A Useless Second Open Letter To Texas Governor Greg Abbott
The Most Dangerous Man in Texas
Back in May I wrote an open letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott detailing why his decision to end enhanced unemployment benefits two months early was both stupid and an example of callousness not seen since Charles Dickens invented Scrooge. As expected, he did not reply; he was obviously busy either drowning puppies or shining Donald Trump’s shoes.
While I knew our governor would continue to infuriate me between then and the time he is hopefully defeated next year (please God, Matthew McConaughey, run in 2022), I did not expect to waste any more time and ink on him. I was wrong.
Yesterday, in the wake of spiking COVID-19 cases nationwide and immediately after the CDC recommended a return to mask wearing in indoor public spaces even for vaccinated people, Abbott sprang into action with an Executive Order that said, among other things:
“No governmental entity, including a county, city, school district, and public health authority, and no governmental official may require any person to wear a face covering or to mandate that another person wear a face covering.”
The order restricts any entity that receives public funding or loans of any kind from requiring masks or vaccines. It also specifically forbids local officials from requiring workers or consumers to get the vaccine, not coincidentally one day after the mayor of Austin inquired about implementing such a requirement and the same day President Biden was set to announce a vaccine mandate for all Federal employees.
In what was the most tragically laughable statement Abbott has ever made, he said this when announcing the new order:
“The new Executive Order emphasizes that the path forward relies on personal responsibility rather than government mandates. Texans have mastered the safe practices that help to prevent and avoid the spread of COVID-19.”
Let’s be clear: roughly half of Texas’s 29 million residents have “mastered the safe practices.” The other half believe either that the disease is a hoax (many even after having contracted it) or that the vaccine campaign is an effort by Democrats to implant tracking chips in all of us (to be fair, my 5G reception has been excellent since my second dose). These people won’t get the vaccine, and will literally fight you if you ask them to wear a mask.
At least cases are trending down in Texas as he issues this insane order, right? Wrong. In the last week, new infections in the state have doubled, with more than 35,000 new cases of the virus reported. Hospitalizations also jumped from 3,600 to more than 5,600 in that same span, and with the virulence of the Delta variant, that number will only skyrocket in the future with Abbott’s order.
Is Abbott really so afraid that following science will so alienate his base that he won’t get re-elected next year, and thus be out of the race for president in 2024 before it even starts? In a word, yes. Republicans in Texas actually started the hashtag #AbbottOut last spring when he locked down the state, a lockdown ultimately shorter than any state except Florida and South Dakota. He has not forgotten this.
Texas has lost over 53,000 of its citizens to this disease thus far, and will lose many more needlessly because of the calculating stupidity of the man elected to watch out for our best interests. At this point, Greg Abbott is the most dangerous man in the Lone Star State. I would use the analogy of a wolf among the sheep, but even the wolf leaves some of the sheep alive.