Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

October 7, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: Insurrectionist Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Claims Trump Supporters Want ‘Rematch of Civil War.’

“I say very candidly that the right wing in this country want a rematch of the Civil War,” the disgraced mayor bellowed. “I want that to set in right now because the President of the United States of America has declared war on the people of Chicago and people across America.”

We all know who wants and who is currently fighting a hot civil war against America, and that’s Democrats like Brandon Johnson. And this is nothing more or less than history repeating itself. What happened in 1860? Confederate Democrats in the South wanted to hold on to their cheap slave labor, and as soon as they believed Republicans might take all that cheap slave labor away, they launched the Civil War.

And so it is the same today. In order to hold on their cheap illegal labor, Democrats have created a confederacy of lawless “sanctuary” states and cities. And now, just like in 1860, these same Democrats are waging literal war against a federal government that is guilty of nothing more than wanting to enforce the federal law by lawfully deporting illegal aliens.

In 1860, Democrats started a Civil War because Republicans wanted to liberate their slaves.

In 2025, Democrats started a Civil War because Republicans want to deport their illegal labor.

Related: They Went There: ‘States’ Rights’ and ‘Sovereignty’ Suddenly Popular With Dems Again. “Democrats in 2025 are looking to their forebears in 1861 and Governor Wallace in 1963, standing in the schoolhouse door, defying federal officials trying to enforce federal law.”

As Byron York writes on “Chicago’s ‘ICE-free zone,’” “this is not a fringe issue. When the Harvard CAPS-Harris poll asked what are the most important issues facing the country today, the top two, high prices and jobs, were economic, the third most important issue was healthcare, and the fourth most important issue was immigration. It’s not clear how this will ultimately be resolved. The president has the clear authority to enforce federal immigration law. A majority of Americans support the enforcement of federal immigration law. Democrats hope they can slow Trump down by stoking opposition to the process of enforcement. But the fact is that when he enforces federal immigration law, Trump is doing what most people want.”

As for the 20 percent who don’t: VDH Coins Perfect Label for Prog Mayors: ‘They’re Really Neo-Confederate Nullificationists.’

UPDATE:

Posted at 4:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 7th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE DOOM GOBLIN: Greta and the flotilla fools have no self-awareness.

I knew the modern left had its fair share of narcissists who can rarely see beyond their own navels. But even I never imagined they would spend the second anniversary of 7 October, the worst atrocity the Jews have suffered since the Holocaust, moaning about their ‘mistreatment’ by the Jewish state. Even I never imagined they would hijack the commemoration of the rape, abduction and slaughter of Israelis to moan about the hard beds and cold food Evil Israel allegedly foisted on them.

The lack of self-awareness of Greta Thunberg and the other flotilla fools who tried to sail to Gaza is astonishing to me. There they are all over the press and clogging up social media, madly claiming to have been ‘abducted’ by Israel and held in ‘poor conditions’.

Meanwhile, Israel is just trying to remember its citizens who really were abducted two years ago today before being tortured, starved and in some cases summarily executed in the grimmest conditions imaginable. To distract attention from those real horrors with self-pitying whimpering about a two-day stay in an Israeli facility is self-regard of the most inhumane variety.

QED:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 7th, 2025

MEDIA ‘WHAT THE F—?:’ CBS News Staffers Melt Down Over New Boss Bari Weiss.

Paramount formally announced the onetime New York Times opinion writer turned Free Press founder Bari Weiss as its editor in chief on Monday. Staffers at the perennially third-place network and their allies in the mainstream media are not taking it well.

Inside CBS News, employees did the courageous thing: They started anonymously leaking their incensed reactions to left-wing outlets like the Guardian and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo. Some encouraged Weiss not to “mess with the Golden Goose(s) of ’60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS News Sunday Morning,'” the network’s most prominent programs. As far as we understand it, that’s, like, her new job. Outside the network, a trio of Times columnists voiced their displeasure. Progressive news site Salon went so far as to cite former CBS anchor Dan Rather—who was unceremoniously fired in 2006 after he humiliated the network when he broadcast a false report on 60 Minutes II about George W. Bush’s military service records in an attempt to throw the 2004 election to John Kerry—as the type of heroic journalist who would oppose Weiss and her “political interference.” No, seriously.

Power Line’s Scott Johnson has further thoughts on “The New Regime at CBS News:”

The distraught reaction of Salon “senior writer” Sophia Tesfaye is unintentionally funny: “From Dan Rather to — Bari Weiss? How far CBS News has fallen.” Ms. Tesfaye claims “over eight years of experience in the political journalism field.” She may have been 9 in 2004.

Conan, what is best in life?

Related: Update to the swarmy New York Times profile of Weiss we linked to last night:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 7th, 2025

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Is Taylor Swift’s album really full of white supremacy and homophobia, or has everyone lost their minds?

Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl” is barely three days old, and already woke killjoys are tearing it apart, finding offensive lyrics where there are none.

Overly-online social media critics of Swift instantaneously apparently decided the new album is rife with racism and homophobia, as well as secret messages of support for the patriarchy, eugenics, and Donald Trump.

Forensic “investigations” have uncovered “dog-whistles,” but only woke detectives themselves are capable of hearing them.

Either Swift is a covert alt-right influencer, or her young critics have been taught to see oppression everywhere, including where it quite clearly is not.

Didn’t the left get this all out of their system before Trump’s first term?

● Can’t Shake It Off: How Taylor Swift Became a Nazi Idol.

—Vice.com, May 23rd, 2016.

● White Supremacists Call Taylor Swift An Aryan Goddess.

—NPR, May 27, 2016.

● Neo-Nazis Are Really Into Taylor Swift.

—KQED, May 25th, 2016.

Dominic Green had fun deflating that weird obsession of the legacy media in 2018: Taylor Swift, Nazi Barbie? “Really, the only Nazi Barbie was Klaus Barbie, a model long out of production. Pop’s echoes of fascist propaganda testify not to pop’s pretend radicalism, but to its merciless commercialism.”

Flashback to last year: Grammy Host Trevor Noah Mocks Taylor Swift Conspiracy Theories — As She Arrives Late for Ceremony.

I agree, I thought the lefties at the Atlantic were also pretty out there, way back in 2013: Who Said It, Adolf Hitler or Taylor Swift? “Can you tell the difference between a quote from one of history’s most infamous revenge-seeking megalomaniacs and Adolf Hitler?”

Ultimately though, I’m pretty sure Swift is shaking all of this off: “And that’s the life of a showgirl. Taylor Swift‘s ‘The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,’ a cinematic complement to the pop star’s 12th studio album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ sauntered to No. 1 at the worldwide box office with an estimated $46 million over the weekend. Those ticket sales — including $13 million from 54 international territories as well as $33 million domestically — represent a massive turnout for a release that wasn’t on anyone’s radar until a few weeks ago.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 7th, 2025

JEFFREY BLEHAR: Jay Jones’s Texts Are a Frightening Peek into a Bleak Moral Worldview.

And it turns out that he is also a moral monster of the first degree — and an eerily familiar degree at that. National Review’s own Audrey Fahlberg broke the story nationally with her blockbuster reporting about texts and phone conversations Jones had with state Republican delegate Carrie Coyner back in 2022. (Jones had already retired at this point — he was shooting the breeze with an ex-colleague from the opposing party.) Jones’s friendly chit-chat about how – should his opponents predecease him – he would “go to their funerals and piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something” was eyebrow-raising, but also nothing a historically-minded reader would have put past Lyndon Johnson.

It was when he continued to muse out loud to Coyner that he revealed the scorpions lurking inside his brain: He declared that if he was trapped in a room with a gun and two bullets, alongside Hitler, Pol Pot, and Todd Gilbert (then the Republican speaker of the state house), he would shoot Gilbert — twice. Again, you might say: This is merely but a variant on an old and crude joke.

But lest you think that Jones merely sent a bad text in haste — okay, make that a series of bad texts — he then called Coyner, explaining himself all too clearly. You see, Jones was not speaking lightly. He wasn’t even “kidding on the square,” in that joking-but-not-really-joking manner people often use to passive-aggressively voice their true thoughts. No, he proceeded to make an impassioned argument in defense of the slaughter of innocents. In his call with Coyner, he declared that he thought at least some Republicans deserve to die for their politics, and he extended his death warrant to their children as well — for punitive, persuasive, and societally hygienic reasons.

According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.

Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust. . . .

Rather than deny that he had wished death on the children, Jones responded by saying, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

This is not the behavior of a psychologically healthy person. A normal person — if we are being charitable, a ruinously drunk person — who has texted something so barbarous would eventually follow up by saying something like, “My God please forgive me I was just making a sick joke.”

The left circling the wagons around Jay also speak volumes about their priorities in 2025 as well:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 7th, 2025

UP IN SMOKE: Nearly half of drivers killed in crashes had THC in their blood.

New study findings show that over 40% of drivers who died in motor vehicle collisions tested positive for active delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in their system, with average blood levels far exceeding those considered to cause impairment. The research highlights a significant and persistent public health risk that is unchanged by the legalization of recreational cannabis, the authors said.

The research will be presented at the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress 2025 in Chicago, October 4-7.

Flashback: How Weed Became the New Oxycontin: “Prior to legalization, marijuana plants were bred to produce higher and higher concentrations of THC, a naturally occurring chemical compound in the plant that induces euphoria and alters users’ perceptions of reality. In the 1960s, the stuff the hippies were smoking was less than 2% THC. By the ’90s, it was closer to 5%. By 2015, it was over 20%. ‘It’s a freak plant that resembles nothing of what has existed in nature,’ said Laura Stack, a public speaker who has advocated against the industry since her son, Johnny, killed himself three years ago at 19 years old after years of cannabis abuse drove him into psychosis.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 7th, 2025

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY:

What does it mean to be “free” in the Hermit Kingdom? In 1937, Robert Ley, the director of the Labor Front of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, famously exclaimed in a speech, “there are no longer any private individuals in National Socialist Germany. It is only possible to be a private person when you are asleep. As soon as you go into everyday life, into your daily life, you are a soldier of Adolf Hitler.”

I would assume the Workers’ Party of North Korea have a similar view of freedom.

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

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION:

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

October 6, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: Conquest Complete? The Bari Weiss Era Starts at CBS And … I Have Questions.

Should we be celebrating Weiss’ success? Absolutely. However, I wonder just how much Weiss can change CBS News, as opposed to how much it can change her — and The Free Press. CBS News has a lot more history and entrenched culture than a webzine, and even though Weiss knows it, it’s not clear whether she can move it in any direction, not even with Ellison’s initial support and endorsement.

Let me offer two examples that feed my skepticism: the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Jeff Bezos bought the WaPo and Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Times, and for a few years let both run without any real intervention to redirect policies and approaches. When Bezos finally got tired of losing money, he tried to change the culture by bringing in Will Lewis and pushing a similar approach as Weiss pledges now … and then spent the next year or so quelling staff revolts. It’s still not clear where the Post is heading now, or even if their profitability has improved in the slightest.

As for the LA Times, Soon-Shiong claims that he will redirect that newspaper in a similar fashion. His staff has pushed back too, and so far, it seems as though Soon-Shiong hasn’t done much but talk about change. At least Bezos is trying.

In both cases, even the owners have had little success in changing the culture and direction at media outlets with entrenched progressive workforces. Ellison’s move here could be akin to Bezos bringing in Lewis at the WaPo, but will Ellison stick to his choice as Bezos did and get rid of staff who stands in the way of change? Or will he be more interested in other issues and future conquests? While I have great admiration for Weiss’ grit and determination, I can’t help but wonder whether Ellison might just get tired of reform at some point if CBS News staff and stars revolt, and give Weiss a golden parachute as the easiest option to keep the operation from collapsing.

The conquest may be complete. The question will be who conquered whom. Only Ellison can answer that in the long run. I’m rooting for Bari, but … color me skeptical, about both CBS and the future of the Free Press.

I very much hope to be wrong, but I agree. Though it’s fun to watch old media absolutely meltdown over Weiss’s new title, including Jesssica Testa, a former colleague of Weiss at the Gray Lady: How Bari Weiss Won. At The Free Press, she battled “wokeness” and buddied up with billionaires. Now she’s the editor in chief of CBS News.

The scare quotes around “wokeness” lets the reader know what he or she is in for:

In its nearly 100 years, CBS has not seen a leader quite like Ms. Weiss. Neither has the media industry. Ms. Weiss, 41, has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot. In 2020, she publicly resigned as an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times to start a newsletter on Substack. Today, she has one of the most prestigious jobs in news.

She achieved this without climbing the typical journalistic career ladder, and with no experience directing television coverage. She is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers. And she is known more for wanting to rid the world of so-called wokeness than for promoting journalistic traditions. While newsroom leaders do not traditionally trumpet their personal beliefs, Ms. Weiss has described herself as a “left-leaning centrist,” a “radical centrist,” “a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice” — she is married to Nellie Bowles, a former Times reporter who now works at The Free Press — and a proud recipient of the label “Zionist fanatic.”

Yet she has also come to symbolize the power and potential of independent media. Her world is a patchwork of podcasts, newsletters and videos built around a common idea that legacy outlets have lost their authority and connection with readers. With that power up for grabs, several younger outlets have spent the last few years jostling for it: The Bulwark, Punchbowl News, Puck, Semafor.

* * * * * * * *

Her publication has criticized corporate diversity initiatives and pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Its popular podcast “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” chronicled the backlash over statements by the “Harry Potter” author about transgender women. Ms. Weiss has agreed that “cancel culture” is akin to “social murder.”

“They ousted good people for fake thought crimes and tried to ruin their reputations and their lives,” Ms. Weiss said of the “far left” during that February speech. (Their “insanity,” she said, included acknowledging Indigenous land, adding pronouns to email signatures and wanting to abolishing police and prisons.)

“Conservatives know two things above all else,” Ms. Weiss continued, after warning of similar rising extremism on the right. “That evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.” She told The Free Press readers on Monday, in an announcement about the Paramount deal, that the publication’s values “now have the opportunity to go very, very big.”

It is unclear how much of this sensibility Ms. Weiss will inject into “CBS Evening News,” the former home of Dan Rather and Connie Chung; to “Face the Nation,” which premiered 70 years ago with an interview with Senator Joseph McCarthy; to “60 Minutes,” where Lesley Stahl has been a correspondent for nearly 35 years. Reached by text, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric said, “It will be fascinating to watch.”

Ms. Weiss has insisted The Free Press is not ideologically homogenous. In 2024, the publication said its staff was split equally between voting for Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris and abstaining.

It is theoretically possible to trace this political inscrutability to the integrity of CBS News giants like Walter Cronkite, who claimed to never vote along party lines. “The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of great American journalism,” its introductory note proffered. “Honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.”

Why is 60 Minutes the former home of Dan Rather? Why can’t Lesley Stahl ascertain the ideologies of the people she works with daily? We know from Cronkite’s biographer, a lefty himself, that Cronkite was from politically inscrutable, particularly when he was on the air. At CBS Katie Couric once read a poem on air hoping that Obamacare would pass, and then had a Rathergate moment of her own after she left CBS.

Considering that in the mid-1950s, Edward R. Murrow helped coach fellow Democrat Adlai Stevenson, CBS News’ bias dates back a good 70 years. Good luck to Weiss finding the pony in that stable.

Still though, credit where it’s due; Testa’s article could be far worse:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

THE PROGRESSIVE FLIGHT FROM REALITY:

Unfortunately, this phenomenon gets even more troubling. As fears of political violence have intensified since Kirk’s murder, the New York Times has posted several pieces assassinating his character. One of its star content creators, Ezra Klein, for example, provided little pushback on a recent podcast as the racialist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates repeatedly labeled Kirk a “hatemonger.” The newspaper also published a long essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the paper’s controversial 1619 Project which tried to put slavery at the center of American history, which repeatedly called Kirk a bigot.

Her only evidence to support this inflammatory portrayal is one 168-word paragraph in a 2,568-word piece that cherry-picked, out-of-context snippets – he said ‘there’s a war on white people in this country’ he referred to a transgender athlete as an ‘abomination’ – to cast Kirk’s opposition to the woke agenda, gender affirming care and his concerns about black crime and Islam as “unabashed bigotry.”

To assess the quality of evidence, note that she repeats the long-debunked claims that Trump “called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., ‘very fine people.’ ” To demonstrate that her views have wide currency, she writes that “Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, ‘one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.’” What she ignored was that the author of that piece, Ben Rothove, published a short piece in the New York Times 16 days before her essay was published that declared, “I was wrong about Charlie Kirk.”

Hannah-Jones is, of course, entitled to her views – but not her own facts. It is telling that she and her editors thought it was appropriate to print a piece that made no effort to contextualize Kirk’s statements, or to try to understand why so many people in the world admired him. Their goal, instead, was to demonize an adversary by assertion. This is our truth. Perhaps more disturbing are two quotes in the piece that suggest Kirk’s murder was acceptable. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk,” one black educator told Hannah-Jones.

“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” another person told her. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away.

Such views, of course, resonate with those of thousands of others who celebrated Kirk’s murder; just as many progressives have cheered Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last December.

I hesitate to say that the Times was sanctioning Kirk’s assassination. But it is clear that progressives are proceeding down a dangerous path where facts, truths, and human decency are being overwhelmed by their dark desires.

Related: Douglas Murray on “The mainstreaming of leftist violence.”

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Democratic lawmakers and commentators found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, most of them loathed Kirk. On the other, many felt that they should try to hold the line condemning the shooting through the throat of a young husband and father at an American university.

The New York Times’s Ezra Klein was among those who dipped his toe into the water, writing a piece within the day titled “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.” Unfortunately, Klein then found himself the subject of a backlash from others on the left who thought that by praising Kirk’s invitation to nonviolent debate, he was somehow “legitimizing” Kirk’s views.

In order to try to tidy up this controversy, Klein invited on to his NYT podcast the Democratic left’s most sacred figure – the memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates – to carry out a public struggle-session on Klein. Giving Coates all the deference that the NYT believes is his due, Coates and Klein tried to have the “difficult conversation” about why Coates had reacted negatively to Klein’s initial piece. Coates said that since Kirk’s murder he had, with his usual degree of research, watched some “clips” of the right-wing speaker. He did not like what he saw. In fact, he concluded that Kirk was anti-black, anti-gay and anti-trans. Or, as Coates elegantly summed it up: “This dude was wrong.”

Yet the most important moment in an otherwise interminable conversation was when Klein tried to explain what he was thinking when he wrote his initial condemnation of Kirk’s murder. Coates gave the telling reply: “Was silence not an option?”

And there it was. The same people who had been telling Americans for the past decade that “silence” in the face of violence is “complicity,” that “silence is violence,” now preaching that silence should, in fact, be an option after a political assassination. Welcome to the current state of the American left.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote on Friday:

Ezra’s true capitulation came, of course, on the trans question. Coates:

So, when I read [Kirk’s] words toward trans people — Jesus … I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t. … If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.

Coates, mind you, is the author of this career-defining sentence:

I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died [at Ground Zero on 9/11]. They were not human to me. [My italics]

Klein first makes a pragmatic case — “In losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly … We’ve just begun to lose that argument terribly — and that has put people in real danger” — and then tips his hand:

A huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.

Bingo. That’s Starmer on immigration: restrictionists are immoral but we’ve got to do something or we’ll keep losing. And somehow Keir and Ezra think we can’t see through them. Of course we can. Behind the rhetoric, the woke mindset still reigns.

Exit quote: “We’re not stupid. No amount of fake rhetorical moves to the center will work. When very basic things that most human beings take for granted — that foreigners are not citizens and citizens come first, that men are not women, that children are not adults — are deemed fundamentally immoral in one political party, that party deserves to lose. And they will.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

WHOA: Jack Smith Tracked GOP Senators’ Private Comms in J6/Election Probe Per the FBI.

Here were Sen. Bill Hagerty’s (R-TN) remarks on the matter:

Thank you, Senator Johnson, and Chairman Grassley, thank you for your leadership in making this happen. This is an extraordinary revelation that just took place this afternoon. My colleagues and I found out — all of us Republicans, by the way — that we were placed under investigation by this FBI, under the Joe Biden FBI, that was led, I presume, by Jack Smith and his predecessors. This isn’t the first time that it’s happened, though. Senator Johnson just mentioned this: I served on the Trump transition team in Trump Tower in 2016. Senator Blackburn was vice-chair of the transition committee then, as were probably a dozen or more members of Congress. To think that we were surveilled by the Obama FBI — this corruption runs deep, and it’s gone on for too long.

And the fact that it’s happened here again, the fact that they are looking at our records in 2023 — sitting members of the United States Senate. Again, the only thing that we have in common, the only thing in common in this entire list, is that we’re all Republicans. They’ve decided to come after us — this is as partisan as it gets — the FBI and the corruption that’s running there has to be cleared out. Thank God we have Kash Patel and Dan Bongino there. This has to be addressed. It has to be resolved. It needs to happen today.

It’s not hard to tell that they’re angry — and rightly so.

More here: Jack Smith Spied on Eight GOP Senators, Grassley Reveals.

Fox News obtained the alarming revelations first, posting on X, “Former Special Counsel Jack Smith was reportedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican senators as part of his January 6 investigation, FOX News Digital has learned.”

The Republican senators targeted by Smith and the FBI were Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, per Fox’s article. The document was titled “ARCTIC FROST—Election Law Matters—SENSITIVE INVESTIGATIVE MATTER—CAST.”

One of Smith’s special agents “conducted preliminary toll analysis” on the senators’ records. Smith and his team not only viewed the phone numbers the senators called but the locations of both parties. The surveillance was reportedly tied to the campaign related to the 2020 election certification vote.

Sean Davis tweets, “Smith should be in prison for this,” but will anything of consequence happen to him?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

FLY BY NIGHT: Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson Will Tour as Rush in 2026.

Rush co-founders Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson will return to the road as Rush next year for a 50th-anniversary tour dedicated to the memory of their late bandmate Neil Peart, they announced today. German drum virtuoso Anika Nilles, who’s previously backed Jeff Beck, will join them for the 12-date, seven-city Fifty Something Tour, which kicks off June 7 at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum — the same venue where Rush played their last show with Peart in August 2015. “After all that has gone down since that last show, Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we fucking miss it,” Lee said in a press release. “And that it’s time for a celebration of 50-something years of Rush music.”

Lee and Lifeson, best friends since high school, spent the past few years in a friendly public debate about the prospect of touring again without Peart, their drummer and lyricist, who died in 2020 after a quiet battle with brain cancer. Lee told Rolling Stone that he’d been working to persuade Lifeson to go out, and even Paul McCartney had told the duo that they needed to tour again. As recently as last May, Lifeson was still resistant, at least in public, telling Rolling Stone, “There’s no chance that we’re going to get a drummer and go back on the road as the rebirth of Rush or something like that.”

Finding Nilles, a widely acclaimed 41-year-old drummer — who happens to be known for playing in the kind of odd time signatures that are Rush’s specialty — to step into what may be the most intimidating open chair in all of rock may have made the difference. “As we all know, Neil was irreplaceable,” Lee said. “Yet life is full of surprises, and we’ve been introduced to another remarkable person; an incredible drummer and musician who is adding another chapter to our story while continuing her own fascinating musical journey. Her name is Anika Nilles, and we could not be more excited to introduce her to our loyal and dedicated Rush fan base, whom, we know, will give her every chance to live up to that near-impossible role.”

Given America’s rapidly declining birth rate, presumably Rush hitting the arenas once again is a devious Canadian plot to tank those numbers even further: An FAQ About Your New Birth Control: The Music of Rush.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

MATT TAIBBI: Milken and Friends Build a $500 Million Monument to Their Version of the American Dream.

I almost fell off my chair a couple of weeks ago when I saw a Bloomberg article titled “The Junk Bond King Opens a Shrine to Capitalism Near the White House.” My thoughts instantly turned to an episode of “The Sopranos” in which Tony and the crew discuss building the Newark Museum of Science and Trucking.

The $500 million Milken Center for the Advancement of the American Dream (MCAAD) is funded by such titans as Citadel Enterprise America’s CEO Ken Griffin, Carlyle founder David Rubenstein, music mogul David Geffen, Walmart multi-billionaire Alice Walton, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. MCAAD’s website highlights The David Geffen Hall of Dreams, The Kenneth C. Griffin Holodeck Experience, The Word Cloud and much more! I decided to see it for myself, but first, a quick story.

* * * * * * * * *

The feel-great American dream vibe of the MCAAD differs quite a bit from a recent Wall Street Journal and NORC survey:

The share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.

Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys.

Interestingly, soon after entering the MCAAD you can sit down at a little booth and pick videos from the “Foundations of the Dream Gallery” and listen to both everyday Americans as well as famous ones like Katie Couric and Elmo from Sesame Street. Yes, Elmo shares his American dream story. You could choose different themes or groups of people like “Walmart.” This option provides testimonials from Walmart employees who got their start at the company and have made a nice life and career. That jogged my memory that Alice Walton, a scion of the family that started Walmart, was a big contributor to the center.

Besides Elmo, Katie Couric and Walmart, Mike Milken is also Biden-approved; well, Jill Biden-approved at least:  Milken Institute Launches New Women’s Health Network, Former First Lady Jill Biden Joins as its Chair.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

REMEMBERING THE HARD HAT RIOT:

Fifty-five years ago, in May 1970, a riot erupted at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan. A few days after the killing of four students by National Guard troops at Kent State University, a large group of antiwar protesters gathered at the historic intersection. They stood on the steps of Federal Hall, next to the statue of George Washington, which commemorates the spot where the nation’s first president took his oath of office.

* * * * * * * * *

Hard Hat Riot is notable for what it does not say. It does not use the word “fascism” to describe the rioters. It does not end with footage of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and it makes no mention of Donald Trump.

Yet the hard hat riot is relevant to today as a lesson in the failures of elite liberalism. Liberal political action, even when taken with the best intentions, often falters when its supporters engage in cultural warfare that alienates ordinary Americans.

A liberalism that looks down on people it perceives as inferiors economically, socially, and culturally, will end up losing electorally. Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection win of 1972 made this clear, as did Trump’s victory more than a half century later in 2024. Such a politics will worsen political tensions and polarization.

Today, some Democrats are desperate to find ways to relate to male, working-class voters without college degrees. It’s not a new challenge. As Hard Hat Riot shows, the Democrats’ problem has been decades in the making.

Their collective opinion about those who don’t share their worldview has been ossified for just as long. In January of 1970, Time magazine declared that “The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans,” and condescendingly wrote about its subscribers in what would eventually be known as the “Gorillas in the Mist” style of journalism:

The Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school on Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor.

Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriots. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.

The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over–the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.

But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were “discovered” first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration’s voices–especially in the Vice President’s and the Attorney General’s–in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation’s course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.

Of course, at least back then, future Democrat state attorney general candidates at least didn’t openly fantasize about shooting those strange looming Republicans. But that’s progress, or at least progressivism, I guess.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

MARK SANCHEZ NOW FACING A FELONY CHARGE STEMMING FROM INDIANAPOLIS ALTERCATION:

It should be noted that Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears is the same prosecutor who recently downgraded an attempted murder charge against Courtney Boose, a man with 99 prior arrests, to “aggravated battery.”

Make no mistake: if Sanchez is guilty, he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The injuries he allegedly inflicted on the 69-year-old victim are horrific. Yet it will be interesting to see how this prosecution unfolds, given the other prosecutorial choices Mears has recently made.

Sanchez was released from the hospital yesterday and immediately taken to jail, where he posted his $300 cash bond.

To their credit, Fox Sports Radio gives a thorough writeup of what’s known about the incident so far:

“GRAPHIC photos of the man attacked by former NFL QB and sportscaster Mark Sanchez. My colleague @maxlewis talked with his wife. The victim is 69 and was working at the time he was attacked. His family says he was cut in the fight and it went through his cheek and hit his tongue,” Ganote wrote on her X account, along with two photos showing the grisly injuries but blocking out the man’s eyes.

Sanchez was reportedly “acting erratically” and attack an elderly grease truck driver before he was stabbed in Indianapolis early Saturday (October 4) morning.

“This guy is trying to kill me,” the 69-year-old driver told police while recounting the incident, according to court documents obtained by the New York Post.

Sanchez was initially charged with battery resulting in injury, public intoxication, and unlawful entry of a motor vehicle in relation to the incident, which resulted in the driver stabbing him. The FOX Sports broadcaster, who was supposed to call the game between the Las Vegas Raiders and Indianapolis Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday, allegedly got into an argument with the truck driver just before midnight on Saturday when he complained that the truck was blocking a nearby alley, sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed to FOX 59.

Sanchez was reportedly doing “wind sprints” in the alley behind the Loughmiller’s Pub and Eatery where he was drinking and “acting erratically” prior to the argument. Video captured from the nearby Indianapolis showed the former NFL quarterback approach and open the driver’s door of the truck, talk to the driver and walk over to the hotel’s security office, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by the Indianapolis Star.

The two men then had another interaction before Sanchez began following the driver, who was seen backing away in the footage described by the charing documents.

“Sanchez is seen running after [the man] and the video shows Mr Sanchez grabbing and throwing [the man] towards the wall of the Westin,” the affidavit states.

The fight continued into the alley, at which point Sanchez allegedly threw the 69-year-old.

“Mr Sanchez is then seen throwing [the man] to the ground on the west side of the alley,” the affidavit states.

The grease truck driver told police that he used mace to protect himself from Sanchez but the attack continued before he stabbed the former quarterback two or three times, at which point Sanchez allegedly stared at him “with a look of shock” before turning around and walking up the alley, the affidavit states. Police found a trail of blood in the alleyway and Sanchez was rushed to the hospital in critical condition before later being upgraded to stable.

Sanchez was arrested, however, hasn’t been booked into Marion County Jail. The driver was reported to have suffered a laceration to his left cheek.

Based on the photos of the driver, which are indeed extremely graphic, that laceration is far more than just “reported.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: Release the Hounds: SCOTUS Rejects Ghislaine Maxwell Appeal. “As long as her attorneys keep up the appeals, though, federal judges will have plenty of cover to keep those transcripts sealed. The Epstein case screams out for more accountability for the trafficking-ring participants, but that usually comes from trials rather than grand jury deliberations. If Maxwell drops all appeals, though, maybe the judges controlling those transcripts will have changes of heart — and maybe Maxwell will see that as her best move. About the only hope she has now is a commutation, and that’s a long shot at best. And even then, it won’t be forthcoming for at least another couple of years.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

HERE WE GO: Bari Weiss: The Free Press is joining Paramount.

As of today, I am editor-in-chief of CBS News, working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations—shows like 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning—and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news in the 21st century.

And curiously, the legacy media is furious that someone who probably has a worldview comparable to that of Bill Clinton circa 1995 has a position of authority with CBS:

Oh no, not 60 Minutes, the home of Rathergate, Pallywood, and Scott Pelley in 2017 admitting on air the network was in bed with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Brian Stelter, whose Sunday CNN show, “Reliable Sources” was for years a safe haven for Dan Rather, tweets:

Not surprisingly, Stelter feigns the same cluelessness as all of his fellow Democrats at CBS right now:

Finally (for now), it’s obvious that there’s only one man who should be the new anchor of 60 Minutes: 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 6th, 2025

October 5, 2025

BEN FREEMAN: I’m Leaving the UK.

For years I clung to the belief that, despite the rise in hostility to the Jewish community, we could still build lives here. I had watched from abroad during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, when Jew-hate poisoned the party and seeped into wider politics. Yet, despite my deep disappointment, I still believed in this country enough to move back from Hong Kong in 2022. I wanted to believe the Jewish story here still had a future, and I was determined to be a part of it.

October 7, 2023, changed everything. Hamas carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and instead of residents recoiling in horror, Britain’s streets filled with marches that celebrated it. Even after two Jews were massacred in Manchester yesterday, on Yom Kippur, the marches continued.

Jew-hatred has become mainstream here. It has been excused by leaders. It has been embedded in a culture where terrorism is justified and Jewish suffering denied. You see it in the tearing down of hostage posters across Britain’s cities, a painful message that Jewish lives do not matter. You can see it in the way Jew-hatred and violence are always paired with condemnations of “Islamophobia.” You can see it in a justice system that treats public displays of Judaism as a threat to public safety, rather than the Islamists who cause the danger. You can see it in placards calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and for the genocide of Jews, and in crowds carrying the flags of proscribed terror organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. These are not, and have never been, pro-Palestinian marches. They are, at their very core, anti-Jewish. They are about stigmatizing Jews as perpetrators of mass murder—and therefore creating the permission structure for violence against us.

Earlier: “I reckon Jews have about 10 years left” in England:

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

UPDATE: Maybe the Union Jack caused the terrorism:

In any case: DEI Expert, One of the ‘Top 50 Influential Muslims,’ Explains Why Jews Can Be Killed in Synagogues. “Any hate towards said Jews would be valid.”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025
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