Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

February 17, 2026

ONE TRICK DONKEY:

Posted at 5:38 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

SASHA STONE: AOC Crashes and Burns in Munich.

AOC makes the same mistake Kamala Harris always has. She tries to sound presidential and forgets to be herself. It’s okay to say you don’t know things or to laugh or to show humility, as Gretchen Whitmer attempted to do. But truth be told, both women came off so empty-headed that one can’t help but wonder why they’re there at all.

Mark Halperin says she did enormous damage to her political career.

AOC got her first real lesson in what it’s like to swim in the deep end. It was a good indicator that she is not ready to run for president. Unless someone else magically appears, it’s Gavin Newsom vs. Kamala Harris.

I did have to laugh at this paragraph in the Times story:

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez argued that efforts to make clips of “any five-to-10-second thing” from her remarks go viral online, especially in the conservative ecosystem, had been done to “distract from the substance of what I am saying.”

Now imagine that on repeat by every major news outlet in the land for ten years, and then she’ll get a tiny taste of what it’s like for Trump or any other politician on the Right.

Tellingly, the Gray Lady is doing major damage control for AOC: The New York Times Tries Impotently to Fix AOC’s Munich Disaster.

Elsewhere in his piece, [the NYT’s Kellen] Browning notes that Ocasio-Cortez was worried that, having been “microscopically dissected,” her message “was being lost in all the commotion.” But what she said was “her message.” One could dissect her words for the next ten years straight, with the best of intentions, and still one would not glean anything coherent or useful from them. This wasn’t the fault of “conservative social media” or “rocketing” or “speculation”; it was the fault of Ocasio-Cortez herself, who went to a security conference, was asked questions about security, and fell flat on her face at the first hurdle. The “commotion” doesn’t enter into the equation. What AOC said didn’t mean anything because AOC doesn’t know anything. Her ideas weren’t lost in translation. She didn’t “stall,” as Kellen Browning pretends she did. She wasn’t afflicted temporarily by madness or dehydration or anesthesia. She had no clue what she was talking about, so what she was talking about had no content.

Browning’s X homepage right now is absolutely loaded with AOC-friendly tweets, as if he’s her personal fixer at the Times. I know we frequently refer to journalists as “Democratic Party operatives with bylines,” but Browning is really living up to the meme right now.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

NEWSOM’S ‘BRILLIANT’ COMMS TEAM REALLY STEPPING IN IT:

Biden was approaching 77 when DNC-MSM began running their “he’s got a stutter” stories in 2019. Newsom is 58. In 2026, that seems an awfully young age for his comms team to attempt to compete in the “oppression Olympics.” (Perhaps 58 seems incredibly old and infirm to the 20-somethings who are likely ghostwriting his tweets.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

JIM TREACHER: Don’t Misgender That Murderer. “Another day, another trans shooter. But this one might be the craziest one so far. This man was named Robert Dorgan:”

Screenshot

A transvestite with Nazi tattoos? Well, it takes all kinds to make up a world.

And this is what Mr. Dorgan did. Providence (RI) Journal:

Police have identified the suspect who killed two and critically injured three others in a Feb. 16 shooting at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena [ice rink], before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves confirmed that the shooting was targeted and appeared to be a family dispute. The shooter was identified as Robert Dorgan, who also went by the name Roberta Esposito.

Specifically, he shot his ex-wife, three of his children, and a family friend while they were watching a high-school hockey game. He then shot himself. His wife and one of his children are dead.

Read the whole thing, including some “unexpected” New York Times anti-journalism, because, as Treacher writes, “Journalism means being as vague as possible about anything that might pose a problem for Democrats.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter.”

The New Hotness?

Amazing how Bezos setting $100 million or so alight every year to keep the doors open at the Washington Post is considered “sitting on his wealth.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

REV. JESSE JACKSON DEAD AT 84:

A protégé of Martin Luther King, lifelong champion of civil rights and a mesmerising public speaker, Jackson had himself run for president in 1984 and 1988 and gone far further than anyone at that time believed a black man could. He had shown that an African-American politician could win white votes and aspire to the presidency.

He had “won a solid place in history”, The New York Times declared. “For the first time in American history, a black made a serious bid for the White House and was taken seriously by the electorate.” A Washington Post columnist wrote that he had “advanced the prospects of black politicians by a good 25 years. He may never be president of the United States, but some black American will. And whoever it is will owe a tremendous debt to Jackson.”

Jackson said he wept in that Chicago park because he was thinking of “all the martyrs and murdered whose blood made that night possible”, and because he knew “people in the villages of Kenya and Haiti, and mansions and palaces of Europe and China, were all watching this young Africa-American male assume the leadership to take our nation out of the pit to a higher place”.

But he would have been inhuman not to have felt a little envious of his fellow Chicagoan that night. He must have reflected on what might have been. And if he was honest with himself he would have acknowledged that Obama — calm, measured and reassuring — was the better candidate.

Jackson’s strengths were also his weaknesses. He was driven, ambitious, a powerful orator and brilliant at garnering publicity, but he was also impulsive, attention-grabbing, and endlessly controversial. He met Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and the like and famously once referring to Jews as “hymies” and New York as “hymietown”. His relentless fight against injustice, poverty and discrimination carried him far, and did much to highlight the plight of black, poor and marginalised Americans, but he was too divisive to go all the way.

At PJ Media, Rick Moran asks: Race Hustler or Civil Rights Icon? Jesse Jackson Dead at 84.

He was a con artist and a “race pimp.” He was an opportunist, a race hustler, and a corporate shakedown expert who enriched himself by using funds earmarked for “the cause” for his own personal gain. He was an admirer of notorious racist and virulent antisemite Louis Farrakhan.

Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was all of that. He was also one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, a groundbreaking political figure, one of the best political strategists in American history, and a towering figure in local Chicago Democratic politics.

You can’t look at Jesse Jackson as a one-dimensional stick figure. Like all humans, especially those who have left their mark on history, he was a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can’t simplify his sins or his enormous contributions to American politics. He was a force whose impact will be felt for generations.

There is no doubting Jesse Jackson’s impact on American history. He was the first “serious” black candidate for president in that he energized the base of the Democratic Party in a multi-racial coalition that forced the party to swing hard left. His grassroots coalition, known as “Operation Push,” was the most dynamic organization in the U.S. until a scandal brought it down.

He was given the opportunity to speak in prime time in the 1984 and 1988 conventions despite finishing far behind Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in the nomination race. Both speeches are considered among the finest convention speeches in American history.

At NRO, Dan McLaughlin adds: On the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Charity toward the departed suggests leaving off further discussion of Jackson’s public career here, but not without noting the man’s abundant gifts as a public speaker in his prime. As P. J. O’Rourke described Jackson’s convention speech in 1988: “I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.”

Presumably, O’Rourke was referring to an event from the previous year, when Jackson wanted everyone to be excluded from Western culture: “On January 15, 1987, Jesse Jackson and around 500 protesters marched down Palm Drive, Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.’”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Bigger Isn’t Better.

A few weeks ago there was a leak out of the Marvel camp that the opening sequence of the new “Avengers” movie promises to be the biggest action sequence of all time and that it will “blow people’s minds.” This is an entirely logical next step in the ongoing arms race that the studio blockbuster business has become, and I suppose we are all supposed to be duly excited by the prospect. But Hollywood would do well to remember that every arms race eventually metastasizes into self-parody.

* * * * * * * *

And though it occurs during a different sequence I want to point out one more fantastic stunt from “For Your Eyes Only” because it’s too good not to. Later in the film Bond and his Greek Ally Milos (Topol) raid a warehouse which is rigged to explode. At the end of the sequence (3:55), Bond’s stuntman emerges from the warehouse seconds before it blows up, the pressure wave knocking him flat and leaving us with the certainly that the poor bastard was hit by flying debris.

That’s real filmmaking, my friends, the kind you only get to try once… And it absolutely cannot be duplicated inside a computer.

“For Your Eyes Only” was released in 1981, the beginning of a decade full of movies that shot real action with real actors on, in and around real physical locations. Commando, Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra, Tango and Cash, 48 Hours, Top Gun, Predator, Rambo, Bloodsport, Terminator, Aliens, Above the Law, Lethal Weapon… we could name them by the dozens. What all these movies had in common was constrained budgets that did not allow for the kind of spectacle that can only be achieved through expensive special effects. The people who brought us the great action programmers of the 80’s operated more like Spielberg with his busted shark… they did the best they could with what they had available to them in the real world.

For Your Eyes Only is a perfect example of temporarily downsizing a franchise, a movie that worked surprisingly well as a contrast from the previous Bond outing, the bloated and campy Moonraker.  Wanting to compete with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Hollywood’s then-burgeoning sci-fi obsession, Cubby Broccoli had Bond in a spacesuit, armed with a laser, sending him up to a giant zero-gravity space station on one of a fleet of Space Shuttles (a few years before the real NASA Space Shuttle first went into orbit), in a particularly silly mess. In contrast, Leonard Marltin gave For Your Eyes Only three stars, and wrote in his long-running TV Movies and Video Guide:

After years of space-age gadgetry, cartoon villains, female mannequins, and giants with steel teeth came this one-shot return to the old days of Ian Fleming minimalism. No other James Bond film has provoked so much debate among 007 fans (even us); judge for yourself. The chases and stuntwork are spectacular; debuting helmer Glen directed 2nd-unit on some earlier Bonds.

Will Hollywood get the message? Alas, probably not, now that it has the opportunity to incorporate cheap AI-driven special effects with paid screenwriters and the most expensive actors on the planet:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: They’re Eating the Dogs!

The New Hotness?

Exit quote:

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

BIAS BY OMISSION:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 17th, 2026

February 16, 2026

SONNY BUNCH: Robert Duvall, R.I.P.

It’s impossible to single out a lone defining performance by Duvall, who died Monday at 95 in his Middleburg, Virginia, home. He was in so many of the greatest films of all time that one loses track trying to count them. Where do you start? With To Kill a Mockingbird, I suppose, though his turn as Boo Radley doesn’t really give you a sense of what was to come. He’s one of those actors who had to age ever so slightly, who had to grow into that weathered face and earn that wry smile that suggested so much hidden knowledge.

That smile serves him well in the first two Godfather films, as consigliere to Don Corleone. The first time you see the movie you don’t know what it means when he grins at the mogul’s seamless transition of ethnic slurs, from guinea goombah to his “kraut-mick friend,” but you know it can’t be good. Duvall was lucky enough to have fallen in with that whole crew a decade into his career—Coppola, Lucas, and the other filmmakers who would change the world as we know it—so you have to mention The Conversation and THX 1138 and, of course, Apocalypse Now. Has there ever been a more quotable character with less screen time than Lt. Col. Kilgore? “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”; “Charlie don’t surf”; “Bomb them into the Stone Age, son.” He’s in the movie for maybe ten minutes and they’re all unforgettable, which is probably why he got his second Best Supporting Actor nomination for the role.

And then there’s Network, a movie I spent a lot of time with last year in the midst of all the drama surrounding CBS News and governmental pressures exerted on the broadcast networks and film studios alike. Duvall’s Frank Hackett is a vision of the future, the amoral corporate hatchet man whose only worry is getting the spreadsheet numbers up a few percentage points to make the shareholders happy at the annual meeting. If that means degrading the news division, fine. If it means killing the news division’s lead anchor, well, who is to say what’s right and wrong in this crazy world of ours? Of all the actors in that film—and there are a number of all-time greats, including Faye Dunaway and William Holden—I’ve always felt as though Duvall adapted best to the overlapping, rhythmic dialogue deployed by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky in this film.

Also in 1976, Duvall played the Nazi colonel who set in motion the plan to kidnap Winston Churchill in The Eagle Has Landed, easily holding his own next to Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Anthony Quayle and Donald Pleasence.

UPDATE:

That clock’s been ticking for a decade now on rock stars, just as it was 50 years ago for big band-era stars.

Posted at 9:24 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

THIS JUST IN: BILLIE EILISH ENDORSES ICE! Aussie Influencer Says Pop Star’s Mansion Joke Got Him Booted From the U.S.

An Australian influencer has lashed out at pop star Billie Eilish, claiming she got him “deported” from the United States after he mocked her Grammy Awards “stolen land” speech by launching a crowdfunding effort to “move into” her multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles.

To be fair, Eilish’s speech—in which she declared that nobody is illegal on stolen land—ranks among the dumbest celebrity remarks yet about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations launched by the Trump administration to remove criminal illegal aliens. No one stole this land. People conquered it. Those are not the same thing.

What the celebrity class refuses to confront is the obvious follow-up question: if the United States returned the land to Native Americans, which tribe would receive it? Tribes constantly fought each other over territory. No one can definitively determine original ownership. Conquest decided the matter. End of story. And by Eilish’s own logic, her mansion sits on “stolen land,” meaning she should either open it up to illegal aliens or hand it over to a Native American tribe.

That outcome seems unlikely. Virtue signaling costs nothing. Practicing what you preach costs everything. Hence, you’ll probably never see someone famous actually doing what they demand everyone else do.

“Billie Eilish got me deported from the US—I think her legal team contacted DHS,” Drew Pavlou wrote in a post published Sunday on X. “I spent 30 hours at LAX immigration trying to explain that my s—posts were just a joke and that I didn’t actually plan to personally move into her mansion.”

Conquest’s First Law of Politics: Everyone is conservative about what he [or she] knows best.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

ED MORRISSEY: Too Dumb to Check: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be AOCs.

Ocasio-Cortez tried to take a swipe at Marco Rubio, whose speech in Munich received broad acclaim and enthusiastic responses. She attempted to fact-check a gracious reflection on how much Europe has influenced American culture and heritage by … exposing her utter ignorance of history.

Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to Western culture. My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain. I believe the Mexicans and descendants of African slave peoples would like to have a word on that.

What did Rubio actually say in his speech? “The entire romance of the cowboy archetype,” Rubio noted in his speech, “that became synonymous with the American West – these were born in Spain.”

And he is absolutely right.

Not only did the cowboy archetype originate in Spain, so did the horses they rode in on. Literally. Horses had gone extinct in the Americas for thousands of years before the first Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Spanish explorers reintroduced horses in the 15th and 16th centuries in their efforts to settle the Americas, as well as the cattle ranching that had long been part of the vaquero culture in Spain.

The Daily Wire offers a brief history lesson:

The word “cowboy” itself is a direct translation of the Spanish word vaquero (from vaca, meaning cow). The tradition began in the medieval hacienda system of Spain and was brought to the Americas by conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Gregorio de Villalobos in the early 1500s. These Spaniards introduced the first horses and cattle to the Western Hemisphere.

Cortés, huh?

With a bit of luck though, Gaia will save us all from POTUS AOC:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

BLOOMBERG: Cuba Is Struggling to Keep Lights On Amid Trump’s Oil Blockade.

Cuba’s blackout problem has worsened in the month since the US cut off oil shipments to the island.

Its grid was fragile even before a critical transmission line failure in early December temporarily severed the link between Havana and the Caribbean country’s primary thermoelectric power plants in Matanzas. Then the Trump administration blocked fuel shipments that supply 60% of the roughly 100,000 barrels of crude a day it needs to feed its aging power system.

Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.

* * * * * * * *

In addition to Venezuela, Mexico had been a steady supplier of oil to Cuba. It delivered a small cargo on Jan. 9, according to Kpler, a data and analytics firm. A few weeks later, Trump threatened tariffs on any nation that supplies the island with fuel, cutting off that flow as well. As a result, Havana has now gone a full month without a major fuel delivery, the data show.

Some analysts estimate Cuba has enough oil left in storage to last fewer than 20 days, but no official figures are available. Last week, the government unveiled a series of contingency measures including reducing public transportation routes, shortening the work week to four days, shutting down resorts and limiting gasoline sales to consumers who can pay in dollars.

In 2019, Think Progress reported, that while Bloomberg News owner Michael Bloomberg wasn’t going to run for the White House, as “The former Republican (and then centrist independent) was always going to be a long-shot to win a Democratic primary, especially at a time when so much of the party’s energy is coming from its progressive wing.” But:

At the same time, Bloomberg points out that many of America’s most pressing problems can’t wait until 2021 — particularly climate change. “Mother Nature does not wait on our political calendar, and neither can we,” he emphasizes in the statement.

He has spent more than $100 million in the past decade on the Sierra Club’s remarkably successful Beyond Coal campaign, which has helped close over half the country’s coal plants plants — 285 out of 530 — and deployed cleaner, cheaper energy in their place.

This effort, Bloomberg notes, “was the single biggest reason the U.S. has been able to reduce its carbon footprint by 11 percent — and cut deaths from coal power plants from 13,000 to 3,000.”

The former New York City mayor said Tuesday that he will build upon those successes by investing even more in the effort to shut down coal-fired power plants. “First, I will expand my support for the Beyond Coal campaign so that we can retire every single coal-fired power plant over the next 11 years,” he says in the statement. “That’s not a pipe dream. We can do it.”

But then he went much further, announcing “a new, even more ambitious phase of the campaign — Beyond Carbon: a grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy.”

An economy entirely powered by clean energy is the exact same goal laid out in the sweeping Green New Deal that has captured the nation’s attention over the past few months. Bloomberg points out that while any such deal “stands no chance of passage in the Senate over the next two years,” the science makes clear action must start now.

Indeed, the world’s nations unanimously approved a landmark report from scientists last October making clear that to have any plausible chance of averting catastrophic climate change, we must make sharp reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 — and then quickly go to zero emissions.

Can Mike Bloomberg object to Trump’s treatment of Cuba? He’s heightening the contradictions, by giving Cuba’s socialist government a crash-course in decarbonization. As a result, Glenn asked on Friday on his Substack, “Will Cuba be Libre soon, and if so what happens next? And after that?”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

RIP: Expansive Actor Robert Duvall, Dead at 95.

Every Robert Duvall performance is an unexpected one. Unlike many actors who have had the length of a career as long as his, his performances are unique and nuanced, diverse and always revelatory. Duvall’s roles as Tom Hagen in The Godfather and The Godfather II, Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now are the works that most people tend to reference as his most memorable performances. The ones that stick with me are Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, Frank Hackett in Network, and Sonny Dewey in The Apostle.

Duvall said to American Cowboy magazine that Lonesome Dove’s Gus McCrae was the role that stuck with him the most. After he completed the 1989 television miniseries, Duvall said he was ready to retire.

I can retire now, I’ve done something I can be proud of. Playing Augustus McCrae was kind of like my Hamlet.

The world is grateful that he kept giving us Hamlet-level performances for another 30 years after that, until his last screen appearance in the 2022 period thriller, The Pale Blue Eye.

On Sunday, the Great Director called, and scene on his denouement. Robert Duvall has passed away at the age of 95.

One of the most versatile actors who ever lived:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

BLUE STATES ARE MOVING LEGISLATION FORWARD TO RESTRICT HOW MUCH YOU CAN DRIVE:

The “15 Minute City” concept is gaining traction on the left, especially in Great Britain, where the Labour Party and leftist cities are seeking to impose harsh restrictions on vehicle use.

Here in the U.S., blue states are pivoting toward mileage caps, which would establish maximum “vehicle miles traveled” (“VMT”) allowed for an entire state, with regulators then creating “incentives” to reduce individual driving so as to achieve the VMT objective. From News Nation: “Massachusetts bill aims to reduce driving to meet climate goals”:

A bill in Massachusetts aims to reduce how much driving occurs as part of the state’s climate strategy. The legislation, spearheaded by Democratic State Senator Cynthia Stone Creem, would require transportation officials to set goals for “reducing the number of statewide driving miles.”

Because this is such an unpopular idea, Democrat politicians in Massachusetts are trying to hoodwink their voters by naming this legislation the “Freedom to Move Act.” There is just an amazing level of duplicity in the name of that legislation, since the specific intent is to limit individuals’ freedom to move about as they choose.

As Lauren Fix correctly notes about The Freedom to Move Act, “When reducing driving becomes a formal state objective, personal mobility inevitably becomes something to be managed.”

Meanwhile, over on the left coast, California is working on further punishing its citizens for the sinful act of driving a car. The deep blue state already has the highest gas taxes and most expensive gasoline in the country, with consumers paying about $1.50 more per gallon than the national average. The state Assembly (the lower house in the California legislature) has now approved a bill that would “study” the implementation of a mileage tax. From NBC San Diego: “California Proposal Causes Confusion Over Future of Road Mileage Tax; A California bill studying a potential mileage tax has passed the state assembly.”

The study would explore the concept of a road usage charge, where drivers could one day pay based on how many miles they drive rather than how much gasoline they purchase.

Rest assured that any California mileage tax will be in addition to gasoline taxes, not in lieu of them.

Flashback to Charles Cooke in 2017: The War on Driving to Come. Or as Iowahawk warned right around the same time, America “needs a Second Amendment protecting the right to keep and bear cars.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE VENEZUELANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?

Related:

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Spike Lee Makes Anti-Israel Statement at NBA All-Star Game.

Deni Avdija is the first Israeli basketball star to play in the NBA’s All-Star Game, as a starter for Team World. Avdija is proud to be there, telling the media, “It’s a dream come true,” to represent Israel on the court.

But because sports cannot be free of politics, this is how filmmaker Spike Lee showed up at the game, decked out in “Free Palestine” garb.

Exit question: “If he’s that desperate for an invite to dinner with [Mamdani] why not just buzz the guy?”

Well, he’s already endorsed him, and the two would likely get on very well: NYC Health Department staffer wished Israelis were wiped off Earth in vile resurfaced X post: report.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

#JOURNALISM: LOL, John Harwood.

Tweet continues:

The fact was Obama got a greater percentage of white voters than Gore, Kerry, or Dukakis and then trump in 2016 won almost a third of the counties that had gone for Obama in both his victories…

Harwood should keep his race baiting leftist tripe over on blue sky…

Obama was the inflection point…finally, a black president to put an end to the last vestiges of the Left who continued to whine about racism…

Instead, the Press went on permanent holiday, anointed Obama the black messiah, even Jesus didn’t have someone waxing poetic about the crease of his slacks, and spent eight years becoming younger, more left, and less enamored of even a modicum of belief in free speech.

Flashbacks:

● CNBC Hack John Harwood Is Really, Really Upset That Al-Baghdadi Was Killed.

● NYT/CNBC’S John Harwood Advises Hillary Campaign, Gloats About Provoking Trump At Debate.

● CNBC’s John Harwood Has No Business Moderating A GOP Presidential Debate.

● CNBC Alters Transcript of John Harwood Question About Hillary’s Email.

● “Everyone in the [CNBC] newsroom knows [John Harwood is] extremely far left.”

● Tool de Force: CNN’s John Harwood Defends Biden, Insists Inflation Pain Is a GOP ‘Charade.’

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 16th, 2026

February 15, 2026

AND NOW A WORD FROM FORMER PRESIDENT HOPENCHANGE:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2026

THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY IN MUNICH:

Making a reference to the infamous occasion in 1938 when the British prime minister flew to Munich to meet with Adolf Hitler in an act of appeasement, Newsom continued: “We’re all becoming Chamberlains in this space. People have to stand up.” The moderator of the panel didn’t press Newsom on quite where Trump fitted into that particular analogy.*

While certainly not as inflammatory in what she said, Ocasio-Cortez was similarly direct in her criticism of the Trump administration. Speaking on a panel exploring the rise of populism, the congresswoman declared that this was a moment in time where “we are seeing our presidential administration tear apart the transatlantic partnership, rip up every democratic norm”. Joining Whitmer later on a panel discussing the “seismic shifts in US foreign policy”, Ocasio-Cortez expanded on her point, theorising that “as the president struggles at home, in my view, he is making rash decisions globally.”

Does the AOC of 2026 remember the AOC of 2019, when she was making an endless serious of rash decisions and wanting to rip up every democratic norm in a power grab to ban all the things?

Also, why would AOC bother running for president to take office in 2029, when the world will be coming to an end in 2030?

* I’m not sure if the moderator needed to: Watch Faces of Germans As Gavin Newsom Compares America’s National Guard to Nazi Stormtroopers (Video).

“Our favorite part is how he pats the one German on the shoulder like, ‘Hey bro, you get it, right?'”

Exit quote: “He just handed the GOP a great campaign ad … so we guess we should all thank him for his efforts.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2026

TRUMP, CALL OFF THE ATTACKS ON IRAN — THEIR NEW STEALTH TECHNOLOGY IS UNBEATABLE!

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED: Why Has Nancy Guthrie’s Case Become America’s Only Story?

None of this diminishes the anguish of the Guthrie family. Their grief is real and ideally should remain private as law enforcement officials investigate their mother’s disappearance. But cable news is not a family support group. They will exploit any story to capture your eyes. When coverage becomes wall-to-wall, it is all you will see.

The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie was not picked up by the media because of the scale of the event but because of the status of those involved. Cable news executives know that name recognition, tragedy, and uncertainty are the main ingredients of a media product that keeps viewers engaged. As cable news continues to fixate on this open investigation, there is one question Americans should ask: What other stories are obscured by these walls of one-track coverage?

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 15th, 2026
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