Nazis at Torchy’s showed a bigger problem. Now’s the time to speak up, Fort Worth | Opinion
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It was Nazi Week in Fort Worth, which is nothing like pumpkin spice month.
A handful of young men, costumed as Nazi wannabes, went recruiting at a gun show, the Botanic Garden, the southside Torchy’s Tacos and probably other places in the city where nobody even bothered to complain.
In Fort Worth, we’re taught not to speak up. It’s a city that prides itself on living the “cowboy way” and minding our own business.
Now is when that stops.
Time and again in recent years, Fort Worth and Tarrant County have proven to be a worry-free haven for belligerent Proud Boys, paranoid police Oath Keepers, conspiracy-crazed militias, prophecy-obsessed religious “regiments” and other just plain nutty woman-haters, minority-bashers or unstable extremists.
We pretend to live the Code of the West, where race. religion, culture or personal life didn’t matter on the cattle trail.
As a commenter on X.com suggested, we think we’re Where the West Begins. But sometimes, we’re more like Where the Nest Begins.
That’s not only bad for Tarrant County’s more than 2 million people, nearly a million of who are in Fort Worth.
It’s also bad for our future.
It’s bad for our success if potential new businesses or residents read about Nazis parading unchallenged — no matter how juvenile — and stay away.
The city development plan published in 2017 went out of its way to label that a “threat” to Fort Worth’s and Tarrant County’s success:
“Fort Worth, especially outside Texas, is perceived as less inviting to diverse groups [racial/ethnic minorities, young adults, international migrants] than other cities,” it reads.
At least Torchy’s quickly announced corrective action. The company wrote: “We do not stand for hate and do not support this group or any hate group.”
Who else besides Fort Worth state Rep. Craig Goldman, Mayor Mattie Parker and the folks at City Hall has even said anything? Has your pastor, or your city, county or state officials?
It was only the latest in a series of degrading incidents for Fort Worth and Tarrant County:
▪ The same weekend, widely banned white racist leader, woman-basher and neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes was seen in western Tarrant County. He was at a meeting that lasted hours at the office of Republican political consultant Jonathan Stickland’s Pale Horse Strategies.
The office building is part of billionaire West Texas religious conservative Farris Wilks’ family Wilks Development empire. Stickland is president of the Wilks’ Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which issued a two-sentence statement saying PAC donors oppose Fuentes’ “incendiary views.”
▪ Also last weekend, homes in neighboring Parker County were papered with racist and antisemitic fliers bearing Nazi swastikas and garish caricatures.
▪ Eleven of the 92 Texans facing charges in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, anti-government U.S. Capitol riot and attack are from Tarrant County cities. That’s the most in Texas.
▪ Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, sentenced to 18 years in prison on sedition and other felony charges over the “Jan. 6” riot, recruited Tarrant and Hood County law officers when he stayed in nearby Granbury. Hood County Constable John Shirley was an Oath Keepers officer for 12 years.
▪ Patriot Front, a national young white racist group known for pasting up fliers, hanging banners and staging hundreds of events meant to strike fear, is led from Grapevine.
▪ Proud Boys and neo-Nazis rallied shouting racist slurs and “Seig heil!” last December outside a touring drag entertainment event at Texas Trust CU Theatre in Grand Prairie.
▪ Stedfast Baptist Church, an Arizona-owned New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church with wildly antisemitic leaders who also preach that gay and lesbian Americans should be executed, operated openly in suburbs such as Sansom Park and Watauga. It recently moved first to Arlington and then to nearby Cedar Hill.
That’s only a few from a growing list of violent, racist, antisemitic and anti-woman incidents in an increasingly belligerent Texas.
Y’all speak up.
