<Texas Governor Greg Abbott's warning to musicians who have pulled out of the South by Southwest festival (SXSW) over the U.S. Army's sponsorship could put the festival's economic impact of $300 million at risk.

The internationally recognized festival brings thousands of visitors to Austin each March, showcasing music, film and interactive media. This year's festival is running through Saturday and includes live panels and special events.

In 2023, SXSW brought in $380.9 million of spending activity to Austin, surpassing even pre-pandemic numbers, according to an analysis by Greyhill Advisors.

On Tuesday, musicians including Kneecap, Lambrini Girls, Scowl, Gel, Okay Shalom, Squirrel Flower and Sprints began pulling out of SXSW in protest of the U.S. Army's sponsorship amid heightened tensions in the U.S. and around the world due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The musicians have cited the U.S Army's role amid the conflict as the U.S. has provided strong support and military aid to Israel following Hamas' October 7 attacks.

Abbott criticized the musicians in a post on X, formerly Twitter, warning them "don't come back" to the state.

"Bands pull out of SXSW over U.S. Army sponsorship. Bye. Don't come back. Austin remains the HQ for the Army Futures Command. San Antonio is Military City USA. We are proud of the U.S. military in Texas. If you don't like it, don't come here," Abbott wrote.

There are concerns that the governor's warning could put the revenue that the festival brings in each year at risk. Newsweek has reached out to Abbott's office and SXSW via email for comment.

"SXSW does not agree with Governor Abbott," SXSW wrote on X. "We are an organization that welcomes diverse viewpoints. Music is the soul of SXSW, and it has long been our legacy. We fully respect the decision these artists made to exercise their right to free speech. Across the globe, we are witnessing unspeakable tragedies, the rise of repressive regimes, and the increasing spread of violent conflict. It's more crucial than ever that we come together to solve these greater humanitarian issues."

After a two-year pause in the festival due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event's impact on the Austin economy in 2022 totaled $280.7 million, according to SXSW, as it typically attracts over 300,000 people each year.

Last year, the number jumped to $380.9 million, with attendees spending on festival partners, local businesses and vendors like hotels, venues and bars. There were 11,444 hotel reservations made for SXSW in 2023 and direct booking through the festival brought $2.6 million in hotel occupancy taxes, which supports the City of Austin's live music fund.

Data provided by the festival shows that attendance accounted for $234.1 million of economic impact, with operations totaling $88.7 million and expenditures from festival partners totaling $58 million.

The flap comes as musicians continue to fight for higher pay from the festival. SXSW announced in June 2023 that it would be raising the pay for musicians in 2024 through its showcase application, with eligible bands that opt for pay to receive $350 and solo artists $150. The announcement came after the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) began a fair pay campaign against SXSW in 2023.>

The worthless twit of Austin can f*** off and die.

<Chubb, the insurance company that agreed to pay former President Donald Trump's nearly $1 billion bond in the second defamation case he lost to writer E. Jean Carroll, is publicly responding to the concerns of its supporters.

Politico's Josh Gerstein reports via X (formerly Twitter), "NEW: Insurance giant Chubb issues letter to customers defending $91.6 [sic] bond for Trump to facilitate his appeal in Carroll libel case. Company calls itself 'part of the justice system plumbing' & says bond 'fully collateralized' if verdict is upheld."

Gerstein also included Chubb Chief Executive Officer Evan Greenberg's statement, which reads, "When Chubb provides an appeal bond it has nothing to do with the underlying merits or with favoring any of the parties in the case. As the surety, we don’t take sides, it would be wrong for us to do so and we are in no way supporting the defendant. We are supporting and are part of the justice system plumbing included in this case."

Greenberg writes, "I fully realize how polarizing and emotional this case and the defendant are and how easy it would be for Chubb to just say no. However, we support the rule of law and our role in it. We considered this the right thing to do and we frankly left our own personal feelings aside."

CNBC reports, "If Trump loses his appeal of the defamation judgment, Carroll can demand payment from Chubb. But in the meantime, Carroll cannot collect on the $83.3 million in damages that a Manhattan federal court awarded her in the case in January."

The news outlet also notes that "CNBC has asked Chubb if Trump separately has sought from the company an appeal bond that could top $500 million against a judgment in the civil business fraud case he lost in Manhattan Supreme Court earlier this year."

According to CNBC's report, the insurance giant is named in that particular lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

"The suit says that in 2010, a Chubb appraiser had visited Trump’s triplex apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan as part of the process of underwriting a homeowner’s insurance policy," the news outlet reports.>

<For Donald Trump, last week must have seemed like a final, crowning victory over his lingering Republican critics. On Friday the Republican National Committee (RNC) made official what Trump had already decreed weeks ago, electing Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as party co-chair.

Lara Trump is nominally co-chair alongside former North Carolina Republican Party Chair Michael Whatley. Both received former President Trump’s endorsement for the role. In practice, the power dynamic is more like when the Roman emperor granted his family a shared consulship with an irrelevant senator. In case any Republican was confused about where true power rested, Trump began her tenure atop the RNC with a sweeping purge of the unfaithful.

Donald Trump’s MAGA ideology can now claim the House Speakership and formal control of the RNC. With Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stepping down from his role as Senate minority leader, Trump will likely soon control that post as well.

But even at the pinnacle of its institutional power, the MAGA movement is already buckling at the joints.

Trump’s GOP is a paradox. The former president now enjoys an unprecedented level of control over the Republican national apparatus. He can freely raid the RNC’s dwindling campaign coffers for legal defense money and appoint family members to key positions while personally directing House Republicans’ disastrous investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party is a remarkable thing to behold.

But Republicans’ willingness to bow to Trump on nearly every issue is making their party staggeringly unpopular with voters — and not just the rank and file. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck stunned Capitol Hill on Tuesday by announcing that he’d simply had enough of Trumpism and would resign in just about a week. In an interview with CNN, Buck slammed Congress as “dysfunctional” and remarked that many of his constituents were sick of Trump.

It isn’t just Buck who’s had enough of Trump’s constant demands for loyalty and submission. Some of the party’s biggest fundraisers are already sitting on the electoral sidelines rather than raise or donate a penny to Trump. Now Newsweek reports that Lara Trump’s RNC takeover is driving even lifelong RNC financiers out of the party.

With Trump about to turn the RNC into his personal ATM and donors abandoning the party in droves, Republicans could enter the heat of the 2024 campaign season unable to compete in a host of critical swing races. That’s going to be a real problem, because GOP candidates have a lot of ground to make up if they want to hold onto their jobs.

Polling from January finds that American voters oppose most of Trump’s far-right policies. Somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of Republican voters now say they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances. Trump’s popularity among women has fallen by 5 percent according to a new Quinnipiac poll, in no small part due to his repeated verbal attacks on his sexual abuse victim, writer E. Jean Carroll. Problems like that take a lot of campaign money to solve — money that likely will instead be redirected into the pockets of Trump’s criminal defense attorneys.

One RNC donor, Peter Henlein, voiced many Republicans’ outrage at the new arrangement in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “After a lifetime of donating to every GOP nominee and multiple down ballot candidates every cycle….I’m out,” Henlein wrote. “I donated to help win elections, not to maintain the lifestyle of a billionaire.”

The MAGA movement’s final purity purge may prove to be one too many. It’s worth asking how competitive a national party can be when its platform excludes everyone from Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) in the moderate wing to Buck on the hard right, from conservative establishment royalty like former Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) to anti-government insurgent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.). It’s getting awfully hard to be a Republican in good standing, and even the former faithful are starting to feel the burn.

Republicans have built themselves a party whose sole purpose is to appease and gratify Trump. In the process, they’re quickly losing appeal to anyone else in America, including some of the party’s most faithful warriors. Buck and Romney may be the first Republican leaders to walk out of Congress before being tossed, but they won’t be the last.

The MAGA movement, once so skilled at enforcing loyalty, is cracking. What’s left of the Republican Party is cracking with it. The sooner it shatters, the better.>

<U.S. Rep. Randy Weber, R-Friendswood, was kicked out of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus last week.

During a one-on-one chat that Caucus Chair Bob Good requested with Weber to address his sparse attendance to weekly meetings members are expected to attend, first reported by Politico, Weber said Good asked him if he had lost interest in the caucus. The Texas Republican said it wasn’t so much a lack of interest as a dislike for the “burn the house down” procedural tactics the rightmost flank has come to be known for. In response, Weber said Good told him he’d need to reapply for admission back into the caucus.

“It was a shock because I've disagreed with some of the Freedom Caucus chairs … but I've never had them tell me you need to get out of the Freedom Caucus,” Weber told The Texas Tribune.

Good did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon. The House Freedom Caucus declined to comment on membership and internal processes.

Weber said he still hasn’t decided whether he’ll reapply to the caucus.

“I’m going to wait, give it some time and see,” he said.

Weber was a Freedom Caucus member for nearly a decade. He said he has seen the group shift from being party rabble-rousers to playing a major hand in holding up budget fights and forcing an unprecedented Speaker election last year. The rightmost flank holds more weight now given House Republicans' razor-thin majority, dangling the threat of a motion to vacate or a government shutdown if leadership doesn’t concede to their hardline demands.

Weber said Good had been checking in with caucus members who had missed previous weekly meetings, but Weber is the only known member to have been removed altogether.

Weber said he had “no interaction with Bob Good” beyond the Freedom Caucus’ weekly meetings until he was called into his office last Tuesday.

Weber said he believes Good “had an agenda” and removed him from the caucus unilaterally. He said the clash over that strategy with Good and perhaps some bad blood left from the presidential Republican primary — Weber is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump and Good initially supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — led the caucus chair to single him out.

The last email invite Weber received for a caucus meeting was Dec. 4 — about a week before Good was tapped to succeed Rep. Scott Perry as caucus chair.

Weber added he’s had conversations with Board of the Caucus members who said they were surprised by Good’s move.

“I know that there's bylaws about missing so many meetings, but there's a lot of people who've missed a lot of meetings and why it would be me singled out I don't know,” Weber said.

Weber said he missed the meetings to have dinner with his wife, who has started frequenting Washington, D.C., more. But he added his lack of attendance was also spurred by his disillusionment with the caucus’ tactics, like the motion to vacate that ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy with just one vote — a move Weber did not support because he said there was no strategy beyond “throwing a monkey wrench into the gears.”

Several Texas Republicans hold membership in the caucus, including Reps. Chip Roy of Austin, Keith Self of McKinney, Troy Nehls of Richmond and Michael Cloud of Victoria. Roy serves as the Freedom Caucus’ policy chair and declined to comment on Weber’s removal. A 2014 article in The Hill about Weber quoted him saying he didn’t see himself staying in Congress for more than a decade, but the recent dysfunction among Republicans has incentivized him to stay longer.

“If anything, it redoubles my resolve to stay here and try to make this place work because it is broken beyond belief,” he said.

The only other House Republican known to be kicked out of the caucus was Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. She was booted over comments she made about Freedom Caucus colleagues.>

Hope Weber tells them to piss up a rope.

<Abdel Irada: <Petrosianic: Ultimately free speech and freedom from offense are incompatible concepts. Both can coexist only by bowing to the other to some extent.>

This is an excellent point, and one that comes up in many contexts.

It's easy for partisans of one "side" of a question or the other to be dogmatic and demand absolute observance of the right they wish to defend, and where there is no countervailing right, there is no reason why they should not prevail.

But quite often, significant rights *conflict*. When they do, <compromise> is necessary. We see this, for example, in the abortion debate, where it appears in the conflict between the fetus' right to life and the right of the woman bearing that fetus to exercise free will over her own body. (I could also name a dozen other such scenarios without breaking a cognitive sweat, and so could you.)