June 3, 2026

PLATNER WILL CONTINUE DEMOCRATS’ LONG TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE IN THE US SENATE, SHOULD HE SUCCESSFULLY CONCLUDE HIS KAMPF:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHARLES COOKE: Scott Pelley Is Ridiculous in All the Usual Ways.

Here’s Scott Pelley, formerly of CBS’s 60 Minutes, complaining about being fired for cause:

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

Where to start? First off, if Pelley cared about his job that much, he probably shouldn’t have behaved as unprofessionally as he did when he met his new boss, Nick Bilton. As the Washington Post reports, “Pelley laid into Bilton during a Monday morning ’60 Minutes’ meeting, when he questioned Bilton’s qualifications” in front of a host of other staff. During that meeting, Pelley also insisted that Bari Weiss, his other boss, “has no qualifications for her job,” and, later, when Bilton organized a private meeting, Pelley continued in the same vein. In his letter firing Pelley, Bilton wrote that Pelley had:

rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation — demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.

Which . . . well, yeah. There is simply no circumstance in which an employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed. A lot of journalists in this country seem to believe that they belong to an elect class to which the normal rules do not apply. They do not. Journalists are protected by the First Amendment, yes, but they are not more protected than anyone else, and nor do those protections afford them the right to behave like jerks in the workplace. CBS is a private company. It is not, at root, any different than Unilever or Ford or Home Depot. Scott Pelley attacked his boss in public and private. Scott Pelley was fired. Film at 11.

“The film at 11” reference is a nice touch – Pelley, and those on the left vigorously defending him, are acting exactly like they did when they defended NPR and PBS last year when Trump cut its government funding. As Iowahawk joked:

Paddy Chafesky’s Network was a brilliant satire of how those in a network television newsroom thought and behaved in the mid-1970s, the last era of three terrestrial commercial television networks. Why do the men and women who inhabit those spaces a half century later still pretend that they have an absolute monopoly on information?

Or as John Nolte writes: Bari Weiss Accused of Killing ’60 Minutes’ After Pelley Firing (Let’s Hope So).

Normal People are surely not gullible to give 60 Minutes a second chance. We all know that the corporate media is an institution too insulated to reform because it has been infested with leftists more concerned with status than truth.

Still, we owe Scott Pelley a huge thank you for once again exposing the elite media for who they are: narcissistic prima donnas unwilling to reform, opposed to any kind of change, and laughably incapable of understanding that their sense of self-importance is a check they can’t cash.

Nolte concludes:

When’s the last time you gave any of these former media elitists a thought: Ryan Lizza, Eugene Robinson, Lester Holt, Alex Wagner, Andrea Mitchell, Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Dowd, Philip Bump, Terry Moran…?

They all vanished into the ether of Substackian irrelevance to talk to one another….

And it is glorious.

But could someone who makes Ted Baxter appear to be a well-grounded font of humility even function in Substack-land?

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

UNREADY, THAT’S HOW:

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Alphabet Is Selling $80 Billion of Stock to Feed Its AI Ambitions—and the Rest of Big Tech May Follow.

The offering is yet another reflection that the artificial-intelligence ambitions of Big Tech are outstripping their substantial operating cash flows, forcing them to tap debt and equity markets. In 2026, Alphabet and four other companies — Microsoft, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, and Oracle — say they will spend about three-quarters of a trillion dollars on AI data centers together.

In Alphabet’s telling, its capital expenditures will “significantly increase” in 2027, which may be a harbinger for others in the sector. If this news is any indication, the AI investment boom still has legs beyond 2026.

Alphabet’s 2026 capex will total up to $190 billion, while Wall Street analysts expect 2026 operating cash flow of $214 billion to pay for it—a slim margin after subtracting about $10 billion used to fund the company’s dividend. But the cash squeeze is affecting returns to shareholders: Last quarter, Alphabet didn’t buy back any shares for the first time since 2017. This offering may be an indication that share repurchases might not return for a while.

Since May 2025, Alphabet has already borrowed over $85 billion, across six currencies. Its debt total now tops $100 billion, up from $28 billion at the end of March 2025.

A company generating that much cash still has to borrow and issue new shares just to fund its AI expansion seems insane.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER: Professional Prevaricator Scott Pelley Fired by CBS. “The only reason that I wish this story had hit during regular work hours is because the meltdown on the left over this is going to be epic. I mean, real popcorn time stuff. I only had to check X for a few seconds to get my schadenfreude really revved up.”

Posted at 11:11 am by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How America’s Racial Politics Poisoned Britain.

To understand how we got here, you have to understand what the post-Floyd “reckoning” actually did to British institutions—especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional, nor was it just symbolic. It was ideological, and it was systematic. Police forces across the country, including the one that attended Henry’s murder, underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism training. A page still on the force’s website today states that its officers are committed to “ensuring Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary . . . is anti-racist in all it does.”

The principle drilled into officers, explicitly or implicitly, was that accusations of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness—that the historic failure of institutions to believe minority victims of racism was the original sin, and it needed atoning for.

Racism is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply the concepts of anti-racism without real-world judgement: You train officers to weigh an allegation of racism so heavily that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in Southampton—a man bleeding to death on the pavement, begging for help, being told by the officers who should be saving his life that they don’t think he’s been stabbed.

What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.

In his 2000 book, The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens wrote:

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Fast-forward to 2o2o:  George Floyd death: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes a knee in support of Black Lives Matter movement.

UPDATE: “The race card would not have been used by the perps — indeed it would not even have been imagined by them — had it not been manufactured and indeed subliminally advertised,” Richard Fernandez tweets. “Two knives were plunged into the dying student that night. First the physical blade now in some evidence room. But there is a second political one and it is still loose on the streets.”

MORE:

Tweet concludes, “This is happening now. Real-time suppression. The cover-up is not history. It is happening in front of you. A British Prime Minister is silencing his own people to protect a narrative that kills children. Let that sink in. Then scream.”

UPDATE (June 3rd, 12:45 am): And thus, 2020 comes full circle:

Posted at 10:48 am by Ed Driscoll

NOT THAT I’M AWARE OF:

Posted at 9:53 am by Stephen Green

21ST CENTURY WARFARE: Pentagon pushes for battlefield AI, some military leaders urge caution.

In a recent annual special forces conference in Tampa, Florida, Adm. Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told attendees that troops “have to be very careful about how we come to (AI’s) employment and its inspiration into the delivery of lethality.”

“We, as humans, have to have the confidence that … it’s going to deliver violence only where we intend it to be delivered,” Bradley said.

In response to the remarks, a Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Monterey Herald that the Pentagon was focussing on efforts to make “functional battlefield tools” with AI to help troops identify targets quickly.

Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations Command officials said AI should not be a tool for eradicating targets, but to assist troops to focus on their mission. Sgt. Maj. Andrew Krogman said at the conference that AI could be used for administrative tasks or to modernize workflows.

AI performed very well in target selection during the active phase of the Iran War. But as always, please keep a human in the loop.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

WHEN THE PUBLIC HEALTH ESTABLISHMENT WRECKED ITS CREDIBILITY FOR A GENERATION:

Posted at 9:32 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 9:22 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Sign O’ the Trump Times — Victoria’s Secret Is Hot Again. “I mentioned president Trump in the headline for the triggering effect, but he has played a huge role in corporations and institutions feeling comfortable enough to back away from DEI initiatives that they had been browbeaten for years into adopting.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

BLUE ORIGIN RUD UPDATE:

Posted at 8:51 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT WILL LIKELY CONCLUDE THEY HAVE TO PURGE THE LEFT OUT OF SELF-DEFENSE: Paul Krugman’s Deranged Call to Purge America of MAGA Is Scarier Than You Think. “Unfortunately, as much as we would like to think it is a mere rhetorical flourish, it is not one at all. If you think that Democrats aren’t serious when they propose what sound like insane measures, just remember what they did during COVID, what they are doing with alphabet ideology (literally sterilizing and mutilating kids and putting sex offenders into girls’ locker rooms), and what they did to President Trump before his reelection. . . . If you don’t know what that means exactly, let me tell you: outlawing political parties, rooting out supporters of the political cause you want to purge, removing academics, doctors, and other professionals associated with the movement, and banning them all from public life. It is Ursula von der Leyen’s wet dream when it comes to AfD. There were also, of course, trials and executions for the top-level malefactors.”

Related: Democrats’ rants confirm their enemies list is serious business.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds