Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

July 15, 2026

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Pass the Popcorn! Dems Will Be Thrilled by the Timing of Biden’s Upcoming Memoir.

The ghost of Jim Wright smiles:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 15th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 15th, 2026

July 14, 2026

JIM TREACHER: Is Haley Stevens for Real?

That clip is going around today, and a bunch of meanies are already comparing her to Pat. You know, It’s Pat. You’re not sure if it’s a man or a woman. Or Matt Foley, the motivational speaker who “lives in a van down by the river!” She does sound like she’s in a Saturday Night Live sketch of some sort. Back when it was still funny.

She kinda reminds me of a grown-up Little Rascal. “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” And no, I’m not old enough to remember the original Little Rascals from the ‘30s. I’m only old enough to remember the syndicated reruns in the ‘70s.

At least this woman isn’t Abdul El-Sayed, her opponent in the primary. I haven’t really talked about that guy much, but the more I learn about him, the less I like him.

Stevens supports Israel, and El-Sayed does not. Huh. Weird. The terrorist sympathizer isn’t a fan of the Jews. (And yes, I know not all Muslims sympathize with terrorists. Just the ones running for public office these days.)

So this lady is the establishment candidate, and he’s the commie terrorist candidate. If you made me pick one, I’m going with Stevens every time. At least she’s not a Jew-hating communist.

And she seems like she’d be fun to party with. Which candidate would you want to have a beer bong with?

Let’s let El-Sayed himself answer that question:

Posted at 8:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE DOOM GOBLIN: Greta Thunberg joins Berlin protest wearing ‘Yalla Intifada’ shirt.

Swedish anti-Israel activist Greta Thunberg appeared at a protest in Berlin on Saturday wearing a T-shirt reading “Yalla Intifada,” as demonstrators rallied outside German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall’s new ammunition factory.

Thunberg joined protesters organized by the Berlin Alliance Against Arms Production outside Rheinmetall’s Berlin-Wedding plant, where production lines are being converted from civilian automotive parts to steel casings for 155-mm artillery shells.

“Greta Thunberg attended a protest wearing a ‘Yalla Intifada’ shirt,” the Combat Antisemitism Movement said on Monday. “The slogan combines the Arabic word for ‘let’s go’ and Intifada, terror campaigns that killed thousands of people.”

And she wore this t-shirt in Berlin, huh?

Tweet concludes, “I kinda think her schtick should embarrass you. Because it highlights the mimetic faddishness of both causes.”

Not to mention where both causes originally intersected: Rupert Darwall on the Alarming Roots of Environmentalism.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

CNBC: Here Are The Ten Worst States to Live In or Start a Business In. They’re All, Get This, the Red States Experiencing The Highest In-Migration.

You will not be surprised to learn that one of CNBC’s main criteria for deeming a state the “worst” to live in is whether they… allow transexuals in opposite-sex bathrooms.

Bennett’s Phylactery @extradeadjcb

Reasons states wind up on this list (not exaggerating)

  1. Not enough abortions
    2. Not gay enough
    3. “food insecurity”
    4. Not enough HR rules
    5. Not enough gun laws
    6. Not enough therapists
    7. Not enough working moms
    8. Not enough affirmative action

Colin Wright @SwipeWright

Here are the reasons CNBC ranked Tennessee as “America’s Worst Place to Live in 2026.”

  1. Laws require people to use facilities matching their sex.
    2. Localities can’t create laws circumventing 1.
    3. The Governor designated June “Nuclear Family Month.”
    4. TN isn’t “inclusive,” meaning the state knows that men who claim to be women aren’t women and should not be treated as such.

Do these sound like negatives to you?

I moved from California to Tennessee in 2022 and it was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. I love it here.

In his 2013 biography of Roger Ailes, the man who built Fox News, Zev Chafets wrote of his earlier stint at CNBC:

CNN had gone on the air in 1980 to considerable derision: Ted Turner, its founder, was called crazy for imagining that a station based in Atlanta could make money providing around-the-clock news from all over the world to an initially small cable audience.

But Turner was right. Over time the cable audience grew and so did CNN’s reach and reputation. During the 1991 Gulf War, it was the only American station with journalists in Baghdad, and its war coverage became the talk of the media world. Cable appeared to be the wave of the future, and the big networks wanted a piece of the action. NBC was especially keen to explore the new terrain. It already had a struggling business channel, CNBC, which it hoped to expand. NBC president Bob Wright saw that as just the beginning, and he reached out to Roger Ailes to run the channel. Jack Welch, the outspoken, politically conservative head of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, blessed the decision. Both he and Wright had reason to be pleased by the results. When Ailes took over, CNBC’s asset value was $400 million. When he left, two years later, it had more than doubled.

* * * * * * * *

Ailes insisted on not insulting the audience. He informed his staff that he didn’t want an antibusiness climate on a business network, or a lot of financial jargon. “Roger is a guy from the middle of Ohio, and he knows how people think,” says Cavuto. Reporters who acted superior to the corporate leaders they interviewed or conveyed the message that capitalism was selfish and crass didn’t find the Ailes’s regime congenial.

As Conquest’s Second Law of Politics states, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

To be fair, this isn’t exactly a new development at the cable network: CNBC’S John Harwood Advises Hillary Campaign, Gloats About Provoking Trump At Debate.

UPDATE: CNBC Proves Why Nobody Cares About Corporate Media Anymore.

Posted at 6:18 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE? Ann Widdecombe ‘murder’ suspect had communist literature at home.

The brutal murder of Ann Widdecombe was last night being treated as a suspected politically motivated terrorist attack.

In a dramatic escalation, counter terrorism officers yesterday took over the investigation into the killing of the former Tory minister. It came after the discovery of Russian communist literature and other items of political ideology at the home of the suspected killer.

And it marked a U-turn after the local force, Devon and Cornwall Police, spent days insisting that there was no link to terrorism. Officers, it is understood, are probing whether the 78-year-old may have been bludgeoned to death in a premeditated attack on Reform UK.

Reform Slams Police Over Botched Probe

They are looking at whether a self-radicalised loner may have considered the pensioner an ‘easy target’ in comparison to more prominent party figures, such as Nigel Farage, who have security.

Last night, Reform accused Devon and Cornwall police of misleading the public in the initial stages of the investigation.

Senior officers were under pressure to explain why they so publicly ruled out terror or a political motivation.

Related: It’s time to talk about left-wing violence. “It used to be hot-headed Islamists who issued fatwas to anyone who blasphemed against their dodgy religious principles. They are still a threat, of course. But now they’ve been joined by radical left-wing activists who spew out death threats to Nigel Farage and JK Rowling, while urging everyone to ‘Be Kind’. Sadly, these are not all empty promises. Last year, Bash Back really did attack Streeting’s office. They sprayed red paint on the building and wrote ‘child killer’ on the windows. And they also disrupted a feminist conference in Brighton by smashing windows and spraying paint.”

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

QUESTION ASKED AND NOT ANSWERED:

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

WHAT’S A FEW MISSING ZEROS AMONG FRIENDS?

In the summer of 2020, NPR gave an approving interview to the author of the book In Defense of Looting. Minnesota’s Somali Pirates are performing larceny on an industrial scale, which they presumably also admire.

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

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

VIKING CONQUESTS CONTINUE: Hundreds of Peruvians are naming their babies after Norwegian soccer star Erling Haaland. “Apparently, the people of Peru (which is in South America) are obsessed with the Viking giant. As of Monday, some 500 new babies have been named after Erling Haaland, and you can expect that number to grow.”

Even Old Blighty isn’t safe:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

ANALYSIS: Wes Moore’s Bronze Star was a political rescue mission.

Most veterans who were wrongly denied a military award do not get a three-star general to personally intervene for them.

They do not get direct access to the Secretary of the Army.

They do not get a U.S. senator from a state they don’t live in to sponsor the award.

They do not get a politically damaging controversy transformed into a retroactive military honor, almost without question, nearly 20 years later.

And they do not get it done from start to finish in seven days.

But Maryland Gov. Wes Moore did.

Spotlight on Maryland has learned that Moore’s pursuit of the Bronze Star medal in 2024 relied heavily on political favors, special access, inaccurate information about his Afghanistan deployment and involved the deliberate concealment of key facts regarding Moore’s end-of-deployment awards in 2006.

These revelations raise serious questions about the process used to obtain the Bronze Star presented to Moore in 2024 and whether it violated federal law.

Related: Wes Moore Attacks Local Newspaper for Deigning To Report on His Record.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE SERVER FARM: Little House On The Prairie Goes Woke.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “bootstrapping mythology” in her original works does not “square” with audiences. George Tann is a black man. Young Reboot Laura becomes friends with an Indigenous girl named Good Eagle. Good Eagle’s family befriends the Ingalls family who snaked their logs to build their home. This nice, Ingalls family stole their timber and their land but, they are gracious enough to forgive but never let them forget it. Then, there’s the reboot of the Oleson’s:

Netflix’s Ingalls family are good people, even by 2026 standards, and you can see it in contrast with the Jameses. The Jameses are town-dwelling rich folk who don’t appear in the Little House books but seem to be an adaptation of the Oleson family … The Jameses’ vision for Independence — hierarchy, respectability, a church, a school — first seduces, then repels, the more gentle-minded Ingallses, Ma and Mary. The James matriarch, Jemma, played by Mary Holland, brings a welcome comedic hateability to this sunny show.”-Rebecca Onion, Slate

Got it. The Olesons are the token MAGA family. And they’re there for comedic relief. Sounds like Rebecca Sonneshine is a bit of a passive-aggressive Nelly Oleson, don’t cha think?

That development plays surprisingly well in Ireland:

Naturally, the show runner is playing the “I don’t even know what ‘woke’ means” card to defend herself:

TV writer Rebecca Sonnenshine, who came up with the reboot of the show has this to say about the recent woke criticisms:

“I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest. I know what I think it means, which is the definition of it being aware and alert to social injustice and prejudice, in particular racial prejudice. So, when people say, ‘I hope it’s not woke,’ I think, ‘Really? Oh, that’s interesting.’ But I don’t think people are using it in that manner; I think it’s just become a catch-all word for things that I don’t quite understand. If I had to sum it up, what people are afraid of is that something from their childhood will be portrayed in a way that scares them.”-Rebecca Sonneshine.

Maybe it’s for the best she didn’t bother reading the source material:

On the other hand, it’s a surprisingly diverse cast, a series perfectly made for, as the Critical Drinker would say with 100 gallons of reverb on his voice, “modern audiences:”

But will there be a season two?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

VW CEO TAKING SOME VICIOUS LUMPS ON HIS FAHRVERGNOGGEN:

Oliver Blume took over the Volkswagen Group in 2022, after spending years in the company’s other divisions. For example, he started as a planner for paint and body shop operations at Audi when he was 28, and then, from 2015 until this promotion, he had been the CEO of VW subsidiary Porsche. Obviously, a capable guy who grew up within the unique VW system.

That is both a good and bad thing, considering the harrowing times the company faces right now.

Three weeks ago I told you all how an internal memo had surfaced detailing the company’s plans to do some drastic cutbacks – up to 100,000 layoffs, shuttering up to four plants, and going through their extensive business portfolio to see what they could offload for some upfront operating cash.

German labor unions went berserk – no surprise there.

Well, last Thursday, the turnaround plans were officially confirmed when Blume presented them to Volkswagen’s supervisory board in Wolfsburg for approval.

The plans were just as quickly shot out of the water – ‘torpedoed,’ as Bloomberg describes it – and in doing so offered a kind of horrifying look into what is strangling Germany’s former industry giant as it struggles to right its sinking ship.

Make sure you pay particular attention to that third paragraph concerning the make-up of the board that just told its CEO ‘nein.’ This would be a state of affairs inconceivable to an American.

In his 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Democratic, and most Republican, health-care plans don’t call for expropriating the private property of doctors and pharmaceutical companies or even for the cessation of employer-provided health care. Rather, they want to use corporations for government by proxy. There’s a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health-care provider that makes cars as an industrial by-product.” In its dotage, “The People’s Car” manufacturer has descended into a similar state. Similarly, in 2024, Germany’s radical environmentalists began implementing a self-imposed update of America’s WWII-era Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize das Vaterland. It looks like those plans are continuing apace.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14th, 2026

July 13, 2026

CAPITALISM, THE UNKNOWN IDEAL: Capitalism Gets a Bum Rap.

Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.

Why is this happening? One underrated factor may be that many Americans don’t have a strictly economic definition of capitalism. When I hear “capitalism,” I think of an economic system where goods are distributed by markets rather than governments. That, I’ve now realized when talking about economics online and in person, is an unusual perspective.

As Matthew Yglesias argued recently, when many people say “capitalism,” they mean “the status quo,” even if that status quo involves a lot of problems caused not by free markets, but by government regulation and cronyist intervention. The housing market, he notes, is the most obvious example of this: “Younger people’s lived experience of ‘capitalism’ is of central planning and massive shortages of the single most important item they consume.”

The result is that anything that seems to be going wrong in American life, no matter how large or small, no matter how unrelated to free markets, will pretty reliably be blamed on capitalism.

“Which brings me to a vintage refrigerator:”

As James Lileks asked in 2023: What Are We Nostalgic For? “There’s a lot that’s grand about our current age. People will, one day, have nostalgia for 2023. The reasons may vary. I hope it’s because the seeds of a better world—more or less, overall, all things considered—are growing today, and we don’t notice them for all the brambles and thistles. I fear the nostalgia may be due to how free and prosperous our era seems in retrospect. They might wonder if we knew how good we had it. Ice machines, gas stoves, private cars, home ownership, no social credit, hot showers without timers, actual hamburgers made from meat instead of crickets…A golden age!”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 13th, 2026

WHEN A STUDIO LOSES THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: Should Disney Exit the Streaming Business?

The Wells Fargo analyst that, if Sony is getting $1 billion annually from Netflix for its pay-1 movie output deal, Disney could be in line for nearly $4 billion. When pay-2 and Disney’s unmatched library is factored in, licensing revenues could hit $15 billion.

“We don’t think the box office, Experiences, or brand value would suffer if the library were on a competing global streamer,” Cahall writes. “Investors would benefit from a de-risked biz model w/ DIS focused purely on content vs. distribution. Josh D’Amaro may be considering all options.”

The report was making waves Monday, with Disney stock rising by 1.75 percent in early trading.

Of course, such a move would be a stark reversal in strategy, especially given Disney’s relative success compared to its peers. But with tech giants like Amazon, Google and Netflix all secure in their space (though Netflix may be seeing pressure, as we’ve seen recently) and with a potential combined Paramount-Warner Bros. on the horizon, the competitive pressure may only ratchet up, potentially making Disney’s content more valuable as a licensed product than a streaming one.

Probably won’t happen, but Disney will likely look for ways to bilk additional fees out of their subscriber base:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 13th, 2026

41 YEARS AGO TODAY: ‘Greatest Concert in Rock History’ Was Held.

Monday marked a historic day in music history, as what many consider the greatest concert of all time took place exactly 41 years ago.

On July 13, 1985, Live Aid took place simultaneously at both Wembley Stadium (London) and JFK Stadium (Philadelphia). The 16-hour benefit concert, which featured over 70 of the world’s biggest artists, was created to raise funds and awareness for the devastating famine in Ethiopia at the time.

And the concert was a massive success, drawing more than 1 billion viewers across 110 countries, reaching over 40% of the world’s population. Live Aid also raised approximately $125 million for hunger relief in the African country.

Well, it raised that money, yes:  What Nobody Tells You About the African Famine that Led to the Most-Watched Concert in History.

If the cause of the Ethiopian famine had been a right-wing regime, it would probably be in every school curriculum alongside Live Aid.

The famine that produced the most-watched concert in history was caused by forced collectivization, forced grain seizures, and a deliberate policy of using hunger as a weapon against civilians. Four decades later, that half of the story still does not appear in most accounts of Live Aid.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 13th, 2026

BRITISH POLICE UNDER PRESSURE FOR SUGGESTING ANN WIDDECOMBE ‘MURDER’ WAS NOT POLITICAL:

News of the arrest was announced at a press conference in Exeter at 11am on Sunday, with Mr Longman again playing down any suggestion Miss Widdecombe had been targeted because of her politics.

In a statement, he explained: “At this time, there is still no information to suggest that this is a terrorism-related incident. And at this point, we are not looking for anyone else in connection with the murder.

“Detectives remain open-minded about any potential motive, but at this stage, there is nothing to suggest that it was politically motivated.”

But Reform UK politicians expressed scepticism and suggested that Miss Widdecombe’s uncompromising views and politics might have made her a target.

They even began reviewing the emails she received in the weeks before she was killed to see whether there had been any threats against her life.

Meanwhile, detectives had begun questioning the suspect and were searching his home and examining his electronic devices.

On Sunday evening, detectives uncovered “new information and evidence” which significantly altered the course of the investigation, suggesting the alleged murder might have had a terrorist motive.

Given that it’s England, this will all end very badly for the miscreant:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 13th, 2026

KURT SCHLICHTER: No Democrat Has the Brains or Courage to Not Be Crazy.

There’s a big empty lane within Democrat politics, and unfortunately for the Democrats, no one seems to be smart or brave enough to merge into it. What’s that lane? It’s the “Not being completely crazy while also not being completely ancient” lane. It really is that simple. Someone could swoop into that electoral sweet spot, but so far, no one has seen fit to take the risk and fight the fight to capitalize—though they all do hate capitalism—on this tremendous opportunity. All they have to do is just act normal and not be a million years old to distinguish themselves and maybe win by appealing to normal people again.

That’s really all there is to it. Instead, they’re crowding the freak lane while leaving the normal lane empty. Several Democrats who were born after the Jurassic Age have danced around it, but none have committed. It’s apparently too much to ask that they not be complete Leftist freaks.

Let’s get the easy part out of the way, which is not being old. The Democrat Party is a gerontocracy. As we’ve seen, the boomer generation has clutched onto power, sucking the lifeblood of the young to keep themselves in office forever. U.S. Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA-11), former president Joe Biden, U.S. Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters (CA-43), and many others—what do they have in common besides a relentless commitment to Moloch? They think Methuselah is a whippersnapper. Only now are they beginning to loosen their grip, and that’s simply because they’re literally too old to maintain it.

What you see now inside the Democrat Party is not so much a fight over ideology—as we’ll see, socialism has been the ideology of the Democrat Party for decades, and now they’re moving into full-scale communism. They’re just shy about telling the truth to the voters. The moderates are social democrats, and the social democrats are outright communists. There are almost no real moderates left, no Democrats of the kind you might have recognized from the 1990s.

There’s quite a feedback loop among far left politicians and their base, both of which appear to be permanently trapped in both the worldview and the adornments of 2020: Democratic Socialists of America activist deletes photo because everyone in the group looks retarded.

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 13th, 2026

AND THEY’RE NOT WRONG: The Last Time America Got It Right, According to MAGA’s Next Generation.

Whether many in the crowd were old enough to remember the songs — or, pointedly, alive when they topped the charts — was beside the point. To Washington’s new Republican elite, the 1990s, and its nostalgia, swagger and anti-establishment edge, have become the house style.

At one level, the 90s-ification of Washington is indicative of generational change after years of boomer ascendancy. Malik is candid that he’s curated a list of headliners for the club — Busta Rhymes, Akon, Timbaland, Nelly — who were topping the charts in his college years. Marco Rubio drops Cypress Hill in the White House briefing room. Kash Patel made an FBI recruitment video that recreated, nearly shot for shot, a 1994 Beastie Boys music video. JD Vance credits Boyz n the Hood with shaping his entire political worldview.

These are Gen Xers and millennials. Of course they are referencing the culture they grew up on.

But the nostalgia is more than generational reflex. It carries a political argument — that the 90s, in their telling, was the last time America got it right. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union had collapsed. By decade’s end, the U.S. was running a budget surplus for the first time in a generation. China had not yet joined the World Trade Organization, the move many blame for hollowing out American manufacturing. It was, in many ways, the last moment of American supremacy — before 9/11, before the 2008 financial crisis, before Covid, before the long cascade of failures this generation inherited.

“The conservative party in the 90s was pining for the 50s,” Malik told POLITICO Magazine. “Now, we’re pining for the 90s.”

This next generation, more often than not, is reaching not for the decade’s feel-good touchstones like Friends, Titanic or Mariah, but for the decade’s darker and more anti-establishment canon: hip-hop, grunge, alt-rock and Tarantino.

“Being anti-establishment, it’s always in vogue,” said one senior White House official, granted anonymity to speak on an unapproved topic.

To illustrate the above article in graphic terms:

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 13th, 2026

July 12, 2026

COCAINE MITCH LIVES! McConnell says a fall led to his hospitalization, breaking weeks of silence about health condition.

Sen. Mitch McConnell on Sunday revealed for the first time that a fall led to his hospitalization, breaking the silence about his condition after weeks of mounting speculation about the Kentucky Republican’s health.

McConnell, 84, said in a statement that he has undergone a battery of tests as doctors try to determine what led to his fall. He explained the long silence about his condition by saying that “folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.”

“Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it,” he said.

McConnell said he is now in a rehabilitation center and will not be returning to the Senate “quite yet.” He said he continues to work with his staff on Senate business in the meantime.

The statement included a smiling picture of the senator with his wife Elaine Chao, a tacit response to speculation online that McConnell had died or was incapacitated.

Here’s the photo:

ChatGPT and Google’s AI both believe the photo is real, though as ChatGPT notes, “Elaine Chao appears exceptionally polished compared with the hospital setting. Her makeup, hair, and crisp white blouse could make the image look ‘too perfect,’ but that’s completely plausible if she dressed up before visiting. The image has the smooth, smartphone-style processing that modern iPhones and Android phones apply automatically. Computational photography can sometimes resemble AI enhancement.” (Bold text in original.)

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 12th, 2026
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