Tarrant County Judge Tim O'Hare Has Podcaster Arrested For Saying "Bullsh*t"
This is what it looks like when a county judge decides dissent is a crime.
We live in a fascist country, but perhaps you already knew that. Simultaneously, America is suffering from a literacy crisis and one hundred years of Red Scare propaganda. That’s why the fascists will tell you that Nazis were socialists and anti-fascists are the real fascists. Although any first-year college PoliSci class will teach you the definition of these words, the fascists have now labeled colleges “indoctrination centers.”
Some people may say, “We’re fighting against the rise of fascism.” But they’re wrong, because it’s already here. In Texas, they showed up years ago, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
You don’t have to look hard to see it. You can see it when someone tells the truth in a room built for silence.
EJ Carrion hosts the 817 Podcast (one of my personal favorites), where he talks Tarrant County politics from a progressive lens and does the thing fascists actually fear most. He shows up. He shows up to Commissioners Court. He shows up to Fort Worth City Council. He shows up to Fort Worth ISD meetings, and he tells people watching to show up too. In the eyes of the far-right, that’s his biggest crime.
Last week, during the Tarrant County Commissioners Court hearing regarding Republicans closing polling locations, he used his one minute of public comment to call out the court’s Republican majority for political extremism, and he punctuated it with a word Tim O’Hare apparently finds more dangerous than a cut to voting sites. “BULLSHIT!”
Here was that one minute:
O’Hare called for him to be removed as he was already walking out. Carrion called O’Hare “a small man” on his way out the door.
Fair assessment, as it turns out, because eight days later, at three in the morning, Fort Worth police pulled Carrion over and arrested him on a warrant tied to that Aug. 4 meeting.
Twelve hours in jail.
Last night, after a long night at the Fort Worth City Council, where activists pressured city officials into a moratorium on data centers, Carrion and other activists went out for a bite to eat. He was pulled over right before pulling onto his street for failing to use a blinker. That’s when he learned he had a warrant for his arrest.
Twelve hours later, he was free.
Carrion didn’t just talk about his own arrest when he got out. He talked about who he met inside. A man held for 45 days on a trespassing charge, unable to make a $100 bond. People younger than 21 sitting in a cell over amounts that wouldn’t cover a week of groceries. Carrion was out in 12 hours because he had people outside fighting for him. Most of the people he described sitting next to don’t have that.
It’s the same machine, in Texas, in Tarrant County. The system that jails a podcaster for saying “bullshit” to a judge is the same system that jails a broke 20-year-old for weeks over a hundred dollars. The countless jail deaths stacking up at the Tarrant County Jail. This is what living in a fascist system looks like.
EJ is free. Speech isn’t. Tarrant County isn’t. Texas isn’t. And America sure as hell isn’t.
The charge is still on the books. The warrant worked exactly as designed, to remind him, and everyone watching, what happens when you say the true thing out loud in the wrong courtroom.
The only option that’s ever actually worked is to vote all of these fascists out in November.
And to the online theory-bros who spend way too much time trying to convince people that you can’t vote your way out of fascism. Greece did it after the Greek Junta in 1974. Chile did it in 1988. It’s been done.
The theory-bros will tell you those countries had something Texas doesn’t. Maybe. But Portugal didn’t wait for permission either. Neither did Argentina. Neither did South Korea. What every one of those countries had was people who kept showing up after the ones before them got dragged out by the hands and feet.
That’s the whole trick, and it’s the same one EJ Carrion is running. Fascism needs you to believe the meeting is over, that the courtroom is theirs, that the only options left are silence or a cell. But it isn’t over. It’s a Tuesday in August, and there’s an election in November.
Show up to the meeting. Say the true thing. And when they hand you a ballot, use it like you mean it.
We live in a fascist country. We don’t have to stay in one.
83 days until the November election!
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Nothing like coming home from a free state to this craziness again. Unbelievable
DISGUSTING!!! Just shared to bsky-- thank you, Michelle!!!