In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted profiles of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who in our first profile, we discussed his three terms as Texas Attorney General where he worked with Gov. Rick Perry, serving as one of the front line soldiers in the sorts of Fundamentalist conservative culture wars the state of Texas has fought against equality, and frankly, facts over the past two decades, including filing 27 separate lawsuits against the federal government in the first five years of the Obama presidency alone, once joking that his daily routine is “I go into the office in the morning. I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” The great majority of those legal challenges were obviously doomed to fail upon review by judges at some level, but that didn’t stop Abbott from filing them anyway to prolong a constitutional battle at of partisan spite at a cost of millions of dollars to Texas taxpayers. No ridiculous legal statute passed in Texas is beneath him, including his obsessive quest to make sure that dildos cannot be sold in the Lone Star State, but fighting tooth and nail to make sure that firearms can be purchased without a background check.
In 2007, The Washington Post reported Attorney General Abbott declined to pursue charges against employees of a Texas youth prison who were sexually abusing underage inmates after a Texas ranger had sent e-mails to him with evidence and asking him to put a stop to the abuses for TWO YEARS.
Greg Abbott is a man who violated the tenets of our very democracy to suit partisan ends by gerrymandering in his own state, and then sued when the Department of Justice tried blocking the racist policy by arguing it wasn’t racist, by pointing out it was just wholly partisan based on party affiliation, writing, ”DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.” Prior to the 2012 elections, Abbott threatened to arrest poll watchers from Europe, who were monitoring the ethics of American elections, and claiming there were “closely affiliated with ACORN” which was amazing because ACORN ceased to exist three years prior to the election. In 2016, he sued the federal government (and lost) because he didn’t want Texas to resettle any refugees fleeing Syria, and threatened to sue any Christian organizations that would, y’know, follow the Bible and take in refugees like it preaches.
Greg Abbott is also an opponent of all kinds of immigration, be it legal or otherwise, fights back against equal pay for women, is a gay reparative therapy supporter, and a climate change denier who is beyond “hands off” with giants of industry, arguing that the government should not regulate chemical giants and that if citizens wanted to be aware of what chemical agents were being used by them, they should just “drive around and ask”, and the companies would simply acquiesce. Gov. Abbott is hyperpartisan enough that he has been quoted saying that “Democrats are a more dangerous threat than North Korea” and has thanked supporters for referring to his opponent in the 2014 elections, Wendy Davis, as “Retard Barbie”.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Greg Abbott being a paranoid lunatic, though, was over the summer of 2014, when several radical conspiracy theorists, the kind who are avid fans of Alex Jones and InfoWars, were frothing at the mouth in fear of routine military exercises known as Jade Helm 15 that they, as kooks are wont to do, imagined to be a government invasion coming to take their guns away, ship them off to work as slave labor in WalMarts (as if WalMart needed any help with that) and impose Sharia Law upon the imprisoned populace. Abbott actually sent the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the activities of the joint exercise between the Green Berets and Navy Seals, our own armed forces, just in case they really were going to swoop in when no one was looking and conquer poor Texas (which is still already a part of our country). Unbelievably, Gov. Abbott decided to waste taxpayer money to keep a watchful eye on American troops to make sure they didn’t come for us all in the night, rather than just dismiss an insane conspiracy theory, that he seemingly also fell for (or exploited). Fast forward a few weeks, though, and after Texas had a series of storms that left the state flooded, Greg Abbott’s mistrust of the federal government was gone when he started asking for relief aid funding to be sent to his state. Because apparently, he also has the memory of a goldfish.
Gov. Abbott won re-election in 2018, and he’s already hitting the fear-mongering hits by sending out fund-raising letters to drum up fears of an “immigration coup” and warning about how gun control will just lead to Hitler, when people asked about maybe changing Texas gun laws after a lunatic murdered a couple dozen people in a Sutherland Springs church, which maybe shows you his priorities are a bit jacked up. It was only after another mass shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, that Abbott finally started to make noise about doing something about mass shootings in his state, All that he really accomplished was postponing his campaign giving away a shotgun at a campaign rally. That brief flirtation with even moving in any way towards a stance of being a human being ended pretty quick, though, as Abbott shortly thereafter made news by trying to insert himself into a custody hearing about a transgender youth to grant custody to the father who wants to deny hormone blocking treatments and prevent his son from having a sex change. Classic Republican hypocrisy… they’re “smaller government” unless it involves someone’s genitals.
In 2020, the threat of Covid-19 saw the White House lead a disastrous response plan that led many governors around the country to take matters into their own hands. And while the governors in many blue states did all they could to take measures to attempt to set limits on public gatherings and close restaurants and bars to avoid the spread of the disease… Greg Abbott only wanted to close the abortion clinics, but keep everything else running. His irrational desire to reopen his state as early as April based on false statistics (lies) had the predictable result of Texas became one of the hottest hot-spots for coronavirus in the nation. Texas alone had one million positive cases by the end of 2020. That’s not a typo. The state has 29 million people, and one million were infected in eight months.
Oh, and not for nothing, but Greg Abbott also made it clear what his feelings are about American democracy, as his October 2020 attempt at yanking all but one of the ballot collection sites per Texas county to make sure there would be no way Texas might turn blue reeked of desperation.
Just… just look at this timeline from the past two years:
- February 16th, 2021: Texas is hit by a winter storm that causes massive blackouts due to Abbott’s failure to winterize equipment in the Texas power grid. The same thing happened ten years prior, and nothing had been done to fix the problem during his tenure. 210 people end up dying as a result of the storm.
- February 17th, 2021: Gov. Abbott lies and claims the winter storm’s power outages were due to “wind turbines”, when the real reason is his state refused to join any national power grid to avoid federal oversight upon the energy industry there, and his failure to require power companies to winterize their equipment to keep it running in the cold. Critics note all the stupid culture war battles Abbott and his Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have waged over the decade since, rather than address this very real concern in his state that could be handled with basic regulations.
- March 2nd, 2021: Against the advice of health officials, Greg Abbott lifts all mask mandates in the state of Texas when his state still has ICUs overwhelmed with positive Covid-19 cases.
- April 26th, 2021: Abbott falsely claims that Texas is “approaching herd immunity” during the pandemic. Follow-up questions indicate he has no idea what statistical goalposts the state would need to pass in terms of population percentage to achieve such a thing.
- May 19th, 2021: Greg Abbott signs a ban on abortion at six weeks. The completely insane and almost certain to be overturned law deputizes and incentivizes private citizens ― even those who aren’t Texas residents ― to sue individuals involved in “aiding or abetting” an abortion. That could be a doctor, a friend or even the driver who dropped the pregnant person off.
- May 31st, 2021: Texas Democrats in the state legislature stage a walk-out to prevent the passage of a voter suppression bill Abbott favors. Abbott responds by getting on Twitter and threatening to defund the state legislature, a fascist attack upon the checks and balances in American government.
- June 9th, 2021: Greg Abbott is so threatened by the existence of the New York Times’ 1619 project to teach American children about systematic racism and the part it played in our country’s history that he signs a bill to create Texas’ “1836 project” that teaches about the state’s “patriotic” ways and “Christian heritage”. (*cough*white-nationalism*cough*)
- June 15th, 2021: Gov. Abbott signs a bill to forbid public school teachers from discussing racism in any way in the classroom, a decidedly authoritarian move.
- June 18th, 2021: Greg Abbott makes good on his earlier threat to Texas Democrats and vetoes a state budget bill so that the legislature is defunded.
- June 23rd, 2021: Abbott calls for a special session of the state legislature to try and take a second crack at passing his voter suppression bill.
- July 12th, 2021: Texas Democrats in the state legislature leave the state en masse in a move to prevent the passage of Abbott’s voter suppression bill by denying Texas Republicans a quorum to do so.
- August 5th, 2021: Greg Abbott calls for a second special session of the state legislature to try to get a voter suppression bill passed.
- September 7th, 2021: Abbott finally gets his voter suppression bill signed, with obvious legal challenges to whether or not it is even constitutional to follow.
- September 7th, 2021: Gov. Abbott, while touting his six week abortion ban, is asked if it leaves enough time for victims of sexual assault to even know if they’re pregnant and then get an abortion, and claims he will “eliminate all rapists”.
- September 24th, 2021: Greg Abbott caves to pressure from Donald Trump and promises to waste taxpayer dollars in the millions to do an “audit” of the 2020 election results in his state. A state… which Trump won.
- October 11th, 2021: As many Texas businesses begin issuing vaccine mandates to their employees, suddenly Greg Abbott’s “hands off” approach to letting businesses run things their own way is put on hold, and he issues an executive order to try to forbid them to do so. Most just ignore his flailing attempt to continue to worsen the death toll from the pandemic.
- October 18th, 2021: Gov. Abbott goes on Fox News to whine to Maria Bartiromo about Covid-19 vaccine mandates saying, “WHERE DOES IT END?” Critics respond, “After they get the shot”.
- October 30th, 2021: Rather than spending money to fix Texas’ power grid after the failures that killed 210 people only nine months earlier, Abbott announces that he will work towards building a useless physical wall along the U.S./Mexico border in his state.
- November 1st, 2021: As his poll numbers slide, Greg Abbott tries to fan the flames of the culture wars more, declaring that many books in school libraries contain “pornography” and begins trying to eliminate anything with any kind of LGBTQ content or titles by LGBTQ authors.
- November 10th, 2021: A judge overturns Abbott’s executive order to ban mask mandates in public schools.
- February 23rd, 2022: Gov. Abbott begins the process of denying transgender children health care treatments, directing Texas Child Protective Services to investigate their hormonal therapy “child abuse”.
- May 24th, 2022: The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, takes place, and 19 children and 2 adults are murdered. Abbott praised the law enforcement response where 376 officers showed up and did more to prevent parents from trying to save their children than preventing the shooter from killing more, and he stayed at a fundraiser for hours after the shooting without consulting any law enforcement official. Child gun deaths had already doubled under Abbott’s leadership prior to the shooting. In the wake of the incident, he refused to consider a special session of the Texas state legislature to ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons to underage buyers.
- September 15th, 2022: Greg Abbott goes to the old playbook of white nationalist southern citizens’ councils “reverse freedom rides”, and begins the human trafficking of detained migrants to be dropped off in more liberal areas of the country, thinking of the presence of migrants as a way to “spite the left”. His office also implicated in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pulling the same stunt a month later.
Greg Abbott, don’t ask us how… Greg Abbott won a third term as Governor of Texas in 2022, in spite of everything above. He will likely continue trying to turn Texas into a Christian nationalist post-apocalyptic landscape until the Grim Reaper comes to finally take him to the great beyond.