GERARD VAN DER LEUN: June 6: A Walk Across A Beach In Normandy.

STACY LENNOX: Ron DeSantis Versus Paul Ryan: The Ultimate Winner Is Not the One Saying Abandon the Culture War. “The only significant achievement of Ryan’s entire career was the Trump tax cuts. Even he admits it.”

THANKS, PRESIDENT TRUMP! US surpasses 300 million COVID-19 vaccine shots administered. I remember when Trump’s promises got the “without evidence” and “experts are skeptical” treatment.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH:

OPEN THREAD: So how was your weekend?

SPACE: Axiom Space purchases three Crew Dragon missions.

COLONIZATION ADVANCES: A catalyst that destroys perchlorate in water could clean Martian soil. “Perchlorate, a negative ion consisting of one chlorine atom bonded to four oxygen atoms, occurs naturally in some soils on Earth, and is especially abundant in Martian soil. . . . The new catalyst reduces perchlorate in a wide concentration range, from less than 1 milligram per liter to 10 grams per liter. This makes it suitable for use in various scenarios, including remediating contaminated groundwater, treating heavily contaminated wastewater from explosives manufacturing, and making Mars habitable.”

I HAVE QUESTIONS: Rapid, at-home blood test could confirm COVID-19 vaccination in minutes. “One challenge as society reopens is identifying who has been vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. A team of Johns Hopkins researchers has developed a rapid blood test that could confirm a person has been vaccinated while they wait to board a plane or enter a sporting event.”

First, does this reflect immunity in general, or only vaccine-produced spike protein antibodies? Second, how many businesses want to handle people’s blood. Third, how many people will submit to a blood test followed by a wait before entering a business? Fourth, do the relatively low risks posed by Covid justify this sort of thing?

I’M SCHEDULED TO BE ON MARK LEVIN’S SHOW TONIGHT AT 8PM EASTERN ON FOX, talking about prosecutorial overreach and the investigations of President Trump.

PRO-BDS GROUP BLOCKS ISRAELI SHIP FROM UNLOADING IN OAKLAND: “Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters prevented the unloading of an Israeli container ship from Asia at the Port of Oakland on Friday, with the cooperation of the local longshoremen’s union, which refused to unload the vessel. The protest was sponsored and organized by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), a pro-Palestinian BDS group operating in the Bay Area.”

Emphasis mine. The Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace.

ALAMEDA COUNTY’S NEW COVID DEATH TOLL IS 25% LOWER THAN THOUGHT:

A quarter of all deaths previously attributed to COVID-19 in Alameda County weren’t actually caused by the coronavirus, the Alameda County Public Health Department announced today.

That puts the county’s new official COVID-19 death toll at 1,223, down from 1,634.

The 25% decrease—or 411 cases—is due to the fact that COVID “wasn’t a direct cause” of death in these cases, according to county health officials.

County officials decided to revise the numbers after they reviewed guidance from the California Department of Public Health about how to classify deaths as being caused by COVID-19. The new count more accurately reflects how many people died as a direct result of, or complications from, a COVID-19 infection.

“There are definitely people who died from reasons that were clearly not caused by COVID,” said Neetu Balram, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Public Health Department.

Brit Hume adds that, “The overcounting fed the panic that produced the lockdowns, school closings and other regrettable decisions.”

As Jordan Schachtel wrote late last month in a Substack article titled, “What to make of the COVID-19 lab leak theory,” “The virus was not the cause for global catastrophe. It was the response to the virus that crippled the global economy and our society. The disease was not nearly as damaging as the ‘cure’ for the disease.”

BOOTLICKING: CNN’s Stelter Embarrasses Himself With Gooey Psaki Interview. “Stelter ultimately embarrassed himself with softball question after softball question that added up into a huff piece for the Press Secretary. He even invited her to lash the media for getting stuff wrong with their reporting on the administration.”

I BLAME PREHISTORIC SUVS: Ancient warming fueled massive marine dead zones in North Pacific.

RIP: Clarence Williams III, Linc on ‘The Mod Squad,’ Dies at 81. The Harlem-born actor also received a Tony nomination and appeared on the big screen in ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘Sugar Hill,’ ‘Half-Baked’ and ‘Tales From the Hood.’

GLENN LOURY: Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America.

HOWIE CARR: The rise and fall of Dr. Fauci.

The Panic was a perfect way to tank President Trump’s re-election campaign. But not even the most committed Trump haters were buying the Faucist line, we now learn.

Consider Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s physician brother, the “Dr. Death” of the Obama administration. After Fauci’s multiple the-sky-is-falling! appearances on state-run television, Dr. Death emailed him in February 2020 that he had a “hard time seeing this as serious as everyone else.”

“Am I blind?” Emanuel continued. “Yes very transmissible but low mortality like flu in many ways – the elderly, those with comorbidities, and total impact is likely to be less than flu.”

Good thing that wasn’t made public last year, or Dr. Death might have been banned from all social media from promoting such a conspiracy theory.

Exit quote: “Will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”

Read the whole thing.

OMAHA BEACH: The Day the Word ‘Courage’ Came Alive.

TRUST BUT VERIFY: Function-checking your guns.

AOC PREFERS HER GRANNY TO BE POOR: You may have heard Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) bewailing her grandmother’s squalid living conditions in Puerto Rico. Conservative journalist Matt Walsh did and he organized a fund-raising appeal that generated $100,000 to help AOC’s granny. Can you guess why she rejected it?

Nothing is more important than the narrative. Nothing. Nothing at all.

(Bumped.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Rod Dreher on Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist.

It’s hard to come up with a better example of the woke totalitarian capture of elite institutions than this Yale School of Medicine lecture by a hardcore anti-white racist psychiatrist, the audio of which is posted on Bari Weiss’s Substack. Weiss highlights these lines from the lecture:

• This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45)

• I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.  (Time stamp: 7:17)

• White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time.  (Time stamp: 17:06)

• We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. (Time stamp 17:13)

• We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless, because they are at the wrong level of conversation. Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about. They can’t. That’s why they sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask. (Time stamp 17:54)

This racist rant was sponsored by Yale.

* * * * * * * *

I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough.

Say, if only there was a likely 2024 candidate who fits the bill: ‘Don’t you worry:’ Gov. DeSantis vows action against critical race theory.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Loudoun County, Virginia parents rally to recall critical race theory-pushing school board members.

MEDIA CONTINUES TO LIONIZE ANTHONY FAUCI, DESPITE HIS DAMNING EMAILS:

These emails come on the heels of a Fauci book that is supposed to be released in November. But after the FOIA-induced emails were released, it’s nowhere to be found on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Perhaps it’s because the last thing a good chunk of the country wants is to read another book from another government official about a pandemic we’d all prefer to forget.

And this goes to a criticism of Fauci that has grown louder in recent months as he continues to contradict himself while delivering ambiguous messages about the virus: He’s addicted to the spotlight. He’s never met a microphone he doesn’t like.

The public, or at least some of it, appears to be growing wise to him: A recent Rasmussen poll showed that nearly two-thirds of voters — 65 percent — say politics have influenced Fauci’s decisions and statements to the media about COVID-19. Only 11 percent — just more than 1 in 10 — believe Fauci hasn’t been influenced by political considerations.

Fauci once was the most trusted man in America on all things COVID-19. That’s clearly no longer the case.

But much of the media still largely treats him as such — even as those reading and watching at home appear to know better.

As Jim Treacher responds to the above article, “‘Despite,’ nothing. The whole point is to deny reality. That makes the other guy mad, which means you’ve owned him.” See also, Dan Rather’s recurring appearances on MSNBC and CNN, despite their knowing how badly he cooked the books in 2004.

Related: Fauci whines to Maddow: Criticism after email release is “very much an attack on science:”

See, he’s not lying about anything, it’s his critics who are lying. The pandemic was politicized from the beginning. It was inevitable because absolutely everything is politicized in life today, including a world health crisis that should have been a unifying event. Remember when Joe Biden was one of the first out of the gate to call Trump’s travel ban an act of xenophobia, a racist reaction to a virus that originated in China? That remark helped set the tone. Even though the early travel bans proved to be good actions to mitigate the spread of the virus, Biden never bothered to acknowledge that. He was more interested in scoring political points with anti-Trumpers. Now Fauci is doing the same – any critics of his performance must be labeled as anti-science mouth breathers.

The head of The New Clerisy is dangerously close to falling from the pedestal his worshipers have built for him.

HUMAN SENSES PROVIDE MUCH MORE INFORMATION THAN WE TYPICALLY USE: Humans Can Learn How to ‘Echolocate’ in Just 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows. Back when I was a sound engineer I could clap my hands and get a good idea of the size, shape, and “hardness” of a room, even in the dark. Probably couldn’t do it as well now without practice. And Richard Feynman used to have a party trick where he’d have someone take a book off a shelf, and identify which book it was by the smell on the shelf, and which person by the smell on their hands.

AMAZON DRIVER BRUTALLY BEATS ELDERLY WOMAN OVER ‘WHITE PRIVILEGE’ (Video).

IN SHORT, THEY SERVED AS WILLING PROPAGANDA AGENTS FOR HAMAS: The Spectator: The problem with the New York Times’ Gaza coverage. H/T Hans Bader.