Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 22, 2026

THE CAPTAIN HAS SPOKEN:

I mean, after all:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

THE ART OF THE DEAL:

As a result, soon:

Since setting the tone for the first Buc-ee’s in Greenland is so important, there is only one man who can be trusted to be the new location’s first manager:

Related: The European mind cannot comprehend the wonders of Buc-ee’s:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

WHY CAN’T THE GOP PLAY SMASH-MOUTH POLITICS?

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 22nd, 2026

January 21, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash and Burn — The Kathleen Kennedy Story.

As the Drinker notes, Kennedy “gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”

I hope the destruction of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises was worth it for her. Gene Siskel famously said that the test of a good movie is, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” For Kennedy, the amount of damage control she’ll be engaging in from here on in will be far more fun to watch than any of the product she put up on the big and small screen.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

HE’S SUPER CEREAL! Al Gore accosts Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after Trump official’s Davos speech.

Former Vice President Al Gore briefly accosted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after the Trump official’s speech on the sidelines of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The Post has learned.

During a Tuesday VIP dinner hosted by billionaire BlackRock boss Larry Fink, where several hundred people were invited, Lutnick delivered a speech that was fiercely critical of European allies.

When he stepped offstage, Gore walked up to him and said, “Boo” – like he was trying to scare him, a source told The Post.

Lutnick laughed and someone at the event remarked, “What an honor to have Al Gore boo,” according to an insider.

We’ve been here before with the Goracle, haven’t we? And with equally predictable results:

And note this:

“I sat and listened to his remarks,” the avid environmentalist told The Post in a statement.

“I didn’t interrupt him in any way. It’s no secret that I think this administration’s energy policy is insane. And at the end of his speech I reacted with how I felt, and so did several others.”

What’s the problem? Al Gore tacitly declared “mission accomplished” to radical environmentalism in 2013, the moment he sold out to oil-rich Qatar:

Al has sold Current, for the magnificent sum of $500-million, $100-million of which is his alone. Not bad for a TV station with less reach and inferior programming to most billboards.

To whom did the Lord of the Upper Atmosphere sell? Why to al Jazeera — which is to say, effectively to the ruler of Qatar, a wealthy country that has nothing else to sustain it but the sale of its huge petroleum resources.

Qatar is about oil, oil and more oil. It is a global warmer’s hell.

But what a paycheck! When Al Gore emerged from his energy-guzzling mansion to address the Senate in 2007 only to refuse to take his own energy reduction pledge from An Inconvenient Truth when presented to him by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Ann Coulter quipped, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: What Blue Zone Collapse Looks Like.

In 2019, a house started burning on Bethel Island, out at the eastern edges of the Bay Area. The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District — which no longer exists, for reasons that will be clear enough — had been eroding for years, closing one fire station after another as funding ran short. In 2019, ten firefighters (three each on three fire engines plus one battalion chief) covered 250 square miles, much of it well-populated. Bethel Island no longer had a fire station. Scroll to page two on this later report that discussed the reform of fire agencies in Contra Costa County, and you’ll find the fire department’s average response time to major emergencies on Bethel Island: a little under 14 minutes for the arrival of the first engine. So there was a house fire, which spread and turned into several house fires, and that cluster of fires was finally brought under control about three hours after the first house started burning. But the fire department existed. It didn’t collapse. In a serious emergency, an adequate response could be summoned in an hour or two.

One you start looking for this — government agencies that exist but are entirely inadequate for the performance of their basic responsibilities — you can find it everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 5:48 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

REDNECK NATION: Justice D E-I Cites “Black Codes” Which Stripped Post-Civil-War Blacks of Right to Bear Arms As Good Law In Order to Justify Endless Gun Control.

Straight out of Redneck Nation, and more recently, Ryan Long’s “When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything” video:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THE DEMOCRATS’ SHOCK TROOPS WITHOUT UNIFORMS:

Federal agents who are doing nothing more than carrying out our immigration laws are being verbally and physically assaulted in blue states, Minnesota and California in particular. Don’t try to convince us these are organic protests with only the purest of intentions.

It’s a generously funded insurgency inflamed by the Democrats, cynics who see a political opportunity to create havoc. The combatants are not in uniform, but they serve the same purpose as shock troops who are on the front lines of a revolution before the occupation forces move in.

Confrontations between ICE agents and protesters have been common for nearly a year. We’ll stipulate that some are simply demonstrating peacefully. But many are there to obstruct, and some of them have violence on their minds. We’ve seen the toxic brew result in at least one death — for now.

It’s foolish to think there won’t be more. There’s a lust for blood. Just this past weekend, a horde attacked a counterprotester in Minneapolis, reportedly whacking him in the head with a flagpole and chasing him as if he were prey. Videos show a man whose life is being threatened. He was bloodied because of his opinions.

Another man was harassed in Minneapolis by an anti-ICE crowd, apparently for having offended the rabble by wearing an American flag hoodie with the word “Freedom” on it. “Take it off and you won’t get hurt!,” his tormenters told him.

This is only a sampling of recent events over the course of a much longer reign of terror.

Which all seems so odd, considering that in 2016, CNN cheerfully went on a ride-along with ICE, and the prior year, Obama awarded Tom Homan “the Presidential Rank Award [which] is bestowed each year by the President upon a small group of career employees and is the nation’s highest civil service award.”

 

Since we mentioned Jerry Seinfeld earlier today, here’s his “rooting for laundry” riff on pro sports in the era of free agency, which applies even more so to the left when someone changes party allegiance:

But then, the left is always rioting about something: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THIS IS THE WAY: GOP Officials Warn Climate Activist Group To Stop Pressuring American Companies.

A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by the state of Florida, said Wednesday that a major climate group may be violating their states’ antitrust and consumer protection laws by artificially pressuring companies to adopt climate activist policies, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier warned the Boston-based nonprofit organization Ceres that it may be illegally pressuring companies to adopt net-zero policies. He said the organization was pursuing policies that were an “assault on American families and businesses.”

“Ceres’ efforts to artificially move entire markets and sectors — and in turn artificially change the output and quality of the goods and services produced by those sectors — toward Ceres’ own preferred policy goals bears all the trappings of the ‘adverse, anticompetitive effects’ that antitrust laws seek to prevent,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter.

Ceres is an advocacy group that says it is “working to accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more just, and resilient world.” In emails obtainedby the House Judiciary Committee, it has described its work as “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force” fighting a war for net zero emissions.

It’s the left’s old friend, the moral equivalent of war!

Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As [Jonah] Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.

Since the century-old moral equivalent of war has long been the moral equivalent of a quagmire, it’s great to see sensible GOP attorneys general declaring a ceasefire.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THE ARTIC SMOKESCREEN: The most dangerous mistake about “Greenland is believing it is about Greenland.”

 

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: As I Suspected, Kamala’s Campaign Was Antisemitic All Along.

According to Kamala’s campaign memoir, 107 Days, Shapiro was taken out of consideration because he “wanted to be too involved in the presidency should they win,” adding, “I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation. A vice president is not a co-president.” She wrote that she had “a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.” Kamala alleged that during their interview, Shapiro attempted to dominate the discussion by insisting on being “in the room for every decision.”

Personally, I never believed that story. I always suspected that deep down, antisemitism played a role. And Shapiro has now confirmed it.

Shapiro, who is considered by some analysts a potential candidate for the 2028 Democratic nomination, made clear he has no intention of letting Kamala rewrite history of what happened during the vetting process, and has now published his own memoir, Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service, in which he revealed the blatant antisemitism within Kamala’s campaign operation.

Shapiro was the only Jewish candidate on the shortlist. During the vetting, Dana Remus, Joe Biden’s former White House counsel, working as a senior member of Kamala’s team, asked him a shocking question. “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?” Shapiro writes that he found the question deeply offensive and interpreted it as essentially asking whether he had been a double agent for Israel. When he objected, Remus told him the team was “just doing its job” and then asked whether he had ever communicated with an Israeli undercover agent. Shapiro shot back with sarcasm. “If they were undercover, how the hell would I know?”

The question tracks a longstanding antisemitic stereotype that Jews are inherently disloyal to their own country or secretly working for Israel.

Was Joe Lieberman asked a similar question when he was being vetted to be Al Gore’s VP nominee in 2000?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 21st, 2026

January 20, 2026

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS:  AWFLs and Boomers Protest ICE by Buying Salt at Target and Then Immediately Returning It.

So what does this do but make life difficult for the employees and customers with legitimate reasons to use the customer service desk?

Shades of 2011’s Occupy Wall Street terrorizing minimum wage New York bank tellers for kicks and grins:

24 protesters were arrested when a mob stormed a LaGuardia Place Citibank and shouted slogans as two demonstrators closed their bank accounts in protest just after 2 p.m.

“[The protesters] all went in a big flash mob to close their accounts,” said Adrielle Slaugh,a 24-year-old office manager who saw the clash. “There were about 30 of them. They were screaming and chanting while they were going in. Security told them to leave, but they didn’t. They stood in a group chanting things to the tellers. There were locked in, and then they were taken away.”

She said when they were locked inside, they were “pressing on the door — you could see them banging on the glass.”

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 9:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 20th, 2026

QUESTION ASKED: Amelia Rockwell — Can an AI Chick Save England?

Someone on X, presumably having the latest free-speech suppressing actions in Great Britain in mind, even posted a tremendous adaptation of a Normal Rockwell painting (hence the title of this piece, “Amelia Rockwell”):

Why is this significant?

Let us harken back to (revolutionary) Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals. You know, the revolutionaries’ guide whose Introduction includes a hat-tip to Lucifer (no clue there).

[Whenever I mention Alinsky I feel obligated to remind that Hillary Rodham-Clinton was an acolyte of Alinsky – he even offered her a position – and Alinsky invented the “occupation” of “community organizer.” Which, not coincidentally, was the pre-political office “occupation” admitted-to by one B. Hussein Obama. But I digress …]

Alinsky developed the “Rules” (as much techniques or tactics as rules) because they are effective. And if the evildoers have developed effective tactics, should we not “repurpose” them on the side of good?

Two of the “Rules” are applicable to the Amelia phenomenon:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)

RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different than any other human being. We all avoid “un-fun” activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)

Knowingly or not, whoever created the patriotic Amelia effectively repurposed those two “Rules” – ridiculing the government and in an enjoyable way (at least for us patriots on both sides of the pond).

Can Amelia save England? Not singlehandedly of course, but it’s a battle well worth fighting: 

Earlier: Two Tier Keir Has a Problem Called ‘Waifu Amelia’ and It Is Screamingly Funny.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 20th, 2026

IN SOCIALIST GRIFTER MILLIONAIRE PARADISE OF DAVOS, GAVIN NEWSOM CALLS UPON WORLD LEADERS TO OPPOSE THE UNITED STATES:

Speaking of knee pads being required: The Boss and His Employee Gavin Newsom Confer at Globalist Conference.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 20th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF RICHMOND:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 20th, 2026

SASHA STONE: Springsteen Lashes Out After Biopic Flops.

Who is the movie for? Springsteen fans? Nope, he alienated most of them with his Trump Derangement Syndrome-fueled rants*. Wine moms and resistance libs? Nope, they stopped going to the movies during COVID. Gen-Z would not even know who he was.

His friendship and alliance with Barack Obama and the Democrats meant that he was now part of the ruling class, not the working class, so who was he now? The Democrats took ownership of him, and he did nothing but scream about Trump, even knowing that most of his loyal fans probably voted for Trump. Did he care? Nope.

Not only did Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere flop harder than a wet noodle, but so far, in the awards race, it has all but disappeared. Maybe it will come in with a Best Sound nomination. That’s the best bet at this point.

Read the whole thing, which goes on to discuss Springsteen’s onstage anti-ICE rant during Saturday gig in Red Bank, NJ. This from the Bruce who sang in 1984, “They’re closing down the textile mill ‘cross the railroad tracks. Foreman says, ‘These jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back,’ to your hometown.” As Stone concludes, “Springsteen, more than any other artist, rescued the desperate who had nothing else. He pretended he was one of them, those invisible working-class stiffs no one in American culture really cared about. Now, Trump’s the hero for many of them, and Springsteen is just another screeching lib trapped inside the Doomsday Cult.”

* Miami Steve Van Zandt told the London Times in 2024, “‘When Bruce got vocal behind the Democrats, we probably lost half the audience. There’s nowhere we can’t do business.’ But some places feel like enemy territory now? ‘A little bit, yeah. We’re ten times bigger in Europe. We might play six stadiums in America and sixty in Europe.’”

Not that Van Zandt is eager to mend fences with the Boss’s former base: Steven Van Zandt Is Bruce Springsteen’s Guitarist. He Hates You. He Wants You Dead.

UPDATE: Celebrities Can’t Stop Lying About Renee Good.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 20th, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Seen The Lights Go Out On Sunset.

I suppose you can still catch a rock show on a Saturday night, it just won’t be Van Halen. And you can grab a drink in one of the Sunset Strip clubs that are still hanging on. But you won’t have any trouble finding parking. And you might be surprised by how empty the streets feel when you stumble out of the club after the show is over in the graveyard hours of the night… those witching hours when, back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, the real fun was just beginning.

In the end the two erstwhile parents of the Sunset Strip were both mortally wounded by the same monster… a monster called streaming which came disguised, as devils always do, as something that would be “better” for us. That it turned out to be more difficult to stream video than audio was nothing more than a technological stroke of luck which gave Hollywood an extra thirty years or so to figure out a solution which, I’m sorry to say friends and neighbors, we never really did. Quite the contrary, Hollywood has actually been complicit in its own streaming decline. A fact of which I was reminded as Robin and I stood on the empty boulevard outside The Rainbow hugging out our goodbyes.

Looking down at me from a billboard across the street were the faces of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon advertising the imminent release of their new movie “The Rip” along with a big red “N” and the words which, for may of us on the theatrical motion picture side of Hollywood, have become something like a muttered curse… “exclusively on Netflix.” With only two weeks to go, this was the first marketing I had seen for the movie despite the fact that it features one of the best-known and most-popular movie star pairings of the current movie star era, and a director (Joe Carnahan) who has made some really good movies.

But there has been no hype for this movie… there is no buzz at all.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: John Nolte: Newsom Fail – Film and TV Production Drops 20% in Democrat-Run California. “Imagine what it takes to move your production to another state — all the inconvenience and expense. But California is such a disaster, nearly twice as many productions are now shot outside California. Things are so bad in the former Golden State that studios are building permanent production facilities in places like New Jersey and Georgia. They obviously want all the way out.”

Posted at 5:50 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 20th, 2026
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