The Artists Were Never Misled. The Left Scored Every Exit. Happy 250th
Platner Said "No Dark Secrets" While His Campaign Had Known for Nine Months, the Vaccine Schedule Split in Two, and Pam Bondi Went Before Congress Unsworn
Hey friends!
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.
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 By late May, all five had withdrawn.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.