Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 14, 2025

BLUEANON AT BLUESKY:

How much of Lorenz’s schtick is performative to generate clicks, and how much of it does she actually believe?

Related: Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the ‘lack of diversity of thought’ is actually pushing users back to X.

Between November 2024 and this May, Bluesky grew from about 10 million users to 30 million, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Many news influencers—people who regularly post about current events on the platform—lean left politically, according to the analysis.

One such figure was billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential run in 2024, although he didn’t give her a penny for her campaign, he said in October. Cuban became a regular Bluesky user, having posted nearly 2,000 times since November 2024. When he first joined the platform, he famously posted: “Hello Less Hateful World.”

But Cuban has changed his tune. In a series of posts this week, Cuban argued Bluesky has become too much of an echo chamber, and is sending more users back to X.

“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”

The former Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner also said he thinks Bluesky users have “grown ruder and more hateful.”

“Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” said Cuban, whose current net worth is about $8.33 billion, according to Bloomberg.

As President Reagan has famously been quoted, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend and not a 20 percent enemy.” That doesn’t seem to be an idea that’s been adopted by today’s “progressives,” despite their legendary — just ask them! — tolerance for ideological diversity.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — Heaven’s Gate. 

Exit quote: “Roger Ebert called [Heaven’s Gate] ‘the most scandalous cinematic waste I’ve ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Paint Your
Wagon.'”

How big was the blast radius? This big: Why Michael Cimino’s Disastrous Epic Western Heaven’s Gate Was Blamed for Ruining United Artists.

The film has undergone quite a significant critical reassessment, however, spearheaded initially by Hollywood’s legendary Z Channel:

In 1982, Z Channel aired the 219-minute 1980 premiere version of the film on cable television – the first time that the longer version was widely exhibited – and which Z Channel dubbed the “director’s cut.” As critic F.X. Feeney noted in the documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, Z Channel’s broadcast of Heaven’s Gate first popularized the concept of a “director’s cut.”

Flashback to my article from 2022: Z Channel: Closed-Circuit TV for Hollywood’s Ruling Class.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2025

HEH:

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2025

BATMAN, SPECTRE, AND GERRY ANDERSON HAVE NOTHING ON ISRAELI ENGINEERING BRILLIANCE!

I’ve got to say that (spoiler alert) the Star Destroyer in the basement was not entirely unexpected:

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB: Iran is everything they accuse Israel of being.

For decades, an aggressive, quasi-imperial state has been at the centre of conflict in the Middle East. It has consistently antagonised its neighbours and in some cases threatened their very existence. And through its shadowy military operatives, it has sought to impose its will on allies and enemies alike.

That state is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is everything the West’s bourgeois leftists imagine Israel to be. It has a genuinely ‘rogue’ and far-right government. A regime that, through its infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and heavily armed regional proxies, has sought to project its power and influence throughout the Middle East. Unlike Israel, it even has a genuinely genocidal objective – namely, the eradication of the Jewish State, or the ‘Zionist entity’ to use its leaders’ own patois. As its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put it in 2020, Israel is a ‘cancerous tumour’ that ‘will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed’.

That is why the prospect of the Islamic Republic developing nuclear weapons has always terrified Israel’s leaders. Because for a regime ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel, nuclear weapons are much more than a deterrent – they are a means to a Jew-annihilating end.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2025

June 13, 2025

AN ANTISEMITIC MELTDOWN BY THE ONLINE RIGHT’S ISRAEL FOES:

Since October 7 some of America’s most popular podcasters have congratulated themselves on their ability to “just ask questions” about Israel’s war aims that the legacy media will not; in the process of doing so, they have given platforms to revisionist historians, Holocaust distorters, and Christian antisemites to, they say, provide counter-narratives to the Israeli lobby that has so desperately tried to engage the U.S. in “forever war.”

Israel attacked Iran last night. As expected, the same people who were “just asking questions” revolted against Israel in support of America’s enemies.

Darryl Cooper, whom Tucker Carlson lauded on his show as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” said on Thursday that America should “commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately.” Dave Smith, Joe Rogan’s favorite comedian-turned-foreign-policy expert, accused Israel of launching “a dangerous, preemptive war of aggression” that “should be condemned by the US government and US citizens alike.” Smith also denied claims that Cooper was an antisemite; Cooper just had “nuanced” views, Smith said.

It may be easy to disregard such online-right opinions as fringe, but their millions of followers and the billions of views they receive suggest otherwise. Nick Fuentes said “this is the final battle in Israel’s 50 year reign of terror to destabilize & destroy every country that resists their rule.” Candace Owens called Israel’s “bloodlust” demonic. Matt Stoller doesn’t think Israel’s “bloodthirsty insanity” should be “our problem.”

Still though, Fuentes is making real progress in the Middle East!

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE STAR WARS CANTINA: The Week in Woke.

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

NEWS YOU CAN USE:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

THAT’S WHAT XI SAID!

That’s right on-brand for the Manchurian Candidate:

America — literally and figuratively — dodged quite a bullet last year.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

CHARLES COOKE: Yes, We Should Have Bombed Japan.

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, has produced and released a video that depicts the horrific consequences of the American attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In the spot, Gabbard laments the “haunting sadness” that remains in that city, before insinuating bizarrely that there exists a political faction in the present-day United States that is jonesing to bring about global “nuclear annihilation.”

I am persuaded by the utilitarian case in favor of the bombings. I believe that, had the United States attempted to end the war by invading Japan, millions of people would have died in the fanatical fighting and the famines that resulted — and that most of those dead would have been Japanese and Chinese. I believe that, absent the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union may well have invaded northern Japan, divided the country in two, and changed the remainder of the 20th century for the worse. I believe, too, that, if Truman had opted to greenlight Operation Downfall, the war in the Pacific could plausibly have lasted for another two years — which, given that the conflict in the East began in 1937, after Japan brutally attacked China, would have pushed that catastrophe into its tenth year.

But, in all honesty, those considerations are subordinate to my primary calculus here — which is that there is no good reason that the terrible cost of concluding a war that was started by another nation ought to have been borne by its victims. By the conclusion of operations, any Allied invasion of Japan would have required the deployment of up to 7 million American men. Per contemporary estimates, the U.S. government expected that between 500,000 and 1 million of those men would have died. That being so, my question is this: In what possible universe would the president of the United States — a man who was elected to represent America, not the world — be morally justified in choosing that option, when the war could have been ended (and, indeed, was ended; that’s neither a hypothetical nor a counterfactual) by dropping two enormous bombs on the aggressor?

As Roger Kimball noted in 2023: The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too.

This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.

Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L. Simon is right: atomic weapons are “as close or closer to being used today than ever since World War Two because of the endless war in Ukraine.”

That is a sobering thought. To his succeeding questions “Was this worth doing? Was it moral to build such an extreme weapon?” I would answer “yes” and “yes.” I also, by the way, support our use of this most horrible weapon in Japan. Why? Because its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War Two. In so doing, it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Data point: the military is still using the huge supply of Purple Hearts it manufactured in anticipation of an invasion of the Japanese home islands*.

But put the number of American lives saved to one side. The use of the bomb, by ending the war, also saved millions of Japanese lives.

This was widely understood at the time. In subsequent years, however,  a new, mostly left-wing, narrative has grown up which faults President Truman for using the bomb. Today, as Oliver Kamm noted in the Guardian, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” are often used as a shorthand terms for war crimes.

That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave laborers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire — and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Historian Mark Felton made a video in 2021 on the US military still awarding Purple Hearts that were made near the end of WWII:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE PAS-DE-CALAIS: Trump Drops an All-Time Troll on Iran, As What Happened Behind the Scenes Comes Into View.

In the aftermath of the first wave of strikes, speculation ensued about what President Donald Trump thought about the attacks. Early on, some on the right (with ulterior motives, in my opinion) claimed that Israel had gone rogue and defied the White House to undermine negotiations with the Mullahs. We are now finding out that wasn’t the case. I wrote in my initial piece on the attacks that there was no chance Trump didn’t bless these attacks, and it is now being reported that not only did he know, but he also participated in the subterfuge to throw Iran off the scent.

That seemed to be confirmed when the president put out the following post, which mirrored a longer post that slammed Iran for not taking the deal he put on the table.

Note: This is not the troll I’m talking about in the headline. That’s coming next.

Exit quote: “I know there’s a segment on the right (or who are ostensibly on the right) who are deeply anti-Israel (or worse) and desperately want to pretend the president was conned by the Israelis. He wasn’t. They are going to have to cope with that as they see fit.”

Read the whole thing.

Related:

Heh, indeed. Buried lede in the above tweet: apparently, prominent journalists can now actually pick up a telephone and call the president of the United States for a quote? This seems like a pretty bigly story in and of itself!

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

THE BUCHANANITE MOMENT IN LA:

The last time the phrase “Los Angeles riots” dominated the national headlines, Patrick Buchanan told a story about order being restored to the city.

“The mob retreated because it had met that one thing that could stop it,” he said at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. “Force, rooted in justice and backed by moral courage.”

President Donald Trump has been compared to Buchanan before. As streets burn in Los Angeles in defiance of federal immigration law, he may have the opportunity for his ultimate Buchananite moment as he sends in the National Guard.

These Los Angeles riots are even less defensible than those of more than three decades ago. Nearly all big-city riots end up only doing more damage to communities that are already hurting. These mobs are attacking the very legitimacy of immigration and border enforcement.

Republicans didn’t win the 1992 presidential election. In fact, they lost California in the Electoral College for the first time since the country went all the way with LBJ, the last president to federalize the National Guard against the will of a Democratic governor, back in 1965. The aftershocks of the 1990–91 recession, compounded by a promise-breaking tax increase signed into law by the GOP incumbent, still lingered.

Instead of Buchanan, Republicans renominated the incumbent who broke his pledge not to raise taxes, presided over the recession, and generally seemed more interested in the New World Order than American domestic affairs.

But in Bill Clinton, Democrats nominated someone who balanced his sympathy for Rodney King with a rebuke of Sister Souljah. Clinton was also the party’s first presidential standard-bearer in a generation to back capital punishment for murderers, just four years removed from the Willie Horton fiasco. Clinton promised to help pass a crime bill and hire 100,000 new police officers to patrol the streets.

But so far at least, there’s no pivot towards the center and sanity coming from today’s left: That Was Quick: Democrats Postpone ‘Sister Soulja Moment’ To Defend Illegal Immigrants and Rioters Waving Mexicans Flags on Burning Cars.

Related: More straight-up reportage from America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2025

June 12, 2025

BREAKING: Israel Bombs Iran in Preemptive Strike (UPDATED).

UPDATE:

UPDATE (10:45 PM):

Posted at 10:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 12th, 2025

ISRAEL LAUNCHES MULTIPLE STRIKES IN IRAN.

Earlier: US Evacuates Middle East Embassy & Military Personnel as Tensions Mount Over Potential Israeli Strike on Iran.

UPDATE: Ben Rhodes hyperventilates:*

* Again.

MORE:

Posted at 8:27 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 12th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE:

Yes, we can imagine quite a bit, based on the lockdown-themed headlines that came out of California:

● First Gavin Newsom Closed the Beaches. Then His Cops Ticketed Those Who Came to Look at Them.

● LA sheriff will fine you $300 if you’re not wearing a mask in public.

● Gym owner charged for opening during coronavirus shutdown, California prosecutor says.

● Los Angeles deputies arrest 158 people in raid on underground house party.

● Newsom Ordered to Pay $1.35 Million in Settlement With Church over Pandemic Restrictions.

Earlier: Democrats Melt Down Over Padilla’s Stunt — Here’s What Really Happened.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 12th, 2025
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