Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

May 15, 2026

HOORAY FOR PALLYWOOD! Why would the NY Times make such horrific claims about Israel? The reasons are several-fold.

Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately.

As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week.

In a piece that has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that Israeli prison guards routinely use rape as a method of torture on Palestinian prisoners. The piece portrayed Israeli prison guards and soldiers as rapists, sadists and akin to Nazi prison camp guards. Perhaps even worse.

Kristof’s most grotesque claim is based on an anonymous source who is described as a “journalist” from Gaza. According to this source, while being held in an Israeli prison in 2024, the Gazan man was stripped naked, blindfolded and handcuffed. Then “a dog was summoned.” The dog’s handler — who we are helpfully told was speaking Hebrew — then encouraged the dog to “mount him.”

The “source” goes on to claim that he “tried to dislodge the dog, but it penetrated him.” During this time, the Israeli guards were allegedly taking photos and filming the assault while laughing and “giggling.”

Like a number of other journalists, I have spent far too much time this week reading up on the relevant literature about this claim. My computer’s search engine history is probably now as suspect as Kristof’s.

Exit questions:

I’m so old, I can still remember when newspapers still employed their own reporters, but that was quite a long time ago. These days, just think of the DNC-MSM as the American distribution wing of Hamas propaganda, and it all makes sense.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

FASTER, PLEASE: U.S. moving to indict Cuba’s Raúl Castro, sources say.

The U.S. is taking steps to indict Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba and brother of Fidel, in connection with the downing of planes 30 years ago, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The potential indictment — which would need to be approved by a grand jury — is expected to focus on Cuba’s deadly 1996 shootdown of planes operated by humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

The plan comes as the U.S. heaps pressure on the Cuban government. The Trump administration has threatened heavy tariffs on any country that exports oil to Cuba, leading to energy shortages as oil shipments are largely cut off. President Trump has pressed for major reforms in Cuba and has floated a “friendly takeover” of the country.

The pressure on Cuba began to pick up in January, after the U.S. military removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power and flew him to New York to face drug charges. Venezuela was a key partner of Cuba’s before the operation.

Raúl Castro formally stepped down as the leader of Cuba’s Communist Party in 2021, but he is still widely seen as one of the most powerful figures in the country. His grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito,” is viewed as both a representative of the 94-year-old and a key point of contact between the U.S. and Cuba.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with the younger Castro on Thursday, following an earlier U.S. visit last month. Ratcliffe personally delivered President Trump’s message that the U.S. is “prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes,” a CIA official said. The official added that Cuba can “no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere.”

Related: James Piereson on JFK’s revenge. “Still, notwithstanding commentary to the contrary, it is highly likely (given the evidence) that Oswald carried out the assassination in order to protect Castro from efforts by the Kennedy administration to overthrow his regime. If this was Oswald’s purpose, then he achieved it when President Johnson chose not to follow JFK’s policy toward Cuba. With U.S. pressure withdrawn and American attention turned elsewhere, Castro (and his regime) was able to survive for decades thereafter, much as Oswald might have hoped for. Nevertheless, President Kennedy was not wrong in trying to eliminate the Cuban dictator who was a security threat to the United States. Today, six decades later, President Trump is once again using American power to topple the Communist regime in Cuba, in belated vindication of the original campaign sponsored by President John F. Kennedy.”

Soon?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: A Texas Military Vet Dropped Out of Penn State Law School Rather Than Submit to Its Mandatory Anti-Racism Course.

David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025.

A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university’s football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains.

“I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager,” Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat.

Then he sat through his first anti-racism class.

On the first day of “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws,” a required course for all first-year law students, Blackman listened as a transgender faculty member, Emily Spottswood, explained why the course was mandatory.

“It’s not optional,” Spottswood said, because “being a lawyer is about recognizing and combating injustice.”

In audio of the session obtained by the Free Beacon, Spottswood said that this “institutional message” was “baked into” the law school’s “DNA,” adding that, as a “trans woman,” the course’s focus on “combatting oppression … is meaningful to me.”

Spottswood’s remarks followed a presentation by Jeffrey Dodge, the law school’s associate dean, and Shaakirrah Sanders, who was introduced as “the first associate Dean of anti-racism and critical pedagogy in the country.” The presentation made clear that Blackman wasn’t in Texas anymore; he and his classmates were now conscripts in a political “coalition” that, as Dodge put it in his talk, was dedicated to “building a more anti-racist” future.

“We are taking action to disrupt and dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress,” Dodge said. “We … want to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism … as a foundation for this course.”

Thus began a series of struggle sessions in which professors demanded students affirm activist talking points and ultimately drove Blackman, whose first-choice law school had been Penn State, to withdraw from the school after just one semester. (The Free Beacon reviewed Blackman’s transcript.) Over the course of three 150-minute lectures, speakers described all white people as “privileged,” called to “eradicate patriarchy,” and asserted that the justice system is “about keeping black people in their place.” One assignment said students should “consider” framing their essays around “the reality of systemic racism,” implying that doing otherwise could affect a student’s grade.

PJM alum Tyler O’Neil adds, “This is an important reminder of how deep the woke rot runs in many professions — it’s not just that professionals are biased, it’s that they’re forced to marinade in leftist-saturated institutions to get the credentials to do their jobs. Even the sanest will get infected to some degree.”

Exit quote from Blackman:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

SHARK SANDWICH:

Okay, but to be fair, given L.A.’s perilously high concentration of Democrats, Raman may simply trying to protect them from themselves:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on May 15th, 2026

May 14, 2026

PEDRO PASCAL KNOWS EXACTLY HOW TO ADVERTISE A BOY’S SCIENCE FANTASY MOVIE: Kissing a Man on the Lips on National TV.

Chris Gore wrote that Disney changing Star Wars (and Marvel) from a boys brand to a girls brand was the costliest mistake in entertainment history.

But they didn’t change it to a girls brand.

They changed it to a gay brand.

What this says to me is that they know The Mandalorian and Grogu is going to be an absolute bomb and either don’t care any more or are looking to pre-emptively make excuses for the disaster. “The public is just too homophobic to accept a gay space bounty hunter!”

In more next-level marketing, Disney has decided that they should allow the fired, disgraced failure Kaffeine Kennedy to remind the public that she is responsible for this movie.

No wonder the movie is tracking at the same level that Soylo: A Soy Wars Soyry tracked at before becoming the first Star Wars movie in history to lose money.

Christian Toto adds: ‘Mandalorian and Grogu’ Faces Even More Box Office Woes?

Some influencers did get access to a 25-minute clip reel of the film and came away impressed. We’ve yet to hear of any early screenings for review purposes.

There’s more.

“Star Wars” legend Mark Hamill just posted, then deleted, an image of a dead President Trump. That ghoulish move got plenty of media attention, forcing him to post a quasi-apology.

Hamill isn’t featured in “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” but he’s an essential part of franchise lore and a brand ambassador.

At least he was.

From last week: Mark Hamill Posts Image of President Trump Dead in a Grave With Caption “If Only.”

As Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith might say, Disney seems determined to make the appeal of Star Wars as “selective” as possible.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): If I were a chick, I still don’t think kissing Colbert would boost my appeal. I mean, ick.

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

CLAUDINE LONGET, CHANTEUSE AND ACTRESS WHOSE CAREER ENDED WHEN SHE SHOT HER LOVER, DIES AGE 84.

She played the female lead, opposite Peter Sellers, in Blake Edwards’s 1968 film The Party, but she was best known for her appearances on the weekly television show hosted by her husband, Andy Williams. She was, in Williams’s words, “a beautiful, athletic, slender, petite brunette with large doe eyes”.

From her spouse’s side, she radiated a mixture of glamour and wholesome domesticity. On the set of Williams’s famous Christmas specials, she would cast protective glances towards the couple’s young children as they unwrapped parcels under the studio tree.

But few stars have made the journey from idol to pariah quite so swiftly and irreversibly as Claudine Longet who, on the afternoon of March 21 1976, shot her lover, the champion skier Spider Sabich, with a .22 handgun at their chalet in Aspen, Colorado. The events of that Sunday afternoon shifted the emphasis so firmly from femme to fatale that even now, decades later, some residents of America’s most exclusive ski resort have yet to forgive her.

She inspired a mercilessly derisive song, “Claudine,” by the Rolling Stones. Originally destined for the 1980 album Emotional Rescue, it eventually appeared as a bonus track on the Some Girls re-release in 2011. “Now only Spider knows for sure,” one verse begins, “But he ain’t talkin’ about it any more/ Is he, Claudine?/ There’s blood in the chalet/And blood in the snow/[She] Washed her hands of the whole damn show/The best thing you could do, Claudine.”

In April 1976, before her case had even been heard, the first series of NBC’s satirical show Saturday Night Live featured a sketch called “The Claudine Longet Invitational” in which male skiers competed in a slalom competition, at the end of which they were “accidentally” shot by Claudine Longet.

As Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in their 1986 history of SNL, “One of [Standards and Practices vice president Herminio Traviesas’s] biggest mistakes came from not seeing how a piece played in performance. The sketch in question was [Michael] O’Donoghue’s ‘Claudine Longet Invitational’ ski tournament, which aired when she was facing trial for manslaughter. Traviesas, to O’Donoghue’s complete surprise, let it pass on the basis of a reading over the phone, not realizing that it came across much tougher visually than it did in the script. NBC’s legal representative on the show also let it pass after consulting with an outside law firm. Almost as soon as it aired, Longet’s estranged husband, Andy Williams, was on the phone with NBC’s lawyers in Los Angeles, threatening to sue. To placate Williams, Don Pardo read an apology in a subsequent show. ‘It is desirable to correct any misunderstanding,’ Pardo said, ‘that a suggestion was made that, in fact, a crime had been committed.… This is a statement of apology if the material was misinterpreted.’ Not a very sincere apology, but it served to keep the show out of court.”

Posted at 6:32 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Remember Peoria!

The New Hotness? Screw those rubes in flyover country, we’re ramming wokeness right down their throats, even if they refuse to buy the product:

Yes, it’s Christopher Nolan, and the film will likely print money this summer, and yes, I want to read the reviews of the finished product before strongly casting doubts, but even he isn’t perfect:

But Dunkirk did lack emotional depth. It felt much more like Stanley Kubrick’s cold and detached Full Metal Jacket than a gripping war movie about one of England’s pivotal moments in WWII.

Regarding Oppenheimer, Will Jordan, aka the Critical Drinker, recently told GB News that Nolan is “a man of ideas and obviously very intelligent, very capable as a filmmaker, but there’s a certain sterility to what he produces. There’s a certain emotional element that’s just missing. I feel like when he does try to include it, it comes across as very clunky and very deliberate. For example, the love scenes in Oppenheimer did not feel like real human beings talking to each other. They felt like a couple of robots conversing, and I think that’s a bit of a shortcoming for him as a director. He basically needs to stay within his comfort zone in order to produce [his] best stuff. He’s a man of ideas — sci-fi, thrillers, that kind of thing. I think historical epics might not be to his taste.”

Still though, if Hollywood wants to lean heavily into reverse-race casting, Siraj Hashmi suggests the ultimate Project Hail Mary:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

EXILE IN THE UNCANNY VALLEY: South Park Creators’ AI Company Made The Rolling Stones Young Again for ‘In The Stars’ Music Video.

The Rolling Stones look straight out of the 1970s in the legendary rock band’s music video for new single “In the Stars,” thanks to de-aging technology courtesy of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s AI company Deep Voodoo.

In the François Rousselet-directed video, which features Odessa A’zion, the band is rocking out in a warehouse as a crowd of fans dances around them and a slew of other musicians join in on the song too. At one point A’zion licks the digitally de-aged Mick Jagger’s face.

“Are you kidding me? It’s my dream,” A’zion said of starring in a Rolling Stones music video. “The first record that I ever got that I listened to from start to finish was Tattoo You. I’m obsessed with the Rolling Stones. This is in my bucket list for sure.”

There appears to be a variety of “is that him or isn’t it?” quick cuts of digitally recreated ‘70s-era Stones sidemen such as Billy Preston and Bobby Keys as well in the video:

The Beatles’ Get Back used heavy audio and video processing to generate almost eight hours of television footage from the raw footage shot for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 Let It Be documentary. Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman and Michael used actors to tell their stories. Last year’s Becoming Led Zeppelin used clever editing of a handful of the band’s rare early television appearances to flesh out a two-hour documentary. Are the Stones opening up a floodgate of AI recreations of AARP-qualified bands who can afford the use of the technology, for both rock videos and documentaries?

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

METAPHOR ALERT:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

VDH: The Four Horsemen of the New Antisemitism.

Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.

After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.

Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.

It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent—and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.

True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.

So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.

Exit quote:

Any visitor to a contemporary American campus who talks at length to protesting students quickly arrives at two general conclusions:

First, many have been taught to despise Israel and simply parrot the indoctrinated talking points of their professors—“apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “settler colonialism,” and so on.

The result is that it is now “cool” on campus to trash Israel, utter the platitude that “hating Israel is not hating Jews,” and then either make life uncomfortable for Jewish students or remain silent when witnessing such harassment firsthand.

Curiously, to build on John Cleese’s Anglo-centric tweet, the reverse does not appear to be true on American campuses:

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

CHAOS ERUPTS BEHIND THE SCENES OF TRUMP’S CHINA TRIP — including trampled White House aide.

President Trump’s much-anticipated summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been marred by multiple physical altercations just offstage.

Among the incidents that took place Thursday:

  • A White House staffer was trampled by Chinese reporters.
  • A Secret Service agent was kept out of official events.
  • American journalists were prevented from joining the presidential motorcade.

The chaos was all captured by a cameraman accompanying “Rush Hour” director Brett Ratner as he prepares to shoot a fourth installment of the beloved feature film franchise.

The dust-ups with the Chinese caused frustrations to boil over on the American side, with one member of the US delegation overheard calling it a “s—tshow.”

Related, from Lee Smith: Strange Trip — The U.S. war against Iran hasn’t ushered in American decline. It’s exposed China’s weakness.

Trump’s tariffs have forced China to find alternate markets for its goods. “But the Iran war,” said the trade analyst, “has stalled the growth of the economies in all of China’s replacement markets, especially Southeast Asia and Europe. All of which means the notion that Trump and the U.S. hold little leverage in their relations with China is complete nonsense.”

Given the damage Trump has inflicted on not just Iran but also China, he could walk away now and declare victory. Together with Israel, the United States has decimated Iranian leadership, destroyed its navy and air force, and collapsed most of its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles facilities. Trump could withdraw forces and promise to return if the regime tests his warnings, or he could leave it entirely to the next administration to stop what he’s described as an existential threat that plagues not only Israel and other U.S. regional allies but also Europe and soon the American homeland. But Trump says he isn’t leaving until he gets all the uranium Iran has enriched and dismantles all its nuclear facilities. It seems he really doesn’t care about the polling, gas prices, or even threats to his future freedom, because he’s not budging. The American president Xi is meeting in Beijing is dug in.

Exit question: Game On: Did Xi Give Trump and Rubio a Tacit Green Light on Iran?

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

SOMALI PIRATES ATTACK AMERICAN WEST COAST:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

BOMBING CHINA’S POPULATION:

DOKOUPIL: America remains the innovation hub of the world. Made in China, yes; but designed and invented in the U.S.A. New drugs, new discoveries, new inventions, new space missions. Xi boasts of the country’s industrial might, and it’s impossible to deny that fact. China’s population is in decline, though, well below replacement rates. Unemployment is high with millions in rural provinces living in poverty, and massive housing complexes that now sit empty.

To paraphrase the lads in the Delta House, China f*cked up, they trusted us – more specifically, they trusted their fellow leftist, the recently deceased Paul Ehrlich, in the 1970s. As did that gold standard of CBS Evening News hosts, Uncle Walter:

[N]ow that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.”

Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News—inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”

From Douglas Brinkley’s 2012 book, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism.

(And unwittingly, the CCP’s birth dearth.)

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

WALTER DURANTY SMILES:

To be fair though, if it wasn’t the dogs, Israel apparently has a whole menagerie of expertly-trained beasts waging war in the Middle East…:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

UPDATE (From Ed): Israel Sues NYT over Kristof Column That Alleged Widespread Rape of Palestinian Prisoners.

Related: Israeli rape dog spotted?

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

NEWS YOU CAN USE:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

EUROPE WILL NEVER FORGIVE THE JEWS FOR THE HOLOCAUST:

Exit quote: “By finding a way to stain the Jews and Israel with those same moral evils they themselves feel the weight of, but for imaginary instead of genuine reasons, Europeans can not only remove but reverse the mark of the evil they inflicted on Jews over their entire history, not remotely least during the Holocaust.”

Earlier: Brendan O’Neill on Holocaust Envy.

UPDATE:

Posted at 11:30 am by Ed Driscoll on May 14th, 2026

OWN GOAL:

Tweet concludes, “You decide to intentionally fumble the football on the goal line because you are afraid of negative PR from people who already hate you It’s outrageous that Republicans in South Carolina and Louisiana intentionally want our own side to lose because they think winning is a violation of principle. We don’t have time for this bullsh*t any longer.”

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

May 13, 2026

AS A WISE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER LIKES TO SAY, GET IN THEIR FACES AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on May 13th, 2026
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