Veteran's Day, and the Bidens, and the Long Knives

Greetings, and welcome to Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. Today is Veterans Day. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I went silent. We've been honoring the men and women who answered the call ever since, and they deserve more than one day a year.

My calendar says it's Veterans Day, Sundae Day, Origami Day, and Corduroy Appreciation Day. Thank a veteran, and mean it. Better yet, buy one lunch. Treat yourself to an ice cream sundae afterward. Fold a paper crane with the grandkids. And dig out your corduroys, since 11/11 looks more like corduroy than any other date on the calendar.

Today in History:

1620: Forty-one male passengers aboard the Mayflower sign the Mayflower Compact before going ashore at Cape Cod, setting up a self-governing body under majority rule.
1831: Nat Turner is hanged in Jerusalem, Va., for leading a slave rebellion that killed dozens of white residents.
1889: Washington becomes the 42nd state.
1918: World War I fighting ends at 11 a.m. under the armistice signed earlier that morning in a railroad car in Compiègne, France.
1921: President Warren Harding dedicates the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.
1940: The Armistice Day Blizzard strikes the upper Midwest without warning, killing about 150 people, many of them duck hunters caught out on the water.
1954: The nation observes Veterans Day for the first time, after Congress renamed Armistice Day to honor veterans of every war.
1965: Rhodesia's white-minority government declares independence from Britain.
1966: NASA launches Gemini 12, the final Gemini mission. Buzz Aldrin's spacewalks prove astronauts can work outside a spacecraft, clearing the way for Apollo.
1987: Vincent van Gogh's Irises sells at auction for $53.9 million, a record at the time.
2004: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat dies in a hospital outside Paris.

Birthdays Today include: Abigail Adams, first lady and adviser to John Adams; Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment; George S. Patton, the general who led the Third Army across Europe; Kurt Vonnegut, World War II veteran, POW, and author of Slaughterhouse-Five; Jonathan Winters, Marine veteran and comedian; Stanley Tucci, actor from The Devil Wears Prada; Demi Moore, actress from Ghost; Calista Flockhart, actress from Ally McBeal; and Leonardo DiCaprio, actor from Titanic. If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us.

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Is it just me, or does the world get stranger by the day?

Yesterday, while I was busy living my life, Joe and Jill Biden were in Ireland, or what’s left of it. In a single afternoon, the Irish gave the Biden family a gold medal and a milk bath.

They went to Trinity College Dublin (are you sitting down?) to watch Hunter Biden receive the College Historical Society’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse.

Hunter Biden. Public discourse. I keep trying to come up with a snarky line to fill this space, and can’t top the bare facts.

I mean, that part of it alone rates a nine on the weirdness scale. Now add the pro-Palestinian hecklers. A crowd gathered outside during the ceremony, and when Joe and Jill came out, they got “blood on your hands,” “shame on you,” and that campus favorite, “Genocide Joe.” Somebody threw something at him. Several reports say it was milk cartons, and an umbrella near Biden took the hit. Security hustled the former president into a waiting vehicle, the motorcade bolted, and the Gardaí wrestled protesters to the pavement and arrested two of them. Nobody in the family got hurt, so the only casualty was the family’s dignity.

Matt Vespa over at Townhall says Biden shouldn’t have gone to Ireland, and he’s probably right. Frankly, though, I’ve watched Joe Biden for decades now, and saying he has a talent for doing the wrong thing is like saying Pavarotti could carry a tune. Nothing he does shocks me anymore.

What does get me is the venue.

The Hist, as the locals call it, is a student debating society, and by its own billing, the world’s oldest. So the medal came from Trinity students, not the college brass. That means on one side of the door, a room full of Irish students gave Hunter Biden a gold medal for elevating public discourse. On the other side, another crowd of Irish students (I’d wager) elevated public discourse by throwing dairy products at his father. No sense of irony at all, these people.

Some history is in order here. Ten years ago, Trinity rolled out the red carpet for Joe. In June 2016, the college gave then-Vice President Biden an honorary doctorate, and the University Philosophical Society, the other big debating club on campus, gave him a gold medal of its own. A decade later, the son gets the medal, and the father gets the milk.

How many of these “Palestine supporters” came from the student body? Nobody has published a head count. But Irish student unions publicly criticized the visit, so I wouldn’t bet the farm on a busload of outside agitators.

That should worry the Left more than it worries me. Joe Biden built his whole political persona on being Irish. He quoted Seamus Heaney extensively, and Ireland loved him back. Now the land of his ancestors greets him with “Genocide Joe” and a carton of milk. The left’s purity machine doesn’t care about your ancestry, your résumé, or your feelings. It eats its own, starting with the people who fed it the most.

Meanwhile, inside the hall, the polite crowd gave Hunter Biden a medal for public discourse. That’s Hunter Biden of the laptop, the gun conviction, the tax charges, and the December 2024 pardon from Dad. You'd need a chainsaw to cut through irony that thick.

So the elites inside reward the Bidens, and the mob outside punishes them. Joe just happened to walk out the door in between.

I’ve written plenty about the “Gaza genocide” business over the years, and I won’t plow that field again here. (Spoiler: It’s nothing of the sort.) But the spectacle of the Left eating its own one more time is just too rich to pass up.

And the left does eat its own. Every totalitarian movement in history has run on the same fuel: young zealots, certain of their own righteousness, turning on anyone who isn’t pure enough. Mao’s Red Guards were students, too. They dragged their teachers into the streets, humiliated their elders, and denounced lifelong Communist Party loyalists like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping as traitors to the revolution. Loyalty to the cause bought those men nothing. It only made them easier targets.

Then there were the Brownshirts in Berlin, who made their name breaking up opponents’ meetings, menacing people in the streets, and making sure everyone knew which opinions could get you hurt. The ending fits, too. In 1934, Hitler purged the Brownshirts’ own leadership in the Night of the Long Knives. The movement devoured the men who had built it.

Now look at the scene outside Trinity: a mob of the self-righteous, hurling chants and objects at an 83-year-old man who spent four years bending over backward to keep the progressive wing of his party happy. It didn’t save him. It never does.

So when these same people throw the word “fascist” at everyone to their right, which, in the end, turns out to be everybody, I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry. They have the tactics down cold: mob intimidation, public denunciation, and zero tolerance for heresy. They’ve just never bothered to look in a mirror. Or at least a history book. The joke is tragic, but it’s still a joke.

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Thought for the Day: Every freedom we argue about in this column was paid for by someone who never got to argue about it. Thank a veteran today.

VIP Members: Since your voice matters, I'll ask you for your thoughts.

Take care, gang. See you tomorrow.

Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote. It's common sense, yet Democrats are spreading lies about the impact of such a measure.

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