Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is urging Congress to strip a provision from the National Defense Authorization Act that would expand U.S.-Israel defense cooperation, arguing it would elevate Israel’s status above some NATO allies. “We must strip Section 224 from the Pentagon budget,” Sanders wrote on X, accusing lawmakers of “burying a provision in the defense bill that would give Israel more military integration than any NATO ally.” The measure, known as the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” is included as Section 224 of the fiscal year 2027 NDAA. Under the provision, the secretary of defense would be required to designate an “executive agent” to oversee and coordinate joint U.S.-Israel defense technology efforts. These efforts would include research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation between the two nations. The provision also calls for expanded collaboration through joint ventures, licensing agreements, and co-production partnerships with Israeli industry. It outlines plans for increased joint training exercises and enhanced information-sharing mechanisms. Israel has heavily relied on intelligence to locate, identify, track, and eliminate radical Islamic terrorist since Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2025, massacre of Israeli citizens, which resulted in the rape, murder, and kidnapping of over 1,000 citizens. The Islamic Resistance Movement also calls for violence against the United States and the West. Areas of cooperation would include counter-drone systems, missile defense, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cyber and electronic warfare, biotechnology, and defense industrial production. Sanders cited public opinion as a rationale for opposing the measure, claiming that only “16% of Americans support arming Israel without restrictions.” The senator has also voted multiple times to block passage of the SAVE America Act, a voter legislation measure passed three times by the U.S. House of Representatives that supporters say is backed by roughly 70-80% of Americans. Legislation similar to the amendment has already been introduced in the U.S. Senate. In February, before Iran’s attempted military retaliation against Israeli civilians, Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced legislation to strengthen the Israel-American military alliance. “The U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act offers an opportunity to strengthen existing bilateral programs by advancing joint investments such as emerging technologies, defense industrial base cooperation, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology initiatives,” Budd said in a press release.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is facing legal action from an unlikely source: her own brother, who has joined Spencer Pratt and thousands of other fire victims in a sweeping lawsuit against the city over its handling of the Palisades fire. Kenneth Bass, 78, and his wife, who lost their Malibu home in January 2025, are joining Pratt in a massive lawsuit against the city, the Department of Water and Power, and others, for alleged negligence. Among the claims is that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which holds roughly 117 million gallons of water, was empty when the fire broke out, contributing to low water pressure in some neighborhoods as firefighters battled the blaze. The Palisades fire was one of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles’ history, with about 13,000 homes destroyed, at least 28 dead, and damage estimates exceeding $30 billion, fueling ongoing questions about whether city officials were adequately prepared for a wildfire threat. The addition of the mayor’s brother to the lawsuit creates an unusual political dynamic for Karen Bass, whose handling of the Palisades fire has faced intense scrutiny from residents who lost homes and businesses. Pratt, who ran for mayor largely on criticism of Karen Bass’ handling of the fire, highlighted the unlikely alliance with a comment about awkward family Thanksgivings.  I am proud to be teaming up with Karen Bass' brother in suing his sister for her reckless negligence that led to the destruction of our homes. I hope their Thanksgiving dinner isn't too awks. I know ours hasn't been the same since last year… pic.twitter.com/d8YyGjJ775— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) June 14, 2026 In a comment to ABC 7, the mayor’s press secretary seemed to not be concerned.  “There’s nothing new here–Mayor Bass has spoken of her brother’s loss publicly since January of 2025. Thousands of people are plaintiffs in this action.” The city has repeatedly defended its response to the fires, arguing that unprecedented weather conditions and extreme fire behavior created challenges for emergency responders across the region. This morning, Pratt shared on X that Californians should expect to learn “shocking details” in the coming weeks about Newsom and Bass’ handling of the Palisades fires.  We Palisades Fire victims are now in the discovery phase of our lawsuit against the State of CA and the City of LA. Over the next weeks, you'll finally learn shocking details of how badly Karen & Newsom screwed our town, and they haven't done anything to change. No more lies! https://t.co/s82eKAKXCC pic.twitter.com/nvat4clVoh— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) June 15, 2026 The development adds a striking twist to the fallout from the fire: even the mayor’s own brother is seeking to hold the city accountable in court. The case is expected to move through the courts over the coming months as plaintiffs seek to determine what role, if any, city officials, utility managers, and emergency planning decisions played in the scale of the destruction.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   There’s a lot of confusion, controversy, and disagreement about the latest phase of the Iran war. Remember, we bombed kinetically 38 to 40 days, then we had 60 days of negotiation, then here we are in mid-June, in which Donald Trump has announced yet another time there is going to be a peace deal coming with a 60-day period for all the elements of the deal to be enacted.  A lot of people are upset. They feel that Iran was on the ropes, they’re going broke, and that had we continued, or if we were to continue now, we could put them out of commission and then dictate a non-conditional surrender to them.   That’s absolutely true, but what this deal then hinges on—because there’s no history of Iran ever keeping their word or following any agreement, explicit or implicit—is the willingness to keep maybe one carrier group in the region to ensure that the strait stays open, that the missiles are not launched against our allies, and of course, the enriched uranium is turned over.  And if we’re willing to do that and hit them hard every time they break it, then it might eventually work.   There’s a lot of misconceptions, though, about the deal and the war in general. I’d like to address just a few of them. A lot of the critics of this administration are saying, I think Hakeem Jeffries said that not long ago, “Well, the strait was open and now it’s closed, so the deal didn’t accomplish anything.  In fact, it made it worse.” Well, the strait was open because Iran had no reason, as it did now, to close it. And the reason they didn’t have any reason to close it was the seven prior presidents, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn’t want to disarm Iran.  They didn’t want to go in there and try to stop their proliferation agenda. Donald Trump did. Anybody who did was going to be confronted with a desperate effort of Iran to close the strait. Now we’ll open the strait, but the idea that we made things worse, is ridiculous.   And then second, people are saying, “Well, it’s just like the Obama deal.  Why did Trump get out of the Obama deal?” Well, they enriched uranium all through the Obama deal. We know that. They wouldn’t let inspectors in. During Joe Biden’s presidency, he begged them to go back  into the Iran deal. They didn’t wanna do it.   Why? Because we now know they had pretty much already enriched to the point, 60 or more percent, that they could make a bomb in a month should they want to.  But here’s the big difference. In the Obama, atmosphere of that deal of 2015-16, Iran was ascendant. Everybody was scared of it. Its military was heavily equipped with Chinese and Russian weaponry. People were afraid of it. Israel didn’t want to attack it. The Gulf States didn’t want to attack it.  Europe was advising caution. It was an appeasing deal because nobody wanted to use force. Now, whatever your disagreement is with the current war, most people, and we don’t have boots on the ground, we don’t have journalists on the ground, but they agree that the Iranian military and its economy are devastated through forty days of intense bombing with probably a thousand planes in the air at any one time.  So we’re dealing with a much-diminished Iran that we can hit again and again because they have no air defenses. Obama was dealing with an ascendant Iran that he was scared to even mention the use of force to make them comply   There’s a third misconception. People say, “Well, now we’re isolated. We’re all isolated. We have no allies. China and Russia are ascendant.” Nothing could be further from the truth.   This is the first time in all of our lifetimes that the Gulf Council, for all their double-dealing over the years, basically are more attuned to an alliance, maybe unspoken, with Israel than they are with Iran.   We know now that some of the 600 combat aircraft based in the Gulf were stealthily flying missions, and that meant alongside the Israelis.  We know that there are Israeli technicians in the Gulf helping them with missile defense. We know the Gulf states and most of the moderate Arab countries believe that Iran, not Israel, is the existential threat.   In other words, we’ve never had a closer relationship with the Gulf states vis-a-vis America, nor has Israel.  As far as Russia and China, they’re both shut out of the Middle East. They have lost their client in Syria. They have lost, and they’re going to lose their client in Iran. They have lost their client in Venezuela. They have a enormous problem. Russia cannot sell weapons to Iran anymore. They may smuggle some in, and China can’t get discounted oil anymore   There’s another misconception, that is the apostate right, that is the Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens right, has said that they were going to fracture the party and maybe their influence will turn the MAGA movement against Donald Trump.  Well, first of all, on all the other issues, maybe except the Iran war, most of the conservative, if not all, agree with Donald Trump. Even Tucker Carlson would agree with Donald Trump’s crime policy, his border policy, the Wall, the deportation policy, the rejection of the green energy mania.   But on this question of the war, the MAGA and Republican parties still overwhelmingly, 75%, support Donald Trump.  And the reason they do is they don’t feel this is a forever endless war, as the apostate right do. They believe that we have not used ground troops, and we have lost fewer soldiers than the accident rate that the military suffers daily over that period of 38 to 40 days of kinetic operations.  Finally, everybody says we’ve lost the midterms.   The midterms are four and a half months away. If the strait is open, suddenly you’re going to have a traffic jam of two things. One, tankers leaving, trying to get out full of oil, and tankers waiting to get in.   But there may be 200 or 250 tankers full of a million to 2 million barrels at a time when the United States and Russia and the Middle East and Venezuela are upping production.  So there could be a substantial drop in prices.   And if you do get a deal the Left is going to be sort of flummoxed because they said that we had lost the war and we didn’t achieve our objectives. But if you do get a deal and the deal is enforced by military action on the part of the United States, it wouldn’t hurt Trump, it could help him.  And then there’s a larger context of redistricting. In this redistricting war, it turns out that so far the Republican legislatures will outdo the Democratic legislatures, and the Republicans may pick up anywhere from three to four to five seats.   And the Supreme Court that said iit is a racial obsession, a fixation to create congressional districts on the basis of race, and you can’t do it, may lend the Republicans another four to five.  I’m not suggesting that Donald Trump, can overturn historical precedent. Remember that of the last 40 presidents, 95% lost their first midterm election. So his history is on the wrong side, but he will not lose the Senate. And it doesn’t really matter, to tell you the truth, if they lose the House.  It would be nice to get legislation through, but most of his legislation has already been through. He can still use executive orders, but most importantly, they can’t… They may impeach him as a performance art act, but the Senate will never convict him.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Supreme Court declined to take up a pro-life student’s lawsuit Monday after her school refused to let her post flyers with photos of signs reading “Defund Planned Parenthood,” but Justice Samuel Alito dissented. Alito, an appointee of President George W. Bush, argued that the case represented an important opportunity to clarify the rules on free speech. E.D., a high school freshman, founded Noblesville Students for Life at her Indiana school and sought approval to hang flyers advertising club meetings in 2021. Administrators refused to approve the flyers, however, because the flyers included pictures of students at the March for Life with “Defund Planned Parenthood” signs. Administrators asked her to submit flyers that only included the name of her club, the meeting time, and the location. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled against the student. As Alito noted, the three-judge panel began by asking “whether Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) or Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988) supplies the governing standard.” “That question is pivotal because Tinker and Hazelwood set forth vastly different standards of review for school censorship,” Alito wrote. In Tinker, the Supreme Court defended the speech rights of students wearing armbands protesting the Vietnam War. “Because students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’ the court held that a school could not censor students’ individual expression unless the school met the high bar of showing that the censored speech ‘would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school,” the justice noted. In Hazelwood, however, the Supreme Court allowed a school to regulate “school-sponsored publications, theatrical productions, and other expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.” The court held that a “school need only meet the low bar of showing that the censorship is ‘reasonably related to pedagogical concerns.'” U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker wrote that “it would be reasonable for parents and other members of the public entering NHS for sporting events, student concerts, theater performances, parent-teacher conferences, or any other reason who observed such flyers displayed on school walls to erroneously attribute any political messaging they contained to the school district or the school itself.” Are student flyers an expression of a student’s free speech or an implicit school endorsement of some ideas at the expense of others? “I would grant the petition to clarify the relationship between Hazelwood and our subsequent government-speech decisions,” Alito wrote. “In an appropriate case, we should do so.”

The White House hosted the Freedom 250 UFC fight Sunday night for a once-in-a-lifetime VIP presidential birthday party. The event brought 4,300 VIPs to the South Lawn of the White House and 85,000 UFC fans and D.C. politicos right next door at Ellipse Park for the free “Fan Fest.” Even though “The Claw” was roughly 1,000 feet away, there were 10 massive stadium screens surrounding the park, streaming the beatdowns live. The $60 million privately funded event, which coincided with President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, was sponsored by UFC parent company TKO Group, which absorbed all the costs and net losses. Some of the VIPs were guests, members of Congress, and White House staff, but others reportedly paid upward of $1.5 million per ticket, though none were ever listed publicly for purchase due to security concerns. VIPs spotted in the Claw included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; country music star Luke Bryan; House Speaker Mike Johnson and his family; various congressional Republicans, including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama; White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt; and many members of Trump’s Cabinet and the entire Trump family. The @ufc @Freedom250 event last night was an epic celebration of American grit and a tribute to our troops and first responders. The 90,000 fans at the White House and Ellipse, and tens of millions who watched the broadcast, enjoyed the once-in-a-lifetime show! pic.twitter.com/iUh2djCLel— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) June 15, 2026 A Spectacle of American Patriotism The entire event was truly a spectacle of American patriotism. The Saturday weigh-ins were emceed by UFC commentator Joe Rogan. The event began with the U.S. Army Golden Knights skydiving down from helicopters with sparklers and American flags. Almost immediately, a bald eagle soared in over the crowd. They absolutely lost it—chants of “USA, USA, USA!” echoed. As Rogan welcomed the fighters to the stage, Johnson, Kai Trump and her Secret Service detail, and UFC CEO Dana White could be spotted behind them catching a glimpse of the world-renowned fighters. Zac Brown Band came out on stage for a free show. Though he received backlash from the Left prior to the show, he went on to sing his America-lovin’ hits. “I’m there for the troops, man,” Brown said. “I’m there to honor America. This is patriotism, not politics, for me.” There’s a bald eagle at the UFC White House weigh insIt doesn’t get more American than this pic.twitter.com/R8CvwmvLBj— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) June 14, 2026 The attendees ranged from tourists who flew in from across the country, UFC groupies, and congressional staffers. The dress code, however, was unclear. Staffers dressed up for the occasion in suits, collared shirts, linen dresses, and heels, while the true UFC fans were wearing T-shirts with their favorite fighters’ bloody faces on the back and cutoff jean shorts. However, everyone contributed to the sea of red MAGA hats and the smell of cigarettes and beer in the open air. The fights themselves kept fans entertained until the wee hours of Monday morning. Justin Gaethje dominated former two-division champion Ilia Topuria, claiming the lightweight championship in a massively unexpected upset. It was the final knockout the event needed—the American underdog sending the undefeated Spanish-Georgian favorite to the hospital with shattered bones. Both are expected to be okay, and neither has announced plans to retire. UFC FAN FEST REACTION pic.twitter.com/77q0BYr94B— Spinnin Backfist (@SpinninBackfist) June 15, 2026 A $30 Million Loss The TKO Group brought dozens of sponsors that built installations and experiences for the fans. Meta, Bud Light, Monster Energy, and Ram Truck had massive booths set up with meet-and-greets with the fighters, merchandise, and even a real octagon fighting ring fans could climb into for a photo. TKO Group predicted a $30 million net loss, including the $700,000 pledged to repair the White House lawn. The White House said the group would need $700,000 for the necessary repairs following the extensive construction the South Lawn underwent in preparation for the night. Dana White says the UFC will never be at the White House again“I can’t afford it. There’s no f*cking way we can do this again.” pic.twitter.com/x1Etj2SOKr— Happy Punch (@HappyPunch) June 15, 2026 In June 2024, on the same lawn, President Joe Biden hosted a Pride Month celebration. The party included transgender biological men on display for the world, standing right where the globally streamed fights took place Sunday night. America will continue to celebrate its 250th birthday across the nation ahead of Independence Day. The next Freedom 250 event coming to the nation’s capital is the Rodeo 250, in partnership with The Great American State Fair, from June 25 to July 10. https://twitter.com/Cjpearson/status/2066613876641108115?s=20