June 28, 2026

RIDE THE ENVIRO-AUTOMOTIVE MOBIUS LOOP!

I’m so old, I can remember when Michael Bloomberg, then mayor of New York City (the past really is a foreign country, kids) reversed the equation: Stupid Mayor Tricks: Bloomberg Pimps His SUV With Window A.C. Unit. “In April 2009, Mayor Bloomberg signed a bill giving NYC the toughest laws against vehicular idling, with stiff fines for repeat offenders. Three months later, AP reporters caught the mayor repeatedly flouting the law, with his chauffeur and security detail sometimes leaving their engines running for an hour while waiting for the mayor. Bloomberg had to apologize, but ever since he’s presumably had a team of engineers working around the clock to come up with a solution to keep his SUV cool when he’s not in it. Well, they finally had a major breakthrough, and yesterday they did some beta-testing!”

UPDATE:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I TOLD YOU SO, YOU F***KING FOOLS: ‘In the End I Was Right:’ How a Harvard Historian Helped Reagan Topple Soviet Communism.

Fortunately for America and for those under the jackboot of Soviet Communism, there were some who saw past the propaganda to the cruel truth. Among them was [Richard] Pipes, a historian of Russia who also served the U.S. government during the Ford and Reagan administrations.

After Pipes first visited the Soviet Union, in 1957, he wrote a colleague: “All the buildings on the streets were in a state of disrepair, the gateways crumbling, the façades patched up, the courtyards invisible for the mud which covered them. … Everything made the impression of being decayed or dead, even the people walking on the streets, somberly and paying no attention to each other. … I found it difficult to suppress the tears as I viewed about me the effects of 40 years of Soviet rule which had exacted such suffering from the population.”

Pipes later recalled it: “in Leningrad everyone looked gloomy and did not look at each other but seemed deep in their own thoughts. Because one could be executed under Stalin merely for an association with someone deemed guilty of counterrevolution, the only reasonable defense was to have nothing to do with other people.”

Daly quotes Pipes in 1996 summing up his own contribution: “Whereas the profession as a whole regarded the Soviet Union as an essentially popular and stable regime, I saw it as an unpopular and weak regime, which we ought to press very hard. That was very much a minority view, but I think that in the end I was right. Sound, stable popular regimes don’t collapse suddenly, as the Soviet Union did.”

The preference cascaded rather spectacularly back then, much to the chagrin of the DNC-MSM.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Republicans Pounce!

The New Hotness? Republicans Flounce!

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

ENDER’S GAME, WITH UKRAINIAN SUBTITLES:

Posted at 1:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

LET NEW YORK SUFFER:

Whatever the case, passive or active, the people of New York voted for all of this or tolerated its support. The sane people are gone, having fled the march of communism for greener pastures.

So, with that in mind, and the fact that people have not only received ample warning of the destructive nature of radical leftist policies, let the city have what it so desperately wants: let New York suffer.

California is going broke – the coming crush of pensions and the “compassion” in the form of welfare and health care benefits for illegal aliens are going to overwhelm the system and be a foot to the groin of their economy. Good. The same goes for New York.

I have zero interest in helping anyone who hits themselves in the head with a frying pan while complaining about a headache. Once I tell you that, you might want to stop hitting yourself in the head, and you don’t, I’ve lost all interest in your pain or the damage it’s doing.

New York City can die. There was a time when the fate of the economy of New York was the fate of the US economy. Not anymore.

The financial and stock economies are so decentralized now, with many brokers working remotely in places like Florida, that “Wall Street” is now more of an address than anything tangible. Let New York get a giant dose of what they voted for.

As Ed Koch was quoted as saying when he lost his primary against David Dinkins, “The people have spoken, and now they must be punished.” (And boy, were they.)

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BUTTIGIEG SEPARATED FROM CHILDREN AFTER BEING TARGETED BY FALSE CPS REPORT: “Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he was briefly separated from his 4-year-old twins after an anonymous caller filed a false report with Child Protective Services concerning his family. Buttigieg wrote about the swatting-like incident in a lengthy Substack post on Friday, detailing his encounter with Michigan State Police.”

Related:

UPDATE: Questions asked:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DATA REPUBLICAN: The grants behind David French’s convenient theology.

In March 2026, David French wrote in the New York Times that James Talarico is “one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian.” I challenged him on this, and he blocked me for it.

Talarico has cited the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas as scripture in a sermon. He told Ezra Klein that all religions “point to the same truth.” He said on the Texas House floor that “God is nonbinary.” He preached that Matthew 25 tells us “exactly how you and I are going to be saved. By feeding the hungry, by healing the sick. Nothing about going to church.”

Every one of these is a doctrinal claim. Every one contradicts historic Christian orthodoxy.

French addressed none of them. When Allie Beth Stuckey pressed him on April 17, 2026 — “these aren’t policy positions, David, these are theological claims” — French said: “I’m just not willing to say James Talarico is not a Christian… I’m just not writing these people out of Christianity.”

Fair enough.

But here is French in August 2024, endorsing Kamala Harris in the New York Times: “There are many churches and Christian leaders who are now more culturally Trumpian than culturally Christian.”

That’s a claim about what Christianity is — and it excludes.

David French won’t question one man’s Christianity when that man cites Gnostic fan fiction as scripture. But David French will question the Christianity of entire denominations when they vote wrong.

Related: Where Are the Bill Kristols and Michael Steeles on the Democrat Side Today?

When the Bushie Republicans were turned out of power in the GOP by the MAGA crowd, many of them updated their belief systems to meet the new reality, and several profited from the change. Others delighted in their obsolescence, mostly because they found paymasters willing to make it worth their while. And that’s how we got the Bill Kristols, David Frenches, Michael Steeles, and the Lincoln Projects of the world, who for the last 10 years have bitched and complained and performatively declared alliances with the Left.

What now of the Clinton Democrats? Why are we not seeing a similar turning of the coats?

What say you, James Carville? For years, you’ve screeched at the Hard Left and complained that they would destroy your party. Well, now that you’ve been proven correct, now that you had the power to stop it, are you going to knuckle under to the DSA? Are you going to champion a third party to replace the loons of the Hard Left? Will you say, as some of the NeverTrumpers said, that your home must be with the GOP until the contagion on the Left burns itself out?

We won’t hold our breath.

For about 60 years now, you could make a very good living in the Northeast Corridor as a columnist who appears on the Sunday talking head shows as a would be Republican who somehow could just never seem to find actual GOP politicians suitable enough to vote for. With the exception of one or two cable TV news channels, the reverse has never been true.

As for rank and file Dems:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY, THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE. How It Started:

Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England. And, as western peoples go, the English are very highly differentiated. There is a sort of back-handed admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure living in England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.

—George Orwell, “England, Your England,” 1940.

How It’s Going:

The King’s official job is to protect faith “within the multi-faith nation”, under a newly published palace definition of the monarch’s role.

The King, who is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, will “protect the space for Faith” under a redrafted job description from Buckingham Palace.

Published in the annual review of the Royal family’s finances, the Sovereign Grant report 2025-26, it changes the description of the King’s role as “Head of Nation” from last year, when he was the “Head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith”.

This year it goes further to specify: “His Majesty is Supreme Governor of the Church of England and protects the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation.”

Before the King’s coronation, there was debate over whether the King would choose to be “Defender of Faith” in the plural, rather than “the Faith” as his Christian ancestors had been. In the event, he chose the traditional wording.

But he has made interfaith dialogue one of the cornerstones of his working life, both as Prince of Wales and now as King. He speaks regularly of the Abrahamic faiths and undertakes engagements with the Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Orthodox, and other religious communities in Britain and around the world.

—“King to ‘protect multi-faith nation’ in revised definition of monarchy,” the London Telegraph, Friday.

Twenty minutes into the future?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE (LACK OF) RESULTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES:

But just think of how many otherwise unemployable NGO-types that Scott provided make-work for.

Posted at 11:24 am by Stephen Green

MONTY PYTHON AND THE MEANING OF SUDDEN RUSSIAN DEATH SYNDROME:

Posted at 10:44 am by Ed Driscoll

WE’VE LEARNED THIS MONTH THAT MUCH OF AMERICA IS PRETTY GREAT ALREADY:

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll