Greets, and welcome to Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026 — bacon, hazy IPAs, and mosquitoes all sharing the calendar, which feels like an oddly accurate summary of a Midwestern summer evening.
My calendar says it's Bacon Lovers Day, Hazy IPA Day, Accessible Air Travel Day, Chocolate Pecan Pie Day, Mosquito Day, and — being a Ham radio operator and a recovering DJ, my personal favorite — Radio Day. Fry up some bacon, crack open a hazy IPA, slice into a pecan pie, and swat at whatever's been biting you all week — the mosquito gets nothing today, and frankly it's earned that snub. And of course, when it’s time to relax, sit back and speak to the world via Ham radio.
Today In History:
1866: President Andrew Johnson formally proclaims the Civil War officially over, a full year after fighting had actually stopped.
1910: The Great Fire of 1910, known as the "Big Blowup," tears through roughly three million acres across Idaho, Montana, and Washington in just two catastrophic days.
1920: Detroit radio station 8MK, later WWJ, airs what's widely considered the first commercially licensed radio news broadcast in the country — the very reason for today's Radio Day. They're still there, on 950 AM, running 50,000 watts in a six-tower directional pattern that goes mostly north out of Detroit from their site on Haggerman Road.
1940: Exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally attacked with an ice axe by a Soviet agent at his home in Mexico City; he dies the following day.
1953: The Soviet Union announces it has successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.
1968: Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia overnight to crush the liberalizing reforms of the Prague Spring.
1975: NASA launches the Viking 1 spacecraft on its mission to orbit and eventually land on Mars.
1988: A ceasefire takes effect, ending the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, one of the deadliest conflicts of the 20th century.
1988: "Black Saturday" strikes Yellowstone National Park as high winds drive that summer's wildfires to the edge of the Old Faithful area, the worst single day of the massive 1988 fire season.
1998: The United States launches cruise missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, in retaliation for the East Africa embassy bombings two weeks earlier.
Birthdays Today include: H.P. Lovecraft, author (The Call of Cthulhu); N.R. Narayana Murthy, entrepreneur, co-founder of Infosys; Dimebag Darrell, guitarist (Pantera); and Demi Lovato, singer, actor (Camp Rock).
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday!.
* * *
For over a decade now, we've been lectured from certain quarters about just how racist the Republican Party supposedly is. By some of the more breathless accounts, the GOP ranks as the most racist political party in American history — and, naturally, by extension, Donald Trump gets crowned the most racist president in American history right alongside it. We've heard this so often it's practically become furniture in the national conversation. Nobody even bothers arguing it anymore. They just state it, like the weather.
Enter Byron Donalds.
He's the man pictured above. He's also, as of yesterday, the official Republican nominee for governor of Florida — winning outright with roughly 48% of the vote in an eleven-candidate field, crushing his nearest rival, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, by a full 23 points. And he did it with the enthusiastic, early, and very public endorsement of that supposedly most-racist-president-in-history, Donald Trump, who backed Donalds before the man had even officially entered the race.
One more detail worth sitting with, because it makes the whole "party of racists" narrative even harder to swallow: should Donalds win in November — and current polling already has him leading Democrat nominee David Jolly 45% to 38% — he'll become Florida's first black governor. Ever. In the state's entire history. Delivered courtesy of the party we're incessantly told can't stomach the sight of him.
I tell you, something isn't adding up here. Florida is about as reliably red as states come these days — by the left's own logic, that should make it one of the most hostile, most racist states in the entire Union. And yet here we are, watching that same overwhelmingly red electorate hand a black congressman a blowout primary win, powered in large part by the very president they insist is the problem.
Either the single most powerful figure in the Republican Party just handed his earliest, loudest, most consequential endorsement of the entire election cycle to a black man running to shatter a 200-year ceiling in one of the largest states in the country — or the "most racist party in history" narrative has been running on fumes and repetition for a decade, propped up less by evidence than by the simple fact that nobody in polite media company has ever been willing to ask an obvious follow-up question.
What we're watching unfold in real time is the entire GOP-racism narrative quietly collapsing, live, under its own weight. I hope to make it a somewhat less quiet demise, because that matters.
And honestly, none of this should shock anyone who's paying attention, because it's not remotely new territory for the Republican Party. Remember who actually nominated Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in the first place — a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, elevating a black conservative to the nation's highest court over three decades ago. Now recall, while we're being honest, exactly who's spent years openly agitating for Thomas's removal from that same bench. Go on, guess. It's the identical crowd currently hoarse from screaming about Republican racism.
And let's not forget who stood in front of the entire country and announced, with zero hesitation and zero shame, that if you didn't vote for him, you "ain't black." That wasn't some anonymous troll or a fringe blogger nobody's heard of. It was Joe Biden, May 2020, on The Breakfast Club radio show in New York City. Biden told host Charlamagne Tha God flatly, "If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black." About as direct an example of a Democrat conditioning racial identity on party loyalty as exists on record.
However, it’s hardly unique by anyone's stretched imagination. And it seems the farther left one goes, the more racist one becomes. Michigan progressive House candidate William Lawrence got caught on a 2024 podcast accusing black lawmakers of serving as "a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power" — essentially attacking black political leaders for insufficient ideological purity. He later called his own words "clumsy" and claimed they were "taken out of context."
So sure, keep telling me about the GOP being a racist party. I'll be over here, watching the actual receipts pile up on the other side of the ledger.
I could keep going — Booker versus Biden, Michigan's own progressive candidates turning on black lawmakers for insufficient purity — the list runs longer than any single column has room for. We're already running long here, and I suspect you've gotten the point by now. In any event, I’m quite sure this won't be the last time I write about this particular double standard. Democrats, being Democrats, will keep supplying fresh material for as long as I'm still able to write about them.
I'd love to think a moment like this — Byron Donalds standing one election away from becoming Florida's first black governor, backed to the hilt by the very party supposedly incapable of stomaching him — might finally put an end to the Democrats' long-running theater over GOP racism. I really would.
But I'm too much of a realist to go hunting for that particular fantasy in my stocking this Christmas. I'm quite sure we will be revisiting this theme even in the near future. It's all the Democrats have left.
Thought for the Day: Andrew Johnson declared the Civil War over a full year after the shooting had already stopped — proof that governments are often the last to officially notice what everyone else already knows is true.
VIP members: Let’s hear your thoughts on Today’s topic. We’re counting on you.
Be careful today, gang. You’re more fragile than you realize. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Recommended: Eric's Daily: Power to the People Needs Government Approval First
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