Today, on the morning update, Democrats who couldn’t spend enough of your unborn great-grandchildren’s money (already spent everyone else’s) are pretending to care about that now, ‘cuz the Midterms. They’re lying, but it’s hard to help people put all that spending into perspective.
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the embedded video does not load.
Ep 163 Link(s):
- https://blog.joehuffman.org/2026/05/02/worth-at-least-two-carriers/
- https://www.military.com/daily-news/2026/04/23/what-led-navy-secretary-john-phelan-losing-his-job-what-we-know.html
- https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2047642503440933305
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQPCs_J_eN8
00:00 Introduction and Context of Navy Secretary’s Dismissal
02:10 Media’s Role in Military Spending Narratives
03:34 Understanding National Debt and Military Expenditure
Transcript:
Steve MacDonald (00:00)
Welcome to your Monday, May 4th, 2026, morning update.
Navy Secretary John Phelan was out of a job on Wednesday as reporting indicates that President Trump wanted a change citing slow shipbuilding times in the midst of an Iran war and blockaded maritime shipping channel. The media is all aflutter at the possibility of infighting in the administration.
I don’t know what the real reason was why he had Navy Secretary John Phelan fired, but after poking around a little bit, I stumbled across this. Thank you very much, The View from North Central Idaho. It’s from John Konrad. He says,
Just as I predicted yesterday, MSM will falsely claim the Secretary of the Navy was fired because of battleships.
The New York Times is actually worse than I thought. Let me explain. The mainstream media will make us about the ships because the defense experts never want more hulls. They want money flowing into consulting fees, AI solutions, and think tanks, white papers. Steel produces nothing for the beltway class. A flight deck you can launch F-35s off does not generate PowerPoints. But the New York Times is running an even more sinister play.
Throughout the Biden administration and later during DOGE’s audit work, I translated every major spending bill into a unit every American can actually visualize, one nuclear aircraft carrier. Nuclear supercarriers cost $15 billion. Biden’s BAD rural broadband program, which connected zero homes to the internet, 42.5 billion, or roughly three nuclear supercarriers.
Pete Buttigieg’s infrastructure package is 1.1 trillion or 73 nuclear supercarriers. Total Doge savings to date: 215 billion or 14 nuclear supercarriers. Known Somali-linked fraud in Minnesota, per federal prosecutors 18 billion or one carrier plus an Arleigh Burke destroyer.
Why do I keep doing this? Because for the past two decades, the New York Times has run the same story on a loop. The military is the reason for America’s skyrocketing national debt. This is a Psyop. It conditions Americans to believe that steel and sailors, not social programs and grift, are what is bankrupting the country.
Human beings are not wired to understand 15 billion. But every American, left or right, understands the sheer weight and menace of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It is the most visible, most photogenic instrument of state power on earth. So the New York Times runs the obvious play. Paint the carrier is expensive. Pile on delays and cost overruns. Quote an anonymous Pentagon source worrying about bloat that anchors the defense budgets to discretionary spending, a small slice of the real pie, and expresses it as a percentage of that smaller number.
The Pentagon instantly looks like the whale in the room. But Medicare alone, roughly $1 trillion in 2025, already eclipses the entire defense budget. Add Medicaid and ACA subsidies and federal health spending hits $1.8 trillion, more than double defense.
None of those programs is labeled discretionary by the New York Times accounting; they don’t count.
This is a magic act. The New York Times holds a shiny capital ship up in one hand to keep your eyes off the social programs bankrupting the country in the other. Once you see the trick, you cannot unsee it. Every time the New York Times runs a carrier or battleship expose, ask one question: What is on the page they did not write? Nine times out of 10, the answer is sitting just outside the discretionary column quietly metastasizing while a Ford class carrier gets blamed for the deficit.
America is not going broke building warships. Warships are a one-time expense that lasts decades and are a tiny fraction of the total annual budget. America is going broke pretending the ledgers that matter do not exist while a national newspaper gets paid to keep the audience looking the other way. That’s why they hate battleships. That’s why they tell you they are ridiculous and antiquated warships that are a waste of money.
To make you think this is the reason why the nation is $39 trillion in debt. And the best part? Their PsyOp works on both sides of the aisle. On liberals who hate the military and conservatives who hate federal spending. Battleships are not a waste of money.
All the many fraudulent programs that cost more annually than a single carrier are.
Perspective. We needed a little proper perspective, and now you have it.
One nuclear supercarrier. That’s a pretty good way to measure things. You might be able to come up with a better example, but it works for now.
That’s it for today. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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