“This Was Not Winston Churchill We’re Dealing With"

This was Trump's remark the other day about Keir Starmer. But here's my question: were we ever dealing with Winston Churchill? YouTube toff Jacob Rees-Mogg in the clip embedded above characterizes Churchill as "one of the great heroes of our country". He lists several others, including Elizabeth I, William Pitt the younger, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington, but he concludes, "the greatest hero of them all has to be Churchill". Just yesterday, Keith Humphreys in The Washington Monthly referred nostalgically to the UK election of 1924:

Consider some political history. In the 24th year of the century, the Labour Party won a third of the vote in the general election, a disastrous performance that cost it 40 seats and led to a further descent into minority status. That was the nature of British politics in 1924, whereas in 2024 a comparable level of popularity with voters allowed Starmer-led Labour to gain 209 seats and achieve a stonking majority in parliament. If you had told politicians of previous generations that a massive majority in parliament could be secured in an election in which two-thirds of voters supported a different party, they would not have believed you.

I've got to asssume Humphreys was in some way harkening back to the UK's period of greatness -- but let's keep in mind that this was the 1924 UK election, which put the Tories back in power, and in particular made the heroic Churchill Chancellor of the Exchequer, roughly corresponding to the US Secretary of the Treasury. According to Wikipedia,

Winston Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 and served until 1929. He presented five budgets during his chancellorship. He was initially sceptical about advice from the Bank of England and leading economists to implement a return to the gold standard. In April 1925, however, he agreed to include the measure in his first budget. It resulted in deflation and unemployment, and was a catalyst to the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926.

. . . Roy Jenkins commented that, the appointment being a surprise, it should have inculcated in Churchill both a respect for Conservative Party ideals and a cautionary approach to a job that he knew little about. Churchill's self-confidence, however, was so pronounced that he showed no such respect or caution.

. . . In his first budget, he controversially announced the return to the gold standard at its 1914 parity of £4.25 to the ounce, the rate set by Isaac Newton in 1717, equivalent to £1 = $4.86. The principal opponent of the proposal was the economist John Maynard Keynes who argued that the measure would lead to a world depression. Keynes later wrote a pamphlet entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. Jenkins has pointed out that, as Churchill was a reluctant convert to gold, it is unfair to blame him entirely for the consequences, but it was in the end his decision to implement the measure and he was the one person who could have refused to do so.

. . . The return to gold at the 1914 parity is widely held to have caused deflation and resultant unemployment with a devastating impact on the coal industry in particular – the higher rate of the pound reduced the demand for already declining coal exports.

This policy is generally acknowledged to have brought about the 1926 General Strike, which as I've written here was a cause of bourgeois self-delusion and enmity with the working class, and more imnportantly, the Great Depression itself. Churchill's position during the 1936 abdcation crisis was also unhelpful:

Essentially he opposed any marriage between the King and Mrs. Simpson. He felt a natural sympathy for the King, however, and believed that the solution was a morganatic marriage. Under this plan, Mrs. Simpson would become the Duchess of Cornwall but not Queen. The Cabinet, however, did not approve; neither did the Dominions. Churchill’s only hope then became that the King would see reason, accept his duty as Sovereign, and give up Mrs. Simpson. To this end, Churchill began pressing for time—which put him out of step with most of the nation.

Churchill’s friend J. A. Spender wrote to him in shock on 6 December: “How can you suggest that the present state of things should be prolonged for five months. . . . The thing ought to be settled at once.” Another colleague, Leo Amery, correctly perceived that “the country as a whole was getting progressively more shocked at the idea that the King could hesitate between his duty to the Throne and his affection for a woman.”

His precise role in World War II is difficult to tease out. On one hand, he was an orator who rallied morale in the UK. On the other, insofar as he interfered with military strategy, his proposals were disastrous, and the main task of Eisenhower, Harriman, and Roosevelt after 1943 was to keep him on the sidelines. Churchill's main job between the time he became prime minister and Pearl Harbor was to ingratiate himself with Roosevelt and ensure the US entry into the war, without which the UK would presumably be defeated -- but more recent revisionist opinion suggests the Nazis were themselves their own worst enemy.

I think this also goes to US expectations about the UK. The Humphreys piece I linked above carries an air of regret that the UK's best days are behind it, but the slightly different question is whether the UK ever had best days the way we somehow want to imagine them. I keep reminding myself that Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and the others thought this through very carefully in 1776 and decided we could do perfectly well without the UK.

Keir Starmer Sort Of Resigns

The alt aggregators were teasing Starmer's rumored Monday resignation, or at least his announcement of a transition plan, all weekend, but once the news dropped, only Breitbart had it.

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at times appeared on the verge of tears as he announced that he’d lost the confidence of the governing Labour Party and would resign, but nevertheless set a months-long departure period that will see him through to the end of the summer.

The resignation of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer could barely be heard in Downing Street as protesters outside the gate blasted Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ — the anthem of the European Union — as he spoke on Monday morning. Sir Keir boasted of the achievements he perceived he had made in office before setting out his timetable for departure, confirming he would remain on as caretaker Prime Minister during a summer-long leadership challenge.

The best, though certainly not perfect, analysis I've seen is from Tim Black at Spiked:

Following his resounding victory in the Makerfield by-election, former New Labour hack Andy Burnham is set to return to Westminster next week. Unless something remarkable happens, this will be the prelude to the former Greater Manchester mayor assuming leadership of the Labour Party and becoming our next prime minister.

. . . Labourites and their party’s legion media cheerleaders seem delighted at the prospect. ‘He has delivered hope’, says one Labour old hand. Another has written of the ‘excited anticipation’ leaving the red side [equivalent to blue in the US] of the Commons positively tumescent. Across the board, they all seem gripped by the same delusion – that Labour’s plummeting popularity is all down to the supernaturally unpopular Starmer.

. . . This is desperately wishful thinking. Labour doesn’t have a Keir Starmer problem. It has a Labour problem. It is organisationally and ideologically estranged from its working-class support base.

But here's where I think he slips up:

Labour today is a deracinated, hollowed-out vehicle for the professional managerial class. The only politicians it can produce are different brands of the same technocratic, managerial product.

But Labour hates the current avatar of the West's professional-managerial class, Elon Musk. Yes, he's rich, but he's hands-on, not a rentier. The first months of the Trump 47 administration were dominated by Musk's DOGE boys, a post-millennial version of the traditional corporate "efficiency experts". Labour and the left generally hate all that stuff. Instead, the point I've been making is that Labour is the direct creation of the UK Fabian society, which was comprised almost entirely of UK bourgeoisie from the late 19th and early 20th century:

The standard definition goes on to give a roll call of relentlessly bourgeois figures connected with the movement: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Charles Marson, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, to the point that either consciously or subconsciously, these people recognized what would happen to the bourgeoisie in the event of world proleterian revolution, viz, the gulag, and they were above all intent on saving their own skins.

Thus they concocted a strategy of tempporizing indefinitely with the proletariat, offering cures of one sort or another to social ailments that seldom solved much except to keep the bourgeoisie in place. By the 21st century, as a practical matter, the US solved tbe problem of proletarian revolution, first by containing the Soviet Union, and then by allowing the Marxist-Leninist project to collapse of its own weight. It's worth pointing out that NATO and similar alliances were constructed as part of this containment strategy, but once the Marxist-Leninist model collapsed, they became irrelevant.

Labour in the UK has abandoned even the pretense of working on behalf of the working class; instead, it's adopted programs of importing and then privileging third-world migrants who've been brought in to keep wages down. Other programs, organized and supported by Labour in all but name, are intended to torment and demoralize the working class, such as grooming gangs. Let's get real: the UK uniparty fully recognized over almost the last two generations that the proletarian revolution, the putative threat Fabian socialism was meant to counter and the consensus UK political program of the past century, had disappeared, and the UK dismantled its military as formal recognition of this.

So Labour has dropped its mask. The result is that it's irrelevant, as is the Conservative party that was once intended to counter it. I've been saying for several weeks that changing Labour's leadership is nothing but rearranging the figures standing on top of Lenin's tomb; the next key step is to call an election that will begin to establish the most influential new parties and place them in power. Nigel Farage is belatredly calling for an election:

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for a general election in the wake of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation on Monday morning, arguing that any replacement will lack a mandate to govern the British people.

. . . Although the former Manchester Mayor will not be constitutionally bound to hold a fresh election — with his mandate technically coming from the support of members of the House of Commons — it remains to be seen if he will be able to regain the popular legitimacy that quickly faded away from the Labour Party after being given power in what largely amounted to a protest vote against the Conservatives in 2024.

But this won't be easy to bring about; the big demonstrations that have taken place will need to start focusing on the issue.

🚨BREAKING: MASSIVE crowds of British patriots have flooded the streets of Birmingham to call for remigration.

Britain’s second-largest city now has over 340,000 Muslims.

They want them all gone. pic.twitter.com/PzJ9g8LtX0

— The British Patriot (@TheBritLad) June 20, 2026

Glenn Reynolds On Academic Corruption

Prominent libertarian, transhumanist, law professor, and intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds has just run an essay on corruption in universities in the New York Post. I love it when professors stand up and loudly proclaim they're not like the bastards who run the place. The path to tenure is so crowded with choices to take the system or leave it that nobody who's made a career in the academy can claim to be without sin -- but let's leave that aside for now.

Reynolds's latest brought back to mind his transhumanist faith, through which he's publicly acknowledged that he has a contract to have his head removed and frozen at the time of his putative "death", on rhe expectation that at some future date, Science will not only have developed a cure for what finally ailed him, but it will be able to thaw his frozen head out, resuscitate it, reattach it to a donor body, and presumably allow him to resume his tenured chair at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as though nothing had intervened.

I occasionally try to torment my infinitely tolerant wife, a retired insurance attorney, with questions about what the frozen head model of the afterlife would do to the insrance industry if someone proved this could be done -- a likelihood on which Reynolds and others already feel confident enough to have placed serious bets. This time, when I brought the question up again, she was able to counter, "Why don't you ask AI?", which has become her version of "Ask your mother".

So I went to the oracle with this question: "What would be the effect on the life insurance industry if it were proven possible to resuscitate a frozen head and attach it to a new body?" Keep in mind that clients of frozen head enterprises typically finance their contracts by buying a life insurance policy with the beneficiary being the enterprise that proposes to freeze their heads. I wondered if this would actually constitute insurance fraud, since the policyholder would be buying the policy with the expectation that he would come back to life once the policy paid out.

I was actually able to get my wife to help me with my query to AI by specifying that a life insurance carrier could, if it chose, list frozen head enterprises among those whom it will not allow as beneficiaries, but she's not aware of any that have done this. Anyhow, the oracle answered,

If scientists prove we can resucitate a frozen head and attach it to a new body, it would completely disrupt the life insurance industry. The core business model relies on the permanent finality of death.

It went on give what must be a very preliminary and tentative list of changes that would have to be made in the industry:

Redefining the Legal Definition of Death

• Contract triggers must change.
• Policies pay out at "legal death."
• Contracts must define "permanent death."
• Temporary suspension is not death.
• Freeze status might pause payouts.

Restructuring Payouts and Claims

• Claims will turn into loans.
• Payouts may fund the resuscitation.
• Benefits could become medical trusts.
• Families might face frozen assets.
• Fraud risks will skyrocket initially.

In other words, the instant someone could prove you can freeze a head, thaw it out, resuscitate it, and reattach it to a donor body, it would upend the very industry that finances the whole frozen head con, such that all existing frozen head contracts would probably be challenged as invalid, and certainly no further frozen head contracts of the earlier sort could be written. This would almost certainly drive existing frozen head enterprises into bankrupcy well before only a few frozen heads could be properly thawed and reattached -- the scores of thousands remaining would almost certainly be lost before any organized effort could save them.

But let's ask a couple more questions. Glenn Reynolds is a law professor. Not only has he structured his own estate on the basis that he can have his head frozen at "death" and be brought back to life in the future, but he has endorsed those beliefs for the public generally, even though if this were at all practical, it would seriously change the overall legal environment by redefining death. Let's just take another example: currently, you can't libel the dead. So someone publishes a book saying damaging things about a dead guy. Can the dead guy now come back to life and sue the book's author for libel?

Why isn't he publishing books warning of the implications of this, rather than blowing the whistle about how AI will make porn impossibly irresistible? He begins his clarion call on academic corruption thus:

One industry in America pumps out toxic waste day and night, but suffers no penalty for the damage it causes.

It operates at enormous public and private expense, sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars in government money.

He concludes,

And much of what students learn isn’t so.

For example Marxism, which has never worked in the real world, remains stylish on campuses — still treated as a hot new concept, though it hasn’t changed much in over a century.

Racism, sexism, antisemitism and destructive economic ignorance, all from a huge and vastly expensive system that was supposed to make our society better.

It’s time for a change.

But Reynolds himself is ensorsing cryonics, another piece of hokum that's never worked in the real world, and he's using his academic prestige to do it. Marxism as a tool for social analysis has a good deal more merit than cryonics, which at best is nothing but insurance fraud, espeically if it ever could be shown actually to work. If anyone wants a good example of academic corruption, I'd point to Glenn Reynolds a lot sooner than many other people.

The UK Makerfield Election

The UK held an unscheduled election in the district of Makerfield, part of greater Manchester, on Thursday:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday he would not walk away, vowing ​to fight any challenge from his leading party rival Andy Burnham and potentially ushering in a new bout of political instability.

Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, won ‌a decisive victory for Labour to claim a parliamentary seat in northwest England, and has signalled that he will use it to enter any contest to replace Starmer.

However, except for the race being a focus of Labour's effort to replace its own leader, Starmer, this would be a dog-bites-man story; Makerfield has been a safe Labour seat for over 100 years. However, Nigel Farage seems to have had a vain hope to win the seat for Reform in an upset:

Nigel Farage says he is disappointed with Reform UK's performance in the Makerfield by-election, as he blamed his party's defeat on a desire among voters to eject Sir Keir Starmer from Downing Street.

The Reform leader claimed frustration with the embattled prime minister had driven Andy Burnham's "emphatic" Labour victory over his party's candidate, Rob Kenyon, who finished more than 9,000 votes behind.

He also conceded his party had also lost votes to right-wing rival Restore Britain, founded by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, which finished third in a breakthrough night for the fledgling party.

Restore Britain is a very new factor in the UK political scene:

Restore Britain is a right-wing to far-right political party in the United Kingdom led by Rupert Lowe, the Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth. The organisation was officially launched as a pressure group on 30 June 2025 and as a political party on 13 February 2026. It presents itself as an umbrella organisation for local grassroots groups and has been labelled as more right-wing than Reform UK on the political spectrum.

Lowe was elected to Parliament for Reform but formally left the party after public disputes with its leadership and criticism of Nigel Farage. Reform subsequently alleged threatening behaviour from Lowe as a reason for his suspension, which Lowe and his staff denied. Later in 2025, he established Restore as a pressure group, with an initial advisory board that included Conservative politicians such as Susan Hall and Gavin Williamson. The party also raised funds via crowdfunding for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.

Farage also blames Reform UK's alleged underperformance in the Makerfield election on the emergence of Restore Britain. At the second link above,

He issued a plea for Restore voters to back Reform instead, as the main "challenger party to the left".

Reform had sought to defeat Burnham in the Makerfield seat, giving it a high-profile scalp to boost its credentials as the likely main opposition party to Labour at the next general election.

But Burnham increased Labour's majority over Reform in the constituency, in a rare feat for a candidate from the governing party.

One problem for Reform UK has been that several high-profile Conservative MPs have left the increasinigly discredited Conservative Party for Reform UK, casting doubt on Reform's commitment to solve the migration crisis:

The latest high-profile member of the struggling main opposition Conservative Party to jump ship on Monday, January 26 announced she was defecting to the anti-immigrant Reform UK party. Former home secretary Suella Braverman became the third senior Conservative Party figure in less than a month to join Reform, led by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage.

. . . Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick announced his defection on January 15, days after former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, who is no longer a lawmaker, also announced that he would join Reform. Braverman's defection brings the number of Reform UK members of Parliament to eight.

Ex-Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak sacked Braverman as home secretary in November 2023 after she accused police of left-wing bias and said homelessness was a "lifestyle choice." After her dismissal, the outspoken lawmaker publicly condemned Sunak for "equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest" over several policies, including cutting immigration.

Last year saw the second-highest annual number of migrants arrive on UK shores in small boats across from France since records began in 2018. A total of 41,472 migrants landed on England's southern coast in 2025 after making the perilous Channel crossing from northern France.

Reform – founded in 2021 from the ashes of Farage's Brexit Party – won the most seats at last year's local elections in England. That has prompted predictions it could seize power from the ruling center-left Labour at the next general election, due by August 2029. The party is also hoping to make major gains in local elections slated for May.

However, Reform UK appears to have underperformed in Makerfield at 34.5%, while Labour, winning at 54.8%, increased its majority from 43% in 2024. Restore Britain, a party only since this past February, came in at 6.8%. The other parties all lost vote shares over 2024. Although Farage complained that Restore Britain took votes from Reform UK, the two together would have been 41.3% still a landslide defeat. One problem for Reform UK is Robert Jenrick, whose defection from (or ouster by) the Conservatives could lead to the impression that he's an opportunist who will betray prcinciples on key issues.

While he's vociferously supported mass deportations since joining Reform UK, while he was Immigration Minister in the Sunak Tory government, net migration reached record highs. While Reform UK had hoped even to pull an upset in Makerfield, it underperformed. This view in the UK Indepedent may explain why:

The biggest issue for Reform is that it has always depended on the personality and political skills of its leader, Mr Farage, and offered almost nothing in terms of substance, policy or political philosophy.

It is probably not a complete coincidence that their only serious economic policy for most of the past year has been to liberalise cryptocurrency.

. . . Like Reform itself, crypto is based more on vibes without any obvious substantial value. It has an empty quality to it that is just waiting to be found out when the bottom drops out of the market.

. . . And this makes them particularly vulnerable to an aspect of British politics which has been underpriced – tactical voting in the first past the post system.

.. . Some 77 per cent of Labour voters would tactically vote Lib Dem or Green to prevent Reform UK winning. And if only the Conservatives or Reform UK stood a chance of winning in their seat, voters would favour the Tories by 31 per cent to 24 per cent.

It means Reform could still be the biggest party in vote share, but only win a handful of seats.

. . . Meanwhile, Reform has clearly been spooked by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain on its right flank.

While Restore did not win anywhere near enough votes to make the difference in Makerfield, its presence has pushed Reform from a trajectory of being more centre-ground back to a core vote strategy based on extreme rhetoric against migrants.

In other words, Reform UK can stand for nothing much and lose, or it could be more hard core like Restore Britain and also lose. Someone is going to have to solve this puzzle.

OK, It's Clearer Why UK Labour Hates Musk

𝕏 is the #1 news app in the UK.

This is exactly why the BBC, The Telegraph and other UK legacy media keep pushing negative fake attacks on Elon Musk.

They are getting destroyed in the rankings. The British public has rejected them.

Legacy media is finished. They are lashing… pic.twitter.com/UBdVCU65eM

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 18, 2026

This post here from last weekend gives just a glimpse of the UK uniparty's program to control media coverage of migrant stabbings and grooming gangs, and in fact, UK legacy media has been generally cooperative. The problem is that, just as in the US, people are bypassing legacy media to get their news. In the post embedded above, the legacy BBC, equivalent to the US PBS, is ranked fourth behind X, reddit, and something called Nextdoor: Neighbour Network. I asked the AI oracle if Nextdoor: Neighbour Network is legacy media, and it answered,

No, Nextdoor is not a legacy media organization. It is a hyper-local social networking platform. While it partners with thousands of publishers to distribute local journalism and emphasizes community information, its core function is peer-to-peer social interaction rather than a traditional publisher.

As if to twist the knife, Musk polsted this in response to the Rupert Lowe-Restore Britain report on grooming gangs:

Those who knew must go to prison for a long time https://t.co/ZxhquiGct9

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2026

The Labour government has been implementing new policies to control social media, the best known of which is to keep children under 16 off most social platforms, especially X, entirely. However, a more comprehensive program will limit or prohibit social media postings the government deems harmful during "crises":

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.

It follows concerns at the top of government over the speed with which misinformation spreads at pivotal moments. Ofcom’s announcement also follows the outbreak of rioting in Southampton over the police response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak.

. . . “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.

The consensus is that the proposed controls will require everyone to have a digital ID, if only to verify age. But kids around the world have found ways to bypass this:

Im over 18 but I didn’t want to give Twitter my ID or selfie because [redacted] the government so I just took photo of some random dude on a different screen and on third attempt it worked.

I’m not in the UK but I imagine that it’s similar there ?

My experience of online controls in the US -- for instance, corporate attempts to block work computers from accessing adult-content sites -- are largely unsuccessful; as the user just above suggested, people can just keep trying, and nobody has the resources to monitor that sort of thing. Controlling VPNs woluld be an even bigger task:

The United Kingdom is going to announce additional restrictions in July on VPN usage. This is ON TOP OF the social media restrictions and mandated online identity verifications.

It's over, UK. You sold out your own society. Absolute tragedy. Very sad.
pic.twitter.com/cJRYSwqTlI

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) June 17, 2026

The idea of a “Great British Firewall” makes for a catchy headline, but it would be riddled with holes and cause huge problems.

. . . To comprehensively block VPNs, the government would need to require internet providers to inspect traffic, restrict apps from app stores, and attempt to cut off access to thousands of VPN servers worldwide. That would be a massive, expensive, and deeply complicated undertaking—and it still wouldn’t work.

. . . Even if the government successfully blocked every major commercial VPN app and service, technically skilled users could simply rent a cheap server anywhere in the world and set up their own private tunnel in under ten minutes. There are also tools designed to evade exactly this kind of blocking, disguising encrypted traffic as ordinary web activity.

To give an idea of the popularity of VPNs, although I don't use one myself -- I'm too small potatoes -- simple math from my blog statistics tells me that roughly 99.5% of my traffic comes from VPNs. That's how many people don't want a record that they're visiting this blog, and it's probably the reason there are almost no comments. But it's also an indication of how big a problem the UK would have in trying to ban VPNs.

The Death Of Hollywood

A recent piece, The Inexplicable Suicide of Hollywood, inadvertently ties the disastrous underperformance of the two latest summer blockbusters together:

Since starting this article, Hollywood has experienced a summer blockbuster phenomenon with the success of two thrillers, Obsession, an indie produced by a YouTuber making over $230 million on a budget of $750,000 and Backrooms, a larger indie distributed by A24 making $118 million on a $10 million budget and directed by twenty-year-old. Audiences showed up to theaters for these two movies while shunning a $165 million Disney Star Wars movie released at the same time.

It looks like he submitted his piece before this past weekend's disappointment with Spielberg, which just reinforces his point.

To be fair, there really isn’t one single cause, but the ones you don’t hear are probative. You’ll never hear that the content just sucks; that we just haven’t been producing entertainment that’s widely enjoyed. And that we’re willing to let Hollywood die before re-focusing from politics and morals to art and commerce.

On rare occasions, you can get a glimpse at internal data. In a break from conformity, Disney made public that they were desperate to attract young men back to the brand. The announcement came as a shock and resulted in pushback from employees. This sheds light on how much they devalued the golden goose of Lucasfilm and Marvel. Most of the industry will remain in denial, but you can feel an inkling of understanding rising under bouts of lashing out in hatred of the very audience they rely on to survive.

During my time at film school, I was forced to pledge to use any opportunity I’d have working in the film industry to support and promote women. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Two decades in, it’s clear how much this sort of indoctrination has shaped the landscape. During the mid-2010s, the generation raised on this ideology hit critical mass.

. . . Laying low became a skill. The revolutionaries saw their power and control proliferate. Every major studio somehow became beholden to the whims of some obscure administrator at San Diego State University, and suddenly, no project would be greenlit unless it met certain quotas in front of and behind the camera. People with no experience dictated terms. This was “important” and the “right thing to do.” Men were purged for the sake of being men.

I'm actually remiinded of Tom Wolfe's argument in his 1975 The Painted Word:

Wolfe's thesis in The Painted Word was that by the 1970s, modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics' theories. Wolfe criticized avant-garde art, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. The main target of Wolfe's book, however, was not so much the artists, as the critics. In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of "Cultureburg": Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that these three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums, and critics with outsized influence.

Let's move to a piece at Real Clear Politics by Roger L Simon. Once again, in my view, RCP is conventional wisdom, and Simon is the sort of elder statesman of conservatism that they like to platform. Here's his take on Disclosure Day:

[B]efore I get into details, let me say that I enjoyed the movie; at least I didn’t feel compelled to leave, as I do with so many these days. Mediocre Spielberg is better than almost everything else out there.

Contrast that with the YouTube reviewer in the clip embedded above, who cites tweet after tweet, "Possibly the worst Spielberg film yet. . . . This is one of the cringiest experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. . . . This is 'alien conspiracy movie' for normies. . . . Disclosure Day is genuinely one of the dumbest science fiction movies I've ever seen. . . . Word of mouth is burying this movie. . . . Felt like someone tried to imitate a Spielberg movie. . . . I mean, potentially one of the worst movies I've ever seen."

Well, Roger L Simon is a respectable conservative who's made a media career for himself as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and pundit as both a liberal and a conservative. He likely has too many friends in the film industry to step too far out of line. Spielberg is still a Great Man, apparently, so Simon gives us dimestore social analysis:

The Spielberg of the late 70s and early 80s was working in an optimistic America that was still relatively postwar. Sometimes accused of being shallow, he turned his attention to the darker moments of recent history with Schindler’s List, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, and an even darker fantasy of an alien invasion, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. The latter contains giant extraterrestrials of a rather distant kind from the benign characters of his earlier films.

By then, we were in a post-9/11 America, and nothing was the same. The journey to Disclosure Day is not all that far. Conspiracies, real or imagined, are the order of the day. No one trusts anyone. Why shouldn’t we be housing extraterrestrials as if they were animals in a zoo? Why not make a movie about it?

A simpler explanation is that Spielberg made a career out of exploiting cinematic cliches, but cliches by their nature go out of date. The people who master and exploit them don't recognize it when they do. Judging from the remarkable number of YouTube reviews that suggest Disclosure Day is comically bad, it's not hard to think it's a symptom of Hollywood's complacency, something Simon's Oscar and detective novel awaard nominations may have blinded him from recognizing.

New UK Grooming Gangs Report, One Of Several

In connection with my recent posts on migrant-related stabbings in the UK, I've mentioned a related problem referred to there as "grooming gangs". According to Wikipedia,

Several government reviews have reported failures by British institutions in preventing, identifying and prosecuting the widespread cases of group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation that mostly occurred between the 1990s and 2010s. Allegations of governmental and institutional failures to respond to the problem or to downplay or cover up the issue have been described as a grooming gangs scandal.

. . . Media coverage and political discourse around these crimes has especially focused on the ethnic and religious background of perpetrators in high-profile cases, most of whom were Muslim men of Pakistani descent, and whether this prevented proper investigation. Data in Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire shows that, in the 2020s, men of an Asian ethnic background are disproportionately represented among perpetrators in those areas, but there is insufficient data to draw conclusions about ethnicity of perpetrators across the UK [cough, cough].

. . . Group-based child sexual exploitation and localised grooming are terms used to describe the sexual exploitation or grooming of children and adolescents by groups

. . . A 2013 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee describes a group first making contact with the child in a public place. After the group's initial contact with the child, offers of treats (takeaway food, cigarettes, drugs) persuade the child to maintain the relationship. Sometimes a boy similar in age presents himself as a "boyfriend"; this person arranges for the child to be raped by other members of the group.

There were numerous local investigations of individual cases in the 2010s, but reports from government and local agencies routinely downplayed the ethnicity of the offenders, often going so far as to say they were mostly white.

In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that victims had been failed due to political correctness, and established a taskforce to target this specific issue. In 2025, the Labour government commissioned Baroness Casey to make a detailed audit of these cases, published as the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. In her audit, Baroness Casey wrote: "Assertions that the majority of child sexual abuse offenders are White, even if true, are at best misleading. In a population with over of 80% of people of White ethnicity, it should always be a significant issue when people from a White background are not in the majority of victims or perpetrators of crime". The review found that there were serious shortcomings in the recording of ethnicity data about perpetrators of group-based sexual abuse. In one instance, Casey stated finding a case file where the word "Pakistani" had been tippexed [whited] out. On 14 June 2025, having previously resisted launching an investigation, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the British government would launch a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs.

The "Casey Report" was released in June 2025.

The British government has announced a national inquiry into organised child sexual abuse following the release of a damning report by Baroness Louise Casey that criticised decades of institutional failure to protect children from so-called “grooming gangs”.

It marks a remarkable U-turn by the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which had resisted months of calls for an inquiry, stating that it was focusing on recommendations already made in an earlier seven-year probe.

. . . In her report, Casey concluded that too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13- to 15-year-old is perceived to have been “in love with” or have “consented to” sex with the perpetrator.

Her review also highlighted reluctance by the authorities to “examine the ethnicity of the offenders”, saying it was not racist to do so.

The formal parliamentary report is still in progress; its partial results can be found here. But yesterday, UK MP Rupert Lowe released his own crowd-funded report on rape gangs. Lowe has previosuly been associated with Brexit and Reform, but as of 2025, he founded the Restore Britain party, which is somewhat to the right of Reform, and as of now he is the only member of Restore Britain in parliament.

The full Lowe report can be found here. Its main point is that "at least 250,000" white girls were raped and trafficked by predominantly Muslim gangs since the 1950s. The reaction I've seen so far confirms what I've been saying here about the problem of the working class in the UK:

We have class issues in this country, though we deny it, but nothing like the deep loathing that the UK middle classes (not the upper classes) have for the working class. We are talking about the university credentialed class (used to be a lot smaller). A whole class of…

— Daniel Heneghan (@dpheneghan1) June 17, 2026

As I've noted, the loathing of the UK lower bourgeoisie for the working class dates back at least to the General Strike of 1926, there's nothing recent about it. It's also reflected in Henry James's 1898 story "In the Cage", where a working-class woman in a telegraph office becomes fascinated with what the bourgeois people in the neighborhood reveal about their lives in the telegrams they send. She becomes particularly attracted to the complex relationships of a Mr Everard, and the two develop a special intimacy on that basis.

Finally they meet outside the office and acknowledge the special relationship -- but soon, Mr Everard's complex dealings require that the woman retrieve a particular telegram, sent months earlier, from the office records. If it can't be found, Mr Everard and a certain noblewoman will be ruined. The woman retrieves it, only to discover that it will put a potential scandal to rest and allow Mr Everard and the noblewoman to marry. So much for the other "special" relationship.

It looks like Henry James had insights into UK class relations as far back as Victoria's reign. The stuff you can pick up in English class! Here's a relevant YouTube as well:

Bachelor Degree Aspirants Decline

The value of a college education:

In a new research brief, The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Education found that only 44 percent of American high school students expected to earn a bachelor’s degree in 2022, down from 72 percent in 2002. The study also revealed a parental gap among high school students, with only 33 percent of first-generation students aspiring to a bachelor’s degree in 2022, compared to 60 percent two decades earlier.

. . . Historically, the prestige of higher education relied on a form of geographic and information monopoly. In 2002, the narrative surrounding a teenager’s future was tightly managed by local gatekeepers—parents, high school guidance counselors, and FCC-regulated television networks that uniformly reinforced the traditional American Dream. If these gatekeepers insisted that a bachelor’s degree was the sole gateway to a middle-class life, a teenager had few tools to verify or challenge that claim. The cultural value of the degree was artificially protected by a lack of visible alternatives.Higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy.

Today, those bottlenecks are gone. With teenagers spending an average of eight and a half hours a day consuming decentralized digital media, the local gatekeeper has been entirely bypassed. In this informational vacuum, higher education has been forced to compete in an open attention economy against hyper-charismatic, highly relatable creators who operate with zero institutional overhead.

Nevertheless,

When combining tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses, the cost to attend 16 colleges and universities across the nation tops $100,000 per year, according to new data from the Princeton Review.

“We just keep going up and it just never stops,” Jeff Selingo, author of “Dream School,” told CNBC, which reported on the data.

“For the 2026-27 academic year, 16 institutions — including Duke, Georgetown, New York University and University of Chicago — have a sticker price of more than $100,000, according to data exclusively provided to CNBC from The Princeton Review’s upcoming ‘The Best 392 Colleges’ list,'” the outlet reported.

But as I've pointed out here, very few US-born students pay full freight. The real moneymakers are foreign students, who are much more likely to pay the posted price. Except,

The number of newly enrolled international students declined by 17 percent during the recent fall semester, according to the Institute of International Education’s Fall 2025 Snapshot on International Student Enrollment.

This drop has exposed universities’ heavy financial reliance on foreign tuition dollars, according to Shaan Patel, CEO and founder of college admissions company Prep Expert.

Unlike the nearly 40 percent of American students who rely on federal aid to cover higher education expenses, international students do not have access to these benefits and pay their tuition in cash, making them infinitely more attractive to universities, Patel told The College Fix via email.

. . . Schools with larger endowments such as the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, whose student bodies are approximately 20 percent and 40 percent international, respectively, have been able to keep their heads above water financially, even outright refusing federal dollars.

Yet broader structural problems remain. Since 1980, college tuition and fees in the U.S. have increased by 1,200 percent, prompting critics to accuse universities of inflating costs and prioritizing profits over affordability for American families.

Over my working career, I had jobs (especially in government) where a bachelor's degree was an absolute requirement. Most tech-type jobs in private industry, though, had four-year degrees optional. I saw very little difference in interpersonal skills or oveall intelligence among my co-workers in either environment. For that matter, our friends at church have varying educational levels, but judging only from their interpersonal and communication skills, there's no way to tell the difference.

The same applies to our neighbors in a very prosperous community -- many have done well at blue-collar jobs in Hollywood, and you can't really distinguish them from others with lofty qualifications.

Another factor is cheating at the college level. I've discussed here how prevalent plagiarism was in freshman composition classes 50 years ago, but apparently with the rise of AI, the problem has only gotten worse. The result is that both students and their parents say that merely paying college tuition and fees should be enough to guarantee status in the upper bourgeoisie, no need to check their work. At best, the univerisites are nervous about this:

Princeton University recently decided to adopt a proposal that would reintroduce proctors to every exam room over AI cheating fears.

The proposal would revise Princeton’s 133-year-old Honor Code, an agreement between students and faculty established in 1893. Previously, students pledged not to take unfair advantage during examinations. In exchange, faculty proctors were not present in the exam rooms.

The proposal cites “the advent of generative artificial intelligence products” as one of the primary concerns which prompted its development. As a result, instructors will “act as additional observers” in the exam room.

The conundrum seems to be, especially with AI, it's difficult to determine whether a submitted piece of work, a paper or an essay exam response, is the result of a student's own mental process or a machine's ability to generate a facsimile of an informed response to any question. But this goes to the problem of the professors, who must themselves work within a closely circmscribed set of views within their subject area -- if they're discouraged from creative thought, how can they recognize it in students?

I don't have a whole lot of confidence that this will be solved, especially not by the universities themselves.

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 Graham'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.