The speaker, an activist for the Longview, Texas religious nonprofit organization promoting the Sanctuary City for the Unborn ordinance, was being quoted by a small-town Texas resident attending a local City Council meeting convened to discuss the Longview group's proposals.

"I just went to listen and see what the council was doing, and found myself close enough to this man that I could overhear what he was saying to a council member," the resident recalled.

"I think the council was kind of blindsided by how fast the Longview group acted after they sent the town information," the longtime resident continued, who asked to speak anonymously in order to discuss a sensitive issue.

"Their behavior was more like scare tactics," the resident said, "with lots of very graphic presentations. It caught everyone off guard, and made many of them feel pressured. And the behavior of the representative I overheard was pretty threatening."

The resident noted the person they overheard was known as the "constant companion" to Mark Dickson, an active member of Longview, Texas's Right to Life of East Texas, Inc., and Dickson's supposed co-promoter.

(Contacting the involved parties, Noticias Southwest so far has been unable to learn the identity of Dickson's assistant.)

Dickson, a long-time zealous anti-abortion activist, is now also becoming known for increasingly high-pressure tactics.

Legal action has sometimes been levelled against Dickson for his activities, but he has continued to take out ads in community newspapers and travels extensively across Texas and elsewhere, striving to convince local office-holders to join what he calls his "movement."

Today, Dickson and his followers work to persuade mostly small-town city councils to adopt his ordinance without putting the document to the vote, and many have complied.

But other municipalities' representatives, like Lubbock, Texas's City Council, fearing potential lawsuits, have instead chosen to put the proposal to a citizens' vote. The Lubbock ordinance was passed by voters on May 1, 2021.

Dickson also recently pressured San Angelo, Texas's City Council to adopt the ordinance outside the electoral process, and even went so far as to publicly confront San Angelo Mayor Brenda Gunter at her local restaurant and pressure her for a speedy decision on the ordinance.

San Angelo's council, all of whom profess Pro-Life beliefs, nevertheless required Dickson and his local partners to create and file a petition to have the ordinance put on an upcoming ballot initiative. The initiative is likely to be on an upcoming November ballot. (See related story, this page.)

Before his work with the Longview group, Dickson and his followers were a constant and turbulent presence in 2020 as they picketed the Shreveport, Louisiana's Hope Medical Group for Women, which has offered reproductive care and abortion services since 1980, and currently is coping with large numbers of women traveling from Texas seeking services since the passage of Senate Bill 8, Texas's so-called "heartbeat" law.

One of Hope Center's patient escorts in fact reportedly told writer Esther Wang in May, 2020 that staff there had come to regard Dickson as a "sort of domestic terrorist."

Hope leadership purportedly was relieved that Dickson has found a new cause in his Sanctuary City work and has essentially left their area.

Such strong statements aside, Dickson's public behavior over recent years has shown a growing tendency toward an obsessiveness with his causes, and a pattern of stepping outside societal and democratic norms.

In public settings, the diminutive 37-year-old frequently introduces himself as "a virgin," and does not appear to ever have been married.

His political activities historically show only a casual relationship with established electoral processes.

Though registered to vote in 2003, Dickson has only voted in general or primary elections four times--2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018--and has no voting history for 2020 or 2022.

A person deeply involved in the anti-abortion issue in Central Texas recently told Noticias Southwest that, "Every time another town adopts his (Dickson's) ordinance, his ego gets bigger and his tactics get more confrontive." (The commenter asked to speak anonymously to discuss volatile issues.)

Funding the Ordinance's Promotional Arm

Given nonprofit organizations' structure and tax exemptions, it can be a challenge to discover just how Dickson's lifestyle and anti-abortion activism are funded.

With no known mention publicly of a job or occupation, he apparently still has operational expenses as he travels throughout Texas and other states promoting adoption of his organization's abortion document.

In his work, he describes himself as "the Director," or "a Director with" the religious nonprofit Right to Life of East Texas, but ostensibly cannot receive salary from a not-for-profit organization. (Right to Life of East Texas has nine directors.)

Political contributions are another thing.

Searching Texas Ethics Commission databases for campaign finance expenditures in 2022, we found a payment to Dickson for $2000 (April 8, 2022) from the Project Destiny Texas Political Action Committee. (Project Destiny Texas is a Pro-Life PAC based in Lubbock, Texas.)

We also found a payment to Dickson from a Republican women's group in the Lubbock area in the amount of $3863.26 in 2021, around the time Lubbock, Texas voters established Dickson's ordinance as local law in a ballot referendum. (May 1, 2021)

How Dickson spent these funds, recorded well inside nonprofits' private income documents, will be harder to ferret out.

Beyond the state and local level, however, Noticias Southwest has uncovered other information relating to the ordinance's funding that, if fully revealed, moves the issue beyond small-town Texas politics squarely into the national scene.

Alvin, Texas City Council member Joel Castro, a passionate local activist for promotion of the Sanctuary City ordinance, recently revealed to a colleague that he may be on the payroll of the Koch Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity.

"Joel had been in law school the last time we talked, and I was surprised when he told me he'd dropped out," said a longtime Alvin resident who has often worked in city activities alongside Castro. (The resident spoke to us on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.)

"But when I asked him if he had a job now, he told me he was working for Americans for Prosperity," the resident continued.

The resident also said they believed Castro was not a mere volunteer or line worker for the political organization.

"I asked him whether he was doing phone calling or things like that," the resident said. "And when he laughed and said, 'Oh, no, we have minions for that!'', I assumed he must be employed at a higher level job with them."

(Alvin's City Council, fearing legal issues and potential lawsuits, on Jan. 20, 2022 voted against Dickson's ordinance, placed on the council's agenda at the request of Castro and fellow council member Richard Garivey.)

Americans for Prosperity, headquartered in Arlington, Va., in official documents describes itself as a "social welfare" organization, currently has established 38 chapters statewide, and reports that it has now recruited more than 3 million activists and as many as 100,000 financial supporters.

AFP raised $47.5 million during the 2020 election period, with some $6.5 million coming from the Political Action Committee Freedom Partners Action Fund, while $7 million came directly from Koch Industries.

(Freedom Partners Action Fund is regarded as a "super PAC," and became part of Koch's PAC network in 2014.) Koch Industries reported a revenue of $110 billion in 2018.

The AFP's Texas domain--http://www.afptx.org--lists no staff, and redirects visitors to the national organization's site in Arlington. The site on our system appears not to be searchable.

AFP Texas is listed with the Texas Secretary of State as a Foreign Nonprofit Corporation operating in Texas, but SOS databases list only Arlington, Va. agents and staff.

AFP Texas also currently has been looking to hire what it is calling "Grassroots Engagement Directors" in an ad running on Austin's Fox 8 channel, actively recruiting for Spanish-speaking employees to "identify, recruit, and engage grassroots leaders in the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, Texas communities, and mobilize them to take action and drive policy reforms."

The AFP well-paying jobs offer apparently targets the current race in the powerful and much-contested South Texas District 28 represented by conservative Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar.

Whether the AFP has been directly funding Dickson's and Right to Life of East Texas's abortion ordinance, or whether such ordinance activists as Alvin's Joel Castro are employed by them separately from his work with the Longview nonprofit remains to be discovered.

Right to Life of East Texas on its governmental documents lists its activities as "discussion groups, forums, panels, and lectures," and its issues as "legalized abortion and referral service (social agencies)."

The group is registered with the Texas Secretary of State as a Domestic Nonprofit Corporation operating in Texas, and as a tax-exempt organization is not required to pay a franchise tax. Its current income or operating budget is not listed in Internal Revenue Service public domain databases.

Noticias Southwest will continue to follow and report on this aspect of Texas's issues involving abortion.