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Why Iran Believes Israel Will Attack Again Before October

Will Israel restart the war with Iran before the October elections? This is the consensus view emerging within Iran’s internal national security debate over the past week.

Several factors are driving Tehran to this conclusion. Beyond its deep – and not entirely unwarranted – suspicion of President Donald Trump’s intentions, heightened by Vice President JD Vance’s recent remark that Trump wants to use the MOU to replenish global oil reserves and then “see where the hand is,” two developments stand out: the recent Israeli-Lebanese agreement and its impact on Hezbollah’s military posture over the coming months.

From Tehran’s perspective, the agreement hands Israel a significant advantage in any renewed war with Iran – one it lacked in February. By allowing Israeli forces to remain in parts of southern Lebanon, the deal appears to contravene the MOU while fundamentally reshaping the military balance. Israel’s continued presence in these strategic positions would make it far more difficult for Hezbollah to mount the kind of offensive operations that proved critical during the previous round of fighting.

That matters because, in February and March, the Iranians say they used only about 40 percent of their offensive capabilities against Israel, because Hezbollah carried much of the remaining burden. At the time, pundits in the West were debating why Tehran hit the UAE harder than it did Israel.

Part of it was because of Israel’s much higher pain tolerance compared to the GCC states. Tehran was aiming to reach the most accessible pain threshold to pressure the US to end the war. But part of it was the critical role Hezbollah played in the war, contrary to much of the press coverage at the time. It played a critical role in stretching Israel’s defenses, complicating its targeting decisions, and forcing it to divide resources across multiple fronts.

That role, however, was poorly understood because Israel imposed near-total military censorship during the war – far stricter than the censorship regime in June 2025 – which sharply limited public visibility into Hezbollah’s operations and their impact. As a result, the degree to which Hezbollah shaped the course of the war has been significantly underestimated.

Unlike the MOU, the current Israeli-Lebanese agreement does not require Israel to withdraw from Lebanese territory until Hezbollah has been disarmed. Since that outcome is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, Israel is poised to retain its positions inside Lebanon, enabling it to renew the war with Iran without facing the same pressure from its northern front that constrained it during the previous conflict.

Netanyahu’s motivations are clear. Beyond his long-standing desire to use American force to subjugate Iran to Israeli domination and achieve a regional balance favorable to Israel, he now also has stark political and personal reasons to restart the war.

The MOU has come at a steep political cost for Netanyahu. His prospects for reelection in October are weaker than they have been in months. Once seen as the Israeli leader uniquely capable of delivering President Trump, he now confronts the prospect that both the war and the ensuing diplomacy will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position – undermining the very case he has made for his leadership.

And of course, if he loses the elections, he will likely spend the next few years in jail, as he will lose his immunity as Prime Minister and face trial over corruption charges.

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Kamala Harris Reaches Out to Mamdani and AOC, and Yes, That’s What It Means

Well, it looks as if Kamala Harris is indeed planning to run for president in 2028, and that she is counting on the Democrat Party’s rapidly growing Marxist wing to propel her into the White House. Yes, it could mean the end of the United States as a free nation, particularly given the Biden regime’s taste for authoritarianism (hounding the social media giants to silence COVID dissidents, trying to establish a Disinformation Governance Board, treating pro-lifers as if they were terrorists, etc.). About that, Harris has never shown any concern, and now she seems more focused on the pursuit of raw power than ever before.

That was clear from the fact that, as Fox News reported Wednesday, Harris is “courting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and other progressive power players as 2028 speculation builds around another possible White House bid.”

Mamdani is a committed Marxist and Twelver Shi’ite Muslim who has already set in motion efforts to make the city government, or Mamdani’s cronies in Marxist NGOs, New York City’s biggest landlord, which would cement the far left in power for the foreseeable future and almost certainly seal the demise of the city that is the very symbol of capitalism and the financial capital of the world. 

Instead of reaching out to Mamdani and trying to forge ties with him, Harris and other pillars of the Democrat establishment ought to be shunning him and his ilk, and making it abundantly clear that their party is not a Marxist, anti-American outfit. That, however, would require a sane world.

In this one, Harris also met with another socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Swizzle Stick), “behind the scenes at a Black women empowerment summit in Chicago,” which also indicates that Harris is still pretending to be black. Among her numerous notorious statements, AOC, herself a rising star in Democrat circles, once declared that “a system that allows billionaires to exist” is inherently immoral, and insisted as recently as May 2026 that it is impossible to earn a billion dollars without breaking the law.

As if embracing more or less open Marxists weren’t enough, Harris went for the full leftist/Islamic trifecta, as she has “reportedly has also been reaching out to pro-Palestinian groups after she faced pushback from those groups during her 2024 presidential run. Harris reached out to at least one group that was part of the ‘Uncommitted Movement’ that developed as a result of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel and Gaza conflict.”

Just days after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Old Joe Biden gave Gaza $100 million in “humanitarian aid,” which means that he was funding Hamas’ jihad against Israel. Hamas was in control of Gaza, and so the money went to Hamas. (The Biden regime wasn’t about to give the money to Israel to distribute.) And since Old Joe was supplying the money for food and medicine and schools and the like, the money that Hamas had planned to spend on all that was then freed up to pay for rockets, bombs, tunnels, and other accoutrements of jihad. 

Yet even that wasn’t enough for the far left, which demanded that Old Joe repudiate Israel altogether. Harris, in meeting with a group that hated Israel so much that it wouldn’t vote for Old Joe, was signaling that she was prepared to throw the Jewish state under the bus in order to get into the White House.

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The War in Ukraine Arrives at a Crucial Juncture

Though relegated to the sidelines thanks to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch an illegal and unjustified war on Iran at the behest of the Israeli warfare state, the war in Ukraine grows more dangerous with each passing day. In fact, recent reports indicate a perilous increase in attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure from both Moscow and Kiev.

On June 17, Kiev launched the largest aerial attack of the war on Moscow with an estimated 550 drones and missiles. One attack resulted in the spectacular explosion at the Kapotnya refinery southeast of Moscow. It was the third time in a month that the refinery had been targeted by Kiev. Whether the explosion was caused by a Russian MANPAD defending Moscow or by a direct hit from a Ukrainian drone remains unclear. Shortly after the attack, a Ukrainian commander sent a message to the Russian people: “This war has now reached your homes as well. We hope that message helps Russia bring this war to an end.”

Only days later, on June 20, another attack struck the Antipinsky oil refinery in Tyumen in Western Siberia, some 1,200 miles from Ukraine. That same evening, Ukraine struck the oil terminal at Kerch in Crimea. A week later, Ukraine hit Russian refineries in the Krasnodar and Yaroslavl regions.

In response, Russian forces have struck both Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia, killing numerous civilians. For his part, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, noted that “strikes on our infrastructure, wherever they are directed, have absolutely no effect on the situation at the front, on the line of contact.”

For Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, there would seem to be a number of motives at play — none of which portend an end to the conflict, now in its fifth year. For one thing, Zelensky has seen a dip in the robust support he once had from Washington under Trump II. He seems convinced that such shows of force will shore up what remains of his support among Democratic war hawks, as well as among his European collaborators such as the German Chancellor Frederich Merz and the now-departing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Yet Zelensky’s stepped-up drone war, far from being, as some US analysts suggest, a show of strength, may be the beginning of the end for the budding despot, the desperate last gasp of a wartime leader with an economy in ruins, a shrinking population, and a generation of young men irretrievably lost. Putting Zelensky’s drone war into proper perspective may require recalling how ultimately ineffective the flurry of Nazi Germany’s V2 missile attacks on London and the Japanese Kamikaze attacks on the US Navy were during the final year of the Second World War.

The mood among ‘official’ Moscow has, as might be expected in light of these developments, grown darker than usual. In addition to the unprecedented drone attacks on Moscow, Russia has suffered an estimated 1.2 million war casualties, including approximately 325,000 dead. And while there are growing signs of war weariness and disgust with Putin’s regime among pro-Western elements in Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are voices close to the Kremlin that are, in a manner not terribly dissimilar to our own neoconservatives whenever Israel attacked, baying for blood.

Sergei Karaganov, an academic who heads the Kremlin’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, has repeatedly called for Russia to strike Europe with nuclear weapons in order to “restore deterrence.” For his part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov promised that Russia would retaliate for the refinery attack on a “mass scale.” Lavrov also warned that the current “state of affairs poses serious threats to global security. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia could rapidly escalate into an exchange of nuclear strikes, with catastrophic consequences.” Lavrov’s comments were originally meant for publication in POLITICO Europe, but the outlet, owned by the shamelessly pro-war Axel Springer group, pulled the piece at the last minute. Heaven forbid we hear from the “enemy” directly.

That said, with Donald Trump distracted by more pressing matters of state such as the deteriorating condition of the Reflecting Pool and his duties as host of the Great American State Fair (his promise to end this war now, as with so many other promises, forgotten) few, if any, remaining world leaders outside of Pope Leo XIV have called for a cessation of hostilities in between Russia and Ukraine and her sponsors in Washington and Brussels.

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The Last Nurse Standing

There are court cases that arrive dressed as employment disputes but carry the weight of an era. Adams et al. v. Mass General Brigham is one of them.

On paper, it is a federal discrimination case in Boston involving three remaining plaintiffs, Tyler Adams, Michelle Orfanos, and Jamie Steverman, against Mass General Brigham, the most powerful hospital system in Massachusetts. In reality, it is a post-pandemic reckoning over institutional power, religious liberty, scientific certainty, workplace coercion, and who gets to write the official history of the mandate years.

Mass General Brigham is not some minor regional employer. It is the largest private employer in Massachusetts, a Harvard-affiliated medical empire with tens of thousands of employees and annual revenue measured in the tens of billions. Its own public materials describe the system as having 82,000 employees and $23 billion in annual revenue, while its CEO profile states that Anne Klibanski leads an 85,000-employee system with $22 billion in revenue and $2.7 billion in annual research funding.

In June 2021, MGB announced that all 80,000 employees would be required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine once the FDA granted approval to one of the vaccines. “The evidence of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness is overwhelming,” Klibanski said in the announcement. Employees, MGB stated, would be able to request medical and religious exemptions.

That promise, that exemptions existed, is where the story begins.

More than 2,400 employees sought exemptions. MGB granted only 234. In a 2023 federal order, Judge F. Dennis Saylor wrote that MGB had “effectively made a determination that some level of risk, eventually involving 234 unvaccinated individuals out of approximately 93,600 employees… was tolerable.”

For the plaintiffs, that fact is not incidental. It is central. Their argument is not that MGB granted no exemptions. Their argument is that MGB granted some exemptions while allegedly denying others through a secretive, discriminatory, and uneven process that favored certain religions and disfavored others.

The most vivid remaining face of that fight is Michelle Orfanos, a registered nurse who had worked for MGB since 2012. According to her state-court complaint, Orfanos worked throughout the pandemic unvaccinated, including as a homecare nurse and as a volunteer in the Boston COVID field hospital. She says she had received religious exemptions to flu vaccines for years, only to have her COVID religious exemption denied in 2021, resulting in her termination.

Then came the second firing.

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Sarah McBride Says Trump’s ‘They/Them’ Ad Worked Because Dems ‘Remained Silent’

Transgender Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) said President Donald Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” campaign ad resonated with voters in part because Democrat leaders “remained silent” instead of responding to the attack during the 2024 election.

In an interview with The Hill’s “In the Know” columnist Judy Kurtz, McBride was asked about the Trump campaign ad that appeared to be highly effective and asked whether Democrats needed to handle the issue differently going into the midterms and the next presidential race.

“In the 2024 White House race, there was an ad from the Trump campaign saying that Kamala Harris is for they/them and Donald Trump is for us. I believe it was featured in your documentary as well. It seemed to be pretty effective,” Kurtz asked. “Do you think, going into the midterms and then the next presidential race, Democrats have to be careful in how they handle this issue so they are not pushed off balance by Republicans?”

“Well, I think the degree to which that ad was effective in the last election was a byproduct of two major issues,” McBride responded. “One was the perception that people had that Democrats were not fighting for bold, broad-based economic policy as our top priority. And the second was that we were silent in the face of the ad.”

McBride said many Democrat leaders were unsure how to answer the Trump campaign’s messaging and ultimately chose not to respond.

“I think many of our political leaders in that moment were concerned about how to respond and therefore sort of remained silent,” McBride added. “I think some of the lessons learned from the 2024 cycle are that we have to be able to respond. We have to be willing to respond.”

The interviewer referenced Trump’s 2024 campaign ad, “Kamala Is for They/Them. President Trump Is for You,” which has been viewed more than 632,000 times and received over 22,000 likes on YouTube.

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Courtroom Battles: Trump’s Wins Against the Deep State

Traditionally, June marks the climax of the Supreme Court term. This is when the justices release their most consequential rulings – decisions that shape how America lives for years to come.

For the Trump administration, this June delivered another round of intense combat against the entrenched forces determined to block common-sense reforms, from protecting women’s sports to dismantling the administrative state’s unaccountable power.

The Court’s current makeup gives conservatives a clear 6-3 edge. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were appointed by Republican presidents before Trump.

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined during Trump’s first term. The liberal bloc consists of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (Obama appointees) and Ketanji Brown Jackson (Biden appointee).

This alignment produced meaningful advances for the administration’s agenda even as the left’s institutional resistance remained fierce.

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The Supreme Court Has Weakened The Regulatory State

n Trump v. Slaughter, published yesterday, the Supreme Court held that the President has plenary (that is, unfettered) authority to fire the heads of regulatory agencies (though not the governors of the Federal Reserve Board, as explained in a note at the end of this post). The decision is hugely consequential. It is both a massive blow to the regulatory state and a huge—albeit precarious—step to returning our nation to function as the Constitution intended.

For over a century, ever since President Woodrow Wilson ushered in the “progressive era,” Congress has been creating “independent” agencies that have complete power to write regulations with the force and effect of law, and then to enforce those regulations, including deciding cases in their own courts, with penalties that include fines and jail time.

This means that, for most of our lifetimes, we have lived in a nation where federal agencies, which do not exist in the Constitution and are insulated from the ballot box, have had a far greater impact on our daily lives than the other three branches of government. The agencies’ reach has been an ever more intrusive tyranny of the regulatory state, from the EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding (which allows the agency to control every aspect of life) to the Department of Education’s unceasing support for teachers’ unions, which launder money to the Democrat party. (Indeed, Jimmy Carter created the DOE to sustain the unions.)

Almost all federal agencies hew to the same increasingly radical left agenda, as evidenced by political donations. And, indeed, this was President Wilson’s dream: To run roughshod over the Constitution and democracy, substituting rule by technocrats. Until yesterday, Wilson had succeeded.

When Congress created these so-called “independent agencies,” it often provided that the people appointed to operate had long-term sinecures that presidents could end only for malfeasance. This created what some called a fourth branch of government, cementing the “Deep State.” These agency heads, running their own fiefdoms, could thwart an elected president’s preferred policies. As Senator Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly, and rightly, pointed out, “personnel is policy.”

However, despite their seeming entrenchment, these agencies have no place under the Constitution. Art. II Section 1 provides that the “executive power” to enforce the laws resides solely with the duly elected president. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion, the Constitution’s drafters explicitly intended that the executive power include the plenary authority to remove any personnel exercising executive powers. Congress cannot curb that power using legislation.

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Child under age of 12 euthanised in the Netherlands for the first time after law change

A seriously ill child under the age of 12 has been euthanised in the Netherlands for the first time after a law change two years ago.

In a letter to parliament, Dutch health minister Sophie Hermans said that the child had died last year but did not clarify their age, date of death or the illness that they suffered, according to broadcaster NOS.

The law in the Netherlands was changed in 2024 to extend euthanasia to children under the age of 12 to allow them to “die with dignity” if there was no route to escape extremely severe pain or suffering.

Previously the procedure had only been permissible for newborns and children aged over 12. Patients under the age of 18 require the consent of a parent or guardian.

Under euthanasia laws, a person must be in a state of intolerable suffering with no realistic hope of relief and it should only be applied in exceptional and extreme circumstances.

In order to undergo the procedure, a doctor must persuade the authorities that euthanasia is appropriate and that there is no humane alternative. The threshold is extremely high when applying the legislation to young children.

Hermans said that the review committee has examined the case and spoken to the doctor involved, according to NOS.

The committee’s judgment has been forwarded to the Public Prosecution Service (OM) who must ultimately determine whether the doctor acted in accordance with the law. The recommendation of the review committee will be made public shortly, she explained.

When the rule was changed it was expected only to apply to around five children every year.

“Euthanasia is only allowed for patients whose unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement has a medical dimension,” government guidance says.

“Termination of life is only allowed if a child is terminally ill and is suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.

“This means the child is in constant, severe pain. And that there is no cure, and no reasonable alternative to relieve the child’s suffering, even through palliative care.

“In this situation, the doctor may decide, together with the parents, to terminate the child’s life. This decision is always made in consultation with the parents and, if possible, also with the child.”

In the UK, a bill to allow adults in England and Wales with fewer than six months to live to apply for an assisted death – subject to the approval of two doctors and an expert panel – will return to the House of Commons this September.

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Big Corporations Get Rich From Their Secret Seed Patents — Taxpayers and Farmers Pay the Price

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties.

As a result, a small number of corporations can — and do — suppress competition in the seed industry, stifle innovation and turn taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found that two companies control more than 70% of U.S. corn and soybean seed sales, and the top four cottonseed companies control nearly 94% of that market.

In a May court filing in a legal dispute between two U.S. seed companies, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said patents on seeds are obstructing competition and research in the agriculture industry.

As researchers who work on plant breeding and seed policy, we have seen how that plays out.

When huge companies assert their patents, smaller businesses and public plant breeders, who often lack the legal resources to fight back, are frequently dissuaded from conducting research and development that might actually not be illegal at all.

And a lack of competition allows dominant companies — not always based in the U.S. — to collect large sums of taxpayer money that Congress allocated in hopes it would help farmers, not shareholders’ and executives’ bottom lines.

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Here’s How Dark Money Uses Children In Deep Red States To Spread LGBT Agenda

Among the rolling hills and twisting rivers of central Indiana stands a bustling city named Carmel. The town is split almost 50-50 Republican and Democrat, which stands out in the largely conservative state where only four out of 92 counties lean Democrat. Yet the city is still small enough, rural enough, that one would not expect an inconspicuous “pride” festival that popped up in 2021 to become the second-largest such event in the state, attracting an estimated 6,000 people last year and hosting a former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant this year.

The question is, how? How does LGBT propaganda infiltrate conservative states and areas, turning them into sensual celebration grounds? The answer: through children backed by big billionaires.

The annual Carmel Pride Festival started in 2021 when a group of high schoolers in the Gender and Sexuality Alliance club (GSA) at their local school decided to create a “pride month” celebration for the city. Around 2,500 people showed up at the modest student-run celebration. The next year, the group of teenagers reached out to It Gets Better and received $10,000 to put toward their next “pride” event.

It Gets Better is a nonprofit organization that targets children to promote LGBT ideologies “to uplift, empower, and connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth around the globe,” its website states. Through its 50 States. 50 Grants. 5000 Voices program, the organization gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to “middle and high schools throughout the United States” to support “projects that uplift and empower LGBTQ+ students.” While reporting on the grant project, PR Newswire bragged that the money went to “many traditionally conservative areas.”

The GSA club in Carmel seems to have received continual funding since 2022 from It Gets Better. An article from 2022 confirms the club received another $10,000 in support for the 2023 event, and the Carmel Pride website currently gives “a big thank you” to It Gets Better under the list of 2025 donors. The left-wing activist group the American Civil Liberties Union and the “gay-owned” pro-LGBT surrogacy agency New Dawn are also listed among the donors.

One of It Gets Better’s biggest donors is American Eagle. On It Gets Better’s financials, it lists American Eagle as a “Ground Shaker” for giving more than $100,000 in 2024 alone. The fashion company recently tried to appeal to conservatives through its Sydney Sweeney ads.

A vast swath of cosmetic brands that support LGBT marketing also back It Gets Better, including MAC VIVA GLAM under the Estée Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation, Bath & Body Works, e.l.f. Cosmetics, and Ulta Beauty Charitable Foundation, among many others. The latter two organizations gave at least $50,000, while the other contributed $100,000 or more in the past year.

One common denominator between the cosmetic brands and American Eagle is their ties to BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, or the “Big Three.” The asset firms hold about a fourth of each of the above companies that fund It Gets Better when their shares are combined, and all three firms are known for pushing leftist ideology.

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