By Thomas Warren III, Editor-in-Chief
It has been a while since I have penned an editorial, simply because June has been such a busy month for me personally. I got married at the end of May, and during our honeymoon as newlyweds, my wife contracted COVID in Fort Worth and I ended up getting a MRSA infection in my sinus passages. Our honeymoon got cut short, but about a week later, we were back on the road to Houston for the Texas Republican Party’s biannual state convention.
We had a great time at convention and while we were there, local voters from the Panhandle and Permian Basin selected me to be their committeeman on the State Republican Executive Committee, following in the footsteps of some great local leaders who have held the position in the past. I was thankful for the opportunity and especially thankful to Carroll Precure, the previous officeholder, who was very gracious about the election and very welcoming to me as a new SREC member.
Since being elected, I have been excited to start digging into the innerworkings of the Texas Republican Party to find areas where we can improve and areas where we can grow the party. However, just like with many good things, there also comes a catch.
Not three hours after I was elected to the SREC, a former elected official in Amarillo and a local activist began spreading many rumors about me, my activism, and my work here at The Pioneer in an attempt to discredit me and sow division. It is sad, but it is expected, as these two individuals are still very bitter over my decision to publicly oppose their candidates in last year’s city council election. Instead of moving on past the election like normal people, they have decided to make me pay for not supporting Claudette Smith for mayor, and her merry band of bad candidates like Rich Herman.
I want to state something very clearly about that decision: I did not apologize then for not supporting Smith and Herman and I won’t apologize now. I don’t believe either of those candidates deserved to be in office, and if that makes me a bad person or not a true conservative, then so be it. But I voted my values and I voted against both of those candidates.
Anyway, since the SREC election, there has been a lot of misinformation floating around about me, The Pioneer, and the activities I have been involved with, all in a cheap effort to discredit me as retribution for my choice in candidates in 2021.
Personally, I have moved on from 2021, but apparently a few people haven’t. So, today, I wanted to clear up all of this nonsense once and for all, so that maybe we can close the door on 2021 and get to work on the business of saving our city and improving the Texas Republican Party.
Buckle up. Like I said, it’s gotten a little crazy out here.
Claim: The Amarillo Pioneer has stabbed conservative candidates in the back by saying they would endorse those candidates and then not following through with those endorsements.
Fact: No candidate has ever been promised an endorsement before their election. The way things work with an editorial board format — like the one we utilize through our publisher’s committee — is that a group of individuals review the candidates, their stated positions, their responses to our questionnaires, their responses at our candidate forums, and in some cases, their responses in one-on-one candidate interviews before arriving at a decision to endorse a candidate. In some races, the editorial board may choose to offer an endorsement, a recommendation, or a non-selection in a race. While every similar article we publish is titled usually marked with “endorsement” in the title, it is up to the reader to read all the way to the end to see how our selection is framed.
Think of an endorsement as the strongest seal of approval for a candidate. This means that this candidate has been thoroughly vetted and is the best candidate for local voters to support.
Meanwhile, a recommendation is a strong indicator that we believe this candidate is the most preferable person among the field of candidates for voters to support, but we do not necessarily wholeheartedly support this candidate. Recommendations are often times just choosing between the lesser of two evils. Candidate A might be slightly better for the taxpayers than Candidate B, which makes them the preferable choice, even if both candidates are bad.
Finally, a non-endorsement is issued in the event that all of the candidates in a race are simply unacceptably bad, or in cases where there is not enough information about a race for our committee to make a firm decision or where our committee is simply unable to reach a consensus between a group of candidates.
The way the endorsement is offered is always found at the end of the article. It will say something like:
We endorse Bill Johnson for Mayor in the case of an endorsement;
We recommend John Smith for City Council in the case of a recommendation; or
We offer no endorsement or recommendation at this time in the case of a non-endorsement. A non-endorsement may also be denoted through the decision to simply not release an endorsement article.
Generally speaking, it is the policy of our publication not to issue endorsements in local judicial contests. We usually will consider offering endorsements or recommendations in most other races.
I also want to make it clear that the endorsements or recommendations of the publisher’s committee do not necessarily reflect the endorsements of any of this publication’s individual advertisers or staff. Likewise, no staff member, including myself, has sole decision making authority to approve or override endorsement. We have checks and balances on our endorsement process for a reason.
In the case of this claim, I believe I know exactly which race the activist in question is referring to, and in that race, no candidate was offered an endorsement. Still, the candidate in question had a criminal record that featured a conviction for a serious misdemeanor offense, in addition to a questionable record preceding their campaign for that office. Let’s just say that this candidate was never promised our endorsement, never received our endorsement, and never deserved our endorsement. End of story.
Claim: The Amarillo Pioneer has endorsed many Democrats for offices in Amarillo.
Fact: Let me make something very clear — no Democrat has ever been endorsed by our publication in a general election. Likewise, no Democrat has ever been endorsed in a partisan election where another candidate running affiliated as a Republican.
There are three races that activists have tried to make an issue of when we supposedly sided with Democrats. One I will address below, but the other two races are both interesting stories.
The first race featured a candidate who had voted in Republican and Democratic primaries, and who had previously been endorsed by supposed local conservative leader Claudette Smith in one of his previous runs for office. Our publisher’s committee recommended this candidate as one of three candidates to win a cumulative election where three seats were available for election, based solely on his prior record as an extremely fiscally conservative school board trustee. Of the other five candidates, our committee recommended two others, and chose not to recommend three candidates — two due to their tax-raising records as incumbent officeholders, and another due to his soft answers on key issues like taxes and fees.
In the other race, our publisher’s committee recommended a candidate in a Democratic primary as the most favorable option compared to the candidate’s two opponents. In that race, no Republican or third party candidate had filed for office, meaning that a Democrat was going to win the race no matter what happened in the primary. The publisher’s committee recommendation was given solely due to that candidate’s position as being against certificates of obligation, which was the central issue in the Republican primary for county judge, as well. The race overlapped on issues and substance with the county judge primary on the Republican ballot, but it just so happened that it was taking place in a Democratic primary. In that race, I wish a conservative Republican would have filed to run, but there was no way to rewrite history. A Democrat was going to win, and the publisher’s committee’s position was that the recommended candidate was the best compliment to the candidate recommended for county judge on the issue of certificates of obligation. Ultimately, neither candidate won election, but those two candidates were the most fiscally conservative in both of their races.
Claim: The Amarillo Pioneer endorsed Ali Ramos for City Council in 2021
Fact: The Amarillo Pioneer did not issue an endorsement or recommendation for any candidate for Amarillo City Council, Place 4 in 2021. I also did not issue a personal endorsement in this race.
Claim: The Amarillo Pioneer, Save Amarillo PAC, and Amarillo Taxpayers PAC are all the same entity so their endorsements can be blamed on each other.
Fact: This claim is just egregiously false.
The Amarillo Pioneer is set up as a for-profit news entity. Meanwhile, Save Amarillo PAC and Amarillo Taxpayers PAC are both political action committees, meaning their sole purposes are to raise money and spend money on issues to sway voters.
As for my involvement with these groups, I was previously involved as a board member with Amarillo Taxpayers PAC and currently I am a board member for Save Amarillo PAC. The two groups remain distinctly different, as Save Amarillo PAC’s primary purpose is pushing voters on bond elections and ballot initiatives, in addition to some candidate endorsements, while Amarillo Taxpayers primary functions just to raise awareness on elections issues and to get candidates elected.
Both groups see many overlap with the individuals involved, but their donors, organizers, and objectives are distinctly different.
The reason this has come up is because Amarillo Taxpayers PAC endorsed Ali Ramos for City Council in 2021 due to her position as being against taxpayer-funded lobbying. Since then, I have been handed the singular blame for this endorsement from activists unhappy that the PAC didn’t support Rich Herman.
Now, first of all, I wouldn’t have supported Rich Herman either. But secondly, I was not involved with the PAC when that endorsement was made. My father made a small contribution to the PAC — $50 — that was earmarked to support Jason Foglesong, one of the PAC’s endorsed candidates, but that contribution was not made by me. Likewise, I am not involved with the PAC now and I haven’t contributed to the PAC since any of its bond election campaigns. But that hasn’t stopped angry activists from blaming me for the endorsement and I expect it won’t ever stop them.
A point I also want to make is that Amarillo Taxpayers PAC has endorsed distinctly different candidates in the past than The Amarillo Pioneer, with perhaps the most notable example being the race for Texas Attorney General this year, where our publisher’s committee endorsed Ken Paxton, while Taxpayers PAC endorsed Louie Gohmert. If we were all the same entity, don’t you think there would be better coordination of endorsements?
Claim: The Amarillo Pioneer interviewed Beto O’Rourke twice on their podcast which has to mean they are a bunch of liberals.
Fact: In 2020, we launched a podcast called “Live in West Texas,” where I have personally interviewed candidates, elected officials, business leaders, influencers, and others who have had a significant role to play in our community. We interviewed Ronny Jackson twice on the podcast, as well as his wife, Jane, and Republican members of the Texas Supreme Court, among others.
In the summer of last year, we published two podcast episodes back to back, I believe on the same day, that were meant to be listened to as a set. Both were shorter than our normal episode lengths for this reason. One interview featured O’Rourke and the other featured Jake Collier, a Republican candidate for state representative in Denton County, with both men giving their party’s position on the voting reform bill that was being proposed in the Texas House. The episodes were meant to serve as somewhat of an informal debate, but a few activists have latched solely on to the episode with O’Rourke as proof of my liberalism without also mentioning the Collier episode.
When we started the 2022 election cycle, we began interviewing candidates who had launched campaigns for statewide office in Texas. We recorded interviews with ten statewide candidates and published them through the end of 2021. It just so happens that one of those interviews was with O’Rourke.
Now, I want to point out that of those ten interviews, eight were with Republican candidates — including Land Commissioner George P. Bush — while one was with a Libertarian candidate, and the last one was with O’Rourke.
We had also reached out to a number of other candidates about coming on for interviews, including Greg Abbott, Don Huffines, and Allen West, but we stopped recording interviews in November 2021 when my grandfather was placed into home hospice and we haven’t resumed interviews since due to family funerals and other life events.
My family struggled each and every day to tend to my grandfather’s needs and we were there for him from the moment he was placed into the hospice bed to the moment he passed away in January of this year.
Now, I am sorry if we did not produce enough candidate interviews that were sufficiently conservative for you, but I was more focused on making my grandfather comfortable and trying to enjoy every last moment I could get with him before he passed away.
My grandfather’s death has been one of the hardest moments of my life and I am still not quite over it. That man was my hero and taught me a lot about life, living, and who I am today. I do not regret a single moment I spent sitting next to him while he was in hospice that I didn’t spend writing an article or recording or editing a podcast. And I will not apologize to anyone for that.
Perhaps if we hadn’t had such a life altering event in the middle of the primary, then I could have also produced two podcasts each with Abbott, Huffines, and West, but there simply was not enough time to do everything. And I don’t regret how I spent my time and I don’t feel like I owe anyone an apology for that.
I hope this clears up any of the misconceptions that have been brought out by a couple of very vocal critics who are looking for a little payback for their 2021 election defeats. I just want to also take a moment to mention that if I had to do the 2021 election all over again, I would do it exactly the same way — that is supporting the candidates I supported and opposing the candidates who I opposed. And if a couple of disgruntled 2021 voters think they are going to shame me into supporting their candidates in 2023 by putting a two-year squeeze on me over not supporting their 2021 slate, then they had better guess again.
Like I said, things have gotten pretty crazy out there, but I am ready to move on and make the Texas Republican Party even stronger in the coming two years.
And as for my record as a conservative — my true record, like killing term extensions and bond issues, working with groups like Empower Texans, and volunteering for conservative Republican candidates from the age of eight until now, not the record that has been created for me by a couple of bitter activists angry about a city election — I’m darn proud of it. And that’s the bottom line.