Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, Joe Rogan has broken publicly with Trump again over the Iran war, just days after being welcomed into the Oval Office. A leaked Pentagon email reveals the administration is considering suspending Spain from NATO and reconsidering U.S. support for British sovereignty over the Falklands. The new anchor of CBS Evening News is being described by his own colleagues as an “imposter” installed by Bari Weiss and David Ellison to put a friendly face on a captured network. And the Justice Department is preparing to strip hundreds of naturalized American citizens of their citizenship in what officials are calling only “the first wave.” Corporate media is not going to give these stories the weight they deserve. The FCC chair has made sure of that. And the Ellisons are already remaking what used to be the news. This is what independent journalism is for.
Raw America is Raw Story and Really American’s people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. CBS is already under Ellison control. CNN is next. The FCC chair has threatened to pull broadcast licenses from any outlet that covers the Iran war the wrong way. And independent newsrooms across the country are being absorbed into billionaire portfolios one by one, not just the Washington Post and the LA Times, but local stations and digital outlets that communities depend on going soft or going dark. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the day.
Joe Rogan Breaks with Trump Again — Days After the Oval Office Photo Op
Less than a week after standing behind Trump at the Resolute Desk for a presidential signing ceremony, Joe Rogan went on his podcast and questioned the entire premise of the Iran war.
“Why did we do it? I don’t know. I think because of Israel, if I had to guess,” Rogan told his guest Thursday. “Netanyahu kept visiting the White House. You think it’s a coincidence? Netanyahu keeps visiting the White House. And then eventually they decide to give in and start bombing.”
He went further: “How do you get out of this, and then what does the exit look like? Do we have troops over there forever now?”
The Oval Office visit had been widely read as Trump’s attempt to keep Rogan, who averages 11 million listeners per episode, from fully breaking with him. It produced an executive order expediting FDA review of psychedelic drug treatments, a cause Rogan has publicly backed. Trump even acknowledged the growing rift in the room, saying of Rogan, “We all respect Joe. He’s a little bit more liberal than I am.”
It wasn’t enough. Rogan had already said last month that the Iran war is “terrifying” and “exactly the opposite of what we were told leading into this administration.” On a recent episode with fellow MAGA skeptic Theo Von, the pair used the word “scared” or variations of it more than 30 times. “Well, you should be,” Rogan told Von. “It’s a real, hot war.”
Rogan joins Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones, and Theo Von in putting public distance between themselves and Trump over the war. For a president whose coalition was built on “no new wars,” the defection of the media figures who built that coalition is a significant problem heading into the midterms.
Every war this country has fought in the modern era has ended the same way, with the propagandists who sold it racing for the exits once the audience turns on them. Rogan and Carlson and Kelly aren’t having a moral awakening here, they’re watching their download numbers, and that tells you exactly where this war is headed politically and how fast the coalition that started it is going to come apart.
Trump Is Considering Suspending Spain from NATO and Flipping on the Falklands
A leaked Pentagon email, reported by Reuters, shows the Trump administration is weighing two dramatic moves against NATO allies who refused to participate in the Iran war: suspending Spain from the alliance entirely, and revising the official U.S. position on British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
Spain closed its jointly operated airbases to U.S. aircraft involved in the Iran conflict and shut its airspace to the operation entirely. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been one of Trump’s most vocal European critics. The Falklands maneuver appears designed as a threat to the UK, whose Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also refused to join the war. Revising U.S. support for British sovereignty would be a gift to Argentina’s Javier Milei, a close Trump ally who claims the islands, known in Spanish as Las Malvinas.
Legal experts note there is no mechanism in NATO’s founding treaty to suspend a member state. Spain’s government has already dismissed the reports. “We do not work off emails,” Sánchez told Reuters. “We work off official documents and government positions.”
The Pentagon’s press secretary did not deny the email and said NATO “was not there for us” despite everything the U.S. has done for the alliance. She added that the “War Department” would ensure the president has “credible options” to make allies “do their part.”
Trump has threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO altogether. The Iran war has accelerated that contempt into something that now looks, at least on paper, like active retaliation against democratic allies who chose not to join an unauthorized war.
NATO was built after World War II specifically to keep democracies from getting picked off one at a time by authoritarian regimes, and now the United States is threatening to do the picking itself. When we reward Milei and punish Starmer and Sánchez for refusing to join an unauthorized war, we aren’t defending the postwar order, we’re burning it down on behalf of the very forces it was built to contain.
CBS Evening News Is Falling Apart and Bari Weiss Is Running the Teleprompter
A new Vanity Fair investigation drawing on more than 20 current and former CBS News staffers describes the network’s new evening anchor Tony Dokoupil as a man in over his head, installed not because he was the best choice but because no one else would take the job.
“He very much was not Bari’s first choice,” one CBS News correspondent told the magazine. “He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the job. She wanted Bret Baier. She wanted Anderson Cooper. She wanted a name. A useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”
Weiss, who was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison despite having no television experience, reportedly edited Dokoupil’s teleprompter script on his first night on air, producing on-air errors that prompted a former CBS anchor to say she “would have killed her.” One producer described Dokoupil as having “the biggest case of imposter syndrome out of any anchor or correspondent I’ve ever worked with. Tony knows he wasn’t ready for the chair.”
His decision to effusively praise Marco Rubio at the end of a broadcast was described by colleagues as exposing his “lack of sophistication” and being “outrageous,” with one staffer noting that “even a MAGA Republican doesn’t want to see that in their news.”
Ratings have fallen. Reviews have been savage. A dumpster fire that broke out next to the CBS Broadcast Center in New York went viral in March because, as one observer put it, the metaphor wrote itself.
CBS can’t fire him, according to one former executive, because “they’ve gone through anchors faster than postmen go through shoes.”
This is what a captured network looks like from the inside.
Edward R. Murrow built CBS News into something this country could actually rely on, and what the Ellisons and Bari Weiss are doing to it now is what happens when Reagan’s killing of the Fairness Doctrine finally meets a generation of billionaires who’ve figured out that owning the news is cheaper than being accountable to it. A captured press isn’t an accident of the market, it’s the first thing autocrats always come for, because you can’t dismantle a democracy while an honest press is still telling the public what’s being dismantled.
The DOJ Is Preparing to Strip Hundreds of Naturalized Citizens of Their Citizenship
The Justice Department has added 384 naturalized American citizens to a list of people it intends to denaturalize, according to reporting by the New York Times, with officials describing this as only “the first wave.”
Denaturalization, the legal process of stripping a person of citizenship they were granted, has historically been rare and reserved for specific cases involving fraud or serious criminal conduct. The Trump administration is now treating it as a volume operation, ordering DHS to refer more than 200 cases per month to the DOJ and assigning civil litigators in 39 regional U.S. attorneys’ offices to handle the caseload. Those offices normally handle healthcare fraud, asset forfeiture, and civil rights enforcement, which officials acknowledged will now receive less attention.
When a person is denaturalized, they revert to the immigration status they held before becoming a citizen, which can then open the door to deportation.
It is not clear why the 384 individuals have been singled out. A DOJ spokesman confirmed the department is pursuing “the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history.” The initiative traces back to a Justice Department memo from last June instructing staff to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law,” covering a broad range of categories including alleged gang membership and vague “nexus to terrorism” designations.
The White House told the Times this is not a White House initiative. It is federal law. The DOJ official who presented the plan to regional offices said she hoped the cases “will not be too much of an additional burden.”
There are currently 23 million naturalized citizens in the United States.
Stripping citizenship has always been one of the first moves of authoritarian regimes, from the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 to the McCarthy era loyalty purges, because once you establish that citizenship is conditional for some Americans, you’ve established that it’s conditional for all of them. The 14th Amendment was written in the aftermath of slavery to make citizenship permanent and equal in this country, and what the DOJ is building right now is a machine designed to unwrite it, 384 people at a time, with 23 million more in the queue.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Let’s be direct about what this morning’s news tells us.
The anchor of CBS Evening News is being managed by a political operative installed by a billionaire Trump ally, with no journalism experience, editing live teleprompter scripts on air. NATO allies are being threatened for refusing to join an unauthorized war. The government is building a mass denaturalization apparatus targeting millions of people who became citizens legally. And the podcasters who helped build the MAGA movement are now publicly asking who authorized this war and how we get out.
The press that is supposed to cover all of this is being bought, threatened, and handed to people who have made clear what the coverage will look like once they’re in charge.
Raw America was built to be the thing that doesn’t get bought.
Because of your support, we have had reporters on the ground at the most important hearings of this political era. We have broken exclusives the corporate press buried. We are joining the D.C. press pool and going after the interviews that hold power accountable, bringing them directly to you unfiltered and unbought.
That coverage, coverage that challenges power, refuses to sell wars, and won’t propagandize for the Ellisons, requires your support. We have no hedge fund, no billionaire backer. We answer to our readers and no one else. If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, today is the day.
This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
DOJ Drops Investigation Into Fed Chair Over Pressure from Republicans. President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has officially dropped its criminal probe into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The DOJ announced the investigation — which it claimed was over the cost of renovations at the Fed’s headquarters — after Powell remained resolute over not lowering interest rates to Trump’s liking. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) has been holding up the nomination of Federal Reserve Board of Governors nominee Kevin Warsh specifically over the Powell investigation.
Kristi Noem Still in Taxpayer-Funded Mansion Despite Being Fired. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has reportedly still not moved out of the waterfront mansion on a military base she’s been in inhabiting since her confirmation as DHS secretary last year, even though Trump fired her in March. Noem’s vehicle was seen outside of the home — which is typically used by the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard — as recently as this week. The current commandant, Adm. Kevin Lunday, has been hoping to move into the house so the Coast Guard’s chain of command can live where they’re supposed to.
Mike Pence Tells Trump to Back Off the Pope. During a recent interview with MS NOW, former Vice President Mike Pence — who was raised Catholic — broke his silence about Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV. Pence expressed appreciation that the feud seemed to have “abated to a degree,” but added that if he were still advising Trump, he would tell him to “let the pope be the pope and you be the president.”
ICE Agents May Be Getting ‘Smart Glasses’ That Would Let Them Spy on Citizens. Trump’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget includes $7.5 million for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to have “smart glasses” that would be equipped with biometric identification technology to use on people they encounter in the field, potentially including facial recognition technology. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sounded the alarm, arguing that this technology would allow ICE agents to spy on U.S. citizens expressing their First Amendment rights.
Trump’s Revenge Campaign in Indiana Is Sputtering. After eight Republicans in the Indiana State Senate voted down Trump’s plans to redraw the Hoosier State’s congressional districts, the president vowed to endorse candidates to run against them in Republican primaries. But so far, Trump has little to show for his efforts. Club for Growth, which has poured $2 million into the primary campaigns, said it wants to flip all eight seats. However, one Trump ally admitted that three to five of those seats were toss-ups.
