Now Is Not the Time to Back Off, Part Two: Narrative Slams Into Reality

Greetings, and welcome to Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. The United States Navy turns 251 today, which makes it older than the country it defends — and a good deal better at keeping its ships pointed in the right direction than Washington is at keeping its budget pointed anywhere at all.

My calendar says it's M&M Day, Train Your Brain Day, Yorkshire Pudding Day, Silly Sayings Day, and Metastatic Breast Cancer Awareness Day. Thank a sailor, train your brain to stop at one handful of M&Ms (good luck with that), whip up a Yorkshire pudding if you've got the drippings and the nerve, collect a silly saying or two — Congress is a reliable supplier — and remind the women in your life to keep up with their screenings, because that one actually matters.

Today in History:

54 AD: Roman Emperor Claudius dies, reportedly poisoned by his wife Agrippina, clearing the throne for her son Nero.
1307: King Philip IV of France orders the mass arrest of the Knights Templar — on a Friday, which legend credits as the origin of Friday the 13th superstitions.
1775: The Continental Congress authorizes two armed vessels, founding the Continental Navy.
1792: Workers lay the cornerstone of the President's House, later known as the White House.
1812: British and Canadian forces repel a U.S. invasion at the Battle of Queenston Heights, although British Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock dies in the fighting.
1843: Twelve men found B'nai B'rith in a New York City café.
1903: The Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the first modern World Series.
1917: Tens of thousands gather in Fátima, Portugal, to witness the "Miracle of the Sun."
1943: Italy declares war on Germany, its former Axis partner.
1960: Bill Mazeroski's ninth-inning home run wins Game 7 of the World Series for Pittsburgh over the New York Yankees.
1972: Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashes in the Andes; 16 survivors are rescued 72 days later.
1999: The Senate rejects the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, 51–48.
2010: Rescuers pull the last of 33 trapped Chilean miners to the surface after 69 days underground.
2016: Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Birthdays Today include: Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister; Paul Simon, singer-songwriter from Simon & Garfunkel; Lenny Bruce, comedian; Sammy Hagar, rock singer from Van Halen; Marie Osmond, singer and co-host of "Donny & Marie"; Jerry Rice, Hall of Fame wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers; and Sacha Baron Cohen, comedian and actor from Borat — if today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.

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Still enjoying a bit of vacation, but I couldn't let the morning go by without checking in. My Bills beat the Rams 37–34 in Los Angeles last night, and they took their sweet time about it, needing the last few minutes of overtime to finish the job. After dropping one at home to New England the week before, I'll take it. But it was a lot harder than it had any business being. For some reason, football games and seasons are tougher for me to call than election cycles. Maybe it's because NFL teams don't release internal polling.

Time to pick up where I left off a couple of days back.

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that we have the Dems on the ropes. Spend 10 minutes on the Instapundit front page, and the headlines tell the tale.

Start in my own (usual) backyard. Gov. Kathy Hochul got booed while marching in Monday's Columbus Day Parade up Fifth Avenue, with at least one spectator letting her know she's a disgrace. Fair enough, Manhattan parade crowds have booed Democrat officials before. Bill de Blasio collected his share. But look at the numbers behind the noise. The latest Siena poll has Hochul leading Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman 50% to 41% among likely voters, barely changed from August.

That's a comfortable-looking lead, until you notice that Blakeman is ahead among independents 44-39 and leads upstate 47-44, while the downstate suburbs are nearly tied, 48-46. A sitting Democrat governor stuck at 50% in New York, losing independents and fighting to a draw on Long Island, is not looking at a coronation. Remember, the polls had Hochul cruising in 2022 too, and she beat Lee Zeldin by only 6 points.

Then there's National Review's report that Democrat campaign ads in Iowa and Ohio are citing Soros-backed fake news sites to sway voters, based on research from NewsGuard. The outlets belong to Courier Newsroom, and if that name doesn't ring a bell, it should. Courier was founded by Democrat operative Tara McGowan, and it's expanding into nine more states ahead of these midterms, for a total of 20 outlets nationwide. Tax filings show Future Forward USA Action, the Democrats' dark-money powerhouse, sent Courier more than $13.5 million. NewsGuard's own editor has said Courier sites hide who owns and funds them and don't disclose possible conflicts of interest. Courier even bragged about the results: it claimed that $49,000 spent promoting stories on its Iowa outlet produced a net gain of 3,300 votes.

Think about what that means. When a party has to build its own "local news" sites so its candidates have something friendly to quote in their ads, it isn't winning the argument. It's manufacturing one. That's a sign that their arguments were never that strong to begin with.

Speaking of manufacturing a narrative, look at how the legacy media handled the latest texts in the Cornell case. As Matt Vespa lays out at Townhall, both The New York Times and CBS New York reported on a text exchange between the accuser and one of the men she later accused. Both left out the portions where she described the encounter as consensual and wrote "our body our choice."

When The Federalist asked, CBS New York admitted its reporter had reviewed the full exchange before publishing, so the omission wasn't an accident. It was an editorial decision. And who's now handling the case? New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom Hochul appointed special prosecutor despite James having prejudged the case on social media. Everything in this state seems to circle back to the same handful of people.

The president, for his part, isn't mincing words. Trump warned this week of a 1929-style depression if Democrats take Congress. You can call that campaign hyperbole if you like. But given what Democrats have promised to do with the gavel, he's describing the direction of travel, and the destination is no exaggeration.

Fox News has several more stories along the same lines. Reporters went to Davenport, Iowa, to see whether the "blue wave" narrative holds up on the ground. I'll be honest with you: Fox itself notes that polling shows Democrats gaining in Iowa's governor, Senate, and House races, and the party in power always faces headwinds in a midterm. But Scott County is the place to test it.

Trump carried the county by only about four points, 51% to 47%, and the state by roughly 13. Greg Guy, the GOP candidate for county treasurer, says that when he knocks on doors, he gets maybe one hostile reception out of 40. He also says his neighbor, who runs canvassing for the local Democrats, doesn't see much excitement on the other side. Scott County GOP Vice Chair Kurt Whalen thinks Republican voters will come home, whatever their gripes, because the alternative is far worse. And remember what I said in the previous column about why I really don't care much about the polling.

Then there's Michigan. On Meet the Press Sunday, NBC's Kristen Welker asked Abdul El-Sayed twice whether he or his family had any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said no both times and suggested Mike Rogers was trafficking in Islamophobia. The trouble is his own half-sister, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi. In 2012, she posted about a talk with their mother regarding her Muslim Brotherhood activism in college in the early 1970s.

In another 2012 post, she wrote that their family had "long been MB." The Washington Free Beacon first reported the posts. El-Sayed's campaign calls all of this a racist, debunked attack. Here's the thing, though. Nobody is holding a candidate responsible for what his mother did in college 50 years ago. The question is why he looked into a camera on national television and flatly denied something his own sister put on the public record.

And finally, Homeland Security Investigations agents executed a search warrant at Rep. Ilhan Omar's Washington home early Monday. A DOJ spokesman confirmed the search was judicially authorized and part of an ongoing federal investigation. According to Fox, the probe involves alleged fraud in Omar's immigration paperwork, which her late father filled out when she was a child. Border czar Tom Homan said back in mid-September that Omar was the subject of a criminal investigation. Omar calls it political intimidation.

To be clear, no charges have been filed, and she's entitled to the presumption of innocence like anyone else. But federal judges don't sign search warrants for members of Congress on a whim. Whatever turns up, the Democrats now carry this story into the last three weeks of the campaign.

Put it all together, and you see a pattern. A governor booed on Fifth Avenue. A party buying ads that quote its own fake newspapers. Legacy outlets cutting the inconvenient parts out of the evidence to shield the leftist narrative. A Senate candidate denying what his own family posted. A congresswoman whose home was searched under a federal warrant as a prelude to being removed from office and from the country. This is what it looks like when the Democrats lose control of their narrative, and it slams into something called reality.

Thought for the day: Pressure makes diamonds, or so they say. Clearly, by these stories and others, the pressure that's being applied is working. We shouldn't back off now, so close to the goal line.

VIP members: Time for you to add to the conversation. Your voice matters.

Take care, gang. I'll see you tomorrow.

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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