New Jersey Registered 6,600 Noncitizens. 400 Voted.
Plus: the Smithsonian’s own director couldn’t defend her museum’s materials on camera, and the press finally found a political platform it refuses to read out loud.
It’s Wednesday!
I have a headache, so let’s get straight into the news.
In Today’s Read
A Democratic governor confirmed 6,600 non-citizens got auto-registered in New Jersey and 400 voted. The left calls it a “software error.”
The Smithsonian’s own director couldn’t defend her museum’s “objectivity is white supremacy” toolkit on camera. The left calls it an attack on scholarship. It isn’t scholarship.
The State Department named 43 Americans and groups, the DSA among them, in a report on Cuba's decades-long network here. The press called it a blacklist and never opened it. Being named isn't being silenced.
In the Rundown: 3.5 million Epstein pages out and 2.5 million held back, the Maine ICE agent’s record, a 50% tariff on Canada, a $37.5 billion Iran war, a ceasefire Trump’s not interested in, and a teenager who turned $3.07 into $89,600.
A Democratic Governor Just Confirmed the “Myth”
The Story.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced Tuesday that a software error in the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission system automatically registered roughly 6,600 non-citizens to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. These were people who pressed “No” when the DMV keypad asked whether they were U.S. citizens. The system registered them anyway. Fewer than 400 of them actually cast ballots in elections since 2023. The state has scrubbed them from the rolls and says it’s protecting their identities so their immigration status isn’t put at risk.
Sherrill framed the disclosure as election protection and used the same breath to accuse the White House of trying to “weaponize elections for political gain.” Hours later, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division moved. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent Sherrill a formal letter demanding, within five business days, the full names, dates of birth, nationalities, and home addresses of all 6,600 individuals, plus when and where the 400 voted. The letter tells Sherrill to preserve every record tied to the disclosure and notifies a federal court in United States v. Caldwell that DOJ will use it to obtain New Jersey’s entire statewide voter registration list, which the state has so far refused to hand over.
Harmeet K. Dhillon @AAGDhillon Today, NJ Gov. Sherrill stated that 400 non-citizens voted in elections. This is unacceptable and illegal! The @CivilRights Division @TheJusticeDept is investigating this unlawful dilution of American votes.
Quick context: let’s talk about how this happens. New Jersey registers voters through the DMV. You apply for a license or a state ID, you answer a citizenship question on a keypad, and the system moves you onto the voter rolls from there. There is no outside verification at that moment. Nobody runs your answer against immigration or Social Security records before you're registered. It's one button press on the honor system, and this time the system failed even for the people who allegedly pressed "No." I say allegedly because New Jersey isn't releasing the underlying data, so nobody outside the state can confirm who answered what. Someone could also just hit the wrong button. That's the level of security we're dealing with.
The left’s read. CNN, NBC, and Axios led with the mechanism and the mercy. “Software error.” “Through no fault of their own.” NBC’s headline put the glitch first and the non-citizens second. Every version stressed there’s “no evidence any election was swayed” and that the state is shielding the people who got registered so their status doesn’t come back to bite them.
The right’s read. Townhall, PJ Media, and the Washington Times ran it as a receipt. “Trump Was Right.” The angle is that a Democratic governor just confirmed the exact thing the administration has been saying, days after DHS claimed 250,000 non-citizens are registered across New Jersey, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Even the Washington Post conceded the disclosure “validates some of Trump’s assertions.”
What both sides skip. The registration mechanism. Nobody's asking how many other states run the same DMV setup, where an unverified keypad answer is the only citizenship check, and how many have ever gone back to audit it. New Jersey found this because someone finally looked. That's the uncomfortable part neither side wants to hold.
You know, we’ve been assured repeatedly that elections are totes secure. For years, anytime someone raised non-citizens getting registered to vote, the response was a pat on the head. Doesn’t happen. “It’s illegal for them to vote.” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic governor, just confirmed it happened: 6,600 registered, nearly 400 voted. But it’s not “widespread” according to the talking heads, so no biggie.
While Sherrill disclosed she scrubbed the rolls, she is sitting on the evidence and protecting 400 people who voted illegally.
Granted, four hundred votes across two years did not flip a New Jersey race. And the state’s own account is that these people answered “No” but were registered anyway, which would make this a state failure rather than a fraud ring. Would. But this cannot be confirmed, because the only people holding the data are the ones who broke it. Their primary cited reason for not sharing the information is to protect the identity of the non-citizens from DHS.
What has been exposed is a significant security risk to voter rolls and voter registration integrity. A single unverified keypad answer decides whether a non-citizen lands on the voter rolls, and the software in this case failed and went undetected for a year. And when the system is working, it hinges on the person answering honestly. That’s the problem, and it’s a design problem, not a 6,600-criminals problem.
And the DOJ didn’t wait a day. Dhillon demanded the names, birthdates, and addresses of all 6,600 people on a five-day clock, then told a court she wants the entire voter roll. An hour earlier, Sherrill said she’s shielding those identities so nobody’s immigration status blows up.
Let me be clear. No governor should be harboring people who are in this country illegally, and shielding these names from DHS is what that is. At a minimum, hand over the 400. Those people answered a citizenship question with “No,” put on the record that they were not citizens, and then went and voted. Maybe some of them figured a registration card in the mail meant they’d been cleared. Doesn’t matter. Ignorance has never been a defense for breaking the law, and it isn’t one here.
And then there’s “not widespread,” the phrase carrying the entire left side of this story right now. It’s a joke. These are the same people who treat one voter allegedly turned away at one precinct as a civil rights emergency worth a week of coverage. Fine. Then follow your own logic. When a non-citizen casts a ballot, an American citizen’s vote gets diluted. That is disenfranchisement. It just runs in the direction they’ve never cared about. You don’t get to spend a decade calling every single vote sacred and then wave off 400 illegal ones we know of as a rounding error.
New Jersey found this because somebody finally looked. How many other states register voters off the same unverified keypad answer? How would anyone know? We’re trusting that people press the right button, and in New Jersey the software didn’t even honor the button they pressed.
Watch whether New Jersey meets Dhillon’s five-day deadline or fights it out in Caldwell, because how hard they fight tells you how bad the data is. Watch whether Sherrill’s office ever names which elections those 400 ballots landed in. And watch whether one other DMV-registration state runs its own audit before November, or whether everybody agrees not to look.
Turns out “secure” meant nobody had checked.
The Smithsonian Sent Its Director to Defend the Museum. She Couldn’t Defend the Materials.
The Story.
Anthea Hartig, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, testified Tuesday before a House DOGE subcommittee at a hearing titled "Rewriting American History." A second hearing, before the full House Administration Committee, happens Wednesday.
The hearings follow a July 4 White House report, "Saving America's Story," that accused the Smithsonian of "extreme political activism" and pointed out the museum has no major exhibit on the Founding Era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or the Revolution. Republicans pressed Hartig on a staff training document the museum promoted starting in 2020 that described objectivity and politeness as features of "white supremacy culture," and on a "Girlhood" exhibit that displayed a 13-year-old girl's diary entries about gender identity. Hartig said the museum "does not take sides."
The left’s read. Two layers. On the hearing itself, the Washington Post and ArtNews framed it as a GOP loyalty test aimed at independent scholarship, with Democrats defending Hartig on the dais and a Republican asking her “Do you love America?” Underneath it runs the bigger charge the left has pushed since Trump’s March 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order: that the administration is erasing Black, women’s, and LGBTQ history to whitewash the country and slip a white-supremacist story of America in through the back. Rep. Ayanna Pressley called it a “crusade to whitewash history.” Examples that they cite: The Park Service cut the “T” off the Stonewall monument’s webpage, and agencies were told to strip content “emphasizing slavery and racial injustice” by September 17.
The right’s read. Townhall, the Daily Signal, and Fox ran it as a rout. Rep. Brandon Gill got Hartig to agree that politeness matters, then read her own toolkit back to her, the one calling politeness a marker of white supremacy, and asked whether she was promoting a white supremacy culture at the Smithsonian. Fox highlighted Rep. Nancy Mace pressing her on gender displays, with the director “stumbling” on basic questions about sex.
What both sides skip. Both sides are curating, and both call the other one propaganda. The left won't admit the museum walked away from neutrality years ago. The right won't admit its own side has nudged exhibits toward the president's comfort, like the Trump impeachment label that came down during a White House-pressured review. The honest fight isn't whether history is being shaped. It's in which direction, and from what baseline.
A congressman asked the director of the National Museum of American History whether she promotes a white supremacy culture, and she couldn’t say no without contradicting her own museum’s training documents.
The left cries “independent scholarship under attack.” But what does this “scholarship” include? A training toolkit telling staff that objectivity itself is a tool of white supremacy. That is not scholarship; it’s a worldview, and a specific one, handed to the people who decide what a taxpayer-funded museum tells 4 million visitors a year about their own country. Hartig says the museum “does not take sides,” but this document, the displays, and the lack of displays, especially as it comes to the founding fathers, say otherwise.
The charge the left has run since Trump's March 2025 history order is that this administration is erasing Black history, women's history, and LGBTQ history to whitewash the country. It's a heavy accusation. It also falls apart the second you walk the National Mall. Nobody is bulldozing the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It opened in 2016, it's one of the most visited museums in the country, and it isn't moving. Slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights marches, the whole arc, still told, in a dedicated Smithsonian building the size of a city block. "Erasing Black history" is a funny way to describe a country that built a national museum for it and lines people up out the door.
So what’s the fight really about? Framing. And the museum’s framing has a paper trail. In 2020, that same African American History museum posted a chart titled “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness” that informed visitors hard work, rational thinking, being on time, and politeness are traits of “white culture.” Those are the museum’s words, not mine. It got pulled after the backlash, with staff admitting it wasn’t “working in the way we intended.” Six years later, Gill stands at a hearing and reads a staff toolkit carrying the identical worldview, objectivity and politeness recast as white supremacy. So they took it out of public view and instilled it behind the scenes. There is a word for that: ideology.
Here’s the turn nobody on that side wants to take. The accusation is that Trump weaponizes history for propaganda. Okay. Look in the mirror. A museum that teaches you America IS its slavery and its sins, then goes quiet on the part where the same country wrote slavery out of its Constitution and bled to end it, is running propaganda too. Just the self-flagellating kind. History flattened into a permanent struggle session, where the only lesson is guilt, and the only posture is apology. Slavery is real American history and it gets taught, no asterisk. So does abolition. So does the country that produced both the wound and the cure. A museum that lingers on the wound and mumbles through the healing isn’t handing you history. It’s handing you a grievance. But make sure you stop at the gift shop for a “Latina Power” hat.
And look at what the administration actually flagged as "improper ideology." One target was an American Women's History Museum exhibit built to celebrate biological men who compete in women's sports. The left files that under "erasing women's history." Putting men in the women's museum is the erasure.
The administration doesn’t get a halo, and neither does the coverage of it. Last summer the museum pulled the references to Trump’s two impeachments from its “Limits of Presidential Power” display and restored that section to its 2008 appearance. The headlines said the Smithsonian “erased” impeachment history. So I went and checked what’s still on the wall. Andrew Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton are all still there. The Trump material was a temporary label put up in 2021 for what was then current events, and the Smithsonian says a future update will cover every impeachment. “They erased impeachment history” is flatly wrong.
The one removal that happens to benefit the sitting president got made during a content review the Smithsonian agreed to under White House pressure, and “we’re restoring it to 2008” is a convenient road to that destination. Grant that one.
Now take the other example the left keeps waving, the Park Service putting “LGB” on the Stonewall page. That was reported as erasure. It’s accuracy. Stonewall was 1969. The word then was “gay.” The community became LGB across the mid-to-late 1980s, and the T didn’t hitch a ride until the 1990s and after. Britain’s National Union of Students didn’t adopt “LGBT” until 2004, thirty-five years after the riot. Writing a 2020s acronym onto a 1969 event isn’t preserving history, it’s editing it, which is supposedly the sin under discussion.
And the argument over whether the T belongs there at all is happening inside the gay and lesbian world, not on the right. The LGB Alliance formed in 2019 on exactly that premise, LGB International launched in 2025 saying the same thing, and their position is straightforward: sexual orientation is who you’re attracted to, gender identity is a claim about what you are, and those are different subjects that got welded together for political convenience.
So yes, Congress should be asking what these directors are doing with taxpayer money. Asking a federally funded institution to account for the story it tells is not a threat to scholarship. It’s the job, and it’s overdue. Nobody is raiding the archives or arresting a curator. A committee asked a director to explain her own museum’s documents and she couldn’t.
The wounded act coming from the left isn’t about scholarship either. It’s what it sounds like when a political project gets questioned out loud for the first time and has no answer ready. Their agenda got called subjective, which it is, and the response was to reach for the word “scholarship” like a badge. Reframing a country’s history to install a worldview is propaganda. Being paid by the taxpayers to do it is the part they’d rather you not think about.
Watch whether Wednesday’s full-committee hearing produces an actual funding condition or just another viral exchange. Watch whether the Smithsonian quietly pulls the staff toolkit now that it’s in the congressional record. And watch whether anyone fills the Founding Era gap without deleting a hard chapter to make room.
The country can hold its sins and its progress in the same room. A museum that can only manage one of them is the one rewriting history.
ICYMI
How Democrats Manufactured Graham Platner for the Maine Senate
Allow me to set the scene. Leanne Fan is sitting on her living room couch next to her fiancé, Dan Moraff, with the vocal fry heard around the internet, scrolling BlueSky. And she stumbled upon a video of a guy with an oyster farm.
The State Department Named 43 Americans. The Press Called It a Blacklist Instead of Reading It.
The Story.
The State Department published a roughly 100-page report Monday titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” accusing Havana of a decades-long “campaign of subversion” that “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists” and served as a force multiplier for China, Russia, and Iran. It names about 43 Americans and organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America, Code Pink, The People’s Forum, the National Lawyers Guild, and the National Network on Cuba, alongside individuals like streamer Hasan Piker, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Amazon union organizer Chris Smalls, Isra Hirsi, and Amy Goodman. It traces the lineage from the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and Puerto Rican militant groups forward to Antifa and anti-ICE collectives. Secretary Rubio separately alleged Cuba has been infiltrating U.S. politics through the DSA. It lands while Trump is threatening to invade Cuba, with a fuel blockade and more than 240 sanctions since January leaving the island nearly out of diesel.
It documents solidarity trips to the island, ideological alignment, institutional relationships, and Cuba-backed nonprofits and travel outfits that coordinate the visits, alongside documented espionage cases with convictions attached. In most cases it stops short of alleging Havana directs these people. Hold onto that, because we're coming back to whether direction is even the right test.
The right’s read. Fox, the Daily Signal, and the Washington Times ran it as documentation of something conservatives have argued for years. The Daily Signal’s framing was “How Cuba Became the Nerve Center of the Anti-American Left.” Fox emphasized the spy penetrations and the campus and nonprofit pipelines.
The left’s read. Blacklist. The Guardian, the New Republic, and Truthout skipped past the substance to the naming, calling it a “modern-day blacklist” of private citizens and a document published to manufacture a pretext for invasion. The New Republic’s headline made the individuals the story: “State Department Targets Hasan Piker, Ilhan Omar’s Daughter, and DSA.”
What both sides skip. The right is running with “infiltration” language. The left is calling it a blacklist to avoid discussing what’s in it. And neither is connecting it to the thing sitting right there: the DSA publishes its own platform in eight days at its Chicago convention, and you can just read it.
Let’s separate two questions, because the media has them welded together on purpose. Question one: is it appropriate for the State Department to name American citizens in a report like this? Question two: is what the report describes actually happening?
On the first one. Yes, these people have free speech. They can say whatever they want, and nobody is arresting them for it. But the State Department also has a duty to bring threats to light and inform the public. If Americans are aligned with and supporting a government and an ideology that openly advocates tearing down the West and this country, telling citizens about it is the job. That’s not a blacklist. That’s a briefing. And it is not crazy for these folks to be on somebody’s radar.
Here’s the distinction the “blacklist” crowd is hoping you won’t make. Being silenced and being identified are not the same thing. Nobody pulled Hasan Piker’s stream. Nobody padlocked The People’s Forum. What happened is that a government report described things these people did in the open: the trips, the speeches, the partnerships, the public admiration for the regime. You don’t get to build a decade of public identity around solidarity with Havana and then call it persecution when somebody writes it down. “We got named for things we did on camera” is a worse headline than “blacklist,” so they went with blacklist.
Which brings me to the part that should embarrass the newsrooms. The Guardian, the New Republic, and Truthout all had the same option I had. Open the report. Check the claims. Tell readers which parts hold and which are stretched, because some of them are stretched. Instead, they made the naming the entire story and never got around to the contents. Typical and predictable.
Now let me stress test the word everyone is fighting over, because “infiltration” is carrying a lot of weight in this report. Infiltration does not require a directive. That’s the wrong test. Intelligence services have run influence operations through people who never took an order for as long as intelligence services have existed, and the Soviets had an entire vocabulary for the useful believer who thinks the idea was his own. “Useful idiot.” The question isn’t whether Havana issued marching orders. It’s whether a foreign government worked its way into American institutions. Yes, yes it did.
Ana Montes was recruited out of Johns Hopkins as a graduate student in 1984 and spent sixteen years as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst while handing Havana what she saw. She took no money. She did it because she believed it. Walter Kendall Myers fed State Department material to Cuba for three decades and is serving life. So when the report says Cuba “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government,” that isn’t a rhetorical flourish. That’s a case file.
So no, I’m not going to pretend State is out of line for keeping an eye on these people. Take Hasan Piker, who is named in the report. In March he went to Havana with CodePink’s Nuestra América Convoy, and CodePink is named in the report too. Fox reported the convoy was organized by a Rhodes Scholar with ties to Cuba’s president. He has called Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world” and said flatly that he would never criticize him. Eight days ago he stood in front of the College Democrats of America convention in a Mao suit and called for an ideological purge of the Democratic Party.
And who cares whose credit card paid for the flight? Montes never took a dime. Payment was never the point. An intelligence service does not need to hand a directive to someone already doing the work for free and streaming it. They aren’t recruiting opponents. They’re finding people who already agree, and then being welcoming and helpful, which is precisely what the report describes.
Treasury has since subpoenaed Piker over the trip, part of a review of roughly 40 Americans who joined the 2026 convoys. Whatever you think of the man, that’s not a speech case. That’s a sanctions question about travel to an embargoed country, and it’s a fair one.
But do you hear that? “They published this to justify a war!” Maybe the timing is political. Both things can be true. A report can be released at a self-serving moment and still contain accurate information, and the way you find out which parts are which is by reading it, not by yelling “blacklist” and going home.
Now let's talk about my current fixation. The DSA is on that list, and the DSA hands you its own case in eight days. Its platform, "Workers Deserve More," is posted publicly ahead of the Chicago convention running July 31 to August 2: abolish the Senate, extend the vote to non-citizens, strip the courts of the power to strike down laws, write a new constitution, put major corporations under public ownership. Nobody needed a State Department report to find that. It's on their website.
Related
The DSA Just Passed Eugene Debs. Ask What Happened Next.
On July 4, 2026, the Democratic Socialists of America handed out a number and a name.
Watch whether any outlet that cried blacklist publishes an actual fact-check of the report’s claims. Watch whether Treasury’s OFAC review of the roughly 40 convoy participants produces actual findings or quietly goes away. And watch the Chicago convention floor for the reformer-versus-revolutionary fight, because that’s the crack forming in real time.
Being named isn’t being silenced. Read the report, then read their platform, and decide for yourself.
The ICE agent who killed a man in Maine has a documented head injury and a domestic-violence record. David Brouillette, who shot and killed 25-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a July 13 traffic stop in Biddeford, said in a 2023 lawsuit that a steel beam left him with “impaired memory” and “cognitive deficits.” Maine family-court records also document a history of alleged abuse against two ex-wives and his daughters, including an allegation he threw boiling water at a pregnant ex-wife. ICE hired him with both records on file.
Trump imposed a 50% tariff on most Canadian goods. The order, signed Monday, uses Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, an obscure Depression-era law that lets a president tariff countries deemed to discriminate against U.S. commerce. It hits wine, dairy, furniture, and hockey gear while sparing energy, potash, and critical minerals, and takes effect in 30 days. PM Mark Carney called it unjustified but said Canada will “intensify” trade talks.
Hegseth put the Iran war at $37.5 billion and asked for $67 billion more. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee Tuesday that the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, then requested a supplemental to cover it and replenish supplies, at a hearing protesters interrupted. The Pentagon now puts the U.S. death toll at 17, with more than 100 injured since early July. Congress still has not voted to authorize the war.
Iran floated a ceasefire. Trump says he isn’t interested yet. Mediators passed Tehran a proposal for a 10-day pause to try to revive last month’s interim deal. Trump’s response Tuesday: Iran “desperately” wants to meet, but the U.S. won’t engage until Tehran is ready for “meaningful” talks, and the earlier memorandum of understanding is “over.”
The DOJ published 3.5 million pages of Epstein records and held back another 2.5 million. The release under the Epstein Files Transparency Act includes more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, much of it heavily redacted, with the department citing exemptions for victim identities and open investigations. The law’s two lead sponsors, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), wrote jointly to Deputy AG Todd Blanche that victim privacy “cannot be used as a blanket excuse to withhold records Congress required to be released.” A separate lawsuit is pushing for an unredacted release.
A teenager turned a $3.07 thrift store find into $89,600. Quinn Brown was digging through a clothing bin at a Goodwill outside Portland, Oregon, in January when another shopper tossed a Lakers jacket back onto the pile. Brown, who resells used clothes online, grabbed it. It turned out to be Wilt Chamberlain's warmup jacket from the 1972 NBA Finals, the series the Lakers won over the Knicks, and Sotheby's sold it Monday for $89,600 on 48 bids, under its $150,000 to $250,000 estimate.
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.