Open letter to my college classmates, including and especially those who teach yoga, and/or live in the northeast, and/or who would never even consider living in Texas among so many Deplorables:

Stop spreading misinformation, y’all. Now that I’m a Texan, I am compelled to defend my home state from your baseless attacks. The biased and uninformed tweets and memes that you post have the potential to further damage any remaining goodwill that might still exist in our fraying Republic. By sharing misinformation with the clear intent to mischaracterize and denigrate a well-meaning and carefully written Texas law, you demonstrate your disdain for your fellow Americans and your complete lack of interest in making even a minimal effort to understand them. Your goal is clearly to present the newly enacted sections of the Texas law on teaching social studies in its public schools as completely backward. The tweet that you shared from NBC News presents some factual information, but it does so in such a misleading way as to be untrue. If NBC had reported that the “school administrator [mistakenly] advised teachers” to include books about the Holocaust and books with an opposing perspective, then that would have truthfully captured to nature of what transpired. One word can make a big difference. Isn’t it funny how these frequent mistakes or omissions by “news” organizations always seem to support a preferred narrative?