Hello and welcome to Sunday, April 26, 2026. The morning after the night before. I’ll get to that. But first, the usual formalities.
It’s National Kids and Pets Day, National Pretzel Day, and National Dissertation Day, designed to support those in higher education struggling with their dissertation.
Today in History:
1514: Copernicus makes his 1st observations of Saturn.
1835: Frédéric Chopin’s “Grand Polonaise Brillante” premieres in Paris.
1859: U.S. Congressman Daniel E. Sickles is acquitted in the murder of Philip Barton Key on grounds of “temporary insanity,” the first time this defense is used successfully in the U.S.
1912: First home run hit at Fenway Park by Hugh Bradley of the Red Sox.
1941: A tradition begins with the first organ at a baseball stadium (Chicago Cubs).
1966: Red Auerbach retires as Boston Celtics coach.
1976: Pan Am begins nonstop flights between NYC and Tokyo.
1982: Rod Stewart is mugged; gunman steals his $50,000 Porsche on Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif.
1986: The world’s worst nuclear disaster occurs when the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union explodes.
Birthdays today include: Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome (161–180); Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, French writer (“Beauty and the Beast”); John James Audubon, American ornithologist and painter (“The Birds of America”); Frederick Law Olmsted, American writer and landscape architect (designed Central Park); Rudolf Hess, German Nazi official (Deputy Führer who dramatically escaped to Britain in 1941); Morris West, Australian novelist (“Shoes of the Fisherman”); Carol Burnett, American comedian (“The Carol Burnett Show”), and actress (“Annie”; “The Four Seasons”; “Mad About You”); Doug Sax, American mastering engineer (Bob Dylan, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Ray Charles); Duane Eddy, American twangy guitarist (“Rebel Rouser”; “Peter Gunn”); Maurice Williams, American doo-wop singer and songwriter (Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs – “Stay”); Bobby Rydell [Ridarelli], American pop singer (“Wild One”; “Wildwood Days”); Gary Wright, American rock singer and keyboardist (Spooky Tooth – It’s All About; solo – “Dream Weaver”); and Kevin James, American actor and comedian (“The King of Queens”).
Happy birthday to you too, if it’s your day.
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There is a huge amount of writing from very capable people about the events of last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A lot of it from the fabulous PJ Media team. I will particularly urge you to read Matt Margolis, Rick Moran, and Tim O’Brien.
With all of that already in play, I feel no obligation to pile on more case facts.Everything worth knowing in terms of the event timeline got posted overnight and early this morning—no bombshells, no earth-shaking revelations remain. Just another registered Democrat going off the deep end. I won’t pretend otherwise.
I seldom do hard news here at PJ Media. What I do here most days is commentary — what I’m actually feeling about a given topic. I’ve done it for decades in various venues. Some would call me a professional reactionary. I’ll leave to you the question of it being a strong point or not.
What am I feeling today? Anger. Bloody anger.
I say, without hesitation, that for over a decade the borderline insane left has actively encouraged the completely mentally unstable to take violent action against one man. Last night was merely the most recent example.
The self-proclaimed party of sweetness and light has built exactly one platform: manufactured hatred toward Donald Trump — and toward anyone who supports him. The zealots at MS NOW and the staff at legacy media outlets across the country have spent years urging the mental defectives in our society to embrace Luigi leftism against anyone to the right of Che Guevara. And several times, they’ve actually taken on that challenge. Thank the Lord above that they have failed repeatedly in that task.
But that hate is nothing new, nor are the actions taken as a result of that hate. As a recent example, we watched a supposedly anti-hate group fund hatred (SPLC, anyone?). Years ago, I wrote a quick post with several examples of leftists holding whatever Republican was the target at the moment to be Hitler. I asked a question at the time: “At what point in the last 60 years at least has the Democrat Party ever been civil?” That question is even more valid today.
That culture — the left’s embrace of violence as a legitimate political tool — didn’t begin with Trump in the White House, as I’ve already pointed out. Remember the burning Teslas? The Biden-era polls showing broad leftist approval of killing millionaires such as Luigi Mangione not so long ago? No, dear reader, that rot set in long before last night.
People even stood outside the event carrying signs reading “Death to Tyrants” — signs the high priests of the media inside would never report on.
After each attempt on the president’s life, the “Orange Man Bad” crowd turned around and told conservatives that it’s right they should fear for their lives at public events — like last night’s. They cheered when Charlie Kirk got killed. Hasan Piker, for one, infamously made public calls for exactly that kind of violence. It’s happening every single day, in thousands of cases. Such calls for violence are a serious crime, the last I checked. I would cite, as a primary example, Brandenburg v. Ohio, which held that the government cannot punish advocacy of illegal action unless the speech meets both of these conditions: it is directed toward inciting imminent lawless action and it is likely to actually produce that action.
I suggest that last night, being merely the most recent example, both of those conditions are more than met by what we’ve seen over the last decades from leftist advocates, which have resulted in assassination attempts, yet I see nobody being jailed over it. Recall also the Rutgers study that found half of the left-of-center respondents held the murder of Donald J Trump to be at least somewhat justified. What about those responses does not meet the standard imposed by Brandenburg?
Many of those media figures who have been parroting these positions were in the room last night, running for their very lives, when a man driven by Democrat party rhetoric, amplified on legacy media outlets, made his terroristic attempt to act on exactly that call.
It’s hard to imagine that the experience of running for their lives as a result of rhetoric many of them have been spouting in their professional lives didn’t shift something in their mindset, even for them. It had to force a reckoning between what they call terrorism and what they call a valid political argument. That is, assuming they’re human, rather than what they’ve appeared to be for so long—political operatives with a byline. If they’re that still, then this conversation is moot. Time will reveal the answer to those questions. But frankly, I will not be holding my breath.
The usual suspects on X and Facebook are already calling the attack a setup, a false flag. (Snort.) Of course they are—it’s the only exit ramp from the obvious conclusion that their own attitudes produced last night’s events. That claim crashes hard against the raw, unscripted reactions of the journalists who were running from that room last night.
I note Steve Scalise, himself a target of such madness, and whose opinions on last night should prove of interest, was in the room last night, as was Erika Kirk. Watching her with tears in her eyes being rushed from that room, I knew it: we are past the talking stage. Her husband built his brand on open dialogue as the path forward. Charlie’s murder proved—if it proved nothing else—that treating terrorist acts and positions as valid arguments does not work. It kills.
It came quite close to doing it again last night. The question, which in reality has been with us for a long time, is what to do about it.
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