News

HFive Texas cities voted to decriminalize marijuana in November. Now, offi cials in three of them are a empting to thwart the will of the voters. The Harker Heights City Council voted last month to repeal its decriminalization measure, while Killeen’s city council halted implementation of its ordinance. In Denton, offi cials are challenging the legality of its voter-approved measure.

HUTSA’s star sixth-year quarterback Frank Harris is returning for one more season with the Roadrunners. Harris, who holds 34 school records and was named the 2022 Conference USA Player of the Year, made the announcement about his future during a press conference last week alongside Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and Judge-Elect Peter Sakai. The Roadrunners are preparing to face the Troy Trojans Dec. 16 in the Duluth Trading Cure Bowl.

HThe Starlighter, an inclusive performance venue in the Deco District, has canceled its drag shows for the rest of the year after receiving threats following an all-ages drag show on Dec. 2. “For the safety of our queens, staff and patrons, we’re cancelling all of our drag [events] for the remainder of the year,” an Instagram post read. “This was a decision made between the queens and The Starlighter owners as a safety measure and nothing more.”

A large donation from philanthropist Harvey E. Najim will enable the San Antonio Food Bank to host three food “mega-distribution” sites around Bexar County in the leadup to the winter holidays. The fi rst was held at Brooks City Base Dec. 7, and the next two will take place at the AT&T Center on Dec. 14 and NISD’s Gustafson Stadium on Dec. 15. — Abe Asher

YOU SAID IT!

“With corporate, overall, there’s a lot of stalling, not bargaining, trying to shut down unionizations by withholding benefi ts and threatening to close stores.” — Seiya Wayment, San Antonio Starbucks worker during a rally commemorating the one-year anniversary of the coff ee chain’s fi rst store voting to unionize.

Creating an atmosphere of hate and violence with Texas’ anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers

Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.

Recent online threats against a San Antonio venue that occasionally stages drag shows and last week’s protest by an armed group the FBI calls an “extremist militia” outside a drag show at the Aztec Theatre didn’t occur in a vacuum. And, sadly, they likely won’t be the last targeting LGBTQ+ Texans and drag performers.

Republican Texas lawmakers have spent years assailing LGBTQ+ Texans — particularly transgender people — with proposals to keep them out of public restrooms, stop them from obtaining gender-affi rming care and playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity. Indeed, by some counts there were more anti-LGBTQ+ bills fi led in the Texas Legislature during the 2021 session than anywhere else in the country.

Now, following the lead of Republican Gov. Greg Abbo who, in the runup to midterms, ordered state investigations of families who allow their children to obtain gender-affi rming care, those same GOP lawmakers are at it again.

Ahead of the 2023 session, State Rep. Jared Pa erson, R-Frisco, fi led a bill to classify any venue that hosts a drag performance as a sexually oriented business. That means minors would be permanently barred and the business owner would face a steep increase in state taxes — never mind whether it’s a café that hosts occasional drag brunches or an inclusive, all-ages performance space for which drag shows are a sideline.

Sadly, we can only assume more Republican legislators will seize on the far-right’s recent obsession with drag shows and fi le similar legislation as the session grows closer. Such proposals fl y in the face of the laughable claim that their party is the one that stands for smaller government and greater personal liberties.

However, the most pathetic thing about the GOP’s targeting of LGBTQ+ Texans is that it has real implications. The continued onslaught of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric has harmed the mental health of the state’s transgender population, LGBTQ+ advocates maintain. What’s more, families caught in Abbo ’s cruel dragnet targeting transgender kids have been subjected to humiliating investigations and forced to lawyer up to defend themselves.

Now, with rising threats against drag shows, these assclowns have shown that they’re willing to put people’s lives at risk to pander for votes from the most extreme and unhinged members of their base. — Sanford Nowlin

A former Judson Independent School District offi cer last week was sentenced to eight months in federal prison for sending a text message construed as a threat to shoot members of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. William Oliver Towery, 55, received a text message soliciting a donation to Biden’s campaign ahead of a San Antonio campaign stop in December 2019, to which Towery reportedly responded that he’d “been practicing my sniping skills” for the occasion.

The San Antonio Police Department last week fi led a driving-while-intoxicated charge against Councilman Clayton Perry, who in November was charged with leaving the scene of a hitand-run collision. The Bexar County District A orney’s offi ce must now decide whether it will pursue the DWI case. Perry, who represents District 10, has been on a leave of absence from his council job since Nov. 14.

Twitter / @ProgressTX

news

San Antonio-based cloud computing fi rm Rackspace Technology Inc. blamed an email outage that aff ected thousands of its customers last week on a ransomware a ack. Rackspace said in a statement that it has hired a cyber-defense fi rm to help it investigate the a ack, which it believes was isolated to its Hosted Exchange business line. Company offi cials also said they “put additional security measures in place and will continue to actively monitor for any suspicious activity.” — Abe Asher

Find more news coverage every day at sacurrent.com

BAD TAKES

Ye’s antisemitic rants are a sign of a deep sickness infecting U.S. conservatism

BY KEVIN SANCHEZ

Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

The artist formerly known as Kayne West, now Ye, fl ew into Austin early this month with the notorious Christian nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. Both devout supporters of Donald Trump regaled the disgraced host of InfoWars, Alex Jones — himself an all-you-can-eat buff et of conspiracist dumbfuckery — with tales of “300 Zionists” controlling the media and “Jewish bankers” conspiring to sabotage the greatest nation on God’s Earth.

It was also the most prominent u erance of Holocaust denial in recent memory.

Let’s get some fact-checks of the three-hour shitshow out of the way fi rst. • Adolf Hitler did not “invent” microphones or highways. Both Alexander Graham Bell’s sound amplifi er and the German Autobahn predate Hitler’s date of birth and his reign as Führer, respectively. • There’s no credible evidence Israeli agents assassinated John and Robert Kennedy to protect Israel’s clandestine nuclear program. Lone gunmen Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan remain the most likely culprits, and the la er is Palestinian. • Investor George Soros didn’t “happily” round up Jews for slaughter during World War II. As a 13-yearold boy, he and his family helped confi scate Jewish property to spare themselves from being sent off to the concentration camps. • Despite Ye’s talk of “Jewish slave boats,” historian Herbert Klein defi nitively rebu ed such hyperbole in the late 1990s, writing, “Jews had a minuscule role in the slave trade and played only a minor role as slave owners wherever they resided in the Americas.” • Planned Parenthood isn’t “New World Order population eugenics” for “aborting Black babies.” The organization provides family planning services, a small percentage of which involve terminating pregnancies. • COVID-19 vaccines haven’t “killed 20 million people.” Not only do they remain remarkably safe and eff ective at preventing hospitalization, severe disease and death, they’ve saved roughly 20 million lives across the globe, according to a peer-reviewed study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. • The Nazis did in fact massacre approximately 6 million Jews. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, has tried to offi cially diarize every single victim and currently has 4,800,000 names in its online database, which anyone, including Ye, can visit.

On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, British magazine The Economist news magazine aptly expressed the historical consensus about the human toll of Hitler’s pogrom.

“Of the 9.5 million Jews in Europe before the war, 6 million were murdered,” according to The Economist. “If you spent fi ve minutes reading about each of them, it would fi ll every waking hour for 90 years. The overall civilian death toll a ributed to the Nazis — including Romani, disabled people, gays, prisoners and bystanders to combat — was perhaps three times greater.”

The testimony of hundreds of thousands of living survivors is irrefutable.

Willfully ignorant of the massive archival and genealogical work in documenting the Shoah, Ye told Jones, Hitler “didn’t kill 6 million Jews, that’s just factually incorrect.” Later, he upped the asinine ante, adding, “I like Hitler, I’m not trying to be shocking. The Holocaust is not what happened.”

The Republican Jewish Council appropriately condemned the broadcast as “a horrifi c cesspool of dangerous, bigoted Jew hatred.”

Although leading GOP fi gures fell all over each other to distance themselves from Ye’s recent tour of interviews, which included a sit-down with the Donald himself at Mar-A-Lago in November, Ye nevertheless embodies the bipolarity of the modern American conservative. He dutifully professes a ride-or-die loyalty to capitalism and quasi-canonizes billionaires such as Steve Jobs and Howard Hughes, recounting their rags-to-riches stories as he would Biblical scripture.

At the same time, the rapper condemns all the sinful decadence that unregulated markets stimulate, enable and unleash. “Instagram is a prostitution ring,” Ye told Alex Jones. Before anything else, though, Instagram is a business which, like Ye, runs on a ention.

Christian nationalists such as Fuentes rail against “the globalists” — which we have every right to assume is a coded allusion to “the Jews.” But notice also that Fuentes seldom mentions for-profi t competition itself as the mechanism that creates multinational monopolies and erodes national sovereignty.

This contradiction between market fundamentalism and moral rectitude neatly sums up the rift between libertarians and evangelicals, and even though the Republican Party desperately must hang onto both constituencies, the ba le rages within the disordered minds of individual right-wingers as well.

Christian conservatives dogmatically repeat that “Christ is King,” but somehow, the God of the Market still gets the last word. Alex Jones, for example, is quite content to smile along politely as Ye praises Hitler’s “redeeming qualities,” provided Jones can hawk his line of dietary supplements during the commercial breaks.

Seated between Ye and Fuentes, Jones might come off as the adult in the room. However, equating reproductive choice and life-saving vaccines to Josef Mengele’s crimes against humanity is its own egregious form of genocide trivialization and denial.

Jones’ deference to Ye was sickening, but so is the a ention we’re obliged to pay talented rap producers and basketball players these days. To state the obvious, just because somebody hits the celebrity jackpot doesn’t make them a genius, or even a terribly good person. Perhaps Ye’s biggest whopper was to declare, “I represent the common man.” The typical antisemite, handing out leafl ets on the street corner or spray-painting swastikas on overpasses, doesn’t get to appear with Tucker Carlson during primetime or hold strategy sessions with former presidents.

“We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time,” Ye said. Except, we don’t. Opposition to fascism is the moral compass by which citizens across the political spectrum have charted the precarious course of democratic societies since the end of the last world war. If we can’t acknowledge the worst crime in history, what can we hope to agree on?

Whether Ye mainstreams the fetishization of Hitler, it’s safe to say Hitler would not have reciprocated the sentiment. And without Blacks and Jews showing up at the ballot box, the United States would likely already have become an authoritarian state run by racists like George Wallace, Donald Trump or worse.

All of us owe an unpayable debt in this respect. One we should never forget.

Creative Commons / Cosmopolitan UK