June 10, 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

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

REALITY BITES WARNOCK: The Georgia Democrat senator told the New York Times a few days ago that the South became Republican when the old racist Democrats failed to stop the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Just Facts Daily marshals key facts and I add some more, based on having been born and raised in one of those “Solid South” states where most voters would “vote for a Yellow Dog if he ran as a Democrat.”

Posted at 4:13 pm by Mark Tapscott

TEXAS PRIMARY VOTERS SEEMED TO HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT ALREADY:

Posted at 4:05 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK: Oh Good, Screwworms Are Back.

Over the next 30-40 years, the there was a major push for screwworm eradication in North America. It was driven out of the US in the 60’s. With enormous international cooperation, they were pushed out of Mexico and Belize in the 80’s and eradication was pushed down to Panama by the 1990’s.

By a happy accident of geography, Panama was an excellent choke-point for the screwworm eradication. We could effectively maintain a screwworm border in Panama with a minimal effort because the geographic area to sterilize was physically small and politically stable. This also meant that screwworm control could be maintained through limited screwworm production facilities based in Panama and managed by COPEG, a joint commission between Panama and the US. COPEG is an institution specifically founded to maintain control over the screwworm barrier in Panama.

It wasn’t plausible to push screwworm elimination past Panama for a number of reasons that include political instability and the fact that Brazil is an enormous and terrifying place.

But then something went wrong.

Here it is: “The screwworm barrier in Panama cost $15 million a year. This is zero dollars to the US government. This program was basically free and it protected an entire continent from billions of dollars of yearly damage.”

And it seems to have gone to hell in 2022-2023 under the Biden administration, when “They were almost certainly transported via unchecked northward migration of people and animals.”

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

THE LAW SCHOOL ACCOMMODATIONS RACKET. This is a huge problem at all sorts of schools. Are you the chump if you’re not taking advantage of it? I wonder…

Posted at 2:44 pm by Robert Shibley

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

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

GOOD: FCC lifts looming deadline for Amazon Leo satellite broadband constellation.

Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC’s authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit.

It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC’s requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.

“Waiver serves the public interest by promoting a second large satellite broadband constellation,” the FCC wrote. “At this time, only one operator, SpaceX, is providing broadband to American consumers from low-Earth orbit. Amazon Leo’s service promises to be ‘groundbreaking,’ both in quality of service and affordability for consumers. Amazon Leo has further invested significant resources into meeting its commitments, including more than $10 billion to deploy the system along with investments in physical infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities.”

Consideration of public interest and Amazon’s multibillion-dollar investment in Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, are among the “special circumstances” the FCC cited for doing away with this summer’s deadline.

Amazon has done everything it can, including manufacturing satellites, building infrastructure, and even buying launches from rival SpaceX. It’s hardly the company’s fault that two of the launch vehicles it needs are currently grounded.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

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

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