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In the era of President Donald Trump, any admission of weakness or wrongdoing has become increasingly rare, but tension over the future of the party could hardly be denied at last week’s midterm Republican convention in Dallas. While the floor and lower levels of the arena were well attended, the upper levels of the ar
The often overlooked race for the Texas Railroad Commissioner received national attention this past weekend due to a viral tweet from Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP Chairman who eked out a 1-point primary runoff victory to become the Republican nominee for the statewide position. On Sunday, French posted a ph
Thanks to Bo French’s racist social media post targeting the ethnicity of students celebrating the University of Texas at Austin’s football win, Texas again is making national and local headlines for anti-South Asian racism. But the state also holds the potential to lead the fight against anti-Asian racism and become a
In the 2013 science fiction film Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp, the affluent orbit above the Earth’s atmosphere, enjoying a habitat free of hunger, thirst, and suffering. They have medical devices that can cure diseases with a quick scan. Below them, the planet has been depleted into an overcrowded and polluted w
The progun shibboleth that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” has become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget its grisly origin. In 2012, after a 20-year-old with severe mental illness who was raised by a gun-loving mother killed 20 first graders at […] The post Why Texans Live
On a Thursday in late August, Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson was on a campaign swing through a handful of key congressional districts in South Texas that will be critical to whether he keeps his job next year. One of those stops was an early-afternoon rally for Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina […] The
Water is one of many issues at the forefront of Texas politics this election cycle, no place more so than in Corpus Christi. Texas’ sparkling city by the sea has received national attention in recent months over ever-worsening conditions for residents deluged by years of drought restrictions. Predictions of an impendin
This spring, a Permian Basin pastor got an unpleasant surprise: a geyser of more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic brine gushing up through the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Grandfalls. It was a “zombie well”—what happens when the plug on one of the state’s hundreds of thousands of old wells fails, […] The
Editor’s Note: This story is the second part of a two-part series supported by the Law & Justice Journalism Project. See part one in the January/February issue. D’Mitri Davis, 36, met his younger brother Dominique Judge for the first time in 2024, when they were both in prison. The two were living at the French […] The
Should Texas public school students learn about the Bible? Yes, they should—but not in the way Texas education officials are going about it. In June, Texas became the first state to require all public school students to read religious texts, as part of a newly approved list of nearly 200 readings—from “Hickory Dickory
On May 26, former Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French eked out a 1-point victory over incumbent Jim Wright in the Republican runoff for a seat on the state’s poorly named oil and gas regulatory agency: the Railroad Commission (RRC). As the Texas Observer has reported, French, a 56-year-old oil-industry nepo baby, rec
Inside a cluster of windowless tents, detainees describe losing their sense of time as they spend weeks and even months beneath the flicker of industrial lightbulbs. Camp East Montana—the largest immigrant detention facility in the country—has quickly become a symbol of the second Trump administration’s aggressive appr
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