Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

July 25, 2026

THIS POST IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE OXFORD COMMA:

As one wag joked on Facebook, “Wow, how did she have time to write?!”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

BEWARE THE FLAMBOYANT CANDIDATES WITH NO EXPERIENCE:

The city also has to be on the alert for Legionella impacting nursing homes this summer. Late Monday, dangerous levels of Legionella were found in the water system at a long-term care facility in Rochester, New York, forcing the facility to shift to bottled water and stop all bathing.

Let the deaths in New York this week be a red flag that being mayor is a serious management job. It’s not about wildly speculating on the popularity of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a preposterous and illegal act. Or cycling around the city, grinning for the cameras.

The investor class is seeing the warning signs of management inexperience. Yields are suddenly jumping upward on municipal bonds, a sign that debt holders are jittery watching the boy mayor demand ever-higher taxes to fund his socialist ideas and allow record dependence on cash welfare to continue.

Voters across the nation should watch this unfold and learn from it as they’re wooed by other candidates offering Mamdani-like theatrical appeal and utopian visions but no experience governing. In many of these races, people’s lives and money could depend on wisely choosing a leader with a track record.

Why would voters start now?

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Adventures in the Patriarchy™: Disgraced Former CNN Host Discovers Perverted New Shtick.

Via Unraveling With Brooke Baldwin (emphasis added):

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I signed up for my very first dating app a few months ago and lasted approximately three minutes before deleting it… Very recently, I gave it another shot.

Why? Maybe I wanted a distraction. Maybe I like to kiss. Maybe I’m a grown-ass woman who can do whatever the hell she wants.

This time I made it… five whole days.

Part of my bio read:

Integrity. Brains. Respect. Big career. Deeply spiritual. Serial monogamist… but taking a break from that for the first time in my life. Rare window.

Rare window.

It’s true. I know myself. I love love. I love partnership. This chapter won’t last forever.

But here’s what’s fascinating. Over the last month or so, I’ve had the opportunity to sleep with four different men. This is not a humblebrag. Nor have I suddenly become Samantha Jones. (Though if that’s your lane… Do you, boo.)

What’s interesting isn’t them. It’s me.

We’ll get to that but first — they’re all amazing.

One literally flew in just to take me to dinner and spends his days trying to save our democracy one congressional district at a time.

One used to run a country.

One is just… hot.

That’s all you’re getting for now.

(Also, this is officially awkward because I know at least a couple of these gentlemen subscribe to this Substack now. Hi, fellas. 👋)

Now that she’s effectively doing a safe-for-work Substack version of OnlyFans, I’d like to bring to your attention my personal favorite Baldwin moment from her storied CNN career, when she performatively feigned outrage after Clay Travis said on the air, preposterously and hilariously, that the only two things he really believes in are the First Amendment and boobs.

Newsreaders invariably get incensed by the notion they can easily be replaced with actors, and yet Baldwin certainly gave an Oscar-winning performance back in 2017:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What Broke Black America? A Review of Howard Husock’s The Projects:

Speaking of painting, the genesis of the American movement to reconfigure big city housing—and soon enough small town and rural housing too, and heck, the entire enchilada of urban design—came in 1934 at, of all places, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which in the Depression’s depths hosted a “Modern Housing Exhibition.”

The Picassos and Cubism and Dadas were on another floor. This unusual museum exhibition, writes Husock, had little to do with art, but a lot to do with “modern.” It “was the spearhead of a crusade; it made the economic, political, and even visual case that the federal government should finance the construction of housing for working families of modest means—not as an emergency measure but as part of the ongoing responsibilities of government.”

Why? A book accompanying the exhibition proved an exemplar of an empowered and eager progressivism, describing itself as:

a statement of the far reaching and varied social, financial, technological, administrative, legislative and political factors which have led to the present situation. It discusses the radical changes which must be made in our social philosophy and public policy in order to improve the housing condition of the masses of the American people.

But was it housing—or was it something else—that tempted the progressive social engineer? Something else gets the nod: The mission, writes Husock, was not truly “the mere provision of utilitarian housing.” Instead, the aspiration was “about building a new type of urban landscape, a city of tomorrow . . . organized by government and designed by architects.”

Actually, a motivating spirit for the exhibition and the forces it would unleash was a 1927 book, The City of Tomorrow, by Charles- Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-French architect known as “Le Corbusier,” whose vision—which detested streets—was the creation of “superblocks,” long now a reality for many American cities. Superblocks

were set projects with no cross streets for stores, cars, or small homes. Le Corbusier had already designed such a city in his 1922 plan for the Ville Contemporaine, which was to comprise sixty-story apartment buildings, all identical, surrounded by a zigzag of smaller buildings and a park. Le Corbusier asserted that whole urban scene “is one of wasted opportunities and inefficiency.” He proposes an alternative course, “which is a bold and drastic reconstruction of the entire machine.” Central to his vision was that of “skyscrapers set at immense distances from one another and surrounded by large open spaces or parks.”

Where to build this new city? The canvases for Le Corbusier and his acolytes were to be empty sites—or, sites that were to be emptied because they were decreed slums. Harvard professor James Ford was one of the moment’s leading, persuasive apostles of slum eradication, and Husock quotes him amply: “Wrote Ford, ‘The slum is a menace which cannot be overcome by piece meal modernization loans or random demolitions with the owner’s consent. . . . No solution will be found short of a comprehensive and intelligent policy actuated by one or more units of government, apply financed, which makes the neighborhood rather than the buildings the basis of operations.’”

What was to be the collateral damage of implementing utopia? “As for the shops,” writes Husock, “the churches and synagogues, the small businesses, street life, and so much more which slums were replete, Ford was silent.”

Within three years of the Depression-era exhibition, its patrons and the forces of “slum elimination” it effectively unleashed had successfully lobbied Congress to pass the National Housing Act and create the United States Housing Authority, tools embraced by big city mayors and in particular First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a major champion of slum clearance.

Corbusier, who would later align himself with Vichy France, only saw two buildings bearing his imprimatur completed in the US. He was part of the architectural committee which designed the UN building in New York in 1948, and he designed the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts building at Yale in 1962.  However, Corbusier’’s urban planning concepts were enormously influential on American urban renewal in the 1950s and ‘’60s, with invariably disastrous results. Jane Jacobs’’ influential book 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is essentially a real-world rebuttal to his architectural and urban planning fantasies.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

JEFFREY BLEHAR: The Most Irresponsibly Stupid Column of the Year.

Because in [Nancy Armour of USA Today’s] moral world, the real threat here is not to Caitlin Clark’s right quadricep but rather to the dignity and safety of the black women who play against her. As Armour describes it, if Clark “flops” during a game . . . she’s apparently encouraging her white fans to take justice into their own hands and lynch the hated blacks. I’m not kidding about this, though I wish I were:

It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The irony of the WNBA’s All-Star Game is that it’s happening this weekend in Chicago, the hometown of Emmett Till, who became an icon of the civil rights movement after his tragic murder. The local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the broader implications of her actions being weaponized.

First off, marvel at that rhetorical stretch. Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi by Jim Crow racists in the Fifties, which is just like Caitlin Clark complaining after being fouled at next week’s All-Star Game . . . and it’s all connected because Chicago. (This one fact alone meant I had to write this. Somehow it’s always MAGA country’s fault.) Then step back further and gaze with disbelief upon the neo-Stalinist moral logic: because others might react badly to her public disapproval at being abused, she must remain silent (and take more abuse). It is howlingly, outrageously wrong — a complete inversion of all accepted principle.

Related: We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Barack Obama is a voice of sanity:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

I INVENTED* NIXONMAXXING:

Instead of the Watergate legend raising the moral standing of the media, today deep distrust of the media has cast Watergate in a new light. So has the revelation that Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s key insider source, “Deep Throat,” was a man who aspired to the power once wielded byJ. Edgar Hoover and brought down the president who refused to make him director of the FBI.

Hoover was a man above the Constitution, thanks to his ability to intimidate and blackmail members of the elected government – Congress was afraid to touch him. Mark Felt believed he was entitled to what Hoover enjoyed, and when Nixon defied him, Felt, through Woodward and Bernstein, showed the president who really had the power to destroy whom.

An unelected government within the government ought to be the subject, not the sponsor, of media investigations. The relationship between the media and those parts of government in agreement with the liberal-leaning news industry’s own biases is a scandal unto itself. Nixon’s reputational recovery is the flipside of the media’s dwindling authority. Rising esteem for Nixon is reciprocal with the plummeting of newspaper circulations.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance told an audience at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in June. Yet the Nixon saga isn’t ancient history: “If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” the Vice President argued.

Nixon was a tragic figure – almost an American Macbeth. His story is human in a way that moves the young right, who have been subjected all their lives to stories that are mere ideological morality tales. It’s not Nixon’s ideology they admire; they admire him for not being easily reduced to inhuman “principles.”

* Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg, and/or the NBC executives who likely told him that it might be a bit off-putting to ‘80s TV viewers if Alex P. Keaton was seen worshipping Ronald Reagan on a weekly basis might like a word here:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

TRUMP FINALLY GETS HIS WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER SPEECH: “Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?”

And here’s the joke I thought was the best: “Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they’re now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She’s a wonderful woman.”

Heh, indeed.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25th, 2026

July 24, 2026

SETH MANDEL: AOC’s Latest Dual-Loyalty Hoax Is a Doozy.

“This amendment is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” declared Ocasio-Cortez.

How did we get here? The lie seemed to get off the ground in late May thanks to folks at the Quincy Institute, the isolationist activist forum, though it didn’t at first use the term “merge” but rather “integrate.” That word is important, because it also appeared in one of the sentences in the defense bill. Of course, the bill doesn’t say the militaries will be integrated, but conspiracy theorists decided it was one of the few straws they had in reach, so they’re grasping it.

A second conspiracy theory around the bill, pushed by the folks at Dropsite, the podcasters who were last seen trying to bully Ro Khanna into approving of October 7, is that a letter sent by Benjamin Netanyahu claims the bill was his idea.

In fact, Netanyahu sent a letter to a congressman who had written up a resolution that just said the two countries would move toward cooperation instead of the old aid model and called for a new Memorandum of Understanding. Netanyahu has been pushing this change for years, and he wrote that he was happy the two allies would now move in that direction.

So when you combine the two lies, you have: Israel is dictating U.S. laws, and the council of the Elders of Zion—Sorry, the Jewish state—now runs our military. Oh, and everyone who supported the U.S. defense bill is a traitor.

Tucker goes full Judgement at Nuremberg about that last idea:

Why would Tucker be in favor of the Nuremberg Trials Mark II, when he thinks the Germans were the good guys in WWII, and the millions of people they murdered were a tragic accident instead of a deliberately planned slaughter? As Steve asked in September of 2024: Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong With Tucker Carlson?

Carlson’s interview on Tuesday with alleged historian Darryl Cooper — like his interview in April with Reverend Munther Isaac, referenced in today’s flashbacks — was so much worse than merely glib or incurious.

Carlson chose to interview Cooper, whom he endorsed as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” to learn exactly how World War II didn’t happen. According to Cooper — and Carlson nodded along the entire time — Winston Churchill was perhaps “the chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

It’s true that Hitler did not want or expect Britain to fight. He wanted Britain to acquiesce to German dominance of Europe from the Urals to Gibraltar and subsume the UK to Nazi interests. This is all a matter of historical record. Britain could fight or submit — that was Hitler’s choice, not Churchill’s.

FLASHBACK: Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a priest who neither lives nor works in Israel and who uses the loaded phrase “Occupied Palestine” as his location on his Twitter/X profile. He is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority.

As for the Holocaust — brace yourself — Hitler was just being merciful, according to Cooper. “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentally created more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with. “And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”

Vance really needs to have his Sister Souljah moment with Tucker, sooner, rather than later:

Flashback: The Last Temptation of JD Vance.

Posted at 8:17 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

STRENGTH THROUGH JOY: Why Democrats Can’t Do Better Than Kamala Harris in 2028.

There are only two lanes to the Democratic presidential nomination two years from now, and one of them is already blocked—by Kamala Harris.

Get ready for the Kamala comeback, followed, in all likelihood, by a replay of her crushing defeat by the Republican nominee. Believe it or not, the ex-VP occupies what counts as the “center lane” within the party, and for most of the last three decades that’s the one that’s led to the nomination.

Republicans used to be the party of orderly succession, even if the candidate whose turn had come looked like a certain loser: think Bob Dole in ’96. But recently, it’s been Democrats who’ve tended to pick a party elder as their nominee: Al Gore, as a sitting VP, might not have been remarkable in 2000, but in ’04 it was John Kerry, in ’16 Hillary Clinton and in 2020 Joe Biden—with only Barack Obama butting ahead of the line in 2008.

Democrats like a known quantity, a reliable liberal who isn’t too overtly radical; the radicalism can wait until after Election Day. So they’re leaning to running Harris again, even if donors aren’t happy about it: They blew nearly $2 billion on her campaign and aligned PAC’s in 2024, only for Harris to lose every battleground state to Trump.

Given her weak performance in 2020 and 2024, I strongly suspect someone else will also be “butting ahead of the line” on the left’s road to 2028.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

NELLIE BOWLES ON THE ANDREW AND TRISTAN TATE FASHION SHOW:

But for our purposes, the top news in the world is that the wildly popular influencer Andrew Tate has finally been arrested in the U.S., with plans to extradite him to his former home, the United Kingdom. Tate, the man your sons and grandsons are probably obsessed with, is charged with rape, sex trafficking, it goes on for a total of 42 counts of that kind of unpleasant stuff. In bonny England he will, I assume, face a tribunal run by bitter, exhausted professional women (my girls!). This is only so interesting because Andrew Tate had been investigated before, suspected of trafficking and rape in Romania, and was barred from leaving that country. But then, in February of last year, seemingly after pressure from someone in the Trump administration, Tate was allowed to leave and took a private jet from Romania to, where else? Florida. (It seems as though Barron Trump was a fan.) When asked if Trump would intervene this time, Karoline Leavitt gave an emphatic “No.” Anyway, it’s also interesting because it gave us a photo of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan being arrested. And I don’t know how to explain to you that these men are considered to be the pinnacle of masculinity by right-wing American Zoomers. This is the hardened male that they aspire to become. He has over 10 million followers on X alone.

The purple silk “shirt”—legally, I feel a shirt must cover the nipples—matches the purple transition lenses. There are the capris, the slip-on shoes. It looks like they’re dragging him out of Fire Island. Put a wig on this person and she’s late for her mimosas at Club Med. Put a wig on and it’s my quirky drunk aunt Annie Tate whose bra is always showing. His brother Tristan, in a three-piece suit and a hat that is both too big and too small, is almost as bad. Andrew Tate and his brother are actually a return to the male animal as a flamboyant, colorful thing, the brilliant male mallard next to the dull brown female. In that way we’re actually made for each other, as I, in Tevas and with limp hair, am a return to the female duck. Andrew, call me.

Heh, indeed:

Also:

Wow, we eventually won Iraq, didn’t we: U.S. companies signed roughly $60 billion in agreements and partnerships with Iraq late last week, including deals to build alternative oil shipping routes bypassing the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing U.S.-Iran war. Goddammit, Dick Cheney, you lunatic, you did it. Credit where it’s due. Mission accomplished.

We eventually won Vietnam as well: How Capitalism Beat Communism in Vietnam.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

THE PRESS TRIED TO SHAME ELON. HE PUT THE ENTIRE MEDIA CLASS ON TRIAL:

During an interview with The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Beddoes tried to paint him as “far right,” because of his criticism of how the government has approached things like immigration in the United Kingdom. Musk shot that characterization down, saying it was normal to want secure borders, safe cities, and sensible spending.

“If people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that,” he said.

“I’m against rape and murder, I’m against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West,” he continued, criticising the media for not understanding or reflecting this.

Beddoes tried to attack Elon Musk over that, saying, “You don’t even live there!” She asked if he understood how some people “loathe you.”

Exit quote: “The extremist didn’t like being told that she’s the actual extremist.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

JOHN NOLTE: Elon Musk’s AI ‘Odyssey’ Could Launch a Revolution that Sinks Hollywood.

Margaret Mitchell wrote and published exactly one novel in her life, a little Pulitzer winner called Gone with the Wind. Sure, prior to that, she’d written short stories and worked as a reporter in Georgia. Still, she basically came out of nowhere with a story that has enthralled hundreds of millions for 90 years.

There are Margaret Mitchells out there today who don’t even know they are Margaret Mitchells, and would never know were it not for the power of AI. No longer will a budding storyteller give up before he begins because he doesn’t know where to begin to convince a producer to finance his project. No more will a budding storyteller have to convince a left-wing studio to distribute his project. All the bottlenecks that keep the gatekeepers guarding the gate will be swept away by AI and YouTube.

Look at how giving Normal People access to national distribution (via the internet) disrupted and disgraced the national media.

Look at how the music and publishing industries have changed for the same reasons.

True movie fans should be ecstatic over competing versions of The Odyssey. Competition breeds greatness and Hollywood has become a groupthink cult with no cultural or political competition. For that reason alone, people should be encouraging Musk, not laughing at him.

I’m happy to see competing versions of The Odyssey, but only if the right director is attached. Who better to direct the adaptation of a 2700 year old story than the 2000 Year Old Man?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

THIS IS CNN: Dana Bash’s Brad Lander Blunder: How CNN Let Facts Slip Through the Newsroom.

Lander’s accusations were part of a wider pattern of misinformation in the broadcast. In many cases, Bash failed to challenge his misinformation and even offered her own glaring historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust.

When asking Lander about attacks he has faced from various groups, Bash noted that some in the Jewish community had labeled him a “kapo,” a term from the Holocaust era used to describe Jews who betray their fellow Jews. Astonishingly, Bash defined kapos as “Jews who were helping keep the peace, so to speak, in the Nazi concentration camps.”

In reality, the SS deliberately designed the kapo system to incite conflict. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that beating and punishing subordinate prisoners was a required duty for kapos, with many committing murders to meet SS expectations, a brutal reality Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel documented in his memoir Night.

Even the Biden administration’s envoy to combat antisemitism, Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, whom Bash quoted authoritatively during the segment, previously signed a letter alongside esteemed Holocaust scholars defining kapos as Jews forced to serve as “unwilling tools of Nazi brutality.”

As of publication, CNN has not corrected the error despite CAMERA’s communication.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

ED MORRISSEY: WSJ: No, Really, Trump’s Had It With Iran Negotiations.

Really? Really really? Color me a bit skeptical about this, but given the events of the last two weeks, perhaps more open to the concept now than I have been for months.

According to Wall Street Journal reporters Annie Linskey and Josh Dawsey, Donald Trump has finally gotten “fed up” with the IRGC’s carpet-merchant tactics at the negotiating table. He has soured on talks with the regime in Tehran entirely, their sources claim, even though Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff want to keep pursuing diplomatic solutions to the war. Their sources claim that Trump was neither bluffing nor attempting to negotiate through the media when he told Axios’ Barak Ravid that he’s about to order a massive scale-up in kinetic action. Trump intends to communicate in the only language Ahmad Vahidi understands:

Has anyone in Trump’s inner circle planned out an endgame?

Tweet continues, “Yet while the IR merely laughs at the blows it is exciting the pity of the entire civilized world who are disgusted at the meting out of such a one sided beating, warning that the worse the thrashings the greater the reparation which must eventually be paid.”

“Of course in this case there will be no A bomb, but some as unforeseen development is needed to provide the same out.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

DR. STRANGEVIEW, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB: The View Claims Trump Is Being Bribed By Saudis to Let Them Nuke U.S.

[Joy] Behar’s hysterics started with her spinning a new nuclear energy deal into Trump plotting to allow Saudi Arabia to stockpile nuclear weapons:

The thing that I really can’t stand about him right now is that he starts a war in Iran because they’re going to get a nuclear weapon. Now, he’s making a deal with the Saudi Arabians that will allow them to produce a nuclear weapon.

In an instant, Behar’s psychosis escalated the situation into Trump plotting with the planners of 9/11 to drop a nuclear bomb on Cleveland. She then lashed out at Republicans for only acting against him after it happened:

BEHAR: Now, where is the head of the Republican Party in this, because they have the power to get rid of him?!

ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN: And they will say that the Saudis are not allowed to make a nuclear weapon but they’re allowed to enrich.

BEHAR: Oh, I see. Then we’ll go to war with the 9/11 group. The Saudis were behind 9/11 and – and – Are they waiting for him to drop a nuke on Cleveland?! What are they waiting for to do something?!

The media’s schizophrenia regarding Trump is completely out of hand. For years, they told me he wasn’t a president obsessed with the environment. And now the women of The View have done a complete 180:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: USA Today Reporter apologizes for invoking Emmett Till in column about Caitlin Clark after upsetting the woke.

USA Today “reporter” Nancy Armour has apologized for invoking Emmett Till in a column targeting — who else? — Caitlin Clark.

“In my recent column, I made an inartful comparison with the murder of Emmett Till. I intended to connect the issues the WNBA is currently facing with its All-Star Game being hosted in Till’s hometown of Chicago,” Armour wrote in an apology posted Thursday on — where else? — Bluesky. “I obviously did not provide enough context for that.”

For background, Armour published one of the most desperate and irresponsible sports columns of the year earlier this week, arguing that Clark’s reactions to missed calls put “Black” and “queer” WNBA players “in danger.”

Paraphrasing Armour’s argument wouldn’t do it justice. So here it is:

“It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of ‘defending’ white women. The WNBA’s All-Star Game this weekend is in Chicago, Emmett Till’s hometown, and a local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the wider consequences of her actions.”

In other words, according to Armour, defending Clark’s flopping somehow puts Black women at risk of lynching.

Of course it does:

Layers and layers of fact checkers and editors, and some how this metaphor slipped through the sausage works:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 24th, 2026

July 23, 2026

REPUBLICANS MOVE TO CLIP AOC’S WINGS* AMID 2028 SPECULATION:

Asked whether she would mount a presidential campaign in 2028, Ms Ocasio-Cortez said on Monday: “I can’t say that I’ve ruled it out.”

She would be likely to become the standard-bearer of the Left if she entered the contest. The party’s progressives appear to be in the ascendant following a series of recent primary victories for socialists in New York and Colorado.

A poll released on Wednesday showed Ms Ocasio-Cortez leading the Democratic pack in New Hampshire, an early-voting state that will be highly influential in selecting the party’s next presidential nominee.

The University of New Hampshire’s “Granite State Poll” showed Ms Ocasio-Cortez had 22 per cent, one point ahead of Pete Buttigieg, the former US transportation secretary.

“Ocasio-Cortez draws much of her support from self-described socialists and progressives, while support for Buttigieg is spread about evenly among progressives, liberals, and moderates,” pollsters said in a statement.

Some exceptions likely apply: Social Media Users Point Out Pete Buttigieg Less Popular Among Black People Than Ex-KKK Leader David Duke Was in 2016.

* To be fair, she certainly wanted to clip ours during her manic pixie new socialist “It Girl” phase in 2019: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23rd, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Someone should take this idea to its logical conclusion:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23rd, 2026

PROPAGANDA FAIL: IRGC’s New Israel Hit Is Just Old American A-10 Footage.

“Did you get that? That’s right – the Iranian/IRGC ‘drone’ was an American A-10, going BRRRRT on a target that absolutely wasn’t in Israel. And yes, this actually made me burst out laughing when I first viewed it. That’s not easy to do these days. We really do know to expect this. The Iranians are such inept propagandists as to make the late, unlamented Baghdad Bob look like Ernie Pyle.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23rd, 2026

I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB: Rep. Brandon Gill Grills Head of American Bar Association About DEI, Future of Law Schools.

More here, from Bethany Mandel: Brandon Gill’s Socratic method.

“If I wanted to yell at liberals,” he said, “I could sit behind my desk and make a video yelling at liberals.”

A congressional hearing, in his mind, serves an entirely different purpose.

“The whole West’s intellectual edifice is based on the Socratic method,” he continued. “It’s based on asking probing questions and coming to truth by asking probing and enlightening questions. A committee hearing is the perfect place to do that.”

That one sentence explains almost every viral moment Gill has had since arriving in Washington. Take the abortion hearing that made him a household name in conservative circles. The exchange wasn’t built around a rehearsed one-liner — it was built around a simple premise. If someone has dedicated decades of her professional life to defending abortion rights, shouldn’t she be willing to describe, plainly and without euphemism, the procedure she is defending?

“If you’re going to dedicate your life to defending this,” Gill recalled thinking, “tell me your favorite method.”

The question wasn’t designed simply to shock. It forced the witness to abandon abstractions and confront the concrete reality of what she was advocating. When she refused to answer, that refusal proved more revealing than any prepared statement could have.

Listening to Gill describe the exchange, it became obvious that he doesn’t think of hearings the way most members of Congress do. Many lawmakers view their five minutes as an opportunity to deliver a speech that happens to include a witness. Gill treats the witness as the point of the exercise. The hearing is valuable precisely because the person sitting across from him is under oath, the cameras are rolling, and millions of people can watch ideas tested in real time.

And they just can’t do it:

Evergreen:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23rd, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Odyssey — A Disastrous Triumph. “For me, The Odyssey was an impressive, thought-provoking movie with an incredible cast made by one of the most successful directors of his age, and it’ll probably go on to rake in a lot of money and awards just like we all knew it would. But ultimately, it’s a movie I’ll probably never watch or even think about again. And that really is the most damning indictment of all.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23rd, 2026

THE AP MORPHED INTO THE BABYLON BEE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED:

Hey, let’s pick our battles here. I’m still worried about this issue: How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23rd, 2026
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