June 4, 2026

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: The NIH Went to the Congo and All I Got Was This Lousy Monkeypox. “This story has the makings of a James Bond film: communists, mad doctors spreading dangerous viruses, and globalist toilet people behind it all. And somewhere, I suspect, is a very jealous Dr. Anthony Fauci watching from the sidelines, wishing the coach would let him play the deadly, worldwide virus game one more time.”

Posted at 10:10 am by Stephen Green

FROM THE DEPT. OF JUST NOT GETTING IT: Europe unveils tech sovereignty package amid growing concerns over reliance on U.S. tech: ‘We want to be sure nobody has a kill switch.’

The European Commission on Wednesday proposed a slew of rules intended to bolster homegrown chips, AI and cloud services as the bloc scrambles to develop tech sovereignty amid huge reliance on products and services from the U.S. and China.

The proposals, which must be approved by all 27 member states, include new actions to bolster advanced chip manufacturing and homegrown cloud computing.

As geopolitical tensions across the globe have ramped up, there have been growing calls for Europe to diversify away from non-European providers of critical tech, including U.S. tech companies, which currently dominate the European market.

“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.

Instead of repealing the innovation-strangling regulations that have made Europe an also-ran in high tech, they’ll impose even more rules.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

HOW “ANTI-RACISM” WORKS IN PRACTICE:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Posted at 9:24 am by Glenn Reynolds

I WONDER WHY? Karmelo Anthony Trial to Proceed with No Black Jurors. “One juror repeatedly said they wouldn’t feel right putting a ‘brother’ in prison.” We’ve seen an increasing reluctance of black jurors to convict black defendants who target white people. That means that there’s cause to dismiss them if they feel that way, or if prosecutors think they do and use a peremptory challenge.

Posted at 9:17 am by Glenn Reynolds

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Marco Rubio BRILLIANTLY Buzzsaws House TDS Dems During Hearing. “The cognitive decline diaper-filling was from California mental patient Ted Lieu, who has a habit of making people think that he wants the Founding Fathers to roll over in their graves. He’s a national embarrassment among national embarrassments.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘It’s Just Been Agony’: Facing a Big Deficit, the New School Begins Layoffs. “One of New York’s most prominent universities has handed layoff notices to about 15 percent of its employees, marking the latest in a series of cost-cutting measures it’s taken to rectify a budget deficit last reported at $48 million. The New School, a private institution known for its progressive history, is also consolidating its four colleges to two beginning this fall.”

If only there had been some sort of warning.

Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds

COLD WAR II: New Mystery Submarine Signals China’s Rapid Undersea Expansion.

China is launching submarines at a pace unmatched by any other nation. Its latest design, a distinctive and innovative vessel that dispenses with the traditional sail, marks another step in the evolution of an increasingly capable and technologically advanced submarine force. With little official information available, understanding the purpose and capabilities of this new class depends largely on intelligence gathering and expert analysis.

As Western navies struggle to build more than one or two submarines concurrently, China continues to pump them out at an increasing rate. They have launched around 15-20 in the past five years, including at least 8 new classes.

Beijing is building quickly, iterating quickly, and one presumes, learning quickly.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

WAIT, WHEN DID BILLY IDOL TRANSITION?

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

HE’S NOT WRONG: Quentin Tarantino Slams Hollywood as a ‘Flavorless Sausage Factory’ Where ‘Miscast’ Actors, ‘Audience Pandering or Stupid S— Torpedos Every New Movie.’

Quentin Tarantino is not a fan of the majority of movies coming out of Hollywood these days. Writing for Sight & Sound magazine, the Oscar winner revealed that “it’s almost impossible” for him these days to watch a new movie and not pick it “to death.”

“Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers or just plain stupid shit usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavorless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood,” the director explained. “These days, the entire concept of what is a movie is more inclined to inspire contempt in me than generosity. Which is fair enough, because by comparison the movies of the last six years make the 80s seem like the 30s.”

Well yes, that can happen you have the modern day equivalent of the Hays Office dictating your production choices: The Fast Death of the Intimacy Coordinator.

Related: Ride the lefty film criticism Mobius Loop!

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

WORSE THAN MAKEWORK JOBS, THESE POSITIONS CORRUPT THE POLICE:

Posted at 8:21 am by Stephen Green

GREAT MOMENTS IN ELITE LEFTIST SELF-LOATHING: Nantucket church cancels Fourth of July celebration in ‘political protest’ because of its ‘own whiteness.’

A liberal church on swanky vacation island Nantucket nixed its Fourth of July readings for the first time in 25 years in “political protest” over the Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling — and its congregants’ “whiteness.”

The Nantucket Unitarian Universalists has read the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights inside its church every Fourth of July for the last 25 years.

This year, the church’s board of trustees and presiding Rev. Erin Splaine published a letter announcing the cancelation of the readings just one month before America’s 250th birthday.

The church blamed the revision on the Supreme Court’s “gutting” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and “an on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness,” according to the letter.

The self-proclaimed “liberal and free faith” leaders claimed that white people know the rights laid out in the America’s foundational texts “have, for centuries, been tragically, often violently, and unequally applied” against non-white citizens.

On the other hand, “These are the same documents that ended slavery and spread freedom around the world. Canceling them over identity politics isn’t courageous, it’s absurd:”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Elite leftists should loathe themselves, but they can leave the rest of us out of it.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

MUCH MORE ON THAT BIG STORY FROM YESTERDAY: New Indictment Exposes Leftist Group’s Scandalous Relationships With White Nationalists. “The superseding indictment also includes forfeiture allegations. The document states that, if the SPLC is convicted of the wire fraud or conspiracy counts, it will ‘forfeit to the United States … property, real or personal, which represents or is traceable to the gross receipts obtained’ in violating the law.”

Corn, popped.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

IF IT SAVES JUST ONE LIFE:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

YES, BUT SHE’S SLIGHTLY UNORTHODOX:

Posted at 7:19 am by Stephen Green

REASON’S MICHAEL MOYNIHAN AND MATT WELCH ON SCOTT PELLEY’S CRASH AND BURN:

Later in their Fifth Column podcast, Moynihan and Welch discuss the current state of the CBS News:

Moynihan: We have seen this for so long. This pompous, journalistic attitude of, “We are here for the truth.”

It’s like, you’re not here for the f**king truth. You’re here for the truth in some ways; you’re not always here for the truth. And thank God you aren’t. I’m happy that you’re not. I just don’t want you to pretend that you’re doing something you’re not.

Welch: If you are here for the truth, you don’t say–because it’s not true–that Bari Weiss was sent to destroy 60 Minutes.*

Moynihan: Or you don’t say to Donald Trump in an interview, as Lesley Stahl did, “You can’t tell that that’s his laptop.”

Are you a journalist? Are you brain-dead?

All you have to do is look at the emails and email the person in the email and say, “Did you get this email from Hunter Biden?” “Yeah, I did.”

[Then] it’s his f**king laptop.

One email. Do five of them. Do ten of them. Take ten minutes.

But they didn’t want the story. They didn’t want it because it crashed into their worldview, and they thought it would help Donald Trump. And that’s not what journalism is about.

“It’s going to help Donald Trump.” Who f**king cares? It’s a story. Go after the story.

And everyone abdicated their responsibility on that. And she did that on camera to Donald Trump: “Well, we can’t tell. There’s no way of verifying it.”

Yes, there’s a way of verifying it.

You guys go to the Uyghur camps in China–and congratulations, you do great work on a lot of stuff–but you couldn’t verify it? You didn’t want to verify that.

That’s fine. But don’t pretend you’re speaking truth to power in a broad way. You’re not.

* As X personality “Jarvis” notes:

Political talk today is characterized by CATASTROPHIZING. Your enemies will put you in CAMPS. Democracy is ENDING. Every election is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIMES. Scott Pelley being sacked isn’t the mere natural outcome of calling his new boss a murderer and generally acted like a petulant dickhead in front of God and everyone — it’s the END OF LIBERAL MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT just like it was when Acosta and Lemon and a million other replacement level talking heads were shown the door.

 

Weiss isn’t “destroying” 60 Minutes, but technology and market forces rendered the original three TV networks no longer a monopoly for news, a topic that Geoffrey Ingersoll explores in “The Truth Behind Scott Pelley’s Epic CBS Meltdown:”

Pelley’s highly choreographed meltdown is more than likely his way of resigning so that he can launch a substack or his own podcast venture amid the kind of controversy that gets an early boost in viewers.

Yes, it really is that cynical and contrived.

Underneath it, however, is a real anxiety.

Scrape away the high-minded f*ckery, the self-flattering elitism, and you lay bare a rather coherent theory of mind.

Pelley is right. Something is dying. They’re losing their grip on the (un)reality machine. They see their rapidly dissolving ability to include and exclude lines of inquiry and it freaks them out. New people with new motivations will now be deciding which stories are legitimate and, importantly, how to cover them.

Pelley’s composure might be well practiced, intact, stalwart, but he is almost certainly shrieking on the inside.

Tranquility Base here, the Ego has landed. Was Pelley doing an Olbermann? Does he think he’s Cronkite? William Holden in Network? Olbermann left MSNBC 15 years ago. Cronkite retired 45 years ago. Network debuted in movie theaters 50 years ago. The era of mass media was over a long time ago.

So what could be Pelley’s next gig?

That cable opinion network is a perfect fit in many ways: Pelley ripped for claiming he was ‘in combat’ in Afghanistan and Iraq after CBS News firing.

Pelley was fired from the long-running CBS News show on Tuesday following a bitter clash with the network’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley, who first joined CBS News in 1989 and did not serve in the military, quickly raised eyebrows with a statement he gave following his termination.

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast,” Pelley, who has reported from several war zones in his career, told The New York Times.

As the successor to MSNBC, M-SNOW has a lot of experience with former network anchormen who cosplay as soldiers:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll