Van Duyne’s district-where the Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke beat Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 while losing statewide-looked like one of their best opportunities. Last year, President Donald Trump’s popularity among Texans was flagging, and Democrats in the state, who hoped to take control of the Texas House and win several congressional seats, thought diverse suburbs such as Irving would be reluctant to elect Trumplike Republicans. Her victory was a surprise-at least to some. As for Van Duyne: This past November, she was elected to the United States Congress. In the end, Mohamed was never charged, and he and his family moved to Qatar. Within days, the news had reached the BlackBerry of President Barack Obama, who tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Yet another public official backed the police response. Yet another brown kid in a red state was being overpoliced. The controversy dragged obscure Irving into the national conversation. “We’ve heard more from the media than the child ever released to the police when we were asking him questions,” she said calmly.
She defended Mohamed’s arrest on Facebook, then went on The Glenn Beck Program to repeat the “ hoax bomb” lie and complain that the child hadn’t given police enough information. The other Texan was Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, a blond 44-year-old with Disney-princess bone structure.
His English teacher decided it might be a bomb, and the school called the police, who arrested Mohamed for bringing in a “ hoax bomb.” Because Mohamed’s family was part of Irving’s large Muslim minority, many liberals saw this as a baseless case of Islamophobia. One was 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a precocious kid in a NASA T-shirt who had built a clock out of spare parts and brought it to school in a pencil case. It's not clear how citizens are supposed to respond to this kind of information - other than perhaps to become more docile, and do whatever the nice people in uniforms or positions of authority say.I n 2015, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, the fates of two very different Texans collided. How many times did Homeland Security raise the threat level to "orange" based on unspecified information? This is literally news you can't use. It felt like the mid-2000s all over again. There was no "who," no "where," no "when," and no "why".just a pretty lame "what." It wasn't so much a story as a bleat of vague terror. Sunday night, the Big Story locally on Channel 6 Action News (usually, on the weekend, the big story is something like, "Our unusually pleasant summer weather!") was that authorities had "disputed" an otherwise unspecified plot against the papal visit to Philadelphia.
This weekend, though, the fog of paranoia suddenly grew thick. To some degree, I'm criticizing the tone, especially in the earlier days of planning, rather than all of the actual measures anyone who remembers the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981 knows the importance of safety measures and preparation. The Secret Service has worked hand in glove with City Hall to help us view our visit from the Vatican as less a time of spiritual uplift and more as a "national security event" where the most sacred relic is a magnetometer. Take the looming arrival here in Pope Francis here in Philadelphia towards the end of the month. In countless ways, large and small, Americans' view of the world tilts too often toward fear and away from hope. But then, the reality is that whether it's President Bush, President Obama, President Sanders or President Pataki, the next commander-in-chief won't erase the national state of pure unbridled paranoia that has planted itself since the hopeful dawn of the new millennium. Just the other day, we were talking about the 14th anniversary of 9/11, and whether it's still necessary for the president to declare a "state of emergency," year after year after year.