Ben Rowen

Travis Iles was rarely summoned for a sit-down meeting with the governor’s team. The call had come late in the workday, and an adviser to Greg Abbott had told him to report to the state insurance building in the morning for an urgent discussion. A tall 53-year-old with short, dark hair and deep-set eyes, Iles had spent nearly 25 years at the Texas State Securities Board, including 7 as commissioner.

Had you tuned into a show hosted by the unusually long-lived conservative thinkfluencer Sean Hannity in the 1990s or 2000s, four or five versions of himself ago, there’s a very good chance you would have heard a nugget of faux history that had totemic value in the conservative movement until sometime last decade.

In Republicans’ endless quest to portray James Talarico as slight and nerdy, there are revolutionary technologies at their disposal. The eye—cornea, rods, cones, the whole darn lot—first emerged 500 million years ago. What would become the human ear came about during the Mesozoic era.