Hospitals Billed a Kid's Cross-Sex Hormones as an "Endocrine Disorder." Vance Refers to DOJ for Fraud.
Plus: the Navy’s flagship carrier is falling apart with sailors going overboard, and the press claps for AOC’s eggs while it snickers at Karoline Leavitt.
It’s Friday,
I am walking like Frankenstein’s monster. This week was heavy on the legs at the gym, and I am struggling.
So, Karoline is stepping down as press secretary, which makes me sad because she was great at her job. However, I am happy she'll be with her babies. Enjoy some of her most memorable moments.
There is a lot of speculation about who will be next. Names so far include Scott Jennings, Spencer Pratt, and Steven Cheung (Assistant to the President & White House Director of Communications).
There is also speculation about not replacing her and continuing to hold press conferences led by cabinet secretaries.
This is a significant change. I can’t wait to see how it shakes out.
Let’s get into the news!
In today’s Read:
225 hospitals allegedly disguised kids’ cross-sex hormones as an “endocrine disorder” to bill insurers $120 million. Now the DOJ’s looking. The coding is the tell.
The USS Lincoln has been at sea longer than any American carrier ever. Families say the crew’s in crisis. CENTCOM says that’s “rampant misreporting.” Somebody’s wrong, and still no relief date.
AOC froze her eggs and the press called it brave. Karoline Leavitt left to raise her babies and got called a punchline. Same week, opposite grade.
Quick Rundown: an arrest in the WWII Memorial case, the DOJ backs off the machine-gun registry, 600 visas pulled over birth tourism, Luigi Mangione set to plead guilty, and a fart clears a Spider-Man screening.
Vance Sends 225 Hospitals to the DOJ Over Kids’ Gender Bills
The Story.
On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance and HHS put out a 64-page report with a blunt title, "Wolves in White Coats," and Vance referred its findings to Attorney General Todd Blanche for a possible criminal investigation. The allegation: more than 225 hospitals and clinics billed insurers about $120 million since 2019 for gender procedures on minors ages 9 to 17, and did it with diagnostic codes that hid what the treatment actually was. Instead of naming a puberty blocker or a cross-sex hormone for an otherwise healthy kid, providers allegedly wrote things like "endocrine disorder, unspecified," so private insurers and Medicaid would cover the bill. The claims hit both: HHS counts roughly $50 million in puberty-blocker claims filed under the endocrine code, about $7.8 million of it paid by Medicaid, which is taxpayer money. Boston Children's Hospital and New York's Mount Sinai are among the named institutions. Boston Children's says it's reviewing the report. Mount Sinai didn't respond. HHS posted the report and the referral.
Quick context, let’s talk billing codes. Every time a provider bills your insurance, the claim carries a diagnosis code that tells the insurer what’s wrong with the patient and why the treatment is covered. The code is the whole basis for payment. So if a clinic gives a biological girl testosterone and codes it as an “unspecified endocrine disorder,” it’s telling the insurer she has a medical disorder she doesn’t have, to get a claim paid for an elective procedure that might not be covered under its real name. That’s the alleged move. Not “they treated kids,” which is a policy fight. “They wrote down something false to get paid,” which is a fraud question.
The right’s read. Child sex changes, and now the receipts. The Daily Caller, Fox, and the National Pulse ran it the same way: you don’t disguise the diagnosis unless you already know the honest one won’t clear.
The left’s read. An ideological hit dressed up as an audit. PinkNews put “alleged fraud” in scare quotes; the hospital-industry desks treated it as a billing-and-coding scrutiny question, not a crime; the standard rebuttal is that the report was co-authored by Independent Women’s Forum figures and leans on Do No Harm data, and that the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics still back “gender-affirming care.”
What both sides skip. The billing question is separable from the ideology war, and nobody is keeping them apart. Notice the left's own tell first: "gender-affirming care" is itself the softened label doing the work, and it lets the coverage skip past the coding entirely. Then the right collapses the whole thing into "child sex changes," which skips the part a prosecutor actually has to prove, which is intent. If a provider deliberately coded an elective hormone as an unspecified disorder to get paid, that's fraud an insurer cares about no matter where you land on the underlying medicine. That specific question is the one both sides are talking over.
The legal case here is narrow. What Blanche can actually charge is the coding, not the care. Providers are still allowed to give these treatments. But they can’t write down a diagnosis that isn’t true to get an insurer to pay. So on paper, this is a billing-fraud case.
While some will focus on the coding and paperwork, I would encourage you to look deeper. Coding a child’s cross-sex hormones as an “unspecified endocrine disorder” doesn’t just grease a claim. It erases the record of what was done to that child. And it was done during the exact years the rest of us were told, over and over, that kids weren’t being medicalized for sex changes, that it was rare, careful, reserved for the most extreme cases. How would anyone have checked that? You couldn’t. If the treatment is filed under a disorder the kid doesn’t have, there’s no line in the data that reads “puberty blockers, healthy twelve-year-old.”
I mean, sloppy coding to get a claim paid is common. Hospitals fudge codes constantly to chase a reimbursement, and half the time it’s a billing clerk, not a conspiracy. But it’s usually about coding a treatment or surgery for a real condition.
I would argue that this is more ideological, because the thing being coded into the shadows is the stunting of a child’s puberty, a stage of development you don’t get back, billed in part to the taxpayer, for a set of treatments that is still hotly debated and carries consequences a person lives with for life. “Everybody fudges codes” is a shrug when you are scoping a knee, not stunting the future fertility of a child.
And the establishment’s only answer is that the AMA and the AAP endorse the care, basically to shut you up. Nobody asked whether the care is blessed. They asked why the paperwork hid what it was.
Worth flagging. Watch whether Blanche actually convenes a grand jury or lets the referral gather dust. Watch whether a single named hospital releases its own billing data to clear itself, or just lawyers up and says nothing. And watch which outlets that ran wall-to-wall on other Medicaid-fraud busts suddenly decide this one is too complicated to cover.
ICYMI
Tucker Carlson: Order Over Liberty - Part 1
On August 1st, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a photo to X: a rustic dining table inside a Maine cabin — Tucker Carlson’s cabin, part of what I can only assume is a multimillion-dollar compound, all of it currently thanks to our system of capitalism. At the head of the table, with wild eyes and a thinly lined smile, sat Carlson. Around him were Thomas Ma…
Sailors in Crisis, or "Rampant Misreporting"? The Fight Over the USS Lincoln
The Story.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, with more than 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard, has been at sea for more than 260 days without a real port stop, the longest stretch for a U.S. carrier in modern history, running operations tied to the Iran war. This week Stars and Stripes and Navy Times reported that multiple crew members had tried to go overboard, citing interviews with sailors and on-the-record family members who described exhaustion, cratering morale, moldy showers, food and hygiene shortages, and contaminated water. On Wednesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao demanding a formal inquiry and a bipartisan congressional visit to the ship.
CENTCOM came back swinging. It called the coverage “rampant misreporting,” knocked down a viral claim that seven sailors had died in a brawl aboard the ship, and put its own numbers on the record.
U.S. Central Command @CENTCOM USS Abraham Lincoln has maintained among the highest crew reenlistment rates (84.4%) of all aircraft carriers in the U.S. Navy. The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended. No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered. The rampant misreporting on Abraham Lincoln’s historic deployment is a disservice to our men and women in uniform and their loved ones.
The Pentagon is sending the USS George Washington from Japan to relieve the Lincoln, a trip that could take up to a week. No return date for the Lincoln has been announced. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told about 200 family members at an August 6 town hall in San Diego that a relief group was being readied, but declined to give a homecoming date, citing operational security.
The right’s read. Fake news, and the receipts to prove it. CENTCOM and the administration cast the whole thing as “rampant misreporting,” leaning on the 84.4% reenlistment rate, the single recovered sailor, and the debunked seven-deaths rumor. RedState and the Daily Wire ran it as the military catching the press inventing a disaster. Hegseth had already called the reports “completely misrepresented.”
The left’s read. A morale and readiness scandal the administration would rather bury. NPR, CBS, and MS Now led with the on-the-record spouses and the Democratic senators demanding answers, and Al Jazeera amplified the “sailors trying to jump ship” outcry.
What both sides skip. A reenlistment rate is not a mess-deck morale reading. It moves on bonuses, career timing, and a lousy job market, so 84.4% can sit right next to real misery without either number lying. The press, for its part, ran a seven-deaths-in-a-brawl rumor that turned out to be garbage, which is exactly the credibility gift CENTCOM needed. And both sides skip the part that doesn’t depend on whose account you trust. The Lincoln is past every endurance record because no relief carrier was staged behind it. The old mark, 206 straight days, belonged to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2020, and that one was forced by COVID slamming every port shut. The Lincoln blew past it in a shooting war. The moldy showers, real or exaggerated, are a symptom. The empty slot where a spare carrier should have been is the disease.
I’m going to level with you. The reporting and the pushback don’t match, and I can’t see the mess deck from my kitchen.
On one side: Stars and Stripes, Navy Times, spouses willing to put their names to it, and a sitting senator, all describing a crew in trouble. On the other: CENTCOM with a stack of numbers and a flat charge that the press made it up. Both of those can be partly true, and I think they are.
I have little doubt the media would grab any thread that makes this administration or this war look bad. “Sailors jumping ship” is a headline that writes itself, and somebody already floated a fake story about seven dead in a brawl, so “journalism” is real. But 5,000 people have been at sea longer than any American carrier crew in modern history, and it is not crazy to think that grinds a person down. I’ve seen the food photos going around, supposedly from sailors aboard. Some look grim. Some look fine. That’s the whole problem with this one. Everybody’s certain, and almost nobody’s verifiable. If you have a family member on the USS Lincoln, I would love some reliable firsthand accounts.
So here’s a fact. This is the longest deployment on record. The Navy itself has said the Lincoln needs to be relieved by the George Washington. And nobody will say when. Whatever the real state of the showers, that’s a fact nobody is denying.
Here’s the bigger issue. The U.S. and Iran are playing chicken. Washington is betting it can wait Iran out with sanctions and economic strain slowly choking the regime. Iran is betting it can wait Washington out the other way, on morale and endurance, on exactly the kind of story the Lincoln just handed it, true, exaggerated, or somewhere in between. A carrier crew’s suffering, real or merely alleged, is Iran’s whole theory of victory, printed in American headlines.
Iran can’t sink that carrier. It’s betting it won’t have to.
Worth flagging. Watch whether Hegseth actually lets the bipartisan delegation board, or runs out the clock. Watch whether the George Washington swap happens on the timeline the Pentagon is floating. And watch whether the Navy ever puts a number on how many go-overboard incidents there really were, or lets “one sailor, recovered safely” stand as the whole story.
Two Women, Two Choices, and a Media That Only Claps for One
The Story.
Same week, two women in public life made opposite calls about career and biology, and the press graded them on a curve. On August 9 and 10, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, posted Instagram videos announcing she’s freezing her eggs, filming the hormone syringe in the green room before ABC’s “This Week” and calling it “a choice I am making to feel more in control of my life,” with a note that “women can do anything.” Days earlier she said she hasn’t ruled out a 2028 run for president or Senate. Then on August 12, Karoline Leavitt, 28, the youngest White House press secretary ever, announced she’ll leave at the end of the month, saying that since returning from a three-month maternity leave she “cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve” while doing the job.
The right’s read. Flip the valence. Leavitt putting her children first is the honorable, grounded call, and the left sneering at it proves it never respected the choice. On AOC, the right reads the egg-freezing-plus-2028 timing as narrative management: get out ahead of the “childless” and “too old” questions before a campaign, and package it as empowerment.
The left’s read. AOC is brave; Leavitt is a punchline. CNN, US News, and Deseret ran warm explainers normalizing egg-freezing and echoing her “in control” framing. Leavitt got the other tone: the Daily Beast headlined “abruptly quits after brag she is mom who does it all,” Jezebel needled that motherhood was her signature line and her exit line, and Fast Company floated that Trump kept calling her on leave.
What both sides skip. Both women's decisions about the hard facts of life- a demanding career against motherhood- and the newsroom handed warmth to the choice that flatters “delay motherhood for power” and a smirk to the choice that doesn’t. And in the glow around AOC, one fact quietly goes missing: freezing your eggs is not a guarantee.
I often say, you can have it all, you just can’t have it all at the same time.
Leavitt figured that out at 28. Two babies now, young enough to pick the career back up part-time or later, and she said the quiet part instead of pretending a newborn and the most demanding podium in the country don’t pull against each other. That’s not a feminist faceplant. He has made a choice and read the clock honestly.
And I'll be honest, I don't buy the premise to begin with. Freezing your eggs is not "taking control." It's a reframing of hard facts that don't bend to reframing. AOC is healthy and able to have a baby right now, today, and she's trading that certainty for a spectacle and a maybe. She turned it into a campaign-ready empowerment moment, likely to put “reproductive health” back on the ballot. And the empowerment part falls into delusion.
Here's what “taking back control” leaves out. The number that gets sold is thaw survival: with modern freezing, about 90% of eggs survive the warming. But survival is the widest part of the pipleline, which narrows at every joint. Let’s say 100 eggs thawed — which would be alot, bit I am keeping the nubmer simple — roughly 91 survive and 77 fertilize, and only half of those reach the embryo stage. Genetic testing culls more. Then implantation and miscarriage take their share. 60 Minutes ran this in May: a woman named Evelyn Gosnell froze 30 eggs across her thirties, and after thawing and fertilization exactly one became an embryo, which testing flagged as not viable. Thirty frozen eggs, not one usable.
The stongest batches tops out around 70% in the best case, which leaves three-in-ten that it never works, and that assumes she banked a pile of eggs we don’t know yet. Then AOC still has to carry it asuuming after her presidency. At 44 to 48, the odds of preeclampsia jump from about 3% to 14%, with gestational diabetes, prematurity, and a C-section climbing alongside.
The point is that to the women who follow her as “you can do anything, on your own timeline” isn’t brave. It’s dishonest. You can not “take control” of mother nature.
The press claps for one of these women and snickers at the other for a single reason. One of them flatters the idea that we can bend nature to a campaign calendar, possibly girl bossing your way to the presidency, and the other one accepted that we can’t. Guess which one ages well.
Worth flagging. Watch whether AOC actually files for 2028. Watch whether one of the outlets that ran a warm egg-freezing explainer ever prints the carry-age risk numbers. And watch how those same outlets would cover a conservative woman freezing her eggs to clear the deck for a presidential run. You already know.
A woman's facing felony charges for tagging the WWII Memorial. On Thursday, surveillance caught a woman spray-painting the National WWII Memorial on the Mall with "clean hands, dirty money" and pouring soap into the fountains until foam spilled across the plaza, months after a multimillion-dollar renovation. The DOJ has since charged Melissa L. Farris with depredation of federal property and destruction of veterans' memorials, each carrying up to 10 years. Interior had called the vandalism "an utter disgrace."
US Attorney Pirro@USAttyPirroVandalizing our World War II Memorial is a despicable attack on a sacred monument honoring the Americans who fought and died for our freedom. Those Americans include my father and grandfather. This morning, we are filing two felony charges, Depredation Against Property of the
2:02 PM · Aug 14, 2026 · 102K Views1.18K Replies · 1.86K Reposts · 7.96K LikesThe DOJ quietly walks away from the machine-gun registry. The Justice Department let a Wednesday deadline pass without seeking a stay of an August 5 federal ruling out of the Northern District of Texas that struck down registration requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and other items under the 1934 National Firearms Act. Gun-rights groups are reading it as a step toward gutting the NFA. The DOJ still has seven weeks to appeal.
State stands up a birth-tourism task force and starts pulling visas. The State Department created a task force targeting “birth tourism” and says it has already revoked more than 600 visas, aimed at foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for the child. A fight over how you prove intent is coming.
The fraud tally hits $230 billion. Vance’s fraud task force now says it has identified roughly $230 billion since March, halted $56 billion in payments, and recovered more than $55 billion through indictments and settlements, with a public “Fraud Ledger” posted August 6 to show the running total. Whether the number holds up under an audit is the open question, but the receipts are now where anyone can check them.
Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty in the UnitedHealthcare killing. Mangione is set to enter a guilty plea in his federal case over the December 2024 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel, the AP reported. The federal counts cover stalking and killing Thompson; the plea terms weren't disclosed, and he still faces separate state murder charges in New York. Nothing's final until he says so in court, expected Friday.
Nick Sortor@nicksortor🚨 BREAKING: Luigi Mangione has officially pleaded GUILTY in federal court The DOJ intends to seek LIFE in prison without the possibility of parole Leftist NYC jurors will NO LONGER be able to set him free.3:23 PM · Aug 14, 2026 · 6.6K Views20 Replies · 45 Reposts · 174 LikesAnd one fart cleared a Spider-Man screening. A showing of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” at a Cine Colombia theater in Cartagena had to be evacuated mid-movie after one patron’s contribution to the air filled the room. Video shows the crowd, including a guy in a full Spidey suit, fleeing to the lobby. Stink bomb or medical event, nobody’s confirmed. With great power comes great responsibility.
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.