Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

October 30, 2025

‘BLOOD BATH:’ CBS Parent Company Announces Mass Layoffs, Slashes ‘Race and Culture’ Unit.

CBS News parent company Paramount on Wednesday announced around 2,000 layoffs—including nearly 100 in the newsroom—and eliminated the outlet’s “Race and Culture” unit in an effort to crack down on ideological bias.

As part of the cuts, the network will cancel its streaming shows CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evening News Plus, shutter its South Africa bureau, and revamp its Saturday morning program, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source familiar with the changes. Guardian reporter Jeremy Barr also reported on the cuts, posting on X that CBS “gutted” its Race and Culture unit. CBS had tasked that unit with overseeing “news stories about race, culture and injustice, ensuring they have the proper context and tone,” according to a 2020 profile of executive producer Alvin Patrick.

Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has vowed to root out ideological bias at CBS and “right-size” the failing network, announced the moves in an internal memo.

“In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” Ellison wrote. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth. Ultimately, these steps are necessary to position Paramount for long-term success.”

Ellison’s announcement has sent the CBS newsroom into a tailspin, according to the Guardian. One staffer described the layoffs as “nerve-racking” and said, “Seems no one is safe,” while another called the cuts a “blood bath.”

The first radio networks in American began in the 1920s. We’re in a similar inflection point as the mid-to-late 1950s, when the executives who commanded those networks began to realize that thanks to television’s rapid growth after WWII, their media was virtually extinct as a product consumed in the home, and started to retool into something less ubiquitous, to be background noise while in the car, and altered their programming accordingly. The original big three television networks are finally grappling with the notion that the Internet, social media, smart phones, and streaming devices have similarly rendered them a legacy media.

As always, be very careful when around those still consume these analog-era outlets:

Earlier: Columbia Broadcasting Struggle Session Concludes.

UPDATE:

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

EAST GERMANY ON THE POTOMAC:

In early 2009, the Washington Post, through its then-sister publication Newsweek informed its readers “We Are All Socialists Now.” Curiously, they left out the fact that the model of socialism that Beltway elites had chosen was East Germany.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

OUR RECEPTIONIST, THE BEAUTIFUL JENNIFER MARLOWE, IS A RESULT OF THE MOST CUNNINGLY SUCCESSFUL SEX-CHANGE OPERATION IN MEDICAL HISTORY: Don Lemon: Megyn Kelly Looks Trans.

I’m starting to think Don Lemon doesn’t like women. I know that’s shocking but hear me out. Lemon hosted a podcast on his You Tube channel featuring two guys who I think work for him, John Cotter and Chris Miglioranzi. They call it the Clip Famers Podcast and I guess the idea is that Lemon is reacting to things online with a couple of guys who are 30+ years younger than he is.

Most of the 30-minute show was just the two young guys mocking right-wing people in various ways and Lemon chiming in and agreeing with them. Lemon’s YouTube channel has just under a million subscribers and after three days this podcast has nearly 13k views.

In any case, at the end of this clip one of the guys is trying on Lemon’s glasses (it’s riveting content) and he makes a joke saying “I’m Don Lemon, hey Megyn Kelly.” Lemon laughs and asks him where that is coming from. The the other guy says he has a real question. “Is Megyn Kelly chopped?” Chopped is slang for unattractive. That leads to this exchange:

Why, it’s as if,  “Don’s been quite the voice on the trans movement. Speaking of Don on trans topics, let’s not forget when Don blamed the biological female for ending up in a boxing ring with Imane Khelif, who was mad at having to take a mandatory genetic sex test. You might also remember during Don’s CNN career when he determined that Nikki Haley was ‘not in her prime.’ One could argue that Don has a problem with women. Anyone arguing he doesn’t?”

It doesn’t help matters that Sirius-XM just announced that Kelly recently was given a multi-year deal to lead her own channel on SiriusXM. In contrast, Lemon crashed and burned when Elon Musk offered him the same sort of podcast setup that Tucker Carlson (for better and more recently for worse) ran with after being fired by Fox News. Flashback: Don Lemon demanded Tesla Cybertruck, $5M advance, equity in X before Elon Musk canned him: sources.

Classical reference (with the setup starting at about the four minute mark) in headline.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

THE ASSASSINATION FAN BASE:

The wounded Reagan quipped to the lead doctor on his trauma team, “I hope you’re all Republican.” What made the quip amusing is that both Reagan and the team knew it mattered not in the least whether its members were Republican. The doctor, a Democrat, amusingly but perhaps a bit solemnly replied, “Today, we’re all Republicans.”

I think most Americans would like to live in a world where such an exchange is still possible. I’m not sure it is.

A significant number of Americans took to Bluesky, TikTok, Reddit, and the streets to express their regret that Trump’s would-be assassins had been unsuccessful and to praise the assassins of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson. In the case of the latter two, many asked or offered their opinion on who should be next. (I won’t cite any examples. If you are at all online, you have seen them in abundance, and if not, you may want to spare yourself.)

At present, the assassination fan base is pretty much a left-wing subculture. So far, it has applauded attempts on the lives of a former president, a conservative activist, a corporate CEO, and a conservative Supreme Court justice. The closest thing on the right is the online coterie claiming that Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, did nothing wrong, either because they were let in or were duped into entering by a government plot. But to speak up on behalf of J6 defendants, even to the point of alleging conspiracies, is not the same as celebrating the assassinations of Kirk and Thompson and lamenting the misses on Trump. I hope no comparable figure on the left becomes a target that thereby allows us to ascertain whether there is a comparable fan base for assassination on the right.

We should also note that even “lone gunmen, acting alone” have to get their ideas about whom to target from somewhere. They, too, have social networks, which likely traffic in in-group suggestions about who in the out-group are the worst of the worst. So we are now living in a political culture in which a potential would-be assassin can count on a social network for inspiration and an outpouring of public support after the fact. This is fertile ground for evil, perhaps because assassins always believe they are doing good. And we may be cultivating more and more of them.

As Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan, “after years of attacks from mainstream media, I know exactly what they’re doing — They’re making it sound like if you kill me, you’re a hero. That’s not journalism. That’s evil.”

Earlier:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

WHY DO THE FOREIGN PRESS ASK TOUGHER QUESTIONS TO AMERICAN DEMOCRATS THAN OUR OWN PRESS?

To ask the question is to answer it, of course:

 

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

ARCTIC FROST:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

MATT TAIBBI: Bill Gates Says We’ll Survive Climate Change, World Furious.

Gates offered a summary of his thesis:

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Reaction was swift and furious. In the words of the immortal Greta Thunberg, “HOW DARE YOU!” The New York Times rushed a piece out titled, “Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead To Humanity’s Demise.’” The paper linked to Gates’s net worth on the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index, to his prior comments about irreversible ecological damage, and to the Gates Foundation’s $1.4 billion commitment to climate change research. It didn’t link to Gates’s new essay, though, instead quoting the editor of Inside Philanthropy, who said “one could imagine” this was Gates’s way of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.” Social media is still burning with theories about Gates betraying the climate cause to get out from under an investigation into his foundation’s alleged funding of Chinese entities. The imminent extinction dream is dying hard.

On the eve of the the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Gates’s downshift from “We’re gonna die!” to “A serious but survivable problem” was ripped as a grievous affront. The climate story has been reported as an extinction panic for decades, in the process becoming one of the most influential news stories ever. Its impact reached far beyond energy policy to realms like mental health, family planning, even journalism and academic freedom. Ostensible uniformity of climate consensus was used as an argument against both “viewpoint diversity” on campuses and objective “both sides” reporting.

“The climate story has been reported as an extinction panic for decades” — and yet somehow, despite almost 60 years of fear porn, we’re still here. (Except for those massacred by the repeal of net neutrality, of course.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

COLUMBIA BROADCASTING STRUGGLE SESSION CONCLUDES: CBS Staffer Calls Layoffs a ‘Bloodbath,’ Race and Culture Unit ‘Gutted.’

Oh no, the race and culture team has been disbanded.

Flashback to October of last year: Jewish CBS anchor forced to meet with Race and Culture Unit after grilling pro-Palestinian author: Report.

CBS News reportedly forced Jewish anchor Tony Dokoupil to meet with the network’s in-house Race and Culture Unit after a group of employees complained he was too tough on a pro-Palestinian author.

The saga began last week when Dokoupil interviewed author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his book, “The Message,” which describes in part his travels “to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives.” The CBS News anchor irked liberal colleagues by bluntly stating that it read like something you would find in “the backpack of an extremist,” and pressing Coates on whether he believes Israel has the right to exist.

The New York Times reported that “a group of CBS News employees approached executives with their concerns about Mr. Dokoupil’s handling of the interview,” and Dokoupil had to meet with both the CBS News standards and practices team and the Race and Culture Unit.

“The conversation focused on Mr. Dokoupil’s tone of voice, phrasing and body language during his interview with Mr. Coates,” the Times reported.

As the editors of Weiss’s Free Press wrote last year, “In other words, Tony Dokoupil did his job. That’s when his troubles began.”

In September of last year, as the presidential race was going into overdrive, Tucker Carlson was promoting a pro-Hitler “historian.” The following month, CBS’s “Race and Culture Unit” was admonishing a Jewish journalist for doing, err, journalism. In his Commentary newsletter yesterday titled, “The ‘Woke Right’ Is on the Left,” Abe Greenwald wrote:

Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and the like are in no way conservative. But their mode of populist outrage—against Israel, corporate America, traditional values, and U.S. military dominance—doesn’t exactly align with the political or cultural right either.

In fact, the closer you look, the clearer it becomes: They simply are the woke left. They’re a faction of the woke left for those who disdain the tawdry aesthetics of campus protest. That’s it. In every other respect, they are the same. They share the left’s hatreds, heroes, and self-pitying worldview.

* * * * * * * *

So the supposed woke right hates Israel, loves Communist and fascist dictators, pals around with America’s present-day enemies, and regrets American military victory. Wrap the lot of them in keffiyehs, and they’re good to go.

Fortunately, the CBS Race and Culture Unit is good and gone, at least.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

October 29, 2025

RUY TEIXEIRA: Big-Tent Politics Won’t Save the Democrats. As Teixeira writes, “voters know whose tent it is, even if a few heterodox guests are allowed inside:”

A recent New York Times conversation between columnist and “abundance” advocate Ezra Klein and progressive author Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrates the problem. Klein, a proponent of big-tent politics, tried to persuade Coates of its necessity. “[A] huge amount of the country, a majority of the country,” Klein said, “believes things about trans people. . . that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong. . . . What politically. . . should our relationship with those people be?”

Coates, unsurprisingly, rejected the premise. As far as he was concerned, those people were on the other side of a moral line: “If you think it is okay to dehumanize people,” he said, “then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.”

Of course, Coates has no problem dehumanizing people himself: The Toxic World-View of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

His monstrous passage about 9/11 is a good summation of where he’s coming from. He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

More from Teixeira:

But the telling detail is in Klein’s own phrasing. He described dissenters from progressive orthodoxy as “fundamentally and morally wrong.” His version of the big tent, then, is that some Democrats, particularly those in conservative areas, should be permitted to adopt wrong and immoral positions for the sake of expediency. But the positions of the party on those issues will and should remain the same. You can come into the tent, but the left will still run the show.

That won’t work. Advocates of the big tent must face the facts: The party’s many unpopular and unworkable positions—on everything from energy to identity politics—have to genuinely change if Democrats hope to win back skeptical voters. Simply holding their noses and letting a few candidates deviate from orthodoxy won’t work.

Take immigration. Democrats have had little to say about Trump’s successful efforts to close the southern border, but much to say about his deportation measures, which they see as cruel and immoral. That, as Josh Barro notes, doesn’t add up to a change in party position. To win back voters’ trust, he argues, the Democrats “must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure,” and put forward better enforcement measures of their own. He adds: “If Democrats are only seen talking about how the government is doing too much enforcement, we’ll be seen as the anti-enforcement party, and that’s politically deadly.”

And that is precisely what’s happening. The party increasingly looks like the anti-enforcement party that doesn’t want to deport anyone. And that image means that a Democrat running in a conservative area can try to carve out a tough-on-illegal-immigration profile, but—even assuming the activists leave him or her alone—the party’s overall stance on immigration enforcement will mostly negate any benefit from the candidate’s heterodox position.

That’s because Biden administration’s “policy of laxity” wasn’t a failure, it was a strategy, and voters knew it:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

Speaking of Kamala and immigration, the Biden “Politburo’s” border stance made the Bulwark rather cross last November:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

SHE DON’T FEEL NO WAYS TIRED: Nancy Pelosi Chews Up Six Minutes Claiming Democrats Didn’t Move America ‘Too Far To The Left.’

“[T]here are certain people in the country who don’t want to see … women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants taking their place in anything,” she said. “And that’s just the way it is. That’s their problem. That’s not America’s problem. America is this great country with this beautiful diversity.”

Pelosi also ranted about her Catholic views to claim she valued all different types of people — before appearing to attack Republicans while seeming to use a southern accent.

“You’re people of faith? You go to church on Sunday and pray in church on Sunday and prey on people the rest of the week. What is this? What is this?” she asked, laughing.

“Pelosi chuckles, but not even the moderator or Harvard student crowd seems to find it funny:”

There’s no doubt that Pelosi already has the support of Zohran Mamdani, Hilaria Baldwin, Jasmine Crockett, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton, but seems little interested in growing the party’s base much beyond the code-switching far left:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

COIN OF THE REALM: This Is How One Secret Service Agent Dealt With That ‘Mysterious’ Bag of Cocaine in the Biden White House.

Now, as reported by RealClearPolitics national political correspondent Susan Crabtree on Tuesday, Secret Service agents who guard the White House weren’t exactly happy campers about what several agents described as a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” cover-up (emphasis, mine):

The @SecretService Uniformed Division officers who guard the White House were so pissed off that they were forced to be part of a cocaine cover-up in 2023, as several Secret Service sources referred to it, that one officer made a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” commemorative challenge coin about the ordeal to lighten the mood and improve morale within the ranks, according to the photos below and several Secret Service sources.

The officer was punished (placed on administrative leave for an unknown amount of time) for making and distributing the unauthorized coin. The coin’s distribution took place within weeks of the USSS closing the case in 11 days. Many rank-and-file Secret Service agents and UD officers are still angry that they were forced to close the investigation in such a short time + destroy the evidence, as I previously reported. “It made us look inept,” one source told me.

Allegations persist that then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other Secret Service officials pushed to have the cocaine destroyed.

Exit quote: “It was never about the cocaine. It wouldn’t have been all that surprising if the coke was indeed Hunter’s, would it? The real story here was the alleged go-to reaction of the head of the Secret Services and others to destroy the evidence — just one more example of the rot of corruption throughout the Biden presidency.”

The Secret Service played cleanup for Hunter on numerous occasions, including:

● Secret Service says it can’t find Hunter Biden travel records for 2010, 2011, or 2013.

● Sources: Secret Service inserted itself into case of Hunter Biden’s gun.

● Secret Service paying over $30K a month for Malibu home to provide security for Hunter Biden.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Liberal Podcaster Goes Off On ‘P*ssies’ Schumer and Jeffries and Offers ‘Kudos’ to ‘No Kings’ Protester Celebrating Charlie Kirk Death.

Liberal podcast host Jennifer Welch went off on the “Democratic establishment” and told them to “jump on board” or face the same fate as MAGA as she offered “kudos” to a protester celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.

On the I’ve Had It podcast on Tuesday, Welch blasted Democratic leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for not being more vocally and actively supportive of New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

“If you think this Zohran thing is happening just in New York, and you think people are waking up only in New York City, you’re mistaken,” Welch said.

She then cut to a clip of a conservative influencer Kaitlin Bennett speaking with a No Kings protester who didn’t seem to have a problem with the recent assassination of conservative activist Kirk.

In the clip, the protester called Kirk “horrible” and said she’s “glad” he’s not around anymore.

“He was horrible on the campuses, the college campuses, horrible person,” the protester said, then telling Bennett she’d “have to think about” whether she wants her dead too.

Earlier: The Assassination Fan Base.

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

CODING BEGINS SOON: CBS News begins staff cull days after anchor announced his exit… amid ongoing rumors Gayle King’s days are numbered.

Brutal layoffs are hitting CBS News after its parent company announced a plan to axe more than 2,000 staff across the organization.

New Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss acknowledged the cuts on the network’s morning editorial call Wednesday, Semafor’s Max Tani reported.

Weiss called it a ‘enormously difficult day’ for the network, according to Tani.

David Ellison, the chairman of CBS News parent Paramount, broke the news about the companywide layoffs in a note to staff on Tuesday.

‘In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,’ he wrote.

‘In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth.’

Flashback: Out-of-work coal miners find new work in computer industry.

—CBS News, November 18th, 2017.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

NEWSMAX’S ROB FINNERTY: What’s Up With TV Anchors Adding an Accent When Pronouncing Spanish Names?

We’ve all experienced the ‘accent road bump’ during a TV news program. That’s where an anchor or reporter comes across a Spanish word or name and suddenly there’s some very noticeable pronunciation gymnastics.

Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty says it’s time for this absurd practice to stop.

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty asks why anchors pronounce Spanish-sounding names with an accent, starts talking in an Irish accent to prove how ridiculous it is.

“As I’ve said before, I am Irish. And if I was moderating that debate, would the host introduce me as Robert James Finnerty, don’t you know the little lad that he is Robert James Finnerty?”

“If the host was Chinese, would they then introduce that person with a Chinese accent? I don’t think so. Stop it.”

To be fair, this isn’t all that new a development. The earlier, funnier incarnation of Saturday Night Live was parodying all of the “accent road bumps” and “pronunciation gymnastics” back in 1990:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: University Leaders Say ‘Organized Networks,’ Including Iran, Drove Anti-Israel Campus Unrest.

Several leaders of prominent universities on Monday said they believe the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations that broke out on campuses across the United States during the Jewish state’s war against Hamas were not organic, instead telling a panel audience they believe “organized networks,” and even foreign governments, may have driven the unrest.

Leaders of notable U.S. universities had not offered many thoughts on the connections between campus protests and outside groups before Monday’s discussion on combating anti-Semitism. During the event, though, Syracuse University chancellor Kent Syverud brought up Iran in particular.

“I really believe [the demonstrations] were encouraged from Iran,” Syverud said. “It did not have the involvement of very many—if any—of our own students.”

Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier agreed, saying the anti-Israel movement on his campus seemed to have been coordinated by outside forces and followed a “playbook” that “was imported” from other universities.

“There was, not a large group, maybe 30-plus students or something, but they were using the playbook that they had seen at Columbia and other places,” he said. “It was the same messaging. So, it’s more than a social contagion. I think they’re organized networks as well.”

“Leaders of notable U.S. universities” certainly didn’t appear to do very much to stop the protests in the wake of October 7th, however. As VDH wrote in December of 2023, “After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses. Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic. But immediately after October 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29th, 2025

October 28, 2025

IT’S OFFICIAL: The Democratic Party Is Now Straight Up Socialist.

When socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral primary, we said that the concern expressed by some Democrats was phony, because they didn’t want to admit just how far left their party had drifted.

Now, they’ve given up that pretense entirely.

On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries endorsed socialist Mamdani, saying the 33-year-old trust fund baby “has relentlessly focused on addressing the affordability crisis and explicitly committed to being a mayor for all New Yorkers.”

He’s the most senior-ranking Democrat to do so, but he joins a list that already includes Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

To be fair, Democrats have been trending in that direction for quite some time:

 

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 28th, 2025

DON’T GET COCKY: Scandal-ridden candidates expose Democrats’ turmoil.

At the heart of the Democrats’ struggle is a furious debate over whether the midterm elections will be won by tacking to the Left or cleaving to the centre.

Zohran Mamdani’s runaway victory in the New York Democratic primary has prompted giddy speculation among the party’s most Left-leaning members that the country is crying out for more progressive candidates.

But strategists warn this approach is doomed to failure. “For the activist base of the party, the existential question is what’s more important: picking the candidate you love or winning the seat,” said [Democratic strategist Joel] Rubin.

“The white whale we’re hunting is how to win back the white working class voters and the economic and social issues voters who left our coalition at the last election.

“What I’m worried about is not learning the lessons from 2024.”

QED:

Earlier: Imagine That — Actions Have Consequences.

If Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City, Republicans plan to highlight that fact in their midterm campaigns against Democratic lawmakers nationwide.

That entirely unremarkable observation is the subject of an item in Axios in which the GOP is accused of plotting to “weaponize” New York City Democrats’ voting preferences, which, we should observe, consists entirely of noticing them.

For years, says reporter Kate Santaliz in her scandalized dispatch, the GOP has made former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into a “bogeywoman.” Her capacity to “rile up the base” was unrivaled. But with her diminished role, “GOP strategists are testing new symbols of the party’s left, and hope Mamdani will fill that void.”

Oh, he will: Ya Think? Democrats Are Just Now Realizing It’s Time to Panic Over Mamdani Mayoral Candidacy.

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 28th, 2025

T. BECKET ADAMS: Media Nazi hunters go on vacation.

You can tell a lot about a guy’s biases based on when he chooses to extend grace.

And when it comes to the news media and grace, there’s an overabundance of the latter for Graham Platner, the loony toon Democratic Maine Senate candidate, who, until last Tuesday, sported a sizeable Nazi tattoo on his chest.

“Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner tells AP he got a new tattoo to cover one seen as a Nazi symbol,” reads a news blurb from the Associated Press (emphasis my own).

Reported the Washington Post, “Maine Senate hopeful changed tattoo ex-aide calls antisemitic.”

CBS News, meanwhile, reported that “Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner says he covered up tattoo that resembles Nazi symbol.”

Politico and CNN likewise claimed the tattoo “resembles” a Nazi symbol.

The tattoo in question, which has been inked over, was the Totenkopf (“death’s head”). It’s a specific skull-and-crossbones image infamously worn by the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or the “SS,” which originally served as Adolf Hitler’s personal protection unit before growing into the paramilitary organization responsible for the Holocaust.

The Totenkopf is not exactly obscure. If you’ve seen Indiana Jones, or the Dirty Dozen, or Schindler’s List, or the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or Life is Beautiful, or Band of Brothers, or Inglourious Basterds, or dozens of other films set during World War II, you’ve almost certainly seen the Totenkopf.

There is even an internet-famous comedy sketch from 2006 by the duo Mitchell and Webb, in which the two comedians play Nazi SS officers who realize, based on their uniforms, that they are the “baddies.”

At this point, Platner must be trolling the media:

Further thoughts from Sasha Stone: The Democrats Have a Nazi Problem, And it’s time to call them out.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 28th, 2025

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 6:48 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 28th, 2025

ROGER SIMON: Too Bad Javier Milei Isn’t Running for New York Mayor.

The more we learn about Zohran Mamdani, the more despicable (and sick) he is revealed to be. Perhaps we need a new hyphenated category for him—Islamist/sociopath. Recently, it was the “aunt” who was so terrified to wear her hijab immediately after 9/11 (never mind the thousands killed, it was the “aunt” that was important), and then turned out, when it was discovered the candidate’s only real aunt was a highly secular, hijab-less woman, who lived in Tanzania, he really meant his nameless “cousin,” who had conveniently passed away several years go.

Now, via the NY Post, “Zohran Mamdani made vile, conspiracy-tinged statement tying NYPD to IDF, resurfaced video shows”. That would be hilarious if it weren’t so far into Jew hatred (forget the relatively passive “antisemitism”) that it crosses the border into outright insanity.

On a personal note, I also discovered online that the rabbi of Central Synagogue, where I was bar mitzvahed what feels like a thousand years ago, is a supporter of Mamdani. If you want to understand how the Holocaust happened, that’s it in a nutshell.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 28th, 2025

THE FINAL DAYS OF MSNBC: Scott Jennings Lives Rent-Free in Lawrence O’Donnell’s Head As MSNBC Host Erupts on Air.

“And now CNN eagerly pays a Trump supporter to lie on CNN every day and night for Donald Trump,” O’Donnell said. “CNN did this during the first Trump presidential campaign and presidency. CNN regularly paid Trump supporters to lie about Trump on CNN.”

“But then CNN got a new head. The head of CNN for the last three years, hired by the Trump-supporting owner and operator of CNN, is an Englishman who thinks paying Scott Jennings to lie about Donald Trump* is money very well spent,” O’Donnell added. “Scott Jennings, who used to be an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, was not always a rabid, lying Trump supporter.”

“When he first started appearing on television, he was capable of criticizing some of the more extreme Trump positions. But Scott Jennings figured out where the money is, and how he could get his own podcast, and decided to become the J.D. Vance of CNN,” O’Donnell continued. “Here’s how bad that television is that they make over there. The show that Scott Jennings frequents the most is on opposite this program. And that show, on a good night, gets half – half — of the audience of this show.”

“This program usually has an audience triple the size of the terrible, terrible television that Scott Jennings is delivering on the absurdly degraded version of CNN presided over by the man who thinks lying for Donald Trump on TV is an honorable pursuit and should be paid for by CNN,” O’Donnell concluded.

Hoo boy. There’s a lot to unpack there, huh?

Exit quote:

* Great moments in projection: Lawrence O’Donnell: “I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals.” Perhaps that’s why in 2021, Politico Gushed: Lawrence O’Donnell ‘Riding High’ — As Biden’s Favorite Ring-Kisser.

In any case, depend upon it, sir – when a man knows his channel is about to clean house in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully: MSNBC Rebrand to MS NOW Taking Place on Nov. 15.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 28th, 2025
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