Greetings! Welcome to Sunday, August 2, 2026. Friendship Day, Sisters Day, and ice cream sandwiches all sharing a calendar square, so bring snacks to the family reunion.
My calendar says it’s Friendship Day, Ice Cream Sandwich Day, Sisters Day, Coloring Book Day, Bryan Day, Woman Astronomers Day, Authenticity Day, Psychic Day, CAD Day, and Family Day. Call a sister, hug a friend, eat something frozen and chocolate-coated, and maybe skip the psychic reading—you already know how this day ends: family, sugar, and a nap.
Today in History:
1776: Most delegates to the Continental Congress formally sign the Declaration of Independence, about a month after it was actually approved.
1790: The first U.S. Census begins under the supervision of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, eventually counting nearly 3.9 million people.
1873: Inventor Andrew Hallidie successfully tests the cable car he designed for the hills of San Francisco.
1876: Gunfighter “Wild Bill” Hickok is shot dead while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.
1909: The Lincoln penny enters circulation, becoming the first widely used U.S. coin to feature a real person’s face.
1918: American troops land at Archangel in northern Russia as part of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.
1921: A Chicago jury acquits seven former White Sox players in the “Black Sox” scandal trial, though the league bans them for life anyway.
1923: President Warren G. Harding dies of a stroke in a San Francisco hotel at age 58, just ahead of the scandals that would define his legacy.
1934: German President Paul von Hindenburg dies, clearing the way for Adolf Hitler to merge the offices of chancellor and president into the unchecked title of Führer.
1945: The Potsdam Conference concludes, with the Allied powers finalizing terms for postwar Europe.
1958: The short-lived Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan dissolves following the coup that killed Iraq’s King Faisal.
1990: Iraqi forces invade Kuwait, triggering the Gulf War.
1998: The Second Congo War begins, eventually becoming the deadliest conflict on the African continent since World War II.
Birthdays Today Include: Isabel Allende, novelist (The House of the Spirits); Butch Patrick, actor (The Munsters); Butch Vig, rock producer and drummer (Garbage); Mary-Louise Parker, actor (Weeds) (Fried Green Tomatoes); Kevin Smith, filmmaker (Clerks, Dogma); Sam Worthington, actor (Avatar); Edward Furlong, actor (Terminator 2: Judgment Day); Vice President JD Vance, Lily Gladstone, actor (Killers of the Flower Moon); Charli XCX, singer (“Boom Clap”); Simone Manuel, Olympic swimming gold medalist.
If today’s your birthday too, happy birthday!
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There’s been no shortage of press lately chronicling Europe’s slow-motion identity crisis with its Muslim populations, and buckle up, because it’s a full continent’s worth of material.
Start with Spain, which is currently dealing with thousands storming the fences into Ceuta from Morocco — because nothing says “sovereign border” like a human wave crossing it in real time on camera. The UK, meanwhile, spent years pretending its grooming gang epidemic wasn’t happening, because acknowledging it might have required admitting the multicultural fairy tale had a body count. France, not to be outdone, is now polling at 70% support for banning Islamic veils in public — and France doesn’t do things by half measures, so don’t be shocked if “considering” becomes “voting on” faster than Brussels can draft a strongly worded memo about it. They’ve already been closing mosques and dissolving organizations tied to extremism, which is French for “we tried tolerance, and tolerance did not go well.”
Austria’s chewing over dissolving Islam-linked organizations of its own. Germany’s playing it cautious—banning the loudest radical groups while pretending “keeping an eye on” the rest counts as a strategy. The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden are all somewhere on that same spectrum, each nation quietly admitting what none of them wanted to say out loud a decade ago: the open-door experiment isn’t going the way the brochure promised. Northern Ireland has also seen riots break out in Belfast. In Ireland as a whole, my research shows at least 10 attacks on churches across the island have also been documented in the same period—arsons in Westmeath, at Tinure, and vandalism at St. Augustine’s in Drogheda in the Republic, plus six attacks on churches or chapels in Northern Ireland between April 2025 and March 2026.
And here’s my favorite part: You just know that any minute now, Brussels is going to swoop in and lecture every one of these countries about how phobic they’re all being. You know it’s coming. It’s basically a scheduled event at this point, like the changing of the guard, except with more finger-wagging and considerably less dignity. When that fight breaks out—sovereign nations telling unelected EU bureaucrats to mind their own continent for once—grab the popcorn, because it’s going to be glorious.
Meanwhile, over in the “authoritarian regimes handling this with their usual subtlety” category: China’s got Islam on a very short leash, right alongside every other religion it doesn’t control outright. North Korea, shockingly, isn’t a beacon of religious liberty either. And Russia’s treatment of the subject runs exactly as you’d expect from a country that considers “freedom of religion” a rounding error.
So there’s your scoreboard: half of Europe finally waking up to a problem it spent 20 years being told didn’t exist, and the other half of the world never bothering to pretend it cared about religious liberty in the first place. Progress, of a sort. Still, the current actions of EU members in this regard can be considered closing the door after the horse has made it to the next county.
One of the axioms that I’ve been leaning on pretty heavily for decades now is this:
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.
All of this leads to the question of what our actions in these matters should be. Say as you will about “religious freedom,” but be prepared to defend what you say against some wise guy (like little ol’ me, for example) pointing out that the freedom of religion you champion is exactly what you won’t have following an Islamic takeover. Dearborn is an example of what happens. The aftermath of that protest had local politicians calling for “unity.” But what precisely are we supposed to be unified behind?
Need a domestic preview? Try Dearborn, where a political rally turned into a chorus of “Allahu Akbar” loud enough to make headlines, followed immediately by the traditional post-controversy ritual: local politicians rushing to podiums to call for “unity.”
Unity. Well, a question: Unity behind what, exactly? Nobody ever says. That’s not an oversight—it’s the entire strategy. “Unity” is the word you reach for when you’d very much like everyone to stop asking what just happened and move along. It’s the political equivalent of “nothing to see here,” dressed up in a tie and given a press conference.
So here’s a suggestion, free of charge: before the next politician stands up and asks us all to unify, maybe somebody should ask him to finish the sentence. Unified behind what, Senator? Behind whom? Behind which set of values, exactly? I solemnly promise you that the chanting crowd and the objecting crowd are not reciting the same list. “Unity” without an answer to that question isn’t leadership. It’s just noise dressed up to sound like it. They’re trying to avoid making the hard choices.
Do I sound annoyed? Good, because that’s exactly what I intend. As a nation, along with the rest of the free world, we have some seriously hard choices to make in these matters. Our very survival as a culture, as a people, depends totally on the choices we make now. I’m annoyed because despite all the coal mine canaries being toes-up on the bottom of their respective cages, we have yet to react.
And isn’t it interesting that all these things are happening at once? It’s as if there was someone or a group of someones directing these efforts to take over us all. Interesting, too, that the people complaining about the supposed attempts to make this a white nationalist, Christian nation, are saying nothing about the increasingly loud efforts to make this an Islamist nation.
Perhaps we should start considering the limits the rest of the world has been considering. The EU members, particularly, have been on the front lines of calling for open borders and are now starting to pay the price for that self-congratulating generosity. Suicidal empathy, I call it. Those “values” have now been exposed as self-destructive nonsense, and it’s now to the point where their cultural survival is an open question.
Let’s not let that happen here. We can prevent that from happening by insisting our government perform its first duty, as I’ve stated. Like it or not, the foundation of our nation is the Judeo-Christian culture. Freedom of religion in the First Amendment is a wonderful thing, but when that threatens our survival, as it increasingly does today, it’s time to have the courage to make the hard choices.
The hard choice is perhaps best described this way: Constitutional guardrails are fine but become problematic when there’s a truck heading right at you and those guardrails prevent your escape from the head-on crash.
Thought for the Day: My trust in people is so profound that I look both ways before crossing a one-way street.
VIP members: You know the drill. Speak up in the comments. Your voice matters.
Take care, gang. Have a great Sunday. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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