I already had the sentence, the day after the anniversary. We still hear people say we deserved it. Treating the dead as a receipt. Changing the subject from the people at their desks to a running argument about everything America has ever done.
The clip is not a pundit discovering that line. It is George Pataki, governor of New York the morning of 9/11/2001, still circling it twenty-five years later with Maya Sulkin of The Free Press. The mayor fight comes with it. The sentence is the same one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
