Texas

Dallas, Texas Howdy from the Lone Star State, where Cockburn is braving 100-degree heat, overpriced IPAs and America First applause lines to bring you coverage of CPAC Texas. The conservative conference has come to the Hilton Anatole in Dallas for the second year — and is once again headlined by former president Donald Trump, set to speak this evening. Appropriately, the hotel’s two bars are called “Media” and “Gossip,” as if they’d been purpose-built for your intrepid correspondent. Cockburn managed to finagle his way into the $375-a-head Cattleman’s Ball for free on Friday night, where he sat at a table with a cadre of fellow hacks, chief among them John Fredericks, the “Godzilla of Truth.

Cockburn has witnessed a lot of legal screw-ups in his day (and has been apart of several himself!), but revelations in the Alex Jones defamation trial have taken it to a new level. In a surprise twist while Alex Jones was on the stand, it was revealed that Jones's attorneys had accidentally sent the entire contents of the Infowars chief's phone to the Sandy Hook parents' attorney. A startled Alex Jones seemed taken aback when emails he claimed didn't exist appeared on a screen in front of the court room, with the Sandy Hook attorney asking, "You know what perjury is?" https://twitter.com/acyn/status/1554875445253812225?

The debate over President Joe Biden's immigration policies exploded again on Monday after news broke that more than forty migrants had been found dead in the back of a truck in Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott blamed the deaths on Biden, tweeting, "These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequence of his refusal to enforce the law." https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1541596214705135617 Thousands of Twitter users piled on Governor Abbott's tweet, arguing that if the border is really "open," then why did these migrants need to be smuggled across the border in the back of a truck?

Americans aged eighteen to twenty account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murderers, almost always male. School shootings get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm. There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under eighteen. The median age of school shooters is sixteen. It’s kids shooting kids; whether because they are left out, bullied, teased or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids.

The calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.

The “Tinder Swindler” has some competition in the “romantic entanglement gone wrong” department this week. Congressman Van Taylor, Republican from Texas, has just announced he’s ending his re-election campaign, which the Texas Tribune reports he had in the bag with 49 percent of the primary vote. The reason? According to Breitbart, Taylor had an affair with Tania Joya, a so-called “ISIS bride.” Cockburn notes that the details are sordid. Joya had been married to the late John Georgelas, an American who had converted to Islam, embraced jihad, joined ISIS and was reported to have been killed in Syria in 2017. Joya says Taylor paid her $5,000 to keep the affair quiet and provided Breitbart with bank records that appear to prove that Taylor did, indeed, make such a deposit.

Cockburn is a great admirer of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In an age when even stand-up comics allow themselves to be intimidated by the woke scolds of the left, AOC is a one-woman Alamo, fearlessly defending her right to talk absolute gibberish. Republicans like to think that Democrats don’t know the country outside their blue-state cities, but AOC isn’t afraid to slum it in red America. In January, when her constituents in the Bronx were enduring the double blow of a New York winter and Covid checks before they could get indoors, AOC went clubbing in Florida, the magic kingdom of Ron DeSantis, went maskless in a drag bar and picked up a case of Covid as a souvenir.

It wasn’t so long ago that an official at London’s Heathrow airport, warned by the scanner through which my luggage was passing, uttered an Archimedean Eureka! (or words to that effect), pounced on my suitcase and abstracted an incriminating bottle of shampoo, which he confiscated. “Over the limit, Sir,” he exclaimed, as a colleague asked me to step aside and extend my hands to be tested for evidence of contact with explosive materials. It’s not only in England, of course, that functionaries subject the populace to their petty tyranny. It’s the same drill in the US. “Oh, but it’s to keep you safe, you know, that’s why we spend billions on our intelligence services and elite crime fighting units, equipping like armies so they can protect us from the bad guys.

Faced with some high-profile crimes, our law enforcement authorities are finding it hard to say what has prompted “suspects” to pursue deadly violence. Even President Biden found himself baffled by what would lead a known Islamist terrorist to invade a synagogue on Saturday night and hold a rabbi and other members of his congregation hostage. The FBI likewise for a period expressed its bewilderment. The hostage taker had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted Islamic terrorist held in a Texas prison, but the FBI wasn’t about to draw any inferences from his choice of hostages or his principal demand. The FBI professed to know nothing of his motives — and President Biden nodded in agreement.

Political brains detonated last week after Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a new executive order that effectively banned vaccine mandates by any institution. The timing of the order seemed extraordinarily odd. Abbott, a Republican, has long advocated for private business rights and inoculation efficacy, especially after President Joe Biden announced a federal vaccine mandate. Abbott also didn't comment when Texas hospitals enacted COVID shot requirements over the summer. Why the change? Texas Democrats and Houston Chronicle columnist Erica Grieder blame Abbott’s 2022 GOP primary fight against Allen West and Don Huffines.

Cockburn was intrigued to learn that OkCupid, the dating app service, now offers a ‘pro-choice’ badge for its users’ profiles. The feature was introduced in response to Texas Senate Bill 8, a law that could potentially limit abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected at around six weeks.  While dating apps are not Cockburn’s preferred method of wooing the ladies (mystery is everything), he wonders whether this corporate vice-signaling is catching on. In addition to abortion enthusiasm, OkCupid also promotes itself as a platform for the sexually adventurous. On its website, colorful gender-bending models simulate various sex positions and one apparent orgy.

The record influx of illegal immigrants on the southern border — and the White House's refusal to refer to it as a 'crisis' — was the biggest story of the young Biden presidency at the start of the year. Even though the number of illegal crossings continued to swell, hitting over 200,000 migrants a month, the scandal practically disappeared during the summer. The media distracted Americans with fear-mongering about the new Delta variant of COVID-19 and warmongering about the undeniably disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Biden border crisis has now returned with a vengeance. This week, more than 10,000 Haitians descended on the border town of Del Rio, Texas seeking entry to the United States.

For a people supposedly united by their great and abiding love of freedom, the pandemic year has been an interesting test of Americans' commitment to their country's founding principles. Sure, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are great — but have you tried surveilling, spying and snitching on your neighbors amid an endless state of emergency? Turns out, many folks in the US are quite willing to sacrifice various freedoms if it means they get to scold and punish others, particularly their ideological opponents, for breaking the rules. The past two years have seen many Americans embrace their inner authoritarians, treating shamings like a spectator sport and excoriating the noncompliant with evangelical zeal.

If you read one book this fall, make it The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. And then don’t read another book, ever again, if you want to remain au courant on Twitter. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, and the more recent Hulu series, which depict a futuristic America called Gilead where women are treated as breeding chattel, have become a political obsession. They're used as a kind of shorthand by the trendy left for the medieval theocracy my fellow pro-lifers and I are supposedly hammering together in our spare time. This totalitarian state is evidently being built over the scaffolding of the lawless Randian anarcho-syndicate we were accused of building just a few years ago. But then those kindly old ladies praying rosaries outside abortion clinics are nothing if not adaptive.