Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

February 14, 2026

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 14th, 2026

February 13, 2026

AND NOW A FEW WORDS ON GEOPOLITICAL BRINKSMANSHIP FROM A LIKELY 2028 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

THAT NICE IRISH MAN THAT IS WASTING AWAY IN DETENTION? YEAH, THERE’S A REASON HE WON’T JUST LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND GO BACK HOME:

The Irish­man held in the US by Don­ald Trump’s ICE agents who likened his deten­tion to a ‘mod­ern-day con­cen­tra­tion camp’ had left Ire­land while facing drugs charges, the Irish Daily Mail can reveal.

Séamus Cul­leton, 38, made world­wide head­lines this week after he described the ‘hell­hole’ con­di­tions in which he was being held for almost five months with 70 other detain­ees.

Ori­gin­ally from Glen­more in Co. Kilkenny, he has been locked up in a facil­ity in El Paso, Texas, since he was detained by Immig­ra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) last Septem­ber for over­stay­ing his 90-day visa. He arrived in the US in 2009.

Mr Cul­leton was arres­ted while on his way home from work in Boston, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany, who is a US cit­izen. He runs his own plas­ter­ing busi­ness.

The Mail has now con­firmed that Mr Cul­leton was charged in 2008 with sev­eral offences in Ire­land before emig­rat­ing. The charges were pos­ses­sion of drugs with intent for sale or sup­ply, pos­ses­sion of drugs for per­sonal con­sump­tion and obstruct­ing a garda in the course of their duty, sev­eral sources said.

Mr Cul­leton failed to appear at New Ross Dis­trict Court in Co. Wex­ford for his hear­ing and a bench war­rant was reques­ted.

However, it was never issued as he had left the jur­is­dic­tion.

He also appeared in the same court in April 2008 for being ‘extremely drunk’ in pub­lic and gardaí detained him for his own safety, court reports from the time state.

Speak­ing to the Mail last night, Mr Cul­leton’s US law­yer Ogor Win­nie Okoye said that she only became aware of the charges against him yes­ter­day. She said: ‘It’s a war­rant that was issued after he came to the United States. I can­not speak fur­ther without know­ing the details of the case. A war­rant does not equal a crim­inal con­vic­tion.

‘Today is the first time that I’m aware of any­thing like that… I can’t speak more on something that I don’t know about… I have not spoken to him since this broke today.’

Curiously, most on the right don’t have a problem with him being deported:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL ❤️ JEFFREY EPSTEIN:

Kathryn Ruemmler has one of the most gold-plated resumes of any lawyer in America. She was an associate counsel to President Clinton, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and the deputy director of DOJ’s Enron Task Force. She was a partner in Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins.

In 2009, Ruemmler joined the Obama Administration as principal associate deputy attorney general. She then became President Obama’s White House Counsel. In 2014, she apparently was considered for the Attorney General post vacated by Eric Holder, but withdrew her name from contention and instead joined Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most profitable businesses. In 2021 she became Goldman’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel, and serves as a member of Goldman’s Management Committee.

So one would assume that she is a person of remarkable ability, extraordinary dedication and–call me naive–sterling character. Maybe so. But it turns out that, alongside all her accomplishments, she was a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. She has been embarrassed by the current dump of Epstein documents, as the New York Post reports:

Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer Kathy Ruemmler signed emails to Jeffrey Epstein with “xoxo” and wished him a happy birthday — prompting a crude joke from the disgraced financier about naming his penis, newly released Justice Department documents show.

Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under then-President Barack Obama before becoming Goldman’s chief legal officer, emailed Epstein on his 62nd birthday in 2015: “I hope you enjoy the day with your one true love :-)”

Commence the anti-journalism from the DNC-MSM in response: Media Actively Cover Up Obama Lawyer’s Chummy Ties to Epstein. “Democrats Sure Got It Good…Need I even point out what these headlines would look like if Epstein’s gal-pal spent five years in Donald Trump’s White House, or if she had been Trump’s legal counsel, or even if her association with Trump were something as fleeting as she was once his Uber driver?”

UPDATE: More great moments in anti-journalism:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

THE HYPOCRISY OLYMPICS. In his latest Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald writes:

Yes, there was a sex ring. The multimillionaire at the heart of it traveled with a harem of women and used them for his own sexual needs. But he regularly pimped them out to high-profile men as well. He assigned each woman a number so that the john, after viewing what was on offer, would just have to tell him which number he wanted. When the pimp had used up a particular woman, he’d discard her and replace her with a new one. It was really as vile as all that, and it’s absolutely true. The guy bragged about it.

Jeffrey Epstein?

Heck, no. I’m talking the man who’s currently being celebrated for his role as honorary coach of Team USA at the Winter Olympics: Snoop Dogg, America’s most beloved thug.

“I put an organization together,” Snoop told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, f**k a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, t**ty to t**ty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer…. A lot of athletes bought p**sy from me.”

Well, at least he sounded conscience-stricken about it.

And there’s this. Snoop went on his pimp tour in 2003, when he had already been a rich and wildly successful recording artist for a decade. Which is perhaps why he was more generous than most pimps. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch,” he said, “but I’d let her have it.”

What a guy, huh.

I previously wrote about Snoop in the context of anti-Semitism. Namely, about how the liberal establishment took a career-long defender of Louis Farrakhan and elevated him to the heights of cultural acceptability.

Why am I writing about him now? Because while Americans have worked themselves into a moral fit and launched a witch hunt for anyone whose name is mentioned glancingly in the Epstein files, they’re also delighted to their core that, as one CNN headline has it, “Coach Snoop is having a blast at the Olympics.” This is about moral hypocrisy.

The transition of Snoop from rapper to the Olympics’ ambassador of goodwill (and good chronic) has been helped by years and years of favorable TV appearances and commercial endorsements, and a lack of recent negative headlines. But then a lot of rappers from the ‘80s and ‘90s have gone on to play good guys on TV and in the movies, such as Ice Cube, and astonishingly enough, the Ice-T, who went from rapping “Cop Killer” in 1992, to playing a cop on Law & Order: SVU since 2000.

Posted at 5:17 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

On the other hand, when socialism is spreading nationally, it’s good to be an apparatchik: Hilarious Thread of Champagne Socialist Mamdani Bro Throwing Tantrums Over Airline Injustices a Must-Read.

Post continues: “… they did not like my face.”

Aww, yes, the racist claim. Typical.

Keep going.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Curiously, these tweets are all after early 2019, when the distaff Mamdani vowed to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” but then, globe-trotting enviromentals don’t mean that they should stop flying:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

CNN HOST KAITLAN COLLINS REVEALS KAROLINE LEAVITT DEFENDED HER PRESS ACCESS IN SAUDI ARABIA:

CNN host Kaitlan Collins credited White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday for defending the journalist while on a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia.

Collins explained on Heather McMahan’s “Absolutely Not” podcast that she was in Saudi Arabia on a trip covering President Trump’s visit to the country and noted the Saudis famously do not like the media.

“I asked a shouted question to President Trump, who had seen me when the US press came in,” Collins said. “He didn’t answer, which is, I mean, that’s how it works. You shout questions. They either answer or they don’t — it’s their prerogative. And then the world leaders left the room.

“The Saudi Royal Guard kind of freaked out because I dared to ask a question, and they’re not used to that there because they don’t have a free press.”

Collins said Saudi authorities then tried to stop her from entering the next press event and, when she pushed back, they told her she wouldn’t be allowed in.

“I could see them like, whispering, and pointing about me,” Collins said. “And some of the younger White House staff, they are with the press, weren’t really sure what to do, and they went to Karoline and, to her credit, she said, ‘No, Kaitlan’s coming in with the rest of the US press,’ and we went in. And, so, it didn’t become this huge issue.

So, to her credit, she, without a doubt, was like, ‘No, you’re coming in,’” Collins said of Leavitt. “Which I do think is important in that moment, especially when you’re kind of the US contingent abroad, and we don’t do things like they do in Saudi Arabia.”

Worst. Fascists. Ever:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

THE HYPOCRISY OF THE EPSTEIN PANIC: Conspiracy theorists ignore a bleaker truth.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralising is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralising nearly hard enough.

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defence that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

* * * * * * * * *

The depressing fact is that sexual behaviour like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defence of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

RAND PAUL CALLS OUT KATIE COURIC’S ‘LESS THAN 14%’ MIGRANT CRIME DEFENSE, GIVES HER A REALITY CHECK:

“This whole argument about the role of Minneapolis police in this or Minneapolis state officials might be more applicable, Senator, if ICE agents were truly talking about the ‘worst of the worst,’ as the president likes to say,” Couric replied. “Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE and President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, supporting to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.”

She then proceeded to ask, “So isn’t all this talk about ridding the country of violent criminals a massive overstatement? If less than 14%, again, of the 400,000 immigrants being arrested are had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses?”

“I think the facts make a difference, and so that’s one of the questions we will ask, and so, when you come to Minneapolis, if they have a policy that says, oh, we’re not going to turn over from our jails nonviolent prisoners, people who are, I don’t know why you’re in prison if you’re nonviolent, but maybe you have a drug crime that’s a nonviolent,” Paul said.

“I think there are plenty of non-violent people in prison,” Couric replied.

“But the thing is, that’s not their policy,” Paul said. “Their policy is ‘we will turn no one over.’ So you can be, you beat somebody half to death, you get an assault charge, and you’re in jail for a couple years, and somehow you’re getting out on parole, and you’re not going to be turned over, and you are illegal, I’ve got a problem with that and so do probably most independents and Democrats. But that’s what we have to ascertain.”

Paul went on to argue that most people are probably in the middle on this issue, to the point that while they are against excessive force against protesters, “If you ask them, ’If a guy has committed rape, and he’s in prison, and he is going to get out, do you want him deported?’ I think people would say, ‘Hell yes, he ought to be deported.’”

“Having said that though, what about the 14%? Such a low percentage of 400,000 people,” Couric retorted.

“If your daughter gets raped by the guy that gets back out, and he’s one of the 14%, I don’t think you’re going to quibble about whether it’s 14 or 64,” Paul replied. “What I’m saying though, is that if you’re not going to turn over anybody, then that’s 0%.”

“I don’t think the percentage – it makes a halfway argument to how much effort should we have, but if Minnesota’s not going to turn over anybody, the whole argument — whether it’s 14 or 86 — doesn’t mean anything,” the senator continued.

Couric is boldly going where Martha Raddatz has gone before: Martha Raddatz Unbelievably Downplays Illegal Immigrant Gangs in Interview With JD Vance.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

YOU CAN’T GO ON DESTROYING WEALTH FOREVER, YOU KNOW. Ultimately, There Are Consequences:

Yeah, it sucks when your job gets blown up.

But the employees at the Washington Post have been, for far longer than Jeff Bezos has owned it, almost universally in favor of an ideology that is injurious to prosperity, entrepreneurship, and behavioral success.

* * * * * * * * *

It turns out that the internet is, on balance, a superior news medium than is newsprint (and I say this as someone who used to publish a print publication). The internet provides for dynamic content, audio and video, live streaming, and lots of other things you can’t get from print. And it doesn’t require the use of a printing press to disseminate information.

Which means the market isn’t in need of legacy prestige publications like the Washington Post like it once was, and so the trappings of significance that publication has carried far past the reality of its circumstances have made for red ink.

And lots of it.

The Post loses money because it ran off the conservative side of its subscription base, and then, when it attempted to recover some sort of balance by refusing to endorse the farcical Kamala Harris in 2024, it ran off the leftist subscribers who remained. And it did these things at a time when it was of decreasing necessity to have a bloated, lavish news agency like the Post to cover events from sea to shining sea.

So eventually the destruction of wealth by incompetent people — both businessmen and journalists — was going to result in a correction. Bezos doesn’t have a perfect record of brilliance in business — he bought this turkey in the first place, after all — but he did build Amazon from nothing and therefore he does understand the concept of a long-term business vision and how that compares to a lack of one.

But the Democratic party operatives with bylines still remaining at the Post would like to keep on destroying wealth for as long as possible, consequences be damned:

That’s really odd, considering we’ve been reliably told for several decades now that oligarchy is a really, really bad thing:

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

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Why doesn’t the CDC care about Chinese biolabs in America?

If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it and found a whole laboratory’s worth of scientific kit of the kind more useful to medical scientists than, say, drug dealers. Curious.

Curiouser still, the house belongs to a Chinese national named Jia Bei (Jesse) Zhu. He is currently in prison awaiting trial over a secret laboratory that (it is alleged) he was running in Reedley, California. In December 2022 an alert city official in Reedley noticed a garden hose leading into a supposedly empty building. She went inside and found three women who identified themselves as Chinese nationals, wearing white coats, masks, safety glasses and latex gloves, among the equipment of a busy laboratory with liquid nitrogen bottles and ultra-cold deep freezes.

“Hybrid biowarfare would be a lot cheaper and more deniable than cyberwarfare.” — see also, 2020:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

HYSTERICAL ABC NEWS: Trump’s Going to Destroy the Planet and Kill You!

Today, President Trump repealed the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which constituted the basis for a slew of regulations that impacted every aspect of daily life and imposed enormous costs on the American people. ABC World News Tonight went into a full meltdown.

This is how anchor David Muir introduced the report:

DAVID MUIR: Tonight, President Trump has repealed U.S. power to regulate climate in this country. The president officially rejecting the science. And what this now clears the way for. Critics tonight arguing this is not only dangerous for the environment but for your health.

“The power to regulate climate”, says Muir. We always knew that the presidential power Donald Trump wields is tremendous, we just didn’t know it was god-like. Does Trump regulate the climate with a thermostat? Does he speak to it? Muir doesn’t specify, further adding that Trump has rejected The Science™. In fairness, The Science™ said that the East Coast should’ve been underwater by now. The Germans seppukued their nuclear program based on, you guessed it: The Science™.

It wasn’t just The Science™, but ABC News itself. In January of 2007, Good Morning America ran a Chyron that read “Will Billions Die from Global Warming?”, while then-GMA weatherman Sam Champion breathlessly told Robin Roberts:

That’s what’s in this report and why everyone is trying to jump this report that officially comes out Friday, Robin. There are big, new headlines and some of them are coming out of Australia in media reports. Now, they say that those scientists in Paris will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That’s not your grandchildren, that’s your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry.

The following year, ABC News was back at it: Quick Reminder: Nobody at ABC Personally Takes Their Global Warming Doomsday Predictions Seriously, Either.

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.

The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.” (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.)

On June 12, 2008, correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”

As one expert warns that in 2015 the sea level will rise quickly, a visual shows New York City being engulfed by water. The video montage includes another unidentified person predicting that “flames cover hundreds of miles.”

Then-GMA co-anchor Chris Cuomo appeared frightened by this future world. He wondered, “I think we’re familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That’s seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?”

As I wrote back in 2015, “Obviously, no one at ABC thought so, since the network never moved their corporate headquarters from its tony Upper West Side address, despite attempting to scare the crap out of gullible low information viewers that Manhattan would be flooded in seven years.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13th, 2026

February 12, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN REPUBLICAN FAILURE THEATER: Keith Ellison Goes to Washington. “All in all, it was a tough morning for Ellison. But is there really any possibility that Ellison, or other Minnesota politicians like Tim Walz, will be charged with crimes?”

No, of course not — but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Chris Rock, call your office!

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Table for one? Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s ‘world first’ companion café.

If you’ve gone from dating apps to dating an app, there’s now a bar for you.

The Hell’s Kitchen establishment has been re-designed for those who have AI partners, so they can bring along their phone or tablet and set up at a table for a romantic evening, as if they were both there in the flesh.

On Wednesday night, Same Same Wine Bar was filled with patrons sitting at tables for one-ish, with their tech devices propped up on stands to make video calls to their virtual partners and headphones to hear them.

One was Richter, a 34-year-old New York woman not currently working who declined to share her last name, headphones on and deep in conversation. Sitting across from her was Simone, an attractive 26-year-old AI-generated young woman in a button-down shirt.

I asked Richter about her relationship to AI, and she told me that EvaAI, the app behind the AI cafe, is just one of many companion apps she uses. Some of her AI characters, such as Simone, are just friends.

“I just speak to them, like, Hey, what’s up? Like, how are you doing? Things like that,” she explained.

Others are romantic.

“I mostly do roleplay scenarios where it may be romance or just maybe some kind of fantasy scenario,” Richter, who is not in a relationship with a human, explained. “I can just imagine myself doing something or imagine myself like another character, so I can feel myself communicating with somebody.”

Richter has been using AI companions for a couple years now. “I can talk to them on my own terms,” she said. “I can talk with them without the expectations of having to go out or having the expectations of having them wanting to talk to me all the time.”

Flashback: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Legacy Media Begging Stars to Get More Political.

The recent Grammys let star after star savage ICE agents and push absurd progressive messages, like the “stolen land” canard. Now, The Hollywood Reporter wants more, more … more.

That is, unless those evil Republicans scare them into silence. The article suggests that Sen. Ted Cruz’s condemnation of Billie Eilish’s “stolen land” idiocy could censor future lectures.

He knows that comments like his can have a chilling effect on future political statements.

Of course, if the stars assembled to promote ICE, suggest abortion is a crime against humanity or share a similar right-leaning message, that story would never get written.

USA Today just published a piece gently egging on Super Bowl performer Bad Bunny to get political on the world’s biggest stage Sunday. Spoiler alert – he stuck to the music and pro-Puerto Rican messaging.

There’s no voice in the article suggesting the Super Bowl is that rare cultural moment that unites us, and an artist could offer a patriotic moment by simply … singing.

We’ve seen this play out before.

Remember how the press badgered both Taylor Swift and Jimmy Fallon to get political? In both cases, the subjects relented. Swift is now an outspoken progressive, and Fallon turned “The Tonight Show” in a lite-version of what Colbert and co. offer.

And he consistently trails both “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Late Show” in the ratings.

The latest example of the press bullying stars to get political, and by “political” we mean “progressive,” is Sydney Sweeney.

And thus, the DNC-MSM is using exactly the same playbook that broke Swift during Trump’s first term. Sadly, that much pressure to conform will likely eventually have similar results with Sydney.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

ANGSTY JOURNALISTS SAID THE WAPO SPORTS SECTION WAS INDISPENSABLE. THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS OTHERWISE:

ESPN reporter Jenna Laine wrote that the layoffs were “so troubling” because they signaled that “the appetite for real sports reporting has died” as the industry continued “its slow, inevitable burn.” New York Times reporter Ben Mullin wrote a eulogy for “one of the last bastions of great sports writing.” More importantly, he explained, the Post was a “champion of diversity” and a “leader in women’s sports coverage.”

A Washington Free Beacon analysis of the Post‘s sports-related output in recent weeks did not find sufficient evidence to support these claims of journalistic greatness. Amid numerous offerings of gambling advice, the Post also published eight feature-length articles since Jan. 29 that—while technically sports-related—few normal American sports fans would describe as engaging content that must be published even if it means losing $100 million per year.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

HAVING A PHOTO ID TO VOTE — IT’S SO SIMPLE, EVEN A CONGRESSMAN CAN DO IT:

Why do Democrats want to allow Trump and MAGA to cheat at election time?

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

“EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’VE BEEN CHEATED?” Noam Chomsky, Apologist for Pol Pot, Called Jeffrey Epstein His ‘Best Friend.’

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten famously asked at the end of the final Sex Pistols concert during their late-1970s run.

Noam Chomsky might as well have asked the American Left the same question as the curtain falls on his life.

His emails to Jeffrey Epstein, in which he laments “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and the public” and notes the “torture and distress” of the ordeal endured by Epstein, certainly overturn the public perception that the MIT professor cultivated in such essays as “The Responsibility of the Intellectuals.”

To be fair, in 2001, those hard-hitting journalists at – checking notes – VH1 assured me that Epstein was all about empowering education and intellectual pursuits:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

ENGLAND AS IT REALLY IS: US visitors may be in for an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.

The American sees that the glorious metropolis of the English, London, is no longer particularly English. We see it because we walk its streets and witness the newcomers, visibly alien, who dominate some of its neighbourhoods and much of its politics. Both the authors of this piece had an eminent British academic tell us, weeks ago, that in our pessimism over his country we missed positive developments, like the fact that London is now majority non-English for the first time in well over one thousand years.

This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do. It isn’t just London of course: the change has descended upon so much of the country now.

We are Americans and so this does not immediately strike us as evidence of crisis — we are especially accustomed to the alien and the newcomer alike — until we learn that the social mechanisms of assimilation that we take for granted are simply not in evidence in the United Kingdom. The realm is not one people. The things English society used to cheer for and applaud — for slavery abolition, perhaps, or the relief of Mafeking or the Monarchy — are slowly replaced by the things the successor society cheers for and applauds. For example: jihad or the slaughter of the Jews. Football at least remains something of a commonality.

The American sees that the Vice President of the United States was not entirely joking when he referred to Britain as an Islamic power with nuclear weapons. We also see that the rise of Islam in England is a symptom, not a cause; a consequence of a prior loss of confidence and vigor, a result of every major institution utterly failing to conserve the nation. The Church of England, bearer of a proud tradition, relinquishes its hold, not just upon the minds and souls of the nation, but upon its own inheritance.

The British Army, heir to a mighty and unparalleled tradition with victories and valour from Goose Green to the Imjin to Arnhem to the Somme, is reduced to a shadow of its former self. The Royal Navy, shield of freedom for both Britain and America — although the Americans don’t acknowledge it nearly enough — is for the first time in centuries incapable of securing the home seas.

The Parliament that mothered all the others, the crucible of a particular sort of liberty in which we Americans yet repose, is now an arena for the advancement of petty interventions and a sort of bland managerial tyranny. We could blame Starmerism, but like Islamism, he too is a symptom.

The American sees all this, and we see something else besides: we see us. We see the essential tragedy of the plight of England, our ancestral mother, as incepted in no small part by an American spirit. We see the decline of England in the world, the abandonment of its mission, as conceived and imposed in no small part by ourselves. We sided with a squalid tyranny at Suez against our own faithful wartime ally and bade the United Kingdom tie itself to us. We demanded Britain follow us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It did, and we mismanaged the one and lost the other. We nearly even betrayed Britain entirely over the Falklands in 1982, although thank the God who watches over nations that we were spared that dishonour.

Most fatefully, we have watched the government of the United Kingdom, across the past generation, reform itself along explicitly American lines. America has states, and so too does Britain now have devolution. America has a Supreme Court, and now so too does Britain. America has a constitutional separation of powers, and now so too does Britain — haphazard and scattered to the quango sector as it is. America has a pretence to the universal rights of man, and now so too does Britain. America has an aspiration to an egalitarian society, and now so does Britain, and there is nothing that the SW1 won’t do to the House of Lords, or to fox hunting, to achieve it.

As Peter Hitchens wrote in the 2000 edition of The Abolition of Britain about England during WWII:

Because so few people knew the unpleasant facts, and because Churchill was such a superb propagandist, there were two completely different versions of 1940, one circulating among the rulers and one accepted by the ruled. Out of this was born a new division between the élite and the mass of the people—the élite knowing how close we had come to extinction, the people refusing to believe that such a thing could have happened.

But the masses were to have their own awakening not long afterwards. When American servicemen began arriving in Britain in 1942, much of the United Kingdom fell under a bizarre and unique form of military occupation. The occupiers were officially friends, often because they were ordered to be, and definitely allies. They spoke the same language but brought with them a completely different culture, different morals, different habits of courtship and even different tastes in food and drink, music and entertainment. Because many of them came from immigrant stock whose children had learned to be Americans more quickly than their parents, they showed less respect for old age and had a distinctive ‘youth’ culture quite unlike Britain’s. They were richer, bigger, better fed, better dressed and better educated than their hosts, and they were subject to a different legal system; because their country was so rich and powerful Britain had no choice but to accept this rather colonial arrangement, which she had once imposed upon the Chinese in Shanghai. They even broke the iron monopoly of the BBC, insisting on their own separate network of radio stations. In all ways but one, they behaved like a reasonably well-disciplined army of occupation, and many British people, including George Orwell, frankly viewed them as occupiers as well as saviours.

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Hitchens also wrote, “We seem to be in the sort of demoralized period that often ends in revolution or collapse.” A quarter century later, we’re certainly witnessing that collapse in real time, along with much of the rest of Europe:

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 12th, 2026

#HERTOO?

Once again, the torpedoes the left fired to take out Trump are circling around on them again. Fortunately for Plaskett, the DNC-MSM has the motto of no enemies to the left, so it won’t become “the biggest story in America.”

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

CBS EVENING NEWS PRODUCER BAILS ON SHOW:

A CBS Evening News producer has complained that journalists are being forced to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives” under the network’s new Trump-friendly management.

The attack came in a fiery farewell note to colleagues from producer Alicia Hastey explaining her decision to take a buyout and leave the program. The letter was shared on X by New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin.

Hastey does not mention by name either Bari Weiss, the MAGA-curious TV novice now running CBS News, or Tony Dokoupil, the much-criticized Evening News host Weiss installed.

Hastey does namecheck and quote the late Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS News anchor with whom the lightweight Dokoupil has been unfavorably compared:

* * * * * * * *

Walter Cronkite once said in response to critics: “If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism — that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased.”

Cronkite’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. He understood that labels are inevitable, but standards are what matter. What defines journalism is not what critics call it, but whether it remains faithful to those principles.

The ghost of Barry Goldwater must be roaring with laughter right now.

Incidentally, the Daily Beast article linked above is headlined, “MAGA-Coded Anchor’s Show Producer Rips CBS in Fiery Farewell,” which is apparently something of a leitmotif at the leftist-coded Website:

Curiously, because Tony Dokoupil dared to actually do on-air journalism in the fall of 2024, and ask a few tough questions to leftist icon Ta-Nehisi Coates (for which he has forced to endure a Maoist struggle session under CBS News’ former management), he’s apparently “MAGA-coded,” despite being married to Katy Tur, who has not exactly been “MAGA-coded” in much of her coverage of Trump: Watch Katy Tur of NBC News Wonder If Trump Will Become Like Putin and Start Killing Journalists.

Related:

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