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

I was born and raised in Mexico and lived at the Texas-Mexico border for eight years. As a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, I began to research Mexican organized crime groups that operate transnationally. Since 2009, I have studied illicit networks involved in U.S.-bound migration and the drug trade. My interests have to do mainly with the fact that I started my U.S. academic career as an immigrant, some of my relatives arrived here as undocumented immigrants, and because my father and brother were victims of extortion by Los Z ..read more

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz is facing yet another complaint to the Federal Elections Commission that claims he has “brazenly” violated federal campaign finance laws through his podcast deal with one of the nation’s largest media conglomerates.  Cruz struck a deal in 2022 with San Antonio-based radio giant iHeartMedia to pay for the production, marketing, and distribution of his “Verdict” podcast, where he pontificates about various right-wing grievances several times a week. The sweetheart arrangement has raised myriad ethics concerns ever since.  The complaint, filed Tuesday, comes amid r ..read more

Ben Sargent Ben Sargent 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: Cult of the All-Powerful Orange Czar appeared first on The Texas Observer ..read more

Ken Paxton has spent almost the entirety of his decade leading the Office of the Texas Attorney General while also under felony indictment for alleged securities fraud. Yet, like every other time Paxton has faced allegations of wrongdoing, including misuse of office, retaliatory firings, and criminal misdeeds, he has once again managed to evade real punishment. By no small measure, this has been enabled by Paxton’s masterful use of state resources to court (and to bolster) the influence of extremely well-funded conservative legal organizations and networks, at the expense of the public interes ..read more

Call him Kevlar Ken. Once again, Texas’ attorney general has proven to possess an impenetrable shield of impunity.  Last week, special prosecutors struck a deal to essentially let Ken Paxton off the hook for three felony securities fraud charges just before the nearly decade-old case was set to go to trial in Houston. The charges will get dropped in exchange for Paxton paying his alleged victims a little under $300,000, among other terms.  Thus came the shockingly abrupt end to a legal saga that has hung over Paxton for almost the entirety of his tenure as attorney general. The longe ..read more

When some of the largest newswire agencies in the world had to retract a manipulated photograph of British royal Kate Middleton on March 11, one thing was made clear: Even well-resourced journalistic outlets are ill-equipped to detect technologically advanced fakery.  Counterfeit photos created to deceive audiences have existed nearly as long as photography itself. Joseph Stalin famously edited political opponents out of the historical record. The use of deceptive photo editing by a PR flack for a British aristocrat may seem inconsequential relative to disinformation deployed to influence ..read more

On a three-dog January night in southside San Antonio, a brightly painted coffee-and-beer joint burbles to life with a bundled-up crowd, chiefly young and hip, many sporting black-and-white keffiyehs—the scarves that serve as worldwide symbols of solidarity with Palestine. Ringing a spacious side yard, vendors arrange wares on tables. Music equipment for a DJ and band waits on a covered patio. String lights line the property’s perimeter.  The occasion: a show and market billed as “Puro Pinche Palestina,” a coinage that would only suffer from direct translation but that is basically a very ..read more

January 17 was a big day for opponents of book bans in Texas schools. Charley Rejsek, CEO of indie bookstore BookPeople, had just returned home from a routine meeting at the Austin Central Library. She opened her email and screamed with joy: The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in her favor in BookPeople v. Wong, a challenge to Texas’ Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READER) Act.  “READER had felt like a death sentence,” Rejsek said. “With the ruling, BookPeople and all book vendors can continue to service school districts the way they always hav ..read more

In one of the ugliest and most contentious Republican primaries in Texas history, an array of insurgent challengers—sent forth into battle by the governor and his school voucher allies and a vengeful attorney general with his radical right-wing base—got what they wanted: change, turmoil, and unease.  Come the 2025 legislative session, the Republican-controlled state House is likely to be a much different entity. While many GOP incumbents prevailed in the face of well-funded challengers, others did not. By the end of the night, nine incumbent GOP state representatives had lost their races ..read more