May 22, 2026
TOP PHOTO: Dawn and Ethan Fry walk home from school in Old Town Uvalde.
Guest article submitted by Jennifer Fry
My brother called yesterday afternoon as I was walking two of my four kids home from their last day of daycare for the school year. My daughter may or may not return for a short summer session before she goes to kindergarten, her “new school.” It was a special moment for us. Though we live only two blocks, at most, from the daycare, we rarely walk either to or from the program. It was a beautiful, cool day on account of the recent rains, and I wanted them to enjoy the short trek home—which they did by, first, dipping their toes in the puddles and, later, traipsing through the mud. In the middle of this idyllic scene stormed my brother’s fury.
A talk with Jason is never an equal give-and-take. He is usually the one to do all of the talking, with the one on the receiving end left with no room for rebuttal. In fact, his abrupt, argumentative nature earned him the nickname “the Judge” by our great-grandfather when we were six. Arguments are not usually a fair fight with him, and this occasion was no exception.
The conversation started off peacefully enough. He reminded me that my family were moving back to San Antonio—an eventuality that I was not able to rebuff by saying that my husband had been having second thoughts. The topic quickly moved to gas prices.
I should convince my husband to move closer, he said, because “gas prices are $4.19 a gallon and they’re not going down, despite what the president says.” I later found the average gas price in San Antonio to be $3.43—not great, but well below his quoted price. Pain at the pump was a good segway into politics for him, my brother’s preferred topic these days.
“Did you know they’ve destroyed all this gas and oil infrastructure in Iran that will take years if not decades to rebuild?” he asked. I didn’t know. I’d been too busy raising my kids.
Somehow the “war in Iran” led to talk of the primaries for midterm elections and Thomas Massie’s recent loss to an inferior candidate in the Kentucky senate race.
“Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote to release the Epstein Files. He was in office 12 years and he lost to a guy who never went out and actually campaigned! It’s because Trump spent millions of dollars against him because he doesn’t want the Epstein Files released,” he said.
This I knew something about. “Thomas Massie is embroiled in his own scandal,” I told him calmly. “His dear wife of 35 years died suddenly—he didn’t cause her death—and within 18 months he was married to a woman half her age. And it sounds like he had a girlfriend or mistress between them.”
What I didn’t say is that Massie’s call for the Epstein Files to be released could signal to voters that he’s a RINO, a Republican in Name Only. Tony Gonzales, a Congressman from our district in Texas, was ousted for a similar reason. In the middle of both the campaign leading up to a run-off election and a brewing scandal of his own, Gonzales rescinded his bid for re-election.
Jason was dismissive. “People grieve in different ways. I knew a guy, my neighbor down the street, who got married within a couple of months of his wife dying,” he said, still angry about Trump’s alleged interference in Massie’s re-election.
“I tell you the Republican Party of today is not the Republican Party from when we were growing up in the ’90’s,” he went on. “Did you know they’re redistricting congressional districts in Georgia to push out black voters?”
I didn’t know that either. But was this true, I wondered.
The conversation then turned to how “all” Republicans should be to blame for things like Alex Pretti’s death, on account of many of them having supported Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal—again, something I knew a little about.
This was, I wanted to point out, a false analogy. The circumstances of the two cases are not the same. On the one hand, two civilians were interacting in a dangerous situation and one became (or continued being) aggressive to the point of threatening life; on the other, as far as I understand, the man escalated tensions with the police. Policemen have the state’s authority to use deadly force for a reason.
“Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial outcome was just,” I said. “He acted in self-defense.”
By this point, I had reached home with my two kids in tow; my husband had been at home with the youngest. The kids and I left our muddy shoes at the door and I sat down to wait one quarter hour until it was time to get my eldest son from school. I was still on the phone with my brother and he was on speaker.
Mine was not a counterargument that Jason had time to listen to, it seemed. Erratically, the topic turned to internment. Earlier in the conversation he had mentioned a detention center being built down the street from our father’s house, a fact that I had not personally verified. I have since learned that it is a massive, already-built warehouse at 542 SE Loop 410, three and a half miles almost directly south of our childhood home, that federal agents are looking to convert to a 1,500-bed holding facility. As of February, there was no word on when the facility would be finished out.
“If these are for deporting illegals, then why are they permanent?” Jason asked.
The purchase of the facility faced some push-back by local leaders and concerned citizens, to no avail. A News 4 San Antonio/WOIA article from February pointed out, “Ultimately, officials acknowledged ICE does not need local approval to buy property.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided a statement to News 4 regarding the purchase of the facility: “Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.” I could not have said it better.
“Tell me,” Jason asked again, “do you think that what happened in Germany in the 1930’s could not happen here?” It was a tiresome trope. “Why would people living here have to prove their loyalty to the U.S.?”
“It’s human nature,” I countered. I reminded him that something like that had already happened. “We rounded up the Japanese and the Germans during World War II out of fear.” Thankfully, our family was not among them, but this is the exception which proves the rule.
Our great-grandfather, J.O. Klatt, the one who nicknamed Jason, had emigrated from Germany to the U.S. as a child in the 1910’s and by 1941 was an integral part of the smithing operation at Alamo Iron Works in San Antonio. He was an exceptional metallurgist. At the time, Alamo Iron Works provided metal supplies to the war effort. Because his supervisor stepped in to say that he was already serving his country through blacksmithing, Klatt was not subject to the draft—nor, as it would seem, to internment. Perhaps he had proved his loyalty to his adopted country by his civilian service, something younger generations would do well to emulate.
On and on it went like this. At one point, Jason’s gruffness made me cry.
I began to notice a pattern: Jason would give what he considered a bombshell revelation based not on facts but his interpretation of the facts—facts that he didn’t consider worth my time to retell, because facts alone aren’t explosive. It was ad hominem after ad hominem, sensational claim after sensational claim, while all along, he was claiming the moral high ground.
“I’m telling you the truth here,” he said, expecting to be believed.
When I tried asking for proof, he whined. “You’re coming at me with logic,” he said. “What do you want me to do, give you my sources?”
Actually, yes.
“Are you sitting in front of your computer? Can you pull all this up?” he asked.
In vain, we tried—as the minutes ticked by for me to go get my son. Frantically, my husband paced about the room, unsure of who was getting the schoolboy and what to do about the other kids. I was already five minutes late by the time I pulled up any articles related to Alex Pretti, to say nothing of any other name my brother had dropped. Meanwhile, Jason was dully reading out meaningless headlines, as if that alone would pull me to his side of the aisle.
This is not the way to persuade, I reasoned. Like a good wine, arguments take time to develop. Clearly, he had not studied rhetoric or the human condition.
“I don’t want to be a Democrat,” I finally told him, more abruptly than I had meant to. The conversation had touched a nerve that both of us were uncomfortable with feeling. “I have to get my son.” I nodded wordlessly to my husband that I would pick up the schoolboy.
Had Jason called to strong-arm me into performing my civic duty, I wondered. If so, he was more than three hours too late. I had already voted in our county’s run-off Republican primary election just that morning—a fact I had been unable to convey.
“I’m just telling you this because I care,” Jason said simply. “You need to look into these things.”
“And you need to stop being a bully!” I wanted to tell him. “And stop berating people for not having the time to look into it.”
And so the storm blew over, with neither of us giving ground. I can’t really even say we agreed to disagree. It was more like a stalled chess game, the pieces of which we will, no doubt, pick back up to hurl at each other the next time he calls.
