Greg Abbott Is Obsessed with Feet

Howdy y’all, it’s Brian Gaar with The Barbed Wire.

Our government here in Texas had a busy week finding new things to be mad about: DFW Airport canceled plans for a Muslim ablution facility after Greg Abbott threatened its funding, while Texas Tech is using AI to hunt through college courses for insufficiently conservative content.

Meanwhile, Minnesota is suing Abbott to get an ICE agent charged with assault back to Minneapolis, and the federal government has temporarily stopped carving a road through Big Bend National Park.

So join me as we take our biweekly bath of culture war bullshit (ginned up just in time for the midterms)!

Abbott vs. the Extremely Dangerous Airport Foot-Washing Station

Gov. Greg Abbott has found a new threat to the Lone Star State: people washing their feet at airports.

Abbott threatened to withdraw state and federal funding from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport after the airport planned to install an ablution facility, a place commonly used by Muslims to rinse their hands and feet before prayer.

He also sent letters to the mayors of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, saying his office was reviewing grant funds for airport facilities and asking the U.S. Transportation Department to investigate.

“These ablution facilities appear designed to single out one subset of the population for special treatment based on religion. That is illegal,” Abbott said.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire defended the ablution room at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, saying it is available to people of all faiths and was created in response to passenger requests. He also pointed out that it was paid for with fees from international airlines, not taxes or grants.

DFW, meanwhile, canceled its planned facility shortly after Abbott announced his threat.

The airport said the project “would not deliver the originally anticipated operational benefits.”

So, to summarize: We, as a state, have reached the point where washing your feet at the airport is a matter of state government concern. Yee haw. 

Texas Tech Deploys the Most Powerful Weapon in Academia: A Robot Looking for Pronouns

Texas Tech University is using artificial intelligence to help review university courses for material involving topics such as sexual orientation and gender identity.

You’d think the Terminator robots would have better things to do, right? Not in Texas!

The effort is being pushed by Brandon Creighton, the former state lawmaker who has led the Texas Tech University System since November. Creighton has said there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” at universities and believes his review process “will produce the best curriculum in America.”

The university system has reviewed more than 14,000 courses, with about 60 recommended for modification. Officials say another 300 were proactively modified by faculty before review.

But professors say the process has produced factual errors and plenty of anxiety.

At one faculty meeting, professors reportedly described the AI-generated reports as “A.I. slop.”

One professor, Lucy Schiller, said a report hallucinated information about a course she wasn't teaching. The system also flagged a book she did teach, Voice of the Fish, which explores the trans experience.

Schiller ultimately left Texas Tech and started at Grinnell College this month.

Other professors have begun changing their courses themselves out of fear of running afoul of the new rules.

One historian removed two weeks of study about Viking men and women because he worried that material about gender-changing figures in Norse mythology might cause problems.

Another professor worried that mentioning gay and bisexual men who were victims of the Nazis could cause her Holocaust literature course to be pushed out of the core curriculum.

“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said. 

Minnesota Is Coming to Texas for One Very Specific Reason

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has sued Gov. Greg Abbott, demanding that Texas extradite an ICE agent charged with shooting an immigrant during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

Christian Castro, 52, faces four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime related to a Jan. 14 incident. Prosecutors allege he fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home he knew was occupied.

Castro is currently being held at a jail in Texas.

Minnesota officials have repeatedly asked Abbott to authorize his extradition. Last week, Ellison warned that he would sue if Abbott didn't do so by Monday.

On Tuesday, he followed through.

“This is not some accidental thing,” Ellison said. “This is a choice.”

Abbott, for his part, said he wouldn't respond to Minnesota prosecutors until they acknowledge their fault in what the Trump administration has accused of being fraud in Minnesota and repay the government for it.

“I don’t trust [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz on anything, let alone something like this,” Abbott said.

Minnesota's lawsuit also seeks to prevent the Cameron County Sheriff's Office from releasing Castro. According to the lawsuit, he could be released under Texas law as soon as Aug. 26 if he isn't extradited.

And this isn't happening in a vacuum. The shooting was one of three January incidents during the federal immigration surge in Minneapolis in which federal officers fired at people. The other two resulted in the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens.

The legal principle here is pretty straightforward: If you're charged with a crime in one state and flee to another, the second state is generally supposed to send you back.

As University of Houston law professor Seth Chandler put it, extradition is “part of the glue that holds the nation together.”

Big Bend Gets a Temporary Reprieve From the Bulldozers

Let’s end on some good news: The bulldozers have stopped bulldozing Big Bend National Park.

At least temporarily.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said Monday that construction of border infrastructure in Big Bend had been halted while he travels to West Texas to personally evaluate the project and meet with local officials.

Contractors had been building a patrol road and vehicle barriers along the border with Mexico, cutting a path through parts of the park near major natural attractions.

The project has drawn criticism from opponents and local law enforcement officials, who say the infrastructure is costly and unnecessary in such a remote area where relatively few migrants have crossed.

Federal officials had previously said they were no longer planning a 30-foot wall there. Instead, the project involves an access road, detection technology and vehicle barriers along roughly 118 miles of border inside the park.

The work has proceeded under waivers of environmental and other laws, and several lawsuits have been filed seeking to stop it.

Jenna Cantrell, who lives nearby in Terlingua, said she visited the park Monday and saw no contractor traffic.

“Every day the bulldozers aren’t working is a nice day,” she said.

But she's not exactly declaring victory.

“We’re not going to rest until there’s no more contract.”

Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity said the project had already caused “irreversible” damage to parts of the desert ecosystem around Mariscal Mountain.

“You can’t pick up a rock and take it home from Big Bend National Park, and yet we’re seeing these federal contractors gouging a permanent scar,” he said.