Welcome to Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. Today is the National Day on Writing, which for some of us is just called Tuesday.
My calendar says it’s Chicken and Waffles Day, Day on Writing, Youth Confidence Day, Brandied Fruit Day, International Chefs Day, International Sloth Day, and World Osteoporosis Day. So write something bold, cook something fried, follow it with brandied fruit, and then go full sloth on the couch. Your bones can file a complaint tomorrow.
Today in History:
1803: The Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the country for about 3 cents an acre.
1818: The United States and Britain signed the Convention of 1818, setting the 49th parallel as much of the border with Canada.
1910: Harland and Wolff launched the hull of Olympic, the older sister of Titanic, in Belfast.
1944: Gen. Douglas MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte, making good on his promise to return to the Philippines.
1947: A House committee opened hearings into alleged communist influence in Hollywood, a probe that gave birth to the Hollywood blacklist.
1952: Kenya’s British colonial governor declared a state of emergency over the Mau Mau uprising.
1967: Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot their famous Bigfoot footage at Bluff Creek, Calif.
1968: Jacqueline Kennedy married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis on the island of Skorpios.
1973: President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry it out. History remembers it as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”
1973: Queen Elizabeth II opened the Sydney Opera House.
1977: A plane crash near Gillsburg, Miss., killed Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines.
1981: Members of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground robbed a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, N.Y., killing a guard and two police officers.
1991: The Oakland Hills firestorm tore through the hills above Oakland, Calif., killing 25 people and destroying thousands of homes.
2004: The Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees in Game 7 to complete the first comeback from a 3-0 deficit in baseball postseason history.
2011: Libyan rebels captured and killed Moammar Gadhafi near his hometown of Sirte.
Birthdays Today include: Christopher Wren, architect (St. Paul’s Cathedral); John Dewey, philosopher and education reformer; Bela Lugosi, actor (Dracula); Jelly Roll Morton, jazz pianist and composer (“Jelly Roll Blues”); Art Buchwald, humor columnist; Joyce Brothers, psychologist and TV personality; Mickey Mantle, Hall of Fame center fielder (New York Yankees); Jerry Orbach, actor (Law & Order, Dirty Dancing); Wanda Jackson, rockabilly singer (“Let’s Have a Party”); Tom Petty, rock singer-songwriter (“Free Fallin’,” “Refugee”); Keith Hernandez, first baseman and broadcaster (New York Mets, Seinfeld); Danny Boyle, director (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire); Viggo Mortensen, actor (The Lord of the Rings); Kamala Harris, former vice president; Snoop Dogg, rapper (Doggystyle); John Krasinski, actor and director (The Office, A Quiet Place).
If today’s your birthday, too, many happy returns. Go easy on the brandied fruit.
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Democrats have spent the better part of a decade wailing about “weaponized government.” It turns out they never objected to the weapon; they objected to who held it. Some evidence of this is in an interesting piece from Glenn Reynolds in the New York Post this morning:
Now Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), speaking at the University of Chicago, is calling for targeted prosecutions of Trump staffers.
Slotkin observed that while Trump has presidential immunity, the people around him do not.
She wants those prosecutions to scare away young conservatives who might want to go into politics.
“I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
In the old days, politicians used to encourage young people to go into politics on either side in the name of civic engagement.
The response was swift — and negative: “Sen. Slotkin, a self-avowed ‘defender of democracy,’ told me and other conservative students that we should live in fear of political persecution if we dare serve our country in the Trump administration,” wrote University of Chicago student Michael Bicksel on X.
“Sadly for her, we will never be intimidated by her Bolshevik-style tactics.”
Hmm.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) calls it “deterrence”? Let’s try to find a more accurate label, and let’s start with the track record.
Glenn mentions Barack Obama’s IRS sitting on Tea Party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. Here’s a fresher one: Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released documents showing that Jack Smith’s team and the Biden Justice Department scooped up data on at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters, and supporters. That haul included people who bought red MAGA hats — their names, their purchases, and the addresses where the hats were shipped.
That's right: The federal government, in the middle of a criminal investigation, wanted to know where you live because you bought a hat. If you’d donated a few bucks, it wanted your credit card information, too.
So when Slotkin talks about prosecutions that send a message, nobody on the right needs her to draw a picture. We’ve seen the picture already.
Recommended: The Democrats’ Lead in the Polls Is Not As Solid As You Think
Slotkin isn’t alone in wanting to make examples of conservatives. Jonathan Turley drew a parallel to Michael Sherwin, the federal prosecutor who led the early January 6 cases, who told CBS News the Justice Department wanted to send a message with its harsh treatment of Trump supporters.
Now, Slotkin insists she meant only accountability for officials who break the law, and she wants lawyers who abuse the justice system to answer for it through their bar status. Fine. But look at who she wants to deter. If she wanted to deter lawbreaking, she’d aim the message at lawbreakers. Instead, she aimed it at kids coming out of school who might want a job in the Trump administration. The goal she stated was fewer young conservatives in government, not less crime. That’s the tell, and no amount of cleanup on X erases it.
The irony is thick enough to spread on toast. When the Justice Department looked into Slotkin over her video telling troops to refuse “illegal orders,” she called it intimidation. As RedState’s Teri Christoph pointed out, Slotkin said at the time, “Facts matter little, but the threat matters quite a bit.” She understood exactly how the threat of prosecution worked when she was the target. She just doesn’t mind it when the target wears a red hat.
One might call this a "chilling effect," if one wanted to be gentle about it. I prefer not to. I’ve pointed out in previous columns that for all their charges of us being “Nazis,” it’s the Left that is actually using Nazi tactics, and what Slotkin is calling for is of a piece with that. (Hey, Elissa — 1933 Berlin called, and it wants its tactics back.)
The Nazis didn’t need to arrest every opponent. They needed to make examples. They needed to make opposition expensive enough that ordinary people chose to sit it out. In 1933, among its first moves, the new regime purged the civil service of the “politically unreliable.” The officials it fired mattered less than the lesson everyone else learned: Keep your head down and stay out of it.
Now reread Slotkin’s own words: “Let me avoid participating in that.” She didn’t stumble into describing that outcome; she described it as her goal. Michael Bicksel went with “Bolshevik,” and he’s not wrong, either. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis disagreed on plenty, but both understood that you don’t have to jail a whole generation if you can scare it into staying home. Now, I could pull the old saying about “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty” to back this up. Interesting that there are so many arguments about the origins of that line, some attributing it to Joseph Goebbels and some to Lenin, Marx, and Saul Alinsky. It seems applicable to all of them.
This is the correct label: political intimidation. Persecution, if Slotkin ever gets the power to follow through. “Deterrence” is just the word she uses when she’d rather not say it out loud. And it’s the same Nazism the left, Slotkin included, so loudly decries.
The good news is that this kind of deterrence only works on people who let it.
Reynolds has pointed out for years that tactics like these don’t build trust in the justice system. Rather, they burn it down, and he’s right to warn that this road leads somewhere far uglier. That’s because this was never about justice. It’s about power, and about making sure the next generation of conservatives never gets near it. Slotkin just had the poor judgment to say so on camera.
Slotkin, in the end, isn't "defending democracy." She's fighting for Democrats. No shock to me she doesn't know, or at least acknowledge, the difference.
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Thought for the Day: A government that punishes people for serving it isn’t deterring crime. It’s deterring citizenship.
VIP members: Your voice matters. Time to use it in the comments.
Take care, Gang. Don't let them intimidate you. See you here tomorrow.