Scared about America losing democracy? Texas is already gone

“I might go to Dallas to murder looters,” a then-active duty U.S. Army sergeant named Daniel Perry texted a friend in the spring of 2020, as protest marches over the police murder of George Floyd swept across Texas and the nation. It wasn’t a stray thought. A right-wing extremist, Perry repeatedly told friends of his intention to use violence against people protesting police brutality. He wrote: “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

Perry was making some extra cash driving an Uber in Austin on the night of July 25, 2020, when he stumbled onto his opportunity, coming upon a Black Lives Matter protest in the shadow of the state capitol. He ran through a red light to drive into the crowd, narrowly missing some marchers who then surrounded his vehicle. One of them, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran named Garrett Foster, pushing his quadriplegic girlfriend in a wheelchair, was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle, an act that Texas not only allows but celebrates.

As Foster approached the car, Perry shot him to death.

At his 2023 trial, Perry’s lawyers’ argument of self-defense was not only undercut by witnesses who said Foster never raised or aimed his rifle, but by the sergeant’s own statement to the police: “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” Perry was found guilty of murder by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Just over one year later, Perry is a free man — pardoned by a Texas governor who all but declared open season on political protesters whose views are not favored by his extreme authoritarian state. Gov. Greg Abbott appointed the state pardons board members who recommended Perry for freedom, a decision that Abbott had urged and immediately rubber-stamped. It was a gross injustice in a former Confederate state that reeked of the bad old days of Southern jury nullification, a modern update on the impunity with which white men lynched Emmett Till and then laughed at justice.

But Abbott’s chilling pardon sent an even bigger, and more alarming message. In this sprawling state of just over 30 million people, supposedly First Amendment-protected protests for causes like Black civil rights or against the slaughter of civilians in Gaza can, and probably will, expose you to arrest or state violence, risk your schooling or your job, or — when all else fails — leave you in danger of deadly vigilante justice. Abbott’s pardon was the last bootheel on Texans’ right to dissent.

Administrators at the public University of Texas-San Antonio were caught on video by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) telling students that they’d be turned over to police if they merely chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It hardly seemed an idle threat after Abbott had sent state troopers clad in riot gear to UT’s main campus in Austin to forcefully shut down a large pro-Palestinian protest as soon as it began.

Texas’ overly harsh, militarized approach to protests is an inevitable outgrowth of the Lone Star State’s hyper-aggressive response to migrants at its southern border. The Abbott administration has spent an astronomical $11 billion, and counting, on maintaining a massive Texas army of soldiers who’ve threatened the federal government’s supposed hegemony over border issues.

The governor’s tin soldiers have — unlawfully, federal courts have found — strung razor wire and other barriers on the Rio Grande to deter asylum seekers. The wires have slashed desperate kids and pregnant moms, and efforts to evade them have been blamed for several migrant drownings — joining the Air Force veteran Foster in the rising body count of a U.S. state in thrall to violent authoritarianism.

But Texas is merely the leading edge of the storm. As I write this on a Sunday morning, President Joe Biden is at Morehouse College delivering the latest in a series of speeches about the dire need to save democracy by voting in November — and the president is absolutely right. But what Biden and many others aren’t saying is that democracy is already on life support.

The signs are everywhere, and not just in repressive red states like Abbott’s Texas.

In Lower Manhattan, a parade of the nation’s leading lawmakers — peaking with an appearance by GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson — utterly beclowned themselves and America by abandoning any pretense of legislative duties to sit in a courtroom to prove their absolute bent-knee fealty to the Republican Party’s strongman Donald Trump, by sitting behind him in his felony trial. Johnson and the other members of Congress even tried to help Trump evade a gag order in the case by lashing out at witnesses or at the judge’s family on his behalf.

In Washington, the degradation of a politicized, warped American justice system hit rock bottom when the New York Times reported that, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection that sought to keep election loser Trump in office, an upside-down American flag flew over the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The flag was a symbol of the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement, and its presence ought to force Alito to recuse himself from any cases involving Trump or Jan. 6. But, just like his thoroughly corrupt colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, who rules on these cases even after his wife lobbied for Trump’s false election claims, he won’t.

» READ MORE: Texas is what modern civil war looks like | Will Bunch Newsletter

Let’s be clear: When top lawmakers and the federal judiciary abandon any notion of checks and balances to support the criminal boss of their political movement, the United States is acting like the most buffoonish banana republic you could imagine. But the rot of billionaire kleptocracy runs much deeper than its purchase of the major branches of the federal government.

In a stunning work of investigative journalism, the Washington Post revealed last week that a chat group of New York City billionaires and multimillionaires, seeking since the Oct. 7 start of war in the Middle East to “change the narrative” in favor of Israel, alternately pressured Mayor Eric Adams and dangled campaign cash and offered private investigators in support of his police crackdown on protesters at Columbia University. The NYPD seems to have embraced the cause. On Saturday, uniformed cops waded into a pro-Palestinian march in Brooklyn to make violent arrests, even punching marchers after they’d been slammed onto the hard pavement of a Bay Ridge street.

The bloody police violence must have been pleasing to Adams’ billionaire boys club. But it also seemed yet another endorsement from a deep blue, supposedly liberal American city of the authoritarian approach that has been mastered in red states like Abbott’s Texas or in Georgia under GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, which has brought an unprecedented racketeering case against those protesting a police training center known as “Cop City.”

The irony in Texas is that just five years ago, the former prosecutor turned governor positioned himself as a true champion of unfettered free speech, especially on college campuses — when the perceived threat was liberal activists trying to shut down right-wing speakers. In fact, Abbott signed a 2019 college free-speech law that offered sweeping protections, including the unhindered right to stage protests in common campus areas. All of which was 100% contravened by the governor’s April order that labeled much pro-Palestinian protesting, even words and chants, as antisemitic and gave college administrators like those at UT-San Antonio sweeping power to shut them down.

Of course, Abbott is clamping down on dissent in Texas at a time when there is so much to protest — especially a much broader crusade against education and the risk of a younger generation of free thinkers. The state’s universities have this year fired hundreds of workers once dedicated to making college classrooms reflect the remarkable diversity of Texas, a melting pot where the children of Juneteenth meet immigrants from Latin America, Vietnam, and all over the world. Meanwhile, billionaire oligarchs — from Pennsylvania’s richest man Jeff Yass to Christian nationalist zealots — are throwing money at Abbott to back their pet cause, a voucher program that would undermine public K-12 schools, especially in rural areas, as a ladder up.

Everything that’s happening in Abbott’s Texas — the relentless war against liberalism and education itself, the influence of a corporate oligarchy, the surge of Christian nationalism, the war on feminism that features its strict abortion ban, and its own state military and militarized cops now deployed against its own people — is textbook fascism. The crackdown on dissent is the flame that keeps this downward spiral going. Knowing that attending a protest can expose you to legalized vigilante murder is just pouring more Texas crude on the fire.

It’s important to remember that — whether or not you agree with the cause — state violence currently directed at pro-Palestinian protests from Brooklyn to Austin is merely a trial run for what could come if Trump is sworn in for a second presidency in January. He has already pledged to send out troops to crush any Inauguration Day protests. But the best way to stop full-blown autocracy in 2025 is to speak out against the police-state authoritarianism we have now.

I find something highly ironic in Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann — whom the justice chivalrously blamed for the whole affair — flying the American flag upside down, a traditional symbol for a ship that is sinking, on fire, or some other serious distress. Maybe the Alitos were sending the right message, but just for the wrong reasons.

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