S3E25: Paxton's Baggage. Brown Is Ours. Texas Is the Senate. We're the Margin.

made fun of how ken paxton looks and talks and still swore he'd come back to get him elected that tells you who holds the strings in that senate race my pack stark freedom is backing the libertarian in it ted brown before we get into it i'm going to play you four cuts of our anthem margin is calling and i want you to pick the winner Cut one is the arena rock cut. Some of you already saw it on X, seventies British arena rock, grand piano, stacked harmonies. The band spent years up in the cheap seats, cheering on cue. Now they own the stage. Trump's own words are up on the screen above them. And every promise gets the same three words back. That's a lie. Vote for your favorite at Stark

freedom.org slash vote. Wakey, wakey, margin is calling We sang your name from the cheap seats We'd have followed you anywhere You swore it at the microphone I will cut your energy prices in half within twelve months

We read the pump, now we grin You looked us in the eye, no more wars, that's a lie You rolled up your sleeves, drained the swamp The Gators have seats at your table And look who's bringing the bill Both sides of the stadium One chant on cue You ran our faith on credit Whatever you do Now the stands can stand and choose And we swear

Do you hear the margin calling? We fund the margin It costs the GOP the Senate Do you hear the margin calling? Do you hear the margin calling? We fund the margin It costs the GOP the Senate

Now we can score. It cost the GOP the Senate Wakey, wakey, margin is calling

Cut to is a pop opera duet, a tenor and a soprano, full orchestra, an empty opera house at dawn, two people who believed every word, sing the promises back like love letters they kept, and they trade one answer back and forth louder every time. You lied. Then the back wall opens onto the road at first light. Vote for your favorite at Stark, freedom.org slash vote. Wakey, wakey, margin is clear.

Promise, fold it soft beside the ballot. I will cut your energy prices in half within twelve months. You lie, the second page the mothers carried home. No more wars, you lie. Sing it slow. We are going to drain the swamp. You lie.

We are holding you accountable. The herd in red, the herd in blue is gone. The jersey hangs forgotten on the door. A vote is earned. It is not all in colors. Break faith and the margin takes the floor. Do you hear the margin calling? We fund the margin. It costs the GOP, the Senate, who pays.

We fund it back. To say goodbye to the Senate. To the Senate. Oh. Do you hear the margin calling? We've found the margin It costs the GOP the Senate The herd is gone and about to lose the Senate Do you hear the

margin calling? We've found the margin It costs the GOP the Senate Adieu Say goodbye We'll be right back.

Cut three is a breakup song. Early nineties, Philly slow jam. Four voices and no band, just finger snaps in a tiled locker room at dawn. The lead croons the promises. Sweet, like he believed them once. And the rest of the group answers, you lied. Then they hand back the team jersey. It's so hard to say goodbye to the Senate. Vote for your favorite at starkfreedom.org slash vote. Margin is calling Every autumn in your

colors Every promised song so sweet I will cut your energy prices in half within twelve months You lie You dance under the lights, you whisper no more wars You lie, you lie Held close one more vow, you swore you'd drain the swamp You lie, no more jersey on reflex No herd that votes the color You burn the vote or lose the senate We are holding you accountable Who pays?

We fund Do you hear the margin calling? We fund The margin, it cost the GOP, the Senate So hard to say goodbye To the Senate Imagine it cost the GOP the Senate so hard to say goodbye to the Senate. You lie, you lie, you lie, you lie.

The margin it costs, the GOP, the Senate No herd, no jersey, no reflex Earn the voter or lose the Senate Who pays? Who pays? The margin it costs, the GOP, the Senate No herd, no jersey, no reflex Earn the voter or lose the Senate Waking, waking, waking, waking, waking, waking, waking

Cut four is a Minneapolis funk cut. Early nineties, Minneapolis funk with horns and a sitar sound. A front man in a gold trimmed robe, a choir on the risers behind him, a church full of gold. He reads the tab out loud, then counts the seats off. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six on the board. The tab comes due. Vote for your favorite at starkfreedom.org slash vote. Wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey Wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey

Lights on, pump sign, lift your tab, reality. We are holding you accountable.

We fund the margin. It costs the GOP the sanity. I didn't call it

that's all four go back and watch them again if you want then vote for your favorite at stark freedom.org vote now let's go to texas and to the man trump says you may not like the look of September, at the GOP's midterm convention in Dallas, Donald Trump made his case for Ken Paxton like this. You may not like the way he looks. And this. They may not like the way he talks. I can see that. That's the president in his keynote address on his own Senate pick. Then he vowed to come back to Texas twice or three times if he had to, to make sure Paxton won. To me, that looks less like loyalty and more like a man who needs the seat more than he respects the man running for it.

I'm Aaron Day, and my pack, Stark Freedom, backs the man who answers to nobody. In Dallas on September ninth, Trump said it flat out. I'll be coming back to Texas because we have to elect Ken Paxton. That vow made the Texas Tribune's headline. The Tribune also reports he went off his own planned remarks in that same speech and riffed on how Paxton dresses, how he talks, and how he looks. That came from the man endorsing him live and unscripted in front of the party faithful, not from a staffer's talking point or an opponent's attack. President doesn't wander off script to mock his own candidate's appearance in the candidate's own backyard by accident.

He does it because he can afford to. Paxton needs Trump far more than Trump needs Paxton. And the strings only run one way. So what does the Paxton campaign say for itself? His campaign puts it plainly on its issues page. Both President Trump and Ken Paxton have been targeted in politically motivated witch hunts. That one sentence is the heart of the whole pitch. Two men with one complaint dressed up as a shared cause. There's no policy in it and no record of delivering results for Texas. It doesn't even answer the mockery he took in Dallas from the man who endorsed him. It's a claim of victimhood offered up as a reason to vote for him. I think you deserve more than a shared

complaint from a man asking for your vote. Now, go back to May, months before that convention stage and before the jokes about how he dresses and how he talks. Back then, Trump had endorsed Paxton outright in the runoff, the second round of the Republican primary, and he didn't hedge at all. he called paxton a true mega warrior who has always delivered for texas that's the full-throated version from before the microphone turned a senate endorsement into a roast paxton got the full embrace when he needed trump to win the runoff and praise and mockery in equal measure once the runoff was already won i'll let you decide which was the real relationship and which was the performance i think you

already know Now look at what's behind that witch hunt line. He's own Texas House impeached him, meaning the State House voted to formally charge him with wrongdoing. The vote was one hundred and twenty one to twenty three. That's more than five to one. Then his own state Senate took the case up and acquitted him. It cleared him on every single article of impeachment, each one a separate charge. Both chambers of his own state legislature start to finish. One chamber charged him and the other cleared him. And you need both halves of that story to tell it straight. Nobody from outside persecuted Ken Paxton here. His own state's legislature judged him and still cleared him.

Next time somebody hands you the witch hunt line, ask them what kind of witch hunt ends with the accused cleared on every article. now spending when the paxton campaign talks about spending it talks about washington's the paxton campaign blames wasteful spending for a national debt of over thirty six trillion dollars that's the campaign's number not mine that debt is money washington spent without having it but he has never cast a single vote in congress not one is a Republican nominee campaigning against a number he's never had a vote on for a seat he's never held in a body he's never served in. Look, I think being angry about federal spending is fair. I'm angry about it too,

but that's still not a record. It's borrowed outrage and the outrage he's borrowing is yours. Trump's own super PAC put money behind him. That money is on your screen right now. Now, the part that has nothing to do with campaign theater, the convention, or jokes about how he dresses in twenty twenty two. a waco attorney named adam dean hoffman was arrested on a charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child that's a first-degree felony and under texas law it carries up to life in prison continuous means more than one act over a period of time this isn't a parking ticket or a technicality the locally elected district attorney, the person McLennan County voters actually

chose to handle cases exactly like this one, recused himself and stepped out of the case entirely. The office that took it over wasn't some obscure agency or a special prosecutor, nobody's ever heard of, was the office of Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General's office, the office of the same man Trump just spent a convention speech praising and mocking in equal measure. keep that in mind, because every offer in this case from here on comes out of the office, Ken Paxton runs. Here's what became of that charge. In two thousand twenty five, Hoffman's case went to trial and it ended in a mistrial. The jury split seven to five and couldn't agree. The so the judge had to throw the whole

trial out without a verdict either way afterward prosecutor said the boy did not want to testify a second time that's the reason given for not trying the case again not new evidence and not any change in the facts just a child who had already sat through one trial and did not want to do it twice About ten months later, the office of Ken Paxton came back with a deal instead of a trial on the felony. The plea deal is a trade. The defendant pleads guilty to something smaller, and the bigger charge goes away. In this one, he'd plead guilty to two misdemeanors instead of continuous sexual abuse of a child. A misdemeanor is the lower tier of crime, a long way down from a first-degree felony.

The jail time attached to that deal was a total of one day, and he wouldn't have to register as a sex offender. The public list a community can check. Put those two numbers side by side. The charge carried up to life in prison. Deal, as offered, carried a total of one day. Look, when the charge is a first-degree felony and the deal on the table is one day and no registry, That's not a plea deal working the way it's supposed to. That's the system finding the smallest possible exit. That one day offer still had to get past a judge. The visiting judge on the case who had previously served on the bench as a Republican did not sign off. here are his words as reported one day

seriously job somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it that isn't a campaign ad talking that's the judge geo the office of ken paxton went back and came back with a new number dirty days in jail and hoffman surrenders his law license may then at the sentencing hearing where the punishment gets set the boy's mother withdrew her agreement to the deal it's The judge responded by raising it to sixty You may. days. In the end, Hoffman served twenty nine days and surrendered his law license for five years. That's five years without a license to practice law in Texas. State Representative Jeff Leach, a Republican who had endorsed John Cornyn, who is then running against Paxton in the primary,

wrote to the office of Ken Paxton criticizing the deal. it took a judge who wouldn't accept one day and a mother who changed her mind about thirty to get this anywhere near accountability the thirty days came from the office of ken paxton after the judge did not sign off on one day and the sixty came from the judge after the mother said thirty wasn't enough one day then thirty then sixty and every step up came after somebody said no me tell you about the man my pack start freedom actually backs ted brown is the libertarian so he's not running as a republican or a democrat that he has run for united states senate in texas before in twenty twenty four he got two hundred

sixty seven thousand and thirty nine votes in that race that's more than a quarter of a million texans who already look past both parties once nobody controls ted brown jump doesn't and party leaders don't he answers to the people who voted for him i think this race comes down to who's holding the strings not who gets the biggest stage i think one group decides this race and it's libertarian republicans in the texas southern university poll taken september fifteen to nineteen that group had paxton at fifty-six tallarico at seventeen and brown at twenty-one in the university of texas poll taken in august voters who lean republican had paxton at sixty-four

tallarico at nine and brown at fourteen in both polls brown already beats the democrat with Libertarian Republicans in one and voters who lean Republican in the other. Twenty one to seventeen and fourteen to nine. Paxton still leads both groups, and I'm not going to pretend he doesn't. But the Democrat comes in third. That's not a protest vote. A protest vote doesn't beat the Democrat inside a Republican group. This is a real block inside the Republican coalition, and it already prefers Brown to the Democrat thing. So the next time somebody tells you a vote for Ted Brown is a wasted vote. Remember that. Let me tell you what the man we're backing actually stands for. In his own words,

Ted Brown opposes digital ID. In his words, he opposes government digital identification requirements that integrate personal ID, medical records, banking records, biometric data. I think he's right. One file holding all that is a lot of power to hand anybody. He opposes government spying on everyone and he opposes what he calls a kill switch requirement for new cars starting in twenty twenty seven. Those are his words, not mine. That's three different fights and none of them sounds to me like a talking point cooked up for a Senate race. They sound like a man who's been reading the actual bills. Brown doesn't stop at cars and spying. He opposes government social credit scores,

the kind of system that would grade you by your behavior and your finances, basically the government keeping a score on you. He also opposes age verification laws, The laws that make a website or an app check your age before it lets you in. In his words, they force providers to identify every user. Every user, not just minors. Brown is willing to say that trade out loud. You don't get a system that checks everyone's age without a system that identifies everyone, period. I think that's what should worry you. Once you identify every user, there's no such thing as an anonymous user. One last piece of what he's running on there. Brown says you have the right to know

what data the government collects on you. He says you have the right to refuse it being collected in the first place and the right to demand it be deleted once it exists. No, it exists. And he opposes any government limit on using a VPN, a tool people already use to keep their own browsing private from that same government. Put those together and you get a simple test. Can you find out what they have on you? Say no to more of it and protect yourself in the meantime. That's a test you can put to every candidate in this race. Start asking it. Now step back from the Libertarian Republicans and look at the full picture. Texas Southern University's poll taken September, fifteen to nineteen,

surveyed one thousand eight hundred likely voters across the whole race. Those are the people the pollster expects to actually turn out and vote. Tallarico at forty seven, Paxton at forty six. One point separates them. Brown is at three in that poll. Brown's three points is three times the size of the gap between Paxton and Tallarico. In a poll separated by one point, three points isn't a rounding error. It's bigger than that poll's margin. I think that's the most important number in this whole episode. me pull this together trump doesn't respect the people he props up he mocked how paxton looks and how he talks on a convention stage then vowed to campaign

hard for him anyway because paxton needs him more than trump needs paxton a judge who once served on the bench as a republican wouldn't accept one day from the office of ken paxton either and ted brown is not a protest vote In Texas Southern University's poll taken September, fifteen to nineteen, one in five libertarian Republicans already backs Ted Brown more than back the Democrat. In that same poll, one point separates Paxton and Tallarico. That's where my pack Stark Freedom comes in. We fund the margin. It costs the GOP, the Senate. Go to Stark Freedom dot org and watch for The Bench Said No, the song telling the same story.