7 Ways to Celebrate Godly Fathers This Father’s Day

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.

During the second session the previously monosyllabic woman began describing a peaceful scene, surfing on an island with her son.

On the latest episode of the Wired In podcast, host Cabot Phillips spoke with Media Research Center President David Bozell to analyze the off-the-rails Scott Pelley's New York Times podcast interview and President Donald Trump’s walkout on NBC’s Kristen Welker.  President Trump walked off the set of a weekend interview with Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, following a heated exchange with moderator Kristen Welker regarding election integrity. During the segment, Trump criticized NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, calling them "one-sided crooked networks."  MRC's @Davidbozell joins @cabot_phillips on Wired In Live to discuss President Trump walking out of the Meet the Press interview. There's a political utility for the President to go after the media; he likes telling them how sick and tired he is of them. pic.twitter.com/IqHorWRIga — Media Research Center (@theMRC) June 8, 2026 Bozell defended Trump's decision to leave, arguing that legacy journalists routinely subject conservative figures to lopsided coverage, something Trump himself noted by citing MRC research. Bozell noted that the interview took place at a John Deere manufacturing facility immediately following a positive national jobs report, an achievement Bozell argued Welker largely ignored in favor of more adversarial questioning. He added that the media's adversarial approach to Trump has driven public trust in news institutions to historic lows. Scott Pelley seems confused as to why Americans think he's biased.@Davidbozell sets the record with @cabot_phillips on Wired In Live pic.twitter.com/HOz2hXWqcu — Media Research Center (@theMRC) June 8, 2026 The segment also addressed the recent departure of veteran journalist Scott Pelley from CBS’s 60 Minutes. Pelley’s exit followed internal friction with the network’s new leadership, including chief editor Bari Weiss. In an appearance on a New York Times podcast, Pelley expressed disbelief over accusations of network bias and compared his journalistic career to military combat. Bozell dismissed Pelley's remarks as performative, citing recent Gallup polling data showing that public trust in the media has hit a 72-year low. Watch the full video podcast below.  

After the Supreme Court’s Louisiana vs. Callais decision struck down the state’s racially gerrymandered congressional map and thus “undermined” the Voting Rights Act, the high court recently granted Alabama permission to use a map that eliminated one of two majority-minority districts. This after an Alabama district court initially defied Callais to reject the map. NPR election correspondent Hansi Lo Wang (who identities as "he/him" in his official bio) sounded bereft in Friday’s online article “Voting rights ruling leaves limited alternative protections,” which came complete with another artifact of wokism that won’t die, capitalizing “Black” (but not “white”) when referring to people:  Minority voters are left with limited alternatives for combatting racial discrimination in redistricting, after the U.S. Supreme Court's latest undermining of the federal Voting Rights Act. Remaining options for protecting the collective power of racial-minority voters include state-level voting rights acts and map-drawing strategies, likely in Democratic-controlled states, yet they cannot fully replace the nationwide provisions under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that many legal experts say are now practically impossible to enforce. .... "Today the bulk of Black people live in the states of the old Confederacy. And that is exactly where you're seeing the worst types of retrenchment," says Wilfred Codrington III, professor of constitutional law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law. Still, some voting rights advocates are pushing forward with what they see as short-term solutions ahead of a longer-term project of rebuilding the federal Voting Rights Act or even the overall system for electing members of Congress. Wang's reporting is out of date in other senses as well: He has a long history at NPR of seeing the bad old days of U.S. racism reemerging. Wang quoted liberal professors but didn’t label them as such, while twice finding a “conservative” Supreme Court and also a “conservative” legal foundation, and strategized with Democrats in the upcoming election cycles. Sometimes partisan gerrymandering is acceptable to NPR, as when heavily Democratic states do it.: The example to follow, [Harvard Law election law professor Nick] Stephanopoulos says, is California's new congressional map, which Democrats drew to flip five Republican-held seats without eliminating any minority-opportunity districts. The Trump administration argued that the map is "tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander," but the Supreme Court ultimately allowed California to use it. That redistricting strategy, however, would not address the court's weakening of protections for minority voters in Republican-controlled Southern states. Reporters love describing liberal policies as "protections" for their favored groups. Another liberal trial balloon was launched: Some election reformers are also calling for structural changes in Congress — specifically how voters elect House members. Supporters of replacing the current single-member, winner-take-all districts with a proportional representation system say that the change could help ensure fairer representation of people of color and other minority voters…. In Wang’s world, ending racially gerrymandered districts is equivalent to ending democracy, while helping partisan Democrats is equivalent to preserving democracy: "States are in this unique position to do some things," Codrington says. "But we need a federal government to be involved and invested in this problem if we're going to have any sort of wide promotion of democracy across the United States." He was equally doleful discussing the Supreme Court’s Callais decision on the May 9 edition of NPR’s race-based, frankly sexist podcast “Code Switch”: “How the Supreme Court gutted Black voting power.” After fretting that the Supreme Court had made “it much, much harder to challenge voting maps with claims that they discriminate against voters of color,” he showed he had zero understanding of or sympathy for conservative philosophy (par for the course at NPR): Wang: ….there have been opponents of the Voting Rights Act who believe in this conservative ideology that racial differences should not be acknowledged in society. That essentially ignoring race will help solve the problem of racism. And that way of thinking really undermines what has been the premise of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws….

Candidate Nithya Raman in the Los Angeles mayoral race came in third place on election night, June 2, so far behind second place finisher Spencer Platt that she essentially conceded the election in a tearful farewell. And then, miracle of miracle, over the next few days as more and more mail-in ballots kept rolling in, Raman suddenly surged in the votes, often exceeding first place Karen Bass in some counts and doubling the percentage of her election day returns to the extent that by Sunday she surpassed Pratt in the vote, thus apparently landing a spot in the November runoff elections. Oh, and for those of you who expressed skepticism about this electoral miracle in the midst of a questionable vote count of the mass ballot mailings in which voter identification requirements were at best laughable, Politico has written off your concerns as "baseless." The Politico California damage control team of Melanie Mason, Dustin Gardiner, and Blake Jones have already described any reasonable skepticism as, wait for it, "conspiracy theories" on Monday in "The online meltdown over LA’s vote count." The best way to describe how Team Politico performed their shtick would be cherry-picking. They focused in on some minor details, while completely ignoring substantive facts that upend their damage control. Here is a glaring example: Social media sites, particularly X, were awash with conspiracy theories about Nithya Raman’s surge since Election Day. By Sunday, Raman had pulled ahead of Pratt by roughly 3,000 votes, making her the heavy favorite to take on Bass in the November runoff — and Pratt’s online fans handled the development much like Quan anticipated. By now, certain corners of the social media ecosystem have settled, baselessly, on an ironclad consensus: The election was rigged. One widely-circulated claim alleged that a suspicious ballot drop included, improbably, zero votes for Pratt. In fact, the charge stemmed from a misreading of election data that had a one-minute lag in updates, the Los Angeles Times reported. Still skeptics were unconvinced when Bill Essayli, the Donald Trump-picked first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California who said he’s launched “multiple” unspecified election fraud investigations, debunked the claim on X. Their story was posted at 9 AM. That is important to note because the prior day at 12:47 PM, that very same U.S. attorney, Bill Essayli that they gleefully cited also posted this highly damaging information about the integrity of the California election: California Is Blocking a Federal Audit of Its Voter Rolls California allows first-time voters to register using forms of ID that most Americans would find surprising, including: -Gym membership card -Employer ID card -Credit or debit card -Prescription drug label -Insurance… pic.twitter.com/kOEOzpctmb — F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli (@USAttyEssayli) June 7, 2026 The only way to explain this significant skip of what the U.S. attorney posted on Sunday afternoon was that it was a very intentional cherry pick since it counters their argument for the supposed integrity of the election. Oh, and the Politico crew citing very liberal media sources to bolster their argument is less than convincing considering the bias of the sources: For the last few days, reporters — notably, The New York Times’ Ken Bensinger and CNN’s Elex Michaelson — have been trying, often in vain, to refute falsehoods and explain the precedent of progressive candidates getting a boost off of late votes. And no defense of California's flawed election system is complete without them bringing up those whom they consider the usual culprits: But the cheating fixation persists, in no small part because it’s amplified by the most powerful man in the world. Trump said during an interview on Meet the Press on Sunday the California elections were rigged — as well as repeating his baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election being fraudulent — before he abruptly ended his interview with Kristen Welker and walked out. Newsom’s press office declared the outburst “the most severe case of California Derangement Syndrome we’ve ever seen.” Pratt’s post-election posts have taken a conspiratorial turn. On Friday, he urged his supporters to be patient; by Sunday, he was intimating the late votes for Raman were entirely due to homeless people voting for her. So happy cherry-picking, Politico. As more election discrepancies are unearthed that technique will certainly need to be applied again ever more frequently.

Google is trying to make Gemini as ubiquitous as possible. From AI Mode in Search to Gemini Intelligence in Android, and even the Gemini app on iPhone, the company is betting big that you’ll encounter its AI bot somewhere on your devices and fall so in love that you can’t live without it. One of these new features is Daily Brief, a digital corkboard that scans through all of your Google services to write a custom agenda for the day that is as cool as it is creepy. But is it useful? Let’s take a look.What is Daily Brief?Every morning, I wake up to a new Gemini notification on my Pixel phone waiting to be unraveled. The Daily Brief is an automatically generated itinerary for the day ahead. It can include just about anything — a reminder about an important event you have coming up next week, a nudge to talk to your boss about that email you sent before you clocked out the day before, maybe even a prompt to follow up on that question you Googled earlier in the week.You are giving Gemini permission to scour your Google account, and it will find a lot.Google calls it “your personalized overview of today’s priorities.”That’s not exactly true. We’ll get to why in a bit. The important part for now is that Daily Brief is a constantly evolving to-do list that changes based on your activity in Google’s apps and services.What makes Daily Brief creepyFor Daily Brief to work, it needs complete access to your Google account through Gemini’s Personal Intelligence feature. Once enabled, Gemini can look through the entire treasure trove of information saved in your Google apps and services and use all of it in its responses to your queries.Before you panic over privacy, Google claims that it “built Personal Intelligence with privacy at the center.” Take that with whatever heaping mountain of salt you like. As for me, Google already knows more than enough, thanks to my dependence on its services, and it turns out that Google knows quite a bit.I was a bit stunned when my first Daily Brief showed up in my notification shade. At the time, I was writing my article about prediction markets with Stu Burguiere. Daily Brief knew that, because it saw the article saved in my Google Docs and it spotted the ongoing email chain with Stu to lock in his responses to my questions. It reminded me that I still needed to gather his answers before I could submit the piece to my editor.Cool, right? I thought it was pretty neat at first, and then I realized what it meant — that Gemini knew everything I was doing in Google’s ecosystem and could serve it back to me, even when I least expected the results.RELATED: Google is about to overhaul the Android. You'll either love it or hate it. lixu/Getty Images This went on for a few more days. It reminded me about pending emails with my editors that still needed responses. It looked at my Chrome browser history and urged me to dig deeper on another set of stories I was researching for Blaze Media. It even recalled from a previous Gemini chat that I write for a living and suggested stories to add to my writing portfolio saved in Google Drive.With Daily Brief, I was suddenly more knowledgeable, more astute, more capable — or at least I appeared that way, as Gemini pinged me reminders for things that were postponed or had completely fallen off my radar.It knew everything about me. Too much, in fact. But I suppose that level of insight is what you get when you give Google a front-row seat to your digital life.Cool? Yes. Creepy? Double yes.Is it useful?For the first couple of days, Daily Brief was useful. I’m not sure it was ever a necessity, but on a few mornings, I woke up intrigued to find what it had in store for the day. Some agenda items were spot-on, like the reminders to follow up on my emails and articles. Eventually, though, Daily Brief started to slip, especially when it came to tasks that it couldn’t see.For instance, I write my stories in Google Docs, but I submit most of them to my editor through a third-party messaging service. In a week, Daily Brief had no idea which stories I was working on or what was still pending approval, despite the fact that my Google Docs are all dated and have activity history that shows when they’re finished or not. It didn’t prompt me for updates on these at all, because it didn’t know when I sent them off for editing. The brief would have been different if I emailed my drafts, but that’s simply not my workflow, so no briefs for me.Just like that, Daily Brief went from creepily useful to oddly empty. All that remained were notes telling me to research article topics that were now outdated because those articles were already in my editor’s hands.Then the following week, Daily Brief did something useful again, reminding me about a paint recycling event coming up next week that I completely forgot about. (I really do need to get those old paint cans out of my storage closet.)So to answer definitively if Daily Brief is useful, I can only say “sometimes.” If you actively participate in Google’s digital ecosystem, it can be extremely helpful. If you use Google services sparingly or not at all, however, Daily Brief will be completely useless. Your mileage depends entirely on how much you rely on Google.Try Daily Brief if you dare!If you’re interested in seeing how useful Daily Brief is all for yourself, you can test it out now. Daily Brief is already available to the public, and it lives directly inside the Gemini app and webpage, so you can access it on Android devices, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and PCs. Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Google Gemini appTo enable it, you’ll need to activate Personal Intelligence in the Gemini app or webpage by clicking on the Settings icon, then Personal Intelligence, and switch the toggles beside “Memory” and “Daily Brief” to the on position. Note that by doing this, you are giving Gemini permission to scour your Google account for any bit of information that it finds useful, and it will find a lot.

The West stands to gain.

It does not have to be this way.