Israel Must Defend Itself

Israel Must Defend Itself

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As Israel systematically dismantles Iranian proxies in the Middle East, Iran is lashing out in an increasingly erratic manner.

This week, Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles on Israel in an escalatory attack. Thankfully, the missiles did little damage to Israel or Israeli citizens. But we cannot allow Iran to continue this aggression against our ally, and Israel cannot wait for another Iranian escalation. They must hit back hard and decisively. 

Iran’s reckless aggression has sealed its fate. Now, Israel has the momentum, and they’re not going to let it slip away. When you’re dealing with a threat like this, you don’t let your enemy rebuild—you keep the pressure on.

Equally important, the United States must give Israel the latitude and support Israel needs to deter further aggression from Iran. Only Israel can decide the time, place, and manner of their counter attack, but they should seize the initiative against an increasingly weak Iran. 

The Biden-Harris Administration is unfortunately but unsurprisingly showing weakness at precisely the wrong time elsewhere in the region, vacating U.S. presence from longstanding bases in Iraq in a misguided deal with the Iraqi government.

This sends the wrong message at the worst possible time—just when Iran’s regional proxy terror network is collapsing. Their leadership is in disarray, and their capabilities are crumbling. Now Biden-Harris want to give them some breathing room by handing over Iraq to Iran.

In the Middle East, strength is respected, and any sign of weakness is exploited. This deal will be seen as a display of weakness because it gives the Iranians exactly what they’ve wanted since 2003: less American influence in Iraq, giving them the opportunity to make Iraq a fully-fledged proxy state. 

Pulling back now would be a catastrophic mistake—a repeat of the Afghanistan debacle. It would be the unnecessary concession of hard fought gains, protected by a relatively small and cheap US footprint. And what would we gain from the deal? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Let’s not make the same mistake again.

What We Must Do To Win This Election

What We Must Do To Win This Election

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The majority of the electorate in this election have already made up their minds. President Trump has a core set of voters who will vote for him no matter what. Kamala Harris has the same thing on her side. The real fight in this election is for that slim share of voters in the middle – the undecideds – who have yet to make up their minds about who they’re going to vote for in not only the presidential race, but up and down the ballot. 

So, how do we win those voters to our side?

Elections are fundamentally about persuasion. Elections are not about screaming and yelling in our own bubble, to people who already agree with us. That wins us no new voters. We must go outside our bubble and into moderate or even liberal environments and speak to people who might otherwise not hear from us. 

That was my message for activists in Montgomery County, Texas, one of the most conservative areas of the entire country. I had a mission for our Republican activists: go out and persuade the independent and undecided voters to join us. And if you live in a deep red county like Montgomery, where a GOP victory is assured, you can volunteer in a blue county like Harris County. There is always more you can do – donate, volunteer, hand out campaign literature, walk blocks, anything. 

And the message to swing voters is simple: by every metric, you were better off under four years of President Trump than you were under Biden-Harris and America is better under conservative leadership at every single level of our government.

Debunking the Biggest Left-Wing Myth About the Trump Economy

Debunking the Biggest Left-Wing Myth About the Trump Economy

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Another massive left wing myth that I debunked on Bill Maher’s show is one that Democrats use repeatedly: “Joe Biden inherited a crappy economy from Donald Trump, and that is the real reason inflation and the cost of living are so high.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inherited an economy that was largely recovering from the pandemic. Biden-Harris inherited low inflation, and then skyrocketed inflation to 9%. Biden-Harris inherited an economy that had GDP growth not only returning to pre-pandemic levels but actually exceeding them by the time they took office. Even unemployment was largely returning to pre-pandemic levels by the time Biden-Harris took office. 

So, what happened? It’s very simple. Biden-Harris injected trillions of dollars of welfare (i.e. demand) into the economy while screwing up supply – specifically by restricting energy production and imposing regulations that suffocated economic growth. That is precisely what causes inflation: too much demand chasing too few goods. That’s why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris created the worst inflation America has seen since Jimmy Carter. 

Biden-Harris inherited a relatively strong economy from Donald Trump and destroyed it.

Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme?

Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme?

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A constant refrain from Democrats is that it is the Republican party that has strayed from its original positions to more extreme policy stances. But is that actually true?

I debunked that myth on Bill Maher’s show with a simple experiment. Which party platform do you think the below quotes came from on the issues of immigration and the role of government?

On immigration: “We must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years, Washington talked tough but failed to act. Our borders might as well not have existed. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.”

On the role of government: “This is what our party stands for – the end of the era of big government. We need a smaller, more effective, more efficient, less bureaucratic government that reflects our time-honored values. The American people do not want big government solutions and they do not want empty promises.They want a government that gives a moderate, achievable, common-sense agenda that will improve people’s daily lives and not increase the size of government.”

That is actually from Bill Clinton’s party platform in 1996. You can read the full Democrat platform here.

Can you imagine any Democrat saying that in 2024? Of course not, because the party has strayed so far from those commonsense positions. They now believe that illegal immigration must be encouraged out of a misplaced sense of compassion, with Kamala Harris promising not to put illegal immigrants in jail and rather give illegal immigrants free health care. Democrats now believe that there are no limits to the size and role of government in our lives, which is why they constantly seek to expand the influence of the federal government. 

Meanwhile, you cannot find much daylight between Republican platforms of the past and Donald Trump’s platform today. Why? Because conservatives operate within a governing framework that is largely unchangeable. The shifts in our party’s policy positions are around the edges and minimal compared to the wholesale rewrite of the Democrat Party platform we’ve witnessed over the past decades. 

When your liberal friends try to tell you that Republicans have shifted to more extreme positions, show them this video. 

Unmasking the Pseudoscience: The Truth About ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

Unmasking the Pseudoscience: The Truth About ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

In 2007, there was only one pediatric gender clinic in the United States. Now there are close to 100. It’s impossible to overstate just how quickly the Left has radicalized on the issue of so-called “gender affirming care.” None of the people pushing this harmful pseudoscientific nonsense believed it 10 or 15 years ago.

According to data collected by Komodo Health and analyzed by Reuters, a total of 121,882 new diagnoses of gender dysphoria were added for patients ages six to 17 between 2017 and 2021. The rate of diagnosis increased by 20 percent each year between 2017 and 2020, and then shot up 70 percent between 2020 and 2021—the year kids were home due to COVID-19 lockdowns, when they spent much more time on their phones and social media.

These are real numbers that tell a real story. As the head of Boston Children’s Gender Clinic confirms for us, they are handing out puberty blockers “like candy.”

The Left accuses Republicans of creating this new fight in the culture wars out of whole cloth. In reality, we’re simply responding to a rapid onset of transgender ideology being pushed on our children in their schools, libraries, and even doctors’ offices. This is an entirely new phenomenon, pushed by people who know better in pursuit of so-called “compassion” for children suffering from sometimes temporary ideations about their gender.

Let’s be frank: It is not compassionate to perform a double mastectomy on a teenage girl who is insecure about her body. It is not compassionate to pump a 13 year-old boy full of puberty blockers, seriously affecting his ability to reproduce in the future. Our children cannot consent to life-altering procedures, and informed consent depends on evidence-based medicine.

We need to be able to trust that physicians are providing care that is backed by solid science, and so-called gender affirming care runs counter to evidence-based medicine.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Endocrine Society, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) have all released policy statements in support of gender-affirming care. Other organizations, including the American Medical Association, have made public statements in support of “affirming” medicine without citing evidence. But not one of these organizations has done systematic reviews of the evidence, a method of review supposed to prevent the cherry-picking of studies and biased analysis. Their statements of support appear to be grounded in a fear of provoking rabid gender ideologues rather than in sound science.

On the other hand, Sweden, Finland, the U.K., and Florida have all done systematic reviews, and all reached the same conclusion: There is no evidence that the benefits of this approach for treating gender-related distress in youth outweigh the risks. Recently, Denmark also imposed restrictions, and Norway is poised to follow suit. Even progressive European countries recognize that high-risk and irreversible interventions must meet a high threshold of evidence. Remember, these procedures on children are permanent. There is no turning back once you start to change a child’s gender. And yet, as our peer-countries have admitted, there is zero high quality evidence for the benefits of this pseudoscience.

Roughly 70 percent of U.S. teens who go to gender clinics have comorbid psychiatric diagnoses that precede the onset of gender dysphoria. That raises a troubling question: Are we misdiagnosing gender dysphoria because of the affirm first, ask questions later approach we have adopted in the United States? Is this affirmative model biased toward one diagnosis—gender dysphoria—and biased toward “gender affirming care” as a treatment?

Medical experts around the world think so. That’s why 21 leading experts on pediatric gender medicine from nine countries recently wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal sounding the alarm about the American affirmative model for youth gender dysphoria.

As legislators, we must stop rewarding medical institutions pushing this pseudoscience. That’s why I introduced legislation to block graduate medical education funding from any children’s hospital that provides gender transition procedures to minors.

This bill is commonsense: When 70 percent of Americans oppose using puberty blockers on minors, we should not force them to fund this sort of treatment with their tax dollars.

Children’s hospitals that are training providers in evidence-based medicine will still receive funding under my legislation.

The fact there is even an argument over whether we should permanently mutilate children is evidence of just how far off the rails our political discourse has become. We are marching our children down a path from which they cannot return. Science and common sense tell us these procedures are permanent, dangerous, and wrong.

We must refuse to participate in this madness for the sake of our kids.

This oped by Congressman Dan Crenshaw was originally published in Newsweek on August 31, 2023.

My Statement on the Fiscal Responsibility Act

My Statement on the Fiscal Responsibility Act

We vote based on realistic choices, not what we wish were true. Of course, I wish that Ronald Reagan was resurrected, and we had 60 votes in the Senate. Then we could enact massive reforms that truly put our spending on a reasonable path. But this isn’t the reality we have now. The reality we have is a slim House majority while radical Democrats have the Senate and White House. Our leverage is limited. 


But even with that limited leverage, we forced Biden to give up on every single demand he had. He first wanted a clean debt ceiling increase without reforms. We said no. He then wanted tax increases. We said no. He wanted cuts to our military. We said no. In the final bill, Biden got nothing, and we got about half of what we wanted. Of course we wanted more, but again, our leverage was limited.  

Here are other facts to consider. Whether you like it or not, there has to be a debt ceiling increase. The economic consequences are catastrophic if you let the government default on its debt. Your 401k would crash as markets crash, the cost of borrowing would increase and make our debt worse, and recession would be imminent. Only third-world countries have allowed this to happen. 

Some might say, “well if we cut spending, we wouldn’t have to increase the debt!” But this isn’t really true, not unless you’re fine with abolishing our Social Security and Medicare programs for our seniors, which account for nearly TWO-THIRDS of all spending. Yes, you read that right. Nearly TWO THIRDS. That means during these negotiations we are only arguing over 11% of all spending. Why? Because no one wants to touch Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits, or the military. That leaves all the other government agencies and programs which only account for 11% of spending. So, even if you abolished the entire federal government apart from the military, you WOULD STILL HAVE TO INCREASE THE DEBT LIMIT! 

So, given that there is no choice but to increase the debt ceiling, and given we only have control of the House, where does that leave us? With what options? The options are clear. They are (1) a Biden-preferred clean debt ceiling increase with no reforms, (2) a default and say goodbye to your 401k, or (3) a debt ceiling increase with all the reforms we got.  

Anyone claiming there is another option is being EXTREMELY dishonest with you. 

So what reforms did we get? About $1.5 TRILLION dollar decrease in spending over 10 years. Not bad. Environmental permitting reform which is HUGE for our energy sector. This means Biden can’t wait 10 years to allow a permit for a new highway lane or gas pipeline. We finally forced the reforms we’ve been trying to do for YEARS. Billions of dollars in investment and jobs for Texas will be unleashed because of this. We also got some additional work requirements on Food Stamp programs and required some spending limitations (called “pay as you go” requirements) on any administrative action taken by the Biden Administration. We also cut all funding for new IRS agents this year. 

There’s more, but those are the basics. The complaints from other Republicans aren’t about what’s in the bill, they’re about what’s not in the bill. But this is faulty logic. I can ALWAYS vote against something because it doesn’t have something I want. And it’s true, I can come up with a MILLION things this bill doesn’t have. No, it doesn’t fix our border, nor does it cure cancer, nor does it give me a new eye. But these are ridiculous excuses not to vote for a bill. Some Republicans will nitpick each of those wins and say they’re not enough. Well, I agree! They’re not enough! But that’s not that question. The QUESTION is (1) was this the best we could get? And (2) is it better than the alternatives, which is a clean debt ceiling increase or a default? The answers to both questions are very clearly YES. 

Many Members of Congress are afraid to take tough votes even when they know it’s the right thing to do. I’m not. Never have been. I could EASILY have taken the easy way out and voted “no,” and kept my voters in the dark about the truth. No one would write to me to complain about a “no” vote. But I won’t do that. I can’t help but tell you the truth. And the truth is that this bill was the best case scenario given the political reality we live in. There is no evidence from anyone that we could have negotiated a better outcome. None. Therefore, I had to vote yes.

Congress is finally taking action against the cartels

Congress is finally taking action against the cartels

The Mexican drug cartels are the primary facilitators and profiteers when it comes to our border crisis. These transnational criminal organizations have operational control of our southern border and kill tens of thousands of Americans every single year with fentanyl. That’s why I have been so adamant that House Republicans take strong action to neutralize the cartels so they can no longer threaten our safety and sovereignty. 

I am proud to report that House Republicans are doing just that, by creating a new cartel task force that I will lead in Congress. This task force will be the focal point for producing legislation targeting the cartels, and we will also issue reports and educate the American public on the severity of this threat. More details regarding the cartels will be announced shortly. 

This is the biggest mission I’ve taken on since joining Congress. I need your support to accomplish it.

Here’s two ways you can do that right now:

  • Share your input on the path forward. What operations do you think the task force must implement immediately to take down the Mexican drug cartels? Click here to share your ideas.
  • Donate to my campaign. As you know from my past emails, Mexico’s President has already said he’s going to run an illegal election interference operation to unseat me in the next election because I have been outspoken against the cartels. If he wasn’t serious before, he sure will be now. Any financial support you can afford to give will help me counter his attacks and accomplish our goal of restoring American sovereignty and security. Click here to donate.

The cartel task force is only happening because supporters like you made it happen. For months, we demanded Congress take action against the cartels. Everyone who donated, signed my petitions, called their congressmen, and shared our message with their community helped me build up the pressure until it became impossible to ignore.

But that was the easy part. We are about to face off against deadly criminal organizations that have almost unlimited funding, advanced paramilitary capabilities, and a corrupt Mexican president backing them. I need your help to finish this mission. 

Debunking the Left’s Narratives About “Assault Weapons”

Debunking the Left’s Narratives About “Assault Weapons”

Click here to read Dan Crenshaw’s interview in the Washington Examiner

The left’s immediate response to any type of shooting in America is always focused on banning so-called “assault weapons.” That is nonsensical because rifles, which the left refers to as “assault weapons,” account for a small percentage of gun violence in the United States. According to the latest available data, handguns were involved in the vast majority (59%) of murders in the U.S. Rifles account for just 3% of firearm murders. 

Despite that fact, the left always pushes for an “assault weapons ban” after shootings, especially after tragedies at our schools. The common narrative from the left and much of the media after these tragedies is always to go after guns. They want to ban certain types of guns and prevent law-abiding Americans from owning firearms like an AR-15, which millions of Americans use for legitimate self-defense purposes. The left’s solutions will undermine the Second Amendment while doing nothing to actually prevent these tragedies in the first place. 

The best way to solve this problem without trampling on our Second Amendment rights is to put armed security guards at every school in America. Texas alone allocated $400 million for school security upgrades. Most schools already have armed security guards but we need to make sure they ALL do. Taking away guns from law-abiding Americans won’t stop school shootings. Putting armed guards at every school in America will. 

Please know that I will always defend your Second Amendment rights against attacks from the left. I have introduced legislation called the Preventing Unjust Red Flag Laws Act, which prohibits the use of federal funds to implement or enforce red flag laws. I’ve also stood up against the ATF as they continue to go after law-abiding gun owners, including with their most recent push to ban pistol braces. I never shy away from defending the Second Amendment, even if that means going on CNN and pushing back against the left’s false narratives on this issue.

Republicans Pass Landmark Energy Bill Through the House

Republicans Pass Landmark Energy Bill Through the House

Last week, House Republicans passed H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act. It was our top priority, which is why it was given #1 as the bill number, and it’s full of commonsense, uncontroversial energy policy. Yet somehow the vast majority of Democrats voted against the bill. They had little specifics when arguing against it and instead reverted to their usual hyperbolic rhetoric that the legislation will kill the planet because it supports American oil and gas production.

We can’t survive on a wind and solar-only energy future. It’s unreliable, and it’s irresponsible for my colleagues on the left to continue pushing this narrative. H.R. 1 removes permitting obstacles for American natural gas, which can provide safe, clean, affordable, and abundant energy to the world and displace foreign coal, which is the primary driver of global emissions. 

This bill makes it easier to tap into America’s vast deposits of critical minerals, which we need to make things like batteries and steel domestically rather than relying on China. And this bill includes two provisions I introduced to protect America’s oil refining capacity and make it easier for states to develop carbon capture projects.

This bill simply promotes affordable, reliable energy produced right here in America. We produce the cleanest energy in the world and when we export that energy abroad, we lower global emissions. This bill checks all the boxes–it’s good for energy production, consumers, and the environment. It is a shame so many Democrats voted against it in the House and that Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden will likely prevent it from becoming law while they’re in control of the Senate and White House.

The Trump Indictments are 100% Politically Motivated

The Trump Indictments are 100% Politically Motivated

I went on CNN to talk about the bogus, political indictment of President Trump.

If this were anyone but Trump, would this New York District Attorney even take up the case? It’s a simple question that I asked the CNN audience to honestly consider. Because when you put your political biases aside and view this through a nonpartisan lens, the answer is obviously that there is no way any prosecutor would bring this case UNLESS they wanted to go after Donald Trump politically. 

Regardless of your opinion of President Trump, we should all be able to admit this fact: this decision to indict a former president and current presidential candidate on a very weak case is going to have serious ramifications for the future. 

It weakens everyone’s faith in the integrity of America’s judicial system. And for all the left’s talk about “threats to our democracy,” I would certainly classify a weaponized justice system against political opponents as a threat to democracy. The fairness of our judicial system is essential to our nation’s rule of law, and the rule of law is essential to our democracy. This bogus case against Donald Trump undermines both.