June 9, 2024

Horns Up, Horns Down for this week

Vol. 2, No. 2: Oh no.

Horns Up, Horns Down is an occasional column that provides snarky, insightful analysis of local news. We use a simple metric for classifying each story we cover: Do we vibe with it? Horns Up. Is it stupid or infuriating? Horns Down.

If you like what you read and want to support independent commentary on local politics and culture, please help grow Lost in Panther City by sharing this post with your friends (and enemies).

HORNS UP: Fairmount shows up to protect trans kids

Back in April, local far-right activists got a lot of attention for attempting to host a transphobic event at a Fort Worth community center. The city cancelled it, the organizers maulded online, and, to be honest, their ability to cast themselves as defenders of free speech ended up being more valuable as PR than the event itself would’ve been. (A post about the event cancellation is still pinned to Carlos Turcios’s twitter page.)

The same activists, lead by Texas Latinos United for Conservative Action, tried again on Saturday with an event titled “Protect Kids” in Fairmount’s Fire Station Community Center that featured a handful of genuinely ghoulish reactionaries like Jeff Younger, a man who has for the past two years struggled to capitalize on his brief flash of relevance in 2022. This time the city let the event go forward.

Is it a loss that we have organizations like LUCA platforming a guy who went to extreme, cruel lengths to try and force his trans daughter to present as a boy? Definitely. But the handful of people who showed up to hear Younger and others speak were vastly outnumbered by the counter-protesters who gathered in the nearby park and threw a colorful Pride party. The event organizers, denied the chance to position themselves as a censored martyrs with subversive ideas, were reduced to maulding about the fact that someone tagged the building with graffiti that reads “Protect trans kids.”

HORNS UP: City workers deserve a higher minimum wage

Local union members showed up to a Fort Worth City Council meeting on Tuesday night and asked the city to raise its minimum wage for city employees to $20 an hour. The current minimum wage for city workers, adopted in fiscal year 2024, is $15.45 an hour, which is well below the threshold of a living wage in Tarrant County. For a single adult living alone with no children, that’s $22.10 an hour, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, though for adults with children, it’s much higher.

So a raise to $20 an hour would be a good start, but let’s be clear: It’s also not sufficient! City workers should be able to afford to live in the city that employs them.

HORNS DOWN: Dark money at the Texas A&M School of Law

The supposed rivalry between Fort Worth and Dallas is fake and stupid and the lingering product of Amon Carter’s overinflated ego. But if we’re going to compare and rank the two cities, let me say this: At least Fort Worth isn’t explicitly associated with a right-wing power broker who is best known for being raked over the coals in a ProPublica investigation because he’s trying to transform the U.S. Supreme Court into an openly corrupt tool of the plutocracy.1

Wait, what’s that new story from The Intercept say?

Right-wing megadonor Leonard Leo considered donating $25 million to Cornell Law School to establish a research center; the deal fell apart amid faculty opposition.

Instead he secretly donated $15 million for a research center with a nearly identical name at Texas A&M School of Law, the university’s former president confirmed.

Oh no.

Well, Leo’s a powerful scumbag who helped fill the Court with enough conservative justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, but at least he’s not best friends with Clarence Thomas —

In 2018, Justice Clarence Thomas, a longtime friend, quipped Leo had made himself “the Number Three most powerful person in the world.”

Oh no.

Well, at least Texas A&M is being open and transparent about —

Texas A&M has never loudly trumpeted this hefty gift. Unlike at Cornell, Leo’s name is not explicitly attached, and many on the Texas A&M law school faculty were unaware of his involvement before The Intercept’s reporting. Under the agreement, Texas A&M promised “not to publicly name or recognize the Donor without prior express approval.”

HORNS DOWN: One rich guy owns nearly a million acres in Texas.

Every year, the Land Report, a magazine that calls itself “the Voice of the American Landowner” — a historically voiceless and underrepresented class in this country — publishes a list of the largest private landowners in the United States. This year, they also published a little supplementary feature on Texas’s largest landowner: Tobacco mogul Brad Kelley, who owns 940,000 acres in the state.

The Dallas Morning News reported on this and made a big deal out of the fact that Kelley lives in Tennessee. In the words of their headline: “Texas’ largest landowner isn’t a Texan.” But the real problem here isn’t that a non-Texan owns close to a million acres of Texas land. It’s that any one person can own that much land!

Lost in Panther City is and always will be outraged that 94% of land in Texas is in private hands, which drastically restricts our collective ability to have good things like state parks and effective conservation programs. But the reality that private land can be scooped up and transformed into just another tool for the billionaire class to maintain their vast wealth is just an extra little indignity.

A dispatch from Lost in Panther City’s squirrel bureau:

Today’s squirrel was photographed right outside the Lost in Panther City HQ.

Did you know that you too could have one of your local squirrels featured in this newsletter? Please send me any and all photos and if they don’t totally suck I might publish them.