#3 Why East Tennessee Children's Hospital Became the Dolly Parton Children's Hospital
Back in Episode One, I talked about Iran. The strikes. The casualties. Operation Epic Fury. And I said something that I want you to remember. I said this isn’t going to stay over there. War never does. It ripples. It spreads. It finds its way to places you think are safe. And I took some heat for that. People said I was being dramatic. Well. March 1st. Two in the morning. Sixth Street, Austin, Texas. How’s that for dramatic?
A man named Ndiaga Diagne — fifty-three years old, lived in Pflugerville just outside Austin — drove a Cadillac Escalade into the entertainment district. Sixth Street on a Saturday night is packed. Bars, live music, college kids, tourists. Wall to wall people just trying to have a good time. And this guy drove around the block a few times. Slow. Deliberate. Circling like a predator sizing up the weakest spot in the herd.
Then he rolled down his window, flipped on his hazard lights, and started shooting a pistol into the patio at Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden. Just started firing into people sitting at tables. People holding beers. People who were laughing ten seconds before they were bleeding on the concrete. Think about that. Ten seconds. That’s the gap between a normal Saturday night and the worst night of your life.
Then he parked. Got out. Grabbed a rifle. And started walking down the street shooting at anything that moved. People on the sidewalk. People trying to run. People crouching behind cars. Just squeezing that trigger like he was at a range and these were paper targets instead of human beings.
He made it about a block. Austin PD had officers on weekend patrol nearby, and God bless every single one of them, they got there in fifty-seven seconds. Less than a minute from the first 911 call. And they put him down. Right there in the street. Shot and killed.
Good.
I’m going to say that again so there’s no confusion about where I stand. Good. I’m glad. You walk into an American city on a Saturday night and start murdering innocent people? You don’t deserve a trial. You don’t deserve a cell. You don’t deserve a lawyer or a plea deal or three meals a day on my tax dollars for the next forty years while some activist judge figures out if your childhood was hard enough to excuse mass murder. You deserve exactly what he got. Two to the chest and a cold sidewalk. And those officers who ran toward the gunfire while everybody else was running away from it? Heroes. Every last one of them. Fifty-seven seconds. That’s what real courage looks like. Not a hashtag. Not a bumper sticker. Boots on concrete, running toward the sound of a rifle.
Three innocent people didn’t make it home that night. Ryder Harrington, nineteen years old. Texas Tech student. Kid was barely old enough to be in that bar. Had his whole life ahead of him. Savitha Shan, twenty-one, UT Austin — her university president called her “a Longhorn preparing to change the world.” Twenty-one. She was somebody’s daughter. Somebody’s best friend. Somebody who should have been arguing about brunch plans the next morning instead of lying in a morgue. And Jorge Pederson, thirty, mixed martial arts fighter from Minnesota. Tough as they come. The kind of guy who fights for a living. He fought for his life in that hospital for a full day before they took him off life support. Thirteen more people were injured. Three of them still in critical condition.
I can’t imagine being any of those families right now. Getting that phone call in the middle of the night. Your kid went to a bar and didn’t come home. Your son, your daughter, your brother. Gone. Because some radicalized piece of trash decided Saturday night was the night. There’s nothing I can say that makes that better. Nothing anybody can say. All I can tell you is that the man who did this is dead, and I hope that gives those families at least one small thing to hold onto.
[Pause]
Now let me tell you what this was. Not what the media spent two days tip-toeing around. Not “motives unclear.” Not “potential nexus to terrorism.” Not whatever careful, lawyer-approved, focus-group-tested language the FBI and the news networks were hiding behind while the rest of us could see exactly what happened with our own eyes.
This was a terrorist attack on American soil. Period. End of sentence. The man was wearing a hoodie that said “Property of Allah.” Under that, a T-shirt with a design matching the Iranian flag. They searched his house in Pflugerville and found photographs of Iranian leaders on the walls. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force said there were “indicators on the subject and in his vehicle that indicate potential nexus to terrorism.” Potential nexus. That’s FBI-speak for “we know exactly what this is but our lawyers won’t let us say it yet.” Well, I don’t have lawyers. And I don’t have a filter. So I’ll say it for them. Terrorist. He was a terrorist. He wrapped himself in an Iranian flag and murdered Americans. What more do you need? A signed confession? A mission statement notarized and sent to CNN? The guy gift-wrapped his motive and delivered it to your front door and the media still spent forty-eight hours saying “we can’t be sure.” Yeah. You can be sure. Everyone else was.
But here’s what really burns me up. And this is the part that should make every American furious, regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on. This man had a criminal record going back to 2001. Twenty-five years of trouble. Domestic violence. Two divorces. His ex-wife told the court he was guilty of “cruel treatment.” He came to this country from Senegal in 2000, became a naturalized citizen, and spent the next quarter century racking up charges. And not a single federal agency — not the FBI, not DHS, not ICE, not anyone — had this guy on a watchlist. Nobody was watching. Nobody flagged him. Nobody cared.
But you know who they are watching? Parents who ask uncomfortable questions at school board meetings. Grandmas who walked through the Capitol building. People who post memes the government doesn’t like on social media. We’ve got federal agents monitoring soccer moms on Facebook and tracking down people for mean tweets while a convicted domestic abuser is pinning photos of the Ayatollah to his living room wall, buying rifles, and planning to shoot up a bar full of college kids. And nobody noticed. That’s not a gap in the system. That’s the system showing you its priorities. And its priorities are upside down.
Now I want to say something, and I want you to listen close, because this is important. CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations — came out immediately after the shooting and condemned it. Publicly. Loudly. Muslim leaders in Austin condemned it. Immediately. And I’m going to say something you don’t hear very often from someone on my side of the fence. Good for them. I mean that. Good for them. Because honestly? Most of the time, they’re quiet. When something like this happens, you hear crickets from most Muslim organizations in this country. They go silent. They wait for it to blow over. And that silence does more damage than any news headline, because it lets people fill in the blanks with the worst possible assumptions.
So the fact that CAIR and the Austin Muslim community stepped up immediately and said “this is wrong, this is evil, this does not represent our faith” — I respect the hell out of that. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done that fast and that clearly after an attack like this. And I hope it’s the start of a pattern. I hope every time some radical animal does something like this, the Muslim community is the first to the microphone, not the last. Because that kind of moral clarity — that willingness to stand up and call evil what it is, even when it’s coming from inside your own house — that’s what this country needs. From every community. Every faith. Every side. You see evil, you call it evil. You don’t hedge, you don’t hide, you don’t wait for the polling data. You stand up. CAIR did that. Credit where it’s due.
Now let’s talk about guns, because everybody’s going to want me to pick a lane. Fine. Here’s my lane. I’m a lifetime member of the NRA. I believe in the Second Amendment like I believe in gravity. Your right to bear arms, your right to protect yourself and the people you love — that’s not negotiable. That’s not up for debate. That’s not something I’m going to “have a conversation about.” It’s in the Constitution. It’s a God-given right. And I will go to my grave defending it. Take gun control off the table. It’s not happening. Not through me, not through this show, not ever.
But. And this is a big but. This man was a convicted domestic abuser. There are already federal laws on the books that say a person convicted of domestic violence cannot legally purchase a firearm. It’s already the law. So how did this man have a pistol and a rifle? How was he walking around Sixth Street armed to the teeth when the law explicitly says he shouldn’t have been able to touch a weapon? That’s not a gun rights problem. That’s an enforcement problem. The system had every piece of information it needed to keep a gun out of this man’s hands and it failed. Completely. So before any politician in Washington uses this tragedy to grandstand about new gun legislation, how about we start by enforcing the laws we’ve already got? You don’t need a new law. You need the people in charge of the existing laws to do their damn jobs.
Here’s the bigger picture. And this circles back to Episode One. I supported the strikes on Iran. I still do. Their military leadership, the Ayatollah, the Revolutionary Guard — they’ve been responsible for thousands of deaths. Tens of thousands. They fund terrorism across the globe. They arm groups that kill American soldiers. The Ayatollah being dead makes the world safer. I believe that. And I watched our Navy blow an Iranian warship out of the water with a torpedo and I didn’t lose a second of sleep over it. That’s what strength looks like.
But strength without security at home is incomplete. You can’t bomb a hornet’s nest on the other side of the world and then leave your back door wide open. That’s not a foreign policy critique. That’s common sense. The strikes were right. The follow-through at home was wrong. Our intelligence agencies should have been on high alert. Every person on a watchlist, every person with ties to radicalization, every domestic abuser with a grudge and an internet connection should have been getting extra attention the moment those bombs fell. Instead, a guy in Pflugerville put on an Iranian flag shirt and drove to Sixth Street, and nobody even knew his name until the bodies hit the ground.
Governor Abbott activated the Texas Military Department. Operation Fury Shield. Big announcement. He said Texas will respond with “decisive and overwhelming force.” I appreciate the posture, Governor. But response isn’t prevention. You know who didn’t get the benefit of Operation Fury Shield? Ryder Harrington. Savitha Shan. Jorge Pederson. They needed protection before the shooting, not a press conference after it. We need intelligence agencies that do their jobs. We need existing laws that get enforced. We need leaders who protect Americans before the body count starts, not after the cameras show up.
Everyone knows something is broken. And I’m just tired of being right about it.
While all this was going on — bombs in Iran, bullets in Austin — there was an election yesterday. Super Tuesday. First real primaries of the 2026 midterms. And as a Republican, I’ve got some things to say. Because yesterday was not a good night for us. Stay with me.
THE FIRST PUNCH
Super Tuesday. Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas. First primaries of the 2026 midterms. And I’m going to do something that a lot of voices on the right won’t do. I’m going to be honest about what happened. Because I’m not a cheerleader. I’m not a party spokesman. I’m a Republican who loves his country more than he loves any party, and right now, the party is making it really hard to defend.
Let’s start with Texas. John Cornyn has held that Senate seat since 2002. One of the most powerful Republicans in Washington. Been there so long he’s practically furniture. And he could not get half his own party to vote for him. Forty-two percent. Ken Paxton — the state Attorney General who was impeached by his own Republican-controlled legislature and then acquitted in the Senate — got forty-one. Neither one cleared fifty. Runoff. May 26th.
Let me say that again. The Texas Republican Party’s two best options for United States Senate are a career politician who’s been in DC longer than some of his voters have been alive, and a man who was literally on trial last year. And Republican voters looked at both of them and said, “We’re not sold on either one.” That’s what we’re working with? That’s the best the Republican Party can put up in the biggest red state in America? Come on.
And it gets worse. Dan Crenshaw — the Navy SEAL, the eye patch, the guy every conservative magazine was calling the future of the party — lost his primary. By double digits. Dan Crenshaw. The war hero. Gone. Tony Gonzales is in a runoff against a gun-rights social media influencer. An influencer. That’s where we are. Incumbents took a beating across the board because the base is furious.
And I understand the fury. I share it. There is a real and justified feeling on the right that too many Republican politicians campaign as fighters and then govern as furniture. They make big promises at rallies, shake your hand, look you in the eye, get on that plane to Washington, and immediately forget your name. They get comfortable. They start caring about cocktail parties and lobbyist money and keeping their seats instead of keeping their word. And voters are done with it. I’m done with it. If you ran on America First and then spent two years doing nothing, you deserve to lose. Period.
But here’s the problem. And this is the part that should scare every conservative who’s paying attention. While we’re burning our own house down, the Democrats are quietly getting their act together. And that is dangerous.
James Talarico won the Democratic Senate primary. Thirty-six years old. Former middle school teacher. Currently getting his Master of Divinity at a seminary in Austin. He beat Jasmine Crockett — a sitting U.S. congresswoman with national name recognition and a Kamala Harris endorsement — fifty-three to forty-six. Now look, his policies are Democrat policies. He’s not my guy. But I’ll give credit where it’s due because I’m not a liar.
This guy went to the reddest counties in Texas. Places where people fly Trump flags from their front porch. And he looked them in the eye and said, “You have a place in this campaign. If you voted for Donald Trump but you’re fed up with the extremism and the corruption, you are welcome here.” And he won saying that. In Texas.
That should terrify us. Not because he’s right — but because he’s using our playbook. Faith. Family. Community. Big tent. That’s Republican language. That’s what we built our party on. And a thirty-six-year-old Democrat just walked into our house, picked up our playbook, and beat a congresswoman with it. If that doesn’t wake you up, nothing will.
Democrats haven’t won a statewide race in Texas in over thirty years. Thirty years. And I’m sitting here telling you — if Cornyn and Paxton spend the next two months ripping each other apart in a runoff, spending millions of dollars destroying each other while Talarico quietly builds a coalition — that thirty-year streak is in real trouble. Not because Texas is turning blue. But because the Republican Party in Texas can’t stop punching itself in the face long enough to put up a decent fight. We’re not losing to the Democrats. We’re losing to ourselves.
And here’s a perfect example of how the left turns our mistakes into their victories. Talarico was supposed to go on The Late Show with Colbert. CBS pulled him. Colbert told his audience it was because the network was afraid of FCC retaliation for having a Democrat on TV. Now, whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t matter. The clip went viral. Millions of views. Talarico raised over two million dollars in a week off the censorship story. We silenced the guy and made him a martyr. We handed him a gift-wrapped fundraising bonanza and he ran with it. Smart opponents do that. And we better start treating the Democrats like smart opponents instead of acting like they’re a joke. Because they’re not laughing. They’re organizing. They’re raising money. And they’re winning primaries in Texas.
One more thing. Dallas County. This one really gets me. Second biggest county in Texas. Heavy Democrat. The Dallas County Republican Party changed the voting rules before the election. Instead of county-wide polling — vote at any location, which is how it’s been done — they made voters go to their specific precinct. And they didn’t properly tell anyone. Hundreds of voters showed up at the wrong place. Got turned away. A judge tried to extend the polls two hours to fix it. The Texas Supreme Court blocked it and ordered those late ballots separated.
Crockett’s team called it voter suppression. Talarico called it voter suppression. And I’m going to say something that might surprise some folks on my side. If that’s what happened — if you changed the rules in the biggest Democratic county right before an election without properly notifying voters — that’s wrong. Full stop. I’m a conservative because I believe in the Constitution. I believe in it when it’s convenient and I believe in it when it’s not. And the Constitution says the people choose. All the people. Not just the people who vote the way you want.
You don’t win by rigging the game. You don’t win by making it harder for the other side to show up. You win by being better. Better candidates. Better ideas. Better message. And if you can’t win that way? Then you don’t deserve to win. If we become the party that’s afraid of people voting, we’ve already lost everything we say we stand for. We’re supposed to be the party of the Constitution. Act like it.
Over in North Carolina, Thom Tillis is retiring. Open seat. Roy Cooper, the former governor, locked up the Democratic nomination. He’ll face Michael Whatley, former RNC chairman. That’s going to be a real fight. North Carolina is a genuine toss-up state. If the Democrats flip that and somehow pull off something in Texas — the Senate math changes overnight. And the way things looked yesterday, I’m not nearly as confident as I’d like to be.
Here’s my message to the Republican Party, and I’m saying this as a loyal Republican who wants us to win. Get. It. Together. Stop the infighting. Stop running embarrassments. Stop the circus. Stop acting like the base owes you something. You owe us. We sent you to Washington to fight for us, and half of you forgot the minute you unpacked your suitcase. Clean it up. Find candidates people actually want to vote for. Because a seminary student from Austin just stole our message and won with it. In Texas. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, you are asleep at the wheel.
Everyone knows the midterms are coming. Yesterday was a warning shot. And right now, I’m not sure anybody on the right heard it.
Now. Remember at the top I told you something happened in Tennessee? Something good? After everything we just talked about, you’ve earned this one. This is the story you’re going to be thinking about tomorrow. Let me take you home.
SOME SUPERHEROES WEAR SEQUINS
Let me take you to Knoxville, Tennessee. Because something happened there last week that reminded me why I chose this state.
And yeah — I said chose. I’m not from Tennessee originally. I’m a transplant. But let me tell you something — when you pick a place, when you choose it on purpose, you love it differently. You don’t take it for granted. And I don’t take Tennessee for granted. Not for a second. This state has been good to me. And last week, it gave me another reason to be proud I call it home.
East Tennessee Children’s Hospital — been taking care of kids since 1937 — officially changed its name. It’s now the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital. And I’m going to tell you why that matters more than you think.
There is one person in this state that everybody agrees on. One. In a place where people argue about everything — politics, football, barbecue, cornbread — you say the name Dolly Parton and every mouth shuts and every head nods. Doesn’t matter what party you vote for. Doesn’t matter what church you go to, what truck you drive, or whether you put sugar in your cornbread — which, for the record, some of y’all need to stop doing, but that’s another fight. Dolly Parton is the one thing Tennessee agrees on. And if you don’t get it? Bless your heart, you ain’t from around here. Although, technically, neither am I. But I got here as fast as I could.
She made a video announcement. Eighty years old. Still got that sparkle, still got that voice. And she said, “Every child deserves world-class care, wrapped in kindness and love.” When most celebrities say something like that, it’s a press release their publicist wrote. When Dolly says it, it’s a promise backed by sixty years of receipts.
This hospital opened in 1937. Day one, they had an open-door policy. No child turned away. Not for race, not for religion, not because the family couldn’t pay. In 1937. In the South. You know what the South looked like in 1937? You know who was being turned away from everything else? And this little hospital in Knoxville said: not here. Every kid who walks through that door, we treat. Period. That’s the kind of institution that deserves to have Dolly’s name on it.
Here’s what drives me crazy about our culture right now. We celebrate garbage. We make celebrities out of nothing. Some kid does a fifteen-second dance on TikTok and gets fifty million followers, a brand deal, and a Netflix special. Some reality TV clown says something outrageous and gets a book deal. Meanwhile, Dolly Parton has been quietly, without fanfare, without a PR team orchestrating it, sending three million free books a month to children through her Imagination Library. All fifty states. Five countries. She started it in 1995, just for kids in Sevier County, up in the Smokies where she grew up. Now it’s everywhere. Three million books. Every month. For free. While the rest of us are screaming at each other on the internet, Dolly’s making sure a five-year-old has something to read before bed. Tell me who’s actually changing the world.
Remember the Smoky Mountain wildfires in 2016? Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge got ripped apart. Fourteen people dead. Thousands of families lost everything. That’s Dolly’s backyard. Those are her people. And she didn’t just send a tweet. She didn’t post a heart emoji and move on with her day. She created the My People Fund. A thousand dollars a month. To every single family that lost their home. Every one. For six months. Then she organized a telethon and raised millions more. That’s not virtue signaling from a mansion in Hollywood. That’s a woman who reached into her own pocket, grabbed other people’s pockets, and didn’t stop until her neighbors were taken care of. Down here, we call that being a good neighbor. Dolly just does it at a scale that makes the government look useless.
When COVID hit, she donated a million dollars to Vanderbilt’s vaccine research program. That money helped fund the Moderna vaccine. Hundreds of millions of doses worldwide. And she didn’t even want the credit. Somebody found out, asked her about it, and she brushed it off like she’d just dropped off a casserole. A million dollars. Helped save God knows how many lives. And she shrugged.
Recently she re-released “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” with other artists and gave every penny to pediatric cancer research at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville. Every cent. Because that’s Tuesday for Dolly.
She’s eighty. Never had children of her own. And she’s spent her whole adult life making sure other people’s kids are taken care of. That’s not charity with a tax strategy. That’s not philanthropy with a gala and a step-and-repeat. That’s a life’s work. And she did it quietly, while the rest of the world was busy tearing itself apart. Book by book. Kid by kid. Dollar by dollar. For decades. Without asking for a thing in return.
Glenn Jacobs, the Knox County Mayor — and yeah, for you wrestling fans, that’s Kane from the WWE, which is a whole other Tennessee story — he put out a statement that nailed it better than I ever could. He said: “Some superheroes wear sequins.”
Can’t improve on that. Won’t even try.
Think about the last half hour. We talked about a terrorist who took three lives in under two minutes. We talked about politicians who can’t stop fighting each other long enough to lead. We talked about systems that fail, agencies that miss, laws that don’t get enforced. And then here’s this eighty-year-old woman from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains who has spent sixty years building things that save children’s lives. Not for fame. Not for money. Not for a legacy. Because that’s who she is. That’s who she’s been since before any of us were paying attention.
That’s the country I believe in. Not the one that’s on the news every night. Not the one with the body counts and the ballot chaos and the politicians who can’t remember who they work for. The one that shows up at four in the morning to open a children’s hospital. The one that puts a book in a kid’s hands just because every kid deserves one. The one that writes a million-dollar check and doesn’t need a press conference to announce it. That’s America. The real one. The one worth fighting for. And as long as we’ve got people like Dolly Parton, I still think we’re going to be okay.
Probably.
Alright y’all. There’s your three. A terrorist attack that never should have happened because the system had every chance to stop it and didn’t. A political party that better wake up and stop eating itself alive before it hands the country to the other side on a silver platter. And a woman from Sevierville, Tennessee, who’s been quietly showing the rest of us how it’s done for sixty years while everybody else was too busy arguing to notice.
That is Everyone Knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
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