At this point, I think it's fair to describe Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as the preeminent cartoon supervillain nazi most people have never heard of. Of course as a trans woman who writes about fascism and U.S. politics, I've heard of him due to his repeated demonization of trans people, threatening to prosecute gay people for consensual adult relationships, numerous corruption scandals, and vociferous support of Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. election based on election denial conspiracies; the guy's a real peach. Most Americans who don't follow news from Texas however, are probably only vaguely aware of this assclown; but perhaps after this latest example of militant fascist fuckery, that might begin to change.

On August 20th, Texas police conducted armed raids on the chair of the Tejano Democrats, multiple members of a civil rights organization that works to protect Latinx people in Texas from racialized discrimination, a small town mayor, and even a state House candidate, as part of what Paxton and a Texas DA have proudly declared an "ongoing election integrity investigation" that anyone with a brain can see is blatant voter intimidation in action.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240826220846/https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/house-raids-texas-democrats-ken-paxton-voting-rights-lulac-rcna168216

Texas AG raids homes of Latino civil rights group members, setting up a voting rights showdown

"Paxton, who announced the raids Thursday in a news release, has been outspoken in advancing baseless claims about voter fraud — particularly about noncitizens voting in the upcoming election.

“There’s a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally,” Paxton said on a radio show earlier this month. “I’m convinced that that’s how they’re going to do it this time, they’re going to use the illegal vote. Why were they brought in, why did he bring in 14 million people? He brought them here to vote.”

Paxton falsely claimed that immigrants were being given Social Security numbers at the border as part of the scheme, too. There’s no evidence of that, or that noncitizens cast ballots in any significant numbers."

Folks, we need to be perfectly clear here about what we're looking at; sending armed police on a fishing expedition to the doors of activists and Dem Party officials working to get out the Latino vote is something right out of the darkest days of Jim Crow and pre-Civil Rights Act cracker supremacy. It is not illegal to organize to protect voting rights, help citizens being targeted by a fascist police state to register to vote, or campaign on behalf of Democratic Party candidates; no matter how much Ken Paxton may not like that. There is no evidence whatsoever that non-citizens are voting in U.S. elections, or that the League of United Latin American Citizens is unlawfully registering non-voters; these are experienced civil rights activists who know the law like the back of their hand. The warrant issued to allow this fascist fuckery makes it completely clear that Paxton and District Attorney Audrey Gossett Louis have nothing and are just fishing for evidence to further their baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud, while actively trying to intimidate Latinx voters in Texas. The entire purpose of these raids are to demonstrate the state's power to harass anyone they like, and send the message that "if we can send 9 armed cops with riot shields to the door of an 87 year old civil rights organizer, we can send the murderpigs after everyday Latino citizens who have the audacity to want to vote against us too" - full stop.

And in the end, I think that's the handle people need to grasp a hold of when trying to understand this story, and what it means in the context of the larger, overtly fascist, cracker supremacist takeover of vast portions of the country. When white nationalist conspiracy theorists obtain the power of political office, they are not bound by what's true and what isn't. They push baseless accusations and conspiracy theories in public not because they believe they'll be vindicated by the truth in the end, but rather because they're creating justification and permission gates to treat those conspiracy theories as *if* they were true, and take authoritative action on them. Paxton isn't hoping to prove non-citizens are voting here, he's trying to scare the crap out of marginalized brown people so that they won't exercise their democratic right to vote in the first place; the target isn't so-called "illegals," it's U.S. citizens who happen to be non-white and unlikely to vote Republican. This is because Paxton and the rest of the Texas GOP know that if everyone gets to vote and have their votes counted, they might not stay in power.

There is an answer here. Not so long ago, U.S. Presidents literally sent the FBI and the National Guard into Southern communities to stop men just like Ken Paxton from doing what he's doing now; but I'm not sure this administration and the America of 2024 have that kind of courage to do what must be done.