Hi, there. Glad you're here. Welcome to Friday, July 24, 2026. My calendar says today is Tequila Day, Amelia Earhart Day, Drive-Thru Day, Cousins Day, International Self-Care Day, Day of Motoring, Thermal Engineer Day, Tell an Old Joke Day, Pioneer Day, Hot Fudge Sundae Day, Wine and Cheese Day, and Day of the Cowboy Culture. Yikes, busy day today.
Today In History:
1567: Mary, Queen of Scots is forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son, James.
1783: Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who would liberate much of South America from Spanish rule, is born in Caracas.
1847: Brigham Young leads a company of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, declaring it "the place" — a fitting nod to Pioneer Day.
1858: Abraham Lincoln formally challenges Stephen A. Douglas to a series of political debates.
1862: Martin Van Buren, eighth president, dies in Kinderhook, N.Y.
1866: Tennessee becomes the first state readmitted to the Union following the Civil War.
1897: Amelia Earhart is born in Atchison, Kan. — the honoree behind today's Earhart Day.
1915: The steamer SS Eastland capsizes at the Chicago wharf, killing 844 passengers bound for a company picnic.
1921: The Pig Stand opens in Dallas, widely credited as the first drive-thru restaurant, setting the stage for today's Drive-Thru Day.
1929: President Hoover proclaims the Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of policy.
1943: Allied bombers launch Operation Gomorrah, the night-and-day raid on Hamburg.
1959: Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev spar in the "Kitchen Debate" during an exhibition in Moscow.
1969: The Apollo 11 astronauts splash down safely in the Pacific, closing out the first crewed lunar landing mission.
1974: The Supreme Court rules unanimously that President Nixon must surrender the Watergate tapes.
Birthdays today include: Simón Bolívar, revolutionary leader; Adolphe Adam, composer (Giselle); Robert Graves, poet and novelist (Good-bye to All That, I, Claudius); Zelda Fitzgerald, writer (Save Me the Waltz); John D. MacDonald, crime novelist behind the Travis McGee series; Amelia Earhart, aviation pioneer who vanished over the Pacific in 1937; Bella Abzug, congresswoman and activist; Lynda Carter, actress (Wonder Woman); H.R. McMaster, retired Army lieutenant general and former National Security Advisor; Kristin Chenoweth, actress and singer (Wicked); Jennifer Lopez, singer and actress; Rose Byrne, actress (Bridesmaids); Paul Ben-Victor, actor.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday!!
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Let's pick up where we left off yesterday, when I laid out the activities of the groups America is up against — and the uncomfortable fact that the enemy isn't massing at the border; it's already inside the walls.
So when, precisely, did the Left trade its “make love, not war” bumper stickers for a lineup that burns down cities, shoots political opponents in the back of the head, and openly calls for abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, jailing the rich, packing the Supreme Court, abolishing borders, abolishing ICE, and abolishing jails and law enforcement altogether — all in service of establishing communism?
Here's the uncomfortable answer: It never traded a blessed thing.
Understand me: This is who it's always been. Admittedly, I'm old enough to remember most of this stuff off the top of my head, but even for those who aren't, you don't even need to dig deep to find the receipts.
Trace it back to the 1960s. The radicalization inside the anti-war and civil rights movements wasn't a fringe glitch—it was the launchpad for Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and revolutionary communist factions that decided persuasion was for suckers and armed struggle against the state was the real agenda.
A few highlights, for anyone too young to remember:
The Weather Underground formed in 1969 as the Marxist-Leninist offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, with a stated goal of destroying “U.S. imperialism” and installing world communism through urban guerrilla warfare. Two of their greatest hits:
The Haymarket Statue Bombing (Oct. 6, 1969): The group detonated a bomb at the Police Memorial statue in Chicago.
The “Days of Rage” riots (Oct. 8-11, 1969): Hundreds of radicals smashed windows, torched cars, and brawled with police through downtown Chicago.
And don't forget the 1968 Democratic National Convention that was held in that same city, that same year. The party's fingerprints are all over the neighborhood.
There was also the moment the radical Left realized it had a ready-made army of pawns in the black community. Between 1967 and 1969, militant factions steeped in Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and anti-colonial theory staged armed ambushes and standoffs with law enforcement. In 1967, members of the Black Panther Party walked into the California State Capitol, carrying loaded firearms to protest gun control — a stunt that turned “public armed posture” into a permanent fixture of the movement's toolkit.
And this was never just an American problem. The same playbook was running worldwide:
The Naxalite Maoist insurgency (India, 1967): A communist uprising in West Bengal launched an armed campaign against landholders and the state, built on Mao's principles of peasant warfare.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1967): A Marxist-Leninist outfit that pioneered international aviation terrorism, including the 1968 hijacking of El Al Flight 426.
The Japanese Red Army (late 1960s): Radical student revolutionaries who moved from campus takeovers and bank robberies straight into hostage-taking and terrorism.
Historians still argue about how deep Soviet and Chinese fingerprints run underneath all of this. My read: They weren't absent. They were just better at covering their tracks. There was a complaint among American radicals at the time that Moscow and Beijing were too “timid” for serious revolutionary work. (Reality detachment, anyone?)
Eventually, either the paranoia wore off, or nobody cared about getting caught anymore. Probably the latter. The Soviets were directing the Communist Party USA by then, which had finally clawed its way out from under the Communist Control Act of 1954 and the Smith Act of 1940 — with an assist from the very Supreme Court the radicals wanted gone. Brandenburg v. Ohio, which I referenced yesterday and which protected speech that advocated for use of force or unlawful conduct in some cases, landed that same year: 1969. Funny how that worked out, isn't it?
Around then, the KGB rolled out what it called “active measures” — disinformation campaigns engineered to pour gasoline on domestic unrest. Forged documents. Fake letters attributed to the Ku Klux Klan or U.S. government agencies. Planted stories in international media designed to enrage black activists and torch what little trust remained in law enforcement.
Does all of that sound kinda familiar? It should. The Southern Poverty Law Center opened its doors in 1971 and got caught running a strikingly similar operation just recently, where it was uncovered that they were funding the Ku Klux Klan incidental to protests in Charlottesville, Va. I was in the area that week, having made a delivery just up the road on U.S. 29, and even to a casual observer, it was clear that there was some funny business I couldn't quite put my finger on. The feel of the thing was off.
Anyway, back to the '70s, by which time, the Soviets were getting more brazen about bankrolling international front groups like the World Peace Council, which organized anti-war conferences and shipped propaganda to Western protesters by the crate.
For a while, Moscow and Beijing actually competed for the loyalty of these radical groups. Up through about 1970, the USSR and the Chinese Communist Party were practically inseparable. When that alliance cracked and the two split ideologically, China tried to rebrand itself as the purer, more authentic communist option. Mao's Little Red Book became required reading for American radicals — the Black Panther Party bought copies wholesale and resold them on university campuses to fund gun purchases.
Chinese “people's war” theory went on to directly shape groups like the Progressive Labor Party, the Red Guard Party in San Francisco, and the militant wings of Students for a Democratic Society.
Beijing didn't stop at theory; it offered sanctuary and a stamp of legitimacy to prominent radical exiles. Activist Robert F. Williams spent the 1960s living in exile in Beijing, broadcasting radio messages back to the United States. Black Panther leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver made their own pilgrimages to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials. It took President Richard Nixon's push to normalize relations with the CCP to shut that pipeline down — or at least drive it back underground. So much for the claims of socialist purity. Making nice with Nixon was all about money. Domestic tensions cooled for a stretch after that.
Which brings us to right now, and here's where I'll level with you: This next part is informed speculation, not a courtroom filing.
Anyone paying attention to the news over the past few years knows Vladimir Putin and his fellow former KGB alumni have their hands full with problems of their own. Russian influence operations inside the U.S. are almost certainly stifled, if not totally dead in the water. That leaves China — which has spent this stretch quietly building up its military and rattling its sabre, particularly during the Biden years — as the more plausible hand on the wheel.
We haven't uncovered direct CCP funding of DSA activities. Yet. Let's recall, however, that it took years to uncover such activities in the '60s and '70s, so that lack should not be considered indicative of a lack of involvement. Also, consider that we do know Beijing funds and supports a parallel ecosystem of far-left organizations operating inside the United States.
The clearest example, surfaced by U.S. intelligence and investigative reporting — including a major 2023 New York Times investigation — centers on Neville Roy Singham, an American tech millionaire based in Shanghai. His network has drawn Senate scrutiny. Singham has run hundreds of millions of dollars through a web of nonprofits, shell corporations, and dark-money conduits into progressive, anti-war, and far-left causes, CODEPINK, BreakThrough News, and the People's Forum among them. Investigators found these outlets routinely promoting pro-Beijing talking points, defending CCP policy on the Uyghurs and Taiwan, and echoing Chinese state media almost word for word.
The Singham network goes out of its way to insist it's separate from the DSA.
Yeah, sure. Maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. Why doubt it? Because given that shady money laundering is basically the CCP's signature move, it's a stretch to believe not a single dollar of that river of cash has ever touched DSA hands. China has a lot riding on this, and assuming they're not hip deep in this stuff is foolish at least.
Beijing is also running online influence operations at scale, largely through social media — an effort intelligence analysts have nicknamed “Spamouflage."
For its part, the DSA's official foreign policy platform explicitly calls for ending U.S. “hegemony,” defunding the U.S. military, and lifting economic sanctions on foreign governments. Take a wild guess who benefits most from that particular wish list.
Now, if I have seemingly forgotten about Islam, and Iran particularly, trust me, I've not. I've already mentioned the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It's had its hand in up to the armpits for generations now, doing anything it can to choke off our influence in that region. China has been directly implicated in the recent conflict there.
Since the Feb. 28 strikes, China has focused on diplomatic mediation while Chinese companies have provided dual-use technology, such as missile parts and geospatial intelligence, to Iran. The U.S. has sanctioned Chinese companies for processing Iranian crude and allegedly providing satellite data to Iran to target U.S. and allied forces in the region. Understandably, China is highly dependent on Iranian oil and is in fact that country's largest trading partner. It has also avoided UN votes on resolutions condemning Iran for its strikes on its neighbors. From my vantage point, China's actions now amount to money, not ideology, since ideology is worthless without the money to implement it.
And there it is. Two columns deep into the anatomy of the modern American Left — and the hands that apparently are feeding it.
Previously: Communism-Socialism, Islam: How to Meet the Threats?
Thought for the Day: Somewhere between a shot of tequila and a call to a cousin you haven't spoken to in years lies the whole secret to self-care: Nobody ever regretted reaching out; they only regret waiting until the obituary to do it.
VIP members: OK, I've given you lots of discussion fodder over the last couple of days. Let's hear your thoughts in the always lively comments section. Your voice matters here. And hit the heart, if you would.
Take care today. Saturday is waiting. I'll see you then.
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