A Texas Teenager Fooled This Conservative Lawmaker Into Posing With His Anti-Trump Painting. See the Video Here

The 17-year-old infiltrated a Tea Party event to get his message to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. Photo: Serlesi Olguin. Courtesy of Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein.

An unexpected photo opp arose at a Tea Party event in North Richland Hills, Texas, this week when a high school senior pranked the state’s hard-line conservative Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

The 17-year-old student, Caleb Brock, convinced organizers of the Tea Party gathering that he wanted to present Patrick with a large Basquiat-esque painting as a tribute. The Republicans welcomed the young artist to join the governor onstage and pose with the work, which is indeed scrawled with the phrases “Students for Dan 2020” and “Conservative,” alongside a smiley face and other jumbles of lines and colors.

But upon closer inspection, it turns out that the phrases “ABOLISH ICE” is also written across the top of the canvas, backwards (so that it appears correctly in photographs), and, less conspicuously, “IMPEACH TRUMP.”

Caleb Brock, left, with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. Courtesy of Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein, Photo: Serlesi Olguin.

In a video shot by Brock’s classmate at John H. Guyer High School in nearby Denton County, and later uploaded online by The Young Turks, the Texas lawmaker proudly holds the canvas, touting its pro-conservative message, as Brock stands by.

Caleb Brock, Manifest Destiny. Courtesy of the artist.

“It confuses me to see old, white men arguing for the exclusion of immigrants, as if this land has always been ours,” Brock told artnet News in an email.

That contradiction was the basis of another painting, titled Manifest Destiny, which confronts the “whitewashed” history of westward expansion in America.

“There’s also a critique of our current political system in there. We have a government led by old, white men. It’s time to change that. It’s time to force seats at the table for underrepresented communities.”