Greetings! Glad you're here. Today is Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2026. Sons, daughters, presidential jokes, and kinetic sand all sharing the calendar, which is a strange but oddly wholesome combination.
My calendar says it's Son's and Daughter's Day, Presidential Joke Day, Play In The Sand Day, Raspberry Bombe Day, Kinetic Sand Day, and Hip Hop Day. Call your kids, tell your worst presidential joke, dig your toes into some sand, and put on a little hip hop while you do it today. And by the way, the worst Presidential joke is Joe Biden. Always good for a laugh.
Today In History:
117 — Hadrian is proclaimed Roman emperor two days after the death of his predecessor, Trajan.
1919: Friedrich Ebert signs the Weimar Constitution into law, creating Germany's first parliamentary democracy.
1929: Babe Ruth becomes the first player in major league history to hit 500 career home runs, connecting off a pitch at League Park in Cleveland.
1943: German forces begin a six-day evacuation of Sicily after Allied troops under General George S. Patton drive them back.
1956: Painter Jackson Pollock, the leading figure of Abstract Expressionism, dies in a car accident.
1960: Chad gains independence from France after six decades of colonial rule — the very reason for today's Chad Independence Day.
1965: Race riots erupt in the Watts district of Los Angeles, ultimately killing 34 people over six days.
1973: DJ Kool Herc throws a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx, an evening widely credited as the birth of hip hop.
1984: President Ronald Reagan, testing a microphone before a radio address, jokingly announces he's "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever, we begin bombing in five minutes," a quip that leaks and briefly sparks international controversy.
1992: The Mall of America opens in Bloomington, Minn., eventually becoming the largest shopping mall in the United States.
Birthdays Today include: Steve Wozniak, computer engineer and co-founder of Apple Inc.; Alex Haley, author (Roots); Chris Hemsworth, actor (Thor, Extraction); Hulk Hogan, professional wrestler; and Jerry Falwell, religious broadcaster and political activist.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday — have a great one.
As an aside, the Perseid shower is supposed to peak tomorrow night, but really it should be worth the time to go out after midnight tonight and check out the sky, particularly if you live away from places of light pollution. We’re in luck, since this peak occurs during a new moon, meaning you have a better chance of seeing meteors as they fly by. I remember going out to a dark spot on the south shore of Lake Ontario about 30 miles out of Rochester to see them. And about one of five meteors you could actually hear rip through the atmosphere. They sizzle and pop like bacon in the pan, and they tend to echo, too. A surreal sound, really. Kinda like the first three seconds of the Safaris "Wipe Out." Tomorrow night is genuinely the one to prioritize if you only want to go out once. No equipment needed, just dark-adapted eyes (give it 15-20 minutes) and a wide open view of the sky. And have fun with it. It won't happen again until 2045.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
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There's a reason Democrats keep tripping over their own feet trying to put daylight between themselves and communism, and it isn't bad messaging. It's well-documented history — the kind of history that every educated person once absorbed as a matter of course before the 1960s radicals, who became 1990s college professors, decided (collectively, of course) that rigorous examinations of history were counterproductive. Indeed, I fully expect some Democratic Socialists of America to come roaring in here to correct me.
Let's start at the source, because the source settles this argument before it even gets started. In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx himself — not some hostile modern critic like me putting words in his mouth, but the man himself, in his own writing — laid out the sequence in black and white:
"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other."
Read that again, slowly, because the modern "democratic socialist" crowd would very much prefer you skim past it. Marx's own sequence runs: capitalism, then evolutionary transition, and finally, communist society.
Notice what's conspicuously absent from that chain? It's socialism as its own permanent, stable, comfortable destination — that isn't in there. It's a bridge, not a house. It’s a stepping stone toward communism, not the final, working utopia they claim.
Marx went on to split communist society itself into two stages. In the lower stage, distribution still tracks roughly to labor contributed — you get out what you put in, more or less. Only in the higher stage does Marx's most quoted line become achievable: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That's the finish line Marx was actually building toward. Everything before it is merely psychological scaffolding.
Here's the part that should genuinely embarrass anyone wearing the "Democratic Socialist" label today: Marx routinely used "socialism" and "communism" as interchangeable terms. He wasn't sloppy about vocabulary by accident — the two words meant essentially the same thing to him. The tidy modern notion of socialism as some cozy, permanent halfway house between capitalism and communism doesn't come from Marx at all. It comes later, mostly through Lenin, and gets sharpened further under what eventually becomes formal Marxist-Leninist theory. Trace the terminology honestly — Marx to Engels to Lenin — and the lineage gets far more precise than the DSA crowd would like you to notice.
So what happened? Socialism matured, as things always do. People spent a century running the experiment in country after country, and the bugs turned out not to be bugs — they turned out to be the actual operating system. That system had several agonizingly familiar features: gulags, breadlines, secret police, failing economies, and brutal suppression. It was demonstrated in countries all over the globe, spanning the full alphabet, from Albania to Zimbabwe, which this column has already walked through just a few days ago.
Related: Socialism's Perfect Failure Record Is Worth Recalling in the Voting Booth
Faced with that mountain of evidence, the "Democratic Socialists" didn't abandon the ideology. They infected our places of higher learning, probably with foreign help. They hired a better PR firm. They rebranded, slapped a friendlier coat of red paint on the same chassis, and started insisting their version is somehow different — gentler, more “democratic,” allergic to the gulag gene that apparently infected every single one of its predecessors (purely by coincidence, of course).
Here's the problem with that sales pitch, and it's not a subtle one: You can rebrand a shark all you like. Give it a friendlier name ("Brucie" sounds about right — remember him from Finding Nemo?). Give the shark a softer logo, a spokesperson with better hair.
It's still got the same teeth, the same appetite, and the same complete inability to stop consuming everything in front of it once it gets the chance. You can chant "Fish are friends, not food" all you like, but in the end, the natural proclivities take over. You don't get to change a shark's fundamental nature with a marketing campaign, and you don't get to change socialism's fundamental nature — an ideology Marx himself designed as nothing more than a waystation toward something even more total — namely, communism — by calling it "democratic" and hoping nobody bothers to open the actual source material.
I’m telling you the truth: Most of the people claiming membership in the Democratic Socialists of America have never actually read Marx. Else they didn’t understand its implications. Else perhaps they're just trying to hide from us what they really want, eh?
Figuring this out takes about ten minutes and a link anyone can click for themselves. I provided the link to that source material — Marx himself — above. That should tell you something about how much the rebrand relies on nobody checking.
Thought for the Day: A block party in the Bronx and a constitution in Weimar both promised something built to last — only one of them actually did, and it wasn't the one with the government behind it.
VIP Members: It's your turn. I say this without shame: Your comments make this column what it is. Your voice matters. Go to it.
Take care today, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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