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Category: texas

  • The Big Grift Behind the Big Lie

    This episode explores two stories of fights over the right to vote. 

    Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote claims to have evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election—an idea Trump loudly echoes as part of “the big lie.” But True the Vote has never shown any proof. The lack of evidence hasn’t stopped the group from netting millions of dollars in donations. As reporter Cassandra Jaramillo explains, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips took home hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal loans and payments to companies they’re associated with. Despite this grift, True the Vote’s influence is still expanding. The group provided “research” for a new film called 2000 Mules that promises to expose widespread voter fraud—with no evidence to back it up. 

    The big lie sparked the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, an event that is now part of the nation’s election history. But this was not the first time that a violent mob tried to challenge election results. In 1898, a group of armed white supremacists carried out a coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, and seized power from legally elected Black leaders. The Wilmington coup created a blueprint for taking voting rights away from people of color—a legacy of voter suppression that the country is still grappling with today. Host Al Letson pieces together the story with help from the grandson of a prominent member of the Black community in Wilmington. 

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • American Rehab: Shadow Workforce

    Picture stepping into a drug rehab. You’re looking for treatment, but instead, you get hard work for no pay. For decades, this type of rehab has quietly spread across the country. How are rehabs allowed to do this? 

    Some organizations argue that participants can work without pay as long as they’re provided with housing and treatment. This issue was raised by a cultish organization that recruited dropouts from the hippie movement and had them sew bedazzled designer jean jackets. The clothes became a Hollywood fashion trend, and the unpaid labor propelled a case all the way to the Supreme Court. 

    The federal government doesn’t track work-based rehabs, so reporter Shoshana Walter spent a year counting them herself. She learned that work-based rehabs are present across the entire country. And the coronavirus pandemic has made the opioid epidemic even more deadly. As one crisis slams into another, we look at how work-based rehabs are turning participants into unpaid essential workers. 

  • Uvalde School District to Abbott: Call Special Session on Raising Gun-Buying Age

    The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District voted on Monday to formally request that Gov. Greg Abbott (R) call a special session of the state legislature in order to pass a bill that would raise the age limit to purchase a gun in Texas.

    The resolution, which is nonbinding for the governor, comes two months after the horrific mass shooting in Robb Elementary School, which is in the Uvalde school district. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the massacre. The gunman, who had just turned 18 years old, had purchased two rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition days prior.

    The resolution, which was passed unanimously by the school board of trustees, asks Abbott and the legislature to raise the age limit from 18 to 21.

    “There’s no reason for an 18-year-old to have something like that,” Uvalde Schools Superintendent Hal Harrell said at the meeting.

    According to the state constitution, only the governor can call a special session of the state legislature to consider a measure or list of proposals when the legislature is not in regular session. A special session can last for 30 days at most.

    Zach Despart, a politics reporter for The Texas Tribune, tweeted earlier this week that most lawmakers in Austin may actually support raising the age limit. But it’s a “long way till they convene in January,” Despart added, noting that the next time the legislature is scheduled to meet is halfway through the upcoming school year.

    In response to news of the request from the district, the governor’s office told The Texas Tribune that “all options remain on the table” and that “more announcements” regarding action to address gun violence would be coming. But the governor appeared noncommittal to the idea of raising the age limit, and didn’t indicate if he’d call a special session to consider the proposal.

    Abbott has been under pressure to do something significant when it comes to guns in the state. His main gubernatorial opponent in this year’s midterm elections, former congressman Beto O’Rourke, has confronted Abbott directly about his inaction on gun reform, and polling shows that the gap between the two candidates may be closing, in part because of the issue of gun violence.

    Surveys in the state also suggest that Texans support swift action on gun policy, and that they back the measure proposed by the Uvalde school board. According to a University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll published earlier this month, 70 percent of Texans support raising the age to buy firearms in the state, while just 25 percent say that they oppose the idea.

    According to the poll, 52 percent of Texans believe that the state should have stricter gun laws, while only 28 percent say that the laws should be left as they are and 14 percent believe they should be less strict.

  • Charity That Backs Trump’s Election Lies Has Ties to the Texas Attorney General

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is pretty familiar with Catherine Engelbrecht. He’s been a guest on her podcast, chatting about their shared passion: rooting out voter fraud. They both have gone to great lengths to try to support former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

    And when Engelbrecht, founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, has found herself in hot water, Paxton’s office has turned out to be a helpful ally.

    Most recently, a state judge sided with Engelbrecht’s argument that it should be Paxton’s office — not a court — that should probe allegations made by a True the Vote donor who says he was swindled out of $2.5 million.

    But more than a year after the case was dismissed, Paxton’s office won’t say whether it ever investigated the donor dispute. Last month, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that True the Vote had engaged in a series of questionable transactions that sent more than $1 million to Engelbrecht and other insiders, while failing to back up its voter fraud claims.

    In the reporting of that story, Paxton’s office withheld financial documents and email communications from Reveal and issued contradictory and inaccurate statements about the nonprofit, which has been a leading voice in driving the voter fraud movement from the political fringes to the core of GOP ideology.

    The embattled attorney general this year skated through a contested primary race. But he faces potential disbarment for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, is under investigation by the FBI, is getting sued by whistleblowers in his office and awaits trial for a seven-year-old felony indictment for securities fraud. In their lawsuit, former staff members have accused him of using his office to provide legal favors to an ally, saying he appointed a special prosecutor to target adversaries of a donor who was under investigation.

    His office advocated on Engelbrecht’s behalf before the Texas Supreme Court in 2016 when she got into legal trouble with her previous nonprofit organization, King Street Patriots, for being overtly political. He appeared on her podcast in July 2020, during which Engelbrecht said she considers Paxton a friend.

    “I can’t say thank you enough for the dignity and the respect that you bring to that office,” she said.

    “I feel blessed to have this opportunity, especially in a time like this. It’s really a crisis,” Paxton replied.

    “God bless you. God bless you, Ken Paxton, God bless you. And thank you for all that you and your team do,” Engelbrecht added.

    Months later, the two went to extraordinary lengths to support Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Paxton filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Texas seeking to overturn the election in key states where Trump had lost, a suit that the Supreme Court eventually dismissed because Texas had no legal standing to challenge other states’ results.

    Engelbrecht, meanwhile, accepted $2.5 million from a major conservative donor to lead a legal and PR campaign to contest the election results. However, True the Vote quickly dismissed the lawsuits it filed and provided no evidence of voter fraud. The donor, Fred Eshelman, became disillusioned and sued True the Vote in rural Austin County, Texas, in February 2021 for misusing his donation.

    Anytime a charity in Texas is sued, the state attorney general’s office is notified under law. On March 9, 2021, Assistant Attorney General Zeenia Challa wrote to the Austin County district clerk, notifying the court that the office learned about the dispute. Challa said she was “currently reviewing the documents provided in the proceeding to determine if Attorney General participation is warranted.”

    On the same day, an attorney for True the Vote wrote to Challa that he anticipated that she would want to know “that the funds spent by this charitable organization are being spent consistent with the purposes for which the entity was formed.”

    “You will see, if it comes to that point, that all of the expenditures of True the Vote have been made in order to evaluate, investigate and ultimately educate on the issues of voter integrity,” attorney Brock Akers said in the letter, which was produced in response to an open records request.

    Neither court records nor records released by the attorney general’s office indicate whether Challa responded to letters from True the Vote’s attorneys.

    On March 31, attorneys for True the Vote argued that the lawsuit did not have standing because it was a matter for the Texas attorney general’s office.

    “Instead, the only true party in interest relative to money donated to this charitable organization is the State of Texas, as represented by the Attorney General,” True the Vote argued, according to court records.

    The Austin County judge agreed with True the Vote’s argument April 8, freeing Engelbrecht’s nonprofit from the specter of having to return $2.5 million.

    More than a year after the case was dismissed, Paxton’s office won’t say whether it ever investigated. And it refused to answer questions about whether it will examine the organization’s finances. Engelbrecht did not respond to questions related to her relationship with Paxton.

    Eshelman has appealed the judge’s ruling.

    Paxton’s Office Withholds Records and Claims True the Vote Isn’t a Charity

    As Reveal sought to better understand True the Vote’s finances and whether Paxton looked into the donor dispute, we requested various records related to the nonprofit, which are public records under the Texas Public Information Act and held by the attorney general’s office. We also requested internal attorney general communications about True the Vote.

    In response to the request for the records, Assistant Attorney General June Harden said True the Vote was no longer a charity and closed the request without turning over any documents.

    When pressed on the decision, Harden later said she “misspoke.” Indeed, records with the state indicate True the Vote is an active charity. The request was reopened.

    As is the case in many states, the Texas attorney general can keep records of nonprofits, like their tax filings. The attorney general’s office first said it did not have True the Vote’s tax filings, then later acknowledged it had the nonprofit’s 2019 return but refused to release it. To make its case, it cited a general statute that says tax returns are confidential for the average person.

    Joe Larsen, a First Amendment attorney and board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said that statute didn’t apply. “That’s the kind of information that’s supposed to be available to the public,” Larsen said. The attorney general’s office “has no basis for withholding that.”

    In Texas, it’s usually possible to appeal records decisions made by public agencies. However, the attorney general is the party that decides on the appeal.

    Ultimately, we received versions of True the Vote’s tax returns from other sources, and they show a series of questionable financial transactions.

    At one point, Engelbrecht provided Reveal a copy of the 2019 tax return that was significantly different from the version on the IRS website. The IRS version showed that True the Vote had loaned her more than $113,000; the version provided to Reveal didn’t list that information. The two versions listed different board members as well.

    When Reveal requested records from the attorney general, Paxton also withheld some communications related to True the Vote, citing attorney-client privilege. It’s unclear what those records could be. Larsen said there could be some communications that can be withheld under attorney-client privilege about True the Vote, but it doesn’t mean it can withhold all communications.

    It’s commonplace for law enforcement agencies to not comment on pending investigations, but in other cases, Paxton has publicly acknowledged when he’s investigating a charity.

    The Texas State Bar in May filed a lawsuit against Paxton for falsely saying he’d uncovered evidence that cast doubt on the 2020 election result. Paxton could face a reprimand or have his legal license revoked.

    “Texas Bar: I’ll see you and the leftists that control you in court,” Paxton said in response.

    Paxton announced his office was investigating the Texas Bar Foundation, which is the nonprofit arm of the State Bar that offers legal services and education. He claimed the nonprofit was “facilitating mass influx of illegal aliens” by donating money to groups that “encourage, participate in, and fund illegal immigration at the Texas-Mexico border.”

    True the Vote’s Research Debunked at Jan. 6 Hearing

    While Paxton has remained silent on True the Vote, the nonprofit’s research grabbed attention during the hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    In a video shown during the second hearing last month, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr mocked the film “2000 Mules,” which used True the Vote’s claims that anonymized cellphone data around ballot drop boxes pointed to “ballot harvesting.” That’s when a third party — like a household member, activist group or nursing home — collects and submits absentee ballots on behalf of others, which is legal in a majority of states.

    In his videotaped testimony, Barr said True the Vote’s data and video evidence were “lacking.”

    “My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr said. “And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.”

    He broke out in a laugh.

    Shortly after the hearing, Engelbrecht joined former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show, where the two bashed Barr’s testimony and made veiled threats against the former U.S. attorney general.

    “Bill Barr, we are coming for you, bro,” Bannon said. Engelbrecht nodded her head.

    “Beware the fury of a risen people, this is not going to go well if they continue to push this aside,” Engelbrecht said.

    In the weeks following the film’s May 7 release, Engelbrecht has hosted a series of question-and-answer forums. However, she engages only with people who pay to subscribe to her content creator platform on Locals.

    Several commenters recently asked Engelbrecht when she planned to release the voter fraud evidence following the debut of “2000 Mules.” She did not address a specific date.

    Engelbrecht, arriving late to a recent livestream and from her car, read aloud from a lengthy commenter’s post about election fraud that went on to say: “I’m not happy about being scammed by True the Vote. And given the apparent holes in the arguments and perhaps the shadiness of the graphics, I certainly cannot publicly endorse ‘2000 mules.’ ”

    She paused.

    “This one would have been a fun question to start from the bottom and read up,” she said.

    “Sorry you didn’t like the movie and that you didn’t like the graphics. Take that up with Dinesh,” Engelbrecht said, referring to director Dinesh D’Souza. “And if you feel like you’re being scammed, then why are you on this Locals channel? You had to subscribe to even ask the question. That’s your choice.”

    Shortly after, Engelbrecht ended her livestream early.

    This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Sumi Aggarwal and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

    Cassandra Jaramillo can be reached at cjaramillo@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @cassandrajar.

    This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to their weekly newsletter at revealnews.org/newsletter.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Charity That Backs Trump’s Stolen-Election Lie Has Deep Ties to Ken Paxton

    Ken Paxton stands in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is pretty familiar with Catherine Engelbrecht. He’s been a guest on her podcast, chatting about their shared passion: rooting out voter fraud. They both have gone to great lengths to try to support former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

    And when Engelbrecht, founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, has found herself in hot water, Paxton’s office has turned out to be a helpful ally.

    Most recently, a state judge sided with Engelbrecht’s argument that it should be Paxton’s office – not a court – that should probe allegations made by a True the Vote donor who says he was swindled out of $2.5 million.

    But more than a year after the case was dismissed, Paxton’s office won’t say whether it ever investigated the donor dispute. Last month, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that True the Vote had engaged in a series of questionable transactions that sent more than $1 million to Engelbrecht and other insiders, while failing to back up its voter fraud claims.

    In the reporting of that story, Paxton’s office withheld financial documents and email communications from Reveal and issued contradictory and inaccurate statements about the nonprofit, which has been a leading voice in driving the voter fraud movement from the political fringes to the core of GOP ideology.

    The embattled attorney general this year skated through a contested primary race. But he faces potential disbarment for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, is under investigation by the FBI, is getting sued by whistleblowers in his office and awaits trial for a seven-year-old felony indictment for securities fraud. In their lawsuit, former staff members have accused him of using his office to provide legal favors to an ally, saying he appointed a special prosecutor to target adversaries of a donor who was under investigation.

    His office advocated on Engelbrecht’s behalf before the Texas Supreme Court in 2016 when she got into legal trouble with her previous nonprofit organization, King Street Patriots, for being overtly political. He appeared on her podcast in July 2020, during which Engelbrecht said she considers Paxton a friend.

    “I can’t say thank you enough for the dignity and the respect that you bring to that office,” she said. 

    “I feel blessed to have this opportunity, especially in a time like this. It’s really a crisis,” Paxton replied.

    “God bless you. God bless you, Ken Paxton, God bless you. And thank you for all that you and your team do,” Engelbrecht added. 

    Months later, the two went to extraordinary lengths to support Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Paxton filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Texas seeking to overturn the election in key states where Trump had lost, a suit that the Supreme Court eventually dismissed because Texas had no legal standing to challenge other states’ results. 

    Engelbrecht, meanwhile, accepted $2.5 million from a major conservative donor to lead a legal and PR campaign to contest the election results. However, True the Vote quickly dismissed the lawsuits it filed and provided no evidence of voter fraud. The donor, Fred Eshelman, became disillusioned and sued True the Vote in rural Austin County, Texas, in February 2021 for misusing his donation.

    Anytime a charity in Texas is sued, the state attorney general’s office is notified under law. On March 9, 2021, Assistant Attorney General Zeenia Challa wrote to the Austin County district clerk, notifying the court that the office learned about the dispute. Challa said she was “currently reviewing the documents provided in the proceeding to determine if Attorney General participation is warranted.”

    On the same day, an attorney for True the Vote wrote to Challa that he anticipated that she would want to know “that the funds spent by this charitable organization are being spent consistent with the purposes for which the entity was formed.”

    “You will see, if it comes to that point, that all of the expenditures of True the Vote have been made in order to evaluate, investigate and ultimately educate on the issues of voter integrity,” attorney Brock Akers said in the letter, which was produced in response to an open records request. 

    Neither court records nor records released by the attorney general’s office indicate whether Challa responded to letters from True the Vote’s attorneys. 

    On March 31, attorneys for True the Vote argued that the lawsuit did not have standing because it was a matter for the Texas attorney general’s office. 

    “Instead, the only true party in interest relative to money donated to this charitable organization is the State of Texas, as represented by the Attorney General,” True the Vote argued, according to court records.

    The Austin County judge agreed with True the Vote’s argument April 8, freeing Engelbrecht’s nonprofit from the specter of having to return $2.5 million.

    More than a year after the case was dismissed, Paxton’s office won’t say whether it ever investigated. And it refused to answer questions about whether it will examine the organization’s finances. Engelbrecht did not respond to questions related to her relationship with Paxton.

    Eshelman has appealed the judge’s ruling.

    Paxton’s Office Withholds Records and Claims True the Vote Isn’t a Charity

    As Reveal sought to better understand True the Vote’s finances and whether Paxton looked into the donor dispute, we requested various records related to the nonprofit, which are public records under the Texas Public Information Act and held by the attorney general’s office. We also requested internal attorney general communications about True the Vote. 

    In response to the request for the records, Assistant Attorney General June Harden said True the Vote was no longer a charity and closed the request without turning over any documents.

    When pressed on the decision, Harden later said she “misspoke.” Indeed, records with the state indicate True the Vote is an active charity. The request was reopened.

    As is the case in many states, the Texas attorney general can keep records of nonprofits, like their tax filings. The attorney general’s office first said it did not have True the Vote’s tax filings, then later acknowledged it had the nonprofit’s 2019 return but refused to release it. To make its case, it cited a general statute that says tax returns are confidential for the average person. 

    Joe Larsen, a First Amendment attorney and board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said that statute didn’t apply. “That’s the kind of information that’s supposed to be available to the public,” Larsen said. The attorney general’s office “has no basis for withholding that.”

    In Texas, it’s usually possible to appeal records decisions made by public agencies. However, the attorney general is the party that decides on the appeal. 

    Ultimately, we received versions of True the Vote’s tax returns from other sources, and they show a series of questionable financial transactions. 

    At one point, Engelbrecht provided Reveal a copy of the 2019 tax return that was significantly different from the version on the IRS website. The IRS version showed that True the Vote had loaned her more than $113,000; the version provided to Reveal didn’t list that information. The two versions listed different board members as well.

    When Reveal requested records from the attorney general, Paxton also withheld some communications related to True the Vote, citing attorney-client privilege. It’s unclear what those records could be. Larsen said there could be some communications that can be withheld under attorney-client privilege about True the Vote, but it doesn’t mean it can withhold all communications. 

    It’s commonplace for law enforcement agencies to not comment on pending investigations, but in other cases, Paxton has publicly acknowledged when he’s investigating a charity. 

    The Texas State Bar in May filed a lawsuit against Paxton for falsely saying he’d uncovered evidence that cast doubt on the 2020 election result. Paxton could face a reprimand or have his legal license revoked. 

    “Texas Bar: I’ll see you and the leftists that control you in court,” Paxton said in response.

    Paxton announced his office was investigating the Texas Bar Foundation, which is the nonprofit arm of the State Bar that offers legal services and education. He claimed the nonprofit was “facilitating mass influx of illegal aliens” by donating money to groups that “encourage, participate in, and fund illegal immigration at the Texas-Mexico border.”

    True the Vote’s Research Debunked at Jan. 6 Hearing

    While Paxton has remained silent on True the Vote, the nonprofit’s research grabbed attention during the hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    In a video shown during the second hearing last month, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr mocked the film “2000 Mules,” which used True the Vote’s claims that anonymized cellphone data around ballot drop boxes pointed to “ballot harvesting.” That’s when a third party – like a household member, activist group or nursing home – collects and submits absentee ballots on behalf of others, which is legal in a majority of states. 

    In his videotaped testimony, Barr said True the Vote’s data and video evidence were “lacking.” 

    “My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud,” Barr said. “And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.” 

    He broke out in a laugh. 

    Shortly after the hearing, Engelbrecht joined former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show, where the two bashed Barr’s testimony and made veiled threats against the former U.S. attorney general. 

    “Bill Barr, we are coming for you, bro,” Bannon said. Engelbrecht nodded her head. 

    “Beware the fury of a risen people, this is not going to go well if they continue to push this aside,” Engelbrecht said.

    In the weeks following the film’s May 7 release, Engelbrecht has hosted a series of question-and-answer forums. However, she engages only with people who pay to subscribe to her content creator platform on Locals. 

    Several commenters recently asked Engelbrecht when she planned to release the voter fraud evidence following the debut of “2000 Mules.” She did not address a specific date.

    Engelbrecht, arriving late to a recent livestream and from her car, read aloud from a lengthy commenter’s post about election fraud that went on to say: “I’m not happy about being scammed by True the Vote. And given the apparent holes in the arguments and perhaps the shadiness of the graphics, I certainly cannot publicly endorse ‘2000 mules.’ ”

    She paused. 

    “This one would have been a fun question to start from the bottom and read up,” she said.

    “Sorry you didn’t like the movie and that you didn’t like the graphics. Take that up with Dinesh,” Engelbrecht said, referring to director Dinesh D’Souza. “And if you feel like you’re being scammed, then why are you on this Locals channel? You had to subscribe to even ask the question. That’s your choice.” 

    Shortly after, Engelbrecht ended her livestream early.

    This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Sumi Aggarwal and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

    Cassandra Jaramillo can be reached at cjaramillo@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @cassandrajar.

    This article is available to republish. Read our republishing guidelines here.

    Texas Charity That Backs Trump’s Stolen-Election Lie Has Deep Ties to Ken Paxton is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The National Weather Service Is Unwittingly Obscuring Reality of Global Warming

    Today’s 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) average global temperature rise above preindustrial levels is now as warm as any time in the last 10,000 years. It is three times warmer than the average temperature for the last 2,000 years, the period when the Earth systems our advanced civilization depends upon evolved. These systems are things like the Amazon, boreal forests, permafrost, a stable sea level, ice sheets, sea ice and the Gulf Stream. This relatively small amount of warming may not seem like much, but only 5 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit) separates the deepest of Ice-Age cold from our previous climate.

    Some of the latest science tells us that half of known climate-tipping systems have activated their collapses since about 2009. A tipping point is crossed when a small change creates a big outcome — like leaning over in a small boat too far and suddenly going for a swim. Fundamentally, Earth’s temperature has risen above the evolutionary boundaries of these systems, and their collapse thresholds have been crossed.

    The Amazon rainforest, Canadian forests and global permafrost are three Earth systems now in tipping collapse. They have flipped from carbon sequestration to emissions with greenhouse gas emissions of plausibly seven gigatons per year. This is as much as all global emissions from transportation.

    These collapses were activated with warming of 0.5 to 0.75 degrees Celsius (0.9 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal from the late 19th century, when the last 2,000 years our world’s average temperature was no warmer than 0.4 degree Celsius (0.75 degree Fahrenheit) above the late 19th century. But the averages themselves are misleading. For example, warming over land is twice what it is over oceans. High temperatures are another example of why today’s averages are misleading.

    For example, in Austin, Texas, where I live, the average high temperatures in September from 2017 to 2020 were 5.3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than between 1966 and 1969. In other words, the normal high in early September, that was 93 degrees Fahrenheit in our “previous climate” (circa 1900), is 98 degrees Fahrenheit today. One would think this kind of warming would have made the headlines in recent years, but this is not the case, and there is a good reason. The National Weather Service (NWS) has a long-standing and little-known statistical weather data procedure that inadvertently helps promote the denial of global climate disruption.

    The “normal” temperatures the NWS reports are averages of the last 30 years. This is the data broadcast on the weather report on the news every night. These so-called normal temperatures are not at all the temperatures from our previous climate. They are not from a time before our climate began to unnaturally warm. What we hear as “normal” from our faithful weather professionals is actually significantly warmer for most of us, has nothing to do with what most of us think of as “normal” and has nothing to do with our previous climate where our advanced civilization evolved.

    Going back to my home state as an example, extremely warm temperatures in Texas in December 2021 broke the 1933 monthly average temperature record by an astonishing 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Normally, monthly average temperature records are broken by less than a degree or two Fahrenheit in a stable climate; in our previous normal climate. Across Texas, the high temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit above the state 20th-century high temperature average for December. Austin’s December average high temperature was 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 30-year normal.

    The statistical procedure to change the normal temperature data is known in professional circles as the “30-year normal,” or the climatological normals, but among the public, this weather data is known as our “normal” weather. The reason for this data manipulation began in the 1930s, with agriculture and as the need for historic climate data increased and spread into other industries.

    The idea here was to supply agricultural and industrial communities with the latest and most accurate weather data related to temperatures, heat waves, first and last freezes, hours below freezing, peak temperature per day/week/month/year, all sorts of precipitation records, etc. The justification of the NWS for this deliberate manipulation of weather data is, “a better understanding of what is happening today. Rather than assess long-term climate trends, Normals (sic) reflect the impacts of the changing climate on our day-to-day weather experience.”

    This strategy of changing the “normal” data for scientific accuracy worked well when our climate was stationary (not changing radically), and when a hugely significant portion of our population needed to know so they could successfully grow food for us all. But today is definitively not like the past. What the NWS is doing by warming the so-called “normal” temperatures hides global climate disruption in the minds of the public. “Normal climate” today is not the average of the last 30 years; it is what our climate was before it began to radically warm.

    So, what is “normal” then? Climate science defines two major “normal” periods. One is “pre-industrial times.” This is the period between 1850 and 1900 and is the baseline for our stable climate before we began to massively emit greenhouse gasses. The other period is 1951 to 1980. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes this period as that time “when many of today’s adults grew up, so it is a common reference that many people can remember.”

    The 2,000 years prior to the pre-industrial period of 1850 to 1900 is quite meaningful. During this 2,000 years, Earth’s temperature was very stable at no warmer than 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1850 to 1900 average for almost the entire 2,000 years. This makes our 1.2 degrees Celsius above normal current warming three times warmer than the maximum of the last 2,000 years. This 0.4 degrees Celsius-maximum temperature range represents the upper boundary of the climate where our current Earth systems evolved. It’s also known as the “natural variation” of our climate. It represents the evolutionary boundary of our Earth’s systems.

    We have warmed Earth above the evolutionary boundaries of its systems, and they are in collapse so they can re-evolve with species and mechanisms that are tolerant of the new climate. This collapse, or excursion beyond the normal, is evident in the nonlinear increase of climate and weather extremes we have all witnessed or endured recently.

    Collapse of these systems is directly related to climate tipping where Earth system collapses result in loss and even reversal of environmental services. Environmental services are things or processes our ecologies or Earth systems supply us with or do for us, like forest products for building materials or oxygen generation from plants. One of the most important and easily degraded environmental services is carbon sequestration, or the ability of our Earth systems to absorb carbon dioxide. This sequestration is reversed with these tipping collapses as we are now seeing in the Amazon, Canadian forests, and permafrost and their plausible emissions of seven gigatons of greenhouse gasses per year. Very importantly, these are just the first system collapses to be studied. Similar systems across the globe are likely in collapse too, and the collapses have just begun.

    The public needs to know how much warming has occurred so we can make realistic decisions about climate change. Americans trust weather professionals on climate change. Our television weather persons are the ones that provide the vast majority of us with what is our best and most trustworthy information about climate change. However, through their standard professional procedures, though no fault of their own, they are masking evidence of global climate warming.

    Today in Austin, the summer (June through August) five-year average high temperature has warmed 6 degrees Fahrenheit, the 10-year average summer high temperature has warmed 5 degrees Fahrenheit, but the 30-year NWS “normal” has warmed only 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This 30-year averaging procedure not only masks warming, it understates it, too.

    Think about what this means to the reporting of heat waves. As the NWS warms the “normal” temperatures, the heat wave diminishes in relative extremeness to us poor, sweltering humans, and we don’t even realize that the NWS has created a stifling understatement through their long-held data reporting standards.

    There is a valid and urgent need to use a much shorter averaging period. Warming is not going to self-restore, it is only going to continue warming nonlinearly, like it has been doing for the last hundred years.

    Our historical normal temperatures (not the NWS “normals”) are from the time when our advanced civilization evolved; they come from the climate that created humankind as we know it. This climate definitively does not include the temperature “normals” of the last 30 years presented by the NWS to broadcast to the entire United States population. Our true normal temperatures are what the temperatures were back in the late-19th century before our greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and land use changes began to substantially warm Earth.

    When historic weather statistics are removed from daily weather communications and replaced with statistics that are warmer and warmer every 10 years, the results are that the public’s awareness of global climate disruption is damaged, degraded, or simply erased.

    Even more damaging, the same weather person that tells us the current much-warmed temperatures are normal, also tells us that, yes, our climate is warming.

    This confusion, imperceptible to almost all of us, creates distrust, disbelief and loss of credibility with our weather professionals. What does this do to the public’s perception of climate change? When our weather people tell us our daily temperatures are normal, then they tell us climate change is a real problem, what are we to believe? How many citizens understand this is going on — that the “normal temperatures” delivered on the weather report every night are not normal? Loss of climate change awareness feeds the narrative that climate change is either not real or is not meaningful.

    To see the warming, the public must see the difference between our climate today and our climate in the past.

    Today, our population is no longer significantly agrarian-based; nowhere close. In 1900, just under 40 percent of Americans lived on farms; today, around 1 percent live on farms. The industrialists that need this information are an exceedingly small proportion of our population. Those that need this kind of up-to-date weather data can easily get it from the NWS or others, but the rest of us need to know what “normal climate” really means.

    The climate has warmed — a lot. It’s not normal. None of it is natural. Most of the warming has been recent, with two-thirds in the last 30 years, and half in the last 20 years, and the rate of warming is still increasing. With this warming comes nonlinearly increasing extremes and Earth systems tipping collapses. The average global temperature today is now three times warmer than the climate where our Earth systems evolved, these systems are now collapsing, and the collapses do not stabilize unless the temperature is lowered to below the tipping threshold.

    When there is no threat of irreversible and societally decimating scenarios from an artificially warmed climate, sure, recalculate the normals. But when awareness of global warming is more critical than ever before, this practice of recalculating the normals is existentially dangerous.

    It is now profoundly important this policy of changing the “normals” be eliminated. The NWS is purposefully warming the normal temperature statistics as our climate warms. They are doing this because it is a habit from the past; a habit whose time must come to end.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas AG Sues to Block Biden Order Guaranteeing Emergency Abortion Access

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing the Biden administration over an executive order that guarantees an emergency abortion to every patient who requires one, no matter what restrictions on the procedure are in place in any given state.

    Although abortion is severely curtailed in Texas under a restrictive 1925 law that recently went into effect, the procedure is still currently allowed in the state for those necessitating emergency lifesaving care. However, Paxton’s lawsuit could pave the way for Texas and other states to deny such care to people whose pregnancies are putting their lives at risk.

    Paxton defended his lawsuit by claiming that the executive order issued this month by President Joe Biden inappropriately extended aspects of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).

    Biden’s order instructed several executive branch departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to revise rules in order to expand access to abortion services. HHS revised its understanding of EMTALA when it comes to abortion coverage, noting that “a physician’s professional and legal duty to provide stabilizing medical treatment to a patient who…is found to have an emergency medical condition preempts any directly conflicting state law or mandate that might otherwise prohibit or prevent such treatment,” including if “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve that condition.”

    In short, HHS said that EMTALA preempts any state law on abortion coverage in cases where the life of the pregnant person is threatened. The rule must be enforced at every medical facility that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding.

    Paxton claims that the changes flout the recent Supreme Court ruling that upended abortion rights “by having [Biden’s] appointed bureaucrats mandate that hospitals and emergency medicine physicians must perform abortions.” He further claims, within his lawsuit, that the new guidance will “coerce healthcare providers to supply abortions outside the allowable scope under the Hyde Amendment” — even though that legislative amendment, which limits federal spending for abortion services, does make exceptions for rape, incest or the safety of the patient.

    The White House denounced Paxton’s lawsuit as an attempt to limit the options of someone with a life-threatening pregnancy.

    “The Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit is yet another example of an extreme and radical Republican elected official,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday. “It is unthinkable that this public official would sue to block women from receiving life-saving care in emergency rooms, a right protected under U.S. law.”

    Others similarly decried the lawsuit brought forward by Paxton.

    “EMTALA was not designed specifically for abortion access, or miscarriage management,” health policy expert Lawrence Gostin said in a statement to The New York Times. “But it absolutely includes both of them.”

    The HHS guidance is on “solid legal footing,” added Gostin, who has advised the administration in the past.

    Paxton “has no integrity and has made it clear that he sees women’s lives as disposable,” said Rochelle Garza, the Democratic Party’s nominee for Texas attorney general and Paxton’s main opponent in this November’s race. “Suing the Biden administration to stop medical exceptions for abortions is just the latest example of his extremist agenda.”

    Doctors on social media also spoke out against the lawsuit.

    “If you’re an ER doc anywhere in this country, and anyone comes in with a medical emergency, you treat them,” said Rob Davidson, an ER doctor and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care. “You do it because of EMTALA and the oath you took. Neither Ken Paxton (TX) nor [Supreme Court Justice] Samuel Alito can do a damn thing about that.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • O’Rourke Belittles Abbott Over Texas Grid’s Problems During Heat Wave

    Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee for governor in Texas, condemned current Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for his handling of numerous energy crises throughout the past year.

    Texas is currently facing a heat wave, which is causing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) energy grid to reach record high power demand. ERCOT said on Sunday that outages were not expected in the near future, but warned state residents to limit their usage of electricity between the hours of 2 and 8 pm on Monday to avoid overloading the system.

    Meanwhile, some cities have contradicted ERCOT’s claims that outages aren’t a possibility. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, for example, has ordered the city’s departments to ready themselves for outages by preparing backup generators in the event that power goes out.

    The warning from ERCOT, in addition to problems the Texas grid has had during recent winters — coupled with Abbott’s refusal so far to make substantial changes to the system — led O’Rourke to deride the incumbent governor on Twitter.

    “The governor of the 9th largest economy on earth — the energy capital of the world — can’t guarantee the power will stay on tomorrow,” O’Rourke said. “We need change.”

    The Democratic gubernatorial candidate continued criticizing ERCOT and Abbott in another tweet.

    “We can’t rely on the grid when it’s hot. We can’t rely on the grid when it’s cold. We can’t rely on Greg Abbott,” O’Rourke said. “It’s time to vote him out and fix the grid.”

    ERCOT runs independently of the national energy grid system. Because of this, Texas is able to largely avoid federal energy regulations when it comes to its own grid, including upgrades to its systems and weatherization projects that federal regulations may require elsewhere in the U.S.

    ERCOT’s problems don’t just happen in the summertime — in February 2021, for example, the power grid shut off during a winter storm, leaving millions without power for days and hundreds dead by the end of the crisis.

    In another tweet over the weekend, O’Rourke reminded his followers that even after the power outages that February, Abbott continued accepting contributions from energy producers in the state.

    “After [the 2021] crisis, Abbott took millions in campaign checks from energy CEOs that he allowed to profit off it. Helps explain why he won’t fix the grid,” O’Rourke wrote.

    O’Rourke’s comments come as new polling suggests that Abbott is in a vulnerable position politically, leading up to their head-to-head electoral matchup later this fall. According to a University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll published earlier this month, Abbott’s approval rating is trending in negative territory, with 43 percent of Texans approving of his work as governor and 46 percent disapproving.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Red States Plot Use of Vigilantes to Restrict Abortion Seekers’ Travel

    Following President Joe Biden’s Friday executive order protecting abortion rights, a Planned Parenthood of Montana spokesperson tells Truthout the organization will not reverse its decision to discontinue providing medication abortion to patients traveling from states where abortion has been banned after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

    The organization, which operates five clinics in the state, had previously cited legal concerns about patients potentially traveling with abortion pills provided by Planned Parenthood of Montana clinics back home to states that have banned abortion, and then taking the pills there. The organization, however, is continuing to provide such patients with surgical abortion procedures (since they can guarantee the procedure happens in state).

    While the safe and effective two-pill regimen may be given at a clinic in a state that has not banned abortions, like Montana, the patient could take one or both pills after returning home to a surrounding state like South Dakota, which is currently enforcing a total abortion ban. Despite President Biden’s executive order, legal questions remain regarding whether physicians who prescribed the pills could be held liable.

    “Although we are encouraged by President Biden’s executive action, our decision to provide abortion care must continue to take into consideration the rapidly changing landscape for abortion access across the country and amid the cruel efforts of anti-abortion politicians to ban abortion,” said Laura Terrill, vice president of external affairs at Planned Parenthood of Montana. “We look forward to seeing how the executive order is implemented, including with respect to improving public awareness, addressing misinformation, and protecting people’s privacy.”

    Planned Parenthood of Montana’s decision to remain firm on declining many out-of-state patients the most common type of abortion method underscores the legal uncertainty that remains after President Biden’s executive actions on Friday, and that will have to be resolved in courts one way or another. For now, some providers and patients are playing it safe in terms of guessing how far state prosecutors will go to criminalize the procedure beyond their own state border.

    Their caution isn’t necessarily unreasonable. In fact, South Dakotans who travel to Montana for abortion could soon find themselves at risk even if their abortion occurs within Montana’s borders, as Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem has called a special session to discuss legislation to potentially restrict out-of-state abortions for South Dakota residents.

    Legal experts with whom Truthout spoke say that while there’s plenty of legal precedent establishing the constitutional right to travel across states lines for medical procedures, and as President Biden’s executive order now establishes, abortion; the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case has created legal gray areas in which lower courts could still create new precedent to prohibit people’s ability to travel for abortion. They’re also concerned that legislation like Texas’s Senate Bill 8, which contains an enforcement mechanism that allows individuals to sue anyone who has helped a person obtain an abortion, may significantly threaten abortion travel.

    National anti-abortion groups and Republican state legislators are already advancing plans to stop people in states where abortion is now banned from seeking the procedure elsewhere. Republican Texas State Rep. Tom Oliverson told The Washington Post that his anti-abortion group, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, has begun working with the authors of Texas’s SB 8 to explore model legislation utilizing the law’s novel private civil-enforcement mechanism to restrict people from crossing state lines for abortions.

    A separate anti-abortion, right-wing legal group, The Thomas More Society, also hopes to utilize Texas’s SB 8 enforcement mechanism to draft model legislation for state lawmakers that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of a state that has banned abortion from terminating a pregnancy outside that state.

    A July 7 letter from 11 Texas Freedom Caucus conservative Texas state legislators likewise outlines plans to introduce legislation next session that would utilize the private civil-enforcement mechanism to go after anyone who pays for or reimburses costs associated with abortion, regardless of where it occurs.

    Groups like the Association of Christian Lawmakers are even utilizing the language of “fugitive moms” and “human trafficking” to describe abortion seekers, providers who administer abortions to people who travel across state lines and/or the people who help them. “Many of us have supported legislation to stop human trafficking,” Association President and Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert told the Post. “So why is there a pass on people trafficking women in order to make money off of aborting their babies?”

    This kind of language offers important insights about how legal contests around interstate travel for abortion are likely to be framed moving forward, as well as how abortion rights advocates can work both inside and outside the legal realm to push back against them.

    “Right now, legally, that [human trafficking terminology] doesn’t make any difference unless the courts start — which is I think the goal — to start viewing [cases] in that terminology, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see some right-wing judges start picking up on that terminology in their decisions,” says South Texas College of Law Professor Charles “Rocky” Rhodes.

    Even within states like Texas, Republican legislators are looking for ways to blur jurisdictional lines. In the July 7 Texas Freedom Caucus letter, lawmakers said they plan to introduce a bill allowing anti-abortion district attorneys to prosecute abortion-related cases outside their home jurisdiction when a local, progressive DA “fails or refuses to do so.” Now, Texas Freedom Caucus lawmakers and others also want to extend that logic so that aggressive DAs can use prosecutorial discretion to read state laws in a way that tries to apply to people in other states, even without the new draft legislation specifically targeting travel.

    Professor Rhodes tells Truthout he’s skeptical that courts would uphold a private civil-enforcement mechanism to prevent interstate travel for abortion since the question of the constitutional right itself is separate from its enforcement mechanism.

    “If you have a constitutional right to go out of state and be able to have an abortion, the fact that the state enforces that through private mechanisms or through public mechanisms doesn’t matter,” Rhodes tells Truthout. “Either way, you still have the right, so you have to separate the substance of the right from the procedure about how rights are brought up in court.”

    A law utilizing such a civil enforcement mechanism is more difficult to challenge in court overall because abortion rights groups don’t have a clear target to sue. However, Professor Rhodes explains that if the individual in question has a constitutional right, they will win the case, whomever they do decide to sue, and whether or not the case utilizes private or public enforcement.

    Yet Rhodes concedes that when the right at issue is legally uncertain, SB 8-style private enforcement often has a chilling effect since providers and others are sometimes unwilling to take the risks involved with the legal fight for their constitutional rights. The very possibility of a large civil fine or unresolved legal questions is often enough to chill legal challenges entirely, as seems to be the case with Planned Parenthood of Montana’s precautionary withholding of services.

    Still, in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rebuffed the idea that states could decide that their residents can’t travel out of state for an abortion, because of the constitutional right to interstate travel, writing that the issue isn’t even “especially difficult as a constitutional matter.” While this statement doesn’t carry any legal weight in terms of setting precedent, it could still inform decisions made by lower courts.

    Justice Kavanaugh’s statement in his concurring opinion, however, appears limited to states trying to prevent their residents from traveling. It wouldn’t necessarily stop states from attempting to prosecute providers in others states, says University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor Greer Donley, who specializes in medication abortion law and has closely studied the proposals now being floated to restrict abortion across state lines. Kavanaugh’s statement also fails to address the novel civil enforcement strategy out of Texas that is gaining traction in Republican legislatures, Donley points out.

    Moreover, Donley notes that Justice Kavanaugh stated during his confirmation hearing that Roe was settled law, and then sided with the conservative majority in Dobbs to overturn it. “If there’s a real case involving real facts, [Kavanaugh] might end up coming out differently and saying, ‘Yes, generally there’s a right to travel in the Constitution, but given the facts here, it does not apply,’” Donley says.

    When it comes to the issue of extra-territorial application of state laws, she says, the questions courts are going to consider are going to be entirely dependent on what states that have banned abortion do to try to apply their laws, and how strong the laws are in states that do allow abortion.

    “A lot of the doctrines that both sides are going to rely on are unknown. They just don’t have a lot of precedent in this context at all, so we really have a lot of uncertainty. Truly, it’s a profound amount of uncertainty,” Donley tells Truthout. “We’re going to have to see what the courts do, and the courts are going to almost certainly disagree. And then, how [the courts] handle those disagreements is just another level of uncertainty.”

    Much will come down to whether abortion-rights states have adequately protected themselves against cross-state prosecution. Only Connecticut, New York, Delaware and New Jersey have passed laws specifically shielding providers from being prosecuted under abortion restrictions passed in other states. Meanwhile, governors in Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico and Nevada have issued executive orders saying they will not extradite providers to states that have banned abortion, and that state employees won’t comply with out-of-state investigations.

    Donley described Connecticut’s shield law as the nation’s strongest protections, upon which other abortion-rights states could model their legislation. The law offers broad protections from anti-abortion laws that try to reach across state lines. The measures shield people from out-of-state summonses or subpoenas issued in cases related to legal abortions in Connecticut. The law also prevents Connecticut authorities from adhering to another state’s request to investigate or punish anyone involved in facilitating a legal in-state abortion.

    At the federal level, President Biden’s Friday executive order formalizes instructions to the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services (HHS) to combat state-level efforts to restrict pregnant people from traveling across state lines for abortion services and to protect access to federally approved abortion pills.

    With the new executive order in place, providers like Planned Parenthood in states like Montana can be assured of at least some level of protection, since the order instructs medical providers that they are not required to disclose patients’ private health information to law enforcement.

    Biden’s Justice Department has already warned states restricting abortion that it will fight legal attempts to prohibit interstate travel or prosecute providers in abortion-rights states, saying that such attempts violate the constitutional right to interstate travel and commerce.

    Still, President Biden’s ability to protect abortion rights by executive action is limited without congressional action codifying abortion rights at the federal level. Biden’s executive order is expected to push HHS and the Justice Department to fight in court to protect abortion providers and seekers, but the order cannot guarantee courts will take their side against aggressive prosecution by states that have banned abortion. Additionally, the action does not protect people who seek abortion pills by mail from other states, which could still be criminalized.

    Legal experts also point out that the Justice Department’s strategy of opposing Texas’s SB 8 six-week abortion ban ultimately failed, and that new state laws involving interstate travel could raise additional legal questions.

    Donley tells Truthout that the federal government has an enormous amount of power to regulate interstate commerce, and that President Biden could do more at the executive level to attempt to regulate issues related to it, including declaring a public health emergency to support abortion access. “Certainly, if the federal government passed a statute that codified a right to travel, that would be a very, very, very helpful and preemptive thing for it to do,” she says.

    Professor Donley also pointed out that the impacts of laws banning residents from traveling across state lines for abortion or cross-state prosecutions of providers are likely to have legal implications that go beyond abortion.

    “Many of the proposals we’ve been hearing about for trying to chill interstate travel are using an SB 8-style mechanism to provide further removal from constitutional protections,” Donley says. “So, to the extent that states are allowed to prohibit travel or prosecute people in other states, the question does become: What other ways can states use those same mechanisms for other types of things?”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Reveals Gov. Greg Abbott’s Lead Over Beto O’Rourke May Be Shrinking

    Following the deadliest school shooting in Texas’s history, new polling finds that far right Gov. Greg Abbott’s unfavorability rating is higher than it’s ever been, while his lead over Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke may be shrinking.

    As new findings from University of Texas/Texas Politics Project show, Abbott’s favorability was at 44 percent as of June, with another 44 percent of those polled saying that they view the governor unfavorably. This is the highest the latter has ever been, according to surveys conducted by the pollster ranging back to 2012, when Abbott was Texas’s attorney general.

    The survey was taken directly after the devastating massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which 21 people, including 19 children, were killed.

    Abbott’s job approval ratings, meanwhile, have dipped back into the negatives, the poll finds. Forty six percent of those surveyed said they don’t approve of Abbott, while 43 said they approve. While Abbott has had net positive approval ratings for much of his time as governor, voters’ disapproval of his performance has been rising over the past year or so.

    This could spell good news for O’Rourke, who’s running to unseat the extremist right-wing governor this fall. While the latest poll found that Abbott still has a lead over O’Rourke of 6 points among registered voters, this is smaller than the 9-point lead that Abbott had in April, according to the pollster.

    The Texas Tribune reports that Texas Politics Project Director Jim Henson says that the scrutiny over Abbott’s response to the Uvalde shooting may have impacted the poll results. The poll found that only 36 percent of voters approve of how Abbott has handled gun violence, while 45 percent say they disapprove, with 38 percent saying they strongly disapprove.

    Texas voters also increasingly believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction, at 59 percent, the highest proportion of voters since 2009. Only 31 percent said that they believe the state is going in the right direction, a major drop from roughly 40 percent in surveys done in October, February and April.

    Texas has weak gun laws, as Republicans have worked to increase gun access in the state over the past years. The Uvalde shooter obtained the AR-style rifle and over 1,600 rounds of ammunition legally, just days before the shooting.

    Abbott has faced widespread criticism over his response to Uvalde and other shootings that have happened in the state under his rule, after which he and his party either stall and do nothing or pass laws making it easier to access guns. The day after the Uvalde shooting, Abbott said that the shooting was “horrible,” but added that “it could have been worse.”

    “The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do,” Abbott said at the time, referring to the police officers who waited 77 minutes before confronting the shooter as he was massacring children, and who later lied about their lax efforts to stop the shooter. “They showed amazing courage.”

    O’Rourke confronted Abbott at the governor’s news conference shortly after the shooting. “You are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said as Republican officials yelled at him and he was escorted out of the room. “You are offering up nothing. You said this was not predictable. This was totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Supreme Court Immigration Ruling Is Welcome, But Deadly Policies Remain in Place

    We go to San Antonio, where 53 migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. died earlier this week after being confined to a sweltering tractor-trailer. Human rights advocates blamed the tragedy on restrictive immigration policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as MPP or the “Remain in Mexico” program. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Biden has the power to end the Trump-era policy, which forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to stay on the Mexican side of the border in unsafe conditions while their cases were resolved in the U.S. “Every single migration-related death is preventable by policy that actually focuses on welcome and care,” says Claudia Muñoz, co-executive director of Grassroots Leadership.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

    The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration on Thursday, saying the president has the power to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program, formally known as MPP, or Migrant Protection Protocols. The ruling was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s three liberal justices in the majority. In his majority opinion, Roberts wrote a lower court had overreached when it blocked Biden from rescinding the program last year.

    Since the policy’s implementation in 2019, almost 70,000 asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their cases were resolved in U.S. courts, a process that could take months or years. Thousands enrolled in MPP reported being kidnapped, raped, tortured or left without shelter while they waited in Mexico.

    The ruling comes just days after 53 people seeking refuge in the United States died after being confined in a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas. Four people have been arrested in connection with the tragedy, including the alleged driver of the truck.

    We go now to San Antonio, where we’re joined by Claudia Muñoz, co-executive director of Grassroots Leadership, an organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration, deportation, criminalization and prison profiteering. She recently wrote an op-ed for Truthout headlined “US Immigration Policy Is to Blame for the Horrific Mass Death in San Antonio.”

    Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. If you could start, Claudia, by talking about the Supreme Court decision and then how it relates to the horror that has been exposed in San Antonio, where you are?

    CLAUDIA MUÑOZ: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me today.

    I think, in terms of the MPP decision, it’s certainly a welcome decision for us. We know it’s not done; it has to go back to the 5th Circuit, the lower court that initially made the decision. And then we still have other programs, such as Title 42, that have a similar impact on migration and in people’s lives, right?

    And I think, for us, what we are seeing is that all of these policies, at the end of the day, force people into violent and deadly pathways of migration, because as long as we have these policies that are really based on control and exclusion, people will not go to the bridge, knowing they will be turned away. And so, with both Title 42 still existing — it’s great that MPP, you know, seemingly will be done away with soon, but Title 42 was just funded for another six months by Congress, including Democrats —

    AMY GOODMAN: And again, Title 42 is the Trump pandemic policy of just citing the pandemic as a reason to keep people out of the United States.

    CLAUDIA MUÑOZ: Yes. Yes, absolutely. So, again, as long as these exclusionary policies exist, people will find other ways to migrate that are much more violent and deadly, such as what happened in San Antonio on Monday.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip of an LGBTQ+ asylum seeker from Honduras who was placed in the “Remain in Mexico” program. They were forced to wait in the border city of Matamoros for two-and-a-half years. This is what they said.

    GLORIA: [translated] I slept by the river, under some tents. I saw how narcos or murderers, people of that sort — they were just called ”la maña” — they would go and find women to rape them, children. I saw people dying. When you don’t pay a kidnapper or you don’t pay a so-called rent, what happens is they pour acid on you. So, if I’m escaping from a country where I will be killed, and then they sent me to another country where I will also be killed for any reason, they are not helping us.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s video from Families Belong Together, Gloria from Honduras. Claudia Muñoz, OK, so, the court says you can end MPP. But how will the Biden administration do it?

    CLAUDIA MUÑOZ: Well, we’re not sure. I think we’re still waiting to see the exact way, right? We know that the decision has to go back to the lower court, and then another decision has to be made.

    And so, I think, you know, for us, seeing all of the death around us, we are asking that some bold action is taken, so that we can prevent more deaths from happening, which I will say every single migration-related death is preventable by policy that actually focuses on welcome and care. And so we’re hoping that whatever is decided by the administration is actually based on those values, and not on exclusion and control.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about how U.S. policy relates to the horror of human smuggling that we have seen unfold outside of San Antonio, with at this point 53 migrants dead in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer truck. We believe at least four children and about 12 others are in hospital. The horror we’ve heard reports of — it’s all just sort of leaking out right now — that steak seasoning was put over the people to disguise the smell. I want to turn Karena Caballero, the mother of 23-year-old Alejandro Andino and 18-year-old Fernando Redondo Caballero, two Honduran asylum seekers who were among the dead in the San Antonio tragedy.

    KARENA CABALLERO: [translated] If it was as in other countries, where we could ask for a law or an organization to fight for the youth’s future, is that possible? No, it isn’t. We’re not in a country that is open to these kinds of things. But if I had to demand something, please, Honduras government, fight for this country’s youth.

    AMY GOODMAN: Karena Caballero’s daughter-in-law, Margie Tamara, was also among the victims. Talk about what you understand took place and how this relates to U.S. policy, Claudia.

    CLAUDIA MUÑOZ: Absolutely. So, we know that this is not a tragedy that just happened. This was done to these human beings by, really, the borders and those in power who uphold them and fund them every single year. And so, what we have seen is absolutely devastating. We know it’s preventable. Again, we know that as long as people are being turned away from the bridge, they will find other paths. Particularly in Texas, migration has been extremely violent, has been made to be extremely violent by state policy and, really, by the complicity and enabling of the Biden administration in stopping all of the states that are taking immigration into their own hands, you know, with the idea that deterrence-based policies will keep people away. We know that’s not going to happen, particularly as conditions, as this mother is mentioning, global conditions are worsening for people.

    And so, as long as we have all of these state, local and federal policies in place, people will continue to die, which we call preventable deaths. This should not be happening. What’s happening again in Texas and other places is absolutely devastating. And these people, all of them, should be here. There are groups that are asking that visas for trafficking, for victims of crime, are provided to the families, to the survivors, and that protection from deportation and relief is provided to the families of those whose lives were taken, as well.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the anti-immigrant Texas policies, such as Operation Lone Star, that are also contributing to asylum seekers dying? I mean, it’s amazing, Operation Lone Star, the full militarization of the southern U.S. border. They were part of the group in Uvalde — right? — who did not move in to save the 19 children, fourth graders, and their two [teachers], even as they stood in the hallway. But yet, Operation Lone Star, the militarization is massive there. Explain what it means for migrants.

    CLAUDIA MUÑOZ: Absolutely. So, in March of last year, Governor Abbott and a group of 25 other governors around the country organized themselves what they called an effort to actually secure the southern border. And this operation, it’s a $4 billion operation, which effectively deploys even more law enforcement than National Guard members, not just from Texas but from other states, as well.

    What they are using is that they are using an emergency order to create an enhanced trespassing charge. Up to date, they have charged over 3,000 people. And some of them have been in a state prison, that was cleared out to detain these migrants, for up to a year. I mean, there are so many constitutional violations in terms of conditions, access to counsel, bail. I can’t even begin to fully cover it. But what’s happening is that the federal government has completely let Texas get away with this, which has emboldened —

    AMY GOODMAN: Claudia, before we go, I want to quickly ask you about the efforts that are being made right now, immigrant rights activists demanding to protect the survivors of this human smuggling tragedy from deportation. Do you know how they will be protected, if they will be granted — allowed to be in this country?

    CLAUDIA MUÑOZ: Yes. So, what we know is that DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, took over the investigation, which, of course, raises red flags for what will happen to the survivors and to the families of those whose lives were taken away. I know that groups like San Antonio Stands are asking both the federal government and local governments to certify new visas, trafficking visas, and also promise and ensure that people are not deported who are both collaborating with the investigation but also the families of those whose lives were taken away. And so, all efforts are being made to protect those lives, as well as efforts to prevent this from happening ever again.

    AMY GOODMAN: Claudia, I want to thank you for being with us, co-executive director of Grassroots Leadership. We’ll link to your piece in Truthout, “US Immigration Policy Is to Blame for the Horrific Mass Death in San Antonio.”

    Coming up, we speak to a Dutch doctor who’s been providing medication abortions around the world, and increasingly right here in the United States. Back in 20 seconds.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Immigration Policy Is to Blame for the Horrific Mass Death in San Antonio

    One hundred human beings were inside an 18-wheeler without water or air conditioning in the blistering 100-degree Texas heat. Fifty of them are now dead. Sixteen more people were taken to a hospital — including four children. That was this Monday in San Antonio. This is the deadliest of such tragedies in recent years, but it is not the first. In 2003, 19 migrants were found dead inside 18-wheelers in Victoria, Texas. In 2017, there were 10 migrants found dead in 18-wheelers — also in San Antonio.

    Summer is the peak season of deadly state-produced violence. Anybody who has done decarceration work will tell you that summer is one of the most dreaded times for heavily policed and imprisoned communities. Summer is also when the most migration-related deaths occur.

    Two hours from San Antonio, a migrant attempting to reach a local ranch for a drink of water was found dead yesterday in Kinney County, Texas. The Sheriff’s Office report states: “It’s the 5th dead illegal alien so far this year in the County.” The disregard for migrant lives has never been clearer.

    The news reported heat stroke and dehydration as the main causes of death in San Antonio. Though that’s certainly what autopsies will reveal, to blame the heat or the smugglers alone would be to dishonor the human beings whose lives have been robbed by local, state and federal immigration policy. Whether related to border crossing or detention, every single migration-related death is preventable.

    On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott took to Twitter to blame President Biden for the deaths. The way in which migrant lives are used as political pawns denies people basic respect and dignity, even in death. As a formerly undocumented immigrant organizer who has called Texas home for the past 20 years, I can tell you what we see from the ground: One of those men is actively trying to kill us, while the other one is leaving us to die.

    In March of last year, Governor Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a $4 billion political operation that deployed law enforcement and national guard members from all over the state (and a few other states) to flood border communities and arrest migrants with misdemeanor trespassing charges to then be sent to state prisons for up to a year. Over 3,000 people have been charged and imprisoned through Operation Lone Star since its inception. This is Abbott’s attempt to create his own immigration enforcement and deterrence program.

    We in Texas have been urging the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to stop enabling Operation Lone Star, and the Department of Justice to begin an investigation. On both fronts, there’s only been inaction — inaction whose end result, predictably, is premature death.

    There is often a villain and a savior narrative along partisan lines that defines the dialogue on immigration policy in the United States. But these deaths remind me of James Baldwin’s powerful statement:

    I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it … it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

    Those in power are responsible for this violence. They are the authors of devastation regardless of whether their actions are considered a crime by the legal system, and regardless of whether they aggressively push xenophobic agendas or fail to intervene to protect the victims of those policies.

    Just last week, Democrats in Congress approved an amendment to the DHS budget bill that would extend the racist and inhumane Title 42 policy that prevents people from seeking asylum at the border. President Biden failed to end the policy when he first came into office, knowing full well that it was put in place by Stephen Miller to end migration.

    Biden’s hesitation enabled Governor Abbott and other Republicans to politicize the issue creating the conditions for this type of tragedy to take place. With Title 42 and other policies foreclosing safer pathways, migrants will continue to enter the U.S. through pathways like the one that ended in mass death in San Antonio yesterday.

    As a political system, Texas is a violence and death-oriented state. From the attacks on transgender youth, to the Uvalde tragedy, to the trigger ban on reproductive rights, our state mass-produces death and then spreads it to other places.

    The federal government, while publicly showing outrage and disdain for places like Texas and the broader South, is an accomplice and enabler of the violence that robbed migrants of their lives in San Antonio this week.

    The embrace of policies that orient toward care and health — rather than exclusion and violence — could have prevented yesterday’s mass deaths. Yet even though those lives were robbed by death-making policies, those human beings were much more than that. So are the survivors.

    Those who died are human beings with loved ones — with strength, with hope, with faith, with stories that should matter to all of us. Their search for a more bearable life, for survival, for resources and for sustenance was met with death instead of welcoming and care.

    As we learn their names, may they weigh heavy on our tongues, and may no one dare say they did not die in vain — they did. This is the root cause that people need to reckon with: In the absence of life-sustaining migration policies, pointless state-sanctioned deaths will continue.

    We in Texas will keep doing what we can to keep each other safe, even through what on most days seem like impossible conditions.

    Those in other places should take note. The policies and technologies that facilitate death in Texas will not remain within our state borders, and organizing to undo Biden’s deadly indifference and Abbott’s active assaults is the only way forward.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Religious Right Mobilized to End Roe. Now What?

    Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that gave women in the U.S. the legal right to an abortion, has now been officially overturned. The Supreme Court rarely reverses itself. The ruling means states can set their own laws around abortion. Many plan to ban it outright. How did we get to this point? 

    For decades, mostly White Evangelicals and Catholics joined forces to put political pressure on Republicans to oppose abortion access – which has serious implications for communities of color. Reporter Anayansi Diaz-Cortes talks with Jennifer Holland, a history professor and author of the book “Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement,” and Khiara Bridges, a reproductive justice scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, about the racial dynamics of the fight over abortion. 

    Most abortions now happen with pills rather than a surgical procedure at a clinic. The ability to get the pills via mail and telehealth appointments has helped expand access to abortions. Now, religious anti-abortion activists are promoting the unproven idea that medication abortions can be reversed. Reporters Amy Littlefield and Sofia Resnick investigate the science and history of this controversial treatment called abortion pill reversal.

    But there’s another religious voice that often gets drowned out by the anti-abortion movement. Reveal’s Grace Oldham visits the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, which back in the late ’60s was part of a national hotline for people seeking an abortion. Callers could be connected with clergy members who would counsel them and give a referral to a trusted doctor who would safely perform abortions. We hear how the church is continuing its legacy of supporting abortion access today, helping people in Texas who want abortions get them out of state.

    Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Rights Groups Urge Court to Strike Down Unconstitutional Texas Law Targeting BDS Movement

    The Center For Constitutional Rights And Palestine Legal Filed An Amicus Brief In The Fifth Circuit Court Of Appeals In Support Of A Lawsuit Seeking To Strike Down A Texas Law That Requires Government Contractors To Pledge Not To Engage In Boycott, Divestment And Sanctions (BDS) Campaigns For Palestinian Rights.

    After A Court Blocked An Earlier Version Of Texas’s Anti-Boycott Law Following Lawsuits From Individuals With State Contracts, Texas Amended The Law To Exclude Companies With 9 Or Fewer Full-Time Employees And Contracts Under $100,000. While The Revised Law Mooted The Previous Lawsuits, Its Underlying First Amendment Challenges Remained.

    The Center For Constitutional Rights And Palestine Legal’s Brief States That The New Texas Law Still Violates The First Amendment And Unconstitutionally Targets Protected Political Speech In Support Of Palestinian Human Rights.

    The post Rights Groups Urge Court to Strike Down Unconstitutional Texas Law Targeting BDS Movement appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Uvalde And The Border Security Scam

    For so long, the people of South Texas have been expected to sacrifice their communities to a border security apparatus. Drones, helicopters, and agents have saturated cities and towns where residents have gone without health insurance and send their children to underfunded schools. It was this apparatus that responded in late May when a gunman rampaged through an elementary school classroom in Uvalde, killing children—19 in all—and two teachers.

    Hundreds of state troopers, federal immigration agents, sheriff’s deputies, U.S. Marshals, and local police quickly descended on a town of 15,000, set among ranchlands 80 miles southwest of San Antonio and 60 miles from the border with Mexico. That rapid influx reflected the deep penetration of the border security apparatus in the region. And it was members of that apparatus, a tactical team that included Border Patrol agents, that Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw credited with charging into a classroom and killing the gunman.

    The post Uvalde And The Border Security Scam appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Austin Starbucks employees become first to unionize in Texas

    A local Starbucks location celebrated victory Friday, becoming the state’s first unionized store. KVUE first learned about the 45th Street and Lamar Boulevard location’s attempts to unionize in March. The location had sent a letter to the CEO of Starbucks after another local store also announced its plans to attempt a union.

    The post Austin Starbucks employees become first to unionize in Texas appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Texas Court Vacates Mallory Nicholson’s Wrongful Conviction After 40 Years

    (Dallas, Texas – June 2, 2022) Today, District Court Judge Chika Anyiam granted the Dallas County district attorney’s motion to dismiss Mallory Nicholson’s 1982 burglary and sexual assault charges based on newly discovered evidence of his innocence that the State had withheld at his original trial. Today’s action by the court officially exonerates Mr. Nicholson of this crime after 40 years. 

    Just over a year ago, Judge Anyiam recommended that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals grant Mr. Nicholson’s habeas corpus petition and vacate his conviction. Five months later, in November 2021, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Mr. Nicholson’s petition based on newly discovered exculpatory evidence that had never been disclosed to Mr. Nicholson’s lawyers during his original trial.

    Mr. Nicholson had spent 21 years in prison for crimes he did not commit and had been forced to register as a sex offender since 2003, when he was released on parole. In 2019, at the Innocence Project’s request, Cynthia Garza, chief of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), and Holly Dozier agreed to review Mr. Nicholson’s case. During their reinvestigation, they discovered that the State had withheld key evidence at trial that pointed to an alternative suspect and demonstrated inconsistencies in the victims’ identifications of Mr. Nicholson. Under the United States Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, the State must disclose such favorable evidence to the defense and vacate convictions, like Mr. Nicholson’s, that involve Brady violations.

    Mr. Nicholson was arrested for burglary and the sexual assault of two children in June 1982. No physical evidence connected him to the crime and he has steadfastly maintained his innocence for decades. At trial, he presented strong alibi evidence to support the fact that he had been with family at his wife’s funeral, which took place 45 minutes outside of Dallas at the time of the crimes.

    Based on the discovery of the undisclosed exculpatory evidence, the CIU agreed that Mr. Nicholson was entitled to a new trial. In addition to the Brady violations, the case was also marred by eyewitness misidentification and racial bias. 

    “Today, the criminal legal system acknowledges what Mr. Nicholson has known and maintained for the last 40 years — he had nothing to do with this crime. Mr. Nicholson has spent the last 40 years enduring the horror of a wrongful conviction. He spent 21 years locked in prison and for the last 20 years, has been forced to register as a sex offender, which led to him being ostracized by his community — all for a crime he did not commit,” said Innocence Project Attorney Adnan Sultan, who represents Mr. Nicholson. “Today, Mr. Nicholson has finally received justice thanks to the Dallas County district attorney, the CIU, and their work uncovering this Brady evidence and recognizing the misconduct of the trial prosecutors in this case.” 

    Mr. Nicholson is also represented by Gary Udashen of Udashen Anton. “D.A. Creuzot’s actions in this case represent significant progress over the last 40 years in how prosecutions are handled in Dallas,”  said Mr. Udashen. “Today, we would hope that Mallory Nicholson would not be arrested, prosecuted, or convicted — and that any prosecutor handling this case would ensure that evidence showing someone other than Mr. Nicholson committed this offense would be fully disclosed to his attorneys.”

    Mr. Nicholson is now officially eligible for compensation for the years he lost to his wrongful conviction.

    The Background: Witness Misidentification 

    On June 12, 1982, two boys, 7- and 9-year-old cousins, were approached by a young man who offered them $5 to help him enter an apartment through a window. Once inside, the man stole several items and sexually assaulted both children. The boys told their aunt, who called the police, and the cousins were taken to Parkland Hospital for sexual assault examinations.

    Both boys initially told police and the examining doctor that they had been assaulted by a Black 14-year-old. They also provided the attacker’s nickname to police, who later learned that the attacker lived near the crime scene.  

    Two days after the assault, police drove one of the victims to the crime scene. On the way, the boy saw 35-year-old Mallory Nicholson standing in front of an apartment building with friends and claimed he was the person who had committed the crime. 

    The following day, police showed the other victim a photo lineup, which included Mr. Nicholson. While the victim did not identify Mr. Nicholson at the time, his mother later called detectives and claimed her son had recognized the person who had committed the crime but had been afraid to point him out. Police put Mr. Nicholson in a live lineup the next day, and both victims identified him. Even though Mr. Nicholson had been at his wife’s funeral on the day of the crime, police arrested him and charged him with burglary and sexual assault. Eyewitness misidentification, as in this case, has contributed to approximately 63% of the 232 wrongful convictions that the Innocence Project has helped overturn. 

    At trial, the boys claimed for the first time that the attacker had told them he had been in a hurry because he had had to attend his wife’s funeral. The State argued that this was a distinct fact, unique to Mr. Nicholson, which proved guilt.

    Throughout the trial, the defense maintained that the boys had misidentified Mr. Nicholson as the person who committed the crime. It also presented numerous alibi witnesses who confirmed Mr. Nicholson had been at his wife’s funeral with friends and family in the hours after the crime occurred. Despite the strength of this evidence, Mr. Nicholson was convicted and sentenced to 55 years for the assaults and eight years for burglary.

    Brady Evidence

    In this case, the favorable evidence which the State failed to disclose to Mr. Nicholson’s defense counsel included:

    • Five police reports documenting conversations the victims had had with police in which they identified their attacker by name as someone other than Mr. Nicholson. The reports were written by a police officer who was never called by the State as a witness despite his role in the investigation.
    • The sexual assault report written by the doctor who examined the victims, which documented their descriptions of the attacker as a 14-year-old Black male. 
    • Handwritten interview notes from prosecuting attorneys listing physical characteristics of the attacker which were inconsistent with Mr. Nicholson’s appearance at the time of the crime in critical ways.  
    • Grand jury testimony from one of the victims in which he failed to say anything about the attacker being in a hurry because he had to attend his wife’s funeral. This was a critical omission, which defense attorneys could have used to discredit the victim at trial. 
    • Handwritten interview notes from the prosecuting attorneys that stated multiple times that the mother and grandmother of one of the victims knew Mr. Nicholson’s wife, and had been aware of her death and funeral date. Had the defense been privy to this information, they could have challenged the State’s argument that the victims’ statements about the attacker’s need to attend his wife’s funeral had been “the most telling factor” of Mr. Nicholson’s guilt. 

    Racial Bias 

    Mr. Nicholson was tried before an all-white jury, who rejected his five alibi witnesses, all of whom were Black. All-white juries have historically convicted Black defendants at a higher rate than white defendants and have been shown to disregard the testimony of truthful Black defense witnesses in favor of weak circumstantial evidence.

    Additionally, the prosecutor relied heavily on negative racial stereotypes at trial, focusing on Mr. Nicholson’s recent unemployment and implying that his alibi witnesses were not reliable because they “hung out” and drank every night. 

    Officers were apparently satisfied by the simplest similarity between Mr. Nicholson and the original description of the attacker — the only commonality was that both were “Black males” — and therefore made no efforts to follow up on the alternative suspect. Such tunnel vision is a known function of implicit racial bias. The resulting wrongful conviction of Mr. Nicholson robbed him of nearly four decades of his life.

    The post Texas Court Vacates Mallory Nicholson’s Wrongful Conviction After 40 Years appeared first on Innocence Project.

  • The AR-15 Has No Business Being in the Hands of Civilians

    As the nation absorbs the horror of yet another massacre of schoolchildren, questions about the police’s response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have become paramount. According to still conflicting reports, police became aware of an active shooter within Robb Elementary School but did not enter the building and engage the attacker for more than 70 minutes. In that span, the gunman was able to kill 19 children and two teachers with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

    The Washington Post reports:

    Since the shooting, officials have faced withering criticism over the series of details that they have released about the shooting, only to later say that information was incorrect. Authorities initially said the gunman exchanged fire with a school police officer outside, only to later say this never happened; they also said the shooter was wearing body armor but reversed course on that count as well…

    Police have also been pilloried for not pursuing the gunman more quickly while he was inside with children calling 911, pleading for help. McCraw said the school district’s police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, had determined the gunman had “transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” so there was a delay of more than an hour before officials stormed the classroom. “It was the wrong decision,” McCraw said.

    The image of police officers refusing to enter the building while tear-gassing and handcuffing parents who were trying to get in has left an indelible mark on the national psyche. Heightening the tension, both the Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde Independent School District police force are now refusing to cooperate with investigators.

    An answer to the question of why the police failed to act may have been inadvertently provided on Sunday night, when the CBS News show “60 Minutes” aired a harrowing report on why mass shooters so often choose this rifle. The reason, according to “60 Minutes,” lies within the ballistics. Rounds fired by the AR-15 travel at three times the speed of sound. According to report, this high-velocity ammunition “is the fear of every American emergency room.”

    Using a long gelatin brick rectangle specifically designed to mimic the human body’s soft tissue, 60 Minutes fired one round from a Glock 9mm pistol into the block. The bullet passed through the material in a straight line, and exited intact. A round fired from the AR-15, however, exploded into pieces within the gelatin, and created a massive internal void from the impact.

    A parade of first responders spent the report explaining their experiences when they entered a room where a gunman with an AR-15 has been at work. The people are not merely dead, they are smashed into unrecognizable pulp by the sheer force of the rounds that struck them. Bones are not broken upon impact; they are shattered. Internal organs are viciously shredded by multiple buzzsaws released when the tumbling bullet fractures within living tissue. Any shots to the head or face make physical identification nearly impossible; there’s nothing left to identify.

    The question of why the Uvalde police refused to enter the building while the shooter was still active may have been answered by that 60 Minutes report: I suspect they knew, better than anyone, what that weapon is capable of, and wanted no part of it. The juxtaposition of their inaction compared to the parents they arrested is stark. The parents wanted to rush in and rescue their children, and some did, because they did not know what they were running toward. Perhaps the cops knew, and therefore froze.

    This is not a defense of the Uvalde police. Their actions, and their scrambled story afterward, speak loudly enough on their own. This is the defenestration of the “Good guy with a gun” NRA talking point. There were plenty of state-sanctioned “guys” with guns at Robb Elementary, and still 21 bodies hit the floor. No number of security guards or armed teachers can match that level of violence and damage. If trained law enforcement officers cannot face that situation, it is folly to believe a kindergarten teacher can.

    Neither should be expected to, and that’s the rub. Somehow, the AR-15 itself has managed to avoid close scrutiny, even with its status as the most popular rifle in the country. I expect the NRA has been influential in this, as that organization has become nothing more than a front for the gun manufacture industry, and all it is interested in is selling the thing. However this veil of secrecy came to be, the fact remains that the AR-15 is a combat weapon meant for soldiers, and has no business on the civilian streets of the U.S.

    Debate over how best to confront this ongoing calamity has ranged from a coordinated student strike when school begins in September, to the argument that the public should see the aftermath of one of these butcher sessions, if only to understand what defenders of the AR-15 are actually talking about. That was the approach chosen by Emmet Till’s mother, who allowed the public and the press to observe the body of her son after he was murdered by a vicious, racist mob.

    “In the case of Uvalde,” writes Susie Linfield for The New York Times, “a serious case can be made — indeed, I agree with it — that the nation should see exactly how an assault rifle pulverizes the body of a 10-year-old… A violent society ought, at the very least, to regard its handiwork, however ugly, whether it be the toll on the men and women who fight in our name, on ‘ordinary’ crime victims killed or wounded by guns or on children whose right to grow up has been sacrificed to the right to bear arms.”

    The fact that getting rid of AR-15s is not deemed even worth discussing in most political quarters of our country tells us far too much about the militaristic, nihilistic bloodbath nation we have become. They are combat weapons that deliver combat injuries, “civilian” appellations notwithstanding. The Uvalde cops likely quailed at the thought of facing just one of them, and according to CBS, there are 11 million such weapons in mass circulation today. They must go, period, end of file.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Uvalde Students Fought for Desegregation in 1970s. Now Let’s Rise Up for Them.

    Communities of Mexican origin and others throughout the United States, in Mexico and beyond, are mobilizing in solidarity with the suffering of the community of Uvalde, Texas. This includes student walkouts at more than 200 schools on May 26 in the first wave of a renewed national movement for rational gun control measures led by survivors and families of previous mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, and elsewhere.

    The horrific slaughter in Uvalde of 19 students and of two heroic teachers who died seeking to protect them should also remind us of all the ways in which children of color have been treated as if they were expendable, and the historical roots of these oppressive conditions. The children of Robb Elementary School are our children, who are emblematic of our families and our future: nuestro pueblo.

    The implications of the incalculable tragedy of Uvalde must also be understood within a broader historical context. Uvalde is located roughly halfway between the U.S.-Mexico border and San Antonio, Texas. More than 80 percent of the population of the school district and city of Uvalde is classified as “Hispanic” according to census data.

    As in much of Texas, Uvalde is a rural, primarily working-class town of overwhelmingly Mexican descent and origin. Uvalde is thus also a border community in the broadest sense — geographically, demographically, socially, culturally and historically — with deep roots in both the U.S. and Mexico, and with many families of mixed immigration status. Much of this context has been ignored or rendered invisible by the predominant narratives promoted by commercial media, including the dilution of Uvalde’s distinctive character by categorizing its population as generically “Hispanic” or Latino/a, and by mispronouncing its name.

    Uvalde and Border Militarization and Policing

    The convergent failures by local, state and federal authorities to adequately protect and rescue these children reflect deeper systemic issues related to the unequal policing and schooling of communities of color in Texas and throughout the U.S. They also highlight the urgent need to organically connect struggles and demands for the abolition of mass incarceration and the mass detention of migrants, and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, with calls for an end to racist policing and the criminalization of migrants.

    At the same time, efforts to glorify the belated but supposedly decisive intervention at the culminating moments of the Uvalde massacre of the Border Patrol’s Tactical Unit (BORTAC) can ironically serve to underline this unit’s lack of transparency and accountability. This includes the expansion of BORTAC’s original mission focused on “SWAT-style raids on organized gangs smuggling immigrants or drugs across the US border” to deployments in Portland, Oregon, and potentially to Albuquerque, Chicago and New York. This was a key dimension of the Trump administration’s unsuccessful plans to repress mass protests during the summer of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020.

    BORTAC has also been deployed internationally to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as several Latin American countries, as part of a broader vision that seeks to position the Border Patrol as a “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community.” All of this seeks to build on its standing, together with ICE (both within the Department of Homeland security), as the largest police force in the country, and one of the largest in the world. Uvalde and the border region, from this perspective, are often treated as if they were occupied territory, as they were on the day of the Robb Elementary School massacre. This is reinforced by the Border Patrol’s generalized, recurrent impunity in more than 200 deaths since 2010, including multiple cases of deaths in custody of migrant children and youth.

    Uvalde is thus representative of broader patterns, as a community that is ostentatiously policed, divided and employed by the Border Patrol, at the edge of the heavily militarized U.S-Mexico border region. Texas itself is, of course, a state indelibly marked by the continuing legacies of white supremacy through intertwined processes of Indigenous dispossession, African slavery, and the invasion, conquest and colonial settlement of Mexican territory. These are the driving forces that have produced the deep, lingering inequities that are evident in settings such as Robb Elementary School, and in broader patterns throughout Uvalde and similar school districts within the state.

    The carnage at Robb Elementary School strikes deeply at our sense of vulnerability, as did the El Paso, Texas, massacre in 2019, and convergent crimes also driven by racism and white supremacy, such as the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. Cases such as these highlight the persistent effects of the targeting of our communities by the human rights crimes of the Trump administration and its apologists, and more recently by the Biden administration’s own abuses and inconsistencies.

    For many of us committed to the struggle for immigrant justice, it has become clear that the border is much more than the imaginary line and the increasingly divisive wall that separates the U.S. from Mexico, Latin America and the Global South. Increasingly repressive U.S. immigration policies have taught us instead that the border is an open wound that runs through every community where we are present as immigrant communities of color, and that bleeds into each of the countries and places of origin of our migrant and forcibly displaced sisters and brothers.

    This landscape is concretely reflected in the intertwined neocolonial legacies of conquest and racial, cultural and linguistic subordination of people of Mexican origin. These are the traces that continue to permeate the soil and air of Uvalde, and of the border region, through the racialized control of land, labor and resources. We have also learned within this context that it is the border itself, with all its trappings and imaginaries, which generates the intricate machineries of structural violence inherent to U.S. immigration policy and its regional and global equivalents.

    This includes the recurrent history of racial violence against communities of Mexican origin throughout Texas, including hundreds of lynchings, which have been reconstructed by scholars such as Marcia Muñoz Martínez and the Refusing to Forget project, as well as William D. Carrigan, Clive Webb and Nicholas Villanueva, among others. This largely suppressed history includes reports of as many as 11 cases of this kind in and around Uvalde during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

    The identity of the Uvalde killer as a youth of Mexican descent or origin, like 80 percent of the students in this school district, has, of course, also been seized upon by others to reaffirm our supposedly inherent, “alien dangerousness.” But we should know by now that the deadly violence unleashed in Uvalde is, in fact, deeply characteristic of the U.S. — just like the guns from the U.S. that have flooded into Mexico to nourish drug violence.

    Uvalde and Community-Based Struggles for Educational Equality

    But Uvalde stands for much more than supposed “Latino-on-Latino” violence, or the suffering of ostensibly passive victims. One place to begin a fuller, more accurate story is with Robb Elementary School itself, and with the history of the struggle for equality in the public schools in Uvalde.

    A quick glance reveals what too many of us have forgotten, regarding the central, historic role played by Mexican communities like that of Uvalde in complex, challenging struggles against the statewide system of racial segregation and its local expressions.

    These are the kinds of systemic practices which led the Uvalde school district to manipulate student assignment policies so that Robb Elementary could be maintained as a segregated “Mexican school” from the time it was established in 1954, ironically the same year as the Supreme Court’s landmark decision holding that measures of this kind were unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

    This kind of segregation was customary throughout Texas, as elsewhere in the southwest, affecting both Black and Brown students, and was only finally dismantled because of community-based struggles in places like Uvalde, combined with targeted litigation.

    In Uvalde this included activism, initially through a Mexican veterans’ branch of the American Legion, and then led by local youth focused on redressing unjust conditions in the Uvalde schools through the Mexican American Youth Organization. It was this core that constituted the leadership of the group that became known as La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), one of the most important driving forces in the national Chicano liberation movement of the 1970s.

    Uvalde is only 40 miles away from Crystal City (known widely as Cristal), which became the first community in Texas to elect an LRUP majority on its school board, in 1970. It is thus not surprising that in Uvalde itself, 500 students led a walkout from the local schools that began on April 14, 1970. It became the longest boycott of its kind during this crucial period of Chicano activism. The Uvalde movement built on the lessons of the East Los Angeles, California, student walkouts in April 1968 and of the community-based boycott of the New York City public schools in February 1964, which laid the groundwork there for desegregation.

    Organizer Genoveva Morales became renowned in Uvalde as a key leader of the Mexican community’s struggle against segregation and for equal educational opportunities and was the lead plaintiff on behalf of her son Roberto, in what eventually became a landmark case known as Morales v. Shannon decided by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1975. The ruling reversed a lower court decision, and found that the Uvalde schools had to be fully desegregated, based in part on the maintenance of Robb Elementary as a separate and unequal “Mexican school.”

    For almost 40 years federal judges supervised and monitored implementation by the Uvalde school district of court-ordered remedies including desegregation, bilingual education and affirmative action measures to ensure the hiring and promotion of teachers representative of the community. Another form of symbolic reparations finally came in 2014, when a junior high school in Uvalde was named in honor of Morales.

    Will Robb’s status as a “Mexican school” be remembered, as well as its 1970 walkout, when it is razed and replaced by a new building, as is apparently planned? Although they’re no longer formally segregated, the Uvalde public schools today continue to reflect the vestiges of historical discrimination against children of Mexican descent and origin, who constitute about 90 percent of the students at Robb Elementary.

    According to school district data, more than 81 percent of the students at this school are eligible for a free or reduced cost lunch, while students’ test scores and overall academic progress last year were far below the state average. In the 2020-21 school year, more than 67 percent of the district’s students were considered to be at risk of dropping out. Several sources identify the reported killer as a student who was bullied because of a speech impediment, who became frustrated and eventually dropped out or was expelled.

    These are the kinds of inequities in Uvalde’s schools that led to the 1970 walkout. Now things have come full circle, with the national student walkout that was held on May 26 in solidarity with the students of Uvalde. It was the students of Uvalde who stood up for us in the 1970s. Today the time has come for us to rise up for them.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Does America Stand For Guns Or For Sanity?

    Above photo: Ann Wright at rally in Houston. On Memorial Day where our country honors its wars and its war dead, it seems to me that too many in our country have adopted a new pledge of allegiance: I pledge allegiance to the guns of the United States Of America and to the gun lobbies […]

    The post Does America Stand For Guns Or For Sanity? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Crowd Booed Gov. Greg Abbott When He Arrived at Uvalde Memorial Site

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was met with boos Sunday as he arrived at a memorial site for victims of the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, which sparked a nationwide wave of grief and anger over lawmakers’ persistent — and industry-funded — inaction on gun violence.

    “We need change, governor!” yelled one member of a crowd gathered at Robb Elementary School as Abbott, a Republican who just two days earlier delivered video remarks at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention, arrived at the site.

    “Shame on you, Abbott!” others shouted at the governor, who has overseen and approved the GOP-dominated state legislature’s further weakening of Texas’ gun regulations in recent years even in the wake of deadly shootings.

    The Texas Tribune noted last week that “in the last two legislative sessions, Texas legislators have loosened gun laws, most notably by passing permitless carry in 2021, less than two years after mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa took the lives of 30 people.”

    Annual child gun deaths in Texas have more than doubled during Abbott’s tenure.

    Recycling the well-worn talking point that mental illness is the primary driver of gun violence, Abbott has signaled following the Uvalde massacre — the deadliest school shooting in Texas history — that he has no intention of supporting proposals such as those put forth in recent days by Democrats in the state Senate.

    The Democratic lawmakers are pushing the governor to call an emergency legislative session — something he has done to attack voting rights — and endorse passage of laws raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21, requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, restricting ownership of high-capacity magazines, and other changes.

    “Texas has suffered more mass shootings over the past decade than any other state,” all 13 members of Texas’ Senate Democratic caucus wrote in a letter to Abbott over the weekend. “In Sutherland Springs, 26 people died. At Santa Fe High School outside Houston, 10 people died. In El Paso, 23 people died at a Walmart. Seven people died in Midland-Odessa.”

    “After each of these mass killings, you have held press conferences and roundtables promising things would change,” the lawmakers continued. “After the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, those broken promises have never rung more hollow. The time to take real action is now.”

    The parents of children killed in Uvalde have echoed that message.

    Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter was among the 21 victims, told The New York Times last week that she and her husband declined an invitation to meet with Abbott, citing his opposition to basic and broadly popular gun-safety measures.

    “We live in this really small town in this red state, and everyone keeps telling us, you know, that it’s not the time to be political, but it is — it is,” Rubio said. “Don’t let this happen to anybody else.”

    People gathered in Uvalde on Sunday also demanded action at the federal level, where Republican lawmakers and right-wing Democrats have obstructed gun-control legislation for years.

    “Do something!” onlookers shouted at President Joe Biden as he departed a mass service in the grieving Texas city.

    Gun control advocates have accused the president of offering little more than platitudes in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, which spurred limited bipartisan talks in Congress that — like similar legislative efforts over the past decade — are likely to end in failure amid near-unanimous GOP opposition.

    Two Democrats in the Senate — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — are refusing to drop their support for the 60-vote legislative filibuster, meaning at least 10 Republican votes are needed in the chamber to pass a gun control bill.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Beyond the official clichés: The Texas school shooting reveals the advanced sickness of American society – World Socialist Web Site

    The mass shooting of 19 children and two teachers, and the wounding of 17 more people, at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday was a genuinely horrific event. The students killed were 9, 10 and 11 years old, in the second, third and fourth grades. The adults killed, both women, were fourth-grade teachers. The perpetrator of the crime barricaded himself inside a classroom and opened fire with a lightweight semi-automatic rifle that he had obtained a day after his 18th birthday, one week earlier.

    In the most immediate and direct sense, hundreds if not thousands of people will never recover from the damage done in this one incident alone.

    The American ruling elite, its politicians and its media outlets, have nothing insightful or useful to say about this most recent calamity. Depending on party affiliation and the level of individual ignorance, they advocate gun control, more police repression or a return to godliness.

    The post Beyond the official clichés: The Texas school shooting reveals the advanced sickness of American society – World Socialist Web Site appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘I have no children left’: protesters take on NRA convention after Texas shooting

    After two sleepless nights wondering what, if anything, she could do, Nancy Harris, 73, decided to drive four hours to Houston. Before she left, she pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down 12 names.

    Each name was someone she knew had been shot. She put an asterisk next to the ones who had died, including her own daughter.

    She says she didn’t know the National Rifle Association, one of America’s most powerful lobbyist groups, was meeting in Houston this weekend until after the horrific shooting in Uvalde on Tuesday. She is a gun owner but stood across the street from the NRA’s convention to share her story with anyone who would listen.

    The post ‘I have no children left’: protesters take on NRA convention after Texas shooting appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Texas Reps Have Taken Over $14 Million From Gun Rights Groups

    Texas representatives in the 117th Congress took more money from gun rights groups than lawmakers in any other state, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.

    Senators and House members representing Texas have received more than $14 million in contributions from gun rights interests over the course of their careers, with much of that coming from the National Rifle Association.

    Texas also ranks second among the 19 states tracked by OpenSecrets for state-level lobbying by gun rights groups with more than $3 million in spending from 2015 through 2021. During that period, the NRA spent more on state-level lobbying in Texas than any other state in the 19 states tracked by OpenSecrets with over $2.5 million in spending.

    The influence gun rights groups exert in Texas is also evident in grassroots organizing and advocacy efforts spearheaded by the NRA.

    The NRA is holding its annual meeting this weekend in Houston — just a few hours drive from the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where at least 19 children and two teachers were killed in a shooting on Tuesday.

    Multiple politicians are slated to speak at the event, which is expected to be the year’s largest for the gun lobby after previous events were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    Some of the convention’s planned headliners — including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — canceled in-person appearances after facing criticism for taking money from the NRA and continuing with plans to speak at the event after the shooting. Abbott is still scheduled to address attendees in a pre-recorded video message.

    The NRA convention schedule also still includes multiple in-person appearances from politicians who have benefited from the gun rights group’s largesse, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former President Donald Trump.

    Trump is scheduled to headline a forum at the NRA’s annual meeting, and the NRA issued a notice telling attendees they will not be able to carry firearms, toy guns or “weapons of any kind” during the forum headlined by Trump.

    Trump’s presidential election bids received significant financial support from the NRA. The gun rights group spent a record $54.4 million on 2016 federal elections, with most of that spending routed through the NRA’s flagship lobbying arm, a 501(c)(4) “dark money” group that does not disclose its donors. Nearly all of the NRA’s 2016 spending went to boosting Trump’s presidential election.

    Though tax records show the main NRA lobbying arm’s revenue dipped down to about $282 million in 2020 after ending multiple years in the red, the group still poured tens of millions of dollars into influencing elections. Most of the $29 million that the NRA spent on 2020 federal elections also went to supporting Trump in the final months before Election Day.

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is slated to speak at the NRA’s annual meeting, is the top recipient of political contributions from gun rights interests, drawing about $749,000 over his career.

    Gun rights interests have also poured money into outside spending boosting Cruz. Of the more than $154,000 gun rights interests spent boosting Cruz since he was elected to Congress in 2012, about $122,000 was bankrolled by the NRA.

    The NRA event schedule includes a prerecorded video message from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with a long history with the gun rights advocacy organization. Abbot has received more than $20,000 in contributions from gun rights groups with most of that coming from the NRA and the Texas State Rifle Association.

    In June 2021, multiple members of NRA leadership — embattled NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre and NRA president Carolyn Meadows — joined Abbott for a special bill signing ceremony for House Bill 1927, NRA-backed legislation that allows Texans to carry handguns for self-defense without a license from the state so long as they don’t have a criminal history.

    Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, is still scheduled to speak at the event.

    Paxton won the GOP nomination Tuesday in a runoff against Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. In November, Paxton will face off against Rochelle Garza, a civil rights attorney who won the Democratic nomination.

    As he runs for reelection, Paxton is under indictment for felony securities fraud charges from 2015 but has pleaded not guilty and is still awaiting trial. In addition to the felony charges, Paxton is also reportedly under FBI investigation for accusations of corruption and the State Bar of Texas is considering whether to take action against Paxton for his role in filing a lawsuit challenging presidential election results in four states won by President Joe Biden. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

    After the shooting, Paxton suggested arming teachers as a possible solution.

    Paxton is a longtime champion of the firearms industry, and the industry in turn has poured money into supporting the controversial politician.

    The NRA, the Texas State Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fund have all given political contributions to Paxton.

    But Paxton’s relationship with gun rights interests goes far beyond money.

    Paxton “welcomed” the NRA to Texas when the gun rights organization ​​filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of 2021, seeking to restructure in Texas and avoid legal action in New York. New York’s attorney general began investigating the National Rifle Association on corruption charges in 2019 and moved to dissolve its 501(c)(4) nonprofit in 2020.

    “The NRA has been instrumental in defending our Second Amendment rights and we would welcome them with open arms to relocate in Texas!,” Paxton tweeted at the time.

    In April, Paxton signed on to an amicus brief supporting the NRA’s petition in partnership with the California Rifle and Pistol Association asking the Supreme Court to hear Duncan v. Bonta, a case challenging California’s ban on magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.

    Gun Money Across Party Lines

    Contributions from gun rights groups in the Lone Star State are not limited to Republicans.

    Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) is one Democratic incumbent who has a history with the NRA.

    Cuellar faced progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros on Tuesday in Texas’ primary. While Cuellar declared victory, his lead was less than 200 votes and ballots are still being counted so the race may be headed for a runoff. The winning Democrat will go up against Cassy Garcia, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who won her own runoff in the Republican primary Tuesday.

    The NRA has poured tens of thousands of dollars into donations to Cuellar and outside spending boosting Cuellar since he was elected to Congress, totaling $31,669 since 2002.

    Most recently, Cuellar’s 2018 reelection campaign accepted $6,950 in donations from the NRA Political Victory Fund. A campaign spokesperson told CNBC that Cuellar doesn’t plan on giving the NRA’s money back or to charity, reportedly asking, “Why would he do that?”

    Cuellar held an A rating with the NRA going into the 2018 midterms and was one of only three Democrats who received campaign contributions from the NRA that cycle. But his rating dropped from an A to a C after he backed an expansion of background checks. The NRA has not given to him since the 2018 election cycle.

    Both Sides of the Gun Control Debate Spend Big in California

    California ranks No. 1 for members of Congress taking money from groups advocating gun control with $968,754 in contributions over the course of their careers but lawmakers in the state have taken money from groups on both sides of the issue.

    As two of the biggest states in the country, California and Texas each have more representatives in Congress than any other state, meaning more lawmakers in the states may already be more likely to cumulatively attract more money.

    But many individual lawmakers in these states are also major recipients of funds from gun groups, and the states were the two top targets of lobbying spending by gun rights interests in the 19 states tracked by OpenSecrets.

    California ranks second among the 19 states tracked by OpenSecrets for most money spent on lobbying by the NRA from 2015 through 2021 and first overall for gun rights groups lobbying during that time period. Gun rights groups spent over $2.1 million on lobbying in California from 2015 through 2021 with $811,899 of that spending bankrolled by the NRA.

    California lawmakers recently advanced a package of gun control bills, including one sponsored by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom that uses the structure of Texas’ abortion ban to crack down on illegal firearms.

    Newsom opened the legislative session this year with a call to action inspired by Texas Republicans and the conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.

    The law would give Californians the right to sue manufacturers, sellers and distributors of illegal assault weapons, ghost guns and certain firearms and to collect at least $10,000 in civil damages per weapon — effectively putting a bounty on guns.

    Other gun proposals in California include bills to ban the advertising of certain firearms to minors, require school officials to report any “perceived threat” of a mass shooting to law enforcement, ban firearm sales on government property and compel firearm dealers to increase security.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Parents reportedly handcuffed, tasered, and pepper sprayed by police during Uvalde school shooting

    More grim allegations about the conduct of police at the Uvalde school shooting are emerging. The massacre took place in Texas on Wednesday. 21 students and teachers died when 18 year old Salvador Ramos entered the school armed with several assault weapons. Ramos was eventually shot and killed.

    Images of heavily armed cops holding back terrified parents while apparently refusing to engage the shooter themselves have circulated widely. Now one parent has said that police handcuffed her and tasered and pepper sprayed other parents at the scene:

    “Kids bled out”

    Other horrific stories are also trickling in via social media as people have tried to assess what actually happened during the attacks:

    Footage showed children who had been hiding in school buses climbing out of the vehicle windows:

    And more anger was aimed at police who are being accused of spending more time hassling parents than dealing with the attacker:

    People continue to be shocked at the police’s alleged inaction during the assault, despite the fact they were armed to the teeth with military-grade weapons:

    Many have been pointing out that the police enjoy substantial funding, but seem to be incapable of actually doing their jobs:

    Cops saved their own kids

    And people have said that some cops actually made sure to get their own kids out of the school:

    It has been reported that the FBI may now investigate the incident and the police response. A move some US politicians, like Texas congressman Joaquin Castro, have called for:

    Some social media users tried to contemplate the horror of parents trying to reach their kids while police did nothing:

    And it was suggested that police inaction compared with parents determination to save their children was the ultimate commentary on the realities of life in the US today:

    The next weeks and months will tell us more about what happened in the small Texas town of Uvalde. And the debates on gun control and policing are not going to likely to quieten down for a very long time.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/VOA, cropped to 770 x 403

    By Joe Glenton

  • O’Rourke Crashes Abbott Press Conference, Blames GOP for Continued Gun Violence

    Beto O’Rourke, a former U.S. congressman and the current Democratic candidate in the upcoming race for Texas governor, interrupted a press conference led by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Wednesday, rebuking him and other Republicans for refusing to take action on gun violence following the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

    Nineteen children and two adults were killed by an 18-year-old shooter in an elementary school in Uvalde on Tuesday. According to an analysis from The Texas Tribune, the state has seen eight mass shootings over the past decade, which have coincided with the loosening of gun regulations and rules by Republican lawmakers over the same period.

    Abbott and other Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, were onstage when O’Rourke condemned their refusal to act. Uvalde’s mayor, Republican Don McLaughlin, was also present.

    O’Rourke spoke as the microphone was being passed from one speaker to another. Although he was technically interrupting the event, he didn’t interrupt a specific person when he made his comments.

    “This is on you,” he said to the lawmakers, regarding the massacre. “Until you choose to do something different, this will continue to happen.”

    “Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed just like they were killed in Uvalde,” O’Rourke went on.

    The Republicans that O’Rourke was addressing were visibly upset by his comments, with McLaughlin immediately demanding that security “get his ass out of here.”

    “I can’t believe you’re a sick son of a bitch that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue,” the mayor said, addressing O’Rourke with a microphone.

    Although several individuals in the crowd were frustrated by O’Rourke’s actions, others demonstrated their approval. Many chanted “Let him speak!” and spoke out in support of the Democrat’s First Amendment speech rights as he was being escorted out of the auditorium.

    The Texas Democratic Party also expressed support for O’Rourke, writing on Twitter that “a real sick son of a bitch would pray for solutions instead of taking action after 21 Texans were slaughtered in their classroom.”

    The same day that he interrupted the press conference, O’Rourke condemned the governor for his plan to attend a National Rifle Association (NRA) event in the state later this week.

    “Governor Abbott, if you have any decency, you will immediately withdraw from this weekend’s NRA convention and urge them to hold it anywhere but Texas,” O’Rourke wrote on Twitter.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Has America Tried Bombing Its Mass Shooting Problem? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Oh cool it’s the part of the news cycle where Democrats and Republicans pretend something’s going to change about American gun laws for a few days.

    “It’s a gun control problem!”

    “Nuh-uh it’s a mental health problem!”

    [Nothing changes about gun laws or mental health care]

    [Repeat]

    ❖

    There’s probably a correlation between the fact that the US is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic and the fact that Americans are the most aggressively propagandized population on earth.

    If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you’d probably see some mass shootings.

    There’s only so far you can warp the human psyche before it snaps. Bash hundreds of millions of people in the brain their entire lives with indoctrination programs telling them madness is sanity and sanity is madness, and eventually a few of them are going to wind up mass murderers.

    It’s surely not a coincidence that the nation which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by mass murder and war propaganda and mass-scale psychological manipulation is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic. But this will never be studied.

    It will never be studied because empire is invisible to mainstream science and social psychology, in the same way it’s invisible to mainstream media, mainstream politics, and mainstream academia. The empire is not even acknowledged to exist within the spheres of mainstream thought, and this is a deliberately engineered reality. The spheres of mainstream thought which prevent people from understanding that we are dominated by an unacknowledged empire which stretches across nations and influences our lives more than virtually anything else our attention is diverted to are actively influenced by that very empire.

    We are all marinating in the US-centralized empire: its influence, its propaganda, its artificially manufactured culture, its ways of thinking. We’re so immersed in it we can’t see it. It’s like water for fish to us. So we won’t see any research into its influence on the collective psyche.

    ❖

    It’s weird how every US president is expected to say something after a mass shooting when US presidents are always orders of magnitude more murderous than the act they’re decrying.

    “Who’s the one person we should look to after a horrific mass murder? Oh how about the head of the most murderous power structure on earth whose very existence depends on nonstop mass murder?”

    ❖

    Everyone shit their guts out for weeks when Trump made some asinine tweets about North Korea but Biden repeatedly threatening direct hot war with China while waging a world-threatening proxy war against Russia is just fine normal stuff.

    ❖

    In terms of contemporary analysis of conflict and strategy, Henry Kissinger hasn’t been one of the world’s worst war hawks for decades. This is true not because he has gotten less psychopathic, but because everyone else in Washington has gotten more so.

     

    Yes Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. Yes Henry Kissinger is a psychopath. Yes the world will be better off when it is finally disencumbered of him. And, also, the US foreign policy establishment has grown much, much more insane than Henry Kissinger.

    ❖

    The US empire has been using impoverished human beings from the Global South as testing animals and target practice for its instruments of war in preparation for much larger military confrontations that it has long been planning for.

    ❖

    You’ve got to graduate from an Ivy League university and read all the latest reports from the most esteemed think tanks to get smart enough to understand why it’s a good idea to fight Russia and China at the same time.

    ❖

    If there was a giant multitrillion-dollar corporation that was allowed to kill anyone it wants to secure its success, its behavior would not be functionally different from that of the US empire.

    ❖

    I never give mainstream media “credit” on those rare occasions when they do something right. They’re supposed to get it right. You don’t get brownie points for not lying and propagandizing as aggressively as you normally do. You don’t give a cop credit for not shooting everyone.

    ❖

    If you’re a popular comedian living under a murderous and tyrannical globe-spanning empire, it’s pretty pathetic to spend your career punching any direction but up.

    ❖

    It doesn’t take much work to understand that the US government is an evil institution. It does take a fair bit of work to understand that the US government is a uniquely evil institution on the world stage, with no one else coming anywhere close. People have trouble getting this; for some reason it’s not too psychologically confrontational to acknowledge that your government is or is allied with one of many bad actors, but it often causes a lot of cognitive dissonance to grapple with the possibility that it’s the absolute worst actor, by a very large margin.

    _______________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • NBA Coach Steve Kerr Slams McConnell and GOP Over Inaction on Shootings

    Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr refused to talk about basketball before Tuesday night’s playoff game, instead dedicating a news conference to condemning politicians’ inaction on gun laws in wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 21 people.

    “I’m not going to talk about basketball. Nothing’s happened with our team in the last six hours…any basketball questions don’t matter,” Kerr told reporters at the pre-game press conference.

    “In the last 10 days we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in southern California,” he said. “And now we have children murdered at school.”

    Raising his voice and pounding on the table in front of him, he demanded, “When are we going to do something?”

    “I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there,” he went on, his voice breaking. “I am so tired of the excuses. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough!”

    Kerr condemned “50 senators” — referring to Republicans — who refuse to hold a vote on gun legislation, and cited HR 8, a bill that would expand background checks that has already passed the House.

    “There’s a reason they won’t vote on it — to hold onto power,” he said.

    Kerr singled out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) in his impassioned plea:

    I ask you, Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings, I ask you: are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, and our elderly, and our churchgoers? Because that’s what it looks like.

    The coach, who won two NBA championships with the nearby San Antonio Spurs as a player two decades ago, implored those listening to think of their own family members. “How would you feel if this happened to you today?” he asked.

    “We can’t get numb to this,” he added.

    Kerr, who has spoken out about gun violence before, got visibly choked up during his commentary. Notably, his father was shot and killed in Beirut in 1984, when Kerr was a teenager.

    At least 19 children and two adults were killed by the shooter in Uvalde late Tuesday morning. Some parents in the community had to wait several hours into the evening to find out whether their children were among those injured or killed.

    The shooter also reportedly shot his grandmother prior to the massacre at Robb Elementary School.

    The event marks the 30th shooting at a K-12 school in the U.S. this year alone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas GOP Sets Sights on Banning Companies From Helping Workers Get Abortions

    A group of Republican state lawmakers in Texas are threatening to ban companies from doing business in the state if they help their employees obtain an abortion in a state where the procedure is legal if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

    According to the Texas Tribune, at least 14 Republican state representatives have pledged to introduce a ban that would stop companies from being able to offer their employees abortion-related health care. Pre-Roe legislation that was never repealed would allow any shareholders of a public company to go after corporate executives for criminal prosecution, according to the lawmakers.

    The threat is the latest in Texas Republicans’ quest to place a wide-ranging chilling effect on abortion and to vastly increase criminalization of the procedure. The move is yet another show of the Republican Party’s willingness to take extreme measures to restrict and legislate the population’s bodily autonomy, even if it means contradicting their reputation as the pro-business party or even risking corporations backing out of the state.

    The plan was first announced via a letter to Lyft CEO Logan Green that lawmakers sent last week, led by state Rep. Briscoe Cain. The letter was in response to an announcement from Green that Lyft would provide its Texas- and Oklahoma-based drivers compensation for legal fees if they were sued for aiding someone in getting an abortion. The company also vowed to cover travel costs for abortion seekers within the company that have a health care plan, in order to combat undue costs under “these cruel laws.”

    “The state of Texas will take swift and decisive action if you do not immediately rescind your recently announced policy to pay for the travel expenses of women who abort their unborn children,” lawmakers wrote in the letter.

    The extent of lawmakers’ overall support for the legislation is currently unclear. But with a Republican trifecta in the state, and with many extremist right-wing legislators in office, the legislation could pass and make it even harder for people to access abortion care. In emails with the Texas Tribune, Cain appeared to be confident that the bill would get support among the party.

    Other companies, including Texas-based ones, have also announced plans to provide abortion aid to their employees in recent weeks, as the country is facing a likely overturn of Roe v. Wade. Corporations offering these benefits have likely calculated that paying for abortion care is cheaper than paying for a pregnancy and parental leave; people who plan on becoming pregnant are often discriminated against by employers.

    With many major corporations — including Amazon, Citigroup, Apple, and Starbucks — announcing plans to help employees receive aid to pursue an abortion in another state, the bill could have a vastly negative effect on the state’s economy and employment.

    Even if there are economic consequences for Republicans’ far right laws, however, the party seems increasingly willing to feud with corporations in order to get their way, threatening to withdraw companies’ government support and to boycott if corporations don’t fall in line.

    GOP lawmakers in Florida recently waged a battle with Disney over the company’s extremely tepid and largely symbolic opposition of Republicans’ homophobic and transphobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill to ban teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender in classrooms. Florida Republicans passed a measure revoking Disney’s special tax status last month in response — a move that Democrats said would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat The Robber Barons

    “I was born in Fayette County, Texas, from German parents, and who fled from the reaction [to] the 1848 revolution. I think that I inherited some of my revolutionary qualifications. I am not responsible for them. I cannot help it.”

    So testified E.O. Meitzen before the Commission on Industrial Relations in March 1915 about why he involved himself in the political struggles of working farmers. At the time, Meitzen was a veteran leader of the Texas Socialist Party. Nearly thirty years earlier, his inheritance led him to help organize and lead the Fayette County Farmers’ Alliance. When the Farmers’ Alliance failed to bring relief to farmers, Meitzen joined the Populist revolt, becoming a statewide leader of the People’s Party. The Meitzen political legacy extended to E.O.’s children, in particular his son E.R., who was a leader successively in the Farmers’ Union, the Socialist Party, the Nonpartisan League and the Farm-Labor Union of America. For three generations, from the 1840s to 1940s, the Meitzens spearheaded movements and organizations that fought for the economic and political rights of laborers and working farmers.

    The post The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat The Robber Barons appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.