ANTIFA May Be New Bathroom Bugaboo
at Texas Capitol if GOP Claims are True

Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside
November 30, 2020

GOP leaders and legislators have to decide if they're going to muster the courage to take a stand against ANTIFA in the 2021 regular session like they did in an epic war against a transgender bathroom invasion four years ago.

Governor Greg Abbott and the Republicans who'll be running the show at the Texas Capitol again next year have six weeks to determine if they're going to let the radical left-wing anarchists run wild in Texas like they allowed them to do during the Memorial Day weekend protests.

With a state budget that's been ravaged by the coronavirus crisis, the ruling Republicans face the unenviable task of putting a price on freedom in a place where it's never been more at risk if there's any truth to the warnings that President Donald Trump and his top allies here issued frantically throughout the summer.

The Republicans at the statehouse first and foremost need to agree on whether ANTIFA poses as much of a threat to law-abiding citizens here as the bathroom hobgoblin did in 2017 when they tried and failed to chase the demon out of Texas. Abbott and the Texas Senate Republicans poured massive sums of time and resources into the historic battle over the bathroom bill before effectively admitting that the proposal had been purely for show when they made no effort to revive it two years later.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick - the Trump Texas campaign chairman - led the unsuccessful crusade to make the public toilet stalls safe again for mothers and daughters around the state. Abbott hadn't appeared to be a true bathroom bill believer until adding the legislation to the agenda of a 2017 special session that the Republicans used as a staging ground for attacks on cities and counties across the state.

The Texas House that's controlled by establishment Republicans ended up flushing the bathroom bill after GOP senators who march in lockstep with Patrick passed it twice that year when they knew it was doomed across the rotunda.

The question now in the countdown to the session that convenes in January is whether ANTIFA is just another partisan hoax aimed at inducing and fueling fear among the most gullible and blind party loyalists who've believed Trump's word to be gospel.

While the majority of Republicans in the Texas House and Senate might see the threat of ANTIFA as red smoke and mirrors gone awry, the biggest-name GOP leaders here like Abbott and Patrick and U.S. Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz have given the impression that they truly fear the folks who oppose fascism.

Cornyn and Patrick both sought to dupe Texans into believing that the El Paso Wal-Mart shooting was a product of ANTIFA when the triggerman had actually been a Trumper who'd been trying to save the country from an immigration stampede from the south.

Cruz has been the most recent ringleader in the Texas clash with the antifascists - having staged Senate subcommittee hearings designed to show that Trump wasn't living in a make-believe world by trying to pin the blame on the demonstrations and rioting in the spring on them.

Abbott appeared to be all in on the ANTIFA paranoia when he appointed a group of Trump-appointed federal judges to lead a hunt for antifacists who he claimed to be responsible for the violence that erupted in the Texas cities in the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minnesota police in May. The governor, however, hasn't provided any recent public updates on the round up of outside agitators who he blamed for the rioting while pretending to be unaware that white supremacists and other pro-Trump elements had a major role in the chaos.

But Texas GOP Chairman Allen West has appeared to be more scared of ANTIFA than any other Republican leader here with repeated five-alarm warnings about a leftist mob marching towards Austin with plans to turn the suburbs into a socialist utopia. West has spiced up the call to arms with imaginary tales of the Capitol being spray-painted with grafitti and littered with hammers and sickles.

The Republicans could find the united front they would need for a titan fight with ANTIFA to be jeopardized substantially by the fact that West has been attacking Abbott as much or more as he's been going after socialist revolutionaries as a result of the governor's pandemic restrictions.