#dan patrick

@propublica - As Texas moves to spend at least a billion dollars over the next two years on private education, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest among 27 private schools. 

Such practices typically violate state laws governing public schools. But private schools operate largely outside these rules. 

📰: Lexi Churchill and Ellis Simani

🎨: Marta Monteiro for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Molly Olmestead at Slate:

If you’re tapped into conversations around Israel online, you may have noticed a certain blond woman who, seemingly out of nowhere, has started popping up all over social media. Carrie Prejean Boller, a former beauty queen and faithful Trump supporter, has found herself at the center of an explosive conservative fight. She appeared as a figure in the national conversation suddenly last month, when clips began circulating online of her comments during a meeting of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission—a group, tasked with creating a report on the importance of and threats to religious liberty, that has focused largely on airing claims of discrimination from conservative Christians. In that meeting, Prejean Boller noted her opposition to the definitions of antisemitism used, asserting that Christians could be labeled antisemites for quoting the Bible—an argument that treads dangerously close to saying that Scripture condones anti-Jew hate. Worse, she insisted, repeatedly, that Candace Owens has never said anything antisemitic. This was an absurd statement: Owens often rants about powerful Jews ruining American society. A couple of days later, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the commission’s chair, announced that Prejean Boller had been kicked out of the group. Afterward, Sen. Ted Cruz called her an “Israel-hating crazed antisemite,” while Laura Loomer deemed her a “stupid bitch.” Meanwhile, figures as unusual as Sarah Palin and Michael Flynn came to her defense, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations praised her for speaking the truth. On Friday, Tucker Carlson released an interview with her on his massively popular podcast.

[...]

It’s fascinating to see how Prejean Boller came to this position. For more than a decade, she was one of Trump’s biggest supporters. She served on his campaign advisory board in 2020 and dutifully claimed that the election had been stolen from him. She ranted about mask mandates, complained about transgender athletes, equated drag queens with sexual predators, and made appearances on Fox News to argue for Christian family values.

[...]

Back then, her political beliefs arose from conventional conservative evangelical culture. But Prejean Boller converted to Catholicism last April. She concluded, after some soul-searching, that Christian Zionism was the product of deeply misguided Protestant thinkers. And she started to say a lot of things that seemed, to pro-Palestine progressives, deeply reasonable.

In the contentious meeting that caused her eventual ouster, for example, she argued that the panelists were acting in bad faith, conflating critiques of Israel with critiques of Jews. That was true. The Religious Liberty Commission, which is composed almost entirely of conservative Christians, repeatedly made this assertion, as if it were an uncontroversial and established truth, and gave no voice to Jewish Americans critical of Israel. Prejean Boller later told the magazine the American Conservative that she believes that many Jewish Americans face real antisemitism in the U.S. but that “they’re not the ‘right’ Jews for this commission, because they aren’t Zionist Jews.” The fact that the commission considered only Zionist Jews legitimate Jews was antisemitic in itself, she argued. Also true.

Even more unusual, in this particular political milieu, was her expressed compassion for Palestinian Muslims. She asked the panelists to stop making Islamophobic comments and wore a Palestinian flag pin at the event. On social media, she has repeatedly advocated for a “free Palestine,” describing her advocacy for Palestinian civilians as her “calling.” She has described what is happening in Gaza as a “genocide.” In the American Conservative interview, she articulated her criticism of Israel’s mass killing of civilians as part of her faith: “As a pro-life Christian, I couldn’t deny the horrific suffering that the Palestinians were enduring,” she said. Because of these arguments, CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization, commended Prejean Boller’s performance on the panel, characterizing it as her “encourag[ing] solidarity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.” And after she was kicked off the council, Sameerah Munshi, the sole Muslim on the commission, resigned in protest.

At a moment when so many Republicans are being aggressively and proudly Islamophobic, it’s easy to see how Prejean Boller would come off as a kind of beacon against anti-Muslim bigotry. But to rally around Prejean Boller would be a mistake. She often veers into more-troubling territory in her opposition to Israel. On the panel, she vehemently disagreed with the other members’ comments about growing antisemitism in the conservative movement—a problem obvious to anyone who has spent any time on X. She shared a hard-right Catholic influencer’s post about “Zionist Israel” being “the enemy of the entire Christian world.” She has suggested that the Epstein files reveal the Zionist power over America. She has amplified gleeful posts celebrating Nick Fuentes, a noted white nationalist and Holocaust apologist.

It’s also clarifying to look at those who have rallied behind Prejean Boller. It wasn’t just CAIR; it was also the extreme right-wing group Catholics for Catholics. It was a Jan. 6 insurrectionist. It was Steve Bannon. This may seem like a confounding mess, but it’s helpful to understand how the split in the conservative movement over Israel maps onto different factions. On the pro-Israel side, for example, there are secular hawks with specific geopolitical ambitions and vile white nationalists who see civilizational stakes in the fight to control the Middle East. But there are also religious motivations: Jews who fear persecution and support a Jewish state; mainstream Christians raised with a general fondness for the Holy Land and sense of kinship with Jews; fundamentalists who believe that the Scripture literally commands the support of Israel; Pentecostal-style Christians who feel a kind of radical rootedness to Israel; and evangelicals who believe that the world’s Jews must return to Israel to trigger Jesus’ second coming and the end of days.

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/lt-gov-dan-patrick-lists-senate-priority-bills-for-the-2025-legislative-session/