Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

November 1, 2025

SASHA STONE: No Country for Old Media: The Shameful Blackout on Arctic Frost.

Is it worse than Watergate? I think so. But you have to look at the big picture, not just one story. The Democrats’ ten-year war to prevent Trump from representing those who voted for him and to deny half the country their right to representation remains one of the biggest scandals in American history.

We’ve never had an administration refuse to step aside because they didn’t like the winner and decide for the American people that their votes didn’t matter because one side had all of the power. It was never Trump who refused to leave. It was Barack Obama and the America he believed he had forever shaped.

Since the Democrats have complete control of the legacy media, they decide what matters. They have manufactured nearly every major crisis where Trump is concerned. So much so that they’ve inadvertently manifested a Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario for themselves, which is why they’re so dangerous now. They are willing to do and say anything to win a war they’ve already lost.

This press conference was ignored by the legacy press, but it’s worth listening to. It lays out in shocking detail just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

It’s No Country for Old Media because they can’t cover a story like this, no matter how big it gets. They don’t chase the story anymore.

Let’s check in at Bari Weiss’ Free Press to see how they’re covering the story. So far, it looks like only one mention, on an October 10th news roundup by Nellie Bowles, Weiss’s spouse:

FBI just investigates senators all day, all night: A new document posted by Senator Chuck Grassley shows that the FBI, under the Biden administration, got phone records for eight of his Republican Senate colleagues, as well as a congressman, during its “Arctic Frost” investigation. The lawmakers targeted, in a probe of “election conspiracy,” Mike Kelly, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Dan Sullivan, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis, and Marsha Blackburn. They got everyone. All the FBI agents who weren’t tasked with smashing windows on January 6 were charged with tailing Lindsey Graham. The more famous Bari gets, the more likely it is that an FBI detail will also start poking around on me, and I just want them to know that I voted for Biden 17 times. I dug up bones and stole identities to cast more votes. I registered migrants and voted for them, for him. But you may want to sniff around Suzy [Weiss]—she’s got some skeletons.

If that’s all the space Weiss’ Website devotes to the topic, it’s not surprisingly, CBS is remaining schtum as well: Complicit: ABC, CBS, and NBC Suppress Bombshell Documents on ‘Arctic Frost’ Scandal.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 1st, 2025

October 31, 2025

IT’S COME TO THIS: Spain ‘regrets pain and injustice’ caused by colonization of Mexico.

Spain’s foreign minister has expressed “regret” over the “pain and suffering” caused by its colonisation of Mexico.

Jose Manuel Albares made the comments on Friday at the opening of the exhibition of Indigenous Mexican art in Madrid, just days after Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mexican president, renewed calls for a Spanish apology.

Mr Albares said relations between Spain and Mexico were “a very human story, and like every human story, full of light and shadow.

“There has also been pain – pain and injustice toward Indigenous peoples, to whom this exhibition is dedicated,” he added.

“There was injustice – it is only fair to recognise it today, and fair to regret it. Because that is also part of our shared history, and we cannot deny or forget it.”

I guess Aztec Batman didn’t have enough gadgets in his utility belt to fight them back: Trailer: Warner Brothers reveals Aztec Batman, where evil white Europeans come to destroy the peaceful natives.

UPDATE: “Some of earliest thinkers, such as the Aztec:”

Here’s an example of that deep thinking in action:

Meanwhile, back in Europe: The University of Oxford Is Older Than the Aztec Empire and Other Facts That Will Change Your Perspective on History.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 31st, 2025

VDH: Are Americans Better or Worse Off Since January?

No wars broke out during Trump’s current year. Tentative Trump-inspired ceasefires helped stop violence between India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, Egypt and Ethiopia, Serbia and Kosovo, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Trump’s tariffs so far have not caused, as critics predicted, a recession or stock collapse. Instead, the stock market has reached all-time highs.

Trillions of dollars in promised foreign investments in the U.S. have set a record. And China, for the first time in 50 years, is facing an American-led global pushback against its exploitative, mercantilist trade policies.

The left is outraged about many of Trump’s executive orders.

But the public largely supports destroying the cartels’ seaborne drug shipments bound for the U.S. Polls show majorities favor banning transgender males from female sports, ending DEI racialist fixations, and enacting long-overdue higher education reforms.

Yet the daily news is about politicians’ f-bombs, government shutdowns, Trump’s social media trolling, and street violence. But the facts tell a different story of national recovery from the self-inflicted disasters of the recent past.

But think of the East Wing! Kamala Harris loses it, goes on expletive-laden rant about Trump’s donation-funded ballroom.

Why, it’s as if: Howls Over the White House Ball Room Remind Us That Progressives Tear Down Only for Destruction.

Destruction that Kamala wholeheartedly supported: Kamala Harris Lies, Claiming That She Never Promoted the Bail Fund That Bailed Out BLM Rioters As Well As Murderers and R4pists; But the Tweet In Which She Promoted that Bail Fund Is Still Up!

(Her tweet offering to bail out rioters is still up, incidentally.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 31st, 2025

THIS IS HOW THE RIGHT DIES:

That Heritage now finds itself defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a man who has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and mocked Jewish suffering, is a symptom of a moral rot spreading through the American right.

Kevin Roberts says, “Christ first, then America always.” He frames this as courage, as standing up to “the globalist class.” But listen closely to what he’s actually saying. It’s not faith or patriotism. It’s the language of power cloaked in religion and stripped of any guardrails.

It is also deeply dishonest.

Nobody is trying to “cancel Christians” for criticizing Israel. Nobody has ever said that disagreeing with Israeli policy makes someone an antisemite, any more than disagreeing with President Trump makes you less of a patriot.

The issue is when you charitably host and defend literal Jew-haters, people who call Jews “vermin” and say the Holocaust didn’t happen, and then pretend that doing so is a defense of free speech.

Roberts says Heritage “won’t cancel our own people.” But that phrase, “our own people,” is doing a lot of work here. Because who exactly does that include now? Are neo-Nazis now “our people”? Is Nick Fuentes, a man who preaches venomous hate against Jews, women, and Black Americans, now under the Heritage tent?

The conservative movement once knew how to draw lines. William F. Buckley exiled the John Birch Society from the mainstream right when it crossed into conspiracy and antisemitism. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire because he understood that evil is not relative. It must be named and it must be confronted.

Now, men like Kevin Roberts call evil a “debate partner.”

He claims “we challenge those ideas in debate.” Debate what, exactly? Whether Jews are subhuman? Whether the Holocaust happened? Whether women belong in the kitchen? Whether slavery was good for the South?

No serious moral movement treats those questions as intellectual exercises. They are disqualifying.

Read the whole thing.

More here: Heritage Foundation President: ‘Don’t Cancel Nick Fuentes,’ as Stalin Fan Fuentes Tells Jews to ‘Get The F— Out of America.’

And here, as the Carlson-Fuentes bromance could be a mile marker on the road to 2028: Warning: The Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes Bigots Are Targeting JD Vance.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 31st, 2025

TED CRUZ CALLS FOR JUDGE BOASBERG’S IMPEACHMENT FOR ‘ABUSING HIS POWER.’

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, this week released more FBI files related to the surveillance of Republican organizations and persons by then-special counsel Jack Smith. The new information provided by Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also prompted a renewed call for Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to be impeached.

In particular, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, denounced the federal judge for signing a gag order preventing AT&T from letting the Texas lawmaker know that his cellphone records had been sought by Smith for at least a year.

“If a judge signs an order reaching a factual conclusion for which there is zero evidence whatsoever, that judge is abusing his power,” Cruz said at the press conference, adding:

“I am right now calling on the House of Representatives to impeach Judge Boasberg.”

More Republican failure theater, or would this actually accomplish something? At the very least, it would put Democrats on record that they support lawfare:

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 31st, 2025

October 30, 2025

DOUBLE DE BLASIO: The Most Wonderful Journalistic Disaster of the Year:

“In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial,” de Blasio wrote when reached via email by the Times. It was a surprisingly hard-headed analysis. Many on the right have, of course, long emphasized that Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky campaign promises are either unfulfillable or prescriptions for civic collapse. But it was a shocker to see de Blasio knifing the man who is the closest he will ever get to an ideological successor a week before the election.

I would love to give you a link to this story, but alas I cannot. You see, the Times has removed it from its website, because as it turns out the paper never actually spoke to Bill de Blasio. The real Bill de Blasio took to Twitter almost immediately after the article was published to state that he had no idea what the heck was going on and that he’d never spoken to anyone with the Times of London. And he hadn’t!

Read the whole thing, which is a hoot.

UPDATE: That Times of London-Bill deBlasio Controversy Keeps Evolving — and Keeps Getting Funnier.

Semafor sent a reporter to the home of Bill DeBlasio – a wine importer, who lives on Long Island. Yes, there are, in fact, two such named individuals in the metroplex. While speaking from his location in Florida, the non-former-mayor conducted an interview with Semafor reporter Brendan Ruberry through his Ring doorbell camera. He explained that he did not deceive Bevan Hurley [the hapless reporter from the London Times]; he simply did not take the effort to clarify things.

Hurley, it is now being reported, sent an email to Bill DeBlasio (not, Bill de Blasio, as the former politician prefers), asking for commentary on the election, and the vino dealer complied with said request. He simply did not elaborate that maybe he was not the intended source for comment.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio. I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion. I could have corrected him. It was all in good fun. I never thought it would make it to print,” DeBlasio said. He assumed the reporter would “have all his people check it out.”

So what we are left with is not a news outlet falling victim to an aggressive trolling effort, but a case of either mistaken identity or journalism sloth, leading to a man having some mirthful fun at the expense of the paper.

Layers and layers of fact checkers and editors, old chap!

Posted at 8:40 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Gayle King expected to depart CBS News in bombshell move amid Bari Weiss takeover.

Gayle King is expected to be the next major departure from CBS News, as the anchor is set to leave the network’s morning show as major changes under Bari Weiss continue.

The 70-year-old, who has hosted CBS Mornings under various titles since 2012, will leave the show next year, with her contract set to end in May, Variety reports.

King may not be purged from the network entirely, as they may give her a new contract to produce specials for the network, similar to what happened to ex-CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell.

‘There have been no discussions with Gayle about her contract that runs through May 2026. She’s a truly valued part of CBS and we look forward to engaging with her about the future,’ the network told the magazine in a statement.

CBS Mornings is currently a distant third place among the major networks, having averaged just 1.8million viewers in the week ending October 20.

In that same period, Good Morning America led the way with 2.71million viewers on ABC, while The Today Show trailed close behind at 2.69million.

In May of 2021, AP reported: Morning shows extend the day to cope with viewer erosion.

In 2000, during the height of the Katie Couric-Matt Lauer dynasty, the “Today” show was being seen by 7.2 million viewers a day, and less than half (3.3 million) were watching during the first three months of this year. “Good Morning America” is down 29% during the same period.

Where people once turned on their TVs to get a sense of what happened in the world overnight, now they can grab the smartphone on their bedside table. Podcasts like “The Daily” have established themselves, and cable television offers opinionated alternatives.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said Alice Sylvester, Spaeth’s colleague at Sequent Partners.

Faster, please. Speaking of which, we’ll always share in the joys of King’s 11-minutes in space: Gayle King insists she was like Alan Shepard on her space ‘joyride.’

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

GREAT MOMENTS IN AMNESIA: Biden “didn’t want” 2024 debate, Harris says.

Then-President Biden “didn’t want that debate,” former Vice President Harris said in a new interview, describing a reluctant president whose fateful night on stage accelerated President Trump‘s return to the White House.

Why it matters: Harris’ remarks tap into Democrats’ broader reckoning over how denial, deference and age shaped their 2024 collapse.

  • “I could tell something was a little off and I was concerned,” Harris said in an interview with Steven Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO show.
  • “If you don’t want to be in the competition, it will absolutely have an impact on your performance,” Harris said in the new interview. “I’m pretty sure that he did not want to debate… I think he got talked into it.”

Context: A Republican-led House panel on Tuesday released a report alleging Biden showed signs of cognitive decline during his time in office, where many top aides responded to questions about his health and whether it was obscured from the public.

But Biden said he did want to debate — in a jump cut filled tweet taunting Trump:

Harris is having quite a round of interviews this week: Kamala Harris Loses It Ranting About Trump’s Ballroom and Starving Babies.

Kamala Harris appeared on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart and had a meltdown over the new White House ballroom, which is currently under construction. A lot of Democrats and the media have clutched their pearls over the demolition of the East Wing, but we haven’t seen anyone quite so animated about it as Harris. We’re not sure if she’s still pimping her 107 Days book or just ranting. Listen to what could have been our 47th president:

Exit quote: “We saw a post earlier where someone said Harris should sue Vice President JD Vance for defamation for saying she gets up at 1 p.m. and hits the bottle. Vance could enter this video as evidence.”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

POPULAR MECHANICS TEACHES YOU HAVE TO BUILD DIY CLICKBAIT! Humanity May Achieve the Singularity Within the Next 3 Months, Scientists Suggest.

  • The world is awash in predictions of when the singularity will occur or when artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive. Some experts predict it will never happen, while others are marking their calendars for 2026.
  • A new macro analysis of surveys over the past 15 years shows where scientists and industry experts stand on the question and how their predictions have changed over time, especially after the arrival of large language models like ChatGPT.
  • Although predictions vary across a span of almost a half-century, most agree than AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century.

This is worse than climate change predictions. At least those were always ten years away, not next year or 2100. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Posted at 5:36 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

CHANGE:

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

THE JEWISH SPACE LASERS SHINE BRIGHTLY ON ABC NEWS! The View Sets Marjorie Taylor Greene as Guest After Co-Hosts Call for More Republicans on the Show.

I can’t wait to hear Whoopi and MTG engage in a spirited discussion of WWII history.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

OH, MAN: Why is Glamour honoring men as its Women of the Year?

At Spiked, Georgina Mumford writes:

Beneath a shot of the ‘dolls’ artfully arranged in the sunlight in their short skirts – and, in one case, what appears to be a pair of belted leather underwear – Faye claims that transwomen are subjected to ‘misogynistic violence’. Yet the ensuing interviews suggest it is the trans ‘community’ that has a misogyny problem.

‘I would like to turn on a TV programme and not be blindsided with a trans joke’, muses musician and dj Mya Mehmi, before going on to make fun of actual women – or ‘bitches’, as he prefers to call them:

‘I think people just need to understand, not only are we human, most of us are badder than everyone else. Put some respect on it, bitch! I look better than you. I dress better than you. I smell better than you. Please learn that and understand that.’

One of the most galling comments was made by Bel Priestley, who claims ‘transphobia is really accepted… people in the public eye make comments about trans people all the time and no one really calls them out on it.’ What he really means by ‘transphobia’ here is the denial that men can become women at will – an opinion that ordinary British women (the type who aren’t invited to do cover shoots for high-fashion magazines) have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to defend. Don’t these women deserve more credit than trans activists – who, let’s face it, are campaigning against women’s rights?

As Julie Burchill wrote in May: ‘Protect the Dolls’ is trans activism at its creepiest.

The ‘Protect the Dolls’ campaign is certainly creepy. But it’s also great for opponents of the trans madness. In the Guardian piece, the ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt designer, Conner Ives, scores a hilarious own goal while trying to big himself up. Reflecting on the use of his slogan at the trans-activist protest in London against the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex, he claims that Trans Lifeline co-director Myles Markham said that with ‘Protect the Dolls’, trans activists ‘finally have a message’.

‘Black is beautiful’, ‘Votes for women’, ‘Out and proud’ – these were important political messages. They were to the point and not one bit creepy. They certainly didn’t compare oppressed black people, women or homosexuals to toys.

The Weimar Republic called and told the 21st century left that it really needs to dial the craziness back a notch or twenty.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

JIM GERAGHTY: The Left’s Disingenuous Pile-On of Karine Jean-Pierre.

We know darn well what’s going on here. First, as Megyn Kelly emphasized yesterday, Karine Jean-Pierre is no longer useful to the Democratic Party, so no one is interested in protecting her.

But secondly, Jean-Pierre is embarrassing Democrats by continuing to say things that were supposed to be memory-holed. On her book tour, she’s reiterating what a whole lot of Democrats believed, said, and defended right up until the night of Joe Biden’s debate.

In the past few weeks, Jean-Pierre has insisted that even as an octogenarian, Joe Biden could have served another four years and ably performed his duties. (Again, the man who turns 83 years old next month is getting radiation therapy for prostate cancer.) She’s insisted the Biden administration had no scandals, and that Biden had done a great job.

Now, a whole lot of people in the Democratic Party and mainstream media were insisting the same things, right up until shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern on June 27, 2024.

Sure, Jean-Pierre is completely wrong when she insists that the Democratic Party’s leadership acted wrongly, unethically, or immorally when they pushed Biden out as their nominee in the summer of 2024. But you can’t begrudge her feeling some whiplash in a world where Delaware Senator Chris Coons was attacking other Democrats for expressing the same doubts about Biden’s abilities that he had himself.

To be a Democrat in 2024 meant believing, and publicly insisting, that Biden was fine for another four years, and then, just about immediately after the debate, completely reversing yourself and insisting that Biden had to be replaced with Kamala Harris. Jean-Pierre’s cardinal sin is that she still believes all the things she was supposed to believe on the afternoon of June 27 and publicly says so. She’s still insisting that the emperor is wearing clothing, and a whole lot of Democrats want everyone to forget that they, too, spent a lot of time insisting the emperor’s new clothes looked fabulous.

As with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, the media are tearing into KJP now in the hopes that the public will forget how they protected Biden and hid his mental and physical decline from 2019 until the June 2024 debate with Trump made their coverup impossible. Assuming Biden was in office today, or early in 2025, had handed to baton to Kamala Harris, the DNC-MSM would still be just as fawning to her as they were last year.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

‘BLOOD BATH:’ CBS Parent Company Announces Mass Layoffs, Slashes ‘Race and Culture’ Unit.

CBS News parent company Paramount on Wednesday announced around 2,000 layoffs—including nearly 100 in the newsroom—and eliminated the outlet’s “Race and Culture” unit in an effort to crack down on ideological bias.

As part of the cuts, the network will cancel its streaming shows CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evening News Plus, shutter its South Africa bureau, and revamp its Saturday morning program, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source familiar with the changes. Guardian reporter Jeremy Barr also reported on the cuts, posting on X that CBS “gutted” its Race and Culture unit. CBS had tasked that unit with overseeing “news stories about race, culture and injustice, ensuring they have the proper context and tone,” according to a 2020 profile of executive producer Alvin Patrick.

Paramount CEO David Ellison, who has vowed to root out ideological bias at CBS and “right-size” the failing network, announced the moves in an internal memo.

“In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” Ellison wrote. “In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth. Ultimately, these steps are necessary to position Paramount for long-term success.”

Ellison’s announcement has sent the CBS newsroom into a tailspin, according to the Guardian. One staffer described the layoffs as “nerve-racking” and said, “Seems no one is safe,” while another called the cuts a “blood bath.”

The first radio networks in American began in the 1920s. We’re in a similar inflection point as the mid-to-late 1950s, when the executives who commanded those networks began to realize that thanks to television’s rapid growth after WWII, their media was virtually extinct as a product consumed in the home, and started to retool into something less ubiquitous, to be background noise while in the car, and altered their programming accordingly. The original big three television networks are finally grappling with the notion that the Internet, social media, smart phones, and streaming devices have similarly rendered them a legacy media.

As always, be very careful when around those still consume these analog-era outlets:

Earlier: Columbia Broadcasting Struggle Session Concludes.

UPDATE:

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

EAST GERMANY ON THE POTOMAC:

In early 2009, the Washington Post, through its then-sister publication Newsweek informed its readers “We Are All Socialists Now.” Curiously, they left out the fact that the model of socialism that Beltway elites had chosen was East Germany.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

OUR RECEPTIONIST, THE BEAUTIFUL JENNIFER MARLOWE, IS A RESULT OF THE MOST CUNNINGLY SUCCESSFUL SEX-CHANGE OPERATION IN MEDICAL HISTORY: Don Lemon: Megyn Kelly Looks Trans.

I’m starting to think Don Lemon doesn’t like women. I know that’s shocking but hear me out. Lemon hosted a podcast on his You Tube channel featuring two guys who I think work for him, John Cotter and Chris Miglioranzi. They call it the Clip Famers Podcast and I guess the idea is that Lemon is reacting to things online with a couple of guys who are 30+ years younger than he is.

Most of the 30-minute show was just the two young guys mocking right-wing people in various ways and Lemon chiming in and agreeing with them. Lemon’s YouTube channel has just under a million subscribers and after three days this podcast has nearly 13k views.

In any case, at the end of this clip one of the guys is trying on Lemon’s glasses (it’s riveting content) and he makes a joke saying “I’m Don Lemon, hey Megyn Kelly.” Lemon laughs and asks him where that is coming from. The the other guy says he has a real question. “Is Megyn Kelly chopped?” Chopped is slang for unattractive. That leads to this exchange:

Why, it’s as if,  “Don’s been quite the voice on the trans movement. Speaking of Don on trans topics, let’s not forget when Don blamed the biological female for ending up in a boxing ring with Imane Khelif, who was mad at having to take a mandatory genetic sex test. You might also remember during Don’s CNN career when he determined that Nikki Haley was ‘not in her prime.’ One could argue that Don has a problem with women. Anyone arguing he doesn’t?”

It doesn’t help matters that Sirius-XM just announced that Kelly recently was given a multi-year deal to lead her own channel on SiriusXM. In contrast, Lemon crashed and burned when Elon Musk offered him the same sort of podcast setup that Tucker Carlson (for better and more recently for worse) ran with after being fired by Fox News. Flashback: Don Lemon demanded Tesla Cybertruck, $5M advance, equity in X before Elon Musk canned him: sources.

Classical reference (with the setup starting at about the four minute mark) in headline.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

THE ASSASSINATION FAN BASE:

The wounded Reagan quipped to the lead doctor on his trauma team, “I hope you’re all Republican.” What made the quip amusing is that both Reagan and the team knew it mattered not in the least whether its members were Republican. The doctor, a Democrat, amusingly but perhaps a bit solemnly replied, “Today, we’re all Republicans.”

I think most Americans would like to live in a world where such an exchange is still possible. I’m not sure it is.

A significant number of Americans took to Bluesky, TikTok, Reddit, and the streets to express their regret that Trump’s would-be assassins had been unsuccessful and to praise the assassins of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson. In the case of the latter two, many asked or offered their opinion on who should be next. (I won’t cite any examples. If you are at all online, you have seen them in abundance, and if not, you may want to spare yourself.)

At present, the assassination fan base is pretty much a left-wing subculture. So far, it has applauded attempts on the lives of a former president, a conservative activist, a corporate CEO, and a conservative Supreme Court justice. The closest thing on the right is the online coterie claiming that Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, did nothing wrong, either because they were let in or were duped into entering by a government plot. But to speak up on behalf of J6 defendants, even to the point of alleging conspiracies, is not the same as celebrating the assassinations of Kirk and Thompson and lamenting the misses on Trump. I hope no comparable figure on the left becomes a target that thereby allows us to ascertain whether there is a comparable fan base for assassination on the right.

We should also note that even “lone gunmen, acting alone” have to get their ideas about whom to target from somewhere. They, too, have social networks, which likely traffic in in-group suggestions about who in the out-group are the worst of the worst. So we are now living in a political culture in which a potential would-be assassin can count on a social network for inspiration and an outpouring of public support after the fact. This is fertile ground for evil, perhaps because assassins always believe they are doing good. And we may be cultivating more and more of them.

As Elon Musk tells Joe Rogan, “after years of attacks from mainstream media, I know exactly what they’re doing — They’re making it sound like if you kill me, you’re a hero. That’s not journalism. That’s evil.”

Earlier:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

WHY DO THE FOREIGN PRESS ASK TOUGHER QUESTIONS TO AMERICAN DEMOCRATS THAN OUR OWN PRESS?

To ask the question is to answer it, of course:

 

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

ARCTIC FROST:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025

MATT TAIBBI: Bill Gates Says We’ll Survive Climate Change, World Furious.

Gates offered a summary of his thesis:

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Reaction was swift and furious. In the words of the immortal Greta Thunberg, “HOW DARE YOU!” The New York Times rushed a piece out titled, “Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead To Humanity’s Demise.’” The paper linked to Gates’s net worth on the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index, to his prior comments about irreversible ecological damage, and to the Gates Foundation’s $1.4 billion commitment to climate change research. It didn’t link to Gates’s new essay, though, instead quoting the editor of Inside Philanthropy, who said “one could imagine” this was Gates’s way of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.” Social media is still burning with theories about Gates betraying the climate cause to get out from under an investigation into his foundation’s alleged funding of Chinese entities. The imminent extinction dream is dying hard.

On the eve of the the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Gates’s downshift from “We’re gonna die!” to “A serious but survivable problem” was ripped as a grievous affront. The climate story has been reported as an extinction panic for decades, in the process becoming one of the most influential news stories ever. Its impact reached far beyond energy policy to realms like mental health, family planning, even journalism and academic freedom. Ostensible uniformity of climate consensus was used as an argument against both “viewpoint diversity” on campuses and objective “both sides” reporting.

“The climate story has been reported as an extinction panic for decades” — and yet somehow, despite almost 60 years of fear porn, we’re still here. (Except for those massacred by the repeal of net neutrality, of course.)

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30th, 2025
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