Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

October 5, 2025

JOANNE JACOBS: Teaching kids the habits of anxious, depressed people isn’t working well.

For Generation Z, personalities are now defined as disorders, writes Freya India. In a 2024 survey, 72 percent of Gen-Z girls said “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”

Adults diagnosed with mild autism, ADHD, depression and other syndromes often feel better, writes Ellen Barry in the New York Times. But the relief at having a name for their challenges fades over time. They feel less self-blame, but also “greater pessimism about recovery.”

Young adults who were diagnosed with disorders such as depression and ADHD in their teens do slightly worse than those with similar symptoms who weren’t diagnosed, concludes a large study by Cliodhna O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at University College Dublin. “After controlling for symptom severity and socio-demographic factors,” the study found “young adults who were diagnosed with depression in adolescence had worse depression symptoms later, despite getting treatment,” reports Barry. Those diagnosed with ADHD “had worse peer relationships, worse self-image and worse emotional well-being.” The diagnosis lowers expectations.

For a 15-year-old, a diagnosis can be a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” warns Suzanne O’Sullivan, an Irish neurologist, in The Age of Diagnosis.

For some diagnoses, such as neurodevelopmental disorders like A.D.H.D. or autism, there’s not [a] path to recovery, she told Barry. “Although you’re relieved to feel explained and you’ve found a tribe, you are now trapped into an illness through the way you conceptualize it as a biological inevitability.”

Earlier: 23 Percent Of American 17-Year-Old Boys Have An ADHD Diagnosis.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump’s Second Term Resets Washington’s Playbook.

Remember the good old days when the FBI would hang out in the parking lots of Catholic churches where the traditional Latin Mass was celebrated? The Bureau claimed that such churches were a breeding ground for what the Biden administration called “domestic extremism” and offered plenty of scope for what the FBI called “mitigation opportunities.” Hence, they jotted down the license plate numbers of the parishioners who just got done reciting really dangerous things like “Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam.” “See? See? They’re talking about blood!”

Those were the days. You could go to a school board meeting and watch hapless parents being tackled and hauled off by the police for complaining that they didn’t want little Johnny battened on books like Gender Queer or, come to that, they didn’t want that bloke Jack, who called himself Jill, moseying about the girl’s bathroom or playing touch football on the girls’ team. Wot larks!

That’s all over now. Sure, here and there, you will discover some pasty-faced feminist festooning her classroom with pride flags and banners instructing us to “globalize the intifada” or whatever. But those pathetic eructations are like the twitching of a frog’s legs after the dissection has begun: vestigial motor movements produced by stimulus, not life.

The magnificent address by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week was evidence of the new dispensation: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” Hegseth said to the hundreds of senior officers he had summoned. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: A.I. Movie Stars: A Solution in Search of a Problem.

Look, I don’t know how to save the theatrical movie business… I don’t even know if it can be saved. But I do know that this is not the answer. Audiences in general are increasingly uninterested in seeing first run movies in theaters. Younger audiences in particular don’t seem that interested in movies at all… they seem to prefer watching content on Netflix, YouTube and Tik Tok. Whatever the myriad reasons (political messaging, cost, convenience) why people are turning away from theatrical movies, the fact is that there’s not a single person in America who would suddenly decide to start going to the movies more often if we would just get rid of all those damned movie stars.

Not a single one.

AI actors are a long con… a grift… another bullshit tech fantasy Silicon Valley is using to drum up another round of sweet, sweet V.C. cash. It’s just another iteration of the same insanity which convinced Hollywood to toss out the theatrical film and ad-supported network TV models in favor of streaming-based subscription fees… a decision which almost everyone in the industry now regrets.

Movie stars are one of the last remaining reasons to actually go out and see a movie in the theater. What we need to be doing is figuring out how to make more movie stars, not eliminating the ones we still have. If we are to have any hope of saving the theatrical movie model, that’s where we will need to start.

The movie star model works. It doesn’t need to be replaced. What it needs, is to be rejuvenated.

Still though, as “George” notes in his Substack, it makes for a great press release.

UPDATE: L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Is Looking Like a Disaster Movie. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

Don’t worry, I’m sure the AI actors will save the day!

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

HOW IT STARTED:

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority.

How it’s going:

Evergreen:

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

THE WASHINGTON POST, ATTACKING TRUMP, SOUNDS LIKE GEORGE WALLACE:

Included in the story is one startling aspect that, for those who know American history – and apparently that does not include The Post these days —  is shocking. It reads thusly, bold print for emphasis supplied.

“The (Trump) compact asks schools to pledge allegiance to conservative values and policies in eight enumerated areas, including by promising to:

*Prohibit consideration of factors such as gender, race or political views from being considered for admissions, scholarships or programming.”

Hello? Today’s Leftists – and The Post?– oppose the Trump “conservative values” view that colleges should not be allowed to take into admission qualifications like the “consideration of factors such as gender, race”?

Take a minute and hop in the history time capsule, and travel back to June 11, 1963. Famously, Democrat and decidedly segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace literally stood in the entrance to the University of Alabama (the “school house door” as it was then termed in the media of the day) to oppose the admission of black students to the then all-white state university.

Which is to say, Wallace was demanding exactly what The Washington Post apparently now thinks is a good thing in college admissions – taking into “consideration of factors such as gender, race…” They can’t imagine having empathy for a deserving white or Asian student not gaining admission to top colleges based on skin color.

The WaPo aren’t the only leftists who are whistling Dixie:

As VDH noted a decade ago, “The intellectual pedigree of sanctuary cities is not 1960s one-world ecumenicalism, but 1850s Confederate nullification. Their logical consequence is not a wide-open transnational continent, but utter disunion among the states and a second confederate attempt at destroying the primacy of the federal government.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

FACT CHECK: Kamala Harris Claims She’s ‘Not a Trained Seal’ Who Memorizes Talking Points.

Expert Analysis: We’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Kamala Harris is a seal or other semiaquatic marine mammal capable of performing tricks, so let’s assume she was speaking metaphorically. Harris’s interactions with the media during her failed presidential campaign were remarkably consistent. She would memorize a bunch of talking points and attempt to spout them off, no matter what the question was. On numerous occasions, she would ramble nonsensically about her “middle-class” upbringing in response to questions about inflation. Harris would inevitably get flustered when the otherwise friendly journalist tried to prod her towards a more coherent response, and this would often end in disaster when Harris tried to come up with new words on the spot.

Discover what can be, unburdened by what has been, and read the whole thing.

Related: Bill Maher sticks the rhetorical shiv in:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

LEGENDARY MILITARY STRATEGIST PEGGY NOONAN IS NONE-TOO-FOND OF PETE HEGSETH:

UPDATE:

Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

—Noonan on November 5th, 2012.

But why would Romney have had a chance?

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

—Noonan on October 31st, 2008.

And in August of 2020, she was praising “The Rise of Kamala Harris. The daughter of East Bay professors grew up to become an excellent performer of politics.”

Exit quote: “It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.”

—By…well, guess who it’s by.

Posted at 7:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

THE GOP EXECUTES AN IMPRESSIVE OCTOBER SURPRISE THAT COULD INFLUENCE VIRGINIA AG RACE:

National Review Online reported that when Jay Jones was a delegate in 2021, he acted in an incredibly demented manner. The Virginia House was honoring the memory of a long-time African American delegate who had just passed, and the Virginia Speaker, Todd Gilbert, a Republican, as well as other Republicans, had said the usual salutary boilerplate statements to praise the deceased.

Jones then sent a series of text messages to a Republican delegate where he scoffed at the “glowing” tributes that were being made by Republicans. “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, “I will go to their funerals to p*ss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.” Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time.”

When the Republican delegate expressed her alarm, Jones called her to explain his reasoning over the phone, where he shockingly doubled down, and later he tripled down with more vile texts, which among other things called Gilbert’s children “little fascists” who deserved to die.

It goes without saying that Jones’ behavior was unbelievably and disgustingly evil, reckless, crazy, and stupid. It is absolutely beyond the pale of American political discourse.

Which makes it impressive that the GOP operatives were patient enough to wait till the very last month of the campaign to explode this scandal. Jones, although he had to know this was coming, seems to have made things worse for himself by doing nothing to prepare for it, not even by warning his own party. His first attempted damage control statement was tone deaf, where he claimed “all people” send these kinds of texts, and that Attorney General Miyares and “Trump controlled media organizations” were unfairly playing it up. Then, when this didn’t satisfy anyone, he acted in a more contrite and appropriate manner.

It’s been quite a week in leftist depravity:

Data Republican is demanding refunds from Jones’ heavy hitting financial backers:

Naturally though, the WaPo isn’t calling for Jones to withdraw:

Flashback: Ralph Northam and the Washington Post — a story in three acts.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 5th, 2025

October 4, 2025

YOU ONLY LIVE WEISS:

As I’ve noted, Bari is actually more consistently centrist than her critics care to acknowledge. Indeed, for all the fears of rightward drift, it’s quite likely that her first brush with controversy will come when her free speech absolutism puts CBS and Paramount in direct opposition to Trump, who has been testing the limits of his ability to influence newsrooms and late-night studios. After all, when Disney pulled Kimmel amid F.C.C. pressure, Bari was the one who reminded us all about the definition of jawboning.

Politics aside, the more pressing question for Paramount and CBS centers on what happens to Bari upon going corporate. To date, she has built her brand by positioning herself as an outsider—a voice the Times couldn’t tolerate, a truth-teller too honest for the mainstream—and much of The Free Press’s commentary contains subtle or overt criticisms of the mainstream media. As one media entrepreneur of Bari’s generation put it to me, she’s ridden that hobbyhorse quite far. But what happens when she becomes mainstream media, and is responsible for what gets said on a national news network between broadcasts of NFL games and reruns of NCIS? It’s harder to punch up when you’re at the top.

Earlier: ‘It’s not a good place right now:’ CBS News staffers are ‘literally freaking out’ about Bari Weiss taking over newsroom.

To be fair, the CBS newsroom has been going very wrong for half a century now, both ideologically, and in terms of ratings. So why not take a chance on doing something different? Curiously though, Esquire’s Charles Pierce is yet another leftist with a case of the vapors over Weiss’s reportedly imminent arrival: Bari Weiss Is Simply Unqualified to Run CBS News.

Based on her résumé, Weiss isn’t any more qualified to run a major news organization than she is to fly Artemis III to the moon. Now, within the universe of wing-nut welfare, to which Weiss fled after departing The New York Times in a huff, one can rise simply on the strength of your superior bullshit. Weiss’s main riff was the “cancel culture” con. Which proved to be positively catnip for the money power, so she landed softly at her own joint, the Free Press.

Now, though, it appears that the elite legacy media has adopted that same philosophy—or it is being dragged into it by a bunch of tech-bro gazillionaires who don’t know any more about actual journalism than she does. In this case, it’s David Ellison, son of Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, the second-richest man in the world and an old pal of the current president, whom Ellison could buy and sell three times over. And if you’re willing to hire a conservative affirmative-action monitor for your newsroom, handing the wheel to an unconvincing ideological chameleon isn’t exactly a leap.

I’m not sure if Pierce should be making steering wheel references: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”

—Charles Pierce, the Boston Globe, January 5, 2003.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 4th, 2025

DEVELOPING:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 4th, 2025

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES:

Well, they actually did, at least couple of times, including 1988’s Running on Empty, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Judd Hirsch and River Phoenix. Lumet’s film sympathized with the Nixon-era anti-Vietnam War terrorists, now on the run from the FBI:

And then there was 2012’s The Company You Keep, directed by and starring the recently deceased Robert Redford:

Promoting the film the following year, Redford had this exchange on Good Morning America with fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos:

Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.”

Among their other terrorist attacks during the Nixon era, the Weathermen bombed the Pentagon; right around the same time Redford’s film was bombing at the box office, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev quite literally bombed the Boston Marathon, leading to his totally cool and dreamy cover photo in Rolling Stone magazine. When Redford’s movie was previewed at Sundance in January of 2012, the late Kathy Shaidle wrote:

Over twenty years after Running on Empty came out and more than ten years after Bill Ayers told The New York Times (in its 9/11/01 morning edition, no less) that he regretted not setting more bombs, Robert Redford’s next movie sees him playing “a fugitive Weather Underground radical who has been in hiding for 30 years.”

I suppose it makes for a nice change from Weather Underground radicals who teach at major universities and hang out with the president.

Just to bring it all full circle, as Marathon Pundit noted back then, “Boston Marathon bombs similar to Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground nail bomb.” Ayers’ “device was intended to be detonated at a soldiers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 4th, 2025

ACE OF SPADES: JK Rowling Finally Blasts Ungrateful Little Rich Bitch Emma Watson For Her Constant Attacks.

It’s a lengthy and absolutely nuclear-powered tweet:

And as a result, Watson makes the Critical Drinker’s “Crash and Burn” list:

And the savagery continues:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 4th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s professor father claimed Hitler inspired by Abraham Lincoln.

During a 2022 panel discussion hosted by the Asia Society, Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, asserted that America was the “genesis of what we call settler-colonialism” around the world.

“With the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations, they herded American Indians into separate territories,” Mamdani, Columbia’s Herbert Lehman professor of government, said. “For the Nazis, this was the inspiration – Hitler realized two things: one, that genocide is doable. It is possible to do genocide, that’s what Hitler realized. Second thing Hitler realized, is that you don’t have to have a common citizenship.”

The elder Mamdani also argued during the talk that the racist and antisemitic Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany “were patterned after American laws.”

Other comments included claims that there is no difference between “nationalism and colonialism” and that the Allied forces during World War II shared the same goals as the Nazis.

“The Nazi political project was shared by the Allies, and that political project was to turn Germany into a ‘pure’ nation. A ‘pure’ nation rid of its minorities,” Mamdani said at the Asia Society event. “When the Allies defeated the Nazis and went into Eastern Europe, they began to create ‘pure’ nations. To ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe of Germans – move them back into Germany. One crime doesn’t wipe out another.”

Following the political upset in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, critics began unearthing videos of the younger Mamdani espousing similarly radical views.

Good and hard, Fun City:

Related: New York conservatives fear city will become Sadiq Khan’s London.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 4th, 2025

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 4th, 2025

October 3, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: Edward R. Murrow Reports Live from London During the Blitz.

The New Hotness? ‘It’s not a good place right now:’ CBS News staffers are ‘literally freaking out’ about Bari Weiss taking over newsroom.

Brian Stelter is probably not taking the reports well, either:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 3rd, 2025

DID SAME HIGH-POWERED POLICE BULLET KILL SYNAGOGUE TERRORIST AND WORSHIPPER?

The police bullet that struck one of the Manchester terror attack victims may have first travelled through the knifeman as well as the heavy synagogue doors, firearms experts have suggested.

Greater Manchester Police confirmed on Friday that one of the two men who died in the atrocity at Heaton Park Synagogue had sustained a gunshot wound.

Jihad al-Shamie, the Islamist terrorist, was armed with a knife and the only rounds discharged came from authorised firearms officers (AFOs), who opened fire to prevent further bloodshed.

An investigation will now examine how the innocent victim was also struck by a bullet.

Firearms specialists said it was possible it was the same round that had killed the terrorist.

And speaking of the terrorist: More About Jihad: “His father, who emigrated to Britain from Syria, is a trauma surgeon who has worked in war zones around the world. He has expressed shock and horror at his son’s actions. Jihad has two brothers, who appear to have been excellent students. One of them has an advanced degree in mathematics and is described as an expert on artificial intelligence…terrorists were often educated and intelligent men–engineers, doctors, and so on. Jihad Al-Shamie illustrates the fact that Islamic terrorism is, often, an elite activity.”

UPDATE: Father of Manchester synagogue terrorist Jihad al-Shamie praised Hamas for Oct. 7 slaughter.

Posted at 4:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 3rd, 2025
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