Fort Worth Weekly // September 7-13, 2022

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FEATURE

The son of Oath Keepers chief Stewart Rhodes explains why he left “Daddy Trump” — and the far-right cult.

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“We have not accepted a bond from you,” Wilder wrote to Burns in March 2022. The disappearance of the collateral valued at 5 ounces of silver had devastating consequences for the father of two. “It was terrible,” Burns recalled, referring to his time in jail. “I split time with my son 50-50. Somebody had to pick him up and take care of him for the other 50% of the time. He was 15 at the time. My daughter was so afraid of [visiting a] jail that I didn’t get to see her for two months. Those were two months without an income.”

But Wilder’s response is inappropriate, especially coming from an elected official responsible for maintain ing official court documents and records. Burns provided copies of an email exchange with Wilder’s office as an ex ample of the district clerk’s apparent hostility toward him.

“You continue to harass my deputies by phone, email, and in person,” Wilder wrote Burns in March. “This be havior will not be tolerated. You must cease your threats and attempts to intimidate my deputies regarding this al leged bond. Your claims are legally unintelligible.” Burns says he did not threaten county officials. Wilder appears to be forgetting that he works for Tarrant County taxpayers, Burns said. Wilder’s “office was caught red-handed,” Burns said. “A conspiracy to cover it up has ensued.”

Burns’ upcoming court hearing is next week. He is rep resenting himself, he said, because he alleges his last attor ney advised that he plead guilty to failing to pay child sup port for four years. Doing so, Burns alleges, would have ab solved the county of losing or possibly stealing his property.

CourtsContemptuous

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This story is part of City in Crisis, an ongoing series of reports on unethical behavior and worse by local public leaders, featuring original reporting.

Judge Patricia Baca Bennett recently threatened a Fort Worth father of two with jail time even though defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Burns filed a sworn affidavit with the Department of the Treasury indicating potential crimes involving theft by Wilder or some other unnamed government official. Burns said he has also filed sworn complaints with the U.S. Secu rities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FBI, and Secret Service, the last due to the federal law enforcement agen cy’s extensive work investigating identity theft.

METROPOLIS

The father said news stories about Bennett have fur ther fueled his concern that she uses her position to retali ate against perceived enemies. Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit by former Tarrant County Associate Judge Diane Haddock, who alleged that Bennett carried out a campaign of harass ment that created a hostile work environment (“Family Court Feud,” Nov. 2018). Last year also saw the Texas Com mission on Judicial Conduct issue a formal warning against Bennett for racist remarks she made on social media.

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Bennett’s 360th District Court charged him in late September 2019 for contempt of court for an alleged missed court date. Burns alleges the arrest is unlawful because he arrived on time for his 8:30 a.m. meeting, but an associate judge did not call him for several hours. Burns, who does not remember the judge’s name, said he did not have an attorney with him that day and thus cannot provide proof of his wait Sherifftime.deputies arrested him on Oct. 1, 2019, and jailed him for two days. Bennett levied the two-month sen tence for unpaid child support the following week. Family court judges have authority to send defendants to jail for contempt of court, but Burns alleges both actions could be seen as unlawful or at least unethical because he had shown up to court and sent the county the silver bond. Following his release from Tarrant County Jail in late 2019, Burns thought the ordeal was over and he could fi nally focus on raising and supporting his two children. He had served his sentence and county officials had possession of his silver bond, or so he thought at the time. In March 2022, Bennett’s court told him he was still liable for pastdue child “Thatsupport.iswhen I decided I needed to find out what hap pened to the bond,” he said. Burns hired a broker who specializes in trading bonds and learned that the silver bond accepted by county offi cials had been sold and placed on the open market. Burns provided documents from the broker that describe the bond’s location within two massive portfolios worth bil lions.Burns alleges that the theft of his silver bond occurred at the 360th District Court, the district clerk’s office, or at the state comptroller’s office, which regularly accepts and manages court bonds. The comptroller’s office did not re spond to my requests for comment.

Now that he has gone public with allegations that a Tarrant County employee may have stolen his property, Burns fears retaliation from Bennett. During a recent court hearing, Burns alleges that she made verbal statements that show she is biased against him.

“We have previously responded in an appropriate way to Mr. Burns,” Wilder wrote via county email.

Considering Wilder’s email denying accepting the bond, the stamped district clerk copy of the bond, and ev idence that the bond had been sold, Burns believes he has compelling evidence of theft, fraud, and possible identity theft.When asked in an email if he accepted the bond, Wild er dodged the question and instead attacked Burns’ cred ibility by calling him a “sovereign citizen,” a derogatory term used to describe domestic terrorists and individuals who believe they are above the law.

BY EDWARD BROWN

“When I was near the judge and she was swearing me in, she said the jails are overpopulated right now,” Burns alleges. “She said she was going to reschedule my court date two months out and hope that the population is not as bad then. She reset my court date, so she has time to weed out how many people are in the jail, so they have room for me. She is assuming I’m guilty”

“How willing are they to try to shut me up and keep this ruse going?” he asked. “They are liable for that bond. They are on the line for damages and all the people who were put out when I was in jail for two months. It’s a deep hole.” l

Michael Burns vividly remembers the day Judge Patricia Baca Bennett sentenced him to two months in Tarrant County Jail. It was the fall 2019, and Bennett’s 360th Dis trict Court told him that he was four years behind in child support. Burns maintains that he had paid the expense in the form of day care for his 14-year-old daughter, but Ben nett did not accept that argument.

A father alleges he faced threats, wrongful arrests, and property theft through Judge Patricia Baca Bennett’s 360th District Court.

Since the courts did not acknowledge his several years of day care payments as a form of child support, Burns pro vided the court with collateral in the form of a silver bond currently worth around $3,000 but many times more once the bond reaches maturity. He believed the bond would either settle the arrears or, at the very least, demonstrate a good faith payment that would prevent him from going to jail.A filed copy of the bond that bears the stamp of Tar rant County District Clerk Tom Wilder shows that Wild er’s office accepted the bond on Sep. 17, 2019. Wilder recently denied accepting it, which makes proving that Burns made a payment to family courts in 2019 all the more difficult.

On the day of his arrest, Burns said he was about to close a large roofing job for his employer. That deal fell through, and Burns said his boss was left scrambling to run the businesses without him. Bennett did not respond to requests for comment. Burns provided court records that show Bennett ap parently wrongfully sentenced him twice in 2019.

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“I think it is a good thing to have a mix of uses and not a concentration of too many bars or restaurants,” she said. “Retail is hard because people are shopping online. We have to figure out not having so many cars. Hopefully, once West 7th Street is redone and people aren’t blasting through at a high rate of speed, it will be easier to enhance the walkability of the area.” Public Improvement District Coming to West 7th Core?

Email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com.

As anyone who travels West 7th Street knows, the four-lane thoroughfare is a work in progress. Several years ago, city staffers recognized that the bustling four lanes were not functioning as efficiently as they should, Zadeh said. The final plan will include buff ered bike lanes and revamped bus stops that will allow public transit to pull ahead of cars. The construction will eventually better con nect the Crockett Row businesses to busi nesses north of West 7th Street to the east. A city spokesperson said the West 7th Street improvements are nearly complete.

By the time former city councilmember Ann Zadeh was elected in 2014, the West 7th cor ridor was beginning to experience the chal lenges tied to increased pedestrian and vehi cle congestion and disagreements over how many bars should be allowed in the area. City council was addressing “the prolif eration of bars and concerns by area residents about the loudness and the crowds at closing time,” recalled Zadeh, who at the time repre sented the district that encompasses the West 7th area, District 9. “We brought together residents, the West 7th Alliance group, bar owners, and the owners of Crockett Row to handle safety concerns due to so many pedes trians being on the street. [In 2018, the city] changed the area to one-way streets. I thought it should be a pedestrian-only area. To do that, they would have had to shut it down at certain times. That takes manpower.”

District 9 Convos Past and councilmemberscurrent talk development, economic growth, and growing pains in the West 7th corridor.

“I can tell you that there is not enough money in the city to do all of these things,” she said.While she still supports the idea of a PID for the area, she sees a potential hurdle from major developments that have largely met their construction goals.

Beck said that she has been surprised at property owners’ willingness to learn about the PID program.

“Bike lanes and streetlights on the out side of the eastbound lanes have been com pleted,” the public statement read. “Bike lanes are under construction from Carroll Street to Currie Street. Once complete in August, this project will provide a roadway in a heavily traveled part of the city that bal ances the needs of the vehicle user, transit user, pedestrian, bicyclist, and others.” After volunteering for six years on the city’s zoning commission before serving three and a half terms as councilmember, Zadeh oversaw many formative years of re vitalization in the West 7th area. So has the mixed-use approach been successful?

Downtown Fort Worth, Camp Bowie Bou levard, and the Stockyards all benefit from a program known as a Public Improvement Dis trict (PID). The idea is to create a stream of money to improve security, maintenance, and other services and improvements as needed.

The Weekly wrote about the traffic woes and the raucous partying at the time that still defines much of the corridor (“West 7th Breakdown,” Aug. 2018). Notably, we saw a heavy police presence that several business owners now say has become inconsistent. “By late evening, the youthful, drunk en energy had become contagiously intox icating,” the reporter wrote. “West 7th is a homogenized, gleaming, clean, safer version of, say, Dallas’ Deep Ellum. I walked up and down the streets taking photos and meet ing people from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. and never felt unsafe. Police were everywhere. In July, city officials converted Morton, Bledsoe, Norwood, and Foch streets from two-way to one-way. Now, pedestrians have to look in one direction only for oncoming traffic, which is expected to reduce vehicle-pe destrian conflicts. Farther south, the Far rington Field parking lot offers paid park ing, further reducing the need for people to dock their cars alongside busy streets.” Zadeh said the feedback before and af ter the elimination of two-way streets was mixed.

As far as improvements to West 7th, Za deh said more variety of businesses in and around Crockett Row would be beneficial.

Emil Bragdon, who owns several bars and properties in the area, doesn’t support a West 7th PID. He told me that property owners already spend enough in property and sales tax to warrant city incentives that don’t come from increased taxes.

Zadeh said there is a common miscon ception that the city has excess funds for un budgeted spending on the types of programs offered by a PID.

Data provided by the city shows that the West 7th Core generated $2.7 million in city general fund income from property tax es, while sales tax from that same area pro duced $1.1 million for the city in 2021.

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BY EDWARD BROWN

“I think so,” she said. “There is some vacancy in the retail stores. I don’t think that’s a failure of the mixed-use. Having a walkable area helps this area be successful.”

“One possible issue is the major prop erty owner Crockett Row,” she said. “They would be the biggest contributor to the PID based on property tax. They have done their own sprucing up and beautification. It wouldn’t make sense for them to pay a big chunk of money that mainly benefits the pe ripheryOneareas.”possible solution would be the cre ation of PID boundaries that do not include developments that may not need the funds.

“It is worthy of having a discussion about,” she said. “A PID is a really useful tool in reshaping the area and making [the West 7th area] a safe and enjoyable place for everybody.” l This story is part of Inside West 7th, an ongo ing series of reports on the past, present, and future of the West 7th corridor. Have news tips or ideas for us?

Councilmember Elizabeth Beck, who replaced Zadeh in District 9 last year, said she is in the early stages of gauging interest in creating a PID for the West 7th Core, the term used by city staffers to describe Crock ett Row at West 7th and nearby bars to the east and “Theresouth.can be different interests be tween retail and bar owners at times,” Beck said. “A PID offers the opportunity to come together and think of [growth and develop ment] as a collective effort.” The downtown ambassadors program, which is funded by a PID, has proven popu lar, Beck added, referring to the hospitality service team that bikes, walks, and Segways throughout Sundance Square to assist and welcomePIDsvisitors.arefunded by fees assessed to property owners, and Beck said that the owners she has spoken to are open to the concept. After a requisite percentage of property owners petition the city, city staff ers view the petition and organize public hearings on the proposal. If all the steps are approved, Fort Worth City Council can ap prove the PID.

METROPOLIS

“Some people feel that one-way streets speed up traffic,” she said. “Others say it makes it easier to not have to look both ways. It allows the cops to get large groups of people out” after 2 a.m. The slow encroachment of bars in the area was allowable under the mixed-use zon ing that can include residential, commercial, and other construction uses in one district. “You don’t necessarily have to have a mix of uses in your building if you are near a mix of uses,” Zadeh said. “Had we said you have to have mixed uses in your building, we wouldn’t have had so many industrial build ings turned into bars.” Zadeh added that the area doesn’t de serve its reputation for lackluster parking options.“Idealt with people complaining about parking,” she recalled. “You get two free hours of parking. I’ve had no issues what soever. At night, you can park at Farrington Field and walk two blocks. There is a ton of parking in this area. Do you have to respect the fact that the garages belong to the Crock ett Row area [and require validation from a Crockett Row business]? Yes. They built those garages, and garages are expensive.”

Crockett Row at West 7th and nearby bars to the immediate east and south generated around $1.1 million for the city’s general fund last year.

PID spending is guided by a “PID advi sory board that is made up of stakeholders in the area,” Beck said. Beck emphasized that the process for forming a West 7th PID is very much in the early“Itstages.canbe a difficult process if you don’t have support,” she said. “I’ve taken a slower route to get there. I would like to be successful in this effort. There is no petition yet. There is no boundary yet. I really am trying to have conversations with the property owners.”

DepartmentAnalyticsDataandPlanningWorthFortofCityCourtesy INSIDE West 7th

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I somehow ended up avoiding misogyny despite all efforts by my father and his cir cle, so when early GamerGate turned from YouTubers like TotalBiscuit actually talking about ethical games journalism to becoming a firestorm of entitled sexually frustrated ha tred, I stepped off the bandwagon. By the time Trump hit the campaign trail, I had finally burnt out enough on mi litia ideology and The Coming End to be open to more mainstream populist politics.

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My own childhood politics of course grew harder and more fringe in my survivalist ad olescence, as Oath Keepers transformed into Stewart’s roving private army and income machine behind the veterans’ org facade, but the drift into further anti-government belief wasn’t quite what would set me up to fall for the Cult of No. 45 later on. Neither were the anonymous internet boards filled with outcasts and edge cases, efficiently compro mised by white supremacist recruiters, the strongest influence, although the endless MAGA memes that would pour through that vector certainly made an impact. I had car ried on the activist spirit of the sign parties for a while, evangelizing Ron Paul’s “real” message, the one the media kept you from hearing, and the good words of Bo Gritz and Ayn Rand to the online masses (that last with some caveats, even then).

This was the first step in the memes getting to my psyche, the rabid Trump en thusiasm overriding my initial skepticism of Trump on Constitutionalist grounds as my anger at the The Establishment made it easy to get swept along with the crowd.

BY DAKOTA ADAMS My name is Dakota Unfortunately,Adams.Iam the son of Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes. And, unfortunately for both of us, I may be relevant to you. It is now undeniable that radicaliza tion and the draw of right-wing extremist thought is a significant problem facing the nation, perhaps a fatal crisis, and in this con text, there’s a lot of interest in the stories of people who came back from the right-wing fringe. I have only my niche experience to offer from a very odd life, but I’ve been told that this might be valuable to those interest ed in how I went from a teenage militiaman who believed in Pizzagate to casting off my birth name of Dakota Stewart Rhodes and joining BLM and pro-choice protests. If tracing the stumbling, fumbling path to independent thought taken by the son of an insurrectionist militia leader contains a valuable lesson, I have a responsibility to show you all. If there’s a chance my story will be of any help to millions of people who have lost family and friends to right-wing cult behavior, then I have an obligation to tell it.So, this is how I left the Far Right. To begin with, I wasn’t always what most people think of when they picture the current crop of alt-rite frat bros and angry bitter incels. (I was never that bitter.) My political life started in the Libertarian Right explosion that was the 2008 Ron Paul cam paign, caught as a child in the wake of my father’s ambition, even before Oath Keep ers, as he made a name for himself as a cam paign organizer. Stewart asserted authority by banking off his law degree, military back ground, and former staff position at the of fice of Paul himself. I gained political consciousness attend ing sign-making parties with all the weirdos and misfits who felt out of place in the main stream GOP, even some crossover democrats from the Occupy Wall Street crowd, but still were undeniably steeped in right-wing ide ology. There was something that would echo later in a much worse year, the belief that only bringing in an outsider candidate, even a crazy one, could fix the system.

Implicit in everything was the sense that even the GOP, with its authoritarian tendencies and bloodthirsty enthusiasm for the global war on terror, was inherently more closely aligned with “us” enlightened souls than anyone on the left. By our ideol ogy, even Left Libertarians would inevitably bring about socialism by introducing clear tools of statism like progressive taxation, environmental protection, and dreaded death-panel Socialized Healthcare, setting off the brief half-life of all socialist government systems as they actively decayed into com munism. Left Anarchists would simply skip the intermediary and go to Full Communism immediately, ironically instituting the most government-ful of all governments. Social ism, after all, is when the government does stuff — the more stuff, the more socialist — with communism as its natural endpoint. The GOP, being fervently against so cialism, must therefore be on the lighter end of the government authority spectrum, despite its decades-long love affair with mil itarized police and the surveillance state. In events, connections, strategy, and policy, the Libertarian right would continue to align itself with big government conservatives as a holding action against democrats. More charitably, it could have been considered an attempt to convert the GOP from the inside. Of course, Ron Paul would lose. In the ensuing panic and dissolution of the nascent Liberty Movement, my father would seize the time and place to found Oath Keepers and redirect the considerable grassroots en ergy that was now aimless and directionless, playing on his particular background to se cure a niche. Oath Keepers would broadcast a message of hope, at least in the early years, and retain something of the emotional core of the activist outsider politics spirit that had given the Ron Paul following its ani mus. Under the surface, Stewart Rhodes was already playing to the fears of conservatives about the incoming Obama administration, particularly on guns, alluding to FEMA camp conspiracy theories and riding the bleak outlook of preppers and doomsdayers to success.Thesense that the Ron Paul campaign was the last best hope for avoiding econom ic collapse and New World Order takeover, prophesied by Survivalists nationwide for decades on end, was prevalent. Now that the last hope was shattered, the die was irrevers ibly This,cast. too, would reverberate later.

Over time, the sheer weight of depres sion and stress from the constant looming civil war and fall of society ground me down, and outlasting Bernie Bros in online argu ments lost its luster with everything else. I spent my remaining adolescence with one foot in apocalypse training and the other in basement-dwelling NEET-dom, bury ing myself in the internet to avoid having to think about The Coming End and taking shelter in web novels and anime when life becameTheunbearable.ComingEnd ruled my life, vari ously called The Collapse, The Crash, the End of Days (for the religious), and some times in our family wryly referred to as the “a-Cop-alypse.” It was an economic crash, a nuclear war, a mass terrorist attack, a natu ral disaster, any event that would end civil society and reduce the United States to a war of all against all as the starving masses turned on each other, local warlords with looted military hardware rising to fill the power vacuum. All of this was of course to be engineered by nefarious forces within the government, taking advantage of a naturally occurring crisis causing one to directly cre ate a situation so bad that most people would beg for a totalitarian rule that would restore order to the chaos. The government faking a biological ter rorist attack by a hostile nation like Iran, a “false flag” attack, to create domestic chaos and start a convenient war simultaneously was a popular scenario. The cause varied with the headlines and the times, fallout from Fukushima or a North Korean EMP attack as examples, but the belief remained concrete, and it was always at most 18 monthsSomeaway.welcomed The Collapse as a chance to start society over again. Others harbored juvenile fantasies of their surviv alism paying off in social status and sexual conquest when the fall of civilization made them superior to the starving “nu-males.” Others simply believed in it as an inevita bility to be weathered or as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Some, like me, lived in unending fear. I knew my family was not ready to survive a collapse, not under Stewart’s leadership.

The Muslim Brotherhood in 2012s Egypt being implicated in a rocket attack on Israel was somehow blamed on shadowy NWO power brokers working to promote war and was obviously a domino that would lead to us struggling to survive the violent U.S. balkanization through fuzzy logic I cannot recall. Every political move large and small by The Establishment was a source of terror and despair when filtered through the paranoid lens I’d been raised with, and I’d had enough.Mybelief in the end of days and sinister conspiracies had waned, but the emotion al mark had not. It was a weak point that would make me vulnerable to exploitation. I had missed many online pipelines to well-known brands of right-wing extremism at this point, largely because I was thorough ly a child of the Constitutionalist Militia Movement and indoctrinated against com peting right-wing ideologies. I’d been trained to see conspiracies and psychological warfare in every shadow, and so I’d clocked the Nazi recruiting on mes sage boards instantly for the manipulation it was.

I’d been raised in a cult of fanatical American Exceptionalism and genuine ly believed that the Constitutional Militia Movement was an anti-racist force unfair ly maligned by liberal media (until, years down the line, I didn’t). The general racism of the unmoderated dark corners of the in ternet washed over me with no effect except warping my sense of humor.

I saw the early beta versions of QA non come and go, numerous online handles claiming to be anonymous insiders from the continued on page 9

I didn’t really see Trump as a savior. I saw him as the bigly-est brick the American people could pick up and throw through the White House windows. After a lifetime of fearing the machinations of political ma chines too vast to comprehend, I saw their churning efforts terminate in the likes of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, feeling si multaneously that this end state could not possibly be the work of a rational unified conspiracy and thoroughly fucking insulted, so I would pick Trump’s ugly bulbous head up on Election Day and hurl the bastard as far as I could to demonstrate how thorough ly done We the People were with a process that consistently returned the blandest of the worst choices.

By the time Trump became the clear front runner in the Republican primary, the endof-days stress cycle I lived in had worn me down, leaving me primed for cult recruit ment. I was beginning to lose my all-encom passing fear of the end after it had repeated ly failed to materialize, just enough to have cognitive space left for deep bitter anger. My entire life, the perceived actions of political elites and policymakers had been cause for household panic, from domestic to interna tional events that were nonetheless evidence of the New World Order at work.

Freedom

In my increasing doubts about whether The Collapse was really ever coming and the Movement as a whole, I had lost the ideo logical core of my early life. Without fervent belief in the apocalypse and the militia role in it, I had nothing to anchor myself to ex cept a vague emotional idea of American Pa triotism. I was finally one of Steve Bannon’s “rootless white males” and ready to be swept up in the next vast current. Like a lot of people, for many different reasons, I felt robbed of the generally secure middle-class life that pop culture had im plicitly promised. In the propaganda storm around Trump, I saw a glimmer of hope that things might be fixed and certainly a chance to strike back at the Establishment that I blamed for the awful state of the country and my life.

The son of Oath Keepers chief Stewart Rhodes explains why he left “Daddy Trump” — and the “far-right” cult.

Feature continued from page

My entanglement in Pizzagate and Clinton conspiracy theories would allow me to ignore the pointed fact that no one had been arrested as promised, but I could ig nore the advance of time for only so long.

The bitter thought that Stewart’s de cisions were putting our dogs in danger of being shot during a standoff at our home would be the beginning of the next step. My belief in The Donald had already peaked, al though I did not know it.

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Secret Service, FBI, and NSA leaking big news about upcoming arrests and secret espi onage operations. Stewart bought into some, in particular a claim that the Clinton server contained mass amounts of damning infor mation that could cause societal instability and foreign wars if released and so had to be handled carefully. In the midst of this, the Q handle would emerge with its now distinctive style of vague allusions and almost Socratic style of rhetorical questions. Q would go on to become a mass cultural phenomenon and perhaps the founding of the next American religious movement, but it failed to appeal to me or catch my interest at the time. I was of course deaf to the many Trump scandals, largely because I was increasingly insulated in Trump fan circles that massively downplayed them or simply ignored them. I wouldn’t see any of the clips of Trump bla tantly lusting after his daughter, the Ep stein party allegations, or the Russian mob connections for years to come. The Russia allegations, if anything, drove me further into the flabby yellow arms of Cult 45. I’d imbibed enough fear of Russian soldiers in UN blue being imported to Keep the Peace in post-collapse America in my life, and I was done with it. My fury at John McCain for seeming to be seeking another Cold War knew no bounds. I was absolutely through with any kind of generational struggle or conflict. I just wanted to live my life, and if the system presented me with a selection of warmongers and a single untested clown, I was going for that red nose for no other rea son than to shock the carnival barker who set myTherechoices.was, of course, the chance that he might be surprisingly competent and fix everything or at least not suck too badly. As a crass reality show star, he might just host some kind of bizarre media telethon from the Oval Office for four years straight and let his generally competent, if corporate stoogeheavy, cabinet run the country reasonably well. All he had to do was not start a major foreign war, keep ISIS down, and avoid col lapsing the economy, and he could be hailed as the next Reagan by the GOP forever. (I as yet had no concept of what a bad president Reagan himself had been.) In my mind, the worst case was four years of W Bush-esque gaffes bringing about a new golden age for Saturday Night Live parodies before he left the White House to comfortably rule American mass media for the rest of his life. If the economy could just not crash for a few years and if I could avoid being drafted to fight in a conflict in Ukraine that I then barely understood and largely didn’t care about, I might be able to get out of the shad ow of Oath Keepers and the Fatherlord and have my own life. Through 4chan and Reddit’s Trump com munities, I was immersed in the Podesta email scandal and the conspiracy theo ries connecting Clinton lawyers to Central American pedophiles and executives for the Amber Alert system. They were entertain ing, sometimes as outlandish as claims that Trump was a time traveler or had force field technology invented by Nikolai Tesla, and more and more they seemed oddly plausible. They fed the shining hope aspect of Trump’s appeal, beginning to paint every event as a move on a chess board that would bring down corrupt political conspiracies and big business. The outlandish and mundane theories existed together, interlinked, on a spectrum that allowed the reader to pick up whatever beliefs suited them and still be meshed within a generally likeminded on line community. The energy and enthusi asm became intoxicating in a way I hadn’t felt since the Paul campaign. At 18 years old, knowing that it hardly mattered in the grand scheme of the Electoral College, I cast my first ever vote in an election for Donald J. Trump. I joked on social media that my vote would single-handedly swing Montana’s results and save the United States. I was, like many Americans, glued to election night coverage and thrumming with anxiety, running to and fro between our table in a rural bar and grill on the Ca nadian border and the parking lot where a ghost of cell service let me check the news as votes were counted. I kept mainstream sources open in one window and 4chan’s toxic Politics board in another to have one eye on the crazy people’s take. I had plen ty of crazy opinions in my personal life of course, but the 4chan crowd had fewer delu sions of “Whatgrandeur.doyou think?” said Stewart after confiscating my small paycheck for answer ing emails for Oath Keepers to panic-buy canned goods and dog food. “If we take Oath Keepers to the Capitol to act as security, will the Left use that as an opportunity for a false flag attack?”Stewart had been obsessed with the specter of a Clinton presidency, terrified of the FBI unleashed to go after the militia leaders who had slipped away from Bundy Ranch. I was mainly concerned that federal agents raiding our house to arrest Stewart could end with our dogs being shot. It did, however, mark one important difference from the past: Stewart was losing his mind over this month’s Potential Apocalypse, and I felt almost totally indifferent to the end-ofworld aspect.

This, the forever wait by the Lock Her Up on myself a world’s weight of new respon sibility. Online political discourse and con spiracy theory simply took a backseat. I would jerk back to attention, however, when our country betrayed the Kurds. <section break> Like a lot of the militia-adjacent right wing, I’d become somewhat enamored with the struggle of the Kurdish people. All the conservative American cultural notes were hit: independent mountain people with a love for democratic government and per sonal freedom who’d been at our side since the Iraq war and had taken the brunt of the losses in combating ISIS. I’d researched the foreign volunteer regiments and decided against buying a plane ticket after reading about one fighter getting his nose broken in a headbutt by a Pirates of the Caribbean actor, which was tracked for a public relations-fo cused outfit that would take middle-aged dads from the U.K. and untrained Ameri can idiots. Like a militant Groucho Marx, I realized I should be wary of joining any paramilitary that would be willing to take continued on page 10 8

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I had political anxiety aplenty, sure, but I had detached myself from the cyclical fear of every headline that had ruled my life un til a peak at Jade Helm ’15. While Stewart fretted and plotted in insane megalomania, laboring under the self-gratifying delusion that the Clinton dynasty and Bilderberg Group were hinging their plans with bated breath on Stewart’s tactical decisions, the first thread in my belief had unraveled.

A perennial problem in militia and conser vative activist orgs is keeping members engaged and money flowing when a Republican is in of fice, the threat being that many members would assume that all was now well and “go to sleep” instead of continuing to power the orgs. Tak ing up position as he who watches the watcher would be one legitimate path to keeping Oath Keepers in circulation as an organization. However, going full MAGA and setting itself against the shadowy leftist threat would

I began to worry that there was nothing Trump could do that would shake their belief.

Later, when Trump was trying to drum up support for a war with Iran, I would have a bizarre argument with a bartender in which we circled endlessly from her insistence that we had no part in Middle Eastern “trib al conflicts” and should leave well enough alone in the entire region before immediate ly declaring that we needed a troop presence in the Middle East to keep hostile Muslim nations down before they posed a threat. No matter how many times I tried, she could not see the contradiction.

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My increasing concern with Trump’s cult status was not enough to draw me out of the right wing completely, although I was agree ing with liberal criticisms of the administra tion more and more, but that shock would be coming soon enough.

After the Las Vegas shooting, I would see it again, in the swirl of disinformation that included one local trying to convince me that the entire shooting had been faked because a photographer with a telescopic lens couldn’t see any bullet holes in the street. I knew people in Las Vegas who’d been there, which led to some awkward confron tations around my small town as conspira cy theory spread. In the aftermath, Trump signed a gun control bill that banned the bump stock accessory that had been used by the shooter, successfully passing more gun control in four years than Obama had in eight, and I watched in amazement as many of the hardcore Second Amendment fanat ics I was surrounded by twisted themselves in knots to avoid conflicting with Trump’s actions.One redneck youth told me that Trump had stopped all mass shootings permanently by banning bump stocks, and people with Gadsden flag plates suddenly advocated for red flag laws and even confiscating all weap ons from veterans on grounds of PTSD only to stay in step with Trump.

The Donald continued to lose me throughout the pandemic, the well-studied absolute failure of the administration to act decisively or effectively particularly striking to a lifelong prepper who’d grown up hearing dire warnings of antibiotic-resistant plagues and weaponized viruses. Not only had the administration failed in the crisis, but they’d politicized it. I watched in shock as a pub lic health crisis was outright denied so that appropriate response could be turned into a wedge issue and again as people I knew who had panicked the hardest at the first reports from Wuhan seemed to gradually forget that they’d ever believed in the virus at all. All chaos and death was blamed again on the shadowy NWO, obviously out in the world sowing societal havoc with gremlin glee to create that ever-precious power vac uum. This frustrated me to no end, as some one who had followed news about the virus closely from the start. Conspiracy theory outlets that had milked the early downplay ing of the outbreaks by health organizations, presenting themselves as champions of truth when governments claimed that all was well, turned to alleging that the entire pandemic had been a hoax or a cover for attacks by se cret microwave weapons. Oath Keepers would perform a similar 180. Stewart, scrambling to recover from an open letter to Trump asking for harsher COVID measures, would appear in a mask less photo op with a gym owner who refused to comply with lockdown orders in an at tempt to salvage support from his base. This was symptomatic of a larger shift in the militia movement, a sea change I’d been largely unaware of after gradually dropping out of militant circles. Oath Keepers presents an excellent case study. An unpublished open letter to Trump by Stewart Rhodes “schooled” the president on the Constitution in an adver sarial tone. This letter would have marked a course forward for Oath Keepers as a less par tisan watchdog organization looming over the shoulder of the Trump admin on the lookout for misbehavior, a direction that was in line with the mission statement of Oath Keep ers more than armed standoffs in the desert. It was, however, just one of several strategies Stewart was evidently weighing for keeping O.K. relevant after the 2016 elections.

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 10fwweekly.com me as a member. Still, I had become deep ly emotionally entangled in their cause and believed they represented a bright light in a dark time for the world. Over the course of a single hour-long phone call with a foreign dictator, our pres ident was convinced to completely abandon our most faithful regional allies in the Global War on Terror in one of the worst strategic decisions made by any president in modern history. The Kurds were added (again) to our long list of local allies betrayed in conflicts from Tripoli to Laos and permanently set the reputation of the United States as an unreli able ally and fair-weather friend. I watched dumbfounded as a state that possibly in tended genocide was given free rein to roll over the people who had done all the dying to destroy the caliphate our national failures helped create, just so that Trump could get an attaboy from an autocratic strongman. Or maybe not just an attaboy. The more I looked at the situation objectively, the more I saw that in every aspect, Russian President Vladimir Putin gained enormously. This de cision had done us no good in any respect but had many advantages for the strategic goals of Russia. Standing in the family kitchen, I remember jokingly telling my mother that I was ready to re-think all of those Russiagate allegations. It didn’t feel like a joke. Almost more worrisome was the way people I knew reacted, changing their own viewpoints to stay in lockstep with Trump.

The death of EMT Breonna Taylor, shot in bed during a no-knock raid on her home, had clear parallels to the 2011 shooting death of Marine veteran Jose Guerena, who had similarly been killed in a SWAT raid when he was given no time to recognize the intruders in his home as police and lay down his rifle. Oath Keepers had protested his death, stay ing the course even when every single police officer on the Oath Keepers board of direc tors resigned in protest to our protest and left half the national leadership seats vacant. Our media guy assembled a touching memorial video that was instrumental in early aware ness of Oath Keepers when it hit the internet, sending a loud and clear message that Oath Keepers would stand up for veterans even if it meant criticizing the police. I saw no reason why the killing of a first responder should be different from the killing of a Marine vet, especially when both had been drug busts that targeted not the shooting victim but an associate under investigation. For Guerena, a family member. For Breonna, a spouse. In my view, Oath Keepers and many allied militias had more history of sympathy with BLM than of being antagonistic or at least of general ideological alignment.

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I was baffled when escalating police vi olence against peaceful protests was met by jeers from my remaining militia contacts on social media. Federal agents in plain clothes abducted protesters in unmarked rental vans without legal arrests ever being record ed, crowds were barricaded in place for mass arrests, citizens were shot with less-than-le thal munitions on their own front porches, tanks rolled through neighborhoods flanked by police and soldiers in gas masks. It was a scene out of any and every paranoid an tigovernment fantasy come to life, and the reaction was “serves you right.” Instead of stepping up to seize the mo ment, even in a self-promotional move to gain legitimacy and a wider platform, the militiamen all stayed home chuckling over the schadenfreude of seeing “the left” be ing repressed after “the left” had refused to 10

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WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 11fwweekly.com prove to be the path of least resistance. Many militias would make this choice, aligning unquestioningly with MAGA to stay rele vant and keep the numbers up despite go ing against their stated antiauthoritarianism and distrust of government. If I fully understood this at the time, the events of the BLM riots would have been less of an awful surprise. This part is going to be hard to imagine, even after getting oriented a bit on what the inside of my younger self’s brain was like, but the fact that the entire constitutionalist militia movement did not turn out in soli darity with Black Lives Matter in 2020 was a massive shock to my entire belief system. In 2014 Ferguson, the Oath Keepers’ rooftop security teams had been planning an armed march in solidarity with BLM, in cluding the loan of AR-15s to organizers, to demonstrate that the Second Amendment be longed to all Americans. It never happened. Stewart blamed local O.K. leaders for drop ping the ball. He had given the green light to collaboration with the John Brown Gun Club but simply never got around to answer ing emails from them. O.K. had even offered to join the Standing Rock protests and been turned down in the justifiable fear of it being co-opted into another standoff circus.

Oath Keepers had taken great pains to boycott events that also hosted speakers from racist groups, main tained careful separation from alt-right and Identity Europa contingents at the Berkeley protests, and once kicked Randy Weaver out of an Oath Keepers parade after he refused to renounce white separatism. I saw the militia movement I had lived in as a force loyal to the idea of America, not an ethnic majority. A lot of this I put down to the influence of 3% founder Mike Vanderboegh, whose life’s work was forging the disparate militias into an anti-racist armed civil disobedience move ment that could gain political legitimacy. I had marched in several protests he or ganized in my childhood — the gun rights marches drew armed crowds and police monitoring. His talks establishing a link between gun rights and racial justice drew a handful of Accordingattendants.tothe dogma of the consti tutionalist side of the militia movement, white supremacists were supposed to be the enemy. Racist groups were perhaps a lower priority to some than communists, out of a belief that radical leftists had influence in government that the Klan lacked (a hilari ous irony in hindsight) but were domestic enemies of the Constitution nonetheless. They were a constant presence that had to be checked, a camel with its nose perpet ually creeping under the tent, attempting to advance themselves by associating with constitutionalist militias in the eyes of the media to increase conflict and puff them selves up. I’d been long since out of touch with most Oath Keepers, but I assumed that the mission remained unchanged. All ene mies, foreign and domestic. It follows log ically that an anti-racist, anti-government movement would turn out for racial justice protests after egregious killings by agents of the state.What happened instead was that the mi litias finally got to see the black helicopters and “black bag” abduction squads they’d long predicted in action, vindicated at last, and they stood aside to cheer on the state.

The only thing that made any sense to me, later, was to wonder whether I’d always believed in a lie and the whole movement really was racist to the core. My remaining militia movement Facebook friends started referring to people by barely disguised ra cial epithets like “dindus” and the leader of the local group, a splinter of Oath Keepers’ CPT program, told me that he’d be willing to accept white nationalist members if they didn’t rock the boat. I stopped wondering, and I severed a lot of contacts.

In all this, I sort of lost track of what Trump was doing.

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on page 13

September 8th – 10th, 2022

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 12fwweekly.com

Instead, they stayed at home, laughing at “the left” for finally getting their turn under the boot (in a very particular view of reality) and actively cheering the black heli copters. The use of state violence against pro test movements in modern America moved toward normalization, the president threat ened the deployment of U.S. military forces to crush protests, and the anti-government freedom fighters applauded from home. Except the ones that went to count er-protests. They turned up all right, to try to provoke queer teens into fights while strutting around in their plate carriers and tactical vests and to unexpectedly run into the eldest son of their generalissimo on the wrong side of the crowd. They turned up waving Trump flags and the Star-Spangled Banner, as if a protest against the unlawful killing of Black people was inherently a protest against Trump and America itself.

The Woman's Club of Fort Worth, 1316 Pennsylvania Ave, Fort Worth

This art show and sale includes themes of preservation, conservation and insights about our city by local studio artists. HFW’s show and sale is held in the elegant and historic Woman’s Club building of Fort Worth.

Both the Woman’s Club of Fort Worth and Historic Fort Worth, Inc. are charities with educational missions that benefit the community.

Enjoy this unique opportunity to see wonderful art in a space that is not generally open to the public. Anna Shelton Hall, which is the room that will house this exhibit was constructed by the architects Sanguinet, Staats and Hedrick in 1926.

stand up for right-wing protesters and gun owners in the Debatablepast.as that is, the Teamsters Union went to bat for Cliven Bundy after all, when the obvious, correct response would have been to act the bigger man and march out anyway. Especially after Bundy Ranch, a lot of police violence would have been cooled by a line of backwoods paramilitary Bubbas, all with wild beards and American flag bandannas, standing between the police and protesters and simply refusing to move.

I’d tuned in a bit to the continued

I thought about that image, the defensive reflex of the militia right to any attack on racism, for a long time. Their excuses when pressed were varied and shallow and made little sense. The protest was ridiculous because Black abortions hap pened and people protest that less, where was the protest for people killed by illegal immi grants?, there’s “intelligence” that Antifa is going to launch a terrorist attack at 7 p.m. (in which case you absolutely should be stand ing in the open, clearly identifiable as rightwing militia and incredibly predictable in your regular movements while you patrol the venue — you go, dude), the killing of George Floyd was a conspiracy because that many cops shouldn’t have shown up that quickly for a counterfeit bill call, and that meant a false flag engineered to sow social chaos. On and on, bewildering bullshit and empty wha taboutisms without any real concrete reasons that had more than a single sentence of depth.

A version of this story originally appeared in Raw Story.

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WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 13fwweekly.com endless conga line of scandals and instant ly burned out when the sheer volume was too much to handle. It felt like diving into a monstrous comic book series with a confus ing timeline, by design, and except for when Trump wandered across the street to hold a bible upside down and tear-gas reporters, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention. I hadn’t yet mastered the post-2020 mindset of staying perpetually afraid and angry of and about everything all the time. By the time of election night, I was to tally apathetic, disliking Joe Biden but com pletely over anything to do with Trump and disgusted by the state of the country when I saw a piece of the presidential debates. I was a bit happy when the results were called in, one eye on 4chan’s “/pol/” board again to watch the endless tide of election fraud claims and denial turn into pure salt. Actual Neonazis had been cheering for Biden, tired of Trump-supporting “normies” crowd ing their weird little online ecosystem and rooting for Joe out of pure spite. Then, the election fraud claims started getting annoy ingly loud and strident in a very real-life non-4chanAnnoyanceway. turned to icy fear real fast when the loyalty purge started in the Pentagon. I again found myself flooded with anxiety and glued to election coverage, my security blanket of no longer believing in civil war and collapse gone. I saw the machinery of a coup clicking into place, the legal justifica tions and attempts to lever control over the military, the Blackwater pardons bringing Betsy DeVos to my attention for the first time amid consistent online rumors that mercenaries were being hired by Trump to secure essential infrastructure amid some domesticTrumpconflict.continued to meet with Mike Lindell, who, from my perspective, ap peared from absolutely nowhere like the world’s worst magic trick, and Michael Fly nn after they both floated imposing martial law to overturn the election. Stewart, who had included imposing martial law and sus pending the Constitution in his Oath Keep ers’ founding list of 10 Orders We Will Not Obey, ignored this and continued pledging his undying loyalty to Trump in the midst of bizarre rants on the O.K. website about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and crossdressing. I knew by then that Stewart Rhodes was in herently cowardly and self-interested, but seeing Oath Keepers as a whole turn to effec tively simping for the figurehead of a clear ly evident treasonous conspiracy, one that embodied in itself every bogeyman threat to America that Oath Keepers had ever warned of, was the final death of any faith I had left in the militia Somewhereright.in here, I realized that I could no longer stand conservative news outlets, which didn’t seem to match reality at all. The only people who saw the warning signs I saw, who were paying attention to the clear and present danger, were the liberals and leftists that I’d held as a logically flawed Other at best for most of my life. I held my breath for weeks on end, even after the 6th and the inauguration, and felt almost emp ty when I was no longer checking political news sites for new reasons to hate the presi dent every hour, on the hour. Obsession over impending doom can be addictive, and if you get started in childhood, it’s pretty hard to break the cycle. QAnon finally came back into my view, no longer fading into background noise, and I saw the mythology seeping into my ev eryday life. Even after the 6th, many in my town were waiting for the national guard on Capitol Hill to shout “surprise” and declare that the security fences and barbed wire were because the Capitol was actually being converted into a prison camp, the loyalists relocating to the new capitol at Mar-a-Lago. The newspaper was filled with Letters to the Editor calling out the Capitol insurrection as a “hoax.” I began to realize that large seg ments of the population, my neighbors and some of my friends, would cling to the alter nate reality for perhaps the rest of their lives. At this point, Trump could die, and millions of Americans would refuse to ever believe it. I have had to learn to accept this. I have had to learn to accept a lot of things, including that there is no silver bul let for deprogramming. I spent my entire youth practicing shouting down opposing views without ever really considering them, simply because I already knew I was right, and it took a series of hard hits undermining my belief system to shake me loose from ide ology and preconception. The key, I think, was the causes that were important to me simply because I had empathy for people who were different from me and the curios ity to look further when the narratives I had agreed with contradicted the facts. These are traits missing in huge parts of our popula tion, although they can be learned, but I be lieve those who find themselves course-cor recting when their sense of what is right di verges from what they are told are the ones that matter most. I would rather reach one thoughtful cultural conservative with facts that give them pause than get 10 rootless habitual followers to agree with me just be cause my views are “in” right now. Only one of those is a lasting change. Above all is the will. Believing that Daddy Trump will save me, that I was al ways on the right side and never seriously, badly wrong about the world and that my deepest held beliefs are infallible, is easy and comforting. Coming to the conclusions that I have, tearing apart every childhood dogma and finding little I want to save, is incredi bly hard and has put me at odds with large parts of my family and my community, but I cannot justify doing anything else. I can not even justify staying quiet and dissenting only in my own mind, even though standing up publicly is a source of horrific anxiety. It would be hypocritical in the extreme to hope for someone else, everyone else, to speak up for sanity and basic human decency when the GOP primaries are running ads that double as vigilante death squad threats. Not unless I spoke up, too. l

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 14fwweekly.com

here. Tonight at midnight, the ballot closes for the readers’ choice portion of Best Of 2022 voting. Vote now at FWWeekly. com/Best-Of-Ballot-2022. (Business owners, if you’re just now catching wind of this, nev er fear. As it’s limited to one ballot per per son, there’s still time to rally your audience to vote for you. For questions, comments, concerns, and — dare I say it? — ad buys, please email Marketing@fwweekly.com.)Regrets,don’thaveafew. Go ahead and secure your tickets to see My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra at Casa Manana (3101 W Lancaster Av, 817-3322272) right now. This popular musical revue tours nationally and is hailed as having “pow erful music, superb arrangements, classy style, and easy-going comedy” and is suitable for most audiences. Showtimes are 7pm Fri, 2pm and 8pm Sat, 2pm Sun, 7:30pm Tue-Thu, Sep 15, and 7:30pm Sat-Sun, Sep 16-17. Tickets start at $15 at CasaManana.org/MyWay.Youngadultfantasyauthor Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, a native Texan, will be at inde pendent bookshop Patchouli Joe’s Books & Indulgences (221 W Hickory St, Denton, 940-808-0530) 6pm-8pm to sign her books Where You Linger & Other Stories and the newly released Glorious Fiends. In the new book, when infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she’s confronted by a dream-dwelling Guard ian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equal ly nefarious creatures or he’ll drag her there instead. Purchase Glorious Fiends for $14.99 (paperback) in-store today or preorder at Un derlandPress.com/Fiends. Learn more about bird migration season Thursday or online at Birdcast.info.

Promotional support provided by September 18, 2022–January 29, 2023

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window, c. 1655–60, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection, 1942.9.46 This exhibition is organized by the Kimbell Art TheMuseum.KimbellArt Museum is supported in part by Arts Fort Worth, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Good Boss this weekend. Básculas Blanco, a company producing industrial scales in a provincial Spanish town, awaits the immi nent visit from the committee that decides whether or not they merit a local Business Excellence award. Prepping his employees for the upcoming visit, company proprietor Blanco (Javier Bardem) pulls out all the stops and crosses every imaginable line in the process. Showtimes are 3:45pm, 6pm, and 8:15pm today, 5pm Sat, and 11:45am, 2pm, and 4:15pm Sun. The film runs for 120 minutes and is in Spanish with English sub titles. Tickets areHead$10. to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (3501 Camp Bowie Blvd, 817-738-1933) 6pm-10pm for Party on the Porch. In celebration of the closing weekend of Sargent, Whistler, and Ve netian Glass: American Artist and the Magic of Murano, enjoy art-making activities, explore the gallery during extended hours, and hear live music by Grammy-nominated country artist Brent Cobb. There is no cost to attend, but you will need a ticket. Download your free tickets at endParty-Porch-2022.CarterMuseum.org/Events/Nowtheendisnear,andsoIfacethatfinalcurtain…wait,wrongblurb(see:below).Forreal,though,theis

NIGHT&DAY

By Jennifer Bovee

Guest speaker Dr. Tania Homanyoun’s topic is Lights Out, Texas: Safer Skies for Migrating. To help birds safely journey south, the Lights Out, Texas campaign encourages Texans to “turn off or dim lights 11pm-6am each night during migration season thru the end of November. Artificial lights at night can disorient birds, even causing them to crash.” For ways you can help during peak migration — today thru Thu, Oct 29 — vis it (3200ofcast.info/Lights-Out.migrationLights-Out-Texas.TX.Audubon.org/UrbanConservation/YoucanalsosignupforalertsaboutheavierdaysatBirdMagnoliaattheModern—anongoingseriesfeaturingcriticallyacclaimedfilmsscreenedintheauditoriumtheModernArtMuseumofFortWorthDarnellSt,817-738-9215)—screens

Those with a serious inter est in ornithology will want to attend the free general meeting of the Fort Worth Audubon Society 7pm-9pm at the UNT Health Science Center (3500 Camp Bowie Blvd, Everett Hall, Rm 100, @fwas.org).

StudioArtHarperCharleyCourtesy Saturday 10 Tuesday 13 Friday 9 Thursday 8 Sunday 11 Monday 12

the Reflecting PerformancePondby Dondoko Taiko Japanese Drumming 7:30–8:30Group pm Entertainment

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH

OTSUKI MI

Modern Art Museum

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76107 817.738.9215 WOMEN PAINTING WOMEN

SEPTEMBERMOONLIGHTBY17•7–10 PM

8–9 pm Entertainment

pm Performance

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MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH

OTSUKI

Japanese

3200

Street Fort

EVENT SCHEDULE 7 pm Doors Open Women Painting Women exhibition galleries open 7:30–8 pm Lantern Launch in the Reflecting PerformancePondby Dondoko Taiko Japanese Drumming 7:30–8:30Group pm Entertainment by Boyblk 8–9 pm Entertainment by Rizkilla 9–10 pm Performance by Cabus All

MI

EVENT SCHEDULE 7 pm Doors Open Women Painting Women exhibition galleries

pm Lantern Launch

3200

76107 817.738.9215 WOMEN PAINTING WOMEN

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 15fwweekly.com MODERN SEPTEMBERMOONLIGHTBY17•7–10 PM

MODERN

FESTIVAL open 7:30–8 in by Boyblk by Rizkilla 9–10 by Cabus CABUS All are invited to celebrate Otsukimi, the annual Japanese festival that honors the autumn moon and the season ahead, in recognition of the rich heritage of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s architect, Tadao Ando. Tickets: Become a Modern member to receive discounted tickets! www.themodern.org of Fort Worth Darnell Worth, Texas on view through 9/25

FESTIVAL are invited to celebrate Otsukimi, the annual festival that honors the autumn moon and the season ahead, in recognition of the rich heritage of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s architect, Tadao Ando. Tickets: Become a Modern member to receive discounted tickets! www.themodern.org Museum of Fort Worth Darnell Worth, Texas on view through 9/25

Street Fort

Modern Art

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We’ve received early evidence that Sonny Dykes will blossom into a solid partner, but it’s far from a lustful affair.

BY BUCK D. ELLIOTT

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 18fwweekly.com

TCU had suddenly remembered, or maybe it was learned, how to play offense and scored a field goal during an 80-yard drive to follow before locating the end zone on every subsequent appearance.

Bottom line: TCU beat a team from a major conference on the road at night by multiple touchdowns in Dykes’ first game as head coach. Yet the offense playing only one effective half of football feels a little too much like kissing your ex for fans to be comfortable in this partnership just yet. The defense will need to maintain what Frog faithful know they’re capable of, and one of the three potential quarterbacks will need to establish themselves the standout if we’re going to escalate this fling to an in-a-rela tionship-on-Facebook status. l

AthleticsTCUCourtesy

The defense didn’t let up until the very end, giving up their first touchdown of 2022 with barely a minute remaining while reclining on top of a 31-point lead. The 38-13 final in favor of the Frogs was good enough for Dykes’ first career win in purple as well as covering a 14-point spread that I wouldn’t have bet my worst enemies’ moneyWhaton. did we learn? It’s much too early to tell. Colorado is in the bottom third of a conference that’s also not particularly good (as we witnessed this weekend while their best teams fell to highly touted opponents from other conferences). The Horned Frogs were the better athletes on the field at almost every position. Still, it’s possible TCU faith ful can have a long and fulfilling marriage with Dykes. It’s not going to be a visceral, clothes-ripping attraction but more a case of friends falling for each other in a genuine and sweet partnership that produces a sus tainable relationship, which is boring but ultimately better. The most prevalent concern is that the Frogs still don’t have a quarterback. Chan dler Morris (#2) looked uncomfortable in the passing game while completing only 13 of 20 passes, many in windows small enough that he was lucky the team in black and gold weren’t running the opposite direction with the football. Morris didn’t finish the game after his lower leg was pinned awkwardly during a scramble, and veteran Max Dug gan (#15) and freshman Sam “Snakes on a Mother-Effing Plane” Jackson (#16) split time as glorified — yet effective — running backs. Morris has already been ruled out for next week’s pay-for-play game against Tar leton State, so the quarterback situation is likely to become hazier than it already is.

PersonalityGood

Friday night games are odd in college foot ball. Colorado is a weird state to boot, so adding a weather delay on top of this quirky duo made perhaps the most anticipated TCU football game — outside of a major bowl — a double-rainbow of weirdness. I’m not a huge fan of the Sonny Dykes hire, but I’m not not a fan of it either. If I were a single person and cruising West 7th to make some bad decisions, I’d consider Dykes a solid 6 at best. He isn’t a stunner, and wouldn’t stimulate my id to the point where we’d end up in a bathroom stall to gether, but he isn’t grotesque. However, af ter a first half involving 62 yards gained in 18 total offensive plays, I was less worried about how attractive Dykes’ hiring was or wasn’t and more seriously concerned that our hookup might land me at the CareNow for a round of reactive antibiotics. It’s un fair to make snap judgments based on just a few drives, especially of a group of brand new coaches, but it was difficult to ignore the lack of cohesion starting out. Luckily, the remnants of TCU’s Gary Patterson-led defense still shone despite ineffectiveness from the offense during the first half. Linebacker Dee Winters (#13) has improved and seems to be the next name-brand player in a long line of disrup tive linebacking athletes from the Fort. The transition to the more traditional 3-4 de fense seems to have freed the mobile mon ster to be even more chaotic for opponents in pass rush and run fits. The defensive line disrupted — not something we’ve seen in several years — as the simplified scheme demands penetration rather than reading of the backfield as in Patterson’s scheme. In the first half, the Buffaloes gained 197 yards during five sustained drives and gained at least one first down each time. Yet they were stopped cold on fourth and short during the first series, and the defense allowed only a pair of field goals. Combine the aforemen tioned with the hijinks of returner Derius Davis (#11), who housed a punt 60 yards, and the Frogs had a one-point advantage over the dregs of the Pac-12 going into half time.

Dykes’ debut was an overall success, though there were serious offensive concerns during the first half that could prove troublesome against better opponents.

The second half was different. Dykes doesn’t wear glasses, but if this were a movie, he would have taken them off and revealed he was scandalous and sexy all along but with a great personality layered on top. The retooled Frog staff made what some coach es call “second-half adjustments.” Frog fans of a certain age might not be familiar with this term — as it’s been several years since it’s happened successfully — but it means the gameplan swapped things TCU was do ing in the first half that weren’t working for different things in the second half that were likelyTheto. third quarter marked TCU’s first offensive touchdown of the season during the first drive, thanks primarily to veterans running the rock. I applaud Dykes’ willing ness to pivot from the traditional spread for which he’s so well known to heavier for mations incorporating sniffer[?] backs and multiple tight ends. The purple defense responded by serving up their first threeand-out of the season.

In our last issue #10 we were asking for help to stop the city from taking this disable man home with bogus charges from Code Compliance. Part 2 These elected officials and city employees did not do anything to help this person. It can not be ruled out that they were the case of his death.

JamesRIPBanks

Superintendent: Mike Graham Should have been Fired long time ago, he is a two-faced liar

If you are not a registered voter then become one and stop depending on other people to do your job! Over 900,000 people do not vote in our local elections in Fort Worth and this is why you can see the worst Mayor and Council in the USA at (fwdistrict5.com) b.willoughby@live.com (817)446-7056

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Over two years ago on January 2020 code got a court order to cut Mr. Banks padlock and got a bid for cleanup. Why have they not cleaned up if there was a violation? Because they were ripping off a disabled man and got caught at it. Something should be done about this, I say Mayor Mattie Parker, and City Manager David Cook Code Employees that are guilty!

These are the two we have on video running from the camera man. This was an awful crime in broad daylight that is happening across the city.

James andWasPastorMemberDistrictBanks8CouncilChrisNettlesaskforhishelpdidnothing.

New Era Contract services for the city is crooked and the City Manager David Cooke knows it(I recorded the meeting with Mr. Cooke from about two months ago on this issue it was a waste of tax dollars for all he would do after the meeting is not reply but run from the camera, Videos at (fwdistrict5.com)

Supervisor: Ken Young and employed: Marc Oler

Mayor Mattie Parker will not instruct the city manager to do his Shejob. is too young and immature for her job. It is written the City Manager David Cooke number one job is to please the mayor.

Code Compliance Director Brandon Bennett Brandon okayed the request to seek a court order to remove what they said was in violation. When James called me, they were about to rip the man off. They had cut the padlock on the gate and were about to remove belongings worth money and charge him $3,600 dollars for clean-up. On the list of items that were in violation were a picnic table, and lawn equipment. But it all came to a stop when we showed up with a camera man. Code ran off and suspended all communications for more see the Video at (fwdistrict5.com) show up to find the ICOC video

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FC Dallas made a significant acquisition with Sebastian Lletget, the 30-year-old goalscoring midfielder who had been a fixture in the LA Galaxy’s starting lineup.

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What do I look like, a financial analyst? They may well win the La Liga title and the Champions League with their refreshed squad this season, but they can just ask Leeds how overextension can send even a soccer powerhouse into purgatory for almost 20 years. I say this will all end in tears for the blaugrana. Anything else? FC Dallas made a significant acquisition with Sebastian Lletget, the 30-year-old goal-scoring midfielder who had been a fixture in the LA Galaxy’s starting lineup.

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 20fwweekly.com

RoundupTransferSummer

Let’s see, Russia invaded Ukraine. The aggressor’s national team was kicked out of World Cup qualifying and Poland qual ified in their place, which probably made Ukraine’s sympathetic neighbor quite hap py. The Russian teams were also ejected from the Champions League. The Ukrainian soc cer league called off their season, and a con tingent of Brazilian players in the country made an S.O.S. video begging their country to get them out. Since then, the league has come back on while those players escaped by whatever means possible. Chelsea’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, made a fuzzy statement and turned the team over to a supporters’ club in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the British government freezing his assets. The team was bought by L.A. hedge fund investor Todd Boehly, who likes dis tressed assets because he’s also the interim CEO of the Hollywood Foreign Press Asso ciation following the Golden Globes fiasco.

Meanwhile, Marsch has showed some unLasso-like attitude, getting into sideline al tercations with opposing coaches and being red-carded in a loss to Brentford. His play ers have been pressing feistily, and they’re not laughing so much at Leeds anymore. Will all this help Team USA at the World Cup? Tune in this November for my pre-tourna ment feature. You are shameless. Who else moved? It may be more significant who didn’t move.

With what money? Yes, the financial troubles at Barça have been a regular theme in this feature, but the Span ish giants managed to scrounge up more cash by mortgaging percentages of their TV rights to British and American buyers in ex change for an undisclosed amount.

The past six months have seen a lot of upheaval in world soccer.

Christian Pulisic was rumored to be on his way out of Chelsea but stayed there and thankfully avoided the offensive logjam at Manchester United. Speaking of which, United spent the summer pursuing Bar celona’s deep-lying playmaker Frenkie de Jong and hit a brick wall. Funniest of all was Cristiano Ronaldo asking out of United and, much like Kevin Durant in the NBA, find ing no takers for his huge salary. Even huger are his ego and delusion, and United have been winning ever since new coach Erik ten Hag benched Ronaldo. This situation could explode in a very entertaining way. I asked you who moved. Manchester City, clearly in need of talent, recruited massive Norwegian striker Erling Braut Haaland, who immediately repaid them with hat tricks in two straight games. Bayern Munich picked up Sadio Mané from Liverpool, and the Senegalese striker looks every bit his magnificent self there. Bayern needed a new goal threat after losing Robert Lewandowski to Barcelona, which bought up a whole bunch of new players for their defense, midfield, and attack.

Hoops already look bound for the playoffs, and Lletget should be a steadying veteran presence. The next time we talk, we’ll know whether he or new teammate Jesús Ferreira are on that plane taking Team USA to the Middle East. l

Is that smart?

Qatar told FIFA back in 2012 that they could hold the tournament in summer even with the country’s scorching heat. Then they realized they couldn’t and postponed the tournament until late November.

Meanwhile, Abramovich, who received not a penny from the sale of his team, went back to Russia to try to broker a peace deal. He and the other peace negotiators apparently got poisoned. It’s hard out here for a Russian oligarch. Weren’t we supposed to have a World Cup this summer?

BY KRISTIAN LIN I need to wake up my idiot friend who joins me for this feature. The World Cup this year is only one reason why this summer’s transfer window was busier than usual. Hey, let’s go! Argh! I’m up! So what did happen in soc cer since last January?

Isn’t it hypocritical to ban Russia from the World Cup and then hold that tournament in a country with so many human rights violations of its own? Yes. This will be America’s first World Cup in eight years. How are our players doing now? Every four years, players for countries that have made the big dance look to change clubs to get more playing time. It benefits no one to be buried on the bench. Thus, USA’s pre sumptive No. 1 goalkeeper Zack Steffen gave up a cushy position as Manchester City’s backup for a loan spell at Middlesbrough. Joining him at “Boro” is striker Matthew Hoppe. Attacking midfielder Malik Till man, rather than take up space in Bayern Munich’s reserves, took a loan to Rangers in Scotland. Jordan Pefok led the Swiss league in scoring last season with Young Boys (in sert: obligatory joke about the team’s name here) and moved to the tougher German league with Union Berlin, where he imme diately won over the fans by scoring against their hated rivals Hertha Berlin. Sergiño Dest seems to have done something to piss off Barcelona’s new coach Xavi, so now he’s on loan at AC Milan. Veteran defender John Anthony Brooks has gone to Benfica to re cover his form after some injury-plagued seasons. Former FC Dallas striker Ricardo Pepi, who struggled at Augsburg, took a loan to FC Groningen, where he can rediscover his scoring touch against the weak defenses in the Dutch league. That’s a lot! I haven’t even mentioned the American rev olution at Leeds United, where Jesse Marsch took over as head coach last spring from the cult-like figure of Marcelo Bielsa. The Brit ish footie fans reacted by laughing at the Whites, because the most famous Ameri can coach in the Prem has been Ted Lasso. However, with a full off-season to work with and some new American players (defensive midfielder Tyler Adams and striker Brenden Aaronson), Leeds has started this season brightly, with a 3-0 victory over hated rivals Chelsea. Aaronson scored his first-ever Pre mier League goal in that game by pressur ing Champions League-winning goalkeep er Édouard Mendy into a hilarious error

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WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 22fwweekly.com PeopleNamaste, In North Fort Worth, this Irving outpost serves up stunningly spiced Indian and Nepalese delights. Namaste Grill & Bar, 7355 N Beach St, FW. 682-385-9091. 11am-10pm Sun-Mon, Wed-Sat. STORY AND PHOTOS BY MADISON SIMMONS What if I told you delicious, authentic Nep alese and Indian food was waiting for you right here in Fort Worth? This spring, the owners of Namaste Grill & Bar in Irving opened a Fort Worth location at 7355 N. Beach St. The restaurant occupies a corner of a shopping center and has a bright and elegant vibe thanks to its high ceilings and a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. continued on page 23 Namaste’s thukpa, studded with tender strips of mutton (the menu offers a choice of proteins) and crunchy fresh green onions, is the stuff for cozy rainy days or to pick you up when you have a cold. With an original location in Irving, Namaste occupies the corner of a strip mall in North Fort Worth. &EATSdrinks Namaste’s Nepali Thali Set comes with small servings of a few different dishes, rice, and pickled and fresh veggies. 4630 SW Loop 820 | Fort Worth• 817-731-0455 order online for pickup Thaiselectrestaurant.com Thai Kitchen & Bar SPICE 411 W. Magnolia Ave Fort Worth • 817-984-1800 order online for pickup at Spicedfw.com“Best Thai Food”“Best Thai Food” – FW readersCriticsWeeklyChoice2016–FWWeeklyChoice2017,2019,2020&2021– FW ChoiceCriticsWeekly2015,2017&2019 THE BEST THAI IN FORT WORTH INRESTAURANTSTHAIAPPROVEDZONESBLUEFIRSTFW! ITALIAN KITCHEN GIOVANNI’S 5733 crowley rd • fort worth tx 76134 817.551.3713 | GIOVANNISFW.COM Vote For Us in Best Of 2022 "Best Italian Food"

Namaste Grill & Bar Chili momo $12.99 Thukpa w/mutton ..................................... $14.99 Nepali Thali Set $16.99 Everything at Namaste tasted fresh and creatively spiced. Eats & Drinks continued from page 22

The extensive menu features both Nepalese and Indian dishes. Offerings in clude an assortment of fried snacks, biryani, dumplings, tandoori, Indian curries, and traditional Nepali dishes. I have had Nepal ese food only on a couple of happy occasions. Eager to try more, my friend and I stuck to that side of the menu. Upon recommendation, we started with an order of chili momo. Momo are Nepal ese dumplings and came in steamed and fried varieties. Our chili momo were fried and slathered in a sweet, smoky, spicy chili paste that left such an impression on me I can almost taste it as I type. We opted for the veggie filling, a rich and savory mixture of greens and onions and maybe chickpeas. The dumplings dazzled on their own, but combined with a topping of jammy onions and crunchy green peppers? This was the standout of the meal. Next, we had thukpa, a soup originat ing from the Himalayas. A redolent smell of spices wafted up from the steam. Chewy noodles floated in a thick clear broth with a pleasantly sour aftertaste that I could not quite place. The soup was studded with tender strips of mutton (the menu offers a choice of proteins) and crunchy fresh green onions. This soup is the stuff for cozy rainy days or to pick you up when you have a cold. We finished with a Nepali Thali Set. A set comes with small servings of a few differ ent dishes, rice, and pickled and fresh veg gies. It’s a good choice if you want to try a few different items and want to combine dif ferent flavors. This iteration had a light sim ple lentil soup, curried cauliflower, a chick en curry, and a potato dish, each in their own little chalice, arranged around steamed rice and mustard greens. The presentation was stunning. The cauliflower, rich and spiced, and chicken curry were scrumptious. Upon request, the waitress brought out a dish of spicy sweet hot sauce that rounded out the flavors perfectly. The set also came with the best naan I’ve had in years, rich and yeasty and fresh.Theset also came with dessert, gulab jamun. The dairy-rich fried dough sat in a bath of sweet, fragrant syrup and made for the perfect end to the meal. Everything we tried at Namaste tasted fresh and broadcasted an unfamiliar-to-me combination of spices that left me wanting more. I already have a running list of what I want to try next time: more momo, some of the Indian curries, a variety of barbecued meats, and a mango lassi, to name a few. I’m planning my next trip back now. l

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other local businesses like Printed Threads. River East will be the home to Cafe Enduro sometime soon. Courtesy Enduro Coffee FacebookCourtesy

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Enduro Roasters

Cafe Enduro will feature a full espresso bar, local breakfast tacos, pastries, various iced teas, and other refreshments for the hikers and bikers off the trail. “We aim to be a stopping point for a quick recharge,” says owner Anthony Parrotta. “There will be both indoor and outdoor seating, with bike racks, a filtered water bottle fill station, and water bowls outside for the pups.” All coffee will be roasted onsite at a roastery located back-of-the-house and pro cessed in the next room. The facilities at Cafe Enduro will include a coffee lab to host cuppings and give coffee courses on every thing from farm to cup. supports

is Opening a New Retail Location in River East

What you get with Enduro Coffee Roasters (2416 Ludelle St, 817-349-9337) is the local service and attention to detail you won’t find at the big box suppliers. All coffee is roasted to order, with new shipments being received each month. It also leases equipment. Open since March of 2018, Enduro has been solely focused on its wholesale busi ness and online sales. Until now. Located across the street from the Trinity River Trail System, the new Cafe Enduro building at 400 Oakhurst Scenic Dr in Fort Worth isn’t a completely new build. (By “breaking ground(s),” we simply mean that we love a good pun.) Until recently, the space had been the construction office of a recently built residential community. Now, the space will serve as the home base for some of the best coffee in town.

817.349.9337 RETAIL LOCATION OPENING SOON IN RIVER EAST! For updates, follow us on Facebook.com/EnduroCoffee. EATS & DRINKS Enduro

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Power Trip was one of the most popular hardcore bands in North Texas, and when frontman Riley Gale died from a toxic dose of fentanyl in 2020, guitarist Blake Ibanez, who still isn’t ready to talk about his friend’s death, said he could only move forward. continued on page 30 Ibanez: “I wanted it to be something like the early days, playing with bandmates to hang out with, and it’s been awesome.”

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 27fwweekly.com

BY JUAN R. GOVEA

DanielZane MUSIC

As Fugitive proves on their debut EP, they’re just like any other metal band: They like to write, jam, and “rip tunes.”

SpreeManiac

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And that’s exactly what he’s done. After recruiting second guitarist Victor Gutierrez (Impalers), bassist Andy Messer (ANS, Stymie), and drummer Lincoln Mul lins (Creeping Death), with Skourge’s Seth Gilmore on vocals, Ibanez created Fugitive, whose debut recording, the EP Maniac, came out on Monday.

The guys are finally getting a chance to take a breather after their run of shows in Vegas and performing live for the first time, at Wrecking Ball Metal Madness a few weeks ago in Dallas.

N. at Cloudland Recording Studios in Fort Worth. Mastering was done by Will Killing sworth at Dead Air in Massachusetts with drums engineered by Drew LeClair and additional drum production by Slade Wil liams.The debut generated lots of buzz in the Texas metal scene. Songs like the opener “The Javelin” rage like a locomotive. While Fugitive is a mélange of its members’ assort ed projects, Ibanez says Power Trip never really disbanded and that the formation of Fugitive wasn’t influenced by Gale’s death. “I guess you could say Power Trip is on hiatus,” Ibanez said. “I wanted to play with a group and to have band practice with a handpicked [group of] guys that I liked. I was just bored and wanted to do something else, and I wanted it to be something like the early days, playing with bandmates to hang out with, and it’s been awesome.”

“I want to get back in the studio in Oc tober to [strike while] the iron’s hot,” he said. “We need some more songs to play a longer set,” he added with a laugh. l Music continued from page 27 Fugitive has played a slew of shows recently but will be buckling down soon to go back into the studio.

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 30fwweekly.com

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“It’s cool to put something out and see what happens,” Ibanez said. “When [Gale] passed away, there was a lot of media out, and then being nominated for a Grammy helped a bit, and there was a lot of visibil ity with the power of the internet. It’s cool to see how far it goes and how many people give a shit about anything I do. I’m proud of that, and it’s really cool to see.” Since some members are on tour with their other projects, Fugitive does not have any immediate shows booked. However, Ibanez is itching to get back to work.

Ibanez said he and his bandmates are happy with the way Maniac turned out and said it feels like the formula for writing new music seems to be working.

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Fugitive recently booked a gig at a na tional festival, Ibanez said, including a re sort in Las Vegas. The venue “was sold out, and Vegas was great,” Ibanez said. “We had a good timeslot, and the room was full.”

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“I was hanging out with [Gilmore] eat ing breakfast one day,” Ibanez recalled, “and said, ‘I feel like doing something musically to keep my creativity going,’ so I basically threw it out in the air [that I] wanted to play with some of the guys, and we were like ‘Sure,’ so I started jamming with [Mullins], and it was all that. Seeing how the songs were going, we started recording.” Ibanez said that, for Fugitive, he re turned to his musicmaking roots and that it was a great life decision to start the group focused on the same thing he’s always done: write music and jam out. “Fugitive is a band that likes to play shows, write songs, and rip tunes like any other band,” he said.

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MuncyGray

GM Financial currently has the following openings in Fort Worth, TX: COMPLIANCE MANAGER – Assist with defining requirements and governance oversight direction of IO Compliance program and framework management of AML/Sanctions, Anti-Bribery & Corruption, and FATCA. Bachelor’s in International Business or Relations, Finance, Accounting, or related and 3 years’ related experience required. Ref CM-AA1.

GLOBAL CONTACT CENTER COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST - Configure and administer voice, video, and data communications systems. Bachelor’s in Telecommunications or Electronics Engineering + 2 years’ experience in engineering and administration of technical networks using Cisco and Avaya, including troubleshooting, testing, and configurations required. Reference GCCCS-RB1.

The five-song EP was produced by Ibanez and engineered and mixed by Rubio

Fabricators are responsible for fabricating and assembling polyethylene pipe to create a variety of customized structures such as: fittings, valves, T's, Y's, elbows, aqua shields, geothermal vaults, manholes, dual containment units, pumps, gas aeration lines and similar structures.

SHIPPING/RECEIVING

Quality Testers pressurize metal pipe stations administering air/nitrogen or hydrostatic testing depending on blueprint specifications, duration, and test pressure, using hand tools and impacts to cap off openings logging all passes and rejecting all fail IN CORSICANA, TX:

ENTRY

SHIPPING/RECEIVING

Our Shipping and Receiving team is responsible for verifying and keeping records on incoming and outgoing shipments and preparing items for shipment.

WEEKLYWORTHFORT 20227-13,SEPTEMBER 31fwweekly.com CLASSIFIEDS employment, public notices, services Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities For more information on these positions or to apply go to:MULTIPLEisco-pipe.comNOWHIRINGPOSITIONSIN CEDAR HILL AND CORSICANA, TX: IN CEDAR HILL, TX: INDUSTRIAL PAINTER

The Painter must be proficient in surface cleaning, preparation and pressure pot paint gun painting in order to accomplish assigned tasks, producing work of a high standard in accordance with Company’s policies and procedures. Painters have a four day work week. LEVEL WELDER

Welders have a four day work week! They fit and weld natural gas delivery products built from raw materials according to blue print specifications in accordance with API 1104 certification standards and procedures.

2ND SHIFT FABRICATOR

Our Shipping and Receiving team is responsible for verifying and keeping records on incoming and outgoing shipments and preparing items for shipment. At ISCO, we put high value on appreciation and respect, and provide you with an opportunity to really make a difference. ISCO is a family owned and operated company born and raised in Louisville, KY that is focused on our team members’ growth. In addition to a standard benefits package of medical/dental/vision, ISCO offers a 6% match on retirement! ISCO Industries is an end-to-end piping solutions provider that specializes in HDPE, working with leading edge technology that makes us a market leader.

QUALITY TESTER

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