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Doing his part to help the Trump administration get their civil war on, Texas Attorney General (and U.S. Senate candidate) Ken Paxton has announced undercover operations to “infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Texas.”
“Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. Corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk marks a turning point in America. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead. To that end, I have directed my office to continue its efforts to identify, investigate, and infiltrate these leftist terror cells. To those demented souls who seek to kill, steal, and destroy our country, know this: you cannot hide, you cannot escape, and justice is coming.”
The radical Left has incubated an environment where political violence is not only justified but celebrated and praised. In July, nearly two dozen armed leftists connected to various Texas-based Antifa-like groups ambushed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) facility in Alvarado, Texas.
Paxton was joined in his “call to uproot left terror cells” by the comparably corrupt Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.
I’ll have more on the “Prarieland attack” later in the post, but first let’s put Paxton’s press release in its proper context: a Republican U.S. Senate primary.
MAGA vs RINO vs Rep. Hunt
I covered one of the leading Democratic candidates, James Talarico, on Monday and I’ve covered the GOP primary before as “The MAGA vs RINO Frontline.”
The Paxton vs Cornyn primary race was complicated Monday by the entrance of Wesley Hunt “one of the first Black Republicans to represent Texas in the House of Representatives:”
Mr. Hunt said he decided to run because the race had become a “blood feud between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn” and that he would offer voters an alternative. He said that while Mr. Cornyn had succeeded in damaging Mr. Paxton’s standing in the polls, he had yet to improve his own numbers very much.
“They’re just slinging mud at each other,” he said. “I’m going to be the one that’s going to put the priorities of Texans first.”
Taking a swing at Mr. Cornyn, Mr. Hunt said his first priority if elected would be the repeal of a bipartisan gun control law that Mr. Cornyn helped negotiate after the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“You cannot author gun control legislation in Texas,” Mr. Hunt said. Mr. Paxton has also attacked Mr. Cornyn on the issue.
That line of attack showed how Mr. Hunt’s entrance is likely to complicate Mr. Cornyn’s re-election effort. The congressman and the senator are likely to draw from the same pool of conservative voters who dislike Mr. Paxton because of his long history of legal and ethical entanglements.…The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has been supporting Mr. Cornyn, had been urging Mr. Hunt for months not to run. The committee was already concerned that Mr. Paxton’s challenge was making the primary contest extremely expensive, drawing campaign cash away from general-election contests during a midterm election cycle that was expected to broadly favor Democrats.
The committee sent a memo in September to donors who had supported Mr. Hunt, telling them that they were wasting their money on a “vanity project that could cost Republicans control of the Senate.”
Mr. Hunt, for his part, said he would not be upset if Mr. Paxton were to win the primary. “What we know about Ken Paxton is, he’s actually a conservative,” he said, implying that Mr. Cornyn was not.…Mr. Hunt, 43, has represented a wealthy, majority-white Houston district west of downtown since 2022, but he remains mostly unknown to voters elsewhere in the state.…At times, he has spoken openly about race and the history of slavery in the United States, presenting his own story of success as a ready-made response for Republicans to Democratic accusations of racism. Texas has never had a Black senator.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think Texans really care about race,” Mr. Hunt said in the interview on Monday.
The jokes write themselves, but perhaps Rep. Hunt has run some undercover operations in the Texas GOP of which I’m not aware.
The Hill reports that incumbent Senator John Cornyn is outpacing Paxton in the money race:
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) raked in $3.36 million between his campaign and political committees between July and September, ending the quarter with $10.5 million cash in the bank…
In comparison, Paxton raised $2.9 million in the second quarter of fundraising this year and ended the quarter with $2.5 million in the bank. Paxton has not yet reported his third-quarter fundraising haul; candidates have until Oct. 15 to report those numbers.
Cornyn and his allies have been going all-in on social media attcks, television ads, and even vans driving around Austin attacking Paxton.
According to Axios, they’ve been working:
In May, Cornyn was down by double digits in some polls. But he has narrowed the gap this summer, drawing to within single digits in most surveys.
But his movement hasn’t come cheap, with Cornyn-allied super PACs having spent or reserved roughly $14 million in the last two and a half months, according to AdImpact.
Here’s a representative sample of Cornyn’s attacks on Paxton:
Hard to run from prison, Ken https://t.co/6oQ3oMqjCN
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) February 29, 2024
For those not familiar with Paxton, The Texas Tribune has a nice summary of his legal woes:
Paxton has been accused of impropriety at least six times while in elected office, including fraud, abuse of office and self-dealing.
In one of the most serious cases, he was charged with multiple felonies in 2015 for allegedly encouraging investors to buy into a McKinney tech firm without telling them that he had a financial interest in the company and also failing to register with the state before soliciting clients for a friend’s investment firm. After years in court, Paxton cut a deal to do community service in lieu of facing trial. He did not admit guilt in this case and has not been convicted of a crime.
Then in 2023, the Texas House impeached him for alleged official misconduct, some of it related to accusations that he swapped political favors with a campaign donor in exchange for a job for the woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair. Paxton called it a political witch hunt and denied that he broke the law.
After a trial, the Texas Senate acquitted him and he was reinstated to office.
The ad below references a campaign finance situation Paxton has gotten himself into:
Federal regulators are asking Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate Campaign to explain or return roughly $658,000 in political contributions that appear to violate federal law.
This is a local news story about a van the Cornyn operation is driving around Austin, Texas:
For his part, Paxton has just begun to fire back with an ad that “uses old anti-Cornyn quotes from Trump and suggests that the senator isn’t a true conservative.”
Paxton is also working hard on the “earned media” front with attacks on doctors:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday accused the Texas Medical Association, the state’s leading physician organization, of skirting new federal recommendations that now state childhood COVID-19 vaccinations are no longer needed.
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice updated its vaccine guidance and no longer recommends that all children should receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Instead, it recommends that “vaccination for COVID-19 be determined by individual decision-making.”
Shortly thereafter, the TMA sent out guidance to members, telling them to consider both the CDC’s new guidelines and those of physician professional organizations that run counter to the federal guidance, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Paxton said the move represents an “undermining” of the federal guidelines.
“It’s outrageous TMA is undermining ACIP’s new federal guidelines for COVID-19 vaccines that expand personal freedom and mitigate the medical tyranny of the Biden Administration,” Paxton said in a statement. “This decision should be reversed immediately, and I encourage every Texas physician to speak out against this brazen, flawed shift by TMA.”
Paxton is also going after LGBTQ advocates, possibly using undercover investigators:
Texas Supreme Court justices will decide how much information PFLAG will have to give Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office for his investigation into medical providers allegedly violating the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors — a request the LGBTQ rights organization says is unconstitutional.…Paxton’s office enforces the law through its Consumer Protection Division, which also enforces the Deceptive Trade Practice Act. The division is investigating whether medical providers are trying to get around the ban by prescribing hormones under the guise of treating an “endocrine disorder” or something else besides gender dysphoria, psychological stress over one’s gender identity that is often the precursor to transitioning.
Specifically, the attorney general’s office claims some providers prescribe medicine under the endocrine disorder diagnosis because some insurers would automatically reject payment for “gender-incongruent” treatments. That violates the deceptive trade act, Paxton’s office alleges.
The investigation brought Paxton’s office to LGBTQ+ advocacy group PFLAG — a national organization with a membership model — which the office says has information about providers who were trying to get around the ban. It points to a July 2023 affidavit in the lawsuit against in SB 14, which PFLAG CEO Brian Bond said he had spoken to various parties about “contingency plans,” “alternative avenues to maintain care in Texas,” and “affirming general practitioners” in case the law was allowed to go into effect in September of that year.
Paxton has also been going after a Chinese-owned tech company over alleged data breaches and he’s also managed to keep the records of his divorce case sealed, so far.
The “Leftist Terror”
That’s enough about Paxton’s antics, let’s talk about the July 4th “Prarieland attack.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The 2025 Alvarado ICE facility attack, also known as the Prairieland attack, occurred at the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, United States, on the evening of July 4, 2025. Officials describe a coordinated plot in which about 12 individuals in black clothing and body armor allegedly used fireworks and vandalism to draw out officers and ambush them with rifles. One Alvarado police officer was shot in the neck and later released from hospital care. Local reporting and court documents identify ten individuals arrested shortly after; an alleged shooter was arrested on July 15 after a manhunt, and several alleged associates were also arrested. Several members of the initial group were tied to left wing organizations or protest activities, and anti-government, anti-ICE, and anarchist documents were found. As of September 23, according to local media, between fifteen and seventeen individuals had been charged in association with the events.
The alleged shooter is a former U.S. Marine Corps reservist named Benjamin Song, 32, who “was named in a 2023 lawsuit involving the Elm Fork chapter of the John Brown Gun Club (JBGC), in a counter-protest at a Fort Worth drag show.”
Meagan Morris, one of the 17 arrested spoke to NPR station KERA News. Morris faces “state charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a peace officer and terrorism, as well as federal charges of discharging a firearm during a violent crime and attempted murder of a federal officer.”
“I don’t know what happened. We sure did not plan for any sort of violence or anything to go wrong like that.
“The original intent was just to show solidarity with the detainees who hopefully lift their spirits with a fun fireworks display and go home. If the officer got shot by someone, that person was acting alone. But they want to punish all of us.”…A recent complaint obtained by KERA News says new evidence suggests there was just one shooter that night, and 11 shell casings were recovered from the scene, “leading investigators to believe the initial 20-30 shell casings to be an inaccurate amount of spent rounds fired.”
The officer has since recovered, according to court records.
The FBI called what happened that night a “coordinated and targeted attack.” Court records allege Morris’ home was the “staging location” for the defendants to meet.
Morris claims neither is true. A few people met at her home to carpool before heading to the ICE facility as part of a nonviolent protest, she said. When they arrived at the detention center, Morris said she stayed in the car.
Since she was parked away from the facility, she said she doesn’t know exactly what happened that night, but knew she wanted no part of it as soon as she heard a gunshot.
“The minute that I thought something was going wrong like that, I tried to leave,” she said.
Morris was not among the 8 against whom the case appears to be proceeding:
A federal judge in Fort Worth found probable cause for the cases against eight defendants accused of opening fire outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Alvarado on July 4th to go to a grand jury.
The defendants — Cameron Arnold, Nathan Bauman, Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris, Maricela Rueda, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Sota, and Benjamin Hanil Song — are among 17 people arrested in connection with the attack.…The first witness, an FBI agent, testified that Song acted as a cult-like leader of the group involved in the shooting. Prosecutors presented evidence of a conspiracy that included ambushing officers, setting off fireworks, damaging property, and trespassing.
Authorities said many of the suspects embraced antifa and anarchist ideologies. Investigators also recovered anarchist publications, or “zines,” and said the group used encrypted messaging platforms that automatically wipe data.…Song faces charges of engaging in organized criminal activity, aggravated assault on a public servant, and aiding in the commission of terrorism, according to the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office.
The Washington Post contributed to the moral panic around the case in a story headlined “Suspects in Texas ICE shooting tied to trans, anti-fascist activism”:
Just after dusk on July 5, the crash of wood and metal suddenly reverberated through a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood here known as The Bottoms. Neighbors peered out to see a small army of men in desert camouflage and tactical vests crouched behind a black armored vehicle, shouting commands toward a brick house.
A SWAT team had smashed through the front door of the residence, which neighbors say was occupied by several transgender women, part of a group of activists who initially united around trans and queer identity issues. Now, the women, dressed in bathrobes and pajamas, were being detained at gunpoint, neighbors said.
“It was weird enough that six or seven White, trans people moved into the neighborhood,” said a neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of privacy concerns. He rolled a joint and gazed at the plywood-covered front window: “And now the FBI is raiding their house.”…Inside the house in Dallas, officers discovered nine firearms and a person wanted in connection with the shooting, a transgender woman named Autumn Hill, according to charging documents.…The Post’s examination of the case found that the purported attackers were among a secretive network of Dallas anti-fascists, part of a growing movement of far-left political resistance that some experts say has shown signs of increasing in violence in the Trump era.
The number of incidents is still small compared to the much larger amount of right-wing violence in America, according to several studies, including a University of Maryland examination that found far-right extremists were responsible for nearly twice as many violent acts as the far-left from 1948-2018.
These are the proverbial “interesting times” we’ve been warned about and corrupt buffoons like Ken Paxton stop being funny as soon as they start drumming up moral panic to justify wielding the power of the state against citizens.
