Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

September 3, 2025

September 2, 2025

THAT’S THE CHICAGO WAY — BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE:

In contrast:

Is Chicago next?

That sounds great. Why is Chicago’s mayor sounding like a German gauleiter when he hears the yanks are coming? After Violent Labor Day Weekend, Chicago’s Mayor Calls for Uprising Against Trump Administration.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM PALLYWOOD:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

JEFFREY BLEHAR: Something Wicked Is Being Loosed in an Online World.

The starting point here is mental illness. But the ending point is the online sump into which mental illness now collects itself, like a malarial pool, cross-fertilizing into ever more virulent strains of social disease. Our modern world is breeding nihilistic evil, even as it lets age-old demons loose. The killer’s (apparently semi-renounced) transgender identity is relevant, but only as a symptom of a much broader, and darker, underlying problem facing America.

Others are less philosophical about such things, however, and just couldn’t help themselves. So I’ll chime in only to point out what a malevolent ghoul the Democratic Party’s self-appointed national mascot Gavin Newsom has become in his pursuit of the spotlight. Newsom let it be known a week or so ago that he had actually hired a spicy young social-media whippersnapper to write and post his recent Twitter/X material. And I had to laugh, because it was a transparent attempt to disclaim personal responsibility for his account’s contents, disguised as “sharing the credit.”

Perhaps he was trying to get ahead of the game. Because last week, in response to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the value of prayer as a reaction to the atrocity, Gavin Newsom (or “Gavin Newsom”) felt compelled to respond on Twitter by mocking the idea of prayer itself as utterly worthless: “These children were literally praying as they got shot at.” (Left implied: “Fat lot of good it did them, or will do you.”)

I now understand why the staffer who purportedly writes Gavin’s tweets is paid for her work: She captures his “voice” with such eerie perfection. Because that right there is the true Gavin Newsom, his spirit in one rotten sentence. The callow glibness, the contemptuously dismissive tone, the clangingly materialist hollowness: Either Newsom wrote that tweet himself (and I suspect he did), or this lady deserves a raise for being an incredibly gifted impersonator.

Newsom, of course, is chasing controversy, and what disgusts me the most is that he may be onto something, however cynical his calculus. He has a sufficient left-wing base already prepared to back him on this specific case for the simple reason that it beats having a long and unpleasant discussion about the nexus between transgenderism and mental illness. And all the while, as this mindless political thrum carries on in the background, my thoughts instead turn to even darker quarters, those more indebted to W. B. Yeats than Gavin Newsom.

I fear we are on the verge of a great societal breakdown — one right out of the late Sixties and early Seventies — and we are not prepared for it. Something wicked this way comes. The atrocity in Minneapolis is but one articulated edge in a far larger fractal pattern of violence and madness creeping across our landscape. Once the progress was imperceptibly slow, but technology has proven to be the accelerant. The threat is pre-political, generational, and perhaps even civilizational. The worst are full of passionate intensity. Things are falling apart, crumbling at both the margins and the center of our societal self-conception.

The “great societal breakdown” has already happened; recall the numerous riots of the Obama era, and as leftist William F. Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus recently noted, “I think the year 2020 is one that’s going to reverberate in our history for a long time. It feels to me a little bit like 1968, one of those watershed years of violence and militarism, militancy. And we know how a lot of liberal publications, including my former publication, The New York Times, treated what were serious uprisings in some of the major cities in this country, rather what they didn’t report about them.”

Anti-journalism to obfuscate reality, in other words. Which has spread to numerous otherwise seemingly disparate topics:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Sick: Tim Walz Publicly Roots for Trump’s Death in Shocking Video.

Over the Labor Day weekend, former vice-presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) demonstrated a disturbing interest in Trump’s health, proving that some on the left are willing to gloat over even the most absurd, unfounded rumors about Trump.

“You get up in the morning and you doom-scroll through things, and — although, I will say this: The last few days, you woke up thinking there might be news. Just saying. Just saying. There will be news sometime, just so you know. There will be news,” he said, dripping with an almost giddy anticipation.

In other words, Walz was caught up in the frenzy of false information and publicly rooting for bad news about the U.S. president with an enthusiasm that should shame any decent public figure. The governor’s manifest delight exemplifies how despicable it is to weaponize baseless rumors and cheer for someone’s potential misfortune or death.

Walz’s public comments betrayed a disturbing glee in the chaos. It is profoundly sick when a politician appears to revel in the speculation of a political opponent’s death. The spectacle was nothing short of a public debasement, a cynical joyride at the expense of common decency.

How odd; Michelle Obama assured me that “when they go low, we go high.”

Related: Wishing Trump dead only makes him stronger.

If history is any guide, you don’t want to live through the death of a sitting President. We’ve built the system to accommodate for it, but it creates chaos, instability, and figurative if not literal violence. Do people really think that Trump won’t leave office after his term is over? He’ll be 82. He’s going to leave. Just like the weather in Chicago, if you don’t like the President, wait a minute.

But people also need to realize that their hatred of Donald Trump doesn’t kill him. It makes him stronger. A more spiteful man has never lived, and he’ll live forever just to spite them.

When he does die, someday, in the far future, some people will mourn, some people will celebrate, but most people’s lives will just go on as if Trump never existed. He’s not your enemy, he’s not your savior. He’s just a President looking for an electorate to love him.

And they will! After he leaves office, the proverbial strange new respect Trump will garner from the left to attack whoever is the current Republican president or presidential candidate will be astounding to watch.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

GRAHAM LINEHAN: I was arrested for insulting the trans mob.

At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices.

By some miracle – probably because I hadn’t slept on the flight – I managed to doze off. After the premier economy seat in which I’d just spent ten hours, it was actually a relief to stretch out. That passed the time, though I kept waking up wondering if it was all actually happening.

Later, during the interview itself, the tone shifted. The officer conducting it asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like… oh, I dunno – crime? I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces are abusers and they need to be challenged every time. The ‘punch in the bollocks’ bit was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence. (Not one of my best as one of the female officers said, ‘We’re not that small’).

He mentioned ‘trans people’. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language. The damage Stonewall has done to the UK police force will take years to mend.

Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 – stroke territory. The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life. So I was escorted to A&E, where I write this now after spending about eight hours under observation.

The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel it may also have been a contributing factor that I have now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign because I refuse to believe that lesbians have cocks.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

GRAHAM LINEHAN’S ARREST HEAPS SHAME UPON BRITAIN:

Graham Linehan had only just stepped back on to UK soil when he was apprehended by five armed police officers. The comedy writer – known for Father Ted, The IT Crowd and his unflinching gender-critical activism – says he was arrested, locked in a cell and interrogated by police yesterday, immediately after landing at London Heathrow.

His crime, he says, was to have spoken his mind – one of the most serious offences you can commit in the eyes of the British state. During his interrogation, he claims he was asked to explain three supposedly offensive tweets, posted back in April, mocking trans activists and their attempts to invade women’s spaces.

In one tweet, he joked: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’ In another, he described an image of a trans-activist march as a ‘photo you can smell’. In a follow-up tweet, he said: ‘I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.’

Linehan’s belief that men aren’t women is based on biological truth. It is the view of the overwhelming majority of British citizens. It has been upheld by the UK Supreme Court. It is also a protected belief in the workplace under the Equality Act. Yet none of this seems to matter to the UK’s thoughtpolice. According to Linehan’s account, a trans activist claimed offence and so the Met swooped in, acting as the personal goon squad of the mad, bad and sad.

Airstrip One’s authorities really has their priorities well in order:

Evergreen:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

THE POUND IS SINKING:

Related: Farage will raise Graham Linehan’s arrest with Trump allies.

Nigel Farage will raise the arrest of Graham Linehan when he meets allies of Donald Trump to discuss free speech in Washington this week.

Linehan, the comedy writer, was arrested by five armed officers at Heathrow airport over gender-critical posts on social media.

The co-writer of Father Ted and the IT Crowd said he was detained “like a terrorist” and locked in a cell for making jokes online.

His case has triggered a backlash, with critics including JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author, branding his detention “utterly deplorable”.

Actually, she said a bit more than that:

Will any American lefties reflect on this development?

Classical reference in headline:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

PENGUIN TO STEP DOWN FROM GOTHAM CITY POLITICS: Jerry Nadler to Retire From Congress: ‘Watching the Biden Thing*’ Made Me Think ‘About the Necessity for Generational Change.’

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election to Congress after nearly 33 years in office.

In an interview with the New York Times, the 78-year-old congressman said he was motivated not to seek re-election next year after watching 82-year-old former President Joe Biden’s ill-fated 2024 presidential campaign and concerns in the Democratic Party about a growing gerontocracy.

“Watching the Biden thing really said something about the necessity for generational change in the party, and I think I want to respect that,” said Nadler, who acknowledged that a younger member of Congress could “maybe do better” and “help us more.”

Classical reference in headline:

* The Biden thing? Flashback: Senior House Democrat Rep. Nadler Reverses Course—Now Says He Supports Biden.

—Forbes, July 9th, 2024.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 2nd, 2025

September 1, 2025

QUESTION ASKED:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

MONUMENTAL MEDIA MALPRACTICE: CBS Deceptively Edits Sec. Kristi Noem Interview.

Here is her statement that was presented on CBS:

And the one thing that we will continue to do is to make sure he (Abrego Garcia) doesn’t walk free in the United States of America.

Here’s what they cut; as you listen, think about whether this might be important information for their viewers to have to form an accurate opinion on this case:

This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors. And even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off, he was so sick in what he was doing, how he was treating small children. So he needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we are doing all that we can to bring him to justice.

Note that the first statement, the part CBS aired, gave you a small piece of the “what.” They left all of the “why” on the cutting-room floor. And there is a lot of “why” there.

This is journalistic malpractice of the first water. Oh, it’s a near-certainty that, if called on this, CBS will claim that all interviews are edited for time (probably true) and that only unimportant information is cut (demonstrably false). They will also claim that political bias is not a part of any editing calls (laughably false). What “Face the Nation” has done here is to obfuscate an important issue of the day. This case is just one of many where the Trump administration is trying to move illegal aliens out of the country, which the left and the legacy media (but I repeat myself) are pulling out all the stops to halt any repatriation. CBS, in this instance, deprived its viewers of critical information, in this case, namely, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal background. He’s an alleged thug, pervert, and wife beater in addition to being an illegal alien, and any honest news organization would present all this information, so their viewers could make an informed decision.

But then, it’s been some years since CBS was anything like an honest news organization.

Years? Try decades – about six of them.

UPDATE: They Shoot Cats, Don’t They?

We were told it was the first time Mike Wallace had ever apologized to an elected official on air on 60 Minutes. For all I know, it still might be the only time. And 15 years later [in 2009], in this age of Obama when the establishment media is hostile to conservatives, the episode still can teach lessons about how to fight back with the truth.

If the story is straight enough, there do remain honest liberal reporters and columnists who will come to your aid.

* * * * * * * * *

THIS TIME, we called the president of CBS News. [Then-GOP Rep. Bob Livingston] played our audiotape for him. And then played it again. There was Wallace apologizing and admitting to having been “dishonest” and “stupid.” And yet the show had run again, without correction. It was clear we had a slam-dunk legal case if we wanted to press it.

The CBS president was irate at his own team. He made that clear. The tape did the trick. Apparently the news president then came down hard on Wallace. Really hard. Wallace soon called back. His voice was shaky. “Well, um, you know something? You’re a better man than I am, Congressman.” He promised to go on the air and apologize to the entire country. Then, after more of what can only be described as groveling, Wallace said this:

“You can get this on your tape recorder—I wish you told me you had a tape recorder going; that would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, the first time….”

Livingston interrupted, lowering the boom: “It would have been, but then I didn’t think that I was necessarily dealing with a gentleman.”

Wallace: “Well, in any case…”

Livingston: “And frankly, you’ve proven me right.”

Bingo. You could almost hear the phone line sizzle. Wallace had no answer. There was no good answer. Livingston was correct.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

GRETA THUNBERG’S GAZA FLOTILLA FORCED TO TURN BACK TO PORT JUST HOURS AFTER LEAVING:

Greta Thunberg’s aid flotilla was forced to turn back to port after hitting stormy weather just hours into its journey to Gaza, organizers said Monday.

The 22-year-old* eco warrior was on one of 20 boats that set off for Gaza from Barcelona on Sunday on what they called the “largest solidarity mission” in history — with Israel threatening to arrest her in harsh “terrorist-level” conditions.

But storms bringing 35 mph winds soon forced Thunberg and her pals — who also included “Game of Thrones” actor Liam Cunningham — to turn back.

“We conducted a sea trial and then returned to port to allow the storm to pass. This meant delaying our departure to avoid risking complications with the smaller boats,” the Global Sumud Flotilla Mission said in a statement, without giving a time for the rescheduled voyage.

Oh, what might have been: Israel Hatches Plan To Throw Greta Thunberg In Terror Cell:

Israeli ministers are drawing up plans to detain Greta Thunberg in “terrorist-level conditions” after the Swedish activist left Spain on Sunday on the largest flotilla yet bound for Gaza.

Ms Thunberg was joined by Liam Cunningham, the Game of Thrones actor, and Ada Colau, the former mayor of Barcelona, among others, on what they referred to as the “largest solidarity mission” in history.

Dozens of ships are expected to set sail for Gaza from Tunisia and other ports in the Mediterranean Sea on Sept 4 to join the Global Sumud Flotilla, which aims to break the siege of Gaza in a symbolic protest against the war and dire humanitarian conditions.

But Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, is planning to present Benjamin Netanyahu with a plan to detain the activists in harsh “terrorist-level” conditions in the Ktzi’ot and Damon detention centres for females, according to Israel Hayom, one of Israel’s biggest newspapers.

So has she fully retired her earlier persona as a doomsday environmental? Because if she still clings to those earlier beliefs, what’s the point of the flotilla?

* No, really!

UPDATE: Eve Barlow on “Greta Thunderpantz.”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — The Wizard Of Oz.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

80/20: Trump Open To Bringing Back Insane Asylums To Clean Up Streets.

[REAGAN REESE of the Daily Caller]: I want to ask you another question about D.C. crackdown. Would you be open to the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness?

TRUMP: Yeah I would.

REESE: You would?

TRUMP: Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them. And what happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive. But we had, they were all over New York. I remember when I was growing up, Creedmoor. They had a place, Creedmoor, they had a lot of them, Bellevue, and they were closed by a certain governor. And I remember when they did, it was a long time ago, and I said they didn’t release these people? And they did. They released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation.

Even Reason magazine isn’t opposed to this idea: We Shut Down State Mental Hospitals. Some People Want to Bring Them Back.

 

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

YOU CAN’T HIDE THIS DECLINE: America’s obsession with British decline.

You’ll find this discourse everywhere – from Tucker Carlson lamenting that Britons are now ‘slaves’ who ‘go to jail’ for dissent to Elon Musk calling us a ‘tyrannical police state’ to internet mega-pundit Charlie Kirk describing us as ‘a husk’ and soon to be ‘a conquered country’. Whatever the provenance of these critiques – and plenty come from a place of grief or regret, not mere contempt – they hit home. They can make you, a Brit, wince. And the one that has made me wince the most came from a much less-well-known voice: a Substack called MrStarStack, created by – as far as I can see – a firmly right-wing but not crazy Republican, known on X as Mr Star.

The particular essay about the impending doom of the YooKay (and he uses this demeaning nickname quite deliberately) is entitled ‘Mind the gap’, but the subhead gives the gist: ‘A powerful set of systemic factors are threatening to bring chaos unseen in centuries to the shores of the United Kingdom.’ I advise you to read the entire essay yourself. It is articulate, considered, perceptive and, if you are British, quite harrowing. He has given us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. And, my God, it is a dismal portrait.

The author attacks us from all sides. Not with pointless venom, but with outright astonishment at our grotesque and self-harming stupidity. Britain is ‘a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if it were run by your neurotic mother-in-law’. Parts of the North resemble ‘a collapsing civilisation’. The NHS is ‘a black-hole money pit with some of the worst dollar-per-dollar outcomes’. We also have ‘some of the nuttiest benefits handouts in the entire world’ (he is particularly gobsmacked by the Motability scandal). He notes that our Chancellor wept in parliament. He says the economy is ‘effectively stagnant, and there is little or no plan to resolve underlying systemic factors’.

He adds that Britain is a country ‘where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of white girls were systematically sexually exploited by gangs of Mirpuri Pakistanis’ – a fact which was then covered up. Meanwhile, we are also a nation that ‘received well in excess of 1 per cent of its population for several years straight during the “Boriswave”’. Mr Star does not see this as a good thing.

Then he really gets going. I’ll spare you the gory fiscal details but it’s when the essay turns to our growing debt crisis – some gilt yields soaring over 5 per cent – that the apocalypse promised by the subhead begins to loom. It is not pretty.

Naturally, as a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t. I have been through the essay, insult by insult, and I’ve found only two arguable errors. Firstly, the UK does not – thank God – suffer weekly or daily terror attacks. Secondly, Britain does not have a ‘uniquely violent street gang culture’.

Apart from that, I cannot find major flaws. Which makes it all the more depressing, and leaves me wondering whether the author’s prognosis is correct, and Britain is ‘rapidly heading towards a grand and brutal reckoning’ and ‘the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely’.

To make it worse, the author does not see a saviour anywhere, not in Reform, Labour or the Conservatives, because we have ‘one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet’. Ouch.

Well, he’s not wrong: Bridget Phillipson has said the quiet part out loud. “Yesterday, education secretary Bridget Phillipson was wheeled out to defend the indefensible. After the Court of Appeal struck down a temporary injunction, that had closed the Bell Hotel in Epping to asylum seekers following weeks of protests from residents, Sky News’s Trevor Phillips was given a yawning open goal. In court, the Home Office argued that the human rights of migrants actually trumped the safety concerns of locals. Does she agree with the government’s lawyers, then?, asked Phillips. After some burbling about a ‘balance of rights’, Phillipson conceded that, ‘yes, of course we do’.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

SURPRISE: Conservatism-Basher Faults NY Times for ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Riot Coverage.

[Sam] Tanenhaus brought a welcome helping of reality to the liberal PBS viewership with his recent history lesson: “I think the year 2020 is one that’s going to reverberate in our history for a long time. It feels to me a little bit like 1968, one of those watershed years of violence and militarism, militancy. And we know how a lot of liberal publications, including my former publication, The New York Times, treated what were serious uprisings in some of the major cities in this country, rather what they didn’t report about them.”

[Firing Line’s Margaret] Hoover stood up for her friends on the left, wondering “why didn’t they report about them.”

But Tanenhaus remained undeterred and delivered the punchline by blasting the left’s “mostly peaceful” moniker. But check out how it’s Hoover — the alleged Republican — who comes to the woke mob’s defense (and nevermind their rank hypocrisy on mass gatherings amid the pandemic):

TANENHAUS: They didn’t report the attacks on shopkeepers, often black shopkeepers, right, black Americans owning shops, seeing their businesses destroyed. There was not a lot of reporting on that. A notorious phrase that conservatives pick up and you’ll probably be familiar with was when The Times described some of the events as ‘mostly peaceful,’ right? That phrase has not gone away.

HOOVER: Yeah, there were demonstrations across the country that were mostly peaceful.

TANENHAUS: That’s a meaningful phrase. So, yes, it’s the left as much as the right…..

Tanenhaus edited the New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013 and was a fierce and misleading critic of conservatism. That dubious history made his unbidden criticism of his former employer all the more surprising: Who would have thought the phrase “peaceful protest” would have even been uttered as part of a media critique by a liberal on PBS?

The Times did favor “mostly peaceful” and the similar euphemism “largely peaceful” as a description of 2020 rioting, while CNN could also claim “mostly peaceful” thanks to a notorious chyron that aired August 26, 2020 under a report about rioting after a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin: “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING”.

PBS’s counterpart in public radio broadcasting also cheerfully promoted an equally insidious attack on shopkeepers that year: Debunking NPR’s Bizarre ‘In Defense of Looting’ Interview.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: Russell Crowe is Gladiator!

The New Hotness? Russell Crowe is Hermann Göring!

The bug-eyed photo (or Photoshop) of co-star Rami Malek on the title card isn’t helping to make this a must-watch Thanksgiving movie either. We all know why Crowe is playing Nazi’s Germany’s fattest fascist, but the timing of its production is curious. According to IMDB, principal photography was February to May of last year, before Biden dropped out, when he still enjoyed the support of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters. What would the marketing have been like if Biden had stayed in the race and won, or if Harris had won in November?

In May, “George MF Washington” wrote of “Treating the Audience Like Adults,” and compared the plots of 2024’s Conclave and 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg, the latter directed and produced by Stanley Kramer, the very definition of a Hollywood bleeding heart liberal in the ‘50s and ‘60s:

“Judgment at Nuremberg” is one of the finest films ever made. It is an “important” film in all the ways modern Hollywood aspires to but rarely achieves. It is dramatic and emotional, while also managing to be wildly entertaining. Set against the backdrop of the real life war crime trials of Nazi officials which were held in Nuremberg after the close of World War 2, the film is a fictional dramatization of what were called “The Jurists’ Trials”, in which senior Nazi judges (16 in all) were put on trial for crimes against humanity.

“Judgment at Nuremberg” echoes many of the same arguments made in the actual historical trials and the case turns on fictionalized versions of real world events. There are four defendants in the case, but the story focuses on the fate of a single defendant… a once-celebrated German jurist named Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster.

A retired District Court judge from Maine named Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) is chosen to be the Chief Justice on a three-judge panel hearing the case against Janning and his co-defendants. Haywood is a good man and an excellent jurist with a stellar reputation who arrives in Germany with an open mind. He has not pre-judged the case he is set to hear, and is determined to give the men in the dock a fair hearing, even though the defendants are, as we might say here in 2025, “literally Nazis.”

And this is where things get interesting… because there is only one character in the film who wants to throw the book at the four accused judges. Richard Widmark plays Prosecutor Tad Lawson, an Army Colonel who fought his way through some of the most brutal fighting on the road to Berlin, only to find himself immersed in the horror of liberating the Concentration Camps. Lawson wants justice, not only for the unspeakable crimes he witnessed in Dachau and the other charnel houses of Eastern Germany and Poland, but also for what he was forced to do, and what was done to him, on the battlefield. Lawson is relentless in his prosecution of the four Justices, his fury always there just below the surface, threatening to boil over at any moment and consume him.

But ultimately Lawson is alone in his crusade. Every other character in the film, and I mean every one, argues that the men in the dock, while certainly guilty of crimes, deserve grace, understanding, leniency, and even clemency at the hands of Haywood and the American-led tribunal. Even Lawson’s superior officers urge him to go easy on the defendants, knowing that the Cold War is already heating up and that the United States will need the German people on its side in the coming conflict with Russia.

Will the upcoming Nuremberg have anywhere as nuanced an approach to this topic? Beyond the poor quality of most Hollywood writing over the past decade, this detail does not give me much hope:

In “Nuremberg,” Oscar-award winner Russell Crowe will play Nazi propagandist [sic] Hermann Göring, opposite Oscar-winner Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist tasked with determining whether he should stand trial for his crimes against humanity.

The film is being directed by James Vanderbilt, whose previous film, 2015’s “Truth,” also relied on real-life events, exposing journalist and longtime TV news anchor Dan Rather following the use of bogus documents about former President George W. Bush’s military service. He wrote the screenplay for the film, which he adapted from the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai.

Far from “exposing” Dan Rather, as Kyle Smith, then of the New York Post wrote in 2015: Wacko Dan Rather movie still insists forged Bush-National Guard documents were real.

[Kate] Blanchett’s [Mary] Mapes tells the committee that the documents had to be genuine because they contain military acronyms and jargon and show knowledge of Bush’s military service (which had been extensively covered in the media). It beggars belief, she claims, that anyone could go through so much trouble and then produce fake documents using Microsoft Word. She even insists she’s been persecuted for her political leanings (though she won’t admit to any): “You mean, am I now or have I ever been a liberal?” she asks the committee. At one point she declares, “Our story was about whether the president fulfilled his service. Nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about fonts and forgeries, and they hope to God the truth gets lost in the scrum!” Except Mapes couldn’t prove the president went AWOL without the documents.

Eight people, including Mapes, Rather and three CBS execs, lost their jobs over the scandal. As Kevin Drum wrote in Washington Monthly after the committee report was released, “It’s a train wreck. A complete disaster. You have to read the whole report to get the full flavor, but the nickel version is simple: It’s unbelievable that this ‘60 Minutes’ segment ever got on the air.”

Another climactic moment near the end comes when Topher Grace’s researcher character, having been fired by CBS, gives a similarly long and angry speech about how CBS and its then-corporate owner Viacom are simply doing the handiwork of its allies in the Bush administration because of Viacom’s interests involving FCC rules.

That speech is equally nutty: It raises the question of why CBS would have allowed the story — or any other anti-Bush stories — to run in the first place. Mapes won a Peabody for her reporting that same year on the Abu Ghraib scandal.

“Truth” is based on Mapes’ memoir, “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power.” Mapes, who hasn’t worked in TV news since the scandal, and Rather insist to this day they were right, and Rather even sued CBS for breach of contract. The lawsuit was laughed out of court — in much the same way that “Truth” will be laughed out of theaters.

In 2023, Outkick the Coverage’s David Hookstead sounded quite excited by the announcement of Nuremberg: Upcoming WWII Movie With Stacked Cast Sounds Awesome:

Does that plot description get you amped up and interested? It sure does for me. Most WWII movies focus on the combat on the ground. Americans love watching movies about the good guys destroying Nazis in WWII. “Band of Brothers” – an HBO limited series – is considered the greatest war story ever put on film, and more than two decades later, still holds up as elite.

“Nuremberg” will focus on the trials of multiple captured Nazi leaders. It’s an interesting and exciting change of pace. Plus, Crowe as Herman Goering and Rami Malek as Lt. Colonel Douglas Kelley sounds awesome.

There’s never been a great movie or show about the Nuremberg Trials. There was a TV series from decades ago with Brian Cox and Alec Baldwin. It’s nothing special and easily forgettable.

Well yes, it was. But Stanley Kramer would very much like a word here. Based on the current trailers, it doesn’t sound Judgment at Nuremberg’s stellar reputation has much to fear from Crowe and Malek’s upcoming effort.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Sep 1st, 2025

August 31, 2025

STEPHEN MILLER GIVES MASTER CLASS IN DESTROYING MEDIA ANSWERING QUESTION ABOUT DEPORTING ILLEGAL ‘MD DAD:’

Stephen Miller knows how to handle the media.

Which is probably why they hate him so much.

Nobody makes them look dumber than Miller … he honestly could teach a class in how to deal with them. A master class, even.

Watch how he responds when they ask about sending Kilmar Garcia, who does not want to go back El Salvador, home.

Meanwhile, America’s Newspaper of Record satirizes the recursion that the alleged human trafficker is caught in:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 31st, 2025

PHYLLIS CHESLER: The All-Too-Eager Islamist Filmmaker.

Revelations of all kinds are upon us. Here’s one that just caught my eye. It’s about Zohran Mamdani’s film-maker mother, Mira Nair, whose films I’ve reviewed over the years.

Guess who funded Mira Nair’s propaganda filmmaking? According to Will Bredderman at the New York Post, (August 31st), none other than Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, sister to the ruling Emir of Qatar. Qatar! The banker for Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hamas, and for Afghanistan’s Taliban; the safe haven for terrorist leaders and for antisemitic psychologists such as Lara Sheehi; the owners of Al-Jazeera, which was founded in 1996. Al Jazeera? An Islamist, anti-American and anti-Israel television network which, as of 2006, broadcast in English.

A film, “Control Room” was all about Al-Jazeera. I remember it well–it excited so many American “progressives” because it reinforced their belief that Al-Jazeera was cool and groovy, just like CNN or the former MSNBC (now MS Now). They could relax. America was the unredeemable Bad Guy and Muslim Islamist terrorists were actually innocent, righteous, and fundamentally “reluctant” to blow up Marines in their barracks and fly planes into Manhattan buildings; they had no choice, we drove them to it.

We are now being told that Nair’s film, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” was fully funded by Sheikha Al-Thani. Shameful Ironies abound. The Haifa Film Festival wanted this particular film but Nair refused to allow it to be shown in Israel.

Oh, the movies that will be made against the Death Wish-style backdrop of Mamdani’s Manhattan to come. But remember, it’s only called socialism if it comes from the champagne region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling democracy:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 31st, 2025

INSIDE HAITI: Where women are raped on the street and gangs rule.

Beatrice was wearing her school uniform the day she disappeared: a yellow blouse and blue trousers. Her mother, Roseline, had dropped her off at the bus stop that morning and waved goodbye. When she got home she realised that Beatrice had forgotten her dinner money and called the head teacher to ask him to let her get lunch from the canteen on credit. He told her Beatrice hadn’t come to school.

She had been taken by the gangs that control almost all of their home city, the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince: teenage boys and young men who sit on broken sofas at intersections, leaning assault rifles against their knees, ruling the place after they pushed out the government a year and a half ago. Beatrice was 15 years old, her favourite subject was maths — and she was gone.

Roseline called her friends, looked around the neighbourhood. She found out that the bus had broken down on the way to school. Beatrice had been waiting by the side of the road with the other passengers when masked men came and took her and two of the others: a young woman and a young man. “I was looking everywhere, asking everyone,” Roseline, 39, told me at a women’s shelter in Port-au-Prince.

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Caribbean and Latin America. It has a similar GDP per capita to Bangladesh. Half the population do not have enough to eat. Hundreds of thousands of children are malnourished.

In the capital there is no accountability, no one in charge, no one who can fix things when they go wrong. In most of Port-au-Prince and its suburbs, where about a quarter of Haiti’s 12 million population live, the gangs are the only law. Police are scattered through the 10 per cent of the capital still controlled by the government, where they park their armoured cars at intersections and fire at people they think are gang members. There’s only one place you can go to find a missing person — your local “chef”, the gang leader who controls your area. Roseline was terrified, but went anyway. He said he’d do what he could.

Local “chef” could be taken quite literally in this case: There Is No Cannibalism in Haiti — Or Perhaps at Least Some.

In any case, I wonder if Conan O’Brien reads the London Times? 

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 31st, 2025
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