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Jared Kushner Begs Netanyahu for Hours to Back Trump’s Plan

Jared Kushner’s meeting with the Israeli prime minister doesn’t appear to have gone too well.

Jared Kushner appears worried while standing in a group of other men in suits.
Jared Kushner ahead of a meeting between the United States, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar in Switzerland on June 21
URS FLUEELER/POOL/AFP/Getty Images
Jared Kushner ahead of a meeting between the United States, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar in Switzerland on June 21

Jared Kushner spent four hours in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and still failed to get him to support the Trump administration’s peace plan for Gaza.

Kushner met with Netanyahu along with Board of Peace Director Nickolay Mladenov Monday to discuss implementing the 15-point plan, CNN reports. The president’s son-in-law, who doesn’t hold an official position with the Trump administration, asked that Netanyahu “not create obstacles,” an unnamed Israeli source told the network.

Netanyahu refused to commit to anything, telling Kushner and Mladenov that Hamas had to disarm before Israel begins withdrawing any troops from Gaza. The meeting with Netanyahu came one day Kushner met with Hamas representatives in Egypt on Sunday. Hamas said it agrees to Trump’s peace framework, but will only begin disarmament if Israel follows through on a sequenced withdrawal from Gaza at the same time.

Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last three years, including at least 1,260 since a ceasefire was declared last October. But Netanyahu publicly rejected the proposed peace plan earlier this month, calling it “problematic” because of impending Israeli elections in October. The accused war criminal has tied his political fortunes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, using the war as an excuse to evade corruption charges and rally Israeli voters. Any concessions could undermine his chances of staying in power.

ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves Are Billed As “Low Optics” Tool

The gloves are designed to disguise federal agents’ excessive use of force.

Four ICE agents manhandle a protester they’re arresting while another looks on.
ICE agents arrest a protester in Minneapolis.
Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu/Getty Images
ICE agents arrest a protester in Minneapolis.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would spend between $10 million and $20 million to buy gloves that emit painful electric shocks. The devices, called G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are manufactured by Compliant Technologies in Kentucky and advertised as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution.” With these gloves, federal agents’ use of force will become nearly invisible to the eye and harder to prove, Mother Jones reported Monday.

“Low-optics” is the key term there. The new gloves won’t stoke public outrage like traditional weapons and they don’t leave any marks—making them the perfect tool for dodging lawsuits for excessive force.

Speaking in a promotional video for Compliant Technologies published in 2024, Adam Glueck, then-assistant chief of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, explained why his officers had grown so “attached” to the devices.

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said, adding that the glove “looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”

Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department recommended the glove for “anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

Video footage of the gloves in action show just how powerful they can be, causing grown men to crumple to the ground in a matter of seconds.

The gloves are considered less lethal—but federal agents will likely feel more empowered to use them against a wider range of people. The manufacturer warns against using their device on elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people with severe disabilities—individuals who have not been spared from the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants.

Trump’s Tacky Aesthetic Comes for the U.S. Navy

In the middle of a war, the U.S. Navy is spending its time on Trump’s aesthetic preferences.

The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Nimitz
The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in 2019
Cristobal Basaure Araya/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in 2019

In the midst of a flailing war with Iran that has caused U.S. sailors to literally jump ship, gas prices to skyrocket, and President Trump’s approval rating to plummet, the U.S. Navy is now reviewing plans to give its Ford-class aircraft carrier fleet a makeover.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Navy is conducting an internal review on the viability of moving command towers from the starboard side of the aircraft carriers to the middle, in an attempt to mimic the older warships from World War II that Trump likes. The decision was spurred directly by Trump’s aesthetic preferences, with a Navy official telling The Hill that the president requested the Navy “implement design changes to our future aircraft carriers.” The review is due in “several weeks,” another former official said.

Trump has also ordered the Navy to switch from electromagnetic catapult systems to steam-powered ones, another aesthetic decision that would force the military to spend time and taxpayer funds on making its ships look more antiquated, all so that they can keep sitting around in the Persian Gulf while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

“The placement of the island on the Ford class was chosen to support the ship’s design purpose of maximizing aircraft sortie generation—which for an aircraft carrier, directly translates to combat power. A good-faith exploration of future carrier design based on real-world operational requirements is one thing,” Naval maritime strategist Hunter Stires told The Hill. “Expending millions of taxpayer dollars and the time and energy of the Navy’s engineering organizations redesigning the nation’s premier capital ship to indulge the president’s aesthetic whims is not only wasteful and abusive, it exemplifies President Trump’s evident contempt for America’s fighting sailors.”

This news comes as Trump’s upcoming class of 10 new aircraft carriers is estimated to cost $275 billion over the next 30 years.

Hasan Piker Prepares to Sue CNN’s Scott Jennings Over Phony Video

The left-wing streamer is fighting back over a heavily edited video claiming he’s racist.

Hasan Piker on a panel
Hasan Piker
Florencia Tan Jun/Web Summit/Sportsfile/Getty Images
Hasan Piker

Left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker appears to be gearing up to sue conservative commentator Scott Jennings for defamation. 

Jennings, a CNN contributor, went viral last week after posting a heavily edited, intentionally misleading video of what looked like Piker expressing extreme hostility towards Black voters and calling for lynchings. With the full context, it is obvious that Piker was being sarcastic. 

“Black voters have been voting against the socialists, only to be ruled in many cases by privileged white commies,” Jennings claimed, using Black identity as a bludgeon against the Democratic left. “Did you ever notice, by the way, how violent these people are? … Now [Abdul] El-Sayed’s best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched. Beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these Communists.”

As Snopes reported, Jennings lied when he claimed that Piker wanted to bringing back lynchings, as “Piker’s remarks on lynchings were sarcastic reactions to a user’s chat comment and opinions expressed by someone else in a separate video.”

Jennings’s video was widely panned, with many calling for Piker to sue. The streamer called Jennings’s video “the worst instance of defamation” he’d seen. On Sunday, Piker confirmed that his team is preparing a defamation lawsuit, saying it seemed “unavoidable,” and that it might include Fox News.

“This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker told Status. “It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility. I think someone has to push back against it at some point.”

“In Trump 2.0, we now traffic in lies all the time. Just because the Republicans are trafficking in lies with regular frequency doesn’t mean that you can’t uphold some kind of editorial standard,” he continued. “CNN can put whoever they want to on a panel at the end of the day, but it just signals to me, and I think a lot of other people, that some of their panelists are just going to be liars.”

Piker has been a boogeyman for right-wingers like Jennings and centrist liberals for some time, as they choose to focus their slander on him rather than constructing any kind of tangible, positive political message. And Jennings is perhaps the last person anyone should be listening to in regards to Black politics in America.  

Trump Just Made up a New, Crazier National Mall Vandalism Incident

Weeks after his farcical case against an alleged Reflecting Pool vandal blew up, President Trump has shifted his focus to grass—and inadvertently implicated himself.

Dead grass on the National Mall
The grass on the National Mall where the Freedom 250 Salute to America event was held
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The grass on the National Mall where the Freedom 250 Salute to America event was held

Surprise! President Donald Trump is the real National Mall vandal.

The president took to Truth Social Sunday to blame vandals for a large area of dead grass on the National Mall—that happened to be on the same spot where he built a massive stage for his Fourth of July celebrations.

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote. “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”

Last week, Trump sounded the alarm again after the World War II Memorial was covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles. U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro said felony charges are being brought against Melissa L. Farris, but the charging documents made no mention of the patch of dead grass on the lawn.

Regardless of Trump’s apparent outrage, the president has demonstrated that he couldn’t care less about protecting national landmarks—he’s the one destroying them.

The president who cried vandalism has been behind a lot of the destruction at the National Mall. The Department of Justice concluded that Trump and his hand-picked contractors were responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Not to mention that across the country Trump is actively bulldozing Big Bend National Park in order to build his border wall.