The News You Need on Thursday, June 11, 2026.
Trump mulls nuclear option for Iran, Elon Musk floats $1.79 trillion IPO for SpaceX AI projects and stirs up racist riots in Belfast. And why does AI need regulating internationally?
Trump Mulls the Nuclear Option for Iran
Seymour Hersh
Charles: Yesterday afternoon The New York Times reported a new wave of air strikes on Iran after Donald Trump complained that Iranian leaders were “taking too long” to negotiate.
But veteran investigator Seymour Hersh reported that, to the dismay of others in the White House, Trump was once again raising the idea of using a nuclear weapon. He wrote:
It was amid what could be called a “what to do” meeting that a frustrated and angry Trump, perhaps only thinking out loud, raised the issue of using low-yield nuclear weapons to destroy “some” of Iran’s underground missile factories. I was told by someone with extensive knowledge of nuclear weaponry that it was “a very scary and very serious moment.” The president was depicted at this point to be “desperate not to lose in Iran.” His idea was to warn the Iranian leadership that “we are very seriously” considering such an escalation. I was told that the president apparently “was talked out of” any thought of nuclear escalation.
Two Federal Judges Condemn the Pentagon’s Anti-Trans Policy
The Guardian
Charles: Nothing about Project 2025 is more vile than its approach to trans people. As I wrote back in the fall of 2024, “The most extreme language in Project 2025 is aimed at transgender people. The ‘propagation of transgender ideology’ is called ‘pornography,’ and that is an essential reason why pornography ‘should be outlawed.’.. Telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
At the time, Wendy Via, president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, explained that while pornography and trans issues may seem unrelated, the connection made by the authors of Project 2025 was intentional because they see the deviance associated with pornography as akin to identifying as LGBTQ. “Their message is that pornography is obscene,” Via said. “Being transgender is obscene. Teaching our kids about affirming their identities or orientations is obscene.”
At the same time, in the fall of 2024, the Trump campaign and its allies spent an astonishing $250 million on television ads demonizing trans people.
In his first term as president, Donald Trump tried to expel all trans people from the military, but after extensive litigation, the Pentagon allowed those currently serving to stay and continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. It barred new enlistments of anyone with gender dysphoria who was taking hormones or had transitioned gender.
Joe Biden removed the ban on trans troops in 2021. And then as soon as Pete Hegseth became secretary of defense, he tried once again to expel all trans people from the military.
28 active trans service members sued the government to overturn the ban and US District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, concluded that Trump’s executive order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violated their constitutional rights.
This month, two of the three judges on a federal appeals panel ruled that there was no legal basis for the Pentagon’s policy excluding trans people. Judge Robert Wilkins wrote that Trump and Hegseth had declared that persons afflicted with gender dysphoria are unfit for military service because “the character of such persons “inconsistent” with the “high standards . . . [of]honesty, humility, . . . and integrity.”
But he found that the government has presented no evidence whatsoever to support its proposed ban:
The government has not attempted to defend or provide any factual basis for these disparaging characterizations of American citizens. Indeed, the government has not contested that the Plaintiff-Appellees who are currently serving (and who have collectively earned more than 80 commendations) have served honorably and pose no threat to national security, even though they happen to be transgender and have suffered from gender dysphoria.
Instead, the government contends that this case is solely about whether, pursuant to the Hegseth Policy, the military can disqualify persons from military service because they have gender dysphoria, a mental health condition. But the record shows that the purpose of the Hegseth Policy is to target applicants and servicemembers who express what the Administration believes is a “false gender identity,” and the Policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria. Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification. The sharp contrast to the Mattis Policy, adopted in the first Trump Administration, which allowed servicemembers who were transgender or who had suffered from gender dysphoria to remain in the military, appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: Persons who identify as transgender…
As a result, and for separate reasons, Judge Rogers and I vote to affirm the District Court’s preliminary injunction enjoining the Hegseth Policy as it relates to those Plaintiff-Appellees already in the military, while Judge Walker and I vote to vacate the preliminary injunction as it relates to the
The Pentagon made no official statement about the judges’ decision, but Hegseth wrote on social media “See you at SCOTUS,” indicating the decision would be appealed.
Mastering the Art of the Space Grift
MarketWatch
Scott: Elon Musk goes boldly where no prior market scam artist went before. And indeed, his SpaceX IPO, with its $1.79 trillion notional market valuation is a work of art—from the perspective of grifting, in any event.
Brett Arenda deconstructs the offering, identifying the key factual assumptions on which it is based, while Financial Times puzzles over all the Middle Eastern sovereign interests scurrying about to acquire stakes in it.
Right now, SpaceX as a business is simply a mobile network, Starlink, that uses satellites. The Starlink division generates 70% of all revenues and far more than 100% of all net income, given that the rest of the company loses money. Starlink currently has 10.3 million customers and generated $3.3 billion in revenue in the first quarter. For comparison, the three main US terrestrial mobile networks, Verizon , T Mobile and AT&T, had in total 40 times as many customers and 30 times as much revenue. Meanwhile their aggregate market values add up to less than one-third of the SpaceX IPO valuation…
How do you ask $1.8 trillion for a mobile operator with 10 million customers? By promising trillions in future profits from other, completely unproven, businesses. In the case of SpaceX, the big promise relates to artificial intelligence…
Many of these “initiatives” or dreams, the company admits, “involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies, or technologies that do not exist or may require significant advancement, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability.” In other words, the company plans to target markets that may not even exist using technologies it does not have.
Perhaps Musk will flee to Argentina, like his long-time partner Peter Thiel. But for the moment, at least, he firmly believes that he controls the US government and has nothing to fear.
Moreover, he’s busy working to add other captured governments to his portfolio.
The Tech Bros Guide to Riot and Mayhem In Belfast
The Independent
Scott: “A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel.” So wrote Charles Dickens in 1841, in his study of the Gordon riots of 1780.
The Gordon riots didn’t spring out of nothingness, of course, they were provoked by Lord Gordon, as pogroms targeting British Catholics. In Britain today, the tech bros face a dilemma in the form of a government crackdown on the dissemination of AI-generated pornography (the signature social media contribution of Elon Musk) to children.
How to respond?
Taking the ban on child pornography head on is unlikely to be successful. So other measures will be used. Elon has an idea.
Use the stabbing of an 18-year-old Hampshire man and a similar incident in Belfast to incite riot and mayhem targeting the “other.”
After all, it’s a proven approach to taking down governments at least since 1780. To this end, Musk is busily mobilizing his assets (with a help from long-time business partner Peter Thiel), including J.D. Vance, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage.
His social media platform provides the launching platform for the whole venture.
Billionaire X owner Elon Musk, who continued overnight to promote calls for people to take to the streets in response to Monday’s knife attack, has hit back at accusations he is inflaming tensions, and instead blamed immigration policy.
At Prime Minister’s Questions, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey spoke of “extremists who exploit that grief and anger to spread hatred and violence, aided and abetted by social media barons like Elon Musk and their divisive algorithms.”
Musk shared lists on X of locations where protests could take place and retweeted Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe’s post saying “Millions must go.”
But he supported a post by GB News presenter Matt Goodwin saying it was not social media or him inflaming tensions in the UK, but “the very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration and open borders.”
Sir Keir Starmer said: “We will crack down on anyone who is fuelling this division.”
Asked what he would do, No 10 referred back to actions the PM had taken over the last year on social media and said he “won’t hesitate to do that again.”
The Horton-Kaiser Report Is Independent, Different From Other US Media.
Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.
To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.
Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’
We both thought it was a terrible thing.
Listen to Scott speaking to NPR’s On The Media in 2009 about torture.
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