It Really Could Happen Here and, In Fact, It's Already Happened in Texas

Greg Abbott captioned this photo when he posted it on X, “Think of that tune: ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”

Happy Black History Month, or as the White House calls it, February.

Texas is a racist swamp, ruled by Social Darwinists who reject Darwin and somebody has to talk about it.

Since last fall, I have been a guest co-host with investigative reporter Steven Monacelli for the podcast series It Could Happen Here. The creators of the series describe the show as “a chronicle of collapse as it happens, and an exploration of how we might build a better future.”

So far Steven and I have served as the unofficialTexas correspondents for the show. The Lone Star State is an epicenter of the societal collapse the show seeks to explore.

To date, we have released episodes on the influence of End Times religion on Texas politics, the history of the racist “Great Replacement Theory”, the evolution of abortion laws in the United States, and the history of American conspiracy theories.

Currently, we are woking on an episode we are calling “Textbooks and Holy Books.” It will focus on the outsized influence Texas and its Christian Nationalist state board of education has on what students learn about American history across the country and the malign influence of one Texas evangelist, David Barton, who helped get Ted Cruz elected to the Senate and is close allies with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson,

Why does Texas matter? The two most consequential presidents in the last half-century, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, hailed from the Lone Star State and delivered to the nation radical new benefits like Medicare and Medicaid. Those presidents, however, also bequeathed to the nation tragedies including the Vietnam war, mass surveillance and the War on Terror.

Texas is the most populous state dominated by Republicans, and controls 40 of the 270 Electoral College votes. Republican success in presidential elections depends on Texas. Should the state ever swing in the direction of the Democratic Party, the GOP would face a grim future. The road to America’s political future runs straight through Texas.

More important, Texas also represents the bleeding edge of the far right that reclaimed power in Washington, D.C. in the November 2024 election. The state provided a home base for extremists like Stewart Rhodes, a leader of the terrorist Oath Keepers network and the January 6, 2021 insurrection that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election. A disproportionate number of the seditionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol that day came from the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs. Texas has furthermore provided a frightening blueprint for the rest of the nation in how to establish localized fascism.

You can learn a lot about Texas by examining the career of its gratuitously cruel governor, Greg Abbott, who has held the office since 2015. In his decade of power Abbott has embodied the ethic of pulling up the ladder behind him. Paralyzed in 1984 when his spine was crushed by a falling oak tree, Abbott received a multi-million-dollar settlement from an insurance company, but subsequently supported a bill in the state legislature that limited settlements for accidents like his to $250,000.

Bereft of original ideas, in recent days Abbott has mimicked the White House war on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion policies) with a similar crusade in Texas. He plunged into this cynical effort to exploit resentment against civil rights laws enacted in the twentieth century even though he benefitted from such legislation promoting inclusion, like the Americans with Disabilities Act signed by famous raving Marxist George H.W. Bush. That law ensured wheelchair-bound persons such as himself access to public buildings.

Abbott exploits the state’s racist climate to a murderous degree, continually inciting a panic about a supposed migrant invasion of Texas, His efforts have killed people, including children. His xenophobia has not just caused repeated human rights disasters but is economically suicidal.

Texas shares a 1,250-mile border with Mexico. The Texas state government has not researched what undocumented migrants contribute to the Texas economy versus what they cost in goods and services since 2006. That year, state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn discovered that the loss of the 1.4 million undocumented workers and their families living in the state would cost the Texas economy a whopping $17.7 billion in gross domestic product, far more than the $1.2 billion in education and health care costs for that population.

Migrants, of course, buy groceries and gasoline, pay rent, and in other ways stimulate the economy. An economic analysis conducted by the Perryman Group, a Waco company that researches the economic impact of public policy, estimated in 2016 that the undocumented contributed a net gain of $11.8 billion in gross domestic product to the Texas economy after subtracting $3.1 billion in health, education and other social serve costs.

“While there are many considerations, the fact is that undocumented workers in Texas generate millions of jobs and billions in tax revenue,” the study concludes. “Restrictive immigration policy will cause substantial economic and fiscal losses, and optimal policy would be crafted to minimize these dislocations.”

The 2006 report by Strayhorn was apparently politically inconvenient. The current Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar has ordered no followup study. Since the slavery era, Texans have enriched themselves on unpaid or grotesquely underpaid labor, but Abbott and his allies are loathe to battle corporate greed. Instead, he demonizes the victims of a global trade system built on exploitation.

In the past Abbott has echoed the racist, far-right “Great Replacement Theory” that has incited mass shootings around the world from Norway to New Zealand to El Paso, Texas. In essence, the Great Replacement Theory posits that there is global conspiracy, typically attributed by extremists to Jewish people, to undermine countries ruled by white people through immigration from the global South. On August 2, 2019, Abbott sent a fundraising appeal that said, in part:

“The national Democrat machine has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to ‘turn Texas blue.’ If they can do it in California, they can do it in Texas — if we let them . . . Unless you and I want liberals to succeed in their plan to transform Texas — and our entire country — through illegal immigration, this is a message we MUST send.”

The next day, a troubled 21-year-old from Allen just north of Dallas, launched his own private race war at an El Paso Walmart, unleashing a torrent of bullets from an AK-47-style rifle that killed 23 and wounded almost two dozen others.

Moments before the massacre, Crusius posted an online manifesto in which he used language remarkably similar to Abbott, bitterly complaining about a Democratic Party conspiracy to flood the country with “illegals” as part of a scheme to create a one-party dictatorship, and a plot to replace white Americans, through Mexican immigration and race-mixing, with an alien majority.

Abbott has done some indirect killing of his own. In June 2019, a photo went viral. Around the world, newspapers captured the heartbreaking image of a 25-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez lying face down near the banks of the Rio Grande River across the border from Brownsville, Texas next to his two-year-old daughter Valeria. Ramirez, his toddler, and his wife had sought refuge in the United States. They blocked from entering because, as the Los Angeles Times reported, the first Trump administration had established a policy called “metering” in which only small number of migrants were allowed to request asylum at official crossings each day.

Desperate, the family attempted to swim across the Rio Grande only to drown. The bodies of the man and his little girl washed back up on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. They were less than a mile from a bridge that crosses the international border.

Abbott responded to this tragedy by doubling down on the racism. In 2023, as part of his white supremacist effort to “secure” the Texas border from the invasion of “illegals” that panicked killers like Crusius, Abbot placed a 1,000-foot string of floating buoys entwined with razor wire in the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, a common crossing point for migrants fleeing political oppression, drug gangs, and poverty.

On August 2, 2023, authorities found two bodies entangled in the barriers. The victims, one an adult and the other an Honduran child, drown while trapped by the razor wire, human sacrifices to Abbott’s catastrophically expensive “Operation Lone Star” border stunt.

The ostensibly “pro-life” governor shed no tears even for the drowned child. Shortly after the tragedy, he bragged on Fox News about his hardline policies and how the Texas crackdown had shifted the migrant crisis to other states.

“In addition to (razor wire), we now have buoys in the water to prevent people from even crossing the middle part of the Rio Grande River and coming into the state of Texas,” he said, . “Because Texas has done such a prolific job of stopping people from coming into our state, you are seeing a massive increase in the number of people crossing into New Mexico, Arizona, and California.”

Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, launched in 2021, to date has involved the dispatch of Department of Public Safety troopers and state National Guard units, the seizure of a 50-acre park near the Mexican border, the laying of 70,000 rolls of concertina wire along the international frontier, and the busing of 100,000 migrants to cities with Democratic mayors like New York and Chicago. Trolling is a major part of Abbott’s theory of governance.

All of this has so far cost Texas taxpayers $11 billion. In addition, as part of Abbott’s anti-immigrant pogrom, construction has begun on a military base that may eventually cost an additional $400 million. Migration patterns have shifted somewhat since Operation Lone Star began, but there’s no clear evidence this is due to Abbott’s harsh policies which place men, women, and children in grave danger.

Meanwhile, in 2021 Texas started building a wall Abbott said will eventually span the entire Mexican border. So far $3 billion has been appropriated for this monument to white supremacy. After four years, the barrier has only been built in bits and pieces and is only 34 miles if you add up all the segments. The tab has been $25 million a mile. Officials report the wall only covers 4 percent of an 800-mile strip of land they deem essential if migration to Texas is to be significantly slowed.

The state has yet to get permission from all of the landowners along the proposed path of the Great Wall of Texas and at the current rate Abbott’s ego project will take 30 years to finish at a price tag of $20 billion.

Abbott has actually expressed his regret that the state has been prevented from murdering migrants.

“The only thing that we're not doing is we're not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” Abbott told Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association during a January 5, 2024 interview.

Abbott makes a big show of being Catholic but apparently his instructions in the faith didn’t include a close reading of Leviticus 19:34, which says, “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”

One of his more hateful stunts has involved busing 130 migrants to Washington, D.C. and having the drivers dumping the refugees in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’s official residence at the Naval Observatory on a Christmas Eve night when temperatures dropped to 18 degrees. The victims of Abbott’s sadistic theater included children.

Abbott then smugly mocked the Houston Chronicle for an editorial pointing out the vicious irony of the governor torturing migrants on a night in which Christians honor the birth of Jesus to a dispossessed family. I copied his “X” post below:

Greg Abbott

@GregAbbott_TX

Chron doesn’t know the story of Mary & Joseph. They weren’t “refugees” (look up definition) Read Luke 2:1-10 They were ordered by the govt to go to Bethlehem to register for the census. Nice distortion. Doing Devil’s work.

It should surprise no one that Abbott, who sees his “faith” only as a means to an end, is Biblically illiterate. Abbott mixed up two Biblical. In Luke 2:1-20 , Joseph is required to take his pregnant wife Mary to the place of his birth, Bethlehem, in order to pay a tax decreed by Caesar Augustus and Jesus ends up being born in a manger.

The Chronicle, of course, was referring to the tale recounted in Matthew 2:13-23. Almost everyone who has ever heard about Christmas is with familiar with the story about how Joseph and his wife Mary flee from Judea with their new-born after Joseph has an ominous dream. In the dream, an angel warns Joseph that King Herod intended to kill all the first-born sons in his realm in order to prevent being replaced by a new “King of the Jews.” It’s one of the most dramatic stories of Jesus’s early life, so popular that it was turned into perhaps the most beautiful Christmas carol ever.

It should be noted that in the Biblical tale, the Egyptians did not close the border to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph nor did the Holy Family encounter barbed wire or deadly floating buoys.

Abbott, apparently, is happy to play the role of King Herod. It’s a great state to live in if you are rich, white, upper middle class or more affluent, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied and don’t think too independently. However, Texas has long turned a cold heart to the poor, the struggling, and the marginalized. By almost every measure of decency, Texas under Abbott has shamed itself.

· The state has become deadly for pregnant women since it banned abortion. According to a report from the Commonwealth Fund, “Texas has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality . . . Between 35 and 51 women died per 100,000 births between 2020 and 2022. In the area of healthcare quality and prevention for expectant mothers, Texas ranked third from last, with Mississippi and Nevada at the bottom.”

· Texas is a particularly dangerous place for women unfortunate enough to suffer a miscarriage during pregnancy, as was seen in the horrifying cases of Josseli Barnica and 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain.

· Thanks to Abbott and the dominance of the state by right-wingers, Texas ranks 51 out of all the states and Washington, D.C. in terms of healthcare access, a tragedy guaranteed by its coldblooded refusal to expand Medicaid coverage for poor working people. (Texas is one of only 10 states that can claim that dubious distinction.)

· In part because Texas has the largest population without health insurance (18 percent of all Texans lack insurance), the state had the 14^th largest drop in life expectancy in the United States (a 3.8 percent decline) from 2018-2021.

· Nearly 26 percent of children live in poverty in Greg Abbott’s Texas, above the national average.

· According to one advocacy group, the state ranks 45^th in the nation for child well-being in terms of spending on education, access to health care and support for families and communities.

· Texas ranks 12^th worst among the 50 states and the District of Columbia for violent crime, even though, by a wide margin, Abbott and his allies make the most prolific use of the death penalty of any state because it is supposedly a deterrent to crime. Abbott pushes for execution even in cases where the defendant is likely innocent.

· With Abbott’s enthusiastic encouragement, in 2023 the Texas Legislature has made life miserable for the LGBTQ+ community (particularly for trans teenagers), banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy and denying trans athletes participation in college sports. Meanwhile, West Texas A&M University banned drag shows. Because of this confluence of officially-sanctioned hate, the civil rights group The Movement Advancement Project ranked Texas rock bottom nationally in terms of LGBTQ+ rights.

· Texas has the sixth largest homeless population in the nation with the number of those without reliable shelter nearing nearly 28,000.

· Texas punishes its citizens for being poor or working class with aggressively regressive taxes.

· While Greg Abbott has crusaded tirelessly to drain public school money to fund a voucher program that will mostly benefit affluent parents wanting public welfare money to defray private school tuition, he has starved public schools of money. The state ranks 46^th out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C. in terms of spending on education. The WalletHub organization rated Texas 29^th in its list of states with the best and worst school systems.

Explaining Texas to the rest of the country, how such a terrible leader like Greg Abbott gets re-elected over and over again here, and what political reality in Texas portends for the rest of the nation will be a challenging job. But to understand the perilous state of democracy in the United States today, we first need to understand how it fares in the Lone Star States. We hope we’re up to the challenge.