Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

July 30, 2026

IT’S COME TO THIS: Boy George Drops Out of London Jesus Christ Superstar Production After Stirring Controversy With AI-Generated Pro-Israel Song.

Boy George is dropping out of a London production of Jesus Christ Superstar, the “Karma Chameleon” singer’s manager said on Instagram on Thursday, days after he stirred controversy after releasing his AI-generated, pro-Israel song “We Will Dance Again.”

“The decision has been made with the utmost respect for the producers, the creative team and the entire company,” manager Paul Kemsley wrote on Thursday. Boy George was set to play King Herod starting in August. Kemsley didn’t specify why George was leaving but wrote that the singer “has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that.”

“Equally, I believe it is my responsibility to make decisions that are in the best interests of my artist while also showing respect to others,” Kemsley said. “In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”

Yeah, you don’t someone who’s too pro-Jewish to be in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar…

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

AARON HANSCOM: Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor.

Search for “traitor” on X this week, and one man will flood your timeline: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The reason? Shocking images of thousands of migrants from Morocco crossing the border and flooding into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. The head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta told the Associated Press that the border had “totally collapsed.” After watching video footage of migrants breaking through fences to get into the city, one would be justified in using the word “invasion” to describe what’s happening. Indeed, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the rising populist/conservative Vox party, called it just that and wrote that “Pedro Sánchez is its main promoter and guilty of all its consequences.”

The migrants don’t disagree. Video footage captured some of the arrivals chanting, “Viva Pedro Sánchez!” or “Long live Pedro Sánchez!”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Old and busted: Can Greeks Become Germans?

—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times, July 19th, 2011.

The New Hotness? Spain has become France:

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

SPAIN IS BEING INVADED RIGHT NOW; UPDATE: Georgia Meloni Responds, Threatens to Cut Off Spain.

Most people don’t know that there is Spanish sovereign territory on the African continent.

I sure didn’t. But it turns out that there are bits and pieces in what you think is Morocco that are, in fact, part of Spain, including islands and cities in what you probably think is Morocco.

Ceuta is one such tiny bit of Spain on the African continent. It is literally Spanish territory, similar to the little spur of Minnesota that looks like it should be part of Canada because it is not connected and is embedded in Canada, or the Kaliningrad Oblast, which is Russia, but entirely surrounded by Lithuania and Poland.

Weird, I know. But there it is.

Right now, today, the City of Ceuta is being invaded by Moroccans (and likely people from other countries) through that border. They are not coming in boats. They are storming the border, and in some cases, border guards have opened the gates to let them stream in.

Ceuta is a city of only 65,000, and at this rate, the invaders will outnumber the population of the city. It is a crisis so great that the city government is begging the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to declare a State of Emergency, which so far he has declined to do.

In April, Theodore Dalrymple warned: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

As Spain is about to find out, the hard way (again):

Tweet below reads, “THIS IS VERY SERIOUS. I’m receiving these images of how Moroccan authorities are emptying trucks full of young people near the border with Ceuta. Anyone who doesn’t want to see that this is a perfectly orchestrated operation by the regime is simply blind.”

Tweet below says, “But when we go on vacation – fingerprints, facial scanners, advanced biometrics, baggage scanners…:”

In English, the tweet below reads, “It won’t be shown on television: this is how the beaches of Ceuta are right now.”

Posted at 8:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

JAMES MIEGS: A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight.

I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. In fact, I’ve spent two decades challenging the pernicious lies of the 9/11 Truther crowd. But sometimes conspiracies do happen. I think the actions of Dr. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, constituted a type of conspiracy. I’m not saying the Covid outbreak was some kind of deliberate “plandemic.” But the disclosures reveal how Dr. Fauci organized his colleagues to obscure his agency’s connections to the suspect Chinese lab.

We now know U.S. scientists collaborated with their Chinese counterparts on controversial gain-of-function experiments and that grants from NIAID flowed to the Wuhan lab through various channels. It’s highly likely that U.S. researchers provided the skills and our government offered some funding that allowed Chinese researchers to continue independently tinkering with deadly viruses until one accidentally escaped the lab. From the start, the NIAID head used his enormous bureaucratic clout to make sure no one explored that relationship. While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was “just conspiracy theories,” he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.

Things got rolling on Feb. 1, 2020, when Dr. Fauci organized a conference call involving a dozen of the world’s top virologists and health officials. Within weeks, four of those scientists were listed as authors of a letter titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” published in the journal Nature Medicine. The authors confidently asserted that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”; the virus must have jumped to humans from some animal species. At the time, many experts believed that leap happened at Wuhan’s messy “wet market.”

The “proximal origin” paper seemed to give scientific clout to Dr. Fauci’s oft-repeated dismissal of the lab-leak idea. Other scientists dropped the question like a hot fireplace poker. The press doubled down, portraying the lab-leak theory as “debunked bunkum,” in the words of MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Social media sites downgraded the topic as “misinformation.”

But this supposed scientific consensus was entirely manufactured. The newly released documents, along with earlier disclosures, show that many scientists in the NIAID leader’s orbit believed the virus had been deliberately modified and then accidentally leaked. In fact, Dr. Fauci’s own diary notes show that most of the researchers on that Feb. 1 call “felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” The entry also mentions that the lab’s famous virologist Shi Zhengli had “been working for years” on gain-of-function modifications that would help certain viruses be more transmissible to humans. Recently released messages reveal that even the scientists who signed the “proximal origin” paper continued to suspect a lab leak; “we can’t rule it out,” one admitted.

He’s the Wuhanian Candidate:

Related: Don’t Forget the Role the ‘Scarf Queen’ Played in the Fauci Cabal:

In her memoir Silent Invasion, Birx painted herself as a heroine for what she framed as balancing Trump administration skepticism over COVID-19, politics, media narratives, the need to treat millions of Americans, and the effort to prevent or mitigate the spread of the virus.

In that book, Birx admitted that she was integral to the effort to extend the initial lockdowns beyond the “15 days to slow the spread.”

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them, she wrote.

Technically, Birx was a Trump insider. He relied on her, Fauci and their team to give him the advice he relied upon to make critical national decisions. But as we’ve seen with Fauci, who clearly worked against Trump and his administration, Birx was more discreet but still a kindred spirit.

As Glenn wrote at the end of 2021: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.

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

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON CLARKSON’S FARM: “Life, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. Take Amazon Studios for example. They’ve pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into producing prestige triple-A sludge like Rings of Power. And yet, the show that gets consistently higher viewership, critical acclaim, and audience support is a low-budget reality TV show about two idiots messing around on a farm in England. The thing is though, you only need to watch a single episode of Clarkson’s Farm to understand exactly why.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP: Couric Admits She, Democrat Producer Worked In an ‘Artful Way’ To Undermine Palin.

Former CBS anchor Katie Couric joined Merit America co-founder Connor Diemand-Yauman on his Is This Working?! podcast on Wednesday, where she recalled her 2008 interview with GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Couric admitted to working with her producer Brian Goldsmith, who is now a Democratic candidate for California State Senate, to construct the questions in a “very artful way” to expose her.

Couric explained her motivations, “So, I think there was just this moment, and she was sort of this—people were fascinated, and she was so magnetic, but nobody knew if there was any there there. So, I think I was the first interview that really exposed her lack of substance and understanding of critical issues.”

According to Couric, those “critical issues” included trying to drive a wedge between her and John McCain on ANWR oil drilling, pestering her on the morning-after pill, and demanding to know which newspapers and magazines she read. It was also this interview that spawned the Saturday Night Live skit with Tina Fey that led many liberals to falsely believe that Palin actually said she could see Russia from her house. Her interview with Joe Biden was very different.

To the point where she ignored a gaffe from a pre-Trunalimunumaprzure-era Biden that would have played on a loop on the 6:30 news if a Republican had said it:

The DNC-MSM’s pummeling of McCain, Palin, and in 2012 Mitt Romney, who all just sat there and took it, did much to propel Trump to the forefront during the 2016 election cycle. Or as Glenn wrote at the time in USA Today: Liberals have chosen The Donald as their ‘Destructor.’

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: eBay agreed to pay nearly $50 million to couple sent cockroaches, bloody pig mask.

The settlement resolves more than six years of criminal and civil proceedings stemming from the harassment campaign. In their 2021 lawsuit filed in Boston federal court, the Steiners said that the company engaged in a conspiracy to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence them” in order to “stifle their reporting on eBay.” The Natick residents, who report on the e-commerce industry in their newsletter, said they were subjected to cyberstalking, death threats and in-person surveillance by former eBay workers.

Ina Steiner said the campaign began with threatening direct messages on social media before escalating into anonymous deliveries of live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig Halloween mask and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with David Steiner’s name to a neighbor’s home and planned to install a GPS device on the couple’s car.

She said she did not initially know who was behind it or why.

“I could not conceive that a company I had been covering for the past two decades had tried to terrorize us into stopping our reporting,” she said.

When the lawsuit was filed, the company said “the misconduct of these former employees was wrong,” and that it would “do what is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through.”

eBay reiterated its apology Tuesday, saying, “What the Steiners were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2019 was wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened.” The company also acknowledged “the unprofessional tone in internal communications” by former CEO Devin Wenig, former Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer and former Senior Vice President Wendy Jones.

The company said the conduct “is not representative of eBay’s culture” and said it has since changed leadership and strengthened its policies, procedures and ethics training.

The Steiners’ “home address was also posted online, with public invitations for adult activities, as well as threats being made against them on Twitter (now known as X) and other social media platforms.” Did eBay’s employees not have the common sense to know that this was going to end very badly for them?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Joyce Carol Oates Defends The Odyssey and Slams Translator for Scathing Review: ‘Speaks in the Crude Language of MAGA Folks.’

Author Joyce Carol Oates came to the defense of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” after translator Emily Wilson wrote a viral review attacking the film.

“Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers,” Carol wrote on X. “One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Advantage Frank J. Fleming!

I finally saw The Odyssey last night; brilliant cinematography and production design, and the nearly three hour film moves at a surprisingly brisk pace to pack all its locales and subplots in. The colorblind casting, and the small role by Elliot (nee Ellen) Page were only distracting because of how obsessed Twitter had been over them, and the resulting backlash to the backlash likely drove ticket sales, just as Nolan knew it would.

The dialogue is awfully clunky at times, but there have been previous epic films where the dialogue was off-putting, but not enough to detract from the knockout visuals. For two examples, the deliberately minimalist dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Something or Other, and George Lucas’ original Star Wars from 1977, which had loads of what even Alec Guinness called “dialogue [that] was pretty ropey,” which didn’t stop it from becoming an epoch-defining movie. (As Joseph Kahn wrote on Monday in a Hollywood Reporter article memorably headlined, “Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!”, the movie executive’s job “is to make money. Real money. Marvel money. The kind of money Hollywood made when it threw muscular white guys named Chris into rubber suits and raked in billions in tickets, billions in toys, billions in theme parks. So much money the studio could dig another five levels down for more parking spaces.” 1977-era Star Wars money.)

In contrast, The Odyssey seems more like a throwback to the earnest biblical epics that Hollywood endlessly churned out in the 1950s through the mid-1960s. Nolan himself said its style was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which was made on a low budget for a biblical-era film, and where everyone (except for David Bowie’s Pontius Pilate) speaks in colloquial American accents, including Harvey Keitel’s “dees and does” Brooklyn-accented Judas.) “As for the other film Nolan privately screened for his cast and crew, Tom Holland recently revealed that he called Sony chief Tom Rothman to arrange a 70mm screening of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for the cast of ‘The Odyssey’ during pre-production,” World of Reel reported a couple of weeks ago. Nolan could have definitely benefited from Robert Bolt‘s crisp screenwriting.

Posted at 4:39 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

CAN WE BUILD A WALL AROUND CONGRESS?

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

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN FAVOR OF LOCKDOWNS:

In case you don’t, here’s how fast the narrative flipped: Kern County doctors use disputed data to suggest Stay Home orders be lifted.

But at the same time, some doctors say the death rate of COVID-19 isn’t nearly as high as officials are leading the public to believe, and are now calling for the stay home orders to end, and the economy to be reopened.

“There are widespread cases, and a small amount of death,” said Dr. Dan Erickson of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County. “It’s similar to the flu, as a matter of fact.”

Dr. Erickson, along with colleague Dr. Artin Massihi, held a news conference earlier this week that is now going viral. They even take shots at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“We’re actually seeing the patients,” said Dr. Massihi. “Dr. Fauci hasn’t seen a patient in 20 years.”

YouTube has since removed the video, saying in a statement that they “quickly remove flagged content that violate our community guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.”

—L.A.’s ABC7, April 29th, 2020.

Fast-forward to the beginning of June 2020: The Apex of the Pivot.


UPDATE: Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance. For months, health experts told Americans to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests.

—Politico, June 4th, 2020.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

KEEP ROCKIN’!

Hiltzik’s L.A. Times column celebrating the deaths of those opposed to taking the covid vaccine ran in the beginning of January, 2022. Since then, the paper’s readership has become increasingly selective, as legendary fictional music manager Ian Faith would say: L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom.

The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it was laying off at least 115 people — or more than 20% of the newsroom — marking one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.

The move comes amid projections for another year of heavy losses for the newspaper.

The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, said Tuesday.

Drastic changes were needed, he said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.

—The L.A. Times, January 23, 2024. I’m sure the laid off L.A. Times staffers will keep rockin’! as they enjoy their funemployment. It’s a blessing in disguise, after all.

Related: Kids and parents turn to coding to boost college, career prospects.

—The L.A. Times, August 1st, 2014.

More classic headlines: Children apologize to their dying elders for spreading COVID-19 as L.A. County reels.

—The L.A. Times, January 12th, 2021.

And of course: Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.

—The L.A. Times, August 21st, 2021.

Not surprisingly, the paper finally received a competitor at the start of this year:  The California Post heralds a new era for the Golden State — we will fearlessly tell you the stories that really matter.

As I wrote a year ago, when the New York Post first announced a West Coast edition, they’ve got to do a better job than the L.A. Times, which for decades has been dull-as-dishwater, despite being located in a town that supplies an endless stream of over the top celebrity news, before morphing into a paper that cheered for the demise of potential readers.

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

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: We Have Receipts: Four Years Ago, Fauci Said ‘Nothing to Hide,’ ‘Very Happy to Testify’ Before Congress.

If you’re a fan of ordinal numbers, the number five specifically, and constitutional rights being asserted, Wednesday was your day.

For everyone else looking for answers as to why we were locked down thanks to The Experts™ and The Science™ back during the COVID scare, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee was wholly unsatisfying.

Over 100 times, CNN reported, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Which is kind of funny when you consider that he was given a pardon for anything he did or may have done while head of NIAID and leading the U.S. response to COVID.

“Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” Fauci said over the course of two hours.

Which is funny, considering that back when he was retiring from running the country’s COVID response, he said he had “nothing to hide” and would be “very happy to testify” before Congress.

To be fair, Fauci said that to Chris Wallace on CNN, so he likely thought that nobody was watching:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

THE SCIENCE IS UNSETTLED:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 30th, 2026

July 29, 2026

SPINAL TAP WAS NOT INTENDED AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: Katy Perry got stuck in a giant plastic bottle at her concert and the crowd wouldn’t roll her back toward the stage. “This was at the Isle of MTV Malta festival on the 22nd, and apparently she thought the best way to start the show was to hop inside a giant inflatable water bottle and crowd surf in it:”

Derek Smalls did it so much better, many decades ago:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 29th, 2026

ED MORRISSEY: Fauci Takes the Fifth.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he continued. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

That presents Paul and the Senate with an opportunity to pursue contempt charges. The Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is not without boundaries. It applies when potential criminal liability exists, which – for most people, most of the time – is always present. In fact, it’s a very good idea to stand on one’s right to remain silent in most circumstances when hostile questioning takes place, at least until you get a good lawyer to figure out what the potential liabilities might be.

However, pardons create the rare exception to the use of the Fifth Amendment. Joe Biden granted a full pardon to Fauci shortly before leaving office for any federal crimes he may have committed during a ten-year period prior to 2025. That covers all of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then some. Fauci cannot be prosecuted or charged for any federal crimes that took place in that period, so he has no criminal liability in testifying. That puts Fauci in the rare position of being unable to refuse to testify under oath in any legitimate trial or hearing, including those in Congress.

Fauci claims that Paul is trying to spring a perjury trap on him today, but the Fifth Amendment cannot be used to avoid it, especially when a pardon exists. All Fauci has to do to avoid a perjury trap is to testify honestly. And as long as the questions focus on the period covered by the pardon, Fauci is required to testify.

Josh Hawley had plenty of fun with Fauci: Senator Hawley Hilariously Forces Fauci to Plead the Fifth on His Tie Color and the Day of the Week.

Related:

Tweet continues, “The chairman has DENIED your assertion of privilege and directed you to ANSWER, but you nonetheless refuse and stand on privilege despite the existence of the pardon. It’s AGAINST THE LAW to obstruct an investigation of Congress. There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.”

But will there?

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 29th, 2026

I SEE DEAD PEOPLE:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 29th, 2026

WAIT, DO WE WANT A STRONGER GERMAN MILITARY?

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 29th, 2026

“MESSAGE: I CARE,” THE NEXT GENERATION. Braindead Politician Accidentally Reads AI Slop That Someone Left in His Speech: “Here’s a More Natural, Flowing Version of That Section That Reads Like a Legislative Speech.”

AI chatbots and politicians who aren’t even pretending to try anymore are a match made in heaven.

Exhibit A: Canadian lawmaker Bill Oliver, who made a strange, cyborgian digression in a speech addressing the New Brunswick legislature last month.

“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver intoned, before offering a bizarre non sequitur.

“Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points,” he added.

Oliver, in a distinctly 2026 twist, had accidentally read a prompt from an AI chatbot. Credit where credit’s due: he did it without blinking an eye, betraying either some serious stage composure or that he didn’t even notice the error, half-asleep as he sounded while mumbling through the machine-amalgamated pablum.

In any case, members of the New Brunswick subreddit, understandably, weren’t impressed after people began noticing the error this week.

“If there are no consequences for this, then we hold our high schoolers to a higher standard than our elected officials,” one commenter fumed.

“If he was a lawyer, he’d be sanctioned,” another wrote. “Why should it be any different for an elected representative?”

Others lamented the “depressing” state of affairs Oliver’s lazy AI slip-up evinced, using words like “grim” and “idiocracy.” There were multiple calls for him to resign.

As Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2012:

George H. W. Bush, Romney-like in aloofness, was once famously handed a staff cue card that read: “Message: I care.” That was supposed to be speech guidance. Bush read the card. Out loud.

Not surprisingly, he lost to Bill Clinton, a man who lives to care, who feels your pain better than you do — or at least makes you think so. In politics, that’s a trivial distinction.

Not surprisingly, (P)resident Biden had a similar gaffe in 2024:

If only some staffer had secretly snuck a “Madagascar” into Oliver’s AI prompt:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jul 29th, 2026

July 28, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT:

As Glenn has written, “the breakdown of law and order won’t go as [leftists] hope. Ultimately, the police are there to protect criminals from the populace, not the other way around. Get rid of the police, and armed vigilantism is what you’ll get. And what you’ll deserve.”

Back in 2013, Reason TV released a video about private security forces in otherwise lawless Detroit. It looks like the Pacific Palisades is adopting a similar idea as well.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026

RICK MCGINNIS: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: New York Goes Down.

When The Taking of Pelham One Two Three came out in the fall of 1974, New York City was building up to a fiscal crisis and a year away from president Gerald Ford’s statement that he would refuse to give the city a bailout, which led to the famous New York Daily News headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”.

The exodus of jobs and residents that was underway by the late ’60s shrank the city’s tax base while a budget deficit that began with mayor Robert F. Wagner’s administration in the early ’60s was compounded by Wagner’s successor, John Lindsay, borrowing heavily to improve city services. New York was funding free tuition at the City University of New York and keeping transit fares low while relying on federal aid to make it from year to year.

Meanwhile in the movie theatres the “New York as shithole” genre had come into focus with Midnight Cowboy in 1969, followed by Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Shaft, The French Connection and The Panic in Needle Park in 1971, Super Fly and Across 110th Street in 1972 and Badge 373, The Seven-Ups, Mean Streets, Black Caesar, Willie Dynamite, Gordon’s War, Hell up in Harlem and Serpico in 1973.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three shared screens in 1974 with Claudine, Three the Hard Way, Crazy Joe and Death Wish and, as the city’s fiscal crisis became global headlines, was followed by Dog Day Afternoon and Report to the Commissioner in 1975 before the cinematic capstones to the subgenre: Taxi Driver (1976) and The Warriors (1979).

Perhaps this genre will be making a cinematic return in a few years: NYC: Begun, the Class War Has.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 28th, 2026
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