After months of deliberation, we have a sale. The Houston Independent School District Board of Education authorized the sale of the campus housing the district's High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice on Thursday.

Trustees voted unanimously to accept a $60 million bid made by St. Thomas High School.

The bid from St. Thomas was one of two the district received on November 1. The other bid was from E.L.K. Mountain Limited for $49,272,914, according to a release issued by HISD. The two entities grappled for months over who would get the deal, but HISD rejected offers from both. This round of bidding was supposed to be the final crack at making the deal.

During the 2012 school bond campaign, HISD officials promised to build a new High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice using land sale proceeds and/or any surplus bond dollars. The existing campus is located at 4701 Dickson. The location of the new campus hasn't been chosen yet.

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In a truly bizarre news segment, local Fox 26 reporter Ivory Hecker surprised her colleagues and viewers Monday evening when she claimed live on-air that Fox’s corporate overlords had been “muzzling” her to stop her from sharing “certain information” viewers deserved to know.

Hecker then said she had secret recordings to back-up her censorship claims which she'd turned over to a far-right anti-news group.

Near the top of the station’s 5 p.m. news broadcast, the Fox 26 studio anchor cut to Hecker for a live hit about the sweltering Texas weather that has state power grid operators nervous about potential power outages. But Hecker had a quick announcement to slip in prior to discussing the topic she’d been sent out to cover.

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“Before we get to that story, I want to let you, the viewers, know that Fox Corp. has been muzzling me to keep certain information from you, the viewers. And from what I’m gathering, I am not the only reporter being subjected to this,” Hecker said.

Instead of immediately cutting away from Hecker, who had obviously gone rogue, the camera kept rolling.

“I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox, because it applies to you, the viewers,” she continued. “I found a non-profit journalism group, called Project Veritas, that is going to help put that out tomorrow, so tune in to them.”

Without so much as taking a breath, Hecker then nonchalantly pivoted to talking about the local heatwave as she’d been assigned, and the on-set anchors didn’t mention the outburst once her segment had concluded.

Project Veritas, the far right-wing organization founded and operated by conservative trickster James O’Keefe, is devoted to discrediting American mainstream media outlets whom they contend are part of a vast liberal conspiracy to brainwash the public.

In addition to attacking news providers, Project Veritas has also targeted Democratic politicians and advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood with deceptively edited video footage and shady undercover sting operations where the group attempts to get outlets to report on fake news stories in order to tarnish their credibility.

Twitter banned Project Veritas and O’Keefe back in April for running afoul of its “platform manipulation and spam policy” for allegedly running fake accounts, but the group bragged Monday night through its still-running Facebook page about being a trending topic on Twitter despite being blocked from the platform.

A Project Veritas representative told The Daily Beast that it would post a video of an interview with Hecker sometime Tuesday night, and that the group would also be publishing some of her secret video and audio recordings she claims prove that her Fox superiors were trying to silence her from discussing certain yet-to-be-disclosed topics.

Folks hoping for some bombshell revelations from former local Fox 26 reporter Ivory Hecker were likely sorely disappointed by the video Project Veritas posted featuring her Tuesday night, unless they were already fans of the right-wing conspiracy group Hecker announced she was working with in her rogue diatribe during Monday’s evening news.

Hecker went off-script at the start of a live news hit on Fox 26’s 5 p.m. broadcast Monday, claiming that her corporate overlords were “muzzling” her, and that she had secret recordings of her bosses to prove it.

But the main revelations to come out of a 17-minute video posted by Project Veritas Tuesday night were that Hecker’s superiors reprimanded her for bringing up the debunked “coronavirus cure” hydroxychloroquine during an interview and for complaining on social media that an unhinged Houston doctor pushing the drug had been censored.

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She also argued that her bosses’ use of demographic data to guide what news stories the station’s audience would care about in certain time slots was proof that the station had sinister motives.

Fox 26 did not respond when the Houston Press called Tuesday to ask whether Hecker had been terminated after her on-air outburst, but a spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Hecker had indeed been fired by the station, claiming that “This incident involves nothing more than a disgruntled former employee seeking publicity by promoting a false narrative produced through selective editing and misrepresentation.”

Project Veritas posted its video to its YouTube channel Tuesday night, featuring an interview Hecker did with James O’Keefe, a noted right-wing agitator and the group’s founder, as well as secretly recorded footage of Hecker talking to her Fox bosses and videos of undercover Project Veritas staff talking to other Fox employees.

“Fox came at my throat for standing up against censorship,” Hecker told O’Keefe in the video, citing a social media post Hecker made last year decrying how social media platforms had been blocking videos of Dr. Stella Immanuel, who’d insisted that hydroxychloroquine was a miracle COVID-cure.

Immanuel, the Houston doctor who notably claimed that many health problems are caused by having sex with demons, touted hydroxychloroquine last year, and a video starring the doctor’s claims the anti-malaria drug could cure the coronavirus was reposted by former President Donald Trump despite there being no evidence at the time the drug could successfully treat COVID-19.

After Hecker made a post on social media in which she opposed how Immanuel’s videos were being removed and labelled as coronavirus misinformation, she later posted a snippet from an interview she did with United Memorial Medical Center’s Dr. Joseph Varon in which he said he’d been using hydroxychloroquine to try and treat some COVID-19 patients. Hecker was then told by her superiors to stop bringing up hydroxychloroquine at work and online.

“You need to cease and desist posting about hydroxychloroquine,” Fox 26 news director Susan Schiller told Hecker in a recording Hecker shared with Project Veritas. Schiller said she thought Hecker "had failed as a reporter" for not doing more research on the drug and blasted her for continuing to bring it up when studies had shown it wasn’t an effective COVID-19 treatment.

“There’s a narrative,” Hecker told O’Keefe. “Yes, it is unspoken, but if you accidentally step outside the narrative, if you don’t sense what that narrative is and go with it, there will be grave consequences for you.”

The Project Veritas video also included a clip of Fox 26 assistant news director Lee Meier explaining to Hecker why the station had turned down stories about Bitcoin in the 5 p.m. news hour.

“I have passed on Bitcoin stories by almost every single reporter for our five o’clock audience, because that’s not our five o’clock audience. If I know our numbers are tanking at five to six, and in one particular segment,” Meier said, “I may say ‘Yeah, Bitcoin for [our] poor African-American audience at five, it’s probably not going to play.’ That’s a choice I’m making.”

Hecker insisted to O’Keefe those comments from Meier were proof of a vast conspiracy that Fox managers were deciding to hold back valuable information from the public on allegedly racist grounds, rather than being proof that all news outlets decide what stories to publish and when based on their own target audiences.

The Project Veritas video also included clips of undercover operatives from the group talking to low-level Fox 26 employees. Two Fox workers who appear to be at a loud bar at night are seen talking about how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ad Council have paid for ads during Fox 26 broadcasts which explain the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.

The undercover Project Veritas rep then tried to tie those ad payments into a conspiracy that the station is covering coronavirus vaccines positively because it’s getting advertising payments.

When the undercover operative asked if, hypothetically, the Ad Council could call Fox 26 and say “Hey, I want you to run all these spots but I want to make sure your journalists aren’t running any anti-vax stories,” the Fox 26 promo producer said “If that happens, it’s above our [pay grade].” Her colleague, a sales coordinator at the station said “It can, a lot of stuff can happen.”

Hecker and O’Keefe tried to spin this admittedly flimsy evidence into proof that Fox 26 had financial incentives to cover vaccines favorably and to suppress “any negative press” about the life-saving shots.

“If you want to get vaccinated, that’s great. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your personal choice. But to use the venue of news to try to convince you to do something with your life,” Hecker said, “that was the journalism schools’ definition of propaganda.”

“That’s why I’m doing this,” Hecker said. “The viewers,” she argued, “are being deceived by a carefully crafted narrative in some stories. In some areas, they do fantastic journalism, [but] for some reason, some of these stories have an incredible slant, and if you accidentally step outside it, they try to internally destroy you.”

Hecker told O’Keefe she’s “so horrified as to what the news business has stooped to,” that she wants out “of this narrative newstelling. I want out of this corruption.”

If the online fundraiser Hecker’s mother set up for her that was emblazoned across the bottom of the Project Veritas video is any indication, Hecker won’t have to stoop to the supposedly ignoble profession of covering the news for a corporation any time soon. As of Wednesday morning, over $88,000 in donations had come through.

After begging Texans to conserve power Monday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas on Tuesday is still asking folks to limit their electricity usage amid a statewide heatwave and an unusually high number of offline power generators, a combination that could lead to power outages if conditions don’t improve.

According to ERCOT’s website, the power grid operator’s forecast for Tuesday shows the statewide demand for electricity is coming dangerously close to the maximum supply that can be generated, and that demand for electricity was extremely close to tapping into the state’s energy reserves as of 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Earlier Tuesday afternoon, ERCOT’s real-time power market map showed the wholesale price of electricity in the greater Houston area surged to $1,000 per megawatt hour before falling back down to just under $80 about half an hour later, a tactic used by ERCOT to give power producers a financial incentive to do everything they can to muster up more electricity when demand threatens to outpace supply.

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ERCOT predicts electricity demand could reach into the state's energy reserves ahead of a Tuesday night demand peak.

Screenshot

ERCOT’s forecast shows that across Texas, the demand for electricity on Tuesday is expected to peak by 8 p.m.

On Monday, ERCOT issued an alert that Texans needed to do what they could to limit energy use through Friday as it tried to figure out why so many power generators were offline. ERCOT asked state residents to unplug unused appliances, to avoid using large appliances like dishwashers and washing machines if possible and to turn their thermostats up to 78 degrees.

ERCOT officials said Monday that rolling power outages across the state would be a last resort, but didn’t rule out the possibility that some Texans could lose power if more electricity generators don’t come online.

While energy supply has recovered somewhat after Monday’s troubling lows, there are still approximately 7,000 more megawatts of power offline in Texas than is normal on a typical hot summer day; typically, a single megawatt can power up to 200 homes, according to ERCOT.

It turns out that arctic winter storms aren’t the only times Texans have to worry about the state’s power grid crapping out.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas asked state residents on Monday to cut down on their electricity usage through Friday to prevent possible power outages across the state, an alarming warning that came a week before the official first day of summer.

ERCOT issued its alert in a Monday afternoon press release, which blamed “A significant number of forced generation outages combined with potential record electric use for the month of June” as the reason for the “tight grid conditions” expected to last for the next several days.

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The grid operator said on a normal hot summer day in Texas, it’s not unusual for “around 3,600 MW” of power generation to be offline due to errors or repairs. But on Monday, “Generator owners have reported approximately 11,000 MW of generation” being on forced outage for repairs.

“One MW typically powers around 200 homes on a summer day,” ERCOT’s news release read.

ERCOT is concerned that Monday’s peak power demand “may exceed 73,000 MW” — which dwarfs the previous recorded June peak of 69,123 MW set on June 27, 2018 between 4 and 5 p.m. — unless Texans cut their power usage as soon as possible and keep consumption low through June 18.

“We will be conducting a thorough analysis with generation owners to determine why so many units are out of service. This is unusual for this early in the summer season,” said Woody Rickerson, ERCOT’s Vice President of Grid Planning and Operations, in a statement Monday afternoon.

ERCOT asked Texans to “take these simple actions to help reduce electric use” Monday through Friday this week:

• Set your thermostat to 78 degrees or higher – every degree of cooling increases your energy use by six to eight percent.
• Turn off lights and pool pumps and avoid using large appliances like ovens, washing machines and dryers.
• If you don’t need something – we are asking you to turn it off and unplug it if possible.

ERCOT’s announcement came just days after Gov. Greg Abbott signed two new bills he and Texas lawmakers claimed would make sure widespread statewide power outages like the ones that left millions of residents powerless for days during February's winter storm would never happen again.

“Bottom line is that everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas,” Abbott claimed at the bill signing ceremony.

Houston's forecast for Monday calls for a high of 98 degrees later this afternoon, with daily highs in the mid to upper 90's expected to last through Friday.