The “Death to America” Caucus Just Won in New York. Hakeem Jeffries Held the Door Open.
Pete Buttigieg says his family was “swatted” via Child Protective Services, detailed on his blog. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court grants Trump two immigration wins in a morning, despite polls showing lit
I was offline for a few days. I was under the weather and prepping for visitors. Great combo.
What happened while I was offline? A socialist sweep, a Buttigieg “swatting” story, and a Supreme Court speed-run. Let’s get into the read.
In Today’s Read
Mamdani’s whole slate swept New York’s House primaries. Two winners trashed America online. Jeffries said welcome aboard.
Buttigieg’s “swatting” story is a post on his own blog. The press ran it as fact. The receipts are still locked up.
The Court ended TPS and shut the asylum door 6-3. The polls say nobody asked. Read the question.
In the Rundown: the Iran ceasefire is a shooting war again, 1,450 dead in Venezuela, a new ICE pick, and AOC warns her own side.
The "Death to America" Caucus Just Won in New York. Hakeem Jeffries Held the Door Open.
The Story.
On June 23, every candidate New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed in the Democratic House primaries won. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, took the open NY-7 seat replacing retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez. Darializa Avila Chevalier, also DSA, knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, who happened to be the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Brad Lander, Mamdani’s old mayoral rival, beat two-term Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10. Espaillat and Goldman were both backed by Hakeem Jeffries and Gov. Kathy Hochul, so the party establishment lost its own incumbents on its own turf.
Here’s the part the celebration skips. Avila Chevalier co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the campus group that later posted “Death to America” in Farsi and named eradicating Western civilization as a goal. Her own now-deleted posts include calling the United States “a f---ing disgrace” and bragging, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” On primary day, she walked out of a live interview with Spanish-language station La Mega when the host pressed her on the posts. Then she won. She’s since told MS NOW’s Ali Velshi she “regrets” them.
Two days later, Mamdani sat with ABC’s Jon Karl, called democratic socialism the future of the party, said a democratic socialist “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position,” and when Karl asked whether Democrats could disagree on something as basic as whether prisons should exist, answered: “There are prisons.” Asked how he felt about Republicans making him the face of the Democratic Party, he said, “Let them.”
The Left’s read. A working-class realignment, not a warning. The Washington Post framed it as democratic socialists “expanding their voting base”; NPR as Mamdani’s gamble paying off; The Intercept as the left “setting the agenda” in the city. On social media posts, the move was to soften: MS NOW carried the “she regrets it” walk-back, and Snopes published a fact-check parsing the flagged tweet. Jeffries welcomed the new nominees into the fold and waved off any worry that it hurts Democrats in November.
The Right’s read. The mask is off, and the leadership likes it that way. Fox profiled the winners as “rising socialist stars,” led with the candidate “whose goal is to eradicate Western civilization,” and ran the storm-out-of-the-interview clip as the tell. The frame on Jeffries opening the door: the party isn’t being hijacked against its will, it’s showing you exactly who it is. Even Bill Maher called Avila Chevalier “patient zero” of the woke mind virus over the abolish-prisons stuff, which lands differently coming from inside the tent.
What both sides are skipping. The left’s “expanding the base” line skips the actual content of what got elected. “I regret the posts” is doing heroic work for someone who co-founded a “Death to America” group and is now headed for a seat she’ll hold for as long as she wants. The right has its own skip: these are the bluest districts in America, not Ohio, and three primary wins in Manhattan and the Bronx don’t prove the whole country went socialist overnight. The thing nobody quite says out loud is the Jeffries piece. He didn’t get rolled. He made a choice, accommodation over a fight, and a leader owns his choices.
Start with the word doing all the heavy lifting: “democratic.” Stick it in front of “socialism” and the whole thing suddenly sounds like a food co-op with a newsletter. That’s the branding, and the branding is the trick. It soft-pedals where this actually goes, which is socialism on its way to communism. The giveaway is the means of production. Once you’re talking about centralizing those, you left “socialism” behind a while ago. That’s the communist part. And these aren’t people hiding their reading list. They speak warmly about Lenin, about Marx, about Mao. Go watch what Hasan Piker says straight into a camera if you think I’m reaching.
Now watch what the leadership did with all of that, because that’s the real story, not the candidates. Two of the three winners have a documented history of trashing the country they’re about to swear an oath to. One co-founded the group that posted “Death to America.” And the most powerful Democrat in the House looked at it and said, welcome in. Not “answer for the posts first.” Not “this is a problem.” Welcome in.
Here’s what gets me about the “regret.” When a candidate wipes her hand on the flag, calls America a disgrace, and then locates her remorse the same week she wins a primary, that’s not a change of heart. That’s a press release with a deadline. Nobody discovers principle on Election Day by accident.
And Mamdani isn’t hiding the ball, to his credit. Karl handed him an off-ramp, asked whether reasonable Democrats could at least agree prisons should exist, and the best he could manage was “There are prisons.” That’s not a man dodging a gotcha. That’s a man telling you the abolish-it wing isn’t some fringe he’s quietly managing in the back room. It’s the base he’s courting. “Let them,” he said, about being made the face of the party. Fine by me. Let’s.
Here’s the part that should end the “they’re just progressive Democrats” spin, because they said it themselves, out loud, on camera. Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of NYC-DSA, went on Spectrum News on primary night and laid out the arrangement in plain English: “We’re on the Democratic Party ballot line. We contest the primaries, and when they’re in the legislature, they’re part of the Democratic Party caucus, but we don’t agree with the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus.”
Translate the polite version: the Democratic Party is a ballot-access vehicle, nothing more. A set of keys to a car they fully intend to drive somewhere the owner never agreed to go. They are not Democrats. They’re using the Democrats. Leeches.
Now my honest caveat, because the cross-check cuts both ways. These are New York City seats, the bluest of the blue, and anyone on the right promising you a socialist Congress by next Tuesday is selling the same overhype the left peddles in reverse. Contained, most likely. But don’t tell me it can’t travel. Bernie Sanders nearly took the 2016 nomination, and the only reason he didn’t is the establishment took it from him. They stole it. The ceiling on this whole movement is the economy, and that’s the warning for our side, not theirs. If this administration doesn’t get prices and wages to where regular people feel like they can actually get ahead, you are handing the socialists their best recruiting pitch ever written, and it stops being a blue-city story in a hurry.
And the establishment Democrats won’t be the thing that stops it, because the establishment is too scared of losing the room to fight for it. So they get dragged left, an inch at a time, until there’s nothing of the old party left to recognize. They eat their own. The DSA is counting on exactly that, and so far it’s working.
One more thing, and it’s the media-criticism heart of all this. Not a single major outlet is doing the obvious work. Read the DSA’s own documents. Pull the archive. Ask these candidates what “democratic socialism” actually cashes out to when you take the adjective off. Instead the press rebrands them “progressive Democrats” and moves along. The reporting that would tell you who you just elected is the reporting nobody will file.
So watch the specifics. Watch whether one network anchor reads the CUAD “Death to America” post on air, or whether it stays a “Fox thing” to wave off. Watch whether a single major outlet digs into the DSA’s actual platform and what it says about who owns what. And watch AOC, who just told her own colleagues the same energy is coming for them next, because the call is coming from inside the house.
They told you who they are. The only people pretending otherwise are the ones who already agree with them.
There's Probably a DSA Member on Your City Council. Here's What You Weren't Told.
As of August 2025, more than 250 members of the Democratic Socialists of America held elected public office in the United States. Roughly ninety percent of them were elected after 2019. The list includes 96 city councilors and county commissioners, eight mayors or county executives, and significant blocs on major city councils. Seven of fifty seats in C…
Pete Buttigieg Says His Family Got "Swatted." I'm Pumping the Brakes on Everybody.
The Story.
On June 26, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, widely floated as a 2028 contender, published a Substack post titled “A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family.” He wrote that a police officer and a Child Protective Services worker came to his Traverse City, Michigan home over an anonymous report, that he was told not to be alone with his 4-year-old twins until they’d been interviewed, and that the kids stayed with their grandparents for about 24 hours. Per his account, the allegation was that an anonymous caller claimed a woman said she’d met Buttigieg at a conference in Alabama years ago, where he supposedly confessed to “unspeakable violent crimes.”
He says he told the officer he’d never been to the town, the officer said it looked politically motivated and wouldn’t go to a prosecutor, and CPS found nothing to substantiate it. He called it a “swatting” by other means and tied the timing to Father’s Day photos and Pride Month. The Michigan State Police confirmed to outlets that a report was made and “determined the report was false,” adding that “false reports are dangerous.” Per the New York Times, the state police did not respond to requests for the actual report, audio of the anonymous call, or the status of any investigation into who made it.
The Left’s read. A chilling political hoax and a new low. NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, and the Times ran it straight off his post, leading with the 24-hour separation, the “sleepless night,” and his line that this was the “ugliest thing” in his career. The Advocate and MS NOW foregrounded the Pride Month and Father’s Day timing and the homophobia angle. The dominant frame: swatting is escalating, this is a frightening new variant aimed at a gay couple’s kids, and the only decent response is solidarity. Even Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden chimed in that it had happened to his family too.
The Right’s read. Hold on, who confirmed any of this? The skepticism started on X and runs on a few stubborn points the gushing coverage skips. The entire narrative is Buttigieg’s own Substack post. The Michigan State Police confirmed a report existed and was deemed false, but won’t release the report, the call audio, or any case status. “Swatting” is the wrong word, because a CPS welfare check is not a SWAT team breaching your door, and the conflation does work. And the timing is awfully convenient for a man laying 2028 groundwork who needs both a sympathetic story and a villain.
What both sides are skipping. The left’s skip is basic sourcing discipline. A false CPS report is a real and ugly thing, and if it went down the way he describes, it deserves condemning without anyone checking a party registration first. But “the subject described it on his blog and the press printed it” is not the same as “verified,” and the same outlets that demand receipts from people they dislike asked this potential presidential candidate for exactly none. The right’s skip is the flip side: skepticism slides fast into “he made the whole thing up,” and there’s no evidence for that either, because the police did confirm a false report occurred. The honest middle is the part nobody’s holding.
Start with the part that isn’t complicated. If someone really did sic Child Protective Services on a man’s four-year-olds to score a political point, that’s vile, full stop, and I don’t care whose kids they are or who their dads voted for. Kids do not belong anywhere near our politics. Find the person who did it and charge them. That’s not a partisan take. That’s just being a human being.
Now the part that’s going to annoy some people, because I’m going to do what I usually do and pump the brakes. On everybody.
Start with the skeptics, because I’m one of them and I’ll defend the instinct. It’s fair to question a story that comes almost entirely from one side, and right now this one comes from Pete Buttigieg’s Substack. We haven’t seen the report. We haven’t heard the call. Asking for the documentation before you carve it in stone isn’t cruelty, it’s due diligence, and the thread that flagged this for me is asking fair questions.
But here’s where I split from the people treating the coverage itself as the scandal. What were the outlets supposed to do? He’s a high-profile guy who made a serious accusation. That’s news, and reporting what he said is the job. They went to the Michigan State Police, who confirmed a report was made and ruled it false. They asked for the records and didn’t get them. And I honestly don’t know how often Michigan CPS hands over paperwork on a case involving a minor, my guess is close to never. So “the press ran his account and noted the documents aren’t available” isn’t laundering. It’s about all you can do with what exists.
So skepticism, yes. Writing the whole thing off as a political stunt, no. A false report did happen; the state confirmed that much. And the motive he floated is at least as plausible as the cynical one. He posted family photos, it’s Pride Month, and someone targeting him over exactly that is a real timeline on its own. He didn’t have to invent it.
Where I do dig in is the word “swatting.” That comparison is doing work it hasn’t earned. Swatting is armed officers at your door over a fake hostage call, guns out, and people have died in the confusion. What happened here was a CPS worker and an officer, a forensic interview, and the kids spending a night at their grandparents’ house. Ugly and probably traumatizing? Sure. The same category of physical danger as a SWAT team breaching your home? No. The two can share a motive, hateful, political, take your pick, without sharing a body count. Collapsing them flatters the story, and a false child-abuse report is bad enough that it doesn’t need the upgrade.
And one more thing worth saying out loud, because it’s the media-criticism heart of this. Legacy media has locked hard onto the hate-motivated-attack frame, and they’re probably right, though nobody actually knows yet. Hold that next to the last two years. Real swatting, the armed-officers-at-your-door kind, hit conservatives over and over, and the same press barely blinked. Marjorie Taylor Greene got swatted something like eight times, once on Christmas with her family in the house. Tommy Tuberville, Brandon Williams, Nikki Haley, Ken and Angela Paxton, all hit in the same wave. I don’t recall the wall-to-wall sympathy tour then. The alarm about a rising, dangerous tactic shows up right on cue when it finally lands on one of their own.
And none of that minimizes the report itself. Filing a fake child-abuse claim to torment someone is egregious, it should be prosecuted every single time, whoever the target is.
So watch the specifics. Watch whether the state police or Buttigieg ever produce the report or the call audio. Watch whether he files the charges he swore he would (”so help me God,” he wrote), or whether the vow fades with the news cycle. And watch which commentators locked in a verdict on day one and never moved it, on either side.
Everybody’s already sprinting for a conclusion. I’ll be the boring one standing in the middle, conclusion TBD.
The Supreme Court Handed Trump Two Immigration Wins in One Morning. The Poll Everyone's Citing Says Less Than the Headline.
The Story.
On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3, along the usual ideological lines, in two immigration cases. In the first, the Court held the administration can end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and Syria, directly affecting roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians, with ripple effects for nationals of eleven other countries. In the second, it held that someone standing in Mexico who tries and fails to set foot on U.S. soil has not "arrived in the United States," and so isn't entitled to apply for asylum, reviving the administration's authority to physically turn people back at the line. Justice Alito wrote both majority opinions. Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare move reserved for deep disagreement, and there was open back-and-forth between her and Alito in the courtroom. DHS called the rulings "victories for the rule of law and common sense." The Haitian plaintiffs' lawyers said the decision would "directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths."
Running underneath the coverage is the poll everyone keeps reaching for: the NPR/PBS News/Marist survey in which 65% of U.S. adults say ICE has "gone too far" enforcing immigration law, against 22% who say its actions are "about right" and 12% who say it hasn't gone far enough. It was conducted January 27–30 (n=1,462 adults, margin of error ±2.9 points), up from 54% last June. The four days it was in the field matter: it opened three days after federal agents killed Alex Pretti at a Minneapolis protest and three weeks after an ICE agent killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen, in her car, both during Operation Metro Surge, the largest immigration operation the country had ever mounted.
The Left’s read. A humanitarian catastrophe, greenlit by a partisan Court and rejected by the public. CNN led with more than a million immigrants facing a scramble to stay. The plaintiffs’ “thousands will die” warning ran as the headline emotion, Sotomayor’s bench dissent as the moral center, and the “two-thirds say too far” poll as proof that even voters have turned against the whole crackdown.
The Right’s read. The Court read the statute and the executive won. DHS emphasized that TPS was designed to be temporary (the word is right there in the name), that an asylum claim was never meant to trigger by failing to cross a border illegally, and that the rulings restore presidential authority lower courts had been second-guessing for months. On the poll, where the right engages it at all, the answer is that it’s a partisan artifact, 93% of Democrats against 27% of Republicans, dressed up as the voice of “America.” The system worked, the angle goes. That’s the story.
What both sides are skipping. Quick context, let’s talk procedure, because the screaming on both ends skips what the Court actually decided. TPS is a temporary humanitarian status the executive grants to people from countries hit by war or disaster. It is renewed at the executive’s discretion, and the ruling says the executive who grants it can also end it. That’s it. It does not mean 350,000 people get deported tomorrow; there are timelines and processes. The asylum ruling is even narrower, a statutory question about what the words “arrived in the United States” mean. Neither opinion is a referendum on whether immigrants are good people. The “thousands will die” line is an advocacy projection presented as a finding, and the coverage almost never labels it that way. And that poll deserves better than either side gives it. The question is actually fair, three balanced options including “not gone far enough,” so the “rigged wording” brush-off on the right doesn’t hold. What the left’s “America has turned” framing buries is the split underneath: 93% of Democrats say “gone too far,” 27% of Republicans do, and the honest swing group, independents, sits at 71%. That gap is the story, and the topline erases it.
Strip the melodrama and read what the Court actually said, because both sides want you reacting to the trailer instead of the movie.
The TPS ruling says temporary means temporary. That is a genuinely hard thing to argue with, given “temporary” is the literal first word of the program’s name. The asylum ruling says you can’t claim asylum by standing in Mexico and not making it across. Also not exactly a wild reading of the law. This is the Court doing the boring thing, reading the text, and the boring thing keeps getting narrated as a massacre.
Is it disruptive? Of course it is. There are real families inside that 350,000, people who’ve been here a decade-plus, holding jobs, paying mortgages, raising American-born kids under a status everyone quietly pretended was permanent. I’m not going to wave that away to score a point. It’s a mess, and it’s a mess with human beings in it. It’s a mess because past administrations, mainly through executive action, have been playing fast and loose with the definitions of “temporary” and “arrived.”
But here’s the question the catastrophe coverage skips: whose fault is the mess? If a “temporary” program runs fifteen years, the scandal isn’t the Court finally calling it temporary. The scandal is that Congress, for fifteen years, never had the spine to decide what these people’s actual status should be. They left them dangling on an executive renewal that flips every time the White House changes hands, and now everyone’s shocked the rug moved. Blame the branch that writes the laws, not the one that read this one.
And about that poll, because I had to eat a little crow here. My first instinct was that “gone too far” is a rigged question, and then I went and read the thing. It isn’t. Marist gave people three real options, including “not gone far enough,” and 65% still picked “gone too far,” up eleven points since last June. Fair question, real result. Credit where it’s due.
But the headline strips two things. First, the crosstabs: 93% of Democrats say “too far” against 27% of Republicans, Trump voters down at 25%. That’s not “America has turned on ICE.” That’s the country split exactly where it splits on everything, with the press stapling “two-thirds of Americans” over a 66-point partisan canyon. The figure that should actually worry the administration is independents at 71%, because independents decide November.
Second, and this is the one that bugs me, look at when Marist was in the field. January 27 through 30. Three days after federal agents killed Alex Pretti at a Minneapolis protest, three weeks after an ICE agent put three rounds into Renée Good’s car and killed her, a U.S. citizen, in the middle of the largest immigration sweep we’d ever run. You could not script a higher-outrage week to take the country’s temperature. Quoting that number today with no mention of the bodies it was measured next to is like running a hurricane-week poll on FEMA and calling it the national mood.
Now the part that keeps me honest, and it cuts both ways. The administration did course-correct after Minneapolis. Bovino got pulled. The surge ended in February. Trump allowed they could use “a softer touch.” Noem is gone. So the worst of what people were reacting to got dialed back, and I haven’t found a clean ICE poll since to tell us where the number sits now that the dust has settled. But the drift wasn’t only a Minnesota thing either. Gallup had Americans warming to immigration well before the surge ever started, a record 79% calling it good for the country and Republican demand to cut it falling from 88% to 48% by the summer of 2025. So the right can’t write the whole thing off as one bad week of footage, and the left can’t pass a number taken next to two fresh killings off as the resting pulse. The honest version is that anybody waving “two-thirds” around today doesn’t actually know if it still holds.
And here’s the question none of these polls bother to ask, because the answer would muddy the headline. Immigration is the issue Trump has won on, more than once. Plenty of people can look at Minneapolis, decide the enforcement went too far, and still not want what’s on the other menu, which right now is a Democratic Party drifting toward the DSA’s “abolish ICE.” “Too far” is a verdict on how it was done. It is not a vote for open borders, and it is not nostalgia for catch-and-release. You can be sick over three rounds fired into Renée Good’s car and still want the border enforced. Most people live right there. But “do you want it done, just not like that?” is the question Marist never put on the card, because a clean 65% reads better than an honest split.
So watch the actual text of the asylum opinion, not the cable summary of it. Watch whether Congress lifts a finger to settle TPS now that the Court tossed it back in their lap (they won’t). And watch whether a single outlet citing “two-thirds” ever tells you it was taken the week of the Minneapolis killings, or shows you the 93-to-27 party split underneath, or just runs the topline that hides both.
The justices didn’t write a death warrant. They read a statute Congress was too cowardly to fix. The mess was always yours, Congress. The Court just stopped covering for you.
The Iran “ceasefire” is a shooting war again. Two months after the signed MOU, Iran allegedly hit the Singapore-flagged Ever Lovely and then the M/T Kiku with drones in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump called the strike “foolish” and blamed Tehran, and U.S. forces ran two straight nights of retaliatory strikes (June 26–27) on Iranian missile, drone, radar, and minelayer sites. Iran’s IRGC then fired ballistic missiles and drones at the U.S. Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait and the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and Qatar reported a citizen killed by shrapnel.
At least 1,450 are dead in Venezuela after twin earthquakes. A 7.2 and a 7.5 hit the coast seconds apart on June 27, flattening buildings in Caracas and the La Guaira region, with more than 1,450 killed, around 3,150 injured, and tens of thousands unaccounted for as rescue crews dig through rubble. Washington moved $150 million in relief, including two urban search-and-rescue teams. ABC News
Trump named a new pick to run ICE. The President nominated Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, to direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement, filling the seat left by Todd Lyons, who resigned at the end of May. The nomination lands in the middle of the detention-surge fight and the “gone too far” polling covered above. NPR
Birthright citizenship is sitting at the Supreme Court, due any morning. The justices are expected to rule this week, possibly June 30, in Trump v. Barbara, on the executive order denying birthright citizenship to children unless a parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Even conservative justices sounded skeptical of the administration at argument, and Trump himself said he isn’t optimistic. SCOTUSblog
AOC told her own colleagues to watch their backs. In the wake of the DSA primary sweep, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a public warning to fellow Democratic incumbents: the energy that took out Espaillat and Goldman is coming for the comfortable, and complacency is a death sentence. Yahoo News
That’s The Read.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.
I was skeptical when you changed the newsletter up but I have to say I absolutely love it and am sad when you don't post LOL!