The Katrina Pierson Bubble Bursts
Katrina Pierson, the longtime tea party activist from Garland who’s challenging Dallas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions, is having a bad few weeks.
First, Pierson acknowledged that she had been arrested in 1997, when she was 20, for shoplifting at a Plano J.C. Penney’s—not, altogether, a big deal. Pierson’s talked a lot about how she’s turned her life around after a hardscrabble upbringing, and if anything, the arrest fit into her personal narrative. Then, Slate’s Dave Weigel attended a Pierson campaign event and characterized her as a “long shot” who exemplified the emptiness of this year’s tea party challengers in Texas. Hurtful, maybe, but probably not a big deal either: Pierson’s potential voters probably aren’t huge Slate readers.
A bigger deal: On Sunday night, the Quorum Report’s Scott Braddock pointed out that Pierson received some $11,000 in unemployment benefits from the Texas Workforce Commission from January 2012 to November 2013—meaning she was receiving government support during a period in which she consulted for Ted Cruz’s senate campaign and was planning for her own run.
Pierson has been a hyperactive tea party organizer for years, doing countless media appearances and traveling extensively around the country to spread her message. When I first met her in the summer of 2011, she was teaching a darkly conspiratorial class on the United Nation’s “Agenda 21″ at a meeting of the Waco Tea Party. Under the UN’s aegis, she told the frightened crowd, Americans would be forced into crowded apartment buildings, and UN-empowered block captains would be “given police power over your neighborhoods.”
When I asked about her activist career, she told me that when “you realize that you’ve been lied to your whole life, it’s an eye-opening experience.” To spread her message, she told me she’d taught classes in Florida, Iowa, Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Washington D.C., and all over Texas. It was her full-time job. It had to be, she said, because “our time is limited.” Since then, she’s ramped up her activity. She’s a frequent guest on Fox News