Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 12, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: CNN, Media Freak When GOP’s Rep. Scott Perry Accurately Ties KKK History To Democrats.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, the New Republic and The Daily Beast  and others in the liberal media jumped on this as well. The New Republic termed Perry’s remarks “bizarro” while The Daily Beast settled for “bonkers.”

In the Inquirer story the reporter quoted “Matt Jordan, director of the Pennsylvania State University News Literacy” who said that after its founding in 1865 by Democrats “it became an extra-legal terror organization that was never the wing of any political party.”

Where to start with this wildly ignorant understanding of basic American history?

The hard historical fact, per, among many, Columbia University historian Eric Foner is that the KKK was in fact “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s description of the Klan was as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

Indeed, the Klan was so tied to the Democrats that the party’s 1924 Convention in New York City has been dubbed the “Klanbake” because so many of the delegates were Klan members.

The Klan’s favorite for the presidential nomination that year was one William Gibbs McAdoo, who had served Democrat – and Klan supporter  – President Woodrow Wilson as Secretary of the Treasury. Wilson, recall, was such a staunch Klan supporter that he hosted a White House screening of the pro-Klan, decidedly racist Hollywood blockbuster Birth of a Nation.

Evergreen:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on May 12th, 2024

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:

UPDATE: Flash-forward to 2024: Bombshell: Biden Administration Has Been Hiding Intel on Location of Hamas Leaders in Betrayal of Israel.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 12th, 2024

RIP: Roger Corman, Pioneering Independent Producer and King of B Movies, Dies at 98.

Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

Corman died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., surrounded by family members, the family confirmed to Variety.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,’” the family said in a statement.

Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).

There was something of a tradition among Corman’s protégés to give their former boss cameos in their films. Corman himself appears briefly as one of the US senators grilling the Corleones in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II. In the classic “terminate with extreme prejudice” scene at the beginning of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen is handed his mission to kill Col. Kurtz, his superior officers are named Col. G. Lucas and Gen. R. Corman, played by a young Harrison Ford and veteran character actor G.D. Spradlin, respectively:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 12th, 2024

May 11, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Classical reference in tweet:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 11th, 2024

WANNA GET AWAY?

Or — and hear me out now — you could just stroll over to the New York Public Library and scroll through the magazine section for the back issues:

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 11th, 2024

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Liberal media is still in denial about post-Oct. 7 antisemitism.

Seven months of an unprecedented surge in antisemitism that has turned American college campuses and even K-12 schools into hostile environments for Jews has changed a lot of minds about the issue. The willingness of much of the political left to downplay or even justify the atrocities of Oct. 7—and then to flip the narrative about the war that Hamas started to one in which the victims of terrorism are somehow the real villains of the story—has shocked even many political liberals into rethinking their assumptions about where the real danger lies.

But not The New York Times.

As two lengthy news features published in the paper this week confirmed, the flagship of liberal journalism in the United States hasn’t let events or the reality of a post-Oct. 7 world interfere with their ideological or political agendas.

In one story, the newspaper devoted the time of four reporters to take a deep dive into contemporary antisemitism. But the result of what is described as their extensive research is that they have come to the conclusion that the real culprits are not the people who seek the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, legitimize a genocidal terrorist movement as justified “resistance” or attempt to allow those responsible for the mass murder of 1,200 people to get away with it. Instead, the Times believes that the problem rests with (surprise!) Republicans who are rallying in support of a beleaguered State of Israel and who are opposed to the deluge of Jew-hatred on display in the American public square since the current war began.

In another, the paper reported a congressional hearing about the growing problem of antisemitism in K-12 schools throughout the country as primarily one about how those in charge of these institutions scored points against members of Congress who care about the issue.

These are just two prominent examples out of many that could be pointed to that show how the Times and other liberal media outlets manipulate coverage of this issue to promote their own partisan agendas. They are worth noting precisely because they illustrate how ideological agendas work to present a distorted picture of a crisis that serves primarily to deflect attention from the real cause.

As Glenn wrote in March, “You can always count on the NYT staff to side with the barbarians.” Just ask Walter Duranty — and his modern day successors.

Related: Don Surber: We don’t want journalism back. “Thus the answer to [Matt] Taibbi’s question ‘Is Journalism Back?’ is no. Journalists abandoned objectivity. Readers have decided that they do not want the journalists back.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 11th, 2024

May 10, 2024

NEO: Biden’s betrayal: “But for Michigan?”

I have long said that although it’s very clear that Joe Biden is very cognitively challenged compared to just a few years ago, he still has plenty of agency and his brain is not so far gone that he’s unaware. Plus, he was Obama’s VP from 2009 to 2017, in full possession of whatever were his native faculties, and he did Obama’s bidding on this and on just about every other topic.

So this is not some recent thing nor is it the result of his age-related cognitive problems. It’s a result of who he is: a corrupt and ambitious viper – or weasel, if you prefer – who would sell out anyone for a dime or for career advancement.

Which brings us to a famous exchange from A Man For All Seasons. No, it’s not the one I often post here, about “cutting down” the laws. It’s this one:

That’s where I got the idea for the title of this post. Biden has betrayed Israel, the Jews, the US, the West, and Congress to win the presidency (he thinks) by winning the votes of the Muslims in Michigan who would dearly love to see Israel and the Jews destroyed, and the US and the West in their current forms as well.

Past performance is no guarantee of future Trunalimunumaprzure:

UPDATE: Biden 2006: Civilian Deaths Are No Reason to Demand Israel Stop Defending Itself From ‘Cowards’ Hiding Among Them. “If nothing else, pick this up at the 2:45-ish mark and watch Joe Biden then absolutely demolish the current version of Joe Biden when it comes to fighting terrorists. It’s the exact opposite of his position regarding Rafah and Hamas. Also, note how much more coherent Biden was in 2006, and compare it to his speech these days. This ain’t a ‘stutter,’ folks. It’s creeping senility.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 10th, 2024

TO BE FAIR, THE TWO VANDALS ARE OLD ENOUGH TO BE AMONG THE ORIGINAL SIGNERS: Just Stop Oil Tries to Destroy Magna Carta.

The Just Stop Oil tactic of attacking priceless works of art and other artifacts is an attempt to duplicate the Taliban campaign to erase non-Muslim culture in Afghanistan. It is a tactic of cultural terrorists and, in my view, should be treated in exactly the same manner.

* * * * * * * *

Two protesters, aged 85 and 82, cracked the glass case surrounding the royal charter at the British Library in central London on Friday morning.

The library holds two of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, with the others at Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral.

Flashback: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation:

As a modern conservative, [the late Roger] Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.

In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.

And from 2019, VDH: Waging War Against The Dead. “Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed. The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 10th, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “Think Different.”

The new hotness? Apple downplays the value of human achievement.

Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays. A piano is smashed and splattered with paint buckets. An arcade machine, a drawing figure, record player, trumpet, vintage film and stock cameras are destroyed. A Greek bust is smashed, and eventually the press, drooling with several different colors of paint, closes completely. When it lifts up, the new iPad rests in the middle with a voiceover bragging about how thin it is.

As several people noted on X, the ad was a direct inverse of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad and representative of the destruction of physical media and the culture that made America. One poster on X wrote, “Apple’s new ‘Crush’ ad (let’s call it ‘2024’) is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad. 1984: Monochrome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colorful, vibrant human 2024: Colorful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist, industrial press.”

Wall Street Journal tech reporter Katie Deighton noted, “This ad perfectly encapsulates the insight that people think technology is killing everything we ever found joy in. And then presents that as a good thing.”

In 2014, the Huffington Post noted, “Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone.” But the iPhone and iPad were touted as great value for money because they combined all of those products into one sleek handheld device, not that they literally pulverized their predecessors into a fine paste.

Or as James Lileks writes: “We know the experience of tapping a picture of a keyboard to get a note: it isn’t real. We know the experience of striking an actual key, the way it yields but has its own presence that reacts to dynamics, the way the note comes from a soundboard of wood hewn from a tree instead of a tiny speaker. Painters know how committing a brush to a canvas is commitment you may or may not fulfill, but how noodling on glass on one of an infinite set of virtual canvases is underscored by the knowledge that nothing need be finished, and anything can be abandoned without cost. It’s like an ad that shows the press crushing the family Fido, and ends with an iPad that shows a video of the dog.”

UPDATE: Apple apologizes for ad that crushes the sum total of human artistic endeavor.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 10th, 2024

May 9, 2024

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Day Before Biden Admin Announced It Would Withhold Weapons From Israel, It Issued Sanctions Waiver To Allow Arms Sales to Qatar and Lebanon.

Less than a day before the Biden administration announced its intent to cut off U.S. arms sales to Israel, it issued a sanctions waiver to bypass congressional prohibitions on arms sales to a host of Arab nations that boycott the Jewish state, including Hamas ally Qatar and Iran-controlled Lebanon, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

On Tuesday—just a day before President Joe Biden threatened to withhold key weapons deliveries from Israel if the country moves forward with an incursion in the Gaza Strip’s Rafah neighborhood—the State Department informed Congress that it intends to bypass laws that bar the United States from selling weapons to nations that boycott Israel, according to a copy of the notification obtained by the Free Beacon.

The Biden administration, which has waived these sanctions in the past, said in the notification that it intends to extend the waiver through April 30, 2025, allowing weapons to be sent to a host of nations that work closely with the Hamas terror group and other Iran-backed terror proxies.

It’s just amazing how much Good Ol’ Moderate Joe’s foreign policy decisions sound exactly like the sort of thing Obama would have done!

Posted at 4:46 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 9th, 2024

YOU AND I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH SCARCITY: ‘The era of cheap food is over,’ says Waitrose chief.

Bailey will unveil the “Farming for Nature” scheme at Leckford, the Waitrose farm in Hampshire where they have been farming regeneratively since 2020. The supermarket wants to source “as much as possible” of its UK meat, milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables from farms that use regenerative practices, such as reducing pesticide use and ploughing and turning over field margins to pollinators. The aim is that by 2035, all of its UK supply chain for these items will be from regenerative farms. It is aware it will be a huge learning curve for Waitrose farmers and can’t predict how many will sign up, but Bailey is determined that the supermarket should lead the way.

“I think there was a point at which we realised we had to do something,” he says. It sounds very noble, but some would say supermarkets have a major part to play in getting where we are now, having engaged in a systematic price war that has pushed farmers into intensification. Does Bailey, who worked for Sainsbury’s for 18 years – starting in the fresh food department and working his way to become its grocery buying director, before he joined Waitrose in 2020 – feel guilty?

He laughs awkwardly. “I feel responsible,” he says. “I’m part of a generation of people who are in the right place at the right time to make a change. And I feel that burden.”

“I think we’re seeing the end of the era of cheap food, because of the impact of that cheap food – not just on people’s health but the external impact, the environmental impact, the societal impact of that cheap food. We need to witness the end of cheap food and a reversal of the value of the food people are eating.”

The ghost of FDR smiles; as Amity Shlaes wrote, in the 1930s, “Roosevelt led the country in passing the Agricultural Administration Act, which taxed middlemen in order to give a greater share of revenue to farmers. The Act also restricted production and sent subsidies to those on the farm. Six million young pigs were killed early to drive up pork prices; farmers were instructed to plow crops under.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 9th, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT PARTY:”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 9th, 2024

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE:

 

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 9th, 2024

May 8, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Press Cowards’ Hypocritical Lament Over Media’s Lack of ‘Balls’ and ‘Swagger.’

“Very few owners have balls anymore,” former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown told [Semafor’s Max] Tani. “A very sorry fact for journalism.”

Tani’s piece was amplified by Jack Shafer at Politico. “Wounded and limping, doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials: its swagger,” Shafer wrote. “Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend.”

Veteran Washington Post newsman Kevin Merida, quoted by Shafer, says: “It’s harder to be confident, and exude that confidence in newsrooms—given the state of our industry. But leaders should find their inner swagger.” He continued, “I don’t like to generalize, as every newsroom is different. But cautiousness, lack of ambition, being too quick to abandon experiments or being afraid to try them, all are signifiers. To quote the immortal [hip-hop group] A Tribe Called Quest: ‘Scared money don’t make none.’”

Shafer hopes that “surely there is a path back from the milquetoastery of contemporary journalism to something approximating swagger.”

In reality, these would-be Mike Tysons are more like the quivering students in the movie School Ties—the ones who hide in their dorm rooms when they are called out by Brendan Fraser.

Tani, Shafer, and Merida may talk tough about mixing it up, but none of them, and none of their epicene peers in the mainstream media, have come within miles of reviewing, or even mentioning the evidence I produced in my book about 2018’s corrupt Kavanaugh hearings. In The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi, I show the way the left was attempting through extortion and bullying to end Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and, potentially, my life. To ignore it as if none of what I’ve revealed is newsworthy or historically important is insane.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and this bias-by-omission makes perfect sense.

Evergreen:


Posted at 6:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 8th, 2024

RIP: Steve Albini has died at 61: “It’s really impossible to sum up just how important Steve Albini has been to the past 40+ years of underground/alternative music, and impossible to say anything that hasn’t been said already. This is a monumental loss and Albini’s impact isn’t going anywhere. Rest in peace, Steve.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 8th, 2024

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Squad Rep Jamaal Bowman’s YouTube Page Is a Conspiracy Theorist’s Dream.

Old (internet) habits die hard.

When The Daily Beast revealed in January that Rep. Jamaal Bowman had promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on his blog while working as a public school principal, the New York Democrat maintained it was just a bygone phase, and that his days of marinating in the nether-swamps of online paranoia were long over. But his personal YouTube account, where he continued to follow new channels and create playlists as recently as last month, indicates his taste for fringe content has endured into his tenure on Capitol Hill.

* * * * * * * *

Bowman has publicly identified himself in the past as a frequent YouTube user. At a panel discussion held at an Islamic center in the city of Yonkers in January, the Democrat described himself as “starstruck” to introduce the incendiary academic Norman Finkelstein, whom he said he knew from online videos.

“I watch them all the time on YouTube,” said Bowman, who subsequently had to denounce Finkelstein’s praise of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israeli territory on Oct. 7.

Sure enough, several of the pages Inner Peace follows—including DiEM25, Real News Network, Free Will, PoliticsJOE, TRT World—feature interviews with Finkelstein.

Moreover, a number of the accounts Bowman has subscribed to are of recent vintage: more recent, even, than his own ascent to power in 2020. For instance, one called Afripost—where recent video titles announce “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS” (capitalization original)—was created in April of last year, just a few months after Bowman started his second term.

Afripost also frequently shares speeches by controversial Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, known for his antisemitic rhetoric. The most recent such video asserts, falsely, “BLACKS ARE THE TRUE J£WS [sic].”

Flashbacks:

● Three Democrats Attended Private Dinner With Iran’s President And Louis Farrakhan.

● Establishment Media Bury Obama-Farrakhan Photo.

● The deep meaning of Keith Ellison.

● Nation of Islam activists on Obama camp payroll. Former insider worried by senator’s connection to Louis Farrakhan, members of radical group.

Related: The Democrat Party’s Antisemitism Went Mainstream With Barack Obama.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 8th, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “I Heard You Paint Houses.”

The New Hotness?

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 8th, 2024
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