Greetings! Today is Friday, April 17, 2026. Today is World Hemophilia Day, International Bat Appreciation Day, Ellis Island Family History Day, and National Cheeseball Day. The list of observances goes on and on; it always does. I usually only pick a few of the more interesting ones to drop into this segment.
1397: Geoffrey Chaucer tells the "Canterbury Tales" for the first time at the court of English King Richard II.
1492: Christopher Columbus signs a contract with Spanish monarchs King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I to find the "Indies" with the stated goal of converting people to Catholicism. This promises him 10% of all riches found and the governorship of any lands encountered.
1534: Thomas More confined in the Tower of London.
1610: English explorer Henry Hudson departs London aboard the Discovery on his fourth, final, and fatal voyage to discover a Northwest Passage to the Pacific.
1907: Ellis Island records 11,745 immigrants.
1942: Twelve Lancasters bomb the MAN factory in Augsburg, Germany.
1943 Japanese Navy Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto flies from Truk to Rabaul, tracked by U.S. fighter aircraft after intelligence intercepts his itinerary.
1945: 8th Air Force bombs Dresden.
1961: Fourteen hundred Cuban exiles land in the Bay of Pigs in a doomed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.
1981: Carl Gottlieb's movie Caveman, starring Ringo Starr, Shelley Long, Barbara Bach, Dennis Quaid, Jack Gilford, and John Matuszak, premieres.
Birthdays today include: Samuel Chase, signer of the Declaration of Independence; Alexander Cartwright, inventor of modern baseball; J. P. Morgan, American financier and banker; William Holden, American actor; Harry Reasoner, American newscaster; Don Kirshner, American rock & roll producer known as "The Man With the Golden Ear”; Jan Hammer, Czech-American rock keyboardist and composer; Michael Sembello, American Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter; “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Canadian pro wrestler; Sean Bean, English actor; Jim Acosta, American journalist; and Victoria Beckham, English singer and fashion designer.
If today’s your birthday as well, we celebrate with you.
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As I noted in the opening segment, today is Ellis Island Family History Day, and it seems appropriate that I address the topic of immigration. Search the phrase "a nation of immigrants." Among the first results, you'll find John F. Kennedy (largely referencing his 1958 book by that name), Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Tim Kaine, Chuck Schumer, and others — all of whom, in both video and text, strongly champion the concept.
Bryan Logan at Business Insider addressed the concept as well in 2017:
"Tears are running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty tonight," Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said on Friday, "a grand tradition of America, welcoming immigrants, that has existed since America was founded, has been stomped upon.
House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi offered similar expressions in her own statement: "As the Statue of Liberty holds her torch of welcome high, there are tears in her eyes as she sees how low this Administration has stooped in its callousness toward mothers and children escaping war-torn Syria."
Sen. Dick Durbin from Illinois said: "History will judge where America’s leaders stood today. Faced with the humanitarian crisis of our time, the United States cannot turn its back on children fleeing persecution, genocide, and terror."
All of this sounds high-minded — but something crucial is missing, and almost no one is saying it: our own unique culture. We have neglected assimilation. Not just the process of bringing people here, but the harder work of making sure those who come want to belong — not only to this country, but to its culture.
As a side note worth pausing on: this is almost certainly the only serious role S.Z. Sakall ever played. He portrays a German resistance member — clearly Jewish, as are the older couple in the scene. Sakall lost much of his own family to the Nazis. He understood exactly what that scene carried beneath its humor. Notice, though, that these characters aren't simply relieved to escape the Nazis or grateful for entry into America — of itself a rare quality among the immigrants of today — they actually hunger to become American. They want the language, the values, the culture. The whole enchilada. That hunger is what we've abandoned in the name of open-mindedness. The damage from that lack has long since begun to show itself.
Germany is now paying for the missing element of assimilation. Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to open Germany's borders to refugees — in which she paraphrased Obama, saying, "we can do it" — set off consequences the country is still tallying. Roughly 20% of people now living in Germany, around 16 million, arrived recently, with another 5.5 million born to that first wave. Germans are responding. The conservative Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has surged since Merkel opened the borders, driving a broad shift away from open-border ideology and toward protecting German culture. The AfD wants to rein in the EU and return Germany to Germans.
Related: A Biblical View on Immigration: NOT in Favor of Open Borders
France tells the same story. Cultural displacement has given real political weight to Marine Le Pen — weight significant enough that even industry leaders have begun lending her support. Not because they've fully embraced her platform, which calls for a restructured EU with stronger national governments and fewer rules handed down from Brussels, but because her core argument resonates: France should answer to the French, not to supranational bureaucrats. Germany is saying the same thing.
So is England, where Nigel Farage's Reform party is surging — driven, above all, by one concern: the erosion of British culture. Breitbart UK pointed out last month:
The rights of Britons will be upheld over those of foreigners under a Reform UK government, Nigel Farage’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf has said. Stating that the United Kingdom is undergoing a “dictionary definition” invasion, the would-be Home Secretary said Britain’s changing society, increasing crime, and “the traditions and culture of Britain steadily and heartbreakingly eroded” is not inevitable, but has been the “deliberate choices of weak men and women who lack the courage, lack the spine, and lack the moral clarity to defend the country they were elected to serve”.
Yusuf stated that while there are serious economic problems with open borders, this policy of decades also harmed less easily quantified characteristics of Britain. He said in London on Monday:
It’s about the very soul and character of our nation. For centuries Britain has proudly been a high-trust culture… but as untold numbers of people from low-trust cultures with entirely different values have been imported into our country that precious, fragile trust — it’s breaking down… a nation without a culture is not a nation at all, it is just an economic zone. A shopping mall with a flag, waiting to be exploited.
That’s why we will protect the Christian heritage of Britain. We’ll end the incendiary practice of converting churches into mosques of places of worship for any other faith. I’m proud to announce a Reform government will immediately grant listed status to all churches, and create a new statutory use category for Christian places of worship to ensure these historic pillars of our community can never be converted for places of worship for any other faith.
Sir Winston Churchill addressed this many years ago: "If you will not fight for right when you can win easily without bloodshed. . .you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
Even John Cleese — a man no one has ever accused of conservatism — saw it clearly enough to say it out loud: "London isn't really an English city any longer."
Here in the States, the rebellion has long since begun. Mark Levin is among the people here in the States who are proudly speaking up:
We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens. I am sick and tired of the American citizen being demeaned and treated as a second-class citizen while anybody who crosses the border is treated as the most virtuous human being on the face of the earth.
Indeed, all these nations, all these people are looking at what’s been done, and seeing the cultural impact of freer immigration, without a tightening of assimilation, and they’re alarmed at what they see, which is all of these great cultures committing suicide by immigration without cultural assimilation.
Think about what we're actually saying here: a native-born citizen, fully invested in this country's culture and values, matters less than someone who just arrived and refuses to assimilate? That's the mind-melting absurdity we’ve been forced by political correctness to blindly accept.
I refuse.
Look across every country we've discussed. In each one, people are fighting to preserve the very culture that built their prosperity. The standard of living they're defending didn't emerge from nowhere — it grew from a shared language, shared values, and a common identity. Open the borders to people who reject all three, and you don't get a richer culture. You get a weaker one, as we have been discovering.
The people pushing back against multiculturalism in all these countries understand something their opponents refuse to admit: none of these nations are nations of immigrants. They are nations of citizens. And those citizens recognize that demographics is destiny. They see where this path leads — Western civilization reduced to a footnote.
Here in the States, the tide has only recently begun to turn. Donald Trump has made real progress fighting the trends I've outlined, but he's barely scratched the surface. The problem runs deep, and it will roar back the moment the left succeeds in hobbling his efforts.
One possibility to that point is November.
We can no longer sit on the sidelines mouthing platitudes. The choice we face is to join the fight or fade into history unmarked.
Thought for the day: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.” — Mark Twain
Take care, my friends. I'm glad you're here today and hope for you to repeat the visit tomorrow.
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