On February 6, pistol-packing pastor Troy Jackson, a former Republican Party of Texas strategist and current candidate for vice chair of the Texas GOP, beamed as he welcomed a dozen conservative activists into a flag-adorned meeting room at the New Beginnings Church in Bedford. The attendees included the founder of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Tarrant County GOP official, the founder of the local John Birch Society, and a representative from the far-right group Turning Point USA. They were gathering as the Remnant Alliance, a coalition of Christian nationalist groups that are working to educa ..read more

(Ben Sargent) To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section, or find Observer political reporting here. The post Loon Star State: ‘Stomp on It!’ appeared first on The Texas Observer ..read more

It’s been a decade since the pride of Paint Creek, James Richard Perry—yes, that’s Rick—occupied the Texas governor’s mansion. In that time, Perry launched a second failed presidential bid, cha-cha’ed on national TV as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, served as former President Donald Trump’s energy secretary (after previously calling the same Donald Trump a “cancer on conservatism”), and ducked a congressional subpoena on the Ukraine impeachment investigation. More recently, he’s enjoyed a quiet retirement at his rural estate in Round Top, road-tripping in his vintage Chevelle, lending ..read more

Early one July morning in 2019, Bexar County sheriff’s deputies rolled down the quiet residential streets of Castle Hills with a pair of bombshell arrest warrants. The San Antonio-area bedroom community was in the throes of one of the biggest political scandals in its history. The deputies had warrants to arrest two of its major players. Sylvia Gonzalez, a 72-year-old newcomer to Castle Hills’ city council, was at her eye doctor’s office when she received terrifying news. Her friend and fellow council member, 77-year-old Lesley Wenger, had already been rousted from her bed and carted off to ja ..read more

Christa Brown, a former Texas appellate attorney, is revered as perhaps the best-known of the brave women (and men) who blew the whistle on abusive clergy and coverups at churches in the powerful Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). She began her quest at age 51, by bravely sharing her own story of being repeatedly sexually abused as a teen by her youth pastor, Tommy Gilmore, the man she’d gone to for counseling at her church in Farmers Branch. She first came forward as a whistleblower in 2009. “I think I was ahead of things. That was before #MeToo and #ChurchToo and all of that,” she says. Whil ..read more

Nearly 150 members of the new Texas Alliance for History, including university professors and students, community historians, and staff members of historical sites and museums gathered Saturday at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for the event, “Looking Back, Moving Forward.” Their collective goal: to form a group dedicated to sharing untold stories of Texas history, efforts that seem even more crucial in an era when various efforts to diversify the state’s historical record are under fire.  The Alliance for Texas History arose in response to an attack on academic historians in th ..read more

In an otherwise strong State of the Union address this March, President Joe Biden breathed new life into a term the immigrant rights movement has spent years pushing out of the Democratic vocabulary. He was stumbling over a sentence; right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was heckling him from the audience about a young woman in Georgia who’d allegedly been killed the month prior by a non-U.S. citizen. Apparently parroting Greene, Biden confirmed that the woman, Laken Riley, had been killed “by an illegal.”  Backlash was swift from pro-immigrant Congress members and advocates who ..read more

Texas Observer readers, This is my first time writing to you in this space, though I’ve been writing for y’all for the last eight years. I started my journalism career as an intern here at the Observer in 2016. My only qualification then was that I worked at a migrant shelter and spoke Spanish, and the hiring editor found that intriguing. For months, I struggled to find my footing. But one day the Observer found itself in need of a series about federal immigrant detention, perhaps the only topic for which I had sources and was qualified to cover. I wrote that series and was rewarded with a cub ..read more

This story is part of “The Holdouts,” a collaborative project led by Public Health Watch that focuses on the 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid. The dueling election signs beckoning voters to choose their next hospital district board have popped up in yards, on street corners, and in the windows of businesses across the small East Texas town of Crockett. “Keep Our Hospital Open,” reads a large sign with four hospital board candidates’ names emblazoned in red in front of the Moosehead Café on the Houston County courthouse square. Next door, a smaller blue sign imploring people to “Keep a ..read more

In its first issue, on December 13, 1954, the Texas Observer ran a political cartoon by Don Bartlett taking a swipe at the Republican-leaning tendencies of Democratic Governor Allan Shivers. Beside it ran Observer founding editor Ronnie Dugger’s ambitious, if eccentric, manifesto. “We will twit the self-important and honor the truly important,” he wrote. “We will lay the bark to the dignity of any public man any time we see fit.” It was the beginning of a long Observer tradition—skewering those who needed it, using both printed words and the sharp sword of cartooning. “The cartoons arrived thi ..read more