September 05, 2026

Good morning! Today is Saturday, September 5th 2026, and this is The American Conservative's Morning Brief. Newly surfaced testimony from former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent confirms that the New Year's Day 2025 Bourbon Street attacker explicitly cited Gaza and U.S. support for Israel, raising questions about why federal officials publicly described him only as ISIS-inspired. Vice President Vance declines to call the 189-day Iran conflict a war even as CENTCOM investigates a deadly strike on a residential area and Netanyahu tells the IDF that regime change in Tehran is within reach. American households are absorbing the costs of the Iran conflict, with diesel hitting a record 5 dollars and 85 cents a gallon and Brent crude near 90 dollars a barrel. and now for the details. We begin this morning with new reporting on the deadly New Year's Day 2025 attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, where an American-born Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd of revelers, killing fourteen people and injuring more than fifty before being shot dead by police. From the beginning, federal investigators told the public that Jabbar had been radicalized by ISIS, but stayed conspicuously silent about what, exactly, drove him to act when he did. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott Horton and John Weeks report that the missing piece has now been confirmed on the record. Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Scott Horton Show in August that he had personally viewed portions of the videos Jabbar recorded on his drive from Houston to New Orleans. According to Kent, Jabbar explicitly cited Gaza and American support for Israel's war there as central grievances motivating the attack. Horton and Weeks argue this raises serious questions about a coverup. The FBI, the Justice Department, and the Biden White House had access to those videos within a day of the attack. Yet in press conferences and public statements, officials described Jabbar only as ISIS-inspired, never mentioning Gaza. The authors note that senior intelligence officials, including former FBI Director Christopher Wray and former DNI Avril Haines, had warned publicly that the war in Gaza was likely to fuel a generation of terrorism against Western targets. Horton and Weeks place the Bourbon Street attack in a long lineage of what they call blowback terrorism, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing through the September 11th attacks and on to more recent incidents, including the May 2025 shooting outside a Jewish museum in Washington, the June attack at a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, and the March 2026 attack in Austin, Texas, following the U.S. strikes on Iran. Their conclusion is direct: American support for Israel's conduct in Gaza and its regional wars is producing violence against ordinary Americans at home, and the public is not being told the truth about why. Turning to the ongoing conflict with Iran, now in its one hundred and eighty-ninth day. At a Thursday press conference, Vice President J.D. Vance declined to describe the confrontation as a war, telling reporters that despite multiple exchanges with Iranian forces this week, the United States is no longer conducting what he called major combat operations. Vance said he could not predict when the conflict would end, and expressed skepticism about reports that a U.S. strike on a residential area Tuesday had killed civilians, though he acknowledged the claims are under review. U.S. Central Command has separately confirmed it is investigating the incident. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the IDF general staff that Israel continues to pursue regime change in Tehran, saying the toppling of the Iranian government is, in his words, close and within reach. Luke Nicastro reports for The American Conservative that the economic costs of the conflict are landing squarely on American households. U.S. diesel prices hit a record high of five dollars and eighty-five cents per gallon on Friday. Because diesel powers freight and delivery, sustained price spikes tend to push inflation across the broader economy. Brent crude was trading near ninety dollars a barrel Friday morning, and triple A pegs the average price of gasoline in the United States at four dollars and fifteen cents. Those are today's highlights. For the full stories and more, visit theamericanconservative.com. Thank you for starting your morning with us.