Texas Sucks

Conservative governance is terrible and deadly.

A melding of America’s Wild West mythology and modern capitalism, Texas represents the idealized future of modern American conservatism. Drawn by low tax rates, insufficient labor protections, and the veneer of rugged individualism, prominent right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Bari Weiss, have publicly relocated to Texas, as have Fortune 500 companies such as Oracle. But acclaim for the Lone Star state isn’t limited to the right. Austin, the state capital and blue oasis in the red desert, has gained nearly a million new residents since 2010.¹ The liberal authors of Abundance praised the state’s response to this influx, citing “The Texas Housing Miracle” as a model for high-cost-of-living blue states to replicate. Riding the high vibes, Governor Gregg Abbott’s recent State of the State speech teetered on boastful, claiming Texas will soon supersede the New York Stock Exchange.

‘Texas is the blueprint for America’s future. We rank No. 1 for technology and innovation and No. 1 for semiconductors that power the things you use every day. We created a Space Commission to boost space exploration in Texas, from NASA, to SpaceX, to Blue Origin, and beyond. And we added new business courts that swiftly deal with complex business litigation. Business is booming so much that we now have our own stock exchange, the Texas Stock Exchange. It will make Texas the financial capital of America.’ — Governor Abbott Delivers 2025 State Of The State Address²

Abbott’s address represents the veneer of Texas, and more specifically, the political ideology that governs it. It’s a high-minded depiction of the state, self-congratulating itself for having The Most Freedom, which, Abbott claims, fosters the best economy and produces the most prosperous citizens. With a culture rooted in American frontier values and anointed the next California by the capitalists who ruined California, many centrist and right-wing political pundits view Texas as an inspiration for other sub-federal governments, if not the ideal form. And while I must commend the multi-century, wildly successful branding campaign that has given the state its iconic brand, the reality is that Texas is a spectacular model for how not to run a government. Despite Abbott’s forward-looking ideation, the state struggles to implement readily available solutions to common problems.

Having spearheaded the anti-anti-COVID campaign, it’s no surprise that Texas has low vaccination rates. Unsurprisingly, the vaccine ‘skepticism’ has expanded from COVID jabs to other established medicines. With the highest vaccine-exemption rate in the state (48% of public school students aren’t vaccinated), Gaines County is experiencing the largest measles outbreak since the disease was eradicated in 2000.³⁴ According to the Johns Hopkins’ Measles Outbreak Board, 61% of all confirmed American measles cases are in Texas, with its neighbors of New Mexico, Kansas, and Coajuila, Mexico suffering high rates of transmitted infections.⁵

The location for the return of a once-defeated disease isn’t a coincidence. Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans were staunchly anti-anti-COVID, even stopping towns from requiring masks in public spaces. Much of the Mennonite community of Gaines used a doctor named Ben Edwards, an ‘alternative medicine’ advocate whose podcast is a popular destination for anti-vaccine advocates. Edwards is close with Health & Human Services Secretary and road-kill connoisseur Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s leading anti-vax proponent, who is currently congratulating himself on ‘controlling’ the West Texas outbreak.⁶⁷

Kennedy and Edwards (yellow tie) at the funeral of an unvaccinated child killed by measles.

In addition to rekindling once-abolished diseases, Texas stands alone in its unique inability to provide its residents with reliable energy, a fundamental responsibility of modern governments. There are three main electrical grids in the continental United States: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the 1935 Federal Power Act creating the Federal Power Commission to oversee interstate electrical sales, Texas chose to go it alone. To avoid federal oversight, the state established its own interconnection, which didn’t cross state lines. The centralized utility was further deregulated in the 1990s to foster market-driven ‘innovation,’ which predictably resulted in power companies cutting corners on maintenance and weatherproofing to decrease costs. When a cold front swept across the American South in 2021, the more-regulated Western and Eastern Interconnections held, while Texas’s deregulated grid collapsed. 40% of the grid went black, leaving 4.5 million households without power. A later study found the entire interconnection was less than five minutes from complete failure, a terrifying brush with an even worse tragedy.⁸ By the time power was restored, seven hundred Texans had died from freezing, carbon monoxide poisoning, exposure, and other outage-related causes.⁹

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Of course, we can’t discuss the failure of Texas’s public services without mentioning the recent Fourth of July flood, which has already killed over a hundred Americans and left an untold number missing. Prior to Trump, disaster management was a test for politicians. Properly handling a mass-casualty event instilled public confidence in a politician, while stories of desperation and unnecessary death caused by lackluster response were a career killer. Obama’s good response to Hurricane Sandy helped him win the 2012 election a month later, while Bush’s calamitous handling of Hurricane Katrina sent his approval rating on its infamous downward fall to 25%.¹⁰ While details are still emerging, it's clear Texas’s government, and the conservative political establishment that runs it, bear extraordinary blame for the result of the tragedy. For example, Kerr County, the hardest-hit region, approved the Christian girl’s summer camp Camp Mystic to build cabins in the Guadalupe River’s floodway, the corridor of riverbeds susceptible to dangerous flooding. Building in these areas is prohibited in many states, but not in Texas — a political choice over two dozen campers and counselors paid for with their lives. Kerr County had also repeatedly requested a flood warning alarm system from the state government, which had received nearly $2 billion in disaster-reduction funding from the federal government over the last decade. The county asked Austin for the funds three times between 2017 and 2024, but was denied each time. Had Austin acted responsibly and approved the grant, the residents of Kerr could have had forewarning and fled to safety, like their neighbors in Comfort, Texas, who suffered no deaths in part due to an updated alarm system funded by local charities.¹¹¹²

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None of these calamities, be it the flash flooding, power crisis, or measles outbreak, should be viewed as unfortunate events, but as the predictable consequences of the hyper-individualistic zealotry of ‘small government’ conservatism, for which Texas is known. Following the 2021 electrical disaster, while his fellow Texans were freezing to death in their homes, Republican Rick Perry denied calls for increased federal oversight of the Texas Interconnection. According to the former Lieutenant Governor, Texans were willing to suffer the outage ‘for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.’¹³ Even as the failure of Texas’s individualistic government was being made clear before them, Texas conservatives were more concerned with defending their zealotry than saving their citizens. And Perry’s statements weren’t an isolated event. Last October, Kerr County officials wrote a FEMA report stating a deadly flood was ‘likely’ in 2025 and ‘probable’ by 2027. Yet, state lawmaker Wes Virdell, who represents part of Kerr, voted against a bill that would have funded local emergency communication equipment for towns like his own. Despite receiving over $820 million from the federal government for disaster prevention after Hurricane Harvey killed eighty-nine of his constituents, Governor Greg Abbott let $730 million go unspent. A committed ideologue, Abbott is like many other conservative leaders who’d rather risk his constituents’ lives than spend federal money and tacitly admit right-wing policies fail to deliver promised results of prosperity and safety.

However, it’s not as if Texas’s failed governance model is limited to its self-inflicted disasters. All the flaws, hypocrisies, and crimes of the conservative project are ever-present in the state that has seceded from two separate nations to preserve slavery. Texas prides itself on its ostensible commitment to freedom and liberty, yet it locks up a higher percentage of its population than any democracy on Earth.¹⁴ Gregg Abbott has championed himself as a Free Speech Defender, even being honored by Bari Weiss at her Austin-located ponzi scheme university. Yet the Governor has no problem sending cops to beat campus protestors, pardoned a man convicted of murdering a peaceful Black Lives Matter activist, and blacklists companies that ‘discriminate’ against gun manufacturers or Israel.¹⁵ Even the praise centrists give Texas appears more mirage than fact. Abundance liberals have praised the deep red states’ commitment to free market affordable housing as an ideal model, but Texas’ average rent is much higher than a decade ago.¹⁶

Average rent prices in Texas.

Much like the conservative administration currently running the United States, Texas is a fantastic case study of what not to do when given power. As evident by the flooding, hurricanes, and power outages, the conservative model fails to surpass even the most basic test of public responsibility. And still, conservative zealots cling to it like it’s a life-saving debris in a rushing river. They preach liberty, then lock their neighbors in a cage. They claim purity in religious faith is the key to a healthy country, then cheat on their wives and protect the senile pedophile President.¹⁷¹⁸ They preach life and liberty, then construct a government that will kill you, either indirectly or literally: Texas has executed almost 600 people over the last half-century, making it the most kill-happy state in the nation. For context, the runner-up has less than a quarter of Texas’s body count.¹⁹

The flash flood is a heartbreaking tragedy. I can’t imagine the pain of a parent sending their child off to summer camp and never seeing them again. That is why we should not view it, or any of the other easily avoidable calamities Texas conservatives brings upon their state, as unfortunate. Death, destruction, and loss are the deliberate, intended consequences of American conservatism, which Texas proudly claims. There’s much discussion about what a post-Trump America could and should look like. Many non-rightist political actors have suggested borrowing from the conservative model currently in place in Texas on issues ranging from building deregulation, to energy supply, to civil rights. They — and everyone else — should remember where that road leads.

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In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/22926/austin/population

2. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-delivers-2025-state-of-the-state-address

3. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/22/texas-measles-outbreak-update/

4. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5461155/measles-outbreak-cdc-vaccination-health

5. https://cori.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/measles-outbreak-response

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/i-feel-like-ive-been-lied-to-when-a-measles-outbreak-hits-home.html

7. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/me/maine/news/2025/07/15/rfk-jr--says-measles-outbreak-is-not-a-national-emergency

8. https://limos.engin.umich.edu/deitabase/2024/12/27/2021-texas-power-grid-failure/

9. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/texas-winter-storm-power-outage-death-toll

10. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx

11. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/deadly-texas-floods-one-town-warning-siren-rcna217202

12. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/texas-flood-alarm-system.html

13. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-electric-grid-failure-warm-up/

14. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/TX.html

15. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/executive-management/OAG%20advisory%20on%20SB%2013%20and%2019%2010.18.23.pdf

16. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/executive-management/OAG%20advisory%20on%20SB%2013%20and%2019%2010.18.23.pdf

17. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/ken-paxton-wife-divorce.html

18. https://newrepublic.com/post/197987/house-republicans-vote-block-epstein-files

19. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/states-with-the-most-executions#:~:text=Texas%20has%20been%20responsible%20for,Then%2DDemocratic%20Gov.