And a Happy New Year from the Twilight Zone

                                                
Some of us gray in the temple remember when the Christmas season represented a period when many of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – at least pretended to put aside the ugliness of political and societal differences and display a little compassion, charity and understanding of one another. Many of us, believers or not, did so in recognition of Jesus’ teachings as outlined in the Gospel of Matthew as well as the hopeful prospect of a better year to come. Yet in 2022 one could see how far we’ve strayed from this custom in the very different social-media Christmas greetings of the current president of the United States and his predecessor, now a declared presidential candidate for 2024 and a still-bitter, flailing loser from 2020.

President Biden: “There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet. And all the clamor, everything that divides us, fades away in the stillness of a winter’s evening. I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve.”

Former President Trump: “Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is illegally coercing and paying Social and Lamestream Media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and USA LOVING Donald J. Trump and, of course, the Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special “Prosecutor” who, together with his wife and family, HATES “Trump” more than any other person on Earth. LOVE TO ALL!”

Well, at least Trump made a stab at professing love for his adversaries and enemies (who tend to be one and the same). That said, you wonder how clairvoyant the former president is, given the assortment of investigations and allegations stacking up against him. Maybe clairvoyance ain't what it used to be.

Son Eric Trump’s Christian prophetess, Julie Green, informed the Trumpian faithful a few days before Christmas 2022 that God was sending a huge storm to wipe out President Trump’s enemies, specifically longtime (and long-beleaguered) public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden, former President Obama, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, vanquished 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook, Wall Street, China and Democratic Congressman and perennial Trump nemesis Adam Schiff. Thus far, all appear to have survived the very worst God could muster in terms of Winter Storm Elliott – if indeed God was behind the crippling storm.

All of which suggests we shouldn’t necessarily put politics aside during the Christmas season but instead quietly and earnestly re-examine how our professed religious, spiritual and philosophical tenets (assuming we claim them) actually inform our politics, let alone our daily lives. In a delusional nation where many of us now realize we would only recognize outright fascism if it came goose-stepping into plain sight with a bad haircut and toothbrush mustache, we must also now acknowledge we wouldn’t recognize and accept Christ’s presence unless accompanied by a sufficient array of Hollywood-styled special-effect miracles.

My wife and I have a Christmas Eve tradition of watching on television at least one of the many cinematic versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in which crusty, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts the night before Christmas. The ghosts manage to enlighten Scrooge about the worth of all human lives and the duty of better-off folks to dedicate themselves to helping relieve the misery, neglect and want of the less fortunate, including the poor and the meek. It’s not just a Christmas story but one that speaks of new resolves, new outlooks and new beginnings with another year fast approaching. My favorite version is an atmospheric 1984 production filmed in Shrewsbury, England, bolstered by a blustery performance by George C. Scott, who seems to have invested some of his “Patton” portrayal in old Scrooge.

This year, however, we watched for the first time a truly formidable version of the Dickens novella – a dark, angry Rod Serling twist on “A Christmas Carol.” Filmed in 1964 as a ghostly melodrama encouraging American support for the United Nations and the broader goal of global dialogue and international consensus, the production came about during a period of growing distress across America over war abroad and civil strife at home. As seen in his screenplay for the powerful 1964 Paramount film “Seven Days in May,” about a U.S. military plot to overthrow the U.S. government, Serling was more and more worried about the direction of the United States amid displays of intolerance, demagoguery, indifference and homegrown fascism. (“The time is 1970 or 1980 or, possibly, tomorrow,” the "Seven Days in May" movie poster warned.) “Seven Days in May” and the Fletcher Knebel/Charles W. Bailey novel that spawned it were inspired by the antics of U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a white supremacist who repeatedly made clear his extremist right-wing views while in uniform, leading to his resignation and decision to settle in Dallas to continue his political agitation, helping create the volatile environment that greeted President John F. Kennedy during his November 22, 1963, visit. Among those Americans earlier hopeful for a film version of the popular novel: Kennedy, dead of assassination in Dallas not even three months when the film was released in February 1964.

By contrast, Serling’s subsequent “A Carol for Another Christmas” practically qualifies as an expanded episode of “The Twilight Zone,” which coincidentally had ended its five-season run on CBS earlier in the year. The ghosts who come to visit and enlighten hard-hearted American industrialist and isolationist Daniel Grudge conjure up a realm not unfamiliar to those of us in 21st century America with our strife over desperate immigrants seeking to work and breathe free in the United States, anxiety over the imagined displacement of white Americans in favor of people of color, suspicion of all foreigners and bleeding hearts and, finally, the rapidity by many of us to embrace conspiratorial fantasies rather than hard facts as legitimate new sources dwindle in size and impact.

The Ghost of Christmas Past, portrayed by character actor Pat Hingle, showcases the anguished and the dispossessed of the times, in this case pitiful and forgotten behind barbed-wire fencing, exposed to the wintry elements, yet somehow finding hope and comfort in singing Christmas songs alongside small makeshift fires. The ghost poses damning questions to those among us forever rattling on about our individual freedoms as sufficient reason to disregard the public welfare and ignore the downtrodden, whether fellow citizens or those "unwashed masses" of other lands.

“If you shared a loaf of bread with them, how would you be relinquishing your freedom?” the Ghost of Christmas Present asks rhetorically. “Or if you joined other nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you desecrate your flag? Or if you had offered them solace and hope and comfort, how would you have made yourself susceptible to tyranny?”

“What are they singing?” Grudge asks the ghost, his concerns invigorated now that he actually sees suffering behind the barbed-wire enclosure.

“Foreign words – but not necessarily conspiracies to destroy you, Mr. Grudge,” the ghost says. “Just Christmas songs – and of those who don’t celebrate Christmas, songs of hope. They sang them in their language before you did in yours.”

The Ghost of Christmas Future, played by British actor Robert Shaw with the same vigor he invested in his portrayal of an obsessive, war-addicted German tank commander in “Battle of the Bulge” during this period, turns up in the rubble of a bombed-out town hall that Grudge recognizes. A stained-glass inscription at the front of the hall reads: “E Pluribus Unum.” The confused industrialist asks what happened, only for the ghost to allude to what years of failure to recognize and address social wrongs and press for constructive dialogue have finally yielded – warfare and an apocalyptic society ripe for tyranny and lawlessness. It’s a message worthy of our times when hatred and vitriol have made a mockery of the promise that social media once offered. Even now echo chambers in our civilization resound with threats against our once-sacred constitutional principles if we must share our freedoms and hard-earned rights with others with whom we disagree or whom we don’t accept as equals. So the question arises: What need is there then for a town hall?

“Attrition, neglect, misuse, a few passing catastrophes … time,” the ghost answers Grudge’s inquiry of what happened. “Of little consequence, really. There grew to be less and less need for a meeting place or a platform for debate. The American town hall, you will remember, Mr. Grudge, was a microcosm of all the meeting halls of the world, places where men could ‘talk it over.’ It seems we reached a moment in time where talk became superfluous, so now your town hall is past tense.”

Most disturbing is the arrival in the rubble of a clownish yet toxic character played in repulsive fashion by Peter Sellers. The character is adorned in a ten-gallon cowboy hat emblazoned with the word “Me.” He encourages his excitable, gullible followers assembled before him to recognize him as “the Imperial Me,” to which his sycophants cry: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” He revels in this near-religious adoration. And he warns of others from afar who want to infiltrate their numbers and overwhelm them.

“Now, then, they don’t come out in so many words and say that they want to take us over – they’re too clever for that – but that’s what they want,” the demagogue tells his mob of true believers. “They want to take over us Individual Me. And if we let them seep in here from down yonder and across the river, if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us, then, my dear friend, my Beloved Me, we’s in trouble – deep, deep trouble!”

As entertainment, “A Carol for Another Christmas” is tough to watch, owing to the long, preachy stretches of monologue Serling’s long-winded ghosts deliver when more incident and exchanges of dialogue might have spurred the teleplay along its way. Nor does Grudge turn into giddy humanitarian a la Scrooge the following morning. Grudge seems more measured in what we can only assume is some small change of heart, maybe just in disposition and tact. Perhaps Serling intended his viewers to wonder and think further, but it’s hardly the joyous transformation readers of “A Christmas Carol” have been conditioned to expect.

Some cast members are striking, including lanky Sterling Hayden as the grim, uncompromising Daniel Grudge. In real life a decorated Marine in World War II who in 1964 gained newfound fame as an unhinged, commie-hating Air Force general who ignites nuclear holocaust in “Dr. Strangelove,” Hayden had seen his acting career suffer earlier from post-war dalliances with the Communist Party – some Americans briefly considered the Soviets our steadfast allies after the successful war against Nazi Germany. Other actors in the TV production never made the final cut, including Peter Fonda as Grudge’s son, a World War II casualty who was to function as a ghost on par with Scrooge partner Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol.” In fact, the son here is named Marley. Alas, Fonda is glimpsed only twice, and very briefly, as a voiceless apparition, then no more.

The ABC-TV production was deemed so bleak that it went nearly a half-century after its 1964 premiere (and, tellingly, three days after Christmas that year) before being revived by Turner Classic Movies in 2012. Outraged John Birchers conducted a massive right-wing write-in effort to protest the original broadcast. Yet today the teleplay  proves that even as society and politics change, they remain the same, if not more so. “A Carol for Another Christmas” is, yes, very much a piece of its times – the Vietnam War and racial strife at home only worsened after its solitary broadcast, aggravated further by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Yet the film resonates amid the madness of our own times, including the sorry spectacle of those willing to sacrifice neighbors, co-workers, even family members during a deadly pandemic by vilifying vaccinations, public health precautions, even doctors and nurses risking their lives to save infected patients. I remember a town-hall meeting in late 2021 conducted by Republican Congressman Pete Sessions in the University High School auditorium in Waco where resistance to President Biden included, amid a multitude of crackpot grievances and conspiracy theories and incomprehensible rants, one constituent’s insistence that Biden – "Brandon" – be tried Nuremberg-style for curtailing liberty and freedom through his administration’s zealous pro-vaccination efforts. 

Plenty of current events prove the continuing relevance of “A Carol for Another Christmas” but one more will suffice for the moment: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s deplorable decision to caravan busloads of immigrants, including utterly blameless children, from Texas to Washington, D.C., then dropping them off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in 18-degree winter weather as an “own-the libs” political statement about disputed federal immigration policies. Count me as a critic of the Biden immigration policies. To me, they border on incoherence. Yet the answer is not Republicans' cheering on what constitutes human trafficking for political ends. Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas Law School, correctly condemned this heartless gesture: “What kind of leader thinks this is the right thing to do? What kind of person?” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a former Republican consultant, expressed outrage at the callousness and hypocrisy involved, especially given many of the immigrants – asylum seekers from Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela – lacked even winter coats: “Don’t lecture me about a made-up ‘War on Christmas,’ or tell me ‘Christ is the Reason for the Season,’ if you support staging this cruel stunt on Christmas Eve, using human beings as political pawns, throwing them out on the street in frigid weather.” Former Republican consultant Steve Schmidt was perhaps most blistering in his criticism: “We need less evil in America. We don’t need men like Greg Abbott. Worse, voters chose him [and just two months ago]. Everyone that did got to carry a bit of his shame this Christmas season. They get the satisfaction of knowing they made Christ weep on his birthday.”

Ironically, Abbott – a man who clearly envisions himself as a presidential prospect – tweeted on Christmas Day his seasonal greetings, confirming to one and all the transformation of so much of latter-day Christianity into a crucible of cruelty, deceit and hollowness, given his political party’s claim as one of family values and Christian nationalism: "May the joy of our Savior's birth fill your hearts today and every day." Included in his post was a passage in Isaiah 9:6: "For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of peace."

Abbott’s decision to play King Herod in a latter-day, real-life Twilight Zone scenario runs counter to his professed Catholicism, at least if Pope Francis’ own Christmas Day wishes are any indication. Apparently offered in a social-media post unrelated to Abbott's affront to Christian sensibilities, Francis reminds us of what increasingly confounds so many evangelicals today: “Today as then, Jesus comes into a world that does not welcome him, that rather rejects or ignores him, as we do so often with foreigners and with the poor. Let's not forget the refugees, the marginalized, people who are alone, orphans and the elderly, prisoners.”

Rod Serling’s Christmas ghosts couldn’t have said it better, but far more of us need to pick up the refrain.

A Few Benign Ghosts of a Newsroom Now Past

ARN Editor Dick Tarpley and seasonal help at the city desk

Merry Christmas Eve! While I seldom reminisce anymore about my days at the Abilene Reporter-News, I'm bowing to ghosts of Christmas past to conjure up a few newsroom spirits from long-ago times. Because of the length, I’m posting separately here not only a few newsroom memories but my thanks to longtime ARN colleague Roy Jones for his overly generous words about my quarter-century tenure at the Abilene Reporter-News — a period of such benefit, joy and edification that I cite Abilene, Texas, as my hometown even now. (Yes, I really do. Notwithstanding my early Yankee years, I remain a proud Dallas native, born at Baylor Hospital at the height of a seven-year drought that humbled much of Texas.)

I appreciate Roy’s “mentor-to-all” credit given me, even if it’s exaggerated to the extreme — a reflection no doubt of his Christian generosity and thoughtfulness as well as his understandable pride in his colleagues' work. Roy also kindly reposted for wider distribution my earlier Facebook post ruminating and rhapsodizing on the razing of the ARN building at North First (or Second) and Cypress just before Thanksgiving 2022. Regarding Roy’s accolades: While it’s true I assumed a number of diverse posts and interesting assignments in the Abilene newsroom, I regard myself as no more than a footnote character amidst so many more considerable talents, including Jim Conley, Bob Bruce, Al Pickett, Richard Horn, Warren Weber and Roy himself.

In an affectionate farewell column upon leaving the Abilene Reporter-News for the Waco Tribune-Herald in spring 2002, I reflected not on what I’d done in the newsroom and for the community (if anything) but rather what I learned under editors-in-chief Ed Wishcamper, Dick Tarpley and Glenn Dromgoole. Had I been permitted more room, I would have cited advice, insights and talents I picked up from fellow reporters, city editors, copy editors and photographers. The quality of journalists Tarpley (and others) hired was phenomenal, even as we young Turks sometimes questioned and even ridiculed his abilities and judgment, as all upstart reporters do with graying superiors and sage presences. Yet Dick’s insights into character, integrity and potential in terms of ARN personnel colored the newspaper long after his tenure as editor ended in late 1985. His contributions thus informed, alerted and entertained the paper’s then-significant readership across rugged, spread-out, always-hard-to-pigeonhole West Texas.

I remember three insights from Dick, perhaps not uniquely profound now but surely meaningful at the time: First, in reference to an ARN alumnus of enormous literary repute, Dick's caution that any story too good to be true probably was; second, regarding a young newsroom upstart in the early 1980s, that reporters should be better listeners than talkers, lest they drown out sources, stories and relevant details; third, Dick’s praise for my newspaper columns in the 1990s after I commented, during our last conversation upon my leaving Abilene, that my work as a daily newspaper columnist was a mere patch on the immensely popular columns of the great ARN Page One columnist Katharyn Duff, who reigned in that post for 18 years: Tarpley, by then retired but writing an excellent Sunday news column of his own for the ARN, pointedly disagreed, insisting my out-and-about Texana columns (started at the request of then-Editor Glenn Dromgoole) eclipsed Katharyn’s in that each had a beginning, middle and end and conformed to classic storytelling form and journalistic tradition. True? It no longer matters. Perhaps it's relevant to note that no less than Katharyn, a week after I began writing the Page One column in spring 1989, very charitably complimented my efforts in an endeavor I always viewed as a tribute to her own work — and then gently encouraged me to find my own style as a columnist rather than imagining hers as the only proper course. And, whatever else, I certainly never replaced Katharyn in the hearts and minds of West Texas readers, probably because of an easygoing, conversational style far more engaging than mine — the sort that conjured up Katharyn and her friends lunching and laughing and tale-spinning at Mack Eplen's Cafeteria just down Cypress Street.

Roy Jones, Jim Conley discuss culture

Of those other employees Dick Tarpley tapped and shepherded and helped advise in careers remarkable if not always appropriately heralded: I marveled at the glowing empathy my friend Jim Conley demonstrated that so ensured an authentic richness of perspective and humanity in effortlessly written prose, whether regarding a disreputable scalawag like West Texas flim-flam man Billie Sol Estes or a richly multi-layered, charismatic character such as globetrotting anti-communist and former Texas politician Jack Cox, both better known to a dwindling generation of Texans from the JFK, LBJ and John Connally era. (Jack, a Republican and a friend who lost his uphill gubernatorial battle with Connally in 1962, once told me that JFK never would have been assassinated in Dallas in 1963 had Jack won in 1962 because Jack sure never would have invited him to Texas.) I was in awe of the completeness and telling nuance in storytelling and the close and important knowledge of the law that so blessed Roy Jones’ much-cherished, highly readable courthouse reporting. I well remember, too, the vast carbon copies and printouts of past stories Roy kept nearby, always accessible if needed. I also recall the courtroom whimsy Roy shrewdly used to enliven his coverage, such as what a cattle feedlot owner said about the odor — that it smelled like money! Bob Bruce, by contrast, set the example for tidy conciseness and promptness, skills I never fully mastered unless lashed to the wheel of the ship. At deadline many of us in the newsroom — harried by city editor Gary Morton's understandably hollering "I need your story NOW! Just give me what you have!” — would glance over and see Bob, his duties for the afternoon edition finished and by then occupied with cleaning his fingernails before moving on to other matters.

Al Pickett and his sports crew young and old astounded me with their razor-sharp accuracy and eloquence on demand, accomplished under unbelievable deadline pressure — something I quizzed Al about during our lonely, post-midnight drive back to West Texas after jointly covering a big high-school playoff game in the biting cold in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. (I was doing last-minute color for the paper that night.) I could write fast but never with such ballsy confidence and finesse as the ARN sportswriters. From the ARN city desk, too, I watched Warren Weber offer passing pearls of wisdom about better writing on the fly (likely borrowed from his well-stocked home library of Hemingway, whose lean style shaped more than one generation of American journalists). More importantly, he calmly counseled reporters skeptical about particular assignments on just how much better and more rewarding their labors might be if they earnestly invested themselves in the task — advice I tried (however successfully) to emulate during my own subsequent tours of duty as a city editor in Abilene and Waco — duties, incidentally, for which I had almost no training except for the sterling examples provided by Warren and other long-suffering city editors at the ARN.

Bill and Richard gauge wine, the news

And there was ever-modest, witty, thoughtful, intellectually curious Richard Horn, who evenwhen consigned to rigorous desk duties such as his all-too-brief tenure as ARN opinion editor was constantly fleeing the newsroom to attend town-hall and city council meetings to enrich his newspaper editorials and columns. When I abandoned the ARN city desk to personally pursue the endangered Concho water snake with herpetologist Okla Thornton one day in summer 1986, my intrepid companion was none other than Richard who, like me, couldn’t resist an outing that one ARN reporter had already quit over. Our efforts along the picturesque Concho River and our subsequent coverage inspired further research that found the harmless little water snake wasn’t as endangered or threatened as originally thought, ultimately clearing the way for Ivie Reservoir (or, as some of us oldtimers like to say, Stacy Dam, out of respect for the small community obliterated by reservoir waters in parched West Texas). How I miss those early evenings Richard and I gathered at Cypress Street Station, right across the street from the ARN, where we toasted the day's hard-won victories and lessons with a glass of wine and we dissected news of the day and intrigue of the newsroom. We were such regular and animated sights at the bar that Cypress Street Station proprietor Brian Green proposed framed artwork of us sitting in the bar, which out of modesty we vigorously discouraged.

I was awestruck at so many of my colleagues, including ARN photographers David Kent, Gerald Ewing, John Best and Don Blakley, who in the darkroom and on the scene taught me so much about picture composition and urgent, up-close-and-personal photography, the sort that constitutes craft but very often rivals art. Such is daily journalism, warts and all.

Even in retirement, some of us toil in journalism. At the bidding of pal and former boss Steve Boggs, I continue to write rigorously researched opinion columns and editorials (some actually invested with shoe leather and moxie) and edit the occasional columns of community colleagues on the Waco Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors as well as other columnists. (I thought ARN editors, in challenging years when shrinking corporate budgets threatened to strangle newsroom capabilities, were shrewdly resourceful in tapping experienced ARN exes for specific assignments and part-time duties including seasoned, all-knowing veterans Larry Zelisko, Scott Kirk and Jerry Reed.) Warren and Josie Weber, standout veterans in the newspaper profession, tutor budding journalists at Pima Community College in Tucson. Many former colleagues, while retired or now engaged in other honorable professions, so far as I know continue to champion this honorable and increasingly misunderstood profession, even as family members and friends and neighbors sometimes echo rhetoric of our being "the enemy of the people,” often voiced from perspectives of willful ignorance hard to imagine being so prevalent just a few decades ago. Other colleagues including Dick Tarpley, Bob Bruce, Katharyn Duff, Gerald Ewing, Don Blakley and Gary Morton are no longer around to hear such blasphemy.

To newspaper supporter and retired nonprofit leader Doug Worthington’s fun questions to Roy and others in Roy's Facebook reposting of my earlier thoughts on the razing of the ARN building, the array of collectible beer bottles in my newsroom office of some 15 years could survive only so many moves later on and have now joined their more common cousins in the landfill. And Roy was right. I didn’t drink from most of them but collected them from well-traveled colleagues (such as Roy from his military travels). And my newspaper dispatches from a riotous river canoe trip came as I traversed the Texas Colorado, not the Brazos. Some “amateur writer” of dubious repute wrote of a canoe trip down the Brazos — and, yes, his reflections gained some repute. (OK, I'm joking — John Graves' "Goodbye to a River" remains an absolutely stellar piece of writing, required reading for anyone interested in Texas literature.)

As for another question that arose among ARN exes about favorite parts of the building now razed and gone, I claim rich memories from just about every nook and cranny of the second-floor newsroom, though perhaps most especially the long, darkly lit, carpeted corridor behind the newsroom whose windows showcased, in all its magnificence, the mighty ARN printing press — like the work of so many of us once at the Abilene Reporter-News and other newsrooms across America, now consigned to history.

Will Supremes come after other rights next?

When I learned of an early draft of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on the future of abortion as a constitutional right surfacing on Politico last week, I balked as a skeptical journalist out of concern for its being a fake. However, when I finally chanced a look at the first 20 or so pages, I quickly recognized Alito's personality in the writing – snarky, intolerant, pugnacious and, whatever else, remarkably straightforward.

In short, genuine to the letter, something Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the following day, even as Roberts stressed that the written opinion was a draft, certain to be tweaked and revised by concurring justices of which there is almost certainly an easy majority. However the opinion is ultimately refined, the outcome seems sure in this forceful, uncompromising text: The high court’s long-anticipated reassessment of Roe v. Wade is about to strip away federal protections that almost a half-century ago invalidated Texas law criminalizing abortion and gleaned from the almighty Fourteenth Amendment a right to privacy that insulates a woman’s choice of whether to pursue an abortion.

Thereafter, this right will be left to the states, which history proves have an abysmal record of protecting the rights of certain citizens. And while 78 percent of Texas voters in a recent University of Texas at Austin poll may well believe abortions should be allowed in some form, don’t bet the house on that sentiment manifesting itself in the form of actual votes. So far as Texas goes, a 2021 state “trigger” law starts a 30-day countdown toward banning most abortions once the formal ruling from the Supreme Court is issued, presumably consigning to the trash heap a bizarre anti-abortion law encouraging nosy and judgmental Texans to sue for cash bounties any neighbors, co-workers or family members they find helping facilitate abortions, exempting those who actually received the abortions.

Even alongside controversial issues such as immigration, health care and gun rights, abortion is unique. In an era that condemns compromise, abortion is the one issue that absolutely demands cooler heads and societal and political compromise and savvy leadership if the life of the unborn is sacred and the rights of the mother are to be respected in ways that men in other matters demand to be respected. Indeed, many men vigorously resisting masking mandates and vaccinations during the pandemic have used the very same rhetoric that women have in resisting government’s telling them what they could and could not do regarding their own bodies.

Anti-abortion protesters once regularly likened abortion to slavery, but that’s a colossally flawed argument for their position – a former slave could indeed survive free, even though some whites for generations openly doubted the abilities of African Americans in individual subsistence; a former master could survive without a slave, certain hardships notwithstanding – the sort that slave owner Thomas Jefferson, for all his soaring words about liberty in the Declaration of Independence, was personally unwilling to accept. The abortion issue, by contrast, has dealt with the solitary instance when two lives are caught up in one physical body for the better part of a year. So whose rights prevail? Is a legitimate and workable balance of these human rights even possible in an age of extremes? Is it relevant? Has it even been possible in recent decades with one side screaming “baby killers” and invoking fuzzily interpreted biblical verses instead of fuzzily interpreted constitutional passages? Has it even been possible with pro-choice forces stridently accusing the other side of hiding their true motives in the debatable term “pro-life” and actually pressing an oppressive mix of Puritanism and fascism in trying to rob women of uniquely tailored rights that arguably ought to be respected to the degree Second Amendment rights are respected? Many Texas feminists note, and with some justification, that “pro-life” forces are largely AWOL in fighting for life-saving measures that might reverse Texas’ disgraceful reputation of having highest rate of uninsured women of childbearing age, the highest rate of uninsured children and the highest repeat teen-pregnancy rate.   

“Back in 1974, my wife and I did murder our own child [through abortion] and I suffer almost daily from that,” Waco attorney, Army veteran and former McLennan County Republican Party chairman Jon Ker told the Texas House Public Health Committee last year in favor of this state “trigger” bill while chairing the Abolish Abortion Subcommittee of the State Republican Executive Committee. “I do know the effects of what abortion can do, even from a father’s perspective, and that is just something that needs to be – the reprehensible thing of abortion needs to be abolished in our state and in our nation because it hurts everybody. And I would like to say one other thing and then I’ll quit: That life inside that mother is not the mother’s life. When we say that it’s a choice or the mother’s health, we’re [suggesting] that that life within that mother is not a separate life, and it is separate and that life under our founding documents needs to be protected.”

During the 2021 legislative session, other presumably equally sincere pro-life advocates lambasted the idea of the state of Texas waiting for the Supreme Court of the United States to finally get around to striking down the constitutionality of one’s right to an abortion. Some argued Texas should ignore the highest court in the land, ban abortion statewide to save unborn lives and secede from the United States if necessary. And more and more, frustrated pro-life advocates citing holy scripture and touting Christian values have abandoned the long-accepted view that young women seeking abortions are themselves innocent and misguided victims. “I see [that] women who have abortions are not seen as criminals, and I wonder why,” a Houston woman told the Texas House Public Health Committee shortly before Ker testified. “I know it’s partially because abortion is kind of an anesthetized term, but what’s really happening is child sacrifice. These precious human lives are being sacrificed to glorify women’s freedom of choice.” She cited Isaiah 1:17: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.”

And all this aforementioned diversity of opinion is just on the pro-life side. A Pew Research Center national survey conducted in March and part of a Pew report released Saturday morning found that while Republicans and Democrats have long been on opposite ends of the issue, the 42 percentage-point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past: “The change in attitudes has come almost entirely among Democrats: Currently, 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38 percent of Republicans and GOP leaners say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. In many ways, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal in the United States tell only part of the story. While most Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, sizable shares favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances. And while most Republicans favor making abortion illegal in all or most cases, majorities favor exceptions in cases of rape or when the life of the woman is at risk.”

In short, many of us – me included – believe abortion is a right that reaffirms the long-suppressed rights of women in America and in history, even if that controversial right is tempered in the way everything from the right of free and provocative speech to the right to bear arms openly or not is tempered. Yet many of us who argue for this nuanced position are clearly caught in the crossfire of those whose principles forbid compromise, all too similar to what we see in long-raging debates over gun rights in Texas and beyond.

The Texas Legislature has certainly tested the limits of nuance and the law. While polls suggested Texans believed the comprehensive anti-abortion legislation passed by the Legislature during the summer of 2013 was excessive in some respects – such as tying up abortion clinics in regulations some say were clearly designed to shutter them – many actually approved of that law’s basic tenet that abortions be forbidden after 20 weeks. That meant a bracing realization for Democratic state senator and abortion rights advocate Wendy Davis in her uphill (and unsuccessful) bid to employ that issue in a 2014 gubernatorial campaign: She would have to broaden her platform beyond women’s health even as she marshaled women outraged by the new state law – a tricky balance, complicated by the fact many of us may stand up for certain abortion rights in principle but are aloof from its potential relevance in the lives of marginalized women. “There are enough women in this state that, if she articulates her message right, they could mobilize around this issue,” Ashley Blinkhorn, 25, a recent arrival from Florida astonished at the state of women’s rights in Texas, told me during a rally at Waco’s Poppa Rollo’s pizza restaurant, co-owned by Democratic activist and educator Mary Duty. Others at this event also wanted Davis to champion women’s rights, up to and including abortion rights. Carole Hanks told me that Davis needed to battle a political system in Texas that supplants a woman’s right to make decisions about her own health: “If a woman wants to carry a baby to term, that should be her decision and no one else’s.” Meanwhile, a big-screen TV replayed, to everyone’s delight, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s wife Anita acknowledging that abortion could be a “woman’s right” — a remark her husband later walked back.

Justice Alito gets this much right at the very outset of his 98-page opinion: “Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” The basic thrust in his draft opinion insists that not only is the right to a medical abortion mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution but the legal scaffolding supporting it and the rights to contraceptives, racially mixed marriages and gay marriages – the fundamental and cherished right to privacy – is also mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. He stresses that abortion ranks as a special concern to the court in contrast to these other hard-earned rights because of its threat to the lives of the unborn.

Yet given the hobbling legitimacy of the Roberts court in survey after survey over embarrassments up to and including the scandal of the leaked draft opinion; heated calls for ethics reform for the high court after texts by the politically bonkers wife of right-wing Justice Clarence Thomas surfaced proposing a virtual coup d'état (texts followed by her husband’s failure to recuse himself from cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol); and high court nominees who clearly will say anything before Senate Judiciary Committee members to get plum lifetime appointments, a question must arise about this court and its supposed integrity: Who amidst all this can believe these politicized justices won't soon come after other “rights"? Conservative gadfly Ben Shapiro and other emboldened right-wing zealots have already signaled they're coming after gay marriage next. Some Republican senators during stormy confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson raised questions about past court decisions justifying such rights as that allowing a person of one race to marry one of another race (though one might well assume that on a court where the racially mixed marriage of Justice Thomas and his wife Ginni are given proper deference, this conservative attack would hold very little sympathy). And some Republicans in Texas and beyond are now discussing legislation to prosecute women who dare travel across state lines to secure an abortion or penalize those organizations that dare aid them – an idea that would seem to conflict with the right to freely travel in the United States of America as well as the Thirteenth Amendment against enslavement. The unrepentant tone in the Alito draft practically invites all malcontents, theocrats and out-and-out fascists to launch further combat in our divisive culture wars, condemning our nation to more vicious infighting and resentment and misunderstanding as the global threats to American democracy and our very lives mount around us.

In his February draft, Justice Alito repeatedly dismisses the reasoning of past justices (nearly to the point of insulting them) in his insistence that the right to an abortion is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. He’s right, of course, but there’s also no mention in the Constitution about, say, allotting free speech rights to corporations in the form of unlimited and corrupting cash to political entities, per the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission ruling of 2010, which Alito supported. And that court decision has enriched already wealthy elites and widened our societal and political divide through corporate titans and noisy billionaires eager to game the constitutional system for their own ends, even as they sometimes play populist puppeteer to the masses.

And regarding that right to privacy upon which some arguments for abortion rights have relied: Given that some of us believe the high court has succumbed to unceasing political pressure, Alito and concurring justices best be wary of the capricious far right, increasingly alone in granting them legitimacy: Privacy has been cited as a constitutionally relevant right by conservatives in everything from filling out U.S. Census forms (a tea-party gripe in 2010) to gun-ownership registries, which some fear will allow the government to readily confiscate our home weaponry when it finally mutates into dictatorship. McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara specifically mentioned this latter scenario as a concern when I interviewed him a couple of months ago. It was part of his broader concern back in January 2013 when he surprised some constituents by insisting he would refuse to enforce new federal laws restricting access to guns or ammunition, a position many sheriffs took after a December 2012 mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school that left 20 children and six staff members dead. The slaughter had prompted calls for new measures against gun violence. Surprisingly, pro-life forces so dedicated to the lives of the unborn went mostly mum in this debate over killing sprees that claimed the lives of innocent women and children, confirming certain suspicions voiced by pro-choice forces all along.

Alito makes a strongly originalist argument for leaving abortion questions to the states, including the very voters whom he has helped confound through court opinions over the years undermining voting rights and perpetuating gerrymandering abuses. And his rationale in the draft opinion that certain unspecified rights must have at least some grounding in history fails to acknowledge that for the past half-century abortion rights have been consistently accepted and even embraced as a relevant if carefully regulated right by a majority of our fellow citizens in survey after survey after survey. And the past half-century going back to the Nixon era and the Vietnam War and women’s liberation and campus unrest and civil rights surely counts as history critical to democracy. True, Alito says the court has long determined rights by how “deeply rooted” they are in our history. Yet this claim proves Alito’s blindness – and likely that of other justices in the anticipated majority – to the rights of many Americans not as personally fortunate as those high justices. Deeply rooted? Consider our deeply rooted history of slavery and Jim Crow laws and Indian eradication and, yes, the tardiness of citizens in granting the Nineteenth Amendment. Dred Scott, anyone? Alito fails to realize that, to note it again, the American saga has always been one of discussion and debate, up to the point of violence and disunion, over who in our vast and increasingly diverse numbers rates full rights – and who doesn’t.  

Finally, Alito pointedly notes how legal schemes of past justices not only fail to pass constitutional muster but “have enflamed debate and deepened division” among Americans. Right again, but one reason past court decisions haven’t gained traction or acceptance is because those in Alito’s own political party have repeatedly enflamed segments of society against these rulings, demonstrated in everything from local boycotts of Girl Scout cookie drives to threats of outright secession. Support for overturning Roe has become a virtual litmus test in the Republican Party – and not only for GOP candidates seeking executive and legislative positions but for supposedly unbiased federal court nominees pressed by Republicans for lifetime appointments. (And, yes, the same charge can be leveled at Democrats.)   

If certain past justices of the Supreme Court of the United States – many of them Republican – are guilty of anything in Roe v. Wade and the Planned Parenthood of Eastern Pennsylvania v. Casey ruling tempering that right in 1992, it’s in trying to establish a reasonable constitutional framework for a safe medical recourse uniquely important to some women in an era of newfound liberation, even if this right didn’t quite constitute an absolute right. But then what right is absolute? What right should be absolute?

When all is said and done by the current court in the days and weeks to come, many women and those who love them and fight for their rights may well realize that the rights of a pregnant woman reluctant for whatever reason to give birth and the rights of an unborn child to one day walk free among us were pretty well balanced by high courts of the past with some reasonable restrictions by states. At least, they were before state legislators began pushing the limits of what was reasonable and a handful of justices on this court, bowing to political expectations inherent in their appointments and confirmations, upset the equilibrium and risked enflaming passions and deepening our divide even more than Justice Alito imagines or cares.

This is an expanded version of a column published in the Waco Tribune-Herald on May 8.

Fighting election outcomes on January 6 and beyond: Q&A with Texas attorney, Capitol protester Paul M. Davis

Frisco attorney and Baylor University alumnus Paul Davis didn’t enter the U.S. Capitol on January 6, but no one can doubt his devotion to President Trump’s claims of a stolen election, even as Davis remained among thousands outside the Capitol. The posted video of himself amid the unrest not only got him fired as counsel for a Texas insurance firm a day later but also led to collaboration with Granbury attorney and self-described patriot Kellye SoRelle and a number of clients in pressing a lawsuit in the Waco-based federal court of the Western District of Texas. The Jan. 18 suit argued multiple 2020 elections should be invalidated because of widespread election irregularities. Before this collaboration splintered amid disagreements over legal strategy and scope, Davis crafted a suit that, among other things, urged the federal judiciary to recognize not only the illegitimacy of President Biden’s election but also that of all of Congress and a third of the U.S. Senate. Davis also drew ridicule for borrowing from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and its realm of hobbits, elves, wizards and goblins to bolster his ambitious proposal that the federal executive branch be governed by a set of “stewards” charged with preserving Trump administration policies till election irregularities could be resolved by the courts, up to and including new elections. A second legal foray – launched Feb. 10 and drawing from a Feb. 4 Time magazine article, “The Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” – claimed opponents of President Trump conspired in “manipulating the election process in violation of the law and the constitutional rights of the American people.”

Based on a recommendation by Waco-based Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Manske regarding this pull-out-all-the-stops effort that he characterized as “fantastic and outright nonsensical” and lacking legal standing, hobbled by procedural irregularities and begging for evidence, the original suit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Alan Albright on Sept. 21; the second amended complaint was stricken. On Christmas Eve, personable 40-year-old Paul M. Davis – touting himself on Twitter as “the God-fearing deplorable Texas lawyer for patriots,” busy helping clients gain exemptions from vaccine mandates – sat down with retired Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill Whitaker to discuss the January 6 unrest and his ambitious lawsuit to overturn 2020 election results. Below are excerpts from an 80-minute interview and a 35-minute Dec. 30 follow-up interview. This is a greatly expanded version of the Q&A published in the Tribune-Herald on January 6, 2022.

Q: By now, many of us have seen videos of what happened inside and around the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and have formed opinions one way or the other. But you were there amidst the unrest, though you reportedly never entered the Capitol or fought with police officers. What is the public and news media possibly missing about that particular day?

Paul Davis: I think a big one is calling it an insurrection. There was a small group of individuals who caused the violence or, rather, participated in the violence, breaking down outer barriers, but other than those individuals I think most people there were more like me. They were people who were very concerned about what was going on with the election and just the failure of public officials and the courts to do a proper audit. People like me feel there was not a proper audit done and that there are a lot of issues with this election. I think most people like myself went there with the intent of just standing outside the Capitol, voicing our opinions. There was no intent to overthrow the government. We were just there making our views known.

Of most of the people who went in [the Capitol], my understanding and from the videos I’ve seen and other people I’ve talked to who were in that situation – there were quite a few from Frisco who went – the police opened the doors for them. And if you walk up to a government building and the authorities open the doors and let you in, I don’t think that’s trespassing. I think it’s egregious that the feds are prosecuting people who just walked in when police opened the doors. You know, in Texas you can go to the Capitol and talk to your representatives, so I don’t know why it would be unreasonable to assume that the same wouldn’t be true for the U.S. Capitol if the police opened the doors so you could enter. [NOTE: Arguably the most famous of those from Frisco participating in the Capitol protest: real estate agent Jenna Ryan, who called January 6 the “best day of my life,” attributed her presence in the protest to Trump "who said we are not giving up the White House, he said we are going to fight," paused amid the chaos inside the Capitol to video herself touting her business back in Texas and vowed by tweet afterward that she would not serve a prison sentence because of her "blonde hair" and "white skin." She was sentenced to a prison sentence of 60 days.]  

Q: Many of the plea agreements negotiated between January 6 defendants and federal prosecutors find some defendants insisting they became “caught up in the excitement of the moment,” including President Trump’s rousing speech at the Ellipse. Is it fair or unfair to say President Trump incited the protesters, given that he at one point told them he was going to travel to the Capitol with them? Again, this is in many of the defense filings and pleadings I’ve read of the January 6 defendants.

Davis: I think it’s unfair because I watched that speech. In fact, I made it a point to stay. I was extremely cold, I was borderline hypothermic and literally my teeth were chattering, but I wanted to hear what President Trump had to say. Actually, I videoed the entire speech. I’ve seen a lot of Trump’s speeches and I would say this was kind of a milquetoast speech. Compared to his other speeches, the energy in that speech was very low. He kind of recited the facts that people who were following the election integrity movement, the “Stop the Steal” movement, knew pretty well. They were assertions that were well known to the crowd. He just went through the stuff that we basically already knew and at the end he said, ‘So we’re all going to go down to the Capitol and cheer on our Republican congresspeople who need our support.” I mean, that’s not verbatim, but that’s largely how I remember it. I don’t remember him saying anything that would incite a riot.

And, you know, you have to take into account, too, the people who broke those outer barriers [around the Capitol grounds], that happened while President Trump was still speaking. So to conclude that something he said in his speech incited the so-called “riot,” that’s not correct. That happened while he was still speaking, before he made his concluding remarks about going down to the Capitol.

Q: Well, how about John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani and Mo Brooks, who famously talked about “kicking some ass” in his remarks at the Ellipse?

Davis: I will say if there was a speech that day where you could possibly be inciting a riot of some sort – now, I love Mo Brooks, don’t get me wrong. I think his intentions were good. His speech was much more inflammatory than Donald Trump’s in my opinion. He was encouraging people – and I don’t remember his exact words – but I think if you could point to one that would have incited people to be violent, that might have been one. But, you know, I don’t think that was his intent. He went through what our Founding Fathers did to rebel against England and compared it to the current situation. If someone was going to make an example of this, they could point to that, but still I don’t think that was necessarily inciting a riot.

Q: Some such as Matthew Dowd, the former Republican strategist who has left the party over its transformation from standard or conventional conservatism, have recently suggested that the anniversary of January 6 be observed with the same reverence we show for, say, the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 or the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11. Worthy idea or not?

Davis: That’s preposterous. The attack on Pearl Harbor cost thousands and thousands of lives. I don’t know the exact count. I want to say it’s several thousand people from my recollection. [NOTE: 2,403 Americans died in the 1941 Japanese aerial attack.] And then the Twin Towers, I don’t know how many thousands of people were—

Q: About 3,000.

Davis: Yeah, 3,000 – that sounds correct. And on January 6, the only person who died of anything other than natural means was Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by the Capitol police. The others were heart attacks and things of that nature, so I think it’s not a fair comparison. I mean, it’s not even close. The people who went to the Capitol were overwhelmingly unarmed. Obviously there were a few people who had some weapons like staffs and things like that, and they broke a few windows and went into the Capitol – I don’t approve of that, I don’t think people should have been violent on that day, but to compare it to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, that’s way out of line.

Q: I’m not sure what the point was of breaking into the Capitol unless it was either (1) to pursue Trump’s attempt to stop certification of Electoral College votes from enough states to secure his re-election – a plan highlighted by Federalist Society member John Eastman – or (2) to take revenge on certain political figures, including the vice president of the United States. You didn’t go into the Capitol, I understand that, but am I wrong?

Davis: Yeah, I think you are right. There was a select group of people who did commit violence to break in. [NOTE: More than 725 persons have been charged so far, including Christopher Grider, 40, a veteran and co-owner of Kissing Tree Vineyards in Bruceville-Eddy, who witnessed the shooting death of rioter Ashli Babbitt, and Stacy Wade Hager, 58, of Gatesville, who said he felt "invincible" after he and others reportedly scaled a wall to gain entry into the Capitol. Of the 725 or so, more than 275 individuals have been charged with felonies such as assaulting law enforcement officers, obstructing an official proceeding and destruction or theft of government property.] I think the overwhelming majority of people there were like me.  And, actually, breaking into the Capitol would have been counterproductive because we all wanted our congressmen and senators to strenuously object to confirmation of the Electoral College vote on January 6 and to take a look at what really happened before moving ahead with confirmation. Interrupting the proceeding was counterproductive and breaking into the Capitol gave the politicians in favor of confirming the vote on January 6 all the incentive to say, “Oh, this is an insurrection, we need to move forward with this, these Trump people are crazy.”

If you look at the reporting from Revolver News by Darren Beattie, he has gone into great detail to point out that so many of the people who were leaders on that day, inciting people to go into the Capitol – and they have emails and other communications and videos – none of those people have been arrested. So it’s reasonable to conclude they are probably FBI assets. I don’t think that’s completely crazy. I think that needs to be investigated. There’s a lot of people who want to get to the bottom of that. You see a lot of the people who initially breached barriers and broke windows were dressed in black, and there’s speculation they could have been antifa. [NOTE: Darren Beattie is a former Trump speechwriter fired in 2018 for his affiliation with white nationalists. Later Trump appointed him to the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, prompting outcry from Jewish groups.] The bottom line of what I’m trying to say is most of us out there, the vast majority of people I know that went to an event like that, people who have the same views as I have, we wanted the January 6 proceeding to go forward. To break into the Capitol to stop it would have been counterproductive.

Q: You have made a point of differentiating between those who went inside the Capitol and may or may not have committed vandalism and violence, as opposed to those like yourself who were outside expressing their First Amendment rights. And I know you got penalized for that in terms of your employment at the time. My question: Is Ashli Babbitt a martyr for liberty or a QAnon-infected insurrectionist?

Davis: I don’t know a whole lot of detail about Ashli Babbitt and her views, so I can’t really speak to that. I don’t know what her intention was.

Q: Well, she was trying to climb through a smashed-out window in a doorway that was barricaded to get into the U.S. House of Representatives. That’s when she was shot. There’s video of it.

Davis: I don’t know if she intended to commit some sort of violence. I really don’t know. I don’t know why people would think that would be a good solution because, you know, what’s going to happen, you’re going to hold members of Congress hostage till the military comes and then there’s a siege and, well, I just don’t know what the end game would be there. I think possibly people like Ashli Babbitt – you point out that people got caught up in the moment – I think that is an easy thing to do. I remember just seeing that atmosphere and feeling just desperate that our country … that our Constitution is slipping away because of an illegal election that our officials are not looking into. So I can certainly understand someone feeling desperate enough to feel that they had to break into the Capitol to cause violence. I don’t think that’s the way to go, but I can understand why that thought might have come to somebody’s mind.

Q: Since January 6, 2021, many Americans seem to have loosened up regarding what some of us would term an insurrection. A friend of mine who is a Republican, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and in 2020 but definitely does not approve of the unrest at the Capitol, now tells me that I simply need to get past all that and fall into line as a dutiful Republican. Congressman Pete Sessions, whose name figured prominently in your legal filings contesting the election, and Republican politician Condoleezza Rice have made similar rationalizations about January 6 and about this need to get past it. Are they right or wrong?

Davis: I’m not sure what they mean by “getting past it.”

Q: They’re saying we need to move on, there are other things Republicans need to be dealing with, there are other things that lawmakers need to be dealing with.

Davis: OK. Well, I think the idea of “getting past” the questioning of what happened in the 2020 election – I don’t think that’s something we need to “get past” as an issue because there are clear issues with that election. I know the media, when the Arizona audit came out, paraded around the fact that, “Oh, this proves that Biden legitimately won.” What they were pointing to is if you counted all the ballots where the name Biden was checked – yeah, the numbers line up. But the report also found that 60,000 of those ballots had some issue that would have made them illegal under applicable state and federal laws. [NOTE: This is a reference to the months-long hand recount of Maricopa County votes conducted by the Trump friendly Cyber Ninjas, now locked in a dispute over pay and records with the Republican-led Arizona Senate. Election officials in both parties dispute Cyber Ninja claims about some 57,000 “impacted ballots.” On Wednesday, the Maricopa County Elections Department issued a report on Wednesday lambasting the audit as brimming with “faulty analysis” and “inaccurate claims.”] Clearly there are issues that need to be looked into with regard to the 2020 election. We can’t “move on” fully from January 6 until we get to the bottom of this issue because all of the people who went to the Capitol and are being pigeonholed as “crazy insurrectionists” – really, if you look at what happened and you look at all the irregularities, it’s not crazy to conclude that something was wrong with that election and demand that our officials do something about it.

To the extent it’s being called an insurrection and compared to Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, I think we do need to get past that because it was not an insurrection. These people did not have the intent to overthrow the government, they had the intent to make sure that our elections were free and clear, which is actually upholding our constitutional form of government. I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to say it’s an insurrection. It’s taking the bad intentions of a few people who tried to break in and caused some violence and extrapolating that to the whole crowd [outside the Capitol]. I do think we need to get past that.

Q: President Trump will be holding a press conference on January 6 to likely express the very same claims he did at the Ellipse and before and since – not about his possible role in the January 6 confusion – and let’s just call it “confusion” at this point – but about a rigged election. What would you advise him to press in his upcoming January 6 comments? [NOTE: Trump this week canceled the January 6 press conference after Republicans and advisers reportedly suggested it might be an unnecessary distraction and lend further attention to the January 6 mob violence pursued in his name.]

Davis: Well, that’s kind of a loaded question. I’m not sure what I would advise President Trump. I guess I could say if it were me speaking about January 6, you know, I would kind of reiterate just what I went through. Here’s the issues with this election, this is still something we need to get to the bottom of. I will say one thing I would advise President Trump to hammer on, and that’s the fact we have close to 50 individuals who went into the Capitol, were let in – I think most of them did not actually break in – and they’re being held in solitary confinement in really awful, unconscionable conditions in D.C. and this is cruel and unusual punishment. They’re being held in solitary confinement against Geneva Conventions, they’re not getting a speedy trial, they’re not allowed to see their attorneys on a regular basis, there’s very little privacy.

[Republican lawmakers] Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert just released a comprehensive report on how these people are being treated. [NOTE: The Nov. 4 report by Greene and Gohmert described conditions suffered by the jailed January 6 defendants as “inhumane.” The defendants, the report said, “continue to be unreasonably mistreated.”] This is really comparable to a gulag in our own country, political prisoners. The most you could say is that they committed misdemeanor trespass and they’re being treated like they committed high treason. This is just something that is not acceptable and so I would advise President Trump to focus on that as something we could do and focus on the fact that I think we still need to get to the bottom of what happened [in the election]. The people who showed up were overwhelmingly patriotic Americans who just wanted to make sure our elections are free and fair and, you know, they’re being unfairly characterized as domestic terrorists.

Q: In the video posted of you outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, you said you and others only wanted to get into the Capitol to audit the votes, to make sure the votes were audited. What did you expect to find given that state and federal courts under Democratic and Republican judges and President Trump’s own attorney general and the Department of Justice said there was no widespread fraud.

Davis: Well, again, they can say that all day long but just because they say it doesn’t make it true. There’s all the pressure in the world for these judges to look the other way. Look at what happened in Michigan where you had the board or election commission over Wayne County – two of them tried to object and they immediately faced threatening videos online and people calling for antifa mobs at their house. They were labeled racists, they were labeled domestic terrorists and all sorts of horrible things. [NOTE: This refers to the four-member Wayne County Board of Canvassers, initially deadlocked on certifying Wayne County election results, then unanimous in certifying them while urging Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to do a “comprehensive audit” of certain precincts.] So I think most judges, you know, they have pretty comfortable lives and it’s a great job and they probably don’t want that kind of controversy in their life. There’s all the incentive in the world to find the excuse to just move on and not do anything about it, but if you look at the actual proceedings in all these federal courts, there was not a single evidentiary hearing. Some will say, “They looked at the evidence, they looked at the evidence.” Well, looking at the evidence in court requires that you have a hearing and bring in witnesses and you have them questioned and you have them cross-examined, and these courts just kind of looked at what was written and just found one reason or another to get rid of the case. Most of these election lawsuits were (dismissed or denied because of) procedural issues – you know, like laches [NOTE: unreasonable delay in making an assertion or claim] – “You waited too long, you should have brought this (lawsuit) before the election.” Of course, if you brought it before the election, the courts probably would have said, “Well, your claim’s not right because no harm has been done yet.”

There’s a great article in The Federalist that goes through all the crazy excuses courts used to not do anything about this. [NOTE: “Courts Repeatedly Refused to Consider Trump’s Election Claims on the Merits,” Bob Anderson, The Federalist, March 11, 2021.] The one that stuck out to me the most was one court said if these statutes said “shall” – I can’t remember exactly what the provision was, but it was something about the election officials “shall” do whatever it was – and, of course, the court said, “Well, ‘shall’ doesn’t necessarily mean you have to,” and, of course, that’s ridiculous because that’s the word you always use in the law when something is required. Now I can’t remember what the original question here was, but I think the fact that judges and [Trump Attorney General] Bill Barr and people like that said there was no fraud does not mean it’s true and if they said that, they were not looking into the evidence deeply enough because I think a child could look at what happened and conclude there was something wrong with the election.

Q: Well, I remember reading a Nevada court ruling that went into detail about quite a bit of evidence in making its conclusion.

Davis: That was the only one, though, and that was a state court proceeding.

Q: Yes, it was, absolutely. But I remember in another ruling – it was in Pennsylvania – when Rudy Giuliani, acting as the president’s attorney, actually backed off when he was directly asked by the judge if he was alleging election fraud. There were many puzzling moments by the president’s attorneys in some of these lawsuits that I think gave credence to the judges’ rulings. You obviously would not agree with me on that.

Davis: No, actually, I don’t disagree with you on that. I don’t necessarily agree with the strategy that Rudy Giuliani and some others took. I can’t remember the exact reasoning he gave in saying, “This is not a fraud claim.” I think they were trying to just find a legal strategy that they thought would work the best, but, I mean, just because he said [in court] “This is not a fraud case” doesn’t mean he was saying there was no fraud. I think that was just a legal strategy that, for better or worse, Giuliani felt was best to get the relief they were seeking.

Q:  Well, one interpretation is that if he dared say it was fraud in a court of law and he didn’t have any evidence to back it up, as you well know as an attorney, the court takes a very dim view of that. But I guess we could argue all day about this.

Davis:  Well, you know, I think that goes back to the fact that if you bring this up, fraud, then you got to bring in a ton of witnesses and evidence, and I don’t know why he didn’t pursue that route in Pennsylvania. Other attorneys throughout the country (did). Like in Wisconsin, for instance, there was a lawsuit by the Republican Party – I can’t remember who the attorney was – but the question in that case (involved) hundreds of thousands of ballots, absentee ballots, that were done in a way that violated Wisconsin law – that evidence was brought before the (state) supreme court and it found, you know, procedural reasons to dismiss it. So it’s not accurate to say other lawyers throughout this case – like you got Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, which I don’t necessarily agree with their strategy either – but it’s not like nobody was trying to bring a fraud claim. Giuliani’s strategy in that Pennsylvania case – the procedural strategy he was pursuing did not involve a look at whether there was fraud, but that doesn’t mean he was saying there was no fraud, because I looked at his podcast live and he was saying there was lots of fraud.

Q:  You did what?

Davis: Giuliani had a regular podcast at places like Steve Bannon’s “War Room” and he would talk extensively about how there was fraud in the election. I don’t think Rudy Giuliani was saying there was no fraud, I think that was just a legal strategy that he was using to go after it in an election procedural standpoint in Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean he was admitting there was no fraud.

Q: I’ve read your own legal filings regarding the 2020 presidential election. Why on earth did you file these in the Waco federal courthouse rather than a federal court where, say, the court might be more ideologically amenable to such a filing? U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, though a Donald Trump appointee, seems to have a pretty conventional view of election law and the Constitution.

Davis:  You know, it actually wasn’t my idea to file in Waco. I am not an election integrity lawyer. I am not an election law lawyer. I’m just a concerned citizen in all of this. My practice is mostly in employment law for about 10 years and I’ve done a fair amount of other types of civil litigation including contract disputes, just general tort, mostly involving businesses and such. So when everything happened on January 6 the way it did, it was quite shocking and dramatic to me as a concerned citizen merely wanting to exercise my First Amendment right to protest, as is the right of all Americans to do, and the things I saw there with the Capitol police pushing people down stairs, gassing the crowd where I was, which in my view did not present any threat – I mean, nobody around me was armed, it was mostly people who were not a physical threat, a lot of elderly people, a lot of women, I even saw some children and pre-teens, not a lot of able-bodied males, certainly nobody with weapons around me – yet standing there we were tear-gassed and flash-banged and, you know, pushed down stairs.

Q: Yes, but getting back to my question of why you filed this lawsuit in Waco.

Davis: Yeah, yeah, and my state of mind – well, the next day I get fired [as associate general counsel at Goosehead Insurance] just because I exercised my First Amendment right. Well, a lawyer named Kellye SoRelle, here in Texas, found me. She told me she had been working on this election lawsuit with another individual named Steve Vanderbol and they needed a federally licensed attorney to bring a case. They wanted to file it in Waco because they just felt that, you know, there’s only one judge there, a Trump-appointed judge. You know, I didn’t do a lot of forum-shopping [NOTE: the practice of choosing the court or jurisdiction with the most favorable rules, ideology and judicial disposition for the position being advocated or argued], let’s just say that. I needed to learn about election law and, as soon as they contacted me, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant trying to learn about election law and what the violations were and so I wasn’t really the one looking around to figure out which forum [or court] to file in. That was more Kellye and Steve. [NOTE: Kellye SoRelle, 43, of Granbury, an unsuccessful, 2020 Republican congressional candidate in a four-way primary election battle and among the protesters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is famously affiliated with the far-right Oath Keepers militia and was recently swept up in an FBI investigation into “seditious conspiracy” arising from the Capitol unrest. A few weeks after this Trib Q&A was concluded, one of her clients, Oath Keepers founder and leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 56, also of Granbury, was indeed arrested on several federal charges including seditious conspiracy “to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power.” The arrest was made in Little Elm, which borders Frisco. Roberto Minuta, 37, of Prosper, which also borders Frisco, was similarly arrested. Steve Vanderbol, Texas-based “entrepreneur” and managing director of the Tattered Flag Project, is presented in the Davis lawsuit as “an expert on how geopolitical events affect the financial markets” who fears that, without prompt remedy by the judiciary, “the economy of the United States will become unstable and cease to be a ‘safe haven’ for financial investors.”] 

Q: Fair enough. They had their reasons then. It might have made sense because he was a judge who had recently been appointed by President Trump.

Davis: I think that was the reasoning because in certain districts you file in, you’re not sure what judge you’re going to get. At least they felt confident that “We are going to get a Trump-appointed judge” [in Waco]. If I had it to do over again, Tyler probably would have been a better venue. I think the judges there are probably a little more conservative, but, you know, I wasn’t specifically looking at that issue from my part on the case.

Q: Let’s dig into your filing and look beyond a certain analogy that caused many to poke fun at you. You suggest that voting protocol changes in all 50 states, undertaken obviously in regard to a pandemic filling hospitals to capacity and stacking corpses in morgues, nonetheless violated the law laid down by the Help America Vote Act. Yet doesn’t our system of federalism specifically allow this wide latitude by the individual states, as determined by the Founders at the crafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution?

Davis: It does allow wide latitude for states with exceptions. If you look Article I, Section 4, it does give states the right to conduct elections as they see fit, unless Congress makes laws (contrary) to that. Congress has the authority to make laws that affect the place and means of federal elections, so in regard to federal elections, Congress does have the constitutional authority to make laws regarding how the elections are conducted, and Congress has made laws such as the Help America Vote Act.

Q: And you mention that specific congressional act in your filings.

Davis: Correct. And the 1964 Civil Rights Act – whichever is the one that has provisions requiring that all papers and records be preserved for 22 months after an election – those are laws duly enacted by our Congress under the Constitution and states are then required to follow those with regard to congressional elections. [NOTE: This is a reference to a federal law on the books since 1960 requiring election officials to “retain and preserve for a period of 22 months” all election records, including ballots in any election for federal office including the offices of president and vice president, presidential electors and members of the Senate.] So states actually don’t have the authority under the Constitution to violate the Help America Vote Act and that Civil Rights Act requirement to preserve all papers and records. Now with regard to presidential elections, there’s another constitutional law well-established by the Supreme Court: If you are a state and you receive federal funds and there’s condition on it, you have to follow that condition. That’s contract law. And here every single state receives federal funding to implement HAVA, the Help America Vote Act of 2002. And so when you receive that federal funding, you are required to follow that. The states by receiving federal funds give up their sovereignty to exclusively regulate how presidential elections are run in their states. When they receive the money, they have to follow that.

Q: Right, and you’re saying that states violated HAVA through election irregularities. To me, the lawsuit you filed seems to expand upon Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s December lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin because those states implemented pandemic-related changes to election procedures that, Texas claimed, were illegal and skewed the presidential election outcome. Yours goes a step further, alleging this of all states and suggesting that all federal elections in 2020 are illegitimate.

Davis:  Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment. I would say that going after all 50 states and the scope of the lawsuit was too ambitious for my britches, but the idea was really Kellye and Steve’s strategy. They reached out to me because they knew they could trust me because of the beating I was taking in the media [over the January 6 protest] and that I was very concerned about the election integrity issues. And Kellye is not federally licensed so they needed a federal licensed attorney. And the idea was if they were able to at least file this case and get it out in the news, possibly we could muster the resources – you know, other attorney would be needed to jump on the case. Obviously the scope of this case would cost, you know, many, many millions of dollars. So that was the original idea, but that didn’t end up being the reality and we didn’t end up getting the support we needed, so that’s why we had to let the lawsuit go. 

Q: Given your strong feelings that HAVA precludes “election irregularities,” even if pursued by the governors, legislatures and/or courts of state government, I must ask: Should the state election code as recently passed by the Texas Legislature then be tossed as an obvious violation of the Help America Vote Act? And I don’t expect you to know everything that’s in it, because they have had several different bills over four different legislative sessions, but you know what I’m talking about.

Davis: Yeah, I can’t really answer that specifically because I haven’t gone into specific provisions of the bill and how it would interact with the Help America Vote Act. But as a general matter, I would say that the Founders’ intent, if you read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, is that these states should have sovereignty over how each conducts its own elections, but at the same time Section 4 of the Constitution does guarantee each state a republican form of government. So I think that was really the idea behind Ken Paxton’s lawsuit – that this is what we signed up for in the state of Texas. We were an independent country and we joined the United States and, when we did that, we were guaranteed a right to republican form of government. We believe in state sovereignty and each state should have the authority to conduct its own elections the way it sees fit, but if the way the states conduct that goes against that provision guaranteeing a republican form of government, then I think that’s a problem. If these procedures in other states open the door and lead to massive election fraud, then that’s a problem for the other states and it’s not what we signed up for.

Q:  But Texas during the 2020 election obviously expanded early voting by a week, and that was obviously an election irregularity but one declared by the governor, not the Texas Legislature. Wouldn’t that seem to qualify as an election irregularity just as in Pennsylvania and some of the other states? Why is it OK in Texas – I mean, it seems to pass muster in your own filing – but wrong in other states?

Davis: I wouldn’t say that’s OK in Texas. I really don’t think Texas conducted a perfect election by any means. I mean, I think there’s lot of issues and we’re still trying to get an audit here in Collin County and we’re still trying to audit Dallas County and Harris County. There were a lot of issues with Texas with regard to how elections were handled. I mean, part of that – I don’t agree we should have expanded early voting. To me, the best way to conduct the vote is to have it on Election Day and count all the ballots on Election Day, and I think the longer you drag out the process, it opens it up to more forms of fraud. I don’t think it is different from what other states were doing. I think it was really just a matter of degrees. [NOTE: After these interviews, the Texas Secretary of State's Office, in a Dec. 31 progress report on Phase 1 of the state's forensic audit of the 2020 election focusing on Collin, Harris, Tarrant and Dallas counties, found little evidence confirming repeated allegations by Republican Party officials of widespread election fraud and discrepancies. Interestingly, a total of 67 potential votes cast in the name of deceased people are under investigation. Of those, 3 were cast in Collin County, 9 were cast in Dallas County, 4 were cast in Harris County and 1 was cast in Tarrant County. On the other side of the coin, since November 2020, 224,585 deceased voters have been removed from voter rolls in Texas, "indicating the counties are performing their fundamental duties under federal and state law to maintain the accuracy of the statewide voter registration list and mitigate fraudulent activity related to potentially deceased voters." Also, the report indicated that statewide, a total of 11,737 potential non-U.S. citizens were identified as being registered to vote. Of these, 327 records were identified in Collin County, 1,385 were identified in Dallas County, 3,063 were identified in Harris County and 708 were identified in Tarrant County. While counties still have a significant number of pending investigations to complete, so far Dallas County has cancelled 1,193 potential non-U.S. citizen records, Tarrant County has cancelled one record, and Collin and Harris have not cancelled any potential non-U.S. citizen records. Final findings "will be verified during Phase 2 of the full forensic audit."]

Q:  Well, should the counting of votes just be cut off at a certain time?

Davis: You know, I’m not an election integrity expert by any means. I don’t know exactly the best practice, but it seems to be the consensus among most election integrity experts that conducting an election on Election Day and counting the ballots the same day – and I don’t speak really to what the ideal cutoff would be – but my general thought is the longer you drag out early voting, the more open it is to various forms of fraud.

Q: Isn’t it a little disingenuous to claim in your lawsuit that many so-called “election irregularities” opened the door to fraud when in fact these were undertaken in the thick of a plague to keep voters safe? Surely that was the point of the election irregularity in Texas that extended early voting by six days. And the Texas Secretary of State’s Office reported no problems afterward.

Davis: I think it’s disingenuous they used the COVID safety issue as an excuse to drastically and dramatically relax election security procedures. I don’t think it’s a good excuse to open our democratic election process for electing public officials to various avenues of fraud. I mean, Anthony Fauci was on TV saying it’s safe to go out and vote. (Laughter.) I mean, he literally said that. [Note: Just for the record, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in-person voting could be done safely only if polling places enforce mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines and voters follow these guidelines.] And then we find out the surface [viral contamination] spread is not really a big concern in how we get it. Remember all the experts who said you can get it by touching things?

Q:  Yes, but that was well before the general election.

Davis: Right. But I think the fear and concern for people’s safety with regard to COVID-19 was massively overblown. I think it was purposely overblown, so that the Democrats came in and brought like 400 lawsuits to change all these election rules. And I think that’s how they stole the election.

Q. Your temporary restraining order filing of Jan. 21 proposes that department heads in the Trump administration as of August 2020 serve as stewards, à la “The Lord of the Rings,” to preserve the Trump policy status quo from any changes pressed by the Biden administration, which would remain in limbo till matters can be sorted out, up to and including new nationwide elections. Don’t you feel this scheme might have been seen as weakness by our many enemies around the world, especially since this proposed order also puts Congress on ice and leaves only one branch of government fully empowered?

Davis: Yeah, I think that’s a valid concern, but on the other side of the coin there’s a lot of concern that the whole election process was not legitimate in the first place, that this too is going to show weakness, that there’s a real vulnerability to our democratic process. So I don’t think you can avoid that. I was just trying to find a solution to the fact that it appears there were some real problems with this election. I don’t think a [court-ordered] remedy is going to add much to that. We’ve seen that all of Joe Biden’s (mental) faculties are not there, and I think that is an even bigger threat. I don’t think the stewards would have been the thing that drew the appearance of weakness.

Q: Do you wish you had never borrowed from “The Lord of the Rings” in that one filing? I know you caught an awful lot of flak about that Kingdom of Gondor reference. Was that just something you came up with at the 11th hour? [NOTE: To quote a footnote in the Jan. 21 Davis filing: “Since only the rightful king could sit on the throne of Gondor, a steward was appointed to manage Gondor until the return of the king, known as ‘Aragorn,’ occurred at the end of the story. This analogy is applicable since there is now in Washington, D.C., a group of individuals calling themselves the president, vice president and Congress who have no rightful claim to govern the American people.” In fairness to Davis, the suit also notes his remedy is “similar to the concept of placing a corrupted business in receivership or in bankruptcy law, which places a ‘trustee’ in charge of the ‘debtor-in-possession’ during the bankruptcy case to rehabilitate the corrupted organization.” Davis also emphasizes the critical role of the federal judiciary as “the last constitutional safeguard against such tyranny to prevent the immediate and irreparable harm of the Usurpers from enacting laws and policy without the legal consent of the People.”]

Davis: Yeah, so I remember that night I was under a lot of pressure. The people I was working with were putting a lot of pressure on me to get everything filed so we could move forward with trying to get the court we needed and get this out there to other attorneys who might be willing to help us and people who might be willing to fund the lawsuit because lawsuits are obviously very expensive. So I was under a lot of time pressure and, for reasons I stated somewhere, I was basically up all night. When I wrote that one [about the kingdom of Gondor], it was sometime in the middle of the night – you know, maybe 3 in the morning or something like that – and I just, you know, I like “The Lord of the Rings,” you know? I think a lot of people like “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a great classic work of literature and I just thought, you know, well, there was a situation there where there was not a legitimate government and so, for whatever reason, for better or for worse, I decided to make that analogy.

Yeah, in hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have made that analogy if I had known the media was going to feed on it, but as I pointed out to a reporter who interviewed me from Law & Crime, you see literary analogies in legal briefs all the time. It’s not all that unusual. It’s a little hypocritical that that was used against me, the fact I made a literary analogy.

Q: Would it have been wiser not to use an analogy involving a king?

Davis: (Laughter.) Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.

Q: Among the filings in your case is what one might even call an economic manifesto by Steve Vanderbol, who was behind this legal effort. What is his suggestion about the economics of the United States in regard to 2020 election irregularities?

Davis: If I can recall correctly, his point was that if it is true that our elections cannot be relied upon because of all these instances of fraud, and if people lose confidence in American elections and we can potentially have an illegitimate regime in control, that’s all going to have some major financial implications where people lose faith in the credibility of the United States government. I think that’s what he was trying to convey.

Q: Right. I’ve read it. He seems to be suggesting the economy in terms of investing is endangered by all this election irregularity.

Davis: I think he was trying to make that point, yes.

Q: Do you think his broader ambitions in regard to this lawsuit ignored the realities of too many plaintiffs in the legal stew?

Davis: Yes, I think his overall plan that I was following and trying to put in a legal framework was

just really unworkable. I kept telling him, “Steve, we have no other attorneys on this case, and according to you we have no funds coming in – I mean, I’m not managing the money, but that’s what you’re telling me.” According to him, we raised just enough to get the lawsuit served. And I was like, “We have no resources. We’re like some small country whose military has declared war on the entire world and we have no allies.” You know, it’s not feasible. And he would be outraged and kept telling me to trust the plan and he had all these people he was engaging, and I had no idea what he was working on and if he could ever show me a plan. It was just typical gaslighting type stuff. And I was just trying to trust him.

Q:  I notice that you’re helping clients get exempted from employer or government mandates on vaccinations. Obviously the far right’s solution of herd immunity is not working. How would you address a pandemic that is obviously killing a lot of people and making a snarling mess of our economy?

Davis:  Well, how do you know that natural immunity is not working?

Q: Well, doctors have said so. Doctors are seeing people who have had and survived COVID-19 before wind up back in the hospital. [NOTE: The first confirmed U.S. death caused by the omicron variant involved a man in Texas who previously had COVID-19, Harris County health officials said. A study published in August about COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 indicated unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus.]

Davis: Not all doctors are saying that. Did you watch the interview with Pete McCullough with Joe Rogan? It’s been very popular. I would recommend listening to that. He’s one of the foremost internal medicine doctors. He’s the most published internal medicine doctor in the world, I think, and he goes extensively into the studies that show that natural immunity is actually a thing and it does persist for quite a while, possibly a lifetime. [NOTE: Dr. McCullough, a Dallas cardiologist, told talk-radio host Joe Rogan on Dec. 13 that the pandemic was planned, the COVID-19 vaccines are experimental and previously infected people have “permanent immunity.” Baylor Scott & White Health has reportedly sued McCullough, alleging he illegitimately affiliated himself with its facilities when promoting controversial views about COVID-19.] The CDC has admitted now that vaccines do not prevent transmission of the delta variant or omicron variant. What’s the point of the vaccine mandate? If we need to do it to protect others, to protect fellow Americans, yet it doesn’t prevent transmission, then what’s the point of vaccine mandates? Your question is premised on the assumption that natural immunity does not work, but I think that’s pretty unfounded. You’re relying on the statements of doctors who presumably – a lot of these doctors get a lot of their money from Big Pharma, you know, for prescribing certain medications. You might find this interesting. I got a letter from a doctor recently that he had gotten from various medical boards stating, “If you spread misinformation about the vaccine or about COVID-19 and other treatments such as Ivermectin, we’re going to go after your medical license.” That’s essentially what the letter said, so you’ll have to forgive me. I’m a little dubious as to what doctors are saying in public about this when their medical licenses are being threatened if they say anything other than the official state narrative coming out of the White House and the CDC.

Q: The other day President Biden said there is no federal solution to the pandemic, that the matter is largely up to individual states. What should we expect of the states?

Davis: To control the spread of coronavirus?

Q: Yeah.

Davis: Well, I think the states should trust their citizens to be responsible. States should look at the actual data rather than just buying into the propaganda that the only solution is vaccines. If you look at that interview with Pete McCullough, he talks about how shocking it is that there is not a single protocol out there that’s being promoted by any medical organization in hospital settings or out-patient settings about preventative care. I think the only solution to talk about publicly is (unfortunately) vaccination. And why is that? I think the state health departments ought to look very closely at how successful these vaccines really are. Why are they not looking at early therapeutic solutions? Why is Ivermectin being suppressed? I can give you a personal example from this last week. I had a client who was pretty much dying in [a North Texas hospital]. The doctor told her, word for word, ‘You’re going to die.” He gave her a death prognosis. They wouldn’t release her. I went down there and threatened to sue them for false imprisonment and got her out of there. Put her on Ivermectin, put her alternative therapies. And guess what? She recovered. The state needs to look at things like that.

Q: I agree with preventative steps, but even masking has been attacked in the present political setting.

Davis: Well, correct. To me, masking is as ludicrous as trying to keep mosquitoes out of your backyard with a chain-link fence. The gaps in a cloth mask are .3 microns and the virus is estimated at .1 micron, so the cloth mask is not going to keep the virus from going in and out. There’s no real reliable study out there showing that masks make a whole lot of difference with regards to spread. One solution is you just rinse your sinuses every day with a solution of Betadine and water. That actually will prevent you from getting it. States just ought to look at other things. We’ve already been doing masks and we’ve already been doing vaccinations and it’s clearly not slowing this thing down, so, you know, why don’t we consider things other than those? But apparently you’re not allowed to do that. [NOTE: Just for the record, Mayo Clinic COVID-19 expert Dr. Gregory Poland says the "idea behind an N95 mask is it has a filtering ability down to, and actually below, the size of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. So the coronavirus is about 0.12 microns in diameter and N95 (masks) protect down to 0.1 microns, with 95 percent efficiency, which is where it gets its name."]  

Q: You lived in Waco during your tenure at Baylor University. Did your undergraduate years at Baylor influence your contemporary thinking? Did Waco?

Davis: Generally speaking?

Q: Yeah, generally.

Davis: I love Waco. It’s a great town and I wouldn’t mind … it’s a great place to live. There’s a lot of beautiful places. I used to love just hiking along the dam at Lake Waco at sunset. It’s just a very peaceful environment. I used to love hiking through Cameron Park. You know, I like the Cameron Park Zoo. It’s a great zoo for a town like Waco certainly.  Waco is just a great place. It’s not really crowded, traffic’s not bad and people generally have conservative American values. You know, there’s a church on every corner. I didn’t get the benefit from the whole Chip and Joanna Gaines complex when I was there. I have been back to visit and I think it’s great. As for my time at Baylor, I studied business. My understanding from talking to some of my classmates who were in the liberal arts college is there is a fair amount of Marxist indoctrination there, but being in the business school I wasn’t really exposed to a lot of that and I was able to maintain a lot of my conservative Christian values through that experience.

Q: I’ve heard this about a lot of universities from conservatives who feel they don’t have a platform to discuss their views. When you refer to Baylor, is that what you’re referring to or is it something else?

Davis: Well, I think just as a general matter, if you look at how academia has changed over the years, it started in the early 1900s when you had American professors going to Germany and the Frankfurt School [the Institute of Social Research] and learning essentially revisionist history with a strong Marxist viewpoint, and then they brought that back and started teaching that in American universities. And that became really the pervasive kind of default for teaching humanities from this Marxist/social justice perspective. So you had a lot of that going on at Baylor. Being in the business school, I never felt like I really experienced a whole lot of that, as far as specific instances. I took AP courses in history and stuff in high school so I actually didn’t even take history at Baylor. But I remember one time I was talking to a classmate who grew up very conservative and she was talking about all the things she was learning in – I can’t even remember what class it was – but she said, “I have to admit it, I’m a liberal, I’m a leftist.” And I thought, “Wow, OK.” So there is some indoctrination going on there. 

Q: I know you just got back from the Turning Point USA conference. What was the highlight for you?

Davis: You know, my favorite was [conservative radio host, lecturer and Prager University founder] Dennis Prager. I want to make a highlight video of the things that he said because he went through all the common lies you hear about America from the left and he did so in very simple, easy-to-communicate-and-understand ways, and I just think he’s a brilliant, brilliant man and I really love his content and I love the videos they do so it was a real thrill to see him speak in person. I’ve never seen him speak in person, I’ve listened to his radio shows. And I’d say the other highlight, maybe the main one for me, I got to meet Brandon Tatum [a former police officer and author of "Beaten Black and Blue: Being a Black Cop in an America Under Siege."] because I’m a huge fan of Brandon Tatum and what he stands for and I got to chat with him for a few minutes and take a picture. That was a huge thrill. He goes by “Officer Tatum” and makes a lot of videos. He works a lot with Candace Owens on the Blexit movement [a campaign to “uplift and empower” minorities and encourage black Americans to abandon the Democratic Party] and he speaks those types of issues.

Q: In your legal filings, you state your efforts are undertaken for neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party. Yet in a footnote in your Jan. 25 legal memorandum, you acknowledge you personally favor Donald Trump as “an outsider and not inherently tainted by a life in corrupt politics,” and you further view his policies as “good for common, everyday Americans as opposed to elites, and not for any other reason.” How is Donald Trump not an elite? He is a billionaire real-estate mogul and casino operator and a reality TV star – I used to watch his show – but he was clearly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. How is he not an elite as opposed to, say, Beto O’Rourke or Adam Kinzinger or George W. Bush, who, after all, did struggle on his own in the West Texas oil patch?

Davis: The proof is in the pudding in how much everyone in the political establishment hates him. (Laughter.) I mean, you know, Trump in his speeches says, “They don’t hate me, they hate you. I’m just in the way.” And that really sums it up. His policies were designed to give power back to the people. He wanted to address these massive spending bills that were coming out, he wanted to privatize medicine again by getting rid of Obamacare, and he lowered taxes. This whole idea that the only taxes he wanted to lower were for rich people? That is completely unsupported by the tax policies. I personally saved a lot of money. I know a lot of people who had a lot more money in their pockets. Domestic energy production is another – for the first time we were a net exporter of energy, we were energy independent for the first time in I don’t know how many decades. And that’s a gift to the average American. It doesn’t benefit these big businesses and industries. It helps the average American.

Q: The sum of all your legal filings make clear this is all about election integrity, not reinstating the former president. Yet I would presume your efforts have found favor with the former president and his allies. Have you heard from any of them?

Davis: No, surprisingly not. For whatever reason, it just didn’t gain the traction that we thought it would and we didn’t get the support we thought we would. You know, I was kind of surprised there wasn’t more support for what we were trying to do. It was against my better judgment to keep the case going for as long as it did when it became clear we weren’t going to get the support we needed, but unfortunately I’m just a very trusting person and Kellye SoRelle was no longer on the case.

Q: It looks to me like the parties kind of fell apart about a month or so after the original filing.

Davis: Yes, they did. Steve Vanderbol kept assuring me. I was working on the lawsuit and his thing was to garner the support and get the resources we needed together, and he kept assuring me that he was doing that and it was all going to come through and I just trusted him a little too much – a lot too much, actually. I probably wouldn’t have continued the lawsuit as long as I did without Steve’s influence.

Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Texas journalist Bill Whitaker. A mercifully shorter version of this Q&A was published in the January 6, 2022, Waco Tribune-Herald.