Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 7, 2026

COMMIE THEATER KID HAS THE SADZ: NYC mayoral aide Cea Weaver who says whites owning houses is racist bursts into TEARS when asked about her mother’s $1.4m Craftsman home.

A woke aide to New York City‘s new socialist mayor burst out crying when confronted over her assertion that it is racist for white people to own homes – despite her own mother owning a $1.4m Craftsman house.

Cea Weaver, who runs Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, was overcome with emotion when confronted outside her apartment in Brooklyn on Wednesday morning.

The 37-year-old began running down the street after seeing a Daily Mail reporter outside her home, then said ‘No’ through tears when asked if she wanted to comment on her professor mother Celia Appleton’s ownership of the $1.4 million property in fast-gentrifying Nashville.

Weaver appeared to be walking towards a nearby subway station, but then turned back and ran inside her home, which has a ‘Free Palestine‘ poster taped to one of its windows.

She was subsequently seen peering out the same window with the poster in it.

Weaver previously tweeted that ‘homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy’ and that ‘homeownership is racist’ in social media posts that also urged people to ‘impoverish the white middle class.’

In another Twitter missive from 2018, Weaver wrote: ‘There is no such thing as “good gentrifier,” only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t.’

Weaver further called on people to ‘seize private property’ and called for the election of communist lawmakers.

I’m so old, I can remember when Communists were made of much sterner stuff than this:

On the other hand, given the path the DNC-MSM cleared for her boss last year, I can understand her confusion that there are now journalists asking questions about his staffers. Not to mention the massive cognitive dissonance that can occur the first time your worldview is called into question:

Also, perhaps the most terrifying concern of all is that the CIA’s cloning program is making considerable strides:

UPDATE: Mamdani Taps Prep School Socialists for Senior Press Roles.

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

BYRON YORK: Jack Smith reveals Jan. 6 committee charade.

Then, in June, [Cassidy] Hutchinson changed lawyers and offered the committee a really big story: On Jan. 6, she said, then-President Trump demanded that the Secret Service drive him to the Capitol, and when agents declined to do so, Trump physically attacked his own Secret Service detail in an effort to grab the wheel of the presidential limousine and point it toward the Capitol.

* * * * * * * *

Smith did not say that he had eliminated Hutchinson as a witness, but his words suggested that if he were trying to present a concise, compelling case to a jury, he would not include Hutchinson’s hearsay version of events. “If I were a defense attorney and Ms. Hutchinson were a witness, the first thing I would do was seek to preclude some of her testimony because it was hearsay,” Smith said.

With that, the final molecules of air leaked out of the Cassidy Hutchinson balloon. It is hard to remember today just how wildly agitated many in the press became when Hutchinson told her story, unchallenged, to the Jan. 6 committee. It’s an old saw that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put on its shoes. That’s certainly what happened in this case. It would be months and years before the public learned about problems with Hutchinson’s testimony.

Now, from the improbable source of Jack Smith, we have the final word — not just on Hutchinson’s account, but on the misleading methods of the Jan. 6 committee.

Still though, maybe the real January 6th were the friends we made along the way: Technical Difficulties! Even the Democrats’ Own Video Feed Died From Their Performative J6 Cringe.

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

DISPATCHES FROM THE SOMALI PIRATES:

Exit question: “I’m going to ask again, does that make Minnesota stronger or weaker?”

UPDATE:

Here’s the article that Barry’s account linked to in 2023: ‘Transformational’ and also ‘bonkers:’ Minnesota Legislature ends its session of historic spending, policy changes.

“Transformational and bonkers” sums up Minneapolis quite well these days.

Posted at 12:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 7th, 2026

STEVE HAYWARD: Reagan, the Original MAGA President?

Reagan was an anti-establishment figure, deeply troubling to many Republicans, just like the current president. Rather than heap contempt on Reagan, serious students of politics ought to contemplate the parallels that made both men so unique and consequential. Reagan had a completely independent and unconventional mind and expressed his unconventional views fearlessly and usually with original language — that is, a vocabulary that didn’t use the regular Beltway terms that everyone else in politics used. In these traits, Trump and Reagan are very much alike. Trump’s tax cuts, both in his first term and last year, were influenced by some of the supply-side thinkers who helped craft Reagan’s tax cuts, and keep in mind that Reagan’s embrace of supply-side economics was a controversial departure from Republican orthodoxy of the era. Now it is the conventional GOP wisdom that Trump builds upon.

Trump and his team acknowledge considering the lessons of the Nixon years, and Trump himself has said Reagan was a great president (though he was “bad on trade,” a claim that may be contested). One might also wonder what Reagan might have accomplished if he had had two full terms to devote his skills solely to domestic policy rather than having to devote so much time and political capital to what turned out to be the climax of the Cold War.

A century ago, G.K. Chesterton observed that “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” This proved accurate for most Republican administrations over the subsequent century. If the nation is restored to its intended constitutional boundaries, future historians will likely apportion credit to Reagan, Trump, and Trump’s successors, as it is certain that it will take several more elections and sustained efforts to fully reverse the administrative state. At the end of Reagan’s presidency, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that the most powerful man in the world is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. A good lesson to keep in mind, while taking seriously the wisdom to be acquired by studying those statesmen who came before, rather than haughtily dismissing them for not aligning with our present frame of mind.

Read the whole thing.

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

WHAT THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE HAS WROUGHT:

 

Earlier: Marxism In The Metropolis: NYC’s New ‘Tenant Czar’ Has Targeted White Homeowners, Private Property.

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

WHAT WAS CHINA’S TAKEAWAY FROM OUR MISSION TO GRAB MADURO?

The lengthy tweet concludes:

Now I’m going to suggest that you juxtapose two phrases: “thermobaric bombs” and “Three Gorges Dam”. A China that’s naked from the air has the biggest glass jaw in human history.

Now I think there’s pretty good odds that the invasion of Taiwan will never happen at all.

In his 2004 book Dresden, historian Fredrick Taylor wrote that during WWII, the Allies dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets on the Nazi Reich that read, “Europe is a fortress. But it is a fortress without a roof.” The CCP may have reached a similar conclusion about Asia.

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

January 6, 2026

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY: Marxism In The Metropolis: NYC’s New ‘Tenant Czar’ Has Targeted White Homeowners, Private Property.

“The reality is that for centuries, we have really treated property as an individualized good and not as a collective good,” Weaver stated, echoing the core tenets of Karl Marx. She went on to warn that the transition to “shared equity” would specifically target “white families” and “some POC (people of color) families who are homeowners,” forcing them into a “different relationship to property” than the one protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 250 years.

In a previous social media post, Weaver said, “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

Matt Taibbi responds, “Ideas matter and some very crazy ones are coming:” 

Crazy ideas are coming? Bane’s motley crew are just getting warmed up — this is only Mamdani’s sixth day in office.

UPDATE:

She’s going to take things away from on behalf of the common good, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE: Unexpectedly! Mom of Zohran Mamdani aide who said owning a home fuels ‘white supremacy’ has $1.6M house in Tennessee.

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

THE $20 TRILLION QUESTION: How to Spend It and How Not To.

$20 trillion is a lot of money.

One would expect a big bang to follow the spending of twenty-thousand billion dollars. It’s a lot of money! It’s pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.

This is the sum that was globally spent — largely by Europe and the United States — in a coordinated effort by the developed world to decarbonize the global economy. China, in contrast, sold the world windmills and solar panels while it opened a new coal-fired power plant per month.

What was the net effect of this “Green” Marshall Plan? Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.

We also saw the de-industrialization of the European and American economies — not just with higher prices at the gas pump and on electric bills, but a stealth green tax that was passed on to consumers on everything. This is the culprit of our American and global affordability crisis. So much treasure and pain for a 2 percent reduction in the share of hydrocarbons.

Ironically, a byproduct of this Green Hunger Games was political populism.

What a tilting-at-windmills waste. The worst bang for the public and private buck ever. Yet, the Chicken Little believers of the Church of Settled Science and the grifters who profited from it will still sing in unison that it failed because they did not go far enough. If only the global community spent and regulated more!

As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

  • Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
  • Blocking oil and gas pipelines
  • Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
  • Cutting U.S. military spending
  • Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

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

WE NEED TO PREPARE FOR THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE U.S. USES MILITARY COERCION AGAINST CANADA:

Donald Trump promised that under his leadership the U.S. would eschew “nation building,” “forever wars,” “regime change,” and violent foreign engagements more generally.

Yet since his second inauguration, he’s ordered military action in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq; bombed Iran’s nuclear weapons complexes; and blown up more than a score of boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean. In just the past two weeks, he has launched missiles against Islamic terrorists in northern Nigeria, declared that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” for another attack on Iran, and now decapitated Venezuela’s government.

In this context, Canadians must acknowledge the real risk that Mr. Trump will use military coercion against our country.

We would be greeted as liberators:

UPDATE: Why would we need to use military coercion and bombs? Trump knows a thing or two about real estate deals, right?

Posted at 6:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Trump targets Venezuela’s oil, US firms stay wary.

The New Hotness? “We seized Nicolas Maduro in order to bring gay marriage to Venezuela, in Tucker’s eyes the most ‘conservative’ country in the New World. You can’t make this stuff up:”

Ride the rainbow-colored Mobius loop! Last year began with “Gay and transgender liberals around the country…arming themselves over perceived concerns they’ll be rounded up and placed in ‘concentration camps’ under a second Trump administration, according to a report,” and this year begins with Tucker claiming that Trump wants to bring gay marriage to Venezuela.

Trump’s been an advocate of domestic partnerships for gay people as early as 2000, and “days after being elected in 2016 in a ‘60 Minutes’ interview, he said he was ‘fine’ with same-sex marriage,” but I’m pretty sure that expanding gay rights in South America isn’t a major component of the Donroe Doctrine.

Related: Ben Shapiro Calls Out Tucker Carlson’s Claim ‘Globo Homo’ People Wanted Venezuela’s Maduro Ousted.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Seriously, WTF is wrong with Tucker?

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

NEVER FORGET:

The late Norm Macdonald tried to warn us of the violence of the radical right wing protestors:

UPDATE:

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

BON APPÉTIT ANOINTS THE DEMOCRATS’ LATEST ‘NEXT BIG THING:’

There are few positions in life greater than being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party; you start getting ludicrously generous coverage, even from publications that are only marginally connected to politics. Back in 2007, Men’s Vogue suddenly put former North Carolina senator John Edwards on the cover. (An actual sentence from the profile: “The hair, up close, is peppered with tiny strands of blond. Chestnut brown and so finely trimmed, mellifluous, smooth, and feathery, it could almost be a weave, the Platonic ideal as imagined by the Hair Club for Men.”)

Back in 2008, Men’s Health declared longtime smoker Barack Obama was one of the 25 fittest men in America. And who could forget Beto O’Rourke on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2019, declaring he was “was born” to be in the presidential race, with his glum-looking dog seeming to know how his presidential bid was going to go? Or the French fashion magazine Marie Claire putting failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on the cover in 2021?

This isn’t just garden-variety liberal media bias; these are once-apolitical publications suddenly giving laudatory soft-focus coverage of a figure, portraying him as the coolest guy ever. In these profiles, the not-so-political audience of the magazine usually doesn’t get told a lot about the figure’s policy positions; often those positions are airbrushed beyond recognition. (In 2017, Vogue insisted that New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand was an economic centrist, an iconoclast, and a campaigning powerhouse with cross-party appeal. She was and is none of those things.)

Bon Appetit has announced that the year is Springtime for Graham Platner, but there are a few problems here.  As Jim Geraghty writes, “Hey, just out of curiosity… if a Republican Senate candidate said he had accidentally gotten a logo of the Nazi SS tattooed to his chest, would they be getting soft-focus glowing profiles in major culinary magazines? Nah, I didn’t think so.”

Tweet continues:

In a deep, gravely voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in a truck commercial, he talks about his decade of military service, and “farming oysters to feed my community.” Interspliced are shots of him hauling up oyster cages, sliding a knife into an oyster to shuck it, handing a fresh oyster to a little girl. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he growls. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”*

I’m picturing some readers asking, “what the f— is this Pyongyang-level propaganda doing in my food and recipes magazine?”

You could see last year when the DNC-MSM hype machine was getting waaaay over its skis trying to promote the candidate du jour:

With brats and coconuts failing to catch on, the following month, the DNC-MSM tried to achieve strength through joy (a slogan which Platner might appreciate as well):

In the last full month of the campaign, things were getting eye-poppingly bad for the left:

“Like a magic spell from Dungeons and Dragons, being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party also grants the bearer of that title temporary immunity to all potential criticisms and attacks,” Geraghty writes. “But as Walz demonstrated, once you lose that title, you also lose that immunity, and past scandals can catch up with you.”

* Isn’t it always?

UPDATE: Via Joseph Campbell, New York magazine’s Dewey Defeats Truman moment in 2016:

As the magazine’s editors admitted a couple of weeks later, “even as we stubbornly maintain that the image is more complex than a certain notorious, erroneous headline from 1948, it is true that seeing the cover on the newsstand after Election Day makes us cringe — and that the vote turned an image meant to be provocative into one that perhaps feels hubristic instead.”

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

DALLAS COWBOYS FIRE COORDINATOR MATT EBERFLUS AFTER DEFENSIVE DISASTER:

The Cowboys will look for yet another new coordinator to try to fix their defense.

Matt Eberflus was fired as the team’s defensive coordinator Tuesday morning after just one season, according to multiple reports, meaning Dallas is in need of its fourth defensive coordinator in four seasons.

The 55-year-old was dealt a surprising blow right before the season when Jerry Jones traded Micah Parsons to the Packers, and Dallas ended up allowing the most points per game in the NFL at 30.1.

Their 511 points allowed were the most in team history.

Their 377 yards allowed per game were the third-most in the league, and their 251.5 yards passing allowed per game were the most in the NFL.

Eberflus was in his second stint with the Cowboys, having been their linebackers coach from 2011-15 and adding passing-game coordinator duties in 2016 and ’17.

No word yet on when Jerry Jones, the Cowboy’s owner, will fire Jerry Jones, the Cowboy’s general manager.

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

IT’S 2026; I’M AFRAID LEFTISTS ARE TAKING THE IDEA OF “SHOOT THE MESSENGER” FAR TOO LITERALLY:

As an Insta-commenter noted in response to Roger Kimball’s Friday column headlined, “The Somali Fraud Scandal is a Turning Point,” “If the Left truly cared about social programs helping people, then the Left should be the most upset about fraud. Every dollar going to fraud is a dollar not going to someone who legitimately needs help. The fact that the Left is always excusing fraud is telling.”

Related:

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

HILTON AXES HOTEL FROM THEIR SYSTEMS AFTER VIDEO SHOWS THEM CONTINUING TO BAN DHS AND ICE AGENTS:

Influencer Nick Sortor, armed with a video recording device, visited the Lakeville Hampton Inn and quickly learned that the owner and front desk manager, at least, weren’t about to change their unwelcoming stance.

In the video posted on X, Sortor asks about available rooms and is met with resistance when he says they are for DHS.

“We’re not accepting people from immigration, ICE agents, DHS, onto our property,” the clerk says. “It’s just per management, our ownership.”

Sortor points to Hilton’s statement, but the front desk manager indicates he had just spoken with the owner, who informed him there was no change to the selective policy.

Less than two hours after the video had been uploaded to X, Hilton issued another statement saying they were dropping that particular hotel from their list of franchisees and accusing ownership of lying to them about making corrections to their policy.

“The independent hotel owner had assured us that they had fixed this problem and published a message confirming this. A recent video clearly raises concerns that they are not meeting our standards and values,” the statement reads. “As such, we are taking immediate action to remove this hotel from our systems.”

It shouldn’t be hard for Hilton’s legal team to send the termination letters to the management of the local franchisee: Gets Worse: Can’t Imagine Why Minneapolis Hilton’s Leaders Didn’t Want ICE Around (Check Out Who Runs It):

 

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

“MY VENEZUELA EXPERIENCE AS HEAD OF TRADING IN THE REGION FOR CARGILL:”

1. The government took over our “minute rice” facility at gunpoint because we were “gouging” the nation’s poor. The government was never able to run the plant. It never ran again. It was returned years later with no equipment inside

2. There are 1000’s of generals in the army. They are each given a slice of the economy to loot. The large number of generals made it difficult to organize a coup against the regime.

3. The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The populous became ever more dependent on the government handouts. (PS this is the mayor of New York City’s proposal.

Read the whole thing.

 

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

RICK BEATO: The 2026 Grammys — Proof Music is Getting Worse.

As Beato notes in his conclusion, after comparing the 2025 songs nominated for Grammys with those nominated from 1983, “No one’s going to remember these songs that were written by three, four, seven, ten, eleven people, 40 years from now, like they remember ‘Beat It’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Every Breath You Take’, ‘All Night Long’, ‘Maniac.’ Those songs are still getting streamed now. They already sold millions and millions of records 42 years ago, and they’re still getting played by people. And it’s new people that are listening to them. No one will remember these songs from today three years from now. They won’t.”

Besides the generic DAW-based production and all of the Mixmaster-blended writing, several of the songs are pastiches of earlier songs, much like the dopey clone of a clone of a clone of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity: 

 

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

CUBA ‘READY TO FALL’ AFTER MADURO’S OUSTING, TRUMP SAYS:

President Donald Trump said Sunday Cuba is “ready to fall.”

The country no longer has any income after the U.S. ousted Nicolás Maduro, the president of Cuban ally Venezuela, Trump explained. Cuba has received economic support from Venezuela for a quarter-century.

“Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re gonna hold out,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it.”

Will Communist Cuba finally collapse on its own?

I wouldn’t mind Trump and Hegseth giving them a push, though.

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

REPORT: Chinese Fishing Vessel Hijacked Off Somalia.

A Chinese fishing vessel from a notorious illegal-fishing fleet has been hijacked off the coast of Puntland, Somalia, according to maritime security consultancy Vanguard Tech.

The vessel in question, Liao Dong Yu 578, was reportedly captured at a position just off the coast near Bandarbeyla, Puntland (09 09 N 050 43 E). The hijackers struck in the early afternoon local time on New Years’ Day, and are suspected to be planning to hold the crew for ransom, Vanguard reported. The report has not been confirmed.

In the past, captured fishing vessels have sometimes been used by Somali pirate gangs to roam the Indian Ocean in search of larger targets, but history suggests that Chinese fishing vessels can also yield significant ransom payouts.

If confirmed, it would be the second time that Liao Dong Yu 578 has been captured by pirates. The vessel was reported hijacked in the same region off Puntland in November 2024, and was released in January 2025 after a reported ransom payment in the low seven figures. In that instance, EUNAVFOR reported the hijacking some weeks after its occurrence.

Insert Kissinger Iran-Iraq War reference here:

 

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

January 5, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Live from the Quality Learing Center in beautiful downtown Minneapolis!

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 5th, 2026
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