Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 18, 2026

IN THE WORDS OF CURTIS LEMAY, IF YOU KILL ENOUGH OF THEM, THE REST STOP FIGHTING: Iranian Intelligence Minister Who Led Assassination Plots Against US Officials Eliminated In Israeli Strike, IDF Says. “Israel on Wednesday killed Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmaeil Khatib, during an airstrike in Tehran, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Khatib orchestrated the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year and ran an agency that attempted assassinations against U.S. officials.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

HMMM: American Diner Gothic.

You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see.

You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.” A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle.

These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.

The term came to me when I was trying to identify what had, over the past decade, silently washed over the 95 percent of America that lived outside of the superstar cities. Placelessness without cosmopolitanism and with complacent downward mobility. A post-subcultural “alt” aesthetic with a post-nerd fandom orientation that’s become a new mainstream. Queerness but casual and prole-ified. Dinergoth: “diner” for provincialism, “goth” as lazy shorthand for alternative aesthetics.

These tendencies are correlated. Something is making them happen together in the places previously considered to be the most normal. A new quirk of 2020s America is that geek equals goth equals left-behind American.

Dinergothdom exists as both a concentrated archetype and a mass-cultural wave. The dinergoth core is the pierced-up, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch, writes fanfiction, wears a furry tail to raves, runs an OnlyFans, and dreams of voice acting while working nights at the fulfillment center.

While we’re on the topic: I’m a Furry. My Community Has a Violence Problem. An insider’s account of how online fandom culture can spiral toward extremism. “Within insular online communities, political narratives can spread quickly and go largely unchallenged. Friend groups often reinforce those narratives rather than question them. Over time, identity politics and extreme ideological positions have become increasingly common in certain parts of the fandom. Criticism of those beliefs is often interpreted not as disagreement but as a direct attack on personal identity. And that reaction makes sense if you understand how identity works within furry culture.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

BREAKING: Rolling Stone has Mild Disagreement with Trump’s FCC Chairman, Forgets Mild Disagreement with Trump’s First Term FCC Chairman:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

EVERY BEST PICTURE OSCAR-WINNER, RANKED:

90. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023)

Daniels Kwan and Scheinert’s tiresome comic drama about parallel dimensions and roads not travelled tries to be everything to all audiences: a piercing portrayal of the immigrant experience, plus disquisition on generational trauma/neurodivergence/insert-issue-of-the fortnight-here, with Power Rangers fights, superhero franchise tropes, and homages to Wong Kar-wai.

Should have won: Top Gun: Maverick or Tár

89. Gandhi (1983)

Everyone felt it was important to like Gandhi – and agreed that Ben Kingsley was tremendous in it. Richard Attenborough enlisted a pedigree supporting cast (Trevor Howard, John Gielgud, John Mills, Michael Hordern) and ranks of extras (300,000 for the funeral procession alone), but the net result is a Western-centric, sanitised view of a complex life. It also goes on forever.

Should have won: Even Attenborough admitted that E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was robbed.

Flashback: “The Gandhi Nobody Knows,” Richard Grenier 1983 Commentary article, one of the greatest film reviews/demolition jobs ever written.

UPDATE: I had forgotten a lot of the newer titles on the above list, and as it turns out, I was far from alone:

Combining poor product with TDS is a recipe for disaster, Christian Toto writes: Trump Effect? Oscar Ratings Crater in Second Term.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR AIRBRUSHES! Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

The Atlantic attacked Chavez in 2011, with an article headlined, “The Madness of Cesar Chavez” which noted that Chavez’s last days were chaotic, to say the least:

To understand Chavez, you have to understand that he was grafting together two life philosophies that were, at best, an idiosyncratic pairing. One was grounded in union-organizing techniques that go back to the Wobblies; the other emanated directly from the mystical Roman Catholicism that flourishes in Mexico and Central America and that Chavez ardently followed. He didn’t conduct “hunger strikes”; he fasted penitentially. He didn’t lead “protest marches”; he organized peregrinations in which his followers—some crawling on their knees—arrayed themselves behind the crucifix and effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His desire was not to lift workers into the middle class, but to bind them to one another in the decency of sacrificial poverty. He envisioned the little patch of dirt in Delano—the “Forty Acres” that the UFW had acquired in 1966 and that is now a National Historic Landmark—as a place where workers could build shrines, pray, and rest in the shade of the saplings they had tended together while singing. Like most ’60s radicals—of whatever stripe—he vastly overestimated the appeal of hard times and simple living; he was not the only Californian of the time to promote the idea of a Poor People’s Union, but as everyone from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the Black Panthers would discover, nobody actually wants to be poor. With this Christ-like and infinitely suffering approach to some worldly matters, Chavez also practiced the take-no-prisoners, balls-out tactics of a Chicago organizer. One of his strategies during the lettuce strike was causing deportations: he would alert the immigration authorities to the presence of undocumented (and therefore scab) workers and get them sent back to Mexico. As the ’70s wore on, all of this—the fevered Catholicism and the brutal union tactics—coalesced into a gospel with fewer and fewer believers. He moved his central command from the Forty Acres, where he was in constant contact with workers and their families—and thus with the realities and needs of their lives—and took up residence in a weird new headquarters.

Located in the remote foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, the compound Chavez would call La Paz centered on a moldering and abandoned tuberculosis hospital and its equally ravaged outbuildings. In the best tradition of charismatic leaders left alone with their handpicked top command, he became unhinged. This little-known turn of events provides the compelling final third of Pawel’s book. She describes how Chavez, the master spellbinder, himself fell under the spell of a sinister cult leader, Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon, which began as a tough-love drug-treatment program and became—in Pawel’s gentle locution—“an alternative lifestyle community.” Chavez visited Dederich’s compound in the Sierras (where women routinely had their heads shaved as a sign of obedience) and was impressed. Pawel writes:

Chavez envied Synanon’s efficient operation. The cars all ran, the campus was immaculate, the organization never struggled for money.

He was also taken with a Synanon practice called “The Game,” in which people were put in the center of a small arena and accused of disloyalty and incompetence while a crowd watched their humiliation. Chavez brought the Game back to La Paz and began to use it on his followers, among them some of the UFW’s most dedicated volunteers. In a vast purge, he exiled or fired many of them, leaving wounds that remain tender to this day. He began to hold the actual farmworkers in contempt: “Every time we look at them,” he said during a tape-recorded meeting at La Paz, “they want more money. Like pigs, you know. Here we’re slaving, and we’re starving and the goddamn workers don’t give a shit about anything.”

Chavez seemed to have gone around the bend. He decided to start a new religious order. He flew to Manila during martial law in 1977 and was officially hosted by Ferdinand Marcos, whose regime he praised, to the horror and loud indignation of human-rights advocates around the world.

By the time of Chavez’s death, the powerful tide of union contracts for California farmworkers, which the grape strike had seemed to augur, had slowed to the merest trickle. As a young man, Chavez had set out to secure decent wages and working conditions for California’s migrant workers; anyone taking a car trip through the “Salad Bowl of the World” can see that for the most part, these workers have neither.

That didn’t stop his bust being displayed in the Oval Office during President Obama’s third term. But apparently, it’s now time to banish Chavez to the memory hole:

UPDATE: Torpedo aimed at Trump circles back yet again:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

MORE FALLOUT FROM 2020:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Hollywood Dodges a Bullet.

The pleasantly surprising news that Paramount, not Netflix, came out on top in the Warner Bros. sweepstakes will turn out to be one of the great cultural bullet-dodges of all time… like Neo on Agent Smith’s roof big. Most everyone here in town understands this on a gut level, though few will say so out loud because as the drama dragged on, much of Hollywood decided that known cinephile Ellison was the bad guy in this particular story.

Perhaps now that the WB derby is over and the good guys won, someone in this accursed town can cash in on that signal and begin to reverse Hollywood’s grand mistake. Because in the recognition and reversal of that mistake lies a profitable way forward for the theatrical movie business, and for those of us who still love the art form and wish to see it endure for another generation of moviegoers, that would be great news indeed.

Netflix’s perilously woke management proved to be their undoing:

 

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

THE CULTURE WAR HAS NO PLACE IN THE CASTING ROOM:

Most disheartening about these banal debates is how little curiosity they show about what art might otherwise be capable of. No one asks what a black Helen of Troy might reveal about desire, beauty or war. No one asks what a contested casting choice might say about contemporary anxieties. No one asks if there are more profound relationships between actors and their characters than shared genetics. The conversation never manages to rise above the level of offence and entitlement.

This is what the culture war really boils down to: a philistine struggle to deliver a pre-approved message, as opposed to just letting artists crack on with making what they want to. It distrusts audiences to make sense of things for themselves. It squeezes out any room for imagination and interpretation. The upshot is a complete flattening of culture.

If Western cinema is to revive itself from the hollowed out zombie-industry it’s become, we must reject such black-and-white thinking. Art ought to be risky, unpredictable and open to exploring the full range of human experience – even ones that might make us uncomfortable. It’s high time to get the culture warriors out of the casting room.

QED:

 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 18th, 2026

March 17, 2026

HOW IT STARTED: New York Magazine Publishes Tom Wolfe’s Brilliant “Radical Chic” Article in 1970.

How It’s Going: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York Mag Lionizes Shoplifter and Gives Tips on How to Steal.

Here’s the excerpt from a New York Magazine article headlined, “Paying the Price for Shoplifting From Whole Foods:”

At Whole Foods, you are apparently being monitored by a swarm of security officers, some of whom wander the aisles in plain clothes, and the company’s surveillance tech is improving. When security officers catch you, they will take you to Whole Foods Jail. Sometimes with glee.

The Union Square Whole Foods jail is a windowless storage closet near the entrance, says Astrid, a photographer. She mostly remembers the wallpaper: “Layers and layers of grainy faces,” she tells Nora Deligter. “All the thieves that had come before me.”

A sculptor we’ll call Gina found herself in the Bowery Whole Foods Jail. She was late to an Alex G concert at Bowery Ballroom and had decided to slip into Whole Foods for a quick spicy-tuna-roll walk-and-dine. She had a system: Approach the item with confidence, grab it, then head upstairs to the dining area and surreptitiously place it into her bag. But this time, she headed straight for the exit. “A rookie mistake,” Gina says. 

Gina remembers keeping her head bowed and her eyes low as she was escorted back to Whole Foods Jail. The windowless office was almost too bland to recall, she says, except for a rudimentary banner, that read: ALL SHOPLIFTERS ARE BANNED FROM WHOLE FOODS FOR LIFE. A few weeks later, Gina says her parents received a $90 ticket in the mail from the company.

David Strom replies, “Is this the new socialism? Why wait for the revolution when you can just decriminalize stealing, or take your chances of getting caught and running to the media with your sob story?”

Pretty much. Flashback to the annus horribilis of 2020: NPR regrets elevating pro-looting anti-Semite.

Did anyone at NPR read the book, which includes a chapter titled “All Cops Are Bastards”? Did no one at NPR question the wisdom of elevating an activist whose Twitter handle even bears the acronym for “All Cops Are Bastards”? Did it not occur to anyone that, instead of elevating a provocative but worthwhile voice, they were actually amplifying an ignorant bigot with no basic understanding of history or community?

Apparently not, which is why NPR is in the embarrassing position this week of having to issue mea culpas for what was always an extremely avoidable fiasco.

“This piece was fact-checked, but we should have done more,” Code Switch editor Steve Drummond said of the interview, which has been updated to correct [Vicky] Osterweil’s many false assertions.

But even with the corrections, NPR’s McBride explained Thursday, “this failure to challenge this author’s statements is harmful on two levels. Publishing false information leaves the audience misinformed. On top of that, news consumers are watching closely to see who is challenged and who isn’t.”

As I wrote back then, I have no problem with NPR interviewing Osterweil. If somebody writes a book with the provocative title of In Defense of Looting — A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, complete with a crowbar on the front cover, and gets it published by the subsidiary of a major publisher, it’s news after all. Alex Haley famously interviewed American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy in 1966 — but he asked the appropriately tough questions. In contrast, Natalie Escobar, who interviewed Osterweil for NPR, tweeted (and eventually deleted) the following, which was still cached by Google as of [September 4th, 2020]:

New York magazine, like much of the left, apparently hasn’t moved on from the positions they staked out during the 2020 color revolution.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

DOWNSIDE: How the Oscars Made Everyone Hate Them.

Upside: As a Result, No One Was Watching. TV Ratings: Oscars Fall to 17.9 Million Viewers, Lowest Since 2022.

Related: Failing Oscars Demoted to YouTube. “Starting in 2029, the irrelevant Oscars will have its annual irrelevant Academy Awards show broadcast on — lol — YouTube.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

GOVERNOR NEWSOM’S PRESS OFFICE GETS RATIOED INTO THE SUN BY NICK SHIRLEY (AND MANY OTHERS):

Newsom decided he would try to insult (and borderline defame) Nick Shirley with an AI-generated image, implying that the independent journalist has some agenda with children and isn’t just trying to expose fraud in California like he so expertly did in Minnesota.

It didn’t work.

* * * * * * * * *

Shirley, to his credit, ignored the attempt to smear him and responded by asking the governor a simple, rhetorical question.

Not a good look from Camp Newsom:

Oh, and speaking of Adam Carolla, and California corruption:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

TOP AIDE TO TULSI GABBARD RESIGNS IN EXPLOSIVE LETTER, BLAMES ISRAEL FOR ‘IRAN WAR:’

Joe Kent, a top aide to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, took to X Tuesday morning to announce his resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), writing, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.”

Kent, an Army veteran who has two failed congressional runs on his resume, also posted his official resignation letter, and tweeted, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

He’s getting strange new “unexpected” respect:

And it’s Tucker time!

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS OWN:

Flashback: “[T]here is no sign of the humour industry taking the side of traditional morality, patriotism or civility. The best it can do is dignify itself with noisy and public collections for sentimental and prominent charity. Once you step beyond the fringe, you sooner or later find yourself in very wild country indeed.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

DATA REPUBLICAN: Data Analysis of the State of the Iranian Conflict on March 16, 2026.

PART A: THE US ENDGAME

Why this is America First, not Israel First.

  • Energy: The US is a net petroleum exporter. At $100+ Brent, US shale producers benefit. The US saves approximately $250 million per day compared to Asia and Europe on energy costs during the war. [CONFIRMED — Forbes, March 16]
  • China hurt directly: China was purchasing ~90% of Iran’s sanctioned oil — ~1.7 million barrels/day at deeply discounted prices. That supply is now disrupted. China’s teapot refineries face acute shortages. A direct strategic blow to a US competitor.
  • Taiwan deterrence signal: Chinese intelligence watched B-2s deliver GBU-57s against hardened targets successfully. The US capability to rapidly close an adversary’s entire air defense network, then strike freely — that signal is unambiguous. PLA is studying the campaign. [CONFIRMED — Taiwan News]
  • Dollar hegemony: The post-1973 global financial architecture rests on oil priced in dollars, with US security guaranteeing the flow. Saudi Arabia was exploring yuan oil pricing in 2023. The 2026 Iran war — demonstrating US willingness to use force to keep the system functioning — sends a specific signal to Riyadh about which security relationship is structural. [CONFIRMED — Hindustan Times]
  • What winning looks like: Iran agrees to verifiable nuclear dismantlement and ends proxy funding, from a position of economic and military weakness. No ground invasion, no occupation, no nation-building.
  • Cost comparison: The Iraq War cost ~$2.4 trillion; Afghanistan ~$2.3 trillion (Brown University). Both were driven by ground deployment, force protection, and nation-building. The Iran air campaign runs almost entirely on munitions already procured and carrier strike groups already forward-deployed. [CONFIRMED — CRS;Brown University Watson Institute]

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: Israel Eliminates Iranian Regime Security Chief and De Facto Leader Ali Larijani.

Israeli forces killed the Iranian regime’s security chief and de facto leader, Ali Larijani, in a Tuesday morning airstrike that has the potential to foment greater chaos within the Islamic Republic’s remaining leadership.

The IDF announced that Larijani was killed through “a precise strike” on his location near Tehran.

“His elimination adds to the elimination of dozens of senior commanders and leaders of the Iranian terror regime, who were eliminated by the IDF during Operation Roaring Lion, and constitutes a further blow to the Iranian regime’s abilities to manage and coordinate hostile activity against the State of Israel,” the IDF wrote in its statement.

After Ali Khamenei’s death, Larijani emerged as the country’s de facto leader, consolidating his power and overseeing combat operations against Israel and other Arab nations in the region. Along with his brother, Sadeq, Larijani waged outsized influence in the Iranian leadership and positioned himself as a successor after Khamenei’s death. He also served as secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, the body that orchestrated attacks on Israel and led efforts to violently suppress the Iranian people.

Curiously, employees of the New York Times and the BBC are taking his demise rather hard:

 

Posted at 12:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

THE LEFT IS GOING INSANE ABOUT THE COMING DOWNFALL OF CUBA:

The Cuban government is on its last legs, begging for help from the Trump administration, if you can believe that.

Guess who is hardest hit by the coming collapse?

Greta Thunberg and the internationalist left, that’s who. These eco- and social-justice warriors are demanding oil for Cuba!

The global left is losing all its favorite regimes, and it is driving them absolutely crazy. Suddenly, they are all about increasing oil consumption, demanding American capitalists save a communist country from collapse, so that the communists can use it as a base to destroy…evil capitalism.

Exit quote: “This is what I voted for. Four years is not enough to completely dismantle the global left and the internationalist world order, but it sure is a good start that Trump is making. By the end of 2026, we may see Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran freed. Unfortunately, it will take longer to free the rest of us.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 17th, 2026

March 16, 2026

ANDREW KLAVAN: Why Movies Suck — It’s the Spirit of the Age.

I found the Oscar winners from the eighties generally good, though not really great. But as we reached the nineties, something odd happened. I started to see films that were exceptionally well-made, some even delightful to watch, but which had at their core an essential element of dishonesty.

Dances with Wolves, which, like Pocahontas and Avatar, partakes of the Rousseauian fallacy that there is something innocent and benevolent about the lives of primitives. Schindler’s List, which presents itself as the authoritative movie about the Holocaust, and yet centers on acts of decency that were so rare an exception as to be nearly non-existent. The English Patient, a dishonorable and subtly antisemitic picture, in which the primary act of love involves giving traitorous aid to the Nazis because who wins the war doesn’t matter so much as getting the girl. (The opposite theme of Casablanca, a far, far better film.) And American Beauty, a picture that pretends to be about a straight man but isn’t, and hasn’t got a single honest frame in it from start to finish.

Let me repeat: these aren’t necessarily bad films. They’re certainly talented films. Most of them are watchable, even good. Schindler’s List would be a great film if you removed its overblown sense of itself, and its childish Spielbergian-Freudian theorizing about the Nazis’ motives. They are simply films with a cancer of dishonesty eating away at their hearts.

Read the whole thing. The 1990s was the decade in which Hollywood went nihilistic on WWII, and while Harvey Weinstein’s productions such as The English Patient and The Reader were the chief cause, even Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan wasn’t immune: What Happened To World War II Movies?

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 16th, 2026

PAUL EHRLICH WON THE DEBATE: Just read the comments.

Responses to that 2021 article were similar: “Maybe fewer humans will help the planet and some of humanity survive.” “At an early age, I saw that the explosion of humans on this planet was ruining the world for future generations and all other living species.” “Mother Nature has an answer to her pressing concerns and we are not needed.”

And the New York Times published four letters in response to its latest piece on low and falling birth rates, and all four were against babies.

This isn’t unique to the New York Times readership, though. The Washington Post’s former letters editor wrote that many of her writers really thought people were bad.

Sure enough, when I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about how to make your life easier by having many children, the 6,000 comments were almost all negative.

“In this world of over-consumption having so many kids seems selfish. More than that morally reprehensible … relies on a patriarchal view of the family.”

“The planet is already overpopulated. The author’s disdain for science and the nature of exponential increase is obvious.”

The sad fact is that millions of people believe the planet is overpopulated. That view is grounded in a belief that humans are basically bad.

Related:

“It’s very rare that you have an intellectual who so clearly would’ve been a Mao or Hitler if he had the chance.” Perhaps not as rare you might think.

 

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 16th, 2026

FACE IT, HOLLYWOOD — YOU’RE BORING VIEWERS WITH YOUR SELF-RIGHTEOUS, OUT OF TOUCH, NAVEL-GAZING OSCARS:

Noting that no Brits were nominated in the best actor category, he quipped, “A British spokesperson said: ‘Yeah, but at least we arrest our pedophiles.’”

That might come as news to all the young girls who were victimized by grooming gangs there. And somewhere from hell, late BBC pedo Jimmy Savile — never arrested — was laughing maniacally.

During his monologue, it felt like O’Brien was on a Oscars justification tour for the show even being aired, noting that there were 31 countries across six continents represented among the nominees, “with people speaking different languages, working hard to make something of beauty. We pay tribute tonight, not just to film, but to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today — optimism.”

Another pat on the back.

Despite the public’s very small appetite for Hollywood lectures, actors’s enthusiasm for delivering them have never been greater.

It must have been tough for Javier Bardem to choose just two pieces of virtue-signaling flair. On Sunday, he wore an old anti-war button and beamed like a child who got a sticker from the dentist for having no cavities.

Presenting the award for Best International Feature Film, Bardem smugly barked his favorite utterly meaningless phrase, “Free Palestine.” He forgot to add “from Hamas.”

Let celebs get it all out of their systems, as they’ve only got two more years left on broadcast TV: Oscars Bolts From ABC to YouTube Starting in 2029.

Outside of M-SNOW, YouTube is the perfect location for an increasingly niche leftist political show:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 16th, 2026

OUT ON A LIMB: ‘War on Poverty’ May Have Created a Permanent Underclass, Economists Say.

America’s “War on Poverty,” launched by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, has expanded into a vast array of federal social welfare programs that today exceed $1 trillion per year.

Upon signing the Economic Opportunity Act, Johnson stated: “This is not in any sense a cynical proposal to exploit the poor with a promise of a handout,” but rather a means to “help our people find their footing for a long climb toward a better way of life.”

While poverty has declined significantly over the past half-century, however, recent reports indicate that these programs simultaneously reduced the share of private income for America’s poorest, locking them into long-term dependency and limiting their ability to move up into the middle class.

A recent study by economists Kevin Corinth and Richard Burkhauser, which analyzed poverty rates before and after America embarked on the War on Poverty, concluded that, while poverty decreased substantially since 1964, this was achieved largely by welfare supplanting “market” income such as wages, investments, and profits. In addition, before the 1960s, market income had succeeded in reducing poverty at similar rates to what the War on Poverty achieved.

As President Reagan said in 1987, “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Posted at 8:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 16th, 2026

SPRINGTIME FOR PLATNER:

“Roger, did you have a chance to read ‘Springtime for Hitler?’” “Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it’s just drenched with historical goodies like that!”

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 16th, 2026

SAY ANYTHING:

● Shot:

● Chaser: Sen. Markey, Reps. Espaillat, Clarke Announce Legislation to Ban U.S. Fossil Fuel Exports.

—Markey’s Website, May 18th, 2023.

● Hangover: Senator Markey and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Introduce Green New Deal Resolution.

—Markey’s Website, February 7th, 2019.

AOC and Markey’s 2019 Green Nude Eel sought to ban pretty much everything, so it’s good to see Trump using Cuba as a small test case before implementing their proposals here: Cuba Becomes The First Country To Reach Net Zero. Shouldn’t We Be Celebrating?

UPDATE: Greta Thunberg calls for oil tankers to be sent to Cuba as nation suffers complete blackout. 

Posted at 6:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 16th, 2026
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