Among our “climate leader” jurisdictions, Britain is a serious contender for the top spot. Sure Germany got started earlier than Britain, with the so-called “Energiewende” going back to the 1990s; and upstart American states like California and New York each think that their own hair shirt energy restrictions should qualify them for the number one position.

But Britain’s suite of policies in the aggregate is hard to top: mandatory Net Zero goals set by statute; madcap buildout of wind and solar electricity generation; shuttering of generation from coal and natural gas; refusal to permit drilling in the North Sea; complete ban on fracking. The Energy Minister of the current Labour government — Ed Milliband — is as crazed a climate zealot as you can find anywhere. The British have even dynamited coal-fired power stations to be sure that nobody could ever change their minds about this Net Zero thing and try to re-start the plants.

Here from a post I did back in 2022, is a picture of the former Longannet coal plant in Fife, Scotland, getting dynamited to smithereens in 2021.

The last coal-fired electricity generation station in the UK closed in 2024. Today, the UK claims to get about 45-47% of its electricity from “renewables,” although that includes about 5-7% “biomass,” plus a small amount of hydro. The wind/solar contribution is around 35-40%. Milliband thinks he can further increase that percentage by just building more and more wind turbines and solar farms.

But unfortunately for the British, their wind and solar generation facilities seem to be subject to all going quiet at the same time, often inconveniently at the very hottest or coldest times of the year. Building more and yet more of them does not solve the problem. Some call this Britain’s “looming firm generation capacity crisis.”

So what’s the answer? How about doing the unthinkable — bring back coal!

On June 9, Andrew Montford, Director of Net Zero Watch, addressed this issue with his new Report “Thinking the Unthinkable: Coal Power and National Security.” (Full disclosure: I serve on the Board of the American affiliate of Net Zero Watch.). Here is the basic assumption underlying Andrew’s paper:

[T]he deteriorating state of the UK economy – unsustainably high electricity prices, low growth, deindustrialisation and a declining tax base – means that Net Zero and, along with it, carbon pricing, will be abandoned, no matter which party is in power.

I think that is clearly right. Reality has caught up with them. It is only a question of time until they are forced to abandon the Net Zero fantasy.

Andrew’s Report also focuses on the national security implications of unreliable electricity, with its inherent need for insecure backup from imports:

[I]mports and offshore production are both vulnerable to the actions of hostile powers, as the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline in 2022 made clear. In this regard, the UK is horribly exposed. Nearly half of our gas supply comes from Norway. Sabotage of the Langeled pipeline, which alone brings around 20%, would be catastrophic for the UK, and would quickly lead to a civil emergency.

Is it even possible to raise the subject of coal power generation today in the UK, where that fuel has been subject to a decades-long campaign of vilification? Montford:

While such a step [i.e., reviving coal generation] was unthinkable just 12 months ago, the political landscape is moving quickly. Polling by More in Common has found that that ever-rising energy bills are causing political volatility and fragmentation. Italy and Germany have both recently announced the extension of the lives of their coal-fired power stations. As a result, new voices are being listened to. As a hint of just how far the Overton window has already moved, the Reform party’s manifesto for the Scottish elections featured a pledge to allow coal mining once again. It clear that the looming geopolitical threats to the country now mean that the time is ripe to reconsider the consensus against coal that has taken hold in the last two decades.

So all that is needed is a sufficiently imminent crisis to force the issue of coal generation back into the public conversation. The two short weeks since issuance of Andrew’s Report have brought to Britain some indicators of the dire corner it has backed itself into. Readers here probably know about the recent record-setting heat wave that has covered much of Europe, including Britain. Paul Homewood, of the Not a Lot of People Know That website, has a post on June 25, titled “No Wind? No Sun? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” Homewood’s post includes extensive excerpts from a piece in the Telegraph from June 24 (behind paywall). The gist is that on June 23 the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) had issued an emergency power supply warning, which was then withdrawn after NESO secured emergency supplies from the continent. However, obtaining the emergency imported supplies required getting a special waiver of EU export restrictions. From the Telegraph piece:

The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the grid, issued a rare emergency power supply warning on Tuesday after soaring temperatures triggered a slump in solar energy, with panels struggling to work in the hot conditions. It was subsequently withdrawn after Neso secured emergency supplies from the Continent on Wednesday. Kathryn Porter, an industry consultant, said Neso had “begged the EU” to lift import trading limits which would have capped the amount of energy Britain could import. Ms Porter said the sudden easing of restrictions had allowed the UK to obtain 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of imports versus a 1.5 GW limit introduced in May, helping Britain avoid power shortages.

OK, crisis averted, for now. But Homewood reports on a few other aspects of this solution to Britain’s crunch. First, they had to buy the power from the Netherlands on a day-ahead market that was already at a high level due to the heat wave and lack of dispatchable capacity. Homewood links a Tweet from a firm called Montel Analytics as to the price: “[T]hey are paying up to €1600 per MWh for it.” €1600/MWh is equivalent to more than $2000/MWh, or more than $2.00/kWh. That will translate to a retail price of around $2.50/kWh, compared to average U.S. retail electricity prices of under $0.20/kWh.

Oh, and almost all of the imported power was generated from either natural gas or coal.

In other words, the only effect of the wind/solar generation obsession has been to drive up the cost of electricity to consumers and businesses to ridiculous levels. And, next time around, when the next wind/sun drought comes along on a hot evening, the imported power may not be available at all, and widespread blackouts could follow.

Thank you, Andrew, for getting the subject of coal-fired electricity generation back into the conversation. It’s only a question of time before this will happen.

---

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

The twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela this week were not merely acts of nature—they laid bare decades of deliberate neglect and ideological folly. A magnitude 7.2 quake followed seconds later by a 7.5 temblor devastated the northern coast near Caracas, particularly La Guaira state, collapsing buildings and claiming at least 1,430 lives as of the latest reports, with tens of thousands still missing.

Rescue workers sifting through the rubble made a grim discovery: entire apartment complexes, many erected under Hugo Chávez’s “Grand Housing Mission,” were little more than facades held together by Styrofoam and thin concrete shells.

Video from the scene shows rescuers pulling apart walls with their bare hands, the interior material crumbling like packing foam. “No wonder everything crumbled like cardboard,” one rescuer remarked, as colleagues openly criticized the regime’s failures.

VIDEOS AT LINK…………..

👀😳The images coming out of Venezuela are raising serious questions.😳👀

Collapsed buildings appear to reveal large amounts of EPS (Styrofoam) inside structural elements. EPS can be safely used in construction—but only when properly engineered with reinforced concrete and… pic.twitter.com/AT5JvKr5iU— 🇺🇸 𝓐𝓟𝓡𝓘𝓛 𝓢𝓟𝓐𝓡𝓚𝓢 🇺🇸 (@AprilSpark1890) June 28, 2026

This catastrophe was foreseeable. Engineers and even some within the Chávez government had long warned that rushed socialist housing projects ignored seismic codes and basic engineering standards. Construction accelerated under Nicolás Maduro to meet political quotas, prioritizing propaganda over safety. The result? Pancaked high-rises and neighborhoods reduced to dust, burying families who trusted the state to provide.

Venezuela’s tragedy stands as a stark warning against centralized power that promises utopia while delivering death. The “Bolivarian Revolution” gutted the private sector, invited corruption, and left the nation ill-equipped for even routine governance, let alone disaster response.

Years of mismanagement, compounded by the regime’s isolation, meant scant heavy equipment and bureaucratic hurdles for aid workers. Interim leadership under Delcy Rodríguez declared disaster zones and restricted access, even as the 72-hour golden window for rescues closed.

The Human Cost of Ideological Hubris

Entire blocks in La Guaira vanished. A four-building complex saw three structures leveled, destroying hundreds of apartments. Survivors and volunteers clawed through debris for days before international teams arrived. Foreign rescuers, including from the United States, now labor alongside locals amid aftershocks, but the scale overwhelms. Over 3,000 injured and thousands in shelters paint a picture of a nation on its knees.

Non-government groups tracked nearly 50,000 unaccounted for, a figure that underscores the regime’s opacity. US Geological Survey models suggest the toll could climb far higher, potentially ranking among Latin America’s worst in a century. Yet the deeper failure lies not in the earth’s movement, but in leaders who built on sand—literally and figuratively.

Socialism’s track record in Venezuela offers no surprises. What began as grand promises of housing for the masses devolved into shoddy structures that could not withstand the shaking ground. Private construction withered under state control, leaving citizens vulnerable. This is the predictable fruit of a system that values loyalty over competence and central planning over reality.

Lessons in Stewardship and Truth As the world watches, the contrast with nations that value property rights, accountability, and sound governance could not be clearer. Free societies build with durability because they answer to the people, not party dictates. Venezuela’s rulers, by contrast, rushed projects for optics, ignoring warnings from their own experts.

In the rubble lies a call to discernment. Scripture reminds us of the peril of building without foundation: “And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:26-27).

Venezuela’s leaders built upon the shifting sands of ideology, and the fall has been catastrophic.

American aid and global response offer immediate relief, but the long-term path forward requires Venezuelans to reject the lies that brought them here. True security flows from honest governance, respect for human life, and structures—both physical and moral—that endure. The Styrofoam walls stand as a monument to failure, a warning for any society tempted by similar delusions.

May the victims rest, the survivors find strength, and the world learn before the next preventable disaster strikes.

The remaining Old Guard Democrats should understand that the forces that they have paired with not only seek our destruction, but theirs too.

Bill Ponton | June 29, 202

Other than self-loathsome, what would you call Chuck Schumer who coddles Ilhan Omar and courts Zohran Mamdami while both call for the eradication of Israel? The contempt that the youth wing of the Democrat party and the whole of the DSA show for Israel is no longer hidden. It is out in the open—huge and hideous. Yet Schumer and others in his party think that they can ignore, or even co-opt the beast. Of all the Democrats, only Fetterman is willing to state the obvious, that feeding the crocodile has not made it go away. In fact, appeasement has emboldened it.

A good example of that is what happened to Congressman Dan Goldman recently. I am not referring to him losing his congressional primary election to DSA commie, Brad Lander. I am referring to Goldman being savaged by Parviz Mukhamadkulov, the owner of the Poetica coffee shops in Brooklyn, after he stopped into Poetica so his 7-yr-old daughter could use the bathroom. In a tweet subsequently removed, Parviz wrote, “[W]e don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers. or anyone in between.. Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

The Poetica website proudly speaks of the Uzbek tradition of its founder that carries obligations. The website states, “When a guest arrives, the entire neighborhood organizes. Tea and bread before questions. A seat before an invitation. The guest is sacred because the act of welcoming is how a community keeps itself intact.” Apparently that Uzbek tradition of showing hospitality toward a guest is trumped by a more deeply rooted Muslim tradition of hating the Jew.

But like Schumer, Goldman is not challenging the rising tide of antisemitism that has infected his party, New York, and the rest of the Western world. It is being left to others like Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, who said that her office was investigating the incident. “Federal law prohibits public accommodations such as coffee shops from discriminating against patrons based on their race, religion, or national origin. These actions are not only reprehensible, but they’re also potentially illegal,” Dhillon wrote.

Standing up for Western civilization means supporting Israel against the anti-civilizational forces arrayed against it. Schumer and the remaining Old Guard Democrats should understand that the forces that they have paired with seek their destruction too.

Everyday life has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take.

Two dangerous trends are coalescing in Germany: the deterioration of private life and the tyrannization of politics. The latter comes to light in the persecution of any political opinion marginally different from that of the government.

Private life deteriorates under pressure from a stagnant economy with its withering welfare state. Unending tax hikes are coupled with the erosion and increasing unreliability of social benefits.

There is another aspect of the regress of private life in Germany. In a rare tour behind the official German media façade, journalist Liv von Boetticher tells of a police force in deep moral decline, of runaway crime, and of law enforcement institutions more concerned with suppressing political viewpoints than stopping crime.

The report by von Boetticher, low-key as it is, offers a frightening example of the forces behind European societal disintegration. Originally published in Die Welt on June 19th (where it appears to be inaccessible from the U.S.), this story is comprehensively covered by U.S. news site Breitbart:

The journalist said she was prompted to come forwards [sic] with what she’d learnt after noticing … officers told a very different and unvarnished account of Germany after official interviews had finished and the cameras stopped rolling.

Let us stop and think about this for a moment. Germany is now a society where police officers feel a need to put watertight walls between what they say in public and what they really think and believe. In a free, open society, with a thriving democracy where people live in peace and harmony, police officers do not feel the need to dichotomize between their official and unofficial views on work and life in general.

If a police officer in a democracy is dissatisfied with something, he knows he can go to his superiors and—without fear of retribution—express his opinions. He also knows that if he ever felt a need to discuss the state of his profession in public, he could do so, and his opinions would be met with respect and responsibility.

This is no longer the case in Germany. Liv von Boetticher uncovers a frightening suppression of opinion within the police force—and a precariously tone-deafGerman government. The most loyal state servants, the ones who are saddled with the duty to uphold law and order, have had their professional and personal lives so curtailed that they can no longer point to the grim, even sickening reality in which these police officers work.

Back to Breitbart:

Having given the official line their jobs may depend on to be taped, afterward they related what [von Boetticher] called “stories of fear and anger, violence, loss of control, and failed migration policies, and the feeling among law enforcement officers of often being abandoned by politics and society.

In what she describes as a “pretty much unanimous opinion” among police officers in every state in Germany, the nation’s thin line of law enforcement believes that Germany “is disappearing,” that the government has created “open season” for serious criminals to go about their business, and that—according to many of them—Germany as a country is “lost” or “finished.”

Ihave no reason to doubt their account of how crime runs rampant in Germany. It is a clockwork-reliable consequence of a society where politics is dominated by Marxist conflict theory; since police officers are deemed by said theory to represent power, law enforcement needs to be suppressed for the ‘liberation’ of the ‘oppressed’—the criminals.

To that point, is not this dissatisfaction with high crime just the usual complaints from politically right-wing police officers?

It is not. As von Boetticher explains, these are the views of police officers who have survived “a decade-long effort” by the German government to eliminate national conservatives and patriots from the ranks of law enforcement. Suppression of speech and of privately held political views includes an open ban on anyone sympathetic to conservative-nationalist AfD from being a police officer.

In other words, with AfD trending to become the biggest party in Germany, the men and women who have survived the political purge within the ranks of police are politically more leftist than Germany’s voters are. Despite this, they hold opinions that—if even hinted at officially—would cost them their jobs and possibly a lot more.

It takes a lot for people with leftist political views to concede that they were wrong. Therefore, when these viewpoints seep out of Germany’s politically sanitized police force, the deterioration of society has already gone beyond the point where normal police work would be effective—even without its politically correct restrictions.

What we have here, plain and simple, is a country where the government is nullifying its own law-and-order system. It is a country where freedom of speech is increasingly curtailed and where the practice of Berufsverbot—a ban from the workforce—from last century’s anti-terrorist campaigns has been revived.

This is the same country where Nazis and communists aggressively oppressed anyone with a dissenting view.

To put it bluntly, German history is fertile soil for seeds of totalitarianism to set roots and grow—and to do so with the blessing of those who claim to be fighting that very same totalitarian ideology.

All this political suppression is taking place over the heads of a population whose ability to feed themselves is being continuously eroded by Germany’s stagnant economy. The ongoing deindustrialization of the country gradually robs growing segments of the working class of well-paying jobs.

At the same time, unchecked criminal activity creeps increasingly closer to the coveted privacy of a family’s home and everyday life.

The compounding effects of persistently deteriorating economic conditions and increasingly invasive crime call for an outlet, a reaction, a strong and stern expression of public opinion. It calls for fundamental change to a political system that is failing its own people—one that would permit the very opinions that are banned, persecuted, and criminalized by the German government.

In short, everyday life in Germany has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take. So far, the nation’s political elite has shown absolutely no interest in relenting: if anything, increasingly hardline political persecution will continue to lead Germany into the dark realm of tyranny.

What we can expect, in other words, is for the German government to ignore the formation of a perfect storm of societal decline. Instead of recognizing the real threats to Germany’s future, the government in Berlin will continue to fight the symptoms of that decline: growing support for AfD, declining morale in police, and perennial budget deficits.

The German elite’s methods of suppression will become harsher and more unforgiving. A government that transitions from democracy and freedom to totalitarianism and suppression of dissent will sooner or later, with eerie predictability, try to dictate the nation’s economy in the same way it dictates politics and public opinion.

At that point, Germany’s political decline will escalate to an economic implosion. At this point, even governments around Europe who are sympathetic to the German persecution of free speech will suffer the consequences of such policies.

European Conservative

Like clockwork, it gets hot in summer in western Europe. And like clockwork, the morons in the European ministries blame climate change for their own failure to face reality and make proper provisions for adapting to it. 

Clarice Feldman | June 28, 2026

We all know the myth – to boil frogs, slowly increase the temperature so they won’t realize it until it’s too late to jump out of the pot and save themselves. This summer, it appears the frogs are starting to feel the heat. Along with the anger at open borders, this may finally presage the end of the green nonsense and the politicians who are destroying their countries by promoting this hogswallop.

Like clockwork, it gets hot in Western Europe during the summer. And like clockwork, the morons in the European ministries and media blame climate change for their own failure to face reality and make proper provisions for adapting to it. Living in the UK, Germany, and France seems to be like living in a giant HOA run by scientific idiots who exempt themselves from the draconian measures they apply to others as they set about recreating pre-industrial feudal states.

The reports from there stand in sharp contrast to the experience of FIFA visitors, who saw air conditioning everywhere in the U.S., even in Houston’s very large stadium, so the FIFA visitors’ American experiences might be even more damaging to the governments involved.

France

Monique Barbut, Minister for Ecological Transition (yes, there is such a thing there), works in an air-conditioned office. She holds stock in a number of large energy-consuming companies like Airbus. She swatted away questions relating to her failure to ensure air conditioning where it’s most needed with this non-sequitur deflection:

I’m horrified by the people who tell me that all we need to do is put air conditioning everywhere (…) Do you think that’s going to prevent forest fires, the death of animals? That’s not adaptation, it’s an emergency measure.”

French electricity is largely nuclear-generated, so greens are deprived of the economy-killing excuse offered by the UK and German functionaries that they must reduce carbon emissions. (As if air conditioning offered much, if any, increase in carbon emissions. It is far less significant — even if you believed it affected the weather to any meaningful degree — than the output in China. China, by contrast, air conditions most of its urban facilities and its public transportation, and even water mists outside large buildings to cool the ambient air.)

In 2003, thousands died in Paris due to a lack of air conditioning. And because of the nature of most living quarters sans air conditioning, numerous premature deaths occur every time the temperature rises in the summer.

Without widespread air conditioning, perishable food will spoil in grocery stores, computers will not work, and public transport will be unendurably hot. Kids are fainting in schools. In one city in southern France, parents got together to pay for some air conditioners. The communist mayor ordered them ripped out because not every school in the city had them. Égalité

Public transport in France generally lacks air conditioning, and the TGV (fast train) from Paris to Nice broke down in a tunnel, resulting in a five-hour delay. Babies fainted in the 122-degree heat aboard the train. The level of bureaucratic idiocy that results in so much death and economic disruption is impossible to

Public transport in France generally lacks air conditioning, and the TGV (fast train) from Paris to Nice broke down in a tunnel, resulting in a five-hour delay. Babies fainted in the 122-degree heat aboard the train. The level of bureaucratic idiocy that results in so much death and economic disruption is impossible to

Public transport in France generally lacks air conditioning, and the TGV (fast train) from Paris to Nice broke down in a tunnel, resulting in a five-hour delay. Babies fainted in the 122-degree heat aboard the train. The level of bureaucratic idiocy that results in so much death and economic disruption is impossible to ignore.

The UK

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In the UK, homeowners are being forced to tear out air conditioners in their own homes.

Council planning officers ordered residents to remove air-con units over fears they produce too much carbon dioxide, stating they should only be used as a “last resort”.

The net zero clampdown is part of building regulations that state “active cooling” should only ever be allowed when all other means of “passive cooling”, such as opening windows or using fans, have been exhausted.[snip] Meanwhile, temperatures are forecast to reach as high as 40C this week, with Britain sweltering under a record heatwave that has forced schools to close, brought trains to a halt and led to the Met Office issuing a red “risk-to-life” warning.

Apparently, the busybody council meddlers require people to justify their need for active cooling. “Air-con engineers told The Telegraph that they had been called out to remove perfectly operational units worth thousands of pounds across London.”

Now, what makes all this even crazier is that all new housing in the UK is required to have heat pumps. As far as I can tell, heat pumps and air conditioners are technically the same — they use the same compression cycle — the heat pump extracts heat from outside and brings it inside, while the air conditioner brings the heat from inside to the outside.

The nitwit energy policies of the UK., including shutting down their North Sea oil production and mandating irregular and insufficient energy sources, meant the country was forced to pay about 17 times normal prices to obtain emergency energy supplies.

Rupert Lowe, who heads the Restore movement in the UK, speaks for me:

With such a debate raging about whether residential air con is a ‘climate responsible’ purchase or not, I want to outline the official Restore Britain position. WE DO NOT CARE.

Germany

For ideological reasons, Germany (and Belgium) stupidly destroyed their nuclear power plants, which it is claimed could have powered air conditioners at full blast all summer with fewer CO2 emissions. Even facilities where common sense demands air conditioning — like hospitals — are deprived of them because placing them in new buildings would create envy in owners of older buildings where there are none.

The most shocking story of this green “crab pot” philosophy is the relatively new hospital in Düsseldorf, which provides care for the most vulnerable heart attack victims who are suffering and probably perishing in this heated, closed atmosphere after builders were denied the right to install cooling systems.

To every criticism for mandating stupid policies, Germany has chosen to flat-out lie to its citizens.

German government to its citizens: portable A/C is “not effective” because the pressure drop sucks hot air into the room, “which heats the room even more”. 🤯 “Here we see the midwit condescension of the European managerial elite in its purest form. First of all, this is all disingenuous. The environment ministry knows full-well that air-conditioners work, they just don’t want people using them because it would strain the German electricity infrastructure — which the environment ministry itself has done a good deal to weaken. Also, if portable AC units don’t work, why have Germans bought 75% more of these machines in the last five years? Why are there literally millions of reviews on Amazon and elsewhere saying “This thing works great! Finally I can sleep through the night!” Why has pretty much nobody ever returned an AC unit, saying “It just made the room hotter!” How stupid do these bureaucrats think Germans are?”

In nearby Austria, the Viennese are replaying the 1940s as informers against those deemed enemies of the state. This time, the “enemies” are those who installed air conditioners.

In the back of many minds is the thought that the leaders of these European states understand full well that the most vulnerable — the elderly poor — are most likely to die from these policies, and that will free up social welfare funds for the hordes of third-world criminals and layabouts they prefer as constituents.

The European Union

Perhaps my favorite example of the feudal structure underlying European energy policies is this from Politico:

The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.

Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.

It reminds me of the many laws in feudal Europe that limited the peasants to poor housing, harsh labor, inadequate low-protein nutrition, ragged clothing, and made it illegal for them to escape.

Some Brits predict it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. military airdrops air conditioners over there

Hezbollah supporters rioted in Beirut over the weekend following the signing of an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on Friday that aims to secure an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory and the disarmament of the Iran-backed terrorist group, according to Lebanese media reports and footage of the unrest.

What began as motorcycles driving through Beirut with Hezbollah and Iranian flags eventually turned into tire burnings, blocking off main roads, including those leading to Beirut’s airport, and the burning of signs calling on the prioritization of Lebanese sovereignty.

Posters leading to the airport, which previously read “Thank you Iran” but were changed to “Lebanon first” last week, were set alight.

While the agreement has been celebrated by several regional powers, including Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, Hezbollah has firmly rejected the deal as “null.”

Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said on Saturday that the US-brokered agreement was a humiliating concession that undermined Lebanese sovereignty.

“We did not leave the battlefield in the most difficult circumstances, and we will not leave it,” he said, asserting that the terrorist group would not abide by the agreement and continue its attacks in violation of Lebanon’s domestic laws.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the agreement allows Israeli forces to remain in southern Lebanon if Hezbollah fails to disarm, in line with a Lebanese law enacted in March prohibiting non-state actors from bearing arms.

Fadlallah: Agreement unenforceable without ‘civil war’

The issue of Lebanese sovereignty has become increasingly contentious in recent months after Hezbollah renewed hostilities with Israel following the killing of Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a decision that drew criticism from Lebanon’s political leadership.

Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah said Lebanese authorities would not be able to enforce the agreement unless “they go to civil war,” repeating similar threats made by Qassem in May.

Lt.-Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center, previously told The Jerusalem Post that despite significant gains by Israel, the group and its supporters still have the power to destabilize Lebanon

Hezbollah would confront any measure taken by Lebanese authorities and would hold on to its weapons even more, adding that the group’s opposition was “serious” and would not allow authorities to implement their commitments on the ground, Fadlallah said, according to Hezbollah-affiliated media site Al Mayadeen.

The issue of Lebanese sovereignty

The attacks from Hezbollah led to a renewed Israeli presence in Lebanon, forcing the displacement of around 20% of the country’s population, according to UN figures.

Iran’s attempts to include Lebanon in its Memorandum of Understanding with the United States were also broadly painted as further Iranian interference in Lebanese affairs.

Jerusalem Post

For years, Democrats have told America they are the ones defending democracy, norms, and institutions.

Then the Supreme Court hands President Trump a few major wins, and suddenly they want to change the size of the Court.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal went on Newsmax and said Democrats are “absolutely” talking about expanding the Supreme Court.

That is the tell.

The timing is impossible to miss.

The Court just handed President Trump key immigration victories, and the response from the left is already shifting from legal argument to institutional redesign.

When you cannot win the ruling, change the scoreboard.

Breitbart reported the Newsmax exchange and laid out the political context around Jayapal’s admission, including the timing after the Court’s immigration rulings.

The report centered on her answer after those decisions, when she said Democrats are “absolutely” discussing expansion of the Court as part of their response to the conservative majority.

That matters because court expansion is far more than a routine policy tweak. It would change the number of justices on the nation’s highest court because the current Court keeps handing down decisions the left hates.

The old pitch was judicial reform. The current political reality looks much more like adding seats until immigration, executive-power, and constitutional rulings come out differently for Democratic priorities.

Jayapal did not stop with the television hit.

She put the demand in writing on her own official X account.

Expand the court. Enact term limits. Implement serious ethics and transparency standards. That’s what we need to do to reform this right-wing Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/4p8oQkT1CL

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 25, 2026

Expand the Court.

Term limits.

New ethics and transparency standards.

That is the package she is selling after the Court refused to give the left the immigration outcomes it wanted.

In Jayapal’s official statement, she tied her criticism to two Supreme Court cases: Mullin v. Doe and Mullin v. Al Otro Lado.

Her statement accused the Court of limiting legal immigration, narrowing judicial review, and helping advance President Trump’s immigration agenda through emergency rulings affecting protected-status and parole policies across multiple immigrant communities nationwide.

That is Jayapal’s framing, and readers should know it accurately before judging the politics around it. She sees the Court’s immigration rulings as a direct threat to the policies she supports.

That is exactly why the expansion talk is so revealing. The objection now reaches the Court’s current composition and its willingness to rule against the left’s priorities in immigration fights.

And Jayapal is not the only Democrat moving in that direction.

Breitbart separately reported that Rep. Seth Moulton also said Democrats should talk about court packing after the Haitian TPS ruling.

Moulton’s comments came in the same post-ruling atmosphere, with Democrats furious over immigration decisions and searching for a way to answer a conservative-majority Court during a volatile term full of legal immigration flashpoints.

He connected the debate to Haitian protected-status recipients and argued Democrats should discuss expansion, term limits, ethics reform, and ways to push back against MAGA Republicans after the ruling.

That is the piece voters should notice. The public message is reform, while the practical effect would be adding new seats when the existing Court will not deliver the left’s preferred immigration rulings.

House Republicans have already warned exactly where this goes.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Court Packing: A Threat to the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy” before this latest round of Democratic comments.

The hearing framed Court expansion as a threat to judicial independence, separation of powers, and public trust in the Supreme Court after years of progressive pressure campaigns against conservative justices and unpopular constitutional rulings.

That institutional warning is the heart of the fight, because the size of the Court becomes a partisan weapon once it is treated as negotiable after bad rulings.

If one party can resize the Court whenever it loses enough cases, the Court becomes a political prize instead of a constitutional check on Congress and the White House.

President Trump won at the Supreme Court under the rules everyone has been living under.

Now Democrats are openly discussing whether those rules need to be changed.

That is a campaign to capture one.

Read the full Supreme Court ruling here: Mullin v. Doe. The related official ruling in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado is here too.

Sophie Hardach

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From Roman freedom to Viking happiness, the iconic words in the Declaration of Independence reveal thousands of years of humans wrestling with how to live well together – and the power of language to put those ideas into action.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

When Thomas Jefferson drafted these words in the Declaration of Independence, two things were on his mind. One: he needed to find “terms so plain and firm as to command their assent” by the colonies, as he later explained, and justify independence from Great Britain. Two: beyond the practical purpose, he wanted the text to be “an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion”. 

250 years ago, Congress approved the Declaration on 4 July 1776. But the meaning of those seemingly simple terms – “created equal”, right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – continue to provoke debate.  

“These phrases seem always to be running automatically in the American background, rather like software,” says Michael Ditmore, professor of English at Pepperdine University in Malibu, US, and the author of Texting the Nation: Agencies and Actions in the Declaration of Independence. “Still, considered purely in their textual wording, we hardly agree on what they mean or obligate us to,” he adds. 

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A ‘mongrel language’ 

Let’s start with the brief phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.  

“This iconic line is actually a great demonstration of what a mongrel language English is,” says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.  

Life” is rooted in Old English, a language brought to Britain by Germanic tribes from around AD400-500. “Liberty” and “pursuit” are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066.  

And then there is “happiness”: a word echoing with distant voices telling stories of trolls, battles and seafarers. 

“Happiness has an interesting etymology, as it comes from Old Norse happ, meaning ‘fortune’ or ‘good luck’,” says Birkett. “When ’happy‘ is first attested in Middle English it means ‘fortunate’, or ‘blessed by good luck’.”  

Old Norse, a Scandinavian language, was spoken by Viking raiders and Scandinavian settlers who brought the word to Britain from around AD800 onwards. Happ appears, for example, in the nickname of the Norse explorer Leif Erikson, who was also known as “Leif the Lucky”, Leif heppni Erikson. He was a member of an early voyage to North America in the 11th Century, and saved a group of shipwrecked sailors – which may have partly inspired his nickname. 

One way to interpret “happ” is as something fixed and fated, which can’t be controlled. It still echoes with that meaning in English words such as “hapless” – luckless, unfortunate – and “happen” – to occur by chance.  

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But over time, the English meaning of “happy” and “happiness” gradually shifted from “favoured by fortune” to “glad, pleased, content“. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Enlightenment movement, with its ideals of human rights, fundamentally challenged the idea that one’s fortune was fixed or divinely steered: instead, human reason and action took on a central role. 

By the time the Declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, with inspiration from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, “happiness” had acquired many layers of meaning. And in the Declaration, its pursuit was presented as a human right – one that was central to the new United States.  

“The document was both political and philosophical, asserting the ‘separate and equal station’ of the new United States among the nations of the Earth, while also laying out the philosophical underpinnings for that assertion,” says Carli Conklin, an associate professor of law and constitutional democracy at the University of Missouri, US, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History.  

“As both Thomas Jefferson and fellow drafter John Adams stated, the Declaration was not asserting anything new. It was not intended to do so,” says Conklin. “These ideas were commonplace in Enlightenment Era discussions about politics and law, with many of these ideas stretching back millennia.” What was new was “the opportunity to practically apply these principles in the formation and establishment of a brand new government in the new United States”, she says.  

The punchy phrasing hid a lot of ambiguity, however. 

That’s because on a practical level, the text had to be easy to agree to, says Ditmore: “It had to speak with a voice and sense common enough across 13 competing, edgy – and in-development – colony states to seal agreement for the publicity of independence.” As a result, its phrasing was seemingly clear, and easy to endorse, but actually, left a lot of room for conflicting interpretations, he says.  

Those interpretations have only widened since then. For example, how we think of happiness has changed over time, says Conklin. 

“Our general understanding of happiness today does not seem to be as rich or as expansive as the understanding of the concept in the founding era,” Conklin says. “To the founders, to be happy was to experience a state of well-being or human flourishing.”  

The founders distinguished between what they called “fleeting and temporal” happiness, and “true and substantial” happiness, she explains. To pursue true happiness was to live a life of virtue, she says: one of wisdom, justice, courage, moderation, industry and benevolence.  

“As John Adams wrote in a letter to his wife, Abigail, the founders believed ‘the virtues that make for a happy private life make for a happy public life’, as well,” says Conklin. 

While the idea of a right to the “pursuit of happiness” might seem far removed from the happ in Old Norse sagas, there is a subtle echo of voyages, quests and human persistence in both contexts – along with the idea of an uncertain outcome. 

“The Declaration does not include a right to attain happiness,” Conklin points out. “It contains only the right to pursue.”  

How exactly might one pursue happiness, then?  

One clue is in the other rights – to life and liberty, Conklin says: “The founders most frequently talked about liberty as a status – a status from which one could exercise their reason and free will toward action,” she explains. “The right to pursue happiness, then, was the right to determine and then to take that action – to exercise one’s reason and free will in active pursuit of one’s own well-being.” 

That meaning of liberty – as a state that allows you to actively shape your life – may sound very modern. But as with “happiness”, the ancient roots of “liberty” reveal how humans have wrestled with the idea of freedom, and what it means to be free, for a very long time.  

Freedom and heartbreak in Roman-era Britain  

“Liberty is a rather old word,” says Philippa Steele, a research professor in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. It is built on an Indo-European root  “which surfaces in numerous languages across Europe and Asia with a meaning connected to ‘people’,” she explains. 

This ancient word appears in Greek as eleutheria, in Latin as libertas, and many related, but lesser-known languages. In all cases, it generally related to personal freedom, she says.  

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One of its oldest appearances on British soil is on a 2,000-year-old tombstone from a Roman-era settlement. The stone was put up by a widower, Barates, for his late wife, Regina. The Latin inscription refers to Regina as a “liberta”, a “freedwoman”: liberta, or libertus for men, was the Roman term for freed, formerly enslaved people. 

Latin lived on in Britain for some time after the Romans left. But many of the Latin-rooted words used in English today, including “liberty“, were re-introduced later, with the 1066 Norman French invasion – French being a descendant of Latin.  

“Liberty”, also spelled “libertee” and “libertie“, appears in various English texts from around 1300AD onwards. It refers to freedom from serfdom, but also, the freedom to do certain things.  

This historical link between the word liberty, and freedom from enslavement, then meets a painful twist in the Declaration of Independence: an early passage condemning slavery, and describing enslavement as a crime against liberty, was deleted from the draft. And Jefferson, as well as other founders, enslaved people themselves. “They did not apply these rights to all people, in practice,” says Conklin.  

Steering the ship 

Other words in the Declaration also carry long histories of people trying to express complex ideas, for example, through metaphor. One of them is “government”, as in: “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”.   

“It comes from Latin via Old French,” says Steele, but the Latin verb gubernare is a borrowing from [the Greek word kybernao]”, meaning, to steer a ship. She adds that this Greek root also lives on “cybernetics“, and other words that feature “cyber”. And then there is the document’s title: “Declaration comes from a root related to light and brightness: claro quite literally means “illuminate”, and a declaratio is an act of making clear,” says Steele.  

While it drew on ancient words, the Declaration also marked a linguistic beginning: one of American English as a distinctive voice. That shift became more pronounced in the early decades of independence.  

“The Declaration of Independence contains spellings that now look British,” says Anne Curzan, a professor of English language and literature, linguistics and education at the University of Michigan, US. She points to the “–our” spelling in: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States”. In American English, “endeavoured” became  “endeavored“. 

So what does the Declaration, this short text squishing together millennia of history, teach us today? 

The answer depends on what we think the Declaration is for, says Ditmore. Is it “a creedal, maybe a propositional, document, one that so foundationally outlines the boundaries of American character and identity that we can return to them for correction when we stray”?  

Or was it “a document that served a specific temporary, limited purpose admirably well, broadcasting independence far and wide, and its surface ought not be scratched further”? 

In other words: is it a historical artefact – or a kind of manual for a good American life and thriving nation? I’ll leave you to find your own answers to that – and join the long chain of human thought filling this document with life.  

Andrea Peyser

Published June 26, 2026, 5:56 p.m. ET

This isn’t pregnancy. It’s a political plot.

A full-blown, unhinged conspiracy orchestrated by the MAGA movement to take over the hearts, minds and uteruses of gestating people all over the nation, one bassinet, one burp, one stretch mark at a time.

The New York Times has cracked the code. It’s Pulitzer time, baby!

In an investigation masquerading as a style piece, the Paper of Record published an unglued commentary, researched with the self-seriousness of Watergate, revealing that a whopping three women connected to the White House are preggers.

At the same time!

That Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller and Second Lady Usha Vance should all be on the nest simultaneously isn’t just a happy mini baby boom. It is — according to the Times — a pernicious “Handmaid’s Tale”-style political plot promoting conservative child-making frenzy in an age of declining birthrates and the collapse of the Democratic Party in middle America.

It’s a cautionary fable, a warning that the dreaded GOP’s steady rate of reproduction amid a Democratic baby drought poses a dire threat to the nation.

According to the Gray Lady (now Gray Female-Identifying Newspaper) Republicans are planning to win support and ever-greater numbers of adherents by growing their own voters. One infant at a time.

It’s all laid out in the piece entitled “The Politics and Power of the Pregnancy Image.”

In it, Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman writes: “That three such prominent women in the MAGA movement were pregnant at pretty much the same time was, indubitably, a coincidence.”

Or maybe not.

“But” — there’s always a “but” — “for an administration that has such an intuitive and strategic understanding of the power of aesthetics that an unspoken dress code in which men outfit themselves in the image of the president has developed, it has also become a telling one,” Friedman froths.

“Together, the women have created a notably consistent, and somewhat paradigm-shifting, picture of the White House’s family and fertility platform.”

Fertility platform? Silly me. I thought the three lovelies just got themselves knocked up.

The writer also found leftist joy in taking aim at the body-hugging coral dress that the wife of Vice President JD Vance allegedly used to showcase her burgeoning bump as she grows the couple’s fourth child, a boy, due next month. To The Times, it’s not just discount maternity-wear from Old Navy. The clothes represent Mrs. Vance’s sinister method of broadcasting cuddly daddy vibes emanating from her hub ahead of November’s

Friedman writes, I assume with a straight face, that Mrs. Vance’s job as second lady “is also to represent and humanize the vice president.”

“By spotlighting her pregnancy,” Friedman spews, “she is doing exactly that

She posted the receipt from her cowl-necked maternity get-up to X, writing “Now that we know the political significance of my $8.75 coral maternity dress from Old Navy, can’t wait to hear what the New York Times has to say about my elastic-waistband pants and compression socks!”

I can’t wait to read the Times’ take on the politics of onesies. And the paper’s answer to this burning question: Breastfeeding — natural nutrition, or infantile.

SACRAMENTO, CA — Governor Gavin Newsom opened up his laptop and fired up ChatGPT this morning to find out what his political positions will be this week.

The day after proposing a billionaire tax while simultaneously working to defeat a billionaire tax, Newsom checked in with ChatGPT for further guidance on what to do next.

“Okay, Chat. What do I believe today?,” typed Newsom. “Let’s maybe talk law enforcement. Is it good or bad right now? I could go either way, to be honest. What’s the vibe out there on the streets about criminals? What’s the scuttlebutt?”

Newsom has bragged that while many politicians struggle to decide major policy positions, he has no such issue. “It’s so easy for me. I just ask ChatGPT, and do whatever it says. I guess it’s one of my many gifts,” said Newsom. “It’s frankly embarrassing hearing other leaders talk about how hard it is to decide things like whether they should commute someone’s life sentence. I just ask Chat — boom, done.”

At publishing time, Newsom had announced that he would proposing a universal health care bill and also breaking up health insurance conglomerates to promote competition.

Babylon Bee