June 15, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Graham Platner’s Face Now Too Toxic for National Dem Ads — Even as Maine Dems Keep Riding Psycho Train.

If he makes it past the primary, I’m sure he’ll be in plenty of the other side’s national ads.

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Ian McKellen Says He Imagined Destroying Mar-a-Lago While Filming Avengers: Doomsday.

The actor rose from his seat to reenact the moment for the audience, explaining that the Russo brothers wanted him to appear even angrier as Magneto unleashed his powers.

“They told me to look more furious — make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying,” said McKellen.

That’s when the actor came up with his own motivation for the scene.

“So I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!’ ” he said, referring to President Donald Trump‘s Florida estate.

How much is McKellen acting when he plays a cartoon supervillain? Flashback: Defacing the Bible because of Homosexuality.

In an August 10 interview on New Zealand’s TV1 Close Up program McKellen was confronted by the interviewer questioning the truth of the rumor “He’s the one, that when he stays in hotels rips the part of the Bible out that criticizes homosexuality.”

“Yes it is true,” responded McKellen in even tones. “It’s Leviticus 18:22 that I object to, or is it 22:18, I’ve always got to look it up. Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman, it is an abomination. And they, I think the punishment for an abomination was being stoned to death,” he said.

McKellen added, “I think it’s rather obscene and pornographic, and shouldn’t be there, so I remove it.”

Asked how many Bibles he has vandalized, McKellen replied, “I have no idea, but other people do it as well, people send me evidence that they have been removing that.”

McKellen has been vandalizing Bibles in the same fashion for at least a few years. He first admitted publicly to the activity in 2004 in an interview with the UK Telegraph.

It seems odd then that McKellen imagines himself destroying the property of someone who’s been a gay rights proponent for decades.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: It’s the Age of Sanders, Too.

Indeed, in one respect, Mr. Sanders’s achievement is more historic than Mr. Trump’s. Not that his electoral record is better. Not that his proposals have become law. What makes Mr. Sanders significant is his novelty. He alone is responsible for bringing socialism into the political mainstream.

By contrast, Mr. Trump swims in the deep currents of American life. Populism predates 1776. Nationalism is rooted in our history. America is the exemplary capitalist nation. Mr. Trump has been a fixture in popular culture for 40 years. He embodies aspects of U.S. identity: glamour, spectacle, volume, braggadocio, success and excess.

Nor did Mr. Trump build his movement from scratch. He seized an opening. He used political tools that others had left to rust: immigration restriction, tariffs, traditionalism, confrontation over gentility, social media, tentpole rallies that married Tea Party populism with the concerns and attitude of blue-collar Reagan Democrats. Mr. Trump’s genius was to bring these tropes and tactics under his inimitable personality. The Republican Party wouldn’t be the same.

Mr. Sanders’s task was harder. His socialism put him at odds with the Democrats, a party to which he has never formally belonged. In 2010, according to Gallup, 50% of Democrats had a positive view of socialism. President Obama distanced himself from the term.

Mr. Sanders’s campaigns tapped a reservoir of youthful antagonism toward the American system. When acolytes took up his message, they found that hostility to Mr. Trump was driving the Democratic base to the left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ousted a 10-term Democratic incumbent in 2018. She formed the socialist “Squad” with Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley.

Mr. Sanders’s causes—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Abolish ICE—set the party’s agenda. In 2020, Joe Biden had no choice but to absorb Mr. Sanders’s movement into his campaign and presidency. The rest of us had to live with the consequences.

Some much more so than others: A Bernie Bro Shot Steve Scalise.

Scalise was the victim of a Democrat terrorist who, inspired by the apocalyptic rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, that millions would die and the planet was in peril because of Republican policies, shot up a Virginia baseball field full of Republican lawmakers in June of 2017.  Scalise spent six weeks in the hospital fighting for his life after the Bernie Sanders–supporter decided to save humanity by shooting Scalise and other Republicans.

A few years later: Bernie Bro with Van Full of Guns and Explosives Plotted to Assassinate Biden. Media Buries the Lede, as Usual.

What was Treisman’s motive? He must be one of those evil Proud Boys or crazy QAnon freaks we keep hearing so much about, right?

Wrong. But to find out the actual motive, you have to go all the way down to paragraph 15 of the WaPo story (emphasis mine):

The 19-year-old’s focus on Biden started in the spring, according to the order… Days after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suspended his presidential campaign, Treisman, who had suggested in a Reddit post that he had to “save bernie,” posted a meme with the caption questioning whether he should kill Biden.

Oh. He’s a Bernie Bro. He wanted to kill Biden to somehow help Bernie.

 

And then there’s the man who’s a Totenkopf stan: “Mr. Platner’s success is a reminder that Mr. Trump and MAGA aren’t the only actors in this drama. Running parallel to the Trump Era has been the Sanders Era: The rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from socialist gadfly to Democratic Party kingmaker.”

Actually, as Kevin Williams noted a decade ago, Bernie signed his own personal Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact long ago: Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

YES.

Related:

Posted at 8:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS: Potential Mass Shooting in Georgia Stopped by Armed Citizens. “During the investigation, deputies interviewed multiple witnesses, reviewed security camera footage, and gathered physical evidence from the scene. Witnesses reported that Jeffrey Tyler Kinzer had been involved in a verbal confrontation with individuals attending a large gathering in the area. Witnesses further reported that Kinzer later returned on foot carrying an AR-style rifle and wearing body armor. Witnesses stated that Kinzer fired toward the gathering, and multiple individuals returned fire toward his location.”

Posted at 6:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BREAKING: Military Plane Crashes at California Air Force Base “On Monday, around 11:20 a.m. PDT, a B-52 Stratofortress plane crashed at Edwards Air Force Base, which is located in Kern and San Bernardino Counties in California. The aircraft had just taken off, according to reports.”

Posted at 5:20 pm by Stephen Green

EMMANUEL RINCON: The Long Tradition of Wealth-Extracting Socialists.

From Karl Marx to Vladimir Lenin, from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez, many of these figures denounced private wealth and entrepreneurship, despite the fact that few, if any, lived according to the austere principles they publicly promoted. Instead, many enjoyed lives marked by privilege, luxury, and the very economic advantages they claimed to despise.

This pattern is not confined to communist regimes. In the United States, self-described socialists have often criticized wealth accumulation — until they themselves became wealthy. Senator Bernie Sanders is among the most notable examples. For years, Sanders condemned millionaires and argued that extreme wealth accumulation was immoral. Yet after purchasing multiple homes and earning millions of dollars through book sales criticizing capitalism, his rhetoric shifted largely toward attacking billionaires instead.

Today, the methods have changed, but the underlying dynamic remains the same.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

ICYMI: Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Musk? “Italics in the original, because otherwise some lefty freakazoid with a rifle might not get the subtle shout-out to assassinate the man who gave the world cheap access to space, universal high-speed internet access, the first mass-produced electric vehicles, and Neuralink brain implants for the disabled.”

Posted at 4:19 pm by Stephen Green

QUESTION ASKED: Will Keir Starmer’s under-16 social media ban actually work?

Saying under-16s should be banned from certain tech is easy to do. Actually keeping them off it – as the Australian precedent shows, not to mention, hem hem, the situation in my own house – is a bit tougher to enforce. Online harms come in many forms, not all of them through social media, which is in any case hard exactly to define. Is WhatsApp social media? And though we can imagine some sort of passport scan or facial recognition mechanism to verify identities for the big individual sites (with all the privacy/data-harvesting issues that will raise), the mechanism for this curfew is difficult even to imagine. And what, meanwhile, of start-ups, unregulated Android apps, browser-based services and so on that will offer an even less secure environment than the horrors of Meta and TikTok and X?

Pause should certainly be given, I think, by the fact that Ian Russell, the father of a teenage girl who died by suicide after viewing self-harm content online – and who has campaigned for years to hold Big Tech to account for online harm – doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He says it makes more sense to implement existing laws than to use “sledgehammer techniques like bans.”

At present, then, we have a headline, not a policy. Until we learn exactly how it is to be implemented, how enforced and how insulated from the law of unintended consequences, it will remain no more than a headline. But I won’t be alone in thinking: what a pretty headline.

BluSky is currently a bit of Schrödinger’s app at the moment:

However, at BluSky itself, there are reports that it will be banned for under-16s in the UK:

Screenshot

In any case, as Joanna Williams of Spiked writes, “there is little evidence to suggest a social media ban will work. Research from Australia suggests that six out of 10 children aged between 12 and 15 who had accounts on now-banned platforms had maintained access to at least one of their sites of choice. This non-compliance matters, not because teens will be harmed by spending time on TikTok, but because they learn that the law is not to be complied with but to be worked around, mocked and, ultimately, ignored. So why is Keir Starmer backtracking? Partly, because it is easier to acquiesce to the panic-mongers than it is to reason with hysteria. And, like other prime ministers before him, Starmer is discovering that bans are the last resort of politicians with nothing else to offer.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 3:00 pm by Ed Driscoll