Hello, and welcome to Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026 — a day for wiggling your toes, floating some root beer, and remembering the weight of what happened on this date in 1945.
My calendar says it's Wiggle Your Toes Day, Root Beer Float Day, Fresh Breath Day, Balloons to Heaven Day, Farmworker Appreciation Day, and Family Day. Wiggle your toes, pour a root beer float, brush your teeth, and call your family — the balloons can wait until evening.
Today In History:
1819: Norwich University is founded in Vermont, becoming the first private military school in the United States.
1901: Kiowa reservation lands in Oklahoma are opened to white settlement, effectively dissolving tribal lands in favor of individual allotments.
1914: German U-boats leave their base at Heligoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea, days after Britain declares war on Germany.
1926: American swimmer Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel, beating the existing men's record by nearly two hours.
1930: New York judge Joseph Crater steps into a taxi in Manhattan and is never seen again, becoming one of the most famous unsolved disappearances in American history.
1942: Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands becomes the first reigning queen to address a joint session of Congress, rallying support for Allied forces while her own country lives under Nazi occupation.
1945: The United States drops the atomic bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan, killing roughly 70,000 people instantly, with tens of thousands more dying in the following years from burns and radiation sickness.
1960: Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property across the island, including oil refineries, sugar mills, and mines, prompting the U.S. to sever diplomatic ties and impose sanctions.
1962: Jamaica gains full independence from Britain, the very reason for today's Jamaica Independence Day.
1965: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law, banning discriminatory voting practices nationwide.
1991: Tim Berners-Lee makes the World Wide Web publicly available for the first time, quietly launching the internet age as we know it.
1997: Apple announces a $150 million investment from rival Microsoft, a lifeline that helps keep the struggling company afloat.
Birthdays Today include: Lucille Ball, actor, comedian (I Love Lucy); Andy Warhol, pop artist; Robert Mitchum, actor (Cape Fear, Out of the Past); M. Night Shyamalan, director (The Sixth Sense, Signs); Geri Halliwell, singer from the Spice Girls; Vera Farmiga, actor (Bates Motel, The Conjuring); and Soleil Moon Frye, actor (Punky Brewster).
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday — enjoy your day.
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There's a story making the rounds in the European press right now, and it's starting to gain real traction among YouTubers here in the States, too. It's worth your attention — not because it's fake, but because of what's conspicuously missing from it.
The headline version goes like this: Educated, professional French Muslims — not new immigrants, mind you, but the French-born children of immigrants, people who grew up speaking French, attended French schools, built French careers — are quietly packing up and leaving for London, Dubai, Montreal, and yes, New York.
So who's actually telling this story? A researcher named Julien Talpin has spent years documenting it, surveying over a thousand French Muslims living abroad and conducting 140 in-depth interviews for a book with the on-the-nose title France, You Love It But You Leave. Outlets from France24 to TRT World to Arab News have covered the phenomenon since at least 2024, calling it a "silent exodus" and a "brain drain."
Some of the individual stories genuinely land. One business-school graduate, rejected from fifty consulting interviews despite solid qualifications, finally gave up and moved to Dubai. "I feel much better here," he told AFP. "We're all equal. You can have a boss who's Indian, Arab, or French." Another interviewee, a tech worker pulling a five-figure monthly salary, described still getting stopped by neighbors after two years living in the same Paris apartment building, and asked what exactly he was doing inside it.
I won't tell you those stories are fabricated. They're not. Stretched, maybe, here and there — but not invented. And there's a real number backing at least part of this up: France's own Interior Ministry recorded a 32% year-over-year jump in Islamophobic incidents in 2021 — a government figure, not an activist talking point. Worth noting in the same breath, because context matters: antisemitic attacks in France fell 15% that same year. Draw your own conclusions about which direction French public sentiment actually leans.
So the trend is real. Here's where the story needs a much harder second look: Nobody actually knows how big this is — and the researchers quietly admit this themselves.
France maintains a legal ban on collecting ethnic or religious data in its census. That's a deliberate feature of French secularism, not an oversight, and it means there's no hard count of how many Muslims have left the country, or how that stacks up against any other group leaving for the same reasons people always leave anywhere — better pay, better opportunity, a fresh start. Talpin's own estimate, when pressed, puts departures "in the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands" over recent years. Take the generous end of that range against France's Muslim population, conservatively estimated at 5 to 6 million people, and you're looking at a fraction of a single percent choosing to relocate. That's not nothing. It's also nowhere near the mass "exodus" the headlines are selling.
And here's the part that should bother you more than the underlying story: Look at exactly who's telling the tale.
Arab News. TRT World — Turkish state media, hardly a neutral party on questions of Islam and the West. Jacobin. Get The Trolls Out, an openly advocacy-driven outlet. Every single source pushing this narrative comes from the same ideological lane. That doesn't make the discrimination these individuals describe imaginary. It does mean you're getting one interpretation of the data, from outlets with an obvious stake in that interpretation, without a single dissenting voice anywhere in the coverage. A hundred and forty interviews conducted, and apparently not one French Muslim who stayed pushed back on the "Islamophobic" framing or offered a competing theory for why the numbers look the way they do.
Because France has a much bigger, much better documented brain drain problem — one that spans every demographic, driven by tax rates that would make an American accountant weep and a job market that's stayed sclerotic for a generation. High earners of every background have been fleeing France for London and beyond for decades. Nobody writes "silent exodus" pieces about French Catholics or French atheists doing precisely the same thing for precisely the same economic reasons. Let a Muslim professional do it, though, and suddenly the story demands a religious explanation, even when a purely economic one sits in plain view.
Then there's laïcité itself — France's foundational secularism principle, restricting religious symbols and dress in public and professional life. Watch how every piece of the coverage treats it: as functionally synonymous with anti-Muslim discrimination. But laïcité, on paper and by design, applies neutrally to every faith — crosses, kippahs, hijabs, all of it banned equally in the same public spaces. You can absolutely argue laïcité lands harder in practice on visibly religious Muslim women than on anyone else, and that's a fair, serious policy argument worth having openly. What you can't honestly do is collapse "France enforces a religiously neutral public sphere, as it has for over a century" into "France is Islamophobic," without admitting you're relitigating a century-old church-state debate and rebranding it as fresh bigotry.
Now, my actual conclusion on all this: I think the underlying story is genuine, and I also think the people amplifying it are playing it for exactly the angle that suits them. The outlets driving this narrative have an obvious dog in the fight, and that alone should raise real credibility questions. Just as telling, though, is who's staying quiet. The French government — particularly the globalist wing that's spent years selling multiculturalism to a skeptical French electorate — has said remarkably little about any of this. They don't want to entertain the economic explanation, because acknowledging it would mean confessing that their own policies drove these people out. It's easier, politically, to let the discrimination narrative run unchallenged than to own the failures, both in terms of financial and cultural management, underneath it.
There's one more piece nobody involved — not the Muslim-advocacy outlets pushing the exodus story, not the French government staying silent about it — wants to bring up too often. France, like the rest of Europe right now, is on edge over its relationship with Muslim migrants, and it isn't hard to see why. Just last week, a man stabbed three women in central Paris and told police he'd been "sent by Allah" to do it. That came on the heels of a van attack in Berlin's Tiergarten Park that killed one person and injured 29 others at the city's Pride celebration. German authorities have officially classified it as an Islamist terror attack, carried out by a 21-year-old previously known to the system for radicalization. Two separate countries, two separate attacks, within weeks of each other. The outlets driving the "exodus" narrative call the backlash to incidents like these "Islamophobia." I'd push back on that label right at the door: A public growing wary after a string of attacks explicitly invoking religious justification isn't manufacturing a phobia out of thin air. It's pattern recognition, and pretending otherwise insults the intelligence of anyone paying attention.
Recommended: Islam and the Hard Choices
None of this is new territory for this column. It's the same shape we caught with the Mamdani "30%" question a few weeks back — a real data point, given a single interpretation by people with an obvious interest in that interpretation while readers get left assuming that's the only honest way to read it. Worth asking every time this pattern shows up: Who decided this was the only lens on offer, and what happened to everyone who might've offered a different one?
The people leaving France deserve to be believed about their own experiences. France deserves an honest accounting of why they're going — one that includes economics, opportunity, a century of secular tradition, and yes, a legitimate public reckoning with a real and rising security threat. Not just the one word doing all the work in every headline covering it.
Every one of these issues traces back to the same misguided notion that mass migration into the West, with no requirement and no real effort to culturally assimilate, carries no consequence. It does. In every European nation, native populations are speaking up, loudly, and their own governments are working overtime to tamp those protests down rather than listen to them. Look at France's efforts to sideline Marine Le Pen through the courts. Look at Britain's treatment of Tommy Robinson.
Le Pen carries real support from French voters precisely because she's become an embarrassment to her own government's establishment. Robinson carries the same kind of support in Britain, for the same reason, on the other side of the Channel. And those are just the loudest examples that make it into the American press. The respective governments have as much blame for twisting the story as any other player in this sordid mess.
Thought of the Day: If I had a dollar for every intelligent comment that came from The View, I'd have maybe 50 cents.
VIP members: Hit that heart, and depose yourself in the comments. Your voice matters.
Take care today, gang. I'll see you tomorrow.
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