I’ve been ovulating this week. Which means I’ve had a lot of energy and no place to put it. War… What is it good for?
I watched myself interact with the events of this past week through profound states of amusement, disgust, frustration, and sadness. I tried to approach it with humor and good graces but Fort Bend County politics managed to piss me off over and over, day after day. I watched the division exacerbate, racial tensions flair, and the eighth largest and most diverse county once again become the “laughing stock of Texas” as one source put it.
I got so pissy at one point I posted this list to Facebook with the caption:
This week gave me two months of blog topics…
I’ve decided to wrap all those topics into one blog. So buckle up folks and maybe get yourself a drink.
Let’s start at the beginning of all this red v. blue and black v. brown v. white NOISE.
SUNDAY
I turned down an offer of $500 from a political operative to research and write a story. We are red team, they are blue team, go manufacture a talking point for us.
NO!
I don’t take money to write stories, I won’t put political ads on my website, and I will not endorse candidates. My wedding money has run dry and my credit cards are maxed out but I’m not worried. The Fort Bend Falcon is gaining momentum and I have sponsors incoming.
Also… the Bible says the poor will inherit the earth and this bitch is brooooooooooke. That should set me up nicely for heaven on earth.
PROOF:
MONDAY
The Fort Bend County Democrats held a replacement election for Fort Bend County Court of Law No. 3. Click here for my story.
The party held this election because the candidate Paula Maria Miller was deemed ineligible to remain on the ballot. Judicial candidates are required to live in the county where they serve for two years prior to the election. She has filed several mandamus to no avail. Precedent is not on her side and she received a stern response from the First Court of Appeals.
Here is Jennifer Cantu in her own words describing why the FBCDP had to hold an Executive Committee election.
“The election was necessitated by a March 31, 2026 administrative declaration of ineligibility by the chair that Paula M. Miller was ineligible to be the Democratic nominee based on conclusive public records. Since that declaration was made, Miss Miller has filed a Mandamus at the First Court of Appeals which was denied by the three justice panel on April 23, 2026.
The entirety of the opinion is as follows : Relator Paula M. Miller has filed a petition for Writ of Mandamus challenging the Fort Bend County Democratic Party Chairwoman’s ruling that declared relator ineligible for the general election. A relator has a burden to file a complete record showing entitlement to Mandamus relief. According to the Texas Rules of Appellate 52.78, the relayer here has not filed such a record. We denied mandamus relief. We dismissed any pending motions as moot.
Miss Miller then filed a new mandamus petition at the Texas Supreme Court the very same day and followed it with a motion for a stay the next day on April 24, 2026. To date, the Texas Supreme Court has chosen not to issue the requested stay, nor have they ruled on the mandamus application. This means that the declaration of inadmissibility stands, and we move forward pursuant to the Texas Election Code.”
There is a mountain of evidence proving Miller did not live in Fort Bend but to me the most damning is that she voted in the November 2024 election in Harris County. I don’t know about you but I want my judges to understand the law so they can interpret it fairly so I don’t see how this issue has turned into one of race but GUESS WHAT EVERYBODY that’s what happened on Monday night.
Miller posted there would be a press conference before the event. It never happened. There were rumors Dr. Candace Matthews would be there. But we waited for an hour to no avail. Maybe Matthews was busy with the accusations her and Aubrey Taylor spent the week lobbing at each other. Or maybe it was just a rumor.
As we waited for the press conference to begin. I noticed that all the major players on Miller’s side kept getting on their phones to someone not in the room. Then several went live on social media. They claimed the Fort Bend County Democratic Party and specifically Chairwoman Jennifer Cantu were disenfranchising voters and barring equal representation.
The frequency in the room heightened as we approached the election meeting. A man came out and told everyone that precinct chairs could come in first to fill out paperwork and gave a reminder that only precinct chairs would be able to ballot “vote.” Cynthia Bennet (a precinct chair and chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats Ft. Bend Chapter) misheard the man and immediately began calling foul. Some calmer heads in her group prevailed and talked her down but it took time, finally I said louder than I intended, “My god woman!”
This isn’t the first or second time I’ve been in a room with Ms. Bennet causing a scene and I and my hormones were over it. But I do regret inserting myself into the story… Just kidding!
Before the vote there was an invocation by Birdie Kelley (a longtime staffer for Texas Senator Boris Miles) in which she reminded God and everyone that “the enemy was not in this room.”
God may have heard it but I’m not sure about everyone else.
After Ken McKee nominated Judge Juli Mathew and Cynthia Bennet nominated Judge O’Neil Williams, the nominees were given two minutes to speak.
Neither of the candidates wanted to go first so a coin was flipped.
Judge O’Neil Williams got up and gave a speech that I and many others found to be rather incoherent. I asked around ten precinct chairs what they thought of the speech. Many said they were confused. Because Williams chose to use the word they instead of naming parties in his speech, it was hard to tell who he was referencing and hard to follow which they was which from each sentence. This assessment came from some chairs who voted for him. I fear someone had been in his ear with information that translated to a very divisive speech based on racial tensions that he did not explicitly state and not on why he would be the better candidate. A precinct chair with a legal background said he has made excellent rulings perhaps better than Mathew in some respects but this did not come through on Monday night.
I said to myself after Williams concluded, “We are so broken.”
Because we are. Here is some proof.
Social media racial claims:
Here members of the red team jump in with some straight up inaccurate information. Cannata is a Justice of the Peace, a completely different court.
And no surprise, red team members have opinions on blue team matters.
Red team members and Miller supporters have been targeting Cantu for her actions to legally fill the candidacy but fail to understand she does not operate in a vacuum. The party has the TDP and its lawyers on speed dial. The FBCDP is full of lawyers, many, many, many lawyers. They are legally protecting the party so that there is a member of the blue team on the ballot in November.
Who knows, maybe Miller will file something successfully (before the 84 day deadline ahead of the November election) that proves she can remain on the ballot but she has not yet. She is resolute that she is the blue team nominee.
My question, maybe it is biased, lawyers call me and tell me why I am wrong, but shouldn’t judicial candidates be able to read the fine print? Shouldn’t they be able to file legal documents that aren’t deemed, AI-fabricated hallucinations, by Appellate Court Justices?
TUESDAY
Two days before this week’s infamous Commissioners Court I found myself in room with all of the commissioners, where they posed for pictures with each other and engineering firm sponsors who hosted the event.
Yay! Red and blue team together!
I was quite excited to be in this particular room because I’ve been researching for a story on engineering and developer money in our local politics. I’ve been watching the social media conversation of those who live in Needville and Simonton and Fulshear and the rural parts of our county as the development has creeped and then flooded in. I’ve watched as local red team members have lambasted blue team Commissioner McCoy for the donations he’s received from engineering firms without any sense of irony all while failing to mention the same donations to the war chests of red team Commissioners Morales and Meyers. They all take it. Lots of it. Morales probably the most.
When I moved from Annapolis to Katy in 2015 my Firethorne neighborhood was the edge of development. Across the road was a field and cows and hot air balloons. Now the concrete goes past Fulshear. I’ve been looking for some land to grow hemp (think cellulose not psychedelics… I want to print the Fort Bend Falcon on hemp paper and then I want to make American-made clothing in American-made mills. Hemp is a soil revitalizer and takes way less water than cotton, it can also make bio-degradable plastic and breathable concrete and loads of other things but its utilization has been stymied by draconian, reefer-madness fear mongering. That’s a blog topic for another day. Some good news on the subject is Texas has recently allowed hemp trials to begin) and I’d like that land to be in Fort Bend County but I’m having a hard time figuring out what is going to be covered in concrete and chain stores in the next few years.
Between the Fort Bend Regional Partnership’s Fort Bend 2050 report and the Commissioner’s Report, I got a clearer (and muddier, eh eh, thats a drainage joke) picture of what the development will look like. I guess naive me thought there was a single vision leading all of this development but it’s mostly just the regional partnerships and chambers and developers and engineers (the money) who are deciding what goes where.
Commissioner Grady Prestage and Commissioner Vincent Morales both began the conversation by telling the banquet hall that they were here to facilitate growth but not necessarily lead it. “We got out of the way,” said Prestage. He also joked that the if the attendees, “weren’t a developer they were related to a developer.”
Morales who rarely speaks during Commissioners Court had loads to say to his donor base. He told the story of a woman in Weston Lakes who was complaining she didn’t want a major roadway coming in from Houston, he told the woman, “In a few years, you’ll be begging for relief.”
The Houston Chronicle this month published an article, Fort Bend County infrastructure may not be able to handle area growth, report shows.
Every new neighborhood requires roads, drainage, water lines, sheriff’s deputies, parks, libraries and emergency services. Those costs don’t disappear simply because a developer builds the homes. They become the responsibility of taxpayers for decades after the ribbon cutting.
And there is no sign the pace is slowing.
Austin Point alone spans roughly 4,700 acres and is expected to house about 50,000 residents. Wild Oak near Needville will bring hundreds of new homes to what has historically been a rural area. Emberly continues expanding southwest of Rosenberg. Another 370-acre Rosenberg development will add approximately 1,100 homes. The George, a 1,500-acre master-planned community, is also moving forward near FM 2977.
Fort Bend cannot sustain its growth by continuing to build houses.
At the same time local officials are warning that infrastructure is struggling to keep pace, the Republican Party at its convention this month in Houston, voted for its Top 8 Legislative Goals and their third highest priority is to Completely Eliminate All Property Tax, the primary source of revenue counties use to build and maintain roads, drainage systems, parks and other public infrastructure. In Fort Bend County somewhere between 75 and 82 percent of the county’s tax revenue comes from our property taxes.
Those two conversations are on a collision course.
Commissioner Andy Meyers wants Austin to intervene. He argues that counties need more flexibility from the Texas Legislature to raise revenue and finance infrastructure projects because state-imposed caps limit their ability to respond to local needs. Whether lawmakers in Austin are willing to grant counties that flexibility, while many are simultaneously advocating for lower property taxes, may ultimately determine what Fort Bend looks like twenty five years from now.
2 million people and aging or inadequate infrastructure sounds like a nightmare to me. Especially when we’ve learned all the concrete causes weather patterns to sit on top of us, and Katy and surrounding areas are sinking,
If the county keeps adding tens of thousands of homes without creating enough commercial tax base or new funding mechanisms, the math eventually stops working.
Commissioner Morales says Fort Bend has lost out to other regions because we have not been ready for industry. “Businesses cannot wait a long term to open up. We’ve lost businesses here in Fort Bend County because we didn’t have the infrastructure in place. I’m talking about tens of thousands of jobs. So, we’ve got to change the way we do business, and our legislators have to help us do it.”
Commissioner Meyers and Commissioner Dexter McCoy emphasized that Fort Bend is experiencing explosive growth while existing infrastructure, particularly drainage, is already under strain.
Commissioner McCoy says the flatness of the county complicates the drainage needed. “We’re a flat county, and so how the heck can we get water to move around? How do we make sure that we’re making plans that folks live in the older communities as well as those who are coming to our county actually are protected? We have over eight billion dollars worth of property value behind some of our levees along the Brazos River.”
McCoy also brought up the Brazos River and its natural erosion process and credited Meyers (Wunderbar! blue team recognizes red team leadership) for funds that he brought in to fix some of the issues. “There’s over a billion dollars worth of projects needed to protect property from the erosion. We were able to get nearly sixty million dollars from HJAC to start that process and Commissioner Meyers was critical to making that happen.”
McCoy says Commissioners Court has allocated funds to start a county strategic plan. “We are kicking that off so that we actually have a roadmap for where we’re going. I am glad that the timing of Fort Bend 2050 worked out perfectly because now we can take what the greater community has said they want to see and how will what the county’s role in responding to that is going to be critical.”
My Key Takeaways
The 59 corridor will see some of the greatest growth in the county in coming years. McCoy says he’d like to see biomedical research laboratories and expanded healthcare access go into that region. This was the only specific industry idea I heard.
Pretty sure they’ll fill up the rest with housing and strip malls.
The agriculture section of the Fort Bend 2050 plan is a paragraph. Y’all. I cannot.
The Strategic Blueprint for the Region’s Future is a lot of data and a loose conglomerate of associations but no one is actually helming this ship. Especially not the commissioners, by their own admission.
The whole time I was in the event I kept thinking about the Frank Zappa quote: Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex. I’m not saying the chambers and partnerships and developers are the military-industrial complex but I couldn’t help but make a slight comparison. While the red and blue teams battle it out in commissioners court over AI policies and proclamations, the developers are going to decide what actually happens to every last inch of the county and the amount of money they give to Wong or McCoy or Jones or Mathew or Meyers or Morales or Aranda or Prestage will determine what happens to the county in the long run.
More concrete everyone?
THURSDAY
Thursday morning as I got ready for Commissioners Court I had a pit in my stomach. I called a source. They had thrown up six times the night before.
We were nervous for Fort Bend County.
I let them go and called another source and we talked through all of the scenarios that could play out.
There was a long silence after I asked, “Will comms court just devolve into a shouting match again?”
And then something funny happened, my brain switched into the weirdest mode. I started thinking about all of the major players as nervous preteens. I looked at myself in the mirror as I put my heels on and felt like a twelve year old girl who was playing dress up.
I got to the Historic Courthouse (BTW who picked the paint colors in there?!) early and had to go upstairs to use the restroom while the one downstairs was being cleaned. On my way back down the stairs as I tried not to let my heels click too loudly, I watched Wong and Nehls and Eberly and Lee walk into the building and I saw them all like the boys at my private high school wearing suits and ties.
The rest of the day went like that too.
I leaned in to listen to a lawyer and watched his eye twitch as he explained a possible legal outcome to me.
I listened in the first press conference to a voice break that doesn’t usually ever break.
I watched a commissioner talk with a sadness I’ve never heard in his voice before.
I looked at the press corps and thought of us all as yearbook reporters.
I watched an officer sigh deeply before taking signs away from protestors.
We were all just kids. Kids playing grown ups. Kids playing red team and blue team. Everyone doing what they think is best, based on the instruction, misinformation, and programming we’ve received. Claiming the same precedent but finding different outcomes. Not wanting to be there. Wanting it to be over.
So very aware of the spectacle of it all.
Everyone in every room of that courthouse thought they are doing the right thing, that they are on the right team. Everybody thinks they are the good guy. Everyone believes they are standing up for what is right and the other team is wrong.
We even still call each other names.
The red team routinely calls Dexter a cry baby on the Falcon’s Facebook posts.
One blue team member routinely calls the red team members magats.
The rhetoric is dehumanizing. It is juvenile.
It is partisan and often racist and not always in the ways you expect. Here’s looking at you Talarico.
I had had enough after listening to Victor Perez’ public comment. I got up and left Commissioners Court. I was overstimulated and so over this gross game we were all playing.
Let me break down his speech for you. Three minutes of questioning the summer intern program. Oh he said it in a nice enough manner. But what he really wanted to say was there are too many black kids in the program, they get paid too much, and we are pretty sure they are all related to the black county employees.
I went to my car (Greta the Jetta) to eat my protein bar and drink some water and wish I had a cigarette.
I later heard that seven blue team members got up and spoke on an agenda item related to a $2600 laptop purchase associated with the red team. Seven times three is TWENTY ONE MINUTES.
FORT BEND COUNTY, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE WE DOING?
Do y’all want to do another 250 years of this red team v. blue team nonsense? I sure as hell don’t.
The projection, the vitriol, the name calling, we can do better. I believe we are capable of more and so my frustration is only temporary. I have too much hope for our future to stay pissy at us for too long.
In his first inaugural address, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.”
So no Congressman Gill, you beautiful divider, I’m not proud of what we are now. Because I do love this country, not because I don’t. I have hope for what we can become. I also have compassion for our existence in a system built to divide us.
We have been so conditioned to play team sports to see the other side as the enemy, we forget that we are the UNITED States of America. That we are here to create a MORE PERFECT UNION.
We are so entrenched in the team play we’ve lost sight of the goal.
We are so busy keeping up with the Joneses, working too many hours, numbing our generational trauma, crawling out of trenches of systemic racism, and fighting a misinformation war for the heart of soul of America.
We aren’t having enough sex, we aren’t sitting in silence, we aren’t eating foods that nourish us, we aren’t convening with nature. We are in our cars way too much. We are reading bad news way too much. We on the internet ENTIRELY way too much. And we are not better for it.
I’m guilty of it all too, of course. I’ve sensationalized headlines in a murder trial for clicks.
I laughed way too hard when someone called Mayes Middleton a “pencil-necked, nepo baby.”
And when Tamara McFarlane started calling me “the left-wing propaganda arm of the Fort Bend County Democrats” and began tying me to “porn-for-books Eliz Markowitz” in social media posts. I text her I didn’t even like Eliz. Which isn’t true, but my ego got in the way because I’ve been in rooms with Eliz for five years and I’ve had to reintroduce myself EVERY SINGLE TIME because she’s failed to remember me.
I apologize for the part I’ve played in this silly game we call politics.
I want to be proud of myself. And I want you to be proud of me too. I want you to be proud of your actions and actions of your leaders. And our county. And our state. And our country. And our planet.
We are a highly educated and beautifully diverse county that could be leading Texas and the United States in EVERYTHING. We could be showcasing our melting pot of excellence to the world. Instead we are the problem child. Making the news for our corruption and our scandal and our drama.
Carl Jung once wrote, “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
Last night under the full moon, I watched the wind blow through the American flag in my front yard and I thought about the next 250 years. I thought about my step children and the babies that I am going to have.
I made a promise to do better to the strawberry moon, traditionally linked to the start of summer and abundance and often tied to emotional healing and a reflection of goals. Perfect timing really.
Twenty years ago I told a boy I wanted to be the President’s wife (I was obsessed with Nancy Reagan AKA the throat goat at the time.) I told him I wanted to have sons named John and James (the two most common names of presidents) and I wanted to host state dinners and do cute little stump speeches. He wasn’t having any of that rely on a man to get where you want to go stuff.
He told me I needed to run for Governor of Texas.
So I’ve spent twenty years thinking about how I would lead, how I would talk, how I would dress, how I would unite people instead of dividing them. I have failed again and again. I have let ego and prejudice and anger take root. But I also course correct again and again.
That boy is a man now and he loves me and we’ve never even met in person. I only care about what he thinks and I have no problem sharing my darkness if it going create light. I know I’m going to be the Governor of the Lonestar State in 2031 and I’m bringing the best and brightest of Fort Bend with me to Austin and that means I’m bringing the red team and the blue team with me. I know our diversity can strengthen instead of divide us. I know these are the darkest days before the dawn.
And I know it’s high time we turn this ship around.
But to do so means we have to go inside ourselves and fix our darkness so we can be the best people we can be to represent the people who need our help. We are a microcosm of the United States and the world and we should be leading where we are leaking.
We’ve played politics for so long we stopped caring about the high ground. We’ll use the race card. We’ll use the victim mindset. We’ll use fake slates and stupid electioneering tactics that leads to fist fights in polling place parking lots.
So I ask you Fort Bend? How do we do this better? Can you take the time to look inward and address your shadow? Then come out and do politics in a different way without the vitriol and the name calling and the sensationalizing? Can you be a light so bright it cannot be ignored?
This poem was politicized because ObAmA but it has been true North for me since I heard it read on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
It isn’t our past that should make us proud. It is our future. So, Fort Bend, here’s to the next 250 years.
All my love,
All my light,
All my best,
Jess
When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.
But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain.
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the West.
We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked South.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Amanda Gorman