Tex's Place

The Strange Connection Between Love, Suffering, and Human Greatness By SEAN BERUBE The Divine Comedy has a wild origin story. Dante’s legendary epic poem of an otherworldly descent through Heaven, Hell and Purgatory — often lauded as the greatest work of artistic genius ever penned — was conceived of in the least likely of places. Indeed, Dante’s genius wasn’t born in the ivory tower of the lecture hall or local church seminary, rather it takes root in adolescent love and despair. Dante was a man of strong passions, deep loves, and deep griefs. His full story is one of heartbreak, grief, exile, homelessness, and despair. He lived in the darkest of days in Italian history, in which the wartorn in-fighting deprived him of everything and cast him off into 20 years of wandering in the wilderness. And even worse, he would live to see his beloved die when he barely entered adulthood. And it was precisely here, as a homeless exile of heartbroken grief, that Dante penned down The ...

By Hayden Daniel The removal of the statues has never been about providing an ‘accurate’ view of history. It’s all about power. Those who wish to systematically dismantle Southern, and ultimately American, heritage scored another victory on Aug. 28 in the state of Virginia. At the behest of the Democrat-controlled state legislature, workers removed the statues of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Gov. William “Extra Billy” Smith, and Dr. Hunter H. McGuire, all of whom served the Confederacy during the Civil War, from Capitol Square in Richmond. This is a familiar story for those who care about our country’s history. Over the last decade, statues of Confederates, and some of Founding Fathers , have been removed all across the country. Virginia, the Civil War mecca, the focal point of some of the most consequential and dramatic events of that conflict, has been hit the worst. The twin tumors of Richmond and the D.C. suburbs have seen to the utter devastation of the Old Dominion’s C...

By Teri Christoph A plane carrying Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin and other top DHS officials was forced to make an emergency landing Wednesday afternoon after an engine failure on the Coast Guard-operated aircraft. An independent newsfeed that covers the Washington, D.C., area posted shortly before 2:00 PM that a Coast Guard C-37A (call sign C101) lost its right engine while in flight and was forced to make the emergency landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, located just across the border from D.C., in Virginia. All 14 souls aboard the aircraft were reported to be safe. UPDATE: A Coast Guard jet carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and other top DHS officials made an emergency landing Wednesday afternoon outside Washington, D.C., after one of its engines failed. pic.twitter.com/mHQDv09xom — The DC MD VA Live (@TheDMVLive) September 2, 2026 A short time later, Mullin himself posted on X and confirmed that he was...

By Ari Hoffman The Trump administration filed a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit Tuesday against Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools (KCKPS), accusing the district of facilitating secret gender transitions for children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, joined by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, alleges that KCKPS violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) through internal guidelines governing transgender and gender non-conforming students. Justice Department Sues Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools to Stop Secret Gender Transitions “Parental rights are paramount in the operation of America’s public schools, and Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools does not know children better than their own parents,” said… pic.twitter.com/xgj8PnhnIG — DOJ Civil Rights Division (@CivilRights) September 1, 2026 According to the complaint , the distr...

By Teri Christoph Bowe Bergdahl, the Army soldier who deserted his post in Afghanistan, wound up in the hands of the Taliban, and was later brought home in a disastrous prisoner swap orchestrated by President Obama, just got some very bad news indeed from a federal appeals court. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that the federal judge who vacated Bergdahl's 2017 court-martial conviction three years ago never had the authority to do so. In other words, what was once seen as a huge legal victory for Bergdahl has now gone up in smoke. The appeals court vacated the lower court's ruling and ordered Bergdahl's case dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, which effectively restores his 2017 military conviction and sentence. https://t.co/2NiQB66CFP — Brett Shumate (@AAGShumate) September 2, 2026 Bergdahl was serving with the Army in Afghanistan in June 2009 when he made the choice to walk away from his post ...

By Rusty Weiss House Democrats spent Tuesday night engaging in a dramatic circular firing squad after two of their own saved Speaker Mike Johnson from an embarrassing floor defeat and cleared the way for a Republican resolution denouncing socialism. As RedState's Ben Smith reported Tuesday , Reps. Jared Golden (ME-02) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) crossed party lines on a razor-thin procedural rule, offsetting five GOP hardliners and passing it 210-208. That rule unlocked a package that included a vote to condemn socialism “in all its forms,” naming the Democratic Socialists of America, and the House later adopted the resolution 220-192. Repeating that — 192 Democrats voted against a resolution denouncing socialism . It's difficult to explain how shocking this move is politically. It is almost unheard of for minority-party members to vote for the majority’s rule — the procedural measure that sets the House floor agenda — which is why Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez’s ye...

By Andrea Margolis Archaeologists have completed an excavation beneath one of Christianity's holiest sites, revealing a fuller picture of the ancient landscape where Jesus Christ was crucified and buried and providing support for scripture — something an early Christianity expert said he found very compelling.  Francesca Stasolla, an archaeology professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, led the excavation in 2025, which focused on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The findings were recently published in Liber Annuus, the archaeological journal of Jerusalem's Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, in a 98-page preliminary report on the campaign. At the time, Stasolla confirmed that her team had uncovered ancient seeds and pollen in layers dating between the site's use as a quarry and its later Roman occupation. The evidence is consistent with John 19:41 in the New Testament: "Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the ...

By Stella Morabito Democrats might have a messaging problem, but they also have a ground game to render rural America irrelevant in elections. Democrat elites despise rural voters. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels paved the way for their contempt by writing in The Communist Manifesto that the migration from small communities to large urban centers has “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” Nearly 200 years later, it seems there is a migration in reverse, with elites invading the hinterlands to “rescue” rural folk from their continued idiocy. One case in point is the recent episode at Wydaho Roasters, a coffee shop in deep-red Idaho , owned by a pro-abortion couple from deep-blue St. Paul, Minnesota , Jim and Mary Sheehan. Jim Sheehan has said his coffee house welcomes everyone. But in mid-August, when a pro-life group met there to quietly discuss how to defeat Idaho’s Proposition 1 , a referendum that would allow abortions up to 24 weeks ges...