The Truth About War And Pizza

'It’s clear she hates family, given how much the size of ours disturbs her'

'Mutually assured destruction'

President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities is as “America First” as it gets – especially in the wake of the agreement between Israel and Iran to enter into a ceasefire. With one decisive blow, Trump acted to prevent a major American adversary from obtaining the world’s most dangerous weapons. What could be more “America […]

Aaron Rodgers is calling it a career

President Donald Trump shared early Tuesday his disappointment with Israel for launching missiles at Iran, hours after reaching a temporary ceasefire with Iran. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing,” Trump said before heading to the Netherlands for the NATO summit.Victoria Coates, vice president of Heritage’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, discussed Trump’s reaction and offered a preview of the summit on “Fox & Friends First” with Brian Kilmeade, Lawrence Jones, and Ainsley Earhardt.Her interview transcript has been lightly edited.Brian Kilmeade: So, Victoria Coates joins us now. She served as deputy national security advisor to President Trump. And that was the president probably 45 minutes ago. Now, he’s on Air Force One heading to NATO. Victoria, your reaction to the president’s obvious frustration with both Israel and Iran on the cusp of the ceasefire. We should add that the Israeli planes have turned around instead of offering a reprisal.Victoria Coates: This is very much the president sticking with his stated goal for this mission, which is to degrade the Iranian nuclear program that posed a threat to the American people. That is what the mission was. It wasn’t regime change. It wasn’t any other kind of social experiment. It was to degrade the nuclear program. That has been done. And he does not want to get dragged into another long engagement in the Middle East. And so, he wants this war to end. Israel said last night that their war aims were largely satisfied. So, it seems like an opportune moment to bring this to a conclusion. Now, it is very frustrating as these ceasefires go into place, each side kind of jockeys for position, especially the losing side, the Iranian side. They want something for domestic consumption. But all that nonsense needs to end, and we need to get to a more serious negotiation. And I think that’s what the president was saying.Lawrence Jones: But this is where interests kind of collide, because you have America’s interest, which we essentially said, “No nuclear weapon,” but then you’ve got Israel that has Iran on the ropes now. So, they want to continue to knock out any type of threat there. Is that going to be problematic for our relationship with Israel?Coates: I really don’t think so. What we’ve seen over the course of the last two weeks is the really extraordinary capabilities the Israelis have, which make no mistake about it, that’s due to their ingenuity and their courage and also the historic investment the American taxpayer has made in Israel’s security. So, that partnership between us is incredibly powerful. And I’m glad to see [Chinese] Chairman Xi [Jinping] and [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin and all of the other bad actors around the world see that kind of partnership and effectiveness, but we’re still two sovereign nations and the president has American interests at heart. And I think this is an important message to those who say Israel dictates President Trump’s foreign policy. No, and no more than he dictates Israel’s. We largely work in partnership. It’s incredible partnership, but when we have to, we defend our own interests. And that’s what we’re seeing here. Ainsley Earhardt: The president had a gaggle on the plane, and he talked about Spain being a problem when it comes to NATO spending because he wants all the countries to pay the 5% on defense spending. All of them have agreed except for Spain. He said Putin called him and offered to help with Iran, and he said he will probably meet with Zelensky. What can you expect at NATO? What can you expect going forward?Coates: Yeah, this is certainly, I think, a president who can walk and chew gum. He’s doing an awful lot of things at the same time here, and it’s refreshing to see that. I think that NATO defense spending is a signature issue for him. We have the 10 largest economies in NATO after the United States, who at best, are at two [percent] or a hair over, and then you have laggards like Spain. We need to get them well over two. That’s not the ceiling anymore. That should be the floor. And the president’s asking for five. I think that’s perfectly reasonable given what the United States has invested, both is doing this year and has done historically for NATO, but it’s time Europe takes the lead on Europe’s defenses with American participation. Obviously, he’s going to the summit, he will engage with all these leaders, but we can’t take European security more seriously than the Europeans do. So, I think that’ll be his message this week.Kilmeade: It was a tandem. It was President Trump saying, “I’m tired of carrying you guys. You’re not spending on defense. And Russia invading Ukraine, that alarmed everyone in Eastern and Western Europe. If you don’t start building up your own defense, you’re going to get steamrolled too.” So, together, Russia’s aggression has blown up in their face. They added two more formidable nations to NATO. Now, every NATO nation outside Spain and Canada understands you got to spend between at least two and 5%, and the world is no longer taking us for granted with that alliance. That’s a pretty substantial change the way things are in NATO, don’t you think?Coates: Yeah, it’s another really significant foreign policy win for the president. And yes, Canada has been a constant source of disappointment in all of this. They should be paying much more attention to this with their vulnerabilities in the Arctic. But going back to Putin, Brian, I think what happened over the weekend was also a really important signal to him that America stands up for their friends and that we have capabilities they’re not even close to. So, hopefully, that will give him much more pause if he has designs on a NATO member, on Estonia, on Poland, on Finland, these countries that share a border with Russia, that he shouldn’t do that. So, I think we’ve really seen some deterrence put back into place by President Trump’s decisive action. The post National Security Expert Anticipates President Trump’s Next Move appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune appeared determined on Tuesday to keep the budget reconciliation bill on track to be passed in the Senate by July 4, even as he acknowledged that some Senate Republicans might in the end vote against the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill. “Could be,” Thune, R-S.D., said at the weekly Senate Republican press conference when asked whether he expected that two or three members of the Republican caucus in the Senate would vote against the budget reconciliation bill.  “Well, we’ve got a lot of very independent-thinking senators,” he said. The majority leader acknowledged that legislating was an imperfect process that was not going to satisfy every senator. “But at the end of the day, this is a process whereby not everybody is going to get what they want,” Thune said. The Senate majority leader touted how the budget bill fulfills the Trump administration’s priorities for a safe and prosperous America. “Well, I just think, when push comes to shove, you know you’re looking at whether or not you’re going to allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. And there are a lot of things in this bill, as I pointed out. It modernizes the military. It secures the border. It brings tax relief to working families. It has the biggest spending reduction in history, and it restores energy dominance for our country.”   President Donald Trump has taken a personal interest in the bill, using his bully pulpit to cajole senators. “To my friends in the Senate, lock yourself in a room if you must, don’t go home, and GET THE DEAL DONE THIS WEEK,” the president posted on his platform Truth Social. “Work with the House so they can pick it up, and pass it, IMMEDIATELY. NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE.”  Thune said that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent had also spoken to the Republican members of the Senate on Tuesday about why it was important to get the bill done soon. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., chairwoman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, said, “I really do think this will be a historic week, because what’s going to happen with the American family, whether it’s keeping taxes low as we did in 2017; keeping those, whether it’s the child tax credit, making it permanent, which will give families a lot of reassurance as they move into the … paying their taxes. We also create a savings account for every child born in this country.” Capito went on to say the bill also helps with adoptions. “This is a family bill from beginning to end,” she said.  Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said that Republicans were elected to provide safety and prosperity for the American people. “Democrats lost the last election because they were the party of high prices and open borders,” Barrasso explained.  On the Israel-Iran conflict, Thune deferred to Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., for more specifics on the strike’s damage, but did note that the Iranian regime’s nuclear capabilities appeared to have been seriously weakened.  “We know for sure that their nuclear program was set back significantly,” the Senate majority leader explained. The post Thune Confident Budget Bill Remains on Track for Senate Passage appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This Is What 'Victory' in the Battle of the Sexes Looks Like

American-based antisemitism—and the unlawful acts it fuels—is spreading like wildfire, and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider is calling out legacy media, agenda-driven publishers, Big Tech platforms and artificial intelligence systems. Schneider laid out his case directly to lawmakers Tuesday during testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, which hosted a hearing titled “Rising Threat: America’s Battle Against Antisemitic Terror.”  In his written testimony, he singled out The Associated Press (AP), The Washington Post, NPR, Wikipedia, Big Tech giants like Google, and AI chatbots for amplifying antisemitism both before and after Oct. 7, 2023—the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Schneider’s full testimony spans 19 pages; what follows is just a brief overview. “Their catastrophically effective methods of reporting and disseminating content have sought to frame the complicated conflict in the Middle East to an oversimplified battle of Israel as the oppressor versus the Palestinian people as the oppressed,” Schneider said in his written remarks. “It is a narrative created to compel empathy from the American public, but one rooted in antisemitic beliefs.” Schneider first condemned politicized legacy media for its part in pushing antisemitism. Among the legacy media entities fueling the rise in antisemitism is the AP—the only western news agency able to operate in Nazi Germany—and which publishes the AP Stylebook, a manual relied upon by countless news organizations for headlines, event descriptions and more.  Yet, the Stylebook has failed to clearly define terms like “antisemitism” or even “Holocaust,” and it instructs writers to avoid using the word “terrorism,” while also urging the use of “fighters,” “attackers” or “combatants” to describe terrorist actors and encouraging the use of “soldiers” to describe Israeli forces. “This discrepancy not only sanitizes violent extremism but also suggests that the Israeli side is the aggressor,” wrote Schneider. The AP is hardly the only offender.  The Post, National Public Radio (NPR), Reuters, The New York Times, and CNN are among the other outlets that have echoed and amplified the AP’s distortions, Schneider warned. For instance, The Post published real-time geolocation data of the site of an IRGC missile strike, effectively helping terrorists improve the accuracy of future strikes. This outlet also hired Heba Farouk Mahfouz, an Egyptian journalist with a disturbing history of supporting violent resistance against Israel. “Her role is not neutral — it is propaganda dressed as journalism,” Schneider added. Reuters, The Times, AP and CNN, not to be outdone by The Post, took it a step further, having employed photojournalists who reportedly joined the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7. NPR has repeatedly used selective framing in its coverage of Israel and violence against American Jews. Schneider also pointed to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that effectively blacklists pro-Israel and right-leaning media outlets—all while propping up the very outlets he previously called out. Adding insult to injury, Wikipedia came under fire after the Anti-Defamation League revealed the digital encyclopedia had more than 30 editors who injected “antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information” into several articles. This poses a serious problem, as Wikipedia pages often appear at the top of the online search engines' results. “Misinformation embedded in its articles does not stay confined to Wikipedia; it migrates into curricula, media reports, and public policy conversations worldwide. In turn, that leads to attacks against Jews in America and other acts of antisemitism,” Schneider alerted. Enter Big Tech social media platforms and artificial intelligence. The MRC Free Speech America vice president said Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is one of the biggest spreaders of antisemitism, often propping up Wikipedia in search results, as demonstrated by MRC’s research. Its CEO, Sundar Pichai, took three days to publicly address the Oct 7 massacre against Jews and failed to mention antisemitism or evil. YouTube, the video-sharing giant, has also participated in anti-Israeli activism. It suppressed a video from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that featured footage from MRC’s NewsBusters, which called out ABC, CBS and NBC for airing video of a supposed Palestinian victim who was actually actor Saleh Aljafarawi. “Of course, it was embarrassing for these media outlets to be exposed for pushing a Hamas narrative without conducting any due diligence (Aljafarawi has over 3.6 million users on Instagram and is a well-known crisis actor based out of Gaza), but the bigger problem is that of YouTube trying to keep the false story alive by silencing the truth.”  Artificial intelligence chatbots have played a role as well, with Google’s Bard (now Gemini) refusing to define Hamas, a foreign designated terrorist organization. Most recently, MRC called out Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, DeepSeek, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta AI powered by Llama for failing to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital without regurgitating leftist rhetoric on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Watch the full hearing below:  Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

CNN/PBS host Christiane Amanpour and her ex-husband Jamie Rubin are among the top media personalities whose Israel-Iran hot takes look especially silly after President Trump announced a ceasefire on Monday. On their The Ex Files podcast recorded earlier that day, Rubin would claim “extremists” in the U.S. and Israel use Iran’s “death to America” sloganeering to justify a hard line towards Tehran while claiming Israel has no way of ending the war right before it did. Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat, began with a sensible point, “But what we shouldn't forget and what's worth mentioning here as the United States faces war with Iran, and Israel is at war with Iran, is that the Iranian chickens regionally are coming home to roost. Remember this is a regime that backed Assad in Syria, who killed 500,000 Sunnis, who were trying to simply have their freedom, and Iran enabled Assad to stay in power. They have undermined the Lebanese government, they've undermined the Iraqi government, and they have been provoking the world since the day they started chanting ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel.’”     Despite giving several examples of the Iranian threat, Rubin claimed that only “extremists” take such eliminationist rhetoric, “Remember these extremists play off each other, so when Iran's regime promotes the idea of death to America, death to America, death to Israel, then the extremists in Israel and the United States take, pick that up, and say, ‘Look, they want to kill us all.’”  After October 7, is it really so hard to believe that when Iran says “death to Israel,” they are being sincere? Furthermore, 82% of Israeli Jews supported the attack on Iran. Are they all “extremists” Further on in the discussion, Amanpour sought to switch topics, “But, you know, we need to stop for a minute because we got to go to the next part, Jamie, we’ve got to stop. Because this is important because, you know, could it also become a failed state and what will that mean? Anybody remember Iraq? We'll talk about it in the next part.”  Amanpour then lamented:  We want to talk about what's now being much more publicly and openly stated by both Israel and President Trump himself, which is the notion of regime change… So first and foremost, it's clear that Trump has been pulled into this moment by Netanyahu… Hegseth, Vance, all the rest of it said we're not at war with Iran; we're at war with their nuclear program. Now, Trump posts that why not regime change if Iran wants to be great again. So, again, it's being posited that this is Netanyahu getting into his ear and saying, ‘Now's the time, Now's the time.’ Jamie?     It’s quite clear that throughout this process, Trump has relished being unpredictable, and the regime change rhetoric was probably part of that. However, Rubin wanted Trump to be more direct, “Yeah, I think they're not understanding that when the president muses about regime change, that becomes perceived as American policy because when the president speaks, people pay attention to it. Regime change is a dumb policy.”  Rubin also claimed, “When the people of Iran try to stand up and change their regime, they get slaughtered by their own security forces, and I would hate to see the president of the United States inspire Iranians to try to protest or demonstrate, if they would in these circumstances and get slaughtered, and I don't see the regime as about to fall, and I think organizing ourselves around that is a terrible mistake. We need to figure out how to end this war.”  He also ridiculed the idea Israel may soon declare victory, “The Israelis can’t figure it out. I heard—I read today that they’re looking to bring this to a close, but how are you going to do it? They have the same problem in Gaza, the same problem all over the Middle East. Their military and intelligence capabilities are extremely successful, but their diplomatic capabilities under Netanyahu are a colossal failure. We should never have been in this situation if Netanyahu had made the right decisions about Gaza.” We would never have been in that situation if Iran simply learned to live with its neighbors. If Iran didn’t chant “death to Israel,” Israel would not have as big of a reason to fear it. Here is a transcript for the June 23-taped show: Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files with Jamie Rubin 6/23/2025 13 minutes, 59 seconds JAMIE RUBIN: But what we shouldn't forget and what's worth mentioning here as the United States faces war with Iran, and Israel is at war with Iran, is that the Iranian chickens regionally are coming home to roost. Remember this is a regime that backed Assad in Syria, who killed 500,000 Sunnis, who were trying to simply have their freedom, and Iran enabled Assad to stay in power. They have undermined the Lebanese government, they've undermined the Iraqi government, and they have been provoking the world since the day they started chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Remember these extremists play off each other so when Iran's regime promotes the idea of death to America, death to America, death to Israel, then the extremists in Israel and the United States take, pick that up and say "Look they want to kill us all." CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And what do you-- how do you read it? RUBIN: Well, I believe that that's a regime rap, but they've organized themselves in opposition to the United States has been a central feature of their foreign policy from the beginning is to be opposed to the United States and to build a group of states and capability in the region— the famous, you know, Shiite arc of whatever they used to call that. AMANPOUR: Shiite crescent. RUBIN: The Shiite crescent. AMANPOUR: But, you know, we need to stop for a minute because we got to go to the next part, Jamie, we’ve got to stop. RUBIN: Okay, let's stop and go to the next part. AMANPOUR: Because this is important because, you know, could it also become a failed state and what will that mean? Anybody remember Iraq? We'll talk about it in the next part. Okay, welcome back to the conversation in this part of our episode we want to talk about what's now being much more publicly and openly stated by both Israel and President Trump himself, which is the notion of regime change. You know, we've spoken Jamie in the last part, you know, earlier bits of the conversation about what might happen, but that implies that this regime survives, and all the things we talked about is about what this regime might do, go dark, go this, go that, so first and foremost, it's clear that Trump has been pulled into this moment by Netanyahu. There has been deep reporting notably by the New York Times about this so now the question is since he said this is not about Iran and his, you know administration, Hegseth, Vance, all the rest of it said we're not at war with Iran; we're at war with their nuclear program. Now, Trump posts that why not regime change if Iran wants to be great again. So, again, it's being posited that this is Netanyahu getting into his ear and saying, “Now's the time, Now's the time.” Jamie? RUBIN: Yeah, I think they're not understanding that when the president muses about regime change, that becomes perceived as American policy because when the president speaks, people pay attention to it. Regime change is a dumb policy. I think if there's anything we learned in the last 20 years is that trying to organize our diplomacy and our use of military power based on our fundamental interests around questions of regime change is a terrible mistake because it's got a mixed record in some cases it's been successful, a la, Serbia briefly after the fall of Kosovo to the Kosvar Albanians, but a mixed record in Libya, an obviously mixed record in Iraq, and a mixed record in Afghanistan so regime change is not a sensible way to go. The Israelis are exaggerating the ability of military power to bring down the regime. I don't believe that outside forces can bring down this regime. I believe that that will only happen when the people of Iran reach a threshold in which they are forcing their regime to change, that's possible, but in this circumstance that's not the way it happens and we've seen Christiane over the last 20 years what happens when the people of Iran try to stand up and change their regime, they get slaughtered by their own security forces, and I would hate to see the president of the United States inspire Iranians to try to protest or demonstrate, if they would in these circumstances and get slaughtered, and I don't see the regime as about to fall, and I think organizing ourselves around that is a terrible mistake. We need to figure out how to end this war. The Israelis can’t figure it out. I heard—I read today that they’re looking to bring this to a close, but how are you going to do it? They have the same problem in Gaza, the same problem all over the Middle East. Their military and intelligence capabilities are extremely successful, but their diplomatic capabilities under Netanyahu are a colossal failure. We should never have been in this situation if Netanyahu had made the right decisions about Gaza.