reveal that as COVID-19 deaths mounted around the world, former White House COVID advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci became increasingly fixated on his newfound celebrity.

Released by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., the journals chronicle Fauci’s day-to-day role during the COVID-19 crisis through conversations with President Donald Trump, governors and world leaders, media appearances, and his personal observations as the pandemic unfolded.

Paul, a longtime Fauci critic who frequently clashed with Fauci over the federal response and the origins of the virus, made the diaries public as part of the committee’s ongoing oversight investigation. The release comes days before Fauci is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after being subpoenaed by Paul.

A surprising recurring theme throughout the diaries is Fauci’s growing awareness of his own public profile during the most intense months of the pandemic, which ultimately claimed more than 7 million officially reported lives worldwide, including roughly 1.2 million in the United States.

On April 7, 2020, after recording the latest pandemic developments, Fauci wrote: “Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.”

On April 23rd, Fauci wrote:

That was only three days after Trump berated Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp for reopening his state:

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.”

Also on April 29th, this response to Kemp opening up Georgia from Amanda Mull of the Atlantic:

That’s an “unexpected” headline from a magazine that was concurrently depicting Fauci as a totally cool and dreamy “heartthrob:”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 27th, 2026

July 26, 2026

RAND PAUL RELEASES DOCUMENTS ON INTERCEPTED COVID RESEARCH MATERIALS:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has released another batch of documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest records show that U.S. officials intercepted undeclared biological materials tied to a U.S.–China coronavirus research network as early as 2018, likely in an attempt to avoid international tensions and regulatory scrutiny, Paul said.

The documents, which include a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report, primarily focus on a network centered around University of Minnesota virologist Fang Li.

The released documents also include pages from “Tony’s Diary:”

As Jim Geraghty writes, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

Then there’s an incredible juxtaposition by Fauci of new deaths and new WaPo profiles:

Alyssa Farah, now an employee of ABC News, makes an appearance in “Tony’s Diary:”

 

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

AND AGAIN: Terror Attack in Berlin.  “Fifteen people were injured, with one having died so far. German police are investigating whether the attack was terror-related, but I am not sure what there is to investigate. The perpetrator drove a car into a gay crowd at a high rate of speed, and then attacked people with a knife. There’s your investigation. I assume the terrorist was a Muslim, but it is possible he was some other kind of extremist. We will find out soon.”

UPDATE: Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.

MORE: Suspect in Berlin Pride attack identified as ‘Islamist.’ “‘Based on the investigators’ initial findings, we have already identified a suspected perpetrator,’ Florian Nath, a spokesman for Berlin police, said, adding that the force’s search for the suspect was ‘proceeding at full speed’. ‘He is known to us as a member of Islamic circles here in Berlin … we still have no information whatsoever regarding his specific motives, the exact sequence of events, or his role in the crime itself.’”

UPDATE (11:14 am): Abdul Ballout: Berlin Pride suspect tried to join Islamic State. Around 2,000 police officers searching for 21-year-old German citizen who is of Lebanese descent.

UPDATE (12:44 pm): Ballout “was convicted and sentenced for terrorism offences in May 2026 but released on time served. By July 2026 he was back on the streets. German authorities told him to attend de-radicalisation counselling sessions. He responded by carrying out a jihadist terrorist attack on a pride parade.”

UPDATE (1:50 PM): Suspect in deadly Berlin Pride attack is killed in a confrontation with police.

Posted at 1:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian.

I said that the best entertainment I enjoyed last week was the cross-examination—not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation—of Anthea Hartig. And the best of the best, I thought, was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). In under 5 minutes, he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on Hartig’s long tenure at the National Museum of American History. And he did it by the simple, revelatory expedient of confronting her with the Smithsonian’s own public educational materials. “Are you a white supremacist?” he asked. “Oh no, no,” replied Hartig, smiling weakly. “Do you think we all have implicit biases?” asked Gill. “If so, what are yours?” Oh dear. “Do you think it is important to be polite?” Gill wondered. “Oh yes,” quoth Hartig, perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness, Gill would be polite to her. No such luck.

Politeness, you see, is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the Smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy. Other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work, rational thinking, respect for private property, delayed gratification, and rugged individualism.

You think that I am making this up, but I am not. It’s all there in an official NMAH brochure called “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” File it under “Things are always worse than you think.” Here’s a thought experiment: What if these habits and behaviors really were signs of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”? What then? Or to put it another way, how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States”? (It would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white. I’d wager most of them were liberal white women.)

Thanks to Proposition 65, Sacramento requires labels on just about everything warning about a possible cancer risk. (Or as Consumer Reports quips, “Why California Thinks Your Couch Will Give You Cancer.”) Should the Smithsonian have warning labels about its ideological capture?

Incidentally, here’s the excerpt from the page at the Smithsonian that sorta kinda insinuates that Franklin’s research assistants for his electrical experiments may have been “an indentured servant or an enslaved person, although he never mentioned them in reports of his work:”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

THE MERGER ISN’T KILLING HOLLYWOOD. HOLLYWOOD ALREADY DID THAT:

Far from “thriving,” theaters sold roughly 770 million tickets last year — down 37% from 2019 and less than half the 1.57 billion sold at the 2002 peak. The share of adults who see a movie at least monthly has fallen by more than half. Receipts hold up only because the average ticket now runs north of $13. Charging ever more to ever fewer people is not a thriving business; it is a shrinking one, repriced. And moviegoers will tell you why they stopped coming: nearly 2 in 5 adults who attend less often say there is simply not a good enough variety of new films worth the trip.

Much of the rest of the case comes down to jobs. The Teamsters call the deal a “direct threat to film and television workers nationwide”; one producer predicted 10,000 job losses, without any data behind the figure. Yet the merger’s own critics have noted that Los Angeles County lost more than 42,000 motion picture jobs between 2022 and 2024 — years before this deal existed. Entertainment employment has fallen roughly 30% in four years, Los Angeles on-location filming is down more than 40% since 2022, and production employment sits at a 30-year low. Hollywood is not losing its audience to consolidation. It is losing its audience to itself.

Nor would blocking the deal freeze some healthy status quo in place. Warner Bros. Discovery was for sale because its trajectory was unsustainable. Its revenues slid from $41.3 billion in 2023 to $37.3 billion last year, after a $9.1 billion write-down in 2024 — the company’s own reappraisal of its worth. Stopping the deal does not change the market.

Opponents of the merger fail to consider the impact the deal could have on long-term employment across the wider creative economy, where the meaningful driver is production volume. Film and television support 2.01 million American jobs, pay $202 billion in wages, and sustain more than 162,000 businesses, 93% of which employ fewer than 10 people. A single-location shoot injects roughly $1.3 million a day into a local economy. The only question that matters is whether this merger means more movies or fewer.

The answer is on paper. Paramount has committed to maintaining both studios, releasing at least 30 theatrical films a year, and guaranteeing a 45-day theatrical window before video-on-demand. And since Skydance took over last August, Paramount has nearly doubled its slate from eight films to 15. These commitments mean more production days, more crews, more stages booked, more location spending — precisely what the unions say they want protected, and the only real medicine for what ails Hollywood: too few movies worth leaving the house for.

The success of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey might be a pyrrhic victory for Hollywood, cementing audiences’ post-Covid habit to go to the movies a couple of times a year to see the blockbuster that has the most hype, rather than going nearly every weekend:

Posted at 12:07 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

TRIGGERNOMETRY INTERVIEWS PETER HITCHENS: “We Live in the Age of Delusions.”

At the conclusion of the clip, Hitchens tells his interviewers:

Intelligence chiefs keep coming out and saying we have to prepare for war. Russia is a great threat.

Well, you can believe that if you want, though I find it a struggle.

I always remember going to Moscow—I think it was in 2008. It was the first big parade of the new Russian Army. They had decided they were going to restart the Red Square parades. I’d watched the last one back in November 1990.

My office said, “Why don’t you go out and watch it?” So I watched it with my old friend Igor, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander who really knew his military stuff. We stood on the balcony of th hotel, watching it from as close as we could get.

I enjoyed the parade as much as the rest. But at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, “What did you think of our great display of strategic scrap metal?” [laughter]

And he was quite right! The big new weapons—they probably only had two or three. Most of the stuff they were able able to put on display was probably old, much of it dating back to the Soviet era.

We knew—and we still know—that the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and incompetent, and the training of its soldiers is a disgrace. It’s a terrible army. After four years, they still haven’t managed to take Kharkiv, 20 miles from the border.

So to turn this into a great bogeyman which is supposedly about to arrive at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast just doesn’t seem to me to be realistic.

But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex-defense ministers, and NATO chiefs are constantly trying to prepare us for war. The last thing I noticed was some suggestion that we should all start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war.

There is a real attempt to get the British people to become war-minded, and I think that can only end sadly.

Obsessing over the Russians “about to arrive at Dunkirk” is a great way to ignore who is crossing the Channel: Iran smuggling agents into UK as Channel migrants.

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

ATLAS SHRUGS:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

ROGER SIMON: The Jews Should Leave New York.

It’s hard to admit this, but we are now at a similar juncture. Jews are not safe around the world, but particularly in New York, a city to which they made huge, one could almost say unparalleled, contributions in finance, architecture, city planning, medicine, education, theater, music, radio and television, museums and art, and virtually every field of science and culture you can think of.

That’s indisputable.

But, ironically, it is time for the Jews to go.

They must leave New York not only to save it but also to save themselves.

Not all will do so. Some are too frightened or too embedded in fusty left-wing politics that has repeatedly failed.

But those who do go, not just titans of Wall Street but regular middle-class folks, will take with them such a significant portion of the city’s tax base that Mamdani’s not-so-Democratic Socialist goals will be more unattainable than they already are.

New York will no longer be the country’s economic capital. Miami and/or Dallas will be, if they are not already.

Lessons might even be learned. Meanwhile, they can go be antisemites by themselves.

New York morphed into London so quickly that everyone noticed:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026

TROLL LEVEL: POTUS DJT.

Also, consider the media environment that Trump is trolling:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 26th, 2026
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