Imagine that in a deep-blue state like California bills advancing transgender activists’ agenda mysteriously died in committee. Not thanks to Republican obstruction, but at the hands of Democrat leaders. Then it came out that the state’s governor, lieutenant governor, and Democratic house speaker had taken large political contributions from businesses that would have lost tens of millions of dollars had those bills passed.

(I know, I know. This all seems like crazy talk. Just stay with me and read to the end, please. It will give you a knot in your stomach that lasts all day. I promise!)

Trans activists would go crazy. Woke corporations would threaten to move out of the state. Media would be filled with the howls and shrieks of trans activists. With claims that those public officials had “blood on their hands.” (Because of all the suicides they’d allegedly have caused.) In the next Democratic primary, those turncoat politicians would see their careers in smithereens.

The GOP: A Goat Rodeo Run by RINOs

The Democratic party knows something that the Republican party doesn’t: A strong, consistent message nationwide is powerful. That’s why there are no virtually pro-life Democrats anymore. You can’t run for dog-catcher on the Aleutian Islands as a pro-life Democrat. Not without the whole national party carpet-bombing you. That’s message discipline for you. The Democrats would rather sacrifice a few House seats in the Deep South than muddy the party’s stance on what it holds sacred. (For instance, the sacrifice of children for sexual convenience.)

So what’s wrong with Republicans? Obviously, I don’t have space to lay that out in detail. It might take several long, depressing books. Follow the work of courageous right-wing iconoclast Pedro Gonzalez if you want to scratch the surface. But I’ll put things very briefly. For decades the pro-business leadership of the party has milked working class, pro-family voters like stolen cattle, while barely letting us graze. We back one “conservative” candidate after another. But we can’t even rely on sane votes from GOP appointees to the Supreme Court. (See Gorsuch’s delusional opinion applying the Civil Rights Act to transgenders.)

We Need a Clean Sweep at the Top

Donald Trump woke us up to this con job on the immigration issue. (Cheap labor for the Chamber of Commerce, cheap votes for the Democrats.) But that didn’t stop the RINOs in Congress from squandering the GOP’s two years of controlling both houses plus the White House. The Wall didn’t get built, but business taxes got cut, as surely as if Jeb Bush or John Kasich had been in office.

We need new leaders, men more like Ron DeSantis in Florida. And less like Greg Abbott in Texas. Because the fantasy scenario I laid out at the top of this story? It just happened right here in Texas. The National File reports that Texas Republican leaders intentionally smothered a common-sense bill protecting vulnerable teens from trans madness.

Dirty Dealings in Austin, at Vulnerable Kids’ Expense

“S.B. 1311 would have stripped liability insurance for doctors who engage in transgender surgeries or chemical castrations for kids,” National File noted. Kids too young to get tattoos, join the military, vote, own guns, or drive are getting hustled into chemical castration clinics by eager trans activist school counselors. CBS reported on 60 Minutes on the regrets many victims of trans “therapy” face after chemically or surgically sterilizing themselves and mutilating their bodies. In the 2020s’ answer to the lobotomy craze of the 1950s, whole Frankenstein industries have emerged to apply a meat cleaver approach to mental illness.

In a typical Texas GOP legislative maneuver, House Speaker Dade Phelan recessed the body without voting on the chemical castration ban. That effectively killed it, without leaving GOP fingerprints on the corpse. Unlike South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Governor Abbott won’t have to veto such a bill for fearing of upsetting Woke corporations like Amazon or the NCAA. Some principled GOP leaders have spoken out in protest.

[F]ormer State Rep. Matt Rinaldi recently told National File that the plot to kill H.B. 1399 was a “team effort” by the Phelan leadership team. HB 1399 would have stripped doctors of their ability to acquire liability insurance if they engaged in child transgender surgeries or chemical castrations at their practices, and was killed last week. “The bill was slow-walked the entire way by Reps. Klick and Burrows, presumably under orders from the Speaker [Dade Phelan],” Rinaldi told National File. “The fact that House Republicans would work so hard to preserve sex change surgeries for minors is beyond contempt,” Rinaldi continued. “The Texas GOP needs a housecleaning next primary.”

Republican Votes to the Highest Bidder?

But wait, it gets worse. The National File found direct financial ties between leading Republicans (including the governor) and clinics that actually profit from chemical castration. It reports:

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan … collectively accepted over $250,000 from Friends of UT Southwestern Center, also known as FOMCPAC. The three were recently involved in shutting down multiple pieces of key legislation that would have prevented hormone treatment and surgery from being provided to supposed transgender children in the state.

…

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who National File has been told led the charges against the bills designed to protect children, received $85,000 from the transgender clinic PAC since 2015. His Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, received the lion’s share from FOMCPAC however, taking over $120,000 since 2015. Newly-elected House Speaker Dade Phelan was given $50,000 in the 2020 cycle by the clinic’s PAC. Similarly, Rep. Stephanie Klick, who was in a position to block these bills in her role as the Chair of the House Health Committee, received $4,000 from FOMCPAC since 2015.

In another story, National File documented what FOMCPAC is all about:

UT Southwestern Medical Center hosts the Gender Education and Care Interdisciplinary Support (GENECIS) program, which is the “first and largest program in the southwest that provides multidisciplinary care to transgender children and adolescents.” While the program does not offer surgery to children, it does offer a number of so-called “treatments” that may amount to chemical castration, including hormone therapy, menstruation suppression, and puberty suppression.

Woke Oligarchs Running Texas by Remote Control

Behind the trans movement stand billions of dollars pledged by financial oligarchs, who use their inherited wealth to mainstream trans ideology. As Jennifer Bilek reported in The Federalist, the almost overnight triumph of that bizarre new worldview can be attributed to … cold hard cash.

[E]xceedingly rich, white men with enormous cultural influence are funding the transgender lobby and various transgender organizations. These include but are not limited to Jennifer Pritzker (a male who identifies as transgender); George Soros; Martine Rothblatt (a male who identifies as transgender and transhumanist); Tim Gill (a gay man); Drummond Pike; Warren and Peter Buffett; Jon Stryker (a gay man); Mark Bonham (a gay man); and Ric Weiland (a deceased gay man whose philanthropy is still LGBT-oriented). Most of these billionaires fund the transgender lobby and organizations through their own organizations, including corporations.

Should James Bond villains like those be calling the shots in the Texas Republican party and state legislature? Alas, they are. And as long as the party is led by the likes of Abbott, Patrick, and Phelan, nothing will change.

Speaking Out on Tucker Carlson’s Show

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller went on Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about this GOP betrayal:

BREAKING: Texas Ag Commissioner Sid Miller appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss a Texas bill that would ban transgender surgeries for minor children in the state.

The bill is being stalled, and multiple activists tell National File that Abbott doesn’t want to sign it. pic.twitter.com/WddotvJyXh

— National File (@NationalFile) May 8, 2021

 
Yes, it’s nice that Gov. Abbott let us take off our masks. That he backed a worthy pro-life “Heartbeat Bill” that’s likely to die in the courts. (So Woke corporations barely bothered to lobby against it.) But on issues where new laws could actually make a difference, like SB 1311, protecting children? Abbott is afraid of angering the oligarchs.

So he proved when he followed his pledge to fight “Big Tech censorship” with a gratuitous and false attack on Gab.com as “anti-Semitic.” At the same time, he courted Amazon to bring a few hundred low-wage, non-union jobs to Texas. This just months after Amazon blackmailed Parler.com, demanding that it … censor content that Amazon disagreed with.

With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats? With Texas becoming like this, who’ll need California?

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”