Twenty-Five Years Later

 I cannot believe September 11, 2001, was twenty-five years ago.

One of the slogans of that period was “Never Forget.” What is sad is that a lot of us have. The phrase still gets said. The people it was supposed to name do not always travel with it.

@America on X

What I notice first, a day after the anniversary, is not only the forgetting. It is that we still hear people say we deserved it.

Deserved it. As if the people who went to work at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, or the passengers on those four flights, had billed the country for something and the bill came due on a Tuesday morning. That is a horrendous thing to say about the dead. It is also a way of changing the subject from what happened to a running argument about everything America has ever done.

The attack had a source, a method, and a target. Those are not mysteries. Treating the day as a receipt for prior sins is a way of not looking at the people who were at their desks.

I do not want to wade into the debate over whether Islam is compatible with Western civilization. I believe in freedom of religion. My instinct is to reject the claim that Islam is, as a whole, a violent faith, and to reject the claim that violent fundamentalism is simply “Middle Eastern culture.” Plenty of Americans who practice the faith live under the same secular law the rest of us do.

What I will not dismiss is the other sentence we keep hearing: that some neighborhoods have, in effect, adopted a different rulebook. Dearborn, Michigan, is the name that gets used. Last month it was not an abstraction. At an Aug. 18 city council meeting, moved to the Henry Ford Centennial Library after a “Christian Crusader March” drew a crowd and 22 arrests outside, Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell of 180 Church told the dais the city was no longer under American law. “We are up under Sharia law,” he said. “We will not have it anymore.” The clip ran for days. Sewell’s examples were the call to prayer, halal meat in schools, Arabic on storefronts, and what he called a two-tier response after activist Jake Lang was assaulted at an earlier protest. Fox noted he was not pointing to an ordinance. He was pointing to favoritism. Council members did not denounce Sharia when he asked them to.

Britannica and city officials say Dearborn is not under Sharia. Last week Rep. Keith Self of Texas filed a concurrent resolution denouncing it nationwide, citing a late-August remark by President Trump. The argument is loud because the stakes are not small. America has a Judeo-Christian history. Its laws are secular. Those two facts can sit together. They cannot sit with a parallel legal system that answers to a different source.

If any pocket of the country is running on a different set of rules, the answer is not a sermon about which faith is worse. The answer is the same one we already have on paper: one set of secular laws, and protection for people who practice all of them.

In 2001 we had a lot to be thankful for. We lived in a country that still offered liberty and opportunity to people willing to take it. Twenty-five years later the fight I see is less about the men who flew the planes and more about how little some of us still think that offer is worth.

Terrorism is not gone. It is also not the only thing that can hollow out a country. The quieter work is teaching people that the dead on those flights and in those buildings did not earn what they got, and that the system that let the rest of us keep living here is not an inheritance you get to spend down while calling it justice.

The enemy that morning had a face and a method. The one that lasts is harder to point at. It is the habit of treating the dead as a moral, and the country as something you apologize for instead of keep.

The Second Night

Night two starts at 3 p.m. Central at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, TX. Same hall as Wednesday. Still no roll call. Vance has the keynote. Trump closes.

Pretend I'm on the Ballot

Trump spoke last. Lee Greenwood, then roughly two hours, then night one was over.

Check out what he said here: [VIDEO]

The line that organized the speech was turnout. “When I’m on the ticket, Republicans always do very well,” Trump said. Midterms without him on the line are the problem he named. “So I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot.” About 35 races. Twice or three times if he has to.

The first name on that list was Ken Paxton.

“I’ll be coming back to Texas, because we have to elect Ken Paxton.” Then the bit he has been doing for weeks: the suit, the voice, “not the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” then “the greatest attorney general in America.” He looked for Paxton in the hall and said Ken would never speak to him again.

Paxton had already gone. Thanked Trump. “Protecting the Texas Promise.” 107 suits against Biden. Talarico as the most radical and most well-funded Democrat in Texas, out to destroy the American dream, California’s third senator, “obsessed with transitions.”

For Talarico, Trump used the trail nickname: Talafreako. Talarico already put that word on merch. Wednesday he was at a grocery drive across town.

The race is why Dallas was not scenery. Paxton beat Cornyn in the May runoff with Trump’s endorsement. Talarico won the Democratic primary outright. Texas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Cook and Sabato: Toss Up since late August. Inside Elections still Lean Republican into September.

Commissioner Without a Definition

Cathy Engelbert is retiring as WNBA commissioner at the end of the year. Adam Silver announced it Friday. She has had the job since 2019.

Libs of TikTok posted the news as a verdict: she is leaving because the league still will not say what a woman is.

BREAKING: Cathy Engelbert, the Commissioner for the WNBA, announced her retirement at the end of the 2026 season after the WNBA couldn’t determine what a woman is pic.twitter.com/ENfE8eCQVZ

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 4, 2026

Enes Kanter Freedom posted the same afternoon. “MAKE @WNBA FEMALE AGAIN.” He called the retirement a win for women and an admission that the rules have to change. Then he offered himself as the next commissioner, dictionary included, on the ground that the league still cannot define the word in its own name.

MAKE @WNBA FEMALE AGAIN

Commissioner Freedom Has a Nice Ring to It.

While the reported retirement of #WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert is a win for women and an admission that the league’s rules must change, her retirement does not solve the systemic issues which must be… pic.twitter.com/QqIQ3bwKsX

— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) September 4, 2026

On Fox’s Ingraham Angle that same news cycle he put it shorter:

“Just get this, America—instead of defining what a woman is, right? The ‘Cocoo Cathy,’ I call her. Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner, decided to step down as commissioner from one of the biggest organizations in America. I mean, I just want America to understand what’s happening here. What we are doing is working. I want to thank all the parents out there. I want to thank all the Americans out there that believe and trust in us. This is just the beginning. We’re going to try to put as much pressure as we can.”

The fight did not start Friday. The current CBA says “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA.” It does not say what a woman is. No public rule on sex at birth, hormones, or self-identification.

Sympathy Is Not a Verdict

Matt Walsh posted an instant reaction Friday afternoon to a hung jury in the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The clip is not a tour of five weeks of testimony. Walsh’s argument is narrower. The only reason the case did not end in an acquittal, he says, is one holdout juror — a man, on a panel of nine women and three men — who would not join the others in finding Clancy not criminally responsible. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, asked the judge to remove him, told a single justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court the juror was biased against people with mental illness, and invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court said no. Outside, Reddington said the other eleven had been “robbed by one man.”

Walsh puts that next to the Derek Chauvin jury. In Minneapolis, he says, jurors ignored the law and convicted Chauvin of murder because he did not inspire sympathy — even after, in Walsh’s telling, they understood George Floyd had overdosed. Deliberations are treated as closed, so the verdict stood. In Plymouth the pressure ran the other way: eleven ready to excuse the killings, and a public effort to pry out the one who would not. Walsh’s larger claim is the Massachusetts rule itself. The killings are not in dispute. The Commonwealth still has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was criminally responsible. He thinks no one can prove another person’s mind that way. A mistrial, to him, is only a relative win. His close is that the insanity defense should not exist.

The case underneath the clip is simpler than the argument about it.

Cruz on PBD: Blue-Collar Voters Decided 2016

Patrick Bet-David sat down with Ted Cruz this week for PBD Podcast #851. The title is the tease: what Trump told him behind closed doors. The conversation is longer than that. Cruz walks back through 2016, through working with Trump as president, and through the family story he uses to explain why he does not talk like a country-club Republican. Bet-David keeps circling 2028. Cruz will not announce. He will describe the argument.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Three stretches do the work. How 2016 broke, including the poll Cruz trusted and the nickname that cut. What the relationship looks like in the Oval — including the afternoon Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. And the biography: financially independent since seventeen, no trust fund, a standing fight with country-club Republicans. The close is 2028, and JD Vance.

Liam Out Loud: When Institutions Stop Valuing Truth

Liam Out Loud posted a short essay-video on August 31 titled Why Feminized Institutions Stop Telling the Truth.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The claim is not that women cannot do science, law, or teaching. It is narrower. Those fields only work if they keep discriminating — science on truth, law on justice, education on intelligence. Once the culture inside them tips toward social equity and consensus, the original job recedes.

He never names Helen Andrews. He is in her argument anyway. I wrote about her Compact essay and the UnHerd interview in June. Her line was that wokeness is not a new ideology so much as feminine group patterns applied to institutions that used to run on different rules. Empathy over detached judgment. Safety over risk. Cohesion over open conflict. Ostracism instead of argument. Liam is asking what that flip does to shops whose job is to tell the truth.

h/t Newsalert

Glenn Beck: Why Lake America Broke the Room

 Glenn Beck’s clip is not about the depth of the lake. It is about who treated names as a moral project for fifteen years, and what happens when the other side picks up the same pen.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Thursday’s order is already on this blog. Federal maps are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to. Mark Carney said the name is four hundred years old. Doug Ford put up a sign: “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.” Kathy Hochul said New York will not be calling it that. Google followed the U.S. government for U.S. users.

Beck’s question is the one after the press release. If names were sacred last decade, why is this one a joke?

The Rubin Report Interview Britain Won’t Air on the BBC

 Dave Rubin sat down with Andrew Gold, the former BBC filmmaker who now hosts Heretics. The title of the episode is the claim: if this is not stopped, the UK’s fall is irreversible.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Gold starts with psychology. Political tribes and social-media loops, he says, run on the same machinery as cults: belonging, status, conformity. Intelligent people get trapped because the group rewards the approved answers. People usually leave only after the group mistreats them. October 7 did that for some progressive Jews.

Then the machinery that is supposed to keep the argument open.

A Meme with a Source

Trump posted a ranking of the presidents. He put his own portrait in a box that did not exist in 1948.

That box is the whole argument. The rest of the chart is an old grid with a few new names dropped in.

Here's what the President posted on Truth Social on August 27, 2026.

Truth Before Narrative

 We are a little more than two months from the midterms. When the policy argument is thin, some Democrats reach for the older one: America is still that country. The one that hangs people from trees.

Jon Ossoff talks as if the Klan is on the ballot in Georgia. Ayanna Pressley says the Confederacy is alive and well. Jasmine Crockett points to “mysterious deaths” in Mississippi — people “found, hung or otherwise” — and says we can no longer rely on the Justice Department to look. The implication is not subtle. Vote our way, or you are choosing the noose.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Ben Shapiro spent part of a recent show on the cases that keep getting cited as proof. His column on the same argument is here.

Ms. Rachel is Rachel Accurso, the toddler YouTube host behind Songs for Littles. About 20 million subscribers, a Netflix kids show, the pink headband and overalls. Parents of two-year-olds know her as the person who teaches Wheels on the Bus. She started the channel in 2019 after her own son had a speech delay. She has a master’s in music education from NYU. TikTok is one of her platforms. It is not the source of the following.

She has spent the last couple of years putting politics in the same feed as the nursery rhymes. Gaza. ICE detention. In March she told NBC News, “I am political.” This week she put the hanging claim in its cleanest form: please listen to the Black community. Black people don’t hang themselves from trees. There have been at least seven this year.

The history that sentence is pointing at is real. The medical examiner reports and the surveillance footage are also real. Those two things are not required to cancel each other. They just have to be looked at in the same paragraph.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Here are the specific ones Shapiro named.

Enes Kanter: Where was the threat?

Chicago Sky owner Michael Alter banned Enes Kanter Freedom from Wintrust Arena after this past Sunday’s Fever game. The phrase he used was “a potential threat.”

The footage of the moment he is talking about is short.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Late third quarter. Natasha Cloud scores, celebrates, then walks toward the baseline. Freedom is sitting there in a shirt that reads “WOMAN noun. adult human female.” He stands. Arms out. One step toward the floor. Security fills the gap. He is walked out holding the shirt up for the building to read.

That is the act. This is how he framed it in a tweet:

“I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA! 🇺🇸”

Alter’s account is that Freedom had been chirping, that people in the seats said he started it, and that the night changed when he got up. “The security’s job isn’t to wait to see how far they get.” Fan code says you do not enter the court. On Wednesday he told OutKick that some threats do not get a warning, and he used shooting a gun as the extreme example.

Lake America

President Trump signed an order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Watch the signing: [VIDEO]

This is the same play as January 20, 2025, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

A lot of people lost their minds over that one. I shrugged. The water did not move. Mexico did not agree. What changed was the name on U.S. federal maps.

Same limits here. The order tells the Dept. of Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the U.S. geographic names database within 30 days. Federal maps and documents are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to.

Text of August 27 executive order renaming Lake Ontario.