June 24, 2026

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: The Only Thing Better Than Pokemon is Pokemon With Guns. “Palworld” emerged seemingly out of nowhere on Friday, releasing on PC’s Steam shop and Xbox, and has now sold more than 5 million copies in three days. It immediately became the most played video game on the planet, with more than 1.5 million concurrent players on Steam as of Monday morning. It has amassed a larger concurrent audience than every Steam game besides “PUBG: Battlegrounds” and “Counter-Strike 2.” That’s larger than the biggest games of the last two years, “Elden Ring,” “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Hogwarts Legacy.”

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: It’s impossible to fail in Philly: It’s too much paperwork. “On paper, Philadelphia students can fail courses, or be retained in a grade, so long as they are offered appropriate interventions and supports,” according to the Inquirer. “But many teachers said that they were discouraged or forbidden by their principals from flunking students, or that they have given out failing grades that were overridden.”

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE GOOD WAR? The Assault on American Myth:

To help answer this question, we turn again to Obama. In May 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago, he gave a little-remembered speech in Japan.

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” Obama posed this question to the world at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, seemingly conscious of making history as the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city—one of only two ever targeted by U.S. atomic bombs. Obama had already embarked on a much lambasted multiyear “apology tour” to foreign countries, including a 2009 talk before Turkey’s parliament in which he lamented America’s “darker periods” and the ongoing “legacies of slavery and segregation.”

His Hiroshima audience might have expected an address on nuclear nonproliferation, and Obama did deplore the “capacity for unmatched destruction” that nuclear weapons make possible. He also praised the hibakusha—survivors of the 1945 strike—citing a “woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself.” He offered no corresponding tribute to the American pilots who risked their lives for their country, nor any defense of the American decision to attack Japan; rather, he lamented the human tendency “to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He enjoined his listeners “to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering.” He came to Hiroshima, he explained, to be reminded of the “ordinary people” who “do not want more war.” He never once sought to legitimate the cause in question or the notion that war is at times justified.

None of this is especially surprising given Obama’s famous insistence on “change.” Around midway through the speech, however, he offered something distinctive. After portraying World War II as having grown out of “the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes,” he sketched his view of Hiroshima’s significance:

There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war—memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

Here, Obama was engaging in a tentative attempt at mythmaking. The defining image of World War II, in this telling, was not that of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy or the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign above Auschwitz. No: It was an image that, in Obama’s words, represented a sinister “material advancement,” employed by America “to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.” American capitalism and American racism thus seem to undergird Obama’s understanding of World War II. He neatly placed the American decision to use the atomic bomb alongside the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany; all of it, he suggests, reminds us of mankind’s aptitude for evil. In this moment, he drew no moral distinctions in his condemnation of the horrors of war. In subtly conflating Nazi evils and the American response, Obama created a permission structure for his ideological partners to do the same thing.

Revisionists on the right, in part by taking refuge within Obama’s permission structure, have furthered this de-mythification project. Instead of castigating America for being racist, however, the right-revisionists rebuke their country as an antireligious tyranny, run by global elites. In this telling, American leadership became drawn into World War II by globalist interests while ignoring the plight of their own countrymen. Other, more extreme voices cast Hitler and Mussolini as heroic for wanting to strengthen their own nations and sense of national identity.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEI IS MAKE-WORK EMPLOYMENT FOR OTHERWISE UNEMPLOYABLE NEUROTICS AND ANTI-SOCIAL TYPES:

To be fair, she won’t be evaluating any interns this summer.

Posted at 2:01 pm by Stephen Green

SPACE: Could we actually terraform Mars? Scientists are trying to find out.

Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, detailed the plan here at a Space Resources Roundtable, which was held from June 2 to June 5 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines.

Kite’s talk showcased a mission concept prototype to validate aerosol dispersal to warm Mars’ atmosphere as a first step toward terraforming the Red Planet.

“Creating sustainable habitats and biospheres beyond Earth is an enormous scientific and technical challenge, but it’s one we’ll have to surmount if we’re going to extend life beyond Earth,” Kite told Space.com.

“We do not yet know enough to create a biosphere from scratch,” he added. “Applied astrobiology, like planetary science, requires contributions from many disciplines.”

Of course, the only way to know for sure is to try.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

JEFFREY CARTER: The Socialist Sweep: NYC is a warning sign. “Socialists are taking over cities. Last night in NYC, the Mamdani candidates won. They beat well-funded, more establishment Democrats. Those Democrats were NOT centrists. They were people of the left, too, just not communists.”

Posted at 12:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK: Why Is the Media Ignoring the Montreal Shooter’s Antisemitism?

In the wake of the shooting, the suspect allegedly left behind a 104-page manifesto, which is now public. In it, he cited feminism, liberalism, capitalism, pornography, and male isolation, among a slew of other factors, as components of a social rot that must be addressed through violent revolution. “I call on all of you now, and I ask you to join me,” he wrote. “Let us be the initiators of a new bloodletting, one in which the blood will flood out from the lacerated bodies of our opponents; all those culpable people, be they bourgeois or lumpen, who hitherto have remained unpunished.”

The apparent manifesto, which ended with a call to “KILL THEM ALL!” was laden with incel ideology and rambling diatribes against women as well as hateful and delusional commentary on “homosexuals,” “black people,” and “immigrants,” among other groups.

The alleged shooter also referred to the “influence of Zionist Jews,” “elite Zionists and their Western bourgeois allies,” and the idea that Israel serves as a “kind of base” that Jews, with their “newly acquired power,” have been using to “assist in the expansion of capitalist hegemony.”

Yet virtually no Canadian coverage of the attack mentions these references to Jews, Zionists, or Israel. Nor do they note that the attacker clearly harbored long-standing antisemitic and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories.

Instead, articles from major outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Global News, and CTV, among many others, focus almost exclusively on what they described as Hatfield’s “violent incel” ideations and “anti-feminism.” Canadian journalist and author Warren Kinsella noted the omission, writing on X that these major media outlets included “not one mention of the killer’s antisemitism, seen throughout his manifesto.” Joe Roberts, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, Oklahoma, acknowledged, “Yes, the Montreal shooter was an incel. Yes, he was a revolutionary Marxist. That is not the end of the story. It is the beginning. Because his manifesto is also explicitly antisemitic and anti-Zionist, and the media’s refusal to say that plainly is indefensible.”

Earlier this month, Ilya Shapiro wrote on his Substack, “It’s Amazing That the Heart of Antisemitism in America Lies on Campus,” and the same is true in Canada. In both nations, some of those young students become journalists. The alleged shooter’s references to the incel movement gives left-leaning Canadian journalists all the excuse they need to minimize his antisemitism.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): More on campus hate here.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN FUND: The rise and rise of America’s radical left.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three fellow socialists in the New York City Democratic Congressional primaries and all three won last night.

Democratic incumbent Dan Goldman lost to Brad Lander, who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until 2023. DSA Member Claire Valdez won nomination for a Brooklyn House seat.

But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DSA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party represented the same area in the 1940s.

The night before his election in November, Zohran Mamdani filmed a video honoring his “radical” hero, Marcantonio.

Chevalier’s views would send even Marcantonio into orbit. DAC – as she will inevitably be dubbed – is so ideologically extreme that Jeff Maurer, a former writer for unrelentingly left-wing comic John Oliver’s HBO show, is gobsmacked by her. Maurer began his latest Substack post by announcing “My challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level s—show truly is.”

DAC has called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders. As recently as last week, she refused to back down on those views when given an opportunity: “All deportations are wrong,” she says, even for those convicted of a crime.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the militant student group behind the violent 2024 occupation of Columbia after the Hamas attacks in Gaza the year before. CUAD is explicitly anti-Enlightenment: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one…”

Chevalier called the United States “a f—— disgrace,” and referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land. She’s written favorably about communism and seizing “all properties from landlords.”

She has criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel, and is known as a key leader in the “left of AOC” faction of Democratic Socialists of America.

The never-Trump right are wondering how we got to this point: Oops! ‘Republicans Against Trump’ Are Figuring Out How Insane Democrats Have Gotten.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

INDEED:

No clue how this ends, aside from “not well.”

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: California’s Glock ban sets stage for nationwide gun control.

There’s more than just a ban:

Beginning July 1, firearms dealers will also be required to complete comprehensive, state-approved training designed to help them identify customers who might pose a danger to themselves or others.

On the surface, the measure sounds entirely reasonable, even noble. Nobody wants firearms falling into the wrong hands or arming someone who hears voices in the drywall.

The catch, as always, is the inevitable consequences of these supposedly well-meaning grand plans. Once private businesses are forcefully transformed into behavioral screening centers, subjective judgments hijack the purchasing process.

What actually constitutes suspicious behavior? Who decides the baseline for mental stability at a retail counter? What protections exist for ordinary individuals who are wrongly flagged based on an employee’s personal biases, political views or a simple misunderstanding?

Suddenly, a minimum-wage store clerk is acting as a state-mandated psychologist with the power to deny a constitutional right, transforming a retail transaction into an amateur interrogation.

Conservatives and civil liberties advocates nationwide should pay very close attention to this shift. California has a long, documented history of exporting its political trends to the rest of the country. Policies that begin as Petri dish experiments in Sacramento almost always become the blueprint for progressive lawmakers elsewhere.

Tell me about it: Colorado To Restrict Ammo & Reloading Supplies Starting July 1, 2026.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green