Texas Observer readers,
One challenge of practicing journalism over the long haul is the feeling you get when—despite all the bombshell investigations, the longform humanizing features, the television exposés, the biting commentaries, and even the podcast series—you see the same underlying issues or injustices persist. You can start to feel that you’re rewriting the same story, shouting your fact-checked findings into the proverbial void.
In Texas, we’re gritting our teeth through another blistering summer, our only hope that it will be marginally more tolerable than the last, though the long-term trajectory is baked into the atmosphere by past mistakes and malfeasance. After years of halting progress by the immigrant rights movement, a Democratic president is reverting to an asylum crackdown at the southern border for perceived political gain. Donald Trump might be our next commander-in-chief, again, and Ken Paxton is still our attorney general. The governor has largely won his war against rebellious Republicans who dared oppose school privatization, setting up a raid on our most important public institution next legislative session—proving that, even two decades into unified control, the Texas GOP always has something more it can pillage or profane.
