Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

GREAT MOMENTS IN STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: TNR: The Fear That’s Keeping Mitt Romney From Endorsing Harris.

Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who has said he would not vote for Donald Trump, has expressed some reticence about endorsing Trump’s opponent over a particularly grim worry.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Romney has cited concern for his family’s safety as one of the reasons he has not publicly supported Kamala Harris, according to one person familiar with the Utah politician’s thinking.

Harris’s party operatives with bylines compared him to Hitler, said he gave employees cancer, a sexist because he had “binders full of women,”   and that he was needlessly cruel to his dog, in between screaming to him, “What about your gaffes??!!”,  and joking about his “magic underwear.” Her boss shouted that he was a racist who would put black people “back in chains.”

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Sister.

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF NEW YORK UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE:

Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?

—The New Yorker, Monday.

Fran Lebowitz: ‘Biden Should Dissolve the Supreme Court.’

Newsmax, yesterday.

NYC Mayor Adams pleads not guilty to sweeping federal corruption indictment.

—The New York Daily News, Friday.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Journey Ends Exactly Where You Expected It Would. “His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just profiled him for the unveiling of his newest book? You guessed it: The elimination of the Jewish state.”

—Jeffrey Blehar, NRO, Tuesday.

CHRISTIAN TOTO ON FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S MEGALOPOLIS: Auteur’s Messy Prayer for Brighter Tomorrow.

Francis Ford Coppola has spent decades thinking about a movie project now known as “Megalopolis.”

And it shows.

The sprawling drama packs so many consequential themes into its two-plus hours it could have yielded a half-dozen films. Maybe more.

As is, “Megalopolis” is a glorious mess, a clash of tonal styles and belief systems that delivers until it leaves us confused, if not frustrated by its reach.

Star Adam Driver deserves an honorary Oscar for holding all the fascinating pieces together.

As John Nolte writes, Coppola deserves major credit for casting previously cancelled actors: Coppola told Rolling Stone, “What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers. The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another. There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”

Unfortunately, Coppola’s risk taking isn’t translating into ticket sales: Box Office: ‘Megalopolis’ Bombs With D+ CinemaScore, ‘Wild Robot’ Soaring to No. 1.

LEBANON LIVE UPDATES: Hezbollah Confirms That Leader Hassan Nasrallah Killed in Israeli Airstrike.

AP seems quite upset over his death. Did he ever stop by the office in Gaza? Sad Terrorist Noises: AP Mourns Loss of Colleague With Glowing Headline About Hezbollah Leader Nasrallah:”

“Hezbollah is responsible not only for the deaths of Israelis, but hundreds of American troops. And the AP mourns their demise. You don’t despise the media enough. You really, really don’t.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Gen Zers are getting fired at shocking levels. Here’s why.

It’s easy to blame Gen Zers for their reported laziness and simply tell them to do better. But attributing these failures solely to the personal shortcomings of young people these days is an oversimplification that fails to capture the nuance of the situation. Young people are being raised in a particular environment that’s leading to these worse outcomes, and that means there’s plenty of blame to go around.

One chief culprit is surely the higher education system, which is supposed to prepare young adults for the workforce, but evidently isn’t doing a very good job.

“Many recent college graduates may struggle with entering the workforce for the first time as it can be a huge contrast from what they are used to throughout their education journey,” Intelligent.com concluded in its report. “They are often unprepared for a less structured environment, workplace cultural dynamics, and the expectation of autonomous work.”

That’s right: Modern colleges often infantilize young adults, through “trigger warnings,” safe spaces, grade inflation where it’s easy to get As, and other wildly unrealistic elements of campus life. I’ll never forget one time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when my dormitory put Care Bears up on the walls — yes, Care Bears! — reminding college sophomores and juniors to drink water, brush their teeth, and sleep eight hours a night. Have you ever heard of a workplace that remotely looks like this?

It is not surprising that college students who “graduate” from this kind of adult daycare then struggle in the real world. And frankly, it’s not even all their own fault.

Who could have seen this coming? “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”

—Ashe Schow, the Washington Examiner, March 26, 2015.

And from earlier this year, our look at what happened when all those delicate snowflakes entered America’s newsrooms.

JOHN NOLTE: Disney Flop The Acolyte Cost Nearly Quarter of a Billion Dollars.

The Acolyte is — er, was; it’s already been canceled — the latest Disney+ Star Wars-raping streaming series. This one was all about how lesbian witches created everything or something.

Anyway, the groomers told us the eight-episode series cost only $180 million. But now, thanks to the fact the United Kingdom does not allow studios to fudge or hide their numbers, we know The Acolyte $231 million.

That Park Place:

United Kingdom tax documents filed by the Walt Disney Company’s UK branch reveal that Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company spent over 172 million GBP (231 million USD) on the production of The Acolyte, a prequel series set in the Disney Star Wars universe.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, The Acolyte series creator Leslye Headland publicly claimed the show cost “180 million,” which was assumed by several to be stated in US dollars. It is evident that if Headland had knowledge of the series financials that she was more likely referring the the amount in Great British Pounds. Accounting for exchange rates at the time of this article, this means that The Acolyte cost almost $230 million US dollars.

That works out to about $29 million per episode.

Industrial Light and Magic certainly knows how to make spaceships explode in a spectacular fashion. But nobody sets money itself ablaze on the small and big screen like Kathleen Kennedy. Not to mention, nobody knows how to either permanently or temporarily derail the career aspirations of the actresses she casts:

But Kennedy isn’t the only producer at Disney who can set money on fire, Ace writes: Disney Is Making “Brutal” Payroll Cuts, Again. Plus: All the Woke Entertainment News I’ve Skipped for a Month.

DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY: Eric Adams’s Turkey trot.

“Brooklyn is the Istanbul of America,”* now-Mayor Eric Adams told a pair of Turks on camera after they asked him for political favors in a cameo he made in a Turkish romcom. Now, in real life, Adams is accused of doing just that, following a sweeping indictment unsealed by prosecutors in Manhattan who allege that he fraudulently obtained $10 million in public campaign funds and accepted over $100,000 in bribes in order to facilitate a new Turkish consulate.

“In 2014, Eric Adams, the defendant, became Brooklyn borough president. Thereafter, for nearly a decade, Adams sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the fifty-seven-page indictment reads; it marks the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted.

The indictment includes multiple outright absurd allegations, including that Adams changed his iPhone password, only to claim he forgot “the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone” and that his staff asked a businessman to lie to the feds about obvious straw donations his employees made in return for him securing a city sponsorship for events.

For his part, Adams, who has called the charges “false,” has suggested that they are politically motivated, and based off of his opposition to the Biden administration’s open borders policies. They come after multiple members of his inner circle had their homes searched.

The hours leading up to and following the indictment saw a series of strange comments from Adams allies and enemies bubble up. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a potential mayoral candidate down the road, called on him to resign — even before the indictments were unsealed. On the other hand, Liel Liebovitz took to the pages of Tablet magazine to argue that “Jewish New Yorkers have an obligation to stand up against a corrupt Democratic Party lawfare campaign that is targeting the mayor who stood up for us.”

If New Yorkers thought the de Blasio years were bad, just make AOC mayor. But then again, even she might be slightly better than Adams’ possible direct successor, Jumaane Williams.

* “We call New York City the Port-Au-Prince of America,” Adams tweeted in March in regards to the Haitian immigrant crisis, if we’re keeping track of crazy pandering stuff that only Adams says about New York.

MUST-FLEE TV: How (Not) to Study Hitler.

There are good reasons for students to learn about the madmen of history. The vices of such men contrast sharply with the heroes whose virtues we hope our citizens and statesmen might emulate; they serve as reminders of the cruelties that a flawed human nature can produce; and they can serve as warnings for where politics can occasionally descend should the better angels of our nature fail on a mass scale. Students today rightly study Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for all three reasons. This is as it should be. Indeed, conditions today are such that the need for the third reason is particularly heightened: antisemitism is growing at alarming rates; fringe fascist-sympathizers have a large following online; and the value of liberal democracy is being openly questioned all around. In such times, Hitler’s Germany can serve as a sobering reminder of just how badly things can go if we lose our heads.

To fulfill this mandate to educate, the creators of the Netflix documentary series, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, needed only to tell the story again, to let the narrative speak for itself. In certain respects, they do this, deploying a mix of real footage from the Nazi era, choreographed scenes with actors to fill in the gaps, and historical commentary that conveys the story of Hitler’s life and how one man directed a respectable country towards evil. But the series is handicapped by crucial flaws. Chief among these is its attempts to compare the Weimar Republic and its chief villain to contemporary American politics. Its loud dog whistles equating Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump betray a desperation of the creators that goes beyond the limits of acceptable bias in such a way as to undermine the aim of the entire project.

In some cases, the references are far too obvious to actually be considered dog whistles:

BENJAMIN CARTER HETT, Author, The Death of Democracy:

Outside of Berlin, large numbers of Germans are living in small communities, rural communities where the artistic experimentation, the innovation, the sexual experimentation of Weimar Berlin is utterly foreign to them. And indeed, they are somewhat hostile to it.

ANNE BERG, Professor, University of Pennsylvania:

It’s a group of people who feel shunned. So, if we want to make a contemporary analogy, we can see the sort of forgotten people in America, there is a sense that the system has dealt them a bad hand, and Hitler kind of taps into a fundamental disillusionment with the Weimar Republic. And this is the concept that he will return to repeatedly, even after he is in power.

As the New York Times noted:

Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”

Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes of “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a new historical documentary series on Netflix. But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.

Egged on by the documentary makers, of course.

NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Danielle Pletka: Meet the President of Iran.

[Masoud] Pezeshkian is a trade up from [the extremely deceased Ebrahim] Raisi: Smarter, smoother, less ranty, and more approachable. And I want especially to emphasize the heart of his messaging, because you will recognize in it the heart of the New York Times, Financial Times, and other elite intellectual bastions’ messaging on Israel. First, he didn’t waste time with the antisemitism, and uttered the word “Zionist” once, more than an hour in. He had tested his approach with his Washington friends in private meetings (yes, we know who sees Team Tehran one-on-one), and he wasn’t going to waste points with college-level trolling. Second, he wanted us to know something: Iran does not want war. Iran hates violence. If the Palestinians want to make nice with Israel, that is their call.

Israel, you should know, wanted the hardliner to win the Iranian elections, so it could tell the world it was right about Iranian intransigence. But they didn’t get their wish, and Mr. Softie, Uncle Masoud, was the victor. He is well aware Iran needs reform, and he is the man to reform it.

Israel wants to drag Iran into a wider war, but the pacifists that run Iran are too committed to their healing message: No one wins in a war. If there is a peace to be had, Iran will do nothing to risk it. So, yes, Israel killed the top Hamas terror master in Tehran, and tested the Ayatollahs. But they were strong, they did not take the bait.

Iran does not want nuclear weapons. Iran just wants to give voice to the voiceless. Iran wants only dignity. Iran would even come back to dialogue with the United States. Sure, the Supreme Leader is very, very angry about bad, bad Donald Trump pulling out of the JCPOA, but Pezeshkian believes only in dialogue. He will fight to make peace, even with the Supreme Leader.

Why is Iran in an axis with China and Russia? Because it must survive. Why is Iran arming Russia against Ukraine? (The nutty professor answered this one for Pezeshkian.) Because NATO has trapped the Russians with its expansionist aims.

This was true alt-world stuff, uttered with complete conviction, more in sorrow than in anger. Zarif often stared lovingly at Pezeshkian, and rightly so. This guy is Mr. Smooth in addition to being Mr. Softie. I couldn’t believe they didn’t give me a stuffed Ayatollah as swag to take home.

Tucker Carlson’s guest booker must be scrambling to arrange an interview with Pezeshkian ASAP.

Related: Why Are Iran’s Thugs Free to Walk the Streets of New York?

OLD AND BUSTED: “Mile Markers on the Road to Detroit.”

The New Hotness? Mile Markers on the Road to Mad Max! Coyote-fearing locals are putting vests with spikes on their tiny dogs in San Francisco.

Anna Contreras was at her home in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood on the evening of June 21 when a neighbor called to say a coyote was running down Agnon Avenue with a small dog in its mouth. Contreras ran to the window, but by the time she got there, the coyote was gone, so she reviewed footage from minutes before on a home security camera that’s pointed directly at the street. She was horrified by what she saw.

The video, she said, showed the dog squirming wildly, trying to get out of the coyote’s mouth. “He drops it, and then the dog had its ass up in the air, it was growling and barking at the coyote. Then [the dog] took off running toward Mission and the coyote pursued it.”

Contreras said she does not know whether the coyote scooped up the dog again. She did not report the incident to San Francisco Animal Care and Control because, she said, “they’re not going to come out for anything like that.”

Back in 2007 Glenn noticed the phrase “fur children,” and wrote in response, “I ran across this term — meaning pets you have instead of, you know, real children – a while back and was bothered. I mentioned it to a friend from DC, who remarked that it wasn’t uncommon to see women, and even men, on the street with a cat or small dog in a baby carrier.”

It was a pretty common term (and trend) when I lived in the Bay Area back then. But to be honest, I was expecting their fur children to have to be defended from being coyote appetizers a decade and a half later.

SOD OFF SWAMPIES: Fresh attack on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers after Just Stop Oil activists jailed.

The National Gallery said the three activists had been arrested and the paintings remain unharmed after the incident at 2.30pm.

A statement said: “The paintings were removed from display and examined by a conservator and are unharmed. We are aiming to reopen the exhibition as soon as possible.”

In a video on social media, one protester said: “Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.”

Holland and Plummer, both 22, were found guilty of criminal damage at Southwark Crown Court in July.

During their trial, it was heard the activists, who denied damaging the painting, caused as much as £10,000 worth of damage to the frame, which prosecutors said was “a piece of art in itself”.

The protesters, wearing Just Stop Oil T-shirts, threw two tins of Heinz tomato soup over the 1888 work in October 2022, before kneeling down in front of the painting and gluing their hands to the wall beneath it.

Visitors were escorted out by security, who then shut the doors to the room containing the painting.

Raj Chada, defending Holland, said the women “did check” that the painting was protected by a glass cover before throwing the soup.

Plummer, representing herself, told the hearing: “My choice today is to accept whatever sentence I receive with a smile.

Earlier: Joel Kotkin: Environmentalism is a Fundamentalist Religion.

RIP: Dame Maggie Smith dies aged 89: Beloved Harry Potter and Downton Abbey star passes away in hospital after 70-year acting career — as tributes flood in for ‘one of the greats.’

INSURRECTION: Tim Walz’s education appointee, Macalester professor backs ‘overthrow’ of United States.

According to the National Review, Brian Lozenski, a professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College in the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota has called for the “overthrow” of the United States. Walz had tapped Lozenski to create an “implementation framework” for Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards.

During a 2022 Zoom recording of Lozenski discussing his book, “My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US,” the professor and appointee of Walz was speaking about how the text tied into education and critical race theory (CRT).

He said that a main tenet of CRT is that the “United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So, if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown.” Lozenski had said that those in favor of CRT cannot simply say that CRT is “just about telling our stories and divers[ity].”

“It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent. And we, we need to be, I think, more honest with that,” Lozenski added, later saying, “The United States needs to be deconstructed, period. Right. Like that’s, you know, and so I think, I think it’s an interesting argument there. And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist.”

As Andy Ngo tweets, “Walz’s DEI, CRT education appointee for Minnesota’s curriculum on ethnic studies advocates for insurrection against the U.S. in the name of overthrowing racism. The same argument was used to burn, loot and kill in 2020 by BLM-Antifa extremists.”

With the blessings of both Walz and Harris: Kamala Harris Lies, Claiming That She Never Promoted the Bail Fund That Bailed Out BLM Rioters As Well As Murderers and R4pists; But the Tweet In Which She Promoted that Bail Fund Is Still Up!

And: Did Tim Walz ‘Let Minneapolis Burn?’

There is one point on which everyone I spoke to seemed to agree: The destruction was orchestrated largely by agitators, not local protesters. Some of them were militant anarchists, and some were far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, and the “Aryan Cowboys.”

“People there with a First Amendment right to protest were being used as cover, whether wittingly or unwittingly, for the destruction,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous.

[Minneapolis police lieutenant Kim Voss], who went undercover decades ago to investigate Antifa, told me that “this is what trained activists do. They found a crowd that was really ripe for it. A lot of the looters were local people—ones that got caught up in it. But they were puppets. The activists were the puppeteers.”

More than anyone, though, Voss blames Walz. She recalled once hearing Walz use the line, “We don’t abandon our folks,” referring to Democrats who were calling for Biden to exit the presidential race.

“I thought, You’re so full of shit,” she said. “You did. You left us all behind.”

Related: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’ “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was — what was happening.”

Walz’s daughter was also apparently pro-rioters as well back then:

FACT CHECK: Interviewing Joe Biden ‘Like Having One of The Beatles at the Table.’

Joe Biden, nominal president of the United States, sat down with the ladies of The View for an interview on Wednesday. “It’s like having one of the Beatles at the table,” co-host Sarah Haines said as the audience roared and her colleagues cackled.

Haines wasn’t entirely wrong, according to a Washington Free Beacon fact check. Biden doesn’t have much in common with the Beatles, but they’re both half-dead, half-octogenarian relics who haven’t accomplished anything of substance since the 1970s. We rate Haines’s claim “mostly true.”

Since the Beatles are now in the “let’s use AI to salvage ancient footage of the band and isolate John’s voice from his mid-’70s demos to generate new product” phase of their corporate existence, and Biden is a withered holographic husk of a man in 2024, I’ll allow it as well.

IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!

That’s nothing. Jessica Savitch told me we’d all be dead by the mid-1990s:

GREAT MOMENTS IN MESSAGE DISCIPLINE: Kamala Harris ridiculed after urging Americans to move on from ‘failed policies:’ ‘New Trump ad just dropped.’

—The New York Post, today.

Joe Biden yesterday on The View:

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