Politics, Lobster, and Football Chaos: A Very Texas Autumn. From The Barbed Wire

Howdy, y’all. Brian Gaar with The Barbed Wire here, coming to you on a Friday(!!) where I’m still sweating at my computer in October. Elsewhere in America, leaves are changing; here, we’re still sticking to our car seats and wondering if “crisp fall air” is just something Starbucks made up. But even as the seasons refuse to cooperate, the news cycle keeps serving up a buffet of political chaos, seafood snobbery, and football heartbreak. Let’s dig in.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Texas students and professors, especially Black voices, are facing threats, firings, and arrests for what they’ve say online. Universities are clamping down, Gov. Greg Abbott is cheering it on, and even national journalists are losing jobs. Jimmy Kimmel may have made a triumphant late-night return, but many Texans don’t feel like they can say much of anything without risking their careers. At least 350 teachers are still under investigation across the state for posting quotations, mockery, and even political cartoons.

More in politics: In just three weeks, state Rep. James Talarico raised a whopping $6.2 million for his U.S. Senate bid, outpacing Colin Allred’s three-month total by a mile. National outlets are swooning, Joe Rogan is telling him to run for president, and The New York Times is wondering if he’s “the savior Democrats have been waiting for.” 

Meanwhile, I wrote about my trip to Maine, where I learned that lobster is their brisket: overpriced, beloved, and unavoidable. License plates say “LOBSTER,” McDonald’s sells lobster rolls, and yes, they’re $35, but worth it. Like Texas barbecue, locals won’t tolerate a bad version. The verdict: Both lobster and brisket are delicious, and both states are insufferable about it.

And in football, former Cowboy Micah Parsons returned to Dallas in Packers green and helped hand the Cowboys their first tie since 1969: a 40-40 shootout where defense took the night off. 

The Free Speech Crisis for Black Americans Is Worse Than You Think

Don’t let Jimmy Kimmel’s return fool you: Black academics are more frightened of talking to the press than I’ve ever seen.

By Taylor Crumpton

America, we have a problem.

In the weeks since the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, historically Black colleges and universities have experienced terroristic threats, Black students have been expelled or withdrawn for expressing their first amendment rights, and prominent Black journalists have been fired for social media posts. 

That’s a big news story, and one that I set out to tell for The Barbed Wire. In its infancy, the story was about how HBCUs should not be held accountable for Kirk’s death. Except I struggled to get anyone to talk. 

Now, it’s an essay about how — and why — that initial piece never came to pass. Because a failed first attempt led me to another big story: In all my years of journalism, I’ve never seen so much fear from subject matter experts.

Since President Donald Trump took office, his administration has restricted Associated Press access to the Oval Office, threatened to revoke foreigners’ entry to the United States because of their commentary on Kirk, and withheld funding from higher education institutions because of their alleged “antisemitism and ideological indoctrination.” Despite positioning himself as a champion of free speech, Trump has reignited a war on not only freedom of speech, but academic freedom as well, with many left in fear of backlash and retaliation. 

More than 50% of American voters are pessimistic about freedom of speech being protected, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday. Almost 80% of those respondents said the nation is in a political crisis. 

Jimmy Kimmel’s return to his late-night show on ABC this week has dominated much of the conversation. Kimmel was suspended after Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, urged broadcasters to stop airing the show, saying they were “running the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC.”  

When he returned to the screen on Tuesday night, Kimmel encouraged the American public to be mindful of the privileges of living in a country with free speech. 

He described the actions taken against his show by the FCC, along with Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcasting Group (which together own more than 300 TV stations across the country), as “un-American” and “dangerous.” He made a triumphant return to air, and his Wednesday night monologue got stellar ratings and has racked up more than 20 million views on YouTube. But Nexstar and Sinclair both refused to air the late night show on their respective affiliate television stations throughout the U.S. 

Kimmel has garnered the support of several Republican senators, such as Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, who warned fellow conservatives that continued actions by the Trump administration against free speech could result in future retaliation by Democrats in the event they regain control of the White House: “They will silence us, they will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly.”

But, there is already a group of Americans that are actively being silenced over fears of professional and institutional retaliation. 

They are worried about the future of their careers. 

They are afraid of their words being used against them. 

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