Marco Rubio clashed with Margaret Brennan on CBS News' "Face the Nation" Sunday over whether Iran ordered nuclear weapons creation

'We will not lay off any employee'

'The President deserves an enormous amount of credit'

thousands will suffer violence

'No idea what they stand for'

'This is a protest, and a political act'

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. On June 22, this past Saturday night, President Donald Trump ordered B-2 bombers—these are the multibillion-dollar bombers based in Missouri—and seven of them apparently flew almost 15 hours one way, 6,000 miles. And each of them perhaps was equipped with two of these terrible bunker-busters, 30,000 pounds. Fourteen of them were dropped on the Fordow nuclear site. And cruise missiles from submarines then hit the other two as well. And the question is, what happens now? We have to get some context. Usually, when an American president does anything in the Middle East, it doesn’t work out well for a variety of reasons. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was destroyed by his failed 1980 April rescue attempt. Joe Biden was about 50% approval until the disastrous flight from Kabul, Afghanistan. George W. Bush, when Saddam Hussein’s statue fell in spring 2003, had about a 55% approval rating. But after the insurgency and the surge and the insurgency, he left office with historic low polls. I don’t think Barack Obama even recovered from that misadventure in 2011, where he—under the influence of Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and Hillary Clinton—bombed Libya. And that went off and on for five years. So, it doesn’t have a good pedigree. And what follows from any air campaign is not necessarily good. We took out Slobodan Milosevic mostly by air, that tended to work, there was something better. I think that we took out Libya, something worse followed. There was chaos. We took all out Saddam—maybe after years and years of turmoil and blood, maybe something’s better in Iraq. But the point is, when you take out a leader or you bomb, it’s not easy for the people on the receiving end to sympathize with you or to rise up against the dictator. So, what’s going to happen? Well, we gotta remember that what Trump did was not 1991, first desert war, where it’s a preliminary to a ground invasion. It was not 2003, preliminary to a ground invasion. It was not 2011, bombing Libya for regime change. There was a specific task. And that was to take out what remained of the nuclear acquisition program in Iran. And apparently, it did that in spectacular fashion. So, what is going to be the reaction to all of this? Everybody says, “Well, there’ll be—” I don’t see the people rising up, a Green Revolution redux. But what might happen is that the military should be feeling very uneasy. The top 20 or 25 officers were taken out by Israel. They know there’s a list. The subordinate officers, the next tier, must know their name is on it. They must know that people are angry. That over 50 years, nearly, they spent a trillion dollars subsidizing the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Assad dynasty. And for what? It’s all up in smoke. And then they probably lost another trillion dollars, over 50 years, through sanctions and oil embargoes. For what? It’s up in smoke. And so, people in the military must know that the public will be pointing their fingers at them, as well as the theocracy. They must know that any association with the theocracy got their superiors killed. And it’ll be interesting to see what the military’s attitude is if they were further humiliated. Will Russia and China do anything? I doubt it. I’ll talk about that in a subsequent episode. So, where are we right now? Right now the ball is in the court of Iran. Trump has said to them, “You can come back and negotiate.” But what would they negotiate over? Their one card was, “We have the specter of a nuclear bomb. So, you better come to us and talk.” They don’t have that anymore, at least not for the foreseeable future. The only negotiable item is whether they survive or not. And I don’t think they’re going to want to negotiate that. And so, what are they going to do? It’s probably going to descend into something like the Houthis, Red Sea, western Israel, tit for tat, tit for tat, until finally they get exhausted. Finally, what is the stature of Israel and Trump in the aftermath? Well, Israel has done the unbelievable. If we had this conversation on Oct. 8, 2023, we would’ve said the very idea that they’re going to take on the formidable Hezbollah legions, that they’re going to destroy Hamas, that they’re going to neutralize some of the Houthis, that they’re going to cause the Assad dynasty to flee, that Russia’s going to be out of the Middle East, that Iran is going to be defenseless—no one would have believed it. Their only problem, Israel’s, will be overconfidence. After the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur surprise happened. After their success, since then, we had Oct. 7 to the day 50 years later. I don’t think they’re going to get overconfident anymore. As far as the United States, they have restored the deterrence that was lost by Joe Biden in a variety of ways but most spectacularly, in Afghanistan. So, it’s a very tense situation. No one can predict what’s going to follow. But for right now, things are much better, now after Saturday night, than they were before. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Iran Has Only One Negotiating Chip Left: Its Survival appeared first on The Daily Signal.

HARPERS FERRY, W.Va.—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sought Monday to reassure the American people that the Trump administration is actively working to protect the homeland following the U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear sites.   “We are continuing to evaluate every single threat and to proactively go after them before they do anything or take any activity,” Noem told The Daily Signal, when asked about the threat of Iranian terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S.  Following the U.S. targeted attack on three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday, the Trump administration has warned that the threat of the activation of terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. has never been higher.   While the threat level is high, it is not new, Noem told reporters at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new facility at the Customs and Border Protection’s Advanced Training Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on Monday.   “We have incredible threats to this country from many nations that are enemies to the United States of America,” Noem told press. “You know, it’s not just Iran, it’s North Korea, Russia, China, consistently every single day are trying to threaten our way of life. So, my job is to do all that I can to protect our country before something bad does happen.”   The U.S. struck Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites over the weekend, dropping more than a dozen bunker-buster bombs from B-2 bombers. The bunker-buster bomb is America’s largest nonnuclear bomb. The U.S. also launched Tomahawk cruise missiles from a submarine, striking Iranian nuclear targets.   President Donald Trump said Monday that the “sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed,” adding that only the “fake news” would claim otherwise.   Satellite images show damage to Iran’s nuclear sites, but Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press Sunday that it is too early to know the full extent of the damage on the sites.   Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian warned on X on Monday that Iran will “not leave the aggression against [Iran] unanswered,” pledging to “respond to every wound on Iran’s body with faith, wisdom, and determination.”   Iran on Monday launched missiles at an American military base in Qatar in response to the U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear sites. No American and no Qataris were killed or wounded in the attack, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday afternoon. “I can confirm that Al Udeid Air Base was attacked by short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles originating from Iran today,” a Defense Department official told The Daily Signal Monday afternoon. “At this time, there are no reports of U.S. casualties. We are monitoring this situation closely and will provide more information as it becomes available.”  Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have repeatedly stated that Trump targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent a larger conflict in the future.  “President Trump did the world a favor” when he ordered the strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, Rubio said on Fox News on Sunday.   “Now, the Iranian regime should wake up and say, ‘OK, if we really want nuclear energy in our country, there’s a way to do it,‘” Rubio said. “That offer’s still there, we’re prepared to talk to them tomorrow and start working on that.”  “@POTUS did the world a favor last night… and now the Iranian regime should wake up and say OK, if we really want nuclear energy in our country, there’s a way to do it. That offer’s still there, we’re prepared to talk to them tomorrow.” — @SecRubio pic.twitter.com/k7YFy3dkFO— Department of State (@StateDept) June 22, 2025 The post On Iranian Terrorist Sleeper Cell Threat, Noem Vows to ‘Go After Them Before They Do Anything’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If the U.S. is going to maintain its military edge in the 21st century it can’t rely on defense contractors that prioritize DEI over building the best warfighting tools. A report recently released by conservative journalist Christopher Rufo and co-author Ryan Thorpe alleges that defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s executives “were so committed to DEI policies that they awarded some year-end bonuses based on employees’ skin color, rather than performance—in open violation of civil rights law.” “As we have previously reported, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Lockheed adopted radical DEI policies and, in one instance, required white men in leadership positions to attend a racial reeducation program and atone for their ‘white male privilege,’” Rufo and Thorpe wrote. This is in reference to Rufo’s reporting from 2021 where he highlighted how Lockheed Martin was hosting conferences for executives to deconstruct their “white male privilege” and generally doing all in their power not to miss out on all the absurdities of the Great Awokening. It wasn’t just conferences and internal corporate indoctrination according to Rufo and Thorpe’s reporting. They wrote that in December 2022 a person who worked for Lockheed Martin was preparing the “aeronautics division’s year-end bonuses.” The whistleblower, who chose to remain anonymous, said that after all the work had been done to calculate the awards, higher ups at the company insisted the list “had too many white employees on it.” The whistleblower got an email insisting the list be changed. Santiago Bulnes, a vice president who now leads engineering on Lockheed’s F-35 program, wrote an email to the whistleblower. “I got a call from [human resources director] La Wanda [Moorer] last night regarding diversity stats on comp adder,” Bulnes, who did not respond to a request for comment, said. “They took a run at getting your few approved and we’re told that we need to fit in the box. I asked her to send you the list of diversity names to simplify the task of finding the best in the group.” Lockheed Martin put out a statement in response to Rufo’s story under the title “Past Compensation Practices.” “Lockheed Martin is a meritocracy,” the statement read. “We are committed to recognizing performance, rewarding excellence, and upholding the principles of merit and fairness. We have and will take all necessary actions to protect that core tenet of our company culture.” The statement noted that the company has taken measures to ensure they are in “full alignment with the President’s recent executive orders.” In addition, Lockheed Martin’s statement said the company is taking the allegations seriously and investigating the payment matter. “In the event that we determine there was any wrongdoing, we intend to appropriately compensate any employees who were adversely affected and will take decisive action to address any misconduct,” the statement concluded. “We appreciate President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, have moved swiftly to support his actions on this issue and are partnering with him to defend our nation and deter our adversaries.” The Daily Signal requested a comment from Lockheed Martin, but they did not respond. It certainly is important that Lockheed Martin get to the bottom of what happened. There have been warning signs for years that the company was placing increasing emphasis on woke nonsense rather than on simply providing the best equipment to the U.S. armed services. The Daily Signal reported in 2023 that Lockheed Martin prominently displayed a transgender flag in the lobby of their headquarters. “When you plant a flag, you send a message,” an anonymous Lockheed Martin employee told The Daily Signal at the time. “To have this representation in the lobby of our corporate headquarters suggests we’ve chosen a point of view on a socially divisive issue that is nowhere near settled.” Given the recent, remarkable airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities aided by F-35s, Rufo and Thorpe’s report should be concerning to all Americans. The production of these rather expensive and complicated machines of war that provide the backbone of U.S. air superiority should be in the hands of the best and brightest. With all due respect to Elon Musk, who has stated that drones are the future of warfare, Saturday’s airstrike suggests that the age of highly advanced manned aircraft isn’t over just yet. The American people paid a hefty price tag to ensure that our country has the best defense in the world. Lockheed Martin at least seems to understand that a major vibe shift has taken place in America. Discrimination will no longer be tolerated. Not only does it interfere with America being all that it can be, but it’s also—in many cases—against the law. Hopefully Lockheed gets back to doing what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pounded the table for since before he took the post. Drop the DEI. Get back to excellence and warfighting. The post Lockheed Martin Awarded Bonuses Based on Race, According to Report appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Iran Blinked