Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

December 14, 2025

ROGER SIMON: Are Tucker and Candace Responsible for Sydney Terror?

Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, plus the whole metastasizing antisemitic crew infecting social media, are not directly responsible for the horrifying Chanukah carnage in Sydney that, as of now, killed 15 and injured 40.

Still, it’s hard to deny that they—putatively conservatives, once anyway—with their constant internecine hostility generate a zeitgeist that encourages such events near and far.

Save Sen. John Fetterman, one of the few courageous politicians who declared opposition to rewarding Palestinian violence with a state, on Maria Baritoromo this morning (Dec. 14), it’s also hard to deny that nearly the entire Democratic Party has turned against Israel,

But that’s an old story. At the 2012 Democratic Party convention, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for a voice vote in favor of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. He got a salvo of furious catcalls in response.

By now, there’s hardly a defender of Israel in that party other than Sen. Fetterman. Most who may be are too afraid to say so.

Though smaller in number, the rise of antisemitism on the right is more recent and, to some extent, more ominous. It threatens to leave Jews and Israel without their only solid ally (and, not so parenthetically, the USA without its only reliable military partner in the Middle East).

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 14th, 2025

ROBERT SPENCER: Australia Discovers What It Means to ‘Globalize the Intifada.’

What exactly would it mean to “globalize the intifada”? What would a globalized intifada even look like? At least twelve people are dead and 29 injured on Australia’s Bondi Beach Sunday, as two Muslims opened fire upon a Hanukkah celebration. And so now the world has yet another example of what looks like when an intifada is globalized.

“Intifada” means “shaking off” or “rebellion,” and refers to armed struggle against Israel, including Israeli civilians. The Jerusalem Post noted back in 2021, when there was a good deal of globalization of the intifada that went largely unnoticed, that “during the Second Intifada from 2000-2005, Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and some affiliated with Fatah, carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel, killing more than 1,000.”

And so it is clear: globalizing the intifada means doing violence to Jews the world over. When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani refuses to condemn the term, he is tacitly admitting that he has no problem with violence against Jews who are not members of the IDF, not fighting in Gaza, but just going about their business on Bondi Beach and elsewhere.

Australia welcomed in the killers who decided to globalize the intifada on Bondi Beach. It welcomed them as “asylum seekers” and “refugees,” but they were actually Islamic jihadis, or became Islamic jihadis once in Australia. (Either way, it’s not a good advertisement for Australia’s immigration policy, which is essentially the same as immigration policies all over Europe and North America.) One of the mass murderers is named Naveed Akram. He is from Pakistan. The other is Khaled al-Nabulsi, who hails from Lebanon and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS). Police said that they were “aware” of one of these grateful asylum seekers before he made the decision to murder Jews in large numbers in order to gain the favor of Allah. They did not, obviously, do anything to stop him.

Related:

UPDATE:

MORE:

Posted at 4:10 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 14th, 2025

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why does anyone want to buy Warner Brothers, anyway?

Break out the popcorn and a jumbo box of Raisinets, because just when we thought the Warner Bros. Discovery drama was over, it turned out we had barely gotten started. The suspense over the company’s pending sale is mounting, and new questions are developing faster than writers can resolve old ones. Which suitor will shareholders choose? Will regulators block the deal? Will any of these characters find happily ever after?

If you remember last week’s episode, Netflix beat out Comcast and David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance to buy WBD — or at least its studio and streaming business, which are the bits everyone really wants. If you kept following the show, you’ve seen the action heat up: Ellison has launched a hostile bid for WBD, arguing that its shareholders would do better by taking $30 per share from him to buy the whole company, including its cable television stations — CNN, TNT, TBS and lifestyle outlets such as HGTV — than by getting $27.75 per share from Netflix for just the studio and streaming.

Spoiler alert: Cord-cutting is decimating the cable business so rapidly that this is a reasonable argument, even though the cable stations currently generate higher revenue and gross margins than streaming or studio. Between WBD’s debt and declining cable subscribers, there’s just not much future value left in those assets.

So stay tuned for more twists and turns! Eventually writers might resolve the biggest mystery: Why does anyone want to buy this company, anyway?

Fortunately, one august institution is dedicated to saving Warner Brothers from its ignoble fate: British cinemas demand Labour intervene against Netflix’s Hollywood takeover.

Cinemas have urged Labour to intervene in the planned takeover of Warner Bros by Netflix, warning that the deal would result in a “much thinner” selection of films for audiences.

Industry bosses have written to media minister Ian Murray to raise concerns about the streaming giant’s $83bn acquisition of the Hollywood studio behind major franchises such as Harry Potter, arguing that it could result in fewer films being released in cinemas.

In the letter sent to MPs on both the culture select committee and business and trade committee, Phil Clapp, the chief executive of the UK Cinema Association, said the takeover would be a “significant blow” to the industry – which is still struggling to recover from the pandemic.

Mr Clapp warned that audiences would be the biggest losers from the proposed deal, adding that it would also lead to significant job losses.

The trade group urged Mr Murray to take an active interest in the takeover and called on both committees to launch an inquiry.

Yes, launch an inquiry – write some really stern letters, England. That ought to do the job! But as John Podhoretz noted last week, we could be witnessing the “end of moviegoing” as we used to know it:

And in a thread Twitter/X McArdle explained why she didn’t bother going into details in her Washington Post article about Ellison’s goal of acquiring CNN along with Warner Brothers, as aging viewers and declining numbers mean that technology is also reaching its twilight years as destination viewing:

 

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 14th, 2025

THE RISE OF GERMAN NATIONALISM EXPOSES WASHINGTON’S DELUSIONS:

The recent electoral surge of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which secured 20.8 percent in February’s snap election and won state elections in Thuringia last year, has predictably triggered alarm bells throughout Washington’s foreign policy establishment. The usual suspects are warning of a new Nazi threat, the collapse of the transatlantic alliance, and the end of Western civilization as we know it. But beneath the hyperbole lies a more complex reality that American policymakers would be wise to understand rather than reflexively condemn.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. The AfD’s rise is not some inexplicable resurgence of fascism but rather a predictable political backlash against decades of failed policies—economic stagnation in eastern Germany, botched immigration policies, and Berlin’s costly entanglement in the Ukraine conflict. When the mainstream parties offered voters more of the same, voters looked elsewhere.

Washington’s foreign policy blob has responded with its standard playbook: demonize, isolate, and lecture. Yet this approach fundamentally misunderstands both German politics and American interests. The same establishment that assured us NATO expansion posed no threat to Russia, that the Iraq War would be a cakewalk, and that Afghanistan could be turned into a democracy now wants us to believe that AfD supporters are crypto-Nazis rather than ordinary Germans fed up with bearing the costs of extreme liberalism and America’s geopolitical adventures.

Politico (whose parent company is based in Berlin) is getting the vapors that much of Europe is turning “hard right and far-right:”

But then, the left see “far right” as being everywhere these days:

If only there was a way to slow the rise of the “far right” in both Europe and America:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 14th, 2025

AUSTRALIA’S BONDI BEACH SHOOTING: What we know so far about Hanukkah attack.

Twelve people have died — including one gunman — following a shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach which targeted the Jewish community on the first day of Hanukkah.

According to police, 29 others were taken to hospital and two officers were shot during the incident, which has since been declared a terror attack by officials. The surviving gunman is in a critical condition.

More than 1,000 people were attending an event on the beach celebrating Hanukkah.

Chris Minns, the premier of New South Wales, said: “Our heart bleeds for Australia’s Jewish community tonight.

“I can only imagine the pain that they’re feeling right now to see their loved ones killed as they celebrate this ancient holiday”.

Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery:

UPDATE: From last December: How Australia went from ‘goldene medina’ to ‘vitriol and vilification’ of Jews.

Posted at 10:54 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 14th, 2025

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Orbital Data Centers Will “Bypass Earth-Based” Constraints.

Last week, readers were briefed on the emerging theme of data centers in low Earth orbit, a concept now openly discussed by Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, as energy availability and infrastructure constraints on land increasingly emerge as major bottlenecks to data center buildouts through the end of this decade and well into the 2030s.

Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud has released a white paper outlining a case for operating a constellation of artificial intelligence data centers in space as a practical solution to Earth’s looming power crunch, cooling woes, and permitting land constraints.

Terrestrial data center projects will reach capacity limits as AI workloads scale to multi-gigawatt levels, while electricity demand and grid bottlenecks worsen over the next several years. Orbital data centers aim to bypass these constraints by using near-continuous, high-intensity solar power, passive radiative cooling to deep space, and modular designs that scale quickly, launched into orbit via SpaceX rockets.

“Orbital data centers can leverage lower cooling costs using passive radiative cooling in space to directly achieve low coolant temperatures. Perhaps most importantly, they can be scaled almost indefinitely without the physical or permitting constraints faced on Earth, using modularity to deploy them rapidly,” Starcloud wrote in the report.

Starcloud continued, “With new, reusable, cost-effective heavy-lift launch vehicles set to enter service, combined with the proliferation of in-orbit networking, the timing for this opportunity is ideal.”

No word yet how SID is holding up these days.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 14th, 2025

December 13, 2025

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Animal Farm review: Director Andy Serkis softens George Orwell classic for family animation. “Originally conceived by George Orwell as a satirical allegory for the Russian Revolution and the subsequent struggles of the USSR under the rule of Joseph Stalin, Animal Farm’s political ire is redirected in this lively CG-animated adaptation directed by Andy Serkis. Rather than Stalinism, Serkis takes aim at greed, rapacious consumerism and corporate corruption and malfeasance. There’s also a timely dig at populist political movements.”

This isn’t the first attempt at a mirror universe Animal Farm; Roger Waters did the same thing nearly 50 years ago on Pink Floyd’s Animals: “Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs.”

(Via, appropriately enough, Small Dead Animals.)

UPDATE:

“Has anyone considered the possibility that the real issue why theaters are shutting down nationally is that no one in Hollywood outside of Tom Cruise has made an entertaining movie in like oh… I don’t know… ten years at least?” Speaking of movies ten years ago, that’s when it all started to go wrong, but few knew it at the time: 

 

Posted at 10:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY:

Posted at 5:39 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

DEVELOPING:

UPDATE: Suspect still at large, apparently:

Posted at 5:05 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

MAYBE NEIL KINNOCK WILL CHIP IN:

Since Joe was the figurehead during Obama’s third term in office, isn’t the answer here simple? Just give Biden’s library a couple of rooms in the basement of Barry’s Death Star flak tower:

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

IT’S FRUM TO THIS: David Frum Explains Why DOJ’s Use of ‘Franklin’ Parody Is a Form of Transnational Organized Crime. “The Atlantic’s David Frum comes across like he’s just been hired as Franklin’s attorney with this assessment of what the Justice Department has done by sharing that meme…As you might have guessed, Frum’s post on the speculative legal aspects of the Trump administration’s ‘Franklin’ memes had the immediate opposite effect:”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

A FACE IN THE CROWD: 

I’m so old, I can remember when Al Sharpton was the person who approved all Democratic Party presidential candidates:

An amazing thing has happened in New York, and in Democratic politics: Al Sharpton has become King. He is Mr. Big, The Man to See, the straw that stirs the drink. Nothing has made that clearer than the prelude to the New York primary, and the budding New York Senate race. They come in a steady parade to him, even if they show flutters of reluctance: Bill Bradley, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton. Everyone refers to this as “kissing his ring”; at times, Democrats seem willing to kiss even more. Not long ago, he was a demagogue, a race-baiter, a menace — and acknowledged as such, by all but a fringe. Day and night, he worked to make an always difficult city — New York — even more difficult, more tense. Now, however, he practically rules. He is a kind of Establishment. His record — as galling as any in our politics — is overlooked, excused, or shrugged off. It is to him that every (Democratic) knee must bow.

I’m also old enough to remember right around this time a year ago, when Democrats wondered why men abandoned them in droves, and sought to create a Joe Rogan-style podcast of their own: Wait, You’re Telling Me This Person Is Shifting the Overton Window?

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

CRISES BY DESIGN: This New York Times Story Gets Everything Hilariously Wrong About Democrats and Immigration.

There isn’t a single reason to continue giving Democrats the benefit of doubt on their destructive, anti-American policies, least of all on immigration, and yet The New York Times is here this week to do just that.

In an unnecessarily long article out Sunday, Times reporter Christopher Flavelle sought to recast the Joe Biden era’s catastrophic mess at the Southern border as a matter of misjudgment and political failure rather than what it really was — deliberate harm inflicted on the nation. “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration,” reads the headline for Flavelle’s story. In it he asserts that Biden was repeatedly advised to get some kind of handle on the influx of destitute foreigners coming to America — though he never says exactly how or in what way — while also saying that Biden as president “seemed to grasp the risk,” but simply “failed to act. …”

Laughable. The day Democrats can be trusted on immigration is the day they can identify a single illegal alien they’re willing to deport. They don’t want to do that. That’s not their position. Their position is the opposite. It’s why a sitting Democrat senator this year literally flew to Central America for the explicit purpose of re-importing a professed illegal alien who had been sent back to his home country. That Democrats are the party of open borders is a matter of record.

Nevertheless, Flavelle wrote that Biden “and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster” and that his administration “made two crucial errors.” (Just two!)

At the beginning of the year, Morning Joe’s Steve Rattner hilariously said, “The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly.” When actually, from a leftist’s point of view, it really was:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 13th, 2025

December 12, 2025

UGH! Oliver Sacks Was a Fraud.

Much of his life, apparently, revolved around his personal torment that derived from his shame over being a homosexual, having grown up in England at a time when it was especially frowned upon, including by his mother, who told him she wished he had never been born. In fact, his career ended over accusations that he sexually abused patients—an accusation he vigorously denied.

Sacks’ fame is based on his ability to tell stories, and he certainly told compelling ones that captivated generations of people. While his colleagues were deeply skeptical of him, the general public and, eventually, the elite who fund and set curricula for medical schools were quite impressed.

Consider the main character in Awakenings, Leonard. He is portrayed in the most sympathetic way possible, and the movie is as much a love story as a tale of medical success and ultimate tragedy.

In reality, Leonard was not the poet we were told, but a man who looked fondly back on his youth as a rapist.

In the preface to “Awakenings,” Sacks acknowledges that he changed circumstantial details to protect his patients’ privacy but preserved “what is important and essential—the real and full presence of the patients themselves.” Sacks characterizes Leonard as a solitary figure even before his illness: he was “continually buried in books, and had few or no friends, and indulged in none of the sexual, social, or other activities common to boys of his age.” But, in an autobiography that Leonard wrote after taking L-dopa, he never mentions reading or writing or being alone in those years. In fact, he notes that he spent all his time with his two best friends—“We were inseparable,” he writes. He also recalls raping several people. “We placed our cousin over a chair, pulled down her pants and inserted our penises into the crack,” he writes on the third page, in the tone of an aging man reminiscing on better days. By page 10, he is describing how, when he babysat two girls, he made one of them strip and then “leaped on her. I tossed her on her belly and pulled out my penis and placed it between her buttocks and started to screw her.”

In “Awakenings,” Sacks has cleansed his patient’s history of sexuality. He depicts him as a man of “most unusual intelligence, cultivation, and sophistication”—the “ ‘ideal’ patient.” L-dopa may have made Leonard remember his childhood in a heightened sexual register—his niece and nephew, who visited him at the hospital until his death, in 1981, told me that the drug had made him very sexual. But they said that he had been a normal child and adolescent, not a recluse who renounced human entanglement for a life of the mind.

All of Sacks’ characters were fictionalizations of himself, or rather, some aspect of himself. He put his own words in their mouths, inserted his personal history into their lives, and privately referred to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat as a “fairy tale.”

So many “non-fiction” best-sellers turn out to have quite a bit of fiction in them, from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. As Greg Easterbrook tweeted in response to the news about Sacks being a fabulist, “NY publishing houses have enabled the making up of facts. It started with Alice Mayhew letting Woodstein put into quotation marks lines that could not in a million years be actual quotes.”

In 2022, historian Bonnie K. Goodman wrote: An enduring problem in academia professors also plagiarize but get away with it.

[Dorris Kearns Goodwin] was a seasoned academic writer with a doctorate from Harvard no less and never should have plagiarized mid-career; she never took responsibility and dismissed what she did. Still, it did not hinder her career, and she was celebrated afterward for another book. That it did not affect her career sends a wrong message that professionals can plagiarize, with few repercussions. Without repercussions, there are no deterrents for others to plagiarize and borrow without abandon. In 2002, Timothy Noah wrote in Slate, “How To Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic (Or, how Alice Mayhew gets her groove back).” Noah expressed, “Either instance would be considered plagiarism–and dealt with quite severely–if the perpetrator were a freshman at Harvard, where Goodwin was previously a professor of government and now serves on the board of directors.” [34]

A plagiarism scandal marred another high-profile historian in 2002. Simon & Shuster author Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarism in multiple books he published. Ambrose wrote over 25 books, including the World War II book Band of Brothers made in 2001 to an HBO Emmy Award-winning series. First, The Weekly Standard accused Ambrose of lifting passages of his book The Wild Blue from historian Thomas Childers’ “Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II,” without putting them in quotation marks, although he did cite him. Ambrose called it a “mistake,” an oversight; Ambrose would write more than a book year with his family and a team of research assistants, and his books were a mill of popular history books. After the first discovery, the speed he wrote and released books was to blame.

Ambrose responded to the accusation in The New York Times:

“I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn’t. I am not out there stealing other people’s writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people’s writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.” [35]

Noah found Ambrose’s statement on the scandal was “more defiant than apologetic.” [36]

Ambrose’s scandal only grew as more accusations from journalists followed, with Forbes’ Mark Lewis looking to make it a story. Lewis discovered that Ambrose’s plagiarism went back to 1975 and his book Crazy Horse and Custer. Ambrose took passages from Jay Monaghan’s 1959 book, “Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer.” Lewis then discovered that Ambrose copied passages in two other of his books Citizen Soldiers (1997) and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery (1991). Ironically, the book Ambrose copied Robert Sam Anson’s “Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon” (1985) was also edited by Alice Mayhew; the revelation put more spotlight on his editor and Simon & Shuster. [37]Then the New York Times’s David Kirkpatrick found five more passages in The Wild Blue were plagiarized.

David Strom writes that “It is striking, as Steven Pinker notes, that The New Yorker seems unbothered by Sacks’ fabulism, or even entranced by the literary quality of his work.” And to bring things full circle: New Yorker blog confuses All The President’s Men movie with actual Watergate history.

Posted at 6:42 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

THIS SOUNDS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY THAT WE WERE PROMISED:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Supergirl — More Superhero Slop?

Related: The new Supergirl poster is trying too hard.

I’d like to preface that the poster itself isn’t the worst (nor is it the best). Featuring a trench-coated Supergirl against a spray-painted logo background, it’s a fairly inoffensive design. With her tousled hair, sunglasses and wired headphones, it’s clear DC are going for a laidback ‘cool girl’ vibe that I feel comes across a little forced, but I can suspend my disbelief.

Well, I could. That was until I saw the new tagline: “Truth. Justice. Whatever.” A quote befitting of my teenage Tumblr blog, the attempt at an edgy tagline simply comes across as a desperate attempt to capture a young audience. It’s giving ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ in the worst way.

It also seems like a way to goad the right into giving the film a little free extra PR, given that it reads like a callback to the 2006 Superman’s infamous slogan, “Truth, justice and . . . all that stuff,” and Gunn’s own earlier efforts to tweak Superman’s motto to be more woke: James Gunn Doesn’t Just Omit “The American Way” In ‘Superman’ – He Changes It To “The Human Way.”

As the Drinker notes, after going through all of trailer’s myriad and exhausted cliches, “the party’s over, James. It’s been over for like five years now. You’re just too wrapped up in your own PR to realize it.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025

RAVING AND DROOLING: Sharon Osbourne nearly mailed Roger Waters a box of poo for his attack on Ozzy after his death.

In the new interview with Piers Morgan, she explained that she ultimately decided not to send a similar parcel to Waters.

“Even that is a waste, to send shit to him. It’s a waste because he’s really insignificant,” she explained. “But I just thought, anybody that passes has a family… you don’t do that.”

Later in the interview, Sharon went on to say that she thought Waters’ comments on the podcast were actually aimed at her, instead of Ozzy, and alleged that they could have stemmed from anti-Semitism. Waters has previously strongly denied any accusations of being anti-Semitic, and has not yet commented publicly on the comments made by Sharon in the new interview.

And yet oddly, these reports just keep happening: Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters accused of antisemitic behavior including swastika confetti, ‘Jew food’ remarks: report.

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 12th, 2025
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