It has been a common lament in the media that President Trump made Game 3 of the NBA Finals in New York all about himself when he decided to attend by inconveniencing fans with enhanced security protocols. However, ahead of Game 4 on Wednesday, NBC’s Late Night host Seth Meyers refused to tell his New York audience that the same security that existed for Game 3 would be in place for Game 4 despite Trump not being in attendance. Reacting to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade claiming Trump had a good time on Monday, Meyers sarcastically claimed, “Yeah, he had a great time. He loves the Knicks. He loves big games. You could tell he was living and dying with every play. In fact, he was so nervous, he couldn't even open his eyes. And I know what you're thinking. ‘That guy's definitely asleep. If he was any more asleep, they would have made him a [bleep] ref!’”   Seth Meyers doesn't care to inform his audience that the security for Game 3 of the NBA Finals when Trump attended was the same as Game 4 when he did not, "Seriously, dude, you shut down midtown Manhattan, made everyone go through two hours of TSA-style security just so you could… pic.twitter.com/aHPYymxGmb— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) June 11, 2026   Meyers then retorted, “Seriously, dude, you shut down midtown Manhattan and made everyone go through two hours of TSA-style security just so you could take a nap at Game 3 of the NBA Finals?” Bringing out his Trump voice, Meyers doubled down: And it's not like Trump wasn't caffeinated. A White House reporter wrote that Trump was seen ‘taking sips from what appeared to be a Diet Coke bottle. The NBA has an exclusive contract with Pepsi, so someone had to bring it in for him because you can't get Coke at MSG.’ So, everyone gets inconvenienced because you decide to go to the game, and you won't even drink your second choice soda? Next time this guy says Iran is being unreasonable in negotiations, remember he basically said, ‘Well, if they don't have diet coke, I'm not going to go.’ While Meyers does tape his show in the afternoon, several hours before both Game 4 and Late Night, that is no excuse. The NYPD posted on X at 8:39 AM local time that the same security setup that existed on Monday would be in place on Wednesday. With Trump not in attendance on Wednesday, the likely explanation is previous episodes of fan violence and any “TSA-style” security decision made by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s government, of whom Meyers is a big fan. Here is a transcript for the June 10-taped show: NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers 6/11/2026 12:49 PM ET SETH MEYERS: Yeah, he had a great time. He loves the Knicks. He loves big games. You could tell he was living and dying with every play. In fact, he was so nervous, he couldn't even open his eyes. And I know what you're thinking. "That guy's definitely asleep. If he was any more asleep, they would have made him a [bleep] ref!" Seriously, dude, you shut down midtown Manhattan and made everyone go through two hours of TSA-style security just so you could take a nap at Game 3 of the NBA Finals? When I saw this clip, I made the same face Mike Bloomberg made when Jose Alverado crashed into him. And it's not like Trump wasn't caffeinated. A White House reporter wrote that Trump was seen “taking sips from what appeared to be a Diet Coke bottle. The NBA has an exclusive contract with Pepsi, so someone had to bring it in for him because you can't get Coke at MSG.” So, everyone gets inconvenienced because you decide to go to the game, and you won't even drink your second choice soda?  Next time this guy says Iran is being unreasonable in negotiations, remember he basically said [Trump voice] "Well, if they don't have diet coke, I'm not going to go.”

The sanctimonious behavior continued to spew from the hallways of CBS News this week as longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl told Puck on Sunday the past few weeks have been “awful,” “the hardest chapter of my career,” and “by far the worst experience I’ve been involved in, or even witnessed.” She also supposedly, as per the creeps at Status, “convened a champagne toast on Monday for” 60 Minutes staff to celebrate her decision to stay and that, as first reported by fellow anti-CBS-obsessed Guardian reporter Jeremy Barr, Paramount Skydance boss David Ellison “called her and pledged that the show would be independent and also apologized for some of the recent turmoil and said things would get back on the right track.” Just like with former colleague Scott Pelley comparing the turnover to a spouse and immediate family being “murdered” in one swoop, Stahl showed how dense and pampered her multi-million dollar ego is and a remarkably offensive world view compared to those who have actually lost everything. Stahl spoke to Puck’s William Cohan and said, “oh, god, this was awful” in reaction to having to decide whether to board a flight to Madrid (the horror!) for a story even though the segment producer assigned to the unidentified story had just been let go. Talk about First World problems: Lesley told me she had to make a snap decision. And while it was just about one particular story for the historic TV newsmagazine, now entering its 59th season, it was also suddenly imbued with fraught significance pertaining to the institution itself. “I had to make a decision to go forward with the story, without knowing if I was going to stay or not,” she told me. In the end, she decided to get on the flight, “not knowing where I was headed.” (Stahl declined to say what the segment is going to be about. I know, but out of respect for her and the show’s process, I’ll keep that under wraps.) She defended Pelley’s I-Am-Spartacus-like attacks from June 1 on new 60 Minutes boss Nick Bilton, saying all he was doing was voicing how “agitated” he was about colleagues such as executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega being let go. “Tell us why they were fired. That was his question. He never got an answer. They felt he was insubordinate for asking that question,” Stahl explained. Explaining why she and fellow remaining correspondents Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim chose to stay, Stahl said they knew “we were going to do it together...no matter what” and “[t]hat was difficult.” She also said she had to explain to Bilton “what the procedures are—all the layers of fact-checking and screenings, just layer upon layer of resh eyes, always fresh eyes, looking over and over and over.” As we’ve shown since our inception as the Media Research Center in 1987, 60 Minutes is anything but straightforward journalism. Along with boasting how “overwhelming” the response has been to her decision, Stahal said “[i]t’s been a gush of lovely thank-you notes, just a flood” that “feels very good” from staff who’ve felt “paralyzed” by the changes. It was here Cohan dropped in Stahl’s tone-deaf, woe-is-me shtick: [S]till, she said, it’s been “the hardest chapter of my career, and it’s been a long career. It’s been over 50 years. This was by far the worst experience I’ve been involved in, or even witnessed. I mean, firing seven people, including the entire management team over here, plus reporters and producers…” Her voice trailed off, as if she was still having trouble processing what had happened during the past week or so. Tuesday over at Status, founder Oliver Darcy boasted CBS News editor-in-chief has “instigated” “unprecedented turmoil” while remaining “bunkered down in her suite on the sixth floor of CBS News’ Manhattan headquarters” that’s “not accessible to the vast majority of CBS News personnel.” He also framed Ellison’s call to Stahl as proof “Paramount brass is becoming more involved in helping clean up [Weiss’s] mess,” which Darcy also described as an “abysmally handled attempt to remake ‘60 Minutes.’” Using anonymous sources to again shiv their boss, Darcy gloated (click “expand”): Of course, Ellison personally stepping in on the “60 Minutes” front suggests he did not believe Weiss was capable of cleaning up the mess on her own. Instead, it signals that he believed the situation had spiraled far enough out of control that he needed to divert his attention way from Paramount’s proposed $110 billion merger with Warners to help extinguish the raging fire himself. Ellison’s hands-on involvement was welcome news to some inside CBS News, who have been hoping the Oracle scion will eventually rein Weiss in. As one CBS News staffer told me Tuesday, “The problem is clearly Bari. We are all trying to clean this up, but we need Ellison’s help.” To be sure, inside CBS News, staffers are increasingly wondering whether Ellison has finally lost confidence in Weiss’ ability to lead the network... (....) Indeed, it is my understanding that in some of these conversations, it has been made clear that the plan is for Weiss to oversee editorial and creative across both networks—an arrangement executives of that caliber are unlikely to accept. (....) “Why would anyone in their right mind take that job without the authority to hire and fire? I can’t think of an executive in the bucket of qualified candidates that can save them who would take that job,” one veteran media executive told Status. “If she remains in charge, I don’t know why anyone with any reputation to preserve would go anywhere near it.” A CNN executive was even more blunt, telling Status: “The notion that someone who is openly failing at running editorial for seven U.S. shows can add 50 more global ones and 150 hours of live news programming a week, not to mention a massive global website, is absurd.” Hilariously, Darcy reported back last Thursday that Weiss being in charge of CBS News has led to “CBS Entertainment chief Amy Reisenbach [having] privately told associates that creatives in Hollywood have expressed disdain over Weiss’ efforts to remake the network” and it’s “inflict[ed] significant damage on the broader CBS brand” with “showrunners” left “in a panic. Yes, Darcy wants us to believe Weiss moving CBS two ticks to the center is going to cause NCIS and George and Mandy’s First Marriage or even The Bold and the Beautiful to collapse. And on Saturday, Status’s Jon Passantino whined Weiss’s “chaotic” cleaning house of Alfonsi, Pelley, Simon, Vega, and others was “a sledgehammer to one of the most storied and successful news brands in American television history” that, without Stahl, Whitaker, and Wertheim staying, could have ushered in “an existential collapse” of 60 Minutes. Absolute children. All of them. As Jay Caruso wrote at the Washington Examiner, no one has a divine right to work at CBS News.

On today’s Morning Joe, Ed Luce of the Financial Times dusted off a hoary ethnic stereotype to explain Iranian negotiating tactics: “They are famously known worldwide, not just as Iranians, but as Persians through history, as very tough hagglers and negotiators.”  The imagery was unmistakable: Persian carpet merchants in the bazaar, haggling relentlessly, playing mind games, feinting and walking away, always ready to yank the deal at the last second.  The panel ran with the stereotype, invoking the Iranians “pulling the rug” out from under American presidents — from Carter to Trump — at least four times. Check the screencap for Joe Scarborough doing his "pulling the rug" move -- which he accompanied with a related sound. In France, this archetype even has a name: "marchand de tapis"— literally, a rug merchant — a longstanding pejorative for a pushy, unscrupulous haggler. I heard it countless times during my years in France—always in a disparaging sense. This is the same media that treats any negative generalization about protected identity groups as a potentially career-ending sin. Imagine a Morning Joe guest describing black negotiators as “street hustlers," Jewish diplomats as notoriously “tough bargainers” with hidden backchannels, or gay counterparts as drama queens who thrive on mind games. The outrage machine would go into overdrive: panels, apologies, firings, the works. Morning Joe: Persians Are 'Tough Hagglers' Who 'Pull the Rug' pic.twitter.com/vkrSe3ajlt — Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) June 11, 2026 But Persians/Iranians? Knowing chuckles all around. The 19th-century Orientalist painting "The Carpet Merchant" by Jean-Léon Gérôme would have made the perfect backdrop. To be clear, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime. The theocratic government has a long record of bad-faith negotiations, hostage diplomacy, nuclear deception, and backing terrorism. The regime deserves the sharpest scrutiny — based on its ideology and actions, not recycled ethnic tropes about “Persians through history.” The real story is MS NOW’s blatant double standard. Stereotyping is only verboten when it targets approved groups. When it serves the preferred Trump-is-Carter narrative, the old marchand de tapis slur gets a polite pass on national television. Here's the transcript. MS NOW Morning Joe 6/11/26 6:08 am EDT JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, Mika, like we said yesterday, the president has been way too eager for a deal, and he's paid for it. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has a new piece out this morning, and it's called, "Trump Needs a New Iran Strategy." MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. It goes on to say, "Iran's large strike on Kuwait's airport was not a big deal, Mr. Trump said, a mere tit for tat. He said the same for Iran's Sunday strike on Israel, urging it not to reply since the missiles didn't hurt anybody. That logic leads to trouble. Only by a miracle did two U.S. pilots survive after an Iranian drone struck and burned inside their Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday. Yet Mr. Trump's early reaction was to say that this too wasn't a big deal."  SCARBOROUGH: An attack on an Apache helicopter.  MIKA: "Mr. Trump won't wanna hear it, but he has been dancing to Iran's tune. He will have to break from it or go down as losing the war politically despite the early military gains. Mr. Trump still hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough, but even the press's favorite unnamed Pakistani officials are now downbeat. As long as Iran believes Mr. Trump is stuck with no alternative, it will squeeze him in the talks and in Hormuz. The president's choice now is to alter the facts on the ground or leave the conflict in a worse position than Mr. Bush did in Iraq." SCARBOROUGH: And they had talk about in this op-ed about what George W. Bush did at the end in '07 with the surge, and how it made a difference, and said he's going to have to figure out militarily how to open up the Strait and keep the Strait open. Also, he may want to go in and do a joint operation with the Israelis to seize their nuclear material. Very risky move, the Wall Street Journal editorial says. But sitting back and waiting for the Iranians to negotiate, and on the Iranians' goodwill, Ed Luce, always leads to trouble. You, of course, as everybody knows, you wrote the biography of Dr. Brzezinski that got you inside the Carter White House during those torturous days where Chris Matthews has said time and time again on this show, we would be told there was going to be a deal, we got excited, we did everything we thought that would line up the deal to get the hostages home, and then the Iranians would [makes pulling gesture] pull the rug out from under us. And he said they did it time and time again.  This is what they do. They just play U.S. presidents, and if those U.S. presidents look like they need a deal, that's when things get really tough, because that's when the Iranians clamp down. ED LUCE: Yeah, I mean, they — they are famously known worldwide, and not just as Iranians, but as Persians through history, as very tough hagglers and negotiators. And they play for time, and they feint, and they walk off, and they play mind games with the people they're negotiating with. Carter did discover this to his lasting cost several times during that 1980 presidency campaign with Reagan. It looked like a deal to release the hostages was about to happen really four or five times, and that would have changed, transformed the mood on the campaign trail, and then Iran pulled the rug.  And it turns out, you know, Iran really needed weapons because Iraq, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, had just invaded Iran. Iran really needed weapons, so that was finally the leverage Carter had been seeking to get those hostages out. And they kept going right up to the brink of a deal, and lots of public positive statements from the White House, and then Iran would pull the rug. Now there's a theory — you know, why that might have been happening in terms of the Reagan campaign's backchannel communications with the Iranians. But this has been going on for forty-seven years at least.  I mean, U.S. presidents — with patience and time and a strategy and a theory of the case like Barack Obama had with the 2015 nuclear deal, might get somewhere. But if you're in a hurry, Iran's got more time. SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, they've got more time and they will walk away. As David Ignatius told us yesterday, you have to let the Iranians know that you're willing to walk away, that you either don't want the rug or you don't want the nuclear deal. You've got to be willing to do that. They weren't. This headline, Willie, I'm just noticing this headline — we have seen a headline in Financial Times for Ed Luce's article that somehow manages to insult supporters of both of the gentlemen in that headline. Trump supporters going, "How dare you compare us to Jimmy Carter?" And Jimmy Carter supporters saying, "How dare you compare such a good man to Donald Trump?" But there it is.  And what, you know, the common denominator, you know, Iran. If you depend on the goodwill of Iran's negotiators, and if they see a weakness, man, they know how to leverage that and they will exploit it.  MIKA: We've had this experience.  SCARBOROUGH: And Jimmy Carter had an election in 1980 that he was trying to make everything just right for, and the Iranians wouldn't do it. And now you have Donald Trump, they know he has some midterms to worry about, so they are not worried about making a deal right now.

No pope can afford to be completely apolitical, but Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, is proving to be more political than most — and he’s siding with the left. It’s a grave mistake that can only hurt the Catholic Church on both sides of the Atlantic. Leo has been in Spain the last few days, where immigration is today the dividing line between left and right. Vox, the Spanish populist party, is surging in popularity, and recently the older conservative People’s Party has signed on to Vox’s idea of giving Spanish citizens priority for receiving government services and benefits — a policy known as prioridad nacional. The country’s left-wing prime minister Pedro Sanchez, on the other hand, is pursuing the Spanish equivalent of Joe Biden’s immigration policy. Spain has been flooded with immigrants both legal and illegal, and Sanchez is working to legalize hundreds of thousands who arrived unlawfully. Addressing the Cortes Generales, the national legislature, on Monday, Pope Leo called for “safe and legal pathways, a respectful welcome and real opportunities for integration” for migrants and refugees. Even when invoking “the right to remain in one’s own land,” the pope framed the issue as “working to ensure that no one has to leave their home due to lack of peace, security or decent living conditions, including economic inequalities and the effects of the climate crisis.” Those last words are the stinger. A pope’s message will always include peace and compassion for the poor, but economic inequality and climate catastrophism are characteristically left-wing preoccupations. World media have been taking the pope’s remarks as a rebuke to Vox — and populists everywhere — and a tacit endorsement for Sanchez and his left-wing governing coalition, which faces a general election by the summer of next year. “Although polling indicates Spanish Catholics gravitate toward the right of the ideological spectrum, the pope’s focus on the suffering of migrants places him in greater political proximity to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s left-leaning administration,” noted Jonas Loesel in Politico’s European edition. The Associated Press made the same observation about the similarity between Leo’s and Sanchez’s views on foreign policy: “The overlap is noteworthy since the Catholic Church in Spain has traditionally been closer to the conservative Popular Party than the left, which championed social issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and euthanasia.” The New York Times summed up Leo’s relationship with Sanchez in a headline: “One Is the Pope, the Other an Atheist. They Both Oppose Trump.” There is good reason to think the College of Cardinals — most of whose members were appointed by Pope Francis — chose an American to be the next pope as a counterweight to Trump and the rise of a politically significant right-wing traditionalist element in American Catholicism. But populists like Trump and Vox are ascendant on the right precisely because of the failures of globalism, particularly the immigration emergencies brought about by liberal and progressive parties almost everywhere. If Leo and others in the hierarchy don’t like Trump or Vox, they should direct their criticisms at the progressives responsible for the conditions that make immigration restriction popular. In America and Europe alike, left-wing parties remain staunchly pro-abortion and opposed to the church’s most fundamental moral teachings. Mass migration is making Europe more Islamic, and otherwise secular left-wing parties are encouraging this transformation. Does the pope really want to side with atheism and Islam against populism? What do conscientious Catholics do when the Holy Father signals they’re wrong if they vote for socially conservative parties that also favor reducing immigration? Pope Leo seems to imagine the centrist politics of the pre-Trump era will someday return. But Trump isn’t responsible for Europe’s changing politics, and even in America, Trump’s rise was largely the effect of failed liberal policies. Leo is investing the church’s future in a mirage — while the reality is that the left will only become more anti-Christian and pro-Islamic over the years and decades to come. The church needs a defender with the same spirit as the new populist defenders of America and Europe. That doesn’t mean the church can ever be fully populist, just as it could never be fully in favor of free-market capitalism and always has reservations about the use of military force in modern international conflicts. But to the extent the church must engage with the politics of this world, the pope must be as astute as Saint John Paul II was. There were some in the church who believed Ronald Reagan was a hard-right warmonger and accommodation with communism was the only path to peace. Indeed, there were some who thought communism and socialism, with their professed concern for the poor, were fundamentally more moral than Western-style capitalism. John Paul II had no illusions. Pope Leo, on the other hand, is badly misjudging this moment, in American politics and the world’s. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.

The regime of George Soros is once again trying to bully corporate America into submission by twisting their charities’ arms into supporting the radical Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been indicted on charges of fraud. The racially charged Color of Change, whose apparatus was pivotal in the whole defund-the-police kerfuffle, launched a lefty drivel-laced petition on MoveOn.org (another Soros-funded operation), demanding charities “Stop Aiding Trump's Attacks on the Racial Justice Movement!” The petition, as of June 10, garnered 18,963 of the 20,000 signatures target. The document railed that “some of the country's largest and most powerful financial institutions are helping carry out Trump's political attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center.” Of course, per its racially-charged namesake, Color of Change had to arbitrarily whip out the race card: “The question this raises is bigger than one organization. It's whether Black people will be allowed to organize, advocate, and build power without being punished for it.” Never mind the fact that it was a grand jury, not the Justice Department in isolation, that indicted the SPLC for allegedly duping donors into believing it was fighting neo-Nazism and white supremacy while financing the very neo-Nazis and white supremacists it claimed to be warring against. Soros funneled $4,400,000 into Color of Change between 2018 and 2020 alone. MoveOn.org also received $3,468,995 from the Soros regime between 2016-2024, which means that both figures together account for $7,868,995 in Soros money. The petition targets a litany of corporate charities who have blocked their donor-advised funds from being distributed to the SPLC following the fraud charges, including Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, Goldman Sachs Gives, Charles Schwab's DAFgiving360, and Thrivent Charitable. Color of Change also imagined itself as a victim of Trump’s crusade against SPLC’s fraud, which read like a pathetic attempt to simply protect their bottom line: The SPLC is one target. But Trump allies are already signaling that Color Of Change and other racial justice and pro-democracy groups are also on their hit list. If these major financial players get away with cutting off the SPLC, the next group will go down more easily, and the one after that more easily still. As was previously implied, Color of Change’s propaganda push isn’t the only anecdote of the Soros empire trying to protect another of its grantees in the SPLC. On May 6, MRC Business analyzed how Soros funneled over $204 million into at least 10 signatories to an open letter also demanding corporate charities resume donations to the SPLC despite the federal indictment.  And Soros’s Open Society Foundations aren’t being quiet about this either. In fact, the OSF posted a statement on X May 11 showcasing its solidarity with the SPLC (sounds about right) and how it would continue to be a cash cow for similar efforts:  As funders committed to democracy, justice, and the long-term health of civil society, we boldly stand with the Southern Poverty Law Center and with the broader civil rights community. We will continue to resource organizations defending rights and freedoms. And we will continue to call out the difference between legitimate accountability and the use of government power to silence critics. Here’s a useful rule of thumb when understanding how the Soros operation works: Whenever a Soros grantee is under public scrutiny, expect its fellow grantees to swarm like wasps protecting the hive.