Daily Archives: February 15, 2022

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Through a Native American Land Acknowledgement statement, The University of Texas at Arlington is formally recognizing its campus historic ties to Indigenous peoples.

The statement, developed by a UTA task force comprising faculty members, staff and studentsmany with Native American ancestryis a public recognition of UTAs ties to Native American lands and history. It reads:

UT Arlington respectfully acknowledges the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes upon whose historical homelands this University is located. Their ancestors resided here for generations before being forcibly displaced by U.S. settlers and soldiers in the mid-1800s. We recognize the historical presence of the Caddo Nation and other Tribal Nations in the region; the ongoing presence and achievements of many people who moved to the area due to the Indian Relocation program of the 1950s and 1960s; and the vital presence and accomplishments of our Native students, faculty, and staff.

Task force member Les Riding In, assistant dean in the College of Liberal Arts, said the land acknowledgement statement is a call to action.

We aim to continue to embark on more related efforts, including adopting a Native American oversight council, transforming an area on campus for individual and institutional reflection and a Native American student scholarship endowed with a gift, Riding In said.

Groups associated with the Caddo nation, including the Keechiwho are now enrolled in Wichita and Affiliated Tribeshad built a village in the area of what is now Arlington by the early 1840s, Conrad said.

Kenneth Roemer, professor emeritus of English and a member of the task force, said other land acknowledgement statements have the unintended consequence of suggesting that Native peoples are of the past. The UTA statement took care to emphasize the present contributions of Indigenous peoples.

This statement is a living document and takes care to highlight the continued presence of Native Americans in Arlington and North Texas in the present, he said.

UT Arlingtons support of the Native American community has earned recognition nationally. For five years in a row, UTA has been listed among the nations best universities for Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students by Winds of Change, a publication of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. The magazine evaluates and ranks the top 200 universities with strong Native American communities and academic support systems in place for student success.

In addition, UTAs Native American Student Association is the longest continuously running student group in Texas that supports Native American interests.

Im proud our students have been involved in the process, said Sampson Dewey, task force member and president of the student association. With the help of all the faculty and staff who have been involved, this statement is a huge show of support to the Native American community, and thats what our student organization is all about.

Task force members

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'A call to action' - News Center - The University of Texas at Arlington - uta.edu

Many people have argued almost since inauguration day that President Biden is not the one running America on a daily basis or making many of the decisions. The normal guessing game about who is running the show focuses on Bidens chief of staff, close advisors like the secretary of state and national security advisor, the Vice President, and the First Lady, among others.

But forget the palace intrigue at The White House for a moment. Who is calling the shots as to what you, I, or anyone, especially public figures, can think or say on television, in print, or on social media?

That there is a liberal media mob in America is not new or even news, though the elites that own the major networks and their top anchors still fail to see or acknowledge this mob. Its the equivalent of pointing out the surroundings to a school of swimming fish. What water? the fish would retort.

One need only look to yesterday for the latest example of someone who stepped on a liberal land mine. Former Democrat presidential candidateAndrew Yangdefended Joe Rogan, on whose show he appeared in 2019, in a tweet that noted Rogan is not racist. I dont think Joe Rogan is a racist the man interacts with and works with black people literally all of the time. Yang added, Do I know black friends of Joes who wouldswear by him? Yes, I do.

The Twitter Universe lit up. The social media backlash was swift and fierce.

We often hear terms and phrases like that. But what or who exactly is the Twitter Universe? Its not an easy question to answer. But it seems clearthere is a cabal of liberal elite activists who monitor speech in America, especially that of political figures and the Hollywood crowd. Straying from the progressive playbook risks public punishment. Of course, its not always known ahead of time what can be said, or what will be tolerated by the cabal. After all, the playbook isnt an actual, physical book.

So, what is the definition of a cabal? Oxford Languages says, a secret political clique or faction. Merriam Webster says, the contrived schemes of a group of persons secretly united in a plot.

People essentially have two choices when the cabal comes for you. You can either repent or double down on what you said or think. Choose the former, and you might continue to be relevant, perhaps able to appear again on radio or television or be able to run for office again. Choose the latter, and you risk being marginalized, pilloried, or ultimately canceled.

Back to Andrew Yang. He repented within 24 hours. I deleted the tweet because it was wrong-headed. It also hurt people, which is never my intent. Im sorry. Im learning and appreciate those who reached out to express their feelings. Yang will likely survive.

Who dares double down? J.K. Rowling did. Were familiar with the Harry Potter authors war with leftist cabals over her initial tweet that only women menstruate. She continued to stand with biology. She explained being an ally of the LGBTQ and trans community when it came to discrimination. No matter. She has essentially been canceled.

Remember actor John Cena calling Taiwan, which is a free and capitalist bastion, a country? That offended Chinas communist party. Cena was quick to apologize to the communists.

Why should we care about leftist cabals? Because no one is safe. Freedom of speech and/or expressing ones opinion is becoming dangerous. The losers are all of us, as more speech has always been considered healthy in a free and enlightened society.

Leftist cabals have even had a chilling effect on comedy. If there was one group that has historically been allowed to criticize, make fun of, or say whatever they wanted, it has been comedians. Comedians now fear the cabals in practicing their craft. Everything and everyone used to be on the table. No person or political party was safe. That was the point of comedy. We wanted to laugh. No more.

Look at the flack that comedian Bill Maher, a staunch liberal, has been getting for a year. Whos angry at him? MAGA supporters? GOP Congressmen? Right-wing media? No. Its leftist cabals. What is Mahers crime? Maher has been outing the cancel crowd and progressives for being so far outside the mainstream that even liberals like him dont recognize what it is to be a Democrat anymore.

We need free speech and more of it. We need the Joe Rogans of the world to question those in authority of all stripes. We need the contrarians, like Dr. Scott Atlas, to take on groupthink. Remember when he said in June 2020 that kids belong in school for in-person learning? Atlas was called things unfit to print here, yet the American Society of Pediatrics concurred with him just one month later.

The point is this. One need not agree with, like, believe, or even care what Andrew Yang, Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, or Dr. Scott Atlas thinks or says. But surely society as a whole is better off hearing from many voices across the political spectrum, and the names in this essay are indeed that. The alternative is to allow a cabal of nameless, leftist elites from academia, Hollywood, and the media mob to narrow what we hear and, worse, what we can say or think.

Jeff Szymanski works in political communications for AMAC, a senior benefits organization with nearly 2.4 million members. He previously taught high school economics for 15 years.

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Leftist Cabals Are Calling the Shots in America - AMAC

Exodus is the account of the newly freed children of Abraham leaving the slavery of Egypt behind. This narrative has inspired and continues to inspire countless people.Every year, millions observe the Passover and recount the inspiring story of deliverance, freedom and of the long march to the land of promise. Abolitionists found hope and inspiration in the biblical account.Escaped slave Harriet Tubman came to be known as "Moses" as she made 13 missionary trips to rescue approximately 70 slaves.Civil rights leaders, many of whom were clergymen, made liberal use of the Exodus account. Martin Luther King, Jr., borrowing from the experience of Moses, declared that he had "been to the mountaintop" and that he had "seen the promised land."In the fullness of time, God sent his son, a prophet, like Moses, Jesus. On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper at the Passover.That night, he predicted a deliverance of a different kind deliverance from sin and sin's consequences. Soon, Christ, the perfect Passover lamb, would be slain. By his blood, many would be saved and the sins of the world would be removed.After his resurrection, Jesus would be proclaimed by Peter in Jerusalem and 3,000 would put their faith in their deliverer, Jesus. They would repent and turn their backs on the "Egypt" of sin and be baptized into Christ as Israel had been baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea.Set free, the 3,000 would begin their long march to the Promised Land and a new Jesus would lead them home. On the way, he would provide the "Bread of Life" and the "Living Water" as God had provided manna and water from the Rock, Jesus.Yes, Jesus still leads those willing to follow him to the Father's house. He is "the Way and the Truth and the Life." No one comes to the father except through him.

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Faith & Insight: John 14:6: Have you experienced the Exodus? - Nevada Appeal

On January 23, voters went to the polls in the city of Nago, located in northern Okinawa, Japan. The incumbent, Toguchi Taketoyo, supported by the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), defeated his challenger Kishimoto Yohei by 57.5 to 42.5 percent. The outcome reflected a mood of powerlessness in Okinawa that the Japanese state has cultivated through decades of obduracy and high-handed policies.

About an hours drive from the Okinawan capital, Naha, and with a population of sixty-one thousand, Nago may not be an especially large or important Japanese city. However, this election took on particular importance because the city contains the site of a major military base that the Japanese authorities are building for the US Marine Corps. The contradictions of the Japanese state and its relations with the US are most evident in a peripheral space like Nago.

Okinawa, which is closer to Shanghai than Tokyo, was only incorporated directly into the Japanese state in the late nineteenth century as Okinawa Prefecture, annulling the long-established Ryukyu Kingdom. The island was the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting between Japan and the United States in the Pacific War. Its geographical location and role as a US military hub mean that it would be in the front line of any China-US confrontation.

The danger of being embroiled in conflict, combined with the land-grabbing of foreign military bases and the many abuses committed by US soldiers, have stoked passionate opposition to the US presence. However, the authorities in Tokyo have repeatedly thwarted efforts to close and return the bases, committed as they are to a role as Washingtons client state in the region.

Marine Corps Air Station Futenma is one of about eight hundred US bases around the world. A cluster of those bases have occupied about a quarter of the prefectures land on the island of Okinawa since 1945. Futenma sits on 480 hectares of prime land in the middle of the township of Ginowan, close to Naha.

The Japanese state covers most of the cost of maintaining bases like Futenma, so it is cheaper for the United States to station its forces there than it would be to maintain them on US domestic soil. Washington has deployed units based in Okinawa at will everywhere from Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s to Iraq in recent decades.

In 1995, the abduction and rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by three US servicemen put the whole base arrangement on the island in jeopardy. A 1996 article for the Brookings Institution described the situation at the time:

Japans smallest and poorest prefecture, Okinawa houses about three-fourths of the US military facilities and two-thirds of the 45,000 American troops in Japan. Roughly 20,000 of the 29,000 troops on Okinawa are Marines. Artillery firings, low-flying aircraft, and other military exercises disrupt Okinawans daily lives, as do the thousands of crimes committed by US soldiers since 1972, when Okinawa was formally returned to Japan by the United States after 27 years of occupation.

It seemed essential for the US and Japanese governments to promise the return of some base land in order to defuse the wave of anger across the island and maintain US hegemony in the long run.

In April 1996, Japanese prime minister Hashimoto Ryutaro and US ambassador Walter Mondale announced that the Futenma base would return to Japanese control within five to seven years. I well recall my astonishment on hearing this news at the time. It seemed too good to be true, as indeed it proved to be.

The reversion hinged on the construction of a substitute facility. That facility would have to be in Okinawa, at a place called Henoko, on Oura Bay, which happened to be within the boundaries of Nago City.

Initial plans coyly described the new base as a heliport, but its dimensions grew and grew, with a monstrous 1,800-meter dual runway structure, protruding ten meters above the surrounding sea, now slowly beginning to take shape. Henoko would also possess a deep-sea port and ordnance storage facility, making it much grander and more multifunctional than the troublesome Futenma base it was supposed to replace.

The insistence of the Japanese government on constructing such a facility, against strong Okinawan opposition to it at prefectural, city, and village levels, has been a recurrent flashpoint in Japanese politics. The only occasion on which elected officials in Nago City ever consented to the bases construction was in 1999. The mayor at the time, Kishimoto Tateo, whose son Kishimoto Yohei was the unsuccessful candidate this year, agreed to a highly restricted formula for a joint US-Japan facility, not a solely US base, with a limited life span of fifteen years, and governed by the strictest environmental regulations.

The Japanese authorities never drew up any such plan, let alone put it into effect. The only prefectural governor to give his consent, Nakaima Hirokazu in December 2013, reversed his own electoral pledge to do so. He made it clear his understanding was that Futenma should revert to Japanese control within fifteen years in other words, by 2028.

The national government never took that time limit seriously either. Today, Futenma remains in operation, and the latest estimated date for its reversion and the opening of Henoko is circa 2040, a full thirty-five years after the five to seven years that were promised in 1998, or twelve after the date agreed to in 2013.

When Okinawans, especially residents of Nago City, have had the opportunity to express their views, they have made their opposition to any new base clear, from the 1997 Nago plebiscite (54 percent opposition) to the prefectural opinion survey of 2019 (70 percent opposition) to the polls taken on the eve of the 2022 election (62 percent opposition). Just before the 2022 poll, despite decades of determined government insistence that the works would proceed, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper only found 24 percent of Nago people in favor of construction.

We cannot consider the 2022 election as a statement of Nago sentiment on the Henoko project because it pitted one candidate, Kishimoto, who took a resolutely anti-base stance, against another, Toguchi, who refused to express any view on the matter. Toguchis two election victories in 2018 and 2022 were the culmination of decades of national government cajolery, intimidation, and deception.

In 2022, Toguchi declared that the base was solely a matter for the national and prefectural governments, and confined his campaign to the carrots on offer from Tokyo by way of better services for the city, such as free childcare, school lunches, and medical care for children. He never acknowledged that these were the states quid for the citys quo of silent cooperation on the base.

From the start, the national government did not take seriously the various agreements on reversion, from the 1996 Mondale-Hashimoto announcement to the Nakaima pledge of 2013. Both set time limits that have long passed. Okinawans have learned that their national government is not to be trusted. Their experience is of a Japan that routinely denies democracy and the human rights of Okinawans.

What the national government strives to cultivate in Nago is not democratic citizenship and sovereignty but a mood of akirame, or hopelessness. Why bother to vote when you know the government will pay no attention? The 68 percent voting rate in 2022 was the lowest on record, 8.6 percent below the 2018 figure. We can understand this, at least in part, as an expression of that hopelessness.

Anti-base activists understand this mood of hopelessness not as related to base construction per se, but rather as a sense of despair with the idea of ever persuading the government to change course through the ballot box. The most Nagos citizens can hope to gain from elections is financial benefit, not the cancellation of the base. Their voting for conservative candidates thus made some sense in the undemocratic and heavily weighted system.

The LDP government in Tokyo greeted Toguchis victory as a green light for base reclamation and construction. However, it remains far from clear whether the base will, or can, ever be built. The site is especially ill-suited to any large construction because of the mayonnaise-like soft ocean floor and the dual fault lines crossing the bay in its vicinity.

Moreover, despite the election result, the Okinawan opposition has declared its intention to persist in on-site protest and court actions. In 2021, when the national government asked prefectural governor Tamaki Denny to agree to a major redrawing of the reclamation and construction design, Tamaki bluntly refused to give his consent. Okinawa, he said, would not cooperate.

Fifty years after Okinawas supposed reversion from US to Japanese control, much of it, including Futenma, remains in US hands, increasingly subject to Washingtons agenda of preparation for a new war against China. If the Henoko base is built, opening around 2040, it will lock Japan into subordination to the US on its eastern flank and hostility to its giant and indispensable neighbor to the west for decades to come.

Such a Japan might become the worlds third-greatest military power if the government presses ahead with current plans to double military spending. Yet that is unlikely to deliver peace or security for the Japanese people.

As the Nago election campaign approached its climax, a huge US-Japanese armada of ten warships, including two US aircraft carriers (the Carl Vinson and the Abraham Lincoln) and the Japanese helicopter destroyer Hyuga, maneuvered threateningly in the waters of the East China Sea, between Okinawa and Taiwan. The prospect of a Taiwan yuji (contingency) becomes ever more plausible. If that prospect were to materialize, Okinawa could anticipate devastation akin to what it suffered in 1945.

For roughly five hundred years between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, Okinawa, as the Ryukyu Kingdom, enjoyed close, more or less friendly relations with mainland Japan, China itself, and the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. Demilitarized, it threatened no one and faced no threats. Today, too, the islands security would be much better served by pursuing the agenda of regional disarmament and cooperation rather than that of US and Japanese militarism.

The rest is here:

Japanese Militarism Has Put the People of Okinawa on the Firing Line - Jacobin magazine

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Park Avenue synagogue said last week he didnt want to respond from the pulpit to the Amnesty International report charging Israel with apartheid and instead let his congregants go to Israel lobby groups AIPAC and the ADL and J Street to read their disavowals of Amnesty but he couldnt help himself because hes committed his synagogue to supporting Israel. So Cosgrove spent 15 minutes trashing a report he admits he hasnt read, because thats what you do when a family member is attacked from the outside.

I reviewed the Conservative rabbis sermon closely because: Cosgrove is forthright about his commitment to Zionism in a religious setting, as so many rabbis are. So This Is What It Means to Be Jewish for the Jewish Establishment; rabbinical umbrella groups have called on rabbis to denounce the report from their pulpits. Yet Cosgrove is out of step with the only Jewish future. Fully a quarter of American Jews disagree with him; they think Israel is practicing apartheid. Among young Jews, that portion is nearly 40 percent. Jewish intellectuals call for Separation from the thug nation.

Cosgrove admits that he has only read the executive summary of the report, but sees that it is the latest in a decades long drumbeat of anti-Israel sentiment emanating from the halls of the UN and a handful of other human rights NGOs.

He says hes thought long and hard about whether to speak about the report, which has been out for five days, and doesnt want to turn the pulpit into political theater. But he overcame his reluctance, because hes a Zionist. This is an honest ideological confession:

I do so because for me Israel is part and parcel to my Jewish identity, its central to my vision of the rabbinate, and as long as Im the rabbi of Park Avenue, it will remain central to the mission of this synagogue. I want you, your children, your grandchildren to keep kosher to create Jewish families to live proudly as Zionists. None of us chose to live in this miraculous era of a sovereign Jewish state where after thousands of years of exile Jews have the right to national self-determination For me to be Jewish today means to be actively engaged with Israel. Regardless of whether the claims of Amnesty are new, to fail to address those claims strikes me as an abdication of my role as a Jewish educator.

So after 1000s of years of exile documented in the bible, people gain political rights to a land from which they ethnically cleanse the indigenous people, and its a miracle. (This is called Koolaid.)

Cosgrove hammers the point of the Jewish peoples claim to the land and says Amnestys questioning of that claim betrays a bias that colors every other claim it makes. After all if the Jews have no right to the land, then Israel is a national project conceived in sin, its very creation an act of dispossession.

Cosgrove says hes also speaking as a father, with children on campus. We must provide the tools to contend with the Amnesty report and the like For Zions sake, I must not stay silent. Imho, telling your kids that Jews were exiled from the land 1000s of years ago and thats why they have special political rights now is not going to be a good tool on campus.

The rabbi is defensive about the new climate of delegitimization of Israel. Apartheid is clickbait for the feeding frenzy of Israels detractors. The singling out of Israel is antisemitic. The report serves as a respectable hook for people who hate Jews.

And heres the family bit. For Israels defenders, this report has shifted everyone into a defensive posture and thus excuse any of Israels actual misdeeds. I have all sorts of criticisms of Israel, its systematic and ongoing restrictions of Palestinian rights, its repeated actions impeding Palestinian sovereignty, most recently the illegal outpost on Evyatar, Israels inability to house liberal expressions of Jewish life, most recently the collapse of the Kotel deal. But today Im not giving full voice to any of those criticisms because well, when a family member is attacked from the outside, thats not what one does.

Cosgrove concludes by saying that the Amnesty report will make peace harder because both sides will just dig in. This is the old argument that Israelis must be hugged to change. But when you hug them, they just evict more Palestinians and dance outside their homes. The news is not good for Zionist rabbis.

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Slamming Amnesty's 'Israeli apartheid' report as 'attack on a family member from outside,' leading rabbi locks out the Jewish future - Mondoweiss

George Prescott Bush was just sixteen when he first took the political world by storm. The year was 1992, the setting the Republican National Convention at the Astrodome in Houston, where his grandfather would be nominated for reelection as president. On the third day of the convention, Barbara Bush, looking matriarchal and resplendent in a pearl necklace, invited her clan on stage, all twenty-two of them. There was P.s uncle George W. Bush. His dad, Jeb, and his mom, Columba, who had met in her native Mexico when they were still in their teens. And a lot of young grandchildren, including a tot wearing an Enron hat. But the speaking slot was reserved for just one family member: George P., our eldest grandson, from Miami, Florida.

Young P. had the awkward swagger of a sixteen-year-old boy, but he delivered his lines with conviction. In a presidential campaign, its hard for people to get a sense of what makes the candidates tick. The family is what makes my grandfather tick, he said. Later, after he finished reading excerpts from a letter from his grandfather, the crowd broke into a chant: George P.! George P.! George P.! Jeb beamed. Seconds later, P.named after his great-grandfather, U.S. senator Prescott Bush, from Connecticutwrapped it up, improvising Viva Bush! and a fist pump. A star was born.

The next decade would see the full flourishing of the Bush dynasty. George W. would parlay his tenure as Texas governor into the presidency. Jeb would become governor of Florida. And P.? By the time he spoke at the 2000 RNC, slipping Spanish into his speech as handmade signs in the crowd declared him a hunk, he had become the face of the familys future. He was young, bilingual, and handsome, with a world-class smile, and was the subject of gushing press coverage. His grandfather had been the forty-first president; his uncle was about to be the forty-third. Some family insiders would soon be calling P. forty-seven.

But two decades later, the Bush dynasty is hanging by a thread. George W. is spending his post-presidency painting portraits of military veterans and immigrants. Jeb is an almost-forgotten punch line from his humiliating 2016 campaign for president. And 2018 saw the death of George H.W., the paterfamilias whose passing occasioned nostalgia in some quarters for a more genteel era of Republican politics. The third or fourth generationbut whos counting?has not been as politically potent as previous ones. When Pierce Bush, P.s cousin, ran for a Houston-area congressional seat in 2020, he came in a distant third in the GOP primary. Barbara and Jenna and Jebby Jr. have evinced little interest in the family business. If there is a future for the Bush brand, it must be carried by the man H.W. once introduced as one of the little brown ones.

George P. Bush has been working for many years to position himself as the next Bush in the line of succession, said Bill Minutaglio, an Austin author who wrote one of the earliest books on the Bush family. Now he may be the last fading gasp of the Bush political dynasty.

After almost two terms as Texas land commissioner, a venerable but obscure statewide post, George P. is running in a chaotic, four-way GOP primary for Texas attorney generala race that his spokesperson calls a circus. Bushes have always been good at remaking themselves to suit changing political tides, but P. faces a particularly daunting task. He has staked his fortunes on convincing Republican primary voters that he is loyal to his familys number one tormentor, Donald J. Trump. He must count on voters seeing him as part of the GOPs future, rather than an irritating reminder of a kinder, gentler, more establishment Republicanism.

The stage for this somewhat Shakespearean drama is a tawdry one. The office is currently held by Ken Paxton, the states almost comically corrupt top law enforcement official. Elected in 2014, Paxton has been under indictment for securities fraud for the last six and a half years, charges hes managed to keep perpetually at bay through some nifty legal legerdemain. Hes also under investigation by the FBI for bribery and abuse of office after eight of his top aides went to the authorities with their concerns. Oh, and he cheated on his wifea fact that became publicly known after Paxtonsaides said he asked a wealthy donor at the center of the bribery scandal to give his lover a job.

But the incumbent is a survivor. Like Governor Greg Abbott, the attorney general before him, Paxton has used the office to relentlessly sue the federal government and please the right-wing Republican base. Most infamously, he ingratiated himself with Trump and his followers with a lawsuit in December 2020 aimed at tossing out election results in four states that voted for Biden.

There are two other challengers. Eva Guzman is a distinguished jurist with a compelling story of working her way up from poverty in a Houston barrio to the Texas Supreme Court. Leaning heavily on her legal credentials, she has raised more money than her competitors, though shes consistently polled in last place. The final entrant is Louie Gohmert, the wild-eyed, nine-term East Texas congressman whose name is synonymous with the angry, conspiracy-prone fringe. All three challengers have the same goal: hold Paxton under 50 percent on March 1 and get into a May runoff with the incumbent.

Bush, Gohmert, and Guzman are all warning that Paxton, if nominated, could face federal criminal indictment, potentially robbing Texas conservatives of a key battle station in the culture wars. The policy differences are slight. All four want to build the wall, crack down on the illegals, and banish critical race theory from Texas classrooms. These are largely hearts-and-minds campaigns, a competition to see who can conjure the MAGA spirit most convincingly.

Bush is in a tough spot. Trump has been insulting the Bush family for more than a decade. In 2013, as P. geared up his land commissioner campaign, the future president took to Twitter to call for no more Bushes! He repeatedly humiliated Jeb Bush in the 2016 campaign, dogging the former Florida governor as low-energy and a mamas boy and reducing him, at one low point, to pleading with attendees at a campaign event to please clap. He has mocked George W. Bushs failed and uninspiring presidency. As president, he bragged to Fox News about ending the Bush dynasty.

At first, when Trump emerged as a 2016 contender, P. seemed to put family first. Three months after Jeb dropped out of the race, P. was tapped to head up the Texas GOPs statewide election strategy. But when asked if he would endorse Trump, P. initially said he couldnt because of concerns about his rhetoric and his inability to create a campaign that brings people together. That summer, however, Bush changed his mind. In August, P. backed Trumps presidential bid, albeit tepidly. From Team Bush, its a bitter pill to swallow, but you know what? You get back up, and you help the man that won, and you make sure that we stop Hillary Clinton, he said.

In the years since, P.s stance has gone from awkward embrace of Trump to smothering bear hug. Fealty has had its rewards. Trump endorsed Bush during his 2018 reelection bid for land commissioner, and in 2019, at an event in Crosby, Texas, Trump enthused that P. was the only Bush that likes me. The quote resurfaced a couple years lateron koozies that Team Bush circulated at P.s announcement party for attorney general. The internet was not kind. This is Please clap in koozie form, said one wag on Twitter. For his announcement, Bush descended a staircase to greet his fansa tableau vaguely reminiscent of Trump riding down the escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. Bush didnt rant about Mexican rapists, but he offered a diluted version of Trumps obsessions. P. complained about open borders, promised never to apologize for backing the thin blue line, and bragged that he was the only member of the Bush family to endorse Donald J. Trump for president of the United States.

If there were any doubts about the power dynamics in the relationship, however, Trump put them to rest a few months later, when he snubbed Bush by endorsing Paxton. Many questioned why Bush had bothered prostrating himself. After all, Trumps warm embrace of Paxton made complete sense: the two men share a fondness for breaking norms and flirting with the outer limits of the law. Also, Trump had bragged about breaking the Bush dynasty. Was he really going to stand aside for its encore performance?

Paxton can certainly smell a whiff of desperation. In a recent fund-raising letter, headlined with Trumps ringing endorsement of Paxton, he painted Bush as a fortunate son. Referring to P. twice as Jeb Bushs son, Paxton wrote, Hes probably been told since he was a child that his destiny is to run for governor and then president.

Some of P.s earliest friends and supporters found the courting of Trump both disturbing and politically inept. Former Republican state representative Jason Villalba, a Dallas centrist who worked with Bush to recruit Hispanics into the GOP, said he counseled P. not to suck up to Trump too much. I told him, Youre never going to make those people happy. And even if Trump had endorsed him, I dont think it would have changed one vote in Texas from Ken Paxton to George P. Bush. Bushs response? He didnt say anything. When someone tells you the frank truth like that, usually you dont respond.

The Alcove Cantina, a Mexican restaurant and bar in the historic district of Round Rock, a big Austin suburb, has a comfy outdoor patio area, complete with a stage and architectural touches from when the building was an ice cream parlor during Prohibition. It seemed a perfect setting for a small political gathering on a warm January evening during the worst of the COVID-19 omicron surge. But the George P. Bush campaign opted to hold its event inside, to better highlight the way pandemic restrictions had hurt Texas restaurants and bars.

About fifty supporters were packed into the bar to hear from the 45-year-old land commissioner. The crowd was a mix of Texas General Land Office employees, local Republican pooh-bahs, curious voters, a law enforcement official or two, P.s wifes cousin, and a college kid who told me he was there just to seek an internship with Bush and lamented that the GOP has gone off the rails. The event was part of Bushs two-month cross-state push to connect with the grassroots and promote his Texas First agenda.

Bushs delivery was typically polished, if a bit stiff. During his stump speeches, he toggles from talking up somewhat technocratic points about veterans programs at the GLO to darkly accusing liberals of the wholesale indoctrination of our schoolchildren. Like his father, Jeb, he doesnt come across as having a tremendous fire in his belly, but the crowd was receptive enough to his promises to run the Texas attorney generals office as a conservative without corruption.

In keeping with the GOP playbook in 2022, Bushs not-too-subtle echo of Trumps America First nationalism spotlights a martial vision of law and order: full-throated support for law enforcement and aggressive pushback against what Bush calls deadbeat county DAs and liberal mayors. But its the border that takes center stage.

Were going to focus on securing the border first and foremost, P. said. Joe Biden campaigned on the idea that he wasnt going to build another inch of wall. Well, hes right. Were going to build miles and miles of Texas walland it starts on GLO acreage. In January Bush pledged to have 1.8 miles of border wall built on GLO-owned land in Starr County by the end of the month. (When I checked back with the campaign in early February, a spokesperson said the completion date had moved to June.) He vowed that as attorney general he would finish President Trumps wall, send attorneys from the AGs office to the border to assist with prosecutions of border crossers, and sue the Biden administration over its open border policies.

If P. feels any regret about so nakedly seeking Trumps blessing, he hasnt shown it. His campaign literature features a photo of the two men shaking hands at the 2019 Crosby event and disingenuously touts P. as an early endorser of President Trump. When I asked him whether Trumps snub stung, during a brief interview in Round Rock, Bush responded by saying, Trump is the center of the Republican party; hes the life of the party. As to the pluses and minuses of the family name, he deployed a line hes been using for two decades, one that his father used too: Im my own man. He elaborated: I obviously love my family, respect their service. They brought me into politics, the craziness of politics, but Im my own man.

If the Trumpist gambit is politically necessary, its also occasionally cringeworthy. One of P.s ads shows him driving a four-wheeler alongside a section of border wall, an awkward image that has just a whiff of Michael Dukakis on a tank. (Strangely, the ad inadvertently depicts the futility of the wall; it includes footage of two men easily scaling the structure while wearing what appear to be heavily loaded backpacks.)

George P. is Exhibit A of the challenge of being a legacy candidate in todays Republican party, said Mark McKinnon, a onetime close adviser to George W. Bush. He gets the advantage of name ID, but all the baggage associated with being part of a pre-Trump dynasty. Hes trying to thread the needle, but the eye just keeps getting smaller. Still, McKinnon added, hes got a lot of talent, and if anyone can pull it off, he can.

While some have painted P. as a family turncoat, theres another way of thinking about himas the latest practitioner of the Bushes talent for reinvention. George H.W. Bush left Connecticut, and his blue-blood roots, and moved to West Texas to make his name and fortune in the oil patch. He began his career in electoral politics by running for the chairmanship of the Harris County Republican Party to prevent the John Birch Society from taking over, only to bring the far-right, anti-communist group into the fold after he won. When he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 1964, H.W. knocked the liberal incumbent, Ralph Yarborough, for supporting the Civil Rights Act, even though he privately regretted taking a position that encouraged racists. In the 1980 Republican presidential primary, he was sharply critical of Ronald Reagan and his voodoo economicsbut he moved to the right as soon as he got the nod for vice president. His son, hard-partying frat boy George W., became a brush-clearing born-again Christian, then governed Texas as a bipartisan champion of education before running the country as a staunch conservative.

Mark Updegrove, an Austin-based presidential historian who interviewed the two president Bushes for a 2017 book about their relationship, said the family has always hewed to an ends-justify-the-means political pragmatism. The Bushes do what they need to do in order to obtain political power, he said. But when they exercise it, they do their very best to reflect their core values as a family and as Americans.

Several P. supporters I spoke with shrugged off his Trumpian turn as just typical election-year politicking. What else was he supposed to do? And, of course, theres a chance P.s gambit will work. At the Round Rock event, I asked a supporter whether the Bush name did anything for him. I dont love dynasties, he said. And frankly, I dont think the legacy is a great legacy. With P. standing just a few feet away, he added, Little Bush was a fup, referring to George W. The idiot in Florida is still an idiot, he said of P.s father. But P., he said, doesnt seem like the predecessors.

The groundwork for P.s electoral career was laid over many years. After earning his undergraduate degree from Rice University, followed by a year teaching at an inner-city school in Florida, he received his law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Then came brief stints as a corporate lawyer, real estate investor, and Navy Reserve officer with a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He and his family resided in Dallas, then Fort Worth, then Austin. In 2009 he helped start a political action committee, Hispanic Republicans of Texas, to cultivate Latino conservative talent. Along the way, Bush campaigned for his father and uncle and perfected his answer to the perennial question of when he himself would run. Its easy for a guy in my shoes to run for office, P. said in 2005. But I want to get there on my own merits, not just because Im part of the Bush family or because I carry the name George Bush.

Bush has claimed his earliest memory is from 1980, when he was four years old, standing onstage at some political event wearing a Bush for President T-shirt. (His grandfather lost to Reagan that year.) At age twelve, in 1988, he led the Pledge of Allegiance at the Republican National Convention. In 2000, eight years after his Viva Bush! speech, he hit the campaign trail for George W.the handsome face and bilingual voice of a new, diverse GOP. Im glad to be introduced by the man in our family, his uncle joked at a campaign event in 2000, el hombre guapo, el estrella. The press ate it up. People magazine named P. one of the nations hundred most eligible bachelors. He later did some modeling, and it became almost a media clich to refer to P. as the Ricky Martin of Republican politics. The Bush With Muy Guapo Appeal, proclaimed a headline from the Los Angeles Times.

Early on, young P. seemed to understand his dilemma. The Bush name opened doors, but it could also be a burden. Its a kind of unwritten law, I think, carrying the name George Bush, he told an interviewer in 2000. At times I ask myself, Am I going to be able to live my life the way I want to? Im cautious about doing certain things.

Caution is indeed one of P.s hallmarks. Though his longtime allies and friends describe him as the most conservative Bush, his policy preferences have often been maddeningly vague. While campaigning for George W., he generally embraced his uncles brand of Republicanism and declined to elaborate on what parts he disagreed with. On immigration, P. favored comprehensive reforma path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, plus stepped-up border securityand he occasionally expressed a trenchant critique of U.S. policy. In 2004, when he went to Mexico to drum up votes among American expats for his uncles reelection campaign, P. described Border Patrols use of plastic pellet guns as kind of barbarous and blamed it on immigration agents acting macho. In one of his first brushes with the gathering anti-amnesty forces on the right, Michelle Malkin excoriated him for impugning Border Patrol agents.

Lesson learned. Seventeen years later, in 2021, when immigration agents on horseback provoked outrage after they were photographed aggressively confronting Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Bush, who has been endorsed by the Border Patrol union, rushed to their defense. He told Fox News that the Biden administrations attempts to disparage our Border Patrol are out of control.

Bushs formal entrance into electoral politics was cautious too. In 2012 he announced that he would be running in two yearsbut for which office he didnt know. Trey Newton, a Republican operative who managed Bushs first campaign, recalls the moment Bush told him about his plans: It was kinda funny. He made this comment, Hey, I think Im gonna run. And I said, Well, youre a Bush; isnt that what yall do?

Late in 2012, his overeager dad perhaps jumped the gun by writing to supporters about P.s interest in the General Land Office. He concluded by asking the potential donors to write a personal check to his sons campaign.

The General Land Office oversees the $48 billion permanent school fund, various veterans programs, and Texas coastal issues. Once in office, Bush would take heat for self-deprecatingly comparing his post to dogcatcher, but entering politics at this level seemed to suit both his cautious nature and his long-term ambitions. He hadnt wanted to run in a competitive primary, and Jerry Patterson, the sitting land commissioner, was stepping down at the end of 2014 to run for lieutenant governor. Prodigious fund-raising and the surname Bush cleared out any Republican competition.

By then, with comprehensive immigration reform a distant memory and the tea party movement in full bloom, P. had learned to finesse his more moderate views, if not bury them. His campaign website made no mention of immigration. When pressed by the Texas Tribunes Evan Smith to state his position on immigration reform during a rare onstage interview in 2014, Bush explained that while he favored an overall solution, it was up to the feds to solve. When Smith kept pressing, he offered lukewarm support for in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants.

Bush had plenty to say, however, about national issues far beyond the purview of the GLO. As he talked up private school vouchersa perennially pushed, perennially failed idea loathed by many rural RepublicansBush came up with a novel triangulation, a sort of half-pregnant formulation: Im a full advocate for private vouchers in limited instances. After conservative activists pounced on P. for seemingly acknowledging the existence of climate change, his campaign unfairly blamed a reporter for misrepresenting his views. None of it mattered all that much. Bush beat his Democratic opponent 6135.

His tenure of the GLO got off to a rocky start. Soon after taking over the agency, he launched an ambitious, high-profile redevelopment of the Alamo. He took over management of the site from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and partnered with the city of San Antonio on a plan to transform the site from a shabby tourist trap to a more respectful and historically informed destination.

For those deeply invested in the Alamo myth, the plan prompted about as much enthusiasm as Ozzy Osbourne peeing on the Alamo grounds. They saw the redevelopment as a harebrained desecration of the martyrs of 1836. In particular, a proposal to move the cenotapha 56-foot-high monument inscribed with the names of slain Texians and Tejanos, many of them misspelledincensed a cadre of modern-day Alamo defenders, some of whom launched heavily armed protests.

In 2018 Bush had to fend off a challenge from Jerry Patterson, his predecessor. He won comfortably, but the scandal soured P.s relationships with elements of the GOP grassroots. It confirmed, for some, a long-term suspicion: This guy isnt one of us.

The other big scandal on Bushs watch has arguably been more damaging: his handling of Hurricane Harvey recovery. In the aftermath of the 2017 stormthe most destructive in Texas history since 1900Governor Abbott put Bush and the General Land Office in charge of long-term rebuilding. It was an opportunity to elevate the status of the agency, not to mention P.s own profile, while doing something indisputably praiseworthy: putting Texans back in their homes and preparing for the next storm. But the recovery has been hampered for years by a series of controversial GLO decisions on how to distribute $2.1 billion in funds meant to build infrastructure to protect against future flooding.

Perhaps the most consequential came in May 2021, just a few weeks before the launch of P.s attorney general campaign. Leaders in Houston and Harris County, which were particularly devastated by Harvey, reacted in horror when they learned how much they would be getting out of $1 billion earmarked for flood mitigation: nothing. The same went for the counties covering Corpus Christi, Beaumont, and Port Arthur that had been hammered by the storm. Instead, the GLO proposed sending every dime to rural communities in southeast Texas, many of which had suffered far less damage. A Houston Chronicle investigation found that the agency had devised a funding formula that punished populous areascommunities that happened to be predominantly Democratic, poor, and non-white.

Bush eventually agreed to ask the feds to send $750 million to Harris County; the city of Houston and the other populous coastal communities, however, would still get nothing. Then, last month, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it was withholding nearly $2 billion in funding after civil rights and housing groups showered the agency with data they said showed that the GLO was discriminating against low-income Texans and Texans of color.

Bush has tried to variously blame the feds and Houston-area Democrats for the bad publicity. At the Round Rock campaign event, he said he had taken on deadbeat liberal mayors, an apparent reference to Houston mayor Sylvester Turner, who is facing accusations that he directed a Harvey-related housing contract to a favored developer. But Bushs defense has been undercut by the fact that the outrage was bipartisan. Also in January, the two Republican commissioners on the Harris County Commissioners Court joined the Democrats in signing a letter urging the feds to bypass the GLO and hand the funds directly to the locals.

Of course, the opinions of local officials dont count for much in todays GOP. Though hard-right criticism of Bush has been muted this campaign seasonGovernor Greg Abbott has attracted most of the ambient rage of the anti-masking, anti-immigrant crowdhe hasnt exactly inspired the activist element. His website lists over a hundred endorsements, about thirty of which are from relatively obscure local law enforcement figures such as Constable Mark Maddog Davison, Liberty County, Precinct Three. Virtually none are from the sort of hard-core grassroots leaders who propel the party.

Paxton, on the other hand, touts a solid list of endorsements from conservative clubs. For groups like the Collin County Conservative Republicans, the choice to support the incumbent was a no-brainer. Paxton has done his job and hes done it very well, and he makes liberals trigger, said Zach Barrett, the president of the group. They squirm every time he comes forth with a lawsuit. Bush was never under serious consideration. I dont care for George P. He tries to separate himself from his family, but Im done with the Bush legacy, I really am. The Bushes are really not conservatives. They are establishment Republican elitists.

But its not clear the establishment is fully showing out for P. Both Paxton and Guzman out-fund-raised Bush during the last half of 2021. Guzman led the pack with $3.7 million in contributions, followed by Paxtons $2.8 million. Bush raised $1.9 million from July through December, while Gohmert brought up the rear with $1 million.

A close inspection of Bushs most recent campaign finance report shows that the Bush family network is still active. Dozens of donors with business, familial, and political connections to George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush have donated to his campaign. Texas Monthly looked at every donor who gave $5,000 or more in the last half of 2021. All told, at least 62individuals and entities who either previously served in a Bush administration, donated to a Bush campaign in the past, or have direct business ties to the familyprovided at least 43 percent of P.s funding from July through December.

The preponderance of former ambassadors, consiglieri, and Bush 43 administration officials gives the report the feel of a stroll down memory lane. The legacy donors include folks like Ray Hunt, the Dallas oilman who was a major backer of George H.W., George W., and Jeb Bush. Hunt gave $50,000 to the P. campaign. Jebs network is in the mix too. Florida developer Sergio Pino, a longtime family friend and major Jeb and George W. contributor, donated $10,000. So did Rio Grande E&P LLC, a private oil exploration and drilling company active in South Texas, which was founded in part by Jeb Bush and his son Jeb Bush Jr. James Baker III, now 91 and still active in Houston civic life, kicked in $2,000. Uncle Marvin Bush? $5,000.

Mark P. Jones, a Texas politics expert at Rice University, said the relatively small donations suggest family loyalty more than deep interest in P. When I look at George P.s donations, I see, effectively, respect for the Bush family, he said. Theyre not giving money to George P. Bush. Theyre giving money to George H.W. Bushs and Barbara Bushs grandson.

Meanwhile, many of the biggest business-friendly donors in Texas are ponying up for Guzman. Her top donor by far is Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC, a nearly $18 million slush fund capitalized by millionaires and billionaires with stakes in construction, finance, oil and gas, real estate, and other industries. TLR previously bankrolled Paxton but had tossed $600,000 to Guzman as of the last reporting cycle. Richard Weekley, the Houston homebuilder and cofounder of TLR, chipped in $500,000. His brother David contributed $50,000. Dallas billionaire Robert Rowling invested a cool $500,000.

Jones has a theory as to why Texas business interests, a conservative but pragmatic bunch, are backing Guzman instead of Bush. Many of them have not been impressed with his tenure as land commissioner, and I think they also believe the Bush name is far too much of a liability in the Republican primary. The thinking, Jones said, is that while he may be able to do well, he isnt going to be able to win a runoff against Ken Paxton.

In a January poll of the race that Jones helped conduct, 37 percent of GOP voters said they would never vote for Bush. Only 11 percent said the same of Paxton. But Bush has consistently polled in second place, behind Paxton. And his supporters talk up his extensive outreach in the conservative Hispanic community. Hidalgo County chair Adrienne Pea-Garza credited P. with helping to build the Republican party in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley long before Trump made head-turning gains in 2020. It was hard for me to not support someone who has supported us so much, Pea-Garza said. George P. Bush has consistently invested in our community and our candidates. He doesnt just show up for election time. His concern here for the red wave is apparent.

So far, George P. Bush has won every race hes runthe two campaigns for land commissioner. In fact, hes the only one in his family to have won his first bid for office. For the next few weeks, P. will be doing everything he can to ensure hes not the first to come up short for the second office hes tried to win.

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Will the Bush Dynasty Die With George P. Bush? - Texas Monthly