Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 2, 2026

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The merciless mistreatment of Henry Nowak.

For me, the most chilling thing in the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s last moments of life is the cops’ cruel presumption that he is lying. As he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’

I know. It is delivered with dry, bureaucratic indifference. Henry is heard moaning, begging, ‘I can’t breathe’, yet here is a representative of the state seeming to agree with his knife-wielding tormentor that he is making it up. That cold, cavalier utterance – I know – will have cemented dying Henry’s great dread: that the police were taking the side of his killer rather than him. As his young, precious life came to an end, he heard himself being disbelieved, distrusted, icily written off as a fabulist. His murderer, meanwhile, was afforded respect. The state blindly bowed to his filthy lies.

The bodycam footage of the arrest of 18-year-old Henry Nowak after he was stabbed in Southampton in December last year is horrifying beyond belief. It is one of the most harrowing two minutes of video I have ever watched. Henry can be seen sprawled in agony in a stranger’s driveway, the place he sought sanctuary after being knifed four times by Digwa. His failing voice is thick with pain and fear. What he wanted in that moment – what he needed – was to be believed. The belief of others was the only thing that might have delivered him from his terror-stricken state. But it never came. He said ‘I can’t breathe’ nine times. He said ‘I’ve been stabbed’ four times. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, said an officer with chirpy, inhumane derision.

Read the whole thing, and then watch Zia Yusuf of Reform UK reminding Cathy Newman of Sky News of her George Floyd-era rhetoric and the Hampshire police’s ‘race action plan’ that O’Neill mentions in the above Spiked essay. “I am not impugning the intention of people who created all this,” Yusuf tells Newman, but what is crystal clear is that we saw in a harrowing, distressing and tragic body cam footage is directly downstream… and what it makes crystal clear is that reaction of the police proves that the burden of proof for a man making an accusation of racism was zero. Henry was arrested pretty much immediately even as he [was] bleeding to death yet the burden of proof in saying repeatedly ‘I have been stabbed’ was such that the police responded as he [was] bleeding to death by handcuffing him and saying ‘I don’t think you have.'”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

SUBSTACK SOON TO GAIN ANOTHER COLUMNIST:

You could say that Pelley’s likely demise at CBS was “to some degree self-inflicted:”

Posted at 6:37 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

OKAY, GROOMERS:

Of course, sometimes the left hand inside the Muppet doesn’t know what the far left hand is doing:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

HOW THE YOUTUBERS BEAT STAR WARS:

Last weekend saw the most unlikely battle between David and Goliath. The little film that could was none other than the psychological horror film Backrooms. It was made on a microscopic budget (in relative terms) of $10 million, yet went on to gross a staggering $81.4 million in the US alone in its opening weekend. And the big film that couldn’t was the not-so-eagerly awaited The Mandalorian and Grogu, which had a 70 percent drop at the box office from its (relatively) underwhelming opening weekend. Unless something wholly unexpected happens, it will conclude its run as the lowest-grossing Star Wars property, confirming the predictions of those who suggested that Disney have run the brand into the ground spectacularly.

Yet the unpredicted triumph of Backrooms might be the change that the Hollywood industry so desperately needs if mainstream cinema is to evolve and survive. It was directed by Kane Parsons, aka Kane Pixels, a 20-year-old YouTuber who has had a series of successful short films and web series, including a 2022 prototype for what became Backrooms. (And yes, this means that Parsons/Pixels was finding huge success online while he was still a teenager, if you want to feel old.) While there has been some chatter on social media about whether Parsons really was solely responsible for the film himself, given the starry list of producers – including The Conjuring’s James Wan and Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy – he has set numerous records, including being the youngest director ever to have a number one hit at the box office.

At her Substack, Justine Bateman explores: The Horror! The Horror! Something new and exciting is happening in film. And it’s scaring the hell out of people.

Horror may be the most consistently profitable genre. Films are made for small budgets, with limited cast and locations. And Elevated Horror, although pricier, provides a reliable return. HEREDITARY, for instance, earned $80m with a $10m budget, and NOSFERATU earned $181m on $50m expenditure. Cregger’s WEAPONS earned $264 worldwide with only a $38m budget.

This is partially due to horror fans being loyal and dedicated. These fans show up. Damien Leone, known for the Terrifier franchise, says, “Horror fans are like drug addicts. We always need that fix.”

Backrooms is also Critical Drinker approved, incidentally:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

60 MINUTES IS BURNING. BRING MARSHMALLOWS:

Scott Pelley knows he’s on borrowed time and has been for quite a while. He’s making himself a pain in the ass so that he can claim to be a victim of “censorship” when he’s let go for a completely different reason — namely, that he’s a leftist hack whose journalistic product is middling at best, that he makes far too much money for the volume of content he produces and the number of eyes it draws, and that his undisciplined and irritating public outbursts are bad for the CBS News brand. Let’s not forget that a much more forgiving CBS News management than this one tried to make Pelley the next Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite back in 2017, and he didn’t last two years before his tenure as CBS News’ anchor collapsed in a heap. They didn’t fire him altogether then; they parked him at 60 Minutes, where he’s drawn a fat check and largely mailed it in ever since. (RELATED: The Agony Of 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley)

And now that the Ellisons own Paramount, the parent company of CBS, and would very much like to make the company somewhat profitable, they’ve brought in Weiss and a new breed of journalists who have a little less sycophantic relationship to elite leftist power politics. Which means Pelley and the rest of the hangers-on from the old regime are going to get evaluated from an objective perspective.

Which is not good news for Scott Pelley.

Would 60 Minutes still be on the air without the NFL?

Related:

Leslie Stahl couldn’t name any conservatives at CBS 23 years ago when asked by Cal Thomas on a Fox News show. I doubt the situation has changed much in the decades since.

Posted at 1:36 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

SPENCER PRATT’S FIRST BIG TEST: Will Voters Reject Karen Bass?

Despite a city budget of nearly $14 billion — more than the gross domestic product of NATO member Montenegro — city infrastructure is in terrible shape, blamed on pervasive under-investment for decades. The Los Angeles Times noted that the city hadn’t repaved a single street for a six-month stretch and declared that the city had “surrendered to the potholes.” (Hey, it’s not like Los Angelenos drive much, right?)

Where’s all the money going? In some cases, exceptionally well-paid city employees. In 2024, a fire battalion chief was paid $905,060, including $650,510 in overtime pay on a base salary of $135,306. Now, we all love firefighters, but that is more than quite a few players on the Los Angeles Rams football team will make this season.

As of 2024 — the most recent year available — at least 15 city employees were paid more than $600,000 in compensation, including the Chief Port Pilot of the city of Los Angeles, who was paid $704,027.

Eighty-seven city employees were paid more than $500,000 in a single year. The one-hundredth highest-compensated city employee was a port pilot in Los Angeles Harbor who was paid $495,022. (The league minimum annual salary in Major League Baseball is $780,000, so roughly one hundred city employees are making about two-thirds of what bottom-of-the-roster players on the Los Angeles Dodgers are making this year.)

Mayor Bass’s annual salary is about $301,000, but she said she has taken a pay cut, but has refused to disclose the amount.

The city’s Democratic tax-and-spend establishment has killed the geese that had been laying the golden eggs.

The 72-year-old Bass — apparently one of the finalists to be Joe Biden’s running mate back in 2020 — has failed her city so thoroughly that you half expect Oliver Queen to show up with a bow and arrow.

The options for the city of Los Angeles are to continue the current status quo, move even further to the left with Raman, or try something new with Pratt and his “Common Spence.” If the city does not choose the Pratt option, we’re left to wonder why anyone dissatisfied with the city’s direction would stick around.

Choose wisely, Los Angeles.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Henry Nowak and the savagery of state wokeness.

The case of Henry Nowak has shocked the nation. He was a Polish-Briton in his first year at university. During a night out in Southampton in England in December last year, he had a fatal encounter with a Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa. Some kind of altercation took place. Digwa then stabbed Nowak five times with his kirpan, the ceremonial curved sword that Sikhs carry. Nowak was gored in his chest, his face and his legs. He scrambled over a fence, leaving a blood trail in his wake. ‘I’m dying’, local residents heard him say. He was right.

As savage as the knifing was, it was what happened next that has shaken Britain’s soul. Digwa’s mother arrived and spirited away the murder weapon – it was later found hidden in the family home with 20 other Sikh swords and knives. Digwa then accused Nowak of having racially abused him. He said Nowak used a racist slur against him, punched him and knocked off his turban. These were ‘wicked lies’, the court heard during his murder trial. Yet there was a group of people on the scene of this atrocity who believed Digwa’s vile libels against the youth he had just fatally lacerated: the police.

The police’s behaviour that night defies all logic and humanity. They bowed to Digwa’s defamatory slurs and arrested and handcuffed young Henry. The Telegraph’s report captures the barbarism of the police’s credulous ineptitude that grim evening: ‘As the teenager lay there, unable to breathe as his lungs filled with blood, begging officers for help, they ignored his pleas and placed him under arrest. He died less than an hour later.’ If anything will cause decent Britons to lose faith in the police, it’s this: the haunting vision of a boy being manhandled by the state as he drowned in his own blood.

As Bertold Brecht asked, “Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

SIX YEARS AGO TODAY, THE PIVOT BEGAN: ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”

QED: Shot: Grief and COVID-19: Mourning our bygone lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an epidemiological crisis, but also a psychological one. While the situation provokes anxiety, stress and sadness, it is also a time of collective sorrow, says Sherry Cormier, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in grief and grief mentoring. “It’s important that we start recognizing that we’re in the middle of this collective grief. We are all losing something now.”

Many people are reckoning with individual losses, including illness and death due to the novel coronavirus, or loss of employment as a result of economic upheaval. But even people who haven’t lost anything so concrete as a job or a loved one are affected, Cormier says. “There is a communal grief as we watch our work, health-care, education and economic systems — all of these systems we depend on — destabilize,” she says.

—The American Psychological Association, April 1st, 2020.

Chaser: APA’s action plan for addressing inequality.

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to you while still reeling from the tragic murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the ongoing protests, which are reverberating in a shockwave throughout our nation and around the world.

These recent events present us with an urgent challenge—as an association, discipline and profession, and individual psychologists—to bring our expertise to bear to address the range of underlying problems these events represent from discrimination to racism, which have resulted in long-standing social, economic, and political inequalities, from police brutality, to the disproportionate spread of the coronavirus among black and brown people, to the soaring unemployment rates among communities of color.

APA is urging psychologists to share their thoughts and recommendations for using the power of psychology to address the “pandemic of racism,” both in the short and long term. As part of that process, we must also examine our role as a field and as an association in perpetuating these ills.

—The American Psychological Association, June 2nd, 2020.

Note the photos atop those Webpages. The April 1st post is illustrated by photos of an elderly white woman looking frustrated in her apartment, and a young black woman staring wistfully into the distance outside the window of her apartment, with the photos separated by a white dividing line to emphasize both persons’ isolation from the world. Contrast that with the photo of the massed protestors carrying “Black Lives Matter” placards atop the June 2nd post.

NPR also pivoted on June 2nd, 2020:

The DNC-MSM and local mayors turned on a dime from enforcing hard-line lockdown rules and shaming anyone who went to church or got a haircut, to letting rioters congregate with impunity. Bill de Blasio was quoted five years ago today, “When you see…an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seated in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”

Flashbacks:

● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

● NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

● The Suicide of Expertise.

● Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

HOW IT STARTED: Paul Krugman’s totalitarian temptation.

Jared Loughner, the gunman charged with wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and murdering six others in Tucson on Saturday, held bizarre beliefs about “conscious dreaming” and government mind control imposed through English grammar. No serious person would connect his belief system to a mainstream political ideology. But then there’s New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He places the blood libel of blame for the Tucson murders squarely on the shoulders of “the crowds at the McCain-Palin rallies” and “right-wing extremism.” It’s the Republicans’ fault because “the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the GOP establishment.” Krugman’s solution is for “decent people” to “shun” those he holds accountable. But the logic of his argument leads straight to calling for official restrictions on political speech after shunning inevitably fails to do the job. The totalitarian temptation is an ever-present possibility with people like Krugman.

—The Washington Examiner, January 10th, 2011.

How It’s Going:

To be fair, acknowledging that the economic “miracle of the 1940s” had a rather massive downside might actually be progress of a sort for Krugman in his dotage.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

June 1, 2026

NETWORK THAT BROUGHT YOU RATHERGATE, PRO-OBAMACARE POETRY READINGS, AND BARRY GOLDWATER AS A NAZI DEMANDS NEW CEO “RESPECT EDITORIAL VALUES:” CBS News Staff Sending Letter to CEO David Ellison Demanding He ‘Respect Editorial Values’ — Media Insider Tells MS NOW.

Oh, and speaking of Dan Rather:

Related: Whom the gods destroy, they first make Olbermann:

More here: Pompous Pelley Tells New ’60 Minutes’ Boss: You’re MURDERING Our Show!

UPDATE:

MORE: The media’s janitor is on the case!

It’s not like Stelter is invested in preserving as much of the old regime at CBS as possible: Dan Rather: CNN’s ‘Reliable Source.’

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

‘NO REGRETS:’ Graham Platner Admitted to Buying Cocaine, Boasted About Doing Drugs During Military Leave While ‘on the Government Dime.’

Platner “highly” recommended the drug-fueled experience to other Reddit users.

“No regrets,” he wrote in February 2020.

Platner, who is running to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, discussed buying cocaine in another post from around the same time. Platner responded to someone who asked about a Coast Guard seizure of 12,000 pounds of cocaine valued at $312 million.

“Street value,” Platner wrote in July 2020. “I always wonder what street you’re buying your cocaine on, because it’s not the street I’m buying my cocaine on.”

Platner’s drug use could also prove a political liability in Maine, the oldest state in the nation in terms of median age. Older Americans typically are more disapproving of drug use compared to their younger counterparts. While there is little public polling on Americans’ views of cocaine and other illicit drugs, just 43 percent of Americans older than 65 approve of recreational marijuana use, compared to 63 percent of Americans between 18 and 29. And unlike marijuana, which is being legalized in multiple states, cocaine remains illegal, and the market is controlled by ruthless drug cartels.

It is unclear if Platner admitted his drug use to the military or if it would have affected his service status. Platner’s posts suggest he took the drug-infused European trip at the end of his first deployment with the Marines, which ended in 2008. After the Marines and a stint at George Washington University, Platner joined the Army in 2011.

No word yet if Platner also scored a few vials of Pervitin as well.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

ADAM CAROLLA ON THE VIEW. No, not Carolla actually appearing on The View. That’ll never happen, for reasons Carolla explains thusly:

“Here’s the problem [with The View]. The problem is they have horrible, ill-sorted, bad ideas that are either just sort of lies or they don’t really comport with any reality.”

“They go, well, ‘J6 was 10 times worse than the Summer of Love.’ And then they all nod, and there’s not one person there that raises their hand and goes, ‘What the f*ck are you talking about? That’s insane.’”

“But if there is one person who actually has facts and data… you will watch ONE PERSON WHOOP UP ON FOUR PEOPLE. Because four people who are wrong still can’t match the one person who is right.”

“So they can’t have somebody who’s going to show up with a lot of information.”

QED:

 

 

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

PRATT SUMMER:

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

TRAVELING TERRORISTS:

Flashback to Andy Ngo in 2023: Who funds Antifa protests? We all do.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

ACTUALLY, IT IS DYING OF NATURAL CAUSES: Jimmy Kimmel ‘Felt Defeated’ by Stephen Colbert’s Cancellation and Says Late-Night TV Is Not ‘Dying of Natural Causes:’ ‘We’re Being Poisoned.’

Jimmy Kimmel has some thoughts on the purported death of late-night television.

The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host opened up in a new interview with Vulture about the future of the genre following the cancellation of Stephen Colbert‘s “Late Show” on CBS and his own run-ins with Trump, including his suspension following comments made about the death of Charlie Kirk.

“I feel a little bit defeated about it,” Kimmel told Vulture after Colbert’s final episode aired on May 21. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”

CBS canceled “The Late Show” in July 2025 — a year before Colbert’s three-year deal was set to end — citing “purely financial reasons” despite much speculation that Colbert’s anti-Trump views had something to do with it, especially with the Paramount-Skydance merger in the background. Though it was reported that Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year, Kimmel told Vulture he finds that hard to believe, pointing to a 2023 New York Times article that claims Colbert was offered a five-year contract but decided to go with three.

“Am I to believe that over the course of those two years, they suddenly started losing $40 million a year?” he said. “These are just made-up numbers.”

Kimmel said that ABC has told him “quite specifically” that his show is still profitable.

“There are far more people watching late-night TV than there ever were, if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings,” Kimmel asserted, adding: “We’re not just dying of natural causes. We’re being poisoned.”

However, Kimmel’s contract was extended in December by just one year instead of the standard three. “Everything is so tumultuous,” Kimmel told Vulture. “That seemed to make sense. It’s definitely not how it’s gone in the past.”

Related: 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley accuses Bari Weiss of ‘murdering’ show.

Scott Pelley, a veteran 60 Minutes correspondent, called out CBS News management in a heated meeting on Monday morning, attacking the network’s decision on Thursday to fire the show’s executive producer, executive editor, and two fellow correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, as part of a broader overhaul of the show, sources tell the Guardian.

During a meeting of the show’s staff and Nick Bilton, its newly appointed executive producer, along with the CBS News managing editor Charles Forelle, Pelley took direct aim at Bari Weiss, the network’s controversial editor-in-chief.

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley said, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

Beyond Pelley’s own stated establishment left biases, and the Rathergate debacle, I can’t imagine why Weiss “does not love this place” and wants to “murder” 60 Minutes:

Kimmel and Pelley must feel a bit like big band leaders with shows on AM radio in the 1950s and ’60s as first television, and then those crazy rock and roll kids and DJs smoking the jazz cabbage arrived on newfangled FM radio, confused by the new technologies that are dooming their beloved legacy platforms.

As with AM radio today, the technology of television will continue long into the future. But the content it delivers will likely change so that those who own these legacy media platforms will continue to make a profit on their diminishing investment returns.

As for Pelley’s likely future:

UPDATE: 60 Minutes’ Leftist Scott Pelley Knows He’s About to be Fired, So He Stages a Tantrum-Flounce to Make It Seem Like He Was Fired in Retalliation for #FightingThePower.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

JIM GERAGHTY: Democrats Have Tied Themselves to Grähäm Plätner.

Based on what we know, Graham Platner is just a full-spectrum creep. That Democratic political firm that controls a bunch of social media influencers generated amazing results.

But we should not expect Maine Democrats to abandon Platner, nor pressure him to end his campaign. A whole lot of Democrats inside and outside of Maine are now deeply emotionally invested in the success of this campaign. From the moment they chose to believe that Platner had “accidentally” gotten the symbol of the Nazi SS tattooed on his chest, and the “military history buff” never recognized it as a Nazi symbol for 18 years, they were taking their consciences and integrity and putting them into a lockbox and entrusting them to Platner. Ending their support of Platner now would mean admitting that his critics were right about him all along. And surely, no modern Republican could relate to the phenomenon of sticking with a deeply flawed candidate out of a sense of partisan obligation, and not wanting to let the other side get a win.

Incidentally, this is who the man with the Totenkopf tat seeks to blitzkrieg:

Related: Flashing back to the infamous ad full of manly men eating carburetors for breakfast that Camp Kamala ran in 2024, did Platner’s recruiters think that the Totenkopf tat would be a plus…?

“So maybe they want to run to the RIGHT of Collins, and since these idiots ACTUALLY BELIEVE we are all actual Nazis, maybe they saw Platner as the ideal candidate. Because they are stupidly brainwashed. Just a theory…”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

MATT WELCH: The Federal Government Botched the Bicentennial Too.

President Lyndon Johnson’s original idea back in 1966 was to use the bicentennial as a showcase for the self-evident glories of…urban renewal. Philadelphia leaders countered with a possible 1976 World Fair, hoping to recapture the glory of the Centennial Exposition a century before. But “an expensive, celebratory international exposition,” noted historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska in The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook, “was out-of-step with the troubled contemporary moment.”

Then came backlash against the heavy-handed ministrations of a vulgar Republican president. Richard Nixon replaced LBJ’s picks on the bipartisan American Revolution Bicentennial Commission with his own cronies and donors, prompting would-be participants to back out of what was shaping up to be a more explicitly partisan exercise. The commission would eventually come under investigation and be replaced by a congressionally authorized American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA). Then as now, Washington treasured its narcissism of small bureaucratic differences.

The early ’70s being the early ’70s, there was also a dog’s breakfast of sociopolitical movements eager to throw turds in the national punchbowl. “A group called the Bicentennial Without Colonies sought to use the commemoration to point to the disjunction between the ideals and realities of the Revolution, specifically the ongoing inequality, disenfranchisement, and imperialism evidenced by U.S. actions in Puerto Rico,” wrote Rymsza-Pawlowska. “Local and national organizers for the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement were involved in this latter effort and in interviews, speeches, and publications, also drew attention to the federal Bicentennial’s erasure of both the histories of inequality and the contributions of people of color to the nation.” Sometimes the past isn’t a foreign country…

By 1973, the ARBA had largely punted on any grand national gestures, opting instead to dish out grants to whatever state and local celebrations looked promising. Turns out there were lots! Parades and historical re-enactments galore, an odd and oddly moving Bicentennial Wagon Train in reverse to Valley Forge, area dads embarrassing their kids with powdered wigs and theatrical speeches. Not the kind of stuff to send thrills up the legs of New York Times art critics, but that was—maybe still is!—precisely the point.

When 2026 Gen Xers and Gen Jonesers wax nostalgic about the Bicentennial of their youth, part of the lament is for the passing of common culture. As Robert Pondiscio observed recently in Commentary, “we were…living in the last days of the three-network, Time-and-Newsweek world that functioned, for all its flaws and limitations, as a civic commons. When the Bicentennial unfolded, it did so on a shared stage.”

That stage so very much included tacky commercial culture—the Coke ads, 7Up’s 50 Cans for 50 States campaign, the collectible bicentennial quarters. “Much of it was kitschy, crass, and transparently designed to separate Americans from their money,” Pondiscio notes. As if that’s a bad thing!

Pop culture and sports, too, were spitting out spar-spangled ephemera. Yes, there were 1776 and Schoolhouse Rock, though for the latter we tend to remember the winning strains of “No More Kings” and “I’m Just a Bill” more than the problematic Manifest Destiny of “Elbow Room.” But, as importantly, you couldn’t turn on an AM radio without hearing Elton John’s #1 pre-disco banger “Philadelphia Freedom” (fittingly, a song written by one then-closeted icon about the sports team owned by another). The then-peaking American Basketball Association featured a red, white, and blue ball to go with its gravity-defying afros; all major professional sports leagues in 1976 held their All-Star games in Philly.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF UNCANNY VALLEYS? The AI Film Dreams of Violets Is How You Get Me to Hate Movies.

The facial expressions are trying to convey sadness, but they are wooden, hollow facsimiles. I look at them and feel nothing except disgust. Beyond these uncanny valleys, many of the shots don’t even make sense. How can a man be walking normally while tear gas moves in slow motion behind him? Have these people forgotten how to tie a blindfold? Why is the bokeh flickering in broad daylight? What is even happening in this film?

Tom Rogers, Executive Chairman of Fountain 0 (the makers of the film), says that when he showed “Dreams of Violets” to “one of the most prominent names in the independent film business,” he had no idea he was watching an AI-generated movie.

I am curious to know which clearly blind person they found to say that, because this film is obviously AI generated.

I have a feeling that much of the criticism that will be levied against this mess of disjointed visuals will be accused of hating the topic of the “film,” not the fact it is AI generated. The creators will likely claim that those who speak out against it are actually somehow supporting the tragedy in Iran, which is an easy way to shift the narrative away from having to discuss the real issues.

Right now, AI works better as commercials and campaign videos (such as those made by Spenser Pratt’s supporters), than trying to pass it off as an actual film. But this is still the early days of the technology. As Glenn wrote in 2024, “Of course, the thing about AI is that AI keeps getting better, while people stay about the same…At a sufficiently advanced level of technology, AI will be super-effective at manipulating people, and they won’t even know they’re being manipulated.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

NIEMAND WIRD GERNE VON EINEM GEBÄUDE GEWORFEN:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

QUALITY LEARING CENTERS, WEST COAST DIVISION: California’s War on Nick Shirley, Explained.

Our story begins at the epicenter of almost all affronts to Constitutional rights / basic decency / shit-free sidewalks: the state of California, where Gavin Newsom and his henchmen of union mouthpieces in Sacramento sensed trouble was afoot.

A young, ragged, hoodie-donning agitator by the name of Nick Shirley, armed with an iPhone camera and a healthy distrust of government officials, had just completed a trip to Minnesota, during which our humble protagonist stumbled upon some curious findings.

Several government-funded daycare centers — all run by individuals who happened to be of a certain common ancestry, an ancestry that happens to be one known for piracy — were not only poorly-spelled… they also had a mysterious lack of children (typically found at daycare centers) and generally appeared to be vectors for outright fraud more than fun playplaces hosting Ms. Rachel singalongs.

This was on the heels of the Feeding Our Future saga, a bombshell scandal in which several Minnesota residents (who also happened to be of the aforementioned ancestry, curious!) stole millions of tax dollars designated for COVID relief in the state, using the money to splurge on cars, vacations, and other various luxuries. In other words, the land of “Minnesota nice” had a bit of a blindspot for scammer exploitation, it turns out, and Shaggy Shirley — “Skater S. Thompson,” they call him (they don’t) — was doing his part to uncover it through gonzo-style, on-the-ground reporting.

After subsequently racking up over 100 million views on YouTube, Shirley’s Minnesota exposé ultimately led to a full-scale response from the Trump administration, including an FBI raid of the “daycare centers,” a freezing of funds by the Department of Health and Human Services, and even the establishment of a Vance-led taskforce dedicated entirely to cracking down on fraud.

But the real kicker came when Shirley announced his next act…

As with Minnesota, that Sacramento has chosen Shirley to be the enemy of the story, rather than those who have plundered their states of millions of dollars of fraud, explains much about the corruption of the left.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 1st, 2026

May 31, 2026

PRATT SUMMER:

Being angry about having your home burned down and having to share city streets with drug-addicted mentally ill homeless people, that’s definitely “MAGA-encoded:”

UPDATE:

Tweet concludes, “The carpenters, electricians, and delivery drivers keeping the cities functional pay the highest gas and income taxes in the continental United States. They fund the programs but receive none of the benefits. They earn too much to qualify for state subsidies but lack the millions required to buy their way into secure zip codes. Time for Spencer Pratt.”

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 31st, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN ASTROTURFING:

 

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 31st, 2026
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