Greetings! Welcome to Saturday, June 11, 2026. You’ve finally made it to the weekend. I’m glad you’re here. Among other things, today is National Blueberry Muffin Day, National Mojito Day, National State Fair Food Day, National 7-Eleven Day / Free Slurpee Day, National Swimming Pool Day, and All-American Pet Photo Day, and it’s also Cow Appreciation Day. I always knew The View would have its own celebration day.
Today In History:
1302: Flemish militia defeat French royal forces at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, a day still marked as Flemish Community Day.
1789: Jacques Necker is dismissed as France's finance minister, helping spark the storming of the Bastille.
1796: Britain hands Detroit over to the U.S. under the terms of the Jay Treaty.
1798: The Marine Corps is formally re-established after being disbanded following the Revolutionary War.
1801: Astronomer Jean-Louis Pons makes the first of what will become 37 comet discoveries.
1804: Vice President Aaron Burr fatally wounds former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
1861: Union troops secure victory at the Battle of Rich Mountain, paving the way for the creation of West Virginia.
1905: Members of the Niagara Movement begin meeting near Niagara Falls, laying the groundwork for early civil rights organizing.
1914: A young Babe Ruth makes his major league pitching debut for the Boston Red Sox.
1955: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill requiring "In God We Trust" on all paper currency.
1960: To Kill a Mockingbird is published.
1979: Skylab, the first successful space station, falls back to Earth over Australia and the Indian Ocean.
1987: The global population is estimated to surpass 5 billion, an event that later inspires World Population Day.
2006: A series of coordinated bombings strike commuter trains in Mumbai, killing more than 200 people.
2021: Richard Branson reaches space aboard a Virgin Galactic flight.
Birthdays Today Include: John Quincy Adams, sixth president, also vice president and secretary of state before that; Robert the Bruce, monarch, King of the Scots; Yul Brynner, actor (The King and I, The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven); Giorgio Armani, fashion designer; Nicolai Gedda, opera singer; Bonnie Pointer of The Pointer Sisters (“He’s So Shy”, “Neutron Dance”, “How Long”); Sela Ward, actress (Sisters, Once and Again); Lisa Rinna, actress (Days of Our Lives, Melrose Place); Justin Chambers, actor (Grey's Anatomy); Caroline Wozniacki, tennis player; Alessia Cara, singer-songwriter (“Here”, “Scars to Your Beautiful”).
If today is when you light your candles, happy birthday — you're in good company!
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If you live in New York City — or if you've been doomscrolling the FDNY blotters, as YouTube’s algorithms apparently think I now do for fun — you've probably clocked the same thing I have: a weird little uptick in fires hitting older churches around the five boroughs.
Naturally, this, by way of my overnight web crawlers, landed me on what we used to consider in saner times, a wild story the New York Post ran the other day.
According to that report and many, many more, the NYPD arrested a Queens man for allegedly hurling Molotov cocktails at two churches Wednesday night, and prosecutors say it's part of a seven-incident spree — because apparently just one act of religious arson just wasn't enough for this guy. OK, actually there's a lot more to this story, as you will see.
The suspect, Yogesh Sayrange, 36 — who reportedly melted down in federal court on Thursday, ranting as if he were auditioning for an “I Love Me” vest — admitted to firebombing Iglesia Bautista El Mesias in Ozone Park and the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses in Woodhaven, along with several other targets, according to police and federal investigators.
Among the other things he said in court:
"Yea, I f***ing firebombed them," Sayrange allegedly told investigators about a separate deli bombing, before adding, unprompted: "They're Muslims, scum and terrorists."
Now, before you start mentally casting this guy in your favorite MAGA-rally fever dream, I would strong advise against it. This plot has more layers than that.
Channel 7 in New York reports that Sayrange is a Guyanese national who overstayed his welcome after the protections he'd been granted as a child arrival lapsed. He reportedly told investigators he had a renewal application pending for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status.
So, no, he's not the Trump-supporter stereotype you were bracing for. Quite the contrary. Just another guy here illegally, (I'll say this because legality demands I do...) "allegedly" lobbing homemade firebombs at houses of worship. Some outlets, in a truly heroic feat of vagueness, opted to just call him a "Queens man," without mentioning his immigration status, as if the story were about a guy who forgot to separate his recycling, not a serial arsonist with an ax fetish. Oh, yeah, that too. Keep reading.
Court records show that as of the time of his arrest, Sayrange was already juggling two other pending criminal cases. He was arrested in Manhattan on June 12 for allegedly threatening someone with a metal knuckle knife, and again in Queens on June 16 for allegedly waving an ax at a man while promising to remove his head from his shoulders.
Think, now: That's three separate incidents of violent criminal behavior in roughly a month, and somehow he's still walking around free enough to firebomb a deli and two churches, and, cops are saying, likely more than that. At what point does "pending case" stop meaning "we're watching him closely," and start meaning "we're just filing paperwork while he works his way through a checklist of felonies"? Put another way, and more succinctly, why the bleep was this guy still on the street?
Is any of this unusual? Unfortunately, no. It's just the latest data point in a pattern that keeps repeating itself. It's certainly emblematic of what's been happening to our criminal justice system, and of the result of the supposed "moral superiority" of those invested in bringing into this country everyone who can drag himself or herself over the border, with little to no vetting.
Remember, this whole thing started as the "Dream Act" with the names of Dick Durban (D-Ill.) and RINO Orin Hatch (R-Utah) on it. Since somewhat less than half of our population wasn't alive at the time and therefore wouldn't remember it, let's recap:
It was originally sold us as as protection for sympathetic kids who did nothing wrong, It's emblematic of good intentions being applied without applying logic and making hard choices. What it's become is a bureaucratic status symbol that a guy can casually mention having "a pending renewal" for, right after admitting to torching a deli and ranting about "Muslims, scum and terrorists." Meanwhile, the left can paint itself as morally superior while subjecting us to added crime and financial burden, and inflicting cultural damage on us.
While I think it's a stretch, one could argue that nobody designed the program for this outcome. Remember, the effort died in Congress several times, and in several different forms, since the Dream Act originally got scuttled. After more than a decade of "Dreamers" and their high-priced legal beagles lobbying for legal status, and with Obama facing pressure from immigration advocates over his administration's high deportation numbers (you know, the ones nobody mentions out loud today, because there was a black Democrat doing the deporting), you know how it came out:
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued the memo creating DACA in the summer of 2012. In his own remarks explaining the decision, Obama pointed to what he called Congress's repeated failure to pass Dream Act legislation as the reason for going the executive-action route.
Of course there was a reason Congress kept rejecting it. Many reasons, actually. Among them was the idea that nobody built in the guardrails to prevent it becoming the danger it has so obviously and so dangerously become.
These kind of immigration nightmares keep popping up. Frankly, they would be far greater in number absent the efforts of President Donald Trump. It is, I think, quite telling who it is that's fighting against those efforts. Meantime, fourteen years of "temporary" later, we're still forced to deal with the results of this madness.
Honestly, I find it hard to distinguish which is the more insane: Yogesh Sayrange, or the people who opened us up to this situation.
Thought of the Day: Nothing says "functioning institution" quite like handing out temporary protections for fourteen years straight, and calling it a "plan."
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Have a great Saturday, and be safe. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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