Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
“For those who have spent time in and around rural Texas today, barbed wire is an often overlooked fact of life. Learning to navigate around it, and getting nicked by it, is part of growing up,” writes author David Griscom in his new book The Myth of Red Texas.
“But when the wire first came to Texas, it was so controversial that it led to what’s called the Fence Cutter Wars: conflicts mainly between the big ranches and rag-tag associations of the dispossessed who opposed the privatization of the land on principle.”
In his book, Griscom recounts neglected stories of grassroots defiance in the face of “arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations,” to quote from the Farmers’ Alliance’s 1886 platform, drafted in rural North Texas. Cattle drivers on strike for higher wages, sawmill workers organizing interracial unions to take on company towns, food cooperatives running an end-around on Big Agriculture and socialist orators packing schoolhouses, churches and convention halls are chapters in Texas’ past all but left out of the romantic portrayals of the Wild West handed down to us in both Hollywood movies and history textbooks.
The Nueces Massacre, the Green Corn Rebellion, the Pecan Shellers Strike and the Grabow Massacre each deserve films of their own, though the Wikipedia entries alone make for dramatic reading. And if, on some random night of bar trivia, your team were asked to name the second-largest political party in Texas from 1912 to 1914, would you correctly guess the Texas Socialist Party?
In contrast with the stereotype of the ruggedly individualistic cowboy loner, Griscom offers us a more statistically representative figure: the neighborly Texan determined to protect their community from rich land-grabbers, polluters and financial speculators. Because revisionist Westerns notwithstanding, gunslinger duels were far rarer than the brave acts of solidarity that marked the prairie populism of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Barbed wire can take many forms.
The Trump administration’s One Bill To Rule Them All, for example, may soon stick those seeking Medicare and Medicaid coverage with extra paperwork — a tangle of bureaucratic redtape the Congressional Budget Office projected will add 15 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured by 2034.
And no constituency stands to fall faster and nastier than the fifth of our fellow citizens who live in rural America, millions of Texans among them.
“Rural health in the United States is in crisis,” the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) declared in January. “Decades of hospital closures, clinician shortages and losses of essential services have left millions of people without reliable access to care and with worsened health outcomes.”
At least 14 rural hospitals in Texas have closed their doors since 2015, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform, and 83 of the remaining 154 are at risk of near-term closure.
Showing the limitations of those still operating, some 60% of Texas’ rural hospitals no longer deliver babies or provide obstetric services, reports the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals.
The nearly $1 trillion in recent cuts to federal healthcare provisions are a bitter anti-populist pill to swallow. Although the Rural Health Transformation Program passed last year to sweeten the bad taste, the NEJM concluded that “the $50 billion in funding is a one-time allocation and will be insufficient to fill the gaps.”
Texas received a mere $281 million of that sum. And the Kaiser Family Foundation predicts that rural Medicaid spending could plummet by $137 billion over 10 years, or $87 billion more than is appropriated for the federal program.
In what researcher Dr. Noam Ross described as “a brutal year” at the National Institutes of Health, Trump’s wrecking crew have “terminated or suspended funding for over 5,800 grants” — more than $10 billion worth of investment in potentially life-saving medical advances. The single-week cost incurred from bombing Iran comes to roughly $11 billion, for reference.
Ross characterized the cuts as part of an “ideological purge” of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs which disproportionately benefit “people from rural populations and disadvantaged economic situations.” Doctors “lost their grants whether they were studying health equity or brain cancer,” he said, causing “an enormous disruption of the research enterprise in the U.S.” and “a real demonstration that the administration is willing to break the promises that are required to do scientific research here.”
Hurting the heartland
In the longest-ever State of the Union speech last month, Sweet Potato Hitler found five minutes to demand a blanket ban on gender-affirming care, but didn’t utter the word “rural” once, much less address the slow-motion trainwreck facing rural hospitals.
“They’re cutting the healthcare infrastructure of the very people who attend Trump’s rallies,” political analyst Jeff Waldorf said of the irony on his February podcast. MAGA voters “bought into a culture war,” he explained, “and are now paying for it with their own life expectancy.”
To his point, rural Americans already live a full three years less on average than their urban compatriots, and an online expose from Vox last year found that cancer care in particular has been slashed at an alarming clip. Roughly half of Texas hospitals that once provided chemotherapy discontinued the service between 2014 and 2022, Vox reported.
And that’s just healthcare. Last year DOGE’s chainsaw chewed through the Rural Development Office, charged with improving rural quality of life. The agency has lost a third of its staff since January 2025, and more than $700 million in funding cuts now hamper single-family housing programs, disaster assistance and ruralsmall-business loans.
In September, The Intercept reported that the nation’s most-rural counties tallied firearm death rates 25% higher than those in the most-urban counties over recent decades.
“That means the archetypal ‘American heartland’ — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles,” the story notes. That’s primarily due to suicides, but domestic violence is a factor as well, “and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts and school classrooms in conservative communities.”
“No corner of the country is spared,” the article concluded, “but red America is bleeding most.”
You won’t get that kind of investigative journalism from the red-baiters on AM talk radio, an omnipresent noise in rural Texas, large swaths of which still lack high-speed internet.
“It’s not a coincidence that the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. coincides with major layoffs in newsrooms around the country,” as reformed finance attorney turned anti-ICE activist Rachel Cohen connected the dots recently.
To her point, how many rural Texans do you wager heard about the bipartisan letter penned by former Ag Department administrators and farm advocates that warned of “a widespread collapse of American agriculture” thanks to tariff chaos, bankruptcies and the mass deportation of migrants?
And who will the increasingly severe droughts, wildfires and floods exacerbated by fossil fuel emissions hit hardest, if not rural America?
Clayton Tucker, a fifth generation Texan rancher, is running for Ag Commissioner on a platform of regulating microplastics and forever chemicals, busting up price-gouging monopolies, and halting the reckless data center gold rush.
“Data centers, including those for AI, are coming to mess with Texas,” his campaign website states. “With them will come higher water and power bills, dry water wells, and no real jobs.” As if channeling the barnburner speeches from Griscom’s history of populism, Tucker proclaimed, “We need an Agriculture Commissioner who will put Texans first, not Wall Street or Big Tech.”
Misdirection at the top
Even more pathetic, perhaps, is that Gov. Greg Abbott refuses to tout what’s gone right in rural Texas, such as the Biden-era industrial policy that helped add 75% more utility-scale battery storage to our electric grid. Almost one-third of all electricity generated in Texas is from renewables, mostly wind and solar power — a dirty little secret that’s staving off future blackouts. Why not build on this success openly instead of regressing into “Drill Baby Drill” backwardness?
During the Obama administration, Abbott stoked conspiracist fears about FEMA setting up secret detention camps, which ended up being makeshift tent cities part of routine anti-terrorism drills. So, why are Texas’ fiscal hawks and proponents of limited government totally fine with Trump opening actual mega-detention camps using ICE’s bloated $85 billion budget? Hundreds of detainees at so-called Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, for instance, mysteriously disappeared from ICE’s databases, according to Project Censored.
Despite Abbott’s normalization of extremism and cruelty, his campaign dumped $1.3 million on airtime targeting rural voters before the March 3 primary to warn them about “radical Democrats.”
The governor, who’s about as rural as salsa made in New York City, has amassed a war chest exceeding $100 million. As his likely challenger come November, Texas State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a staunch opponent of private school vouchers and voter suppression, remarked of the ad buy, “It looks like a governor who’s not very confident with his base.”
From her lips to Red Texas’ ears.
“I remember being in church on Sunday, and my pastor said, ‘You know your faith has been hijacked when suddenly your God hates all the same people that you do,’” Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic governor, recently told PBS NewsHour.
During that same interview, Beshear said 35 rural hospitals in his own state may soon close and “about 100,000 people are going to lose their SNAP benefits.”
One wonders if modern-day Republicans would harangue Jesus Christ himself for encouraging welfare dependency when he insisted, over his disciples’ objections, on feeding the multitude.
In The Myth of Red Texas, Griscom convincingly documents generations of Lone Star State residents who “rose to fight for a better future,” from the People’s Party to the Brotherhood of Timber Workers. While “each of these movements was brutally put down, in their collapse, another emerged armed with the lessons ofthe past.”
One moral from cowboy movies has stayed with me in this regard: you always double-back for a friend. We ought not abide those who, ignoring radical common sense, would take the tenacity, resilience and communitarian ethic of rural Americans for granted.
That is, if we ever hope to escape the age of barbed wire.
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