June 2, 2026

60 MINUTES IS BURNING. BRING MARSHMALLOWS:

Scott Pelley knows he’s on borrowed time and has been for quite a while. He’s making himself a pain in the ass so that he can claim to be a victim of “censorship” when he’s let go for a completely different reason — namely, that he’s a leftist hack whose journalistic product is middling at best, that he makes far too much money for the volume of content he produces and the number of eyes it draws, and that his undisciplined and irritating public outbursts are bad for the CBS News brand. Let’s not forget that a much more forgiving CBS News management than this one tried to make Pelley the next Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite back in 2017, and he didn’t last two years before his tenure as CBS News’ anchor collapsed in a heap. They didn’t fire him altogether then; they parked him at 60 Minutes, where he’s drawn a fat check and largely mailed it in ever since. (RELATED: The Agony Of 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley)

And now that the Ellisons own Paramount, the parent company of CBS, and would very much like to make the company somewhat profitable, they’ve brought in Weiss and a new breed of journalists who have a little less sycophantic relationship to elite leftist power politics. Which means Pelley and the rest of the hangers-on from the old regime are going to get evaluated from an objective perspective.

Which is not good news for Scott Pelley.

Would 60 Minutes still be on the air without the NFL?

Related:

Leslie Stahl couldn’t name any conservatives at CBS 23 years ago when asked by Cal Thomas on a Fox News show. I doubt the situation has changed much in the decades since.

Posted at 1:36 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPENCER PRATT’S FIRST BIG TEST: Will Voters Reject Karen Bass?

Despite a city budget of nearly $14 billion — more than the gross domestic product of NATO member Montenegro — city infrastructure is in terrible shape, blamed on pervasive under-investment for decades. The Los Angeles Times noted that the city hadn’t repaved a single street for a six-month stretch and declared that the city had “surrendered to the potholes.” (Hey, it’s not like Los Angelenos drive much, right?)

Where’s all the money going? In some cases, exceptionally well-paid city employees. In 2024, a fire battalion chief was paid $905,060, including $650,510 in overtime pay on a base salary of $135,306. Now, we all love firefighters, but that is more than quite a few players on the Los Angeles Rams football team will make this season.

As of 2024 — the most recent year available — at least 15 city employees were paid more than $600,000 in compensation, including the Chief Port Pilot of the city of Los Angeles, who was paid $704,027.

Eighty-seven city employees were paid more than $500,000 in a single year. The one-hundredth highest-compensated city employee was a port pilot in Los Angeles Harbor who was paid $495,022. (The league minimum annual salary in Major League Baseball is $780,000, so roughly one hundred city employees are making about two-thirds of what bottom-of-the-roster players on the Los Angeles Dodgers are making this year.)

Mayor Bass’s annual salary is about $301,000, but she said she has taken a pay cut, but has refused to disclose the amount.

The city’s Democratic tax-and-spend establishment has killed the geese that had been laying the golden eggs.

The 72-year-old Bass — apparently one of the finalists to be Joe Biden’s running mate back in 2020 — has failed her city so thoroughly that you half expect Oliver Queen to show up with a bow and arrow.

The options for the city of Los Angeles are to continue the current status quo, move even further to the left with Raman, or try something new with Pratt and his “Common Spence.” If the city does not choose the Pratt option, we’re left to wonder why anyone dissatisfied with the city’s direction would stick around.

Choose wisely, Los Angeles.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

A NEW VIDEO FROM F.I.R.E.:

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RESIST: More Virginia Counties Announce They Won’t Enforce Spanberger’s ‘Assault Firearms’ Ban.

How quickly the courts will act on these challenges is anybody’s guess, and regardless of what decisions are handed down, it’s unlikely any of them will be resolved until every step of the appeals process in either the federal or state courts is exhausted. If the courts rule in favor of the Second Amendment or the Virginia arms guarantee, anti-gun Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones will surely appeal. And if any ruling goes the other way, NRA and others will appeal.

So, we could be looking at several years of court cases.

On the other hand, there’s the very real possibility that the bans will be neutered in other ways; at least in parts of Virginia.

The Washington Times reported that prosecutors in five Virginia counties have indicated there will be no prosecutions under the new law in their jurisdictions. Commonwealth’s Attorneys in Powhatan, Pulaski, Scott, Smyth, and Spotsylvania Counties have all signaled there will be no prosecutions for otherwise law-abiding Virginians simply possessing the items Governor Spanberger is trying to eradicate.

Of course, prosecutions for actual offenses committed by criminals while in possession of any firearms—irrespective of their status as “good” or “bad” guns as determined by anti-gun extremists—will continue in these counties.

Pulaski County Commonwealth’s Attorney Justin L. Griffith stated, “I am not going to take law-abiding citizens as of June 30th, 2026, and criminalize that same behavior on July 1st, 2026, solely on the basis of this new law.”

These are the Left’s rules. The Right is just playing by them.

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Henry Nowak and the savagery of state wokeness.

The case of Henry Nowak has shocked the nation. He was a Polish-Briton in his first year at university. During a night out in Southampton in England in December last year, he had a fatal encounter with a Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa. Some kind of altercation took place. Digwa then stabbed Nowak five times with his kirpan, the ceremonial curved sword that Sikhs carry. Nowak was gored in his chest, his face and his legs. He scrambled over a fence, leaving a blood trail in his wake. ‘I’m dying’, local residents heard him say. He was right.

As savage as the knifing was, it was what happened next that has shaken Britain’s soul. Digwa’s mother arrived and spirited away the murder weapon – it was later found hidden in the family home with 20 other Sikh swords and knives. Digwa then accused Nowak of having racially abused him. He said Nowak used a racist slur against him, punched him and knocked off his turban. These were ‘wicked lies’, the court heard during his murder trial. Yet there was a group of people on the scene of this atrocity who believed Digwa’s vile libels against the youth he had just fatally lacerated: the police.

The police’s behaviour that night defies all logic and humanity. They bowed to Digwa’s defamatory slurs and arrested and handcuffed young Henry. The Telegraph’s report captures the barbarism of the police’s credulous ineptitude that grim evening: ‘As the teenager lay there, unable to breathe as his lungs filled with blood, begging officers for help, they ignored his pleas and placed him under arrest. He died less than an hour later.’ If anything will cause decent Britons to lose faith in the police, it’s this: the haunting vision of a boy being manhandled by the state as he drowned in his own blood.

As Bertold Brecht asked, “Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

BUBBLE OR NOT? Anthropic Joins the IPO Stampede — Profits Still Optional. “But then there’s the sharpest business analyst I know of, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, who argued earlier this year that AI’s ‘economic imperatives are going to be impossible to resist, and will fuel demand for even more compute over time, further supporting the case that this is no bubble.'”

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green

OUT: THE VOICES IN MY HEAD. IN: THE VOICE ON MY SCREEN. Florida sues OpenAI, Sam Altman after multiple ChatGPT-linked murders.

The civil lawsuit comes after Florida opened an unrelated criminal probe into OpenAI, following a ChatGPT-linked mass shooting where two people were killed at Florida State University. In statements, OpenAI has insisted that ChatGPT isn’t responsible for the FSU shooting, merely providing factual information, but Uthmeier does not seem to agree. In his complaint, Uthmeier noted that Florida has now been blindsided by two violent events where suspects used ChatGPT to assist in planning.

“Horrifically, ChatGPT has aided and abetted in more than one multiple murder in the State of Florida,” Uthmeier’s complaint said. “The 2026 deaths of University of South Florida graduate students Nahida Bristy and Zamil Limon were also plotted using ChatGPT, which advised Hisham Abugharbieh on how to dispose of bodies, change VIN numbers on a car, and whether cars were checked at the crime scene.”

Uthmeier then went on to list all the ways ChatGPT has allegedly fueled violence. In 2025, ChatGPT was blamed for encouraging several users to commit suicide, including teenager Adam Raine and a 56-year-old bodybuilder who murdered his mother based on a ChatGPT-hallucinated conspiracy.

More recently, in February, a man with mental health struggles killed his wife and attacked his mother “after talking with ChatGPT several hours a day and coming to believe robots were taking over the world, ” Uthmeier said. And a small mining town in Canada was shocked by a school shooting that claimed nine lives the same month. Altman later apologized for not alerting law enforcement about the shooter’s ChatGPT logs, which some believe could have averted the shooting.

Developing…

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

ANOTHER WIN FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: Seattle Public Library hosted the first of what was expected to be a regular series of training sessions at branch facilities, entitled the People’s Hard Reduction Alliance workshops.

One attendee just happened to be independent journo Jonathan Choe, dutifully reported the details of the session, including the fact free Narcan was being made available with easy access by children. End of workshops.

Posted at 11:26 am by Mark Tapscott

DEFUND THE NGOS, AND RESTRICT NONPROFIT STATUS TO GROUPS HELPING THE NEEDY:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

SLIPPING RIGHT DOWN THE SLOPE:

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Hat tip to the ever-sharp Eugene Volokh for this one, but the study’s authors seem to be “two anti-euthanasia academics hypothesizing such a model, and using it as a reductio ad absurdum to argue against Canada’s voluntary euthanasia programs.”

Well done, fellas — the abstract had me.

Posted at 10:54 am by Stephen Green

CRINGEY WEIRDO IS PUTTING IT NICELY: The Talafreakco Menace. “In case you hadn’t noticed, James Talarico is an cringey weirdo who is deeply out of step with the state he wants to represent. So here’s a roundup.”

There’s a lot to round up.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

POSITIONS SO MAINSTREAM, THEY HAVE TO BE MEMORY-HOLED:

Posted at 10:23 am by Stephen Green