The Gang That Can't Shoot Straight
On 3 November Texas elected a Democrat as Attorney General for the first time in a generation. Nathan Johnson beat Mayes Middleton roughly 52 to 46. Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott. The Texas House flipped for the first time in more than twenty years. Ken Paxton did not seek a fourth term as Attorney General — he ran for the United States Senate and lost to James Talarico.
I want to set down what the actual problem was, because the public version is mostly gossip and the gossip is the least important part. The method is the part worth understanding, and it is the same method whether it is pointed at a Speaker, a judge, or one person nobody has heard of.
The pattern, not the scandal
Three matters in Ken Paxton's record share one shape.
WatchGuard Video. He held an ownership interest in the company, which does business as Enforcement Video, L.P. In 2006 it was awarded a contract worth at least ten million dollars to supply the Texas Department of Public Safety with in-car cameras. He voted for the appropriations bills that provided the money while holding the stake. Representative Byron Cook, also a shareholder, voted for them as well. When it surfaced, Paxton said: "I didn't even know we had contracts with the state of Texas." The company's own marketing advertised that it was held by an "influential shareholder group" including three state representatives. The legislative ownership was not incidental to the pitch — it was the pitch. No charge was ever brought against him over WatchGuard. He amended his ethics disclosures in 2014, the same year the Dallas Morning News ran "Ken Paxton's business list has surged since he entered the Legislature."
The 2014 reprimand. The Texas State Securities Board found he had solicited clients for Mowery Capital Management of McKinney in 2004, 2005 and 2012 while serving in the Legislature, standing to receive thirty percent of the resulting management fees. A client he solicited had no idea he was being paid. Reprimand, and a thousand-dollar fine.
The 2015 indictment. A Collin County grand jury charged him with two counts of first-degree felony securities fraud for soliciting investors — including a sitting state legislator — to buy at least a hundred thousand dollars of Servergy stock without disclosing that he was being paid a hundred thousand shares to make those sales, and that he had put in none of his own money. Plus a third-degree count of failing to register with state securities regulators.
Here is how it ended. The case sat for nearly nine years on fights over venue and over who would pay the special prosecutors. In March 2024, weeks before trial, it ended in a pretrial diversion agreement: restitution reported at roughly $271,000 by one account and nearly $300,000 by another, a hundred hours of community service, and fifteen hours of legal ethics training. He entered no plea and the agreement contained no admission of wrongdoing. He completed it, and the charges were dismissed in 2025. No conviction, ever — nine years of process that resolved without anyone deciding the merits.
The recurring element in all three is the same: an undisclosed personal financial interest standing behind an official act, followed by a claim of ignorance once the interest surfaces. That is the thing to recognise. Not the headline — the shape.
His own people turned him in
This is the part that gets misreported as partisan, and it is the opposite of partisan.
In the autumn of 2020, seven of his most senior aides went to the FBI about him. These were not opponents. They were conservative Republicans, several of them personally recruited by Paxton, working in the Office of the Attorney General of Texas. They alleged he had used the office to help a friend — the Austin real estate investor Nate Paul — investigate and harass business rivals, delay foreclosure sales on his properties, and obtain confidential records about the police investigating him. Among the concerns raised was that a job had been found for a woman Paxton was involved with, who had worked in his wife's office. His wife, Angela Paxton, was a sitting state senator.
The Texas House impeached him. The Texas Senate acquitted him on all sixteen articles in September 2023, and he returned to office. The Justice Department later declined to prosecute.
But hold the structure in view. The people who reported him were the Christian conservative Republicans who worked for him. When an institution's own staff, who share its politics and owe it their careers, go outside to a federal agency, the disagreement is not about politics.
Texas v. Pennsylvania
On 8 December 2020 the Attorney General of Texas moved the Supreme Court of the United States for leave to file a bill of complaint against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, seeking to set aside their certified presidential results. Three days later the Court denied it:
"denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections."
Read what that actually decides. The Court did not say Texas pursued a real interest by the wrong route. It said there was no Texas interest presented at all — that nothing before it amounted to a claim belonging to any Texan. Article III standing requires an injury to the party suing. The Attorney General appeared in the Supreme Court purporting to act for thirty million people and could not identify one legally cognizable injury to any of them.
On the morning of 6 January 2021 he spoke at the rally at the Ellipse, recounting that effort, hours before the Capitol was breached.
The wave he was riding
The thing to understand about that period is that there was a story going around, and the story was that powerful people were harvesting a drug called adrenochrome from terrified children. That was the engine. Not a policy disagreement — a belief that the people on the other side were doing something unspeakable to kids, which is the one accusation that makes every other question stop mattering.
I was telling anyone who would listen that adrenochrome is oxidized adrenaline. That is not a clever framing, it is just what the compound is.
Adrenaline is epinephrine. Leave epinephrine exposed to air and it oxidizes, and the oxidation product is adrenochrome. That is the entire chemistry. It is the reason an old vial of epinephrine turns pink and then brown and gets thrown out — the pink is adrenochrome, and it is a sign the drug has degraded. There is a stabilized form, adrenochrome monosemicarbazone, sold as carbazochrome, and what it is used for is helping blood clot. It was studied from the 1950s into the 1970s as a possible internally-produced cause of schizophrenia, which is a real chapter in psychiatric history and one our library already covers. None of that research found what the story claimed.
You do not need a child. You need adrenaline and air.
And you do not need to get the adrenaline off anybody either. Adrenaline has been manufactured since 1904, when the German chemist Friedrich Stolz first synthesised it; Jokichi Takamine had isolated it in 1901, and it was in medical use by 1905. It is a cheap generic drug that sits in every crash cart and every EpiPen in the country. One hundred and twenty years of industrial production, and the story asks you to believe the supply chain runs through children.
You do not have to take my word for the rest of it either, because adrenochrome is mass produced, commercially available to the public, and is not a controlled substance. Anyone can buy it. There is no black market in it because there is no need for one.
And here is the part that finishes it, from the man whose hypothesis this was. Abram Hoffer's own 1981 paper recounts that Dr Max Rinkel obtained the commercial form — adrenochrome semicarbazide, stable adrenochrome, the one surgeons used to reduce bleeding — gave it to subjects, and found no hallucinogenic activity at all. Hoffer calls it "this inert material" and argues the body never releases the active compound from it. So the version you can actually buy does nothing, by the account of the researcher who spent thirty years insisting the active version did something.
What the human record does describe is not a drug anybody would seek out. Hoffer reports adrenochrome injected intravenously into known epileptics worsening the EEG; one young woman with no prior psychotic episodes went "morose and quiet" within minutes and was admitted to a psychiatric ward days later for her first psychosis. The supporting studies were, in total, a handful of trials with fifteen or fewer subjects each, and the hypothesis collapsed because adrenochrome turned out not to be detectable in people with schizophrenia at all. Aldous Huxley wrote about it in The Doors of Perception and had never taken it.
Morose and quiet, or nothing. That is the whole recorded effect. Nobody in the literature describes anything remotely like the film.
The movie did the rest. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is where almost everyone picked up the idea — the scene where it comes from a living person's gland and hits like nothing else. Hunter Thompson made that up. He said so himself in the commentary on the film, that he invented both the effects and the harvesting; Terry Gilliam, who directed it, has said flatly that the drug as depicted is fictional. Thompson wrote a book that blends fact and invention on purpose and never pretended otherwise. A generation read the invented part as reporting.
So the wave was built on a pharmacology error about a degradation product, dressed in a scene from a novel.
People do traffic children, and I am about to name a documented case. The specific mechanism at the center of that movement does not exist, and that matters, because a movement organized around an imaginary crime cannot find a real one. It is looking for the wrong thing. Worse, it hands anyone a defense: when every accusation in the air is absurd, the serious ones look like more of the same.
That is the part I keep coming back to, because I have been on the receiving end of it. Once "this person believes wild things" is established, nothing they document gets read.
Baylor
Here is the documented case, and it is close to home.
Kenneth Starr — the independent counsel from the Clinton investigation — was on Jeffrey Epstein's defense team in 2007 and 2008. He worked on the non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein plead to state charges in Florida instead of facing the federal case that had been built against him. Reporting on a later book describes Starr as the most powerful force behind that deal. In June 2008 he wrote to the Deputy Attorney General urging the Department to stand down and leave it to the state. The agreement was secret at the time, including from the victims.
In 2010 he became president of Baylor University. He held that job until 2016, when he was removed over the university's handling of sexual assault allegations. He died in 2022. When the Epstein documents were released starting in late 2025, they included his correspondence — Baylor's own student newspaper, the Lariat, covered the files that named its former president, and the letters that surfaced were affectionate ones.
Ken Paxton has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Baylor, class of 1985, and an MBA from Baylor's Hankamer School of Business in 1986. He was student body president there. His law degree is from Virginia.
Paxton graduated twenty-five years before Starr arrived. The link is not between those two men. It is the institution, and it is structural.
The man who rode a wave premised on elites protecting child abusers graduated from an institution that, two decades later, hired as its president the lawyer who had gotten the most notorious child abuser of our lifetime a secret deal, and then fired that president over how the school handled assault complaints. Nobody had to hide any of that. It was in the papers. The conspiracy was busy with adrenaline chemistry and a movie scene while the real leniency ran through a university presidency, a law firm, and a letter to the Deputy Attorney General, in daylight, done by people with excellent credentials.
That is how it actually works. Not a basement. A résumé.
The local version: find a crime
Here is the same method at county scale, and it is documented.
In March 2008 Judge Suzanne Wooten defeated the incumbent, Judge Charles Sandoval, in the Collin County Republican primary — the first person ever to beat a sitting district judge in that county. The day after the primary, Sandoval went to District Attorney John Roach Sr.'s office and asked them to investigate Wooten and find a crime. The District Attorney's Special Crimes Unit ran it, with no independent law enforcement agency involved.
Six successive grand juries over nearly three years. The sixth returned an indictment. United States District Judge Amos Mazzant noted it took six. She was convicted of bribery, conspiracy to commit organized criminal activity, money laundering, and tampering with a governmental record.
In 2017 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated every conviction, finding the evidence legally insufficient because the allegations, even if true, were not crimes under Texas law.
Nine years. Collin County's insurer settled for about six hundred thousand dollars. She then sued the former District Attorney, the former Attorney General — Greg Abbott — and the prosecutors, calling it a sham investigation.
Abusing a grand jury is itself recognised in Texas as stepping outside official authority. Guardiola v. State, 20 S.W.3d 216.
Notice the sequence, because it is the whole lesson. The crime was selected after the target was. Six panels had to be run through before one agreed. And the convictions fell not because a jury was wrong about the facts but because the facts were never a crime to begin with.
The lawyer they appointed me
I was eighteen. I had finished high school a year ahead of my class and it was less than a year later.
Officers came into a residence without a warrant to arrest me for the religious use of cannabis. What they had was a social-media post written by teenagers, which they read as meaning there was a party at "the Gallagher house." There was no party. They entered 609 Riviera Drive in McKinney — my mother's house, listed under the surname Wight. My mother is a Lopez. Inside were me and one friend. They asked for consent to be there after I was already under arrest.
The first lawyer appointed to me refused to raise a religious-freedom defense at all.
The next one was Kerrie Walker, Texas Bar No. 24045043. She pressed me to plead guilty and would not negotiate.
Here is what I did not know at eighteen, and what is on the public record.
Kerrie Walker had been the Chief Misdemeanor Prosecutor for Collin County. In 2009, District Attorney John Roach demoted her — from Chief Misdemeanor Prosecutor down to Misdemeanor Prosecutor, with her pay cut from $64,900 to $61,665 — and she then resigned. The demotion followed reporting by Brett Shipp at WFAA that she had taken over a solid DWI case from a subordinate, dismissed the witnesses, and canceled the jury trial. Roach said her conduct, and possibly that of another prosecutor, appeared to violate county policy. She was the second prosecutor out of that office over the same case; the other was her former boss.
And this is the part that matters, because it is not the story people assume. She was not refusing to work without being paid. She was a prosecutor who helped the defence. She was applying for a job with the FBI, and the defence attorney sitting across the aisle from her was her own former boss and a former FBI man — the person whose good word would get her in. So she took the case off her subordinate, let the witnesses go, and killed the trial.
Not for money. For a referral. And nothing about it had anything to do with the merits of the case — the State's evidence was fine, which is exactly why it drew a WFAA investigation and cost two prosecutors their positions. The case was simply the thing she had available to spend.
So the sequence is this. A prosecutor is forced out of the Collin County District Attorney's office for sinking her own case to buy favour with a federal agency. The next year, the same courthouse appoints her to an indigent eighteen-year-old, and she tells him to plead.
Understand what that means about the appointment. Her decisions in both matters turned on what the file could do for her, and the merits entered into neither one. In the DWI there was something to trade for. In mine there was nothing — no money, no bureau, no former boss across the aisle, nothing a referral could be built on. I was the case with nothing in it for her, and I got the advice that costs a lawyer the least: plead.
That is the two-tier system in one person's career, and the currency is not always money. One woman, two years, both sides of it.
And the office she came out of is the same office that a federal judge later described in exactly those terms. In Wooten v. Roach, 377 F. Supp. 3d 652 (E.D. Tex. 2019), affirmed at 964 F.3d 395 (5th Cir. 2020), United States District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III found that the Collin County District Attorney's Office had "investigated a suspect to find a crime." Same Roach. The DA who demoted Walker is the defendant in the case that named the practice.
"That's the culture here" is not a defense. It is a confession.
Now watch what happens when I say any of that out loud.
I do not say "everyone in Collin County is corrupt." I say: this prosecutor did this specific thing, here is the reporting, here is the demotion and the pay figure, here is the federal opinion and its page number. Every piece of it is a document.
What comes back is a translation. It gets restated as me attacking the whole local bar, the whole bench, everybody — he is saying that about all of us, that's the culture here. And once it is restated that way they think it answers itself, because obviously no reasonable person believes an entire county is crooked, so obviously this man is unreasonable, and we are back to the designation.
I did not make the claim that large. They enlarged it and then argued with the enlarged version.
But understand what that phrase actually is. It is not an observation handed down out of the sky. It is an excuse, and it is the excuse losers reach for. Nobody says that's the culture here about something they are proud of. You say it about something you would rather not have to justify, and you say it in a tone that means you are naive for raising it.
Decode it and there is one sentence inside. What that's the culture here means is: you can pay for that in Collin County.
Pay for that. Not for a lawyer's time, not for a filing fee — for the result. For the case going away. For the witnesses not being there. For the motion being granted. The phrase is not a description of local manners. It is a price list, delivered in a shrug by someone who assumes you already knew, and who finds it tiresome that you are making him say it.
And the Walker file is the proof of it, because that DWI was paid for. Not in cash. In a referral to the Bureau. The currency moved, the case died, and the merits were never in the room. Somebody with something to trade bought an outcome in Collin County, and the only reason anybody outside the building ever heard about it is that a television reporter looked.
And it runs the other direction too, one county over.
Walker made a case disappear. Stephanie Martin brought one.
Al Hill III is an heir to the Hunt oil fortune. In Dallas County he was indicted on mortgage fraud charges, and Martin — an assistant district attorney under Craig Watkins — was the prosecutor who carried it to the grand jury. Watkins' own former top prosecutor, Russell Wilson, later said Martin made the sole decision to take the Hill case before a grand jury, and contradicted Watkins' claim that he had played no role in it.
Hill's lawyers argued the charges had been filed as a favour to Lisa Blue, a lawyer who was then in a multimillion-dollar legal-fee dispute with Hill. Not a bribe. A favour, for somebody with money, who asked.
In March 2013 Judge Lena Levario dismissed the case and held the elected District Attorney of Dallas County in contempt of court when he refused to take the stand and answer questions about the alleged misconduct. Levario said Martin's own testimony was what changed her mind, and she put it on the record: Martin at best had a bad memory, and "at worst, she lied."
Watkins was later acquitted of the contempt charge, after a different judge decided the hearing should never have been held at all. Then in 2016 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that Levario had been right to hold the hearing. Hill won that round in the highest criminal court in the state.
Now hold the two files side by side, because together they are the whole argument.
A prosecutor in Collin County killed a good case for a job referral. A prosecutor in Dallas County built a case out of nothing as a favour to a wealthy lawyer. Neither of them, so far as anyone has ever shown, took a dollar. That is what makes it work. A bribe leaves a trail and has a statute attached to it. A favour between people whose careers are useful to each other leaves nothing but an outcome, and the outcome is indistinguishable from a decision honestly made — unless somebody with resources goes and digs it out.
Which is the last thing worth noticing about Hill. Al Hill III beat it. He got a hearing on prosecutorial misconduct, a dismissal, a contempt finding against a sitting District Attorney, and a judgment from the Court of Criminal Appeals that he had been entitled to that hearing in the first place.
He could afford to. That is the only material difference between his file and mine. I have been asking for the hearing for fifteen years.
Are these friends?
That is the question, and it is not a rhetorical one. It is the question American corruption law has been stuck on for a decade.
Ask Bob Menendez. At his first federal bribery trial in 2017 his lawyers used the words "friend," "friends" or "friendship" more than eighty times in closing argument. The gifts, they said, were what close friends do for one another. The jury deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial.
And the Supreme Court had already made that defence stronger. McDonnell v. United States (2016) held that an "official act" does not include merely setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event. Opening a door for someone is not, by itself, a federal crime.
It took gold bars to get past it. In July 2024 Menendez was convicted on all sixteen counts — more than $480,000 in cash, a Mercedes, bullion — and sentenced to eleven years. That is the actual threshold in practice: the friendship defence held until the government could put metal on the table.
So understand where that leaves Walker and Martin. If you ask whether a crime was committed, "they were friends" is a winning answer, and it usually wins. A prosecutor hoping for a word from an old boss at the Bureau. A prosecutor doing a turn for a well-known lawyer. No cash, no gold, no meeting that counts as an official act. Charge that and you will likely lose.
But I am not asking that question, and that is the whole move.
Which is a losing answer to a recusal motion
The disqualification standard does not ask whether money moved. It asks about appearance, and friendship is not a defence to it — friendship is the disqualifier.
A judge must "avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all of the judge's activities" and must act so as to promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 2A. Recusal is required whenever "the judge's impartiality might reasonably be questioned," Tex. R. Civ. P. 18b(b)(1) — word for word the federal standard at 28 U.S.C. § 455(a), which asks not whether a judge was in fact partial but whether a reasonable, informed observer would have doubts. Liljeberg v. Health Services Acquisition Corp., 486 U.S. 847 (1988). And due process itself reaches the objectively assessed probability of bias, with no showing of actual bias required. Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009).
The appearance is the violation.
So run the fork. Either these relationships were corrupt, in which case there are crimes — or they were friendships, in which case they were disqualifying relationships that had to be disclosed on the record. There is no third branch where nothing at all was required. The friendship answer does not get them out; it only changes which rule they broke.
And I am from Collin County
This is the part that should have ended the question before it started.
I am not a stranger who wandered into that courthouse. I grew up in Collin County. My mother's house in McKinney is where they came through the door without a warrant when I was eighteen. My father's mother's house is in the county. My father runs a business in McKinney that does business with Collin County and with the City of McKinney — he prints for Ken Paxton and publicly endorsed him, and my stepmother attends his fundraisers. There are ties from that business into Collin County judges and mayors.
I also have a degree of fame. The people in that building knew who I was before the file was ever opened.
And notice that these relationships do not all run against me. Some of them run the other way entirely — my own father's business is tied to the same political network whose figures I have been accusing. That is precisely why it had to be said out loud. A conflict is not only a reason to rule against someone; it is any relationship that makes a reasonable observer wonder whether the ruling was about the law.
The duty was never to prove they could be fair. The duty was to state the relationship, and then say they could be fair. That is all. One sentence on the record and a chance for me to respond to it.
Nobody did either. In a county where I was born, known, and connected by family to the people involved, my matters were handled by judges and lawyers who said nothing about any of it — one of whom had a spouse who created the very drug court at issue in a religious drug case, another whose associate judge is married to a partner at the firm she is associated with. I took those conflicts to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct as Nos. 20-1256 through 20-1259.
They did not have to be crooked for the orders to be void. They only had to be quiet.
The flip side is the same coin, and it is the side I have been standing on for fifteen years: if you don't pay, you don't win. Which is why this is not mainly about bribing judges. It is about lawyers.
There are two ways to be a person who does not pay. You can represent yourself, or you can take the lawyer you are given. Both get punished, and I have done both.
What I was given at eighteen was a lawyer who had been the Chief Misdemeanor Prosecutor for Collin County until she was demoted and resigned over taking a solid DWI case away from a subordinate, dismissing the witnesses and killing the jury trial — to get a good word with the FBI from the defence attorney across from her, who was her old boss. Then she was appointed to me, and told me to plead. The first one appointed to me refused to raise my religious-freedom defense at all. That is what free counsel bought me, and it is why I started filing on my own.
So then I became the other kind of person who does not pay. And there is a published literature about people like me, written by the firms that are paid to defeat them.
Read how Cowles & Thompson opens the subject. Their article "Dealing with a Vexatious Litigant," by senior shareholder Sim Israeloff, 31 October 2016:
"Texas courts are open to everyone. It normally costs around $400 in fees and other charges to file a lawsuit. But a person who can't afford it can file an Affidavit of Indigency which permits them to file their lawsuit without paying a fee."
That is the setup. Here is the complaint:
"The rule is sometimes abused by people who make a business of filing large numbers of baseless lawsuits acting as their own lawyer (pro se) and claiming the right to file each suit without a fee."
"Many of the suits will fail. But some defendants will pay to settle a frivolous claim just to avoid the time and expense of fighting it. A professional plaintiff can find endless victims to sue."
Notice what the grievance is actually keyed to. Twice in a few lines, the offence is not paying the fee. Not that the claims are wrong — that they were filed by someone who did not pay for the privilege. A person with money who files five losing suits is a litigant. A person without money who files five is a professional plaintiff running a business. Same filings. The difference is the four hundred dollars.
And then the recommendation: the statute is "a powerful tool to stop the abuse."
The Supreme Court already weighed that complaint and rejected it
The fee grievance has an answer, and it is forty-nine years old.
Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817 (1977). The holding:
"the fundamental constitutional right of access to the courts requires prison authorities to assist inmates in the preparation and filing of meaningful legal papers by providing prisoners with adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law."
Not permits. Requires. And the Court spelled out that this costs the state money on purpose:
"our decisions have consistently required States to shoulder affirmative obligations to assure all prisoners meaningful access to the courts. It is indisputable that indigent inmates must be provided at state expense with paper and pen to draft legal documents, with notarial services to authenticate them, and with stamps to mail them. States must forgo collection of docket fees otherwise payable to the treasury and expend funds for transcripts."
Read that against Israeloff's complaint about people "claiming the right to file each suit without a fee." It is not a loophole somebody is claiming. The State is constitutionally required to forgo the fee. The thing the firm identifies as the abuse is the thing the Constitution commands.
And the burden on the system argument — the claim that giving free legal help to people without money gums up the courts — is not merely unproven. It was tested on the people who actually run the institutions, and they rejected it. The Court put the numbers in the opinion, from a national survey of state corrections commissioners, prison wardens and treatment directors:
"Nearly 95% of the state corrections commissioners, prison wardens, and treatment directors responding to a national survey supported creation and expansion of prison legal services. ... Almost 85% believed that the programs would not adversely affect discipline or security or increase hostility toward the institution. Rather, over 80% felt legal services provide a safety valve for inmate grievances, reduce inmate power structures and tensions from unresolved legal problems, and contribute to rehabilitation by providing a positive experience with the legal system."
Ninety-five percent of wardens. These are not civil-liberties advocates. These are the people who would have to absorb the extra paperwork, manage the extra grievances, and deal with whatever a lawyered-up population does next. Over eighty percent of them said legal help is a safety valve — that unresolved legal problems are what create pressure, and that giving people a real route through the system makes the institution work better, not worse.
So when a firm tells you that people who file without paying are a burden on the courts, understand the posture. The administrators of the most adversarial institutions in the country were asked that exact question and answered the other way, and the Supreme Court of the United States wrote their answer into the law of access to courts.
The burden is not the person filing. The burden is what builds up when he cannot.
Now look at who the tool actually gets used on, because the firm publishes that too. In March 2023 they posted a piece under their "Success" category — "Sim Israeloff Successful in Motion to Declare Opposing Plaintiffs as Vexatious Litigants." The clients were an international law firm and two of its attorneys. The pro se plaintiffs were homeowners who had lost a foreclosure and then sued their opponent's lawyers.
That is the same shape as Collin County's own list. Crim v. Collin County, Matthews … & Robert J. Davis. Merritt v. Robert J. Davis. Sue the lawyers, and the lawyers obtain an order barring you from filing.
And look at what those homeowners were alleging, in the firm's own reproduction of it:
"The clerk drew up a final judgment document and forged the judge's signature…"
"The Sheriff, District Clerk, and everyone who touched this eviction conspired in falsification of judicial documents."
"…falsifying of the sheriff's deed, tampering with court documents…"
Forged judicial signatures. A falsified sheriff's deed. Court records altered by the clerk. Printed in a law firm's marketing material as the colourful background to a win — and no court ever determined whether any of it was true. The claims against the firm's clients went out on a Rule 91a motion for having "no basis in law or fact," and seven weeks later the people who made the allegations were barred from filing anything new.
That is the product. Not a finding that the accusation was false. An order that the accuser cannot speak in court again.
So: it is corruption, and it does not stop being corruption because it is customary or because the money moved in instruments with names and receipts. Paying does not make it go away — "everyone does it" has never been a defence to anything in Texas law, and a defendant who stood up and said this is the culture here about any other offence would be convicted on his own statement.
And they have not proven it. They have asserted it. There is no finding anywhere in my record that the system works the way they shrug and say it works. There is no order that says you lost because you were not in the arrangement. They would never write that down. They say it sideways, in a tone, and then put the consequence in an order and leave the reason out.
I think it is a scandal and I have put the documents behind that. They have told me, in writing, that I am the problem for noticing.
Team Paxton
That phrase is not mine. It is the term for a judicial alignment, and it is in my filings because it describes a bench-succession pattern.
Ray Wheless left the 417th. The Governor appointed Tom Nowak to the seat. Christine Nowak, a federal magistrate judge, issued the recommendations disposing of the related federal case in the same period. Cynthia Wheless, who entered the 2017 sanctions order against me while I was in Colorado, is Ray Wheless's spouse — and Ray Wheless was himself a co-defendant alongside Paxton in Gallagher v. Paxton, No. 4:18-cv-00575 (E.D. Tex.).
And the financial pattern behind the alignment is a matter of public record. Paxton and Byron Cook voted for appropriations benefiting Enforcement Video, L.P. — WatchGuard — while holding stock in it, an interest Paxton failed to disclose on his 2008 personal financial statement filed with the Texas Ethics Commission. Asked about the state contract that boosted the company, he called it "like a flea on an elephant" and said he "didn't even know we had contracts with the state of Texas." That company was later acquired by Motorola Solutions for roughly $271 million. There are also the El Dorado-Collin L.P. land dealings involving Paxton, District Attorney Greg Willis, and Cornerstone Development.
Even the grand juries have a shape. In the Collin County record the composition irregularities include five members of a single church, a foreman who was their pastor, and a juror who had hosted a Greg Willis fundraiser.
Six grand juries to get one indictment that an appellate court then vacated in full because the conduct was never a crime. A prosecutor who sank her own case for a referral. A designation built on arithmetic the Supreme Court of Texas threw out. An Attorney General who lost the Senate seat after beating a sitting senator by twenty-eight points in his own primary.
They are not good at this. That is the thing nobody says out loud. The machine is frightening if it is pointed at you and you have no money, and it is also, considered as craftsmanship, a joke.
The fraudulent fraud campaign
And this is where I have to correct the way this usually gets told, including by people sympathetic to me. None of it was political.
The story people reach for is hypocrisy: that Paxton defended speech selectively, went to bat for his own side and left me alone. That is far too generous. He was not neglecting me. He and Bob Davis were actively pretending we were a fraud.
That was the characterisation. Not that my religion was unusual, not that my filings were excessive — that the organisation was a fraud. And it was one piece of a much larger program: Ken Paxton built a public career on accusing other people of fraud, in elections, in charities, in business, while he was himself under felony indictment for securities fraud from 2015 until the charges were dismissed in 2025. A fraud campaign run by a man under indictment for fraud. The campaign was the fraud.
That is not a political position. It is a tactic, and in Texas the Attorney General's office is the body with authority over charitable and non-profit organisations — which means the characterisation came from the one office in the state whose word on the subject carries weight.
And while that was going on, Paxton was handed a statute written for precisely the problem it was creating.
House Bill 20, passed in 2021 and codified at Texas Business & Commerce Code chapter 143A, forbids large platforms — more than fifty million monthly users in the United States — from censoring a user based on viewpoint. It requires them to maintain an appeal process for removed content and to respond to complaints within fourteen business days. And it names who may enforce it: a private user, or the Attorney General of Texas.
A right to be heard about a removal, enforceable by his office, with a fourteen-day clock on it.
Consider what was happening to me in that same window. The accounts through which I published my religious teaching, my research, and my account of this conduct were terminated, suspended or restricted — Facebook and YouTube among them. And Paxton's office was not a stranger to my file. He was a defendant in it. I had sued him. His office had already appeared and had already had my allegations against him dismissed as "gossip."
So the Attorney General held enforcement power over a deplatforming statute at the same moment that a Texas resident publishing religious material and accusations against his office was being removed from the platforms. He litigated deplatforming elsewhere. Here he was on the other end of it — not an official who failed to act, but the source of the characterisation that made the removals look justified.
Understand why that distinction decides the legal question rather than just the tone. A platform that removes a religious organisation it believes to be a fraud is not acting on a whim. It is acting on what the State of Texas said about it. The fraud characterisation is the procurement.
I want to be exact about what I am and am not claiming, because the law draws a hard line and I am pleading on the right side of it.
A platform is not a state actor just for moderating. Running a forum open to the public is not a traditional, exclusive public function, and neither heavy regulation nor public money converts a private editorial decision into state action. Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 587 U.S. 802 (2019); Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991 (1982); Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830 (1982). I do not claim that being unhappy with a moderation decision is a constitutional injury, and I am not asking any court to hold that.
What is unlawful is a government using its authority to get a private intermediary to do the suppressing for it. A "system of informal censorship" run through private distributors violates the First Amendment even when the government issues no order and imposes no penalty. Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 71-72 (1963). And the Supreme Court said it again unanimously in 2024: an official may not use regulatory or enforcement power to coerce a private party into punishing disfavoured speech, and a plaintiff states a claim by plausibly alleging coercion rather than persuasion. National Rifle Association v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024).
That is the burden I have taken on myself: to show that a governmental actor procured, induced or coerced a removal — by communication with the platform, by a stated ground that references a governmental request or legal process, or by timing that permits the inference. If the evidence shows only private moderation, I do not press it as a constitutional claim. It stays in the case as damages.
But the technique is old and this country has a file on it. COINTELPRO was not a program of prosecutions. It was a program of arranging for other people to act — employers, landlords, spouses, editors, hosts — so that the injury arrived through a private hand and the government's hand was never in the file. Hobson v. Wilson, 737 F.2d 1 (D.C. Cir. 1984); Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F.2d 600 (7th Cir. 1979).
The publication surfaces of 2026 occupy the position the employer and the landlord occupied in 1968. A letter to your boss then; a terms-of-service action now.
Sources are public: Texas v. Pennsylvania, No. 22O155 (U.S. Dec. 11, 2020); Guardiola v. State, 20 S.W.3d 216; Wooten v. Roach, 377 F. Supp. 3d 652 (E.D. Tex. 2019), aff'd 964 F.3d 395 (5th Cir. 2020); McDonnell v. United States, 579 U.S. 550 (2016); Liljeberg v. Health Servs. Acquisition Corp., 486 U.S. 847 (1988); Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009); Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963); NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024); Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 587 U.S. 802 (2019); Hobson v. Wilson, 737 F.2d 1 (D.C. Cir. 1984); Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F.2d 600 (7th Cir. 1979); Tex. Bus. & Com. Code ch. 143A; Tex. Code Jud. Conduct, Canon 2A; Tex. R. Civ. P. 18b(b)(1); 28 U.S.C. § 455(a); the Texas State Securities Board's 2014 order; the Collin County indictment of 31 July 2015; and contemporaneous reporting in the Dallas Morning News, Star Local Media, WFAA, Courthouse News and the Texas Tribune.
A three-part series.
- The Gang That Can't Shoot Straight — @hathor/the-gang-that-cant-shoot-straight (this post)
- The Machine, and Who It Protects — @hathor/the-machine-and-who-it-protects
- Justified — @hathor/justified
— @hathor, witness · hathor.live · witness.melek.salon