Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

August 4, 2026

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Mark Halperin Suddenly Notices a TEENY Bit of Bias on the Sunday Shows.

It is the nature of bubbles that the people who exist in them have a difficult time seeing outside of them—at least not without an extremely distorted lens.

One example of this is leftist Huffington Post ‘reporter’ SV Date, who tried to clap back at Halperin with sarcasm.

Uhh … who wants to tell him?

This is exactly what legacy media does, except these days, they’ll only write from the perspective that criminals are good people. Often, they won’t even bother with the law and order perspective.

Nice own goal there, Mr. Date.

Flashback: Anatomy of a Failed Moral Panic: The left tried to reboot George Floyd–style chaos after an ICE shooting, but video evidence, public dissent, and firm federal response exposed the narrative as hollow agitprop.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

WE’RE NOT GOING TO MOSCOW. IT’S CZECHOSLOVAKIA. IT’S LIKE GOING INTO WISCONSIN: Wisconsin Socialist Candidate for Governor Francesca Hong Wants to Cancel Thanksgiving, Defund the Police as a Modest Step Towards Abolishing Them Entirely.

She declared that Thanksgiving should be cancelled during the covid lockdowns, but went further: She said it should have been cancelled since its founding in 1621, because it’s “painful” to hysterical identity-politics-drenched racists.

Mediaite:

“Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621,” Hong posted. “If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx [sic] and women so be it.”

Hong still thinks it should be cancelled but knows it’s political suicide to admit it: Should Thanksgiving Be Canceled? Socialist Candidate Can’t Give CNN a Straight Answer.

“Do you still believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled?”

It seemed like an easy enough question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to answer. But not for Francesca Hong (D).

Instead, the democratic socialist candidate — who is running for governor in Wisconsin — gave a rambling 46-second response on Monday night, touching on her professional restaurant experience, her claim that Thanksgiving is “incredibly painful” for many Americans, and her views on the holiday can “evolve.”

In the end, she never gave an actual “yes” or “no” answer.

Then she’s answered the question:

(Classical reference in headline.)

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: French trans phenom Julie Tétart looks WNBA-ready — so why hasn’t the ‘inclusive’ league called?

French trans basketball player Julie Tétart is waiting for a call from one of the inclusive WNBA teams who needs a 6’3 scoring and rebounding machine.

During the 2025-26 season for a club team in Monaco, Tétart dominated the second-tier French women’s basketball Ligue 2 by dropping 21 points per game while grabbing 20 rebounds. The biological male, who came out as trans in October 2021, led the league in both categories. It was as season unlike any the Ligue 2 had ever seen.

With those numbers, the WNBA should be knocking down Tétart’s door, right?

“If they contact me, I won’t say no. But you have to be realistic: I’m old, and there are far better players than me!” the overly humble 34-year-old Tétart told OutKick in French over Instagram direct messages on Monday.

Not least of whom, this candidate put forth by America’s Newspaper of Record:

Wow, the roster of the Nashville Balls is really coming together quickly!

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

THE ‘ME DECADE’ — 50 YEARS LATER AMERICANS ARE MORE SELFISH THAN EVER:

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the essay that observed the moment when all of this began: Tom Wolfe’s August 1976 cover story for New York, published under a headline that lodged itself permanently in the language: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” It was Wolfe at his most gleeful and profanely merciless, a 10,000-word safari through Human Potential Movement talks, encounter groups, Aquarian communes, and the new therapeutic religions, which pointed toward a single insight. Americans had discovered a subject more absorbing than God, country, or class: themselves. The great national project of the age was self-actualization. “Let’s talk about Me,” Wolfe wrote, and he meant it as the era’s Lord’s Prayer.

Fifty years later, the Me Decade is best understood as more than just a diagnosis for the 1970s, that itchy, sweaty waiting room wedged between the revolutionary ’60s and the acquisitive ’80s. The essay now feels like a Rosetta Stone for understanding the shift to permanent navel-gazing that followed the collapse of the postwar order. The ’60s promised to remake the world, and when the world declined to be remade, the great “we” of the New Left splintered into 1,000 private quests for meaning. In the mid-2020s, after the hyperpolitics and populist moments of the late 2010s and early 2020s burned out, Wolfe’s Third Great Awakening has returned in the form of self-care and therapeutic identity on the Left; and looksmaxxing, longevity, and personal sovereignty on the Right.

Rereading the essay now, it’s clear that Wolfe, the thin white duke of New Journalism, wasn’t simply mocking the narcissists. Across his books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, the author, who died in 2018, had watched the New Left and the counterculture at close range and seen the dream of political revolution giving way to the search for private revelation. By the bicentennial of the United States, he was performing what he called a “social autopsy” on the ’70s. Wrote Wolfe: “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!).”

Wolfe’s deeper claim was that this was something genuinely new under the sun. For most of human history, he argued, ordinary people had no self to speak of — not in the way we mean it. They understood themselves less as sovereign individuals than as a link in what he called the “great biological stream,” living not only their own lives, but those of their ancestors, their children, their neighbors. The self was a vehicle, not a destination. What changed, he believed, was money.

America’s postwar bargain between capital and labor had handed the working and middle classes — unevenly, and with enormous racial exclusions, but on a mass scale — more leisure, privacy, mobility, and bodily freedom than their grandparents could have dreamed of. The great question posed by midcentury American abundance was: now that the masses have security, leisure, and disposable income, what would they do with it?

* * * * * * * *

That craving for recognition found a perfect delivery mechanism in the smartphone and social media. Your phone’s central demand — the thing it asks of you dozens of times a day — is that you perform, curate, optimize, and, above all monitor, the self. And while “phones bad” may be the most exhausted take in America, the point isn’t that social media rotted our brains. It’s that social media offer the infrastructure the first Me Decade lacked: continuous self-regard with measurable feedback that’s always on, where every injury becomes content, every hobby a possible side hustle, and every political position both an opinion and a costume. It even swallows its own antidote: log off, move to the country, bake bread, cultivate the simple, local life — congratulations, you’re making content about the moral superiority of not making content. The exit door opens into the gift shop.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

GOOD AND HARD, SAN FRAN: The possible fine? $192. His crime? Being a tennis dad.

[Sam] Dogen posted on social media about the tennis incident and got supportive and sardonic responses.

“Honestly, you deserve jail for gaming the system. Even if they’re your own kids, you’re still teaching tennis,” @aremuhknee posted (opens in new tab). “I’m getting sick of you loophole freeloaders.”

“Surprised they didn’t call in the SWAT team. SF is super strict enforcing every bit of their laws against basically law abiding people,” @frankiegems wrote (opens in new tab). “True law breakers usually get a break tho.”

Spencer Pratt and Adam Carolla smile. Or as Carolla told an interviewer last year, “Once you essentially look the other way for the homeless, junkies, illegal immigrants, criminals, or whoever it is, while shining a spotlight on taxpayers with overregulation, over-permitting, and trying to manage every grain of their lives, versus saying to illegal immigrants, ‘Go do whatever you want,’ or to the homeless, ‘Go shoot up wherever you want or sleep wherever you want’—then you’ve lost it. L.A.’s there. San Francisco’s there. Look, if you’re not a taxpayer and you don’t have a checking account, whatever city you’re in, they’re not going to be nearly as interested in you as they are in the people who have a checking account, pay taxes, and can be compliant.”

Posted at 6:38 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

JASON GUMP: Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s Ohio State Affiliation Appears Fabricated.

Jason Arday, who received media attention for becoming the youngest black professor ever at the University of Cambridge in England, has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly fabricating his professional affiliations and plagiarizing his academic work.

Now, another line on his résumé is in doubt: Arday says on his official faculty website that he is a visiting professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion — but Ohio State’s DEI office shuttered in 2025, and the school said he was never an employee.

“We have no record of an employee by that name,” Ohio State University spokesman Benjamin Johnson told National Review on Tuesday.

Ohio State previously announced that its Office of Diversity and Inclusion would close, effective February 28, 2025. Arday did not respond to a request for comment.

The Ohio State revelation comes after The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, revealed earlier this week that Arday’s claim to have worked as a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow in its School of Education was false.

Meanwhile, Arday is siccing his lawyers on reporters – who are then in turn siccing the police on them: Police investigated journalist who tried to expose Cambridge professor.

Scotland Yard investigated a journalist trying to expose a plagiarism row and told him to stop asking a Cambridge professor questions.

Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of harassment after he emailed a series of questions to Prof Jason Arday about his academic record. Mr Grove said officers told him to stop contacting the professor because his “mental health” had been affected by the questions.

Prof Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be… racially motivated”.

The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of harassment before deciding in February to close the case.

The police did not interview Mr Grove, who only found out about the investigation when the Met contacted him to inform him that they would not be taking action.

The Met also reportedly passed on a complaint to another force about an academic who was also looking into the academic record of Prof Arday, but the other force refused to investigate.

The Met is among forces that have been accused in recent months of wasting time on pointless investigations while insisting that they do not have the manpower to routinely attend burglaries and other crimes.

Mr Grove told The Telegraph that he had been “stunned” to receive a phone call from the police to be told he had been investigated simply for doing his job.

He said: “I was told a complaint had been made against me and investigated, but the force was not taking it forward. The officer told me that I shouldn’t contact Professor Arday again because his mental health had been affected by my actions.

“I asked him what I had done, and he said there had been online posts about Professor Arday. I said I’d never posted anything about him and asked him if he realised he was speaking to a journalist who was investigating a story. He didn’t really respond but repeated his request for me not to contact Professor Arday again, citing his mental health.

“I was just doing my job. Journalists should be free to ask questions of anyone, even star professors. It’s very rare that academics refuse to speak to the press – that caused me to look into this matter further and I was astonished by what I found.”

I’d ask since when do police tell reporters not to request interviews, but then the British police also arrest sitcom writers, people posting spicy tweets, and wearing a Star of David.

Posted at 4:41 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

KYLE SMITH: Old University, New Problem.

A lot of funny guys are associated with the University of Cambridge, such as alumni John Cleese, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams and Sacha Baron Cohen. Today, though, one of the ancient university’s faculty is inspiring as much laughter as any of them at their best. Meet Jason Arday, the most hilarious storyteller alive.

* * * * * * * *

It has become a reflex in academe to question the motives of those who discover evidence that endangers the reputation of favored scholars, the ones the university really wants to succeed. Naturally, Mr. Arday’s response to one professor who in 2023 brought up passages from Mr. Arday’s work that strongly resembled previously published writing was to claim that he was being wronged by the questions. “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes,” he replied, adding, “anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Sorry, but questioning the character of an accuser isn’t how truth is found. “You’re racist” may be one of today’s most favored epithets but it still isn’t an argument. Picture a toddler putting his fingers in his ears and yelling “La la la” when being told it’s bedtime, and you’ll have some sense of how our supposed guardians of truth react to unwelcome information. As one long-ago Cambridge figure, Bertrand Russell, wrote in 1942, “People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people, is a secondary consideration.”

Exit question: “Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian’s greatest creation.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

TROLL LEVEL: POTUS DJT.

Do the writers and editors really think this AMC clip is “beloved?” When I saw The Odyssey last week, Kidman’s ad was just more padding in a half-hour block of terrible trailers, product commercials(!) and more self-promotional slop from AMC to make the wait before the movie began even more excruciating.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Will mortarboards roll after the Jason Arday allegations?

I am reminded of two examples of showing the threat to the university’s core tenets. One involves a famous little book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. There he explored the idea that more harmful than liars to the intellectual health of a nation, or its subdivisions, are ‘those who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth’. Liars are at least actively aware that the truth exists and are trying to conceal its whereabouts. Bullshitters just don’t care.

Everyone loved that little book and knew exactly the sort of thing Frankfurt was talking about. Yet like intellectual knotweed, this indifference to the truth has proved not only resilient but anti-fragile. It has a few dauntless foes, but from every bloody stump of neck, two or three new heads seem to spring every day.

The second is a quote from 2022 attributed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR and former head of the Wikimedia Foundation: ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’ I say attributed to – I saw her say it and you can, too. It’s from her TED Talk and she seems to be in no hurry to distance herself from it. She might, of course, argue that the context was important, and she was not talking about the criteria by which we appoint professors to one of the great seats of learning in the history of the world. And maybe she’s right. But honestly, why should I care?

Stay focussed. Demand action in our universities. If not heads, then mortarboards at least must surely roll. And if that suggests an impossibility, given their geometrical properties – well, then I think we know just the man for the job.

As Gareth Roberts writes at the London Spectator on “Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday,” “Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

AARON HANSCOM: Nick Shirley’s New Video Dismantles the Left’s Narrative on Ceuta’s Migrant Crisis.

Intrepid investigative journalist Nick Shirley isn’t one to shrink from danger. He had to escape from Cuba when spies followed him during his trip to the communist island and was forced to hire 24/7 security after exposing Somali fraud in Minneapolis. In his latest video, Shirley once again finds himself in serious peril when a Muslim man chases him through the streets while wielding a knife and threatening to stab him.

The scene of the pursuit was the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta, which has made headlines in recent days after 60,000 illegal migrants poured in from Morocco. Shirley traveled to the autonomous city to report on the current state of the crisis, which has become more manageable after most of the migrants returned to Morocco.

While the knife chase — in which the enraged man yells, “I’m going to stab both of you,” at Shirley and Javier Mansilla, the Spanish vigilante who accompanies Shirley in the video, as they run down the street — will likely attract the most attention, there are several other revealing moments I want to highlight that go against the left’s preferred narrative of what is occurring in Spain right now.

Video at link.

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

JASON GUMP: Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor.

A charity has cast doubt on claims about volunteering made by the Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row.

Prof Jason Arday has listed among his achievements “installing water points” in South America and West Africa with the charity WaterAid.

WaterAid, however, says it never sends volunteers abroad.

It is the latest blow to Prof Arday’s credibility following questions over alleged plagiarism and apparently bogus claims he has made about ultra-distance running and fundraising.

His memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is set to be published at the end of this month, with a publicity tour of the UK and America to promote it.

His editors must having Biden-level aneurysms right now.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 4th, 2026

August 3, 2026

JASON GUMP: Cambridge professor made impossible claim he was on Seven Up.

Now footage of a talk Prof [Jason] Arday gave in October 2022 has re-emerged, revealing his claim that he appeared as a child on Seven Up.

He told the University of Bath’s Race Equality Taskforce: “I was part of a programme, actually, which – it doesn’t really exist any more – but it was called Seven Up at the time.

“And Seven Up is basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at [ages] 7, 14, 21. I was pulled out of the project when I was 14.”

During the same talk, he also claimed: “I had just turned 18 when I learnt to read and write.”

Seven Up was the first episode in a decades-long TV series created by Granada Productions for ITV.

The series follows 14 people’s lives at seven-year intervals, beginning when they were seven years of age. The final instalment is expected to be broadcast later this year.

The inaugural episode was broadcast in 1964, meaning its subjects were born in 1957. Subsequent programmes have been titled 21 Up, 28 Up and so on as the participants have grown older.

The BBC also commissioned a spin-off series titled Up: Millennium Generation. This began in 2000, also featuring a group of seven-year-olds. At the time, Prof Arday would have been 15.

A BBC spokesman confirmed that Prof Arday was not involved with the Up: Millennium Generation films.

Like Forrest Gump, or his prototype, Woody Allen’s earlier Leonard Zelig character, Arday has made claims of being seemingly everywhere, apparently not considering that he’d eventually be caught, or that he’d be too entrenched in academia for anything to happen to him if he was. And he may be right — over to you, Cambridge: Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

UPDATE:

A source close to Mr. Driscoll adds that in 2011 at the Freakanomics blog, Fred Shapiro wrote:

The Yale Book of Quotations traces the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” back to 1989. Subsequent to the publication of the YBQ, I found that Toni Morrison was quoted in Essence, July 1981: “I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.” The forthcoming Yale Book of Modern Proverbs notes: “The saying is often referred to as an ‘African’ or a ‘West African’ proverb; however, no prototype from Africa has been discovered — though several sayings from that continent do urge cooperation in child rearing and other enterprises.”

Regarding Hillary Clinton’s 1995 book popularizing the quote, a source close to the late P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote that the title is “an ancient African proverb which seems to have its origins in the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia.”

Posted at 6:20 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 3rd, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: Longtime Bay Area tech conference is leaving San Francisco after a 50-year run.

One of the technology industry’s longest-running conferences is leaving San Francisco for Phoenix, a setback for a city that has promoted the return of conventions and visitors as evidence of its downtown recovery.

Semicon West, a major gathering for the global semiconductor industry, will make Phoenix its long-term home beginning in 2027, the trade association behind the event announced Thursday.

The conference will hold its final scheduled San Francisco edition on Oct. 13-15 at Moscone Center before moving to the Phoenix Convention Center for an event next spring. Conferences are also scheduled in Phoenix in 2028 and 2029.

The decision reverses an earlier plan to rotate the conference between the two cities and ends Semicon West’s more than 50-year association with the Bay Area.

Its departure comes as San Francisco seeks to rebuild a convention and tourism industry battered by the pandemic, remote work and the prolonged decline of its downtown business district.

Gooder and harder, San Fran.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 3rd, 2026

HOW IT STARTED: Rosie O’Donnell Confirms Move to Ireland, Will Return to U.S. ‘When It’s Safe for All Citizens to Have Equal Rights.’

—People Magazine, March 11, 2025.

How it’s going: Rosie O’Donnell confirms Season 30 return to The View.  

Rosie O’Donnell will be back on “The View” for Season 30.

The former co-host confirmed her return on Monday’s episode of the “Tangle With Kyle Ridley” podcast, saying she will take part in the show’s 30th-anniversary special.

The 64-year-old plans to take part “in whatever way they want” her “just as a guest.”

She added, “They’re bringing back all the hosts, I think. And, you know, I’m pretty proud of that show, what it’s become and how it really speaks to the people and to politics.”

O’Donnell, notably, co-hosted the ABC talk show for Seasons 10 and 18.

In addition to an infamous on-air spat with colleague Elisabeth Hasselbeck that led to her initial 2007 exit, the comedian had a “tense” dynamic with Whoopi Goldberg before her 2015 departure.

“I admired Whoopi, wanted to be on her team, had respect for her and I expected we would be like Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan passing the ball back and forth, shooting and leading the team to victory,” she recalled on Monday. “And that’s not exactly what happened.”

I’m looking forward this ABC News program returning to engaging in such intellectually stimulating conversations as fire not being able to melt steel and that the Holocaust “wasn’t originally about race.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 3rd, 2026

REPRISALS WOULD BE A GOOD START:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 3rd, 2026

August 2, 2026

TOM ELLIOTT: The Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid for Everything It’s Worth.

Page 13 of the diary covers two important events from January 31, 2020.

The first is that Fauci is handed the mic to serve as Covid’s point person. He writes:

“White House is now fully convinced that I be the science/health spokesperson for the USG. Bob Redfield just does not come across very weel. He takes forever to say something and it is usually wondering. This drives the WH and HHS comms people crazy and so they are putting me out on all the requests.”

The director of the CDC was not sidelined for being wrong, but for being slow on camera. The selection criterion was not who’s the most credible scientist, but who performs best on TV.

Redfield’s own account of that period, given under oath in 2023, is worth recalling. Asked why he had been excluded from the origins discussions, he pointed to ideological differences: “Because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view.”

The second thing happens after he gets back to his office. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust calls, sounding “very concerned,” with Kristian Andersen of Scripps conferenced in and Eddie Holmes in the background from Sydney. Fauci writes down what they told him:

“The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary ‘jump’ that they found nowhere in bat isolates.”

Deliberate insertion, they said, followed by release — accidental release being the most likely.

The next day Fauci convened a larger call of twelve experts in epidemiology. His entry characterizing it (p. 14) is the probably the single most consequential paragraph in the whole diary. There was “not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion,” he writes. Ron Fouchier was certain it could have arisen naturally and said they shouldn’t waste time. Christian Drosten agreed with Fouchier. And then, in Fauci’s own words:

“the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

Ten of 12 thought it must be manmade. And he admits the person driving the zoonotic theory perspective, Ron Fouchier, was “expected of him since he was the original GOF [gain of function] person with Yoshi Kawaoka.”

* * * * * * * *

The most revealing aspect of these pages are how Fauci worked with compliant “journalists” to shape media narratives. On July 26, 2020, while watching Brett Giroir — the assistant secretary for health and a fellow member of the White House task force — be interviewed on CNN’s State of the Union, Fauci writes that Giroir was “talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him.” Then (p. 263): “I gave Jake some questions to ask him.”

So, a senior federal official is trying to undermine a rival federal official, using a CNN anchor as his conduit.

Related: RFK, Jr. DESTROYS CNN’s Dana Bash Over Media Handling of Covid, Fauci.

UPDATE: What the Fauci Diary Reveals About Washington. “April 17, 2021 Dana Bash sent me a text: ‘I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I…. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply ‘Mr. Jordan, go f— yourself’’ Presumably, this referred to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Also, presumably, Fauci refrained from telling him this.”

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 2nd, 2026

HEH, INDEED:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 2nd, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 2nd, 2026

PEGGY NOONAN: Anthony Fauci Unmasks Himself. His diaries make clear that he saw the pandemic less as a historic emergency than a media opportunity:

Looking back on the public-leadership aspect of the pandemic—while we were in the trauma and fear of the first months, while we were banging pots at 7 p.m. to thank hospital workers, and scientists were zooming to find out more about treatments and protocols, and earnest medical officials were showing up on cable explaining what they believed to be true—a lot of people tried to do a lot of good things. But it all became pretty political pretty fast, pretty insidery and groupthinky, and pretty smug as the previously obscure became famous overnight.

It all came together and yielded a little societal Chernobyl.

The reactor blew, causing a calamity. The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

Noonan writes accurately that Fauci’s diary “screams Seven Deadly Sins—he gave in to his pride. But it also makes the history in which he took such a big part look banal and inhuman: Your historic emergency is his media opportunity.” But she writes little about the media that made Fauci such a superstar in the first place. In February she wrote a “A Lament for the Washington Post” that concluded:

I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

But of course, as Mary Katharine Ham responded, something bad did happen on a national scale, and now we can measure how superstar journalists responded both in their public performance and how they were eager to be Fauci’s lapdogs:

Tweet concludes, “I delivered the AJC at 4 am every day of my freshman year of college. I’m sad we don’t have local Metro dailies now instead of the Columbia Journalism School-to-NYT pipeline, which gives almost no journo any exposure to normal people. But acting like these institutions haven’t EARNED distrust is just missing the story.”

And the DNC-MSM are still thrilled to protect Fauci. We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which RFK Jr. is a voice of sanity: CNN Got Absolutely Wrecked By RFK Jr. Over Their COVID Coverage Today.

Related:

Posted at 4:53 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 2nd, 2026

AND THEN HE SHOUTED, CAMBRIDGE IS MAGA COUNTRY! Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

Arday is one of the U.K.’s newest academic superstars, a true success story as the youngest black scholar ever to become full professor at the University of Cambridge, Britain’s second-best institution of higher learning. His life story is truly impressive, an inspiring tale of a man rising to a prestigious position from severe disadvantages in life — Arday claims to suffer from an autism so severe that he was entirely nonverbal until the age of eleven, and wholly illiterate until learning to read at the age of 18. Now, not only is he a national pseudo-celebrity, as a “high-functioning neurodivergent,” he’s at the top of the academic hierarchy.

The devastatingly thorough report by Nathan Cofnas, a scholar at Ghent University (and a former research fellow at Cambridge), summarizes Arday’s remarkable vault up the academic ladder after claiming to have achieved literacy only after he started attending Sixth Form:

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

But by gum, it gets even more inspiring than that. Arday also claims that before becoming a full professor at Cambridge, he raised over £5 million for charity. And built clean-drinking-water facilities for South American and African peasants. While becoming an ultra-marathoner who ran 600 miles in six days (only 50 miles short of the world record) — all without any formal documentation of said feat. He has a heartwarming memoir about his triumph over adversity, with the glurgy, quotidian title of Great and Unfortunate Things, due to be released on August 11. Is there anything this heroic autist can’t do?

As it turns out, the answer is scholarship. If something seems a little too good to be true about Arday’s life story — from nonverbal illiteracy to the halls of Cambridge — then perhaps that’s because it was. Arday may be a fabulist. But according to Cofnas, Arday quite clearly is a serial plagiarist, having stolen enormous chunks of others’ scholarly work — pages upon pages of it, usually almost verbatim — for his Ph.D. thesis. In academia, one’s thesis is essentially one’s professional calling card as a budding academic. Plagiarizing it was once a death penalty offense; just ask Claudine Gay.

And much like Gay, he apparently has kept on plagiarizing well into his (remarkably thin) academic career, up to and including seemingly stealing clinical data (in other words, interview responses) from others for his own pieces. He didn’t do the work himself — he simply rewrote someone else’s work; the approach leaves more time for marathoning, one supposes. Needless to say, the sort of academic work he is vulturing from others is itself largely worthless, which is its own irony — the inevitable decay of “remix culture,” imported into scholarship.

Even the Grauniad has spotted Arday veering into Jussie Smollett territory: Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.

In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.

The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.

The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.

He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.

In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.

When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.

When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.

Arday had contacted the Met to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris after his plagiarism allegations and, because he was based in Plymouth, the case was handed over to Devon and Cornwall police. Correspondence seen by the Guardian confirmed that the force declined to pursue a case against Harris.

Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.

Exit quote: “When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. ‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,’ he said. ‘Why would I lie?’ He would be jeopardising his career.”

UPDATE: I understand the “no enemies to the left” rule, but if you’re going to mention the pig’s head in the article’s, err, subhead, why bury those details so deeply into the article?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 2nd, 2026
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