June 18, 2026

UM, WHAT? Georgia Republicans scrap redistricting talks before special session begins.

Georgia lawmakers will no longer discuss redrawing the state’s Congressional maps when a special session begins Wednesday.

Speaker of the House Jon Burns sent a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp signed by the House Majority leadership regarding the decision.

“Changes to Georgia’s maps should take place only when members of the General Assembly and citizens have been given ample opportunity to gather the facts, provide input and engage in meaningful discussion,” Burns wrote.

At a news conference, Senate President Pro Tem Larry Walker III says he and Georgia Republican Senators agree with Burns on not moving forward with redrawing the maps at this time.

Because that’s exactly what Democrats would do in this situation?

What a wasted opportunity.

Elsewhere in Georgia: The Classic City Dodged a Socialist Bullet in Its Mayoral Runoff.

Posted at 11:43 am by Stephen Green

REQUIRED READING:

Key section:

These were organised, clan-linked operations that treated white girls as “easy meat”…as fair game precisely because they lacked the honour protections afforded girls inside the perpetrators’ own communities.

But the deeper crime…the one that stains the soul of the state…was not committed by the men who used taxis and takeaways as cover for their predation.

It was committed by the police officers who lost evidence bags and classified raped children as prostitutes…by the councillors and social workers who tippexed the word “Pakistani” out of case files…by the prosecutors who raised evidential thresholds when the suspects belonged to protected demographics…and by the national political class that treated the screams of working-class girls as less important than the maintenance of “community cohesion” and the avoidance of racism accusations.

Britain is in a bad place, but it will have to go through a worse one to get out of it.

And that’s only if Britons have the stomach for it.

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

UPDATE: Obama Presidential Center subcontractors claim they’re owed millions and facing financial ruin ahead of grand opening.

Several [contractors] also described what they viewed as a wall of silence surrounding the project, with some declining to speak publicly or requesting anonymity because of confidentiality agreements or fears of professional retaliation.

The allegations emerge days after a Fox News Digital investigation reported that the Obama Foundation’s reserve fund — originally promoted as a $470 million financial safeguard intended to help protect taxpayers if the project encountered financial trouble — remains funded at roughly $1 million.

Standing outside the center on a gloomy Friday afternoon, Owen flipped through spreadsheets and financial records that he said documented millions of dollars in losses tied to the project.

Owen said the project stretched on for years longer than anticipated, forcing his company to absorb millions of dollars in labor and overhead costs as work demands changed and expanded.

He said the losses have drained the company’s reserves, created uncertainty for employees and could ultimately force layoffs. Owen also said the years-long effort to recover what he believes is money owed has taken a significant toll on his mental health.

“I haven’t had eight hours or six hours sleep in over a year,” Owen said. “I’m cooked emotionally. I feel like an aluminum can that’s been thrown in front of a steamroller. We’re crushed. And I have to fight for my company and for my people.”

You f****d up; you trusted Obama.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

FREE SPEECH FRIGHTENS THEM, AND IT SHOULD:

Posted at 10:25 am by Stephen Green

WELL PUT: Thune Keeps Counting Votes Instead of Finding Them.

Reagan’s first political director, Ed Rollins, once explained how the White House got a needed vote out of a stubborn senator. “We just beat his brains out. We stood him up in front of an open grave and said he could jump in if he wanted to.”

Mister, we could use a man like Ed Rollins again.

Posted at 10:10 am by Stephen Green

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? California seeks to allow kids to ‘divorce’ their parents without cause.

Assembly Bill 1967 is moving through the California Legislature with barely a ripple of public attention. The bill, authored by LGBTQ rights activist-turned-Assemblymember Rick Zbur, would allow children of any age to initiate state dependency proceedings against their own parents. The parents will not even know this has happened until the die is already cast.

The bill allows any minor residing in any residential facility to file a legal application against their parents, without cause or evidence of harm.

Residential facilities include drug rehabilitation programs, boarding schools, wilderness therapy programs, faith-based residential programs, and runaway shelters It does not matter whether the facility is safe and an appropriate placement chosen by the parents. The child can petition the court to strip the parents of custodial authority and substitute county child welfare control or foster placement. The application need not be corroborated by any adult and need not be served on the parents. The child’s statement alone is sufficient to trigger a mandatory assessment of the parents’ home. This assessment can occur without the parents’ knowledge.

The investigation includes a social worker assessment of the parents’ home. The use of the word “assessment” instead of “investigation” is legally significant: an assessment carries no requirement of a physical home visit and can be completed entirely on the basis of the child’s statements alone, without the parents ever being contacted.

“The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.” —George Orwell, 1984.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:

Posted at 9:23 am by Stephen Green

THERE’S A LOT OF CHATTER ABOUT THE IRAN AGREEMENT, BUT I DON’T HAVE A LOT TO SAY. IT WILL FAIL. At least, Iran will break it, and Trump will start bombing again. I think Trump knows this. The Iranians probably do too. At best it’s Peace Of Amiens II and I doubt it will last that long.

Posted at 9:13 am by Glenn Reynolds

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Chips Away at the Dept. of Education, but Will It Be Enough? “The president and Secretary McMahon have do deal with bureaucratic realities while I’m dreaming of them taking a blowtorch to the whole department. Rather than deliver a knockout punch, they’ve been trying to weaken the Dept. of Education (ED) via a series of body blows in the form of offloading its duties elsewhere.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

SUPER HEAVY LIFT: SpaceX valuation balloons to $2.6T, briefly passes Amazon.

The newly public company’s stock had already climbed 20% on Monday — its first full day of trading. Tuesday’s news that SpaceX was acquiring AI coding company Cursor, along with the start of options trading on SpaceX’s shares, sent the share price even higher, spiking its valuation to $2.9 trillion before it ultimately settled back down.

This is all despite the fact that SpaceX posted a $4.9 billion loss on $18.7 billion in revenue last year, compared to Amazon, which turned a $78 billion profit in 2025 on $717 billion in sales in 2025. SpaceX has recently added new revenue streams in the form of compute leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, though, and will absorb the revenue from Cursor when that deal closes in the third quarter.

The Anthropic and Google deals are non-binding, but investors don’t seem to mind either way. Elon Musk’s space-and-AI company had added roughly $1 trillion to its valuation since going public on Friday.

I managed to buy a single vanity share last week, and snagged a few more when SPCX closed down for the first time on Wednesday. Don’t know if I’ll win, lose, or draw, but it’s exciting finally owning even a minuscule piece of the world’s most exciting company.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

DREW HOLDEN: A COVID Autopsy, Part 5: ‘Kids Will Be Resilient with Lost Education.’

But perhaps no legacy media coverage failure about COVID was worse than the threat the virus posed to kids, and what steps the government should take in response. Remember the fight over school closures?

Amid the push to reopen after 15 Days to Slow the Spread, and for months (and even years) thereafter, legacy media fought tooth-and-nail against efforts to allow students to return to in-person learning. As parents were trying to figure out how to ensure their children’s education could continue amid the pandemic, legacy media outlets were preaching panic at every turn.

Take the New York Times. As late as August 2020, the outlet was publishing headlines asking “As the Coronavirus Comes to School, a Tough Choice: When to Close” – a when, mind you, not an if, even five months after lockdowns started. It was a perspective, published as straight news, seemingly encased in amber of what the paper said back in March. Under a section titled “A growing consensus,” NYT alleged, the increase in school closures was “reflecting a growing consensus that the benefits of closings outweigh the harms, especially since many of the harms can be mitigated,” highlighted by the fact that “a transition to e-learning is possible.”

The paper went further. Despite a paragraph of disclaimers about expert concerns that “the effect of school closings is extremely difficult to predict because of unknowns like how infectious children are and because of the difficulty in separating out the effect of school closures from other measures that states took to control the virus” and that, at the time, “testing was especially limited and spotty, raising questions about how well the number of confirmed cases reflected actual infections,” the Times’ title of the piece (just in time for the debate on whether to cancel a second year of in-person school) was definitive: “School Closures in the Spring Saved Lives, Study Asserts.” And it wasn’t enough for the Times that public schools locked their doors – “If Public Schools Are Closed, Should Private Schools Have to Follow?”

But it wasn’t just the Times – the message that it was too dangerous to allow students to go to school was everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

SHOCK: Ringleader of Plot to Blow Up UFC 250 Fight Is ‘NOT a Citizen.’ “Announcing the arrest of five suspects in the foiled plot to attack the UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House on Sunday, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday that an Omaha man taken into custody was the mastermind behind the whole conspiracy. Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, of Omaha was arrested Sunday in a raid on an old church in the small town of Western, Neb. According to federal court records filed Tuesday, Alvarez is not a U.S. citizen.”

Omaha man.

Posted at 8:24 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE INEXPLICABLE SUICIDE OF HOLLYWOOD:

In late February of 2026, Netflix announced it was pulling out of its attempt to purchase Warner Brothers, paving the way for Paramount and David Ellison to merge the two century-old studios. David Zaslav spent four years as the most hated executive in Hollywood, acting as hatchet man at Warner Bros., priming and pruning the company for its eventual sale, so you’d think the consensus reaction would be positive, no matter whether Netflix or Paramount won the bidding war. That has not been the case. Ellison has been greeted by hostility and skepticism despite his pledge to produce at least 30 films per year for theaters (something Netflix would not have done). It would be logical for actors, writers, directors, and production staff to be happy to resume business as usual. It would be logical to believe that beggars can’t be choosers, and that replacing Zaslav, who was brought in specifically to cut debt, would be met with relief, but that wasn’t the case. The news triggered a backlash.

Former Hollywood Reporter editor Matt Belloni worried it would result in mass layoffs, only to be rebuffed by the fact that every major studio was already doing layoffs; a month later Disney laid off 1,000 employees. Elizabeth Warren announced she was going to fight the merger, and 4,000 Hollywood professionals signed a petition opposing it. Did they not get the memo? Hollywood is dying. Surely now is not the time to fight whoever is willing to invest money in more production, right? They’re willing to cut off their nose despite their heavily botoxed, nipped and tucked faces. Entertainment media rooted for Netflix because CEO Ted Sarandos was on their side. The idea of the largest global streamer absorbing a major theatrical studio and almost surely reducing the number of movies in theaters was a concern they were willing to overlook. As long as it was the company that paid the Obamas $65 million for their now departed partnership, they’re happy.

We’re now nearly halfway through 2026. The Paramount/Warner Bros. merger seems set to go through. The WGA leadership avoided another strike, making major concessions to extend the deal for four years. Bob Iger finally resigned as CEO of Disney with little fanfare. The heads of Disney Animation and Lucasfilm have been replaced. Unlike other domestic industries that have been killed by offshoring, importing, and international competition, there isn’t really an easy substitute for Hollywood productions. Even as the country has become more diverse than ever, and despite the best efforts from entertainment media and awards shows, foreign films do not perform well domestically. So, while the domestic auto industry can be decimated while Americans still buy cars, the fall of the domestic entertainment industry just leaves a gaping hole.

This could accelerate the decline:

Related:

Though to be fair, its local industry building a crappy product and eventually having their lunch eaten by overseas production isn’t the only reason Detroit collapsed:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

YES:

Posted at 8:21 am by Stephen Green

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Terrible Mercy of AI Killbots. “Let me cut to the chase and tell you right up front what happens when you remove the human from the AI killbot chain: You get dead enemy soldiers requiring zero human intervention. That was demonstrated in a real-world combat test we’ll discuss below. But the big issue is even bigger than battlefield Terminators, and it’s also the real subject of this week’s essay.”

Posted at 8:06 am by Stephen Green

ACTRESS AMANDA SEYFRIED PAINTS HERSELF THE VICTIM, CLAIMS SHE NEEDED A BODYGUARD AFTER ATTACKING CHARLIE KIRK:

In a classic move of a leftist turning the tables to paint themselves the victim after an attack against a conservative, actress Amanda Seyfried claims she had to get a bodyguard due to the backlash she received for bashing Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk after his assassination.

“A, I’m allowed to fucking voice my feelings, and B, do it in a way that’s not unkind necessarily,” Seyfried — who smeared Kirk as “hateful” on social media after his assassination — told GQ magazine in a recent interview.

“But there’s just an outsized fear and hatred and impulse to bash and to tear down. And I experienced a very small fraction of that,” the Mean Girls actress ironically added.

Seyfried went on to say, “I want my kids to be able to feel safe to voice their opinions as long as they’re not harmful. So I’m like, ‘What do I do? What do I say?’”

“And then all of a sudden I find myself with a fucking bodyguard at the airport and I’m like, ‘This is crazy,’” the Les Misérables star added.

As Breitbart News previously reported, Seyfried initially waved off Kirk’s assassination in a comment she made on an Instagram post on September 16, 2025 — six days after the conservative icon’s murder — dismissing the story because “He was hateful.”

That’s some serious projection by Seyfried:

Tweet continues:

“A, I’m allowed to f*cking voice my feelings, and B, do it in a way that’s not unkind necessarily. But there’s just an outsized fear and hatred and impulse to bash and to tear down. And I experienced a very small fraction of that. I want my kids to be able to feel safe to voice their opinions as long as they’re not harmful. So I’m like, ‘What do I do? What do I say?’ And then all of a sudden I find myself with a f*cking bodyguard at the airport and I’m like, ‘This is crazy.’” (British GQ)

Charlie experienced far more than “a very small fraction of that.”

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll