Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

March 10, 2026

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II:

Posted at 4:18 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

ACE OF SPADES: CNN Story Valorizes Islamic Terror Bombers, Then CNN Claims It Was Just a Mistaken Tweet.

CNN’s spokespotato and inveterate liar Brian Stelter is pretending it was only the “tweet” which was egregious. But he’s lying. The tweet just repeated the first sentence “lede” of the story.

The story was later stealth-edited, but people had screencapped it.

At NewsBusters, Curtis Houck adds: CNN TORCHED for Sickening Article Gushing Over Islamists With IEDs ‘Enjoying the City.’ “‘My trajectory always takes a dark turn when I make and carry homemade bombs to a protest to kill people. It’s the darnedest thing. Like, help me out, trajectory,’ tweeted the great Mary Katharine Ham with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Washington Examiner senior writer David Harsanyi had an interesting observation about CNN’s treatment of these alleged terrorists: ‘CNN treating Islamic terrorists better than they did Nick Sandmann’… Like Ham, [NRO’s Charles] Cooke dialed up some sarcasm of his own in a follow-up tweet, parodying how these two might have written an article on 9/11 about the hijackers: “Nineteen Middle Eastern tourists crossed into New York City Tuesday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally sunny weather . . .”

UPDATE:

 

Posted at 12:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN ANTI-JOURNALISM: CNN Changing Name to PNN: Propaganda News Network.

Some things you cannot make up.

I mean, who would believe it if you told them that CNN would turn an Islamist terrorist attack on New York City into a tale of two brothers minding their own business until they were forced to protest the injustice of white supremacists who were committing an Islamophobic hate crime?

CNN may have invented a whole new genre of anti-journalism:

At PJ Media, Scott Pinsker writes, “New Yorkers Can’t Trust Their Mayor to Tell Them the Truth About Islamic Terror Attacks.”

The rest of us can’t trust CNN to report the story, either. Curiously, the author of the piece has pronouns, which may not be ISIS-approved:

Exit questions:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Democrats’ swoon for Jew-hater Graham Platner shows antisemites now run their party.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck . . . well, you know the saying.

Today, if a candidate walks and talks like an obsessive Jew-hater, Democrats swoon.

And in Maine, Graham Platner is making an entire political campaign out of his waddle and quack.

First, we learned that the democratic socialist Platner, who’s competing with Gov. Janet Mills in the Democrats’ US Senate primary, had a large Nazi tattoo — an SS Totenkopf — emblazoned on his chest.

When the revelation set off a public furor, Platner insisted he’d had no idea what the infamous grinning skull symbol meant, and that the only “disgusting” aspect of the controversy was the insinuation he knew otherwise.

Yet Platner has spent the months since proving those “disgusting” doubters right, with a stream of mindless anti-Israel rhetoric and openly antisemitic associations.

And it’s working: Bulwark, Matt Yglesias Embrace Graham ‘Nazi Tattoo’ Platner.

Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, the current frontrunner in the Maine primary, proudly ran around with an SS Death Head tattoo… for 18 years.

For those who don’t know, the SS (Schutzstaffel) was the Nazi unit primarily responsible for the murder of six million Jews.

Platner claims he didn’t know what the tattoo signified. Graham Platner is lying.

Graham Platner also retweeted a Holocaust denier.

Graham Platner also sat down with an antisemitic podcaster, a guy who’s so bad he believes the Jews killed John F. Kennedy.

Through and through, Platner is bad news. But suddenly, the very same people who have spent years attacking President Trump and his supporters as Nazis, racists, and bigots, are willing to embrace the Nazi tattoo guy because they believe the Nazi tattoo guy has the best chance to defeat incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins in Maine.

Here’s Yglesias telling Democrats not to get too “uptight” about a Nazi tattoo:

Less uptight. Maybe even a bit boring, you might say, as the WaPo described Yglesias himself in 2023, while noting how popular he was with the Biden administration: “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias:”

“I don’t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,” says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, “offers ‘unconventional wisdom:’ He’s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there — a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.”

* * * * * * * *

But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don’t. His Substack was tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team, according to digital strategist Rob Blackie, and Yglesias himself was No. 4 on the list of most-followed journalists. Some of Yglesias’s posts on policy — particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February — have reportedly circulated among White House staff.

“There’s a broad sense that he’s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they’ll take other ideas,” says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss outside influences on the administration. “He’s not super influential, but he’s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.”

Or perhaps Matt just wants to explore socialism on a more national level:

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 10th, 2026

March 9, 2026

THIS IS CNN:

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

HORSESHOE THEORY:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

RIP: Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed Watergate tapes, dies at 99.

Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.

His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and went on to, along with Butterfield, help expose the wrongdoing.

“He had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system,” Dean said. “He stood up and told the truth.”

As a deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw the taping system connected to voice-activated listening devices that had been secretly placed in four locations, including Nixon’s office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Butterfield later said that, besides himself and the president, he believed that only White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, a Haldeman assistant and a handful of Secret Service agents knew about the taping system.

At Media Myth Alert in 2013, Joseph Campbell wrote: The Nixon tapes: A pivotal Watergate story that WaPo missed.

The book, All the President’s Men, says that Woodward had found out about private testimony that Butterfield had given to staff members of the select committee and he called Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, for guidance.

The call to Bradlee was on a Saturday night. After outlining what he knew, Woodward, according to the book, said:

“We’ll go to work on it, if you want.”

In reply, Bradlee is quoted as saying with some slight irritation, “Well, I don’t know.”

How would you rate the prospective story? Woodward asked him.

“B-plus,” Bradlee replied.

Woodward figured a B-plus wasn’t much, according to the book.

“See what more you can find out, but I wouldn’t bust one on it,” Bradlee is quoted as instructing Woodward.

And Woodward didn’t “bust one.”

Two days later, on July 16, 1973, Butterfield made his reluctant disclosure at a public session of the Senate select committee.

The following day, according to All the President’s Men, Bradlee conceded that the lead about the taping system was “more than a B-plus.”

The anecdote from All the President’s Men is suggestive of the overall minor role that the Post played in uncovering Watergate. As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, unraveling a scandal of the dimension of Watergate “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of Watergate’s signal crime, the break-in in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

As Glenn has written, “Recent Events Have Made Me Doubt the Entire Watergate Story:” Nixon’s Revenge.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

WEEKEND AT MOJTABA’S: Iranian Clerics Choose Khamenei’s Son Mojtaba As Next Supreme Leader.

For everyone yammering about how stupid Trump was to back out of the atrocious Obama/Kerry Iran deal, the enriched uranium Iran holds is there BECAUSE of the deal…and all those pallets of cash.

Not only that, but RedState’s Jen Van Laar points out something else regarding Mojtaba and his new role. He’s filthy rich.

Mojtaba Khamenei owns an extensive and troubling real estate portfolio in the U.K., including two luxury apartments in London overlooking the Israeli Embassy and “a stone’s throw” from Kensington Palace, home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Bloomberg News reported in late January after a year-long investigation. He purchased the apartments in 2014 and, according to the probe, the funds for the purchases came from Iran’s oil program.

In addition, Khamenei “owns 11 mansions in Hampstead, North London, through a front man and a shell company registered in the Isle of Man.” The properties are part of a “global property empire” worth “hundreds of millions of pounds,” according to Bloomberg.

Being able to sell oil to China, Russia and others despite all the sanctions over the years was certainly lucrative for Khamenei. And, if they need any more money to continue …if they can… enriching uranium, all he has to do is sell some property.

If he still has a pulse:

Did they bring along a cardboard cutout of Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie and play “Tusk” at the allegiance ceremony as well?

UPDATE: Heh, indeed.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “What is a Woman?”

The New Cluelessness? “What is a Man?”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

JOHN NOLTE: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Ultra-Woke Frankenstein Flick The Bride! Bombs at Box Office.

Useless Sycophants in the Entertainment Media, did you see what we didn’t do? What we didn’t do is what you useless sycophants did with Melania. We didn’t wishcast by writing piece after piece about how Bride! would die at the box office. Why? Because I try not to make a fool of myself, and one of the easiest ways to make a fool of yourself is to predict the box office with such certainty — which is what you useless sycophants did with Melania, something all Normal People thank you for.

So, The Bride!…

Writer, director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! cost around $100 million to produce and at least another $60 to $80 million to promote, and it’s about to become an iconic box office bomb with an opening weekend in the $7 to $10 million range.

The Bride! had everything going for it. A big star in Christian Bale, the hottest actress around in Jessie Buckley (who’s about to win a Best Actress Oscar), a massive budget, plenty of promotion, a wide release in over 3,300 theaters, an appealing genre, and a 61 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes thanks to critics who didn’t really like the movie but found a way to pretend they did to prove their fealty to the Woke Gestapo.

So what went wrong…?

Well, I haven’t seen the movie and probably never will, but unless the title is Barbie, woke equals 100 percent flop rate at the box office.

Many of the critics who pretended to like this mess had the same complaints as those who published negative reviews: 1) it’s an angry feminist diatribe and 2) Gyllenhaal didn’t have a handle on what she wanted the movie to say so she threw a bunch of feminist tropes against the wall and now moviegoers have to sit through watching none of them stick.

Angry feminist diatribe? This woke-Website’s headline implies exactly that: Misogynistic Reactions Can’t Stop Feminist Frankenstein Reinvention The Bride! From Being One of the Boldest Studio Films Ever.

Perhaps Gyllenhaal inadvertently remade the wrong old beloved B-movie, though. Instead of The Bride(!) of Frankenstein, she’s remade the Time Machine instead: The Bride! A Feminist Frankenstein That Plays Like a Lost Remnant of Woke Culture.

Developed in 2023 and early 2024, The Bride! was passed between studios that reportedly disagreed with writer-director Gyllenhaal about budget and creative direction. Looking at the disastrous final product, it’s hard not to come down on the side of executives who had creative disagreements. And no amount of money should have been spent on this mess.

More than anything else, The Bride! feels like the lost remnants of a pre-vibe shift culture, the last vestige of a fully woke world. There are explicit references to riot grrrl culture, and the film’s climax literally involves Ida repeatedly shouting “me too!” at no one in particular.

It would be too easy to describe this as a stitched-together monster of a movie, but at least Frankenstein’s monster had something resembling life.

In any case, the Critical Drinker is succinct: The Bride! It Sucks!

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

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Suspected terrorist defiantly flashes ISIS salute after he’s busted for tossing explosive device near Gracie Mansion.

One of the accused terrorists busted for lobbing explosive devices near Gracie Mansion flashed a sick salute honoring ISIS as he was led in shackles from a police precinct Monday.

Emir Balat, 18, was seen holding up his right index finger — a universal salute for the terror group — and grinning at the press while being led by a cop and an FBI agent.

Balat, wearing a black T-shirt and beige pants, made the gesture before one of the officers flanking him slapped down his hand.

Balat, whose parents are reportedly from Turkey but who became naturalized citizens in 2017, was arrested Saturday along with 19-year-old Ibrahim Kayumi after a homemade “Mother of Satan” bomb was thrown at protesters outside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Upper East Side residence.

Related:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

WE’RE WATCHING DOWNFALL, BUT WITH MASS NOTIFICATION SYSTEMS AND PCs TO CRANK OUT AI SLOP IN THE AYATOLLAH-BUNKER:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

GONE IN 60 SECONDS: Noem’s deputy director of ICE bought thousands of vehicles that officers can’t use.

A former Trump administration official wasted millions of taxpayer dollars given to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to purchase thousands of employee vehicles that the agency cannot use to arrest illegal immigrants, according to three sources.

ICE’s top brass are quietly searching for a way to amend the remainder of a massive order of pick-up trucks and SUVs that were ordered last year and slated to be wrapped with the agency’s name, logo, and motto, as well as storing away many vehicles that have been delivered to ICE facilities across the country, the Washington Examiner has learned.

“ICE has never had marked vehicles,” the first person familiar with the purchases said in a phone call. “In talking to people, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to use these, we can’t.’”

The saga is the latest controversial expenditure of taxpayer money within the Department of Homeland Security and speaks to the different ways political appointees at the department have tried to approach operations versus how career law enforcement officials have historically done so.

Over the past year, assaults against ICE personnel have risen 8,000%, according to the DHS, and federal police have opted to hide their faces and identities while working in public. They have frequently switched license plates on rental vehicles to avoid detection by activists, who track the license plate numbers of suspected ICE vehicles in massive crowdsourced databases.

Despite the growing number of ways ICE employees have sought to protect their identities, ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, placed a bulk order for vehicles clearly marked with ICE’s logo.

Exit quote: “‘If leadership would have been consulted — leadership being the executive assistant directors, do you need marked vehicles, the people that have done this job would have said, ‘We don’t need marked vehicles, because you’re not going to use them,’ the first person said.”

UPDATE Why would ICE need unmarked cars? Oh, right:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

METAPHOR ALERT:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T COMMIT JOURNALISM HERE, THIS IS CBS NEWS!

Oh no, not a political adversary to a politician! And yet, “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics,” H.L. Mencken wrote in 1920s, in sharp contrast to the vast majority of today’s “journalists,” who view themselves as Democratic Party operatives with bylines.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

THE WORLD THE FATWA MADE:

A mysterious feature of the fatwa was the way it brought out apologists, appeasers, and peacemakers who misunderstood its motivations. Former President Jimmy Carter blamed Rushdie in The New York Times for “vilifying the Prophet Mohammed and defaming the Holy Koran.” The former president, who had been in office when the ayatollah held American citizens captive, blindfolded and abused for 444 days, did not seem to recognize the nature of the trap he was falling into. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” Carter wrote, he nevertheless agreed the work of fiction was a “direct insult” to Muslims whose sacred beliefs had been “violated.”

Those like Carter, who approached the fatwa with rational expectations, wound up saying irrational things, ratifying its terms even if they quarreled with them. Blaming Rushdie’s novel for inflicting “the kind of intercultural wound that is difficult to heal,” as though the author had assassinated an archduke, Carter chose to see the fatwa as a mirror of offended religious sentiment, even though it was a license to commit transnational murder issued by a cleric who had named a street after Anwar Sadat’s assassin.

Carter’s hope that “tactful public statements and private discussions could still defuse this explosive situation” was like waiting for a hostage to be released. He failed to understand that the fatwa’s rejection of borders, laws, national sovereignty, and individual autonomy was the whole point. Or that a decree that made the victim the aggressor, murder a virtue, and suicide a sacrament did not permit common ground.

The message Carter failed to understand was received loud and clear by a 24-year-old American named Hadi Matar.

Thirty-three years after Rushdie was sentenced to death, Matar traveled from Fairview, New Jersey, to Chautauqua, New York, where he attacked Rushdie with a knife from behind as he sat onstage at the Chautauqua Institution waiting to give a speech about free expression and the importance of keeping writers safe. Matar, who told a reporter that he had only read “a page or two” of The Satanic Verses but knew it was an “attack on Islam,” stabbed the 75-year-old writer in the face, the eye, the neck, and the midsection, 15 times before being tackled by bystanders.

That was the logic of the fatwa. Khomeini hadn’t read The Satanic Verses either but had revoked its creator’s right to exist anyway. This helps explain how Matar, who was found guilty of attempted murder last year, could tell the court before his sentencing: “Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people. He wants to be a bully; he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”

You don’t need magic to turn a writer into a monster; the sleep of reason will do, and the overriding presence of conspiracy theories that do the thinking for you, and turn whole categories of humanity into stock villains in a long-running play.

On Thursday, Erik Florack described Carter as “The Father of the Islamic Revolution.” A decade later, he was quite happy to keep stoking it along.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

FAFO:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

DAY SEVEN OF THE U.S.–ISRAEL WAR: The Strategy Appears to Be Working, and Iran Is Losing.

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.” – Carl von Clausewitz

Seven days into the U.S.–Israel war with Iran, the central question is not simply what has happened on the battlefield, but whether the strategy behind the war is working.

In classical strategic terms, war must always be evaluated through the relationship between political objectives and military action. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz argued that the political objective determines the military means used to achieve it. The success of a war cannot be measured simply by explosions, missile launches, or headlines. It must be measured by whether the use of force achieves the political objectives of the war, whether through territorial control, destruction of military capability, or compelling the enemy to change its behavior in accordance with those objectives.

The first task, therefore, is to identify what those objectives actually are.

Thus far, the United States has been consistent in publicly stating its goals. President Donald Trump’s March 1 statement announcing the start of operations made clear that the war is aimed at ending the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons pursuit, destroying the missile capabilities that Tehran has long used as a shield for that nuclear ambition, and eliminating Iran’s ability to threaten global commerce through the Strait of Hormuz.

Long, but well worth a read.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2026

March 8, 2026

REPORT: Iranian F-14 fleet attacked at a base in central Iran believed to host all the remaining F-14s in Iranian service.

Early in the morning on Mar. 8, 2026, the IDF announced that Iranian Air Force F-14 Tomcats at the 8th Tactical Fighter Base in Isfahan (or Esfahan), in central Iran, home to the 81st, 82nd and 83rd Tactical Fighter Squadrons, had been obliterated in an air strike part of the Operation Roaring Lion.

* * * * * * * *

However, the latest attack is something different: the 8th Tactical Fighter Base, which was also targeted last year, is believed to host all the remaining F-14s in Iranian service, meaning no Tomcat (or very few, maybe hidden in some underground facility) may have survived anywhere in the world.

Well, only in museums:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 8th, 2026
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