Help! My Governor Has Been Replaced By A Pod Person!
What six weeks worth of flip-flops tell you about November.
According to Urban Dictionary, a Pod Person is a “person pretending to be something they aren’t, or an impostor.” And watching Governor Greg Abbott’s behavior lately, I am almost certain the real Abbott has been abducted and replaced with a Pod Person. I have proof.
Exhibit A: Abbott calls for Texas Rangers to investigate Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s murder by ICE.
Don’t get me wrong, this is what we want. If you’ve seen the videos from the Houston incident, you know that an independent investigation is warranted. And I thought that with enough pressure and media attention, we could get the Houston PD to investigate. But Abbott calling in the Rangers?
We’d all be silly-nillies if we forgot that only a few years ago, Greg Abbott instructed border patrol to push children into the Rio Grande and to deny migrants at the border any water.
Then, we can’t forget that Abbott intentionally installed drowning devices along the Rio Grande, intentionally to drown migrants, which did lead to several deaths.
In fact, Abbott was caught on the Dana Loesch Show musing over murdering migrants at the border, stating the “only reason they weren’t shooting them was because of the Biden Administration.”
At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Greg Abbott rolled around on stage in a stadium full of J6ers, religious fundamentalists, and Nazis. He promised to be harder on immigrants under the Trump administration than ever before. The crowd held up signs that said “Mass Deportation.”
Let’s be clear about what “mass deportation” actually means, because I say this as a historian. Mass deportation isn’t a policy proposal.
The Armenian Genocide started with deportation marches into the Syrian desert. The Holocaust started with deportations to ghettos, then to camps, each stage sold to the public as “removal” and “resettlement.” The Trail of Tears, which plenty of historians now correctly call what it was, started as a removal policy, too.
This is a pattern, every single time, and it was the pattern in 2024 when a stadium full of MAGA delegates held up “Mass Deportation” signs like they were rooting for the home team.
So here’s your timeline. Push kids into the river. Deny water in 100-degree heat. String up drowning devices with nets underneath so nobody can swim free. Go on a radio show and complain that the only thing stopping Border Patrol from shooting migrants was Joe Biden. Stand on a stage while a stadium screams for mass deportation and promise them you’ll deliver. And now, in the summer of 2026, that same man wants us to believe he’s troubled enough by a migrant’s death to call in the Texas Rangers.
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
Abbott has spent years telling us exactly who he is, and asking us to forget it, when it’s politically convenient. The real Greg Abbott wanted these people dead. Whoever showed up at that podium wanting a Rangers investigation is wearing Greg Abbott’s skin.
Exhibit B: Abbott is trying to ban all the data centers he invited to Texas.
Governor Abbott has spent the last decade recruiting the tech industry to Texas. As recently as November 2025, Abbott sat next to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to personally announce Google’s $40 billion investment in three new Texas data center campuses, calling it “a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state” and Texas “the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”
The data center tax abatements are projected to cost the state $3.2 billion in lost revenue over the next two years. Gina Hinojosa is already using this against him directly, “Data centers are moving to Texas because Greg Abbott helped create the most generous tax dollar giveaway to data centers in the country so that Texans would foot the bill... Abbott has zero credibility here. No one believes that the arsonist is going to put out the fire.”
But, all of a sudden, a new Greg Abbott showed up. (A Pod Person Greg Abbott.)
In June, Greg Abbott sent a letter to state regulators demanding oversight. He wanted data centers to pay for their own power, reuse their own water, and stop passing their costs onto Texas families. By the end of the month, he was standing in Bullard calling for an outright ban on AI data centers in rural neighborhoods, framing it as a fight for “East Texas values.”
He wants to eliminate the very tax break he signed into law. He wants developers “responsible for funding their own projects here in Texas,” as if he didn’t spend a decade making sure they never had to.
I don’t buy this Abbott either.
You don’t get to torch a match, watch the fire spread for ten years, and then show up at the scene demanding to know who started it. Abbott built this. He signed the tax break. He recruited the companies. He stood next to Sundar Pichai and called it “the epicenter of AI development” seven months before he called it a threat to East Texas values.
What changed is that nearly two-thirds of rural Texans started telling pollsters they hate what he built.
Then, this week, two weeks after promising a ban, he personally announced a $919 million AI infrastructure deal in McKinney backed by a state grant.
Pick a lane, Governor. Pod People can’t hold two positions in the same body. They can’t both be real. One of them is wearing the other one’s skin, and I don’t think it’s hard to guess which one’s actually running the state.
Exhibit C: Abbott is ready to adapt to the consequences of climate change.
Greg Abbott just proposed a $400 million fund to fortify roofs against “extreme weather events... becoming more frequent and severe,” his own campaign’s words, not mine, because home insurance premiums are up 80% since 2020. He’s finally acknowledging that the weather is getting worse.
In 2017, after the devistating impact of Hurricane Harvey, Abbott refused to say climate change was a factor when asked directly, during a press conference where he was literally signing a disaster declaration.
When DHS Secretary Mayorkas linked climate change to the border migration crisis, Greg Abbott said, “Climate change? Mayorkas is pathetic.”
When the UN Secretary-General urged Texas to reduce its reliance on oil and gas, Greg Abbott told him to “pound sand” and then completely skipped COP26.
After the 2021 winter storm killed hundreds of Texans, Abbott went on Sean Hannity. He blamed wind turbines, saying, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” even though the Green New Deal was never implemented in Texas. The real problem was the unwinterized fossil-fuel infrastructure.
As Governor, Abbott has signed executive orders to bolster the oil and gas industry. He has repeatedly fought the EPA over Permian Basin regulation, declaring that “the State of Texas will do whatever it takes to protect its production” of oil.
Now, the Pod Person Greg Abbott wants to protect Texas roofs from extreme weather (caused by climate change).
Is Abbott sneaking out the back door of his own denial because the roof, quite literally, is caving in on an election year?
The real Greg Abbott has spent his whole career telling Texans the weather isn’t political. The Pod Person is pushing a $400 million grant that says otherwise.
I rest my case.
There are only two logical explanations for this.
One. Aliens really did abduct Greg Abbott sometime this spring and replace him with a Pod Person.
Two. Greg Abbott’s internal polling is so catastrophically, historically bad that his campaign has decided the only path to a fourth term is to spend the summer performing the opposite of everything he’s built his entire career on.
You don’t reverse course on immigration, tech policy, and climate denial in the same six-week stretch because you had a change of heart. You do it because someone showed you a spreadsheet that scared the hell out of you.
Abbott is panicking, in real time, in public, and hoping Texans don’t notice.
We noticed.
Gina Hinojosa isn’t waiting for Abbott to finish his costume change. While Abbott spends his summer trying on new faces, Hinojosa’s been saying the same thing since day one. That Texans deserve a governor who isn’t allergic to their own record. That affordability isn’t a talking point you discover in an election year, it’s a promise you make and keep. If you’re tired of guessing which Greg Abbott will show up at the podium, there’s a candidate on the ballot who doesn’t need a body double.
The pod people can keep swapping costumes. Texas needs a different governor.
111 days until the November election!
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Abbott was previously attacking Talarico instead of campaigning on his own behalf. I suppose he's backtracking and campaigning for himself now because it turns out people won't vote for someone who governs in a manner hostile to their best interest. But, unless he calls a special session and turns these pronouncements into legislation, I think it's too late. Rural Texans are pissed. I mean, data centers? You just do not mess with a West Texan's water.
It is election year, only 100 days to go so he is adopting the Big John playbook since Big John is now little John. So he is acting like a Democrat! If you didn’t know well. Which we do! So let’s call him out!