Now it’s a waiting game. They’re waiting for his pneumonia to get better, because it must improve considerably before they can do any more surgery (unless the surgery is literally a matter of imminent life or death). He’s very miserable, but he’s conscious and talking. The whole thing has been shocking and frightening.
In a little while I’m going to go to the hospital for a few hours.
And for anyone who has paid attention to him, that should not be a surprise.
Nor am I exaggerating; take a look:
Tucker Carlson has unexpectedly praised Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, calling his platform “literally Trumpian” and saying he would not vote for his GOP rival Mike Rogers “at gunpoint.”
The right-wing broadcaster hosted podcaster Saagar Enjeti on his self-titled show, in the course of which the duo discussed the race between El-Sayed and Rogers, noting that while the former had started out as a “full-blown leftist,” he had undergone an “ideological evolution.”
“I watch his campaign now, it’s America First,” Enjeti said. “When he talks about Israel, he says, ‘Israel is committing a genocide, but ultimately I want to make sure that you don’t pay more for healthcare.
“‘I don’t want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military.’ He stands in front of a giant American flag. It’s almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of those problems.”
“Well, it is literally Trumpian,” Carlson agreed, with both men going on to predict that the progressive former public health official was likely to beat Rogers in November.
I take issue with the word “unexpectedly” in the first sentence of that quote. Nothing could be less unexpected.
I also take issue with the phrase “right-wing” that begins the second paragraph of that quote. Tucker isn’t on the conventional right and it’s not clear where to categorize him, except that if anyone is against Israel and Jews, he’s for them.
And of course El-Sayed’s “ideological evolution” from “full-blown leftist” is because he now has to pretend to tack a tiny bit to the middle in order to try to win the election in Michigan.
The idea that El-Sayed is “literally Trumpian” would be comical if it weren’t so unhinged. But I’m not of the opinion that Tucker is actually unhinged. I think he knows exactly what he’s doing, and is giving free rein to ideas and impulses he’s had for a long long time. One motive is to split the GOP and try to take over the wreckage. He doesn’t have to cater to Fox News or anyone else now; he’s free to speak his mind. I’ve already written many many pieces about Tucker, so I won’t go into what I see as his “ideological evolution,” except to refer you especially to this post and this, as well as this one.
ADDENDUM: I originally was thinking of writing a separate post on this article in Tablet about J. D. Vance’s recent address to the Republican Jewish Coalition this past Tuesday. I may still write about it separately. But for now I’ll just link to it here, because it’s relevant to the ongoing discussion of why Vance has refused to criticize Tucker Carlson at all – not just refuse to “denounce” him, by the way, but refuse to be specific about whatever disagreements he might have with him. I wonder whether Tucker’s words on El-Sayed and Rogers would be enough to get Vance to say something; I tend to doubt it, but it’s certainly possible.
The Tablet piece I just linked is well worth reading, in order to see what Vance is saying about Israel and related topics. It’s considerably worse than I had originally thought; I wasn’t aware of some of the Vance quotes discussed in that piece.
… but now it’s taking Jason Arday’s word for things:
In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face… pic.twitter.com/4woPSfDWuK
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) September 2, 2026
For those without access to X:
In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face value.
Nature makes no mention of credible evidence that he committed academic fraud and that he lied about a lengthy catalogue of elements of his life in an effort to burnish the mythology he had built around himself and that came crashing down in July and early August.
Instead, this editorial effectively removes all blame from Arday for the choices he made and the consequences those ultimately yielded. The editorial minimizes the plagiarism accusations and places blame on journalists for investigating his many false claims and on Cambridge for ultimately placing him under investigation—questioning whether the university followed proper protocol.
It is amazing that a news outlet ostensibly devoted to science would blame those who told the truth or sought to determine the truth about someone who demonstrably lied over and over and who was apparently culpable for committing egregious academic misconduct, including stealing another academic’s data.
Yes, some of the coverage has racist undertones at least. But it is illiberal to argue that the media should not have done their job to thoroughly investigate a public figure at one of the world’s leading academic institutions who had evidently conned his way to the pinnacle of academic success.
But Nature is no longer “devoted to science.” I don’t know when that began, but it was certainly the case by the time this letter was written about a year ago. Excerpt:
Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.
The author is a chemist, and she cites explicit woke policies of Nature going back at least to 2019.
I first heard of Nature when I was in law school. One of my roommates, who was getting her PhD in a scientific field, was being published in the journal at a very young age. I remember how excited she was and what an amazing achievement it was considered to be. So I long held the publication in very high esteem; it was considered the pinnacle. I haven’t held that opinion in quite some time, and of course it’s not alone in its decline.
On how much oil is getting through:
The Trump administration has been saying for a while that as many as nine million barrels of oil a day are traversing the Strait of Hormuz. That claim has been “fact checked” and derided by just about everyone. …
Only–oops–it turns out that President Trump and Secretary Wright, one of his cabinet’s most impressive members, were right all along, as Kpler now confirms:
“An average of 8.6 million barrels of oil a day have been flowing through the Strait of Hormuz — more than previously reported, maritime analyst firm Kpler confirmed in a new update that matches estimates from the Trump administration.
***
“Kpler and other trackers had initially put the number closer to 5 million, but new data includes “dark transits,” where ships turn off their transponders and secret ship-to-ship transfers, which the group wasn’t previously tracking.“The nature of the transits left Kpler and other analysts to report only a handful of crossings every day, figures that were picked up by media outlets and used to point out the discrepancy between what was being reported and what the Trump administration was claiming.
“The White House has long-maintained that the data firms were missing a chunk of the exports due to the dark transits, with Kpler now confirming the fact as the dark ships start reappearing and painting a clearer picture of the oil flow.”
I seem to recall a considerable amount of discussion on this blog in the past about this topic.
They celebrated the killing of Charlie Kirk. They made a hero out of Luigi Mangione. They were completely okay with the murder of a young couple who happened to be Jewish. And now some are celebrating the murder of a young mother who happened to have been a bank executive at Bank of America.
University of Pennsylvania grad Erin Piacenti, 32, of Chester, NJ, posted a touching photo only four days before her murder of herself smiling broadly while holding her infant and standing with her husband — and wrote how happy she was, the New York Times reported.
Piacenti, also a Fordham Law School graduate who ended up working for Bank of America, said in the post that she was grateful for getting five months off to care for her new daughter, according to the outlet. …
The banking exec was knifed to death by mentally disturbed mom of three Pamela Cisneros, 49, during a random attack Monday afternoon in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. Cisneros also stabbed and wounded another passerby before cops shot her dead.
The perp had a known history of mental illness, so this case is also still another example of a failure of that system. The police tried to tase Cisneros, but the taser had no effect on her.
The NY Post has written many articles about this horrific incident, including this editorial:
The Times Square stabbing maniac should not have been walking free: Court records and social-media posts sounded blaring alarms that she needed help . . . but progressives fight tooth and nail against involuntary commitment, no matter how many innocents like Erin Piacenti die.
It’s bad enough that obviously homicidal people such as Cisneros are walking the streets. It’s horrific that anyone on the far left celebrates such killings based on the race and jobs of the victims. But this has been going on for quite some time. It’s the same impulse that led to the killing fields of Cambodia, which class enemies (including people who merely wore eyeglasses) were slaughtered:
Once the Khmer Rouge took power, they instituted a radical reorganization of Cambodian society. This meant the forced removal of city dwellers into the countryside, where they would be forced to work as farmers, digging canals and tending to crops. Gross mismanagement of the country’s economy led to shortages of food and medicine, and untold numbers of people succumbed to disease and starvation. Families were also split up. The Khmer Rouge created labor brigades, assigning groups depending on age and gender. This policy resulted in hundreds of thousands of Cambodians starving to death.
… Because the Khmer Rouge placed a heavy emphasis on the rural peasant population, anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. This meant teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were the targets of the regime. Even people wearing glasses were the target of Pol Pot’s reign of terror.
This is also an impulse I recall from the terrorism in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I very much doubt that our present-day young people of the leftist variety know much if anything of this history except perhaps to applaud it. And I also doubt that the Cambodian killing fields or the earlier war of the Soviets against the kulaks are widely taught in many of our US colleges, except perhaps to be excused and/or justified.
Most garden-variety Democrats probably aren’t applauding killings such as that of Piacenti or championing Luigi Mangione, but there’s a not-insignificant group of leftists who are. Plus, it is the case that a great many of those garden-variety Democrats routinely call for the murder of President Trump. There is a bloodthirstiness there that is chilling.
The analogy isn’t perfect. But I think it’s a good one:
Vance’s strength is his wit, intellect, and gift for political framing. He’s a verbal sharpshooter who decimated Tim Walz in their vice-presidential debate, and Jewish Republicans surely applauded his withering takedown of El-Sayed. …
Vance came across as reasonable, sincere, fair-minded, and respectful. He acknowledged Israel’s importance to American foreign policy, praised it as an ally, and connected the rise of antisemitism to unchecked Third World immigration — traditionally, one of the GOP’s most unifying issues.
Best of all, he did it without pandering.
But on the other hand, Vance failed to separate himself from Tucker Carlson, whom many Jewish Republicans feel is just as much of a dangerous antisemite as El-Sayed. The event’s emcee, ex-Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), gave him a golden opportunity to denounce Carlson’s rhetoric.
Vance declined, opting to pivot to Nick Fuentes and Joe Rogan …
By failing to cleanly separate himself from Hasan Piker, El-Sayed has shot himself in the foot. He’s now dogged by Piker everywhere he goes — and every time Piker says something offensive, El-Sayed is back on his heels. …
But what’s true about Piker is also true about Carlson: He monetizes outrage and controversy to stay in the headlines, too. That’s his business model as well.
Which means, JD Vance and Abdul El-Sayed share the same political vulnerability.
It’s puzzling why Vance refuses to bandage his wound. It wouldn’t take much. Just two or three sentences.
All he’d have to say is that Carlson has changed — and as a Christian, Vance prays for Carlson’s redemption — but OF COURSE he vehemently disagrees with Carlson about Trump being the antichrist, a slave, and/or Israel “destroying” the United States.
Carlson isn’t some quiet personal friend of Vance’s, he’s a major figure who is (or used to be) on the right, and he is a disgusting blood-libeling Jew-hater who is vocal about it nearly on a daily basis. Vance’s refusal to even criticize him in that regard is very telling, in my opinion.
Vance sometimes utters words that indicate he’s an Israel-supporter, but he has also said many things having nothing to do with Tucker Carlson that show a compromised support of Israel which is sometimes more like the position of a politician on the left than one on the right. I’ve written about it before; please see this from about a month and a half ago. In that post, I quote Lee Smith, who had written:
During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …
Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.
I also think Vance has shown some naivete about Iran.
I am assuming that Vance’s motive for all of this is to not alienate the Tucker wing of the GOP. That’s the kindest interpretation.
My ex-husband was doing better, but now there’s a new problem and it presents several dilemmas and decisions to be made. So I’m going over to the hospital now, and probably won’t be posting until tonight.
Prayers would be good. He’s not at death’s door, but he might need to have another surgery very soon and is not in any shape to have it because of the pneumonia that has been improving but is certainly still present.
UPDATE 9/2 at 1:30 PM: Nothing new to report so far today. The idea is to try to hold off on the surgery and get him stabilized first, which could take a while.
From Jonathan Turley’s “Letitia James exposed as fighting only for revenge, not justice”:
According to whistleblower Daniel Wiesenfeld, a former Brooklyn prosecutor who works in the Investor Protection Bureau, James produced her chosen defendant and ordered her staff to find a crime, any crime.
Wiesenfeld sent an email to call on fellow lawyers not to assist James further in weaponizing her office. He recounted his own experience as a prosecutor in her office and how Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe allegedly directed him to target “Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger) . . . without having a credible reason for targeting the organizations and individuals.”
He added that “If you believe Trump is using the [Department of Justice] attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish [James] is doing exactly the same thing.”
In his blistering email, Wiesenfeld reminded his colleagues that they have other things to do than hunt down James’ enemies. While she wastes “significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies,” Wiesenfeld reminded them that there is “rampant nonprofit homeless shelter fraud and antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues.”
Instead, James concentrated on an absurd civil case against Trump where the “victims” made money, lost nothing, and wanted more business from the Trump corporation.
We’ve known this for a long long time. The basic idea is not new and in fact, James campaigned on it. She had identified the criminal and all she had to do was find the crime. The one she and her underlings found was absurd, underscoring how difficult it was to come up with a crime for which to prosecute Trump. They had to essentially make one up.
So, what is new about this? The details are being fleshed out via a whistleblower.
Turley points out, correctly I believe, that most on the left still applaud her:
James is unlikely to be deterred by Wiesenfeld’s email. She knows that the far left still prefers performative lawfare to actual enforcement of fraud and other laws. Some voters would willingly watch billions stolen in program fraud in exchange for just one more trophy Trump conviction.
In fairness to James, she has always been open about what she is and what she was offering.
Absolutely.
Not only that, but some of the left are recipients of the largesse of that fraud. So of course they don’t mind – it’s a win/win situation for them.
[NOTE: I recently heard a bunch of very garden-variety non-DSA Democrats talk with relish about wanting to impeach Trump. Again. For what, they didn’t say; it was just assumed this would be a good thing.]
In Germany, there are efforts to ban the AfD (or at least its more extreme elements) as it becomes even more popular with the volk:
With Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging in polls ahead of next month’s regional elections, establishment parties are calling for a ban on the right-wing party. “High-ranking German politicians have advocated for proceedings to ban the most radical regional branches of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party,” German public broadcaster DW News reported Sunday.
For years, the German left has called for a ban on the AfD, but these demands are now reaching a fever pitch as Berlin’s political class dreads a looming right-wing victory.
Over a year ago I wrote this post on efforts to weaken the AfD’s legislative power by denying the party the committee leadership to which it was entitled by its victories in elections. In that post, I quoted the following rationale that’s been given:
The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.
AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.
The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show.
Germany’s past causes it to be understandably wary of parties that speak of the special German identity and the need to preserve it. But what is the AfD actually advocating? From what I’ve read, it sounds somewhat similar to MAGA regarding immigration – but of course, the favorite tactic of MAGA’s leftist opponents here is to call MAGA “Nazis.”
In Germany, those who want to ban this wing of the AfD refer to it this way:
… that the party’s more radical, ethnically based wing rejects the constitutional principle. In their view, this wing should be subject to legal scrutiny.
They refer to this faction of the AfD as “völkisch” — a German adjective derived from das Volk, meaning “the people.” The völkisch movement was an ethno-nationalist movement and precursor to Nazism. Today, the AfD is often accused of holding völkisch views because its officials repeatedly distinguish between Germans with and without a history of migration.
Banning a very popular opposition party is highly unlikely to cause its members to just quietly take it.