Tex's Place

By Nicole Shanahan It’s Burning Man week again. The “Man” will burn this Saturday, as it does every Saturday before Labor Day. I used to be a devoted Burner, having attended faithfully every year from 2014 through 2022 (minus one year due to COVID). “Is Burning Man demonic?” is a question I see floating around several Christian circles, and as a newly baptized Christian, I’ve been asking myself the same question. To even begin unpacking that question, several prerequisites for theological understanding are necessary. And, please excuse me as I am a new Christian, currently devouring large amounts of Christian literature and trying to educate myself. So, bear with me as I navigate and unpack the overlay of theology on my personal experience of Burning Man. On the nature of “demons,” “Satan,” and “evil,” I’ve found C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters — and its companion essay Screwtape Proposes a Toast — to be helpful illustrations of Satan at work. I recognize that Lewis was, ...

By Streiff The Trump administration is returning a 20-foot-tall painting of General Robert E. Lee to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed. In a statement, Army spokeswoman Rebecca Hodson  said,  “At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place. Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.” General Lee, who epitomized the perfect cadet, excelling in military skills and academics, was relegated to the closet in 2022 at the direction of a bizarre little commission, called "The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America." It was part of the national madness when that was unleashed after a Black career criminal and doper, George Floyd,...

By Cam Edwards Millions of Americans are hitting the road this Labor Day weekend, but those gun owners traveling through the state of Ohio need to be extra careful once they cross the Buckeye State line. Even though the state has a Constitutional Carry law in place, gun owners could end up facing a felony charge if they're traveling with a firearm.  Vontae Garrett knows firsthand about the pitfall in Ohio law. Garrett, who lives in Indiana, was recently visiting family in Toledo. On his way home, he was pulled over by a Lucas County sheriff’s deputy, who informed him that his car's license plates didn’t match its registration. Garrett explained that he had recently purchased the vehicle and the previous owner's tags were still in place, but that wasn't what resulted in him being charged with a felony and facing the  prospect of a prison sentence .  Garrett says when the deputy asked if he had a firearm, he answered truthfully — noting that Ohio is an open carry stat...

By Christine Rosen For a few weeks in August, an American Eagle blue jeans advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney captivated the nation. The advertisement embraced a known truth—sex sells—and used a classically beautiful woman (blond hair, blue eyes, buxom) to do it. The ad included a lame pun on the word “jeans,” with Sweeney reciting lines from what sounded like a middle-school science textbook to land the joke: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color... My jeans are blue.” As the grandfather of public relations, Edward Bernays, noted in 1947, the “engineering of consent” by those who wish to influence the masses can take many forms. In a free society, advertising is one of the most common. The advertising industry reflects the cultural mood as much as it attempts to manipulate it, and for some time, a significant amount of our country’s advertising has been driven by progressive ideolog...

By Jamie K. Wilson A shooting happens. Cue the circus. Cable anchors put on their solemn faces, politicians squeeze out their pre-written lines, and Twitter fills with keyboard prophets reading entrails like Roman augurs. “Look! He liked Trump memes — clearly a right-wing terrorist!” “No, he followed gender activists on TikTok — clearly a leftist lunatic!” Both sides pound the table, as if the meaning of the carnage can be divined like tea leaves. By day three, the only thing anyone agrees on is that America is being torn apart by political enemies in their midst. It’s all theater. A blood-soaked ritual in which every tragedy must prove that the other tribe is to blame. Meanwhile, the actual shooters — and the people they kill — get lost in the noise. Two Very Different Beasts Not all shootings are the same. In fact, there are two broad types — and confusing them is like confusing a hurricane with an earthquake. Both kill, but they come from very different places. Hate-Driven Shoot...

  By Jim Thompson Friday night, a relative sent me a text. That wasn’t unusual. He’s recently discovered texting as a vehicle to rant, and specifically, to rant at me. The context also wasn’t unusual. It was a rant about “fascist Trump.” Trump, he wrote, had sent his stormtroopers to Washington state and they had pulled two, brave firefighters off the front lines of a forest fire. Fascist! He cried – they are pulling firefighters away from fighting fires!  What amount of children and puppies will die because of Trump?!   This relative is a card-carrying leftist. I don’t know the source of his Kool-Aid. I could guess. Maybe it’s just ghosts in his head, but he’s not alone. Politicians who know better disseminate nonsense and half-truths to agitate the base. Gavin Newsom has been stumping lately, claiming that  Trump will “cancel” the 2026 elections .  After I got the text from my relative (and sighed deeply), I looked up what actually  happened . This i...

By Ward Clark There's clueless, then there's abysmally clueless. Then, somewhere beneath that, there's New York's own, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), or AOC. In her most recent eye-roller, AOC is bragging about the new trash cans she caused to be placed along the "Avenue of Sweethearts" - Roosevelt Avenue, in Queens, still the greatest place for one-stop shopping for prostitution, drugs, and gangs, as the NY Post reported exclusively. Oh, she got the trash cans,  but the trash remains . Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trumpeted on social media how she successfully pushed to have dozens of new trash cans placed on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. Problem is, she ignored the real trash. She was immediately mocked for ignoring the parade of johns, pimps and prostitutes flooding the avenue’s infamous  “Market of Sweethearts.” “Celebrating garbage cans is like putting sprinkles on s–t and calling it a birthday cake,” lambasted Elmhurst’s Ramses Frias, who’s run...

By Sister Toldjah Republicans, up to Donald Trump himself, were roundly vindicated on claims that then-President Joe Biden was unfit to serve another four years in office after his disastrous June 2024 debate performance massively exposed not just the poor state of Biden's health, but the press/White House  cover-up  that had been ongoing. In part because of that, Democrats and their mainstream media allies have  ramped up  efforts they attempted during Trump's first term to try and prove that he is in a similar condition or, worse, that he's on his last leg. We all remember the ridiculous fretting in the Trump 45 era over President Trump once  walking down  a ramp slowly, as well as the bonkers spin surrounding him once holding a glass of water with both hands.  Trump would get his revenge on the media at a later point, however, mocking them over it during campaign appearances and then waging one of the most amazing political comebacks in American...