Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 4, 2026

REASON’S MICHAEL MOYNIHAN AND MATT WELCH ON SCOTT PELLEY’S CRASH AND BURN:

Later in their Fifth Column podcast, Moynihan and Welch discuss the current state of the CBS News:

Moynihan: We have seen this for so long. This pompous, journalistic attitude of, “We are here for the truth.”

It’s like, you’re not here for the f**king truth. You’re here for the truth in some ways; you’re not always here for the truth. And thank God you aren’t. I’m happy that you’re not. I just don’t want you to pretend that you’re doing something you’re not.

Welch: If you are here for the truth, you don’t say–because it’s not true–that Bari Weiss was sent to destroy 60 Minutes.*

Moynihan: Or you don’t say to Donald Trump in an interview, as Lesley Stahl did, “You can’t tell that that’s his laptop.”

Are you a journalist? Are you brain-dead?

All you have to do is look at the emails and email the person in the email and say, “Did you get this email from Hunter Biden?” “Yeah, I did.”

[Then] it’s his f**king laptop.

One email. Do five of them. Do ten of them. Take ten minutes.

But they didn’t want the story. They didn’t want it because it crashed into their worldview, and they thought it would help Donald Trump. And that’s not what journalism is about.

“It’s going to help Donald Trump.” Who f**king cares? It’s a story. Go after the story.

And everyone abdicated their responsibility on that. And she did that on camera to Donald Trump: “Well, we can’t tell. There’s no way of verifying it.”

Yes, there’s a way of verifying it.

You guys go to the Uyghur camps in China–and congratulations, you do great work on a lot of stuff–but you couldn’t verify it? You didn’t want to verify that.

That’s fine. But don’t pretend you’re speaking truth to power in a broad way. You’re not.

* As X personality “Jarvis” notes:

Political talk today is characterized by CATASTROPHIZING. Your enemies will put you in CAMPS. Democracy is ENDING. Every election is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIMES. Scott Pelley being sacked isn’t the mere natural outcome of calling his new boss a murderer and generally acted like a petulant dickhead in front of God and everyone — it’s the END OF LIBERAL MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT just like it was when Acosta and Lemon and a million other replacement level talking heads were shown the door.

 

Weiss isn’t “destroying” 60 Minutes, but technology and market forces rendered the original three TV networks no longer a monopoly for news, a topic that Geoffrey Ingersoll explores in “The Truth Behind Scott Pelley’s Epic CBS Meltdown:”

Pelley’s highly choreographed meltdown is more than likely his way of resigning so that he can launch a substack or his own podcast venture amid the kind of controversy that gets an early boost in viewers.

Yes, it really is that cynical and contrived.

Underneath it, however, is a real anxiety.

Scrape away the high-minded f*ckery, the self-flattering elitism, and you lay bare a rather coherent theory of mind.

Pelley is right. Something is dying. They’re losing their grip on the (un)reality machine. They see their rapidly dissolving ability to include and exclude lines of inquiry and it freaks them out. New people with new motivations will now be deciding which stories are legitimate and, importantly, how to cover them.

Pelley’s composure might be well practiced, intact, stalwart, but he is almost certainly shrieking on the inside.

Tranquility Base here, the Ego has landed. Was Pelley doing an Olbermann? Does he think he’s Cronkite? William Holden in Network? Olbermann left MSNBC 15 years ago. Cronkite retired 45 years ago. Network debuted in movie theaters 50 years ago. The era of mass media was over a long time ago.

So what could be Pelley’s next gig?

That cable opinion network is a perfect fit in many ways: Pelley ripped for claiming he was ‘in combat’ in Afghanistan and Iraq after CBS News firing.

Pelley was fired from the long-running CBS News show on Tuesday following a bitter clash with the network’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley, who first joined CBS News in 1989 and did not serve in the military, quickly raised eyebrows with a statement he gave following his termination.

“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,” Pelley, who has reported from several war zones in his career, told The New York Times.

As the successor to MSNBC, M-SNOW has a lot of experience with former network anchormen who cosplay as soldiers:

UPDATE: Democrats’ youth movement continues unabated:

 

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

CHANGE:

Tweet continues:

After not letting Bessent answer his question, Bessent ultimately revealed that the Trump admin has already asked Congress to eliminate the gas, after Larsen thought Bessent would be against it.

Of course this Congressmen had no idea; Larsen had no words and responded surprisingly, “You’re in favor of eliminating the gas tax?! Why isn’t it before the committee for a vote?”

Bessent responded with, “I don’t run the agenda.” These people in Congress don’t even know what they are working on!!! Unbelievable.

I’m so old, I can remember Tom Brokaw, The New York Times and The Washington Post simultaneously begging President Elect Obama to raise the gas tax in late 2008, and Hillary being excoriated by Obama earlier that year for wanting to lower it.

Related: Question asked and not answered:

Americans at the time knew who was president during WWI. Afterwards, not so much: Jill Biden, Edith Wilson, and the Changing American State.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

HOW IT STARTED:

How It’s Going: Could Joe Rogan replace Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes? Here’s what we know:

CBS News is reportedly searching for a replacement for “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper, and network executives may have their sights set on Austin-based podcaster Joe Rogan.

RadarOnline, a celebrity and entertainment news site, reported that CBS considering Rogan, who boasts 20.9 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, “PowerfulJRE,” and millions of viewers of his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” would be “strategy,” not “stunt casting.”

Rogan would bring “a core connection to over 50 percent of the country,” an unnamed media executive told RadarOnline, saying the 58-year-old media mogul speaks to “viewers who feel ignored or mocked by legacy media,” a viewership that, if reengaged, would solve the network’s ratings and credibility problems. 

The American-Statesman reached out to Rogan’s team for comment. CBS and “60 Minutes” have not confirmed the reports.

—The Austin American-Statesman, yesterday.

Well, Rogan does have broadcasting experience, of a sort:

But in all seriousness, would his style translate to the much shorter segments that 60 Minutes runs? Rogan’s podcasts involve the guest talking and talking and talking until the listener realizes, “wow, this guy really knows what he’s talking about.” Or, “this guy is full of it.” Rogan’s 60 Minutes segments would likely need a lot of editing before they air.

UPDATE: Alas, not to be: CBS Denies Rumors Joe Rogan Is Under Consideration For 60 Minutes Role.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Dancing Spot Robots Will Surveil the 2026 World Cup.

Hyundai, the South Korean automaker that owns Boston Dynamics and sponsors FIFA, said the bots “will support on-site security operations, helping contribute to a safer tournament environment.” Neither statement says what happens to the footage after the package gets checked, how long the feeds live in storage, or who beyond the security team can pull them up later.

After a viral TikTok video claimed the dogs could identify faces, a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told WFAA that “the robots do not have facial recognition capabilities,” saying they flag unauthorized people in restricted zones without facial scans for now.

A robot that already sees in every direction, senses heat, and runs anomaly detection is a face-recognition system waiting on a software update. Off-the-shelf AI can add that capability through a settings change rather than a hardware rebuild, so the denial describes today’s configuration and nothing past it.

These robots are not autonomous. Human operators sit at consoles, watching the live feeds and deciding when to sound an alarm or call police.

The same platform already works outside the stadium. Security dogs patrol apartment complexes and parking lots in Atlanta, issuing spoken commands to residents and calling in officers even after people comply.

Which as we noted in April isn’t creepy at all: Robot Police Dogs Powered by AI Take Over Atlanta’s Streets. (Language alert if you’re playing the video in public):

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Do Senate Democrats Really Buy Graham Platner’s Assurances? “‘Worse than [the] Nazi tattoo.’ That’s the claim of Steve Robinson, who runs the website Maine Wire, regarding some sort of forthcoming scandal news about Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner. I think that may be the first time those words have been put in that order in the English language. Robinson isn’t alone; other folks claim to have heard similar claims of some worse scandal that will emerge soon.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

JOEL KOTKIN: The Strange Afterlife of Fascism.

Within MAGA, right-wing racism is often seen by its critics through their concern that immigration is slowly “replacing” whites who settled and largely built the nation. Like fascism, the term white supremacy has been cited in massively greater instances this decade. Nativism is clearly ascendant on the right, but while some of this is racially driven, much rests on a defense of traditional culture and has only rarely been implicated in organized race-centric violence.

By contrast, the identity politics embraced by progressives in the U.S., Britain, and the EU hinges on pigeonholing individuals as members of specific groups to whom favors are dispensed or withheld. And when it comes to violence, those acting most like the fascists tend to be Trump’s bitterest opponents. The call for political violence is now stronger on the left than the right, and particularly among their young, college-educated base, where it is rising far more rapidly, notes one recent study. Witness, for example, the support and even admiration for Luigi Mangione, who murdered a healthcare executive in cold blood. And it’s a sign of the times that anti-Jewish rhetoric, as well as “anti-Zionist” violence, comes increasingly from the left. Nick Fuentes, who is virulently anti-Israel, is now telling his acolytes to vote for Democrats in November.

The idea that Trump must be eliminated “by any means necessary” certainly does not focus on democratic procedures but reflects attitudes reminiscent of Mussolini’s enforcers – and almost every left-wing dictatorship. A combination of radical politics and personal delusion marks the rhetoric of would-be Trump assassins, as is evident in their digital imprint. Indeed, outside the Washington, D.C., hotel where one recent attempt took place, demonstrators carried “death to the dictator” signs.

Another parallel lies with the embrace of criminal behavior that was typical among Mussolini’s and Hitler’s thuggish enforcers. Today, progressive media figures such as Hasan Piker, as well as writers at the New Yorker magazine, openly embrace theft as a kind of social protest, something practiced on a large scale in the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. Antifa, the self-appointed center of “resistance” to fascism, most resemble Mussolini’s Blackshirts shirts – and even wear the appropriate color.

Related: Porn-obsessed Hasan Piker goes on shocking homophobic rant after Scott Wiener wins SF congressional primary.

“It’s just f–ing rich liberals who just want homo-fascism in the country, that’s it. They want gay fascism. They want gay techno-fascism,” he insisted, without explaining what those terms meant.

Wiener is a prominent gay politician in the state who has heavily leaned into his LGBT background. During the campaign season, [rival Saikat] Chakrabarti had accused Wiener of being wedded with certain artificial intelligence groups that spent to support Wiener’s bid.

In Chakrabarti’s concession statement late Tuesday morning, the flopped candidate claimed he couldn’t overcome “the 7 million dollars of AI, crypto, and AIPAC money that were put into this race.”

In 2019, Chakrabarti seemed to prefer a much less hyphenated form of fascism:

And apparently still does: “In a move that perfectly captures the modern left’s priorities, former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign manager Saikat Chakrabarti is melting down because Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss dared to call out a Nazi tattoo on Graham Platner as personally disqualifying—and suggested voters might feel the same way.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

I’M PRETTY SURE I SAW THE ZIONIST GOLEMS OPEN UP FOR STONE TEMPLE PILOTS AT THE SPECTRUM IN ’93: Roger Simon’s Golem Is a Zionist.

The novel time-travels through Jewish history–and both reader and narrator are everywhere. Sometimes we are led to safety by an angel. Really, it’s all very Biblical.

Really wanna know how Yahya Sinwar was captured or rather found dead? Just as two terrorist men wearing burqas were about to blow up the Israeli soldiers who were in the process of rescuing some wounded companions, an unearthly beam of light blew up the terrorists and collapsed the building in which Yahya Sinwar had been hiding. Absolutely no one can explain this. The Israeli top secret guys are baffled. Suspicious. But attentive.

Those beams of light were the work of a Golem that was unintentionally created by a humble rabbi living in Nashville, Tennessee named Benjamin Golub.

What else, who else but a Golem could have done this? Or freed an Israeli hostage because her cries so unsettled Reb Golub that the Golem did what he thought? Felt? Knew? that his Master had wanted.

Or, better yet whom else could have, quite on his own initiative, ship a certain Jew-hating Congresswomen back to Somalia in a package marked “Return to Sender?” Of course, with enough food and water to keep her healthy and alive until someone could hear her cries.

No one else but a clever and powerful Golem.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:50 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

WAIT, WHEN DID BILLY IDOL TRANSITION?

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

HE’S NOT WRONG: Quentin Tarantino Slams Hollywood as a ‘Flavorless Sausage Factory’ Where ‘Miscast’ Actors, ‘Audience Pandering or Stupid S— Torpedos Every New Movie.’

Quentin Tarantino is not a fan of the majority of movies coming out of Hollywood these days. Writing for Sight & Sound magazine, the Oscar winner revealed that “it’s almost impossible” for him these days to watch a new movie and not pick it “to death.”

“Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers or just plain stupid shit usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavorless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood,” the director explained. “These days, the entire concept of what is a movie is more inclined to inspire contempt in me than generosity. Which is fair enough, because by comparison the movies of the last six years make the 80s seem like the 30s.”

Well yes, that can happen you have the modern day equivalent of the Hays Office dictating your production choices: The Fast Death of the Intimacy Coordinator.

Related: Ride the lefty film criticism Mobius Loop!

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

GREAT MOMENTS IN ELITE LEFTIST SELF-LOATHING: Nantucket church cancels Fourth of July celebration in ‘political protest’ because of its ‘own whiteness.’

A liberal church on swanky vacation island Nantucket nixed its Fourth of July readings for the first time in 25 years in “political protest” over the Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling — and its congregants’ “whiteness.”

The Nantucket Unitarian Universalists has read the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights inside its church every Fourth of July for the last 25 years.

This year, the church’s board of trustees and presiding Rev. Erin Splaine published a letter announcing the cancelation of the readings just one month before America’s 250th birthday.

The church blamed the revision on the Supreme Court’s “gutting” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and “an on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness,” according to the letter.

The self-proclaimed “liberal and free faith” leaders claimed that white people know the rights laid out in the America’s foundational texts “have, for centuries, been tragically, often violently, and unequally applied” against non-white citizens.

On the other hand, “These are the same documents that ended slavery and spread freedom around the world. Canceling them over identity politics isn’t courageous, it’s absurd:”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Elite leftists should loathe themselves, but they can leave the rest of us out of it.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 4th, 2026

June 3, 2026

TYLER O’NEIL: “The SPLC built its reputation by suing the KKK into bankruptcy, but now it smears mainstream conservatives and Christians, juicing the numbers on the ‘hate’ it claims to oppose.”

Including, “The SPLC paid $350K to an officer of the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.” It’s 21st century Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between International and National Socialists.

Earlier: So, the Premise Behind Biden’s 2020 Run Was Built on a Lie Paid for By the SPLC?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 3rd, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Gambling Going On in Rick’s Café.

The New Hotness? Ron Wydon’s son investing in Rick’s Cabaret!

‘Most Corrupt Regime in American History!’ Scott Bessent Fires Off Epstein Accusation in Wild Hearing Brawl.

“I had hoped to keep this in terms of the economy — Senator Wyden has mendaciously slandered the Treasury building in an attempt to cover up his son having an investment meeting with Jeffrey Epstein to ask for funding,” Bessent said.

Recently-unsealed DOJ documents showed that Wyden’s son, Adam Wyden, met Epstein through a mutual fund and later sought to pitch him an investment opportunity.

“I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and hope my passion and dedication for my business came through in the meeting,” Adam Wyden told Epstein in a 2016 email.

“Let’s be clear here. Nobody is interested in the ramblings of a capo in the most corrupt regime in American history. We want to get some facts about this deal. That’s what we’re here for,” Sen. Wyden shot back at Bessent.

“And we would like to hear what Adam Wyden and Jeffrey Epstein talked about. Your son’s largest investment position was Rick’s Cabaret. So did your son and Jeffrey Epstein talk about pole dancing as he begged him for money using your limited credibility?” Bessent threw back.

From Forbes in 2021: How This Democratic Senator’s Son Made $100 Million In Stocks And Why He Fled To Low Tax Florida.

[Adam] Wyden is no shrinking violet when it comes to making big bets. His fund is the single largest shareholder in Houston’s RCI Hospitality, operator of over 40 gentlemen’s clubs and parent company of Rick’s Cabaret. Wyden built his 10% position beginning in late April 2020, when the coronavirus led investors to believe that in a world of masks and social distancing, a company built on drunken bachelor parties and lap dances was toast. But Wyden reckoned that as the pandemic ebbed there would be pent-up demand for RCI’s clubs, many located in Florida and Texas, and that they would reopen fast. Another plus: It’s exceedingly difficult to obtain a strip club license, meaning the company has a deep moat around its business.

And from the New York Post this past April: Ron Wyden’s son had business meeting with Epstein.

Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has bashed the Trump administration over its handling of Epstein files, but documents released last month reveal his own son arranged a business meeting with the convicted pedo.

Seven years after Epstein was released from a Florida prison after pleading guilty to solicitation of prostitution from a minor, Adam Wyden, who founded his own private investment fund, ADW Capital, in 2010, was introduced to the disgraced financier through mutual friend Jonathan Farkas.

“Adam my friend jeffery Epstein who manages 5 billion said to call his office he wants to see your record and would consider investing with you,” Farkas wrote on April 27, 2016.

A message from a redacted email address also helped arrange the meeting, according to a trove of emails released by the Justice Department.

The men decided to huddle the following day at Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse at 10 a.m., according to the documents.

Wyden gushed in a follow-up message to Epstein after the meeting about his “passion and dedication for my business” while seeking to reel him in as a client.

He also called them “like minded individuals” and said he ‘would very much look forward to having you join us at the fund.” There are no indications Wyden knew about any illegal Epstein activity or that Epstein became a client.

When contacted by The Post, Adam Wyden, 41, said, “No comment — I’m not interested,” and hung up.

As Leon Trotsky never said, you may not be interested in Rick’s Cabaret, but Rick’s Cabaret is interested in you.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 3rd, 2026

‘WHAT A COOL PIC:’ Totenkopf-Tattooed Graham Platner Admired ‘German Helmets’ in WW2 Photo of Nazi-Allied Troops, Deleted Post Shows.

Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, praised a “cool pic” of Nazi-aligned troops aiming a rifle during World War II, zeroing in on their “German helmets” and weapon, in a now-deleted social media post, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.

It’s not the first time Platner has shown enthusiasm for Nazi iconography. He notoriously had a chest tattoo of an SS “Totenkopf,” the skull and crossbones symbol worn by SS officers who manned the Nazi concentration camps.

In April 2019 a Reddit user shared an image of “Swedish Volunteer Battalion in a trench during The Continuation War, 1941.”

The image showed soldiers in German helmets during the conflict, pointing a Browning Automatic Rifle at the enemy over a defensive trench. A soldier gesturing to an enormous dog—which appears to be an Alsatian or German shepherd—dominates the foreground.

In a comment from his now-deleted Reddit account P-Hustle, Platner offered this response:

“German helmets and a [Browning Automatic Rifle]. What a cool pic.”

As John Levine of the Washington Free Beacon adds in a tweet, “If NOTHING else — this post shows that Platner is a deep in the weeds WWII military history nerd, making it especially unlikely he wouldn’t know what a Totenkopf was.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 3rd, 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 on Jun 3rd, 2026

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 on Jun 3rd, 2026

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 2020:  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 on Jun 3rd, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 3rd, 2026

“THE MOST EXPENSIVE MAGIC TRICK IN AMERICA. AND THE THING THAT DISAPPEARS? IT’S YOUR HOME OWNERSHIP:”

UPDATE (from Steve): The plan was obvious just as soon as Mamdani announced it.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 3rd, 2026

SCOTT PELLEY FIRED FROM CBS NEWS AFTER 60 MINUTES CRASHOUT:

In an early statement to The New York Times, Pelley humbly compares himself to a combat veteran.

Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to “60 Minutes,” which he said he still cared about deeply.

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “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.”

Of course, there’s only one thing Pelley can do now that he’s been fired by CBS:

I’m sure an audience of at least dozens are eagerly awaiting the Amazon Grand Tour-style reboot of 60 Minutes — just imagine the opening scene, when Pelley puts the band back together again!

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 3rd, 2026

June 2, 2026

CBS TERMINATES SCOTT PELLEY’S CONTRACT:

And so, as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say aloha, Five O’Clock Pelley, and return to our duties. Let me me remind you that the Weblog is open 24 hours a day for your dancing and dining pleasure.

UPDATE:

 

Posted at 10:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

K’PLAH:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

HOPENCHANGE IS BARACK IN CALIFORNIA! ‘Barack Obama’ Is Running for California Governor, but There’s a Catch.

Hailing from the sunny streets of Alameda, Barack D. Obama Shaw has entered his not-so-unique name in California’s upcoming gubernatorial election against 61 other candidates.

Born as Cecil Shaw III, the governor nominee legally changed his name to Barack D. Obama Shaw in 2013, while he was serving in the US Army Reserve. In a recent interview with Spectrum News, Shaw credited the Democratic Party leader with opening up political possibilities for the likes of him.

He noted, “When I would stand to attention…and his picture was on the wall, and I was proud. He made it happen that a person like me could become president. And the word on the street was it’s not going to happen in our lifetime,” adding, “Barack Obama is the superhero. I’m the guy wearing his suit, that’s me. I’m the one that has the privilege that carries that banner around.”

If Barack D. Obama Shaw isn’t to your liking, also running for governor of California is LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott.

I have a plan to STOP illegal ICE operations; and a chaplain’s heart to remember who the system serves. I’m 100% against the miles-driven tax. To Make California Great Again, PROTECT THE PEOPLE! As the old parties are debating the heat over who bought the matches, while the dumpster fire burns; I’m handing you a fire extinguisher! That’s why I am the best choice for Governor of California.

No word yet if Kevin Phillips Bong or Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim bus stop F’tang F’tang Olé Biscuit barrel are running as well:

 

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The merciless mistreatment of Henry Nowak.

For me, the most chilling thing in the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s last moments of life is the cops’ cruel presumption that he is lying. As he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’

I know. It is delivered with dry, bureaucratic indifference. Henry is heard moaning, begging, ‘I can’t breathe’, yet here is a representative of the state seeming to agree with his knife-wielding tormentor that he is making it up. That cold, cavalier utterance – I know – will have cemented dying Henry’s great dread: that the police were taking the side of his killer rather than him. As his young, precious life came to an end, he heard himself being disbelieved, distrusted, icily written off as a fabulist. His murderer, meanwhile, was afforded respect. The state blindly bowed to his filthy lies.

The bodycam footage of the arrest of 18-year-old Henry Nowak after he was stabbed in Southampton in December last year is horrifying beyond belief. It is one of the most harrowing two minutes of video I have ever watched. Henry can be seen sprawled in agony in a stranger’s driveway, the place he sought sanctuary after being knifed four times by Digwa. His failing voice is thick with pain and fear. What he wanted in that moment – what he needed – was to be believed. The belief of others was the only thing that might have delivered him from his terror-stricken state. But it never came. He said ‘I can’t breathe’ nine times. He said ‘I’ve been stabbed’ four times. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, said an officer with chirpy, inhumane derision.

Read the whole thing, and then watch Zia Yusuf of Reform UK reminding Cathy Newman of Sky News of her George Floyd-era rhetoric and the Hampshire police’s ‘race action plan’ that O’Neill mentions in the above Spiked essay. “I am not impugning the intention of people who created all this,” Yusuf tells Newman, but what is crystal clear is that we saw in a harrowing, distressing and tragic body cam footage is directly downstream… and what it makes crystal clear is that reaction of the police proves that the burden of proof for a man making an accusation of racism was zero. Henry was arrested pretty much immediately even as he [was] bleeding to death yet the burden of proof in saying repeatedly ‘I have been stabbed’ was such that the police responded as he [was] bleeding to death by handcuffing him and saying ‘I don’t think you have.'”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 2nd, 2026
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