Former president and CEO of Alamo Trust, Kate Rogers, speaks at a news conference in Alamo Plaza on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks as officials and guests gather at the Alamo in 2021.

Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, far left, with San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick at a ceremony for a new Alamo Visitor Center and Museum in 2024.

Kat Rummell and Danny Reeves are with Montgomery County's new William B. Travis' famous "Victory or Death" letter monument at the Montgomery County Veterans Memorial Park. It was dedicated Oct. 11 as a part of the Alamo Letter Society's mission to place a replica of the letter in each Texas county.

Kate Rogers, the former CEO of the Alamo, was preparing to speak at a reception for a retiring San Antonio official who worked to preserve Texas’ most famous battle site when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called.

She said Patrick demanded her resignation as head of the Alamo Trust, but he didn’t want anyone to know he was behind it. He said a handful of sentences she’d written two years earlier in the final pages of her doctoral dissertation were “troubling,” and he expected her to quit without causing any trouble.

“When I got the call, obviously, it was very upsetting to me,” Rogers told me in an interview.

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Rogers said Patrick made clear that her fundraising successes, glowing performance reviews and recent promotion meant nothing. Right-wing activists had labeled her “woke,” and they wanted her purged from public life.

The most notorious bully in modern Texas politics may have expected Rogers to slink away. But he was messing with a Daughter of the Republic of Texas, a descendant of the women who’d guarded the Alamo for generations — and a Republican who’d taught her children to be........

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