Greetings! Welcome to Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026 — peaches, petroleum, and rock-paper-scissors all sharing the calendar today, which is about as random a trio as this column's seen all month.
My calendar says it's Just Because Day, Peach Day, Pots de Crème Day, Kiss Me Day, Petroleum Day, Rock Paper Scissors Day, and Tarzan Day. Eat a peach just because, kiss somebody, settle an argument with rock-paper-scissors instead of yelling, and give a nod to the petroleum industry — without it, half this column's readers wouldn't have a truck to drive today.
Today In History:
1776: British forces defeat George Washington's army at the Battle of Long Island, the largest engagement of the entire Revolutionary War, forcing a nighttime retreat that narrowly saves the Continental Army from total destruction.
1859: Edwin Drake drills the first successful commercial oil well in the United States near Titusville, Pennsylvania, launching the American petroleum industry — the very reason for today's Petroleum Day.
1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs' jungle hero first swings into print in All-Story Magazine with "Tarzan of the Apes" — the very reason for today's Tarzan Day.
1928: Fifteen nations sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact in Paris, formally renouncing war as an instrument of national policy — a pledge that proves tragically unenforceable within a decade.
1939: The Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet-powered aircraft, makes its maiden flight in Germany.
1941: Nazi and Ukrainian auxiliary forces execute an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 people, mostly Jewish and Roma civilians, over two days near Kamianets-Podilskyi, one of the largest single massacres of the early Holocaust.
1955: The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records is published in Great Britain, born from a barroom argument about the fastest game bird in Europe that nobody could settle.
1962: NASA launches Mariner 2, which later that year becomes the first spacecraft in history to successfully fly by another planet, Venus.
1991: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania win international recognition as independent states after decades of forced Soviet occupation.
2003: Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in almost 60,000 years, a rare celestial alignment that draws stargazers worldwide.
Birthdays today include: Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th president; Mother Teresa, nun, humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize laureate; Paul Reubens, actor/comedian (Pee-wee's Playhouse); Chandra Wilson, actor (Grey's Anatomy).
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday. Make it a good one.
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Let's start with one of my axioms. It plays a large role in this discussion. "The purpose of government, any government, should be to nurture, protect, and, if possible, extend the influence of the culture that gave it life."
That's an axiom I've leaned on in more than a few columns over the past year, and it's worth keeping front and center for what follows, because Michigan's newest Democrat Senate nominee just gave us a textbook case study in what happens when a candidate is actively working toward the exact opposite. Let's examine a New York Post piece from a few days ago:
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed got extremely personal with Fox News host Jesse Watters on Monday — asking if he is circumcised — during a bizarre defense of sex change surgery for minors.
"Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?" El-Sayed bluntly asked the "Jesse Watters Primetime" host, after arguing that the government shouldn't get involved in transgender medical procedures for children.
Watters was floored by the question.
"Jesse, are you?" El-Sayed pressed.
"Yeah, yeah, but I mean, that's a personal question — doctor," Watters responded.
El-Sayed, seemingly convinced that he ended the debate with Watters, suggested: "You probably should want to move on."
"Circumcision is different than castration!" Watters fired back.
Undeterred, El-Sayed argued that it's a "problem" that Watters believes the government should step in to outlaw sex change surgeries for minors but not circumcisions.
"I'm just saying that yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid's ding-a-ling," the former public health official told Watters. "So if you really want to bring that up, you can ... I just think you guys are really selective about these things."
Watters described El-Sayed's position as "wacky" and "sick."
"Abdul, Michigan's not going for that. That is sick stuff," he said.
I see our Matt Margolis has already touched on this. Watters is entirely, unquestionably correct here. Let's dig into exactly why, because the "why" here matters a lot more than the soundbite.
El-Sayed's little rhetorical stunt — trying to equate circumcision with irreversible pediatric gender-transition surgery, as though they're remotely the same category of medical intervention — isn't just a debate tactic that fell flat on live television. It's a position that lands squarely as anti-Jewish, and by extension anti-Western culture generally, given how deeply that particular practice is woven into Judeo-Christian religious tradition and has been for well over four thousand years.
El-Sayed understands the relationship between government and culture completely, as my axiom lays out. He knows very well indeed that his cause needs to tear down Western civilization, and what he needs to do to accomplish that. It's what he's doing.
Comparing a religious covenant that millions of families observe in good faith to elective surgical intervention on a confused, prepubescent child isn't a clever "gotcha." It's a deliberate attempt to drag a sacred, ancient practice down to the level of something controversial, purely to muddy the waters around something that genuinely deserves scrutiny.
Here's the pattern worth noticing, because it's not isolated to this one exchange: this is practically the only position the modern far left holds with any real confidence these days. Push them on literally anything substantive — the budget, healthcare costs, foreign policy, crime — and watch the answers evaporate into fog. But hand them a chance to relitigate gender ideology on national television, and suddenly they've got a script memorized and ready to fire.
The Fox host followed up by asking El-Sayed if he was in favor of "boys playing in girls' sports," which irritated the Senate hopeful. "You have not asked me one time about the issues that people actually care about in Michigan," he said.
"You can play this game if you want," El-Sayed fumed. "I just want to understand what you're getting at here."
"I'm getting at whether you think men should play in women's sports ... it's a big issue," Watters asked again.
El-Sayed dodged the question, arguing: "At the end of the day, the decision of who gets to play what sports ought to be decided by the people who govern sports."
He then called it "insane" that Watters would pose him such a question.
"I'm running for U.S. Senate," he said. "Jesse, this is insane."
Earlier in the interview, El-Sayed refused to say how much his proposal to socialize the healthcare system would cost; would not answer a question about the size of the US budget; and declined to explain why he allegedly suggested the "NFL was racist."
Notice the tell in real time: the moment Watters asked a plain, one-sentence question any Michigan voter could understand — Namely, “should men compete in women's sports, yes or no?”
El-Sayed didn't answer it. He punted the entire question to "the people who govern sports," as though a sitting U.S. senator has no opinion on basic fairness in athletics and no business forming one. Compare that dodge to how eagerly, how enthusiastically, he leaped at the chance to ask a cable news host about his genitals. One question got a five-second deflection. The other got a full performance.
That contrast tells you everything. He'll fight you tooth and nail on gender ideology because that's the one hill his coalition actually agreed to die on. Ask him what his healthcare plan costs, how big the federal budget is, or why he's slandered an entire professional sports league as racist, and the man goes suddenly, conveniently silent.
Irony abounds here, because with stones like that, El-Sayed could play in the WNBA. Except in that case, he'd be wearing a burka.
Look, gang, it comes down to this: to actually implement their, ahem, unique ideology, the Left has to tear down the foundational cultural values of the West first, brick by brick, tradition by tradition. Circumcision is just today's brick. Tomorrow it'll be something else. The target keeps rotating. The attempts at demolition will never stop, so long as they keep being given an opportunity to spew.
Thought for the Day: Fifteen nations signed a pact in 1928 solemnly renouncing war forever, and within eleven years the whole promise was rubble. This historical tidbit is my answer to those who still somehow believe that any problems get solved by government passing a resolution.
VIP Members: Your turn. Let's hear from you in the comments section because your voice matters here.
Have a great day today, people. When you come back tomorrow, bring a friend, will you? I'll see you then.
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