Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 12, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE ICE FLOE:

Flashback: The Democratic Party’s Ice Floe Politics. “The next time a Democratic politician makes an anonymous observation about the age or vigor of a colleague with whom they disagree, be skeptical. The remarks are made to reporters as if in sorrow, but the message is about as subtle as a shiv in the prison yard.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 12th, 2026

EVERGREEN QUESTION: What Happened to Tucker?

Tucker’s show became the top-rated primetime cable news show during Trump’s first term. He then lost his show in 2023, following the Dominion lawsuit against Fox. Zengerle admits he doesn’t know why Tucker was fired, but speculates that he might have been a sacrificial lamb thrown in along with the lawsuit settlement. Since then, Tucker has had his own podcast in which he has gone to increasingly dark and conspiratorial places. It’s not clear what exactly has sent Tucker in his current antisemitic direction, but there is no shortage of suspected reasons – Qatari money, jealousy, resentment, or a thousand other things that have made antisemites in the past. Regardless of the reason, there is little doubt that he has changed since his Weekly Standard days. As Zengerle writes in the book’s concluding sentence, “He had descended into madness, but he was speaking to millions.”

Without the Fox platform, Carlson may no longer be essential viewing in the White House, but he remains disturbingly influential, with over 1 million listeners to his podcast. Whereas he once was surprised and even a little worried that the president would watch his show, he now has to make a special effort to ensure that the president hears what he is saying. As Zengerle writes,

where Carlson once tried to reach Trump through his Fox show, he now recognized that Trump did not have the wherewithal to watch (or listen, after Trump began releasing his online show as a podcast) to a two-hour-plus program. He began to communicate with Trump more directly – by text message, on the phone, and in person.

Direct communication with the president is concerning but could also be helpful. After all, if Trump is telling him to tone down his antisemitism, he might be one of the few people in the world that Carlson still listens to.

Worst. Hitler. Ever.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 12th, 2026

March 11, 2026

MEDIA CAN’T HIDE THE TRUTH ABOUT GRACIE MANSION BOMB ATTEMPT*:

There is no doubt as to their motivations: Both men spoke freely and unrepentantly to police at the scene, proudly claiming inspiration from ISIS and stating they had intended their terrorist atrocity to be “bigger than Boston” — a reference to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that took the lives of three and injured scores more. Only the incompetence of the bombers prevented Saturday from turning into one of the darkest days in recent New York history.

Yet one would know none of this were one to go only by the headlines and framing devices the mainstream media have consistently used to explain this story to American readers, who — like it or not — primarily consume their news in headline rather than article form. NBC New York got an early start on what would quickly become an overwhelming trend, telling a curiously noncommittal story over the weekend: “Multiple arrests made after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.” The Daily News’ headline whimpered, “Protestors throw smoking improvised device, clash over Jake Lang pig roast at ‘anti-Islamification’ rally at Gracie Mansion.” The tone-setting New York Times itself wrestled with curiously tortured locutions: “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.”

It is impossible not to notice that all of these headlines — or countless others from similarly situated media outlets — are carefully crafted to avoid stating a politically inconvenient truth: Islamic terrorists came horrifyingly close to detonating bombs in a crowd of protesters. Instead, our attention is directed toward the “hateful” nature of the rally, and readers are asked to fill in the missing narrative gaps with their own imaginations instead.

By Tuesday, the sugarcoating of the obvious — that homegrown, self-radicalized jihadis had targeted a protest and nearly murdered who-knows-how-many people outside Gracie Mansion — had moved well into parody. CNN led the morning with a widely mocked (and subsequently deleted) tweet framing the acts of Balat and Kayumi as a soft-focus human interest story: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather . . .” the piece begins. (You’ll never believe what happened next!)

* But CNN is determined to do their damndest: After CNN’s Horrible Tweet About NYC Bombing Attempt, They Just Made It Worse With New Comment From Host.

During Abby Phillip’s show on Tuesday, she made things even worse, claiming in two places during her broadcast that the NYC attack was an attempt to target Mamdani. She said it at the start of the program at about one minute in, where she talks about “after that attempted terror attack against New York’s mayor.” Then later in the program, she repeats it here:

She called it ‘an attempted terror attack against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani,’ while accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson of staying silent on what she characterized as anti-Islam comments from two Republican lawmakers.

As we reported, one of the suspects allegedly threw a bomb at the protest crowd, then he dropped another on the street as police started to chase them. The police have made multiple statements regarding the alleged ISIS comments made by the suspects.

The CNN tweet about the suspects was bad enough, but how does a CNN host actually say this live on air, twice, no less? Then, apparently, trying to paint it as a part of an anti-Islam sentiment? How do you justify this?

By going to X instead of apologizing on-air: Abby Phillip DRAGGED After Tweet-Correcting On-Air Distortion of NYC ISIS Attack.

The most generous interpretation of Phillip’s gross mischaracterization of what is now obvious is that it was an ill-fated teleprompter read. Nonetheless, it went viral to the point of drawing a correction via social media:

The correction appears to have drawn more virality than the underlying video. This is due in large part to its careful wording which, in part, appears to validate the Bad ‘Prompter Load Theory. However, the correction reads as needlessly vague about the potential targets of the bombing. There were protesters, counterprotesters and NYPD all assembled at Gracie Mansion and all within range of the improvised explosive devices.

Condemnation of the correction has been swift. A sampling:

There are several tweets condemning Phillip for tweeting out an apology rather than going on-air.

Earlier:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 11th, 2026

March 10, 2026

THIS IS A REAL OBITUARY OF IRAN’S THEOCRATIC DICTATOR FROM THE ECONOMIST:

The Economist just casually refers to America as “the Great Satan” in a story that focuses on the theocratic dictator of Iran’s unwavering spirit in the face of adversity.

You can feel the drama dripping from The Economist’s official obit:

Across the decades, Ali Khamenei built up countless reasons for his hatred of the West. They began with a fiery speech he heard at 13, when at school, inveighing against the monarchy that was backed by America and its allies. As a young man he was jailed six times, beaten and tortured by the Shah’s secret police. When the Shah fell in 1979, and the hotheads in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic took American diplomats hostage, it was plain that America would seek to undermine Iran by any means. In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 America even supported Iraq, ruled by a tyrant, rather than Iran. A decade later, when Ali Khamenei became Supreme Leader himself, attitudes had hardened on both sides. Increasingly, over the next 30 years, he knew he was personally in the Great Satan’s sights.

* * * * * * * *

Goodness, what a heroic and inspiring eulogy of the Islamic tyrant who who killed tens of thousands of his own people over decades of brutal, relentless rule.

All that from the people who are paid to write about … the economy?

Critics say The Economist was merely giving us Khamenei’s point of view. Well, you can certainly feel the passion Khamenei had as he hung yet another woman who had failed to cover her hair, or beat another Christian for renouncing Islam, or executed another poor soul who had run amok of his morality police!

That apparently was the obituarist’s goal: Death comes for the Economist:

Obituaries editor Ann Wroe explained “The art of writing an obituary” in a 2017 Medium interview. In Wroe’s explanation of the art, she commented on one Economist obituary that especially upset American readers (link in original):

The obituary you wrote for Osama bin Laden is very striking, particularly the passage about how he enjoyed taking his children to the beach and eating yogurt with honey.

I got into such trouble for that! Our American readers were incensed.

Do you have a different approach for someone like him?

You could just write a rant about how evil he was, but as I said, I don’t like to do it from the perspective of other people. I like to do it from his. I’ve done about three people who I think are pretty evil, and the thing is that they hang themselves with their own rope. They say or do something appalling, and you just put it in there. They condemn themselves, as far as I’m concerned. It’s true that there’s no such thing as being totally evil or totally good. We have to recognise that we all have the potential for good and for evil. When I found out ordinary things about bin Laden, I wanted to put them in. Why not mention them? You have to try and give a rounded picture of a person. They’re not entirely monsters. There’s a human somewhere in there. And that should make their evil all the more horrific by contrast. You wonder how those two things could co-exist.

Americans still have the notion that obits have to be of worthy people and that they should be praising like the eulogy you would give at a funeral. The New York Times does them really well, but most of the American press thinks it must be very reverential.

The Economist has undertaken such an exercise on an extremely limited number of occasions. The Khameni obituary can now be added to the list.

Wroe might have had a field day with Hitler. We can be grateful we have Mel Brooks’s portrayal of Franz Liebkind in The Producers to give us some idea of what Wroe would have wrought if only she had been on the case for The Economist in 1945.

Writing material from the point of view of someone who the rest of us view as evil can be a powerful tool for a writer or satirist. It’s the basis of most gangster movies; the 2008 German movie The Baader Meinhof Complex tells its viewers that those West German terrorists viewed the government of West Germany as the successors to the Nazis – and then cast the actors who played Hitler and Albert Speer in Downfall as the detectives pursuing them! But attempting to employ Tom Wolfe’s “New Journalism” writing strategies in obits to épater les bourgeois may be going a bit too far.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II:

Posted at 4:18 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

ACE OF SPADES: CNN Story Valorizes Islamic Terror Bombers, Then CNN Claims It Was Just a Mistaken Tweet.

CNN’s spokespotato and inveterate liar Brian Stelter is pretending it was only the “tweet” which was egregious. But he’s lying. The tweet just repeated the first sentence “lede” of the story.

The story was later stealth-edited, but people had screencapped it.

At NewsBusters, Curtis Houck adds: CNN TORCHED for Sickening Article Gushing Over Islamists With IEDs ‘Enjoying the City.’ “‘My trajectory always takes a dark turn when I make and carry homemade bombs to a protest to kill people. It’s the darnedest thing. Like, help me out, trajectory,’ tweeted the great Mary Katharine Ham with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Washington Examiner senior writer David Harsanyi had an interesting observation about CNN’s treatment of these alleged terrorists: ‘CNN treating Islamic terrorists better than they did Nick Sandmann’… Like Ham, [NRO’s Charles] Cooke dialed up some sarcasm of his own in a follow-up tweet, parodying how these two might have written an article on 9/11 about the hijackers: “Nineteen Middle Eastern tourists crossed into New York City Tuesday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally sunny weather . . .”

UPDATE:

 

Posted at 12:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN ANTI-JOURNALISM: CNN Changing Name to PNN: Propaganda News Network.

Some things you cannot make up.

I mean, who would believe it if you told them that CNN would turn an Islamist terrorist attack on New York City into a tale of two brothers minding their own business until they were forced to protest the injustice of white supremacists who were committing an Islamophobic hate crime?

CNN may have invented a whole new genre of anti-journalism:

At PJ Media, Scott Pinsker writes, “New Yorkers Can’t Trust Their Mayor to Tell Them the Truth About Islamic Terror Attacks.”

The rest of us can’t trust CNN to report the story, either. Curiously, the author of the piece has pronouns, which may not be ISIS-approved:

Exit questions:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Democrats’ swoon for Jew-hater Graham Platner shows antisemites now run their party.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck . . . well, you know the saying.

Today, if a candidate walks and talks like an obsessive Jew-hater, Democrats swoon.

And in Maine, Graham Platner is making an entire political campaign out of his waddle and quack.

First, we learned that the democratic socialist Platner, who’s competing with Gov. Janet Mills in the Democrats’ US Senate primary, had a large Nazi tattoo — an SS Totenkopf — emblazoned on his chest.

When the revelation set off a public furor, Platner insisted he’d had no idea what the infamous grinning skull symbol meant, and that the only “disgusting” aspect of the controversy was the insinuation he knew otherwise.

Yet Platner has spent the months since proving those “disgusting” doubters right, with a stream of mindless anti-Israel rhetoric and openly antisemitic associations.

And it’s working: Bulwark, Matt Yglesias Embrace Graham ‘Nazi Tattoo’ Platner.

Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, the current frontrunner in the Maine primary, proudly ran around with an SS Death Head tattoo… for 18 years.

For those who don’t know, the SS (Schutzstaffel) was the Nazi unit primarily responsible for the murder of six million Jews.

Platner claims he didn’t know what the tattoo signified. Graham Platner is lying.

Graham Platner also retweeted a Holocaust denier.

Graham Platner also sat down with an antisemitic podcaster, a guy who’s so bad he believes the Jews killed John F. Kennedy.

Through and through, Platner is bad news. But suddenly, the very same people who have spent years attacking President Trump and his supporters as Nazis, racists, and bigots, are willing to embrace the Nazi tattoo guy because they believe the Nazi tattoo guy has the best chance to defeat incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins in Maine.

Here’s Yglesias telling Democrats not to get too “uptight” about a Nazi tattoo:

Less uptight. Maybe even a bit boring, you might say, as the WaPo described Yglesias himself in 2023, while noting how popular he was with the Biden administration: “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias:”

“I don’t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,” says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, “offers ‘unconventional wisdom:’ He’s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there — a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.”

* * * * * * * *

But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don’t. His Substack was tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team, according to digital strategist Rob Blackie, and Yglesias himself was No. 4 on the list of most-followed journalists. Some of Yglesias’s posts on policy — particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February — have reportedly circulated among White House staff.

“There’s a broad sense that he’s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they’ll take other ideas,” says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss outside influences on the administration. “He’s not super influential, but he’s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.”

Or perhaps Matt just wants to explore socialism on a more national level:

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

March 9, 2026

THIS IS CNN:

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

HORSESHOE THEORY:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

RIP: Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed Watergate tapes, dies at 99.

Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.

His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and went on to, along with Butterfield, help expose the wrongdoing.

“He had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system,” Dean said. “He stood up and told the truth.”

As a deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw the taping system connected to voice-activated listening devices that had been secretly placed in four locations, including Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Butterfield later said that, besides himself and the president, he believed that only White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, a Haldeman assistant and a handful of Secret Service agents knew about the taping system.

At Media Myth Alert in 2013, Joseph Campbell wrote: The Nixon tapes: A pivotal Watergate story that WaPo missed.

The book, All the President’s Men, says that Woodward had found out about private testimony that Butterfield had given to staff members of the select committee and he called Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, for guidance.

The call to Bradlee was on a Saturday night. After outlining what he knew, Woodward, according to the book, said:

“We’ll go to work on it, if you want.”

In reply, Bradlee is quoted as saying with some slight irritation, “Well, I don’t know.”

How would you rate the prospective story? Woodward asked him.

“B-plus,” Bradlee replied.

Woodward figured a B-plus wasn’t much, according to the book.

“See what more you can find out, but I wouldn’t bust one on it,” Bradlee is quoted as instructing Woodward.

And Woodward didn’t “bust one.”

Two days later, on July 16, 1973, Butterfield made his reluctant disclosure at a public session of the Senate select committee.

The following day, according to All the President’s Men, Bradlee conceded that the lead about the taping system was “more than a B-plus.”

The anecdote from All the President’s Men is suggestive of the overall minor role that the Post played in uncovering Watergate. As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, unraveling a scandal of the dimension of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

As Glenn has written, “Recent Events Have Made Me Doubt the Entire Watergate Story:” Nixon’s Revenge.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

WEEKEND AT MOJTABA’S: Iranian Clerics Choose Khamenei’s Son Mojtaba As Next Supreme Leader.

For everyone yammering about how stupid Trump was to back out of the atrocious Obama/Kerry Iran deal, the enriched uranium Iran holds is there BECAUSE of the deal…and all those pallets of cash.

Not only that, but RedState’s Jen Van Laar points out something else regarding Mojtaba and his new role. He’s filthy rich.

Mojtaba Khamenei owns an extensive and troubling real estate portfolio in the U.K., including two luxury apartments in London overlooking the Israeli Embassy and “a stone’s throw” from Kensington Palace, home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Bloomberg News reported in late January after a year-long investigation. He purchased the apartments in 2014 and, according to the probe, the funds for the purchases came from Iran’s oil program.

In addition, Khamenei “owns 11 mansions in Hampstead, North London, through a front man and a shell company registered in the Isle of Man.” The properties are part of a “global property empire” worth “hundreds of millions of pounds,” according to Bloomberg.

Being able to sell oil to China, Russia and others despite all the sanctions over the years was certainly lucrative for Khamenei. And, if they need any more money to continue …if they can… enriching uranium, all he has to do is sell some property.

If he still has a pulse:

Did they bring along a cardboard cutout of Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie and play “Tusk” at the allegiance ceremony as well?

UPDATE: Heh, indeed.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “What is a Woman?”

The New Cluelessness? “What is a Man?”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

JOHN NOLTE: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Ultra-Woke Frankenstein Flick The Bride! Bombs at Box Office.

Useless Sycophants in the Entertainment Media, did you see what we didn’t do? What we didn’t do is what you useless sycophants did with Melania. We didn’t wishcast by writing piece after piece about how Bride! would die at the box office. Why? Because I try not to make a fool of myself, and one of the easiest ways to make a fool of yourself is to predict the box office with such certainty — which is what you useless sycophants did with Melania, something all Normal People thank you for.

So, The Bride!…

Writer, director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! cost around $100 million to produce and at least another $60 to $80 million to promote, and it’s about to become an iconic box office bomb with an opening weekend in the $7 to $10 million range.

The Bride! had everything going for it. A big star in Christian Bale, the hottest actress around in Jessie Buckley (who’s about to win a Best Actress Oscar), a massive budget, plenty of promotion, a wide release in over 3,300 theaters, an appealing genre, and a 61 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes thanks to critics who didn’t really like the movie but found a way to pretend they did to prove their fealty to the Woke Gestapo.

So what went wrong…?

Well, I haven’t seen the movie and probably never will, but unless the title is Barbie, woke equals 100 percent flop rate at the box office.

Many of the critics who pretended to like this mess had the same complaints as those who published negative reviews: 1) it’s an angry feminist diatribe and 2) Gyllenhaal didn’t have a handle on what she wanted the movie to say so she threw a bunch of feminist tropes against the wall and now moviegoers have to sit through watching none of them stick.

Angry feminist diatribe? This woke-Website’s headline implies exactly that: Misogynistic Reactions Can’t Stop Feminist Frankenstein Reinvention The Bride! From Being One of the Boldest Studio Films Ever.

Perhaps Gyllenhaal inadvertently remade the wrong old beloved B-movie, though. Instead of The Bride(!) of Frankenstein, she’s remade the Time Machine instead: The Bride! A Feminist Frankenstein That Plays Like a Lost Remnant of Woke Culture.

Developed in 2023 and early 2024, The Bride! was passed between studios that reportedly disagreed with writer-director Gyllenhaal about budget and creative direction. Looking at the disastrous final product, it’s hard not to come down on the side of executives who had creative disagreements. And no amount of money should have been spent on this mess.

More than anything else, The Bride! feels like the lost remnants of a pre-vibe shift culture, the last vestige of a fully woke world. There are explicit references to riot grrrl culture, and the film’s climax literally involves Ida repeatedly shouting “me too!” at no one in particular.

It would be too easy to describe this as a stitched-together monster of a movie, but at least Frankenstein’s monster had something resembling life.

In any case, the Critical Drinker is succinct: The Bride! It Sucks!

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Suspected terrorist defiantly flashes ISIS salute after he’s busted for tossing explosive device near Gracie Mansion.

One of the accused terrorists busted for lobbing explosive devices near Gracie Mansion flashed a sick salute honoring ISIS as he was led in shackles from a police precinct Monday.

Emir Balat, 18, was seen holding up his right index finger — a universal salute for the terror group — and grinning at the press while being led by a cop and an FBI agent.

Balat, wearing a black T-shirt and beige pants, made the gesture before one of the officers flanking him slapped down his hand.

Balat, whose parents are reportedly from Turkey but who became naturalized citizens in 2017, was arrested Saturday along with 19-year-old Ibrahim Kayumi after a homemade “Mother of Satan” bomb was thrown at protesters outside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Upper East Side residence.

Related:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026
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