The Barbed Wire drives itself into the ditch

I had hopes when it the online news-y magazine was announced, then launched, late last year. I knew the Texas Monthly needed competition, and thought there was room for that.

Then, as postings faded after election day, and into this year, the hope faded a bit.

Then, we get this last week.

The Barbed Wire officially drove into the ditch the first time for letting some Billy Begala (don't think he's related to Paul) make the evidence-free claim that "the woke left" as well as rightists oppose legal gambling in Texas, along with the asshattery of using that phrase. Worse? This Begala is a managing director there, per the "about."

The Barbed Wire then drove into the ditch a second time, when, in a piece about Black cowboys, it had this:

“They didn’t have white cowboys,” Larry Callies, founder of The Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg told The Barbed Wire. “Black (men) was called a cowboy because of his skin,” said Callies, who is a fourth-generation cowboy and a country singer. “They called Black people ‘boys’ in the 1800s. The white man was called the cowhand. (Back then) you better not call a white man a cowboy. He’d say, ‘I’m not your boy. I’m a cowhand. Cowperson. Cowdriver.’ Not a cowboy… until Hollywood.”

The actual etymology of "cowboy" calls bullshit.

H. Drew Blackburn is promising 254 pieces, every other week, of Texana in film, books, etc. I'll read any further ones at least as critically, or else skip.

And, that will apply to the site as a whole.