Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Jurassic World Rebirth — A Cinematic Abortion.

OLD AND BUSTED: Steve Coogan playing Alan Partridge, hapless British everyman.

The New Hotness?

Or as Martin Prince put it…

INSIDE F1: THE MOVIE — How Brad Pitt hit 180mph (with Lewis Hamilton’s help).

What if you made Top Gun, but with cars? And if Tom Cruise isn’t available, what if you cast Brad Pitt?

The idea was simple, as the most successful in Hollywood often are. It started with the fact that Top Gun: Maverick had made $1.493 billion in 2022, thrilling a worldwide audience who had been stuck at home for two pandemic-heavy years. The movie was produced by the industry heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean, Beverly Hills Cop) and directed by Joseph Kosinski: together the two men had the sort of brainwave that could go on to make a further billion.

The result? F1: The Movie is a racing movie that aims to bring the live thrills of Formula 1 and the behind-the-helmet personal dramas of the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive to the big screen (and later the small). Taking place over several key races, it’s the first movie that effectively captures the details and daring of F1.

Funded by Warner Bros and Apple, a studio and a streamer, it has had full co-operation from the official Formula 1 body (Lewis Hamilton is a producer) with a video game and soundtrack tie-in to boot. This is the modern way to make an enormous budget film — proving that the movies did not die, they just needed to collaborate more.

“I’ve been doing this for over 50 years and the same thing has been echoed again and again — that the cinema business is done,” Bruckheimer, 81, says. “There was VHS, DVDs, multiple-channel TV, but we’re still doing it.” He smiles. “You have a kitchen, right?” I do. “But you also go to restaurants?” Guilty. “Why? Because the food is good and you want a change. So all we need is to make films people want to leave their home for. That’s our job. And if we fail then, yes, we have a problem.”

The titan behind behemoths from Top Gun to Armageddon and Con Air, Bruckheimer has made glossy action films that have changed Hollywood, for better or worse — ushering in today’s multiplex era. Yes, he has had his flops, but there is a reason he is still making films in his eighties. First, he lives and breathes them. Second, he is very good at making money.

It’s a great popcorn flick (I watched it this afternoon in a nearly-packed theater) that assumes that the audience knows nothing about Formula One rules, produced a man who has (pardon the pun) the formula for making crowd-pleasing summer hits:

JAMES PIERESON: What, to the New York Times, Is the Fourth of July?

The editors and journalists at the New York Times plan to celebrate the Fourth of July with the rest of us. One has to wonder why.

After all, the far-left newspaper has declared, through its sponsorship of the 1619 Project, that July 4 is a bogus holiday and the Declaration of Independence was (and is) a fraud. The real “founding” of the country occurred, not on July 4, 1776, with the separation from Great Britain and the publication of the Declaration, but in 1619 when the first slaves arrived on American shores. While most Americans will celebrate the nation’s independence on July 4, there is little reason for the Times to do so.

Read the whole thing.

BURDENED BY WHAT HAS BEEN:

(Curiously though, despite Hitler being in the Reich Chancellery, she’s still able to tweet away without any fear of reprisals.)

Still, could be far worse. Imagine what she’d be saying about America today if she had become president: Fact Check: Yes, Harris Once Said European Explorers Brought Devastation, Violence and Disease.

Barry’s not coping well today, either:

RICH LOWRY ON BANANA BALL: Mom, apple pie and the Savannah Bananas — America at its rollicking best.

Major League Baseball is currently debating various rules changes to improve the game — when what it really needs is more players wearing capes and doing backflips.

That, at least, is the lesson of the Savanah Bananas, the barnstorming team that has come up with a madcap version of baseball that’s widely popular and is selling out stadiums around the country.

The Bananas, or the Nanners as devotees call them, sold out Clemson University’s Memorial Stadium back in April, with 81,000 in attendance.

Tickets for a couple of Nanner games at Yankee Stadium in September are selling on secondary sites at rates significantly higher than any Yankees game.

Who’s Yankee ace Max Fried compared to Dakota Stilts, the Bananas pitcher who bestrides the mound standing at 10 feet and 9 inches on, yes, stilts?

Read the whole thing.

CALVIN COOLIDGE ON INDEPENDENCE DAY:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Read the whole thing.

THE GRAY LADY WILL SELL NO BAD NEWS ABOUT DEMOCRATS UNTIL ITS TIME: NY Times: There Really Was a Gang Problem in Aurora, Colorado.

Last September, in the waning months of the election, the NY Times published a story titled “How the False Story of a Gang ‘Takeover’ in Colorado Reached Trump.”

Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., said he was at home on Tuesday night watching the presidential debate and bracing for the worst…

“They’re taking over buildings,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re going in violently.”

Mr. Coffman was contrite on Thursday as he told that story. After all, he had helped create the tall tale now sullying his city’s reputation.

* * * * * * * * *

And the general response from the left was a lot like the NY Times story above. They claimed it was a false story used by Trump to attack migrants.

Today, the Times published a rebuttal of sorts about the same incidents. The tone of this one is very different. It’s headline reads, “Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated.

Funny how the Gray Lady always wants to make sure that every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed in reporting a story that either negatively impacts Democrats during a presidential race, or might benefit the Republican candidate, even if it means taking months or years to inform their readers of a huge story: Almost Two Years after 2020 Election, the New York Times Discovers Hunter Biden Laptop and Corruption Investigations Are Real.

If you are really industrious, you can dig 20 pages into the A section of today’s New York Times and find a 1,700-word news story by three of its top reporters, relating that the Justice Department’s investigation of President Biden’s son, Hunter, is not merely a tax-matter. Turns out that prosecutors are probing his penchant for cashing in on his father’s political influence, through payments by overseas entities for which he did not register as a foreign agent.

Well, I’ll be damned!

Even better, if you wade 23 paragraphs into the story, you will learn that prosecutors are examining emails between Biden and his business associates that come from “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. [Hunter] Biden in a Delaware repair shop.”

You don’t say.

This has been going on for quite a while at the Times; as Byron York wrote on September 24th, 2008:

Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase “God damn America.” Wright’s comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright’s quote in its news pages. Until today.

Similarly, it took the Gray Lady a whole year to discover the “Luv Guv’s” crimes and misdemeanors in 2020:

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported in 2022: New York Times Announces They Have Finally Confirmed The Watergate Tapes Are Authentic.

WELL, HE JUST LOCKED UP RACHEL DOLEZAL AND ELIZABETH WARREN’S ENDORSEMENTS: Zohran Mamdani Said He Was Black on Columbia University Application.

I guess that means he identified as black on his Bowdoin College application as well, the place where he did get in and go to school. Did Bowdoin College give an advantage to Black students at the time? I don’t know for certain but if it did then Mamdani would have gotten an advantage over other applicants.

He told the Times these applications were the only instance he can remember where he identified himself as “Black or African American.” The Times says it wasn’t able to identify any speeches in which he’d referred to himself in this way.

Maybe this was a one off but if so does that make this better or worse? It suggests he wasn’t dumb enough to make this claim out loud but he did do it on applications where a) it could benefit him and b) no one would ever find out he was lying. Indeed, it’s likely no one would have ever known if he hadn’t won the mayoral primary (raising interest in his biography) and if someone hadn’t hacked Columbia’s application data. It reminds me of this story I wrote two years ago. What’s to stop people from just lying on their applications to gain an advantage? Not much it seems.

It goes without saying that a conservative who tried this would be crucified for it, but the rules never really seem to apply to Democrats, or Democratic Socialists in this case. Is this going to matter to any of his voters in NYC?

As John Sexton concludes, “The memes should be amusing though.”


And:

BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.

The revolution that William F. Buckley, Jr., set into motion itself remains far from complete. In truth, and in Buckley’s mind, the main idea was actually to create a counter-establishment that would eventually produce not a revolution, but a “counter-revolution.”

—Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus (1018 pages, Random House, 2025)

An accounting of the “life and revolution that changed America” might well have justified nearly 900 pages of text, but that was not the life of William F. Buckley, Jr. To be sure, his was a very consequential life, as well as an entirely fascinating life, not to mention a very full, if sometimes frustrating life to boot.

The result here is itself thoroughly fascinating, quite full, but occasionally frustrating as well. The phrase “if only” seems to apply, as in “if only” Buckley’s had actually been a revolutionary life….

To be sure, this is the life of a brash thirty-year-old conservative who founded a magazine that insisted that it was time to “stand athwart history yelling stop.” And yet here we are seventy years later, conservatives of all ages, still standing—or reeling—against history, while still yelling—or at least pleading—stop.

For that matter, Buckleyite conservatives are still waiting for, and working toward, the peaceful revolution that is both very much needed and might yet come, or the revolution that might well change America and renew and restore America all at the same time.

Did Buckley himself think that his had been a revolutionary life? If so, he either didn’t tell Sam Tanenhaus or Tanenhaus prefers to remain silent on the subject. Does Tanenhaus think so? Once again silence reigns. Would Tanenhaus have approved of such a revolution? Silence still reigns.

Regarding that last question, James Piereson’s review of Tanenhaus’ 2009 book, The Death of Conservatism, has some answers:

Like the liberal writers of the 1950s, Tanenhaus wants to see a conservative movement that accommodates rather than opposes liberalism, and thus one that will accept its role as subordinate to the dominant liberal tradition in American life. He acknowledges that there is an important role for conservatism, but it must be a “genuine” conservatism that preserves but does not seek to overturn liberal gains. In any event, he says, conservatives will have little choice but to accommodate to liberal leadership because the election of 2008 has effectively ended the era of conservative dominance in American politics. Much as liberals had to accommodate to conservatives after Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives will now have to accept the newly dominant status of reform liberalism, or else accept the consequences of being turned into “the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight.”

Incidentally, reading Piereson’s review, written during the heady Tea Party era, really does feel a bit Pompeii-like these days, particularly after seeing the Harris campaign aggressively courting Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush last year.

MSNBC REGULAR WANTS OTHER COUNTRIES TO SANCTION U.S.: ‘We Are The Bad Guys.’

Regular MSNBC guest Elie Mystal called on other countries to sanction the United States, claiming that especially after the American military carried out strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, “we are the bad guys on the world stage.”

Mystal, who also serves as justice correspondent for The Nation, joined ex-MSNBC host Joy Reid on her new eponymous show to discuss the targeted strikes against Iran, and they both appeared to take the side of the world’s most prolific and eager state sponsor of terror.

“Joy, I’ve argued — and I don’t say this lightly — but our country needs to be sanctioned,” Mystal declared. “We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace to not only free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point.”

Somebody needs to read the room – since when does the socialist, regulation-obsessed MSNBC care about “free people?” To the point where, “your kids are not your own:”

ROLLING STONE’S ‘FACT CHECK’ ABOUT ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS EXACTLY THE PROPAGANDA YOU’D EXPECT:

The Democrats know they have a problem with a guy who says out loud what many of them do actually believe, which is where some in the media are helping them run cover when the commies in their midst say the quiet parts out loud.

The Left can always count on Rolling Stone for assistance with the gaslighting. According to RS, claims about Mamdani having communist leanings are among the “viral and persistent lies” about the possible next mayor of NYC:

While today’s zombie version of Rolling Stone is happy to inflict Mamdani’s radical chic politics on its readers, even its founder was smart enough to know when to get out of Dodge, as Joe Hagan wrote in Sticky Fingers, his 2017 biography of Jann Wenner:

Wenner said it was [his then-wife] Jane who ultimately catalyzed Rolling Stone’s move to New York [in 1977]. Her paranoia and anxiety had spiked to uncomfortable levels in the wake of the Patty Hearst episode. “San Francisco got very tricky at one point, because you had the Zodiac, the Zebra, and the SLA,” she said. “It was too small. There were too many people that were just too closely removed from the SLA and the Mansons…there was something creepy happening at that point.”

* * * * * * * *

Wenner once told Town & Country magazine that he would never take Rolling Stone out of San Francisco. Wasn’t the Bay Area the very essence of Rolling Stone, its integrity, its history, its point of view? But Ralph Gleason was dead, and the success of the Patty Hearst story had rocketed Wenner to a bigger stage, where he could hear the blare of [then-Saturday Night Live bandleader] Howard Shore’s sax. When Rolling Stone published a complete history of the Haight-Ashbury in 1975, by Charlie Perry, it was both an homage and a tombstone. The Hearsts were the last bit of glamour left in town, and Wenner had already done the backstroke in their pool, his visit captured for posterity by Garry Trudeau, who caricatured the scene in Doonesbury. Indeed, San Francisco was the Old World; New York was the New. Despite the recessionary gloom and high crime rate, New York slushed with ad dollars and teemed with Mailers and Wolfes and Ephrons who vied for choice checkered tables at Elaine’s, the hub of intellectual and literary life operated by the rotund matron Elaine Kaufman. Wenner was halfway there, so why not go all the way?

As Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”

OLD AND BUSTED: Bomb Canada, The Case for War.

The New Hotness? And now let’s bomb Glastonbury.

A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver.

Street drummers, liberal politicians, provo vegans, radical rappers, spiritual healers, Billy Bragg, that bloke who owns Forest Green Rovers, druggies, tattooed blue-haired hags, almost the entirety of middle-class London – all evaporated. I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way. One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.

One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery

The BBC would cease to exist, too. It identifies Glastonbury as an expression of the UK ‘coming together’, which shows you how much it understands about the country. It has poured millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money into its coverage, and 400 staff were there last weekend, including the director-general, Tim Davie. Or at least 400 staff were actually working there – I’ll bet another 400 or so were there in their little tents, desperate to surf the vibe or whatever the phrase is. All those people, then, and they still couldn’t get it right.

Perhaps bombing is overkill, but “A lack of charges or punishment for the Glastonbury performers would be the ultimate confirmation of Britain’s two-tier policing and judiciary.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Prestigious Virginia K-8 School Hit with Civil Rights Complaint over Environment ‘Hostile to Jews.’

How hostile? This hostile:

The Nysmith School, known as one of the top 10 institutions in the country for students between kindergarten and eighth grade, allegedly expelled Brian Vazquez and Ashok Roy’s three Jewish children in March, after the parents complained about its “unwillingness to respond to anti-Semitic harassment of their 11-year-old daughter,” according to a copy of the complaint the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed with Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares.

The complaint accuses the tony school—a feeder institution for the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Falls Church—of fostering an environment “that is hostile to Jews,” suggesting that the hatred displayed on America’s college campuses has also infected younger students.

The school “allowed anti-Semitism to take root in her class” over the course of several months, including with a social studies project that saw students promote Adolf Hitler as a “strong historical leader.” That project “was shared with the entire school community” and contributed to “a pattern of persistent and severe anti-Semitic harassment,” the complaint alleges.

Jim Treacher adds: DC-Area Schoolkids Taught to Harass Jews and Admire Hitler.

October 7 opened the floodgates on this antisemitic hatred, and now it’s mainstream on the left. I’ve never seen any of those Charlottesville guys on Fox News, but you can turn on CNN or MSNBC at any hour of the day and hear someone defaming the Jews.

At this point, America might actually be more antisemitic than Europe. Bob Vylan is being dropped from festivals in England, Germany, and France for chanting “Death, death to the IDF.”

As Treacher concludes, “This won’t end well. And I have no time for anybody who’s trying to deny it because they want to win elections. Best of luck, NYC!”

JIM GERAGHTY: Joe Biden Emerges — to Lament the Reversing of His Record.

Since leaving the presidency, the 82-year-old Biden hasn’t completely disappeared from the public eye, but his public appearances have been few and far between.

He’s done one major televised interview, with the ladies of The View. His office has intermittently released brief statements, such as his insistence that he “made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.” (Note the irony of Biden insisting he was always aware of what he was doing and signing and did not simply trust his staff’s directions and requests . . . through a brief written statement distributed to the press by his staff.)

As with Biden’s speech to the conference of the National High School Model United Nations, there was not a lot of media coverage of the remarks of the former president, beyond a little local television coverage. As far as I can tell, no transcript of Biden’s remarks has been released.

Perhaps the most extensive coverage of Biden’s remarks that we can find are from the Wall Street Journal, in an article under the headline, “Biden, in Rare Remarks Since Presidency, Warns His Accomplishments Are Coming Undone.”

Biden is quoted as saying, “Many of the things I worked so damn hard, that I thought I changed in the country, are changing so rapidly.”

You can almost hear everyone who voted for Trump answering, “Yes, that’s the point.”

* * * * * * * *

Let’s also point out that if Biden is lamenting that his legacy is being destroyed right before his contact-lens-assisted eyes . . . he has a lot to do with that! In the past months, we’ve seen whole bunch of books detailing how a slew of videos taped for the 2020 convention were deemed unusable, as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all”; how he couldn’t remember the names of national security adviser Jake Sullivan and communications director Kate Bedingfield; how Senator Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that the president had no idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy; how in the early months of 2024, the Biden campaign’s high command debated whether Biden could get away with refusing to debate Trump; and how Biden couldn’t get through a single 2024 debate practice session.

Just how durable a legacy did Biden and his top staffers think they were building under President Mr. Magoo?

Finally, from that article in the Journal:

Johnny C. Taylor Jr., SHRM’s president who joined Biden on stage after his address, asked him what he would most like to be remembered for.

“Being a good father,” Biden responded.

Beg pardon?

Oh, that’s right, the former president already did that.

But not a very good grandfather: “‘Every single day, I contact every single one of my grandchildren,’ Biden, who as president repeatedly failed to acknowledge the existence of the granddaughter his son, Hunter, fathered out-of-wedlock, claimed.”

SWING AND A MISS! Hakeem Jeffries Generates a Meme Storm Trying to Look Tough With a Baseball Bat.

The Democrats really are just overgrown theater kids. No matter how cringeworthy their last stunt was, rest assured that they will find a new stunt that will make everyone wince even harder with embarrassment.

As President Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ returned to the House of Representatives last night, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, needed to try something to make himself look tough in his opposition to the bill (even though he has no power to stop it if Republicans hold together).

This is Jeffries, on Instagram, ‘looking tough’:

Based on Cynical Publius’ take on the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and considering that post-Trump, the Democrats have chosen to brand themselves as the party of death and violence, no wonder Jefferies is posing as a pint-sized version of Robert DeNiro’s Al Capone from The Untouchables:

Which is why, based on his past statements, Jeffries recommends not delaying further:

He’s really become an excellent salesman for the BBB:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● Shot: When will the #MeToo movement address pornography?

—Madeline Fry Schultz, the Washington Examiner, January 21st, 2020.

● Chaser: Democrats Should Become the Pro-Porn Party.

—Elie Mystal, the Nation, yesterday.

Taylor Lorenz approved, to boot (unexpectedly):

As John Podhoretz noted in an October 2018 GLoP podcast at Ricochet, at the height of the #MeToo cultural revolution and the left’s concomitant Kavanaugh hysterics:

So two years ago, yeah, everybody, everybody on the left was freaking out. Because Mike Pence said he wouldn’t go out to dinner with a woman who was not his wife. And now that would seem to be, that would seem to be exactly the kind of standard that would be necessary in order that that is the thing when people say, yeah, men shouldn’t be afraid. Now, men should be very afraid, the culture has changed, and they better behave well because they should be afraid, well, hewing to a standard according to which you only go out anywhere in public with your wife would fit entirely that model we live in a world in which you can make used and or you can be credibly accused of things. So you better only be in the company of your wife, right, say and, and this this is what we got from them two years ago about Pence.

So that’s why I say it’s situational. I think this is just classic liberal, leftist and Democratic you know, sort of all arms fire, anything that comes to hand you throw at the problem that you face, which is you don’t like the right, you don’t like its policies, you don’t like the vision of the country or the world that they’re going to portray and all bets are off and all arguments are merited and justified.

A decade ago, Salon wanted to nationalize TV news and Hollywood:

“Like [the late communist Pete] Seeger and the FDR cargo cult, Salon also harbors turn-the-clock-back fantasies of their own: Last month, the publication called for the nationalization of the news media because it was uncomfortable with the glut of right-leaning news and opinion led by — you guessed it! — Fox News. (Hmmm — I wonder if someone in the FCC read that article?) Now the Website wishes to turn the clock back on the film industry because of a perceived glut of independent films.”

Will Mystal and Zohran Mamdani attempt to seize the means of pornographic production and demand a nationalized Pornhub? Ladies and gentlemen (and all genders in-between), welcome onboard AmPorn!

QUESTION ASKED: