Category: 9th & Congress

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!

There’s a political tactic called “inoculation” that came into mainstream parlance in the Bill Clinton era—it’s a kind of pre-emptive strike designed to protect against expected attacks and allegations.

Going down to the wire to Election Day on Nov. 8, Texas Democrats have begun an inoculation strategy, deploying their strongest resource, the Texas press, to help blunt the reprisals that are sure to come when Texas voters once again reject their woke, left-leaning candidates.

Texas Democrats never reflect on what they did wrong when they lose. They never ask why Texans don’t vote for their big spending, anti-business, teacher-union backed, anti-fossil fuel candidates. Instead, many of them, particularly those in the media, will insist without evidence that Democrats were defeated by “voter suppression.” They will ignore the fact that 85% of Texans, including a majority of Democrats, support election accountability reforms.

We know there will be long, post-election analyses explaining that the deck is stacked against Democrats—because they have been delivering the same message since 2011 when photo voter ID passed. The media provides the groundwork for them to make these outrageous claims.

This year, after the primary election in March, Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune claimed that voter suppression was responsible for the fewer than 1% of mail-in ballots that may have been rejected because new reforms require those who vote by mail to have the same identification as those who vote in person. Most voters who had problems corrected their mail-in ballots or voted in-person.

There was a drop in mail-in ballots in March, but not because Democrat votes were being “suppressed.” About the same number of Democrats cast their ballots by mail in the 2022 primary as did in the last gubernatorial election in 2018, but in the largest 15 counties, Republicans who had voted by mail in the past decided to vote in person—a 40% drop.

It was no surprise to hear Ramsey echo President Joe Biden, who called election accountability reforms “Jim Crow 2.0” and likened Republican reformers to southern segregationists and even Jefferson Davis.

The Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for making the same allegation, insisting that Texas politics has been rooted in racism and voter suppression since Reconstruction.  Its award winning editorial claims:

“[Election] Integrity is no more the goal for them [Texas Republican leadership] than it was for the white primary associations of the 1900s. Only today’s voter fraud warriors have laser pointers.”

Despite the Houston Chronicle’s big award, no serious evidence of voter suppression has emerged. States that have passed reforms, most notably Texas and Georgia, have seen voter turnout dramatically increase. Turnout in Texas increased 40% in the 2020 presidential election and 76% in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre recently waived away that data saying bluntly that increased voter turnout and voter suppression can happen at the same time.  That is roughly equivalent to saying the sky is green.

During the 2020 election, a left-leaning group called the Election Protection Coalition reported 267 reports of voter intimidation in Texas but even they admit what their study reveals—almost all of those reports were in response to campaign rallies, not instances of people actually being prevented from voting.

Where are the victims of the election accountability reforms? A Texas Association of Business poll conducted during the 2021 legislative session found that fully 95% of Texans say it is easy to vote in this state. That’s Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—virtually everybody. Among the reforms in 2021, the two-week early voting period, one of the longest in the country, was extended to include more hours.

On October 20—two and a half weeks before the election, the liberal Brennan Center issued a big flashy report boldly proclaiming Massive Disenfranchisement and Racial Disparities in Texas giving the Texas press a hook to follow up with more matter-of-fact stories of voter suppression they insist are happening in Texas. Again, no victims emerge.

The Houston’s Chronicle’s Pulitzer Prize winning insistence that if it weren’t for voter suppression, Texas would be a Democrat state seems out of touch with reality. Still, you can expect to hear cries of “voter suppression” coming from Texas media analysts on Election Night—because press coverage of things like the Brennan Center report have teed it up for them. That’s how inoculation works.

A poll this fall from the University of Texas at Tyler and the Dallas Morning News found that fewer than 20% of Texans get their political news from the Texas media. This is why.

In 2007, when photo voter ID was first being debated in the Texas House, State Rep. Rafael Anchia, a leading Democrat leader from Dallas, spoke against it, telling his fellow legislators that they were targeting the wrong problem:  “…Vote by mail that we know is the greatest source of voter fraud in this state,” Anchia said.

Today, years after the Texas photo voter ID law finally passed and has the support of 85% of Texas voters, the left is still trying to get rid of the rules.

In the latest case, Texas State LULAC v. Paxton, which was just heard at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) argues that voters should not have to prove where they actually live when they register to vote. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has joined Attorney General Ken Paxton in arguing in support of new law that requires proof of residency.

When the left argued against photo voter ID, they said it was racist to make voters prove who they are. Now, they are using the same outrage to argue that requiring people to register to vote at their actual home—not their office or a house where they used to live or even a post office box—is somehow a violation of, among other things, the Fourteenth Amendment.

What is ironic about this is that the Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures the right of every citizen to vote, is also where representational voting is defined. Voters are apportioned by where they live so they can elect people to represent them. To do that, voters must demonstrate not only that they live in Texas, they must also show what county they live in, what city and what precinct. Because nobody actually lives at say, P.O. Box 431, a mailbox can’t be used without other proof of residency.

The people at LULAC undoubtedly know this, but that’s not the point of this lawsuit.  Instead, they went to court to challenge the law as part of the same old media strategy to paint Texas election laws as some kind of “voter suppression” plan.

LULAC certainly aren’t the only people pushing the “voter suppression” lie in Texas.  Earlier this year, the left-wing Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for accusing Texas election reforms of “voter suppression” going so far as predicting that the state would lose more than $31 billion in economic activity and 223,000 jobs by 2025 because of backlash over photo voter ID and other election reforms. In fact, Texas lost no money and zero jobs because of election reforms.

And who can forget the Texas House Democrats who shut down the Texas House in 2021 and flew to Washington D.C. to protest the “voter suppression” in the election reforms bill? A Texas Public Policy Foundation poll showed that Texans opposed the walkout by a 2-to-1 margin. The Democrats returned home with their tails between their legs and never mentioned it again.

The Democrats’ stunt didn’t pay off because the whole idea that anyone who is eligible to vote in Texas is intentionally prevented from voting just doesn’t hold water. Voter turnout in Texas increased 40% in the 2020 presidential election and 76% in the 2018 gubernatorial election. In 2012, 58% of registered Texans voted but in 2020, almost 67% voted.

A Texas Association of Business poll conducted last year found that 95% of Texans said it was easy to vote here. That’s Democrats, Republicans, Independents, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, everybody. The same poll found that 81% of Texans believe the identifications requirements for voters should be the same for voting in person as they are by mail. Anyone who votes in-person in Texas knows that the first thing they ask you when you show up to vote is “what is your address?”

As Rep. Anchia pointed out years ago, mail-in ballot fraud has been a long-standing problem in Texas because mail-in ballots are inherently less secure. There is no way to guarantee that the ballot was received or filled out by the voter who applied for it. The “protections” that were in place in the past, including matching of signatures, proved meaningless.

Texans have dealt with mail-in ballot fraud for decades and they want it to end. That’s why the Legislature instituted common sense mail-in ballot reforms to ensure Texans have elections they can trust, and why Attorney General Paxton and TPPF are fighting in court to protect them.

Despite the bleak report on learning loss following pandemic school closures, Texas got some very good news last week with the release of the annual A-F school ratings. Fully 95% of the 38 school districts and 10 charter systems in the Region One Education Service Center area received either an A or B rating in the latest round of state public school grading, compared with 87% for school districts statewide.

Region One includes Laredo and runs south through the Rio Grande Valley to Hidalgo County. Region One also had the most individual campuses of any other district in the state receiving an A grade. The vast majority of the students in Region One are economically disadvantaged or living in poverty, and 96% are Hispanic.

If we’d left it up to the teachers’ unions, we would never know how well the students in Region One were doing. Leadership in Texas’ public schools, including teachers unions, school administrators and school boards fought against enacting an A-F grading system  for Texas public schools for almost a decade. They spent millions to convince Texas lawmakers that holding public schools accountable with an A-F letter grade—like we do public school students—was a threat to our children and communities. They insisted that poor schools and poor communities would get bad grade ratings that would stigmatize the children and their schools.

Superintendents flocked to the Legislature to argue that A-F ratings ignored the “real” problem—which was the lack of funding. Sen. Sylvia Garcia, then a Houston state senator and now a member of Congress, said called A-F “redlining.” She added, “Poor performance is more because of lack of resources than anything else. I would really caution us from getting into any scheme that redlines school districts.”

A-F opponents said the old pass/fail rating system was good enough. Before A-F was established, a school was rated either “Met Standard” or “Needs Improvement.” Those ratings obscured any real problems at schools from parents and the community—and that was the point. It is hard for parents to demand that schools do better if they don’t know how they are performing in the first place. Teachers unions and school administrators predicted the results would be obvious—poor kids would do poorly in school, and those schools would get bad grades. These educators had apparently never heard of the idea of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Teachers unions were so afraid of being held accountable for the performance of their students that in 2017, when A-F ratings finally passed the Texas Legislature, they demanded that the ratings only be given to school districts for the first year—not individual campuses.

Teachers unions fought against A-F ratings until the last minute before they were finally released, but once the public school ratings came out, the lies of the teachers unions, school administrators and school boards became crystal clear.

Region One in the Rio Grande Valley established the record that it repeated last week. No Region One school was graded lower than a B. Teachers in those schools proudly talked about the positive impact of having high expectations and a “no excuses” attitude when it comes to their students.

They also talked about innovative ideas including making sure that their students were fed—both breakfast and lunch. Both meals are known to be key factors in improving school performance.

Parents love A-F ratings. If their child’s school is doing poorly, they want to know why. They get engaged, and, if possible, they can make another choice. Many parents have no idea that their elected officials, school administrators and teachers had been working against A-F ratings for years.

That’s partly because teacher-union backed lawmakers who had led the battle against A-F showed up at A-rated schools for a photo ops and pretended they’d supported A-F all along. About a third of public schools were A-rated this year, including schools that are in low-income communities.

In terms of the Rio Grande Valley, there are a number of factors in play that likely led to the high quality of public schools there, including a strong network of charter schools, which fostered competitiveness in innovative teaching strategies.

Of course, teachers unions are now fighting charter school expansion too, just like they fought to keep schools closed during the pandemic and they tried to block A-F school ratings in Texas. They also oppose increasing transparency in schools and expanding parent empowerment and increasing parental choice. Clearly, their track record is no good when it comes to our children. Parents and policymakers should ignore them.

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.

It has been said that Texas is the best expression of the American idea—and Red McCombs is one of the best expressions of everything it means to be a Texan. He came from a tiny town in the southern panhandle, started as an Edsel salesman in Corpus Christi and went onto become one of the richest men in the world. McCombs has been enormously generous in so many ways throughout his life—a gift to the Lone Star State that keeps on giving.

An advertising genius who, literally, invented product placement, McCombs’ business successes have contributed to Texas’ growth and economic prosperity in a dozen different ways. In my hometown of San Antonio, he is known for bringing NBA basketball to our city with the Spurs. The key for him in his first professional sports venture was understanding the importance of television in moving San Antonio onto a national stage.

When the movie “The Alamo” was being filmed in 1960 at Bracketville, McCombs sought out John Wayne and got him to agree to open the film in San Antonio, pulling the klieg lights and red carpet out of Hollywood and into downtown San Antonio again, putting Texas on the map.

McCombs also brought Formula 1 racing to the United States after he learned that over 1 billion people watched those races. The possibilities of a billion viewers around the globe all looking at Texas motivated him to make sure the “Circuit of the Americas” was located here.

McCombs has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to all kinds of charities in Texas including the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In 2000, he contributed $50 million dollars to establish the Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, a gift which leveraged an additional $100 million to ensure that the state that has repeatedly been identified over the past two decades as the best state for business anywhere in America has a first-class business school.

Knowing what McCombs has done for the state and for the University of Texas, you can imagine how outrageous it was to see that when the template for the fall schedule at the McCombs School was released this week it included a warning for students that some business topics may be “traumatic.” Professors must promise to give their students a heads up if some really scary business topic is about to be discussed.

Are they kidding? Anyone who knows Red McCombs knows he is not afraid of anything.

There are also directions requiring every professor to “identify their pronouns (she/he/they/zhe).”

Zhe?

They seem to be serious. There is an entire section on “personal pronoun preference.”

Farther down in the syllabus template, professors are directed to let their students know that they “acknowledge that we are meeting on the Idigenous [sic] lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what is now North America.” They must also affirm: “I would like to acknowledge that Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa, Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo and all the American and Indigenous Peoples who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories of Texas.”

The Comanche arrived in Texas after the Spanish, so why aren’t those great minds over at the prestigious “40 Acres” acknowledging that they are on the lands of Carlos III de Bourbon, His Most Catholic Majesty and King of Spain? And the “Turtle Island” reference is nonsense. It’s a creation story from native tribes in the Northeast, not Texas.

The point is, why aren’t professors at the McCombs School of Business required to inform their students that if it weren’t for Red McCombs, they wouldn’t have a building, desks or, indeed, a business school?

Furthermore, McCombs School of Business students should know that McCombs is one of those Texas giants who understood from the beginning that Texas—now the best reflection of the American idea—is not an accident. It has been and continues to be a hard-fought battle to maintain a state where freedom and liberty are harnessed to ensure businesses are free to innovate to create jobs and prosperity for all. McCombs never walked away from that fight.

Texas universities are on very shaky grounds these days. Enrollment is plummeting because students are no longer willing to pay outrageous tuition to have a steady diet of “pronoun protocols” and “land acknowledgements” shoved down their throats. They have also had it with the constant drum beat of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), which actually means exclusion, injustice and essentially a stacked deck for anyone who does not genuflect to the woke ideology that is destroying our colleges.

Other states are fighting back. Florida passed a “Stop Woke” Individual Freedom law designed to eliminate these kinds of ridiculous and divisive antics on campus and to affirm the principles of actual equality, merit and hard work. It requires that students be reminded that in America, we work together to overcome challenges and hardships—we don’t band together to blame others for them.

The University of Texas needs to wake up before somebody shows this syllabus to Red McCombs—and he demands his money back.

 

When I saw a June 30, Texas Tribune a story headlined: “State education board members push back on proposal to use “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery,” it was immediately clear that it was riddled with inaccuracies, misinformation and blatant left wing propaganda, but it was such non-news that it hardly seemed worth the effort to challenge it. The Texas media – particularly the Texas Tribune — is dogmatic and unapologetic and cannot be reasoned with or even shamed into caring about the truth.

But then the story, misinformation and all, was picked up nationally and the San Antonio Express-News published an equally uninformed and outraged editorial complete with a 48 point headline, and it became imperative to point out the facts.

The media uses several tactics to create and repeat false narratives day after day, both in the stories they write and the stories they ignore. In the Texas Tribune story about the Texas State Board of Education [SBOE] it’s clear how they made 2 plus 2 equal 5 by reporting a tidbit of non-news and linking it to a left-wing narrative. Here’s the opening line:

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction, but board members have asked them to reconsider the phrasing, according to the state board’s chair.

The “group of Texas educators” were volunteers who were making suggestions to the professional historians who advise the SBOE on curriculum. As soon as term “involuntary relocation” was pointed out, it was immediately rejected by everyone in the meeting.

It is not clear from the news report why the SBOE was looking at what was essentially an un-reviewed draft of some suggestions from these teachers, but whoever proposed the term “involuntary relocation” did not defend it. The volunteers were told to go back to the drawing board. There was no discussion or debate regarding the term “involuntary relocation” and there was never any chance it would show up in a Texas classroom or a text book.

Still CBS national news reported that Texas officials propose changing slavery to “involuntary relocation” and Forbes Magazine joined dozens of other media outlets in repeating and adding new misinformation to the Tribune news report. Their headline was: Downplaying Slavery, Texas educators will call it “involuntary relocation.”

Brian Lopez, the Tribune reporter who wrote the story, intentionally created this controversy by embellishing his news story with several statements from other educators who were adamant about the inappropriateness of the term “involuntary relocation.” He gives the impression that it was only their outrage that stopped “involuntary relocation” from being substituted for slavery in Texas public school classes.

If Lopez had been interested in reporting facts, he could have added that the term “involuntary relocation,” was in a section of the proposal entitled “Enslaved People in America.” He could also have talked with any of the prominent historians who are actually developing the content for the social studies curriculum and given his readers some insight into that process.

He might also have explained that the new social studies guidelines for K-2 were being developed for the first time because the SBOE decided this spring that history will now be taught in every grade. Previously history and social studies were only taught in Texas in the 4^th and 7^th grades.

Instead he “explained” that slavery is not currently taught in second grade.

By throwing the word “slavery” into his story, he can then falsely blame Senate Bill 3, the ban on using critical race theory as a basis for instruction in Texas public schools, for the “involuntary relocation” wording.

He chooses words like “dictates” to suggest that Senate Bill 3 restricts or even prohibits teaching about slavery in Texas schools. In fact, Senate Bill 3 makes it clear that slavery and the issues surrounding it must be taught. A few of the minimum requirements for history students include learning the basic facts of the civil war, reading the writings of Frederick Douglas, reading both fugitive slave acts and “the history of white supremacy, including the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong…”

Reporter Lopez then returns to a familiar and inaccurate talking point for him — that Texas conservatives are restricting the teaching of slavery in schools in reaction to critical race theory which he insists is not being taught in Texas schools. To “prove” his point he links to several teachers who insist they never teach it. He ignores the fact that Texas public schools have frequently been found to use the precepts of critical race theory, which states that racism permeates every American institution and all white people are racists, whether they know it or not.

In fact, Senate Bill 3 ensures that, in Texas public schools, no child can be blamed for any action because of their race. It also affirms that no child will be regarded as a victim solely because of their race or ethnicity.

In order to get in one more slam against conservatives, none of whom are quoted in his story, he finishes his phony narrative that the teaching of slavery is restricted in public schools by noting that both the Texas governor and the lieutenant governor have announced their support for the so-called “Don’t Say Gay,” bill which he says “limits classroom discussions about LGBTQ people.”

As everybody except the left-wing press seems to know, that Florida legislation limits discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.

There’s no prohibition against saying “gay” in schools in Florida and few seriously question that it’s inappropriate for teachers to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity with 5, 6 and 7 year olds. But the Texas Tribune goes with the inaccurate spin rather than the facts to feed their false, anti-Texas narrative. It is difficult to say what is the most inaccurate and biased news outlet in Texas, but the Texas Tribune is always a top contender.

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.

What an ugly irony that the Houston Chronicle—which may be the most out-of-touch and Texas-hating newspaper of the metropolitan big five—has just won a Pulitzer Prize for a series they called “The Big Lie.”

Predictably, the left-wing Pulitzer crowd is lauding a series written by four editorial writers that they say “reveals voter suppression tactics…” in the Texas election reforms that were adopted in the 2021 legislative session. Like the New York Times’ repeatedly debunked 1619 Project, the Chronicle’s “Big Lie” insists that election politics in Texas has been rooted in racism since reconstruction. It demonizes Republicans and insists efforts to increase transparency and public trust in elections is all a ruse. The editorials claim:

“[Election] Integrity is no more the goal for them than it was for the white primary associations of the 1900s. Only today’s voter fraud warriors have laser pointers.”

The series mostly forgets that it was Democrats who established those “white primary associations” at the turn of the century, while the Republican Party was the party of reform, primarily comprised of African-American Texans.

The Houston Chronicle editorial writers rail against requiring a photo ID in order to vote, a Texas law that passed in 2011, as well as what they describe as the refusal of the state lawmakers to allow voting “innovations” like 24-hour and drive-in voting.

The Pulitzer committee apparently didn’t bother to fact check the series, or they would have learned that it wasn’t just Republicans who support requiring a photo voter ID in order to vote—nearly 85% of all Texans support it, including Democrats.

As for the charge of “voter suppression,” a Texas Association of Business poll (TAB) conducted in 2021 during the election reform debate found that fully 95% of Texans surveyed—again, that is people from both parties—say it is “easy” to vote in Texas elections.

And there’s no voter suppression. Since photo voter ID has passed in Texas, there have been record breaking voter turnouts in both presidential and gubernatorial year elections.

Voter turnout in Texas increased 40% in the 2020 presidential election and 76% in the 2018 gubernatorial election. In 2012, 58% of registered Texans voted and in 2020, almost 67% voted.

The news hook for the “Big Lie” editorial series were blaring headlines in Texas and nationwide that 12% of Texas mail-in ballots had been rejected in the March primary election. Always looking for ways to demonize Texas, almost none of the news stories on mail-in ballots in the primary reported that those ballots, which required verified identification of either a driver’s license or a social security number, included only about 1% of the total ballots cast in the election. Since it’s not clear how many of those voters went on to vote in-person anyway, like Willie Nelson, the percentage could be even smaller.

But actual numbers didn’t distract the Houston Chronicle’s writers from pushing their ugly theory that racism motivated Texas Republican leaders, who they charge with manipulating Republican voters into believing that protections against voter fraud were needed. It apparently didn’t matter to them that it isn’t just Republicans who want election security—Democrats support it too. The TAB poll also found 85% of Texans in both political parties believe mail-in ballots should require the same identification as in-person voting. Voter fraud in mail-in balloting has never been a secret in Texas, even among Democrats.

In 2007, when photo voter ID was first being debated, Texas State Rep. Rafael Anchia, a leading Democrat leader from Dallas, spoke against expanding photo voter ID, by using the argument that where real reform was needed was in ballot by mail:  He said: “…vote by mail that we know is the greatest source of voter fraud in this state…” requires no identification.

Still, the story of the 12% mail-in ballot rejection moved forward in both the state and national press unchallenged by any reporter.  However, a new poll from RMG Research suggests that even people outside Texas didn’t really buy it. In early May, when asked about the 12% of mail-in ballots that were rejected in Texas, RMG found, predictably, that a third believed what they’d heard in the media, but a larger number—almost 40 percent—believed the rejected ballots indicated that there had been more voter fraud in the past and the new rules were finally able to catch it.

A Pulitzer fact check would have revealed another “big lie” in the Houston Chronicle’s “Big Lie.” Before election reforms were passed in 2021 the Chronicle wrote that the “state stands to lose more than $31 billion in economic activity and 223,000 jobs by 2025…” because of backlash over the legislation. In fact, Texas, which was among the first states to recover from the pandemic, lost no money and zero jobs because of the election reforms.

This piece is riddled with many snide little lies, too, and ignores how Texans feel about the Texas House Democrats who shut down the Texas House and flew to Washington, D.C. to protest the election reforms bill. A Texas Public Policy Foundation poll showed that Texans opposed the walkout by a 2-to-1 margin.

Far from being an award-winner, the Houston Chronicle’s “Big Lie” series is just one more in what has become a staple of the Texas press. Texans are portrayed as gullible rubes at best—if not evil, calculating racists. The media doesn’t seem able to accept that conservatives don’t win elections in Texas because of rigged election rules; over the past two decades, conservatives have won with whatever rules were on the books.

Texans elect conservatives because they share their principles and they like their ideas. They also win because Texas liberals haven’t had a good idea in at least two decades. That’s the Big Truth!

Sherry Sylvester, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, is a political communications and public policy expert who has directed multi-million dollar statewide campaigns in New York, New Jersey and Texas. Campaigns and Elections Magazine has called her a “respected veteran” of hard-fought elections and in 2005, her alma mater, the Graduate School of Political Management, now at George Washington University in Washington D.C., named her “alumni of the year,” for her accomplishments in the field of professional politics. Early in her career Sherry worked as the Communications Director for U.S. Senate candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman ever nominated for Vice President on a major party ticket. She also worked for David Dinkins, the first African-American to be elected Mayor of New York City. In Texas, she served for over a decade as the spokesperson and a strategic advisor to Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the most successful tort reform organization in the nation. She was a member of the original campaign and transition teams of Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and she managed his 2018 re-election campaign. She served for seven years as Senior Advisor to the Lt. Governor.

See Sherry’s latest op-eds;

“Every Parent Should Read ‘Gender Queer’”

“Opinion: Texas fails victims of sex trafficking. Overhaul child welfare services now.”

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Calls from the left and the media to repeal the updated rules for mail-in ballots are predictable. They opposed requiring photo voter identification to vote too. The attack on the reforms to mail-in ballot rules defy the data—and common sense.

First, the numbers. Opponents of the new law highlight that over 12% of mail-in ballots were rejected in the last primary election. That sounds high until you consider that more than 3 million people voted, making those rejected mail-in ballots less than 1% of all ballots cast.

But even that would overstate the problem, because the Texas law requires officials to work with voters to try to reconcile rejected ballots. Famously, Willie Nelson’s initial ballot was rejected, which he then reportedly fixed and resubmitted. There are surely others who did the same.

Additionally, once a voter received word their ballot was rejected, they could have decided to vote in person instead. We don’t know how many did, but while opponents of the law are attempting to claim that “confusing new rules” were responsible for large numbers of supposedly disenfranchised voters, the truth is that even if there was some initial confusion, it only affected a tiny fraction of votes cast. There is no reason to repeal the new law.

And now for some common sense. Elections have rules because without them we cannot trust the results. The two most basic rules for ensuring election integrity are that voters must demonstrate they are who they say they are and that they are eligible to vote in the election. Most voters do this by voting in person and showing an election worker a photo identification card that has both the voter’s picture and address on it, verifying identity and eligibility.

Mail-in ballots are inherently less secure. There is no way to guarantee that the ballot was received or filled out by the voter who applied for it. The identity protections for mail-in ballots that existed before the new law, such as matching signatures, proved meaningless.

A system in which some votes are verified and others are not is unacceptable. That’s why the Legislature was compelled to act last year. Texas has strong protections and relatively easy procedures for voting in person. Now the same is true for mail-in ballots.

Not only is this common sense, but the new measures are supported by the vast majority of Texans. In polls taken during the debate over the new rules last year, 89% of Texans said they support photo voter ID and 81% said voting in person and by mail should have the same voter identification requirements.

Every rejected ballot is one that couldn’t prove voter identity and/or eligibility. The increased number of rejected mail-in ballots is evidence that the law is working to prevent the inclusion of unverified and potentially fraudulent votes, which protects the legitimacy of election results, just as Texans want.

Do voters make honest mistakes? Of course. But there’s a process for reconciling mistakes for mail-in voters who neglect to put their address or even their own name on a mail-in ballot.

Texas voters don’t buy that the updated rules are too “confusing.” Fully 80% agree mail-in ballots should include either the identification number of a valid government ID or a partial Social Security number.

In the March primary, over 99% of voters were able to understand the rules and vote successfully without issue. For the tiny fraction of those who didn’t, there’s a process for making it right. Texas’ election reforms strengthen protections for every ballot and improve  confidence in election results. It’s a better system that clearly works.