Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

October 16, 2025

HAVING A PULSE CERTAINLY DIDN’T HURT: How Did Trump Get a Peace Deal Done Where Biden Could Not?

Will Trump actually win a Nobel? There are too many open questions when it comes to the future of Israel and Gaza. It is hard, at the very minimum, to justify such an award when so many Palestinians are dead, thousands of them shot and bombed and starved after Trump took office. Trump, at least, was not president when the war began and first spiraled out of control. Biden had a chance to wrench history in a different direction and failed. If he is cognizant at all of the events over the past week, he should feel regret and shame.

“Cognizant at all?” It was only last year that Joe Scarborough assured me that “This version of Biden intellectually, analytically is the best Biden ever. And I’ve known him for years.” What on earth happened in the months that followed?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16th, 2025

HOW THE MEMES GET MADE:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16th, 2025

THREE TERM PRESIDENT PARACHUTES INTO GUBERNATORIAL RACE TO RESCUE FELLOW RADICAL DEMOCRAT: Panic At The Demsco: Obama Jumps In to Save Spanberger in VA.

Virginia Democrats find their prospects in a tailspin in the last couple of weeks. Their Attorney General nominee, Jay Jones, turns out to be stupid enough to commit death wishes for opponents’ children in text format. Gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger froze in a debate with Winsome Earle-Sears when challenged on it. Now polls show a sharp decline in both races, and Democrats need to change the narrative — fast.

He’s fit. He’s rested, coming off his third term in office during the Biden Regency. And now Barack Obama will put himself back in the game — to rescue Democrats from themselves in Virginia:

Former President Barack Obama is endorsing Democratic former Rep. Abigail Spanberger in the Virginia governor’s race and starring in two new digital ads for her campaign.

“Virginia’s elections are some of the most important in the country this year,” Obama says in both ads, shared first with NBC News, which focus on the economy and abortion rights. He also says in both ads, “Every vote counts.”

How desperate is this move? Well, let’s Psaki back four years, when this exact same scenario unfolded. Remember when current governor Glenn Youngkin started to overtake Terry McCauliffe in polling?

This time around, Obama will be tacitly endorsing Spanberger’s radical positions:

And he’ll be tacitly endorsing Jay Jones’ nihilistic racialism: Spanberger Refuses to Withdraw Support of Jay Jones Over Violent Texts Scandal.

Winsome Sears called Spanberger’s bluff on this topic: Slay Queen! Winsome Sears DROPS VA Dems Turning What They Thought Was a GOTCHA Into a LEGENDARY Self-Own.

That’s how it’s done. Because otherwise:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16th, 2025

THE UPCOMING ‘NO KINGS’ ZOMBIE BARN DANCE AND BBQ:

Men, at least ones still in possession of their original equipment, tend to be very logical creatures. And yet, the Democrats have been hitting us for years now, with positions that are about as logical as a football bat. Among them:

  • Allowing crime is compassion.
  • Men can be women, and vice versa.
  • National borders are an option.
  • If we take that open border policy as an indication, citizenship means nothing.
  • Joe Biden’s dementia is still regarded as being “sharp as a tack.”
  • Guatemalan gang members who abuse their wives are called “Maryland dads.”
  • After it was absolutely clear that Biden had the brain capacity of a doorknob (or less), they stuffed a candidate with an even lower IQ into the replacement role.
  • The chosen replacement candidate had absolutely no primary votes whatsoever, and yet Democrats publicly regard this as “saving democracy.”

All of these declarations of insanity have collectively attained an almost religious dedication among the left. The left assumes that these positions simply can’t be wrong, regardless of the carnage wherever they are applied. The violent chatter from their side has been going on for so long now in support of these obvious incongruities that it has become a part of who they are. They see altering their position on these matters as more of a problem than cutting off one’s b— er, sorry — surgically altering one’s sex.

The attitude seems to be, “We said it, it can’t be wrong, so now the violence, which is now threatening to break out into Civil War, is just fine with us.”

I tell you true, I’ll not be shocked if this next “No Kings” Barndance and Bar-B-Que on Oct. 18 shows us at least some of that, complete with Zombie suits.

To be fair though, I think we can say with great certainty that no one in America wants any kings:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16th, 2025

GOOD AND HARD, FUN CITY:

What could possibly go wrong?

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16th, 2025

BROKEN WINDOWS AT THE PENTAGON:

Hegseth denounced the erosion of standards and distraction from warfighting caused by DEI directives and unnecessary training. Having already eliminated the former at the very beginning of his term, Hegseth order the reduction of mandatory training from twenty-seven to sixteen courses and rescinded 350 hours of online modules required for promotion.

In its place, the secretary promised the “ruthless, dispassionate and common sense application” of the newly mandated fitness and grooming standards.

In particular, Hegseth elaborated on his two criteria for reinstituting past standards — the E-6 and 1990 tests.

Under the former, if a proposed change enables E-6s (or O-3s) “to get back to basics”, then the change is justified.

Under the latter, if a standard was in existence in 1990 and was modified for reasons other than changes to the battlefield, then the original is reinstated.

Curiously, Hegseth acknowledged he had no specific rationale for picking 1990 – “seems to be as good a place to start as any.”

Broken Windows Theory provides a clue.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16th, 2025

October 15, 2025

OPEN THREAD: There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences, and participate in tonight’s open thread.

Posted at 9:41 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

WITH FUNDING CUT, PBS TURNS TO RERUNS TO FILL THE PROGRAMMING GAP:  Leftist, Language-Twisting PBS News Sees ‘Orwellian’ Era Dawning Under Trump.

Sunday’s PBS News Weekend devoted eight minutes to the tired leftist cliché that Republicans have ushered in a new Orwellian era, using a new documentary about writer George Orwell by director Raoul Peck.

After years of PBS News capitalizing “Black” but not “white” in transcripts, calling illegal immigrants “undocumented,” and insisting men can choose to become women and boys choose to become girls in the twisted name of transgender rights, PBS has discovered the danger to plain language comes from the political right. (PBS’s math isn’t so hot either.)

* * * * * * * *

No one at PBS seemed to think it was weird to interview a guy who made a boosterish movieon The Young Karl Marx and his “urgent and necessary” analysis as an opponent of authoritarianism.

Everything that pleases the left meets the anti-Trump “moment.” [William] Brangham’s math was about as reliable as that of Winston Smith’s 1984 antagonist O’Brien (who made the original “2 +2 = 5” claim).

BRANGHAM: As you’re listening to him speak, overlaid with images of modern day. Several times watching the film, I had to remind myself these were words written almost half a century ago.

Orwell’s 1984 was in fact published in 1949, making it far more than “almost half a century” old. Did Brangham get the title confused with the publication date? An unfortunate mistake to make when discussing a film whose title condemns faulty arithmetic.

As Kyle Smith wrote near the start of Trump’s first term in 2017 when the left had their first dose of 1984 fever: Please stop comparing Trump’s presidency to Orwell’s ‘1984.’

Here’s a simple test for detecting whether you are living in George Orwell’s “1984.” If you feel free to tell everyone you’re living in “1984,” you aren’t.

Proving that they remain completely unable to distinguish between “I don’t like this” and “This is some serious HitlerStalin stuff right here,” America’s Party of the Intellectuals (™) has been screeching that the Trump era represents a fulfillment of Orwell’s prophecy.

CNN, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and other outlets have all run pieces warning that “1984” is here.

My voice is being silenced, the citizens scream. Protest is being stamped out, cry the protesters. Dissent is no longer allowed, people say as they watch a clip of Alec Baldwin ridiculing Trump for the 45th time.

In November of last year, Peter J. Hasson of the Washington Free Beacon tweeted, “People forget how truly insane 2017 was.” Including when leftists thought that the answers to their woes could be found in Orwell’s 1984, which they bought en masse that year, but apparently never bothered to read, given their embrace, two years later, of AOC’s apocalyptic environmental ravings, out of which spawned her totalitarian Green Nude Deal proposals.

Followed of course in 2020, by Dr. Fauci’s actual totalitarian shuttering of the economy in March, which the left loved so much that Dr. Fauci action figures and bobblehead dolls can still be found on Amazon. At least they loved it until the spring, when Oceania declared it had never been at war with East Peoria, and decided large gatherings were perfectly fine, as long as they were happening in the name of “social justice.” Or as the Ministry of Truth NPR declared at the beginning of June: “Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. ‘White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,’ they wrote.”

It can happen here – and it did. (Just ask Shelley Luther.)

Don’t worry lefties — I’m sure Mayor Mamdani will do his level best to make a Fun City version of IngSoc a reality.

UPDATE: More lame reruns from early in Trump’s first term: Kathy Griffin Crowned Queen of Crazy: Calls Trump a ‘Fascist Dictator’ and Pushes ‘No Kings’ Protests.

Comedian Kathy Griffin went on a 10-minute-long rant as part of a promotion for this coming weekend’s left-wing “No Kings” protests, slamming President Donald Trump by referring to him as a “dictator” who she believes “didn’t win a free and fair election.”

Given what happened in 2020 and the way people like Griffin treated MAGA folks who questioned the results of that presidential election, her statement is chock full of irony and hypocrisy. Griffin clearly isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But it makes you wonder. Who’s got the smaller IQ? Griffin, or those who, for some strange reason, still buy tickets to see her do “comedy” in person? Might as well put your cash directly in the toilet and flush.

“I am going to be 65 on November 4. So listen to Aunt or Grandma Kathy when I say our country has never been through anything this horrible in my lifetime,” Griffin kicked off her screed. After going on to compare Trump to former President Richard Nixon, Griffin said, “The current so-called president is a fascist.”

He’s doing a really lousy job of being either a king or a fascist, considering he did nothing in response after you posted this in 2017:

Speaking of “No Kings:”

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED:

The New Lameness? Justice Jackson’s DEI Disaster: Equating Race to a Disability in a Bizarre Supreme Court Meltdown.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record notes:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Kamala Harris freaks out over devastating nickname (video).

Harris is currently in the midst of a 15-city book tour following the release of her new book “107 Days,” recounting her presidential campaign against President Donald Trump.

For the most part, Harris’ whirlwind promotional tour has been uneventful — until last night.

In now viral footage circulating across social media, a far-left activist group called “Climate Defiance” abruptly interrupted Harris’ commentary, calling her a “right-wing war criminal.”

Socialist Kamala is right-wing? Laughable. But the jab clearly upset Harris as she stood up and yelled back at the protesters, who were quickly escorted out of the venue by security.

Take a look:

Was Harris more upset with being labeled “right-wing” … or “war criminal?”*

While last night’s protest and disruption was the most vocal, Harris has quietly been the subject of pro-Palestinian protests throughout her book tour. She has at times rebuffed the protesters and also given airtime to their concerns, but last night was clearly not the case.

“I was the first person at the highest level of our United States government or administration to talk about the fact that the people in Gaza were starving,” Harris told protesters at a book event last month, according to The Washington Post.

Uh, they are?

* Well, Kamala certainly went out of her way last year to collect the endorsements of former “right-wing war criminals,” which probably didn’t do much to help her case with her fellow radical leftists: Kamala Harris’s gushing tribute to Dick Cheney backfires spectacularly: ‘The single most evil man in the 21st century.’

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

DARK BRANDON COMES OUT SWINGING! I’m Just That F—ing Good: Gaza Peace Plan Was the Opening Act of My Bold Second-Term Agenda.

Earlier this week, I traveled on Air Force One to Jerusalem to fence some diamonds for Hunter. I also addressed the Israeli Knesset, where I was reminded of something my former press aide Andrew Bates once said: “To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that fucking good.” Andrew is one of the most intelligent and loyal public servants I have ever known, which is why I was honored to nominate him for Treasury Secretary after my so-called friends in the U.S. Senate refused to confirm my kid brother James.

Don’t worry, you can thank me later. My diplomatic talents notwithstanding, solving the Gaza conflict wasn’t easy. We toiled for years without results, but it finally paid off earlier this year, around the time of my second inauguration. Everything just started to click. We solved inflation and the border crisis without batting an eye, then we turned our sights on the Middle East. The usual suspects didn’t think I could pull it off, especially since I’ve been working so hard on other important issues such as climate justice, health care for transgender youth, and amnesty for violent criminals. Joe Scarborough thought I was washed up, tried to give me the name of Mika’s Botox guy. Ian Sams—my own White House press secretary—still won’t let me poop in private. But I persevered.

This was truly a bipartisan accomplishment. I would like to thank former president Donald Trump and his team for streamlining the negotiations with our Arab partners. Barack Obama had absolutely nothing to do with this peace deal. What a bum. He must be pissing himself with jealousy right now. I got the peace deal, the transformative legacy, the hotter wife. He’s got an ugly half-finished library in Chicago, and a buttload of regret for ghosting me in 2016 and begging me to step down in 2024. Who’s laughing now, Hussein?

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

SCENES FROM A STARVING POST-GENOCIDE HELLSCAPE:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

BEN RHODES FROWNS: Former Obama Official Ben Rhodes Can’t Bring Himself To Give Trump Credit For Israel-Hamas Deal.

“It’s not really a peace deal in the sense that we still don’t know who’s going to govern Gaza. We still don’t know if Hamas is going to disarm,” Rhodes continued. “We’re at phase one, quite literally, of what would be a very long road to some kind of lasting peace. So, look, I think a transactional — and, you know, it’s interesting to reflect on that quote you put up, I mean, a transactional style of diplomacy, it can get you that kind of short-term win, right? You know, you take care of a piece of business, but it’s not necessarily designed for the kind of patient follow-through and painstaking work that is necessary to address something as deep as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.”

Trump terminated the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018, calling it “a horrible deal that should never, ever have been made.” The 2015 agreement faced backlash from critics of the deal claiming it “paved the road” for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

No wonder Rhodes is unhappy with Trump’s role in securing a hostage exchange and (likely temporary) ceasefire, as Jewish Insider noted in July:

Rhodes said, “If you think you can continue to take money from AIPAC, whether you’re Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or whomever, AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.”

“And you cannot give them a carveout,” Rhodes continued. “And we need to have this fight as a party because these are the wrong people to have under your tent. I’m usually a big-tent person, but the kind of people who are supporting Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I don’t want them — my leaders of my political party — like, cozying up to those people.”

During his time at the White House, Rhodes was one of Obama’s closest advisors and masterminded the public relations push behind the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He told The New York Times in 2016 that he “created an echo chamber” of experts who would feed reporters positive analyses of the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes stated.

Rhodes was a strident critic of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly earning himself the nickname of “Hamas” in the White House. In his 2019 book The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, Rhodes wrote that Israel was “driven by the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox emigres” and that Netanyahu used “political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing Palestinians.”

As Lee Smith wrote at the beginning of 2020: Obama Passed the Buck. Trump Refused to Play. “The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

TRUMP DUMPS ON HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Free tours of Obama Presidential Center to start soon in Chicago.

Construction is coming along on the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park.

The Obama Foundation will start offer free community tours to take a look at the property.

People can ask questions, see the renderings, and take a walking tour outside the fence of the construction site.

In 2019, Jon Gabriel described the library as looking like “A discarded Chinese take-out box. The backside of a Star Wars sand crawler. The Washington Monument with the interesting bits lopped off. That’s what sprung to mind when confronted with the initial design of the Obama Presidential Center.”

And as the library nears completion, we must face facts: thanks to the runaway inflation during Obama’s third term, $850 million doesn’t go as far as it used to:

Still though, in case we really do need to go to war with Canada, Chicago will have one heck of a flak tower once the library is completed.

© C.Stadler/Bwag
Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Oct 15th, 2025

October 14, 2025

MEGYN KELLY: Viral “Diversity is Not Our Strength” Commentator Will Kingston on What’s Happening in the UK.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 14th, 2025

WHY THE DEMOCRATS’ ACTIVIST CLASS COULDN’T CELEBRATE THE CEASE-FIRE THEY DEMANDED:

Way back on October 11, 2023, New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Now, at that point, Hamas had just massacred civilians in 21 communities, killing 1,195 people including 38 children. The Israel Defense Force had barely begun its retaliation for the atrocity, but the answer in the mind of Cabán was clear: Everyone should stop shooting and accept a permanent cease-fire. To some of us, this sounded like allowing Hamas to get a free shot at Israelis and then preventing the Israelis from hitting Hamas back.

Two days later, on October 13, a then-little known state senator by the name of Zohran Mamdani joined the call for a cease-fire: “Now is the moment for all people of conscience to call for a ceasefire and no more military funding.” The same day, another Democratic socialist state senator, Julia Salazar concurred: “A ceasefire is urgent. Please implore your federal elected officials to take every action they can to stop this from continuing.”

On October 28, 2023, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her call. “Some may dismiss a ceasefire as naïve or worse. Yet who has a plan for what follows this destruction? What do we call that?”

Mamdani offered a statement on Twitter yesterday that declared “Today’s scenes of Israelis and Palestinians are profoundly moving” but also said that “we have watched as our tax dollars have funded a genocide.” At least Mamdani acknowledged that the cease-fire occurred.

Genocide, huh? Hamas carries out public executions — just hours after peace treaty signing.

Hamas carried out mass public executions in Gaza on Monday, gruesome video shows — as the bloodthirsty terror group desperately seeks to maintain control over the Palestinian enclave and punish those it deems “collaborators with Israel.”

The barbaric reprisal came just hours after President Trump declared the “end of an age of terror and death” and signed a document enshrining his 20-point peace plan.

The graphic footage shows eight badly beaten, blindfolded men kneeling in the street before each is shot dead by Hamas gunmen in front of a cheering crowd.

The terror group said, without providing evidence, that the killings targeted “criminals and collaborators with Israel,” the BBC reported.

The images currently being released by Hamas look awfully genocide-adjacent:

But the left doesn’t care: Checking In on Bluesky…

It’s not easy being trapped in the bubble:

If only the left had coined a name for this ostrich-like behavior. If only.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 14th, 2025

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE SNAKE PLISSKEN AGAIN: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he wants Trump to send National Guard to San Francisco; mayor’s office responds.

It’s looking grim on the Streets of San Francisco:

(The above tweet doesn’t appear to be embedding, so click over to watch video.)

Related:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Oct 14th, 2025
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