Republicans are terrified of Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate who’s only three points behind Ted Cruz in the Senate race down in Texas, which Trump won in 2016 by nearly ten points.

They’re coming after Beto on a variety of fronts. Some are direct frontal assaults, like this one from Cruz that accuses him of being a “left-wing liberal Democrat pushing an angry agenda that includes raising taxes and grabbing guns.”

“Grabbing guns”!! A huuge lie, albeit an alliterative one. But that’s all Cruz has–that, and doubling down on anti-Democratic hate. O’Rourke isn’t just a “liberal,” he’s “left-wing“! In Republican circles, that’s worse than serial adultery and child molestation a la Roy Moore.

Other Republican attacks are more subtle, such as this hit piece by a “writer based in Texas,” Kevin D. Williamson, entitled “Republicans Do Well in Texas, Except for Dallas, Houston, Austin…”. (The “…” ellipsis” in the header is because a fourth Texas city, San Antonio, also has turned blue, and the Lone Star State’s demographics are rather quickly making it viable for Democrats.)

I never read a political op-ed piece from someone I’ve never heard of without turning to Google to find out what that person’s agenda is, and in Williamson’s case, it’s not hard to figure out. The first hit for him is another op-ed piece he once wrote, called “The punishment I favor for abortion.” In that one, he said women who have abortions “should be punished by hanging,” a statement that got him fired from his then job at The Atlantic. An embarrassed and frightened Williamson later tried to walk back that awful remark by explaining, “That isn’t my view at all,” a typically Trumpian lie.

Well, it is his view, because he said it, and he didn’t retract it until the merde hit the fan. Ten years ago that kind of inflammatory rhetoric might have ended his commentator career. Now, in the age of Trump, when lies, insults and threats are the lingua franca of the conservative movement, Williamson still has publishing opportunities, notably in the Wall Street Journal, where you can say just about anything, no matter how deplorable, as long as it’s well-written. His thesis, in the Beto O’Rourke piece, is predictable: Texas Republicans had better watch out (as if they need him to tell them that) because the Democrats are coming! “Drive through the up-and-coming Winnetka Heights section of Dallas and it’s a sea of BETO signs, with not a whiff of Ted Cruz.”

At least Williamson isn’t living in the Land of Denial, the way the purblind ammosexuals at Breitbart are. Having issued his warning to the GOP, Williamson must deal with O’Rourke, an attractive candidate whom even Williamson acknowledges as “a fresh face.”

How does he savage O’Rourke? “A stale agenda,” Williamson hisses, “offering up the familiar and bland welfare corporatism his party has been selling for 30 years.”

There they are, the buzzwords and dog whistles Republicans love: Welfare! Lazy slobs, usually colored, who refuse to work, suck up the taxpayer’s hard-earned money to buy booze and junk food for their illegitimate kids, ruin our neighborhoods, and are probably secret Islamic terrorists. Never mind that a centerpiece of O’Rourke’s campaign is to provide jobs “for Texas who are ready to work,” that he vows to “bring jobs to Texas,” that he wants to improve access to community colleges so that people don’t have to go on welfare in the first place, and that nowhere in his campaign has he uttered a word about “welfare” or “welfare corporatism,” a Republican euphemism for a stew of clichés concerning Food Stamps and Black welfare queens, of the sort Ronald Reagan elevated to notoriety. Beto O’Rourke is, in actually, more closely aligned with Bush-style Republicanism than with Bernie Sanders. If he were a Republican, the Wall Street Journal would endorse him.

But, you see, when Republicans can’t run on issues, they run on smears: “bland” is a particularly interesting choice of adjectives for Williamson to use. It telegraphs to Texas voters that O’Rourke is nothing more than a pretty face.

I’m glad that Texas is shifting its political allegiance. My mother’s people hail from that great state (and Oklahoma, too). Texas was LBJ country; the President who gave America Medicare, Medicaid and the Civil Rights Act was part of an honorable tradition of Texas Democrats that also included Sam Rayburn and the inestimable Ann Richards.

The switch in Texas is due—as Williamson points out—to the state’s increasing urbanization (86% of Texans now live in cities). City folk—better educated and more culturally tolerant than their country cousins—tend to be Democrats. This is great news for Texas, and for other deep red states, including Alabama and Georgia, where Democrats are slowly and inexorably becoming the majority, vote by vote, household by household, county by county. A new generation of enlightened, younger Americans is seeing right through the GOP’s lies; it’s a pleasure for an oldtimer like me to watch this exciting, dramatic transformation that, hopefully, will put the reactionary/evangelical right out of business, once and for all.