Abbott Appointed Comptroller Owns Epstein’s Ranch—Because F**k Them Kids

Meanwhile, unironically SCOTUS restricts app downloads for kids, claiming they care about kids.

Today the Supreme Court let Texas start enforcing SB 2420, the state’s App Store Accountability Act. Justice Samuel Alito, in a pair of one-sentence orders with no explanation and no dissents, denied the emergency applications filed by app-store industry groups. Texas can now require age verification and parental consent at the app store level for every mobile app download in the state.

“A minor child who downloads a software application from an app store agrees to contractual terms of service, including whether the child’s location will be tracked, whether the child’s privacy will be protected, whether information from the child’s phone can be sold by the developer, and whether the child waives the right to sue,” Texas told the Supreme Court in defense of the act.

But the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members include Apple and Google, said the law prevents young people from accessing a wide range of content, “be it a book by Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling, a Taylor Swift album, or a subscription to National Geographic.”

Six days earlier, Governor Greg Abbott appointed Don Huffines as Texas Comptroller, effective August 1. Huffines is the man who owns Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. He’s now going to run the finances of the state of Texas.

This is what Republican policy, masquerading as child safety policy, looks like in this state. Total surveillance of what children can read, watch, and download. Total silence on the pedophiles and child traffickers.

What SCOTUS did today

SB 2420 is the Texas App Store Accountability Act. It requires Apple and Google to check the age of every user who tries to download an app and to get parental consent before letting any user under 18 install anything. Texas is the first state in the country to move this kind of law from the individual-website level, all the way up to the app store itself.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman blocked SB 2420 in December 2025, saying the law violates the First Amendment. The 5th Circuit stayed his order on June 4, 2026, letting Texas begin enforcement. The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a group called Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, and two teenagers who use apps for journalism and art asked the Supreme Court to freeze the law during their appeal. On Monday the Supreme Court declined to freeze anything.

Here’s what that means: age verification at the app store level is not just about kids. To verify that a child is a child, Apple and Google have to verify the age of every adult too. Every Texan who wants to download an app is now going to be pulled into a state-mandated ID pipeline. The state is now steps away from even more content censorship across the board.

SB 2420 is the third law in a stack. HB 1181 was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2025 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton and requires age verification on any commercial website that is more than one-third sexual material. HB 18, the SCOPE Act, restricts what minors can see on social media. And now SB 2420 puts the ID checkpoint at the app store level. Every one of these laws was defended in court as a necessity to protect children.

The man who owns Epstein’s ranch

Last Wednesday, acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock announced his resignation. Last Thursday, Abbott appointed Huffines to the job, effective August 1. Huffines had already won the Republican primary in March by 35 points against Hancock, who was Abbott’s preferred candidate. Rather than let Texas voters pick the state’s chief financial officer in the November general election, Abbott handed the seat over four months early. Sarah Eckhardt, the Democratic state senator from Austin who is running against Huffines in November, will now be running against a sitting comptroller instead of a candidate.

Who is Don Huffines? He is the man who owns Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. I wrote about this in February.

In 2023, four years after Epstein’s death, the 7,600-acre Zorro Ranch in New Mexico went to auction where the proceeds were supposed to benefit Epstein’s survivors. The Huffines family bought the property through a shell company called San Rafael Ranch LLC, registered in New Mexico one month before the sale in a jurisdiction that allows anonymous ownership. After the purchase, they renamed the ranch from “Zorro Ranch” to “Rancho de San Rafael” and changed the address. If you tried to search public records for “Zorro Ranch” from 2023 forward, you wouldn’t be able to find it.

Then the Huffines family used Epstein’s crimes as a tax argument. The property was appraised at roughly $21 million. Their LLC challenged that valuation and argued that the property’s history as a sex-trafficking site justified a reduction. County officials dropped the assessed value to about $13 million. The man Abbott just handed the state’s finances to used the fact that children were trafficked at his new property to shave millions off his own tax bill.

The claim that the auction money went to Epstein’s survivors is a lie. Estate filings show the funds went to administrative costs, legal fees, and creditor payments while victim compensation was zero.

Zorro Ranch is the one major Epstein property authorities never fully searched. The Manhattan townhouse, the Palm Beach mansion, and Little Saint James all got raided. Zorro sat untouched until New Mexico state officials finally sent ground-penetrating radar and cadaver dogs in February 2026. That was three years after Huffines bought the place, renamed it, and changed the address.

That is who Abbott appointed to run Texas’s $338 billion budget starting August 1.

What “child safety” actually protects in Texas

The answer is nothing. None of the book bans, none of the 10 Commandments hanging in their classrooms, none of the rainbows they’ve scratched off our streets have made children safer. Republicans in this state have made “child safety” the cover for their entire online regulatory agenda. If you look at what they’ve actually done for children as opposed to what they have done in the name of children, the receipts are as follows:

In 2022, 19 children and two teachers were murdered in Uvalde. The response from Republican leadership was permitless carry and no minimum age increase for assault-style rifles. In 2025, 27 kids and counselors drowned at Camp Mystic during the Hill Country flood that killed 139 Texans. The response? A year later, not a single official whose job it was to warn people that night has been fired. Kerr County had $10.2 million in ARPA funds and spent $6.9 million of it on radios for the sheriff instead of the river warning system people had been asking for over a decade. Not one Republican elected in Texas has publicly named the neo-Nazi Patriot Front members who volunteered at that flood, either.

Nobody who has hurt children in Texas is doing serious time. Robert Morris, the founder of Gateway Church, pleaded guilty this year to five counts of lewd or indecent acts against a child in the 1980s. His sentence was ten years, with the first six months in an Oklahoma county jail. He was out by March. In Waco, admitted child molester Adam Hoffman was offered a one-day plea deal by Ken Paxton’s office. The Republican visiting judge rejected it, and raised the sentence to 30 days. Hoffman doesn’t even have to register as a sex offender. Both men are free. Neither is on the sex offender registry. And the state’s Attorney General, the man who offered that one-day plea deal to Hoffman, is Ken Paxton, currently running for the U.S. Senate against James Talarico.

Nobody in the Epstein files has been investigated by Texas. Nobody’s been asked to explain how the ranch quietly changed hands, or how the Huffines family got the assessed value cut in half by citing sex trafficking, or why the federal authorities never searched the one property where testimony puts survivors on the ground. Not one Republican has called for a state review of the Zorro purchase or the tax dispute.

Rapists have parental rights in Texas

When Governor Abbott was asked in 2021 why the Texas Heartbeat Act had no exception for rape or incest, he said the state didn’t need one because he was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Surprise, he didn’t. A January 2024 JAMA study by Dr. Samuel Dickman estimated that more than 26,000 rape-related pregnancies had occurred in Texas in the 16 months after the state’s abortion ban took effect. That number was 45 percent of all rape-related pregnancies in the country during that period.

The Texas abortion ban has no exception for rape or incest. A twelve-year-old raped in Texas today, who doens’t have the money to travel out of state, is required by state law to carry that pregnancy to term. And once she gives birth, the man who raped her retains his parental rights to the child, including custody and visitation. To strip him of those rights, she has to prove aggravated sexual assault in court, as a child, while recovering from being raped by the person now suing for access to her baby.

This is the state that will now require Apple and Google to verify the age of every child who wants to download an app. This is the state that won’t require that same children’s rapist to give up his parental rights to the baby he forced her to have. Is this what child protection looks like?

The pattern

The party that won’t investigate anyone from the Epstein network in Texas is the same party that just won the right to make every Texan prove their age at the app store before they can install an app.

This is what surveillance in the name of protection looks like. The state gets a permanent ID checkpoint on every Texan’s phone. Adults get pulled into the pipeline whether they wanted to be or not. And the coalition that is passing these laws is the same coalition that just installed the Epstein-ranch owner as chief financial officer. If you’re looking for a coherent theory of child safety in these policies, you’re not going to find one. What you’ll find is a policy that expands adult surveillance and empowers extremist patronage at the same time, and uses “the children” as the cover.

What you can do

1. Read my February piece on the Zorro Ranch purchase. It’s got the full paper trail on the shell company, the rename, the address change, and the tax dodge citing the sex-trafficking history. Share it with the next Texan who has no idea about this appointment.

2. Read the Texas Tribune report on the appointment and the CNN report on Monday’s SCOTUS ruling. Share both.

3. On November 3, vote Sarah Eckhardt for Comptroller against Don Huffines. Vote Gina Hinojosa for Governor against Greg Abbott. Vote James Talarico for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton. Abbott installed Huffines to give him incumbency before you got a chance to weigh in and you can take it back at the ballot box. Register at votetexas.gov by October 5.

4. Forward this article to one Texan who thinks Texas’s “child safety” laws are actually about children, and to one Texan who has ever thought Republicans “hate Epstein.”

See y’all tomorrow.