Hello, my friends, and welcome to Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026 — the 225th day of the year.
My calendar says it's Prosecco Day, Filet Mignon Day, Left-Handers Day, Blame Someone Else Day, and Share the Warmth Day. Pour some prosecco, grill up a filet mignon, use your off hand for something today just to see how the other 10% live, and if dinner goes sideways, there's a whole holiday built for blaming somebody else. And Hasan Piker and many of his fellows on the whack job left are totally prepared to celebrate, as you’ll see.
Today In History:
1521: Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés captures Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, from Emperor Cuauhtémoc's forces.
1624: King Louis XIII of France names Cardinal Richelieu his first minister, launching one of the most consequential political partnerships in French history.
1704: The Battle of Blenheim ends in a decisive victory for combined English and Austrian forces over the French and Bavarians during the War of the Spanish Succession.
1812: The frigate Essex captures the British sloop Alert after an eight-minute engagement, the first British warship taken by the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812.
1846: The American flag is raised for the first time over Los Angeles.
1898: American forces under Commodore George Dewey capture Manila during the Spanish-American War.
1910: Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, dies in London at age 90.
1918: Opha May Johnson becomes the first woman to enlist in the Marine Corps.
1926: Fidel Castro is born in Cuba's Oriente province, growing up to become the dictator of the Western Hemisphere's first communist state for nearly half a century.
1934: Al Capp's satirical comic strip Li'l Abner makes its debut.
1960: The first two-way telephone conversation via satellite takes place using NASA's Echo 1 balloon satellite; the same day, the Central African Republic gains independence from France.
1961: East Germany seals off the border between East and West Berlin, the opening move in what becomes the Berlin Wall.
1981: President Reagan signs a sweeping package of tax and budget cuts at his California ranch.
Birthdays Today include: Alfred Hitchcock, director and producer (Psycho, Rebecca, The Birds, North by Northwest); Annie Oakley, sharpshooter and entertainer (Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show); John Logie Baird, Scottish engineer, inventor of television; Don Ho, singer and ukulele player ("Tiny Bubbles"); and Kathleen Battle, opera singer.
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday!
* * *
Pity poor Hasan Piker. Every single time this man opens his mouth, he does more damage to his own side than an entire opposition research team could manage in a year. And all he has to do, as the song goes, is act naturally. He can't help himself. It's practically a public service at this point. The New York Post picks up the latest installment:
Mao-adoring Twitch streamer Hasan Piker erupted in fury after Wisconsin state rep. Francesca Hong's shocking defeat in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, venting that boomers should be outlawed.
Hong, who was forced to walk back past statements in favor of abolishing police and canceling Thanksgiving Day in the run-up to primary night, led the Democratic field by double-digits in most polling before losing to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley by more than 3,000 votes.
Outlawed. Boomers. That's the takeaway a grown man streaming to hundreds of thousands of viewers landed on after his chosen candidate blew a double-digit polling lead. Not "maybe running on canceling Thanksgiving cost us something." Not "perhaps the police-abolition platform didn't play in suburban Milwaukee County." No — the actual voters showed up and rejected the product, so naturally the problem must be their birth year. Truly the analysis of a serious political mind.
Piker, who had stumped with Hong during the final weeks of her primary, blamed older Americans for her loss and struggled to talk about the blow to the far-left.
He couldn't even manage to talk about his own candidate's loss coherently. That's the state of affairs here — a man who built an entire online persona around confident political commentary, reduced to sputtering when the electorate declined to cooperate with his preferred outcome. I suspect the word describing what we're seeing is "Panic".
Now, remember exactly who we're dealing with, because context matters and Piker would very much prefer you forget his greatest hits. This is the same man who told the world:
"America deserved 9/11," which he later, very begrudgingly, sort of suggested was an "inappropriate" remark. Later, he was spotted with a framed copy of a front-page newspaper story showing the Twin Towers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
Piker also argued that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was a "direct consequence" of Israeli actions, adding that if a terror group engaged in rape, it "doesn't change the dynamic for me." At one point, he also gushed over the "brave mujahideen" who injured Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas).
A framed newspaper commemorating the worst terrorist attack in American history, displayed like a trophy. Justifying a massacre that included mass rape as a mere "direct consequence" that "doesn't change the dynamic" for him personally. Cheering on the man who maimed a sitting congressman. This is the résumé of the guy who thought he was in a position to lecture Democrat primary voters about their choices, and then blamed their grandparents when they declined the lecture.
The prince of the far-left had done an interview with Hong, where she expressed support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), government-run grocery stores, a one-year data center moratorium, and more.
Government-run grocery stores. In 2026. Somebody genuinely proposed this out loud, on camera, to a sympathetic interviewer who cheered instead of asking the obvious follow-up question about how that's worked out literally every time it's been tried anywhere on Earth.
This is the current state of the Democrat Party, gang. I want to be fair about scope here: Yes, I fully recognize this represents the far-left flank specifically, not the entire party. But watch closely, because here's the part that matters: No supposedly mainstream Democrat has stepped up to publicly denounce any of this. Not the boomer comment. Not the Thanksgiving cancellation. Not the government grocery store fantasy. The silence isn't accidental — it's strategic cowardice, a calculated refusal to alienate a voting bloc the party's establishment is now visibly terrified of crossing. And their actual position on all this doesn't show up in press releases. It shows up in what they quietly declined to do, exactly as the Post piece lays out:
During the primary battle, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and "Squad" Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declined to throw their weight behind Hong as she faced a media firestorm.
In contrast, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota were forcefully backed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez during their respective Senate primary races and defeated their centrist opponents.
However, neither El-Sayed, who defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) last week, nor Flanagan, who topped Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) Tuesday night, had called for the cancellation of Thanksgiving.
Read that comparison twice, because it's genuinely revealing. Sanders and AOC, the two loudest voices the socialist wing of the party has, were perfectly willing to go all-in for El-Sayed and Flanagan. Full-throated endorsements, real campaign muscle behind both. But Hong, who'd wandered out onto the "abolish Thanksgiving" ledge, got left standing there entirely alone, ready to jump, with the Fire Department spotlights on her but without the net below. Even the far-left's own standard-bearers apparently have a line, and canceling a many-centuries-old national holiday sits somewhere past it.
That's not nothing by anyone's imagination. That conspicuous lack of overt support — that deafening silence from inside the movement's own house — tells you everything. A good chunk of what Piker and his fellow travelers are peddling has gotten so radioactive that even Bernie Sanders and AOC won't touch it with a ten-foot ballot.
When AOC and Sanders — the two people who've spent entire careers cosplaying as the outer edge of the party — take one look at your platform and quietly back away, you haven't found a niche. You've found the floor. In fact, you've crashed through it. You've managed to be too extreme even for the professionally extreme.
Somebody get this candidate a trophy, a participation ribbon, and a one-way ticket back to Irrelevance City. The lesson writes itself, and it's not a flattering one.
It goes this way: the far left will absolutely carry your water, cheerlead your campaign, and lend you their biggest names — right up until you're honest enough to say the quiet part out loud. Dare to expose your real agenda like that, and suddenly everybody's very busy that week.
As I've mentioned in these spaces often in recent days, the Democrats are already staring down a genuinely ugly midterm. They're already underwater and certainly cannot afford a fracture like this one, and they're getting it anyway, front and center, on primary night, for everyone watching to see.
Keep in mind, too, that the actual rank-and-file voter sits well to the right of Sanders and AOC on basically everything — which means this split isn't some fringe squabble contained to Twitch and Bluesky streams and campus rallies. It's a preview of what they're in for, and a bad one, of exactly how ugly November gets. This is the state of the Democratic Party in the summer of 2026: too radical for its own radicals, yet still somehow surprised when the voters notice and walk away. Do you still wonder why I'm not exactly losing sleep over whether the GOP holds the House?
Related: What Would Karl Marx Think of the Democratic Socialists of America?
Thought for the Day: The anniversary of East Germany sealing the border is a reminder that it didn't build the Berlin Wall to keep people out — it built it to keep them in, and that's still the tell whenever any government suddenly needs to wall off an exit instead of an entrance.
VIP members, let's hear your thinking.
Have a great Thursday. Hope you can be here tomorrow. It means a lot.
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