CBS News fired “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, just one day after he accused editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of attempting to “murder” the long-running show.  Nick Bilton, the tech journalist and filmmaker recently named the new boss of “60 Minutes,” told Pelley that he was being fired after he aggressively “hijacked” a staff meeting to attack the new direction of CBS. Pelley, who has been with the network for decades, attacked Bilton’s qualifications during a staff meeting on Monday and reportedly ignored opportunities for private meetings with the new leadership.  “Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress,” Bilton wrote to Pelley. “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.” WATCH FROM TODAY’S EPISODE OF MORNING WIRE:     Bilton said that Pelley “hijacked” his first meeting with staff to “disparage” him and responded to his efforts to reach out with “remarkable incivility and contempt.”  “I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort,” he said.  During Bilton’s first meeting with staff, Pelley interrupted Bilton to say that Weiss was “murdering ‘60 Minutes,” according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” Pelley said of Weiss. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job,” he added. “The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?” Bilton responded by saying that he would be meeting with everyone, including Pelley, to discuss his plans for the show and that he wanted to focus on producing quality journalism. Pelley met with Bilton and other CBS executives on Tuesday, but that meeting did not go well.  “Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together,” Bilton wrote. “You made clear that you are not interested in such a path. Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (‘CBS’) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately.” Pelley had worked for CBS News since 1989 and once anchored “CBS Evening News.”  In an interview with the New York Times after his firing, Pelley discussed his experience reporting in various war zones.  “I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” he said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.” Weiss came to CBS after the network and “60 Minutes” had faced years of accusations of bias, including for releasing a highly edited interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass officially secured a spot in November’s runoff election, while reality television star Spencer Pratt and far-Left Councilmember Nithya Raman continued battling for the second slot. With roughly 63% of the vote counted as of Wednesday morning, Bass led the field with 34.8% support, according to Associated Press results. Pratt was running second with 30.4%, while Raman trailed in third at 22.3%. The Associated Press projected Bass would advance to the runoff. As of Wednesday morning, however, the race between Pratt and Raman had not yet been called. WATCH FROM MORNING WIRE:     Pratt, however, was already talking like the runoff matchup had been set: Spencer Pratt versus Karen Bass. “She knows it’s on. I hope she’s ready,” Pratt said Tuesday night when asked about a potential runoff against the incumbent mayor. “I literally could not be more excited.”      A few months ago, Pratt was viewed as a long-shot candidate. Now he appears within striking distance of becoming Bass’ challenger in November. “I was going to be happy if I wasn’t moving forward, but now I feel very confident,” he said. The reality television star turned political outsider has built his campaign around voter frustration with homelessness, crime, and Bass’ handling of the wildfire disaster that destroyed thousands of homes. Pratt lost both his own home and his childhood home in the fire. And while election officials were still counting ballots, Pratt was already talking about what comes next. “We have five months to put the best team the city could ever dream of,” he said. Pratt argued that voters have rallied behind his campaign because they are tired of politicians and want someone willing to tell them the truth. “At the end of the day, what’s been resonating is that people just want the truth and they want to know somebody’s heart,” he said. “I try to be as true to my authentic self and I just believe a lot of Los Angeles is so excited to hear from a non-politician.” Pratt said voters are looking for a fighter. “They want somebody to speak the truth for their communities and fight for them,” he said. “They want a fighter that’s going to step up when the city fails them or their elected leaders fail them and I’m ready to be that person for Los Angeles.” He also couldn’t resist taking a shot at Raman, who spent much of the campaign fighting him for second place. “The communist already lost,” Pratt said. Thousands of ballots remain uncounted, and election officials will continue processing votes in the coming days. If the current results hold, Los Angeles could be headed toward one of the most unexpected mayoral runoffs in recent memory: Karen Bass versus Spencer Pratt. Pratt made it clear he’s ready for that possibility. “We can do debates every Friday if she’d like,” he said. “As many debates as Mayor Bass would like.”

As Democratic lawmakers and activists claim detainees at ICE’s Delaney Hall are engaged in a hunger strike, a different story is playing out inside the facility. While detainees at the Newark, New Jersey, detention center are opting not to eat their regular meals, they’re going to the commissary to buy candy bars instead, a source familiar with the situation said recently. New data obtained by The Daily Wire shows that commissary sales at Delaney Hall surged 161%, rising from $11,498 on May 26 to $30,013 on June 1. While snack sales jumped, the detainee population fell from 724 to 621 during that same time period. The so-called hunger strike stems from allegations of poor conditions inside the facility, where Democratic lawmakers like Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) have claimed that there are worms in the food. President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said Monday that he personally visited the facility and ate the same food being served to detainees, which he said he enjoyed. “I even made a surprise visit this weekend and walked into the cafeteria and ate the same meal that the detainees around me were eating, and I made sure my tray equaled their tray. I had spaghetti and meat sauce, I had green beans, I had bread and rolls, I had drinks, I had dessert. The food was good, it’s all a false premise. There was never a hunger strike,” Homan said. “They may not be eating in the cafeteria, but what I found out they’re ordering food from the commissary and eating it in their cells,” he added. The Department of Homeland Security has also repeatedly hit back at the allegations, saying “all detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.” Former ICE New York Field Office Deputy Director Scott Mechkowski recently told The Daily Wire that so-called hunger strikes where detainees are loading up on commissary snacks are all too common in immigration detention. “I’ve seen real hunger strikes during my time as an ICE official, managing detention facilities. What’s happening at Delaney Hall is not a hunger strike,” Mechkowski said. “When detainees are buying up Honey Buns and Snickers bars, and those with money are helping others get snacks, that’s not a hunger strike, it’s just a publicity stunt,” he added. Meanwhile, Newark Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka announced Tuesday that he was expanding an existing lawsuit against Delaney Hall operator GEO Group. The state later announced a separate lawsuit against the private prison company, accusing it of refusing to allow state health inspectors inside. Protesters have clashed with authorities for days outside the facility, leading to dozens of arrests. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill held back state police from responding to the melee until nearly a week after the protests began. On Monday, Baraka instituted a curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Do people who are really, ridiculously rich deserve our sympathy? Radical progressives think the answer is no if the murder victim is a healthcare CEO. Certain mainstream journalists believe the same about at least one millionaire socialite who owns keys to a private beach on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.  In case you haven’t seen it, the latest “author telling lies” controversy revolves around Belle Burden, a New York City heiress who wrote a memoir detailing the breakup of her marriage.  “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” started out as a Modern Love column and eventually was turned into a full-length memoir that went viral. Book clubs and avid readers were drawn by the schadenfreude of a rich, beautiful woman being abandoned by her husband of two decades for reasons that are still frustratingly unclear.  Yes, he had an affair and got caught. As Burden’s memoir explained, her husband “James” (really hedge fund executive Henry Davis) calmly explained to her in the aftermath of getting caught that rather than trying counseling or finding a path back to trust, he was unhappy with the marriage and wanted out.  The book was highly praised until it wasn’t. The New Yorker published an exposé at the end of May titled “What’s Missing From Belle Burden’s ‘Strangers,’” laying bare some of the details the author reportedly fudged about her financial situation.  While Burden expressed alarm at the prospect of losing multiple properties after blindly trusting her husband and adding his name to the deeds without protecting the generational wealth her family had built, the publication noted with disdain that Burden would have remained super rich no matter what. Journalist Jessica Winter accused the socialite of overexaggerating the severity of the situation and, crucially, of not being anywhere near poor enough post-divorce.  “No reasonable person would demand that she provide a forensic accounting of her finances in the memoir. Yet its impression of candor may suffer in light of what Burden leaves out of the narrative,” Winter wrote. She later concluded, “[Burden’s] long-term financial security, as opposed to her emotional security, was never at risk. It might be difficult for anyone in her position to separate one from the other.” The fine details of Burden’s tax returns aren’t even the point here. What’s very revealing is how quickly the online discourse changed from sympathy for a woman who had her entire life blown up overnight to scorn for someone who didn’t tell the whole truth about how much money she had. “Belle Burden’s Memoir Made Me Feel Poor,” one Substack writer titled her reaction piece.  It led to questions like, are rich people allowed to be sad? Are they allowed to mourn the loss of their life partners if they still have a lot of money left when that person leaves them?  Burden said in a statement to the New Yorker: “When I wrote ‘Strangers,’ I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could, and I respected the privacy of sealed court records. I stand by everything I wrote, including the fear I felt from my ex-husband’s threats, the contributions I made and could make to my family, and what happened to me financially and emotionally in my marriage and divorce,” she said to the New Yorker. “While I didn’t intend it, I am glad that women have taken my story as motivation for insisting on financial transparency in their marriages.” I’ll admit, as someone who does not boast Vanderbilts in my lineage and who has never owned a vacation home, I found it a little jarring when I read “Strangers” earlier this year. But the moments that stuck out to me most had nothing to do with money. Burden shares three children with her ex-husband, and, according to her, he didn’t fight for custody at all. Instead, he allegedly told her, “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t. You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids.” According to her book, her husband said, “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.” Rejection of his wife is bad enough. But a man rejecting his children and, according to her, seeming happy enough seeing them infrequently in the coming weeks and months, is an absolute tragedy. I try to imagine being in a similar situation and would almost certainly feel more heartbroken about my husband abandoning our children than I would about him rejecting me.  Sympathy for any aspect of Burden’s messy divorce is hard to come by after the New Yorker journalist tore her story to shreds. There are multiple think pieces and exposés that essentially say we shouldn’t care anymore because she lied about the finances. Burden was never in danger of ending up homeless, they argue, so we shouldn’t care about her memoir anymore at all. While the financial fallout of her divorce does feature prominently in the memoir, the more pressing issue Burden focuses on is trying to glean an explanation from her ex. She asks why he left her alone when she expected to grow old with him. Why did he abandon what she believed to be a stable, loving relationship in favor of something else?  “This was not just an affair. This was not just a rejection of me,” Burden wrote in the book. “He was abandoning all of it, and all of us.” Anyone who has actually read the book can see this woman’s pain laid bare. Meanwhile, the whole conversation has changed to figuring out how much Burden has in her multiple trusts. As if having millions of dollars makes the sacred covenant of marriage dispensable.  “I don’t know if he made the decision to leave suddenly after being caught, or if he’d carefully planned his exit for years,” she wrote. “I don’t know what role the pandemic played. I don’t know how much of it was about money. I don’t know how much of it was about me.” “I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will,” Burden added. Memoirs in general should be taken with a grain of salt. They are one person’s perspective on a situation and shouldn’t be read as non-fiction. They sit somewhere in between — not totally true, but not untrue. Burden added a disclaimer, saying the book “recounts events as accurately as I can remember them.” Memoirs are meant to be entertaining, and they are always deeply personal and emotionally vulnerable. Would it kill us to show a little grace to the person writing them?  And then there’s the question of whether any journalists would have dug into this woman’s tax returns if she were poor or even middle class. Maybe they would have. But it does seem that any exaggerations or half-truths would have been reported less gleefully if Burden had fewer commas in her bank account. Somewhere along the way, we’ve decided that grief only counts if it happens to the right people. A husband can abandon his wife, reject his children, blow up a family, and leave emotional devastation in his wake. But if the woman left behind still has money in the bank, we’re told not to feel sorry for her. The question isn’t whether Belle Burden is rich or if she really lost everything when her husband left. It’s whether we’re allowed to have sympathy for rich women when they, like the rest of us, often do face tragedy.

The cotton candy-buffet of society. Entertainment on our one-dimensional, flat-screen, wall-mounted televisions that give us endless choices, read our algorithmically trained minds, and feed us limitless but unfulfilling content, we might miss the one thing that is, well, missing: cigarettes. In 1965, 42% of adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes compared to 11% in 2023. Never has something so prevalent in the culture fallen so far out of favor. Are we better for it? Sure, if we let our lungs dictate public health policy, then bravo cig scolds. You’ve done your job. But from a broader societal view — one where we examine tradeoffs and trends, aesthetics and habits, life’s joys versus the firm hammer of the lifestyle police — it’s a tossup. But there is no doubt that something has been lost. Post-WWII America was ready to settle down and light up. There was a barrage of consumerism-fueled advertisements, the flash-bang of novelty housewares and houses — Plastic! Nylon! Asbestos! Vinyl! The Joneses lived next door, where the grass was mowed on Saturday morning, and the backyard barbecue was fired up at night. There was a trip to Disneyland, kids with coonskin hats, and Roy Roger cap guns with matching cowboy boots. Mom had a Kelvinator Foodarama refrigerator, Dad brought a briefcase and hat to work, and there was a Cadillac Eldorado in shimmering Brenton Blue parked in the driveway. A new RCA television sat on the satin-carpeted living rooms of Suburbia U.S.A., where Groucho Marx bet your life, the White Hat always got his man, Eliot Ness appeared, cigarettes were everywhere, and life was good. Too good to last. The hippies took care of that. And a misunderstood war. And assassinations and civil unrest, and a nation at the cusp of generational change. It was also the release of a new superpower, the combining of government as your mommy and daddy, combined with the limitless self-important smug narcissist-morality complex of virtue-by-action. The ultimate shame game; a nuclear bomb dropped on society that didn’t defer to natural selection — it was selection. Big Tobacco was the villain, and moral scolds looked down their noses at the dirty, working-class cigarette smokers from their jazzercise class and Jane Fonda workouts, dressed in Nike sneakers and spandex, sucking fresh-squeezed pulpous juices from the exotic carrot section of a natural foods co-op, extracted from a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer, and pecking at bran flake cereal. Pedal faster on your stationary bike. Thus was born the true nanny state. We shifted from Robert Young’s Father Knows Best, to the feds and the little foot soldiers of the social justice army, doing their best to boot stomp as life’s-simple-little-pleasures police. Fast-forward past the release of the landmark 1964 Surgeon General report warning of the health hazards of smoking to today. The rate of tobacco use in the United States has fallen significantly and keeps falling, now to its lowest point in the U.S. In 2024, only 9.9% American adults reported smoking at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and currently smoke every day or some days (the CDC’s definition of a smoker). Public health became public business, singled out and stigmatized. But decades of being squeezed into zones, taxed, ostracized into frozen huddled masses behind the dumpsters in the dead of winter, and subject to rude comments from passers-by — all in the name of “public health” or as the grannies say, “For your own good.” For your own good. What does that mean? How far are we willing to go? How much are we willing to moralize our neighbors to soothe a sense of do-gooder attitude toward complete strangers? Now Gen Z — the kids who got the fuzzy end of the lollipop over Covid mass hysterics, had the environmental neuroses of the world heaped on their backs, and are drowning in the inherited miasma of youth sculpting, health-maxxing, green-drink, bio-hack, and Silicon Valley godsplainers — are on a steady diet of kombucha and anxiety (and, it turns out, vaping, which doesn’t count because it’s gay). We have access to eye-popping amounts of personal data, we have health trackers, bio-cryo-genesis, cell rejuvenation, fillers, plumpers, GLP-1s, and personal trainers. Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, The Biggest Loser, Gold’s Gym, L.A. Fitness, Planet Fitness, Equinox, Washington, D.C. Sports Club, New York Sports Club, and Pure Barre. Spinning, plyometrics, resistance training, martial arts, therapy art, AI therapists, personal dietitians, life coaches, meditation coaches, sleep coaches, sleep trackers, and mind-body spiritualists. We’ve had fat-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free, high protein, high fiber, low-carb, no-carb, natural flavor, no flavor, non-GMO, organic, fair-trade, small-farm, farm-to-table, vegetable-forward, cage-free, free-range, grass-fed, raw, steamed, canned, flash-frozen, dehydrated, rehydrated, sustainable, oil-based, natural color, no seed oil, no artificial color, no color. Filtered water, ultra-filtered water, mineral water, distilled water, reverse-osmosis water. Bottled water, water bottles, canned water, and lugging around jugs of water. Eggs are good, bad, and good again. Same with coffee, alcohol, fat, bacon, steak, fruit, fruit juice, soda pop, ice cream, caffeine, sugar, milk, sunlight, sunscreen, anti-perspirant, underwear, processed fibers, processed foods, ultra-processed foods, preservatives, vitamins, supplements, and MSG. Now there are PFAS, PVB, PVA, UVAs, and UVBs. Yet we are constantly told we are the unhealthiest beings on the planet. What good does it do? Eh, not a whole lot, except to encourage people to obsess over things that, a generation or two ago, we didn’t even know existed. We had more common sense and common experiences. We went to bars and smoked cigarettes and met girls and had drinks. It wasn’t a five-alarm fire waiting for Karen to write in the comment section about how bad smoking is. Guess what? We know. It’s right there on the pack of Luckies, Marlboros, American Spirit, Camels, and Newports. It’s been drummed into us since grade school. But after years of “guidance” from the government on everything from vaccines, masking, heart health, weight, junk food, seatbelts, exercise, sleep, eating, and drinking, along with social pressures from the same mentality of people who wiped down their groceries during COVID, who believe non-electric vehicles should be banned and that firearms spontaneously leap up and shoot people, and who think it’s their right to moralize habits, vices, and pleasures for a sense of self-importance and righteousness, it’s time to knock it off. Cigarettes come with an attitude. What that says about the smoker is up to the smoker, but right at this moment, it’s a small act of rebellion against the nanny state and the health-and-wellness scolds. The truth is, we’re not really well. A person can follow all the right rules (or at least the rules of the current minute) and die a tragic, untimely, and unfortunate death. Another person can break all the rules and live to 104. The rise in the prevalence of smoking, or at least its visibility, was a recent Vulture essay in New York Magazine by writer Xochitl Gonzalez. She discusses why smoking is attractive, “But I loved the culture of the whole thing: the intimacy of someone getting close to light you up. The matches, the Zippos. The way, over the course of five minutes, small talk could fall into something like deep conversation.” (Even though she acknowledges the risks and dangers of cigarette smoking, there are still comments accusing her of shilling for Big Tobacco and warning of the health consequences, completely missing the point of the piece.) Are there other ways to accomplish this? Sure. But for some people, it’s enchanting: A tactile experience that evokes the simplicity and freedom of the past; a rebellion against the health obsession and neurotic worrying of our present. It’s the aesthetic of the movie-house big screen, where people used to laugh and cry together. It’s the wild west, the punk rocker, the Monte Carlo gambler, the race car driver, the farmer, the guys at the track, and the ladies at the bar. It’s in the hands of athletes, musicians, artists, movie stars, inventors, presidents, soldiers, and writers. If you look through the smoke screen, you might find something in that slim smoldering stick. You’ll find what you’re looking for, whether it’s unyielding confidence of Clint Eastwood’s Blondie in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with his silent, piercing eyes; the toughness of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in his Casablanca-white tuxedo coat, a taut, complex face of a man deep in thought over the hill of beans he’s found himself in as the Free World hangs in the balance, a cigarette lingering in each scene as if it were an extension of his hand. Audrey Hepburn’s delicate, gloved hand with a comically long cigarette holder perched between fingers that seem like they could wave away the worries of the world, as only Holly Golightly could, draped with simple elegance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And then there’s the sex — and lots of it. Sharon Stone is notoriously dripping with sex as if she found a natural wellspring and bathed in it for Basic Instinct. Lighting a cigarette in that famous scene, as a room full of bulging-eyed men look on, objecting to her casual flicking of the lighter just to see what she would do. She lit the cigarette. Smoking is the thousand-colored beam of light that radiates from a single prism; an act of defiance and rebellion, comfort, power, greed, lust, love, connection, grief, loneliness, confidence, satisfaction, sex, and contemplation. Film director David Lynch was a visionary and a creative in the purest sense, never succumbing to the indignities of conformity or to a world that restricted the possibilities evoked by great art. He was also a smoker. In an interview with Sight and Sound, he described the relationship between his art and cigarettes, “Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful.” The split screen of the American psyche runs through the moving images that form our collective consciousness. Nothing is more prevalent as we shuffle through the Baby Boom generation, with their privilege of living in a sheltered shadow of post-WWII America: the land of space dreams and cosmic urgency, shaken up with the rising passions and fears of the escalating Cold War; hot rods and surfers and rebels, with or without a cause; rock and roll dancing to The Stroll, duck walking with Chuck Berry, and hips shaking with a king; Gunsmoke and the Duke; the Rat Pack and Vegas. The mid-20th century evokes the images that shape our present, especially popular culture. Maybe we’re longing for something that we lost, and in smoking, we see a glimpse of that past and are addicted to the feeling that we could get it back, even if it’s only for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Lynch cited the contradictions of life in his work and his art, observations indicative of his genius. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.” ***