One thing non-Texans don't often consider about Texas is that we broke off from Mexico, not from Britain (and seceded rather than being seized). This gives Texans concepts of race and nationhood that are a little different from other American,s in ways that are hard to describe.
The clearest way I can describe this is that white Texans generally don't see ourselves as the "sons of the soil" in the way that white people in much of the country do. We see Mexican people as the "sons of the soil". It's more subtle than that, of course.
When I first became aware of the virulent xenophobia that existed against Mexicans in California in the 90s (and a bit of which remains today), I was just utterly baffled. How could Californians think of Mexicans as foreign? It made no sense.
General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thought Trump might attempt a coup after the election. He and other military brass were prepared to stop it.
He explicitly and repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler, and MAGA activists to brownshirts.
1/A brief thought about the Critical Race Theory wars.
When my dad was in high school, a girl he knew got pregnant. Abortion was illegal, so she had an illegal underground abortion, which was botched and rendered her permanently infertile...
2/She was also a devout Catholic, so this caused a huge rift with her family. She developed severe mental issues because of this, and was basically incapacitated for life.
The ban on abortion utterly ruined her life.
3/When I was young, Culture Wars in America were all about abortion. Right-wingers would picket abortion clinics and pass laws to make abortion harder to get. Occasionally someone would even murder a doctor for doing abortions.
We've reached some sort of inflection point in our politics where things have stopped meaning anything, and have become in-group signals without any external significance.
All the shouters have found product-market fit now. They have their messages down, their followings are primed to mash the retweet button. Everyone stays in their lane. There's little real discussion, just an infinite recursion of hipsterisms.