Tea, Crumpets, And A Felony

The top cop may have committed the crime he built a task force to catch.

Have you seen the Pro-Publica/Texas Tribune bombshell today? Paxton’s own office told Texans, “It is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.” But according to the Biblical divorce, between Angela and Ken Paxton, he moved out of their humble abode, and then voted from that home SIX times after that.

In 2020, Paxton spent more than 22,000 staff-hours on voter fraud cases but resolved only 16, all of which were due to false addresses, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. He helped Donald Trump try to steal the 2020 election. He was impeached by his own party.

Now, all the headlines from mainstream media say, “Paxton MAY have committed voter fraud.”

The court of public opinion.

If you missed it, a few months ago, I wrote, “Ken Paxton Will Go Down As The Most Corrupt Attorney General In Texas’ History.” I thought we covered everything. There’s more, actually; there’s a part two coming soon. But here’s the thing, I spent most of the day on Google and in the back corners of Democratic Underground, and there was still so much more.

The voters on our side, in the court of public opinion, have made up their minds about Ken Paxton. We’ve all had a front row seat for more than a decade to the naked corruption perpetrated by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

And even if there is an investigation. Even WHEN Paxton loses, and Talarico wins, if an investigation proves Paxton committed voter fraud. I would almost put money on Paxton fleeing the state, but the Republican base will still support him and make it about some conspiracy.

Texas Republicans do corrupt shit. They always have. Ken Paxton. Greg Abbott. Dan Patrick. All of them.

Like only last October, Abbott was named in a pay-to-play scheme. And now he’s calling to end data centers in rural Texas, four months before the election, after he welcomed all these mega-corporations here.

What we are looking at in Texas, between the open corruption, the data centers, the games of “throw-the-ball-and-hide-my-hand” that Republicans play, is decades of deliberate deregulation. This is what years of donor-first governance look like, sky-high electric bills, healthcare deserts, hungry children, fights over water, and our leaders aren’t even in the country.

Did you see that Ken Paxton hates America so much that he went to England for our 250th birthday?

The irony. 250 years after the land-owning, slave-holding, white racists kicked the British’s ass so they could steal more Indigenous land, our AG, who is running to be part of our highly propagandized, debatable, still white supremacist federal government, spent that birthday in London drinking tea and crumpets with his girlfriend.

So much for the ultra-patriot right.

For as long as Texas has known Ken Paxton, he has shown us that he has no moral floor or ethical framework to guide him. Not even the law has stopped Ken Paxton from doing whatever he wants in the moment.

And if Ken Paxton wants to drink tea at noon with his little pinky up and his girlfriend by his side at America’s once oppressor’s doorstep on July 4th, he will. And if he wanted to vote from wherever the heck he was living, he could do whatever he wanted. He’s the top cop after all.

When Tim Dunn paid off Dan Patrick (allegedly) for Paxton’s acquittal, did anyone think he would walk the tight-rope after that?

What actually keeps me up at night.

It really isn’t Paxton, or Abbott, or Patrick. It’s the base. The people who know all the same information you and I do, yet come away with conspiracies or a warped sense of reality.

Last year, sometime, I fell down a TikTok rabbit hole. The “leaving MAGA” side of TikTok, where former true believers document the process of unlearning everything they were raised on. I just listened (yes, I was being nosey).

And the thing that came up over and over was empathy. Person after person described that nobody ever taught them how to feel it. Not in their Conservative households or their Evangelical churches. They were deconstructing. It was fascinating to watch. But also an alarming realization that there are millions of people walking around out there who were never taught empathy. And they vote.

I’ve read a thousand op-eds trying to explain the Southern white working-class Republican. Class resentment, media capture, racial backlash, take your pick. But none of them ever fully explained the thing I kept running into, the man in the work boots defending a billionaire’s tax break. “Ain’t no poor man ever gave me a job.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence my entire life in this state, as if it were real wisdom.

I think this is an empathy gap. And if you were never taught to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, you were also never taught to imagine yourself in the shoes of the guy paying $600 million to write a business court into law so his lawsuits get decided by his own hand-picked judges.

You just see a rich man, and rich men get to win. That’s the whole worldview. That’s not a defense, to be clear. Grown adults are responsible for the votes they cast and the men they keep sending back to Austin. But it is, I think, the actual mechanism. Paxton and Abbott don’t survive scandal after scandal because Texans are gullible. They survive because a whole sect of the population in Texas was raised in a world without empathy, so corruption looks like winning, because rich men win.

Neither Paxton nor Abbott has ever faced accountability.

Texas is tilting away from Republicans. The truth is, it’s been tilting away from them for a long time, but we’ve been a non-voting state for so long that it hasn’t caught up to them yet. It’s about to catch up to them.

I know, I know. “Michelle, you say that every election.”

One of these days, I’ll be right. One of these days, enough Texans will get tired of watching the corruption, the lies, the tax dollars funneled to the wealthy, while the least among us suffer. One of these days, the aging Republican base will age itself out.

In 2026, we have a shot. Republicans have gerrymandered nearly everything on the map based on low voter turnout, and they spend at least one Sunday a year in church praying that the low voter turnout holds. But if Democrats showed up. If typical non-voters, young voters, working-class voters, and Hispanic voters showed up, we can flip this state. We can take the US Senate seat, the Governor’s seat, several Congressional seats, and we can flip the Texas House. It really just takes turnout.

Texas didn’t get this broken by accident, and it isn’t going to get fixed by accident either. It’s going to get fixed by showing up, by knocking doors, by turning “I don’t do politics” into “I did, actually, and here’s my sticker.” Paxton can drink his tea. Abbott can hold his press conferences. We’ve got an election to win.

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