Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
July 8, 2025
BEGUN, THE CLONE WARS HAVE: Yikes: Marco Rubio Imposter Used AI to Contact Five Government Officials Including Foreign Ministers.
WHEN THE LEDE DOESN’T MATCH THE HEADLINE: “Hondurans, Nicaraguans in Nevada to lose temporary protective status,” screams the Las Vegas Review-Journal headline, only for the reader to be told:
Hundreds of Nevada residents from Honduras and Nicaragua who have been shielded from deportation for a quarter-century are set to lose their temporary protection after the Trump administration announced Monday that it was revoking their legal status.
President Reagan famously said that “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Similarly, only in lefty-speak is “temporary protection” meant to last a quarter of a century.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers Union Resolves To Call Trump ‘Fascist,’ Support Student Protests Over ICE Raids.
The largest teachers union in the United States has demanded that $3500 be set aside so that it can officially refer to President Donald Trump and his “programs and actions” as “fascist.”
Members of the National Education Association, during its annual convention, adopted a resolution that would have the group put up the cash so that all official NEA materials would “correctly characterize” the agenda of the Trump administration as “fascist.”
Corey DeAngelis shared several of the resolutions that were adopted by the NEA, saying in a Monday X post, “I just received a copy of the National Education Association’s resolutions that they passed at their annual convention. They kept them private this year.”
Smearing Trump with the F-word was a dead-end for Kamala and Walz last year, but it’s particularly shameful that the NEA wished to program a generation of kids to believe this idea. Naturally, the NEA doesn’t know it, but it’s also an indictment of America’s public education system. In February, when CBS’s Margaret Brennan absurdly claimed to Marco Rubio that JD Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” Mark Steyn responded, “I did not think it was possible to despise the ‘mainstream’ media more than I already did. In a society thoroughly moronized by Brain-Dead Brennan and her ilk, Hitler is the sole remaining historical figure anybody’s heard of. And they can’t even get that right. ‘Weaponising’ free speech? What does that even mean? In Germany, tweets get you gaoled but rape is just part of your ‘cultural tradition’. And CBS News knows which side it’s on.”
So does the NEA.
Flashback: The Left’s fear of fascism under Trump is the ultimate example of projection.
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Biden’s Team Scolded Reporters, Changed His Number After They Called Personal Cellphone: Report.
According to the book, [NYT White House correspondent Tyler Pager, the co-author of the upcoming 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America] obtained Biden’s personal number and called him directly on March 25, and the former president picked up.
Notice that the Times couldn’t be bothered to report this detail when it occurred, lest it alter the dynamic of the race, during the period when the Biden “Politburo” was still attempting some variation of the 2020 basement campaign to get the (p)resident across the finish line once again. And notice that as always throughout his four years in office, the figurehead of a president never pushed back against or fired a staffer who overrode him.
HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Superman Actor Calls MAGA ‘Not American’ For Enforcing Borders.
Sean Gunn on the MAGA backlash to Superman being called an immigrant: "People who say no to immigrants are against the American way." pic.twitter.com/XgivaD34PE
— Variety (@Variety) July 8, 2025
A smirking Variety scribe asked Sean Gunn about “MAGA’s” reaction to the suddenly political “Superman” reboot. The actor grinned through his response.
“It is exactly what the movie is about … we support our people. We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant and yes, the people we support in this country are immigrants. If you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say, ‘no,’ to immigrants are against the American way. They’re against what the American dream is all about,” Sean Gunn said.
“Truth, justice and the American way,” the unnamed reporter ironically added, quoting the Superman line that Hollywood loves to bury.
Gunn and the reporter are doing what the Left always does. They pretend there’s no difference between legal and illegal immigration. They also ignore the fact that an American can’t just waltz into most countries and immediately gain the rights and privileges afforded to that land’s citizenry.
Either way, Sean Gunn could have diffused the controversy. He might have restated his brother’s comments or simply reframed that messaging in a more welcoming manner.
We’ll know soon enough if…:
This is genius marketing. Free publicity, and people who would boycott Superman over something so dumb probably wouldn't have gone to see the movie anyway. https://t.co/NiTWrctrO3
— Ibuprofen Hippo 🪓🌲🔪🐋 (@JimJamitis) July 7, 2025
Or Hollywood pitting audience demographics against each other is the surest sign the studio knows it has a dud on its hands, and is just trying to gin up as much controversy as possible to goose the ticket sales, while creating a pre-postmortem as to why its film failed to live up to expectations:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
July 7, 2025
WELL THERE’S A REAL SQUARE CAT, HE LOOKS 1974: CBS Nudges Ken Burns Into Preposterous Claim PBS Isn’t Leftist, It Has ‘Firing Line.’
On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson interviewed Ultraliberal Ken about his new film on the American Revolution, but also supinely cued him up to make cockamamie arguments about PBS.
JOHN DICKERSON: Are you worried about the future of PBS?
KEN BURNS: Of course I am. And I’ve always been worried about it. In the 1990s, I think I testified in the House or the Senate, in appropriations or authorization about the endowments are about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a half dozen times.
JOHN DICKERSON: Make the case for PBS.
KEN BURNS: It is the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world. It’s a bottom up. It’s the largest network in the country. There’s 330 stations. It mostly serves, and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so shortsighted, it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only they get. [???] They also have not only our good children’s and primetime stuff, they have Classroom of the Air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather, emergency information. That we’re going to take away? This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left wing thing when this is the place that for 32 years gave William F. Buckley a show. And it’s – I mean it’s – and it’s – that show is, by the way, is still going on and moderated by a conservative.
This is a preposterous argument. Firing Line was the conservative exception to the liberal rule. They used it for exactly this purpose: to distract people from the leftist programming every night. Firing Line often had liberals on it. Other shows on PBS didn’t have any balance. [The last new episode of WFB’s Firing Line aired in December of 1999 – Ed.] It’s especially lame for Burns to claim the ersatz new version of Firing Line is “moderated by a conservative” when Margaret Hoover sells herself as a gay-rights activist and her husband is John Avlon, the Democrat candidate that Ken Burns maxed out with campaign money.
But that’s not quite as embarrassing as suggesting the hayseeds in rural America have no channels except PBS, and no cable or streaming or cell phones or internet. What happened to “CBS fact-checking in real time”?
Burns and Dickerson are both reasonably intelligent guys. So why does their ideology require that they pretend that it’s still the 1970s, and not an era of innumerable Websites, news outlets and social media platforms, not to mention near-ubiquitous satellite dishes, cable TV, and satellite radio. Why is Ken Burns pretending that PBS “mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only [one] they get?”
And even back in the bad old days of mass media, there was a lot of television programming besides PBS. As Iowahawk jokes:
OBAMA JUDGE BLOCKS DEFUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD IN OBBB:
The ruling simply halted the will of Congress in its tracks, leaving Americans and even seasoned legal professionals scratching their heads. How does a judge order the executive branch to ignore a duly-enacted statute without first declaring that statute invalid? On what grounds?
This isn’t just a technicality. It’s a direct assault on the separation of powers and the legitimacy of our system. If judges can simply override Congress whenever they don’t like the outcome, what’s the point of elections? Why bother sending representatives to Washington if their decisions can be nullified on a whim by an unelected judge with a political axe to grind?
Even those who despise Donald Trump and support abortion rights should be outraged. Every time a judge pulls a stunt like this, it chips away at the credibility of the courts and the very idea of self-government. If the courts can simply invent new rights for their political allies while ignoring the plain text of the law, we’re not living in a constitutional republic anymore—we’re living under the rule of lawyers.
Exit question: “While one can hope this is overturned on appeal, and I’d guess it will be, every time a judge does something like this, it takes another bite out of the credibility of the judiciary. If nefarious parties can simply stall their way to overriding elected officials with specious legal reasoning, then why even have elections?”
THE OMERTAS KEEP PILING UP: London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about.
And yet despite the scale of the atrocity visited upon London there has long been an awkwardness around the remembrance of 7/7. It has not been forgotten exactly. Prince Charles opened a memorial in Hyde Park in 2009, featuring 52 stainless steel columns to mark each of the bombers’ victims. And there has been a slew of insightful documentaries to mark the 20th anniversary this year on the BBC, Netflix and Sky. But 7/7 has never been invested with anywhere near the same cultural and political significance in Britain that 9/11 has for the US.
The disparity can be partially explained by the sheer magnitude of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers. But there’s a more important reason. The London bombings raise troubling questions about British society that 9/11 didn’t raise about America. After all, the perpetrators of the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were nationals from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – 9/11 could therefore be conceived as an attack mounted by people from outside the US. But that wasn’t the case with the perpetrators of the London bombings. They came from Leeds. And with the exception of Germaine Lindsay, who was born in Jamaica, they were all British born. 7/7, then, was an attack mounted by UK citizens. As former prime minister Tony Blair has put it recently, the London bombers ‘had been brought up in Britain and… enjoyed all the advantages of being British [and yet they still] wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country’.
* * * * * * * * *
And so on 7 July 2005, four young men arrived at London’s Kings Cross station with a plan to kill themselves and as many of us as possible. Because they believed they were pure, and we were not. It was an atrocity made possible not by the war in Iraq, but by a vicious Muslim identity politics. A vicious Muslim identity politics encouraged by Britain’s own elites just as much as by overseas Islamists.
This is why 7/7 has become the forgotten atrocity. Why Britain’s deadliest terror attack of the 21st century has left so little cultural imprint, and has had so little political impact. Because it raises uncomfortable questions, particularly about multiculturalism and integration, that the authorities do not want asked. But until we’re prepared to reckon with the homegrown sources of 7/7, the lessons from this calamity will remain steadfastly unlearned.
Better dead than rude, which is why a whole lot of Airstrip One’s recent history immediately goes down the Memory Hole: Rape Gangs and Liberal Silence.
MEET THE FIRST COMMUNIST TO SUDDENLY HATE CENTRAL PLANNING: LA Mayor Karen Bass confronts heavily armed federal agents on apparent immigration sweep through park: ‘Outrageous and un-American.’
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass confronted a group of heavily armed federal agents conducting an apparent immigration sweep at a local park on Monday, demanding law enforcement leave the greenspace.
Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the military units deployed by President Trump arrived at MacArthur Park in force, with the agents seen carrying rifles and traveling across the grounds on foot, horseback and in armored vehicles.
Bass, who was due to meet with California Gov. Gavin Newsom in the morning, showed up in the middle of the operation to yell at the agents to get out of the park, slamming the demonstration as a “political stunt.”
“They need to leave and they need to leave right now!” Bass yelled after getting off the phone with someone coordinating the officers.
“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege,” she told reporters following the confrontation. “It’s outrageous and un-American to have armed vehicles in our American parks.”
Presumably she means that last sentence ironically. In any case, the members of Fidel Castro’s Venceremos Brigade smile. And so does Barack Obama:
MARK STEYN: Drowning in Lies.
I have said before that we live in “a blizzard of lies”, but the gap between the Diversity Myth and reality widens daily, and the lies are becoming more brazen. In Germany the government has now launched a new campaign to warn patrons of its public baths that groping is verboten:
As you can see, in one poster, a white man is invading the privacy of a brown woman; in the second, a white man is grabbing the bottom of a brown woman; in the third, two white men are assaulting a brown woman; and, in the fourth, a predatory redhead is groping a brown man with a peg leg — presumably a Somali pirate whose storm-tossed galleon was forced to put into port at the Cologne municipal baths.
As Europe’s bestselling newspaper was obliged to point out, this advertising campaign is the precise inversion of German reality:
Elf Tage ist es her, dass acht Mädchen in Gelnhausen bei einem Schwimmbad-Ausflug sexuell belästigt wurden. Die mutmaßlichen Täter waren vier junge Männer. Alle vier sollen derselben syrischen Familie angehören.
Which means, more or less:
Eleven days ago, eight girls were sexually assaulted on a trip to the swimming pool trip at Gelnhausen. The alleged offenders are four young men. All four are said to be from the same Syrian family.
There’s a surprise — not.
Read the whole thing. At Hot Air, Beege Welborn adds: Apparently, Germany Is Facing a Plague of Teutonic Butt Grabbers. “Now, these brilliant behavioral efforts were designed by exactly the sort of person you might conjure up in your head if someone asked you to.”
Exit quote: “White women only distribute swords in ponds anyway. They haven’t molested one-legged boys in years. This will never work.”
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Kylie Jenner flew her lavish $73 million private jet to Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice and that single trip emitted the same amount of CO2 an average person would if he drove his gasoline car around the world three times.
This meme made the rounds last year at the height of Taylor Swift mania. It’s applicable to everyone who attended the Bezos’ wedding:
Related: Democrats retreat on climate: ‘It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts.’
Yes, setting Teslas on fire followed by the mass elite’s jet-powered commute to the Bezos wedding signaled the end of the good old days of radical environmentalism.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: An Elderly Lawmaker’s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?
A few weeks ago, my POLITICO colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC’s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? “Yeah, sure,” Norton said.
Coming on the heels of multiple stories about Norton’s alleged cognitive decline, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton’s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat “wants to run again but she’s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best,” a spokesperson told Wu. There was still no final decision.
It was all awkward and embarrassing — and did little to buttress Norton’s insistence that she’s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she’s running: “Yeah, I’m going to run for re-election.” And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that “no decision has been made.”
CTL-F “Biden” brings up only one result in the body of this Politico story:
It turns out Norton’s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss’ comments without it becoming a story: There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.
Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”
Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.
Those previous five years in the White House and on the campaign trail? Look into the light, please:
PHOTOSHOP DISASTERS:
"Actually I'm in such good shape that I bent the fence just by leaning against it" https://t.co/477UeLrrSJ
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 7, 2025
Pro Tip: The Content Aware Scaling Tool is extremely useful, but you still have to check your work afterwards.
HOW IT STARTED: “PolitiFact” declares Zohran Mamdani is not a communist in fact-check of Trump.
—David Rutz, Fox News, June 30th.
How it’s going:
For context, I went into the Wayback Machine to find the deleted posts in Mamdani’s Twitter thread:
I’m sure Mamdani will attempt to play some variation of the left’s “botched joke” get-out-jail free defense, but these things just keep happening to Mamdani. He’s not a witch; no word yet how he much enjoys playing Simon Says.
Related: If It Quacks Like a Communist: Zohran Mamdani Describes Himself as a ‘BMW Bolshevik’ in Old X Post.
IN NEW YORK, SCRAPPY LOCAL NEWSPAPER STRUGGLES FOR SURVIVAL: Times pushed ahead to avoid being scooped on Mamdani Columbia story.
The afternoon before a long holiday weekend isn’t always the best time to drop a major scoop. But the New York Times did not want to wait to publish its story about Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University in 2009, in which the paper reported that the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor then identified his race on a form as both “Asian” and “Black or African American.” Mamdani is of South Asian ethnicity and was born in Uganda.
The story, published late last week, came as the result of the release of hacked Columbia University records that were then shared with the Times. The paper believed it had reason to push the story out quickly: It did not want to be scooped by the independent journalist Christopher Rufo. Two people familiar with the reporting process told Semafor that the paper was aware that other journalists were working on the admissions story, including Rufo, a conservative best known for his crusade against critical race theory.
In a message, Rufo confirmed to Semafor that he had been reporting out the piece before the Times published its version of the story. Rufo said that he would be publishing additional details about the incident on his Substack in the coming days.
Not surprisingly, Rufo is having fun trolling Mamdani’s fellow leftists at the Times:
Bummer to get scooped, but kudos to my friends at the New York Times for being first to publish the story https://t.co/SSOw62Hnxa
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 7, 2025
Earlier: New York Times Struggles to Explain Why It Reported News to Traumatized Readers.
(Classical reference in headline.)
July 6, 2025
CRYING WOLF:
Texas officials are absolutely right to call out NWS for treating every storm like it's the storm of the century. Since Katrina there has been a significant shift in the way NWS forecasts and issues storm warnings. These days EVERY storm is the "storm of the century." EVERY storm…
— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) July 6, 2025
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Other than indoor plumbing, air conditioning, a more-than-doubling of lifespan, analgesics, medicines, and abolition of worldwide slavery, what has capitalism ever done for us? https://t.co/2DdAhYxvmz
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) July 6, 2025
YOU DON’T HAVE TO FALL IN LOVE, YOU JUST HAVE TO FALL IN LINE: Hayes Demands Concerned Democrats Fall In Line Behind Mamdani.
Key to the MSNBC critique of the Republican Party in the Trump Era has been the implication that if Democrats ever nominated an insane person, they would stand on principle and put country over party. On Friday’s edition of All In, Chris Hayes proved that to be a pack of lies as he demanded Democrats who have “said really vile things” about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani fall in line because all Mamdani wants is to make life more affordable.
While most people were having fun with their 4th of July celebrations, Hayes was doing stand-up comedy by pretending Mamdani’s bumper sticker slogans about affordability should be treated the same as his actual policy proposals of high and racially-motivated taxes, rent control, government-run grocery stores, or his history of wanting to seize the means of production[.]
And no wonder Al Sharpton’s network is so high on New York’s likely next mayor: Zohran Mamdani shared ‘sick’ video mocking Hannukah and ‘cosplaying Jews,’ advocacy group charges.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE LEFT’S SICK RESPONSE TO THE TEXAS FLOODS WILL MAKE YOUR BLOOD BOIL:
When tragedy strikes, you can always count on the left to weaponize heartbreak for political gain. The catastrophic flash floods in central Texas—already the deadliest weather disaster of 2025—have claimed over 50 lives, including 15 children. Families are shattered. A Christian girls’ camp in Kerr County was virtually obliterated, with desperate searches underway for the missing. Yet, as rescue teams work around the clock and communities cling to hope, the left has seized the moment to launch a grotesque smear campaign against Donald Trump and red-state governance.
Instead of mourning the dead or supporting the heroic first responders—who have already rescued more than 850 people from the floodwaters—leftists are spinning a narrative that blames Trump-era budget decisions for the devastation.
When Obama took office, the far left declared “We Are All Socialists Now.”
Now with a chance to ding Trump and Texas Gov. Abbott, it’s time for the left to dust off the Katrina playbook and declare “We Are All James Wolcott Now.” Will normies recoil from such an unsympathetic tone? Of course, but the left doesn’t seem to be all that into coalition building at the moment.
UPDATE: Former ABC News employee who blamed GWB for 9/11 blames Trump for Texas flooding:
Rosie O’Donnell blames Trump for the Texas tragedy because he cut wasteful spending.
NWS had EXTRA staffers during the storm and warnings were issues hours in advance.
This is TDS pic.twitter.com/LpzZfgblQN
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 6, 2025
IT’S COME TO THIS: New York Times Struggles to Explain Why It Reported News to Traumatized Readers.
This week, the New York Times experienced an uprising in its ranks and among its readers. The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned. Why? Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The newspaper took the additional step of publishing a cringing explanation of why it reported the news that Mamdani lied on his Columbia application in claiming to be black.For liberals, it was an utter nightmare. For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react.The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.
The problem is when a news eco-chamber for many readers is shattered by an errant outbreak of journalism. Many Times readers live within a hermetically sealed news silo, relying on MSNBC for cable, The New York Times for print, and BlueSky for social media. You can literally go all day without being exposed to an opposing view or fact. Then suddenly this happens.
The result is often anger. It is the same response many in higher education have to “triggering” views being expressed on campus by conservative or libertarian speakers.
And groveling to bitter and angry subscribers:
No need to grovel. This was your first piece of real reporting in about 5 years. You outed Mamdani as a fraud according to his own standards. This Indian rich kid tried to take the affirmative action spot of a black person. Why do you have to “explain” why you exposed him? https://t.co/SzoQQxHeFQ
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) July 6, 2025