Abbott’s Fluffy Soldiers And The New Texas Invasion

Texas tried to conquer Illinois and ended up conquering Reddit memes.

Please remember that Lone Star Left is a BODY POSITIVITY page. I also pointed that out last week when I commented on how many people on the internet were commenting on ABCNews’s Instagram photo of the Texas National Guard, being on the fluffier side of the body-size spectrum. It was mostly ironic that it came one week after Pete Hegseth said, “No fatties in the military.”

Well, ‘ol Petey must have seen that photo, because he sent our fellow Texans packing, calling them “unfit for duty.”

Now, as a Texan and a member of the opposition, I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this.

1. Texas invaded Illinois, and we don’t want our people up there in the first place.

2. But, this is so sad and embarrassing for them, because they’re probably just an average size in whatever shithole town they come from, and they can’t help that they’re big-boned and grew up on a steady diet of bacon and Dr. Pepper.

3. But also, doesn’t this reflect poorly on Texas, since Governor Boot Licker called them our “ELITE” soldiers? Like, Texas is already one of the “most obese states,” now the whole country thinks our most elite soldiers are too fluffy for the Civil War.

A Reddit campaign called #BoycottAbbott is urging people to stop spending with Texas-based companies.

AT&T, Dell, American Airlines, USAA, Target… no company is safe until Abbott calls his troops home. The idea is that if Abbott won’t listen to blue states, maybe he’ll listen to billion-dollar boardrooms watching their quarterly reports tank.

Abbott keeps pretending this is about “safeguarding ICE officers.” But courts in Illinois and Oregon already called the deployments illegal. There’s no rebellion, no uprising, just a MAGA governor auditioning for a dictator who can’t even win his own lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Texans get the worst of both worlds. We look ridiculous, and we lose business. Even Tesla’s getting dragged, and that company survives on chaos.

It’s one thing to fat-shame your own troops. It’s another to send them halfway across the country for an illegal PR stunt, and then act surprised when the country cancels you. I hope the business community turns on Abbott. But we’ll see.

There is only one thing we can give Abbott credit for, and that’s being one of the last Texas Republicans actually FROM Texas.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we 💙LOVE💙 our transplants here in Texas.

But it’s become a running joke. The number of Republicans who move here later in life to get involved in politics. Some of them move here when they’re young, but way too many of them move here specifically FOR politics.

Texas Republicans have really turned political grifting into an art form.

Take Valentina Gomez, for example, who couldn’t get above 7% of the vote in Missouri, so she moved to Texas, and now she’s running for TX31. She’s just this year’s Brandon Herrera. If you missed the drama last campaign season, he calls himself “The AK Guy.” He moved to the Uvalde area from North Carolina and left an explosive device at a restaurant in Uvalde.

Anyway, so Valentina Gomez, who now wants to call herself a “Texan,” dropped her debut rap song. Get ready to cringe:

It boils down to this. We have enough second-hand embarrassment with our natural-born Texans, like Abbott calling our fluffy soldiers “elite,” but now we have to be associated with this. ⬆️

Speaking of colonization…

Today was Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

I want to share a video of two activists from the climate group Futuro Vegetal throwing biodegradable red paint on a Columbus painting at Madrid’s Naval Museum.

The activists in Madrid weren’t vandalizing art. They were vandalizing the myth. They threw red paint on the portrait of a man whose voyages painted the planet in blood, and they did it on Spain’s national holiday, the same day Spain celebrates centuries of conquest. They called it ecosocial justice, which is just a fancy way of saying, stop extracting, stop exploiting, stop pretending the people you harm should thank you for it.

Christopher Columbus perpetrated a genocide of the Arawak people. He should never be celebrated, anywhere, by anyone.

Texas Must Face Its Colonial Past: The Case for Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Further reading:

• Native Hope: Why Indigenous Peoples Day Matters

• PBS: 5 things to know about Indigenous Peoples Day

• NPR: Indigenous Peoples Day, as explained by Native Americans

The same state that can’t keep the lights on in February is suddenly invading Illinois in October.

Perhaps if Abbott devoted less time to playing Civil War reenactor and more to governing, we wouldn’t be trending for all the wrong reasons.

But here we are, fat-shaming our own soldiers, losing corporate dollars, and watching the world remind us what real resistance looks like. Texas wanted to make a statement, and it did. Just not the one Abbott thinks.

• November 4: Constitutional/TX18/SD09 Election

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

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