Greets! Welcome to Saturday, Aug. 29, 2026. Chop suey, lemon juice, and playing by the rules all sharing the calendar today, the 241st day of the year.
My calendar says it's Lemon Juice Day, Chop Suey Day, According to Hoyle Day, and Sport Sampling Day. Squeeze some lemon into something, order chop suey for lunch, play a card game by the actual rules for once, and try a sport you've never touched before — Edmond Hoyle would be proud of at least one of those choices.
Today In History:
1758: The first American Indian reservation in the colonies is established at Indian Mills, N.J.
1862: The Second Battle of Bull Run begins in Virginia, ending three days later in a decisive Confederate victory under Robert E. Lee.
1877: The U.S. Treasury Department forms the Bureau of Engraving and Printing specifically to print the nation's newly issued paper currency.
1949: The Soviet Union successfully detonates its first nuclear weapon, known as "First Lightning" or Joe 1, ending the American atomic monopoly years ahead of Western intelligence estimates.
1955: The U.S. Air Force Academy opens in Colorado Springs, Colo., with its first class of 306 cadets graduating a year later.
1963: Wendell Scott becomes the first African American driver to win a NASCAR Cup Series race, taking the Jacksonville 200.
1997: Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings found Netflix as an internet DVD rental service, years before the company pivots to streaming.
2003: Skype Technologies releases its peer-to-peer video-calling software, technology Microsoft later acquires and folds into Teams.
2005: Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, becoming one of the costliest and deadliest hurricanes in American history.
Birthdays Today include Michael Jackson, singer ("Thriller," "Bad"); Ingrid Bergman, actor (Casablanca); Richard Attenborough, actor, director (Gandhi, Jurassic Park); Temple Grandin, author, animal behaviorist, autism advocate.
* * *
As we've seen plenty of times before, the more radical elements of the Democrat Party go to enormous lengths to repackage themselves as "mainstream" as we get closer to election time. The wild radicals tend to mute themselves.
As predictable as that is, I have to tell you that in the 50 or so years I've been watching this kind of thing, the delta between the mainstream and the Democrats has never been wider. It's to the point now where even the Democrats themselves are having problems with it. Exhibit A is Abdul El-Sayed, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:
Abdul El-Sayed's latest ads showcase his Michigan roots, including his stepmother's white Presbyterian parents and a photo from his suburban high-school football days.
For Michigan's Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, a central challenge heading to the midterms is convincing people his progressive politics are compatible with the mainstream in a purple state and that his Muslim faith shouldn't be a barrier to winning.
A white Presbyterian stepmother's parents. A suburban football photo. That's not a platform, that's a costume change, and a fairly transparent one at that.
First, worth noting up front: even the supposedly "mainstream" wing of today's Democrat Party — assuming such a thing still meaningfully exists — sits well to the left of where the actual American electorate lives. That's always been true. So El-Sayed has an enormous task ahead of him just to convince anyone that his values line up comfortably with mainstream anything, outside the boundaries of heavily Islamic Dearborn.
The last few days have handed us a case study in exactly how uncomfortable that task has gotten. El-Sayed just tossed Hasan Piker under the bus — and I do mean "just." On August 24, after Piker suggested on livestream that American Jews who support Israel risk inviting violence against themselves, El-Sayed rushed out a statement distancing himself from the very streamer whose audience helped power him through his primary. His Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, didn't let the moment pass quietly, calling Piker El-Sayed's "running mate" and posting: "If Abdul El-Sayed had any courage at all, he would call this out and disavow Hasan Piker once and for all. We're waiting, Abdul…"
Yeah. And we're still waiting, really.
Here's the part that should embarrass everyone involved: this is not by any means new information suddenly surfacing about Piker. Back in April, El-Sayed was already getting grilled on Fox & Friends about appearing alongside Piker, and his answer then was breezy dismissal: "[Just] because you appear with somebody, doesn't mean you agree with them on everything." A day later, pressed again on whether he'd disavow Piker's greatest hits — including comments excusing 9/11 — El-Sayed refused outright, snapping instead: "I'm not here to disavow people's views... This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture, I thought we were over it."
So in April, disavowing Piker was "cancel culture" and a "gotcha game."
However, by August, once Piker's rhetoric predictably got more antisemitic, with Michigan Democrats such as Rep. Hillary Scholten publicly calling Piker "a hack who thrives on hate," suddenly El-Sayed found his courage. Funny how that timeline works. Even his own party's strategists saw this coming — Democratic strategist Tré Easton posted bluntly: "The most predictable thing in the world was that Piker would inevitably become a serious liability in a general election."
We're apparently supposed to forget El-Sayed spent months building his youth appeal specifically by leaning on Piker's platform, right up until it became a political liability rather than an asset. An important question that even Easton isn't asking: What values that Piker has been spewing does El-Sayed still support?
Mixed into all of this is a line El-Sayed keeps reaching for whenever the subject of Sharia law comes up:
"The issue that people are worried about isn't that somehow somebody's going to push Sharia law on them."
That obvious redirection sounds reassuring, right up until you check his own paper trail. Back in 2009, a 24-year-old El-Sayed told the New York Times, discussing his decision to take out a Sharia-compliant mortgage, that he felt religiously obligated to live that way: "Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don't want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Sharia-compliant way. Not because of fear, but because of obligation." Fine — that's his own personal religious practice, and nobody's arguing he doesn't have a right to it.
But then there's the part that actually matters for a Senate candidate: back in 2022, addressing the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, El-Sayed didn't just defend his personal faith — he attacked a 2010 Oklahoma ballot measure banning Sharia law from state courts, explicitly comparing efforts to keep it out of American courtrooms to the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa race massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing. When Jesse Watters pressed him the other night on that exact comparison, El-Sayed tried to soften it by reframing Sharia as functionally equivalent to Catholic canon law: "Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else, just like I hope nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion."
Neat trick, except I defy anyone to show me where canon law has ever... even once... been floated as a replacement for American civil or criminal statutes in any serious American legal debate. Remember please that Sharia bans exist specifically because of the worries about exactly that scenario playing out in family courts and civil disputes.
Equating the two isn't clarification. It's misdirection, dressed up as an interfaith seminar. The history of Islam is not about religious freedom, but the elimination of it. Ask those in Iran and Afghanistan, for openers, on that one. Or even now, ask the English. When you get your answer, tell me how that one's going to work out.
Stack these two stories side by side and the shape becomes obvious. When Piker was useful, "disavowing" him was cancel culture. When his rhetoric became a liability, disavowal became courage, conveniently timed to the exact moment public pressure made silence too costly.
When his own 2022 remarks about Sharia and white supremacy got read back to him on live television, the response wasn't ownership — it was a strained comparison designed to make the whole conversation sound like paranoia rather than a fair question about what a Senate candidate actually believes government's relationship to religious law should be.
A white Presbyterian stepmother's parents in a campaign ad doesn't answer any of that. It's not an argument. It's a contrived photo op standing in for one.
I say again, whatever else El-Sayed is, mainstream he ain't.
Thought of the day: The Amish are proof that one can wear beards, dress modestly, reject modern society and be completely devoted to your religion without strapping explosive vests on your children.
VIP Members: The floor is yours. Open the comments editor and have at it. Your voice matters.
Take care today, gang. And take the time to safeguard your culture. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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