Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 16, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Real Reason Yale Professors Are Leaving Trump’s America.

“We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.,” a Wednesday New York Times headline read.

* * * * * * * * *

At the heart of the issue is a redefinition of the word “fascism” in such a way as to make it sound like it means the same thing as “patriotism.” These Yale professors — and a good many people who think like them — find the American assertion that this country, with its quasi-sacred founding and its insistence on the rights of man given him by God, is an exceptional one a troubling concept. They seem to equate “Make America Great Again” with Adolf Hitler’s “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”

But to do so ignores the very close association between fascism and racism, specifically antisemitism. Hitler, as you will remember, was virulently opposed to any race other than his Aryan one. He imagined a world in which blue-eyed, blond-haired giants ruled the earth, and Jews, Roma, and his detractors no longer existed. It’s this connection with racism that Snyder, at least, hasn’t quite fit into the picture.

In a recent piece with the Free Press, Peter Savodnik noted that Snyder’s depiction of Yale as a cloister of free speech and acceptance simply defies the reality that has unfolded at Yale after October 7, where pro-Hamas demonstrators antagonized Jewish students and even poked one woman in the face with a Palestinian flag. As a progressive, Snyder, according to one of his colleagues at Yale, may find it hard or even impossible to “imagine that those on the left could hate Jews.”

To the historian, Trump’s decision to investigate antisemitism on campus is merely an excuse to bully universities. “Nobody ever goes after universities in order to help Jews,” he told Savodnik.

The result is that fascism has become a cheapened term that, at least in popular progressive parlance, has become confused with patriotism. The love of one’s country is a duty, Cicero affirms. That’s not to say that the country should become a god in the popular imagination, but that we should be proud of it, work for its benefit, and wish it well.

Flashback: The Left’s fear of fascism under Trump is the ultimate example of projection.

UPDATE: NYT’s ‘Fascism’ Narrative Is So Tiresome It Has Become Self-Parody.

As George Orwell famously wrote, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

Posted at 5:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THUNDERDOME: CNN black sheep’s very surprising response to Trump Qatar plane freebie that’s angered liberals and conservatives.

‘Can you imagine if Barack Obama got a plane from the Qataris?’ asked Congressional Democrat Jared Moskowitz, as the costly gift continues to cause pushback from progressives and conservatives alike.

‘I mean, Scott would be calling it the Barack Hussein plane,’ Moskowitz joked, inadvertently offering Jennings a softball he would soon hit out of the park.

‘I mean, we – it would be endless all day long. We would be seeing it,’ he continued – paving the way for a seemingly serious Jennings to interrupt the visibly frustrated guest.

‘No,’ Jennings simply stated. ‘Barack “Huplane” Obama,’ he quickly followed up, offering a pun — and some much-needed levity — in the otherwise austere debate.

Laughs immediately rang out in response.

“Can you imagine it?” Yes we can! According to Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), the plane arrived during Barack Huplane Obama’s third term in office:  Senator Markwayne Mullin Just Tossed a Big Ol’ Wrench Into the Media Freak Out Over Trump’s Qatar Plane.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2025

‘WE OCCASIONALLY MISJUDGE:’ Pulitzer Board Told Me I Was out of Line When I Asked Why the Organization Gave an Award to Palestinian ‘Poet’ Who Made Hateful Comments About Israeli Hostages.

[Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller] told the Free Beacon that the Pulitzer Prizes “are based on a review of works that have been formally submitted for consideration.” See no evil, hear no evil.

In media interviews, meanwhile, Abu Toha has continued to shed light on the board’s most profound misjudgment of honoring an apologist for terrorism, lying on MSNBC over the weekend when he said, “First of all, I did not question [Damari’s] status as a hostage, because she is a hostage.”

Pressed, gently, by the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell about why he lashed out at the media for humanizing Israeli hostages, Abu Toha snapped, “Do you know what I’m going through every day? Do you know how many members of my family were killed? … And you are requesting me [sic] how to use language here?”

How to use language is precisely a journalist’s job—and a poet’s, too. It’s not outlandish, then, to believe that Abu Toha meant exactly what he said and said exactly what he meant: No mercy for the men, women, and babies Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7.

But hey, the Pulitzer board, they occasionally misjudge. Don’t you dare report on it.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2025

JOE CONCHA: Jake Tapper’s ‘bombshell’ book on Biden’s decline is a laughable attempt to rewrite history.

Thompson’s claim that every White House “is capable of deception” again makes the hilarious case that reporters believed what the Biden team was telling them without raising any questions.

Remember, this was the same White House that insisted inflation was transitory or was part of the mythical “Putin price hike.”

This is the same team that claimed the border was secure.

It’s the same team that actually accused Republicans of wanting to defund the police.

And the same team that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of Russia and COVID-19 didn’t come from a lab that literally studies coronaviruses.

Not exactly a track record of honesty.

Tapper and Thompson’s Original Sin is on track to be a bestseller when it hits bookstores next week. The authors will profit nicely from it.

But in terms of something that can’t be bought, a thing called integrity, both men can kiss that goodbye.

Just like most of the rest of legacy media that took part in the worst “cover-up” in modern American history.

Soon to be a major motion picture? Jake Tapper’s bombshell book on Biden mental decline could be made into a movie.

A high-stakes bidding war is brewing in Hollywood over the rights to the upcoming political exposé by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson detailing the decline of Joe Biden, according to a report.

With the release set for May 20, Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor — representing Tapper and Thompson respectively — have begun quietly circulating the manuscript to select producers, according to the Status newsletter.

But while the talent agencies angle to sell the screen rights, the book’s explosive claims and the timing of its release are drawing fierce criticism against the authors and other journalists for failing to aggressively cover the evident signs of Biden’s deterioration.

All the President’s Men is now best thought of as these days as a fictional political thriller ala The Manchurian Candidate than a serious look at Nixon’s Watergate scandal. But at least it’s built around the classic Hollywood tropes of reporters doggedly pursuing a story. A movie version of Tapper and Thompson’s book has the potential to be hilarious. Picture scenes of journalists repeatedly seeing Biden continuing to descend downhill, and then alternately ignoring them and issuing condescending “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes” public statements.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2025

DEVELOPING: Kash Patel to shut down FBI HQ, move 1500 agents out of DC.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the FBI will be closing down its headquarters and moving 1,500 agents out of the Washington, DC area.

Patel said on Fox Business, “The FBI is 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not. In the National Capital Region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, DC, there were 11,000 FBI employees. That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here. So, we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”

“Every state’s getting a plus up,” Patel later added. He said that the process to move the agents will take around next nine months or so and then added, “I didn’t know that I was going to do this, but I’m going to announce it on your show anyway, this FBI is leaving the Hoover Building because this building is unsafe for our workforce.”

But gosh, it’s such a handsome building:

Headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, The J. Edgar Hoover Building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Thursday, March 23, 2017. Construction finished in September 1975, and President Gerald Ford dedicated the structure on September 30, 1975. (AP Photo/NewsBase)

Flashback to 2018, when Slate was defending this style of architecture, purely because Trump hates it: “Of Course Trump Hates Brutalism —Buildings like the FBI headquarters are everything Trump is not.”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2025

May 15, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Believe me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor and Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

FLASHBACK: ‘Shorthand for killing someone:’ Trump campaign disturbed by Gretchen Whitmer displaying ‘8645’ in background for interview.

—The Washington Examiner, October 20th, 2020.

Related: Did Former FBI Director James Comey Just Call for Trump To Be Murdered?

UPDATE: The former director of the FBI regarding “8647:” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Likely the same response from the DNC-MSM as well:

Robert Underdunk Terwilliger Jr., PhD could not be reached for comment:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

TWO-TIER KEIR:

Shot: Just Stop Oil poster girl avoids jail for M25 protest.

A Just Stop Oil poster girl has avoided prison for her part in M25 protests that caused misery for motorists.

Phoebe Plummer, 23, and fellow activist David Mann, 51, were among 45 demonstrators who scaled gantries to protest about oil and gas licences in November 2022.

Mourners missed funerals and students were late for exams as traffic ground to a halt during the protests.

Plummer, of Lambeth, south London, was convicted of conspiring to disrupt the M25 by a jury at Southwark Crown Court, while Mann earlier admitted the offence.

Judge Justin Cole branded the protesters “arrogant” for thinking they were “cleverer” than those whose everyday lives they disrupted.

He said: ‘It was part of a plan to cause major disruption to the M25 by climbing on motorway gantries.

“Neither of you played an organisational role but you were motivated by a desire to cause large-scale disruption and to attract publicity for JSO and their aims.”

The judge said the protests continued over four days and cost the Met Police more than £1million and the economy more than £750,000.

Chaser:

Related: The punishment of Lucy Connolly.

‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care …. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’ After this rash and ugly tweet, she took the dog out for a walk, mulled it over and later deleted her message. But the post had been screenshotted, and soon she had been arrested for stirring up racial hatred.

‘Whatever I’d done, [the] police made it quite clear I was going down for this’, she says, ‘their intention was always to hammer me’. So it proves. She received only a perfunctory psychiatric evaluation, where she was not even asked about the loss of her child. After she expressed reasonable concerns about illegal immigration in a police interview, the CPS issued a misleading statement that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants’.

Several legal professionals consider her 31-month sentence inordinately harsh, and we have learned about the effect her imprisonment is having on her family. In the absence of her mother, her daughter has started having behavioural issues at school. Her husband, Ray, who is ill, does his best, but is no substitute for Lucy.

Flashback: The moment a Met Police officer tells Jewish woman that swastikas ‘need to be taken into context’ — after she complained about the Nazi symbol being used in pro-Palestine march banners in London.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

OUCH:

 

Posted at 6:29 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN — AND HOW HIS TEAM COVERED UP HIS DECLINE:

At the start of an election year that would be gruelling for a candidate half his age, the US president’s stiffened gait was already a clear sign of age-related decline.

But Biden and his inner circle were forced to discuss a worse prognosis.

“Advisers talked about how he may need a wheelchair in a second term,” says Alex Thompson, co-author with Jake Tapper of Original Sin, a book telling the inside story of the ill-fated 2024 Democratic Party presidential campaign.

“He had significant spinal arthritis and his spine was degenerating to the point that, if he either had another bad fall or maybe just because of time, he would have needed to be in a wheelchair.”

In the grand tradition of American presidential medical reports, this was barely hinted at in the description of Biden’s “moderate to severe” arthritis and “mildly decreased range of motion” that was relayed to the public in February 2024.

The revelation of the “wheelchair debate” is just one of many telling glimpses behind the scenes by Tapper and Thompson into the “insane” attempt to convince America that Biden, then 81, was fit to serve in the White House until he was 86.

Even more outrageous than his true physical state was the failure to carry out any kind of cognitive assessment, given that Biden’s frequent gaffes, memory lapses and odd behaviour were increasingly sounding alarm bells with voters who saw signs of a president well past his prime.

“He passes a cognitive test every day,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, when asked why no formal evaluation was carried out.

This came at a point when Biden was not yet confirmed as the Democratic candidate but was not being opposed by party heavyweights out of deference to his judgment. They had little idea how bad his condition was getting because access to Biden became tightly controlled by a cabal of family members and senior advisers known by senior Democrats as the Politburo, the book claims.

Of course, the Politburo needs a Pravda, and Tapper and the rest of the Washington press corps were happy to play their part:

Despite the sense of inevitability about Biden’s implosion conveyed in the book, compiled from 200 or so post-election interviews, the authors are bracing for significant blowback on at least two fronts once it is published next week. On the one hand there are critics already decrying the idea of journalists who did little to expose Biden’s fragility throughout his presidency now claiming to tell the inside story, and on the other hand there is the Politburo who still believe Biden would have beaten Trump. “I would have loved to know any of this and break it last year,” Tapper says. “I mean, we learnt all this after the election. We weren’t wise to this. We saw it the way everybody else saw it, which was, yeah, he looked bad, but everybody behind the scenes was saying he was fine. And then came the debate.”

Shades of Dan Rather’s infamous statement, as quoted by Howard Kurtz in September of 2004, after being caught cooking the books:

CBS anchor Dan Rather acknowledged for the first time yesterday that there are serious questions about the authenticity of the documents he used to question President Bush’s National Guard record last week on “60 Minutes.”

“If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story,” Rather said in an interview last night. “Any time I’m wrong, I want to be right out front and say, ‘Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.’ “

As a result, Ace of Spades writes, “Jake Tapper Reportedly Hires a Crisis Communications Firm to Stop Criticism.”

Mark Halperin, among others, has a different view. “One thing that’s not true is that the cover-up was so good that no one could see this, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten to the bottom of this during the election,” he said. “It is not true that it’s only after the election that Jake Tapper could’ve gotten to the bottom of this, and the rest of the Washington press corps could’ve gotten to the bottom of this.” The media were not simply “stymied from getting to the truth” by lying White House aides, Halperin argued. “No, they were part of the conspiracy and the cover-up. They allowed themselves to believe the ridiculous spin on TV and in public, and privately they allowed themselves to be browbeat,” he said. “They were told, you will lose access … Reporters who covered any story the Biden people didn’t like were denied access.”

Media reporter Dylan Byers noted Tapper’s insane levels of “self-promotion and sanctimony” are even bothering to annoy his fellow leftwing hacktivists.

And now we know who made that deceptively-edited video that both Tapper and Thompson linked, which purported to show, through cheapfake manipulation, Tapper showing any interest in the story.

Ace has a compilation of media headlines defending Biden, including this classic from AP: “Biden at 81: Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful”…”And from the Federalist: nine times Tapper showed what a valuable soldier he is for the Democrat Party by insisting Biden was ‘mentally sharp.'”

Tapper and Thompson’s book is an attempt to put a Band-Aid on an enormous scandal involving both the White House and the media whom it gave marching orders to. And while its details are fun and dishy to read, I want to go much deeper. Take this clip from a year ago today:

Who thought it would be a good idea for Biden to challenge the world’s biggest media persona to a debate? Who allowed this clip of an angry Biden with at least five jump cuts in it to go out? I don’t necessarily need to know the name of the intern who loaded up Premiere Pro and did the donkey work, but who signed off on the clip? Did he think nobody would notice all the edits? Did he not put two and two together and say, “Wow, if the president can’t shoot 14 seconds of continuous usable video, how can he handle a ninety minute live debate?” Was he trying to sabotage Biden’s reelection bid in order to replace him with Kamala? Just get ahead of another news cycle? That’s the book I want to read.

As Duane Patterson writes (accompanied by an AI-created image of Tapper wearing Ray Charles’ sunglasses and carrying his cane: Media Still Missing the Big Story — Who Ran The Country For Four Years?

Where are the tell-all books that get to the bottom of the true scandal of the last quarter century – who was running the country now that it’s been established that the cognitive and physical decline of Joe Biden was much more severe than previously reported? You’ve got a media enterprise in the nation’s capital whose sole job is to challenge the premise of the White House, whomever is in it, and get to the real truth. But we get crickets about who was making consequential decisions for at least the last year of the Biden administration? Why? Logic would conclude that one of the reasons why there’s no journalistic curiosity is because if that truth and scandal were reported as it deserved to be, Kamala’s chances would have diminished further. Her role in the coverup, being one of the people lying to media about Biden’s condition, and she would have been disqualified for office. The Trump margin of victory almost certainly would have been wider, and the House and Senate might have seen larger Republican majorities as a result.

* * * * * * * *

My humble, but sincere advice for my friends in media, and I do have dozens of them that are friends, is it’s hard to take them seriously when they won’t admit their failings in coverage of the Biden regency. If you want to regain trust, go where the story goes, not where you want the story to go. And I’m telling you, the story is who was running the country the last four years, and why there was no accountability in government. Why did the 25th Amendment fail as a failsafe apparatus against an obviously incapacitated president?

Find me a reporter that gets to the bottom of that, regardless of whether they lean left or right on the ideological spectrum, they’re going to be the first ones that lead the media herd back out of the wilderness.

After every presidential election, a leftist media grandee takes one for the team and apologizes, just a little, for all of his industry’s biased reporting during the election cycle. But the last four years of being deeply in the tank for a president who took office resembling John Gill, and left it at risk of becoming Capt. Pike in the wheelchair deserves much more inside detail than Tapper and Thompson’s meager efforts.

UPDATE: In The Wake Of Biden Book ‘Bombshells,’ One Pressing Question Still Remains.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

IN ANDOR, TONY GILROY SHOWED US THE EMOTIONAL POWER OF STAR WARS:

None of the previous Star Wars entries have worked in this fashion. There are no Jedi. There is no Skywalker family drama. The Force is only present on the edges, as a ludicrous old fable of a lost religion, not an abiding faith. This is a story about rebels becoming soldiers becoming a revolution, not a plucky fantasy where all the Stormtroopers miss and no one ever gets just straight-up murdered. The casting, particularly of Imperials Denise Gough and Kyle Soller, injects a resonance into the series for understanding the true nature of evil and how it overtakes its human cogs and collapses their misgivings. And Gilroy’s choice to use as many physical settings as possible – casting aside the Unreal Engine Volume for Britain as the cold emotionless Coruscant and Spain as the gorgeous but decaying Republic – makes the whole series feel more grounded, a human drama where otherworldly things exist, but are not the focus of the plot.

There’s always an inclination to assign current politics to Star Wars, whether in the context of the George W. Bush years or the current anti-Trump moment. But what Gilroy manages in this series is to show this clash instead as one between elites. This is no Occupy Wall Street rebellion. Instead, it is an authoritarian empire which creates nothing that must lie, steal and disrupt peaceful people in order to grasp the wealth and political freedom of a capitalist class of traders and merchants. It is a militarist state that takes from those who grow, build and create by force of arms, because that is all they have. Yes, they are stronger – but their hubris leaves the villains vulnerable to the machinations of those who actually know how to build, how to create, and how to hide the key to the Empire’s destruction in plain sight.

Whatever comes next for this saga, if the cost of three increasingly ridiculous sequel movies was getting the Gilroy vision of Star Wars, it was absolutely worth it.

I watched the last two episodes of Andor last night, and they were pretty good. They were a combination of Cold War thriller and an episode of SWAT blended with a smattering of Star Wars technology. The same complaints I made after seeing Rogue One on the big screen apply: Diego Luna isn’t the most charismatic actor, and the machinations of the baddies are far more interesting than those of the Rebellion. But just imagine how astonishing Andor would have been if it had been the live-action series that ran on network TV in the late 1970s in-between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Or if it had immediately followed The Mandalorian on the Disney+ streaming platform. Instead, it really feels like the last gasp of an utterly bankrupt franchise:

Posted at 5:19 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

MEDIA SHOCKED THAT MEDIA COVERED UP BIDEN’S COGNITIVE DECLINE:

It’s a headline that reads more like satire than reality. But the corporate media is once again pretending to be shocked at new details about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline – despite having themselves perpetrated the cover-up of the former president’s failing health for years.

Since Biden left office, details have slowly emerged about the lengths to which top White House staff, Democrat insiders, and liberal media pundits went to cover up the president’s physical deterioration. But that trickle has become a torrent this week as details from “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” a new book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, have entered the headlines.

The book is reportedly based on interviews with more than 200 people and includes explosive revelations like the fact that Biden’s health was apparently so bad as early as 2023 that advisors privately discussed the potential need to use a wheelchair if he won re-election. Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, also pleaded with aides to give the president more time to rest, and White House staffers were instructed to plan events so that Biden had to walk as few steps as possible.

In another instance, Biden allegedly did not recognize movie star George Clooney at an event, despite the fact that the two men had known each other for nearly two decades. Clooney would later pen an op-ed urging Biden to drop out of the race – but only following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.

For Americans who watched the media’s fawning coverage of Biden for four years, the feigned shock and outrage of the commentariat class over these new details is as laughable as it is insulting. Do Tapper, Thompson, and their legacy media brethren really expect us to forget that they themselves paved the way for the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline until that lie became impossible to maintain?

Well, yeah. There’s a lot they’re hoping you’ll forget:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

CHANGE:

That’s all well and good, but the real question involving Trump and Saudi Arabia is of course, did he touch the mystical orb again, as in 2017?

Posted at 10:00 am by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

THIS WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN AFTER THE LEFT REJECTED MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: How New Age Women Turned Right. For some, the pursuit of inner truth is a dead end.

Amy Carlson wanted to be special. She tried astrology, and she tried men — angry, violent, useless men. One held a knife to her throat, which forced her to get a restraining order. One fathered her first child, but the relationship didn’t last. She married another man and gave birth to a daughter, and yet she was still restless. In 2005 she got divorced, and she delivered her last child, Aidan, the same year. That’s when she saw the archangel Michael. The great being was visible above Aidan’s crib, and he had a message for her alone. “It’s time,” he told her, and then he disappeared.

When Carlson told this story much later, she said she had no time to ask the angel any questions. Instead she looked to the internet, writes journalist Leah Sottile in her new book, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. Carlson began posting on a website called lightworkers.org, where she claimed that her spiritual “guides” had informed her of her true mission on earth. “They are insisting that I move out of 3d completely and begin living fully in 5th dimension … I have been balancing both,” she wrote, adding that she wanted to stop living in an “illusion.” Carlson’s posts “read like they were written by two different Amys,” Sottile observes: One had a purpose, and the other cried in the shower. Carlson also said online that a disembodied voice told her that she would become president of the United States. “I am choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and to step into my Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be,” she posted. Then, during a family dinner at a Mexican restaurant, she stood up and said she had to go. “I didn’t think she’d just leave and never come back,” her sister told Sottile, but that’s exactly what she did.

50 years ago in New York magazine, Tom Wolfe wrote about “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

The encounter session—although it was not called that—was also a staple practice in psychedelic communes and, for that matter, in New Left communes. In fact, the analysis of the self, and of one another, was unceasing. But in these groups and at Esalen and in movements such as Arica there were two common assumptions that distinguished them from the aristocratic lemon sessions and personality finishings of yore. The first was: I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

Wolfe connected the narcissism of the 1970s with the exploding popularity of the Born Again Christian movement, something that was entirely unexpected by establishment liberals in the late 1960s, especially after Time magazine asked in 1966, “Is God Dead?” (Note how they pulled their punch just slightly; even in 1966 America, America’s biggest weekly news magazine didn’t risk going the full Nietzsche.) However, the 2025 New York article above shows what happens when Me Decade-style narcissism and navel gazing meets the much darker religious trend that’s been undergoing newfound popularity as of late: The Return of Paganism:

To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.

If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.

To borrow from another prescient (albeit infinitely more turgidly written), but lesser-known title from the 1970s: Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.

Classical allusion in headline:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

WATCH: Democrat Debbie Dingell Does a Biden, Dozes Off During Hearing.

Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell (Mich.) was caught on camera dozing off during a committee hearing Wednesday morning, drawing mockery and prompting comparisons to former president Joe Biden.

Video footage shows Dingell, 71, with her eyes closed and head tilted upward as she sits near the center of the dais during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.

The Michigan congresswoman, who has served in the House since 2015, came under scrutiny in February after she paid tribute to Osama Siblani, an anti-Semitic activist who hailed the leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah as a “hero” and has called for Jews to be sent “back to Poland.” Dingell said that Siblani’s “voice has rung loud and clear as an advocate for Arab lives around the world” and that his “efforts are worthy of commendation.”

In addition to serving on the Energy and Commerce Committee, Dingell is in charge of messaging for House Democrats.

And the message is: Dynasties that would make the Mings blanch:

Fortunately though, one gallant man stands ready if it happens again:

 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2025

May 14, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Never wear anything that panics the cat.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2025

AFTER 100 DAYS OF DOGE:

How well is DOGE doing in reducing wasteful government spending 100 days after President Trump jump-started its efforts? The President renamed and retasked the 12-year-old executive branch agency on January 20, 2025, to identify and eliminate fiscal waste within the federal government. DOGE became very visible thanks to the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk, who serves as a temporary government employee advising the service.

Despite that visibility, answering the question of how much money it has saved to date is challenging.

If you go to DOGE’s website, it reports $160 billion worth of savings, or almost $994 per taxpayer. However, Jordan Green of the Memphis Commercial Appeal reviewed the receipts posted at the site, finding they summed up to be over $61 billion, leaving around $100 billion yet to be fully accounted for.

Related: Christopher Rufo: Washington Got the Better of Elon Musk. The tech tycoon’s Department of Government Efficiency was prevented from achieving its full reform agenda.

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2025

JONTHAN TURLEY: Oregon Law Professor Accuses Oregon Law Review of Anti-Israeli Discrimination.

The University of Oregon has long faced controversies over the alleged political bias on its campuses, including celebrating the career of a professor who physically attacked pro-life students as a model of activism. It has been criticized for monitoring off-campus speech and unconstitutionally censoring dissenting faculty. Now, Law Professor Ofer Raban is accusing the Law Review and school administrators of discriminating against an Israeli professor who was allegedly rejected for publication because of his association with an Israeli university.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Paul Caron.)

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2025

TINY MUMMIES DIG BIG MEMORY HOLE: In “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump,” the excerpt from the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson published at the New Yorker, the Woodward and Bernstein of the 2024 campaign write:

“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us. Plouffe had served as Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as a senior adviser to President Obama before largely retiring from politics in 2013. After Biden dropped out of the race, on July 21, 2024, Plouffe was drafted to help Harris in what he saw as a “rescue mission.” Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed hundred-and-seven-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, “He totally fucked us.”

The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.

It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But, until the last day of his Presidency, Biden and those closest to him refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered considerably. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it. And then came the June 27th debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world. As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people.
“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.” Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.

Curiously, in 2023, the New Yorker was running articles with headlines such as, “Joe Biden’s 2024 Opening Argument: It’s Me or the Abyss:”

Now it’s official: President Joe Biden is running for reëlection. In his opening argument of a campaign that will span the next eighteen months, he portrayed himself as a bulwark against right-wing assaults on freedom, democracy, and social rights. “That’s been the work of my first term, to fight for our democracy,” Biden said, in a three-minute campaign video posted online Tuesday that opens with footage of Trump supporters storming the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

Biden cast the entire Republican Party as an extremist, Trump-dominated organization that is attacking basic American values. Around the country, he said, “MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you paid for your entire life . . . dictating what health-care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love.”

The video, parts of which were filmed at the President’s home in Delaware, was short on policy pronouncements and large on the broader themes that he has sounded since he announced that he was running for the White House four years ago, and has further emphasized since the January 6th attack. Biden argued that a “battle for the soul of America” is still raging, as fundamental rights and liberties are in peril. The video includes images of Biden and civil-rights campaigners walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma; of him with Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he nominated to become the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court; and of demonstrators protesting the high court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade. “This is not a time to be complacent,” he said. “That’s why I’m running for reëlection.”

The New Yorker could have noted that Biden rarely appears on camera delivering the above speech. Most of it is audio only, likely because editing audio together is much easier than video — there are no jump cuts to hide; it’s easier to smooth out “umms” and “errs” and cut out pauses when there’s no picture to worry about. And yet, he still slurs a few words. Biden only appears on camera in short moments delivering a couple of the key phrases of his speech:

The New Yorker has occasionally done real journalism — in 2014, Dexter Filkins reported on how Obama tossed aside hard-won gains in Iraq. But no Democrats — least of all Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson, and the staff of the New Yorker wanted to be first to say that Biden was cooked.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2025

FUNNY HOW THIS KEEPS HAPPENING, AGAIN AND AGAIN: Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar power inverters.

U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.

While inverters are built to allow remote access for updates and maintenance, the utility companies that use them typically install firewalls to prevent direct communication back to China.
However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.
Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.
Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at.

The rogue components provide additional, undocumented communication channels that could allow firewalls to be circumvented remotely, with potentially catastrophic consequences, the two people said.

Do not trust China. China is asshole.

Posted at 4:12 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2025
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