The shock for the informed is not that Trump declared the Mexican state a narco-regime, but that it didn’t happen years ago. “The Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico,” announced the White House last month, buried in the official statement on US tariffs on that country’s goods. The declaration...
What does it mean to be a Texan? Perhaps Joanna Troutman thought about that as she carefully placed stitch after stitch, listening to the men of Macon, Georgia making their preparations. Joanna Troutman, just 18, had never seen Texas when she learned that a group of Georgia volunteers was setting off to come to the...
When the Rev. Al Sharpton used the word “invasion” to describe the onslaught of migrants at the southern U.S. border on Monday, his MSNBC guest suddenly stopped nodding along. And then the fast blinking began — he was triggered. Because to the American left, the word “invasion” is off-limits and even “violence-inciting.” But the word — and...
Mark Esper, former defense secretary under President Donald Trump, recently released a memoir which claimed that the former president had asked about the possibility of shooting missiles into Mexico to target drug labs run by cartels. While Esper painted this question as a potential (and “inappropriate”) attack on our southern neighbor, Trump’s proposal shouldn’t be...
The struggle and the idea. Defining Texas and the Texans. This is the prepared text for my remarks at the Texas Center at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas, 25 March 2022. Texas identity. What is it? How do we understand it? What does it mean? What does it demand of us? Those of us who...
Most of the past forty-eight hours have been spent either in, or en route to and from, the Midland-Odessa region. Far out in west Texas’s Permian Basin, the two cities — towns, really — have a relationship that I still can’t quite unpack. On my last visit, which turned out to be the first time...
Consider Sinaloa. If you don’t know Sinaloa, you ought to know it is physically beautiful and possesses a rich local culture. It is also a historic and current epicenter of cartel activity: the homeland of the infamous “El Chapo.” He is now a permanent guest of the United States government at a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado,...
You can see a long way from Border Patrol Hill. A clear day and good pair of binoculars get you visibility for twenty, thirty, sometimes forty miles into Mexico. It’s view broken only by the rolling terrain on both sides of the Amistad reservoir. This used to be a barren and canyon-strewn section of the...
On the high north bank of the Rio Grande River, an uninhabited home overlooks the river. Our small group — members of the Border Security Coalition who traveled to Val Verde County to see the border crisis for ourselves — stood on a pleasant green landing near the property, but we weren’t allowed to enter....
Val Verde County is like a lot of South Texas counties: sparsely populated, rugged, dry, and vast. If you’ve never been there, well, I’m not sure there’s much reason to go. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for me. I happen to think places like this are the best places in the world: places where...