Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

February 13, 2026

February 12, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN REPUBLICAN FAILURE THEATER: Keith Ellison Goes to Washington. “All in all, it was a tough morning for Ellison. But is there really any possibility that Ellison, or other Minnesota politicians like Tim Walz, will be charged with crimes?”

No, of course not — but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Chris Rock, call your office!

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Table for one? Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s ‘world first’ companion café.

If you’ve gone from dating apps to dating an app, there’s now a bar for you.

The Hell’s Kitchen establishment has been re-designed for those who have AI partners, so they can bring along their phone or tablet and set up at a table for a romantic evening, as if they were both there in the flesh.

On Wednesday night, Same Same Wine Bar was filled with patrons sitting at tables for one-ish, with their tech devices propped up on stands to make video calls to their virtual partners and headphones to hear them.

One was Richter, a 34-year-old New York woman not currently working who declined to share her last name, headphones on and deep in conversation. Sitting across from her was Simone, an attractive 26-year-old AI-generated young woman in a button-down shirt.

I asked Richter about her relationship to AI, and she told me that EvaAI, the app behind the AI cafe, is just one of many companion apps she uses. Some of her AI characters, such as Simone, are just friends.

“I just speak to them, like, Hey, what’s up? Like, how are you doing? Things like that,” she explained.

Others are romantic.

“I mostly do roleplay scenarios where it may be romance or just maybe some kind of fantasy scenario,” Richter, who is not in a relationship with a human, explained. “I can just imagine myself doing something or imagine myself like another character, so I can feel myself communicating with somebody.”

Richter has been using AI companions for a couple years now. “I can talk to them on my own terms,” she said. “I can talk with them without the expectations of having to go out or having the expectations of having them wanting to talk to me all the time.”

Flashback: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Legacy Media Begging Stars to Get More Political.

The recent Grammys let star after star savage ICE agents and push absurd progressive messages, like the “stolen land” canard. Now, The Hollywood Reporter wants more, more … more.

That is, unless those evil Republicans scare them into silence. The article suggests that Sen. Ted Cruz’s condemnation of Billie Eilish’s “stolen land” idiocy could censor future lectures.

He knows that comments like his can have a chilling effect on future political statements.

Of course, if the stars assembled to promote ICE, suggest abortion is a crime against humanity or share a similar right-leaning message, that story would never get written.

USA Today just published a piece gently egging on Super Bowl performer Bad Bunny to get political on the world’s biggest stage Sunday. Spoiler alert – he stuck to the music and pro-Puerto Rican messaging.

There’s no voice in the article suggesting the Super Bowl is that rare cultural moment that unites us, and an artist could offer a patriotic moment by simply … singing.

We’ve seen this play out before.

Remember how the press badgered both Taylor Swift and Jimmy Fallon to get political? In both cases, the subjects relented. Swift is now an outspoken progressive, and Fallon turned “The Tonight Show” in a lite-version of what Colbert and co. offer.

And he consistently trails both “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Late Show” in the ratings.

The latest example of the press bullying stars to get political, and by “political” we mean “progressive,” is Sydney Sweeney.

And thus, the DNC-MSM is using exactly the same playbook that broke Swift during Trump’s first term. Sadly, that much pressure to conform will likely eventually have similar results with Sydney.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

ANGSTY JOURNALISTS SAID THE WAPO SPORTS SECTION WAS INDISPENSABLE. THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS OTHERWISE:

ESPN reporter Jenna Laine wrote that the layoffs were “so troubling” because they signaled that “the appetite for real sports reporting has died” as the industry continued “its slow, inevitable burn.” New York Times reporter Ben Mullin wrote a eulogy for “one of the last bastions of great sports writing.” More importantly, he explained, the Post was a “champion of diversity” and a “leader in women’s sports coverage.”

A Washington Free Beacon analysis of the Post‘s sports-related output in recent weeks did not find sufficient evidence to support these claims of journalistic greatness. Amid numerous offerings of gambling advice, the Post also published eight feature-length articles since Jan. 29 that—while technically sports-related—few normal American sports fans would describe as engaging content that must be published even if it means losing $100 million per year.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

HAVING A PHOTO ID TO VOTE — IT’S SO SIMPLE, EVEN A CONGRESSMAN CAN DO IT:

Why do Democrats want to allow Trump and MAGA to cheat at election time?

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

“EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’VE BEEN CHEATED?” Noam Chomsky, Apologist for Pol Pot, Called Jeffrey Epstein His ‘Best Friend.’

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten famously asked at the end of the final Sex Pistols concert during their late-1970s run.

Noam Chomsky might as well have asked the American Left the same question as the curtain falls on his life.

His emails to Jeffrey Epstein, in which he laments “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and the public” and notes the “torture and distress” of the ordeal endured by Epstein, certainly overturn the public perception that the MIT professor cultivated in such essays as “The Responsibility of the Intellectuals.”

To be fair, in 2001, those hard-hitting journalists at – checking notes – VH1 assured me that Epstein was all about empowering education and intellectual pursuits:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

ENGLAND AS IT REALLY IS: US visitors may be in for an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.

The American sees that the glorious metropolis of the English, London, is no longer particularly English. We see it because we walk its streets and witness the newcomers, visibly alien, who dominate some of its neighbourhoods and much of its politics. Both the authors of this piece had an eminent British academic tell us, weeks ago, that in our pessimism over his country we missed positive developments, like the fact that London is now majority non-English for the first time in well over one thousand years.

This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do. It isn’t just London of course: the change has descended upon so much of the country now.

We are Americans and so this does not immediately strike us as evidence of crisis — we are especially accustomed to the alien and the newcomer alike — until we learn that the social mechanisms of assimilation that we take for granted are simply not in evidence in the United Kingdom. The realm is not one people. The things English society used to cheer for and applaud — for slavery abolition, perhaps, or the relief of Mafeking or the Monarchy — are slowly replaced by the things the successor society cheers for and applauds. For example: jihad or the slaughter of the Jews. Football at least remains something of a commonality.

The American sees that the Vice President of the United States was not entirely joking when he referred to Britain as an Islamic power with nuclear weapons. We also see that the rise of Islam in England is a symptom, not a cause; a consequence of a prior loss of confidence and vigor, a result of every major institution utterly failing to conserve the nation. The Church of England, bearer of a proud tradition, relinquishes its hold, not just upon the minds and souls of the nation, but upon its own inheritance.

The British Army, heir to a mighty and unparalleled tradition with victories and valour from Goose Green to the Imjin to Arnhem to the Somme, is reduced to a shadow of its former self. The Royal Navy, shield of freedom for both Britain and America — although the Americans don’t acknowledge it nearly enough — is for the first time in centuries incapable of securing the home seas.

The Parliament that mothered all the others, the crucible of a particular sort of liberty in which we Americans yet repose, is now an arena for the advancement of petty interventions and a sort of bland managerial tyranny. We could blame Starmerism, but like Islamism, he too is a symptom.

The American sees all this, and we see something else besides: we see us. We see the essential tragedy of the plight of England, our ancestral mother, as incepted in no small part by an American spirit. We see the decline of England in the world, the abandonment of its mission, as conceived and imposed in no small part by ourselves. We sided with a squalid tyranny at Suez against our own faithful wartime ally and bade the United Kingdom tie itself to us. We demanded Britain follow us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It did, and we mismanaged the one and lost the other. We nearly even betrayed Britain entirely over the Falklands in 1982, although thank the God who watches over nations that we were spared that dishonour.

Most fatefully, we have watched the government of the United Kingdom, across the past generation, reform itself along explicitly American lines. America has states, and so too does Britain now have devolution. America has a Supreme Court, and now so too does Britain. America has a constitutional separation of powers, and now so too does Britain — haphazard and scattered to the quango sector as it is. America has a pretence to the universal rights of man, and now so too does Britain. America has an aspiration to an egalitarian society, and now so does Britain, and there is nothing that the SW1 won’t do to the House of Lords, or to fox hunting, to achieve it.

As Peter Hitchens wrote in the 2000 edition of The Abolition of Britain about England during WWII:

Because so few people knew the unpleasant facts, and because Churchill was such a superb propagandist, there were two completely different versions of 1940, one circulating among the rulers and one accepted by the ruled. Out of this was born a new division between the élite and the mass of the people—the élite knowing how close we had come to extinction, the people refusing to believe that such a thing could have happened.

But the masses were to have their own awakening not long afterwards. When American servicemen began arriving in Britain in 1942, much of the United Kingdom fell under a bizarre and unique form of military occupation. The occupiers were officially friends, often because they were ordered to be, and definitely allies. They spoke the same language but brought with them a completely different culture, different morals, different habits of courtship and even different tastes in food and drink, music and entertainment. Because many of them came from immigrant stock whose children had learned to be Americans more quickly than their parents, they showed less respect for old age and had a distinctive ‘youth’ culture quite unlike Britain’s. They were richer, bigger, better fed, better dressed and better educated than their hosts, and they were subject to a different legal system; because their country was so rich and powerful Britain had no choice but to accept this rather colonial arrangement, which she had once imposed upon the Chinese in Shanghai. They even broke the iron monopoly of the BBC, insisting on their own separate network of radio stations. In all ways but one, they behaved like a reasonably well-disciplined army of occupation, and many British people, including George Orwell, frankly viewed them as occupiers as well as saviours.

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Hitchens also wrote, “We seem to be in the sort of demoralized period that often ends in revolution or collapse.” A quarter century later, we’re certainly witnessing that collapse in real time, along with much of the rest of Europe:

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

#HERTOO?

Once again, the torpedoes the left fired to take out Trump are circling around on them again. Fortunately for Plaskett, the DNC-MSM has the motto of no enemies to the left, so it won’t become “the biggest story in America.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

CBS EVENING NEWS PRODUCER BAILS ON SHOW:

A CBS Evening News producer has complained that journalists are being forced to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives” under the network’s new Trump-friendly management.

The attack came in a fiery farewell note to colleagues from producer Alicia Hastey explaining her decision to take a buyout and leave the program. The letter was shared on X by New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin.

Hastey does not mention by name either Bari Weiss, the MAGA-curious TV novice now running CBS News, or Tony Dokoupil, the much-criticized Evening News host Weiss installed.

Hastey does namecheck and quote the late Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS News anchor with whom the lightweight Dokoupil has been unfavorably compared:

* * * * * * * *

Walter Cronkite once said in response to critics: “If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism — that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.”

Cronkite’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. He understood that labels are inevitable, but standards are what matter. What defines journalism is not what critics call it, but whether it remains faithful to those principles.

The ghost of Barry Goldwater must be roaring with laughter right now.

Incidentally, the Daily Beast article linked above is headlined, “MAGA-Coded Anchor’s Show Producer Rips CBS in Fiery Farewell,” which is apparently something of a leitmotif at the leftist-coded Website:

Curiously, because Tony Dokoupil dared to actually do on-air journalism in the fall of 2024, and ask a few tough questions to leftist icon Ta-Nehisi Coates (for which he has forced to endure a Maoist struggle session under CBS News’ former management), he’s apparently “MAGA-coded,” despite being married to Katy Tur, who has not exactly been “MAGA-coded” in much of her coverage of Trump: Watch Katy Tur of NBC News Wonder If Trump Will Become Like Putin and Start Killing Journalists.

Related:

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

VDH: Our Super Bowl Satyricon.

In his vile, obscene “Safaera,” to avoid being censored, Bunny omitted a few of the song’s lyrics about his celebration of exploitative sodomy, fellatio, and anilingus—with misogynistic trashing of his compliant female sexual partners as “hoes.”

(Do woke intersectional feminists weigh in on the side of Bunny’s DEI credentials and sexual fluidity, or do they bristle at Bunny’s “objectification” of women, as he reduces them to mere mindless receptacles of violent and toxic masculinity?).

If Bunny’s purpose was to shock America, then he should have sung his full lyrics of “Safaera” in English, ensuring that his first-time listeners were forced to hear and react to his sick adolescent riffs on breasts, bottoms, phalluses, and vaginas.

Bunny had been previously instructed not to repeat his prior performance-art trashing of ICE and to keep his politicking subtle and coded.

Translated, that meant the NFL had greenlighted some of his obscene references as long as they were relegated to a Spanish-speaking audience only and toned down a bit. But he was not overtly to alienate over half of the NFL’s viewership, who not long ago had voted to stop illegal immigration and millions crashing the border.

Bunny mostly complied, albeit with empty platitudes about hate and love, and reducing the American flag to a status similar to that of the other South and Central American states.

Ricky Martin chimed in with his own incoherent Spanish-language harangue about the American rape of paradise in Hawaii (“They want to take my river and my beach too/They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave”). If Martin’s point was the arrival of too many newcomers, then he might have first reflected on the 10-million uninvited illegal aliens who, during the Biden tenure, stormed America’s southern border.

A writer for the now-defunct sports section of the Washington Post had earlier and ludicrously boasted that the mostly forgotten Colin Kaepernick—the Dylan Mulvaney of the NFL—would be the most relevant figure at the 2026 Super Bowl.

He really was though – everything Kaep set in motion in the twilight of the Obama era was in full display during the halftime show on Sunday.

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

AARON HANSCOM: Sweden and Spain Move in Opposite Directions on Immigration Policy.

“No requirements to become a citizen”? That sounds a lot like what anti-ICE protesters in the U.S. and their supporters advocate. After all, Billie Eilish said at the Grammys that “no one is illegal on stolen land.” One can’t help but wonder if she would agree with ISIS’s claim that Spain is stolen land.

Heh, indeed.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

INDUSTRIAL POWER—FINANCED BY HOUSEHOLDS, ENFORCED BY SILENCE:

The IMF puts China’s 2025 GDP per capita at $13,806 a year — roughly $1,150 a month.

But using China International Capital Corp (CICC) income buckets below, only about ~2.5% of Chinese actually clear that level in monthly income — ~35 million out of ~1.4 billion. Most don’t live anywhere near the “average.”

So when outsiders swoon over the skyline, the mega-bridges, the high-speed rail to end of map, and the factory machine that exports “cheap and good” to the world, keep the base reality in frame:

•~547 million live on < $145/month.

•~1.33 billion earn < $724/month.

In any case, it’s all fun and games, until the CCP begins welding the doors shut:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

THIS IS CNN: CNN has lost nearly two-thirds of its viewership since 2016 amid growing fears network is circling the drain.

To be fair, they’re far from the only DNC-MSM institution that’s circling the drain:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California is entering the seizure phase of the wealth cycle.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

February 11, 2026

RIP, JOHN EKDAHL:

Flashbacks: Ekdahl tweeted in 2019, “The left, and I’m not trying to be funny or snarky, takes gun ignorance as a source of pride. They absolutely refuse to learn or educate themselves on what they seek to deny their fellow citizens.”

Ekdahl on Bud Light’s implosion in 2023, “The biggest problem isn’t even the boycott; it’s that they’ve become a cultural punchline. This is now like having an AOL email address or driving a minivan. People avoid it so their buddies don’t rip them. Not sure how you fix that as a brand.”

Ekdahl in October of 2024: “My theory on the great liberal McDonalds freakout is this: Donald Trump is not allowed to have fun. Remember, he is the physical avatar of humanity’s cruelty, evil, and malice. The left has also spent a large amount of time, money, and energy though both media and legal campaigns, targeting his livelihood and even his personal freedom all to ensure that the man can never crack a smile again for the rest of his life. And then he did. While donning an apron and serving fries. They can’t handle it.”

And speaking of the DNC-MSM not being able to handle people having fun, from 2017: Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck. “Which brings us to the simple question about truck ownership from John Ekdahl that drove Acela corridor progressive political journalists into a frenzy on Tuesday night: ‘The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?’ Rather than answer with a simple ‘no,’ the esteemed members of the most cloistered and provincial class in America–political journalists who live in New York City or Washington, D.C.–reacted by doing their best impersonation of a vampire who had just been dragged into the sunshine and presented with a garlic-adorned crucifix.”

UPDATE: 14 Principled Anti-War Celebrities We Fear May Have Been Kidnapped.

—Ekdahl, Buzzfeed, September 6, 2013.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: Clavicular’s cult of ‘looksmaxxing’ speaks to the narcissism of our age.

Don’t you hate it when you’re mid-jestergooning, and a group of foids comes and spikes your cortisol levels? We’ve all been there – and it raises the valid question of whether ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids is more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club.

If those words are completely incomprehensible to you, that means you are enviably offline. A brief translation: ‘jestergooning’ is a derogatory term for the act of making a woman laugh in an attempt to sleep with her. A ‘foid’ is a woman and a ‘moid’ is a man. To have one’s cortisol levels spiked is to be aggravated and stressed out. To ‘mog’ someone is to intimidate them, usually by way of superior physical attractiveness. ‘SMV’ is an acronym, standing for ‘sexual market value’ (how attractive people find you). ‘Chadfishing’ is a play on ‘catfishing’ – trying to fraudulently convince others you are a ‘chad’, or a desirable male. ‘Munting’, as far as I can tell, has no meaning in this context at all.

The above wordsalad came from a now legendary viral post on X about a 20-year-old online influencer and streamer known as Clavicular (real name Braden Peters). He achieved fame – or, more accurately, infamy and ridicule – for being a ‘looksmaxxer’. That is, a member of the online subculture-come-cult dedicated to making oneself more physically attractive, by any means necessary.

Evergreen:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Ohio State University placed an assistant professor on administrative leave Tuesday after a viral video showed him tackling a person seeking a video interview with E. Gordon Gee, the university’s former president.

In the video of the altercation, the professor, Luke Perez, appears to be trying to prevent two people from asking Gee further questions and filming him. Mike Newman, who told The Chronicle he is an independent documentarian, took a step toward Perez when the professor struck the camera out of his hand and pushed him to the ground. Perez, who teaches in the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, directed a request for comment to university communications.

A university spokesman called the incident “very concerning” and said the “faculty member involved” has been placed on leave. He added that campus police are investigating.

Newman, an Ohio State alumnus, told The Chronicle that his neck and shoulder hurt after the incident and that he went to the emergency room.

Newman and D.J. Byrnes, a journalist who writes a Substack newsletter about Ohio politics, entered Smith Lab in an attempt to interview Gee, who is a paid consultant for the Chase Center. The former West Virginia University president has made headlines recently for defending Les Wexner, a prominent university donor, who had a public relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Late last month, he called attempts to remove Wexner’s name from a building “cancel culture.”

The professor who teaches on civics, culture, and society appeared to do a thorough job of cancelling Newman’s HD camera and microphone:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

UNEXPECTEDLY: Bad Bunny Reportedly Lost Record Slice of Super Bowl Viewers Heading Into Halftime Show.

It looks like a record number of Super Bowl viewers stopped watching once Bad Bunny started his halftime performance on Sunday.

That’s according to a new report from Front Office Sports on Wednesday, with reporter Ryan Glasspiegel explaining on X:

Based on my understanding of the data, Bad Bunny lost more [percentage] of the Super Bowl viewership from the end of the second quarter than has ever happened before.

His conclusion is based on quarter-hour ratings data from Nielsen.

Glasspiegel reported 135.9 million people were watching the NBC and Telemundo broadcasts between 8:00-8:14 p.m. ET on Sunday; that dropped to 128.2 million combined viewers between 8:15-8:29 p.m. That exodus of 7.7 million viewers lined up with the halftime show.

“Bad Bunny’s performance occurred during the latter window,” he explained. “This was a decline of 7% from the game’s peak viewership of 137.9 million in the second quarter, and 5.7% from the immediately preceding quarter-hour.”

The article noted that the audience typically increases for the halftime show during most Super Bowls, but last year’s performance from Kendrick Lamar also took a dip when it shed 4% of viewers who were watching towards the end of the first half.

I clicked over to watch the game recap on the NFL Channel, then clicked back to see what the fuss was about, only to see Mr. Bunny was imitating the Weeknd’s 2021 Super Bowl halftime show, with the Weekend’s maze of lights being replaced by a field of polypropylene sugarcane. I quickly clicked back to the NFL Channel.

 

 

Posted at 4:49 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

DOMINIC GREEN: Say His Name: Rupert Pupkin.

Scorsese’s prince is a pert pup, a quipster on the up and up, but he’s also a triple-plosive time bomb like Travis Bickle (or Jake LaMotta, another human detonator in another Scorsese–De Niro collaboration,1980’s Raging Bull). Scorsese habitually counterpoints the threat of violence with the discharge of humor. The Goodfellas tracking shot through the kitchens of the nightclub leads to a stage-side table and Henny Youngman in full “Take my wife” flow. In Casino, Don Rickles plays a Rickles-like Borscht Belter called Billy Sherbert. In Raging Bull, LaMotta watches real-life straight man Bernie Allen cracking jokes at the Copacabana. LaMotta himself ends up as a small-time comic. His routines resemble the black-and-white futilities of Dustin Hoffman’s reenactment of Lenny Bruce’s monologues in the biopic Lenny (1974).

Like Travis Bickle and Lenny Bruce, Rupert Pupkin is scorched by confusing his transgressive desires with social reality. Thwarted, he reacts by forcing himself onto the screen in the hope that he will impress a young woman and make his mark on the world; in Schopenhauer’s terms, he tries to impose his will on its representation in the world. Scorsese is a lifelong admirer of the dreamlike set pieces in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Archers productions, where, he has said, “the fantasy is more real than the reality.” In The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer’s shoes possess her and dance her to death. In The King of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin is possessed by fame. Our last sight is of the red suit that marks his departure from the real world and his entry into the inverted dreamland where the anonymous becomes famous and the loser becomes king.

Pauline Kael missed the point in her review for the New Yorker in 1983. She complained that De Niro inverted the “bravura” extravagance of his characterizations in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York to make the polite and frustrated Pupkin “a nothing.” Slapstick reminds us that the core of comedy is inversion—of power, of status, of reality. We think fame and money will free us, but Johnny Boy (Mean Streets) and Travis Bickle get shot in the neck. Jimmy Doyle (New York, New York) gets stood up. Jerry Langford eats his TV dinners alone with three TVs and a lap dog. Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, Scorsese has said, are the same “isolated person”: a “nothing” and a “nobody” who dreams big.

But this is not nothing. It is everything. America had always sifted the winners from the losers and called it justice. The modern status economy of images plays the results back in everyone’s face. And the postindustrial economy that took off in the 1980s replicated the fame economy that sorted Americans into a small population of stars and immortals and a mass of ticket-buying “nothings.” When Rupert Pupkin inverts dreams and reality, he performs the loyal American act of chasing his dreams, of getting what you want, at any cost, even if for one night only, like James Cagney at the “top of the world” in White Heat.

Naturally, The King of Comedy bombed at the box office. The critics eventually caught up—two plosive hard k sounds and two cheers for getting it right in the end. Rupert Pupkin’s triumph of delusion previews our culture of self-reflective entertainment, in which show business incites and rewards performative psychosis. Like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, The King of Comedy told the truth about America. But who goes to the movies for the truth?

Rupert Pupkin, that’s who. And all of us, too—pursuing enlightenment in the dark. When we perceive Pupkin perceiving himself under the TV studio lights, we see ourselves. Our laughter confirms German gagmeister Artie Schopenhauer’s analysis that humor erupts when we realize our ideals do not match our perception. As the FBI waits for him in the shadows, the Hamlet of humor tells the truth in his kiss-off to his first and last audience: “I figure it this way: Better to be a king for a day than a schmuck for a lifetime.”

You might as well laugh.

Jussie Smollett certainly did: The King of MAGA Country.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Knife Horror — Ex-pupil ‘sprayed classmate with substance before knifing two teens in school horror attack.’

A former pupil sprayed a 13-year-old classmate with a substance then stabbed two boys in a school horror attack, police said.

Cops arrested a boy, 13, on suspicion of two attempted murders after he fled the scene at Kingsbury High School in Brent, north west London.

Great moments in hard-hitting tabloid journalism: This London Sun article was written with very short one or two sentence paragraphs, but even so, it takes eight paragraphs before the word “mosque” is mentioned, and over 50 paragraphs before this detail: “Unconfirmed reports suggested the suspect yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ – God is great – as he launched the attack. However, sources stressed that youngsters carrying out such attacks often have a variety of potential motives.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY:

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026

LIBERAL AMNESIA IS A SUPERPOWER:

We are all familiar with the liberal tap dance whenever we point out that some awful thing, such as chopping the genitals off of children, is happening.

It’s commonly described as a four-step process:

Step 1: It is not happening.

Step 2: Yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal

Step 3: It’s a good thing, actually,

Step 4: People freaking out about it are the real problem.

But actually, it is a five-step process, culminating with the claim that liberals never supported it in the first place. We are approaching that stage among center-left people regarding alphabet ideology, and we are well into step five in the COVID saga. I know many people now arguing that nobody wanted to keep kids out of school, nobody was forced to take the jab, and that nobody was censored for disagreeing with The Science™.

Never happened.

For some reason, I have run across several posts recently arguing that the “fat acceptance” movement was fringe, with nobody in the mainstream fronting for the idea that people could be “healthy at any size,” or that “fatphobia” was the real problem people suffering from obesity faced.

As Daniel Hannan wrote in 2014, “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact:”

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

Back in the early 2000s, a similar pivot could be seen on the left’s 180-degree turn on the removal of Saddam Hussain. (George Clooney starred in a 1999 movie excoriating Bush #41 for failing to oust Saddam from power):

After (P)resident Biden set a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head and after months of “No Kings” protests, the left once again pivoted on a dime over his ouster, including members of the (p)resident’s own administration: Kamala Harris Humiliates Herself Condemning Capture of Maduro.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 11th, 2026
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