Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 24, 2026

January 23, 2026

RIP: John Brodie, ex-49ers quarterback, dead at 90.

Former 49ers quarterback John Brodie, who played nearly two decades for San Francisco, passed away at 90 years old on Friday, the team announced.

“The 49ers family is saddened to learn of the passing of one of the franchise’s all-time great players, John Brodie,” Niners co-chairman Dr. John York said in a statement. “As a kid, my 49ers fandom began by watching John play quarterback on television.

“He displayed an incredible commitment towards his teammates and his support of the organization never wavered after his playing days. John became a dear friend of mine, and he will always be remembered as an important part of 49ers history.”

Brodie joined the 49ers in 1957 after the team took him with the No. 3 overall pick in the draft.

“Brodie played for the San Francisco 49ers from 1957 to 1973.” That was a very, very different version of the NFL’s than today’s:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Want to curse a former lover? There’s a spell for that on Etsy.

The scent of dried sage and beeswax does not normally travel over the internet but for a growing group of spiritual consumers, the magic begins with a Google search.

Self-styled witches are selling spells on Etsy and TikTok for good luck or an increased social media following to finding love, curing male baldness and enacting revenge, with prices going as high as several hundred pounds.

The term “Etsy witches” — people providing witchcraft services over the internet — went viral last year after several influencers claimed to have successfully changed the weather on their wedding day after purchasing a spell.

Since then online witchcraft has been booming as people turn to “metaphysical services” to help with everything from selling a house to dealing with stress. On Etsy, customers only need to type in “spell”, “hex”, “jinx” or “curse” to find hundreds of offers from shops boasting thousands of five-star reviews.

Those in the Beltway area can simply drop by the offices of the Washington Post: Rod Dreher on Sally Quinn, Georgetown’s Madame Blavatsky.

Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans—Quinn embraces it all. And yes, she has been in contact with her husband since his passing. Through a medium. Repeatedly.

Some friends have voiced reservations that Quinn is now showing all her cards, so to speak. “Don’t play up the voodoo too much,” one implored. But Sally does nothing by halves. She reveals that, in her less mellow days, she put hexes on three people who promptly wound up having their lives ruined, or ended.

The first, cast in 1969, was spurred by old-fashioned jealousy. Some exotic beauty at a Halloween party inspired lust in Quinn’s beau at the time—and then killed herself just days after Sally cast her spell.

Her second victim was Clay Felker, the longtime editor of New York magazine who oversaw a brutal profile of Quinn in 1973, just before her catastrophic debut on the CBS Morning News. Quinn hexed Felker not long after flaming out at CBS and returning to Washington. “Some time afterward, Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in a hostile takeover, and Felker was out,” she writes. “Clay never recovered professionally. Worse, he got cancer, which ultimately caused his death.”

Target number three: a shady psychic who, the autumn after Quinn Bradlee was born, ran afoul of Sally’s maternal instincts. The woman dropped dead before year’s end.

Though it’s worth noting that there limits to the kinds of spells even she can cast: The end of Sally Quinn’s Washington.

Posted at 5:40 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

AND THE BEARDS HAVE GROWN LONGER OVERNIGHT:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM ABC NEWS: Joy Behar: ICE Is the New ‘Gestapo,’ Trump Wants ‘War’ With NATO and MN.

On Friday’s episode of ABC’s The View, fill-in moderator Joy Behar admitted that she needed therapy to deal with her Trump Derangement Syndrome. And during the Tuesday episode of The View’s Behind the Table podcast, Behar proved just how severe her TDS actually was. According to her, ICE was just like the Nazi Gestapo rounding people up for extermination. She also claimed that America was “at war” with NATO and President Trump wanted to launch a war against Minnesota.

The first step in trying to fix one’s self was to admit you had a problem. Behar admitted that she was getting her therapy idea from former first Lady Michelle Obama. “She talks about how she and Barack have been in therapy all these years because they’re dealing with the empty nest. I’m dealing with the next few years of Trump. I need therapy,” she quipped.

And boy, did she need it.

Behar kicked off their podcast with delusions of grandeur, proclaiming that she wanted her legacy to be taking part in getting Trump out of office; seemingly suggesting she played a critical role in the 2020 election results:

BEHAR: I want my legacy to be that I helped get Trump out of office. That’s what I really care about.

TETA: Well, you did once. [Laughter]

BEHAR: I did. I wanna do it a second time. This time he’s much more dangerous than he was before.

Behar would go on to claim that Trump was “10 times worse than Nixon was. At this point.”

I’m so old, I can remember when Nixon was compared to Hitler by no less than George McGovern, before having his reputation rehabilitated by numerous elite leftists to bash the New Hitler. Speaking of which, yet another New Hitler has finally come along:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

THE UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS’ NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Related:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

“A GOOD TACTIC IS ONE YOUR PEOPLE ENJOY. If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic:” Operation Fakeout: Leftist Hotlines Send Protesters to Biker Bars — Surprise, No ICE, Just Laughs.

Related:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

IT’S COME TO THIS: New York Times Hiring a Reporter To Cover US Jews.

The New York Times, whose executive editor a decade ago publicly acknowledged, “We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives,” and which has been afflicted with a series of errors on basic matters of Jewish literacy everywhere from the crossword puzzle to the food section, is now hoping to hire a reporter who knows something about Judaism.

A recently posted Times job listing seeks “an experienced and versatile journalist to join the National desk as a religion correspondent … with a particular emphasis on Jewish life in America.”

The posting indicates that the Times is adding a reporter focused on American Judaism and also another one “on the Muslim experience in America,” kind of a Times-job-listing version of the higher-education-administrator and Democratic-politician tic of adding “and Islamophobia” every time anti-Semitism is mentioned. As even a Times editorial acknowledged, “University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia.” The rise of Islam in America, like the Christian religious revival that is also under way in America, is a newsworthy story in its own right; that Islam-related job listing does not appear to be posted yet, but it could be a promising beat for a reporter skeptical enough to tackle, say, the Minnesota welfare fraud story.

The Times is doubling the size of a religion reporting team that is already double what it was when then-executive editor Dean Baquet lamented, in an NPR interview, “We have a fabulous religion writer, but she’s all alone. We don’t get religion. We don’t get the role of religion in people’s lives. And I think we can do much, much better.”

And how, but of course, the Gray Lady is far from alone among US newspapers when it comes to not getting religion. As Rod Dreher wrote in his classic 2003 article, “The Godless Party:”

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “This is not a religious city,” he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”*

In the main—and I’ve had this confirmed to me by Christian friends who labor elsewhere in the secular media—the men and women who bring America its news don’t necessarily hate religion; in most cases, they just believe it’s unimportant at best, menacing at worst. Because they don’t know any religious people, they think of American religion in categories that have long been outdated. For example, to hear journalists talk, Catholics are berated from the pulpit every Sunday about abortion and birth control; reporters think I’m putting them on when I tell them that I’ve been a practicing Catholic for 10 years and I’ve only heard one sermon about abortion and none about contraception. For another, outside the Jewish community, there are no stronger supporters of Israel than among American Evangelicals, and that’s been true for at least a generation. The news has yet to reach American newsrooms, where I’ve been startled to discover a general assumption among Jews and non-Jews alike that these “fundamentalists” (i.e., any Christian more conservative than a Spong-ite Episcopalian) are naturally anti-Semitic.

In a further comment, that New York Post city editor inadvertently revealed something else important to me about the way media people see religion: As far as he was concerned, Catholics and Jews were the only religious people who counted in New York City (he himself is a non-practicing Jew), because they were the only ones who had any political pull. Because journalists tend not to know religiously observant people, they see religious activity in the only way they know how—in terms of secular politics. Thus, when your average journalist hears “Southern Baptist,” she immediately thinks of an alien sect whose rustic adherents lurk in the shadows thinking of cunning ways to manipulate Republican politicians into taking away a woman’s right to choose. The trouble is, she doesn’t think much further, and it is unlikely that anyone in her professional and social circles will challenge her to do so.

If only the New York Times hadn’t run a journalist eminently qualified to write about US Jews out on a rail in 2020. If only.

* That’s a paraphrase of Kael’s legendary moment from 1972: The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST WEARING MASKS FOR PROTECTION:

Shot: Arizona AG Kris Mayes wildly suggests residents can shoot masked ICE agents under state’s self-defense laws: ‘Recipe for disaster.’

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes wildly suggested that residents can open fire on masked ICE agents if they feel their life is in danger under the state’s self-defense laws.

The Democrat, in a sit-down with 12 News anchor Brahm Resnik, warned that Arizona’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows citizens to use deadly force if they believe they’re in imminent danger, could become a “recipe for disaster” if protesters clash with immigration officers.

“It’s kind of a recipe for disaster because you have these masked federal officers with very little identification, sometimes no identification, wearing plain clothes and masks,” Mayes said in the Monday interview, calling ICE “very poorly trained.”

“And we have a Stand Your Ground law that says that if you reasonably believe that your life is in danger and you’re in your house or your car or on your property, that you can defend yourself with lethal force.”

A flabbergasted Resnik repeatedly challenged Mayes, cautioning that her remarks could be interpreted as a “license” to residents to shoot a federal agent.

She retorted that she was merely stating a “fact,” not encouraging violence.

“If you’re being attacked by someone who is not identified as a peace officer — how do you know?” the state’s top prosecutor pressed, adding that “real cops don’t wear masks.”

“I mean if somebody comes at me wearing a mask, by the way, I’m a gun owner, and I can’t tell whether they’re a police officer, what am I supposed to do? No, I’m not suggesting people pull out their guns, but this is a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ state.”

—The New York Post, yesterday.

Chaser: Arizona’s state government, July 23rd, 2020:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 23rd, 2026

January 22, 2026

DEMOCRATS SURE GOT IT GOOD:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

THE CAPTAIN HAS SPOKEN:

I mean, after all:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

THE ART OF THE DEAL:

As a result, soon:

Since setting the tone for the first Buc-ee’s in Greenland is so important, there is only one man who can be trusted to be the new location’s first manager:

Related: The European mind cannot comprehend the wonders of Buc-ee’s:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

WHY CAN’T THE GOP PLAY SMASH-MOUTH POLITICS?

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

January 21, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash and Burn — The Kathleen Kennedy Story.

As the Drinker notes, Kennedy “gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”

I hope the destruction of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises was worth it for her. Gene Siskel famously said that the test of a good movie is, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” For Kennedy, the amount of damage control she’ll be engaging in from here on in will be far more fun to watch than any of the product she put up on the big and small screen.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

HE’S SUPER CEREAL! Al Gore accosts Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after Trump official’s Davos speech.

Former Vice President Al Gore briefly accosted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after the Trump official’s speech on the sidelines of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The Post has learned.

During a Tuesday VIP dinner hosted by billionaire BlackRock boss Larry Fink, where several hundred people were invited, Lutnick delivered a speech that was fiercely critical of European allies.

When he stepped offstage, Gore walked up to him and said, “Boo” – like he was trying to scare him, a source told The Post.

Lutnick laughed and someone at the event remarked, “What an honor to have Al Gore boo,” according to an insider.

We’ve been here before with the Goracle, haven’t we? And with equally predictable results:

And note this:

“I sat and listened to his remarks,” the avid environmentalist told The Post in a statement.

“I didn’t interrupt him in any way. It’s no secret that I think this administration’s energy policy is insane. And at the end of his speech I reacted with how I felt, and so did several others.”

What’s the problem? Al Gore tacitly declared “mission accomplished” to radical environmentalism in 2013, the moment he sold out to oil-rich Qatar:

Al has sold Current, for the magnificent sum of $500-million, $100-million of which is his alone. Not bad for a TV station with less reach and inferior programming to most billboards.

To whom did the Lord of the Upper Atmosphere sell? Why to al Jazeera — which is to say, effectively to the ruler of Qatar, a wealthy country that has nothing else to sustain it but the sale of its huge petroleum resources.

Qatar is about oil, oil and more oil. It is a global warmer’s hell.

But what a paycheck! When Al Gore emerged from his energy-guzzling mansion to address the Senate in 2007 only to refuse to take his own energy reduction pledge from An Inconvenient Truth when presented to him by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Ann Coulter quipped, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: What Blue Zone Collapse Looks Like.

In 2019, a house started burning on Bethel Island, out at the eastern edges of the Bay Area. The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District — which no longer exists, for reasons that will be clear enough — had been eroding for years, closing one fire station after another as funding ran short. In 2019, ten firefighters (three each on three fire engines plus one battalion chief) covered 250 square miles, much of it well-populated. Bethel Island no longer had a fire station. Scroll to page two on this later report that discussed the reform of fire agencies in Contra Costa County, and you’ll find the fire department’s average response time to major emergencies on Bethel Island: a little under 14 minutes for the arrival of the first engine. So there was a house fire, which spread and turned into several house fires, and that cluster of fires was finally brought under control about three hours after the first house started burning. But the fire department existed. It didn’t collapse. In a serious emergency, an adequate response could be summoned in an hour or two.

One you start looking for this — government agencies that exist but are entirely inadequate for the performance of their basic responsibilities — you can find it everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

REDNECK NATION: Justice D E-I Cites “Black Codes” Which Stripped Post-Civil-War Blacks of Right to Bear Arms As Good Law In Order to Justify Endless Gun Control.

Straight out of Redneck Nation, and more recently, Ryan Long’s “When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything” video:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THE DEMOCRATS’ SHOCK TROOPS WITHOUT UNIFORMS:

Federal agents who are doing nothing more than carrying out our immigration laws are being verbally and physically assaulted in blue states, Minnesota and California in particular. Don’t try to convince us these are organic protests with only the purest of intentions.

It’s a generously funded insurgency inflamed by the Democrats, cynics who see a political opportunity to create havoc. The combatants are not in uniform, but they serve the same purpose as shock troops who are on the front lines of a revolution before the occupation forces move in.

Confrontations between ICE agents and protesters have been common for nearly a year. We’ll stipulate that some are simply demonstrating peacefully. But many are there to obstruct, and some of them have violence on their minds. We’ve seen the toxic brew result in at least one death — for now.

It’s foolish to think there won’t be more. There’s a lust for blood. Just this past weekend, a horde attacked a counterprotester in Minneapolis, reportedly whacking him in the head with a flagpole and chasing him as if he were prey. Videos show a man whose life is being threatened. He was bloodied because of his opinions.

Another man was harassed in Minneapolis by an anti-ICE crowd, apparently for having offended the rabble by wearing an American flag hoodie with the word “Freedom” on it. “Take it off and you won’t get hurt!,” his tormenters told him.

This is only a sampling of recent events over the course of a much longer reign of terror.

Which all seems so odd, considering that in 2016, CNN cheerfully went on a ride-along with ICE, and the prior year, Obama awarded Tom Homan “the Presidential Rank Award [which] is bestowed each year by the President upon a small group of career employees and is the nation’s highest civil service award.”

 

Since we mentioned Jerry Seinfeld earlier today, here’s his “rooting for laundry” riff on pro sports in the era of free agency, which applies even more so to the left when someone changes party allegiance:

But then, the left is always rioting about something: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THIS IS THE WAY: GOP Officials Warn Climate Activist Group To Stop Pressuring American Companies.

A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by the state of Florida, said Wednesday that a major climate group may be violating their states’ antitrust and consumer protection laws by artificially pressuring companies to adopt climate activist policies, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier warned the Boston-based nonprofit organization Ceres that it may be illegally pressuring companies to adopt net-zero policies. He said the organization was pursuing policies that were an “assault on American families and businesses.”

“Ceres’ efforts to artificially move entire markets and sectors — and in turn artificially change the output and quality of the goods and services produced by those sectors — toward Ceres’ own preferred policy goals bears all the trappings of the ‘adverse, anticompetitive effects’ that antitrust laws seek to prevent,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter.

Ceres is an advocacy group that says it is “working to accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more just, and resilient world.” In emails obtainedby the House Judiciary Committee, it has described its work as “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force” fighting a war for net zero emissions.

It’s the left’s old friend, the moral equivalent of war!

Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As [Jonah] Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.

Since the century-old moral equivalent of war has long been the moral equivalent of a quagmire, it’s great to see sensible GOP attorneys general declaring a ceasefire.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THE ARTIC SMOKESCREEN: The most dangerous mistake about “Greenland is believing it is about Greenland.”

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026
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