What a difference a year makes.
Twelve months ago, when we launched The Barbed Wire, it felt like we were finally crawling out of the wreckage of Trump’s first term, maybe even headed toward a slightly less-shitty future.
Sure, Texas was still Texas — stubborn, messy, allergic to progress — but wasn’t the arc of the moral universe supposed to bend toward justice?
Turns out, that arc snapped in half. We’re not just back in the hole; in Texas, we brought a bigger shovel.
A year ago, Texas politics was already a disaster. The Republican machine had been grinding since the ’90s, but at least there were some guardrails — flimsy, sure, but enough to slow their worst instincts. Things were bad. We didn’t yet know how much worse it could get once they gave themselves full permission to indulge.
Now, Trump is back in the White House, barking orders at our state’s leadership like a mob boss with a tan line, and Texas lawmakers are free to be as cruel as possible to the poor and as generous as possible to the rich. If Trump says, “I want five more congressional seats,” Republicans in Austin don’t just salute — they deliver.
“One of the very real struggles of the last year has been trying to find ways to describe the changes in the culture at the Texas Capitol without sounding hyperbolic. It is nearly impossible for veterans of the building,” wrote Scott Braddock for the longtime Capitol insider publication Quorum Report.
Texas is unrecognizable. Rules aren’t just bent; they’re shattered. Our leaders aren’t even pretending to govern for the people anymore. They’re governing for Trump, billionaires, and whatever Facebook meme has the most shares that week.
Of course, the Texas Legislature has always been a circus. Now it’s a prison yard. Democrats returned from their gerrymandering walkout only to be handed “permission slips” and assigned DPS officers to follow them everywhere — to lunch, to their offices, even to the bathroom.
State Rep. Nicole Collier, from Fort Worth, refused to play along and ended up locked inside the chamber overnight, as if skipping homeroom was now a felony.
This isn’t democracy. It’s what you get when you embolden people who want power above everything else.
You get cops as hall monitors — and duly elected lawmakers treated like kids who won’t stop passing notes in math class.
Democrats in the Texas Senate weren’t even allowed to carry out the filibuster they’d planned on the redistricting maps last week. Instead, they were blocked by the GOP in a procedural vote.
And while officers were babysitting Democrats, Republicans were busy making the state actively worse. Their crown jewel: school vouchers, Gov. Greg Abbott’s white whale. That means $1 billion taxpayer dollars now go to private tuition and home-schooling, while public schools limp along with a funding bump that experts say won’t stop closures or deficits. Translation: Your neighborhood school gets a bake sale, while the private school down the road with its own royal crest gets a water polo team.
But vouchers were just the opening act. Republicans also torched diversity, equity and inclusion in K-12 schools and banned LGBTQ+ student clubs, because what better way to prove your commitment to “education” than by banning empathy and safe spaces for marginalized kids?
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick got his prize too, with a THC ban passing both chambers. Though Abbott vetoed it during the Legislature’s regular session, the Senate passed a similar bill during the (second) special session. All it needs now is for Abbott to sign off, which he probably will.
Veterans and chronic pain patients who found relief in edibles? Sorry — back to opioids and Jack Daniel’s, the way God intended.
Add Ten Commandments posters in every classroom (whether the courts like it or not), new laws targeting transgender Texans, and another round of property tax cuts big enough to destabilize the budget, and you’ve got a session where our endless culture wars mattered far more than governance.
Sure, lawmakers threw money at water infrastructure, but the real headline wasn’t “Texans won’t run out of water.” It was “Texans won’t run out of culture war.”
And if all this wasn’t enough, Abbott now wants to make Ivermectin (a medication used to treat parasitic worms in horses) available over the counter. Why? Because his lunatic base thinks it can treat COVID and, as usual, Abbott goes along with such idiocy because he’s scared of being primaried. Of course, Ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is completely unsupported by scientific evidence.
Meanwhile, Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the country, and it’s getting worse.
It’s salt on the wound that these policies don’t even work in boosting the economy. Whenever they’ve been fully unleashed, they fail. Look at Kansas.
And, sure enough, thanks to deportations and trade wars, Texas’ economy is “slowing down.”
“Certainly from the private sector, this volatility obviously creates uncertainty,” according to Ed Hirs, an economist and energy fellow at the University of Houston, in an interview with Texas Tribune. “It’s pretty clear the economy is on a path to recession.”
So here we are: One year later, Texas is poorer, meaner, and less free.
Public schools are being gutted, diversity is a dirty word, weed is about to be banned, and elected officials can’t walk down a hallway without a police escort.
Republicans still call themselves the party of liberty, but Texas actually ranks last in personal freedoms (according to Libertarians, no less).
Last year, the Texas government was dysfunctional. This year, it’s dystopian. And the worst part? Twelve months from now, it’ll be worse.
When I helped start The Barbed Wire a year ago, I hoped the work would be about accountability. Maybe even a little hope.
Lately, it feels like screaming into a void filled with Ten Commandments posters.
But here’s what keeps me going: Texans are paying attention. You’re paying attention. We’ve built this community from nothing because people like you want the truth served straight (ok, with some sarcasm on the side).
The Barbed Wire isn’t just here to chronicle Texas’ decline into a right-wing fever dream. We’re here to remind you that democracy, decency, and basic reality still matter. Maybe not to the people in the state Capitol, but to the rest of us.
We believe Texas can be better — but only if we fight for it.
So if you value this work, help us keep going. Sign up for our free newsletter — it’s written by me, every week. Or, even better, become a paying member and keep independent Texas journalism alive.
Texas doesn’t have to be like this. We can fight for a better tomorrow together.