Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

April 16, 2026

RECONSIDERING FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:

While we’re wondering, we can only wonder why neither Hoover nor FDR called to mind something of fairly recent memory, namely President Warren Harding’s refusal to leap to governmental quick—and/or possibly permanent—fixes in the face of the post-Great War economic doldrums, doldrums that might well have qualified as a panic. For that matter, one can only wonder what a re-elected Calvin Coolidge might not have done in 1929 had he, in fact, chosen to run in 1928.

By the way, that would be the same Calvin Coolidge who referred to his secretary of commerce as the “boy wonder,” and he was not complimenting him. We can conclude that because Coolidge was known to complain that the aforementioned wonder boy had kept trying to give him advice, “all of it bad.” Who might that cabinet secretary have been but one Herbert Hoover.

That would be the same Herbert Hoover whose misfortune it was to accomplish in 1928  what he had refused to attempt in 1920, namely, run for and win the presidency. During the lead-up to that presidential campaign, leaders of both parties had made serious overtures to the orphaned boy from Iowa who had amassed a small fortune as a mining engineer before serving admirably in the Wilson administration. But Hoover spurned them all.

[Roosevelt biographer David] Beito wastes little time on the eventual Hoover presidency, aside from joining candidate Roosevelt in criticizing this Republican’s penchant for turning to governmental solutions to deal with the panic that might have been. He notes that Hoover spent more on public works than the nine previous presidents combined. A few pages later he quotes from a Roosevelt campaign speech that accused Hoover of presiding over the “greatest spending administration in peace time in all our history.”

Related:

Tweet continues, “Unemployment peaked at 9 percent two months after the crash and started going down. The unemployment rate was down to 6.3 percent when the federal government figured it had to intervene. And that’s when the downward movement reversed and we never saw 6.3 percent again for the next decade. It’s clear as crystal that the disaster came after federal intervention.”

Posted at 5:18 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 16th, 2026

MARK FELTON: Bombing Saddam’s Nukes — Joint Israel-Iran Attacks, Iraq 1980-81.

 

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 16th, 2026

AMERICA’S OLDEST NAVY PILOT RETURNING TO DUTY: Top Gun 3 Officially in the Works With Tom Cruise Returning.

Tom Cruise is returning for “Top Gun 3,” Paramount announced during its CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas, as is producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

The sequel to director Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” was first revealed to be in the works back in 2024 with scribe Ehren Kruger, who co-wrote “Maverick” with Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie.

“Top Gun: Maverick” became a blockbuster hit when many theaters were still shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic. It grossed $1.5 billion at the global box office from a $170 million budget, giving movie theaters the jolt they needed when times were tough.

It certainly gave the left a jolt back then as well: Top Gun Hits Over $1 Billion and the Left Is Going Crazy: Here’s Why.

UPDATE:

Heh, indeed. Although in retrospect, it was pretty obvious:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 16th, 2026

QUESTIONING THE TIMING:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 16th, 2026

DEVELOPING: Former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax Fatally Shoots Wife and Himself in Murder-Suicide. “Fairfax served as the lieutenant governor under former Democratic Governor Ralph Northam from 2018 to 2022. While in office, the lieutenant governor was accused of sexually assaulting two women years earlier. He maintained the sexual encounters, one of which took place in 2000 and another in 2004, were consensual. He then launched an unsuccessful bid for Virginia governor in 2021, coming in fourth in the Democratic primary. Prior to his tenure as lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax served as a federal prosecutor. On top of the sexual assault allegations against Fairfax, the Northam administration was also rocked by the emergence of a yearbook photo from 1984 depicting two men, one in black face and the other in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Northam initially said he was one of the two men but did not specify which. In the days following the scandal, however, Northam said he was not actually in the photo, but did admit to wearing black face for a Michael Jackson dance competition. Northam, however, never resigned.”

UPDATE:

 

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 16th, 2026

April 15, 2026

THE WALT DISNEY CO. BEGINS LAYING OFF 1,000 EMPLOYEES:

The Walt Disney Co. on Tuesday began layoffs expected to lead to 1,000 job cuts across the company.

Josh D’Amaro, who in February succeeded Bob Iger as chief executive, announced broader layoffs following a move in January to consolidate Disney’s marketing division. The cuts are expected to fall across the Burbank, California-based company’s traditional television businesses, including ESPN, as well as its movie studio. Employees in product and technology, and in certain corporate functions will also be affected.

Let’s check in with the news and opinion division of Disney:

UPDATE: Link in headline was missing before; now added.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

GRAY LADY DIVES FOR FAINTING COUCH (AGAIN): NYT Melts Down Over Texas Rangers Statue Outside… Texas Rangers’ Stadium.

The New York Times and its sports section, The Athletic, has found its newest outrage target: a statue of a Texas Ranger outside Globe Life Field, home of the Texas Rangers. Seriously.

That was the basis for Sam Blum’s 2,000-plus-word Wednesday piece about the Rangers installing the “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at the ballpark. Fellow Athletic writer Stephen J. Nesbitt piled on by calling it a “deeply controversial” statue and capping off his post with the always-serious journalistic flourish: “Yikes.”

He also called Blum’s article “important work.” Yes, we need more sports journalists doing deep dives on… statues outside stadiums. These guys are really putting those journalism degrees to work.

OutKick founder Clay Travis responded the way plenty of normal sports fans probably did.

“It’s a statue of a Texas Ranger at a Texas Rangers stadium,” Travis wrote on X, blasting The Athletic for treating the whole thing like Pulitzer Prize-worthy reporting.

Hard to improve on that, but I’ll try.

Exit quote: “Keep in mind: the statue came down during the ‘Summer of Love’ when Black Lives Matter activists were burning American cities to the ground and basically demanding that all American history be erased. The statue removal from Dallas Love Field came at a time that practically any statue that depicted a white person was at risk of being removed, defaced or destroyed. The Athletic tries to make a point that the statue being taken out of the airport is a signal it shouldn’t exist anywhere, publicly. But that ignores the broader context of 2020.”

Of course it does — because the left’s worldview is permanently trapped in that annus horribilis, and they can’t figure out how the rest of us were never trapped in that box canyon.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

GAY TALESE ON A WRITER’S LIFE:

An unrelenting winter and circumstance dictated a most uncustomary form of interview with Gay Talese: a phone call. Another ice storm in New York kept Talese in his Upper East Side townhouse, where he first occupied a bachelor pad as a New York Times reporter at 26 and then bought the whole property with his wife, Nan, by 1973, when he was a writer – and subject – at Esquire. On a January late afternoon, when the call arrived, Talese was pushing 95, and I was in Pennsylvania, laid up on crutches and recovering from a knee injury. There was no time for a serendipiter’s journey.

“When I was younger and working in the field, I always felt you have to be there in person,” said Talese, who in 1999, following a post-anniversary European sojourn with Nan, and in a fit of inspiration and determination, suspended his plans to return home and instead flew to China to pursue a story about the soccer player whose kick cost her team the World Cup. He didn’t return to New York for five months. “You observe so much in person that you don’t get over the phone,” said Talese. “But that’s what the limitations are like today. I can’t meet you. I’m 94, and I can’t go outside. It’s snowing outside.”

In his writing life, Talese has accumulated untold flyer miles, sources, and carefully cut shirt boards – his preference for notetaking, as the son of a Calabrese tailor. There was never a smartphone or recorder, nor even email, until The New Yorker requested that he start submitting his stories online. Today, “people have a narcissistic relationship with their phone,” said Talese. “I never had a phone.”

Indeed, Talese is among the last writers to have lived a life free of pixels, texts, and scrolls. Instead, he pursued his subjects, either befriending them or observing them if they were averse, and then wrote about them with detachment, fairness, and meticulous care. Stories germinated from chance encounters, late-night dinner conversations, and periods of waiting. Drafts and rewrites were composed on yellow legal pads and the typewriter.

It was how Talese could produce his most famous profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published 60 years ago this month in Esquire, and write how “New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed,” at 28 for the magazine. “The problem in New York today: most people don’t see anything. They’re looking down in their fucking phones,” said Talese. “They’re walking the streets and everybody’s looking down, not up. I was always looking up … wondering what goes on up there.” But now the influencers abound. “No one gives a shit about what’s going on anywhere except in their fucking phone.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

WOW, IT REALLY IS THE GAYS OF HORMUZ:

Note that breakthroughs in miniaturization will eventually allow the Iranians an even smaller one-man version of that sub:

Classical reference in headline:

Posted at 8:33 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP: California Giving Homeless Illegal Aliens Sex Change Operations.

I would call this peak woke, but we will never reach peak woke because they will keep inventing new categories of victims to steal money and rights from you to give them. As with the ever-expanding number of letters in the Progress Pride list, the types of victims to be unearthed is endless.

But this certainly is a new level: creating a program to give free sex change surgeries to transgender homeless illegal aliens. One hopes that they are, as seems likely, “of color” to add yet another category of oppressed people. Throw in “indigenous,” or perhaps terrorist drug-dealing gang members, and liberals will have an orgasm.

The invaluable Christopher Rufo uncovered the story by doing actual journalism, something that barely exists anymore outside the alternative media. It wasn’t exactly hard to uncover because, as is almost always the case, most of the people involved aren’t exactly hiding what they are doing. It’s just that the Pravda Media is incurious about anything that might make lefties look bad to normal people.

Flashback to October of 2024: The Democrats’ Insanity Defense. “The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. ‘When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.’ Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party’s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. ‘Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.’”

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

HAPPY HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR DAY TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

THE SINGLE SWALWELL THEORY: The Mystery Sweeping D.C.: Who Executed the Political Hitjob That Destroyed Eric Swalwell?

For all [Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries] know, Swalwell will be replaced with an AOC/Mamdani-styled “Democrat Socialist” that’ll cause them headaches. Keeping a reliable, dependable, known quantity like Swalwell under lock-and-key would’ve made their jobs a helluva lot easier.

Yes, the Democratic Machine had a vested interest in pushing Swalwell out of the governor’s race — but it wasn’t in their interest to push him out of Congress completely!

Second, the catalyst for the hit job doesn’t appear to be Swalwell’s career in D.C. Instead, it’s all seemingly connected to his Sacramento aspirations. That would point to a California-based culprit.

Which is why I think it’s more likely Pelosi and Jeffries covered up Swalwell’s crimes than outed them.

And third, if Swalwell’s skirt-chasing, philandering, and/or sexual deviancies were an open secret among Democrats, media, and staffers, then anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of PR could’ve executed the hit. This wasn’t the kind of high-level sandbagging that could’ve only come from a powerful political machine.

Honestly? Hits like this aren’t rocket science. Any Dem candidate could’ve done it.

Including billionaire Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, who’s spent $120 million of his own money on his primary campaign. Steyer was already one of the top two or three polling Democrats; eliminating Swalwell was exactly what he needed to claim the big prize.

With a $50K private investigator and a semi-decent PR professional on staff, Steyer could’ve executed the hit himself.

Same goes for candidates Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, Antonio Villaraigosa, Xavier Becerra, Betty Yee, and Tony Thurmond. Mahan’s raised over $11 million; Porter nearly $6 million; Becerra and Villaraigosa, over $3 million (each).

PIs and PR are cheap. Emailing/texting a reporter is free. It’s well within the budget of all the aforementioned candidates.

Furthermore, if Swalwell’s libido was as manic as we’re (now) hearing, it’s not like the PIs would’ve had to dig too hard. Discovering that Swalwell was a loathsome, disgusting pig was low-hanging fruit.

But with a reliable, dependable California Democrat in an ultra-safe congressional district, no one in his party — and thus, none of the DNC’s coconspirators in the mainstream media — had a motive to assassinate Swalwell’s character. Killing his career didn’t benefit any of the kingmakers on the radical left.

Until he ran for governor.

Related:

Posted at 6:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

I TOO ENDORSE REGIME CHANGE IN BRUSSELS:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

GEORGE WILL: Seattle has a severe case of the Ayatollah Itch.

In 2004, Seattle’s government, as woke as a rooster at dawn, adopted the Race and Social Justice Initiative, which was more than a program to promote workforce diversity. Rather, it was a program of compelled racial identity.

Its explicit purpose was to change “the fundamental nature of local government” by embedding “racial equity and social justice principles” throughout city “programs, budgets, and culture.” This involved evaluating city employees through a “racial equity lens.” Facially illegal and presumptively unconstitutional, this monomania featured the full spectrum of now-familiar nostrums and policies. They are divisive, bullying and, by now, boring.

Favoring a colorblind society is stigmatized as “racial evasion.” What normal people consider elementary adult virtues — e.g., punctuality, individualism, perfectionism — are residues of “white supremacy culture.” Diversity, equity and inclusion trainers told trainees that racism is “in white people’s DNA.” Although it is against the law to “limit, segregate, or classify” employees by race “in any program, established to provide … training,” Seattle inflicted mandatory, race-segregated sessions. The preferred euphemism for such evasions of the law is “affinity groups.”

They separate White people and BIPOCs (Black, indigenous and people of color). Seattle seems unaware of how close it has come to formulating a 21st-century version of the Jim Crow “separate but equal” doctrine.

The city’s first manager of the Race and Social Justice Initiative was almost endearingly candid: “We asked all the white people to go in one room and all the people of color [to] go in another room. … Well, the White people got in the room and just talked about their fear, and the Black people got in the room and talked about how glad they weren’t the White people.“ Living, no doubt, in a bubble of the like-minded, this person probably had no clue how repulsive he sounded to normal Americans.

Exit quote: “The Ayatollah Itch is a communicable disease spread by aspiring thought police. The vaccine against it is the visceral American recoil against government establishment of religion. Including ersatz religions concocted from evanescent political fads.”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLANKET PARTY: Eric Swalwell Finds Out About Sudden ‘Investigative Reporting.’

California Democrats have been growing increasingly panicked at the polls in their “jungle primary” for governor — where the top two vote-getters (regardless of party) advance to a general-election runoff. It had become disastrously possible that the top two could both be Republicans — Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. Democrats needed to shrink their field of candidates. So, voila, “investigative reporting” dropped a bomb on Swalwell — from the liberal San Francisco Chronicle and liberal CNN.

That’s not to say that Swalwell’s accusers don’t have deeply disturbing facts on their side. It’s all about the remarkable timing. Swalwell ran for president in 2020, which would have been an obvious occasion for investigative reporting, even if Swalwell wasn’t exactly a front-runner in that cycle. Swalwell was one of many Democrats that CNN rewarded with a primetime “town hall” program for national publicity.

It reminded me of the early months of the 2011-12 presidential primaries on the Republican side. They started with Sarah Palin, who never even proclaimed her candidacy. NBC ran with wild allegations from leftist author Joe McGinniss that Palin and her then-husband had used cocaine, and he claimed Palin slept with NBA star Glen Rice when she was a sports reporter in Anchorage.

“Just last year, Swalwell showed himself wearing a ‘No Kings’ protest shirt, bragging to a bunch of supporters that he’d come up with a new Democrat Party campaign slogan: ‘It’ll All Come Out.’ Then it did. He didn’t see the train coming until it hit him.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: Why justice keeps failing Asian hate victims in San Francisco.

The preferred storyline demanded framing every incident through the lens of systemic racism, mental health, or “root causes” rather than straightforward criminal accountability. So the hour-long interview with my terrified 14-year-old son sat on the shelf and never aired.

Even harder is exposing what happens inside the San Francisco Superior Courts themselves. For years, the courts have shielded ideological judges by refusing to submit required criminal disposition data to the California Judicial Council, as mandated by state law. They spent five years claiming their case management system was “too new” to produce disposition numbers, yet somehow found ample time and resources to build their own public judicial dashboard filled with conveniently skewed metrics. What we do know is that the vast majority of crimes in San Francisco are diverted, reduced, or delayed for years, with few, if any, receiving timely trials. On an annual basis, Alameda County averages 11 trials per judge, while San Francisco manages just one.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

BBC LAYOFFS TO IMPACT 2,000 JOBS AS PART OF MAJOR COST-CUTTING PLAN:

The BBC is to cut as many as 2,000 jobs, affecting 10% of its 21,500 employees, in what is being described as the biggest scaling back in 15 years.

According to The Guardian, staff at the broadcaster were to be informed of the cuts on Wednesday afternoon in an all-staff meeting, with interim director general Rhodri Talfan Davies expected to announce the redundancies.

News of the cuts — representing the biggest job cuts at the BBC since 2011 — come before top Google exec Matt Brittin takes the reins as director general in May.

Live look at the reaction of one former BBC employee:

Related: Learning to code ‘will seriously change your life.’

—The BBC, March 25th, 2021.

As Kier Starmer looks to violate Brexit and reintegrate Britain with the EU, I’m sure its jet-setting president will applaud the reduced energy output of the shrinking Beeb:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

THE BETTER MAN:

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

ONE MAN IS ANGRY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN 1945, THE OTHER IS ANGRY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN 1991:

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

FINALLY. FRANCE WILL SECURE THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

PAYBACK (LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY):

Exit quote: “In some strange way, the Strait of Hormuz being blocked is actually the biggest payday U.S. oil has ever had.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 15th, 2026

April 14, 2026

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