The Morning Briefing

Nukes, fading greens, and a bacon explosion

• I imagine everyone heard about the hopped-up hip-hopper “Bob Vylan” calling for the extermination of Israel at the recent Glastonbury music festival, following which our awesome Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceled “Vylan’s” visa to tour in the U.S.

But an equally satisfying response comes from Spectator columnist Rod Liddle, who has apparently caused more outrage than Vylan’s vile vent. Here’s Liddle’s lede:

A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion had arrived even more summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver.

Street drummers, liberal politicians, provo vegans, radical rappers, spiritual healers, Billy Bragg, that bloke who owns Forest Green Rovers, druggies, tattooed blue-haired hags, almost the entirety of middle-class London—all evaporated. I am not saying we should do this, of course—it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way. One of Glastonbury, one of Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.

Naturally the people who shrug at calls for genocide against the Jews think this is an outrage.

• Does it seem like the usual bleating about climate change in the aftermath of the Texas flash floods is distinctly smaller than after Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago? It is one more sign that Americans totally over climate hysteria, so much so that even Democrats are backing away from rending their garments over the cuts to “green energy” in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Politico reports:

Donald Trump is coming for California’s signature climate policies — and so is California.

Stung by the party’s sweeping losses in November and desperate to win back working-class voters, the Democratic Party is in retreat on climate change. Nowhere is that retrenchment more jarring than in the nation’s most populous state, a longtime bastion of progressive politics on the environment. . .

Other parts of the country are pulling back on climate policies in the name of affordability, too. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is delaying plans for a carbon-trading system and slowing enforcement of the state’s rules for clean cars and trucks, which follow California’s. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is similarly pausing on carbon trading. And in Congress, some 36 Democrats — including two from California — signed on to the effort to overturn California’s vehicle rules.

Meanwhile, CNN’s polling unit concludes that three decades of climate hysteria hasn’t impressed Americans. Says Harry Entin: “Americans aren't afraid of climate change. Climate activists have not successfully made the case to the American people.”

I’m sure more gluing themselves to roadways and throwing soup on museum artwork will do the trick.

• From Time magazine, 11 years ago:

• From time to time people ask me to offer some content derived from my obsession with grilling, and so today I happily oblige with something highly unusual: breakfast grilling, featuring what is known as a “bacon explosion”—in this case fresh ground homemade sausage, wrapped in bacon, and then grilled on a Weber. Here’s the process from start to finish: