Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 15, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY:

Glenn dubbed it the “Question of the Decade” back then. A few days earlier, Iowahawk spotted some other now-questionable urban leftist shibboleths:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 15th, 2025

DOGE: The Early Years.

Remember, it’s Obama, Biden, Clinton and Gore approved!

UPDATE: Why does this leftist hate so many of her party’s recent leaders?

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 15th, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: CNN/PBS Host Christiane Amanpour Finds Environmental ‘Silver Lining’ in Coronavirus Epidemic. “So if there is a silver lining to this crisis, it’s visible in the skies above China. The dramatic slowdown in manufacturing and driving has caused a reduction in carbon emissions. We’ve all seen these NASA satellite images which show the improvement in China’s air quality.”

Flashback to the early years of the Obama era, when both John Kerry and Claire McCaskill praised the Great Recession for reducing carbon emissions. (Never mind unemployment, which was explained away as “funemployment!”) Or to put it another way: Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 15th, 2025

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Joe Biden Commits to Picking a Woman As His Running Mate.

As PJM’s Paula Bolyard presciently tweeted at the time, foreshadowing Ketanji Brown Jackson’s career-defining moment two years later, “Please define ‘woman.’”

Of course, Joe would eventually have difficulties himself on this topic: Another Biden Interview Fumble: He’s Proud to Be ‘The First Black Woman to Serve With a Black President.’

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 15th, 2025

NEWSBUSTERS PODCAST: No Media Apologies, Five Years After Covid Lockdowns.

We’ve reached the five-year anniversary of when the U.S. government locked down the country to curb the Covid pandemic. It lasted much longer than “Two weeks to stop the spread.” CBS and PBS explored the anniversary, but there were no apologies for getting so much of the “science” wrong and using the pandemic so mercilessly against Trump and Republican governors in an election year.

This wasn’t a time for the networks to reflect on everything they exaggerated or simply got wrong, from the “science” of mask mandates and six-foot separations to refusing to grant any credence to the idea that the virus came from a lab in China. Most importantly, it’s downright weird that the Left can warn of “authoritarianism” under Trump when most Americans never had their freedoms more squashed than in 2020.

Flashback to last year: Bill Maher Mercilessly Drags the Media for Being Dead Wrong About COVID.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 15th, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announces closure of Ohio bars, dine-in restaurants. “During a press conference, Gov. DeWine added that establishments can stay open for carry-out and delivery but what we can’t have is people congregating and seating.”

Also five years ago today: Fauci open to a 14-day ‘national shutdown’ to stem virus.

That (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) “14-day national shutdown” will the topic of tomorrow’s “Covid Five Years Ago Today” post.

Posted at 7:40 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 15th, 2025

March 14, 2025

THE NOT-SO-FINAL COUNTDOWN: CBS Environmental Journo Slams Trump EPA: We Have ‘Less Than 10 Years’ to Save Planet.

During the “By the Way” segment on Friday’s CBS Mornings Plus, CBS environmental correspondent David Schechter decried the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Administrator Lee Zeldin by giving away the game on the climate alarmists by reupping a line that’s been deployed for at least five decades, which is we have “less than ten years” to save Earth from climate change.

Co-host Adriana Diaz twice teased his appearance and spelled doom about what deregulation at the EPA would mean, ominously wondering “what” the “big changes at the EPA” “could cost you” as the “administration…mak[es] good on the President’s campaign promise to roll back climate protections.”

Flashback to CBS in 1972: CBS News’ Walter Cronkite Warns of Coming Ice Age (Video).

And Dan Rather in 1982:

Beyond CBS:

● President ‘has four years to save Earth.’

—The Grauniad, January 27, 2009.

● “A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”

—The Grauniad, February 21, 2004.

● Warming expert: Only decade left to act in time.

—NBC News, September 14, 2006.

● U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

—AP, June 29, 1989.

And finally, this classic:

Found via Jim Treacher, who tweets, “Every 10 years, we only have 10 years left.”

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

RICH LOWRY: Tesla terrorism only reveals the left’s impotence.

The left, with Soros-funded organizations taking a big role, has its next project — an intifada against the country’s largest maker of electric cars.

The progressive fear and loathing of Elon Musk now may be greater than that directed at Donald Trump.

* * * * * * * *

The heretofore trend-setting, eco-conscious vehicle for the affluent is now a hate object, a so-called swasticar, the equivalent of a Volkswagen in 1930s Germany.

Everyone has a right to peacefully protest, of course, and to refuse to buy whatever products they wish.

But when the left engages in direct action, it’s always a sign you should take steps to protect your property and person.

Teslas have been set on fire, spray-painted and otherwise damaged. Charging stations have been burned and dealerships vandalized.

Shots were fired at a Tesla showroom in Portland, Ore.

A woman in Colorado who attacked a Tesla dealership, including with a Molotov cocktail, was subsequently arrested near the location with more makeshift bombs in her car.

A Tesla charging station in South Carolina was also Molotov-cocktailed. The vandal spray-painted “LONG LIVE UKRAINE” on the ground.

In Ukraine, they prepared Molotov cocktails to blunt the advance of Russian tanks closing in on Kyiv; in America, progressive activists use them to stick it to an entrepreneur whose politics they don’t like.

Of course, Teslas have been painted with swastikas, as if a streamlined federal government is an indicator of incipient fascism.

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which the son of John and Yoko is a voice of sanity:

Joel Kotkin adds: The climate has changed on climate change.

Immiseration has become central to green ideology. According to Robert Jackson, a Stanford professor of earth system science, Americans should learn to like living on one-quarter of their current energy, essentially turning the clock back to consumption patterns of the 1950s. This does not make an appealing proposition to the public, as the likes of Bill Gates and even the head of a powerful and prominent UK trade union have noted.

Political scientist Roger Pielke’s “iron law of climate policy” suggests that “substantially increasing the costs of energy, which supports every aspect of modern life, is off the table as a policy option for achieving deep decarbonization.”

Fortunately, there are other less damaging ways to reduce emissions, by using natural gas instead of coal and building emissions-free nuclear plants. Gradual shifts in cars with greater efficiency — such as hybrids — are more likely to win marketplace acceptance than the current insistence on electrical vehicles. (EVs also have their own considerable environmental drawbacks, due to the heavy use of carbon-intensive materials.)

Mark Kelly’s Musk Derangement Syndrome is causing him a definite “past performance is no guarantee of future results” moment: ‘Trashing the Climate to Own the Cons’! Here’s What Dem Sen. Mark Kelly Traded in His Tesla For.

Exactly. Like Al Gore selling out to oil-rich Qatar a decade ago, Mark Kelly has just declared “Mission Accomplished” to radical environmentalism:

Earlier: “Seriously, it’s like Musk is some kind of evil genius who figured out how to separate lefties from billions of their dollars by appealing to their idiotic climate religion…and then made them despise themselves for doing it. He should get a Nobel Prize for that.”

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

IDIOCRACY WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE TO LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Dumped Host Joy Reid Set to ‘Scream Bloody Murder’ Over Being Axed from MSNBC – ‘She Knows Where the Bodies are Buried and Is Getting Set to Torch Network to Ground!’

An unrepentant Joy Reid is set to scream bloody murder and seek vengeance against MSNBC for canceling her show, The ReidOut , and unceremoniously kicking her out the door, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

The 56-year-old anchor, who had been with MSNBC for over a decade, is said to be furious over what she sees as a backstabbing betrayal from the very network she helped build.

An MSNBC insider said: “She’s livid, and she knows everything. She’s ready to burn the house down.”

Including any future television career for herself, apparently:

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

DOGE, THE EARLY YEARS:

Well, we know Obama wasn’t very serious about this cost-cutting effort, because Joe was allegedly in charge it. (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” to coin a phrase.) Note that Joe’s speech is slowing down a bit in this 2011 video, there are several edits in his portion of the clip, and he looks a little glassy-eyed, but he’s not yet the withered husk of 2020-2024.

UPDATE: Flashback: When Did DOGE Really Launch?

Obama and Biden promised taxpayers a DOGE-esque housecleaning. They conceded the point of its necessity. Eventually, voters were going to demand delivery on those promises. They whetted the appetite for an outsider to come in and clean house — and even then, it took Trump a second opportunity to make good on it.

To be fair, though, Obama and Biden weren’t the first to virtue-signal on that point. Bill Clinton and Al Gore made a big production over their study on “reinventing government,” launching what certainly looked like a DOGE-esque effort to put the recommendations into action. Like Obama, Clinton put his VP in charge of the effort, which went exactly nowhere after the press conference announcing it. It sure seems like a consensus existed for a major executive branch overhaul for decades before Mr. Musk came to Washington.

Dems were happy to go along with both Obama and Clinton, because they knew it was all kabuki — but now they’re terrified — and furious — that Trump and Musk are actually implementing a plan to shrink government.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

SUMMER RERUN SEASON STARTS EARLY THIS YEAR ON TELEVISION: ‘Mercury Poisoning Is Back:’ Colbert Freaks Out Over EPA Deregulation.

Joe Biden became president in 2021, which was not that long ago, but according to CBS’s Stephen Colbert, repealing Biden-era EPA regulations is a public health crisis of grave consequence. Colbert made the remarks on Thursday’s edition of The Late Show, where he also expressed his lack of interest in the financial cost of regulations.

Reaching for the alcohol, Colbert declared, “Trump also, and I want to be fair, is ruining everything. For instance, his EPA, his Environmental Protection Agency, announced plans to repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. I mean, just even hearing that stresses me out. I need a drink, man. There you go. Oh, my god. That’s water.”

Moving on, Colbert added, “The EPA is also going to overturn limits on soot from smokestacks and restrictions on emissions of mercury. Mercury poisoning is back, baby! Pretty soon your horoscope’s gonna read, ‘This month, Mercury is in retrograde and also in your brain. Blaaaaaaggahhhaa.’”

Colbert’s source for this was a New York Times article that included a note that the soot and mercury regulation was a Biden rule, but Colbert made it seem like Trump was turning the clock back to the 1870s.

Or maybe 2003, when James Lileks wrote: “For all these accusations to work, you have to believe that Republicans want poisoned water. You have to believe they drink different water than everyone else. And, of course, they do:”

Doubt it? Switch parties. Join the GOP, and see what happens: cheerful clean-cut uniformed men show up the next day, and take you off the city water lines. They’ll connect you to the special Republican water system that crosses the nation, supplying pure clean perfect water to GOP households. You can get it without Fluoride, too, as a sop to the Birchers and Goldie holdovers.

And there’s more! They’ll also install special GOP “screens” for your windows — they’ll trap airborne pollutants as small as three molecule across. You’ll also have access to rich, satisfying Republican sunshine, which tans you twice as fast — just look at Bob Dole! — and you’ll enjoy even-tempered Republican weather all year long. This is why Republicans don’t care about pollution, or bad water, or the ozone layer, or global warming: for all practical purposes, they’re not living on the same planet as the rest of the people, so they don’t care at all what happens to you.

True! All true! Invite a Republican over and hand him a glass of water. Watch him avoid drinking it — sometimes they spill it, sometimes they just say “I had water earlier today, thanks anyway” — and sometimes they sneak a little sponge out of their cuff, put it in their mouth and pretend to drink. Oh, they’re clever.

Well, if this isn’t true, then perhaps . . . maybe . . . there’s another side to this arsenic debate. Is it possible? Could it be?

Nahh, that’s just crazy talk.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: The Democrats are the Working Man’s Party.

The New Hotness? The Democrats’ Brahmin Left Problem.

The Democrats have become and remain today a “Brahmin Left” party. “Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites, including of course our own Democratic Party. The Brahmin Left character of the party has evolved over many decades but spiked in the 21st century. The chart below illustrates this trend.

The chart does not show the most recent elections but election surveys agree that education polarization spiked further upward in both 2020 and 2024. Indeed, in the most reliable 2024 election survey the differential between unmodeled college and non-college Democratic support (compare the blue line in the chart) reached 27 points—literally off the Piketty chart and more than twice its level in the 2016 Piketty data.

It has not escaped the notice of many Democratic-sympathizing analysts that this ever-increasing education polarization—Brahminization—of the Democrats presents existential dangers to the party. Not only might the continued desertion of working-class (non-college) voters fatally undermine the Democrats’ electoral formula over time, the party’s fundamental purpose is being rapidly obliterated. What does it even mean to be the “progressive” party if the most educated and affluent voters are your most enthusiastic supporters? What does it mean to be “progressive” if working-class voters think your party mostly represents the values and priorities of those educated and affluent voters not their values and priorities?

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

UNEXPECTEDLY: Steven Soderbergh Compares Trump to Movie Villain.

Steven Soderbergh misses the Old Hitler.

The “Sex, Lies and Videotape” auteur told Variety how much he pines for President George W. Bush.

God, the George W. Bush-era seems like the golden age now. Who would have thought we’d find ourselves wishing that things were that simple?

The two-term Republican president was slammed as Hitler throughout his White House days. Kanye West even told a telethon audience that Bush didn’t “care about black people.”

That was news to African nations that received billions in aid from the 43rd president.

Soderbergh shared that thought and more during a Variety Q&A tied to his latest film, “Black Bag.” The thriller stars Michael Fassbender as an intelligence officer tasked with investigating his wife for treasonous ties. The film co-stars Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Pierce Brosnan and Regé-Jean Page.

“God, the George W. Bush-era seems like the golden age now. Who would have thought we’d find ourselves wishing that things were that simple?” Everybody who votes Republican. Flashback:

Strange, how a man once so reviled has gained stature in the memory. How we cheered when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency! How dramatic it was when David Frost cornered him on TV and presided over the humiliating confession that he had stonewalled for three years. And yet how much more intelligent, thoughtful and, well, presidential, he now seems, compared to the occupant of the office from 2001 to 2009.

Nixon was thought to have been destroyed by Watergate and interred by the Frost interviews. But wouldn’t you trade him in a second for Bush?

—The late Roger Ebert in the lede to his December 2008 review of Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon.

For the institutional left, every Republican president or presidential candidate is Hitler, and then is inevitably rehabilitated as a wise, thoughtful statesman once the latest Hitler runs and/or wins.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Upstart ‘Classic Learning Test’ Gets a Testy Welcome From the SAT.

The battle over [the Classic Learning Test (CLT)] also reflects the profound forces transforming K-12 education. As growing numbers of Americans seek alternatives to traditional public education, an infrastructure of charter, private, and home schools has expanded to support them. The CLT, which grew out of the classical education movement, is a recent addition to that infrastructure, a bridge between high school and college.

“The [Classic Learning Test (CLT)] is another option for students that tests a different aspect of education,” said Chester Finn, an expert on assessments and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “It has merit as a test for college admissions.”

For decades, the College Board’s SAT and its chief rival, the ACT (which was bought last year by a private equity firm), have dominated the college admissions market. They are not simply exams – they are touchstones of academic achievement that have extraordinary influence on education, giving shape to what students study in school and strive for in life. High-performing schools display their students’ SAT and ACT scores online as a badge of honor.

William Slater, Tennessee lawmaker: “I’m not going to allow a monopoly to keep us from doing good education policy in Tennessee.”

As CLT founder Jeremy Tate sees it, those tests have played a role in making education overly utilitarian and job-focused. It has lost its soul, leaving students bored and uninspired with learning, says Tate, a former public school teacher in New York City. He is not surprised at all that public education is afflicted with sky-high absenteeism and record low achievement.

Tate is a central figure in an educational revival that aims to restore some of the wonder in learning. The great books of Western civilization and a focus on big questions of virtue and justice form the centerpiece of classical instruction. Science, math, and technology are important, too, but as pieces within the broader classical approach.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

HOW IT STARTED:

● Rep. Maxine Waters Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

● Maxine Waters: ‘Americans should be out in the streets screaming’ for Trump’s head.

● Democrat Maxine Waters Makes Public Call For Harassment & Violence Against Members of Trump Administration.

● Maxine Waters Attacks The Declaration Of Independence On The 4th Of July.

● Dershowitz: Maxine Waters Used KKK Tactics to Intimidate Chauvin Jury.

● Rep. Maxine Waters Asked For Police Escort As She Encouraged Protestors To ‘To Get More Confrontational.’

● As Maxine Waters Calls for Riots in the Streets to Continue, Minnesota National Guardsmen Shot At.

How it’s going: Rep. Maxine Waters Believes Trump Wants Violence and Is Working Toward a Civil War.

—Twitchy, yesterday.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 14th, 2025

March 13, 2025

RIP: Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva dead at 77. “Grijalva, D-Ariz., died of lung cancer-related issues on Thursday morning, his office announced in a statement. In Congress, the southern Arizona Democrat was most known for his work on the House Natural Resources committee.”

Posted at 5:54 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2025

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: There’s Plenty of Toilet Paper in the U.S. So Why Are People Hoarding It?

Australia has also suffered from panic buying of toilet paper despite plentiful domestic supply. A risk expert in the country explained it this way: “Stocking up on toilet paper is … a relatively cheap action, and people like to think that they are ‘doing something’ when they feel at risk.”

This is an example of “zero risk bias,” in which people prefer to try to eliminate one type of possibly superficial risk entirely rather than do something that would reduce their total risk by a greater amount.

* * * * * * * * *

Americans aren’t alone in panic buying to ensure they have plenty of squares to spare. Venezuelans hoarded the commodity in 2013 as a result of a drop in production, leading the government to seize a toilet paper factory in an effort to ensure more supply. It failed to do the trick.

Unexpectedly — but as America’s Newspaper of Record “reported” five years ago today: Bernie Sanders: ‘We Must Seize The Means Of Toilet Paper Production!’

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2025
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