New York Times and ProPublica Unnerves Liberals with Extensive Feature on Texas Billionaire ‘Theocrats’

The leftist journalists at ProPublica pose as “A Pulitzer-winning, non-profit newsroom focused on investigative journalism in the public interest.” But that journalism tends to rip conservatives as a danger to America.

The headline writers for their latest effort, a 6,000-word expose in the Sunday New York Times Magazine by Ava Kofman (in partnership with the liberal nonprofit newsroom ProPublica) certainly know how to scare the paper’s liberal readership:

How Two Billionaire Preachers Remade Texas Politics 

They control Republican politics in the state. Now they’re poised to take their theocratic agenda nationwide.

Kofman introduced readers to Texas State Rep. Glenn Rogers, who portrays himself as a die-hard conservative who was nonetheless not pure enough for those two scary Christian conservative billionaire preachers, at least in the reporter’s telling.

In reality, Rogers had disappointed two men: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on….

She found a left-wing spokesman to put in their two cents. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

…,

It is no accident that Dunn and Wilks have concentrated their energies on infusing Christianity into education. Many far-right Christians trace the country’s moral decline to Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s that ended mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Texas recently proposed an overhauled reading curriculum that strongly emphasizes the Bible “in ways that verge on proselytizing,” according to Brockman, the scholar at the Baker Institute….

The Times has displayed an amusing habit over the past decade for portraying the Texas legislature as skewing even further and further to the right over the year (surely there’s no room left to shift by now), a trend that accelerated under Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. This story adds a conspiratorial edge to the paper’s usual liberal fearmongering.

Kofman used poll data to paint conservative Christians as dangers to the republic.

Last year, researchers at the [leftist] Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified….

Later, Kofman claimed “The slogan Make America Great Again can be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a dog-whistle to make it Christian Again, too.”

Her sources for fact-checking were almost uniformly liberal.

David Pepper, the author of Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, calls this trend the Texas Lesson. “It’s a tragic case study in how statehouses have flipped from serving the public interest to serving the far-right interests of private donors,” he told me….

Kofman really has it in for school vouchers, decrying them with lines that could have been lifted from an anti-choice pamphlet.

Gov. Greg Abbott faced a primary challenge in 2022 from a candidate on the far right backed by Dunn and Wilks. Abbott won, but later began to advocate forcefully for the school-voucher program….Abbott’s newfound ardor for vouchers was striking. He asked faith leaders to “go to the pulpit” for the measure and called four special sessions of the Legislature in an attempt to rally the House into passing it.

That vouchers undermine church-state separation while also draining resources from public schools has made them appealing to both free-market fundamentalists and far-right Christians. Yet vouchers are unpopular in rural districts across Texas, where Friday-night football games are sacrosanct and private schools are scarce. When Abbott failed to corral the votes he needed, he began to vigorously campaign against the holdouts, including Rogers.

“How did someone who pitched himself as a governor committed to public education end up leading the charge to destroy public schools?” asks James Talarico, a Democratic member of the House and a former public-school teacher. “Follow the money.”

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