May 19, 2026

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: How Disney ruined Star Wars.

If [The Mandalorian and Grogu] does underperform – “flop” is a bit strong – then questions will be asked of Filoni’s judgement. Whether next summer’s Ryan Gosling-starring Star Wars: Starfighter is similarly doomed – and if audiences are weary of a series that has been systematically exploited and therefore ruined for years. With the more than honorable exception of the excellent Andor – which, if rumors are to be believed, Filoni was bewildered by – there hasn’t been anything any good in the Star Wars universe since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney for $4 billion back in 2012.

It isn’t hard to see why not. Regardless of whether you are an especially big fan of Star Wars or not, there is no denying the way that the first film completely reshaped the American cinematic landscape when it emerged in 1977. Becoming an even bigger hit than Spielberg’s Jaws two years before and laying the groundwork for virtually every big-budget science-fiction fantasy that followed ever since. Its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, is justifiably believed to be one of the seminal films ever made, introducing elements of moral ambiguity and genuine wit into the series.

Yet when Disney paid the big bucks for Lucasfilm, they were not thinking about moral ambiguity or wit, but instead as to how they could monetize the franchise for all that it was worth.

And then Kathleen Kennedy alienated the male half of the entire original fanbase. This is the point in a Critical Drinker video where he pastes in the obligatory clip of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark saying, “Not a good plan:”

Tweet continues, “So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with.”

UPDATE: Christian Toto was not impressed by the latest movie with the Star Wars imprimatur:

Tweet concludes, “One late scene is a DEI highlight reel. This is a franchise on life support.”

Posted at 12:45 am by Ed Driscoll

May 18, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE: ‘I Don’t Give a Flying F— He Died!’ NYC Mayor’s Office Gives Press Badges to Luigi Mangione Fangirls Caught on Tape Celebrating CEO’s Murder.

The New York City Mayor’s Office gave coveted press badges to a trio of “journalists” who celebrated the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson outside a court hearing for his accused killer, Luigi Mangione, on Monday.

The women, sporting city-issued press badges, called Thompson a “murderer” and “terrorist” outside a hearing held ahead of Mangione’s upcoming trial. Mangione, who is accused of fatally shooting Thompson in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024, has become a cause célèbre of left-wing activists and journalists. Hasan Piker, the far-left podcast host who rubs shoulders with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D.), said in a recent New York Times interview that Thompson was guilty of “social murder.”

“F— Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying f— he died,” Ashley Rojas, one of the credentialed journalists, said outside the court hearing. Rojas was joined by two other “Mangionistas,” Lena Weissbrot and Abril Rios. The trio do not appear to work for any publication.

Mangione’s attorney is asking his fan girls to dial their squeeing back a notch or twenty:

As Noah Blum adds, “Luigi fangirls tanking his defense would be the ultimate hilarity.”

Including those old enough to know better:

Related: Review: Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, by Noah Rothman.

One particularly jarring moment in the first chapter comes not when we find that left-wing violence has become hugely prevalent in modern American life, but that we have all become—to some degree—numb to this left-wing violence. Even the most avid political enthusiast will likely have forgotten—under the weight of sheer frequency—at least one example of violence that should be once-in-a-generation, but is now more once-in-an-afternoon. Even as a conservative reader whose career focuses on the battle against antisemitism in the West—making the notion of political violence far from imaginary—I was astonished by how normal this constant onslaught of violence has become, with the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots of just a few years ago feeling more like a long-forgotten dream.

We’ve had a few of those:

One of the reasons these periods of violence eventually become “long forgotten dreams” is that media gatekeepers are “unexpectedly” simpatico with leftist violence. In response to Posobiec’s tweet, Hollywood has made two movies about this period — one was directed by Sydney Lumet, and the other by Robert Redford. And both films sympathized with the bombers.

More:

See also: the DNC-MSM’s freakout over Spencer Pratt. Or as America’s Newspaper of Record quips:

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

RIDE THE ASSASSINATION RECURSION! Why Are So Many on the Left Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempts Were Staged?

New polling data reveals that a surprisingly large portion of Democrats either believe the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump were staged or aren’t sure they were real. It’s a hard thing for many of us to wrap our heads around, and I think it’s worth asking why so many refuse to acknowledge those assassination attempts for what they were.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents in a Newsguard survey said they believed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting “event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans.”

So, a third of Democrats are entertaining what amounts to a wildly implausible conspiracy theory. The numbers skew even higher among younger respondents: Americans between 18 and 29 were more likely than older people to believe the incidents were fabricated.

It’s quite a dichotomy — the left believe that Trump faked multiple assassination attempts, even as they cheer on the assassins of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk: ‘I Don’t Give a Flying F— He Died!’ NYC Mayor’s Office Gives Press Badges to Luigi Mangione Fangirls Caught on Tape Celebrating CEO’s Murder.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FINALLY: Candace Owens to sit down with Hunter Biden.

Conservative* podcaster Candace Owens, a longtime critic of former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, is set to sit down with the ex-president’s son to cover a litany of topics, including the infamous laptop saga.

Owens, who has frequently criticized Hunter Biden and his family over his business dealings, drug addiction, and the controversy surrounding his laptop, previewed a wide-ranging discussion touching on addiction, politics, faith, and Washington’s political culture.

“Hunter Biden, welcome to the Candace Owens Show,” Owens said in a promo clip previewing the interview.

During the interview, Hunter Biden openly addresses his past struggles with addiction, acknowledging the personal destruction it caused in his life. “I was a crackhead,” Hunter Biden said, reflecting on how his addiction contributed to the collapse of his marriage and sent him into what he described as a “really, really dark cycle.”

Exit quote:

* And yet, Candace continues to have strange new respect from the left.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHEN NARRATIVES FAIL:

Posted at 6:46 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“PREASE ACCEPT OUR APOROGY:”

Readers: we’re sorry. On May 13, 2026, we covered the story of Eileen Wang, the California mayor who confessed to working as a Chinese foreign agent, and in doing so, we made a grave error — we failed to acknowledge that accurately reporting on CCP spies running entire American towns was, in fact… racist. You see, NBC News published an article last week explaining the real problem with the Chinese spy mayor story was that it has “reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination,” which totally doesn’t read like a Norm Macdonald joke come to life, and definitely serves as a helpful reminder that words, even accurate ones about bombshell espionage scandals, can carry violence. The next time an American mayor is caught working for the PRC? We urge you to sit your racist ass down and instead reflect upon what you can do to Stop Asian Hate.

Evergreen:

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HOW IT’S DONE:

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JOANNE JACOBS: Zombifying the universities.

AI use on college campuses “threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons,” writes Owen Yingling, a University of Chicago philosophy major, in The Great Zombification. “It will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training,” he argues in The New Critic.

Elite universities are spending millions of dollars to figure out how to “integrate” AI in the classroom, Yingling writes. What it really means is substituting AI “for learning, teaching, and conversing.”

Some will wait for the university system to crumble, hoping to build something new from the ashes, he writes. The ivied halls “will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent.”

Harsh, but fair.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

THIS:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

Posted at 4:25 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll