NEW ARRIVALS: Hong came and went as a new arrival!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2026

Hasan Piker remains: Based on her lead in the polls, the new arrival on the front was supposed to be Francesca Hong.  It was thought that she would be the Democratic Party's nominee for governor of Wisconsin. 

In this passage from a profile in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis starts to explain why that didn't happen. Dual headline included:

AOC Knows a Lemon When She Sees One   
Francesca Hong’s surprise loss in Wisconsin is a blessing to the Democratic Party.

[...]  

Hong’s loss yesterday was unexpected. Two weeks ago, the 37-year-old state legislator was the front-runner in the polls, largely because the Democratic primary had turned into a clown show... [O]ne poll had Hong 22 points ahead. In the interim, another candidate, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, had returned to the race after previously withdrawing because of a lack of momentum. All the hopes of the Democratic establishment rested on Crowley’s Hail Mary pass.

Why were they so scared of Hong? Partially because she is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that calls for public ownership of large corporations, looser immigration laws, and the abolition of prisons. Hong has said that she does not agree with all of the DSA platform, but she entered the contest with an unscrubbed Twitter account, full of the most voter-repelling, peak-2020 statements you can imagine. 

At this site, we wouldn't be inclined to refer to Hong as a "lemon." On Election Day, we saw videotape of her taking questions from reporters, then walking away holding hands with her 10-year-old son.   

Years from now, that child may be lucky enough to feel that he was raised by the world's best mother. But his mother was deeply challenged as a candidate under prevailing rules of the game, according to which you run for office in order to serve, and to be allowed to serve you have to win a plurality of votes in a full-scale November election.   

Judged by any reasonable calculus, Hong was a shaky bet to win in November. As her profile ends, Lewis explains why David Crowley's surprising win this Tuesday was seen, by establishment pols, as "a blessing to the Democratic Party:"    

Crowley squeaked past Hong at the last minute. That is a nightmare for the Republicans, whose candidate Tom Tiffany was the only serious contender for the party’s nomination. In Congress, he is a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. He has been heartily endorsed by Donald Trump—great for the primary, but worse than useless in the general.

Tiffany very obviously wanted to run against Hong, whom he could have painted as a dangerous radical who loves illegal immigration and hates cranberry sauce... 

The final winner, however, is democracy itself. Who would bet against Donald Trump calling up swing-state officials in 2028 and asking them to find a few more votes for the Republican candidate for president? After all, that’s exactly what he did in Georgia in 2020. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by just 21,000 votes that year, while Trump took it back by only 30,000 in the next race. For a decade, Trump and his allies have counted on Democrats to sound so out of step with mainstream voters on cultural issues that even his most authoritarian moves look tolerable by comparison. The Badger State is one of the most crucial places on the electoral map. Francesca Hong’s unexpected loss is America’s gain.  

We live in a time of madness and rage (and in a time of mental illness). Who will end up in Wisconsin's state house? Given the madness of the time, a great deal may turn on that question.  

Or then again, possibly not! Those of us in Blue America have shown the ability to find ways to occasion our own defeats. The current president squeaked into the White House for his current term in part because of the conduct in which we Blues engaged along the way, the earlier Hong included.

Among other self-inflicted disasters, the Biden administration's open border and our less digestible "Woke One" claims were able to drive a certain number of voters away from Candidate Harris. Enough voters were driven away so that someone as unpopular as Candidate Trump was able to make his way back to what's now left of the White House.

And now, along comes the latest new arrival, one who sounded off at the start of this very week. Rightly or wrongly, Republican strategists love this arrival. The leading authority starts its profile as shown:   

Hasan Piker   

Hasan Doğan Piker (born July 25, 1991) is an American Twitch streamer, influencer, and left-wing political commentator. His livestreams usually include discussions on current affairs and lifestyle stories, playing video games, reacting to memes and media clips, and interacting with his viewers.

As of 2026, Piker's Twitch channel ranks among the platform's most-subscribed. Piker has been called one of the biggest voices on the American Left. He began streaming on Twitch in March 2018, while working at The Young Turks (TYT). In January 2020, Piker left TYT to focus on his career as a Twitch streamer. He has regularly spoken about the Gaza war, advocating for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli government. 

Piker was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Turkish parents. He grew up in Istanbul and was raised as a Muslim...His father, Mehmet Behçet Piker, is a political scientist and economist who was a board member and vice president of the Turkish financial conglomerate Sabancı Holding and is a founding member of Turkey's conservative Future Party. His mother, Ülker Sedef Piker (née Uygur), is an art and architectural historian who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology...

Piker returned to the United States and attended the University of Miami, then transferred to Rutgers University, where he joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. In 2013, he graduated cum laude from Rutgers with a double major in political science and communication studies.

And so on from there. We'll start by stating the obvious:   

There's a great deal a person might criticize about the current Israeli government—about its conduct of "the Gaza war," about its excruciating behavior in the West Bank. 

There's a great deal a person might say about the ongoing plight of that region's Palestinians.

It seems to us that major American news orgs tend to shy away from coverage of the conduct in question. That said, we aren't specialists on such matters—and opinions, which are often ardently held, will differ on such matters among citizens of this country.

That said, Piker has become a favorite of the Fox News Channel because of some of the ways he has expressed his views and opinions. Correctly or otherwise, that channel sees him as someone whose aggressive rhetoric will tend to affect votes in a way which tilts more Red than Blue.

Joe Scarborough seems to hold a similar view. On Monday, he criticized the mainstream Democratic Party for failing to disassociate itself from vote-killing rhetoric of the farther left. Without ever naming Piker, he seemed to refer to something Piker once said when he offered this:   

SCARBOROUGH (8/10/26): There's nothing wrong with the Democrats supporting economic justice. There's nothing wrong with the Democrats supporting...getting rid of the Trump taxes and making billionaires pay more in taxes. 

That’s a legitimate mainstream debate for people to have. "Healthcare for all! Healthcare is unaffordable!" That is something most Americans would agree with.

But please, I don’t need people telling me, "Oh, you have to just turn a blind eye to people saying that women getting raped on October 7 didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things." No, Americans aren’t going to support that!

Women getting raped on October 7 don’t matter in the grand scheme of things? 

Almost surely, that was a reference to something Piker once said. Later, he created a case to justify, defend or explain what he had said. 

Without ever saying his name, Scarborough had presumably been referring to Piker. On Monday, the streamer responded at length.

Tomorrow, we'll show you what Piker said. He's an important new arrival. For citizens of Blue America, there's a great to think about here.

Tomorrow: Piker's arrival

BREAKING: Trip off campus to take place!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2026

We'll be posting maybe by noon: We're off on a rare trip to, where else, the medical mission. 

We expect to be posting by noon. Today's subject:

New arrival Hasan Piker!

WEDNESDAY: Discussion is "tempered," Levin says!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2026

We agree with him all the way down: We agree with TMZ's Harvey Levin. One part of this story has, in fact, been strangely "tempered"—or at least, so it seems.  

Levin was referring to the president's flight from Air Force One on his way out of Turkey. So let us just link you to this:

TMZ’s Harvey Levin Questions Why Threatened Air Force One Was Allowed to Take Off with ‘Unsuspecting’ Reporters and Staff Aboard  

Security threats which prompted President Donald Trump to secretly ditch Air Force One after the July NATO Summit were “astonishing enough,” but TMZ’s Harvey Levin wants to know why the plane was allowed to fly at all with “unsuspecting” reporters and White House staffers aboard.

TMZ’s Harvey Levin wants to know why the plane was allowed to fly at all with “unsuspecting” reporters and White House staffers aboard

Levin took to X to raise the question of why so many people were apparently put in harm’s way while Trump was reportedly snuck out via a catering truck to a waiting military aircraft.

“It’s scary that there was this kind of a threat,” Levin said in the video posted to the social media platform before adding, “but one of the elements of this incredible story has kind of been tempered for some reason. … I’m not sure at all why it’s been tempered.” 

And so on from there. 

When Levin says that one part of the story has been "tempered," he means it's odd that major journalists aren't discussing the extremely peculiar ethics which seem to be involved in this strange event.  

NEW ARRIVALS: Press and staff stayed on the plane...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2026  

...after the president left: Crouched behind barrels of chicken salad, he made his way out of Turkey!

It was the Washington Post which broke the story. The Post's report starts like this: 

Contradicting public statements, Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat

An Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump prompted an extraordinary operation last month in which he flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One, The Washington Post has learned.

The clandestine mission, which has not been reported previously, was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president, according to material reviewed by The Post, a U.S. official familiar with the operation and another person with knowledge of the president’s travel. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the matter.  

[...]   

In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane—an Air Force C-32A—via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.   

The catering truck took the sitting president to the smaller C-32A. Flying out of Turkey on Air Force One was deemed too dangerous for the president, though media and some White House staff were left aboard the doomed plane.   

We were puzzled by the ethics of this procedure. Last night, someone finally asked about that, as Mediaite reports:  

REPORTER (8/11/26): Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One, but not too dangerous for the press?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, I don’t know. I think, actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk.

REPORTER: Why do you say that? 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for.  

You're right! The reporter asked a good question, but she got a ridiculous answer. 

(To see C-Span's unedited tape of the full exchange, you can just click this.)

At first glance, the arrangement here was quite strange. It was decided that the president couldn't leave on Air Force One due to the possibility that the plane would be attacked. But the press was allowed to leave on that plane—and no, they apparently weren't informed that they were presumably in danger.   

We were surprised to think that some such arrangement had actually taken place. We've also been surprised by the way cable discussions have tended to skip right past this apparent moral dilemma.  

Those were our initial reactions to this unusual event. But when we read the Post's report, we ran headfirst into this:   

To transport the president out of Turkey, U.S. officials relied in part on a technique that has occasionally become public knowledge. One such mission occurred in March 2000, when President Bill Clinton visited Pakistan. With television cameras recording in Islamabad, Clinton disembarked from a plain white jet that followed the blue-and-white Air Force One, clarifying where he had been.

There have been other times in the last 30 years when Air Force One served as a decoy for the president because of a serious threat or because he was flying to a dangerous location, another U.S. official said, declining to elaborate. [Air Force One] is highly secure, but also highly visible, so putting the president on an alternate plane instead can be considered safer, that former official said.   

"Considerably safer" for him, but not for the staff and the press!

Rather plainly, that passage seems to suggest that this sort of thing has been done in the past. Does that perhaps explain the silence of the journalists? 

Is it possible that news orgs have agreed to have their employees exposed to danger in this way? Is it possible that they don't want their employees to talk about this ongoing arrangement? 

Whatever the truth may turn out to be, the madness of the age is all around us today. We don't know of any reason to assume that a modern nation can survive this degree of tribal madness—the tribal madness referred to at the start of Kurt Andersen's guest essay for the New York Times:

Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”    

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours" and “jumped again a few weeks later...

As we noted in Monday's report, that's the way the essay starts. We think it gets a bit unrealistic from there.

In our view, Madness Red is everywhere, as we've endlessly noted. And as we'll note tomorrow, we're also dealing with the rising tide of something which could even be seen as Madness-Adjacent Blue. 

Can things really "go on this way?" We can't say the answer is obvious. At any rate, for today, we'll leave you with these stone-cold basic questions:

While the president fled on the C-32, were journalists and White House staff subjected to significant danger?

Will news orgs choose to explore the question that one reporter asked?   

Also, was this troubling procedure a "new arrival?" Or has it been here all along? 

Tomorrow: Who is [NAME WITHHELD]?

TUESDAY: Wehner and Jha tilt different ways!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2026

One cable star knows for sure: Yesterday afternoon, we took a look at the David Wallace-Wells opinion column about the Senate hearing in which mountains of rage were directed at Dr. Fauci 

In print editions, the column appeared in last weekend's Sunday Times.  Online, the headline on the column says this:  

Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For. But We’re Asking the Wrong Questions.   

Is the first part of that headline true? Does Dr. Fauci actually "have a lot to answer for?" 

We have no clear idea. The issues involved in the GOP's accusations were scientific—technical. It's hard for non-specialists to make assessments with respect to topics like that.   

Wallace-Wells is typically very sharp. But in an assessment for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner seems to feel that Dr. Fauci was mugged by a lack of reality, which is largely the way it looked and felt to us. 

 The start of Wehner's piece suggests his general drift, which may well be perfectly accurate:

Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci   

Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live...   

Then it all came apart.

Last week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul—a fierce Fauci critic who has said that the American people want the 85-year-old retired scientist “behind bars.” Acting on his lawyer’s advice, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, citing what he called Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with him. Yesterday, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.   

It's a bit like what Woody Guthrie wrote in his ballad, Pretty Boy Floyd:  

"And every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name."   

Every crime was added to Fauci's name at the Senate hearing. But had he actually committed the crimes in question? 

It's extremely hard for a layperson to know. In a wide array of subject areas, this has become a growing problem for our flailing political culture.   

Wehner was a speechwriter for Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush. He didn't much like what he saw the Republicans doing at that rage-filled Senate hearing. His portrait starts like this:  

[continuing directly]  
The hearing produced an avalanche of ad hominem attacks, ludicrous claims, and accusations—most of them years old and long since answered. But two matter more than the rest, because so much of Paul’s case rests on them: (1) that Fauci funded the research that made the pandemic, and (2) that he lied to Congress about it. 

Wehner seems to be placing those two accusations in the basket of claims marked "ludicrous." As his column proceeds, he dispatches matter #1 in two quick paragraphs. A bit later, the claim that Dr. Fauci lied also meets a quick death.    

Wehner's analyses may well be perfectly accurate; we aren't saying they aren't. But along the way, Wehner says this about where the Covid virus came from:   

As for the origins of the virus itself, nobody has established with certainty where the pandemic began. Chinese stonewalling means that we are unlikely to ever know. No outside investigator has been given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s records, its early samples, or the medical files of its staff.  

However, the scientific evidence favors a natural origin.    

And so on from there. That too may be an accurate assessment. But nine days ago, on CNN's State of the Union, Dr. Ashish Jha seemed to surprise Dana Bash when he stated a different view.

Dr. Jha served as White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator under President Biden. Here's what he told Bash as she tried to recover from 22 minutes with Robert Kennedy Junior:

BASH (8/2/26): Before I let you go, you reshared a tweet that said...Well, let me say it this way:

You said that the available evidence points towards research-related incidents in Wuhan as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted.

You agreed with that.

JHA: I did. This is going to surprise some people. When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak.  

Here's the bottom line: No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are officials in China, and we still need transparency and accountability on that. So that is my best assessment. I'm not suggesting I know for sure, but I'm saying my best assessment is that it probably was a lab leak.

BASH: That is definitely news to hear that from you, for sure, and shows that we're just—we're still learning, which is really important.

For the record: If it was a lab leak, was that somehow Dr. Fauci's fault, if only in some absurdly tangential way? As with almost everything else, we can't exactly tell you for absolute sure.

That said, Dr. Jha was clearly wrong on one key point. At least one person in this country really does "know for sure!" We've seen the all-knowing Greg Gutfeld say, with absolute certainty, that we do know that the Covid virus emerged from the lab.  

Fox sends him out, twice a day, to make a joke of our culture. On the brighter side, profits are good.

NEW ARRIVALS: When he did it again, the New York Times...

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2026

...did what a news org should: Incomparably, your astonishing Daily Howler keeps banging out those results!

We refer to a news report which appears in print editions of this morning's New York Times (but also online, of course). The news report starts like this: 

Trump Stokes Islamophobia by Calling Democratic Candidates ‘Jihadists’

President Trump on Monday described Democratic candidates in the midterm elections as “jihadists,” adding to Islamophobic statements recently made by Republican elected officials.

Mr. Trump also delivered another tirade against people of Somali descent, saying: “They’re not smart, they have no aptitude, they have nothing going, and they’re telling us how to run our country.”   

Asked about the candidates representing the Democratic Party in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place. We have this — whether it’s communism, jihadism.”

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Trump’s statements on Monday, and about how the comments could alienate Muslims in the United States.

"And about how the comments could alienate Muslims in the United States?" What an absurd instant focus! And yet this news report goes where it ought to go and it does what it should:   

It reports the inexcusable, perfectly recognizable conduct being engaged in by the man who currently sits in the White House.   

On this sprawling campus, we assume the person in question fits the description given by his niece earlier this year. We assume that the person in question is dealing with "obvious age-related cognitive declines," layered atop "decades of serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen."   

The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true. On balance, we'd be inclined to assume that it is.

We're inclined to assume that it's true. Borrowing therefore from a fictional freedom fighter, we therefore will tell you this:

"Since no one is to blame, I demand no [further] explanation."
(Victor Laszlo)

There's no one to blame for cognitive decline, or for serious "mental illness." But we'll call it a "new arrival"—we'll call it a welcome new arrival—when the New York Times, the very next day, reports such inexcusable conduct as this:   

While the president did not name a specific candidate, he targeted Mr. El-Sayed hours later when he posted an image depicting the Democratic candidate standing in front of a crowd that included two women wearing head scarves. “They are coming for your home and your belongings,” a caption read along the image.

And his rant came two days after he posted on social media an image of himself with the first lady, Melania Trump, next to an image of Dr. El-Sayed and his wife. The text above the image read: “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s.” 

[...]

A number of other Republicans have ramped up their anti-Muslim language since Dr. El-Sayed’s primary win. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama wrote on social media that “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST,” calling him a “TERRORIST.” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on social media that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”   

Most senior Republican officials have remained silent...

Most officials have remained silent? As we noted yesterday, so has the bulk of Blue America's mainstream press corps, as for example when the sitting president engaged in this very familiar behavior last week, before a crowd in Las Vegas:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/5/26): In Congress, we're working every day to defend the American dream for you and your children. The radical left, the maniacs, they're trying to destroy it with the disaster known as, not socialism—Communism!

It's Communism. These are Communists. And the polls were wrong again last night when they thought it would be a landslide victory for a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel. 

This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, "Oh, that's a little strong." No, he hates Jews, and he hates Israel.

 "Abdul El-Sayed." Can you believe this? This could only happen to me. 

Abdul El-Sayed, a lovely gentleman! He's a man of hate, and now he's going around saying, "No, I love everybody." He doesn't love everybody. Put him in office, you're going to find out what he loves. 

He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart, and there's not a fricking thing he can do about it. There's not a thing he can do about it because he hates them.   

Sadly, there was more from where that came from that day. We regard that as a blindingly obvious type of behavior—but also, in all likelihood, as an artefact of the situation his niece had described.  

It's a tragic but deeply dangerous fact about modern American life. Almost surely, the sitting president is afflicted in something like the ways his niece, a doctorate-level clinical therapist, described in her best-selling 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough:   

Prologue

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.   

For fuller context from her book, you can just click here. But so the gentleman's niece assessed—and you didn't have to read very far. It was right there in the Prologue!

The fact that Mary Trump said it didn't mean that it's true. But among trained medical specialists, she was hardly the first to say or suggest it. 

Former Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee had already died for our sins by the time Mary Trump's book arrived in the stores. But nothing has ever inspired our mainstream journalists to report, or to discuss, these unfortunate but plainly dangerous medical possibilities.   

That said:   

The president's behavior is inexcusable, but it's also undisguised. It's easy to see what it is.   

Today, in a type of new arrival, his behavior has been instantly chronicled by the New York Times. Also appearing today is this second news report, a first cousin to the report we've already cited:   

Trump Signs Executive Order Calling for Fewer Childhood Vaccines  

For the third time in less than a year, President Trump on Monday issued an executive order that calls for American children to be routinely immunized against fewer diseases, as they are in countries like Denmark.

The latest version embraces more explicitly than its predecessors a revised schedule that recommends immunizing children against 11 diseases, rather than the 17 that are currently recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The order also “directs the attorney general to advance legal challenges against states that violate children’s rights to religious or medical vaccination exemptions,” Mr. Trump said.

Speaking in the Oval Office before signing the executive order, Mr. Trump said he was motivated in part by concerns over whether vaccines were tied to autism, even though dozens of studies have found no link between the two.   

There he's gone again! Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy's name doesn't appear until paragraph 9. For the record, also this:   

“There’s no science behind these recommendations,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s all about ideology.”  

A reader doesn't encounter that until she hits paragraph 8.   

In recent weeks, quite a few "new arrivals" have appeared on the front. Some members of the DSA have brought the eternal note of sadness in. 

When a Muslim was nominated for the Senate, his arrival was greeted with this.  

Tomorrow: New arrivals, arriving fast