The Wild Texas Newsletter!

Welcome to the Wild Texas newsletter! We’re happy to have you in our strange little corner of the internet. Thank you for subscribing — and for opening this email. I’m Olivia, the editor-in-chief of The Barbed Wire, and I’ll be your hostess 💖🎙️for the next 90 seconds while you scroll. Buckle up because this week’s stories will make you laugh, cry, and smack your head into a wall.

First up, we have an incredibly thoughtful, exceptionally well-written, and intensely vulnerable reported essay from senior editor Leslie Rangel, in which she describes her sister’s two painful miscarriages post-Roe. I’m not kidding when I say I think this might be one of the most poignant pieces of journalism I’ve ever been involved in making. Editor-at-large Cara Kelly and I both separately cried while editing this, so fair warning.

In 2016, Victoria voted for former President Donald Trump. After her traumatic pregnancy losses, she says: “I know you’re not supposed to have regrets, but I do ...It was my fault because I also helped put Trump in the office, and now look what’s happened.”

She Voted for Trump. Then She Had Two Terrifying Miscarriages in Texas.

In 2023, my sister Victoria spent more than 24 hours hemorrhaging into three diapers when Dallas-area hospitals declined to help her.

By Leslie Rangel

My sister Victoria was wrangling Elias, her then-2-year-old, into his costume on Halloween when the spots of blood in her underwear became worrisome. It was almost exactly two years ago, in 2022, and Elias had woken up from a nap excited about trick-or-treating. She’d gotten him into a shiny black firefighter hat, a yellow jacket with neon reflectors, kelly-green shoes, and a bright red hatchet — the color of the blood she could no longer ignore.

“I could feel it. That’s when I started to panic,” she told me last week. It was the first time we had spoken at length since 2018. “I was trying to hide it because it was Halloween, so the only thing I was thinking about was just making sure that I wasn’t spoiling the holiday for Elias.”

Our relationship was non-existent then, strained both by a traumatic childhood and the fractured ways we’d each coped. She was a busy toddler mom. I’d just been nominated for an Emmy. We were doing the best we could, but we butted heads. Meanwhile, people across the country were on edge, wondering what a midterm election would bring in the months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Now, with weeks to go before another Halloween — and another presidential election — she was explaining the terror-filled night she’d spent without me, when she faced the consequences of our state’s conservative agenda to outlaw abortion.

Speaking of Election Day 2024, columnist Steven Monacelli has another killer story this week about the real consequences of conspiratorial notions on the far right. Steven starts with a story you may have forgotten, but changed everything — or in the case of our Gen Z readers, it might be one you’ve never heard before: the 2000 election’s “Brooks Brothers riot.” 

In other — and much more absurd — news, the mayor of Colleyville has an idea for how to help with preparation for the devastation that Hurricane Milton might bring to Gulf Coast Florida. It’s one I desperately hope nobody tries. 

And, in case you missed it last week, Kimberly Reeves went to death row to report this moving and urgent piece about Robert Roberson on Friday. Roberson, who has a hearing next week, is scheduled to die on Oct. 17 for a crime that might not even have occurred. I’ll say this: It’s rare to have 86 bipartisan lawmakers in this state on the same side of anything.

For those of you more interested in more amuse-bouche-sized stories, here are some Wild Texas posts for your taste buds. (But seriously, read them all.)

Federal Complaints Over ‘Bullsh*t’ Blue Alert Hit 4,500

Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness Attacked in ‘Upsetting’ Pro-Trump Ad 

Texas Woman Gets Death Threats For Baking Tim Walz Cookie

‘I Am Not Batman’: Texans Are Pissed the Cops Woke Everyone Up Before 5AM on a Friday

Texas May Finally Get Connected (Kinda) to the National Power Grid

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