Posts Tagged ‘Texas’
“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion”*…
The estimable cultural historian Fred Turner, a seasoned observer of Silicon Valley, on what’s happening as Bay Area tech entrepreneurs turn their eyes (or, indeed, relocate) to the Lone Star State. He opens with the story of Tesla’s Gigafactory outside of Austin, then looks more broadly…
… For Elon Musk and his backers in the state capitol the Gigafactory is much more than a place to make cars. The complex’s enormous assembly floor, with its shiny red robots and twenty thousand employees, sends a Texas-sized message to entrepreneurs everywhere: the future won’t be built in California or New York. It will be built in the Bible Belt, by men—always men—with the willpower to tame the forces of technology, wrestle profit from the land, and create new industries out of whole cloth. It will rise up like the oil derricks of a hundred years before and give evidence of the limitless, God-given natural bounty of the region. It will make some men rich and when it does, it will provide evidence that the land still breeds heroes like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, defenders of the Alamo.
You can see where this is going. In press releases and feature stories, Tesla’s Gigafactory is a translation device, turning decades and even centuries of Texas lore into elements of a new cultural formation, a Texan Ideology. Thirty years ago, when political theorist Richard Barbrook and artist Andy Cameron published their canonical essay “The Californian Ideology” in Mute, a British journal devoted to critiquing early internet culture, the computer industry of Silicon Valley was surrounded by the remnants of San Francisco’s 1960s counterculture. The collision of these worlds produced a new orthodoxy, they wrote, one that “promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.”
Today, the hippies have aged out of the computer industry entirely, the yuppies are retired, and high-tech entrepreneurs like Musk are leaving California for Texas. The world of digital technology has changed too. In the 1990s, everyone from modem makers to software developers was focused on building the global network. Connection was the order of the day. Today, the World Wide Web is in place, our computers are in our pockets, and the smart money bets on turning the data we generate into patterns that can be sold to the highest bidder. The global system of connection built out in the 1990s has turned the social world into a resource for the oldest form of capitalism, extraction.
For that kind of work Texas makes an ideal home. Built early on from the profits of cattle ranching and slave-picked cotton, propelled to national prominence by the oil booms of the early twentieth century, Texas has long been synonymous with turning natural and human resources into money. Its promoters have been expert, too, in turning cowboys and oilmen into emblems of American masculinity and celebrating a muscular Christianity. From its earliest days as part of Mexico, when the Mexican government required settlers to convert to Catholicism, extraction has been entwined with religion and racial politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalist Christian radio echoed across the state. In 1953, Reverend Billy Graham staged a revival that filled the Cotton Bowl with seventy-five thousand Texans. Since the 1950s, Southern Baptists, whose conservatism has increased over the decades, have dominated the state’s religious scene. Today, they and right-wing members of other denominations help organize and fund the state’s politics…
[Turner unpacks the history, both formative and recent, and explores the motives of the tech migrants, and the ways in which the culture, attitudes– and the economic and legal structures in Texas– suit them…]
… In the 1990s of the Californian Ideology, a loose hippie spiritualism prevailed, but going to church was for the hopelessly square. Today, as Silicon Valley leaders turn to the right, and particularly when they migrate to Texas, many are embracing the simultaneous celebration of entrepreneurship and Christian discipleship at the heart of the Texan Ideology. Elon Musk has announced that although he doesn’t go to church, he considers that the “teachings of Jesus Christ are good and wise” and thinks of himself as a “cultural Christian.” [Palantir co-founder] Joe Lonsdale is Jewish, but he regularly promotes “Judeo-Christian” values as fundamental to the good society. When he moved to Texas, he brought with him the Cicero Institute, a free market and public policy think tank he founded in California. Once there, he helped establish the University of Austin, a school devoted to teaching the great books of the Western canon. For Lonsdale, as for [oil billionaire and “the state’s most powerful figure” Tim] Dunn and, increasingly, Musk, the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.
That fusion is the essence of the Texan Ideology. The millenarian impulse that animates it could be felt in 1990s California too, but the Californian Ideology grew from the counterculture, a movement driven by the search for a new consciousness, for new ways to understand our collective interconnection and so leave earthly politics behind. Its spiritual tendencies proved ideal for motivating and legitimating the construction of a global digital network. The Texan Ideology grows out of two centuries of resource extraction in the heart of the Bible Belt. Its Christianity emphasizes the idea that saints walk among us and should be venerated over the notion that we should tend to the least among us first and foremost. The Christian elements of the Texan Ideology lead to the building of private compounds, not soup kitchens.
Then again, maybe the Texan Ideology has more in common with its Californian forebear than we think. After all, it was precisely the failure of the digital industries to build an egalitarian society that led to homelessness on San Francisco’s streets. And it may be that in due course, the economic inequalities that have long plagued Texas will drown out the self-serving voices of the high-tech entrepreneurs. If the schools become bad enough, the housing expensive enough, and the Christian nationalist ethos constraining enough, Texans might finally find a way to undo Republicans’ gerrymandering and kick the current regime out of office.
In the meantime, the Texan Ideology is making its way back to California. In February 2025, the Stanford Review, a conservative student publication cofounded by Lonsdale’s former mentor Peter Thiel when he was an undergraduate, published an essay titled “Manifest Destiny is the Antidote to Bureaucracy.” The essay reached deep into the heart of Texas history to justify its calls for massive deregulation of industry, the liberation of entrepreneurial innovation, and the conquest of Greenland and Mars. “Without the frontier, elites would have monopolized land, blocking progress—just like in Europe,” said the authors. “In the oil boom, Texas’ loose regulations let wildcatters drill freely, giving rise to Exxon, Shell and Texaco. More recently, SpaceX was capable of innovating in hard tech when everything from airplanes to automobiles stagnated precisely because space remained a wholly unregulated frontier.”
In the authors’ view, as in that of multiple generations of technology entrepreneurs, the state has to set the regulatory stage for exploration and then get out of the way. The measure of America’s success will not be equality among its people. On the contrary. Only when the right men are allowed to roam the plains will oil be found. And only when oil is found will God’s mission for America finally be fulfilled…
Silicon Valley looks for Lebensraum in the Bible Belt: “The Texan Ideology,” from @thebaffler.com. Eminently worth reading in full.
* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
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As we mess with Texas, we might remark that today is the birthday of a man with a claim to being the “father of modern Texas” (and who in any case certaibly embodied many of the key traits illustrated by Turner above), Stephen F. Austin; he was born on this date in 1793.** Austin (for whom the state capital is named) was the first successful “empresario,” a grantee of the right to settle on land in the eastern areas of Coahuila y Tejas in Mexico in exchange for recruiting settlers in the early nineteenth century. Austin brought 300 families and their slaves from the United States to the Tejas region in 1825.
Throughout the 1820s, Austin sought to maintain good relations with the Mexican government and helped suppress the Fredonian Rebellion. He also helped ensure the introduction of slavery into Texas despite the Mexican government’s opposition to the institution, and he led the initial actions against the indigenous Karankawa people in this area.
By the 1830s Texas settlers had become dissatisfied with the Mexican government and Austin abandoned his conciliatory posture. In the Texas Revolution, Austin led Texas forces at the successful Siege of Béxar, after which he served as the Republic of Texas’ commissioner to the United States. He ran as a candidate in the 1836 Texas presidential election but was defeated by Sam Houston, who appointed Austin as Secretary of State for the new republic, a position Austin held until his death in December 1836.
** year of birth corrected; apologies for your correspondent’s fat fingers…
“The call is coming from inside the house”*…
As the old proverb goes, “we become what we hate.” In this post, two examples of groups adopting practices they had decried in their enemies.
First, from the fetid ocean of political finance: it’s been pretty obvious for some time that the Trump Administration and the Republican party at large have embraced the doctrine of “honest graft” (and here and here and…). What is perhaps less obvious is the extent to which that impulse has affected (infected?) their approach to campaign finance per se (and here).
But, as Stanford professor Adam Bonica demonstrates, greed is an equal opportunity vice…
The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.
The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.
We all have that one obscure skill we’ve inadvertently maxed out. Mine happens to be navigating the labyrinth of campaign finance data. So, after documenting the spam tactics in a previous article, I told myself I’d just take a quick look to see who was behind them and where the money was going.
That “quick look” immediately pulled me in. The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. During their tenure at the DCCC, they helped pioneer the fundraising model that now dominates Democratic inboxes—a high-volume strategy that relies on emotionally charged, often hyperbolic appeals to compel immediate donations. This model, sometimes called “churn and burn,” prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term donor relationships.
After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party’s most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.
They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.
The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.
The core defense of these aggressive fundraising tactics rests on a single claim: they are brutally effective. The FEC data proves this is a fallacy. An examination of the money flowing through the Mothership network reveals a system designed not for political impact, but for enriching the consultants who operate it.
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm’s other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined…
… After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
But here’s the number that should end all debate:
This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns…
For all of the details, and an explanation of why the Party looks the other way: “The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine,” from @adambonica.bsky.social.
Second, consider the case of Texas, a state that used to hate lawsuits, the nanny state, and the film industry. As Christopher Hooks reports, it’s learned from the Golden State to embrace all three as a means of cultural influence. After unpacking the state government’s turnabout from tort reform to encouaging rise of private enforcement of laws through fines and lawsuits and it’s shift from it’s prior rejection of government nutritional and health guidelines, Hooks looks at Texas’ new push to become a seat of film and television production…
… Beneath the long-standing contempt for California and its tyranny was, apparently, a fair bit of envy. On no issue was this more obvious than the expensive package of film incentives the Lege passed this year—$300 million to refund movie and TV productions for money spent in the state.
Most lawmakers who supported the package doubtless did so because of a general positive feeling about the arts, or just because Matthew McConaughey came to the Capitol to lobby for it. But implicit in the way some lawmakers talk about the baleful influence of the California-centered movie industry—currently in a state of near collapse because of AI and the streaming revolution—is a belief that it represents a malign channel of cultural control and coercion by liberal Hollywood elites. In writing the incentives, Texas lawmakers seemed to be asking: What if we had that power instead?
Texas is likely to attract many additional TV and film shoots with this new money. Some productions will come specifically to take advantage of the bill’s Texas Heritage Project funding, a pot of money set aside and controlled by the governor’s appointees to fund projects that promote “family values” and portray “Texas and Texans in a positive fashion.” A cynic might blink twice and wonder if the governor just gave himself a propaganda fund.
The subtext of the bill is probably more important. The state has already in the recent past revoked film incentives from a movie, 2010’s Machete, because state officials disapproved of its message. Future films made here will likely aim to avoid the watchful eye of state lawmakers. The Legislature seems to be embodying the favorite idea of a profoundly influential Californian, Andrew Breitbart, who reminded conservatives at every possible opportunity that “politics is downstream from culture.” It’s perhaps true, but it’s also the kind of thing you think up when you’ve lived in Santa Monica for too long.
After ten years of a governor who has vowed to keep West Coast ways from our pleasant shores, the state is awash in tech exiles. Big money and a strong executive dominate the Legislature more than ever before. Republicans in the House have turned into granola-eating health food obsessives while trial lawyers are on the ascent. The lieutenant governor spends his days entertaining movie stars. Close your eyes, and you can almost imagine you’re U-Hauling down the 405…
Becoming your enemy: “Right-Wing Lawmakers Are Trying to California Your Texas,” from @hooks.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
Yet another bizzaro flip: “Welcome to the age of Hard Tech” from @taylorlorenz.bsky.social.
* from When a Stranger Calls
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As we try to appreciate the ironies, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008, that a tour bus belonging to the Dave Matthews Band dumped an estimated 800 pounds (360 kg) of human waste from the bus’s blackwater tank through (grated surface of) the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago onto an open-top passenger sightseeing boat sailing in the Chicago River below. Roughly two-thirds of the 120 passengers aboard the tour boat were soaked.
More here.
“I think of reading a book as no less an experience than traveling or falling in love”*…
Via Why Is This Interesting, a reading list from the man who created The Library of Babel…
Jorge Luis Borges, the consummate reader & librarian of the infinite, left behind an unfinished gift in the form of his Biblioteca Personal, meant to be 100 selections of personally-prized literature. Each was to have a written prologue and the entries were a kaleidoscopic collection of remembrances, lyrical passages, and warm regards…
In 1985, Argentine publisher Hyspamerica asked Borges to create A Personal Library — which involved curating 100 great works of literature and writing introductions for each volume. Though he only got through 74 books [64 individual titles, 6 to be issued in two volumes] before he died of liver cancer in 1988, Borges’s selections are fascinating and deeply idiosyncratic. He listed adventure tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells alongside exotic holy books, 8th century Japanese poetry and the musing of Kierkegaard…
[Borges said] “I want this library to be as diverse as the unsatisfied curiosity that has led me, and continues to lead me, to explore so many languages and so many literatures”…
Borges’ personal book picks– remembrances and warm regards: “The Biblioteca Personal Edition,” from @WhyInteresting.
Download a PDF of Borges’ list here.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we browse, we might recall that today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of 2021, as a federal holiday.
“I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves… are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons”*…
Today is Juneteenth.
Though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863), word was slow to spread. Indeed, in Texas (which had been largely on the sidelines of hostilities in the Civil War, had continued its own state constitution-sanctioned practice of slavery, and so had become a refuge for slavers from more besieged Southern states) it took years… and federal enforcement.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger, who’d arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 federal troops to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, read “General Order No. 3” from a local balcony:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Former slaves in Galveston celebrated in the streets; Juneteenth observances began across Texas the following year, and are now recognized as state holidays by 41 states– and as of this past Thursday, as a federal holiday.
While the commemoration has deep historical and political resonance, Juneteenth has also become a time for family reunions and gatherings, but usually with a eye to the past. As with most social events, food takes center stage. Juneteenth is often commemorated by barbecues and the traditional drink – Strawberry Soda – and dessert – Strawberry Pie. Other red foods such as red rice (rice with tomatoes), watermelon and red velvet cake are also popular. The red foods commemorate the blood that was spilled during the days of slavery.
[Image at top: source]
* Abraham Lincoln, in the Emancipation Proclamation
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As we set to the work still to be done, we might recall that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved, after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate on this date in 1964. The House agreed to and passed the Senate version on July 2, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law that same day.
This day– or any day– would be a good day to watch this profile of James Baldwin, produced in 1979 for ABC’s 20/20, but never aired.
“We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do”*…
A logistical note to those readers who subscribe by email: Google is discontinuing the Feedburner email service that (Roughly) Daily has used since its inception; so email will now be going via Mailchimp. That should be relatively seamless– no re-subscription required– but there may be a day or two of duplicate emails, as I’m not sure how quickly changes take effect at Feedburner. If so, my apologies. For those who don’t get (Roughly) Daily in their inboxes but would like to, the sign-up box is to the right… it’s quick, painless, and can, if you change your mind, be terminated with a click. And now, to today’s business…
Historians across the country are criticizing Texas House Bill 2497—which, after Gov. Greg Abbott signed it on Monday, establishes the “Texas 1836 Project”—as yet another rhetorical volley in the culture wars, aimed at inflaming already-high tensions and asserting partisan political power. And they’re not wrong.
But as a historian, a Texas history professor, and a proud born-and-raised Texan, I applaud the new law’s call to “promote awareness” of the founders and founding documents of Texas. For teachers, this is an opportunity to read and analyze history with students. And speaking from my own experience, there’s one thing I can tell you: It’s not going to turn out how the politicians who applauded at the signing ceremony think it will.
H.B. 2497 mandates only two things. First, it calls for the creation of a nine-member advisory committee “to promote patriotic education” and Texas values. Second, it requires the committee to provide a pamphlet to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which will give an overview of Texas history and explain state policies that “promote liberty and freedom.” The DPS must distribute this pamphlet to everyone who receives a new Texas driver’s license. Another bill, H.B. 3979, which bars teachers from linking slavery or racism to the “true founding” or “authentic principles” of the United States, is now on Abbott’s desk.
The text of H.B. 2497 is itself relatively tame. It wants to promote history education—a cause that every history teacher would champion. But the context of the bill is much more troublesome. Abbott and much of the Republican-led Texas Legislature have joined a battalion of state leaders across the country who have declared war on ideas they believe aim to destroy society. They’ve identified two scapegoats: the New York Times’ 1619 Project and critical race theory, or CRT, a set of ideas coming from legal academia that is rarely directly taught in K–12 and college classrooms but has become a favorite dog whistle for the right. (If you’ve lost track of the many anti-CRT/1619 bills in play across the country, the situation is outlined in this New York Times piece from earlier this month.)
Enter the 1836 Project, and Greg Abbott’s rallying cry as he signed the bill: “Foundational principles” and “founding documents”! As a history professor, I say we take Abbott up on that challenge, especially the “documents” part. Time to start reading!
…
Let’s read Texas’ single most foundational document, the 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas. We will find several values familiar to present-day Texans: divided government, religious freedom, and the right to bear arms. But we will also find some “values” that don’t track very well in 2021. That it was illegal for either Congress or an individual to simply emancipate a slave. That even free Black people could not live in Texas without specific permission from the state. That “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians” had no rights as citizens.
…
I know these historical documents are opportunities for education because I teach them all the time. Every semester that I teach Texas history at Southern Methodist University, we read these documents (and many more). And every semester, without fail, I have students respond in two ways: frustration and enlightenment. After reading the 1836 Texas Constitution’s enshrinement of racialized citizenship, they’re exasperated: “Why didn’t anyone teach us this before? I thought the Alamo was all about freedom.” When we read Texas’ reasons for secession in 1861, some can hardly believe it. They’ve always been taught Texans joined the Confederacy to defend their family or states’ rights, not because of an explicit devotion to maintaining a society based on racial subjugation.
I’m not an award-winning teacher. I don’t have any elaborate tricks up my sleeve, and I’ve never asked students to read any academic writing on CRT. And yet it’s my great joy every semester to watch students leave the class more aware of injustices, past and present. They’ve read for themselves. They’ve learned. They’ve changed.
So thank you, Greg Abbott. I know that you mean for the 1836 Project to manufacture a certain kind of citizen, one who joins you in the fight against the dark forces of CRT, 1619, and the very idea of “systemic racism.” But I can assure you—by insisting on a strategy that encourages teachers to read and discuss Texas primary sources, you have made a fatal error. You’ve charted a course to lead students of history to one destination, but the map will bring them straight to the places you’re trying to hide. Everything is right there in the documents, for everyone to see…
The “Texas 1836 Project” is a state-mandated effort to promote “Texas exceptionalism”– and counter CRT. But it may not work out as its Republican sponsors plan… A chance to teach Texas’ “founding documents”? This historian says, “Yes, please!” SMU professor Brian Franklin (@brfranklin4) explains why “The 1836 Project Is an Opportunity.”
For more background: “Texas’ 1836 Project aims to promote “patriotic education,” but critics worry it will gloss over state’s history of racism.”
[image above: source]
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As we listen for the backfire, we might recall that it was on this date in 1215 that King John affixed his seal to the Magna Carta… an early example of unintended consequences: the “Great Charter” was meant as a fundamentally reactionary treaty between the king and his barons, guaranteeing nobles’ feudal rights and assuring that the King would respect the Church and national law. But over succeeding centuries, at the expense of royal and noble hegemony, it became a cornerstone of English democracy– and indeed, democracy as we know it in the West.
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