Surreal Boomer Shooter goblinAmerica Asks You To Speedrun Through Our Crumbling Political Landscape
The article discusses a new trend among TikTok users who are speedrunning through the Church of Scientology, reminiscent of past online movements. It also highlights the game goblinAmerica, which allows players to navigate through U.S. history while saving presidents from various threats. The developer, Gil Lawson, believes these gaming trends reflect deeper societal impulses and a desire for rapid action in a changing world.
- ▪TikTok users are speedrunning through the Church of Scientology, dressed in costumes.
- ▪The game goblinAmerica lets players navigate different presidential administrations to prevent historical disasters.
- ▪Developer Gil Lawson suggests that these gaming trends reveal underlying societal impulses.
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Record
| Original publisher | Kotaku |
| Canonical URL | https://kotaku.com/surreal-boomer-shooter-goblinamerica-asks-you-to-speedrun-through-our-crumbling-political-landscape-2000697185 |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 18:00:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T18:07:39.397Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T18:07:39.397Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9z-icZxEpesn |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
By Zack Kotzer Published May 25, 2026 𝕏 Copied! In recent weeks, TikTok teens and general gremlins have been “speedrunning” the Church of Scientology. Dressed in costumes, sometimes as Minions, they storm the doors of the church, zip past as many members and security officers just to see how deep they can penetrate the secretive chambers before being ejected. Just like their gaming counterparts, the runners are iterating and improving on each other’s attempts. They’ve even recreated churches in Roblox to improve their strats. The trend reminded me of the nascent days of “Anonymous,” the online hacker collective who initially targeted the same contentious organization.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Kotaku.
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