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Democrat jumps into attorney general race

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, announced Tuesday that he is running to replace Republican Ken Paxton as Texas attorney general.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson of Dallas on Tuesday announced he will run for Texas attorney general, becoming the first Democrat in the contest to replace Republican Ken Paxton.

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“It has been so long since we had an attorney general that viewed that office as being the attorney for the people of the state of Texas that I think people don’t even have that expectation anymore,” Johnson said.

“One of my goals as attorney general will be to restore people’s understanding of and faith in that office.”

Paxton is mounting a GOP primary challenge to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2026 election instead of seeking another term of attorney general.

There are already a slew of competitors running for his job on the GOP side: state Sens. Mayes Middleton, of Galveston; and Joan Huffman, of Houston; and former U.S. Department of Justice official Aaron Reitz.

Johnson, a lawyer and mediator, was first elected to the state Senate in 2018 when he flipped a Republican-held seat.

He said he is running because Texas needs an attorney general who will be a lawyer for all citizens, “irrespective of their ideology.”

Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House and later acquitted by the state Senate for alleged abuse of office, has not been doing that, Johnson said.

Instead, Johnson said he’s used the office for “right-wing order taking from D.C. institutions” and allowed it to be “abused for personal purposes and political gain.”

The attorney general acts as the state’s lawyer, and some of Paxton’s highest profile lawsuits have included challenging former President Joe Biden’s agenda and policies carried out by liberal-leaning cities.

Johnson said he’s able to work across the aisle and pointed to his legislative accomplishments over six years in office as proof. As a member of the minority party in the GOP-led state Senate, he has passed over 100 bills, he said.

In 2021, he passed a bill that gave the state power back from the federal government to regulate health insurance premiums and allowed an estimated 350,000 previously uninsured Texans to get coverage using federal subsidies.

He was also one of the authors of a 2021 bill that created new regulations on the sale of e-cigarettes, similar to existing ones for tobacco cigarettes, in an effort to prevent underage sales.

As vice-chair of the Senate’s Jurisprudence Committee, Johnson is one of only a few Democrats appointed by the lieutenant governor to such a role. He also serves as a member of a number of others, including Business and Commerce, Transportation, and Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs.

Johnson is not up for reelection until 2028, meaning he will not need to give up his Senate seat if he fails to win the Democratic nomination for attorney general in the 2026 primary election.

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Abbott refuses to release emails with Musk

Gov. Greg Abbott, right, argues that his conversations with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were of a private nature.

Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want to reveal months of communications with Elon Musk or representatives of the tech mogul’s companies, arguing in part that they are of a private nature, not of public interest and potentially embarrassing.

Musk had an eventful legislative session in Texas this year.

In addition to his lobbyists successfully advocating for several new laws, Abbott cited the Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO as the inspiration for the state creating its own efficiency office and has praised him for moving the headquarters for many of his businesses to the state in recent years.

As part of an effort to track the billionaire’s influence in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom in April requested Abbott and his staff’s emails since last fall with Musk and other people who have an email address associated with some of his companies.

Initially, the governor’s office said it would take more than 13 hours to review the records.

It provided a cost estimate of $244.64 for the work and required full payment up front.

The Texas Newsroom agreed and cut a check.

Reasons for request

After the check was cashed, the governor’s office said it believed all of the records were confidential and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office referees disputes over public records, to allow the documents to be kept private.

Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, gave several reasons the records should not be released.

He argued they include private exchanges with lawyers, details about policy-making decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here.

Releasing them to the public, he wrote, “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

Taylor also argued that the communications are confidential under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consist of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public, including financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a governmental body.”

He did not provide further details about the exact content of the records.

The language Abbott’s office used appears to be fairly boilerplate.

Paxton’s office, in an explanation of the common-law privacy exception on its website, mentions that “personal financial information” that doesn’t deal with government transactions “is generally highly intimate or embarrassing and must be withheld.”

But Bill Aleshire, a Texas-based attorney specializing in public records law, was appalled that the governor is claiming that months of emails between his office and one of the world’s richest people are all private.

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‘That is shocking’

“Right now, it appears they’ve charged you $244 for records they have no intention of giving you,” Aleshire said.

“That is shocking.”

Aleshire said it’s not unusual for government agencies to tap the common-law privacy exception in an attempt to withhold records from the public.

But he’s used to it being cited in cases that involve children, medical data or other highly personal information — not for emails between an elected official and a businessman.

“You’re boxing in the dark,” Aleshire said. “You can’t even see what the target is or what’s behind their claim.”

Aleshire added that due to a recent Texas Supreme Court ruling, there is effectively no way to enforce public records laws against Abbott and other top state officials.

He called the decision an “ace card” for these politicians.

The case dealt with requests to release Abbott and Paxton’s communications in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde.

The high court ruled that it is the only body that can review whether these officials are in compliance with public records laws.

Kevin Bagnall, a lawyer representing Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, also wrote a letter to Paxton’s office arguing the emails should be kept secret.

He cited one main reason: They contain “commercial information whose disclosure would cause SpaceX substantial competitive harm.”

Most of the rest of Bagnall’s letter, which further explained SpaceX’s argument, was redacted.

Musk and representatives for his companies did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Abbott’s spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the records, including whether The Texas Newsroom would be refunded if Paxton withholds them.

In a statement, he said, “The Office of the Governor rigorously complies with the Texas Public Information Act and will release any responsive information that is determined to not be confidential or excepted from disclosure.”

The office of the attorney general has 45 business days to determine whether to release Abbott’s records.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with the Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. This report was co-published with the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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How “The First Homosexuals” Shaped an Identity

A timely exhibition dissects the emergence of modern ideas about gender and sexuality—and the backlash against them.

A painting of a group of people.

“Our Ancient Gods” by Saturnino Herrán (1916).

Tolerance was over.

Drag shows, activist-driven science, the spurious multiplication of identities—all of these were to be purged, along with the backstabbing liberals, likely collaborating with foreigners, who’d emasculated the nation by abetting such depravity.

Doctors fled as their research was targeted.

Censors and vigilantes destroyed the works of “degenerate” artists.

In Hitler’s Germany, the scapegoat was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, a center of gay-rights advocacy that also pioneered gender-affirming surgeries.

In Trump’s America, it’s an ever-expanding array of teachers, health-care providers, children’s-book authors, and trans athletes.

Both crackdowns followed periods of unprecedented visibility for groups previously confined to the shadows.

But who were these brand-new people that fascists couldn’t bear to look at?

“The First Homosexuals,” at Wrightwood 659, in Chicago, attempts to answer this question, tracking the emergence of modern ideas about gender and sexuality across more than three hundred art works.

It focusses on the period between the eighteen-sixties, when the word “homosexuality” was coined, and the nineteen-thirties, when the Nazis shut down Hirschfeld’s institute and burned his research.

The flames have again come so close that the show’s co-curators, Jonathan D. Katz—a founding figure in queer art history—and Johnny Willis, struggled to find a venue in the United States.

(Next spring, the exhibition will travel to the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.)

Still, they’ve assembled a monumental survey, which includes everything from Qing-dynasty erotica to Félix Vallotton’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.

“Gertrude Stein,” by Félix Vallotton (1907). Baltimore Museum of Art The show hinges on a word, but its insights are resolutely visual.

Art is the world’s greatest archive of sexual difference, Katz argues in the catalogue, preserving subtle shifts that language evades.

Take “La Blanchisseuse,” an 1879 drawing by the French artist Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

Two men wearing top hats stroll, arm in arm, along the Seine in Paris, while a young woman with a bundle of laundry, whom they’ve just passed, invites our sympathy with an exasperated stare.

It’s Europe’s first known depiction of an openly gay couple, a status communicated less by their touching than by the laundress’s spurned expression.

Her vocation was a common cover for sex work;

clearly, she has identified the two men as not only disinterested but ineligible to be her tricks.

The look is resigned and beseeching, as though to say, “These gays, they’re trying to murder me.”

To be sure, same-sex relationships have existed since time immemorial.

What’s newly visible is the notion that engaging in them might be an exclusive preference and defining quality—in other words, that one could be “born this way.”

This theory coalesced in an 1868 exchange of letters, one of which is on view in the exhibition, between two queer Karls—Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, and Karl Maria Kertbeny, an Austro-Hungarian journalist.

It was Kertbeny who coined the words “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” which he saw as impulses of which anyone might be capable.

Ulrichs, by contrast, believed that men who liked men had female souls, and women who liked women had male ones.

More than a century later, their argument is still going:

Is it better to fight for universal rights or to advocate for minority recognition?

Over time, though, Kertbeny’s word became attached to Ulrich’s understanding of sexuality as innate.

The homosexual had arrived.

There’s both power and peril in claiming an identity.

“Homosexual” quickly became a pathological diagnosis; at the same time, the word opened a space for collective self-consciousness.

A portrait gallery tracks the formation of its visual lexicon, a mélange of dandyism, classicism, androgyny, and theatrical irony that owed much to famous figures in the arts.

We see Oscar Wilde, of course, and the Parisian aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, whom Giovanni Boldini shows deep in contemplation of his own elegant cane.

Nearby is Montesquiou’s friend Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary bisexual actress—and first woman to play Hamlet on film—who sculpted a “Self-Portrait as a Chimera” (c. 1880) with bat wings.

Such was her fame that the feared nocturnal creature, which sleeps in an “inverted” posture, became a queer symbol.

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‘Dr. Phil’ is launching a new media company on the heels of bankruptcy filing, lawsuit

Phillip McGraw, known as Dr. Phil on his talk show that ran for 21 seasons, was the first to testify Monday afternoon and said he did not believe Robert Roberson had a fair trial. McGraw testified during a hearing at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer)

Less than two weeks after the sudden public collapse of one media startup, Phil McGraw is launching another.

The celebrity psychologist’s new venture, called ENVOY Media Company, was announced by McGraw on Monday.

The media startup will include both a free, “interactive” phone app and a more traditional television channel that is expected launch later this month, according to a news release.

Content will include breaking news, commentary, entertainment and live sports, the release added.

“As always, my commitment and that of the Envoy network team is to focus on real people, facing real challenges, seeking real solutions,” McGraw said in a statement.

“By talking about things that matter to people who care, presenting facts, encouraging people to think critically, they can make up their own minds.”

McGraw is also partnering with one of the most recognizable faces in American broadcasting: comedian and game show host Steve Harvey, a longtime friend of McGraw’s.

Harvey, perhaps best known as the host of the popular television show “Family Feud,” will also develop and produce original content for the new platform, according to the release.

The nascent media company will operate out of a new, 5,000-square-foot broadcast center in North Texas, although the exact location of the center was not immediately clear.

Jerry Sharell, a representative for McGraw’s new company, declined The News’ request for more details, but said the media personality “is keeping extremely busy and has not stopped taping content for the new venture.”

The platform will also have access to thousands of hours of existing content from McGraw’s personal library, according the release, including some 3,800 hours of “Dr. Phil,” the daytime talk show that turned him into a household name.

It also plans to utilize AI for advertising and to customize user experience, as well as rely on “citizen journalists” — i.e. members of the general public who are not trained reporters — to “share news and stories from their communities,” according to the release.

McGraw’s announcement comes on the heels of the highly public meltdown of another recent North Texas media venture.

On July 2, Merit Street Media — a Fort Worth-based broadcast company that McGraw had founded in 2023 — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing hundreds of millions of dollars in financial liabilities to more than 200 creditors.

On the same day, the company filed a lawsuit against its business partner, the giant Christian broadcaster Trinity Broadcasting Network, alleging breach of contract.

The suit claimed that Trinity had reneged on various promises that wrongly cost Merit Street at least $96 million ― resulting in a litany of public-facing production and content problems, including teleprompters that blacked out during live shows and an unusable cell phone app.

“This lawsuit arises out of a sad but oft told story,” the suit says. “One side lived up to its commitments but the other … did not.”

On Thursday, Trinity filed a legal document that denied some claims but largely postponed the company’s full response until a later date. Merit Street’s Chapter 11 case is progressing in federal bankruptcy court.

Merit Street Media and Trinity did not respond to previous interview requests from The News.

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STOKES— visiting judge CCL#1 JP-appeal

TEXAS CAUSE NO. CC-23-08311-A

DARREN L. REAGAN

PRO SE

PLAINTIFF IN THE COUNTY COURT ATLAWNO.1 vs. DALLAS COUNTY, TEXAS 1 EDWARD SAUCEDO PERLA MARTINEZ JOHN SALAZAR GREG BUNTING DEFENDAN

NOTICE OF APPEAL RELATED TO DEFENDANT GREG BUNTING ONLY TO THE FIFTH DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS AT DALLAS, TEXAS TO THE HONORABLE COURT:

NOW COMES DARREN L. REAGAN, PRO SE PLAINTIFF FILES THIS NOTICE OF APPEAL TO THE FIFTH DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS AT DALLAS, TEXAS.

PLAINTIFF AFFIRMS HE DID NOT RECEIVE NOTICE FROM THE HONORABLE JOHN WARREN, CLERK OF THE COURT VIA USPS MAIL UNTIL APPROXIMATELY 30 DAYS AFTER THE DEFENDANT'S HEARING TO DISMISS.

THE PLAINTIFF ASSERTS FAIR NOTICE/LIBERAL PLEADING AND RESPECTFULLY SHOWS THIS HONORABLE COURT THE FOLLOWING:

THE VISITING JUDGE ABUSE HIS DISCRETION AND COMMITTED REVERSIBLE ERROR IN GRANTING THE DEFENDANT GREG BUNTING MOTION TO DISMISS WITH PREJUDICE.

THE VISITING JUDGE KNEW OR SHOULD HAVE REASONABLY KNOWN AND ADMITTED TO KNOWING SOME OF THE FOLLOWING fACTS:

(1) THIS HONORABLE COURT PRESIDING JUDGE HAD ISSUED THIS INSTANT CASE INTO A COURT ORDERED MEDIATION THAT IS SCHEDULED FOR JUNE 17, 2025 AT 1:00PM.

(2) ALL PARTIES INCLUDING THE DEFENDANT GREG BUNTING, A MEDICAL CHIROPRACTOR HAD AGREED TO THE COURT ORDERED MEDIATION SESSION.

(3) THE VISITING JUDGE STATED HIS CONFUSION WHETHER HE HAD JURISDICTION TO HEAR THE CASE BECAUSE IT WAS ON APPEAL OUT OF THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE COURT ANO THE GREG BUNTING WAS NOT A DEFENDANT IN THE CASE.

THE VISITING JUDGE EXPLAINED ACCORDING TO TEXAS LAW GREG BUNTING HAD TO BE A DEFENDANT IN THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE CASE IN ORDER FOR HIM TO HEAR AND PRESIDE OVER THE CASE.

THE VISITING JUDGE ALSO EXPLAINED HE HAD NO AUTHORITY AND JURISDICTION BASED ON THE COMPENSATION DAMAGES LIMITED TO THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF $20,000.

(4) THE VISITING JUDGE SHOULD HAVE IMMEDIATELY ADJOURNED THE PROCEEDING AND DISMISSED THE CASE DUE TO THE COURT'S NOT HAVING JURISDICTION OVER THE INSTANT CASE AS TO THE DEFENDANT GREG BUNTING .

SPECIFICALLY BASED ON THE AFORMENTIONED JUDICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND STATEMENTS RELATED TO THE STATE OF TEXAS LAW.

(5) THE VISITING JUDGE GRANTED DEFENDANT BUNTING MOTION TO DISMISS WITH PREJUDICE.

PARTICULARLY, AFTER THE DEFENDANT'S COUNSEL ARGUED THE DEFENDANT WOULD SUFFER PREJUDICE BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH NOTICE AND THE PLAINTIFF DID NOT CITE PARTICULAR CAUSE OF ACTION AGAINST THE DEFENDANT.

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’65, haskell

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Co-workers want to visit my house

Dear Miss Manners:

I just moved into a new home, and I wanted to keep that information private at the place where I am temporarily working. I’m not particularly close to anyone there.

Several people are nice to me, but not to the point of being friends.

Well, word got out about my house, and now several people have invited themselves over or hinted as much.

None of these people have ever socialized with me, so I find it odd and awkward that they would suddenly invite themselves.

I don’t entertain anyway, but I know telling them that will not work.

I’m just really bothered that they say, “You’ll have to invite us over.”

What would you do? I need a list of excuses!

Gentle Reader:

No, you need only one: “I’m not planning anything.”

Or fewer than one, if that is possible: a strained smile and silence.

Miss Manners understands that people who have trouble saying no might be sorry to disappoint those who importune them.

Or they may be cowed by the authority with which some people state their demands.

But to give a specific excuse is to admit that the matter is open for discussion.

You say you are busy?

“Well, when will you be free?” they will ask.

You say that the house is not ready for visitors?

“That’s all right; we don’t expect it to be in perfect shape.”

You say you have guests coming? “We’d love to meet them.”

And so on.

If you don’t supply material, they can’t argue.

Dear Miss Manners: I was visiting a dear friend’s home a few days after her husband died. While I was there, her adult daughter arrived from out of town. I had not met her before.

We were introduced, and then I said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She immediately said, “I hate it when people say that,” and continued to complain about people always saying that.

What was I supposed to say in response? I was speechless.

Gentle Reader:

Good.

Because you wouldn’t have wanted to upset your friend by offering double condolences: for losing her husband and also for having a rude daughter.

Dear Miss Manners: I am 64 years old. My mother insists that when I am offered another helping of food, it’s rude for me to reply, “No, thank you, I’m full.”

She says I should just say “No, thank you” and leave it at that because no one wants to know whether I’m full.

If I say that I am full, she frowns and gives me a withering look.

In fact, she gives me the same look when I just say “No, thank you” because she always thinks I’m going to add that I am full.

However, many of my other relatives regularly say that they are full!

Is my mom right?

Gentle Reader:

Always.

And Miss Manners agrees that picturing your full stomach has a bad effect on other people’s appetites.

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NEW YORK Clerk refuses to enforce abortion judgment

Texas AG filed case against doctor who prescribed pills to a Dallas-area woman

A county clerk in New York on Monday again refused to file a more than $100,000 civil judgment from Texas against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.

New York is among eight states with shield laws that protect providers from other states’ reach.

Abortion opponents claim the laws violate a constitutional requirement that states respect the laws and legal judgments of other states.

Republican Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton wants a New York court to enforce a civil decision from Texas against Dr. Margaret Carpenter, who practices north of New York City in Ulster County, for allegedly prescribing abortion medication via telemedicine.

Acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck in March refused an initial request to file the judgment, citing the New York law that shields abortion providers who serve patients in states with abortion bans.

A second demand was made last week by the Texas attorney general’s office, which said Bruck had a “statutory duty” to make the filing under New York civil practice law.

Bruck responded Monday that the rejection stands.

“While I’m not entirely sure how things work in Texas, here in New York, a rejection means the matter is closed,” Bruck wrote in a letter to Texas officials.

An email seeking comment was sent to Paxton’s office.

The Texas case is one of two involving Carpenter that could end up testing shield laws.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this year invoked the state’s shield law in rejecting a request to extradite Carpenter to Louisiana, where the doctor was charged with prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor.

Hochul, responding to the latest request from Paxton’s office, claimed he was attempting to dictate “the personal decisions of women across America.”

“Our response to their baseless claim is clear: no way in hell. New York won’t be bullied,” she said in a prepared statement. “And I’ll never back down from this fight.”

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‘Landman’ back in North Texas

ENTERTAINMENT

Filming begins in, around Fort Worth for popular show’s new season

Walk down a North Texas street and you might stumble upon the filming of Season 2 of Taylor Sheridan’s Landman .

Since March, the cast and crew of the oil rig drama have been filming in downtown Fort Worth, on TCU’s campus and at a church in Springtown, outside Fort Worth.

Most recently, Landman filmed in the small town of Jacksboro, about an hour northwest of Fort Worth.

The Jacksboro Herald-Gazette, a local newspaper, posted photos on Facebook showing the crew at the local police station.

This isn’t the first time Landman has filmed in Jacksboro.

Last year, the show filmed scenes at Faith Community Hospital, and in April the show returned to film funeral scenes.

The Paramount+ series immerses viewers in the West Texas oil industry. It stars Billy Bob Thornton as an oil industry “fixer” navigating his professional and family life. The show’s star-studded cast includes Andy Garcia and Demi Moore. Sam Elliott, who was previously in Sheridan’s 1883, is expected to join the cast of Landman Season 2.

While North Texas is a go-to shooting location for Sheridan, it’s not the only spot he’ll film for Season 2.

The show has expanded filming to Oklahoma for scenes about a casino.

Sheridan’s Landman is based on the podcast Boomtown from Imperative Entertainment and Texas Monthly , a series looking into the modern-day oil boom in West Texas’ Permian Basin.

Here are some of the North Texas hotspots Landman cast and crew have been seen at:

The Worthington Hotel

61 Osteria

Texas Christian University campus Studio 74 Vintage in Fort Worth

First United Methodist Church in Springtown

Hurtado BBQ

Sheridan’s Bosque Ranch in Weatherford

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If ICE agents won’t display a badge number, what distinguishes them from vigilantes?

Hidden faces, justice don’t mix

In recent months, conversations surrounding immigration enforcement have taken a chilling

turn. We’ve heard officials and supporters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement justify the anonymity of its agents — who often wear balaclavas, refuse to identify themselves and hide their badge numbers — by claiming it’s a matter of safety.

They say they fear being doxed, harassed or even physically harmed. This concern, on its face, seems understandable.

But what happens when that fear becomes the justification for a federal law enforcement agency operating with no transparency?

The central question is not about ICE’s safety.

It’s about ours.

If a person claiming to be an ICE agent refuses to show a warrant, refuses to provide identification and refuses to display their face or badge number, what distinguishes them from a vigilante or a kidnapper?

In a country founded on constitutional checks and balances, the idea that law enforcement can “disappear” people without oversight is not just dangerous — it’s authoritarian.

And it’s not hypothetical.

A federal court approved a settlement requiring ICE to adopt new policies after a lawsuit alleged that nearly 70% of those arrested in a 2018 raid were collateral arrests — carried out without individual warrants or the legally required justification.

Nothing suggests that this is an aberration.

That means in thousands of cases, the agency potentially offered no clear legal basis for its actions.

No paperwork.

No warrant.

Just masked figures with weapons, knocking on doors or pulling people off the street.

And the public has no way to verify their legitimacy.

This matters.

During the summer of 2020, unidentified federal agents, many believed to be from Homeland Security agencies, grabbed protesters off the streets of Portland, Ore., and loaded them into unmarked vans.

No warrants.

No explanation.

No names, leaving civil rights organizations to denounce it as an abuse of power.

And yet, instead of being curtailed, this behavior has become normalized.

And let’s dispel one of the most common myths: that ICE is simply targeting “dangerous criminals” or “people here illegally.”

That’s not what’s actually happening.

Under the current administration, the very definition of who belongs in this country has been under systematic assault.

The administration has pursued policies designed to strip legal status — from temporary protected status holders to attempting to eliminate DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Even now, a federal court had to intervene to stop the administration from terminating protections for half a million Haitians.

This came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the administration to revoke deportation relief for Venezuelans.

These policies have consequences, such as suggesting people should “self-deport” and removing protections designed to scare immigrants away from using legal benefits for fear it could disqualify them from green cards.

We have even seen instances of ICE arresting people as they leave immigration court hearings.

The goal isn’t just to enforce the law; it’s to change it so that no one is safe.

And who are the people actually being deported?

Not hardened criminals.

Not violent offenders.

We’re talking about an 11-year-old U.S. citizen with a brain tumor.

Elementary school children.

Parents at work.

Dozens of U.S. citizens.

And, according to data from CNN, less than 10% of immigrants taken into ICE custody since October had serious criminal convictions.

The majority of those targeted by ICE were not fugitives — they were neighbors, caregivers, classmates, co-workers and kids.

And yet ICE agents are being empowered to carry out these detentions with no visible badge, no warrant and no requirement to prove who they are.

How is the average person supposed to distinguish someone in law enforcement from a fraud?

They can’t.

And that should terrify all of us.

The risk of impersonation isn’t abstract: An incident in Philadelphia, another in South Carolina, and even the political assassination in Minnesota show that these are not isolated incidents.

These are real people facing real danger from those exploiting the vacuum of accountability.

This isn’t just a civil liberties issue; it’s a fundamental question of democracy.

A nation where federal agents can operate in secret, without oversight, is a nation teetering toward authoritarianism.

If ICE agents can refuse to identify themselves while detaining civilians, and if the government can redefine who “belongs” here with every passing year, every passing day, then what remains of our due process?

Who even are we?

is a civil rights attorney in Dallas.

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i'm as cool as the flipside of the pillow

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The Overlooked Queer History of Five Titans of American Postmodernism

The exhibition begins in silence—four minutes and 33 seconds of it.

The musician and theorist John Cage composed the groundbreaking piece 4’33”, which contains no sound, as a response to White Painting by his friends Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

The musical composition and the artwork, which could be misconstrued as a blank canvas, were each exercises in negative space—gestures of quiet set against the tumultuous backdrop of postwar America, a time marked by violent prudishness and anti-communist paranoia.

This act of silence, and the painting that inspired it, were just two examples of the deep artistic cross-pollination among five friends who were at once collaborators, comrades, and lovers.

The group was rounded out by choreographer Merce Cunningham and sculptor-painter Jasper Johns.

All five would prove titans of early postmodernism.

Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at Louis and Fance Stevenson's home “somewhere up the Hudson”, 1954.

Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at Louis and Fance Stevenson’s home “somewhere up the Hudson”, 1954. Photo: Rachel Rosenthal, Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

These white and empty works hang together in the first gallery of a major show at the Museum Brandhorst.

Following this defiantly minimal prelude, the show erupts into a torrent.

The exhibition spans 180 works across rooms brimming with color, texture, avant-gardism, and vivid monumentalism, mapping the charged interplay among costumes, musical scores, drawings, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and letters.

Stretching from the late 1940s through the 1970s, “Five Friends” unfolds as a web of influence, examining how personal entanglements propelled historic breakthroughs.

What becomes clear is a complex and intricately connected universe of creativity that defined postwar art. And the notion of “friends” is loaded due to the long-overlooked angle that these celebrated figures were queer artists who desired each other in a multitude of ways, and were at times in intensive romantic partnerships, all within the constraints of McCarthy-era America.

Shockingly, this is the first time such an exhibition has been put together, thanks to large loans from the Museum Ludwig, a major holder of works by Rauschenberg (the show will travel there afterward), as well as prominent U.S. museums.

The Museum Brandhorst also has a major holding of work by Twombly.

Rauschenberg would have turned 100 this year.

Setting their work together against the context of a repressive post-war era, a transgressive power can be read into every tap and jump of Cunningham’s feet as he shuffles around, imitating a masculine football player with vaudeville inflections; it brings a joyful resistance to Twombly’s gestural lines in his chalk paintings, which no longer feel quite so escapist.

They almost seem like musical notes for a song that can never be sung—across the rooms in different works, we see Cunningham moving in a stilted way without a score, trying to break patterns.

jasper johns work at five friends show at museum brandhorst

Johns and Rauschenberg’s work, each teeming with a visual intensity that is unmatched by most 20th-century art, is read through the prisms of passion and frustration and a rejection of politics, which is political in and of itself.

Of course, it’s too simple to look at their art through a queer lens alone—there are so many points of access—but it deepens the reading of them profoundly.

That opening chapter of “Five Friends” at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, a room dedicated to the idea of silence, is sublime and conceptually immaculate; in its quiet monumentalism, a scene is set for how these five artists deeply influenced each other’s work.

When Rauschenberg and Twombly’s White Painting—a two-panel work that is part of a series by the same name, which was long attributed to Rauschenberg alone but was in fact made in collaboration with Twombly at Black Mountain College that Cage was inspired by—it was itself inspired by Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” from 1949. These works confounded audiences. “I have nothing to say and I am saying it,” wrote Cage. “And that is poetry exactly how I need it.” These works offer a sense of being washed over by a bright and brave new era of art—a deep yearning for a reset.

In that same room, the heavily tactile, numbered encaustic works of Johns breathe a radical reading into Twombly’s works. In Cunningham in his Suite for Five, a dance piece that was costumed by Rauschenberg and scored by Cage, we see the dancer holding a spot on the floor. Accompanying drawings show studies for this choreography are sketches of concentric circles on a page that look a lot like the target paintings Johns would later make.

At the time, America was gripped by the so-called Lavender Scare—a queer purge that mirrored McCarthy’s anti-Communist hysteria.

Government workers, teachers, and artists were dismissed or surveilled.

That context makes the coded intimacy of this show feel radical. A 1951 letter from Rauschenberg to Twombly says it all: “A quiet day without fear” sits at the page’s edge.

Unlike other artist groupings, these five never formed a manifesto-driven movement.

Their alliance was intimate, informal, and hidden in plain sight. While their influence on Modern and postmodern art, music, and dance is well-documented, the emotional and erotic relationships driving that influence are less so—and often deliberately erased.

Cage and Cunningham had been romantic and creative partners since the early 1940s. Rauschenberg and Twombly met in 1951 and joined them at Black Mountain, where Cage and Cunningham were faculty.

The painters absorbed Cage’s chance-based theories. He, in turn, collected their work. Johns entered the circle in 1954.

Yet queer desire is everywhere—if you know where to look.

Bed (1955), a loan from the MoMA, is especially evocative. A bed hanging on the wall, the pillow is stitched in the middle, and seems to have both Twombly and Rauschenberg’s painterly styles on one side of each half.

The pillow, as a place to rest a head, could stand in for a shared mind; the unmade bed, a shared passion.

“A bouquet of some of the most beautiful moments in bed,” was what Rauschenberg called the work.

Rauschenberg and Twombly’s travels through Europe and North Africa are documented in tender silver gelatin prints.

In Cy and Roman Steps, the artist’s feet descend frame by frame, until the camera lingers at the fly of his pants.

The exhibition continues in this way, offering an exhilarating number of pathways with which to understand just how influence and collaboration worked between them.

The show is of such a tenor that it almost leaves you breathless—in room after room, we see a group of artists intellectually and emotionally aligned.

They are also rigorously dedicated to radically new directions in art.

In an all-black gallery, the largest part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, of which John Cage was the musical director, Rauschenberg was artistic director, and later, Johns also played a leading role.

Cunningham’s camp aesthetics—his taste for visual flair, androgyny, and performative exaggeration—are shaped and supported by the others.

Rauschenberg’s very first “Combine” paintings—his signature contributions to art history—were stage props for Cunningham.

His many costumes for Cunningham are playful, sometimes knitted, sometimes painterly.

Johns’s stagings for Walkaround Time have a radical physicality not dissimilar to his paintings, and his costume for Second Hand includes every single color of the rainbow, a power play he is also known for.

Cage’s sonic unpredictability underlines Merce’s plays with chance and abstraction.

The dance was never completely his—it was theirs, too.

All dances must end. There were breakups, too. Rauschenberg and Johns separated in 1961, marking the end of their romantic and creative partnership. Johns said little publicly about the split, but its echoes ripple through some work, including in In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara, a restrained, grief-laden painting made in 1961 that nods to both loss and longing, and an encrypted nod to the openly gay poet. It is as close as the artist ever came to a personal declaration and it suddenly softens the stark and heavy symbolism of his other works. A spoon and a fork hang tied together at the center of a canvas.

“All of us worked totally committed,” Rauschenberg once said of their collaborations, “[and] shared every intense emotion and, I think, performed miracles, for love only.”

[dankusner]

“But don’t save me in a woke way.”

“But don’t save me in a woke way.”

[dankusner]

[dankusner]

even lech walesa a has a low-down funky beat