Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 2, 2024

RECREATE ’68 — YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG:

And in some cases a lot of snacks:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 2nd, 2024

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden May Have Just Created an International Incident With Comment Insulting Our Allies, Japan and India.

“One of the reasons why our economy’s growing is because of you and many others. Why? Because we welcome immigrants,” Biden said at a Washington fundraising event for his 2024 re-election campaign and marking the start of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

“Why is China stalling so badly economically, why is Japan having trouble, why is Russia, why is India, because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants. Immigrants are what makes us strong.”

* * * * * * * * *

He really is: Biden-Harris HQ Is Campaigning for Donald Trump Again.

Flashbacks:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

Related: Japan won’t forget Biden’s ‘xenophobia’ accusation.

The other possibility is that he just went off script, and his inner grouchy grandpa persona leaked out. His summit with Kishida was all of three weeks’ ago, so it is understandable if he has forgotten about it. And perhaps he has been binge-watching the remake of Shogun on those long spells at his Delaware retreat and imagines it still to be the Edo period.

Whatever the explanation, two things are certain. Firstly, this won’t be forgotten any time soon — the Japanese have only just about forgiven the Democrats for Bill Clinton skipping the country on an Asian tour in 1998 (the “Japanese passing” incident). And Donald Trump just made a load of new friends in Japan.

But, look on the bright side! Unlike Papa Bush, during a key milestone on his way to losing reelection, Biden only metaphorically vomited on Japan.

UPDATE: Biden’s base hands Trump another campaign ad:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 2nd, 2024

BIDEN STILL STUCK IN “VERY FINE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES” MODE: Biden Satisfies No One With Lackluster Speech Decrying ‘Antisemitism & Islamophobia:’

Summary: Last night, CNN spent its prime time segment decrying the Democratic president’s “radio silence” on the Gaza-related campus protests and chaos. MSM pundits have pointed to his lack of leadership as violence at times erupted from UCLA to Columbia to a number of elite schools.

As expected, Biden began by trying to chart a kind of middle course condemning “antisemitism” and “Islamophobia”… though many conservatives have pointed out it’s only the former they are seeing evidence of during these campus protests.

“Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder or denying the rights of others… no place for hate speech in America,” Biden said. “Denying the rights of others” appears a very vague reference to students occupying buildings, and denying the ability of tuition-paying students to go to their classes, libraries, or to take exams.

“In moments like this, there are always those who rush in to score political points. But this isn’t a moment for politics. It’s a moment for clarity. So let me be clear…Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is.”

“Destroying property is not a peaceful protest, it’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows*, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation. None of this is a peaceful protest, threatening people, intimidating people,” Biden said.

We should note that Biden’s ‘middle way’ attempt (akin to “good folks on both sides” rhetoric that the Left gets angry about) is unlikely to satisfy either side. In the end, this lackluster speech is not going to make the encampments disappear, or the protesters disperse.

* Wait until Biden discovers what his vice president was doing in 2020:

Prior to today’s typically lackluster speech, the Washington Free Beacon dubbed Biden “The Invisible President:”

We’re not in the business of offering political advice to President Joe Biden, but it is hard to miss his absence from the situation. The New York Times calls him a “bystander,” and the president has forsaken the bully pulpit for strongly worded statements meted out through various spokesmen. “The president believes that forcibly taking over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach,” the spokesman, John F. Kirby, told reporters hours before officers cleared the hall. “That is not an example of peaceful protest.”

Good to know. The chaos engulfing the campuses is but a first foretaste of the bitter cup which will be proffered to Biden at the Democratic convention this summer, when the same protesters, with degrees from the same “elite” institutions bring their “peaceful” protest tactics to Chicago intent on wreaking havoc.

Biden wants to blend into the curtains.

And ultimately, at least on this issue, he still does, which seems an odd stance for someone who’s ideology believes that “silence=violence,” and who tweeted in 2020 (or far more likely whose handlers tweeted):

And as a result, the increasingly Corbynized left are at an inflection point: Democrats enter panic mode as Gaza protests erupt.

On the other hand though, Biden, through his silence, is creating a path for both sides of the aisle to move forward in agreement! ‘F*ck Joe Biden’ Chant Unites Pro-Palestinian and Counter-Protesters at University of Alabama.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 2nd, 2024

May 1, 2024

FINALLY, A TRUE ALTERNATIVE TO AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION IS NOW AVAILABLE: Iran University Offers Scholarships to Expelled US Students.

The head of a university in Iran is reportedly offering scholarships to students in the U.S. who have been expelled for taking part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses.

Mohammad Moazzeni, head of Shiraz University in the southern region of Fars, extended his proposal to those protesting Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas, following clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement across America.

He said: “Students and even professors who have been expelled or threatened with expulsion can continue their studies at Shiraz University and I think that other universities in Shiraz as well as Fars Province are also prepared [to provide the conditions],” he said, according to Irainian state-owned outlet Press TV.

U.S. students have been facing arrest or expulsion following their actions in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the divestment of their universities from companies which support Israel.

A couple of words of warning; the keg parties are going to be pretty lousy, and unlike Columbia, the university is really strict about the dress code: Iranian woman, 22, dies ‘after being beaten by morality police’ over hijab law.

With those caveats in mind, note that discounted transportation options are available to interested students:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 1st, 2024

KURT SCHLICHTER: Will Jewish Voters Stop Voting for the Democrats Who Want to Kill Them?

Jewish Americans are going to have to make a decision – the famously Democrat-leaning minority has a big problem because many of its fellow Democrats want them dead. That’s not an exaggeration – the chant of the Democrat’s left wing is not, “From the river to the sea, the Chosen People should be happy, safe, and free.” Kind of the exact opposite. These scumbag commies are so promiscuous with lies about the Jewish people like “apartheid” and “genocide” they ought to hand out rhetorical condoms on the many college quads these loathsome heirs of the Nazis have infested.

Yet Jews in America overwhelmingly vote Democrat. You know, this might be a good time to rethink their traditional leftist voting habits, but that conundrum represents a conflict in human nature – the conflict between self-preservation and self-identity. I don’t know which one is going to win out, but I know what’s going to happen if the Hamas-huggers win out.

I’m not in the business of telling any particular ethnic group how to vote, and I don’t think any particular ethnic group should vote in any particular way. The whole idea of ethnic voting is stupid. But other people seem to have other opinions. Some groups vote as a bloc. Black Americans almost always vote Democrat – something like 90%, though this time Donald Trump seems to be earning a better percentage. Similarly, Jewish Americans are famously liberal voters, with the vast majority supporting Democrats in the past. But things have changed. The position of the Democratic Party is aligned with the far left, which pretty much wants to kill all the Jews. And Biden really, really wants to win the states with large number of Muslims like the despicable Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, whose daughter/niece was recently suspended from the University of College for her hate crimes. The Democrats are not show about excommunicated groups they find to be no longer useful to their goal of attaining power. They famously dumped the white working class in recent decades. Guess we know who’s the next to get the boot.

Think of the dilemma that all voters will face in November!

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 1st, 2024

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Speaking on Camera about Columbia Is Too Much to Ask, Huh?

If Biden feels so strongly that forcibly taking over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach, is it too much to ask that Biden step to the podium and say so on camera? Apparently so. The only event on President Biden’s schedule today is a “digital town hall campaign event” that occurred at 3 p.m.

We’re six months from Election Day. It’s Tuesday. Biden had no public events yesterday or Sunday. Biden’s lone public event on Saturday was the White House Correspondents Dinner. His lone event on Friday was his interview with Howard Stern.

He’s an 81-year-old man and he’s maintaining the schedule of a retiree.

While Trump became infamous for his “bad tweets,” are there enough scheduled tweets by John Gill’s comms shop to get him over the finish line in November?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 1st, 2024

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Orwell’s Arresting Ambiguities.

Occasionally [Orwell biographer D.J Taylor], whose own judgment is pretty good, misses something important. For example, he describes the effect that Orwell’s time in Spain had on him:

Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.

Orwell told the general litterateur, Cyril Connolly, who had been with him at Eton, that he had seen “wonderful things” in Barcelona, then a revolutionary city in the control of the Trotskyist POUM. Taylor continues:

It was, he declared, “the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.” Churches were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Shops and cafes bore inscriptions saying that they had been collectivised. Tipping was forbidden by law, all private motor cars had been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis had been painted in the anarchist colours of red and black. “In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.”

Everyone dressed the same too, in drab overalls, Maoist avant la lettre.

Barcelona, then, was a Catalonian Pyongyang: and it is important to recall that Orwell approved of it. At this stage of his development, he was an enthusiastic totalitarian, and the shallowness of his belief that such uniformity was a triumph for freedom and equality is rather startling in a man who, a very few years later, was to be the greatest literary scourge of totalitarianism in the world.

In his 2000 essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxist,” Tom Wolfe wrote that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the subsequent publication of the Venona transcripts “made it damned hard to express your skepticism, your cynicism, your contempt, in Marxist terms… Not to mention the Spanish Civil War—archives! Turns out the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!”

In “Orwell’s Bad Republicans,” a 2007 book review at the American Spectator, Hal G.P. Colebatch noted:

When the heroics of the Spanish Civil War come up — Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway’s fictions or the effusions of various poets — there is a very large and usually unremarked elephant in the room: Orwell, who actually fought, and Hemingway who wrote about fighting, were on the wrong side.

The strategic point is simple: had the Stalinists won war, then during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact from 1939 to mid-1941, they would have allowed Hitler to cross Spain and seize Gibraltar. Had this happened, the British forces in the Mediterranean, including the British Empire’s last remaining field army in action, would have been cut off. The British army and fleet could probably have been supplied through the Suez Canal, at least for a while, but their positions would have been immeasurably weakened, and the enemy’s position immeasurably strengthened.

Fortunately, as Dalrymple wrote, “It was all to the credit of Orwell that he changed his opinion of totalitarianism so diametrically, but had he died just after the publication of Homage to Catalonia, not living long enough to write his anti-totalitarian masterpieces, he would have been remembered, if he was remembered at all, as a literary forerunner and praise-singer of some of the worst features of communist regimes.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 1st, 2024

April 30, 2024

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTS LIVE UPDATES: Anti-Israel protesters swarm Penn Station and crowd subway during rush hour, wild video shows.

Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters could be seen on the steps of New York City’s Penn Station before taking a rush hour train toward Columbia University, video shows.

A group of approximately 150 anti-Israel protesters congregated at New York University’s campus on Tuesday, calling for the university’s administration to reevaluate their negotiations with the protesters, as demonstrations heat up in the Big Apple.

Columbia students who took over Hamilton Hall are now facing expulsion, according to a memo sent out by the Ivy League school.

Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters could be seen on the steps of New York City’s Penn Station and later swarming the train hall, video shows.

Protesters were seen beelining toward the doors of Moynihan Train Hall, where Amtrak and the LIRR runs.

When inside, demonstrators marched and stood for the uptown A train in swarms.

Trains, eh? It seems bad form by the protesters to remind voters of anti-Semites’ historical obsession with them.

As is this: Oh Look, A Night of Broken Glass at Columbia.

And from America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 30th, 2024

2024 IS WAY TOO CRAZY FOR EVEN THE BABYLON BEE TO SATIRIZE:

“Marxian lens,” huh? Why so reactionary?

Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “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.”

As James Lileks wrote in response, “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.”

Related: Karl Marx Calls Mexicans Lazy. Will Social Justice Warriors Demand Noted Racist Karl Marx Be Banned From Study on Campus ?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 30th, 2024

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Or, Old and Busted: Listen to the kids!

The New Hotness? James Carville Has a Message for the Kids. The message: “You suck!”

As is so often the case, Democrats believe that they own the votes of certain populations, and younger voters (people who don’t yet have jobs or families and hence don’t understand anything about how the world works) are one of the demographics to which they are entitled every vote.

Carville is directly responding to the bad news for Biden in Harvard’s latest poll of young voters, which indicates that the president’s popularity with young people is much lower in 2024 than it was in 2020.

Or as his boss’s wife would say, “You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 30th, 2024

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Where the hell are the parents of these deluded Columbia students chanting about attacking Jews?

Intifada is an Arabic phrase that translates to “uprising” or “shaking off.”

It became notoriously immortalized by the two intifadas that erupted in 1987 and 2000 — when Palestinians rose up against what they deemed to be the long-time Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The First Intifada, which lasted for six years until 1993, escalated into violent riots and acts of terrorism by Palestinians against Israelis, fueled by a very aggressive Israeli military response, and caused the deaths of 160 Israelis and 1,087 Palestinians.

The Second Intifada, which lasted for five years until 2005, involved significantly worse violence and acts of terrorism from Palestinians against Israelis, amid a significantly more aggressive Israeli military response, that led to 1,000 Israeli and 3,000 Palestinian deaths.

Whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of any of this, there is one undeniable fact: The Intifadas were violent uprisings.

And here’s another undeniable fact: When Jewish people hear the word “intifada,” they believe it denotes a desire to do them violent harm.

So, these chants and banners, accompanied by acts of increasing violence and intimidation, will have sent a shudder down the spine of many Jewish undergrads.

Yes, yes — I know there are some Jewish students joining the protests too.

But honestly, I wonder what the hell they’re thinking if they’re involving themselves in those chants or standing near those banners, or seeing fellow Jews being jostled and threatened?

Are they really encouraging another violent uprising against their own people?

If so, have they taken leave of their senses?

And where the hell are THEIR parents?

Many of them must be horrified, but why aren’t they doing anything about it?

Aside from the hideous anti-Semitic rhetoric, if I was paying $400,000 to have my child educated at Columbia, I wouldn’t be too happy seeing that child risking their chances of completing their course or even jeopardizing future employment by chanting on camera about launching a violent attack on Jewish people.

In fact, I’d be bloody livid.

Especially if I then saw scores of faculty members in orange safety vests, joining the students in solidarity.

“We salute you, we stand with you,” bellowed Shana Redmond, a professor of English and comparative literature, to the mob with her megaphone. “And we’re so proud to be your professors.”

Unlike Volkswagen, Hugo Boss has never entirely shaken off its image as being the outfitter of choice for those who wish to party like it’s 1939. But as Iowahawk noted yesterday, the 21st century “anti-Zionist” need only go to Amazon or Home Depot to get his fascist freak flag on:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 30th, 2024

April 29, 2024

TWO WAPOs IN ONE!

C’mon – it’s 2024. Surely by now, Raichik knows that if you really want to get huge glowing profiles from the Washington Post, the way to do it is by threatening GOP congresspeople! WaPo Runs 5,000 Word Profile Of Man Imprisoned For Threatening Marjorie Taylor Greene.

In 2022, Josh Barro pondered: Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post? As Iowahawk noted around the same time, Barro was clearly asking the question rhetorically:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Ron DeSantis wants to teach young people about communism. He should use rock ‘n’ roll.

Rock ‘n’ roll is an exciting, popular art form geared toward young people. It also has a proud (and largely ignored) history of anti-communism.

In their book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, who both work for the libertarian outfit Reason, reveal the often hidden history of popular music as a weapon against totalitarianism. In the chapter “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” they detail how the music helped defeat communism.

As Welch and Gillespie note, Vaclav Havel and the leaders of the 1960s revolt against communism in Czechoslovakia were deeply influenced by American rock and roll, particularly the band the Velvet Underground. A group of young Czech hippies formed the group the Plastic People of the Universe, named after a Frank Zappa lyric, and were soon banned by the government. A fan of the Rolling Stones, Havel saw and heard in rock and roll “a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretch and humiliated.”

* * * * * * * *

In The Declaration of Independents, Welch and Gillespie note an incredible irony. In October 1989, a month before the Berlin Wall was torn down, rock and roll and hippie icon Neil Young released the album “Freedom.” Young meant the title ironically; the title track was about how the world was collapsing with Reagan-inspired greed and violence.  But when the album was received in Central Europe, the newly free young masses took to it without irony.

It’s an exciting piece of history. DeSantis should add it to Florida’s new pro-freedom curriculum.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

Flashback: Welcome to the PMRC, Neil Young.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2024

GOOD NEWS FROM POLITICO!

I mean, I think they intend it as good news from their perspective, given their interest in keeping the population down:

Incidentally, could pundits try to update their language from beyond the Cold War ’50s and ’60s? It’s Sputnik moments and moonshots all the way down!

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2024

JIM TREACHER: Today’s College Kids Get an “A” for “Antisemitism.”

In the seven years since a bunch of neo-Nazis in polo shirts stomped around Charlottesville with tiki torches, chanting “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” and other caca del toro, somehow it has become acceptable for young people to publicly call for the extermination of the Jews.

As always, the left’s refrain is: “It’s different when we do it!”

It’s happening all over the Ivy League. Our best and brightest, or so we’re told. Now they’re openly parroting antisemitic filth, and the dumber it is, the angrier they get.

Well, I’m getting pretty ticked off too.

It’s obvious that a lot of young people are living in their own little fantasy world. Some grownups are blaming TikTok for this antisemitic garbage spreading so fast, which sounds plausible. If the Chinese Communist Party is evil enough to unleash a deadly virus on the world, why would they balk at spreading the mind-virus known as antisemitism?

I don’t know what can be done to stop it, if the colleges and the local police aren’t willing to do anything. Some of them are finally starting to step up, so maybe that’ll stem the tide.

In the meantime, all I know how to do is make fun of these little idiots. So I think I’ll do that.

* * * * * * * *

Here’s another large child saying something silly:

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2024

GOT WOKE, WENT…: Scotland’s Humza Yousaf resigns after conflicts over climate change, gender identity weakened government.

Flashbacks:

● Scotland Just Banned a Surgical Anesthetic Because of Climate Change.

● SNP frontrunner Humza Yousaf says transgender double rapist Isla Bryson is ‘not a genuine trans woman’ and ‘is trying to play the system’ – after outcry over initially sending sex predator to all-women’s prison.

● UN says Scotland’s proposal for gender self-ID poses risk to women and girls.

● Women in Scotland outraged as country’s first ever Period Poverty tsar is announced as a MAN.

● Scotland hate crime bill seeks to criminalize ‘dinner table’ conversations.

Exit Quote: Humza Yousaf is everything that’s wrong with modern politics. “Many of us find ourselves wondering what will happen to the West when the woe-is-us bourgeois youths of the 21st-century campus enter politics, bringing with them their hyper-fragility, blacklisting lunacy and BS about ‘structural racism’. Wonder no more. Yousaf’s Scotland is what will happen. This first minister with his innate wariness of his fellow citizens and his seemingly boundless capacity for self-pity is woke made flesh.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 29th, 2024
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