Joe

There’s a version of Benghazi that keeps getting retold, and it’s wrong. It needs to end. Not once, over the course of September 11 or 12, 2012, did anyone on the ground request to be “saved” by the U.S. military. The calls were for reinforcements so we could take the fight to Al-Qaeda. That was the mission. That was the intent. We were not asking to run, we were asking to finish it. When those reinforcements never came, everything changed. It was no longer about securing the compound and hunting down the more than 200 terrorists involved in the six attacks that evening. It became a full evacuation. Not just non-essentials, everyone. And in that shift, we lost the opportunity to pursue the enemy, to hold them accountable in real-time, to deliver justice when it mattered most. We were forced to give up ground. With that, a U.S. diplomatic presence has NEVER returned to Benghazi. Al-Qaeda walked away from that night with a massive victory in their minds, even though their original kidnapping objective failed. It emboldened them and sent a clear message of weakness across the global terrorism network that you could kill a U.S. Ambassador and face ZERO consequences. Just months later, our attackers carried out the In Amenas attack in Algeria, killing more Americans. And over the past dozen years, the network that hit us that night has gone on to kill thousands more, including, yes, even more Americans. Today, our attackers are actively working on a massive plot targeting the U.S. homeland. So, if this failure to confront Al-Qaeda continues, we will be forced to watch our terrorists kill Americans on U.S. soil because that is the reality of what failure buys us. That is the cost of being forced to retreat instead of being allowed to fight. So stop twisting what we asked for. It was never to save us. It was about justice. We planned to finish the fight against the enemy, and no one stepped up to help us do it! @BentonDave28405 @TigTiegen @KTantoP @MarkGeistSWP

Congratulations to the crew of #ArtemisII on going beyond where no human has gone before! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Leaving your American flag @AEO boxers behind… $15.
 Taking an American back from behind enemy lines in terrorist-run Iran… Priceless.

BREAKING: I'm taking legal action as part of a landmark investigation into an alleged effort by the Islamic Tribunal to impose sharia law on Texas. This is America, and we will not be governed by sharia law.

The truth of what lies behind doors #1 and #2 of these Falls Church, VA condos is either a coincidence of astronomical improbability, or proof that @FBI began their coverup of the J6 pipe bomber as early as January 13, 2021. @HanneReports and I are now free to tell the entire story. Rollout begins tomorrow. Please follow both of us here on X. Thanks to @elonmusk, you won’t miss any of it. Happy Easter 🙏✝️

@TracesofTexas Incredible photo! This should have been on the cover of Life Magazine!

The greatest Texas Easter photo of all time or the greatest photo ever taken in Texas? The pure, unabashed joy on San Antonio farmer Sam Smith's face as he celebrates rain on Easter Sunday after a prolonged drought in 1951 takes me to my happy place every Easter. Taken by Harvey Belgin and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Traces of Texas reader Stan Watty kindly sent this in and I rarely "LOL" when I get something in my messages but I did this time. This is pretty much the unvarnished truth, isn't it? Thank you, Stan!

This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth. I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy? Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every Marine is a rifleman, and as a priest he can’t carry a weapon. He’s hoping to get assigned to a Marine unit anyway. All chaplains are Navy officers, so that’s the only door in. I laughed. I feel a little bad about that. Then I explained to him what “Devil Doc” means. The Marine Corps doesn’t have medics. They use Navy Corpsmen. I told him: when you get out to the fleet, find a Marine sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts and tell him Devil Docs “aren’t real Marines.” Be prepared to duck. Marines are violently particular about who gets to wear their uniform. Navy Corpsmen and Navy chaplains who have eaten dirt alongside them in combat qualify. Full stop. My dad was Air Force. Not even Navy. I remember going to VFW halls with him as a kid. Someone would ask him what service, he’d say Air Force, and the room would chuckle a little. Then they’d find out he was a medic, and the air in the room changed. Something close to reverence. Dad hated being honored. He had one line he used to deflect it: “I didn’t do much. Save your praise for my cousin the PJ.” That always broke the ice. PJs are the Air Force special operators who go into hell to pull downed pilots out. They will take casualties and are prepared to die to rescue a single pilot or crewman. The math doesn’t math out. Why would any combat force take multiple casualties to rescue one air force jet jockey? What the padre is about to learn is that the military has a hierarchy that has nothing to do with rank, and nothing to do with the service stitched on your chest. Have you deployed? Have you seen combat? In every firefight there are men who move toward the guns and men who hang back. And when the guy at the tip of the spear is pinned down, bleeding, with rounds cracking past his head, there is exactly one word he screams into the radio. “Medic.” Here is the catch, and it is the whole reason America fights the way America fights. That Marine is willing to push forward into fire BECAUSE he knows the Corpsman is coming. He knows the medevac birds will land in the hot LZ. He knows the Devil Doc will drag him out by his plate carrier if it comes to that. And, if the medic can’t help, if he has what Dad called “injuries incompatible with life,” he knows that chaplain will crawl on his belly to administer last rights and deliver him to heaven. The F-15 pilot punching out over enemy territory knows the same thing. He knows the PJs will move heaven and earth to reach him, and turn whatever is shooting at him into a smoking crater of hell on earth on the way in. This is the quiet math underneath American violence. Our warriors are the fiercest on earth not because they are more aggressive, not just because they are better trained, or better equipped, though they are all of those things. They are the fiercest because they know, in their bones, that when they key the mic and call for help, help is coming in hot. Take that away, and you don’t have the U.S. military anymore. You have a security force.

As professors spend less time teaching students, they’re spending more time doing research. The catch: Analysis shows that 70% of the studies published in scholarly journals didn’t receive a single citation within 25 years of publication. youtu.be/UAL3aW0nQEc

@CJGRISHAM I think he should put his narcissistic globalist money where his mouth is and try to primary Cruz. Then he will blame someone else.

Ted Cruz didnt unelect you; Texans did, Dan. You lost us with your fake conservatism.

@dom_lucre This is for you, Art Bell, wherever you are. You've been vindicated.

🔥🚨BREAKING: Congress. Burchett revealed that he can’t respond to former Rep. Matt Gaetz claims of being on an alien hybrid breeding program while in Congress Rep. Burchett: “If they would release the things I’ve seen, you’d be up at night thinking about this stuff. I was briefed 2 weeks ago. It would’ve set the Earth on— This country would’ve come unglued if they would’ve heard what I heard. They would demand answers. Unfortunately it keeps getting covered up and the people that know are dying or disappearing. For the record, I’m not suicidal and I don’t take risks.” “I told the President: ‘Release it all.’”

I am the Director of Professional Signal Intelligence at LinkedIn. Every time you log in, we search your computer. Not metaphorically. We run code that scans your installed software. Every browser extension. Every application. We catalog it. We transmit it to our servers. We share it with a third-party cybersecurity firm you've never heard of. The tracking pixel is zero pixels wide. We hid it off-screen. You never consented. We never asked. Our privacy policy doesn't mention it. That's networking. We call the program Project Handshake internally. The Slack channel is handshake-telem. In 2024 we scanned for 461 products. By February this year we scan for over 6,000. I don't know what all of them are. Nobody does. Someone on my team added categories for browser extensions that identify practicing Muslims. Someone added extensions for neurodivergent users. Someone added 509 job search tools. That last one is my favorite. We can tell which of our one billion users are secretly looking for new jobs. On the platform where their current boss checks their profile. That's networking. We scan for 200 products that compete with LinkedIn's sales tools. Apollo. Lusha. ZoomInfo. We know each user's real name, employer, and job title. We mapped exactly which companies use which competitor products. We extracted their customer lists from their users' browsers. Without anyone knowing. Then we sent legal threats to the users we caught. The EU told us to open our platform to third-party tools. We published two restricted APIs. They handle 0.07 calls per second. Our internal API, Voyager, handles 163,000 calls per second. In Microsoft's 249-page compliance report, the word "Voyager" appears zero times. That's networking. I presented our Software Disclosure Rate metrics at a leadership summit last quarter. The conference room is called The Fishbowl. Glass walls. Appropriate. There's a plaque on the wall. Q3 Competitive Landscape Award. I won it for the extension scanning initiative. Someone asked if users had a way to opt out. I said they can close their browser. The room laughed. I wasn't sure why. I browse LinkedIn on a Chromebook with no extensions. Most of the team does. The platform that helps you get hired searches your computer every time you visit. We know your name. We know your employer. We know your religion. Your disabilities. Your politics. Whether you're looking to leave. That's networking. The system works exactly as designed. I designed it.

SCOTUS better get it right. If it does not, we will take additional steps to ensure the American citizenship factory of birth tourism is ended. It must be.

@AndrewDesiderio @PunchbowlNews @emilyjashinsky @Punchbowl Punchbowl is Thunebowl. Not only does Thune receive tons of money from their sponsors, Thune also is by and far their most prominently featured Congress member. Pass it on. x.com/DataRepublican…

@less_tx Spring holiday? In the middle of spring break? Seriously?

SPRING HOLIDAY? Really? Offending the citizens of Houston on purpose?

The #FBI is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to the whereabouts of John Bui Tran, last seen on April 2, 2005, at a party on Mitchell Street in Randolph, Massachusetts: fbi.gov/wanted/kidnap/…

ALMOST FRIDAY AND AMERICA’S GOING TO THE MOON 🚀🇺🇸🦅

This…is…awesome. 🤣🤣🤣

There will be no parallel legal systems in Texas hiding behind the First Amendment. Sharia Law is incompatible with Western Civilization and has no place in this country. chiproy.com

The National Mall celebrated the launch of ARTEMIS II right. Beautiful tribute to NASA.