Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 14, 2026

“CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE MADE ABOUT ALEX SOROS:”

Perhaps the OystergruppenfĂŒhrer can bring PeenemĂŒnde to Portland, Maine:

 

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

CHINA’S COLLAPSING JOB MARKET:

Flashback to November of 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.

Posted at 1:19 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN, I SHALL BECOME MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 14th, 2026

June 13, 2026

VICHY FRANCE CONQUERS ENGLAND!

This black and white 1972 BBC documentary, titled “Moving to a ‘Town of the 21st Century,'” is simultaneously dreary and hilarious as hell. It’s about a young working class couple leaving their cramped flat and moving to Thamesmead, a brutalist concrete mixed-use project with both apartments and shops. You may not recognize the name of the development, but you’ve seen it: 

Thamesmead’s style of architecture was brutalism, a concrete-oriented architecture dreamed up by France’s Le Corbusier, after WWII, to cheaply build tower apartment blocks:

The use of bĂ©ton brut was pioneered by modernist architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier coined the term bĂ©ton brut during the construction of UnitĂ© d’Habitation in Marseille, France, built in 1952.

As Glenn noted in his New York Post column yesterday on “Trump’s Reflecting Pool glow-up:”

“Brutalism,” as a dominant architectural style, was a choice.

Gone were soaring columns, noble statuary depicting American heroes or abstract figures like Justice or Liberty, and welcoming spaces.

Instead we got modern architecture — which, as Tom Wolfe notes in his delightful book “From Bauhaus to Our House,” was quite literally designed to promote socialism.

Modern architects blamed bourgeois values for the horrors of World War II and wanted to promote socialist values instead.

They disdained “bourgeois” adornment and designed buildings to dwarf individuals, not uplift them.

As scholar James Scott points out, the French architect Le Corbusier, noted for his huge buildings amid vast, sterile plazas, dedicated his book “The Radiant City” thus: “To Authority.”

The Radiant City was published in 1933. So, which authority was Corbusier toasting a decade later?

Mr Jarcy said that in “Plans” Le Corbusier wrote in support of Nazi anti-Semitism and in “Prelude” co-wrote “hateful editorials”.

In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law”. In October that year, he added: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.”

Mr Chaslin said he had unearthed “anti-Semite sketches” by Le Corbusier, and ascertained that the French architect had spent 18 months in Vichy, where the Nazis ran a French puppet government, where he kept an office.

The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an “extended stay” in the town.

Just don’t mention the war. In 1995, Theodore Dalrymple wrote of the Corbusier-inspired brutalist buildings in England:

Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers.

* * * * * * * * *

“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”

“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”

Embrace the healing power of and, to coin a phrase.

Regarding Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, James Lileks once wrote:

The only convincing dystopian movie I’ve ever seen is “1984.” Other moves look dated. They dress the set with a few Futuristic Things, change the collars on the jackets, tweak some element of society so something we take for granted is forbidden and bad. Old age is bad, or food is scarce, or overpopulation ruined everything — a particularly amusing claim for “Soylent Green,” as if you could feed a teeming population with compressed rectangles of old people. Same with Fahrenheit 451 — it appeals to an adolescent’s need for unambiguous cackling illiberal villains.

Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.

Observing the families in the BBC video moving into the exterior set of A Clockwork Orange brings to mind another Lileks quote: “You realize: no one in a dystopia probably thinks they’re living in a dystopia.”

At the end of the video, Geoffrey Horsfall, one of Thamesmead‘s architects, tells the BBC, “I’ve got every confidence in the future of Thamesmead and I think that it’s something that many of us will see, but certainly you younger people, you know, you will see this finished and complete and will be able to say, ‘Well, that chap I heard talking wasn’t all that wrong.’”

He was. The appropriately named Failed Architecture Website has a page titled: Ultraviolence in Representation: The Enduring Myth of the Thamesmead Estate.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2026

CLOSE ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK: Wisconsin Democrats make udder mistake with National Dairy Month post.

Perhaps because “pouncing” and “seizing” have been used far too often, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has jumping Republicans:

Tom Tiffany, the leading Republican candidate for governor, jumped on the mistake, posting a video touting his experience growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm.

Tiffany and other Republicans also criticized Democrats for celebrating the start of Pride Month, which recognizes LGBTQ+ communities and begins June 1 alongside National Dairy Month.

“I regret to inform [Wisconsin Democrats] that you cannot milk a bull. But considering they think men can get pregnant, I guess thinking you can milk a bull tracks too,” Tiffany wrote on X.

Tiffany also said June 1 that, if elected governor, he would no longer fly the Pride flag over the state Capitol in June – a practice started by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2019.

Evers also celebrated June Dairy Month with a video message, in part criticizing President Donald Trump’s tariff policies and cuts to federal programs supporting farmers.

Evergreen:

(Via Buck Throckmorton of Ace of Spades, who adds, “Democrats are completely oblivious about agriculture. Since Democrats believe that cross-dressing men have menstrual cycles and can lactate, it is entirely consistent for Dems to believe that trans-cows (e.g. bulls) can be milked.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2026

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Everyone is talking about this photo that apparently got posted to Reddit and then deleted.

This is not what I had in mind when talking about White Boy Summer!!!

Trump is outside of the White House with these elven creatures and no one knows if it’s AI or who posted it.

But everyone is arguing about it from sea to shining sea.

The top tweet is in Portuguese. Grok translates it as “A Reddit account just posted this photo on the platform and deleted it right after.”

More here: Deleted Mysterious Trump Photo With Red-Clad Group Ignites Speculation and Meme Wave.

Including this utterly terrifying image:

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2026

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG:

Including Mike Wallace’s Springtime for Stalin moment:

Replace International Socialism with National Socialism, and you’ve got a Mel Brooks movie:

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2026

NO, I THINK IT CAN STILL GET WORSE: Just When You Thought the Platner Tattoo Scandal Couldn’t Get Worse
:

The fact that Graham Platner had a Nazi tattoo on his chest for nearly 20 years should have been disqualifying. Instead, all the enthusiasm from the Democrat Party base was for him, and he won the Maine Democrat Senate primary on Tuesday. He will now face incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in the fall. At this point, Platner has managed to get away with the tattoo in part because the Democrat base is antisemitic anyway, but also because he’s claimed he had no idea what the tattoo meant.

Now, another former girlfriend has come forward, and the Nazi tattoo scandal just got so much worse.

The former girlfriend, who spoke to the New York Post but was not named in the story, is a self-identified leftist. According to her, Platner knew exactly what the tattoo represented and kept it deliberately. Her account blows a massive hole in his story. Platner has insisted he didn’t recognize the symbol until last fall, but she says that’s a lie. She confronted him about it directly.

“As a person who is a leftist, I immediately looked at him and asked him, ‘Is that a Totenkopf?’ and he told me a whole, ‘he will hold this weight forever’ bravado sob story about how it was, but he decided to keep it as a reminder that the United States was the evil, bad guy overseas,” she told the Post.

Think about that for a second. He kept a Nazi tattoo as an anti-American statement. He knew it had Nazi origins, kept it for years, and used it to express contempt for this country. And Maine Democrats just voted to make him their Senate nominee.

Not just Maine Democrats; game respects game:

 

Related: Curiously, the socialist who’s looking to go national is proposing a blitzkrieg on technological advancement:

 

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2026

SPACEX ROCKETS TO $2 TRILLION VALUATION* ON STOCK MARKET DEBUT:

SpaceX shares rocketed after Elon Musk kicked off the biggest stock market listing in history, valuing the company at more than $2 trillion.

The rocket company’s stock surged by 25pc when it began trading on the Nasdaq in New York after successfully raising $75bn (£56bn) through its initial public offering (IPO).

Investors who were able to get hold of stock at the initial $135 price saw the company’s shares leap to $169 in opening trading as they floated on public markets for the first time.

SpaceX’s new valuation on Friday minted Mr Musk, its founder and chief executive, as the world’s first trillionaire.

Thanks to his SpaceX stock and his shares in electric car business Tesla, Mr Musk’s net worth now sits just north of $1tn.

* Like Musk’s rockets, “valuation” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here:

In any case, Jimmy Kimmel is big mad: Kimmel: Elon Musk Is ‘An Immigrant Who Has Been Stealing From Us’

All of that setup took 41 seconds for a joke that got a mild laugh. He then went into another long set up for helping people conceptualize a trillion dollars.

A trillion dollars. It’s hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know a trillion is a number but it’s so large we can’t fathom it, the same way we know that Elon has a lot of kids but we can’t fathom him getting laid, right?

Let me try to illustrate it. If you tried to count out loud to a trillion you would be counting until the year 33,736. A trillion dollars is ten billion hundred dollar bills. If you stacked them up the pile would be almost 700 miles high, as tall as 123 Mount Everests. With that kind of money Elon could buy every NFL team…he could buy all 30 Major League Baseball teams, every NBA team, every Wendy’s every Target store, the Beatles entire music catalogue. He could buy Nike, Macy’s and every Hyundai Elantra ever produced.

All of this presents the idea that maybe Elon has a Scrooge McDuck vault where he keeps his stacks of $100 bills, but of course that’s not why he’s a trillionaire. He’s a trillionaire because he created and owns a portion of two successful companies, one that revolutionized the car business and one that revolutionized rocket flights to orbit and global satellite communications. His money isn’t a stack of bills, it’s ownership of these valuable companies. He can’t buy up all the country’s sports teams unless he wants to first sell all of his ownership of his own companies.

Kimmel probably knows this but the real story isn’t as good as the image of a stack of bills 700 miles high if your goal is to demonize someone. And that leads up to his final comment.

Elon Musk came to the United States from South Africa in 1995, the son of a humble emerald mine owner and he is so grateful to this country that allowed him to become a trillionaire, Tesla paid almost no federal income tax over the past three years. You know, for a guy who has been openly cheering immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing form us, sure seems like an immigrant who has been stealing from us to me.

Tesla employs more than 70,000 Americans. SpaceX employs another 22,000 and thanks to Musk all of them are doing very well. In fact, the cafeteria workers at SpaceX are expected to become millionaires this week.

The Times reported that some of the workers who could see life-changing wealth include hourly blue-collar employees who worked at launch sites. Bloomberg’s Jessica Karl put an even more striking image on it, writing that the SpaceX cafeteria is about to be full of millionaires (2).

“I guess it’s too late for me to pivot careers to become a food service specialist in Brownsville, Texas,” Karl joked, referencing an online post (3) that says “SpaceX’s IPO is expected to create 4,000 new millionaires, including some cafeteria workers whose compensation packages include employee stock options.”

Kimmel also despises people angry over having their homes burned down by an incompetent communist mayor: Jimmy Kimmel’s Cruel Attack on Spencer Pratt, Explained.

Kimmel didn’t wonder why the city’s super-slow counting methods apparently reversed the Pratt/Raman electoral odds. He couldn’t question how Raman’s lethargic campaign suddenly caught fire, surpassing vote totals for both Pratt and Bass.

Nope. Instead, he danced on Pratt’s electoral grave. Literally.

First, he invoked President Donald Trump. Of course.

“
the MAGA crowd is now using this to try to claim the election was rigged.”

What sane person doesn’t suspect foul play? Does Kimmel really believe Raman suddenly came out of nowhere to beat Pratt the way she did?

Doesn’t he sense foul play, too, even if he preferred the outcome?

Next, he remembered that Pratt vowed to leave the city that allowed his house to burn down should he lose the race. So Kimmel kicked him on his way out the door.

“And Spencer, if you’re watching, we are so, so sorry to see you go. We’re going to miss the hell out of you. You’re a man of your word, and you gotta go.”

“I know things might be tight right now, especially with the out-of-state donation money running out. Moving is expensive, so to help you out we rented you a U-Haul,” Kimmel joked. “Our staff spent the whole day decorating for you, and everybody will notice you and wave goodbye as you leave.”


Mazel Tov and goodbye, Spencer Pratt!”

We don’t expect laughter or comedy from Kimmel any more. He’s a propagandist, and a dishonest one at that. This felt just mean and vindictive, a terrible look for any public personality.

Pratt, never one to stay silent, had the last word.

Kimmel has reached Arthur Godfrey-levels of ego and rage:

In 1953, Godfrey’s infamous on-air firing of cast member Julius La Rosa permanently damaged his kindly, down-to-earth, family-man image which resulted in an immediate decline of his popularity that he was never able to overcome. Over the next two years, Godfrey fired over twenty additional cast and crew members, under similar circumstances, for which he was heavily attacked by the press and public alike. A self-made man, Godfrey was fiercely competitive; some of his employees were fired for merely speaking with those he considered to be competitors, like Ed Sullivan, or for signing with a talent agent. By the late 1950s, CBS reduced his on-air presence to hosting his daily radio show, which ended in 1972, and the occasional television special.

But then, Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon know they’re the last late night network TV hosts standing. As Stephen Kruiser asked last month: Now That Colbert Is Gone, Can We Start the Clock on Kimmel? “Kimmel will no doubt use Colbert’s absence as an excuse to become more execrable than ever. ABC can keep him afloat for a while. The network is still a for-profit business, though, and not a weeknightly charity for the Democratic National Committee. ABC execs will almost certainly take a cue from their counterparts at CBS. Kimmel’s petulant attitude won’t do him any favors, either.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 13th, 2026

June 12, 2026

RIP: Gene Shalit, Mussed-Up Movie Critic of the Today Show, Dies at 100.

Gene Shalit, the fun-loving film critic on the Today show known for his oversized mustache, out-of-control mop of black hair and lively use of puns in his movie reviews, died Friday. He was 100.

Shalit, a mainstay on the NBC morning show for four decades until his retirement in November 2010, “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life,” his family said in a statement to NBC News.

Shalit started as a book reviewer on Today in 1970 and went on to replace Joe Garagiola on the desk three years later. Working alongside the likes of Hugh Downs, Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, Bryant Gumbel, Jane Pauley, Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, Shalit proved to be a spirited counterbalance to the heavier news of the day, entertaining audiences with celebrity interviews and insights into moviegoing choices during his “Critic’s Corner” segment.

Exit quote:

Posted at 8:43 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 12th, 2026

JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS DISCLOSURE DAY: 

[W]hat Disclosure Day really evokes is [Spielberg’s] pre-movie television juvenilia—by which I mean his earliest professional work, as a director of series episodes and made-for-TV movies. If you’re not in your 60s, you don’t really know about the Movie of the Week. This was a staple of the American pop-culture junk diet in the 1970s. ABC aired one, or two, movies-of-the-week every week for years. They were the genius brainchild of the visionary Barry Diller, who figured out his network could make original fare for $450,000 a pop rather than paying Universal $600,000. There were comedies, mysteries, ghost stories, sensitive dramas. They ran in a 90-minute time slot, and since they needed to accommodate commercials, they had to be 72 minutes long. They were made quick and dirty, starring series actors on their summer breaks or has-beens between gigs. No one expected them to be good, and they mostly weren’t, but neither was most TV at the time.

Spielberg made four. One was a segment of an anthology called Night Gallery, in which the 22-year-old Spielberg directed the 65-year-old Joan Crawford, playing a mean blind woman who has her sight restored for a day, only to discover there’s a blackout. Another was a Rosemary’s Baby knockoff called Something Evil with the very, very nervous actress Sandy Dennis. Savage was about a reporter who gets dirt on a Supreme Court nominee. But it was the 90-minute car-vs.-truck chase he directed called Duel, universally considered the best MOW ever made, that opened the doors of the cinema wide for him.

Spielberg was the only major director to rise out of the Movie of the Week factory. So there’s something kind of touching about Disclosure Day’s evocation of the junk he had to helm to get his career going. I’m sure that’s not what he intended to do here, since the movie derives from an original idea of his (though the screenplay is by someone else) and is therefore theoretically some kind of passion project. But it’s just too silly to take seriously.

The Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed, either: “Disclosure Day bills itself as a movie of big ideas, but ultimately it feels small both intellectually and creatively. And worst of all, it’s a movie that feels weirdly dated and irrelevant now despite a few clunky references to AI and current-day conflict zones.”

UPDATE: Poor word of mouth isn’t helping the film at the box office:

Spielberg’s recent mutterings that “his alien movie will leave Christians questioning their faith in God” didn’t help its chances at the domestic box office, either.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 12th, 2026

FREDDY FROM GERMANY IMMANENTIZES THE ESCHATON: A German soccer fan has been live-tweeting his reaction to visiting the USA and it’s some of the best stuff on the internet right now. “This German madlad is currently on his way to New Orleans for the next part of his adventure. This guy wanted the full American experience. I gotta say, I couldn’t have planned a better trip myself.”

“Cynical Publius” adds, “Lots of Europeans visit the USA as tourists. They visit New York City, or Washington DC, or Hollywood, or Las Vegas, and if they visit natural beauty too, they go to really crowded places like the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone
Freddy is not seeing fentanyl and decline. He is seeing the real, hopeful, patriotic, kind America that European tourists rarely traverse. And he loves it. That’s why Freddy is a phenomenon.”

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

ANALYSIS: ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 12th, 2026

June 11, 2026

JERRY SEINFELD BRUTALLY SHUTS DOWN PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTOR AFTER KNICKS GAME: ‘It doesn’t exist.’

Jerry Seinfeld was ambushed by a live streamer who attempted to bait him into saying ‘Free Palestine’ after a massive comeback New York Knicks win in Game 4 of the NBA Finals.

The 72-year-old comedian pulled no punches as he dismissed the Kick streamer named FinesseFave outside of Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night.

The social media personality asked the star to say ‘free Palestine’ in the microphone as he left the arena to which Seinfeld chuckled before brutally replying: ‘It doesn’t exist.’

It’s a show about nothing.

Related: Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Carolla talk Cars and Comedy (Video).

Posted at 4:40 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026

GET WOKE, GO…: Going Woke Drove Doctor Who Into Oblivion.

So what went wrong here? I think it’s obvious but the Telegraph summary is pretty good. Starting with the Jodie Whittaker era:

It’s arguable that the show became a little too preachy; the Sunday-night scheduling forced it away from being simple whizz-bang fun, and that a reduction from 12 to 10 episodes per series took away the “appointment viewing” feel and made storylines feel rushed. Moreover, the show had become simply dull. On the fan website Doctor Who TV, eight of Whittaker’s instalments make the 10 worst Doctor Who episodes…

Jodie is a good actress and lovable, but there was all this baggage [during her run]. There was a pregnant man and assistants going back in time to look at their heritage histories. If you’re going for a populist audience that was ill-judged.”

As for the Gatwa era, people hated it.

Some episodes were deliberately childish, while others contained distinctly adult social and political themes – stories about incels and trans rights. The latter became increasingly remarked upon, something that doesn’t surprise the show’s former writer: “We had this nonsense, this identity politics, and there is nothing less likely to make people feel at ease than by making them think they are being hectored or lectured.”

There you have it. Doctor Who was an entertaining show for quite a few years and then it went woke and now the show is history and everyone associated with it is done for good. It will be 4-5 years at a minimum before they find a way to reboot this. It’ll take at least that long for viewers to forget what a boring, woke scold of a show this had become.

Found via the Critical Drinker, “Nerdrotic” has a simple solution for a reboot: “Cast Hugh Laurie as the Doctor with a smoking hot actual female companion. You’re welcome.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026

SPOILER: MOVIE CRITIC DEVOURED BY TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Mark Judge reviews A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson. As Judge writes, “Trump is the bad guy. I just saved you $30 and 368 pages of reading.” At the conclusion of his book, Thomson completely lets his TDS freak flag fly:

July 13, 2024, a day so bright outside Butler, Pennsylvania, that you could miss a flash of light. This is photographed live, soon after 6 p.m. local time, as he takes the stage to speak. This is what he lives for, the being on and seeing how he will play. For years now, he has sounded bored, or lethargic, in a stupor with the words he repeats, masturbating his close-ups. He is growing older, you see. But in July 2024, his opponent had gone dead on camera, staring into an abyss in which we felt the nausea of utter loss. He knows this vacancy will come for him, too. But will anyone notice? He feels himself congealing. Then, outside Butler, there is a tiny crack in the air and he flinches. There are more shots as he is surrounded by the bulk of Secret Service, as if they have nothing to do with the “security” that is supposed to stop a shooter shooting. There is a huddled confusion from which his golden head arises. This is not being critical or unsympathetic: A boy wants to stand up after a splinter of something has stung him in the ear. But what is so striking about this victim is his mix of pathos and bravery—such a movie trope—that understands how thoroughly he is on and how the image of him with his fist upright, and “Fight! Fight! Fight!” will play on T-shirts and posters for a while. This is not to say the Butler shooting was designed or directed—he’s not competent enough for that. But the immediacy with which he took his movie moment, that was destiny and our disappearance. Little happens now that is not like a movie. Our seeing has been trained in the habit. Being spectators has undermined the spectacle. Some anxiety in us understands that everything may be a trick.

So there it is. Trump is the devil, manipulating us with theatrics.

“From time to time in this book,” Thomson writes,

considering the glamour of the moving train that will not stop at our station, and the haunting way in which Charlie Kane and Michael Corleone and so many other fellas have been gang leaders who secured Donald Trump’s rapture at the movies, I have realized that he is our movie man.

Thomson didn’t want to spoil the ending, he insists, writing: “I held back, urged on by my editor: Not yet, keep it for a big finish.”

Finally, he had to go there, because “any theory of seeing had to know that this was as hideous as Germans telling themselves they really could not smell what was coming down the country road.

A couple of questions. First, there was the 1912 assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt:

On October 14, 1912, former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt by John Schrank, a former saloonkeeper, while Roosevelt was campaigning for the presidency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Schrank’s bullet lodged in Roosevelt’s chest after penetrating Roosevelt’s steel glasses case and passing through a 50-page-thick (single-folded) copy of his speech titled “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual”, which he was carrying in his jacket pocket. Schrank was immediately disarmed and captured; he might have been lynched had Roosevelt not shouted for Schrank to remain unharmed. Roosevelt assured the crowd that he was all right, then instructed the police to take charge of Schrank and ensure he was not harmed.

As an experienced hunter and anatomist, Roosevelt correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung; he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

The movie industry was still in its infancy in 1912, with the forerunner of Paramount Pictures being founded that year, but Thomas Edison’s studio in the Bronx still a going concern. Did Edison’s pictures inspire Roosevelt to rally himself to finish his speech after being shot?

And how does Trump compare to all of the previous Hitlers who have come before him?

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026

DOUGLAS MURRAY: Britain imported a problem it refuses to name.

Starmer described the attempted beheading as “sickening,” while the Chief Constable of the PSNI warned about the challenge of toxic online commentary. “All of our communities in Northern Ireland contribute positively to this place,” Jon Boutcher said, warning people not to be “fooled or duped into a trap by people online.”

In the Commons the government had a swift response to a question from the Northern Ireland Unionist MP Jim Allister, who asked what might be done “to stop the importation of an alien culture that thinks it’s appropriate to try and behead someone.” The responding minister – Hilary Benn – spied his opening. “I’m sorry the honourable gentleman used the term ‘alien culture,’” he said. “What exactly is he referring to?” It shouldn’t be that hard to understand.

Historically speaking, Northern Ireland is not a place filled with pacifists. Indeed, it was almost touching that the First Minister Michelle O’Neill responded to the attack by saying that its citizens should not let “other people, who don’t care about here, incite hatred or fear.” She went on to say the public should not allow “people who are faceless to orchestrate campaigns on the street.” Because in the normal order of things it has been the job of Sinn Fein/the IRA to do just those things.

Still, the appallingness of the crime should not baffle the political class. Why not – finally – use it as a learning moment?

For years there has been a stock response whenever anybody raised the issue of the mainly Pakistani rape gangs. “So you’re saying that everybody from that background is a rapist?” was deflection question no. 1. To which the answer was: “Obviously no.” But then there was a clever little question no. 2: “So you think white British men don’t abuse children?” To which the answer was obviously once again “no.” The questions were insincere because the real answer – as with the Belfast attack – is so obvious. We have our own rapists, but why exactly do we need to import more? It is a version of the question Germany might have done well to address in the past couple of decades: “Given our historical problem with anti-Semitism, ought we to import a large and fresh batch of anti-Semites?”

Evergreen:

UPDATE: Belfast suspect is former policeman. “A Sudanese man charged with attempted murder after the Belfast knife attack served as a policeman in Khartoum, friends told The Telegraph. Hadi Alodid is from a prominent north Sudan family and after arriving in the UK was followed by two other brothers who also live in Britain…He was born and partly raised in Saudi Arabia, but returned to Sudan for his education. Azheri Omer said he had been friends with Alodid since 2022 in the Sudanese capital Khartoum. He joined the police in Khartoum, but Mr Omer said he only stayed a few months.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026
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