Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 6, 2026

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY: Marxism In The Metropolis: NYC’s New ‘Tenant Czar’ Has Targeted White Homeowners, Private Property.

“The reality is that for centuries, we have really treated property as an individualized good and not as a collective good,” Weaver stated, echoing the core tenets of Karl Marx. She went on to warn that the transition to “shared equity” would specifically target “white families” and “some POC (people of color) families who are homeowners,” forcing them into a “different relationship to property” than the one protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 250 years.

In a previous social media post, Weaver said, “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

Matt Taibbi responds, “Ideas matter and some very crazy ones are coming:” 

Crazy ideas are coming? Bane’s motley crew are just getting warmed up — this is only Mamdani’s sixth day in office.

UPDATE:

She’s going to take things away from on behalf of the common good, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE: Unexpectedly! Mom of Zohran Mamdani aide who said owning a home fuels ‘white supremacy’ has $1.6M house in Tennessee.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

THE $20 TRILLION QUESTION: How to Spend It and How Not To.

$20 trillion is a lot of money.

One would expect a big bang to follow the spending of twenty-thousand billion dollars. It’s a lot of money! It’s pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.

This is the sum that was globally spent — largely by Europe and the United States — in a coordinated effort by the developed world to decarbonize the global economy. China, in contrast, sold the world windmills and solar panels while it opened a new coal-fired power plant per month.

What was the net effect of this “Green” Marshall Plan? Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.

We also saw the de-industrialization of the European and American economies — not just with higher prices at the gas pump and on electric bills, but a stealth green tax that was passed on to consumers on everything. This is the culprit of our American and global affordability crisis. So much treasure and pain for a 2 percent reduction in the share of hydrocarbons.

Ironically, a byproduct of this Green Hunger Games was political populism.

What a tilting-at-windmills waste. The worst bang for the public and private buck ever. Yet, the Chicken Little believers of the Church of Settled Science and the grifters who profited from it will still sing in unison that it failed because they did not go far enough. If only the global community spent and regulated more!

As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

  • Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
  • Blocking oil and gas pipelines
  • Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
  • Cutting U.S. military spending
  • Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

WE NEED TO PREPARE FOR THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE U.S. USES MILITARY COERCION AGAINST CANADA:

Donald Trump promised that under his leadership the U.S. would eschew “nation building,” “forever wars,” “regime change,” and violent foreign engagements more generally.

Yet since his second inauguration, he’s ordered military action in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq; bombed Iran’s nuclear weapons complexes; and blown up more than a score of boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean. In just the past two weeks, he has launched missiles against Islamic terrorists in northern Nigeria, declared that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” for another attack on Iran, and now decapitated Venezuela’s government.

In this context, Canadians must acknowledge the real risk that Mr. Trump will use military coercion against our country.

We would be greeted as liberators:

UPDATE: Why would we need to use military coercion and bombs? Trump knows a thing or two about real estate deals, right?

Posted at 6:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Trump targets Venezuela’s oil, US firms stay wary.

The New Hotness? “We seized Nicolas Maduro in order to bring gay marriage to Venezuela, in Tucker’s eyes the most ‘conservative’ country in the New World. You can’t make this stuff up:”

Ride the rainbow-colored Mobius loop! Last year began with “Gay and transgender liberals around the country…arming themselves over perceived concerns they’ll be rounded up and placed in ‘concentration camps’ under a second Trump administration, according to a report,” and this year begins with Tucker claiming that Trump wants to bring gay marriage to Venezuela.

Trump’s been an advocate of domestic partnerships for gay people as early as 2000, and “days after being elected in 2016 in a ‘60 Minutes’ interview, he said he was ‘fine’ with same-sex marriage,” but I’m pretty sure that expanding gay rights in South America isn’t a major component of the Donroe Doctrine.

Related: Ben Shapiro Calls Out Tucker Carlson’s Claim ‘Globo Homo’ People Wanted Venezuela’s Maduro Ousted.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Seriously, WTF is wrong with Tucker?

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

NEVER FORGET:

The late Norm Macdonald tried to warn us of the violence of the radical right wing protestors:

UPDATE:

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

BON APPÉTIT ANOINTS THE DEMOCRATS’ LATEST ‘NEXT BIG THING:’

There are few positions in life greater than being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party; you start getting ludicrously generous coverage, even from publications that are only marginally connected to politics. Back in 2007, Men’s Vogue suddenly put former North Carolina senator John Edwards on the cover. (An actual sentence from the profile: “The hair, up close, is peppered with tiny strands of blond. Chestnut brown and so finely trimmed, mellifluous, smooth, and feathery, it could almost be a weave, the Platonic ideal as imagined by the Hair Club for Men.”)

Back in 2008, Men’s Health declared longtime smoker Barack Obama was one of the 25 fittest men in America. And who could forget Beto O’Rourke on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2019, declaring he was “was born” to be in the presidential race, with his glum-looking dog seeming to know how his presidential bid was going to go? Or the French fashion magazine Marie Claire putting failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on the cover in 2021?

This isn’t just garden-variety liberal media bias; these are once-apolitical publications suddenly giving laudatory soft-focus coverage of a figure, portraying him as the coolest guy ever. In these profiles, the not-so-political audience of the magazine usually doesn’t get told a lot about the figure’s policy positions; often those positions are airbrushed beyond recognition. (In 2017, Vogue insisted that New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand was an economic centrist, an iconoclast, and a campaigning powerhouse with cross-party appeal. She was and is none of those things.)

Bon Appetit has announced that the year is Springtime for Graham Platner, but there are a few problems here.  As Jim Geraghty writes, “Hey, just out of curiosity… if a Republican Senate candidate said he had accidentally gotten a logo of the Nazi SS tattooed to his chest, would they be getting soft-focus glowing profiles in major culinary magazines? Nah, I didn’t think so.”

Tweet continues:

In a deep, gravely voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in a truck commercial, he talks about his decade of military service, and “farming oysters to feed my community.” Interspliced are shots of him hauling up oyster cages, sliding a knife into an oyster to shuck it, handing a fresh oyster to a little girl. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he growls. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”*

I’m picturing some readers asking, “what the f— is this Pyongyang-level propaganda doing in my food and recipes magazine?”

You could see last year when the DNC-MSM hype machine was getting waaaay over its skis trying to promote the candidate du jour:

With brats and coconuts failing to catch on, the following month, the DNC-MSM tried to achieve strength through joy (a slogan which Platner might appreciate as well):

In the last full month of the campaign, things were getting eye-poppingly bad for the left:

“Like a magic spell from Dungeons and Dragons, being the Next Big Thing™ in the Democratic Party also grants the bearer of that title temporary immunity to all potential criticisms and attacks,” Geraghty writes. “But as Walz demonstrated, once you lose that title, you also lose that immunity, and past scandals can catch up with you.”

* Isn’t it always?

UPDATE: Via Joseph Campbell, New York magazine’s Dewey Defeats Truman moment in 2016:

As the magazine’s editors admitted a couple of weeks later, “even as we stubbornly maintain that the image is more complex than a certain notorious, erroneous headline from 1948, it is true that seeing the cover on the newsstand after Election Day makes us cringe — and that the vote turned an image meant to be provocative into one that perhaps feels hubristic instead.”

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

DALLAS COWBOYS FIRE COORDINATOR MATT EBERFLUS AFTER DEFENSIVE DISASTER:

The Cowboys will look for yet another new coordinator to try to fix their defense.

Matt Eberflus was fired as the team’s defensive coordinator Tuesday morning after just one season, according to multiple reports, meaning Dallas is in need of its fourth defensive coordinator in four seasons.

The 55-year-old was dealt a surprising blow right before the season when Jerry Jones traded Micah Parsons to the Packers, and Dallas ended up allowing the most points per game in the NFL at 30.1.

Their 511 points allowed were the most in team history.

Their 377 yards allowed per game were the third-most in the league, and their 251.5 yards passing allowed per game were the most in the NFL.

Eberflus was in his second stint with the Cowboys, having been their linebackers coach from 2011-15 and adding passing-game coordinator duties in 2016 and ’17.

No word yet on when Jerry Jones, the Cowboy’s owner, will fire Jerry Jones, the Cowboy’s general manager.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

IT’S 2026; I’M AFRAID LEFTISTS ARE TAKING THE IDEA OF “SHOOT THE MESSENGER” FAR TOO LITERALLY:

As an Insta-commenter noted in response to Roger Kimball’s Friday column headlined, “The Somali Fraud Scandal is a Turning Point,” “If the Left truly cared about social programs helping people, then the Left should be the most upset about fraud. Every dollar going to fraud is a dollar not going to someone who legitimately needs help. The fact that the Left is always excusing fraud is telling.”

Related:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

HILTON AXES HOTEL FROM THEIR SYSTEMS AFTER VIDEO SHOWS THEM CONTINUING TO BAN DHS AND ICE AGENTS:

Influencer Nick Sortor, armed with a video recording device, visited the Lakeville Hampton Inn and quickly learned that the owner and front desk manager, at least, weren’t about to change their unwelcoming stance.

In the video posted on X, Sortor asks about available rooms and is met with resistance when he says they are for DHS.

“We’re not accepting people from immigration, ICE agents, DHS, onto our property,” the clerk says. “It’s just per management, our ownership.”

Sortor points to Hilton’s statement, but the front desk manager indicates he had just spoken with the owner, who informed him there was no change to the selective policy.

Less than two hours after the video had been uploaded to X, Hilton issued another statement saying they were dropping that particular hotel from their list of franchisees and accusing ownership of lying to them about making corrections to their policy.

“The independent hotel owner had assured us that they had fixed this problem and published a message confirming this. A recent video clearly raises concerns that they are not meeting our standards and values,” the statement reads. “As such, we are taking immediate action to remove this hotel from our systems.”

It shouldn’t be hard for Hilton’s legal team to send the termination letters to the management of the local franchisee: Gets Worse: Can’t Imagine Why Minneapolis Hilton’s Leaders Didn’t Want ICE Around (Check Out Who Runs It):

 

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

“MY VENEZUELA EXPERIENCE AS HEAD OF TRADING IN THE REGION FOR CARGILL:”

1. The government took over our “minute rice” facility at gunpoint because we were “gouging” the nation’s poor. The government was never able to run the plant. It never ran again. It was returned years later with no equipment inside

2. There are 1000’s of generals in the army. They are each given a slice of the economy to loot. The large number of generals made it difficult to organize a coup against the regime.

3. The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The populous became ever more dependent on the government handouts. (PS this is the mayor of New York City’s proposal.

Read the whole thing.

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

RICK BEATO: The 2026 Grammys — Proof Music is Getting Worse.

As Beato notes in his conclusion, after comparing the 2025 songs nominated for Grammys with those nominated from 1983, “No one’s going to remember these songs that were written by three, four, seven, ten, eleven people, 40 years from now, like they remember ‘Beat It’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Every Breath You Take’, ‘All Night Long’, ‘Maniac.’ Those songs are still getting streamed now. They already sold millions and millions of records 42 years ago, and they’re still getting played by people. And it’s new people that are listening to them. No one will remember these songs from today three years from now. They won’t.”

Besides the generic DAW-based production and all of the Mixmaster-blended writing, several of the songs are pastiches of earlier songs, much like the dopey clone of a clone of a clone of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity: 

 

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

CUBA ‘READY TO FALL’ AFTER MADURO’S OUSTING, TRUMP SAYS:

President Donald Trump said Sunday Cuba is “ready to fall.”

The country no longer has any income after the U.S. ousted Nicolás Maduro, the president of Cuban ally Venezuela, Trump explained. Cuba has received economic support from Venezuela for a quarter-century.

“Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re gonna hold out,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it.”

Will Communist Cuba finally collapse on its own?

I wouldn’t mind Trump and Hegseth giving them a push, though.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

REPORT: Chinese Fishing Vessel Hijacked Off Somalia.

A Chinese fishing vessel from a notorious illegal-fishing fleet has been hijacked off the coast of Puntland, Somalia, according to maritime security consultancy Vanguard Tech.

The vessel in question, Liao Dong Yu 578, was reportedly captured at a position just off the coast near Bandarbeyla, Puntland (09 09 N 050 43 E). The hijackers struck in the early afternoon local time on New Years’ Day, and are suspected to be planning to hold the crew for ransom, Vanguard reported. The report has not been confirmed.

In the past, captured fishing vessels have sometimes been used by Somali pirate gangs to roam the Indian Ocean in search of larger targets, but history suggests that Chinese fishing vessels can also yield significant ransom payouts.

If confirmed, it would be the second time that Liao Dong Yu 578 has been captured by pirates. The vessel was reported hijacked in the same region off Puntland in November 2024, and was released in January 2025 after a reported ransom payment in the low seven figures. In that instance, EUNAVFOR reported the hijacking some weeks after its occurrence.

Insert Kissinger Iran-Iraq War reference here:

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 6th, 2026

January 5, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Live from the Quality Learing Center in beautiful downtown Minneapolis!

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 5th, 2026

GOTTA PUMP THOSE NUMBERS UP; THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS IN THIS RACKET: 2,000 federal agents deploying to Minneapolis in immigration crackdown, fraud probe.

Related:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 5th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN CHUTZPAH:

In 2000, when Michael Caine won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the pro-abortion film The Cider House Rules, William F. Buckley wrote:

Non-amateur writers avoid industriously the word “Orwellian” because even years ago it became an overused and underdefined cliche.

But try to find another word for what Michael Caine came up with at the Oscar ceremony on Sunday after receiving a prize for his performance in “The Cider House Rules.” That’s the movie that’s a paean to the abortion industry. And what the great actor said, when finally the thunderous ovation let him be heard, was, “I’m basically up here, guys, to represent you as what I hope you will all be, a survivor.”

Well, George Orwell would have pondered that, all right, inasmuch as a survivor, in the context of the theme of that event, turns out to be somebody who was physically present at the Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, i.e., somebody who survived the mother’s temptation to abort the fetus. That makes them survivors, does it not? So they are being applauded for surviving the practices celebrated by the movie … That, ladies and gentlemen, is Orwellian.

Similarly, for Charlie Kirk of course, it wasn’t a “near-death experience.” Kimmel knows it, and he doesn’t give a damn about the assassination of someone on the other side of the aisle.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 5th, 2026

SECSTATE RUBIO SCHOOLS SUNDAY SHOWS OVER CAPTURE AND EXTRADITION OF NICOLAS MADURO:

Finally, Rubio went on CBS’s Face the Nation and dealt with Margaret Brennan’s…confusion.

[Transcript omitted]

Imagine weeks of helping the Democrats pound a “regime change” narrative ahead of any action in Venezuela, only to not have a military action yield instant regime change. This totally ruins any comparisons to the Middle East. Brennan was naturally confused, and Rubio tried to guide her- to no avail.

To her credit, Brennan asked no authorities questions (saving those for a subsequent interview with Senate Intel Chair Tom Cotton (R-AR). Instead, she muddled through questions about oil and the scope of the operation, and on the potential military occupation of Venezuela.

As Ace writes: Retarded Spinster Margaret Brennan Clowns Herself So Hard on Venezuela That No One Will Ever Be Able to Top It (Except Tucker Carlson, One Day Later).

Margaret Brennan says she’s “confused” why Hegseth (and Rubio) just didn’t order Delta Force to not only land inside a military base to capture Maduro, but also order five other helicopter squads to simultaneously capture the other top five leaders of his regime.

Why didn’t we just do five simultaneous Al Qaeda captures when we got OBL?

My guess would be: Because as soon as you do one, the entire country is alerted to your presence, so you have to get the Big One and get out, quick.

But that’s too obvious. Margaret Brennan is “confused” why Delta Force just didn’t execute five other Miracle Operations in perfect coordinated simultaneity.

The Cotton interview was equally, err, interesting: Margaret Brennan Clearly Doesn’t Like Senator Tom Cotton.

To quote Miles Davis, it’s also fun to watch “in a silent way:”

Even individual still frames are remarkable:

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

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:

Posted at 5:12 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 5th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN NEGATIVE PR: Hilton Hotels in Minneapolis Just Asked for the Bud Light Treatment.

More (from Steve):

Hilton’s legal department might have an issue here, depending on what contracts they have with Washington.

Posted at 4:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 5th, 2026
« Previous Entries
Next Entries »