June 1, 2026

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Graham Platner Is Not an Outlier in the Democratic Party. “What the few remaining normie Democrats don’t understand is that the coastal Dems are OK with Platner because he’s not that different than any of them. We’ve seen the hard turn to antisemitism that the Democrats have taken in recent years. They’ve been big defenders of the ‘Free Palestine’ campus Brownshirts. The only real difference between Platner and a lot of the Dems in D.C. is that he got the tattoo.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

THE COUNTER-RECONQUISTA IS AIDED BY THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Posted at 8:49 am by Stephen Green

GOOD: Hegseth Says US and China Agreed to Keep Talking About AI Guardrails.

Trump and President Xi Jinping discussed guardrails on AI and how to prevent bad actors from exploiting the most powerful AI models, such as Anthropic’s Mythos, which has exposed major software security vulnerabilities.

Hegseth said the two countries agreed to continue talking as technology develops.

“Guardrail conversations are productive between two strong countries,” Hegseth said, “but it’s also our job to run the fastest, and certainly at the War Department, we’re trying to do everything we can to maintain that.”

If we learned anything from The Terminator or WarGames, it’s to keep a human in the loop.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

HOW THINGS WORK:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

INSURRECTION: “Over the past two weeks, there have been nightly and escalating riots at the Delaney ICE Detention Center. Massive resources have been poured in by outside NGOs funded by leftist billionaires, foundations, Neville Singham, and the Chinese Communist Party. Protesters from around the country have assembled there, expensive riot gear provided to the activists, and even scripts given to selected spokespeople to push out a carefully constructed message. As in Minnesota, local politicians have been backing the rioters, insisting that they are only using their First Amendment right to protest, even if that means assaulting officers, lighting fires, stealing from local businesses, dismantling public property to turn the rubble into weapons, and demanding that officers kill themselves, or threatening to kill them and their families.”

Posted at 8:24 am by Glenn Reynolds

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

I’M A FAN OF WALTER MCDOUGALL: A Return to Proper History. REVIEW: ‘The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe’ by Walter A. McDougall.

“Too often academic treatises these days are insufferably ‘woke’ or even unreadable, thanks to their postmodern jargon,” explains the author of this refreshingly countercultural work. “This book, by contrast, consists of old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes history.” After lecturing on European history at UC Berkeley and Penn, Professor Walter McDougall is clearly exasperated at the way his craft has been wrecked by what he lists as “postmodernism, deconstructionism, critical race theory, radical feminism, and ‘wokeness’ in general.”

Instead of merely ranting against those ideologies, however, he has shown what can be achieved if historians simply ignore them. Drawing on his half-century of lectures, he has written a history of Europe from the Renaissance to 1945 that is erudite, thought-provoking, and engaging, proving that sweeping surveys of the past can still be written in the grand old style. This book is a triumphant return to proper history, the way it was written before the commanding heights of the Academy were captured by the Left. It’s so old-fashioned that there are no endnotes or bibliography, but is none the worse for that.

I’ve been a fan of his ever since his The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

BILL WHITTLE JOINED THE SPENCER PRATT VIDEO VOLUNTEER BRIGADE:

Posted at 7:47 am by Stephen Green

CLASS ACT, HIDING BEHIND YOUR WIFE: Maine Senate Dem Graham Platner puts wife Amy on video to defend against claims he was posting on creepy hookup app.

Amy Gertner, who married Platner in 2023, said that she was “deeply hurt” about the campaign’s former political director, whom she tipped off about the sexting, confirming the messages to the press.

The randy oyster farmer is believed to have had sexting affairs with up to a dozen women, according to reports.

“It makes me really angry, disappointed, and I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip, instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on, like healthcare and education and childcare,” Gertner groused in a video addressing the scandal.

Here’s the video, but be warned that the cringe factor is high.

Related: Platner reshuffles campaign and sends out NDAs as he struggles to get ahead of controversies.

Amid fallout from Platner’s controversial years-old social media posts, his campaign began sending non-disclosure agreements to staffers last week, according to his former top political director, Genevieve McDonald, who said she declined to sign one.

“The campaign offered me $15,000 to sign a NDA,” McDonald told POLITICO in an interview. “I did not accept the offer. I certainly could have used the money. I quit my job to work on Platner’s campaign, believing it was something different than it is.”

And here’s the background on what happened with McDonald: Mamdani spin doctor accused of threatening Graham Platner’s ex-staffer before she blew whistle on sexting scandal.

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green