Erick Erickson devotes the first half of the hour to a story he says you should know even if you do not want to: Jason Arday, the Cambridge University sociology professor and serial fabulist who took his own life after the Guardian, the Times Higher Education, and the Daily Telegraph unraveled a biography that was almost entirely invented. Erick walks the whole record, the plagiarized Liverpool John Moores thesis, the harassment complaints filed against the academics who caught him, the masked knifeman and the pig's head that closed circuit television and the Metropolitan Police could never find, the visiting professorships that Glasgow and Ohio State say never happened, and argues the real culprits are the white progressive elites who elevated an unqualified man to prove their own allyship, then blamed his critics when it collapsed. He runs the same pattern through Elizabeth Warren at Harvard, Ibram Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Duke lacrosse case, and the Rolling Stone hoax at the University of Virginia. The back half turns to a Democratic Party in a panic, with Hakeem Jeffries, Ro Khanna, and Rahm Emanuel all scrambling to put distance between themselves and the Democratic Socialists of America.

• Jason Arday, Cambridge, and Liverpool John Moores: the plagiarism, the fabricated marathons and charity millions, and the police reports filed against the professors who exposed him
• Why Erick Erickson says the villains are the white academic elites who graded a man on a curve, from Elizabeth Warren and Ibram Kendi to Nikole Hannah-Jones, with Thomas Sowell as the counterexample
• Harry Enten on CNN: Donald Trump at 79 percent disapproval on gas prices, worse than Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, with gas still above $4
• Hakeem Jeffries, Ro Khanna, and Rahm Emanuel run from the DSA, plus why the Democratic Socialists really want the flock cameras gone
• The 2026 map: Mike Rogers up in Michigan, Ken Paxton in trouble in Texas, Susan Collins tied in Maine, and Republican sore spots in Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia
• Cory Mills in Florida's 7th and Max Miller in Ohio's 7th: two scandal plagued incumbents who could cost Republicans Vivek Ramaswamy, Jon Husted, and the House
• Trump's slipping grip on his own party in the Axios polling, the lame duck problem, and why the courts are what Republicans are really fighting for