UK Criminally Investigates Band for 'Death to the IDF' Chant; Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' Pentagon Budget Boom
A rap duo is under investigation in the UK for chanting "Death to the IDF" at a concert. Glenn Greenwald breaks down the revealing reactions to the chant and the free speech implications. Plus: Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' is a gift to the defense industry, but will it help everyday Americans? ----------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, there's a major intense controversy in the West involving Israel and Gaza, finally, but the controversy is not about the Israeli bombing of a Gazan coffee shop on the beach on Sunday, nor is it about its droning of various people walking once they get flour back home, nor is it about its ongoing massacre of people seeking aid and food in Gaza, as well as people living in the West Bank.
No, what has terrified, enraged, and frightened Western leaders and Western journalists of all stripe is that a punk and rap band named Bob Villen appeared at a music festival in England over the weekend and chanted, quote, death, death to the IDF.
Now, it goes without saying that if they had simply chanted death to the Russian army in Ukraine or called for more Israeli killings of Iranian scientists like people love so much, or if they had just celebrated exploding pagers from Israel that maimed thousands of people in Lebanon, including children, nobody would have noticed and nobody would have minded at all.
But because the chant was directed at the Israeli military, which happens to be engaged in multiple wars, the indignation from Western media and political circles has been vociferous, shrill, and endless, not just manifesting an unhinged rhetoric, but also a criminal investigation by the UK police into this band and the immediate revocation by the U.S. State Department of the visas already issued to this band and one other,
NECAP, preventing them from their scheduled tour in the U.S. We'll look at this reaction and what it says about free speech in the UK and in the U.S. and the West more broadly, and also the ongoing demand that Israel have unique rules imposed on it to shield it from anger and disgust and criticism that it has, with its U.S.-funded actions over the last two years, globally provoked.
Then one of the main primary planks of the MAGA movement and President Trump, yet another one where I was supportive, was their ongoing opposition to the military-industrial complex and war machine that has sucked up American wealth and resources for no reason.
Shortly after being inaugurated, President Trump said he instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegsteth to cut 8% from the defense budget.
Supporters of Doge vowed that they would target the Pentagon without which real savings are impossible.
But then President Trump in May out of nowhere proudly boasted that he wanted to increase the military budget by at least $200 billion to achieve the first ever trillion dollar annual military budget in all of human history.
And his so-called Big Beautiful bill now being voted on in Congress calls for exactly that.
We'll examine this remarkable boondoggle for weapons manufacturers at the expense of the American worker yet again and other aspects of this budget bill that also merit attention.
Before we get to that, a few quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Six to eight weeks ago, there was a band in the UK called Knecap, which as part of their concert had been issuing all sorts of oppositional sentiment about Israel.
They were saying free Palestine.
At one point, they even said up up, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and they became criminally investigated because of things they said at a concert in the middle of songs.
That was one of the bands that was invited to participate at one of England's biggest musical festivals of the weekend called the Glastonbury Music Festival.
And BBC covered that festival live, except when NECAP was about to take the stage, they immediately stopped streaming it live because they were concerned that BBC viewers might hear harsh credits about Israel.
You can't have that.
And so the BBC said, oh, they might say something politically upsetting to us, to our editorial line.
So we're not going to show them.
They did, however, show a different group called Bobby Villain, which is a duo of rap singers.
And they sing rap and punk kind of mixture of each.
Bobby Villain is a pseudonym for each of them that they adopted to obscure their real identity and preserve their privacy.
And obviously, they play on Bob Dylan, Bob Villain.
And they did have their performance shown live on the BBC.
And one of the things that fragile BBC viewers, as a result, were subjected to was this.
I think we have the video.
Free, free!
Alright, but have you heard this one though?
Death, death to the IDF!
Death, death to the IVF!
Death, death to the IVF!
Hell yeah, from the river to the sea, Palestine must be, will be, inshallah, it will be free.
All right, so the BBC editors decided that they would avoid kneecap, but they would cover Bob Villain, only to find that Bob Villan wasn't just chanting Free Palestine or from the river to the sea, but chanted something much more upsetting to a lot of people, which was death, death, the IDF.
Now, just let me break down quickly what that means and what that doesn't mean.
Death to the IDF doesn't mean kill all Jews.
Not all Jews are in the IDF.
Not all IDF soldiers are Jewish.
It is an army, a military that is at war, just like you could say, yeah, Ukraine, kill those Russian soldiers in your country.
Death to the Russian army.
Death to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Death to the Ayatollahs.
It's very common to call for or celebrate the killing of soldiers in a war zone if you think one side is the aggressor, if you think one side ought to be defeated.
This is very common in American discourse.
We call for people's deaths all the time.
President Trump very proudly posted about two months ago a video of about 40 people in Yemen in a prayer circle.
He claimed they were Houthis plotting American attacks.
Lots of indication to believe that wasn't true.
But in any event, he posted video very proudly of a massive bomb that was dropped on those 40 people, extinguishing their lives, exterminating them on the spot.
He celebrated it.
That's what people do in wars.
Nobody suggested President Trump had committed crimes or ought to be investigated.
But he didn't even really call for the death of soldiers either.
He said death to the IDF, the institution that is fighting this war.
Now, you can certainly interpret that as death to IDF soldiers who are in active duty.
And again, you may not like that chant.
You may not agree with it.
You may not want to hear anybody chanting death to anybody.
But this is the sort of thing that in Western discourse is said all the time.
It's just usually not said about the IDF.
It's said about militaries that are viewed as Western enemies.
To say that there was indignation about this, even as Israel was engaged in horrific violence, not just in Gaza over the weekend, but also the West Bank, actual violence, not chanting about it, was a huge understatement.
And as I said, it wasn't just restricted to rhetoric, this indignation, but criminal investigation of this group, criminal investigation, whether they committed crimes by chanting that.
And there are a lot of people who claim to be free speech champions in the U.S., who cheered when J.D. Vance went to Europe and condemned both it and the UK for censoring people and punishing people for their views.
Certainly, I don't expect J.D. Vance to say, yeah, UK, this is the kind of thing we mean.
I seriously doubt.
And most conservatives who are cheering J.D. Vance or waving the free speech banner are going to do so in defense of the right to chant this.
Some will, probably, but not most.
And then the U.S. government, the State Department came out.
I mean, the State Department, I don't know if you ever dealt with it before.
Usually things take a really long time, even important things.
You want to get a passport renewed or an emergency passport or some kind of special visa or other documents that you need.
Governments and bureaucracies take a long time.
In this case, it took about six seconds for Marco Rubio to come out and announce that the visa that had been issued to the people in this group to come to the United States in October, about three, four months away, for a planned tour with tickets sold in the United States,
not just Bob Villa in the group, but also Nekap in the group, those visas have been revoked in a flash because the government apparently can act very quickly when it comes to its priorities, such as punishing people who speak against Israel.
As we've already seen, we know that refraining from criticizing Israel is a condition under the Trump administration for entering the United States, for working in the United States, for studying in the United States, even for being a green card holder you can have revoked if you are deemed to criticize Israel too harshly or protest against it.
So it's not a surprise, just amazing the speed, the velocity with which this was done.
Here's Sky News asking, who are Bob Villain, the duo, which led an anti-ADF chant at Glastonbury.
Quote, the duo are Bobby Villain, the frontman, and drummer Bobby Villain.
So one with an Y, B-O-B-B-Y, the other with a B-O-B-B-I-E.
They have not revealed their real names to protect their privacy.
I guarantee I'll be shocked if those real names don't come out instantly.
Nothing gets you docked more quickly than saying something that people get angry about toward Israel.
They formed an Ip Switch in 2017.
Their music style is a mix of punk, rap, and hard rock.
Their songs confront issues including racism, homophobia, toxic masculinity, and far-right politics.
And the track, Pretty Songs, is often introduced by Bobby, saying that, quote, violence is the only language that some people understand.
In an interview with The Guardian last year, Bobby Villan told how he attended his first pro-Palestine protest at the age of 15, escorted by a friend's mother.
The duo had been outspoken on the war in Gaza and called out other acts seen as left-wing who haven't been showing the same amount of public solidarity.
Meaning, other musical acts they've been condemning who are perceived as left-wing, who haven't been speaking on it.
Now, again, I can't overstate the utter meltdown over this chant, certainly in the UK, but all throughout the US as well.
And I think a lot of people expected Bobby Villain to go and apologize.
Kneecap actually semi-apologized for some of what they said.
Obviously, it didn't help them.
They still got bans from BBC, and they still are having their visa revoked.
But Bobby Villain did not go and apologize at all.
He posted a post, or they posted a post on Instagram.
I guess this is Bobby Villan.
I don't know if it's a group or one of the individuals.
I think it's the group page.
Yeah, it's the one with the library, so is the group.
But anyway, he said, I said what I said, which is not exactly apologetic, quite the contrary, it's rather defiant.
Yeah, I did say that, and I meant it.
And then here's the post.
Oh, we don't have the post that he posted with it, but it was a post essentially defending what he said, explaining that the genocide in Gaza he thinks Is the real issue.
We'll see if we can get you that.
But he was very defiant, didn't apologize at all.
And had he apologized, it wouldn't have changed anything.
It would have just fed the mobs against him.
Now, again, I want to stress that I understand there are a lot of people who don't like this kind of expression.
As always, with free speech issues, it's not about whether you like the speech or not.
It's about whether somebody has a right to express the idea.
You don't have to like the idea in order to object to criminal prosecutions of musicians for expressing political opinions on a stage.
Nor do you have to like the idea to question the U.S. government's reaction or even just to question the rhetoric surrounding this, like whether this is really some uniquely malicious or malevolent idea to wish death on a military at war, which as I said we do all the time.
Here was the Glastonbury Festival itself.
Now, I presume when they invited NECAP and even Bobby Villan, they had an understanding there were a lot of Palestinian flags in that crowd.
It's probably a left-wing crowd.
They had to expect that there was going to be some political sentiment, especially about the war in Gaza, especially since the UK, like the US, pays for it, supports it, runs reconnaissance missions over Gaza, and then feeds the intelligence to Israel.
But once this exploded, there were a lot of calls too for the BBC to be investigated for having actually shown this live.
Here was Glastonbury itself under the name Emily Evis, who is one of the executives of the festival, and this is what they posted.
Quote, Glastonbury Festival was created in 1970 as a place for people to come together and rejoice in music, the arts, and the best of human endeavor.
Now, music in 1970, I haven't checked what the 1970 event was, but most musicians who were prominent and popular and influential in 1970 were extremely political,
particularly politicized against the American War in Vietnam, in favor of the civil rights movement, but particularly in 1970, I mean, the opposition to the war in Vietnam was central to every major music festival, obviously Woodstock.
It sounds like it's kind of a Woodstock festival, probably not as overtly political, but certainly that's the ethos in which it was created.
It was all about musicians opposing the war in Vietnam.
It's part of what music often for many, many years, decades, centuries, has been, not always, but certainly frequently, an expression of philosophical sentiment, ideological ideas, political protest.
It goes on, quote, as a festival, we stand against all forms of war and terrorism.
We will always believe in and actively campaign for hope, unity, peace, and love.
With almost 4,000 performances at Glastonbury 2025, there will inevitably be artists and speakers appearing on our stage whose views we do not share, and a performer's presence here should never be seen as a tacit endorsement of their opinions and beliefs.
However, we are appalled, appalled by the statements made from the Westhoyt stage by Westholt stage by Bob Dylan yesterday.
Their chance very much crossed a line.
What line is that?
And we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for anti-Semitism, hate speech, or incitement to violence.
If you say death to the IDF, is that anti-Semitic?
Do you see how all-encompassing the term anti-Semitism has become?
It's not talking about Jews.
You don't have a problem with the IDF because there are a lot of Jews in the IDF.
It's not his problem with the IDF.
People have been protesting the American wars forever.
They're not an overwhelmingly Jewish army.
People are angry about the destruction and death the U.S. military has wrought at the behest of government leaders.
And it's the same with the IDF.
People dislike the IDF because they've been watching them blow up little children every day with no limits for the last 20 months.
It's not anti-Semitic to dislike watching the extinction of human life in Gaza or the escalating violence in the West Bank or the stealing of land from Syria and Lebanon, all of which the IDF has also bombed.
Hate speech?
How is that hate speech?
Death to the IDF?
I mean, I suppose if saying death to the Ayatollah, death to the revolutionary guard of Iran, death to Assad, death to the Russian army, death to Putin, if that's hate speech, I guess this is hate speech, but again, it's the sort of thing that's extremely common.
Nikki Haley went to Israel and signed bombs and missiles that the Israelis were going to drop on Gaza, and she wrote, finish them on that.
Is that hate speech?
Or incitement to violence?
Is that incitement to violence saying death to the IDF?
Is that actually telling people go murder Jews or go murder IDF soldiers?
Certainly in the United States, there would be no conceivable way to punish or prosecute this under the First Amendment.
And when J.D. Vance and lots of other people in the Trump administration have been chiding and criticizing Europe and the UK for punishing political expression that they regard as extreme or dangerous or inciting, they have a different standard than the U.S., but J.D. Vance has been saying, no, it's our standard that should apply.
That's the way to secure liberty.
BBC also apologized here from the Times of London, June 30th, which is yesterday, oh, today actually.
BBC admits it, quote, should have pulled the Bob Villain Glastonbury show.
So they're apologizing for having shown it, letting their viewers watch it if they wanted.
Now, as I said, they did make a decision editorially, a censorship decision two days ago, here from June 28th, that BBC chooses not to live stream Kneecap's Glastonbury set.
So they were already deciding they don't want any band that might express harsh criticism of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
They don't want their fragile adult BBC viewers to be exposed to that kind of view.
And now they're apologizing because they didn't also censor Bobby Villen.
Here is Lisa Nandy.
She is a member of parliament and also a minister in the Labour government.
So a kind of center-left figure, like a Labourite sort of figure.
And she's currently the Minister of Culture for the UK as part of Kier Starmer's government, extremely unpopular government.
And here's her speaking while many on the right also nod.
Total unity across the political spectrum about this in the UK.
Here's what she said.
And can I finally say to him that I really welcome what he said about the, you know, death to anyone and chance of death to anyone is not welcome in our society.
But there was something particularly pernicious about chanting death, death to the IDF.
Even though British society eggs on wars constantly, cheers people killing constantly.
But she's saying, look, in general, it's not good to chant death to anybody, but there's something particularly pernicious about chanting death, death to the IDF.
You can chant death, death to the United States, death, death to Britain, death, death to China, to the Iranian military, the Russian army, whatever.
That's bad.
But something particularly pernicious, she says, about chanting death, death to the IDF, the Israeli military.
What is that?
What is particularly pernicious about that?
The IDF.
Many colleagues will know that in Israel there is a conscription model.
Every young person is required to serve in the IDF, which means that chanting death to the IDF is equivalent to calling for the death of every single Israeli Jew.
That is one of the many reasons why we take this so seriously and why it cannot be argued that this did not cross a very dangerous line.
Okay, so let me just make sure I understand.
So if you are a country and you have like a limited draft, the way the U.S. kind of did during Vietnam, lots of people didn't end up having to go fight, Donald Trump didn't.
Dick Cheney didn't.
You claim like a medical thing or you're in college or your parent, whatever.
But still it's conscription in the sense that people are fighting who weren't there choosing to fight.
Then somehow it's less pernicious or if it's a volunteer army, it's less pernicious to chant death, death to the U.S. military.
If they're at war in Vietnam, it is to chant death, death to the IDF because there's universal conscription and therefore it's a tantamount to calling for the death of all Israeli Jews.
First of all, Israeli Arabs serve in the military.
Israeli Christians serve in the military.
It's not only for Israeli Jews.
But also, huge numbers of Jews, Israeli Jews, are not in the IDF.
Maybe they were at one time, but they're not anymore.
I hardly think you could interpret the statement to mean go kill all Israeli Jews.
But also, there are a lot of Israeli Jews who end up prosecuted, end up in prison, or even with a light fine because they refuse to join the Israeli militaries on grounds of being a conscientious objector.
No one's forced to go to the IDF.
They choose to go to the IDF.
But the idea that if you have universal conscription, now you've shielded yourself from having people express animosity towards your military on the grounds that any animosity towards the military is necessarily animosity to the population.
People are preposterous.
This is the UK standing up and saying, a member of the government of the UK saying, look, if you said death to the UK military or death to the American military, that wouldn't be good, but like death to the IDF?
No, that is a red line that you do not cross.
It's amazing how just single-mindedly devoted people are to this foreign country.
It's constantly talked about in their legislatures, in the American legislature.
They send money to it.
They support its wars.
Here's Bella Waller Steiner, who said this in a pretty viral tweet, quote, as a proud Zionist, I wouldn't feel welcome at Glastonbury this year.
This is the state of Britain's biggest music festival, a platform for extremists.
First of all, nobody in the crowd was attacked.
No one was forced to say if they support the Israeli war in Gaza or not.
But I thought there'd have been like this kind of agreement that when left-wing students go to college campuses, the fact that there's a view that makes them uncomfortable doesn't mean that you can suppress its expression.
Sometimes political views will make you uncomfortable.
And the fact that you're a Zionist doesn't mean it has to be prohibited in all public spaces to criticize the IDF or even call for its death because you feel uncomfortable.
Israelis March Through the Street is we're going to show you calling death to Arabs.
And they have a military and a government that actually does it.
There's not just musicians.
I'm sure Israeli Arabs and people in the West Bank of Gaza feel pretty uncomfortable by that.
But the government doesn't stop it.
Here's from the Avon and Somerset Police, the police department in the town where Glastonbury was held.
Update.
Investigation into comments made on the stage at Glastonbury Festival.
Video footage and audio from Bob Villen and Nikop's performances at Glastonbury Festival on Saturday has been reviewed.
Following the completion of that assessment process, we have decided further inquiries are required and a criminal investigation is now being undertaken.
A senior detective has been appointed to lead this investigation.
This has been recorded as a public order incident this time.
While our inquiries that are at an early stage, the investigation will be evidence-led and will closely consider all appropriate legislation, including relating to hate crimes.
We have received a large amount of contact in relation to these events from people across the world and recognize the strength of public feeling.
There is absolutely no place in society for hate.
Okay.
First of all, one of the members of NICAP, the aforementioned group that the BBC refused to show, one of the members is actually already being charged with terrorism-related crimes because of parts of his song that said, up up, Hezbollah, up up, Hamas.
Now, again, you may not like that view.
The Europeans hate when the ADF, the German alternative for Deutschland, the FD rather, evokes Nazi sentiments or rails against immigrants in ways that the German government finds very alarming.
And they say it's dangerous and it's inciting, and they ban it and they punish it.
And the UK did the same, and there was a perception that immigrants had killed a little girl in the UK, and people were going online and citing violence, and they were prosecuted.
And J.D. Vance went and said, you can't do this.
This is tyrannical.
This is repressive.
And I've been saying the same thing for a long time, too.
Once you start constricting and criminalizing speech, there's no end in sight to it.
And if you only object when it's the views that you feel comfortable with or like, and then suddenly remain silent or applaud when it's the views you really hate, you're not really calling for free speech.
And that's the case for, unfortunately, a vast majority of people who claim to be free speech advocates.
They start twisting themselves into a pretzel in order to justify why the speech they most hate ought to be banned, even though they were vehemently angry about prior censorship aimed at speech expressing ideas with which they agree.
I think it's very important to be very cognizant of not doing that.
Here is the stop anti-Semitism account, which has basically spent the last two years doing things like taking a picture of some random woman in a cafe.
And because she has like a free Palestine sticker on her laptop, they call and say, anyone who knows her, tell me her name.
Let's find out where she works.
Let's try and get her fired or flight attendance with little pins or flags.
And they've gotten a huge number of people fired.
Cancel culture in its purest form, as the right has called it.
And here's what the stop anti-Semitism account said yesterday.
Bob Villen, legal name Pascal Robinson Foster.
There you go.
It's already been doxxed.
Called for the death of the IDF yesterday at Glastonbury.
He's coming to the U.S. this fall as part of the inertia tour.
The anti-Semite must have his visa denied and rescinded.
His hate is not welcome here, Secretary Rubio.
And he also targeted Leo Terrell, who is anti-Semitism, anti-anti-Semitism official at the Justice Department, had been on Fox News, incredibly aggressive about hunting down and rooting out anti-Semitism, people with bad thoughts.
And the Congressman Randy Fine, who we've covered before, who is single-mindedly devoted to Israel, immediately said, on it.
And then other people chimed in and said things like this.
Here's from Christopher Landau, who said this after, oh, Christopher Landau said done, meaning, okay, the anti-Semitism, the stop anti-Semitism account demanded immediately, this is on the day that it happened, that this person be banned from coming to the U.S. because he's a quote-unquote anti-Semite, a bigot, a racist.
And now they're like, yeah, done.
No coming to the U.S. Here's Christopher Landau, his own tweet.
The State Department has revoked the U.S. visas for the members of the Bob Villain band in light of their hateful tirade at Glastonbury, including leading the crowd in death chants.
Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country.
That's a complete lie.
Israelis who chant the worst things, who call for all people in Gaza to be driven out, to be killed, who celebrate that war are perfectly welcome in the United States.
John Fetterman went to Israel and he got a golden pager to commemorate the Israelis' attacks in Lebanon that killed Hezbollah members or maimed them, but also many, many children.
That's glorifying violence, obviously.
They're all welcome in the United States.
It's not about whether you've glorified violence.
It's against whom do you glorify violence.
Nikki Haley got back into the U.S. after signing missiles and bombs in Israel saying finish them that were then dropped on gods and children.
Here from the Hollywood Reporter, just in case Hollywood's people in Hollywood aren't getting the message, Bob Villen loses his visas, its visas dropped by UTA, the United Talent Agency, following death of the IDF channel at Glastonbury.
So the band had a talent agency, United Talent Artists, big talent agency in Hollywood.
Shockingly, talent agencies in Hollywood don't like people who harshly criticize Israel.
Who knew?
And here was the text of the article, quote, English punk rap duo Bob Villen are facing significant backlash due to their death to the IDF chant from Glastonbury of the weekend with the State Department confirming Monday that it has revoked the group's U.S. visas.
Meanwhile, a source confirms to the Hollywood Reporter the United Talent Agency has dropped Bob Villain following the controversy.
As of Monday, Bob Villain is no longer listed on the UTA's roster on its website.
UTA didn't respond to requests for comment.
A rep for Bob Villain couldn't be reached.
Just the speed with which these people are disappeared, legally punished, criminally investigated.
Just governments act immediately when it's this particular topic, when it's this particular foreign country.
Just imagine him saying this about any other foreign military, any other foreign country.
Do you think any of this would be happening?
Here's what J.D. Vance said when scolding the Europeans and the British at the Munich Security Conference in February, less than a month after they were inaugurated.
This was J.D. Vance's priority one of his to go to the Munich Security Conference and lecture and condemn the Europeans for not respecting free expression.
I praised J.D. Vance at the time.
I agreed with him.
Here's what he said.
And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners.
I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.
Or to this Very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of quote combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder.
And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to supposedly protect free expression do not in fact grant, and I'm quoting, a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
Oh, wow, that'd be terrible.
Banning ideas because it offends the people who hold that belief, you wouldn't want that.
That's really tyrannical.
And I agreed with J.D. Vance.
I'm glad he went and said this.
But you notice he's angry that banning the Quran is speech that could be banned as inciting or dangerous or hateful.
Burning the Quran, rather.
He's angry that if you burn the Quran, you may have a visit from the police that says, oh, this is very hateful to burn a Quran.
This makes Muslims feel endangered.
Which, of course, it does.
If you're burning Qurans, obviously it's going to make Muslims feel uncomfortable.
It's going to make them feel threatened.
It has the potential to incite violence against Muslims.
J.D. Pence said, it's outrageous to suppress that speech or to tell people it's a crime to burn the Quran.
So it's outrageous to criminalize the burning of the Quran, which, by the way, I think ought to be, is encompassed in freedom of expression.
But he went and chided European states for criminalizing that.
But chanting death to the IDF while it's a military in multiple wars, that's supposed to be criminal?
That's supposed to be outlawed.
That results in state punishment, not just by the UK, but also the U.S. Do you see the utter inconsistency in all of this?
And I should also point out that at the time J.D. Mance was issuing this lecture, this defense of free speech, the evils of censorship, it had already been the case that huge numbers of Americans had been punished, had lost their job, had been fired for criticizing Israel after October 7th.
Even well before October 7th, it was common.
The most easy, the easiest way to lose your job as an academic would be to criticize Israel too excessively.
I know there's this belief that at colleges everybody hates Israel.
It's the way...
Or Stephen Salacia, who had a tenure offer at the University of Illinois until his tweets about Gaza were discovered.
And then Jewish student groups and donors demanded that his tenure offer be rescinded, and it was.
And he sued the University of Illinois.
The University of Illinois had to pay him a million dollars for punishing him due to their speech.
It's a state school.
This has been going on for a long time.
Of course, J.D. Venge won't mention this because there's too many people on the right who believe that anti-Israel speech should be punished and sanctioned and censored.
Here, let's listen to the rest of this.
Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.
A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.
Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
Now the officers were not moved.
Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person, but no.
This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime.
In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
Indeed, across Europe and in the UK, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
I think so, too.
Now, one might question, and if you are European officials sitting in that auditorium probably were, what ground, what standing does J.D. Vance have to go to Europe and demand that they abandon their views of the limits of free speech and adapt them or copy them to the American view?
But given the completely interlocking relationship between the United States and Europe, I do think it's appropriate if Europe is becoming tyrannical and authoritarianism on free speech for an American official to go and say, we're supposed to be countries that are in an alliance based on shared values.
But if your shared value, one of your shared values is censorship and not free speech, it's extremely difficult for you to partner with the United States, given that one of our founding ideals is free speech.
He did think it was in the business of the United States to go and object to European censorship.
And also with social media and everything being so borderless and so globalized, it absolutely is true that the erosion of free speech in Europe or in Brazil or in other places in the democratic world absolutely affects the standards and the views of how American free speech should be thinking also.
But I do think it's worth highlighting here that well before J.E.D. Vance said that and after, it's not just the Trump administration, Started arresting people and deporting them who were in the U.S. legally for things like writing an op-ed, encouraging Tufts University to follow the student Senate resolution to divest from Israel, just like a, oh, just an op-ed.
No protest, no violence, nothing, just an op-ed.
Saying, look, what Israel is doing is so genocidal.
Human rights organizations around the world have said this in unison and consensus.
And I don't think Tufts University should be funding Israel, just like people called for the defunding or divestment or boycott of South Africa.
Under the Trump administration, the Trump Vance administration, she was arrested and detained and faced with deportation proceedings after the State Department withdrew her, revoked her student visa.
She was a PhD student, never charged with any crime, never done anything except write it up bed.
So if you're going to go to Europe and you're going to lecture them on evil censorship, you probably should make sure first that your own country is abiding by precepts of free speech.
But well before that, throughout October 7th, the easiest way to get canceled, as conservatives used to call it, or fired, was by criticizing Israel.
Not by criticizing the United States, criticizing Israel.
NBC News, October 26, 2023, firing of a science journal editor after his Gaza post spokes free speech rift.
Quote, the board of the biomedical and life sciences journal eLife fired its editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, after he posted a message on X about an article from The Onion.
We've gone over that case before.
Michael Eisen is a Jew.
He's Jewish.
He's an editor of this science journal, this biomedical journal.
And he was fired because he cited an Onion headline that was critical of Israel and what it was doing in Gaza.
NBC News, rather this is the New York Times from October 26th, says 2025 is actually 2023, so the same day actually.
Art Forum fires its top editor after he signs an open letter on the Israel-Hamas war.
David Velasco was removed after the magazine's publishers said there was a flawed editorial process behind the publication of a letter that supported Palestinian liberation.
Can't have a job in the United States if you're critical of Israel.
SBS News documented how many cases there were of very prominent people losing their jobs or otherwise being punished for their criticism of Israel.
Film stars, athletes faced career consequences for speaking out in the Hamas-Israel war.
Glenn Lowry, who for a long time was very popular among the American right.
In fact, he was until recently a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, which is a more conservative institute.
That's where Chris Ruffo is.
And here he is talking to, he went on to talk to Carlson and explained that he got fired from the Manhattan Institute because he was interviewing critics of Israel, including Tana Easy Coates and others.
And then he published this story, I was fired by the Manhattan Institute, here's why.
And he describes how his opposition to Israel resulted in his firing.
Here from the New York Times yesterday, it's just yesterday, an Australian court says a journalist critical of Israel was wrongfully fired.
Quote, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation violated labor law when it took Antoinette Latouf off the air after she posted on Instagram about Gaza, the court ruled.
Now, as I said, this is central to the censorship epidemic in the United States.
During COVID, the primary censorship was aimed at dissidents at Dr. Fauci.
We did so many shows condemning that.
They weren't arrested.
They were often banned from the internet at the behest of the Biden administration in a major attack on the First Amendment.
During the Trump administration, President Trump himself was removed from Twitter.
And Facebook, after January 6th, huge numbers of Trump supporters were banned.
People have been banned for opposing the war in Ukraine.
But this idea of calling for death or killing people in the context of war is so common, especially in American discourse.
Here is that Reuters article from May 29th, 2024.
Nikki Haley writes, finish them, on an Israeli artillery shell drawing criticism.
Here is Channel 13, a very conservative, far-right, nationalistic, pro-Netanyahu television station in Israel.
And here on March 15th, 2025 is a debate that took place where two of the people involved in the debate with the host was saying, there's no innocent people in Gaza, not even babies.
We should be killing everyone in Gaza.
Nobody suggested withdrawing their visas to come to the United States.
Nobody suggested prosecuting them.
Nobody was horrified.
It barely got any attention.
Here is this discussion.
They murdered us, raped us, robbed us, kidnapped us, murdered little children, women raped.
You can't say such a thing after what they did.
Gaza should be wiped out.
Burko, Gaza should be wiped out.
Gaza should have received, Gaza should be wiped out.
Gaza should have received an unprecedented blow.
Okay, so this was the kind of reasonable one who's saying, like, I don't think we should talk about murdering everybody in Gaza.
He's saying, Gaza should have received an unprecedented blow, but you criticize it.
And then they're interrupted.
They're screaming over each other in Hebrew.
He says, boogie, you made a mistake.
I don't accept it.
You can also admit you made a mistake.
I think the IDF should have given them an unprecedented blow, but you say, and then he says, but without hurting, without hurting who, they're kind of screaming at each other.
Are there innocent people in Gaza?
And then the guy says, no, everyone is a terrorist.
Everyone.
And that's your mistake.
And then the ghost says, I disagree with you.
And he says, they're wrong.
There are women there.
There are children there.
When they kidnapped our children, they all waited for them with candy.
So I don't agree with you.
They should have been killed on the spot.
I don't send the Israeli soldiers to kill people.
The nation disagrees with you.
The nation disagrees with you.
You know that the Korean government doesn't send Israeli soldiers and then tells them to kill everyone they can or kill children and women.
And that's a very, very problematic statement to say.
Even though the guy right next to her is saying The IDF should go and kill all women, all children, everyone in Gaza.
And it goes on with statements like: you're calling it so-called ethnic cleansing.
It's very problematic.
You're creating a major stir in the world.
You have a role.
By virtue of the roles you've had in the past, you're quoted in the media, it does real damage.
And then he's saying, after I said that, there was forced taken out of Gaza.
I solved the problem.
And the guy's saying, why all this pity?
Why do you feel sorry for them?
Why do you feel sorry for them?
They're all terrorists in Gaza.
Why are you feeling sorry?
They slaughtered us on October 7th.
I agree, they should have received an unprecedented blow.
Blow!
Gaza should be wiped out.
So, anyway, this goes on and on.
This is hardly the first time I can show you so many of these.
This is mainstream Israeli television.
Compare death to the IDF to that.
How come Makaribu didn't revoke any of their visas?
Because it's all viewpoint-based.
It has nothing to do with hate speech or inciting violence or glorifying death.
You're totally free to do that.
If you're Israeli, you're talking about every man, woman, and child in Gaza as terrorists who should be wiped out.
No problem.
No problem.
Come to the United States.
Yahoo comes to the United States.
He's an indicted war criminal by the ICC.
No, come to the United States.
They're using starvation as a weapon.
They're not just chanting at a music festival.
They're starving a population of 2 million people to death.
No.
Come to the United States.
You're welcome.
But if you say anything about the IDF, the UK is going to criminally investigate you.
The whole world's going to burst out in outrage.
You're going to get condemned by the parliament.
Do you think anyone condemned this?
Here is a poll from the Quds News Network that was taken of Israel.
82% of Israelis support ethnic cleansing in Gaza, a poll finds.
The poll also revealed that 93% of Israelis believe the biblical command to, quote, erase Amalek still applies today, which is a biblical reference to essentially a wiping out of Israel's enemies.
Quote, the poll was conducted in March by one of the researchers on behalf of Penn State University.
It surveyed 1,005 Jewish respondents across Israel.
When asked if the Israeli army should act like the biblical Israeliites under Joshua in Jericho, killing all inhabitants of a conquered city, 47% agreed.
More than 65% of respondents believe in a modern-day incarnation of Amalek, a biblical enemy of the Jews.
Support for forced expulsion has spiked.
82% of Israelis support expelling all Palestinians from Gaza, of Israeli Jews.
Over half, 56%, also back expelling native Palestinians who are critical of Israel.
In 2003, support for these views was lower at 45 and 31%.
Secular Israelis also favor radical measures.
Among them, 69% support expelling Gaza's population and 31% support mimicking the biblical destruction of Jericho.
So it's not like what I showed you are fringe views.
That's what I said.
This is a very mainstream Israeli media outlet, Channel 13.
I mean, they're definitely pro-NetNA, but he's the elected prime minister of the country.
Here from AP, for those of you who think the U.S. government should be banning people from entering the U.S., who chant death, these people weren't just chanting death to an army, they're chanting death to an entire ethnic group.
May 26, 2025, just a month ago, thousands of Israeli nationalists, not hundreds, not dozens, thousands of Israeli nationalists chant, quote, death to Arabs during the annual procession through Jerusalem.
And remember, huge numbers of Arabs and Palestinians live in Jerusalem.
It's a city that is at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over to whom it belongs.
Part of Jerusalem is always going to go to the Palestinians, part of a two-state solution.
And this is what they were doing, these nationalists backed by the IDF, quote, chanting at the Arabs and singing, may your village burn.
Groups of young Israeli Jews made, look what they teach their kids.
Now we always hear that from Muslims.
Look what they teach their kids.
Look what the Israelis teach their kids.
Groups of young Israeli Jews made their way through Muslim neighborhoods of Jerusalem's old city on Monday during an annual march marking Israel's conquest of the eastern part of the city.
The march commemorates Jerusalem Day, which marks Israel's capture of East Jerusalem, including the old city and its holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the 1967 Mideast War.
The event threatened to inflame tensions that are rife in the city.
After nearly 600 days of war in Gaza, people kept a close watch as demonstrators jump dance and sang.
And then here's a video of a bunch of Israelis in Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day.
This is from June 4th, 2025.
And they're chanting, death to Arabs, may your village burn.
This seems to me to be a little bit more inciting of violence, a little bit more threatening.
They're saying Prophet Muhammad is dead.
They're waving Israeli flags.
A little bit more inciting, a little bit more hateful, a little bit likely to result in killing than some not very known British band across the other side of the world chanting not death to Jews, not death to Israelis, death to the IDF.
Here's them chanting this.
Prophet Muhammad is dead.
Death to the Arabs.
They're like 10, 12, 14 years old, these kids chanting death to the Arabs.
The second ban-Nakba is coming soon.
They're laughing.
Just wait, it's near.
You will end up in refugee camps.
Saudi Arabia stands with us.
Lebanon stands with us.
Your religion is rubbish.
A good Arab is a dead Arab.
They're all clapping.
The Arab is the son of a bitch.
Jews are my beloved.
The Arab is the son of a bitch.
All right, so you get the point.
There's the IDF, too, protecting them.
As far as music is concerned, I saw a lot of people talking about, oh, music should be apolitical.
What kind of evil person would use music to promote death?
Bob Dylan, the beloved American musician, who ironically himself is Jewish, he's a supporter of Israel.
But In 1963, he was a critic of the U.S. military, of its imperialism, its wars, starting in Vietnam, just starting.
But this is part of what he wrote.
It was called Masters of War.
And the whole song is basically spouting hatred, hatred, and a wish for death toward American warmongers, toward American leaders who send the military into war all the time.
Here's just part of it.
Quote, and I hope that you die and your death will come soon.
I'll follow your casket by the pale afternoon.
And I'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed and I'll stand over your grave till I'm sure that you're dead.
He wasn't prosecuted.
He wasn't investigated for that.
We used to have a concept of free speech.
I'm not going to go deeply into it, but just to remind you of what the critical hallmark case is defining free speech in the United States is Brandenburg versus Ohio.
Brandenburg versus Ohio involved a Ku Krux Klan leader who stood up and threatened American leaders with violence if they continue to be, in his view, anti-white.
And he was prosecuted by Ohio police and Ohio prosecutors and officials for having made what they regarded as terrorist threats.
If the government doesn't stop doing this, we're going to kill you.
And he was convicted in court.
He appealed to the Ohio Appellate Court, the Ohio Supreme Court.
They upheld the conviction.
It went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court overturned the conviction and said, under the First Amendment, you're even allowed to advocate violence.
You're allowed to say, I think violence is justified.
You're allowed to say, I think American leaders, violence is justified against American leaders if they continue to be anti-white.
They said, that is absolute free speech.
Even the abstract advocacy of violence is protected free speech, the Supreme Court said.
Which would make Bob Dylan's song indisputably constitutional, protected free speech under the First Amendment.
The only thing you can't do is gather a crowd and say, go burn down that house.
Like imminent, immediate, deliberately directing a crowd to go burn down a house or kill people or use violence.
They were trying to get to prosecute President Trump for that speech he gave to the people who then marched to the Capitol on January 6th.
And as I pointed out, there was no way you could do that.
In that speech, he didn't incite violence.
He said, go peacefully.
But that would have been a lot closer than prosecuting someone who says, death to the IDF, and there's no IDF around.
There's no imminence at all.
It's pure free speech.
But so many people who claim to believe in free speech, who cheer J.D. Vance for telling Europeans you have to honor American views and concept of free speech, are cheering the Trump administration for withdrawing, revoking their visas, even though people say way worse in Israel, don't have their visas revoked, they're welcome to the U.S. And the U.K. is now criminally investigating them.
The BBC is apologizing.
They're investigating the BBC.
Just letting you see that in the West, it's not a viewpoint-neutral application of censorship frameworks and free speech frameworks.
For reasons that we'll leave for another time that you can discern on your own too, that we've talked about before, we'll talk about again.
There is a particular repression in the United States, in the UK, in Europe that comes from comments a lot of people deem offensive when directed at Israel.
As Lisa Nandy, the member of the British government said, it's always bad to chant death too, but it's particularly pernicious to do it about the IDF, particularly bad.
I think that tells us a lot about where our liberties stand, about what kind of loyalties Western governments have, and the centrality of this one foreign government, constantly at war, multiple wars, killing huge numbers of people with our taxpayer money, with our weapons, continues to provoke for reasons that seem clear, also are incredibly potent even as public opinion about that foreign country continues to decline.
All right, before we get to the second segment, I just need to ask you a question.
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I hope you're going to take it very seriously as this topic deserves that.
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Music.
The so-called big beautiful budget, a huge omnibus bill that absolutely will raise the debt and deficit, at least in the short term, almost certainly in the long term, for obvious reasons, including the fact that it is going to cut or extend tax cuts on the wealthiest.
Obviously, that decreases revenue, increases the deficit of the debt, massively increases the budget for military by a huge amount.
Just that alone, but all sorts of other things as well.
And the odd part about, or the notable part about the big, beautiful bill is that President Trump, from the moment he got into office, started talking about the need to cut the Pentagon budget, which is consistent with MAGA's long-term grievance toward the military-industrial complex, toward its bloated nature.
Probably know all the statistics.
United States spends three times more than the next highest spender on military, which is China.
Even though China is starting to have a fair amount of equality in terms of military Prowess, even in some areas, technologically exceeding the U.S. But it also spends more than the next 15 countries combined.
15 countries combined.
And the Defense Department can't pass an audit, has no idea where this money is going.
And for that reason, Donald Trump, from the time he got into office, started talking about the need to cut military spending.
He even talked about cutting it in half if he could get a deal with China and Russia to do so.
Here's what he said on February 12th.
One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia.
And I want to say, let's cut our military budget in half.
And we can do that.
And I think we'll be able to do it.
So things we'll be able to do.
I don't think we're there yet, given that he now wants to increase it by a couple hundred billion dollars, if not more.
In mid-February, too, this is when Doge was unleashed.
A lot of conservatives are very excited about cutting massive amounts of government spending.
Doge ended up cutting relatively very little, not even the amount that Trump wants to raise military spending by.
But at the time, it was understood that Doge would have to target the Pentagon.
You'd have to cut immensely at the Pentagon if you wanted to make any real headway in cutting government spending and lowering the debt and the deficit.
Hear from NPR mid-February, February 14th, exclusive report that, it's an exclusive report that right before the Hexeth memo, which we'll show you, it said, quote, Elon Musk's team is expecting to target the Pentagon soon, pledging cost cuts.
Quote, members of Elon Musk's government efficiency team are poised to arrive at the Defense Department in the coming days.
Officials tell NPR that DOGE has a target of cutting 8% from next year's budget.
Cutting 8% from the next year's military budget.
The officials were not authorized to speak publicly and provided details on condition of anonymity.
Targets will likely include the workforce, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth already said has grown too much.
Quote, we won World War II with seven four-star generals, Hegseth said during his confirmation hearing.
Today we have 44.
There is an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield.
We do not need more bureaucracy at the top.
We need more warfighters empowered at the bottom.
So it is going to be my job to identify those places where fat can be cut so it can go toward lethality.
A few days later, the Washington Post reported this, quote, Trump administration orders the Pentagon to plan for sweeping budget cuts.
Quote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years.
8% in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post and officials familiar with the matter.
A striking proposal certain to face internal resistance and strident bipartisan opposition in Congress.
Both parties are funded by the military-industrial complex, by arms manufacturers.
If Trump tried to cut the defense budget by 8% even, let alone 8% every year over the next five years, as the Washington Post said, he would face, quote, internal resistance and strident bipartisan opposition in Congress, that's for sure.
The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter threats posed by China and Russia in particular.
So we spend $850 billion, which is needed to deter threats from China and Russia.
We all have nuclear weapons, huge amounts of nuclear weapons.
China spends about $300 billion, so one-third, a little bit less than one-third, more than one-third rather, of what the U.S. is budgeted to spend.
Russia spends about $70 billion, so 10 times less, more than 10 times less what the U.S. spends.
But we're told we have to keep shoveling close to a trillion dollars a year to Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing and Palantir to deter the threat posed by China and Russia, which spends a fraction of what the United States has been spending for decades.
If adopted in full, the cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.
Wow, that sounds great.
Cuts to the Pentagon budget.
Finally targeting this gigantic boondoggle, this massive transfer of wealth from the American worker to these huge arms manufacturers that employ huge numbers of lobbyists to control both parties.
The military industrial complex finally confronting and taking it on and saying, no, you can't keep putting us in massive amounts of debt and deficit spending to fund your stockholders and make them rich and your executives as well.
From the Hill, February 7th, this is going on at the same time.
Lindsey Graham unveils a budget plan to beef up border security and defense.
Quote, Senate Budgetary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on Friday unveiled a 61-page budget resolution that would lay the groundwork for the Senate to pass a special budget reconciliation bill that would provide $175 billion to secure the southern border and $150 million to beef up national defense.
Quote, to those who voted for and support real border security and a stronger defense in a troubled world, help is on the way, Graham said in a statement.
Oh, we were very vulnerable before.
We were only spending $850 billion on our defense.
Don't worry, says Lindy Graham.
We're increasing that.
Help is on the way.
The legislation would increase annual spending by $85.5 billion and be fully paid for by $85.5 billion in budgetary offsets.
Graham did not reveal what spending cuts would be used to pay for the proposal, leaving it for Republican leaders and committee chairmen to decide at a later date.
They always say that.
Oh, don't worry, we're going to cut offsetting amounts of the budget.
And of course, they can't do that.
They don't do that.
But they do raise defense spending, military spending always.
Here's Donald Trump in April, just two months after he told HexF.
And Hexeth said they're going to cut it by 8% every year over the next five years.
He said he wants to meet with Russia and China to cut it by 50%.
Here out of nowhere, while at the White House, this is In the middle of the tariff controversy, when the tariffs were first announced, and here's what he said about the defense budget.
We have great, great things happening with our military.
We also essentially approved a budget which is in the facility.
You'll like to hear this, of a trillion dollars, one trillion dollars.
And nobody's seen anything like it.
We have to build our military, and we're very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build, and we have to be strong because you've got a lot of bad forces out there now.
So we're going to be approving a budget, and I'm proud to say, actually, the biggest one we've ever done for the military.
By the way, I believe this was the second meeting he had with Netanyahu at the White House.
The first one was in February.
This one, I believe, was in April.
We'll check on that, but I believe it was Netanyahu sitting next to him when he said, you're going to like this.
Yeah, it was Netanyahu right next to him.
He said, you're going to like this, Bibi.
We're raising our defense budget to a trillion dollars a year, the first ever in human history.
So more for you, Bibi.
And Bibi smiled.
Trump was very proud to say it in front of Netanyahu.
Even said, you're going to like this.
Why would Netanyahu like it?
Why would Netanyahu care?
It's because a lot of it goes to Israel.
Here from the Office of Management and Budget, May 2nd, 2025, major discretionary funding changes.
This is a letter to Susan Collins from the OMB.
Quote, Dear Chair Collins, cutting such spending from the discretionary budget leads to significant savings.
The President is proposing base non-defense discretionary budget authority, $160 billion, 22.6% below current year spending, while still protecting funding for Homeland Security, veterans, seniors, law enforcement, and infrastructure.
Over 10 years, this restraint would generate trillions in savings necessary for balancing the budget.
At the same time, the budget proposes unprecedented increases for defense and border security.
For defense spending, the president proposes an increase of 13% to $1.01 trillion for fiscal year 2026.
For Homeland Security, the budget commits a historic $175 billion investment to a long-last fully securing our border.
Program name is DOD Topline.
The budget delivers on the President's promise.
Okay, so this is what they're claiming the budget would do, the White House.
And here is part of what the increased defense budget is intended to do.
This is from Breaking Defense, June 4th.
Less ships, more bombs.
Senate unveils its version of the $150 billion defense reconciliation package.
Quote, the Senate Armed Services Committee version of the $150 billion defense reconciliation bill roughly mirrors the House version, but makes spending adjustments to key areas like shipbuilding, nuclear modernization, and munitions.
Quote, the House and Senate are very, very close in the provisions, said Chairman Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, during a defense writers group event this morning.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and I are really, very close together, and the administration is supportive.
The difficult portion of reconciliation and the things that might trip it up are really in other parts of the bill.
In a statement released last night, Rogers, Republican of Alabama, said the bill is, quote, a generational investment in our national defense.
Here from the New York Times, June 30th, it's a breakdown of the increases of where they would go when you see all of these items here, $28 billion, $24 billion, $23, $15, $15.
It goes in descending order.
Things like shipbuilding, munitions, defense industrial base, air and missile defense, military rattliness.
So basically, exactly what's been happening for the last 40 years, the military-industrial complex grows and grows and grows.
After we're always promised that it will finally slow down because we're basically paying for it by borrowing from China.
That's how we fund this military.
We're somehow doing it to protect ourselves from China while borrowing money from them to build it up.
You'll never guess who is one of the main beneficiaries of this massive increase in military spending.
From the street, May 27th, Palantir gets great news from the Pentagon.
I'm so surprised that Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, that people like Alex Karp and Joe Lansdale, we showed you, we did a whole show on Palantir, its key role in the surveillance state, how it integrated into the Trump administration during the transition, even though most of them didn't really support President Trump until it became apparent that he was going to win, put a lot of money into PACs for President Trump's campaign.
And you'll never guess.
You'll be so surprised.
They have great news from the Pentagon.
Quote, Palantir's progress has been largely driven by its lucrative defense contracts, including a $30 million software deal from the ICE, but the company recently revealed something else that indicates demand for its services is still rising.
The DOD seems to believe it will have considerably more use for Palantir's technology concerning mission support systems as it has significantly increased its budget from software licenses.
An official from the department recently issued the following statement, quote, combatant commands in particular have increased their use of MSS to command and control dynamic operations and activities in their theaters.
In response to this growing demand, the Chief Digital AI Office and Army increased capacity to support emerging combatant command operations and other DOD component needs.
So billions more to Palantir.
Congratulations to them.
Part of what we're doing is a golden dome similar to the Iron Dome that Israel has.
Now, I don't know what use the United States has for shooting down ballistic missiles.
We have a gigantic arsenal.
We have a huge nuclear arsenal.
Nobody shot ballistic missiles at the United States before, but Trump has an idea that we're going to build a huge, massive golden dome, way, way, way bigger than the Iron Dome.
Obviously, the United States is much, much bigger.
From MarketWatch, May 21st, Trump's Golden Dome missile defense system could be a boon to these companies.
President Donald Trump's unveiling of a $175 billion plan to build a massive missile defense system, a project viewed as ambitious in both its timeline and budget, boosted defense stocks on Wednesday.
Congratulations to those defense contractors on their massive increase in their stock price as a result of this commitment to tens, if not hundreds of billions more in resources from the American taxpayer to these companies.
Trump Said he wants the quote Golden Dome to be operational by the end of his term in three and a half years.
The price tag, partially funded in the administration's big, beautiful tax and spending bill, which has yet to pass, was higher than Wall Street expectations.
L3 Harris is likely to benefit the most from Golden Dome, Herbert said, the Melbourne Florida tech company and defense contractor, recently made a $125 million investment to expand its factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as it was already eyeing Golden Dome opportunities.
Raytheon, which is now RTX, and Lockheed Martin, are also, quote, well positioned to take share given their integrated and strategic missile defense systems.
Privately held aerospace company and defense disruptor SpaceX and defense tech startup Andrew Industries would also get a boost.
So congratulations to everybody there.
From Axios, June 29th, which was just a couple days ago, yesterday in fact, $11.8 million more uninsured from the Senate bill according to the CBO.
So this is the scheme that's happening.
And it's been happening for forever.
There are certain programs, very limited programs, that are designed to help the middle class and the working class.
That's why the middle class and the working class are doing so poorly.
And the main promise of the Trump administration, the modern movement, the Republican Party has been, remember, we're going to stand for the forgotten person, the working class people.
And huge numbers of them who voted for Trump on that basis are actually on Medicare.
They use Medicare.
They can't afford health insurance.
They can't afford if their families get sick, some accident happens.
They use Medicare.
And according to the CBO, just from yesterday, 11.8 million more uninsured people, if that Senate bill passes, the big, beautiful bill will become uninsured.
So huge numbers of billions and billions and billions of dollars to Palantir, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, et cetera.
The working class people smashed.
No more Medicaid.
Medicare rather.
Josh Hawley is one of the few Republicans who actually believes in economic populism.
He, as I've told you before, doesn't just say it.
He stood by Bernie Sanders when they wanted to do that COVID relief bill to send billions to big business, and they filibustered it, demanding that some direct payments go to the American people.
They succeeded in a $600 direct payment to American citizens.
When Trump got the bill, he vetoed it, saying $600 wasn't enough.
He wanted $2,000 to each person.
Josh Hawley has been doing a lot, and he has been expressing major concerns, and we'll get to him in a second, about how this bill cuts Medicaid, which is exactly a service that primarily serves the working class voters who voted for Trump and who are promised that their interests would be served.
Here's what he told CNN earlier this month.
I walked through him and he said, oh, wow, that's very surprising.
He said, I'm surprised that they made all these changes.
And to the degree they did, I said, I am too.
He was real clear to Senate Republicans just two weeks ago, don't touch anything else on Medicaid.
Take the House framework, tweak it if you need to, but do not do anything else.
And this Senate framework is really, it departs from his framework big time.
Josh Hawley has been saying for the last two weeks, three weeks, he will not vote for the Big Beautiful bill because of the massive cuts to Medicaid.
And then in the last couple days that the White House pressured him, Josh Hawley said, you know what, I'm going to vote for this.
I hate these Medicaid cuts.
There are other things in the bill.
He's been wanting for years to get a funding program for radiation victims in Missouri, and he got that in the bill.
So I think that's part of his incentive.
But Tom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, who had been expressing opposition to this bill, Trump threatened a primary challenge to him, the way Trump formed a PAC to remove Tom Massey from the Congress.
Trump said it was going to go and campaign in Kentucky against Thomas Massey, one of the very, very few members of Congress who speaks out against APAC, who criticized the Trump decision to join the war in Iran with Israel.
He's certainly angry about Massey for that, his criticism of Israel and APAC and Trump's war in Iran, but he's also angry that Massey keeps saying, we're supposed to, we keep promising to come and cut the debt.
We keep passing budgets that exploded.
Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter, so I'm voting no.
And Josh Hawley was one of the people saying he would vote no, and then at the last second, he said he voted yes.
But Tom Tillis, after Trump threatened that if he does vote no, he'll take him out of Congress by supporting a primary challenger, said, I'm not going to run for a reelection again.
I prefer to leave the Senate.
I've been here for years.
I don't really like it.
And then he gave a speech today saying, we have told the people of North Carolina, my state, many states like it, with a big working-class population, people struggling with health insurance, that we're going to take care of their needs.
And once this bill passes, within the next two years, millions of them are going to be thrown off Medicaid, 650,000 in particular are in North Carolina, but millions throughout the United States.
And he said, what am I supposed to go tell them once they lose their Medicaid coverage?
And they're going to come and say, wait, I voted for the Republican Party.
I voted for the MACA movement, for Donald Trump, because you promised us you were going to stop feeding the military-industrial complex, stop feeding all these big businesses, and then you cut taxes on the biggest corporations and raised the defense budget, the military spending budget, by $200 billion, $150 billion to get to a trillion dollars, putting us more and more in debt, and you took away our Medicaid.
Seems like kind of a violation of the promise.
Now, whether you support Medicaid or not, President Trump did repeatedly run on a promise not to cut Medicaid.
And of course, there's some attempt by the White House to deny it.
We're not really cutting Medicaid, but the result is going to be that people are going to be thrown off Medicaid in large numbers.
And if it were a true kind of we all have to tighten our belt, everybody has to sacrifice, we're really cutting deeply into the budget, we need to get the debt, the deficit down, I think people would be a little bit more understanding, although generally people don't like when you take things away from them, especially when you promise to look out most for their interests.
Things, not like luxury items, I mean like health care, health insurance, the ability to pay doctors when your kids get sick.
But watching $200 billion more go to all the defense contractors and palantir that funded Trump's campaign that are the richest people in the country at the same time you're cutting Medicaid, it seems like the Republican Party will have difficulty justifying that.
And some Republicans haven't the courage to say it, but I think the main point is that the military complex wins no matter who you vote for.
Even if you vote for somebody to get into the presidency who has repeatedly said he wants to cut the inflated budget, stop having so many wars.
First trillion dollar budget ever in human history.
So congratulations to the United States on that.
Congratulations to Chinese creditors on that as well, since they'll be funding it and then having the debt increase to them.
So that's the bill.
It seems like it's not 100% guaranteed that it's going to pass, but Trump does have so much influence in the Republican Party.
People who do want to run for re-election are petrified of incurring his wrath.
And it seems like they're all going to snap into line, or at least enough of them, to get this bill passed.
And so we're going to probably over the next week, over this course of this week, as the vote gets finalized, they're going to go in processes, have a couple people on to be able to break down what this budget does who are sort of experts in budgetary analysis and the like.
And, you know, I think it's important to understand exactly what this budget does.
But for sure, one of the parts that we're able to focus on and talk about and report on is this massive increase in defense and the defense budget.
So that's what we did.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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