Activists staged Shelley Luther’s stunt against Greg Abbott, to the tune of $500,000
Let me explain what happened in Texas last week.
First of all, it was really Gov. Greg Abbott who got the trim.
The Republican Party’s Tea Party-liberty faction set him up. They’ve been agitated for a year, after the last Legislature didn’t give them looser gun laws or anything else they wanted.
For six weeks, they’d been trolling on social media for somebody to raise the money for a challenge to Abbott’s emergency coronavirus health orders. They also wanted to wake up listless grassroots Republicans in an election year.
They found Shelley Luther, 46, a Denton County nightclub singer. Then she put on a show of calling TV stations saying she just had to open her Dallas beauty salon right now, because she needed to feed her family, a teenage daughter.
Now, Luther won’t ever have to sing “I Will Survive” again.
An activist website that also promotes the QAnon alternate-reality conspiracy fantasy has raised more than $500,000 for her legal fees though a GoFundMe.com page. According to Texas Monthly, it was already set up to fundraise April 23, the day before Luther reopened her salon.
So I think she’ll definitely be able to afford the bills from her attorneys, state Republican Party committeeman Warren Norred of Arlington and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park.
In Texas, these staged political stunts almost never work. Or they didn’t until last year, when a secret recording helped the same faction drive out Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen.
This time, they found a lead singer who knows a lot about staging and orchestrating a show.
And she was in the perfect place: blue Dallas County.
Look, I don’t know whether the Democrats there watch the Dallas Cowboys.
But one of the basic rules of the game is that you don’t jump offside.
You don’t lock people up for seven days over a haircut. or even over the backtalk she gives you. Not during a pandemic.
First of all, it’s dangerous. Those officers could have caught COVID-19. It’s dangerous for any officer to be making an arrest for minor malfeasance.
Second, it looks embarrassingly petty.
When police ticketed her and District Judge Eric V. Moyé jailed her seven days for contempt of court, all they did was make Luther a celebrity and a conservative hero.
She now has fellow celebrity Sarah Palin and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz as customers at her Salon À la Mode.
(Sign of the week: “Remember the À la Mode.”)
Look at it this way.
In the long run, did this episode make people more likely to follow state and county health orders, or less likely?
Older police pros have a saying: “The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
I asked some of the political pros around the state to review the week’s performance:
▪ Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston: “This was largely a political stunt designed to get the ideological right revved up.
“ ... Think of this event as a targeted appeal to suburban female voters. ... If Republicans can’t stem the shifting of suburban women to the Democratic Party, they’ll lose every big county in the state and dozens of seats.”
▪ Cal Jillson, Southern Methodist University: “I wish the law had been discretionary when I was young. To find out so late in life that government orders, pronounced with one voice from the White House to the Courthouse, are just suggestions ... is information I could have made excellent use of.
“ ... The kerfuffle taking place around Shelley Luther feels like a pale version of the Tea Party groundswell of a decade ago.”
▪ Rebecca Deen, UT Arlington: “Many folks see this as government overreach against personal/business liberty. Those themes are good ways of mobilizing Republican voters in Texas, historically.”
▪ Marshall Hobbs Jr., Tarrant County College: “The overreach of politicians on the left ... abridging citizens’ civil rights and civil liberties will face a big backlash. This has motivated the grassroots silent majority.”
▪ Matthew Wilson, Southern Methodist University: “Rightly or wrongly, people overall seem more scared of the virus than they are of economic and social consequences of continued closure. But that 35%-40% who want swifter, broader re-openings are heavily concentrated among Republicans who participate in primaries and state conventions.”
(The state Republican convention is July 13-18 in Houston.)
▪ Kimi King, University of North Texas: “The release of Shelley Luther only symbolizes high-stakes, symbolic politics. ... Abbott needs to show he is taking measures to keep Texans safe. ... Republicans need to make a statement about the economy and perceptions of individual freedom, plus the added pressure of a volatile, trending toward declining, public approval of President Trump.”
Abbott, she wrote, “faces looking disorganized and undermined for trying to apply the rule of law.”
It was all a show.
This story was originally published May 9, 2020 at 5:45 AM with the headline "Activists staged Shelley Luther’s stunt against Greg Abbott, to the tune of $500,000."
