For many of us, the two most important speeches of the program on Day Two of the Republican Party’s Midterm Convention were not delivered by the headliners – President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance – but by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
In his remarks Senator Ted Cruz laid out in stark terms the threat the Red-Green Axis, the alliance between Communists and other Marxists and Muslims, presents to America.
As Senator Cruz explained, “One year ago today, our friend Charlie Kirk was murdered.
Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, jihadist terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans in the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history… The hate that killed Charlie Kirk, that knocked down the Twin Towers, that led to two assassination attempts on President Trump — it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Why does this seemingly unlikely alliance exist?
Senator Cruz nailed it when he observed, “…we are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance: communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party.
They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution, and they hate America.”
And, as the Senator noted, he knows this oppression first hand because his family has experienced it:
My family has bled and has been imprisoned and tortured by communists in Cuba. That’s what communists do…
From the frozen gulags of the Soviet Union to Chairman Mao’s driving nails through the eyes of Christians.
From the killing fields of Cambodia to the starvation and misery of North Korea and Venezuela and Nicaragua and Cuba.
And Islamism likewise produces murder and oppression.
From the forced wearing of hijabs to the stoning of rape victims.
From the systematic murder of homosexuals to honor killings and the barbarism of October 7th and 9/11.
Hear me now.
Sharia law has no place in America.
Sharia law is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution, and we need to stand together and stop it now.
A simple truth. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
When Hasan says America deserved 9/11, believe him.
When Mondami says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it.
When Abdul El-Sayed says he has an “obligation” to comply with Sharia law, he means it.
And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it.
Secretary Kennedy was equally blunt about the threats, especially of Islam:
[My family] stood with Israel as the bulwark of democracy and as a beacon for press and religious freedoms, a haven from oppression for gays and women and ethnic and religious minorities, amidst a regional sea of intolerance, of misogyny, of child marriage, of human slavery, and of ethnic and religious genocide.
They saw Israel as America’s most critical frontline ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism, which by its own accounts is waging an existential war against our country and against Western liberal democracy. It’s an ideology that has subjugated, impoverished, tyrannized, and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran. And they openly promise to do the same to us.
The warnings given by Secretary Kennedy and Senator Cruz were in my view the most important – and most substantive – motivators for conservatives to vote in this election delivered by any speaker during the Convention.
Far more important than the many policy proposals floated by the other speakers and the many accomplishments of the first two years of the second Trump administration touted by the other speakers is this simple truth, “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”
And on September 11, 2001 the Muslim world told us Americans who they are.
