The Christian Nationalist Government Is Here, by Eric Lane, August 11, 2026

Eric Lane ends his powerful essay posted below, “The Christian Nationalist Government Is Here,” with the question that matters most: What are we going to do about it?

Let's not grow fearful here, my friends. The answer, ultimately, is democracy.

If Americans are concerned about the growing fusion of religious ideology and governmental power, the most consequential response available to them is to vote—and to vote en masse.

Christian nationalism did not acquire political influence overnight. It built organizations, cultivated candidates, developed legal strategies, created networks of donors and activists, and, crucially, turned people out to vote. 

Those who believe in religious pluralism, public education, academic freedom, civil rights, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state must understand the importance of electoral participation with equal seriousness.

That does not mean everyone must vote the same way. It means citizens must pay attention to what candidates actually stand for, examine their records, and vote for those who genuinely represent their interests and their understanding of democracy.

And voting cannot be treated as something that happens only during presidential elections. Governors appoint officials. Legislatures write laws. State boards determine educational policy. Judges interpret constitutional rights. Members of Congress decide what becomes federal law. And all of this is happening while school boards, city councils, and county governments exercise enormous power over everyday life.

The lesson of Lane’s essay is therefore larger than Christian nationalism. Organized political minorities can exercise extraordinary political power even when the broader public disengages.

Democracy has always depended upon participation.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Register. Organize. Learn where candidates stand. Help others participate. Vote in primaries, local elections, midterms, and presidential elections.

And above all, vote in numbers large enough that government once again reflects the will and interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Christian Nationalist Government Is Here
The Christian nationalist capture of the United States government has entered its most dangerous stage.

Eric Lane | Substack
Aug 11, 2026

With his confirmation as attorney general, Todd Blanche—a man who wants to put “God front and center again” and make Christianity “actually a benefit”—now commands the Department of Justice and the vast machinery of federal law enforcement.

He is not alone. Pete Hegseth, openly aligned with Christian nationalism and its patriarchal vision of biblical authority, runs the Department of War. Russell Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025, is turning the Christian right’s blueprint into the daily machinery of government.

Christian nationalists no longer stand outside the gates demanding power. They are inside, pulling the levers.

Blanche’s confirmation gives them something indispensable to every authoritarian movement: the power to decide whom government protects, whom it prosecutes, and whose rights count.

And Blanche has already told us what he believes government should do. During a July 30 call organized by the White House Faith Office, he said his goal was to ensure that “God is front and center again” and that being a Christian in America is “actually a benefit.”

A benefit. That word gives the game away. Under the Constitution, Christianity is not supposed to be a benefit. Neither is Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, atheism, or any other religious identity. Government may neither punish nor reward you because of your beliefs. That is religious liberty. What Blanche described is religious privilege. There is a name for that: Christian nationalism. And when government enforces that privilege, there is another name for it: tyranny.

Agency by Agency

Blanche chairs Trump’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. Notice what Trump did not call it. It is not a task force against religious discrimination generally. The administration singled out Christians, constructed a persecution narrative around them, then handed the man who runs federal law enforcement the job of acting on it.

Blanche also served as an ex officio member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and populated with Franklin Graham, Ben Carson, Paula White-Cain, Eric Metaxas, and Kelly Shackelford. The seat belongs to the attorney general, making the point sharper: whoever runs Justice receives a place on a commission whose report compared church-state separation to a “Berlin wall” and whose chairman declared there is “no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the Constitution.”

The campaign extends far beyond Justice.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly used official communications to preach Christianity to more than 100,000 employees. Her Easter message told the entire workforce that “we celebrate” the Resurrection, invoked “our faith,” and proclaimed Jesus “our risen Lord.” Seven USDA employees and a federal workers’ union have sued, arguing that Rollins used the authority of her office to proselytize a captive workforce. She has continued sending the messages since the lawsuit began.

At Veterans Affairs, Secretary Doug Collins, a Baptist minister and Air Force Reserve chaplain, created his own anti-Christian-bias task force. He instructed employees to report colleagues for “informal policies, procedures, or unofficial understandings hostile to Christian views,” and asked for names, dates, and locations. Imagine the atmosphere that creates: federal employees wondering whether a colleague will report them for an opinion deemed insufficiently friendly to Christianity.

At Housing and Urban Development, Secretary Scott Turner has erased any remaining ambiguity. Turner, an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, has said Washington is “a mission field” and that “HUD is a great vehicle, but the Kingdom is the mission.” At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, he told the crowd, “The Biden administration worshiped the government as their God, but we in the Trump administration, we will worship God Almighty.”

At the Department of Education, Linda McMahon has partnered the federal government with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and dozens of other conservative organizations through the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. The department calls it civics programming. The Freedom From Religion Foundation calls it an attempt to rewrite history through a Christian nationalist lens. Look at the partners and decide which description fits.

This is not a series of officials occasionally mentioning God. Agency by agency, Christian nationalists are replacing religious neutrality with Christian preference, turning public offices into pulpits and federal power into an instrument of religious restoration.

The Capture of the Other Branches

The project does not stop with the executive branch.

House Speaker Mike Johnson worked as an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most powerful legal organizations in the Christian right. He has called the Bible his worldview and the “ultimate source of all truth.” He has dismissed church-state separation as a “misnomer” and argued that the Founders intended America to be a Christian nation. He now occupies the highest position in the House of Representatives.

The same movement built the Supreme Court’s religious-right supermajority. Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society spent decades constructing the judicial pipeline. Leo advised Trump and helped shepherd Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh through confirmation. Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment completed the six-member conservative majority. That Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It has redirected public money toward religious education, expanded religious exemptions, protected public prayer by government employees, and steadily dismantled the wall separating church and state.

These justices did not emerge from a constitutional mist. They came through an ideological assembly line built by Leo, financed by secretive conservative money, and designed to remake American law. The operation worked.

The President Chosen by God

None of this could happen without the millions of white evangelical Protestants who supply the movement with votes, money, and divine permission. A PRRI survey conducted after the 2024 election found that 60 percent of white evangelical Protestants agreed that “God ordained Donald Trump to be the winner.”

Think about what that belief does to democracy. If voters elect a president, they may criticize him, restrain him, remove him. If God chooses the president, political opposition starts to look like rebellion against divine authority. Investigations become persecution. Court decisions become attacks on God’s servant. Elections matter only when they ratify what believers have already declared to be God’s will.

Trump’s personal conduct poses no obstacle to this theology. His evangelical defenders compare him to Cyrus, the pagan king God supposedly used for a purpose Cyrus never understood. It is a useful miracle. Every moral failure becomes evidence of a mysterious plan. Trump need not be honest, faithful, or particularly religious. He is the imperfect vessel chosen to destroy their enemies.

Trump understands the transaction. He gives the Christian right judges, abortion restrictions, public money for religious schools, and federal power. In return, its leaders place a halo over his head and tell their followers his authority comes from somewhere higher than the ballot box.

Leonard Leo supplied the judges. Russell Vought supplied the blueprint. Project 2025 supplied the personnel and policies. White evangelical Protestant supremacy supplied the army, and its religious leaders assured that army that God had chosen its commander.

Todd Blanche now holds the prosecutorial sword. The question is no longer whether Christian nationalists seek control of the United States government. Todd Blanche now holds the prosecutorial sword. Christian nationalists have captured enormous power across all three branches of the United States government. The question is no longer what they intend to do with it. They have already told us.



The question is: What are we going to do about it?

Texas Cannot Survive on Culture Wars Alone: What Should Haunt All Texans of Good Conscience, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Texas Cannot Survive on Culture Wars Alone: What Should Haunt All Texans of Good Conscience

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 8, 2026

Jorge Meave’s powerful Substack essay in The Credential, “Hitza Hitz: A Humanist Sermon,” does something urgently needed in Texas politics: it connects the dots.

He begins with the New World screwworm, confirmed in Texas on June 3, 2026—the first U.S. animal case in the current outbreak, according to the CDC. The USDA has described the screwworm as a serious pest of livestock and wildlife, and Texas officials have imposed movement restrictions across affected counties. This is not metaphor. It is living tissue, animal suffering, ranching vulnerability, and state capacity all converging in real time (see Center for Disease Control).

But Meave’s deeper point is that the screwworm is not alone. It is part of a larger story of abandonment—and Mother Earth herself is reflecting it back to us. Across Texas, the signs are everywhere: water disappearing, farmers leaving, schools closing, aquifers threatened, and the ground itself shaking under the pressures of extractive industries. Research from UT Austin and SMU has linked significant seismic activity in the Permian Basin to wastewater injection associated with oil and gas production (UT Austin News). 

Meave is right: the ground is telling us what is happening.

And now, to this already stressed landscape, we must add the rapid expansion of data centers.

Texans across the state are beginning to ask urgent questions about who benefits and who pays when massive data centers arrive requiring enormous amounts of electricity, water, land, and infrastructure. The Texas Tribune reports that Texas is experiencing an AI-driven data center boom, with at least 248 projects planned statewide. Experts warn that these facilities could intensify pressure on Texas’ already fragile water supplies, especially in arid regions and communities already facing drought, population growth, and climate stress.

A 2026 UT Austin report similarly warns that data center growth could significantly increase water demand in Texas by 2040 and calls for greater transparency, shared standards, and integrated planning. HARC Research estimates that Texas data centers already consume roughly 25 billion gallons of water per year and that this figure could rise dramatically by 2030. Meanwhile, ERCOT and energy analysts are grappling with the electricity demand created by data centers, AI technologies, fossil fuel production, and other energy-intensive industries.

This is where Meave’s essay becomes even more important. The issues facing ranchers, farmers, schoolchildren, rural communities, Black and Brown communities, immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Texans, women, teachers, and working people are not separate. They are connected by the same politics of extraction, deregulation, privatization, and neglect.

For too long, Texans have been told to see the culture wars as separate from material survival. But they are not separate. The same political forces that scapegoat immigrants, attack LGBTQ+ communities, restrict women’s autonomy, dismantle DEI, and censor honest teaching about race and history are also too often the forces that look away when aquifers are drained, schools are underfunded, rural hospitals disappear, ranchers lack veterinary access, and communities are asked to absorb the costs of corporate expansion.

This means that “regular Texans” and Black and Brown communities are increasingly in the same boat. The culture wars may target Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and women’s communities first and most visibly. But the broader policy regime harms far more people than it claims to represent. It leaves rural Texans without infrastructure. It leaves working families with higher costs. It leaves communities fighting over water. It leaves schools struggling. It leaves the land exhausted.

That is the heart of Meave’s piece.

Immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Texans, women, students, teachers, ranchers, farmers, rural communities, and working families are not competing constituencies. They are all living inside the same state policy regime—one that protects wealth, extraction, and ideological theater while ordinary people are left to absorb the damage.

This is what is at stake in the coming election. Not simply party control. Not simply personalities. Not even simply corruption, though that matters, too. The deeper question is whether Texas will continue to be governed through distraction, scapegoating, deregulation, privatization, and neglect—or whether candidates for public office will be expected to see the whole state and tell the truth about what is happening.

Meave’s invocation of the Basque phrase Hitza Hitz—when you give your word, it is what you are—lands with particular force. In politics, words are cheap unless they become policy, budgets, protections, regulation, and repair.

If leaders give their word on rural Texas, they must show up for ranchers facing animal disease and veterinary deserts.

If they give their word on water, they must protect aquifers and communities before private interests drain them.

If they give their word on data centers, they must demand transparency about water use, electricity demand, tax abatements, environmental impacts, and who ultimately pays.

If they give their word on schools, they must fund them and oppose privatization efforts—urban, suburban, and rural alike.

If they give their word on Black and Brown communities, they must defend truthful curriculum, Ethnic Studies, voting rights, language rights, and the public institutions that make democracy possible.

If they give their word on the land itself, they must listen when the ground shakes.

Meave’s essay is a sermon and a warning. Texas cannot survive on culture war politics while its water disappears, its schools are weakened, its communities are divided, and its land is treated as disposable.

The ground is telling us what is happening.

So are the ranchers. So are the teachers. So are the students. So are the farmers. So are the communities watching data centers, pipelines, private water deals, and extractive industries arrive without adequate public accountability.

The question now is whether Texas politics will listen.

Cases of the New World screwworm fly infecting animals are on the rise, with the U.S. 

Department of Agriculture documenting 32 cases since June 3. More than 93% of those are 

based in Texas. U.S. Department of Agriculture

Hitza Hitz: A Humanist Sermon

Saturday, July 4, 2026

Friends,

On June 3, 2026, the New World screwworm was confirmed in a calf in Zavala County, Texas. The first case in sixty years. By now, twenty-five confirmed cases. Twenty-one Texas counties under quarantine. The animal lies infested with larvae burrowing through living flesh. A rancher has to move that animal 50 miles to find a veterinarian. Maybe. If there is one.

This is not drought. This is not abstract. This is a living animal, dying.

And I need to tell you something else about this moment. Because the screwworm is not alone.

It happens across Texas.

South Texas: a calf is infested. A rancher cannot move the animal without breaking quarantine. A veterinarian is 50 miles away, or does not exist.

West Texas: The Pecos Valley melon farmers are gone. A state agriculture official said it plainly: "There's no water. They had to leave." That is a brand. That is a name people know. It is gone.

North Texas: In the Permian Basin, nineteen earthquakes recorded in 2009. Sixteen hundred by 2017. Southern Methodist University and UT Austin confirmed this year what was happening: wastewater injection from oil production reactivates pre-existing faults. The ground fractures. Magnitudes as high as 5.4. When the state reduced injection rates in late 2021, the earthquakes declined. The science is clear. The ground is telling you what is happening.

Central Texas: Schools are closing. Local control is being stripped. Families are watching groceries climb. Traffic clogs the cities and the country roads both. This is survival.

East Texas: A hedge fund manager wants 15 billion gallons of water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. The property rights doctrine that says "what you pump is yours" — that rule — is being used to drain the wells of people who have lived on that land for generations. Look it up. The details will astound you.

So we have a living animal infested with larvae. We have farmers gone. We have the ground shaking. We have schools closing. We have property rights being stripped. We have water vanishing.

That is Texas. All of it. Right now.

And I want to ask you something.

There is a woman named Gina Hinojosa who was born in McAllen, Texas. She is running to be governor. The crowds chant in Spanish: No te dejes. Don't let them. Hold your ground. Fight back.

I know that the people fighting the culture wars — the ones defending immigrant families being scapegoated, defending LGBTQ+ people being attacked, defending women being stripped of bodily autonomy — I know those are survival fights. They are real. Those are real people trying to live with dignity and safety. That fight matters.

But here is what haunts me.

While that fight has been happening, other survival issues have been put on hold. And the people affected by those issues — rural Texans, working people in suburbs and small towns — have watched that happen and moved away. Thirty-two years ago, Democrats won rural and suburban Texas. Then they stopped. Not because they got lazy. But because they focused on one fight and put another one on hold.

Democrats have not won a statewide office in Texas since Ann Richards in 1994. Thirty-two years. No Democrat has cleared 45 percent in a governor's race since Richards lost to George W. Bush. They have not cracked 46 percent once in thirty-two years.

The research is clear on why. Rural Texas and suburban Texas realigned to the Republican Party starting in 1994. They did not move left. They moved right. And once they moved, they stayed.

But here is what the research also shows.

Democrats could hold both fights at once. They could defend the people being attacked in the culture wars AND address the screwworm, the water, the schools, the property rights, the ground itself.

If Hinojosa ran on this. If she said: I see you. The people you're defending in the culture wars — I see them. But I also see the rancher in South Texas who cannot move livestock because the state was not prepared. I see the farmer in Pecos who is gone because water policy failed him. I see the family in North Texas living above fracturing ground because wastewater injection was not regulated. I see Central Texas closing schools instead of funding them. I see East Texas property rights being stripped in the name of profit.

If Democrats made that their case. If they said: we will fight the culture wars and we will fight for survival. We will not pick one and abandon the other.

The research says that would work. That would move votes. That would change things.

But it would require one thing.

It would require Democrats to stop choosing between the fights. And start leading on all of them.



Quisiera escribir con amor y la pluma se me torna látigo.

I would like to write with love, but the pen turns into a whip.

An ancestor wrote that in exile, more than a century ago. Because he saw the machine crushing people and could not stay silent.

I am not in exile. But I see the same machine. The same extraction. The same silence from the people who might fight it.

I want to speak two words this morning. From the Basque Country.

Hitza Hitz.

When you give your word, it is what you are.

Not what you say. Not what you promise. What you do. What you actually do. What you fight for when the cameras are gone and the money is cut and the polls move against you.

If you give your word on screwworm ranchers, you act. You deploy. You show up.

If you give your word on water, you regulate. You mandate transparency. You protect property rights before they are stolen.

If you give your word on schools, you fund them. All of them. Even in rural Texas. Even in the Panhandle. Even in the counties that vote for the other party.

If you give your word on the ground itself, you tell the truth about what is happening to it. You do not look away.

A hitza hitz is not noise. It is substance.

Go see the ground. All of it. From Zavala County to the Pecos Valley. From the Permian Basin to Central Texas to East Texas.

See what is there. See what is not there.

Tell what you see.

And if you are a politician — if you are running to serve these people — give them your word on this: that you will see them. That you will see their screwworm ranchers, their water, their schools, their ground. That you will not look away.

Because the ground is telling you what is happening.

The only question is whether you are listening.

Quisiera escribir con amor y la pluma se me torna látigo.



“Ann Richards, Texas Governor 1991-1995. The last Democrat to win statewide.”

A Report from UT’s College of Education, by Noah De Lissovoy and Deb Kelt, The Higher Ed Advocate June 3, 2026

Friends:

I am proud of my UT-Austin College of Education fellow colleagues, Dr. Deb Kelt and Dr. Noah De Lissovoy, for this powerful and timely The Higher Ed Substack Advocate post. Writing as educators, scholars, and members of our university community, they remind us that the struggle over academic freedom is not only a struggle over content, curriculum, or political ideology. It is also a struggle over pedagogy itself—over the conditions that allow teaching and learning to be intellectually honest, socially meaningful, and grounded in care, rigor, and relationships.

What Deb and Noah make especially clear is that these attacks do not remain confined to a single college, building, department, or program. In the College of Education, restrictions on teaching ripple outward into Texas classrooms through the teachers, counselors, principals, superintendents, and education leaders we prepare. In Liberal Arts, the consolidation of fields rooted in Ethnic Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical interdisciplinary inquiry similarly affects the future of knowledge production, civic understanding, and democratic engagement. In both cases, what is at stake is not simply institutional rearrangement. It is the university’s public mission.

Their post invites us to recognize the courage, solidarity, and clarity already emerging across campus. I am grateful to Deb and Noah for naming what so many of us know to be true: when we defend open and critical inquiry, affirming classroom relationships, and the knowledge traditions that speak to the lives of diverse students and communities, we are defending teaching itself.

May such reports from the front lines of our university continue to illuminate the stakes, strengthen our resolve, and remind us that defending education is a collective calling.

-Angela Valenzuela

A Report from UT’s College of Education

by Noah De Lissovoy and Deb Kelt, Members, AAUP@UT Chapter

In the field of education, we know something about what works in teaching. From this vantage point, the current attack on critical inquiry in higher education in Texas is not just ideological—it is also pedagogical.

Restrictions on academic freedom and on teaching about “controversial” topics (including race, gender, and sexuality) are not just a matter of moving the ideological center of gravity in the classroom; they fundamentally undermine teaching that starts from any perspective, since they make it difficult for teachers to explore with students the full scope of a subject and its social context and implications. But the current conservative attack is not just limited to these aspects of teaching. This attack also makes it hard to make connections between students’ lived experiences and class content, and to create a robust learning community that is grounded on care and solidarity. These pedagogical principles are supported by decades of research on K-12 and higher education teaching.

It should be no surprise then that even as legislators and university administrators in Texas seek to reorganize curriculum and teaching across the university, they have also turned their attention to colleges of education. Like our colleagues in other fields, faculty in education have felt pressure to self-censor and to limit the scope of classroom discussions. (Interestingly, in teacher education spaces, this pressure is felt doubly, since faculty are teaching about the pedagogy that they seek at the same time to embody.) And alongside our UT colleagues, we await the results of a shadowy curriculum audit connected to the passage of Senate Bill 37.

In addition, our College of Education dean, who has been dedicated to supporting faculty and reimagining education to better serve the state and its many communities, was not renewed in his contract despite broad faculty support and remarkable success. The search for his replacement, by a committee with limited faculty representation, has been shrouded in secrecy. At the same time, right-wing news outlets have vilified the college and called out specific courses and staff. A recent successful tenure-track faculty search was blocked at the last minute by the university for reasons that remain obscure to faculty. In the context of these developments, faculty are anxious for themselves and their students.

It is important to recognize that any move to compromise our freedom to teach -- and our students’ freedom to learn -- will not stay contained in the Sánchez Building on UT’s campus. Our students leave to teach in Texas and across the United States, mentoring children with care and rigor in numerous content areas. In this way, our graduates prepare young people for all professions. As teachers of teachers, we know that censoring our work ripples like a rock tossed in a pond: If our UT students receive a compromised education, so will their future students. When one considers the various departments in our college, we can see how the damage compounds further. Stellar superintendents and principals graduate from our programs, as do special education experts, health science specialists, and school counselors. Any move to stymie the work done in these departments will, undoubtedly, cause broad harm.

It is important to recognize that any move to compromise our freedom to teach -- and our students’ freedom to learn -- will not stay contained in the Sánchez Building on UT’s campus.

As educators and scholars dedicated to creating a better world for all people, we have organized to push back against the current challenges. Sixty tenured and professional track faculty in the college signed a letter of concern regarding the non-renewal of Dean Charles Martinez. (Neither the President nor the Provost responded.) We have grown our membership in AAUP in recent months, and we have met as a new college-based group to strategize against interference regarding our right to teach and research. We attend rallies, speak at state school board meetings, and network with like-minded colleagues across UT. We are also working to strengthen relationships with the community, as many of us have long histories with public school teachers here in Austin.

Our group knows the stakes are high for students, staff, and faculty. Though this work of resistance sometimes keeps us up at night, we don’t see any alternative. We have always advocated for our students, for their future students, and for schools in Texas and beyond. The times are certainly different – with aggressive forces working harder than ever to muzzle us -- but we are steadfast in our calling to serve.

Both the recent pressure applied to colleges of education and the resistance to it show that how we understand and organize the process of pedagogy is deeply consequential. This struggle is a reminder to faculty across the university that as we fight for content and courses that are critical and relevant to diverse students we are also fighting for enlivening and affirming classroom relationships, community, and collaboration– that is, for teaching itself.

Gavel Down, Mic Drop: Rep. Vincent Pérez Ends Session with Facts

Gavel Down, Mic Drop: Rep. Vincent Pérez Ends Session 

with Facts

Sine Die might be Latin for “the end,” a towering Rep. Vincent Pérez stood firm—not just in opposition, but in defense of democracy. He made damn sure the 89th Second Special Session of the Texas Legislature didn’t close without a reckoning—to which the video below attests and about which Substack author Michelle H. Davis writes.

While Republicans used this session to pass gerrymandered maps, ramp up voter suppression, and double down on attacks against women, trans people, students, and anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their dystopian playbook— it was Rep. Pérez who reminded Texans what public service is supposed to look like.

Before the gavel dropped, Republicans introduced HR 128—a petty, authoritarian stunt masquerading as a rule change. The goal? Punish future quorum breakers with everything from fines and budget cuts to taking away parking spots like this was high school. But Rep. Pérez wasn’t having it. He stood up and made it clear: this wasn’t about enforcing “duty.” It was about silencing dissent.

And he said so — loud and unapologetically.

Rep. Vincent Pérez

“This is not discipline for a member, but disenfranchisement for the people who sent them here.”

He didn't stop there.

When Rep. Tony Tinderholt tried to derail the conversation — turning it into a petty debate about per diems and attendance—Pérez flipped the script.

“The maps before this body were the most segregated since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was my duty to stand up against that injustice.”

Then came the knockout punch. When Tinderholt pushed harder on the per diem issue, Pérez fired back with a line that deserves to be carved into the chamber walls:

“There are representatives on both sides of the aisle, both republicans and democrats, who sit in this chamber who collect the $221...and are about as useful as the chairs they sit on.”

It was more than a zinger. It was a gut-check—not just for Tinderholt, but for everyone watching this session spiral into yet another exercise in intimidation disguised as governance.

Let’s be clear: Pérez didn’t just win the argument. He reframed it. He forced the chamber to confront the moral rot at the heart of what the Texas GOP is doing — from rigging maps and expanding the STAAR test, to criminalizing abortion and policing public restrooms.

He called out structural racism. He defended the right to dissent. He reminded everyone that elected office belongs to the people—not to the party in power.

In a session defined by fear, fascism, and manufactured outrage, Rep. Vincent Pérez stood apart.

We need more of that. More fire. More clarity. More courage.

So yes, Sine Die — this special session is over. But if Texas is going to have any kind of democratic future, voices like Pérez’s can’t just echo in the chamber. They need to echo across the state.

Because dissent isn’t disorder. It’s democracy.

And Rep. Vincent Pérez just gave us all a masterclass in both.

-Angela Valenzuela

Sine Death To Democracy

The Texas Legislature called Sine Die on the 89th Second Special Session. How bad is the damage?

MICHELLE H. DAVIS
SEP 04, 2025



Two weeks into the 30-day special session, Republicans decided they’ve done all the damage they can do for now and called Sine Die late last night.

But did they pass flood relief?

SB3 mandates outdoor warning sirens in Texas flood-risk areas. It uses state grants to help pay for sirens, but makes them legally required for local governments in disaster-designated regions. SB5 is a funding bill for Texas’s FEMA match and disaster needs, gauges, as well as forecasting and weather technology.

Both of these bills passed both chambers unanimously.

Several bills regarding disaster preparedness died. Another bill that was debated aimed to synchronize communication equipment (walkie-talkies and radios) across agencies. That bill died, too.

SB1 prevents youth camps from getting licensed if cabins are in a floodplain. HB1 overlaps with SB1 but is somewhat broader in accountability and enforcement.

Is it enough? Would it have prevented the July 4th tragedies? Will it prevent more tragedies in the future? The sirens are needed. The gauges are needed. Changing the license and regulation requirements for youth camps is needed.

Republicans wanted to premise this special session (and last) as flood relief, even though it was all about a power grab for the pedophile protectors in DC. That was their “emergency items.” It ought to be enough for them NOT to call a third special session. 

Vince Perez (D-HD77) was definitely the breakout star of the Second Special Session.

He did it again last night. Before Republicans called it quits on the Special Session last night, they introduced HR128 to “punish” would-be quorum breakers. Higher fines, censure, loss of seniority, loss of operating budget, loss of chairmanships, loss of parking places, and a bunch of other nonsense.

Representative Perez did not hold back. He reminded members that their oath of office wasn’t about perks or power, but about stewardship and that every seat in the chamber belongs not to the politician, but to the people who sent them there. Perez said, a direct attack on the communities Republicans don’t value, “not discipline for a member, but disenfranchisement for the people who sent them here.”

Then came the clash with Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R-HD94). True to form, Tinderholt tried to boil the whole debate down to money and duty. Where was Perez during the quorum break? Shouldn’t he be in Austin? Shouldn’t he pay taxpayers back for the per diem?

Perez wasn’t having it. He turned the conversation right back to the root cause: “The maps before this body were the most segregated since the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” he said. “It was my duty to stand up against that injustice.” Perez hammered Tinderholt for defending maps that give white Texans three times the political power of Latinos and five times that of Black Texans, calling it what it was. Structural disenfranchisement.

When Tinderholt pressed him on the $221-a-day per diem, Perez cut deep. “There are people in this chamber who collect the 221 bucks and are about as useful as the chairs they sit on,” he said. And reminded everyone (most of all Tarrant County residents) how Tinderholt is leaving the Legislature to run for a county commissioner seat stolen from the Black community.

Perez flipped the attack into a full indictment of GOP gerrymandering, racism, and small-minded politics. It was a reminder that while the GOP is busy rewriting House rules to punish dissent, Democrats like Perez are the ones reminding Texans why dissent matters.

So, what else did Republicans do in this special session?

They passed the gerrymandered maps. Then, a resolution was passed to punish would-be quorum breakers.

They passed HB8, which expands the STAAR test. Yes, you heard that right. Texans wanted the state to eliminate the STAAR test. Instead, they expanded it, quadrupling the number of tests students will have to take in a year. Every Republican voted in favor of it. The Democrats who joined them:

Cesar Blanco (SD29)

Chuy Hinojosa (SD29)

HB7 passed. This bill bans the manufacturing, mailing, prescribing, or distributing of abortion pills in Texas and creates $100,000 bounties on women who take them. Because our maternal mortality rate is higher in Texas than anywhere else in the developed world, and Republicans want more women to die. Chuy Hinojosa was the only Democrat who voted in favor of this bill.

Then, of course, the Republicans enacted the “Pee Pee Police” bill with SB8. This bill segregates bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other multi-user facilities strictly by biological sex. While they haven’t done it yet, they always add to their oppression each session. So, if we don’t flip the House in 2026, expect that in 2027 Republicans will be looking to station a DPS officer at the door of every public restroom in Texas, to look under the skirts of suspected transgender women.

SB12 gives the Texas Attorney General direct authority to prosecute all criminal offenses under Texas election law. But now that Paxton’s leaving office, they’re just hoping to get lucky with another crook in office to target people of color and the elderly with made-up crimes again.

Of course, there was also HB25, which makes Ivermectin available over the counter.

SB54 makes it harder for voters who have recently moved to cast a full ballot because it would be a Legislative Session, special or regular, without some form of Republican voter suppression. Renters, students, and low-income people who move often will be disproportionately disenfranchised. Which means we have to work twice as hard to register those voters, y’all.

HB26 allows sheriffs and constables in Harris County to contract directly with local governments (cities, MUDs, school districts, etc.), property owners’ associations, and private landowners. It prohibits the Harris County Commissioners’ Court from stopping or restricting these contracts. HB192 prevents Harris County from reducing police budgets without a countywide election, as enforced by the governor’s office and comptroller. This is part of the broader GOP playbook to punish and control Harris County (the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold).

Then there was HB16, which flew under the radar despite its size. It’s a judiciary “clean-up and reorganization” bill. It makes hundreds of tweaks across the court system, touching everything from judicial districts to clerk duties, salaries, jurisdiction, and municipal court security.

SB18 creates a new permit exemption in Texas water law. It cuts regulatory red tape for small, locally operated flood-control dams. I see both good and the potential for harm in this bill, and I always worry about anything framed as “deregulation.” However, the Sierra Club testified in favor of it.

SB11 gives victims of sex trafficking a legal shield in court, ensuring that juries can consider coercion as a defense. It was ironic that it was passed, considering the party in charge is the same party protecting the Epstein pedophile ring in DC. But I suspect they just tacked this one in there to pretend like they were actually doing something good for the people of Texas.
When you stack it all up, Texans didn’t get real flood relief, didn’t get accountability, didn’t get protection from the next disaster.

What we got was more criminalization, more voter suppression, more privatized policing, more attacks on women, kids, and trans people, and more power consolidated in the hands of a Republican Party that governs like the Constitution is optional. This was a session about control. The fascist drumbeats of Republican rule grow louder with every session, every new map, every gag order on dissent.

So let’s call it what it was. Another round of Republican cruelty packaged as governance. And let’s pray it stays dead until 2027.

"Neoliberalism’s End Game: Accumulation by Another Name," by James B. Greenberg

Friends,

James B. Greenberg—Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, founding editor of the Journal of Political Ecology, and former president of the Political Ecology Society—has authored a searing and brilliantly articulated exposé of a system devouring itself—and us.

Neoliberalism, as he lays bare, is not a deviation from capitalism but its most predatory form. There is, for example, feminist economics as an alternative, especially the work of renowned Nancy Folbre (2006), who advances the notion of a “care economy”—a model that is antithetical to neoliberalism.

Greenberg names what too many still refuse to confront: neoliberalism isn’t failing—it’s succeeding with a ferociousness and on its own brutal terms. From extractive economics to temporal looting, he draws incisive connections between austerity, the climate crisis, and racial capitalism with anthropological rigor and moral urgency. 

This is more than critique—it is a call to reclaim imagination, rebuild solidarity, and fight for a livable future.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Folbre, N. (2006). Measuring care: Gender, empowerment, and the care economy. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 7(2), 183–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649880600768512

Neoliberalism’s End Game: Accumulation by Another Name
How Market Logic, Structural Scarcity, and Political Abandonment Are Hollowing Out the Future


James B. Greenberg Substack
Jun 27, 2025

The old promises are collapsing. Growth no longer lifts all boats—it lifts yachts. Progress no longer means shared prosperity—it means shareholder returns. What we’re witnessing isn’t a system in crisis; it’s a system reaching its logical conclusion. Neoliberalism was never about efficiency or freedom. It was about transferring public wealth into private hands while dressing the theft in the language of merit and inevitability.

We’re now living in its endgame.

Every domain of life is being made extractable—our labor, our attention, our data, our ecosystems, even our grief. Where public institutions once existed to buffer risk and extend care, they’ve been gutted, outsourced, or rebranded as markets. What’s left is a politics of managed precarity, where the illusion of choice masks deepening dependence on volatile systems.

Control no longer needs to announce itself with force. It’s embedded in systems we’re told are neutral. It works through spreadsheets, billing codes, and risk scores—quiet mechanisms that control without appearing to rule.

Anthropology has long studied systems of exchange, reciprocity, and redistribution. Neoliberalism offers their inverse: a world where every need becomes a payment plan, every right becomes a subscription, and every crisis becomes an opportunity for someone else to profit. The commons—whether land, water, health, or education—are being enclosed anew, not with walls but with pricing tiers and contractual exclusions. The dispossession is as subtle as it is ruthless.

But the extraction isn’t just material. It’s temporal. What neoliberalism extracts is the future itself. Delayed transitions, deferred maintenance, stalled climate action—these are forms of temporal looting. The system generates short-term profits by mortgaging long-term stability. Every unmet obligation, every deferred repair, every “not yet” becomes a mechanism for robbing the next generation of options they never had a chance to claim. This is extraction across time, not just space.

The logic of this moment isn’t only economic—it’s ecological. Political ecology reminds us that systems of power are embedded in landscapes, infrastructures, and flows of energy and capital. Extraction is not confined to oil rigs and clearcuts. It is structured into zoning laws, data centers, insurance markets, and eviction courts. Accumulation by dispossession has become accumulation by design—a regime that doesn’t just seize opportunity, but manufactures scarcity in order to profit from it.

Look closely, and you’ll see the pattern. The same firms underwriting fossil fuel expansion are buying up water rights, farmland, and housing. The same actors slashing climate funds are cutting Medicaid and food assistance. The billionaires rebranding as technocrats are buying influence, shaping regulation, and engineering predictive models of your behavior. In this new economy, you are not just a consumer—you are a datafied asset, evaluated for risk, monetized through surveillance, and expected to perform in real time.

What looks like failure is often functioning exactly as intended—a system designed not to serve, but to extract.

Climate denial, austerity, deregulation, border militarization, and corporate greenwashing aren’t isolated tactics—they are components of a coherent toolkit. Together, they protect capital from accountability by dispersing blame and disorienting the public. But behind every market correction and manufactured crisis is the same imperative: protect capital at all costs, even if it means rendering entire communities—and ecosystems—uninhabitable.

And we know where it leads.

Across the country and the globe, we see sacrifice zones multiply. These are not accidents of neglect—they are the continuation of colonial logic turned inward. Flint. Jackson. Pine Ridge. Standing Rock. Gaza. Places where extractive industries and militarized policing converge, where public health collapses and no one is held accountable. These are domestic frontiers, where the violence of empire is repatriated and masked as budgetary constraint.

The lines are drawn by insurability. Those deemed too costly to protect are left to absorb the damage: rising premiums, evictions, unlivable heat, chemical spills, food deserts. In this system, insurance becomes the new passport—a gatekeeper of risk that determines not just what you can afford, but whether you can belong.

The ideology that sustains this is not neutral. It’s racialized, gendered, and historically rooted in conquest. The fossil fuel regime isn’t just an energy system—it’s a worldview. One that insists prosperity requires no limits, that nature is inert, and that markets are moral arbiters. Anthropologically, it is a cosmology of domination—one that crowds out other ways of being, knowing, and organizing life.

But alternatives do exist. And they are not hypothetical.

Across Indigenous and land-based communities—from the Amazon to the Arctic—are models of reciprocal governance, ecological stewardship, and collective care. These aren’t relics of the past. They are systems of survival honed over millennia. The fact that they are ignored or actively undermined is not a coincidence. It is part of the same colonial logic that demands control, even at the cost of collapse.

Neoliberalism thrives on exhaustion. It teaches us to fear rather than imagine, to hustle rather than organize, to consume rather than care. Its most insidious achievement isn’t privatizing services—it’s shrinking the horizon of what we imagine to be possible.

But that, too, can be reversed. Systems endure because they are reproduced—and they can be dismantled the same way.

The fight ahead is not simply about policies or elections. It’s about unmaking a worldview that sees life as extractable, inequality as natural, and solidarity as a threat. A livable future won’t come from tech fixes or carbon markets alone. It will come from shifting the underlying logic—from profit to reciprocity, from scarcity to care, from collapse to repair.

Neoliberalism may not end with fire and fury. It may fade, hollowed out by its own contradictions. But what rises in its place will depend on how ready we are—not just with critique, but with vision.

Because the real endgame isn’t theirs.

It’s ours to reclaim.

Suggested Readings

Auyero, Javier, and Debora Swistun. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2006.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology of Our Planetary Crisis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.