You Are Being Told What to Care About
Somebody decided what you would think about this week. It worked, and most Americans never noticed.
A Maine oyster farmer left a Senate race. Six days earlier, the Attorney General of the United States told a federal judge that despite what the law requires, the public does not get to see who was on the other end of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails. One of those stories owned the week.
You are being managed.
Not lied to, exactly. Managed. Somebody decided what you would think about this week, and it worked, and most Americans have no idea it happened.
Here is how the trick runs. A story arrives that is true, serious, and emotionally total. It fills every screen you own. It crowds the frame so completely that you never notice what got moved out of the frame to make room. You end the week believing you were well informed, because you consumed a great deal of information. You were well informed about one thing. That was the point.
The people who made that decision are not shadowy. They have names, they filed paperwork, and the paperwork is public. Their companies have business pending before the President of the United States right now. Merger approvals. License transfers. Rule waivers. Regulatory silence. They have learned exactly what it costs to get those things, and they have paid it, in public, with receipts.
This week they got a gift.
What actually happened in Maine
Graham Platner ended his Senate campaign Wednesday night.
The Democratic nominee walked away after Politico published an account from Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine woman who says Platner came to her home in 2021 uninvited and heavily intoxicated and forced himself on her. Platner called the allegation “categorically untrue.” A second woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who dated him in Washington from 2013 to 2015, told CNN and the Washington Post that he was physically rough with her and removed condoms during sex without telling her. His campaign called her account categorically false and politically motivated.
He was gone inside of three days. In his exit video he said suspending the campaign “most certainly is not” an admission of guilt. Maine Democrats have until July 27 to name a replacement to run against Susan Collins.
That is a real story. I support the victims and survivors. The women who came forward deserve to be heard and protected. Maine has courts, prosecutors, and an attorney general’s office fully capable of handling what needs handling. Nothing that follows takes a single thing away from this news.
Now look at what shared the calendar over the last 7-10 days.
The week you did not watch
June 30. The Supreme Court struck down Executive Order 14160, the order Trump signed on the first day of his second term declaring that babies born on American soil to parents here unlawfully or temporarily are not citizens. Writing for the majority in Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice Roberts held that those children satisfy the Citizenship Clause and are citizens at birth, and he dismissed the administration’s domicile theory as revisionist scholarship that the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers never contemplated. The judgment ran 6 to 3, but the constitutional holding carried only five votes, with Justice Kavanaugh voiding the order on statutory grounds alone and writing that Congress remains free to enact exceptions.
Trump began demanding that Congress do exactly that within hours of the decision. An order that would have stripped citizenship from roughly 150,000 American-born children every year stood for seventeen months, reached the Supreme Court with the President himself seated in the gallery at argument, and drew four justices unwilling to say it violated the Constitution. That got a single news cycle.1
July 2. Democratic staff on the House Natural Resources Committee released a 55-page interim report titled From Vanity to Insanity, alleging that Freedom 250, the LLC incorporated last October inside the National Park Foundation’s 501(c)(3) charter, lured donors who intended to support the congressionally chartered America250 commission and handed them Freedom 250’s banking information instead. The report states that the conduct may have constituted wire fraud, charitable solicitation fraud under federal law, violations of District of Columbia charity law, and foreign emoluments problems, and it lays out sponsorship tiers running from $500,000 for VIP access, to $1 million for a private reception and a photo with the President, to $2.5 million for a speaking slot on July 4, to $10 million for the full package.
Federal grant records show Interior routed at least $68.3 million to the National Park Foundation, while America250 received roughly $25 million of the $100 million it expected. Palantir, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, and UnitedHealth Group all signed on as sponsors, and every one of them holds or seeks federal business. Nobody has been charged, the committee never adopted the report, House Democrats hold no subpoena power, and the department that would investigate a referral is the one Todd Blanche runs.2
July 2. The Justice Department told a federal judge it would not lift the redactions on the Epstein files.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan had ordered Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to do one of two things. Strip the redactions from a specific set of records, or show cause why he could not. Those records include at least eight email exchanges in which Epstein and others discussed a torture video and sexual activity with young women, some of them minors. They include a draft federal indictment, never filed, with the names of potential co-conspirators blacked out. They include the underlying FBI notes from a 2019 interview with a woman who alleged that Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump when she was a minor and that Trump later assaulted her. That allegation is uncorroborated. Trump denies it.
Blanche took the second path. In a filing signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the department defended every redaction, said it had already complied, asked for sixty additional days, offered to brief the judge privately behind closed doors, and announced it would appeal.
Understand precisely what that is and is not. Sullivan built an exit and Blanche walked through it. This was not contempt. It was lawful. It was also the Attorney General of the United States telling a federal judge that the American public does not get to learn who was on the other end of those emails, in a matter that touches allegations against the president who nominated him.
Sullivan had already written that Blanche “conceded that he is in violation” of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the bipartisan law Trump himself signed on November 19, 2025. The department says the judge mischaracterized the record and called his reading “perverse.” Sullivan denied the government a stay. The Inspector General is auditing the department’s compliance. Roughly half of the six million collected pages remain unreleased. Some victims’ identifying information was published while associates’ names stayed hidden.
Blanche sits for two days of Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings starting July 15. More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees have written to the committee opposing him.3
July 6 and 7. Three commercial ships were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States escalated strikes on Iranian assets. Trump declared the truce over on July 7 and reversed himself on July 8.
The war began on February 28. In a March 12 report, the International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. CSIS puts direct American war costs between $34 billion and $42 billion and notes that neither the FY 2026 defense budget nor the FY 2027 request contains a dollar for it. Other tallies run considerably higher. Congress will have to fight over who pays.
Both chambers already voted to end it. The House passed a war powers resolution 215 to 208 on June 3. The Senate passed it 50 to 48 on June 23, six days after Trump signed a memorandum of understanding at Versailles that was supposed to close the war out. That is the first time in the history of the War Powers Act that both chambers directed a president to withdraw forces from a conflict. The strikes continue.
You are paying for it at the pump. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released June 10 shows gasoline up 40.5 percent over twelve months. Headline inflation reached 4.2 percent, the highest reading since April 2023. Energy accounted for more than sixty percent of the monthly increase, with shelter and food both climbing. The June numbers land July 14.4
June 29 through July 8. The Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s appeal of the 2023 jury verdict finding that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll.
Judge Lewis Kaplan then ordered roughly $5.8 million released to her from funds Trump deposited in 2023. On July 8, the Second Circuit declined to issue an administrative stay blocking the transfer. That order did not reach the merits, and the panel will still hear Trump’s appeal of the disbursement.
The separate $83.3 million defamation judgment is a different case with a different posture. A Second Circuit panel affirmed it on September 8, 2025. The full court refused to rehear it on April 29, 2026. On May 11 the court stayed the judgment so Trump could petition the Supreme Court, conditioned on his raising his bond by $7.46 million to nearly $99 million. He has not paid a cent of it. With interest, he owes Carroll more than $100 million across the two cases.
The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation reaching into Carroll’s litigation. Prosecutors in Chicago, under Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, are examining money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction theories against American Future Republic, the nonprofit run by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a prominent Trump critic, which helped cover some of Carroll’s legal costs. Sources told CNN and CBS that a perjury theory aimed at Carroll’s own deposition testimony is part of it. Boutros publicly stated his office has never opened a criminal investigation into Carroll. Multiple outlets reported, after that statement, that she remains a focus.
Blanche is recused from that case. He represented Trump on the Carroll appeal.
Read the sequence one more time. A woman won a jury verdict establishing that the President sexually abused her. The Supreme Court closed the door on his appeal. His Justice Department is now running a criminal investigation that touches her and the man who funded her lawyers.
That is a story about sexual assault and power. It did not own a single evening.5
Who owns the news now
The loose claim is that Trump controls the media. The precise claim is worse.
Paramount. David Ellison’s Skydance closed its $8 billion takeover of Paramount, and CBS with it, in the summer of 2025. His father is Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, who according to the Wall Street Journal gave roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit supporting Trump’s 2024 election and millions more since. In October 2025, Paramount bought Bari Weiss’s The Free Press for $150 million and installed Weiss, who had never worked in broadcast journalism, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Reporting at the time put the layoffs that followed at around a hundred people, including eight on-air hosts, all of them women. In December she pulled a 60 Minutes segment on Trump deportations. It aired on January 19 after the outcry. Reports say she dismissed correspondent Scott Pelley in June.
Paramount and CNN. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion. In April, Ellison hosted a private dinner for Trump at the U.S. Institute of Peace while the deal sat before regulators. On June 12, the Trump Justice Department approved it. No divestitures. No behavioral remedies. No conditions of any kind. When that deal closes, one family controls CBS News, CNN, HBO, two of the largest movie studios, and two major streaming services. Ellison and his deputies are reportedly weighing whether to put Weiss in charge of CNN as well.
As of Wednesday, lawyers for a coalition of states led by California were finalizing an antitrust suit to block it, because the federal government will not bring one. The United Kingdom’s culture minister has said she is minded to intervene.
Local news. On March 19, 2026, the FCC’s Media Bureau waived the national ownership cap and cleared Nexstar’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna. The Justice Department signed off the same day without conditions. Congress set that cap at 39 percent of American television households. The combined company reaches roughly 80 percent of them in raw terms, or 54.5 percent as counted under the FCC’s UHF discount, which is the measurement the cap actually uses. Either number clears the ceiling Congress wrote. Nexstar closed within hours of the approval. Its CEO thanked President Trump, Chairman Carr, and the DOJ by name. Nexstar also owns The Hill.
Then the courts arrived. DirecTV and the attorneys general of eight states had sued the night before the closing. On April 17, Chief Judge Troy Nunley of the Eastern District of California issued a preliminary injunction finding the plaintiffs likely to prove a Clayton Act violation. He ordered Nexstar to halt all integration, run Tegna as a separate and independently managed business, and keep its hands off Tegna’s newsrooms, personnel, and retransmission deals. Nexstar is appealing to the Ninth Circuit, where it has called the injunction a “straightjacket.” The largest local television merger in American history is closed on paper and frozen in fact.
Nunley wrote that the FCC “was not given the power to decide antitrust issues.”
Sit with that sentence. Federal clearance has stopped meaning what it used to mean. The officials currently testing that proposition are eight state attorneys general and a satellite television company.
This is the same FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, who said publicly of Jimmy Kimmel that broadcasters could “do this the easy way, or the hard way.” Nexstar and Sinclair pulled Kimmel from their ABC affiliates within hours. This is the same chairman who, in March, threatened broadcast licenses after Trump complained on Truth Social about coverage of the Iran war.
The settlements. ABC paid $15 million to Trump’s presidential library plus $1 million in legal fees, and apologized, in December 2024. Meta paid $25 million in January 2025. Elon Musk’s X paid $10 million. Paramount paid $16 million in July 2025 to settle a 60 Minutes lawsuit its own lawyers had called completely without merit, at a moment when it needed FCC approval to transfer CBS broadcast licenses. As of mid-2025, a CBS News analysis put the total flowing into Trump’s library from media settlements at roughly $63 million. Trump has said publicly he expects another $20 million from Skydance.
Media lawyers said ABC and Meta would probably have won at trial. They paid anyway. Every one of those companies had business before this administration.
Trump does not own the networks. He does not have to. The people who own the networks want things from him, and every one of them now understands the price.6
Accountability has no party, and pretending otherwise is a losing hand
If we are going to talk about sex crimes and public office, we do it with the whole record.
The House Ethics Committee has investigated twenty matters involving alleged sexual misconduct by members since 2017. It has named fifteen of them.
This April, two members submitted resignations on the same day. Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas, admitted an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide, and has never addressed a second misconduct allegation. Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, resigned after multiple women came forward. By mid-April at least five had spoken publicly, one alleging he assaulted her twice while she was too intoxicated to consent. Swalwell denies every allegation.
Two Republicans are under active House Ethics investigation right now.
Rep. Cory Mills of Florida. An investigative subcommittee opened November 19, 2025. It has authorized more than twenty subpoenas, collected thousands of documents, and contacted dozens of witnesses. It is reviewing a February 2025 incident in which D.C. police responded to a report that Mills assaulted a woman he was in a relationship with. Police did not charge him. The committee wrote that a decision not to bring charges “is not a finding of innocence.”
It is also reviewing an October 2025 Florida injunction obtained by Lindsey Langston, who alleged Mills threatened to release sexually explicit videos of her and to harm anyone she dated. The order barred him from coming within 500 feet of her home or workplace and ran through January 2026. Mills denies everything and calls it politically motivated.
Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. On May 14, 2026, the Ethics Committee announced it is reviewing whether Edwards “may have created or fostered a hostile work environment and engaged in sexual harassment.” Axios reported that Edwards, 65 and married since 1980, gave gifts and jewelry to female staffers in their twenties, wrote one a handwritten note saying she had “written a complex chapter in my heart,” read a poem aloud to her at her going-away party while a slideshow of the two of them played, and took her to Las Vegas after she left his office. Edwards calls the allegations “horseshit” and says he welcomes the investigation.
No sitting Republican senator has been publicly identified as under Senate Ethics investigation for sexual misconduct. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna referred allegations against an unnamed senator in April. John Thune confirmed the referral. Nothing further is public.
Two of the loudest voices demanding accountability inside the House today are Republican women. Nancy Mace and Anna Paulina Luna played central roles in pushing out both Swalwell and Gonzales. Mace said it plainly. If you are abusing your power in Congress it does not matter whether you have an R or a D beside your name.
She is right. Write that down. Any argument that needs a partisan body count is an argument that cannot stand on its own.
The man in the office
Donald Trump was convicted in May 2024 on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. Judge Merchan sentenced him to unconditional discharge ten days before his second inauguration. The conviction stands. The appeal is pending.
A federal jury found that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and defamed her. The Second Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, declined to hear it. A second jury awarded her $83.3 million for defamation. That judgment has been affirmed and stayed against a $99 million bond while he petitions the Supreme Court.
A New York trial court found that he and his eldest sons conspired for years to inflate his net worth for tax and insurance benefits. A fractured Appellate Division panel threw out the half-billion-dollar penalty as excessive. Two judges would have upheld the trial court outright, two would have ordered a new trial, and one would have tossed the case. The fraud liability survived, as did the three-year bar on Trump serving as an officer of any New York company. Both sides have appealed to the Court of Appeals.7
His financial disclosure for 2025 runs more than 900 pages. It reports over $500 million from World Liberty Financial and $635 million in royalties tied to his memecoin. Reuters, working from corporate filings, calculated that the Trump family extracted roughly $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures through the end of April 2026 while putting up almost no capital of their own. Outside investors lost about the same amount. The New York Times reported on July 4 that nearly a million people lost a combined $3.8 billion on the Trump coin alone. Forbes puts his net worth at $6 billion, nearly triple where it stood when he took office.
An Abu Dhabi state-backed firm used $2 billion of World Liberty’s stablecoin to finance an investment in the crypto exchange Binance. The New York Times reported in February that UAE royal family interests hold a 49 percent stake in World Liberty. Legal scholars have described the arrangement as a potential emoluments problem.8
Where this actually lands
Corporate America is not the villain here. Corporations pursue their interests inside the rules they are given. That is what they are built to do.
The people who write the rules failed.
Republicans hold the majority in both chambers. They hold the subpoena power. They hold the purse. They hold oversight. They hold the confirmation power. Every one of those tools exists for exactly this moment, and every one of them is sitting in a drawer.
An FCC chairman waived a national ownership cap Congress wrote into statute, and Congress has done nothing. A Justice Department is in court fighting a transparency law Congress passed nearly unanimously, and the response has been letters. A president has monetized his office at a scale no American has attempted, and the committees with jurisdiction have held no hearings. A war that neither chamber authorized continues after both chambers voted to end it.
When federal enforcement quits, the work falls to state attorneys general and private plaintiffs. That is what happened to Nexstar. That may be what happens to Paramount. Those officials are doing real work, and they were never meant to carry this alone.
The Constitution supplied the answer to every one of these problems. The majority decided not to use it.
This is not a media problem. This is not a Maine problem. This is a Congress problem, and it has a remedy, and the remedy has a date on it.
What to do
Stop letting an assignment desk set your agenda. When a state-level story runs for three nights on a national broadcast while an Attorney General tells a federal judge that names stay sealed, somebody made that choice, inside a building owned by somebody who wants something from the government.
Check your voter registration today. Not in October. Check your parents’ registration. Check your kids’.9
Then vote in the midterms as though the subpoena power depends on it, because it does. A majority that refuses to investigate cannot be persuaded. It can only be replaced.
Susan Collins will be on the Maine ballot in November against somebody. Todd Blanche sits before Senate Judiciary on July 15. The June inflation numbers land July 14. The Epstein appeal is live right now. The Ninth Circuit will decide whether the biggest local television merger in American history stands.
Watch those.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Uncensored Objection runs on readers who refuse to let an assignment desk decide what matters, so subscribe free and get most pieces. Paid subscribers get everything including instant access to exclusive benefits, including my new political fact checking prompt, my 21 chapter 251 page best-selling book “Privacy In America” and Sidebar AI, my legal and civic research assistant built for subscribers only. → See the perks!
Art of Distraction is the psychopathy playbook. Every time we are directed to look somewhere, look elsewhere too! The more we are distracted by a topic the more we must learn to ask ourselves: “what am I missing that they are distracting me from knowing?” People with psychopathy raise your awareness about something else, so that you are too busy and upset to notice the bigger offense elsewhere.
Well done, Mitch! Uncensored Objection should be required reading for every American eligible to vote.