Hey there, hi there, ho there, and welcome to Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. Vinyl records, julienne fries, and middle children all get their moment today, and tonight the sky puts on its own show. (Refer to yesterday's column for info on that).
My calendar says it's Middle Child Day, Vinyl Record Day, Julienne Fries Day, Youth Day, and World Elephant Day. Dig out an old record, fry up some julienne potatoes, and give your middle child an extra hug — they've earned it just for existing between the other two.
Today In History:
1323: Sweden and the Novgorod Republic sign the Treaty of Nöteborg, establishing a formal border between the two powers for the first time.
1492: Christopher Columbus arrives at the Canary Islands to restock food, water, and supplies before pushing west across the Atlantic.
1851: Isaac Singer receives a patent for his sewing machine, featuring an overhanging arm and a foot treadle that freed both hands to guide the fabric.
1865: British surgeon Joseph Lister performs the first antiseptic surgery in Glasgow, repairing a young boy's compound leg fracture and preventing the infection that would once have made such a wound fatal.
1883: The last known quagga, a half-striped relative of the zebra hunted to extinction, dies at an Amsterdam zoo.
1898: The Hawaiian flag is lowered from ʻIolani Palace and replaced with the American flag, formally marking the transfer of sovereignty to the United States.
1914: France and Britain declare war on Austria-Hungary, widening a conflict that within days pulls in Germany, Russia, and eventually the United States.
1944: Alençon becomes the first city in France liberated from Nazi occupation, four years after German forces first took it.
1950: North Korean troops massacre 75 American POWs from the 555th and 90th Field Artillery Battalions in what becomes known as the Bloody Gulch Massacre.
1960: NASA launches Echo 1A, the world's first passive communications satellite, enabling the first two-way long-distance voice relay via space. (Actually, Ham radio types have been bouncing signals off the surface of the Moon and back to Earth for quite a while, the Moon being a natural communications satellite of sorts.)
1964: South Africa is banned from the Olympic Games over its apartheid policies, a suspension that lasts nearly three decades.
1981: IBM releases its first Personal Computer, priced at $1,565, running on an Intel 8088 processor with 16 KB of RAM. That's $5,750 in today's money, if you allow for the 267% inflation since then.
1990: Fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson discovers the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton found to date on South Dakota's Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. It is one of the few relics older than Nancy Pelosi.
Birthdays Today include: Ross McWhirter and Norris McWhirter, Scottish publishers who co-founded Guinness World Records; Michael J. McGivney, priest and founder of the Knights of Columbus; Katharine Lee Bates, poet and author ("America the Beautiful"); Buck Owens, who established the Bakersfield Sound and was the leader of The Buckaroos.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday — you're in with some really important people. Have a good one today.
* * *
I see Professor Ward Churchill checked out last night. CBS Colorado confirms it: a stroke, according to his former lawyer, at 78.
I'll be honest with you. My gut reaction was to give the event all the photons it deserves — which is to say none at all. But I'm usually about writing on current topics, and I won't get another chance to enlighten folks about this one. And it has bearing, I think, on current politics. So hold your nose, and let's dive in.
Ward Churchill was unquestionably one of those people who belonged either involuntarily committed to what we used to call an insane asylum or installed as chairman of what we to this day label as insanity personified — the Democrat Party. I'm not sure which.
I know, I know — Say WHAT? Fair reaction. Since his moment in the spotlight predates most people currently breathing, a refresher seems in order before the eulogies get overly generous. That generosity won't be long in coming. As this is written, it's only been a few hours since the news came out, and the usual suspects haven't had a chance to warm up the sackcloth and ashes yet.
Ward Churchill was a former University of Colorado Boulder ethnic studies professor who became a major national flashpoint in 2005, conveniently timed right around the anniversary of 9/11. An essay he'd written back in 2001, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," resurfaced and drew the kind of backlash that should follow anyone dumb enough to write it, much less publish it.
In it, he made the vile argument that the September 11 attacks were, in effect, a foreseeable consequence of U.S. foreign policy. Most infamously, he described some of the civilian victims working in the World Trade Center's financial sector as "little Eichmanns," comparing office workers filing paperwork to the Nazi bureaucrat who helped orchestrate the actual machinery of the Holocaust. Bold comparison for a man about to discover what actual accountability feels like.
Once the well-earned flamethrowers turned his direction, Churchill did what every cornered blue-blooded academic fraud eventually tries: He reached for a fake identity to hide behind. He claimed membership in the American Indian Movement. AIM wasted no time torching that claim:
Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe. He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled innocent and naïve Indian community members in Denver, Colorado, as well as many other people worldwide. Churchill does not represent, nor does he speak on behalf of the American Indian Movement.
New York's Hamilton College Kirklands Project should be aware that in their search for truth and justice, the idea that they have hired a fraud to speak on Indian activism is in itself a betrayal of their goals.
In short: Churchill was the male prototype for another leftist phony who came along later, one Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.), similarly exposed for fabricating Native American ancestry. Different decade, same grift, same shameless refusal to apologize once caught. If you'd like a deeper dive into this creep's history, the Instapundit archives have you covered with a link to CBS News.
If you're a little confused about the politics of it all, I really can't blame you, given the current political climate. It's not easy to recall that there was a time, right around the turn of this century and before, when Democrats liked to position themselves as defenders of Jewish victims, not the cause of their victimhood. They've since found a new hobby.
Once Churchill's little manifesto crawled out into the sunlight, the backlash arrived exactly on schedule and with the impact of a B-52 bombing run. The University of Colorado's Board of Regents tried firing him — a genuinely startling display of spine, given the institution's long-standing leftward tilt — which promptly triggered a lawsuit from Churchill himself. Then-Gov. George Pataki (R) of New York, showing more clarity than most of academia managed that year, called Churchill a "bigoted terrorist supporter." Colorado's own governor backed the firing. Churchill, naturally, wrapped himself in the flag of free speech. The actual problem, of course, was never free speech — it's that his speech wasn't free at all. Taxpayers were signing his paychecks.
Indeed, commentary by Newt Gingrich on the point back in the day leans on this:
In a Feb 28, 2005 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich responded to a question about Ward Churchill with this answer: “Jefferson basically said every generation needs its own revolution. One of the revolutions we need is on campuses.” Gingrich called for imposing political control over colleges, abolishing tenure, and reinstating loyalty oaths: “I think we have to say to state legislatures, why are you putting up with this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial construct of state law. So you could modify, you could introduce a bill tomorrow morning to modify tenure law to say, proof that you’re viciously anti-American is automatically grounds for dismissal. And it would be over.”
I think Gingrich is quite correct here. Recall one of my axioms:
Any government that wants to survive for long needs to understand its first duty is to defend and, if possible, expand the influence of the culture that gave it life.
That friction is a major reason why I have called for removing government outright from the educational process. That duty will become twisted once accountability for what gets taught is removed by things like tenure. Churchill is a prime example.
Recommended: What Would Karl Marx Think of the Democratic Socialists of America?
Anyway, CU Boulder fired Churchill in 2007, officially over the academic misconduct findings — plagiarism, fabrication, falsifying research — rather than the 9/11 essay itself, which the university (correctly, if reluctantly) treated as protected speech. Churchill sued, claiming the misconduct investigation was pretext for punishing his politics. A Denver jury actually sided with him in 2009, awarding him the princely sum of $1 in damages and ruling his firing unconstitutional retaliation. A judge then vacated that reinstatement, and the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the university's immunity from the claim in 2012, closing the book on the whole circus in the university's favor.
Ann Coulter, never one to let an opening pass (God Bless her), dove headfirst into the mess back in February 2005, in a column titled "Not Crazy Horse, Just Crazy":
University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that "unquestionably, America has earned" the attack of 9/11. He calls the attack itself a result of "gallant sacrifices of the combat teams" – by which he means the terrorists who hijacked commercial airplanes and flew them into skyscrapers, killing thousands of Americans.
That the "combat teams" killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not "unreasonable or vindictive." He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists "would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people."
To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.
Coulter, a lawyer by training, went on to make the actual legal point most commentators fumbled at the time:
Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that "free speech" is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That's why you don't see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their "free speech" include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.
In fact, the Constitution says nothing about state governments firing employees for their speech: The First Amendment clearly says, "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech." Firing Ward Churchill is a pseudo-problem caused by modern constitutional law, which willy-nilly applies the Bill of Rights to the states — even the one amendment that expressly refers only to "Congress." (Liberals love to go around blustering "'no law' means 'no law'!" But apparently "Congress" doesn't mean "Congress.")
Even accepting the modern notion that the First Amendment applies to state governments, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the government as sovereign and the government as employer. The government is extremely limited in its ability to regulate the speech of private citizens, but not so limited in regulating the speech of its own employees.
Worth adding: rhetoric that ugly, coming from literally anyone other than a card-carrying far-left academic like Churchill, would have been correctly branded hate speech before the ink dried, and the offender would've been unemployable within the week. With the left leaping up to defend his actions, Churchill got a decade of speaking fees, campus panels, and sympathetic profiles instead.
I said at the time and still insist that a jail cell would have suited him nicely. Or DNC chair. I leave the reader to judge how much space actually separates those two options. Bring your electron microscope.
The man was a vile creature. There, I said it, and without regret.
Rest, I suppose, in whatever passes for peace for a man who spent a career insisting America deserved its dead. For my own part, I will neither be (officially, at least) grave dancing nor shedding tears over his passing. But, say as you will of me, I could not be silent. That free speech thing, again.
Thought for the Day: Tenure was built to protect scholars from the mob. It was never meant to protect them from the truth, and Ward Churchill spent a career proving the difference matters.
VIP members: I'd like to hear from you. Speak up in the comments and hit that heart.
Remember to go outside after midnight if your skies are clear. The meteor show is about to begin. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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