IT SURE SOUNDS LIKE IT: Did Ellen ‘Elliot’ Page Just Pull a Jussie Smollett?

As per Page’s account in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, she was at the intersection of Sunset and La Cienega, simply walking to the Pink Dot convenience store, when a stranger approached her.

And yet here, downstairs at his Sunset Strip hotel, he [sic] is less than a mile from the spot where a man on the street threatened to assault him just last year. As he describes in his book, Page, who lives in New York, was standing at the corner of Sunset and La Cienega, taking a quick walk to the Pink Dot convenience store, when a stranger approached.

“I’m going to f—ing gay bash you, f—t,” the man threatened. Terrified, Page began running toward the Pink Dot, where employees ushered him inside. From the other side of the door, the man yelled: “This is why I need a gun!”

“Now when I’m in Los Angeles, I don’t feel comfortable like I used to going for walks,” Page says.

Right… because “I’m going to gay bash you,” is something someone would actually say? For real?

Exit quote: “Hey, at least she didn’t say the man chanted, ‘This is MAGA country!’”

QUESTION ASKED AND UNANSWERED: “What privileges do straight white men have that you don’t have?”

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Southern Poverty Law Center Adds Parental Rights Groups to ‘Hate Map.’

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Hot take: We should take our Pride cues from Muhammad, who was an OG ally to the LGBTQ+ community.

QUESTION ASKED: No sex shows for kids in Texas: Why is this controversial?

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: New York City just introduced crack pipe vending machines. Really.

Hey, you never know when Hunter will be in town.

THE LID: June 6, 1944, D-Day: The Day That Saved The World.

OUT ON A LIMB: ‘Lockdowns were a costly failure:’ New meta analysis.

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: After Overseeing Weaponization Of Government Against Trump, James Comey Frets Trump Could Weaponize Government.

HMMMM: What to make of Apple’s intriguing $3,499 Vision Pro headset.

We’re still reeling a bit from today’s announcement of Vision Pro, Apple’s biggest new platform/hardware product rollout in years. The magnitude of the entirely new computing interface the company is trying to sell here is matched only by the augmented reality headset’s significant $3,499 starting price.

Whether or not Apple’s gambit here can succeed in a headset-curious but still largely headset-skeptical market will depend in large part on the quality of the “immersive” experience Apple can deliver. We’ll only know by actually putting this thing on our heads. Before we get that eyes- and hands-on time, though, here are some immediate thoughts on how to position Vision Pro in the market and in your mind.

The crowd at the 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino sounds, well…reserved about the announcement:

You won’t find a better pre-sale indicator than this sound from the audience https://t.co/gERziGaQp2

— Ramp Capital (@RampCapitalLLC) June 5, 2023

Related: Google Glass is now officially dead: Why did the ‘innovative’ product fail?

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Owner of SF’s Largest Hotel, the Hilton Union Square, Is Walking Away, Surrendering It to Lender.

Another bit of bad news for downtown San Francisco arrived Monday morning with the revelation that the investment firm that owns the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels is walking away from its debts and giving up hope on a return of SF’s convention market.

Virginia-based REIT Park Hotels & Resorts has opted to cease payments on a $725 million loan, as the SF Business Times reports today, essentially surrendering over 2,900 hotel rooms and hospitality facilities to its lender. This includes the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, which is San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, and one of the country’s largest hotels outside of Las Vegas.

Park Hotels & Resorts is also giving up on the 1,024-room Parc 55, citing the continued debt burden of the two hotels on its portfolio, and multiple factors that have made the SF market less desirable for their business.

“After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,” said Park Hotels CEO Thomas J. Baltimore in a statement. “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges, both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand.”

Related: San Francisco Falls Into The Abyss. “No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.”

HOW IT STARTED:

“As mayor of our city, I would never trade away peoples’ civil rights for money,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said. “That’s the only place to stand on behalf of this city that turned out 25,000 people to Capitol Mall (for the women’s march) and this city that prides itself on its incredible diversity.” Steinberg added his city would “join, if not lead, any effort to fight (the sanctuary city threat) with litigation.”

—“California leaders push back against Trump, pledge to protect immigrant ‘sanctuaries,’” the Sacramento Bee, January 25, 2017.

How it’s going: Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Ron DeSantis ‘pathetic’ on Twitter; calls for kidnapping charges after migrants dropped off in Sacramento.

—ABC7 Los Angeles.

Flashback: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

If I’m reading the numbers correctly in the ABC7 article, Newsom is melting down over — brace yourself — 36 illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, “The US Border Patrol has encountered approximately 1.33 million migrants in fiscal year 2023 to date,” according to CNN. Newsom’s pain could be reversed if Biden could be persuaded to change course: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.

Related: Leftist Hypocrisy: Failing to Criticize Environmental Disaster of Biden’s Open Border.

SEN. TIM SCOTT TAKES ON SUNNY HOSTIN OVER SYSTEMIC RACISM:

“Progress in America is palpable; it can be measured in generations,” he said. He continued, “I look back at the fact that my grandfather born in 1921 in Salley, South Carolina when he was on a sidewalk, a white person was coming he had to step off and not make eye-contact.”

He pointed out that today every major network has black hosts and anchors. “So what I’m suggesting is yesterday’s exception is today’s rule.”

Perhaps sensing that Sen. Scott was on a roll, Hostin interjected “So America has met its promise?” This is a dodge. Sen. Scott never claimed the country had achieved perfection, merely that a great deal had changed in the past 100 years.

“The concept of America is that we are going to become a more perfect union, that in fact the challenges that we faced 50 years ago and 60 years ago should not be the same challenges that we face today,” Scott replied. He continued, “When my mother was born about 10% of African-Americans got a high school degree, diploma. Today, it’s over 90 percent.”

At this point, Whoopi Goldberg interrupted to go to a commercial and Sen. Scott made a joke about just getting started. After the break, Goldberg asked why these sorts of conversations were never discussed by Republicans.

Anyway, there’s more to the discussion but you have to hand it to Sen. Scott for walking into the lion’s den, so to speak, and doing a pretty good job defending his views when he was clearly outnumbered on the panel. At least three of the co-hosts (Hostin, Goldberg and Navarro) were out to make him look bad and he held his own.

But is Scott’s appearance all for nothing? Tim Scott’s Appearance on ‘The View’ Ends in Embarrassment Because Republicans Never Learn.

Does Joe Biden go on Sean Hannity’s show? No, he doesn’t. So why are Republicans going on the shows of people who hate them and want to see them destroyed? What is gained by helping produce ratings and money for The View or doing a town hall on CNN when the end result is so obviously a net negative?

I understand the notion that facing adversarial media makes a candidate look “tough.” But that’s not the reality of the situation. Instead, Republicans usually come away looking weak, having been denied a chance to fully explain their positions. You will never beat the left by agreeing to play by their rules. How many more times do I need to say it? How many more articles must I write? I suspect the answer will be quite a few more.

Sadly, yes.

UPDATE: Joy Behar was too cowardly to appear onstage with Scott: The View co-host who lectured Tim Scott on racism misses his appearance on show.

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Mike Pence Officially Enters the 2024 Presidential Race.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: CNN Exclusive: New Hampshire GOP Gov. Sununu says he will not run for president in 2024.

OUT ON A LIMB: CNN lost trust over COVID coverage, internal report found.

The network won multiple prizes for its coverage of Covid-19, including the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Cronkite/Jackson Prize, which was awarded to Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his coverage “correcting Covid-19 misinformation.”

But Licht’s criticism was drawn from CNN’s own research.

Last year, CNN commissioned a survey examining viewer trust and the places where CNN was succeeding and falling short with viewers across the ideological spectrum. According to a partial copy of the report, which hasn’t been revealed before, CNN’s coverage of Covid-19 was the third leading cause of distrust in the network behind liberal bias and “the Chris Cuomo situation.”

Survey respondents of all ideological stripes criticized the network’s “overly dramatic and sensational”* and “dire” reporting, the report said.

Sanay Gupta, you say? Flashback: Joe Rogan’s Dust-Up With CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta Exposes the Narrative:

Rogan continued to ask why the network would lie about a Nobel prize-winning drug that had cured blindness due to a parasitic infection in millions of people, suggesting it was only used in animals. Rogan asked, “Does it bother you the news network you work for out and out lied? Just outright lied about me taking horse dewormer?” Gupta responded, “They shouldn’t have said that.”

That’s what Gupta told Rogan while in his studio. The following day, however: CNN’s Effort to Clean up the Gupta Train Wreck Interview Proves Joe Rogan’s Point:

CNN’s [Don Lemon]: “It is not a lie to say that [Ivermectin] is used as a horse de-wormer. I think that’s important. And it is not approved for Covid.”

[Gupta]: “Correct … If you look at the data, there is no evidence that it really works [against Covid].”

This is CNN. “But that’s the problem with CNN in a nutshell, and it’s the point that Rogan was making,” Red State’s Nick Arama writes. “They don’t care about the truth; it’s all about narrative.”

“Overly dramatic and sensational,” you say? Flashback: ‘It’s Good TV:’ CNN’s High-Drama Coverage of the Pandemic Hits Close to Home: “But another current CNN employee who spoke with THR criticized Cuomo’s appearances, particularly the dramatic moment last Monday when he was filmed leaving the basement where he was quarantined to reunite with his family, as ‘reality TV.’ ‘Him coming out of the quarantine with the cameras there, that’s all Jeff Zucker reality TV, and that screams Zucker,’ the person says, referring to the network president who brought The Apprentice to NBC and helped make Trump a star.”

Related: Explosive Report Details CNN CEO Chris Licht’s Time At the Left-Wing Network.

GREAT MOMENTS IN OUTREACH: Biden’s State Department Launches Multimillion Dollar Push To Fight Climate Change, Teach Gender Studies in Iraq.

The Biden administration is prepared to shell out up to $12 million to teach Iraqis how to fight climate change and appreciate “gender diversity,” an effort it says will help strengthen democracy in the Middle Eastern nation.

President Joe Biden’s State Department on May 15 posted a grant solicitation offering three universities in Iraq up to $4 million each to develop programs to help fight climate change and advance gender equity. Recipients must develop “fields of study, course offerings, and/or majors” centered on “gender issues” and “the adaptation to and mitigation of the impacts of climate change,” the grant offering shows. Additionally, the State Department wants Iraqi universities to develop recruitment programs for students who will work toward advancing “greenhouse gas reduction” and “other areas of study related to climate change.”

Programs approved for funding must also have “progressive curricula” and “strengthen the diversity of the student body of American-style Iraqi institutions of higher education.”

Will the works of Marcel Duchamp also be studied in Iraq?

BACKWARDS RAN SAN FRANCISCO UNTIL REELED THE MIND; WHERE IT WILL ALL END KNOWS GOD: In 2021, PJM’s Victoria Taft referred to San Francisco as “Baghdad by the Bay.” The beleaguered city is quickly regressing even further: Immigrant store owner begs San Francisco for help after losing $100K to burglars: ‘Worse than Afghanistan.’

Why does it keep having such unexpected bad luck?

(Classical allusion in headline.)

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: CNN’s Kirsten Powers Hilariously Leveled When She Talks About Censoring Republicans.

Leaving this here: 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/claSYFWInM

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 3, 2023

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND: Non-binary ex-Biden official Sam Brinton arrested for yet another baggage theft. Brinton is being charged with grand larceny in third airport baggage theft case.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Due To High Crime, Mafia Closes Its Chicago Office.

‘SUDDENLY, WE WERE IN WONDERLAND:’ Paul McCartney on his lost photos of Beatlemania.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I ‘married’ the perfect man without ‘baggage’ — he’s completely virtual.

Related: AI and the Screwfly Succession. What if love really does conquer all?

OKAY, GROOMERS:

Related: I fought for gay rights — but trans activists have destroyed the meaning of Pride.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Holding the Far Left Accountable Week in Education.