Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

THIS WAS PREDICTABLE RIGHT FROM THE START: Covid Lockdowns Devastated an Entire Generation of Children.

A new study was released this month tracking the developmental outcomes among young children growing up during the pandemic period, aged between 1-5. This study was a systematic review; essentially an examination of over a dozen studies on childhood development for those who started learning and growing in the era of masks and mandates.

Sure enough, of the 17 studies included that covered how developmental outcomes unfolded during the pandemic, “almost all” of them reported a “negative association” between the Covid years and educational and emotional development.

“Among the 17 studies that reported developmental outcomes, almost all reported a negative association between the pandemic and developmental domains screened,” the study says.

It wasn’t just one issue either; children saw significant “negative associations” in multiple areas in 15 of the 17 included studies.

“Fifteen out of 17 studies showed negative associations in several domains (behaviour, communication, language, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, emotional, and personal-social skills), measured with ASQ-3 and ASQ SE-2 (Ages and Stages questionnaire).”

Children who were born and started growing up during the era of Covid restrictions fell behind in virtually every single important area of development.

Read the whole thing.

As Ace of Spades wrote in March of 2022, “The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from. The early years of development are critical ones. You don’t get those back. These are critical years of development in which children’s brains are wired to rewire themselves like crazy. Their brains will reconfigure themselves during these years like in no other point in their lives, ever. There is no ‘Do Over’ switch on a child’s formative years.”

The following year, Karol Markowicz reminded her readers: Never forget: It was Randi Weingarten and the Bidens who sacrificed a generation of kids.

CINCINNATI IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:

Cincinnati’s last Republican mayor left office in 1971.

DISPATCHES FROM THE SILLY SEASON: Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Ad Attacked By Good Morning America: ‘Being Compared To Nazi Propaganda.’

In case you’ve been in a coma, the legacy media has lost its mind.

Look no further than the report from “Good Morning America: First Look” where the Disney-owned show told viewers how actress Sydney Sweeney‘s new American Eagle advertisement proclaiming, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” is “being compared to Nazi propaganda.”

Those words actually ran on network television. Then, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, the network doubled down by bringing on an advertising professor from Kean University to tell us how the pun, “good genes” is tied to the eugenics movement and how it’s bad for America.

Let’s dive into the segment.

The eugenics movement “weaponized the idea of good genes,” professor Robin Landa told GMA. “…to justify white supremacism.”

Since this is 2025, I think we all knew how this was going to end up:

(Classical reference in headline.)

SHOTS AT COLBERT? CBS Reminisces About Johnny Carson as Late Night Withers.

After weathering a week of blistering heat from the rest of the liberal media following the announcement that The Late Show and host Stephen Colbert were being kicked to the curb, CBS seemed to respond in the form of a love letter to Johnny Carson and reminiscing about what late night used to look like. CBS News Sunday Morning put together a piece remarking on how Carson brought people “peace,” “hope,” and laughter at the end of the day instead of being a divisive political silo.

“With so much talk about the future of late-night TV shows just now, we thought it was the perfect time for Jim Axelrod to take a look back to a time when late night was the place to be and ruled by a most singular man,” proclaimed fill-in host Tracy Smith as she introduced the segment.

Walking into the legendary Studio 1, Axelrod marveled at space. “It may not look like much now, but once upon a time, this was where the king of comedy held court,” he beamed. “As Johnny Carson presided over not just late night, but American popular culture.”

Something no current late night host could boast.

How is Colbert’s ride into the sunset going? Stephen Colbert continues to be bested by Gutfeld after announcing cancellation.

Fox News’s Gutfeld! topped the late-night ratings this week, even after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert saw a bump in viewership since Colbert announced the show’s cancellation.

Colbert’s show attracted an average of 1.9 million total viewers. In the week since the show was confirmed to end in May 2026, viewership bumped up to 2.4 million according to Nielsen ratings.

Still, this bump wasn’t enough to beat Gutfeld!, which saw a 3.1 million viewers tune in this week. Almost 400,000 viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 chose Greg Gutfeld over Colbert. The Late Show reported less than 300,000 viewers within this demographic.

Probably for the best for all concerned that no one is watching: Canceled Colbert Rips on Paramount With Stream of Pee Jokes.

Stephen Colbert emptied his bladder all over Paramount with a stream of pee-related jokes, tearing into the network for cancelling his show and bowing to President Donald Trump to get an $8.6 billion merger with Skydance Media approved.

Reacting with a spit-take to news that the Paramount-Skydance merger had been approved by the FCC following the cancellation of his show, Colbert quipped, “I’m cancelled!? What!? And I’m being told I already knew that, but I spent the weekend huffing airport glue.”

Composing himself, he added, “I’m thrilled for everyone at Paramount that the deal went through and very excited for our newly announced official combined Paramount-SkyDance stock ticker name, which will go from ‘PARA’ to ‘PSKY.

“Soon, PSKY will blast hot streaming content right in your face with hits like Yellowstone, Yellowjackets, and the full variety of water sports. I predict PSKY will become synonymous with number one. PSKY: a pitcher of warm entertainment.”

And thus, the would-be successor to David Letterman comes full circle:

CAN AMERICA BE GREAT AGAIN WITHOUT A RETURN TO THE MOON?

July 20 marked 56 years since Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked across that “magnificent desolation,” to borrow the words Aldrin radioed back to millions of television viewers on Earth.

From the summer of 1969 to the end of 1972, through six Apollo Moon landing missions, the United States of America placed no less than a dozen human beings on the surface of the Moon.

The rest of the world could only watch in awe – or, in the Soviet Union’s case, envy.

With the lunar dust kicked up by those first explorers long since settled, Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” is at risk of reverting to merely “one small step.”

That will be the case if America retreats from its admirable legacy of lunar exploration.

Put simply, NASA’s “rebooting” of the Moon is in trouble: the Artemis program aims to return American astronauts to the Moon, this time to establish a sustainable presence. But projected budget cuts and layoffs, including senior leadership – and an enormous amount of difficult-to-replace human capital – have translated to delays, scaled-back missions, and an overall “brain drain” that place the administration and its mission on shaky footing.

America will eventually get back to the moon; but it could well be via the private efforts of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, rather than bloated post-Apollo version of NASA.

GREAT MOMENTS IN LAW AND ORDER: Cincinnati’s DEI-Loving Police Chief Gives Jaw-Dropping Statement on Viral Attack.

Is there some requirement that left-wing cities have female police chiefs who are terrible at their jobs? It seems like every time a story goes national involving crime in a major blue city, the same archetype is always in charge. Are we to believe that these women are truly just the best of the best and being selected on merit alone when around 88 percent of police officers are men? New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Washington, Oakland, Portland, Louisville, and Seattle all have female police chiefs. That’s not because they were selected without gender bias in mind.

The president’s son responded:

IT’S COME TO THIS: MSNBC Goes Full Racist, Attacking Sydney Sweeney Ad Campaign.

Remember how, in recent years, nearly every high-profile “racist incident” that dominated the headlines eventually turned out to be a false flag or outright hoax? Well, nothing’s changed. The outrage-obsessed left has apparently run out of real things to be angry about, so now they’re inventing reasons to keep the mob frothing.

Case in point: the latest American Eagle ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. According to some perpetually offended leftists, it’s somehow Nazi propaganda. Yes, really.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. In one spot, Sweeney says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue.” From that, the usual outrage machine decided the campaign’s playful “great genes” riff is secretly pushing white genetic superiority.

And naturally, the gatekeepers of left-wing culture are more than happy to amplify this.

MSNBC producer Hannah Holland, for one, has written a scathing critique of Sweeney’s casting. Instead of acknowledging the innocuous nature of a celebrity endorsement, Holland frames the entire campaign as a symptom of what she calls “an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.” She writes, “Advertisements are always mirrors of society, and sometimes what they reflect is an uncomfortable truth about who we’re really elevating.”

How can Sweeney’s ad be racist? At no point does she utter the words “golf” and “Chicago.”

Incidentally, here’s Hannah Holland, on the reich, right.

What exactly is the Comcast-owned network implying here?

WHY DOES ISRAEL HAVE TO FEED ITS ENEMIES? The AP on Saturday reported: Israel’s military says airdrops of aid will begin in Gaza as hunger grows.

Naturally the led to the following response:

I don’t recall reading about the Dutch having a similar response when the Allies dropped food from B-17s near the end of WWII:

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW: Woke Mob Comes for Sydney Sweeney (Again).

It’s almost as if ugly women want pretty women to hide themselves away, and black racists want white people to live their lives in shame of their skin color.

Leftist TikTok is in full pitchfork-and-torch mode after a new ad for American Eagle jeans featuring actress Sydney Sweeney used a play on words, with some claiming it’s full-on Nazi propaganda.

The ad features Sweeney, 27, clad in a pair of the brand’s jeans and a denim jacket, talking about her jeans/genes.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” she intones in a spot.

“My jeans are blue,” she says as she flashes her blue eyes.

The “Nazi propaganda” video is below.

Not exactly the second coming of Leni Riefenstahl, and regarding the ad’s pitch line, Ace of Spades adds:

Jennifer Sey, a former Levi’s executive who was forced out due to her normal, logical, factual beliefs about men not being women, says that she’s heard a hundred variations on the “genes/jeans” pun in advertising pitch meetings.

I know schools don’t teach history these days so it is not surprising that these people don’t actually know what a Nazi is.

Also if I had a dollar for every time an ad agency pitched me the ‘Great Jeans’ idea in my 23 years at Levi’s, well it would be a lot of [cash emoji]

In a VIP post at RedState, Brandon Morse finally tackles the most important of questions: Why We’re So Attracted to Sydney Sweeney.

The convenient timing for [Scarlett] Johansson’s sudden turn isn’t lost on people, but she’s hardly alone. The “male gaze” has become a mustache-twisting villain in pop-society, with many modern feminists targeting it as the reason women are objectified and mistreated in Western culture. It’s funny that you now have an online avalanche of women complaining that men aren’t approaching them despite intentionally doing things to attract them now, but that’s another article.

Sweeney does not do this. She’s not “ashamed” of her beauty. She wants you to look. She’s welcoming about it. She’s not shaming you for wanting to look.

She embraced the feminine desire to be a beauty to behold and is unapologetic about the fact, and many people — especially men — find a sort of comfort in that. She’s not just beautiful, she’s feminine, and being welcomed into enjoying that beauty is refreshing in a society that tells you that you’re a pig and a monster for wanting to see beautiful women.

That’s why Sweeney is such an attractive person. It’s not just the outside, it’s the fact that she seems like a fun gal who doesn’t want to make you feel bad for being a man with masculine instincts.

But she’s clearly angering the gnostic tattooed women with septum piercings on TikTok. During the 2008 presidential campaign in a column for Politico, then-Reason editor Michael Moynihan wrote the left had turned into a “a virtual Bletchley Park of racial cryptographers teasing out the sinister motives and subtexts of McCain’s campaign advertising.”

Today, the septum piercing set are seeing Nazism everywhere, even in blue jeans ads. Talking with Megyn Kelly, Victor Davis Hanson paraphrases Stalin’s head of the secret police Lavrentiy Beria, who was infamously quoted as saying, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Or, in this case, show me the hot actress pitching blue jeans, and I’ll show you the Nazi dog whistle:

Iowahawk writes that the TikTokers have arrived at Subliminal Seduction territory of imagining Deutschland dog whistles everywhere they look:

Finally, Jeff Bezos has a lot more housecleaning to do at the WaPo: How American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ‘good jeans’ ad went wrong. A provocative new denim campaign featuring the actress leans into retro sexiness — and it’s sparking debate about eugenics and ‘wokeness.’

Not to mention a debate on how it all went wrong for advertising in its response to the 2020-era leftist insanity:

(Classical – and NSFW – reference in headline.)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Meanwhile, a simple rule is that ugly women will use whatever social power they have to get hot women to look less hot.

TYLER O’NEIL: The Ghost of Eric Holder Haunts Trump’s Justice Department.

A lawyer who worked closely with Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder now works in President Donald Trump’s administration as an ostensibly nonpolitical staffer at the Justice Department.

While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in purportedly nonpolitical, career positions. The Office of Personnel Management tracks when political appointees transition to career positions—a process often referred to as “burrowing in” to the bureaucracy—and Tina Thomas did so in August 2024.

Biden appointed Thomas as a political appointee in September 2021 to serve as senior counsel in the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department. She transitioned to a career role as assistant U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., also in the Justice Department. OPM approved the transition on Aug. 11. Thomas went from an annual salary of $110,460 to $121,435.

Still a lot of swamp draining to go.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE:

Why Speaking English May Spread More Coronavirus Than Some Other Languages.

Forbes, September 8th, 2020.

To be fair, Forbes wasn’t alone in exploring this topic in 2020 and early 2021:

The German dialect [may] promote the coronavirus. Immunologist Beda Stadler believes that guttural sounds in the dialect are at increased risk of contamination.

—Firefox translation of a April 3rd 2020 Swiss-French Tribune de Genève headline.

● Say ‘vous’ not ‘tu’ in French to limit virus spread. French speakers should say ‘vous’ to each other rather than ‘tu’ and avoid colourful French insults, to avoid spraying out spit droplets that could contain the Covid-19 virus, linguists say.

The Connexion, “French News in English Since 2002,” June 4th, 2020.

● Does Speaking Japanese Lower The Risk of Spreading Coronavirus?

Vice, June 9th, 2020.

● Research finds singing in some languages could spread COVID-19 more easily than others.

—CBS News, January 28th, 2021.

THERE ARE NO EASY ANSWERS, BUT THERE ARE SIMPLE ANSWERS:

ROGER KIMBALL: Cambridge University should be ashamed of itself for honoring Angela Davis.

Remember Angela Davis? Few people under fifty do. Was Cambridge University counting on that historical ignorance when it decided to honor Angela Davis with an honorary degree?

In case you, Dear Reader, are a little fuzzy about Davis, I note for the record that the former Black Panther and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall is the recipient of many honors, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize.

Cambridge University, of course, has long demonstrated a certain fondness for Commies, as the names “Kim Philby,” “Guy Burgess” and “Anthony Blunt” remind us. But as far as I have been able to discover, Angela Davis is the first person who appeared on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list to have been honored by Cambridge.

As David Harsanyi wrote in 2019: Angela Davis, Women’s March Honoree And Champion Of Terror, Prisons, And Tyranny.

It was “human rights activist Angela Davis,” as NPR astonishingly described the woman in an article this week, who bought the shotgun that was used in a 1970 Marin County court room kidnapping and shootout that ended up killing a superior court judge and three others. The subsequent manhunt and trial of Davis, a proud lifelong communist, would be a very big deal in Soviet nations.

In 1971, in fact, the CIA noted that Davis’s case had become “a Soviet manipulated international anti-US campaign reminiscent of the orchestrated by Communist propaganda efforts made on behalf of atomic spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.” The CIA estimated that at least 5 percent of the entire Soviet Russian propaganda budget had been aimed at propping up Davis. To put that in context, that’s more than was being spent on propaganda directly about the Vietnam War. All schoolchildren in East Germany were ordered to collect flowers and stamps for Davis.

Davis soon traveled to many of these nations to stand with leaders who, collectively, had jailed hundreds of thousands of political dissidents. She visited East Germany, and effusively praised Erich Honecker while the Stasi were torturing political prisoners and his border police were summarily executing those who tried to escape.

As Richard Brookhiser tweeted last year, “Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Angela Davis appeared at a ceremony honoring the guards who shot people trying to escape over it.”

WASHINGTON POST’S CONTROVERSIAL “FACT CHECKER” EXITS PAPER AMID ANTI-WOKE REBOOT…AND HE ISN’T BEING REPLACED.

The Washington Post’s chief fact checker accepted a buyout and is leaving the newspaper without a replacement.

Owner Jeff Bezos and CEO Will Lewis have taken a slew of recent steps to try and help the paper shed its left-wing reputation.

Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker, announced on Monday that he is leaving the Post, reported Fox News.

‘After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout,’ Kessler said on Facebook.

‘Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss.’

Well, scrutinizing some politicians. Mostly those who had an (R) after their names: WaPo’s Lead ‘Fact-Checker’ Is Reportedly Departing and Here Are a Few Doozies Being Left Behind.

Kessler was quite happy to toe the party line when it was crunch time:

How will the WaPo recover from their ongoing brain drain?

UPDATE: John Nolte adds, “During his first term in office, Barry Obama did not visit Israel. He didn’t. Obama jetted all over the Middle East, but never bothered to visit Israel. That’s a fact. And so, during the 2012 presidential election, Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, ran a campaign ad pointing out Obama did not visit Israel during his first term, and Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler still called Romney a liar. That’s Glenn Kessler in a nutshell. The effort he put into disgracing himself was something to see.”

TIM CARNEY: NPR went from liberal journalists to left-wing crusaders.

Republicans never liked NPR, but they were unwilling to expend enough political capital to cut off federal funding from an institution that was merely very liberal. Once that institution became hostile toward and intolerant of half the country, ruling its views out of bounds and nakedly boosting one party, the knives came out.

* * * * * * * *

NPR was always free to say “we believe Fox News is not framing this correctly,” or “we disagree with the Republican governor’s policies,” but this way of writing would frame the disagreement as a debate with two sides. However, NPR’s project over the past decade has been to brand center-right viewpoints out of bounds. And so it wielded fact-checks for exactly that purpose.

Of course, this resulted in absurd “fact-checks.”

On March 31, 2020, NPR ran this astounding headline: “FACT CHECK: Trump Praises Florida Governor Despite Criticism Of Coronavirus Response.”

The “fact check” pointed out that while Trump said Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is “a great governor” who “knows exactly what he’s doing,” others disagreed. Specifically, NPR cited a lawsuit by a Democratic politician who wore a grim reaper outfit on the beach, said letting Floridians walk outdoors would cause mass death, and demanded a full lockdown of the state (presumably arresting folks who stepped outside).

The suit NPR leaned on as an authority was immediately and repeatedly dismissed in court. One state court imposed sanctions on Florida Attorney Daniel Uhlfelder because his case was so obviously frivolous and political.

That’s an NPR “fact-check” of Trump: Trump praised DeSantis, but some partisan hack lawyer says DeSantis is bad, so Trump must be wrong.

In February 0f 2021, Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner noted: CNN’s promotion of idiot ‘Grim Reaper’ attorney ends in embarrassment.

“To the extent determined necessary, we also encourage The Florida Bar to require Appellant and his counsel to undertake additional educational training the Bar may deem appropriate to ensure that Appellant and counsel comply with their ethical and professionalism obligations,” the order added.

For the record, this is all slightly unusual, particularly the appeals court panel’s angry tone and its recommendation that disciplinary action be taken against the idiot Grim Reaper lawyer. But it just goes to show how annoyed the judges are with Uhlfelder’s shenanigans. And the panel is right. Uhlfelder is an embarrassment. He clearly abused his position as an attorney for political purposes, cheered on all the while by a news media that are too stupid and too ratings-obsessed to learn from their past missteps.

Sure, the press’s embrace of Uhlfelder isn’t quite as embarrassing as their embrace of convicted felon Michael Avenatti. But it’s close. Elevating an obvious clown because he has the “right” politics and he attacks the “right” targets is embarrassing, and unethical, regardless of whether a felony conviction is involved somewhere along the way. The difference is just a matter of degrees.

Uhlfelder, the self-styled grim reaper, was one of many leftists who did a complete 180-degree pivot in June of 2020, once the dancing Tiktok nurses and other powers that be declared that suddenly mass lockdowns were giving way to riot season:

 

DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVE WITH A CHYRON: NBC’s Kristen Welker Firefights the Russia Hoax Doc Drop, Gets SHUT DOWN by Sen. Graham.

Legacy Media have taken a keener interest in firefighting the revelations contained within the Russia Hoax document drop published by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. NBC’s Kristen Welker joined the fray and inadvertently demonstrated why Republicans aren’t usually booked on these segments.

Having heard enough, Graham calls Welker out for “sweeping this stuff under the rug” (click “expand” to view transcript):

Flashback:

Related:

THERE GOES THE SUN:

From Politico,

Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public.

Good morning, dear readers. How’s your day going so far?

Perhaps for the first time ever, I’m recommending that your read a Politico article in its entirety.

The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay.

It reads like a rejected plot in the James Bond movie series. “Secretive billionaire-backed initiative”? What could go wrong?

It was also a proposed by ultimately rejected plot by the Obama* administration:

When your environmental extremism loses the man who vowed to bankrupt the coal industry, it might be time, as a wise woman once wrote, to “check your premises.”

* During all three of his terms in office.

Still though, could be worse:

GREAT MOMENTS IN BLUE-ANON: These Democrats believe Kamala won the election – in an alternate universe.

It’s 4am on election night and things are not looking good for Kamala Harris.
Donald Trump has already won the key swing states of Georgia and Wisconsin and is well on his way to seizing Pennsylvania, at which point the election will be called in his favour.

But all might not be as it seems. According to a growing number of spiritually-inclined Democrat supporters, 4am on Nov 6 2024 is the moment the universe “split”, leaving us on an alternate timeline where Mr Trump is president.

In reality, they claim, Ms Harris was installed in the White House, and it is only a matter of time before we all collectively realise our mistake and jump back to the “correct” timeline.

Psephologists may cast doubt, but for thousands of self-described witches and mystics on TikTok, the evidence is incontrovertible.

Known as the 4am Club, the movement is founded by Gia Prism, a self-styled psychic medium and healer, and has been described as the “Left’s QAnon”.

Videos of “4am clubbers” on social media have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, featuring mostly young women describing their uncannily similar experiences on election night.

Are they planning to will themselves into a hookup with 1980-era Jane Seymour as well?

OLD AND BUSTED: “I Saw a Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac.”

The New Hotness? Felix Rosenqvist’s Car Rockin’ the Grateful Dead at Laguna Seca.

Meyer Shank Racing’s dynamic partnership with SiriusXM continues to strike a chord, this time with an iconic, tie-dye twist.

For this weekend’s NTT INDYCAR SERIES race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and the Aug. 10 race at Portland International Raceway, the No. 60 SiriusXM Honda driven by Felix Rosenqvist will sport a one-of-a-kind Grateful Dead tribute livery along with SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead Channel, honoring the band’s 60th anniversary.

The custom car design launches just ahead of Dead & Company’s highly anticipated sold-out concerts in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Aug. 1-3, celebrating 60 years of the Grateful Dead’s music.

Unfortunately, it was not a particularly long strange trip at the track for the tie-died racecar: