Welcome to Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026 — Taco Tuesday and National Taco Day at once, the closest thing to a perfect alignment this calendar offers. The planets are aligned for you to find the best taco joint in town and not have to explain it.
My calendar says it's Coaches Day, Noodle Day, Mad Hatter Day, German-American Day, Orange Wine Day, Fruit at Work Day, Physician Assistants Day, and World Cerebral Palsy Day. So bring fruit to the office, thank your coach and your physician assistant, then pair tacos and noodles with orange wine under a ridiculous hat — the Mad Hatter would approve.
Today in History:
1536: Authorities execute William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into Early Modern English, for heresy.
1683: Thirteen families from Krefeld, Germany, arrive in Philadelphia to found Germantown, one of the nation's oldest settlements.
1723: Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Franklin arrives in Philadelphia with almost no money after running away from his apprenticeship in Boston.
1866: The Reno brothers rob an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train near Seymour, Ind., in what is widely regarded as the nation's first train robbery.
1889: The Moulin Rouge opens in Paris.
1927: The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, opens and ushers in the era of talking pictures.
1973: Egypt and Syria attack Israel on Yom Kippur, launching the Yom Kippur War.
1976: President Gerald Ford tells Jimmy Carter in a televised debate that there is "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." Carter narrowly wins in November.
1981: Militants from Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as he reviews a military parade in Cairo.
1993: Michael Jordan announces his retirement from basketball after three straight NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls.
1995: Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announce the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet found orbiting a Sun-like star.
2010: Instagram launches and signs up 25,000 users on its first day.
2018: The Senate confirms Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, 50-48, after a bruising confirmation fight.
Birthdays Today include: George Westinghouse, inventor and industrialist (Westinghouse Air Brake Company); Carole Lombard, actress (My Man Godfrey); John Warnock, computer scientist (Adobe); Tony Dungy, Hall of Fame football coach; Lonnie Johnson, inventor (Super Soaker); Thomas McClary, guitarist (Commodores); and Elisabeth Shue, actress (The Karate Kid, Back to the Future Part II).
If today's your birthday, too, you're sharing it with the man who stopped trains, the queen of screwball comedy, and the inventor of the Super Soaker.
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With the midterms bearing down and precious little to run on, the Democrats and their friends in the press have reached for the oldest trick in the campaign playbook: weapons of mass distraction. And, look, I know I touched on some of it yesterday, but today I'm zooming out and looking at the totality of the panic-filled headlines, their timing, and where we've seen this before.
Look at this week’s menu:
A plague scare out of Siberia. A 27- or 28-year-old lab worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute landed in a Shelekhov hospital with what looked like severe pneumonia on September 29 and died two days later. Russian media now report plague killed her — reportedly after she broke a test tube of live bacteria — and authorities quarantined the hospital and put nearly 200 contacts under observation. The neighboring region’s leader confirmed the plague diagnosis, then edited his post to say she “may have” died of it. Alarming? Sure. Evidence of a widespread outbreak, let alone a weaponized bug? Nobody has produced any.
Fuel prices. Those hit everybody, and Russia’s own pumps are hurting. Moscow just extended its ban on diesel exports by producers through October 31, on top of a gasoline export ban that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries forced on the Kremlin. Never mind, of course, that meat puppet Joe Biden had fuel prices on average over five bucks a gallon for a while — and that they're still lower than that today.
Cornell. The alleged 2024 fraternity gang-rape case went national overnight. Tompkins County District Attorney Matt Van Houten told ABC News that a six-page Cornell police summary persuaded him not to file charges, and he now says his office should have heard what the accuser told police beyond that summary. Gov. Kathy Hochul then pulled the case and handed it to New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. That appointment alone should tell you the goal here. Spoiler alert: It's not justice; it's politics. Remember, we're talking about a woman who ran specifically on "Getting Trump."
Epstein. The political isotope that never decays. Every new document, name, or rumor guarantees a news cycle, a trending hashtag, and a fresh round of cable-news head-shaking. There, too, any exculpatory information is totally erased in the "reporting."
Oh, don't misread me here. Every one of these stories carries real weight. Some are frightening. Some demand investigation. Some have festered for years. Fine. So here’s the question nobody in a newsroom seems eager to ask: Why did they all hit crisis mode at once — conveniently, just as voters start paying attention to the midterms?
Now, before you start warming up, I’m not claiming the press invented these stories. It didn’t have to. Nobody needs a smoke-filled room or a JournoList sequel, either. The machine needs only one thing: a spectacular, panic-generating story. Then a bigger one. Then a bigger one still.
Before long, we’re all staring at the latest shiny object while yesterday’s scandal sinks below the fold — and the GOP’s enviable record under President Trump slides off the front page and onto page 8-B, if it makes the paper at all.
As I noted yesterday, we’ve seen this movie before. Let's recall, please, given that today is the anniversary of Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court, that the Democrats tried that trick with both him and Justice Thomas as well. The closest parallel between the current headlines and the historical ones, though, is the Duke lacrosse case.
Recall the setup: Mike Nifong had held the Durham County district attorney’s job by appointment since April 2005, and he faced a Democrat primary on May 2, 2006, against two challengers — one of them a prosecutor he had fired. With only Democrats in the race, the Duke Chronicle noted at the time, the primary could decide the whole election. His opponents openly accused him of working the case for votes. Nifong gave an estimated 50 to 70 interviews in the first weeks, and he won the primary by 881 votes, riding strong showings in black precincts.
Years before #MeToo gave the instinct a hashtag (which, by the way, had its own political purposes: revenge for Hillary Clinton losing the election), the case landed in a climate where race, privilege, feminism, and criminal justice already ran hot. It pushed every button a narrative-hungry press could want: race, class, town versus gown, a black woman versus “privileged” white athletes at an elite school. The story fit the long-running political script so neatly that hardly anyone bothered with the actual facts — including the 88 Duke faculty members who signed a full-page ad in the student paper thanking protesters who had already convicted the players in the court of campus opinion.
Run a story like that through the megaphone a few times and, boom — you’ve built yourself a nifty distraction and a handy shield against the real issues of the day and possibly bought yourself an election.
Recommended: More Proof That LGBTQ Identification Is a Social Contagion
The bill came due later, of course. State prosecutors dropped every charge and called the three players victims of a “tragic rush to accuse.” The disgraced Nifong lost his job and his law license. But all of that came long after he won his election. One academic paper summed up the political payoff in its title: “A Million Dollars in Free Advertising: Politics and Sex Offense Prosecution in the Wake of Duke Lacrosse.” Yeah, the "oops" finally surfaced, but the political purpose had been served, and mostly people didn't notice the updates on the story. And that's almost invariably the way of it.
Interesting. The claim is the woman in that case got used by the frat boys. What a lot of folks missed is the black woman in that case got just as used by the Democrats. So, today's translation in both cases, reads something like this:
“Rich frat boys are gang-raping helpless college girls and there’s only one way to stop it — VOTE DEMOCRAT!”
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) October 6, 2026
Again, are the stories real? Are each of them of some importance? Of course. Have they been amplified and twisted to the political purposes of less than 50% of the population? The answer is obviously "yes."
That’s the lesson here. When a sensational allegation collides with racial politics, campus ideology, a hungry press, and Democrats with an election staring them in the face, the politics and the investigation become one and the same — and the facts show up after the voters have already spoken. And when you've got four different "The Sky Is Falling" headlines that show up just weeks away from an election, the conclusions are fairly straightforward.
You may want to consider that before voting.
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Thought for the day: "I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." — Clarence Darrow.
VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts. Do you believe that the stories I mentioned are being manipulated to gain political traction?
And here's a bonus thought: You're the best caretaker of you. Get to it. I'll see you here tomorrow.