Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 9, 2026

OPEN THREAD: They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made, and debate about it in the Open Thread.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

BREAKING: We Have the Verdict in the Karmelo Anthony Murder Trial.

A Collin County jury has delivered its verdict in the trial of Karmelo Anthony, who faced murder charges for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf during a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas, on April 2, 2025. Now he knows his fate.

The jury found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder.

The facts of this case were never particularly complicated. Anthony, also 17 at the time, wandered under a tent belonging to Memorial High School during a rainy multi-school track meet at Kuykendall Stadium. He had no business being there. Multiple student athletes asked him to leave multiple times.

Anthony reportedly told students, “Touch me, and you’ll find out,” and “If you want me to move, you have to move me.”

Austin Metcalf, by contrast, told him, “I’m not going to fight you at a track meet.” Multiple witnesses testified that Metcalf had no interest in a physical confrontation. At least one witness said Anthony appeared to be “looking for a fight.” Throughout the exchange, Anthony kept one hand inside his backpack. Some students thought he was bluffing. He wasn’t.

Prosecutors called 21 witnesses who built a clear picture: Anthony escalated a verbal dispute into a deadly encounter by pulling a knife from his backpack and driving it into Austin Metcalf’s chest. After the stabbing, Anthony told a police officer, “I’m not alleged, I did it. He put his hands on me. I told him not to.”

The defense bizarrely tried to spin all of that as self-defense, essentially asking jurors to believe that a teenager who invited physical contact with “touch me and you’ll find out” and had brought a knife with him was somehow the victim.

Summer riot season to commence shortly?

UPDATE: “The jury sentenced Anthony to 35 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole after half that time is served.”

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

VIRAL INFLUENCER: How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research.

Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire’s close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposés on his own fraught relationships with women.

On the eve of Gates’ private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country’s health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates’ efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates’s extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, “What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

TO BE FAIR, AFTER APRIL, THE SPLC DENOUNCING A MAN WITH A NAZI TATTOO REALLY IS NEWS: Republican Lawmaker Presses SPLC Boss On Whether Graham Platner’s Nazi Tattoo Should DQ Him From Senate.

Earlier: “The SPLC paid $350K to an officer of the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.” Much like Platner himself, it’s a 21st century Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between International and National Socialists.

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

ROGER SIMON: Who the Hell Is Nithya Raman?

I worked in Hollywood. I wrote for newspapers and websites. I knew politicians, journalists, studio executives, activists, and assorted crackpots of every description.

I arrived when Sam Yorty from the San Fernando Valley was mayor. All of us smartypants film-and-drama-school wannabe literati thought he was a yahoo. I lived through Bradley, Riordan, Hahn, Villaraigosa, Garcetti, Bass (from afar—by then I had left), and others. I watched Hollywood transform, newspapers shrink, neighborhoods burn, homelessness proliferate, and the city grow from a sprawling postwar metropolis into something quite different.

Yet when Nithya Raman emerged as a serious contender for mayor, my first reaction was not approval or disapproval.

It was: “Who the hell is Nithya Raman?”

Well, now I know her politics are supposed to be on the far, far left of the Democratic Party as she heads into a runoff against merely far-left (one far) former Fidelista incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, whom Ms. Raman endorsed (before Nithya did or did not throw in the towel, depending on who you believe).

Speaking of which, it’s hard to believe she actually beat out Mr. Pratt. The redoubtable Dan Greenfield has a good analysis of that —‘The LA Mayoral Election is Being Stolen”. Subtitle: “How does the third-place candidate win the majority of late-arriving ballots?”

To be fair, it’s good to see L.A. awarding someone for being extremely competent at her job — that job being to increase the “Homeless Industrial Complex” to a size that would make the Manhattan Project seem like a neighborhood 7-Eleven:

Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF IGNORING TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: #FIGHTFOR15.

The New Hotness? McDonald’s testing AI at the drive-thru.

A robotic voice may soon be taking your order at the drive-thru.

McDonald’s is testing out an artificial intelligence-based operating system called ArchIQ, the company announced this week. The voice-activated AI system is being tested at five locations around the country, Restaurant Business Magazine reports.

A franchisee showed off a demo of the technology, nicknamed Archy, on X. The video shows ArchIQ taking orders in English and Spanish.

While it’s currently in a test phase, the franchisee, who posts under the popular account McFranchisee, said “every McDonald’s in the US” is getting a technology upgrade in anticipation of the new tech.

More here: “Taco Bell and Wendy’s previously announced that they had launched their own AI-powered drive-thru ordering systems. [Jonathan Maze, editor-in-chief of Restaurant Business, told ABC News that] the trend could significantly reshape the industry in the years ahead. ‘You can imagine a future five, 10 years down the line, where no orders at McDonald’s are actually taken by a human being,’ he said.”

As a wise man once said, “the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

GIVE IRELAND BACK TO THE IRISH: Sudanese migrant arrested after ‘attempted beheading’ in Belfast.

A Sudanese man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a knifeman appeared to try to behead a man in Belfast.

The suspect has been taken into custody after the victim suffered “significant injuries” to his face, neck and back in what police called a brutal attack.

The injured man, a resident of the area in his 40s, is being treated in hospital, where his condition is described as serious.

Footage shared on social media – which is too graphic to publish – appears to show the knifeman, in his 30s, pinning the man to the ground before repeatedly stabbing him in the head.

The video shows three apparently local men intervening, one hitting the attacker with a wooden hurling stick as others kick him to try to force him to release his victim.

Police revealed the suspect had been granted leave to remain after crossing the border from Dublin.

Asst Chief Constable Ryan Henderson, of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), told a press conference: “My understanding is that the individual was given leave to remain in Northern Ireland, but I know that colleagues in the Home Office will be confirming the exact details of the status in the coming days and hours.”

There is “no information” to suggest the attack was terror-related, the police chief added.

Well, I’m really glad it wasn’t a terror-related attempted beheading.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 9th, 2026

June 8, 2026

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Is the Karmelo Anthony Trial the Distraction Democrats Have Been Waiting For?

A guilty verdict or a plea deal? Another young black man has been unfairly punished by the judicial system! Let’s riot.

An acquittal? This faultless young black man was unfairly targeted by the judicial system! Let’s riot.

And the Democrat Party is rubbing its hands with glee. They love nothing more than summers of riots, and this setup is just too perfect. While they twist themselves into rhetorical knots trying to defend a Nazi (sham) oyster farmer who mocks veterans and mistreats women – and has possibly done worse on the Kik app – the Karmelo Anthony trial is the answer to their sinister prayers and their Graham Platner-sized problem. American cities being looted and burned is the very distraction they need.

Even better, the teen takeovers that have been blighting urban areas in recent months – something Democrat mayors won’t address because the chaos is the point – dovetail nicely with the brewing unrest. These kids have a long, hot summer stretching before them and nothing better to do.

So watch McKinney closely. Whatever the jury decides, the narrative machine is already warming up, the activists are already primed and ready to go, and Democrats are already preparing to squeeze every last drop of political juice out of another tragedy.

If you see strategically-placed pallets of bricks suddenly popping up in your neighborhood or lawyers start carrying Molotov cocktails, you’ll know the Democrats have mobilized, and things are about to kick off. Never let a crisis go to waste, after all.

Flashback: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

JIM TREACHER: I Believe Lyndsey Fifield.

According to Graham Platner, everybody in his life knew he had a Nazi tattoo… except him. And it’s their fault for not telling him.

That’s his story. I guess he didn’t have time to come up with a better one.

Even for a Democrat, this guy is full of $#!+. He makes Obama look like George Washington.

So, yes, when Graham Platner calls Lyndsey Fifield a liar, he’s lying. That’s what Nazis do.

Adolf Hitler himself called it the Big Lie. The more brazen and audacious the falsehood, the more likely people are to believe it. Because who would have the gall, the impudence, to be so horrible?

Well, Graham Platner would.

It worked for that guy, and it’s working for this guy. The Democrats love their new pet Nazi.

“Uhhhh, he’s not a Nazi. He’s a socialist!” I love that one. As if they’re polar opposites. No, those philosophies are on one end of the scale, and on the other end is freedom, liberty, the truth.

Not all the Democrats are on board, though.

John Fetterman, who knows a thing or two about lying to get elected, is now promising to wear a suit every day if Graham Platner can prove that he didn’t send pictures of his penis to underage girls.

I’ve said a lot of things about John Fetterman, but I’ve never said he’s not funny.

And he’s bucking his own party again, which I appreciate. All the Democrats who lied about his stroke during his election now hate his guts. They think he owes them a bunch of lies in return, and he won’t comply. I like that. He got ya.

Then you have James Carville, who’s always good for a quote. And it tends to be something he ends up wishing he hadn’t said.

“Listen to what political super-genius James Carville has to say about Graham Platner,” Treacher writes. Here’s a transcript: James Carville endorses ‘f–ked up’ Graham Platner, compares him to US allying with Stalin to win WWII.

“If you believe, as I do, that the country is in imminent peril — I mean imminent peril — who is most likely to slow this criminal in charge? Susan ‘Blueberry Jelly’ Collins, or five degrees off dead center Graham Platner?” Carville asked. “I think it’s Graham Platner.”

“And you know if Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could work with Joseph Stalin — who, by the way, well, I’ll tell you this, he was a bad guy, a really bad guy, alright — then I can overlook a tattoo,” Carville added.

So the guy with the Nazi tat isn’t the second coming of Hitler, here’s merely the modern day equivalent of Stalin. Hey, you know what the two had in common? And what they share with the modern-day left? As Batya Ungar-Sargon writes: The Left Has Made Offending Jews the Cornerstone of Its Agenda.

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:51 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT: Scott Pelley Isn’t a Serious Journalist.

In Britain, news anchors have traditionally been called “newsreaders.” That’s because this is what they are. Their job is to make sure that their hair is coiffed when they read from the teleprompter. Pelley was a male bimbo: a himbo.

Over the years, he made many absurd and bombastic statements. For example, in 2006 he presented a completely uncritical two-part report on climate change. When critics asked him why he didn’t speak to anyone who questioned the assertions of those who said that climate change was an existential threat to humanity, he responded by saying that this idea was akin to Holocaust denial.

By contrast, Pelley’s new bosses are serious journalists. Both forged meaningful careers as writers and editors. Bari Weiss, who is Bilton’s boss and the editor in chief of CBS News, made a name for herself through her work as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After leaving the Times, she started and built up the Free Press, which has two million subscribers and top writers like Sir Niall Ferguson and Nellie Bowles. Bilton also wrote for the Times, and he has been a contributor to Vanity Fair and a documentary filmmaker for HBO. They are genuine writer-editors.

Who will replace Pelley in the talking-head role? There’s been online chatter that Weiss and Bilton are considering trying to recruit Joe Rogan as a replacement for Pelley. While the chatter is probably just that—chatter—the deal has provoked an outburst of dismay in the media establishment. To which I would say: Why not? The job of on-camera talent is that of a performer. Pelley was known to end some broadcasts by taking off his glasses for effect as the camera dramatically panned into him. That was his way of ending on a weighty yet “intimate” note.

I used to edit future CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s writing at New York Press. Tony is someone of intelligence, character, and sensitivity. However, let’s be honest: His on-air value starts with his good looks. This is what news personalities ordinarily are required to display. Rogan is a different fish. Yet, while he may not be pretty, he’s shown that he can command an audience. So, would he be any less qualified than Pelley? Or might he be more qualified?

Who’s to say? What can be stated is a provable fact: The main reason 60 Minutes continues to be America’s most-watched news program is its lead-in, NFL football.

Related:

“He did something jaw-dropping to me. He read a statement from his phone.” It’s telling that Pelley claims he had a meltdown over that, considering he makes (or made) bank by reading words off of teleprompters. When ABC hired a young Leonard Di Caprio to interview Al Gore for a 2000 “Earth Day” special, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

For example, in 2000, ABC News selected Leonardo DiCaprio to interview Bill Clinton about the environment for Earth Day. The staff, including Sam Donaldson, and outside critics erupted in a barrage of outrage. How dare ABC suggest that a dim-bulb movie star can do the same job as a seasoned journalist? The defensiveness was telling. Because the truth is that most news readers are little more than actors. That’s one reason so many attractive young women want to be an actress/model/news anchor when they grow up.

Consider Barbara Walters. In the ’70s and ’80s, it was drummed into us that she was the Susan B. Anthony of American journalism. Even today, whenever her bona fides as a serious journalist are questioned, she gets her hackles up and plays the angered feminist. Then she returns to asking Hollywood movie stars what kind of tree they would be if they could be a tree and hosting that paragon of Cafe Vienna Moment journalism, The View.

Indeed, the current host of The View, Meredith Vieira, is NBC’s first choice to replace Couric. Vieira has another job: She hosts the daytime version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Ms. Vieira’s official bio touts up front that she won a Daytime Emmy as a game-show host and buries the fact she won five real Emmys for her work as a 60 Minutes reporter.

Is Pelley off to Substack-land? Maybe. But who will do the writing?

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

JOHN NOLTE: Steven Spielberg Hopes to Break a Pretty Dreadful 20-Year Run with Disclosure Day. 

The last 20 years have been quite a step down from a filmmaker whose name once stood for the best the movies had to offer. No one’s questioning Spielberg’s technical skills. Ready Player One and West Side Story both prove Spielberg still knows where to place his camera, compose a shot, and edit a sequence. The problem has been his choice of material and the execution of that material story-wise.

So now he’s returned to two areas that have worked out well for him in the past: aliens and superstar screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, Lost World (which is underrated), and War of the Worlds. Granted, Koepp also wrote the dreadful Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but I blame George Lucas for that debacle.

I must say, though, the Disclosure Day trailer doesn’t do much for me:

Then there’s Spielberg’s current PR pitch in which he runs around on all The Shows saying he believes there is life on other planets. It reeks of the desperation of a guy who’s sweaty to make headlines for his $120 million movie.

I just hope he doesn’t go too over the top in hyping his movie:

Didn’t Stanley Kubrick already do this almost 60 years ago with 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The God concept is at the heart of this film. It’s unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution — chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution. Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe. Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we’re really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill — as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?

Kubrick uttered (or typed) that quote in 1970, four years after Time magazine boldly went where Nietzche had gone before on its cover and asked “Is God Dead?” But that was still the era of mass media. In 2026, it will be interesting to see if Spielberg’s attempt to drum up some controversy Last Temptation of Christ/Brokeback Mountain-style over his new science fiction film helps to goose ticket sales.

It could backfire: “The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

THE PLATNER PARADOX:

(1) The Democrats perceive that they need to run candidates who are straight White Christian men to win in certain jurisdictions- and maybe even nationally.

(2) No normal straight White Christian man today would want to be deeply involved with the Democratic Party.

Even many Democrats embrace the first part of the paradox.

An Axios piece in March that got a lot of attention was entitled “Some Dems’ 2028 strategy: a Straight, White, Christian Man.” And that, according to Axios “Their fear, divulged with dismay in group chats, at cocktail parties and increasingly in public, is that parts of the electorate are too biased to support a woman or other diverse candidate for president.”

The Axios article noted that:

“Former first lady Michelle Obama fueled such talk recently, saying the U.S. is ‘not ready for a woman.’

Democratic strategists have put it bluntly, with several saying a version of ‘It has to be a white guy.’”

Now, I happen to be fairly confident that, just as they are wrong about most things, they are wrong about this. They projecting their own racism, which is omnipresent, onto the electorate. But what’s important for understanding Democrat behavior is that *they* think it’s true.

One could only look at the 2024 election to falsify their claim. Trump’s gains that led him to victory over Harris, as opposed to “Scranton Joe” Biden, were overwhelmingly concentrated among minority voters. He won Hispanic men—the first time a GOP candidate has done that in modern history. By contrast, Trump had only very small gains among White voters. White voters were just as happy to vote for Harris as they had been for Biden—minority voters weren’t—and not because of her sex or the color of her skin, but because of the content of her character.

The reason, of course, that normal straight, White Christian men won’t become leaders in the modern Democrat party is simple. The Democrats hate straight White Christian men—organizing against them and their interests as a class is essentially a requirement of participating seriously in Democratic party politics.

In October of 2024, producer/director Jacob Reed, a supporter of Kamala Harris’s campaign, released an ad that said it all about how Democrats view men:

The ad was mocked as ‘the cringiest political ad ever created:’

“This ad is amazing because neither pole in the argument captures the spirit of ‘being a real man,’” City Journal writer Chris Rufo said. “It’s not about barrel-aged bourbon or deadlifting 500 pounds, nor is it about supporting IVF or voting for Kamala Harris. These are both caricatures: one is a left-wing mistranslation of ‘manosphere masculinity’; the other is an attempt to ‘redefine masculinity’ in left-wing ideological terms. Taken together, they represent a phony simulacrum of the male nature.”

Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir argued, “What this ad fundamentally misses is that manliness is all about NOT waiting for encouragement or permission to stand up for (or to) something. This is what makes it at once dangerous and essential for civilization.”

“I don’t think this ad is meant to convince men to vote for Harris (LOL),” Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote. “I think it’s meant to reassure her base—college educated women—that the Democratic Party is truly theirs. The only men the party recognizes are these emasculated, AI generated putzes.”

And thus, an Army of Betos become cloned by the left for each election cycle.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

HAPPY 60th ANNIVERSARY OF THE NFL-AFL MERGER, TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE:

Flashback: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

AMERICA MUST LOOK TO EUROPE TO FIND SENSIBLE WAYS TO RESOLVE COMPLEX IMMIGRATION ISSUES:

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

GOODER AND HARDER, LA: Decision Desk HQ Declares Nithya Raman Second in LA Mayor Race, Overtaking Spencer Pratt.

As Joel Pollak wrote yesterday, likely before Decision Desk declared Raman the winner of LA’s “jungle primary:” LA voting debacle reflects a democracy in crisis.

Half of America is watching LA count its votes with a sense of déjà vu: The spectacle of a candidate who is leading on election night, suddenly falling behind when mail-in ballots are counted, is what caused many to regard the 2020 election as fraudulent.

There was no proof of fraud then, just as there is no proof in LA; but the process does not inspire confidence. The fact that we are being told — by incumbents — that everything is OK only deepens the suspicion.

It was always possible — as I had said before Election Day — that socialist Nithya Raman would take second place, ahead of Pacific Palisades fire survivor Spencer Pratt.

I used an analogy from auto racing: Raman was “drafting” off Pratt, letting him do the tough work of attacking incumbent Karen Bass, and take all the attacks in return, then scooping up voters who decided they could not reelect Bass, but would not vote for a Trump-like Republican.

Yet, assuming that Raman does qualify for the general election ahead of Pratt, it would have been better to know that on election night — not several days after the fact.

If there were, in fact, fraud, this is exactly what it would look like. Again, there is no proof of fraud — but there is also no proof that there isn’t. And those who defend California’s system as necessary for fairness and accuracy cannot explain why other Democrat-run states manage to count their results relatively quickly.

And:

Around the nation, cities that are badly run by Democrats are choosing to move further left. Chicago voters ousted failing mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2023 — and elected Brandon Johnson, a favorite of the teachers’ unions. He is running the city into the ground, most recently watching the Chicago Bears look for a stadium in Indiana.

Earlier:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Binders Full of Women.

The New Hotness?

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 8th, 2026

June 7, 2026

TRUMP STORMS OUT OF MEET THE PRESS INTERVIEW:

The exchange started to unravel when the topic of election integrity came up. Trump made clear that he views the media’s handling of these stories as part of a larger systemic problem, one that the press has deliberately chosen to ignore. He told Welker that her network actively works against him and that he had the receipts to back it up.

“You play right into their hands with this stuff,” Trump said. “You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. Do you know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.”

Welker tried to redirect the conversation toward acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, but Trump wasn’t having it. Every time she jumped in, he pushed through it. He insisted the evidence of problems with election integrity runs deep: “You have more evidence, there’s more evidence than ever presented.”

“Your elections in this country — we’re like a third world country,” he said. “Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked.”

He didn’t stop there. “And so is ABC and CBS and CNN,” Trump continued. “You’re a one-sided crooked network.”

Related:

Meanwhile America’s Newspaper of Record might to revise and extend its remarks:

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2026

GOOD AND HARD, L.A., GOOD AND HARD:

UPDATE:

Tweet concludes, “We look forward to winning a contest against an opponent who allows encampments near schools and fights against hiring more cops, yet is MIA on saving Hollywood jobs and fighting back when ICE invades LA.”

MORE:

Richard Fernandez’s tweet concludes, “How honest was city hall? How reliable was the state? None of the answers to these things are available from Google but you can infer it from observation. Thus ‘poor devil, he never had a chance’ can also mean ‘don’t go to that swamp. It’s full of reptiles.’”

Posted at 9:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: David Lammy told JD Vance ‘you’re wrong’ after Henry Nowak case intervention.

David Lammy has told JD Vance he was wrong to link Henry Nowak’s murder to immigration and warned him the intervention on social media was “not helpful”.

The Deputy Prime Minister said he challenged the US vice-president in a “robust” phone call on Saturday after Mr Vance appeared to blame the killing on a “mass invasion” of people into Europe.

The 18-year-old student was handcuffed by police who ignored his pleas that he had been stabbed as he lay dying after his British-born killer, Vickrum Digwa, claimed to have been the victim of a racist attack.

Sir Keir Starmer’s deputy, who shares an unlikely friendship with Mr Vance despite their different political backgrounds, said the two had disagreed about the details surrounding the murder.

Mr Lammy, who is also Justice Secretary, told Sky’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips: “I spoke to the vice-president yesterday and I wanted to emphasise a number of things.

“The first is that our democratic process is working well. This young man has been convicted. There is an investigation into the police by the independent police complaints authority.

“There is an investigation into Hampshire Police by the inspectorate. The AG (Attorney General) is looking at the sentencing in relation to this. The national police chiefs are looking at the guidance in relation to this.”

He added: “The second thing was I disagree with him – this has got nothing to do with mass migration.

“This young man (Digwa) was a Brit. Let’s be… clear about that, and I said, ‘Look, Mr vice-president, you’re wrong about this’, and it’s also the case that actually murder is coming down in the United Kingdom.

“So, we had an agreeable conversation, but we disagree.”

Related: The article is behind a subscriber-only paywall, but the London Times’ headline on this story is: David Lammy: JD Vance was wrong to intervene in Henry Nowak case.

Curiously, Lammy’s boss didn’t mind intervening in American politics in 2020: George Floyd death: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes a knee in support of Black Lives Matter movement.

UPDATE: Pure, Cold Rage: What Henry Nowak’s Murder Says about the State of Britain in 2026.

Posted at 5:42 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 7th, 2026
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