Bye-bye weekend, and hello Monday, June 22, 2026. Today is National Onion Ring Day, National Kissing Day, National Chocolate Éclair Day, National Limoncello Day, National HVAC Tech Day, National Pet Choking Prevention Day, and National Take Your Cat to Work Day. It's also World VW Beetle Day.
1832: John Howe patents a pin manufacturing machine.
1870: Congress creates the Department of Justice.
1911: World's largest pipe organ debuts at its new home in the Grand Court of Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia; originally built for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, it filled thirteen railroad freight cars. It's still there, and last I heard giving concerts, even though the store closed in 2025.
1940: The first Dairy Queen restaurant opens in Joliet, Ill.
1951: Gene Rayburn & Dee Finch's morning show premieres on NBC radio.
1955: Walt Disney's animated film Lady and the Tramp is released.
1981: Mark David Chapman pleads guilty to killing former Beatle John Lennon.
Birthdays today include: Erich Maria Remarque, German novelist (All Quiet on the Western Front); Richard Gurley Drew, (created masking tape and cellophane at 3M); John Dillinger, notorious bank robber; Billy Wilder, filmmaker; Paul Frees, voice of Boris Badenov in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show; Ralph Waite, actor (Cool Hand Luke, The Waltons, Cliffhanger); Dianne Feinstein, longest serving female senator; Kris Kristofferson, actor and singer-songwriter; Ed Bradley, journalist; "Pistol" Pete Maravich, basketball HOF guard; Todd Rundgren, singer, songwriter, and producer; Sen. Elizabeth Warren; Lindsay Wagner, actress; Meryl Streep, actress; Graham Greene; actor (Dances With Wolves); Cyndi Lauper; and Dan Brown, author.
If it's your birthday as well, have a great one;
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It's been pretty much a year since I came back to PJ Media, and I'll say it plainly: I love this job.
Some of you will know that I wrote here back in 2009. I hated to leave, but the day job made it impossible to do my byline justice. And yes, I take that aspect very seriously. When I retired from my day job last year, I came back to PJ Media — and I haven't looked back. Working with this crew is an honor, full stop. Without a doubt, they’re the best.
That said, finding subjects to write to every single day is getting harder.
Now, don't misread me here, I'm not complaining — there's nothing anyone can singlehandedly do about it — but finding something fresh to write every single day is increasingly a genuine grind.
The problem is my sourcing. Let me be transparent about my raw material: headlines, social media, and the occasional long-festering cultural grievance that's overdue for sunlight. I wade daily through Facebook and X, along with the news media, in pursuit of relevant content, which is roughly as pleasant and is often exactly as productive as shoveling out a clogged sewer with a teaspoon. I have to tell you that the situation is getting worse... the left's robots are working overtime of late, and I take it as a sign of desperation. I'm often forced to use other commentary sites to kick off my own writings. That's okay; I like giving the pieces I pick out the added traffic.
But the real aggravation — the pièce de résistance — is the so-called mainstream media.
Take yesterday's piece as Exhibit A, where I examined and linked to the documents Tulsi Gabbard released on Anthony Fauci. ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, MS Now, and the New York Times collectively mustered zero interest. Zero. Not a segment. Not a chyron. Not even a dismissive paragraph buried on page twelve. Nothing — almost as if they had somewhere else to be, or, more realistically, they'd rather you never heard about those documents and their story at all.
And yet, the story moved. My hit counters didn't lie. People wanted to read it — they still do, if I read things correctly. It's still trending, a full 27 hours after it was originally posted.
You'd think that outlets whose survival depends on reader interest might notice a story lighting up the internet and think, "hey, maybe we should cover that".
Trust me when I tell you that it wasn't exactly hard to investigate, though, as I suggested in the piece itself, it was time-consuming. I managed it, even with the minimal resources I have available to me. Apparently, though, that's too heavy a lift for organizations with full newsrooms and unlimited resources. I think we may have hit on what is causing the demise of so many news outlets, eh? I also note that this is the kind of difference that brought Blogs to the fore.
As you might expect, Fox covered it fairly extensively. So did The Washington Times, Breitbart, and Newsweek. I spent a good hour this morning, as my coffee went cold, searching for even the slightest mention of those documents and what they tell us. Outside of those sources I mentioned, I was annoyed I didn’t find anything more, even when involving my AI setup, which will usually dig up something. But, no. Nothing at all. That's your complete list.
Oh, I admit it’s worth noting: the New York Post editorial page called out the Washington Post for publishing a 9,000-word Gabbard profile — two days after the document release — without mentioning the Fauci documents once. They probably started writing that extended profile when she announced she was leaving. The Post column also flagged that a Senate whistleblower hearing on the same topic that the mainstream media ignored across the board. The Media Research Center, which has been tracking this closely, reports that ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have all buried the story completely.
My own selection process for sourcing and writing about is really rather simple: don't duplicate what my fine PJ Media colleagues are already covering, and write something you folks actually want to read — not something that puts you to sleep faster than CNN prime-time. That's how page counters spin and how advertising revenue gets made. Mainstream outlets supposedly operate the same way.
So when a story this relevant lands the way this one did, with this much public interest, and instead of covering the story, they choose silence — that tells you everything about what they're actually in the business of doing, and it isn't news reporting.
Now, all that said, I’d like you to consider why they, by and large, haven’t touched the story. Ask yourself why they might not want to put that story in front of the American voter.
You already know the answer to that, don’t you?
Thought for the Day: Calling some people a tool implies that they're actually useful.
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I'm glad you made it here today. Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you here tomorrow.
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