Good morning, and happy Friday, Sept. 18, 2026. Somewhere out there, a calendar company is still trying to figure out how many recognitions it can cram into one day before the concept loses all meaning. Today, they tried hard.
My calendar says it’s Cheeseburger Day, Air Force Birthday, HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day, World Water Monitoring Day, and International Equal Pay Day. Grab a burger, salute the Air Force on its 79th, check your tap water for quality, and — since it’s Equal Pay Day — go ahead and ask for that raise.
Today in History:
313: Constantine I signs the Edict of Milan, granting religious tolerance to Christians throughout the Roman Empire.
1180: Philip Augustus becomes king of France at age fifteen.
1502: Christopher Columbus lands in present-day Costa Rica on his final voyage.
1759: French forces surrender Quebec to the British.
1793: President George Washington lays the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol.
1810: Chile declares its independence from Spain.
1850: Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act, empowering federal commissioners to return escaped slaves to their owners.
1851: The New York Times publishes its first edition.
1927: The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System — later CBS — debuts with a network of sixteen radio stations.
1931: Japanese officers stage the Mukden Incident, using a railway explosion as a pretext to invade Manchuria.
1947: The National Security Act takes effect, formally establishing the Air Force as its own branch and creating the position of Secretary of Defense.
1961: United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld dies in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia.
1970: Rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix dies in London at age 27.
1975: FBI agents capture kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in San Francisco, 19 months after her abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Birthdays Today include: Frankie Avalon, singer and actor best remembered for the Beach Party movies; Scotty Bowman, Hockey Hall of Fame coach; Bobby Jones, gospel singer; Kerry Livgren, guitarist for Kansas; Anna Deavere Smith, actress from The West Wing; Rick Pitino, basketball Hall of Fame coach; Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist and author; Ryne Sandberg, Baseball Hall of Famer; and Jada Pinkett Smith, actress from the Matrix film series — if today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday.
* * *
Watching the Democrats this midterm cycle, I have come to the conclusion that their entire campaign looks a little something like this:
OK, maybe we lied when we told you Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack.” Never mind the ice-cream-cone stares — that was just projection from Fox News viewers, apparently.
Maybe we lied when we spent years insisting Donald Trump was functionally a Kremlin asset, even though the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee ultimately found no evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government — while also documenting real Russian interference in 2016 and the FBI’s embarrassing reliance on the discredited Steele dossier. Three years of prime-time certainty, one bipartisan report to quietly walk it all back.
Maybe we lied when we told you the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a claim 51 intelligence officials signed their names to right before an election. It took years for the same institutions that laughed the story off a cliff to admit what forensic examination had already shown: thousands of emails on the drive could be cryptographically authenticated, and the FBI had confirmed the laptop was genuinely Hunter Biden’s, according to the Washington Post’s own analysis.
Maybe we lied when we told you there was nothing to see in the Biden family’s foreign business dealings. Nobody’s proven every allegation — though the record does show Hunter Biden had substantial financial relationships with Chinese and Ukrainian business figures, and a lot of the confident dismissals were considerably more confident than the facts warranted, according to the Washington Post.
Maybe we lied about COVID-19, too — not that the virus existed or that it killed people, but about how much certainty anyone actually had regarding its origins, its transmission, or the wisdom of the policies rolled out in its name. The origin question remains unresolved, and it certainly wasn’t Fauci dealing with China under the table. U.S. intelligence agencies disagree with each other; the CIA now leans toward a lab-related origin, though only with low confidence, while conceding a natural origin is still plausible, according to the Associated Press. Funny how “low confidence” wasn’t the tone anybody took in 2021.
Maybe we lied when we told you that asking questions about the official COVID-19 narrative was indistinguishable from believing the Earth is flat.
Maybe we lied when we told you there was no evidence of election irregularities in 2020. There were individual irregularities. There were cases of illegal voting. What the evidence never supported was the much bigger claim — that fraud on a scale sufficient to flip the presidency actually occurred. Even Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said the Justice Department found no fraud of that magnitude, directly to the AP.
And maybe we lied or at least flattened the story of January 6 into a propaganda talking point either side could grab.
There was a real, violent attack on the Capitol. People committed real crimes. But the theory that the FBI quietly stage-managed the whole thing from the shadows doesn’t hold up either. The Justice Department’s inspector general found 26 FBI confidential human sources in Washington that day, some of whom entered restricted areas, and documented a genuinely embarrassing set of intelligence failures. What the same investigation did not find: any undercover FBI employees in the crowd, or any evidence the FBI directed informants to commit crimes or incite violence, according to the Washington Post’s report on the IG findings. Both things can be true. The uniparty just prefers you pick one and stop asking questions.
So, yes — reality turned out to be a great deal messier than either side’s cable-news morality play.
And then there’s Jeffrey Epstein.
For years, the press assured us that any lingering Epstein questions were settled, irrelevant, or strictly the property of tinfoil-hat message boards. Then the government started declassifying and unsealing its own files. In 2025, the DOJ and FBI said their review turned up no secret “client list” and reaffirmed that Epstein died by suicide, according to the Justice Department’s own release. That doesn’t validate every message-board theory — but it does confirm how much of the “settled” public conversation was really just people confidently telling everyone else what they were allowed to wonder about out loud.
And Ukraine?
For years, the press treated questions about Hunter Biden’s seat on Burisma’s board, Ukrainian corruption, and Joe Biden’s own involvement in his son’s business affairs as evidence of a Russian influence operation in itself. The underlying facts were a lot less tidy than that. Hunter Biden really did sit on Burisma’s board. He really did collect substantial foreign payments. And there really were legitimate questions about the appearance of a conflict of interest, laid out at length in the House Oversight Committee’s report. What those facts prove about Joe Biden personally remains disputed — which is an entirely different thing from “there was nothing here.”
But never mind all that.
Because this time we’re absolutely sure.
Trump is an “existential threat to our democracy”. Trust us. We were right about everything else.
Well.
Almost everything.
OK, some things.
(Sigh) OK, fine. Just about none of it.
But this time, really — you’ve gotta trust us. We’re telling you the truth this time; we pinky swear.
Honest.
Thought of the Day: Institutions ask you to trust them right up until the moment they need you to forget you ever did.
VIP members: Your turn. You’ve got some blank space in the comments section. Fill it with your wisdom. And for those who have been asking, the heart I’ve been asking you to hit is just below the comment window. A little thing, on the left side of the screen.
And by the way, my Buffalo Bills made short work of the Lions last night. That’s 2-0. Life is good, watching Josh Allen doing Josh Allen stuff.
Take care, gang. You’ve got a full weekend in front of you.
Recommended: The RINO Seven: This Cycle’s Version of an Old Establishment Mistake
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