Hello and welcome to Saturday, July 25, 2026. My calendar says it's Hot Fudge Sundae Day, Wine and Cheese Day, Day of the Cowboy, Merry Go Round Day, Clay Day, Thread the Needle Day, Hire a Veteran Day, and World IVF Day. Saddle up for a carousel ride, pour some wine, and hire a vet before the sundae melts.
Today In History:
1729: North Carolina becomes a royal colony after King George II buys out its seven proprietors.
1850: Gold is discovered in Oregon's Rogue River, triggering a rush of settlers and violent conflict with local tribes.
1854: Walter Hunt patents the paper shirt collar, a disposable stand-in for pricier linen.
1866: Congress authorizes the rank of General of the Army, and Ulysses S. Grant becomes the first officer to hold it.
1868: President Andrew Johnson signs the Wyoming Organic Act, establishing the Wyoming Territory.
1871: Wilhelm Schneider patents the first carousel, giving Merry Go Round Day its reason for being.
1946: The Crossroads Baker device detonates as the first underwater nuclear weapons test, contaminating the target fleet so badly that decontamination largely fails.
1965: Bob Dylan plugs in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, splitting the crowd between cheers and boos.
1969: President Richard Nixon declares the Nixon Doctrine, pledging American aid and a nuclear shield to allies while expecting them to supply their own ground troops.
1978: Louise Brown, the world's first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization, is born in England — the whole reason World IVF Day exists.
1984: Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to walk in space.
2000: An Air France Concorde crashes shortly after takeoff outside Paris, killing all 109 aboard and four on the ground, effectively dooming the aircraft's future.
Birthdays Today Include: Matt LeBlanc, actor (Friends); Iman, supermodel entrepreneur; Jaafar Jackson, actor/singer; Verdine White, bassist Earth, Wind & Fire; Thurston Moore, guitarist, Sonic Youth; Geoffrey Zakarian, chef restaurateur (Iron Chef America); Katherine Kelly Lang, actor (The Bold and the Beautiful); Wendy Raquel Robinson, actor (The Steve Harvey Show, The Game); Miriam Shor, actor (Younger); Finn Bálor, professional wrestler; Estelle Getty, actress (The Golden Girls); Rosalind Franklin, chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work underpinned the discovery of DNA's structure.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday!
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The New York Post's editorial board landed a haymaker yesterday, and landed it both powerfully and cleanly:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a "no room for hate" hypocrite: His obsessive Israel-bashing — and the ravings of his rabid pro-Palestinian besties — encourages antisemitic violence.
Tuesday night, he released an incendiary video repeating (again) a litany of lies about Israeli's war of self-defense against the Hamas terrorists and urging mass demonstrations when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next comes to town.
Thursday, an attacker shouting "Allahu Akbar" stabbed two men — a Jew in a yarmulke and an Asian — on the Upper West Side; the mayor responded with noises about hate and mental illness.
Notice the con job buried in that last line. Mamdani didn't call the guy a monster. He called him sick. And while it's certainly true that the attacker is a few card short of 52 cards, he says it that way because "sick" absolves the mayor. "Sick" means nobody incited anything — oh, no. The universe just spat out a broken person at random, and isn't that a shame. Convenient, that. And before I proceed, here I'll send kudos to the New York Post for having the courage to call out the mayor on this. Alas, the rather brief op-ed left off an important point that needs addressing. But I'll get to that.
Here's the truth Mamdani doesn't want you anywhere near: generic "hate" doesn't hand a man a knife and send him hunting for a yarmulke. Specific incitement does that. Rhetoric that aims the unstable and the violent at one chosen class of victim, over and over, from an office with a bully pulpit attached — that's what puts blood on a sidewalk. Pushing that hate on an official New York City government channel is unconscionable. That's the Post's thesis, and it absolutely holds up.
But sitting with that piece, one question wouldn't leave me alone, so let me put it to you straight:
If nonstop, office-sanctioned incitement against a group creates a climate where violence against that group gets more likely — and it does — then what do we call the nonstop hate machine the online left and cable news have been running for over a decade, aimed dead-center at Trump and everyone supposedly dumb enough to vote for him?
Let's do the math, since nobody on that side seems willing to.
Since 2016, Donald Trump has survived ten known assassination attempts. Ten. A twice-elected president, shot at, nearly run down, and hunted by foreign hit squads more times than any man who's ever held the office. Say that number out loud, and ask yourself why it isn't the lead story on every network, every night, forever. Well, I'm guessing you already know why.
But now, flip the lens onto the people who did nothing but show up and vote for him. Breitbart is tracking more than 350 verified acts of violence against Trump supporters, and the list grows, with new incidents just about weekly. A taste, so you can go dig up the rest yourself:
Largo, Florida, May 2025—Laura Garrett confronted a 72-year-old man over his MAGA hat, poured a can on his head, then beat him with it. Police charged her with battery and booked her into Pinellas County Jail.
Escondido, California, May 2026—Thomas Butler allegedly punched and stomped the head of Kerry Sheron, the elderly owner of a Trump-flag-draped "Trump House," in Sheron's own driveway, then threatened a witness who tried to step in. Prosecutors charged Butler with attempted first-degree murder and elder abuse. Police haven't officially called it political yet. I'll let the flags do the talking.
Swampscott, Massachusetts, Oct. 2025—Michael Curll attacked Jonathan Silveira for the crime of wearing an inflatable Trump costume near a "No Kings" rally. Police charged Curll with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
That's three. Three out of hundreds, and that's before you count the ones no assignment desk ever bothered to log, because "Trump supporter gets sucker-punched" doesn't move ratings the way "insurrectionist gets what's coming" does.
You know what does move the newsroom, though? When the calls for it dress themselves up as commentary. Athena Thorne nailed this back in April, and her targets have since aged like milk left on a Tucson sidewalk:
...remember during Trump's first term, when TIME LIFE put out a Special Magazine called "ASSASSINS Killers Who Changed History"? And then newsstands and retailers festooned their businesses with the issue?
Oh, no — no wink-wink nod-nod to your friendly neighborhood assassin there!
It is nearly impossible to prosecute someone for stochastically calling for an assassin to step up. James Comey and his g**dam seashells are now a test case. You can't tell me that a man so steeped in law enforcement as to become director of the nation's police force had no idea that the expression "86" might be interpreted as "off," "murder," or "kill." Especially within the historical context of two would-be assassins trying to kill "47" not a year earlier, with one spectacularly putting a bullet through the president's ear.
That smarmy beanpole knew exactly what he was doing. They all do.
Quite so. Athena called it "stochastic terrorism," and the label fits like a glove on a bad hand. Someone with a much fatter megaphone than I have here demonizes a target — "vermin," "enemy of the people," "existential threat," "fascist," take your pick — without ever naming a name or ordering a hit. It's relatively seldom that someone says "go kill this specific man."
They don't have to. Say it loud enough, long enough, ugly enough, and out of a big enough audience, somebody unstable pulls a trigger or swings a bat. The speaker walks away clean — "I never told anyone to do anything" — while having done exactly that, in every way that matters except the legal one. And that's the rub: "Stochastic terrorism" isn't a crime. It's not even a real legal term, so far as I can find. Correct me in the comments if I've missed a statute. And sometimes, they actually do call for a particular political opponent to be un-alived.
Will Stancil, a Minnesota state house candidate with a following in the tens of thousands, posted on X in Jan. 2024: "So is there any reason [Joe] Biden couldn't just drone strike Trump and end this," then deleted the post.
Jacqueline Marsaw, then a staffer for Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), posted on Facebook days after the Butler shooting that a would-be assassin should get some shooting lessons "so you don't miss next time." Thompson fired her over it, but Marsaw got no jail time.
Keith Olbermann, that oh-so-reliable stooge, reposted a Biden-Harris campaign clip about Trump being treated "worse than Lincoln," and added "There's always the hope," then deleted it and claimed he only meant Trump should be convicted and die in prison.
Robert De Niro told reporters outside Trump's Manhattan trial that under a second Trump term, America's government would "perish from the Earth," and elections would be "over forever."
Joe Scarborough said Trump "will imprison, he will execute whoever he is allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country."
Robert Kagan wrote in the Washington Post that a second term had "pretty good" odds of becoming a dictatorship.
Rachel Maddow said Trump keeps saying "the exact kind of things... Hitler and Mussolini said." None of that is a call to violence on its face — it's the "existential threat" framing the Post's own thesis says primes the unstable to act.
I could go on, but I'm sure by now you get the picture. None of these (cough, cough) non-attacks were prosecuted. Now, of course, I can also produce lists of such incidents that were in fact prosecuted; there's actually quite a number of them. But those were cases where the speaker stepped well outside the box of plausible deniability so many on the left hide their violent rhetoric behind.
So I'm going to take the unusual step of calling out the New York Post, a paper I genuinely respect. Understand, I do this reluctantly.
Address this question in print, New York Post Editorial Board, and I'm encouraging you to do this, because it would be both groundbreaking and speaking an undeniable truth:
If Mamdani's constant, office-sanctioned Israel-bashing helps put a knife into a Jewish man on the Upper West Side — and it obviously does — then explain to the world, in plain English, why a decade-plus of constant cries of "Trump is a fascist," "Trump is Hitler," and "punch a Nazi" rhetoric, which politicians and pundits with platforms ten times the size of Mamdani's blast out, and the resulting assassination attempts don't seem to get mentioned.
I dare you, Editorial Board, to print the answer. Mind, this is not an accusation against the Post. I'm simply calling for the logical extension of the principles behind your op-ed, and the application to an issue that's just as large and probably larger.
Thought for the Day: History doesn't remember the people who waited for permission to say the obvious thing out loud. It remembers the ones who said it first.
VIP members: It's your turn. Your voice matters here.
Have a great Saturday. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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