{"id":1509343,"date":"2024-02-20T17:12:09","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T17:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealnews.com\/?p=308181"},"modified":"2024-02-20T17:12:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T17:12:09","slug":"greg-abbotts-border-stunts-are-the-real-invasion-at-eagle-pass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/02\/20\/greg-abbotts-border-stunts-are-the-real-invasion-at-eagle-pass\/","title":{"rendered":"Greg Abbott\u2019s border stunts are the real \u2018invasion\u2019 at Eagle Pass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Greg Abbott&amp;apos;s border stunts are the real &amp;apos;invasion&amp;apos; at Eagle Pass\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/4jXXrBmhkpsqtynA5auljk?si=3c5c32c940f94e5c&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, has spearheaded a manufactured political crisis over the state of the US-Mexico border for years. Not content to send hundreds of non-consenting migrants to Democrat-run cities by the busload, Abbott&#8217;s latest stunts have now brought him into confrontation with the federal government over the border. Jim Hightower and David Griscom return to&nbsp;<em>The Marc Steiner Show<\/em>&nbsp;to discuss the impact of Abbott&#8217;s standoff on border communities and migrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jimhightower.com\/\"  rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Jim Hightower<\/a>\u00a0is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/jimhightower.com\/store\/swim_against_the_current\"  rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow<\/a>.&#8221; He publishes the monthly &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hightowerlowdown.org\/\"  rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hightower Lowdown<\/a>,&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DavidGriscom\"  rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">David Griscom<\/a>&nbsp;is a writer and Texan based in Austin and the cohost of the podcast&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.leftreckoning.com\/\"  rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Left Reckoning<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>Studio \/ Post-Production: David Hebden<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-transcript\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I&#8217;m Marc Steiner. It&#8217;s great to have you all with us once again, and welcome to another episode of Rise of the Right, and we&#8217;re taking ourselves back to Texas, and we made a great journey down there. A lot has come out of that, and Texas is all over the news at the moment. There&#8217;s a crisis on the border. In terms, it&#8217;s also a battle for the future of this country being played out right now between the border of Mexico and Texas. Immigration has always been a line of confrontation in our country, and with a powerful racist and right-wing power in Texas at this moment, migration across the border has become literally a violent flashpoint. It feels like some of the first volleys of a second civil war being played out right along the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s a place called Eagle Pass where it is really being played out. Abbott, the Texas governor has mobilized the Texas National Guard, the state police, put razor wire across the border, pushing confrontation with the border patrol and the federal government. It has put immigrants who come across the border, when they get across the border, Abbott and his people put them on buses and send them into cities run by democratic mayors and dump them off literally. We&#8217;re going to explore that, what that means, where it may be taking us, and what can be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We are joined by, once again, the legendary Jim Hightower, who from 1983 to 1991 was the elected commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture, and he publishes his monthly newsletter, an in-depth investigative reporting called The Hightower Lowdown. Also joining us once again is Dave Griscom, a writer, organizer, wildly known activist, and co-host of the podcast Left Reckoning. So, let me start with you, Jim, and just this&#8230; what&#8217;s happening at the Eagle Pass, what it sets up, and how dangerous this point is, do you think?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, I&#8217;ve been to Eagle Pass many times. It&#8217;s a very pleasant little town. Maybe 25,000 people, something like that. Pleasant cross-border relationship. The Rio Grande is not really a divisive border. People cross it all the time. They&#8217;re intermarried. They play sports on either side of the border, et cetera, et cetera. So the people of Eagle Pass are a little bit PO&#8217;d that their town is being trashed as somehow a horrific battleground that&#8217;s extraordinarily dangerous. That is not the situation. In fact, the MAGA crowd sent a caravan down a week or so ago to Eagle Pass. It was a part of the Christian Nationalist Movement, and they called it Take Our Border Back, and they were going to have 700,000 truckloads of people come down, and it ended up&#8230; They had 20 trucks, not 700,000, and the whole shebang turned out to be a rambling, babbling speech by Sarah Palin, and Ted Nugent played a song, and about 200 people showed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I can tell you that you can get a bigger crowd at a children&#8217;s greased pig contest at a state fair, at a county fair here in Texas than 200 people, but nonetheless, it&#8217;s a big show. So the point is though that they&#8217;re trying to create this scene of violence. In fact, some of those 200 who had made the trek several hundred miles to be there were stunned to find that, &#8220;Wait a minute. I don&#8217;t see any invasion of hordes of murderous people from Mexico, or Latin America, or wherever. It seems pretty peaceful to me,&#8221; and it is. Not that it&#8217;s not a problem. It is a problem, but the problem is a solvable one if people really want to solve it rather than doing political stunts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dave, let me bring you in here. I mean, we want Jim to do a tale on that, but I also have a question for you that&#8230; I was just reading a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that had these recordings on a dash cam of interactions between some of the militia leaders, this guy, Michael Meyer, and the Veterans on Patrol, and with some members of the Border Patrol actually sounding like they were coordinating. In the long term, how dangerous is this situation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Griscom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. I mean, I&#8217;ll say, first up, just following what Jim was saying is I feel like a lot of those folks who went down to the border were a little bit disappointed when they showed up. There was very odd videos of those guys driving around in pickup trucks, circling Mexican restaurants while people were having a nice Saturday\/Sunday evening. When it comes to lawlessness at the border, the only thing that I could see, really, was, one, the commotion that these guys were creating, and I believe there&#8217;s also a bank robbery that weekend, probably, no doubt, due to the fact that all the police were doing traffic duty after dealing with all of these guys coming down on the border. I mean, at the same time, it&#8217;s like you don&#8217;t want to make too light of this. It&#8217;s like these guys are strange and odd, but Greg Abbott and the Republican Party are really creating a dynamic here where people are hearing orders, and they&#8217;re responding, right? People are driving down the border and harassing folks. So when you create an environment like that, it doesn&#8217;t take too much to light that fuse and seeing something really awful happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m going to pick up on this for a minute. So, on the one hand, they can seem like a bad Laurel and Hardy movie. On the other hand, I look at this, and that&#8217;s why I wanted to parse this through with you all, see what the reality is that it could be a harbinger of some really dangerous things happening. You have Texas, which is a politically divided state that has had this very conservative and now very right-wing government that is taking federal law into their own hands of the border, putting up razor wire, shipping people across the country that do cross the border, and maybe setting up a confrontation with the Border Patrol despite some of the interaction that these statewide militias, these Texas militias have had with the Border Patrol. Let&#8217;s talk about this politically. What does it mean? I mean, in some ways&#8230; Yeah. Let me just start there, and David, why don&#8217;t you jump off on this first, and then Jim jump right back in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Griscom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, politically, I think it&#8217;s very clear that Texas&#8230; not just Abbott, but many members of the executive branch are really trying to expand the powers of the state of Texas. So you see Greg Abbott in this direct confrontation with the federal government. We&#8217;re also watching this with Ken Paxton who was trying to enforce Texas laws regarding abortion and trans healthcare outside of the state, trying to chase down people who might&#8217;ve left the state to have a medical procedure done to them. So there is this fundamental question that we&#8217;re seeing pop up in the Republican Party here which is a direct confrontation with the federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s two things that we have to be able to hold in our heads at once is that there is a very, very dangerous increase in willingness of the Republican Party in the state to start to push those boundaries and ask dangerous questions about the role of the state government versus the federal government while also recognizing that in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott has been having this up and down relationship with his own GOP. The Texas GOP is in the middle of a civil war. We saw that with the very recent impeachments against Ken Paxton. You saw them struggle to do certain red meat policies for the Republican Party like school vouchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All at the same time as we saw, as I know you&#8217;ve covered and I&#8217;ve written a lot about, things like HB 2127 which are direct attempts to strip democracy from the vast majority of Texans. So there&#8217;s a dangerous game that&#8217;s being played as Abbott particularly, I think, is trying to put on a show for national politics, that that creates really, really dangerous downstream effects for migrants and for everyday Texans. It&#8217;s an interesting thing because as I&#8217;m saying is Abbott is two things at once. Probably one of the most powerful governors of the state of Texas has seen, and two, somebody who&#8217;s also very much struggling to whip his own Republican Party in line, and that creates a very dangerous dynamic of really wanting to do a lot of spectacle to shore up support and project power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, you don&#8217;t have to be in who&#8217;s who to know what&#8217;s what, and what&#8217;s what is that Greg Abbott is playing political games. Ken Paxton, our indicted attorney general who is himself under federal investigation, is playing the same game alongside of Abbott. They are [inaudible 00:09:19]. That&#8217;s right that they are endangering real people. You mentioned, Marc, that there&#8217;s a razor wire stretched across the border. The razor wire is in the river. That means you&#8217;re going to get caught in it and get gashed. People are having that experience every single day who are trying to cross, who are fleeing their own horror. This is an abomination. These guys, Abbott, and Paxton, and others who support them politically in the legislature, are just nasty pieces of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Woody Guthrie has a song that he wrote that&#8217;s not well-known, but it&#8217;s a very poignant which is, &#8220;I&#8217;m mean,&#8221; he says, &#8220;I&#8217;m mean. If I ever did good for somebody, I&#8217;m sorry for it. I&#8217;m studying to be meaner yet.&#8221; Well, that&#8217;s Greg Abbott. These people aren&#8217;t just&#8230; They&#8217;re not ideological. They&#8217;re not even political. They&#8217;re just mean bastards, and that&#8217;s what&#8217;s at play here. The people who live on the border overwhelmingly oppose this kind of assault. The real invasion, as you indicated, coming to Eagle Pass is from the north, people coming down there armed and driving their pickups or whatever, and full of fury, and thinking that they&#8217;re going to war, but they get there, and there&#8217;s no people to hate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s really what&#8217;s being spread here is an ethic of hatred that has popped up periodically throughout our history along that border. It has never done any good for anybody, including the demagogues who try to make hay out of it. They end up getting caught on their own petard, and I think that&#8217;s going to end up being the case here because there&#8217;s a logic to what is going on. Also, by the way, there are solutions to this mass movement which I certainly agree is a problem, and not just on our border, but in Chicago, and now in New York City and other cities, Los Angeles where Abbott, and DeSantis, and these political stunt players are sending migrants. I mean, they&#8217;re just playing politics with real people&#8217;s lives, and there&#8217;s going to be a comeuppance on that because believe it or not, even in politics, logic and sanity can ultimately prevail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I want to come to the solutions as we conclude this because I think it&#8217;s important for us to get there because we have to have an understanding of what hope is and organizing how to confront what we&#8217;re faced with. But as we&#8217;re taping this, just yesterday, Alejandro Mayorkas, who is the Homeland Security Secretary, was impeached in the United States Congress in large part because of the situation, because of what&#8217;s happening on the border and what they&#8217;re using to get rid of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let&#8217;s explore that politically because I mean, this is a&#8230; What these militias and these convoys represent is not being larger and deeper that&#8217;s infecting the entire body of politics of Texas and the entire country. I don&#8217;t think the secretary will be impeached ultimately in the Senate, but that&#8217;s a huge move. So it&#8217;s drawing this political line that&#8217;s also being drawn in Texas. So how do you both see this playing out? I mean, it&#8217;s been a long time since a Democrat, let alone, somebody that leans towards the left has been elected in Texas, and it&#8217;s a very divided state. So let&#8217;s talk a bit about how you both perceive this playing out politically and what it says for the country as a whole. You can start if you want, Jim, and Dave, leap right in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, how it plays out is that this is just political gamesmanship. Lily Tomlin once said, &#8220;No matter how cynical you get, it&#8217;s hard to keep up.&#8221; That&#8217;s what&#8217;s at work here. The Mayorkas impeachment is a complete fraud. He&#8217;s not impeached according to constitutional requirement that he be guilty of some crimes, high crimes and misdemeanors. They didn&#8217;t even offer that. They didn&#8217;t pretend that. They said, &#8220;We disagree with him. Therefore, we are going to impeach him.&#8221; They had to have two runs at it to get that done. Even then, they only did it by one vote. So that&#8217;s not exactly a firestorm, but I&#8217;ll go to my own party, the Democratic Party and say that it has not stood up in the way that it needs to do on the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Franklin Roosevelt, when he came into office, got his staff together and said, &#8220;Do something. If it works, do it some more. If it doesn&#8217;t work, do something else.&#8221; That&#8217;s what we need. It&#8217;s not working, what they&#8217;re doing. If I was president, I would mobilize a Border Amigos Corps that would bring lawyers and judges down to clear the caseloads. That&#8217;s a huge problem. It&#8217;s just taking forever, months for an individual case to proceed. Well, that could be fixed if we just set up quick courts and moved on it, moved thousands of people a day through that system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then, I would also have doctors on board, bring in the Doctors Without Borders group that works around the world very effectively to actually take care of people and show that we&#8217;re not a country of hatred. We&#8217;re not a country just going to exploit very vulnerable migrants, but we&#8217;re going to actually at least see that you don&#8217;t die on the border, and then bring in family consultants and et cetera, and move it. Bring the force in to clear this up. It is a humanitarian disaster that is taking place, but it doesn&#8217;t have to be. It would just say, &#8220;All right. We&#8217;re going to fix it,&#8221; and then do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David, let me ask you to jump in here as well. I mean, what Jim is saying, you also have the governor of Texas, Abbott, and others in power, A, saying they&#8217;re going to start prosecuting immigrants coming across the border. They could be put in jail for up to 20 years. You have the razor wire put down that Texas did. Texas saying it has the constitutional right to protect its borders, and arrest people, and put the razor wire down. So even though this convoy petered out, this is something bigger than just the convoy. Something is erupting here, and it&#8217;s erupting on the right having power in places like Texas and doing the things that I&#8217;ve just described they&#8217;re doing. A, talk a bit about that, and B, how you fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Griscom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think that it&#8217;s just exceptionally clear that Greg Abbott&#8217;s strategy here hasn&#8217;t done very much to slow immigration. It&#8217;s just on that level, if I was a conservative Republican, that would be something that you could say is that we&#8217;re spending a lot of money at the border right now running, effectively, a parallel operation to the federal government, spending a lot of Texas money on this kind of thing. Also, Abbott can go on Fox News and talk about how he&#8217;s tough on the border. Right? It&#8217;s a waste of our money, it&#8217;s extremely dangerous, and it&#8217;s also not effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, I don&#8217;t share their goals here, but just saying by their logic, what Abbott is saying he wants to do, it&#8217;s not effective. On the larger thing, I think that when it comes to taking this issue on, I love Jim&#8217;s idea of having an Amigo Corps going down to the border, and I wish we were seeing more proposals like that coming from the Democratic Party. What&#8217;s really frightening to me is that under Joe Biden, despite all of the attacks he&#8217;s been getting from the right, Joe Biden has been following similar kind of brutal border politics and even this kind of bipartisan deal that they were pushing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, of course, the Republicans didn&#8217;t go for it, right, because a loser for them. But also, the idea that the Democratic Party is going to beat the Republican Party by being crueler on the border is, one, I think, politically wrong. It&#8217;s also morally wrong. We&#8217;re going into the same kind of crisis that the Democratic Party in this state has fallen into many times, and the Democratic Party has done&#8230; a trap the Democratic Party has fallen into many times on the national level which is, &#8220;Oh, we&#8217;re going to beat the Republicans at their own game, and we&#8217;re going to say, &#8216;Hey, we&#8217;re tougher than the Republicans on immigration.'&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I just think that&#8217;s an absolute loser as a political strategy and morally wrong to boot. I think one of the things that just needs to be made exceptionally clear is that you have to have a response to what&#8217;s going on at the border, and that doesn&#8217;t mean troops. That doesn&#8217;t mean being brutal. It means helping people get settled, come into&#8230; who are entering into this country, giving them medical care that they need, giving them the ability to get to where they need to go. Remember too that for people who want to see different kind of politics in a different kind of economy in this country, that this immigration stuff, it doesn&#8217;t stop at the Texas border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fear of getting deported, the fear of having your family get deported, the fear of getting pushed out of your home is something that is utilized all across this country to brutalize folks. As I know y&#8217;all cover a lot on The Real News Network, all these horrific stories of children, undocumented children working at places like meatpacking facilities, right? This is used by bosses all across the country to instill fear in people of being deported or being harassed by the government, and we need to come up with a sensible solution so we don&#8217;t have an underclass of people in this country, adults and children, working in fear and in under dangerous conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I want to digress on something for just a moment because it&#8217;s something you&#8217;ve both said which&#8230; When you look at the history of immigration in the United States, there&#8217;s always been a battle not to allow immigrants in, this movement to say no to other people coming across the border, and it happened to my grandparents who came in from Eastern Europe. I remember my grandfather talking to me about his experience coming into the Port of Baltimore. He didn&#8217;t come to Ellis Island. They came to the Port of Baltimore where they had to go through all these inspections, and health checks, and the rest, and he spoke very little English at that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As horrendous as that was, what there was was a system that actually worked that allowed people who many Americans did not want to come in the country to come in the country without visas, without passports, coming in, and it became productive citizens of the United States of America. So how do you think that you get to a place where that becomes part of the battle to fight against what&#8217;s going on in the border? Before I get to the razor wire, which I&#8217;ll get to in a minute, how does that happen? How do people as yourselves and other people, other Texans organize and confront the power that wants to take us back to a very venal place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, one, you come right out and say that again, and again, and again. By the way, that is being said all across Texas and not just in the so-called liberal Centers of Austin, and Houston, and Dallas, and El Paso, but it&#8217;s throughout the state that people are fairly commonsensical about it, and they know the absurdity of what the Republicans are doing along with Democrats going along with it and playing right to it. One thing that also needs to be included in this is make the Border Patrol our friends instead of casting them as the enemy, which some of them have been, but instead, let&#8217;s put real money in so that we&#8217;ve got an adequate border presence, real money into training who they are, and most importantly, give them a positive role to play so that they&#8217;re not just people standing there with guns and stretching barbed wire in the river to snag people who are trying to cross for their own humanitarian reasons, but that they become part of the solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then, I would just add one other thing that this is not just on the border. This approach that Abbott and them are taking is, really, they&#8217;re trying to replay the Civil War. They want to go back to pre-Civil-War period in which a few elites ran things, and they&#8217;re doing that right now with abortion. We&#8217;ve passed the most Draconian abortion bill, Abbott and Paxton being leaders in that, in the country. Yeah. Even in cases of rape and incest, you cannot get a legal abortion, and so people are fleeing the state to get the abortions or to get the healthcare that they have to have. So, what have they done? They&#8217;ve come up. They&#8217;re trying to outlaw the use of public roads, that you cannot drive on the public roads of Texas to go to New Mexico to get the medical services that you need. This is just a level of insanity and the right-wing tyranny that these people represent. So we&#8217;ve got to go at the heart of it. Are we going to approach this as human beings of goodwill, or are we going to try to make enemies of everybody that we possibly can?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dave, you can pick up on that if you would. I think that when you also look at what Jim was just saying and look at in the context of other governors willing to send in National Guard of the militias coming in Texas itself, the razor wire that he will not take down saying, &#8220;It&#8217;s our right to do so,&#8221; it is setting up, in some ways, some kind of civil war scenario in this country with Texas will play a leading role, so it&#8217;s something&#8230; So pick up what Jim was saying and how you think you organize against that for something different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Griscom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there&#8217;s no doubt about it that people are playing with fire. I will say that I had wished that the Biden administration would&#8217;ve gotten a little bit more&#8230; had a little bit more backbone earlier with this. I mean, people might forget that this has been going on for a while. There&#8217;s a million arguments you can make about, for example, putting razor wire in the border. The first challenge being that they didn&#8217;t consult the Army Corps of Engineers. I don&#8217;t know. It felt a little weak to me. You had Greg Abbott negotiating with governors of Mexico, right? So not only is he trying to do his own border policy, he&#8217;s dipping his tone to doing foreign policy. He was doing that last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I wish there had been more fight earlier on, and I think that the Biden administration made a calculation that was wrong that, A, if they just ignore this guy, that this is going to go away. Now, it started to boil, I think, into a dangerous place. Remember too, when it comes to what Abbott is doing, he&#8217;s somebody who has made a political career out of operating in the gray space, that kind of gray legal space where the law is interpretable. He did that with Operation Lone Star from the get-go where he was using COVID money to fund that. Despite the fact that he declared the COVID emergency over, he was continuing to declare disaster declarations in the state so that he could reportion money. This is just how he operates, and when you&#8217;re watching what he&#8217;s doing with the &#8220;defying the Supreme Court,&#8221; he&#8217;s operating from this grade school like, &#8220;Oh, well, you didn&#8217;t explicitly say that I&#8217;m not allowed to do any more of this kind of thing.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I think there&#8217;s an important thing to remember that this is an extremely dangerous game. Abbott, I think, is trying to operate in that space before it boils over into something that he can&#8217;t back down from, but that&#8217;s no reason to sit there and let them play this game because, again, it&#8217;s extremely dangerous, and it doesn&#8217;t take much to push this over the edge. I think when it comes to fighting this, it has to be a political solution, and I think there has to be a lot more courage from people in this state. There&#8217;s a lot of people doing great work, and I&#8217;m never one of these people to say that that&#8217;s not happening, but there needs to just be a way that we talk about the border that I think is a little bit different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So much of, I think, the Democratic Party in this state and I&#8217;d also argue, nationally, especially in places that are run by Republicans, is a point at Republicans and say, &#8220;Look how bad they are,&#8221; or, &#8220;Look how bad they are.&#8221; Look, they&#8217;re bad, and that works for a lot of folks, but it&#8217;s not working enough. One of the biggest victories for the Republican Party, one of the issues that they run on time, and time, and time again is the border. Right? I don&#8217;t think that deep in people&#8217;s hearts, they want this brutality, but what people will say is something along the lines of like, &#8220;Well, at least they&#8217;re doing something,&#8221; when they&#8217;re talking about the GOP. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Look, the Democrats have plans and things like that, but they need to come out there and convince people that there is an actual humane strategy that is deeper than just saying, &#8220;Hey, we&#8217;re not going to do what the Republicans are doing, that we actually want to do a humane kind of program to help get people set up in this country. We&#8217;re not going to have people living in the shadows in this country. We&#8217;re not going to have mothers dying crossing over the Rio Grande,&#8221; and really be able to hold that space because right now, the Republicans are able to say, &#8220;Hey, look. You might not like our techniques, but&#8230; It might be a little ugly, but we get things done.&#8221; It&#8217;s extremely, extremely heartbreaking and dangerous, and it doesn&#8217;t have to be this way if I think there was a stronger vision coming from the opposition here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ll just add that there&#8217;s a final step in their right-wing nutballism too which is that Texas should secede from the union. So going back to their Civil War mission, but I noticed that Abbott and Paxton are not calling for that because the rest of the country would rise up and applaud the secession of Texas. In fact, I think the greater danger is that the other states will get together and expel Texas from the union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So when you do have these right-wing militias that are in Texas that are patrolling the border, the razor wire that the federal government has to find a way to have the gumption to tear it out and tear it down, what average response would be? We don&#8217;t know, even if the federal government had the guts to do it. So I wonder if you could both paint a picture here of where you think this is going to take us. I mean, Jim, when you were elected Agriculture Commissioner, it was on the cusp of when the right was really pushing power in Texas, and you ran as a very open, progressive populist when you ran in Texas. So talk about, both of you, where you see the political struggle going in Texas at this moment, and what is successful about the rest of the country, and what we may face. You want to start, Jim, since I called your name out? Dave, please close it out for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, to me, it&#8217;s not about what the Republicans are going to do. They&#8217;re going to do the same thing they always do and that they are doing now. Rather, it&#8217;s where are the Democrats? What are we going to do? Dave is right. You can&#8217;t just point and say, &#8220;Well, the other guys are so bad.&#8221; Truly, they are. They&#8217;re worse than bad actually, but nonetheless, that is not a program. A program is saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to put the money, and the effort, and the dignity of the people of America on the line down there on the border, and we&#8217;re going to work with the other countries that are causing the influx into our country, and we&#8217;re going to come up with a program that will clear the border problem.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The people who are amassing down there, they don&#8217;t want to stay. They don&#8217;t want to be there. They want a decent life. Basically, it&#8217;s why they&#8217;re there, and we should welcome that and make that possible, but only by restoring an order to it. As you indicated, when your parents came across, there was a system, and it worked. We don&#8217;t have a system. In fact, we&#8217;ve torn down the system, and then we cry, but the system is broken. Well, we broke it. Put it back together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dave, I&#8217;m curious, where you see this going? I mean, I was thinking about how you see people like Abbott bringing in the National Guard, the militias happening, other right-Wing governors saying, &#8220;We&#8217;ll bring our National Guard to you to confront the stuff on the border, the razor wire.&#8221; I mean, how do you see the future going and how you organize against it for something, for a different vision of where Texas and the nation could be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Griscom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. I mean, I hate to be pessimistic. I think it&#8217;s going to get worse for a little while. I think that what we&#8217;ve seen in the response from the Democratic Party in particular makes me very worried about what this is going to look like. I mean, Colin Allred who&#8217;s running in the Democratic primary to be the Democratic Senate candidate going up against Cruz basically came out, condemned Biden&#8217;s border policies from the right. He&#8217;s run up against Roland Gutierrez, but there&#8217;s a lot of money behind him, and that to me shows that there still is a pretty large segment or at least power base within the Democratic Party in this state, and I think nationally too, that wants to pursue the strategy of outflanking the Republicans and trying to do some version of a right-wing border policy. I think that&#8217;s really scary and dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>How do we fight back against it? I mean, I think at the end of the day, going back to what I&#8217;ve been saying is holding on to a vision that is not just morally better, but it&#8217;s also mobilizing and motivating for people. South Texas, still very strong Democratic a part of the state, but we&#8217;ve been seeing some of those districts&#8230; decent amount because of gerrymandering, but also, just because there has been a shift within certain populations of the Hispanic community in South Texas in voting for the Republican Party. You go, and you talk to folks, and you really investigate why. It&#8217;s because, for example, that&#8217;s a part of the state that has been under-invested in for a really long time in Texas&#8217; history, and it&#8217;s been under-invested in on the national level, on the state level, and you have a program like the Border Patrol which can give you a nice job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have to be thinking like that to not tie employment or better life for folks to brutalizing people at the border. What we have to be able to do is to think about, &#8220;How can we think of programs, for example, that can work to meet this historic need that we&#8217;re seeing at the border, this humanitarian need of people coming into this country who need healthcare, care, need abilities to get set up?&#8221; Go to where they want to go. Hell, what they&#8217;re doing, what DeSantis and Abbott is doing is so disgusting with these buses. Tricking people and sending them into a parking lot in Massachusetts is an evil thing to do, but a very humanitarian thing to do would be somebody comes across the border, you give them medical care that they need. You say, &#8220;Hey, where would you like to go?&#8221; and you set somebody up in a Massachusetts, or in an Oregon, or wherever it is that they want to go where they can get set up with jobs, employment, and that kind of thing. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That would be a jobs program in the sense of, one, helping out migrants and two, helping out people in those local communities get employment, doing a good thing for society, for the state, and for the country. I think when it comes to what the right wing is promising, the right wing is promising more harassment, more brutality, more violence, and more chaos. What the left should be able to do is say, &#8220;Hey, we are pushing for more humanitarianism for a better life for you and people coming into this country, and for a stronger social vision for what life is like in the border communities, or in the entire state of Texas, or the nation.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You just have to be able to beat them with actual concrete visions of programs and organizations that will help improve their life and improve other people&#8217;s lives instead of just saying, &#8220;Yeah, these guys are really bad.&#8221; You have to be able to promise people something that is going to make their life better. That&#8217;s the promise of politics, at least on our side, is that we&#8217;re offering people a better life than the one that they have right now. I think that is going to have to be the cornerstone of any kind of political messaging to deal with this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, I want to thank both of you for taking your time. I know you&#8217;re busy men, and I do appreciate you taking the time today. Before I let you go, I want to remind our listeners that we will be bringing you&#8230; Very shortly, you&#8217;ll be hearing them again along with others in our production that we are producing that came out of our journey to Texas to begin to learn more about this story, about what&#8217;s happening on the border, and what&#8217;s happening in Texas in general, and what it says for the future of the nation. That will be coming up very shortly in the next couple of weeks, and so look for that. I look forward to giving you all that. I want to thank both of you for joining us here today, Jim Hightower and David Griscom. It&#8217;s always a pleasure to talk to you both. Thank you for the work you do, and thank you so much for being with us today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Hightower:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>David Griscom:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. Seriously, thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marc Steiner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once again, thank you to Jim Hightower and David Griscom for joining us today, and we&#8217;ll be linking to their work on the site here. Coming up the next couple of weeks, we&#8217;ll hear a special report from Texas featuring the people you heard today, other activists who are organizing and taking on the fight for the future. It&#8217;s a very critical report, and we look forward to sharing that with you in the coming week. Once again, I want to thank you all for joining us today, and thanks to David Hebden here for running this show and editing this program, and the tireless Kayla Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As I said, we&#8217;ll link to the work of Jim Hightower and David Griscom here on our site at The Real News Network, and please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you&#8217;d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I will write to you right back and create a dialogue. Stay tuned for more conversations about Texas, the rise of the right, and what we can do to secure our future. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I&#8217;m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, support The Real News, and take care.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">This post was originally published on <a href=\"https:\/\/therealnews.com\/greg-abbotts-border-stunts-are-the-real-invasion-at-eagle-pass\">The Real News Network<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The sleepy Texas border town has been thrust into the limelight by its governor&#8217;s antics, and real human beings are paying the price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1533,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1383,3971,5582,5585,876,5583],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1533"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1509343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1509344,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509343\/revisions\/1509344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1509343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1509343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1509343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}