The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guests: Kevin Roberts & Winsome Earle-Sears | 10/14/25

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

We are in a global competition with China, and Glenn warns that if we lose this AI/rare-earth minerals race, America will be in big trouble. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears (R) joins to discuss the close race and why she is the best fit to lead the state of Virginia. Houston Chronicle investigative reporter Eric Dexheimer joins to expose how an out-of-towner is plotting the complete takeover of a county in Texas, which prompted a lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. Today, really important program, the coming battle over rare earth minerals with China. This sounds boring as snot, but it's really not. I tie four or five stories together that nobody is really talking about,

and is probably the most important conversation we can have today. Also, Winsome Sears is joining us. She is running for governor in Virginia. This race changes everything in Virginia, and she's about two points behind the Democrat in Virginia. I want you to hear from her. Also, Eric Dexheimer. Eric is a reporter with the Houston Chronicle,

and he's talking about a story I had not heard about until a couple of days ago, something we really, really weird is happening in West Texas. West Texas is like, you know, Alaska, except without the snow. It's like living on the moon with, if the moon were a lot closer to the sun. And yet there are these people that are city slickers that are moving in because they're getting free housing and $5,000 a month from a some sort of millionaire or billionaire in Indiana. He wants to change the makeup of the town and change, you know, the sheriff and the mayor and the city council and everything else. Why is the question?

We have a reporter on that. And it's incredible story all on today's podcast. First, let me tell you about my Patriot Supply. Every year, winter reminds us that our comfort is incredibly fragile, one bad storm, one power outage. And you're going to learn really fast that heat isn't just about cozy. It's about survival. That's why the winter prep special from My Patriot Supply exists. Turn to, you know, hope we're ready to, we're ready.

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Hello, America. You know we've been fighting every single day. We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you. We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it. But to keep this fight going, we need you. Right now, would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast. Give us five stars and lead a comment because every single review helps us break through Big Tech's algorithm to reach more Americans who need to hear the truth. This isn't a podcast. This is a movement and you're part of it, a big part of it. So if you believe in what we're doing, you want more people to wake up, help us push this podcast to the top. Rate, review, share. Together, we'll make a difference. And thanks for standing with us. Now let's get to work.

Would it take him pulling the trigger? Is that what would do it? And then you would say he needs to get out of the race, Abigail? You have nothing to say? Abigail. What if he said it about your two children, your three children? Is that when you would say he should get out of the race, Abigail? Governor.

Ms. Earl Sears. I mean, we're talking about murder. We're talking about someone's life being taken from them. Have you nothing to say about that? Are you not going to address it? Really, you can't go any further. You're a governor. You're supposed to stand up for all the people.

Are you saying political murder is all right? Have some political courage. What you have done is you are taking political calculations about your future as governor. Well, as governor, you have to make hard choices. And that means telling Jay Jones to leave the race. It is one of the most powerful moments I've ever seen in any debate. And I think we've seen some powerful moments in debates recently. Winsom Earl Sears is with us now.

Winsom, when she refused to even look at you, was it your guess she would do that? Or did you actually think she would respond? Because I was dumbfounded by her response. No, it occurred to me that she was, I thought she was, being cowardice, but then it occurred to me, no. She's being calculating and cunning, which is worse, because when you look it up, a calculating and cunning politician is one who uses methodologies to turn people against them. They're manipulators, and they're like three, four steps ahead of you.

But then, you know, she has former CIA training, and it also says that they show no emotion. And that's who she is. At least if you're a coward, at some point, you're going to get a backbone, And you're going to say to yourself, my God, I've got to do the right thing. But I never saw that in her. She was cold and she was smirking so much. And then, you know, she just adjusted herself. And I'm thinking, this woman can't pick up or she doesn't care about us. So what was her calculation on that?

How is she planning on spinning that? Well, because she's thinking, well, if I tell him to get out of the race, then these folks are going to be angry with me. And if I tell him to stay in the race, then these folks are going to be angry with me. And I didn't, you know, I have planned my life. If you look at her life, she's lived a very careful, a very curated life, a very calculating life. And you can see that she, you know, now I've got to do this and then I've got to do this and then I've got to do this. And then I've got to do, I don't know very many people will live that way. I mean, we're all real people around here and things happen to us, but they never seem to happen to her.

She always seems to, you know, just work her way. And I'm thinking, my God, this is, this is something else. she doesn't have the right common sense ideas. And when she knows what the right thing to do, she doesn't take those hits. And I'm telling you, if you're running to be governor, you've got to have a backbone. But she's more of a calculating cunning person. That's usually what we get now from the Uber left is calculation. And they won't tell you who they are until they start enacting until they have power.

When she was asked about the question about boys being in girl sports, it's another one. She didn't give a yes or no. Did she? No, she didn't. She just looked and stared off into spaces if, you know, I got this. I'm over this. I'm above this. You know, we don't elect our politicians from above us. We elect them from among us, and you need to come back and talk to me, you know, and ask me in my opinion. I want to know, do you know me? Do you see me? Do you hear me? Do you want to hear from me? I didn't leave politics for 20 years and come back to be neely-mouthed. That's not what we want.

And that's what she is. She also wants to make Virginia a sanctuary state on day one, and she doesn't seem to understand the benefit of local police working with the federal government and federal police. Can you explain this? Oh, she does. But you see, they're trying to change things and what they do. So she and people like her in politics, they divide the people, they put in policies that, you know, have us at each other's throats so then they can say, see, this is why you need us and they, you know, ride in like the cavalry to come help us.

We don't need that because if she had stopped the open borders, fentanyl wouldn't have flowed through and killed five Virginians every week. if she had kept the borders closed, then we wouldn't have had the Chinese communist gangs. We wouldn't have MS-13 and Trandaragua and all those people come through. We wouldn't be now seeing ICE, you know, having to do what they're doing to get those who are criminally illegal gone.

And so this is their doing. And now they're saying, oh, look how bad ice is. Do you see what they're doing? But you did it. You started it. And now you're on the other side. I'm telling you, this is cunning stuff.

You really got to, you know, think about this hard. There is, Stu, what was the name of that Islamic organization that she was a part of? Right after September 11th, she was very, very proud of being part of this. And I don't know if you know. Yeah, the ISA. Yeah, what was the school? ISA school. And I don't know if you're aware of her ties to, deep ties to Islamists in Virginia.

No, I'm not aware, but see, that's the other thing. You know, she's part of a group that, well, there are five schools here who will not protect our girls from the men coming into the bathrooms, from the men standing full front nude in the locker rooms with girls. And when we talk about these things, they try to make us look like we're the people who don't have any sense. when even when I ask her about her own children you know Abigail what if it's your child who comes and she's crying what are you going to do then silence nothing nothing just cold just cold who is this woman who wants to be our governor here in

Virginia we can't have her she's going to destroy our business you know we've created so many jobs here over 250,000 job openings now 276,000 people we put back to work we've put in child care money We are keeping the right to work so you don't have to be forced to join a union and then drive up wages, which doesn't help anybody. We've gotten rid of 91,000 plus job-killing regulations and businesses are coming. The U-Hauls are finally coming back to Virginia, stopping here. She doesn't know how to do any of that. She was never here when we were making all these great choices for Virginia.

So I don't need on-the-job training. I have been doing the work. Where have you been, Abigail? Oh, in Congress making decisions against us. Now, it was easy, right, when she was one of 435 members of Congress, but now she's by herself and she's got to stand on all those decisions she's made. Even Joe Biden in his most lucid moments, vetoed a bill that she voted for, which kept D.C. where you see the crime is today.

She's soft on crime and voted that for criminal penalties to be absolutely reduced, for the most heinous tribes. That's what she wants to do in Virginia. And don't even talk about energy policy. She has none. Oh, it's solar and wind. And what do we do? What do we do when the sun isn't shining?

Isn't it actually worse than no energy policy? Isn't the energy policy of Virginia pretty much the energy policy of California? Aren't you guys tied together with the California regulations? So we were until Virginia. Virginians put Governor Yonkin and myself and our Attorney General Jason Niarz in office, and we got us out of there because, wait a minute, good. You did see that even Gavin Newsom now is suing the oil refineries and the gas industry because they want to leave California.

You've been against them, Gavin, all this time. You and the other Democrats and now you're suing them to force them to stay. This is nonsense. none of this makes any sense and you know Glenn here's why this is important that we have a head on our shoulders the industrial revolution is still happening technological revolution is still happening i was reading about china two days ago they have factories in china that don't even have any people the lights aren't even on because it's all robotic so while we're trying to figure out who a woman is they have moved on that is going to eat our lunch if we're not careful

So what is the big thing that would be the difference between you and Yonken administration and certainly a Spanberger administration? What's the big thing that you bring to the table? Well, we bring a continued success story and success beget success. And for a long time, Abigail was running on our successes. I mean, we've lowered taxes to the tune of returning $9 billion back to the people of Virginia. Even as we kept our AAA bond rating, even as we teacher pay 18%, even as we've been attracting businesses, even as we have decompressed the pay for our law enforcement and Department of Corrections personnel, I mean, even as we've put in new programs to help those who are mentally ill,

I mean, we've done so, we've put roads and bridge money. We've done so much, and it's because we know how to do this. I mean, I've run my own business. The governor has run businesses. My opponent doesn't know any of this. She would just destroy everything. Put all those regulations back. Put all those taxes back.

Put us back in the Greenhouse Gas Initiative of California. I mean, every single Democrat voted for this green initiative, and you know what it's doing? It's driving up our costs in Virginia. And you've probably heard of our energy bills where people are paying $800 a month, up to $1,600 a month, and winter is coming. This is what the Democrats have given us,

and when I'm governor, I'm going to repeal that darned act because it does nothing but drive up costs. We cannot have Abigail. She will destroy everything that we've done. You know, I know nobody mentions this, and it's not really important. It's not important to me, but it is worth mentioning at least.

On the left, they'd be running, this is all this campaign would be about. You were the first woman elected to lieutenant governor, the first black woman and female veteran to hold a statewide office in Virginia. You will be the first black woman to be a governor if you win in Virginia. That's pretty remarkable. It's remarkable for a country that everybody, you know, on the left keeps saying is a racist country.

You know, who said we were not a racist? country, Biden. And by the way, Kabla said that there was no systemic racism in America. And they said that in 2021. I guess they forgot that little bit later because what, their side wasn't liking that. And I'm from a third world country. Think of this. I am an immigrant and yet here I sit. Second in command and the former capital of the Confederate states, don't tell me that America is not a great country. And yet we have enough people on the left teaching their children. children, Glenn, to hate their own country, their own country. What in the world? It's amazing. Winsom, thank you so much. We pray for you. We hope you do really well in the election.

How long of the, how long of the voting, early voting been going on now? Oh, we've been voting since, no, we're about in our fourth week now. We've been voting since September 19th. Yes, and this is what the Democrats have given us. Open season. And that's why we've got to win. We've got to change things. And by the way, the polls are looking very good. The Trafalgar polls shows that I am two down, but it's margin of error.

It's four. So I'm either two up or right in the middle. And the Washington Post, of all newspapers, I would hope that they would tell the truth. But they're showing polls where I'm 13 down, and they know it to be a lie. We can't have press like that. This is America. We look to our press to give us truth. or maybe not.

Yeah, I was going to say, Washington Post had kind of given up on, but I appreciate it. Thank you so much. We're going to talk about the polls here in just a second. Winsom, thank you so much. Where can people go to join your campaign and help you out? Yes, she's out raising me four to one, but by the grace of God we're still standing. I need your help. Winsome for governor.com.

Winsome, F-O-R-Governor.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. God bless you. I just love her. I just think she would make, a great, great governor. She's really smart. She's business-minded, common sense,

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Usually it would tell us that the dollar is in real, real trouble. I think, and I am guessing at this now, but I think what this is telling us is that the whole world, the whole system is in trouble. And let me give you an example. I'm going to talk to you about something to try to make sense of it here, but I don't have a good answer. because we're not having these conversations. I have told you for almost 20 years when it comes to AI, we must have these conversations now because the world is going to change overnight,

and we are at that point. We are at the point of singularity where there is no turning back. And we haven't had these conversations. Do you want to win the AI war? I will tell you, we cannot lose it. But to win it, we may have to sacrifice so much on the altar of liberty that I don't want to fight it. So what do we do?

Let me explain. Something has shifted in the world and most people cannot feel it yet, but if you're paying attention, you understand there is something on the horizon. One day soon, we're going to wake up and we're going to realize, uh-oh, I think we crossed a line here, quietly, silently. While no one was paying attention, everything changed. Over the past few days, while the world has been paying attention to what is going on in Israel in the Middle East, there's a couple of other really important headlines that have caught my attention. And at first, they all seemed unrelated, just random stories from around the world. But when you look closer, and this is what I think I do best, I take things that are seemingly unrelated and say,

wait a minute, wait a minute, I think they all fit into this category. So let me give you some threads here. First thread is China. Beijing just tightened its grip on rare earth elements. These are the minerals that make absolutely everything possible. Your smartphone, your electric car, your missile defense system, your refrigerator. Everything depends on these rare earth minerals. China, because of our inaction and stupid policies over the last couple of decades,

control now 80% of the world supply chain. That cannot stand. Now what they're doing is they're choking it off. They are now closing it up, and they are threatening the West. No more rare earth minerals. If that happens, we cannot defend ourselves. Do we have rare earth minerals? Yeah, we have lots of them.

But we're not mining them. It will take a decade to start mining them up in a last. where they mainly are. That's why Donald Trump was saying, we need Greenland. That's what he was saying, rare earth minerals, because they're already mining them there,

and we cannot lose them. Now, they're choking it off, and rare earth stocks exploded overnight. Because whoever controls those minerals controls the future. Now here's the second thread, the Pentagon. Out of nowhere,

they made a, billion dollar emergency order for those same rare earth minerals. That's not normal. That's not paperwork. That is the sound of a military quietly preparing for something, a shortage, possibly in a storm. Like I said, we are because of what Biden did in Ukraine. We are wholly unprepared for any kind of military action. We don't have the materials. And at the same time, everything is changing to high tech. We don't have the rare earth minerals and the chips now to make our guided missile systems. The third thread, J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the most powerful institutions on the planet,

just announced this week a $1.5 trillion investment plan in what they called security and resilience. That's not going to mom and pop shops. That's not going to community loans. That money is being funneled straight into AI, defense manufacturing, and critical minerals. It's as if the Pentagon and Wall Street just linked arms and decided to build a fortress economy together. Then came the fourth thread.

Nobody paid attention to this one. In Europe, the Dutch government just seized control of the Chinese-owned chipmaker on their own soil. They invoked emergency powers and nationalized the company to stop the Chinese influence over the semiconductor industry. That's not good. Four stories, four continents, four quiet tremors in the ground. When you weave them all together,

that's when you begin to understand what all of this means. So let me try to do that. The old world, as we know it, is dying. The world of free markets, the world of open trade, individual enterprise, the world that lifted billions out of poverty is being replaced now slowly but surely by something new. And this one is being done in the name of security. And I don't have an answer for this. This is why we must pay attention and talk about it now.

corporations now are aligning with state power. Before we had the tech industry aligning itself with the government to control speech. This is the government aligning themselves with tech, rare earth minerals, etc., etc., to be able to win the AI war. All of this is a single unspoken motive, and that is the race to dominate artificial intelligence. This is the new arms race. This is the new Manhattan Project, the new nuclear weapon, except this is a million times more enslaving the nuclear weapons could ever hope to be. Whoever masters this first, whoever gets to AI and AGI first, will control the economies, the information, even your thought itself.

Every rare earth mineral, every chip, every line of code, they're all ingredients in that same contest. And the nations are moving fast. They're hoarding materials now. We're beginning to seize companies. They're building walled off supply chains. This is happening on their side and our side. And the free market in this particular place is no longer free. It's being drafted into a digital Cold War.

Now, that sounds bad, but now let me tell you the danger that nobody seems to get. When nations go to war, even an economic war, freedom always becomes a casualty. We tell ourselves we're fighting for liberty, and we are because we don't want to live in a society like China, right? I don't. But when survival's on the line, governments tighten control for our own good. They regulate, they ration, they censor. And one day you look up and you realize the line between democracy and technocracy is gone. If the West wants to win this AI war and we must, then we have to have a conversation.

Why are we even fighting this war? Because if in winning it, we become China, why not? let China just win. If we adopt the same top-down control, the same surveillance, the same merger of government and corporate power, then what did we actually win? Didn't we just trade one master for another? The old global system, free enterprise, open markets, individual liberty, it is being rewritten in real time. And the threads are now all coming together and they're they're weaving a new tapestry. I don't know what the tapestry looks like.

I can guess at what that tapestry looks like and I don't like it. Will it be woven from freedom or will it be woven from fear? If we lose sight of who we are, look, our global leadership, it's already lost sight for who we are. They don't care. They don't care. None of them care.

They'll get to this global dominance over the individual one way or another in their book. You must care. You must stand for freedom. You must be at the head of having this conversation. Because if we lose sight of who we are, this tapestry is going to be strong, efficient, and unbreakable. But it will not be free. And someday, historians are going to look back at this moment and they're going to, what happens? They're going to see these quiet headlines, these invisible decisions that are being made right now, and they realize this is when the new world began. They will be able to look at this point and say this was it. Why didn't people see it?

The answer to that is obvious. We're overwhelmed with everything that we have to do, everything we're looking at. This has been a very well-planned takeover of freedom. have to ask yourself, when the weaving is done, whose pattern will we be living in? Because that's what is coming. There's a story in the show prep today that I really want you to read. I'm going to talk to you about it here in a second. Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified. You don't have any idea how far China is ahead of us. And you can say, well, I don't want to be China.

Well, you will be China, and China will be controlling you if we don't push back. But how do we push back without becoming China? This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. Let me bring in Dexter Heimer. Dexter Heimer. He is a Houston Chronicle investigative reporter. And he has been reporting on this. seemingly crazy story. When you first heard about this, Eric, did you have a hard time believing it?

Because I know I did. I did have a hard time believing it, at least the particulars of it, in terms of the general idea that something crazy could happen out in Loving County. That was a little more believable. I've been covering the area for a little while, and it's a peculiar spot out in far west Texas. Okay. Can we rule out one thing? Is any of this, because it seems to to be, when I first heard it, they're saying, a lot of black people are moving in. And I'm like, okay, well, maybe that's okay. Maybe that's okay, white people. Is this in any way influenced by race, do you think? Me not. You know, at first blush, it might seem that way, but my reporting didn't really show that. It is true that the group of people moving in is called the

melanated people of power. It refers to their skin color. Most, if not all of them, appears to be black, but I also interviewed people in Loving County, including some black folks who live there. And, you know, they said that there wasn't anything really racial about what was happening out there. Okay. So who are these people that are moving in? How is this happening? And what are they after? So they are followers of a guy named Dr. Malcolm Tanner, who's an Indiana resident. And over the summer, he started promoting on his social media platforms, this program where if you moved out to Loving County, Texas, you would get a free home, and $5,000 a month in free income. And so far about three dozen people that have moved out there.

And is that a lot for this town? What is the population of this county? So Loving County has about 70 people in all. It has one city, called Mentone. So for commissioner seats, those seats that have precincts, you can win with about a dozen votes if you want to run for and win as a sheriff or as a county judge, which in Texas is the highest administrative office in a county. You can have that office for, you know, maybe four or five dozen votes. So, yeah, 30 people is starting to build a substantial voting block out there. And what is this, who is this guy in Indiana? that's doing this.

So he's kind of mysterious. He's a charismatic guy. He has claimed that he started this melanated people of power to, you know, enfranchise folks who typically don't have political or economic power of their own. He claims he's an entrepreneur. He claims that he's a philanthropist, but really nailing down things about him is pretty difficult. He's got a trail of lawsuits in Indiana against the city.

of Muncie against Grant County, having to do with property disputes. He calls himself doctor, but he doesn't identify which institution conferred that degree on him. But as I said, what he does have is a fairly sizable social media presence. And it seems to his message seems to be speaking to a lot of people, you know, all over the country. The folks who have moved to Loving County have come from Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, some within Texas, but really from all over. So you don't improve somebody's station in life by giving them free housing in $5,000 a month. You create jobs.

You help them create their own life and their own path. What is his plan other than just continuing to pay for these trailers because they're mobile homes, right? So paying for the mobile homes and then the $5,000 a month, that's not a plan. Yeah, I don't know if he has a grand economic plan. You know, what I can tell you is that based on the people who have moved out there and kind of reading it on social media, it's, you know, the idea of a free home for someone who can't otherwise afford one or, you know, for whom that seems out of reach is a pretty powerful lure, right? And he has said that, you know, if we get enough people out here, we'll kind of, you know, goose industry and bring in businesses. is, I mean, the truth is that Loving County is doing very well for itself. Right now, it's in the middle of the Permian Basin, which is the big oil and gas producing region of Texas. And they have

about, say, 70 permanent residents in their budget this year is going to be about $60 million for a little, so a little less than a million dollars per person. You know, overwhelmingly that money comes from oil and gas taxes that they collect. So there's already a lot of money out there. There's, you know, besides oil and gas, there's a couple of support service businesses, you know, some gas stations, one or two restaurants, but not a ton else. Okay, so what is the city doing to investigate, to stop this, or can they do anything? Well, one of the really interesting things to me about Levin County is that it does have this very long history of kind of dicey voter registration and voting out there. that there are a couple of powerful families out there. They've been feuding in recent years.

And in order to kind of keep and maintain power, they've been pretty loose with voter rules. So people who may have moved away from there, you know, years and years ago are still registered to vote there. So the result of that is that there are many more people registered to vote in Loving County than who actually live there. That's a long way of saying that to a lot of people, of saying that a lot of people who live out there, this is kind of the, you know, the chickens

coming home to risk, that they've promoted and lived with the system for quite a while, and here's someone who's come in, you know, looking to take advantage of it. So the only thing they can really do is, you know, make sure that all the boxes are checked on the voter registration forms. Outside of the county, however, there have been some investigations mounted. A couple of state representatives have asked for investigations by the Texas Secretary. state, which is the office that oversees elections here in Texas. There's a U.S. representative, Chip Roy, who was asked for an investigation. And then yesterday, our attorney general, Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit asking for a restraining order and also accusing the

group of violating a handful of local laws. His purpose seems to be trying to shut it down. What do you, where does this end up? I mean, as a reporter, I know you don't report on future news, but where, where, where does this lead? Well, I mean, the most obvious point is that living in Loving County, particularly in the conditions that these folks are living, is, is pretty difficult, right? I mean, it's a arid, isolated place. It's very hot out there. There's no trees. It's just a bunch of, you know, creosote and caliche and scrubland. And so if they, yeah, it's, it's hard. And there's no services out on this piece of property that, um, Malcolm Tanner has purchased. He purchased two five-acre plots out there in January, and they're

there about 30-minute drive out, you know, kind of rough oil company roads outside of the only town. It's about an hour away from the nearest grocery store. So if your plan is to live out there in these conditions without water, without sewage, without electricity, and you want to run for office. How are they doing that? Well, they, you know, they haul in water. I think they have some generators out there. They have some RVs that may have their own kind of temporary power systems. But if your plan is to run for office and the primaries are not until March of next year, that's quite a while to basically camp, you know, in some pretty harsh conditions.

So it may resolve itself and people may, you know, people, as you pointed out, are coming from cities and urban areas and they may not be accustomed to the harsh conditions. So it may resolve on its own. There may be the authority of the government, you know, kind of pushing them out through a variety of alleged broken laws. And if that doesn't happen, then it'll be fascinating to see if they actually can win office out there. What are you working on next for this story? I've been following up on the investigations that have been done by the, you know, as I said, the attorney general. I'll be following up the attorney general. I'll be following up the

The district attorney out there is also mounting an investigation. I'm trying to learn some more about Malcolm Tanner. I'm trying to learn some more about the people who have moved out there and what their backgrounds are. And, of course, we'll be following the elections, which, as I said, are always fascinating in Levin County. Almost every election there is challenged based on residency. So it's a never-ending source of news despite the small population.

You know what it reminds me of is the Old West. I mean, this kind of stuff happened in the old West where the big, you know, the big money would want to change a town and they would bring people in and, and they would change it and control it. I mean, it really harkens back to the 1800s in some ways, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, there is an element of, you know, kind of being isolated way out there in the middle of nowhere in West Texas. I mean, even the names of the people, you know, the old time sheriff who's the patriarch of the kind of powerful family there. His name was punk and the current county judge's names is Skeet. And yeah, it's a very kind of, it's a place of rugged individuals and I won't say lawlessness, but

definitely, you know, it's, it's out there. Yeah, it's out there. Eric, thank you so much. Appreciate it. And keep us up to speed on this. We'll be following your stories. Houston Chronicle investigative reporter, Eric Dexheimer, following what's happening. in Loving County, Texas. It is so weird, Stu, and it, all the things that are happening in Texas where they are doing everything they can to take Texas and flip it blue. And I'm not convinced that that's what this is. No. You know, I don't know what this is, but it is, it's weird.

It's really, really weird. Yeah, it reminds me of Wild Wild Country, the documentary on Netflix. It was a series that came out a few years ago where it was a story of what, I can't remember the name of the group off the top of my head, but they went into Washington or Oregon and tried to take over a town like the 70s or 80s, maybe. By the way, an incredible documentary, if you've never seen it. Incredible documentary. It's just an insane story.

It seems like groups do this every once in a while, someone with a big ego or, you know, some of these groups is a cultish type behavior, like just move into areas and just take them over and try to take over the town council and everything else so they can, you know, run their little thing the way they want to run it. I'm always fascinated by those stories. Yeah, I'm not sure what this one is. Right. People are comparing this with Elon Musk.

What's the problem? Elon Musk did this. No, Elon Musk was creating thousands of jobs. Elon Musk was like, I'm going to build you a house and send you $5,000 and you don't do anything for it. That's not what Elon and sending you into a trailer with no services whatsoever. I mean, his town is going to be a model town already is, a model town. in Texas. He's creating something and creating jobs. There's a purpose for people to move there. Here there is no seeming purpose. If you've never been to West Texas, imagine the moon

if it was a lot closer to the sun. I mean, a lot closer to the sun. That is West Texas. You're in for quite a surprise if you've never been to West Texas and you're like, I'm moving to West Texas. Oh, good luck with that. Good luck with that. It takes real pioneers to do that. When you were little pioneers to do that. Always in trying to negotiate

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