Keir Starmer Takes On Elon Musk

Via International News:

UK leader Keir Starmer accused US tech tycoon Elon Musk on Thursday of "trying to whip up division" in Britain following anger over the police handling of the murder of a white student by a Sikh man.

. . . Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has posted numerous times on the platform about the police response to the stabbing.

In one, he falsely asked whether people knew that "official police policy requires them to be racist against Whites?"

. . . Musk has offered to fund a private prosecution against the police over its handling of the murder and insulted the Hampshire Police force involved.

UK legacy media has generally portrayed public criticism of police polices, especially from Musk, as "far right". From The Guardian:

Musk is a regular poster of ethnonationalist content, and is a strong supporter of Restore Britain, the far-right party set up by Rupert Lowe, a former Reform UK MP.

. . . In recent weeks Musk has repeatedly argued that the case of Nowak, who was arrested by police as he lay dying from stab wounds inflicted by Vickrum Digwa, shows the UK is biased against white people.

In contrast, the line is that Starmer is calm, collected, and simply wants to fix what's wrong:

Starmer met Nowak’s family at Downing Street on Thursday to discuss a response to the actions of Hampshire police, who arrested the 18-year-old student as he lay dying from stab wounds after a false accusation of racist abuse by the killer.

He said after the meeting that he had been “profoundly humbled” and promised to take “whatever action is required to right the wrongs in this case”.

Of course he does. At the first link,

On Thursday, he said there were "difficult questions that need to be answered about the way the police handled Henry's murder".

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) watchdog is investigating.

An inquest into whether police contributed to Nowak's death will open in front of a jury in September 2027, officials announced Thursday.

The IOPC has already leaked to the Guardian that nobody did anything wrong, and an inquest over a year from now will firmly establish that, once the furor has died down. What's clearly going on is that Musk is simply applying US standards of police conduct to the UK, where they're very different. The US has had a long history of experiencing police misconduct on one hand and finding equitable ways of investigating and ameliorating the problem on the other, something the UK apparently has not.

I asked the AI oracle, "Musk has offered to fund a private prosecution against the police over its handling of the Nowak case. Can this be successfuly done under UK law?" It answered,

No, Elon Musk’s proposed private prosecution against the police over the handling of the Henry Nowak case is highly unlikely to succeed under UK law. While Section 6(1) of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 explicitly permits individuals to initiate private criminal prosecutions, the legal and systemic safeguards embedded in the English justice system make a successful outcome against the police in this scenario virtually impossible.

The absolute largest obstacle to any high-profile private prosecution is the sweeping intervention power of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Under UK law, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has the right to review any private prosecution at any stage.

If the CPS determines the private prosecution lacks sufficient evidential ground, is vexatious, or interferes with existing state investigations, they will legally take over the case and immediately shut it down. Because state watchdogs are already investigating the handling of the Nowak case, the CPS would almost certainly intervene to avoid a parallel, politically charged trial.

. . . Hampshire Constabulary has already issued a formal apology for the error. While an apology does not grant legal immunity, it signals a systemic failure and professional error rather than the malicious or intentionally criminal behavior typically required to secure an individual criminal conviction.

{I note yet again that AI made no attempt to seduce me, flatter me, or chat me up. Nor did it offer to draw me a picture of Kamala Harris in a bikini. It simply gave me a clear, straightforward, informative answer. I'll cover this in tomorrow's post.]

In other words, the police have already said, "Whoopsie! Our bad!" and that settles it, the fix is in. This is simply not how things would play out in the US, as race-related cases like George Floyd, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Rodney King make clear. It does seem relevant to draw such comparisons, as Musk is in a position to do. But via Reuters,

Starmer has said police had serious questions to answer about their handling of ​the incident, but condemned a violent and disorderly protest that took place on Tuesday night and said it was "unforgivable" to ​exploit the death to stir tension.

"Musk again has been interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division. That is not who we are in Britain," Starmer told reporters.

The problem for me as a US observer is that the US, 70 years ago, acknowledged that it had serious problems in policing and race relations and has made effective progress in dealing with them equitably. So far, it seems as though the UK hasn't even acknowledged the nature of the problem. Viewers of the highly popular US TV program On Patrol: Live recognize that US police departments employ African-Americans and other ethnicities widely and at all levels, and regardless of race, there's a dominant ethos of maintaining order and equitable justice.

In fact, officers of all ethnicities share the same gallows sense of humor about crime and criminals, whatever the ethnicity of the perps. This, definitely including the gallows humor, is a big reason the show is so popular. In fact, it's a testament to the actual work that police departments have done over the better part of a century to put things where they are in the US. Musk is asking, somewhat naively, why things can't be the same in the UK -- but the UK first has to acknowledge there's a problem.

It sounds like the UK has yet to take that first step. Even if they hired lots if Muslim officers, for instance, I have a feeling that all we'd see would be repetitions of the Nowak episode all over the country. A big part of the problem, as I pointed out yesterday, is that the UK doesn't have the same constitutional incentives to solve the problem, especially if the government has such broad authority to limit prosecutions.

You know what? Edmund Burke had it all wrong. The Jacobins at least had a point.

Let's Take A Closer Look At The UK's Current Constitutional Crisis

Right now, I think I may be the only person who thinks the UK is in a serious constitutional crisis, or at least the only person who's writing about it. In this post a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the basic problem of the UK's constitutional monarchy, in which the sovereign is theoretically "above politics", but the monarch nevertheless opens parliament with a "king's speech" written for him by the prime minister outlining the government's legislative agenda.

In that post, I noted the palace's extreme discomfort with any implication in the whole king's speech ritual that the king in any way supported the extremely unpopular Starmer government -- but there's only so much poor Charles can do to distance himself from His Majesty's Government. This is precisely the conundrum Thomas Jefferson, a really smart guy, exploited in the text of the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

. . . He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

All the way down to "Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us". Although George III had somewhat more executive authority than his 19th and 20th-century successors, he had no authority to create laws, which were passed, as they are now, by pariiament. Jefferson in the Declaration is attributing a great deal of parliamentary policy to the sovereign, which in the end is nevertheless correct -- the 1774 Coercive Acts", or the "Intolerable Acts", intended to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party, mentioned implicitly in Jefferson's list of grievances, were passed by parliament, not imposed by George III.

Nevertheless, Jefferson attributes every British action to the king, not parliament. The Declaration addresses the sovereign and declares, parliament or no, that he's no longer the sovereign; i e, the UK is no longer sovereign over the incipient US. This was the constitutional crisis of 1776, which has never quite gone away -- the UK itself is trying to deal with an unpopular government that can't be reined in by elections for several more years, but in the meantime, it's His Majesty's Government, no matter how uncomfortable that makes the palace.

But let's move to another part of the current constitutional crisis, exhibited by the Henry Nowak scandal. In yesterday's post, I outlined the stark differences in constitutional protection afforded to people in contact with law enforcement in the UK vis-a-vis the US. Any US police officers who behaved as the ones in Southampton did with Henry Nowak would simply have been suspended pending investigation and likely terminated, with serious questions raised about their training and who'd allowed them to stay on the force. There would almost certainly have been resignations higher up.

In the UK, a least so far, there's been only pro forma handwringing from the Hampshire police chief and Keir Starmer, with the chief refusing to resign. The agency charged with investigating the case is leaking that the officers did nothing wrong. I turned to he Chrome AI mode oracle and asked, "What are the principles of US policing in contrast to the UK?" It answered,

The primary principle of US policing is policing by law enforcement, which prioritizes legal authority, crime control, and reactive enforcement. This directly contrasts with the UK principle of policing by consent, which dictates that the police are "citizens in uniform" whose power derives from public approval rather than state coercion.

But doesn't the Henry Nowak case suggest that the UK police aren't acting with public approval? In fact, in the Southampton demonstration the following day, demonstrators threw bottles and such at a police line, with the result that a dozen or so officers chased down one demonstrator and held him to the ground, while several others repeatedly kicked him (video in yesterday's post). In the US, that demonstrator would have been taken down and handcuffed, but only with necesssary force, and there would have been no group kicking.

Officers involved in such a vignette in the US would almost certainly be fired and potentially face criminal charges. This sort of thing can start urban race riots; police are trained to avoid it. In the UK, it's apparently business as usual. Why is this?

Discussions of police history in both countries seem to trace police policy as something that began with modern police forces in the early 19th century as a response to growing urbanization -- but the US Bill of Rights, which forms the legal limits on police power, dates from 1787, roughly two generations before modern police departments began. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments are the parts of the Bill of Rights that limit police power in the US.I asked the oracle, "Does the UK have equivalent limits to the Bill of Rights on police power?" It answered,

Yes, the UK has equivalent protections, but they are enforced through parliamentary statutes and the Human Rights Act 1998 rather than a single written constitution. Because the UK operates under parliamentary sovereignty, these limits are built into ordinary laws that Parliament can change, unlike the rigidly protected US Bill of Rights.

But clearly, as Nigel Farage pointed out in a link in yeaterday's post, there's "a growing perception that Britain now operates according to a two-tier culture, where some groups receive greater protection than others." In other words, political expediency overrides natural rights, and Keir Starmer's response is to gaslight everyone by claiming that just isn't the case. The fact is that US police policy has been formed by centuries of case law and court opinions based on the Bill of Rights, while the UK has no equivalent tradition of safeguards.

On one hand, the US advantage is that for nearly 250 years, the US has had a written constitution, not just a bien pensant assumption that everyone has good basic intentions. But there's a second problem: Even if the UK suddenly recognized that it actually needs clear limits of authority and a specific enumeration of natural rights in a written constitution -- a lot like, say, the US version -- it would lack the nearly 250 year body of case law that's built up from it.

And in fact, if the UK were to begin to think about a written constitution, it would have to face the problem of how the sovereign can be above politics, but in giving a king's speech at the opening of parliament, he endorses the legislative program of the prime minister, which boils down to the same basic problem Jefferson recognized: if you object to the prime minister's legislative program, you object to the sovereign. Right now, Labour is the king's party, whether the king likes it or not.

The only real solution, as far as I can see, is to cut the Gordian Knot and make the UK the 52nd state. Otherwise, the UK will simply dissolve into a bigger and bigger muddle.

The UK Henry Nowak Scandal, The Sloppy Reporting, And The Real Issues

For those who haven't been following the story, here are the basics of the Henry Nowak murder case, from Wikipedia:

On 3 December 2025, Henry Nowak, an 18‑year‑old British university student, was murdered by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old British Sikh man, in Southampton, England. Digwa stabbed Nowak five times with a Sikh dagger [but see below], including a fatal wound to the chest. When police officers from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of assault. Police body camera shows that Nowak repeatedly told the officers that he had been stabbed and pleaded that "I can't breathe," as the police handcuffed him. Nowak died shortly after being handcuffed.

There's been a great deal of sloppy reporting on both sides of the pond, especially regarding the knife Digwa used, which is shown in the police photo above. Even the Wall Street Journal gets this wrong:

This week, Digwa was sentenced to life in prison for murdering Nowak with a knife he carried as part of his Sikh faith. . .

Elsewhere, this knife is described as a kirpan. According to Wikipedia,

The kirpan . . . is a blade that Khalsa Sikhs are required to wear as part of their religious uniform, as prescribed by the Sikh Code of Conduct. Traditionally, the kirpan was a full-sized talwar at around 76 cm long (30 in); however, British colonial policies and laws introduced in the 19th century reduced the length of the blade, and in the modern day, the kirpan is typically a dagger between 12 and 30 cm long (5–12 in). According to the Sikh Code of Conduct, "The length of the sword to be worn is not prescribed", but must be curved and single edged (as its original sword form was), and worn over the right shoulder and across the body.

So an actual kirpan, unlike the knife in the police photo above, is shorter, single-edged, and curved:

Acccording to the BBC,

The Sikh Federation said the blade used by Digwa was not a religious knife, known as a kirpan.

It has condemned the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for not making this clear during the trial, telling the BBC the community has been "demonised".

The CPS said that Digwa chose to carry two ceremonial knives and that the judge's finding of fact made clear that he agreed with its assessment that this was a kirpan that Digwa chose to use.

According to The Telegraph (behind a paywall), Digwa wasn't a very good Sikh. He had already been banned from his temple for stealing £1,000 worth of kirpans from the temple in 2023. According to the BBC,

Following Thursday's verdict, the UK Sikh Federation said in a statement: "Fully practising Sikhs who wear a Kirpan should continue to recognise the serious responsibility that accompanies it, together with the limited legal protection that exists for wearing it for genuine religious purposes."

The federation said it believed the large blade used by Digwa "was not the normal Kirpan worn by fully practising Sikhs".

"That's what we wanted to clarify - that actually the perpetrator used an item which can only be called an offensive weapon," it added.

I've got to say I'm on the Sikhs' side here. Good Sikhs are good citizens; there's a Sikh temple only a few blocks from us, and it's part of the community. This guy was definitely not a good Sikh; this is an issue entirely of UK immigration, social, and law enforcement policy, not the Sikh religion. Nigel Farage lays it out clearly:

That barbarous act was bad enough. But what compounded the horror, and shocked so many of us to the core, was the behaviour of the police officers who subsequently arrived on the scene.

Because that help, when it came, was not what young Henry expected.

Far from assisting the dying teenager, the police’s focus from beginning to end was on the allegation made by the assailant’s brother that they had been “attacked and racially abused by a white guy”. In other words, an accusation of a racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder.

Henry was handcuffed as he lay bleeding. He died on the pavement. The last words he heard on this earth were not ones of comfort or calming reassurance, but of those police officers coldly reading him his rights. Those images are impossible to watch without feeling a profound sense of anger.

While the incident had to be reported to the Independent Office of Police Conduct, and the local agency did this the day after the murder, the IOPC statement is hardly reassuring:

“Our thoughts and sympathies remain with everyone affected by Henry Nowak’s tragic death.

"Our independent investigation into the contact Hampshire and Isle of Wight officers had with Mr Nowak immediately prior to his death on 4 December, including the use of handcuffs by officers and the first aid provided, remains ongoing.

“Our investigation began following a mandatory referral from the force, which we received the same day.

“We acknowledge that this case has raised questions about the actions of the attending officers and we are aware that a few minutes of police body worn footage has been issued by the force following the conclusion of criminal proceedings.

“As part of our ongoing investigation we are reviewing a large amount of police body worn footage, which we need to consider in context with other evidence we have obtained, including reviewing material presented during the murder trial, as we establish the full circumstances. . ."

In other words, this will be slow-walked until the furor dies down and they can whitewash the whole episode. According to the UK Guardian,

The Guardian understands the IOPC has found no indication of any disciplinary or criminal offence by the officers involved after six months of inquiries, after it was referred to the watchdog in December. Hampshire police said of four officers involved, three remained on full duties and one has resigned.

But the officers handcuffed the dying victim but never handcuffed the perp at all. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What would be policy in the US for officers, as in the Nowak case, handcuffing the victim while never handcuffing Digwa?" It answered,

If American law enforcement officers responded to a scene like the Henry Nowak case—where a severely injured person was handcuffed while the actual attacker (Vickrum Digwa) was left unrestrained due to a deceptive narrative—the officers’ actions would face severe scrutiny under several major U.S. policing policies and legal standards.

. . . When an individual states they cannot breathe or have been stabbed, U.S. officers are legally and contractually required to assess the medical emergency immediately. Handcuffing a prone, heavily bleeding victim worsens positional asphyxia and delays trauma care.

Dismissing statements like "I've been stabbed" or "I can't breathe" to prioritize an arrest for a misdemeanor assault allegation violates standard First Aid/First Responder protocols taught in American police academies.

. . . Handcuffing a person who is slipping out of consciousness, unable to stand, and drowning in their own blood fails the "objectively reasonable" test. The physical state of the individual proves they pose zero immediate threat and are incapable of resisting.

. . . Leaving Digwa completely unrestrained while he is close to a critically injured person violates basic officer safety and scene control protocols. Even if officers initially believed Digwa's claim of being a victim, standard U.S. procedure dictates frisking or securing both individuals temporarily to search for weapons if a violent altercation was openly admitted.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, if U.S. officers take a person into custody (by handcuffing them), they assume a legal duty of care for that person’s safety and well-being.

In the U.S., acting with such severe negligence would strip officers of qualified immunity, exposing them and their municipality to catastrophic civil rights lawsuits under 42 U.S. Code § 1983.

Had this specific tragedy occurred under U.S. jurisdiction, standard accountability protocols would immediately trigger:

1. An Internal Affairs (IA) or independent state-level investigation for a critical use-of-force/in-custody death.

2. Immediate termination of the officers for violating the department's mandatory Duty to Intervene and Medical Aid policies.

3. A presentation of the case to a grand jury by local or federal prosecutors for potential charges of reckless endangerment or manslaughter.

So far, reporting, especially on the US side, hasn't taken any note of the stark differences between what's apparently expected of UK police and US police, nor the extent to which US Constitutional guarantees would prevent a Nowak-equivalent situation from occurring, or if it did, how quickly severe penalties would accrue both to the officers and later, via the civil system, to the agencies involved.

One of the four officers involved was allowed to resign in the immediate wake of Nowak's death, and this has only sharpened suspicion about how the case is being handled:

Henry’s father Mark Nowak, speaking after Digwa was sentenced on Monday, said that officers involved in the case are still on duty, and one was allowed to resign before they had given a full account to the IOPC.

He said: “We believe the officers involved remain on duty although we understand some may since have resigned. One was allowed to leave the force before she had given an account to the Independent Office of Police Conduct of what happened that evening.”

It is understood that the officer who resigned in January was not one of the two who arrived first at the scene. They provided an initial account to the IOPC but have not given a more detailed statement. The other officers involved have all given full accounts.

Comparing the treatment of his son with that of his killer, Mr Nowak told journalists: “His murderer, however, was afforded decency. He was believed. He was not handcuffed when arrested. He was not handcuffed when transported to the police station. As far as we understand, he was never handcuffed at all.

There have been protests in Southampton:

A large group of more than 1,000 protesters marched through Southampton's city centre towards the scene of the crime on Tuesday, local time, and attacked police blocking the road with stones, bottles and bins.

Some members of the rally who gathered outside the city's main police station were heard chanting "two-tier scum" and "shame on you!" while waving British Union Jack and England flags, AFP reported.

. . . Protesters, some wearing masks, then marched to the residential area where the crime took place and attacked a line of police wearing helmets and carrying riot shields, chanting "scum".

American tech tycoon Elon Musk has posted on X an offer to fund a private prosecution against the police over their handling of the murder.

The police response was unhelpful:

British police officers kicks a Henry Nowak protester as he’s pinned down on the ground by several other officers pic.twitter.com/TjaaLauPZQ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 2, 2026

Nigel Farage continues at the link:

For many people, this case reinforces a growing perception that Britain now operates according to a two-tier culture, where some groups receive greater protection than others. Make no mistake, this is not a perception that emerged overnight. It is the product of decades of political choices.

. . . The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson recently revealed an email from an experienced Hampshire police officer. According to his account, officers are encouraged to respond differently depending on the ethnic backgrounds of those involved. The same officer described a culture in which promotion was influenced by diversity targets rather than merit alone.

If such claims are true, they should concern every citizen, regardless of political persuasion.

Policing depends on public confidence. The public must believe that officers enforce the law fairly and without fear or favour. The moment people begin to suspect that race, religion or background affect how they are treated, trust begins to erode.

Later, Farage went farther:

Appearing via a live stream from a location with fields in the background, Nigel Farage paid tribute to the “extraordinarily dignified” response of the Nowak family, before wading in with remarks of his own.

“I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage,” Farage said.

He went on to link the case of Nowak – handcuffed by police after being fatally stabbed by a Sikh man who claimed the student had racially abused him – to “anti-white prejudice” and call for the “promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives”.

My own takeaway from this case is that the comfortable platitudes we hear about similar US and UK cultural and legal traditions are simply false. The unwritten UK "constitution" provides nothing like the protections US citizens receive just in the daily course of contact with law enforcement. I'm more and more inclined to agree with Farage that "pure cold rage" is called for, except it seems like we took care of that ourselves in 1776.

So far, though, nobody seems to be noticing the enormous differences between the US and UK constitutional and political systems and the poor treatment they afford to ordinary UK citizens.

Epstein's Trump Connections Were A Nothingburger -- Bill Gates Is Something Else

Every time a rich guy messes up his PR, I keep going back to Ivy Lee (1877-1934), the inventor of the field, who said, "Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway." He's credited with rehabilitating the Rockefeller family's reputation after thr publication of the muckraking History of the Standard Oil Company and the 1913-14 Colorado miners' strike, which culmnated in the Ludlow Massacre. (I've always thought Ida Tarbell's characterization of Rockefeller Sr is second only to Milton's Satan in Pardise Lost.)

But to the Rockefellers' credit, Lee had to have something to work with. If they followed his advice and told the truth, after all, there had to be something good to tell the truth about. Sonehow, even if Ivy Lee were still around, Bill Gates wouldn't have been such a successful client. A Wall Street Journal piece reports Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.

Bill Gates’s employees have spent years carefully cultivating his image—down to keeping a custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for different days of the week.

A styling group stores troves of neutral tone crew and V-neck sweaters, button-down shirts, slacks and extra pairs of the Silver Lining Opticians “Carbon” glasses at an off-site building, current and former employees said. Once options are selected for public-facing engagements, employees usually send three options for approval by senior staff. The goal: to depict someone calm and approachable, like Mister Rogers.

But even if you're rich, your staff can do only so much. In the 1990s, he visited a tech company I worked for, and although his button-down collar was buttoned, one one side, his tie came down outside the button. His personal life overall seems to have been something like that -- maybe it still is:

His carefully crafted image has been shattered as more details of Gates’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein have spilled into public view, challenging prior efforts by the 70-year-old to downplay his relationship with the sex offender. In a February town hall with foundation employees, Gates owned up to two affairs with Russian women referenced in Epstein’s emails.

Some people familiar with the matter said they heard about his admission to staff with disbelief: In his divorce proceedings, allegations related to more than 20 affairs had come up.

His relationships with employees at both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation appear to have been complex and incestuous:

Now, several women have reported that Gates engaged in inappropriate sexual misconduct or sexual advances over the past few decades while he was married. He allegedly made sexual advances and pursued sexual relations with women who worked for him at Microsoft and at his philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Specifically, in 2019, Microsoft’s board of director, on which Gates sat at the time, opened an investigation into one of the claims after it received notice that Gates had pursued an “intimate relationship” with an employee back in 2000.

Gates was also accused of having a multi-year romantic relationship with one of the company’s female engineers. After the allegations, Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board, but continues to serve as a technology adviser at the company. His spokespeople say that this decision did not relate to the alleged affair.

Melanie Walker, an Epstein protegee whom he initially recruited by claiming he could get her work as a lingerie model for Victoria's Secret, later served both as his "science adviser" and a date for then-Prince Andrew, and still later worked for the Gates Foundation and served as a back-channel interface between Gates and Epstein. At the same time, she began a relationship with Steven Sinofsky, who had become a technical assistant to Gates. She later moved in with him, continuing a close connection between the Epstein and Gates worlds. The WSJ continues,

Justice Department files show that Gates met with Epstein multiple times despite concerns from his then-wife, that Epstein knew about some of Gates’s extramarital relationships and that two of Gates’s close advisers had exchanged hundreds of messages with Epstein for years up until 2019, the year he died. [One of these two was Melanie Walker, Sinofsky's live-in.]

Fallout from the revelations about Gates’s behavior is now eroding efforts to protect his reputation. Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was recently snubbed from the company’s annual CEO summit and from the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which he has attended for years.

Allegations of sexual misconduct continue to bubble up in connection with his business activities:

In early March, a House committee investigating the Epstein case sent letters to Gates and other high-profile Epstein associates seeking their testimony. The next week, Gates’s nuclear power company TerraPower was engaging in its own form of reputational damage control.

On March 9, TerraPower gave employees three days’ notice of a virtual all-hands meeting, without saying why, according to an internal document. Usually the company gives staff weeks’ notice.

During the meeting, CEO Chris Levesque reiterated Gates’s talking points. Levesque told employees to expect to hear more about Gates’s ties to Epstein in the coming months given the upcoming congressional questioning. He acknowledged receiving employee concerns through an anonymous program, managers and human resources on the matter, which he described as “troubling.” He also told staff that he had talked to Gates’s private office and “it is clear it doesn’t involve TerraPower.”

“There’s no connection to any TerraPower activities, even the two affairs that Bill had to share with the broader public, and his regrets on those, had nothing to do with TerraPower,” according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by the Journal. He encouraged employees to stay “mission-focused.”

Several current and former employees found that confusing—and privately talked to each other about how it wasn’t true. One of the women Gates had referred to having had an affair with—a “Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities,” he had said in his foundation town hall—was closely tied to TerraPower.

She worked at TerraPower from 2010 to 2012, according to her LinkedIn page, and her name was even in TerraPower’s internal system. She had been featured in a 2011 magazine article about her TerraPower work, including a photo shoot with Gates and TerraPower Vice Chair Nathan Myhrvold, a longtime Gates confidant.

What's beginning to come out is that Bill Gates doesn't seem ever to have been able to keep his trousers zipped, which his position as a person of wealth and influence facilitated -- but he also doesn't seem to have been able to keep that part of his life separate from his position of wealth and influence. Whatever Trump may or may not have done, he seems to have been much more successful at keeping things separate. This is going to come back and bite Gates, whOse judgment seems to be so poor that legions of staff can't protect him from it.

At The Very Minimum, Spencer Pratt Has Become A National Figure

The latest polls are an illuminating vignette. There were a few polls in March that had incumbent Kasren Bass at abouit 25%, Mamdani clone Nithya Raman at between 9% and 17%, and Spencer Pratt trailing in the low double digits. There were no polls in April. All of a sudden, the pollsters got interested, and there were four polls in May; the big change is Pratt. Three of the polls put him at 22%, while one, McLaughlin, puts him at 30%, leading Bass by one point. All four put Bass in the mid-to-high 20s, while most have Pratt leading Raman, who is between 19% and 20%.

The big difference between March and May is Pratt's momentum. The hurdle he has to overcome in the primary tomorrow is that he must finish in the top two and keep Bass from getting over 50%, in which case she would be elected mayor withut going to the November general election. This is his only possible strategy, since he himself doesn't have any serious chance of making 51% himself, at least as of now. But he's doubled his March numbers and put the race into a margin-of-error tie. Polymarket betting odds right now give an 84% chance that Pratt and Bass advance to a runoff.

So far, Pratt has been able to define the big issue in the race, which is homeless encampments. Raman and Bass are seen as either tacitly favoring the homeless outright, or supporting them de facto due to their weaponized incompetence. This seems to have done the most damage to Raman, whose numbers have improved since March, but not as much as Pratt's. Raman was trolled by constituents independently of the Pratt campaign for her inaction:

Socialist LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is getting hammered online after appearing visibly rattled by a staged homeless encampment protest outside her own home.

“I’m glad my kids didn’t have to see that,” Raman told comedian [sic] Adam Conover on his podcast released Wednesday before adding, “I thought this campaign was going to be about bike lanes and transportation.”

Raman was referring to a staged Memorial Day protest outside Raman’s Silver Lake-area home.

Footage from the stunt shows homeless people climbing out of tents, staging an open-air barbecue and one individual walking around carrying a bucket as neighbors recorded the scene.

The podcast was quickly shared on online with comment exploding because Raman has spent years defending homeless encampments near schools, parks and neighborhoods across Los Angeles while opposing tougher enforcement restrictions.

Critics immediately accused the Democratic Socialist councilmember of showing a stunning lack of self-awareness as families across Los Angeles continue dealing with encampments outside homes, playgrounds and schools.

Yup, she was going to campaign on bike lanes and transportation. Pratt singlehandedly changed the issues in the campaign with the innovative ads he's run since March. Media has begun to find him an appealing figure; as the YouTube embedded above shows, he was on Gutfeld Friday night bantering about Jill Biden and Joe's debate performance. Bill Maher has given him a not-quite endorsement:

CNN's Harry Enten says Pratt has a shot at winning, and Mark Halperin, who's been a Pratt fan all along, agrees:

Peachy Keenan at The Spectator says, Get ready for a Spencer Pratt Summer: He can win. Mark Halperin's more recent take is at best outside the box:

Guys, I have a new theory of the race . . . we looked at the poll yesterday [May 30] that showed the three candidates all bunched up. . . . Here's my new prediction: Bass is not gonna make the runoff. And if it's Spencer Pratt against a socialist, he's gonna win.

His interlocutor replies,

But you remember, it's ironic this is happening in LA. You remember the Bradley effect? Remember about Mayor Tom Bradley?

Actually, his own memory is fuzzy. Tom Bradley was LA's first African-American mayor, in office from 1973 to 1993. He never lost a mayoral election, However, according to Wikipedia,

Bradley ran to be the first black Governor of any state since Reconstruction in 1982 and 1986 but was defeated both times by Republican candidate George Deukmejian. Bradley's narrow and unexpected 1982 loss was at odds with the polls and was attributed to the racist vote, giving rise to the political term "the Bradley effect".

Again, according to Wikipedia,

The Bradley effect, less commonly known as the Wilder effect, is a theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections where a white and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some white voters who intend to vote for the white candidate will nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to California attorney general George Deukmejian, an Armenian-American, despite Bradley's being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.

It might also be called the "truth-teller effect" if it applies to Donald Trump or, potentially, to Spencer Pratt. Trump won the 2016 presidential election in spite of the polls and also outperformed the polls in 2024 because he ran on uncomfortable truths regarding DEI and immigration. People are less likely to tell pollsters they support the "truthteller's" position on the uncomfortable truths.

I don't think Mark Halperin's prediction will turn out, but I do go along with Polymarket's prediction that the two top candidates in tomorrow's election will turn out to be Bass and Pratt. But if it turns out to be Pratt and Raman, Pratt's strategy will be the same: he'll campaign against drugs, homeless encampments, and his opponent's open or tacit support of both.

What Pratt has going for him is that he's natural and sincere in front of the camera, he has a quick wit, and he's telegenic, which got him on Gutfeld. His momentum since February has come from the combination of these qualities with the truthtelling on issues. It doesn't hurt at all that some very talented people have donated extremely effective ads to his campaign, and this is likely to continue. His performance in then one debatge before the primary suggests he'll do well if there's another, but Bass did so poorly in that same debate that she may try to avoid another.

But what if he's elected? Remember that only one City Council member, Traci Park, is aligned with Pratt's program; many of the other 14 are likely to oppose him bitterly. Pratt will need to use the attractive persona he's built to rally the public directly to have much chance in implementing his program.

But the past few weeks have begun to bring me around to the view that he at least has a chance of winning -- even if he loses, he's established himself as a national figure. What might he do then?

UPDATE: Bill Maher, "Just keep doin' what you're doin'."

💥NEW: Bill Maher to Spencer Pratt👏

“You had me at hello … You have the exact right impatience with this sh*t. It’s very authentic … It’s good. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” pic.twitter.com/CHo5oxK3rx

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) June 1, 2026

A Glimpse Into The Disney Brain

The failure of Disney's latest Star Wars chapter, The Mandalorian and Grogu, has been a big story for weeks. For instance,

The last time a Star Wars movie under Disney ownership registered a low opening, it was 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story with an $84M 3-day, $103M 4-day and $153M WW (in like for likes). We bashed that result. The ambitious Star Wars expansion pic’s ticket sales were impacted by behind-the-scenes drama, in addition to the fact that Alden Ehrenreich was no Harrison Ford.

Now, Disney’s latest Lucasfilm title, this weekend’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is opening lower with $81M 3-day and 4-day $98M U.S., lower than Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s domestic start. Global is at $167M WW with $69M from 51 offshore territories. The movie was made under the previous Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, but it’s executive produced and co-written by Dave Filoni, who is the new co-Lucasfilm Head.

Even worse, just this past week,

The Mandalorian and Grogu has been toppled from the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office... by an R-rated indie horror film with a budget of less than $1 million.

Curry Barker's Obsession has proven to be a huge hit with cinemagoers since it hit theatres on May 15, and as it heads into its third weekend of release, the movie has reclaimed the No. 1 position from the first Star Wars feature since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.

This isn't good news for Disney, and especially not good news for its new CEO, Josh D'Amaro, who's only a few months into that job. He recently felt the need to defend the film, but oddly, the only reference i've been able to find is in the YouTube video embedded above -- I've searched in vain for online text, and as a result, I've had to transcribe the words of the statement from what Mike Zeroh quotes in the video:

From our pespective, examining and analyzing this massive property like Star Wars, I thik it's very fair to say that there's this obsession with one side of the fan base that are politically motivated to financially halt the success of a prioperty as big as Star Wars. And so, when youi look at The Mandalorian and Grogu, I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of those in this fandom that they're afraid of change and afraid of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As CEO, it is my abdolute responsibility to make sure that we keep DEI at the forefront, and we are doing this with many of our upcoming projects.

But looking at the critics who suddenly changed their tune, and we are talking actual critics, I think the problem with this administration is that they have actually influenced the media in a very different way, and we are talking actual critics. I think the problem with this is that we are witnessing a cultural shift, and not for the better, where critics are afraid to express themselves. It just seems to me that the media right now is suppressed, and that goes for all journalists out there, even when it comes down to those reviewing major motion pictures, and we saw that impact our latest Star Wars film release.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is our greatest Star Wars film yet, and I could even go as far as to say that we did a better job than some of our previous films under Bob Iger. So our goal is to perhaps focus on smaller scale and less financially buerdened Star Wars films.

Except that Mike Zeroh in his own commentary simply sums up the critics' consensus, that the film already comes off as a low-budget attempt to turn out episodes from a TV series, not theatrical cinema, which Star Wars always was until Disney got hold of it. He goes on to quote D'Amaro later in the statement,

. . . this administration, without a doubt, has damaged our industry and damaged the media. It's something that we have to find a way to recover from. Journalists in the media need to actually gain back the courage to speak freely about a film when they really like something. And again, we have no plans on stopping our goals with DEI and just how important diversity and inclusion really is for our industry and for our movies and our properties here at the Disney company.

Zeroh goes on to say that in fact, there's very little DEI in The Mandalorian and Grogu, the problem is that it's dull and predictable. But DEI has been part of Josh D'Amaro's brand at Disney; in 2021, as head of Disney's parks, he liberalized dress and appearance standards for cast members at the parks:

For all the little boys who wanted to be princesses and the girls who wanted to be heroes and everyone in between, Disney is “A Place Where Everyone is Welcome” — at least it’s trying to be.

Ahead of their theme parks’ planned reopening, Disney announced a new addition to “The Four Keys,” the casts’ long standing tradition of honoring safety, courtesy, show and efficiency: inclusion. As part of their renewed efforts, cast members will be allowed “greater flexibility with respect to forms of personal expression,” including gender-inclusive hairstyles, jewelry, nail styles, costume choices and even tattoos.

“There’s more to do, but we’re committed to listening, learning and making meaningful improvements. The world is changing, and we will change with it, and continue to be a source of joy and inspiration for all the world,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, in a blog post.

Buit this wasn't D'Amaro's only innovation. At the same time, the parks imcreased prices to favor an upscale market:

Disney’s price strategy now positions them as a premium priced product. The company realizes many families simply cannot afford the price of admission. And, they accept this fact. On the other hand, plenty of people happily pay for the Magic Kingdom experience. They know their ideal client.

Their customers, known as guests, expect a memorable experience. Although their prices steadily rise, customers continue to walk through their gates.

Disney’s often the price leader. They raise their admission prices. Then all the other local theme parks follow their lead.

Currently adult tickets on peak days max out at $149. Those rates aren’t scaring their customers away. Since 2015, Disney’s revenue increased by $4.1 billion. I’m sure the stock holders are very happy.

The problem for Disney at this point is that the world is continuing to change. D'Amaro clearly blames criticism of the Disney product on the Trump administration. but Trump was voted in by the American electorate, in part because they didn't want drag shows at Army bases. D'Amaro represents a world view that's fading into the rear view mirror, but he insists that what Hollywood needs to do is force the culture back into the Obama-Biden years, while the culture clearly wants to move on.

So at this point, the Disney business plan appears to be to shut the public up and convince them instead just to pay more and more for a debased product. We'll see soon enough how that works out, but that was never Walt Disney's idea of how to make money.

Elon Musk OnThe Value Of College Education

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial.

Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”

For a thousand years,… pic.twitter.com/F5FS6lzlts

— Shadow Intel (@TheShadowIntelX) May 22, 2026

Toward the end of my time as a graduate assistant -- more than 50 years ago, in fact -- the whole purpose of a four-year degree began to clear up for me. Those of us who were teaching freshman comp were acutely aware of how many of the papers we got were plagiarized, and it must have been not too far from 100%. The students were going through the motions of submitting them, we were going through the motions of grading them, and everyone expected an A.

I finally got so fed up that I found an obvious case, and I started the formal process of bringing the student up on honors-code violations. This caused a major problem, such that my faculty adviser got involved. (He was actually schtupping my graduate-assistant girlfriend as well, but that's a whole separate matter.) He got all sanctimonious and insisted that "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" was the standard. I really couldn't go against him, except that I had the text the student had cribbed right in front of me, but he claimed that wasn't enough.

Actually, the standard of proof almost universally used in academic environments is "more likely than not", as explained in this University of Alberta policy:

Unlike the criminal system which must meet a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, . . . the Code is based in Administrative Law, which lowers the requirement for proof. . . . Balance of probabilities is the “more likely (or probable) than not” standard. In other words, if the available evidence convinces the Dean to the point that he or she is 50% + 1 certain that a student has committed an offence, the standard of proof has been met.

But clearly any argument I made in that direction wasn't going to get anywhere. The problem was that I was going against the whole reason for college: an easay I linked in a post here not long ago puts it one way:

As the economist Bryan Caplan has observed, “The main function of education is not to teach useful skills (or even useless skills), but to certify students’ employability. By and large, the reason our customers are on campus is to credibly show, or ‘signal,’ their intelligence, work ethic, and sheer conformity.” As long as college remains a way for upwardly mobile kids to stand out from one another, and as long as employers believe that a better college degree is a sign of a better potential worker, the American university system should survive, even if teaching methods change.

Or more succinctly, the point of a degree is to qualify students for a certain level of white-collar job, but, contra the typical university mission statment, preparing students for responsible citizenship by fostering critical thinking, or something like that, is not what's on offer, those are just words. The point is to go through motions that more or less suggest something like that has taken place, when everyone pretty much recognizes it hasn't. The tweet above variously quotes and paraphrases Elon Musk:

Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.”

That is the product. Not intelligence. Not creativity. Not vision. Compliance.

You are paying $200,000 to prove you can tolerate bureaucracy on a schedule.

Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.”

The entire system is a sorting machine for corporate HR. It does not measure what you can build. It measures whether you can sit still, follow directions, and deliver on command.

A number of the commenters to the tweet got quite hot under the collar:

I would prefer a surgeon with some institutional training, and a pilot and maybe a lawyer.

But surgeons and lawyers go to med school and law school for that training. A four-year degree has little to do with it. Even a pilot can't get hired with just a degree from Princeton or whatever; they have to have flown for the military or been to flight school. And for that matter, why do even med schools like Yale do DEI? That implies that even prestige professional degrees can be gamed.

And the four-year certificate of compliance quite frequently can be satisfied with everyone going through the motions. The English Department knows it's a popular major in some measure because the students recognize it won't just let them by if they plagiarize, it'll give then As. Why else would their parents pay $200,000?

Not only that, but the English Department is fully aware that if it became routine for instructors to bring students up on honors code violations, enrollment in its courses would quickly fall to something approaching zero, from which it would follow that faculty positions in the department would also quickly fall to something approaching zero.

That was the year it began to dawn on me that an academic career wasn't going to work out for me; no matter what I did, I'd just be going through the motions, and in fact, if I had a PhD on my resume, I'd be less employable in the real world than if I didn't have one. A real education might have made that clear to me much faster than the one I got.

Looking back, I recognize that what I should have done was try to find out how many plagiarism cases had ever gone through the system. It probably would have been something in single digits, notwithstanding everyone who taught freshman comp was fully aware that a huge proportion of freshman essays was cribbed. Actually, I wonder if any university has ever made a serious study of the size of the plagiarism problem and why it exists. I think that would raise too many basic questions about the system.