☢️ Drone Strikes UAE’s Barakah Nuclear Plant — IAEA Issues “Grave Concern” Warning

A drone strike hit an electrical generator on the perimeter of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant in Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra region Sunday — the only nuclear plant in the Arab world, which supplies roughly 25% of the UAE’s electricity — with UAE air defenses intercepting two of three incoming drones but failing to stop the third, as IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi expressed “grave concern” and called for “maximum military restraint near any nuclear power plant.” No radiation was released, no injuries were reported, and all four reactors continued operating normally, according to The National and Fortune.

The UAE did not officially attribute responsibility, but it has accused Iran of launching repeated drone and missile attacks on its infrastructure since the Iran war began — hitting oil and gas facilities, a hotel, an airport, and now the perimeter of a nuclear plant. Emergency diesel generators are now providing backup power to one reactor unit, and the IAEA said it was following the situation closely. One reactor being powered by backup generators rather than the grid is, engineers note, not the same as a reactor being damaged — but it is a sign of how close a strike on civilian nuclear infrastructure came to a much more serious outcome, CNBC reported.

The Founders who designed the republic’s war powers understood that when a conflict begins to touch nuclear facilities — even the perimeters of them — the potential consequences have crossed a threshold that makes ordinary military calculations obsolete. The ceasefire with Iran is already on life support. An attack on a nuclear plant, even an unsuccessful one, represents an escalation that the current diplomatic framework is simply not equipped to manage.

✈️ Four Airmen Eject Safely After Midair Collision at Idaho Air Force Base Show

Two F-15E Strike Eagles from the 366th Fighter Wing collided midair at roughly 2,000 feet over Mountain Home Air Force Base in southwestern Idaho Sunday afternoon during the second day of the Gunfighters Skies Air Show — with all four aviators ejecting safely and deploying parachutes visible to the thousands of spectators below before the jets crashed approximately two miles northwest of the base in a fireball of black smoke, prompting an immediate base lockdown and cancellation of the show, according to NBC News.

An eyewitness told NBC News: “I heard someone next to me say ‘We are down.’ I turned around and saw four parachutes coming down, then black smoke appeared. The atmosphere is very calm, controlled and well managed right now.” Mountain Home police urged the public to avoid traveling to the base as emergency crews responded and the Air Force Safety Center launched its investigation. The 366th Fighter Wing — nicknamed “Gunfighters” — is one of the Air Force’s primary composite wing units, capable of conducting full-spectrum air combat missions, Fox News reported.

We are grateful all four aviators are safe. Midair collisions during air shows — while rare — are a sobering reminder that military aviation, even in a demonstration context, carries real risk undertaken by real men and women who train for exactly this kind of emergency. The ejection system worked. The training worked. The men came home. That is the right outcome, and it speaks well of the Air Force’s preparation and equipment.

🇺🇦 Ukraine Launches Its Largest Drone Strike on Moscow in Over a Year

Ukraine struck Russia overnight with one of its largest drone attacks since the war began — sending over 1,000 drones across Russian territory in a 24-hour period, with 556 shot down or jammed over Russia proper and 81 intercepted over Moscow alone, while four people were killed, including a woman in Khimki just northwest of the capital and two men in a village six miles north of Moscow, and 12 were wounded near the city’s oil refinery — with drone debris also falling on the grounds of Sheremetyevo Airport, Russia’s largest, without causing damage or disrupting flights, according to NPR.

President Zelensky confirmed the strikes and called them “entirely justified,” saying they were retaliation for Russia’s heavy attacks on Kyiv immediately after the Victory Day ceasefire ended. Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Ukraine was “reminding the Moscow population that it is vulnerable” — and noted that Russia’s battlefield setbacks, economic deterioration, and intensifying internet crackdowns are “intensifying the mix of concerns” in Moscow, though the same analysts said there is “no prospect in the shorter term” that those pressures will push Russia toward peace negotiations, NBC News/Reuters reported.

The Founders who gave Congress the power to declare war understood that wars are easy to start and hard to end — and that a conflict that has now stretched beyond three years, with no diplomatic framework in sight and strikes reaching the outskirts of Moscow, has its own momentum that is not easily reversed by the will of either side. The Ukraine-Russia war and the Iran ceasefire are not unrelated. They are two theaters of the same broader struggle over what kind of international order follows the one built after 1945.

🤝 Trump Turns on Boebert for Backing Massie — But His Reach Has Limits

President Trump turned his Truth Social fire on Rep. Lauren Boebert Saturday, calling her “weak-minded” and asking if anyone wanted to primary her in Colorado’s 4th congressional district — after she traveled to Kentucky to campaign alongside Rep. Thomas Massie ahead of his Tuesday primary against Trump-backed Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein — threatening to withdraw his own prior endorsement of Boebert, even though Massie pointed out after the rally that the filing deadline to challenge Boebert had already passed, according to The Hill and Fox News.

Boebert responded without apology: “Yes, I saw the President’s post. No I’m not mad or offended. I knew the risks when I agreed to stand by my friend Thomas Massie. I was, and will be, America First, America Always, and MAGA.” Rand Paul, who also traveled to Kentucky to stump for Massie, similarly absorbed Trump’s condemnation with equanimity. Massie’s response was characteristically direct: “I think he should be mending fences with these folks, not trying to burn bridges,” he told Fox News — adding that Trump’s Truth Social posts were actually helping his fundraising, saying “every time he tweets about me, it’s good for some money coming in.”

There is a reasonable conservative case for Massie’s independence — he is a principled fiscal hawk who votes his convictions — and a reasonable conservative case for replacing him. What is harder to defend is a president targeting a loyal ally like Boebert for the offense of standing by a friend, in a race where the filing deadline had already passed and the threat was therefore empty. The Founders who built a republic of separated powers understood that the strength of an alliance comes from its voluntary nature. Loyalty that is coerced is compliance, not fidelity.

⭐ Massie: “Billionaires Are Trying to Buy My Seat” — The Most Important Conservative Primary of 2026

Rep. Thomas Massie went on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning to make his closing argument ahead of Tuesday’s primary — one of the most expensive House primary in American history at $25.6 million in advertising — pointing to the outside money flooding against him and insisting he was ahead in his internal polling, with Rand Paul, Lauren Boebert, and four members of Congress traveling to Kentucky on Saturday to stump for him, according to ABC News.

Before Tuesday’s verdict comes in, it is worth being precise about who Thomas Massie actually is — because the president’s framing of him as disloyal does not survive contact with the scorecard data. Massie earned a perfect 100% from the Club for Growth in 2024 and carries a 93% lifetime rating, winning the Club’s “Defender of Economic Freedom” award 10 consecutive times. He is rated “A” by the NRA, strongly pro-life, and consistently aligned with the Republican Party platform on social, constitutional, and Second Amendment issues. He has been one of the most reliably conservative members of Congress by every objective measure for over a decade — on everything except fiscal restraint, where his principles actually exceed most of the party’s, The Hill reported.

Where Massie broke from Trump was not on values — it was on a handful of principles: opposing runaway deficit spending even in Republican bills, pushing for full release of the Epstein files, and criticizing aspects of the Iran war policy. These are exactly the kinds of principled disagreements the republican system was built to accommodate. Trump’s decision to treat those breaks as acts of disloyalty deserving political destruction — rather than as the honest conservatism of a strong ally who occasionally disagrees — raises a question conservatives across the country are watching closely: has loyalty to the president replaced fidelity to conservative principle as the price of admission in today’s GOP?

🏛️ Cassidy Gone — And Unlike Massie, the Scorecard Actually Backs It Up

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana became the first Republican senator Trump successfully ousted from office Saturday night, failing to advance past a primary that sent Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming to a June 27 runoff — ending Cassidy’s political career five years after he voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, according to CNN and NPR.

Unlike Thomas Massie — who scores 100% annually and 93% lifetime with the Club for Growth — Bill Cassidy scored 62% in 2024 and 65% in 2023, with a 70% lifetime rating that places him squarely in the moderate-to-establishment wing of the Republican Party. That gap is not a technicality. It reflects a consistent pattern of votes that put Cassidy closer to the big-spending center than to the principled conservative right: he voted for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, repeatedly split with conservatives on fiscal restraint, chaired the Senate HELP Committee in ways that frustrated the MAHA movement, and had a governing record that was genuinely out of step with the Republican Party platform — not just with Donald Trump personally, The Hill reported.

Louisiana voters had substantive conservative reasons to want a different senator, independent of the impeachment vote. The two races — Cassidy’s and Massie’s — are not the same story told twice. They are the opposite story. Cassidy was a tax-and-spend establishment Republican who was not loyal to Trump, the Constitution, or the Republican Party platform. Massie is a 100%-scoring, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, constitutionally faithful conservative who broke with the president on a handful of specific principles — and is being treated identically. When Trump targets Massie with the same energy he used to oust Cassidy, he is no longer running a conservative loyalty test. He is running a personal loyalty test. Those are very different things, and conservatives who care about governing philosophy rather than just political allegiance know the difference.