Confess, Don't Complain

A follow-up to "The Door Is Open"

A few weeks ago I wrote about the door that’s open for people walking away from MAGA and the Republican Party, and about the difference between walking through it right and walking through it wrong. I said the price of entry is: “Here is what I was wrong about. Here’s who got hurt. Here’s what I’m doing about it.” Not complicated. Just hard.

We got a live demonstration of the wrong way this week, and I want to highlight it, because it’s the pattern in miniature.

Hunter Bonner shared a piece by Suzanne Bellsnyder in the Texas Rural Reporter, captioned it as her nailing it, and added his own gloss: as a lifelong Reagan Republican, it’s time for Republicans to “rescrew our heads on” and stop the nonsense.

Worth pausing on the article itself, because it’s the first layer of the same problem. Bellsnyder opens with Reagan’s line about the nine scariest words in the English language, then walks through a week covering an $8 million state curriculum correction and nearly ten hours of Capitol testimony on data centers, water, and energy. Her argument is that authority keeps drifting away from local communities while responsibility stays put, and she frames the whole thing as an American question rather than a partisan one, closing on the country’s 250th birthday as a moment to revisit first principles. It is, in other words, a real argument about power and accountability that never once names a person, a policy, or a party responsible for any of it. Nobody gets confronted. Nobody gets asked to answer for a specific decision. It stays at the altitude of first principles, which is a comfortable place to stay, because nothing up there costs anyone anything.

Mendi replied with the thing that needed saying. Y’all voted for all of this. Trump and the Republican Party are the same today as they were in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024. You didn’t mind voting for it when it was hurting other people. You’re mad now because it’s at your doorstep. You voted for vouchers, for the marginalizing, for the cost of everything going up, when you voted for Trump, Abbott, and the rest of the ticket. You own it.

Hunter’s response is the whole essay in one paragraph. He doesn’t dispute the record. He doesn’t defend the platform. He says: I don’t think you or your husband know what I voted for. And then, for the record, myself and many other Republicans were against vouchers, and still are today.

Sit with that move for a second, because it is the move. Not a defense of the party. Not a real accounting of what he actually supports and doesn’t. An assertion of disagreement, offered as if it settles something, followed immediately by a request that we extend him credit for a single position, attached to a ballot he won’t name, cast for a party whose platform he claims to partly reject.

Mendi’s response cuts to the actual question. Did you vote for Democrats, or did you vote for Republicans? Because if you voted Republican, you voted for vouchers. It’s in the state party platform. That’s not an accusation. That’s a simple reality.

Now here's who's actually saying "you don't know what I voted for." Bonner isn't a rank-and-file voter airing a private gripe. He built his public identity as a Republican organizer. In a November 4, 2022 opinion piece in the Marion County Herald, written while he was President of the Marion County Republican Assembly, he urged every Republican in the county to get to the polls and vote a straight Republican ticket, arguing Beto O'Rourke was a far-left radical unfit for office over his positions on abortion, guns, and inflation. He won the county chairmanship in the March 2024 primary, and in his first column as chair, laid out his priorities in order: electing Republicans up and down the ballot, even at the local level, and uniting the party around defeating Democrats and ending what he called Joe Biden's destructive reign.

Here’s the part that everyone should note. In that same 2022 piece, writing about abortion, he told his fellow Republicans it’s time to publicly own it, and do so unapologetically. That was the standard he set for everyone else. Say the position out loud. Attach your name to it. No hedging.

Compare that to what he did with Mendi. He didn't publicly own anything. He hid behind "you don't know what I voted for," the exact move he told Republicans not to make on abortion four years ago. This is not a man with a quiet, private dissent from his party. This is a man whose entire public career has been organizing Republican votes, uniting Republicans around defeating Democrats, and demanding public, unapologetic conviction from others, who now wants credit for mild disagreement.

This is the part people keep trying to skip past, and we should all be done letting it slide, so let’s call it what it is.

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Mild disagreement is not public accountability.

You don’t get to hold a quiet exception to your party’s platform and then present that exception as evidence of your good character when someone calls the platform out. If you voted for the ticket, you voted for the platform and what it has delivered. That’s what a ticket is. Hunter wants to be evaluated on the position he claims to hold, while being shielded from the position he actually funded with his vote. That’s not principle. That’s an escape hatch, and it only opens when someone gets close enough to make him uncomfortable.

“You don’t know what I voted for” is not a rebuttal. It’s a refusal.

Notice what it does. It doesn’t say I didn’t vote for this. It says you can’t prove what I voted for, so you have no standing to say it. That’s not somebody correcting the record. That’s somebody hiding behind the secret ballot to avoid the consequences of being associated with what the ballot produced. If the position is one you’re proud of, say what you did. If you won’t say what you did, you don’t get the credit for having supposedly done the right thing.

Being vocal about one plank doesn’t exempt you from the rest.

Give him this much: Hunter has actually been vocal about vouchers, publicly, on the record, more than most Republicans who quietly go along. That’s more than nothing. But it doesn’t do what he thinks it does. A ticket is not a menu. You don’t get to check the box next to Trump and Abbott and the rest of the Texas GOP slate, and then, when someone hands you the bill for the whole thing, point at the one line item you complained about and act like that clears your tab. You still cast the vote that hired the people who passed the platform, sight unseen, the parts you liked and the parts you didn’t.

This is the principle people flinch from, so let’s spell it out. If you belonged to a movement and only supported part of its agenda, you were still part of the movement. Nobody looks back at a rank-and-file member of a monstrous political party and grades them on a curve because they personally objected to one specific policy while cheering the leadership onto power anyway. Objecting quietly, or even loudly, while still supplying the votes and the organizing labor that puts the whole thing in charge, is not the same thing as opposition. It’s membership with an asterisk you get to add after the fact, for your own comfort, not because it changes what your vote did.

That’s the standard Hunter is asking us to waive for him. Not “judge me by what I did,” but “judge me by the exception I’m claiming, and ignore what I actually did.” That’s not a distinction anyone gets to make for himself. It’s not tone policing to reject it. It’s arithmetic.

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I keep coming back to something from A.R. Moxon’s Very Fine People, because it names the actual work in a way that’s more precise than anything I could improvise in a comment thread. He lays out what realigning actually requires:

• Awaken to the truth of systemic corruption and abuse, in all its ugliness.

• Convict ourselves to the truth that we share responsibility to transform our minds.

• Confess our individual and shared involvement, publicly and unequivocally.

• Repent from the involvement, by agreeing to pay the cost of repair.

• Repair what is broken, by actually paying that cost and doing the work.

• Redeem our natural human system, by entering the cycle of the realigning work of repair.

Read that list against what Hunter actually did. He got as far as noticing something is wrong, which is Awaken, and he stopped there, hard. There’s no Convict in “you don’t know what I voted for.” There’s no Confess in refusing to name your own ballot. There’s no Repent, because repentance costs something, and asserting a mild or private disagreement costs nothing at all. There’s certainly no Repair, because repair requires you to name who got hurt and what you’re doing about it, and he named nobody.

And notice that Bellsnyder’s article stops at the exact same place. It Awakens beautifully. Centralized authority, eroding local control, an $8 million mistake, ten hours of testimony nobody outside the Capitol will ever read. And then it stops, right at the edge of Convict, because naming who holds that centralized authority and who voted to hand it to them would mean naming her own party. It’s a first-principles essay because first principles are the one place you can stand and gesture at a problem without ever having to point at a person. That’s not an accident. That’s the load-bearing feature of the genre. You get to sound alarmed without being implicated.

So what we have is an op-ed that Awakens without Convicting, and a comment section reply that won’t even get that far. Different registers, same architecture. Notice the problem, invoke Reagan or the Constitution or first principles, and stop the instant the sentence would require you to say who did it and what you’re going to do about it. What he did instead is skate past every single step past Awaken and go straight to demanding the credit that only shows up at the end of them. He wants the reputation of someone who has realigned without doing any of the realigning. That is the entire method. It’s the same method the Republican politicians I wrote about in “The Door Is Open” use, the ones who want applause for breaking with their party on vouchers or on Christian nationalism, while their record on everything else looks exactly like the party they claim to have partly abandoned.

This isn’t unique to Hunter Bonner. He’s just a clean, small, recent example of a pattern that shows up at every level in this state, this county, though not always in the same shape. Hunter’s failure is passive. He stalls at Awaken and hopes nobody notices he never moved. Greg Abbott and Tim O’Hare are a different, worse thing entirely. Neither one is a reluctant bystander to what state and county government have become under them. They’re the ones building it, and they treat naming that fact as an attack to be crushed rather than a truth to be reckoned with.

If you genuinely don’t want leaders like that, the exit isn’t a private disclaimer or a comment you leave under someone else’s post. It takes a real reckoning, the whole cycle, not some false confession that stops the moment it starts to cost you something.

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Here’s the thing I want to be explicit about, because I don’t want this read as cruelty. The door really is open. I meant that. People can change, and when they do it for real, it matters, and it makes the coalition stronger. But the door being open doesn’t mean we owe anyone the benefit of the doubt for a private, unstated, unverifiable objection to a public record they funded with their own vote. That’s not skepticism. That’s just requiring the thing that was always required: say what you did, say who got hurt, say what you’re doing about it.

Until then, “rescrew our heads on” is not a call to accountability. It’s a request that everyone else do the work of pretending you already did.

The door’s open. Confess, don’t complain.

See It. Name It. Fight It.

And here is The Door Is Open.