Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 19, 2026

#DAILYFAIL:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 19th, 2026

GOODBYE, STEPHEN COLBERT: Bringing ‘Very Fine People’ Hoax Back.

A media hoax unlike any other was born. And boy, did it have legs. Future President Joe Biden used the lie to launch his 2020 campaign.

It took the progressive Snopes seven years to set the record straight on the matter. Seven. Years.

Better insanely late than never. Gee, why would Snopes drag its feet on this particular fact check?

Either way, anyone with a healthy news diet knows it’s a lie, and a despicable one at that.

Does that explain why Colbert repeated it … LAST YEAR?

“For the record, Trump did not come up with ‘America first.’ ‘America first’ was the motto of Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s … Trump wasn’t Nazi-friendly until 2017,” Colbert said, before mimicking the president’s voice saying, you guessed it, “very fine people.”

No lie is too big, apparently, for the far-Left host. It’s one more reason Colbert won’t be missed on late-night TV.

Remember on the original Star Trek, there were maybe a dozen shots of the USS Enterprise flying in space that were repeated over and over and over again throughout the series? In 1960s Hollywood, those shots were expensive to produce, and Desilu/Paramount wanted to squeeze every last drop out of them. The SPLC production expenses to manufacture Charlottesville were similarly costly to produce. But like the 1960s TV franchise eventually running in perpetuity in its various forms, the initial investment was equally profitable in the long run:

Earlier: So, the Premise Behind Biden’s 2020 Run Was Built on a Lie Paid for By the SPLC?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 19th, 2026

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: How Disney ruined Star Wars.

If [The Mandalorian and Grogu] does underperform – “flop” is a bit strong – then questions will be asked of Filoni’s judgement. Whether next summer’s Ryan Gosling-starring Star Wars: Starfighter is similarly doomed – and if audiences are weary of a series that has been systematically exploited and therefore ruined for years. With the more than honorable exception of the excellent Andor – which, if rumors are to be believed, Filoni was bewildered by – there hasn’t been anything any good in the Star Wars universe since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney for $4 billion back in 2012.

It isn’t hard to see why not. Regardless of whether you are an especially big fan of Star Wars or not, there is no denying the way that the first film completely reshaped the American cinematic landscape when it emerged in 1977. Becoming an even bigger hit than Spielberg’s Jaws two years before and laying the groundwork for virtually every big-budget science-fiction fantasy that followed ever since. Its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, is justifiably believed to be one of the seminal films ever made, introducing elements of moral ambiguity and genuine wit into the series.

Yet when Disney paid the big bucks for Lucasfilm, they were not thinking about moral ambiguity or wit, but instead as to how they could monetize the franchise for all that it was worth.

And then Kathleen Kennedy alienated the male half of the entire original fanbase. This is the point in a Critical Drinker video where he pastes in the obligatory clip of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark saying, “Not a good plan:”

Tweet continues, “So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with.”

UPDATE: Christian Toto was not impressed by the latest movie with the Star Wars imprimatur:

Tweet concludes, “One late scene is a DEI highlight reel. This is a franchise on life support.”

MORE: Trade rag Variety tries to salvage a decent review of the Mandolorian movie…and really can’t:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll on May 19th, 2026

DECLINE IS MOST DEFINITELY A CHOICE:

Beyond Karen Bass, as Iowahawk noted about Nithya Raman:

Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on May 19th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on May 19th, 2026

PEAK M-SNOW: “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government; they come from our creator?”

 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 19th, 2026

May 18, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE: ‘I Don’t Give a Flying F— He Died!’ NYC Mayor’s Office Gives Press Badges to Luigi Mangione Fangirls Caught on Tape Celebrating CEO’s Murder.

The New York City Mayor’s Office gave coveted press badges to a trio of “journalists” who celebrated the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson outside a court hearing for his accused killer, Luigi Mangione, on Monday.

The women, sporting city-issued press badges, called Thompson a “murderer” and “terrorist” outside a hearing held ahead of Mangione’s upcoming trial. Mangione, who is accused of fatally shooting Thompson in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024, has become a cause célèbre of left-wing activists and journalists. Hasan Piker, the far-left podcast host who rubs shoulders with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D.), said in a recent New York Times interview that Thompson was guilty of “social murder.”

“F— Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying f— he died,” Ashley Rojas, one of the credentialed journalists, said outside the court hearing. Rojas was joined by two other “Mangionistas,” Lena Weissbrot and Abril Rios. The trio do not appear to work for any publication.

Mangione’s attorney is asking his fan girls to dial their squeeing back a notch or twenty:

As Noah Blum adds, “Luigi fangirls tanking his defense would be the ultimate hilarity.”

Including those old enough to know better:

Related: Review: Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, by Noah Rothman.

One particularly jarring moment in the first chapter comes not when we find that left-wing violence has become hugely prevalent in modern American life, but that we have all become—to some degree—numb to this left-wing violence. Even the most avid political enthusiast will likely have forgotten—under the weight of sheer frequency—at least one example of violence that should be once-in-a-generation, but is now more once-in-an-afternoon. Even as a conservative reader whose career focuses on the battle against antisemitism in the West—making the notion of political violence far from imaginary—I was astonished by how normal this constant onslaught of violence has become, with the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots of just a few years ago feeling more like a long-forgotten dream.

We’ve had a few of those:

One of the reasons these periods of violence eventually become “long forgotten dreams” is that media gatekeepers are “unexpectedly” simpatico with leftist violence. In response to Posobiec’s tweet, Hollywood has made two movies about this period — one was directed by Sydney Lumet, and the other by Robert Redford. And both films sympathized with the bombers.

More:

See also: the DNC-MSM’s freakout over Spencer Pratt. Or as America’s Newspaper of Record quips:

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

RIDE THE ASSASSINATION RECURSION! Why Are So Many on the Left Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempts Were Staged?

New polling data reveals that a surprisingly large portion of Democrats either believe the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump were staged or aren’t sure they were real. It’s a hard thing for many of us to wrap our heads around, and I think it’s worth asking why so many refuse to acknowledge those assassination attempts for what they were.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents in a Newsguard survey said they believed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting “event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans.”

So, a third of Democrats are entertaining what amounts to a wildly implausible conspiracy theory. The numbers skew even higher among younger respondents: Americans between 18 and 29 were more likely than older people to believe the incidents were fabricated.

It’s quite a dichotomy — the left believe that Trump faked multiple assassination attempts, even as they cheer on the assassins of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk: ‘I Don’t Give a Flying F— He Died!’ NYC Mayor’s Office Gives Press Badges to Luigi Mangione Fangirls Caught on Tape Celebrating CEO’s Murder.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

FINALLY: Candace Owens to sit down with Hunter Biden.

Conservative* podcaster Candace Owens, a longtime critic of former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, is set to sit down with the ex-president’s son to cover a litany of topics, including the infamous laptop saga.

Owens, who has frequently criticized Hunter Biden and his family over his business dealings, drug addiction, and the controversy surrounding his laptop, previewed a wide-ranging discussion touching on addiction, politics, faith, and Washington’s political culture.

“Hunter Biden, welcome to the Candace Owens Show,” Owens said in a promo clip previewing the interview.

During the interview, Hunter Biden openly addresses his past struggles with addiction, acknowledging the personal destruction it caused in his life. “I was a crackhead,” Hunter Biden said, reflecting on how his addiction contributed to the collapse of his marriage and sent him into what he described as a “really, really dark cycle.”

Exit quote:

* And yet, Candace continues to have strange new respect from the left.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

“PREASE ACCEPT OUR APOROGY:”

Readers: we’re sorry. On May 13, 2026, we covered the story of Eileen Wang, the California mayor who confessed to working as a Chinese foreign agent, and in doing so, we made a grave error — we failed to acknowledge that accurately reporting on CCP spies running entire American towns was, in fact… racist. You see, NBC News published an article last week explaining the real problem with the Chinese spy mayor story was that it has “reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination,” which totally doesn’t read like a Norm Macdonald joke come to life, and definitely serves as a helpful reminder that words, even accurate ones about bombshell espionage scandals, can carry violence. The next time an American mayor is caught working for the PRC? We urge you to sit your racist ass down and instead reflect upon what you can do to Stop Asian Hate.

Evergreen:

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

Posted at 4:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bill Maher Did What No Late Night Comic Dared.

“It’s everyone’s right in a free country to be Antisemitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel, or Zionism or Netanyahu,” Maher said. “[If you think] when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy. Because there are so many worse places.”

“That’s how you know it’s antisemitism. It’s the inconsistency,” he added.

Maher brought up The New York Times getting cozy with Hasan Piker, a rabid progressive who has compared Zionists to neo-Nazis.

Yes, Maher both-sided the matter, but there is fault on both sides.

It’s hard to even quantify where Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens currently fall on the Left/Right divide*, but the anti-Israel fury isn’t confined to the new Left.

Maher brought some receipts there, too.

“The meathead manosphere and Code Pink people are on the same page,” he said. “They both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.”

Read the whole thing. With the exception of Maher, it’s increasingly looking like, as Karol Markowicz wrote on Thursday: Face it, Jewish liberals: You have no friends on the left.

* To be fair, Tucker’s newfound love from the New York Times is a clue.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

HELTER STELTER:

Flashback to 2017: Stelter Skips Dan Rather Fiasco in 22-Minute Interview on the History of ’60 Minutes.’

CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter routinely trashes President Trump for sticking to “his safe space” and doing interviews on Fox News. But on his show on Sunday, he provided the safest of spaces to 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. Both on CNN and in his 22-minute podcast, Stelter discussed the history of the CBS magazoine show without once mentioning Dan Rather or his phony-documents fiasco attacking President George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II in 2004.

That’s because for Stelter, Dan Rather became one of CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources.’

Stelter often invokes the importance of truth and facts in his run-up to bringing on Rather, whose reputation was shattered for ignoring those things in the defining episode of his career.

Rather reported on documents in 2004 purporting to show George W. Bush had been derelict in his duties and gone absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s. The documents were almost immediately revealed to be forgeries. CBS and Rather initially stood by the report, but Rather was eventually forced to apologize, and the 60 Minutes producers of the segment were fired. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair in 2005.

However, Rather has long insisted his team was correct and reported the truth about Bush avoiding Vietnam service and shirking his responsibilities with the National Guard. He’s even gotten assistance from Hollywood in what came to be known as “Rathergate.”

A 2015 movie based on producer Mary Mapes’s memoir of the affair, called Truth, starred Robert Redford as Rather, portraying him and Mapes as flawed but heroic in their journalistic pursuits. It was a box office flop and tepidly received by critics, some of whom panned it as didactic, simplistic, and one-sided. The Atlantic called it a “terrible, terrible movie about journalism.”

60 Minutes’ quality control has been uniformly terrible, but as long as it leans hard in Stelter’s direction, all is well in his world.

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on May 18th, 2026

May 17, 2026

INSTEAD, THEY WERE THINKING IN DECADES — AND THAT DECADE WAS THE PAUL EHRLICH 1970s:

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

A FOGGY DAY IN LONDONISTAN:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

I ASSUME THEY’RE ALL FAKE UNTIL PROVEN TRUE:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

NEW SPENCER PRATT VIDEO DROPS:

Steele’s Tweet continues, “That’s how the Left rules by fear while its politicians and elites pray the value of their million dollar homes doesn’t fall.”

I think that’s spot-on, but there’s an uncanny valley aspect to this AI video that may work against it. In the earlier videos by Pratt’s supporters, the use of AI didn’t matter, because they were depicting Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Gavin Newsom as amped-up cartoon supervillians, and Pratt as “Prattman,” here to rid Gotham City Los Angeles of its greediest and most venal criminals. Will AI, in its current form, still work as well depicting yoga moms who want to vote for Pratt?

Think of the ’84 Reagan campaign’s “Morning in America” ad:

We know everyone in it is an actor (Reagan’s former career), but by the time the above commercial came along, Americans had been going to the movies and watching TV for decades, and there’s enough “suspension of disbelief” to accept that we’re watching actors underscored by folksy music and warm cinematography to sell the message. “Morning in America” would feel like Soviet or North Korean propaganda if created using AI, and because of its use, I’m wondering if Pratt’s new ad is working against its message.

Earlier: Spencer Pratt Is Where It’s At.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

HEH: Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques.

A fascinating art social experiment unfolded on social media this week after someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the “AI image” inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of “sharp-eyed” critics eager to chime in.

It all started after X user @SHL0MS posted the painting and wrote: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.”

* * * * * * * *

“The fact that it looks like s**t and is s**t,” writes @RDL0013 in a since-deleted reply. “Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.”

Orson Welles, call your office!

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

U.S. EYES ATTACK-DRONE THREAT FROM CUBA:

Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and recently began discussing plans to use them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West, Fla., 90 miles north of Havana, according to classified intelligence shared with Axios.

Why it matters: The intelligence — which could become a pretext for U.S. military action — shows the degree to which the Trump administration sees Cuba as a threat because of developments in drone warfare and the presence of Iranian military advisers in Havana, a senior U.S. official said.

“When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning,” the official said.

“It’s a growing threat.”

How do you say “Operation Bodenplatte” in Spanish?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED, Or Where Does Old Blighty Stand After a Half-Century of Oikophobia?

Even John Cleese (quite a dedicated oikaphobic himself in his younger days) now (sometimes) gets it:

Tweet concludes, “Perhaps ‘sensible right’ would be a better description.”

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

STACY MCCAIN: ‘There Is No Truth … Only Power.’

Bad causes attract bad people.

We know for a fact that Communism leads to mass murder, killing as many as 100 million people in the 20th century, and therefore must question the motives of its defenders. Hence, we can disregard the accusation of committing an ad hominem fallacy in so doing.

Something similar can be said for the philosophers of “postmodernism.” Michel Foucault was an influential French intellectual and also a homosexual pedophile, and this is not a coincidence, you see.

Read the whole thing. As Daniel J. Flynn wrote in a 2021 article at the American Spectator under the headline, “Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil,” “News that Michel Foucault molested children recalls revelations that Hulk Hogan used steroids. The surprise comes only in response to surprise.”

Related: Zhou Enlai Gets His Answer.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West.

[Allan] Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works from the woke grievance industry that rules us, works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Aristotle, Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism, imperialism, and so on. A favorite recent example was the news that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, has embarked upon the project of “decolonizing Shakespeare” in order to rid the bard’s work and reputation of “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly West-centric worldviews.”

“Gosh,” I thought, “has it come to that?” I am afraid that it has. In many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment and look to the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

Earlier: Deconstruction is “a virus. It self-replicates. Once inoculated, it turns everything it touches into a target. Science is patriarchal, so let’s deconstruct it. Language is colonial, so let’s reinvent it. Meritocracy is racist, so let’s abolish it. Sex is a construction, so let’s choose it. There is no more bedrock. Everything is sand.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026
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