Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 17, 2026

U.S. EYES ATTACK-DRONE THREAT FROM CUBA:

Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and recently began discussing plans to use them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West, Fla., 90 miles north of Havana, according to classified intelligence shared with Axios.

Why it matters: The intelligence — which could become a pretext for U.S. military action — shows the degree to which the Trump administration sees Cuba as a threat because of developments in drone warfare and the presence of Iranian military advisers in Havana, a senior U.S. official said.

“When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning,” the official said.

“It’s a growing threat.”

How do you say “Operation Bodenplatte” in Spanish?

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

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED, Or Where Does Old Blighty Stand After a Half-Century of Oikophobia?

Even John Cleese (quite a dedicated oikaphobic himself in his younger days) now (sometimes) gets it:

Tweet concludes, “Perhaps ‘sensible right’ would be a better description.”

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

STACY MCCAIN: ‘There Is No Truth … Only Power.’

Bad causes attract bad people.

We know for a fact that Communism leads to mass murder, killing as many as 100 million people in the 20th century, and therefore must question the motives of its defenders. Hence, we can disregard the accusation of committing an ad hominem fallacy in so doing.

Something similar can be said for the philosophers of “postmodernism.” Michel Foucault was an influential French intellectual and also a homosexual pedophile, and this is not a coincidence, you see.

Read the whole thing. As Daniel J. Flynn wrote in a 2021 article at the American Spectator under the headline, “Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil,” “News that Michel Foucault molested children recalls revelations that Hulk Hogan used steroids. The surprise comes only in response to surprise.”

Related: Zhou Enlai Gets His Answer.

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

ROGER KIMBALL: The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West.

[Allan] Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works from the woke grievance industry that rules us, works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Aristotle, Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism, imperialism, and so on. A favorite recent example was the news that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, has embarked upon the project of “decolonizing Shakespeare” in order to rid the bard’s work and reputation of “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly West-centric worldviews.”

“Gosh,” I thought, “has it come to that?” I am afraid that it has. In many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment and look to the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

Earlier: Deconstruction is “a virus. It self-replicates. Once inoculated, it turns everything it touches into a target. Science is patriarchal, so let’s deconstruct it. Language is colonial, so let’s reinvent it. Meritocracy is racist, so let’s abolish it. Sex is a construction, so let’s choose it. There is no more bedrock. Everything is sand.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Trump celebrates after UN climate committee moves away from its most extreme global warming scenario.

President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted Democratic climate policies after scientists moved away from one of the most extreme global warming scenarios previously used in United Nations-backed climate modeling.

“GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

15 years? More like 37:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

—“U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked,” the Associated Press, June 29, 1989.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:

”It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on May 17th, 2026

May 16, 2026

REPORT: My sources tell me Keir has decided to stand down, but he’ll do it on his terms.

If true:

UPDATE:

Tweet concludes, “Nothing on Starmer’s X feed. I have to assume he’ll have some self serving excuses. But the fact is, after he smeared these people repeatedly, they were the ones who showed and behaved like Englishmen today. And it was clearly a cross section of native Britons, to include those of non-native descent who have chosen to adopt the ways of Britain. And clearly it finally got through to him. May he come to understand how he has defamed them and injured them.”

Posted at 7:37 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

“KEIR STARMER BANNED FOREIGN JOURNALISTS FROM ENGLAND TO STOP A RALLY → IT PRODUCED THE LARGEST ANTI-GOVERNMENT MARCH IN YEARS:”

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

ITS ORIGINS AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: He struck pedestrians with his car, injuring eight, four seriously. “He was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. The man is a 31-year-old Italian of Moroccan origin, who plowed into pedestrians [in Modena, Italy] at 100 km/h. He then attempted to flee, striking one person but was stopped by passersby. He had previously undergone psychiatric treatment….Salim El Koudri, a thirty-one-year-old Italian of Moroccan origin, was arrested on charges of massacre.”

English text via Google Translate; Western media likely to be calling for sensible car control in 3…2…1:

Posted at 6:17 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE RAPE DOGS OF WAR! Rape Dogs: The Laff Riot.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

AND THE ANSWER IS NONE. NONE MORE BAGEL: The world has officially reached peak bagel.

New York’s Citi Field has weathered its share of away-team blowouts over the years, but the crowd gathered on a brisk Sunday last fall was not prepared for the upset awaiting them.

At the sixth BagelFest, more than 2,000 devotees of New York’s most iconic breakfast food had lined up to try samples and schmears from local favorites and shops as far away as Denmark and Hawaii. When a panel of expert judges announced its pick for “Best Bagel,” the crowd erupted with a mix of elation and disbelief.

The winner? Starship Bagel, which is not based in New York—or even London or Montreal, cities with venerable bagel traditions of their own—but in Dallas, Texas.

For many bagel purists, the future should look like the past. True New York bagels today are made in much the same way they were when they were brought over by Jewish immigrants from Poland in the 19th century. Few had succeeded in replicating them outside the region until places like Starship Bagel came along and shattered New Yorkers’ long-held belief that great bagels could only come from their own backyard.

The View of the World from 9th Avenue strikes again:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Knoxville’s own Potchke made the list.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “Don’t Be Evil.”

The New Hotness? Google Maps Just ‘Unburned’ the Pacific Palisades — and Infuriated Angelenos Noticed.

Angelenos have been noticing something strange: the Google Maps satellite imagery depicting the Los Angeles areas of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena now shows pristine neighborhoods untouched by the devastating fires of January 2025.

Of course, as we all know, those neighborhoods are in ruins. Why would Google pretend otherwise?

On Reddit, user TinyPinkSparkles asked, “Why is Google maps back to showing old satellite images of Altadena?” She continued:

Not too long after the fire, Google updated the satellite imagery to reflect the fire and thousands of lost structures. Now it’s back to pre-fire images of houses and businesses that are no longer there. Why?

Live look at Google maps of the area:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

DECONSTRUCTING DECONSTRUCTION:

The virus is *non-falsifiable*. If you defend a norm, it’s because you’re the oppressor. If you deny being an oppressor, that’s proof of your unconscious privilege. If you cite facts, your facts are contaminated by the power that produced them. If you cite reason, reason itself is white, male, Western. There is no possible exit. The system is designed to make any objection inadmissible by definition. That’s exactly the structure of a cult.

And that’s exactly what has taken hold in universities, HR departments, media, administrations, and corporate boards for the past twenty years.

Read the whole thing.

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

MADE IT, MA! TOP OF THE WORLD! The Coolest Video Ever Shot on Everest. Ma Chunlin has created one of the best videos we’ve ever seen come out of the Himalaya.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

BILL KRISTOL FINALLY MAKES IT OFFICIAL:

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 16th, 2026

May 15, 2026

IT’S HITLERS ALL THE WAY DOWN: Surprise, Trump Isn’t Hitler After All.

If you look at my X timeline, going all the way back to just after Trump’s win in 2024, you’ll see me behaving like Chicken Little. Every time I tweeted with some urgency that the sky was falling, I was always reassured by many who told me that things are different on the Right. They don’t all “fall in line” like the Left. It’s okay to disagree. The sky isn’t falling.

It’s just that the sky kept falling. It can mostly be boiled down to one word, or one country: Israel. All of the emotional tirades against Trump stem from that one country, including the Epstein Files, where many in the MAGA movement still think there is a pedo ring starring all of the powerful Jews who run this country. They’re just one document dump away from uncovering it all.

Trump has taken the biggest hit as influencers on the Right punish him over his alignment with Israel. Isn’t it ironic?

Who thought he’d be the guy turning his back on Israel? Well, the entire Left for the past ten years. They’ve been calling him Hitler. They’ve been selling the “Jews will not replace us” lie from Charlottesville.

And guess what? They never backtracked. Instead, they’re just using this moment, where the MAGA movement is being dismantled from within, to ride the wave to finally rid the country of their manufactured villain.

Well, the Southern Poverty “Law” Center allegedly paid a lot of money to make Charlottesville happen, and they’re entitled to see a profit on their investment. And boy, did they:

Read the whole thing; I wonder if Trump’s coming redemption arc will be something along the lines of this Hitler:

Or this one:

According to ChatGPT, the Dutch text reads:

“RICHARD NIXON, re-elected president of America by a large majority and chosen by TIME as Man of the Year, may one day go down in history as a Monster of the Century, comparable only to Adolf Hitler as the greatest war criminal of all time.”

Or he might go on to gather strange new respect from Timesmen Paul Krugman and Thomas Wicker, and leftist film critic Roger Ebert.

But I’m pretty old school; I prefer my fascists to be much more libertarian and small government oriented — like Calvin Coolidge.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: AI Might Make Campaign Ads Halfway Tolerable.

If there’s a person on the face of the planet who actually appreciates and enjoys political campaign ads, I’d like to meet them. On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t. We’ve all experienced those weeks of torture leading up to primary or general election battles — where you can’t escape the horror that is political advertising. It’s bad. It’s annoying. It’s grating. It’s irritating. And it’s seemingly endless.

But the rise of AI and social media has introduced a new wrinkle into things, and we’re seeing that play out in particular regarding the L.A. mayoral race. Now, many of the “ads” we’re seeing aren’t actually from the campaign(s). They’re from creative sorts, interested in the race, who have put their imaginations and AI to work and come up with some real bangers.

I happened upon this one last night and couldn’t help but marvel at its cleverness — and its swiftness. This one incorporates components from things that just happened on Wednesday! Watch and enjoy.

I don’t know how Pratt will actually do in the election (John Nolte sounds particularly glum), but his campaign and its supporters have jump-started a new form of political advertising that will be endlessly copied going forward:

UPDATE:

Posted at 4:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “Minnesota Nice.”

The New Hotness? “Didn’t have multiple Democrat colleagues yelling at me to ‘go f’ing shoot myself’ on my bingo card…”

Earlier this week, legislative leaders from both parties reached a final budget deal to conclude the 2026 legislative session. However, that deal did not include the gun control proposals that Democrats had pushed for all year.

On Thursday, Democrats spoke for hours on the House floor as they attempted to bring a major gun control bill up for a vote. Ultimately, the DFL’s effort to suspend House rules and vote on the gun control bill failed in a 67-67 party-line vote.

Following that vote, DFLers pledged to hold a sit-in on the House floor until the next floor session. The next floor session is not scheduled to start until Saturday, May 16 at noon.

After Thursday’s floor session wrapped up, an altercation broke out on the House floor involving GOP Rep. Elliott Engen and DFL Rep. Aisha Gomez. Video of that moment shows Gomez confronting Engen as shouting can be heard.

GOP Rep. Drew Roach posted a video of the altercation and said Gomez told “[Engen] to ‘go fucking kill himself.’” Engen reposted that video and said “Can confirm. Didn’t have multiple Democrat colleagues yelling at me to ‘go f’ing shoot myself’ on my bingo card…”

Shortly after that moment, the House GOP issued a statement which called on House DFL Leader Zack Stephenson to remove Gomez from her role as Tax Committee co-chair. The statement also called on Gov. Tim Walz to condemn Gomez’s behavior.

I’m sure no one in the Minnesota GOP is holding their breath, considering that this is Walz’s lieutenant governor a potential US senator, running to “Avenge Minnesota.”  “She wants to ‘avenge all that has been taken from us.’ So, who is ‘us’? And what supposedly has been taken from us?”

Last year’s assassinations of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and the shooting of State Sen. John Hoffman and his spouse add to the tension in post-2020 Minnesota politics.

And don’t get Mrs. Walz started on how much she enjoys a whiff of the old ultraviolence herself: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE IRON EYES CODY, WARD CHURCHILL, AND FAUXCAHONTAS HAVE GONE BEFORE: Buffy Sainte-Marie Stripped of Honorary Degree Over Native American Ancestry Dispute.

Buffy Sainte-Marie — the Oscar-winning folk singer who claims to be an Indigenous woman of Cree descent — was recently stripped of an honorary degree over an ancestry dispute.

On Wednesday, May 13, the University of Toronto announced that it had rescinded Sainte-Marie’s honorary Doctor of Laws degree. She received the honor in 2019 for her “excellence in the arts, as a singer-songwriter, actress and visual artist.”

The decision, approved on May 13, came more than two years after the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a documentary from The Fifth Estate alleging that Sainte-Marie lied about her Native American ancestry. In it, a birth certificate indicated that she was born in Massachusetts to Italian-American parents. Family members also confirmed this.

Flashback to a much more enlightened and tolerant 2023: Rachel Dolezal ahead of her time? The “Pretendian” wave in Academia. “Even eight years ago, I point out, Dolezal justified her posturing as a black woman — who wound up running a local NAACP chapter in Washington — because, as she told Matt Lauer, she ‘identifies as black.’ Was she just ahead of her time? If biology has nothing to do with sexual identity, can anyone argue that it has a role in ethnic identity? And if so, what does that do to the entire edifice of affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring, especially in Academia?”

Or as a wise Assistant to the Traveling Secretary of the New York Yankees once said:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026
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