Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 19, 2025

CRASH AND BURN — THE RACHEL ZEGLER STORY: New video series from the Critical Drinker.

Earlier: Clifton Duncan on Disney’s Cannon Fodder Actresses.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2025

GAIA CRIES: The Guardian Seethes Over ‘Carbon Footprint’ of Israel’s War in Gaza.

Anti-Israel journos with the intelligence quotient of a moth flying face-first into a bug lamp are just inventing stupid new ways to stir up furor at the Jewish State for daring to defend itself against terrorists obsessed with its obliteration.

The Guardian’s climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani put out a staggering piece of mind-numbing, fallacious eco-drivel May 30 that insults common sense. “Carbon footprint of Israel’s war on Gaza exceeds that of many entire countries,” cried Lahkani.

Writing as if she found some kind of proverbial silver bullet, she flexed a new bonkers study to claim that the “carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of a hundred individual countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency on top of the huge civilian death toll.” She tied her nonsense to the typical climate agitprop: “Burning fossil fuels is causing climate chaos, with increasingly deadly and destructive extreme weather events forcing record numbers of people to migrate.”

Who in the bosom of Gaia has ever heard of a clean war?

The Grauniad has, that’s who! Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet. Laying waste to land scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

—The Grauniad, January 26th, 2011.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2025

HMMMM:

Related: Lawmakers shootings: Trump says calling Walz would ‘waste time.’

What they’re saying:

Trump said he hasn’t and wouldn’t be calling Walz because it would “waste time.”

Trump called the Democratic governor “slick” and “whacked out” and said he’s “not calling him.” Trump added, “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess.” Trump said he could “be nice and call him, but why waste time?”

Remember:

Walz was the vice presidential running mate for 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump.

The other side:

In an interview Monday with Minnesota Public Radio, Walz said he wasn’t surprised by the lack of outreach from Trump, saying, “I think I understand where that’s at.”

On Tuesday, Walz’s spokesperson, Teddy Tschann, said, “Governor Walz wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans, but this tragedy isn’t about Trump or Walz. It’s about the Hortman family, the Hoffman family, and the State of Minnesota, and the Governor remains focused on helping all three heal.”

In the early 2000s, Mickey Kaus liked to talk about “the Feiler Faster Thesis, [named] after the guy I stole the idea from:”

The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc. As a result, politics is able to move much faster, too, as our democracy learns to process more information in a shorter period and to process it comfortably at this faster pace. Charges and countercharges fly faster, candidates’ fortunes rise and fall faster, etc.

And how! In the old days, it took decades between when a Republican was declared Hitler by Democrat politicians and their media operatives with bylines, and when he was issued a new suit and allowed to leave the Führerbunker in Berlin to attack the latest Rethuglican Hitler. It took over 35 years between Richard Nixon being smeared as a Nazi by George McGovern in the 1972 election, and Roger Ebert and Paul Krugman rehabilitating him as a nuanced, thoughtful statesman to attack current Republicans. It took over 20 years between when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were declared Nazis by all thoughtful “Progressives,” before the Harris campaign aggressively sought their endorsements last year.

In contrast, it’s only taken Walz eight months from when he called Trump someone with “fascist tendencies” to now wondering when the sympathetic phone call to Saint Paul would be coming. And considering that Walz was calling ICE agents a “modern day Gestapo” only a month ago, the pace of change is accelerating exponentially!

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2025

June 18, 2025

HEH, INDEED: JD Vance Signed Up For Bluesky with Trump-Level Troll and Hilarity Ensued.

“Wow. They banned JD Vance from BlueSky in under 15 minutes,” the podcaster wrote. “What a hero.”

Others caught on to the Vance ban and couldn’t help but point out how absolutely hilarious the whole thing was.

“I give it about 25 minutes before BlueCry bans the sitting VP for ‘hate speech,'” Nick Sortor wrote. “UPDATE: BlueCry banned the sitting VP for hurting their feelings.”

Apparently, the ozone layer of BlueSky’s management realized the optics of banning the vice president would likely bring the wrath of the Trump administration upon them, so they eventually changed their minds. But Vance’s presence there is already enraging the tolerance for diversity crowd.

Screenshot
Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

FASTER, PLEASE. BUT WHAT COMES NEXT? Is it curtains for the mullahs? “Iran is at a crossroads. Few will mourn the end of a theocracy that sponsors terror and has spent 40 years agitating for the destruction of the West, namely Israel and America. But history – in Iraq and more recently Syria – offers a timely warning. Yes, regimes in places like Iran can collapse and do so swiftly. Yet what comes after is not democracy and freedom but chaos and violence. Can Iran be the exception to this rule? I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

MICHAEL GOODWIN: Cuomo should thank Mamdani for making him look like the safe, stable choice for NYC mayor.

In his race for mayor, Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has done the impossible: He’s made Andrew Cuomo look like a safe, stable choice.

Mamdani pulled off the remarkable feat by breaking a cardinal rule of politics: Don’t scare ­people.

But he has done exactly that by taking such radical positions in the Democrats’ mayoral primary that the portion of the electorate that hasn’t fallen for his vision of a socialist utopia realizes his policies would wreck New York.

His mantra of free this and free that, combined with a rent freeze on 1 million privately owned rent-regulated apartments, while promising that higher taxes on the rich would pay for everything, is music only to the ears of those who are ignorant about history and the laws of economics and human nature.

He’s also anti-cop to the core, which is the absolute last thing New York needs in City Hall.

Mamdani, just 33 years old, is vying to become the city’s youngest mayor.

He’s got clever videos and a lively presence on social media.

The base of his support comes from young New Yorkers, which proves the wisdom of ­George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “youth is wasted on the young.”

Then there are those ardent leftists behind him who refuse to grow up, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Born in Uganda, Mamdani would also be Gotham’s first Muslim mayor, and his refusal to recognize Israel as the legitimate homeland for Jews is another bridge too far.

New York has more Jews than any other city in the world, and the idea that its mayor would support BDS and other policies that aim to damage and even destroy Israel is unthinkable.

Bill de Blasio smiles.

Related: Mamdani says ‘globalize the intifada’ is expression of Palestinian rights.

Zohran Mamdani, a leading candidate in next Tuesday’s New York City mayoral primary, refused to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada” during a new podcast interview with The Bulwark released on Tuesday, arguing the phrase is an expression of Palestinian rights.

In an exchange about antisemitic rhetoric on the left, Mamdani was asked by podcast host Tim Miller to share his thoughts on the phrase, which has been invoked at anti-Israel demonstrations and criticized as an anti-Jewish call to violence.

“To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” said Mamdani, a far-left assemblyman from Queens who has long been an outspoken critic of Israel. “And I think what’s difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means struggle,” he said, apparently referring to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

A struggle, eh?

Related: Riots for thee, but not for me:

Shot:

Chaser: Zohran Mamdani hires security, citing ‘new level’ of threats in NYC mayor’s race.

CTRL-F “Defund” brings up zero results in the Gothamist’s article.

UPDATE:

Naturally, Mamdani switched into theater kid mode today in response to the outcry:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

CANCEL YOUR DREAM IRANIAN VACAY? Americans Devastated as State Dept. Ruins Summer Plans for Zero People.

I’m pretty sure the New York Times dropped their Iranian trips, in case anyone was thinking that was still an option. Flashback: What I Saw in Iran: A Free Beacon journey to the birthplace of Valerie Jarrett.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Tucker Carlson Plays Gotcha with Sen. Cruz on Iran.

Anyway, the full interview is out today and it starts out a lot calmer than the snippet above suggests. Cruz praises Carlson at length for his positions on the border and the pandemic shutdowns. He suggests they agree on about 80% of their politics with the exception of some foreign police issues. Cruz argues that he holds a position in between interventionist and isolationist which he calls “non-interventionist hawk.”

But there is a moment about 30 minutes in where Cruz actually puts Carlson on the spot. Carlson suggests the aid given to Israel is very expensive and doesn’t make sense when so many Americans are struggling to buy groceries. Cruz responded, “You said the support for Israel was very expensive. How much support do we give Israel?”

Carlson dodged by saying, “Well, you tell me you vote for it.”

“It’s about $3 billion a year is the military assistance,” Cruz said. He added that the military assistance was the only aid given to Israel.

And not long after that the conversation takes a turn into a discussion of AIPAC. This is the point when all hell really breaks loose. Cruz admits to being supported by AIPAC and even describes how the organization works, holding fundraisers for candidates who support their goals. Carlson keeps asking if AIPAC is a foreign lobbyist being directed by Israel, which Cruz denies repeatedly.

And that leads to Cruz wondering why Carlson is only focused on AIPAC and lobbying by Israeli aligned groups when there are lobbyists for every nation on earth in Washington doing many of the same things. He implies that Carlson is fixated on Israel and “the Jews.” Carlson takes offense at this and says Cruz is making a “sleazy feline” insinuation that he is antisemitic.

The conversation eventually moves on with Cruz saying he wants to lower the temperature but it never really does go down much.

Which seems quite odd; Tucker used to be made of sterner stuff on the topic of Iran:

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM BARACK PROJECTION OBAMA: Obama: US ‘dangerously close’ to moving toward autocracy.

Former President Obama warned on Tuesday the current political climate isn’t “consistent” with American democracy.

“It is consistent with autocracies,” Obama told a crowd in Hartford, Conn., where he spoke about the growing threat posed under the Trump administration, according to Connecticut Public Radio.

“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that,” he added.

The former president was in conversation with Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor who writes a daily newsletter on Substack, “Letters from an American.”

“If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood, and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work,” Obama told Richardson earlier in the conversation.

Related: Wielding A Pen And A Phone, Obama Goes It Alone.

—NPR, January 20th, 2014.

More: Liberals want Obama to be a king, not a president.

—CNN, June 8th, 2012.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB: The case for cars.

I once had an idea to host a conference where the speakers and the attendees had all recently retired. The idea was that, freed from the obligation to repeat the usual approved platitudes, you could learn what experts really thought when they were free to speak their minds, rather than reciting a Davos-style litany of received opinion. (My cunning idea was not to pay the speakers, but to hold the event on a cruise ship, which are like catnip for the over-sixties.)

One of the speakers would have been David Metz, the author of Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy, a fabulous polemic written after the author had left his job as chief scientist at the Department for Transport.

The book is a revelation. What becomes clear is that, in policy circles, it is now impossible to express any opinion which is pro-car or in favor of roadbuilding. The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into some form of mass transit. This is obvious nonsense. While trains and buses are fine for very specific journeys, for the overwhelming number of journeys we make day to day, the car is either irreplaceable, or else supreme. If it’s raining, if you have luggage, if you have children, if you want to transport anything heavier than a suitcase, if you want to travel at an unusual time or anywhere remotely rural, the car or van wins hands down. And I write this as someone who really likes trains.

New roads might be better than rail in countless ways. For one thing, you can build houses alongside them. Indeed, when you take land value into account, the case for road-building becomes stronger still. High-speed rail mostly connects places where land is already expensive with other places where land is also expensive. It is centripetal, funneling people into areas which are already comparatively rich. Roads, by contrast, are centrifugal – they disperse people and their money, adding value to land that was cheap beforehand. If you can capture the increased value of newly accessible land (for instance by selling planning permission) it becomes possible for government to build roads for free while reducing the housing shortage.

So why the desire named streetcar? (To coin a phrase.) That’s an easy one, Jeff Jacoby tweets:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2025

June 17, 2025

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!, BUT IN FARSI: Report: Ayatollah Khamenei Is Not Making Decisions ‘Due to His Poor Mental State.’ As Jim Geraghty writes, “Ayatollah Khamenei is 86, four years older than Joe Biden. Come on, Biden cabinet. If the Iranians can remove their leader from making key decisions because of his poor mental state, why couldn’t you?”

Related: Trump Tells Khamenei: We Know Where You’re Hiding and ‘Our Patience Is Wearing Thin.’

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:07 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

MARK FELTON: The Last Shah—How Iran Changed from Western Ally to Enemy (Video).

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

FASTER, PLEASE:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

FASTER, PLEASE: ‘America’s Hypercar:’ The New Chevy Corvette ZR1X Aims to Take Down Ferrari.

The 2025 Corvette ZR1 may already be the fastest rear-wheel-drive car to touch down on our planet: A record-stomping track monster that crushes 60 miles per hour in 2.2 seconds, and whose 233-mph top speed reads like an AI hallucination.

Bucket-list ZR1 laps in May at Circuit of the Americas—the kind of Texas-sized corral this raging bull needs to properly fling itself about—find me chasing the very Corvette engineers who’ve been setting production-car lap records in their spare time; smoking a $1.2-million McLaren Senna, shaming a Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

Stretching its jacked legs on COTA’s back straight, my ZR1 reaches 175 mph, then 178 the next lap. 180 mph feels tantalizingly within reach. The 5.5-liter LT7 screams its titanium-hardened lungs out, flexing more turbo horsepower than the F1 cars that fly past and fill these grandstands. This ‘Vette grips harder than Schwarzenegger on the campaign trail, and it’s not the Terminator you might imagine: It’s communicative, (reasonably) accommodating, and daily drivable, still a Corvette at heart.

And it all costs $178,195 to start, including a $3,000 gas-guzzler tax for a ZR1 that can inhale two gallons of premium unleaded per minute at full power. The drinking problem is real, but you can barely buy a 911 GTS for this much cash; the 532-hp Porsche, with precisely half the ZR1’s 1,064 horses, starts from $167,000.

It certainly looks sharp:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

ISRAEL KILLS IRAN’S NEW WAR CHIEF DAYS AFTER TAKING OUT PREDECESSOR, AS STRIKES CONTINUE:

Israel killed a senior Iranian general overnight, just days after eliminating his predecessor, the Israel Defense Forces said Tuesday morning, as the campaign against Iran’s nuclear program and Iran’s retaliatory missile barrages at Israel entered its fifth day.

Israel launched its campaign early Friday, saying it was acting against an imminent existential threat from the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Explosions and air defense fire were reported Tuesday in Tehran, as Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that there were significant strikes in store for the Iranian capital.

Air defenses were reportedly also activated in Natanz, home to a major uranium enrichment plant that was seriously damaged in Israel’s opening attack, and satellite images showed extensive damage at a missile base.

An airstrike Monday night killed Maj. Gen. Ali Shadmani, the new head of the Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters, also known as Iran’s military emergency command. He had only been on the job for some four days, having replaced Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid, who was killed on Friday in Israel’s opening strikes against Iran.

Exclusive video of Shadmani taking office last week:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

DAVID THOMPSON: Scenes From The Zombie Apocalypse.

“By the responses, I’d say that yes, pretty much everyone is.”

And the activists’ power lies in an assumption that their victims will not risk injuring their assailants.

But to insist that the victims should remain trapped, inert, and at the mercy of their aggressors, indefinitely, and while risking greater danger to themselves or their property, does not strike me as a morally persuasive position. And note that the activists typically rush from all sides, rapidly surrounding the car and its occupants, intensifying the alarm, the likelihood of panic, and drastically reducing the driver’s options. This is not accidental.

There’s an implied dare. The game being, “You won’t do what’s needed, despite our alarming and menacing behaviour, because you’re nicer than us, less vain, and not unhinged, and so we can dominate you and terrorise you, and break your stuff, for as long as we want, for shits and giggles.”

Well. I would suggest that the activists’ own actions render their wellbeing of very low importance.

Not to mention being the only Angelenos who’ve apparently never heard of Reginald Denny.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025

WHOA NELLIE! NYT Rips Zohran Mamdani a New One in Brutal Non-Endorsement and We are Here for It.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges. He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing.” “Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents. Mr. Mamdani, who has called Mr. de Blasio the best New York mayor of his lifetime, offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.”

Mr. Mamdani would also bring less relevant experience than perhaps any mayor in New York history. He has never run a government department or private organization of any size. As a state legislator, he has struggled to execute his own agenda.”

“…We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.”

Exit question: “Who wrote this editorial and what have you done with the real NYT editors?”

Well, yes: NYT endorses de Blasio for mayor.

—The Politico, October 26th, 2013.

Related: Do New York’s mayoral candidates know that despite that whole “Gotham City” nickname, they’re not supposed to act like supervillains in a Batman movie?

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 17th, 2025
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