August 15, 2026

STEVE DEACE: Tucker Is Now Deconstructing His Own Work.

Blaze Media personality Steve Deace comments on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Hunter Biden, recalling his past interview with “laptop repairman” Tony Bobulinski:

* * * * * * * *

Maybe the most celebrated work Tucker did at Fox was Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s associate. What was Joe’s name? Was it “the big guy,” that Bobulinski was telling us that Hunter was trying to get grift deals with the ChiComs and others on behalf of “the big guy,” right?

Now, see, the deconstruction goes all the way down. Tucker’s now deconstructing his own work.

And he’s saying, “Hey, the Jews made me do this. The Bidens are really the persecuted people here.”

We’ve reached rock bottom at this point.

I’m not even sure what would warrant doing this segment anymore, unless or until Tucker just flat-out converts to Islam and appears, you know, with a towel on his head. I’m not sure where there is left to go here.

Earlier from Stephen Kruiser: Cute Couple — Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden Find Each Other. “If Carlson really does want to run for president, his pathological hatred for Israel pretty much obligates him to run as a Democrat. He’s going to need to start working on his commie bona fides if he wants to get any cred with them. Don’t be surprised to see him brunching with Hasan Piker soon.”

Tucker’s already learned to stop worrying and love the New York Times, so brunch with Piker wouldn’t be that far out of place for him.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! China ‘funding pro-Palestine marches in UK.’

China is suspected of funding pro-Palestine marches in the UK, The Telegraph can disclose.

US politicians investigating alleged secret Chinese backing of Code Pink, a far-Left feminist protest group established in the US, are examining its activities in Britain as part of an inquiry into foreign interference.

Code Pink has organised protests in the UK against Britain’s involvement in “the genocide in Gaza”, encouraged its activists to demonstrate outside RAF bases, and issued statements claiming that Britain’s leaders have been “bought by Zionism”.

The investigation comes amid concern that Beijing is seeking to exploit divisive causes in the West to deepen social tensions and wage what critics describe as “political warfare” against its adversaries.

The Telegraph can reveal that the US investigation is examining £250,000 in alleged payments to a company linked to Code Pink in the UK from firms connected to Neville Roy Singham, a tech tycoon accused of financing Chinese propaganda around the world.

As Eyal Yakoby tweets, “We told you that this is a foreign psyop intent on destroying the West.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

RIP: Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen Biographer and Rock Critic, Dies at 76.

Dave Marsh, the music critic and biographer who documented the early days of Bruce Springsteen in his influential 1979 book “Born to Run,” died Friday in his Connecticut home. He was 76.

Jim Rotolo, who hosts the Springsteen-fan cast “The Wild & The Innocent” on SiriusXM, confirmed Marsh’s death in a Facebook post on Saturday morning.

“Dave wrote several books about Bruce as part of a remarkable body of work spanning some 25 titles,” Rotolo wrote, along with a picture of himself, Springsteen and Marsh. “A longtime rock critic for Creem and Rolling Stone, he was also one of the creators of ‘E Street Radio’ and hosted ‘Kick Out the Jams’ on SiriusXM for 19 years. Rest easy, Dave. Thank you for everything, my friend. You will be missed.”

“Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story” was one of the first extensive biographies written about the Boss, who was still rising through his young career when it was published in 1979. “Born to Run” followed Springsteen’s journey from local New Jersey rocker to budding global phenomenon and shared a name with Springsteen’s 1975 breakout album.

Marsh, who penned several works about Springsteen, also published texts on the Who, Sly & the Family Stone, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Black Sabbath. He was also one of the earliest editors of Creem magazine and was a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.

I’ve read Marsh’s 1982 book on The Who, Hope I Die Before I Get Old numerous times over the years. His obit at Rolling Stone mentions his rather more caustic side when he found an artist he couldn’t hero worship:

Marsh was a fearless critic, rarely holding back even with his most caustic and controversial views. “Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain,” he wrote in a notorious Rolling Stone review of Queens’ 1979 LP Jazz. “This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, ‘We Will Rock You,’ is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.”

He had similar disdain for Journey, Air Supply, and Kiss, once bragging that he did his “share to keep [Kiss] off the ballot” during his 26-year tenure on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee.

Similarly, Marsh’s Wikipedia profile adds:

Marsh has been referred to as a “grumpy rock and roll journalist” due to his acerbic comments on popular musicians whom he dislikes. In 1976, he wrote that Led Zeppelin had an “insurmountable flaw” in drummer John Bonham, whom he saw as “something like clinically incompetent” and responsible for marring every Zeppelin album to date.

Somehow I think most of those artists managed to survive his withering reviews.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

“A NOTABLE NUMBER OF AWFLs WANT THEIR POLITICAL OPPONENTS DEAD:”

Earlier: The Assassination Fan Base.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON’T EAT THE BROWN ACID:

Reminder: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic.

As did Apollo 11, the first manned moon landing, whose astronauts returned to earth on July 24th, 1969, and released from a 21 day quarantine on August 10th:

The Apollo 11 crew in the mobile quarantine facility aboard the USS Hornet. Richard Nixon had come to greet them. From left to right, Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin.
Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

JONATHAN TURLEY: The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.

From New York to California, the American left is proving that nothing succeeds like failure. From immigration to taxes to health care, politicians are playing to their past fiascos to push an even more radical agenda.

Take immigration. Many, including the Democratic Socialists, have called for open borders or disbanding ICE. After the Biden administration chose to allow millions of undocumented people to enter the country, most Democrats are now calling for “pathways” to make them citizens. After all, they argue, there are too many to deport.

We now know the open border was a choice. The Trump administration immediately stopped crossings using the same laws Biden had refused to enforce. As expected, Democrats are expressing horror at the thought that the government would try to deport the millions that they allowed and even encouraged to enter the country.

The same is true on public health policy. Remember when ObamaCare was going to reduce health care costs and improve health care options? While insisting that they did not want government-run single-payer healthcare, Democrats promised that ObamaCare would lower costs while allowing you to keep your own doctor and health care plan. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised his plan would “lower your premiums by up to $2,500 per family per year.”

As Stephen Miller tweeted in June after Nithya Raman bested Spencer Pratt to run again Karen Bass in L.A. and thus perpetuate that city’s continued collapse:

Tweet continues, “See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness and instead it ballooned on purpose. This is why there was such enormous flip out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign. Once people realize that things can be improved a lot of nonprofits and public union/money dries up. There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam. Mostly the concern I see on the political right over AI is cultural because there’s nothing more that the political left and the Democratic Party wants them to get their claws into AI. Because once an AI is programmed to tell people that boys can become girls it’s the death of truth. Data centers being built isn’t the problem, the data in those data centers is.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

STEVE HAYWARD: The Left’s Permanent Derangement — It’s more than Donald Trump.

Cold War liberals may have been weak-minded and timorous, as James Burnham and others never tired of pointing out, but they understood that Stalin was no hero, that Soviet Communism was an obstacle to social democratic aspirations in the West, and fellow-travelling was not to be tolerated. Equally important for Cold War liberals was the disposition to see America as a decent country, even as they remained highly critical of American capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and racism.

The latter point was not always to be expected. Left-wing intellectuals reveled in their alienation and contempt for America especially when the Great Depression seemed to validate their Marxist worldview. But sometime early in World War II Mary McCarthy shed her aloofness, consciously recognizing she wanted America and its allies to win. Her attitude quickly spread. Shortly after the war, Partisan Review startled the Left’s intellectual circles by noting “a reaffirmation and rediscovery of America is under way,” and Lionel Trilling grudgingly conceded that “for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world.”

On some questions, many of the Dissent-ers sounded increasingly like neoconservatives, and might have completed the odyssey to the Right but for their stubborn attachment to dreamy socialist utopias. (Some of those at Partisan Review, such as William Barrett, did shed their socialist commitments—the key step, as it turns out—and became neoconservatives.) At the very least, a number of these conditionally pro-American Old Left figures understood early on that the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s was bad news for democratic socialists. Irving Howe thought the New Left amounted to “kamikaze radicalism.”

***

The Old Left decisively lost (and ultimately surrendered) this intramural fight, but the conditional American loyalty remained. Enough so that in spring 2002, just months after the 9/11 attacks, Dissent’s then-editor Michael Walzer, whom The New Republic’s Martin Peretz described as “the unanointed dean of the American left,” threw down the provocation, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” A serious student of just war theory among other issues, Walzer was appalled by what he perceived to be “the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.” Needless to say, his essay was not well received at the very moment that Bush Derangement Syndrome was taking hold.

To paraphrase AOC, woke 0.0 was crazy.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Jonah’s tweet concludes, “I think the most annoying thing about these people — not the worst thing in a moral/intellectual sense, just the most annoying thing — is how cliched and boring they are to anyone who knows anything about this stuff. These are not edgy, new, exciting positions. This crap was in the streets and sitting in crumbled pamphlets in coffee houses in the 1960s, 1930s, heck in the 1890s. It’s just weak-minded radical cosplay for people who think incanting stale ideas makes you transgressive and cool if your audience already agrees with you or if they’re even more ignorant than you. She’s just an academic version of Hasan Piker and no more impressive.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: “There are no second acts in American lives.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, 1941.

The New Hotness? “American culture is wild, irrepressible, and exuberant and full of hucksters always coming up with new ways to reinvent themselves. There’s a shamelessness to Americans that Europeans perhaps look down upon but that is a great source of creativity and excitement.”

Posted at 12:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jason Arday Should Never Have Been Allowed High Enough to Fall as He Did.

I think, for example, that Arday’s professional colleagues — the men and women who passed him up through the scholarly ranks at warp speed — ought to account for putting him in the position to fail, despite such obvious lack of merit and so many strange red flags. We don’t have to speculate about whether they doubted his credentials, scholarship, or intellectual capacities: In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch reveals that black studies academics in the U.K. had quietly pegged him as a fraud long ago:

The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted. I have had various conversations with sociology professors in which this has been the main topic of conversation, and their questions began to mount into a list. They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.

What a damning confession — and published in a national newspaper, no less. Did any of Arday’s “black peers” ever think to quietly go to their department heads for a frank discussion? Maybe if one of Arday’s “peers” had taken him aside, man-to-man, and called BS on his impossible tales (“no way did you run 600 miles in six days, friend”) he wouldn’t have felt emboldened to make up so many spectacular lies about his life — and put them in a memoir, no less. After all, he’d gotten away with the entire grand fable until then! Arday wouldn’t have been able to bring such a truly catastrophic amount of shame crashing down upon his head had he not been coddled, excused, and even encouraged at times.

What did these people’s reflexive tribalism get them? A man whose obvious lies about himself, whose track record of grievous academic misconduct, and whose frank inability to actually do the work on any level found himself promoted, on a fast-moving conveyor belt, to the place where his many lies could no longer be concealed. His peers claim they knew all this — and they stayed quiet even as white administrators promoted him into a position where he was destined to flame out.

Even the New York Times is surprisingly tough on Cambridge’s role in Arday’s self-immolation: Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring.

Prominent academics on the left agree that Cambridge must answer for its decisions. They say that the ordeal has fueled racism and cast unjustified aspersions on accomplished scholars of color.

Cambridge said on Friday that it was “desperately saddened” to hear of Dr. Arday’s death. An administrator, in a letter to the faculty on Tuesday, called the misconduct accusations “an aberration” and “troubling.” A spokesman separately declined to answer a list of questions about his hiring and his time there, citing a planned independent investigation — a difficult inquiry that will likely be made even more uncomfortable following Dr. Arday’s death.

Dr. Arday, for his part, had worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials. When a journalist for Times Higher Education, a respected academic industry publication, asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article, the journalist said. Dr. Arday later reported the journalist to the police.

When a scholar from another university questioned his work, Dr. Arday turned the tables and filed a racism complaint with the other school, according to someone with direct knowledge of the complaint. That person, like some others who spoke to The Times, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being dragged publicly into the controversy.

Dr. Arday never squarely addressed the questions of plagiarism and fabrication.

But what is clear from interviews and public records is that elements of the story would have been easy for Cambridge to check.

Greg Lukianoff reminders readers that this isn’t the first time that an academician has succumbed to massive public scrutiny by ending his own life. “Mike Adams was mobbed and cancelled in 2020, and he killed himself shortly thereafter, and the American press largely treated it like he had it coming. Also, some commenters on the Internet seemed almost gleeful about his death. That was wrong then and it would be wrong now.”

Personally, I had hoped that Arday would have taken a few years to hide out, self-reflect, and then reemerge to tell the public about how deeply the rot has set into academia. He would have been a massive hit on the British talk show circuit:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHE’S THE HEROINE WE WANT, AND THE HEROINE WE NEED:

Posted at 12:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds