“At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s Central South Command Unit. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”

He cited an “unrelenting level of public scrutiny” as his reason for resigning.

I find it suspicious until proven otherwise. Suspicious of suicide, to be exact. But there are more innocuous possibilities. All of it is extremely sad.

One thing that seems clear and has seemed clear from the start: whether or not Arday’s backstory of mutism till 11 because of autism was true, it seemed fairly certain that he was both a liar and a fragile person who both used and was used by the DEI system. Then, when the unraveling occurred, it was overwhelming to go from the heights of adulation to become basically a joke.

Apparently it was too much for his system to handle, however he met death. This is an extremely sad sequel to the story, and if suicide was involved I suppose that, in retrospect, it should have been predicted as a possibility. Was he getting any sort of psychological help with the fallout of his fall from grace? I haven’t a clue, but it seemed indicated.

His latest book is titled Great and Unfortunate Things. His death is a highly unfortunate thing and I think an extremely sad one.

RIP, Jason Arday.

The post Jason Arday has died appeared first on The New Neo.

Arday became the youngest black professor at Cambridge. But he seems to not only have been guilty of plagiarism but also of a series of lies that sound preposterous:

We have a fantasist in an environment where, for political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to invite unwanted attention. In such fertile ground the fantasist’s claims (which he continues to deny fabricating) inevitably become increasingly outlandish – epic marathon runs, prophetic blessings, an appearance in a television programme that began 20 years before he was born – because he is increasingly secure that they will never be questioned. This is what inevitably occurs when a fantasist encounters people who want, for whatever reason, to believe his fantasies. …

Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.

You can read some of Arday’s claims in this article from 2023. And you can find some of his debunked statements here. I think, however, that if checked, a great many other “facts” in his biography might be unsubstantiated as well.

Will Arday lose his position? Or will the wagons circle until the furor dies down, and will he remain?

The post Jason Arday, Cambridge professor: too good to fact-check appeared first on The New Neo.

The DSA is riding high after the high-profile win of socialist Mamdani in 2025, capped off by a string of primary victories this year that have emboldened its more than 120,000 rank and file members nationwide.

But some DSA leaders are not yet on board the AOC train, and urged caution against getting ahead of the base while still hashing out the big questions regarding their platform, direction and whether her previous stance on Israel should be disqualifying.

The congresswoman previously supported sending defensive aid to Israel, but at a private NYC-DSA forum in April, she vowed to vote against sending any further military aid to the country, including defensive supplies, according to City & State NY.

Can’t have anyone who ever supported Israel, however tepidly. AOC hasn’t moved fast enough for some DSA members.

She’s now thirty-six years old – my, how time flies – and in November of 2028 she’ll be thirty-nine years old. The fresh young thing is being replaced by even fresher and even-more-leftist young things – Mamdani, for example, at 34, although he’s ineligible for the presidency (fortunately) as a non-native-born citizen.

Hard to keep up, things are moving so fast.

The post Is AOC far enough to the left to be the DSA’s pick in 2028? appeared first on The New Neo.

A surprising recurring theme throughout the diaries is Fauci’s growing awareness of his own public profile during the most intense months of the pandemic, which ultimately claimed more than 7 million officially reported lives worldwide, including roughly 1.2 million in the United States.

On April 7, 2020, after recording the latest pandemic developments, Fauci wrote: “Press still hot and heavy about me. Multiple stories per day directly or indirectly involving me.”

Why would that be a surprising theme? I suppose it would matter if that topic completely dominated the diary, or if he was writing things like, “I am one of the most wonderful people of all time.” But merely noticing that he’d become a celebrity isn’t all that strange. The fact is, he was one of the most famous people in the world at the time, and it happened rather suddenly.

However – and it’s a big “however” – the diaries certainly reveal other extremely disturbing things about Fauci. But maybe the word “reveal” isn’t quite right, either, because they are mostly things we already knew. So perhaps the correct word would be “underline.”

For example:

[Fauci was] A man who claimed Covid had a mortality rate of a flu in his diary.

[Fauci was] A man who claimed Covid had a mortality rate 10X of a flu under oath in front of Congress.

Or the fact that Fauci was telling us not to have family gatherings because of the possibility of the spread of COVID at the same time he himself was having social dinners with none other than Jake Tapper.

It was released today that Anthony Fauci was dining with Jake Tapper at his home during a federally imposed quarantine.

We already knew, long ago, that most of our “betters” were defying the restrictive rules they were setting down for us peons. We already knew that they were allowing the 2020 demonstrations in the streets when all other gatherings were forbidden. We already knew they made up most of the rules with almost no scientific backing, and we already knew they strongly suspected a lab leak was the cause of the pandemic long before they admitted it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not still infuriating and destructive. But it’s no surprise at all.

I also see in the comments of most posts and articles on the subject some variation of the following: “Fauci should be arrested, tried, and sentenced, but the GOP doesn’t care.” Well, that’s absurd, because Biden gave Fauci a blanket pardon. Whether he could be tried for perjury if he lies at the Congressional hearings that will be forthcoming – in other words, whether the pardon will extend to future offenses involving his past behavior that has already been pardoned – I’m not 100% certain. But there can’t be any federal prosecutions for his previous alleged crimes.

The post The Fauci diaries appeared first on The New Neo.

[Ortego said] There won’t be any more elections here. There won’t be any more elections for them [the opposition factions] to try to seize the government, to seize power.

And we are going to work with the national assemblies and the corresponding organizations on the laws because laws need to be made.

Let them build a wall, a blockade against the coup plotters, the traitors and no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t be able to.

The polls must not have been looking so good.

If you’re wondering how long Ortega has been around, he’s 80 years old now and was the country’s head from 1979 to 1990, was voted out, won again in the 2006 election and has been in power ever since:

In June 2018, organizations such as Amnesty International and the Organization of American States reported that Ortega had engaged in a violent oppression campaign against anti-government protests. The violent crackdown and subsequent constriction of civil liberties have led to waves of emigration to neighboring Costa Rica, with more than 30,000 Nicaraguans filing for asylum in that country.

His government jailed many potential rival candidates in the 2021 general election, including Cristiana Chamorro Barrios. Ortega’s government also imprisoned other opponents, such as former allies Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres Jiménez. In August 2021, Nicaragua cancelled the operating permits of six US and European NGOs. Many critics of the Ortega government, including opposition leaders, journalists and members of civil society, fled the country in mid-2021. In his fourth term, Ortega ordered the closure of several NGOs, universities, and newspapers, and resumed his repression of the Catholic Church after a brief rapprochement, imprisoning prelate Rolando José Álvarez Lagos.

Nice guy.

Now he wants the Nicaraguan legislature to abolish elections. Apparently, they have the power to do that. It’s not quite the Enabling Act in Nazi Germany – by which the Reichstag effectively dissolved itself. But the Nicaraguan legislature has been cooperative with Ortega’s accumulation of more and more power, and it will continue down that path:

Ortega and [his wife] Murillo expanded their authority through sweeping constitutional changes that took effect in 2025. The reforms included extending the presidential term from five years to six and placing the legislative, judicial and electoral institutions under the authority of the presidency.

The pair now exercise control over nearly every branch of government, including the armed forces, police and judiciary.

Ortega, Nicaragua’s longest-serving leader, is scheduled to remain in office until early 2028, although his statement on Sunday effectively canceled Nicaragua’s next elections, which had been scheduled for November 2027.

Critics say Ortega had already effectively eliminated meaningful electoral competition during elections in 2011, 2016 and 2021.

As Rubio says:

“Daniel Ortega’s declaration that, under his family’s dictatorship, Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have abandoned even the pretense of popular consent,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday.

The US had already imposed some sanctions and visa restrictions on government officials. The international community has been condemning Ortega for quite some time. But they are powerless to do anything. I doubt Trump will pull another Maduro caper, although I suppose it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

As Turkey’s Erdogan once said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” Ortega stepped off a long time ago, but now he’s telling the world in no uncertain terms. And, in the usual way of Newspeak, he says he’s doing it in order to save democracy.

The post Ortega of Nicaragua decides to become official dictator appeared first on The New Neo.

Jackson started out his political career as a Republican but fairly quickly became a Democrat and has become more and more “progressive” as time has gone on. For example, he has done pretty much an about-face on abortion in recent years. Same for LGBTQ rights. By 2016 and 2020 he was a Bernie Sanders guy, and he now says ICE should be abolished. As for Israel, he spouts the current garbage required of Democrats:

Jackson is critical of Israel and its role in the Gaza genocide, stating in July 2026 on social media that “anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza.” He added that as a senator, he would never vote for U.S. military aid to Israel.

Israel’s role in the Gaza genocide attempt is as its victim, but of course that’s not what Wiki means by the above quote.

Jackson supported Platner’s candidacy but bailed when the rape allegations came out. Jackson himself has some baggage, but it seems it’s significantly lighter than the huge steamer trunk of his predecessor:

Jackson shares Platner’s progressive ideology but none of his charisma. …

Then there’s Jackson’s personality, which can be abrasive, according to former colleagues who report tantrums and outbursts involving thrown water bottles. When a campaign’s best defense is that he wasn’t throwing things at any one person, it’s a sign that the stories being spread are more than just axe-grinding.

For its part, Jackson’s team is trying to put its best spin on his sudden return to the arena. His advisers seem to resort to a single word to describe his leadership style: “passionate.”

“Passionate” might not be the best choice of adjectives.

The post It looks like Troy Jackson will be replacing Graham Platner appeared first on The New Neo.

The post For your enjoyment appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s been cumulative, but the Rogan interview is somewhat of a turning point for me. Initially, I was – if not a Vance fan, exactly – of the opinion that he might gain the sort of experience as VP that would make him a good presidential candidate in 2028. He’s clearly a smart guy, and he’s had a way with words when talking to the regular press and pointing out their illogic and lies. In his debate against Tim Walz he was excellent, and he used a delicate and deft touch. Among his other assets, he has a wife who seems as though she would make a wonderful First Lady.

But in recent months, Vance’s refusal to say something about Tucker Carlson’s horrendous viewpoints has been very disquieting. Carlson isn’t just anti-Israel and a spreader of classic lies about Jews, but he’s a historical revisionist, a Qatar and Putin shill, and has become a platform for some of the worst ideas around these days. For a while, Carlson’s son worked for Vance (although he’s quit now), and it’s long been known that it was Carlson who promoted to Trump the idea of Vance as VP. So in a very real way Vance owes his present job to Carlson.

That meant that there was a simple explanation for Vance not speaking out against Carlson as Trump had. That reason was loyalty. Blind and unwavering loyalty is not necessarily a good thing, but as long as Vance kept neutral on the subject of Carlson, I was willing to give him a pass and to wait and see. And then Vance decided to go on Rogan’s podcast, and he began to sound somewhat like Tucker himself. Not just that, but the interview was an exercise in buck-passing, which is not a good look.

This article by Lee Smith describes it quite well:

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.

Epsteingate is a reboot of Russiagate, a conspiracy-theory template holding that Trump is controlled by a foreign power. During Trump’s first term, that power was Russia. Now, in the second term, it’s Israel. Epstein became crucial to the narrative because his supposed role in running a pedophile blackmail ring at the behest of the Mossad provided a mechanism by which Israel could extort Trump and other high American officials into doing its bidding.

Smith goes on to explain why this is preposterous, but I think it’s of great interest that Vance was willing to hint at this route despite – as he himself admitted – having zero evidence of it. Vance even explicitly said that there was no evidence Trump was involved in sex with minors. But Vance has to know – unless he’s stupid, which I submit he is not – that Vance’s wink and nod about Epstein and the Mossad, and Israeli influence on the US, not only appeals mightily to the Jew-hating Tucker wing but is an indirect way of saying Trump is controlled by Israel.

I very much doubt Trump is happy about that.

More from Smith, on the origins of the story Vance is pushing or at least nodding along when Rogan mentions it:

The rumor that Epstein was a high-level global intelligence asset—as opposed to a rich pervert and con man—seems to have started with Steve Bannon, who left the first Trump White House in disgrace after leaking to the press. Bannon has ignored calls to release the 15 hours of interviews he reportedly taped with Epstein, presumably because they show Epstein was not a spy—or, at the very least, because Bannon failed to press the late sex offender to address a rumor he continues to popularize. The idea the Jewish financier pimped out underage American girls to compromise liberal elites for the purpose of advancing Israeli interests was most ardently promoted by Vance’s political patron, Tucker Carlson.

This is the Jew-hating Tucker wing. They have their own agenda, and I believe it is somewhat parallel to the DSA agenda for the Democrat Party. The goal is to take over the Republican Party. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but it won’t be for lack of trying. And now I strongly believe that Vance has hitched his wagon to him.

Vance is pragmatic, and may back off from this. It’s a long way to 2028 and a lot can happen. But he has shown, at the very least, that he’s willing to go very low in his own pursuit of power and need to excuse himself from responsibility for the failure of the negotiations with Iran.

It gets worse [emphasis in original]:

And to explain why his memorandum of understanding failed, Vance sourced the reading at a supermarket checkout counter. “There’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing,” said Vance, pointing to a recent article in Time magazine. In fact, the story is about a former Trump deputy paid by Israel to pay pro-Israel influencers to post pro-Israel content, to combat the rising tide of campaigners on the right targeting Israel and paid for by Qatar.

Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told the media he is “not aware of any intelligence about a secret information operation to try to change American public opinion on negotiating under the memorandum of understanding.” Also, no one prevented Vance from negotiating the MOU, because it got signed. Yes, there was plenty of criticism on social media, but as Cotton said, it was the Iranians who blew up Vance’s deal by continuing to blow up ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which they declared to be their own private waterway—contrary to long-standing treaties that guarantee freedom of the seas.

But Vance insists it’s on Israel. “There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” he told Rogan. “Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”

Vance challenges anyone to show how he’s antisemitic. But claiming that Israelis want war for the sake of war, indefinitely, toward no specific objective, is a pretty good place to start. Vance’s denials are part of the act: I didn’t say something recognizably antisemitic; it’s on you to prove that the classic antisemitic conceit I used is antisemitic, you paranoid freak. My point is clearly just that Israelis simply kill people for no reason or purpose because they enjoy spilling blood, and they will continue doing so forever, to satisfy their perverted, inhuman lusts.

That is the part that seems to me to be the most revealing of Vance’s actual position.

Rubio, on the other hand, seems to actually have some integrity, and to have thought more deeply on these sorts of issues. Not only that, but he has a great deal of experience in government and in particular in foreign policy. He’s the child of Cuban refugees, and knows a lot about Communism and its effects. Plus, he’s quite expert on Latin America and has been active in dealing with that part of the world.

Rubio recently gave a much-praised speech on left-wing violence (you can find the text here). And he also gave a speech in Germany against 3rd-world migration that got a standing ovation [ADDENDUM: The video at that link, of the ovation, might be of an earlier speech; hard to say, but I’ve seen some statements to that effect].

The contrast between the two men is stark.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently said this about J. D. Vance [emphasis mine]:

I think if JD Vance were president, of course he would not be at war with Iran.

It’s impossible for me to imagine JD Vance standing up and saying we need to have two wars to defeat a phantom nuclear program.

It’s too insane. I think he has too much self-respect to say something like that.

I wish he had been elected president in 2024, but that didn’t happen. I love JD.

I don’t agree with him on everything, of course, but I think he’s an honest, very smart, decent person. That puts him above almost all politicians I’ve ever met.

That’s an endorsement.

The post More reflections on Vance – and also on Rubio appeared first on The New Neo.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases. …

But what [Obama] actually stood for was sitting in the third row and wearing the Communist star. The media didn’t even believe that Obama’s mentor getting a front row seat to the opening of his presidential center while wearing the symbol of a movement responsible for the mass murder of millions mattered.

Bill Ayers was pretty clear about what Obama represented. “The people who tried to say that Obama palled around with terrorists, that he had Palestinian friends, that he had a black nationalist minister, none of that s___ worked,” Ayers told the one reporter who stopped him to chat.

Some of us – actually, many of us – were quite aware of what Obama stood for even back in 2008. The media and the left (but I repeat myself) were devoted to covering it up. But apparently there’s no need to cover it up any more.

Those of us of a certain age can remember the 60s quite well:

The Weathermen were a murderous Marxist terrorist organization dedicated to bringing down the United States. After they realized that planting bombs wouldn’t work, they turned to politics.

And the radicals accomplished with politics what they never managed to do with explosives.

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men,” Prairie Fire, a book co-authored by Ayers, Dohrn and other radicals declared. “Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.”

Barack Obama may have seated his two terrorist mentors in the front rows, but he made no direct reference to them, except for having “found my community here, friendships that would last a lifetime.”

Ah, but remember that Obama claimed back during his first campaign that Ayers was someone he hardly knew, just “a guy” who lived “in the neighborhood.” I wrote this post about the Obama-Ayers connection in 2008 prior to Obama’s first election, and I was hardly alone. But the media was engaged in covering it up, and they succeeded.

So here we are. Ayers is 81 years old now, and retired. But he has managed to have an outsized influence on politics by going into academia and focusing on the field of teaching teachers to teach. That’s how he has shaped the beliefs of several generations of students. He must be very very proud:

Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues. …

Ayers was elected vice president for curriculum studies by the American Educational Research Association in 2008.[48] William H. Schubert, a fellow professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote that his election was “a testimony of [Ayers’s] stature and [the] high esteem he holds in the field of education locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally”. Writer Sol Stern, a conservative opponent of progressive education policies, has criticized Ayers as having a virulent “hatred of America”, and said, “Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer.” …

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs]

Funny stuff.

The post Back to the future: Ayers and other 60s leftist radicals appeared first on The New Neo.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the most prominent and powerful foreign policy hawk in Congress, died suddenly Saturday following reported chest pains and cardiac arrest. He was 71.

For more than two decades, Graham championed the peace through American strength abroad, advocating for military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq — and Iran.

Graham had a lot of enemies, including some on the right, and he had a lot of friends. He even had some enemies turned friends, such as President Trump, who grew close to him. Many tributes poured in, and of course much online hatred as well, in the manner of our present age.

I didn’t always agree with Graham, although I often did. I think his finest hour – certainly his most intense hour – was at the Kavanaugh hearings:

Recently, Graham had been busy flying to Ukraine, working on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, and promoting the SAVE Act. I also just learned, from this article, that he hadn’t taken advantage of his position to amass enormous wealth, comparatively speaking:

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham ranked among the bottom half of Congress’ big earners despite more than three decades in office and a top role leading the GOP.

Graham, 71, died Saturday night with a net worth of nearly $1.5 million, leaving the senator, who had a modest upbringing in South Carolina, ranked at 294th in wealth among the 535 voting members of Congress, according to data from the Quiver Quantitative tracker. …

Despite a 31-year career in Congress that catapulted Graham to the center of power in the Senate, the South Carolina native has never strayed too far from his humble roots.

Graham grew up in a blue-collar family in the small town of Central, where his parents ran a restaurant and pool hall known as the Sanitary Cafe. A young Graham lived in the room right behind the family business.

The late senator previously credited his working-class upbringing — in which he helped his parents run their restaurant — with pushing him to be the first person in his family to go to college.

But while he was attending the University of South Carolina, both his parents died of illness just 15 months apart from each other, leaving Graham to legally adopt his then-13-year-old sister and get her through her education.

After earning his law degree, Graham joined the Air Force …

I saw Graham in person once, and I was extremely impressed, but not by what you’d imagine. It was at a large outdoor gathering during the 2015-2016 primary season, and he was running for president. He dropped out early in the game, but this was before that. There was a big crowd but not an enormous one, it was a beautiful day, and there were about ten speakers – all of them GOP candidates for the presidency. When it came Graham’s turn he spoke for about fifteen minutes.

I of course knew who he was, but he surprised me by being incredibly humorous. I mean really zany quips, one after the other, all of them sounding like ad libs, all of them incredibly witty. I hadn’t ever seen that side of him, and he was in rare form. Afterwards I somehow found myself speaking to a volunteer for his campaign, and I asked if this was unusual. She said he was constantly cracking them up with his humor.

RIP Lindsey Graham.

The post RIP Lindsey Graham appeared first on The New Neo.