Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 22, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED:

The Moo Hotness? The Cowgorithm!

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

COLUMBUS RISES AGAIN: Toppled Statue Now Reborn at the White House.

On Sunday, a new statue of Christopher Columbus was installed on the White House grounds, as part of the run-up to this summer’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The best part? The new statue incorporates parts of another Christopher Columbus statue damaged by rioters in the 2020 “Summer of Love” riots.

A new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer that protesters destroyed six years ago. 

The 13-foot, one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 – then dumped into the city’s inner harbor – was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

The statue has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Artists retrieved shards of marble belonging to the wrecked statue from the harbor that were used in the recreation – and reached out to the White House after officials in Baltimore refused to put the new monument up, according to the organization.

More here: White House installs Christopher Columbus statue made from remains of toppled sculpture. “President Trump signed a proclamation last year hailing Columbus as an American hero. ‘Columbus Day — we’re back, Italians,’ Trump declared after signing the proclamation. ‘We love the Italians.’”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: 

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

GIVE ‘EM HELL, HAIRY: Truman Begets Roseannadanna.

A great president in many ways, Truman befouled American rhetoric by his casual use of the word “fascist.” In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, “fascism” referred to a specific mostly-European political/economic philosophy. The term was sometimes applied to Americans who, by and large, were actual fans of actual fascism (e.g., Father Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund). But in 1948, Truman bleached the meaning out of the word in order to make it an all-purpose left-of-center term for “people we don’t like.” Just before that year’s presidential election, the New York Times ran a headline:

“PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … REPUBLICAN VICTORY WILL THREATEN U.S. LIBERTY.”

Tom Dewey had been a hard-hitting prosecutor and bane of organized crime, but by 1948, he was a bland, inoffensive, Eastern Establishment Liberal Republican. His greatest contribution to American politics was engineering the 1952 Republican candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower—whom Truman had attempted to recruit for the Democratic nomination in 1948. Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, labeled the mustachioed Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake.” Post-election, the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote:

“No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.”

Such was the existential threat of Truman’s fevered diatribe.

Truman’s invective simultaneously immortalized the insult and stripped it of meaning. Shamefully, he called Dewey a fascist while the corpses of those slaughtered by actual Fascists and their Nazi allies were still rotting in mass graves. But, with the precedent set, Truman’s successors applied the fascist label to, among many others, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. (Truman narrowly won over Dewey, so perhaps the fascist ploy worked for him.)

Read the whole thing. This clip of Angela Davis in 1972, employing massive amounts of vocal frrrrrryyyyyy, imagines Richard Nixon’s first term as the twilight of Weimar Germany, rhetoric that would be repeated by Kamala Harris in 2024 and early 2025, while simultaneously seeking the endorsement of two previous Hitlers, Dick Cheney, and the aforementioned Dubya: (Davis was and is a big of fan of totalitarian international socialism, of course.)

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY:

How far left is The Nation? This far: 

The magazine was also supportive of the new Soviet Union. It published a eulogy of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin by Russian writer Maxim Gorki, who called the Soviet leader “the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present.”5

During the Cold War, the magazine became a home for some Soviet apologists. In 1946, Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief who won the Pulitzer Prize but later became infamous for having covered up the famine in Ukraine orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, praised Stalin’s purges in the pages of The Nation. He called them “a general cleaning out of the cobwebs and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.”6

The magazine praised Stalin when he died in 1953.6 The magazine also contributed to efforts to exculpate Alger Hiss, a State Department official convicted of perjury related to his activities as an agent of the Soviet Union. Even after the declassification and publication of decrypted intercepts that proved Hiss spied for the Soviets, then-Nation publisher Victor Navasky continued to assert Hiss’s innocence.7

The Soviet Union was not the only communist state for which The Nation offered cover. Its pages covered up the crimes of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and his new People’s Republic of China. An editor, Maxwell Stewart, was the chairman of a communist Chinese front group.6

During the Greek Civil War, The Nation’s editor, Freda Kirchwey, praised the Greek communist guerillas. During her tenure, The Nation also endorsed friendship with the Soviet Union and opposed the Cold War.6

But it was not until the 1970s that The Nation published its most infamous example of “whataboutism”—dismissing Communist crimes by claiming American misdeeds–of a communist regime. In 1977, it published “Distortions at Fourth Hand” by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. In the article, both men denied that a genocide was taking place in Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia even as evidence from refugees was indicating killings on a mass scale.8 Estimates of the death toll from the genocide exceed 1.5 million people.9 The United Nations would ultimately conclude that the Khmer Rouge regime had committed genocide, and a joint UN-Cambodian tribunal would sentence three surviving Khmer Rouge officials to life imprisonment.10

“Unexpectedly,” The Nation is also Dan Rather-approved: Dan Rather to Headline $200-a-Person Fundraiser for The Nation Magazine.

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Schools Named for César Chavez Face Renaming Debates After Assault Allegations.

Education Week on Wednesday contacted a dozen districts and charter school networks with schools named for Chavez. None had a firm position on renaming, but many acknowledged that conversations were already taking place in their communities.

States including California, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, Utah, and Washington recognize César Chavez day on the leader’s March 31 birthday. By Thursday, some had already committed to renaming the holiday. Several districts that have the day off said it’s too late to change their calendars. Others that planned commemorations during the school day have canceled their plans.

The San Francisco school district, which has an elementary school named for Chavez, said it “shares in the community’s concerns” regarding the allegations. The San Francisco school board faced pushback when it voted to rename 44 of its 117 schools in 2021 because of concerns their namesakes were tied to racism and oppression. Schools flagged under the plan, which the district later abandoned, included those named for George Washington, Paul Revere, and former U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein.

Elsewhere in California: San Bernardino school moves to remove Cesar Chavez’s name amid sexual abuse allegations.

A San Bernardino middle school named after Cesar Chavez is taking steps to remove the labor leader’s name after bombshell sexual abuse allegations surfaced this week.

In a statement posted on its website, the San Bernardino City Unified School District said it is “taking initial measures” while they continue to gather information and assess next steps.

The school, currently known as Cesar E. Chavez Middle School, opened in 2005 and was named to “honor the enduring contributions to the farmworkers’ labor movement.”

“Effective immediately, the district will begin removing or covering external signage bearing the school’s name and will pause the use of the name and logo across official district and school platforms, including websites, social media and printed materials,” the district said.

During the interim period, the school will be referred to as Middle School #318.

A couple of years before Jerry Orbach passed away in 2004, the veteran actor was “named a ‘Living Landmark’ by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, along with his Law & Order co-star Sam Waterston. Orbach quipped that the honor meant ‘that they can’t tear me down.’”

But as we found out in 2020, they can tear you down – and in a frighteningly quick fashion, to boot.

Speaking of actors, there’s a remarkably simple solution to California’s current dilemma:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

IT’S COME TO THIS:

 

After declaring “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” Nietzsche wrote that Europe wasn’t going to like what comes next. “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming,” Nietzsche warned Europe in 1885′s Also sprach Zarathustra, “he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man…The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

WALTER DURANTY CALLED, AND SAID YOU MIGHT WANT TO DIAL THE DECADENCE BACK A BIT:

UPDATE:

And all in service to the Omnicause:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

INSECT-IFYING HUMANITY: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy.

Far from suffering rising death rates, the world is healthier than ever before. By the reckoning of the U.N. Population Division, global life expectancy has leapt since 1968: from under 56 years to over 73 years. Indeed, worldwide life expectancy today is roughly three years higher than was America’s when The Population Bomb came out.

But then again, Ehrlich wasn’t great at forecasting the American future, either: Among his more memorable howlers was a 1969 conjecture that overuse of pesticides might drive down U.S. life expectancy at birth to just 42 years by 1980.

One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, indeed, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight.

For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in the cost of food. By 2024, the inflation-adjusted prices of the main cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—were less than half as high as when The Population Bomb came out. This means that food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller.

Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications about the human future were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is really very simple. Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population: It’s just that he studied butterflies.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

In “Paul Ehrlich’s Unexploded Ordnance,” James Lileks begins with a flashback to the doomsday-obsessed 1970s before concluding:

The subhead of Ehrlich’s New York Times obituary was amusing: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature. As in, “It’ll surely happen eventually, and we hope so because people are a pestilence and Mother Earth weeps every time a baby is born.” Optimism, of course, is for fools who just don’t know how bad things are — and who can actually close their eyes at night without thinking about microplastics.

As populations crash all over the world, the specter of numberless hordes clashing over the last pack of peanuts no longer haunts the leftist imagination. It might occur to them that societies could suffer from population decline, particularly in places where the system is set up to extract money from one small group and give it a much larger one. Well, if it comes to that, we can just turn to incompatible cultures and import grand quantities of sullen dudes who are disinclined to adapt. If they vote correctly, what’s the downside? Okay, well, some of them might blow themselves up at a Christmas celebration, but that’s the price you gotta pay. The metaphorical Population Bomb was horrible! The literal population bomb, well, we can work with that.

Governor Walz and Mayor Mamdani chuckle and shrug their shoulders.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

NOT ANTI-WAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

Related: Julia Ioffe, who in 2018 said that Trump was radicalizing more people than ISIS, was asking “Is Trump Headed for an Iran Quagmire?” on March 2nd, the day after the first US and Israeli bombs and missiles were launched.

And as a result:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Veteran airline pilots are always welcome to take up the craft of acting as a second career, however:

 

Posted at 10:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

SONNY BUNCH: Chuck Norris, 1940–2026.

Invasion USA is one such absurdity: One of the most expensive films in the Cannon canon, the film is borderline incoherent, with Norris frequently appearing out of nowhere to deliver nearly spectral justice on a band of Soviet-Cuban guerrillas attempting to destabilize the United States by , for some reason, invading America through Miami. But he shows up, kicks ass, and the film has, oddly, had an outsized impact in the world.

“Invasion USA became an underground sensation in Romania, with bootleg videos of the film passed around and helping to fuel the 1989 uprising” against Nicolae Ceauşescu, de Semlyen notes in his book. According to James Bruner, who worked on the film with Norris and director Joseph Zito, “They use the poster, to this day, in Romania when they protest against the government. . . . Ultimately, action movies are about freedom. Overcoming evil, in whatever form it may be.”

* * * * * * * *

Norris’s greatest success was probably in Walker: Texas Ranger, a procedural that ran for eight seasons on CBS before entering syndication immortality. But he arguably found a bigger surge of fame as one of the early internet memes, a sort of parodic tough-guy bit emblemized with the moniker “Chuck Norris Facts.” Some examples cribbed from Wikipedia: “When the bogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris”; “Chuck Norris has a polar bear rug at home. It’s not dead, it’s just afraid to move”; and “Chuck Norris once killed two stones with one bird.”

What can I say: The internet used to be fun.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN WORD ABOUT TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S CARBON FOOTPRINT!

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

BOND MARKET MAY BE A LAST GUARDRAIL ON FAR-LEFT MAYORS AS MOODY’S GOES ‘NEGATIVE’ ON MAMDANI’S NEW YORK:

A mostly obscure and widely derided sector of the financial industry—bond rating agencies—may be one of the few remaining things with the power to save some of America’s largest cities from destruction by the policies of the far-left mayors who run them.

Moody’s Ratings this week revised its outlook on New York City to “negative” from “stable.”

“The negative outlook reflects the emergence of sizable and persistent projected budget gaps that signal underlying structural imbalance and reduced financial flexibility,” the agency said, noting that if New York City is struggling to balance its budget even in a strong economy, things could worsen “if economic growth slows sharply or an outright downturn materializes.”

“That the city projects large and persistent imbalances under still-favorable economic and revenue conditions highlights the extent of its underlying structural budget challenges,” Moody’s said.

Analysts at S&P Global, another ratings agency, also warned that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans “make it difficult to sustain budgetary balance beyond fiscal years 2026 and 2027,” a Bloomberg report said.

Moody’s and S&P Global have since been joined by Fitch, and Kroll:

As I wrote last fall, I’m absolutely certain that the New York Daily News has a “TRUMP TO CITY: DROP DEAD” cover page already laid out as an Adobe InDesign file and ready to go for when Mamdani takes office and demands a bailout.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “I’ve always said to pay attention to the people in Washington DC, specifically the [R]epublicans, who claimed Robert Mueller was an honorable figure.  As soon as you hear that sentiment, you know that is a corrupt conniving bastard speaking.”

 

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

THINGS ARE GOING SWIMMINGLY FOR GRACIE MANSION’S NEWEST TENANTS:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 22nd, 2026

March 21, 2026

AOC SPENDS $19K IN CAMPAIGN CASH ON PSYCHIATRIST:

She’s trippin’.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spent nearly $19,000 in campaign cash last year on a shrink who specializes in controversial ketamine therapy.

The socialist lawmaker hired Boston-based Dr. Brian Boyle, the chief psychiatric officer at Stella, a chain of mental health clinics focusing on “novel” therapies popular with Hollywood and Wall Street.

Her campaign paid Boyle $11,550 in March 2025, another $2,800 in May, and $4,375 in October for a total of $18,725, Federal Election Commission records show.

The expenses were marked as “leadership training and consulting.”

I can’t fault anyone for attempting to bolster their mental health when the world is coming to an end in five years: Ocasio Cortez: ‘The World is Going to End In Twelve Years If We Don’t Address Climate Change.’

—NRO, January 22, 2019.

 

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 21st, 2026

OUT ON A LIMB: A-10s are striking Iranian boats. Some say it’s a ‘wake-up call’ to stop the Warthog’s retirement.

A-10 Thunderbolt IIs are strafing boats in the Straits of Hormuz as part of President Trump’s war on Iran, and at least some experts say it shows why the venerable aircraft should remain in service.

“The A-10 Warthog is now in the fight across the southern flank and is hunting and killing fast-attack watercraft in the Straits of Hormuz,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.

The Defense Department posted images of the A-10 flying in U.S. Central Command airspace this week. CENTCOM praised the Warthog’s capabilities, noting in an X post on Sunday that the aircraft “can loiter for hours, standing by and ready to execute a mission whenever needed.”

The close-support aircraft, battle-proven in the Gulf War and Global War on Terror, has been threatened with retirement for decades. Congress has often pushed back; the most recent National Defense Authorization Act caps the number that can be scrapped until the Air Force details its retirement strategy. Experts told Defense One that the aircraft’s latest operations prove the war in Iran shouldn’t be the Warthog’s last rodeo.

The A-10s renewed use in the Middle East should serve as a “wake-up call” for lawmakers and the military calling for its retirement, said Dan Grazier, a Stimson Center senior fellow and the director of the nonprofit’s national-security reform program.

“The longer the A-10 exists, the more impressed I am with that aircraft,” Grazier said. “It’s just proof positive that when you design a weapon system that is stripped down and all the decisions that were made in the course of its design were all made for matters of military effectiveness, you get a really effective aircraft.”

Speaking of being impressed by an aircraft, the late Steve Irwin sounds like a kid in a hobby shop as he admires the A-10:

 

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 21st, 2026

分断ではなく、統合をもたらす男:

(見出しにおける古典の引用.)

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 21st, 2026

CYBERATTACK ON IOWA BREATHALYZER COMPANY IMPACTS DEVICES IN 45 STATES:

A Des Moines-based breathalyzer test company is recovering after a cyberattack impacted drivers in 45 states, KCCI reports.

Intoxalock makes ignition devices that people use to start their vehicles after an OWI. People with the devices have to provide a breath sample to prove they have not been drinking before the car starts.

The company said many customers are locked out of their devices or that the device is giving misread calculations.

One state in particular is truly suffering:

Related: Lewis Black on the bionic resilience of Wisconsinite livers:

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 21st, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT ATLANTIS: San Francisco is sinking at a rapid pace, NASA data shows. 

NASA is out with a dire warning about San Francisco.

The city is sinking at a rate so fast, it could put human life at risk.

Scientists used satellite data to study vertical land motion from 2015 to 2023.

Findings revealed that regional studies substantially underestimate sea level rise.

NASA projects more than double the expected rise by 2050.

Experts say environmental changes and frequent extreme weather could increase that even more.

When it sinks as far as Florida did in the ’80s and ’90s, let me know:

Also, San Francisco sinking will provide a useful bookend to DC sinking on the opposite coast of America: ‘Promise?’ Illustrated warning of what Washington, DC might look like if climate change isn’t addressed backfires:

The article about San Francisco sinking is at ABC’s Bay Area affiliate; in 2008, their parent company’s news division predicted that Manhattan would be underwater — by 2015:

On June 12, 2008, correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”

As one expert warns that in 2015 the sea level will rise quickly, a visual shows New York City being engulfed by water. The video montage includes another unidentified person predicting that “flames cover hundreds of miles.”

Then-GMA co-anchor Chris Cuomo appeared frightened by this future world. He wondered, “I think we’re familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That’s seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?”

Nahh — but why take chances? Gentlemen, start your SUVs!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I have a cunning plan.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 21st, 2026

OH, NO, YOU DON’T: People Band Together, Rip to Shreds Garbage Media Take About Chuck Norris.

Norris, a martial arts and television/film legend, is being lauded by most people with great affection across social media.

I thought he might even escape any media criticism because, after all, he was Chuck Norris.

But Variety decided to step on the third rail, not even waiting an entire day, before offering up a steaming pile of garbage, rather than simply honoring a wonderful entertainer who brought all of us so much joy.

You knew it would be bad from just the headline.

It was bad, talking about how “in nearly every Norris movie, he’s muscling into a foreign land or othered community.” Othered community, really?  The article also talked about how the “right-and-wrong simplicity of ‘Walker’ is cop-aganda.

But it gets worse.

Was Norris a brilliant athlete and top-shelf star? Yes. But there’s no denying that his roles were part of a body of work used to show American strength, might and the pernicious attraction of taking the law into one’s own hands — something that seems less fun in a year in which our country is funneling money into bombing Iran and ICE agents are acting like one-man militias. Given our nation’s divisions in morality, information literacy and overall sense of reality, it’s easier to see Norris’ characters as justification for a fringe conspiracy movement rather than a moral standing. When patriotism and laws shift away from the Constitution, what side does a gunslinger land on? [….]

When a star is the poster boy for American exceptionalism and might, at what point does his legacy transition from escapism to dangerous propaganda?

Oh, hell no. Don’t you even. Talk about divisions in morality and reality. Iran has been committing terrorism against us for 47 years. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is enforcing the law, whether the left likes it or not. That’s just a bizarre, twisted take from Variety.

In order to keep sweet with its company town subscribers, that’s all Variety can offer these days, unfortunately. In 2022, Variety’s editors signed off on one of their staffers changing the pronouns quoted by a woman allegedly attacked by troubled Flash star Ezra Miller from “he” and “him” to “them” and “they:”

So a hit piece on Chuck Norris on the day his death was announced isn’t at all surprising, unfortunately. Fortunately, X readers got the last laugh:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 21st, 2026
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