Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 25, 2026

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends.

Nineteen-year-old Olivia’s profile picture shows a demure and innocent-looking young woman with long blonde hair styled in beachy waves. She’s wearing a short, cleavage-exposing nightdress and her biography says she’s “deeply caring, supportive and attentive” and “sleeps on the floor… until you call her. Then silence. Obedience”.

While Olivia may appear to be an online dater looking for love, she isn’t real – not in the conventional sense of the term. This prospective love match is actually one of a growing trend of “AI girlfriends”: realistic-looking artificial intelligence “bots” created by “companion apps” – services that are being advertised on online games played by children and on platforms they watch, such as YouTube.

New research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion. A report carried out by men’s organisation Male Allies UK and published last month spoke with more than 1,000 boys aged 12-16 in focus groups in 37 schools – public and state, grammar and comprehensive, and across a range of Ofsted ratings – up and down the country. Peer-to-peer focus groups were set up where boys could speak freely, with the aim of diving into their behaviour and attitudes, and it was the boys who wanted to talk about AI technologies. The findings make stark reading: eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. More than a quarter (26 per cent) say they like the attention and connection over real-life equivalents, and (36 per cent) admitted that they prefer speaking to AI chatbots rather than to their family and friends at times.

And then there’s terrifying rise of 79-year-old men making AI girlfriends: Paul Schrader Had an ‘AI Girlfriend’ Who ‘Terminated Our Conversation:’ ‘What a Disappointment.’

Filmmaker and “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader revealed on Facebook that he “procured an online AI girlfriend,” but the chatbot ended the relationship after he attempted to explore the boundaries of its programming.

“Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment,” Schrader wrote. “I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.”

Referencing Schrader’s 1976 masterwork directed by Martin Scorsese, a Facebook user suggested under the post: “The best possible ‘Taxi Driver’ sequel would involve Travis trying to have an AI girlfriend but then scaring her away. Then resetting her and offending her in another way.”

Schrader responded to the idea: “I like it.”

I’m not at all surprised that an “AI girlfriend” would run away as fast as digitally possible from the writer of Taxi Driver, Hardcore, and Auto Focus.

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

SETH MANDEL: The Enormous Blast Radius of the NYT’s Dog-Rape Debacle.

Kristof’s decision to publish his Israeli-rape-dogs phantasmagoria, but it’s important to widen the lens and examine how this latest disgrace is part of a broad institutional failure inside and outside the media environment that produced it.

It has become common to point out the Times’ hypocrisy here by noting that when its opinion section published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for the tougher policing of riots, the Times unraveled: Opinion Editor James Bennet was pushed out, as were Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein.

But this purge was more than just a demonstration of elite fragility. It ensured that an ideological monolith would serve as the gatekeepers of future articles. The years that followed October 7 demonstrated how this would apply to anything Israel-related: accusations were published first and investigated later, if at all. Kristof’s article was an escalation in the war on truth, not an innovation.

The Times retains a ton of influence over other publications in the same ideological sphere, which includes much of American and British corporate-left media. So the institutional rot isn’t limited to the Times; it seeps into media practices on a much wider scale.

Kristof’s article represents the entry of this particular libel into mainstream discourse after months of confinement to the fringes. Now it won’t require anyone else to “report” it to keep it in the news ecosystem. One needs only to reference the New York Times or the scandal Kristof’s claims have kicked off, and voila: Lots of people in establishment media spaces are suddenly talking about imaginary Israeli monster dogs.

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neil explores the “Anatomy of [this] blood libel:” “‘One of the marks of anti-Semitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true’, wrote Orwell. We are back there again. In fact, there is something dispiriting even in the sight of Jews and their allies – spiked included – having to point out the mechanical impossibility of dogs being commanded to rape humans. ‘Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies’, wrote Sartre. ‘They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.’ This, right here, is the moment we are in. The anti-Semites are revelling in the vision of Jews and their friends being compelled to discuss dog penises and human anuses. This in itself is a victory for the scum. They are amusing themselves. They are enjoying this. It is obscene.”

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

POWER WASH:

Related: The Price Is Right host Drew Carey lashes out at LA mayor hopeful Spencer Pratt calling him a ‘serial scammer:’

Drew Carey publicly slammed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt in a social media rant on Friday.

The Price Is Right host, 68, proved he’s no fan, labelling Pratt a ‘serial scammer’ with no ‘moral compass,’ even though the former Hills star has received a surge in donations that places him close to incumbent mayor Karen Bass.

‘Anyone who votes for, or endorses Spencer Prattfall for Mayor of LA needs to get their head out of their a**,’ Carey wrote on Threads.

‘I understand being angry/unsatisfied, but at least get behind someone competent and not some serial scammer without a soul or moral compass.’

‘F*** this guy already,’ he concluded on a testy note.

I’m so old, I can remember Carey appearing in videos for the libertarians at Reason, before finally finding, in 2020, a presidential candidate who was “competent and not some serial scammer without a soul or moral compass:” “In 2016, Drew Carey backed the presidential campaign of libertarian Gary Johnson. This year, the long-time host of ‘The Price is Right’ has thrown his support behind the campaign of Biden, donating $25,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.”

UPDATE:

MORE: Whoops:

UPDATE (4:14 pm):

To be fair, demanding competent governing is highly controversial in every Democrat-run city and state.

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

MEMORIAL DAY: Margaret Brennan Tries to Get Medal of Honor Recipients to Bash America, Is Schooled:

The Elitist Media don’t often pass up on an opportunity to convey their disappointment in the American people, which is part of what makes them the Elitist Media. Memorial Day is no different, as CBS’s Margaret Brennan closes out an interview of two Medal of Honor recipients by trying to get them to bash America.

But our heroes rebuff this weak enticement, and instead offer a glimpse of the kind of character our nation needs to see more of:

MARGARET BRENNAN: And before I let you go, we are coming up on this 250th anniversary of the American experience. I know I can’t ask you a question like, are you optimistic? There’s no way that two Medal of Honor winners could say they’re not optimistic. So what specifically makes you optimistic? Because this country, at times, can feel dark, these days, there’s a lot of darkness. What makes you feel optimistic?

WILL SWENSON: Well, ultimately, because we’re in Washington, D.C., and everything revolves around politics, we have to remember that politics aren’t everything. American lives continue on. Children are born, children go to school. Lives are achieved. Dreams are achieved. This country is a great place. It’s not politics. It’s not just what’s the news bites coming off of media. Ultimately, we continue forward as a country, continually imperfect, continually evolving forward, always trying to achieve a more perfect union. That’s what’s important to remember, what we can achieve aspirationally. No other place in history, time or on this planet have ever gotten to where we are today. We need to be proud of that, and we need to remember that is what we stay focused on, what we can be.

Evergreen:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

KYLE SMITH: Bruce Springsteen’s Lecture Tour.

Reports that Mr. Springsteen was turning portions of his “Land of Hope & Dreams Tour” into a Rachel Maddow monologue gave me pause, but the man is 76, and you never know when you’ll get another chance to see him perform. Besides, Madison Square Garden is 20 minutes from my apartment. So I found $700 lying around in my children’s college fund and went down to 33rd St.

The Boss opened with his cover of “War,” made famous by Edwin Starr in 1970. That was pretty exciting because although Starr’s version reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, I don’t think I’d heard Mr. Springsteen play it before. He added to the song a little speech about Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran.

Fine, I thought. He’s gotten it out of his system. But it turned out to be merely the first of four political speeches Mr. Springsteen delivered that night. For the last one, he unspooled his thoughts like a talk-radio host. It would have been witty if he had followed up with “Yakety Yak,” but he didn’t. He closed the show with Bob Dylan’s lament “Chimes of Freedom” and sent us all staggering out to Seventh Ave. in a cloud.

“This White House is destroying the American idea and our reputation around the world,” Mr. Springsteen has been saying on the tour. “We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are now, to many, America the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation. That is this administration’s and this president’s legacy. This is happening now.” He adds, “Go out and get in some good trouble. Say something, do something. Hell, sing something!” One of his guitarists, Tom Morello, has the words, “Arm the homeless” spelled out on his instrument (as he has for many years). At what Mr. Springsteen evidently considered a high point, he screamed, “ICE out now!” three times, urging the audience to join him.

As someone once said, it’s hard to be a saint in the city, and the audience response to all this was mostly polite, not boisterous, even in an overwhelmingly Democratic metropolis. I looked around at my fellow ticket holders and saw maybe 30% of them sitting quietly, waiting for all of this to be over. Their faces said, “OK, boomer.” We all have a senior relative who gets way too excited watching those shouty TV news channels, don’t we? The guy next to me in Section C, Row 21, whose haircut said, “Military, and not to be messed with,” folded his arms and took on a sullen expression.

As did I. I would never tell Mr. Springsteen, or any other artist, to “shut up and sing.” Mr. Springsteen is entitled to his views. Nor would I suggest that a man who is so rich that his daughter was able to grow up to be an equestrienne on their 400-acre horse farm is out of touch. Rich people are entitled to be angry about the excesses of ICE.

The problem is that Mr. Springsteen writes political diatribes about as well as I play guitar. He added nothing to the discourse. He simply repeated talking points we’ve all heard many times. He was like the guy at the Thanksgiving table who brings up politics when you ask him to pass the stuffing.

Say what you will about your cranky far left grandfather or uncle, I doubt he brings a teleprompter to the table to help him power through his diatribes:

Earlier: Springsteen Lashes Out After Biopic Flops.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Cannes Lets Hollywood Elite Show Their True Selves.

The festival allowed Oscar winner Javier Bardem to rage against the dying of the Israeli state without fear of a single pushback. That’s exactly what he’s done this week, in lie of promoting his new projects or breaking down his craft.

That would be interesting. He’s a brilliant actor with considerable range. Instead, Bardem trotted out the false “genocide” card against Israel.

It doesn’t help that film journalists tee up the stars to get political, hoping they share their left-leaning views and get them more clicks. Bardem was only too happy to oblige. The star, promoting his new film, “The Beloved,” claimed the industry blacklist against pro-Palestinian actors won’t stand for long.

As if it ever truly started.

“The fear does exist, granted, but one has to do things even if you feel a bit scared or afraid …You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, look at yourself in the eyes and that was my case. My mother taught me to be the way I am. There is no plan B. This entails consequences, which I am fully ready to shoulder.”

Bardem’s personal sacrifice? He’s the star of “The Beloved,” headlines the new Apple TV+ reboot of “Cape Fear,” will appear in “Dune 3” this winter among his current and future project.

Some blacklist. James Woods would like a word with Bardem.

Bardem wasn’t finished, though. He also blased President Donald Trump for flexing his “toxic masculinity.” That’s the kind of bold, subversive commentary that could get him in trouble, career wise.

He might start getting too many job offers all at once.

Meanwhile the Hollywood Reporter’s headline writer has a “Somebody Set Up Us The Bomb” moment: Hollywood Ghosts the Croisette, Queer Cinema Owns It and AI Crashes the Party: Five Takeaways From Cannes 2026.

Including this bit of fun, also involving Bardem:

The biggest drama at Cannes 2026 was off-screen and involved a growing civil war between French film industry professionals and the country’s top studio, Canal+.

On the eve of the festival, some 600 French film professionals, including Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel and Swann Arlaud, signed an open letter protesting Vincent Bolloré, the right-wing media mogul who is the leading shareholder in Canal+. The letter didn’t mince words, calling Bolloré’s expanding French media empire — he is already a leading force in film and TV production and, through Canal+, is planning a takeover of UGC, the country’s third-largest theatrical exhibitor — a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”

The anti-Bolloré petition gained momentum after Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada, speaking in Cannes, said he would blacklist the signatories. Thousands put their names to the open letter, including international stars like Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, Yorgos Lanthimos and Ken Loach.

By the end of the festival, there were more than 3,500 names on the petition. France’s biggest trade union representing entertainment workers has said it will file a lawsuit against Canal+ for Saada’s blacklisting threat. The audiences at Cannes screenings made their feelings clear by loudly booing the Canal+ and Studiocanal logos whenever they appeared on the big screen.

With French elections next year and the far-right National Rally party expected to challenge for the presidency, this particular French film drama is nowhere near its climax.

Most conservative actors in Hollywood stay in the closet until they’ve got very well-established careers because they know that if they openly support politicians with an (R) after their names, they’ll be, to slightly paraphrase the title of Roger Simon’s autobiography, blacklisting themselves in the industry. Why are Bolloré and Saada obligated to hire celebrities who openly hate their guts?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

AS I TELL PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT MOVING TO TEXAS, KEEP YOUR A/C REPAIRMAN ON SPEED DIAL:

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

HOW IT STARTED:

● Washington becomes sanctuary state, joining Oregon, California.

—The Oregonian, May 23, 2019.

● Why ‘defund the police’ has become the rallying cry at Seattle protests.

—Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW, June 5th, 2020.

How It’s Going:

A wall, huh? How about a really nice big one at the border, as well?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

DIDN’T EARN IT:

Related Flashback: Suicide Mission. What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 25th, 2026

May 24, 2026

A TRACK-BY-TRACK GUIDE TO MILES DAVIS’S KIND OF BLUE, THE GREATEST JAZZ ALBUM EVER:

The critical reaction was sometimes baffled by the absence of easily graspable melodies, but it was mostly awe-struck. Benny Green wrote on the album’s liner that “Davis is the most delicately poised musician ever to use the jazz frame…classic severity is the hallmark of Miles’s painful sensitivity, as he devotes his attention to each single note.” Later it floated free from the jazz world to become, as Richard Cooke described it in the Penguin Guide to Jazz, “the hippest easy-listening album of them all”. Not everyone was ecstatic. Some missed the absence of jazz’s wonted driving energy, and Philip Larkin couldn’t stand the “passionless creep” of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet.

As with many classic albums, there was something miraculous about the birth of Kind of Blue. All the stars had to be aligned, and that wasn’t easy in such a volatile art as jazz, where everything depends on the musical chemistry between naturally headstrong individuals.

Well worth a read, but there’s a jarring “layers and layers of fact checkers and editors” moment in this London Telegraph article for even the most cursory of Miles Davis fans. It’s a sort of photographic Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect moment; as author Ivan Hewett notes, “Crucial to the album’s soft-edged, blurry sound was Bill Evans, also no stranger to heroin and booze.” So much so that Evans died in 1980 at age 51 of a “peptic ulcer, cirrhosis, bronchial pneumonia, and untreated hepatitis,” according to Wikipedia.

But the photo above that text is captioned, “Miles Davis (R) and saxophone player Bill Evans (L) performing on stage in Paris, 1982.” There was a second Bill Evans, born in 1958, who played and recorded frequently with Miles in the 1980s. But that’s not him in the photo, which based on Miles’ hairstyle and wrap-around sunglasses, is from the early 1970s. It’s Dave Liebman, who played sax with Miles in 1973.

Related: From me in 2019: The 60th Anniversary of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis’ Masterpiece.

Posted at 6:57 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Bitchy Resting Face.

The New Hotness Massive Warning Sign for Craziness Ahead:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE:

“Then the manifesto dropped,” the tweet continues, “And everything went dead quiet.”

Much more from Stacy McCain: Why Would Two Jew-Hating Teenage Incels Shoot Up a Mosque in San Diego?

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

FREEDOM ISN’T FREE:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

THE WITCHES OF LUIGI:

The media has an odd term for the sullen young women who have made a sexual fetish of pretty-boy killer Luigi Mangione.

They’re called Luigi Fangirls.

It evokes a frolic, young women skipping down the street, singing, holding hands. You know, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

But I much prefer another name, a more direct name:

Witches.

I’m told that witches are supposedly fictional, a phobia created by men, by the patriarchy, to impose our evil will upon women who cling to stories like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” to justify generations of their cruelties upon boys, from wholesale abortion to “gender affirming” castrations of transgenders.

But they began to appear in our lives, as they had appeared in the past, when they publicly poured out their hysterical sexual fantasies and pathetic love for their heartthrob with those Italian eyebrows, the killer Luigi Mangione, the rich boy of privilege who stalked then shot Health Care executive Bryan Thompson in the back.

Mangione is the pretty privileged boy who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care. Thompson was fatally shot outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel in December 2024. Mangione, who was apprehended days later in Pennsylvania, is currently facing both federal and state murder and weapons charges.

But what explains the hysteria of the witches?

If this Post Millennial article is true, then I think we can ascertain the anger of one of them: Luigi Mangione fangirl who celebrated murder of Brian Thompson is the daughter of CVS Health exec: report.

One of the fangirl “journalists” who has publicly supported Luigi Mangione is reportedly the daughter of a senior healthcare executive at CVS Health.

Lena Weissbrot is the daughter of Reina Natero, a longtime pharmaceutical industry executive who oversees prescription drug insurance coverage rules at CVS Health. Natero has worked in the industry for more than two decades.

Weissbrot is one of three supporters of Mangione who are referred to online as “Mangionistas.” They recently gained attention during Mangione’s pre-trial hearings after receiving New York City press credentials.

Weissbrot has publicly expressed support for Mangione for the alleged murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. On Monday, outside the New York State Supreme Court, Weissbrot said Thompson’s children were “better off without him.”

According to the New York Post, Weissbrot received a Fulbright-MTV fellowship in 2015 after graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida State University. The grant allowed her to study “South African artists identifying as feminists who use Hip-hop music as a form of activism” at Rhodes University in South Africa.

“This has become an archetype at this point, when activists become defined as the ‘anti’ of what their parents were,” Stu Smith, analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told The Post. “There’s no self-awareness.”

Patricide is a theme that runs throughout Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskend’s retrospective on the “New Hollywood” of the 1960s and ’70s. But with women becoming high-powered executives in the decades since, there’s no reason to be sexist about young distaff lefties hating their mothers as well.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: Out on a Limb, but Unmoved: Trump Will Finish the Job in Iran.

What’s the end game? President Trump vouchsafed the world a hint in a Truth Social post on Saturday. It’s a map of the Middle East showing Iran bedecked with the stars and stripes and emblazoned with the headline: “United States of the Middle East?” Later Saturday he announced that “An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” subject to review. All of which is to say that I stick by my original prediction. Donald Trump is not Barack Obama. One way or the other—through tough negotiation or by force—he will “finish the job.” He would prefer the former. If he wants a longstanding peace and a free Iran, he is likely to require the latter.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Iran Agreed to Discuss Surrendering Its Uranium Stocks; Trump Responds. Ed Morrissey writes, “This may not be the Bridge and Power Day outcome that hawks had hoped to see. If this is accurate and it holds, it’s not TACO Tuesday either. It leaves Trump with all of his options in place while keeping pressure on the regime to comply with the biggest and most dangerous threat it poses – the development of nuclear weapons. That is the true existential threat to Israel, not to mention other Gulf states that are now aligning with Israel and the US, and it would head off a nuclear arms race in one of the most unstable regions of the world. If it works. If it doesn’t, Trump hasn’t lost much but time in this agreement. And a failure by Ahmad Vahidi to adhere to this deal would make it easier for Trump to justify more kinetic action in the future.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

As Mollie Hemingway notes, “You’re not just having a debate with an opponent, but your most hostile and most rabid opponent:” 

 

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

DEAR DIARY: Jim Acosta Didn’t Like Greg Gutfeld’s Reality Check About Colbert’s Cancellation (Replies Off of Course).

By the end of Obama’s second term, Jim’s then-employer had a simple, if rather brutal, solution they proffered to employees losing their jobs in industries that the three-term president and his party’s operatives with bylines had dubbed obsolete:

Related:

Exit quote: “The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing ‘one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news.’ They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don’t have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn’t already approved. That’s comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it’s church.”

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

AS ANDY WARHOL SAID, NOTHING IS MORE BOURGEOIS THAN TO BE AFRAID TO LOOK BOURGEOIS:

Posted at 10:43 am by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

DEMOCRACY DIES IN JUNK SCIENCE:

 

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 24th, 2026

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.

The DNC-MSM loves ginning up the crazies:

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

May 23, 2026

SUSPECT IDENTIFIED: Gunman who believed he was Jesus Christ opened fire on White House checkpoint, neutralized by Secret Service.

Nasire Best, 21, fired at a checkpoint at about 6:10 p.m. after being seen pacing in a strange manner up and down 17th St. Northwest, sources told The Post. He used a revolver and only got off a few shots before he was quickly shot and killed in a hail of bullets from federal officers.

A least one bystander was hit and seriously wounded in the fusillade, the sources said.

Exit quote: “While a motive for the attack hasn’t been confirmed, sources said Best is a mentally troubled individual who believed he was Jesus Christ and is known to the Secret Service and has violated a previous court order to stay away from the White House.”

Posted at 9:18 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 23rd, 2026
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