Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

December 9, 2025

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 9th, 2025

December 8, 2025

YES, NEXT QUESTION? Were the late ’80s and early 1990s “the best time in recent years to be alive?”

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

ANDREW FERGUSON: Getting Intimate With Updike.

When he was a young writer—[John] Updike was astonishingly precocious, becoming a regular contributor to the New Yorker when he was barely out of Harvard—the protagonists of his fiction tended to be sex-obsessed young men. As he grew into middle age, the protagonists evolved into middle-aged men obsessed with sex. Entering his dotage, full of honors and years, he somehow conjured up older, materially successful protagonists who were obsessed with sex. One of the great American stylists, he nevertheless managed to write sex scenes that were unbearably cringe-making. The meticulous, magical gift for poetic physical description that led him (for instance) to describe a snowfall at night as “an immense whispering” was misapplied to the mysteries of sex. A year before his death in 2009, the British magazine Literary Review, famous for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction competition, simply threw up its hands and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

And yet it would be a mistake to call him the horniest writer of his time. It was quite a time. And he had lots of competition—an entire class of phallocrats, as they were sometimes called. These were male novelists who were too old to have enjoyed the vanguard of the sexual revolution, led by youthful baby boomers, and who were making up for lost time. In the 1990s, the novelist David Foster Wallace lumped several of them together—Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Frederick Exley, Charles Bukowski—under the heading GMNs, the Great Male Narcissists. As Wallace pointed out, however, Updike was the one who evoked an especially intense mockery, at least among Wallace’s own contemporaries (Wallace was under 40 at the time, Updike in his 60s). One of Wallace’s feminist friends called Updike “a penis with a thesaurus,” a deathless tag that followed him to the grave.

Heh, indeed. It’s Andrew Ferguson, so definitely read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Beginning of the End.

UPDATE: Hollywood has only themselves to blame:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

T. BECKET ADAMS: Have media forgotten what it means to be ‘sympathetic?’

The New York Times recently published what is clearly meant to be a tear-jerker, highlighting the supposed human cost of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Except that the paper of record tried to portray as a sympathetic character an illegal immigrant who killed a man. Amazingly, it doesn’t end there. Romeo Perez-Bravo has additional victims, including those who’ve suffered the consequences of his theft, drunk driving, and repeated illegal border crossings.

One such victim is American-born Dan Kluver, whose identity Perez-Bravo stole around 2009. Since then, the real Kluver has had to pay thousands of dollars in mistakenly assigned IRS fees. His wages have been garnished. Kluver has spent hundreds of hours trying to convince the IRS that the man they really want is the illegal immigrant who stole his identity. It gets worse. False charges of tax evasion are just the beginning.

The real Dan Kluver has also been sued in a wrongful-death lawsuit after Perez-Bravo struck and killed a 68-year-old American-born man in a vehicle accident. Perez-Bravo was “cleared of any wrongdoing” in the man’s death, according to the New York Times, but that’s no comfort for Kluver, whose name and identity are now forever linked to an accidental death in which he had no part.

If you need more proof that Perez-Bravo is a bad person, beyond the episode in which he refused to give up his stolen identity even after he killed a man, it’s worth noting that since first crossing illegally into the United States as a teenager, he has accumulated a “string of DUI convictions.” He was also deported in 2005, 2008, and 2009. Each time, he illegally crossed back into the U.S. and stole a different citizen’s identity. Perez-Bravo has since been arrested and charged with aggravated identity theft and false representation of a Social Security number. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison to be followed by deportation (again) to Guatemala.

Perez-Bravo is not a good person. He’s the antonym of “sympathetic.”

Yet, in its coverage of Kluver and the man who has made his life a living hell, this is what the Times chose as its headline: “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.”

The subhead is even worse: “Thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent Social Security numbers. One of them belonged to Dan Kluver.” The story itself refers to identity theft as “a survival tactic used to pass background checks and get jobs.”

Surely, the New York Times is aware that identity theft isn’t like cancer or a wildfire caused by lightning, or some other random event. It involves agency, free will, and premeditated criminal intent. Yet its writers and editors seem to think you can slip on a banana peel and, by pure chance, end up using someone else’s Social Security number. Even more ridiculous is that Times staffers evidently believe that identity theft is a victimless crime, just a little bit of harmless truth-bending. Tell that to Kluver.

As the classic Babylon Bee headline from 2019 noted:

I assume this sort of moral equivalence is designed to keep the Grady Lady’s subscriber base happy (and thus not reaching for their pitchforks), which speaks volumes about the left’s collective mindset in 2025.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

QUESTION ASKED: Why in the World Is Bari Hiring This Guy?

CBS News remained in the headlines last week vis-à-vis comings and goings as editor-in-chief Bari Weiss further having a look under the proverbial hood. This time, we saw a date for the expected departure of CBS Evening News co-anchor Maurice DuBois and a reported desire to sign CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil to the PM chair, but most notable was a questionable decision to bring over longtime ABC correspondent Matt Gutman.

Yes, the same Gutman who said the texts between the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination and his transgender lover were “heartbreaking,” “intimate” and “touching” (which he was forced to offer a mea culpa one day later):

Earlier this year, he whined about the actions of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) in California, defended Los Angeles rioters, and carried water for Harvard in its fight against the Trump administration.

Exit question: “Thus, it has to be asked: What in the world is Bari thinking?”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: Hold the Phones and Pass the Popcorn: Ellison Launches Hostile Bid for Warner, CNN.

This morning, Ellison’s Paramount launched a hostile takeover offer for Warner Discovery, going directly to the shareholders with a better share price bid. Ellison also wants all of Warner Discovery:

Paramount, run by David Ellison, is arguing that its all-cash $30 a share offer for all of Warner, owner of networks such as CNN, TBS and HGTV as well as the HBO Max streaming service, is a better deal for shareholders and more likely to pass regulatory muster. Paramount said its offer “provides shareholders $18 billion more in cash than the Netflix consideration.”

The offer, “provides superior value, and a more certain and quicker path to completion,” Ellison said in a statement.

Netflix agreed to pay $72 billion, or $27.75 a share, for Warner’s studio and HBO Max streaming business after the entertainment company splits itself in two, in a cash-and-stock deal the companies announced Friday.

That’s not the only consideration that WBD shareholders will have to consider. Any acquisition of WBD will raise regulatory concerns and will have to pass muster with the FTC. Donald Trump warned last night that he planned to take a role in the approval process, although he praised Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos as well:

Axios notes that “Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing…Paramount is telling WBD shareholders that it has a smoother path to regulatory approval than does Netflix, and Kushner’s involvement only strengthens that case.”

Stay tuned.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN AI HALLUCINATIONS: UK police used fake evidence to justify ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, chief admits.

The UK’s West Midlands Police used fictitious evidence to justify its advice to ban Israeli fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team from attending a match in Birmingham last month, the force’s chief admitted to a parliamentary committee Monday, as MPs grilled police brass on the basis of their controversial decision.

The Aston Villa soccer club announced in October that no Maccabi fans would be allowed at a November match following a police assessment that classified the event as “high risk” and suggested banning Israeli fans from the stadium.

In the report presented to the club that suggested banning Israeli fans, police presented information about a 2023 match between Maccabi and West Ham, which the report said was the Israeli club’s “last appearance on UK soil to date.”

“The most recent match Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in the Europa Conference League on Nov 9, 2023,” the report read.

However, no such match was played, and Maccabi has never faced off against the East London club.

Well, it did in the Central Scrutinizer’s digital mind:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

MARK STEYN: Minneapolis, Twinned with Rotherham.

For the last thirteen months, the United States has demonstrated the central aspect of the thesis of America Alone – that in critical aspects it remains different from the more obviously suicidal parts of the west. The real question is whether it is sufficiently different to affect the ultimate outcome. As I have said, absent severe course-correction, we are in the last fifteen years of anything remotely recognisable as the western world. No country other than Somalia – or the breakaway Somaliland – needs a single Somali other than Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

And yet there is the Hennepin County Attorney loosing them on Minneapolis in order that its maidenhood should grow accustomed to the progressivism of gang-rape.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 8th, 2025

December 7, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: Is Paris Burning?

The New Hotness? When Isn’t Paris Burning? Paris is a city afraid.

This year what was once the [New Year’s Eve] celebration has been reduced to a simulation. Paris must now film a celebration in advance because it cannot trust itself to manage a real one. The city that staged the Olympics cannot handle a national holiday. Paris, a capital that used to defy threats, can no longer manage its crowds.

In recent years [the Champs Élysées] has become the predictable destination for trouble. Large groups stream in from the suburbs on major nights and the pattern repeats itself. Burning scooters. Smash and grab attacks on luxury shops. Running fights with police. Dozens of arrests. Last year there were more than two hundred in Paris alone. Television networks keep a running tally of the number of cars torched across the country. During the Champions League celebrations this summer there were hundreds.

The French state understands all of this. The problem has only gotten worse with the transport reform which cuts the price of public transport for residents of the suburbs while raising them for travel within central Paris itself. Presented as ‘social justice’, it makes it cheaper than ever for huge numbers to surge into the centre from the suburbs on major nights. Parisians now pay more to move around central Paris, while the journey in from the suburbs has never been more affordable. The consequences are obvious. The city and the police are no longer willing to face them.

France spent billions on Olympic security and deployed an army of police officers. The fireworks will still take place at midnight, but they will rise over a boulevard the authorities no longer consider safe for real celebration. The city knows where the pressure lies. It knows who floods into the avenue on nights like these. It knows how quickly things can turn.

Massive understatement alert: “France’s open-door policies have had consequences.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2025

WHEN OBJECTIVITY LOOKS LIKE A SHIFT RIGHT TO LEGACY VOICES:

Connie Chung spoke in a recent interview about what she views as a troubling move inside CBS.

Her comments sounded less like a warning about journalism and more like proof of a mindset that decades of a system that convinced itself it had no bias at all have shaped.

Chung — on Thursday’s episode of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” — described CBS as a “whole different organization” from the time she worked there before calling out Shari Redstone, who sold her majority stake in parent company Paramount Global to David Ellison’s Skydance Media in a $8.4 billion deal over the summer.

“Their greed has caused the venerable CBS to actually disassemble, to crash into crumbles,” said Chung, the second woman ever to anchor a major U.S. nightly news program.

She proceeded to chuckle before name-dropping Bari Weiss, the conservative journalist who recently became CBS News’ new editor-in-chief.

“I don’t know what to call Bari Weiss, I just don’t know,” she said.

Her reaction tells a larger story; when a newsroom leans left for generations, any push toward balance feels like a conservative wind. The ground under that newsroom never moved; the center, voters, and America moved.

* * * * * * * * *

During the Cronkite years, executives never admitted any bias — to them, old Walter’s declaration that Vietnam was lost was objective. Yet entire generations of academics, analysts, and former producers noted how often CBS mirrored Democratic Party priorities. Major stories received heavy coverage when they helped one side, but when they harmed one side, they received softer coverage.

These patterns created a worldview that felt safe to the people inside the building, one with limits, by rewarding the same political group and treating dissent as unserious.

Chung’s comments reflect that comfort; she doesn’t want a CBS that welcomes voices she never saw as credible, or one that moves to the center. She needs the CBS she knew.

Chung’s reluctance to accurately define Weiss, despite Weiss being remarkably open over the years about her biases, is classic example of DNC-MSM myopia. We can see it in reverse, here: MS NOW Host Stephanie Ruhle Melts Down After Charlamagne Tha God and Andrew Schulz Point Out Her Network’s Left-Wing Bias.

During the New York Times’ 2025 Dealbook Summit roundtable event, Stephanie Ruhle, host of MS NOW’s The 11th Hour With Stephanie Ruhle, flipped out on Charlamagne the God after he said “when I turn on MSNBC [MS NOW] I know I’m going to get a left angle.” Ruhle, clearly bothered, interrupted her co-panelist and said “that’s an assumption.”

“That only continues that narrative, you know what you’re going to get here, you know what you’re going to get there,” Ruhle continued pushing back, “I challenge that. You don’t.”

“Oh that’s not true,” Charlamagne responded. “I know exactly what I’m going to get when I turn on Fox News. I know exactly what angles they’re going to come with. If I turn on MSNBC I know I’m getting a left angle.”

Comedian Andrew Schulz chimed in, asking Ruhle “are you shocked when you turned on MSNBC? Are you like ‘OH MY GOD! I didn’t see this take coming?’”

“Then I invite you to watch my show any night of the week,” Ruhle responded.

“We watch your show,” Schulz said shrugging his shoulders.

Why bother feign objectivity when you’re on the air at MSNBC (or as Ed Morrissey recently described it, M-SNOW)? The network has openly prided itself as being the leftist alternative to Fox News. Why not openly lean into your ideology? Particularly since Charlamagne and Schulz forced Ruhle to acknowledge that media designed to entertain and inform other worldviews actually exists.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2025

BASED FRANKLIN:

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2025

PREY MORALITY:

Posted at 1:37 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2025

DAN HANNAN: Not all immigrants are equal.

Minnesota may be the single largest source of funds for the Somali terrorist organization al Shabaab. An investigation by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute found that schemes established in the state to provide healthcare, children’s services, and food distribution have been subjected to such gargantuan fraud that Minnesotan taxpayers may, in effect, be simultaneously funding several sides in Somalia’s civil war.

This is a reminder that not all cultures are equal. Minnesota‘s political structures were designed for Scandinavians, who are famously industrious, with a high level of social trust that has allowed them to sustain ambitious welfare programs with little abuse.

In the New World, as in the Old, they designed institutions that reflected their character. Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program, which was supposed to provide housing for seniors, disabled people, and drug addicts, is a good example. With its client groups in mind, it was deliberately built to have “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.”

It turns out that Somalis do not respond to such schemes in the way that Swedes do. Instead of simply over-claiming, as your unambitious American fraudster might, locals set up bogus companies to make fictitious claims running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the money went on cars and holidays, but a chunk found its way to al Qaeda-aligned Islamists in Somalia, where remittances from overseas amount to a larger sum than the state budget.

As Kevin Williamson once wrote of Bernie Sanders, “Sanders is particularly taken with the case of Finland, which he holds up as a model of what a long-term commitment to democratic socialism can produce…A critic once asked Milton Friedman what he thought about the fact that Sweden has basically no poverty, and Friedman answered: We don’t have many poor Swedes in America, either.”

But perhaps we do have some in power who failed to project into the future where mass importation might lead:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 7th, 2025

December 6, 2025

SHAKEDOWN STREET:

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 6th, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

The New Hotness? To Boldly Go Where Beverly Hills 90210 Has Gone Before:

Needless to say, the cringe is extremely strong in this one. As the Critical Drinker notes in the video below:

This feels like the kind of show that their target audience would have on a second screen while they flick through social media on their phone.

So every so often they can look up and see some really hot, young, muscly, good-looking characters having relationship stuff going on—vaguely connected to the Star Trek universe—and then they can look back at their phone again. That’s honestly what this seems to have been designed for.

And, wow. As you say, Star Trek used to be a show of real intelligence and ideas, something that would expand your view of the world and what was possible. And this is what it is now? Wow.

Gene Roddenberry must be rolling over in his grave. The first show he produced was The Lieutenant, starring Gary Lockwood, who would appear as a guest star in the second Star Trek pilot, before hopping on a plane to London to become the co-star of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Lieutenant depicted Lockwood’s character as being, as Wikipedia notes, the young idealistic “recent graduate of the United States Naval Academy who is assigned his first command, that of a rifle platoon,” at Camp Pendleton in southern California. Roddenberry, a former L.A. cop and WWII bomber pilot, kept the military theme going in the original Star Trek, of course. Even after Roddenberry’s death, Star Trek: The Next Generation could do an episode set in Starfleet Academy that depicted a far more disciplined and serious group of students studying to join a futuristic military origination than the weird L.A. high school class in space depicted in the new trailer.

Oh, and just to put the button on the new series: Stephen Colbert Joins Cast of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Role Revealed at New York Comic Con.

James Lileks once wrote that whenever Kirk mentioned “we were at the Academy together” about that week’s guest star, it was Trek’s version of “I have a bad feeling about this.” I’ve got a very, very bad feeling about Starfleet Academy. 

UPDATE:

Posted at 7:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 6th, 2025

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF SACRAMENTO UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Gavin Newsom’s Twisted ‘Crotch Clench’ Sparks Concern, Baffles Experts.

There’s something wrong with Gavin Newsom. Americans recoiled in horror, then squinted in fascination at the images of Newsom’s appearance at the New York Times Dealbook Summit. There he was, the greaseball California governor, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed impossibly tight, protruding akimbo at improbable angles like a human swastika, a wanton display of “testicle-crushing” contortion. It was the opposite of manspreading, the inverse of kink-splaying, yet Newsom’s gnarled pose, his tangled appendages—like a steel-beamed hedgehog standing guard at Omaha Beach—still managed to intrude upon the public space in a way that many found unsettling.

Still though, it could always be worse: Gavin Newsom bites back with bonkers photo after being roasted for bizarre sitting position.

California Governor Gavin Newsom bit back at detractors for rumbling about his awkward sitting position.

Newsom, 58, was mercilessly trolled online earlier this week after critics took issue with his cross-legged position while he spoke at The New York Times‘ DealBook Summit.

His press office was quick to bite back, releasing an AI-generated image of the Democrat sitting his legs to in the air and his ankles crossed by his face. His hands were raised to his middle and pressed flatly into each other.

‘Democracy requires flexibility,’ his office wrote on X Friday.

Newsom, himself, reposted the image, writing: ‘WOW!’

Conquest’s Third Law of Politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Particularly those who staff its social media departments.

Posted at 4:48 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 6th, 2025
« Previous Entries
Next Entries »