Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• Iran shot down a U.S. Apache. Trump hit back. Then Iran fired missiles at American bases in three countries.

• The House passed $70 billion for ICE by two votes. The slush fund survived.

• A Texas jury with zero Black members convicted Karmelo Anthony in three hours.

• Primary Watch: Platner won Maine in a walk. California’s “rigged” count landed right where everyone expected.

• Plus: Trump booed at the NBA Finals, ICE stopped counting the dead, Bari Weiss eyes CNN, NASA’s moon crew is all men, and the VP got chickens.

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An Apache, a Truth Social Post, and a Warning to Bibi

The Story.

Monday evening, June 8, an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter went down over the Strait of Hormuz while patrolling near the Omani coast. Both pilots were rescued by an unmanned Navy drone boat, uninjured.

A U.S. official told Axios an Iranian drone struck the helicopter and caused the crash. By Tuesday afternoon, Trump confirmed Iran shot it down and promised a response. At 5 p.m. ET, CENTCOM launched strikes against Iranian air-defense sites, ground-control stations, and surveillance radars near the Strait using Air Force and Navy fighter jets. The strikes concluded around 9 p.m. Hours later, Iran’s IRGC fired four ballistic missiles and several drones at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. Nearly all were intercepted. No American casualties reported.

Hours later, Iran's IRGC fired four ballistic missiles and several drones at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. Nearly all were intercepted. No American casualties reported. The IRGC claimed it attacked 21 targets and destroyed four, including an F-35 hangar in Jordan. This is the worst U.S.-Iran exchange since the April ceasefire. It came the same day Trump warned Netanyahu, per Channel 12 and Axios: "Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon." Netanyahu reportedly called off a major strike on Iran with fighter jets already on the runway after that call. Six days earlier, the House passed a war powers resolution 215-208 to force Trump to end hostilities with Iran.

Tuesday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran has "taken too long" to negotiate and will "pay the price."

The Left’s read. NPR and CNN led with escalation risk and the ceasefire collapsing. The frame: Trump started an unauthorized war 102 days ago, lost an Apache over Hormuz, retaliated, and now Iran is launching missiles at American servicemembers in three countries nobody voted to defend. The war powers vote from last week is the connective tissue: four Republicans crossed the aisle to make it happen, and the thing they warned about just did.

The Right’s read. The right splits the way it has since February. The hawk lane (Fox, NY Post) ran it as proof Iran can’t be trusted and the ceasefire was always fiction. The restraint lane is quieter: Trump telling Netanyahu to stand down reads, in that camp, as a president still trying to end this, not expand it. What’s telling is how little anyone on the right connects the helicopter downing to the war powers vote, because that vote was bipartisan and embarrassing. The four Republicans who crossed over look less like cranks by the hour.

What both sides are skipping. The left runs the escalation clock and barely pauses on the “on your own” quote, which is the single most remarkable statement a wartime president has made about the ally he went to war alongside. Trump didn’t say “I’ll defend Israel.” He said “you’ll be on your own.” That’s not reassurance. That’s a threat aimed at the ally from the commander-in-chief while Iranian missiles are in the air. The right won’t touch it because a Republican president threatening to abandon Israel mid-war splits the donor base and the evangelical lane. And neither side is connecting the “on your own” quote to the Truth Social post that landed this morning, where Trump wrote Iran has “taken too long” and will “pay the price.” That’s not the language of a man who thinks the deal is close. It’s the language of a man preparing the public for the next round of strikes.

I told you on Friday that I didn’t know what was happening with Iran, and I meant it. Four days later, I still don’t, and I’m frustrated, and I suspect a lot of you are too.

Here’s what I think I can see. Trump has a trigger-happy ally who won’t stop swinging and an adversary who’s running out the clock. Netanyahu had jets on the runway and had to be told to stand down. Iran keeps showing up to the table, ordering water, and leaving before the check. Trump’s strategy from the start has been economic pressure: squeeze them with the blockade, crater their oil revenue, and force a deal. Maybe that’s working. But if it is, it’s not working fast enough, and the Iranian strategy looks a lot like wait him out. Stall the talks, test the patience, bet that the Americans get tired before Tehran runs out of runway.

That’s a game of chicken, and the president started it. I say that as someone who supported the initial strikes. But 102 days in, we’ve got an Apache at the bottom of the Strait, Iranian missiles aimed at American bases in three countries, and a Truth Social post this morning where Trump wrote “they’ve taken too long to negotiate” and “now they will have to pay the price.” That’s a different tone from “final throes” and “two or three days,” which is what he told reporters yesterday. Both things can’t be true. Either the deal is close or Iran’s about to get hit again. My gut says more bombs are coming.

The “you’ll be on your own very soon” line to Netanyahu is the other piece. That’s a president telling his ally, mid-war, that the alliance has a shelf life. Which is cool, it should, we have different interests. But the left won’t touch it because threatening to abandon Israel sounds like a compliment to half their base. The right won’t because it sounds like a betrayal to all of theirs. But read it plainly: Trump is frustrated with Netanyahu too. He’s got a war he can’t close, an ally who keeps escalating, and an enemy who keeps stalling.

The war powers vote six days ago, 215-208, with four Republicans crossing: Barrett, Davidson, Fitzpatrick, Massie. None of those were surprises. Fitzpatrick and Massie have been increasingly vocal critics of the war for weeks.

I can’t tell you what happens next. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more strikes before we see a deal. Watch whether Trump’s economic pressure actually bends Iran or just buys time. Watch whether Netanyahu listens to “on your own” or tests it. And watch whether the press covers this as a negotiation that’s struggling or a war they’re rooting against, because I promise you some of them can’t tell the difference.

$70 Billion by Two Votes, and a Slush Fund Nobody Could Kill

The Story.

The House on Tuesday voted 214-212 to pass the Secure America Act, a $70 billion reconciliation package that funds Immigration and Customs Enforcement ($38B), Border Patrol ($26B), and a $5 billion discretionary pool controlled by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin through the end of Trump’s term in January 2029. The bill now goes to Trump’s desk. Every Democrat voted no. One Republican-caucusing independent, California’s Kevin Kiley, also voted against. The Senate had passed it 52-47 on June 5 after an 18-hour marathon during which Democrats and some Republicans tried and failed to attach guardrails to the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, the pot created when DOJ settled Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. That fund, which Democrats call a slush fund for January 6 defendants and Trump allies, survived intact. Schumer: “Republicans refused to permanently outlaw Trump’s $2 billion slush fund, leaving taxpayers to rely on nothing more than a promise from Donald Trump’s personal fixer.” About a dozen conservative Republicans, including Chip Roy and Tim Burchett, initially held up the House vote demanding language from H.R. 2. Speaker Johnson promised them a vote on it before July 4th. They relented.

The Left’s read. NPR and CBS framed it as the end of a 115-day standoff, a party-line vote funding Trump’s deportation machine with no legislative block on the anti-weaponization fund. MSNBC led with: “House passes immigration reconciliation bill — without blocking Trump’s compensation fund.” The emphasis is on the fund that wasn’t killed by statute, not the $70 billion that was.

The Right’s read. Fox ran it clean: “Trump locks in ICE funding through end of presidency.” The Daily Caller emphasized that reconciliation bypassed Democrats, ICE is funded, the process works. The conservative holdout drama got covered as inside baseball that resolved itself. The right isn’t touching the fund because Trump’s own answer on Meet the Press, where he wouldn’t rule out paying J6 defendants, contradicted Blanche’s “dead, period” line from five days earlier.

What both sides are skipping. The $5 billion discretionary pool controlled by Mullin is getting one sentence in every story and deserves a paragraph. That’s $5 billion at the sole discretion of one cabinet secretary with no line-item accountability in the bill. The fund gets all the attention because of the J6 hook, but the discretionary pot is bigger money with less oversight. The other gap: 214-212. One Republican voted no, meaning a single additional defection kills it. The biggest immigration bill of the Trump presidency passed by the thinnest margin possible, and both sides talk about it like it was a landslide. And nobody is putting this vote next to the 76-day DHS shutdown that preceded it, where over 1,100 TSA agents quit while ICE and Border Patrol were already funded from last year’s reconciliation.

Before we talk about the bill, let’s talk about how we got here, because Democrats are hoping you forgot.

After the Minneapolis shootings in January, Senate Democrats vowed to block DHS funding until they got guardrails on ICE: warrants for arrests, body cameras, agents identifying themselves. They shut down DHS to pressure ICE and Border Patrol, but ICE and Border Patrol were already funded through last year’s reconciliation. The agencies Democrats were targeting kept operating. The people who actually lost their paychecks were TSA agents, FEMA workers, support staff, none of whom had anything to do with immigration enforcement. Over 1,100 TSA agents quit. Airport security lines backed up for weeks. The shutdown lasted 76 days. And when it ended? Democrats got zero guardrails. Not one. The deal to reopen DHS didn’t include a single reform they demanded. They left federal workers without a paycheck for almost four months and accomplished nothing.

Now the $70 billion reconciliation passes 214-212, ICE is funded through 2029, and Democrats want to campaign on... the anti-weaponization fund. The fund that’s procedurally dead, judicially frozen, and that the acting AG told Congress is “not moving forward, period.” Is it fair to have concerns about a fund that could theoretically compensate people who assaulted cops on January 6? Sure. As I said last edition, Trump told Welker he wouldn’t be inclined to do that but would have to look at the cases. That’s not a blank check. It remains to be seen whether this fund ever comes back to life. The $5 billion in discretionary cash that Markwayne Mullin can spend however he wants also remains to be seen.

But here’s what doesn’t remain to be seen: Democrats shut down DHS to fight ICE, the fight failed, the workers who had nothing to do with ICE paid the price, and now ICE is funded for three years anyway. That’s not a midterm talking point. That’s a record they’re going to have to answer for, and shouting about a dead fund won’t make the TSA agents who quit forget who left them without a check.

214-212. Two votes. Chip Roy had to be talked off the ledge with a promise of a future vote that has no enforcement mechanism. This bill barely happened. And Democrats still couldn’t stop it, because they spent their leverage four months ago on a shutdown that got them nothing.

Zero Black Jurors. Three Hours. Thirty-Five Years.

The Story.

On Tuesday, a Collin County jury found 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a Frisco ISD track meet on April 2, 2025. The jury deliberated roughly three hours. Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white. They didn’t know each other. The fight started over a tent: Anthony refused to leave a shelter belonging to Metcalf’s team on a rainy day, witnesses described a heated exchange, Metcalf pushed Anthony, and Anthony pulled a knife and stabbed him in the chest. The defense argued self-defense. Prosecutors called it a “sneak attack” with a prohibited weapon. Anthony did not testify. His mother took the stand during sentencing and asked for mercy. During jury selection on June 3, prosecutors used their peremptory strikes to dismiss all three qualified Black women from the jury pool. The defense filed a Batson challenge, arguing the strikes were race-based and noting that a white female juror who was also an educator was not struck. Prosecutors said they removed the Black jurors because they were educators and the stabbing happened at a school event. The judge denied the challenge. The final jury had zero Black members.

The Left’s read. CNN and NBC covered it as a racially charged verdict, emphasizing the all-white jury, the Batson challenge, and the community response. Social media compared it to Jim Crow. WaPo ran a long feature on Frisco’s existing racial divisions and how the trial cracked them wider. The frame: the legal system failed a Black teenager before the trial even began, and the verdict was baked into the jury.

The Right’s read. Townhall ran “Sometimes Justice Does Prevail,” celebrating the verdict and mocking Court TV panelists who were upset. The Daily Wire framed the defense’s collapse as exposing “the big lie of the civil rights era.” Fox covered the jury selection but didn’t question it. The right’s frame: a killer was convicted, the system worked, and the race narrative was manufactured by activists and media.

What both sides are skipping. The left leads with "zero Black jurors" and buries the prosecution's actual explanation: the struck jurors were K-12 educators and the stabbing happened at a school event, while the white educator who stayed teaches adults at a trade school. That distinction disappears from every left-of-center write-up. The left also skips the trial evidence: Anthony brought a knife, was asked to leave more than ten times, didn't testify, and his self-defense claim didn't convince 12 people in three hours. The right runs a victory lap without engaging the Batson record at all. Townhall mocked Court TV panelists for being upset rather than examining the jury question on its merits. The Daily Wire used the verdict to run "Anti-White Violence" and "the big lie of the civil rights era," which does the same thing the left does in reverse: makes race the frame instead of the facts.

Everyone picked a side the second the verdict dropped, and the side they picked tells you nothing about the case.

The Daily Wire ran “Anti-White Violence.” The left ran “Jim Crow jury.” And the actual trial record got buried under both.

Start with the jury. Prosecutors struck three Black women because they were educators and the stabbing happened at a school event. The defense pointed out a white educator who stayed. The prosecution’s answer: that woman teaches adults at a trade school, not children. There is a real difference between teaching at a trade school and teaching K-12. Anyone who’s spent time in both environments knows they’re not the same. It’s a valid distinction. But you’ll notice the outlets pushing the racial framing skip that detail entirely and just say “no Black jurors.” The nuance doesn’t fit the headline.

Now the trial itself, because this is where the race-first framing falls apart. Karmelo Anthony brought a knife to a track meet. He was asked to leave Memorial’s tent more than ten times. Witnesses said he was cursing and taunting. One quoted Metcalf telling him, “I’m not gonna fight you at a track meet, dude.” Metcalf pushed him. Anthony pulled a knife from his backpack and stabbed him in the chest. At the scene, he told the officer: “I’m not alleged. I did it. He put his hands on me. I told him not to.” The wound was two inches and gaping. The medical examiner said it was not survivable.

A defense witness, a 17-year-old who claimed Anthony was surrounded before the stabbing, recanted under cross-examination when prosecutors showed surveillance video proving he wasn’t even looking at the tent when it happened. Eddie Parra, who knew both Anthony and the Metcalf brothers, was asked by the prosecution who was wrong that day. His answer: “Karmelo.”

The media covered this as a race case from day one. But between boys, especially teenage boys, a little pushing happens. It’s not unusual and it doesn’t justify a knife to the chest. Why was a 19-year-old carrying a knife to a track meet in the first place? The coverage that leads with “zero Black jurors” and buries the ten requests to leave, the taunting, the knife, and the confession at the scene is not reporting a race story. It’s building one.

The jury deliberated three hours. The Batson challenge will be appealed, and the standard is weak enough that it’s worth watching. But the people loudest about the jury composition are the ones least interested in what the jury actually heard.

🗳️Primary Watch

Maine: Platner Won With 78%. It Tells You Less Than You Think.

Graham Platner won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary Tuesday night with 77.7% of the vote (Mills got 16.7%, Costello 5.6%) and immediately turned the podium into a prosecution of Susan Collins.

He called her “just as spineless and corrupt as the establishment she now serves,” said she “lied to us” by promising to protect Roe and then voting to confirm Kavanaugh, accused her of supporting “endless wars since I was a teenager,” and said she “is getting rich while we are getting screwed” from private equity donations. He closed on redemption: “If you believe that people can change, then you must also believe that we can change our politics.” Collins responded from Washington: “The allegations against Graham Platner are extremely troubling and serious, and he owes the people of Maine a detailed answer.”

The Free Press

Graham Platner’s Ex-Girlfriend Wants to Set the Record Straight

Last Thursday, The New York Times ran an exposé about Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. The reporters describe a pattern of “unsettling behavior” Platner displayed toward three of his ex-girlfriends—one woman, Lyndsey Fifield, 40, spoke about an instance where he yanked her out of a cab after an argument, and another where she said he twisted her arm behind her back, pushed her into a room, and held the door shut so she couldn’t escape. She also said he cavalierly discussed violence, including threatening to “rape” home intruders. Platner’s campaign did not dispute the rape remarks, but strongly denied any allegations of physical abuse…

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5 days ago · 78 likes · 263 comments · Frannie Block and Audrey Fahlberg

The left framed it as a decisive, defiant launch. The Kavanaugh and Roe lines got heavy rotation. The right keyed on Collins’s response and the abuse allegations that haven’t gone away, reading the “redemption” line with a raised eyebrow. One Nation put $3 million behind Collins before the ballots were counted.

California: The “Rigged” Count Did Exactly What Counts Always Do

A week after the June 2 primary, the count landed where every operative expected. In the governor’s race, Democrat Xavier Becerra overtook Republican Steve Hilton for first place, leading 28% to 25% with 88% of the expected vote counted. The election-night story was “Republican leads in deep-blue California.” The June 10 story is “the mail ballots got counted.”

In the LA mayor’s race, Karen Bass holds first at 34%. Nithya Raman overtook Spencer Pratt for the second runoff spot, 29% to Pratt’s 26% with 93% counted. Pratt, the former reality TV star who led on election night, is now out. Trump spent the week calling the count “rigged.” Hilton himself said he hasn’t seen anything illegal, calling the counting system “a national and international laughingstone” but stopping short of fraud.

Both Maine governor primaries are heading to ranked-choice tabulation.

No candidate in either the Democratic or Republican gubernatorial primary broke 50% on first-choice ballots Tuesday night. On the Democratic side, Dr. Nirav Shah leads narrowly with Hannah Pingree close behind and Troy Jackson in the mix. On the Republican side, Bobby Charles, a former Bush administration official, leads the first round. Ranked-choice tabulation will determine both nominees.

South Carolina’s GOP governor primary heads to a runoff.

Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Attorney General Alan Wilson will face off in two weeks after neither cleared the threshold Tuesday. Rep. Nancy Mace is out. Another test of Trump’s endorsement power in a state he carried by 25 points.

Trump got booed at the NBA Finals. Then the Knicks lost. Trump became the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game Sunday, watching Game 3 from James Dolan’s suite at Madison Square Garden with granddaughter Kai and cabinet members Zeldin, Duffy, and Burgum. When he appeared on the jumbotron, the sellout crowd booed him loudly enough that multiple outlets used the word “thunderous.” The Spurs won 115-111. The president was at a basketball game the same evening his Apache helicopter went down over the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody put the two timelines on the same page.

DOJ opened a civil rights investigation into Arizona State University over DEI. The Justice Department announced it is investigating ASU’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, joining a growing list of federal probes into university DEI offices under a Trump administration that has made the issue a second-term priority. More than 300 colleges have already dismantled DEI offices, per the Department of Education. Fox 10 Phoenix

ICE will stop reporting when people die after leaving its custody. In an internal memo dated June 4, acting ICE Director David Venturella told staff the agency is ending its requirement to report deaths within 30 days of someone being released from custody. The policy being reversed was adopted in 2021 after ICE was found to have a pattern of releasing seriously ill detainees to avoid counting their deaths as in-custody fatalities. Eighteen detainees have died in ICE custody in the first five months of 2026.

NASA announced the Artemis III crew. It’s all men. The four astronauts heading to orbit: commander Randy Bresnik, pilot Luca Parmitano (Italian), and mission specialists Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio. The crew is racially diverse but entirely male, coming right after Artemis II brought the first woman into lunar territory. The mission itself got quietly downgraded in February from a crewed moon landing to an Earth-orbit test flight, roughly the Apollo 9 equivalent. Launch is slated for 2027. NASA

Bari Weiss is reportedly set to oversee CNN’s editorial operations. After a year running CBS News as editor-in-chief, Weiss is earmarked to take editorial control of CNN if the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger goes through. Scott Pelley, fired by CBS on June 2, told the New York Times that “CBS News is on fire” and Weiss should be removed. Paramount CEO David Ellison has full confidence in her. The woman the legacy press treated as a pariah when she left the Times in 2020 may soon run two of its biggest competitors.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is full again. It reflects. Move on. Trump had the Reflecting Pool drained in April and repainted "American flag blue" for America's 250th anniversary, a six-week project that also fixed years of leaking and a persistent algae problem. Water started flowing back in this week. It reflects. The left spent weeks insisting it wouldn't. It does. Trump brought the pool workers into the Oval Office. The coverage is treating an objective infrastructure improvement like a culture war, and the pettiness is hard to watch. NBC Washington

European World Cup fans are going viral for discovering America is not walkable. German, British, and French fans arriving for the 2026 FIFA World Cup are posting TikToks of themselves navigating New Jersey streets to reach MetLife Stadium, discovering that the venue is in East Rutherford and not Manhattan, and reacting to $18 stadium beers. A German creator, Freddy, documenting his entire trip, from the parking lot hike to the portion sizes, went viral on X . Freddy loves America.

JD Vance installed a chicken coop at the Naval Observatory. A Victorian-style custom coop, designed by Carolina Coops at no cost to taxpayers, with a round turret and faux slate roof to match the historic VP residence. A dozen baby chicks. Guests at a camp-themed party this weekend got the first look, along with a 4-H demo from local students. Vance once joked his kids “actually eat about 14 eggs every single morning.” This is the lightest story in today’s edition and it’s staying.

That’s The Read.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

This is the printable that lives in your binder forever. Fold it in, or magnet it inside a cabinet door. When you can’t remember whether your Morton’s converts 1:1 with Diamond Crystal (it doesn’t), this is the page you check.

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Sorry, I went dark over the weekend, but I pressure-washed my entire pool deck and front driveway, which took an entire day and the morning of the next day. It’s the only “outside” job I do around here. I weirdly enjoy it, but I also can’t move today.

This morning I was staring at my driveway while I drank my coffee. I have become one of those people.

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• Trump wouldn’t rule out paying January 6 defendants from his slush fund. Welker badgered for a clean yes, didn’t get one, and he ripped off the mic and left. The walkout was the clip. The answer was the story.

• Iran and Israel traded strikes overnight while Trump pushed a ceasefire. It’s a bluff, and the loudest “disaster” takes are coming from people rooting for one.

• Maine’s about to nominate Graham Platner anyway, and the “believe all women” party just discovered redemption.

• The Quick Rundown: the Pope rebukes the Iran war, California’s count keeps erasing the GOP leads, 12 shot in Toledo, an ISIS drone plot, and Trump wants his face on the money.

He Walked Out

The Story.

Trump sat with NBC’s Kristen Welker in a barn in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on Friday, for an interview that aired Sunday on Meet the Press. Welker asked whether his $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund would pay anyone who assaulted police on January 6. Trump: “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.” Welker pushed back that 172 people pleaded guilty to assaulting officers; Trump said they pleaded because they were “frightened,” staring down fifteen years. She circled back to it, he circled back to “dirty cops” and a “rigged” California count, and about fifty minutes in he called NBC “a one-sided crooked network,” told her “thank you, darling, have a good time,” pulled off his mic, and left. The fund is the same one acting AG Todd Blanche told Congress on June 2 was “not moving forward with, period,” and that a judge froze on May 29.

The Left’s read. The Daily Beast led with his age (“Donald Trump, 79, Storms Off”). The Wrap and Variety made the walkout itself the story, a president who can’t take a fact-check. MS NOW went into the substance, arguing the real news was the non-denial on paying cop-assaulters, not the exit.

The Right’s read. Fox ran “rips Welker, ABC, CBS, CNN as crooked.” Townhall, PJ Media, and RedState framed it as a man refusing to sit for a hit, and predicted, correctly, how the rest of the press would spin it.

What both sides are skipping. The left loops the walkout because “elderly president melts down” writes itself. The right won’t touch the J6 payout because “would you cut a check to people who beat cops” splits the coalition. So the one exchange that actually moves money, a president declining to rule out paying people convicted of assaulting officers, got buried under a fight about a microphone.

Let’s be fair to Welker first. She’s a reporter, and pushing a politician who dodges is the job. I don’t want a press corps that hears “I’d have to see it” and nods along. Still not a fan but I get it.

But this stopped being an interview and turned into a hunt. Trump gave her an answer. “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.” It’s the one he gives constantly, because he hates being pinned to a yes or no he can’t walk back. Welker wanted the clean “yes,” the kind you cut into a fifteen-second clip captioned “Trump backs payouts for cop-beaters.” He wouldn’t hand it over, so she asked again, and again. That’s when he walked. These outlets fly to a barn in Wisconsin hunting one bad line, and when it doesn’t come, the digging becomes the story.

Now the stat she kept swinging. 172 people pleaded guilty to assaulting police. True, and stripped of the only context. No surprise there.

A guilty plea isn’t always a confession. It’s frequently a calculation. When the DOJ overcharges you, freezes your money, and offers a choice between a plea and a decade in a cell, plenty of people with no lawyer on retainer and limited funds take the deal, whether they did the worst version of it or not. That’s what makes a weaponized DOJ so sinister: it manufactures the plea, then the press recites “they pleaded guilty” like that closes the case. Which is exactly why “I’d have to see it” is the right answer and not the dodge they are selling.

And here’s the part nobody on the right actually wanted aired, which is its own tell. Republicans don’t want this fund within a mile of a midterm, because it hands Democrats a layup: Trump’s cutting checks to the January 6 mob. The press will run that line the way it runs everything about that day, flattening “January 6” into nothing but beaten cops and a trashed Capitol. That violence was real and ugly, and I’m not waving it off. But of the 172 who pleaded guilty to “assaulting” officers, how many actually injured someone, versus how many shoved a barricade or pushed through a line and watched it get charged as assault, then took the plea because, see above, fifteen years? Nobody puts that on a chyron. The blur does the work. And hold it next to the summer everyone’s supposed to have forgotten, when blocks of American cities burned in 2020, and a pile of those arrests got quietly dropped or never charged at all. One riot the press christened “mostly peaceful.” The other one still can’t stop calling it an insurrection. It was horrible and ended in 6 hours. The other terrorized cities and the country for an entire summer.

So yes, if the government abused its power, compensating the people it actually railroaded isn’t crazy. That’s the ordinary remedy when the state wrongs you. The hard question should not be whether. It’s how. Who sits on the panel? Who sorts the man who swung a flagpole from the retiree who walked through an open door and took a selfie? Those are questions worth asking, tough on the government and the fund at once. We got a shouting match about a mic instead.

My guess is the fund is dead, at least for now. It’s not politically viable in the lead-up to the midterms. Many Americans are not interested in relitigating the past, and this will become the headline if it happens. That is unfortunate for some who were prosecuted, but it’s the truth. Does that mean the President will let it go? Maybe for now. Watch the outlets drum it up again as we approach the midterms. Watch it become a talking point on the campaign trail. And watch how many “172 pleaded guilty” headlines ever mention what those pleas cost the people who took them.

Trump Said Stand Down. Everybody's Bluffing.

The Story.

It flared back up overnight. After Iran fired roughly 30 ballistic missiles at northern Israel on Sunday, June 7 (the Houthis added two), the first barrage since the April ceasefire, Israel struck back early Monday, hitting military targets in western and central Iran, a petrochemical plant in the southwest, and what the IDF called "an extensive strike against strategic defence systems," with blasts in Tehran and Tabriz (Iranian officials reported no casualties so far).

A senior U.S. official said Trump had called Netanyahu and urged him not to retaliate; Israel went ahead. Netanyahu is also heading into a fall election that's become a referendum on his handling of the war. Trump's line afterward, to the Financial Times: "I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn't call the shots."

On Truth Social he posted the two sides "are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE!" and that "Final negotiations on 'Peace' are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way," with the U.S. blockade staying until a deal. Iran's IRGC says any ceasefire is "conditional on a cease-fire on all fronts," meaning Lebanon and the blockade; Iran says its attacks on Israel are now "over." Brent crude jumped nearly 5% to about $97, and the war is past day 100

The left's read. CNBC, NPR, and Al Jazeera lead with the ceasefire "faltering" and the slide back toward full-scale war, Trump's restraint plea ignored, the talks imperiled. The throughline is quagmire.

The right's read. Split. Hawks want Israel's overnight strike to be the start of finishing the job, and read Iran's 30 missiles as proof Tehran bargains in bad faith. The camp closer to Trump reads the exchange as managed pressure, a couple of permitted blows to keep both sides at the table, and points at the White House's own "Peace Through Strength" framing. Neither camp says much about the part where even friendly assessments admit Operation Epic Fury did real damage but never reached the deepest sites.

What both sides are skipping. The "illegal war" cry, and the amnesia underneath it. The 100-days math assumes one continuous war. The administration says Epic Fury ended at the April ceasefire and that this is a new operation, Project Freedom, which on the executive branch's long-running "intermittent hostilities" theory restarts the 60-day War Powers clock. Hate the argument if you like. Obama ran a version of it in Libya, Clinton blew past the clock in Kosovo, and a line of presidents have called the War Powers Resolution unconstitutional and worked around it while Congress watched on purpose, because Congress would rather complain than own a national-security call that might go wrong. The only new variable is the name on the desk. So when an outlet brands this "unauthorized" with no mention that every modern president did the same, that's not law. It's the narrative in a law-school blazer.

My friend has a great geopolitics newsletter, if you are looking for a source to trust.

Amanda Talks

My personal Substack

By Amanda Peterson

Let me start with a confession, because nobody else will. I don’t know what’s happening here, and neither do you, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says they do, the president included. This is a negotiation, and most of what you’re watching is theater staged for the table.

Read it like a poker game. Iran fires thirty missiles it knows Israel will mostly knock down, because after getting its military taken apart it needs to look like it can still throw a punch. Israel hits back hard, partly because it can and partly because Netanyahu is running into a fall election that’s become a referendum on whether he looks strong, and an Israeli electorate that won’t swallow incoming missiles quietly. Trump lets both of them throw a couple of swings to save face, then gets on the phone and says do not escalate, because the one thing he cannot afford is this spiraling into a real war that craters the stock market and sends oil past $100. Everybody got to look tough. Nobody actually wants the table flipped. The “I call all the shots” line and the all-caps “immediate CEASEFIRE” are both lines in the same script.

Why is it taking forever? Two reasons that don’t make the coverage. Either the Iranians are slow-rolling, or they’re fighting among themselves over who’s even allowed to sign, and probably both. And every offer has to crawl up a chain of people who trust no one and crawl back, which takes weeks. That’s not proof the deal is dead. It’s what a deal between enemies looks like from the outside.

Now the part the cross-check is built for. A lot of these outlets, and most of the Democrats, are not anxiously hoping this works. They want it to fail. A Trump foreign-policy win heading into the midterms is the last thing they’re rooting for, and “quagmire” sells better than “uneasy truce holds.” Watch a ceasefire that holds get filed as a stumble, and a single missile get filed as a catastrophe. The framing tells you what the framer wants.

So no, I’m not handing you “Trump’s a genius” or “Trump’s a disaster” this morning, because I don’t know yet, and neither does anyone with a chyron and a deadline. What I’ll say is this: it’s a negotiation, the strikes are mostly noise meant to save face, and the people surest it’s a fiasco are the people who would most enjoy one.

Watch whether the ceasefire Trump posted holds past 48 hours. Watch oil and the S&P, because that’s the scoreboard he’s actually playing to. And watch whether one outlet covers the war-powers clock honestly instead of pretending this is the first president who ever ran one out.

Nobody at that table is telling you the truth. They’re not supposed to. I suppose it’s the art of the deal.

ICYMI

“Believe All Women” Has a Party Registration

Disclosure: as I noted Thursday, I know Lyndsey Fifield a little, the online way. Mutual friends, some back-and-forth on social, never met. You should know that going in.

The Story.

One day out from Maine’s June 9 Democratic primary, Graham Platner is still favored to win it. No real alternative got in (Janet Mills suspended her campaign April 30), and the markets haven’t moved off him despite last week’s New York Times report from three ex-girlfriends, one of whom, Lyndsey Fifield, says he grabbed her hard enough to leave marks and held her in a room. Since Friday, Platner drew warm, donating crowds at a Bar Harbor rally (“you have my back”) and told Maine Public the accounts are “false and, I believe, politically motivated.” Bernie Sanders called it a distraction from “the issues facing working families a little bit more than Graham Platner’s marriage.” Elizabeth Warren refused to engage with the conduct and pivoted to Susan Collins. Ro Khanna flew in to headline the rally, called the relationships “toxic and volatile,” said no one should attack the women, agreed Platner should apologize, then landed on “I believe in redemption.” Meanwhile, Fifield, a conservative, went public, accusing the Times of softening her account into “a gift to the Platner campaign.”

The Left’s read. Three deflections, none about the conduct: it’s “his marriage” (Sanders), look at Collins (Warren), believe-the-women-but-redemption (Khanna). ABC found Maine Democrats holding their nose (“What else are we going to do?”).

The Right’s read. Aim at the Times, with the accuser as lead witness. Fifield says the paper buried her, cut her corroborating witnesses and screenshots, and dropped other accusers it had lined up. The Daily Caller called it feeding victims “to the wolves.” One Nation put $3 million behind Collins.

What both sides are skipping. The right swings Kavanaugh as a dunk, not a standard: gotcha, hypocrites, never here's how we weigh evidence. The left answers every question about Platner with "what about Trump," which isn't an answer; it's a change of subject. And Fifield's résumé hands both sides an exit, since she co-founded "Ladies for Kavanaugh" in 2018: the left files her as a "Republican operative," the right calls her vindicated, and the actual side-by-side, Ford with no corroboration treated as gospel against Fifield with screenshots and named confidants treated as a smear, never gets the feature it deserves. And if anyone ever runs it straight, it comes from the right or the right-leaning press, and the legacy outlets pretend it doesn't exist. Their contribution so far is CNN asking whether scandals even matter anymore, the horse-race shrug that buries the standard instead of testing it.

I spent Friday on how the Times buried this, and I won’t redo it here. I want to talk about the Democratic response, which is a case study in walking a line.

There are two ways to handle a candidate like Platner if you’re a Democrat. You can pretend it isn’t happening, the Sanders route (”his marriage,” go look at gas prices) and the Warren route (change the subject to Collins). Or you can do the Ro Khanna thing, which is slicker and worse.

Khanna has spent years branding himself a fierce protector of women and victims. In February, he stood on the House floor and read six names into the record as men tied to the Epstein files. The DOJ later said several of them had no connection to Epstein at all. Didn’t matter. The point wasn’t accuracy, it was the posture: name the powerful men and believe the victims. Verification of the facts, inconvenient. Maximal and public, with zero benefit of the doubt for the accused.

Now put Platner in front of him. A named woman, on the record, with screenshots and people she told at the time, more documentation than Khanna ever needed to torch six near-strangers from the House floor. And suddenly the great believer finds his caveats. He flies to Bar Harbor, grants the behavior was “wrong” and “misogynistic,” assures the crowd Platner “took accountability” and “worked to be a better man,” then pivots to “redemption” and “his issues, stopping the war, taking on the billionaire class.” He believes the women, sort of, and he’s voting for the man anyway. That’s the straddle, and he’s betting his own party and the press won’t look too close.

Here’s the tell. If Khanna actually wanted the truth, he had an easy move. Fifield says the Times omitted screenshots, witnesses, and evidence she provided. The man who reads unverified names onto the House floor in the name of believing victims could have called on the Times to release every bit of it. He didn’t. He went quiet the second the receipts might sink his guy. Redemption, apparently, comes with the right to evidence out of publication.

And spare me the redemption sermon from this party of all parties. This is the operation that made cancellation a political weapon and torched careers over a decade-old tweet or an anonymous tip, all of it filed under accountability. It never once spared a Republican who asked for grace. Now “people grow” is the closing argument in a Senate race, because this time the sinner has a D next to his name.

Look, I’m for redemption too, and I mean it. A society that can’t forgive eats itself, and nobody is the worst version of themselves forever. But redemption and a Senate seat are not the same thing. The question was never whether Graham Platner can become a better man. It’s whether a man whose redemption is still in progress belongs in the United States Senate while it finishes. You don’t hand someone the keys to the institution mid-rehab and call the doubts a smear.

Watch whether Khanna, the great believer of women, ever asks the Times to unseal what Fifield gave them. Watch whether one Democrat who demanded a Republican quit over less holds Platner to the same standard. And watch how fast “believe the women” comes roaring back the day the accused wears the other jersey.

Redemption is a process. The Senate is a reward. Don’t confuse the two.

🗳️California's mail-in count keeps chipping away at the Republicans who led on election night. As the "blue shift" rolls in (mail ballots get counted later and lean Democratic), the GOP's Tuesday-night standings are sliding. In the governor's race, Steve Hilton (R) has slipped behind Democrat Xavier Becerra, who's already locked a November spot, and Hilton's grip on the second runoff slot is now threatened by Tom Steyer. In the LA mayor's race, Spencer Pratt (R) fell from second to third as progressive Councilmember Nithya Raman overtook him for the runoff against Karen Bass, by roughly 3,000 votes with counting ongoing. It's the same blue shift Trump spent the weekend calling "rigged"; about 3.5 million ballots remain uncounted, final results due July 3. ABC7

Trump called California’s count “rigged” as Republican leads faded. With ballots still being tallied from the June 2 primary, Trump accused Democrats of “cheating” to “steal” the governor and Los Angeles mayor races from Republicans. AG Rob Bonta said there’s “no specific allegation of any individualized act of voter fraud,” and Trump’s own DOJ debunked a viral claim that GOP candidate Spencer Pratt got “zero new votes.” The shrinking leads are the “blue shift,” mail ballots counted later and leaning Democratic. Time

Pope Leo says the Iran war fails the “just war” test. Aboard his plane to Spain on June 6, the first American pope said “there is no just war there” and called just-war theory “outdated,” a direct rebuke of the 100-day U.S.-Israel war on Iran. It escalates an April clash in which VP JD Vance told the Vatican to “stick to matters of morality” and let the president “stick to dictating American public policy,” a line the U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee corrected twice. NPR

The FBI charged three men in an ISIS plot to kill U.S. troops. Bisaam Ghafoor, 21, of Leawood, Kansas, and Californians Elias Shamsaldeen, 21, and Bereen Dzayee, 25, were arrested June 5 for conspiring to support ISIS, funneling over $2,000 to someone they believed was a member and financing drones meant to attack American servicemembers overseas. Per the complaint, Ghafoor said it would be “sick” to have his name on the drone. DOJ

Twelve people were shot near a Toledo street festival. Gunfire erupted around 5:30 p.m. Saturday near the Old West End Festival in Toledo, Ohio, wounding 12 from at least two shooters police say were “probably shooting at each other.” The youngest victim is 14, the oldest 61, two critical. No suspects were in custody as of Sunday. NPR

That’s The Read.

See you Wednesday. Stay nosy.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

Heads up, this edition breaks format. The Read usually gives you three cross-checked stories. Today it's one because the Platner coverage is a masterclass in the thing I started this newsletter to call out, and it didn't deserve to be crammed. Regular news is still waiting in the Quick Rundown.

In today’s Read:

• Platner told Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday there were no more allegations coming. The Times published three women on Thursday.

• The worst of it lands in paragraph 22. That placement is the story.

• Then the woman at the center sat down and wrote out exactly how the paper handled her. She used the word “setup.”

• A friendly network handed him a couch the same night, and he called the women “politically motivated.” His writing partners on the left agreed.

• The Quick Rundown: Blanche gets the Epstein files job, the House breaks on Iran, California cracks, and 8,000 federal workers lose their jobs protection.

If this is the kind of work you want more of, the best way to keep it coming is to go paid. You’ll get the subscriber-only pieces and the full archive, and right now there’s a discount with your name on it. Thank you for being here.

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Disclosure: I know Lyndsey Fifield a little, the way you know people online. We’ve never met, never worked together, never spoken directly, but we’ve engaged on social media and share some mutual friends. You should know that going in.

This Wasn't Journalism. It Was A Platner Protection Racket.

Tuesday, Graham Platner went to Washington to calm down a nervous party. The Maine Democrat is five days from a primary he’s favored to win, and a Senate seat Democrats need is riding on him. He met privately with senators, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sanders asked the obvious question: is anything else coming?

“There aren’t any,” Platner said.

Read the Wall Street Journal’s version (🎁 link), and it’s a little different. Warren drew the line between marital mess and sexual assault, and Platner told the room there were no credible allegations of assault on the way. Pocket that word. “Credible” is the one someone who has been advised reaches for when they can’t say “none,” because it leaves room to call whatever surfaces next as not credible.

Forty-eight hours later, the New York Times (🎁 link) published the accounts of three women who dated him, and Platner reached for exactly that word.

So one of two things is true. Either he looked Sanders and Warren in the face and lied about what was coming, or he genuinely had no idea the paper of record was about to run it. Pick whichever you like. Both are problems for a man asking Maine to trust him for six years.

Paragraph 22

Before the press critique, let’s cover the women, because the NYT buried it.

Lyndsey Fifield says that when they dated, roughly 2013 to 2015, Platner grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks. She says he once yanked her out of a cab by the wrist, and during another fight twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut from the outside until she was “calm.” She fell asleep on the floor and left in the morning. A second woman told the Times she cut off contact after he showed up at her house drunk, uninvited, in an episode she found “reckless” and “unsettling.” A third described feeling like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”

Platner “strongly disputes” any physical intimidation, and the Times could not independently corroborate the physical altercations. Critiques cite no corroborating evidence, but this is not an anonymous source. It’s on the record, with her name on it, her picture is in the article, and her full resume. It is also backed by texts and diary entries the paper says it reviewed, but chose not to publish. That’s not nothing, and a serious paper would treat it like it wasn’t nothing.

Here’s how the Times treated it instead.

The story opens soft: Platner “could be charming,” some women “found his actions intimidating.” Paragraph four tells you he spent the day “working the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends” who’d vouch for him. Paragraph five hands those supportive women the mic. The first real signal that something darker is here shows up in paragraph six, and it’s one clause, wrapped in “charming and charismatic”: “in at least one case, even physically threatening.” Then the soft words do their work for a while. “Toxic.” “Unsettling.” “Emotionally wrenching.” “Complicated.”

The marks on her shoulders, the wrist, the locked bedroom door? Paragraph 22. Under a subhead. Past the point most readers quit.

And the worst of it sits deeper still. Fifield says Platner told her that if anyone broke into his home, he’d rape them “to show them that I’m dominant,” that “rape was about power,” and that he called women “hatchet wounds.” The campaign did not dispute the rape remarks. A paper that wanted you to know that would put it up top. This one parked it near the basement.

That’s not a botched edit. A reporter who interviews a man’s exes for two months, reviews the texts, reads the diary, and lands on “charming but complicated” for the first six paragraphs made a choice about what you’d see first and what you’d have to dig for.

The Source Read the Story Too

The morning after publication, Fifield wrote down what the experience was like. The soft-kill playbook doesn’t plan for the source to respond. And when she did, the paper had already done its work, undermining her with the structure of the piece and everything it left out.

Read her account and it’s the source describing the machine from the inside. She went against her friends’ advice, set aside what she calls her “conservative bias,” and trusted the Times reporters. They asked her not to talk to any other outlet, and she kept her word for weeks while they circled back for more. Go on the record, okay. More screenshots, okay. She met every benchmark they set.

And here’s the part that makes the “come back for more” uglier. By her own account, the Times had other women who accused Platner of sexual assault, and the reporters used them, telling Fifield they existed, to draw more out of her. None of those women made the published piece. So the most serious accusations the paper had became leverage to pry open a conservative ex, then vanished, while hers got buried two dozen paragraphs down.

Then the story was published, and she started counting. Eleven paragraphs on her work history, she says, more than the paper has run on Platner’s. The phrase “nobody could corroborate” sitting in the piece when, by her account, she handed them people who could. Friends who told the Times she’d confided years ago that Graham was abusive, back before he ran for anything: left out. The screenshots they promised to use: missing. That she’d backed local Democrats and that her husband and most of her family are liberal: cut. A “do not call Graham” text from a friend: kept and stripped of context.

Her conclusion, in her own words: “It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted ... methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign.”

The Cleanup Crew

The same night the story dropped, MS NOW sat Platner down with Chris Hayes for his first national interview. It went the way you’d expect when a friendly network books a friendly guest in a crisis. Hayes asked if he’d thought about dropping out. “No, not once.” Hayes asked about the allegations, and Platner called them “simply not true” and “the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.”

There’s that frame again. The same one from his written statement to the Times. “Politically motivated.” Say it enough and a woman’s bruises become a Republican’s opposition research.

Hayes pressed on the tattoo, and this is where it falls apart. Platner has claimed since October that he had no clue the skull on his chest was a Nazi symbol until reporters told him last fall. Fifield says she knew the word for it a decade ago because he taught it to her, calling it “my Totenkopf,” bragging his unit picked the SS death’s-head on purpose because “they were like a death unit.” The Times has a text where Fifield called it a “Nazi tattoo” in August, before his October reckoning. Hayes asked: how does she know in August when you say you didn’t?

Platner’s answer: “she certainly didn’t send that text to me,” and her friends “may have recognized it.”

Let me get this straight. She knew it was a Totenkopf because he told her. By her account, he taught her the word, tied it to the SS, and bragged his unit picked it on purpose. So when she told her friends exactly that in August, before it was public, before Platner “realized” what it meant in October, she wasn’t guessing. His response? She never sent that text to him. Follow the logic he wants you to buy: he didn’t know the meaning of his own tattoo, but she did, she sat on it for 13 years, and somehow it was on her to call and tell him what the ink on his chest stood for. The only reason she knew the meaning is that he’s the one who gave it to her. His dodge falls apart. The dates don’t lie, even when he does.

Meanwhile, the talking heads ran their assigned routes. Krystal Ball waved the whole thing off as “uncorroborated accusations” from a “Heritage staffer who previously worked for a conservative org that backs Collins.” Emma Vigeland reframed it as Platner being “a bad boyfriend to some women but also a good boyfriend to other women.” Tidy.

Except the Times checked the Collins line and killed it: “Records show no evidence of any relationship between Ms. Fifield and the Collins campaign.” Independent Women confirms she was last paid about $15,000 back in 2022. The smear Ball ran got debunked in the very article she was dismissing. She went with it anyway, because the point was never accuracy. The point was a permission slip for the base to stop listening.

This Started in October

None of this is new.

When the tattoo first surfaced in October, Pod Save America let Platner explain it away while showing video of him dancing shirtless at his brother’s wedding. The bit: look how relaxed he is, no real Nazi would be this chill. The same people that spent years calling Republicans Nazis decided a Nazi tattoo on a Democrat candidate was forgivable.

That’s the machine. The campaign sells a redemption arc, the friendly outlets supply the softball interviews, and “I’ve changed” does the quiet work of filing every receipt under ancient history. Right up until the receipts include a woman who says he locked her in a room, and a tattoo lie you can date to the month.

A paper doesn’t spend two months on a story, interview two dozen people, review the texts and the diary, then accidentally open with the supportive ex-girlfriends and eleven paragraphs of the accuser’s resume. That’s a choice. The rumor of this piece had circulated for over a month, and Platner walked into his meeting with Senate Democrats on Tuesday almost certainly knowing it was coming. That’s why he reached for “credible.” He wasn’t reassuring the room. He was planting the word, so that when the story hit two days later, the verdict was pre-loaded: whatever you’re about to read, it isn’t credible.

Then look at who found whom. By Fifield’s own account, the Times came to her. She didn’t pitch a leftist paper, the worst story of her life. A conservative woman doesn’t do that. So how did they find her? Watch that question, because the likeliest answer is that someone steered them, and the person with the motive is the campaign. If Platner’s people pointed the Times at his own accuser, the paper didn’t break this story. It ran the version he could survive.

Back to those women, the Times dangled and dropped. Fifield asked the same in her thread: where did their accusations of sexual assault go? Her account is brutal, and by these reports, it isn’t even the worst the paper had. If those allegations are real and still out there, the soft open already built the permission structure to wave them off before they land.

So, what to watch? Watch whether more allegations drop before Tuesday. Watch whether the outlets that booked Platner book even one of these women. Watch whether Maine Democrats say a word about the rape-dominance quote his campaign didn’t deny. And watch how they use Lyndsey Fifield. The next women to come forward probably aren’t Republicans, and it won’t matter. Because the first name attached to this was a conservative’s, the well is already poisoned. They’ll point at Fifield and call the whole thing a right-wing operation, whoever’s actually doing the talking. She’s not the pattern. She’s the smear they’ll staple to everyone after her. It’s gross.

The Times did the reporting. Two months, two dozen interviews, the texts, the diary. Then it filed the hardest, ugliest, most specific findings where the fewest people would look.

“Journalism” is a protection racket.

Trump nominated the man his own former attorney general says ran the Epstein files. Trump said Wednesday he’ll permanently nominate acting AG Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer. Hours earlier, the House Oversight Committee released Pam Bondi’s transcript, in which she testified Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi was fired in April over that release. Majority Leader John Thune said it’s “hard to say” whether Blanche can be confirmed, and Sen. Thom Tillis threatened to oppose him over January 6 and the anti-weaponization fund. The Hill

The House voted to pull the U.S. out of the Iran war, and four Republicans crossed over. The chamber passed a war powers resolution 215-208 Wednesday directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran absent congressional authorization. Reps. Thomas Massie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Warren Davidson, and Tom Barrett joined every Democrat. It heads to the Senate, where there aren’t the votes to override a veto. C-SPAN

A Republican topped California’s governor primary for the first time since 2006. With a majority of the vote counted, Steve Hilton (R) leads near 27% and Xavier Becerra (D) sits second around 26%. Both advance to November under the top-two system; a split Democratic field divided the majority vote. CalMatters

Trump stripped firing protections from about 8,000 senior federal workers. A June 3 executive order moves roughly 8,000 GS-15 employees into a “Schedule Policy/Career” category, making them fireable for any reason with no appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. OPM Director Scott Kupor called it “about accountability.” The reclassification already faces litigation. Government Executive

ICE and South Carolina raided a manufacturer with 200 vehicles in “Operation Ghost Story.” State AG Alan Wilson announced six indictments and 48 detained after the June 3 raid on Burnstein von Seelen Precision Casting in Abbeville County. Two plant managers were arrested for criminal conspiracy and identity fraud, and four other defendants are accused of selling forged IDs. The investigation began in fall 2024. Post and Courier

Israel and Lebanon agreed to renew their ceasefire. The two governments announced they’ll extend the truce and work toward a broader agreement, in a joint statement with the United States. Just Security

The Five Eyes warned China is using LinkedIn to recruit spies. The U.S. and its intelligence partners issued a joint alert that Chinese operatives are mining LinkedIn and other job platforms to pull secret information from security-cleared professionals. Just Security

That’s The Read.

See you Monday. Stay nosy.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

He didn’t answer Fox’s Nicholas Ballasy, who caught him climbing out of the car. “Mr. Platner, are you here to calm the waters, sir?” He didn’t answer walking into DSCC headquarters. He didn’t answer ninety minutes later, walking back to the car with reporters shouting after him. Head down. Mouth shut.

Inside, the senators did the talking for him. Gillibrand. Sanders. Warren. Welch. Schiff. They filed into the same building to prop him up.

Eight months ago the DSCC told him he had no right to run. They had a candidate. Janet Mills, the two-term governor, was recruited to stop him. Mills suspended in April. So the very people who tried to stomp out his campaign spent Tuesday in a conference room making sure it survives the week. The message went from “you have no right” to “whatever you need.”

While the news cycle is focused on Platner’s texts and tattoos, it is casually ignoring the larger issue.

The Democratic Party’s center has moved further left than it has ever been — further than 2020, further than anything the Biden years shoved down our throats. And here’s the part the party would like you to miss: they aren’t exactly kicking and screaming about it.

In 2020 the slogans came off the street. The party borrowed the language, made excuses for the activists and the riots. Biden ran as the restoration candidate. He beat the left in the primary, then governed far to the left of what he promised — if he was even the one governing.

What’s coming next is more of the same, only further left. Because the activists aren’t outside chanting anymore. They’re the candidates. They’re about to hold the pen. If you thought the Biden years were as far as it went, look at who’s next in line.

Platner is in the headlines because the receipts are loud and hard to ignore: the Totenkopf tattoo he wore for seventeen years and covered after launch (the one he claims he never recognized as an SS symbol despite calling himself a lifelong student of military history), the Reddit account where he called himself a communist, called cops bastards, and wrote that rural White Americans are racist and stupid, the post praising a 2014 Hamas raid as “well executed and successful,” and the texts to other women that his own wife flagged to the campaign.

That should be disqualifying. All of it. But the Democrats’ attitude is essentially “no, it’s cool.” And that isn’t even why you should be worried. It isn’t why I’m writing this.

A bad tattoo and a decade-old Reddit account make for an easy scandal. They photograph well. They give moderates something to wring their hands over and the base something to forgive. No question they are a problem.

However, the candidates who should scare you are the ones whose policies are the real disqualifier — what they’re running on right now in 2026, and what they quietly deleted last month because a campaign adviser told them to.

I wrote about the deletions a few weeks ago. The Great Erase. It keeps happening.

Abdul El-Sayed scrubbed roughly a dozen defund-the-police posts before he launched in Michigan. Then he opened his mouth. He campaigns next to Hasan Piker, a fanboy of Lenin and Mao. He said Israel is as evil as Hamas. After a Hezbollah-inspired attack on a synagogue full of preschoolers in West Bloomfield, El-Sayed reached for “hurt people hurt people.” He might have deleted some social media posts, but his worldview is on full display.

In New Jersey, Adam Hamawy just won his primary. A plastic surgeon and Army veteran who, as a medical student in the early nineties, served as a defense witness for Omar Abdel-Rahman — the Blind Sheikh convicted of seditious conspiracy, whose followers bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Hamawy had ridden with him from New Jersey to a Michigan conference where the cleric spoke of conquering the land of the infidels. He even acknowledged translating a document for him after the bombing. Under cross-examination, prosecutors walked him through the transcript until he conceded the cleric “always talked about” jihad. Andrew McCarthy, who led that prosecution, says the denials weren’t convincing. Hamawy denies wrongdoing, was never charged, and calls the scrutiny guilt-by-association aimed at Muslim and Arab candidates. His rivals mostly wouldn’t touch it. The left flank had no such trouble. Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Piker backed him. He won.

In New York, the candidate Mamdani endorsed over a sitting congressman — Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA member — deleted an entire account. The old posts surfaced anyway. The endorsement didn’t move.

When the delete doesn’t hold, the move isn’t to apologize. It’s to explain. Morris Katz, the strategist Platner shares with Mamdani (that association should tell you plenty), sat down with David Axelrod and made the case: You want real people in politics? Real people said things online fifteen years ago. You can’t have one without the other. Pick the authentic veteran or pick the man who’s wanted the Senate since he was three. You don’t get both.

Good line, I suppose. But it also gives the game away. Katz doesn’t argue the posts were taken out of context or that they don’t mean what they plainly say. He grants they’re real and asks for absolution anyway. He calls it redemption. And this week: don’t worry about that sexting two years ago — it’s none of your business.

Platner’s own response ad runs the same play. The words were abhorrent, he says, from a low point after the war. Not who he is today. Notice what’s missing: Not “I was wrong about the cops.” Not “I no longer think an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.” Simply: that was then. Judge who I’m selling you now.

The opinions didn’t change. The packaging did.

And when redemption doesn’t sell, they pivot. Before the texts broke, Katz leaned on the one person who knew about them — Genevieve McDonald, the campaign’s own former political director. Fifteen thousand dollars to sign an NDA. She said no thank you. So they went to work discrediting her in the local press. The Bangor Daily News has the messages. He claims redemption for the cameras. A payoff, an NDA, and a threat when no one is looking.

The scrub used to be how you survived your own party. The internet Left — the people who spent fifteen years digging up other people’s tweets and running the struggle sessions — knows exactly what an archive does. It was their weapon for years. Now they’re running the candidates the weapon was built to destroy, and they’re betting the party and the media will cover for them once they win.

So far the bet is paying off.

That’s the question Tuesday’s meeting was built to avoid: Who’s really in charge, the party, or the candidates?

For the socialist wing, there’s a clear answer. It’s on their website. In New York, DSA elected officials meet with the chapter on a schedule, share information, and line up their votes. They call it co-governance. Mamdani put it flatly: to be an unorganized socialist is a contradiction in terms. He told a DSA convention that he and his fellow electeds are special not because of themselves but because of the organization. The chain of accountability doesn’t run through voters. It runs through the chapter.

And the discipline cuts both ways. When Chi Ossé moved to challenge Hakeem Jeffries, the DSA’s own people voted narrowly not to back him. Mamdani wanted Jeffries left in place. So the movement told one of its own to stand down — and he did. Why protect the most powerful Democrat in the House? Because Jeffries is exactly the kind of leader they can work around. Weak, careful, easily rolled. They’d rather keep the door they already know how to walk through.

Some of them keep their distance from the word “socialist.” Platner ducks “communist” even though he wrote it himself, then deleted it. Now he’d rather you call him an “economic populist.” James Talarico won in Texas running “Medicare for Y’all” out of a pickup truck with a Bible on the dash — branding perfect for Texas with the same platform. They aren’t much different in policy from the DSA. They just know the word “socialist” doesn’t play in Maine or Texas.

Medicare for All. Abolish or overhaul ICE. The same anti-billionaire populism. The same line on Israel. Sanders and AOC have been beating the same drum for years. They’re hoping candidates like Platner give them backup.

With Platner, the oysterman in the dirty hoodie is just packaging. A working-class aesthetic made safe for voters in a state Susan Collins has held for thirty years. But the party knows exactly what it is: another pull further to the left. And they’re happily along for the ride.

I suspect that the Democratic establishment comforts itself with the idea that it can let these candidates win and then curb them. Bring them inside, hand them a committee, watch them mellow.

They are in denial about having lost their teeth with age. History supports it. We have seen how progressives don’t get absorbed. They absorb. They’re loud, they’re disruptive, they live on the platforms, and they move the party every time — not the other way around. Look at Mamdani. Look at AOC. Neither one drifted toward the center after winning. The center drifted toward them. You don’t tame the loudest person in the room by giving them the microphone.

Some will point to Illinois. In March, the open DSA insurgents got tested and lost. Kat Abughazaleh lost. Robert Peters lost. Junaid Ahmed lost.

Look at what beat them. These were not Clinton Democrats. It was a field where most of the fifteen Democrats ran on Medicare for All, a citizenship path, and dismantling ICE. The establishment pick was a progressive, and the only “moderates” who won were floated on a few million in AIPAC money. The furthest-left candidates might have lost, but the furthest-left agenda is now the baseline the party runs on.

So when someone points at Illinois, point back at who the progressive wing, the online talking heads, and the leftist media are rooting for everywhere else. Point out what these candidates deleted. Point at who they share a stage with.

There’s a meme: a stick figure, the Democratic Party, getting dragged further and further left across the frame. Five years on, the stick figure is at the edge. And the party isn’t digging in its heels.

The good news is that most of the country doesn’t like crazy. And they really don’t like socialists. A bet worth making is that as the party continues to pull left, it’s too hard to ignore, and gets told so at the ballot box.

But that only works if people show up. So show up and drag everyone you know with you. All the way to November.

Yes, I know The Read is late. I stayed up late on a project last night and could not get up this morning. So enough excuses.

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Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• Scott Pelley says CBS instructed him to inject falsehoods into stories and let politicians pick their own interviewers. He mentioned it immediately after being fired for cause.

• Mikie Sherrill announced “peaceful protest zones” outside Delaney Hall, state police cleared the area hours later after fireworks and gas canisters, and she’s now calling it a lawsuit problem instead of a protest problem.

• Jill Biden’s memoir says she feared Joe was having a stroke during the 2024 debate, doctors were called, then they went to Waffle House, then she kept campaigning for another month. Her own party is publicly begging her to stop.

• California’s governor's race has a Republican leading in early returns for the first time in years. Iowa handed Trump his first gubernatorial endorsement loss of the cycle.

• Rubio testified on the Iran war, a Hellfire missile hit a tanker, and gas is $4.34.

60 Minutes Battle. CBS Fired Scott Pelley.

The Story.

Monday, veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley confronted new executive producer Nick Bilton at a staff meeting and accused incoming CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering 60 Minutes.” Audio leaked to the New York Times, where it was noted his “newscaster’s baritone was shaking.”

Bilton fired Pelley by letter Tuesday night for cause, calling it a “performative display of hostility” and “remarkable incivility and contempt.”

Pelley’s exit statement accused CBS of instructing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and said politicians were invited to “select which correspondents would interview them.” He said he refused those instructions. He is in conversations with Bryan Freedman, the media litigator who has represented other fired news personalities. No suit filed yet. Pelley’s 60 Minutes previously ran a segment calling Trump a foreign agent; CBS settled for $16 million.

In May 2025, Pelley gave a commencement speech at Wake Forest warning graduates that “our sacred rule of law is under attack, journalism is under attack.” He never named Trump. The target was not subtle.

Backdrop: Skydance acquired Paramount (and with it, CBS) in August 2025 — deal closed, done. Weiss was brought in by the new owners after that. Paramount is now separately in the middle of a $110B acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN, HBO); that deal needs regulatory clearance and WBD shareholders approved it in April 2026. Pelley said Weiss was brought in to kill the show.

The Left's read. Martyred journalist. NPR, CNN, Rolling Stone, and Variety treated the firing as legacy journalism being gutted by corporate owners under political pressure. The "CBS told me to lie" claim ran in most pieces without meaningful pushback. The motive chain cited: Paramount is now trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN, HBO) in a separate $110B deal that still needs regulatory clearance. Don't antagonize the Trump administration while that's pending — so move out the old guard at CBS and install friendlier management.

The Right's read. The termination letter went viral as an example of firm, clear management. Pelley is insubordinate, entitled, and a weak messenger on journalistic integrity given the $16M Trump settlement. PJ Media headlined it: "Professional Prevaricator Scott Pelley Fired by CBS." If CBS instructed him to put falsehoods on air and he refused, why did it take getting fired for him to mention it?

What both sides are skipping. The “CBS told me to lie” claim is either the most significant journalism story in years or the best exit strategy money can buy. Both are possible. There will likely be litigation to follow and documentation revealed in the process. The left wants a martyr, the right wants a discredited hack, and both framings let everyone avoid the harder question.

I seriously doubt it. The “instructed to inject falsehoods” claim is perfectly timed, strategically deployed, and almost certainly more of an exit strategy than whistleblowing.

Here’s what I think actually happened. Pelley is a journalist who crossed fully into activism — and not quietly. His 60 Minutes produced a segment calling Trump a foreign agent that cost CBS $16 million to settle. He stood at a Wake Forest podium and gave what was functionally a political speech in a commencement robe. He leaked audio from a staff meeting to the New York Times before his own firing. These are not the moves of a neutral journalist protecting journalistic standards. This is what someone does when they believe their political views belong in their work and stop hiding them.

CBS’s new leadership is trying to bring actual balance back to a show that had spent years functioning as prestige liberal media with a stopwatch. That’s not murdering journalism. That’s acknowledging that journalism with a visible thumb on the scale has already killed itself with a significant portion of the audience.

The bigger problem isn’t Pelley. It’s what he represents. Journalism spent decades pretending to be neutral while systematically favoring one worldview in how stories were framed, which sources were elevated, and which questions got asked. The audience isn’t blind to it anymore. Pelley didn’t even try to hide it. He leaned in. And when the correction came, he grabbed a microphone and called it an attack on truth and ran to the NYT. That’s the move now. Claim that any demand for balance is actually censorship. It works great for building a personal brand.

Don’t even get me started on the martyr play. We’ve seen this game already. Colbert. Terry Moran. Every fired-or-exited media figure who’s parlayed their “heroic opposition to the regime” into an independent platform. Pelley is doing the exact same calculation in real time. He’s already talking to Bryan Freedman, which tells you this is a planned exit, not an ambush. My money is on a Substack. Ironically. The man will end up on the same platform Bari Weiss helped build, charging $10 a month to tell his subscribers what CBS wouldn’t let him say.

Watch for the platform announcement within 90 days.

Delaney Hall: She Built the Protest Zone. Then This Happened.

The Story

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and AG Matt Platkin filed suit against GEO Group on June 2, seeking to force full health inspector access to Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed ICE detention facility in Newark. State inspectors visited on May 28 but were given access only to the cafeteria, not the full facility. DHS formally debunked the conditions allegations on May 29 in a “Correct the Record” release. Sec. Markwayne Mullin visited and reported no violations found.

Nicholas Scelfo was arrested by the FBI on federal felony charges after video caught him screaming at an unmasked ICE officer: “I’ll kill your whole family. Your whole family is dead. Your children, your wife — all dead.” He was released on $100,000 bond and barred from returning to Delaney Hall. Five of the six people arrested during the protests were from out of state. Food complaints at the facility date to 2011, under the Obama administration. Nobody protested then.

The Left’s read. The lawsuit is accountability. Detainee allegations are credible; health inspector access is a basic transparency requirement. CNN and MSNBC ran the inspectors-blocked narrative without engaging DHS’s formal rebuttal. Rolling Stone called Delaney Hall “the new front in Trump’s immigration war.” Scelfo’s arrest got light coverage; the protest characterization stayed largely “overwhelmingly peaceful.”

The Right’s read. DHS already answered this. Mullin visited and found nothing. Fox News reported a federal inspection contradicts central claims in the NJ AG’s lawsuit. Five of the six arrested were outside agitators. The governor created a designated area for disorder, and the disorder arrived on schedule.

What both sides are skipping. The food complaints go back to 2011 under Obama. Nobody protested then, nobody filed a lawsuit then, nobody flew in from out of state for it then. That’s not a gotcha. It is a relevant context for evaluating whether this is genuinely about detainee conditions or about who’s doing the detaining.

On May 29, Sherrill announced formal “peaceful protest zones” to professionalize the response at Delaney Hall. State police cleared those same zones hours later after protesters deployed fireworks and threw gas canisters at law enforcement. Scelfo threatened to kill an ICE officer’s wife and children on video. And Sherrill called the protests “overwhelmingly peaceful.”

This is a first-term governor from a blue-but-not-far-left state doing what is required. Her base needed her fighting. Swing voters can’t see riot footage running in Republican ads in October. So she praised the peaceful crowd, blamed out-of-state agitators for the violence (while not noting she’d spent days promoting the protest), and filed a lawsuit that moves the story from the street into court, where it’s slower, quieter, and doesn’t produce footage. The base reads it as fighting. Moderates read it as a process. Smart play.

Except that five of the six arrested were people she’d been implicitly inviting for weeks. The protest zone she created became the riot site. And the conditions she’s suing over existed under Obama while she was silent.

The lawsuit has real grounds. The health inspector access question is legitimate. But the framing runs into the uncomfortable fact that those exact conditions existed for years under a Democratic administration, and nobody was at the gate.

Watch how quickly Sherrill stops holding press conferences once this moves into litigation.

ICYMI

The Democrats Would Like Jill Biden to Stop Talking

The Story

Jill Biden’s memoir, “View from the East Wing,” published June 2, reveals that during the June 2024 presidential debate she thought: “Is this a stroke?”

NPR reports doctors were called immediately after the debate because of her fear. She told NBC’s Craig Melvin on Today that she stayed silent because “I’m his wife. I’ve got to lift him up” and said “He did. He got older. We all saw him aging.” They went to Waffle House that night. She kept campaigning for another month. MSNBC gave her the platform to say Biden would have beaten Trump if he’d stayed. Jake Tapper wrote at CNN that her account is “rosy if not blindfolded” and questioned whether she was enabling her husband. Named Democrats are going on record: John Morgan (major fundraiser) called it “ripping open a healing scab.” Former White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said he doesn’t see “why that painful conversation for the party needed to be publicly reopened right now.” Former Biden aide Meghan Hays told C-SPAN the memoir “is not helping the party ahead of the midterm elections.” Joe Biden is also planning midterm campaign stops. So the party can’t just ignore him either.

The Left’s read. MSNBC treated the book sympathetically, leaning into the grief narrative: a wife watching her husband struggle and staying loyal. The “Is this a stroke?” line got covered as humanizing fear rather than as evidence of a cover story. Tapper was the notable exception.

The Right’s read. Townhall and Jonathan Turley went directly at the contradiction: she feared a stroke, she kept campaigning. The right is citing Tapper approvingly. When your argument is “even Jake Tapper agrees,” the receipts are solid.

What both sides are skipping. The actual political problem is that Biden is coming back onto the campaign trail in the fall. Democrats running in competitive House districts in 2026 are trying to nationalize the midterms around Republican overreach. Every day the Bidens stay in the cycle is a day Americans are reminded of Democrat failures and cover-up.

“We all saw him aging.”

If we all saw it, the Democrats running in swing states in November who went on television in 2023 and 2024 and said Biden was sharp, capable, and fully in command also saw it. The ones who signed letters urging him to stay in the race saw it. The ones who repeated talking points about his debate prep, his stamina, and his record saw it. And now those same people are on the record saying “we all saw him aging” and pointing fingers at his inner circle, as if they were passive bystanders watching a slow-motion car wreck instead of people who had every incentive to tell the truth and chose the party line instead.

That’s the live grenade the memoir drops into the 2026 cycle.

The donor problem is arguably worse. The Democratic donor class wrote nine-figure checks for a candidate they were told — repeatedly, by people who knew better — was viable, sharp, and capable of another term. Jill Biden’s memoir is now confirming, in her own words, that she feared he was having a stroke in real time and kept it to herself. Jake Tapper is saying the inner circle enabled it. Former aides are calling the book “disingenuous.” Every one of those words is a sentence in the brief that Democratic donors are now building about why they cannot trust the party’s judgment with their money. The question isn’t whether they’re angry. It’s whether that anger shows up as withheld checks in 2026.

And the left-leaning media. Don’t even get me started.

The same outlets that told us for 18 months that questions about Biden’s fitness were right-wing talking points are now covering this memoir as a humanizing portrait of a devoted wife. The gaslighting didn’t stop when he dropped out. It just changed form. The press that ran cover for this is implicated by every new detail, which is why many of them are covering the book sympathetically instead of asking the obvious question: what did you know, when did you know it, and why did you keep telling us everything was fine?

Here’s the thing: I genuinely want this book tour to go as long as possible. Keep going. More morning shows. More Craig Melvin exchanges where she gets testy under gentle questioning. More named Democrats going on record asking the Bidens to please stop. Every day the Bidens are in the news cycle is a day the 2026 frame is “Democrats hid the truth about their own candidate” instead of “Republicans are extreme.” That’s not the midterm terrain Democrats want to fight on. So, Jill: please, keep talking. Tour every city. Do the podcast circuit. Joe, feel free to make those campaign trail stops. We’ll be watching.

🗳️Special Feature: Primary Night

California

California results are not final and won’t be for roughly another week. State law allows mail-in ballots postmarked by election day to arrive up to seven days later; the Secretary of State certifies final results by July 10.

With roughly half the vote counted, Republican Steve Hilton led Democrat Xavier Becerra 27%-26% in the California governor’s race. Tom Steyer trailed by 6+ points; Katie Porter conceded. If the current order holds, it would be the first time in a decade that a Republican is on the November ballot for California governor. No projection has been made. The mail-in count runs through June 26.

LA Mayor

In Los Angeles, Karen Bass officially advanced. With 63% counted: Bass at 35%, Albert Pratt at 30%, Councilmember Nithya Raman at 22%. Pratt and Raman are still battling for the second runoff spot. No network has called it. AP projected Bass; the second slot is not confirmed.

Iowa

Iowa was the clearest story of the night. Businessman Zach Lahn defeated Trump-backed Rep. Randy Feenstra in the GOP gubernatorial primary, 37.8% to 37%, with 99% reporting. Lahn aligned himself with RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement and picked up an endorsement from former Rep. Steve King, the same Steve King that Feenstra beat in a bitter 2020 primary. Feenstra’s closing argument leaned on Trump’s late endorsement. It lost by less than a point. Feenstra conceded. It’s the first time in this cycle a Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate has lost a primary.

Iowa Senate: Ashley Hinson won the Republican primary by 50+ points over Jim Carlin. She faces Democrat Josh Turek (state rep) for Joni Ernst’s open seat in November.

One note on Iowa: this is a margin-under-one-point race in a MAHA-vs.-MAGA lane fight, not a broad repudiation of Trump. Rob Sand has been setting up his November run for two years and Iowa is looking competitive. The more interesting question is whether MAHA as a movement can hold a coalition in general. Watch November.

Rubio testified before the Senate on the Iran war for the first time since it started. He outlined a two-phase framework: Phase 1 is Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Phase 2 is nuclear talks. The same afternoon, US forces struck a Botswana-flagged oil tanker heading toward an Iranian port with a Hellfire missile, and explosions were reported near Iran’s Qeshm Island. Gas is at $4.34 per gallon. Sen. Cory Booker to Rubio: “We are the strongest nation on the planet Earth, and we’re in a stalemate with Iran.” (WaPo / CNBC)

A federal appeals court blocked the Pentagon from discharging current transgender troops but left the recruiting ban in place. The D.C. Circuit ruled the Trump administration’s policy illegally discriminated by gender identity in a divided 3-judge ruling (Talbott v. USA). The discharge block covers only named plaintiffs, not all transgender service members. Defense Secretary Hegseth posted: “See you at SCOTUS.” (Military Times)

The DOJ says it will comply with a court order pausing the anti-weaponization fund. That provision stalled the $70-72 billion ICE/CBP reconciliation bill in the Senate. Sen. Katie Britt objected to language that could benefit January 6 defendants who assaulted Capitol Police. The package missed Trump’s June 1 deadline with the J6 payout language still unresolved. (Federal News Network)

Trump signed an executive order asking AI companies to submit their most powerful models for voluntary government testing up to 30 days before public release. The order creates an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse” and directs agencies to develop assessment benchmarks. Explicitly bars mandatory licensing or preclearance. An earlier draft required 90 days; the timeline was cut to 30 after industry pushback over innovation concerns. (CNBC)

Trump has two weeks to remove his name from the Kennedy Center. Judge Cooper’s order stands: only Congress can rename it, and the two-year renovation closure blocking all programming is blocked. Trump floated “giving it back to Congress.” The administration has not said what actually happens next. (NBC News)

A man barricaded inside a Chase Bank building in downtown Bakersfield with hostages is entering his second day. The suspect made bomb threats Tuesday afternoon before locking himself inside with several people; at least two hostages have been released and no injuries reported. FBI assumed command of SWAT operations around 11 p.m. Tuesday. Chase confirmed its branch was empty; the standoff is in a separate office suite in the same building. (NBC News)

That’s The Read.

See you Friday.

The Read does the cross-check work so you don’t have to. If it’s useful, send it to someone who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

I also made my FAVORITE chicken sandwich, so yay for me!

The fixed part stays the same every time: salt, time, and meat. What changes is what you do after the brine, and that depends on what the cook actually needs. That's the lesson inside the lesson.

ICYMI

Read more

It’s Monday, and the weekend news cycle is plagued with a sexting scandal, America 250 drama, and men in full gear climbing out of manholes.

I spent the weekend reading on a rainy porch. Hope your week was more like mine and not as dramatic as the news.

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• Five acts walked out of Freedom 250 with coordinated “we were misled” statements, while the left scored every exit like points on a board.

• Platner’s wife disclosed his sexting to the campaign during vetting; they ran him anyway, and the infertility story in yesterday’s campaign video never came up before this week.

• Trump aligned the U.S. vaccine schedule with European peer countries. Blue states, which have spent years telling us to follow Europe’s lead, are refusing to follow.

• Pam Bondi went before Congress unsworn, unrecorded, and still wouldn’t answer the Trump questions on the Epstein files.

  It's Meseidy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Freedom 250 Was Always a White House Task Force

The Story.

The Great American State Fair, organized under the Freedom 250 umbrella as a nonpartisan celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, was scheduled for June 24 through July 10 in Washington. The announced artist roster included the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels, and Young MC. By late May, all five had withdrawn. Martina McBride said she was “presented with an opportunity to perform at a nonpartisan event but that turned out to be misleading.” Young MC said the artists “were never told about any political involvement with the event.” Bret Michaels, the last to exit, gave a different reason: Variety reported he received specific threats against his fans, band, crew, and family, which he called “completely unfounded and unforgivable,” and said the event had “evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of.”

Trump responded on social media calling departing acts “highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” who had gotten “the yips,” and floated a “giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY” as a replacement. Vanilla Ice confirmed he’d still perform. The event includes a $1 million private reception with the president, a detail that ran in every major outlet’s coverage of the departures. Trump is now headlining the opening ceremony.

The Left’s read. NPR, WaPo, and NBC News cover the departures as a music-industry rebuke of Trump: artists who love America but refused to be used for partisan branding. The $1 million private-reception detail runs prominently as the tell: pay-to-play dressed up as patriotism. Trump proposing a MAGA rally as replacement is cited as proof the event was never really about the 250th.

The Right’s read. OAN and right-of-center commentators frame the departures as cancel culture pressure on anyone willing to appear at a patriotic event. Trump headlining is a power move: if the music industry won’t show up for America’s birthday, the president will. There’s also a defense of why Freedom 250 exists at all: conservative critics, including The Federalist, documented that the original America250 commission’s programming guide (produced by the American Association for State and Local History) was built around themes like “Unfinished Revolutions” and treating the founding as a launching point for contemporary grievances. The AASLH’s own president called the 250th a “once in a generation opportunity” to “foster critical awareness of our faults.” The right frame: Freedom 250 was created specifically to redirect the celebration back toward the founding, away from a deconstruction agenda the original commission had been building for years.

What both sides are skipping. Freedom 250 is a publicly filed White House Task Force. It’s on the White House website. The “nonpartisan organization singularly focused on celebrating America’s 250th anniversary” language from the Freedom 250 spokesperson is technically accurate and also obviously incomplete. Every talent agency that booked clients into this event had access to those same public filings. The “we were misled” statements are coordinated exits, not honest accounts. The actual story: the event design itself (the $1 million donor receptions, the White House Task Force structure, Trump as headliner) was never built to survive contact with neutral acts. The 250th deserved a real nonpartisan commission. It didn’t get one. The artist departures are just the visible part of that failure.

Martina McBride’s agency knew what Freedom 250 was when they signed the contract. Young MC’s team knew. Bret Michaels’ people knew. The White House Task Force filing was public. The moment each act was announced and faced a pressure campaign from the left. That’s when the “discovery” arrived. Not during contracting. Not during diligence. After the backlash landed. Call it what it is: a coordinated exit with a convenient cover story.

And let’s be clear about where the pressure came from. The majority was not from their own fans. It came from the left, which has been in tantrum mode since November 2024. What about the other half of their audience? The fans who’d have been in those seats, who love their country, who wanted to celebrate? They don’t get a vote?

Bret Michaels is at least honest about what actually happened, because he named the real problem: actual threats. Against his fans, his band, his crew, his family. He called them “completely unfounded and unforgivable.” He’s right about that. The press covering the artist departures as principled stands should also be covering who sent those threats, and what it says about an opposition that sends them to a rock musician for agreeing to play a birthday party.

I am fatigued. The left lost an election. They are not in power. So the 250th anniversary of the United States has to become a flashpoint, because participating in anything under this administration’s umbrella is treated as collaboration. When this news broke, I watched left-leaning creator after left-leaning talking head announce each act’s departure with barely concealed glee. Like they were keeping score. Every cancellation was a point on the board. Never mind that the venue was America’s birthday party. This is not principled opposition to a president. This is opposition to the country itself, using the president as the excuse. Patriotism apparently has a two-year expiration date depending on who won. It’s a tantrum dressed as a conscience, and most Americans can see it.

Now: the president announcing he might replace the departed acts with a giant MAGA rally speech is not the answer. It hands the press exactly the footage they need to confirm the “it was always partisan” narrative. What would actually work: open the lineup to lesser-known acts who want to be there. Bring in the military bands. Every branch of the armed forces has excellent performance units that represent the country without being a political liability for anyone. Honor the birthday. Don’t give the critics the clip.

There’s also context the press has largely skipped. The original America250 commission wasn’t actually planning a celebration. The Federalist documented that the AASLH’s programming guide for the semiquincentennial was built around themes like “Unfinished Revolutions,” treating the founding as a launching point for contemporary grievances. The AASLH’s own president said the 250th was a “once in a generation opportunity” to “foster critical awareness of our faults.” That’s not a birthday party. That’s a seminar. Freedom 250 was created, at least in part, to redirect the celebration back toward the actual founding. The plan already in place was not a celebration. It was a deconstruction. That context doesn’t get mentioned in any of the coverage of the artist exits.

Most Americans are exhausted. They wanted to celebrate 250 years. They got a fight about who gets to plan the party. That failure belongs to everyone who turned a birthday into a battleground.

Platner’s Wife Told the Campaign. They Ran Him Anyway.

The Story.

Graham Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, positioned to challenge incumbent Sen. Susan Collins after Gov. Janet Mills declined to run in late April. Platner is a Marine Corps veteran with no prior elected office. CBS News reported that his wife, Amy Gertner (whom he married in 2024), discovered sexually explicit texts he had sent to other women early in their marriage. In August 2025, while campaign aides were conducting opposition research, Gertner disclosed the texts to a campaign aide and asked them to assess the risk. The campaign continued with his candidacy. Platner also carries a “Totenkopf” tattoo (the skull insignia used by the Nazi SS units that administered the concentration camps), which he says he got in his 20s without understanding its significance. He has since covered it. Rep. Jake Auchincloss told CNN the tattoo is “personally disqualifying.” Sen. Cory Booker said he has “concerns.” A Bloomberg-reported pro-Collins PAC is running ads on the tattoo.

The number of women Platner sexted is also in dispute: a current campaign worker told reporters he communicated with up to six women; former campaign political director Genevieve McDonald said Gertner told her it was as many as twelve. Washington Times and Townhall also reported that Platner maintained a sexually suggestive profile on Kik under the username “phustle0331,” a handle linked to his Reddit and Instagram accounts, on an app the BBC and federal authorities have described as a “Predator’s Paradise” due to its use in child exploitation cases. There is no indication he used it to contact minors. Despite all of it, Platner leads Collins by 9 points in a recent poll. His primary is June 9.

As of May 31, the campaign’s official X account posted a five-minute video of Gertner filmed on a rural Maine road, swatting black flies, telling the camera it was her “20th take.” She called the coverage “gossip” and “shameful,” said “Graham and I have a great marriage,” and disclosed for the first time publicly that she and Platner are going through infertility and traveling to Norway for IVF after finding local options unaffordable. Fox News reported the video was widely panned. Platner also appeared in a subsequent interview with Gertner seated beside him.

The Left’s read. CNN and Scripps News lead with Gertner’s perspective: she’s “deeply hurt” by the public disclosure, believes a former campaign official betrayed her trust by making the texts public, and is standing by her husband. The Boston Globe treats Auchincloss’s disqualification statement as an outlier. The broader Democratic establishment is deflecting to Trump when pressed. Platner’s expected primary win on June 9 gets framed as voters making their choice.

The Right’s read. Townhall and the Daily Caller frame this as a knowing vetting failure the party absorbed. The Totenkopf gets its full historical context: not “Nazi-adjacent imagery” but the specific insignia of SS units that ran Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka. The party knew about both the tattoo and the sexting before committing to the candidacy. Collins is the target and Platner is all they have. The press is running wife-sympathy cover for a decision the party made with open eyes.

What both sides are skipping. His wife walked into the campaign and told them. During vetting. The decision to run him anyway belongs to whoever was in that room. Not Gertner, not the staffer who leaked, not to Platner’s characterization of the tattoo as a youthful corrected mistake. Nobody has named the specific staffers or consultants who reviewed that disclosure and said “run him anyway.” That question hasn’t been asked seriously by anyone with a platform.

The campaign knew. During the vetting phase. His wife walked in and told them. And they ran him anyway, because Susan Collins is the target and Graham Platner is the only viable candidate they have. That’s the whole story.

There are also two direct questions with two direct answers on record. In May, Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked him on the NYT’s The Interview podcast if there was anything else he wanted to get ahead of before the episode aired. He said no. That interview published May 16. The sexting story broke May 30. Then in April, eight months after his wife had disclosed the sexting to his campaign, a voter named Carolyn Greeley asked him the same thing at a town hall in Sabattus: “Is there anything you need to share with us?” He told the crowd everything had already been dragged up. “In my past, there is not some big, dark secret.” Asked afterward how he could be so certain, he was terse: “I lived my life. That’s how.” NYT. Two chances. Two no’s. His campaign had known since August 2025.

The video Amy posted yesterday came from @grahamformaine. The campaign’s account. The same people who reviewed the sexting disclosure during vetting and said “run him anyway” made the call to put his wife on a rural Maine road, on her 20th take, swatting black flies. That’s not a wife defending her husband. That’s a campaign asset.

Let’s talk about the infertility disclosure specifically. It never came up before this scandal broke. Not in any interview, not in any profile, not in any prior public statement. It arrives in a campaign-posted video the same day the sexting story peaks. The structure is familiar: he claims responsibility, then the excuse follows immediately: the pressures of new marriage, infertility, IVF, a Senate campaign. The sympathy is real. The timing of the disclosure is a campaign decision.

And here’s what the excuse doesn’t hold: this wasn’t behavior from a decade ago that a changed man has put behind him. Platner married Amy Gertner in November 2023. By spring 2025, within the first eighteen months of that marriage, she had found him sexting between six and twelve women, depending on whose account you believe. He announced his Senate run in August 2025. His wife disclosed the texts to his campaign political director days after the launch. The Kik profile (active, under a username tied to his Reddit and Instagram, on an app federal authorities have called a “Predator’s Paradise”) was not a relic either. The SS tattoo was from his twenties. The Reddit posts (written primarily in 2020 and 2021, deleted before the campaign launched, then surfaced by CNN in October 2025) cost him four senior staffers when they came out. When Graham Platner faces difficulty or transition, a pattern of destructive behavior follows. That is a relevant data point for voters being asked to send him to the Senate.

The media coverage wrapping this in the “loyal wife stands by complicated man” frame is running cover for a party decision. Not a candidate decision. The party chose to absorb the risk.

Auchincloss calling the tattoo “personally disqualifying” is fine, but the disqualification test should have happened in the room where someone reviewed the opposition research, saw the sexting disclosure, and said “yeah, we can manage this.” That room existed. Those people haven’t been named.

Here’s the asymmetry: a Republican Senate candidate with an SS tattoo, a Kik profile, and a wife who disclosed his sexting to campaign staff would be a front-page daily story at the Times and the Post for three straight weeks. You’d have op-eds about what it says about the Republican Party. Activist pressure on donors. Party figures queuing up for carefully worded condemnation statements. Platner is getting the “complicated man, loyal wife” frame instead. The party hasn’t asked him to step aside. I will also add: I have never seen such grace demanded of a Republican candidate’s wife. The press running Amy’s video as a sympathetic portrait of a marriage working through struggle would not extend that frame for one news cycle to a Republican’s wife in the same situation.

Former Richmond mayor Levar Stoney put it plainly on X: “I can’t help but think that if this candidate were a person of color or a woman, my party would be asking them to consider stepping aside immediately.” He’s not wrong.

Watch what Senate Democratic leadership does after the June 9 primary. If they cut ad support quietly rather than formalize an endorsement, that’s the tell. Watch whether national donors follow the voters or follow the caucus.

ICYMI

Last week I launched a new newsletter series Kitchen Sense. Lesson 1 was all about salt and was free for everyone to sample. Tomorrow is the first Kitchen Sense: Skill in Action, exclusive to paying subscribers.

The CDC Has One Schedule. The AAP Has Another.

The Story.

On May 29, Trump signed an executive order directing HHS, the CDC, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to align with a Department of Health and Human Services assessment calling for fewer childhood vaccines. The recommended schedule drops from 17 to 11, limiting vaccines for RSV, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, rotavirus, influenza, and meningococcal disease largely to higher-risk children.

The White House fact sheet frames the change as aligning U.S. standards with peer developed countries. The U.S. previously recommended more doses than almost any comparable nation. The American Academy of Pediatrics responded by publishing its own competing immunization schedule, co-signed by 12 major medical organizations including the AMA, ACOG, and the Infectious Disease Society of America. The AAP alleges the EO is partly retaliatory, with the White House acting after the AAP repeatedly challenged earlier vaccine-policy changes. A Massachusetts judge had previously blocked certain CDC schedule changes; the competing AAP document lays groundwork for further litigation.

The Left’s read. CNN leads with the fracture: Trump and RFK overriding career scientists, American pediatricians now caught between the White House and their own professional organization. Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, told CNN that “for now, unfortunately, we have to ignore everything about vaccines that is coming from our federal government.” All states with Democratic governors have announced they won’t follow the federal schedule; only four Republican-led states have done the same. The left frame: the administration is dismantling a child-protection system, and doctors are heroically defecting to the higher standard.

The Right’s read. The Hill and Robert Malone frame this as long-overdue course correction. The U.S. recommended more doses than almost any peer country, more than twice as many as some European nations, and the ACIP has added to the schedule repeatedly without meaningful external audit. The right frame: parental rights and evidence-based medicine finally prevailing against a captured regulatory bureaucracy.

What both sides are skipping. The practical fallout hits every family with a school-age child, not just low-income households. School districts run on state-mandated vaccine requirements, and those requirements don’t automatically update when the federal schedule changes. When September arrives, parents who followed the new federal guidelines, trusting the White House’s framing that this is an alignment with European peer-country standards, may show up at public school registration to find their child’s enrollment held because the state never changed its rules. In many states there is no notification mechanism that alerts families to the divergence. Nobody sends a letter saying “the federal schedule changed but your school district didn’t.” Parents find out at the front desk.

The blue-state opposition is also worth naming for what it is: partly political. States that have spent years pointing to European healthcare systems as the standard the U.S. should aspire to are now resistant to following European vaccine recommendations the moment a Republican administration is the one doing the aligning. If a Democratic administration had moved to bring U.S. standards in line with Germany and France, those same governors would have called it evidence-based leadership. The selective application of “look what Europe does” is not a public health argument. It’s a jersey.

The medical establishment spent five years burning its credibility on COVID. Mask on, mask off. Two weeks to flatten the curve became two years. The agencies that said “trust us” were the same ones updating their guidance weekly, moving goalposts on what “following the science” meant, and labeling anyone who asked questions an anti-vaxxer. RFK is cashing the check they wrote. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s cause and effect.

And it’s not just COVID. The CDC issued opioid prescribing guidelines in 2016 that clinicians applied so rigidly that chronic pain patients lost access to medication, fueling a crisis of undertreated pain. Federal dietary guidelines spent decades telling Americans to cut fat, fear cholesterol, and eat more grains: guidance now broadly understood to have been shaped by industry influence and tied to the obesity epidemic. The ACIP added to the vaccine schedule year after year without meaningful external accountability. At some point, skepticism is the rational response. Don’t even get me started.

There’s also a specific hypocrisy in the blue-state opposition worth naming. For years the left has pointed to European countries as the standard the U.S. should follow on healthcare, drug pricing, public health policy. All of it. The U.S. had one of the most vaccine-heavy schedules of any peer developed nation. More doses than France. More than twice as many as some Scandinavian countries. The moment this administration moves to bring U.S. recommendations closer to those same European peers, the European comparison suddenly doesn’t apply. That is not a scientific argument. That is a jersey.

I’m fine with pediatricians having real scientific concerns about specific vaccine removals. Debate the data. Make the case. But let’s be clear about who we’re talking about. These are the same AAP-affiliated physicians and professional organizations that pushed COVID vaccines for children and pregnant women (including before the long-term safety data was in) because the federal agencies said to. These are the same professional bodies that endorsed gender-affirming care for minors: puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, the whole protocol, because the establishment consensus signed off on it. We’ve all seen how that’s going. Detransitioners. Lawsuits. A growing body of evidence that the outcomes did not match what was sold. So when the AAP says the federal vaccine schedule is dangerous and theirs is the correct one, I’m genuinely asking: what has changed about the institutional process that should make us more confident now than we were then? That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the question.

But. The blue-state response isn’t purely about the science either. Every governor and state health official who announced they won’t follow the federal schedule is making a political calculation: an executive order has no long-term teeth. The next Democratic administration issues the opposite order. These states know that. They’re weighing how long this EO stays in effect against the cost of changing school-mandate policies, and most are betting the political calendar solves this in two years. Why update your kindergarten enrollment requirements for something that may not survive the next election? They’re probably not wrong to run that calculation.

So here’s where we end up: a federal schedule most public school districts aren’t following, a competing professional schedule most pediatricians prefer, state mandate requirements that haven’t changed, and parents walking into September with no idea there’s a conflict. Nobody in that chain is accountable to the family. This issue should not be partisan. It is very much partisan. And the people who made it partisan aren’t exclusively on one side.

Bondi stonewalled every Trump question at the Epstein hearing — and she wasn't under oath. Former AG Pam Bondi appeared before House Oversight on May 29 for a closed-door, unsworn, unrecorded interview. Democrats said she refused questions on Trump's involvement and redirected to Deputy AG Blanche as the person "in charge." Bondi disputed that on X afterward: "NOT TRUE. I praised Acting AG Blanche's management of this Herculean task." Current and former DOJ officials pushed back on her denial, telling reporters she was informed of every key decision and signed a memo in July 2025 formally ending the government's review of the Epstein files. CBS News | Daily Caller

UPDATE: The DOJ opened a Carroll/Hoffman probe. The U.S. Attorney supposedly running it says it doesn’t exist. The Chicago U.S. Attorney stated publicly his office “has not, and has never opened, a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll” — the same probe DOJ sources confirmed to multiple outlets. Carroll allegedly told the court in a 2022 deposition that no one was funding her legal fees; her lawyer later disclosed $7 million from a Reid Hoffman nonprofit. Acting AG Blanche is recused (he was Trump’s appeals attorney). CBS News

No Iran deal. Trump sent it back with new demands and says he’s “not in a hurry.” As of May 31, Trump returned the proposed MoU with tougher language on nuclear commitments and Strait of Hormuz reopening. Defense Secretary Hegseth said the military remains ready to resume combat “if needed.” Gas is $4.34/gallon nationally — down 18 cents from last week but up 46% from the start of the war. Senators Cruz, Wicker, and Graham panned the framework; former Secretary of State Pompeo said it resembles the Obama-era JCPOA Trump tore up in 2018. CNBC

Louisiana eliminated its Black-majority congressional district after the Supreme Court struck down the existing map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The legislature passed the new GOP-favored map 28-10, wiping out Rep. Cleo Fields’ 6th Congressional District, which runs from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to sign it quickly. The ruling has set off a chain reaction: Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina are all moving to redraw their lines, and Cook Political now estimates Republicans could net 5–7 House seats nationally through redistricting heading into the midterms. The Hill

A federal judge temporarily blocked the DOJ’s $1.7 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund from operating or making any payouts. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s order bars DOJ from “taking any further action” on the fund while she considers longer-term relief. The fund was created from Trump’s settlement of a civil lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns; critics argue it lacks congressional authorization and could benefit Jan. 6 defendants. Multiple lawsuits have been filed to dismantle it; the DOJ says it’s “extremely confident in the legality” of the program. CBS News

Seven men climbed into Brooklyn sewers at 2am, filmed themselves coming out in waders, changed clothes on the sidewalk, and vanished before police arrived. The NYPD launched an investigation after video obtained by The Flatbush Scoop showed the group descending into a Gravesend manhole, emerging around 2am, stripping off apparently filthy clothes, and piling into waiting cars. A similar incident was reported the same night in Williamsburg. Police said there’s no apparent terrorism link; the men could face burglary charges if caught. Cops did not say what they were doing down there. Nobody knows. NY Post

That’s the read.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

My feeds have been dominated by Talarico. Annoying for obvious reasons, but also because I know there is other news. At least it’s Friday!

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• The DOJ opened a criminal probe into Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit after E. Jean Carroll told the court no outside money was funding her lawyers. A billionaire was cutting checks.

• Ken Paxton won the Texas GOP Senate runoff by 27 points, and within 48 hours it became the ugliest incoming race in America: a pedophile plea deal versus a “God is non-binary” floor speech.

• Two threats against conservative women hit the same week. One got national coverage. The other got Fox and local Texas TV.

• A former CIA officer was arrested with 303 gold bars, $2 million cash, and fake credentials.

• Hamas confirmed its fourth military wing chief killed since the war began.

Reid Hoffman Paid the Bills. She Said Nobody Was Paying the Bills. The DOJ Is Now Asking About It.

The Story.

The Story. On May 27, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into American Future Republic, the Chicago-based nonprofit founded by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman. The nonprofit paid $7 million to Kaplan Hecker & Fink, the law firm representing E. Jean Carroll in her civil suits against Donald Trump. Prosecutors are examining money laundering, obstruction, and conspiracy charges. The perjury question centers on Carroll's 2022 deposition, in which she said her lawyers were working on contingency. Hoffman's payments were disclosed to the court two weeks before trial. The Chicago U.S. Attorney's Office has clarified that Carroll herself is not the target; the probe is focused on the nonprofit and its funding structure.

The Left’s read. MSNBC’s Maddow blog frames it as “weaponization” of the Justice Department. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade calls it a vindictive prosecution waiting to be tossed. The Washington Post emphasizes that Carroll isn’t a target, the funding was disclosed pre-trial, and prosecutors are stretching to find a crime. The consensus frame: this is Trump using the DOJ to punish a woman who beat him in court.

The Right’s read. The Washington Examiner and PJ Media treat the probe as vindication. The lawsuit that produced a half-billion-dollar verdict was bankrolled by a Democratic megadonor with a political motive, and the plaintiff’s sworn testimony didn’t reflect that. Newsweek leans into the perjury angle as the prosecutable thread.

What both sides are skipping. Neither side is treating this as a story about how billionaire money flowing through 501(c)(4) nonprofits has become the operating system of high-profile political lawfare. Hoffman’s American Future Republic isn’t his only nonprofit vehicle. The left wants it to be about Trump’s vendetta. The right wants it to be about Carroll’s deposition. The bigger thread is the structure itself. And here’s the part nobody is connecting: Carroll told CNN she personally helped push New York Democrats to pass the Adult Survivors Act in 2022, the law that created the one-year lookback window that made her case possible. Hoffman funded the legal team. The plaintiff helped create the law. The same billionaire’s money sat behind both the lawsuit and the plaintiff who advocated for the statute that enabled it. That’s not a scandal. It might be perfectly legal. But it is a system, and the press should describe it as such.

Depositions are under oath. That’s the part everyone is skating past to get to the framing they prefer.

“My lawyers work on contingency” is either true or it isn’t. Carroll said it under oath in a 2022 deposition. Meanwhile, a billionaire’s nonprofit was writing seven-figure checks to her law firm. The funding was disclosed to the court two weeks before trial, which the left is using to argue there’s nothing to see. But “disclosed before trial” is not the same as “told the truth under oath during discovery.” Those are different legal moments with different legal consequences, and the press covering this story knows the difference. They’re choosing not to explain it.

If a Republican megadonor had funded a lawsuit against, say, Hillary Clinton, and the plaintiff testified under oath that no outside money was involved, MSNBC would be running a five-part series titled Follow the Money. You know it. I know it.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2016, Peter Thiel spent $10 million secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Billionaire bankroll, personal vendetta, media company destroyed by the verdict. The left treated it as a five-alarm free-press emergency. Hoffman’s operation is the mirror image: billionaire bankroll, political target, nonprofit conduit, sworn testimony that didn’t mention the money. The left’s response this time? “Weaponization.”

The mock defense writes itself: “This is just Trump using the DOJ to punish a woman who beat him in court.” Maybe. It might also be that a person under oath answered a direct question about who was paying her lawyers, and the answer was not the whole truth. Both can be true. I don’t want the DOJ pursuing dubious cases against anyone, friend or enemy. I also don’t want a press corps that decides perjury matters only when the right person is alleged to have committed it.

Pick one and live with the standard.

Paxton Got the Nomination. Then Talarico Got the Pedophile Plea Deal. Then Paxton’s First Ad Hit “God Is Non-Binary.” Welcome to the Race.

The Story.

On May 26, Texas AG Ken Paxton beat three-term Sen. John Cornyn 60-33 in the GOP runoff after a last-minute Trump endorsement. Within 48 hours, Democrat James Talarico launched his opening salvo: Adam Hoffman, a Waco man charged with sexually abusing a young boy over three years, who got a plea deal from Paxton's office for two misdemeanors and no sex-offender registry.

Here's what Talarico leaves out. McLennan County DA Josh Tetens recused himself because Hoffman had sought his counsel when Tetens was a defense attorney. The case went to Paxton's office by default. The trial ended in a hung jury, 7-5 for a guilty verdict. The child victim made clear he would not testify again. Without his star witness, the prosecution's hand collapsed. The visiting judge doubled the proposed sentence from 30 to 60 days. Hoffman was released after 29 on good-behavior credit. Talarico on CBS: "If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles."

Paxton's first ad fired back with Talarico's 2021 Texas House floor speech declaring "God is non-binary." Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who raised $27 million in Q1.

The Left’s read. CNN, the Washington Post, and Daily Kos lead with Paxton’s scandal sheet: securities fraud indictment, impeachment by his own party 121-23, Senate acquittal 16-14, FBI probe triggered by eight of his own aides. The Hoffman plea is the new front-page exhibit. Diana Butler Bass frames it as “a straight up religious argument between Christianity as a religion of love for neighbor and Christian authoritarianism.”

The Right’s read. Fox News called Paxton’s win a “MAGA triumph.” Newsmax’s Laura Hollis urged Paxton not to dodge the Christianity fight, arguing Talarico’s positions on abortion and gender are not consistent with historic Christian teaching.

What both sides are skipping. The left is running the Hoffman plea deal as a Paxton scandal without mentioning that Paxton’s office inherited the case on a recusal, that the jury hung, or that the child refused to testify again. Those details don’t make the outcome acceptable, but they do make Talarico’s “Epstein-style sweetheart deal” framing dishonest about why the prosecution’s hand was weak. Meanwhile, the right is running “God is non-binary” as though it’s the only thing Talarico has ever said on camera. It’s not. There’s also the anti-meat clip, the sermon saying the “trans community needs abortion care too,” the 2020 tweets calling racism a virus spread by white people, and the 2019 comments about police in schools creating a “culture of violence.” These are all on video. Talarico told NBC he “missed the mark” on some old comments and called them “cringey.” The left-leaning press is helping him create that distance by treating each clip as an isolated GOP attack rather than a pattern of stated positions he held until they became inconvenient for a statewide race.

Two things are true and the press will pretend they’re not.

The Hoffman plea deal is ugly. I want to be clear about that. A child was abused for three years, the jury leaned guilty 7-5, and the outcome was 29 days in county jail and no sex-offender registry. That should make anyone sick. But "Paxton personally cut a deal for a pedophile" is a campaign line, not a description of what happened. The local DA, Josh Tetens, recused himself because Hoffman had consulted with him before Tetens took office. Paxton's AG office stepped in because that's what happens when the local DA can't prosecute. The trial hung. The child victim said he would not take the stand again. The prosecution lost its star witness, and its case collapsed. The visiting judge could have gone higher and chose 60 days. If there's corruption in that sequence, show me the evidence. If there isn't, then say what the case actually was: a prosecution that lost its witness and settled for what it could get. That's not a defense. It's an explanation. Talarico knows the difference. He's choosing the campaign line anyway.

And let’s talk about Talarico, because the press is running a rebrand on him in real time and hoping nobody notices.

This is not a fresh-faced seminarian who made one provocative comment on the Texas House floor. This is a politician with years of on-camera statements about God’s gender, veganism, policing, and race. The “God is non-binary” speech. The sermon where he said the “trans community needs abortion care too.” The anti-meat clip. The 2020 tweets calling racism a virus spread by white people. The 2019 comments about police in schools creating a “culture of violence.” These are all on video. He said them. He meant them at the time. And now he’s calling them “cringey” because Texas is not Austin, and a statewide race is not a House floor speech in a safe district.

The left-leaning press is helping him create distance by treating each clip as an isolated bad-faith Republican attack instead of asking the obvious question: Do you still believe what you said, or were you performing for a different audience?

The race is going to be ugly because both candidates have issues.

ICYMI

DSA members just won Democratic primaries, and everyone's acting surprised. They've been building locally for years. I wrote about it when fewer people were paying attention. It was behind the paywall — I've opened it up.

Erika Kirk Got Bomb Threats Nine Months After Burying Her Husband. Ivanka Trump Got an IRGC Assassination Plot. One Got National Coverage.

The Story.

Two threat events bookended the week. On May 23, federal authorities unsealed charges against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi national allegedly trained by Iran’s IRGC, extradited from Turkey after a foiled assassination plot against Ivanka Trump as revenge for the 2020 Soleimani strike. Prosecutors say he had a floor plan of her Florida home and posted a map on X with an Arabic-language threat. He was tied to nearly 20 plots across Europe and North America. He faces six terrorism counts in Manhattan federal court.

On May 28, San Antonio police arrested Jacob Wenske, 26, on two felony terroristic-threat charges. The emails: “Death to Erika Kirk and every single speaker there!!” A social media reply: “I know exactly where to bomb.” The target was the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit scheduled for June 5-7 at the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter. Erika Kirk is the CEO of TPUSA and widow of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.

The Left’s read. Mainstream outlets covered the Ivanka plot as a foreign-terror story with geopolitical context: IRGC, Soleimani retaliation, the broader Iranian threat network. Coverage was steady and factual. The Kirk threat received minimal national attention from left-of-center outlets, following the same pattern that played out with the Charlie Kirk assassination coverage in fall 2025.

The Right’s read. Fox News, the Washington Examiner, RedState, and the Daily Caller covered both threats as part of one pattern. Capitol Police logged over 14,000 threat investigations against lawmakers on pace for 2026, up from 9,474 in 2024.

What both sides are skipping. The two threats have different operational profiles. Al-Saadi is a state-sponsored foreign operative trained by a designated terrorist organization. Wenske is a domestic individual. Lumping them together is sloppy. Treating them as unrelated is also sloppy. The asymmetric press response is a separate problem from the threat analysis, and it’s the one worth naming.

Imagine a series of Democratic congresswomen were receiving bomb threats nine months after a colleague was assassinated on a college campus. Imagine the widow of the murdered man took over his organization and, within eight months, a man was arrested for emailing “Death to [her name]” before her women’s summit. Imagine the same week, a foreign operative was indicted for plotting to assassinate the daughter of a former Democratic president.

Every newsroom in America would be running a daily threat tracker on the front page. Everyone would know Erika Kirk’s name the way you know Gabby Giffords’s name. There would be a CNN special. There would be a Time cover. There would be think pieces about the climate of violence against women in public life. And every one of those pieces would be correct.

But the targets are conservative women. So the Ivanka plot gets foreign-terror coverage because the IRGC fingerprints make it geopolitically respectable. And Erika Kirk gets Fox and local Texas TV. That’s it. Her husband was murdered in front of a crowd in September. She took the CEO job. Eight months later, bomb threats. And the press that covered every angle of the Charlie Kirk assassination for about 72 hours before moving on has already moved on from this too.

The defense, “Right-wing extremism has historically killed more people, so the aggregate data justifies the coverage imbalance.” Except the aggregate data doesn’t say what they think it says anymore. CSIS tracked domestic terrorism incidents through early 2025 and found that for the first time in thirty years, attacks from the left outnumber attacks from the right. The University of Maryland’s dataset logged over 150 politically motivated attacks and plots in 2024 alone, with left-wing incidents surging. The narrative that right-wing violence is the only domestic threat worth covering isn’t supported by the data they claim to follow. It’s supported by the story they prefer to tell.

And Charlie Kirk wasn’t some random activist. His assassination was the most significant political assassination in recent American history. But the press covered it for about 72 hours and moved on, because the victim was a conservative and the killing didn’t fit the “right-wing extremism is the real threat” framework they’d spent a decade building. When Erika Kirk shows up in coverage at all, it’s framed as MAGA drama, not as a widow who took over her murdered husband’s organization and immediately started receiving death threats. A bomb threat eight months after a successful assassination isn’t a culture-war sidebar. It’s a pattern. And covering it honestly would mean acknowledging that violence against the right is rising, which would mean revisiting every editorial decision they’ve made since Charlottesville. They’d rather not.

The press isn’t required to like conservative women. It is required to treat threats against them as news.

Hamas confirms new military chief killed in Israeli strike. Mohammed Odeh, head of the al-Qassam Brigades and identified as an October 7 architect, was killed in a Gaza City airstrike May 26. His wife and two sons were also killed. Fourth Hamas military wing chief eliminated since the war began. Second in 11 days.

U.S. and Iran reach tentative 60-day ceasefire extension, await Trump approval. Negotiators agreed to a 60-day MOU with Strait of Hormuz terms and a nuclear-talks framework. Trump was briefed Tuesday and said he’s “not satisfied.” The White House called reports a “complete fabrication.” Tehran hasn’t confirmed. So either there’s a deal, or there isn’t, or there’s a deal nobody wants to own yet.

Ex-CIA official arrested with 303 gold bars and a fake resume. The FBI arrested former senior CIA officer David Rush at his Virginia home, seizing $40 million in gold, $2 million cash, and 35 luxury watches. He allegedly faked Navy-pilot credentials and advanced degrees to get his security clearance. CIA internal probe opened. Somebody watched Catch Me If You Can and thought it was a training manual.

Blue Origin rocket explodes at Cape Canaveral. The New Glenn rocket exploded during a hotfire test on May 28. No injuries. It was preparing to launch 48 Amazon Kuiper satellites. The program was already grounded since April after an engine failure on its third flight. Jeff Bezos’s space program is having a quarter.

Six protesters arrested after clash with ICE officers outside NJ detention center. Over 100 protesters clashed with ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark. Pepper balls and mace were fired. Rep. Mikie Sherrill and other Congress members were denied facility access. DHS denies a hunger strike is underway; detainee attorneys say 300 are striking over conditions. Sen. Andy Kim was pepper sprayed.

Mullin “drawing up plans” to halt international flight processing in sanctuary cities. DHS Secretary Mullin cited the Newark protests as rationale for drafting plans to pull customs processing from sanctuary-city airports including Newark, LAX, SFO, and O’Hare. Not yet initiated. Airlines and tourism groups called it “devastating.” Whether it’s a real policy or a pressure campaign depends on whether you read the follow-through or just the headline.

Freedom 250's Great American State Fair lineup is collapsing in real time. The 16-day America's-250th celebration on the National Mall (June 25-July 10) announced its concert lineup this week, and within 48 hours Martina McBride, the Commodores, Morris Day, Young MC, and Bret Michaels all pulled out after learning the event had Trump-administration ties. McBride said she was told it was nonpartisan, which "turned out to be misleading." Left-leaning outlets are counting every withdrawal like a box score, and The New Republic preemptively mocked the lineup before half of it had even dropped. Vanilla Ice is still in. Make of that what you will.

Shrey Parikh wins the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga won the 98th bee at Constitution Hall, defeating 12-year-old Ishaan Gupta in a spell-off, 32 words to 25. Third trip to nationals. From 89th place in 2022 to champion. That’s the kind of persistence most adults give up on after the second rejection email.

That’s The Read.

Enjoy the weekend. For my friends in the south, stay dry. We needed the rain, but I don’t know about you, but I could use a break.

Closing the laptop for the weekend

See you Monday!

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

The Read is back from the Memorial Day break.

Quick note: I launched a new newsletter, Kitchen Sense. Not recipes. The cooking fundamentals behind every dish you already make: when to salt, how heat works, and why one oil and not the other. With dedicated chats to ask questions, swap recipes, and make friends. Lesson 1 dropped on Tuesday on salt, and it's free for everyone. From Lesson 2 forward, the rest is for paying subscribers.

Let’s get into it.

In Today’s Read

• OPM proposed a five-year NDA for every federal worker, covering “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material.” That phrase covers the whole federal email system.

• Sarah Kellen named three Epstein abusers in closed-door testimony. CNN ran the names. Most legacy outlets buried them.

• Treasury subpoenaed Hasan Piker over his March Cuba trip. On a Sunday Twitch stream, with no prompting, he named CCP-tied tycoon Neville Roy Singham as his funder. About 40 Americans are in the probe.

• Plus: Paxton beat Cornyn in the Texas runoff, Al Green lost his Houston primary, a third firearms incident near Trump, and Garden Grove evacuations lifted.

A Five-Year NDA for Every Federal Worker

The Story

Office of Personnel Management (OPM) posted a draft government-wide non-disclosure agreement to the Federal Register on Tuesday, May 26. The rule would bar federal workers from sharing "confidential government information," including "internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material." The term is five years post-employment, retroactive to current hires. The draft text says the NDA does not override the Whistleblower Protection Act. Disclosures of fraud, waste, abuse, corruption, and retaliation to inspectors general, the Office of Special Counsel, or Congress stay protected. Disclosures to the press are not carved out. OPM cited recent press leaks as the trigger, naming the January Venezuela raid and ongoing immigration-enforcement leaks. AFGE, the largest federal union, says agencies will push the form on existing employees and fire those who refuse to sign. Per Bloomberg Law, the proposed rule went up for a 60-day public comment window before any final adoption. WaPo, CNN, and NPR ran identical timelines.

The Left’s read. WaPo, CNN, NPR, and PBS frame this as a press-freedom crackdown and a chilling effect on whistleblowers. Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Lauren Harper said the proposal from “the ‘most transparent administration in history’ that millions of federal employees sign a blanket NDA is not just absurd, it’s unnecessary and dangerously secretive.” Coverage emphasizes the breadth of “pre-decisional” as a category and the retroactive application to current hires.

The Right’s read. Sparse to nonexistent. The right-of-center outlets that covered the story framed it as leak-plumbing. The Venezuela raid is the working example, the IRGC retaliation risk if the leak had landed early enough. Most conservative coverage skipped the rule entirely.

What both sides are skipping. OPM itself admits the NDA "does not create new substantive restrictions on employee speech or disclosure rights." The Espionage Act already criminalizes leaks of classified information. Disclosure of personal information is covered by the Privacy Act of 1974. Federal employees are already barred from disclosing or using nonpublic information for personal benefit under the 1993 Standards of Ethical Conduct. So if the substantive obligations already exist, what's actually new? Contractual enforcement. A signed contract every federal worker has to actively acknowledge. A breach-of-contract claim agencies can pursue without filing a criminal case. A firing pathway that doesn't require an Espionage Act prosecution. Left coverage has gestured at this. Right coverage has skipped it. Neither has led with the OPM admission.

Leaking has always been a problem inside the federal government, and it’s escalated significantly since Trump entered politics. The Venezuela raid is the cleanest example. American operators were in the field. A legacy outlet held the leak only after the White House made the case that publishing would risk service members in action. Leaking is a real issue and a real national security risk. But what happens when competing priorities collide? When is it about national security, and when is it about politics?

The wording matters. “Any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material” is the whole federal email system. Every draft memo, every personnel discussion, every agency back-and-forth before a final decision. That is the entire record. A five-year gag on every federal employee, retroactive to current hires, is extensive. And while the rule keeps IG, OSC, and Congress open as channels, it forecloses the one channel that has actually moved the needle when those failed: the press.

The carve-outs are there because legislation requires them. Without those carve-outs, the rule would be challenged and shut down fast. So is the carve-out out of principle, or out of requirement? I think we can guess. By foreclosing the press route, federal whistleblowers’ only formal options become IG, OSC, and Congress. IG complaints often take many months to move. OSC has its own backlog. The press call lands a story in a day. Think of the cases that have kept the government accountable when the internal channels failed. Dr. Sam Foote spent 24 years at the Phoenix VA before taking the secret-wait-list deaths to CNN in 2014, after years of internal complaints went nowhere. Forty veterans had died waiting for care. Secretary Shinseki resigned within weeks. The story moved because the formal channels had stalled.

Comey’s 2017 memo leak is the counter-example. The memos reached the public through the press and got used to push the now-discredited Russiagate framing for three years. Leaks can be politically weaponized when press bias and source motivation align. The First Amendment doesn’t sort which.

It’s a challenge to balance all of the priorities and still protect the freedom of the press. Which is the entire point of the Bill of Rights.

Watch the 60-day comment-period close date. Watch which agency adopts the form first. Watch the First Amendment challenge that’s coming. The test will be whether courts force a carve-out for the press the same way the Whistleblower Protection Act forced one for IG, OSC, and Congress.

CNN Ran the Epstein Names. Most Outlets Buried Them

The Story

Sarah Kellen, Epstein’s longtime assistant who pleaded the Fifth roughly 700 times in civil depositions over the years, sat for closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, May 21. Chairman James Comer called it “by far the most substantive and productive interview” the panel has conducted on Epstein.

CNN reported Friday that Kellen named three additional alleged abusers in Epstein’s orbit: celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai (who denies it), former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine (who says he met Epstein “only a few times”), and fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier (who died in 2022). Kellen also told the committee she was sexually and psychologically abused by Epstein on a weekly basis for over a decade. Comer now considers her a victim, not a co-conspirator. Bondi testifies on the Epstein files Friday, May 29.

The Left’s read. CNN ran the names. That’s the exception, not the norm. Most other mainstream-left coverage led with procedure (“closed-door testimony,” “victim status determined”) and walked the three names down the page or omitted them. NYT, WaPo, and NPR did not lead with the names. PBS covered the testimony without naming Levine or Fekkai in the headline or first three paragraphs.

The Right’s read. ABC News led with the names. The Gateway Pundit, Just the News, and the Free Press treated the names as the lede. The framing inside that ecosystem: legacy press won’t run the names because two of the three named are Democrat-adjacent or Manhattan-society-adjacent, and the press protects its own.

What both sides are skipping. Kellen's contested status. Multiple Epstein accusers have positioned her as the operations role for years. Virginia Giuffre's 2015 sworn declaration in the Maxwell case: Kellen "kept a list of girls" and "lined up the massages," and was "often the one who brought the girls upstairs" before Epstein entered the room. A 2008 Florida lawsuit by a Jane Doe plaintiff: Kellen gathered the victim's name and phone number, then walked her up a flight of stairs to a bedroom with a massage table. In 2013, a separate lawsuit called Kellen a "lieutenant" in Epstein's organization, "who served as both his scheduler and a recruiter/procurer of the girls." The 2007 federal non-prosecution agreement named her as one of four "potential co-conspirators." Never charged. Comer's "she's a victim now" call is a political determination from an Oversight chair, not a court finding. Both can be true. She could have been abused for a decade and run the logistics of other girls' abuse. The framing on both sides treats it as binary. It isn't.

I can’t imagine the toll a decade of sexual and psychological abuse by a man like Epstein takes on a person. If half of what’s in Kellen’s sworn statement to the committee is true, the harm she carries is real. I understand the legal calculus too. All of her prior depositions where she pled the Fifth happened while Epstein was alive and before Maxwell went to prison. Pleading the Fifth when you’d otherwise be staring down a co-conspirator charge is not silence. It’s competent legal advice.

The opposite can also be true. She had enough sense to take the Fifth when the prosecutor’s view of her was lieutenant, scheduler, recruiter. Now that Epstein is dead, Maxwell is in prison, and the narrative has settled on monster, she can step in as victim. Timing is the question. A witness with this much legal exposure pleads the Fifth across roughly seven hundred questions in a 2016 deposition and then opens the door in May 2026, because the door is finally safest to open. Naming three new abusers strengthens the victim posture and pulls focus from the operations role Giuffre’s 2015 sworn declaration and the 2007 federal non-prosecution agreement put her in. Both motivations can coexist.

Which brings us to the press. They are all too happy to run some names and not others. Three months ago, on February 11, 2026, Rep. Ro Khanna stood on the House floor and read out six redacted names from the Epstein files: an American billionaire (Wexner), a Dubai logistics CEO (bin Sulayem), a former European Parliament member (Caputo), and three names that read Italian, Georgian, and Russian (Nuara, Mikeladze, Leonov). DOJ pushed back within days: Deputy AG Todd Blanche said some of the men were “completely random people selected years ago for an FBI lineup,” with no actual connection to Epstein. Lineup photos are filler the FBI uses so victims aren’t identifying the only person shown to them. The mainstream press ran the names anyway. CNN had Khanna on Anderson Cooper. PBS NewsHour and The Hill put the names in their headlines. WaPo’s response was an opinion column titled “How Ro Khanna turned Epstein sex trafficking case into campaign stunt.” That headline framed the namer as the problem. Not the named. The names ran because they served the narrative. Foreign nationals and lineup-photo fillers handed the press a clean way to swing at the Trump DOJ with low political and litigation risk. Nobody had to pressure-test. They printed.

Three months later, Kellen testifies behind closed doors. The Republican-led House Oversight panel hands the names of Fekkai, Levine, and Demarchelier to the press. CNN runs them. NYT, WaPo, NPR bury them in paragraph nine. Same outlets, different volume. The Epstein test runs both ways. Either you name the named, or you don’t.

Bondi testifies on the Epstein files Friday. The Kellen names pre-load the questions Garcia and Mace will ask. Watch which networks cover the Bondi hearing live and which ones run summary clips after. Watch whether NYT and WaPo lead with Levine’s name once Bondi gets asked about him under oath. Watch whether the WaPo opinion section runs a “Comer turns Epstein files into political stunt” version of the Khanna column from February. The asymmetric naming pattern will repeat.

IKYMI

Ever Heard of Neville Roy Singham? Hasan Piker Just Named Him

The Story

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control subpoenaed Twitch streamer Hasan Piker in May over his March trip to Cuba, which he took alongside Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. About 40 Americans are reportedly in the probe; Ilhan Omar’s daughter Isra Hirsi is in the broader scope.

On a Sunday Twitch stream, with no prompting, Piker named CCP-tied tycoon Neville Roy Singham as the financier behind the Cuba trip and as the funder behind the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the ANSWER Coalition, and Code Pink.

Independent journalist Asra Nomani has tied Singham to a $278 million network of nonprofits seeding U.S. political activism through layered LLCs and 501(c)s. Older Piker clips also surfaced this week showing him acknowledging the Cuban government provided his streaming infrastructure during a prior visit.

The Left’s read. Largely silent. NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, and Politico did not lead with the Piker admission and, in most cases, did not mention the Singham name. Where left coverage exists, the frame is OFAC overreach and the chilling effect on political speech.

The Right’s read. The Post Millennial, Fox, RedState, and the Free Press treated the admission as the lede. The frame: a left-wing influencer with a multi-million-dollar Twitch contract just confirmed on his own broadcast what right-of-center reporters have been chasing for years. Foreign money, layered LLCs, and ostensibly grassroots protest groups.

What both sides are skipping. The legal mechanism. OFAC subpoenas are administrative. They’re not indictments, and they’re not jury-protected. The First Amendment concern is real if Piker is being targeted as a journalist. He’s also not a journalist by his own description. He’s a streamer who took a trip to a sanctioned country with Medea Benjamin and used hardware allegedly provided by the Cuban government. That’s a different category. Both sides are running their pre-set frame on the press question and skipping the actual scope question. What is the $278 million network actually paying for?

Most readers have never heard of Neville Roy Singham. Until Sunday, a lot of the political class hadn’t either. If Piker hadn’t been talking himself in circles on his own stream, the name would still be where Singham wanted it: out of sight. He doesn’t carry the public profile of a George Soros. No press secretary, no foundation everyone recognizes, no name on the side of a building. That opacity is the point. Singham is arguably worse than Soros. Soros funds progressive causes domestically through Open Society. Singham operates a $278 million network with documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party and a clear Marxist ideological project, channeled through layered LLCs and U.S. 501(c) nonprofits. One is an American political movement. The other is a foreign-aligned ideological project running under American activist branding.

The most-watched left-wing streamer on Twitch named his own funder on stream. The Treasury subpoena did in two months what every right-of-center investigative reporter has been chasing for the last five years.

Where is the NYT investigative piece? Where is WaPo’s deep-dive on Singham’s $278 million network? The Asra Nomani receipts have been public for years. Stu Smith’s X thread compiled Singham’s own ideological supercut. The clip of Piker acknowledging the Cuban government provided his streaming hardware is on X. None of this is hidden. It just isn’t being covered by the outlets that have spent the last decade hunting for foreign influence in American politics. Except when the foreign hand is Russian, apparently.

Piker streams from a million-dollar mansion, pontificating (if you can call it that) on communism and revolution he would never actually participate in. The moment things get challenging, he flips and rats. This is a weak man, and the progressive Democrats see him as a symbol of the future. That should tell you a lot about them.

The mock defense will be: “You’re cheering Treasury subpoenas of left-wing voices.” No. I’m noticing that the only mechanism that finally got the foreign-funding network named on the record was Treasury, because the press class that’s supposed to do this kind of reporting hasn’t.

He named his own funder on stream. Believe him.

Watch which legacy outlet runs the Singham name in a headline this week. Watch whether NYT files anything on the $278 million network now that Piker has confirmed the wiring on his own broadcast. Watch what happens to the framing if Isra Hirsi’s name turning up in the broader scope draws formal notice and a sitting member of Congress’s adult child gets pulled in.

Paxton wins the Texas Senate runoff. Texas AG Ken Paxton defeated four-term Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday's Republican primary runoff. The Associated Press called the race shortly after 8 p.m., roughly an hour after most polls closed. Trump's eleventh-hour endorsement, landed seven days before the runoff, did the work. Paxton will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in November. Cornyn's three-decade Senate run is over. Texas Tribune

Al Green loses TX-18 to Christian Menefee. Houston Democrat Al Green, a two-decade incumbent and Trump's most aggressive impeachment antagonist, lost the TX-18 Democratic primary runoff Tuesday to fellow Rep. Christian Menefee. Final count: Menefee 68.6%, Green 31.4%. The incumbent-on-incumbent matchup was forced by GOP-led redistricting that put the two members in the same Houston district. Green introduced articles of impeachment against Trump in both terms and was censured by the House last year for disrupting Trump's joint-session speech. Even Houston Democrats appear to be done with the shenanigans. Texas Tribune

Trump’s redistricting push hits two losses in 24 hours. A three-judge federal panel ruled Tuesday, May 26, that Alabama’s 2023 congressional map intentionally discriminated by race. The state must use the two-majority-Black-district map for the 2026 midterms while AG Steve Marshall appeals to SCOTUS. The same day, the GOP-led South Carolina Senate voted to reject Trump’s redrawn map that would have eliminated Rep. Jim Clyburn’s district. Several Republicans broke with the White House, citing primary-cycle timing. CBS on Alabama | CBS on South Carolina

Third firearms incident near Trump in a month. On Saturday, May 23, around 6 p.m., a 21-year-old man named Nasire Best from Dundalk, MD pulled a gun at the Secret Service checkpoint at 17th and Pennsylvania and opened fire. Best died at the hospital. The wounded bystander is in serious but stable condition after successful surgery. Best had three prior Secret Service encounters in 2025. He blocked a White House entry lane in June, claiming to be Jesus Christ. He was detained on June 26 for making threats and again on July 10 for entering a restricted area. Third firearms incident near Trump in roughly a month, after the WHCD shooter (April 25) and the Washington Monument incident (May 4). Per CBS News

Garden Grove evacuations lifted. All evacuation orders related to the GKN Aerospace chemical incident were lifted Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The final 16,000 displaced Orange County residents are home. Unified Command (fire, law enforcement, EPA, county health) confirmed no active leak, no fire risk, and no threat to the public. The 34,000-gallon methyl methacrylate tank that off-gassed Thursday May 21 has cooled after a crack let pressure release safely. A limited road closure remains near the GKN site, and the OC DA's probe into the cause is ongoing. ABC7 LA

Vance announces $22B in fraud referrals. On Tuesday, May 26, VP JD Vance posted that the administration’s Anti-Fraud Task Force has clawed back billions and referred roughly $22 billion in fraudulent small-business assistance claims to DOJ in its first two months. The task force was set up earlier this year following Medicaid-fraud audit findings. No formal DOJ filing has been announced yet.

Pentagon vs. DNC over Memorial Day post. The DNC published a Memorial Day post naming 13 U.S. service members killed during the recent Iran operation. The Pentagon called the post “classless,” arguing the political framing politicized the soldiers’ deaths. Pushback from Gold Star families and bipartisan veterans groups followed within hours.

UFC octagon rises on the White House South Lawn. Construction is underway for UFC Freedom 250, the Octagon-on-the-lawn event scheduled for Sunday, June 14. The date is both Flag Day and Trump's 80th birthday. The card headlines Ilia Topuria vs. Justin Gaethje for the unified UFC Lightweight Championship. Capacity: 5,000 invited guests on the lawn, with another 100,000 expected on screens nearby. UFC and TKO Group are covering the $60 million construction tab. The White House covers staffing and security.

• Related: A UFC Fight on the White House Lawn? Yeah, I’m Actually Here for It

That’s the read. See you Friday. Share this with a friend who could use a cross-check on their news.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

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Most home cooking that tastes “fine” is actually undersalted. That’s the secret. End of lesson. JK!

Here’s the deal. You can buy nicer ingredients, follow better recipes, spend more on cast iron, and your dinners will still land in the “fine, I guess” zone because the salt is doing about 20% of the work it could.

Fix salt, and you don’t need to fix much else.

The Skill

Three things matter: when you salt, how you salt, and which salt you use. Get those three right, and you’re cooking with skill instead of simply doing as you’re told.

When. Salt in stages. Never ONLY at the end. Salting needs to be layered.

• Salt the meat before it cooks. This is called dry brining, and it’s the biggest single upgrade few are doing.

• Salt the aromatics as you sweat them in the pan.

• Salt the pan sauce as it reduces.

• Taste at the end and adjust salt.

Five salt moments in a weeknight dinner are normal. I promise you are not over-salting.

How. Think Salt Bae, minus the dramatic wrist bend. I know he looks ridiculous, but there is a method to his madness. Sprinkle salt from a few inches up, so it disperses evenly. You don’t want pinches dumped in one spot. Watch a good cook salt a steak, and their hand is higher than you’d think, with the salt raining down evenly.

Tip: When I’m salting steaks, chicken, or fish, I hold the cut in one hand over a bowl and sprinkle salt from a few inches above with the other hand, rotating the cut to distribute it evenly on all sides. The bowl catches the runoff, and I use it on the next pass.

Which. For cooking, use kosher salt. Flaky, forgiving, easy to pick up with your fingers. Diamond Crystal and Morton’s are the two big brands. Diamond is lighter and my personal favorite. The shape of the flake cling you’ll use about 1.5x the volume of Morton’s to hit the same saltiness. For baking, fine sea salt dissolves reliably. For the table, a flaky finishing salt like Maldon. Skip iodized table salt. The iodine has a slight chemical edge, and the fine grain over-salts before you notice.

The Why

Salt needs time to penetrate.

When a salt crystal lands on food, it doesn’t immediately flavor it. First, moisture has to come out of the food and dissolve the crystal. Then that salty liquid gets reabsorbed and disperses through the flesh. The whole process is osmosis, and it’s slow. A thin slice of tomato takes minutes. A chicken thigh takes hours.

This is why dry brining works so well. Salt the meat for 1 hour (or up to 24 hours) before cooking so the salt has time to penetrate. The result is meat seasoned all the way through, not just on the crust.

People taste dry-brined chicken next to regular chicken and assume the dry-brined version is juicier. It’s not, really. It’s just better seasoned, so it tastes more like itself, and our brains register “properly seasoned” as “juicy and good.”

The juiciness has its own explanation, though. That salty liquid the meat reabsorbs? It holds onto water more stubbornly than plain meat does, so less of it sweats out under heat. That’s why dry-brined meat doesn’t dry out while it cooks. Pretty cool, right?

Caution

• Salting only at the end. Even if the amount is right, it’ll taste flat. Flavor has to build through the dish, not get sprinkled on at the finish line. This is a detail all those recipes leave out.

• Table salt is not a 1:1 swap for kosher salt. Table salt is way denser; the crystals are smaller and packed more tightly. If a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon kosher, you need about half a teaspoon of table salt. Get this wrong and you’ll over-salt everything and blame yourself.

• Tomatoes, cucumbers, and salads are salted 30 seconds before serving. The salt hasn’t dissolved yet. You bite into actual grains and think “this is too salty” when really nothing has been seasoned. Salt those 5 to 10 minutes ahead, minimum.

• Underseasoned pasta water. Pasta should taste seasoned before it ever touches the sauce. Your pasta water should taste like the ocean, not like “I added a pinch.” Most home cooks undersalt pasta water by 75%.

• Trusting a recipe’s salt amount blindly. Recipes are written by someone using their salt, their palate, their pans, their produce. Season as you go and taste. The recipe is a draft, not a verdict. (See first bullet)

The Everyday Translation

This skill shows up in your cooking more than almost anything else you’ll learn. Five places to put it to work right away:

• Flat-tasting soup or stew. Salt twice, once when you sweat the aromatics, and again right before serving. If you only salt at the end, you’re dressing the dish instead of seasoning it.

• Gray or bland steak. Dry brine it. Even 40 minutes ahead makes a visible difference, and overnight is better. Steakhouse flavor is mostly salt and time. There isn’t a secret technique.

• Roasting vegetables. Salt them BEFORE the oil. Dry vegetables hold salt; oiled ones don’t, and the salt slides right off in the pan.

• Bland eggs even with butter. Salt the eggs in the bowl before you scramble, not after they hit the pan. The salt dissolves into the raw eggs and distributes evenly.

• Pasta night. Salt the water like you mean it. A tablespoon of kosher salt per 4 quarts of water is the floor. Taste the water — it should taste like mild seawater. If it tastes like tap water, add more.

The Take-Home Pack

Two PDFs are attached to this post. Print them both.

• Recipe Card #1 — Dry-brined sheet-pan chicken thighs

• Salt Cheat Sheet — One-pager covering salt types, dry brine timings, and the five salt moments you shouldn’t skip. Designed for the fridge.

Next Week: Skill in Action: Dry-Brined Chicken Three Ways

Next month: Heat & the Pan: Why Most Home Cooking Fails at the Stove

Sadly, for many, it has been relegated to summer cookouts and people online wishing “Happy Memorial Day.” I have always found it morbid to wish happiness on a day of remembrance. But if your only reference is pools and cookouts, it is a happy day. I had always assumed it came out of WWII, likely because we are all guilty of seeing the world through the lens of our own experience. It’s the same reason some wish you a “Happy Memorial Day.” Why wouldn’t you, if every Memorial Day in your life marked the start of summer and not the death of a loved one in war?

Memorial Day originated in the aftermath of the Civil War. After four years of fighting, the bloodiest war in American history, 620,000 soldiers were dead. A war that almost split the country in two and put neighbors and family against one another.

In 1865, in Charleston, freed slaves dug up a mass grave.

Union prisoners had died at a Confederate camp on the old planters’ racetrack and been dumped in a heap. The Black residents of the city exhumed them, reburied them one by one, built a fence around the ground, and came back on the first of May to lay flowers. They called it Decoration Day. Thousands came: schoolchildren with bouquets, Black Union regiments marching, ministers reading scripture over the graves.

Historians still argue over which town gets to call itself the birthplace of Memorial Day. The official version credits an 1868 order from a Union general and a ceremony at Arlington; a couple of other towns make their own claims. Charleston came three years before the general did. Regardless of which city it began in, the purpose was remembrance, thanks, and healing.

It’s been 161 years since that day in Charleston, and we are on the cusp of America’s 250th anniversary. With time, history that isn’t cared for can lose its meaning. It can be rewritten. Forgotten.

Today, the Civil War is told simply through a lens of good and evil. But division within a nation, among its own people, is never that simple. We know this all too well. For many of us, it feels like we have been in the midst of a civil war with our family, friends, and neighbors for close to a decade, and it only seems to be escalating. When you tell yourself the story of why, it’s simple. When you take the time to tell the story out loud, it gets more complicated.

During service, we prayed for the families who lost a loved one to death in battle and in service to our country. When I learned that Memorial Day came out of the Civil War, I reflected on the division happening now in our own country, especially within families. I prayed for healing.

I then went looking for the plainest American writing I could find from that time. To understand what it was like and what it took to come out the other side of so much division.

We are so far removed from that time the questions feel settled. Was the war worth it? Clear. Who was right and who was wrong? Simple. But read the writing of the people who lived through it, and certainty falls apart. Nothing is clear when a country breaks in half and buries over six hundred thousand of its own.

Civil war has become an all-too-common phrase. Many times it’s tossed out flippantly. Others feel anxious about the weight of it, wondering what it means in 2026.

Five pieces. Read them top to bottom if you can. The last two don’t agree, and that’s the whole point.

Lincoln at the graveyard

The Gettysburg Address — Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

We all know of this one, but have you read it? It’s 272 words, spoken over a cemetery that had not existed a year earlier, on ground where the dead had been hastily buried after three days of fighting that left more than fifty thousand men killed, wounded, or missing.

Remember that the war was not won at this point. The war would continue for another year and five months. Lincoln did not know that Lee would surrender in Virginia. For all he knew, the Union cause was still slipping away, and these dead had bought nothing. So when he tells the living that the dead have already consecrated the ground, and that the work left undone belongs to us, he is making a promise he does not know he can keep. He is asking a grieving country to believe that the sacrifice will mean something, without any guarantee that it will.

He makes a declaration to God near the end: this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. He is a president standing in a graveyard, asking the living soldiers to have faith.

The letter

Letter to Sarah — Major Sullivan Ballou, July 14, 1861

Ballou was a lawyer from Rhode Island with a wife and two small boys. He wrote this from a camp outside Washington a week before the First Battle of Bull Run. He had a feeling he would not come home. He was right. He died in that battle, and the letter to his Sarah was found in his trunk afterward.

You can see that he does not know how it will end. He is writing into the dark, weighing what he loves against what he believes he owes the country, and you can watch him make peace with God in real time. One moment he surrenders: “Not my will, but thine, O God, be done.” The next, he is reaching past death itself, promising Sarah he will find a way back to her:

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the garish day, and the darkest night amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours always, always, and, if the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air cools your throbbing temples, it shall be my spirit passing by.

He had no way of knowing if his country would survive him, if his sons would grow up free in it, or if any of it was worth his life. He chose to serve his country and trusted God with the rest.

The one nobody sings right

The Battle Hymn of the Republic — Julia Ward Howe, 1862

Everyone has heard the song. But almost no one knows it was first a poem Howe wrote in the dark of a Washington hotel room after a day spent watching Union troops drill. And the words are stranger and more severe than the marching tune lets on.

She reached straight into the Book of Revelation for them, into its visions of the end of the world: God descending in judgment (14:19–20, 19:15), trampling out his wrath like grapes in a winepress, bringing a day of reckoning by the sword.

She wrote it early in the war, with years of death still ahead and the outcome very much in doubt. It is not a gentle hymn. It reads the war as holy ground, the soldiers’ cause as God’s own, the bloodshed as part of a plan too large to see when living it. Where Ballou was sure of almost nothing, Howe looked at the same terrible war and saw the hand of God moving through it.

Whitman in the hospital

The Wound-Dresser — Walt Whitman

Whitman spent much of the war as a volunteer in the army hospitals around Washington. He dressed wounds, sat with the dying, wrote letters home for boys whose hands no longer worked. The poems that came out of those years are not about patriotism. They sound like a man who has seen more than a person should and refuses to look away.

I onward go, I stop, With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.

He is not thinking about the cause here, or the politics, or who will win. He is holding one wounded stranger and finds that he would trade his own life for him. Whatever the war meant in Washington, this is what it came down to in the tents: one human being beside another, and a love that asked everything.

Lincoln, and then Douglass

I put these two together last because they were reaching for different things, and neither knew if they were reaching the right way.

Second Inaugural Address — Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865

A month before he was assassinated, with the war nearly won, Lincoln stood up and refused to gloat. The speech reads like a sermon. He names slavery as the sin the whole nation is being judged for, North and South alike, no hands clean. But, instead of vengeance, he reaches for mercy: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” He calls for America to bind up the wounds. Care for the widow and the orphan. Move forward together.

He did not know it would work. He was betting the country’s future on grace, with no guarantee it would be enough, and he would not live to find out.

Address at the Monument of the Unknown Dead — Frederick Douglass, Decoration Day, May 30, 1871

Six years later, Douglass stood at Arlington, on the holiday freed slaves had begun, and reached for something different. He opens gently, calling the cemetery air full of “lessons of all that is precious, priceless, holiest, and most enduring in human existence.” Then he plants his feet. People were already pressing him, in the name of healing, to honor both sides equally, to call every grave equally noble. He would not:

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic.

He was no preacher of malice, he said. He would not strike the fallen or turn the repentant away. But he believed that healing built on forgetting was no healing at all, and he could not yet see whether the country would prove him right or wrong.

Two men who loved the same wounded country. One reached for mercy, one reached for memory, and both were feeling their way forward in the dark, trusting that God could see the whole of what they could only see in part. We have the benefit of hindsight. They had only faith. Sit with both of them, and ask yourself which one you would have been in a year when no one knew how the story ended.

Five voices, one graveyard, none of them able to see past the next year.

We read them now, knowing how it all turned out, which makes us feel wise. They wrote without knowing anything, which made them faithful. They buried their dead, prayed over the graves, and trusted that a God they could not see was working a purpose they could not know.

We are in our own uncertain year. The division is real, the outcome is hidden, and it is tempting to believe we already know who is right and how it ends. We don’t. We are living in it, the same way they were.

So tomorrow, before the cookout, maybe pray with me.

Lord, we don’t know the end of our own story any better than they knew theirs. Give our leaders the wisdom they don’t yet have. Heal what is broken in our families, our friendships, our country. Comfort the families who stood in church this morning with an empty seat at home. And bless the souls of all who died believing the sacrifice would mean something, whether or not they ever got to see that it did. We are in it, and we cannot see the way out. We trust that You can. Amen.

— Until next Sunday.

P.S. No edition of The Read tomorrow.

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Yesteryear appears in my feed again. Fourth time today. Two social media platforms. I shouldn’t be surprised. I clicked the first video because I recognized the book name. Two weeks ago, at my women’s Bible study, one of the women asked if I had read Yesteryear. I said no, but planned to, thinking she was talking about a different book. I don’t remember which one I thought it was. I put it out of my mind until the book started following me through my feeds.

@aye_neeReplying to @neighborhood.doula I think you’ve already made your mind up, but I actually think that’s a pretty shallow criticism #yesteryear #caroclaireburke #tradwife #literaryfiction

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A young woman sits in a room, holding a ceramic coffee mug, replying to a comment about the novel and enthusiastically defending the author.

“No, I do not find it weird that a woman who has been interested in and highly critical of how fundamentalist Christianity has been inherently damaging to women around the world would then go on to write a book about fundamentalist Christianity that may or may not have been inspired by some of the front-facing people promoting this movement.”

This is the book mentioned at my Bible study?

I type “Yesteryear” into the search bar. Two scrolls down, I stop at the thumbnail of who I assume is the author. A woman with mousy brown hair holds the book near her face, her body turned slightly toward the camera. The image feels familiar. I get that twinge of memory and pause, trying to grab hold of it before it slips away.

Where have I seen her before?

A year ago, a woman would frequently cross my feed. Sometimes she was sitting in a car, other times in a dimly lit room, speaking directly into the camera in a tone that emphasized that what she had to say was important and thought-provoking. Back then, she was blonde. The camera angle was always slightly off to the side, tilted up her nose. I stare at the thumbnail for another moment before realizing who she is. Caro Claire Burke. This could be considered our first introduction, because even though I knew her face, I did not know her name.

It all made sense now. Of course, she got a publishing deal. Her content was narrowly obsessed with “deep dives” into the “alt-right pipeline,” which translates to any content creator with traditional values sharing traditional content. When she frequented my FYP, her criticisms centered on either Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman or Jessica Kraus of House in Habit. Hannah and Jessica could not be more different, but they fed the same pipeline. You could say she had her bases covered. But I want to trace a different pipeline. The feminist commentator to published author pipeline.

It’s a pattern that’s hard to miss. A progressive creator shares her deep thoughts on social media, usually TikTok. The thoughts are never new, mostly recycled progressive criticism repackaged through the language of analysis and intellectual seriousness. Burke’s content typically centers on feminism, criticism of Christianity, and particularly women who openly embrace traditional roles — marriage, motherhood, religion — but do not frame themselves as oppressed. Oh, and I almost forgot: a sprinkle of anti-capitalism. Of course.

The platform grows through cultural affirmation as much as personality. She tells followers what they already believe, with little nuance, delivered as confident absolutes, dressed up as research and cultural concern. Publishing houses love this because the audience is already there, and the politics already align. Look at any “Hot and New” table at the bookstore, and it’s clear the modern literary world is not politically neutral. It rewards progressivism and treats it as moral and intellectual seriousness, particularly when it arrives wrapped in feminism, anti-traditionalism, or resistance to scary “Christian nationalism.”

A talking head like Burke is the perfect package for the modern publishing pipeline: a recognizable online following, progressive politics, an intellectual presentation style, and a book critiquing traditional values and Christianity at a time when publishing houses are deeply invested in amplifying those exact cultural anxieties. Give that girl a book deal, a Vogue feature, and a guest spot on Seth Meyers.

I haven't read the novel. So, I'm not here to review the prose or the plot — I can't. What I've read is the jacket copy, a stack of reviews, the excerpts, and, before any of that, a year of the algorithm feeding me enough of her intellectual feminist banalities. This isn’t a book review. It’s about the woman who wrote it, and the machine that handed her the deal.

Her fixation was Hannah, and from the description, it’s clear the book is a critique of Hannah and anyone like her.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Burke’s platform runs on feminist values and a running critique of any woman who doesn’t share them. She launched her podcast, Diabolical Lies, with co-host Katie Gatti Tassin of Money with Katie — named, of all things, after Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College, the one where he told the female graduates to go home and become homemakers. The brand keeps growing. She built it on the speech she hates.

Much of her commentary fixates on the raw milk, the egg apron, the sourdough, the gaggle of children. But her beef with Hannah Neeleman isn’t really about any of that. Hannah is a symbol of audacity. The audacity of a woman to choose a life that is anything other than the one Burke would choose. Any choice made against her worldview is dangerous, perpetuates female oppression. Worse, women like Hannah make that oppression look like a fulfilling life. That’s the part that gets her.

Anyone with a presence online is curating an image. Even if you show up in a bathrobe and a messy bun, you are curating an image. Burke warns women that Hannah’s life is not real, that it is curated. But she does the same as anyone marketing themselves online. Curating intellectual seriousness, “digging deep” into the truth.

Except Burke doesn’t dig deep. She confirms. Asked by Vogue how she found Natalie’s inner narrative, what she said exposed herself:

I did a lot of internet lurking of women who are in these fundamentalist communities. I also got to interview some women for my job, and talk to them about Mormonism and these Christian religions, and what it feels like to be a woman.

I am not from [that background], but so much of it is relatable to all women—it’s just that the dial is turned up to 11. So once I had locked into that worldview, it was pretty easy to create Natalie.

She researched exactly enough to verify what she already believed, cranked it to an 11, and called it done. Natalie isn’t a person. She’s a verdict.

The rest of the research tells the same story. On Seth Meyers, she explained the influencer boot camps she paid into, all on Zoom, expensive enough that she joked needing the book to sell or she’d be in the hole. Then, with a shrug: “It’s a pyramid scheme. So I was at the bottom of the pyramid.” She and Meyers had a laugh, because of course it’s a pyramid scheme, as if that’s just what tradwives do.

The scoff about the pyramid scheme is because it’s synonymous with dishonesty. The point. Hannah and any woman online representing traditional values is a con, fleecing the women who follow them. Burke went looking for the con, sat inside an actual one on Zoom, and spent money to confirm what she already believed. The whole book is an accusation. Except Hannah sells beef. It’s almost as if, to Burke, selling anything to anyone is the con. As if entrepreneurship, the cart on the website, the woman making money from her own life, is the pyramid.

The pyramid scheme is the oldest hustle on the internet; the make-money-from-home funnel started in the mail, door-to-door. It ran long before “tradwife” was a word. Amway. LuLaRoe. The essential oils your neighbor wouldn’t stop texting you about. The supplement guy. The sales-bro selling a “mentorship program.” Burke didn’t find something rotten at the heart of trad culture. She found influencer culture. A grift that’s everywhere, run by everyone, aimed at anyone. But she used it to villainize traditional women.

The book only sells if Hannah is secretly cosplaying the 1800s, if the farm and the babies and the sourdough are a performance she’d abandon the second the Wi-Fi died. Just like Natalie. Drop her into 1855, let her bleed, haul firewood, and break. That is when the fraud reveals herself. But Hannah Neeleman isn’t living in 1855. She’s a thoroughly modern woman who happens to have a farm. She runs a business with her husband, films it on an iPhone, and ships the product. The whole point is that 2026 is what makes her life possible. The automated dairy barn, refrigeration, the camera, the cart on the website. We all know this. But that doesn’t benefit Burke, because a woman who freely chose this and is genuinely happy blows up her income stream. Strips her of her prestige. So Hannah, like Natalie, has to be miserable, or secretly miserable, or about-to-be-miserable. She’s a conduit for the one thing Burke needs to be true: that no woman could choose this life and mean it. That if you scratch the happy tradwife hard enough, you’ll find a prisoner. Natalie is the scratch.

Feminism has sold women for fifty years that you could have it all. The career, the marriage, the kids, the empire. Hannah Neeleman went and did it. Eight kids, a working ranch, a brand, a business she runs with her husband, millions of people watching. That’s her dream, fully realized. No pyramid scheme in sight. The catch is she built it on a worldview Burke finds morally reprehensible, so it has to be dissected into a grotesque, bloody corpse.

Burke will never admit she is Hannah; in part, she is the same from the other end of the spectrum. UVA, an MFA from Bennington, a media job at Katie Couric’s company. The kind of pedigree that gets you taken seriously. Her life is also aspirational. To some, at least. A book, a Vogue feature, a movie option, a baby on the way, a move to New York. There are women snapping “queen” in her comments who want exactly that: write the book, get the deal, do it all while married with a kid. Same as the women who watch Hannah make sourdough bread while holding a baby. Both lives took work, drive, a husband who’s on board, a dream worth chasing. Burke just doesn’t like Hannah’s dream.

Let’s not forget the money. Both women are reaching for success. The difference is that Hannah’s whole origin story is unapologetically capitalist—there’s a shopping cart on the website, sell the cookies, sell the apron, sell the beef—and Burke views this as a con. Her own money is fine, of course. Hers is a byproduct of being right. A reward for the harder, more honorable work of holding the correct worldview. The check just shows up because she earned it the good way. It’s okay when she does it because she’s fighting the patriarchy.

Give me a break.

Burke spent years in her car arguing that Hannah’s followers were too dim to see the brand for what it is. But nobody’s fooled. The followers know it’s a brand. That’s the appeal. The sourdough starter and the grass-fed steaks are two taps away in the cart. Duh, it’s a product. Hannah is selling something, and the millions watching understand that completely. It’s aspirational. Its content. They know exactly what it is. So Burke has to invent a victim who doesn’t exist: the gullible woman with traditional values who thinks it’s all real, who’s being sold a bill of goods and is too foolish to notice. She needs that woman. Without her, there’s nothing for her to monetize.

Burke is pregnant now. Congratulations, genuinely. She’s also moving to New York. I’ll be curious whether the woman who built a brand on exposing Hannah’s hidden help will be doing the cooking, the cleaning, and the 3 a.m. feedings herself, or whether there will be a nanny somewhere off-frame while she’s advising Annie on set. There usually is. If you’ve got the means, why not? It’s not a crime. It’s just the thing she judges other women for doing.

I keep coming back to the bookstore. A few weeks ago, a new indie shop opened near me, and I went in expecting to like it. I didn’t. Every cover was the same. The flat illustrated people, the lowercase titles, the modern lit, the “spicy” romance, and the fantasy with the sprayed edges, all of it arranged on tables at the front like a feed you could walk through. And there was Yesteryear, on the “Hot and New” table.

I almost missed the classics. They were on a short bookcase, lower than the rest, pushed against the back wall, facing away from the door.

I don't know if the woman from Bible study ever read it. I hope she did. I hope she saw exactly what it thinks of her — and bought the sourdough starter anyway.

Some quick housekeeping.

IKYMI, upon frequent demand, I will be launching some cooking content here on Substack. Kitchen Sense will be exclusive for paying subscribers. It’s not about recipes, it’s about skills. I am really excited about it, and I hope you will be too. Get all the details here. The first Lesson drops on Tuesday, free for everyone.

For the Memorial Day weekend and the lunch of Kitchen Sense I am currently running a Memorial Day discount until Tuesday. Get it!

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Let’s get into the news!

In Today’s Read

• The DNC’s 2024 autopsy came out 192 pages with the exec summary and conclusion literally blank. Gaza doesn’t appear once. The chairman fired the author the same day and told you not to trust what’s inside.

• A managing assistant U.S. attorney in Southern Florida allegedly emailed herself Volume II of Jack Smith’s sealed report, twice, after renaming the file “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf.” She pleaded not guilty Wednesday.

• JD Vance confirmed at a White House briefing that DOJ is probing Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud and family financial ties. ABC, NBC, and CBS evening news ran zero seconds on it. Her March disclosure amendment also revalued her husband’s companies from $30 million to zero.

• Aimee Bock got 500 months and $243 million in restitution for the Feeding Our Future scheme. Same day, DOJ charged 15 more Minnesotans in a $90 million Medicaid fraud sweep.

• The Senate punted ICE and CBP funding past Trump’s June 1 deadline after GOP senators revolted over the DOJ’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

The DNC’s autopsy is missing a body

The Story.

The Democratic National Committee released its 2024 election autopsy on May 21 after CNN obtained the document and forced the issue. The report runs 192 pages. The author is Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who DNC Chair Ken Martin announced was no longer with the committee hours after publication.

Martin’s release statement reads more like a disavowal: “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.” The exec summary, the conclusion, and the “Notes for the reader” section are blank. The words “Gaza,” “Israel,” “Palestinians,” and “Walz” do not appear anywhere in 192 pages. Biden’s decision to run again is not analyzed.

What the report does say: identity politics is a crutch, kitchen-table economics is the path forward, the assumption “Trump’s negatives were baked in” was “a major failure of analysis,” and state-party support was cut.

The Left’s read. The Intercept and Common Dreams are furious about the Gaza omission. The Intercept quoted a policy executive who met with Rivera in July 2025 and was told privately, “the data clearly showed Gaza had hurt Biden and Harris.” Then Rivera handed in 192 pages with no Gaza analysis. MaddowBlog and MSNBC are running the autopsy-of-the-autopsy frame: who got to Rivera between July and December?

The Right’s read. The Washington Times is celebrating the identity-politics-as-a-crutch finding and the rural-America critique (“Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate. The math doesn’t work.”). The frame: Democrats just admitted, in their own document, that they do not care about rural America, and the bet that nonwhite voter growth would carry them forever was a fantasy.

What both sides are skipping. The 2028 prospect. Mediaite reported that Martin only released the report after a phone call with an unnamed 2028 Democratic prospect left him “rattled.” Nobody has the name yet. That call is the story under the story, and neither the Intercept frame (Gaza) nor the Washington Times frame (identity politics) is chasing it.

Everyone thought Ken Martin was holding the autopsy back because it was damaging to Harris or Biden. The truth was simpler. It was embarrassing for the DNC because there was no autopsy.

There’s no analysis of the campaigns, no examination of Harris’s coronation, no reckoning with Biden’s debate collapse. Entire sections sit blank. The thing is riddled with spelling errors. The only substantive finding is that the Democrats blew up their own coalition by assuming non-whites would vote Democrat forever. When they didn’t, the Democrats couldn’t tell their donors why.

The Left’s biggest criticism is the Gaza omission. They want it to be THE reason Harris lost. It isn’t. Foreign policy sits at the bottom of voter priority lists cycle after cycle. The Left wants the omitted data to confirm their pro-Palestine, blame-Israel-for-everything trajectory. The likelier read is that Harris lost because she was a bad candidate forced on the electorate. They need Gaza to be the story so they don’t have to confront the harder one: their cultural policies are unpopular.

The 192-page autopsy of a party that lost the White House, the Senate, the House, and the down-ballot map has no substance and no reflection. It exposes their incompetence. The party stays unpopular and keeps getting pulled further left. They have learned nothing. The seeds of antisemitism since October 7 have only grown. Look at the most recent Democratic primary winners. A large portion are Hamas apologists and/or socialists. Harris is still ranking at the top of 2028 Democratic primary polls.

I want to know which 2028 prospect got Martin on the phone. My guess is Kamala. The speculation was that the report was damaging to her, and the play would be to make the DNC and Martin sacrifice themselves by releasing this joke of an autopsy. Whoever takes the stage in August is the one on that rattled call.

Worth flagging. Akela Lacy at The Intercept had the Gaza-omission story first and ran the Rivera-told-us-privately receipts. Credit where due. The left is doing the cross-check on the left’s own party. The right press wasn’t going to.

IKYMI

A fair share of the recent Democratic primary winners I called Hamas apologists or socialists are DSA members or DSA-endorsed. The Democratic Socialists of America is the political machine quietly unseating moderate incumbents and putting people on your city council. Most readers have no idea how the DSA actually operates, who funds it, or how it picks its targets.

Read about it here. 👇

A DOJ prosecutor allegedly emailed herself the Smith report under “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf”

The Story.

On May 20, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida unsealed an indictment against Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, of Port St. Lucie. Lineberger was the managing assistant U.S. attorney in the Fort Pierce branch of the SDFL, the office that handled the Trump classified-documents prosecution. She pleaded not guilty in West Palm Beach on Wednesday.

The charges: one felony count of obstruction, one felony count of concealing public records, and two misdemeanor counts of theft of government property. Prosecutors allege Lineberger received Volume II of Jack Smith’s sealed report, the classified-documents volume Judge Aileen Cannon had blocked from release, and emailed it from her DOJ account to her personal email accounts twice. In fall 2025, she allegedly renamed the file “chocolate cake recipe.” In December, she allegedly renamed it “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf” and sent it to her personal Gmail and her personal Hotmail.

The Left’s read. The Washington Post led procedurally, then pivoted hard to Rep. Jamie Raskin’s statement that the Smith report contains “damning” evidence that Trump retained classified documents tied to his business interests. The angle: the real story isn’t Lineberger, it’s what was in the report she tried to get out. CNN runs the same beat.

The Right’s read. Jonathan Turley at Fox News, under “Recipe for Disaster,” and the Washington Examiner ran the obvious frame: a career DOJ insider tried to exfiltrate a sealed federal document by disguising it as a cake recipe. Trump’s DOJ caught one of its own. The irony lands hard: the office handling Trump’s classified documents case produced an officer charged with mishandling classified documents.

What both sides are skipping. The Cannon gag order itself. Cannon had blocked Volume II from release, and Lineberger’s alleged exfiltration happened while that order was in force. Neither side wants to ask whether sealing a document of high political salience produces the very leak incentive it was meant to prevent. The Post would have to credit the right’s longtime complaint about over-sealing; the right would have to credit the left’s argument that suppression breeds whistleblowing. So neither touches it.

A career DOJ attorney saw Volume II, renamed it after a cake, and emailed it to her personal Hotmail. Also, who still has Hotmail?

Quick context. Volume II is the classified documents half of Jack Smith’s final report. After Cannon dismissed the case in 2024, Smith finalized two volumes. Garland released Volume I, the election-interference half, in January 2025. Volume II got sealed when Cannon barred Garland or any successor AG from releasing it publicly. That order was still in force the day Lineberger allegedly emailed Volume II to her Hotmail.

So we are all on the same page. The DOJ, a sealed report, and dessert filenames, it reads like a bad spy novel. I picture an Angela Lansbury type. But it’s not a joke, the Biden DOJ pursued Trump for mishandling classified documents. Having an insider justifying moving evidence into a personal inbox is a service to the resistance. We have seen similar play repeatedly. The same thing happened with Russiagate, Trump’s tax records, and Carter Page. It’s a pattern. And now Lineberger is emailing herself a report that is under a gag order concealed as a cake recipe?

Why? Was she keeping it as leverage against the president or to monetize it?

The president is over 2 years into his second term after the first was plagued with institutional opposition. Clearly, the problem still exists. Watch whether DOJ ever surfaces filings showing Lineberger sent Volume II to anyone outside the department. The indictment doesn’t yet allege a third-party recipient. If one surfaces, the cake disguise shifts from internal exfiltration to an active leak. Did anyone else at the SDFL office squirrel away a copy? Will we eventually see Volume II on the front page of WaPo?

Worth flagging. Turley’s column is the cleanest legal walkthrough of the charges I’ve seen. He sticks to what’s in the indictment. Read it.

A sitting VP confirmed a federal probe into a sitting congresswoman. Three networks skipped it.

The Story.

On May 19, at a White House press briefing, Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the Department of Justice is actively investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud and family financial ties. Vance said “it certainly seems like something fishy is there” about Omar’s 2009 marriage, and added: “If we think that there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime.”

The immigration-fraud allegation is old. It centers on Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who multiple investigators have alleged is her biological brother. The financial angle is newer and overlaps with her reported ties to the Feeding Our Future fraud network (see the Quick Rundown for more). The Biden DOJ ran a financial probe in 2024 that closed without charges. Omar denied wrongdoing, called the probe “racist, creepy, and weird,” and said any claim of knowledge of the Feeding Our Future scheme is “flat-out false.”

The financial picture got worse for her in March. Omar amended her 2024 financial disclosure after the original filing valued husband Tim Mynett’s two companies at $6 million to $30 million, a sharp jump from prior years. The amended filing revalued the companies at zero and reported income from them between $102,502 and $1.005 million. Her attorney called the original an accountant’s error. Independent accountants have publicly said the math doesn’t reconcile.

Then NewsBusters audited the May 19 evening news broadcasts. ABC, NBC, and CBS did not lead with the Vance confirmation. None of them mentioned it. Zero seconds across the three of them.

The Left’s read. MaddowBlog framed Vance’s confirmation as “another person Trump doesn’t like” being added to a political-revenge list, and tied it to the administration’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as a single architecture of payback. The frame: the probe is the story, not the substance. Slate and the WaPo opinion section run the same angle.

The Right’s read. Fox 9 Minneapolis, the Daily Caller, and Fox News reported the confirmation straight and pivoted to substance: the brother-marriage receipts, Feeding Our Future donations from defendants, the Minnesota state fraud committee’s parallel suspicion. The frame: the Biden probe was thin because it had to be, the family-finances angle is new, and the only question is whether DOJ produces filings.

What both sides are skipping. The networks. Not the probe itself, the network silence around it. A sitting VP confirming a federal investigation into a sitting member of Congress at a White House briefing is, by any normal news-judgment standard, a national lead. NewsBusters compared it to coverage volume on the Santos investigation. Networds ran Santos investigation non stop, zero on Omar.

Did three of the largest news operations in the country decline to lead with a White House confirmation of a federal probe into a sitting congresswoman? Yes. So which institution is “weaponizing” here? The DOJ, which has to produce filings and meet the burden in court, or the editors who decided viewers shouldn’t know the briefing happened?

The brother-marriage allegations are old. The Biden probe closed without charges. Fine. A news outlet should still report on it, but let’s grant the networks the benefit of the doubt on old news. The Feeding Our Future angle is genuinely new, the sentenced ringleader is named Omar, and the Minnesota state fraud committee is parallel-tracking. The VP of the United States addressed it from the podium, and they reported nothing.

The test: if DOJ produces filings within 90 days, will the networks report? Can they keep ignoring the story? If DOJ produces, Vance’s “fishy” line ages well. My money is they find a fish. The media will run “weaponization” and “retribution” with accusations of racism and xenophobia mixed in. Omar will become the face for Trump’s alleged attacks on all immigrants.

Watch whether MSNBC books Omar for a friendly hit. Watch whether DOJ files anything within 30 days showing actual scope. If the networks still won’t touch it after the Bock sentencing dropped the same day, they’re not going to. They’re just crossing their fingers you won’t notice.

Aimee Bock got 500 months and a $243 million restitution order Thursday for the Feeding Our Future scheme. At least 57 people billed the federal government $250 million for pandemic-era meals never served. Bock told the court “I don’t have the words to express just how horrible I feel.” CBS Minnesota.

DOJ also charged 15 more Minnesotans in a separate $90 million Medicaid fraud sweep across seven state programs. Assistant AG Colin McDonald called the charges “unprecedented,” flanked by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz. Fox News.

The DOJ unsealed a 20-page Miami indictment charging 94-year-old Raúl Castro and five Cuban pilots over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Charges include conspiracy, murder, and aircraft destruction. Acting AG Todd Blanche said it was no “show indictment.” CBS News, Daily Wire.

The Senate punted ICE and CBP funding past Trump’s June 1 deadline after GOP senators revolted over the DOJ’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Grassley and Cotton reportedly erupted at Deputy AG Blanche behind closed doors. The parliamentarian also stripped a $1 billion Secret Service ballroom-security line. CBS News, Fox News, Daily Signal.

Kyle Busch, two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, died Thursday at 41 after a severe illness. Busch holds the all-time wins record across NASCAR’s top three series. Eleven days before he died, he radioed for a “shot” from a doctor at Watkins Glen. CBS News.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show signs off tonight after CBS canceled the show ahead of the Paramount-Skydance merger. John Oliver and David Letterman appeared on the finale; Letterman delivered an on-air “good night and good luck, motherf---ers” aimed at CBS leadership. The Hill.

That’s the Read! Also, keep your eye on your inbox tomorrow. I got a fun essay/rant headed your way. Free for everyone.

See you Monday.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

What if that exact dish—same cut of meat, same pantry, same twenty minutes you’ve got on a Tuesday—was noticeably better? Not in six months. Not after you buy a $400 pan. Next week.

That’s Kitchen Sense.

By Lesson 12, you’ll taste a sauce, and your hands will already know what it needs. Nobody told you how much salt to add. You just know. That’s the goal. Not 52 new recipes. Not “12 secret hacks chefs don’t want you to know.” The difference between a cook who knows ten recipes and a cook who can make dinner.

This isn’t a recipe collection

I’m not feeding you recipes. There are plenty of those online. Kitchen Sense is about the mechanics. Why is the recipe telling you to roast? How to salt. Why that oil and not the other one? Why it matters how I cut my carrots.

One skill at a time. Each lesson applies to almost everything you make. Once you’ve got the why, you can adapt. Swap ingredients without panic. Troubleshoot a sauce that broke. Build dinner out of what’s actually in your fridge instead of the perfect list a food blogger assumes you have.

Cooking confidence built on someone else's recipe is fragile. I know, I was a food blogger for over a decade. The minute things go sideways, you guess, you rationalize a substitute, you call it "fine." Kitchen Sense is built so you don't have to guess.

How it works

One lesson per month. A new edition every Tuesday. Each month, we go deep on one fundamental—salt, heat, fat, acid, and so on—and the weekly editions build it out: the core lesson, applied examples in other dishes, a printable for the fridge, and a Q&A built from real subscriber questions.

Lesson 1 is salt. When, how much, what kind, why it matters. I see you— “Cool, salt, I salt my food.” Believe me, it’s not that simple. Salt is a building block, and most home cooks don’t realize how much work it does. By Lesson 4, you’ll see how salt connects to heat. By Lesson 7, salt, heat, and fat are behaving in your pan together.

Alone, each lesson looks small. Together, you have a killer dish.

What’s free and what’s paid

Free: Lesson 1 on May 28. That’s your taste of how Kitchen Sense works—the depth, the why-behind-the-why, the format.

Paying subscribers get everything after that:

• Every weekly edition for the next 12 months

• All mini-lessons apply each skill to different dishes

• Printables for the fridge — salt charts, heat references, timing guides

• Q&A posts built from subscriber questions

• Full chat access to ask questions as you cook

• The end-of-year complete Kitchen Sense field guide

Lesson 1 shows you what you’re getting. From Lesson 2 onward, the real build happens, and you need to be inside to get it.

Memorial Day Sale

Launch week, through Tuesday, May 26: New paid subscribers lock in $52/year for the life of their subscription. That’s 20% off the regular rate, and the price never goes up as long as you stay subscribed.

After Tuesday, the rate resets. If Kitchen Sense sounds like the thing you’ve wanted, this is the week.

Get 20% off forever

What to do right now

Don’t go shopping. Don’t buy tools. Three small things instead.

Open your pantry. Take a mental inventory. What kind of salt, what oils, what you reach for, what’s been sitting there for two years. Just notice.

Pick the dish. That autopilot meal from the top of this post. Write it down. As we go through each lesson, you’ll apply the skill to that dish and watch it change.

Grab the Pantry Essentials Checklist at the end of this post. It’s not a shopping list. It’s a reference for prioritizing as we go.

What you can expect from me

Real cooking in my kitchen. I’ll show my work when something goes wrong. Not because mistakes are charming, but because watching a real cook fix a too-salty sauce is more useful than watching a perfect take.

No filler. No “in today’s busy world.” No 800-word personal essay before the payoff.

Push back. If a lesson didn’t land, or your version came out weird, tell me. The chat will be open to paying subscribers, and I will read every message.

One free lesson. That’s it.

Lesson 1 drops free on May 26. It’s your one look inside Kitchen Sense—the full lesson, same depth as every week after.

After that, the door closes. Lesson 2 is for paying subscribers. So is everything that follows—the weekly editions, the printables, the Q&A, the chat, the field guide at the end of the year.

If Lesson 1 lands the way I think it will, you’ll want to be inside before Lesson 2 hits. This sale is only open through Tuesday, May 26.

Get 20% off forever

Pantry Essentials Checklist

Apparently, I am in a mood. 😉 I get a little ranty in some of today’s Reads, and did a little rage baiting on X this morning.

Let’s get into it.

Today’s edition:

• Trump just spent $32 million to take out the one Republican asking the Epstein questions. Plus a primary-night recap callout with prelim results from all six states that voted Tuesday.

• DOJ stood up a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” inside a Trump IRS settlement. Even Republicans are squinting at this one.

• California made a girl share her gold medal with the biological male who beat her. They’re calling it “inclusion.” Her mother isn’t.

Massie Got 14 Years, One Bill, and a Goodbye From His Own Party

The Story

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) lost his GOP primary Tuesday night to retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, the Trump-endorsed challenger the president personally recruited. The final margin (with about 72% of the vote counted): Gallrein 54.4%, Massie 45.6%. An 8.8-point loss. The race cost a combined $32.6 million in ad spending, making it the most expensive House primary in U.S. history. Trump's aligned super PAC dropped $16.4 million on Gallrein. The Massie-aligned side raised about $10.1 million. Massie has held the seat for 14 years.

Trump went scorched-earth on Truth Social in the final week. The greatest hits: “the Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman in the History of our Party.” A “disloyal, ungracious, and sanctimonious FOOL.” A “moron,” a “nut job,” a “major Sleazebag.” On primary morning, the president posted: “Kentucky, get this LOSER out of politics.”

What did Massie actually do to earn it? Three things. He voted against the House GOP budget in February 2025 (the only Republican to do so) and against Trump's big beautiful bill in June. He voted against the administration’s strikes on Iran. And led the House push along with Democrat Ro Khanna to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Massie’s reaction Tuesday night was characteristically dry. “I think that’s going to help my fundraising,” he told The Hill when asked about Trump calling him a moron.

Primary night, in one paragraph. Five other states voted Tuesday. Here’s what’s called and what’s still settling.

Pennsylvania: Reps. Fitzpatrick, Mackenzie, Bresnahan, and Perry all coasted unopposed on the GOP side. Chris Rabb won PA-3 by nearly 15 points, becoming the newest DSA-endorsed member headed to Congress. Summer Lee held off Will Parker in the PA-12 primary; she’ll face Republican James Hayes in November.

Georgia: Big runoffs on the GOP side. The Senate primary ended Mike Collins (41%) vs Derek Dooley (30%), with Buddy Carter knocked out at 25%. The governor primary ended Burt Jones (38%) vs Rick Jackson (33%). Both head to June 16. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Dem governor primary outright with 56.2%, dodging a runoff.

Alabama: Tommy Tuberville won the GOP governor primary; he’ll face Doug Jones in November, a rematch of their 2020 Senate race. The Senate primary to fill Tuberville’s seat is headed to a runoff, with Trump-endorsed Barry Moore leading and AG Steve Marshall narrowly ahead of Jared Hudson for the second spot.

Idaho: Sen. Jim Risch easily fended off three challengers. Reps. Russ Fulcher (77%) and Mike Simpson (62%) defended their House seats.

Oregon: Christine Drazan won the GOP gubernatorial primary with 44.5%, setting up a 2022 rematch against Gov. Tina Kotek, who cruised on the Dem side. Janelle Bynum took 84% in OR-5; Val Hoyle won the OR-4 Dem primary with 78% and will face Republican Monique DeSpain (87%) in November.

The Left is calling it “Trump’s revenge tour.” Axios used those exact words. The Washington Post calls Massie “the latest casualty of Trump’s wrath.” The ideological-purity-test angle is the spine. They want you to read this as Trump punishing a man for the crime of having his own opinions.

The Right is celebrating it as a purge. Fox News leads with the loser-out-of-politics quote. The Hill calls it a “major victory” for the president. The framing: a RINO got disciplined by the base.

What both sides skipped: Why was this race the most expensive House primary in history? Where did the $16.4 million in super PAC money come from? The Intercept was the only outlet to name AIPAC’s heavy spending against Massie because of his Iran vote. Most of the post-mortems quietly scrubbed the Epstein angle too. Massie was the lone Republican in the House publicly forcing the document release. He’s gone now.

Being principled and being effective are not the same thing. Massie was the first. He was not the second. In Washington, the second gets legislation across the line.

For years Massie cited that he voted with Republicans 90% of the time. Pull the receipts on the 119th, and that number has slid closer to 78. Heritage Action had him at 96% in the 117th. Quick context, because this is the part the cable shows skip. Most of Congress votes bipartisan 90% of the time. The bulk of the House calendar is naming post offices and renewing routine appropriations nobody fights over. The 10% that decides whether a Republican or a Democrat agenda actually moves is where the floor fights happen. That’s the 10% where Massie has been quietly siding with the Democrats.

A congressperson represents their district. Yes. They also have to make legislation move. The way you do that in Washington is by making friends, the kind of friends who pick up the phone when your district needs a favor. Massie didn’t have any.

What did Massie actually pass in 14 years? The Epstein Files Transparency Act. One piece of legislation. And he didn’t pass it through his own conference. He passed it through a discharge petition with Ro Khanna and all 215 House Democrats. The thing he’s most famous for getting through is the thing he had to leave his own party to do.

And about that bill. I have said this on the podcast and I will say it again here. Dumping 100,000 pages of documents on the public with no context, no curation, no understanding of why a name appears in a witness photo lineup versus a flight log is exactly how guilt by association turns into a witch hunt. Khanna stood on the House floor and named six “co-conspirators.” Four turned out to be random men pulled into an FBI photo lineup during the original investigation. Zero connection to Epstein. “This should not be a witch-hunt,” Khanna said after the fact. Cool. Tell that to the four men whose names are sitting on the open internet because two congressmen wanted a headline.

And about Hegseth. Pete Hegseth, the sitting Secretary of War, showed up Monday in Hebron, Kentucky at an America First Works rally to campaign against Massie. "Too much grandstanding, too few great votes," he said about a sitting member of Congress. That's a real break from Pentagon norms. Yes, Massie's exit benefits Hegseth specifically because Massie voted against the Iran strikes. That doesn't make it appropriate. I want my Department of War running operations, not running congressional primaries. Stay in the Pentagon.

And spare me the left-media framing that Tuesday night was “Trump’s loyalty test” against an honest dissenter. As if party discipline were invented in 2024. Pelosi got “strategic genius” coverage for the exact behavior Trump gets “authoritarian” coverage for. The rest of the media is like, cool.

Watch whether Massie runs again in 2028 or pivots to a Senate run or the podcast circuit.

Being a martyr is not the same as being effective. Massie chose the first. Kentucky’s 4th chose the second.

$1.776 Billion. No Oversight. No Cap. No Recipient List

The Story

On Monday, May 18, Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. In the same motion, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” inside the Department of Justice. The fund will be financed by the federal Judgment Fund, a permanent Treasury appropriation. A five-member board (four appointed by the Attorney General, one chosen in consultation with congressional leadership) will hear claims from people who allege they were victims of government “weaponization” and issue both formal apologies and monetary awards.

The number, $1.776 billion, is a wink at 1776. Subtle.

Trump is technically not eligible. Blanche told reporters that Trump’s family won’t receive money from the fund. But his orbit can apply. That orbit, per CBS News reporting, reads as the obvious shortlist: the roughly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Trump’s lawyers, and others targeted under Biden-era DOJ. James Comey could apply. So could everyone who has been a victim of lawfare.

Quick context. The Judgment Fund is a real thing. It exists to pay court-ordered settlements against the federal government. It doesn’t normally cut $1.776 billion checks to a board with no judicial review, no defined evidence standard, and no requirement to disclose who gets paid. There is no rule requiring DOJ to tell you who got the money.

Sen. Ron Wyden on X called it a “$1.7 billion slush fund for right-wing political violence.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “an insane level of corruption.” 93 House Democrats filed an amicus brief opposing the settlement on self-dealing grounds.

The Left is calling it a slush fund. Time magazine walks through the structural problem. CBS asks who actually gets paid. WaPo’s editorial board says “bad precedent.” The Democratic talking point is corruption.

The Right is running cover. Fox News headlined it “apologies, cash headed to alleged weaponization victims.” Blanche insists the fund is “not limited to Republicans, not limited to Democrats, not limited to January 6 defendants.” Even Deseret News (Utah, Mormon, Romney-coded but mainstream right) reports congressional Republicans are skeptical.

Restitution funds for government overreach are not new. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 paid out $20,000 each to 82,219 Japanese Americans wrongfully interned in WWII, financed through Treasury and administered by a defined Office of Redress Administration with criteria published in the Federal Register. Pigford v. Glickman put $1.25 billion through Congress in 2010 to compensate Black farmers the USDA had discriminated against, with a two-track claim system and court supervision. The principle that a federal government should pay people back when it crushed them is settled in American law. Start there.

Lawfare against Trump and his orbit was real: the Letitia James prosecution, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the Manhattan DA case run on charges no predecessor ever brought against a former president. And it didn’t stop at the top of the org chart. It went down to grandmothers who walked into the Capitol on January 6 and got plea-bargained into felonies by a DOJ that left half the Antifa docket on the table. The process was the punishment. For ten years. “That’s a slush fund for his circle!” Yeah, his circle. The circle that was specifically targeted by the previous DOJ for ten years. Don’t act surprised that’s where the claims line up.

So I get the impulse. Make people whole, show that it happened, use the resources of the state to acknowledge what the state did. The history says the state can do that without it being corrupt, if the state is honest about how.

Here’s where I’m not loving it.

Where is the oversight? A five-member board appointed by the Attorney General, with no Senate confirmation requirement, no published evidence standard, and no requirement to release the list of who gets paid. Every prior restitution fund of comparable scale in U.S. history had either judicial review or legislative oversight baked into the founding document. This one has a board the AG picks and a Treasury fund that empties whenever the board says yes. No likey.

Where’s the cap? The number $1.776 billion is a wink at 1776. Cute. We are $39 trillion in debt as of today, gas is climbing past four-fifty a gallon, and DOJ just picked $1.776 billion out of the branding department. The fund quantity should be tied to what the country can afford and what the claims actually justify, not to a Founding Father math joke that fits on a Truth Social post. Pick the number from the evidence. Don’t pick it from the branding department.

What’s the process? Who decides what makes a valid claim? Are these board members nonpartisan? Is nonpartisan even possible anymore? The claims themselves are going to be partisan by nature. Picture the room. So what happens when the Democrats run DOJ in 2029, stand up a “Restorative Justice Fund” with $1.776 billion of their own, and decide that everyone harmed by Trump-era DOJ deserves a payout? Conservatives would lose their minds. They would be right to lose their minds. And we would be the ones who set the precedent. The right’s instinct used to be limited government with rule-of-law guardrails. This is the opposite of both.

I am not running cover for Letitia James. The lawfare was real, the victims were real, and the principle of restitution is right. But the implementation is not it. A discretionary fund administered by political appointees with no published criteria is the same mechanism that produced the original problem.

Watch which Republican senators ask for oversight language before this fund cuts a single check. Watch what Judge Williams does at the May 27 hearing in Florida. Watch who the AG names to the board and how many of them have ever drawn a paycheck outside a political appointment. Watch whether DOJ ever tells you the name of the first recipient.

I get the idea, but this is not it.

California Made a Girl Share Her Gold Medal to Save Its Federal Funding

The Story

At the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section finals on Saturday, May 16, AB Hernandez (a biological male, 17, Jurupa Valley High senior) won the girls' high jump, long jump, and triple jump. He beat second-place Gwynneth Mureika in the high jump by two inches. In the long jump, he outperformed Gianna Gonzalez by more than a foot. CIF, anticipating the politics, had pre-baked a workaround: any female athlete finishing behind a "trans athlete" gets bumped one spot up the podium. So Mureika and Hernandez both received gold medals in the high jump and stood next to each other on the top step. Some of Hernandez's female competitors iced him out. Others skipped the medal ceremony entirely.

Riley Gaines went on Fox & Friends Monday and called the shared podium “a public humiliation ritual for the girls. It’s probably one of the most abusive things you can do to a young woman.”

Hernandez’s own mother criticized the policy. She told Breitbart that the shared podium is humiliating for the girls and unfair to her son.

The Left is framing this as Hernandez being forced to share what was rightfully his. PinkNews ran 800 words about Hernandez’s feelings and didn’t quote one girl who lost. The Mirror US ran the same angle. Yahoo Sports called the rule a compromise. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office released a statement Monday saying he “rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids,” and that his position is to “stand with all kids and stand up to bullies.”

The Right is letting the image speak. Fox, Breitbart, Newsbusters, OutKick. The framing is photographic. A 17-year-old biological male next to a 16-year-old girl on a girls’ gold medal podium. Both wearing first-place medals. The argument writes itself.

What got skipped: This isn't a kindness policy. It's a federal-funding workaround. Trump's February 2025 executive order threatened to pull federal education funding from any state allowing biological males in girls' sports. The DOJ sued California in July 2025 for Title IX violations; California countersued first in June to keep state law in place. CIF's shared-podium pilot rolled out in the middle of that active legal fight, with the stated purpose of letting "cisgender female athletes qualify for first place, even if they don't win, while still allowing transgender female athletes to compete." Translation: we will not deny the girl gold, so technically not Title IX, and we will not stop the boy from competing, so technically still California law. The girls on the second step are not props for inclusion. They are props for a federal-funding argument California needs to keep alive in court.

Remember the entire pro-trans-athlete argument? There is no significant biological advantage to being male in women’s sports. That was the line for years. Hormone suppression, estrogen levels, leveled playing field, just let them compete. So somebody tell me why CIF needs a shared-podium workaround at all. If there’s no advantage, just hand the boy the gold and move on. The workaround is the confession. Every shared podium is California’s school board whispering: we know, we know, we know.

Real question I haven’t seen anyone ask. What happens at nationals? If a trans athlete wins a California state qualifier, does CIF send both the boy and the girl to the regional meet? And does whatever federation hosts that meet even allow him to compete with the girls? CIF didn’t think this through past the local press cycle.

And the girls. Gwynneth Mureika cleared that bar. Gianna Gonzalez ran that long jump. They trained for years and showed up to that finals meet to compete against girls because the bracket said girls. A biological male shows up and wins. CIF puts one of those girls on the top step next to him and calls them co-champions. Give me a break!

If California believes this position so passionately, then stand on business and take the consequences. Fight the Title IX lawsuit on the merits, lose the federal funding if that’s what conviction costs, and make the public case that biological males belong in girls’ sports. Instead California built a workaround that contradicts its own argument, still violates Title IX in substance, and is crossing fingers that a court sides with the technicality. That isn’t conviction. That’s a state with a deathgrip on an ideology and a deathgrip on its federal funding spigot trying to keep both. Pick one.

Newsom calls it “cynical” to ask the question and says people raising it are “bullies” trying to “vilify individual kids.” He’s the governor of California telling Gwynneth Mureika her gold medal isn’t worth talking about. Bro, shut up.

Watch which girls’ track team boycotts a meet next. Watch what happens when the first CIF trans-athlete winner advances to a regional event that doesn’t permit it. Watch whether any California Democrat running for governor in 2026 says one honest sentence about this.

The argument was always that there’s no biological advantage. The shared podium is California conceding there is.

Trump called off a “scheduled” attack on Iran at the last minute. The president said Monday he was “an hour away” from striking Tuesday morning when the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE asked him to hold off for two or three days because they think a deal is close. Trump postponed the strike but ordered Hegseth and the Joint Chiefs to be ready to “go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice.” The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. National gas prices sit at $4.52. A U.S. official separately denied Iranian and CNBC reports that Washington had agreed to lift its oil sanctions. CBS News

Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas Senate runoff. The endorsement came Tuesday, one week before the May 26 runoff between the four-term incumbent senator and the state attorney general. Cornyn finished the March primary at about 42% to Paxton’s 41%, with neither clearing the 50% threshold. Trump on Truth Social: “Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas.” Senate GOP leadership had been quietly lobbying Trump to back Cornyn. Lindsey Graham warned the endorsement could make the general election “three times more expensive.” Democratic state Rep. James Talarico is the November nominee. Fox News

Three killed at Islamic Center of San Diego in suspected hate crime. Two teenage gunmen, identified as Cain Clark (17) and Caleb Vazquez (18), shot and killed three adult staff members, including a security guard, at the mosque Monday morning before turning their guns on themselves. The security guard was credited with helping contain the attack and saving lives. Police recovered a shotgun and gas can marked with the Nazi SS symbol, plus written hate-speech material and anti-Islamic writings in the suspects’ vehicle. Police are treating the attack as a hate crime. (Note on online rumors: there is no evidence either shooter was transgender. One had long hair worn in cornrows because he was a high school wrestler.) New York Post

TX-35 Democrat Maureen Galindo pledged to convert an ICE facility into an “internment camp for American Zionists.” Galindo, headed to a May 26 Democratic runoff against Johnny Garcia in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, wrote in an Instagram post that she would turn the Karnes County ICE detention center into a prison for “American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” and “a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.” Former primary opponent John Lira rescinded his endorsement. Senate nominee James Talarico said he will not campaign with Galindo even if she wins the runoff: “This antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics.” The San Antonio Jewish Federation condemned the remarks. San Antonio Current

VP JD Vance confirmed DOJ is investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar for immigration fraud. Vance, the administration’s designated “fraud czar,” told reporters Tuesday that the Justice Department is actively investigating Omar (D-MN) over the long-standing allegation that her 2009 marriage to British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was a green-card arrangement with her biological brother. Vance: “It certainly seems like something fishy is there. If we think that there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime.” Omar’s husband’s companies reportedly grew from $51,000 in value in 2023 to as much as $30 million in 2024; Omar called it an accounting error. She has denied the brother-marriage allegations as “absurd and offensive.” Just The News

Shein bought Everlane for about $100 million. China's $100 billion fast-fashion giant acquired the San Francisco slow-fashion brand (known for pricing transparency and recycled-material lines like its 2019 DayGlove ReKnit shoes made from recycled plastic bottles), per Puck News reporting Sunday. Shein faces allegations of sweatshop labor, child workers in its supply chain, design theft from independent designers, and is currently under a Texas AG investigation by Ken Paxton over unsafe consumer products and labor practices. American textile manufacturing has declined more than 80% since its 1970s peak; roughly 98% of U.S. apparel is now produced abroad. Daily Wire

That’s The Read! See you Friday. Remember to share it with a friend.

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

🚨 WARNING: Light Spoilers Ahead

Never Let Me Go is called dystopian sci-fi. It isn’t, not really. Kazuo Ishiguro uses the genre—the off-kilter institution, the slow drip of revelation—to ask something harder than what dystopia usually asks. Not how do people resist a system that owns them? But what conditions produce a person who doesn’t?

When I posted about the book, the few people who responded either hated it or wondered if they had missed something. I get the reaction. If I’d come to it differently, I might have landed there, too. Normally, I don’t spoil a book. This one is the exception. Going in blind, I think most people will end up frustrated or confused. I knew the basic plot and roughly how it ended before I started, and that shaped how I read it.

The story opens in an English boarding school where small things feel off. Required weekly medicals. Constant warnings not to injure themselves. Creativity is emphasized to an unusual degree. The children’s art becomes a kind of currency. A French-Belgian woman called Madame evaluates the children’s art and selects pieces for what the students call “the gallery.”

The story centers on three friends: Kathy, our narrator; Tommy; and Ruth. There’s a love triangle, but it’s not the center of the book. The children are clones raised to become organ donors. Kathy works for years as a “carer,” looking after donors as they progress through their donations—before becoming a donor herself.

The language is flat. The children don’t give up organs; they make “donations.” They don’t die; they “complete.” The clones aren’t for specific recipients. The children question if they are cloned from someone real, a “possible.” Ruth hears that hers was spotted working in a fancy office in Norfolk. A group of them goes to find her. It isn’t her.

Every child wants to know where they come from. These characters are no different. But for Ruth, this confirms the worst fear. That they aren't copied from anyone admirable. They're likely cloned from criminals, addicts, and the discarded, spare parts assembled from spare people.

The book is told as a memory. It’s incomplete, the way memory is. Kathy remembers some things sharply and shrugs at others. She asked a question once, accepted whatever answer she got, and moved on. The whole novel sits in that slight fog. And it has another quality, harder to pin down: the children have been raised so thoroughly to accept their fate that even the questioning that does happen stays small. Internal. Private. There is no uprising. They don’t organize.

Ishiguro explores this question through love and creativity. The students were told the art mattered, though they didn’t know why. Tommy, who couldn't make art, got teased for it and lectured by teachers. Then one of them, Miss Lucy, told him it was fine. He didn't need to be creative. He should just be himself.

On a first read, it sounds like kindness. It isn’t. Miss Lucy accepts the purpose of the children. Telling Tommy his art doesn't matter is another way of telling him that nothing he does will change what happens to him, delivered as comfort.

Miss Lucy eventually breaks. She starts telling the children the truth, believing that they need to understand what’s coming, not be sheltered from it. The other guardians push back. She’s removed.

But notice what Miss Lucy doesn’t do. She doesn’t tell them to run. She doesn’t tell them to refuse. She tells them to accept it knowingly, which is still acceptance. She thinks she’s doing right by them, but her rebellion is about how the children meet their fate, not whether they meet it. Even her rebellion serves the system. Miss Lucy gives the children just enough truth to make their compliance feel like understanding rather than ignorance.

The school is unusual within the system. When Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth meet other donors after graduating, people want to hear about Hailsham. They ask questions. They don’t talk about where they grew up. The implication sits in what they don’t say: most of these children were raised somewhere much worse. What looked like a strange, sheltered, slightly ominous boarding school was, by the standards of this world, the kind version.

I picked this book up because comfort as a tool of control is a theme I’ve been exploring. This book takes that idea to its end. Asking what it takes to strip a person of their essence. In what conditions would a human being walk willingly to their own end? Whether clones have souls is the question this world cannot afford to answer. If they do, the donations are murder. So the question is never asked. The clones stay soulless because they have to be. Because the truth is unbearable to the people whose lives depend on them.

The children are never taught to question authority, to think of themselves as individuals, or to follow an instinct. Even Miss Lucy tells them to accept their fate, never to challenge it. She is accepting the sacrifice of these children for the benefit of others, of “real people.” The instincts that the rest of us cultivate—ask questions, be different, push back—are absent here by design.

So the question becomes: is the compliance the product of how they were raised or of what they are? When a person is a copy, does something essential become diluted? The book doesn't answer. It doesn't need to. It just shows you children with small private conflicts and no fight against the system that owns them. They’re told they have a purpose. They’re given no skills for any life outside that purpose. And so they do as they’re told. The donations are what their lives are for, and, eventually, they are what give their lives shape.

Even Kathy carries a quiet pride in being a good carer, her donors don’t get too agitated; they don’t struggle the way she’s seen others struggle. As her time as a carer ends, she’s almost looking forward to begin her own donations.

The other major thread is whether love can save them, or at least buy them time. A rumor circulates that couples who can prove they're truly in love can defer their donations. Tommy and Kathy chase that hope. They get an answer. It isn't the one they want. They all complete. Some on the first donation, some after four. Nobody runs, there is no breakout, no wheelchairs rolling through the gates. Everybody donates. Everybody completes.

That's the source of most of the frustration with this book. Why didn't they fight? Why didn't they refuse the first appointment? Wrong question. It's the question the book wants you to sit with, not answer. This isn't a thriller about clones escaping their fate. It's about how escape never crosses their mind.

This book is a thinker. Slow and introspective, with no big reveal. If you go in expecting dystopian sci-fi, you'll be disappointed. If you go in expecting a meditation on what makes a person a person—and what can be done to a person to make them stop asking—you'll get a lot from it.

Have you read Never Let Me Go? Did you hate it? Did I convince you to reread it?

Up next: My Summer Reading List

I know I’m not super excited either.

Random question for you. Did you watch the Ronda Rousey v. Gina Carano “fight” on Saturday night? If you managed to stay away and didn’t blink an eye, it's possible you did. Because it took all of 17 seconds.

I’m not kidding. The commercial for the UFC fight on the White House lawn was longer than the fight. Also, yes. I saw a commercial for the UFC Fight for America 250.

Moving on…

In Today’s Read

• The Supreme Court left mail-order mifepristone in place. Thomas and Alito wrote dissents that look more like a how-to guide than a fume.

• Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in the country, agreed to pay $10 million and stand up a clinic to reverse the procedures it performed. Call it a confession.

• The Washington Post wants ICE blamed for a two-year-old’s murder. Their evidence: she said so.

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Thomas Throws a Lifeline to the Battle Over Mail-Order Abortion

The Story.

On May 14, the Supreme Court left mail-order mifepristone in place while Louisiana’s challenge goes back to the Fifth Circuit on remand. Access stays as-is for now. The actual news is the dissents.

Alito called the order “unreasoned” and “remarkable,” and wrote that “what is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.” Thomas went further. He pointed at the Comstock Act of 1873, which bans the mailing of any drug “designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” and wrote that the Court should enforce it on its face. His line: “mifepristone shipped to Louisiana, which bans abortion, causes nearly 1,000 abortions per month. All of this violates the Comstock Act.”

Quick context. Comstock was a moral crusader. Most of the 1873 law banned mailing obscene material. One clause banned mailing abortion drugs. Never repealed. Sat dead under Roe. After Dobbs, it became a live wire nobody had touched. Until Thursday.

The Left’s read. Slate’s headline was “Samuel Alito fumes over abortion access in red states.” Talking Points Memo led with the justices “seething.” Lawyers, Guns & Money called them “two misogynist septuagenarians.” On the left, the story is that the conservatives lost and are mad. The Comstock argument gets treated as a Thomas quirk, not a roadmap. The Intercept is the rare outlet on that side that flagged the Comstock revival as the next phase.

The Right’s read. The Federalist framed the order as the Court “authorizing mail-order abortion.” The Washington Stand called the stay a procedural punt and treated Thomas’s dissent as the playbook. Right-of-center coverage took the Comstock revival as the signal, not an asterisk.

What both sides are skipping. Two sitting justices, including one writing a full-throated invitation, put a 153-year-old statute back on the table as the mechanism. The next state AG who wants to file a Comstock-revival test case now has the bench’s own language to quote in the opening pages. The question stopped being whether the argument existed. It’s now which case carries it.

Where does the case stand? Currently, the Supreme Court has said, “Hold up, wait a minute,” to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that would have blocked mailing the abortion pill mifepristone or sending it after a telehealth visit. That means people can still get the pill by mail for now, while the case continues in the lower courts. It could all return to the Supreme Court for a final decision, which would determine whether mail‑order access to the pill remains legal nationwide or whether stricter limits take effect. Until then, access is unchanged.

The dissent by Alito, and especially Thomas, provides the State AGs with a pretty solid argument. But expect that line of attack to be that the Right is digging up old and antiquated laws to strip women of the right to control their bodies. “Of course, the Right would dig up laws when women were second-class citizens and weaponize them.”

It’s a played-out strategy to attack a law that is still on the books as “old,” as if the age determines enforcement. You know what else is old? The Constitution.

The Comstock argument has been kicking around law review pages for two years. Now, a sitting justice has named the statute, the conduct, and the remedy in writing. Will the State AGs get the memo?

The rebuttal to Comstock will likely be based on federalism. If Washington enforces the 1873 mail statute, it overrides the abortion policy of every blue state. “Let the states decide” was the post-Dobbs principle. However, if a state has decided on no abortions, what right does another state have to mail a drug for at-home abortions?

See how the law gets messy?

Watch the test. When Louisiana refiles, watch which state AG signs on as amicus. Watch whether the Fifth Circuit cites Thomas verbatim. Watch whether DOJ briefs a position. The point is, mail-order abortion is far from settled.

Texas Children’s Pays $10 Million for Detransition Clinic

The Story.

On May 15, Texas AG Ken Paxton announced a settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest pediatric hospital in the country. Texas Children’s pays $10 million. Five physicians are fired permanently, and their privileges are revoked. The hospital stops performing gender-transition services on minors. It stands up the country’s first “detransition clinic” to provide five years of free care to kids whose transitions need to be reversed. The state alleged Medicaid fraud through false diagnosis codes. The DOJ signed on.

Paxton called it a “monumental day.” Texas Children’s said it agreed to settle “to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation” after “navigating an unconscionable campaign of mistruths and mischaracterizations.”

Translation of the second half: we paid $10 million and rebuilt our practice on the way out.

The Left’s read. NBC News led with Texas Children’s framing. The hospital settled to avoid prolonged litigation; the detransition clinic is “politically driven,” and the campaign against gender-affirming care is “mistruths.” The Texas Tribune and Houston Public Media ran the same beat. Hospital as victim, state as aggressor, medical evidence suppressed.

The Right’s read. The Daily Caller called it the “infamous sex-change hospital” opening the country’s first reversal clinic. Newsweek and Fox 26 Houston led with the financial concession, the doctor firings, and the policy reversal. The settlement reads as substantive admission, not procedural surrender.

What both sides are missing. The hospital’s own settlement language is the buried lead. “To protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.” It’s about the money. If they thought the standard of care was sound, they had every reason to litigate. Instead, the country's largest pediatric hospital fired the doctors, paid the state, and contracted to open a clinic for patients they say didn’t need fixing. Read that again.

After years of gaslighting parents into transitioning their child or risking a dead child, Texas Children’s Hospital admits it’s all about the money, honey.

The AMA, AAP, AACAP, and APA all signed on to “gender-affirming care” as the standard of care for minors. The whole pediatric establishment closed ranks for a decade. Parents who asked questions were told the medicine was settled and they were the problem.

Did Texas Children’s Hospital put up a fight? Defend their doctors? Point to peer-reviewed studies? No. Instead, they opted to pay $10 million to stop performing those procedures, fired the physicians who performed them, and agreed to build the clinic that will undo them.

There has been significant damage caused to a generation of children, and the media know it. That’s why left-side coverage is focused on the “unconscionable campaign of mistruths” line and not on the key paragraph. The one that says Texas Children’s will “cease providing gender-transition interventions” and will “amend its bylaws to trigger automatic relinquishment of privileges for any physician” who violates Texas’s prohibition. They didn’t agree to that because they were tired. They agreed because the lawsuits would expose the truth.

Here’s why the clinic matters more than the $10 million or the firings. The doctors who transitioned these kids never ran detransition services. Almost nobody did, anywhere. The activist class used that absence as a defense: detransition is rare; look at the literature. Of course, it looked rare. The same protocol that pushed kids into transition never tracked the ones coming back. Now, Texas Children’s is contractually obligated to track them, treat them, and document it.

Watch what happens next. The detransition clinic will develop the country’s first published clinical pathway for puberty-blocker and cross-sex-hormone reversals. Those doctors will see patient outcomes on the record. Every plaintiff’s attorney in the country gets to read them. The institutional class that spent ten years calling concerned parents transphobes has nowhere to stand once those papers hit PubMed.

Texas just made the first hospital pay for the cleanup.

ICYMI

A Two-Year-Old Is Dead. The Washington Post Wants ICE Blamed

The Story.

On May 16, the Washington Post published a long-form piece on Wendy Hernandez Reyes, a Honduran woman in the U.S. illegally. She was pulled over in Baldwin County, Alabama in January, handed to ICE by 287(g) deputies, and deported January 26. Her two-year-old son Orlín, a U.S. citizen, was beaten to death in Florida in March by the uncle the family had arranged to care for him.

The spine of the piece is a contested claim. Hernandez says she repeatedly asked ICE to take Orlín with her and was ignored. ICE says she agreed to leave him with family. WaPo does not produce the tablet logs, the officer notes, or the witness statements from her sister.

The undisputed facts. She had a 2023 final order of removal from a missed asylum hearing. ICE officers at the scene asked her sister what should be done with the children. The sister called the uncle, Maldonado, who agreed to take Orlín and three cousins. Hernandez told the Post she “reasoned it would be best for Orlín to stay with his cousins.” She also told the Post that Maldonado had been violent toward her sister “but never the children.” The uncle then killed Orlín.

The Left’s read. WaPo, Yahoo News, The Mirror, and IBTimes all ran the same headline frame: “ICE blamed her.” The mother’s account anchors the piece. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons becomes the villain for issuing a post-death press release calling her abandonment her choice. The killing is the lead, deportation is the cause.

The Right’s read. The Washington Times and similar outlets framed it as the predictable outcome of a final removal order against someone whose family arranged the caregiver. She had a 2023 order on the books. The family chose the uncle. The uncle is the murderer. The agency enforced a ruling.

What both sides are skipping. The press has no version of this enforcement that it can report fairly. ICE keeps mothers and children together in the same facility; you get “children in cages.” A mother brings her U.S.-citizen child on removal; you get “ICE deported a U.S. citizen.” A parent goes alone after the family arranges the caregiver; you get “ICE blamed her.” Three framings, all bad, applied to the same statutory framework.

It is devastating and horrifying what happened to this baby. The uncle killed him. A two-year-old is dead. Everything else in the WaPo piece is contested.

WaPo built a 4,000-word piece on a “he said, she said” about a tablet conversation between Hernandez and an ICE officer. They didn’t produce the tablet logs. They didn’t produce the officer’s contemporaneous notes. They didn’t interview the sister who called the uncle on her own phone. The reader's acceptance of the mother's story as true determines the piece's emotional impact. WaPo’s own reporting quotes her saying Maldonado had been violent toward her sister, “but never the children.” So the mother knew the caregiver had a violent history, yet opted to leave her child with Maldonado, even though taking the child with her was an option. That detail is in paragraph 27.

I’m not running cover for ICE. Blanche’s press release a week after a child’s murder was a self-inflicted wound. I understand that ICE and the administration would face attacks regardless, but it is possible to show compassion while enforcing immigration laws.

This story is likely to gain traction, and they will bury or omit important details altogether, just like WaPo did. Policy critique is justified. But ICE’s duty is not to track children outside its custody. They were doing what the parent requested. The Biden administration lost track of thousands of children in its custody, and WaPo had little to say about it.

Watch to see if other outlets pick up this story. What is the framing and the lead? Also, what happens at trial? Maldonado will be charged. Discovery will produce the tablet logs. WaPo didn’t obtain. Was the mother prevented from reuniting with her child? When the documents come in, will the Post run the correction at the same length and with the same headline weight? Watch and see.

Cassidy is out. Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his Louisiana Republican primary Saturday, the first GOP senator to lose renomination in nearly a decade. Rep. Julia Letlow (Trump-endorsed) and state Treasurer John Fleming advance to a June 27 runoff. Cassidy finished third at 25%. Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “his political career is OVER!” The 2021 impeachment vote ages well. NBC News

U.S. and Nigerian forces killed the No. 2 of ISIS on Saturday. Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, the global director of operations for ISIS, was killed alongside several of his lieutenants in a joint precision strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin. AFRICOM called it a “highly complex precision air-land operation.” No U.S. casualties. Fox News

Israel killed the architect of October 7. Izz al-Din al-Haddad, head of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, was killed in an Israeli airstrike Friday night in Gaza City’s Remal neighborhood. The IDF confirmed Saturday. Al-Haddad personally planned the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks and oversaw the breach of the eastern fence. Hamas called it “treacherous and cowardly.” Al Jazeera

Iran is on the clock. Trump sent Tehran a nuclear proposal Saturday and warned of “very bad” consequences if the regime stalls. Sunday he said “there won’t be anything left of them” if Iran doesn’t move. He’s meeting with national security advisers on May 19 to discuss potential military action. The ceasefire he called “life support” last week now has a deadline. NBC News

Voting rights rallies hit Montgomery. Thousands rallied Saturday in Alabama against the Supreme Court’s late-April Callais ruling, which struck down Louisiana’s majority-minority district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Florida’s House approved a new map within an hour of the ruling. The 2026 midterm map is being redrawn live. The Hill

That’s The Read! Thanks for all the positive feedback on this new format. Share it with a friend.

See you on Wednesday!

If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon. My husband has been on calls since morning. He lets out a loud sigh. I poke my head into his office.

“You done? Let’s get a croissant.”

“Where?”

“A new bakery at the old hipster pancake place,” I say. “Remember, it had that menu that was trying too hard—pansy garnishes, lavender lattes, and all that. You liked the corn pancakes, though.”

“No, but yeah, we can go.”

The Tudor revival at St. Elmo Ave. and W. 45th St. was built in 1934. It was Fire Station No. 14 for nearly fifty years. Now it's home to Wayward Pastry Co., the best croissants in Chattanooga. We park in front of the carriage house doors. They are fire engine red in the sun. A chalk sign by the door: one hour to closing.

Few pastries are left in the case. One looks as if it’s upside down, lacquered in sugar. The kind that hardens and cracks like crème brûlée. It reminds me of a turtle shell.

My husband asks, “What is it?”

The girl with a septum piercing says something that is meant to be Kouign-amann. I only know this because it’s written on the small chalk sign.

“But what is it?” I repeat.

“It’s like an inverted croissant with sugar.”

“Ooooh, I’ll get that! With a latte,” my husband says.

“I’ll have a latte too and a croissant. And a cookie. We can share,” I say to my husband.

Behind the girl, the barista grabs a ceramic mug. “Oh, and can we get the coffees to go?”

The septum piercing nods.

I turn around. A young woman sits at the bistro table below a large hole in the ceiling. Likely where a fire pole once was. Her eyebrows are pressed together. The keys of her laptop click. Behind the laptop are a mug and a plate of crumbs. She stops typing and makes a note. The clicking resumes.

Behind me steam bursts from the wand of the espresso machine; hissing echoes off the bare walls.

A gray-haired man walks in with a newspaper and stands in line behind us. He is wearing shorts with a button-down shirt. We make eye contact. His glasses are on his head. I smile as I leave with the box of pastries to sit outside. My husband stays to wait and pay for the coffees.

The courtyard is red brick, sunken into the earth, surrounded by tiered dirt beds held back by weathered timbers, silver with age. A woman wearing large sunglasses sits alone on the west side of the courtyard. Another laptop. The brilliant white tabletops hurt my eyes. She is focused. I wish I had my sunglasses. The only table in the shade is a bistro table along the back, next to two women engaged in conversation. One of them is waving her arms as if she were directing traffic. They laugh in matching pitch and tone. On their table are crumbed plates. One of the women has her quilted tote on her shoulder.

I sit at the bistro table.

I peek into the pastry box, tempted to steal a bite of the cookie, but I wait. The two women get up and say their goodbyes. I overhear one confirming plans for the weekend, something about snacks and a game, walking toward the courtyard steps. My husband comes out with the coffees, almost running into them. They exchange apologies. The other woman watches them as she closes her laptop.

We are alone in the courtyard.

I tease my husband that he is lucky the cookie is still untouched after taking so long with the coffees. He laughs, scrolling on his X feed.

“So what states are going to redistrict besides Louisiana, obviously?” I pull apart the light layers of my croissant and press them back together before putting it in my mouth.

He puts down his phone and cracks the shell of his Kouign-amann. “Several southern states. Five maybe before the midterms. Ten when it’s all done.”

“How is that inverted croissant?”

“It’s good. Do you want a bite?” He tears a piece and puts it on my plate. “Have some of the sugar too.”

“Mmm, that is good!—And Virginia is about to get overturned.” A chair scrapes across the brick courtyard.

“Yeah, that looks like it’s going to backfire.” He sets the coffee down. “Can you imagine if at the end of all this the Republicans are up 12 or more!”

“Lower your voice,” I say, smiling.

“Alito did awesome work with that opinion,” he says, lowering his voice.

“Sorry, are you talking about the Supreme Court ruling?” I hear from behind.

My husband stretches his neck to look behind me. I turn. It’s the man from earlier. His newspaper is on the table with his coffee and earbuds. I pause for a moment. His legs are crossed at the knee.

“Do you mean on the VRA?”

He shrugs. “The most recent one. What do you think of that?”

Like a dolt, I answer honestly. “I agree with the ruling.”

“But why?” He raises his hands and lets them fall. “I just can’t understand how anyone would think that this is a good thing.”

He asks if we know what it means. What will happen? Do we care about black people? Jim Crow 2.0! Every time we go to answer, he interrupts, pointing his finger. My heart beats in my ears.

I want to ask if he read the opinion, but he keeps cutting me off. I turn to look at my husband; he is smirking. In a brief moment of quiet, I say, “So you are okay with discrimination, and I am not.”

“I have black friends!”

“Congratulations,” we say together.

“I’ve lived on Lookout Mountain for forty years. You have to give back. I'm okay with a black district if it benefits them."

“So you’re prejudiced. I think we’ve established that.”

Trump’s Triumphal Arch over the bodies of dead soldiers. The ballroom. Trump’s name is everywhere.

“He thinks he’s a king!”

He had asked if I cared about black people, but he hasn’t mentioned one since.

My husband and I make eye contact. We chuckle.

I look at our plates with crumbs. My husband and I nod at each other.

We stand. “If you never cared to hear my opinion, why did you ask a question?” I say while placing my plate in the dish bin.

Putting his earbuds in, he mumbles something about this backfiring on the Republicans.

Did we allow this boomer to chase us out?

Last night, we sat on a different patio. Several tables with a bucket-o-beer. One table is discussing baby monitors and sound machines. There are empty bottles on the table.

Our server took our drink order. His t-shirt said, “Say sometimes to drugs.”

As he walks away, my husband is about to speak before I ask him if we cannot talk about politics or the news. He holds my gaze for a moment before he smiles and nods.

The man from Lookout Mountain didn't change my mind. He changed where I'm willing to open my mouth.

Eric Church and the Six Strings of Life at UNC

If you watch one thing this weekend, please watch Eric Church’s commencement address at UNC last Saturday. Twenty minutes and a guitar. The whole speech runs on a six-string metaphor about life.

Church, a graduate of UNC, built the speech around the strings of his guitar, one pillar per string: faith, family, marriage, ambition, community, and the original voice only you can bring. The spouse you pick is the D string. Ambition and resilience both live on the G and pull against each other. The high E is the thinnest one, the melody, the string most easily bent by outside pressure. “The world does not need another cover song. It needs an original.”

Then he hit the community string. He told 7,000-plus graduates to resist the temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one, to be globally visible and locally invisible, to have thousands of followers and no one knows where you live. Plant yourself somewhere. Learn names, not usernames. Coach the team. Build the thing your community needs even if the internet never sees it.

This is how we all should live.

The Women on Either Side of Him

This summer, I made a pact. No TV unless I’ve already read. The idea is to spend more evenings with books and less time half-watching shows we wouldn’t remember a week later. It’s been working. Mostly.

Then a friend started hounding me to watch False Prophet. She had finished it, she needed to talk about it, and I am a good friend. I read first. Then I binged all four episodes in one afternoon.

False Prophet is the follow-up to Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, the Netflix documentary about the FLDS church under Warren Jeffs. If you saw the first one, you remember thinking the story ended when Jeffs went to prison. It didn’t. It almost never does. False Prophet is about Samuel Bateman, an FLDS member who broke off years after Jeffs’s arrest, declared himself a prophet, and started collecting wives and children. Including his own daughters. I know, eww. Also the daughters of the men who followed him.

If you like true-crime cult documentaries, this is a good one. Four episodes, tight pacing, no fat. But the part that stuck with me wasn’t Bateman. The dude is something else, sure. It was the women.

Christine Marie Katas runs an organization that helps women leave fundamentalist polygamy. She came out of a similar situation herself. When she got word of what was happening inside Bateman’s group, she didn’t call the FBI and wait. She infiltrated. She told Bateman she was making a documentary about his ministry, brought a camera, and spent months filming a man who believed she was promoting him, while she was actually building a case to get the women and children out. His ego was the lever, and she pulled it. She lied to a prophet to save the people he was destroying. The deception was the rescue.

And then there’s Julia Johnson. She’s the heart of the documentary. Her husband, Moroni, was one of Bateman’s first followers and one of the men who handed his daughters over as wives. Julia went along at the start because that’s what the structure required. Her husband was the head of the household. She was raised inside the FLDS framework, women second, don’t question authority, keep sweet, and Moroni’s word was the word she was supposed to obey.

By the time she realized her daughters were in danger, she had no tools to act. The structure she’d been raised in was the same structure now threatening her children. She had been taught her whole life that her instincts were the problem. So when her instincts started screaming, she didn’t know if she could trust them.

She turned to Christine. A stranger with a camera. That was the only door open to her.

This is the thing the documentary is actually about, even if it doesn’t quite know it. Bateman’s downfall is the plot. His ego, his greed, his sloppiness, the federal charges that finally stuck. All of it is satisfying in the way true crime is satisfying, which is to say it gives you a man in handcuffs and credits. The women are the story. Julia, raised to obey, learning to trust herself in the worst possible circumstances. Christine, already out, walking back into the fire on purpose because no one else was coming.

Documentaries package resolutions. Bateman is in prison. The children are out. Roll credits. Christine is still doing this work because there are more Batemans. There’s always another one. The false prophets are interchangeable. What outlives them is the theology underneath, the one that teaches women their second-class place, treats doubt as sin, and dresses obedience up as virtue.

If you like true crime and the culty stuff, watch False Prophet. It’s worth your time. Just know what you’re watching.

The Tree That Owns Itself

There is a white oak in Athens, Georgia, that legally owns itself.

I am not making this up. The tree owns itself, and it owns the eight feet of ground around its trunk in every direction. It has a deed. A small stone plaque sits nearby. People take pictures with the tree.

Sometime in the early 1800s, a man named William Henry Jackson grew up playing under this oak. He loved it like it was a friend. Climbing its limbs and widdling its broken branches.

When he inherited the land as an adult, he decided the tree shouldn’t have to depend on whoever happened to own the property next. So, he wrote a deed transferring ownership of the tree and the ground it stood on to the tree itself.

Whether the deed is legally valid is something lawyers like to argue about. Georgia has never said no. The city of Athens has treated the deed as real for almost two hundred years, which in legal terms means it is settled.

The original tree fell in 1942. Blown by a storm. By then, it was around 400 years old. The people of Athens were distraught, and the Junior Ladies Garden Club planted one of its acorns in the same spot. That tree is now in its eighties. People call it the Son of the Tree That Owns Itself. I think it would be more southern to simply call it Junior.

I love this story.

Yes, part of it is absurdity. A tree with a deed. It doesn’t pay property taxes if you were wondering, but it’s a legal person. Sounds like a good deal to me.

William Henry Jackson looked at something he loved and decided the only way to protect it was to give it to itself. He feared his future heirs would chop it down. He didn’t trust the next buyer to not clear the lot. So he removed the tree from the market entirely. He made it ungiveable. He made it un-sellable. He gave it the only thing a tree could plausibly own, itself.

The tree has had a quiet life. It has watched Athens grow up around it. It survived the Civil War, two world wars, the invention of the chainsaw, and at least one storm that killed its Pa’. It has been photographed by tourists, climbed by children, and visited by every sentimental writer who has ever passed through northeast Georgia.

I hope to be one of these visitors soon.

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Here’s the deal. The Brief was a news roundup, which is cool. But not different enough from the ten other newsletters trying to do the same thing. I want to give you something only I can give you, and it will help you digest this insane news cycle.

The Read is built around one promise: I read the left’s coverage, the right’s coverage, and the primary sources, then hand you the synthesis and my take. Three days a week. Easy.

Each issue has the same shape. Two or three top stories, each broken into The Story (what happened, with the receipts), The Framing (how the left is covering it, how the right is, what both sides are leaving out), and My Read (my colorful 2 cents to take up in the comments). Then, a Quick Rundown for the smaller items that are worth putting on your radar.

The work of cross-checking the news is exhausting. Trust me, I know. I’ve been doing it for years now. But you don’t have time for that.

Welcome to The Read.

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In Today’s Read

• The NYT published a 5,000-word column accusing Israel of state-enabled mass sexual abuse, parked it in Opinion, and the rest of the press refuses to either confirm or refute it.

• VP Vance deferred $1.3 billion in California Medicaid payments and warned all 50 states to start prosecuting Medicaid fraud or lose federal funding. The play maps exactly onto a Daily Wire series the legacy press blacked out.

• Florida AG James Uthmeier filed to intervene in a routine surrogacy case and argued the practice violates the 13th Amendment. If he wins, adoptive parental rights across Florida could be in play.

• A drunk William Paul accosted Mike Lawler in a DC dive bar and went on a 10-minute antisemitic tirade, then apologized via his father.

• Kevin Warsh got confirmed as the next Fed chair on a 54-45 vote with one Democratic defection.

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The NYT Publishes a Bold “Investigation” Behind an Opinion Shield

The Story.

On May 11, Nicholas Kristof published “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians” in the New York Times Opinion section. An important detail, file it. The piece is built on 14 firsthand interviews alleging systemic sexual violence against Palestinian detainees by Israeli soldiers, settlers, Shin Bet interrogators, and prison guards. Kristof cites a 2025 UN report, a Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report, a Save the Children survey of detained children, and B'Tselem testimony. The column ran days before the Civil Commission, an independent panel investigating October 7 atrocities, was set to release its long-anticipated report on Hamas's sexual violence against Israeli women. The Israeli Prison Service called the allegations “entirely unfounded.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the column “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.”

Netanyahu announced Israel will sue the New York Times for defamation. The Times called the lawsuit threat part of a "well-worn political playbook" aimed at "undermining independent reporting" and at dismissing any legal claim as "without merit." Yesterday, there were protests outside the New York Times.

The Left’s read. The NYT and aligned outlets treat the column as documented human rights reporting, and the Times has been posting a multi-front defense in real time on X. NYTimes Communications defended Kristof as"one of the world's best on-the-ground reporters" covering sexual abuse in conflict zones, citing his two Pulitzers. The column was called a "deeply reported piece of opinion journalism" with 14 sources "corroborated" against other witnesses, family, and lawyers, and details "extensively fact-checked" against UN testimony, surveys, and human rights research. The Times also denied that the Civil Commission report on Hamas sexual violence influenced the column's timing. The Israeli response gets framed as the standard denial pattern when human rights groups document state abuses. The Hill covers the lawsuit as Netanyahu trying to bully the free press.

The Right’s read. National Review, Fox News, and HonestReporting walk through the evidentiary gaps. Euro-Med has documented Hamas ties. The Sde Teiman case Kristof cites was investigated; the last charges were dropped in March, and the IDF reinstated the soldiers in April. A canine expert told National Review the dog-rape claim is “absurd.” Kristof’s lead source, Sami al-Sai, had been celebrating Hamas and “martyred” terror leaders on social media before his detention.

What both sides are skipping. Two important questions nobody is asking. First, why did this run in Opinion? If a reporter spent months interviewing 14 sources, reviewed UN and Euro-Med material, corroborated accounts through lawyers and families, and is making criminal allegations against a state security apparatus, that’s an investigation. Investigations belong on the News desk, where multi-source verification is required and editors sign every claim. Opinion runs on a columnist’s reputation. Filing this as Opinion is convenient due to significantly different editorial standards. Even Kristof admits this.

The NYT owes its readers an answer on which one this is supposed to be. Second, where is the follow-on reporting. AP, Reuters, WaPo, and CNN should be racing to confirm or expand. Three days in, the only outlets covering the piece are covering the lawsuit or debating Kristof’s reporting. No one is investigating the allegations.

It’s crazy that this is being covered as a “deeply reported piece of opinion journalism.” This is an intentional and manipulative blurring of the lines. The phrasing the NYTimes Communications has chosen borrows the prestige of “investigative reporting” while also maintaining legal and editorial flexibility, but publishes it as opinion. That is some insane journalistic contortionism.

It’s kind of evil genius. If the piece turns out to be flawed, or even false, they are protected because “it’s just his opinion.” The NYT filed this in Opinion to keep the editorial standards loose. But we are the NYT, and Kristof has a Pulitzer prize, so when we say it’s “deeply reported,” you can trust us.

The rest of the press is letting it happen. They have a track record of not investigating when a story can instead be weaponized to undermine this administration, Israel, or whoever's standing in the way of the narrative that week.

What happened? The most respected paper in the country published a 5,000-word accusation of state-sponsored sexual violence, dressed it as a columnist’s “opinion,” and the rest of the media is like, cool. These are the people who get a Pulitzer.

Worth flagging. Matti Friedman’s interview with Dan Senor at The Free Press is the smartest piece I’ve read on how NGO laundering, the collapse of the opinion-versus-news distinction, and ideological capture at the NYT produced this column. Read it after you read this.

Vance Just Did What the Press Refused to Cover

The Story.

During a press conference on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, flanked by CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, announced the administration is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California pending a home health and hospice fraud investigation. Oz called it the largest deferral the federal government has ever made. Roughly 800 hospice and home health centers in California have been forcibly closed. A warning letter is going to all 50 states: Medicaid Fraud Control Unit funding will be frozen if states do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud. The crackdown follows weeks of Daily Wire reporting by Luke Rosiak alleging Ohio Medicaid home health fraud, reporting that legacy outlets did not cover until DC made it official.

The Left’s read. CNN, NBC, and Politico cover the deferral as administration overreach against a Democratic state. Civil rights groups warn that the closures will leave vulnerable patients without care. Politico frames it as Vance positioning for 2028.

The Right’s read. The Federalist’s headline: “We Are Going to Turn Off the Money.” Conservative outlets emphasize the scale (the $1.3 billion deferral, 800 fraud-ridden centers operating under California state oversight), the 1,500% surge in California hospice claims Oz cited, and the Daily Wire’s role in surfacing the pattern. The all-50-states letter gets covered as the model for fraud elimination across the federal Medicaid system.

What both sides are skipping. The press contrast is the story. Daily Wire spent weeks documenting Ohio Medicaid home health fraud and got blacked out by every legacy outlet. NewsBusters documented Big Four news aggregators burying the Rosiak series. Then Vance held a press event with Oz and Ferguson, deferred $1.3 billion, and shut down 800 fraud-ridden centers. CNN, NBC, and The Times will write about California and how it is a victim of the administration. But they won’t write about Luke Rosiak. Independent reporting documented the pattern, the administration acted on it, and the press will cover the administrative action while pretending the journalism that drove it never happened.

The talking heads will say “fraud should be held accountable,” then cover it like California is the victim. The fraud, much of it post-COVID, has gone unchecked for years. California is a fair focus precisely because MediCal’s broad eligibility, including coverage for undocumented immigrants, makes it the country’s largest fraud vector. Now somebody’s finally doing something about it, and somehow that’s the problem.

Two things happened. Daily Wire’s Ohio Medicaid fraud series got blacked out by every legacy outlet because the byline was wrong. Vance then held a press event with Oz and Ferguson, deferred $1.3 billion in California payments, shut down 800 fraud-ridden centers, and put all 50 states on notice that MFCU funding gets frozen if they don’t aggressively prosecute fraud. CNN, NBC, and the Times will cover California-as-victim. They won’t cover Luke Rosiak. Why does a Daily Wire byline disqualify an investigation that, six weeks later, the Vice President is operating the biggest Medicaid fraud action in federal history?

So here’s the test. When the data comes in, will the administration still focus on Blue state fraud if Red states post worse numbers? Will CNN still cover enforcement as an attack on California when Florida or Texas outpaces it? Watch and see.

A Baby Is Not a Product

The Story.

Florida AG James Uthmeier filed to intervene in a routine surrogacy case involving a French same-sex couple living in France, who contracted with a Florida surrogate to obtain a child now born in the US. Uthmeier’s argument: surrogacy is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery, the practice “endangers children,” and “poses a threat to national security.” He cited registered sex offenders and Chinese nationals using American surrogacy services to obtain U.S. citizen children. His office is asking the court to strip the couple’s legal parentage. If he prevails, adoptive parental rights across Florida could be open to challenge.

The Left’s read. Slate and aligned outlets frame Uthmeier as a Florida AG trying to outlaw surrogacy and adoption together, with the same-sex couple as the test case for stripping legal parentage from families. The reproductive rights framing dominates. The Tampa Bay Times leans into the family-fracturing angle.

The Right’s read. The Center for Bioethics and Culture and have made the surrogacy-as-exploitation case for years. Uthmeier is the first state AG willing to litigate what the UN already called for: a move toward abolition. The framing centers on children as commodities and women as wombs, with an international trafficking pipeline running underneath the industry.

What both sides are skipping. The Chinese-nationals claim. Uthmeier said in a press conference that registered sex offenders and foreign buyers are using American surrogacy. Slate skipped it. WaPo skipped it. The left framing requires the conversation stay on same-sex parental rights. The right framing focuses on the foreign-buyer question. Here's the harder truth: same-sex couples are more likely to use surrogacy because they can't have biological children together, and foreign nationals buying American babies is a real national security concern. The case in front of the court is the proof. A French couple living in France is taking a US-citizen baby home to be raised abroad. Both sides are using one of those facts to bury the other.

If you’ve been following me, you know where I land. A baby is not a product. A womb is not for rent. Period.

Slate’s whole frame is emotional manipulation. A child needing a home through no fault of their own is nothing like a child created on contract. Many adoptions today are open and the kid has access to their biological parents. Surrogacy is the opposite: a baby built to specification, a paid surrogate, a kid disconnected from a biological parent because the contract said so. Conflating the two is bad-faith framing.

Don’t even get me started on the regulatory mess. The US surrogacy industry is lax, profit-centered, and under-policed. Documented abuse runs through the foreign-buyer cases and the broker networks. I’m a capitalist all day, but I draw the line at baby buying, womb renting, and selling national security risks for a margin.

Now the legal case. Uthmeier’s 13th Amendment argument is a stretch, and he probably loses in Florida. But it’s crafty, worth following, and if it sticks, it could go straight to the Supreme Court. At that point, it could redefine adoptive parental rights along with surrogacy. Credit to Florida for being the state willing to litigate the question.

Rand Paul’s son went on an antisemitic bender at a DC dive bar. William Paul drunkenly confronted Rep. Mike Lawler at the Tune Inn Tuesday night, ranting for about 10 minutes on Jews, Israel, and gay people. He apologized and cited a drinking problem. Lawler called it a reminder of the alarming rise of antisemitism. The senator hasn’t commented. William Paul has been banned from the bar.

SCOTUS held the line on mifepristone-by-mail. The Supreme Court set aside the 5th Circuit ruling that would have killed telehealth dispensing of mifepristone, keeping the FDA’s 2023 mail-order policy in place while Louisiana’s case continues. Alito and Thomas dissented. Thomas cited the 1873 Comstock Act and called drug-by-mail revenue a “criminal enterprise.” That dissent just handed the next round its argument.

The administration lit up Cuba on two fronts the same day. CIA Director John Ratcliffe met in Havana Thursday with Raúl Castro’s grandson and Cuba’s intelligence chief, carrying Trump’s message that the US will engage on the economy and security if Cuba makes “fundamental changes.” Same day, CBS reported DOJ is moving to indict 94-year-old Raúl Castro over Cuba’s 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.

Kevin Warsh got the Fed gavel. The 54-45 vote seated the former Fed governor with Sen. John Fetterman as the lone Democratic yes. Powell stays on as governor. Daily Caller’s read: Warsh walks in under maximum political pressure to deliver rate cuts. The left frames him as a Trump installation built to do exactly that. Fed independence is now a 5-4 question.

Missouri’s “Born-Alive” bill puts the death penalty on the table. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act advanced out of House committee 12-4 this week. The bill criminalizes failing to provide care to an infant who survives an abortion attempt, with murder charges and capital punishment available. Some pro-life advocates are flagging concerns about the non-severability clause acting as a poison pill. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, SB1095 advanced with a misdemeanor charge for patients seeking abortions, up to two years in prison. Two different states, two different theories of how to enforce post-Dobbs law.

That’s The Read

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TGIF, if the weather stays how it’s been the last few days, you can find me lying on a blanket in the grass reading a book. I'm reading through a book of Joan Didion's essays while I wait for my next read to arrive. Which reminds me that a new edition of The Bookie is on its way. I’ll share what’s on my list and defend my choices because they’re unconventional.

See you Monday.

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