14 SEP 26 SITREP

• Blood-red paint was smeared across the face and neck of the Charlie Kirk statue outside Turning Point USA's Phoenix headquarters, with vandals going out of their way to simulate blood gushing from the neck, across the body, and across the MAGA hats on the statue, a direct reference to Kirk's assassination. At the same time, a nearby Christian prayer memorial was defaced, with the name of Jesus crossed out entirely.
• The attack happened overnight and was discovered early Saturday morning, just days after the statue had been unveiled the previous Thursday to mark the one-year anniversary of Kirk's death. The timing was not accidental, as vandals waited until the memorial was barely standing before hitting it.
• Turning Point USA staff came in over the weekend on their own time to scrub the statue clean, and the organization is now working directly with local law enforcement to track down who did it. Security cameras outside the Phoenix headquarters were fully operational and captured the incident, and law enforcement has been given access to that footage.
• Turning Point USA announced plans to put statues of Charlie Kirk in every state, push for Charlie Kirk Free Speech Squares on college campuses across the country, and pursue a permanent statue installation in Washington, D.C. A statue of Kirk is already standing in Times Square in New York City.

• Texas Republican candidate Bo French was watching Saturday's University of Texas at Austin football game when he noticed the overwhelming number of foreign students in attendance and posted a question on social media asking what was going on with immigration levels and foreign student enrollment at UT Austin. Within hours, both Republican and Democratic leadership across the state of Texas came down on him hard, demanding he delete the post and publicly denouncing him for raising the issue at all.
• Texas Governor Greg Abbott refused to join the pile-on and held his ground on what French raised, while Senator Ken Paxton went directly on offense against James Talarico, making the case that French was not making a racial statement but was exposing real anti-white discrimination baked into UT Austin admissions and the broader foreign student enrollment system running through Texas institutions.
• The financial engine driving the whole system comes down to money. Foreign students from India and China pay roughly 4 times the tuition of in-state Texas students at UT Austin. That creates a river of cash benefiting Texas politicians, border-region systems, and corporate tech firms in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, who then hire those same graduates as H-1B workers. Approximately 70% of all H-1B visas are currently going to Indian nationals, a number that has no legitimate merit-based explanation.
• Bo French did not apologize, did not delete the post, and did not back down, and the public backed him up. Nearly every politician who attacked him got ratioed on X, with supportive replies for French vastly outnumbering those defending his critics. The Trump administration has already moved to impose a $100,000 per-application fee on H-1B filings to put direct financial pressure on corporations exploiting the program.

• Country artist Chad Prather released a song called "Never Forget" to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, with 100% of net profits going directly to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports the families of fallen first responders and military service members. The song is available on iTunes, Spotify, and all major music platforms.
• At the Ground Zero ceremony marking 25 years since the attacks, cameras caught New York politicians Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughing while the names of the victims were being read aloud. Unsurprisingly, that angered a lot of people, and it became a driving force behind the push to get the song up the charts as a direct rebuke of politicians who cannot be bothered to show basic respect for the dead on the anniversary of the worst attack ever carried out on American soil.
• The song is available in both a standard digital download edition and a limited 25th anniversary vinyl edition. The vinyl has the names of every person killed on September 11 printed on the back cover alongside a commemorative New York City skyline etching on the record itself. A 9.11% discount is automatically applied at checkout, and an additional 50% off is available with the promo code SAVENYC on the vinyl edition.
• Prather and others making this push believe that without a shared memory of September 11, Americans lose the common ground that holds the country together as a people. They point to music as one of the most powerful tools for passing that memory down to younger generations, including Zoomers and Gen Alpha, who were not alive or were too young to remember the attacks. They also argue that mass immigration brings in a population that has no personal connection to that day, and that over time that weakens the thread of national memory that keeps Americans unified.