Hey, gang, glad you could make it. Today is Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026 — banana splits, whiskey sours, and secondhand wardrobes all sharing the calendar, which is a genuinely strange combination for a Tuesday.
My calendar says it’s Banana Split Day, Kiss and Make Up Day, Park Service Founders Day, Secondhand Wardrobe Day, and Whiskey Sour Day. Build yourself a banana split, patch things up with whoever you’re feuding with, thrift yourself a new outfit, and pour a whiskey sour to toast the National Park Service — it’s earning its keep today.
Today In History:
1875: Matthew Webb becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel, crossing from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in under 22 hours.
1896: Outlaw Bill Doolin is killed by a posse in Lawson, Oklahoma Territory.
1914: German troops occupying the Belgian town of Louvain begin five days of burning, looting, and executing civilians during the opening weeks of World War I.
1916: President Woodrow Wilson signs the National Park Service Organic Act, establishing the National Park Service to maintain the country’s natural and historic sites — the very reason for today’s Park Service Founders Day.
1928: Richard E. Byrd’s expedition sets sail from Hoboken, New Jersey, bound for Antarctica. Some people will do almost anything to get out of Jersey.
1944: Paris is liberated after four years of Nazi occupation, as the German commander surrenders rather than carry out Hitler’s order to burn the city to the ground.
1948: Alger Hiss denies before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was a Communist spy, in the committee’s first-ever televised congressional hearing.
1958: Japanese inventor Momofuku Ando develops Chicken Ramen, the world’s first instant noodles, to help address Japan’s postwar food shortages.
1979: The storm that becomes Hurricane David forms in the eastern Atlantic, eventually killing more than 2,000 people across Dominica and the Dominican Republic.
1991: Michael Schumacher makes his Formula One debut at the Belgian Grand Prix, going on to win 91 Grand Prix races over his career.
2012: Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, dies in Cincinnati at age 82.
2017: Hurricane Harvey makes landfall near Corpus Christi, Texas, eventually dropping nearly 52 inches of rain, the heaviest tropical rainfall ever recorded in the continental United States.
I almost forgot: We have a Lunar eclipse coming up you may want to stay up for, on the night of Thursday, August 27 into the early morning of Friday, August 28. According to my sources, this will be a “deep partial” lunar eclipse — up to 96.3% of the Moon’s disk slips into Earth’s dark umbral shadow at peak, just short of a full total eclipse. Because it’s so close to total, it’s being called an “almost Blood Moon” — the shadowed portion should take on a reddish or coppery tint, though since it’s not a true total eclipse, the whole disk won’t turn that deep red color the way a full Blood Moon does. If you’re on the East Coast, the timing looks like this:
- Penumbral phase begins: 9:23 p.m. EDT, Thursday, August 27 (subtle at first, easy to miss)
- Partial eclipse begins (the visible “bite” out of the Moon): 10:33 p.m. EDT
- Peak/greatest eclipse: 12:12 a.m. EDT, Friday, August 28 — this is the moment to prioritize if you only catch part of it
- Partial eclipse ends: around 1:52 a.m. EDT
- Whole event wraps up: 3:01 a.m. EDT
No special equipment or eye protection is needed as you would with a solar eclipse, though it does require some clear sky.
* * *
So this morning, I see Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, linking Lauren Chen on X:
The fact that leftists use the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Christianity while ignoring the fact that it’s way more similar to Islam will never not be hilarious to me. https://t.co/rLno4XPOyh
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) August 24, 2026
I’ve actually been thinking they’d stopped with this nonsense by now, but apparently I was wrong. Absent that, I’d have waded in on this a long time ago.
And here’s the kicker:
Crazier still: it WAS written about Islam. Atwood was disgusted by what the Muslims were doing to women during the Iranian revolution and she imagined that happening here. https://t.co/AMDA4cFcc3
— Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) August 24, 2026
And before you start on me, one commentary on Atwood’s research process does specifically note that she drew on the 1979 Iranian Revolution as one influence among several, and states plainly that “prayer times draw from Islam” as one specific structural detail borrowed for Gilead’s daily rituals. So it’s accurate to say Islamic theocracy (specifically post-revolution Iran) was one ingredient in the mix, particularly for describing what a real-world overnight shift from secular to religious rule under Islamic law actually looked like for women.
Seems to me an indication of a lack of things to protest on the left, or at least a lack of things they can protest without getting themselves into trouble, either by running afoul of their own set of values, or running into the angry and violent. And even in this case, it’s a bit of a stretch to ignore Islam in this.
That said, we’ve all seen it by now: the feminist left arrives at a statehouse dressed like the world’s most politically fashionable laundry accident — red cloaks, white bonnets, and enough Handmaid’s Tale cosplay to make Margaret Atwood’s royalty checks twitch. The costumes supposedly represent the coming Christian theocracy, where American women will presumably wake up one morning to discover that the patriarchy has finally figured out how to issue matching uniforms. Someone’s got a sewing machine that still works, apparently.
What’s fascinating isn’t the costume. It’s what these activists somehow manage not to see while wearing it. It’s apparent that the ones in the red robes have never read the book, much less done any research on it.
The imagery isn’t new. Women first staged this particular piece of political theater outside the Ohio Statehouse back in 2017, protesting an abortion procedure ban. Organizer Jaime Miracle explained the group had been directly inspired by similar protests already underway in Texas. From there, the red robes spread like political herpes — Missouri, Tennessee, California, New York, Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, and eventually across the Atlantic to Poland and the Netherlands.
Ohio abortion fund director Stephanie Craddock Sherwood told NBC News that the imagery works because: “The Handmaid’s Tale is based on what actually has happened to women throughout history, where women have been essentially narrowed down to their reproductive abilities.”
One Chicago protester carried a sign reading “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again,” while another solemnly announced: “We cannot rest as anti-women forces do not stop their assault on our autonomy.”
Quite right. We certainly shouldn’t rest when women face genuine oppression. Which raises an awkward little problem. The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction. A novel. A television series. A dystopian political parable with superb production values and an Emmy collection large enough to require its own shelving unit. The particular American Gilead these protesters fear doesn’t exist. It’s a hypothetical future, constructed from a deliberately frightening extrapolation of religious authoritarianism. Meanwhile, actual Gilead exists.
It’s called Islam.
And here’s where the intellectual gymnastics become truly impressive. The feminist left can summon an army of red-robed protesters to warn about what American Christians might do someday, while an actual government, operating under the Taliban and Iran and their brutal interpretation of Islamic law, systematically strips women and girls of education, employment, legal equality, mobility, and basic autonomy. Can you imagine a protest by women against Islam’s treatment of women, in today’s England, or anywhere in the UK? Or (dry chuckle) Islamabad, Kabul, or Tehran?
We’ll never see anything of the sort, trust me. The same red-robed crusade will never materialize. We never seem to get the same theatrical outrage about Iran, Afghanistan, or Dearbornistan, or London, either, for that matter. Protesting Islam can get you killed.
Here’s what real, literal, non-metaphorical female oppression looks like. UNESCO confirmed this month that, for example, “Afghanistan is the only country in the world to formally prohibit access to education for girls and women beyond the primary level,” with an estimated 2.4 million girls currently locked out of secondary school.
Afghan women have been banned from medical institutes since December 2024, and last November’s medical graduation exams were held for the second consecutive year with zero female participation.
Since September of last year, the Taliban has barred Afghan women — including UN staff — from even entering UN office buildings, prompting UN experts to call it: “a direct attack on women’s rights, including their right to work,” adding the rather devastating observation: “There can be no cultural, religious or administrative justification for this policy.”
Apparently somebody forgot to send the Islamic leaders a copy of the feminist left’s costume calendar.
Iran, meanwhile, hasn’t gone quite so far, imposing various gender-based restrictions within its educational system. For example, women have faced restrictions concerning particular university fields and institutions, and married girls can be exempted from educational requirements. The State Department has also reported lower enrollment among girls in some rural areas.
Afghanistan’s women civil servants who had been ordered to stay home since 2021 — receiving reduced salaries simply for not being permitted to work — were informed this past January that the salaries were gone and their employment terminated. The process came “with minimal transparency, no due process, and no mitigation measures.”
It gets worse.
This year’s Decree No. 12 formally abolished legal equality between men and women before the law, placing husbands in direct legal authority over their wives. Domestic violence receives criminal treatment only when it produces “severe, visible physical injuries.” Translation: If the abuse doesn’t leave sufficiently impressive evidence, good luck.
Decree No. 18 makes it dramatically harder for a woman to leave a marriage while preserving a man’s unilateral right to walk away from one. Georgetown’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security counted 264 total decrees affecting human rights as of June, with 166 specifically targeting women and girls. It summarized the resulting system in two words: “gender apartheid.”
Nearly 30% of Afghan girls under 18 are married off, with 10% married before they even turn 15 — often, according to UN Women, because desperate families see marriage as a survival strategy.
That’s not a costume, gang. That’s not a dystopian novel. That’s not a television show. That’s not some speculative future conjured up by a Canadian novelist in 1985 as a warning about where America might go. That’s Tuesday. That’s right now.
For millions of actual women and girls living under an actual government enforcing an actual system of religious authoritarianism. No metaphor required. No allegory necessary. No Emmy nomination pending.
And that’s where I keep waiting for somebody in the red-cloak brigade to answer a very simple question: If the moral emergency is supposedly the possibility that women might someday lose bodily autonomy under a theocratic regime, why does the theocratic regime already doing precisely that to real women generate so little outrage?
I mean, where are the bonnets? Where are the statehouse demonstrations? Where are the screaming headlines? Where is the viral photograph? Where is the sign reading “Make Georgetown’s Own Report Fiction Again”?
Oh, right. That particular sign has the unfortunate characteristic of being difficult to wave around without also acknowledging reality — and reality, in this case, is exceptionally inconvenient.
Protesting Christianity in America is wonderfully safe. It costs virtually nothing. It carries no meaningful personal risk. It earns applause from sympathetic crowds, approval from editors, social-media validation, and invitations to explain to everyone else how terribly oppressed you are. Protesting Islam, meanwhile, is considerably less convenient and can be downright life-threatening.
It requires acknowledging that women are being systematically oppressed by a mindset explicitly claiming religious justification. It requires criticizing something that certain activist circles have spent years treating as uniquely protected from scrutiny. It requires applying the same moral standard to actual oppression that they enthusiastically apply to hypothetical oppression.
And, worst of all, it might require admitting that religion isn’t automatically the problem merely because the religion happens to be Christianity. That’s an uncomfortable thought — the kind that doesn’t survive contact with the crew on Bluesky, so it rarely gets said out loud. Much easier to put on that red robe.
It’s funny how moral courage so often points in exactly the direction where it’s safest to exercise it, in much the same way as leftists will protest against rich women wearing fur, but don’t protest against bikers wearing leather.
Real bravery doesn’t usually come with a built-in laugh track, an Emmy-winning wardrobe department, and a guaranteed standing ovation from the exact people you were hoping to impress in the first place.
The red cloak isn’t necessarily a symbol of courage.
Sometimes it’s just camouflage.
Thought for the day: When Muslims start a war, they call it a “Jihad.” When they’re losing, they call it a “Genocide.” Odd how that works, isn’t it?
VIP members, let’s hear it. I know very well this is a hot topic among a lot of you. Fire up that keyboard and get your thoughts into the comment section. Your voice matters.
My friends, have yourselves a great Tuesday. I’ll be seeing you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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