The Houston Chronicle and Fascism

The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board just published one of the worst pieces of journalism I’ve ever seen in print. The article was an endorsement of the far right-wing Republican candidate for the chief executive/legislative role in Harris County, Texas over the progressive Democratic incumbent. This particular election is one of the most important local government elections in the U.S.

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But the Houston Chronicle article is no ordinary endorsement—it is an open normalization of a far-right candidate, proudly supported on her website by fascists, based on arguments that make no sense. The article, in a major U.S. source of “news,” is based on misinformation, lies, omissions, logical fallacies, ignorance, and a lack of priorities and perspective that should send chills down the spines of all people of good will who fear for the future of our society. Virtually every key sentence in the article is flawed in demonstrable ways. It is a kind of incomprhensible manifesto of media mediocrity, and it is this merger of an ostensibly reasonable, prestigious institution with far right propaganda that portends full scale authoritarian fascism.

I encourage you to read the article for yourself, which I’ve linked above. But I try my best below to explain some of the key problems and why they are so dangerous.

The Endorsement:

The upshot of the endorsement is that the Editorial Board agrees with the progressive candidate on virtually every issue, and it is troubled by the far right candidate’s positions on defunding early-childhood education, ignoring the environmental catastrophes near Houston, abortion, LGBTQ issues, democracy, gun control, lying in campaign ads, etc. However, because of vague concerns about “crime,” the Editorial Board is endorsing the far-right Republican who has no meaningful experience on the issue, positions on “crime” the Editorial Board itself itself calls “simplistic, and what the Editorial Board calls “a lack of experience in government.”

As I’ve written before, this endorsement of “tough on crime” pro-incarceration policies contradicts all available evidence. It actually increases future crime. But this endorsement goes well beyond typical media “tough on crime” copaganda. The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board affirmatively embraces a politics and logic of fascism. For example, in the one area where the Editorial Board goes into detail about a specific crime proposal of the far-right politician, the Editorial Board calls her proposal to defund investments in early childhood education for children before kindergarten to hire 1,000 new cops “simplistic.” Time and again in the article, the Editorial Board articulates the actual evidence, lays out the case for rejecting the far-right ideas, but then says it is endorsing the candidate anyway, almost always based on vibes. Or in the Editorial Board’s incomprehensible gibberish: “her heart for victims and their families will guide her budgeting priorities.” Editorial Boards in 2022 sound like Trump campaign text messages from 2016.

This articulation of evidence and facts only to reject them without basis is something I’ve rarely come upon in the mainstream media. This intentional, open, anti-science, and ultimately nihilistic rejection of logic, honesty, transparency, science, and good faith is a sort of epic gas lighting.

Take a look at a key passage, where the Editorial Board notes that the far-right candidate was rude and combative during the Editorial Board’s interview, refusing to let the progressive candidate answer questions. In the same passage, the Editorial Board states that it would “rather live in” the progressive candidate’s version of the world—one with democratic norms, attention to the environment, health, and early childhood education, etc.:

The Flaws in the Editorial:

First, the entire basis of the Houston Chronicle’s endorsement decision is supposedly “crime,” but the editorial itself admits each of the following things:

1. Statistics show crime is going down in Harris County.

2. But statistics don't matter as much as feelings and anecdotes on the nightly news. Here’s how the Editorial Board dismisses the actual evidence: “Statistics, of course, mean little to those such as Paul Castro,” a random person whose family member was the victim of a tragic crime that the paper chose to highlight for unexplained reasons. This is like saying it felts colder one day last week, so statistics about global warming don't matter. The paper also wrote that, regardless of the actual evidence, “the seemingly infinite ticker tape of suspect mug shots on the 10 o’clock news has us looking over our shoulders and praying.” So, the paper admits that the endorsement is not based on what the Editorial Board acknowledges are the facts, but rather on how the fear-mongering local corporate media has manipulated the facts. This is a remarkable moment in U.S. journalism: it admits that a constellation of propaganda intended to create fear leading to authoritarian policies is itself a reason to adopt those policies.

3. The paper further admits that the progressive incumbent is not responsible for crime policy. The policies directly relating to the criminal legal system in the County are handled primarily by police, prosecutors, and judges. This is an odd admission when the endorsement is supposedly based on crime policy.

4. Nonetheless, the paper zeros in on one policy: a court backlog. It is this policy on which the entire editorial hinges. In Harris County, there is supposedly a years long backlog of cases working their way too slowly through the system. However, the paper admits the the progressive incumbent is not even responsible for the court backlog. Indeed, to the contrary, this is a unique area where other actors (prosecutors, judges) have almost complete control. Two things are vital to know:

   1. The Chronicle baselessly blames the court backlog for the fake crisis of crime increasing (even though it isn't increasing). This is bewildering on a number of levels, including that crime is going down now according to the Chronicle, but more importantly because the county government (led by the progressive incumbent) commissioned a group of national experts to study the backlog. That group made recommendations to end the backlog, and the District Attorney and judges just ignored them. So, it is explicitly incorrect to blame the county executive for this. The whole editorial hinges on this point, and the Editorial Board didn’t even tell readers about the expert recommendations that the county sought or who was to blame for them being rejected.

   2. But that is just an appetizer for the gaping factual hole in the editorial: there is no evidence at all that a court backlog can increase “crime,” even if crime were not going down.  This is like climate science denial.  And, incredibly, despite all of the other important issues, the Chronicle uses this false claim and fake connection to court backlog as the entire basis for is endorsement despite all of the other issues that it suggests it supports the progressive incumbent on.

   Second, the Editorial Board baselessly says that pre-K programs “arent’t essential” in the course of endorsing the far-right candidate because she is willing to cut pre-K programs to hire more cops.  I don't think I've ever seen anything like this in a newspaper.  Early childhood education programs are among the most popular and most scientifically proven government programs. There is a scientific consensus that investments in root causes of harm are what makes us safer not cops: schools (especially early childhood); healthcare; youth art, music, athletics programs; mental health crisis response; affordable housing; poverty reduction; minimizing toxic pollution, etc. But the article fraudulently suggests that early childhood education isn't as important as "crime" even though there is overwhelming evidence that early childhood education, in addition to its own benefits, is one of the best strategies for reducing crime and violence. Pitting these two against each other is baseless.

   Third, the editorial casually dismisses the fact that the far-right opponent doesn't care about the environment.  It is hard to explain how surprising this was to read in the wake of the multiple natural disasters that Harris County has gone through and given the enormous pollution problems facing the county, problems that kill orders of magnitude more people than all “crime” combined. But criminal violations of clean water and air regulations, which plague the Houston area (and which kill 100,000s of people nationally) aren’t the narrow type of crime the Editorial Board is apparently talking about. It is unstated because the Board is so sloppy, but the paper appears to be talking about only a very narrow kind of crime—the ones police and prosecutors choose to investigate and report; the ones committed by poor people.

Fourth, the Editorial Board says that it would be a "deal breaker" if the far right candidate wanted to return to the old unconstitutional misdemeanor money bail system. But then the Editorial Board admits that the candidate is attempting to do just that: to undo the federal consent decree that the federal court issued after the bail system was struck down. (The bail case has already freed over 100,000 people from jail, prevented over 100,000 convictions, saved tens of millions in debts to the poorest people, saved hundreds of millions of dollars for the county, and prevented tens of thousnads of future crimes.). I’m at a loss for words: I brought that civil rights case as a lawyer, and the far-right candidate is literally attempting to undo the federal constitutional reforms. The Editorial Board called this a “Deal breaker,” and then endorsed her anyway.

Fifth, the article half-heartedly attempts to blame the progressive for what are actually problems caused by organized right-wing forces. First, the article blames the progressive for the fact that two Republican commissioners have been boycotting meetings preventing a quorum to pass legislation. The Editorial Board asks, rhetorically: “but would they have tapped the nuclear option had earnest attempts been made to listen to their concerns and broker compromise?” This is like blaming a person for being physically assaulted after not giving up their wallet when a mugger demands it. Or blaming a country for being invaded when it doesn’t accept immoral or unreasonable demands to cede its territory to the invader. Second, the Board blames the incumbent for several staffers who were indicted by the unhinged DA, but the Board omits from the readers that its own reporting has established both that the DA has been lying in public about various reforms and that the indictments were a small part of a politically motivated and unprecedented assault on local democracy by the DA. The DA has turned into an authoritarian far-right zealot who has attempted to prosecute almost every single one of her progressive enemies who accomplished misdemeanor bail reform, including a sitting judge (another DA’s office rejected those charges after the Harris County DA was forced to recuse herself.) None of them have been convicted. She has also been raiding offices and forcing county employees to politically motivated grand jury proceedings. The environment in Harris County is as lawless and authoritarian as I have ever seen any local legal system, and the lack of mention about any of these things, which the Editorial Board knows about, is stunning.

Finally, the article then goes down a long list of worries about the far right candidate’s outrageous positions and associations on various issues:

• anti-gay affiliations;

• right-wing abortion positions;

• dismissiveness of early-childhood education generally;

• “pandered and stretched the truth in campaign ads” (i.e. she’s been lying);

• Lack of experience

• Terrible positions on the environment, etc.

But ultimately the newspaper chooses to base its endorsement on the evidence-free words of the same crime victim’s family member quote above.

We found something Paul Castro said instructive: “If I have cancer and I’ve been stabbed and I’m overweight, I’m going to handle those in a certain order,” he said.

He’s right. Some call it triage. Maslow called it a ‘hierarchy of needs.’ Harris County must treat the stab wound: the murders and violent crimes being committed by repeat, violent offenders who are enabled by an underfunded criminal justice system that’s paralyzed by severe backlogs.

Conclusion:

I have a particular interest this topic because I have sued many of the Democratic and Republican officials in Harris Couty for the last 6.5 years in various civil rights cases. I have been studying the county’s laws, politics, budgets, jail conditions, court system, county government, and punishment bureaucracies. I have met numerous times and worked closely with many members of the Houston Chronicle (which has been and still is home to skilled news reporters) and have had a number of meetings with editorial board members since 2016. But the publication of this editorial in a major media outlet in the United States, and the content of the article, has shocked and bewildered essentially every contact I have developed in Houston since I began working there. People across the journalism world shared the article with me along with comments like: “Truly deranged” and “embarrassing.”

As I’ve written about before, our society is on the precipice of overt fascism. The far right is highly organized and well-funded, and it has an unprecedented level of mobilization over ethnic, religious, and political narratives that provide the ideological infrastructure for fascism in the United States. Economic and political conditions are ripe. And not only has the fascist right has captured one of the two major U.S. political parties, but it has achieved significant control of various bureaucratic apparatuses essential for authoritarian rule. Many of my recent conversations with historians, political scientists, and journalists have been breathtaking in the level of alarm that people who study authoritarianism are expressing.

At this moment, we desperately need institutions like the Houston Chronicle to promote reasoned, evidence-based discourse. We’re getting exactly the opposite.

1. At stake in this election is one of the most powerful government positions in the U.S.—Harris County (Houston) is run by 5 people who act as both the executive and the legislature, the county is bigger than 25 states, and this person is the head of that group. The position not only runs the county, but it could also be a swing vote that determines whether Democrats or Republicans control the county.