This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** The funny thing about the new “Masters of the Universe” movie is that nearly everyone seemed determined to misunderstand it before it premiered. The trailer features a shot of the main character, Adam, at his desk behind a nameplate that says “He/Him.” Of course half the internet panicked while the other half preened, and almost everyone walked straight into the bit. Conservatives saw the clip and assumed another childhood franchise had been stuffed into a DEI binder. Leftists were happy to claim another cultural trophy. Both missed the joke. Apart from being a nostalgia filled blast, the new “He-Man” movie works because it understands something Hollywood usually treats like a thought crime: Evil is not defeated by a group therapy session. The movie isn’t an endorsement of that worldview, but a mockery of it. The live-action “Masters of the Universe,” released theatrically June 5, stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam/He-Man, Jared Leto as Skeletor, and Idris Elba as Duncan/Man-At-Arms. Amazon’s own description frames the story around Adam saving “his family and his world” from Skeletor’s rule. That matters because the film’s central jest is not just cultural; it’s moral. Beneath the explosive, nostalgia-fueled spectacle, “Masters of the Universe” is a thinly veiled satire of the modern corporate grievance complex. It pokes fun at HR culture, it mocks the blue hair brigade, and it skewers the childish postmodern fantasy that every conflict is just a misunderstanding waiting to be resolved by therapy speak. Skeletor is not waiting for someone to validate his trauma and invite him into a restorative justice circle. He does not care about your shared emotional space. Skeletor is a genocidal maniac. This is the key to the whole movie. Its moral universe is not complicated in the lazy, modern way so many blockbusters now pretend to be complicated. It makes clear that evil exists, evil chooses evil, and evil sometimes loves being evil. And when evil refuses to stop, refuses to negotiate, and keeps coming for your home and your family, the moral response is not weakness dressed up as compassion. The moral response is courage. This is where the film becomes more than a joke at the expense of corporate wokeness. It becomes the defense of something older, deeper, and much more important: strength ordered toward the protection of the innocent. Elba’s Man-At-Arms drives this point home as he trains a young Adam. The lesson is not that masculinity means cruelty, nor that a man should go looking for violence. The lesson is that a man has a duty to stand between danger and the people he loves. That is what He-Man represents. He fights because there are things worth defending. He protects because protection is one of the foundational duties of manhood. And that, more than anything, is what makes the movie feel almost radical in the current cultural moment. For years, audiences have been told that traditional heroism is suspect. Fathers are fools, warriors are dangerous, courage is primitive, protection is patronizing, moral clarity is simplistic. Every villain needs a grievance dissertation, and every hero needs to learn that the real battle was inside himself all along. “Masters of the Universe” does not play that game. But the movie is not merely a rebuke to the woke Left. It’s also a rebuke to the woke Right, or the New Right, whatever we’re calling them now. I mean the perpetually online, performative “Right” that mistakes reflexive isolationism for wisdom, “swagger” for strength, and cynicism for seriousness. The Left’s error is obvious: It thinks evil can be managed by language, empathy, and institutions that specialize in avoiding reality. But the woke Right has developed its own mirror-image error. It sees real evil abroad, in Iran or in the imperial ambitions of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and responds with a shrug masquerading as prudence. It looks at tyrants who have already told the world what they want and insists that the truly sophisticated move is to pretend they don’t mean it. That is not prudence. Prudence begins by seeing reality as it is. Iran is not a misunderstood actor seeking emotional validation from the international community. Nor is Putin’s war against Ukraine an unfortunate misunderstanding caused by insufficient empathy. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and the Ukrainian conflict is an imperial war waged by a man who wants territory, control, and submission. This is what evil looks like in practice. It doesn’t always announce itself with a skull for a face and a horned staff. Sometimes it arrives in a suit, gives speeches about historical destiny, bombs apartment buildings, demands territory, and calls the whole thing peace. But whether in Eternia or the real world, the moral principle is the same: When a regime has built its identity around revolutionary domination, terrorism, and the pursuit of weapons that would alter the balance of civilization, you don’t defeat that regime by pretending that your refusal to act is a moral strategy. And here the woke Right makes the same mistake as the woke Left, with different branding. The woke Left says, “Surely we can defeat evil with empathy and feelings.” The woke Right says, “Surely evil will stop if we simply declare it none of our business.” Both positions are fantasies, and they both allow evil to continue while the people who should know better congratulate themselves for being “above the fight.” That doesn’t mean America should rush blindly into every conflict. It doesn’t mean every foreign crisis requires American troops. And it doesn’t mean every enemy is best answered with bombs. Prudence, strategy, cost, and national interest all matter. A strong country, like a strong man, does not fight because it enjoys fighting. It fights when fighting is necessary. It arms allies when allies are standing between civilization and conquest. It deters enemies before deterrence becomes war. It understands that weakness invites aggression and that the time for talking eventually ends when the other side uses every negotiation as a pause between attacks. In this way, He-Man’s line lands heavy during his final battle with Skeletor: “The time for talking is over.” This is not a rejection of reason. It’s the recognition that reason has already been rejected by the other side. It’s the realization that mercy cannot mean surrender to tyranny. And that seriousness is exactly what so much of the online commentary missed. “Masters” also offers a clean break from the fake masculinity peddled by Andrew Tate and his imitators. Tate-style masculinity is not strength. It sells young men the idea that being a man means becoming unaccountable and unburdened by anyone else’s needs. It’s also not a coincidence that Tate was recently glazing Russia and Putin. Fake masculinity is often drawn to fake strength. It sees a strongman and mistakes him for a strong man. He-Man understands that his strength is not ordered toward conquest. It’s ordered toward protection. His masculinity is not chest-thumping or cruelty. It’s duty. It is love strong enough to become dangerous when the people he loves are threatened. That is the part Hollywood keeps missing. And it is the part the online woke Right too often misses as well. A man who refuses to protect his family is not enlightened. A country that refuses to recognize evil until it arrives at the doorstep is not wise. It’s asleep. The appeal of “Masters” and of He-Man is not complicated. Audiences are tired of heroes who need to be deconstructed before they are allowed to be heroic. Sometimes the good guy should simply be good. Sometimes the bad guy should simply be stopped. Sometimes the lesson really is that a man protects his family, defends his home, and refuses to let evil win. He-Man wins because he understands the truth our culture keeps trying to forget: When evil will not stop, good men must make it stop. *** Justin Siegel is the executive producer of The Ben Shapiro Show.

Steven Spielberg wants us to believe. Trailers for his latest blockbuster “Disclosure Day,” set for release next Friday, feature humans in direct contact with extraterrestrials (ET) — the stereotypical “grays” from alien-abduction lore. He says the film is “more truth than fiction” and could “upend all established order.” Whether by coincidence or design, the movie is timed just after the federal government started releasing UFO “disclosure” files, upon order by President Donald Trump. Like other hyped-up government document releases, this could ultimately change everything — or it might prove to be a nothingburger, revealing little more than grainy, cryptic, black-and-white videos. I’m not expecting “aliens” to land on the White House lawn any time soon, but let’s consider a far-out thought experiment: If humanoid aliens were shown to exist, what would that mean for questions about evolution, origins, and intelligent design? The stereotypical ET, familiar from media depictions, would have two arms, two legs, two eyes, and an oversized head — a humanoid body similar to our own. Some will be tempted to say that we “evolved” such biological similarities independently — the “Star Trek” version of aliens who inexplicably always look like humans. Evolutionary biologists call this “convergent evolution.” But under an evolutionary view, the existence of other humanoid life is highly improbable. According to mainstream biology, Darwinian evolution is blind and unguided. This means that the likelihood of evolution on another planet independently generating humanoid life like humans is infinitesimally small. Scientists recognize this. Writing about ET life, the late University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup noted that “the majority of evolutionary biologists find the chance of an independent evolution of a recognizably humanoid creature to be essentially nil.” Or, as the physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently wrote in the New York Times, the existence of “humanoid” aliens would “shock” him, “violating everything we know about biodiversity.” The reason for Tyson’s “shock” is that such a high degree of similarity would be extremely unlikely to evolve independently. Even Richard Dawkins once wrote that it is “vanishingly improbable that exactly the same evolutionary pathway should ever be travelled twice.” Instead, as leading UFO disclosure advocate Luis Elizondo recently argued, aliens with a “humanoid form” would suggest a “common link.” The best explanation would be that we all come from a common designer. After all, intelligent agents regularly reuse functional parts in different systems. Engineers reuse wheels on both cars and airplanes, or keyboards on both tablets and cell phones. A high degree of similarity is far better explained by a common intelligent designer, not blind evolution. Undoubtedly, there will be those tempted to say that the aliens actually are our designers, but what does this really explain? Invoking aliens kicks the can down the road and doesn’t explain the aliens’ origin. If humanoid aliens really existed, such a degree of similarity would require that they be based upon something like DNA and proteins. But complex biomolecules like DNA won’t arise once, much less twice, by unguided chemical evolution. Something else is needed. And much more than DNA alone is needed for cells to operate. Life contains a myriad of molecular machines that maintain a highly ordered state of cellular complexity. But how does all that machinery arise? The answer is that they are programmed into our DNA. The nucleotide bases in DNA must be arranged in precisely the right order to produce functional proteins. Molecular biologist Douglas Axe published a paper finding that only 1 in 10^77 amino acid sequences will work to produce a typical functional protein. Blind evolution could never stumble upon such rare and precise sequences of genetic information. Special machines in living cells read and interpret that genetic information, executing its commands, to produce cellular machines. The result is a form of computer-like information processing where you literally have machines building machines. As Bruce Alberts, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, wrote: “The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.” Information-rich codes, computer-like information processing, and factories making machines have only one known cause: an intelligent mind. If alien life does exist — and that’s still a very big “if” — and if it looks or works even remotely like human biology, then it did not arise by blind evolution, and those similarities didn’t occur by chance. Their complexity was intelligently designed, and their similarities trace to a common designer. So, could aliens be the designers? No, because these aliens could not create themselves. Speaking philosophically, if we go back to the beginning, there can only be one ultimate designer: an unevolved, superintelligent, supernatural, transcendent being. Most people call that God. *** Casey Luskin is a PhD geologist, California-licensed attorney, and an associate director at Discovery Institute in Seattle.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Millionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson wants to live forever. But after spending $2 million a year “future-proofing” his body, the 48-year-old has finally tapped into an actual reason for living.  “Guys … I have a girlfriend,” Johnson posted to X.  In 2025, he announced he had been dating his Blueprint health protocol co-founder, 30-year-old Kate Tolo, for three years. But it wasn’t until this month that he flew to Australia to meet Kate’s parents for the first time.  “International travel causes aging,” he noted from the plane. “But I really love her so it’s worth the cost.” Behind every man attempting to live forever, there’s a strong woman organizing his 54 daily supplements, plugging in his red light therapy laser helmet, and holding his stuff during his therapeutic plasma exchange appointments. But a temporary deviation from his 1,977 vegan calories per day allowed him a glimpse at an existence beyond vitalitycore. “I ate everything [Kate’s mother] prepared, including meat, bread, and pasta, and embraced the discomfort of being an introvert in a week-long marathon social interaction,” Johnson shared. “It was laughter and teasing all around … It feels nice to be part of the family.” Johnson also posted a photo of himself cowering under a UV umbrella on a sunny day as Kate’s dad cracked macadamia nuts from their tree, and he lamented the “spike in food noise” while traveling thanks to off-kilter hormones from jet lag. But while the painfully on-brand longevity enthusiast routinely takes incoming fire from haters in the comments, many related to Johnson’s desire just to be accepted by Kate’s family. “A pale immortal trading their immortality for the love of a human is actually a very important trope to me,” an X user wrote. Someone else gleefully shared, “Lol why does this man who I loathed have me screaming and kicking my feet?” “Some things are worth dying for,” commented another.  It wasn’t a total surprise that Kate’s Bosnian-born parents were slow to warm up to her mogul boyfriend. Just a month before the trip, Johnson wrote about Kate’s “top 1%” vaginal microbiome swab test with a not-safe-for-work announcement about the couple’s recent activities. Mom and Dad’s dream. Considering that he’s said “I really want to have multiple lifetimes,” it’s putting it extraordinarily lightly to say Johnson sets a high bar. Since selling his company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800 million, the 48-year-old has been raking it in, acting as his own guinea pig to shill gateway goods for his branded longevity protocol. Apparently, all it takes is $40 “Snake Oil” extra virgin olive oil, $60 facial serum, and a $40 blueberry nut mix and you’ll be on your way toward sitting in front of a sunlamp every morning stimulating your “body clock” for your health. I watched Johnson’s 2025 Netflix documentary, “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever,” without blinking. My basic Amazon omega-3-6-9, magnesium, and creatine routine felt like Flintstones Vitamins next to Johnson’s aspirational regimen. Can anyone keep up with this guy? We all have our types. But I could never imagine even being distant roommates with someone so focused on manicuring his body hair like a mint-condition Ken doll. Earlier in his life, Johnson was married for 13 years to a woman with whom he shares his son, Talmage Johnson. But by age 44, Johnson says he was beginning to come to terms with living out the rest of his lifetimes (yes, plural) solo.  Then he met Kate, who witnessed the unvarnished ins and outs of life with BJo (she may have even styled the French braid he wears to keep his mane out of his rejuvenated eyes) and said, Sign me up for more of this. They say there’s a pot for every kettle.  On some level, we’re probably all just looking for someone whose weirdness is compatible with our own. Luckily for humanity, most of us meet our match. Even for fans of ultra life-maxxing, the love quotient has a real impact on longevity. Research proves that those of us with close relationships experience a 50% greater overall rate of survival than those with “meh” personal connections, with one study suggesting that we should all “take social relationships as seriously as other risk factors that affect mortality” such as smoking, alcohol, and inactivity.  On the flip side, the devastating surge in loneliness and social isolation has been shown to lead to earlier death from all causes.   If you’ve got the money, you can pay for $25,000 gene therapy at a specialized clinic in Honduras as Bryan Johnson did. But while the procedure may have helped him maintain muscle mass and quell a little of his alleged inflammation, he can’t spoon with his own six-pack abs at night under the covers.  According to an 80-year-long study (the rough equivalent of two of Bryan Johnson’s current lives), happy, fulfilling relationships — not genes, IQ, or social class — might be the greatest predictors of longevity. “Playing the longest game ever with Bryan Johnson: Don’t Die …” wrote Kate, summing up their serendipitous meeting of the minds when she emailed him as a fan of his work. Even though she originally wanted to get into fashion, their life’s passions aligned. “Kate was luminescent … butterflies fluttered in my stomach,” Johnson wrote of first falling for his co-founder. “It wasn’t how she looked but how her mind worked: original, eccentric, entirely her own. She was art.” “Life sinks or sails based upon the quality of our most intimate relationships,” he said. Sounds like a well-matched pair doing a little love-gevity research as they sail into the sunset.

Today is the day. The day Democrats are asking Maine voters to look past a campaign dogged by a Nazi-linked tattoo, comments mocking a Purple Heart veteran, and explicit messages sent to other women during a marriage. Maine voters are heading to the polls in a Democratic Senate primary that was supposed to set up the party’s best shot at unseating longtime incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Instead, it has become a referendum on the character of Graham Platner, the progressive Marine veteran and oyster farmer who is now the likely nominee after Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign in April. “While I have the drive and passion, commitment and experience, and above all else – the fight – to continue on, I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources,” Mills said in a statement.  Tuesday’s primary could deal a major blow to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who recruited and backed Gov. Janet Mills. The Democratic establishment viewed Mills as the strongest candidate to defeat Collins. Meanwhile, Platner gained momentum with a progressive-populist message and secured high-profile endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The results will test just how many Democrats are willing to support a candidate whose personal controversies have become increasingly difficult to ignore. And the final stretch has been brutal. Democrats spent years building a political movement around the idea that allegations should be taken seriously and investigated aggressively.  Now, Democrats are asking voters to overlook a growing list of Platner-related scandals in the name of taking back power.   The Daily Wire previously uncovered that the Senate hopeful maintained an active account on a social media platform known to attract child predators. Several media outlets reported that Platner, a married man, had also exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women.  Most recently, The New York Times reported that multiple women who dated Platner described his behavior as “unsettling.” One former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, accused him of physical aggression — allegations he denied during a national television interview. “There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about, are simply not true,” Platner said on the television network. “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.” Then came the twist. After The Times story was published, Fifield publicly accused the newspaper of watering down her account and omitting key details she said would have strengthened her allegations. In a lengthy social media post, she argued the final article amounted to a political “gift” to Platner’s campaign. No major elected Democratic figure has called for Platner to leave the race. Rep. Ro Khanna has condemned Platner’s conduct as “misogynistic, shameful, and wrong,” but has continued to support his candidacy. For some non-elected Democrats, Platner’s behavior is a bridge too far.  “Graham Platner is a chronic liar who is mentally disturbed, sympathetic to Nazis, and dangerous to women,” Ally Sammarco, a Democratic political consultant, said. “I’m disgusted to see members of my party make excuses for his behavior because it’s politically beneficial. He should be nowhere near our party and the U.S. Senate. Meanwhile, Platner’s supporters on the ground have largely stuck by him, including one woman who said an Israeli tattoo, not a Nazi tattoo, is the real dealbreaker.  At a Graham Platner rally in Portland. “Would an Israeli flag tattoo be a deal breaker?” “Honestly yeah, because I don’t support genocide.” https://t.co/93SQVwHOXH pic.twitter.com/CKrpQwkmxO — Caroline McCaughey (@TheCarolineMc) June 8, 2026 “Somebody said that they talked to somebody who had seen one of those or worn one of those, and it was silver, and it didn’t even prove to him that it was the same thing. I think people are making as much of it as they can; they don’t have a lot of substance around anything else,” the woman said, attempting to defend the tattoo. “They are trolling for dirt,” she added. “Would an Israeli flag tattoo be a deal breaker?” reporter Caroline McCaughey pressed the voter.  “Honestly, yeah, because I don’t support genocide,” she said.  Other Maine voters have a different take on the oyster farmer. “He’s a disgrace to every veteran that has PTSD, like I do,” one voter told Fox News. “Because he’s using it as an excuse to cover up his own personal failings.” Maine veteran destroys scandal plagued Graham Platner for using his service to distract from his horrifying past. “He’s a disgrace to every veteran that has PTSD, like I do.” pic.twitter.com/eV79LWoMr2 — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 8, 2026 Republicans have already signaled that every scandal surrounding Platner will become fresh ammunition for the November general election.  With no active or formal opposition, Platner is expected to cruise to victory in Tuesday’s primary. The remaining question is how many Democrats will choose to withhold their support from a candidate whose controversies could jeopardize one of the party’s best opportunities to flip a Senate seat.

The head of New York’s casino union is living like a high roller while his lieutenants allegedly raked in luxury goods. New York Hotel Gaming and Trades Council President Rich Maroko made $923,053 in 2024, according to publicly available financial disclosures reviewed by the Center For Union Facts. That near-million-dollar salary includes $313,386 in base salary, $380,108 things like retirement benefits, and $229,559 from other organizations. Under Maroko’s leadership, union higher ups have been accused of rampant corruption. A group of New York City hotel owners last month retained a private investigator to probe a whistleblower’s claim that the union was shot through with “corruption, misconduct and malfeasance.” “The whistleblower alleges union officials received free gifts of liquor, gourmet food and electronics including an Xbox and PlayStation from hotel-industry executives,” Crain’s New York Business reported. “The letter further alleges that union officials defrauded UNITE HERE Local 6, a Midtown-based chapter of the union, out of nearly $3 million by paying below-market rent for Eighth Avenue office space it owned.” The New York Hotel Gaming and Trades Council is the latest union to come under fire for profligate spending and alleged corruption. In 2024, the International Longshoremen’s Association was slammed for a strike that shut down ports up and down the East Coast. Association president Harold Daggett emerged as a villain in that saga, thanks to his million-dollar salary, luxury yacht, contributions to Democrats, and alleged mafia ties, as The Daily Wire reported at the time. The Center For Union Facts is calling attention to Maroko’s pay raise as unions across the country use the World Cup to hike labor costs. That includes hotel workers in Seattle and Philadelphia, as well as stadium workers in Los Angeles. MI X DW: BIGGEST EVENT ON EARTH COMES WITH A $150 GUT PUNCH “Hotel workers may believe they’re receiving a World Cup windfall,” said Charlyce Bozzello, the group’s communications director. “But from where we sit, Maroko is the one hitting the jackpot,” “Union members deserve transparency about the lucrative compensation package they’re being asked to fund.” The union recently enjoyed some positive press following its announcement of a massive new pay package for members. But even with that jump, members still fall far behind the brass. Workers made $38.87 per hour on average in 2024, about 570% less than Maroko.