Donald Trump’s many deals during his trip to the Middle East last week have rankled one of his closest allies on the right.

Tucker Carlson called out the president’s “corruption” on his podcast Tuesday while speaking with his guest on the program, fellow right-wing influencer Shawn Ryan. The pair were discussing their thoughts on the Trump administration, and while Ryan was happy with certain things from the president, such as his immigration crackdown and his war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Trump’s Middle East trip gave him pause.

“F--- it, I’m gonna get blasted for this,” Ryan said, “but I see all these negotiations going on in the Middle East, and then I don’t know when these buildings were approved or when these deals got done, but then I also see like, ‘Oh, there’s a brand-new hotel going up in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And another one going up in Doha.’”

“I’m like, ‘Did these just get done also with the deals that just happened over there, or was this earlier?’” Ryan continued, before telling Carlson, “You would probably know.”

Carlson denied knowing about Trump’s dealings, and Ryan said he thought the pundit was “a lot more on the inside than I am,” adding about Trump’s deals, “That stuff kind of worries me.”

“Well, it seems like corruption, yeah,” Carlson said.

It’s surprising to see Carlson offering criticism of the president, considering how close he is to Trump. He even spoke at a Trump campaign rally in late October, just days before the election.

Trump’s Middle East trip came with several announcements from his businesses in the region, as well as a $2 billion investment in his family’s cryptocurrency business from a firm backed by the United Arab Emirates government.

But the worst of it was the “gift” of a $400 million luxury plane from Qatar to Trump, ostensibly to replace Air Force One, which drew criticism even from Republicans, such as Senator Rand Paul, Ben Shapiro, and Laura Loomer. Now it seems even Carlson has some misgivings about Trump’s dealings. Does this mean that there are cracks in Trump’s base, or will all of these personalities forget Trump’s corruption the next time he panders to them?

A federal judge slammed the Department of Justice Wednesday for its “hasty arrest” of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and agreed to dismiss the ridiculous trespassing charge against the Democratic mayor.

U.S. Judge Andre Espionosa questioned why federal prosecutors would arrest Baraka only to retract the charges days later.

“An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence,” Espionosa said, in a nearly 10-minute tirade against the DOJ’s attorneys.

Earlier this month, Baraka was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and charged with trespassing after visiting Delaney Hall, a newly reopened detention facility where he had previously been denied entry. It marked the first immigration-related arrest of a sitting U.S. mayor by the Trump administration and yet another indication that the White House will try to take down just about anybody who gets in the way of its unlawful attack on immigrants. Last month, the FBI arrested a federal judge in Milwaukee for “obstructing” an attempted deportation.

Alina Habba, the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey and Donald Trump’s former lawyer, announced the Democratic mayor’s arrest on X. “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW,” she wrote, an absurd proclamation given her former client Donald Trump’s criminal history.

Just 13 days later, however, Habba announced her office would drop the misdemeanor charge against Baraka—though in the same announcement she revealed new charges against Representative LaMonica McIver, who accompanied Baraka on his visit to Delaney Hall.

Espinosa scolded Habba’s “worrisome misstep” in Baraka’s “hasty arrest,” calling the retraction of charges “embarrassing.” He dismissed the charge with prejudice.

“Federal prosecutors serve a single paramount client: justice itself. Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas,” Espinosa said. “Your allegiance is to the impartial application of the law, to the pursuit of truth, and to the upholding of due process for all.”

Despite Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attestations against the use of fluoride, his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda is apparently going easy on one of the root causes of fluorosis (the only known side effect of over-fluoridated water): pesticides.

Under Donald Trump’s helm, the Health Department secretary has sworn to remove fluoride from all public water systems. Last month, Kennedy said he was assembling a task force on the issue, with plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end its fluoridation program for good.

But a forthcoming report from Kennedy, expected to be released Thursday, will apparently not label two popular pesticides used by U.S. farmers as “unsafe,” reported The Wall Street Journal. They include atrazine, a herbicide used on grasses and corn, and glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.

Bayer and Monsanto (which transferred ownership of Roundup to Bayer in 2018) have jointly paid nearly $11 billion to settle multiple lawsuits and class actions related to accusations that Roundup’s use is behind a host of cancer cases, including lymphoma and leukemia. Approximately 165,000 Roundup lawsuits had been filed against the companies as of January 2024, according to the law firm Simmons Hanly Conroy, which represented some of the victims.

Well water, fed by groundwater, is one of the most common sources of over-fluoridated water. But why that water is exposed to high concentrations of the naturally occurring mineral is largely related to local industries and agrobusiness operations “that increase the risk of heavy metals, pesticides, nitrates, radon and fluoride in the water,” according to a 2023 study that extracted data from 15 fluoride-related studies conducted around the world.

Fluoride was first introduced to U.S. water in 1945 as part of a public health decision to reduce cavities and tooth decay in adults and children. It was remarkably successful, lowering the cavity and decay rate in both groups by as much as 25 percent, according to the

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