I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the weekend! My plan is recovery. Last weekend was Independence Day weekend, and I have yet to catch up on regular life tasks this week. So an exciting weekend of laundry and cleaning ahead, and I am actually cool with that.

In today’s Read:

• Robinson’s own boyfriend read the confession into the record. Candace Owens keeps moving the goalposts. Get off her train.

• McConnell’s been hospitalized since June 14, and his party will only say “he’s improving.” A Democratic governor is the one asking questions.

• Trump emptied the election commission the day after his DOJ threatened election officials with prison. Same campaign, two moves.

• Quick Rundown: Spencer Pratt’s fraud video, Carroll’s $5.8 million, another strike on Iran, the ICE-obstruction judge walks, Platner quits, Trump’s Arlington arch, and the Smithsonian report.

The “Total Patsy” Theory Died This Week. His Boyfriend Killed It on the Stand.

The Story.

Tyler Robinson, 23, is charged with aggravated murder in the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Since the last edition, the preliminary hearing ran several more days in Provo and the evidence got a lot heavier.

Prosecutors played a recorded interview with Lance Twiggs, Robinson’s romantic partner, who told investigators Robinson confessed in several ways: face to face, by text, and in a handwritten note. One message read, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.” Twiggs said Robinson asked to borrow a Dremel tool about a month earlier to engrave bullets “for a hunting trip,” and forensics matched that exact Dremel to the engravings on casings found in the rifle and in Robinson’s home.

The engravings included “hey fascist, catch” and “bella ciao.” The court also, by accident, put Robinson’s handwritten confession note on the screen. Utah’s highest court declined to hear the defense’s appeal of Judge Tony Graf’s rulings on cameras and hearsay. Graf decides at the close of the hearing whether the case goes to trial.

The Left read. A careful evidence build. PBS, CNN, and the wires cover the confession texts, the Dremel match, the DNA, the boyfriend on the stand, with the defense’s DNA objection noted and moved past. Straight true-crime procedural.

The Right’s read. Fox and the smaller sites lead with the confession and the “hey fascist, catch” casings. What went missing this round is louder than what got said: the “Tyler Robinson never set foot on that campus, he’s a patsy” faction that ran hot in June has mostly gone silent as the confession texts landed, except Candace of course.

What both sides are skipping. The defense’s live fight isn’t the confession. It’s the DNA. Lawyer Michael Burt is hammering the analyst on whether the sample can be pinned to Robinson at all, and that’s the only real challenge going down right now. But it is also the defense's job.

I am not about to be polite. For almost a year Owens has run a "just asking questions" operation on this murder, and the questions keep changing because the last batch got demolished. "Total patsy." "Tyler Robinson was never even on campus." Then the state put his Dodge Challenger on UVU's cameras four times on September 10, the footage flatly contradicting her, and this week his own boyfriend read the confession texts into the record. So watch the pivot happen in real time. On her feed this week it's not "never on campus" anymore.

Now it’s the phone screen was doctored, the ballistics don’t add up, Twiggs testified Tyler “wasn’t political,” and my personal favorite, the whole hearing is a “Zionist PR” operation against her personally. “He wasn’t there” collapses and the answer isn’t “I was wrong.” It’s a fresh theory by dinner.

Notice what she is not doing. She isn’t sitting down for the obvious move, the hours-long livestream taking the hearing apart exhibit by exhibit, in real time, the way you would if you actually had the goods and could dismantle the state’s case on camera. That would mean holding a year of contradictory claims still long enough for people to line them up next to each other. So instead you get one-liners and quote-tweets of anonymous accounts about phone glass. The drip lets her keep moving. A livestream would pin her.

Here’s the tell inside the tell. Candace offered to help Robinson’s defense. They never called. And the defense hasn’t floated a single one of her theories as grounds for reasonable doubt. Not the “never on campus” line, not the doctored phone screen. None of it. Their actual argument is a narrow, technical fight over whether the DNA analyst can pin the sample to Robinson, and nothing more than that. So run her logic all the way to the end. You can’t say the defense is in on some plot to hang Robinson out as a patsy, because then why would Candace, his loudest booster, offer to work with them? But when they pass on her help, the pass itself gets spun into proof of something. Heads she’s right, tails she’s still right. Goalpost moved, again.

Then the part I won’t dress up. This week Owens called the hearing a “show trial,” took a swipe at Erika Kirk’s tears, and posted that “science has no place in a discussion about men made of steel and grieving widows. In fact, it’s demonic.”

A widow buried her husband. Candace turned it into content and a subscriber drive.

So let me say it plainly. I don’t file Candace Owens under “the right” anymore. She’s in it for Candace. Her numbers are climbing because a chunk of the left now cheers her for kicking TPUSA and the president, and grief-farming Erika Kirk pays the bills. If you’re still on her train after this week, after the footage, after the confession, after the goalposts sprinted down the field one more time, get off. This isn’t questioning a case. It’s selling a story she can’t keep straight to an audience that stopped checking.

Watch whether Graf binds the case over (he will). Watch whether Owens ever does the real-time, evidence-by-evidence livestream, or just keeps drip-posting theories with a 24-hour shelf life. And watch her follower count, because it tells you exactly who she’s performing for now.

She keeps moving the goalposts. The hearing keeps not caring.

Mitch McConnell Has Been in a Hospital for a Month. Republican Won’t Tell You Why.

The Story.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, 84, has been hospitalized since June 14 and hasn’t appeared in public or said a word in nearly a month. His office offers one sentence on repeat: he “continues to improve” and is “working closely with his staff.” No diagnosis. No prognosis. Emergency dispatch recordings reported by multiple outlets say responders were sent to his Washington home for an unconscious person in cardiac arrest, with CPR in progress. He chairs the Senate Rules Committee and a defense appropriations panel, and the Senate is back to a full calendar. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, published a letter asking McConnell for a real update, writing that “allowing speculation to continue in the media is not fair to the Senator or to Kentuckians.”

The Left’s read. A transparency failure and a governance problem. Beshear presses, former Sen. Barbara Boxer says she’s “stunned” at the silence, and The Hill runs the broader “what does a lawmaker owe voters” debate.

The Right’s read. Split, and the split is the story. GOP leaders rolled out near-identical statements that they’ve “spoken with” McConnell, and he’s recovering. And a big piece of the right isn’t buying the choreography: conservatives who spent years demanding transparency are calling the coordinated messaging its own cover-up. CNN’s own conservative commentator flagged the matching talking points as “weird.”

What both sides are skipping. The vacancy math, which is the part that actually decides things. In 2024 Kentucky’s Republican legislature passed a law, over Beshear’s veto, that strips the governor of the power to appoint a replacement senator. So a McConnell exit doesn’t hand a Democratic governor a pick. It triggers a special election on a tight clock. And the cardiac-arrest detail sits in the “rumor” pile only because the office won’t confirm or deny it, which is exactly how a silence turns into a conspiracy generator.

Quick context, because this is the part that changes the stakes. Everybody assumes a senator leaving mid-term means the governor picks the next one. Not here. Kentucky’s own GOP wrote that power out of Beshear’s hands in 2024. If the seat opens, Beshear issues a proclamation, and the state runs a special election it has never actually run before, with a practical September 1 deadline to line it up with November’s vote. So the “what happens next” isn’t a backroom appointment. It’s an untested law and a calendar nobody’s tested against a real vacancy.

Look, I don’t wish the man ill, and I’m not going to pretend a health event at 84 is a scandal by itself. Both parties do this, and they all do it badly. Dianne Feinstein’s staff ran her Senate office while she was visibly gone. Fetterman’s early weeks were a fog nobody would describe. This is a bipartisan bad habit, and it’s insulting every single time.

The line we are being fed, “He’s improving,” is not reassuring and, coming from his press aide, does not meet the threshold for informing the public. A sitting United States senator has been in a hospital for four weeks, reportedly went into cardiac arrest, and his party’s answer is a group text of identical reassurances. We can’t keep doing this. The people asking for real answers are a Democratic governor and a chunk of the online right, and the people running interference are McConnell’s own leadership team reading from the same script. When the reassurance is that coordinated, start asking what it’s hiding.

Watch whether the office ever puts a diagnosis on paper. Watch whether Beshear moves toward a proclamation, because that’s the moment this stops being gossip and becomes a Senate seat in play. And watch that September 1 date, because Kentucky’s untested vacancy law is about to get a live trial nobody planned for.

A month is a long time to say nothing. Somebody owes Kentucky a straight sentence.

Trump Fired the Whole Election Commission. The Day Before, His DOJ Threatened to Jail Election Officials.

The Story.

On Thursday, July 9, the White House removed all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency built solely for election administration. The two Democrats, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were fired by email. The lone Republican, Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign. All three were Senate-confirmed. With zero commissioners, the agency has no quorum, so it can’t act. It can’t certify voting systems or update the federal voter-registration form, four months before the November midterms. Many states require that federal certification before they’ll buy or use voting machines. The firing leans on the Supreme Court’s Slaughter ruling expanding a president’s power to remove independent officials.

Now rewind one day. On July 7 and 8, Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent letters to all 50 states warning that any election officer who “knowingly retains noncitizens” on the rolls “could be subject to criminal liability,” and gave states five days to explain their compliance. Michigan’s Secretary of State was named directly. Here’s the piece that recasts the whole thing: the DOJ has been suing states for voter data and losing, 11 times in district court, with the Sixth Circuit becoming the first appeals court to affirm one of those losses, siding with Michigan. The criminal-threat letters showed up after the courtroom strategy collapsed.

The Left’s read. Seizing the machinery. Schumer calls the EAC firing “a brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast,” and the Brennan Center ties it to a pattern of election interference. The Dhillon letters get filed as an intimidation campaign against blue-state officials.

The Right’s read. Lawful housekeeping. Townhall and the pro-administration read frame the firing as a president using the removal power the Court just handed him and staffing a commission with people “aligned” on election security. Noncitizens shouldn’t be on the rolls, the argument goes, and officials who won’t clean them off can answer for it.

What both sides are skipping. The EAC doesn’t run elections; states do. So “seizing election control” oversells what one gutted commission can do. The durable move is quieter: strip the agency of a quorum and it can’t be captured by anyone, but it also can’t do its normal certification job at the exact moment states need it. And nobody’s connecting the dots the administration is drawing in plain sight. The Slaughter removal ruling, the Dhillon prosecution letters, the mail-voting executive order, and now the EAC firing aren’t four separate “Trump fires people” stories. They’re one campaign aimed at the election machinery, and the press keeps covering the pieces one at a time. One more thing both sides skip: the Dhillon letters threaten the officials personally, not any actual illegal votes, and they came after eleven courtroom losses. As election-law expert David Becker put it, if the DOJ believed officials had committed crimes, it would indict them, not issue warnings by mail.

This one isn’t cut and dry, and I won’t pretend it is.

Start with what’s real, because my side is right about the underlying worry. There might not be proof of noncitizens voting in numbers that swing an election. But “we haven’t caught it” is not the same as “the door is locked,” and in a lot of states the door is propped wide open. California and plenty of blue states run elections loose enough that there’s no real check on a ballot before it hits the processing center to be counted. Ballot harvesting is legal. Signature rules are a formality in places, a mark that’s supposed to have a witness, except the witness never has to give their name. You don’t have to film someone casting a fraudulent vote to see the hole. You don’t leave a loophole open just because nobody’s proven it’s being climbed through, and anyone who’s ever locked a door they weren’t sure would get tried understands that instinct fine.

And here’s the part both parties talk around. The doubt itself is the damage. When a big chunk of the country isn’t sure the count is clean, that’s a real injury to the system whether or not one illegal ballot exists, and restoring that confidence takes actual changes, not a press release. So on the goal, tighten the rules, close the gaps, make people trust the number again, I’m here for it.

Now the execution, because this is where I get dicey. The DOJ has gone 0-for-11 in district court trying to force states to hand over their full voter files, and just lost its first appeal when the Sixth Circuit sided with Michigan. Before you write that off as liberal judges covering for a scam, look closer. Some of the reddest states in the country, Utah and Idaho among them, refused the exact same demand, on the grounds that handing Washington unredacted rolls full of Social Security and driver’s license numbers breaks their own state privacy laws. Only two states signed the full agreement. When Idaho and a federal appeals court end up in the same spot, “activist courts” doesn’t cover it.

So let’s run the test. If a Democratic administration emptied the entire election commission and had its DOJ threaten red-state clerks with prison four months before a midterm, the right would lose its mind, and it would be right to. The only reason Democrats aren’t running this exact play is that the current setup already tilts their way, so they don’t have to. That’s not a moral high ground. It’s just whose turn it is.

Does Trump get to act surprised anyone’s upset? No. He ran on election integrity, this is the brand, and the base wanted teeth. Do I think emptying the EAC and mailing prosecution threats after eleven straight courtroom losses is his smartest move? Also no. The optics are bad, and the legal record is worse. And the precedent is the part that bites, because the removal power he’s using and the “fire the referees” move he’s modeling don’t retire when he does. They are there for the next president, and someday that’s the one you didn’t vote for.

Watch which states actually get their rolls cleaned versus just threatened. Watch whether the EAC gets restaffed before November or stays frozen through the vote. And watch whether one Republican cheering today remembers this the first time a Democrat reaches for the same tool.

Fix the locks. Just don’t hand the next guy a key to the whole building.

Graham Platner quit the Maine Senate race. The Democratic nominee suspended his campaign July 8 after Jenny Racicot told CNN and Politico that he raped her nearly five years ago, which he denies. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ro Khanna pulled their endorsements, and Maine Democrats have until July 27 to name a replacement to run against Susan Collins.

Spencer Pratt says the LA mayor’s race was stolen, and Elon Musk ran with it. The former mayoral candidate posted a roughly 10-minute video July 9 alleging fraud cost him a runoff spot: homeless residents paid to vote, NGOs “hoarding ballots,” dead and out-of-state names on the rolls, and harvesters filling in mail-in ballots. Pratt led Nithya Raman on election night before finishing third behind Mayor Karen Bass and Raman. Musk amplified it as “legalized election fraud,” and U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli says his office has fraud investigations open with the FBI.

E. Jean Carroll can finally collect her $5.8 million. A federal judge ordered the jury award, grown from $5 million to $5.8 million with interest, released to Carroll from escrow after the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s underlying appeal in the sexual-abuse and defamation case. Trump’s lawyers appealed the release order within the hour.

The U.S. bombed Iran again. American forces struck southern Iran early July 9, a second night of strikes as the June ceasefire falls apart and days after Trump declared the deal “over” from the NATO summit in Turkey.

The judge who helped a migrant dodge ICE got a $5,000 fine and no jail. Former Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan was fined $5,000 and spared prison this week after a federal jury convicted her of felony obstruction for steering an undocumented man out a back door while ICE agents waited. She faced up to five years, and prosecutors had asked for 15 to 21 months. Judge Lynn Adelman called her “an otherwise good person” who “made a bad decision in the moment.”

A federal commission advanced Trump’s 250-foot arch near Arlington. The National Capital Planning Commission gave preliminary approval July 9 to the “Triumphal Arch,” after nearly three hours of public opposition, including a Gold Star mother who said it would block the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The structure violates a 1910 height law, and a final vote could come in September. Washington Post

The White House graded the Smithsonian and flunked it. A 162-page report titled “Saving America’s Story” accuses the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism” and of trying to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens,” with complaints running from a slavery placard to a monarch-butterfly sculpture symbolizing DREAMers. It follows Trump’s executive order to strip “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from the Smithsonian. Washington Post

That’s The Read!

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

In today’s Read:

• Platner’s accusers went on camera, and underneath it is a New York Times “could not corroborate” line one of them calls misleading “by design.”

• Robinson’s hearing put his car on campus four times on video, a real problem for the “he’s a patsy” theory the online right has run for months.

• The U.S. hit 80-plus Iranian targets, Trump declared the ceasefire “over” from the summit, and the press is calling it “unprecedented.” It isn’t, and I’ll show you why.

• Quick Rundown: the Epstein revolt eats MAGA, ICE kills a man in Houston, a Midtown high-rise nearly buckles, and Texas moves to ban foreign wombs-for-hire.

The Part of the Platner Scandal That is Being Ignored

The Story.

Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner is now facing multiple accusers. Jenny Racicot told CNN’s Jake Tapper that a 2021 encounter was “by definition” rape.

And Lyndsey Fifield, whose earlier allegations the New York Times had reported it “could not corroborate,” went on camera with Tapper July 7 describing Platner repeatedly grabbing her hard enough to leave bruises and once blocking her inside a bedroom, comparing his look to “a pit bull” with “dead eyes.”

Fifield says the Times’ “could not corroborate” framing was misleading “by design”: she gave reporters the names of former roommates who remembered Platner waiting outside her home, plus her former fiancé and the priest she’d told during premarital counseling years earlier, and says the reporters declined to interview any of them.

Platner calls the claims “categorically false.” Democratic leaders (Schumer, Gillibrand, Warren, Gallego) have called for him to quit. He’s refusing, and he has until July 13 for Maine Democrats to nominate a replacement.

The Left’s read. The coverage now centers the accusers and the party scramble, but the Times is on defense about its own reporting. Fifield’s “by design” charge, that the “could not corroborate” line left readers thinking there was nothing there, is being covered as a media story in its own right, separate from the campaign fallout.

The Right’s read. A clean case study in how the paper of record buries a story that’s inconvenient for a Democrat. National Review and Fox run Fifield’s account of naming corroborating witnesses the Times wouldn’t call, then printing “could not corroborate” anyway.

What both sides are skipping. The right is enjoying the New York Times beating, but mostly as “liberal bias,” the usual shorthand, without naming the specific breach for what it is. Fifield says she handed the Times five people who could speak to the relationship and the abuse. The reporters called two, the two who could only confirm she and Platner dated, and skipped the three who could speak to what he actually did. Then the paper printed “could not corroborate.” When Fifield went public, the Times doubled down, saying it “stands by” the reporting.

A spokesperson for The New York Times also offered a statement.

“We published accounts provided by several women who were in romantic relationships with Graham Platner. Our story accurately presents each of these accounts as told to our reporters and according to our standards. We stand by our reporting of the accounts from Ms. Fifield and the other women, who provided a revealing look at the behavior of a major candidate for the U.S. Senate.”

That’s not bias as a vibe. That’s a documented decision not to make the calls, then a refusal to revisit it once the decision blew up. And it won’t get corrected, because the one force that could correct it, the rest of the industry holding the paper of record to the standard it holds everyone else, isn’t showing up. Meanwhile, the progressive left is running the opposite story: that these revelations are the establishment’s move to take Platner down, “this is not your opening.” The most establishment institution in American media did everything it could to soften the story for him. Both can’t be true. Only one has receipts.

Forget the horse race for a second. The story here is how the New York Times handled Lyndsey Fifield.

She handed them a list. Former roommates who remembered Platner waiting outside her house. Her former fiancé. The priest she confided in during premarital counseling, years before any of this was political. She says the reporters called none of them, and then the paper published “could not corroborate.”

To any normal human reading over coffee, “we could not corroborate it” means “we looked hard and found nothing to back it up.” That’s the whole power of the phrase. Fifield’s word for what actually happened is “by design,” and I don’t think she’s wrong.

“We couldn’t corroborate it” and “we didn’t try very hard to” are two completely different sentences. The Times printed the first one while Fifield says the second one is the truth. That gap is the entire story, and it’s exactly the product The Read exists to point at: the framing did the work the facts wouldn’t.

And don’t lose the tattoo thread while everyone’s distracted by the campaign math. Fifield is the same ex who flagged Platner’s chest Totenkopf as a Nazi SS symbol back in 2025, before he claims he figured out what it was. So this is a firsthand source the paper leaned on quietly, then waved off when her account got inconvenient, twice. That her story is now being told in full on CNN, by her and by a second accuser, tells you what the Times left sitting on the table.

I’ll grant the Democratic side its own circus, because it’s earned it. Platner won’t step down. Maine Democrats have flatly ruled out giving him any role in choosing his replacement, and the state party’s executive director says his team keeps “reaching out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale.” There’s loud online chatter that more allegations are staged to drop before the 13th. Whether or not that pans out, a nominee digging in and demanding a say in his own succession is not a man who thinks this is over.

Watch whether the Times runs a single editor’s note. Watch whether Platner walks by July 13 or forces a convention fight. And watch whether the paper that “could not corroborate” ever explains why it didn’t call the priest.

The accusation is the campaign story. The “could not corroborate” is the media story. Guess which one your paper would rather you focus on.

The Kirk Hearing Is Dismantling the Conspiracy Theories.

The Story.

Tyler Robinson, 23, is charged with aggravated murder in the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. His preliminary hearing entered its second day July 7 in Provo, and prosecutors walked the courtroom through campus surveillance: Robinson's Dodge Challenger, plate visible, entering the UVU campus roughly four times the day of the shooting, twice before, at the time of, and again after. Lead investigator David Hull traced the alleged shooter arriving about four hours early, moving through campus, stopping to eat, accessing the roof of the Losee Center, then escaping. FBI testing found a two-person mix of DNA on the towel wrapped around a bolt-action rifle recovered in the woods nearby and on a screwdriver from the roof; analyst Amanda Bakker testified Robinson was the major contributor on both and his roommate and alleged partner Lance Twiggs the minor contributor (under 20 percent), and pegged the mixture as "30 quintillion times more likely" to have come from the two of them than from Twiggs and an unrelated stranger. Robinson's lawyers are disputing it.

The Left’s read. A methodical evidence dump. CNN, CBS, and the Washington Post cover the surveillance timeline, the DNA, the rooftop “sniper position,” with Kirk’s widow in the courtroom facing the accused for the first time. Straight true-crime procedural.

The Right’s read. Split, and the split is the story. Outlets like HotAir walked the DNA and video day by day. But a loud online faction, Candace Owens most prominently, spent months insisting “Tyler Robinson has never even set foot on UVU’s campus” and that he was “a total patsy.” The Philadelphia Inquirer notes the conspiracy theories are still swirling even with the accused sitting in court.

What both sides are skipping. Two things. Because this is a probable-cause hearing, the defense hasn’t really swung yet, so treating the state’s timeline as the settled whole truth is its own mistake. And almost nobody covering the “conspiracy versus evidence” fight will confess that the loudest patsy theories came from inside the movement Kirk built, and are being quietly abandoned as the surveillance lands, except Candace, of course; she keeps running the ball.

A man was murdered in front of a crowd for the crime of talking. Charlie Kirk is dead, and his widow sat in that Provo courtroom this week looking at the person accused of pulling the trigger. Start there, because everything else is downstream of a real person who is really gone.

Now, quick context, because it changes how you should read every headline this week and every conspiracy grifter. This is a preliminary hearing. It is not a trial. No jury, no verdict, nobody gets sentenced. Judge Tony Graf has exactly one job: decide whether there’s enough here to send the case forward. The bar is probable cause, not “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Prosecutors do not have to prove Robinson was definitely the man in that Challenger or definitely the figure on that roof. They only have to show it’s probable enough that a reasonable judge binds the case over to trial. What you’re watching is the floor of the evidence, the state’s opening hand, not the finished case.

The theory that Tyler Robinson was never on campus, that he’s a patsy, that somebody else did this, did not come from MSNBC. It came from Candace Owens and fellow conspiracy pushers who have only speculated and attempted to present their opinions as evidence. Their claims are now getting taken apart, not by a fact-checker, not by CNN, but by a Dodge Challenger with a readable license plate driving onto UVU four times on the day Kirk was killed.

That’s a law enforcement witness narrating Robinson on the campus a big slice of the internet swore he never set foot on. The limp, per the testimony, is a rifle down his pant leg.

Then there’s the DNA. Robinson is the major contributor to the mixed DNA on the towel wrapped around the rifle and on the screwdriver from the roof, with Twiggs the minor contributor under 20 percent, and the state pegged the mixture as 30 quintillion times likelier to have come from the two of them than from Twiggs and some random stranger. That is not “he was never there.” That is his DNA on the murder weapon. The patsy crowd already has its answer, of course. Planted. It’s always planted. Once the tape, the plate, and the lab all point the same direction, the only move left is to accuse the FBI of framing a 22-year-old nobody had heard of before September, which is a lot of machinery to invent on the fly.

Brian Entin’s debrief runs the towel, the screwdriver, and the motive prosecutors floated in open court. This is the DNA the defense is now fighting, and the part worth watching.

I’ll hold the honest caveat, because the cross-check requires it. This is probable cause, not a conviction, and Robinson’s defense hasn’t had its turn. Bakker first thought the samples might have three contributors, and she was clear that DNA on an object can’t tell you when it got there or that anyone even touched it. Robinson’s lawyers are hammering exactly that, and they’re allowed to. Presumption of innocence is real, and I’m not going to pretend a preliminary hearing is a verdict just because the evidence looks heavy. Keep that.

But “he was never there” isn’t a defense theory. It’s a claim the surveillance already ran over. “Contested by the defense” and “he was framed by the FBI” are not the same sentence, and only one of them is a real legal argument. When your own side spins up a conspiracy and then the discovery quietly buries it, the grown move is to say so, out loud, not to change the subject or roll straight into the next theory before the first one’s body is cold.

Watch whether Graf binds the case over, which legal analysts say is likely. Watch whether the “patsy” crowd issues a single correction or just pivots to a fresh narrative. And watch what the defense does with that DNA, because the three-contributor question is the one thread they’re actually pulling.

The evidence is doing to the conspiracy what a year of arguing couldn’t. It’d be nice if the people who spread it noticed.

Trump Restarted the Iran War From Turkey. Slow Your Roll On the “He Defied Congress” Panic.

The Story.

Iran fired on three commercial tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on July 7. CENTCOM answered with strikes on more than 80 targets inside Iran, air defenses, radar, anti-ship missile sites, and dozens of IRGC small boats, and Treasury reimposed the oil sanctions it had lifted under the June 17 Islamabad Memorandum. Iran claims it hit more than 80 U.S. facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait in return. Trump ordered all of it from Ankara, where he was at the NATO summit.

Then, asked whether the ceasefire and the memorandum still hold, he told reporters “I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” called the deal “a waste of time,” and called the Iranians “liars,” even as his own lead negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, reportedly still want to talk. The backdrop: back in June, the House (215-208) and the Senate (50-48) both passed a War Powers resolution directing him to stop striking Iran without congressional authorization.

The Left’s read. A constitutional crisis. Rep. Ro Khanna calls the new strikes “a blatant violation” of the resolution Congress already passed and says he’s ready to take Trump to court. The framing across NPR and CNN: a president waging an unauthorized war, told to stop by both chambers, widening it anyway. The word doing the heavy lifting everywhere is “unprecedented.”

The Right’s read. A clean retaliation. Fox leads with the fact Iran shot at civilian tankers in an international shipping lane and the U.S. hit the military sites responsible. Sen. Jim Risch’s earlier warning gets recycled: tie the president’s hands mid-negotiation and Tehran just walks away from the table.

What both sides are skipping. The left skips that this War Powers fight is 50 years old and every modern president has been on Trump’s side of it. The right skips that Trump oversold the June deal to your face, called it a win, and is now calling the same deal a “waste of time” six weeks later.

Let me be clear about where I actually am, because I’m about to defend a framing, not a war. I’m skeptical Iran ever complies with anything. I said in June that the memorandum was a rumor until somebody showed you the signatures, and I said Trump oversells. Well. He’s standing in Ankara calling the deal he bragged about a “waste of time” and the other side “liars” while Kushner apparently didn’t get the memo that negotiations are off. Yes, that’s his negotiation style, and yes, it’s still frustrating to watch a “win” curdle this fast. Hold that thought.

Now the part the press is counting on you not knowing. Quick context: let’s talk about this War Powers thing everyone’s calling a crisis.

The War Powers Resolution is a law. Congress passed it in 1973, over Nixon’s veto. It’s a statute, not a line in the Constitution. And here’s what the “he defied Congress” coverage conveniently leaves out: presidents of both parties have treated that statute as advisory and questioned whether it’s even constitutional, because Article II makes the president commander in chief and hands the executive the national security lane. Obama ran the Libya campaign straight past it. Clinton did Kosovo past it. Reagan, both Bushes, same posture. A president using force without a War Powers permission slip isn’t a new abuse. It’s been the standard operating position of the office for half a century.

So when the coverage reaches for “unprecedented” and “overstepping” and “constitutional crisis,” shut it. That word is doing a lot of work for people who had zero problem with the exact same executive power when their guy was the one giving the order. This is a genuine, decades-old fight between two branches over a contested statute. It is not Trump inventing a new way to break the government.

That’s not a blank check, and it’s not me pretending the war is going well. It’s the cross-check: the thing you’re being handed as a five-alarm scandal is a constitutional argument older than I am, and the people ringing the alarm skipped the entire history of their own side doing it.

Watch whether Khanna actually files that lawsuit, and whether any court touches it, because judges have tossed War Powers challenges as “political questions” for 50 straight years. Watch whether Witkoff and Kushner keep quietly negotiating after Trump told a bank of cameras it’s “over.” And watch whether a single outlet running “unprecedented” today ever mentions Libya.

The strikes deserve scrutiny. The scary word attached to them is borrowed.

The Epstein files revolt is coming from inside MAGA. Acting AG Todd Blanche defied a July 2 court deadline to unredact a set of Epstein documents, announced an appeal, and called Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order a “perverse interpretation” meant to drive “misleading headlines.” Trump then defended Pam Bondi on Truth Social, told his base to stop wasting time on “somebody that nobody cares about,” and got “ratioed” on his own platform, reportedly for the first time. The loudest anger is coming from activists who were promised a full release.

An ICE officer killed a man in Houston. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot July 7 during a “targeted enforcement operation” in the East End. DHS says he rammed an ICE vehicle and tried to run over an agent, who fired in self-defense; his son says his father lived here nearly 35 years, worked construction, and was picking up his crew for work. It’s at least the sixth fatal shooting by immigration officers since the enforcement surge. The DHS Inspector General is investigating.

A Midtown Manhattan high-rise nearly buckled. The 37-story former Pfizer headquarters near Grand Central was evacuated July 7 after two structural support columns on the 21st floor began buckling around 8 a.m., triggering warnings of a possible partial collapse. Four nearby buildings stayed under evacuation orders. No injuries; officials say emergency shoring and new steel supports have stabilized the tower, which is being converted into luxury rentals.

Trump floated taking Greenland again. In Ankara, Trump said Greenland “should be controlled by the U.S.,” floated pulling American troops out of Europe, and posted that the U.S. gets no benefit from the alliance. Relations soured further after allies refused to let U.S. forces use joint bases for the Iran strikes. He meets Zelensky on Wednesday, who is coming to ask for Patriot interceptors as Russian strikes intensify.

A Chicago judge blew open 1,000-plus cases after catching prosecutors rigging a grand jury. U.S. District Judge April Perry unsealed grand jury transcripts in the “Broadview Six” case and found a prosecutor had “vouched” for the evidence, dismissed jurors who pushed back, and contacted one outside official proceedings. The top federal prosecutor in Chicago now says more than 1,000 cases are under review. Broadview is the ICE facility that’s been a flashpoint all year.

Texas is moving to ban foreign nationals from using its surrogates. The Texas Senate health committee heard testimony July 7 on prohibiting foreign nationals from contracting with Texas surrogates, an interim charge Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick set ahead of January’s session. The state GOP already put a foreign-national surrogacy ban in its platform. Florida beat them to it, barring surrogacy contracts with residents of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria.

The trans-sports fight is headed to the ballot. After the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling upholding state bans on biological males in girls’ sports, November ballot measures are set in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona. Organizers say the ruling put wind behind the effort. Twenty-seven states currently bar biological males from girls’ athletics.

That’s The Read.

See you Friday.

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

250 years of freedom, baby, and I need about 250 years of sleep and recovery.

The news never sleeps!

America turned 250, Trump got on the phone with FIFA, the State Fair cooked on the National Mall, and ICE ran up the numbers while New York’s socialist mayor gave a speech from George Washington’s desk.

Let’s get into the news!

In Today’s Read

• FIFA suspended Balogun’s red card after Trump called its president. The press screamed “unprecedented.” It wasn’t. The rule’s been on the books since 2023, and Ronaldo got the same treatment in November.

• The State Fair was a planning mess in triple-digit heat. The bigger tell was a press corps rooting for America’s 250th birthday party to fail.

• ICE hit 10,000 arrests in five days on a White House quota. The enforcement doesn’t bother me. The quota does, and so does what it hands the “abolish ICE” crowd before the midterms.

• In the Rundown: the preliminary hearing opens for Charlie Kirk’s accused killer with Erika Kirk in the room, Trump heads to a NATO summit in Turkey, an audit reopens the Puerto Rico grid-funds fight, a Spider-Man-masked fireworks threat, a guilty plea in the Nancy Guthrie case, and China thins its own military.

The Red Card “Unprecedented” Everyone’s Selling You Wasn’t

The Story.

Folarin Balogun scored the U.S.'s opener against Bosnia-Herzegovina Wednesday, then got sent off in the 64th minute for stepping on Tarik Muharemović's ankle, a foul that looked a lot worse in FIFA's slow-motion replay than at full speed. Thierry Henry, watching as a Fox analyst, said it plainly: "You need to have some common sense." FIFA suspended the automatic one-game ban Sunday, clearing Balogun to play Belgium in the round of 16. Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino directly, and confirmed it himself at a press conference Monday morning, saying he'd phoned FIFA and asked them to review the call. According to a FIFA official, the U.S. government also submitted "additional evidence" that the Disciplinary Committee weighed in making its decision, which is a meaningfully different thing than a president leaning on a phone until someone folds.

Quick context, because everyone's throwing around "unprecedented" like it means what they think it means. FIFA used Chapter 4, Article 27 of its Disciplinary Code, the rule that lets a judicial body suspend a punishment and put the player on probation instead. That rule has existed since 2023. FIFA already used it in November on Cristiano Ronaldo, who elbowed an Irish defender in a qualifier and got a three-match ban knocked down to one, with the other two deferred a full year.

Two more players, Otamendi and Caicedo, got their pre-tournament cards wiped by a separate rule change entirely. So no, Article 27 isn't new, and it isn't Trump's invention. What's actually first here is applying it mid-tournament, to a card from a knockout match that had already started. That's a real precedent. It's just not the one anybody's reporting.

The left’s read. CNN and the international-press desk treat the reversal as an integrity problem: a sitting president got a global sports body to bend its own written rules with a phone call. UEFA went furthest, calling the decision "unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable." Belgium's federation says it's "astonished," and Sepp Blatter, of all people, said red cards shouldn't get overturned by political phone calls.

The right’s read. Rubio told reporters the U.S. “got screwed.” Fox’s OutKick argued the reversal was correct on the merits, Trump’s call notwithstanding, and leaned on the fact that damn near everyone watching, Henry included, thought the card was excessive from the jump.

What both sides skip. The original card was bad for a boring, specific reason: FIFA’s own VAR crew used slow-motion replay to judge “intensity,” which its own protocol says you’re not supposed to do. The politics story ate the officiating story whole.

The original card was bad. Not “bad because Americans are biased” bad, bad because FIFA’s own VAR crew judged “intensity” off slow-motion replay, which its own protocol flatly says you don’t do. Henry saw it. UEFA’s angriest critics saw it. The sending-off was excessive, full stop, and Article 27 is the exact rule sitting on the books to undo it. That’s not a scandal. That’s the mechanism doing what it’s there for.

So spare me “unprecedented.” It isn’t. Ronaldo got the same rule eight months ago and nobody reached for the fainting couch. The only new wrinkle is FIFA using Article 27 mid-tournament instead of before kickoff, and “mid-tournament procedure” doesn’t move papers the way “Trump broke soccer” does.

And Trump isn’t hiding the call. He said it out loud Monday morning: he phoned FIFA and asked them to review the card. Take him at his word, then, because it doesn’t change the math. He asked for a review. The review found what everyone already saw, a bad card, and Article 27 undid it. The card was wrong before Trump dialed and it’d be wrong if he never did.

Which leaves Belgium, and Belgium is being a bunch of whiners. The consensus, theirs included if they’re honest, is that the card never should have stood. They got their appeal. The process rolls on. I doubt they win it, and I suspect they know it, which is why this reads like procedural theater more than a real grievance. A good sport looks at a bad call getting corrected and says fine, see you Saturday. Belgium looked at it and filed a complaint, because “astonished” is a nicer word than “we’d rather not face a full-strength USMNT.”

Here’s the tell. If you’re actually the better team, you want Balogun on the field. You want the win with no asterisk hanging off it. The American instinct is to want the best version of the other guy across from you and beat him anyway. Belgium’s instinct is to lawyer the roster down first. That’s not confidence. That’s a hedge in cleats.

Watch whether the appeals committee rules before kickoff, whether UEFA’s “red line” talk becomes an actual move to change Article 27 or just stays a press quote, and whether the sports desks finally connect this to the Ronaldo case that’s been sitting right there since 2023.

The card was wrong. The rule fixed it. Play ball, boys.

The Great American State Fair Was a Planning Mess. The Coverage Was the Real Embarrassment.

The Story.

The Great American State Fair opened on the National Mall June 25, a 16-day, 56-state exposition anchoring the 250th anniversary. At least 10 mostly Democrat-led states skipped it after learning they'd owe $100,000 to $500,000 out of pocket with zero federal funding attached. House Democrats then put out a 55-page report alleging the nonpartisan America250 committee asked for $150 million with an understanding that $100 million would fund nonpartisan events and $50 million would go to White House programming, but the nonpartisan side only saw $50 million while the White House allegedly sat on the rest. Then the weather showed up: 102 degrees, the hottest July Fourth on record for D.C., a full fair closure on safety grounds, and a storm evacuation Saturday night that pushed Trump's speech back nearly four hours.

The left’s read. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey called the funding structure “ridiculous,” saying Trump “invited all the states to participate and wants to charge us.” Independent-left outlets went further: The New Republic ran “Trump’s Melting State Fair” and a follow-up on the White House allegedly deleting photos after “Trump Threw a Tantrum.” The Mirror’s headline was “Trump Caught Faking Huge Crowds.”

The right’s read. Fox ran with Rep. Chuck Edwards calling out NC Gov. Josh Stein for “choosing partisanship over patriotism,” and covered Republican officials scrambling to staff empty blue-state booths. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, showed up on opening day, paid the same bill every state did, and told reporters “nobody’s talking politics,” adding “every governor has to make their own choice.”

What both sides skip. Nobody wants to reckon with the fact that the fair drew thin daytime crowds in 102-degree heat regardless of who boycotted. A fringe MAGA corner also claimed the heat wave was “geoengineered” by liberals with weather machines, so credit where it’s due, the left doesn’t have a monopoly on unhinged this week.

Yes, the planning was a mess. The bill structure was clumsy, the heat was brutal, and no amount of spin makes a half-empty afternoon look full. Grant all of that up front, because it’s true, and pretending otherwise is how you lose people. But that’s the setup, not the story.

The story is the coverage, and the coverage told on itself. “Trump’s Melting State Fair.” “Trump Threw a Tantrum.” “Trump Caught Faking Huge Crowds.” That’s not reporting a flop. That’s savoring one. You can cover a rough opening honestly, low RSVPs, thin daytime crowds, real numbers, and plenty of outlets did. What a chunk of the left-leaning press did instead was root, out loud, for America’s 250th birthday party to belly-flop because of whose name was on the invitation. That’s the tell, and it bothers me more than the ticket price or the Ferris wheel ever could.

The boycott is the same move in a governor’s suit. Every state owed the same $100,000 to $500,000, red and blue alike. DeWine wrote the check. Ohio showed up. So “we couldn’t afford it” collapses the second a red state pays the identical bill without a peep. The honest version isn’t budget. It’s “we didn’t want to hand Trump a win.” That’s a real political calculation, and I’d respect it more if one of them said it out loud instead of hiding behind an invoice.

Now the one thing I won’t wave off, because fair is fair: Healey’s funding complaint. She alleges the White House redirected $50 million meant for the nonpartisan celebration into its own programming. If that’s true, it’s a real problem, and it deserves an actual answer instead of a shrug from either team. I’m not taking her word for it. I’m also not dismissing it. Show me the ledger.

And can we sit with Saturday night for a second? After a storm evacuation, in triple-digit heat, roughly 150,000 people came back out for the fireworks. That’s not a failed event. That’s a stubborn crowd. It got a sentence, maybe, once “humiliating flop” was already the filed headline. Funny how the inconvenient number always shows up late.

Watch whether the White House ever answers the $50 million allegation or just runs out the clock. Watch whether a red-state governor publishes their own bill so we can compare costs honestly instead of taking Healey’s word for it. And watch the final attendance count when the fair closes July 10 against that “million-plus visitors” projection everyone quoted on day one.

The planning was sloppy. Fine. Sloppy isn’t the same as what half the press was openly hoping for, which was the whole country’s birthday failing on camera.

ICE’s Quota Doesn’t Bother Me. What It Could Cost Republicans This Fall Does.

The Story.

ICE arrested more than 10,000 people nationwide between last Friday and Tuesday, north of 2,000 a day, roughly double the earlier pace. DHS sources say the number came straight from the White House, which set 2,000 arrests a day as the new baseline after the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling went against the administration. Karoline Leavitt confirmed the figures July 2. The same weekend, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani used a July 4 “America 250” address, delivered from George Washington’s desk, flanked by newly naturalized citizens, to say: “We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”

The left’s read. Truthout and Common Dreams call the surge “lawless and rogue,” running on a “new slush fund,” a top-down order tied to the court loss rather than organic enforcement.

The right’s read. PJ Media and Fox frame the 10,000 figure as enforcement finally matching the mandate voters gave the administration. Elon Musk’s response to Mamdani was blunt: “He is a taker, never a maker.” Ron DeSantis called Mamdani’s framing “regressive,” not progressive, and invoked the founders directly.

What both sides skip. The framing fight is all about whether the surge is “lawless” or “overdue.” Almost nobody is asking the actual policy question: whether a White House-set daily arrest quota, independent of caseload or evidence, is a sound way to run federal law enforcement, no matter who’s in the Oval Office.

I have no issue with ICE doing its job. Enforcing immigration law is not the scandal here.

Here’s what actually concerns me: a White House ordering agents to hit 2,000 arrests a day, like a sales floor with a quota board, is a morale and pressure problem regardless of your politics. Agents chasing a number instead of working actual cases make worse calls at the margins, rushed stops, sloppier target selection, the kind of thing that doesn’t show up in a press release until it shows up on video.

And here’s the part I’ll put my political hat on for: that pressure is a gift to exactly the people trying to abolish ICE outright. Every viral image of a rough arrest, every protest that turns into a news cycle, hands the DSA wing a recruiting poster heading into the midterms, right as “abolish ICE” moves from fringe slogan to actual primary platform. Republicans don’t need a self-inflicted PR wound six months out. You can support the mission and still think a quota is a dumb way to run it. Those aren’t in tension.

Which brings me to Mamdani, because I need to say this plainly too: he’s a political snake and hack. He reaches for the most emotive language available, “masked agents,” “unmarked vans,” “terrorizing our streets,” not because it’s the most accurate description of federal law enforcement, but because it’s the most useful description for selling a socialist agenda whose actual goal is undoing the country as it currently exists. Illegal immigration staying unresolved and ugly serves that project. A chaotic, viral, “look what they’re doing to your neighbors” ICE image is worth more to Mamdani’s politics than a quiet, well-run enforcement operation ever would be.

So no, I’m not running cover for ICE going soft, and I’m not running cover for Mamdani’s framing either. Enforce the law. Just don’t let a quota write the headlines for you, because somebody’s counting on exactly that.

Watch whether arrest-footage virality picks up as the 2,000-a-day baseline holds through the summer. Watch whether any Republicans start quietly distancing from the raw numbers as midterm ads get cut. And watch whether “abolish ICE” stays a DSA-primary talking point or actually starts polling as a mainstream Democratic position, because that’s the real fight underneath this one.

The preliminary hearing for Charlie Kirk's accused killer opened Monday in Utah. Tyler Robinson, 23, faces aggravated murder and six other counts in the September 10 assassination of Kirk at Utah Valley University, and prosecutors are using the five-day hearing to lay out their case for trial and the death penalty: DNA tying Robinson to the rifle, surveillance video, and a note that read "I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it." Erika Kirk, who took over Turning Point USA after her husband's death and publicly forgave Robinson at his memorial, sat in the courtroom with Charlie's parents, the family's first time in the room with the accused. Robinson has not entered a plea. AP via WSLS

Trump heads to Turkey for a two-day NATO summit. He leaves for Ankara Monday night, with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa both on the calendar. The White House says he’ll press Zelensky on ending the war and push al-Sharaa to take on Hezbollah rather than leave that fight to Israel. Al-Sharaa has already said he isn’t interested. The Hill

Democratic lawmakers released a federal audit faulting the slow pace of Puerto Rico's grid rebuild, noting only about a quarter of the roughly $14 billion obligated after Hurricane Maria has been disbursed. The GAO ties the roughly $3.5 billion pace less to Washington than to conditions on the island itself: a power authority (PREPA) still buried under more than $10 billion in debt, a private grid operator (LUMA) locked in dueling lawsuits with the Puerto Rico government, staff turnover, and review processes it calls "onerous." DHS told auditors the government of Puerto Rico is "ultimately responsible" for rebuilding its own grid. The report stops short of any finding that the island misspent the money already released. US News

A 19-year-old California man was arrested for threatening to blow up generators at Sacramento federal buildings. Trevon McDaniel of Elk Grove posted a TikTok in a Spider-Man mask telling the city to “hold onto your fireworks” ahead of the Fourth. Prosecutors say he’s also tied to an earlier plot targeting a White House UFC event. DOJ

A California man pleaded guilty to sending a fake ransom note in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance. Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother has been missing from her Tucson home since February. The FBI says some of the notes demanding cryptocurrency were extortion attempts with “no legitimacy,” while others may still be real. NBC News

China promoted two new generals after purging more than 100 senior officers since 2022. The latest round hit the military’s second-highest-ranking officer. Analysts say a 10-week “loyalty” training program was built to sever the officer corps from a recently purged vice chairman and re-pledge them straight to Xi Jinping. NPR

That’s The Read.

See you Wednesday.

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

Special Edition. Two hundred fifty years on, near enough, and I still want to know what happened this week before anyone tells me how to feel about it. So tonight, by candlelight and against my better judgment, The Read files from Philadelphia.

In today’s Read:

• Congress voted for independence yesterday, the second of July, not tomorrow, whatever the almanacs end up telling your grandchildren. Mr. Adams already wrote his wife that history got the date wrong before history even happened.

• The delegates have spent three days taking a blade to Mr. Jefferson’s draft, and the cut that should trouble you most isn’t about the King.

• General Howe’s fleet is putting men ashore on Staten Island by the boatload, the largest force the Crown has ever sent across an ocean, and New-York is watching it happen from its own harbor.

• Quick Rundown: a hanged bodyguard, a fleet still swelling, an empty Loyalist press with its type melted into musket balls, and a pamphlet still outselling everything in the colonies.

On the second day of July, twelve colonies voted for Mr. Lee’s resolution, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. New-York alone abstained, its delegates still awaiting instruction from home, expected within the week. The vote came only after a night’s worth of arranging: Mr. Caesar Rodney rode near eighty miles through a thunderstorm to break Delaware’s tie, South Carolina’s delegates set aside their objections for the sake of one voice, and two of Pennsylvania’s dissenters simply did not appear, leaving that colony’s remaining men to carry it three to two. Mr. John Adams, writing his wife Abigail the following morning, declared the second of July “the most memorable epoch in the history of America,” one he expected “celebrated by succeeding generations” with “pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

The Patriot printers say. A deliverance, plain and simple, the thing every broadside from Boston to Charleston has been building toward since Mr. Paine’s pamphlet first put the word “independence” into common speech back in January. The vote itself is being treated as the whole of the matter, the paperwork to follow being a formality Congress will surely settle within days.

What the Crown claims. His Majesty settled this question himself last August, when the royal proclamation declared the colonies in “open and avowed rebellion” and charged every loyal subject to “withstand and suppress” it. By that reading, yesterday’s vote changed nothing legally, twelve colonies of subjects cannot vote themselves out of a kingdom any more than a tenant votes himself out of his lease. There is little more argument than that on offer, and less appetite in New-York to print it since the Sons of Liberty wrecked Mr. Rivington’s press last November and melted his type into musket balls. A newspaper is difficult to publish without any letters left to set.

What neither side will print. Mr. Adams bet on the wrong date, and everyone reading this two hundred fifty years hence already knows it. He picked the vote. History picked the document. Neither the Patriot broadsides nor the Crown’s proclamations spend much ink on the plainer truth underneath both: a vote taken in a closed room in Philadelphia changes nothing on the ground until an army makes it stick, and that army is presently digging trenches in New-York with a much larger one arriving by ship as this is written.

Mr. Adams wrote to his wife with more confidence about a date than I would give to most weather forecasts, and I say that with real affection for the man. He picked the second of July. You will mark the fourth. Off by two days and two hundred fifty years of habit, and there is something delicious about a Founder this certain getting the anniversary wrong while getting everything else right.

Here is what I will not do: pretend this vote was some safe, symbolic gesture. Twelve colonies just told the most powerful empire on earth, in writing, with their names attached, that they no longer recognize its authority. That is not a petition. That is a declaration of war, and every man who voted for it knew it. A resolution on paper doesn't fight anybody. It is, however, the only thing that turns a scattered rebellion into a country with a reason to win.

I am not interested in pretending both sides of this have an equal claim. The Crown’s argument, dressed up in a royal proclamation, amounts to: subjects don’t get a say, ever, full stop. Twelve colonies just said otherwise, out loud, at the cost of their own necks if this goes wrong. That is the bravest thing printed on this continent all year, and I will take that trade over royal parchment every single time.

So yes, plainly: to vote for independence is to vote for war, the real kind, with real ships already sitting in the harbor. I think it was worth it then. I think two hundred fifty years of receipts prove it was worth it. Watch whether New-York’s delegates fall in line. Watch whether the other colonies ratify what their men already voted. And watch a King learn, the hard way, that a people who have decided they are free do not need his permission to mean it.

General Washington is standing on Manhattan this week, watching the largest invasion fleet Britain has ever assembled sail into his harbor. Here is what the marble statues leave out: he has never won a stand-up fight..

His record, honestly read, is thin. Fort Necessity, 1754: his only formal surrender, terms signed in French he could not read. Braddock’s defeat, 1755: an ambush that killed or wounded nearly nine hundred of thirteen hundred men, Washington one of the few who rode out alive. Boston, this past March, was not even a battle. Mr. Knox’s cannon, hauled from Ticonderoga in the dead of winter, simply made the harbor impossible to hold, and the British left.

That is the man Congress has entrusted with stopping what is anchoring off Staten Island. And within the week, word is he will have the Declaration Congress is still fighting over read aloud to the assembled army right here in New-York City, on the same ground Howe’s fleet is bearing down on now.

I do not count his record against him. A general who has already surrendered once, and watched men die beside him at Braddock's side, has no illusions left about what this costs. A man with a cleaner record might read his troops a declaration of independence for the applause. This one does it already knowing better than to expect an easy win.

Mr. Jefferson presented his draft declaration to Congress on the twenty-eighth of June. In the days since, the assembled delegates have taken their own pens to it, by Mr. Jefferson’s private account cutting nearly a quarter of what he wrote. Most of the trims are matters of tone, softening his harsher words against the English people themselves rather than only their king. One cut runs deeper.

Mr. Jefferson’s draft accused the King of waging “cruel war against human nature itself” by keeping open “a market where MEN should be bought & sold,” language aimed squarely at the slave trade. South Carolina and Georgia’s delegates would not sit for it, and, by Mr. Jefferson’s own telling, certain Northern delegates whose ships carry that same cargo were not eager to press the point either. The passage is gone. The institution it named is not.

The Patriot printers say. Not a word on this particular cut, which tells you something on its own. The broadsides are occupied entirely with the vote and the coming document’s language on liberty, tyranny, and the rights of man, all of it stirring, none of it inclined to dwell on what got left on Mr. Jefferson’s floor.

What the Crown claims. Even less interest here. A Crown that has spent a decade extracting revenue from these same colonies, slave-trading ports very much included, has no standing to lecture anyone on the point, and to its credit, or perhaps its silence, it has not tried.

What neither side will print. This is the one worth sitting with. A document about to declare that all men are created equal is being edited, this week, specifically to avoid saying anything uncomfortable about the men currently held as property. That is not a footnote. That is the fault line this country will be standing on again in another eighty-some years, and no amount of pomp and illumination changes what got quietly struck from the page to keep two colonies at the table.

I am about as pro-rebel as a woman writing from two hundred fifty years in the future can be, and I still think you should sit with this one rather than skip past it for the fireworks.

A room full of men who are, this very week, writing that all men are created equal, took a blade to the one passage that tried to say the quiet part out loud about slavery. Not because the accusation was false. Because South Carolina and Georgia would not sign a document that named the trade plainly, and because, per Mr. Jefferson's own account, some of the Northern delegates in that room were not exactly neutral parties either. Unity purchased at that price is still unity. I am not going to pretend the arithmetic wasn't real: without those votes, there may be no unanimous declaration at all. But I am also not going to call a wound clean just because it closed the room.

Here is the plain contradiction nobody in Philadelphia this week wants printed: the document argues from a truth it will not fully apply. That does not make the argument wrong. It makes the men making it human, which is a different thing from making them right about where they drew the line.

None of that touches whether independence itself is right. It is. It is the same document’s failure to live up to its own words that will need finishing later, by other Americans, willing to fight for it the same way this room is about to. Watch whether that cut passage ever resurfaces in a future generation’s argument for finishing what this one started. Watch which colonies keep buying and selling human beings long after they’ve finished declaring all men equal. History, so I am reliably informed by people living in it, keeps receipts.

Ships under General William Howe began putting troops ashore on Staten Island this week, part of what will be, once his brother Admiral Richard Howe’s fleet and the reinforcements behind it are fully assembled, the largest expeditionary force the Crown has ever sent across the Atlantic. General Washington’s Continental Army, encamped in New-York City and across the harbor’s approaches since spring, has spent these same weeks digging works at Brooklyn Heights and along Manhattan’s shore, in expectation of exactly this. The city that will, within days, be reading of a vote for independence is simultaneously watching the King’s answer to that vote arrive under sail, in plain sight, from its own rooftops.

The Patriot printers say. Grim resolve, mostly, and a fair amount of bravado layered over real fear. The broadsides frame Howe’s arrival as proof the Crown fears what a free people can accomplish, else why send so many men against so young an army. There is truth buried in the bravado. There is also an awful lot of bravado.

What the Crown claims. This is the argument that requires no ink at all, only ships, and the Crown has sent a great many of those. The message from Staten Island is the plainest one in this entire dispatch: however Congress votes, however elegantly Mr. Jefferson writes, the King intends to settle this with soldiers, not sentences.

What neither side will print. Neither the broadsides crowing about resolve nor the Crown’s silent armada wants to say plainly what any soldier standing watch in Brooklyn already knows: this is an extraordinarily young army, thin on powder and thinner on training, about to meet the largest force Britain has ever floated, and a vote taken in a room in Philadelphia will not stop a single musket ball.

Here is the part that should make your stomach drop a little, two hundred fifty years of hindsight or not. Congress voted for independence with a British invasion fleet already visible from the harbor. Not a threat on paper. Ships, men, guns, arriving by the boatload while the ink on Mr. Jefferson's edits was still wet.

I don't think that's a coincidence worth glossing over for the sake of a tidy anniversary story, and I'm not going to dress it up as some grim accident either. A vote for independence was always a vote for this. You don't get to declare yourself free of the largest empire on earth and expect that empire to shrug and wish you well. A free people doesn't get the freedom part first and the fighting part later, as a treat. Every man in that Congress knew what he was signing meant a King's army on his doorstep, and they signed anyway. That is not recklessness. That is knowing exactly what a thing costs and deciding it is worth paying.

I know how this particular chapter ends, because I have the benefit of living on the other side of it. Washington loses New-York before he wins much of anything, and that is not a spoiler that should comfort anyone standing in Brooklyn this week. But I will say this plainly, because two hundred fifty years buys me the right to: it was worth it. Every bit of it. The men on those Staten Island beaches represent the largest, best-equipped force their king can throw at the idea that people get to govern themselves, and I would take that fight again a hundred times over rather than stay a subject of a crown three thousand miles away that never once asked what the colonies wanted. The fact that the idea eventually wins anyway is the whole point of printing this at all.

Watch how many ships keep arriving after this week’s first landings. Watch whether Washington’s works at Brooklyn Heights hold. And watch what happens when the best-funded army on earth meets an idea it cannot actually kill with cannon fire.

• A bodyguard hanged for plotting against his own general. Thomas Hickey, one of General Washington’s own Life Guards, was hanged on the twenty-eighth of June before a crowd of thousands, convicted of conspiring with New-York’s Loyalist mayor, David Mathews, in a plot against the Continental Army’s officers. The city’s mood has not fully settled since.

• The fleet keeps growing. More sail arrive in New-York’s outer harbor by the day, and word from correspondents in London holds that German princes have let out their own soldiers for hire to the Crown, to be shipped over once terms are settled. A king fighting his own subjects with rented foreign troops is not, even by 1776 standards, a flattering look.

• Mr. Rivington’s press sits silent. The loudest Loyalist voice in New-York has printed nothing since the Sons of Liberty smashed his shop last November and melted his type for musket balls. Whatever argument the Crown has left to make in print, it is not being made from this city.

• Powder remains short. Congress and the Army continue to scrape for gunpowder and shot from any willing merchant, foreign or domestic. An army can vote itself into existence considerably faster than it can arm itself.

• Mr. Paine’s pamphlet still will not stop selling. Common Sense, in print since January, has by most estimates reached well past a hundred thousand copies across colonies that together hold perhaps two and a half million souls. Rarely has so much of a population read the same argument for its own government at the same time.

  

That’s The Read, filed from Philadelphia.

Back to 2026 on Friday, America is 250 years old! Go celebrate the greatest country on earth. Make a founding father proud!

If a resolution passed in a closed room two hundred fifty years ago is still worth arguing about today, forward this to someone who thinks history is settled.

Today’s Read is SCOTUS and another DSA win, and I HAVE THOUGHTS. So make sure you read My Read.

Also for Friday, I have a special edition of The Read planned specifically for the eve of America’s 250th birthday. It’s going to be fun, so even if you are busy getting ready to celebrate, keep an eye on your inbox.

I have family arriving over the next few days for July 4th, so it’s going to be a little quiet over here.

I will see you Friday with a special edition of The Read. Go celebrate AMERICA!

Let’s get into the news.

In today’s Read:

• The Court told Trump he can’t end birthright citizenship, and the “6-3” every outlet is running is actually 5-4 once you strip out Kavanaugh’s separate vote.

• Same morning, the Court ruled 9-0 that Title IX doesn’t require girls’ sports to include biological males, buried under a louder 6-3 headline about the constitutional question.

• A DSA-backed candidate ousted her third House incumbent in eight days in Colorado. Two hours earlier, the identical playbook got demolished by 14 points in that state’s Senate primary.

• Quick Rundown: Carroll wants her money, the Epstein files hit a deadline, Venezuela’s toll passed 1,900, and the Court also blew up campaign finance law while nobody was looking.

The Supreme Court Just Told Trump He Can’t End Birthright Citizenship.

The Story.

On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that Executive Order 14160, Trump’s January 2025 order denying citizenship to children born here to undocumented or temporary-status parents, violates the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson on the constitutional question, a five-justice bloc. Kavanaugh supplied a sixth vote against Trump on narrower federal-law grounds, not the constitutional one, which means the real constitutional vote was 5-4, not the “6-3” most headlines are running. Thomas dissented for 91 pages; Alito called it “one of the most important decisions in the history of the court.” Hours later, Deputy AG Colin McDonald sent a memo directing every U.S. Attorney’s office to prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism” schemes under visa fraud and wire fraud statutes.

The Left’s read. The Constitution held, full stop. The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang called it “a victory that belongs to all of us,” and CBS, PBS, and CNN centered the 14th Amendment beating back an order that tried to rewrite it by decree, leaning on Alito’s and Thomas’s marathon dissents as proof of how big a swing this was.

The Right's read. A loss, but a survivable one. JD Vance told Laura Ingraham it was a "major, major mistake" while pointing to the "silver lining": pull Kavanaugh's statutory vote out and the constitutional question was 5-4, which is why Vance says birthright citizenship is "hanging by a thread." Sen. Eric Schmitt called it "wrong, dangerous, and disastrous" and is already floating a constitutional amendmen

What both sides are skipping. Everyone's reporting "6-3" because it's the cleaner number and it flatters both storylines. Neither wants to explain that Kavanaugh carved his own lane, and almost nobody outside CNN's own analysis mentioned the loss came bundled with a same-day enforcement consolation prize. And nobody in the mainstream coverage, left or right, went back to the actual 1866 floor debate to ask what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was written to mean.

“significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868 and that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have fully anticipated. And the Framers likely would not have anticipated (and presumably would not have intended) the odd result of granting a substantial birthright citizenship benefit to (i) those foreign citizens who violate U. S. immigration law and illegally enter or overstay and then have children in the United States over (ii) those foreign citizens who follow U. S. immigration law and have children in their home countries while seeking to lawfully immigrate to the United States. Nor presumably would they have wanted to grant constitutional birthright citizenship to children of foreign citizens unlawfully in the country while simultaneously denying constitutional birthright citizenship to children of tribal American Indians.”

“Consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”

A baby is not a product. A womb is not for rent. I wrote that back in April, knee-deep in a Wall Street Journal investigation about a Chinese gaming executive with over a hundred American-born children, and Monday’s ruling is exactly the reading that let that industry exist in the first place.

I think the Court got this one 100% wrong. Go read Senator Jacob Howard’s own floor speech introducing the Citizenship Clause, May 30, 1866: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.” People keep running that quote with the ellipsis cut right before “every other class of persons.” I won’t do that to you. Read it as the list it is: foreigners, aliens, and people who belong to ambassador or foreign-minister families are the excluded classes. The “every other class” Howard swept in was the entire point of the amendment, freed slaves and their children, the people Dred Scott said could never be citizens. That’s who the 14th Amendment was written for.

Howard wasn’t the only one saying it. Senator Trumbull, the amendment’s chief architect, said “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else” and being under the “complete jurisdiction” of the United States, which is exactly why that same debate excluded tribal Indians who owed their allegiance elsewhere. Allegiance was the test. Not GPS coordinates at the moment of delivery.

A woman who flies to Los Angeles specifically to give birth doesn’t owe this country allegiance. A Chinese billionaire renting a California womb because his own government won’t let him have this many kids doesn’t owe this country allegiance. Their children weren’t accidentally born on American soil, they were shipped here on purpose, through an industry built for exactly this. That’s not the “every other class of persons” Howard meant. That’s a loophole nobody in 1866 was debating, because nobody in 1866 had invented commercial surrogacy.

I’ve spent two long pieces on how far that loophole has grown (part one, part two, paid subscribers, no apologies for the length): Xu Bo, a Chinese billionaire who wants sons because they’re “superior to girls,” legally fathered over a hundred children through American surrogates. Margaret Wang, who runs Rhea Fertility on Peter Thiel money, calls the U.S. the destination for “regulatory arbitrage,” her words. That’s not an accident of a 158-year-old amendment. That’s a national security vulnerability built on a reading of “subject to the jurisdiction” the men who wrote the clause never intended.

DOJ’s same-day birth tourism memo is the tell that even this administration knows something’s broken. It’s still too small. “Birth tourism,” as DOJ uses it, means visa fraud and lying to customs agents, a real crime. It says nothing about the legal surrogacy pipeline moving foreign elites’ children through American wombs by the hundreds, no fraud required, because nobody wrote a law around the actual loophole. One is fraud. The other is Tuesday.

Rick Scott’s SAFE KIDS Act doesn’t fix it either. It voids surrogacy contracts involving adversary-nation nationals, hits brokers with a misdemeanor, and has stalled in committee since November with zero Democratic cosponsors. No cap on children commissioned. No transparency across agencies. No protection for the woman whose body is the actual product. It’s a national security bill wearing family-values clothing, aimed at the wrong century’s problem.

Watch whether a single justice, in a future case, revisits what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually meant to the men who wrote it. Watch whether Congress ever legislates the loophole instead of leaving it to DOJ memos. And watch whether anyone in Washington, either party, proposes something that closes the door on manufactured citizenship instead of chasing fraud around its edges.

The 14th Amendment was written to make freed slaves citizens. Monday, the Court used it to guarantee citizenship to a child conceived in a lab, gestated for a fee, and shipped home to a country that already has a father. Those are not the same amendment. A total travesty.

The Court Also Ruled 9-0 on Trans Athletes. You Wouldn’t Know It From the Headlines.

The Story.

Also on June 30, the Court ruled 6-3 in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox that states may bar biological males from girls' and women's school sports. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. All nine justices, including the three liberal ones, agreed the laws don't violate Title IX; the 6-3 split was only on a separate equal protection question, where Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. Kavanaugh wrote the ruling doesn't "require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports throughout America," while also writing a biological male who identifies as female deserves "respect" and shouldn't be "ostracized or vilified." Trump posted: "BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN'S SPORTS."

The Left’s read. A devastating loss dressed in soft language. The Human Rights Campaign said it comes “at the expense of all women and girls.” CNN’s Steve Vladeck called it “a significant loss for equality advocates,” though he flagged the ruling also cracks a door for future challenges, a nuance mostly missing from the louder coverage.

The Right’s read. Common sense, finally codified. Fox led with Trump’s own post and framed the ruling as restoring biological reality after years of lower courts second-guessing state legislatures. The unanimous Title IX holding gets top billing as proof this was never actually close.

What both sides are skipping. This ruling doesn’t ban anything; it only permits. States that already let biological males compete in girls’ sports can keep doing exactly that; this just gives cover to the states that want to say no. That’s a green light for state-by-state sorting, not a national resolution, and it’s likely to reshape where recruits, families, and entire athletic programs land depending on which state they’re in. Neither side’s coverage frames it that way. The left doesn’t want to admit the ruling leaves its preferred states untouched, and the right doesn’t want to admit this is nowhere near over.

Nine justices, not six, agreed Title IX doesn’t require a school to let a biological male compete on the girls’ team. Sit with that, because almost none of the coverage wants you to. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, cast as the ruling’s losing side, signed onto the exact same statutory reading conservatives have wanted since West Virginia and Idaho passed these laws. Not a 6-3 culture war outcome. Unanimous.

The 6-3 split was on the narrower constitutional question. Kavanaugh also wrote that a biological male who identifies as female deserves “respect” and shouldn’t be “ostracized or vilified,” and I don’t disagree, I’ll just say it in my own words instead of his. Nobody should be bullied or treated cruelly for struggling with gender dysphoria. That’s compassion for a real mental health condition. What it doesn’t buy is a spot on the girls’ team or a key to the locker room. Compassion for the person and access to women’s sports and women’s spaces are two different questions, and collapsing them is how we got here.

The left's version has its own gap. Robinson warning that any girl could be branded "the wrong kind of girl" buries the part where three liberal justices just told you the statute was never on their side to begin with. That's the text of Title IX, and pretending it's a partisan bloodbath is its own kind of laundering.

My line hasn’t moved: girls’ sports get to mean biological girls, a 1972 statute doing what it was always supposed to do. Biology is a fact. It doesn’t get set aside because a man believes he’s a woman. Period. And per the skip above, this is a floor, not a ceiling. Watch which states go the other way, and whether the equal protection theory Sotomayor’s dissent left open ever gets tested by one of them.

A Third Colorado Democrat Just Got Primaried by the DSA.

The Story.

On June 30, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old DSA-backed democratic socialist, defeated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado's 1st District primary, the third House Democrat toppled by a DSA insurgent in eight days, following last week's New York sweep. Kiros's platform includes abolishing ICE and ending U.S. military aid to Israel; she's drawn scrutiny for calling 9/11 and October 7 "inevitable" results of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. Nearly three hours earlier, state Sen. Julie Gonzales, a former DSA member running an "insurgent progressive" campaign against Sen. Hickenlooper, lost by 14 points after being outraised roughly twelve to one.

The Left’s read. Real, but precise, not a takeover. NPR framed Kiros’s win as “the progressive wing’s deepening influence,” while treating Gonzales’s loss as proof the model doesn’t travel statewide.

The Right’s read. “Socialism goes west,” and the specifics are the point. Fox and Breitbart led with Kiros’s 9/11 comments and noted over $1 million in AIPAC-linked spending failed to stop her.

What both sides are skipping. Almost nobody put the two Colorado results in the same sentence. A DSA win in a safe urban seat and a DSA-adjacent blowout loss in a real statewide race are two different data points, and each side only cites the one that fits its story. Neither side is breaking down who actually cast these votes by income or education, which is where the “working class” branding falls apart.

Two Colorado Democrats went home Tuesday night, and only one fits the story the press wants to tell. Melat Kiros, on record calling 9/11 and October 7 “inevitable,” just knocked out a fifteen-term incumbent in Denver, her movement’s third scalp in eight days. I’ll say what I said about the New York sweep: “democratic socialist” is branding. Put “democratic” in front of “socialism” and it sounds like a debate club. The actual project is centralizing the means of production, which has a different name, and the people cheering Kiros know it.

Here’s the part almost nobody’s reporting. Two hours before Kiros’s race got called, Julie Gonzales ran the identical insurgent playbook statewide against Hickenlooper and got beaten by 14 points after being outraised twelve to one. Same night, same state, same lane. NPR is framing Kiros’s win as “the progressive wing’s deepening influence” while filing Gonzales’s blowout under fundraising math. Convenient. A DSA-aligned candidate wins where the district is safely blue enough to survive comments about terror attacks being “inevitable.” It gets crushed the second it needs an actual swing voter.

Now watch who’s actually doing the electing, because this is where “working class” stops meaning anything. In last week’s New York sweep, Darializa Avila Chevalier won higher-income precincts by 5.1 points and lost lower-income precincts by 9.1. Claire Valdez won higher-income areas by 33.7 points and college-educated areas by 36.4. Brad Lander’s best precinct, Park Slope, has a median household income of $202,310 and a plurality with a master’s degree, and he won it by 40.6 points over the guy who actually carried the lower-income vote.

Every DSA-aligned winner ran up the score with young, college-educated, higher-income voters. Every one of them lost the actual working-class precincts to the more moderate Democrat. Kiros herself is a doctoral student and former lawyer. Say “working class” one more time.

And here’s the part small business owners should sit up for. DSA’s own Labor 101 curriculum defines “working class” as anyone who has to sell their labor to survive, full stop, no income cutoff, no job-type cutoff. Jacobin’s companion explainer spells out what that means in practice: a New York City train conductor pulling $70,000 a year is “working class,” while a Bronx bodega owner earning far less is not, because he’s “charged with his own exploitation, as well as that of others, even if few in number.” Their example, not mine.

Own a bodega with one employee and their model puts you on the same side of the line as a hedge fund manager. The labor economists Jacobin cites for the numbers put the “corporate elite” at 2 percent of the country and the working class at 63 percent. On the stump, they’ll sell you Bernie’s “millionaires and billionaires” line. Their own curriculum says the actual target is anyone who signs a paycheck, and that’s every small business owner in America, not just the ones with private jets.

That’s not an accident, and it’s not new. I’ve written before about how the DSA actually operates once its people win (full piece here, free), and the model isn’t “represent your district.” It’s “co-govern.” Mamdani said it himself on stage at the 2023 DSA convention: “We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization.” Nithya Raman found out what happens when you forget that, censured in writing by her own chapter in 2024 for accepting an endorsement from a mainstream Jewish Democratic club, with members privately told to stay quiet to preserve the chapter’s “leverage” over her.

So no, this isn’t a working-class movement being run by working people. It’s academics, activists, and nonprofit lifers, career activism and NGO work instead of manual labor, entrepreneurship, or the kind of innovation that actually creates a job, getting elected by the most comfortable, most educated, most insulated voters in the Democratic coalition, then answering to a private committee instead of the constituents who thought they voted for a Democrat.

That’s the trajectory worth watching, more than any single Colorado race. A party that keeps letting its safest seats get captured by an organization whose own bylaws call for overcoming capitalism isn’t managing an insurgency. It’s being eaten from the inside. Keep going and there won’t be a Democratic Party left to argue about. There will be a Socialist Party wearing the Democratic Party’s name, and those are not the same thing.

Watch whether Hakeem Jeffries treats Kiros the way he treated the New York winners, welcome in, no pushback, whether a vulnerable House Democrat in a genuinely competitive seat starts distancing publicly, and the AIPAC-linked money that spent over a million trying to stop her and failed. Somebody’s going to have to explain that one to their donors.

E. Jean Carroll wants her money now. After the Supreme Court refused Monday to hear Trump’s appeal of the 2023 verdict, Carroll asked a judge to release the roughly $5.8 million he owes her, with interest. His lawyers want a delay; Carroll’s team says every prior delay has already been denied.

The Epstein files hit a deadline Thursday. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the DOJ to release less-redacted records by July 2 or explain why it can’t. DOJ is appealing, calling the order a bid to drive “misleading headlines.” Fox’s own headline called Sullivan the “Clinton judge,” which tells you where that defense is headed.

Trump’s yelling at gas stations instead of Iran. Days after two nights of U.S. strikes on Iranian sites and Iranian retaliation against American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, Trump posted that “Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY,” targeting $2.50 a gallon. Iran denied requesting the Doha talks Trump announced, calling it “fake news.”

Venezuela’s earthquake death toll just passed 1,900. The confirmed toll has climbed past 1,900 six days after the twin quakes, with more than 10,500 injured and rescue crews warning the survival window is closing.

The Court also gutted campaign finance limits, same morning, different headline. In NRSC v. FEC, the Court ruled 6-3 that a 1974 cap on party-candidate coordinated spending violates the First Amendment, overturning its own 2001 precedent. Kagan dissented, warning “the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account.” A real midterm advantage for the GOP, and almost nobody noticed.

That’s The Read.

See you Friday.

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

I was offline for a few days. I was under the weather and prepping for visitors. Great combo.

What happened while I was offline? A socialist sweep, a Buttigieg “swatting” story, and a Supreme Court speed-run. Let’s get into the read.

In Today’s Read

• Mamdani’s whole slate swept New York’s House primaries. Two winners trashed America online. Jeffries said welcome aboard.

• Buttigieg’s “swatting” story is a post on his own blog. The press ran it as fact. The receipts are still locked up.

• The Court ended TPS and shut the asylum door 6-3. The polls say nobody asked. Read the question.

• In the Rundown: the Iran ceasefire is a shooting war again, 1,450 dead in Venezuela, a new ICE pick, and AOC warns her own side.

The "Death to America" Caucus Just Won in New York. Hakeem Jeffries Held the Door Open.

The Story.

On June 23, every candidate New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed in the Democratic House primaries won. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, took the open NY-7 seat replacing retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez. Darializa Avila Chevalier, also DSA, knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, who happened to be the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Brad Lander, Mamdani’s old mayoral rival, beat two-term Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10. Espaillat and Goldman were both backed by Hakeem Jeffries and Gov. Kathy Hochul, so the party establishment lost its own incumbents on its own turf.

Here’s the part the celebration skips. Avila Chevalier co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the campus group that later posted “Death to America” in Farsi and named eradicating Western civilization as a goal. Her own now-deleted posts include calling the United States “a f---ing disgrace” and bragging, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” On primary day, she walked out of a live interview with Spanish-language station La Mega when the host pressed her on the posts. Then she won. She’s since told MS NOW’s Ali Velshi she “regrets” them.

Two days later, Mamdani sat with ABC’s Jon Karl, called democratic socialism the future of the party, said a democratic socialist “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position,” and when Karl asked whether Democrats could disagree on something as basic as whether prisons should exist, answered: “There are prisons.” Asked how he felt about Republicans making him the face of the Democratic Party, he said, “Let them.”

The Left’s read. A working-class realignment, not a warning. The Washington Post framed it as democratic socialists “expanding their voting base”; NPR as Mamdani’s gamble paying off; The Intercept as the left “setting the agenda” in the city. On social media posts, the move was to soften: MS NOW carried the “she regrets it” walk-back, and Snopes published a fact-check parsing the flagged tweet. Jeffries welcomed the new nominees into the fold and waved off any worry that it hurts Democrats in November.

The Right’s read. The mask is off, and the leadership likes it that way. Fox profiled the winners as “rising socialist stars,” led with the candidate “whose goal is to eradicate Western civilization,” and ran the storm-out-of-the-interview clip as the tell. The frame on Jeffries opening the door: the party isn’t being hijacked against its will, it’s showing you exactly who it is. Even Bill Maher called Avila Chevalier “patient zero” of the woke mind virus over the abolish-prisons stuff, which lands differently coming from inside the tent.

What both sides are skipping. The left’s “expanding the base” line skips the actual content of what got elected. “I regret the posts” is doing heroic work for someone who co-founded a “Death to America” group and is now headed for a seat she’ll hold for as long as she wants. The right has its own skip: these are the bluest districts in America, not Ohio, and three primary wins in Manhattan and the Bronx don’t prove the whole country went socialist overnight. The thing nobody quite says out loud is the Jeffries piece. He didn’t get rolled. He made a choice, accommodation over a fight, and a leader owns his choices.

Start with the word doing all the heavy lifting: “democratic.” Stick it in front of “socialism” and the whole thing suddenly sounds like a food co-op with a newsletter. That’s the branding, and the branding is the trick. It soft-pedals where this actually goes, which is socialism on its way to communism. The giveaway is the means of production. Once you’re talking about centralizing those, you left “socialism” behind a while ago. That’s the communist part. And these aren’t people hiding their reading list. They speak warmly about Lenin, about Marx, about Mao. Go watch what Hasan Piker says straight into a camera if you think I’m reaching.

Now watch what the leadership did with all of that, because that’s the real story, not the candidates. Two of the three winners have a documented history of trashing the country they’re about to swear an oath to. One co-founded the group that posted “Death to America.” And the most powerful Democrat in the House looked at it and said, welcome in. Not “answer for the posts first.” Not “this is a problem.” Welcome in.

Here’s what gets me about the “regret.” When a candidate wipes her hand on the flag, calls America a disgrace, and then locates her remorse the same week she wins a primary, that’s not a change of heart. That’s a press release with a deadline. Nobody discovers principle on Election Day by accident.

And Mamdani isn’t hiding the ball, to his credit. Karl handed him an off-ramp, asked whether reasonable Democrats could at least agree prisons should exist, and the best he could manage was “There are prisons.” That’s not a man dodging a gotcha. That’s a man telling you the abolish-it wing isn’t some fringe he’s quietly managing in the back room. It’s the base he’s courting. “Let them,” he said, about being made the face of the party. Fine by me. Let’s.

Here’s the part that should end the “they’re just progressive Democrats” spin, because they said it themselves, out loud, on camera. Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of NYC-DSA, went on Spectrum News on primary night and laid out the arrangement in plain English: “We’re on the Democratic Party ballot line. We contest the primaries, and when they’re in the legislature, they’re part of the Democratic Party caucus, but we don’t agree with the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus.”

Translate the polite version: the Democratic Party is a ballot-access vehicle, nothing more. A set of keys to a car they fully intend to drive somewhere the owner never agreed to go. They are not Democrats. They’re using the Democrats. Leeches.

Now my honest caveat, because the cross-check cuts both ways. These are New York City seats, the bluest of the blue, and anyone on the right promising you a socialist Congress by next Tuesday is selling the same overhype the left peddles in reverse. Contained, most likely. But don’t tell me it can’t travel. Bernie Sanders nearly took the 2016 nomination, and the only reason he didn’t is the establishment took it from him. They stole it. The ceiling on this whole movement is the economy, and that’s the warning for our side, not theirs. If this administration doesn’t get prices and wages to where regular people feel like they can actually get ahead, you are handing the socialists their best recruiting pitch ever written, and it stops being a blue-city story in a hurry.

And the establishment Democrats won’t be the thing that stops it, because the establishment is too scared of losing the room to fight for it. So they get dragged left, an inch at a time, until there’s nothing of the old party left to recognize. They eat their own. The DSA is counting on exactly that, and so far it’s working.

One more thing, and it’s the media-criticism heart of all this. Not a single major outlet is doing the obvious work. Read the DSA’s own documents. Pull the archive. Ask these candidates what “democratic socialism” actually cashes out to when you take the adjective off. Instead the press rebrands them “progressive Democrats” and moves along. The reporting that would tell you who you just elected is the reporting nobody will file.

So watch the specifics. Watch whether one network anchor reads the CUAD “Death to America” post on air, or whether it stays a “Fox thing” to wave off. Watch whether a single major outlet digs into the DSA’s actual platform and what it says about who owns what. And watch AOC, who just told her own colleagues the same energy is coming for them next, because the call is coming from inside the house.

They told you who they are. The only people pretending otherwise are the ones who already agree with them.

Pete Buttigieg Says His Family Got "Swatted." I'm Pumping the Brakes on Everybody.

The Story.

On June 26, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, widely floated as a 2028 contender, published a Substack post titled “A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family.” He wrote that a police officer and a Child Protective Services worker came to his Traverse City, Michigan home over an anonymous report, that he was told not to be alone with his 4-year-old twins until they’d been interviewed, and that the kids stayed with their grandparents for about 24 hours. Per his account, the allegation was that an anonymous caller claimed a woman said she’d met Buttigieg at a conference in Alabama years ago, where he supposedly confessed to “unspeakable violent crimes.”

Pete Buttigieg's Substack

A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family

Someone decided to hurt our family this week. I’m furious, and I want to share what happened…

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16 days ago · 38303 likes · 9232 comments · Pete Buttigieg

He says he told the officer he’d never been to the town, the officer said it looked politically motivated and wouldn’t go to a prosecutor, and CPS found nothing to substantiate it. He called it a “swatting” by other means and tied the timing to Father’s Day photos and Pride Month. The Michigan State Police confirmed to outlets that a report was made and “determined the report was false,” adding that “false reports are dangerous.” Per the New York Times, the state police did not respond to requests for the actual report, audio of the anonymous call, or the status of any investigation into who made it.

The Left’s read. A chilling political hoax and a new low. NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, and the Times ran it straight off his post, leading with the 24-hour separation, the “sleepless night,” and his line that this was the “ugliest thing” in his career. The Advocate and MS NOW foregrounded the Pride Month and Father’s Day timing and the homophobia angle. The dominant frame: swatting is escalating, this is a frightening new variant aimed at a gay couple’s kids, and the only decent response is solidarity. Even Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden chimed in that it had happened to his family too.

The Right’s read. Hold on, who confirmed any of this? The skepticism started on X and runs on a few stubborn points the gushing coverage skips. The entire narrative is Buttigieg’s own Substack post. The Michigan State Police confirmed a report existed and was deemed false, but won’t release the report, the call audio, or any case status. “Swatting” is the wrong word, because a CPS welfare check is not a SWAT team breaching your door, and the conflation does work. And the timing is awfully convenient for a man laying 2028 groundwork who needs both a sympathetic story and a villain.

What both sides are skipping. The left’s skip is basic sourcing discipline. A false CPS report is a real and ugly thing, and if it went down the way he describes, it deserves condemning without anyone checking a party registration first. But “the subject described it on his blog and the press printed it” is not the same as “verified,” and the same outlets that demand receipts from people they dislike asked this potential presidential candidate for exactly none. The right’s skip is the flip side: skepticism slides fast into “he made the whole thing up,” and there’s no evidence for that either, because the police did confirm a false report occurred. The honest middle is the part nobody’s holding.

Start with the part that isn’t complicated. If someone really did sic Child Protective Services on a man’s four-year-olds to score a political point, that’s vile, full stop, and I don’t care whose kids they are or who their dads voted for. Kids do not belong anywhere near our politics. Find the person who did it and charge them. That’s not a partisan take. That’s just being a human being.

Now the part that’s going to annoy some people, because I’m going to do what I usually do and pump the brakes. On everybody.

Start with the skeptics, because I’m one of them and I’ll defend the instinct. It’s fair to question a story that comes almost entirely from one side, and right now this one comes from Pete Buttigieg’s Substack. We haven’t seen the report. We haven’t heard the call. Asking for the documentation before you carve it in stone isn’t cruelty, it’s due diligence, and the thread that flagged this for me is asking fair questions.

But here’s where I split from the people treating the coverage itself as the scandal. What were the outlets supposed to do? He’s a high-profile guy who made a serious accusation. That’s news, and reporting what he said is the job. They went to the Michigan State Police, who confirmed a report was made and ruled it false. They asked for the records and didn’t get them. And I honestly don’t know how often Michigan CPS hands over paperwork on a case involving a minor, my guess is close to never. So “the press ran his account and noted the documents aren’t available” isn’t laundering. It’s about all you can do with what exists.

So skepticism, yes. Writing the whole thing off as a political stunt, no. A false report did happen; the state confirmed that much. And the motive he floated is at least as plausible as the cynical one. He posted family photos, it’s Pride Month, and someone targeting him over exactly that is a real timeline on its own. He didn’t have to invent it.

Where I do dig in is the word “swatting.” That comparison is doing work it hasn’t earned. Swatting is armed officers at your door over a fake hostage call, guns out, and people have died in the confusion. What happened here was a CPS worker and an officer, a forensic interview, and the kids spending a night at their grandparents’ house. Ugly and probably traumatizing? Sure. The same category of physical danger as a SWAT team breaching your home? No. The two can share a motive, hateful, political, take your pick, without sharing a body count. Collapsing them flatters the story, and a false child-abuse report is bad enough that it doesn’t need the upgrade.

And one more thing worth saying out loud, because it’s the media-criticism heart of this. Legacy media has locked hard onto the hate-motivated-attack frame, and they’re probably right, though nobody actually knows yet. Hold that next to the last two years. Real swatting, the armed-officers-at-your-door kind, hit conservatives over and over, and the same press barely blinked. Marjorie Taylor Greene got swatted something like eight times, once on Christmas with her family in the house. Tommy Tuberville, Brandon Williams, Nikki Haley, Ken and Angela Paxton, all hit in the same wave. I don’t recall the wall-to-wall sympathy tour then. The alarm about a rising, dangerous tactic shows up right on cue when it finally lands on one of their own.

And none of that minimizes the report itself. Filing a fake child-abuse claim to torment someone is egregious, it should be prosecuted every single time, whoever the target is.

So watch the specifics. Watch whether the state police or Buttigieg ever produce the report or the call audio. Watch whether he files the charges he swore he would (”so help me God,” he wrote), or whether the vow fades with the news cycle. And watch which commentators locked in a verdict on day one and never moved it, on either side.

Everybody’s already sprinting for a conclusion. I’ll be the boring one standing in the middle, conclusion TBD.

The Supreme Court Handed Trump Two Immigration Wins in One Morning. The Poll Everyone's Citing Says Less Than the Headline.

The Story.

On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3, along the usual ideological lines, in two immigration cases. In the first, the Court held the administration can end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and Syria, directly affecting roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians, with ripple effects for nationals of eleven other countries. In the second, it held that someone standing in Mexico who tries and fails to set foot on U.S. soil has not "arrived in the United States," and so isn't entitled to apply for asylum, reviving the administration's authority to physically turn people back at the line. Justice Alito wrote both majority opinions. Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare move reserved for deep disagreement, and there was open back-and-forth between her and Alito in the courtroom. DHS called the rulings "victories for the rule of law and common sense." The Haitian plaintiffs' lawyers said the decision would "directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths."

Running underneath the coverage is the poll everyone keeps reaching for: the NPR/PBS News/Marist survey in which 65% of U.S. adults say ICE has "gone too far" enforcing immigration law, against 22% who say its actions are "about right" and 12% who say it hasn't gone far enough. It was conducted January 27–30 (n=1,462 adults, margin of error ±2.9 points), up from 54% last June. The four days it was in the field matter: it opened three days after federal agents killed Alex Pretti at a Minneapolis protest and three weeks after an ICE agent killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen, in her car, both during Operation Metro Surge, the largest immigration operation the country had ever mounted.

The Left’s read. A humanitarian catastrophe, greenlit by a partisan Court and rejected by the public. CNN led with more than a million immigrants facing a scramble to stay. The plaintiffs’ “thousands will die” warning ran as the headline emotion, Sotomayor’s bench dissent as the moral center, and the “two-thirds say too far” poll as proof that even voters have turned against the whole crackdown.

The Right’s read. The Court read the statute and the executive won. DHS emphasized that TPS was designed to be temporary (the word is right there in the name), that an asylum claim was never meant to trigger by failing to cross a border illegally, and that the rulings restore presidential authority lower courts had been second-guessing for months. On the poll, where the right engages it at all, the answer is that it’s a partisan artifact, 93% of Democrats against 27% of Republicans, dressed up as the voice of “America.” The system worked, the angle goes. That’s the story.

What both sides are skipping. Quick context, let’s talk procedure, because the screaming on both ends skips what the Court actually decided. TPS is a temporary humanitarian status the executive grants to people from countries hit by war or disaster. It is renewed at the executive’s discretion, and the ruling says the executive who grants it can also end it. That’s it. It does not mean 350,000 people get deported tomorrow; there are timelines and processes. The asylum ruling is even narrower, a statutory question about what the words “arrived in the United States” mean. Neither opinion is a referendum on whether immigrants are good people. The “thousands will die” line is an advocacy projection presented as a finding, and the coverage almost never labels it that way. And that poll deserves better than either side gives it. The question is actually fair, three balanced options including “not gone far enough,” so the “rigged wording” brush-off on the right doesn’t hold. What the left’s “America has turned” framing buries is the split underneath: 93% of Democrats say “gone too far,” 27% of Republicans do, and the honest swing group, independents, sits at 71%. That gap is the story, and the topline erases it.

Strip the melodrama and read what the Court actually said, because both sides want you reacting to the trailer instead of the movie.

The TPS ruling says temporary means temporary. That is a genuinely hard thing to argue with, given “temporary” is the literal first word of the program’s name. The asylum ruling says you can’t claim asylum by standing in Mexico and not making it across. Also not exactly a wild reading of the law. This is the Court doing the boring thing, reading the text, and the boring thing keeps getting narrated as a massacre.

Is it disruptive? Of course it is. There are real families inside that 350,000, people who’ve been here a decade-plus, holding jobs, paying mortgages, raising American-born kids under a status everyone quietly pretended was permanent. I’m not going to wave that away to score a point. It’s a mess, and it’s a mess with human beings in it. It’s a mess because past administrations, mainly through executive action, have been playing fast and loose with the definitions of “temporary” and “arrived.”

But here’s the question the catastrophe coverage skips: whose fault is the mess? If a “temporary” program runs fifteen years, the scandal isn’t the Court finally calling it temporary. The scandal is that Congress, for fifteen years, never had the spine to decide what these people’s actual status should be. They left them dangling on an executive renewal that flips every time the White House changes hands, and now everyone’s shocked the rug moved. Blame the branch that writes the laws, not the one that read this one.

And about that poll, because I had to eat a little crow here. My first instinct was that “gone too far” is a rigged question, and then I went and read the thing. It isn’t. Marist gave people three real options, including “not gone far enough,” and 65% still picked “gone too far,” up eleven points since last June. Fair question, real result. Credit where it’s due.

But the headline strips two things. First, the crosstabs: 93% of Democrats say “too far” against 27% of Republicans, Trump voters down at 25%. That’s not “America has turned on ICE.” That’s the country split exactly where it splits on everything, with the press stapling “two-thirds of Americans” over a 66-point partisan canyon. The figure that should actually worry the administration is independents at 71%, because independents decide November.

Second, and this is the one that bugs me, look at when Marist was in the field. January 27 through 30. Three days after federal agents killed Alex Pretti at a Minneapolis protest, three weeks after an ICE agent put three rounds into Renée Good’s car and killed her, a U.S. citizen, in the middle of the largest immigration sweep we’d ever run. You could not script a higher-outrage week to take the country’s temperature. Quoting that number today with no mention of the bodies it was measured next to is like running a hurricane-week poll on FEMA and calling it the national mood.

Now the part that keeps me honest, and it cuts both ways. The administration did course-correct after Minneapolis. Bovino got pulled. The surge ended in February. Trump allowed they could use “a softer touch.” Noem is gone. So the worst of what people were reacting to got dialed back, and I haven’t found a clean ICE poll since to tell us where the number sits now that the dust has settled. But the drift wasn’t only a Minnesota thing either. Gallup had Americans warming to immigration well before the surge ever started, a record 79% calling it good for the country and Republican demand to cut it falling from 88% to 48% by the summer of 2025. So the right can’t write the whole thing off as one bad week of footage, and the left can’t pass a number taken next to two fresh killings off as the resting pulse. The honest version is that anybody waving “two-thirds” around today doesn’t actually know if it still holds.

And here’s the question none of these polls bother to ask, because the answer would muddy the headline. Immigration is the issue Trump has won on, more than once. Plenty of people can look at Minneapolis, decide the enforcement went too far, and still not want what’s on the other menu, which right now is a Democratic Party drifting toward the DSA’s “abolish ICE.” “Too far” is a verdict on how it was done. It is not a vote for open borders, and it is not nostalgia for catch-and-release. You can be sick over three rounds fired into Renée Good’s car and still want the border enforced. Most people live right there. But “do you want it done, just not like that?” is the question Marist never put on the card, because a clean 65% reads better than an honest split.

So watch the actual text of the asylum opinion, not the cable summary of it. Watch whether Congress lifts a finger to settle TPS now that the Court tossed it back in their lap (they won’t). And watch whether a single outlet citing “two-thirds” ever tells you it was taken the week of the Minneapolis killings, or shows you the 93-to-27 party split underneath, or just runs the topline that hides both.

The justices didn’t write a death warrant. They read a statute Congress was too cowardly to fix. The mess was always yours, Congress. The Court just stopped covering for you.

The Iran “ceasefire” is a shooting war again. Two months after the signed MOU, Iran allegedly hit the Singapore-flagged Ever Lovely and then the M/T Kiku with drones in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump called the strike “foolish” and blamed Tehran, and U.S. forces ran two straight nights of retaliatory strikes (June 26–27) on Iranian missile, drone, radar, and minelayer sites. Iran’s IRGC then fired ballistic missiles and drones at the U.S. Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait and the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and Qatar reported a citizen killed by shrapnel.

Amanda Talks

Hormuz Fighting Pauses, Iraq Purges Pro-Iranian Officials, and Venezuela's Earthquake Death Toll Climbs

📰 THIS WEEK’S BIG STORY: The US and Iran traded strikes around the Strait of Hormuz before agreeing to stand down and resume talks in Doha Tuesday. While the West argues over whether the Iran MOU is a “capitulation,” two pro-Iranian outposts got gutted in the same 72 hours — Iraq arrested 47 pro-Iranian officials, and Israel and Lebanon signed a framew…

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13 days ago · Amanda Peterson

At least 1,450 are dead in Venezuela after twin earthquakes. A 7.2 and a 7.5 hit the coast seconds apart on June 27, flattening buildings in Caracas and the La Guaira region, with more than 1,450 killed, around 3,150 injured, and tens of thousands unaccounted for as rescue crews dig through rubble. Washington moved $150 million in relief, including two urban search-and-rescue teams. ABC News

Trump named a new pick to run ICE. The President nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, to direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement, filling the seat left by Todd Lyons, who resigned at the end of May. The nomination lands in the middle of the detention-surge fight and the “gone too far” polling covered above. NPR

Birthright citizenship is sitting at the Supreme Court, due any morning. The justices are expected to rule this week, possibly June 30, in Trump v. Barbara, on the executive order denying birthright citizenship to children unless a parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Even conservative justices sounded skeptical of the administration at argument, and Trump himself said he isn’t optimistic. SCOTUSblog

AOC told her own colleagues to watch their backs. In the wake of the DSA primary sweep, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a public warning to fellow Democratic incumbents: the energy that took out Espaillat and Goldman is coming for the comfortable, and complacency is a death sentence. Yahoo News

That’s The Read.

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

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Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• Iran staged a snub of Vance on camera, then agreed to let nuclear inspectors back in 24 hours later. The press covered the handshake.

• Gabbard dumped the Fauci files on her last day as DNI. The Times, the Post, and CNN found other news. The blackout is the story.

• A top SPLC “extremism expert” allegedly funneled $1.2 million in donor cash to her secret neo-Nazi boyfriend. The hate map was funding the thing on it.

• In the Rundown: the FTC sues the trans-kids rulebook, Starmer quits, Colombia swings right, SCOTUS, and more.

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Iran Snubbed Vance on Camera, Then Folded on Inspectors. Guess Which One Led the News.

The Story.

Vance led the U.S. delegation to the Bürgenstock resort above Lake Lucerne on June 21 for the first round of direct U.S.–Iran talks under the memorandum Trump signed last week, with Pakistan and Qatar mediating. Then came the part that ate the weekend: two different “snub” videos.

In the first, at a reception line, Qatar’s prime minister appeared to walk past Vance and instead hug the Iranian and Pakistani delegates.

In the second, and the loaded one, there was a scheduled photo op and press availability at the start of the meeting that, per U.S. officials, “Iranian representatives previously agreed to.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi walked in, embraced Pakistan’s PM, and left without engaging Vance. Iranian state media then bragged that its delegation snubbed him and claimed it refused any joint media appearance with the United States. Separately, the talks recessed Sunday after what Tehran called “the publication of an insulting message by the U.S. President”:

Trump, on the phone with Fox News during the session, said of the Strait of Hormuz, “We may take over the Strait if we have to. I’ll blow the s--t out of them.”

The delegation met with Qatari mediators and left the site. And then the turn almost nobody led with. On Monday, June 22, Vance announced Iran agreed to let UN nuclear inspectors back in, called it “a major milestone,” and said IAEA inspections could resume as soon as this week, with the agency and the U.S. helping Iran destroy its highly enriched uranium stockpile per the MOU. Vance’s read on the day: “a very, very good day.”

The Left’s read. The optics were the story. The Daily Beast ran “Grimacing Vance Snubbed By Diplomats at Iran Peace Summit” and built the piece around the footage.

The broader frame: Trump blew up his own negotiation with a vulgar threat, Iran walked, the vice president got left hanging on camera, and the whole thing proves the administration can’t run a serious table. The snub clips and the recess led. The Monday inspections breakthrough got a fraction of the volume, if it landed at all.

The Right’s read. Split the two videos, because they don’t carry the same weight. On the Qatar clip, a U.S. official told the Daily Wire the supposed snub was “complete nonsense,” that the delegation “had just spent hours with the Qataris and there was no need to re-greet someone having just spent hours with.” And the man in the clip said the same on the record: Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, told Al Jazeera the reports that he snubbed the vice president were unfounded, that the two sides had spent hours together and kept a strong partnership throughout. You don’t shake hands again on a smoke break. On the Iran clip the pushback was different: Iran agreed to a press availability and then bailed. The broader frame is that legacy desks grabbed a few seconds of video, decided it was a humiliation, and ran it as a verdict on Trump’s diplomacy, while the actual result, Iran caving on inspections inside 48 hours, got buried for not fitting the chaos script.

What both sides are skipping. Two clips, two stories, and nobody separated them. The Qatar reception moment is body-language theater, and “they’d been in a room together for hours” handles it. The Iran moment is real, and it’s the opposite of what the coverage implied. There was a photo op Iran had agreed to, Araqchi blew it off on purpose, and Iranian state media bragged about it, which makes it a performance staged for Tehran’s home audience, not an American pratfall. The left skipped that distinction, because “Vance humiliated” beats “Iran played to its base and then folded.” The right skipped it too, by waving off the whole thing as fake when half of it was a deliberate Iranian snub. And both sides skipped the recess cause that’s actually fair to swing at: Trump freelancing a Hormuz threat on cable in the middle of a live negotiation. The fact sitting under all of it: inspectors are headed back into Iran, and “diluted under international supervision” is the entire deal, because Tehran has a long record of underperforming verification and getting paid anyway.

Here’s the trouble with a video like this. It goes viral, it’s easy to digest, and everybody pours their own meaning into four seconds of footage. I’m not going to pretend I know the fine print of negotiating a peace deal in the middle of a war. I don’t. But I’m also not going to insult you by pretending the optics here weren’t a problem. They were. Iran walked past the vice president on camera and made him look small, and that’s exactly what they wanted.

Because this is what Iran does. They lean into theater. They’ve spent decades projecting a face of strength they don’t actually have, performing for the cameras so the world thinks they’re the ones holding the cards. That’s what Switzerland was, at least on Iran’s end. Its foreign minister walked past Vance, and its state media bragged about the snub afterward, which is how you know it was on purpose. I won’t blame a single person for watching that clip and wincing.

Qatar is a different story, and I land on the PM’s side. He says he didn’t snub anybody, that the two delegations had spent hours together and kept a strong partnership the whole way, and I believe him, partly because of where he said it. He said it to Al Jazeera English. If he’d wanted to score points off humiliating the Americans, that’s the exact audience he’d play to, and instead he went out of his way to knock the story down.

Here’s the trouble, though. The legacy media and social media already did the damage. That snub clip went around the world before the Qatari PM ever opened his mouth, and his denial is going to get a sliver of the play the original got. U.S. outlets ran Iran’s version first and fast, because a humiliated vice president was the story they wanted. The correction, the man in the video saying it never happened, won’t trend. It rarely does.

I’ll give the other side its due, too. The president popping off on Fox in the middle of a live negotiation, threatening to “blow the s--t out of” Iran over the Strait, is not helpful. It handed Tehran an excuse to recess and it muddied his own team’s week. Own that.

But then look at the clock. Less than 24 hours after Iran won the optics round, it agreed to open its doors to the IAEA, and the Strait of Hormuz is open. That, to me, is the tell. The snub was theater. The inspections are the result. So the real question, the one nobody filming the handshake wants to ask, is the simple one: do we want to be a country that worries about the theater, or the results?

I know we all want this wrapped in a neat little package. A clean win, a tidy bow, everybody home by dinner. That’s not how a peace deal works, with Iran or with anybody. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it’s full of people performing for their own audiences back home.

As of today, the signs are good. Iran’s agreed to inspections. The Strait is open. And like I always tell you when it comes to Iran: this thing is ever-developing, and it’s TBD.

Gabbard Dropped the Fauci Files on Her Way Out. The Times Found Other News.

The Story.

On Thursday evening, June 18, outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified hundreds of pages alleging that Anthony Fauci funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with U.S. taxpayer money, then worked with politicized leadership inside the intelligence community to bury both the lab-leak origin and his own role in funding the work.

The documents allege Fauci quietly steered the IC’s COVID-origins assessment, including advising analysts to consult Kristian Andersen, the Scripps virologist who lead-authored “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the March 2020 paper that publicly dismissed a lab origin as implausible, all while Fauci insisted he had no such involvement. They also allege that analysts who challenged his conclusions faced retaliation, were marginalized, and took career hits. Gabbard said Fauci and his allies “ripped a page right out of the deep state playbook.” The release capped a year-long declassification review and was her final major act as DNI. Fauci, who called these accusations “preposterous” at a June 2024 hearing, did not respond to a request for comment by outlets.

The Right’s read. Wall to wall. Fox, the Daily Caller (”The Fauci Files: Five Explosive Findings”), OANN, and the rest treated it as confirmation of what they’d argued since 2020: the lab leak was real, Fauci funded the underlying work, and the intelligence assessment that muddied the origin question was shaped from the inside. The emphasis is the cover-up mechanics, the Andersen “Proximal Origin” hand-guiding, and the retaliation against dissenting analysts, all tied to Trump’s transparency push.

The Left’s read. Mostly silence. No prominent New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN treatment of the release surfaced. Where the mainstream has engaged the broader Fauci-origins fight before, the frame has been “politicized witch hunt,” that gain-of-function is a contested technical definition and that Fauci has repeatedly denied misleading Congress. This time the move wasn’t rebuttal. It was non-coverage. A sitting DNI accusing the most famous public-health official of the century of a cover-up, with documents, is a story by any normal standard. The desks that covered Fauci as a folk hero decided this one wasn’t.

What both sides are skipping. The right’s skip is the honest caveat: “declassified documents allege” is not “proven in court,” and a government official dropping a one-sided file on her last day is exactly what you’d want cross-examined before you treat every line as gospel. Fair. The left’s skip is bigger, and it isn’t a framing skip. It’s an existence skip. You can’t accuse the documents of overreach if you never tell your readers they exist. And the thing both sides skip: if analysts really were punished for dissenting on the origin question, that’s an intelligence-integrity scandal that outlives Fauci, and it deserves more than a victory lap on one side and a blackout on the other.

The story isn’t only what’s in Gabbard’s documents. It’s who decided you didn’t need to know they exist.

Normally I’d lead with the caveat, and I still will. This is a one-sided file dropped by an outgoing official, the word “alleges” is doing real work, and it deserves scrutiny. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Gabbard, but I want this pulled apart. I would love a thorough investigation. Except here’s the thing: Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci on his way out the door. So before you even get to “can she prove it,” there’s a louder question sitting right there. Could this ever reach a courtroom at all? This is exactly the challenge a preemptive pardon for a man who hadn’t been charged with anything was meant to pose, and the same outlets that are ignoring the documents are ignoring that one, too.

Now flip the names. If RFK Jr. had funded research tied to a global pandemic and then steered the intelligence community to bury it, you would not be hunting for the coverage. It would be the only thing on your screen. Wall to wall, every front page, for a month. Instead, half the press is busy with whatever drama is happening at the reflecting pool, and a document drop naming the most consequential public-health official of the century gets nothing.

And this is the part that gets me, because it isn’t even about agreeing with Gabbard. The documents are right there. The entire job of journalism, the whole point of it, is to take released documents and dig into them. That’s the gig. They’re not doing it. They’re not even reporting that the documents exist. A sitting DNI declassified hundreds of pages on her way out, said all of this on the record, and the legacy press is like “the reflecting pool is green!”

Why? Because they sold it. For three years, they told you to “trust the science,” and what they meant was trust this one man. They put him on magazine covers. They sold the prayer candles, and I’m not exaggerating, you could buy a Fauci votive. The CDC and the NIH handed down policies built on what he said, children lost two years of education, Americans were coerced into vaccinating, and Biden almost succeeded in making it a condition of employment for virtually every American. And the press promoted every one of them, citing Fauci’s words as settled truth. So touching, this story now means admitting they spent three years laundering one man’s word into law. They’d rather look away.

The blackout tells you everything. If the documents were nothing, they’d debunk them by lunch and dunk on Gabbard all week. They didn’t, because you don’t bury what you can easily answer. You bury what you can’t.

Here’s what it comes down to. A man helped fund the work, watched it get loose, then hid the information and silenced the people who tried to say so, all to cover himself. CYA. This little man sat on the truth and smeared the doubters rather than admit his fingerprints were on a global pandemic. He silenced voices and torched the public’s trust to protect his reputation. And today? Retired. Preemptively pardoned. Probably out on a boat.

The Group That Calls Everyone a Nazi Was Allegedly Funding One. Through Its Own “Expert.”

The Story.

A DOJ superseding indictment filed June 2 alleges that Heidi Beirich, who ran the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project from 2012 to 2019, helped funnel roughly $1.2 million in donor money to a paid field source who'd infiltrated the neo-Nazi National Alliance, a man who was also her secret romantic partner. Prosecutors say the SPLC created a fake shell company, "Tech Writers," to route the money, and that investigators traced about $140,000 in donor funds from the SPLC's main operating account, through Tech Writers, and into the couple's shared personal bank account. The broader filing alleges the SPLC "secretly funneled approximately $4.1 million dollars in tax-exempt donor funds" to a series of fictitious accounts that paid field sources "who were either leading or affiliated with multiple violent extremist organizations." The June 2 filing builds on an April 21 grand jury indictment charging the Montgomery-based group with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering over a paid-informant program the DOJ says ran from 2014 to 2023. One informant the filing labels "F-37" was allegedly paid more than $270,000 and, per the DOJ, sat in the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and helped coordinate transportation for attendees. Beirich, now chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, did not respond to requests for comment. The SPLC calls the case politically motivated and says the government knew about its informant program all along.

The Right’s read. A direct hit on the credibility racket. Breitbart’s John Nolte, Blaze Media, the New York Post, and Fox ran it as the mask coming off: the outfit that monetized labeling churches and conservative nonprofits “hate groups” was secretly bankrolling an actual neo-Nazi group, with the cash flowing to a top official’s boyfriend through a fake company. The angle is the donor fraud plus the hypocrisy, an extremism empire fundraising off the very thing it was quietly financing.

The Left’s read. Thin to silent. The SPLC has been a trusted “hate map” citation for mainstream outlets for two decades, and a federal indictment alleging its money funded a neo-Nazi group through a shell company is awkward for everyone who treated that map as gospel. No prominent mainstream-left treatment surfaced. Where the SPLC’s troubles got covered before, the 2019 internal racism-and-harassment scandal that pushed out its founder, the frame leaned “growing pains at a storied civil-rights group.” Expect the same instinct here. Minimize, or skip.

What both sides are skipping. The right will be tempted to read this as proof the SPLC’s entire field-informant program was a fraud, and the indictment is narrower than that. Running paid sources inside extremist groups can be legitimate work. But the filing alleges something past observing: informant “F-37,” the DOJ says, sat in the chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally and coordinated transportation for attendees, which raises the harder question of whether the SPLC was watching these groups or helping them along. The left’s skip is the one tougher to defend. This is the organization whose “hate group” labels get cited in news copy, cited by tech platforms deciding who to ban, cited by corporations deciding who to defund. If its books were cooked and its money flowed where the indictment says it flowed, every one of those citations deserves a second look, and the outlets that leaned hardest on the SPLC’s authority are the least eager to take it.

Let me give them the fair version first. Running informants inside extremist groups is real work, and yes, the SPLC isn’t law enforcement, but you could squint and call it the investigative arm of what they do. Fine. Except that’s where the floor drops out, because there’s a world of difference between watching a group and feeding it, and the indictment says they crossed it.

The informant the DOJ labels “F-37” wasn’t a fly on the wall. According to the filing he was paid more than $270,000, sat in the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and helped coordinate transportation for the people who showed up. That’s the rally where a woman ended up dead. So the question stops being whether the SPLC investigates extremists and becomes whether the SPLC manufactures them. Were they studying the fire, or handing out matches and then selling the photos?

Now think about the donors. After Charlottesville, Apple's Tim Cook pledged a million dollars, calling hate "a cancer," and JP Morgan put in another half a million. The Hollywood-and-Silicon-Valley money poured in. Every one of those donors believed they were funding a fight against hate. Not one of them, I'd bet, thought they were bankrolling a fake company called Tech Writers that wired $140,000 into the joint checking account of an SPLC organizer and her neo-Nazi boyfriend.

Here’s the bigger rot, and it’s the reason this matters past one woman and one bad romance. For decades the SPLC got to define the words “hate group,” and somewhere along the way the definition quietly swallowed anyone standing to the right of them. Moms for Liberty. Catholic charities. Christian legal shops. Slapped on a map, then handed to brands deciding who to cut, to newsrooms deciding who to quote, and to the federal government deciding who to investigate. The label became a weapon, and the SPLC got to fire it with no accountability and a tax exemption.

So follow the money, honey, because it explains the whole machine. After Charlottesville, donations nearly tripled, from $50 million to $132 million in a single year. Founder Morris Dees once promised to stop fundraising at $55 million. He hit it, bumped the target to $100 million, then quietly dropped the pretense of a cap at all. Today the endowment sits at roughly $787 million, more than double what it was in 2016, a chunk of it parked in offshore equity funds, which is a curious address for a group with “poverty” in its name. The tin cup is still out.

See the incentive? An organization that fundraises off racism needs racism to exist. If it runs short, it can widen the definition until it finds some, and if the indictment is right, in at least one case it helped fund the very thing it then raised money fighting. That isn’t a watchdog. It’s a business, and the product is fear.

The SPLC denies all of it, obvi. Calls the case politically motivated, obvi. And says the DOJ knew about the informant program for years, which, if so, is a separate problem. Maybe that wins in court. But “we told the government we were paying the guy who helped plan Charlottesville” is not the defense they seem to think it is.

The FTC sued the group that wrote the trans-kids treatment rulebook. On June 17 the FTC, joined by the attorneys general of Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Alaska, sued the World Professional Association for Transgender Health over what it calls deceptive, unsubstantiated claims about puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors. The complaint alleges WPATH removed age minimums from its 2022 guidelines for procedures including double mastectomies on biological girls and promoted pediatric transition as “lifesaving” despite insufficient evidence it reduces suicide risk. WPATH’s standards are the document hospitals, courts, and insurers have cited for years. FTC

Keir Starmer resigned as UK prime minister. Starmer announced Monday he’s stepping down as Labour leader and will leave office within weeks, less than two years after a landslide win, following a party revolt and a collapse in the polls. Andy Burnham, the former Manchester mayor who just returned to Parliament, is the likely successor. It puts Britain on track for its seventh leader in a decade. NBC News

Colombia elected a Trump-backed right-winger. Lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella won Colombia’s runoff Sunday by under a point, 49.65% to leftist Iván Cepeda’s 48.70%, with 12.9 million votes, the most any presidential candidate in Colombian history has received. He ran on “traditional family” and against “gender ideology.” Trump endorsed him on Truth Social, calling the race “a battle between Law + order and 21st century Marxism.” NPR

The Supreme Court limited disarming marijuana users. In a unanimous ruling June 18 (United States v. Hemani), the Court held the government can’t prosecute someone as a felon just for using marijuana and owning a securely stored gun without showing he’s actually dangerous. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the government went too far assuming every regular marijuana user is categorically violent. The holding is narrow but the Second Amendment teeth are real. CNN

A Missouri judge restored medication abortion. A state judge ruled Thursday in favor of Planned Parenthood, restoring access to medication abortion in Missouri. Planned Parenthood Great Plains CEO Emily Wales applauded the decision. It’s one ruling in a state that’s been a legal seesaw since Dobbs. The Hill

Ukraine struck Crimea overnight. Ukrainian drones hit an oil terminal and a power plant in Russian-occupied Crimea into June 21–22, with additional strikes reported in Moscow Oblast. The Russian-installed governor suspended civilian gas sales on the peninsula, reserving fuel for “state services.” Kyiv Independent

That’s The Read.

See you Wednesday.

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

I am ready to get this weekend started! Plans are pool, lounge, read my book and maybe scroll for some more videos of Europeans loving on America.

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

• The full 14-point Iran memo is out, Trump signed it at Versailles, and the panic is finally bipartisan. When Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz read from the same hymnal, that’s not a verdict on the deal. That’s the war party.

• The man the FBI calls the ringleader of the UFC plot overstayed a B2 visa in 2001 and got DACA in 2014. Guess which outlets left that part out of the headline.

• Federal prosecutors indicted 15 anti-ICE activists in Minneapolis. One side says antifa cell, the other says protesters, and the 94-page complaint is sitting right there if anyone wants to read it.

• In the Rundown: the DOJ tells a court that shutting down Elon Musk’s polluting turbines is a national security risk, 350,000 Haitians wait on the Supreme Court, and a Putin critic gets shot dead in Poland.

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

The Iran Text Is Finally Public. The Only People Panicking Are the Ones Who Never Wanted the War to End.

The Story.

On Wednesday night the administration released the full 14-point text of the U.S.-Iran memorandum, after Trump signed it himself at Versailles. The Friday signing ceremony in Geneva got scrapped in favor of an electronic signing by both sides.

The terms: an “immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts,” including Lebanon, the Strait of Hormuz reopened, and a 60-day window to negotiate a final deal endorsed by the UN. On the nuclear file, Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium “must at minimum be diluted under international supervision,” and envoy Steve Witkoff told Congress Iran will invite the IAEA to inspect its sites and help locate enriched material believed buried under rubble. The $300 billion Gulf-funded reconstruction fund I broke down Wednesday is still in the text, still conditional.

What’s new is the reaction. It’s a bipartisan pile-on now. Schumer says it “looks like Iran has won on just about every one of them.” Pence calls it weak. Cruz calls it capitulation. Cassidy says Iran’s nuclear ambitions stay unchecked and that Tehran just learned it can turn Hormuz threats into cash. Trump fired back at the “fools” opposing it. Meanwhile, Iran’s lead negotiator warned the U.S. will get an “even harder slap” if it violates the deal, and Vance’s trip to Switzerland was canceled.

The Left’s read. Schumer’s scorecard is the whole Democratic frame. Count the 14 points, hand most of them to Tehran, file it under Trump-got-rolled. MSNBC’s angle is that the more Senate Republicans learn, the less they like it, which lets the Democrats narrate a GOP civil war from the cheap seats. CBS leads on the bipartisan criticism and Trump “lashing out.” The emphasis stays fixed on the $300 billion and the concessions.

The Right’s read. Split, and loud about it. The hawk wing (Pence, Cruz, Cassidy, plus a Fox opinion page calling it “surrender”) hammers the money and the missing teeth. The other lane (Lindsey Graham’s “little downside to trying,” and the administration itself) sells a war ended, ships moving through Hormuz, the IAEA back inside Iran, no new American boots in the sand. Witkoff’s briefing on inspections and diluting the uranium is the administration’s entire case, and it’s barely audible under the panic.

What both sides are skipping. Everyone is litigating the same two things, the dollar figure and “who won the 14 points,” and almost nobody is saying the plainest fact: the shooting stopped. The war that had the strait closed and oil twitchy ended this week. A regular person clocks that before they clock point nine of a memorandum. The other skip cuts the other way, and the hawks have a point. “Diluted under international supervision” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and Iran has a long record of underperforming verification and getting paid anyway. So the honest middle is that the “Iran won” chorus and the “real peace” victory lap are both dodging the one thing that decides this, which is enforcement.

This MOU is a step. It’s not the end, and we are a long way from the end. What it is is the thing this moment actually calls for, economically for the world and politically here at home. It stops a shooting war. It reopens the strait, which means fuel prices come down. In June 2026, with inflation still parked on people’s grocery bills, that is not a footnote. That is not on the cyrons.

Then look at the board. Where Iran sat when this started and where it sits now are two different planets. Economy in a stranglehold. Its nuclear facilities cratered and, by our own envoy’s account, buried under rubble, its military bombed down to a fraction of what it was. And the reconstruction money everyone’s clutching their pearls over? Iran doesn’t touch a dollar of it unless it behaves, and not one dollar of it is yours. It’s Gulf and private money, conditional, paid only on performance. That is not a country that won. That’s a country negotiating off the floor.

So what’s actually left for the next 60 days? Enforcement. The piece that decides whether any of this holds is verification: what happens to that enriched stockpile, who inspects it, and whether “down-blended on-site under IAEA supervision” turns into a real inspector in a real facility or just one more Iranian promise. The IAEA hasn’t laid eyes on Iran’s near-weapons-grade material since last summer. Closing that gap is the whole job now, and 60 days runs us to about mid-August, at which point, watch, it gets extended.

Now the beltway. The talking heads and the politico set will keep crying that this is a failure for the president, and maybe someday it will be. It isn’t one today. What they actually want is regime change and the visual of the United States hauling Iran’s nuclear material out on a flatbed. Would that be satisfying? Yeah, absolutely. Is it practical? No. That picture takes American boots on Iranian ground, and that’s the on-ramp to a war far uglier than the one we just ended. The president’s job is to put U.S. interests first, and here’s the move the “he went soft” crowd won’t think two steps ahead on. If you genuinely want this president able to finish the job later, the midterms matter. Gas spiking and inflation climbing into November is how you hand Congress to the people who’ll make certain he never drops another bomb. Ending the war and bringing the pump down isn’t the soft play. It’s the one that keeps the hard option on the table. To be clear, I am not arguing for more war; I am just stating a fact that the war hawks need to consider.

And the talking heads can be as loud as they like, because normie America stopped taking their calls a while ago. Most people will carry a vague, half-heard notion of what an MOU even is, if that. What they’ll feel is the number on the gas station sign dropping. That’s the only poll that moves.

Here’s my take, and I’ll own it as a prediction. I fully expect Iran to flake. It’s what they do, it’s all they’ve ever done, and I’d bet the president is counting on it. Sixty days to mid-August, extended, ridden straight through the midterms. If Tehran starts cheating after that, I expect another round of bombs, and I expect it lands a lot harder the second time. We’ll find out soon enough.

One last thing, because it’s the lie I’ve got the least patience for. Anybody telling you this is “Obama’s deal again,” or somehow worse than Obama’s, is a partisan lying to your face. Obama sent the money up front, unconditional, to an Iran that was intact and bargaining from strength, including a literal pallet of cash on a tarmac. This is the inverse on every axis. The money here is conditional, it isn’t American, and it goes to an Iran we just spent two months taking apart. Opposite money, opposite direction. The one honest worry, the verification gap, is real, and it’s the exact thing the 60 days exists to fix. The dishonest worry, “Trump just paid off the mullahs like Obama,” is the tell that whoever’s saying it read neither deal.

The war’s off and the pump’s coming down. The talking heads will keep screaming. America already changed the channel.

From the Archives

The FBI Says This Man Ran the White House Fight Plot. He Overstayed a Visa in 2001 and Got DACA in 2014.

The Story.

On Wednesday I told you the FBI broke up a drone-and-sniper plot on the South Lawn UFC fight. Two facts surfaced since, and you are not going to find them on the mainstream. On Thursday, DHS confirmed the alleged ringleader is Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, a Mexican national who went by the alias “Shepherd.”

Alvarez overstayed a B2 visitor visa that expired in 2001, then received DACA in 2014 under the Obama-era program. His DACA status has now been revoked, ICE has lodged a detainer, and the FBI says he’s the one who planned, organized, and directed the attack. Agents arrested him in Omaha on the day of the fight. The DOJ complaint lays out the plan I covered on Wednesday: explosive drones to force a mass evacuation, then snipers on the fleeing crowd. The stated motive was anti-government and anti-capitalist. The conspirators talked about hating “billionaires” and “capitalist elites,” and built target lists of politicians who’d taken money from pro-Israel PACs. Five are charged. Investigators say they’ve identified 23 people in the network.

The Right’s read. Lead with the status. Fox, the Washington Examiner, National Review, and Breitbart put it in the headline: Mexican illegal immigrant, overstayed since 2001, DACA recipient, alleged ringleader of a terror plot against a sitting president. National Review ties it straight to the program that was sold as protection for model “Dreamers.” The right also runs the ideology, anti-capitalist, “kill the billionaires,” the AIPAC lists, as proof this was never the right-wing lone wolf the first wave of coverage implied.

The Left’s read. When the story broke Monday, the mainstream desks ran the Tycen Proper version, the 19-year-old Ohioan whose parents tipped police, the graduation money, the tactical gear, “domestic extremism.” As of now, the DHS confirmation of Alvarez’s immigration status and DACA history is carried hard on the right and thin to absent at CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, the same outlets that led with the teenager and the “his mom called the cops” angle. The status and the anti-capitalist motive are the two facts that don’t fit the original frame, and they’re the two getting the least mainstream pickup.

What both sides are skipping. The left isn't burying Alvarez, it's skipping him. The desks that led with the teenager mostly never ran the ringleader at all, because "Latino DACA recipient driven by anti-capitalist, anti-Israel politics" doesn't fit the story they tell about who commits political violence in this country. The right has a skip too: it's so locked on "illegal immigrant" that the bigger headline, an organized 23-person network plotting mass murder out of left-wing politics, sometimes gets flattened into a border story. The status is a real detail. It isn't the most alarming one.

Let me kill the strawman first. Nobody on the right is claiming a DACA card turns a man into an assassin, so I’m not going to waste a paragraph swatting down an argument no one made. His status isn’t the charge. It’s a signal. Put it next to the rest of the profile, the alias, the stated hatred of “capitalist elites” and “billionaires,” a target list built from lawmakers who took pro-Israel money, and you’re not looking at a confused loner. You’re looking at a political direction, and it points left.

Here’s the part I actually find interesting, and it’s not the one you’d guess. The left-leaning outlets didn’t bury Alvarez. Burying I’d understand, because burying is the standard move, the inconvenient fact tucked into paragraph eleven where they’re betting you’ve already clicked away. That’s not what happened here. CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the desks that led Monday with the teenager and his mom, mostly never ran Alvarez at all. Not buried. Absent. If those outlets are your whole news diet, you could finish this week with no idea the FBI named a 31-year-old as the man who planned the entire thing.

Think about what that takes. The ringleader gets identified, and a whole class of newsrooms decides to keep the camera fixed on the 19-year-old white kid whose own mother called the cops on him. That’s the sympathetic suspect, the one whose story reads as a family tragedy instead of a movement.

And that’s the actual issue, the one sitting under all the immigration noise. This isn’t about Alvarez being Mexican, and it isn’t about DACA. It’s about where the political violence is coming from, and the left-leaning press can’t make itself say the answer out loud. When the suspect is a lone white extremist, the coverage writes itself, because it confirms what they already tell you about who the dangerous people are. When the planner is a Latino DACA recipient running on anti-capitalist, anti-Israel politics, the story gets complicated fast, and complicated stories that point the wrong way have a habit of not getting told.

Point at the white guy. It’s easier. It always has been.

So watch the specifics. Watch whether the major networks ever put Alvarez’s name in a headline, or leave him a “Fox story” they get to wave off as noise. Watch what comes out about the other names in that network of 23. And watch the motive language, because “anti-government” is the word they’ll reach for when “anti-capitalist” is the one that’s actually true.

Fifteen Anti-ICE Activists Got Indicted in Minneapolis. Then Everybody Argued About One Word.

The Story.

On Monday, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging 15 people, members of a Minneapolis group called Direct Action Minnesota, with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers during ICE operations in the city earlier this year. Twelve are in custody. The DOJ describes the group as a direct-action outfit with antifa ties and folds the case into “Joint Taskforce Vanguard,” a program aimed at political violence. The 94-page complaint alleges the defendants set up blockades around federal buildings, threw chunks of ice at federal vehicles, and “stalked” agents as they moved through Minneapolis. Charges run from conspiracy to impede a federal officer up through stalking, threats, solicitation to commit a violent crime, assaulting a federal officer, and destruction of government property.

The Left’s read. The Washington Post hedges the label in the headline itself: DOJ “claims antifa ties.” The frame leans civil-liberties, that this is the administration stretching “conspiracy” to cover protest, stapling the scary word “antifa” onto people who showed up to oppose immigration raids. The unspoken worry is the criminalizing of dissent.

The Right’s read. Fox and the conservative press take the complaint at face value: 15 antifa radicals indicted, 12 arrested, in a coordinated operation to physically obstruct federal officers. The emphasis is the conduct, the blockades, the ice thrown at vehicles, the agents followed, and the word “violently” from the filing. This wasn’t a vigil, the angle goes. It was an organized campaign to stop federal law enforcement by force, finally charged as one.

What both sides are skipping. The left's "claims antifa ties" hedge skips the tape. The blockades, the overturned cars, the ice and rocks thrown at agents, it's on video, and you don't get to "allegedly" footage the whole country already watched. The right's skip is smaller but real: when "antifa" gets used as a catch-all, it blurs the sign-holder on the sidewalk with the masked man throwing the brick, and that blur is exactly what lets the left cry "they're criminalizing protest." Keep the line clean, charge the conduct, and the dodge has nowhere left to hide.

Um, bro, the videos exist. People in black surrounding federal vehicles so they can’t move, overturning cars, hurling water bottles and chunks of ice at agents, and in Portland last summer, a rock thrown straight at an ICE agent’s head. That’s not a charging document’s interpretation of events. That’s footage. You’ve watched it.

Now the part about that “broad” conspiracy-to-impede statute everyone wants to wring their hands over. Here’s the history the hand-wringers would rather skip: that breadth didn’t get used to over-prosecute these people. It got used to let them walk. Under Biden’s DOJ, federal prosecutors quietly dismissed roughly a third of the Portland riot cases, including felony charges for assaulting federal officers, a chunk of them tossed “with prejudice,” meaning they can never be refiled. One Portland rioter who’d been charged with assaulting police closed the whole thing out with 30 hours of community service. Same elastic statute, pointed the opposite way. For four years the wide discretion was a shield for militants, and the militants learned the lesson exactly as taught. There was no cost.

That game is over, and good. You put hands on an officer, jail. You throw something, jail. You tap their vehicle with your little sign, jail. Consequences came back, and the people who spent four years operating without any are calling it tyranny.

Let me be clear about the line, because I’ll defend the right half of it as hard as the left half. You can protest. Hold your signs. Chant. Stand on the sidewalk and say the most disgusting things you can dream up about ICE, the president, me, whoever you want. That’s your right, and I want it protected. What you cannot do is block, impede, or throw. The second an object leaves your hand or your body goes in front of that van, you stopped protesting and started committing violence. It really is that simple, and pretending the line is blurry is how the violence got excused for four years.

Which brings me to the lie sitting at the center of all of it. The left’s official position, said out loud by Joe Biden on a debate stage in 2020, is that “antifa is an idea, not an organization.” An idea. Tell that to the Alvarado police officer who took a rifle round to the neck on July 4 of last year, when a group set off fireworks as a distraction and opened fire on a Texas ICE facility. Tell it to the federal jury that convicted nine members of that “Antifa Cell” this March on terrorism charges, after the evidence showed they’d stockpiled more than 50 firearms and coordinated on encrypted apps rigged to auto-delete. An idea doesn’t buy 50 rifles. An idea doesn’t run an ambush with a designated shooter in the treeline. That’s an organization, and calling it a vibe is a deliberate decision to look away.

So when the Washington Post writes “claims antifa ties,” recognize the move for what it is. It’s the 2020 dodge in a 2026 outfit. “It’s just an idea, there’s nothing organized to charge.” Alvarado already answered that, in a courtroom, with a verdict.

Watch how the networks describe the conduct as this moves, whether it’s “protesters” or the people on the tape actually throwing the ice. Watch whether the impede-and-assault counts stick now that there’s a DOJ willing to file them. And watch whether a single person who spent 2020 calling antifa a figment ever walks it back.

You have every right to scream at an ICE agent from the curb. The moment you throw the rock, you’re the story, and now you’re the defendant too.

The DOJ told a court that shutting down Elon Musk’s polluting turbines is a national security risk. On June 15 the Justice Department moved to dismiss a Clean Air Act suit the NAACP brought against Musk’s xAI over its Memphis data center, which the NAACP says runs dozens of unpermitted gas turbines fouling majority-Black neighborhoods. DOJ’s argument for tossing it is national security: the power feeds AI used by the military, and a Pentagon filing says a version of Grok was used in an automated targeting platform during strikes against Iran. The government didn’t argue the turbines are permitted. It argued the company is too useful to sue.

350,000 Haitians are waiting on the Supreme Court, and new documents say the call was rigged. A ruling in Trump v. Miot, on whether the administration can end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians, is expected by the end of June. This week their lawyers asked the Court to toss the case, citing newly disclosed DHS documents they say show career staff recommended keeping the designation and were overruled by a political appointee, making the termination a “preordained outcome.” A cert dismissal on process grounds would settle the case without the justices ever reaching the big TPS question.

Newsom is now whipping Democrats to call his DOJ probe a witch hunt. Gavin Newsom’s team sent congressional Democrats a talking-points memo, obtained by Axios, instructing them to frame the investigation into him and his wife as political retribution: “Donald Trump is not investigating a crime. He is investigating a critic.” A source told Axios the probe actually originated from whistleblowers and local sources in California, the Biden-era origin I covered Wednesday, and wasn’t ordered by Trump or Main Justice.

A Putin critic was shot dead outside his home in Poland. Robert K., 44, a Russian artist who worked under the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky and painted unflattering portraits of Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was killed at close range near his home in Biala Podlaska on June 15. Polish prosecutors arrested two Belarusian citizens, ages 37 and 33, near their country’s consulate.

Israel tore up part of the Hebron Agreement. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced he’d “abolished” the parts of the 1997 Hebron Agreement that gave the Palestinian municipality control over planning and zoning in the city’s H2 zone, transferring those powers to Israeli authorities and marking a new settlement nearby. The Palestinian Authority called it a violation of signed agreements and asked Washington to step in. It lands the same week Trump signed a deal promising to end military operations “on all fronts.”

The Supreme Court’s biggest culture-war rulings are due any day. With 22 of 58 argued cases still undecided and the term ending this month, the Court has yet to rule on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the cases over state laws barring biological males from girls’ and women’s sports, plus the Haiti TPS case above. Expect a heavy stretch of decisions between now and June 30. NPR

The Obama Presidential Center opens today in Chicago. After years of construction and courtroom fights over its Jackson Park site on the South Side, the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public June 19, housing the presidential museum, a new Chicago Public Library branch, an NBA-regulation basketball court, and a civic space called The Forum. An invite-only ceremony ran June 18, with public festivities through the weekend. CBS News

The Europeans came for the World Cup and fell in love with Buc-ee's. With 2026 World Cup visitors flooding American cities, European fans have gone viral marveling at the stuff we consider a Tuesday: the free refills at Waffle House ("10/10, we will be coming back"), the Texas and Carolina BBQ that one Scottish fan said "ruined" all other meat for him, and Buc-ee's Beaver Nuggets, which another Scot decided "the European mind cannot comprehend." Ranch dressing has apparently broken several nations. Let them eat. NPR

That’s The Read.

See you Monday.

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

In Today’s Read

• The alleged $300 billion for Iran is real but conditioned and misunderstood, with IRGC media fueling fear. G7 leaders are aware.

• Gavin Newsom claims Trump’s DOJ targets his family over his wife’s nonprofit, a probe that began under Biden; he hasn’t been subpoenaed and is fundraising from it.

• The Supreme Court won’t hear a teenage pro-life free speech case; Alito dissented, raising concerns regardless of abortion views.

• The FBI thwarted a drone and sniper plot at the White House UFC fight, with the suspect’s mom playing a key role.

Let’s do the news.

Three Versions of the Iran Deal, and Nobody Will Show You the Deets.

The Story.

The Story. On June 15, Trump and VP JD Vance virtually signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran. Vance says the document runs “about a page and a half.” It lifts the U.S. naval blockade, reopens the Strait of Hormuz, extends the ceasefire 60 days, and starts nuclear talks, with a formal signing set for June 19 in Geneva. The number everyone’s quoting is a $300 billion “Reconstruction and Development Fund.” Here’s the part the headlines cut: a U.S. official says it’s performance-based, meaning “Iran can only access any benefits of the MOU if they abide by all of the points they agreed to, including no nuclear weapon, neutralizing its enriched material, and not interfering with the free flow of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

The money isn’t American. It’s Gulf states and private investors financing reconstruction of war-damaged sites, much of it loans and credit lines, and more than half is already committed by regional players. The $25 billion in “released” frozen assets that led so many stories is Iran’s IRGC claiming it gets half up front; the U.S. official says Iran gets none of it until it proves compliance.

Canada’s Mark Carney, who actually read the text, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the G7 he’s “absolutely” on board, “as is everyone else” at the summit. Overnight, the first tankers carrying Iranian crude left the Strait of Hormuz since the blockade began two months ago, the first concrete sign the deal is doing something.

And on June 16, Bloomberg published what it says is the full 14-point draft it obtained, since neither government has released an official text. The leaked version has the war ending immediately, the blockade lifting, a 60-day window for nuclear talks, a phased U.S. troop withdrawal within 30 days of a final deal, sanctions relief on Iranian oil and banking, frozen assets released in stages, and Iran reaffirming it will never build a nuclear weapon.

The White House isn’t confirming it. It’s called the circulating leaked terms a “complete fabrication,” and Trump ripped the “dishonorable” Iranians for leaking false terms. Two regional officials told reporters the Bloomberg and Al Arabiya versions broadly match the real thing, while Iran’s IRGC-linked Tasnim says Bloomberg’s copy is missing parts.

The Left’s read. CNN ran it as hypocrisy before the text was even public: “Trump’s $300 billion problem,” the Obama comparison, the suggestion that a president who hammered Obama over $1.7 billion just blessed a payout 175 times bigger. MSNBC: “Republicans nervous Trump made a bad deal.” The New Republic: “Vance Confirms Iran Will Get Jaw-Dropping Sum.” The move is to lead with the biggest, scariest figure, frequently Iran’s own number, and treat conditional access to a Gulf fund as identical to wiring Tehran cash.

The Right’s read. Vance, on Fox and in his own feed: “Iran doesn’t get a dime of money unless they perform their obligations,” and “not a single dollar of American money will go to Iran.” Hegseth: totally different from Obama, who paid up front. The Washington Times pressed the label, it’s an MOU, not a “peace deal.” The structural case stays consistent: no U.S. money, Gulf-financed, phased on verifiable denuclearization and an open strait, Iran collects nothing until it complies.

What both sides are skipping. The caveats are the story, or at least should be. But instead, the panic coverage buried them. “Iran could access up to $300 billion if it fully denuclearizes, neutralizes its enriched stockpile, keeps Hormuz open, and stops funding terror” is a wildly different sentence than “$300 billion for Iran.” The conditions are an important detail, and most outlets cut them. The other skip: the loudest dollar figures trace back to the Iranian state and IRGC media, and a chunk of the Western press ran them straight, while the people who’d actually read the document stayed calm. The right has a blind spot too. The real question isn’t the headline number; it’s enforcement and “performance-based” with Tehran, which has a long history of Iran underperforming and getting paid anyway.

On Monday I told you the terms were a rumor until Friday. That still holds, except now there are three versions and nobody will show you what’s up.

Start with the press, because we all know they are my favorite. If we had a press that prioritized actual reporting over making this administration look incompetent, we’d all be in a better spot. Instead, they grabbed Iran’s talking points and spun the country into a panic. I’ll be fair about one thing: a void of information gets filled with whatever’s available, and the only “text” going around came from Tehran. You can’t really fault an outlet for publishing what it’s got. The fault is in the weight. Run Iran’s number as your headline, bury the caveats, quote the regime straight with no reminder that this is a government with a forty-year habit of lying, and you’re not reporting anymore. You’re laundering.

That’s the three-document problem in one sentence. There’s Iran’s state-media version, there’s Bloomberg’s leaked 14-point draft, and there’s the actual signed text nobody has published. The White House calls the leaks a fabrication. Two regional officials say Bloomberg nailed it. Iran says Bloomberg left parts out. Everyone’s quoting a document they can’t actually show you.

And no, this isn’t me running cover for the White House. The president owns a piece of this. Trump is a salesman, and a salesman sells you the best-case scenario, which, with the president, runs a few feet short of the truth. Yes, it’s his negotiation strategy, but it doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating. He swore through Vance that nobody gets a dime, confirmed the $300 billion structure by Tuesday, then called his own number “fake news” the same afternoon. When the people defending the deal can’t keep it straight for 72 hours, they hand the panic merchants the opening. Clean it up.

Here’s the bigger challenge. Iran is a fractured country that historically cannot be trusted, and every president who’s tried to take it on talked himself into believing his deal would be the different one. Trump at least has a record of making “different” actually work. Whether it works here, I don’t know yet, and neither does anybody else.

But if the MOU is what the administration says it is, look at what it actually does. It’s a step toward normalizing relations between Iran and the Gulf States. That is enormous, and it’s a completely different play than anything we’ve run before, no matter how hard the talking heads work to sell you Obama 2.0. This isn’t cash on a tarmac. It’s a conditional fund from someone else’s treasury that Iran only touches if it gives up the nuclear program, neutralizes its enriched stockpile, and keeps the strait open. A carrot Iran only eats if it does the one thing it has never once done.

The real questions start after the signing. What happens if Iran misses its benchmarks? What happens when the political state and the military state, the IRGC, keep clawing at each other, and the Guard decides to freelance? Does the U.S. step back in? Are we watching bombs drop on Iran the week after the midterms? Trump said today that if Iran doesn’t behave, he would “drop bombs right smack in the middle of their head.” So, likely since Iran never behaves.

Anybody selling you “it’s over” or “it’s a sham” has no answer, because the answer doesn’t exist yet.

I’ve got questions about the choreography, too. The MOU is already signed. They kept that quiet, and my first question is why. If it’s signed, where are the details, and why are we all waiting on a “ceremony” Friday in Geneva? Who is that ceremony for? From here, it looks like it’s for Iran, a little pageantry to keep the mullahs feeling important and on course. If buttering them up is the cost of holding the thing together, fine. Just call it what it is.

Now the good sign, and it’s a real one. Mark Carney read the actual text and signed off, and Carney is no friend of Trump. When a man who’d love to watch this president trip reads the deal and says he’s “absolutely” on board, the whole G7 with him, that tells you something the panic coverage never will.

So watch the text Friday, and check it against both the Mehr News version Tehran fed its own people and the 14 points Bloomberg ran. Watch whether Iran neutralizes its stockpile or just promises to. Watch the first dollar of frozen funds, because if money moves before Iran performs, the “no cash” line is dead. And watch the people quoting Iran straight, no caveat, propping Tehran’s word up over our own government and our allies. They’ll tell you it’s just skepticism. What it really is, is rooting for Trump to fail, and whether they’ll say it out loud or not, that’s rooting for America to fail.

ICYMI

Newsom Says Trump Is Hunting His Family. The Probe Started Under Biden.

The Story.

On June 15, Gavin Newsom posted a video claiming Trump weaponized the Justice Department against him and his wife “because I am considering running for President.” He said agents have “knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees. Not because they’ve found a crime, but because they’re trying to find one.”

Here’s the timeline he left out. The investigation into Jennifer Siebel Newsom, focused on her personal taxes and her nonprofit, The Representation Project (IRS filings show it paid her and her film company more than $3.7 million), grew out of whistleblower complaints filed in 2025 with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento, before Trump took office. DOJ headquarters in Washington wasn’t involved in opening it. A related thread runs through Dana Williamson, Newsom’s former chief of staff, who pleaded guilty in a corruption case last year tied to a probe that also began under Biden. The DOJ has not confirmed any investigation into Newsom himself, and he has not been subpoenaed.

On June 17, a source familiar with the matter told the AP flatly that there is no investigation specifically targeting the governor, only probes into people around him, including the one into his wife’s taxes. That same morning Newsom sent a fresh letter to Acting AG Todd Blanche accusing Trump of a retribution campaign and challenging the DOJ to investigate Trump’s allies instead. Within hours of his original video a Democratic strategist was calling the whole thing “rocket fuel for fundraising,” his 2028 prediction-market odds ticked up, and Newsom, who’s confirmed he’s weighing a run, had his moment.

The Left’s read. The Washington Post, NPR, CBS, NBC, and Time mostly ran Newsom’s frame as the headline: “Newsom says DOJ is investigating him and his wife, blames Trump.” The weaponization claim leads, the 2028-rival angle follows, and the qualifier, that DOJ hasn’t confirmed any of it, lands near the bottom. Time’s framing: Trump is “politically targeting” a top critic. The story becomes Trump-abuses-power, with Newsom as the brave target who won’t be silenced.

The Right’s read. Fox, the Daily Caller, American Greatness, and the Washington Examiner went straight at the timeline: the probe opened under Biden, from whistleblowers, and it’s about his wife’s nonprofit books and a chief of staff who already pleaded guilty. The Examiner’s frame is the cynical one, that Newsom is treating a real inquiry as a “gift” to elevate himself for 2028. The angle: he built a persecution story out of an investigation he inherited from his own party’s DOJ.

What both sides are skipping. The left skips the date stamp, conveniently. You can’t call something Trump’s political hit job when the whistleblower complaints were filed in 2025, and the Sacramento U.S. Attorney opened the file before Trump was sworn in, with the Main Justice not involved in launching it. The left also skips that DOJ hasn’t confirmed investigating Newsom at all; the documented inquiry is into his wife’s taxes and a former aide who’s already guilty.

The timeline is the tell. It’s also the tell the left-leaning outlets keep leaving out.

How did this actually start? Not with Trump. Not with a phone call from the White House to Main Justice. It started with whistleblowers walking into the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento in 2025, while Joe Biden was still president, with questions about Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s taxes and her nonprofit’s books. The same office was already running the case that ended with Newsom’s former chief of staff pleading guilty to corruption. None of that is Trump. All of it predates him. And every story that leads with “Trump is investigating Newsom” and saves the date stamp for paragraph nine knows exactly what it’s doing.

Here’s my honest read, and I’ll flag it as opinion because I haven’t sat Newsom down myself. This is campaign prep. He’s been carefully building a lane as the moderate option, reasonable enough for the normies still left in the Democratic Party and the Independents who’ve drifted, while tip-toeing just enough to keep the progressive base from turning on him. A tax-fraud investigation into his wife’s charity is poison with every one of those groups. So what do you do with a story you can’t kill? You change what it’s about. You don’t let it be “the Newsoms and their nonprofit accounting.” You make it “Trump’s weaponized DOJ is hunting me, and I’ll fight them for you.” The tax problem becomes a badge. The suspect becomes the victim. And the guy who needed a reason for normies to rally to him just manufactured one.

We’ve watched this exact play run over and over, and it works every time. Cry victim of Trump, watch your profile go up.

Stephen Colbert: CBS cancels The Late Show, and the story becomes Trump silenced a critic. The quieter story is that the show was reportedly bleeding north of $40 million a year. He was winning the ratings and losing the budget, and “Trump got me canceled” is a much better exit than “I cost too much.”

Scott Pelley and 60 Minutes: a wave of firings, Pelley out, and the frame is billionaire owners bending the knee to Trump. The stated reason was insubordination. The fact is, “I was defending journalism from Trump” sands the edges right off “I was pushed out for clashing with my bosses.”

Graham Platner up in Maine: with him, it’s not the DOJ, it’s “Republican political attacks.” Same thread. Frame yourself as the target and hope nobody reads the actual list, the deleted Reddit posts, the tattoo he’s covering up, the texts he sent while married, the ex-girlfriend’s allegations. Make it about the people coming after you so it’s never about what you did.

Different scandals, identical move. And the left-leaning press is all too happy to run the cover, because “Trump’s enemy under siege” is a story they’ll print on no notice, every time.

Newsom is playing politics skillfully. Annoyingly, I have to give him some props. He hasn’t been charged. He hasn’t even been subpoenaed. By Wednesday, a source close to it told the AP there’s no investigation targeting the governor at all. He’s not the victim of a Trump vendetta. He’s a candidate launching a campaign, he just found the ad to run it on, and did some fundraising to boot.

The Supreme Court Won’t Hear the Pro-Life Teenager. Alito Wrote Down Why That Should Bother You.

The Story.

On June 15, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a former Indiana high school student who, as a freshman in 2021, founded a pro-life club and tried to hang flyers showing students at the March for Life holding “Defund Planned Parenthood” signs. The school refused to approve them. A federal judge sided with the school in 2024, the 7th Circuit agreed in 2025, and the Court’s denial leaves that loss standing. Justice Samuel Alito dissented alone, arguing the Court should “clarify the relationship” between its school-speech precedents and warning the justices need to sort out how far schools can go to silence student speech “they find politically inconvenient.”

The Left’s read. Mostly a shrug, which is its own tell. CBS and the MSNBC legal desk covered it as a routine denial, the Court declines thousands of petitions, the lower courts upheld a school’s authority over its own bulletin boards, nothing to see here. The framing is procedural: schools regulate school-sponsored speech, the student lost twice below, the Court passed. Alito’s dissent gets a paragraph as a curiosity.

The Right’s read. The Daily Signal and the pro-life press treat it as exactly the warning Alito meant it to be: a 15-year-old wanted to advertise a club meeting, the message was “Defund Planned Parenthood,” and three levels of the federal judiciary said the school could shut it down. The angle is viewpoint discrimination, that the same flyer with a Planned Parenthood logo would’ve sailed through, and the Court just declined to say schools can’t do that.

What both sides are skipping. The left’s “routine denial” frame skips the obvious test, which I’ll get to. The right’s “viewpoint discrimination” frame skips an inconvenient fact: the school-speech doctrine genuinely does hand administrators wide latitude over sponsored bulletin boards, whatever the message. That’s Alito’s actual point, the doctrine is a mess. And both sides skip the cleanest fact of all: a cert denial isn’t a ruling. The Court didn’t say the school was right. It said it wouldn’t look.

A cert denial is the Court’s way of saying, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Alito just refused to let it.

Quick context, let’s talk procedure. When the Supreme Court “denies cert,” it’s not ruling on who’s right. It’s declining to take the case at all, which leaves the lower court’s decision in place without the Court endorsing it. So every headline telling you the Court “sided with the school” is wrong. The Court did something quieter and, honestly, more frustrating. It kiboshed a fight a justice was begging it to take.

Now my read. It’s true that schools get a broad say over what gets promoted in their hallways, and they should. But that breadth is exactly the problem. It’s the same vague, sweeping authority that gets used again and again to shut down conservative viewpoints and student organizing, then dressed back up as neutral policy. A “Defund Planned Parenthood” flyer comes down. Would a “Trust Women” poster? You know the answer, I know the answer, and so do the administrators.

That uneven application is precisely what the Court exists to fix. Leave the rule vague and you’ve handed every school in the country a tool it can quietly aim in one direction. Alito said as much in his dissent: the doctrine is loose enough to launder viewpoint discrimination, and the Court keeps passing on the chance to tighten it.

I understand the instinct to stay out of the political fights. The justices don’t want to look like they’re picking a side, and I get that. But protecting speech isn’t picking a side. It’s the job. And when a pattern of abuse has taken shape, when that “broad authority” keeps landing on the same kinds of students and the same kinds of viewpoints, declining to even look isn’t neutrality. It’s permission.

So no, the Court didn’t rule against this girl. It just didn’t rule, and that’s the frustrating part, because the fix was sitting right there and the justices weren’t ready to pick it up.

This isn’t the end. A denial today doesn’t slam the door, it just means the right case, with the cleaner record, has to come back around, and that takes time. Watch for a better school-speech case next term, and watch whether the 7th Circuit’s reasoning starts spreading into other districts, because that’s how a quiet “no” today becomes the fight you actually win later.

Alito put the argument on the record. Now it waits for the case that finishes it.

DEVELOPING: The FBI Says It Stopped a Drone Attack on the White House Fight

This one is still developing. The details below come from the DOJ complaint and early reporting.

The FBI announced five arrests in an alleged plot to attack Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House South Lawn, with all five charged with conspiracy to commit murder. According to the complaint, the suspects planned to fly explosive-laden drones into nearby buildings to force a mass evacuation, then mount a “second wave” at a security checkpoint, with snipers positioned to fire on people as they fled. The lead suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper of Ohio, allegedly told investigators he wanted to “jump-start a revolution.” Two of the men, Bryan Omar Roa and Michael Alan Thomas, were arrested in California and appeared in court in Riverside; the others were taken into custody in Missouri and Nebraska. Investigators say they recovered screenshots from Proper’s iPhone showing aerial photos and maps of D.C. and the White House, notes on sniper placement and drone launch points, and an encrypted Signal and SimpleX group of roughly 19 people.

The complaint lays out the intended targets. Proper told investigators the "high value targets" were "both wealthy people and politicians," the attendees the drone blast was meant to drive toward waiting snipers. In SimpleX chats, he named Sen. Marsha Blackburn as a target because "she's taken money from the Israel pro-Israel lobby," and he circulated images of Sens. Jim Justice and Shelley Moore Capito and Reps. Carol Miller and Riley Moore that appear pulled from the site TrackAIPAC.com, listing how much each had taken "from pro-Israel PACs." The filing says the group formed on a TikTok channel called "Vanguard of the Old," believed the country "needed to be torn down so it could be rebuilt," and cited grievances including government corruption and the handling of the Epstein files. It also notes Proper had made antisemitic posts and "sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler."

Federal agents first learned of the plot on June 10, after Proper’s mother contacted local police about his recent firearm purchases and online activity. Proper was interviewed by the FBI on June 11. The event went ahead Sunday with no incident.

Coverage has split mostly on emphasis. The DOJ, FBI Director Kash Patel, and outlets on the right have framed it as a law-enforcement success, the threat identified and the “planned attacks stopped cold,” five suspects in custody and no one harmed. Coverage on the left has carried the same facts while noting the plot’s proximity to a 4,000-guest event on the White House grounds and the security questions raised by staging the fight there.

Carlson says Iran won the war. Tucker Carlson used his show to call the Iran deal a loss, arguing “Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. It did not when this war began. Now it does.” The America First wing that never wanted the war is now openly split from the Hegseth-Vance victory lap, with Trump dismissing Carlson as “low-IQ.” The Hill

Trump’s name came off the Kennedy Center. Crews stripped Trump’s name from the building around 3 a.m. on June 13, hours after the center missed a federal judge’s deadline to comply. The judge ruled the renaming illegal under a 1964 law that designates the center a memorial to John F. Kennedy and bars putting anyone else’s name on the exterior. NBC News

Eight dead in a B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base. A B-52H Stratofortress went down shortly after takeoff on June 15 on a routine test mission, killing all eight aboard, a mix of uniformed military, government civilians, and contractors, including two Boeing employees. The first names released are Lt. Col. Miles Middleton and Jeromy Smith, a DoD flight-test engineer whose wife had their baby four months ago. It’s the deadliest B-52 crash since 1982, and the Air Force has stood up an interim safety board to find out why. ABC7

Planned Parenthood is suing Alaska over telehealth abortion. The regional Planned Parenthood affiliate filed suit June 15 in Alaska Superior Court to strike the state’s requirement that patients seeking medication abortion show up in person, a rule that in practice limits access to Anchorage and Fairbanks. Alaska Public Media

McDonald’s is bringing back the original fried apple pie. Starting June 23, for two weeks only, the deep-fried pie McDonald’s retired in the ‘90s returns for America’s 250th birthday, 100% American-grown apples, 220 calories, that blistering-hot filling that took the roof of your mouth off in 1994. There’s a 35-foot pie parked outside Chicago to mark it. Petty nostalgia, sure. I’ll be in the drive-thru anyway. Fox Business

That’s The Read.

See you Friday.

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

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🗳️Primary Watch

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

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

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

The Free Press

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

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

Read more

a month ago · 78 likes · 263 comments · Frannie Block and Audrey Fahlberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s The Read.

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

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

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

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

He Walked Out

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Said Stand Down. Everybody's Bluffing.

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amanda Talks

My personal Substack

By Amanda Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICYMI

“Believe All Women” Has a Party Registration

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s The Read.

See you Wednesday. Stay nosy.

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

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

In today’s Read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There aren’t any,” Platner said.

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

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

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

Paragraph 22

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

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

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

Here’s how the Times treated it instead.

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

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

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

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

The Source Read the Story Too

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

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

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

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

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

The Cleanup Crew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Started in October

None of this is new.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Journalism” is a protection racket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s The Read.

See you Monday. Stay nosy.

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

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

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Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

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

60 Minutes Battle. CBS Fired Scott Pelley.

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch for the platform announcement within 90 days.

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

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICYMI

The Democrats Would Like Jill Biden to Stop Talking

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

“We all saw him aging.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

🗳️Special Feature: Primary Night

California

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

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

LA Mayor

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

Iowa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s The Read.

See you Friday.

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

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

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

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom 250 Was Always a White House Task Force

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICYMI

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

The CDC Has One Schedule. The AAP Has Another.

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the read.

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

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

Let’s get into the news.

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pick one and live with the standard.

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICYMI

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s The Read.

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

Closing the laptop for the weekend

See you Monday!

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

The Read is back from the Memorial Day break.

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

Let’s get into it.

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

A Five-Year NDA for Every Federal Worker

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CNN Ran the Epstein Names. Most Outlets Buried Them

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IKYMI

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

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He named his own funder on stream. Believe him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Let’s get into the news!

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

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

The DNC’s autopsy is missing a body

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IKYMI

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

Read about it here. 👇

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you Monday.

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

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

Let’s get into it.

Today’s edition:

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

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

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

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

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s where I’m not loving it.

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

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

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

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

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

I get the idea, but this is not it.

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

The Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know I’m not super excited either.

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

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

Moving on…

In Today’s Read

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

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

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

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See how the law gets messy?

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

Texas Children’s Pays $10 Million for Detransition Clinic

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas just made the first hospital pay for the cleanup.

ICYMI

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

The Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you on Wednesday!

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

Last week, I shared that I launched the newsletter “The Bookie” to document my summer goals to make reading physical books a habit again. Yesterday, I binged the last of my latest read, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I will be sharing my thoughts on the book in the next edition of “The Bookie” and locking down my summer reading list, which I warn you up front is the antithesis of a summer reading list. But I will explain my reasons. If you are on Fable, follow me there. I am the only “Meseidy” on the platform. LOL

Let’s get into the news!

In today’s Brief:

• Trump lands in Beijing with Musk, Cook, Hannity, and a Rubio tracksuit moment that’s not subtle.

• Marty Makary is out at the FDA. The pro-life camp is throwing a party.

• April inflation hit 3.8%, worst in three years. The president says he doesn’t think about it.

• South Carolina Republicans just told Trump no on redistricting. Missouri’s court said yes.

• Kash Patel and Chris Van Hollen spent a Senate hearing accusing each other of being drunk. We’re not making this up.

Beijing or Bust

Trump landed in Beijing Wednesday morning local time for his long-delayed summit with Xi Jinping. The trip got pushed from March because of the Iran war. Boatloads of Chinese-bound oil sit trapped behind the Hormuz blockade. China buys about 90% of Iran’s oil.

Before he left, Trump told reporters Iran wasn’t a top discussion item because the U.S. has it “very much under control.”

The delegation is the part everyone’s talking about. Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Goldman’s David Solomon, filmmaker Brett Ratner, and Sean Hannity. Eric and Lara Trump were also on board.

Eric Trump is the Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization. So, of course, Democrat talking heads jumped on this, pointing out Hunter Biden’s trips to China with his father to do business, but the Trump Organization swears Eric isn’t doing business. It’s like everyone forgets the concept of optics.

Then there’s Marco Rubio’s Air Force One loungewear. The Secretary of State boarded in a Nike tech tracksuit, and the internet immediately clocked it as a direct nod to the tracksuit Nicolás Maduro was wearing after his arrest. Communications director Steven Cheung shared the photo. The White House social accounts did their thing.

This administration troll game remains on point.

What Trump wants out of Beijing: trade announcements he can post about by tomorrow, movement on fentanyl and rare earths, and Chinese pressure on Iran to reopen Hormuz. What Xi wants: time, stability, and Taiwan eventually. Foreign policy experts say China believes it won the 2025 trade war and walked in confident.

The Makary Era Ends. The Pro-Life Movement Cheers.

Marty Makary resigned Tuesday as FDA commissioner after 13 months. The official trigger was Trump’s frustration over Makary slow-walking flavored vape approvals. The unofficial reason is much more interesting.

Anti-abortion groups have been calling for Makary’s head for months. He was widely viewed as soft on mifepristone. The FDA was sitting on a safety review of the abortion pill that Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America publicly demanded for over a year. Sen. Josh Hawley didn’t mince words:

Worth flagging: Rachael Bade scooped this firing a week ago at her Substack The Inner Circle. Give her a follow. Bade reported the vape angle was the public excuse, but the internal knife was sharpened by Makary’s clashes with the West Wing and his alienation of both MAHA and the pro-life camp. Both wings of Trump’s 2024 coalition wanted him gone. The president obliged.

The Inner Circle with Rachael Bade

SCOOP: Makary's job in jeopardy as WH considers FDA shakeup

CHOPPING BLOCK PART IV? — FDA Commissioner MARTY MAKARY is expected to get the ax in the coming weeks, according to two well-placed individuals familiar with the matter — the latest sign that Trump’s pre-midterm, house-cleaning isn’t over…

Read more

2 months ago · 41 likes · 1 comment · Rachael Bade

Kyle Diamantas, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, takes over in an acting capacity. He’s already close to RFK Jr. This is the fourth Cabinet-level exit since January, following Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

Inflation at 3.8% and Trump on Americans’ Finances In Waging Iran War

April’s CPI rose 0.6%, pushing year-over-year inflation to 3.8%. Highest annual reading since May 2023. Energy alone drove 40% of the rise. Gas hit $4.50 a gallon nationally. Beef is up 14.8% year-over-year. Grocery prices climbed 0.7% in a single month. Real wages dropped 0.5%.

The Iran war is the engine. Brent crude sits at $107, up from $62 in February. The Hormuz blockade is closing in on two months.

Then the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese asked Trump whether Americans’ wallets were motivating him to make a deal with Iran:

“Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

You can read that two ways. Charitable: Iran with a nuke is a worse problem than $5 gas, full stop. The other read: a president who ran on affordability told an inflation-burned electorate he isn’t thinking about them. Six months out from the midterms, that clip is going to get airtime.

South Carolina Just Told Trump No

Five South Carolina Republican state senators tanked the redistricting push Tuesday, voting with Democrats and killing the two-thirds majority needed to extend the legislative session. The map would have unwound Jim Clyburn’s district, the state’s sole Democratic seat. Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey led the charge.

His floor speech was something:

Massey also said he had “too much Southern blood” to surrender to Trump’s demand. A sitting Republican Senate Majority Leader compared presidential pressure to Yankee invasion. On the floor. Out loud.

Trump urged the chamber on Truth Social to “BE BOLD AND COURAGEOUS.” The five Republicans who defied him (Sean Bennett, Chip Campsen, Tom Davis, Greg Hembree, plus Massey) aren’t up until 2028. Last week’s Indiana primaries, where Trump-endorsed challengers crushed five GOP incumbents who’d sunk redistricting there, didn’t move them. Gov. Henry McMaster could call a special session, but he hasn’t.

Related

Better news for the White House: the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously upheld the GOP map carving up Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district. Louisiana’s Senate is moving on a new map that could erase one or both of its Democratic seats. James Blair, Trump’s midterm strategist, told Politico’s Dasha Burns his strategy is simple: “attack, attack, attack. And when in doubt, attack some more.”

Margaritas, Sobriety Tests, and a Senate Hearing That Got Weird

This story exists. We have to cover it.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen pressed Kash Patel Tuesday on a recent Atlantic piece alleging the FBI director drinks so heavily his security detail has broken into his home to wake him. Patel sued The Atlantic for $250 million over it.

Van Hollen asked if Patel would take a dependency audit. Patel agreed, then pivoted:

“The only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted, gang-banging rapist, was you. The only person that ran up a $7,000 bar tab in Washington, DC, at the Lobby Bar was you.”

The El Salvador reference is Van Hollen’s April 2025 trip to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the deported alleged MS-13 affiliate, where photos showed margaritas on the table. Van Hollen has long insisted the drinks were a “staged hoax” by President Bukele. The $7,128 Lobby Bar tab was real. His campaign paid it at a December 2025 fundraiser. Legal, sure. Still seven grand at the bar.

Both men agreed to take sobriety tests, side by side. The Senate is now operating on a bar-fight standard.

Quick Rundown

• Key Bridge indictment. The DOJ indicted Singapore’s Synergy Marine and its technical superintendent Tuesday over the 2024 Dali crash that killed six workers and took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Eighteen counts, including conspiracy and false statements. Maryland separately landed a $2.25 billion settlement.

• Denver runway death. The Frontier Airlines trespasser sucked into a jet engine was Michael Mott, 41, a career criminal with 20+ arrests, including a 2005 attempted murder conviction. Authorities believe he intended to kill himself. He cleared the 8-foot perimeter fence and reached the runway in two minutes.

• Canvas pays the hackers. Instructure, the parent company of school platform Canvas, struck a deal with ShinyHunters to delete data stolen from 9,000 schools and 275 million students. The company says the hackers sent “digital confirmation” the data was destroyed.

• Massie’s $60K problem. Axios reportedly confirmed a $60,000 settlement and NDA tied to Rep. Thomas Massie, with allegations he threatened a woman named Cynthia West at a Cracker Barrel in Kentucky. His office hasn’t said much. Won’t stay quiet long.

• The Reflecting Pool saga. Trump’s $13 million plan to repaint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” is 35% done with 12 days to deadline. Joint-replacement work sits at 0%. Started at $1.8 million. Trump now says he doesn’t know the contractor he originally recommended.

Let’s Talk About It

Trump told a reporter he doesn’t think about Americans’ finances when he thinks about Iran. Is that honest, tone-deaf, or both? Tell me how that quote landed for you.

Margaritas, $7,000 bar tabs, sobriety tests on the Senate floor. Who else is over these performative hearings?

See you Friday.

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