You probably know about Mamdani, who was elected Mayor of New York City. You probably know about AOC. There are exactly two DSA members of Congress, between them, and the political press has built every conversation about democratic socialism around those two faces.

The actual concentration of DSA influence isn’t in Congress. It’s on your city council. Your school board. Your county commission. The bodies that decide your zoning. Your housing policy. Your public safety budget. Your school curriculum. The places where your tax dollars get allocated at the level closest to your actual life. And the way the DSA’s elected officials operate at that level isn’t what you think. It isn’t what they told you on the campaign mailer either.

There’s a word for the arrangement they enter when they win. The word is “co-govern.” It’s their word, not mine. It’s printed in their own censure letters. It’s discussed openly in mainstream political coverage that almost nobody outside New York reads. And it changes the answer to a basic question every voter should be able to answer about every official they elect: Who is this person actually accountable to?

Most voters don’t know to ask. The reporters who could explain don’t bother. So let me explain it.

Spencer Pratt asked the question

Spencer Pratt is running for Mayor of Los Angeles. If you just rolled your eyes, that’s the reaction the political class is counting on. Reality TV guy. The Hills. Lost his house in the Palisades fire. Now he wants to be mayor. Cute.

Then the latest Ethics Commission filings came out, and Pratt had raised nearly $540,000 since January. Out-fundraising the sitting mayor in her own city. The UCLA Luskin poll puts him second, ahead of every other challenger, including Councilwoman Nithya Raman. A USC political science professor told the LA Times Pratt is now a “legitimate top-tier candidate.” Forty percent of LA voters are still undecided heading into the June 2 primary.

We did this once. In 2016, the political class watched a reality TV guy who talked like a person instead of a consultant, dismissed him because he wasn’t “serious,” and were genuinely shocked when he won the presidency. Ten years later, they’re doing the same thing in LA. They’re going to do it again somewhere else after that. The lesson never lands.

I’m bringing this up because Pratt went on Joe Rogan and asked a question about one of his opponents that almost every political reporter in America should have already been asking. He pointed at Nithya Raman, the DSA-LA councilmember now running for mayor, and said she had signed a “contract” agreeing to “co-govern” with the DSA. Where, he asked, was her allegiance: with her constituents, or with the chapter?

While Pratt got the mechanism wrong, he didn’t get the question wrong. There is no contract. But there is a real, named, published arrangement called co-governance, and DSA chapters use it openly. Voters mostly have no idea it exists, because nobody is bothering to explain it to them. The reporters who could explain it would rather dismiss a former Hills star’s electability than tell you what’s actually there.

What’s actually there: Socialists in Office

When a candidate seeks a DSA endorsement, they fill out a long questionnaire. NYC-DSA’s is 87 questions long. They sit for a candidate forum. Multiple internal endorsement votes are held, branch level first, then citywide. If endorsed, the chapter doesn’t just slap a logo on a yard sign. They effectively run the campaign. According to City & State New York, which is mainstream NY politics coverage and not a right-wing site, first-time DSA candidates “tend to rely on fellow DSA members to staff their campaigns, run as a slate with other DSA-endorsed candidates and work closely with the DSA to organize volunteer canvasses and other campaign events.”

Then, if the candidate wins, the real arrangement begins. The official becomes a “Socialist in Office,” or SIO, and joins a committee that meets regularly with the chapter to coordinate strategy on legislation, votes, and public positions.

That isn’t a contract. A contract would be visible. Signed. Legally enforceable. It would be tangible.

What’s actually there is opaque, ongoing political pressure. Voluntary on paper, with real consequences for officials who break ranks. And unlike a contract, the public can’t see the terms because there are no terms. Just an expectation, repeated in chapter materials, that you will “co-govern.”

Here’s how it works in New York City, where the DSA’s bench is deepest.

After winning, a DSA-endorsed official can join a State SIO Committee (for state lawmakers) or a City SIO Committee (for city council members). Per City & State, as of January 2026, there are eight State SIOs in New York — Senators Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport, and Kristen Gonzalez, plus Assembly Members Emily Gallagher, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Sarahana Shrestha, and Claire Valdez — and two City SIOs, Council Members Alexa Avilés and Tiffany Cabán.

The State SIO meets weekly virtually and monthly in person. The committee includes the elected officials, their staffers (who are often DSA members themselves), plus representatives from NYC-DSA’s Citywide Leadership Committee, geographic branches, and working groups focused on specific issues.

Now read this next part slowly, because this is the sentence that matters most:

“Any member — not just those in elected office — able to suggest that the committee adopt a collective position on a certain issue or piece of legislation.”

So a dues-paying DSA member in Brooklyn — not a constituent of any of these legislators, not someone who voted for them, just someone who paid their dues and showed up to a meeting — can propose how a state senator should vote on a bill. The proposal gets debated. The committee votes. The senator is one voice among many. And the expectation is that the senator will then go support whatever the chapter decided.

City & State, again hardly a hostile outlet, describes the arrangement plainly: “In some limited but very real sense, SIOs are willing to share the power they have as legislators with the DSA, agreeing to support the collective goals of the socialist organization despite their own personal beliefs.”

Despite their own personal beliefs. That is the design.

And here’s Mamdani himself, speaking at the 2023 DSA national convention as a sitting state assemblyman, giving his own theory of the case:

“We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization.”

That’s the man who is now Mayor of New York City describing where his power as an elected official actually comes from. Not himself, not his constituents, the organization. He said it on stage, on the record, to a national audience of his own supporters. And to make sure the point landed, he told City & State the same thing in shorter form: “To be an unorganized socialist is a contradiction in terms.”

He’s not hiding it. The political press just doesn’t print it because it doesn’t fit the “moderate Bernie-bro social democrat” frame they’ve built for him.

Mamdani’s not a hypothetical here either. He served on the State SIO Committee throughout his time in the Assembly. According to the NYC-DSA cochair writing in Jacobin, the SIO mechanism continues into his mayoralty: “The elected officials and their staff meet with NYC-DSA leadership every week to share information, collectively choose priorities, and cohere on key votes. The primary purpose of this co-governance model is to enable an inside/outside strategy.”

Their phrase. Co-governance model. Used by the cochair of the largest DSA chapter in the country, in a flagship socialist publication, to describe how the Mayor of New York City is currently running his office.

The obvious next question is whether this applies to House members too — AOC, Tlaib, the federal-level names everyone knows. The answer is yes, with a caveat that’s more revealing than a clean yes would be.

Read more

I had a meltdown in my stories yesterday over the price of blinds. My office window is east-facing, and the sun is blinding in the morning. But my Instagram friend came through with some recommendations, so hopefully in the very near future, my retinas will be grateful for the assistance.

I’ll keep you updated.

Also, ICYMI

In today’s Brief:

• Fauci’s right hand just got indicted on five counts. Wuhan grant, personal Gmail, wine subplot.

• Comey got indicted again. This time over a beach photo of seashells.

• FBI raids 22 Minnesota daycares. Walz tries to take credit. Kash Patel says no.

• The FCC pulled Disney’s ABC license renewals forward by three years. Kimmel still won’t apologize.

• King Charles addressed Congress, then roasted the East Wing demolition over dinner.

• Quick Rundown: a Cuba war-powers fight, the Trump passport, a Special Forces sergeant’s $400K Polymarket bet, and DeSantis’s redistricting math.

Let’s get into the news!

The ‘FOIA Lady’ Just Caught Up With Fauci’s Top Adviser

Dr. David Morens, 78, served as senior adviser inside Fauci’s NIAID office from 2006 to 2022. On Tuesday, a federal grand jury indicted him on five counts: conspiracy, destruction of federal records, concealment of records, and aiding and abetting.

It’s the first criminal indictment alleging a COVID-era cover-up. The DOJ’s claim: Morens and two unindicted co-conspirators (House records identify one as EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak) agreed in writing to route pandemic communications through Morens’s personal Gmail to dodge FOIA. The grant at the center: “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” subgranted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. NIH terminated it in April 2020 over lab-leak concerns. Morens and the co-conspirators allegedly worked to restore the funding and counter the lab-leak narrative.

There’s a wine subplot. Daszak allegedly sent two bottles in June 2020 thanking Morens for “behind-the-scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses boss, his boss, and the ultimate boss on the hill.” Morens then allegedly authored a medical-journal commentary arguing for natural origins, which prosecutors call the act he performed to “deserve” the gift.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer, took a victory lap: “We caught Dr. Morens red-handed as he boasted in emails about how the ‘FOIA lady’ coached him on how to hide records and cover-up information.”

Fauci himself is untouchable. Biden preemptively pardoned him on the way out in January. Whatever happened at the top of NIAID, the case lands on the adviser.

Reminder: Every parent who got called a conspiracy theorist for asking about Wuhan, gain-of-function, or Fauci’s emails just got receipts. Five years late and one pardon short. But receipts.

Comey Got Indicted Again. Over Seashells.

A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina indicted James Comey on two counts Tuesday: threatening to kill the president and transmitting that threat across state lines. The “threat” is a beach photo from May 2025 showing seashells arranged to spell “86 47.” Comey deleted it the same day, said he hadn’t realized people read the numbers as violent, and called it a “totally innocent” political message.

Acting AG Todd Blanche announced it:

The first Comey indictment, in September for allegedly lying to Congress, was dismissed in November after the prosecutor was found to have been unlawfully appointed. Pam Bondi was ousted as AG earlier this month; Blanche took over.

Comey posted a Substack video: “I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid. So let’s go.” His lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, said they’ll contest the charges and “vindicate Mr. Comey and the First Amendment.” Both counts carry up to 10 years.

I will not pretend Comey is sympathetic. The man leaked memos through a friend and gave inconsistent testimony. But the indictment hangs on whether “a reasonable recipient” would read seashells as a kill threat. That’s a thin reed, but also a lot of people have been literally gunning for the president.

Walz Wants Credit for the FBI Raids He Once Called “White Supremacy”

The FBI hit 22 Minnesota locations Tuesday, most of them daycares tied to the Somali-American community. The infamous “Quality Learing Center” (misspelled sign, 95 state violations) was on the list. Agents used a battering ram on at least one site. The Trump administration estimates Minnesota fraud at $19 billion.

Then came the X post that aged poorly inside an hour:

Same Walz who four months ago called federal scrutiny of Somali-owned businesses “vile, racist lies and slander.”

FBI Director Kash Patel was not having it:

Walz dropped his reelection bid in January. The fraud he waved off as a smear keeps producing federal indictments. Asking for a friend: when does the press stop letting this man rebrand?

Disney’s License Renewal Just Got Yanked Forward by Three Years

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr ordered Disney to file early renewal applications for eight ABC-owned stations. The previous window was 2028 through 2031. Disney now has 30 days. The official rationale is a DEI investigation from March 2025. The unofficial rationale is Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel did a parody bit on Thursday of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He looked at Melania and said, "Our First Lady is here. Mrs. Trump… you have a glow like an expectant widow." This is after Trump has faced two assassination attempts.

Two days later, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen rushed the Washington Hilton checkpoint with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

Melania did not let it sit:

Kimmel doubled down Monday, “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80.” He apologized for nothing.

Carr’s letter doesn’t mention Kimmel by name, but the timing is difficult to ignore.

King Charles, a British Remodel, and the HMS Trump

Only the second British monarch ever to address Congress (his mother was first, in 1991), Charles spent 30 minutes Tuesday on US-UK relations, NATO, Ukraine, and climate. Both sides stood for the line about executive limits.

A George Washington reenactor (Texas pastor Mark Collins) watched from the gallery as a guest of Rep. Michael Cloud.

Rep. Michael Cloud @RepMichaelCloud Who better to attend King Charles III’s address to Congress than the man who led us to independence? Thank you, General George Washington.

Then came the state dinner. Charles looked around the construction zone and threw a soft jab at the East Wing remodel:

CSPAN @cspan King Charles III at White House State Dinner: “I cannot help noticing the ‘readjustments’ to the East Wing, Mr. President…we British, of course, made our own small attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House in 1814.”

But the big question is, what do you give the man who has everything and is President of the United States?

A bell. Off the HMS Trump, a Royal Navy submarine that ran the Pacific, engraved with Trump’s name and 1944. Charles handed it over with: “May this stand as a testimony to our nation’s shared history and shining future. And should you ever need to get hold of us, just give us a ring.”

Diplomatic dad joke of the year.

And because I know you will ask. The HMS Trump was a Royal Navy T-class submarine named as part of a predetermined wartime naming pattern, not for Donald Trump. The name was simply one of the “T” names chosen for that class of boats.

The big question is, will this bell make an appearance in the Oval Office? My money is on the mantel.

First Lady Highlights

Quick Rundown

• Senate Republicans blocked Kaine’s Cuba war-powers vote. Rick Scott called it “moot.” Kaine pointed to the Trump oil blockade and said the US would call that an act of war if the tables were turned. Trump in March: “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished.” Quiet story. Give it a minute.

• Trump’s face is going on a passport. Limited-edition America250 booklet with Trump’s portrait and signature over the Declaration of Independence. Washington Passport Agency only, no extra fee. The man is becoming his own gift shop.

• Special Forces master sergeant pleads not guilty to a $400K Polymarket payout. Gannon Van Dyke, 38, of Fort Bragg, placed $33,000 in bets last December that Maduro would soon be out. He helped plan the January 3 raid that captured him. First DOJ insider-trading case against a prediction-market trade.

• DeSantis dropped a Florida congressional map that adds four GOP seats. Hakeem Jeffries said Florida Republicans should “F around and find out.” DeSantis offered to fly Jeffries down personally: “I’ll put you up in the Florida governor’s mansion. We will take you fishing.” Map wars are now national.

Let’s Talk About It

The Morens indictment is the first criminal accountability for the COVID-era cover-up. With Fauci pardoned and other co-conspirators still unnamed, what does real accountability actually look like from here?

Lightning round: Do you carry the Trump-face passport on principle, refuse it on principle, or just see what the customs agent in Paris does? I need a new passport. Should I get one?

See you Friday. Stay nosy.

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The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.

He closed with a jab at the Secret Service. He called them incompetent and said he hoped they’d get it together by the time the country had “competent leadership again.”

Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.

Actually insane.

When something like this happens, the image that forms in your head is a radicalized, blue-haired ANTIFA type screaming through a megaphone. That’s not Allen. He graduated from Caltech in 2017 with a mechanical engineering degree and picked up a master’s in computer science from Cal State Dominguez Hills last year. A high school teammate called him “borderline genius” and “super stable.” A college professor described him as soft-spoken and polite, the kid who sat in the front row. He was named Teacher of the Month for December 2024 at C2 Education, where he worked part-time.

He was also, by his own LinkedIn profile, a member of the Caltech Christian Fellowship.

The media and the President have described the manifesto as anti-Christian. After reading it, I’d argue the opposite. Allen didn’t reject his faith to do this. He recruited it. He leaned on the same narratives that the left and Democrat politicians have been repeating for years.

The Reasoning

The manifesto isn’t a rant. That’s the first thing that hits you. It’s structured. He wrote it as a series of objections and rebuttals, the way you’d format a debate brief. He thought through what people would say to talk him out of it, and then he answered.

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

He cited none of these. They are the talking points you've heard on every cable panel and in every viral thread for the past year, treated as established fact.

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

Convenient, that. He’d done the work to give himself permission.

His targets were ranked by seniority. Administration officials first, highest to lowest. Secret Service only if necessary, and only with non-lethal force if possible. Hotel staff and guests not at all. He’d use buckshot rather than slugs to minimize collateral damage. He even noted, almost apologetically, that he’d go through anyone in his way to reach the targets, on the grounds that anyone who chose to attend a speech by a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” was complicit.

That’s the line that should stop you. Complicit because they chose to attend. Categorical guilt by association. Once you accept that frame, there’s no innocent person left in the room.

He reasoned his way there.

Where Does Someone Learn To Think Like This?

You don’t have to draw a straight line from any single pundit to Allen. You can’t, and you don’t need to. What you can do is name the pattern.

“I would never, but I understand why.” Hasan Piker said a version of it about Luigi Mangione. Mainstream Democrats have been echoing softer versions of it for years now. Whole stretches of the online left treat the moral question of political violence as a sliding scale. It depends on who, it depends on why, it depends on how bad they are. Not the wall it used to be.

The pattern works because it does two things at once. I would never keeps the speaker’s hands clean. I understand why hands the listener a permission slip.

Allen reads like a man who took the permission slip seriously. He didn’t need a podcast host telling him to do it. He needed a culture that told him a thoughtful, churchgoing, soft-spoken guy in the front row of his classes could do it and still be a thoughtful, churchgoing, soft-spoken guy. The rhetoric does that work. It’s been doing it for years. It doesn’t matter whether the person saying it means it literally. What matters is that someone, somewhere, is going to.

His sister apparently saw it coming. She’d told family members he had a tendency to make radical statements, that he kept referencing a plan to do “something” to fix the world. He sent his writings to family about ten minutes before the attack. One of them called the police. They didn’t get there in time.

That’s the part the people insisting this kind of language is just venting need to sit with.

The Cover, Not the Faith

Here’s what needs to be said plainly. Allen’s reasoning isn’t Christian. It’s a counterfeit wearing Christian language as a costume.

Real Christianity teaches the opposite of what his manifesto concludes. Turn the other cheek doesn’t have an asterisk for political violence. Love your enemies isn’t a suggestion with carve-outs. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord is unambiguous about who’s authorized to deal it out, and it isn’t a 31-year-old with a shotgun who decided his fellow citizens were complicit. Allen didn’t reach his conclusion by reading the text. He reached it by importing a political worldview and decorating it with scripture afterward.

This counterfeit Christianity is everywhere now, and it crosses partisan lines.

Tucker Carlson runs a version of it. He’ll post that “Muslims love Jesus” and simp for Islam in ways that would have gotten him laughed off the air ten years ago. He’s treating Christianity less as a faith with content and more as a tribal identity that can be flexibly redefined to fit whatever argument he’s making this week. That’s not Christianity. That’s a man using Christianity as set dressing.

The progressive-activist version is more cynical. People who don’t actually believe any of it deploy a self-edited Christianity as a rhetorical weapon, almost exclusively against conservative Christians. Jesus was a refugee. Jesus was a socialist. Jesus would have wanted whatever they already wanted. Stolen-valor Christianity from people who would never set foot in a pew on a Sunday, lecturing actual Christians about what Jesus would have wanted.

When an actual believer marinates in that culture long enough, surrounded by people calling his political opponents fascists, traitors, criminals, using moral language stripped of any moral foundation, eventually some of them will start to think the cover story is the real thing. They’ll act against their own faith and call it Christianity.

Over the last few years, the verbal barbs have crossed the spectrum. The bullets don't. Charlie Kirk was murdered. President Trump has survived three assassination attempts and a string of thwarted plots. The pattern isn't symmetrical, and pretending it is has become its own kind of dishonesty.

The same people who have spent years warning about Christian Nationalism as the rising domestic threat just produced a Christian assassin who did it for them. They will pretend not to notice. They will probably try to make his Christianity the problem.

It isn’t. The problem is what they handed him to call Christianity in the first place.

The Quiet Version

The shooter is the loud version of all this. The quiet version is happening at dinner tables.

Permission structures don’t usually produce gunmen. Most of the time, they produce a country that’s slowly forgotten how to be one country. Estranged siblings. Parents who haven’t spoken to a kid in two years. Friendships that ended over an election. Churches that split. Holiday tables with empty chairs that didn’t used to be empty.

That is the byproduct. The shooter is the headline. The fractures are a collective story.

Cole Allen thanked his church family in his goodbye letter. He apologized to his students. He used buckshot to minimize the harm to people he didn’t intend to kill. He thought he was the good guy. He was a Christian.

People who do terrible things while believing they’re the good guy don’t get there alone. They get there because somebody, a lot of somebodies, kept moving the line and kept telling them the line had always been there.

The next one is already reading. We should be very careful what we hand him.

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Another wild weekend, a third assassination attempt on the President, and a pivot of denial from the left.

Also, this morning I realized I forgot the Sunday Brief yesterday. I stayed up late covering the THIRD assassination attempt on Trump and forgot to queue up the Sunday Brief. Apologies.

Let’s get into the news.

In today’s Brief:

• A Caltech grad with a Kamala donation history opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. We have his manifesto.

• Cole Allen mailed his “Friendly Federal Assassin” letter to his family ten minutes before pulling the trigger.

• His Bluesky timeline reads like every blue-check post you’ve muted this year.

• King Charles and Queen Camilla still land in D.C. today. State dinner Tuesday. The show goes on.

• One guy at the dinner kept eating during the lockdown. Folk hero status.

Assassination Attempt At The WHCA Dinner

Saturday night, a third assassination attempt was made on President Trump. The President, Vice President, and most of the Cabinet were seated for the WHCA Dinner at the Washington Hilton. A 31-year-old man from Torrance, California, charged through the metal detectors outside the ballroom and started firing.

CBS’s frame-by-frame timeline clocks the chaos at 8:34 p.m.: shots fired, Secret Service grabs Vance four seconds before pulling Trump from the dais, Stephen Miller throws himself in front of his pregnant wife, RFK Jr.’s detail swarms the table. Trump posted on Truth Social by 9:17. The dinner was canceled by 9:39. By midnight, the suspect had a name.

A Secret Service officer was hit. The vest stopped the round. He's expected to be okay. He also hasn't been paid in 72 days, because Senate Democrats are still blocking the DHS funding bill and the Secret Service runs through DHS. Worth remembering.

Yashar Ali @yashar Getty Images’ @andyharnik captures the moment the Vice President and President were evacuated from the dais at the White House Correspondents Dinner. You can see the Secret Service grabbing Vance by his jacket to pull him away.

Trump wanted to keep going. Law enforcement said no. Protocol required clearing the room. Dinner canceled. 30 minutes later, he was in the White House Briefing Room, fielding questions from the same press corps that had just been evacuated from the Hilton.

Sunday morning, Trump told reporters the silver lining was Democrats waving to him on the way out. He wants to reschedule inside 30 days.

Cole Allen is being arraigned in federal court today on at least two charges to start: using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon. More are expected. The prosecutor on the case is U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Yes, that Jeanine Pirro. The universe has a sense of humor.

Don’t Get Between A Man and His Dinner

You’ve already seen the clip. While Secret Service agents had their guns drawn and guests dove under tablecloths, one guy at the table reached up, scooped his food, and kept eating.

Gunz @TheGunzShow Shout out to THIS guy who decided to take a spoonful of his mashed potatoes while ducking and covering after tonight’s WHCD shooting. No way he was passing up on that free food, even with Secret Service having their guns drawn out.

His name is Michael Glantz. He’s a talent agent at Creative Artists Agency, and his client list includes Wolf Blitzer, who got knocked over in the chaos and was apparently the only thing Glantz was actually worried about. Everything else was burrata salad.

Glantz told the New York Times he didn’t dive for the floor because he has a bad back and is “a hygiene freak.” His exact words: “There was no freaking way I was getting in my new tux on the dirty Hilton floor.”

Folk hero confirmed. Get this man a plate to go.

Who Is Cole Allen

The biographical detail will not match the narrative the press is reaching for. Cole Thomas Allen, 31. Caltech graduate, mechanical engineering, class of 2017. Master’s in computer science from Cal State Dominguez Hills, 2025. C2 Education tutor. Named “Teacher of the Month” in December 2024. A classmate told the Wall Street Journal he was “even more nerdy” than the average Caltech kid. “Always nice and kind to people.”

He also donated to Kamala Harris, attended at least one No Kings protest, and was affiliated with a group called The Wide Awakes. He bought the Maverick 12-gauge from Turner’s Outdoorsman in Torrance last August. The Armscor pistol came from a shop in Lawndale the prior October. He stored both at his parents’ house and trained at a range.

He took a train across the country with his weapons. He was reportedly a guest at the Hilton where the dinner was held, having checked in the day before.

By Sunday morning, Barack Obama was on X telling the country we “don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting.” The manifesto had been public for half a day by then. The shooter’s own brother had already handed the email to Connecticut police before the gunfire ever started.

The motive isn’t unclear. It’s inconvenient, Barry.

Democrats spent ten years calling Trump an existential threat to the Republic and comparing him to Hitler. A Caltech-grad Kamala donor with a Bluesky timeline took the rhetoric at face value, then mailed his family a manifesto on his way to kill the Cabinet. And the most recent Democratic president still wants you to believe the motive is a mystery.

The Manifesto Reads Like a Bluesky Timeline

Ten minutes before opening fire, Allen emailed a 1,052-word manifesto to his family. He signed it Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen. His brother called Connecticut police as soon as he opened it. Why Connecticut is unclear.

The document named Trump administration officials as targets, ranked highest to lowest. FBI Director Kash Patel was excluded from the list. Allen wrote that he chose buckshot to keep the casualty count down, but if he had to take everyone, he would, because they were “complicit.” He invoked Christian faith to justify the killing. He preemptively rebutted the predictable objections about race and theology. He mocked Secret Service for “incompetent” hotel security.

His Bluesky account under the handle coldforce.bsky.social was active from November 2024 until the morning of the attack. The Free Beacon pulled what he was boosting:

“the president of the united states is personally looting the treasury to the tune of literally billions of dollars and that he is not being immediately removed from office and tried for high crimes against this country is a devastating indictment of every part of our political system.”

He boosted “Abolish ICE” posts. He called an immigration facility a “concentration camp.” Elon Musk got the standard Nazi treatment. Jake Tapper’s First Amendment pocket square was apparently fascist accessorizing. The account was suspended after the shooting.

The manifesto was every anti-Trump social media narrative come to life. Hard to argue.

Robert Sterling pulled the relevant polling and posted it Saturday:

Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling 25% of very liberal people say political violence can “sometimes be justified.” Among very conservative people it’s just 3%. In other words, the far left is 8x more likely to support political violence as the far right. Stop pretending this is a “both sides” problem. It’s not.

Save that one for the next “stochastic terrorism” lecture.

King Charles Lands Today Anyway

The royals are still coming. Buckingham Palace confirmed Sunday the visit will proceed. King Charles and Queen Camilla touch down in D.C. today for a four-day swing built around the 250th anniversary of American independence.

The itinerary: private tea and a garden party with the Trumps tonight, white-tie state dinner Tuesday at the White House. Charles addresses a joint session of Congress Tuesday morning, the first time a sitting British monarch has done that. Then up to New York Wednesday for a 9/11 Memorial visit with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former Mayor Bloomberg. Closing in Virginia for Appalachian cultural performances and a climate roundtable with indigenous groups before flying out to Barbados.

The backdrop is uglier than the curtsies suggest. Trump and PM Keir Starmer are openly feuding over Iran. Trump called the British aircraft carriers “toys” earlier this month. A handful of House members are publicly demanding Prince Andrew testify about Epstein. Awkward small talk to come.

But the show goes on. After watching the President of the United States get evacuated from a podium 36 hours earlier, the optics of a state dinner this week land different. The man at the metal detector wanted the Cabinet dead. The Cabinet is hosting the King.

Quick Rundown

• The SPLC just got federally indicted. Wire fraud, false statements, money laundering. Prosecutors say the Southern Poverty Law Center funneled more than $3 million in donor cash to people tied to violent extremist groups (KKK, neo-Nazi outfits) through shell companies between 2014 and 2023. One informant they paid helped plan the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Jim Jordan also wants their internal documents by April 30. The FBI cited SPLC in at least 13 documents, including the Richmond memo flagging traditional Catholics as extremists. Quiet story for now. Give it a minute.

• Iran talks stall, Pakistan trip canceled. Trump pulled the plug on the U.S. delegation’s Pakistan trip Friday after telling Tehran they can call him if they want to talk. Within ten minutes of the announcement, Iran sent over an improved proposal. He’s still saying no.

• The White House ballroom pitch returns. Within 24 hours of the shooting, the President pointed to the security failure at the Hilton as the case for his proposed White House ballroom. Read that as you will.

Let’s Talk About It

If the WHCA shooter had been a MAGA voter who’d attended a Trump rally and posted right-wing memes, how long would the wall-to-wall coverage last? Be honest.

Can you really blame the burrata salad guy? If that’s potentially your last meal on earth, you could do a lot worse than burrata.

Drop your takes in the comments. See you Wednesday. Stay nosy.

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Is everybody ready for the weekend? (attempted earwig implantation)

What do you have planned? There’s this cute little pastry shop that just opened in town, and I’ve been dying to try it. Legit pastries. Croissants. Tarts. Not to dog on donuts or cookies, but there’s something special about the airy layers of a warm butter croissant.

Makes me wonder what your favorite baked treat is?

Anyway, let’s get down to business.

In today’s Brief:

• The NYT Opinion podcast spent Wednesday explaining which crimes are acceptable now. Murder made the list.

• A Special Forces soldier involved in Maduro’s capture bet $33K on Polymarket the week before the raid, walked with $409K, now facing 60 years.

• The DOJ just filed more denaturalization cases in one year than Biden’s DOJ filed in four.

• The FBI flew a DOJ jet to Havana to retrieve a 10-year-old boy whose parent allegedly took him for gender-transition surgery.

• Plus marijuana rescheduling, a Regeneron price deal, the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended, and missing scientists on Congress’s radar.

Microlooting, “Cool Crimes,” and the Rotating List

On Wednesday, the NYT Opinion desk ran an episode titled The Rich Don't Play By The Rules, So Why Should I? Guests: self-described communist Hasan Piker and New Yorker anti-capitalism writer Jia Tolentino. — Can we acknowledge the irony of Condé Nast paying someone to write about anti-capitalism? What are we doing?! — Host: NYT culture editor Nadja Spiegelman. Topic: "microlooting," which is apparently what we're calling petty theft. Progressives love making things up to validate their subjective morality.

Fifteen minutes in, Tolentino casually admitted she’d stolen lemons from her Brooklyn Whole Foods “on several occasions.” Miss Nancy needs lemons. Organic ones are $1.29 each. Tolentino, who posts her fab NYC life on IG, walks back in and pockets them. Piker: she “should go to prison.” Wink.

Related

Rivera and Reeves

R&R Ep. 226 | SPLC Indicted for Paying Nazis — And That's Just the First 20 Minutes

The Southern Poverty Law Center just got indicted by a federal grand jury — and the details are wild. Meseidy and Rachel break down the charges, the shell companies, the payments that allegedly went straight to a Klan leader and the guy who helped organize Charlottesville. If you’ve been wondering why the “Nazi” narrative against half the country never seemed to die, this episode connects some uncomfortable dots…

Listen now

6 days ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Meseidy and Rachel Reeves

They built a philosophy around it. Fine to steal from Whole Foods. Not from a small business. Fine to pirate movies, bypass paywalls, rob a bank. Fine, to steal from the Louvre. Piker said he’d “pirate a car” if he could figure out how. Whatever that means.

Piker’s logic: corporations budget for theft, so theft is a subscription fee you pay yourself. It's payback for the self-checkout, which put the cashier out of a job. Seattle is this at scale. Half the downtown Target shelves are behind plexiglass or gone.

Then Spiegelman asked the real question. 41% of Gen Z told pollsters the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was morally justified. How do we sit with that?

Piker’s answer: “Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.” (For the unaware: Engels was Marx’s homie, co-author of the Communist Manifesto.) Hasan kept going. Structural violence. For-profit paywall. Because of that, he argues, people understood why Thompson had to die.

Same move as the lemons, applied to a man’s life. The act doesn’t matter. The target does. Whoever’s bad enough this week is fair game. Assassinated in the process? Understandable. According to Hasan.

A rotating list. Today, insurance executives. Yesterday, landlords. Last week, the Louvre. Pick the character, the method follows.

anya @anyaxmar you’d think this i-just-want-healthcare socialist would want a high trust a la nordic society but he just dreams of being soviet union party elite...

Your life and property here aren’t contingent on anyone else’s approval. Strip that out, you don’t have a society. You have a seating chart.

The part that’ll keep me up: this isn’t a Twitch stream. The NYT gave him the mic. Bernie and AOC appear with him. Ro Khanna said he’d sit down. This is the adult table.

Republicans need to run Piker clips on a loop through November.

The $33,000 Bet on a Classified Raid

January 3, U.S. Special Forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. A week before, Fort Bragg Master Sergeant Gannon “Ken” Van Dyke, directly involved in the planning, placed $33,000 in Polymarket bets on Maduro’s removal. He won roughly $409,000 and tried the foreign crypto shuffle on his way out. Apparently Fort Bragg doesn’t teach Money Laundering 101. The DOJ charged him with Commodity Exchange Act violations, wire fraud, and insider trading. Max: 60 years.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Two Florida Republicans want Van Dyke to walk. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wants a full pardon. Rep. Jimmy Patronis was plainer: “If the DOJ isn’t prepared to go after every member of Congress profiting off insider trading, this feels like selective enforcement, not justice.”

They aren’t off base. Members of Congress do this every quarter, sometimes betting against American interests. Their fig leaf: the intel was “technically public” by a day when they trade. The argument is that Van Dyke should give the money back, get a reprimand, and go home. The man served his country. More than you can say for most of Congress. Go after Pelosi’s next tech position and every member who beats the S&P by ten.

Trump got asked Thursday and reached for Pete Rose: this was “Pete Rose betting on his own team.” Pressed on Iran war patterns, he shrugged: the world has become “somewhat of a casino.” Harvard estimates $143M of Polymarket profits may trace to nonpublic info.

How about no one cheats or steals, and if you do, everyone faces a consequence.

If a Master Sergeant pulled this off, how many others did? Polymarket is a public ledger. Someone at the CFTC is staring at that chart.

The DOJ’s Record Denaturalization Push

The DOJ confirmed Thursday it’s moving denaturalization cases to all 93 U.S. attorney offices. Targets: naturalized citizens who got citizenship through fraud, sham marriages, or concealed criminal histories. Will this include “brother-lover” Ilhan Omar? Asking for a friend.

DOJ deputy Matthew Tragesser: “The Department is pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history.” The year’s 384 cases already exceed Biden’s four years combined. The media will frame it as the administration targeting immigrants. For context: the U.S. brought 305 denaturalization cases total between 1990 and 2018.

Denaturalization used to be rare enough that one case made national news. Now it’s industrial. Cases are moving out of the specialized immigration unit to 93 U.S. attorney offices in parallel.

Blanche is betting, not incorrectly, that a chunk of the naturalization backlog is fraudulent. USCIS approved hundreds of thousands a year for a decade. Built for volume, not scrutiny.

Quiet story for now. Give it a minute.

The Justice Department Jet That Flew to Havana

The FBI flew a DOJ plane to Cuba this week to retrieve a 10-year-old American boy. His biological father is Rose Inessa-Ethington, a 42-year-old male who pretends to be a woman. Rose and partner Blue Inessa-Ethington took him to Havana from Cache County, Utah. Shared custody. They told the boy's mother they were going camping in Calgary.

Per the USAO Utah and the federal complaint, the child is “a biological male who identifies as a female.” Family members told investigators Rose had been manipulating him that way. The FBI cited concerns he was taken “for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.” Not legal there. Not legal here. The trip ran past the April 3 custody return. The mother got one phone call March 28 saying they’d “arrived in Canada.”

So, a man who convinced himself he was a woman then convinced his 10-year-old son of the same, and allegedly tried to move him to a communist island to make it permanent.

The aviation internet noticed first. Flight trackers spotted a DOJ jet on a rare Richmond-to-Havana route Monday. Answer: a kidnapping complaint unsealed days earlier in Utah. Both defendants arrested on arrival. The boy is home.

A DOJ jet to Havana to retrieve an American child is unprecedented. The White House made the call anyway. This is the clearest sign, yet this administration will use the full federal apparatus to keep kids out of the medical transition pipeline. A boy is home with his mom because of it. The class that spent a decade defending “gender-affirming care for minors” has nowhere to stand.

Quick Rundown

• Marijuana rescheduled. The DOJ moved marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III Thursday, out of the same class as heroin. Only took 50 years and half the country legalizing it anyway. Broader reclassification is expedited.

• Regeneron drug price deal. Trump announced a voluntary price cut with Regeneron Thursday. Praluent drops $537 to $225 on TrumpRx, per Newsweek. Future Regeneron drugs hit at Most Favored Nation rates. Covers 86% of branded drugs. Also: a two-year-old named Travis Smith stole the press conference while Trump announced Regeneron’s gene therapy for a rare hearing disorder. Watch the clip.

• Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended. Trump added three weeks to the truce. Iran ceasefire also holds, for now.

• Missing scientists. Axios has a quietly alarming report on Congress investigating missing U.S. scientists connected to space and nuclear programs. Thin on details. Worth watching.

Let’s Talk About It

If the New York Times ran a podcast where a conservative guest defended political assassination as “justified response” to bad actors, what do you think the week would have looked like? Be honest.

Wrong answers only. What’s the most on-brand thing Hasan Piker could steal next?

Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Monday.

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The Number That Should Make You Uncomfortable

There are many hands in the pot of the global commercial surrogacy industry, and it’s a big one. Three separate market research firms estimate 2024 revenue at roughly $22 billion, with projections approaching $200 billion by 2034. A compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 24.5%. That figure is the one worth dwelling on. Most established medical services that simply meet existing health needs grow far more modestly, typically in the single digits (for context, the more common assisted reproductive technology and IVF services market is commonly projected at only 7–9% CAGR over similar periods). Growth at this scale is more characteristic of industries that are actively scaling and expanding their customer base than of markets simply responding to a health crisis or need. Behind that growth is a cultural conviction that biological parenthood is a right — and that whatever stands between a person and that right, whether medical infertility, age, a same-sex partnership, or the choice to parent alone, is a barrier the market should resolve.

This solution comes at a cost. It’s always a woman who takes on the physical risks of carrying someone else’s pregnancy, usually for a set payment she has little say in. Her ability to have children is valued by the week and paid out when a healthy baby is delivered. By design, the child is separated at birth from at least one, and often both, biological parents. The money goes to agency fees, IVF procedures, egg donor payments, legal and escrow services, insurance, and finally the surrogate’s pay. Even though surrogate pay is the largest single expense, it’s still less than half of the total cost.

How Many For How Much

About 11,000 US surrogate embryo transfers happened in 2023, per industry data cited by WSJ, more than double the 2014 number. Average full arrangement now runs $200,000, up from $120,000 a decade ago, per surrogacy agency owner Yifat Shaltiel, quoted by WSJ.

But these are just estimates, because there’s no federal regulation of surrogacy agencies — and most states don’t regulate them either. No one knows exactly how many agencies there are in the U.S. One industry association has 155 member agencies on its rolls, while Alcea Surrogacy founder Angela Richardson-Mook’s own market research puts the total closer to 1,100, meaning the industry’s membership organization has access to roughly 14% of the agencies operating in the country. Leaving a big blind spot.

With each arrangement averaging $200,000 and 11,000 happening each year, where does all that money end up?

Read more

A lot is happening at once, and with the Iran conflict dominating the headlines a lot is slipping past the morning scroll.

So, let’s get into it!

In today’s Brief:

• SPLC got indicted on 11 counts for allegedly funneling $3M to actual Klansmen.

• Two Americans died on a cliff road in Chihuahua. Mexico’s president had no idea they were there. They were CIA.

• Kash Patel filed a $250M suit against The Atlantic. The legal bar is a wall.

• Virginia voters passed a 10-1 Democratic gerrymander by three points. Half the state is locked out of the House map. Lawsuits pending.

• Three House members resigned in a week; Mace and Mills are drafting expulsion resolutions against each other.

• Plus Iran threatens to break the blockade by force, Ilhan Omar’s vanishing $30M, and a Michigan Dem convention that shows where the base is going.

The DOJ Drops an 11-Count Indictment on the SPLC

Tuesday afternoon, a grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned an 11-count indictment against the SPLC: six counts of wire fraud, four of bank fraud, one of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Acting AG Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced it together.

Between 2014 and 2023, SPLC allegedly paid $3M to eight individuals tied to the KKK, the National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations, and the American Front. One ~$270,000 payment went to a leader who helped plan the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville which lead to the death of Heather Danielle Heyer. DOJ says SPLC routed the money through shell companies and prepaid cards to hide the source.

SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair announced the probe himself in a Tuesday YouTube video, framing it as Trump-administration weaponization.

What does this actually mean?

The SPLC is charged as an entity, not any individual leaders. The corporation faces 11 federal felonies and, if convicted, potentially millions in fines, court-ordered oversight of its finances, restitution to donors, and a real fight over its tax-exempt status. Corporations can’t go to prison, so the penalties are financial and structural. But Blanche and Patel made clear Tuesday that the investigation is ongoing and “individuals who are responsible will be brought to justice.”

Translation: anyone who authorized the payments or helped hide them could still get hit with their own charges, and federal fraud and money-laundering convictions carry real prison time. Next up is arraignment (expect a not-guilty plea), then discovery, motions, and either a plea deal or a jury trial. DOJ has also already filed actions to claw back the alleged proceeds.

Patel cut FBI ties with SPLC last October after it labeled Turning Point USA a hate group. On September 9, one day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, SPLC published a hostile newsletter about him. Kirk’s producer Andrew Kolvet has publicly asked whether it contributed to the shooter’s motive.

The "hate group" label isn't rhetorical. It carries financial teeth. Fundraising platforms, credit card processors, and Big Tech companies quietly use the SPLC's hate map to decide who they'll do business with. The Ruth Institute, a pro-family Christian nonprofit in Louisiana, got dropped by its credit card processor in 2017, then refused by fundraising platform Salsa Labs in 2021 after SPLC flagged them "anti-LGBTQ." The Salsa Labs employee handling the account wrote back privately that it was "absolutely RIDICULOUS that the SPLC gets to pick and choose who is a hate group." His CEO agreed, but the board wouldn't budge.

The SPLC built a career calling mainstream conservative organizations like Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty, and parents’ rights groups “hate groups.” Well, now they are charged with bankrolling actual Klansmen. “SPLC-designated hate group” is going to read differently going forward.

Pssst! Have you been a regular reader of The Brief? Do me a solid and help this little newsletter grow by sharing it with a newsie friend. Look I even have a nifty button for you.

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Two CIA Officers Just Died on a Mountain Road in Mexico

Sunday morning, a convoy of six wound down a mountain road in northern Chihuahua. One vehicle skidded off, plunged 600 feet into a ravine, and exploded. Four dead: two Mexican state investigators, two Americans.

For 24 hours, the U.S. Embassy called them “embassy personnel.” Turns out they were CIA. They’d just come from the destruction of what Chihuahua’s AG called “perhaps one of the largest” clandestine meth labs ever located in Mexico.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said flatly, “It was not an operation the security cabinet was aware of. We were not informed.” She’s opening a federal investigation into possible national security law violations. The State AG of Chihuahua spent Monday contradicting himself about whether the Americans participated, before settling on: they taught a drone class nearby and hitched a ride back.

Okay.

Under CIA Director John Ratcliffe, the agency has quietly expanded its counternarcotics role: intel sharing, training, unarmed MQ-9 Reapers over Mexico. Ambassador Ronald Johnson is himself a 20-year CIA vet. Same week: visa restrictions on Sinaloa cartel family members.

Two Americans died running an operation most Americans had no idea was happening. Ask why the Embassy tried to call them “embassy personnel” first.

The FBI Director Sues For $250 Million

Friday, The Atlantic published a two-dozen-source piece on FBI Director Kash Patel. Rough allegations: conspicuous intoxication in front of White House staff, a security detail that couldn’t wake him, a request for “breaching equipment” to get him out of a locked room, meetings rescheduled around alcohol-fueled nights, firing an Iran-focused counterintel squad days before the Iran war started.

Monday, Patel filed a $250M defamation suit in D.C. federal court.

FBI Director Kash Patel @FBIDirectorKash see you and your entire entourage of false reporting in court... actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up.

Reuters couldn't verify a single claim in The Atlantic's piece. The magazine quietly changed the headline from "Kash Patel's Erratic Behavior Could Cost Him His Job" to "The FBI Director Is MIA" after publication, with no public explanation. Every allegation ran on anonymous sourcing. On the record?

Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino told Reuters he never once found Patel unreachable, adding, "You reach out to the deputy, and that's me." Patel's comms strategist Erica Knight called it a story "every real DC reporter chased, couldn't verify, and passed on." This is also the same magazine that ran stories on Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth both with unnamed sources, zero people willing to sign their name meanwhile many publically disputed their reporting. Wash and repeat for Patel with a quiet headline swap after the piece went live. At some point it stops looking like journalism.

“Actual malice” is not a legal lay-up. It’s one of the highest bars in law, set by NYT v. Sullivan. Public officials must prove a publisher knew a claim was false or acted with reckless disregard. Media lawyers are openly skeptical. Trump has lost similar suits against CNN, the NYT, and the WSJ.

Patel’s stronger card: The Atlantic sent him 19 detailed questions Friday at 4 p.m. His lawyer asked for more time. The magazine published at 6:20 p.m. That’s the cleanest evidence for recklessness.

Also: a DOJ watchdog has now requested Patel’s calendars and security detail messages. Suing for $250M while an IG is pulling your schedule is a choice.

Virginia Just Approved the Country’s Most Aggressive Gerrymander by Three Points

Tuesday, Virginia voters narrowly approved a redistricting referendum handing the Democratic General Assembly the keys to redraw every congressional line until 2030. Final margin: 51% to 48%. Three points, in a state Kamala Harris won by just under 52% in 2024.

The delegation flips from 6-5 Democratic to a projected 10-1 split. Four new Democratic House seats. Virginia approved a bipartisan redistricting commission in 2020 by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. Tuesday’s vote suspends it so Democrats can draw the maps themselves.

The disenfranchisement case is real. CBS noted rural voters “said the new map disenfranchises them.” Former GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin called the process “unconstitutional” and said it “will disenfranchise millions.” Argue the math however you want: in a state Harris won 52-48, Republicans get one of eleven seats.

Nearly $100M poured into the race, 95% from dark money. Pro: $64M. Anti: ~$20M.

The legal fight is teed up. Lower courts blocked the referendum twice before the Virginia Supreme Court let it proceed while considering the underlying challenges. GOP lawsuits are still pending. Eric Cantor and Jason Miyares, who ran the opposition, said it plainly: “Virginians disenfranchised by today’s vote will have their day in court.”

One last note. Gov. Abigail Spanberger said during her 2025 campaign, “I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.” Six months later, Virgina gets hosed.

Congress Is Imploding in Real Time, UGH

Three resignations in a week. Two sitting members drafting expulsion resolutions against each other. Bipartisan dirtbag energy.

Florida Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick resigned Tuesday moments before her Ethics hearing. The committee had found 25 of 27 violations “proven by clear and convincing evidence.” Shopping list: FEMA fraud, a 3-carat yellow diamond, a Tesla, Tiffany jewelry, cruises. She called it a “witch hunt.” Third resignation this week, joining Eric Swalwell (D-CA) over sexual misconduct and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) over an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.

Then the Mace-Mills speedrun. Mace filed a resolution Monday to expel Mills over domestic violence, sexual misconduct, and stolen valor, calling him “a woman beater and a fraud.” Mills is drafting one right back. Both are under separate Ethics probes.

But the WaPo’s body-cam story is the damning piece for Mills. A D.C. officer wanted to arrest Mills in February 2025 after a woman showed him bruises. A lieutenant overruled it. Mills said allegations would be “weaponized because of my party” and tried to call AG Bondi mid-interview.

Neither party has clean hands. That’s the point. They are all trash.

Quick Rundown

• Iran ceasefire extended, Pakistan talks stalled. Trump extended the ceasefire indefinitely Tuesday with the blockade staying put. Vance's Pakistan trip is postponed indefinitely after Iran refused to commit to the Islamabad meeting. Tehran threatens to break the blockade "by force, if necessary." Buried detail: Adm. Paparo told Congress it'll take one to two years to scale Tomahawk and Patriot production.

• Ilhan Omar’s vanishing $30 million. Her financial disclosure swung from $6M–$30M down to $18K–$95K after the Office of Congressional Conduct came asking questions. Her lawyer blamed the accountant. Whip Tom Emmer joked the accountant must have trained at Minnesota’s Learning Center, the daycare in the Nick Shirley fraud video.

• Senate GOP goes nuclear on ICE funding. A 52-46 party-line vote Tuesday kicked off reconciliation to fund ICE and CBP for 3.5 years, up to $140B authorized. DHS has been shut since Feb. 14. Trump wants it signed by June 1.

• Michigan Dems show their cards. Progressive Amir Makled upset incumbent Jordan Acker for the UMich Board of Regents nomination Sunday, despite old retweets praising Hezbollah leaders. Acker was caught in sexually degrading Slack messages which he claimed were fake. Pro-Israel Senate candidate Haley Stevens got booed off the stage. That’s where the base is going.

Let’s Talk About It

Virginia passed a 10-1 Democratic map by barely three points in a state Harris won by four. If this stands in court, what does “fair representation” even mean going forward? Are any of you in VA? How are you feeling today?

Wrong answers only: Ilhan Omar’s accountant made a $29.9 million arithmetic error. What’s the worst math mistake you’ve ever made in your own life?

Drop your takes in the comments. See you Friday.

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The antisemitism of the right has been on-brand and easy to spot. Tiki torches, message boards, the kind of thing the left has spent the past decade happily pointing at, and now we are seeing some within the realms of the podcaster class and social media. But it's being called out, it’s being challenged.

The antisemitism of the left is different. It’s in the house. It dresses itself up in Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framing, which lets everyone skip the uncomfortable step of evaluating motive or morality. Once Israel gets slotted as the oppressor, anything done to it, or to the Jews who defend it, gets filed under justice. Motive no longer matters. Morality gets treated as a bourgeois concern. That’s how you end up with “resistance” covering October 7.

It’s moving into positions of governance, into university boards and Senate primaries, and the Democrats who should be stopping it are tiptoeing around it instead. They’re being weaklings about it, frankly, and weaklings let rot spread.

Start with Michigan because it is shaping up to be the epicenter.

At the state Democratic convention on Sunday, delegates ousted Jordan Acker, a Jewish incumbent on the University of Michigan Board of Regents, in favor of Amir Makled, a lawyer who has posted praising Hezbollah’s leaders and retweeted antisemitic content from Candace Owens. Acker’s offense: he backed discipline for campus protesters who assaulted police and intimidated Jewish students, and he voted against divesting university funds from Israel. His reward for that position was a home and car repeatedly vandalized with antisemitic graffiti and a family living under threat.

Michigan Democrats then rewarded his tormentors by replacing him. Acker’s non-Jewish ticketmate, Paul Brown, who held identical positions on the same votes, was renominated without incident.

Seems like they view being Jewish as the problem.

That’s not a fringe. That’s the state party.

In Michigan’s Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed is leading recent primary polls and campaigning alongside streamer Hasan Piker. You might know Piker — because I cannot shut up about him lately — as the guy who calls Hamas “a thousand times better than” Israel, said America “deserved 9/11,” calls Orthodox Jews “inbred,” and recently sat across from Obama’s old speechwriter Jon Favreau and confirmed that yes, he really does mean the Hamas part.

RNC Research @RNCResearch Obama’s former speechwriter, Jon Favreau, asks Democrat spokesperson Hasan Piker if he actually supports Hamas terrorists. FAVREAU: “When you say Hamas is a thousand times better, do you actually mean that?” PIKER: “I do mean it.”

El-Sayed isn’t just sharing a stage with him. On CNN this weekend, he told viewers the Israeli government is as evil as Hamas. On Fox News he compared Trump to the Ayatollah.

During a private campaign call leaked to the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed told staff he wouldn’t comment on the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad.”

Sad. About Khamenei. The man who oversaw the torture and murder of his own people and the deaths of hundreds of Americans.

That’s the position the guy currently leading Michigan’s Senate primary is taking. The party is like, “cool.”

Then there’s Maine, where Senate primary frontrunner Graham Platner is still rolling despite having a Nazi tattoo on his chest and a paper trail of 2014 Reddit posts cheering Hamas fighters who killed Israeli soldiers.

John Fetterman, who is rapidly becoming the last pro-Israel Democrat willing to speak into a hot mic, went on CNN Friday and said the quiet part plain:

“The guy that’s going to win the primary in Maine has a Nazi tattoo on his chest and now that’s no problem for a lot of voters. I don’t know why. That’s crazy.”

He wasn’t done. On El-Sayed: “They’re just palling around someone like Hasan Piker, you know the guy that, absolutely, I mean, he absolutely is proud to cheer for Hamas, loves Hamas… We have a serious problem with my party.”

Fetterman is correct. He’s also mostly alone.

Here’s the part the progressive TikTok set doesn’t want to sit with. Authoritarianism isn’t a right-wing gift. The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror was a left-wing project. So was 20th-century Communism. Franco and Mussolini came from the right. The Nazis were their own horseshoe, a movement that bent far-left and far-right tactics toward each other until the two extremes met in the middle and strangled it.

In the Weimar Republic, Communist paramilitaries and Nazi stormtroopers turned city streets into battlefields. Both sides hated the liberal center. Both sides made moderate democracy unworkable. When economic collapse arrived, middle-class voters and conservative elites handed Hitler the chancellorship in a desperate coalition to “stop the Communists.” The Nazis exploited that fear, blamed the crisis on “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and used the Reichstag Fire to suspend civil liberties. Once in power, they crushed the left and the center alike.

The chaos and terror generated by the far-left gave the Nazis their opening, and middle-class voters who tolerated Nazi antisemitism told themselves it was a price worth paying to get jobs back and stop the streets from burning. The ideology was ugly. The economy mattered more. That was the trade.

People told themselves they could manage it. They couldn’t.

Pull up TikTok or BlueSky any afternoon, and you’ll find someone citing a German cousin or a Spanish friend who says America is walking the same path Germany walked in 1932. Trump is the Hitler figure. Heather Cox Richardson has built a Substack empire, drawing parallels between Weimar and now. The schtick is always some flavor of “danger to democracy.”

It falls apart on contact.

Trump pushes hard against legal and institutional limits. So did Lincoln. So did FDR. Even Obama. Every president tests what he can get away with. The real question is what happens when the courts say no, and Trump, like the presidents before him, has followed rulings he didn’t want. That isn’t the trajectory of a regime collapse. That’s a strong-willed executive operating inside a functioning system.

He also doesn’t have an antisemitism problem. Whatever else you want to say about him, that isn’t even the charge. The current left-wing attack line is the opposite, that Israel controls him through the Iran operation. You can’t call a man a Nazi-in-waiting and an Israeli puppet in the same breath. The people doing it don’t appear to mind.

Look at where the actual political violence has been coming from. The summers that forced businesses to board up their windows weren’t responding to MAGA marches. Cities knew the riots would come from the left. Red cities don’t cover storefronts in plywood when conservatives protest. Blue cities do. That's a fact.

The parallel today isn’t identical. It rarely is. But the shape is familiar. Economic frustration mixed with cultural grievance, plus a loud far-left faction aggressive about Israel in ways that keep sliding into open antisemitism, plus a party establishment that keeps accommodating instead of confronting. Moderates tiptoe because they’re afraid of a primary challenge from their left. They’re afraid of being called insufficiently progressive. So they stay quiet while a Hezbollah supporter takes a Jewish regent’s seat, while a Nazi-tattooed candidate wins a Senate nomination, while the leading Michigan Senate candidate equates Israel with Hamas on national television.

Of course, people don't see it. They've been trained not to. The narrative built in academia and legacy media that insists authoritarianism only comes from the right has prepped a generation of voters to dismiss exactly this kind of warning when it points at their own side. If you’ve spent ten years absorbing the Heather Cox Richardson version of events, where the only danger to democracy wears a red hat, you literally don’t have a framework to see what’s happening in your own party. The narrative did its job. That was the job.

The training is also enforced. Try pointing any of this out as a Jew or a Christian and watch what happens. You’ll get called a racist. You’ll get called Islamophobic. The worldview runs on one axis, oppressor versus oppressed, and it hands out the labels before the conversation starts. Israel is the oppressor. So are the Jews who defend it. Christians, especially white ones, are filed as the domestic version. Radical Islam slides into the oppressed column even when the specific movement being discussed would happily kill everyone in this sentence. That isn’t analysis. That’s a flowchart.

Young people aren’t taught to see around it because they aren’t taught history anymore. They’re taught identity. Twitch and TikTok finish the job. Spend an hour on either platform, and you’ll catch the recurring lesson: Christians are oppressors, Jews are white-adjacent oppressors, and anyone defending either is complicit in whatever atrocity the algorithm is circulating that week. Actual history — which has a lot to say about what happens to religious minorities when Islamist movements take power — doesn’t fit the chart, so it doesn’t get taught.

Rahm Emanuel is a useful tell. He recently said he wants to cut off all U.S. military aid to Israel. Rahm Emanuel. Former AIPAC-friendly Democrat, fresh off an ambassadorship, now pandering to a base that wouldn't have recognized his old positions a decade ago. He can read a poll. Two-thirds of Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, up from 13 percent in 2013. The DNC is debating a resolution this month aimed squarely at AIPAC.

Check last week's roll call. 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block weapons sales to Israel, with only Schumer, Fetterman, Coons, Blumenthal, Gillibrand, Cortez Masto, and Rosen siding against the resolution. AOC has gone further publicly, saying she’ll vote against any future military aid, including the Iron Dome, the defensive system that intercepts incoming rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. Reasonable people can argue all day about how the U.S. spends money abroad. That’s a fair debate. But the Iron Dome used to be the easy vote, bipartisan, and unremarkable. Now it’s the dividing line. This is a sign of a clear shift and realignment within the Democratic Party.

When the president of a liberal Jewish think tank, Yehuda Kurtzer, tells American Jews to “embrace political homelessness,” that’s a man telling his own community their political home stopped being safe.

Some Democrats are pushing back. In 2024, Piker was credentialed to stream the Democratic National Convention as part of the Harris campaign’s “Creators for Kamala” initiative. A guy who calls Hamas “a thousand times better than” Israel, streaming from the convention floor with a campaign press pass. That was the baseline. He got kicked off on the last day for loudly protesting the lack of Palestinian delegates, but he didn’t get tossed for what he believed. He got tossed for saying it out loud at the wrong moment. Then, in March 2026, Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Lily Cohen ran a single op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Democrats Are Too Cozy with Hasan Piker.” Reporters who had profiled Piker gently for months — looking at you, NYT — suddenly started asking Democrats whether they agreed with him. Mallory McMorrow and Brad Schneider broke away. Within weeks, only three of fourteen prospective 2028 presidential candidates told Politico they’d appear on his stream.

That’s the encouraging column. Here’s the rest of it.

While a handful of moderates were backing away from Piker, Michigan Democrats ousted a Jewish regent in favor of a Hezbollah-praising lawyer. El-Sayed is still leading his Senate primary. Platner is still leading his. 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block arms sales to Israel. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” during his campaign, is now mayor of New York City. (Don’t even get me started on his wife.) Analilia Mejia just flipped a suburban New Jersey House seat running to AOC’s left. That’s the actual scoreboard.

The pushback isn’t winning. It’s getting outrun.

The problem is where the energy is. The party is chasing a youth vote raised on TikTok and Twitch, where anyone to the right of Bernie registers as a sellout. Party leaders decided the cure for losing young men was to find their own Joe Rogan. They ended up with Hasan Piker and a rally circuit of candidates who can’t say plainly that Hamas is bad. That isn’t a youth strategy. That’s managed decline.

The one check left is the hope that progressives winning primaries and House seats doesn’t scale to a presidential win. Maybe. But “maybe they’ll be unelectable nationally” is already being tested. Mamdani won the nation’s largest city. Mejia flipped a suburban district to AOC’s left. The ceiling keeps rising.

Moderates, Democrats, Jewish friends who still call yourselves progressive, it’s time to grab this problem by the horns. Republicans and people on the right have been calling out the antisemites associated with the right, Carlson, Owens, Fuentes and the mutuals around them. Also, we aren’t putting them on ballots; your antisemites and terrorist sympathizers are. But it doesn’t matter how loudly we say it. They'll never hear it from us. You're the only ones they'll listen to. So say it.

You either name it yourselves, the way Fetterman keeps trying, the way Cowan and Cohen did, or you watch your party get eaten from the inside while you swing at Fox News on the way out. Every moderate who stays quiet now is feeding the faction that will eventually run the party. And when voters punish that party for it, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves.

Every time a moderate Democrat tells themselves, “yeah, but the right is worse,” the faction already in the house takes another room.

Get it together. History doesn’t grade on a curve.

That means a new week and new news. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and is recharged to take on the week ahead.

I had a wonderful weekend outside in the yard and enjoyed a baseball game. Let’s hope it was enough to get me through the week. LOL

ICYMI

In today’s Brief:

• The FISA 702 stopgap, the hardliners who forced it, and what warrantless spying on Americans actually means

• The USS Spruance boards the TOUSKA, the Strait of Hormuz closes again, and a Beverly Hills businesswoman gets flagged at LAX

• Shreveport: a dad, his own children, and why calling this a “mass shooting” misses the point

• Trump, Rogan, and an executive order that fast-tracks psychedelics for vets

• Quick Rundown: the Callais slow-walk, the NYT SCOTUS leak, blue-state wealth taxes, and gas above $3

Surveillance powers on life support

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was set to lapse today. That’s the law letting the NSA and FBI sweep up communications of foreigners overseas, with the side effect of also catching every American those foreigners happen to email, call, or text. No warrant required.

Speaker Mike Johnson wanted a clean five-year reauthorization. Then an 18-month version. Then a year. Each one died on the House floor. A small faction of privacy hawks, led by Thomas Massie, Tim Burchett, and Lauren Boebert, held the line and refused to extend the authority without warrant requirements for U.S. person queries.

By late Friday night, Johnson was out of options. Per the Washington Examiner, it was “an overnight defeat” for the Speaker. The Senate then passed a ten-day stopgap by unanimous consent, kicking the real fight to April 30. Just the News has the play-by-play.

The White House is furious. Trump has pushed hard for a clean reauth since January, and he’s running out of Republicans willing to hand him one. Trump argues that it is vital to national security right now, as we face attacks from adversaries.

Massie has been the loudest holdout, arguing that the FBI already has a miserable track record of abusing 702 to snoop on Americans. He’s right about that. The 2023 DOJ audit documented 278,000 improper queries in a single year.

Here’s the honest question. Privacy hawks want to strip a tool the intelligence community swears it needs. The IC wants warrant-free queries because they’d rather not ask permission. Neither side trusts the other. Neither should.

Ten days until round two.

The Navy just rappelled onto an Iranian ship

At dawn local time today, the guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) disabled the propulsion of M/V TOUSKA, an Iranian-flagged cargo vessel making a run for Bandar Abbas at 17 knots. According to CENTCOM, six hours of warnings were ignored. The Spruance put several rounds from its 5-inch MK 45 gun into TOUSKA’s engine room. Marines from the 31st MEU rappelled onboard and took the ship into U.S. custody.

Here’s the CENTCOM footage:

Trump declared a naval blockade on April 12 after Iranian gunboats fired on a UK tanker in the Strait. His Truth Social post was blunt: any ship paying the Iranian transit toll in Chinese yuan or crypto would be intercepted. TOUSKA is the first real test.

VP Vance is on a plane to Islamabad right now, leading the US delegation with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. That's the White House line after a chaotic Sunday: Trump told ABC News that Vance would skip the trip over security concerns, and officials walked it back within hours.

The 20-plus-hour flight means Vance hasn't landed yet. Round one, on April 11, ended in marathon talks with no deal and produced the fragile ceasefire now on fumes. Tehran state media is already hinting that round two may be off after the Spruance boarding.

Oh, and on Saturday, federal agents arrested Shamim Mafi at LAX. She’s an Iranian businesswoman with Beverly Hills ties, accused of brokering more than $70 million in drone sales to Sudan, destined for Iran’s proxy network.

Iran is simultaneously claiming 3,500 of its people have died in the war against the U.S. Whether that number is real or regime theater to TBD, but Iran is posturing, and Tehran is escalating.

The Supreme Court may have already decided the Voting Rights Act

Sean Spicer went on the DC Huddle podcast last week and dropped a grenade. His claim: the Supreme Court has already decided Louisiana v. Callais internally, and the liberal justices are slow-walking their dissent on purpose.

The quote, verbatim: “I have been told by reliable sources that the decision is done and the minority is slow walking the dissent so that states do not have time to redistrict.”

Callais is the case testing whether Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the rule that forces states to draw majority-minority districts where practicable, still holds up under the 14th and 15th Amendments. If the Court guts Section 2, Louisiana’s congressional map flips. So does Alabama’s. Georgia. Mississippi. South Carolina.

Per Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern on Bluesky, he predicted that this slow-walk would happen back in January. This is a rare moment where a right-leaning pundit and a progressive SCOTUS beat reporter are telling the same story from opposite ends of the political table.

Why the calendar matters: states need weeks, sometimes months, to redraw maps and defend them in court. A June ruling might let southern states reconfigure for November. A September ruling almost certainly doesn’t. The NYT is projecting up to twelve southern congressional seats could swing Republican if the ruling lands early enough.

If Spicer’s sources are right, this is one of the more aggressive procedural games the Court’s minority has run in memory. If they’re wrong, he just burned a lot of credibility. Watch the June hand-down calendar.

Shreveport — 8 Children Murdered by Their Own Father

Early Sunday morning, across three homes in Shreveport, Louisiana, Shamar Elkins shot and killed eight children. Seven were his. The youngest was one. The oldest, fourteen. He also shot the mother of his children, who survived, and another woman, who is in critical condition. Then he fled, carjacked a vehicle, and led police on a chase into Bossier Parish, where officers shot and killed him.

The headlines are calling it a “mass shooting.” It’s not. This is a familicide. A domestic annihilator. A father who targeted his own descendants.

The distinction matters because policy follows framing. “Mass shooting” invites gun control arguments. Familicide invites an honest reckoning with what we tolerate in domestic violence intervention, what warning signs get ignored, and how custody and restraining orders work in practice. Elkins served in the Louisiana National Guard from 2013 to 2020. Never deployed. He wasn’t some shadowy stranger. He was someone’s partner, someone’s dad.

Governor Jeff Landry and Speaker Johnson both issued statements on Sunday. I read ten versions of this story yesterday and could not shake the ages. One. Two. Three. Five. Seven. Nine. Twelve. Fourteen. Hug your kids today.

Trump signs psychedelics into the mainstream

Saturday afternoon in the Oval, Trump signed an executive order called “Accelerating Medical Treatments For Serious Mental Illnesses.” The room was a sight: Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, former Gov. Rick Perry, former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, and Bryan Hubbard of Americans for Ibogaine.

The order directs the FDA to fast-track review of any psychedelic already designated a breakthrough therapy. That includes MDMA, psilocybin, and the big one: ibogaine, still Schedule I. It opens data-sharing pipes between the FDA and the VA and sets up automatic rescheduling once anything gets approved. Roughly $50 million in research funding is attached.

Trump cited a Stanford study showing 30 special operations vets with traumatic brain injuries reported an 80 to 90 percent drop in depression and anxiety symptoms within a month of ibogaine treatment.

The counter. Ibogaine has killed at least 27 people documented in clinical and retreat settings since the early 2000s, mostly via cardiac events. It’s not aspirin. The whole point of the FDA track is to run it through the same safety process as any other serious drug. Doctors are split. Some call this overdue. Others warn Trump is moving faster than the data.

Veterans have been crossing the border to Mexico and Costa Rica for this treatment for years. The order doesn’t legalize anything overnight. It stops the federal government from pretending these drugs don’t work while 22 vets a day take their own lives.

Quick Rundown

• The NYT’s SCOTUS Shadow Docket leak. The Times published memos from the 2016 Clean Power Plan internal deliberations last week, citing “people familiar.” Chief Justice Roberts is reportedly livid about the sourcing. No named leaker yet, and the Court’s internal investigation is underway.

• Blue-state wealth tax contagion. The WSJ reports that Maine is floating a 2 percent tax on assets over $50 million. Washington and Massachusetts are considering 4 percent. Mamdani’s NYC proposal is already in committee. Maine is not a wealthy state. The math will go the way it always does, which is that the targets move and the middle class eventually gets the bill.

• Gas prices above $3 through 2027. Axios broke the EIA forecast. The Hormuz closure and the blockade are the main drivers. If you’re budgeting for summer travel or a midterm campaign, plan accordingly.

• Tomorrow: the full House Ethics Committee takes up the adjudicatory subcommittee’s sanctions recommendation on Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL), who was found to have committed 25 of 27 alleged ethics violations, including funneling FEMA disaster money through family-linked businesses. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has a privileged expulsion motion queued: “Either resign or be expelled.” Speaker Johnson publicly endorsed expulsion Friday. Two-thirds threshold means Democrats have to decide whether they own the cover.

Let’s Talk About It

Section 702 is the question of the week. Clean reauthorization so the intelligence community keeps its current tool, or a warrant requirement for U.S. person queries even if it slows down terror investigations? Where do you land, and has your position changed since the 2023 DOJ audit? Hit reply.

Lightning round: what’s your heavy-news-weekend decompression move? Long walk, trash TV, church, call your mom, clean the kitchen like a psychopath? Anything special with the warmer days? I’m taking new recommendations.

Subscribe now

The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.

@chattlookoutsLooie new fit 👀 #looie #lookouts #fitcheck

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It’s opening week at the Chattanooga Lookouts’ brand new stadium. The air was fresh. That stretch of spring where it’s warm but you can sit outside all day without the heat wringing you out. And while baseball ranks roughly second-to-last on my list of sports to watch live, there’s no better way to shake off winter than a night at the ballpark.

We made the obligatory stop for hot dogs and beer and found our seats — front row, behind home plate. The away team was the Montgomery Biscuits. Their logo is a fluffy biscuit with a pat of butter in its mouth. Or maybe that’s its tongue. I’m still not sure.

I settled in, balancing a hot dog, fries, and a shandy, ready for the game — and realized the real show had nothing to do with the field. Five young guys in the row at our backs, and one of them had taken up the noble sport of heckling the players loud enough to crack up everyone within three sections.

I caught some of it for you. Listen close.

The Kids Are Showing Up

A few years ago, if you’d told me young men were about to be the ones quietly filling the pews, I would have likely laughed. We were told that Gen Z was supposed to be the generation that buried organized religion for good. Every graph pointed down. Every headline about church closures read like an obituary.

Gallup dropped a poll this week that has a lot of people doing a double-take.

Forty-two percent of American men between 18 and 29 now say religion is “very important” in their lives. Two years ago, that number was 28%. That’s a fourteen-point jump, the biggest Gallup has recorded for any age or gender group in that window. It’s also the first time in a quarter-century that young men have outpaced young women on the question. Attendance is up, too. Four in ten young men now show up at a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple at least once a month. That’s the highest it’s been in over a decade.

Something’s happening.

I want to be careful here, because it is too soon to say “America is approaching a revival.” It’s not. At least not yet, we can pray. Overall religiosity is still near historic lows. Tens of thousands of churches are expected to close in the coming years. Axios pointed out that this isn’t the Third Great Awakening. PRRI’s CEO told them the decline among Gen Z may just be flattening out, not reversing.

But here’s the good news. A generation that was written off as lost to faith is, in at least one corner, walking back toward it. Not because anyone told them to. Not because their parents dragged them. A lot of them, frankly, are walking back without their parents. That’s not nothing.

The Gallup senior scientist running the numbers, Frank Newport, put it plainly: the decline among young people is starting to stop. In his words, that’s significant.

There are a few ways to read this. The cynical one — the one the media loves to tell — is that young men are finding religion because the manosphere told them to. The Gallup data show that most of the growth is occurring among young Republicans. What the media doesn’t know or won’t acknowledge is that you also can’t reduce a person walking into a sanctuary on a Sunday morning to a political demographic. Something pulls them through the door. A question they can’t shake. A tether that they seek. A friend who invited them. A feeling that the algorithm isn’t feeding them anything real.

The generous read — and the one I’m choosing today — is that a bunch of young people are looking around at a world that feels thin and trying to find something with weight. Community. Ritual. A place where your phone doesn’t work and someone older than you knows your name. You don’t have to be religious yourself to see why that would be appealing right now.

A rabbi in Los Angeles told the AP her congregation has been growing steadily since the pandemic. She put it simply: people are looking for a sense of belonging in dark times.

It’s not just the boys. Young Republican women’s attendance is up eight points over the same period. Democratic women under 30 are the one group that hasn’t budged, and there are real reasons for that worth taking seriously, from abortion politics to a loss of trust in institutions.

But I see a light. Young people are showing up somewhere that isn’t a screen. They’re sitting in rooms with other humans. They’re singing. They are making friends. Some of them are having the first quiet hour of their week. They are reacquainting themselves with God.

This is a good thing. The kids are showing up. Let’s pray it continues.

Someone Pick Up the Phone

Somewhere on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, there is a bright yellow payphone sitting outside a coffee shop. No coin slot. No instructions. Simply bold, bright blue letters that beckon you to just pick it up and CALL A BOOMER.

On the other end, 2,500 miles away in Reno, Nevada, a phone rings in the recreation room of a senior living facility. Whoever is nearest answers. And just like that, two strangers — separated by decades and a continent — are talking.

It’s called “Call a Boomer,” a social experiment by a biotech startup called Matter Neuroscience. The payphone in Boston connects to a matching one at the senior facility that reads, on that end, “Call a Zoomer.”

Maria Jaynes is 73. She grew up a small-town girl in Texas, met her husband Chris when he was stationed nearby with the Army, and married him when she was 18. He was 21. They spent the next forty years building a life together, Texas to California to Nevada, where Jaynes cried the first time she saw the mountains. Chris passed away in March of 2011, and she still lights a candle for him at mass.

When a BU student called her recently and asked how she managed to fall in love and make it last, Jaynes didn’t hesitate. She gave a list. Four things. Get to know someone slowly. Keep communicating. Hold hands and never stop. And live a life outside your partner.

She also, in the gentlest possible way, offered her opinion on dating apps. “Maybe meet someone in town that you know of,” she suggested.

How great is that?

So what’s with the phone? The startup behind it describes itself as a “happiness company” focused on neuroscience and feel-good brain chemistry, which sounds like the kind of thing that belongs on a hippie wellness podcast you listen to while doing something you don’t enjoy. But their actual intervention — the thing they built to make people feel better — was a payphone. A dial-age technology planted on a college campus, designed to do nothing but make two lonely people talk to each other.

Because that’s the thing they identified as the gap. Not a new app, not a subscription, not a curated digital experience, not another text message. A conversation with a stranger that goes well. That’s the whole formula.

The company noted that Gen Z and seniors are two of the loneliest demographics in the country. The ones on opposite ends of a life. And somehow, a yellow payphone on a random street in Boston is quietly bridging that gap, one half-hour conversation at a time.

Maria Jaynes told the student who called her: “I’m not just learning from you, you’re learning from me.”

That feels right. That feels like something we used to know and forgot.

I think about the things that are likely to be asked, while standing at that payphone with the wind in my face and a stranger’s soft voice coming through the line. What did a marriage look like before you had to perform it online? What did it feel like to see a mountain for the first time? What do you do with grief when there’s no algorithm to distract you from it?

Pick up the phone.

The Man Who Decided Only 400 People Mattered

There is something almost poetic about a man who spent his entire life deciding who belonged — and died alone because of it.

Ward McAllister was not born rich, not born famous, and not born into the kind of New York society he would eventually come to rule. He was a short, pudgy lawyer from Savannah, Georgia, who studied the mannerisms of the European elite the way some people study a second language, obsessively, with the desperate hope that fluency might pass for native speech. He married a wealthy woman, bought a farm in Newport, and set about constructing the most elaborate social scaffolding in American history.

It worked. Alongside Caroline Astor — the Mrs. Astor, the undisputed queen of Gilded Age New York — McAllister became the gatekeeper of the city’s most exclusive circles. He organized the famous Patriarch Balls, decided which new-money families were acceptable and which were not, and in 1892 coined the phrase that would define an era: The Four Hundred. According to McAllister, there were exactly 400 people in New York who truly mattered in society. Coincidentally — or perhaps not so coincidentally — that was precisely the number of guests who could fit inside Mrs. Astor’s ballroom.

For decades, an invitation to one of his carefully orchestrated evenings determined whether you existed or didn’t, in the only world that McAllister considered worth inhabiting. He called Mrs. Astor his “Mystic Rose.” He could spend ten minutes deliberating over the wording of a single invitation. He was, by all accounts, entirely humorless about the whole enterprise, which is, if you think about it, the funniest thing about him.

Then he wrote a book.

In 1890, McAllister published Society As I Have Found It, a memoir of his years at the center of New York’s elite. He was careful, technically. He didn’t name names outright. He used initials. He thought that was enough. It was not. Everyone knew exactly who he was talking about, and the people he had spent his life cultivating stopped inviting him anywhere. Slowly, then all at once, the doors closed.

He spent the next five years fading from the only world he had ever wanted. And on January 31, 1895, Ward McAllister — the man who had decided only 400 people mattered — died while dining alone at New York’s Union Club.

Mrs. Astor did not attend his funeral. She had a prior engagement.

There is a lesson buried in there somewhere about the difference between access and belonging, between influence and love, between being at the center of every room and actually being wanted in one. McAllister built a world and then discovered, too late, that he had never really lived in it; he had only been allowed to manage it.

The Four Hundred moved on without him. They always do.

We opened the pool yesterday! That also means I will be spending my weekend clearing up the backyard and probably doing a little power washing. So fun for me.

But I am grateful to be heading into the weekend and, for the most part, signing off from the news cycle. If the president could do everyone a solid and stay off his social media for the weekend, that would be swell.

Also, I love this clip!

Ok, let’s get into the news.

In today’s Brief:

• NJ-11 just voted for The Squad in Mikie Sherrill’s old seat.

• The Altman attack has a Discord post, a podcast tape, and a kill list.

• Clarence Thomas named progressivism. He’s right.

• The Fairfax murder-suicide tracked the 2019 warnings almost line by line.

• Plus: Lebanon-Israel ceasefire, the Iran blockade goes global, Lyons out at ICE, and Gen Z is going back to church.

NJ-11 Just Voted Abolish-ICE In Sherrill Country

Analilia Mejia, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 national political director and an AOC endorsee, beat Republican Joe Hathaway in Thursday’s NJ-11 special election. AP called the race minutes after polls closed. A child of illegal immigrants, she ran openly on Medicare for All and abolishing ICE, and did not soften those positions in the final week. The district did not care.

NJ-11 is Mikie Sherrill country. Moderate House Dem, retired Navy helicopter pilot, flipped the seat in 2018 and held it by fifteen points in 2024. The exact profile the DNC spent a decade selling as the road back through the suburbs. Mejia is the opposite of Sherrill on nearly everything, and the seat still went to her comfortably.

Hathaway did everything a sensible Republican is supposed to do in a district like this. He hit Mejia on her Gaza “genocide” rhetoric. Jewish voters are a key bloc in the district, and he made her record on Israel the central argument of his closing. A local pollster called his plan to peel off crossover Democrats “a pipe dream.” The numbers never moved.

Mamdani in NYC. Mejia in Congress. Two progressive-over-moderate fights in twelve months, in places that were supposed to be immune. The DNC’s private line is that the Sanders-AOC wing is loud and unelectable in districts like this. The tally might saying otherwise.

The Altman Attack Had a Manifesto, a Podcast, and a Kill List

Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, a Texas college student, was arrested Monday and charged with attempted murder and attempted arson after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s San Francisco home, then showing up at OpenAI headquarters with a kerosene can, a lighter, and a list of AI executives plus their home addresses.

In December, Moreno-Gama posted on a Discord run by the anti-AI group Stop AI, asking whether it would get him banned. He then told producers of a podcast called The Last Invention what he had in mind was “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs.” Per the WSJ exclusive, they recorded an interview with him in January. They sat on the tape. The attack happened. Then they published it on Wednesday.

Host Andy Mills went on the record this week with the NYPost. Mills says Moreno-Gama walked the comment back on tape (”I didn’t really mean that as a threat”), but also came off “pumped” to appear and carried what Mills called “a hint of martyrdom.” Mills has interviewed violent people before. He says this one didn’t set off the alarm. That should worry everyone.

Altman’s blog response blamed “incendiary” coverage, an obvious shot at a recent magazine profile. The copycat problem is real. A parallel case: Chamel Abdulkarim, charged with torching a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Southern California while filming himself and invoking Mangione. The cultural glamorization of Luigi Mangione is itself the problem, and very few people with platforms are willing to say so.

From the Archives

In roughly four months: Mangione folk-heroed online after murdering a health-insurance CEO, a warehouse arsonist quoting him on camera, and a kid with a Molotov and a kill list. When the culture makes political assassination aesthetic, a small but real slice of unstable young men will take it as permission. The media is still calling Altman “controversial” while the suspect had addresses. That imbalance is the rot.

Thomas Named Progressivism. He’s Right.

Justice Clarence Thomas gave a rare public speech Wednesday at UT-Austin for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. He didn’t hedge. He named progressivism, called it “incompatible” with founding principles, and warned it “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration” by holding that rights come “not from God, but from government.”

This is the speech the conservative legal movement has been waiting for Thomas to give. The argument is simple and true. Progressivism locates rights in the state. The founders located them in something higher. If government grants rights, government can revoke them. If rights are prior to government, they can’t be legislated away. That single disagreement sits beneath every serious fight in American politics right now, and Thomas said it out loud at a university podium.

The detail that makes the speech land is in his own biography. Thomas grew up in the segregated South. The principle that all men are created equal “survived” Jim Crow precisely because it “came from God, not man.” The state that denied him his rights couldn’t actually take them away, because it hadn’t given them in the first place. That is the whole case for natural rights, delivered by the justice who lived inside the counterexample.

Related

In the same week, Sotomayor spent the week walking back a shot at Kavanaugh's working-class background. Jackson took the Yale podium to call the conservative majority "corrosive." Both reached for character. Thomas reached for first principles. When the two most progressive justices on the Court can't find a bigger argument than each other's manners, the justice who explains that rights come from God, not the government, is doing the actual work.

The Fairfax Murder-Suicide Tracked the 2019 Warnings

Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax shot his wife, Cerina, in their Fairfax County home Monday, then killed himself. The story is staying in the news because the court filings keep confirming what the public record already suggested.

The couple’s divorce hearing was scheduled for April 21, five days after the shooting. Fairfax had been ordered weeks earlier to leave the home, with custody and financial rulings going against him. The worst of the filings: an alcohol problem Cerina had documented in writing for months, and a handgun Fairfax bought in 2022 with cash his wife had set aside for the kids’ horseback-riding lessons.

The hardest detail: the 16-year-old son, Cameron, found his mother and made the 911 call. He told the dispatcher he thought she’d been stabbed.

Fairfax was one credible sexual-assault allegation from being Governor of Virginia in 2019. Two allegations later, the Virginia Democratic Party chose not to pursue his removal. The state party decided the mess wasn’t worth the reckoning and quietly waited him out. The accusers got buried. One of them, Vanessa Tyson, said this week she’d seen “decades of signs.” You don’t have to take her word for it. The divorce file has the receipts: the drinking, the money hidden from the kids, the ignored court orders, the gun.

Roasting European Becomes X Latest Past Time

Quick Rundown

• Lebanon-Israel ceasefire is in effect. Ten days, started midnight Friday. Trump-brokered. Hezbollah gave ambiguous statements and isn’t a signatory. Lebanon’s refugee minister called the $60M US humanitarian pledge insufficient and publicly asked for $88M a month.

• Iran blockade goes global. Trump said he’d fly to Islamabad if the deal signs there. The US has expanded the blockade worldwide to target Tehran’s “dark fleet” anywhere it sails. Three US carrier groups, two Marine assault ships, and ten destroyers now sit off Iran’s coast.

• Todd Lyons resigns from ICE. Last day May 31. Roughly 584,000 deportations on his watch. Reporting also indicates Lyons privately opposed the elevation of Bovino, the Border Patrol official relieved after the Minneapolis ICE shootings. Agency now has no Senate-confirmed director during a shutdown partly driven by ICE reform demands.

• Trump nominates Schwartz to lead CDC. Former deputy surgeon general. Reporting thin so far.

• Gallup: Gen Z is going back to church. The decade-long “young people are done with faith” narrative stopped matching the numbers. Good.

Let’s Talk About It

Mamdani in NYC, Mejia in NJ-11. Is the DNC’s suburban-moderate era actually over, or is this a few loud data points that a 2026 midterm will wash out?

Wrong answers only: Which single detail from today’s Brief are you bringing up at dinner tonight?

Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Monday.

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The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.

But in today’s Brief, let’s bring it back domestically.

In today’s Brief:

• The Biden DOJ partnered with Planned Parenthood and abortion groups to build dossiers on pro-life activists before ever charging them

• A D.C. appeals court shut down Judge Boasberg’s contempt probe into Trump officials over deportation flights

• Eric Swalwell officially resigned from Congress as a fifth accuser came forward with rape allegations

• California Democrats advanced a bill critics are calling the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” to shield immigrant NGOs from investigative journalism

• Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house and had a hit list of AI executives

Let’s get into the news!

The Biden DOJ Was Running Surveillance on Pro-Lifers With Help From Planned Parenthood

An 882-page report from the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group dropped Tuesday, and the details are worse than the headline. This isn’t just about selective prosecution. It’s about a federal agency coordinating with private abortion advocacy groups to track, surveil, and build cases against American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.

The report alleges that after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, then-AG Merrick Garland stood up a national task force to pursue FACE Act cases against pro-lifers. The task force was run by Civil Rights Division trial attorney Sanjay Patel, who was, per internal emails, on texting terms with the National Abortion Federation’s security director. He called her an “MVP” for flagging incidents that “usually result in investigation/prosecution.”

It gets worse. Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and the Feminist Majority Foundation were supplying the DOJ with full dossiers on pro-life activists. Personal addresses. Family photos. Drivers’ license numbers. Travel plans. All before any charges were filed.

One activist, Calvin Zastrow, was monitored for years. Patel emailed the NAF in 2021 asking about Zastrow’s travel to Montana. He wasn’t charged until October 2022. His daughter Eva was flagged in a 136-page DOJ dossier that cataloged her associations, physical description, and missionary work.

Then there’s the Mark Houck case. Houck, a Catholic father of seven, was arrested by 16 FBI agents at his home in rural Pennsylvania over a shoving incident at a clinic. A federal jury acquitted him. The Trump administration later settled with him for over $1 million.

The sentencing numbers tell the story. Biden prosecutors sought an average of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants. For pro-abortion defendants? 12.3 months. Actual sentences: 14 months versus 3 months.

Internal emails also showed prosecutors trying to screen out Christian jurors, referring to pro-lifers as “culty,” and complaining about getting assigned a “very Catholic magistrate.” One prosecutor griped the judge was “very particular about the bond conditions and not infringing on their first amendment rights.” Imagine being annoyed that a judge cares about constitutional rights.

Four prosecutors were fired Monday, including Patel. Acting AG Todd Blanche said the department “will not tolerate a two-tiered system of justice.” Trump had already pardoned 23 pro-life defendants convicted under Biden’s FACE Act push.

The Washington Post predictably downplayed the findings, noting that most Biden-era cases ended in convictions. Sure. The question was never whether prosecutors could win cases. It was whether the government selectively weaponized a federal law against one side of a political debate. Eight hundred eighty-two pages say yes.

Appeals Court Shuts Down Boasberg’s Contempt Probe

The D.C. Circuit told Judge James Boasberg to stand down. In a 2-1 ruling Tuesday, the appeals court ordered him to end his criminal contempt investigation into Trump administration officials over the Venezuelan migrant deportation flights to El Salvador last March.

Judge Neomi Rao, writing for the majority, called the proceedings “a clear abuse of discretion” and a “legal dead end.” The court found Boasberg’s contempt probe encroached on executive branch autonomy over matters of national security and diplomacy. The government had already named then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as the responsible official, making further judicial digging “unnecessary and therefore improper.”

Judge J. Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, dissented with an 80-page opinion arguing the ruling “stymied the district court’s inherent and statutory powers.”

The White House didn’t mince words. “We have long known that Judge Boasberg is a far-left judicial activist trying to undermine the President’s lawful authority,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

Boasberg issued an oral order last March demanding the government turn around planes bound for El Salvador. He later said the administration defied it. The administration said the order never mentioned transferring custody. The appeals court agreed.

Boasberg already had a DOJ misconduct complaint filed against him, and Trump has called for his impeachment. Tuesday’s ruling doesn’t end the broader Alien Enemies Act legal battle, but it puts a lid on the contempt theater.

Swalwell Resigns as New Rape Allegation Surfaces

Eric Swalwell’s political career ended on Tuesday. Not with a press conference. With a paper resignation filed hours after a fifth accuser came forward at a press conference in Beverly Hills.

Lonna Drewes, a former model and entrepreneur, alleged that Swalwell drugged her drink and raped her at a West Hollywood hotel in 2018. She said she’d only had one glass of wine. “When I arrived at his hotel room, I was already incapacitated, and I couldn’t move my arms or my body,” Drewes said. “He raped me and he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. I thought I died.”

Drewes appeared alongside attorney Lisa Bloom and said she planned to file a police report with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. She said she disclosed the assault at the time to people close to her and later discussed it in therapy. Her delay in going public, she said, was “driven by fear, not doubt.”

Swalwell, through attorney Sara Azari, called the allegations “false, fabricated, and deeply offensive” and a “political hit job.” He denies all claims of nonconsensual contact.

At least four women have now accused him of sexual misconduct, according to CNN, including a former staffer who alleges he raped her in 2024. The Manhattan DA’s office confirmed it is investigating. The House Ethics Committee had opened a probe. An expulsion resolution was being drafted. Pelosi pulled her endorsement.

Sen. Ruben Gallego has also been facing significant scrutiny over his close friendship with Swalwell. Gallego onfirmed he’d heard Swalwell rumors “for years.” When pressed by reporters, Gallego got visibly flustered and tried to characterize what he’d heard as Swalwell being “flirty.” The reporter pushed back, “That wasn’t the issue.”

A special election for California’s 14th District is expected on August 18, 2026. Also, on Tuesday, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) resigned after it was revealed he sent sexually explicit texts to a staffer who later died by suicide. His departure, combined with Swalwell’s, leaves the GOP House majority at 216-213.

TMZ On The Hill

It’s about to get more interesting in D.C.

Agreed Meghan!

California’s “Stop Nick Shirley Act” Moves Forward

California Democrats advanced AB 2624, a bill that would expand privacy protections for “immigrant services providers” and allow them to demand the removal of videos, even those recorded in public. Violators face up to a $10,000 fine and a year in county jail. If someone gets hurt as a result of shared information, penalties jump to $50,000 and felony imprisonment.

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R) dubbed it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” after the YouTuber and citizen journalist whose viral investigations exposed millions in fraud at Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota and fake hospice operations in California.

The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D), says it protects people facing “targeted harassment” and mirrors Safe-at-Home protections for domestic violence survivors. DeMaio pressed her on a double standard: California Democrats are simultaneously trying to strip privacy protections from law enforcement officers. Bonta said her bill was unrelated.

The bill is now awaiting its next committee hearing. Lawmakers have until the end of August to send it to the governor. Translation: this fight is just getting started.

Quick Rundown

• Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s home. Suspect Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, faces attempted murder and arson charges after allegedly traveling from Texas to San Francisco to attack the OpenAI CEO’s house and later target OpenAI headquarters. He reportedly carried a manifesto advocating violence against AI executives and a list of other names and addresses. No injuries reported, but the domestic terrorism implications are serious.

• “Baby Jessica” arrested in Texas. Jessica McClure Morales, the woman the world watched get rescued from a well as an 18-month-old in 1987, was arrested Saturday in Midland County on a charge of assault causing bodily injury involving family violence. She was released on bond. Limited details available.

• House Democrats filed a 25th Amendment bill targeting Trump. Rep. Jamie Raskin introduced the long-shot measure, the latest in a string of Democratic efforts to remove Trump from office amid tensions over his Iran policy. It has zero chance of advancing in a Republican-controlled House, but it keeps the "unfit for office" drumbeat alive heading into midterm season.

Let’s Talk About It

The Biden DOJ was building dossiers with Planned Parenthood on people who hadn’t been charged with anything. Be honest: if this had been any other group being surveilled like this, would the reaction be different?

Lots of scandals on the hill and more are likely on the way with TMZ in town. How do we feel about TMZ in D.C.? Is Meghan right? Should they get a WH press pass?

Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Friday.

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She brought it to Judge Amy Pellman. The judge thought it was worth a closer look.

Pellman issued a summons. On the day of the hearing, the intended parent appeared on video. Not because he was stuck in LA traffic, but because he was on the other side of the world in China, speaking through an interpreter. He was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children at the time. Further court research revealed he had already fathered, or was in the process of fathering, at least eight more, all via surrogates, all in the United States.

He told Judge Pellman he hoped to have approximately 20 U.S.-born children via surrogacy — boys specifically, because, in his words, they are “superior to girls” — to one day take over his business. Several of his children were already in Irvine, California, being raised by nannies while their paperwork to travel to China was processed. He hadn’t met them. His excuse? Work had been busy.

Judge Pellman denied the parentage petition. Experts described it as a rare rebuke; such petitions are almost always approved quickly and without question. The denial left the children in legal limbo: already born, already paid for, without a legal parent on American soil.

The man is Xu Bo. He makes fantasy video games. He calls himself “China’s first father” and is a vocal critic of feminism. His company’s Weibo account confirmed that through surrogacy in the United States, “after many years of effort,” Xu Bo has “only a little over 100” children. His ex-girlfriend, Tang Jing, put the figure at more than 300, living across numerous properties in multiple countries. Xu Bo’s company disputes this. Xu has previously accused Tang of theft, and the two are involved in ongoing lawsuits. In a 2023 Weibo post, he fantasized about obtaining “50 high-quality sons.”

This case had never been publicly reported before the Wall Street Journal investigation. That’s not an accident. U.S. court proceedings for surrogacies are typically sealed, often without even a mention on the public docket. The intent is to protect privacy. The effect is to limit oversight.

So who is Xu Bo, and how did he manage it?

The Numbers First

Between 2014 and 2019, international parents’ use of U.S. surrogacy quadrupled. By 2019, IVF clinics were starting 3,240 cycles for surrogate carriers working with international parents, nearly 40% of the U.S. total, according to researchers at Emory University. Of those international parents between 2014 and 2020, 41% were from China. Over 12,900 cycles during that period involved non-U.S. intended parents, most of whom were raising children abroad. 75% of those cycles happened in California.

Not dozens of cases. Not a fringe phenomenon. Thousands of cycles, year over year, operating in plain sight.

Now consider what it actually took to make each one happen, and who built the infrastructure to do it.

The System That Made Him Possible

If you are a foreign national who wants a U.S.-born child and never wants to set foot in America, you don’t have to. The system was built for you.

Surrogacy agencies. Fertility law firms. IVF clinics. Escrow services. Nanny networks. Hospital pickup services for newborns. End to end, the logistics of commissioning a child from abroad have been industrialized: genetic material shipped from overseas, an embryo transferred in California, a surrogate contracted and managed through a full pregnancy, a newborn handed to a nanny, U.S. citizenship documents filed, baby flown home.

Some surrogates report never meeting the intended parent at all — the baby collected from the hospital by a stranger carrying a power of attorney document, working on behalf of a father in China.

Cost: up to $200,000 per child. Agencies typically collect $40,000–$50,000 per surrogacy, separately from whatever is paid to the surrogate herself.

The industry’s own executives describe what they’re selling without much embarrassment. Take Margaret Wang, CEO of Rhea Fertility, backed by Peter Thiel’s family office to the tune of $10 million. Before Rhea, Wang ran Bridgewater Associates’ Singapore hub, the firm’s first international outpost. So this is not someone stumbling into the fertility industry from the sidelines. This is someone who built her career moving capital and infrastructure across borders, and who is now applying that exact same logic to reproductive medicine.

Wang has described the United States explicitly as the destination for clients pursuing “regulatory arbitrage” — her words — meaning: use American law to access services that are illegal where you actually live. And Rhea is built to operationalize exactly that. The company’s 2024 expansion is explicitly structured around connecting Southeast Asian clients to more established legal frameworks in the U.S., with Rhea’s GenPrime clinic network functioning as what the company itself describes as a “one-stop shop” — handling the emotional and logistical complexity of moving a pregnancy across regulatory environments. Headquartered in both Singapore and New York, Rhea doesn’t just broker the introduction. It manages the whole pipeline.

So when Wang says “the U.S. remains the destination for people who have the resources and need to go down that path,” she’s not editorializing. She’s describing her business model.

Nathan Zhang, CEO of IVF USA, which caters to wealthy Chinese clients out of California, has said his original clientele were “largely parents trying to bypass China’s one-child policy. Babies brought back to China, as U.S. citizens instead of Chinese citizens, fell outside the country’s penalty system.” In other words: have your child in America, ship it home, sidestep the government entirely.

Zhang also said this, about where his client base is heading now: “Elon Musk is becoming a role model.” He described an increasing number of wealthy clients commissioning dozens — or even hundreds — of U.S.-born children with the goal of “forging an unstoppable family dynasty.”

The regulatory environment is what made all of this possible. There is no federal surrogacy law. None. Gestational surrogacy contracts are enforceable in 31 states, void or unenforceable in one, and unregulated in 17 others. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington D.C., Illinois, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington are the most permissive: enforceable contracts, pre-birth parentage orders, and explicit openness to international clients. Cross multiple agencies, different counties, different states, and nobody is talking to each other. There is no registry, no cap, no alarm.

“Oversight of the industry is so scant,” the WSJ reported, “that it’s almost impossible to figure out whether parents are working with multiple surrogates, across different agencies and law firms.”

Joy Millan, a California surrogacy agency owner, put it plainly when asked about industry self-regulation: “The suggestion lacks teeth.”

The One Party Nobody Asked

The WSJ investigation named the billionaires. It quoted the fertility CEOs. It described the agencies by name. It did not quote a single surrogate.

The women who carried Xu Bo’s children — American women, most likely from working-class or middle-class backgrounds — are absent from the story the industry tells about itself. We don’t know how they navigated the contracts. We don’t know what NDAs they signed, or whether they were told who the intended parent was, or how many other pregnancies he was running simultaneously. We don’t know if they would have agreed had they known.

What we do know comes largely from a separate WSJ investigation into what happens when the transaction goes wrong. Nia Trent-Wilson, a Texas surrogate, lost her uterus carrying someone else’s child. She went home with $182,000 in medical debt. The parents went home with the baby. In court, a judge described her agency’s arrangement as the “contractual use of a woman’s body” for a “profit venturing business,” an honest assessment and rebuke of the industry. Surrogate compensation typically runs $40,000–$80,000 per pregnancy. The agency collects $40,000–$50,000 per surrogacy for significantly less physical risk. The intended parent, at up to $200,000 per child, is buying something. The surrogate is renting her body — for nine months, under legally binding terms she didn’t negotiate, in a transaction she didn’t design.

The Holy See put it without diplomatic softening in a March 2026 statement to the UN Commission on the Status of Women: “Many women who become surrogates cite economic need as their primary reason for doing so. It is not happenstance that stories of the rich and famous commissioning surrogates are common, whereas stories of wealthy women serving as surrogates are rare.”

The class architecture here is not incidental. It is the point. We’ll come back to it.

Part 2

Read more

That’s all….

In today’s Brief:

• Trump announces a full naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz after 21-hour talks with Iran collapse over nukes

• Eric Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign implodes in real time after a former staffer accuses him of sexual assault

• New forensic evidence and a handwritten confession letter surface in the Charlie Kirk assassination case

• The Artemis II crew splashes down after traveling farther from Earth than any human in history

Let’s get into the news.

The Blockade Begins at 10 a.m.

After Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner flew to Islamabad for 21 hours of direct talks with Iranian negotiators (the first U.S.-Iran face-to-face since 1979), there was no deal. The sticking point was nuclear; Iran refused to make an “affirmative commitment” not to seek a nuclear weapon. Vance was blunt: “That is the core goal of the president.” Everything else was largely agreed to. That one thing killed it.

Trump responded Sunday morning on Truth Social and then on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, announcing a sweeping “all or nothing” blockade effective today. CENTCOM begins enforcement at 10 a.m. ET. No selective access for China, India, or Pakistan. The U.S. Navy will intercept any vessel that paid Iran’s $1-per-barrel toll in Chinese yuan or crypto, and will begin destroying mines Iran laid in the strait.

About those mines: Iran admitted it placed them but can’t locate all of them. The U.S. is deploying underwater drones plus destroyers USS Frank E. Peterson and USS Michael Murphy, which already became the first U.S. warships to transit the Strait since Feb. 28. The UK quietly retired its minesweeper fleet before replacements were ready. Great timing.

Trump is pitching the blockade as a market opportunity, telling China to buy American instead. Reality check: the U.S. exports roughly 4.2 million barrels a day. The Strait normally carries 20 million. We can ease the crunch. We can’t replace it.

Vance left what he called “a final and best offer” on the table. Trump predicts Iran comes back. Whether Iran’s fast attack boats test the Navy in the next 48 hours will tell us a lot more than any diplomatic statement.

The Party That Built ‘Believe All Women’ Now Has to Explain Eric Swalwell

A former staffer, hired at 21, went on record with the San Francisco Chronicle. She alleged pursuit via Snapchat, pressure for explicit photos, sexual exposure while driving, and two incidents of assault while she was blacked out drunk. She texted a friend at the time: she told him to stop and he didn’t. A 2024 incident at a New York hotel is now the subject of a Manhattan DA criminal investigation. Three additional women told CNN about unsolicited explicit messages and nude photos.

The collapse was immediate. All 21 congressional endorsements gone. Pelosi personally told him to drop out. Schiff withdrew. Gallego publicly ate crow after defending him days earlier. SEIU California (750,000 members), the California Teachers Association, and California Professional Firefighters all pulled out. Both campaign co-chairs resigned. His ActBlue page went dark. Ad buys pulled.

By Saturday, Swalwell suspended his gubernatorial campaign, saying he was “deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment” while still denying the assault allegations. DHS is separately investigating him for allegedly employing an unauthorized Brazilian nanny paid with campaign funds.

Here’s the part that stings for the party: In 2025, Swalwell publicly said the criminal justice system should “throw the book” at people who commit violent or sexual crimes. His behavior was reportedly known by local Democratic officials and the Alameda County Democratic Party since 2013. Before the Chronicle published, Swalwell’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to advocates in the dead of night.

The bigger question now is whether Democrats will call on Swalwell to resign from Congress entirely. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna already has. So has Democrat Ro Khanna. But will those calls grow louder, or will the party quietly move on? And if local Democrats knew about this since 2013, why is it surfacing now, in the middle of a governor's race? The timing isn't coincidental. Swalwell was seen as the easiest to sacrifice. The suspicion among California political insiders is that fellow Democrats orchestrated the leak to thin the field. Here's why that matters: California runs a top-two open primary. Every candidate, regardless of party, competes on one ballot. The top two advance to the general election. With a crowded Democratic field splitting the vote and Republicans consolidating behind fewer candidates, there is a real possibility that two Republicans make the top two and no Democrat appears on the general election ballot at all. Knocking Swalwell out doesn't just punish a bad actor. It clears a lane. The question is for whom.

Trump Does Stupid Stuff, I Cannot Process This Early on a Monday

He posted the following after criticizing Pope Leo XIV, which, for the record, I do not have an issue with, even if it is incredibly unproductive.

I hate everything.

The Note Under the Keyboard: New Details in the Charlie Kirk Murder Case

According to a search warrant affidavit obtained by KSL. Tyler Robinson left a confession letter for his trans-identified partner, Lance Twiggs (”Luna”), hidden under Twiggs’ keyboard. “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.” Robinson planned the attack for over a week, pre-programmed an auto-text to Twiggs to find the note, and had hoped to flee and live with his partner afterward.

Investigators in September subpoenaed records from Discord servers named “Craftopia,” “Gamin,” and “The Corruption.” A group chat member posted, “Tyler killed Charlie!!!!” Robinson confirmed in the group: “It was me at UVU yesterday. I’m surrendering in a few moments.”

Forensic evidence includes fingerprints and a smeared palm print at the rooftop edge where Robinson dropped to the ground, a Google Maps route to UVU on his phone, and surveillance footage capturing his distinctive gait with the rifle concealed in his jeans as he crouched into a prone shooting position.

Robinson is back in court April 17. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. The defense wants to restrict press recording at trial.

Kirk was assassinated for his political views by someone who, per court documents, became “more political and left-leaning” in the year before the shooting. Political violence has a face. And it’s going to trial.

Artemis II is Home.

The Artemis II crew splashed down off San Diego on Friday, capping a nearly 10-day mission that took them 252,756 miles from Earth. That’s farther than any humans in history, surpassing Apollo 13’s record by over 4,000 miles.

The mission’s defining image: the first-ever “Earthset” photograph, Earth setting behind the moon from the far side. NASA called it the new “Earthrise.” And for 54 minutes, the crew witnessed a solar totality physically impossible to see from Earth’s surface, the moon completely covering the sun. Victor Glover’s reaction: “Humans probably have not evolved to see what we’re seeing.”

Commander Reid Wiseman named a crater “Carroll” for his late wife, who passed in 2020. He’ll formally submit the name to the International Astronomical Union.

In a week where diplomacy failed, and a congressman hid from rape allegations in a billionaire’s mansion, four astronauts came home from the moon. We all need a moment like this.

Quick Rundown

• DHS shutdown drags on. TSA workers got back pay after Trump signed an executive order, but DHS warned the April 10 check may be the last until Congress acts. House Freedom Caucus is blocking the Senate deal. Lawmakers return to DC this week.

• Orbán loses in Hungary. His 15-year reign ended Saturday as opposition leader Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won in a landslide, potentially taking a two-thirds supermajority. Notably, given Trump’s very public embrace of Orbán. Magyar immediately pledged closer EU and NATO ties.

• NJ Chick-fil-A shooting. Masked gunmen stormed a Union Township location Friday night, killing one and injuring six. Police say it appears targeted, not random. No arrests yet.

• "Screaming Mary's" son loses his LA life. ICE arrested the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the infamous Iran hostage crisis spokeswoman, along with his wife and their son in Los Angeles. Secretary Rubio revoked their green cards. They entered on Obama-era visas in 2014. The pampered LA life is over.

Let’s Talk About It

Did you expect the Iran talks to produce a deal, or did you see the blockade coming from a mile away?

The “Believe All Women” party knew about Swalwell since 2013. What’s your take on that?

Drop your answers in the comments. I’ll see you Wednesday.

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The window situation remains unresolved, and I still haven’t figured out the TV wall, but everything else? I love it. Actually love it, which — if you’ve ever poured a month of decisions and dollars into a space and then held your breath waiting to feel something — you know that’s not guaranteed.

It’s intimate. Cozy. The kind of room that wraps around you instead of demanding something from you. I walk in, and my shoulders drop half an inch. That’s the goal, honestly. I wanted a space that felt like mine, not a productivity aesthetic from Pinterest, not a content creator’s backdrop. Just a room that says yes, you can relax here, go make something.

And my husband built that for me. Patiently, without complaint, with actual skill. I don’t take that lightly.

Now. The windows.

Here’s the thing: I have no emotional resistance to spending money on things I want. Furniture, books, a good meal, zero internal conflict. But certain categories of spending make me irrationally annoyed, and window treatments are apparently on that list. After a full month of remodel spending, the idea of also paying for Roman shades has me behaving as if someone asked me to tip on a to-go order. Unreasonable? Completely. Do I understand it? Not even a little.

I’m thinking wood or reed Roman shades with heavy drapes. The inspo image above is the vibe, ignore the blue and the zebra print, we are obviously not doing that. But color, pattern, fabric weight? Still no idea. So for now I have grommet panels on a pressure rod. Muy classy.

If you have opinions, drop them in the comments. I genuinely need the help.

Ben Sasse: A Calling to Die

I watched the Ben Sasse interview on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast this week, and this one left a mark.

If you don’t know the story: Sasse, the former Nebraska senator, was diagnosed last December with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. By the time they found it, it had already spread. Five forms of cancer. Doctors gave him three to four months. He sat down with Douthat anyway — face visibly covered in dried blood from a drug that’s shrinking his tumors but won’t let his skin heal — and he was funny, clear-eyed, and at peace in a way that had nothing to do with denial.

That’s the thing that got me. It wasn’t performed peace. It wasn’t the practiced calm of someone who has rehearsed the right things to say about faith and suffering. He was genuine; you could feel it.

He talked about death plainly, calling it a “wicked thief,” something to be genuinely hated. He didn’t soften it. And then in almost the same breath, he said something I keep turning over: “I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.”

The illness, for him, wasn’t the interruption of a good life. It became the thing that finally told him the truth about himself.

At the end of the interview, Douthat asked if he felt ready to die. He was honest, he didn't feel ready, not exactly.

But then he talked about being able to approach God, to call him Father, Abba, Daddy, and said, quietly, “That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.” Douthat, a professional keeper of composure, choked up and could barely close out the episode.

I don’t think Douthat was moved by tragedy. I think he was moved by witnessing someone actually mean what they believe. I know I was.

As a Christian, I found myself convicted. Not in a guilt-spiral way, but in the way that happens when you see someone living out a faith you share with a clarity and a joy that you feel you fall short of. I want that. I want to draw closer to God.

And I hope — genuinely hope — that when my time comes, I can face it with even half his grace.

Go listen to the interview. It’ll do something to you.

What I Consumed

• Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? - The New Yorker

• Glenn Greenwald vs. Coleman Hughes Debate: Does Israel Control U.S. Foreign Policy? - Conversations with Colman

• The Mansion, the Heiress, the Jewel Heist, and Me: A Bel-Air Fairytale - Vanity Fair

• I Don’t Care If Gen Z Likes Me - The Free Press

Time to Dust Off the Grill

Am I the only one whose husband has a grill problem? I mean, this man has at least four types of grills. Well, technically, one is a smoker, one is a flat-top, one is gas, and he also has a charcoal grill.

To be clear, I am not complaining because when the temperatures rise, the grills get dusted off, and my days slaving over a stove become fewer.

As the days get longer and warmer, we are all looking for easy dinners that don’t heat up the house. A tried-and-true grilling recipe is always my go-to.

Let me answer some questions I know someone will ask.

• You can marinate the chicken ahead of time and have it ready to go.

• You can use chicken breast if you like less flavor. 😉

• The same goes for boneless skinless thighs, but they are better than boneless skinless chicken breast.

• If you cannot tell, I am not a fan of white chicken meat.

• Sazón can be found in the Hispanic/International food aisle of most grocery stores.

Enjoy my favorite grilled chicken recipe. Make extra and shred

for salads and sandwiches.

The Most Chaotic Race in Olympic History

Thirty-two men showed up. Fourteen finished. The one who crossed first hadn’t actually run most of it.

Welcome to the 1904 Olympic marathon, the race so catastrophically botched that people seriously considered removing the marathon from the Olympics entirely.

St. Louis, August 30th. The temperature was 90 degrees. Race officials had set up exactly one water station along the 24-mile course because the games director, James Sullivan, believed dehydration was actually good for athletes. Athletic science was at its peak in 1904.

The course ran on dusty country roads, open to traffic. Race officials rode in cars ahead of the runners, which sounds helpful until you realize those cars kicked up massive dust clouds that made breathing nearly impossible. One runner, William Garcia of California, inhaled so much dust he ended up in the hospital with internal hemorrhaging.

And that’s before we even get to the cast of characters.

The guy who hitched a ride

The first man to cross the finish line was American Fred Lorz, who received a hero’s welcome, got photographed with Alice Roosevelt, and was about to be handed a gold medal when someone figured out he’d spent a good chunk of the race riding in a car. When the car broke down, he jumped out, ran the last few miles, and let everyone think he’d won. He was banned for life by the Amateur Athletic Union, a ban that was quietly lifted just in time for him to win the Boston Marathon the following year.

Cool.

The Cuban postman who refused to lose

Félix Carvajal was a Cuban postman who showed up to the St. Louis World’s Fair, decided he was running the Olympic marathon, and somehow made it happen. He arrived at the starting line in full street clothes, long trousers, a white shirt, and walking shoes, very Cuban. A competitor took pity and cut his pants into shorts on the spot.

He hadn’t eaten in 40 hours. When a spectator refused to share his peaches, Carvajal stole them and ran. Later, he spotted an orchard, stopped to eat some apples, discovered they were rotten, got stomach cramps bad enough that he had to lie down for a nap mid-race, and still finished fourth.

Yo go papi!

The South African who got chased by dogs

Len Taunyane, one of the first Black Africans to compete in the modern Olympics, was chased nearly a mile off course by a pack of wild dogs and still managed to finish. He likely would have placed much higher without the detour. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by this at the time.

The actual winner, who probably should have died

Thomas Hicks spent the last ten miles of the race in agony. His support team, watching him deteriorate, made a decision: they fed him a mix of strychnine and egg whites, the first recorded instance of drug use in the modern Olympics. Strychnine, for context, is rat poison. In small doses, it stimulates the nervous system. In larger doses, it kills you.

Hicks spent the final miles hallucinating, believing the finish line was still 20 miles away. His support team essentially carried him across the finish line, holding him upright while he shuffled his feet as if still running. He had to be treated by four doctors afterward and might have died on the track without intervention.

His finishing time — 3 hours, 28 minutes, 53 seconds — remains the slowest in Olympic marathon history by half an hour. He never ran a marathon again.

The aftermath

James Sullivan, the games director who organized this entire disaster, later declared the marathon “indefensible on any ground, but historic.” Which is one way to describe it.

After the race, many argued it was too dangerous and should be abolished. It wasn’t — the marathon returned for the 1908 London Games — but the chaos left a mark. The 1908 marathon included the first anti-doping rule in Olympic history and significantly more water stations.

The whole thing reads like someone tried to design the worst possible conditions for a footrace and then handed out medals at the end. With a body count and a car ride thrown in for good measure.

The marathon survived. Barely.

The weekend has arrived, and I could not be more grateful!

It’s been 41 days of war coverage, and your girl needs a break. My plans this weekend are to put the decorative finishing touches on my office and spend some time outside cleaning up the yard. I am literally touching grass this weekend.

If the president could be chill this weekend, that would be awesome, but Vance and crew are headed to Islamabad to pow-pow with Iran, so my hopes are slim.

ICYMI

Rivera and Reeves are now LIVE Tuesday and Thursday at 12:30 pm EST exclusively on Substack for R&R paying subscribers!

Rivera and Reeves

Ep. 222 | Iran Ceasefire Chaos: Conflicting Plans, Missing Info & What's Really Happening

The ceasefire with Iran has a very big asterisk on it—and the media isn't helping anyone figure out what's actually in it. This week, Meseidy and Rachel break down the chaotic reporting surrounding the Iran negotiations: conflicting 10-point plans, a White House pushing back on its own president's statements, a mysteriously revived Ayatollah, and China quietly pulling strings behind the curtain. They also get into NATO's stunning refusal to open airspace during the conflict, why European allies are playing a dangerous game of ingratitude, and what the political consequences could look like heading into the midterms. Plus: the podcast class revolt, Lawrence O'Donnell's latest brain melt, summer grilling recommendations, and a cat who brought home a snake. It's the episode that covers everything—because everything is happening at once…

Listen now

21 days ago · 5 likes · Meseidy and Rachel Reeves

In today’s Brief:

• Melania steps to a microphone in the Cross Hall and resurrects the Epstein story on purpose.

• Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner land in Islamabad Saturday for the highest-level U.S.–Iran meeting since 1979.

• A former Army employee who exposed harassment inside Delta Force just got charged under the Espionage Act.

• Anthropic says its newest model is so good at hacking that only eleven companies on Earth are allowed to touch it.

• Plus: a judge accuses the Pentagon of acting like an autocracy, and Trump goes nuclear on Tucker.

Let’s get into the news!

“Epstein was not alone.” Melania breaks her silence and demands a hearing.

Thursday afternoon, Melania Trump walked into the Cross Hall, spoke for six minutes, took zero questions, and single-handedly resurrected a story her husband’s team has spent months trying to move past.

She denied being an Epstein victim. She denied friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell. She dismissed the 2002 “Dear GI” email as “trivial,” noting the Daily Beast, Carville, and HarperCollins UK have all retracted. Then she did the part nobody saw coming. She demanded a public, sworn-testimony congressional hearing for Epstein’s survivors.

“Now is the time for Congress to act,” she said. “Epstein was not alone.”

So the First Lady, whose husband pushed against the bipartisan transparency law that forced the FBI file release, just endorsed the exact hearings House Oversight Democrats have demanded since January. The beltway was stunned. The President told MS NOW he didn’t “know anything about” it beforehand.

This is stunning from a First Lady who is famously private. So why this week, with Iran peace talks two days away? Had she had enough, or is something about to drop, and she’s setting the terms first?

The real line wasn’t what she said about herself. It was what she said about everyone else. “Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized.” Every wealthy man who flew on that plane just got put on notice. By the First Lady. From the Cross Hall.

Then came the pushback. Within hours, Jim Acosta published a statement from Epstein’s survivors threading a fascinating needle. They’ve told their stories, they say, and being asked to tell them under oath in front of Congress is a “deflection.”

Let me get this straight. Melania offered them a microphone, a hearing room, and subpoena power. They called testifying a “burden.”

These are the same survivors whose advocates have spent years demanding accountability on TV, in op-eds, and in documentaries that carried zero perjury risk. The moment someone says, “Okay, say it under oath,” it becomes, sorry, I can’t, too retraumatizing. Maybe it’s easier to workshop the story in friendly media than say it where Jim Jordan gets to cross-examine.

Update after Publishing:

Vance to Islamabad: the highest-level U.S.–Iran sit-down since 1979

Saturday morning local time, VP JD Vance, envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner meet Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Islamabad. It’s the highest-level U.S.–Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution. Vance, now Trump’s designated “closer”, warned in Budapest that if Tehran doesn’t negotiate in good faith they’ll “find out that President Trump is not one to mess around with.”

The ceasefire is held together with duct tape and Truth Social posts. Per The Hill, Israel just launched its largest barrage on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran calls it a breach. Ghalibaf says three of ten clauses are violated. Trump told Netanyahu to “low-key it.” Meanwhile Iran is demanding $1-per-barrel in crypto to let tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. About 20,000 mariners are stranded in the Persian Gulf. Oil is flirting with $100 again.

The nuclear question is the only one that matters, and the press is treating it like an afterthought. The minimum for this war to end as anything but a failure: remove the 60% enriched uranium from Iran, dilute the 20% stockpile, suspend enrichment for years. If Iran keeps the capability, this “ceasefire” is just halftime. Mike Pence publicly warned Vance this week not to sign an “Obama-style” deal. No pressure.

The big question is, will this meeting happen, and will there ever be a deal?

A Delta Force whistleblower gets the Espionage Act

Courtney Williams, 40, held top secret clearance at Fort Bragg from 2010 to 2016. She was the on-the-record main character of a 2025 Politico Magazine feature adapted from Seth Harp’s book The Fort Bragg Cartel, which alleged rampant sexual harassment inside Delta Force.

Tuesday, the FBI arrested her. Wednesday, the complaint was unsealed in Raleigh federal court. She’s charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly transmitting national defense information to Harp across “more than 10 hours of phone calls” and “over 180 messages” between 2022 and 2025. Up to 10 years in prison. FBI Director Kash Patel went on X to tell other would-be leakers that more arrests are coming.

Harp’s response, per the Washington Post: “Former Delta Force operators disclose ‘national defense information’ on podcasts and YouTube shows every day, but the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit. This is a vindictive act of retaliation, plain and simple.”

DOJ’s theory is clean. NDA signed, classification understood, ten batches of documents handed over. The defense theory is also clean and uglier. Prosecute the woman who said “harassment” out loud while the guys cashing consulting fees off Zero Dark Thirty walk around Austin doing podcast rounds. Both can be true. Right now, the scoreboard reads: harassment whistleblower in jail, Pete Hegseth’s Department of War trying to lock reporters out of the Pentagon entirely.

Anthropic to the world: “Our new AI is too dangerous for you to use”

Anthropic announced this week that it will not release its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, to the public because it can already find and exploit software vulnerabilities better than nearly every human on Earth.

A major AI lab looked at what it built and said “nope, not for you.” Instead, Mythos Preview is being locked inside Project Glasswing. The eleven companies with access: AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. Anthropic is throwing in $100 million in usage credits and $4 million to open-source security groups.

Per PCMag, the model has already found “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities,” including a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD. Early versions were capable of “hiding their reasoning” and exhibited “strategic thinking and situational awareness, at times in service of unwanted actions.” Translation: it can hack your bank, your hospital, your power grid, and it knows how to lie about why.

Anthropic frames this as responsibility. Maybe it is. But offensive cyber capability just got privatized behind a velvet rope. Eleven tech and finance giants get a hacking god. The open-source maintainer working on FFmpeg in his spare bedroom gets a newsletter. Chinese state-backed attackers already have an autonomous version running on DeepSeek. That’s not a guardrail. That’s a moat.

Welcome to the new arms race.

Quick Rundown

• Judge checks the Pentagon. Judge Paul Friedman ruled Thursday that the “Department of War” violated his March order restoring NYT press access, writing that “suppression of political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy.” Pentagon has until April 16 to file a compliance declaration.

• White House: stop betting on the war, staff. After $760 million in oil futures changed hands in the two minutes before Trump paused the Iran strikes — and three Polymarket accounts cleared $600,000 on the ceasefire timing — the White House sent staff a federal-ethics “refresher.” Blumenthal and Kim have a bill to ban war-related prediction markets.

• Trump goes thermonuclear on Tucker, Megyn, Candace, and Alex Jones. In a 500-word Truth Social tirade, Trump called them “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” after Carlson urged troops to refuse Iran orders and Owens called for Trump’s removal under the 25th. MAGA’s Iran civil war is no longer subtext.

• 70+ Democrats intensify 25th Amendment calls. House Dems are publicly calling for Trump’s removal over his Iran rhetoric. They don’t have the votes. Jeffries and Schumer are pushing war powers resolutions instead.

• Swalwell’s misconduct cloud. Eric Swalwell is facing unverified sexual misconduct allegations ahead of California’s June gubernatorial primary, with Villaraigosa and Porter circling. Campaign calls it “outrageous.”

• Planned Parenthood lost $29.3 million on $2.14 billion in revenue while performing a record 434,450 abortions. Taxpayer funding still grew by $39.8 million. Pap tests and cancer screenings fell.

Let’s Talk About It

Two questions before I let you go:

Be honest: what do you think Melania is getting ahead of, or is she just fed up? Drop your best theory, wrong answers encouraged.

Lightning round: Which of the eleven Project Glasswing companies would you trust LEAST with a hacking supermodel? Apple? JPMorgan? Microsoft? Amazon?

Reply in the comments.

See you Monday. Stay nosy.

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The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.

A ceasefire was announced Tuesday night. As of this writing, it barely qualifies as one; Iran’s own statement made clear that this does not signify the end of the war, and fighting has continued. Iran just added a new condition: it will not open the Strait while Israel continues operations in Lebanon. The U.S. and Israel say Lebanon isn’t part of the deal. So here we are. I don’t have a blanket opposition to this conflict; if it ultimately ends the Iran threat, that may prove to have been worth it. But that remains very much to be determined, and anyone telling you otherwise right now is selling you something.

What I do want to talk about is the tug-of-war over the America First flag. Because if this Iran conflict has accomplished anything, it's given us the full monty on how much of the large podcast class of the right has to do with conservatism, which turns out to be very little.

Read more

Congratulations, we made it through another day without any civilization being totally annihilated. If we don’t laugh, we cry.

As for what's on the schedule today — the President is at the White House with no travel planned, meeting with the Secretary of Agriculture, sitting for an interview, and then hosting NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office at 3:30 — because managing a ceasefire that may or may not be holding wasn't enough for one week.

Karoline Leavitt briefs the press at 1:00, which should be fun. Meanwhile, VP Vance is in Budapest, wrapping up a two-day visit with Viktor Orbán — bilateral meetings, remarks on the U.S.-Hungary partnership, and a very visible show of support four days before Hungary's election. The man went from possibly heading to Pakistan for nuclear talks to rallying with Europe's most controversial conservative. Full plate all around.

Waking up this morning, trying to decode what is going on with this “ceasefire” has my head spinning and chugging my third cup of coffee.

In today’s Brief:

• Iran accepted a two-week ceasefire — then launched missiles at Israel minutes later. Everyone’s telling a different story about what was agreed to.

• Iran’s 10-point “peace plan” demands we accept their nuclear program, pay them war damages, and leave the region. Sure.

• The Strait of Hormuz is “open” — if you pay Iran $2 million per ship in yuan or crypto. That’s not freedom of navigation, it’s a toll booth.

• Eight U.S. scientists tied to NASA, the Air Force, and Los Alamos are dead or missing, and nobody’s connecting the cases

• Artemis II broke the Apollo 13 distance record and named a crater after a commander’s late wife

• Georgia chose MTG’s replacement — and the margin tells you something about where voters stand on the war

Let’s get into the news!

The Ceasefire Happened. Then Iran Kept Firing. So What Exactly Did We Agree To?

Here’s the problem with this story: every player involved is telling a different version of what happened, what was agreed to, and who won. So let’s walk through it.

Trump set an 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline. Two hours before it hit, he announced a “double-sided ceasefire” brokered by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif — whose army chief was on the phone all night with Vance, Witkoff, and Iran’s Foreign Minister. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed acceptance. Talks begin in Islamabad on April 10. Markets rallied. The S&P 500 swung from a 1.2% loss to a slight gain.

And then — minutes after Trump posted on Truth Social — Iran launched another barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel. Sirens across Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar all activated air defenses. Meanwhile, Israel said it was continuing strikes inside Iran despite the announcement. So. That’s the “ceasefire.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting — and messy. Trump posted a statement from Iran’s Foreign Minister confirming acceptance and promising “safe passage” through the Strait of Hormuz. But Iran’s Supreme National Security Council released a very different statement — bombastic, defiant, claiming this “does not signify the termination of the war” and that “our hands remain upon the trigger.” And here’s the kicker: Iran is now claiming the U.S. accepted their 10-point plan as the basis for negotiations. Pakistan reportedly communicated this to Tehran.

Let’s talk about what’s in that 10-point plan, because it reads like a wishlist drafted by someone who thinks they won this war. Iran’s demands include: a U.S. commitment to no further aggression, continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment rights, lifting of all U.S. primary and secondary sanctions, termination of all UN Security Council and IAEA resolutions targeting Iran, payment of war damages to Iran, withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region, and cessation of hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon.

I’m sorry — we’re paying them damages? They want us to accept their nuclear program and leave? There is zero chance the U.S. agreed to this in principle. But the fact that Iran is selling that narrative to their people — and to the world — we’re negotiating with people who lie as a strategy.

Now, let’s talk about the Strait “opening.” Yes, the Strait of Hormuz will technically be open during the ceasefire. But Iran and Oman are charging a toll — an estimated $2 million per vessel, payable in Chinese yuan or cryptocurrency, with passage coordinated by Iran’s armed forces. At that rate, Iran could pull in $600–800 million a month — during a ceasefire — while the world’s oil supply runs through their toll booth. So everyone else pays more for oil, Iran collects a fortune, and they get a two-week break to resupply. Not a bad deal — for them. (Reports indicate Oman has been named in the arrangement, though Oman’s posture on accepting its share of the revenue remains unclear.)

Who exactly is negotiating? Vance will lead the U.S. delegation in Islamabad. Iran’s delegation will be led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. But here’s the question that keeps hanging over everything: Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — who’d been reported unconscious and in a coma — suddenly gained consciousness and issued a written order for the ceasefire via runners passing handwritten notes. State TV read out his declaration. Reports also indicate China applied significant pressure, with Wang Yi personally making 26 phone calls to parties in the region. No surprise since China gets a significant amount of oil from the Strait. So the Supreme Leader rose from the dead — or at least from a coma — just in time. How convenient.

Now the part I want to keep in front of you. Before the ceasefire, the left and the podcast genius class — Tucker, Candace, Dave Smith, Greenwald, etc. — were screaming that Trump was an unhinged maniac about to destroy civilization. The moment he agreed to talk, the left pivoted to “he chickened out.” You cannot have it both ways. Anyone who was panicking last night needs to take a breath. The U.S. had already struck roughly 50 military targets on Kharg Island — bunkers, radar, ammunition storage — while deliberately sparing the oil loading docks. Kharg handles 90–96% of Iran’s crude exports. You don’t bomb what you might want to seize or use as a bargaining chip. That leverage is now formally on the table in Islamabad.

But am I confident this is over? No. I’m not sure we’re in a better negotiating position than we were before, because the Iranian regime are professional liars — and they’re already spinning this as a victory. Two weeks is a long time for a regime that fires missiles during a ceasefire.

“Our hands remain upon the trigger.” They told you who they are.

Eight Scientists. Three Agencies. No Arrests. No Answers. And No One’s Asking Why.

Eight researchers connected to the most sensitive programs in American defense and space are dead or missing. Fox News’ Will Cain spotlighted the cases, and it’s weird.

The short version: Monica Reza (NASA/JPL rocket scientist) — vanished hiking in California, no trace. Gen. William McCasland (Air Force Research Lab, professional connection to Reza) — missing since February. Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez (both Los Alamos) — disappeared separately, both left behind phones, wallets, keys. Carl Grillmair (Caltech/NASA astrophysicist) — shot dead on his porch, suspect charged, no motive, they didn’t know each other. Frank Maiwald (NASA/JPL) — died July 2024, cause of death never disclosed, no autopsy.

Authorities have not connected these cases. The Bernalillo County Sheriff told Newsweek they’re “looking into” possible connections. Congressman Burlison has requested FBI involvement. Some will dismiss this as a conspiracy theory. But there is a pattern — NASA, Air Force Research, Los Alamos — and the question is why nobody with a badge seems to be asking.

Artemis II Is Coming Home — and Someone Watched a Solar Eclipse From the Moon

In a week of wall-to-wall dread, here’s something good. The Artemis II crew broke the Apollo 13 distance record, the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen are heading home after a lunar flyby that produced the first-ever “Earthset” photo and a 54-minute solar eclipse visible only from their position, never seen by a human before.

NASA released the photos on Tuesday, and they are stunning. The “Earthset” — Earth dipping behind the moon with Australia visible — was captured at 6:41 p.m. ET Monday. The lunar surface shots show ridged craters and long shadows along the boundary between day and night. Victor Glover said the sun’s corona created “a halo almost around the entire moon” and that “humans probably have not evolved to see what we’re seeing.” He’s not wrong.

The crew named two craters. Integrity, after their spacecraft. And Carroll, after Commander Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman, who passed in 2020. Splashdown is Friday near San Diego. Trump called the crew “modern-day pioneers.” For one moment this week, the country felt something together that wasn’t fear.

Georgia Picked MTG’s Replacement — and the Margin Matters

Trump-endorsed Republican Clay Fuller defeated Democrat Shawn Harris 56% to 43% to claim MTG’s old GA-14 seat. Fuller was always favored — this district went for Trump by 37 points in 2024. But Harris outraised Fuller nearly 5-to-1 ($6.5M to $1.3M), ran hard against the Iran war calling it “a war of choice,” and still lost by 13. Fuller’s message — “our country is safer” — held. A 37-point Trump district producing a 13-point margin in a special election isn’t a red alarm. But it’s a yellow light heading into midterms.

For Fun:

Quick Rundown

• Iran-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah released American journalist Shelly Kittleson after a week in captivity in Baghdad. She was kidnapped March 31, appeared in a video reading from a script praising her captors, and was released Tuesday. The militia said this “initiative will not be repeated in future.” Chilling phrasing.

• Federal authorities warn pro-Iran hackers breached U.S. infrastructure. FBI, NSA, and CISA issued a joint warning Tuesday: hackers allied with Iran exploited vulnerabilities in industrial control systems. Ports and water plants flagged as potential targets.

• Upper middle class is now the largest income group in America — 31% of U.S. households, up from ~10% in 1979, according to AEI. The middle class is shrinking upward, not downward. Good news that no one will report because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

• Jennifer Siebel Newsom is making Gavin’s 2028 problem worse. Scolded reporters at a press conference, went on Instagram calling Bondi and Noem’s exits proof of a “war on women.” Gavin now polls behind Kamala in a 2028 primary. Miranda Devine: “Gavin’s first partner is a ‘New’sance.”

• New Nancy Guthrie ransom notes sent to TMZ — sender claims to know where her body is, demands half a bitcoin. The second note says she was last seen in Sonora, Mexico. Savannah returned to the Today show the same day without mentioning her mother.

Let’s Talk About It

Be honest, do you trust this ceasefire? Iran fired missiles during the announcement and is already claiming we agreed to their terms. What’s your read?

On something lighter: what do you name a crater on the Moon? Wiseman named one after his late wife, and I’m not over it. Wrong answers welcome.

Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Friday.

Subscribe now

The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.

Today it is repeated almost as an involuntary response during any abortion debate, like when a doctor taps your knee to check your reflexes.

But when a movement is built on the illusion of bodily autonomy — to cover for its lack of respect for life and to evade moral responsibility — it’s not surprising that the time would come for that same movement to toss the slogan aside. Enter: a 31-page peer-reviewed argument for chemically or physically restraining a girl to end her pregnancy against her will. For her own good, of course.

Good-bye, “My body, my choice.” Hello, “Do as you’re told, honey.”

What the Paper Actually Says

The article was published in Ethics, the University of Chicago’s flagship philosophy journal, authored by Kimberley Brownlee — Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy at UBC — and Alyssa Izatt, a UBC PhD candidate in moral philosophy.

Read more

I hope your Easter weekend was filled with more peace than the news cycle and the President’s Truth Social feed, which got a little colorful.

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate the current pinned post on Sec. Rubio’s X profile.

It has riled up a few left-wing outlets, and I am here for it.

IKYMI

We’ve got a lot to cover today, so grab your coffee and let’s get into it.

In today’s Brief:

• A wounded American colonel hid in an Iranian mountain crevice for 36 hours with nothing but a handgun and a prayer — and the rescue mission that brought him home is one for the history books.

• Trump dropped an Easter Sunday f-bomb on Iran and gave them until Tuesday at 8 p.m. to open the Strait of Hormuz or watch their power plants disappear.

• Marco Rubio revoked the green cards of Soleimani’s niece and her daughter, who were living their best Instagram life in LA while calling America the “Great Satan.”

• Artemis II flies by the Moon today — the first crewed lunar mission since 1972 — and you can watch it on literally every streaming platform.
  

The Rescue of “Dude 44”: An American Colonel, a Mountain Crevice, and One of the Most Daring Missions in U.S. History

It’s Good Friday. An F-15E Strike Eagle with the call sign “Dude 44” is conducting combat operations over southwestern Iran when it gets hit. Both crew members eject. The pilot is recovered quickly. But the weapons systems officer — a highly respected Air Force colonel whose name still hasn’t been released — lands deep in the Zagros Mountains, 200 miles inside enemy territory. He’s seriously wounded. And he’s alone.

The following story is destined to be a movie script, and it all played out on Easter weekend.

Despite his injuries, this man climbed a 7,000-foot ridge and wedged himself into a mountain crevice. He had a handgun. That’s it. Meanwhile, Iranian state television was broadcasting a $60,000 bounty for his capture and urging civilians and tribesmen to hunt him down. “Thousands of these savages were hunting him down,” Trump told Axios.

Then came the radio message that almost derailed everything. From his hiding spot, the colonel transmitted: “God is good.” Officials in Washington initially feared it was a trap; the phrase sounded too close to “Allahu Akbar,” and they worried Iran had captured him and was sending false signals to lure more Americans into an ambush. Turns out, the man is simply a man of deep faith. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later posted the same phrase on X.

Once the CIA confirmed his identity and location — described as finding “a needle in a haystack” — they launched a deception campaign, spreading false intel inside Iran that U.S. forces already had the airman and were moving him overland. While Iran chased a ghost, 100 special operations forces led by SEAL Team 6 moved in. Delta Force and Army Rangers were on standby. Four B-1 bombers dropped nearly 100 satellite-guided bombs. MQ-9 Reaper drones struck anyone who got within kilometers of the colonel’s position.

The extraction wasn’t clean. Two MC-130J transport planes got stuck in the terrain of a makeshift airstrip inside Iran. Rather than let $200 million worth of sensitive military equipment fall into enemy hands, commanders ordered them destroyed, along with two MH-6 Little Bird helicopters. Three replacement aircraft were sent in to complete the exfil.

Just before midnight Saturday, the colonel was out of Iranian airspace and on his way to Kuwait for medical treatment. At 12:08 a.m. Easter Sunday, Trump posted two words that said everything: “WE GOT HIM!”

You cannot write this stuff! Down and trapped behind enemy lines on Good Friday, saved by Easter Sunday.

No American rescuers were killed. The colonel sustained serious injuries but is expected to recover. Trump will hold a press conference at 1 p.m. today from the White House to discuss the operation.

Here’s what you won’t hear on most networks: this was the first time a U.S. fighter jet was shot down in hostile territory in over 20 years. The media would love to frame that as a failure. But this is a story of American dedication, excellence, and grit. The fact that we sent 100 operators 200 miles into enemy territory, fought our way to a wounded man hiding in a crevice, and brought him home alive — destroying $200 million in equipment rather than leave a screw behind — is not a failure. It’s a statement.

We do not leave Americans behind.

Side Note: How was the Left doing while all of this was happening?

Trump — who typically flies to Mar-a-Lago every weekend — stayed in Washington. The White House called a lid at 11:08 a.m. Saturday, locking out the press pool as the president received constant in-person briefings from Secretary Hegseth on the rescue operation.

So naturally, the geniuses on Bluesky and left-wing social media did what they do best: they started a viral rumor that Trump was at Walter Reed because he was sick or in critical condition. Anonymous posts claimed roads near the hospital were blocked. It trended for hours. White House communications director Steven Cheung eventually had to go on X to shut it down, confirming Trump had been working nonstop in the Oval Office. Because apparently, the idea that the Commander-in-Chief might be quietly managing the rescue of a wounded American airman trapped behind enemy lines in Iran was just too boring a theory.

No — must be a health crisis. These people are unserious.

Trump’s Easter F-Bomb: “Open the F*in’ Strait, You Crazy Bastards”**

Look, I’ll be the first to say that dropping f-bombs on Easter Sunday is not exactly what Emily Post would recommend. But let’s be real — I’ll take a president who curses at a terrorist regime over one who spent Easter 2024 declaring Trans Day of Visibility. Priorities.

Here’s what Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Yes, he signed off with “Praise be to Allah.” CNN’s Jake Tapper had to read the whole thing on air with a parental warning. The man is a content machine.

The substance behind the showmanship: Trump has given Iran until Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil flows — or he starts hitting power plants and bridges. He told Fox News’ Trey Yingst there’s a chance for a deal by Monday. He told Axios that the U.S. is in “deep negotiations” with envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are leading talks through Pakistani, Egyptian, and Turkish mediators. But he also made it crystal clear: “If they don’t make a deal and fast, I’m considering blowing everything up and taking the oil.”

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, fired back on X, accusing Trump of “following Netanyahu’s commands” and dragging America into “a living HELL for every single family.” Which is rich coming from the guy whose regime just offered a bounty to civilians to hunt down a wounded American airman.

The question now: is Tuesday a real deadline, or is it leverage? With mediators still working and no breakthrough in sight, we’ll know soon enough. Either way, the pause on energy strikes expires today, and the clock is ticking.

Soleimani’s Niece Was Living Her Best LA Life While Calling America “The Great Satan.” Rubio Said: Not Anymore.

On Friday, ICE agents in Los Angeles arrested Hamideh Soleimani Afshar — the niece of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror mastermind Trump turned into a crater and “died like a dog” in January 2020 — along with her 25-year-old daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny. Rubio had revoked both of their green cards.

The State Department’s case against her reads like a parody. While living in the United States, Afshar promoted Iranian regime propaganda, celebrated attacks against American soldiers, praised the new Supreme Leader, and called America the “Great Satan,” all while posting photos of her lavish LA lifestyle on Instagram. Louis Vuitton hoodies. Champagne in the desert next to a helicopter. Bikini photos. Her daughter was clubbing in Miami and partying in Las Vegas.

Here’s the kicker: Afshar entered the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2015, was granted asylum in 2019, and got her green card in 2021, under the Biden administration. She then traveled back to Iran at least four times. DHS called her asylum claim “fraudulent.” You think?

Meanwhile, women in Iran are being sentenced to death for showing too much hair. But sure, the niece of their top terror general needed asylum in America, where she could sip champagne and trash our country from the comfort of her $740,000 Tujunga home.

Rubio said it plainly on X: “The Trump Administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes.”

Good riddance.

Artemis II Flies By the Moon Today — Here’s How to Watch

In news that has nothing to do with war, cursing, or deportations, humans are going back to the Moon today.

NASA’s Artemis II mission, which launched on April 1st carrying astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will make its historic lunar flyby today. This is the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Let that sink in — over 50 years.

Here’s the schedule (all times ET):

• 12:41 a.m.: Orion enters the Moon’s gravitational sphere of influence

• 1:00 p.m.: Live coverage begins on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Hulu, HBO Max, Roku, NASA+, and YouTube

• 1:56 p.m.: The crew is expected to break Apollo 13’s record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth

• 2:45 p.m.: Lunar observations begin

• 6:44 p.m.: Communications blackout as Orion passes behind the Moon (~40 minutes)

• 7:02 p.m.: Closest approach to the Moon — just 4,070 miles above the surface

• 7:07 p.m.: Maximum distance from Earth: 252,760 miles

• 7:25 p.m.: “Earthrise” — Earth comes back into view

• 8:35–9:32 p.m.: Solar eclipse as seen from Orion

Watch it. Show your kids. This is the kind of thing that reminds you what this country is capable of when we’re reaching for something bigger than ourselves.

Quick Rundown

• March jobs report crushed expectations: The economy added 178,000 jobs in March — triple the 59,000 predicted — and unemployment dipped to 4.3%. Healthcare led the way with 76,000 new positions, while federal government employment fell by 18,000. Good news, but rising energy prices from the Iran war could cool things off.

• White House Easter Egg Roll is today: First Lady Melania Trump’s 2026 edition features a patriotic theme for America’s 250th birthday, 40,000 hand-dyed eggs, 150 live baby chicks (a first), a sensory-friendly egg hunt, an AI Creation Station from Meta, a NASA Lunar Exploration activity, and storytime with the First Lady, Second Lady Usha Vance, and Karoline Leavitt.

• Trump’s 1 p.m. press conference: The president will address the nation from the White House press room today to provide details on the F-15E rescue mission and answer questions from reporters. Expect fireworks.

• Iran deal deadline looms: With negotiations ongoing through Pakistani, Egyptian, and Turkish mediators, Trump’s Tuesday 8 p.m. deadline approaches. Witkoff and Kushner are reportedly exchanging texts directly with Iran’s foreign minister. If no deal is reached, Trump has promised power plants and bridges start falling.

• IDF struck a mobile ballistic missile launcher in Tabriz over the weekend, continuing joint U.S.-Israeli operations to degrade Iran’s missile capabilities as the war enters its sixth week.

Let’s Talk About It

That rescue story is absolutely unreal. A wounded man, alone in enemy mountains for 36 hours with a handgun, while thousands hunt him — and we brought him home. What part of the rescue mission hit you the hardest?

Are you watching the Artemis II flyby today? Be honest: did you even know we had astronauts headed to the Moon right now?

Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you on Wednesday.

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