Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

January 15, 2026

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Golden Globes Happened, I Guess…

Back in 2010, when the gulf between reality and what the legacy media was reporting was too big to ignore, I wrote, “A few years ago, the news industry built a mausoleum of their own — remember the Newseum? And that’s not the only place where they’ve entombed themselves. Their news product, particularly on TV, is essentially a closed-circuit system designed to assuage the ruling class. That you and I can choose to also watch is merely a byproduct.”

But that’s the news. I’d call the material released by Hollywood the industry’s own closed-circuit system, but I doubt the people who make this material are actually sitting down to enjoy it themselves. Who is consuming Hollywood’s “entertainment” product these days?

QED:

UPDATE: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Already a Flop — Free YouTube Premiere Draws Shockingly Low Viewership.

MORE: Dispatches from United Earth’s Newspaper of Record:

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

REDNECK NATION:

(Classical reference in headline.)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

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

THOMAS SOWELL: My Experience With Artificial Intelligence.

Another target of this particular AI fraud is military historian Victor Davis Hanson. In addition to his profound scholarly writings on military history, Prof. Hanson has also spoken out strongly on many current and controversial issues.

Apparently those who do not agree with him cannot argue effectively against what he said. So they use AI to make him seem to be saying something different.

Political or ideological reasons for creating fraudulent imitations of people on the internet are not the only reasons. Some of the creators of these deceptive imitations have things to sell or donations to seek. These are the easiest imitations to tell are not mine.

My own website—FactsAgainstRhetoric.org—sells nothing and asks for no donations. It contains not only things that I have actually said, but also a great many things that others have said—on subjects ranging from affirmative action to medical issues, education issues and geographic influences.

This is a website set up in hopes of helping young people get an education, despite being in college.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

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

TURNING DOWN THE TEMPERATURE WOULD BE EASY — COORDINATE LOCAL POLICE AND ICE, AND ALLOW ICE ACCESS TO JAILS:

More here: A Belated Call for Peace.

Posted at 4:32 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

REPORTS: New York Giants, John Harbaugh finalizing $100M contract. “According to multiple reports, the Giants offered Harbaugh a five-year deal that could be worth as ‍much as $100 million. The 63-year-old head coach was only out of work eight days after the Baltimore Ravens fired him over the phone last week, ending their 18-year partnership after missing the playoffs.”

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

JIM GERAGHTY: Trump’s Sudden Reversal on Iran.

To be fair, Iran’s mullahs are doing a fair job of imploding the nation all by themselves:

I cannot say with certainty that the Iranian regime will topple in the coming year. But I can say with certainty that this current Iranian regime will never be able to fix the country’s deepening economic problems. Earlier this week, Jason Malsin of the Wall Street Journal had a spectacularly reported account of how a bank collapse illuminated the deep-rooted destructive rot running throughout the country’s economy:

Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink. That buried the problem but didn’t solve it.

Instead, the failure became both a symbol and an accelerant of an economic unraveling that ultimately triggered the proteststhat now pose the most significant threat to the regime since the founding of the Islamic Republic half a century ago. The bank’s collapse made clear that the Iranian financial system, under strain from years of sanctions, bad lending and reliance on inflationary printed money, had become increasingly insolvent and illiquid. Five other banks are thought to be similarly weak. . . .

The director of bank supervision at the Iranian central bank last year called Ayandeh “a Ponzi scheme.” For many Iranians, it was a symbol of a system whose few resources had been diverted to a well-connected few while they suffered.

The regime in Tehran is running out of money. And it’s not helping when every elite in Iran can see the cracks in the foundation widening and is trying to get every portable asset out of the country.

As Geraghty writes, “You don’t move tens of millions out of a country on a whim. You don’t fly planeloads of gold to Moscow unless you think there’s a good chance you’re going to lose it if you keep it in the country. The people within the regime and closest to the regime are moving their money out, risking its seizure. You only take that risk when you’ve concluded that keeping your money in the country is more dangerous.”

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

DUDE. SO CLOSE! LOL! Mayor Jacob Frey’s Whiny ‘ICE Invasion’ Meltdown Backfires Spectacularly (Watch).

UPDATE: Great moments in losing the plot:

Posted at 1:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

KAMALA HARRIS BUYS $8.2 MILLION SEASIDE MANSION AFTER WARNING ‘SEA LEVELS ARE RISING’ DUE TO ‘CLIMATE CRISIS:’

Former vice president Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff purchased an $8 million mansion in an exclusive oceanside Malibu neighborhood last month. The move came after Harris spent years warning that such communities could be threatened by the “climate crisis.”

A real estate listing for the mansion, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, says the luxury pad is “perched in a prime coastal location” with “breathtaking ocean views.” The property sits right near a coastline that—according to climate scenarios endorsed by Harris—is at risk of facing extreme flooding. A climate model issued by the Biden-Harris administration determined that Point Dume State Beach, the beach a short walk from Harris’s new property, would be severely damaged by sea level rise even under the model’s most modest projections. The Trump administration discontinued that model in June 2025.

The purchase, which was first reported by the New York Post, calls into question Harris’s earnestness when discussing the threats posed by what she calls the “climate crisis.”

“Our oceans are warming. Sea levels are rising,” Harris wrote duringher short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. “Extreme weather is destroying our communities. We are poisoning the planet.”

2019 was also the year that AOC claimed, “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” so I hope Kamala and Doug enjoy their mansion while there’s still time…

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

THE MONEY-MAKING SECRETS BEHIND HOTEL DESIGN (Video):

 

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

The tweet doesn’t appear to be embeddable, which is why there’s a screen cap instead. Click on the above link to watch the video.

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN RESISTANCE THEATER FROM A FORMER US AMBASSADOR:

Posted at 8:55 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

COLEMAN HUGHES: Scott Adams Made Me a Better Thinker.

At a time when America’s elites (myself very much included) were struggling to understand Trump’s appeal, Adams strode onto the scene as a kind of “Trump whisperer.” Drawing on his longtime study of the art of persuasion, Adams took what he’d learned and applied it to Trump, arguing that statements which often looked lunatic at first glance were in fact evidence of elite persuasion skills.

I don’t think I bought Adams’s thesis at the time, but when I heard yesterday’s tragic news that Adams had died after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer, it occurred to me that whatever my disagreements with him, Scott Adams influenced the way I think—for the better.

Here’s how Adams’s thesis worked in practice: During Trump’s first presidential run, Adams considered his promise to build a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it an absolute masterstroke of persuasion—precisely because it was so overly simplistic and technically inaccurate. Fact-checking outlets destroyed Trump’s idea on the basis of all of the financial and technical details—pointing out, for instance, that a solid wall didn’t make sense for many kinds of terrain—and for legacy media, the wall became Exhibit A in proving that Trump was both a racist and a total moron. But for Adams, the avalanche of criticism Trump provoked was a feature, not a bug. Here is how Adams framed it in his 2017 book, Win Bigly:

In order to pull off this type of weapons-grade persuasion, he had to be willing to endure brutal criticism about how dumb he was to think he could secure the border with a solid wall. To make those criticisms go away, all Trump needed to do was clarify that the “wall” was actually a variety of different border solutions, depending on cost and terrain, every time he mentioned it. Easy as pie. But the Master Persuader didn’t want the critics to be silenced. He wanted them to make border control the biggest issue in the campaign just by talking nonstop about how Trump’s “wall” was impractical. As long as people were talking about the wall, Trump was the most important person in the conversation. The Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most.

And during Trump’s first presidential campaign, he discerned that voters wanted radical change to immigration policy.

No wonder numerous DNC house organs attacked Adams in their obits:

Flashback to when Rush Limbaugh passed away in 2021: Just Why Are Post, NY Times Obits Nicer to Terrorists Than Conservatives?

Posted at 8:36 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

TIM WALZ, PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1859:

 

 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

REPORT: Trump questions Reza Pahlavi’s ability to garner support in Iran.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Iranian opposition figure Reza Pahlavi “seems very nice” but expressed uncertainty over whether Pahlavi would be able to muster support within Iran to eventually take over.
In an exclusive Reuters interview in the Oval Office, Trump said there is a chance Iran’s clerical government could collapse, blamed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for the stalemate in negotiations with Russia over the war in Ukraine, and dismissed Republican criticism of a Justice Department probe of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene in support of protesters in Iran, where thousands of people have been reported killed in a crackdown on the unrest against clerical rule. But he was reluctant on Wednesday to lend his full support to Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran, who was ousted from power in 1979.
“He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump said. “And we really aren’t up to that point yet.
“I don’t know whether or not his country would accept his leadership, and certainly if they would, that would be fine with me.”
Trump’s comments went further in questioning Pahlavi’s ability to lead Iran after saying last week that he had no plans to meet with him.

Presumably, Trump is playing his cards very close to the vest when it comes to offering any opinions about what is to come in Iran, especially when talking to Reuters, the home of the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” worldview.

Related: New video from Mark Felton: The Man Who Would Be King — Who is Reza Pahlavi?

Earlier from Felton: The Last Shah — How Iran Changed from Western Ally to Enemy.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 15th, 2026

THE PRESIDENT IS A HEARTLESS NAZI! “You know why you haven’t heard about this story? Because it happened under Obama. Imagine if this happened under Trump. Imagine how many Democrats would fly to Mexico to find this woman and exploit her story,” the tweet goes on to note. 

Earlier:

Related:

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

January 14, 2026

OUT ON A LIMB: White Girl George Floyd Isn’t Working.

Americans have been through too much in the past six years to be raised to hysteria over Good’s death. She doesn’t turn out to be a very sympathetic plaintiff, even post-mortem, and as the country is informed — grudgingly, and not with the participation of the legacy propaganda press — that she was part of an organized cabal of left-wing termagants trained to use their vehicles as weapons against federal law enforcement officers in order to protect illegal aliens from deportation, the case gets harder to make. (RELATED:The Media Are Agents of Propaganda)

The country is looking for prosperity. It’s looking for cultural renewal. It wants the illegals to go home and the radical leftists to shut up.

And at the end of the day, when it looks at Minnesota, what it has to say is not “we stand with Renee” but rather “where did all of our money go?”

Walz and Frey and Minnesota’s gangster attorney general, Keith Ellison, who never paid a price for organizing a kangaroo court for Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the wake of Floyd’s death, don’t have a good answer for that. All they have is a promise to eventually close the barn door now that the horses are gone.

Related: ICE agent who shot Renee Good suffered internal bleeding, was hospitalized after she clipped him with car: DHS.

More: The Goods were larping at being revolutionaries in Minnesota—celebs and Dems must stop encouraging people to do this.

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:58 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 14th, 2026

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 14th, 2026

WATCHING THE SAUSAGE BEING MADE:

This is a practice dating back at least 60 years. As Tom Wolfe told Bill Moyers when he was promoting The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1988:

[O]ne of the things is what I would call “media ricochet,” which is the way real life and life as portrayed by television, by journalists like myself and others, begin ricocheting off of one another. That’s why, to me, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, it was so important to show exactly how this occurs when television and newspaper coverage become a factor in something like racial politics. And a good bit of the book has to do with this curious phenomenon of how demonstrations, which are a great part of racial and ethnic politics, exist only for the media. In the last days when I was working on The New York Herald-Tribune, I’ll never forget the number of demonstrations I went to and announced to all the people with the placards, “I’m from The New York Herald-Tribune,” and the attitude was really a yawn, and then, “Get lost.” They were waiting for Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 5, and suddenly the truck would appear and these people would become galvanized. On one occasion I even saw a group of demonstrators down in Union Square, marching across the Square, and Channel 2 arrived, a couple of vans, and the head of the demonstration walked up to what looked like the head man of the TV crew and said, “What do you want us to do?” He says, “Golly, I don’t know. What were you gonna do?” He says, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, you tell us.”

Related: Maze Found a Positive CNN Story on ICE Arresting Criminal Illegals (Not During the Trump Years of Course).

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 14th, 2026

SASHA STONE: Confessions of a Recovering Liberal White Woman.

Drive Baby Drive. 

Hearing those words by Renee Good’s wife just before disaster hit and the bullets killed her instantly, I thought of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise.

Back then, the controversial ending where they drive off a cliff and we assume crash to their deaths seemed like a twisted form of empowerment, but all it really meant was that they had to give up on a world that had given up on them.

Liberal white women in the past 20 years have lived the most privileged lives of almost anyone on the planet. But even having everything somehow wasn’t enough. They needed to still feel like Thelma and Louise, like they had no other choice but to scream in the faces of the ICE agents, no other choice but to resist, no other choice but to step on the gas.

Related: How have so many young women become brainwashed by the far Left?

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jan 14th, 2026

CHANGE: USAF welcomes delivery of first operational T-7A Red Hawk.

The US Air Force (USAF) ushered its first new-generation T-7A Red Hawk advanced jet trainer into operational service on 7 January, when a formal arrival ceremony for the type was held at Air Education and Training Command’s (AETC’s) headquarters at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph (JBSA-R) in Texas.

This recent ceremony comes after the USAF’s first operational T-7A (serial 21-7005) was delivered to the Texas base from Boeing’s fighter production plant in St Louis, Missouri, on 5 December. Having now arrived at JBSA-R, the new aircraft has formally joined the 12th Flying Training Wing’s (FTW’s) 99th Flying Training Squadron (FTS).

* * * * * * * *

T-38C: Beginning of the End

This recent delivery marks the beginning of a new era in the training of future USAF fighter pilots as the service presses on with its quest to modernise its primary jet trainer fleet. For more than six decades, the service’s now-veteran T-38C Talon fleet has formed the backbone of its fast-jet training syllabus.

However, due to its advanced age and circa-1960s design, the Talon fleet is now struggling with maintenance issues and unavoidable obsolescence, becoming more expensive to maintain and no longer being representative of the technologies and capabilities offered by modern combat jets, such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II.

It lacks the modern digital systems and avionics required to prepare new-generation pilots for complex, multi-domain warfighting in fifth- and future sixth-generation fighters, like Boeing’s F-47.

While the USAF will eventually replace its ageing T-38Cs with the T-7A, but this process won’t start until enough Red Hawks have been handed over to the service. According to Cirium, the USAF still maintains a fleet of more than 480 T-38s. Despite this, USAF officials have cited availability issues with the platform as contributing to ongoing delays in the fast-jet pilot training pipeline.

The new plane, which looks a bit like a McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet with a shrunken body and a jumbo-sized cockpit, was “jointly developed by Boeing and Saab.” Here’s hoping it performs much better than some of Boeing’s more recent product.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jan 14th, 2026

January 13, 2026

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