Abduly Noted

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode: Abduly Noted

Date: August 5, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz, with Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, Eliana Johnson

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Overview of the Episode

This episode, titled "Abduly Noted," dives deeply into the aftermath and implications of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary, focusing on Abdul El Sayed’s narrow victory over Haley Stevens. The panel examines polling failures, Democratic Party dynamics, the potential impact for November’s general election, and the rise of DSA-aligned (Democratic Socialists of America) figures. The episode concludes with a cultural segment on the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal at Cambridge and a broader discussion on anti-Semitism in publishing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Michigan Senate Democratic Primary Aftermath

Theme: El Sayed’s victory, establishment weakness, polling fiascos, and what it means for November.

• Unexpected Results and Polling Misses

  • El Sayed was expected to win by double digits according to limited polling; instead, he edged out a one-point victory ([03:00]–[05:00]).
  • Discussion about whether polling inaccuracies were accidental or part of a strategy to discourage Stevens voters ([03:30], [04:30]).

• Polling as "Psyop"

  • John Podhoretz: “This may have been a psyop, this polling, to kill enthusiasm for Stevens, to get her voters to stay home...” ([03:35]).

• Nature of Media and Party Support

  • Eliana Johnson notes the outsized favorable media coverage for El Sayed, lack of scrutiny on his record, and the establishment’s insufficient support for Stevens ([05:12], [06:00]).
  • "She was portrayed as a... loser, and he was not. So I do think that she got sort of robbed... given it was an incredibly, incredibly tight race." — Eliana ([06:35]).

• Role of Spoilers and Establishment Dormancy

  • Third candidate Mallory McMorrow’s votes exceeded the victory margin, exposing vote fungibility and the passivity of institutional Democrats ([07:03]–[08:00]).
  • Seth Mandel laments, “...even in victory you see a certain amount of disarray in that the party does nothing in a winnable seat...” ([09:17]).

• Notable Quotes:

  • Seth: “If you're a Democrat... these guys are incompetent, they're untrustworthy. They will never have your back.” ([08:20])
  • John: “It is a fact that she [Stevens] outspent El Sayed nine to one... yet still lost.” ([15:53])

2. What Does This Mean for the Democratic Party?

Theme: Disarray or adaptation? Democratic establishment faces an insurgent DSA.

• Disarray or New Alignment?

  • "I know it is a cliche to say that Democrats are in disarray... but even in victory you see a certain amount of disarray..." — Seth ([09:15])
  • Eliana draws a distinction: establishment’s fear of the DSA shapes their behavior, referencing Alyssa Slotkin’s neutrality in the race despite her moderate credentials ([10:18]).

• Comparisons to the GOP’s Trumpification

  • John compares what’s happening in the Democrats to the Republican Party’s post-2009 transformation, noting the consistent forced elevation of establishment picks like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden despite grassroots discontent ([12:00]–[13:30]).
  • “Why should anybody listen to any of these people ever again?” — John ([14:48])

3. Implications for the General Election

Theme: Can El Sayed win statewide? Will party divisions matter?

• High Turnout and Electorate Shifts

  • Over 1.5 million voted in the primary, signifying extreme engagement—but with a potentially fractured base ([16:50]).
  • John foresees a likely drop-off in committed Democratic votes for El Sayed due to his radicalism, especially among Jewish voters ([18:00]).

• Risk of “False Hope” for Centrists

  • “The advantage of Democratic voter enthusiasm... may be mitigated by the fact that he [El Sayed] won and... that a not insignificant number of voters... are just not gonna be able to pull the lever for him.” — John ([18:46])

• Republican Prospects and Crossover Votes

  • Abe raises the scenario where El Sayed moderates his image; skepticism remains about its authenticity ([19:24]–[20:53]).
  • Discussion of the open primary format and whether GOP voters influenced the race — Eliana remains skeptical; Republicans were not mobilized ([21:19], [22:48]):

“Republican enthusiasm is so dampened... But now I think is where the Republican energy will come into this race and where Rogers is going to be able to raise real money...” — Eliana ([21:36]–[22:48])

• Target-Rich Opportunity for the GOP?
  • John: “...they are going to have to take an extreme left winger with extreme views on Jewry and Israel... and run against him. I don’t think they have any experience at this.” ([37:06])

4. How Should Republicans Run Against a DSA Populist?

Theme: Can the GOP effectively campaign against a radical candidate?

• Opposition Playbook May Not Fit

  • “Does the current cadre of GOP campaign strategists even know how to fight against a populist socialist? Not sure it is in their toolkit.” — John ([37:51])
  • Eliana suggests hitting “phony and a hypocrite” themes—El Sayed's wealth, his wife’s psychiatry practice, policies like open borders and abolition of police ([38:04]).

• 9/11 and the Old Electorate

  • John floats using 9/11 memory: “...reminding people that this is a guy who sides with the same ideological, theological forces that flew those planes...” ([39:33]).
  • Eliana: “Old people vote. All the young people who are super online and saying how much they love El Sayed— they don't turn out as much.” ([40:11])

5. Cultural Segment: The Jason Arday Plagiarism Scandal at Cambridge

Theme: Media, academia, and the weaponization of identity.

• The Arday Saga

  • Arday, youngest Black professor at Cambridge, faces revelations he fabricated life stories and plagiarized work ([49:15]–[53:16]).
  • When challenged, Arday accuses critics of racism and anti-autism, even involving the police to silence questioning journalists ([52:14]).

• Media and Academic Complicity

  • The New York Times coverage frames increased scrutiny as “weaponizing” plagiarism detection, raising broader issues about how media and universities treat claims of professional fraud if the accused checks identity boxes ([54:23], [56:14]).

• Notable Moment:

  • “Self-evidently absurd... the willingness of these people to suspend reality, to hire somebody who checks their boxes is comical.” — Eliana ([57:49])

• Systemic Issues

  • John: “...con artists ultimately tell people what it is they want to hear and then steal... and then they just keep upping the ante, and then at some point, it all comes crashing down. Or maybe not.” ([61:19])

6. Anti-Semitism and Censorship in Publishing

Theme: The exclusion of Jews and normalization of anti-Semitism in mainstream publishing.

• Publishing Industry Dynamics

  • Panel exposes Simon & Schuster for publishing open anti-Semitic authors, such as Susan Abulhawa, while Jewish authors face suppression ([63:51]–[66:00]).
  • “There is a frontal assault on Jews in publishing... these are firms that were started by Jews... now they’re suppressing Jewish content and publishing openly anti-Semitic content...” — John ([66:00])
  • Jewish buying power in books highlighted as historically decisive, while now explicitly cited as a reason for “controversy” by publishers ([66:45]).

• Case Example:

  • John reads a direct Abulhawa tweet: “Israel must be dismantled if humanity is going to have any chance at a moral future. Demonic parasite.” ([69:36])

• Publishing’s Double Standard

  • Eliana: “They are selling, as a memoir, this guy's load of crap... because the people working in publishing are all left wing nuts...” ([63:55])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Even in victory you see a certain amount of disarray in that the party does nothing in a winnable seat...” — Seth Mandel ([09:17])
• “It’s a false hope that what is happening to the Democratic Party isn’t really happening…” — John Podhoretz ([04:45])
• “Republicans are going to be energized to try to keep this guy out of the Senate.” — Eliana Johnson ([22:20])
• “They are suppressing Jewish content and publishing openly anti-Semitic content on the grounds that it’s so heartfelt.” — John Podhoretz ([67:21])
• “Con artists ultimately tell people what it is they want to hear and then steal... and then at some point, it all comes crashing down.” — John Podhoretz ([61:19])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Michigan Senate Primary Recap and Polling Debacle: [03:00]–[10:00]
• Democratic Establishment vs. DSA: [10:00]–[17:00]
• Implications for 2026 General Election: [17:00]–[22:20]
• Crossover Voting, Open Primaries, GOP calculations: [20:50]–[25:30]
• How Republicans Should Run Against El Sayed: [35:33]–[40:30]
• Cultural Segment: Jason Arday Scandal: [49:15]–[61:00]
• Anti-Semitism in Publishing, Simon & Schuster: [63:51]–[69:36]

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Tone and Style

The conversation is incisive, pointed, and laced with the panel's characteristic wit and skepticism toward both their political targets and the failures of institutional authority. There is open frustration at Democratic and Republican leadership incompetence as well as a strong undercurrent of concern regarding the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism in American culture—especially within academia and publishing.

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Conclusion

For listeners who missed the episode:
This was a deeply granular, often stinging analysis of the Michigan primary as a harbinger for broader trends in American politics—both party disarray and the challenge of rising extremism. The panel’s cultural discussion on academic and publishing scandals connects the dots between political, cultural, and institutional decay. The episode ends as a call to vigilance against both political radicalization and institutional corruption.

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Summary compiled preserving the panel's language, attribution, and tone for full context and fidelity to the discussion.

Transcript

[A]

Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst, Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, August 5th, 2026. I'm John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary, reminding you again about November 8th. That's the date of the 17th annual commentary roast, our dinner in New York to celebrate the magazine and to poke fun at a grandee, a figure of high respect and importance. We've been doing this for, as I say, you know, since 2010. And this year, Ron Dermer is our roastie. It's a fantastic evening. People say it's the highlight of their year. People come from all over America just to attend the roast. If you would like to be one of them, go to commentary.org roast for more details. And with me, of course, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

[B]

Hi, John.

[A]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[C]

Hi, John.

[A]

And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi Eliana.

[D]

Hi, John.

[A]

Okay, so we have been watching the Michigan Senate primary race granularly for months and Eliana has in the pages or whatever, the virtual pages of the Free Beacon has covered this race with extraordinary attentiveness. Seth has written extensively about it on the Commentary website. And so when we came to the events of last night, where it became clear about two hours after the polls closed that it was a very close race and that we had been fooled by admittedly very few polls being taken in the primary race, but a polling that said that Al said was going to win, I think on average by 13 points, and that in fact the race as it has ended up, it appears that he has won by one. This is a systemic massive polling error, so much so that I think it is fair to ask whether these polls were deliberately ginned to get the this result. That's what happens. If you have three polls that herd to a 13, 14, 15 point advantage. It's very easy to do this, which is you just over sample the age group that you know is going for El Sayed and you under sample the age group, meaning the elderly, who would go for Haley Stevens, his rival. And so this may have been a psyop, this polling to kill enthusiasm for Stevens to get her voters to stay home on the grounds that there's no point and it's all useless. And therefore, like the DSA in general, El Sayed's campaign is functioning through the modalities of trying to get inside the heads of people and Sort of trick them when they're not necessarily totally enthusiastically behind the leader. So my fear is that because we watch this so granularly, we are inclined to look at this result and say, gee, you know what I mean? Everybody said he was Gonna win by 15 and El Sayed only won by one. And therefore, it's almost like he lost. And so, hoo boy, the DSA hasn't. There's life in the old Democratic establishment yet. Or, you know, America isn't turning to the DSA and to anti Semite Hamas supporters. It is resisting them. But he won. The fact is he won. And the fact is that six years ago, a guy like him would have gotten 37% if he got even that. I think in the last race that he did run, he lost by 22 points. And he won here in a different atmosphere. And I'm worried that there's gonna be this kind of false hope that what is happening to the Democratic Party isn't really happening or that there's more pushback. And given the fact that Wesley Bell in Missouri turned back a challenge from squad member and ousted congressman and Cori Bush, another DSA aligned person and won his primary after having ousted her, had won by 22 points, that there are now these two data points that say El Sayed was weaker than he looked and Cori Bush did not win. And so don't throw on the ashes and sackcloth. This is a real fight. But I'm worried that that is like sunshine thinking.

[D]

Well, on the polling point, we obviously can't know with any kind of certainty whether this was intentional. But there's a point that Nate Silver makes in his very interesting note on this this morning, which is that Democrats also have a polling problem. Not only is Michigan difficult to poll, but. But that their primary polling under samples white rural voters and black urban voters, and those were both Stevens voters. So there are reasons that aren't conspiratorial that Haley Stevens would have underpolled, but those are things that people would have known in advance. And I do think what we can see, the data that we have that doesn't require us to speculate, is that the media coverage of this race that we've been reading for the past nine months made Stevens look like a real loser and characterized him as the exciting rising star, did not scrutinize him in the least. Stephen is. Stevens is a congresswoman. She's much more of a known commodity. He's a random, you know, health commissioner from Wayne county or. And he got very little scrutiny and he was portrayed as an exciting upstart that we know for a fact. For a fact. She was portrayed as a, you know, establishment, unexciting loser, and he was not. And so I do think that she. She got sort of robbed in this, given that it was actually an incredibly, incredibly tight race.

[C]

Robbed. I would add to that. And that's all exactly right. I would add to the people who robbed her is put the Democratic Party establishment front and center in this. If this was a one point race and a candidate who dropped out a month ago got three times the number of votes, three times the difference in votes between the two candidates who were left. Mallory McMorrow got close to like three and a half percent or something.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And so she got about three times the difference between Abdul Al Said and. And Haley Stevens. And I'm not. This isn't blaming McMorrow for being a spoiler. We can. You know, I'm sure there are ways to sift through the data and see one way or the other. But the point is, these numbers were highly fungible. They were, you know, McMarrow was at one point at 20% and then felt like the next day she was at 7% and had no choice to drop out. And now she's at three and a half percent when. When the two candidates are. Are separated by, you know, just over 1%. So these numbers were malleable. You could move them, you could. You could massage them, you could rearrange them. And the Democratic establishment did exactly one thing, one thing once, and that was Gretchen Whitmer with a late endorsement of Haley Stevens. That's literally it. They did nothing, nothing to try to push a sitting congresswoman who was part of their establishment over the edge. I just, I think if you're a Democrat and you see this, you go, these guys are incompetent. They're untrustworthy. They will never have your back. I mean, I know this is Washington, so I'm not trying to be naive, but boy, if I'm a Democrat, and I see that at the first sign of, you know, Abdul El Sayed raiding Simon Cowell's closet and putting on those. Those size small gap children's T shirts and running around that Chuck Schumer and everybody else is gonna, you know, have a thrill run up their leg. As Chris Matthews said, what am I even doing here? What am I doing? I. Who pay, let's say paid my dues to the Democratic establishment who ran campaigns with them, who endorsed them, who campaigned with them, who ran on their, you know, on Their on their policies and all this stuff and defended them all this time. I think you have a party that, you know, I know it is a cliche to say that Democrats are in disarray. That's become a joke. But even in victory you see a certain amount of disarray in that the party does nothing in a winnable seat when the person running against them. Abdul said I'm going to start putting the Democrats heads on pikes. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna start cutting off heads and putting them on pikes and they don't do anything. And lastly the DNC which does or does not exist, there is no definitive proof.

[D]

We should talk about Alissa Slotkin who didn't endorse him.

[A]

Alyssa Slatin's the senator. Right. Is the sitting senator a Jewish woman, supposedly a moderate. Right. A veteran, therefore presumably not somebody who would like hearing that. The most prominent supporter of Abdul El Sayed believes that America had it coming on 911 did not endorse Haley Stevens

[D]

didn't endorse in this race and at the same time has expressed her interest and said she hopes to be a part of the conversation for 2028. And, and if you think those two aren't linked, you're fooling yourselves. And Seth, you said you think the Democratic Party's in disarray. In a certain sense they're, they're in array. They are afraid of the DSA and they are taking the Alissa Slotkin position in that sense. You know, Gretchen Whitmer was the outlier taking, taking a real stand. The rest of them are all lined up like ducks. And on the polling point just to add some data, the Real Clear Politics average had El sayed ahead by 10.2 points. So it was a real polling miss. It was like off by a factor of Susan Collins which is how much we're polling is typically off by in Maine.

[A]

What's important about your point Seth is that you're saying the Democratic establishment has proved itself incompetent and no one you could trust. If they come at you and say you should run in 2028 for a higher office or you should run for Congress if you are in a non radical lane. Right. But whom does that help? That is an endorsement of the El Sayed DSA argument which is that the Democratic establishment needs to be extirpated and we have had this, we have a dry run for this in the Republican Party once again. This is what happened after 2009 and really came to its conclusion. Not only with Trump's election, but with Trump's pursuit after he became president, of the politicians who were not falling in line with him. That was throwing the bums out. Reorienting the party ideologically, reorienting the party culturally. Eliminating the whip, the House whip, Eric Cantor, with a sort of little known candidate that no one had heard of. And her entire public national exposure was on Laura Ingraham's radio show. And he nonetheless, Dave Bratt beat Eric Cantor in 2014, 2015. And then the speaker of the House, John Boehner, quit, just resigned and left the House because he couldn't work with these people. So we've seen this happen. It's the idea that it's out of touch, they don't know what voters want and all that. And look, they're right. I mean, let's just think about the Democratic record since 2016. The establishment forced Hillary Clinton on the Democratic Party and her weaknesses as a candidate were pretty clear by the middle of 2015 when her approval rating went from 63%, which is where it was when she resigned as Secretary of state to 40% after the exposure of her emails and the destruction of her email server and all of that. And they nonetheless shoved her down the throat. Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere because somebody had to run against her and say, you're in the pocket of the millionaires and the billionaires. And it's not that he almost won, but I mean, he staged a creditable race. And then she lost. 2018, they came out and they won 40 seats. 2020, once again, Joe Biden shoved down everybody's throat by Jim Clyburn. And by the minute that Jim Clyburn endorsed in South Carolina, the entire party came and got behind Biden and got Biden elected. And there was Biden. And I'm sure that as early as 2021 or as early as late in the summer of 2020, people quietly were talking behind Biden's back about whether or not he could fill out his term given his cognitive decline. Don't think that that was just something that happened after the 22 election. So they, by installing Biden, they effectively ended up losing in 2024, almost losing in 2020, losing in 2024. Why should anybody listen to any of these people ever again? Why should Chuck Schumer gets Janet Mills to run for Senate? She's driven out of the race. What good is Chuck Schumer if he can't at least say to Janet Mills, we want you because you're the most effective Democrat in The state. You're the governor of the state and all that, but we are gonna have your back. We'll raise all the money you need and all of that. So, I don't know. In this case, you're saying that the establishment didn't help Haley Stevens. But I mean, it is a fact that she outspent El Sayed nine to one. Or the money that was spent on her behalf was nine to one in her favor.

[D]

Most of it was aipac. Right.

[C]

Thing is that the Democratic institutions are like, this is a blue year. And in a blue year, a year when Democrats are winning or at least, you know, expected to, these are the primaries. But, you know, it's a progressive year. It's a blue year. And the DNC is like taking out second mortgages to, like, rent space and whatever. It's unbelievable that the organs of the party are entirely disintegrating before our eyes.

[A]

And in a blue wave year, because they're not needed. I mean, they're disintegrating because they're not needed. Or are they? Cause now I wanna go ask you this question so we don't have to rehearse. What's wrong with El Sayed? We've been talking about it for six months. The question is what these results portend for November.

[D]

I was just gonna talk about that. Yeah.

[A]

So I'm gonna offer two different points, data points. One and a half million people voted in this primary. That's a colossal number for a primary like this. I don't really know. I have to look up how many voters there are in Michigan total. That's a huge turnout. Right. So on the one hand, that shows that Democrats are incredibly engaged in this election cycle. And that can only be helpful to the eventual nominee, not only in the Senate race, but also in the governor's race. Right. Because there was a governor's race and I can't remember the name of the person who won the governor's race will run against John James in the election. But also, Haley Stevens got 730,000 votes. Some number of those votes will not go over to El Sayed. Remember that, Zoran. There are only 125,000 Jews in Michigan or 150,000 Jews in Michigan. 75% of the Jewish population of New York voted against Zoran Mamdani here. I don't know that you're going to get those very Democratic Jews to vote for Mike Rogers, the Senate, the Republican Senate candidate. But I can sure as hell see them staying home saying, I just can't. I just can't. Pull the lever for this guy. I can't. Or I'll go. I'll vote for the governor. I'll vote for my congressman. I am not voting for this guy. And that may be. This is my theory, and then I'll stop talking. That may be the advantage of Democratic voter enthusiasm as opposed to Republican depression may be mitigated by the fact that he won and that he is so radical and so extreme that a not insignificant number of voters that Democrats could reliably have counted on in November are just not gonna be able to pull the lever for him. Okay, those are my theories. A, the turnout was amazing and should be very heartening for Democrats. And B, the candidate, the success of the candidate who was running against who. This became a referendum on El Sayed. So Haley Stevens was the candidate, the anti El Sayed candidate by the end of the race, and she almost won. She lost by what, 15,000 votes.

[B]

Okay, well, what if El Sayed is, and I think he shows some signs of this, more slick than, say, Imam Dani is in the sense that he now says he's a capitalist and perhaps he will do something like tack to the center between now and then. What if he drops or softens his obsession with AIPAC and Jewish money and the Jews in Gaza and all that? I think that's a possibility with him. And I'm fearful that this last night is the start of some momentum on his part here, because I think when you have to hang on to when the thing that's keeping you above water is that he. He only won. The crazy radical Jew hater only won by, you know, less than two points. You're in a bad place.

[A]

Okay. Do you guys.

[C]

To which we can add my.

[B]

Go ahead.

[C]

I want to hear. Elliot, I want to hear Eliana's response. Can I just add one question on top of what I want to hear? Eliana, Can I throw in also the, The. The crossover effect? Eliana, I don't know how to judge this. I'm wondering your thoughts on that, too. Michigan is an open primary, and John said, you know, a number of those votes won't be there for El Sayed in the general. A number of those votes maybe won't be there for Haley Stevens also because maybe they were Republicans. Can you.

[A]

Because it was an open primary, you mean?

[D]

Right, Right.

[A]

Yeah, it was an open primary, which means Republicans could vote in.

[C]

The Republicans could have voted in Democratic primaries last night. And just seeing it as more important. Is that a factor at all that

[D]

I'm skeptical of being a significant factor because Republican enthusiasm is so dampened. I Rodgers has to fight the environment. But I do think, you know, enthusiasm and vibes is not what I associate with a candidate who just came through an incredibly bruising primary and won by 1%, which is, I think where he's at right now. And he was talking a big game and he's coming out of this with him with EL Sayed not being able to put his money where his mouth is now, he's a very talented candidate and this is a real serious fight. But now I think is where the Republican energy will come into this race and where Rogers is going to be able to raise real money because I think Republicans are going to be energized to try to keep this guy out of the Senate.

[A]

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[D]

But I actually think, I mean, I know that the view in the Republican establishment was that they preferred to run against El Sayed. So I'd be shocked to hear that there was a coordinated campaign to get voters out to the polls, to get Republicans out to the polls to vote against him. Because if you really got people in back rooms, they'd say, yeah, we'd really rather run against these guys and these people's job, you know, is just to win the, to hold the Senate. I don't think that happened.

[A]

Okay, so if AIPAC's gonna spend $35 million or $40 million in Michigan, maybe it could have done it, to do that so the Republicans don't do it. But AIPAC could have worked that as an angle. But we could put that to one side. Cuz let's just assume 15,000 votes, even though it's an incredibly tight margin in an electorate of 1.5 million, still that's a lot of votes to make up. When election night ends and 15,000 people have voted more for one candidate than the other, then you can say that that's a real victory. A one point victory is a victory. There's no recount, there's no this. You start standing like a crazy person if you say that you know that the election was stolen, fine, so is it the case that the Republic. But when, Eliana, when you say, which I know to be true, that Republicans said that they would rather run against El Sayed than against Taylor Stevens,

[E]

do

[A]

you think that that is penny wise and pound foolish? Because maybe Abe's right and he can moderate or maybe he doesn't moderate, but what he looks like is an authentic, passionate, serious candidate who will fight like hell for people. And Rogers is an establishmentarian and a Trump and a vassal for Trump or whatever. Whatever they'll say. But I don't think you want a passionately committed guy who has just climbed the greasy pole. You shouldn't be sanguine that he's not going to win in November. You have to run like he's going to win and figure out how to beat him. I don't think he is going to moderate. That's not in the playbook and I don't know how he moderates, to be frank. How does he moderate? What view he just said as of Sunday, he was saying we're gonna take over this party and throw all the Jews out. Basically he was giving interviews, saying stuff like that.

[D]

This weekend ambitions are to transform the Democratic Party. They already go beyond just winning this election. And I think if he loses this election, he'll be back, you know,

[E]

so

[D]

he's already set his sights higher than, I'm gonna do what it takes to win this election. He wants to get into the Senate. He wants to shove John Fetterman out of Pennsylvania. He wants Summer Lee to run in that seat. I'm with you, John. And I think we're all in agreement. And we've been saying all along that. That he's too dangerous a candidate, too dangerous a man with views that are too noxious to risk him getting this close to a Senate seat. But I do think that he and his team are guilty of managing expectations very poorly, and that despite all of his tangible political skill and slickness, that was a real error on their part. And one of the things we can look to to see whether he moderates is what does he do with Hasan Piker? The Beacon had a reporter at his election night party last night, and I was getting texts to my cell phone of photos of Hasan Piker, you know, oafing around the election night party. And then Piker is. Is out last night or this morning saying, we don't need to move to them, they need to move to us. And I'm just skeptical that after Piker campaigned with El Sayed all through, you know, he was the only statewide candidate to campaign with Piker, that El Sayed is gonna throw him under the bus. I don't see it happening. Yeah.

[C]

I also think that there's a. There's a difference between Mamdani and El Sayed in the terms of. In. In their types of slickness, which is El Sayed is very slick in talking about politics from a national perspective, and Mamdani is very slick in. In coming across as a likable guy. El Sayed is. You know, again, I. I made. The reason. Part of the reason I made the Simon Cowell joke earlier is because he. It's like he's trying character who is a jerk. I don't know if else I had is this much of a jerk to the people in his real life, but he. He just decided that the last month of the election, he was going to be kind of obnoxious and he was going to be dismissive, and he was going to ooze resentment out of his pores for even making him run and compete for this. And how dare you. And somebody said somebody asked him about his family being landlords all over the world, and he's like, well, I guess it's because my name's El Sayed that they're accusing me of, you know, have, be having foreign properties or whatever. Yes.

[D]

The Ilhan Omar playbook.

[C]

Yes. So I, I think that. Right, exactly. So I. And they've leaned into this. And as you just said, Hasan Piker, you know, leaned into it strongly. I think Mamdani knows that you just kind of be a normal dude for long enough and your brand is normal guy. And El Saya doesn't have that in him. And I think he's coming at this with a fighting spirit. And I don't think, not only do I not think he wants to moderate. I mean, I, I'm a capitalist who just, you know, whatever, fine. But I don't think, not only that he doesn't want to moderate, I think that he wants to press the idea that moderation is bad and that moderation is what has hurt Democrats in the past. And I think he's putting on a version of the this is how, this is how you got Trump argument. We got on the right. Where it was, you run nice guys like Mitt Romney and they're just going to walk all over you. And the real answer is to run a guy who just walks around slapping people in the face.

[A]

I agree with that analysis entirely. But I also want to point out here that we are talking about two radically different electorates. And that is the problem for Abdul El Sayed. Mamdani was running in a city that is six to one Democratic. And the only reason that his victory in November wasn't entirely assured was that he had a rival who was a Democrat. Andrew Cuomo was his rival. And if somehow it was never going to happen, Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, had somehow dropped out or thrown his support to Cuomo or whatever. Mamdani got a sliver over 50%. Abdullah Assad got a sliver under 50% with one rival in a state that Trump won in 2024. So he is now entering a general election in a state that, where there was the larger electorate, that is the presidential electorate went for Trump. He is in a purple state. And he is as, I mean, it is a version of the four candidates in 2010 that saved the Senate for the Democrats. Murdoch, Angle, Akin, o'. Donnell. Right. He is a version of them being on the extreme of his party in states where people might be liable to say he's too extreme for us. And so Abe's right that he might actually have to moderate to deal with that problem in the state that he's running in. But Seth, you're right that his entire reason for being is being immoderate. That's how he got where he got. And you dance brung you.

[B]

Yeah. Look, obviously I totally agree with Seth and you, John and Eliana. I assume that, yeah, this is who he is, this is who he wants to be. This is his reason for being in the race. But also recall how much of his fire was aimed at the Democrats. It was about teaching them a lesson. He's kind of done that by virtue of having won last night. I just think he's capable of pretending to, to be another type of guy for a limited period of time in order to take down Republican rival. Then he'll be the guy. I'm not saying he's not. When I say he'll moderate, I don't mean he'll commune with himself and say, maybe I'm going too far. I don't mean that. I just mean he'll say, all right, I'm going to keep my mouth shut about the Jews a little bit. I think that'll help. You know, purely tactically.

[D]

I mean, he's going to have to do spend a lot of time doing research on what else to talk about because all he talks about is aipac. So he's going to have to go underground for a couple weeks.

[A]

And I don't think AIPAC is necessarily. The question is, what's AIPAC's? What's AIPAC's game gonna be in this primary? This is the other thing I wanna talk about now, which is so now it is the mission of the Republican Party to save America from the dsa. And that means beating El Sayed in November. This is like job one for the Republican Party if it's going to serve America in the best way that it possibly can. And a friend of mine, a longtime Republican strategist and campaign worker and wise man, asks this, texts me, is Rogers actually a good candidate? I don't know. Also another question. Is there a black anti Muslim vote he can tap into? But this is the most interesting. Does the current cadre of GOP campaign strategists even know how to fight against a populist socialist? Not sure. It is in their toolkit. And this is a very interesting point because we may think that there are messages that will ring very delightfully on our ear. Right? He's a communist, he's whatever he wants to Medicare, he wants to socialize, medicine, all of that. But this is a radical running. And these guys have playbooks for Running for making Democrats who are left wing but are actually kind of relatively conventionally left wing, making them look very left, more left wing than they are, and trying to polarize the electorate or like expose how left wing they are or something like that. Here they are going to have to take an extreme left winger with extreme views on Jewry and Israel and all of that and run against him. And as my friend says, I don't think they have any experience at this. And they may blunder like they may think, oh, well, this worked for us in 2022, against so and so. But, you know, this is an entirely different atmosphere, an entirely new kind of threat. I'm not sure I have the advice to give them, but I'm not sure that they have good advice to give Mike Rogers.

[D]

Well, I think there are a couple threads to pull on, and I think Rogers will actually pull on them. The first is that he's a phony and a hypocrite. He is a top 1 percenter, and I think you'll hear that phrase a lot. Who wants socialism? And those are the people, you know, those are the Mamdani supporters. But the Guy made almost $700,000 last year. His wife, a psychiatrist, doesn't accept insurance. And those are really simple things. Everybody knows what a top 1 percenter is. Everybody knows what it is not to take insurance. And people don't like those things, okay? It's using their terms, you know, against their candidate. People don't like the very rich. They don't like doctors who don't accept insurance, particularly when the guy's out there peddling something completely different. And they don't like radical Islam. They also don't like open borders. They don't like abolishing the police. And he may run away from that now, but his tweets are his tweets, and that is what sunk Kamala Harris.

[A]

And I assume that they're going to debate.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, these are things that are very easy to understand. It's not AIPAC and it's not Israel and it's not foreign wars. They're very, very easy things to understand.

[A]

I think that's the point that my friend is getting at. That I think is very interesting in light of the fact that we are approaching the 25th anniversary, 9 11, which is what kind of oomph in an electoral context does reminding people that this is a guy who sides with the same ideological, theological forces that flew those planes into the Trade center, that flew a plane into the Pentagon, and that a plane was crashed In Pennsylvania that might have been on its way to the White house and killed 3,000 people and began the war on terror.

[D]

Well, you know what we saw in the turnout last night, old people vote. And all the young people who are super online and saying how much they love El Sayed they don't turn out as much.

[A]

I mean, that's always been the case. Right. That is like, that's politics 101, is that voters get more reliably, are more reliably attendees at the polling place as they age. And that the older you are, the more likely you are to vote. And that this was supposed to be a great reversal of that, the rise of the DSA people. And certainly was a factor in New York City, which is a large electorate. Right. It's eight and a half million people, but it's actually a relatively young place as opposed to other places. This, by the way, is a reason to watch Maine and to Washington, also

[D]

a place where people don't have kids. You know, people get much older without having children. And Michigan is not like that.

[A]

Right. And remember Maine, if we're gonna talk about another DSA candidate, although Troy Jackson is now a sort of pseudo DSA candidate after Platner's departure, Maine is the oldest state in the Union. That is. It's, you know, it's the state with the largest. With the average age is highest in Maine, which means that the voting population will skew old. And that is bad news for Troy Jackson. It might have been bad news for Platner. It would have been mitigated by Janet Mills because she was older than Susan Collins. But are these messages going to be of interest to older people? And I think the answer is obviously no. If you have a memory of 9, 11 or if you have a sense of what happened, and if you had a family member who went off and fought in the war on terror or something like that, all of which is a real thing in a state like Michigan where there are plenty of veterans and there are plenty of, you know, and there are Trump voters. That's my point. Like, Trump won there twice. You know, he lost once. He won twice. There was a Republican governor from 2011 to 2019. This is not a blue state. And so trying to get that electorate that may. Now, Gary Snyder last ran in 2015, so that's 11 years ago. The electorate is different. Fine. I just don't know that he is a good standard bearer for.

[D]

I think you meant Rick Snyder. Right.

[A]

Was the governor Rick Snyder.

[D]

I'm sorry.

[E]

Sorry.

[A]

Rick Snyder. Did I Say Daniel Snyder. That's the.

[D]

Gary.

[A]

Oh, Gary. Gary Snyder is a professor.

[C]

I believe. I believe it was. I believe it was D. Snider.

[A]

D. Snider, of course, Twisted Sister. And then of course you have Dan Snyder, the evil former owner of the Washington Redskins. So it is. Thank you for correcting me. That's the good Snyder. But okay, so I think we need to be very worried that El Said can pull this off because the meaning of that will be catastrophic about America. But things are contingent and we are gonna have a reminder of 911 in a month and what it meant and what pain was caused by it and who attacked us and how closely aligned with Hamas, the organization that El Said's father in law is effectively a fundraiser for. I, you know, I mean, you know, it is as. Then maybe the Republicans are right. It is a target rich opportunity. If you need to run against someone, the race will be about. If the race is about El Sayed, maybe he loses. If it's about change in general, vaguely, then he would probably win. But if it turns into a referendum on him, he almost lost the Democratic primary as a referendum on him. And then we'll have a statewide election and a referendum on him is not what he wants, is my view. Although he may not know any different. That's, I think, what the. The jerkiness that Seth is talking about and the kind of weird triumphalism that he was displaying in the last week, that is maybe the most suggestive thing about him now. Again, it could have been part of the psyop. I think they really thought that the way to win this race was to depress Stephen's voters and to act as though he had already won. And maybe that really worked. We don't know how many people were affected by that sort of thing. So, you know, I don't know, but it is like there's nothing more important now, is there? I mean, there are the places where they have to be defeated, right? That's Maine and Maine and Michigan. Now, Michigan in particular because of El Sayed's anti Semitism and the mainstreaming of antisemitism emerging, of course, from the, you know, that deathless city of antisemitism, Dearborn, which is where Henry Ford published his newspaper and where the epicenter of radical Islamic antisemitism in America is now sort of spewing forth from. I'm back to talk to you about Brooklyn Bedding. I've told you this story before that they came to advertise on the commentary podcast and they sent me a mattress to test and I got one for my son's room and I lay down on it and so did he and it was so comfortable that I got two more mattresses for each of my daughters. So I am a Brooklyn Bedding customer. I'm a Brooklyn Bedding enthusiast. I'm big on buying things I know will last. Brooklyn Bedding is that kind of purchase. These mattresses are cost effective but they're also built with long term durability in mind and they're built right here in the usa. They use Glaciotex covers, copper infused foams, temperature regulating materials to help keep you cool and comfortable all night long. I don't know how much more I can say except that I got them for myself, paid for them myself and so should you go to BrooklynBedding.com and use my promo code commentary at checkout to get 30% off site wide during the back to school sale. That's right, that's BrooklynBetting.com and promo code COMMENTARY for 30% off site wide exclusive with my code. BrooklynBetting.com promo code COMMENTARY August is the perfect time to hit reset before the autumn rush begins. And honestly I can't think of a better place to start than my closet. That's why I love shopping at Quince. If you're still hanging on to the same worn out basics, Quince makes it easy to upgrade. For example, I just bought a bunch of linen shorts because frankly I've been losing a little weight and I need some shorts that fit and these are fantastic, comfortable, breathe and very very good looking. Everything at quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middleman. So you're paying for high quality, not brand markup. Everyday staples that work harder like their ultra soft organic cotton tees and premium Mongolian cashmere sweaters which I've been telling you about for years. And it's not just clothing. Quince has become my go to for everything from hotel quality bedding and bath essentials to premium cookware and travel must haves. I also just got a new Quince wallet Just to give you a sense of how this goes. Upgrade your everyday Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com commentary get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q U Y N C E.com commentary. Speaking of scandals, we do have an important cultural scandal though it is not in the United States but is very indicative and suggestive of the kind of rot we're talking about, political rot, the cultural rot of universities and what it is that and how they are so easily gulled into becoming sort of like the places where successful con artists can work their will. And that's the case in Cambridge with a professor who seems to have made up his entire life. Eliana, do you want to give us some backfill?

[D]

Sure. The professor's name is Jason Arday and he is the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge. And over the past year, key aspects of his biography have come into question by reporters and the media. And those who have started asking questions have been intimidated by high priced lawyers in the uk and to date, the University of Cambridge has stood by him. And he's got a forthcoming memoir, the reason this is in the news, including in a New York Times piece that we'll talk about. He's got a memoir being published in the US next week and in the uk. So Arday claims to have grown up in a very poor area in the uk, to have suffered from severe autism and spoken his first word at the age of 11, not to have learned to read until he was 18 and then to have gone on and gotten a PhD in education. He's now a, of course, a professor. He also claims to have achieved spectacular feats of athleticism, to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and to have run these for charity and raised millions and millions of pounds while doing so. We can now see that he's stealth edited biographies of himself online and that there's a p. We have a piece in the Free Beacon by the investigative journalist Ben Ryan, who notes that even Simon and Schuster, as questions have been raised about his biography, has gone and edited the Simon and Schuster biography about him without acknowledging it. And of course Ryan has hired a team of lawyers who have responded that the questions are being asked because people are racist. And the four of us were texting yesterday about the New York Times coverage of this. Oh, I should note the original piece in Substack by on Substack by a journalist by the name of Nathan Koffnas notes that the bulk of his academic work is plagiarized and you can just look at it side by side in the same way that the Free Beacon and Chris Ruffo at the Manhattan Institute did with Claudine Gay's work. So he says this is racism and

[A]

the four of us are technically and anti autism. So he actually the police in Britain on a journalist who was writing about this fabulism and plagiarism stuff. And the cops show up at the guy's door and say, we understand that you were harassing a disabled person because he called the cops and said, I have autism and this man is abusing me in the public prints. Literally sic the cops on somebody to silence him by claiming that his autism shielded him from any kind of critical exposure. If he is, in fact autistic, which we do not know, because just as we don't know, just as we can assume that he didn't run 600 miles in six days, we can also assume that whatever he says about himself can't be taken at face value or raise

[D]

hundreds, hundreds of thousands of pounds. So. So the Times, the New York Times writes a story, and the story is, you know, some allege he's a plagiarist. Others say the allegations are coming from racial animus, and who can really know? But he does write exactly the same words in exactly the same order as some other scholars. And then there's this paragraph. The allegations against Arday come amid broader concerns about the ways accusations of plagiarism are being weaponized, comma, particularly as widely available plagiarism detection software makes possible infractions easier to identify. Conservative news outlets highlighted plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard. The university then announced it had identified several instances of duplicative language without appropriate attribution in her scholarly work. You know, and then she resigned. So, you know, the real concern here is the weaponization of plagiari plagiarism allegations. The Times would like you to know.

[A]

This is a great moment.

[C]

So I, I just, you know, want to say that I had a roommate and one of my housemates in college was autistic. You know, definitely autistic. He do it, whatever. We. And I would just want to say he was the absolute last person in the world who would have plagiarized anything academically. He didn't need to, first of all. But, but, you know, this idea that, like, a person who claims to be socially awkward is not, you know, this is, this, is this trend of, you know, oh, I was so autistic today, you wouldn't believe what I said to this person, you know, whatever. It has totally scrambled the whole concept in a way that I think that stuff has to be dismissed out of hand by this guy because it's. Now it's just like, it's, oh, now it's just like, oh, I was behaving this way, or I said something silly or whatever, and it's becoming. And it's only once it's diluted that it's becoming some kind of protected class. Like people get to hijack it and then they get to be protected by it. When in fact, fact it's so out of character for the people who are actually have it and deal with it.

[A]

I mean, that's an important point. But let's go to the media thing here because this is the Times engaging in what came to be known as Fox Butterfieldism. That is when Fox Butterfield, who was the Boston correspondent of the New York Times in the 1990s, reported breathlessly that spending on police and arrests have increased and the net result is a horrifying, you know, it's a lower crime rate. This was written in a tone of wonderment and also some concern that too many people were being arrested.

[C]

So the idea is despite the drop in crime, spending on police is increased or increasing.

[A]

Exactly. So here we have, you know, he's a plagiarist. Amazingly enough, questions are being raised about attacking people for plagiarism because it's now easier to figure out who's a plagiarist. And that therefore is. It's unfair because it used to be harder to prove that people were stealing other people's intellectual property and copying their writing and doing what is effectively a mortal crime in the world of intellectualism and scholarly thought and writing and all of that, which is to steal somebody else's words. And now it's like it's just not cricket. It's not fair. I mean, all you gotta do is run an article through some machine and then it turns out that this guy was a plagiarist. And we want him as here at Cambridge because he checks off so many fantastic boxes for us. We get the autism box, we get the race box, we get the, you know, intersectionality box. We get a guy who can run 600 miles in six days. He's like a. He's a total gimme. And you know, you're harshing our mellow here. It is unbelievable.

[D]

The thing that really struck me about this was that when you read the guy's bio, it is self evidently absurd. It is so obviously preposterous. And the willingness of these people to suspend reality, to hire somebody who checks their boxes is comical. Comical.

[A]

Yeah. And that's what, far from being autistic, my guess is that our day is an extraordinarily clever, weirdly clever. Fabulous. Because he realized the thing to do was to go sort of like Taylor Sheridan plots, is to go totally implausible. Because the more implausible your story is, the more people sort of, like, have to buy it, because then they're gonna have to admit that they should have figured it out. The first go round when you were just autistic, then it's like, oh, okay, you're autistic. Well, that, you know, it's amazing what you pulled off. And. Oh, oh, and you ran 600 miles and you're autistic and you're a brilliant scholar. Oh, you're a plagiarist, but you're a brilliant scholar who's autistic. And you ran. Like, at what point? It's sort of like Susan Dolezal, right? Or Rachel Dolezal, whatever. She was like. She just kept saying she was blacker and blacker and blacker, and everybody sort of had to accept this resume of blackness. And nobody said, really, like, you know, where did you. You know, did you celebrate Juneteenth? I don't. Like, at what, you know, it's also.

[B]

It's also, when you bring up Rachel Dolezal, it reminds me that it's a good gamble for frauds these days to give it a shot, too, because even once you're caught, you. You have this sort of second career as a. A penitent fraud or something. You know, like, you, You. You stay a part of the culture. Someone will do some documentaries on you. You'll write a book. You know, you'll. You'll. You can become. You can share some really important insights on identity after that, you know, you know, it's like there's really no. There's no downside. You know, give it a shot, ride it out, or George Santos, whatever. You know, like, you can.

[C]

You.

[B]

You stick around, you don't. You don't disappear.

[C]

But like, and also, like, isn't. Isn't there an element of Gary Hartism in that? Like, go ahead, see if I'm check. You know, go ahead and find the affair that I'm supposedly having. And then, you know, the next day they find the affair that the guy's having. But in this case, right, it's like, go ahead, accuse me of plagiarism. No one wants to do it because of the weaponizing plagiarism aspect of this. The Republican people are happy to do it.

[A]

Yes, those people are bad.

[C]

But that's exactly why I say, Eliana, that there's a Gary Hart aspect to this, which is, like, you just daring people. You get credit for daring people to do something that the people in your circle will never do. But someone's gonna take you up on the job.

[A]

No, but that's the whole thing about con artists. And that's why this is a particularly interesting point, which is that con artists ultimately tell people what it is they want to hear and then steal. You know, pick their pockets by figuring out how to win them over, woo them, seduce them, and then it works. And then they just keep upping the ante, and then at some point, it all comes crashing down. Or maybe not. Like, how many people have survived scandals like this without us ever knowing about it? We don't know that. But that is the con. And of course, the long con, as we know from the Sting, the greatest movie ever made, is that you con somebody and then can you keep them conned forever? Can you run the long con? It's not just that you run the con. You run away and they're like, oh, my God, that guy tricked me. I shouldn't have given him $20 for a sandwich. He just went and bought drugs with it. It's you make them complicit. Or even if they find out, then they're complicit in the con, because if they reveal it, then they make themselves look like buffoons and ludicrous figures who themselves might lose their jobs because they empowered somebody who clearly shouldn't have been empowered. But we need these scandals at the university level because it's very important, because these are corrupted institutions. And it's always the tip of the iceberg. It's always the tip of the iceberg. And so, you know, make it clear that this is the sort of thing that happens when somebody is up for a coveted job. And I hate to put it this way, but let's say you're in the running for some professorship somewhere. You should start doing oppo research on the people who are likely to be up for that same job. Take their books, run them through plagiarism machines, send the material that you found to the committee that is deciding who is going to get the Philip Ryman Singelhoff Chair in Anthropology at the University of Pasquaxie. So, you know, I mean, that's a real, you know, that's something that should start happening.

[D]

Can we also talk about Simon and Schuster's role in this?

[A]

Oh, please.

[D]

Where they are selling, as a memoir, this guy's load of crap to their readers, and then going in to clean up his doo doo's after him and they're conning their readers to make a buck. Because the people who work in publishing are all left wing nuts. Unless you are working explicitly at a conservative publisher. And this goes along with the fact that they are publishing the book of the outspoken anti Semite Susan Abdul Waha, however you say her last name, who partnered, she had Zoran Mamdani's lunatic antisemitic wife illustrate her work. And meanwhile, you know, a normal conservative can't get a. Can't ink a book deal.

[A]

Or normal Jew can. A Jew can't ink a book deal. Susan Abdul Hawa is having her new memoir published and her old. Her two other books republished by Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. And all we hear, and Meg Keane and others are now doing work on this, we hear that Jewish books are being rejected very explicitly by publishing houses on the grounds that Jewish content will create controversies that publishing houses do not want to involve themselves in. And that is a real thing. And we have the case in Nashville of the bookstore refusing to publish, refusing to host an event for Alyssa Rosenheck's book White Blonde Jew. This is like her local bookstore because the book is called White Blonde Jew. And they said that they had scheduled it and then they canceled it on security concerns. And Alyssa Rosenheck said, ah, I actually have private security. I've had it for three years. So I will have a security person

[C]

who has the receipts that they accepted her private security for the event.

[A]

Right. And then cancel it. And then in a desperate effort to make themselves not look like the anti Semitic, cowardly, loathsome, speech suppressing scum that they are, said that they were worried about security. So, you know, there is a frontal assault on Jews in publishing, in publishing. Do you know who the most reliable readers in the United States were in the course of the 20th century? The people who made books bestsellers. Jews. The entire publishing industry has helped build itself on the shoulders of wildly disproportionate readership among Jews in the United States. I am not joking. This is like there was some point at which Jews, who make up 4% of the population, were buying 20 to 25% of the books that were sold in the United States, just like they give money way disproportionately. And here we are with a publishing industry that is now not publishing Jewish fare, won't intervene when a Jewish writer is having a book event or help that book get published. And these are firms that were started by Simon and Schuster, was started by two Jews, Simon and Schuster,

[E]

both of

[A]

whom were Jewish a hundred years ago. The head of Climate and Schuster until very recently was a guy named John Karp, who was a Jew So now they're suppressing Jewish content and publishing openly anti Semitic content on the grounds that it's so heartfelt. It's so heartfelt.

[C]

Well, and can I just say, like, as somebody who, who, you know, forces himself to read Susan Abu Hall's books and put myself through this, she is the book. The, the, the, the initial book, the novel Mornings in Jeanine is, was not its original published title. It was originally called the Scar of David, which tells you a bit more about, you know, where this woman's career was going. But it was not just retitled to be released, it was re. Edited. She had written what was seen as a potentially best, a potential bestseller, but she is not capable of suppressing her rage to write well enough for a wider audience. And so the book was massaged into readability by again, editors and publishers. She's been. My point is that she's kind of been carried from the beginning that this is not just publishers, you know, helping her at a moment when she is literally talking like a Nazi on Twitter, when she's literally saying, you know, things like, no wonder the Nazis did, you know, what they did to the Jews and people get tired of this Jewish act and all this other stuff. I really believe that her career was saved from being from, from collapsing on the launch pad by this. Let's rename the book, let's read it. Let's get people who know how to write to go through it again. The book was already published and then it took off as a seller when it was republished under a different name and with the edits. And I also think that, you know,

[A]

okay, that's, look, that's a great point. I just want to read one tweet by her just so people understand what we're talking about. And then we probably have to go. This is just one tweet. And taking this from the free Beacon report on Susan Abdul Hawa. For a long time we've known these demonic parasite that the world is finally glimpsing. Israel must be dismantled if humanity is going to have any chance at a moral future. Demonic parasite. Jews are demonic parasites. Simon and Schuster is publishing this woman they should drop dead. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, the home of Simon and Schuster should be fumigated. And cleared of this wretched filth of a publishing house. That was actually my first publisher. I noted that Gerald Posner, the author of Case, the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination and other things, has pulled his next book from Simon and Schuster because of the Susan, because of these two scandals and maybe Others will follow, but demonic parasite, you know, woman should look in the mirror. Okay, we'll be back tomorrow. So for Abe, Eliana, and Seth, I'm John Pothoric. Keep the candle burning.

[E]

I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak. Yay. Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[F]

From the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room and in the classroom, Americans are losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the story, stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[G]

I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes, and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.

[A]

When you get momentum, you step on the gas.

[C]

That's how you get separation from everybody else.

[A]

I was at Harvard Law School.

[E]

I was. Blah, blah, blah. I looked up.

[F]

Let me tell you something.

[A]

There's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that are smarter than you.

[C]

AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.

[A]

It is never going to disrupt physical blue collar trade skill.

[C]

And the guy just looked at me

[A]

and he said it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question.

[G]

I said, it's impossible unless that's Pod crash with me. Matt ebert, watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.