Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 19, 2026

THIS IS CNN: ‘You Have To Make People Uncomfortable:’ How Don Lemon Helped Anti-ICE Activists Storm a Minnesota Church.

Disgraced former CNN host Don Lemon colluded with anti-ICE activists now under investigation for storming a Minnesota church on Sunday—a “clandestine” operation that Lemon helped keep secret ahead of time before publicizing it once it began.

Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023 over mistreatment of female colleagues, accompanied Minneapolis lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong on “Operation Pull Up” at Cities Church in Saint Paul to protest the ICE shooting earlier this month of 37-year-old Renee Good. According to Armstrong, the operation targeted Cities Church because an associate pastor is allegedly the acting director of Saint Paul’s ICE office.

“We show up somewhere that is a key location,” Armstrong told Lemon in an interview prior to the event. “They don’t expect us to come there. And then we disrupt business as usual.”

Storming a church is never a good look:

Late last week, another former CNN employee was letting it all hang out during his appearance with leftist podcast host Jennifer Welch:

● Deranged: Acosta Floats Choking CBS’s Dokoupil, Welch Says ICE Is Like ISIS.

● Jim Acosta Helps Dems Make the Pivot to ‘JD Vance Is Worse Than Trump.’ (Plus: Get the TDS Straitjacket!)

In December of 2012, the Grauniad asked: Can Jeff Zucker fix what ails CNN?

Upon his departure a decade later, his fellow leftists at the New Republic concluded: Jeff Zucker Was the Most Craven TV Executive of the Trump Era. The CNN executive’s commitments to “The Trump Show” wrecked his network—and did lasting damage to the country.

Lemon and Acosta’s recent antics illustrate that the hangover from Zucker’s reign of error continues.

Minnesota’s DFL party will of course look the other way at Lemon’s stunt…

…But the Feds? Stay tuned:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:10 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 19th, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Starfleet Academy — This Show Is Pure Torture.

The Drinker asks:

Oh, Star Trek, my old friend. What have they done to you? You know, I remember when Star Trek was a serious show made by serious people with a passion for science and technology and a desire to broaden human horizons. How times have changed after the indignities of Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds. I honestly thought we’d seen an end of the brain dead, cringe-inducing, hyper-identity politics-driven garbage wearing the Star Trek brand like a skin suit, but apparently not. Is this like some kind of humiliation ritual at this point? Do they hate their own franchise?

Yes, and like Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars, the producers hate the franchise’s core fans even more.

On the bright side though, Starfleet Academy is singlehandedly bringing together a divided nation — I was not expecting to see the words “I am so on the same page” with Trump advisor Stephen Miller coming from the X account of William Shatner, but that’s where we are at the beginning of 2026 AD:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 19th, 2026

A TALE OF TWO CITIES:

Tweet continues, “Why is Minneapolis a different story?? Is it because the fraud and crimes happening there involved the elected government? Who is paying the rioters? I believe the rioters and the government officials protecting them and egging them on are both idiots.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 19th, 2026

JOSH SHAPIRO: Team Kamala Asked If I Was an Israeli Double Agent.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

It certainly says something about Dana Remus. It also speaks volumes about former Attorney General Eric Holder, who ran the search committee to vet potential running mates for Kamala Harris. And that in turn speaks volumes about Holder’s former boss Barack Obama, who kept trying to cut deals with Iran and repeatedly involved Rob Malley in those efforts, who had to quit Obama’s initial campaign when his contacts with Hamas got exposed in early 2008.

It also has something to say about the progressives that control the Democrat Party of today. This query relies on an old and bigoted trope about Jews being inherently disloyal to their own countries, a claim that long predates the establishment of the state of Israel. In Germany, political leaders blamed Jews for the collapse in World War I that led to their defeat, using the same ugly claim, which got amplified and then industrialized by the Nazis. No one asks that question about being an Israeli double-agent out of the blue without having bought into that anti-Semitic mindset.

Jim Geraghty adds:

Occam’s razor would suggest that either A) the Harris campaign foresaw insurmountable obstacles from having a Jewish, pro-Israel running mate at a time when the Democratic grassroots were growing vehemently anti-Israel, and needed an excuse to conclude Shapiro had flunked the vetting process or B) the Harris campaign was full of paranoid antisemites who believed that every American Jew they encountered was secretly working for the Mossad.

Shapiro writes, “The fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

Our Audrey Fahlberg asked the very good question of how Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, up to his eyeballs in fraud scandals involving state spending, managed to come through the Harris campaign’s vetting with no red flags. The paranoia about Shapiro’s alleged dual loyalties are even more absurd in light of Walz’s 30 visits to China, one funded by the Chinese government, status as a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University, a Chinese state-run institution of higher education, and so on. And one of the few decisions of the Harris campaign that we can be 100 percent certain was made by the candidate was the selection of Walz over Shapiro. (Selecting Shapiro wouldn’t have won the race for Harris, but she might have at least kept Pennsylvania in the Democratic column.)

Geraghty’s post is aptly titled, “Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics.”

Agreed. Why is the Democratic Party such a cesspit of antisemitism?

Exit question:

Of course, perhaps Walz was similarly vetted, with the goal of taking the “Quality Learing Center” nationwide:

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 19th, 2026

HEH, INDEED:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 19th, 2026

January 18, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM STARFLEET LEARING ACADEMY: John Nolte: Free Premiere of Trump-Hating Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Bombs.

Paramount+ made Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s premiere episode available for free and, after a full day, it has amassed only 81,000 views and a dreadful like-to-dislike ratio…

As of this writing, only 3.9K people have hit the “like” button, compared to the 10K that have hit the “dislike” button.

Gee, I wonder what the problem is?

Oh, wait…

What is that? A smug lesbian virtue-signaling with her strident Karen Power is supposed to be appealing, someone we can relate to, someone to aspire to? Does that teacher look like she should be training people to handle Starships or blowing whistles at ICE agents in Minnesota?

What a joke.

Everyone smelled this turd from a mile away, which is why no one bothered to tune in.

Nolte’s post went up on Friday; here’s where the likes and dislikes stand on its YouTube page as of Sunday afternoon:

I wonder how much money Paramount has left on the table by alienating men from the streaming iterations of the Trek franchise? In the 1970s, even prior to the massive Star Wars merchandizing blitz, Paramount made a fair chunk of change licensing the Star Trek brand to sell plenty of toys, books, blueprints, and wargames aimed at young males. (While Heineken apparently didn’t bother to seek Paramount’s permission to use Spock’s image to sell beer in 1975, an underemployed Leonard Nimoy being furious with the studio that he received zero royalties from the use of his image was a key sticking point that almost kept him out of the first Star Trek movie in 1979.) In the 1980s, sales of videotapes of the Trek movies and especially the old 1966 TV series were added to the mix. The same thing that someone recently posted on X about how Kathleen Kennedy killed Star Wars’ merchandizing and DVD sales dead by making the brand toxic for males applies to Trek as well:

Classical reference in headline:

Earlier, from Steve: I (Almost) Watched Starfleet Academy So You Don’t Have To.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

I HOPE YOUR BEEPER DOESN’T GO OFF:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

SEEMS LIKE A FAIR TRADE:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT!

The reaction to the left of California’s business community heading off to Galt’s Gulch has been instructive, though:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

“WELL, HERE YOU HAVE IT–THE EXACT MOMENT WHEN THE ARABS DECIDED TO INVENT A ‘PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’ FOR THE PURPOSE OF DESTROYING THE STATE OF ISRAEL:”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

“OH, THEY’RE ALREADY DOING IT:”

Posted at 10:23 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

CONAN, WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE?

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

WHEN FOUCAULT MET THE AYATOLLAH:

Earlier that year [1978], Foucault had been commissioned by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to write a regular ‘Michel Foucault Investigates’ column – and other pieces for several French papers, too. The original focus was supposed to be America under its new president, Jimmy Carter. But as the Iranian people began rising up against the shah’s autocratic reign, Foucault’s focus shifted eastwards. And so, between the summer of 1978 and early 1979, he visited Iran twice, and contributed a series of op-eds, features and interviews on what, come early 1979, would culminate in the Iranian Revolution and the birth of the Islamic Republic.

By the time Foucault sat in awe before Iran’s future supreme leader, under the shade of an old apple tree, he had already become a full-throated supporter of the revolt against the shah. Plenty of leftists in the West had. But Foucault’s stance was different. Unlike those Western left-wingers at the time, who supported the revolt in spite of its religious character, Foucault supported it precisely because of its religious character.

At first glance, this may look like a very odd coupling – the Western radical, libertine and poststructuralist, and the Islamist reactionary. But dig a little deeper, and it’s an alliance built on a shared, anti-Western animus. Foucault’s radicalism, drawing deep on a counter-Enlightenment tradition of thought, rested on a profound critique and rejection of modernity as a whole. He conceived of Western society along the lines of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationality’, a spiritless, disenchanted system of domination in which ‘individuals’ are little more than the effects of power. And in Islamism, Foucault effectively saw a solution – a spiritual alternative to the supposedly empty, prison-like rationalism and materialism of the modern West. Indeed, an interview with Foucault published in March 1979 is even called, ‘Iran: the spirit of a spiritless world’.

Related: Roger Kimball on “The perversions of M. Foucault:”

Self-destruction, in fact, was another of Foucault’s obsessions, and Miller is right to underscore Foucault’s fascination with death. In this, as in so much else, he followed the lead of the Marquis de Sade, who had long been one of his prime intellectual and moral heroes. (Though, as Miller notes, Foucault felt that Sade “had not gone far enough,” since, unaccountably, he continued to see the body as “strongly organic.”) Foucault came to enjoy imagining “suicide festivals” or “orgies” in which sex and death would mingle in the ultimate anonymous encounter. Those planning suicide, he mused, could look “for partners without names, for occasions to die liberated from every identity.”

A notion that Foucault took horrifyingly literally:

Tweet continues, Foucault “thought AIDS was just another fictional moral panic engineered to stigmatize ‘marginalized groups.’ Then he died of AIDS in 1984.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

BOMB CANADA — THE CASE FOR WAR:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 18th, 2026

January 17, 2026

SOCIALISTS NATIONALLY BEGIN SEARCHING FOR THEIR NEXT HITLER: Jim Acosta Helps Dems Make the Pivot to ‘JD Vance Is Worse Than Trump’ (Plus: Get the TDS Straitjacket!)

Flashback to 2021: Ron DeSantis Gets Labeled ‘Worse Than Trump.’

This is what Democrats always do. Geroge W. Bush is Hitler until Mitt Romney comes along. Then, Bush is the harmless guy who paints who they wish all Republicans were like. Once Trump came along, Romney was rehabbed. Now that DeSantis is the frontrunner for 2024 in many people’s minds, and clearly, the one Democrats fear the most, he must become worse than the Republican who came before him.

Related: Found via Ace of Spades, Scott Adams at the dawn of the Biden error era:

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17th, 2026

MATT DAMON SAYS NETFLIX WANTS MOVIES TO RESTATE THE ‘PLOT THREE OR FOUR TIMES IN THE DIALOGUE’ BECAUSE VIEWERS ARE ON ‘THEIR PHONES WHILE THEY’RE WATCHING:’

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recently appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience” to promote their new Netflixfilm “The Rip,” and the long-time friends and collaborators shared their thoughts on how the streamer is changing the way movies are made.

Damon pointed out that because viewers give a “very different level of attention” to a movie at home versus in a theater, Netflix wants to push the action set pieces toward the front of the runtime. He also said there are behind-the-scenes discussions about reiterating “the plot three or four times in the dialogue” to account for people being on their phones.

“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon explained. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

As Justine Bateman noted in early 2024, “I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’ Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a ‘visual muzak.’ When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No.”

Netflix may very well be controlling Warner Brothers in the not-too-distant future. And with that, the collapse of the movie industry will be complete.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17th, 2026

HOLLYWOOD STARS PUT BIG MONEY BEHIND CLIMATE ACTIVISTS WHO STORMED CONGRESSIONAL BASEBALL GAME, TAX FILINGS SHOW:

A fund backed by Hollywood stars including Jeremy Strong and Chelsea Handler provided nearly all of the funding for Climate Defiance, the far-left group that carries out illegal demonstrations like storming the field at the Congressional Baseball Game to “defeat” what it calls “fossil fuel fascism,” tax filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

The Hollywood-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) gave $250,000 to Climate Defiance’s political action arm and another $243,292 to its charitable arm in 2024, according to the filings. That means the CEF provided more than half of the two groups’ combined grant revenue and the entire revenue for the charitable arm, the Climate Defiance Foundation.

The records provide the most complete view of Climate Defiance’s finances since it was founded in 2023 for the purpose of pressuring officials to fight climate change, which it saysis “an existential crisis that threatens every fiber of every being in every corner of the world.” It also comes shortly after the IRS formally granted the group tax-exempt status in July 2025.

The nearly three-year-old organization has emerged as one of the most extreme protest groups in the nation, regularly disrupting public events and speeches in an effort to force lawmakers to rapidly abandon fossil fuel power in favor of green energy. It accuses oil executives and other officials who support fossil fuels of “mass murder.” One of their activists once went viral for calling former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin a “sick fuck” and “hideous fiend” to his face over his support for a large natural gas pipeline.

Sure, their tactics are the very definition of extreme — but let’s face it, they really get results. Such incredible results that they’ve protested themselves right out of their jobs!

Screenshot
Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17th, 2026

UNEXPECTEDLY: Elon Musk-funded mural of murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska goes up in Brooklyn — and local lefties are furious.

The artwork on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen Street is part of a campaign launched by conservative tech CEO Eoghan McCabe to honor the 23-year-old aspiring artist with murals depicting her in several cities. He told The Post he wanted to highlight how crime in liberal areas can lead to tragedies like Zarutska’s death.

“I started this campaign to make sure that the story of Iryna does not disappear. Her murder is at the nexus of many issues plaguing American society. For example, one is the progressive approach to crime,” said.

McCabe, who runs the AI firm Intercom, donated $500,000 to the tribute initiative and collected $1 million from Musk, a spokeswoman for McCabe told The Post. They also raised $200,000 from smaller donors.

As images of the painting on the building, which is home to the Taiwanese dumpling restaurant Formosa, first got praise from those saddened by the young woman’s tragic loss.

“Beautiful!! What a lovely tribute to a beautiful girl and a beautiful life! RIP Iryna!! . . . I’m so sorry the USA failed you!!” said a user named Mary Signorino on a Facebook post that also showed other murals commissioned by McCabe in Washington DC, Miami and Los Angeles.

But a backlash to the campaign by the conservative billionaire came quickly, as lefties on a Bushwick neighborhood reddit page angrily called the the mural propaganda from “anti immigrant fascists.”

“Anti-immigrant” and “fascist” seem like rather strange phrases to describe one of America’s most-prominent African Americans*, who is a proponent of a smaller government, but okay. The mural of Zarutska is a repeat, on a giant scale, of the posters that went up — before promptly being torn up — in American cities after October 7th. It’s already producing the same reactions from the same people who opposed them:

* In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17th, 2026

WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE FREEZING COLD PRESS CORPS?

How hot is the White House briefing room? Pretty scorching if you’re Niall Stanage, the Hill reporter who was drawn into a back-and-forth with press secretary Karoline Leavitt over ICE’s conduct. Leavitt asked for Stanage’s opinion on why Renee Good was shot, he gave it… and she branded him a “biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” “You shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat, you’re pretending like you’re a journalist but you’re a left-wing activist,” Leavitt continued, in a moment that was rapidly clipped for Team Trump’s social media and posted by a flurry of White House staff.

The temperature is considerably lower for most other journalists, however. During briefings, the double doors that serve as the main entrance are propped open, which in the winter months effectively turns the briefing room into a wind tunnel. This has led to regular tensions in the packed room ahead of Leavitt’s arrival, as tetchy hacks beg for the doors to be closed, while those in the entryway have to explain that White House staff have insisted they be kept open. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with the sheer volume of reporters inside: Cockburn understands that Leavitt wants the doors open because she gets hot.

Thursday’s briefing offered a flashpoint in the door dispute: it was 32°F with a wind chill, “So cold I could barely think,” one reporter with a seat by the front told Cockburn. “Even when we’re packed like sardines in there, it’s absolutely frigid in the winter months,” said another. “My shivering is distracting as I’m trying to follow.”

Still though, could be worse — a lot worse, as Mark Steyn wrote way back in August of 2001, in the first months of a very different Republican president, and the last month of America’s decade-long “holiday from history:” The Desert Before the Storm.

According to his tanned spokesman, George W Bush will cut short his vacation in Crawford, Texas, and return to Washington next Friday, 31st August. The President arrived in Crawford on 4th August and it was thought he intended to stay at least until Labor Day, 3rd September, thus beating Richard Nixon’s 1969 summer sojourn and earning his place in history as the taker of the longest-ever presidential vacation. On the other hand, even at a paltry twenty-eight days, it’s almost certainly the longest vacation anyone’s ever taken in the Greater Waco area. Don’t try to book online: the computer will redirect you to more glamorous resorts such as Crawford, Florida, Crawfordsville, Indiana, Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, or the Crawford oil field in the middle of the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And, if you insist that no, really, you really want to spend a month in Crawford, Texas, the entire site crashes.

Vacation-wise, Bush’s place in history is already secure, as the patron of the hottest presidential resort in history: in his usual careless, brutal way, Dubya has ended the bipartisan presidential tradition of moderate vacation destinations with average August temperatures in the mid-seventies — Clinton, Martha’s Vineyard (77); Bush père, Kennebunkport (75); Reagan, Santa Barbara (75). In an average August, Crawford clocks in at 97 degrees. This summer, if anything, it’s a little hotter, with temperatures not dipping below three digits until well after sundown. Needless to say, the town, like the President, is teetotal.

The GOP — subjecting “elite” Beltway scribes to temperature swings that are almost as bipolar as the journalists themselves, for a quarter of a century.

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

IT’S NOT MEN WHO RADICALIZED; IT’S WOMEN:

We hear all the time about how young men have lurched rightward, moving toward a fascist view of things.

There are endless thinkpieces out there trying to divine why men have become so right-wing. The evidence, they say, is clear: the gender gap between men and women is growing, which obviously shows that something is deeply wrong with men.

But…if you dive into the available data, it shows that men have not moved much at all ideologically. The movement is almost entirely among women, who have lurched—dramatically, as a group—leftward. So far left that in many cases, they verge on radical revolutionaries.

Read the whole thing, and then check out this article-length tweet, which is also well worth your time:

 

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

GREAT MOMENTS IN “FOSTERING INTEGRATION:”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17th, 2026

YES, SHE CAUSED A BELOVED FRANCHISE TO DEI A PAINFUL DEATH: Good riddance, Kathleen Kennedy.

If you wanted a skilled producer with excellent taste and blockbuster smarts, you sent for Kathleen Kennedy. And she delivered, over and over again.

It therefore was not remotely surprising that, when Lucasfilm passed into the hands of Disney, Kennedy was seen as the perfect person to shepherd their projects into highly profitable existence. With Star Wars pried from the protective hands of Lucas, Kennedy was free to expand the saga from a galaxy far, far away into a never-ending project in IP renewal. The first picture that came out, 2015’s The Force Awakens, was a shameless exercise in fan service, but it was still exciting and nonetheless made over $2 billion at the global box office. Kennedy was lauded to the skies; she announced plans for more films, to be released at the rate of one a year, and television series to fill in the gaps. Audiences loved Star Wars, and they were about to get an awful lot more of it.

What went wrong over the intervening decade represents one of the most fascinating – and deadening – studies in Hollywood hubris that there has ever been. There were two more canonical Star Wars films, Rian Johnson’s insultingly sneering and smug The Last Jedi, and returning director J.J. Abrams’s panicked The Rise of Skywalker, which was a desperate exercise in undoing all Johnson’s provocations. Both films were commercial hits but lacked the freshness of The Force Awakens.

As John Nolte wrote a couple of weeks ago, “Personally, Star Wars has worked so hard to alienate, offend, insult, and troll its loyal fanbase, it wouldn’t surprise me if Mandalorian & Grogu underperforms. We just don’t care anymore. There’s an air of indifference out there, a sense of moving on. I see it too with Paramount’s woke warping of its Star Trek franchise. The creators politicize their golden geese to a point where disappointment turns to anger and then the most deadly fate of all sets in for the brand: indifference.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 1:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17th, 2026
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