What On Earth Did Spielberg Have In Mind?

The more I read or see reviews of Disclosure Day, the more I wonder if Steven Spielberg's head is stuck somewhere in the 1970s, or maybe his private fantasy of the 1970s. This review has two insightful points; first:

Disclosure Day is a movie that is hanging on to the value of legacy media, with the overarching journey trying to get the stolen footage on network television. There’s an archaic quaintness to this, and it’s a willful one, as O’Connor’s whistleblower seems heavily inspired by Wikileaks, so Spielberg and Koepp know the internet exists. The reason for the focus on network television may be entirely functional - the movie needs a ticking clock. It has two - Wardex chasing our heroes as they try to release the footage and WWIII brewing in the background as North Korea starts acting up significantly.

In other words, we're back to Woodward, Bernstein, and "Deep Throat", using the white hats at the Washington Post to catch the Nixon administration bad guys, pure 1974. Never mind the Post, with the whole legacy media establishment, has seriously declined, we're expected to suspend disbelief and root for the whistleblower hero. The review's second point is this:

Hewson’s Jane, the innocent bystander caught up in the chase, talks to Josh O’Connor about the possible deleterious impacts of letting everybody know ET is real. Her argument is that it will cause a breakdown in the social order because of religion, but the movie never examines what this means. . . . This is one of the aspects of UFO theorizing that has always baffled me. The Catholic Church has been okay with the idea of aliens for a long time, and Pope John Paul II once replied to the question about whether there is life on other planets with the statement “Always remember: they are children of God as we are.” . . . I really feel like the popularity of science fiction over the past 70 years means that most folks would accept aliens as simply technologically advanced beings also created by God. The problem would be with Evangelicals, who invented the idea of the Bible being infallible, and thus have very strict ideas about what should and should not exist in the universe. But those folks today are saying UFOs are demons, which indicates to me not that the existence of aliens would create a religious crisis for them but rather act as a proof of faith.

Again, media people don't seem actually to know much about Christianity. Cdl McElroy just revoked the license of a Catholic exorcist who said UFOs are demons, and Vice President Vance, a Catholic, believes UFOs are demons, too. It's not just Evangelicals, and of course infallibility and inerrancy are difficult terms.

The concepts of infallibility and inerrancy are related but distinct. Infallibility refers to the Bible’s inability to fail in matters of faith and practice, while inerrancy denotes freedom from all errors, including historical or scientific details. Some denominations allow for minor errors in non-essential historical or scientific details under infallibility, whereas inerrancy traditionally holds that all original manuscript content is fully true.

The reviewer concludes,

There was nothing I wanted more than to love this movie. The religious element intrigued me, and Spielberg doing aliens again seemed so promising. . . . knowing that Spielberg is a True Believer I was hoping for something deeper and more interesting when it came to the space brothers. But there isn’t; Spielberg doesn’t break an inch of new ground here, and there’s not a UFO moment or idea in this movie that hasn’t been explored better in The X-Files thirty years ago. It’s very disappointing.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Spielberg is drinking his own Kool-Aid. Last week, I noted that Spielberg was expecting the film to make Christians question their faith as it made the entirely hypothetical proposal that space aliens are real. Why did he expect this?

I think he expected it because he knew he had a real turkey on his hands, but he was counting on the likes of Franklin Graham to denounce the film from the pulpit, which would spark interest. The review embedded above begins, "The runup to the movie's release has featured claims that it's anti-Christian, that it's designed to make people question their beliefs as they leave the theaters." Instead,

“Disclosure Day,” a sci-fi adventure from Steven Spielberg, opened to No. 1 at the domestic box office with $44 million from 3,824 theaters.

Those ticket sales were above estimates of $35 million, though below the $50 million that rival studios argue a film of this scale should earn in its debut to justify its price tag. “Disclosure Day,” one of the summer’s biggest gambles, cost $115 million to produce and $80 million to market. Since theaters keep about half of revenues, “Disclosure Day” needs to earn about $300 million globally to be profitable.

. . . Meanwhile, “Obsession” continues to do unprecedented business with $19 million in its fifth weekend of release, a 25% decline, and enough for second place on box office charts. . . . Now the low-budget “Obsession” has generated $188.3 million in North America and $265 million globally.

“Backrooms,” another horror sensation, captured the No. 4 spot with $12 million from 3,404 venues in its third weekend. The film, from another YouTube phenom Kane Parsons, has grossed $160 million domestically and $262 million worldwide to date.

The YouTube reviewer above sums it up: "Disclosure Day is a very, very bad movie." Spielberg hoped to rescue it by trying to twist Franklin Grahnm's tail. Not even that could help.

Uneasy Weekend In The UK

🚨 JUST IN: Outrage erupts after a 17-YEAR-OLD GIRL was ST*BBED in broad daylight in England

These ANIMALS feel emboldened!

The 17YO is now being treated in the hospital after major wounds to her neck 🙏🏻

The animal, 30, is "suspected" of attempted murderer

IT'S GETTING OUT… pic.twitter.com/p7KgWwTdaH

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 12, 2026

A more complete story is at legacy BBC:

A girl who was stabbed in the neck as she walked down the street has been released from hospital.

The 17-year-old was attacked as she walked along Wood Street in Brierfield, Lancashire, at about 15:00 BST on Friday.

A 30-year-old, described by Lancashire Police as a British man of Pakistani heritage, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of the teenager, who the BBC understands is also of Pakistani heritage.

"This was a very serious incident but thankfully the girl's injuries were not life-threatening," a police spokesman said.

This seems not to have provoked riots, since both victim and perp were of Pakistani heritage; had the victim been of native UK working-class stock, we may surmise the outcome would have been different. Meanwhile, legacy media stressed "anti-racism" demonstrations:

Belfast had its “largest ever” anti-racism rally on Saturday afternoon, with thousands of people gathering in the city centre.

Speakers at the event included Lord Mayor Róis-Máire Donnelly, the SDLP’s Matthew O’Toole, trade union representatives and figures from voluntary and migrant support groups.

Ahead of the event, AI-generated posters advertising an anti-immigration counter-protest had been circulated online. The turnout for the counter-protest was small.

Meanwhile, at a similar event in Londonderry, a Guyanese woman said anti-racism rallies “let people know that there is hope”.

Nurse Beverly Simpson, who attended the event at the Guildhall, said: “I think it is fantastic to see so many people supportive. People are so aware of what is happening and totally against racism.”

But the problem isn't race. The problem is 80 years government policy bringing in third-world migrants to keep wages down, when the migrants arrive in such numbers that they can't be assimilated. The fact that even after generations in the UK, they murder each other over issues like honor killings (the likely root of the incident above) is an illustration of the problem. That the mayor, other politicians, and union officials would headline the Belfast "anti-racism" rally indicates that the official line will be that protests about migrant stabbings and rapes are "racist".

But apparently this isn't enough:

Britain’s minister for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, delivers a warning to those who complain on social media about their stabbing or beheading. Minister Benn notes the danger created by people online sharing information from Belfast after two days of civic unrest in the city following a migrant stabbing and slicing a local resident.

. . . “Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days”

According to The Guardian,

Social media companies have been ordered to have emergency measures in place to stop illegal content going viral, as regulators battle to stop the type of misinformation spiral that circulated after the 2024 summer riots.

Sites such as X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok will have to have a “crisis protocol” in place to intervene when the sharing of dangerous content begins to rise.

Under the measures to be implemented by Ofcom, the UK’s tech regulator, online platforms will also need to reserve a dedicated line of communication channel through which the police can contact them in a crisis.

. . . Ofcom said it would define a crisis as an “extraordinary situation in which there is a serious threat to public safety in the United Kingdom”, which is highly likely to have “resulted from a significant increase in relevant content”.

. . . “For example, evidence from previous crisis events illustrate how the perpetrators use online services to carry out illegal activity, such as inciting racial or religious hatred, making threats or inciting violence. This can lead to an increase in the amount of illegal content circulating online but also manifest in violence in the real world.

“Such crises are exceptional, and this means that online service providers’ usual content moderation systems and processes may not be sufficient in such circumstances.”

The bar for the implementation of such protocols is high, dealing with outright illegal content. The new measures will come into force after being approved by parliament.

The main problem for the UK government is Elon Musk.

This is the way https://t.co/8NTAO9zuPl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2026

The government had already been mulling the option of banning X under the Online Safety Act:

The UK government is threatening Elon Musk’s X with the nuclear option under the country’s online safety laws: a ban. The social media platform is under pressure from ministers after it allowed the Grok AI tool, which is integrated within the app, to generate indecent images of unsuspecting women and children.

. . . The Online Safety Act (OSA) contains a provision that allows Ofcom to seek a court order imposing “business disruption measures” on a website or app that is in breach of the legislation. These measures are in effect a block on the recipient operating in the UK.

. . . Ofcom said it must follow due process as part of its investigation. “As the UK’s independent online safety enforcement agency, it’s important we make sure our investigations are legally robust and fairly decided,” it said.

Ofcom’s own guidance also makes clear this is not workaday punishment under the act and such measures are not a “matter of routine”. “We acknowledge that business disruption measures are a significant regulatory intervention and therefore we are unlikely to find it appropriate to apply to the courts for business disruption measures as a matter of routine where we have identified failures, or likely failures, to comply with enforceable requirements,” Ofcom said.

It seems to me that the problem Labour faces is that in the current migrant crisis, stabbings and rapes are going to continue at a pretty rapid rate -- as are equivalent episodes with homeless and mentally disturbed individuals in the US. Labour's aim will be to keep such continuing episodes from being publicized, rather than to try to solve the underlying problem. But in trying to rein in Musk's own perceived right to free speech, this will likely annoy Trump and others in his circle like Rubio and Vance, since Musk has their ear.

Well, good luck. I think Musk's post above suggests he understands the one solution to the UK's migrant crisis: call early elections. Letting Labour stay in power another three years will be disastrous.

Disclosure Day Bombs

I asked the AI oracle, "Has Disclosure Day been getting bad reviews?"It answered,

Yes, Steven Spielberg's sci-fi film Disclosure Day has been receiving a significant amount of mixed and negative reviews.

While it has a decent audience score of roughly 75% on platforms like Rotten Tomatoes, critical reception has been polarizing.

"Polarizing" is a polite word for it; a good example is the YouTube review embedded above, for which I can only give an extreme bad language warning. The Critical Drinker makes the point that the two big summer blockbusters released so far, The Mandalorian and Grogu and Disclosure Day, have been runnming behind a pair of low-budget horror flicks made by YouTubers, Obsession and Backrooms, although my barber says although Obsession is good, even Backrooms isn't worth the time and money.

I haven't seen any of these, but I'll speculate on why nobody's interested in Disclosure Day. In some ways, this is odd, because in his heyday, Spielberg was always a step or two ahead of the public imagination, but it seems to me that he's somehow lost it now. The first big issue is the films's MacGuffin, which is what Hitchcock called the object or secret that sets the plot in motion. In this case, it's the fact that a government contractor, Wardex, has a secret stash of evidence that extraterrestrials are real. Daniel Kellner, a brilliant data privacy expert, goes on the run after stealing part of the stash.

OK, first quick stop. I spent part of my tech career in the data privacy field. There are no geniuses in that field, only paper pushers. Even if they somehow stumbled on something important, they wouldn't have a clue it was.

Back to the main thread. Trump wrongfooted Spielberg just this past February by announcing the government would begin declassifyhing its UFO files, and several tranches have been released since May. Here's an example of what Wardex pesumably has:

UFO FILES TRANCHE # 3: “NORTHEASTERN ORB SIGHTING” 2025

FBI-UAP-PR004

In July 2025, at approximately 2100 local time in the northeastern United States, an eyewitness observed an intense bright light in their backyard as they parked their car upon returning home from work. The… pic.twitter.com/Irk7Q6pb6n

— UAP James (@UAPJames) June 12, 2026

The comments overwhelminmgly say it's a Chinese lantern and recommend doubters spend $20 and try several themselves. UFO clips are already part of the public imagination, and the public already expects somethiong at the Plan Nine from Outer Space level at best. If they want fantasy, Spielberg already knows how to give them fantasy, laid on thick. But this time, he's trying to leave fantasy behind, he thinks he's gonna make them ask the deep, deep questions.

Deep questions indeed. In fact, anticipating this, legacy media had already been furrowing its brow. I got an idea: I decided to try to get AI to help me cheat on a sophomore essay. I asked the oracle, "Can you write me a wishy-washy first paragraph of an essay that says there's no conflict between Christianity and UFOs?" It answered,

While the intersection of faith and the cosmos is often debated, many theologians and philosophers argue that there is no fundamental conflict between Christianity and the existence of UFOs. Instead of mutually exclusive worldviews, they suggest that the vastness of the universe and the potential for extraterrestrial life can actually enrich one's spiritual understanding of a divine creator.

If you are writing an essay on this topic and want to narrow down your focus, I can help you.

I could probably have answered, "No, I'm actually trying to get something published at Real Clear Politics, and I just want another 750 words of anodyne blather," and it would have given me what I needed, but RCP was already there this morning:

In Disclosure Day, the head of a far-flung conspiracy to control the narrative about extraterrestrials warns of a worldwide collapse of order if the truth is revealed. But a sympathetic character, a person of faith, also is fearful of disclosure: She makes the case that humans “will stop believing in God” if they’re presented with evidence of superior beings in space to compete with the superior beings evoked by religion. “People can’t handle both,” she warns.

. . . But religious leaders here in reality tend to sound much more chill about aliens. The Vatican has acknowledged the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe and affirmed its consistency with Catholic theology. Jewish rabbis have contemplated ETs and reached the same conclusion, as have Muslim scholars who see textual evidence that life could exist out in the vastness of space. Buddhists believe that their sacred traditions anticipate that life on earth is part of a much grander cosmic community.

A similar piece made it into The Wall Street Journal, Are You There God? It’s Me, Spielberg:

The only reason to think alien theology would look radically unlike ours is if we assume from the jump that human theology is nothing but the local fiction of a primate species, rather than a set of valid claims about the rules governing the universe. But that’s exactly the kind of open question we might hope aliens, if we met any, would help us resolve. They might shock us by professing total disbelief in the things of the spirit. But they might astound us still more by finding our ideas about creation consonant with, even similar to, their own.

All these pieces do is demonstrate how easily this sort of product can be produced by AI, far more quickly. I asked the AI oracle, "What does the Wall Street Journal pay for an op-ed picee?" It answered,

The Wall Street Journal typically pays between $200 and $500 for a published op-ed piece, though rates can vary based on the author's prominence, the topic, and the exact length of the essay.

However, writers primarily submit op-eds to major national outlets like the WSJ for the prestige, thought leadership, and exposure rather than the writer's fee.

But if AI can generate the same thing that op-ed writers think can bring them prestige and thought leadership, why is anyone bothering? And this is Spielberg's miscalculation, too. It really sounds like Spielberg somehow decided these were Weighty Questions For Our Time, and he maybe thought he was gonna cap off his career with something equivalent to War and Peace. Instead, he came up with the stuff sophomore essays are made of.

The public is actually ahead of this.

Why The UK Decline?

A recent piece at the Atlantic, How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi, asks, "Who broke Britain?" but it asserts that this somehow took place over just the past 18 years, specifically since the 2008 financial crisis:

In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

This is a remarkably short-sighted view. In 1982, the UK was, at enormous trouble and expense, and only with covert US help, able to reconquer the Falkland Islands with a naval task force. But even in 2008, this would have been unlikely; the three aircraft carriers that had played a key role in 1982 were in the process of being decommissioned, with no replacements planned. But the UK's decline had been in progress well before then. The inspiring utterances of two Royal Navy admirals give a hint:

In 1805, before the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson said, "No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy." In 1916, during the Battle of Jutland, Admiral David Beatty said, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today", after two of his battlecruisers catastrophically exploded; German gunnery had vastly exceeded expectations. The same defects in design led to the loss of the HMS Hood at the hands of the Bismarck in 1941.

Winston Churchill is vastly overrated as a political figure; he was the primary architect and most vocal champion of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929, he returned the pound to the pre-1914 gold standard, which increased the value of UK exports and drove down demand for coal, which in turn forced miners' wages down and led to the General Strike of 1926, which as I've noted here had the effect of worsening conditions for the working class while increasing bourgeois self-delusion.

The US Federal Reserve supported the return to the gold standard and kept US interest rates low, which led to the speculative bubble that culminated in the crash of 1929. The 1929 crash hit Germany especially hard:

The new Weimar Republic had weathered a period of intense inflation in the 1920s due to reparations required by the Versailles Treaty. Rather than tax German citizens to pay the reparations, Germany borrowed millions of dollars from the United States and went further into debt. American demands for loan repayment had disastrous repercussions for an already fragile German economy, with banks failing and unemployment rising.

. . . While the Great Depression (and German economic conditions in general) were not solely responsible for bringing Hitler to power, they helped create an environment in which he gained support.

In other words, Hitler and the European Theater of the Second World War were in some measure the product of UK policy missteps since the 1920s. Luckily, by 1943, the US had arrived in the UK with enough influence to see that, via Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Churchill was largely sidelined.

Twice, at Churchill’s behest, the British had lobbied to postpone the invasion of France and instead pursue operations in the Mediterranean, initially in favour of Operation Torch (1942), then for the invasion of Sicily in 1943. Although there were sound military reasons behind both deferrals, American suspicions had grown by the time of Washington DC-based ‘Trident’ Conference of May 1943 that the British prime minister was opposed to a cross-Channel invasion, period. . . . But the consistency of his own utterances – in favour of operations in the Balkans, bringing Turkey into the war, and a projected assault on Norway, Operation Jupiter – were instrumental in the Americans concluding that the British had lost faith in the cross-Channel option. This was also the view of the Soviets, for whom the only worthwhile second front was a major invasion of German-held France.

The idea of the UK as some sort of cultural bastion has always been largely unquestioned hype. The writer at the Atlantic piece blames post-2008 decline on budget austerity and Brexit:

The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. . . . He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics. . . . Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending.

The mention of migrants here is one of relatively few, and this only in the context of "European" ones. This passage below, on the other hand, gives more context to the real problem:

The most detailed plans released by Reform involve immigration—the one issue that evokes as much anger among voters as living standards do. The Conservatives broke their pledges: Johnson promised to reduce the net inflow of migrants, but his policies, meant to bolster health-care staffing and stabilize falling university enrollment, led to the legal arrival of more than 3 million non-EU immigrants, who now amount to one out of every 25 people in Britain. Later, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struggled to deal with the arrival of more than 150,000 migrants who’d crossed the English Channel on small boats.

This is just the most recent reappearance of the same mistake: in this post in March, I noted that the first measures to import non-European migrants to the UK took place after World war II in response to "labor shortages" in the health care industry -- except that "labor shortages" are just another way of saying that wages in the industry were rising, and this was simply a government-sposnored effort to keep wages low by importing workers willing to work for low wages.

But a byproduct of the low-wage migrant worker policy is this odd phenomenon of stabbings and rapings by migrants, or the UK-born children of migrants in persistent old-country ethnic communities, primarily against members of the UK working class, who apparently are closest at hand. And it's the Labour government, the creature of the UK Fabian socialist movement founded theoretically to promote the interests of the working class, that's enabling the continuing phenomenon.

And it's Elon Musk, the wealthy US industrialist, who's taken the role of thorn in Labour's side by using his US-based social media platform to call out Labour's failings. The story goes that Musk's predecessor Henry Ford understood that if he paid his workers well enough that they could buy his cars, he'd make a lot more money. Others argue that he doubled their wages not to make them prosperous, but to avoid turnover, although that would just be a sign that whatever the reason, it's good policy to treat the workers well.

Somehow, the Atlantic writer seems to have lost sight of the idea that if your policy is to drive wages down, you'll wind up like Mississippi. But as far as I can tell, as a naive American looking at the UK from thousands of miles away, it's hard not to think this policy has been in place long before the 21st century, and members of the highly prestigious intellectual bourgeoisie have promoted it for 150 years. It's time to rethink the UK.

The State Of The UK's Fragile Social Decorum

I've been mentioning here the problem of the UK's social decorum and the extent to which the Starmer government and the legacy media have been exploiting it to minimize public frustration over the migration problem. A good example is in the video embedded above, in which at 1:45 the host features a woman who maintains that Stephen Ogilvie, the Belfast stabbing victim, was not only special-needs, but he had been working hard to help the Ugandan who stabbed him move in.

In fact, the woman says, it wasn't just one Ugandan who attacked Ogilvie, it was two; one of them escaped when the crowd moved in to help Ogilvie, but he was never caught. Skeptical of this narrative, I asked the AI oracle, "Had Stephen Ogilvie been helping the Sudanese who later stabbed him to move in?" Yesterday, it answered, "Yes, Stephen Ogilvie had been helping the Sudanese who later stabbed him to move in," but this morning, it had changed its mind and and said, "No, Stephen Ogilvie had not been helping his attacker move in, according to verified official details."

So there you have it. It added,

Mr. Ogilvie's family has actively spoken out against the misinformation online. They released a statement clarifying his condition and pleaded for the public not to use his attack to target minority groups, stating: "We have witnessed a lot of false information circulating on social media... We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility."

This is the same line taken by the Henry Nowak family and quoted by Prime Minister Starmer to try to calm things down. The UK Sun added these details:

A neighbour told The Sun that Ogilvie lived in a first-floor flat close by. They added that the unidentified suspect had only moved to the area a few days before the attack. The 70-year-old neighbour noted that Ogilvie has 'lived here for around a year and a half and has been a bit of a nuisance, but what's happened to him is absolutely horrendous and I'd never wish that on anybody.'

So he wasn't helping the Ugandans; instead, he was being a nuisance, so the Ugandans stabbed his eyes out and tried to cut off his head, which was sort of justifiable if he'd been such a nuisance. I'm not sure what to make of this quasi-denial, but it at least confirms he was nearby and had apparently been interacting in some way with the attacker before the attack, so I'm not sure how to take this. But clearly the biggest problem isn't the migrants, it's all the outsiders and local Neanderthals trying to stir up trouble:

While their calls echoed those made by several politicians the demonstrations were encouraged online by far-right activists, including Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, as well as tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Overnight, Musk reposted many social media messages denouncing the state of the United Kingdom. “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change,” he said in response to a post from Robinson.

After being criticized by figures such as Labour Party Chair Anna Turley, who called Musk’s posts “appalling” and “grievously wrong and doing damage,” Musk posted to X, saying, “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!”

This piece, originally at UnHerd, makes the point that the migration issue is bringing Catholics and Protestants together:

What gave the atrocity its added political piquancy was that it took place in a firmly Catholic, Nationalist area. The symbolism of the attacker being beaten off with a hurling stick, a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism — by a local man named Maitiu Mág Tighearnán — was quickly taken up by new Irish Republican factions firmly set against mass migration. Until now, the governing rule of thumb was that anti-migrant riots are, in Northern Ireland, a purely Loyalist affair, which Catholic Nationalists regard with detached dismissal. But it is increasingly common to hear grumblings against mass migration from working-class Catholics, grumblings entirely absent from their community’s social media and journalistic commentators.

Elon Musk, of all people, is aligning himself with the workng class, while the Labour government is against them:

BREAKING NEWS: Australia's public broadcaster ABC News just accused @elonmusk of ''inciting racial tension'' in Belfast because he did not censor footage showing a Sudanese refugee attempting to behead someone.

They're angrier at Elon than at the stabber. pic.twitter.com/PGDTLChDxd

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) June 10, 2026

Let’s go… pic.twitter.com/LOmUWu5j3g

— NateSk8s (@natesk8s87) June 10, 2026

Another factor completely absent from legacy media coverage of the riots is that they're just a replay of similar demonstrations exactly a year ago:

Starting on 9 June 2025, riots broke out across Northern Ireland after two Romanian Roma [Gypsy] teenagers were charged with attempted rape after allegedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl in Ballymena, a town in County Antrim. Police said the disorder was targeted at ethnic minorities and law enforcement. Across two weeks of disorder, a total of 107 police officers were injured whilst 56 people were arrested, with 27 remanded into custody; across five of the nights, police used a total of 32 attenuating energy projectiles (AEPs).

The entry traces the origin of this outbreak to another a year earlier, the 2024 Southport stabbings:

On 29 July 2024, a mass stabbing targeting young girls occurred at the Hart Space, a dance studio in the Meols Cop area of Southport, Merseyside, United Kingdom. Seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana [the son of Rwanda-born parents] killed three children and injured ten others at a yoga and dance workshop attended by 26 children. Two girls died at the scene, six injured children and two adults were taken to hospital in a critical condition, and a third girl died the following day.

So what nobody mentions is that such episodes of people from migrant communities attacking innocent native Brits are pretty common, and unlike in the US, there's been no effort to deal with the problem. Migrants arrive, they're placed in free housing, and now and then, they go rogue. The US solution, inelegant as it may be, is to identify and deport those in the country illegally, encourage others to self-deport, close the borders, and make it plain that further migration is unwelcome. It's at least convincing the public that something is being done.

In the UK, the best solution at this point is to find a way to force an election, which at this point won't otherwise take place until 2029. It's in Labour's interest to wait things out. The opposition at this point is simply relying on the continuing likelihood of futher stabbings from migrant communities to spark spontaneous outrage, which is simply not a productive strategy. The opposition movements have to find a way to unify and force an election to get Labour out.

Why So Many Knife Attacks?

I woke up this morning to news of an anti-migrant riot in Belfast, with organized groups of Northern Irish deliberately setting out to burn the homes of migrants:

Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes.

This is an intriguing development that deserves its own discussion, which I'll take up separately. But it comes in the context of a remarkable cluster of knife-attack news:

• The demonstrations in the UK following the conviction of Henry Nowak's Southampton murderer
• A homeless man slashed five people in New York's Penn Station on Sunday
• Decarlos Brown Jr, accused of stabbing Iryna Zarutska to death on a Charlotte, NC light rail train, was found incompetent to stand trial in federal court, after the same outcome in state court
• In Februiary, another Charlotte, NC man was accused of a knife attack
• Karmelo Anthony was found guilty for stabbing Austin Metcalf to death at a Texas track meet last year.

This is a wide range of separate incidents in widely different locations and circumstances, but there are common factors that connect many of the cases. For instance, in the Penn Station slashing at the link:

The homeless madman accused of slashing five people with a dagger in Penn Station was roaming free despite an arrest just weeks earlier in New Jersey and a conviction for an eerily similar stabbing.

Hector Deleon, 51, was quickly released on cashless bail after his 2022 arrest for slashing a man in the neck in Newark — and then received just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars in that case or in the years that followed, even as he racked up more arrests — including one just two weeks before Sunday night’s rampage.

DeCarlos Brown, accused of the Charlotte knife attack on Iryna Zarutska, had a lengthy record of encounters with police and mental health authorities:

“I think there are multiple failed opportunities here, in the mental health space and in the criminal justice space,” said Kenneth Corey, a former department chief for the New York City Police Department who now teaches at the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Policing Leadership Academy.

Court records show Brown was initially charged in 2014 with being a felon in possession of a firearm, which is sometimes used by federal prosecutors to pull cases into the federal system where there are often stiffer penalties. Federal prosecutors did not take the case, and the state charge was dropped in exchange for a guilty plea on a charge of robbery using a deadly weapon, court records show.

. . . Corey said many federal prosecutors offices tell police and local officials they lack financial resources to try more cases of felons in possession of a firearm, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. But he believes the charge could be used better as a tool against the small percentage of people responsible for repeated violent offenses.

“They end up taking only the worst of the worst because they don’t have the resources,” Corey said. ”And to be clear, despite multiple previous arrests, I’m not sure this man’s case rose to anywhere near that threshold.”

. . . In January, Brown was arrested after repeatedly calling 911 from a hospital, where he complained that someone was trying to control him with foreign substances. He was quickly released without bail on a promise to return for court, which is standard for lower-level misdemeanors.

Micah Emmanuel Ragin, the other Charlotte man accused of a knife attack, also had a long arrest record:

A North Carolina man accused of stabbing another individual in broad daylight has faced more than 18 criminal charges over the past decade, including assault-related cases and a domestic-violence conviction, before the latest violent incident, court records show.

. . . Altogether, court records indicate Ragin has faced more than 18 charges in several counties over multiple years before the current felony accusation.

The Penn Station slasher, Hector DeLeon,

was quickly released on cashless bail after his 2022 arrest for slashing a man in the neck in Newark — and then received just two years of probation as a sentence, court records show.

Deleon doesn’t appear to have spent any significant time behind bars in that case or in the years that followed, even as he racked up more arrests — including one just two weeks before Sunday night’s rampage.

. . . His at least seven prior arrests – six of which unfolded in New Jersey – include busts for aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, use or possession of drugs, assault, domestic assault and criminal mischief.

Before the attack at Penn Station, Deleon was most recently busted May 22 in Long Branch, New Jersey for theft and possession of drug paraphernalia charges.

On the other hand, Karmelo Anthony, the track meet stabber, had a clean record, although his behavior prior to the stabbing was puzzling:

Students who were under the tent during the stabbing testified on June 5. A student witness stated that people, including Metcalf, had confronted Anthony and asked him to leave the tent, to which Anthony allegedly said, "touch me and find out", and kept his hands in his backpack, warning that he had something. Witnesses estimated Anthony was asked to leave as many as 15 times.

The UK stabbings seem both to be related to an overall sense of entitlement and resentment in ethnic communities, stoked on one hand by frustration that the prosperous lifestyles they'd been led to expect from migration hadn't materialized, while they also weren't being welcomed by the native population (with whom they compete for jobs), although they somehow also expect the native population to accept their continued adherence to the cultural norms of their former countries.

The US attacks seem more connected with outright mental disorder mixed with criminal history, although enititlement and resentment are also factors. However deranged DeCarlos Brown may have been, he is reported to have said, "I got that white girl" following the stabbing.

Karmelo Anthony appears to have felt entitled in some way to stay in a tent connected with a different school, despite a long-standing convention that team members stayed in their respective school tents. This, of course, in part had a racial basis, but he took his sense of entitlement seriously enough to kill someone who disagreed with him.

Clearly now in the UK, the authorities are nervously trying to deal with a restive native population for whom the recent knife attacks are bringing the migration problem into clear focus. There's little question that measures to deal with the overall cluster of entitlement, resentment, and the decline of social decorum are failing on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Latest Space Alien And UFO News

As someone who converted to Catholicism late in life, I'm only slowly coming to recognize that it's always a good idea to listen to the bishop, even if the bishop is someone you'd rather not listen to. Thus, in Washington recently,

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy has removed a priest from his exorcism ministry in the Archdiocese of Washington, citing concerns over the cleric’s recent social media statements “linking UFOs to demonic presence.”

In a brief statement issued June 3, the cardinal said that Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, New York, can no longer exercise his ministry as an exorcist of the archdiocese.

In addition, Cardinal McElroy said he had “ended all affiliation between the archdiocese and the Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal located in Washington, D.C.”

The cardinal said that the connection Msgr. Rossetti drew between UFOs and demons, and the St. Michael Center’s “recent use of social media,” both “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”

Msgr Rossetti remains a priest in good standing. Accounts note that Cdl McElroy didn't give any explanation of how Rossetti's statements undermined Catholic teaching, but some reports indicate that Rossetti has said that UFOs don't necessarily carry space aliens, but they themselves are demons. According to People,

In a video published on Facebook on Friday, May 29, Rossetti said “there is a danger here” as he addressed UFO sightings and aliens, according to the Associated Press.

“As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide,” Rossetti said in the video. He later added, “They don't want us to know what they're doing because they're more effective when we don't realize it.”

Rossetti also said, “It's my personal belief that probably many if not most of these UFO sightings are in fact demons.”

That video has since been taken down. Can a UFO be a demon, according to Catholic teaching? CCC 392 says that demons are fallen angels:

This "fall" consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign.

Catholic teaching is that, as Catholic Answers puts it, both angels and demons are spiritual beings:

When I was very new as a street-corner preacher for the Catholic Evidence Guild, a questioner asked me what I meant by spirit. I answered, “A spirit has no shape, has no size, has no color, has no weight, does not occupy space.” He said, “That’s the best definition of nothing I ever heard,” which was very reasonable of him. I had given him a list of things spirit is not, without a hint of what it is.

Spirits are normally invisible, but both demons and angels can be temporarily visible. Nevertheless, the problem with UFOs is that they're primarily understood as artifacts made by beings who can manipulate the physical world, which spirits can do only indirectly. It's a couple of steps too far, as I understand this, to imagine a UFO as a spirit trying to deceive people by manifesting as an artifact. It would also be contradictory, in the sense that if it were a spirit, its ability to manifest physically would be only temporary, which would make the question of whether UFOs are real moot -- they aren't, if they're just temporary manifestations.

But so far, I haven't seen any serious, systematic attempt to show that Cdl McElroy is mistaken in his view that Msgr Rossetti's statements undermine Catholic teaching. If someone does this, I'll be very attentive. On the other hand, I see references to an estalished view among some ufologists, many of whom are Catholic like Vice President Vance, that UFOs are demons. In my opinion, this view isn't consistent with Catholic teaching.

Another recent news item is the imminent release of the new Spielberg blockbuster Disclosure Day.

Half a century after Steven Spielberg challenged audiences to think about what lies beyond the starry canopy that defines our universe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the director is again challenging accepted precepts of faith and singular belief in a supreme being.

. . . “‘Disclosure Day’ is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what’s been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once?” Spielberg said, adding it is as much a “chase” movie as it is a reflection on our very being.

“And the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening, that is basically the core of this chase movie.”

. . . Spielberg – who directed and co-produced the movie – feels Christians will find themselves asking of their faith and their beliefs as the movie takes the absolute position of the Church.

. . . As Breitbart News previously noted, the movie stars Josh O’Connor as a cybersecurity whistle-blower with government evidence, long suppressed, chronicling a history of alien encounters.

I see two problems here. One is that Spielberg seems to think the idea of space aliens is troubling only to Christians, but of course, the Christian view of a world created by God in six days is based entirely on the account in the Hebrew Bible. Jews woukld be asking just as many questions about their faith as Christians.

But now we get to two sub-issues that are raised by Fermi's paradox, which is the apparent contradiction between the high statistical probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of verifiable evidence for it. The first is the UFOs, or whatever we want to call the vehicles that bring the aliens to Earth from the planet Zohran.

Fermi's paradox inevitably implies that these aliens are "intelligent", which means that they have reason equivalent to, or surpassing, humans and can build space ships with warp drives and so forth. But where does reason come from? Let's return to the Catholic Answers link above:

Mind, we say, splits the atom and calculates the light years. It is true that in both these operations it uses the body. But observe that there is no question which is the user and which is the used. The mind uses the body, not asking the body’s consent. The mind is the principal, the body the instrument. . . . We have evidence in our own experience of mind affecting matter directly. We will to raise our arm, for example, and we raise it.

. . . Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space-and neither has spirit, whose offspring they are. But no one can call spirit nothing, for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world-apart from love, which spirit also produces.

Reason, or intellect, is spirit, and it comes from God. God created humans with a unique ability to reason and manipulate the physical world. On one hand, we can conceive of creatures that have spirit and reason through which they can manipulate creation, but their ability to do so is going to have to be very similar to the way humans do it, and this is something we don't understand at all. Back at the link,

Occasionally a materialist will argue that there are changes in the brain when we think, grooves or electrical discharges or whatnot. But these only accompany the thought; they are not the thought. When we think of justice, for instance, we are not thinking of the grooves in the brain; most of us are not even aware of them. Justice has a meaning, and it does not mean grooves. When I say that mercy is kinder than justice, I am not comparing mercy’s grooves with the stricter grooves of justice.

The second sub-problem under Fermi's paradox is that we have no idea how intellect inserts itself into the material evolutinary process. We have no better explanation for what specifically takes place when I decide to raise my arm than what specifically took place when the physicist Ernest Rutherford figured out how to split an atom and built a machine to do it. Fermi's paradox is only the simplest expression of a bigger problem which is outside the evolutionary model: on one hand, we've never seen an actual, confirmed flying saucer type device with a space alien in it, but we have no understanding at all of the spiritual process by which a being on another planet could undertake such a thing.

In other words, we can construct a Darwinian model for cells evolving into complex beings in the right sort of pond slime, but we can't even build any model at all for how intellect somehow inserts itself into whatever complex being develops, that's an entirely different question, of which Fermi's paradox is just a simple illustration.

And this brings us to Spielberg and Disclosure Day. In it, a hero-whistleblower is somehow able to assimilate all the known evidence of extraterrestrials and put it out before the public in a new, completely irrefutable form, or at least that's what the teasers say. But we're back to Fermi's paradox. Why hasn't this already been made manifest? Can someone seriously claim the Vatican or the National Council of Churches could possibly cover this up?

In fact, the Trump administration has had a project to release just that aggregation of UFO data that's apparently what the hero-whistleblower in Disclosure Day aims to disclose -- but with each new tranche, the complaint continues that all we see are unconvincing fuzzy blurs -- you'd think even an enterprising demon could do better. This is one factor that knocks down the UFOs-are-demons theory in my mind.

But this also turns up another problem with the Disclosure Day model of hidden evidence: as i've pointed out here before, since the advent of systematic empirical observation in tbe early modern period, nobody, not Copernicus, not Newton, not Galileo, not any of their thousands of genius suceessors, has found any evidence of flying saucer-type artifacts, much less sentient space aliens. This is why the ancient astronauts theory has had currency; if we haven't been able to find it since the invention of the printing press, we're forced to try to discern it in ancient hieroglyphics.

Fermi had a poweful point. Even Spielberg will have trouble disproving it.