Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 7, 2025

THIS IS CNN:

Based on his take on Luigi Mangione, I assume this is Donie’s response to the L.A. riots and last weekend’s antisemitic Molotov Cocktail enthusiast:

 

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST TESLA: Now the Dems Want the Guy They Called a Nazi for Six Months to Come Back to Their Side.

Khanna’s case was primarily based on the idea that having Musk on their side would benefit the Democrats. He stated: “Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump’s unconstitutional administration. I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.”

Khanna also said of Musk: “We should ultimately be trying to convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with. A commitment to science funding, a commitment to clean technology, a commitment to seeing international students like him.”

Wait a minute. The Democrats have more of the values with which Musk agrees? Really? Does that mean that the Democrats are a National Socialist party? Of course they aren’t. They’re an international socialist party, and it’s grimly ironic that they’re now hoping to win the allegiance of a guy they’ve been smearing as a National Socialist for the last six months.

Is Ro Khanna unaware of the words of his California colleague, Rep. Robert Garcia, who back in Jan. 2025 denounced Musk for making what he claimed was a “Nazi salute,” and adding: “He didn’t just do it one time—he did it twice for emphasis. If you talk to anyone like historians, folks actually study the Nazis and study this actual kind of disgusting display, they’ve been very clear about what that was. He should not just apologize. He should be condemned for those kinds of actions. So gross.”

Then there was America’s sweetheart, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-You Wanna Open a Tab?) declared: “In this country, we fight Nazis. We don’t celebrate them.This is the United States of America. And I don’t care what Elon Musk is doing behind a presidential seal. In this country, we hate Nazis. Kind of like a foundational, defining thing. Two of probably the most foundational, defining things about American history is that we beat the Confederates and we beat the Nazis. And I don’t know what side people may be on today, but I still am not rocking with anyone sympathetic to Nazis.”

Wow, wait until 2025 AOC discovers what she and her Green Nude Eel architect were saying and doing in 2019!

And as I wrote yesterday, it took Dick Cheney and George W. Bush almost 20 years to lose their Nazi-branding among the left. It only took took Elon 24 hours.

Flashback: “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact” and toss it down the Memory Hole.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

THE ISSUE IS NEVER THE ISSUE. THE ISSUE IS ALWAYS THE REVOLUTION: New: Violent Rioters in Paramount, CA Create Havoc, Pelt Fed. Law Enforcement Vehicles With Rocks.

Looks like the chaos is continuing in Los Angeles.

Protesters tried to block ICE vans on Friday with one person finding out it wasn’t a good idea, when he appeared to fall in front of a van. Then the protesters went to the federal detention facility, got violent, and caused chaos there as they damaged property and threw things at law enforcement officials. The California SEIU President David Huerta was among the people detained, and the U.S. Attorney later said he was arrested for allegedly interfering with officers.

Homeland Security said that they were surrounded by 1,000 people, and it took over two hours for the LAPD to arrive despite being called “multiple times.”

The rioters also defaced the building with graffiti, including anarchist symbols, “Kill ICE,” “Dead cops,” and anti-Elon Musk statements.

And displayed plenty of Mexican and at least one Palestinian flag:

 

Flashback: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

QED:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

RICO prosecutions, asset seizures, give them the full J6 treatment and more.

But wait, there’s more:

And once Trump activates the Insurrection Act, he can recognize a new California Legislature, which can then vote to split the state into 5 red states and one blue state. A majority of Congress can approve it and it’s done. Okay, probably not going to happen, but this is the can of worms the left risks opening.

It’s been done before.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

NEWSOM 2028 CAMPAIGN KICKING OFF NICELY:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE WAS JUST PARANOID FICTION:

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: To be fair, the destruction of L.A. is very a group project: Attempted Obstruction of L.A. ICE Raid by SEIU President Makes Him New Poster Child for ‘Resist Trump.’

And:

MORE:

Posted at 2:51 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

KURT SCHLICHTER: Patriots Are the Losers in the Trump v. Musk Feud.

My parents were Scottish and German, so they didn’t actually yell at each other. I can only imagine that this is how little kids with Latin parents feel like when Mami and Papi are fighting. People fight and then they make up. Now, some people are speculating that this is a giant put-on designed to blow people’s minds, and if I hadn’t been alive for the last decade of insanity, I would write that off completely. It’s possible this is some sort of 4D chess match between grandmasters that is beyond my capacity to comprehend. More likely, Elon is just really, really angry. And  when somebody swings at Trump, he swings back

But it’s time to stop swinging. We need both of these guys on our team. We need Donald Trump on his A game, and we need Elon doing what Elon does. Elon’s at terrific personal risk here if this relationship goes completely off the rails. He’s got zero friends on the left. They are out for his blood. They will literally take everything he owns and throw him in jail – if not try to murder him – should the Republicans lose power. How do I know? Because we saw what they did to Donald Trump when he was on a temporary power hiatus.

But Republicans still love Elon Musk, and the Republican Party needs guys like Elon Musk, not just for his money but for his brains. There’s no going to the left for him. There’s no sitting out politics. He got in the game and now there’s no escape. Elon Musk needs the Republican Party because the Democrat Party wants him in a cell or a hole. The Republican Party needs Elon Musk because he’s Elon Musk.

Additional thoughts from Joel Kotkin: Musk’s outbursts reveal a deeper rift in MAGA: Trump is squandering the chance to build a coherent populist programme.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

SIMON BILES AND RILEY GAINES DUKE IT OUT OVER TRANS ATHLETES:

Okay, buckle up folks, because something truly bizarre happened this week that you probably didn’t see coming. We’re talking about Olympic golden girl Simone Biles suddenly deciding to take a bizarre, unprovoked swipe at none other than Riley Gaines, the fearless advocate for saving women’s sports. I mean, seriously? Simone Biles attacks Riley Gaines? Didn’t have that on my bingo card.

Most of you know Riley Gaines. She’s the former NCAA swimmer who experienced the absurdity of competing against a biological male, Will “Lia” Thomas, firsthand. Since then, she’s become a national voice, tirelessly fighting to protect female athletes and the integrity of women’s sports. She’s been instrumental in getting legislation passed, and even President Trump signed an Executive Order on this issue back in February.

The whole dust-up started on X after Gaines reacted to a tweet from the Minnesota State High School League congratulating the Champlin Park Rebels for winning the state championships. Comments were disabled on the post because this is the team that cheated its way to victory by having a male pitcher.

Read the whole thing to see Biles sadly towing the establishment left’s party line:

Posted at 2:16 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

THIS INTERVIEW WITH THE SHOWRUNNER FOR ANDOR IS PRETTY INTERESTING:

The show is more political than anything Star Wars had done before. The villains are all participants in a dictatorship and the heroes are all independent people who become victims of that dictatorship in various ways. There weren’t a lot of 4th wall breaking clunkers of the kind you see in most politically minded shows these days. They aren’t beating you over the head with the message.

And yet, as I was watching it I kept having the same thought: This is a show about China that thinks it’s a show about America.

So I was interested to read this interview with showrunner Tony Gilroy because NY Times columnist Ross Douthat isn’t shy about a) saying he loved the show and b) framing it as a left-wing show. What’s interesting is that Gilroy seems genuinely not to like this framing, as if admitting his own politics would be a failure of some kind.

In a portion of the interview that John Sexton doesn’t quote at Hot Air, Gilroy rather simplifies the history of Hollywood:

Gilroy: I mean, the bar is higher. Seriously, man. This is a trickier conversation than most of the ones I have to have on this. I listened to the podcast that you did with the — I don’t know the gentleman’s name. The one who’s trying to revive the vibe shift into the ——

Douthat: Jonathan Keeperman.

Gilroy: Right wing. Yeah.

Douthat: Right-wing publisher. Yep.

Gilroy: You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive?

Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.

For the last 50 years, Hollywood has been “Progressive or liberal.” But prior to that, as Neil Gabler wrote in his 1988 book, An Empire of Their Own, the moguls who founded the industry were quite conservative, in their politics, their worldview, and in the product they released. Did the best of their movies have less “empathy” than today’s product? It wasn’t until 1960s as they aged and lost control over the institutions they founded, and the mostly leftist “Easy Riders-Raging Bulls” crowd of New Hollywood took over. In a 2009 interview with the late Andrew Breitbart, Peter Robinson asked, “How did Hollywood go from Republican David Selznick, who produced Gone with the Wind to liberal David Geffin. What happened?”

Andrew Breitbart: Well two things, the studio system ended and now the celebrities are in charge.

Peter: The studio system ended, what bearing did that have on the politics?

Andrew: Well, there were people, actors have always been held in low regard by society and the businessmen who ran the studios cleaned up after their messes around town. I mean that is sort of the LA Confidential movie, you know. That changed in the 1960s to a great extent, but I would attribute a majority of this to the cultural revolution in the late 1960s and at the end part of John Wayne’s career, he no longer had the swagger. He was 60 something years old, the movie were no longer original. They were doing the same hackneyed thing over and over and over and simultaneously you know, there is a youth revolution going on in the country. And while the left was never able to take over the White House while George McGovern was not able to be victorious, Hollywood was taken over by the left and they have never relinquished it. And in fact I would argue that the right has abrogated its place in Hollywood because they were told that you are not wanted here anymore and they never fought for it. So, I don’t know who I have more contempt for, the left for its totalitarian behavior of those that disagree with them or the right the conservative movement just for allowing it to happen and not to fight back.

In his new book, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola’s longtime editor and sound designer, recalls running into George Lucas in New York shortly after Star Wars debuted in 1977, and Lucas was stunned by the massive runaway hit he had created:

I reminded him of his pre-Star Wars attempts to get Apocalypse Now off the ground, and that what interested him about that story was that it grappled with the success of the ‘rebel’ Vietnamese against the overwhelming might of the American military empire.

George: ‘Star Wars is Apocalypse Now in a galaxy long ago and far away.”

Me: Ironic that millions of Americans are now cheering for the Rebels to defeat the overwhelming might of the Empire?

It’s difficult to picture old Hollywood greenlighting Apocalypse Now, and it was only by burying that same theme that Lucas was able to get funding for Star Wars.

John Sexton concludes that “At the end of the day, Andor was made for a mostly American audience by Hollywood progressives who think it’s a show about the American right wing in some sense. That’s how I see it, but of course your mileage may vary.”

But then, that was the theme of the original Star Wars, and Lucas began writing the first drafts of his script a half century ago. Maybe it’s time for the “progressives” of Hollywood to find some new ideas about the country they inhabit.

Posted at 1:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

GRETA THUNBERG AND THE GAZA CLOWN SHOW:

Her Asperger’s diagnosis became mythologized, seen as a superpower, a divine lens through which she perceived what the rest of us supposedly could not. Her social awkwardness was cast as purity. From the start, she was denied the ordinary messiness of youth. No room for uncertainty, no space to stumble, no chance to figure things out without the world watching. There were no years of trial and error, only slogans, superficiality, and scripts. She wasn’t raised. She was constructed. Greta became a pawn in adult ambitions before she ever had the chance to be a teenager. And now, she’s trapped, not just publicly, but developmentally. There’s no path out of the role she was assigned. She can’t evolve, can’t step back, and can’t show doubt, because doubt would crack the mythology. Growth would threaten the brand. Every appearance must top the last. Every stance must be louder, starker, more “historic”. Climate, capitalism, Gaza, colonialism — every issue fashioned into an end-times narrative. The machine she rides runs on moral absolutism, and if she slows down, it leaves her behind. Her parents should be ashamed — not just for allowing it, but for facilitating it. They didn’t protect her from the spotlight; they handed her to it.

And the worst part? She’s not even the main beneficiary. The NGOs, the think tanks, the activist collectives — they are. They need their martyr. They need their icon. Because an adult saying these things would be just another angry activist. But a child, frozen in time, still radiating that wounded urgency from 2018 sells.

But she’s not a child. In 2023, before she settled into her new role as an antisemite, Ezra Levant wrote, “Greta Thunberg, you know the name. She’s a young lady, a girl, really. And she is the face of the climate movement. Except the thing is, she’s not actually that young anymore. I mean, listen, I wish I was just 20 like she is, but she is 20. That’s not a teenager anymore. It’s certainly not a girl. Although meeting her in person today reminded me of how physically small she is. And I don’t know if it’s a medical condition or just a particularly unique look, but she truly looks like someone who is 12 or 13.”

She’s now 22. Since yesterday was the anniversary was D-Day, it’s worth mentioning who else was that age: “The average age of a soldier landing on Normandy was just 22.”

They were most definitely men. And despite that moon face, Greta no longer gets to play the permanent child victim role anymore.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2025

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH ERASING HISTORY:

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

June 6, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Doctor Who Is Finally Dead — Let It Rest In Peace.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

BY MANY YEARS: Right Media Scooped Jake Tapper On Joe Biden’s Cheap Fake Presidency.

The truth is that the story of Democrats using Biden as a mere figurehead was reported on as early as 2018 by right-leaning outlets, including The Federalist. In August 2021, The Federalist published my piece entitled, “Democrats Got What They Wanted in Joe Biden: An Autopen In the White House.” Just seven months into his presidency, I wrote that Joe Biden was only a president in the technical sense, and that White House and media Democrats had to know Biden was not actually discharging the president’s duties himself.

All of this is now widely acknowledged. Where was Tapper then? Perhaps too busy bashing people like Lara Trump for bringing up the topic years ago. Even in Tapper’s apology to Lara Trump, he conceded that it came only because he had a book coming out.

Thompson recently won the coveted White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual award for “overall excellence.” His publisher boasted that it was “for his exclusive reporting … around Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate: what led to that moment, and what happened afterward that ultimately drove the president out of the 2024 race.”

Not included in that list was any mention of journalism questioning the president’s fitness for office. Yet to buttress his street cred for the new book, Thompson launched into a mea culpa at the awards dinner, admitting that “being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it.”

It says a lot about the state of journalism when the profession’s top honoree has to stand in confession for failing to do his job.

Journalists used to be recognized for uncovering previously unknown facts. Tapper and Thompson want credit for missing and even hiding them. Yes, they found religion, the virtue of honest reporting — after the election. In any other profession, resignations happen for such colossal failure.

The “Original Sin” wasn’t the White House cover-up, nor was it being deceived by staffers, as Jake asserts. It was the sin of denial. Corporate media didn’t miss the story. They actively worked to not see it, or worse, to help cover it up.

QED: “Original Sin” Co-Author Alex Thompson calls Joe Biden “a good man and a well-intentioned one.”

Who occasionally partied at Nuremberg After Dark:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN CIVIL DISCOURSE: ‘Sickening:’ DHS Rips Dem Boston Mayor’s Seeming Comparison Of ICE Agents To Neo-Nazis.

“Mayor Wu comparing ICE agents to neo-Nazis is SICKENING,” DHS wrote on X. “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected gang members, murders, and rapists. Attacks and demonization of our brave law enforcement is WRONG. ICE officers are now facing a 413% increase in assaults.

More here: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Made To Answer For Comparing ICE Agents To Nazis.

The Boston mayor defended her city’s refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities during a March 19 “State of the City” address, where she criticized “presidents who think they are kings.” The White House pushed back by calling Wu a “radical mayor” who “puts violent criminal illegal aliens first.”

Wu’s 2021 mayoral campaign received over $300,000 from Gary Yu, the founder of Boston International Media Consulting, with the help of a Chinese civic association that he leads, the Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively reported. Yu is listed as an official by an agency of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence and intelligence service called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), and operates as a recruiter for the Chinese government.

Yu has organized Chinese Americans in Massachusetts to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrat lawmakers, including Wu. He has personally donated $45,515 to various Massachusetts Democratic politicians since 2018, including $3,200 to Wu, according to the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.

So she’s comparing ICE to national socialists, while being bankrolled by international socialists. Got it.

Related: Democrats Want to Unmask ICE Agents But Not Anti-Israel Campus Protesters. “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and other Democratic figures are calling for the exposure of ICE agents, demanding that their masks be removed so they can be identified. Members of ICE wear masks because they are facing death threats against them and their families. Democrats are putting their lives at risk over this. Of course, Democrats have never called for members of Antifa or the anti-Israel campus radicals to be unmasked. Curious, isn’t it?…Go back and look at our extensive coverage of anti-Israel protesters on college campuses over the last two years. You know what you’ll find they all have in common? All of the protesters are wearing masks. Democrats have never called for them to be unmasked. That tells you everything you need to know.”

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: The Hemi V-8 Is Back: ‘We Screwed Up,’ Says Ram CEO. “The Hemi-powered Ram 1500 is back, and it goes on sale this summer for the 2026 model year. It won’t be the standard engine in the pickup, but if you’re a cylinder counter and can’t live without eight of them, it’ll cost up to $1,200 to upgrade. Order books are open now. ‘Everyone makes mistakes, but how you handle it defines you,’ said Kuniskis. ‘Ram screwed up when we dropped the Hemi—we own it and we fixed it.’ The brand shifted to a six-cylinder engine lineup for 2025, which buyers didn’t like.”

Posted at 4:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

THE SCANDAL OF DOGMATISM:

In the prologue to his new book The Last Supper, Paul Elie remembers being a young man in the 1980s, “riding the D train with The Village Voice and the Pensées in a black messenger bag.” His reading material was fitting preparation for this book, a masterful survey of pop culture—if a less sure treatment of religious controversy—in the ’80s. His canon is capacious: A-sides and B-sides, major works and minor, early stuff and late, live performances and music videos, installations, short films, feature films, essays, novels, memoirs, biographies. Elie deftly intercuts figures and artifacts in an elaborate chronology of the decade. It is a decade in which, he says, we are still living.

Elie describes the long 1980s as the full flowering of postsecularity—that phase of modernity in which religion rebounds from its losses, but religious authority does not. Religious topics and images suffuse a public that is rife with variance and contestation. The sacred mixes with the profane, if indeed the profane can still be called profane. Beheld by Andy Warhol, a soup can is sacralized, announcing that “presence is everywhere.” If this age has a dogma, it is that the ordinary is extraordinary.

A religious age produces religious art. But the art of the postsecular age, Elie proposes, is “crypto-religious.” Elie uses this term to denote art that “incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Its styles are many: enigmatic (Bob Dylan, U2), rebellious (Madonna, Sinead O’Connor), sensuous (Prince, Leonard Cohen), ironic (Warhol), esoteric (Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt), blasphemous (Salman Rushdie, Andres Serrano), satanic (Robert Mapplethorpe). In every case, the artist’s religious profession is elusive. Crypto-religious art always “raises the question of what the person who made it believes.”

Elie’s canon encompasses any and every religion, but Catholics, more or less lapsed, are his most numerous and most typical subjects. Elie, of course, is the longtime Catholic correspondent for The New Yorker. But there is a further necessity. Catholicism is the great instance of a doctrinally and culturally thick religion that relaxed during the long 1960s, cutting loose millions of adherents and cutting slack to those who remained, even as its imperious phase lived in memory. So it supplies in spades the raw material of crypto-religious art: a public heritage that can be invoked, evoked, traduced, and remixed by artists who are shaped or exercised by it while disregarding its strictures.

Mark Judge dubs Elie’s book an exploration of “Art, Religion, and Culture in the ’80s:”

Put more simply, The Last Supper explores the deep hold Christianity still held on many people during the 1980s, including famous actors, artists, and writers. They took their religion seriously. Elie is a magnificent writer, and The Last Supper is deeply reported and researched. It powerfully evokes a time and place. Take, for example, Elie’s description of New York City. In the 1980s “the city was characterized by its celebrity nightlife: discos, launch parties, black limousines, lines of cocaine on the counters of mirrored bathrooms. And it was defined by squalor and decay.”

Despite these signs of moral decay, pilgrims to the city saw excitement and opportunity:

And yet those of us who had come from somewhere else were struck by by the stone-and-iron solidity of the city, not by the signs of decay. New York City at that moment was as ancient-looking as Rome. It was an unreconstructed place, free of the shopping malls and space-age sports arenas that had transformed the mainland. It was still in touch with the dark forces of clan and tribe and territory, of sin and retribution, and the Old World feel of the city was what set it apart from continental America.

Elie concludes that “the city was powered by the shared belief that it was the center of everything and that being a New Yorker gave your life meaning and purpose. It was this belief that drew you there and held you there.” Anyone who was alive at the time and familiar with the place can vouch for the accuracy of this assessment. It was a thrilling time to be a young artist, or even a young fan.

Artists like Madonna, U2, Sinead O’Connor, Martin Scorsese, and Andy Warhol saw the spiritual in art, film, dance, everyday objects. “As moderns,” Elie writes, “they affirmed the integrity of ordinary experience, in defiance of the Church; as Catholics, they saw the ordinary as imbued with a supernatural presence, in defiance of modernism in the arts.” This caused them “to express their Catholicism furtively—and cryptically.”

While ‘80s artists were creating “crypto-religious art,” at the Free Press, Madeleine Kearns describes Catholicism on the upswing: How Catholicism Got Cool.

Why are so many adults in the once-secularized West seeking to be baptized into the Catholic Church? I’ve been reporting on the rise in religiosity for a while now, and have heard many theories: Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community. The Church of Rome offers all these things, but so do other religions. So: Why Catholicism?

“In an age of instability, people are attracted to ancient traditions; in an age of therapy-speak, there’s something appealing about the tough demands of Catholic doctrine,” Dan Hitchens, a senior editor at First Things and former Catholic Herald editor, told me. “Catholicism also has a visual and aesthetic heritage which has translated well into online culture. Catholics have turned out to be surprisingly good at using the internet to evangelize.”

To find out more, I tracked down a handful of the several thousand or so American adults who were baptized this past Easter, and spoke to those who hadn’t been raised Catholic, to find out why the religion appealed. Most of them were in their 20s, which makes sense: The Catholic boom is especially notable among Gen Z. A 2023 study by Harvard University found that the percentage of Gen Zers identifying as Catholic jumped from 15 percent to 21 percent from 2022 and 2023.

Why am I reading this story in the Free Press rather than the New York Times? Perhaps this cultural hot take from the Gray Lady a month ago explains why: “The New York Times just ran a 1,400-word story to explain what cross necklaces are.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

ROGER KIMBALL: Is Biden’s autopen mightier than the sword?

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?

The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.

Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

As I note in another Speccie piece, on January 17 of this year, 2,490 pardons and commutations were issued over Biden’s name, more than any prior president had granted in the course of his entire presidency. Who decided to issue that wholesale clemency? And who signed the documents ratifying the decision?

“The issue,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich wrote on X, “is not President Biden, who was clearly cognitively incapable of these acts. The issue is who was doing them and what did they get for doing them?”

Gingrich is right. We do not yet know the answers to those two questions, but we might soon. Yesterday, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the Attorney General and White House Counsel to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.”

Curiously, this is yet another aspect of the “Biden” administration where Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are unwilling to name names.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

PADDY CHAYEFSKY, CALL YOUR OFFICE! An Anti-American Propaganda Network Encouraged Violent Protests at Columbia—Then Produced a Documentary Lauding Them.

The Encampments, produced by the nonprofit BreakThrough Media, tracks the Columbia University students who orchestrated anti-Israel protests at the school last April. Apple TV+, which offers the film to rent for $9.99, bills it as an “insider” look into a “historic moment that continues to reverberate across the globe.”

But it may actually serve as a propaganda coup for a sophisticated network of nonprofit groups funded by pro-CCP tech mogul Neville Roy Singham.

BreakThrough Media, which claims its film debuted as the #3 documentary in Apple’s documentary category, is the media arm of Singham’s propaganda empire. Singham, the husband of CODEPINK founder Jodie Evans, has poured millions of dollars into two nonprofits, The People’s Forum and the Justice and Education Fund. According to tax records, those groups gave more than $1.4 million in grants and office space through 2023 to BreakThrough Media, which operates a popular YouTube channel that features interviews with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist group, and episodes with titles like “How the pro-Israel lobby hijacked Judaism.” The People’s Forum and BreakThrough Media also share an address, according to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank housed at Rutgers University.

The Singham network’s involvement in both the protests and the documentary underscores the extent to which America’s enemies see the anti-Israel campus movement as a means to destabilize the U.S. The NCRI report concluded that the Singham network serves as “the conduit through which CCP-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S., advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda.” According to a New York Times report, Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”

Several BreakThrough Media executives worked on The Encampments, which has so far received buzzy reviews from The Guardian, the New Yorker, and other outlets. BreakThrough journalist Kei Pritzker is a co-director of the movie. Ben Becker, the editor in chief of BreakThrough, is an executive producer of the film, and the movie’s credits acknowledge contributions from BreakThrough host Eugene Puryear. Both Becker and Puryear are founders of the Party of Socialism and Liberation—a far-left organization whose past members include Elias Rodriguez, the suspect accused of murdering two Israeli diplomats outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.

It really is “The Mao-Tse Tung Hour” from Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network come to life. (Language NSFW):

 

Posted at 1:36 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

HIS FACE! LOL! Watch Scott Jennings as CNN Panel Pushes Stealing Healthcare from Americans for Illegals. “Dude is cool as a cucumber, no matter how crazy they get about illegals deserving healthcare on our dime. Watch this and pay special attention to Jennings’ face as he sits back and takes in all the craziness.”

Cloward and Piven are smiling as well, albeit for different reasons:

John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist adds that in 2025, “by ‘healthcare,’ Democrats also mean transgender surgeries/mutilation. So their position is actually worse than ‘free healthcare for illegals.’ It’s ‘free trans surgeries & hormone therapy for illegals.’ Good luck running on that, Dems.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 6th, 2025

June 5, 2025

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