6 December 4 - 10, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents and a D.C. bathhouse. LeVeck filed a com- plaint with the Texas Ethics Commission and dubbed West, who is gay, “Bathhouse Chad” in his content. (The Texas Ethics Commission did not cite West for wrongdo- ing.) LeVeck does not believe that the video or the nickname is homophobic, and adds that “anyone who knows him” would agree that he is not discriminatory towards the LGBTQ+ community. Most recently, the council denied the pro- posed appointment of LeVeck’s wife to the city’s ethics advisory commission, citing his in- flammatory social media content and arguing that LeVeck’s willingness to “stoop to any means necessary” to “achieve his goals” would interfere with his wife’s ability to do the job. Nonetheless, LeVeck believes that he is playing a vital role in Dallas’ political land- scape, filling what he sees as a growing gap left by legacy media by “shining a light” on the stuff that “either nobody is willing to look at, or they’re intentionally hiding.” “I think Dallas residents are being disen- franchised by city leadership that is running the city into the ground behind their backs,” LeVeck said. “I’m not Batman, but it’s kind of like when Gotham is in trouble, you have to turn on the spotlight.” Nice No More T o understand LeVeck, you should consider movies more than politics. He’s been a largely “apolitical person” through his life, and he set out to be a film- maker, not a citizen journalist or a political commentator. Even now, as he creates con- tent about City Hall, he aims to entertain. He grew up in Illinois, the son of a doctor and a symphonic orchestra violinist, and from a young age was “enthralled” by films like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Another favorite is V for Vendetta; all three movies depict scrappy rebels who employ uncon- ventional tactics to confront institutions. It’s a message he may have internalized, as he now employs guerrilla reporting techniques — such as wearing a small camera on his chest while walking around City Hall so that he can publish interactions with his adver- saries — to go against the institutional grain. He’s only been in Dallas for three years. He moved from Los Angeles, where he’d lived for 22 years and worked as an editor for TMZ and E! News, then a horror film- maker. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis hard, LeVeck, by then a young father, found him- self upset about the direction things were going in the city. His first foray into politics was signing a recall petition against his council member after the representative’s office informed him that there was nothing to be done about an encampment develop- ing at the neighborhood park where his wife often took their children. His wife, Natalie, hails from Dallas, so his family joined the other 102,000 Californians who packed up for Texas in 2022, according to the Texas Realtors’ Relocation Report. “I’ve been accused of being a carpetbag- ger from L.A. who’s coming here just to as- troturf politics. That’s not what I’m doing,” LeVeck said. “I don’t have plans to leave Dal- las. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, and I just want a City Council that repre- sents people better.” Like many other Northern Dallasites, LeVeck was radicalized against the city by the District 11 rezoning case known as Pep- per Square. The issue involved an old shop- ping center, a developer looking to build apartments and a coalition of nearby neigh- borhoods that insisted transient apartment renters, tall buildings and strain on traffic would ruin the suburban feel they’d come to love. In March 2024, LeVeck launched a recall effort against then-City Council member Jaynie Schultz after attending a community meeting to discuss the development. He felt the meeting was unproductive because of Schultz’s unwillingness to side with her con- stituents. Videos taken at the meeting show the Schultz being heckled and yelled at by various audience members throughout the meeting. For LeVeck, it was evidence that Dallas residents were fed up with the same old city maneuvering, so he also started the @dallasenfuego X account. “I think what I saw was that being nice hasn’t really worked out very well for me. Being nice, being re- spectful and following all the rules that you’re supposed to follow, the rules of deco- rum, that had not worked,” LeVeck said. “So I saw an opportunity to be a little bit more brash. The name-call- ing, the jokes, the standing up and raising your voice and interrupting, sometimes it has a place.” When the recall effort failed, LeVeck spent Schultz’s final months at the horseshoe going at her relentlessly over social media while simul- taneously encouraging the swell of anger that surrounded the Pepper Square is- sue. Despite rousing opposition from com- munity members, the horseshoe passed Pepper Square in a 10-4 vote on March 27. While she had two terms of council eligi- bility remaining, Schultz did not run for re- election. In a February interview with the Observer, she said that the vitriol she faced in the lead-up to Pepper Square had left her “disillusioned” with Dallas, and she worried about the “simmering anger” that had seeped into local politics. After a runoff election, Bill Roth was elected to the District 11 seat. LeVeck was a fan of Roth’s and used his social media spit- fire to rally discontent against Roth’s oppo- nent, Jeff Kitner. LeVeck said he credits himself with getting Roth elected — al- though he emphasizes he does so “with the utmost humility.” A recurring theme of LeVeck’s messaging is stoking frustration in the average Dallas- ite. A photo of empty chairs at the Dallas City Council horseshoe during public com- ment may be captioned with, “There is no better illustration of [the council’s] hatred for you.” “You’re not mad enough,” is an- other common refrain, usually written at the end of a post about something the coun- cil did that infuriated LeVeck. “Your representatives are actually au- thoritarians who hate you. And they must be dealt with accordingly,” LeVeck wrote on X ahead of the Pepper Square vote. The tweet was accompanied by an image of a colonial man being tarred and feathered. Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, said that tapping into the average citizen’s feelings to- ward normal politics and honing that con- cern toward rage has been an effective strategy for President Donald Trump over the last decade. “You certainly see it at the national level … and you see it at the local level. [People are] trying to tap into that sense that citizens feel like politics is a service industry, and it’s expensive, and they don’t get much for it,” Jillson said. “Some people are pretty damn good at that. Trump would be one of those. And coming on down [to the local level] is Damien LeVeck.” But not everyone believes that LeVeck’s message has staying power. West, a frequent target of LeVeck’s, declined to do an interview with the Observer on this topic, but he did provide written re- sponses to a few emailed questions. In one, he questioned whether the calls for uprising would truly resonate with most Dallasites. “My fourth cam- paign in 2025 was the nastiest I have dealt with, thanks in no small part to Damien,” West wrote. “It was also my biggest victory of my four campaigns be- cause I don’t think people are looking for anger. I don’t hate my neighbors. I love them and am honored they chose me to rep- resent our community.” LeVeck splits his time between Dallas HERO, his film and television career and ed- iting his @dallasenfuego videos, but it’s the latter that he has to actually put in effort to tear himself away from. Once he started looking, he found there were too many ex- amples of what he calls “unbelievable in- competence” at City Hall to warrant stopping the meme-y videos. It’s a “rabbit hole” that he doesn’t have the resources to fully explore. But if he could, he said he’d be more than happy to spend “all day, every day” making antagonistic videos and going to City Hall to chastise the council. “When you start looking at it, you realize how dire things actually are. And I don’t think people really understand how bad things are in this city. … This town needs an enema,” he said, quoting Jack Nicholson’s Joker character from the 1989 Batman movie. “The town needs a wakeup call.” Ethical Considerations I f there is something that LeVeck ap- pears to be motivated by above all else, it is ethics (although the entertainment factor is a close second). Ethics is an uncomfortable topic at Marilla Street right now. This year has seen three different individuals in the city’s in- spector general role, which is intended to serve as an independent investigator in cases involving ethical issues, including cor- ruption and misconduct claims. One of the three is suing the city, alleging retaliation af- ter he brought attention to the City Coun- cil’s improper spending. The Ethics Advisory Commission, meant to act as another layer of oversight for com- plaints brought against the city, has six va- cancies, according to Dallas’ boards and committees website. In September, Oak Cliff resident Christine Hopkins published an ar- ticle titled “Dallas: Where Ethics Go to Die” on the website “Visible” that describes her fruitlessly trying to file an ethics complaint on behalf of an environmentalist client. There is a bit of a vigilante streak in LeVeck as he circumvents the traditional channels to post about his ethical concerns online. While the name-calling and artificial intelligence-created videos are strategies that have been coined by Trump, LeVeck said he gravitated towards them not for partisan rea- sons, but because he thinks they’re “funny” and get people engaged in a topic that most residents are happy to know little about. “I believe in ethics. I believe in integrity. And I don’t think you can assign a political persuasion to that, I think that’s just some- thing that everyone should have,” LeVeck said. “The people that didn’t vote [to approve my wife to the city’s ethics commission], many of them are people who I have filed eth- ics complaints against. So I think that that shows that I am being very effective. Because a formidable opponent is not going to waste ammunition on a weak enemy.” However, even as LeVeck describes his own strict moral code, there are risks associ- ated with the rise of non-traditional media. Historically, journalistic outlets have fol- lowed similar codes of ethics across the in- dustry. Best practices outlined by groups like the Society of Professional Journalists man- date both big-picture goals, such as mini- mizing harm and ensuring accountability, as well as specific details, like how to write an editor’s note on a story when it has been changed after publication. Those things don’t necessarily apply to citizen journalists or independent pundits; it’s up to LeVeck to define his own standards. “If someone is intending to be taken seri- ously or even listened to by people outside the ‘Let’s burn it down’ community, I do think that they have to be seen as honest,” Jillson said. “I think that Mr. LeVeck be- lieves he’s doing a service [to our local poli- tics], so I’d hope he holds himself to some standard of honesty and responsibility.” LeVeck does believe that everything he has published up to this point has been ei- ther truthful or clearly satirical. He under- stands that his tenuous sliver of influence over City Hall commentary has been built on his word. In his videos, he typically ac- companies claims with screenshots of cam- paign finance reports or findings from Freedom of Information Act requests to support his points. “I’m not just some schmuck who’s try- ing to mudsling. I’m actually somebody that really cares. … Certain people Unfair Park from p4 >> p8 “The Town needs a wakeup call.” -Damien LeVeck
