Michael Phillips is a scholar of American racism, right-wing extremism, and apocalyptic religious beliefs. He covered crime as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before earning his Ph.D.in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His first book, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history. He recently retired from teaching American history after a 20-year career as a professor. Since then, he has served as an historical consultant for and appeared in the award-winning documentary about the Kennedy assassination and its long-term impact on Dallas, City of Hate. He was also an adviser and appears in a series of short films about Dallas history, Recovering the Stories, periodically broadcast on Channel 13 and available on the KERA website. In 2019, he won a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to examine the history of eugenics in Texas. As a result of that research, he most recently co-authored, with Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas History, published by the University of Oklahoma Press on June 3. You can read his thoughts on politics, the world, and life in Texas at drmphillips2001.substack.com. Subscriptions are free.