Hard Hitting Conservative Commentary by Gary M. Polland
Volume XXIV Number 9 – September 5, 2025
This Edition of TCR Sponsored By
For sponsorship information, please contact Marc Cowart at [email protected] or call 832.282.2175.
Thoughts This Fortnight
By Gary Polland
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A [MOLD] PROBLEM!
On August 19, the Houston Chronicle published a story by Nicole Hensley with the headline, Mold outbreak at Harris County courthouses sickened judge, forced mass closure of public bathrooms. The story detailed an explosion of mold in several county courthouses and the effect it is having on judges, staff and visitors to the buildings. TCR hears that the explosion is due to an effort to save costs by reducing the hours the air conditioning runs causing the humidity to balloon from 53% to a stuffy 70%. This high humidity creates a breeding ground for the deadly mold. While the idea of cutting costs sounds worthy, the future costs to remediate the mold will dwarf any savings realized from the reduced air conditioning operating hours.
SENATOR BRANDON CREIGHTON
TO LEAD TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY
Congratulations are in order for State Senator Brandon Creighton who is on his way to being appointed Chancellor of Texas Tech University. Cody Campbell, chairman of the TTU board of regents, broke the news on Sunday via the social media platform X saying that Creighton had been confirmed unanimously as the lone finalist to succeed outgoing Chancellor Ted Mitchell.
Congratulations Senator Creighton and…Guns Up!
CONGRATULATIONS TO MATT AND AMY MACKOWIAK
Austin political consultant Matt Mackowiak and wife Amy are expecting a baby boy. Congratulations, Matt and Amy! For those who want to show Baby Mackowiak some love, you can visit the baby registry here.
CANDIDATES NEEDED!
We must fill out the entire ballot and challenge Democrats in every race, especially the judicial races. If you are an experienced attorney interested in running for judge (or a non-lawyer interested in running in a non-judicial seat) contact Marc Cowart by emailing [email protected] or calling 832-282-2175 and we will set up a meeting to discuss what open race might be best for you. If you are already an announced candidate and want to make sure you are on our list, also contact Marc Cowart.
MARC COWART ANNOUNCES FOR HARRIS COUNTY TREASURER
TCR Managing Editor Marc Cowart announced on Tuesday that he is a Republican candidate for the office of Harris County Treasurer, which will appear on the March 3 Republican Primary Election ballot. If successful in the primary, Cowart would face the Democratic Party nominee in November 2026.
In his statement Cowart said, “I believe we need a DOGE-style review of all elected offices, departments and programs in Harris County government. If elected, I will conduct such a review at the County Treasurer’s office and will look at all personnel and procedures to find and implement the most practical and cost-effective measures to ensure that the taxpayers get the value they deserve. Like the federal DOGE, I will work as though there are no “sacred cows.” Anything and everything will be on the table, whether it is minor tweaks, a major overhaul of the office or even total elimination of the office as they did in Galveston County under Galveston County Treasurer Hank Dugie. I will look at everything.”
So far, Cowart has earned the support and endorsement of Texas Conservative Review, Conservative Republicans of Harris County, Conservative Republicans of Texas, Dr. Steven Hotze, Harris County School Trustee Eric Dick, former Harris County Republican Party Chairman Jared Woodfill, former conservative City of Houston mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee and former Harris County District Clerk Chris Daniel.
He also has my support as the former Chairman of the Harris County Republican Party where he served as my Executive Director. Together, with Vice-Chairman Paul Bettencourt and other great conservative grassroots leaders, we built our party and achieved the first Republican county-wide sweep in Harris County. Marc Cowart did a great job as Executive Director and I know he will do a great job for the taxpayers of Harris County. —Gary Polland
2025 TEXAS YOUTH SUMMIT IS ALMOST HERE
The deadline to participate in the 2025 Texas Youth Summit is approaching Fast. The event will be held on September 19 and 20 at the Woodlands Marriott. Tickets start at just $2 for youths and $25 for adults.
Friday, Sept 19 @ The Woodlands Waterway Marriott:
• 2:00 PM – VIP Registration Opens
• 4:00 PM – Special Student VIP Event — Leadership Institute Workshop/Training
• 5:00 PM – VIP Reception (by invitation/ticket level)
• 6:15–9:40 PM – Main Program
Saturday, Sept 20:
• 7:30 AM – Doors Open/Check-In
• 8:00 AM–6:15 PM – Main Program (with breaks)
For more information about the Texas Youth Summit watch the video here.
KEEPING THE FLAME OF CONSERVATISM IS A MUST-READ
“Keeping the Flame of Conservatism” is must-read commentary for all conservatives. It is an article that was published in four parts in The Prickly Pear. TCR will publish in the same four parts. You may read part I on The Prickly Pear by visiting https://pricklypear.news/keeping-the-flame-of-conservatism-part-i/ or as reprinted below. Please consider a subscription to The Prickly Pear for just $4.99 per month.
Keeping The Flame Of Conservatism- Part I
August 23, 2025/by Editors of The European Conservative
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Editors’ Note: In the future, articles such as Keeping the Flame of Conservatism – Parts I, II , III and IV will be published in our Premium Content (VIP) section. We ask that all readers consider a Premium Content subscription to The Prickly Pear. Your monthly subscription of only $4.99 will support the site and our dedicated effort as citizen journalists to bring timely, factual, and informative articles, videos and podcasts to you, fulfilling our mission of ‘educating, informing and advocating’ for the public and those in the governing and public policy arenas about current and critical issues impacting Arizonans and Americans.
The Democrats right now look like a party that favors a terrorist group over the Middle East’s sole democracy and has become anti-Semitic as well as anti-Israel. They believe that men can become women (and vice versa) and often favor transgender women (biological men) competing against biological women in sports at every competitive level. At the same time, they believe heterosexual white men are a national security threat and the source of much of Western civilization’s evil. Many still want to wear masks that didn’t work during the COVID era. Their elected and unelected leaders want to spend the country into oblivion and increasingly favor socialism.
That’s just a short list. Whew!
Many are looking for the adults in the room to challenge the rumbustious extremists within their midst. That could be difficult because, increasingly, the communist leaning extremists look like the future of the party, with the New York mayoral race being a glaring example.
But before we laugh at their difficulties, let’s be sure we Conservatives are doing our job as well to keep extremist elements from taking over our movement. We are developing some problems that need to be addressed.
This raises some tough questions to which we have no firm answers. Who gets to define and stand for Conservatism, and what criteria do you use to judge when members of the movement violate key principles?
Fissures have appeared before in the history of the Conservative movement. Whether he was elected to do so or not, one of the founders of the modern Conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr., took on the role of arbiter.
In the 1960s, he marginalized the John Birch Society from the Conservative movement. Those who might remember them know they were a substantial power at the local level, and through their “chapters” and their chapter libraries, book stores, and their magazine American Opinion, they did yeoman work building the Conservative movement. Looking back, they were uncannily correct about a lot of things. However, some of their leaders were prone to making outlandish and unsubstantiated statements. One statement from their leader, Robert Welch, that got significant negative attention was his claim that Dwight Eisenhower was either a communist or an agent of the communist movement.
That was a bridge too far for most Conservatives, and the Birchers were never able to walk that statement back from the suburbs of kookdom. Those excesses hurt much of the good work they had performed.
Buckley again played the role of arbiter with the 1991 flap with former Presidential aide, candidate, and columnist Pat Buchanan. Buchanan must be credited with developing seminal ideas, some of which have been incorporated in MAGA, but he also seemed to have a loose screw when it came to Israel.
In 1991, Buckley wrote a famous 40,000-word essay (and later a book) that received significant attention at the time from both sides of the issue. He concluded that Buchanan had said some anti-Semitic things, but that he was not himself an anti-Semite. That may sound like hair-splitting, but shortly you will see why.
Buchanan and his followers never accepted the criticism, but Buchanan became a diminished force. He went on to found his own magazine, The American Conservative.
The Conservative movement, like a great river, has many tributaries. Among those are Judeo-Christianity, reverence for the Constitution as written, a noninterventionist foreign policy, libertarian economics, and opposition to Communism and socialism.
One of those tributaries (noninterventionist foreign policy) had elements of anti-Semitism in it, with the original America First movement of the late 1930s, particularly with the popularity of Charles Lindbergh.
Later, during the late 1940s and into the 1950s, an uncomfortable number of Jews were involved in espionage against the US and in favor of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The most spectacular was the Rosenberg trial and the couple’s later execution, which made headlines and remained controversial until about 35 years ago, when Cable #1651 of the Venona Papers (decrypts of cables discovered after the fall of Communist Russia) reconfirmed their guilt.
As you might expect, during the Cold War and McCarthy era, some people demagogued this issue for their own purposes. Selling atomic secrets to the enemy was treason, and some wanted to spread collective guilt to all Jews in general.
It was also a period of “country club” anti-Semitism, a discomfort that some higher-status people had with Jewish people and other minorities.
But like all attempts at collective guilt, the proponents were dishonestly selective. Most of the scientists who gave the US the bomb, like Einstein, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Bohr, Bethe, van Neumann, and the tremendous strategic advantage that came with it, were Jews. Later, another Jew, Edward Teller, would help develop the hydrogen bomb and advise leaders on nuclear strategy. The man who developed much of the theory of atomic warfare (On Thermonuclear War) and founded the Hudson Institute, Herman Kahn, was Jewish. And no one did more to put nuclear weapons where they could protect the US most effectively than the Jewish US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the atomic submarine fleet that remains so important still today.
As usual, Jews find themselves on both sides of great controversies. While it is true that Jewish thinkers were essential to the left, it was equally valid that they contributed mightily to the development of modern conservatism.
Buckley had seen anti-Semitism in politics, and he did not want it in the modern Conservative Movement. Most conservatives agreed.
And for good reason. A key principle of Conservatism is not to judge people as a collective, so anti-Semitism does not mix with Conservatism. Collectivism and individualism are incompatible.
Moreover, Buckley was acutely aware that not all Jews are leftists, even though most were liberal Democrats. He worked in the early Conservative movement with many Jews who were not leftists. While a minority for sure, Jews played a key role in the rise of Conservatism. Here are some examples:
Willi Schramm, an Austrian Jew, in fact helped Buckley found and fund National Review, which became the most influential Conservative magazine.
Frank S. Meyer was a close confidant of Buckley, one of the founding editors of National Review. A former communist who had attended Oxford, he was a prolific writer and organizer. He is credited with “fusionism”, the molding together of traditional conservative beliefs with libertarian economics.
There were not many competing Conservative publications at that time, but one other magazine that grew up in the same era was Human Events. One of its most prolific columnists was Morrie Ryskind, a former Hollywood writer. His son Alan later became an owner and editor of the publication.
Frank Chodorov also partnered with Buckley in founding the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the very first scholarship program to assist Conservative scholars whom the universities were constantly shunning.
From the supporters of the free market came Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard. Jews were prominent in the Chicago School of Economics as well, with Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Aaron Director, and Richard Epstein (in the law and economics movement).
Others were not publicly political, but explained and promoted free market mechanisms. Among them are Fritz Machlup (trade), Peter Bauer (foreign aid and development), Anna Schwartz (monetary history), Myron Scholes (option trading theory), Peter Drucker (management), Simon Kuznets (national income accounting), Alexander Gerschenkron (economic history), Julian Simon(environmental economics), Jacque Rueff(international banking and the gold standard), Hyman Minsky (credit cycle), Harry Markowitz (modern portfolio theory), and Kahneman&Tversky( Behavioral Economics).
The novelist Ayn Rand, too, was Jewish, as was her chief collaborator, Leonard Peikoff. There could not be a modern libertarian movement without Ayn Rand.
And there was Barry Goldwater, the most prominent Conservative of his era. Buckley’s brother-in-law helped Goldwater with Conscience of the Conservative, a hugely impactful book.
Professor Leo Strauss was also a seminal conservative thinker who influenced political thought today. He helped birth an entire generation of conservative thinkers, among the most influential of whom was Harry Jaffa.
Professor Harry Jaffa, one of the most essential Lincoln scholars in the country, also helped Goldwater and wrote the famous “extremism in the defense of liberty” speech that Goldwater so famously delivered. Jaffa later became important in the Claremont Institute, one of the most impactful Conservative think tanks.
Thus, Buckley understood that conservatives should not lump people together as a collective (whites, gays, blacks, Hispanics, Jews) but treat them as individuals. People have individual rights, not collective rights, and there can be vast differences of opinion among people of the same race or religion. Moreover, he knew firsthand that many Jews had contributed mightily to both Conservatism and Libertarianism.
Buckley felt the ugliness of anti-Semitism could not be allowed to infiltrate Conservatism, and that is what concerned him with Buchanan.
Interestingly, in the most recent September 2025 issue of National Review, there is a lengthy article on the strange shift in the tone and content of Tucker Carlson, something we have raised concerns about ourselves. It is almost as if the Conservative movement is going to have to re-litigate the problem of anti-Semitism within our ranks.
But one can be critical of Israeli policies without being anti-Semitic. If you have any knowledge of the politics of Israel, you know that Israeli politics are among the most fractious in the world. Yet it is a characteristic of anti-Semitism to see Jews as a coordinated secret hidden hand. The accusation of a ‘secret Jewish power’ is that it is so unified and powerful that it runs the world like a puppeteer controls puppets.
Both in Buckley’s era and today, some are convinced that Israel and the “Jewish Lobby” are so strong and so unified that they control US foreign policy – not influence, but rather control. In short, Israel and American Jews who support Israel are considered a fifth column, changing America’s actions to suit their aims, and not those of America.
So, in his 1991 essay, Buckley delineated what rhetoric and behavior he thought crossed the line from criticism into Jew hatred.
There are lessons in that essay we can use today. In part II, we will dig into Buckley’s arguments and apply them to the current situation.
*****
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JUST FOR FUN
TCR IS INTERVIEWING CANDIDATES
The Texas Conservative Review is interviewing prospective candidates for the November 4, 2025 and March 3, 2026 Republican Primary elections for potential endorsement. Candidates who wish to be considered for endorsement by TCR should schedule an interview by contacting Marc Cowart by phone at 832-282-2175 or by emailing [email protected].
EVENTS CALENDAR
Click link for full details
September 4 | 6:30 p.m. Kingwood Tea Party with speaker Briscoe Cain
September 6 |10:00 a.m. Judicial Petition Signing
September 6 | 11 a.m. 18th Congressional District Candidate Forum
September 8 | 5:30p.m. CPAC-Houston
September 9 | 7:30 a.m. Pachyderm Club of Northwest Houston
September 9 | 6:00 p.m. Texas Tea Party of Republican Women
September 10 | 11:00 a.m. Magic Circle Luncheon with Governor Greg Abbott
September 11 | 11:00 a.m. Cypress Republicans Monthly Meeting
September 13 | 6:00 p.m. Boots and Heroes Gala
September 15 | 7:00 p.m. Harris County Republican Party Executive Committee Meeting, Hyatt Regency Baytown, 100 Convention Ctr Wy, Baytown, TX 77520
September 16 | 7:00 p.m. Cherry Tree Republicans, Mamacita’s Restaurant, 19831 Northwest Freeway
September 18 | 6:30 p.m. San Jacinto Conservatives HQ Opening
September 19 | 6:00 p.m. Texas Youth Summit
September 20 | 7:00 a.m. Texas Youth Summit
September 22 | 5:30 p.m. Dennis Paul for State Senate Fundraiser with Lt. Governor Dan Patrick
To submit an event please email [email protected]
ELECTION CALENDAR
November 4, 2025: General Election (CD 18 and SD 9 for example)
January 1, 2025: First day to apply for a ballot by mail for any 2025 election
July 19, 2025: First day to file for a place on the November 4, 2025 General Election
August 18, 2025: Last day to file for a place on the November 4, 2025 General Election
October 6, 2025: Last day to register to vote in the November 4, 2025 General Election
October 20, 2025: First day of Early Voting for the November 4, 2025 General Election
October 31, 2025: Last day of Early Voting for the November 4, 2025 General Election
November 4, 2025: Election Day
March 3, 2026: Primary Election
January 1, 2026: First day to apply for a ballot by mail for any 2026 election
September 9, 2025: First day to file for Precinct Chairman for the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
November 8, 2025: First day to file for all other offices for the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
December 8, 2025: Last day to file for a place on the ballot for the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
February 2, 2025: Last day to register to vote in the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
February 17, 2026: First day of Early Voting for the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
February 20, 2026: Last day to apply for a ballot by mail for the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
February 27, 2026: Last day of Early Voting for the March 3, 2026 Primary Election
March 3, 2026: Election Day
May 26, 2026: Primary Runoff Election
April 27, 2026: Last day to register to vote in the May 2, 2026 Primary Runoff Election
May 15, 2026: Last day to apply for a ballot by mail for the May 26, 2026 Primary Runoff Election
May 18, 2026: First day of Early Voting for the May 26, 2026 Primary Runoff Election
May 22, 2026: Last day of Early Voting for the May 26, 2026 Primary Runoff Election
May 26, 2026: Election Day for the 2026 Primary Runoff Election For information on becoming a candidate on the Republican Primary Election Ballot, visit https://www.harriscountygop.com/run-for-office/
ADVERTISE HERE!
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ADDITIONS, CORRECTIONS OR FEEDBACK?
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About Your Editor
Gary Polland is a long-time conservative and Republican spokesman, fund-raiser, and leader who served three terms as the Harris County Republican Chairman. During his three terms, Gary was described as “the most successful county Chairman in America” by Human Events – The National Conservative Weekly. He is in his twenty-eighth year of editing a newsletter dealing with key conservative and Republican issues. For the last twenty-three years, he has edited the Texas Conservative Review. As a public service for the previous 20 years, Gary has published election guides for the GOP primary, general elections, and city elections, all to assist conservative candidates. Gary also for 20 years cohosted Red, White and Blue on Houston Public Media TV 8 PBS Houston, longest running political talk show in Texas history and for the last four-plus years Gary has been a regular commentator on Fox 26-Houston’s “What’s Your Point” airing Sunday’s at 7 a.m. Gary serves on the Board of Directors of American Values, a national pro-family, pro-faith, conservative organization supporting the unity of the American people around the vision of our founding fathers and dedicated to reminding the public of the conservative principles fundamental to the survival of our nation. Gary is a practicing attorney and strategic consultant. He can be reached at (713) 621-6335.
