Trump at Dallas GOP Midterm Convention: ‘let us finish the job’

Addressing a packed house at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Trump sought to make it clear: “The choice in this election is very, very simple,” Trump told the crowd. “Democrats are asking you to vote for their failed far-left agenda… and I’m asking you to let us finish the job.” Trump argued his administration has delivered unprecedented economic success, calling his first two years in office “the most successful two years, financially and every other way in the history of the presidency. “He also pointed to what he described as a surge in foreign investment commitments flowing into the United States. “We have more money being spent from outside countries and companies — over $20 trillion,” Trump said, adding that the figure could climb to as much as “$25 trillion” by the time his administration reaches the two-year mark (Fox News). President Trump: “Vote Republican, and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come. There will be nothing like it.” The crowd: “USA! USA! USA!” (Townhall).

Fetterman Praises Trump at GOP’s Dallas Convention

The Pennsylvania Democrat was introducing his Republican colleague Dave McCormick via video. Fetterman (with a steel plant in the background): Yes, I’m Senator John Fetterman, Pennsylvania. Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I’m a commonsense Democrat. I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life. Dave McCormick is the kind of senator that gets the job done and he’s going to fight for Pennsylvania. I’m proud to count him as my friend right back over my shoulder. That’s the iconic US Steel Mill. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that will work together and we’ll work with President Trump to fight and defend the steel way of life right here in the Steel Valley (C-SPAN). Axios recognizes the significance: Fetterman’s stunning turn — a Democratic senator in a supporting role at the GOP’s showcase campaign event, fewer than eight weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms — marks a dramatic escalation in Fetterman’s growing estrangement from his party…. Democrats are certain to see the cameo as political mutiny — and it will supercharge questions about whether he’ll ultimately leave the Democratic Party before he’s up for reelection in 2028. It’s also a major coup for Trump, who has long reveled at the idea of winning over former Democrats to his side. If Fetterman were to eventually switch parties, it would make Democrats’ uphill battle to take control of the Senate much more difficult (Axios).

News Alert: James Talarico Discovers That There Are Only Two Sexes

It’s only a mere coincidence that the candidate for the U.S.  Senate seat from Texas has discovered this with just 54 days before the election—as polls tighten and Texans start looking at his real record. First, for context: In April of 2021, State Rep. Talarico pressed Beth Stelzer of Save Women’s Sports—one of the early courageous voices standing up women. Talarico, 2021: Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six (YouTube). Talarico, 2026, in an interview with Fox News yesterday: What I meant is that there are two sexes and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities. I obviously didn’t say it correctly. There are not six sexes. There are two (RNC).

Today: One-Year Memorial of Charlie Kirk Assassination

 
Charlie was at an event at Utah Valley University when his life was so brutally cut short. The university will host an event today with guests who were with him at the time he was shot—Frank Turek, Andrew Sypher and Caleb Chilcutt. Glenn Beck will be joining them as well. Deseret: The “Freedom Built to Last” event will take place at the UCCU Center, a 5-minute walk from the amphitheater where Kirk was shot last year while engaging with thousands of students during the first stop of his “All-American Comeback Tour.” “The gathering will honor Charlie as a faith-filled husband, father, and defender of free speech,” Turning Point USA said, describing it “as a deliberate act of remembrance, and a call for students and supporters to continue his life’s work” (Deseret). Salem Media will be airing a special one-hour honoring Kirk: Mike Gallagher, Larry O’Connor and Alex Marlow narrate special tribute featuring rare audio from Kirk’s earliest days….  The special tells the story of how Charlie started Turning Point USA in his parents’ garage and built it into one of the largest youth organizations in the country, becoming the most consequential conservative voice of his generation…. The program draws from rare archival interviews and recordings, along with stories from those who knew Charlie throughout his rise from a young activist to a national conservative leader. More than anything, it gives listeners another chance to hear Charlie as they remember him: in his own voice (Salem Media). Live stream, 8 p.m. ET: (Salem News Channel).

Erika Kirk on the Lessons From the Unanticipated Guest of Grief

Erika has endured the loss of her dear husband with admirable strength and equally admirable vulnerability. When she returned home—immediately after Charlie’s death—Usha Vance (our second lady) encouraged her: “Just get through the next 15 minutes.” Erika Kirk: Grief is strange. Time continues even when every part of you wants it to pause or, better yet, rewind. But the people we love who have passed on would not want us to spend the rest of our lives trying to rewind. At first, I needed to survive the next 15 minutes. Over time, I’ve realized that Charlie would want me to live them. Occasionally, I’m asked whether I’m angry at God. I say no. My husband was one of one. I was blessed to be his wife, and I understood his assignment here on Earth, which he more than fulfilled. He wanted people who felt lost to know the everlasting hope he found through faith and the sense of meaning and purpose that can fill the deeper longings we so often try to satisfy elsewhere. To the world, he was Charlie Kirk. But to me, he was the love of my life. To our children, he was the center of their world…. I have seen extraordinary good born out of something unimaginably evil. I have watched people return to faith in droves, reconcile with their families and forgive old wounds because of Charlie. I know my husband is in heaven, but I ache for him to be here. Still, I can stand and say without a shadow of a doubt that God is good. The wave still comes, but it’s different now. A year ago, when I felt it coming over me, I wondered whether it would swallow me completely. Now, I recognize it; sometimes I even welcome it, because for a moment the grief makes Charlie feel impossibly close…. If you are living through grief, I won’t tell you what to feel or that tomorrow will be better than today. I will tell you what a dear friend told me: Just get through the next 15 minutes. One day, maybe when you least expect it, you’ll start to see that those 15 minutes hold more than just grief. The grief is there, always, but so is the beautiful gift of life (New York Times).

House Majority Leader Scalise: Look for a Vote Next Week on Legislation That Would Keep AM Radio in the Car

The legislation is the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (H.R. 979)—and it would keep AM radio in new cars (Congress). On the Hugh Hewitt show last week, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise made clear that the legislation would be on the next week: I made a decision. I’m bringing that bill to the floor the week of September 14th. So, we’re going to the convention next week with President Trump…. He’s really excited about this convention next week. A midterm convention never happened before. But then the following week, Congress is going to be back in session and the AM radio bill will be on the House floor. So let all your audience know, everybody ought to be calling their congressmen to vote for that bill. We need to pass it (You Tube). More from Inside Radio: The announcement drew an immediate response from the National Association of Broadcasters. NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt said broadcasters “applaud” Scalise’s decision to bring the bill forward for a standalone vote, calling it an important step for legislation that has earned “overwhelming bipartisan support” in Congress and across the country. The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act would require AM radio capability to remain available in new vehicles, even as automakers introduce newer entertainment and communications technologies (Inside Radio).

Houthi Terrorists Strike Saudi Oil Facilities

Eli Afriat: The Houthis launched a broad attack on Saudi Arabia overnight, targeting Abha Airport, the Aramco fuel terminal in Abha, King Khalid Air Base in Khamis Mushait, the Jizan refinery, and the fuel terminal in Najran. Seventy-three people are reported injured, and the Jizan refinery is still burning. Riyadh has vowed to respond (Afriat). Wall Street Journal explains Iran’s plan behind it all: The Revolutionary Guard used the calm created by the memorandum of understanding to lay the groundwork with allied militias around the region to step up attacks if needed, sending advisers to Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon to discuss the plans, the officials familiar with recent Arab intelligence findings said. The intelligence including intercepted communications showed the Revolutionary Guard sending commanders to areas controlled by Yemen’s Houthis to plan for a stepped-up confrontation with Saudi Arabia in coordination with Iraqi militias that also are backed by Iran (Wall Street Journal).

Houthis Are Weakening

The attacks we see (above) could well be desperation moves. Whatever the immediate motive, they do not come from a terror group advancing. Our embassy in Yemen is speaking up: The Houthis have brought Yemen nothing but suffering (Yemen). Jerusalem Post reports: Reports from Yemen that express optimism and portray a new offensive against the Houthis as potentially successful may be part of a path to reshape the Middle East (JPost). The recent military offensive from the Yemeni army against the Houthis has given optimism: What began as a Houthi offensive in Taiz has, within days, expanded into fighting across several Yemeni provinces and raised a larger question over the direction of the war: Has the battle to retake Sanaa begun? … The widening battlefield has fueled speculation that the internationally recognized government is attempting to move beyond containing Houthi attacks and toward a broader campaign aimed ultimately at recapturing the capital (Arab News). Streiff at RedState: The IRGC regime is quite willing to burn down its proxy armies if it thinks it might give it an advantage. Iran encouraged Hezbollah attacks against Israel. This has resulted in the destruction of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon…. It has thrown its proxies in Iran to the wolves. Now it is ruthlessly tossing the Houthis into the struggle. This “martyrdom for thee, but not for me” attitude will be noticed throughout the region. I think this offensive could succeed precisely because the Houthis no longer have access to Iranian arms and money. In contrast, the Saudis and UAE have had a near-death experience with their oil trade and will not be willing to go through that again (RedState).

25th Anniversary of 9/11: Bin Ladin Succeeded in Ways He Would Not Have Expected

The good folks at MEMRI have been doing extensive work on the Middle East and South Asia through original language research and translation since 1998. Alberto Fernandez is their Vice President. He writes: Bin Ladin wanted to bring about a type of global “Islamic Moment” and it has finally come about in ways he did not quite expect (although lslamists at the time boasted about how the 9/11 attacks had led to many conversions to Islam in the West). We in the West are in a sort of twilight struggle for meaning that many of us also do not quite comprehend. Only last month, the head of an influential Qatar-funded Muslim cleric organization made the connection: Without the Hamas attacks of October 7, Muslim political leaders like Mamdani in New York City and El-Sayed in Michigan would not have risen. Terror led to political success. A non-Muslim making such an expansive claim would have been regarded, at best, as an ignorant alarmist. Rather than being some sort of dated, retrograde backwater, the Middle East pathologies that reigned for decades, and among which political Islam grew and festered, have now been implanted or reconfigured in the West: identity politics, disinformation, antisemitism. 9/11 and subsequent events accelerated this process. This all happens right at the time that the West, and the world, are confronting other, unrelated existential crises: the birth dearth, the debt bomb, and the economic and social dislocation caused by new technologies including artificial intelligence. The fateful fuse lit by Al-Qaeda a quarter century ago has now joined a wider conflagration (MEMRI).

25th Anniversary of 9/11: ‘We don’t have another 25 years to get this right’

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the more courageous intellectuals writing in this space today. She’s a convert from Islam. After years on the secular right, she’s now a Christian. From her essay at Tablet: Twenty-five years later, ignorance is no longer a tenable excuse. Yet even among those who acknowledge that violent Muslim extremists are not simply reacting to injuries inflicted by the West, and that Muslims themselves were some of history’s greatest colonizers, a substantial blind spot remains. We in the West are so fixated on the military arm of the Islamist movement that we often fail to pay attention to the methods of institutional capture and demographic transformation that are equally part of the Islamist strategy. This habit of denial is particularly acute among Americans on both the left and the right…. What I hear is the same inability that I heard in Europe 25 years ago to accept the magnitude of the threat posed by a hostile foe, or even to admit the reality of cultural differences. The reality is that we don’t have another 25 years to get this right. We don’t even have another 10 years. The strategic environment confronting Western nations has changed dramatically. The West now confronts a broader hybrid battlespace in which hostile states and movements rely less on classical warfare and more on cyber operations, disinformation, migration pressure, institutional subversion, and the exploitation of domestic polarization, facilitated not only by tech platforms, but also by the rise of a secular leftist vanguard that has forged an alliance with politicized Muslim cadres that have learned to speak the common language of third-world sectarianism in order to mobilize migrant communities. Each side of the so-called red-green alliance that is now contesting elections not only in Europe but also from New York City to Michigan no doubt believes that it is using the other in order to gain power. But only one half of that alliance is likely to win. I personally would bet on the side that has an army of 1.6 billion believers that it can potentially mobilize, backed by the wealth of the world’s leading oil producers, over the university students from comfortable homes for whom politics means dorm-room banners of Karl Marx and Che Guevara. By the time they find out otherwise, it will probably be too late (Tablet). More on Ali from Rick Moran: (PJMedia).