Iran Snubbed Vance on Camera, Then Folded on Inspectors. Guess Which One Led the News.
Plus: Gabbard dumps the Fauci files on her way out the door and the legacy press pretends it didn’t happen, and the watchdog that calls everyone a Nazi allegedly bankrolled one through its own “expert
Hey friends!
It’s Monday, and after taking a long weekend to entertain friends, pool party, and eat pizza, the new cycle has been a full-blown assault this morning.
Yesterday was the longest day of the year. I hope you enjoyed the extra time in the sun and had some fun.
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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.
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.
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