Iranians are openly calling for Trump's assassination — at the former ayatollah's funeral



Iran's supreme leader for 36 years died in the opening strikes of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. On June 18, Trump and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding setting a 60-day clock for a final deal.

Those talks are now paused — not for negotiations, but to bury the man America's war machine killed.

'Trump's killing is our duty.'

The six-day mourning period kicked off Friday, July 3. Foreign delegations arrived in Tehran, including Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who, at the funeral, called deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "a great scholar, a great leader" and said Pakistan and Iran would "march together under all circumstances."

He has otherwise avoided taking a side, telling reporters in June that Iran's leaders "genuinely mean to promote peace in the region" and that Trump is "a man of peace."

By Sunday, the tone at Tehran's Grand Mosalla turned from grief to open threat. Eulogist Mohammad Rasouli asked the crowd why "the most despicable man in the world" was still alive, calling the crowd to chant "Trump's killing is our duty." According to Newsweek, banners read "Kill Trump" and "Kill Bibi," a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Fox News reported that mourners pelted an image of Trump with stones, in footage it obtained from Iranian state media; one poster read "There will be blood." Mourner Fatima Hassan told Fox: "We are here for revenge."

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Trump weighed in from Mount Rushmore on the eve of America's 250th anniversary, saying the U.S. had "knocked the hell out of Iran" and gave Tehran "a week off for a funeral." In a separate Axios interview, he said the U.S. wouldn't strike Iran's assembled leadership since it would leave "nobody to negotiate with."

Speaking separately from the Oval Office on Monday, he warned the U.S. could knock out Iran's power plants and bridges within hours if Tehran won't make a deal.

New supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei hasn't appeared publicly since the strike that killed his father, amid unconfirmed speculation about his security or health.

Netanyahu disputed reports of a rift with Trump, saying they see "eye to eye" 99% of the time and Iran won't get a nuclear weapon, "deal or no deal." He also urged Trump not to readmit Turkey to the F-35 program, calling Ankara's government "infected by the Muslim Brotherhood" — a request Trump appears set to ignore, with Erdoğan already claiming at the summit that he had been promised five of the jets.

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No slaughter for the CIA's DEI office — yet



President Trump won the 2024 election promising to gut Biden-era DEI across the federal government, calling it "illegal and immoral." The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence tried to do exactly that — moving to fire 19 career officers who had spent their time on diversity, equity, and inclusion assignments instead of actual intelligence work.

Two Democrat-appointed judges said not so fast.

'As long as the employee subject to termination chooses to pursue reassignment, the agencies must attempt to reassign her.'

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Thursday that the CIA and ODNI have to let the 19 DEI-linked officers appeal their firings and, in some cases, apply for reassignment before they can be shown the door, the Washington Times reported.

The panel found the agencies skipped procedural steps required for a reduction in force — a technicality that's now kept the firings frozen for well over a year, according to Bloomberg Government.

Writing for the majority, Biden-appointee Judge Nicole Berner — joined by Obama-appointee Judge Stephanie Thacker — ruled the officers had enough of a claim to their jobs to sue in the first place.

Berner wrote: "As long as the employee subject to termination chooses to pursue reassignment, the agencies must attempt to reassign her."

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Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In a blistering dissent, Judge Paul Niemeyer, a George H.W. Bush appointee, argued that Congress gave intelligence directors "unfettered discretion" to fire employees precisely so courts couldn't micromanage personnel decisions at agencies handling national security.

He called the injunction unlawful and urged the Supreme Court to step in, calling it a serious separation-of-powers problem: judges telling the CIA how to run its own house.

The ruling lands days after the Supreme Court handed Trump a win affirming his broad authority to fire employees, with a separate case providing a narrow carve-out for officials like Federal Reserve board members.

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The reason 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is so hard to sing



Most Americans know the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Few know the tune wasn’t written for America at all.

The melody Francis Scott Key used was the popular English tune "To Anacreon in Heaven," originally the constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s music club in London.

The next time you bail on the high note at a ball game or a July 4 cookout, don’t blame your lungs.

The club met regularly for a formal concert, dinner, and social time during which members entertained each other with songs. Its 1780 membership included peers, commoners, aldermen, gentlemen, actors, and tradesmen.

Although it is often described as a “drinking song,” the song was not a barroom ballad — it was convivial, but in a special and stately way. The verses were sung by a solo singer, with the entire society joining in only on the refrain.

When Key wrote his lyrics on September 14, 1814, after watching the British attack Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, he wasn’t composing original music — he was setting new words to a tune Americans would have instantly recognized.

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Nik Pennington/MLB Photos/Getty Images

He wasn’t the first American to do it. By 1798, many new songs had already been set to the melody, including “Adams and Liberty,” a patriotic song in praise of the nation’s second president. By 1820, 84 sets of lyrics had been written to it in the United States alone.

The tune’s origins also explain a common modern complaint: The anthem is famously difficult to sing. It was intended for solo performance by an experienced vocalist — never designed for mass singing.

The composer’s identity was itself a mystery for generations. John Stafford Smith was identified as the writer of the original tune only in the 1970s, when a librarian in the music division of the Library of Congress tracked him down.

So the next time you bail on the high note at a ball game or a July 4 cookout, don’t blame your lungs. Blame an 18th-century London music club that never expected anyone outside its dining room to try.

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Americans bear ‘significant responsibility’ for heat wave killing the French, Paris official says



As Europe's record-breaking heat wave continues and excess deaths in France climb past 1,300, a Paris official says Americans bear responsibility for the crisis because of emissions and air conditioning.

Audrey Pulvar, Paris' deputy mayor for international relations, lashed out at American tourists and influencers who had mocked the city for its lack of widespread air conditioning as temperatures soared past 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

'OMG, this is so rich.'

"Dear American journalists and social media 'influencers': for days, some of you have been criticising and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. ... OMG, this is so rich!" she wrote on Instagram.

She argued the U.S., which she claims is the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, bears a "significant amount of responsibility responsibility" for the warming driving the crisis, noting American cities are roughly 90% air-conditioned. "So please, enough with the lecture. Just start doing your part."

France has recorded at least 1,300 excess deaths since June 21, according to Sante Publique France, with officials warning the count could climb higher.

About 15,000 elderly people died in France's 2003 heat wave, though air conditioning still hasn't caught on nationwide. As of June 25, officials had confirmed at least 55 drowning deaths — a toll likely to keep climbing — after many have sought relief in unsupervised waterways.

Paris went so far as to ban public alcohol consumption on streets and in parks to "preserve emergency services and allow medics to concentrate on taking care of the most vulnerable."

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Dimitar DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images

Only about a quarter of French households have air conditioning, versus roughly half in Spain and Italy and 90% in the U.S. and Japan. The French have long associated air conditioning with illness, attributing colds to "thermal shock" from sudden temperature changes, according to GB News.

With Parisians sleeping in parks and booking hotel rooms to escape the heat, even traditionally AC-skeptical politicians — including France's Green Party — have conceded wider adoption may now be unavoidable.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright drew fire days earlier, telling a London conference that "cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is," citing deaths tied to high energy prices after Russia's 2022 Ukraine invasion.

On Europe's air conditioning scarcity specifically, Wright said a "shale gas revolution" in the U.K. could have cut electricity bills and avoided the shortage altogether.

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Nuclear is so back. America's birthday gift to itself just went critical.



For the first time in more than 40 years, privately developed nuclear reactors are switching on in America.

On June 4, Antares Nuclear's Mark-0 reactor went critical at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory. Valar Atomics followed on June 18, producing heat from a reactor core inside a tentlike structure in the Utah desert. The Department of Energy called it "the rebirth of America's nuclear industry."

'Nuclear in America has been defined for too long by delays, by companies that said they would and then didn't. ... Today is the first of those commitments delivered.'

President Trump has long been skeptical of large traditional reactors, saying they tend to get "too big and too complex and too expensive." But he bet big on small modular reactors, pledging to "approve new reactors" and "slash the red tape."

In May 2025, Trump signed four executive orders and set a deadline: at least three new small reactors online by July 4, 2026 — the nation's 250th birthday.

The Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program followed, fast-tracking 11 new designs and sidestepping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's traditional licensing process, which previously took more than 20,000 hours to complete. Oversight was placed with the Energy Department instead.

Antares CEO Jordan Bramble put the stakes plainly: "Nuclear in America has been defined for too long by delays, by companies that said they would and then didn't. We said criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to the warfighter in 2028. Today is the first of those commitments delivered on the schedule we set."

Chief nuclear officer at Ocean Atomics Nick Touran summed up the pace: "We haven't done anything this fast, basically ever."

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Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

The reactors look nothing like today's massive plants, which average 44 years old. Radiant's design uses small nuclear fuel balls — its chief nuclear officer compared them to gobstoppers — built to be mass-produced and deployed anywhere from military bases to disaster zones. A third reactor still needs to go critical before July 4 to fulfill the president's pledge.

This month, the Trump administration also announced $17.5 billion in loans to build 10 large-scale conventional nuclear plants using Westinghouse technology. Construction is targeted to begin by 2030.

Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner made the bigger ambition clear: "The goal was never just criticality. The goal is 400 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050."

Critics aren't sold. Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists called the race "essentially an exercise in public relations," warning that slashing regulations undoes decades of safety lessons. "This is taking us back to the 1950s, and that is not progress."

The program skipped public comment periods and environmental reviews — which the DOE said were unnecessary.

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Brazil Threatens Citizens With Years In Prison For Saying Men Aren’t Women

Isadora Borges, a Brazilian veterinary student, faced trial last month for a post stating 'trans women are not women.'

Look How The Google Speech Police Scold Me For Searching The Term ‘Illegal Alien’

A patronizing warning at the top of the page scolded me that "the term 'illegal alien' is considered pejorative and offensive."

Hemingway To Dem: You Play Dumb About The Censorship Industrial Complex Because It Works For Your Party

‘In part, because you can rely on the censorship-industrial complex to do the work for you,’ Hemingway retorted.

'They're desperate': Joe Rogan rails against YouTube's apparent censorship of Trump interview



Earlier this week, Americans experienced difficulty tracking down President Donald Trump's three-hour interview with Joe Rogan on YouTube, which presently has over 41.5 million views on the Google-owned platform. The hotly anticipated interview was also glaringly absent from the platform's trending page on Monday.

Rather than connect would-be viewers with the unfiltered interview, YouTube inundated users with results for antagonistic legacy media reports about the interview and unrelated videos — a redirection strategy that Rogan indicated had a dramatic impact on traffic.

Rogan blasted YouTube on the Wednesday episode of his show, telling stand-up comic Francis Foster and political commentator Konstantin Kisin that the apparent censorship effort reeked of desperation.

"There's no way this was a mistake," said Rogan. "That's too convenient."

The titular host of "The Joe Rogan Experience" noted that he initially gave YouTube the benefit of the doubt: "I'm like, 'I'm sure it was a mistake. There's no way that it was on purpose.' And so if you googled 'Rogan Trump,' you could only get clips. You couldn't watch the whole episode. You couldn't find it."

'There is massive far left censorship at Google/YouTube.'

David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-owner of the software company Basecamp, shared footage of his unsuccessful attempt to find the interview on Monday, tweeting, "Tried to find the Rogan/Trump interview on YouTube but no matter what I search, it's not coming up. Would be beyond bonkers if they're actively trying to suppress it. Must be a glitch, right?"

Hansson, whose original concerns were amplified by Rogan, noted further that numerous variations of his search, including "jre trump" and "trump on rogan," similarly failed to produce the desired result.

Rogan told Foster and Kisin that not only could potential voters not find the video, YouTube refused to highlight the Trump interview in its trending section, despite the video far surpassing the competition by leaps and bounds. He indicated that this omission revealed either that the section is meaningless or that something foul was afoot.

According to Rogan, amid YouTube's apparent election-time censorship attempts, Elon Musk — who stressed that "there is massive far left censorship at Google/YouTube" and noted that "Alphabet (Google/YouTube) is the #1 biggest donor to the Democratic Party" — reached out to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, successfully porting the entire interview to X to ensure its visibility.

"So now it has way more views," said Rogan, referring to the tens of millions of additional views it has since netted on Musk's platform.

'They hate it because ideologically they're opposed to the idea of him being more popular.'

"You can't suppress s***. It doesn't work," said Rogan. "This is the internet. This is 2024. People are going to realize what you're doing. If you try to make it so that something can't come up in a search engine because it's too popular — first of all, if that's not trending, then you tell me what the f*** is."

YouTube said in a statement Monday evening:

Since airing Friday, the interview has generated over 34 million views on YouTube and counting, making it Joe Rogan's most viewed episode of the year. For some searches on Monday the original 3-hour interview didn't appear prominently. Short excerpts uploaded by the Joe Rogan channel appeared, but we know it was frustrating for users looking to find the full video. We've worked to resolve this and viewers will begin seeing the full podcast in more YouTube search results soon.

While Rogan indicated that the censorship was unmistakable, he expressed openness to the possibility that rather than an institutional effort on the part of Google to once again interfere for the ostensible benefit of Democrats, "it could have been like some rogue engineer. There's a lot of people that are working behind the scenes."

According to OpenSecrets, individuals at Google's parent company, Alphabet, have donated over $2.2 million to the Harris campaign this election cycle, as well as $1.6 million to the Harris super PAC Future Forward USA and millions more to congressional and Senate Democrats.

Google has also been accused in recent months of manipulating the autocomplete feature for its search engine to suppress information about Donald Trump. An attorney for Alphabet Inc. admitted to Congress in August that the autocomplete tool for its search function hid results about an ActBlue donor's attempt on Trump's life in Pennsylvania.

Earlier this year, Google also reportedly killed a pro-Trump ad for a supposed "policy violation."

"I think they're desperate because they had no idea it was going to be that popular," said Rogan. "It's a runaway train, and they hate it because ideologically they're opposed to the idea of him being more popular."

BlazeTV host Steve Deace recently underscored the social and political significance of the interview, writing, "The benefit of this interview for candidate Trump could be equivalent to the largest and most expensive media ad buy in political history — something unattainable given the resources and precise messaging required to pull it off effectively."

Rogan suggested that leftists largely control "these massive media distribution companies like YouTube or Facebook. They're massive companies. They have so much influence on everything. And they didn't like that this one was slipping away."

Google's antipathy for Trump is likely not all ideological. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order with the aim of limiting legal protections for social media companies and signaled a desire to implement new regulations on Big Tech.

"Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see," wrote Trump. "As President, I have made clear my commitment to free and open debate on the internet."

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'60 Minutes' omits critical details about 'misinformation expert' otherwise painted as victimized researcher



CBS News' "60 Minutes" recently boosted the grievances of activists who fancy themselves online narrative curators, including so-called "misinformation expert" Kate Starbird, the cofounder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public.

The liberal news network framed Starbird as a defender of truth and a victim of conservative criticism but failed to mention critical biographic information about the so-called expert, namely that she's a partisan who has taken money from the Biden administration and is named as a defendant in an ongoing legal battle over censorship.

The beleaguered academic

"60 Minutes" introduced Starbird as "a professor at the University of Washington, a former professional basketball player, and a leader of a misinformation research group created ahead of the 2020 election."

The dribbling academic complained to host Lesley Stahl that X has not responded to or heeded more than 30% of her censorial outfit's suggestions — "and on the majority of those, they put labels."

Additionally, she claimed that conservatives disproportionately push "misinformation" online, insinuating further that they have a stake in combating her fact-checking efforts and have sought to intimidate both her and her team.

"This campaign against you is meant to discredit you so we won't believe you," said Stahl.

"Absolutely. And it's interesting that the people that pushed voter fraud lies are some of the same people that are trying to discredit researchers that are trying to understand the problem," said Starbird.

"60 Minutes" leaned on Starbird's claims in the episode to later suggest that while conservatives bemoan censorship of speech online, they simultaneously seek to "chill the research" of benevolent academics such as Starbird.

X, formerly Twitter, only responded to 30% of the notes from researchers flagging misinformation in posts, says Kate Starbird, the leader of a misinformation research group. https://t.co/yCfxH64hAU
— (@)

The censorious partisan

The liberal news outfit neglected to mention that Starbird is a radical partisan, a Biden donor, and a recipient of Biden administration grants who has collaborated with the Biden Department of Homeland Security on efforts to shut down speech deemed undesirable by the powers that be.

The Daily Caller highlighted that Starbird ran lead on a narrative-curing project that secured $2.25 million from the National Science Foundation in August 2021. The stated purpose of the initiative was to "study ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation."

Upon receipt of the grant, Starbird said in a statement, "Working to advance scientific understanding of online disinformation, this research will develop and evaluate 'rapid response' methods for studying and communicating about disinformation at a sophistication and pace on par with the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of the challenge."

Starbird was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed last year by Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit and Jill Hines, codirector of the conservative Health Freedom Louisiana group, whose criticism of mask wearing was suppressed on Facebook. Starbird is also referenced in Murthy v. Missouri, the case concerning the Biden administration's efforts to have Americans censored online now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hoft and Hines' complaint alleged that Starbird and other personnel from her organization were involved in "probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history — the so-called 'Election Integrity Partnership' and 'Virality Project.'"

The complaint further claimed that Starbird's UW lab secured the aforementioned $2.25 million grant "just months after Starbird's lab helped censor the Biden Administration's political adversary during the 2020 election."

Starbird served as a member of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Cybersecurity Advisory Committee. She apparently also ran lead on the CISA task force "Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation."

CISA, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, is accused along with other prongs of the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri of violating Americans' First Amendment rights online.

Last year, Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, shared a video from Starbird detailing how to kill or curate narratives on Twitter.

— (@)

In her interview with "60 Minutes," Starbird regurgitated many of the talking points advanced by the Biden administration in its fight to keep leaning on social media companies to censor dissenting voices online.

"It's interesting that the people that pushed voter fraud lies are some of the same people that are trying to discredit researchers that are trying to understand the problem," said Starbird.

The bespectacled researcher is not only sympathetic to the Democratic administration's clampdown on undesirable speech online but also a fan of the man in the White House.

The Daily Caller noted that Starbird donated to then-candidate Joe Biden's presidential campaign in 2020.

Extra to signing checks for the Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, Starbird has poured cash into ActBlue and other leftist causes, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The Caller indicated that "60 Minutes" did not respond to requests for comment.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) responded to Starbird's interview, writing, "Missouri v. Biden exposed this. 'Misinformation Researchers' are part of the Vast Censorship Enterprise. No tax dollars to these wannabe authoritarians."

Trump advisor Stephen Miller's America First Legal noted, "Irony Alert: CBS is guilty of rank disinformation in this interview. They use Kate Starbird as their 'expert' ... but they don't tell you that Starbird is the defendant in our lawsuit alleging a vast scheme to silence speech and deprive Americans of their fundamental civil rights."

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