Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS JUN 22, 2026

The United Kingdom is going on its seventh prime minister in ten years —a turnover rate that would embarrass a fast-food fryer— and why every British paper can explain Keir Starmer’s downfall in four thousand words except the four that matter; how the battle over the University of Florida’s presidency curdled into a full Republican circular firing squad over who runs the state’s biggest school; and how the Wisconsin Supreme Court spent forty pages saying what your grandmother could have said in one simple declarative sentence.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “U.K.: Starmer Announces Resignation as Prime Minister.” Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who looks remarkably like a runner-up in the first-semester project contest at the school of taxidermy, sort of announced his retirement early this morning (on U.S. time). It surprised no one. If anything, it was a year overdue.

CLIP: Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation statement (0:40).

Corporate media gaslighting is off the charts. Read all the UK’s corporate media articles you want, and you will come away stupider than you started. They avoid naming Starmer’s two essential failures by expelling a vast fog of mind-numbing detail; each article offering the most granular post-mortem of any political career in history, with encyclopedic timelines and Shakespearean casts of staff characters and cabinet ministers— each of whom, according to UK media, deserves more blame for Starmer’s disastrous term than the ‘luckless’ Prime Minister.

The Times never even tried to diagnose his fall. It just admitted Starmer was “one of the least popular prime ministers in modern British history.” It conceded he “had a popularity among voters in record lows.” But the same paper that runs Trump’s approval rating on a scrolling Chyron never mentioned Starmer’s actual approval rating. It was around 11%. (One may fairly ask how EU politicians with approval ratings in the low teens manage to keep getting re-elected and finally must be forced to resign. You won’t get a satisfying answer, but you can ask all you want.)

Mind you, Starmer’s replacement will mark Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. That’s like America rotating presidents every 18 months. (Coincidentally, that period of destabilized UK governance is also the same post-2016 decade following Trump’s first election in the U.S. Just saying.)

The truth is that Starmer’s inglorious reign was cut short by the DOJ, which released certain emails from Jeffrey Epstein. That injury was made infinitely worse by Starmer’s incurable personality shortcomings. Let’s start with those.

Behold how the man answers simple questions— even rhetorical questions. “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” Starmer said in his resignation statement, his ‘voice breaking with emotion at times.’ (The loss of his man card didn’t help either. Crybaby.) Starmer answered himself: “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. “That is why I will resign.”

Catch that? He said, “I have heard the answer, blah blah,” but never said what the answer was. The answer to the question that he asked himself was obviously ‘no.’ One two-letter word. A single syllable. Just say it, you pretentious gasbag.

Many articles conceded that Starmer lacks any ‘special gifts of oratory.’ The problem is that his verbal disability left him unprepared to handle his Epstein flare-up, and everybody knew it. Headline from the UK Independent, February:

Answer: No. (See how easy it is? It’s just one short declarative word. Keir should try it sometime.)

🔥 In February of last year, Trump had been in office only a few weeks, and Starmer and the UK team were in the White House meeting with President Trump about Ukraine. Media had glowingly forecast the meeting as Starmer getting tough with Trump and applying the full weight of EU influence, presumably in the form of leverage from other EU leaders.

Starmer, you will recall, has been one of Ukraine’s most important EU allies. Starmer literally embraced the alliance. This fact will be important later.

That same day of Trump’s first face-to-face with Starmer, Pam Bondi called an unscheduled meeting for some conservative influencers who were in DC for a different event, and theatrically handed them “Epstein Phase One” binders that turned out to be a random sheaf of boring Epstein documents that might’ve been scraped off the top of Pam’s desk.

At the time, I speculated this seeming self-inflicted injury could actually be a pressure point— the Trump team sent the UK team a message: we know where your Epstein skeletons are buried.

It seemed to work. In the meeting, Starmer appeared rattled and never “dropped the EU hammer” like media predicted. At the time, I had no idea what the Epstein skeleton was. I was just guessing there was one. But in December, we finally learned that the skeleton’s name was “Peter Mandelson,” the appointed UK Ambassador to the US, and his nickname in Great Britain was “the Prince of Darkness.” I promise I’m not making that up. (It’s too on the nose to invent anyway.)

From the US side, everything we could see said Bondi’s binder stunt was a net negative domestically: media mocked the binders as “binders full of nothing,” and senior Trump aides later said she “completely whiffed” on the Epstein files and blindsided the White House. But Trump’s team still achieved something valuable— leverage over a rising British leader who had just installed an Epstein‑linked fixer as his ambassador, (then) spoke for the whole EU coalition, and who also happened to know there was probably some stuff in the Epstein file that could destroy his Prime Ministership.

Well, it did destroy his position. In December, the DOJ —following the instructions of bleating Democrats in Congress— published a vast tranche of Epstein emails that, among other things, documented the more-than-cozy relationship between the Prince of Darkness (Mandelson) and the Devil’s Apprentice himself, Jeffrey Epstein.

As the scandal unfolded in the UK, it came to light that Starmer had been briefed on Mandelson’s Epstein stickiness before Starmer picked him for US Ambassador.

We now see that our timeline fits perfectly. At the time Starmer was sitting in the White House, hearing from frantic aides that Trump’s new attorney general was making a dramatic Epstein disclosure, Starmer knew for a factthat he had an Epstein problem. He’d just been briefed about it. Headline from the New York Times, March:

And, sitting there in front of the President, Starmer must have been thinking, Trump knows.

From that point, Starmer’s Epstein problem, already in Stage 4, metastasized like turbo cancer. His political enemies in the UK seized hold of it. His Labour party started losing local elections in large numbers. And his pompous ramblings did nothing to defuse the problem; just the opposite: The more word salad Sir Keir Starmer dished out trying to deny it, the more he sounded just like an arrogant Epstein-class élite, straight from Central Casting.

Six long, painful months later, Starmer’s career abruptly crashed and burned, punctuated only by his typically supercilious resignation.

🔥 In short: Starmer didn’t stumble into bad luck. He didn’t hire the wrong people (even Mandelson). Starmer was taken off the geopolitical chessboard— on purpose. Why now? I don’t know, and don’t want to know, but it does occur to me that Starmer was helping keep the Ukraine Proxy War afloat. If a single person is crying today over Starmer’s resignation, that tearful idiot would be the Green Goblin of Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy (two y’s).

But as always, we look for the timeline as our best evidence for the parts we can’t see. So … why now?

My newsreading spider senses are tingling about the Proxy War. Do you suppose Trump plans to end that war before the midterms, to join it to the long list of other wars he’s ended, and to check off his original campaign promise to end that war?

I went looking for more circumstantial evidence and immediately found this NPR headline from February:

June. That’s this month. Makes you think, what? Sorry, Starmer. Stiff upper lip, old boy. Keep calm and soldier on. Bob’s your uncle. And so forth.

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I thought I’d update you on some news from my little hometown, which contains the state’s not-so-little University of Florida. Actually, it’s the Sunshine State’s biggest educational institution, and we love to brag about it, right alongside “Florida has the most lightning strikes per capita” and “our governor once wrestled an alligator, probably” (everybody has, at one point or another). UF has lacked a president since the tragic resignation of Ben Sasse, who was perfectly healthy until he announced his wife’s profound illness. Seventeen months later, Ben himself got a surprise diagnosis of Stage 4 turbo cancer. Since then, Ben has been fighting for his own life (and he’s on our prayer list). Anyway, bloodthirsty politics have dogged repeated, failed efforts to replace him. Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, “U. of Florida Plays Punching Bag — Again”

“As an anti-DEI campaign tries to sink another presidential search,” the subheadline explained, “faculty see a beleaguered university that has lost its sheen.” A war has broken out between the State Board of Governors, which oversees all public universities, and UF’s Board of Trustees, which makes certain decisions for the school— a governance structure that, in terms of clarity and efficiency, closely resembles two rival HOA boards fighting over the color of a shared community mailbox.

Last year, the Trustees tried to install Santa J. “Oh, No!” Ono as UF’s next president. The Canadian-Japanese candidate was best known for his tenure at the University of Michigan, where he’d bragged about making it the top DEI school in the country. This was not a good look, especially not in Florida, where it went down about as well as a vegan influencer boasting about the virtues of all-plant diets during the keynote of a convention of big-game hunters. After much political infighting, Dr. Ono got the boot.

This year, the Trustees are back. This time, they are pushing Stuart Bell, who implemented the University of Alabama’s DEI program, though perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as Santa J. Ono at U. Mich. The far-left Chronicle explained the current climate with unexpected clarity:

In a telling sign of the times, the global reputation of a top-ranked public research university appears to hinge on whether a longtime administrator of limited national notoriety can convince the state’s political establishment that he is sufficiently hostile toward DEI and satisfactorily contrite about his past support of diversity programs.

I admit it all. Guilty as charged. That is all true. We conservatives in Florida do want academics to convince us they are “sufficiently hostile toward DEI.” And, if they did stupidly support DEI in their previous job, we do want them to be “satisfactorily contrite” about it. 

The only thing remarkable about this is the left’s mystifying lack of self-awareness. These are, after all, the same people who invented loyalty codes, mandatory land acknowledgments, and the squishy concept of “lived experience” as a substitute for actual evidence that a fifth-grader could recognize.

Mr. Bell’s problem is that, while serving at Alabama, he was mentioned in unearthed post-meeting notes as reassuring faculty that, though he re-named that school’s DEI department to comply with that state’s new anti-DEI law, not to worry! because the renamed department would continue its same mission. Ruh-roh. This is the administrative equivalent of investigating yourself for ten seconds and then producing a three-volume exculpatory report.

Compounding Bell’s general sneakiness and willingness to defy at least the spirit of Alabama’s law in the name of woke, Bell then lied about it to Florida’s search committee. His opponents thus characterize Dr. Bell as a crook and a liar. His supporters insist his DEI beliefs have ‘evolved,’ like a new covid variant, or possibly a powerful new X-Men villain with the ability to change people’s pronouns at will.

CLIP: Dr. Bell denies ‘rebranding’ DEI at his school, but meeting notes say it was ‘in name only’ (0:23).

So the State Board of Governors responded by pulling Dr. Bell’s approval vote off the agenda, attempting to castrate his candidacy using Robert’s Rules of Order. But the local Board of Trustees counter-moved, and plans to hold an emergency vote this afternoon to approve immediately hiring Dr. Bell as UF’s “interim” president— something within the Trustees’ power. They may not hire any permanent president, but they can hire ‘interim’ ones— a loophole that exists because the people who wrote these rules apparently never anticipated that anyone would actually use it this way.

More amusingly (or inflammatory), to hire Dr. Bell, they must release the current interim president before his contract expires in two months, incurring a $2 million severance bonus. That’s how badly the Trustees want a DEI-friendly president— badly enough to light two million taxpayer dollars on fire as a down payment. (In fairness, some may just want to end the DEI wars because they think any presidential candidate with recent experience will inevitably have some DEI baggage, which is a reasonable point, and also the most depressing sentence I have written this week.)

I heard from an insider contact who described the massive civil war brewing between and among Florida Republicans over UF’s presidency. It involves top lawmakers, think tankers, Governor DeSantis’s office, top (state) GOP donors, and, of course, various members of the dueling Boards of Governors and Trustees, all of them locked in mortal combat over a mid-tier administrator from Alabama.

It’s not enough anymore to fight with Democrats. There just aren’t enough of them. Absent any effective Florida Democrats, I suppose we must now battle each other, which at least keeps everyone’s knife-fighting skills sharpened. Oh well.

I don’t know Dr. Bell. He may be a terrific guy. And truthfully, I opposed Ben Sasse at first, since he was one of the Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He got primaried for that, then he came to UF. But Sasse turned out to be great while he was here, and his anti-Trump bona fides lent just enough credibility with the far-left faculty for him to be effective. Maybe Bell would be the same. Maybe a state that idolizes Florida Man can’t afford to be too choosy.

It is true that you can’t let the activists drive everything, because they are nearly impossible to please, and sometimes, compromises become necessary, even inside one party. That’s politics for you. The Democrats are shattering right now thanks to their inability to compromise with each other. Don’t become Democrats.

At bottom, though, my sense is that installing a woke president at Florida’s flagship university despite credible red flags could be a self-inflicted political injury for the GOP that could really sting for a long time, like squatting on a fire ant mound while trying to make a nuanced point about institutional governance. Why poke yourself in a tender spot? Can’t we just find someone who stood up to DEI? Is there anyone?

Anyway, setting all that confusing intra-party conflict aside, there’s a more important silver lining. It might even be a gold lining. And that gold lining is the fact that, at least in the red states, DEI background is becoming professionally toxic. The Great DEI Purge will force aspiring top academics to stake out public positions for or against diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it cost-prohibitive to play both sides of the woke fence.

Which means, for the first time in a very long time, the people running our universities may actually have to clearly state what they believe —without any word salad— a common sense concept so revolutionary it could end up changing everything.

🔥 Late last week, we received even more encouraging anti-DEI news, assuming you consider it “news” when a court finally points out the glaringly obvious. On Thursday, Wisconsin Public Radio reported, “Wisconsin Supreme Court rules college minority grant program unconstitutional.”This latest terrific decision arrived thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, which in legal terminology held y’all progressives stop being so racist.

The 40-page opinion was clear: Wisconsin’s “minority retention grants” program was racially and ethnically biased and therefore unconstitutional. In progressive parlance, it was racist. “At the heart of the Equal Protection Clause,” the majority wrote, “is the principle that race‑, national origin‑, ancestry‑, or alienage-based discrimination is unconstitutional except in the most extraordinary instances where such a remedy is required.”

In other words, you can’t just throw out taxpayer money based on a color chart, a concept that is apparently baffling to modern university administrators like Dr. Bell, who spend their days trying to figure out how to divide students into ever-smaller categories of victimhood, grievance, and lactose intolerance.

“Under the Equal Protection Clause,” it continued, “the government must treat each citizen as an individual— not as one member of a class, … and not on the basis of race.” Thank goodness somebody finally said it. “Because racial classifications are ‘odious’ to the Constitution,” they explained, “statutes concerning one’s race are inherently invidious, regardless of how benign or laudable the law may appear.”

This was a polite, judicial way of saying, “Stop doing this, you absolute lunatics.”

The court’s unambiguous conclusion struck down the racist retention grants and cut off any future attempt to come up with a replacement that uses taxpayer money, which was Very Bad News for the flourishing industry of Diversity Consultants, whose primary job is to write reports justifying bureaucrats in giving our money to favored Democrat voting blocs. “No State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”

To be perfectly clear: private charities remain free to award scholarships to anyone they want, and they can use race as a criteria. After all, private charities aren’t bound by the Constitution— so long as they have no ties to government money or Title VII institutions. If the charity is an NGO that receives taxpayer money, it will be bound by this ruling— at least, in Wisconsin. So if you want to start a scholarship fund exclusively for disabled, pansexual persons of color, go right ahead, provided you use your own money.

One suspects that, with taxpayer funds off the table, the gusher of free money might soon dry up.

This carefully written Wisconsin opinion is likely to influence decisions in other states, too, especially since it was a straightforward application of the 2023 SCOTUS decision. This is more than progress. This is winning.

Have a marvelous Monday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow with more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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