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Hello, America. I’m Erick Erickson. It is September 4th, a Friday, thank goodness, with a three-day weekend ahead of us. Happy Labor Day weekend to all of you. These are “The Four Things You Need to Know” this afternoon.

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Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where, if a judge allows a defendant to argue they were insane based on certain criteria, then the jury, when they deliberate, must assume the defendant is insane, and the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was actually sane.

How do you show Lindsay Clancy was sane when she strangled her three toddlers, slit her own throat, and jumped out a second-story window, rendering her permanently paralyzed?

That’s a pretty tough thing for the prosecution to show.

My guess is that the jury was not going for “not guilty” but “not guilty by reason of insanity” with one hold out.

You lawyers can read the Massachusetts model jury instruction here.

You won’t get that nuance from the online mob, but it is deeply relevant.

🚨 🚨 JUST IN: Judge set to declare mistrial in Lindsay Clancy case after jury deadlocked again - The Guardian

🚨 NEWS: Why Maria Bartiromo was fired from Fox. - X

➡️ DRIVING NEWS: Behind Closed Doors, John Fetterman Shows Little Interest in the Work of a Senator - WSJ (free)

🔥 WOW: The city of Seattle is refusing to shut down a sprawling homeless encampment that local reporters describe as a “humanitarian and environmental disaster.” - KOMO & X

📈 RECORD: US diesel prices just hit an all-time record. - AP

‼️ NOTABLE: Democrats’ path to a House majority is narrower than it looks - Washington Post (free)

👀 ASTRA: Check out OpenAI’s new model.

🎇 LOL: UMass defeated Rutgers last night, snapping college football’s longest-running losing streak. Rutgers paid UMass $1.5 million to be its week 1 opponent and then accidentally set off fireworks after the game was over.

🏈 MUST READ: America Needs Its Boys to Play Football - Ben Sasse at WSJ

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Jobs and Rate Hike

The Federal Reserve is increasingly likely to hike interest rates after more than 165K positions were added to the US economy in August, beating analysts' expectations by more than 100,000 positions.

• While job growth in prior months was heavily concentrated in healthcare, August defied the norm, with hospitality, education, construction, and manufacturing all making meaningful contributions to the report.

• So far in 2026, the economy is averaging more than 80,000 new jobs per month, a big rebound from the roughly 10,000 per month in 2025.

Why does this increase the chance of a rate hike?

• August’s stronger-than-expected jobs report significantly increased the odds of a Federal Reserve rate hike in September because it shifted the balance of the Fed’s dual mandate. The Fed is tasked with maintaining both maximum employment and managing inflation, and a resilient labor market reduces concerns about the employment side of that equation. With jobs holding up, policymakers have more room to focus on inflation and can be more comfortable raising rates—or keeping them higher for longer—to cool demand and bring prices under control.

As favorable as the topline number in the jobs report was, wages continue to lag behind inflation.

Despite this, Donald Trump is calling on the Fed to cut interest rates:

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The tables are gone now.

On Thursday, Marco Rubio’s State Department sanctioned Fidel Ernesto Castro Calis, a grandson of Raul Castro, along with Banco Exterior de Cuba, the regime’s foreign trade bank, and the entities that move the island’s nickel and its fuel: Nicarotec, Cexni, Abapet, and Comercial CUPET. That came a month after sanctions on what the State Department called Cuban regime actors tied to Marxist subversive networks. Both followed a July State Department report describing a Cuba linked rapid response network, run through Havana’s ICAP and the more than 60 organizations of the National Network on Cuba, built to put bodies outside American military bases and ICE facilities within 24 hours. Code Pink is named in that report. So is the Democratic Socialists of America. So is the People’s Forum.

This could be correlation instead of causation. Freezing a correspondent account does not automatically empty a sidewalk in Chicago, and I cannot prove the two are one thing.

What is not in dispute is the plumbing. A regime with 2 or 3 hard currency streams keeps them open through a foreign trade bank, a nickel exporter, a fuel importer, and front companies that reach American banks through third countries. Cut the bank out of dollar clearing and every one of those pipes narrows at once. Cuba spent 60 years exporting revolution because it could not export anything else at a profit. It is being contained now by Marco Rubio and a piece of paper, and containment by paperwork is cheap, reversible, and does not require a single American in uniform.

The second piece of good news came from Tom Homan, who says ICE broke its all time monthly arrest record in June, broke it again in July at roughly 51,000, and held that pace in August. That’s three consecutive months of deportation arrests at record levels in the middle of what was supposed to be an unmanageable political backlash.

Notice who did it.

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Hello, it is September 3rd. I’m Erick Erickson. These are “The Four Things You Need to Know” this afternoon.

There’s a lot happening on my screen and in the news. I’ve been delaying this with the Lindsay Clancy situation. Lindsay Clancy’s jurors have been polled one by one by the judge in the courtroom without actually the audio there for people to pay attention to.

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‼️ NOTABLE: Older adults now outnumber the youngest children worldwide - Axios

🫏 HAPPENING NOW: 33 House Dems break with Jeffries as party fractures over Israel - Fox News

🔥 NEWS: 400 prominent Jewish Democrats in Michigan just backed Mike Rogers.

👀 DATA: Record 89% Of Americans Say Government Corruption Widespread - ZeroHedge

🚨 HEADLINE: ‘Time Is Running Out!’ Karl Rove Sounds Alarm Over Ken Paxton Flailing Against James Talarico - Mediaite

😂 LOL: Tucker Carlson basically endorses Abdul El-Sayed for the U.S. Senate - X

💰 PROBLEM: People are turning to BNPL loans to pay for rent, food and other necessities - CBS

➡️ WHAT I’M READING: Do Big Firms’ Environmentalist Ties Collide with Their Energy Clients’ Interests? - National Review

👂 The Show Notes is my blueprint for radio but is only for subscribers. You can subscribe and listen here.

Starting here: Nonsense from Joe Rogan

Listen to Joe Rogan. He sounds like he is answering a question at a Miss America contest. It is shallow and loaded with an ignorance developed in a bubble of wealth. Crime and poverty are not actually related. Jesus says we’ll always have the poor. Rogan thinks we can solve poverty and, thereby, solve crime. This is shallow thinking from someone so many people listen to. It’s no wonder brain rot is spreading.

Ending The War?

The Wall Street Journal (free) reports that as Pete Hegseth is extending troop deployments in the Middle East, Donald Trump is privately considering putting an end to the war.

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Somebody at Secure America PAC needs to hear that story. The first ad out the door was 30 seconds on how tough and resilient President Trump is, with the new Air Force One circling behind him.

The second was better — no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, the price of eggs down 60 percent, and prescription drug prices down.

Every one of those is true, and every one of those is something already done.

The voters who love Trump and are moved by those things are already going to vote in November. Harry Enten has the numbers.

Republicans take 41 percent on the generic ballot while the President sits at 37 percent approval. Among voters who say their vote is a message about President Trump, Democrats lead by 27 points. Among voters who think the election is not about Trump, Republicans lead by 19. The Republicans who are already motivated to vote approve of the President at 81 percent. The Republicans still sitting on the couch approve of him at 58 percent. The people the party has to reach are the people least interested in being told the President is wonderful.

Those voters do not need to be persuaded to love anybody. They need to be shown two futures and asked which one they want to live in.

The Republican future is not complicated. Police are allowed to police, and violent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill are kept off the sidewalk instead of left there to die in the name of compassion. The border stays secured and the cartels get treated like the enemy they are. Inflation, now around 3 percent, keeps falling until wages are clearly ahead of it again. There is real work left. We have not finished cleaning up the economy Joe Biden left, and the tariffs this administration keeps defending are raising prices on the very families the GOP needs. Republicans should say so and then go fix it.

The Democratic future is not a guess either, because they keep announcing it. Zohran Mamdani wants a rent freeze, a government grocery store, and landlords barred from evicting tenants who do not pay. Ro Khanna dropped his wealth tax threshold from $1 billion to $50 million. James Talarico told a forum that capitalism and white supremacy are the same oppressive system and that oil and gas is the cassette tape business. Abdul El-Sayed denied his own defund the police record until CNN produced the audio. They want ICE abolished, the jails emptied, bail eliminated, and boys in girls’ locker rooms, and they only stop saying it out loud when a camera shows up. Give them the House and none of it is theoretical anymore.

Ann Richards understood something the President’s PAC does not. Voters do not cast ballots as a thank you note. They cast them out of fear of what comes next. President Trump deserves credit for a secured border and for breaking Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz. He will not get a single vote he does not already have for either one. Tell people what the other side will do to them, and many will crawl over glass to stop it. The GOP must remember that President Trump is overwhelmingly disliked by the country as a whole and by the independent voters who will decide this election. But, my friends, Democrats are still absolutely despised. In a race between what people dislike and what people despise, dislike can win.

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Hello America, I am Erick Erickson. It is September 2nd. These are “The Four Things You Need to Know” this afternoon.

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➡️ STARTING HERE: Paid actors, AI writing: How a new kind of video business cashed in on America’s divided politics - SEMAFOR

‼️ LISTEN: "If you want to achieve the American Dream, you should move to Canada" - Abdul El-Sayed on X

🇮🇱 STUNNING: In Daylight Raid Backed by Drones, Israel Seizes Senior Hamas Militant - WSJ (free)

🔥 NOTABLE: Rogue House Democrats face growing push for “consequences” - Axios

🏈 HEADLINE: “Keep Him Away From the Sorority Girls.” Inside Lane Kiffin’s Trash-Talking, “Joey Freshwater” Era With Nick Saban at Alabama - Vanity Fair

🎟️ GET YOUR TICKETS: It’s the Not Safe For Radio show, things not safe to say on radio, not safe in front of kids or my mom, but a ton of fun stories on an off-the-record night, October 10th at the Gas South Arena, great hotel on site, tickets are on sale now. Come hang out with me, text show to 33-777 for details.

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NEW: Trump’s Midterm Ad

If Trump-world is going to orient midterm messaging around a president with an approval rating in the 30s, Republicans will lose from coast to coast.

Harry Enten agrees: ⬇️

BREAKING: Second Trump midterm ad just dropped.

Data Centers

Donald Trump is doubling down on his support for data centers despite being fully aware of their unpopularity, according to new reporting from Politico.

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Laura Ingraham went after me on Twitter yesterday for bluntly telling people the truth about Ken Paxton. She called me “NeverTrump.”

I’d just remind people that in 2020, Laura Ingraham was helping seed the stolen election stuff on Fox while, in the privacy of her text messages, dismissing both Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

You may get aggravated with me telling you the truth about Paxton and how Trump needs to drag his lazy butt across the finish line, but unlike Laura and a lot of right-wing voices, I’m not going to lie to you or hide the truth from you because I’m afraid you’ll get mad (again).

Again, the legal record shows that off air, Laura Ingraham was telling her colleagues in text messages that Sidney Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

I never keep from you what I actually think. I won’t be as rich as Laura Ingraham because you can make more money lying to people, telling them what they want to hear. But I’ll be fine just telling people the truth.

And as I also wrote yesterday, Ken Paxton can still win in Texas. He’s just got to stop calling Talarico weird, questioning his sexuality, etc. The way to beat Talarico is to just expose people to Talarico’s own words.

Start with this:

And then add in all this stuff.

Paxton is a terrible candidate. He needs to give people a reason to vote for him. He can’t make the case for himself, but he can certainly make the case that Talarico does not belong in the Senate.

And he needs about $100 million from Donald Trump because Paxton is not raising the money he needs to get the job done.

That’s not NeverTrump. It is the truth.

Paxton can win. Trump is going to have to spend a bunch of money to make it happen. Republicans are going to have to do the cost/benefit analysis on whether it is worth it to spend that much on a single race. Money is not unlimited.

But beating Talarico in Texas can be done if Paxton stops trying to sell himself and, instead, uses Talarico against Talarico.

Lindsay Clancy’s Jury

I am kind of disgusted with a lot of the social media commentary on Lindsay Clancy and the jury of nine women and three men. Based on reports yesterday, it appears two women on the jury are unwilling to go along with the rest.

Some conservatives are attacking the women, claiming it proves women cannot serve on juries, etc. Many of these same conservatives were previously dismissive of postpartum depression.

I know a man whose wife dropped her children off at her in-laws, went home, lay on the floor, and killed herself. I know another who had to be admitted to a psychiatric facility. Those are the very rare cases. The complete dismissal of postpartum depression and the effects it can have on women is ignorance masquerading as sophisticated truth-telling.

This case is more complicated than many people want to believe, in large part because it is in Massachusetts, and, honestly, I think the prosecution overcharged the case.

Massachusetts is (I’m pretty sure) the only state in the United States where the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant is sane if the defendant pleads not guilty by reason of insanity. You can read the actual instructions to jurors on the matter here. The relevant part is this:

If the Commonwealth has proved the elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt, the Commonwealth must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible at the time of the alleged offense. Under the law, a person is not guilty if they lacked criminal responsibility when they committed the offense. This is sometimes referred to as not guilty by reason of insanity. There is no burden on the defendant to prove that they lacked criminal responsibility.

These are the options being presented to the jury:

1. not guilty

2. not guilty by reason of insanity

3. first-degree murder

4. second-degree murder

5. manslaughter

It is easy for us as spectators to watch the trial and hear the commentary, but as both a lawyer and a more than once juror, I think juries do tend to take these matters seriously. And the prosecution in Massachusetts has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy was totally in her right mind when she strangled her three children.

Had the prosecution just offered up manslaughter and limited the jury’s options, it probably would have been an easier call. Instead, you’ve probably got jurors all over the place with a lingering, obvious question — who in their right mind would do that to their babies, then cut themselves and throw themselves out a window, leading to permanent paralysis?

I won’t be surprised by a mistrial or a not guilty by reason of insanity.

The social media witch hunt is not the same as a jury, and I trust the jury far more than the mob on social media.

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Hello, America. It is September 1st. I’m Erick Erickson. These are “The Four Things You Need to Know” this afternoon.

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❌ LEADING: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned last night. - NOTUS

🔥 STARTING HERE: Divided Supreme Court rules White House ballroom construction may proceed - The Hill

➡️ NEWS: Apple has a new CEO, John Ternus. - NYT (free)

🏈 BOOM: Black college athletes are pushing back against NAACP voting nonsense.

🏞️ DEVASTATING: Flash floods killed two in the Grand Canyon and destroyed roughly 40% of the park's only water pipeline. - AP

‼️ DISTURBING: Victim stabbed to death in Times Square rampage was VP at Bank of America, just celebrated 2nd wedding anniversary - NY Post

👂 The Show Notes is my blueprint for radio but is only for subscribers. You can subscribe and listen here.

A personal note:

Talarico: Capitalism is an oppressive system that should be dismantled

CNBC: Global bond yields soar to multi-decade highs as Middle East turmoil reignites inflation fears

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The only thing for which Paxton has ever shown prodigious energy is philandery and possibly corruption. He is a lazy candidate in a heated race, and laziness is not a flaw you can fundraise your way around. In the primary, I argued that Paxton could beat John Cornyn and that dragging the man across the finish line in November could cost Republicans the Senate. We have arrived at that moment.

Paxton’s supporters now insist everyone else must carry him. They want the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the outside groups, the donor class, and President Trump to spend whatever it takes, even if the money spent in Texas costs Republicans Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio, and even if it forecloses winnable pickups in Michigan and New Hampshire. Saving Paxton, they say, matters more than saving the country from a Democrat controlled Senate. That is nonsense. I said it in the primary, and I stand by it now.

Senator John Kennedy went on Fox and put the number at $100 million to get Paxton across the line.

That is not a rounding error. Every dollar of it is a dollar not spent defending Alaska and Maine, not spent in Ohio against Sherrod Brown, and not spent contesting a Michigan seat where Democrats nominated Abdul El-Sayed. Republican money is finite. The President is sitting on the sidelines of the Texas race for now, which ought to tell Texas Republicans something about how people who count votes for a living see this.

Cornyn was not a great candidate. He was too moderate for much of the Republican base in Texas, and the frustration with him was real. It was always nonsense, though, that the better option was a serial philanderer whose own staff reported him to federal law enforcement for corruption and whose own party impeached him. Republicans did not choose between a squish and a fighter. They chose between a safe seat and a coin flip, and they took the coin flip on purpose.

The tantrum now underway in Texas consists of blaming everyone else for refusing to rescue Paxton. It is a tantrum precisely because the people throwing it lack the intellectual honesty to say out loud that this is their mess and theirs to clean up. In every prior race, Ken Paxton was carried across the finish line by somebody else, by a strong top of the ticket, by a good year, or by straight ticket voters who never learned his name. This is the first time he sits at the top of the ticket himself. Paxton has a string of mistresses, but he has no coat tails.

None of this is hindsight. It is what a great many of us predicted out loud when it could still have been avoided, and we were shouted down, insulted, and rebuffed for it. We are being shouted down, insulted, and rebuffed now by the same people who insisted Paxton was the stronger candidate and who have decided the rest of the country owes them a bailout. We told the Paxton cult of personality this would happen, and, as it plays out, they insist we hate him and want him to lose as opposed to recognizing their myopic hatred of John Cornyn could saddle Texas with James Talarico as the rest of us predicted.

Texas Republicans still have the largest activist base and one of the deepest donor pools in the country. The activists who nominated Paxton and the donors who funded him can pony up, knock on the doors, and run the turnout operation his campaign has not bothered to build. If they save that seat themselves, they earned it. God bless them. Paxton can, after all, still win. But the rest of us have a Senate to save, which is more important than saving Texas at the expense of the republic.

Point of Personal Privilege

As you wake up this morning, Apple has a new CEO — John Ternus. He replaces Tim Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs. Jobs, occasionally, would reply to customer emails. Cook continued that tradition and was probably more responsive than Jobs.

I once had a nice exchange with him, sharing pictures taken from my iPhone of the Northern Lights here in Georgia. Once, a friend’s business had mysteriously been converted on Apple Maps to Japanese letters. Have hitting dead end after dead end getting it fixed, I emailed Tim Cook. The next day, the matter was resolved.

Tim Cook, in less than twenty years, turned Apple into one of the most profitable companies on planet earth. Under his watch, Apple launched its watch, its AirPods, its Airtags, and more — not to mention the transition of Apple from Intel chips to its own chips. And as Apple updated and refined its computers, it also has continually upgraded that small device I keep in my pocket that connects me to the world and lets me make memories with my family, like that night we stayed out late on a school night to marvel at the Northern Lights in Middle Georgia.

Thanks Tim.

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Hello America, I’m Erick Erickson. It is August 31st and these are “The Four Things You Need to Know” this afternoon.

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⛳️ NEWS: LIV Golf eyes bankruptcy filing as soon as next week - SBJ

🚨 NOTABLE: America’s next grocery shock is brewing - Axios

🔥 FASCINATING: China Prepared for One Himalayan Hazard. Then Another Struck. - NYT (free)

➡️ MUST WATCH: Everything you need to know about the glacial collapse that resulted in historic flooding in Nepal. - X

‼️ HEADLINE: Taxpayers Lost $65 Billion On Obamacare Fraud Last Year - ZeroHedge

😳 WOW: NYC socialist leaders caught living large, quietly collecting millions from real estate flips - NY Post

👂 The Show Notes is my blueprint for radio but is only for subscribers. You can subscribe and listen here.

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Give President Trump the credit he has earned. Nicolás Maduro is gone. The Strait of Hormuz is open. And Friday night, the President announced Venezuela’s fields are opening back up to American capital. Chevron and Halliburton are moving in with billions. Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still on the sidelines, gun-shy after 2007 and unconvinced that dilapidated infrastructure and a 1999 constitution declaring the oil unsellable are worth the legal risk. Marco Rubio calls it a huge win. On the strategic question, he is right. A hemisphere where the crude comes from Caracas instead of Kharg Island is a hemisphere where the ayatollahs have one less card to play.

To the people clutching pearls about American re-entry: we were there first, we were there legally, and we left at gunpoint. You do not get to seize a man’s property, wreck it, starve your own people with it, and then cry colonialism when he comes back with a contract instead of a rifle.

Unfortunately, the structure of this deal is socialist, and I am not going to pretend otherwise because a Republican signed it.

Read what the Wall Street Journal actually reported. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, an office built to make national security loans, is taking a 35 percent equity stake in a private company called North American Blue Energy Partners through penny warrants, plus the right to buy a fifth of its production at cost. We get 17 oil fields, 65 billion barrels of oil, and rights for a century. The company will be run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman investigated for money laundering in Spain and Switzerland, close to Delcy Rodríguez, and a friend of the President’s.

We have seen this movie three times this year. Washington took roughly 10 percent of Intel, the weakest American chipmaker, and called it the CHIPS Act. Washington took a golden share in U.S. Steel as the price of the Nippon deal. Now the Department of Defense will be a shareholder in a Venezuelan oil venture.

The problems are not theoretical. The federal government is now part-owner of the second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves on earth, which makes it the business partner of a competitor to the American companies it spent months begging to come back. Ed Hirs at the University of Houston asked the obvious question: why is the United States building a rival to the American oil patch? A friend of the President got the concession, which is what we spent four years screaming about when it was a Biden and a Chinese energy company. And when Venezuela’s next government challenges this in court, and it will, the United States is not the referee. It is a litigant with a balance sheet.

This is the same error the socialist left makes, arriving from the other direction. The left wants the state to own the means of production because it distrusts the market. The post-liberal right wants the state to own the means of production because it distrusts the market too, but it calls it national security. Both decide that a bureaucrat should hold the shares instead of the people who built the thing. Coolidge understood that the government’s job is to stay under the playing field and keep it level so David can still beat Goliath. It is not to buy a piece of Goliath.

Notwithstanding all of that, on balance, this is a good deal. It is good for Venezuela, which needs capital, jobs, and an economy that is not a criminal enterprise. It is good for the United States, which needs crude that does not travel through a strait Iran keeps trying to mine. It is good for a hemisphere that spent twenty years watching what socialism does to a rich country.

But the structure is rotten, and rot spreads. A future president should sell the warrants, divest the Intel shares, hand back the golden share, and get the Treasury and the Pentagon out of the equity business.

That same president had better not let up on the harder half of the job, turning Venezuela toward free elections and the West rather than settling for a compliant, unelected government that signs whatever we put in front of it. Delcy Rodríguez was Maduro’s vice president. She is not the destination.

Chávez took it with rifles. We are taking it back with paperwork, which is the better instrument. Let us make sure the paperwork ends up in private hands, where it belonged in the first place. But President Trump deserves credit for a dramatic shift in the right direction.

“Non-Concur” And the Problems The Leaks Entail

Somebody wrote the word “non-concur” in a classified binder on August 14, and now you and I and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps can all read about it.

The Secretary of Defense Orders Book comes out twice a month and lays out where every American ship, plane, and soldier is. In the August 14 edition, according to the Washington Post, the heads of European Command, Pacific Command, and Southern Command, along with the Chief of Naval Operations, formally told Pete Hegseth they disagree with extending their forces for the Iran fight and will carry out the order anyway. Admiral Daryl Caudle told him barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is ready to deploy. One person familiar with the assessment summed up the mood of the uniformed leadership as “too much for too long.”

That is the third leak in a sequence. First came the reporting that our defensive stocks were being burned through, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimating about 65 percent of Patriot interceptors expended between February and July and THAAD inventories down at least 38 percent, and a U.S. official telling ABC News both are “extremely low.” Then came Reuters, reporting the Army has used “virtually all” of its ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles. Now come the generals and admirals telling the Secretary of Defense, in writing, that we cannot keep this up.

Whether every detail in those stories is accurate matters less than what a cornered adversary does with them.

Brett McGurk, who served four presidents and is nobody’s Republican partisan, argued at CNN this week that for the first time, Iran is genuinely losing. He has the better of the argument. The blockade reimposed in mid-July has stopped Iranian oil exports, shipping through Hormuz has recovered to two-thirds of prewar levels, energy prices have stayed stable, and the Iranian economy is set to contract more than 5 percent this year, with inflation near 70 percent. Tehran’s entire theory of this war was to raise the gas price until the midterms made President Trump quit. That theory is collapsing.

A regime watching its leverage evaporate has just been handed a public inventory of our shortages. It has every incentive to move first, and to move where it hurts, which is Gulf energy infrastructure, with assistance by Hezbollah against Israel, Iranian proxies in Iraq against the United States and Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis in Yemen shutting down the Red Sea. If the leaks are accurate, they tell the Iranians when to go. If they are false, they are bait, and a desperate regime is precisely the kind that takes bait. Either way, the odds that Iran tries to break our economic stranglehold through military pressure on our allies went up this weekend.

The military’s warning is narrower than the headline suggests. The commanders are not telling Hegseth that they cannot fight Iran. They are telling him they cannot hold more than 50,000 troops on alert indefinitely for a conflict with no anticipated end date, which is the phrase Admiral Caudle used. The Army and the Air Force actually concurred with extending their forces. The objection is to open-ended attrition, not to force.

That points in the same direction as McGurk’s analysis does. If Iran is losing and knows it, and if the uniformed leadership is telling the Secretary of Defense that slow and indefinite is the one thing we cannot sustain, then the answer to an Iranian first move is not another six months of tit for tat. It is fast and overwhelming, aimed at ending this regime’s ability to do any of it again, with Israel turned loose to finish what it started in February, and our partners in the region authorized to move with us. The generals have not argued against that. They have argued against the alternative.

If the leaks are accurate, the civilian leadership within the Pentagon has badly mismanaged this war. Multiple people in the administration confirm what people inside the defense industry told me months ago: nobody ever sent the signal to ramp up production. The Pentagon never gave that order to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman before the shooting started, possibly out of fear of tipping off Beijing and Tehran. Congress has funded the government by continuing resolution since the Obama years, and you cannot sign multiyear production contracts against money that expires in six weeks. Since the 1993 “last supper,” the Pentagon dinner where Les Aspin and Bill Perry told defense executives that shrinking post Cold War budgets would support only half of them, deliberate government policy has consolidated the primes into system integrators running 8 to 9 percent margins. An interceptor costs roughly $4 million and can take two years to build. You cannot decide in the fifth month of a war that you would like more of them in the sixth.

The isolationist right is quietly content with all of this, because an America that runs out of missiles is an America that comes home, which is what they wanted anyway. The progressive left wants defense budgets starved to reach the same place by a different road. Xi Jinping is taking notes on how long our magazine lasts.

The commanders who wrote “non-concur” did their jobs. They told the truth up the chain in the one place they are supposed to tell it, and President Trump deserves real credit for a blockade that is working and for reopening the Strait when much of Washington said it could not be done. The failure sits upstream of all of them, in the years nobody picked up a phone and told a factory to start building. Now the word is on the front page where Tehran can read it, and we are about to find out what the Iranians do with it.

Tucker and Vance, Sitting In a Tree…

The Vice President has patently refused to offer up much criticism of Tucker Carlson.

In the past three weeks, Abdul El-Sayed has had to distance himself from Hasan Piker because he invited Piker to campaign with him and Piker is a raging anti-American a—hole who is also an antisemite and Mao fan.

History shows Tucker Carlson lobbied for J.D. Vance to be Donald Trump’s running mate. History shows Tucker Carlson’s son worked for J.D. Vance. History shows time and time again J.D. Vance has refused to distance himself from Tucker Carlson or condemn Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric.

Now, Tucker Carlson, who is on the record insisting J.D. Vance is his preference for the presidency, is also insisting President Trump needs to be immediately removed from office.

Just based on the same standard the press has for Abdul El-Sayed, you’d think they’d ask the Vice President about Tucker Carlson. And, like El-Sayed, will Vance refuse to really condemn Carlson as E-Sayed has refused to condemn Piker? Or will Vance finally get a Sister Souljah moment?

🎟️ GET YOUR TICKETS: It’s the Not Safe For Radio show, things not safe to say on radio, not safe in front of kids or my mom, but a ton of fun stories on an off-the-record night, October 10th at the Gas South Arena, great hotel on site, tickets are on sale now. Come hang out with me, text show to 33-777 for details.

🙄 WHAT: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation told staff not to refer to 9/11 as a terrorist attack.

🚨 DEVASTATING: 579 are dead and over 2,500 are missing as the devastation continues to rise in Nepal. - BBC

‼️ NEWS: Fed Chairman Warsh expresses concern about inflation while advocating for a ‘quieter’ central bank - CNBC

👀 WHAT I’M READING: The Left’s Antisemitism Is Still Festering - David Drucker at Bloomberg (free)

🔥 NOTABLE: Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Fall For The Left’s Data Center Scare Tactics - Dailywire

🤢 NOOOOO: KFC Reveals the Oreo Chicken Burger - IGN

🎧 IMPORTANT: Make sure you check out my new podcast, Four Things To Know This Afternoon.

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🎟️ GET YOUR TICKETS: It’s the Not Safe For Radio show, things not safe to say on radio, not safe in front of kids or my mom, but a ton of fun stories on an off-the-record night, October 10th at the Gas South Arena, great hotel on site, tickets are on sale now. Come hang out with me, text show to 33-777 for details.

Hello, America. It is Friday, August 28th. These are “The Four Things You Need to Know” this afternoon.

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🔥 NEWS: Fed Chairman Warsh expresses concern about inflation while advocating for a ‘quieter’ central bank - CNBC

⛴️ HEADLINE: “That sucker is open”: U.S. gains the upper hand in the battle for Hormuz - Axios

🤢 RECALL: FDA upgrades recall on Whole Foods guacamole to highest threat level - NY Post

‼️ NOTABLE: Buc-ee’s says it will prioritize ‘conservative, business-friendly’ states amid pushback over logo lawsuits - The Hill

👀 WHAT I’M READING: Who is Behind the Case that Could Shut Down American Energy - Deep Background

🇺🇸 YESTERDAY: Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ in the United States - AP

👂 The Show Notes is my blueprint for radio but is only for subscribers. You can subscribe and listen here.

Chinese Influence

A Chinese influence campaign involving more than 200,000 bot accounts was recently uncovered on X, where the accounts were attempting to shape American public opinion on the construction of AI data centers.

According to the X Safety Team, “Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”

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