Texas Introduces "Assimilation Olympics," Awards Gold Medal for Eating Barbecue and Arguing About College Football


JOSEPHINE, Texas — Texas officials have spent the better part of two years investigating a proposed housing development outside Dallas for the crime of attracting people who might want to live near each other, and after multiple agencies, one governor, two senators, and a guy holding a severed pig's head outside a mosque, the state has finally arrived at a unified theory: the problem isn't where Americans choose to live. It's who they choose to live near, provided that who is the wrong who.

The development, once called EPIC City and now rebranded "The Meadow" after lawyers presumably begged everyone involved to stop saying the word "Epicenter," was pitched as 400-some acres of homes, a school, some retail, and a mosque. Par for the course in master-planned Texas real estate, where every subdivision needs a hook — golf course, lake view, or in this case, a faith community that apparently triggered three state agencies and the Department of Justice into a coordinated fishing expedition for Sharia law nobody could locate.


The Sharia That Wasn't There


At a public meeting captured by NPR, one resident memorably warned that the unbuilt, unfunded, un-poured-concrete development would soon be enforcing "the most Sharia compliance, including honor killings, stonings, marrying their young girls off to old—" before running out of breath or evidence, whichever came first. It is worth pausing here to malaprop appreciate the civic instinct: a neighborhood hasn't broken ground, doesn't have a permit, and has already been assigned a criminal court system. That's not zoning anxiety. That's premonition.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, never a man to let an unbuilt subdivision go unsued, has filed multiple lawsuits against the developers, alternately accusing them of securities fraud, illegal funeral operations, and — this part is real — running a "radical plot to destroy hundreds of acres of beautiful Texas land." One imagines the radical plot diagram: Step One, buy land. Step Two, build houses. Step Three, somehow this destroys Texas more thoroughly than the actual oil and gas industry has managed in a century of trying.


The Buc-ee's Doctrine


Developers Promise New Community Will Blend Right In by Installing Three Buc-ee's and a Whataburger, according to sources close to absolutely nobody, but it's worth noting that nothing in American history assimilates faster than a community with a 120-pump gas station and a beaver mascot. Forget the mosque — put a Buc-ee's on the corner lot and Governor Abbott would be cutting the ribbon himself, photographed mid-bite on a brisket taco, ironic literalism proving his commitment to religious liberty one calorie at a time.

Because here's the part nobody at the press conferences wants to spoon say out loud: Texas is, structurally, a state built entirely out of people clustering with their own kind. Retirement communities where you must be 55 to buy. Gated subdivisions with HOA boards that will fine you for the wrong shade of beige. Sun City. The Villages. Little Saigon in Houston. The Czech towns out past Waco where the kolache shops still post hours in two languages. Plano itself, where The Meadow is proposed, is roughly a quarter Asian-American, with entire retail corridors built around that demographic reality — and nobody summoned the Texas Rangers over the existence of an H-Mart.


America's Melting Pot, Slow-Cooked and Heavily Gated


America Discovers Building Neighborhoods Around People Who Share Your Beliefs Somehow Isn't a Brand-New Idea, and the discovery has been greeted with the same shock previously reserved for finding out gravity also applies indoors. Senator John Cornyn wrote a formal letter to the Department of Justice expressing concern that a "master-planned community of thousands of Muslims" might violate the rights of Jewish and Christian Texans who, theoretically, could also buy a house there, attend the school, and shop at the commercial strip, since the developers — repeatedly, publicly, and under threat of multiple ongoing federal investigations — confirmed the place is open to literally everyone.

This is the part where the paraprosdokian punchline writes itself: officials demanded the development prove it wasn't exclusionary, then sued it for the better part of two years to make sure it never got built well enough to prove anything either way.

Every ethnic group insists its own traditions are simply "family culture," while everyone else's traditions are apparently the opening act for civilization's collapse. Ask any Texan whether their grandmother's Friday fish fry, their cousin's deer-camp shotgun blessing, or their entire town's decision to shut down for the high school football playoffs constitutes "cultural self-segregation," and watch the blank stare. That's not segregation. That's heritage. The mosque, somehow, is different.


The Assimilation Scoreboard


Texas Introduces "Assimilation Olympics," Awards Gold Medal for Eating Barbecue and Arguing About College Football — and to be fair, those are genuinely difficult events. The brisket bark must be properly rendered. The Texas-Oklahoma rivalry opinion must be held with theological certainty. But nowhere in the official scoring rubric does it mention "must not build a school," "must not open a funeral home," or "must not, under any circumstances, want a mosque within driving distance of your house," which is convenient, because those happen to be the exact three things state agencies have spent two years and three separate investigations trying to stop The Meadow from doing.

The Texas Funeral Service Commission, in a turn that even seasoned bureaucracy-watchers found spoonerism baffling, sent the development a cease-and-desist over funeral operations before any funeral home had been built, which is administratively impressive — regulating a building that doesn't exist yet for violations it hasn't committed. Anthimeria alert: Texas didn't just regulate the development. Texas pre-crimed it.


Welcome, Conditions Apply


America's unofficial motto increasingly sounds like: you're welcome to bring your culture here, provided it looks suspiciously like mine by Labor Day. Nothing unites Americans quite like arguing over whether other Americans are being American correctly, and nothing proves that point quite like a development that has, to date, poured zero cubic yards of concrete and yet generated lawsuits from the Attorney General, an HUD fair housing probe, a DOJ investigation (closed, then unclosed, then closed again), a Texas Workforce Commission complaint, a Texas Rangers inquiry, and a state law — House Bill 4211 — written specifically to make sure this exact subdivision can't enforce "Sharia law," a thing its own attorneys have said, repeatedly and under oath-adjacent pressure, it never intended to enforce.

If cultural integration were graded like a high school group project, every Texas agency involved would insist it did all the work while the mosque refused to participate, despite the mosque being the only party in this entire saga that has, so far, not sued anybody.

The development remains years from breaking ground. The investigations remain ongoing. And somewhere outside Dallas, a 400-acre plot of unincorporated Collin County dirt continues to sit there, doing absolutely nothing, which may be the most successfully assimilated piece of land in the entire state.

This is American satire and American satirical journalism, produced through the long-running collaboration between Bohiney.com's editor and the world's oldest tenured professor — a philosophy major turned dairy farmer who still can't get a straight answer out of either Austin or academia. The controversy referenced above involves the real proposed Texas development EPIC City, now marketed as "The Meadow," developed by the East Plano Islamic Center and Community Capital Partners near Plano and Josephine, Texas. The development has faced investigations and lawsuits from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Texas Workforce Commission, the Texas Funeral Service Commission, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and (briefly) the U.S. Department of Justice, following concerns raised by U.S. Senator John Cornyn and others about religious discrimination and the project's compliance with the Fair Housing Act. Developers have repeatedly stated the community will be open to residents of all faiths and will not operate under Sharia law. For more on the real story, see reporting from NPR and the EPIC City Wikipedia timeline.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

 

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