Here’s a fun thing to do on a Saturday. Google the terms “Nehls for Congress”. Among the results is the one that takes you HERE. That’s Congressman Troy Nehls’s campaign website. From there, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Now click on the “Pre-Order My Book” menu option.

That takes you HERE. From there, scroll down just a tad until you see this (or click the screen capture below to make bigly):

Note his mailing address. That’s 1612 Crabb River Road. The location seemed familiar, so I asked around, and this is the best answer I got:

“Yep. I just remembered it!  The Z Bar.  Lots of bikers and bare boobs.  If you drove by on your way to the donut shop, the odds were pretty good that “innocent bystander” would appear in your obituary.  They got sued enough times for over serving that it became a nonprofit but not by choice.”

“It sat empty for a while and then became the Republican headquarters.  Truth be known, it was hard to tell the difference.”

That’s right, I told myself, the Z Bar. I used to pass by it on my way to visit Brazos Bend State Park (the latter is a must-see if you’re in the area). I recall that it was a rare weekend that didn’t have news coverage of the worst sort out of that address.

So now I know what happened to it. The GOP took over Z Bar and it became Freedom Hall: aka the Nehls Campaign headquarters. What I don’t know is whether they had a shaman shake bones and waft acrid smoke in the various rooms to exorcise the evil spirits before moving in.

Something tells me “No”.

But that’s not the end of it. Nehls’s Pre-Order page is obviously out-of-date. Google Maps says that “Freedom Hall” is

If you go one step further, type in the address “1612 Crabb River Road Richmond” in Google Maps, you get the precise location of where Z Bar and Freedom Hall used to be, but a tap on the street view photo gives you this:
Wait. What?

That looks like Arabic script. It is Arabic script!

Further clicking got me to the new owners of Troy Nehls’s old HQ, aka “Freedom Hall”: Darul-Quran Masjid.

From Z Bar to the GOP Freedom Hall to a Mosque. How’s that for progress in Texas?

(Hat tip to Alfredo at the Dairy Queen)