Hello and welcome, dear reader, to Friday, July 31, 2026 — the last day of the month, and system admins everywhere get their one day of glory. Since I used to be a sysadmin (at a bank, no less), I’ll raise my coffee mug to sysadmins everywhere.
My calendar says it's Mutt's Day, Avocado Day, Raspberry Cake Day, System Administrator Appreciation Day, Get Gnarly Day, Talk In An Elevator Day, Cotton Candy Day, Jump For Jelly Beans Day, Shredded Wheat Day, Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day, and World Ranger Day. Buy a bag of avocados, thank your sysadmin, and try not to say anything weird to strangers in elevators — you've got a full plate before the month's over.
Today in History:
1556: St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, dies in Rome.
1777: The Marquis de Lafayette, just 19 years old, is made a major general in the Continental Army.
1790: The first U.S. patent is granted, to Samuel Hopkins for his improved potash-making process.
1875: Andrew Johnson, the 17th president, dies in Carter Station, Tenn., at age 66.
1919: Germany's National Assembly adopts the Weimar Constitution.
1941: Hermann Göring orders Reinhard Heydrich to draft a comprehensive plan for what the Nazi regime called the "final solution."
1945: Pierre Laval, premier of the Vichy government, surrenders to American authorities in Austria; France later tries and executes him.
1948: President Truman helps dedicate New York International Airport at Idlewild Field, later renamed the John F. Kennedy International Airport.
1964: The unmanned probe Ranger 7 transmits the first close-up pictures of the moon before crashing into its surface.
1970: The Royal Navy ends its centuries-old daily rum ration for sailors, citing problems with drunkenness aboard ship.
1971: Apollo 15 astronauts take a six-hour joyride across the lunar surface in their electric rover.
1972: Democratic vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdraws from the ticket with George McGovern after disclosures of past psychiatric treatment.
1991: President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign the START treaty in Moscow, agreeing to major cuts in long-range nuclear arsenals.
Birthdays Today include: J.K. Rowling, novelist (Harry Potter); Wesley Snipes, actor (Blade, White Men Can't Jump); Mark Cuban, entrepreneur businessman (Shark Tank); Dean Cain, actor (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman); Evonne Goolagong Cawley, tennis Hall of Famer; Zac Brown, country singer (Zac Brown Band); Milton Friedman, economist and Nobel laureate; Bill Berry, drummer for R.E.M.; and Rico Rodriguez, actor (Modern Family).
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday! You’re sharing your day with the inventor of Quidditch, and that’s nice.
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Another data point for the file marked "the party that never stops accusing Republicans of Nazi sympathies has an actual, ongoing Jewish safety problem of its own," from The Daily Wire yesterday:
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — Jewish, elected statewide, twice, announced Thursday she's skipping her own party's convention next month. Not because of a scheduling conflict. Because she's afraid of what her own party's activists will do to her in the room.
Speaking at a roundtable with Jewish community leaders, Nessel didn't hedge: "I feel like my presence isn't going to be welcome. I don't want to get chased around. I don't want to get harassed. I don't want to get yelled and screamed at. I don't want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I'm saying. And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it's been happening to me."
Read that again.
This is a sitting state attorney general, describing her own party's convention the way you'd describe a 1930s Berlin neighborhood you avoid after dark, and doing it two weeks after a bitter Senate primary that's split her party wide open over Israel and antisemitism.
The same party that spends its evenings warning you about brownshirts in red hats while ignoring its own Senate candidate sporting an actual Nazi tattoo can't guarantee one of its own statewide officeholders a booth at the convention without her fearing an anti-semitic mob. Michigan Democrats are acting as if their only problem with Hitler was he didn't finish the job.
Glenn Reynolds noted this same story yesterday, and asks a pointed question: Why are any Jews still Democrats?
After all, the problem cited by Nessel is hardly an isolated one. There's no shortage of history on which to judge these matters.
Perhaps some of you will not remember the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. After that incident, the rhetoric from the left was that President Trump was to blame. But what all too often got missed in that case is that the shooter, then 46-year-old Robert Bowers, stated flatly in his social media accounts that he believed Trump was part of the Jewish conspiracy he imagines controls America. In the words of National Review's Karol Markowicz at the time:
Bowers was explicit in his dislike of the president, saying he did not vote for him and had never ‘owned, worn or even touched‘ a (Make America Great Again) hat.” Challenging the media narrative that President Trump praised Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017, Bowers agreed with another extremist that the president had “betrayed” right-wing radical protesters by “comparing them with a violent mob."
It's worth noting that the Rabbi at the Tree Of Life received several death threats for suggesting that Trump would be welcome at the memorial service.
More recently, I've already brushed up against the Platner issue and commented extensively in previous columns. Consider, though, that Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoralty with only 30% of the Jewish vote—a number that would've been unthinkable for a Democrat in that city a generation ago. And by the way, who are these 30%? That's a column unto itself, I think.
Before someone starts in on me, let's completely shatter the absolute lie that nobody dares to question, that this antisemitism we see today was ever a rightward swing. Let me make this crystal-clear:
The Nazi movement was never a right-wing concept or ideal. This isn't some petty branding problem; it is a foundational historical fact.
Right out of the gate, early Nazi economic rhetoric violently attacked capitalism, big business, and "interest slavery," shamelessly pandering directly to the working class. Under ideological architects like Gottfried Feder, Hitler's economic program demanded the nationalization of trusts, mandatory profit-sharing, radical land reform, and the destruction of department stores — these are genuinely redistributive, heavy-handed, statist positions.
The regime forged a monstrous, centralized state that dictated production quotas, locked down wages, and froze prices through the Four Year Plan. That is total, suffocating state control of the economy — the exact same heavy-handed levers that socialist states pull. Indeed, explain to us how this is any different from what the Democrat party of today is selling us.
Again, though, there's a good deal of misdirection going on with these things. What we're dealing with is nothing less than the war between socialism and capitalism, with the socialists calling themselves Democrats, while dressed up in their antisemitic skin suits. This is hardly a new perception, but it is one that tends to be brushed aside all too easily.
You might not know the name of August Bebel, a German socialist leader, who in the late 1890's coined the phrase "antisemitism is the socialism of fools." He warned at the time that economic resentment against capitalism kept getting redirected at Jews as convenient stand-ins for "capital" rather than at capitalism itself. Now again, Bebel was a socialist, but he made my point for me 60 years before I was even born. No wild-eyed right-winger, he. I also would point to the Soviet Union, which ran real, documented antisemitic campaigns that were, in reality, anti-capitalist and anti-cosmopolitan ("rootless cosmopolitan") purges under Stalin, the Doctors' Plot, and, after 1967, state-sponsored anti-Zionism, casting Israel as a colonial-capitalist outpost. The connection between antisemitism and anti-capitalism cannot be denied.
As evidence of this connection still existing today, I note that the Democrats don't seem to much mind the Jews so long as they vote Democrat. Like for example, the 30% who voted for Mamdani. I've seen that statistic cited several times as "proof" that the Democrats don't have a problem with Jews, which of course is utter nonsense.
OK, now you've got something to think about.
Thought for the Day: Every ideology promises it will finally treat people as individuals — and every ideology, sooner or later, finds a group it prefers to treat as a symbol instead.
VIP members: Let's hear from you in the comments.
Take care today, my friends. The future of your loved ones depends on it. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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