Author: Sherry Sylvester

As the 88th Legislative Session concludes, Texas Public Policy Foundation Distinguished Senior Fellow Sherry Sylvester will host a live, one-on-one interview with Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

They will discuss the various bills passed by the Legislature to advance conservative priorities and ensure that Texas remains a bastion of freedom.

What were the biggest challenges? How will these policies help Texas families? And what work might still need to be addressed in a special session?

Join us to hear the leader of the Texas Senate’s perspective on these questions and more.

Testifying in support of Senate Bill 17, University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac told members of the Texas House Higher Ed Committee that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs function as “campus thought police…indoctrinating students and training activists.”

Dr. Bonevac is in a position to know. He’s a tenured professor who has been teaching at UT for more than 40 years. He has seen what DEI has wrought—up close.

He reports that dissent from the DEI orthodoxy is not tolerated on campus and by dissent he means “laughing at the wrong joke, liking the wrong social media post, asking the wrong question in class” — all of which can lead to serious, career-ending consequences.

We have seen these dramas play out across the country. But throughout the debate on Senate Bill 17, the anti-DEI bill by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe and Rep. John Kuempel, R-Seguin, Texas colleges and universities continued to insist, despite piles of evidence to the contrary, that it wasn’t happening at their institutions.

Texas academic leaders routinely testified that DEI was nothing other than a support program for minority students, veterans and students who are the first in the families to go to college. They ignored video evidence of statements like that of former UT Dean of DEI, Skyller Walkes, screaming at a group of students that “an educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor. Which one will you identify as?”

Walkes left UT to an even higher ranking job at Columbia. After this report came out, her name was removed from UT’s website.

Texas Tech University officials were incredulous when confronted with evidence showing that a biology professor was disqualified from a job there for stating that he treats all his students equally. The head of DEI at Texas Tech announced last week that she is leaving Texas to take a similar job at the Northern Illinois University.

Last month University of Texas Psychology Professor Kirsten Bradbury asked the following question on a test:

Which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others, in a pattern of behavior that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility and lack of remorse?

The correct test answer was “wealthy white men.”

Bradbury issued a non-apology. There’s no indication she has suffered any repercussions from the university.

Christopher Rufo found curriculum materials at University of Texas’ College of Communication promoting the idea that “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “worship of the written word” were all “characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

Rufo also found that a professor of educational psychology and African Diaspora Studies teaches that “white supremacy is so pernicious . . . it is responsible for virtually every ill that we see within our communities.”

These and a host of other egregious examples of DEI in action on Texas campuses were all treated by academic leaders as one-offs perpetrated by some rogue professor or administrator. Once evidence to the contrary surfaced, it was usually quickly removed from university websites.

When the Vice President for Diversity and Community and Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin testified on the bill to end DEI in Texas, she was not asked about the DEI doctrine of white supremacy and gender theory. She said DEI programs at UT were focused “on the success of students.” When legislators questioned her about anti-discrimination programs, she didn’t let them know that civil rights, Title VI and Title IX compliance are separate programs and not part of most DEI offices.

When Gov. Greg Abbott demanded that universities stop using diversity statements which require adherence to DEI principles when hiring faculty, Texas A&M quickly renamed their faculty hiring guidelines from Strategies and Tactics to Improve Diversity and Excellence (STRIDE) to simply the Faculty Hiring Handbook. However, the so-called “Berkeley Rubric” from the University of California, which require candidates to be scored based on their diversity statement, was not removed. This means candidates would still be downgraded for using words like merit, color-blind or best-qualified.

At the House Higher Education hearing on DEI, Texas A&M’s Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs acknowledged that DEI had been “discovered in some pockets of the university,” but he insisted that the administration was unaware of it.

But A&M’s State of Diversity Report released in 2020 details a vast network of DEI programs throughout the A&M system.

The A&M report parrots the credo of DEI, insisting that, “…racism, hate speech, safety, and belonging issues are evidence of systemic, cultural problems and are enduring trends at Texas A&M.” The report concludes that “dismantle[ing] systemic racism” is essential to advancing Texas A&M’s land-grant mission.

It is unlikely that most Texas academic leaders are committed to the basic premise of DEI—that all American institutions (including all colleges and universities) are predominantly racist, whether consciously or not. Instead, it appears that many college administrators have been captured by DEI hucksters and are in too deep to back out now.

To see how these hucksters work, take a look at the website for the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Ed (NADOHE). Their mission has nothing to do with student success. Instead, their goal is to create more jobs for diversity officers to do. They see racism everywhere, whether there’s any evidence or not.

Some believe that NADOHE actually foments unrest on campuses so academic administrators will reach out to them for help. You can see how that could happen. As the National Association of Scholars’ John Sailer has documented, the explosion of DEI programs at the University of Texas began after students protested and made demands.

Ironically, NADOHE’s website makes it clear that DEI is little more than a full-employment act for bureaucrats that creates division and resentment on campus and does nothing to help minority students succeed. It is not just the red states that have figured out the truth about DEI. Last month a debate was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) entitled “Should DEI Be Abolished?” Even the side arguing in support of DEI agreed that it has “gone off the track.”

Texas’ passage of Senate Bill 17, the strongest anti-DEI bill in the nation, does not mean that Texans don’t believe racism and sexism still exist and must be challenged. But it does mean an end to the massive and complex network of DEI programs built on the premise that white supremacy and racism are the primary driving force of our academic institutions and American life.

The goal of SB 17 is to end the powerful incentives and career-threatening penalties that are mandated by DEI, and to return Texas campuses to places where free speech, academic freedom and intellectual inquiry are the values that drive the institution.

When Gov. Abbott signs SB 17 into law, we can hope it is the end of the campus thought police.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

After early voting ended on Friday night, Texas voting data guru Derek Ryan issued his final report of who voted, compiling all the information available from the Texas Secretary of State, Two telling points emerged for us to ponder while we wait for the polls to close tomorrow night. First, the number of voters who previously voted in Republican primaries leads the number of voters who previously voted in Democrat primaries by over 565,429. Second, early voter turnout is down a half-million votes from the last gubernatorial election in 2018.

Ryan reports that in 2018, 38% of registered voters cast their ballots early. This year, only 31% voted early – and we have 2 million more registered voters!

Low early vote turnout means that two things could happen on Tuesday – one or both parties could blow out their Election Day “get out the vote” efforts, producing another record turnout in Texas or 2022 will look more like 2014 when fewer people voted in the mid-term election in Texas because top of the ballot races weren’t competitive.

We can guess which will happen but nobody actually knows. However, one thing we can bet on is that regardless of the turnout, Democrats and their media allies will insist the Election Integrity reforms passed by the Texas Legislature in 2021 somehow resulted in voter suppression. I am 100% confident making that election prediction.

The Daily Caller published this op-ed over the weekend about the voter suppression scam in Texas and I want to share it with you:

Sylvester: Harris County Texas Wants Biden’s DOJ to Monitor Its Elections. Here’s Why:

Have a great election night!

It makes absolutely no sense for the media to be in charge of political debates in Texas or anywhere else. They don’t even pretend to be neutral players anymore. They are on the liberal Democrat side. 

Which makes it all the more telling, now that the only Texas gubernatorial debate is over, that almost none of the media’s post-debate analysts named Beto O’Rourke the winner. What is amusing is that media analysts can’t seem to understand how, after literally years of biased and dishonest coverage of Texas conservative leadership in general and Gov. Greg Abbott in particular, O’Rourke managed to lose a debate against a man they demonize and misrepresent every day. 

With the media in charge, the debate questions on Friday night all leaned in O’Rourke’s favor. There were no questions about the Texas energy policy and how O’Rourke’s support for the Green New Deal would cost millions of jobs and devastate the Texas oil and gas industry. 

There were also no questions about parental rights and school choice which Abbott and a majority of Texans support and O’Rourke opposes. Instead, the media’s education questions were focused on the issues teachers’ unions care about—more money for schools and more pay for teachers and retirees. Student outcomes took a back seat to whether the New York City mayor had actually contacted Abbott’s office about busing migrants there.   

And, of course, they didn’t ask O’Rourke to define what a woman is or if he thinks boys should be allowed to play girl’s sports.

Still, O’Rourke’s prospects seemed good going into the debate.  Polls show 54% of Texans think the state is going in the wrong direction. Texas has had a very difficult couple years, which include the pandemic, a horrifying mass shooting followed by an inexplicable failure to respond by law enforcement, a deadly freeze that paralyzed us and a Supreme Court decision on abortion that has divided Texans.  

O’Rourke clearly went into the debate thinking he would blame Greg Abbott for all that. Using his entitled, rich kid persona, he ignored the rules and launched flailing attacks that repeatedly fell flat. The old suggestions by a previously star-struck media that O’Rourke is, somehow, the reincarnation of Bobby Kennedy are laughable after his debate performance.

O’Rourke attacks repeatedly noted that Abbott has been in charge for the last eight years—he clearly thought it was a killer punch.  

But he doesn’t understand Texans. The Texas Public Policy Foundation conducted focus groups last year asking Texans across the state what they believe about the Lone Star State. We learned that Texans, regardless of race or ethnicity and even most Democrats, are proud of being Texans because, they said, Texas is a state that does things right. 

They listed things like the state’s low cost of living, no income tax, available jobs and reasonable regulations—all results of conservative pro-Texas policies moved forward by Abbott.

No recent pollster has asked Texans if they believe the last eight years would have been better if Democrats were in charge, but if they did, I am confident the answer would be a resounding no. Right next to the right track/wrong track number on most polling results is the disapproval rating for Democrat President Joe Biden, which stands at close to 60% in Texas. Only 37% of Texans approve of his performance and even members of his own party don’t want him to run again. At the same time, a majority of Texans approve of Abbott.  

O’Rourke missed the fact that while Texans believe the state is going in the wrong direction, they don’t blame Abbott. Instead, polls have shown again and again, that Texans’ most urgent concern is the crisis at the border and the 2.1 million people who have crossed illegally since President Biden has been in office. Texans support Abbott’s border policies.

A basic rule of politics is to never believe your own press, but O’Rourke doesn’t seem to realize that virtually all the Texas mainstream media is his press. That’s probably why he misjudged his rude and condescending attacks on the governor and crossed the line of good Texas manners. He thought he could badmouth Abbott because he thinks Texans believe the daily mainstream media headlines screaming that Texas is a backward state whose conservative policies have left it in shambles. But most Texans don’t buy that. It doesn’t ring true with the reality of their lives.   

Republicans finally took control of all three branches of Texas government in 2003, and now, after a generation of reversing the liberal policies of high taxes, intrusive regulation and trial-lawyer packed courts, conservative principles are part of the Texas DNA, right next to liberty and freedom.

If someone is going to overthrow the state’s top conservative leader, he or she will need to be a genuine Texan who understands that the Lone Star State became the country’s top job creator and the top destination for Americans moving from other states because of conservative policies that have rebuilt our state after almost 100 years of Democrat rule. 

O’Rourke showed he doesn’t understand that hard-working Texans know how the economy works because they can see the difference in Texas and blue states around the country. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be putting a higher statewide minimum wage at the top of his platform. Texas voters would never support a plan that would kill both jobs and businesses.    

The media is saying that Abbott stacked the deck by only agreeing to one debate, but Texans saw all they needed to see on Friday night. O’Rourke demonstrated he’s not in tune with the priorities Texans care about. Hopefully, we are seeing his last run for public office.

Texas and the country are still in shock from another horrific story of a young man – a boy really — who morphed into killer. The left is still pushing the same old simplistic answers, while the rest of us assess what went wrong and how we can finally stop it from happening again.

In times like this it is never clear whether the media pushes the left’s view or the left echoes them, but in Texas they go into their rote anti-Texan attack blaming the majority in the state who vote conservative without ever seriously examining their own role in sensationalizing mass shootings. We have known since 2000 that the coverage of mass shootings increases the likelihood of more mass shootings. Mass killers quickly become more well-known than movie stars. It is one of the few paths young people have to become immediately famous even after they are dead. As expected, at least a dozen mass shootings, presumed to be copy-cat shootings, involving four or more victims – have occurred since Uvalde. A few media outlets don’t report mass shooters’ names, but we didn’t see much of that in the case of Uvalde.

Uvalde families have had it with the media. They have blocked journalists from attending the funerals of their children and family members and after two weeks of the small town residents being hounded by reporters at every step, outside police have been called in to protect the privacy of families burying their children.  The media is outraged insisting that police are attempting to “intimidate, harass and impede” their work.  No concern was expressed about how the people of Uvalde might feel after having their small town taken over by the massive media camped out in tents and sound trucks trying to get a shot of something new, turning memorials into a staging area.

Which is not to suggest that reining in the media would eliminate mass shootings, but because the press takes such a self-righteous stance in echoing the simplistic answers of the left, it should be pointed out that they have their own work too.

For the left there is only one answer, increased gun restrictions. President Joe Biden came back immediately with an assault weapon ban, even though it did nothing to reduce gun violence the decade it was in place and gun violence did not increase when it was lifted. He knows it won’t pass but he put it on the table because he thinks it might help Democrats in the mid-terms.

After Uvalde, when Governor Greg Abbott pointed out that that 10 days before the school shooting, an 18 year old killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York, a state that has some of the most rigid gun control laws in the country, few reporters – none in Texas – seriously examined Abbott’s assertion. No one asked, “If it didn’t work in New York, why do we think it will work here?”

In Robert Francis O’Rourke’s carefully choreographed campaign stunt the day after the shooting, he pointed to Governor Abbott and said glibly, “this is all on you.”

That’s another easy answer. So if we never want a school shooting in Texas again, we should vote for O’Rourke? I doubt if even Democrats believe that.

Most people in both parties know there is no single answer to this horrible problem. Although President Biden doesn’t believe in hardening schools, most people know that school buildings must be retrofitted so that there are fewer entrances and, as we painfully learned in Uvalde, when outside doors are closed they must lock.

However, recall how the media ridiculed Lt. Governor Dan Patrick in the aftermath of the Santa Fe school shooting when he said that there were too many open doors into schools.

“Guns don’t kill people, doors do,” they laughed. Patrick pushed forward anyway, to make sure Texas schools had access to funds for doors that lock automatically when they are closed. Millions were appropriated to cover the cost. Unfortunately, Uvalde had not utilized that funding at Robb Elementary and the shooter entered the building through an unlocked door.

Everyone also agrees that aggressive mental health strategies are needed to address this issue as we try to figure out how to identify a kid before he turns into a killer.

Texas spends almost $9 billion on mental health per biennium and in 2019 nearly $100 million was added for the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium to address children’s mental health needs across the state including teen suicide and school shootings. The most recent state budget includes $232 million for that consortium.

Experts have ideas about how to target mental health resources but they must navigate through the distorted values the left has perpetrated on our culture, which often normalizes the anti-social behavior that too frequently emerges from damaged families, even when it is a warning sign that something terrible is going on inside a kid.

The Uvalde shooter had recently developed serious anger issues, he was cutting his face, driving around shooting people with a BB gun and enjoyed hurting animals – classic warning signs of a serious problem. At least one parent told his son to stay away from Ramos, because, “You never know.” Still, no one took him to a clinic because no one was there for him. Mental health resources are critical, but they are not the only answer.

Some believe it is public schools themselves, where current teaching philosophy is based on moral subjectivism and group think that engenders rage and sets teenage boys adrift. Black Lives Matter launched a program for schools earlier this year and said one of their goals is to “disrupt the Western nuclear family structure.” If they achieve that goal, we can expect more shootings.

Despite what BLM and the left believe, the profile of the Uvalde shooter makes it clear that parents matter. News reports indicate that Ramos’ mother had serious drug issues and both she, his father and his grandfather have criminal records. His parents did not live together and it is not clear from news reports whether they were ever married. Ramos moved between his mother, grandmother and father. His sister had left home.

In the past couple weeks we have seen the people of Uvalde gathered in all kinds of churches to pray and bury their loved ones, but there is no indication that the shooter or his relatives were connected to a faith community or attended church.

Experts insist there is no correlation between violent video games and mass shootings. The attitude seems to be that because they are ubiquitous and there’s nothing we can do about them, we should just ignore them instead of trying to figure out why some kids who stare at screens all day virtually shooting people go out in the real world and do the same thing — like both the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters did — and others do not. That’s not an easy question to answer and we only seem to be looking for easy answers.

We will not be able to end mass shootings until we stop battling this like the culture war and instead make a commitment to fight on every front, starting with identifying all the factors that are turning young men like the Uvalde shooter into a cold-blooded killers. It won’t be easy.

As we navigate the tumultuous waters of our political reality, it behooves us to lean on the expertise, experience, and wisdom of those who have successfully done so before. On Thursday, May 5th, TPPF’s Distinguished Senior Fellow Sherry Sylvester will have a candid discussion with the legendary former Texas Congressman Lamar Smith about what he sees in Congress today and what he believes will be the best path forward.

The Honorable Lamar Smith faithfully represented the Texas 21st District in Congress for 32 years, during which he moved Texas and the nation forward with visionary legislation on issues ranging from space age development to patent protection and tax reform. Congressman Smith is the only Texas Congressman to have chaired 3 committees during his tenure, and, in 2019, he was named the Texan of the Year by the Texas Legislative Council. After his service to the Lone Star State in Congress, Congressmen Smith worked for a time as a journalist and has been a longtime critic of media bias.

Ever since the Johns Hopkins report came out the other week, I have been waiting for headlines across the country to appear saying “Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was Right.”  Lockdowns had virtually no impact on COVID-19 deaths or infection rates.

On March 23, 2020, Lt. Gov. Patrick told Tucker Carlson on Fox News that as a person in the high-risk age group for Covid, he did not believe the country should sacrifice the economy or imperil the future of our grandchildren to protect seniors like himself by locking down. He made it clear he was only speaking for himself, and he repeatedly advocated seniors take every step necessary to protect themselves from exposure. But he said he was more afraid of the collapse of the economy than he was of dying. He told Tucker he’d spoken with other older Americans who agreed with him.

It only took minutes for the media and the left to accuse Lt. Gov. Patrick of telling older Americans that they should sacrifice their health or even die to keep businesses open. Media and the left across Texas and the rest of the country—and even in Europe—lambasted him, insisting that he’d said that old people should be sacrificed for the economy. They shortened the message to “Die for the Dow,” and it trended on Twitter. At the same time, the very same media was effusively praising then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was actually killing old people with his pandemic strategies.

We are still calculating the costs of shutting down the economy—beyond killing businesses and putting millions out of work. Staggering suicide rates, drug and alcohol addiction, mental health issues, delayed medical tests and treatments and the devastating impact on our schools and children are all part of the fallout from lockdowns that we now know were totally unnecessary.

The media should have been asking the questions Johns Hopkins asked in its lockdown analysis from the first day the orders were proposed, but they didn’t. Instead, they presented Patrick and other leaders who opposed lockdowns as insensitive and hateful. President Joe Biden even accused lockdown opponents of “Neanderthal thinking.”

So now the data shows that Lt. Gov. Patrick was right, who holds the media accountable? Judging from what happened at the trial last week, when former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin sued the New York Times, it looks like nobody.

Like Lt. Gov. Patrick, the media accused Palin of being responsible for killing people. In 2017, after Congressman Steve Scalise and several other Republicans were shot playing baseball in Washington, D.C., the New York Times wrote an editorial headlined America’s Lethal Politics charging that Palin was at least partially responsible for the shooting:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

The Times deleted the line “the link to political incitement was clear” pretty quickly, and later it was forced to admit that the shooter had never seen the graphic in Palin’s PAC map. A recent report by the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman notes that the paper admits its work was sloppy. It also said it had a policy to never apologize for errors.

That’s it. The official response from the national newspaper of record was to shrug it off with a “my bad.”

Editorial Page Editor James Bennett said he hadn’t meant to imply that Palin had incited violence.

So, in addition to the “my bad” shrug, the editor told the court that he didn’t really mean what he wrote. But the New York Times didn’t actually back down. Its editorial still suggests Palin, somehow, was responsible for the shooting; it just can’t prove it. Here’s what the “corrected” editorial that is posted online now says about it:

Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff called the Times editorial an “honest mistake,” and he says he plans to throw the case out after the jury returns.

But, of course, it wasn’t honest and it wasn’t a mistake. The media routinely uses tactics like this to demonize individual conservatives. They use various forms of lying—hyperbole, twisting words, exaggeration, taking statements out of context or simply making things up. If they can concoct a charge that involves people being killed, that’s even better.

National Public Radio (NPR) icon Nina Tottenberg reported recently that conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch refused to put on a mask when liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayer asked him too. The story noted that since Sotomayer has co-morbidities and is at a high risk for COVID-19, Gorsuch’s actions could kill her. However, both Gorsuch and Sotomayer issued a statement saying it wasn’t true. Obviously, Tottenberg either made it up or she published something she hadn’t confirmed. NPR is standing by the story. Apparently it has a “no apology” policy too.

Palin is expected to appeal the judge’s decision to dismiss the case, but no one expects the New York Times to admit she was right, just like the media will never report that Lt. Gov. Patrick was right to oppose lockdowns early in the pandemic. It is ironic that the media calls challenges to the 2020 election “the Big Lie” when clearly, those in the media are the big liars, whether it be through their attacks on conservatives or conservative issues.

Here are just a few of the facts they continue to misreport. Photo Voter ID doesn’t suppress the vote. Turnout has increased since it passed.  Banning critical race theory doesn’t prohibit teaching about slavery and racism, it requires it. School choice isn’t for rich kids, it’s for poor kids, a proven way of obtaining better performance outcomes. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the media to report those facts. And don’t ever expect them to apologize when they lie.