This is a chapter of a book I wrote a few years ago. During our 250th anniversary celebration I will post more of these uplifting stories.

The Battle of Brooklyn

One of the first large scale battles of our revolution was fought on grounds that would eventually become part of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, now a part of New York City. It happened on August 27 – 28th 1776. Here is how it unfolded and why we should have lost; but won anyway.

When General George Washington’s troops were fighting the best army in the world, there was no way we could have won out over the United Kingdom. They had everything going for them, but we hung on, never quit, escaped certain defeat again and again and in the end won anyway.

Our war for freedom would be a long hard struggle with lots of pain, suffering and death. Fighting the British was serious business. We would see great heights of heroism and sharp depths of betrayal before the hand of God brought us to victory.

After that spring day in April 1775, the world was forced to recognize that we Americans were different than any other people on earth. We were exceptional and were willing to prove our exceptionalism whenever we had to because we intended to win not just make a statement.

Under the leadership of George Washington, we used a siege to force the British to leave Boston. Thereafter, Washington turned his attention to winning control of New York City because of its obvious value for holding the colonies together. He was, however, not the only one to recognize the strategic value of New York. Britain’s General William Howe had his eyes on the city as well. He understood the importance of splitting the colonies into two manageable segments and saw an opportunity to capture George Washington at the same time.

Adding the Washington’s problems was the fact that from the very beginning of the rebellion, New York was a Loyalist town. Most prominently among the Loyalist strongholds was Staten Island, a forty-square mile piece of land separated from Brooklyn by little more than twelve miles of ocean. Over the spring and early summer of 1776, the British Army took up residence on Staten Island practically under George Washington’s nose They trained and prepared for what was to be the largest amphibious assault ever attempted by any army to that date.

By the third week of August, after he was informed of their presence by a Loyalist spy, Howe was ready to make his move and capture Washington and his troops in Brooklyn. The movement was a spectacular example of the power and efficiency of the British Army. They loaded supplies, horses and battle hardened British and German troops on a huge flotilla of British Navy ships.

On August 22, 1776, just weeks after the Colonists signed and promulgated the Declaration of Independence, Howe safely landed more than 10,000 troops on the beach of the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Once he got settled, he turned west toward Washington’s camp. The skillful British General, took his time setting up the battle. He could taste the sweet fruit of victory and the fame of being the hero who crushed the American Revolution. There was no reason for him to believe otherwise.

He had nearly twice the strength of Washington’s force, which consisted of a small number of professional soldiers supported by part time militiamen. From any view of the comparative size and experience of the opposing sides, the British were poised to crush Washington and end our Revolution. Aside from the enormous size of the British Army and their skill and experience, the invaders were led by the best commanders King George III had with orders to achieve a total victory.

By August 28 th Howe had caught up to Washington in modern day Prospect Park. That first clash resulted to a twenty percent casualty rate for our side that saw 400 Patriots from Delaware and Maryland killed. At first glance, their sacrifice looked like a meaningless defeat that would do little to stop what Washington knew was coming.

Nevertheless, those brave men did not give their lives in vain. The battle that took their lives bought precious time for us; yet it appeared even that sacrifice would go for naught.

Washington backed his troops up to the East River which separates Brooklyn from Manhattan. There was nowhere left to go. Then, as if things were not looking dire enough for us, a Loyalist volunteered to lead Howe’s troops through a short cut path unknown to the British. It brought them to a commanding position on Washington’s left flank.

As was the way of war in 1776, General Howe began to prepare for a siege that would starve Washington and his men into submission and end our revolution without further unnecessary loss of life for both sides. Only a miracle could save us.

Washington prayed for a miracle that came to him very shortly.

When he found himself trapped between thousands of General Howe’s veteran troops and the East River, Washington called on his friend Colonel John Glover, a man he knew to be skilled and knowledgeable in seafaring. He asked Glover to help him evacuate his 7,000 troops to safety in Manhattan. The Hand of God Himself changed the dynamics of the coming battle when Glover, a strong Patriot, developed a plan to save Washington and his men.

His plan was to gather up every boat and barge within fifty miles and get them to Washington’s camp. As night fell, Glover had his men, known as the Marblehead Militia, row Washington’s troops across to Manhattan. These were big strong men who were very familiar with the section of the East River that flowed into New York Harbor between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

As they loaded, went to Manhattan, came back, reloaded, and returned to Manhattan some rowers made the trip as many as ten times. While the evacuation was under way a small number of troops were assigned to remain in camp and make noise. This was to fool the British into believing Washington was spending his last night as Commander of the Revolutionary forces preparing to surrender in the morning.

The operation went on all night, but Glover was unable to move all of Washington’s troops. With sunlight streaming down, there were still about 1000 troops that had to be moved to safety. Up to that point, Glover’s success was due to a providential strong wind that stopped the British Navy from sailing up from New York Harbor.

Although the moon was full, the British war ships could not maintain their position and were blown too far away to be of any assistance to Howe. They could not even see the escape taking place, as men, supplies, and horses with burlap wrapped on their hooves, silently made their way to safety in the armada Glover had put together.

Had they been free to sail north the British would have been able to spot what was going on, blast Washington out of the water and bombard him at daybreak. Now, as the sun came up, there was still that problem of moving 1,000 more men to safety to be solved.

Finally, with daylight almost upon them there was still no help for the 1000 Patriots trapped on the Brooklyn side. Sunrise threatened to expose the operation. They were losing their cover. We could not afford to lose any troops let alone about fifteen percent of our fighting force. With nothing else left to do, Washington prayed for Devine help. As he had before and would do many times afterward, he got on his knees and begged The Almighty for help.

In a little while he got it.

Once again God reached down and helped us. He intervened and sent us a fog so thick it cut visibility to five feet. That was just enough to navigate the way back to Manhattan, but not nearly enough for the British Navy to see what was going on. They never fired at the fleeing troops because they never realized what was happening a half mile upriver.

True to his nature and understanding of the responsibilities of command, it is said that General Washington was on one of the last barges making the trip across to Manhattan. He and his remaining troops were saved. They made it to the relative safety of Manhattan without the loss of a single barge load of men or supplies.

In the end only four men were lost when a scouting party sent by Howe discovered what was happening and fired on the last rowboat to leave the Brooklyn shore.

America should have been lost that night less than two months after declaring our independence. The whole impossible dream should have ended in a humiliating surrender. That did not happen. As would become the case over and over, when we should have lost, won anyway as we always would.

Kevin “Coach” Collins

Reflections on Graduate School

I nearly failed out of grad school. People who know me already know this and the politics, not the science behind it. But I guess now you do, too. But over a decade later, I now know that it was overprotecting a lie. Let me explain.

Different linguistics programs have different ways of doing things. But the one that I attended at UPEN followed the relatively normal system of having mandatory coursework in the first few years, qualifying papers. You write a paper for publication, it’s graded by your professors, and language exams. In our case, translating an academic paper from a language relevant to your research, sitting a traditional competence exam, although more on that later, or writing a paper about a sufficiently exotic language. Yeah, that’s a direct quote. I’m told that when I translated a French research paper for my first exam, I translated more than anybody ever had. I thought you’re supposed to translate the whole thing in an hour and I’d failed. You couldn’t study at PEN without taking a full year of generative syntax.

Does it matter that my focus was initially game-theoretic pragmatics or that I ultimately wound up writing a dissertation on sociolects that uses geospatial statistical methods? No. Was there a course on introduction to linguistic typology and the kinds of broad questions relevant to the field? No. Somehow the syntacticians got a stranglehold on the foundational training requirements and linguistic typology was taught incidental to learning syntax in a Chomskyan tradition.

And in the first semester, the syntax professor gave me a C on the midterm, which is basically the kiss of death. I won’t tell you the story of how he told me nobody has ever come back from this and that I should just quit and that I shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place and how I listened and then asked him simply what would it look like to come back from this and extracted, painfully extracted by staying consistently focused on message what his actual standards were and then met and exceeded them with the final in the course of like 10 days.

The point of the story is that generative grammar in a Chomskyan approach, first X-bar theory and government and binding and later minimalism, were the screener, the gatekeeper, the barrier, the flaming hoop that you have to jump through. If you want to know what a real intralinguistics looks like, the broad questions, typology, what the field actually does when it isn’t busy gatekeeping, I’m making one link in the description. Consider it the orientation Penn forgot to give me.

I should probably mention that Penn at the time had a reputation for failing students out, of course, after paying their stipend for a few years because why burn $30,000 to $100,000 when you could waste the same amount of money tormenting a grad student for a few years? It was an absolute hazing. So, in my time there, I saw at least four people either asked not to return or given a terminal master’s degree, which sounds much more morbid than it is, as a parting gift. Some just walked off and never came back. Pretty sure one left after the language exam was just an antagonistic conversation in German with a syntax professor grilling them about the double passive construction in German.

So I learned syntax. I learned the [ __ ] out of it. I learned it so hard that I wrote a paper included in conference proceedings that prompted the professor who threatened to fail me out. I eventually got a gentleman’s B to come find me in the grad student’s office I was working in and ask me if I wrote it myself and who had helped me. I read all the books that I could find on X-bar theory and minimalism. I have feelings about the approaches in various textbooks, including some unpublished ones. I devoured Chomsky and syntax. I had my doubts. My adviser even referred to it as a “toxic system,” which if you’re an academic, is a sick burn. Things my wife said in casual conversation broke the model that I’d learned consistently. And a co-author of mine on the descriptive grammar of Black English just handed me a book that brought the whole house of cards down.

By the way, scan the QR or follow the link in the description if you want to know more about that project and sign up for updates. I’m completely rebuilding my idea of how the world works like a freaking cult survivor. And today I’m going to share that with you. This is going to be criticizing Chomsky for political things like denying the Cambodian genocide or his anti-government writings while accepting money from federal defense grants and is not going to criticize him for social things like his horrifically embarrassing interview with Ali G.

How many words does he know? What are some of them? Or even his epistolary correspondences with Jeffrey Epstein where he brainstormed how to rehabilitate the latter’s public image after the trafficking was widely known. He is Chomsky, that is by all accounts one who doesn’t research who he’s talking to and who is credulous and eager to help to a fault. He’s thinking about syntax the whole time.

This is Language Jones.

Anyway, I’m going to keep it linguistic. First, I’m going to explain what Chomsky got right and why he’s so important. Then, I’ll explain the challenges to his theory, including the niggling doubts I had even at the very beginning of grad school. And finally, I’ll explain the alternatives that I’m exploring and how they’re the last nail in the coffin.

First, let’s start with how Chomsky got famous and what Chomsky got right. His rise to fame in the 1960s in linguistics coincided with the cognitive revolution he helped kick off. A huge influence was his scathing review of B.F. Skinner’s verbal behavior in 1959, eviscerating Skinner’s behaviorist approach to language learning, which more or less reduced human language to stimulus response like classical conditioning of dogs. He was developing his theory of transformational grammar at the time.

And despite having not been enrolled at Penn for four years at the time, in 1955 he submitted a thesis and was awarded the doctorate. It’s astounding how different the times are. Anyway, he wrote Syntactic Structures in 1957 and rose to fame on the basis of that and his epic takedown of Skinner two years later. His approach has changed over the years. It’s been about 70 years of theorizing and work, but there are a few key points that he got really right, and I think they’re worth stating explicitly.

First, those who criticize Chomsky often criticize the concept of generative grammar. That’s not up for debate. We clearly have the ability to make use of a limited set of symbols or mental objects and create infinite novel utterances from combining them in new ways. Not only that, but the ways we combine them are constrained. There are grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. In linguistics, ungrammatical doesn’t mean socially stigmatized, like using a double negative. It means something that completely breaks your ability to communicate or parse the sentence. Something like, “What do you like and broccoli?”

Quick aside, if you find this stuff interesting and you want a proper grounding in what linguists mean by grammar, grammatical, and the dozen or so other terms I’m about to throw around, my intro to linguistics course is in the description. It’ll make the rest of the video hit a little bit harder.

It’s worth flagging upfront, generativity itself isn’t the controversy. The alternatives I’ll be talking about, dependency grammar and construction grammar, are also generative in this broad sense. They account for the discrete infinity of language too. The word generative just got captured by one specific research program. So a lot of people think rejecting Chomsky means rejecting generativity, and it doesn’t. These frameworks just generate differently by combining constructions or by linking heads and dependents without phrase structure trees and without movement.

Chomsky and his acolytes developed a very robust system for exploring how you can get a small number of pieces, a small number of conceptual rules, and generate language. Their goal was to describe a mental architecture that can give rise to all and only natural human languages. That is, it doesn’t over or undergenerate. They ended up pursuing an approach that uses graph theory. It treats words, we’re not going to define that for now, as nodes in an acyclic directed graph.

Chomsky later imposed the condition that they’re all binary branching for elegance of the theory and parsimony. Another quick aside that’ll matter later, dependency grammar also uses directed graphs, but the nodes are words connected directly to other words with no intervening phrasal nodes. No NP, no VP, no IP, no CP, just words in the asymmetric relationships between them. That’s a big deal because it means that the entire scaffolding of phrases that Chomsky’s theory rests on is in dependency grammar just not posited. It’s an ontological commitment Chomsky made that you don’t actually have to make. Tesnière was doing this in the 1950s parallel to and independent of Chomsky.

Part of Chomsky’s approach was to assume that there is a conceptual category called a phrase. So for instance, you might have a noun phrase that has a head, the actual noun, and arbitrarily many modifiers. The insight is that the whole thing acts like the head taking on its category. So when I said the whole thing, I could just as easily replace that with it. It acts like the head, and the sentence is perfectly grammatical because the categories match. Whereas if I tried to only use part of it, we’ve got problems.

Dependency grammar accounts for headedness, too. In fact, more directly, the head in dependency grammar isn’t an abstraction from a phrase. It just is the word that governs the dependence. The substitutability I just described falls out for free because when it replaces the whole thing, it’s just taking the same head position in the dependency structure. You don’t need to posit a phrase that acts like its head. The head is the structural anchor from the start.

Where it gets tricky is where Chomsky adds movement. The idea is that there’s an underlying base-generated mental form of a sentence structure, and other structures are derived by movement. So normal sentence structure in English is “I gave a chocolate to my wife.” To simplify the Chomskyan approach would be to say that the passive “my wife was given a chocolate” is derived from the basic structure of the other sentence. There’s a deep structure that’s a cognitive architecture and a surface structure. That’s the actual sentence we say or write.

incremental. Speakers really do start sentences without fully planning them. That empirical work is much more compatible with construction-based and dependency-based approaches that don’t require a fully specified deep structure to exist before any words come out of your mouth.

The Chomsky GG folks rebut that their model is one that explains the relationships among structures in an utterance, but isn’t attempting to be an explicit exact definition of what goes on in the brain. Except that’s exactly what they claim. If you’re not modeling language in the brain, which you absolutely are when you talk about your language acquisition device in the brain, then what are we even doing here? And honestly, the framework slides between those two claims in ways that immunize it from both kinds of evidence.

Performance data, that’s just performance, not competence. Brain data, well, neuroscience hasn’t caught up to the theory yet. This is what philosophers of science call an unfalsifiable framework. Heads I win, tails you lose. Not to mention that empirical studies consistently challenge claims about what is happening in the brain and what is possible. Psycholinguistic research demonstrated that Chomsky’s whole bit about anaphors, words like “himself,” is just not supported empirically.

So we moved on from government and binding when it became clear that the purely universal principles A, B, and C, the rare, actually falsifiable claims were false, at least some of them. The cross-linguistic work was particularly damaging. Long-distance reflexes in Mandarin, Icelandic, and Japanese showed that principle A, as originally stated, couldn’t be universal. Logographic pronouns in the discourse sensitivity of binding more generally turned out to be empirically thorny. Each fix made the theory more baroque and less predictive.

The nail in the coffin for me was the book “Syntax: A Cognitive Approach,” which is an introduction to dependency grammar. Now, here’s the thing. It’s still acyclic directed graphs with dependency relationships, but they posit that you don’t get “John ate the cake” and “the cake was eaten by John” by transforming one into the other. There’s just two different structural things.

And as I explore the literal decades of literature on dependency grammar and construction grammars that I was told either didn’t exist or was not important or was dismissed out of hand, as I look into those, they align with both the rest of the science I was familiar with and the models of cognition that other fields have robust empirical evidence for and frankly common sense.

Let me make this concrete. In a dependency analysis of “John ate the cake,” “ate” is the root with “John” as its subject dependent and “cake” as its object dependent, with the dependent on “cake.” In “the cake was eaten by John,” the structure is different. “Cake” is the subject dependent of the verbal complex and “John” is a dependent inside the by-phrase. Two distinct dependency structures, both directly produced, neither derived from the other. The relationships between them that they share truth conditions are semantic and pragmatic facts, not syntactic ones.

And beyond that, constructions like “the more the merrier” suddenly aren’t a problem. The dative alternation, the difference between “I gave my wife chocolate” and “I gave a chocolate to my wife,” cease to be a problem. They’re communicating slightly different things based on information structure and the existing context. And I don’t have to figure out how to make one into the other.

Even things like construction grammar’s ideas of inheritance and coercion are basically exactly what they sound like if you’ve ever coded a class in Python. Take coercion. When “sneeze” appears in a caused motion construction, “she sneezed the napkin off the table,” the construction coerces the verb into a transitive caused motion reading. In a movement-based grammar, this is mysterious. In construction grammar, it’s the construction contributing meaning the verb doesn’t have on its own, just like how a parent class in Python contributes methods to a child class.

And “the more the merrier” isn’t a weird exception to be banished to the periphery. It’s a construction with slots, the X or the Y, sitting in the same continuum as the transitive and the passive. They differ in degrees of productivity and abstractness, not in kind. It’s constructions all the way down. Even the dative alternation turns out not to be a single alternation.

Beth Lavine and others have shown different verb classes pattern differently, and the choices between forms are conditioned by information structure, weight, animacy, and discourse status. Quick Pause on Animacy, that’s how you can say things like, “I slid her the book.” But you can’t say, “I slid the door the book.” None of that falls out of a movement analysis. All of it makes sense if you start from constructions. So, here I am just over 5 years out from grad school, finally letting myself say out loud what my adviser was already not so subtly hinting at when he called it toic. The thing that nearly ended my career, the thing that I was told was the science of language, the thing that gate kept an entire generation of linguists out of a PhD program. It’s not the only game in town. But it’s not the best game in town, and it’s not even by the standards that we hold every other science to. An especially good game.

There are decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar that I was told just didn’t exist or didn’t matter or had been subsumed by the Chomskian framework. And none of that was true. The frameworks I was kept away from align better with cognition, better with neuroscience, better with what we actually see kids doing when they learn language, and better with the cross-linguistic data. I wasn’t bad at syntax. The syntax I was being taught was bad, and they should feel bad. Your music’s bad, and you should feel bad.

And the relief of saying that, I can’t even describe it. If you’ve ever been deep in something where the explanations kept not quite working, where you kept having to be told the doubts that you were having were just because you didn’t really fully understand it well enough yet, where the smart people around you kept gently suggesting maybe you weren’t cut out for this, you know, a cult. And then one day you read the right book and the whole thing snaps, and you realize that the doubts were the data, were the facts.

Yeah, that I’m not a cult survivor in any literal sense, but the cognitive shape of it is real, and I see it in other people who escaped other intellectual traditions that overpromised and underdelivered. You’re allowed to leave. If any of this resonated, if you’ve had your own version of this experience in linguistics or somewhere else, I want to hear about it in the comments. Subscribe if you want more in this vein because I have a lot more to say about syntax, about what gets taught as foundational versus what actually is, and about the politics of who gets to be a linguist.

And one more time, because it matters, scan the QR code or hit the link in description for the descriptive grammar of black English project. That’s the work that broke the model for me. That’s the kind of linguistics I want to do. Come along. Until next time, happy learning.

Talks due to take place on Friday between the US ⁠and ​Iran in Switzerland to implement a peace deal were cancelled as Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers and Israel carried out a wave of retaliatory airstrikes in south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley that killed at least 18 people.

The talks had been due to begin in the Swiss village of Obbürgen two days after the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that opened a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent understanding over Iran’s nuclear programme, while getting oil traffic moving through the strait of Hormuz.

The White House said the US looked forward to “beginning technical talks as soon as possible”, as it announced that JD Vance, the vice-president, who is leading negotiations for the Trump administration, would now not be travelling.

Iran peace deal makes clear how far US has been forced to retreat since 2025Read more

“The logistics of these negotiations have never been simple or predictable. As of now, the vice-president is not departing tonight,” a White House spokesperson said late on Thursday.

The cancellation of the talks came as Israel and Hezbollah traded their most violent strikes since the ceasefire was established. Hezbollah targeted Israeli forces near the city of Nabatieh, in south Lebanon, with several salvoes of rocket fire and drones overnight after intermittent Israeli shelling throughout Thursday.

Israel responded with a wave of airstrikes on the city and surrounding towns on what it said were Hezbollah targets, leaving at least 18 people dead and 33 wounded, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health.

Hezbollah said it was targeting Israeli forces that were trying to advance towards the foothills surrounding Nabatieh – a flashpoint where there has been intermittent fighting since the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Prior to the truce, Israeli forces were advancing towards the southern Lebanese city.

The killing of Israeli soldiers prompted fury within Israel, with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, calling for scorched earth in Lebanon.

“With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not up for bargaining. All of Lebanon must burn,” Ben-Gvir said in a statement.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, called on Israel on Friday to stop its strikes in Lebanon and said the US must put pressure on it to respect the ceasefire deal.

“This agreement provides for a cessation of hostilities, the Israeli government must respect it, and the United States in particular must exert all the necessary pressure on the Israeli government to ensure that this is the case,” Barrot said on France Info radio.

The cancellation of the talks between Iran and the US on Friday came so abruptly that Vance’s staff and a small pack of journalists had gathered at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington in anticipation of the trip. Dozens of White House officials, advance staffers and media were already in Switzerland to prepare for Vance’s anticipated arrival.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, said on Thursday that he had approved the MoU despite reservations, while at the same time the US officially lifted a blockade of Iranian ports.

Before the talks were cancelled, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said Iranian negotiators needed ⁠to see signs of implementation of the interim agreement from the US before the next rounds of peace talks could begin, and that there was no confirmation that its delegation would travel to Geneva.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, said on Thursday that he had approved the MoU despite reservations, while at the same time the US officially lifted a blockade of Iranian ports.

Before the talks were cancelled, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said Iranian negotiators needed ⁠to see signs of implementation of the interim agreement from the US before the next rounds of peace talks could begin, and that there was no confirmation that its delegation would travel to Geneva.

The cancellation of the talks came after a report from Al Mayadeen, an Arabic-language network that is politically allied with Hezbollah, that said Tehran was delaying sending its delegation to Switzerland owing to Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Lebanon.

Israel, which was not included in the peace talks and has distanced itself from the US-Iran agreement, has continued its fighting in Lebanon and launched fresh ​airstrikes early on Friday, accusing Hezbollah of violating the ceasefire, an accusation the armed group has thrown back at Israel.

Hezbollah said on Friday that its fighters destroyed three Israeli tanks in the country’s south and that clashes were ongoing. Israel had not confirmed its tanks were hit.

Fighting began in Lebanon on 2 March when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in what it said was revenge for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader by the US and Israel. The subsequent Israeli invasion of south Lebanon and bombing campaign has left more than 3,900 people dead in Lebanon. Hezbollah has killed at least 32 Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and three Israeli civilians.

On Thursday, Israel announced what it called its “security zone” in south Lebanon, which comprises hundreds of square miles of Lebanese territory. Lebanese officials have demanded a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces, something Iran said was required by the MoU.

The MoU calls for the “permanent termination” of the war in Lebanon and for the country’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty” to be ensured. Donald Trump has said he expects a complete ceasefire on all fronts.

Israel has so far insisted it will not pull out its troops from south Lebanon, leading to open criticism from Trump and Vance. On Thursday, Vance said Israel needed to respect the peace process.

“What the president has grown frustrated with, at times, is that we seem to be right on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the agreement and then all of a sudden there’s a major explosion that goes off in a civilian population centre in Beirut, and a lot of people who have nothing to do with Hezbollah lose their lives,” Vance told reporters, adding that such actions were “not acceptable”.

On Friday, Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned against any breach of the agreement, saying: “In case of misconduct, breach of treaty and excess of the other side, we have no doubt that decisive response will be given to the enemy.”

Trump’s Iran deal could place his legacy in the hands of TehranRead more

The diplomatic back-and-forth over the planned talks adds to the uncertainty over ​whether a lasting truce can be found to a regional war that has killed at least ‌7,000 people, sent energy prices soaring and shaken global markets.

Khamenei on Thursday said Trump had signed the deal “out of desperation” and signalled that further talks would not be easy. “If the American side wants to be too demanding, we will not accept it,” he said in a written message.

The deal gives negotiators 60 days to reach agreement on the status of Iran’s nuclear programme unless ‌both sides agree to an extension, and sets up a $300bn reconstruction fund for Iran and other financial incentives.

On Thursday, US forces lifted their naval blockade of Iranian ports that had prevented ships from sailing to or from the country, the US military said, noting that American warships “will remain in the general area”.

Activity was still muted in the strait of Hormuz, the strategic bottleneck for energy shipments that Iran blockaded during the conflict.

The Guardian

New Evidence Fauci Manipulated Intelligence and Lied to Congress

WASHINGTON D.C. — Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—work which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic.

Today, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions, the virus’ lab-leak origins, and his role in directing U.S. funding for this dangerous research that caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives. These documents expose Fauci’s direct role in influencing and manipulating IC assessments on COVID-19, and how Fauci lied to Congress in 2024, when under oath he denied knowledge of or participation in discussions with intelligence officials about viral research.

You can view the communications and documents HERE.

“The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world. After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,” DNI Gabbard said. “The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook: politicized self-serving leaders like Dr. Fauci covered up their own wrongdoing and abuses of power, manipulated intelligence, lied to Congress, and undermined a duly elected President by restricting his access to vital facts needed to keep the country safe. It’s time the American people learn the real story.”

The materials released today are a result of DNI Gabbard’s yearlong declassification review in support of President Trump’s maximum transparency mandate. During this process, ODNI officials gathered testimony from multiple IC whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the IC’s manipulation of intelligence on the virus’ origins. This unveiled a clear pattern of suppressing dissent, silencing critics, and burying evidence that undermined IC integrity and disserved the American people.

Fauci’s close IC relationships enabled him to assume three key roles during the pandemic that shielded him from scrutiny as he wielded outsized influence.

• Fauci funded risky coronavirus research linked to big pharma and the pursuit of “universal vaccines” worth trillions of dollars.
• Fauci was the behind-the-scenes advisor who, with his hand-picked experts, pushed the IC to endorse a natural, animal origin to hide his dangerous research.
• Fauci became the nation’s pandemic “pundit” and publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship.

Fauci’s Relationship With The Intelligence Community Drove Intelligence & Public Narratives

Throughout the pandemic, Fauci and politicized leaders within the IC created a self-serving circular reporting loop. He provided hand-picked NIAID-funded scientists to advise the IC. This input shaped official intelligence assessments, which were then publicly cited as scientific consensus to refute the lab-leak theory.

According to hundreds of reviewed emails, the IC almost always incorporated his recommendations. Fauci promoted a fraudulent paper, whose publication he helped prompt, as legitimate information for Intelligence Community consideration. Senior analysts praised Fauci not as a “policymaker,” but as an unbiased guide to “the real coronavirus experts”—while ignoring experts who might dissent from Fauci’s narratives.

Fauci Lied to Congress

The correspondence released today directly contradicts Fauci’s 2024 testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In that hearing, while under oath, Fauci was repeatedly asked whether he spoke to “FBI, CIA, DIA or any U.S. intelligence agency concerning viral research” before, during, or after the pandemic. Fauci repeatedly dodged the questions, before falsely stating, “not to my knowledge about COVID.”

Retaliation Against Truth-Seekers

Testimony from multiple whistleblowers reveals intelligence analysts who challenged Fauci’s COVID-origin conclusions faced threat of retaliation, were marginalized, and often suffered career setbacks. This silenced dissent and fostered a culture where truth was sacrificed to conformity and credible evidence was buried.

The following are examples from whistleblower accounts that Director Gabbard has referred to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General.

• A contractor was terminated just days after coming forward to ODNI as a whistleblower.
• Managers reminded analysts who advocated for the lab-leak hypothesis that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted. The message was clear: disagreement with the manipulated finding would derail careers.
• Senior leaders allegedly set up roadblocks for whistleblowers, removing anonymity from the complaint process by insisting managers or attorneys be present at ODNI meetings, creating an atmosphere of intimidation.

Tulsi Gabbard

By Washington Examiner

Published June 18, 2026 5:00am ET | Updated June 18, 2026 4:08pm ET

Janeese Lewis George, an avowed socialist and proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, took a commanding lead in the District of Columbia’s Democratic primary on June 16, all but guaranteeing she will be the next mayor of Washington. As radical as Lewis George’s socialist policies are, however, they should not be thought of as an aberration, as they might once have been. For socialists within the Democratic Party now control the mayor offices of New York, Chicago, and Seattle, and are poised to take over Los Angeles and Washington. The Democratic Party has become the party of socialism.

Lewis George’s record and policy proposals are cartoonishly bad. At a time when Washington’s economy is shrinking, its budget deficits growing, and its downtown office vacancy crisis worsening, Lewis George wants to create a new business activity tax. The levy is designed to reach law firms, lobbying shops, consulting firms, and other professional services partnerships that operate in Washington but avoid the city’s unincorporated business tax because their owners live outside the district. Lewis George claims the tax would raise $500 million, but its likelier effect would be to drive hundreds of successful firms out of the capital and across the Potomac River into Virginia, further hollowing out Washington’s struggling commercial core.

In addition to weakening Washington’s economy, Lewis George proposes dismantling the city’s IMPACT education reforms, which are a bright spot in an otherwise dysfunctional government. IMPACT improved Washington’s schools by testing students, rewarding good teachers with bonuses, and removing bad ones from the classroom. Teachers unions hate the policy because it makes them accountable for doing their jobs effectively. With union support backing her campaign, Lewis George has agreed to end it.

I have often noted that the climate scam and the associated forced energy transition would of necessity go away at some point because the proposals being advocated to “save the planet” could never possibly work. But the open question has always been, when that happens, what will it look like? Would all the big enviro groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club all go on national TV one night and admit that the whole thing was a fake scare from the beginning? In the real world, that’s not how these things happen. People who have staked out absurd positions somehow need to save face. So there would have to be some sort of gradual process of backing down.

And thus we come to the key role of the New York Times for the Left, which is to mold and convey the official talking points to the team’s candidates and influencers. How about sharing some instruction on how to quietly back away from the Green New Deal?

Today on page A-12 of the print edition there is a piece with the headline “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure.” The subheadline is “As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.” The online version indicates that the piece first appeared there five days ago, June 11. They held it for the print edition until today, and then buried it deeply on page A-12. The casual reader may not get that far, but the person who will see it is the party apparatchik who needs direction from central headquarters. Excerpt:

With voters worried about spiking gas prices and inflation, some [Democratic Party] leaders argue that they should stop trying to throttle oil and gas, which heat the planet when burned. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines. . . . The result could be a less ambitious climate agenda if the party returns to power in Washington. . . . Now many Democrats argue that the path back to power means abandoning some of their most aggressive stances on climate change.

The piece is filled with useful pointers in how to tone down the catastrophism. Most of that seems to involve an end to vilifying oil and gas, while continuing to promote wind and solar as the “cheapest” ways to produce electricity. (They still haven’t figured out that by the time you include costs of integrating wind and solar into the grid, those things are a far more expensive way to produce electricity than fossil fuels.). Here are some of the pointers:

– “Rather than pushing green solutions only, many Democrats say they have a better way to bridge the gap: Be the party of yes to all forms of energy. After all, they argue, wind and solar power are often the cheapest forms of electricity and the fastest to deploy. On an even playing field, they say, renewables would beat fossil fuels.”

– “We shouldn’t be against the domestic oil and gas industry, but we have to be for the energy transition,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. “Democrats should be running toward that instead of away from it.”

– Rahm Emanuel, the former congressman, chief of staff to President Barack Obama and mayor of Chicago who is exploring a 2028 White House run, said Democrats need to focus on household budgets, specifically electric and gas bills.“I’m not against talking about climate policy, but you’ve got to talk about it as energy and energy prices,” Mr. Emanuel said, “and you talk about it as it relates to protecting ratepayers.”

And if you stop vilifying the oil and gas industries, you can even start taking their money!:

[Recently] in California, . . . Tom Steyer, a champion of fighting global warming, was edged out of this month’s gubernatorial primary by Xavier Becerra. Mr. Becerra, a moderate Democrat, questioned the state’s most stringent climate goals, like ending sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, and received donations from oil and gas companies.

If the Democratic candidates are getting this message, it could be that the climate scare suddenly mostly disappears from the upcoming midterm elections. Wouldn’t that be an incredible change!

On the other hand, so far this is just about messaging. Even if the messaging changes, that does not mean that the goals of the Democrats on taking power will have changed. Certainly, over in the Endangerment Finding litigation, dozens of enviro groups and all the blue states continue to argue that atmospheric CO2 (the product of use of fossil fuels) is a “danger” to human health and welfare. Where Democrats rule, the destructive policies will continue until either there is some sort of catastrophic grid failure or the costs become too wildly excessive to credibly blame on some bogeyman.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

I’m pretty much a hawk on Iran and certainly don’t trust them to hold their part of any deal. Putting that aside for a moment…

Note, numbered paragraphs below are not meant to correspond to MOU numbering.

1 – Why do we even need a deal? If, for whatever reason, the US doesn’t want to fight anymore, we can stop and leave without ceremony. Let them wonder if we’ll hit them again. They know what prompted our attack. The US doesn’t owe them a written apology. Iran misbehaved, we b*tch slapped them, so now -Bye! What’s wrong with that? Worried about the strait being open? How about letting other countries deal with that? I think of Trump on NATO when he said if they don’t pay in we won’t defend them. Why not take that approach if we’re tired of running this operation? If folks want the strait open, go open it! Oh, yes, I forgot – they let us use airports. Gee thanks. You saved us some mileage. We took Iran down a big notch. If there’s no will on the US part to finish it, let everyone else mop up. No occupation or nation building required.

2-Why does the US need to be involved in any way with Iran getting $300 billion? Iran’s concern would be that we would just sanction any charity gifts or loans sent their way. So? They have plenty of back channels they’ve been using to get around sanctions for decades. If they want to beg, let them beg through those channels.

3-The deal will be given 60 days to be finalized, but the US must begin removing forces in 30. Say what? If they said 30 days after a final deal, that may make some sense. This is patenty absurd. Would Trump do a real estate deal this way? Sure, we’ll finalize the mortgage qualification stuff in 60 days, but the seller has to move out and hand us the keys within 30. Yeah, right. I know I said first that I would put aside trust issues, however, this provision extends the Iranians a level of trust beyond ordinary business transactions.

4-As stated on Whitehouse.gov on 1 March, the first reason to do this operation was to deal with the nuclear program. The nuclear program should be settled now not later. What the MOU does settle is that Iran can maintain the status quo of its nuclear program – that means spinning up to 60%. So this MOU off the bat is a failure in the nuclear regard.

5-It completely fails to mention ballistic missiles, another big reason for attacking given in the 1 March statement. Coupled with Iran spinning away, this at best a can kicking provision. Note, the short range stuff that Iran has been using for decades are not ballistic missiles.

6-As an Iranian terror proxy, Lebanon is definitely a front on this war, but this deal is between the US and Iran and it’s Israel and Lebanon dealing with Hezbollah now. There are no US forces involved in that. If you want to include Lebanon territory in this, then you need to include the primary parties in that part of the transaction – Israel and Lebanon. This deal is written as if Hezbollah is the sovereign government of Lebanon. It is not. Again, would Trump run a real estate deal this way? This is like a bank and insurance company agreeing that two people will exchange property even though those individuals have no idea they are about to be moving. This also risks the entire deal failing on the whims of a Hezbollah commander launching rockets at Israel. You think Israel is not going to respond? And since Iran is now basically coming out and saying “Hezbollah is Iran”, the Israelis would be fully justified in including attacks on Iran as part of any response to Hezbollah.

Flat out retarded.

The Iran war is already reshaping alliances and narratives, while fueling a deeper argument over U.S. power, limits, and long-term strategy.

By Victor Davis Hanson

June 18, 2026

The shooting portion of the Iran “War” lasted about 40 days—far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya.

Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants—far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far.

No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes—depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance.

But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and is now closed, so the war was a failure.

The Strait was open because an appeased Iran had no reason to close it—given that no nation on earth dared to end its nuclear dreams of dominating the Middle East, funding anti-Western terrorists, and threatening Europe and the U.S.

So the rub was always disarming Iran and then dealing with its inevitable desperate strategy of closing the Strait.

Trump’s agreement will simply be a copy of Obama’s earlier Iran deal.

Obama dealt from a position of abject weakness. Iran assumed correctly that Obama would offer endless concessions and cash, while never considering force.

Does Obama really believe that Iran in 2015 was stronger than it is now after 40 days of intense American, Israeli, and Gulf state bombing?

Trump is dealing with a bankrupt Iran, a neutered military, a restive Iranian street, a wounded regime, and the specter that the U.S. can do whatever it wishes militarily to a shattered Iran for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. is bereft of allies and strategically isolated in the war.

During the war, the unthinkable occurred when Israel de facto became an ally of the Arab Gulf monarchies. Other than a few rogue nations and Arab terrorist clients—the weakened Hezbollah, the crushed Hamas, and the wary Houthis—Iran has zero friends.

Neither China nor Russia offered Iran much in the way of aid, other than satellite imagery and some smuggled supplies. Both lost their once-prominent positions among clients in the Middle East who deeply resented their siding with Persian Shiite theocrats over Arab oil suppliers and arms buyers.

Israel has more combat aircraft than the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The Gulf monarchies do so as well. Both Israel and the Gulf states have been flying bombing missions against Iran. There is a far greater chance of Arab-Israeli rapprochement after the war than before it.

The war has torn apart the Republican Party, ensured a Democratic landslide in the midterms, and endangered a Republican victory in 2028.

Antisemitism, neo-isolationism, and conspiracy theories were already the mark of the apostate right. But almost all of the new MAGA critics have lost the trust of Republicans and increasingly are either mirror-imaging the Left in Never Trump fashion or drifting off into Nick Fuentes nihilism.

Trump may lose House and/or Senate seats in the midterms—as happened in 38 of the last 41 midterms since the Civil War.

Yet there are still well over four months before the elections. If Trump keeps the Strait open—ither by force, negotiations, or through a mixture of both—oil prices will likely drop before November, given increased production worldwide.

If Iran is rendered militarily incapable of posing a major threat to the region and the world and is forced to accept American terms, then Republicans may enter November quite competitively.

The Iran War was a betrayal of MAGA’s commitment to no “forever wars.”

The second Iran intervention, following up on the initial June 2025 bombing, was certainly an optional and preemptive action. In that sense, it was akin to Trump’s first-term Soleimani and Baghdadi hits, the destruction of ISIS, and the response to the Wagner Group attack.

Yet there still are no ground troops in Iran. The loss of 13 soldiers, while tragic, is less than the two-week fatal-accident rate of the military.

There is a good chance that less than six weeks of active bombing achieved far more than 20 years in Afghanistan and a decade in Iraq—at a fraction of the human and fiscal costs.

The key to negotiating an end to the war is to always remember that Iran’s regime—its theocrats, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, military leaders, and elected officials—has no history of telling the truth or abiding by any agreement it signs.

So the only means of enforcing concessions is to use disproportionate force each time Iran inevitably violates the terms of 

I always liked Jay Leno; his jokes would make you groan but begrudgingly chuckle during his 21-year reign as Tonight Show host, which started in 1992 (with a brief break as Conan O’Brien took over for a bit, but that’s another story). Compared to the toxic bile spewed by today’s wastes of airtime like Jimmy Kimmel and the thankfully cancelled Stephen Colbert, however, he was a genius.

That being said, I could have done without this latest bit from “Jay Leno’s Garage,” which I will describe shortly.

But if you’re ever feeling down about the current news cycle or cynical about the latest dramas in Washington, D.C., I have a cure: remember where we could have been. Joe Biden — or God forbid, Kamala Harris — could be sitting in the Oval Office right now, watching with a wry grin as they further engineer the decline of America.

As if to bring the point home, here’s Ole Joe appearing with Leno, reminiscing about his attempts to kneecap America’s energy supply:

Biden:

…the other thing I was able to do, I made sure there could be no oil drilling off the East Coast, the West Coast, and 150 miles —

The next part is completely unintelligible; Lord only knows what he actually intended to say. As you can see in the RNC Research tweet above, they were able to discern that he meant “hescodoinalotprotection.”

And what does this next utterance mean? It implies anger, but other than that, who knows?

No more windmills. Yeah, because they killed birds. Yeah, give me freaking break.

Okayyyyyy. And yes, windmills do kill hundreds of thousands of birds a year — birds like eagles. Go ahead and laugh about it, guys; the brutal death of many of our national birds is so humorous.

One can’t help but wonder what Leno really thought about this idiocy, seeing as he is a car collector and, although he’s been supportive of electric vehicles, the vast majority of his autos are gas-powered.

Here’s the problem, Einstein (I mean, Joe) — you may have attempted to kneecap our energy independence, but you didn’t invent a replacement technology. Sure, “green energy” advances have progressed, but the tech is nowhere near as efficient, cost-effective, and reliable as good old fossil fuels, as our Ward Clark has documented relentlessly.

It’s like cutting off the hose, but forgetting to provide an alternative source of water. Without water, everything dies. Without energy, economies wither (and/or end up having to depend on foreign powers — often our enemies).

Laugh all you want, Joe, but it’s decisions like these that thankfully have you trading jokes on a California highway with Jay Leno and not making decisions in the Oval Office.

Bob Hoge, Red State

Social promotion and efforts to ban standardized tests are ways of shielding adults from accountability.

By Jason L. Riley

June 16, 2026 5:19 pm ET

If you stare really hard—and maybe squint—at last week’s federal report on long-term K-12 education trends in the U.S., there is some good news. Math and reading scores among 9-year-olds have improved a little since 2022, and most of the gains were driven by struggling students. It’s a signal that those in the youngest cohort of test takers are recovering from the disastrous pandemic school closures.

The good news pretty much ends there. Among 13-year-olds in nearly every demographic group, test scores in math and reading were flat. And most youngsters continue to lack proficiency in both subjects. Standardized tests have no shortage of detractors, but these evaluations have become more important in an era of grade inflation and meaningless graduation rates.

Last week several readers pointed me to a recent investigative report in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the pressure on teachers to pass students regardless of classroom performance or even attendance. The paper said it was “an open secret that in many schools, it is nearly impossible to fail a student.” The result is a school system full of children unable to perform academically at even the most basic level.

“On paper, Philadelphia students can fail courses, or be retained in a grade, so long as they are offered appropriate interventions and supports,” according to the Inquirer. “But many teachers said that they were discouraged or forbidden by their principals from flunking students, or that they have given out failing grades that were overridden. Others said failing students was permitted if justified, but the administrative burden to rationalize failure, even for students who did not show up to school, is onerous or impossible.”

The downstream damage of promoting students to the next grade based on their age rather than their mastery of the material might be incalculable, and it raises frightening questions about what our workforce will look like in the decades to come. The literacy and numeracy skills of Americans have declined in recent years. An Education Department study in 2024 found that 1 in 4 young adults are functionally illiterate, even though more than half received high-school diplomas.

Job prospects and earnings for people who lack rudimentary language and math skills can be severely limited. There are exceptions, but in general people with higher levels of education have higher incomes and a lower risk of unemployment. We talk about the earnings gap between high-school graduates and college graduates, yet many of today’s high-school grads function at or below a middle-school level of education. Eliminating standardized tests wouldn’t change that reality, and it would help policymakers and the education establishment avoid accountability.

The problems with our K-12 school system have been in the making for generations, and what’s frustrating is the feebleness of efforts to address them. Political leaders insist on the need for more education spending, but it isn’t expensive to teach children reading and arithmetic, something that was done competently for many decades on budgets much smaller than what educators have at their disposal today.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed smaller class sizes to address the learning gap. This is a hobbyhorse of the teachers unions that control public education (and the mayor) because it requires employing more dues-paying instructors and school staff. Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown that smaller class sizes have minimal effect on student learning. Countries that consistently outperform the U.S. on international tests, including Japan and South Korea, have larger classes on average. So do many high-performing charter schools. The data show that a good teacher is far more important than a smaller class, yet our public school system values seniority over competence.

Liberals are likewise focused on classroom diversity and on hiring teachers who share the racial or ethnic background of minority students. But you will be hard-pressed to find much racial diversity in the classrooms of Tokyo and Seoul, and the best-performing students in the U.S. tend to be of South Asian and East Asian heritage. They are among the groups least likely to be taught by someone who looks like them.

So much of what ails higher education in the U.S. is rooted in a broken K-12 system that fails to prepare college-bound students adequately. Grade inflation in high school necessitates grade inflation at universities. Lower high-school graduation standards lead naturally to lower college graduation standards to guard against high failure and dropout rates. Colleges have amassed redundant remedial programs to teach freshmen subjects they should have learned long before arriving on campus.

Historically, educational attainment has been an effective way of addressing social inequality, and standardized testing is one of the few ways to measure which policies are working and which ones aren’t. The educators and policy wonks who want to do away with these assessments aren’t looking out for children. They are looking out for themselves.

By Jason L. Riley