Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 20, 2026

GOD AND ‘BAM AT YALE:

I wonder if the person who took that photo realizes that he recreated the terrifying juxtaposition brutalist architect Louis Kahn created in 1949 with his infamous addition to the Yale Center for British Art?

As James Lileks wrote earlier this year:

Ah yes. That one. The building that gave us one of the best examples of life before and after the Second World War.

Hint: Kahn’s building is on the left.

You know how many years separate those two structures?

Nineteen.

The building on the right was completed in 1928. The building on the left was begun in 1947.

In From Bauhaus To Our House, Yale man Tom Wolfe wrote, “Baffled but somehow intimidated, as if by Cagliostro or a Jacmel hoongan, the Yale administration yielded to the destiny of architecture and took it like a man. Administrators, directors, boards of trustees, municipal committees, and executive officers have been taking it like men ever since.”

In contrast though, the architects for the Obama Presidential Center didn’t originally want to put a Death Star flak tower in Chicago:

Consider the fact that architect Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s original proposal was a more horizontal affair: a low-lying campus of museum, forum, and library buildings spread across the lakefront park, restrained in the way their firm’s work usually is. (One architecture critic called their work “confident buildings, but not boastful ones. They have a way of insinuating themselves into the landscape, behaving as if they’ve always been there.”)

“The tower wants to be humble, but not so humble that anyone might miss it from the highway.”

Obama sent them back, saying he wanted something “iconic.” The Obamausoleum is the result of the ex-president becoming the shadow architect, the built expression of a client who had once seriously considered becoming an architect before settling for the presidency instead. “He made many good suggestions, and he made a few not so good suggestions,” Tsien told the Chicago Tribune. This is a fascinating revelation, because it captures the barely concealed vanity of the whole enterprise.

Everything at the center ultimately bends back toward the former president, from the exhibits narrating Obama’s rise from subject of earnest hand-drawn campaign posters to gray-haired statesman, culminating in a full-scale replica of his Oval Office circa 2014, where visitors are invited to sit at the desk and take a photograph. The references to the Civil Rights Movement, community organizing, the future, and the children: all of it is arranged around the central fact of Obama’s historical importance. The tower wants to be humble, but not so humble that anyone might miss it from the highway.

Since 2016, Obama has seemed to barely even pay lip service to politics. Consider the soft-focus cultural project that has defined his post-presidency. “There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president,” John Quincy Adams once supposedly said, which is easy to say when you then spend almost 20 years in Congress making yourself useful. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the United States. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Jimmy Carter turned his post-presidency into a rebuke of his presidency, including numerous attempts to safeguard foreign elections. Obama has settled for something like curator-in-chief of his post-presidential decades. The Netflix deals, the Bruce Springsteen podcast, the memoirs, the music playlists, the book lists, are premised on the idea that America’s problems are fundamentally narrative rather than structural, that the right stories, the right voices, the right cultural institutions can do the work that policy apparently couldn’t.

But now in 2026, the thinness of that philosophy is hard to ignore. The end of the end of history is here, and we’ve seen politics roar back, even with a Democratic president in the form of Joe Biden’s big post-COVID restructuring of the economy. Now that Trump is restored, Obamacare is fraying, the courts have been remade, and the Democratic Party has been reduced to relying on the courts to save its legislative wins of the past from the rubble; there is little left of Obama’s legacy to grasp onto other than 2010s nostalgia.

In his 1965 book, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius (1883-1969) wrote:

Can the real nature and significance of the New Architecture be conveyed in words? If I am to attempt to answer this question it must needs be in the form of an analysis of my own work, my own thoughts and discoveries. I hope, therefore, that a short account of my personal evolution as an architect will enable the reader to discern its basic characteristics for himself.

A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.

I dunno, Walter. Judging by the juxtapositions in the photos above with two brutalist buildings spanning 80 years, “the morphology of dead styles” looks to have been frozen in amber for quite some time. “Start from Zero” was Gropius’ slogan at the Bauhaus of the 1920s. A century later, when do we move past the starting line?

Still though, should do wonders for tourism:

Exit quote from Maher: “Really?! You’re a bunch of f*cking liars, you are. You’re not going to the Obama library.” If you do go, make sure to bring your ID:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 20th, 2026

HOW THE WESTERN WORLD WAS WON:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 20th, 2026

June 19, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Cigars, a canceled lacrosse season and the scandal rocking a Massachusetts town.

The boys gathered on an Ipswich, Mass., beach to celebrate their high-school graduation, some with medals draped over their black gowns. Jutting from each mouth: cigars that may or may not have been real.

The photos taken under cloudy skies June 7 mirrored those snapped all around the country lately. But in this coastal enclave dubbed America’s Best-Preserved Puritan Town, those snapshots have lit a burning debate.

What’s beyond dispute: Six of the grads were on Ipswich High School’s lacrosse team, and administrators suspended all six from a playoff game two days later for violating state athletic association rules against tobacco use. The team ultimately voted to forfeit the contest—and just like that, their championship run went up in smoke.

Now, this hamlet of 14,000 north of Boston is in a fierce debate over whether the penalty matched the foul. It has grown into a saga featuring a “a CSI-level investigation” at a local grocery store, and a heated showdown involving two dads in the principal’s office—captured on a police body camera.

“Come on, how many times you’ve been pulled over and a cop has said, ‘Ahh, go ahead?’ ” said Marc Randazza, a lawyer representing one of the suspended students and his father. “There is always discretion, right?”

To Ipswich resident Heidi Garofalo, though, the line was clear. “Kids have to learn the consequences when they do something wrong,” she said. “You have to abide by the rules. It just takes one slip [to] ruin everything.”

It really is “America’s Best-Preserved Puritan Town” – as H.L. Mencken famously wrote, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy:”

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE BOOM BELT:

 

Posted at 6:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

RIP: Empire Strikes Back and Alien Special Effects Pioneer Brian Johnson Dead at 86. “Brian Johnson, one of the most legendary special effects artists in the history of the industry, and whose work shaped some of the most iconic science-fiction movies and television shows ever made, has passed away. Johnson is perhaps best known for his time on Space: 1999, while his wider career included major contributions to Alien, The Empire Strikes Back, and Aliens. Johnson’s effects work helped bring some of cinema’s most incredible worlds to life, from the Nostromo of Ridley Scott’s Alien to the frozen battlefields and starship spectacle of Hoth.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

LATERAL MOVE: “Engels very much made his family fortune as a derivative beneficiary of American slavery. And he used that slave-derived fortune to directly subsidize Karl Marx.” 

To be fair, Marx was an equal-opportunity racist. Flashback to 2015: Karl Marx Calls Mexicans Lazy. Will Social Justice Warriors Demand Noted Racist Karl Marx Be Banned From Study on Campus?

In addition to slurs against Mexicans, Marx, whose father had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, was none too keen on Jews and blacks, as well.

But the SJWs are already on the case! They want to see Marx removed from the college criteria not because he was a stone cold racist totalitarian, but — wait for it! — because he’s yet another dead white European male. As James Lileks wryly observed back in January, “Some Berkeley students are mad about a class that is just plain othering the living heck out of them. From a piece they wrote for the Daily Californian:”

We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.

In response, Lileks wrote:

If there’s one thing you take away from the Daily Californian essay, it’s the pursed-lip’d narrow-eyed glare of someone who is being forced to sit in a room and NOT BE VALIDATED. (Some of the complainants may be angry because they are witnessing the non-validation of others and are compelled to be enraged on their behalf.) College, apparently, is now a place where the notions of people freshly matriculated from high school must be handled with oven mitts and lightly buffed with soft cloth lest their orthodoxies suffer the slightest abrasion. Like the school that canceled the annual performance of The Vagina Monologues because it othered non-traditional women who lacked the titular orifice, it’s a delightful example of leftist autophagy. Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate.

By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.

Heh. Yet another reminder that as Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, the books will be burned as much to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the ideas within them.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

RIP: James Burrows, Will and Grace director and Cheers co-creator, dead at 85.

James Burrows, known for co-creating “Cheers and directing “Will & Grace,” has died. He was 85.

“We celebrate the extraordinary life and enduring legacy of James ‘Jimmy’ Burrows, who passed away peacefully today surrounded by his loving family,” his family told People in a statement Friday.

“For more than five decades, Burrows was one of the most influential and beloved directors in television history,” the statement continued. “As a legendary director, mentor, and creative force, he helped shape generations of comedy and brought immeasurable joy to audiences around the world.”

“Burrows directed more than 1,000 episodes of TV, including every episode of the original ‘Will & Grace,’ and is credited as having helped create shows including ‘Friends,’ ‘Taxi’ and Frasier,’” CBS News reports.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden mumbles to himself and requires stage direction as he aimlessly wanders off at Obama’s library debut.

Joe Biden was seen mumbling to himself after being directed across the stage at the opening of Barack Obama’s presidential library.

The former president, 83, seemed bewildered at various points during the event in Chicago on Thursday.

Video showed him staring straight ahead into the crowd as Obama strolled past.He then lingered near the podium after much of the ceremony had ended, with cameras capturing him waving to the crowd, scanning the audience and remaining on stage after Obama and other dignitaries had moved away.

After being left alone on stage, Biden appeared to ask: ‘Where are the children?’ before adding: ‘Where’s my granddaughter?’ according to Daily Mail lip-reader Nicola Hickling.

That’s the evergreen question, isn’t it? Biden supporters struggle to square refusal to recognize granddaughter.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

KEIR STARMER ‘CONSIDERING RESIGNING’ AFTER ANDY BURNHAM BY-ELECTION VICTORY:

Starmer is considering resigning amid mounting pressure from his Cabinet in the wake of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory, according to reports.

The Time reports that Starmer will consider his future as Prime Minister over the weekend despite him publicly insisting this morning that he will not “walk away”.

Several Cabinet ministers have reportedly told Starmer “to go” or set out a timeline for his departure. The list includes Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander.

Andy Burnham’s allies believe Starmer should set out a timetable to hand over the premiership in September to avoid jeopardising Labour’s prospects in the Greater Manchester mayoral race, it is understood.

Starmer’s departure won’t do much to change the political landscape, though: Labour’s heading for a catastrophic collision with reality.

The likely makeup of a Burnham cabinet is amusingly grotesque and indicates exactly why his premiership looks doomed before it starts. The New Statesman has breathily anointed Harriet Harman protégé Miatta Fahnbulleh as ‘the brains behind Burnham’, which is like naming someone the moral guide behind Boris Johnson or the personality guru behind Keir Starmer. Meanwhile, Sheffield’s answer to the Artful Dodger, Louise Haigh, has been given the mandatory Fabian bob-cut in preparation of a return to government. Another member of the inner sanctum is Anneliese Midgley, who as a measure of her depth as a politician, recently called for the Netflix show Adolescence to be screened in all British schools. Meanwhile, Labour insiders are talking about Ed Miliband in Number 11, which will give hope to lunatics with asylum-running ambitions everywhere.

Burnham doesn’t represent Labour realising it has to do something drastic to survive but, as his post-Oasis vibes-vomit of a victory speech today showed, is in fact a sort of anti-reality, a denial that any change has to happen at all.

To be fair, anti-reality is the order of the day in Old Blighty:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON TOY STORY 5: Did We Really Need This?

In his review of Toy Story 5, John Podhoretz writes, “How the mighty Pixar has fallen!“

[D]irector Andrew Stanton has come up with an inspired idea at its center: He literalizes the danger posed to childhood itself by internet devices in the form of a tablet dubbed Lilypad. It is gifted to a very shy little girl and immediately takes the place of the toys that formerly provided her solace and an outlet for her imaginative play. The toys need to find a way to save her from becoming a screen-addicted zombie.

Smart, right? The problem here is that Stanton and his cowriter Kenna Harris really chicken out when it comes to exploring the theme—which is perhaps understandable, as Pixar was largely the handiwork of Steve Jobs, the person most responsible for the hypnotic power the iPhone and iPad have over all of us. Pixar lecturing us about how we let our kids drown themselves in their screens is a little like a tobacco company attacking a vape pen. It turns out that Lilypad just wants the little girl to make friends and soon sees the error of her ways—then ends up becoming part of the gang that saves her.

When Pixar had nothing to lose, it made a great and unsentimental comedy called Toy Story. It followed that with Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and The Incredibles—each of them a masterpiece. Then it began stumbling. And now that it has everything to lose, Pixar has gone and made a decent and false work of sheer sentimentalism called Toy Story 5. I’m sure it will make a billion dollars. I’m also pretty sure Pixar will never again make anything remotely resembling a masterpiece.

But Toy Story 5 should sell lots of real toys to kids, which will continue to endure Pixar with their corporate bosses: “What’s the best way to get kids to play with toys? Selling new ones, of course! That’s why we have Woody wearing a red bandana in this movie for no reason whatsoever other than to sell you the new version of this toy. Why do we have a storyline in this movie surrounding 50 shipwrecked Buzz Lightyears, complete with a new design? To sell you the new design, of course!”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

CHANGE: The Professional Guest Is Dead. The Need They Filled Is Not.

Charles Nelson Reilly, a Tony winner before he ever sat down at Match Game, became known almost exclusively for that seat. Paul Lynde, a Broadway force in Bye Bye Birdie, was reduced in cultural memory to the center square on Hollywood Squares. Rip Taylor had a fake mustache and confetti. Nipsey Russell rhymed couplets between commercial breaks. Zsa Zsa Gabor presided over the ecosystem with what may be the most durable case of evidence-free celebrity in American history. Rock himself appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show as many as 84 times, usually with nothing to plug.

The architecture that produced them was specific and quantifiable. The daytime talk shows — Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore — ran five days a week, 52 weeks a year, each needing three to five guests per episode. The celebrity panel game shows, Match Game, Hollywood Squares, To Tell the Truth, Password and The Gong Show, needed several panelists at a time. Latenight talk needed two or three guests a night, five nights a week.

The arithmetic produced a structural demand for warm, entertaining bodies that the supply of A-list stars could not meet. The Professional Guest filled the gap, and the medium rewarded a specific craft for doing so: the compressed bit, the affectionate self-caricature, the ability to enter a crowded format and command three minutes without disrupting it.

What made these performers a new species was that their fame exceeded their act. Each had a defined craft: a bit, a routine, a signature. But the craft was eclipsed by the persona that carried it. Corey was not famous as a stand-up; he was famous as “Professor Irwin Corey.” Rock was not famous as a hairdresser or a singer; he was famous as “Monti Rock III.” The persona was the product, and the product was infinitely renewable as long as the formats kept buying.

And then the medium stopped buying. The ecosystem collapsed in the 1980s, killed by a convergence of structural forces every executive reading this column will recognize. The daytime variety talk show declined as syndication economics shifted. Issue-oriented daytime shows, Donahue first, then Oprah, found that ordinary people’s confessions drew larger audiences at lower cost than celebrity banter. The classic celebrity panel game show went extinct as audiences fragmented to cable. The habitat disappeared, and with it the species.

At least until YouTube and TikTok came along. As an old line in 1990s-era Wired magazine went, in the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: How Vermont Became Ground Zero for the Anti-Israel Movement.

Rachel Feldman, who co-founded pro-Israel group Shalom Alliance, told me Vermont was particularly vulnerable to a campaign like AFSC.

“It’s a Trojan horse,” Birong told me. “They’re just wedging the door open a little bit with words that sound ‘peaceful’ and ‘anti-war.’ And that is the ever-evolving nature of antisemitism.”

In most towns, the pledge under consideration comes from American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a tax-exempt Quaker organization that launched the so-called Apartheid-Free Communities network in spring 2023. It states that their goal is “not necessarily” to push towns toward boycotting and divesting from Israel—just toward any actions against “Israeli apartheid.”

“How to do that is up to your community and your context, and many can choose to engage in boycott or divestment actions.”

Late last year, Israel announced that AFSC—along with 36 other international organizations—could no longer operate in Gaza after failing to turn in a list of their Palestinian employees, along with their addresses and contact information. AFSC, which has been working in Gaza since 1948, called the new regulations a “part of a systematic effort” to “inflict further harm on Gaza’s civilian population.”

Just look at Senator Bernie Sanders, she said.

Polls consistently show that Sanders, a Jew and frequent critic of Israel who has called the country’s war against Hamas a “genocide,” is the most popular senator in America. All three members of the state’s congressional delegation are critics of Israel and boycotted Netanyahu’s 2024 address to Congress, including Rep. Becca Balint, who has described herself as “Jew-ish” and said that her “spiritual life is an amalgamation of Judaism, Quakerism, and Buddhism.”

When Sanders “walks through Montpelier, it’s like he’s a rock star,” Feldman said, calling him a “folk icon.”

“People want someone to look up to, and Bernie is that person for a lot of Vermonters.”

Vermont is a state of liberal superlatives. It is among the whitest, most elderly, and most progressive states in the country. It “takes seriously the concepts of institutionalized racism. We were fertile ground to be convinced that Jews are the oppressors,” Feldman told me. More than 80 percent of Vermonters live in towns that have adopted a Declaration of Inclusion, a pledge that “condemns racism” and is intended for “everyone to feel safe and welcome in our community.” No state voted more heavily for Kamala Harris in the most recent presidential election. And unlike the anti-Israel movement on college campuses and in major cities like New York, the activists driving this campaign are often boomers—retirees with a long track record of anti-war activism and nothing but time to kill. Catherine Bock, a 77-year-old Burlington resident, falls into that camp.

Vermont stalwart Howard Dean has also fallen in line with the left’s current hatred of Israel:

● Shot: Dean defends Middle East remarks.

Under fire for saying that the United States should be even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, 2004 Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean Wednesday said he would not abandon the long-standing policy of strong U.S. support for Israel.

The former Vermont governor said criticism of his remarks by presidential rival Sen. Joseph Lieberman was a “despicable” attempt to divide the Democratic Party, which has long enjoyed the support of many Jewish voters.

“We do have a special relationship with Israel. We would defend Israel if necessary. I think that is well-known,” he told CNN. “However, we are also the only country capable of bringing peace to the Middle East, and when we sit at the negotiating table, we do have to have the trust of both sides or we will never succeed.”

—CNN, September 10th, 2003.

● Chaser: Former Vermont Governor calls Israel an Apartheid state.

—The Jerusalem Post, October 3rd, 2021.

In 2003, Jonah Goldberg wrote about revisiting David Brooks’ “Latte Town” image of Burlington, Vermont during the Clinton-era 1990s:

In his Weekly Standard article, entitled “The Rise of the Latte Town,” Brooks highlighted Burlington, Vermont as Exhibit A in what he identified as a profound transformation of American liberalism and American society in general. Brooks declared, “One of the striking things about Burlington is that it is relatively apolitical.” He noted how the bookstores downplayed overtly partisan books in favor of tomes which explained how individual citizens could help the homeless. “Bulletin boards are everywhere,” he reported, “but most of the fliers advertise rock bands, not rallies.” He saw only three political bumper stickers there: two simply said “Bernie” (a reference to Vermont’s only congressman, an Independent in the House and a socialist in his heart) and the third was a sticker for Rush–which he found on the outskirts of town on a pickup truck, so maybe the owner was an out-of-towner making a delivery.

All in all, Brooks discovered, Leftists didn’t care much about national or international politics. They wanted to be left with their expensive-but-necessary homes, cars, and clothes. “So these upscale liberals have retreated from national and urban politics and instead concentrated their energies on the local politics and small-scale activism to be found in the Latte Towns.” Moreover, while this retreat may be literal for those who voted with their feet and moved to Burlington, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, there has been a broader psychological retreat by the Left in general. “In this sense, Latte Towns represent a fundamental transformation in the American Left, the shift from the adversary culture to the alternative culture.”

Visiting Burlington in 2003 one discovers a very different Latte Town, and not just because Brooks seemed not to notice all of the drug addicts and facially pierced ne’er-do-wells. Oh, by the way, Latte Towns (Alan Ehrenhalt coined the term) are exactly what you’d think. I describe them in my forthcoming NRODT piece as one of those clever, crunchy, condescending college burgs crammed with students–and professors–with open-toed shoes and closed minds. The kids can name 50 different espresso drinks but not one reason to cut a tax, a tree, or their hair.

Anyway, Burlington is hardly the “apolitical” hamlet Brooks encountered. These days the bookstores front a lot more Noam Chomsky and Al Franken. You can still find flyers for bands–if you’re willing to peel off the ones advertising trips to Cuba. Political bumper stickers are everywhere. “Impeach Bush” is particularly popular, but my favorite was one I saw while driving along the campus of the University of Vermont: “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.” You can also find it for sale at the “Peace & Justice Center & Store” on Church street in the heart of downtown Burlington.

Fast-forward to Latte Town in 2026:

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

TRANQUILITY BASE HERE, THE EGO HAS LANDED:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

TO BE SURE, THERE ARE FAR WORSE THINGS IRAN COULD BE DOING DURING PRIDE MONTH:

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN FAVOR OF SECURE BORDERS:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 19th, 2026

June 18, 2026

HEH: Tom Hanks’ brutal insult to M-SNOW reporter in shocking on-air outburst at Obama library opening.

A-list actor Tom Hanks took a surprise shot at MS NOW while attending the ceremonial opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on Thursday.

Hanks, 69, found himself face to face with a reporter from the network shortly after arriving.

MS NOW Senior National and Political Correspondent Jacob Soboroff was streaming  live and approached Hanks.

‘Great to see you,’ Soboroff said, eagerly attempting to get Hanks’ attention.

The actor appeared busy, but eventually acknowledged Soboroff after some light pestering.

He broke the silence with a quip: ‘What can I do for the 800 people watching MS NOW?’ – a nod to the network’s waning viewership.

‘Oh, come on. We’re live on MS NOW,’  Soboroff said, putting his hand on Hanks’ shoulder before offering a smile.

‘All right – add a zero to it,’ Hanks said in a dead-pan tone.

Well, that’s one way to get flyover country to see your new movie: What Have They Done to Buzz Lightyear?

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2026

JOHN MCWHORTER: “Dr. King didn’t die demanding that whites make excuses for us.”

Folks, I’d like to get my two cents in on Karmelo Anthony. This is a long one — pretend it’s an editorial.

“He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” Why does a boy spontaneously justify stabbing someone on so thin a pretense? And why do so many Black Americans see his 35-year prison sentence as racist?

I think the answer to both questions takes us to Scotland, Ireland, and northern England.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:36 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2026

JAMES PIERESON: The Age of Friedman.

The following remarks were delivered on receiving the Milton Friedman Award at the Pacific Research Institute in New York City June 16, 2026.

It is a special honor to receive an award named for Milton Friedman, pathbreaking economist, friend and advocate for liberty, fierce debater and intellectual combatant – a man whose ideas have shaped the modern world. It is not an exaggeration to say that we live today in the Age of Friedman, an era shaped by his ideas about the importance of monetary policy in the performance of modern economies, and the role played by central banks in managing money supply.

That was not all, not by any means. Milton Friedman was a fierce advocate of market economies not only because they worked, but because they promoted liberty, which was to him the most important principle of all. One of his early books, Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1963, which I encountered in college, made this case from historical and philosophical points of view, much as Hayek did in The Road to Serfdom. Along the way in that book, Friedman set forth numerous applications of free market principles that are influential today: school choice and school vouchers, a negative income tax to replace welfare programs, and private accounts in social security, among them. He was the rare academic economist who could speak to the public as well.

He advanced those ideas in other forums as well, including in his award-winning television series, Free to Choose, and in a regular column for Newsweek magazine, in which he expressed many controversial ideas, for example: that the welfare state increased poverty, public unions were harming schools and student achievement, and government regulation was responsible for inflation, unemployment, and stagnation. Free to Choose reached millions of viewers, in the same year as Ronald Reagan was poised to win the presidency – and to put some of those ideas into practice.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash and Burn Gaming — The Anita Sarkeesian Story.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 18th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: ChatGPT.

The New Hotness? ChatVSOP! Meet my snooty AI sommelier. Like many wine drinkers, my family and I are taking notes from Claude.

These days, I am not the only one turning to Daddy AI for wine advice. The New York Times recently ran a piece on the customers consulting chatbots in restaurants, so they know where to start with terrifying wine lists. Sommeliers, for their part, are largely delighted about this development. “People making the conscious effort with AI, it means they’re curious, and that makes me happy,” said Claudia Rossellini, wine director of the restaurant Bavel in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the internet abounds with techy types bragging about online cellars coded by AI. “How I Built an 80,000-Line Open Source Wine Cellar App in 6 Weeks with Claude,” is a typical headline, in this case by one Johan Eklund of “wine cellar management” app Cellarion. Reddit is also full of happy AI users for wine help. “I know almost nothing about wine,” writes one. “Rather than get the same bottle of Pinot Noir over and over, I tell Claude what I am having and it gives me a few good suggestions!”

To wit: my parents and I decided to find out what our Claude “sommelier” could teach us. To do so, we peered at a collection of bottles kindly made for the taking by the daughter of my late great-aunt, a glamorous, chain-smoking, Vienna-born mother of two. Where to start?

Hope pulsed as it does. Should we go with the 1982 Bouchard Père & Fils Meursault? Pictures were uploaded to Claude; the response was extensive and damning.

Claude took one look at the color and declared it was oxidized, which happens when wine is stored at “too warm a temperature.” The wine would then “taste flat, nutty, and vinegary – not pleasant.”

I’ve used ChatGPT a few times on my iPhone when shopping the wine departments at H-E-B and its Trader Joe’s inspired spinoff, Central Market. I uploaded photos of the bottles on the shelf, it OCRed the text on the labels and gave me descriptions of each type of Chablis, until it described the last one as “Ahh, Jean-Marc Brocard Sainte-Claire Chablis 2024 — now we’re talking. This one is a serious reference-point Chablis…If you’re choosing one bottle and want the most true Chablis experience from this shelf: Jean-Marc Brocard Sainte-Claire is the pick.”

I don’t know if it’s one “serious reference-point Chablis” — but it wasn’t bad at all.

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

DON SURBER: “Hello. I’m the Boss:”

Kris Sidial is a prominent derivatives trader, volatility specialist, and Co-Chief Investment Officer and co-founder of The Ambrus Group. He is on vacation in France. He tweeted:

I’m in Versailles right now, staying at the Waldorf, which is connected to the Palace of Versailles.

When we arrived, the receptionist told us the gardens would be closed because, “President Trump is coming.”

I turned to my fiancée and said, “That’s an odd thing for a French citizen to say, wouldn’t you say Macron?”

It’s a very interesting psychological dynamic that exists globally right now with Trump. On a micro level, this small interaction probably reflects the broader perception of why he believes he can walk into meetings of that caliber and project himself as “The Boss.”

President Trump is The Boss.

Indeed, he did visit the Versailles with Macron in tow. Gone are the days when Macron could try to one-up Trump in a handshake. In his second presidency, Trump realizes he holds the cards.

Likely the Secret Service requested the closure of the garden for security reasons. None of the other G7 leaders fear assassination, which reflects their importance. Trump leads the United States, which has an economy larger than the rest of the G7 combined—despite having 100 million fewer people.

Read the whole thing.

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

HOLLYWOOD TO PARENTS*: FOR PRIDE MONTH, BRING THE KIDS TO SEE THE NEW GAY SUPERGIRL!

“I’m honored that that’s happening, but I think because she doesn’t live inside the binary of what we think a woman should be, that is what makes it so special and so exciting and so new.”

But it really isn’t. Warner Brothers aimed the marketing of 2006’s Superman Returns, which should have been a family-friendly movie towards a gay audience. As a result:

While the film was one of the biggest films of the year, earning $391.1 million on a budget of $204–223 million and becoming the ninth highest-grossing film of 2006, Warner Bros. was disappointed with the worldwide box office return and cancelled a sequel for release in 2009.

*Except for “Christian dads.” Alcock attacked that demographic last month.

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

DEATH OF LATE NIGHT: Jay Leno On What Went Wrong At 11:30, Why Joe Rogan Is The New Johnny Carson & How John Oliver Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About.

LENO: Yeah, so when I turn on late-night now, regardless of how I’m watching, if I see Jake from State Farm again, I’m gonna shoot myself in the f*cking head.

It’s like, geez … the host comes out, does the monologue, then it’s right away over to six minutes of commercials. You come back, the host talks about who’s coming up and everything out, “We’ll be right back,” and so on. All cut up.

Enough already.

Why watch that when I can switch over to streaming or YouTube and I can watch an hour with Harrison Ford talking off the top of his head, as opposed to just having few minutes with the guest or with the host, you know? Johnny used to have real conversations. I tried to have real conversations. That’s seems to be gone, and the audience knows it.

DEADLINE: Can it come back?

LENO: It’s not that people are better or worse, it’s the fact that the whole medium has changed. The idea that you have to turn the TV on 11:30 p.m. to hear what was being said, like appointment television, that sounds ridiculous now.

DEADLINE: Devil’s advocate — why?

LENO: Because you can watch TV whenever you want now, you can watch whatever show whatever you want, you know, so that’s what’s really ruined it. There’s no immediacy. People used to say, “Oh, let’s see what David Letterman or whoever had to say about the president’s thing today,” and you and the whole world simultaneously at 11:30 knew what they thought. Now you can look it up anytime, and whenever you watch it, if you miss it, that’s OK, you know? So yeah, that’s what’s really changed.

DEADLINE: Sounds like Jay Leno is channeling Marshall McLuhan. That you’re saying, it’s the medium, not the message?

LENO: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.

I mean, podcasts really are the new talk shows. Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson.

Yeah, Joe talks to everybody about everything. There’s no FCC to step in and say what you say and can’t say, so you really do get an unfiltered idea of what everybody thinks. So yeah, I mean, to me, that’s what’s also changed late-night.

I talk to young people — they don’t know CBS, NBC or ABC, Channel Four; they know Channel 682 or whatever. They just go to YouTube. Which is amazing. If you had predicted YouTube would be the most popular channel in the world 10 years ago, I think people would have said, “What are you talking about?” But it is now.

Read the whole thing. There are a pair of photos atop this section of the interview juxtaposing a young, Brylcreemed Carson in a suit and tie, and a bald stubble-faced Rogan. In the 1960s and pre-cable 1970s era of mass media, every American man wanted to be the suave yet accessible Johnny Carson or the fun and boisterous Ed McMahon. While Rogan can certainly get his guests to talk and talk, does any guy fancy himself a Rogan clone?

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