Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

June 11, 2026

MIRANDA DEVINE: Pete Hegseth’s D-Day speech gave Europe a spot-on warning – be smart or be invaded.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a great speech on D-Day in Normandy.

He told the Europeans they were committing civilizational suicide by allowing themselves to be “invaded” by unassimilable migrants.

It was the kind of warning you give to a friend who you see is making a terrible mistake.

“Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said in northwestern France during commemorations for the 82nd anniversary of the June 6, 1944, landings of American and other Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from Hitler’s dangerous ideology.

On “beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive …

“When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Naturally, he was pilloried by out-of-touch elitists on both sides of the Atlantic.

But Hegseth was absolutely right, and his weekend comments echo earlier, ever more forceful warnings from Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Europe’s greatest challenges are self-inflicted — existential civilizational decline caused by unprecedented mass migration and a coinciding loss of confidence in Western values, or what Vance calls “self-hatred.”

Two terrible murders currently dominating UK news effectively demonstrate the points being made by these American statesmen.

Brad Essex writes that “Hegseth Brings Uncomfortable Truths to Normandy:” “Nations that cannot control who enters their territory lose the ability to define and defend their own character. Eighty-two years on, the rows of graves at Colleville-sur-Mer still speak clearly. The men who lie there did not fight for abstract ideals alone. They fought for concrete realities: secure homelands, accountable governments, and the right of free peoples to chart their own course. Honoring them means recognizing that vigilance remains necessary, whether the threat arrives by landing craft or small boat. Hegseth’s remarks cut through polite evasion. They reminded the audience that freedom, once secured, must still be earned.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026

DREW HOLDEN: A COVID Autopsy, Part 4: ‘Social Distancing Informants Have Their Eyes on You.’ The defining legacy of COVID might be the social catastrophe that mitigation efforts inflicted.

The problem with all of this fear-mongering, all this confident predicting that six feet of space would protect us, was that there wasn’t any real science to back it up. Why was six feet so important? Where did that guidance come from? As Fauci would tell the House Oversight Committee in 2024, he made it up — the guidance “just sort of appeared,” the doctor in charge of America’s response to COVID said. As the Washington Examiner reported at the time: “Dr. Anthony Fauci said in congressional testimony that he reviewed no scientific evidence behind the specific recommendations for masking children or maintaining 6-foot social distancing before advocating these policies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Invented though it was, social distancing, paired with the public doctrine of masking from the Left and among legacy media outlets, motivated a wave of hard-hearted and mean-spirited public cruelty for anyone who questioned The Science.

Do you remember the ‘Grandma killer!’ Twitter cycle about how awful it was to not wear a mask outside? (Here’s a thread if not). Have you forgotten all the awful things mask enthusiasts said about the “selfish” and “childish” people who so much as left their homes?

Do you remember the New York Times valorizing self-appointed social-distancing monitors? “Social Distancing Informants Have Their Eyes on You: Largely confined to their homes and worried about the spread of the coronavirus, members of the public are becoming unofficial watchdogs.”

Do you remember when legacy outlets like CBS News jumped in to support Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s Orwellian COVID hotline? “Coronavirus In Minnesota: Where To Call If You See People Who Aren’t Social Distancing.”

Holden’s Substack column was published on Friday, June 5th. Which seems appropriate, because it was in early June of 2020 that all of those rules got tossed out the window if you were protesting for the right cause: Six Years Ago Today, The Pivot Began.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 11th, 2026

June 10, 2026

WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Ron Klain, Biden’s ex-chief of staff, has a new lie to explain away Der Oystergruppenfuhrer’s totenkapf tat, despite knowing better:

Flashback: Ron Klain and the Demise of Moderate Democrats, including this show-stopping Platner-adjacent moment during Klain’s tenure:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

PARIS IS BURNING:

Another recurring controversy in French classrooms concerns the teaching of the Holocaust. A 2020 survey of young French people between the ages of 15 and 24 by the Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP) found that 21% of students criticize Holocaust education for excessive emphasis and question aspects of the genocide, and 13% of students outright reject it being taught because they find it offensive to their cultural or religious identity. Moreover, 70% of those surveyed agreed that teachers experience “real difficulties teaching about the Holocaust in schools located in the banlieues.” Already in 2004, the Obin report, authored by then national schools inspector Jean-Pierre Obin for the Ministry of Education, revealed growing tensions in several French schools regarding the teaching of topics such as the Holocaust, the history of religions, and evolution. These tensions included cases of student resistance, Holocaust denial, teacher self-censorship, and, in general, serious difficulties in delivering the curriculum within a framework of secular neutrality.

All these fundamental flaws in the system, which have been in place for years and which President Emmanuel Macron carries on today, are also what have allowed the existence in France of so-called no-go zones: neighborhoods where the gendarmerie either cannot or will not enter and where, in some cases, Sharia law is enforced unofficially. This failure of integration is the first dimension of the collapse of Europe’s multicultural experiment. The second is poverty and crime, since isolation cuts many immigrants off from the institutions and opportunities that could help them improve their education or find employment.

Does this explain the gratuitous violence that accompanies these celebrations? In theory, no. In practice, perhaps it does. There is a large population of French citizens of Arab and African origin who have grown up in cultural and religious bubbles where hostility toward the West is commonplace and, by extension, hostility toward France and what it represents in Europe. Among the most disadvantaged—nearly 40% of African immigrants in France live in poverty—that resentment is often compounded by frustration at having failed to achieve the aspirations that motivated migration in the first place. Life in the banlieues also exposes these communities to particular social problems such as unemployment, educational failure, drug trafficking, and the influence of radical Islamist movements.

Meanwhile in Belfast, the same authorities who cheered on 2020’s mostly peaceful but rather fiery protests in Minneapolis are breaking out the water cannons on their own citizens:

Related: After Single Night of Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests, Two-Tier Keir Starmer, Who Did Not Mention Henry Nowak Until the Video of His Police-Assisted Murder Was Released, Is Johnny-on-the-Spot in Condemning Riots.

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE WONDERS OF BUC-EE’S: The real star of Alabama’s World Cup match? Freddy from Germany and his 1 a.m. Buc-ee’s dinner.

Lee County was hit Tuesday with a deluge just before the match. But Freddy found a friend:

“I love Americans. We were about to walk an hour to the stadium in the rain to save on an Uber, and the receptionist at the hotel we were parked in front of decided to drive us there.”

Once inside Jordan-Hare, Freddy seemed surprised by a familiar sight to Alabamians. “There’s an eagle flying around the stadium,” he wrote.

Apparently, his upper deck seats were memorable. “This is the craziest stadium I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot of ones.”

With the view of the stadium as the sun set, Freddy was in awe. “This is the most ‘The European mind can’t comprehend this’ moment of my life,” he wrote. “One of my friends said, ‘Punch me five times tomorrow and I’ll still think this isn’t real.’”

As fireworks erupted following the match, he said, “What an experience.”

It was too late for Freddy to sample some lemonade at Toomer’s Corners, but he did make a tour of campus before a 1 a.m. stop at Buc-ee’s.

“DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION,” he marveled, before heading back on the road.

Exit quote:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

MOLOTOV–RIBBENTROP PACT SIGNED:

Bernie could use the reinforcements; his battle with “oligarchy” is an even deeper quagmire than Stalingrad:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Disclosure Day – Close Encounters of the Sappy Kind.

Steven Spielberg. Aliens. Summertime.

’nuff said, right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

“Disclosure Day” boasts a trippy cast, a timely premise and the potential for endless thrills. The result is a mess, suggesting that the iconic storyteller’s best days are behind him.

Boy, were those days movie magic. Now? The only illusion here is thinking this saga is worth its bloated running time.

* * * * * * * *

“Disclosure Day” sounds so intriguing on paper, but nearly every element offers surface-level thinking. Even worse?

The dramatic stakes are all over the map, arguably the film’s biggest lapse. And then there’s Hugo (the great Colman Domingo), trying to thwart Noah’s plans. Hugo is part of an effort to tell the world all about the aliens hidden by dark, nebulous forces.

Who are these forces? Why are so many aliens visiting Earth? What is their purpose? Is there a reason for their repeated visits? If they’re so sophisticated, why are they constantly in peril once they reach our planet?

Make some of this make sense.

“Disclosure Day” asks endless questions while offering few answers. The story quickly falls into a stale pattern of chase, escape and chase anew.

Sonny Bunch concurs, declaring Disclosure Day “Close encounters of the trite kind:”

It’s not fair to Disclosure Day or screenwriter David Koepp—who apparently wrote this in conjunction with Spielberg, who has described it as the culmination of his interest in the subject of alien life—to compare this film to something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a genuine masterpiece of sci-fantasy wonder. But there’s something to be said for the earlier movie’s sense of detached awe, the innate curiosity at the heart of its desperate hunger for the truth and the uncertainty that comes with unknowing. That’s a movie that was written and directed by a young man who felt he still had so much to learn, so much to see, so much to do. It’s a movie made by a man who can understand abandoning his family and getting on that ship and taking it to wherever the little gray men want to take him. In many ways it’s a movie about that man, an unconscious synthesis of his artistically minded mother and scientifically minded father.

Disclosure Day, on the other hand, is a film made by a man who has seen it all—or at least enough to think that he has unlocked the key to it all. It’s a movie that has its feet firmly on the ground, more concerned with the mundanity of man’s petty squabbles, and the potential ugliness and destruction always lurking nearby, than any exploration of the cosmos. It’s a film that blithely dismisses the upheaval that revelations about extraterrestrial life would unleash, choosing instead to argue that a worldwide information dump about the existence of little grey men would be such a unifying moment that we’d all simply stare at our phones in wonder and forget about little things like “wars” or “North Korean ballistic missiles.” (Okay, fair enough: This is probably the smartest point the film makes.)

But perhaps not to the level that Spielberg thinks, in order to hype his film:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

LESLEY STAHL SAYS JOURNALISTS GETTING FIRED IS WORSE THAN CHILD TRAFFICKING, NAZI TORTURE DUNGEONS:

Stahl is 84—even older than Joe Biden. She lived through 9/11 and the Jimmy Carter administration. She witnessed the self-inflicted debasement of her former colleague Dan Rather after he reported on forged documents purporting to cast doubt on President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. That was pretty bad.

What else might the iconic journalist have experienced in her career that was almost, but not quite, as traumatizing as corporate restructuring in a dying industry?

Well, Stahl’s first story as a 60 Minutes correspondent was about child trafficking in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She visited a family that wanted to sell their four-year-old son for $500 to buy a camcorder. The following year, Stahl interviewed survivors of Josef Mengele’s twisted human experiments at Auschwitz. In 2020, she was forced to endure interviews with Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, cofounders of the much-maligned Lincoln Project super PAC.

It’s entirely plausible that Stahl was more disturbed upon learning that a handful of journalists had been fired by CBS. After all, she is a journalist, and many journalists have described Pelley’s termination alone as one the greatest tragedies to befall mankind.

Stahl has unintentionally (well, I think unintentionally) channeled Mel Brooks’ classic 2000 Year Old Man character, who told Carl Reiner in 1963, “To me, tragedy is if I’ll cut my finger. That’s tragedy. It bleeds, and I’ll cry, and I’ll run around, and I’ll go into Mount Sinai for a day and a half. I’m very nervous about it. And to me, comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die. What do I care? That’s comedy. My finger is important.”

Scott Pelley concurs:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

SURPRISE! Democrat “Ballot Harvesters” Were Illegally Paying Skid Row Homeless Drug Addicts $5 to “Vote” for Nithya Raman.

A series of shocking videos show homeless residents on Los Angeles’ Skid Row claiming they were paid to vote for Mayor Karen Bass and councilwoman Nithya Raman.

The California Post obtained copies of the videos after they were published Tuesday on the TikTok account LaneNeedsSpencerPratt.

The footage, recorded near 7th Street and Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, has since been provided to the Department of Justice. It also follows The Post’s revelations that thousands of homeless voters were registered to shelters where they didn’t live.

One shelter in Venice, where 185 Raman voters were registered, received $600,000 from taxpayers care of the socialist Raman.

In one of the clips, a man who calls himself Kevin Shepherd, claimed he received $4 to vote for Bass.

When asked whether he would also have been paid to vote for Raman, Shepherd answered “yes” and said Spencer Pratt was not among the candidates he was encouraged to support.

As a result of the primary’s outcome, America’s Newspaper of Record compares and contrasts the difficult choice that L.A. residents will be facing this fall:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

DON’T BE STUPID, BE A SCHMARTY: The Democrats Have Officially Ceded the Moral High Ground*.

It’s official: The guy who knowingly got a Nazi tattoo on his chest and roughed up his girlfriend is now the Democrats’ nominee in Maine. Graham Platner has won his primary and will now face off against Susan Collins in November.

The same people who called the Right Nazis for 10 years, who accused the Right of sending women back to the dark ages, who called Trump a rapist and pedophile protector, and who claim Trump is sending soldiers to die, are now backing a guy with an actual Nazi tattoo, who twisted his ex-girlfriend’s arm and left bruises, who spent years on a sexting site notorious for hosting predators cheating on his wife, and who has relentlessly mocked veterans.

It’s truly amazing. Yet it goes beyond just the hypocrisy of it all.

There’s a Wall Street Journal video that’s gone viral of an interview with Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, the activists who handpicked Graham Platner and convinced his to run for office. The activists had uncovered some of Platner’s gross Reddit posts but told the WSJ didn’t find them disqualifying.

“Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings,” Moraff says.

Did you catch that?

Your choices are Nazi or a vat.

Roughing up your girlfriend makes you a “real human being.”

Apparently, this is how you get back the white working class! This is how you get back men, according to Daniel Moraff and a host of other progressive college-educated pundits and nepo baby activists.

As “Cynical Publius” tweeted at the start of the month:

Tweet concludes, “So maybe they want to run to the RIGHT of Collins, and since these idiots ACTUALLY BELIEVE we are all actual Nazis, maybe they saw Platner as the ideal candidate. Because they are stupidly brainwashed. Just a theory…”

That theory seems confirmed by Bill Maher, who told viewers last week, “I mean [Platner] is a new kind of guy and it is not just in the Democrats, people who, like—if you look at their history, you can find things that make them look very conservative. Like a Nazi tattoo. What I would—in the past—associate with conservatives.”

For the record, outside of a few stereotypical motorcycle gang members on TV cop shows, I don’t recall ever seeing anyone on the right with a Nazi tattoo, but I’ll admit to leading a very sheltered life. The Nazi tat aside (and those are three words I never thought I’d type in a row):

#Metoo? “Believe All Women?” Returning to power is far more important:

 

* I’ll take headlines from 1959, Alex:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

THE IRISH, SCOTS AND ENGLISH ARE AT THE END OF THE “FIRST FOLLOWER” PHASE IN CULTURAL SURVIVAL:

When the systems of a ‘law and order’ society find no intention, benefit or reasonable expectation of safety from their established construct of government -generally driven by an intentional willingness to ignore the demands of the citizens those officials are expected to represent- eventually people take matters into their own hands.

It is fair to call this the end of the “first follower” phase.

It began when a singular voice stood boldly in righteous opposition to the violence. This person was watched by many.

Then, when that person, the original opponent to the violence is met with brutal isolation and retaliation, a first follower surfaces.

The first follower is the individual who stands up in anger against the retaliation they have witnessed against the singular voice.

This is the key moment when you can guarantee something is about to change.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

WHEN THE LAW OF THE LAW OF MERITED IMPOSSIBILITY REBOUNDS TO EUROPE: Here Come the Riots.

Anti-immigrant violence erupting in the United Kingdom was as predictable as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West.

I knew it was coming. Elon Musk predicted it. Konstantin Kisin, ditto. Anybody with half a brain could see it coming.

Seeing it coming is not the same as wanting it to come. Cassandra didn’t want the evils she foresaw to come to pass, and, unfortunately, those of us predicting the inevitable were reviled as much as she was for telling people the truth. British politicians threatened to prosecute Musk for merely saying what any sane person knew.

Metaphor alert:

Related:

As Rod Dreher wrote numerous times during the previous decade, the Law of Merited Impossibility states: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

More:

Which seems odd, considering that during June of 2020, Starmer was quite happy to encourage violence and disorder that threatened America, and had little desire for calm or “letting the police get on with their work:” George Floyd death: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes a knee in support of Black Lives Matter movement.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The barbarism in Belfast.

Isn’t there now a case against officialdom of reckless endangerment? Every week there are reports of horrifying rapes carried out by illegal immigrants. Working-class women and girls have suffered sickening abuse at the hands of men who came on small boats under the noses of our apathetic, cowardly rulers. People have been murdered, too. From the alleged rape gang overseen by Afghan nationals in Norwich to last night’s demented bloodletting in Belfast – when are we allowed to say this is all the bitter harvest of state failure, the predictable outcome of refusing to get a handle on who is coming here and why?

People are sick of paying the blood price of bourgeois virtue. That is increasingly how it feels to working-class communities – that they are expected to absorb the risk of letting in tens of thousands of unvetted men, while their betters absorb the glow of righteousness that comes with crying ‘Refugees welcome’. The activist class in their leafy suburbs are shielded from the social consequences of their moral theatre. It is the lower orders who suffer the fallout. Working-class girls who suddenly have 800 men from fuck knows where in the hotel at the end of their road. Women like Rhiannon Whyte, murdered by a Sudanese ‘asylum seeker’ from the very migrant hotel she worked in. This poor man in Belfast. It seems their suffering is a small price to pay for the moral gloating of our rulers.

This is why people are angry. Not because they’re racist. Not because they want all non-whites cast out of the kingdom. Such defamatory classist bile doesn’t wash anymore. No, it is the pathological nonchalance of the establishment that infuriates them, and the green light that such institutionalised cowardice gives to certain wicked men who come here. That image of the suspect in Belfast seeming to punch the air with bloodcurdling delight as his exhausted victim fought for his life – this will be burned into people’s minds. It deserves to become a defining image in the life of our nation. For it grimly embodies the twin horrors of an individual’s murderous intent and a state’s murderous indifference.

Already the political class is fretting more about the masses’ response to this apocalyptic event than the event itself. Just as Starmer lamented the calls for ‘pure, cold rage’ over the death of Henry Nowak, so they will seek to crush our outrage over the barbarism in Belfast. An MP for Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party is fuming about the ‘English right-wing politicians’ who might exploit this atrocity to ‘further their own ends’. Imagine witnessing such End Times violence and thinking, ‘Shit, how are people going to react?’. They are so lost. They are beyond lost.

Related: Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

● Shot: As I watch Belfast burn in violent protests, I think of the far right in England and the US spreading poison.

—Headline, the London Independent, today.

● Chaser: ‘No justice, no peace:’ Tens of thousands protest against racism across UK despite coronavirus warnings.

—Headline, the London Independent, June 7th, 2020.

● Hangover: Coronavirus: Stunning photos show world under lockdown. ‘Really, Earth needs a break from humanity… time for a long rest,’ says observer.

—Headline and subhead, the London Independent, March 16th, 2020.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

TWO-TIER KEIR:

Related: Belfast burns after knife attack protests.

Footage on Sky News showed infants being carried out of neighbouring homes as flames crackled inside the houses, while a pastor told the BBC people were being forced out of their homes “because they’re black”.

Protesters also attempted to set the Sham Supermarket, a Middle Eastern shop, alight on Donegal Road, just south of the city centre.

Several vehicles, including a police vehicle and a Glider bus on the Newtownards Road, were set on fire in the east of the city earlier in the evening.

The violence was widely condemned across the political spectrum.

Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein First Minister, said the burning of homes amounted to “outright thuggery” while Arlene Foster, her DUP predecessor, said she watched the unfolding scenes “with great sadness”.

For O’Neill, some riots are far more acceptable than others:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2026

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
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