Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. A quick ask: if you’re reading this on Substack, take a second to tap the ❤️ and click restack. That’s how we make sure these important stories break through the algorithm and reach the most people.
Donald Trump suggested to a crowd of red state Republicans that he’d be fine with Iran destroying Los Angeles and San Diego, calling the hypothetical deaths of millions of Americans “a small price to pay.” Disney and ABC are currently in a federal courtroom fighting Trump’s FCC chair over an unprecedented effort to potentially strip broadcast licenses of its local stations because Trump doesn’t like Jimmy Kimmel and The View. Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas was just caught using an unauthorized photo of children at a church camp in a campaign ad. And a group made up of both liberals and conservatives called Humans First just wrapped up an 8,000-mile anti-data center bus tour with a protest outside the headquarters of some of the country’s biggest AI companies.
One more thing before the news: today, Paramount CEO David Ellison — the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison — officially took over CNN’s parent company today. That’s one more newsroom that will soon become a MAGA mouthpiece. Independent media is more important than ever, and because we have no wealthy owner or corporate parent, we exclusively rely on readers like you to keep our journalism going.
At a rally in Nebraska last night, Donald Trump let us know exactly how much he values the lives of ordinary Americans.
The president began the rally by shrugging off concerns about the rising cost of food and fuel — which is happening thanks to his tariffs and his war with Iran — saying they’re “just a little bit high.”
But then he went on to say he would even be fine with the Iranian regime taking out major American cities, like Los Angeles and San Diego, which are populated by roughly 13 million people. The crowd of Trump supporters even cheered on Trump as he cavalierly dismissed the hypothetical deaths of millions, calling it a “small price to pay.”
MAGA commentators have been doing damage control by insisting that Trump meant high gas prices were the small price to pay, and that his war is the one thing keeping Iran from attacking U.S. cities. But that generous interpretation doesn’t hold up when considering that Iran has been targeting American bases throughout the Middle East, killing an estimated 23 American soldiers and injuring hundreds of others.
California’s leaders didn’t waste time responding to the president’s comments. Los Angeles’ Democratic mayor, Karen Bass, said his remarks were “irresponsible” and that they could endanger her city. Bass went on to say that “the role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives.”
Democratic Mayor Todd Gloria of San Diego stated that his city wasn’t collateral damage. In a post to his official X account Gloria wrote, “We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’” He then made it clear that Trump should keep San Diego’s name out of his mouth. California’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Xavier Becerra, piled on, saying Californians’ lives aren’t a punchline for Donald Trump’s rallies.
Things aren’t improving much for Americans at the gas pump. Because Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and its Houthi allies in Yemen control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, a significant chunk of the global oil supply is without a key shipping channel. As of Tuesday morning, AAA pegged the national average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas at $4.37, while diesel has hit a staggering $6.32 per gallon.
It’s also important to remind everyone that Trump’s claim of the war being almost over doesn’t jibe with reality. He turned down Iran’s proposal to end the conflict tat the U.N. General Assembly last month, and mediators for the two countries continue to remain at a standstill. Meanwhile, the fighting has continued to escalate, with Houthi rebels attacking airports in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis bombing Yemen in response. The midterms are just weeks away, and Trump has nothing to show for his war except for higher prices and dead troops.
The authors of the Constitution wrote in Article IV that the United States shall protect every state against invasion. They didn’t carve out an exception for states that vote against the president. When a commander in chief starts deciding which American cities are worth defending and which ones he’ll sacrifice, he’s ruling a faction, not a nation.
This morning, the Walt Disney Company is squaring off in a federal courtroom against Donald Trump’s FCC in a case that may end up defining how far the First Amendment goes under this administration.
Trump has spent the last several months demanding that ABC fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for mocking him. He’s also not a fan of The View for the same reason. The president has also previously sued ABC over George Stephanopoulos’s statements about the verdicts in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits against Trump, and the network settled in December of 2024 for $16 million. But now, new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro is taking a different approach by engaging in a high-stakes legal fight with the White House.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — who wrote the section of Project 2025 about the FCC — has acted on Trump’s orders, with his agency now moving to carry out official reviews of all eight of Disney’s ABC stations several years ahead of schedule. Carr’s announcement came in response to Trump repeatedly posting to his Truth Social platform that the FCC should strip ABC of its broadcast licenses. These licenses aren’t for the networks themselves, but rather for the individual stations so they can broadcast on public airwaves. For decades, the FCC has normally renewed those licenses on a staggered timeline with very little if any drama.
Former Republican FCC chair Mark Fowler, who led the agency during the Reagan administration, filed an official statement in the case in support of ABC. He told NPR that Carr’s actions are blatantly unconstitutional and likened it to state-sponsored censorship of a broadcaster. He went on to say that “the First Amendment is very plain in its wording and its meaning.”
Disney is officially requesting U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan — an appointee of former President Joe Biden — to stop the FCC from accelerating its review process. She previously ordered Carr to hold off on any reviews until after today’s hearing. Both free speech advocates and FCC veterans say that the government challenging all of a network’s local licenses at the same time is completely unprecedented. Six of those eight stations sit in major media markets that bring in many millions of dollars in revenue for ABC.
Carr insists the FCC hasn’t made any official decisions and is only expediting the review process, which could become a key question in whether Disney has the legal standing to sue the agency. The GOP’s official House and Senate campaign committees filed amicus briefs in support of Trump’s FCC, claiming there was “overwhelming” evidence of The View going out of its way to help Democrats. However, multiple conservative-aligned groups like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, disagreed and filed briefs in support of Disney and ABC.
Those groups say Carr’s own words prove their argument. During an interview with a right-wing podcaster in September of last year, Carr suggested ABC could deal with Kimmel “the easy way or the hard way.” Just hours later, ABC went on to suspend Kimmel over his remarks about Charlie Kirk, though public outrage ultimately reversed that decision and got him back on the air.
Bruce Brown, who leads the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said overreach from Trump’s FCC is one of the greatest threats currently facing American journalism. He observed that the FCC has opened investigations into every single broadcaster save for the Murdoch-owned Fox, while the Trump administration has cut off reporters’ access at both the White House and Pentagon. Brown insisted this is all “part of a wide effort by the Trump administration to intimidate the press.”
In 2024, a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in the NRA v. Vullo case made it clear that government officials can’t use their regulatory powers to pressure private companies into silencing speech the government doesn’t approve of. If that rule could protected the NRA from New York regulators, it should also protect late-night comedians from a thin-skinned president. A country where comedians need an official government license to tell jokes is no longer a democracy.
In Linwood, Kansas, the Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center is now demanding that Republican Senator Roger Marshall stop airing a campaign ad that used an unauthorized photo of children in its chapel. The ad is attacking Democratic candidate and pastor Adam Hamilton over a church volunteer’s alleged sexual abuse of boys at a 2005 program run by Hamilton’s church.
Lea Ann Combs, who chairs the Tall Oaks board, said Marshall’s campaign never approached the camp before running the ad. Combs said the ad “creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the young people pictured and events that did not happen here.” While the camp had permission from the children’s families to photograph the kids for promotional materials, that permission never extended to political ads — particularly ones that deal with allegations of abuse.
Marshall’s chief of staff, Brent Robertson, is now claiming the campaign understood the photo in question to be a stock image, and insists the ad has since been corrected. But hours after that statement, a social media version of the ad still depicted the Tall Oaks chapel and roughly two dozen people in the pews. Robertson added that Kansas families still care more about Hamilton’s record than “what cabin picture was used.”
The ad began running on Kansas airwaves after the Republican Senate Leadership Fund pulled $8 million out of the North Carolina Senate race to prop up Marshall in the Sunflower State, who is now in an unexpectedly competitive race. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows Marshall and Hamilton tied at 45 percent. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in almost 100 years.
Hamilton campaign spokesperson, Tyson Brody accused Senator Marshall of using Kansas children as political pawns. He then made sure voters knew about Marshall’s September 2025 vote to block Senate legislation that would have directed the Justice Department to release unclassified records pertaining to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein records, adding that Marshall “voted to protect the predators named in the Epstein files.”
As far as the allegations about Hamilton’s church, the Democratic Senate candidate told States Newsroom in July that two church employees investigated the 2005 claims internally and ultimately didn’t reach a conclusion because the children couldn’t identify the perpetrator. Hamilton acknowledged that he should have gone to police. And when new allegations surfaced against that same volunteer in 2006, the church notified local law enforcement.
In 1950, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine stood on the floor of the Senate and said she didn’t want to see her party win on what she called the “Four Horsemen of Calumny” of fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear. But seven decades later, a senator from her own party is now putting other people’s kids in an attack ad without the consent of their parents. That should tell you how far the GOP has gone.
On Monday afternoon, a tour bus bearing the slogan “AI Data Center Revolt” parked outside the San Francisco headquarters of Anthropic. That bus is with the group Humans First, which concluded its 8,000-mile trip with more than 35 stops across the country over five weeks to rally local communities against widespread data center development.
The group is led by Amy Kremer, who is a longtime conservative organizer with ties to the tea party and even to a group that organized the rally leading up to the January 6th insurrection. Humans First first began in early 2026 as a coalition of people on both sides of the political aisle worried about Big Tech billionaires forcing AI on America without input from the public. It’s since become a conservative-only effort under Kremer.
Kremer says AI is “being shoved down people’s throats” and that it’s un-American to force the construction of billions of dollars worth of AI infrastructure on ordinary Americans without them having a say. The tour also traveled to the offices of OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia on Monday. Kremer’s daughter, Kylie Jane, said the group’s 13-point Data Center Policy calls for things like community control over data center planning, rails against data centers driving up utility costs for local residents, and openly opposes the use of data centers for unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance.
Kremer observed that in Montgomery County, Missouri — which houses just 12,000 people — Google and Amazon are planning to pour in a massive infusion of $25 billion for data center development, calling it a David-versus-Goliath fight. She then asked how anyone could be expected to take on a fight of that magnitude on their own. It isn’t just Montgomery County: hundreds of communities have discovered data center projects hidden behind a confusing web of shell companies and officials bound by non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
Kremer said Americans are increasingly worried about the existential risks of AI, and wasn’t shy about telling reporters that she believes the concept of conscious AI is “demonic.”
Despite her conservative ideology, Kremer is openly conflicting with Trump on data centers and the AI industry. The president has referred to AI a “golden goose” and is hyping the building of more data centers across the country. Kremer pointed the finger at tech investors, saying they’re responsible for swaying the president in their direction. Kremer also added she doesn’t believe Trump would want a data center in his own backyar.
When Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act more than 130 years ago by a near-unanimous margin, Senator John Sherman argued that a citizenry who wouldn’t endure a king in government shouldn’t endure a king in the private sector. You don’t have to agree with Kremer’s politics to see that electricity, water and land belong to the people. No trillion-dollar company should be able to claim them for themselves while hiding behind an NDA.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. Once again, please hit the ❤️ and restack this post so we can get these stories in front of the people who really need them.