Things you learn in Texas: 1. The guy in the F-150 is worth a lot more than the dude in a Mercedes. 2. The small business owner from a state school is smarter than the majority of Ivy League grads. 3. There’s more racism in Connecticut country clubs than in rural honky-tonks. 4. Rednecks are more honorable than investment bankers. 5. The man who looks like he can’t afford the tab could buy the building. 6. They don’t ask for a deck before the meeting. 7. Prep school is where they send the problem kids. 8. If he’s wearing dusty boots, a 2XL Magellan shirt, a gold Rolex, and has a bulletproof case on his iPhone 12, you’ve already lost the negotiation. 9. “How’s business?” is a real question. “What do you do?” is a New York question. 10. Tips are bigger and egos are smaller. 11. A handshake still closes deals that a term sheet would kill. 12. The wealth is in real estate, oil, or a company nobody in Manhattan has ever heard of. 13. Your wife or daughter will never struggle finding help to change a tire. 14. Nobody asks where you went to college. 15. A weekend invitation to their ranch makes you part of the family.

Democrats are trying to fool Texans into believing James Talarico isn’t some whacked out lib, but the clips keep coming. In 2022, Talarico, wearing a mask, scolded Texans about going meat-free (!!) to stop climate change. This is TEXAS. This will haunt him in the general.

You've seen the story that the Headhunters have been retained in recruiting Investment Bankers for an Economic Defense Unit. Here's the Deck going out to potential candidates:

Muslim aviation enthusiasts boarded flights Tuesday morning for what could've been normal day trips to Washington D.C., Virginia and New York in the abnormally warm September weather. But in less than a few hours, their lives would drastically change as their planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the ground in rural Pennsylvania. Here's what we know so far.

It’s going unnoticed because so much other news is happening, but the war drums are beating again in D.C. The warmongers worry this is their last chance to get the white whale they’ve been chasing for thirty years, an all-out regime change war against Iran. A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake. Our military stockpiles are depleted from three years of backing Ukraine. Our effort to reshore manufacturing has only just begun and will take years to bear fruit. War would worsen our already immense deficit and national debt. Iran is larger than Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined. A war would not be easy and could easily become a calamity. Thanks to President Trump’s restraint during his first term, America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good. We shouldn’t throw that opportunity away so that sone D.C. has-beens can feel tough by sending young Americans to die yet again.

1. Is Trump planning to "Venezuelize" Iran? This analysis deviates from the mainstream media portrayal of a fickle, senile, or Bibi-led president. It assumes Trump is evil but rational. A thread. 🧵

It's extremely disheartening to watch a generational opportunity to permanently reshape the Overton Window be pissed away for the sake of regime change on behalf of a foreign government. I get the feeling that Trump gradually abandoned large parts of his domestic agenda because of the numerous obstacles he encountered at every turn. Endless sabotage from the civil service, a near-total lack of willingness to rock the boat by Congressional Republicans, and nationwide court injunctions preventing him from even taking a piss outside the White House all culminated in Trump essentially concluding that the only things he could truly have an impact on were found outside America's borders. And impact them he did. I'm not one of those people who sees this and immediately decides to pick up the idiot ball in response to it all. I'm never going to go out there and claim that we need to now start voting Democrat or that there hasn't been anything positive from Trump 2.0. There has been, and anyone trying to pretend otherwise is either a fool or a liar. And that's what makes this so tragic. There ARE things, enormous things, that were accomplished over the past year. Shutting down US Aid, eliminating over 300,000 Federal jobs, net negative migration for the first time in 50 years...all of these are things that we didn't believe were even possible just a few short years ago. It's just a shame that instead of going further, there is now a very real possibility that Trump's remaining political capital is going to be burned away on Iran. The Senate isn't going to pass the SAVE Act, there won't be any substantive Congressional actions to speak of between now and the election because Republicans don't know how to wield power, Democrats will flip the House and probably pick up one or two seats in the Senate, and Trump's remaining two years in office could very well be consumed by war and Leftist institutional sabotage that will have spread beyond the bureaucracy and courts and into Congress itself. All of this will culminate in them attempting to reclaim a trifecta in 2028, where they'll re-open the border, re-staff the bureaucracy, re-fund their NGOs, and reset the clock back to 2021. A decade will have been lost at a time when the hour is already late.

THREAD: James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian and Texas state lawmaker who on Wednesday defeated Jasmine Crockett in the state's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, is being cited as the man who could finally "Turn Texas Blue." His prolific social media posts could complicate the effort. Shortly after Talarico's victory, many of his past tweets—professing woke positions on everything from pronouns to racial issues—went viral. Here are some examples:

It's not false, and as @seanmdav just correctly noted, it really doesn't help your cause to gaslight, cherrypick, or omit relevant data points. So, here we go. First, it’s important to note that the vast majority of pollsters could not accurately poll Donald Trump’s strength in any of the three presidential elections in which he ran precisely because they were not particularly competent at polling MAGA/America First. That includes identifying and measuring the demographic groups that made up MAGA originally dating back to 2016, and which demographic groups were new additions to the coalition in 2024 explicitly because they were drawn to his message of putting America First. Cited pollsters wouldn’t know how to poll MAGA even if they were legitimately attempting to do so. That being said, even if we assumed they were polling MAGA correctly, what those percentages don’t tell you is that the percentage of voters who Identify as MAGA/America First has declined significantly since hitting a high shortly after Donald Trump took office last year, even from November 2024. I’ve been referring to this trend as “purification through subtraction.” Simply put, 98% of 30% (29.4%) is considerably less than 90% of 40% (36%). It deceptively looks like unity. But in reality, it’s the result of fracture and shrinkage in his base. President Trump’s coalition had shrunk before the Iran War by ≈18%, beginning largely with trouble over the handling of the Epstein situation last spring, which hurt him particularly among female voters below 45 years old. It accelerated in the summer after the first bombing of Iran, and worsened as the conflict in the region derailed the administration’s domestic push. The largest decline in people who identify as MAGA has been driven by younger voters and non-white voters who voted for Trump in 2024 and fueled his diverse coalition. It’s not that they are isolationists. They just see their own economic challenges, and our political challenges at home, as a greater threat to them than Iran, or the Middle East for that matter. We made this chart showing our approval trend for the president BY key events that moved the needle, hoping to illustrate what happened. We will be updating it shortly with new numbers coming out soon. datawrapper.de/_/VJXm6/

CATO will classify him as “right wing” because he’s a religiously-inspired jihadist and “American” because he’s naturalized. That’s how their vaunted terrorist database works. But then they’ll also be classifying him as a net-paying immigrant because he won’t be taking social security. I’m serious. I am not exaggerating.

Keep the pressure up. Regime change in Iran would be a catastrophe.

This guy heard Charlie Kirk was a racist so he decided to sit down and listen to him. You know what happens next.

This Trump accuser has zero evidence for her claims and her allegations of Epstein's use of drugs on her contradict his known behavior. He was psychologically manipulative and paid his underage victims, but he didn't like drugs. The files show him discouraging women from using.

🚨🚨EXCLUSIVE and BREAKING: What about that @GavinNewsom dyslexia disgnosis - can the gov. provide any paperwork related to his dyslexia diagnosis at any time of his life? Newsom’s comms team just now tells me to “fuck off.” Think @GavinNewsom’s comms team is losing it today?

This is an all-time classic NY Governor Hochul: "Young black kids in the Bronx that don't even know what the word of 'computer' means"

They honored Johnny Gaudreau’s widow and children after winning the gold 🥺🥺 I’ve spent the day with my own family so I’m catching up, but I’m just overwhelmed thinking of Charlie, Erika, and their kids as I watch this. God bless these guys 🇺🇸🇺🇸

You can hear the genuine pride in Donald Trumps voice when he called the Team USA Hockey Team

When I was in high school and college, the College Republicans were all staffed with young RINOs who thought sucking up to Mitt Romney's wing of the party was their only pathway to a successful political career. They were almost universally two standard deviations to the Left of the average GOP primary voter. Now look at the messaging coming out of College Republican X accounts today. Total reversal. It's almost like we've entered an alternate timeline from the one that existed in 2012. This reads like something I myself would have written. It's draped in postliberal language about where we are, how we got here, and what the implications are going forward. The kids are alright.

Pledges respecting the authority of actives over actual law enforcement. #TFM

🚨 HOLY CRAP! Chuck Schumer is going viral for demanding ID CHECKS to prevent fraud in the late 1990s "Everywhere people go, they're asked for Social Security or driver's license!" 🤯 "This is anti-fraud!" Now? "ID is Jim Crow 2.0" You're a CLOWN, CHUCK! PASS VOTER ID NOW.