February 7, 2026

IT’S COME TO THIS: Somalis sign up for IDs, voter cards, but not all are sold on universal suffrage.

Irony can be pretty ironic, sometimes:

Posted at 12:46 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHY DOES TAXI DRIVER STILL RESONATE?

Another thing [David] Berkowitz shared with his fictional counterpart was that strangely American cult of celebrity that allows its outcasts to become just as famous as its achievers. In the somewhat incongruous happy-ending coda to Taxi Driver, Bickle ends up a hero, finally validated, at least in his own mind, for having cleaned the scum off the streets, while Berkowitz, in turn, would prove far from averse to sharing his story with the outside world. It’s largely thanks to him that 40 US states currently carry so-called Son of Sam – named for Berkowitz’s Labrador-owning neighbor, Sam Carr – laws on their books specifically designed to keep convicts from profiting financially from their crimes.

The other ghastly perversion of Scorsese’s movie came when another pudgy-faced drifter, this one named John Hinckley Jr., became obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, who famously plays a pre-teen hooker in the film. Like Charles Manson before him, Hinckley was a frustrated folk singer, and, like Berkowitz, another sad advertisement of what can happen when paranoid delusions meet with gun ownership. Over the years, his plan came to revolve around the idea of assassinating the US president in the belief that this might impress the object of his desires. Hinckley wasn’t fussy about which president. In October 1980, he was arrested at Nashville airport with three handguns in his luggage while Jimmy Carter was speaking elsewhere in the city. He was fined $50 and released the same day.

Five months later, Hinckley managed to shoot Carter’s successor in office, Ronald Reagan, outside the Washington Hilton. The attack left Reagan with serious injuries and permanently paralyzed press secretary James Brady. A Secret Service agent and a police officer were also wounded. Jodie Foster was not impressed. So far from being attracted to Hinckley, she’s commented on her reluctance to ever act in live theater lest another deranged fan appear in the audience. Hinckley himself was released after 41 years’ confinement in a psychiatric hospital, and is now attempting to resume his career as a musician and artist, although his reception thus far has not been encouraging from the ranks of either the record industry or the public.

And once again, the WaPo was there! “The man who shot Reagan wants to play concerts. It’s not going well,” the Post reported in 2022:

If he were any other shooter — found not guilty by reason of insanity and later deemed not a danger to himself or others — Hinckley might have been free of the court system years ago, and blending in with his guitar at a New York City club. But his victims included a U.S. president, as well as a press secretary, a D.C. police officer and a Secret Service agent. Many people are not eager to see him enjoy the benefits of a life without court supervision.

The Reagan Foundation opposed lifting Hinckley’s restrictions and his attempt at a music career, saying in a statement that Hinckley “apparently seeks to make a profit from his infamy.” A 2021 op-ed in The Washington Post by Patti Davis, one of Reagan’s daughters, also protested his freedom.

“I don’t believe that John Hinckley feels remorse,” she wrote. “Narcissists rarely do.”

In 2022, we descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Patti Davis was a voice of sanity. But then pretty much everyone was much saner the Washington Post during the last decade. QED:

As James Lileks wrote of Taxi Driver: “It’s a brilliant movie. The civilization it portrays is a sad and empty place — Weimar Germany without the energy to muster up the brownshirts, Rome that fell because it was grew bored waiting for the Huns. If I had to choose between its 1 hour and 54 minutes of brilliance and the few minutes of Herrman’s score — no question. That sad sax theme alone sums up everything about the latter 70s, its exhaustion, its dead-hearted nostalgia for everything it grew up pissing on. Julia Phillips was one of the movie’s producers. I’ll bet she would have wanted someone to play that theme at her funeral.”

I wonder what Zohran Mamdani thinks about Taxi Driver? Much like Bill de Blasio before him, he seems determined to return New York to its dissipated 1970s-era condition, which made the film imaginable in the first place.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

POLITICS AS SELF-AGGRANDIZING FANTASY FOR LOSERS:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OLD GODS, ALMOST DEAD:

● Neil Young cancels tour of UK and Europe.

Neil Young has cancelled his planned summer tour of the UK and Europe with his band The Chrome Hearts, telling fans: “this is not the time”.

The 80-year-old singer-songwriter had been due to begin the run of concerts in June, with dates scheduled across Britain, including Manchester, Cork and Glasgow, before continuing through Europe and concluding in Italy in late July.

In a brief message on his website on Friday evening, he apologised to ticket-holders and confirmed he will no longer travel to Europe this year.

“Folks, I have decided to take a break and will not be touring Europe this time. Thanks to everyone who bought tickets. I’m sorry to let you down, but this is not the time. I do love playing live and being with you and the Chrome Hearts,” he said.

Ticket-holders will be contacted and fully refunded.

—The London Telegraph, yesterday.

● Dee Snider [70] quits Twisted Sister over health issues, forces band to cancel anniversary shows.

In a recent Instagram post, the band announced that all performances planned in celebration of the band’s 50th anniversary were canceled after lead singer Dee Snider’s resignation.

“Due to the sudden and unexpected resignation of Twisted Sister’s lead singer Dee Snider brought on by a series of health challenges, the band has been forced to cancel all shows scheduled, beginning April 25th in (São Paulo) Brazil and continuing through the summer,” the band’s statement said.

The statement continued by addressing the future of the band, saying it “will be determined in the next several weeks” and encouraged fans to “stay tuned for updates.”

—Fox News, yesterday.

And from Variety in December: Rolling Stones Call Off 2026 Tour.

The Rolling Stones have called off plans for a 2026 stadium tour of the United Kingdom and Europe, a source close to the band confirms to Variety, following reports that guitarist Keith Richards was unable to “commit” to it.

While never officially announced, the group’s touring pianist Chuck Leavell and a spokesperson recently told press in the U.K. that the band has nearly completed a new album — their second with 35-year-old producer Andrew Watt — and planned on touring the U.K. and Europe. However, Richards, who turns 82 on Thursday, is said to be unable to commit to the rigors of another tour. Live dates in recent years have shown that he has faced challenges due to a long battle with arthritis, which he has called “benign” and said has forced him to change his style of playing.

As Kyle Smith wrote in 2019 in “The Great Forgetting:” 

As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century.

No wonder Paul McCartney allowed Beatles songs to be used in two commercials during the NFC/AFC championship games a couple of weeks ago. Starbucks and Airbnb likely paid a small(?) fortune for the rights, and it keeps the band at the top of the consciousness for millions of similarly aging fans:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MASSIVE RESISTANCE:

Posted at 10:13 am by Glenn Reynolds

EW.

Posted at 9:51 am by Glenn Reynolds

ONE EXPECTS LEFTISTS TO BE THEOLOGICALLY AND SCRIPTURALLY ILLITERATE:

Posted at 9:47 am by Glenn Reynolds

STEPHEN KRUISER: This Awful Thing That the Super Bowl Has Become Belongs on the Hallmark Channel*.

The greatest evil visited upon us by the non-fans who have taken over the Super Bowl is the halftime show abomination. The NFL rulebook states that, “Between the second and third periods, there shall be an intermission of 13 minutes.” Again, that’s from the official rules. Because the Super Bowl has very little to do with football, the rules are tossed out the window in order to appease the television network programming wraiths whose offices are in the ninth ring of Hell. The Super Bowl halftime show finishes a few minutes before Opening Day in Major League Baseball. A slow learner could get an associate’s degree during the Super Bowl halftime.

No true fan wants there to be extra time between the action of a football game. Oh, and we don’t care about the party cuisine either. Get the Lipton’s onion soup mix, make some dip, and get your idiotic commercial-loving butt away from the TV.

Since I don’t believe in coincidences, I read a lot into the rise in popularity of the Super Bowl and its attendant parties happening concurrently with the wussification of the game of football. Within ten years, I swear that the defenders will have to seek verbal permission to come in contact with the offense. In an effort to bring more fans to football, the NFL apparently believes that gutting everything that’s good about the game of football is the key. Roger Goodell (told you I didn’t like him) probably dreams of the day that NFL scores look like NBA scores.

I know that we real football fans will never get the Super Bowl back. Goodell’s vision board probably sees a day when there are four quarters of halftime performances, with 13 minutes of flag football between the second and third, and the games will be played in Stockholm or Buenos Aires (a rant for another day). Perhaps I’ll start a company that organizes Super Bowl parties for true fans. Membership will be predicated upon things like knowing the difference between encroachment and offside, or being able to name at least five players from the 1950s and ’60s.

* Provided your smart TV has bilingual closed captioning enabled:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE:  I’m the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone: Volume 3 (I’m The Beautiful But … Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!).

Imperial Princess Regnant Alice and Crown Prince Daniel of Xeros are now engaged to be married, by the laws and customs of the Church of the Goddess on Xeros.

But if you’ve ever had a wedding, or anything like a wedding, you know you have to hope the guests will be well-behaved.

Enter the Goddess herself, and her “plus-one,” Michael of Terra, who have a bit of an emergency for which they need our plucky crew.

But don’t worry . . . it’s only the universe unraveling. It can wait till tomorrow.

The third volume of the BBESP light novel!

Posted at 7:31 am by Sarah Hoyt

PEGGY NOONAN: A Lament for the Washington Post.

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups.

The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself. (And there would always be an important David Ignatius column, or a great scoop on some governmental scandal that made it worth the cost.)

But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.

I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

But as Mary Katharine Ham writes, something bad did happen on a national scale, and we can measure how newspapers like the Post met the moment:

The Post went full Alinsky-style “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” on Eric Clapton in 2021, because he was a prominent celebrity (who makes his living playing music in sold-out hockey arenas) who disagreed with the official lockdown policy to fight covid, and dared disclose he had a bad reaction to his vaccination shot.

The following year, the Post repeated the same tactics on the Canadian truckers: Washington Post seeks to dox and shame donors to Canadian freedom protesters.

Of course, some protestors were just fine — they were radical and surprisingly chic!

As with the medical profession, the DNC-MSM ability to turn on a dime from “we all must lockdown to slow the spread to Covid,” to “we all need to be taking it to the streets, maaaan” — and then back again, when it suited their worldview — was yet another nail in their reputational coffin:

Related, from last August: Washington Post “Fact Checker” Was “Completely Wrong” on Wuhan Lab-Leak Headline, He Says.

From that a tweet embedded in that last link, it’s obvious why Noonan feigns having no memory of how the WaPo covered 2020:

Also in Noonan’s article, CTL-F “Biden” “unexpectedly” brings back zero results.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll