Kathy Tran; Adobe Stock
Audio By Carbonatix
When Damien LeVeck’s name is called as the next public speaker at the Nov. 12 Dallas City Council meeting, he takes his time. He slowly raises the lectern in front of the council horseshoe to accommodate his height and places a camera on a tripod on the desk to capture his remarks. His uniform consists of a blazer, a fedora-style hat and a badge that reads “MEDIA,” bearing his black-and-white profile photo from his X account, which he uses to post commentary on City Hall.
He casually crosses his legs at the ankles as he observes the horseshoe, noting which council members are failing to meet his eye, are talking among themselves or have walked away.
“Mr. Mayor, if I could please have the attention of the full council?” He asks before making his remarks. “They are very rudely speaking through mine and other people’s speeches.”
He clears his throat and, when somewhat satisfied, launches into a dramatic reading of a Dallas Morning News editorial headlined “Dallas hired more cops, and the sky didn’t fall.” The final sentences of the article take him a few seconds over the three-minute limit given to each speaker, and he finishes with a quick “thank you” before brushing past the security officer who has begun to approach him.
This year, make your gift count –
Invest in local news that matters.
Our work is funded by readers like you who make voluntary gifts because they value our work and want to see it continue. Make a contribution today to help us reach our $30,000 goal!
LeVeck, 43, is not The Dallas Morning News’ biggest fan, but he has an appreciation for just about anything that criticizes City Council melodrama or calls out general dysfunction at City Hall. After speaking at the meeting’s morning session, he will hang around for another 11 hours until his next chance to speak, where he will lambaste the council for what he sees as mismanagement of city resources during a discussion on City Hall’s future.
“When I’m there with my camera, the tone and behavior of the council members changes. … They’re more careful about what they say,” LeVeck said. “I’ve gone really hard on some of them.”
Since early 2024, LeVeck has used the social media platform X to post videos and self-described “spicy memes” about Dallas’ leadership on the account @dallasenfuego. He has coined nicknames for council members he finds most frustrating and has used everything from ethics complaints to artificial intelligence to draw attention to what he believes is “incompetent” stewardship.
He considers himself an “intransigent iconoclast” — one who stands opposed to city leadership’s continued adherence to the status quo — and would categorize his brand of comedic political content alongside that of Bill Maher and John Oliver, albeit with less funding and fewer fans.
He also took over as executive director of Dallas HERO, the organization that, in November, helped pass City Charter amendments requiring the city to hire more police officers and paving the way for residents to sue the city. He notes that while the missions of @dallasenfuego and Dallas HERO are somewhat aligned, he considers his work on each operation to be independent of the other. During an interview, LeVeck declined to talk about Dallas HERO, citing the need to keep the endeavors separate to avoid the risk or perception of censorship.
What he did say is that he believes the HERO organization has been “vindicated” in the year since propositions S and U passed, and he points out that, despite threats, the group has not brought a lawsuit against the city of Dallas.
“I don’t think that’s going to be good for anybody. I would much prefer diplomacy with city leaders over that,” he said.
But LeVeck hasn’t built a platform as a City Hall gadfly without earning some criticism of his own, and you’d be hard pressed to find a council member who’d describe his methods as diplomatic.
Last year, he was accused of being homophobic after publishing a video that criticized council member Chad West for spending campaign funds at a gay bar and a D.C. bathhouse. LeVeck filed a complaint 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 wrongdoing.) 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 proposed appointment of LeVeck’s wife to the city’s ethics advisory commission, citing his inflammatory 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 landscape, 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 disenfranchised 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
To 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 filmmaker, not a citizen journalist or a political commentator. Even now, as he creates content 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 unconventional 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 adversaries — 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 filmmaker. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis hard, LeVeck, by then a young father, found himself 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 developing 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 carpetbagger from L.A. who’s coming here just to astroturf politics. That’s not what I’m doing,” LeVeck said. “I don’t have plans to leave Dallas. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, and I just want a City Council that represents people better.”
Like many other Northern Dallasites, LeVeck was radicalized against the city by the District 11 rezoning case known as Pepper Square. The issue involved an old shopping center, a developer looking to build apartments and a coalition of nearby neighborhoods 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 constituents. 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 respectful and following all the rules that you’re supposed to follow, the rules of decorum, that had not worked,” LeVeck said. “So I saw an opportunity to be a little bit more brash. The name-calling, 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 simultaneously encouraging the swell of anger that surrounded the Pepper Square issue. Despite rousing opposition from community members, the horseshoe passed Pepper Square in a 10-4 vote on March 27.
While she had two terms of council eligibility remaining, Schultz did not run for reelection. 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 spitfire to rally discontent against Roth’s opponent, Jeff Kitner. LeVeck said he credits himself with getting Roth elected — although he emphasizes he does so “with the utmost humility.”
A recurring theme of LeVeck’s messaging is stoking frustration in the average Dallasite. A photo of empty chairs at the Dallas City Council horseshoe during public comment may be captioned with, “There is no better illustration of [the council’s] hatred for you.” “You’re not mad enough,” is another common refrain, usually written at the end of a post about something the council did that infuriated LeVeck.
“Your representatives are actually authoritarians 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 toward normal politics and honing that concern 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 responses to a few emailed questions. In one, he questioned whether the calls for uprising would truly resonate with most Dallasites.
“My fourth campaign 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 because 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 represent our community.”
LeVeck splits his time between Dallas HERO, his film and television career and editing 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 examples of what he calls “unbelievable incompetence” 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
If there is something that LeVeck appears 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 inspector general role, which is intended to serve as an independent investigator in cases involving ethical issues, including corruption and misconduct claims. One of the three is suing the city, alleging retaliation after he brought attention to the City Council’s improper spending.
The Ethics Advisory Commission, meant to act as another layer of oversight for complaints brought against the city, has six vacancies, according to Dallas’ boards and committees website. In September, Oak Cliff resident Christine Hopkins published an article 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 reasons, 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 something 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 ethics 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 associated with the rise of non-traditional media. Historically, journalistic outlets have followed similar codes of ethics across the industry. Best practices outlined by groups like the Society of Professional Journalists mandate both big-picture goals, such as minimizing 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 seriously 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 believes he’s doing a service [to our local politics], 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 either truthful or clearly satirical. He understands that his tenuous sliver of influence over City Hall commentary has been built on his word. In his videos, he typically accompanies claims with screenshots of campaign finance reports or findings from Freedom of Information Act requests to support his points.
“I’m not just some schmuck who’s trying to mudsling. I’m actually somebody that really cares. … Certain people online like to malign me like, ‘Oh, he’s TMZ-ing this issue,’” LeVeck said. “If you mean I’m exposing stuff that no one else knows about and [is] reporting on, and stuff that the mainstream media won’t report on, then I guess I am.”
Still, some of LeVeck’s techniques have been called into question.
Ahead of the Pepper Square vote, LeVeck approached West with a warning: He’d made a video about the council member, but he wasn’t planning on posting it unless West voted to approve the development. West voted for the development anyway, and a video accusing him of being in the pocket of developers was published on @dallasenfuego shortly thereafter.
LeVeck said his offer wasn’t blackmail, just an “opportunity” for the representative to “vote in a sensible way,” but he can see how the maneuver would “leave a bad taste in somebody’s mouth.” Still, he said that if he ever had evidence of a truly egregious ethical issue committed by someone on the council, he would not refrain from posting it, even if the person had voted in his favor.
“I will go easier on council members that aren’t foolish and who don’t do foolish things or disrespectful things,” he said. “I call balls and strikes, that is my philosophy. And I do not have unbridled loyalty to anybody. I’m not a huge fan of [council member] Jaime Resendez, but I haven’t made any videos about him yet. And I certainly could.”
West, though, is less convinced of the reliability of LeVeck’s moral compass. Over the last year, LeVeck has filed ethics complaints against West and council members Paula Blackmon and Adam Bazaldua, all of which have “gone nowhere.” West thinks that speaks for itself, although LeVeck would probably argue it’s just further proof that the system is broken.
“I wish Damien would just be honest in his attacks on me and some of my colleagues, that he thinks we take bad votes and have bad ideas. He manufactures ethics complaints so he can make videos saying we are unethical,” West said. “I think if Damien saw someone who voted against Pepper Square take an envelope overflowing with cash, he would look the other way.”
And then there’s the artificial intelligence. LeVeck introduced the tool into his videos earlier this year, using it to create various videos depicting council member Gay Donnell Willis as the Wicked Witch of the West and council member Bazaldua as a baby or bowing to Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. When conversations about the city’s proposal to move away from alley trash pickup were at their hottest, LeVeck used AI to create a video of City Manager Kimberly Tolbert appearing to make fun of residents for being upset.
That video included a disclaimer that AI was used, because LeVeck “didn’t feel like dealing with the blowback” he knew it would likely inspire. But for the most part, the use of AI is not disclosed in his content. “You’d have to be pretty dense” to think most of it is real, he said, and then there is the fact that getting most people to stick around until the end of a video to read a disclaimer just isn’t practical in the social media age.
“I see using derivative AI in a comical way as the political cartoons of the 21st century,” he said. “Political cartoons and satire have been a part of political discourse since the founding of our country. And if the politicians that I’m making this stuff about have a problem with that, then you know what they say. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. You signed up for this.”
Texas has attempted to put in guardrails at the intersection of politics and AI. During the legislative session, the Texas House passed a bill that would require political advertisements to disclose whether images, video, or audio were altered, a direct response to the rise of generative AI, which makes it difficult to discern truth from fabrication. The bill died in the Senate, but even if it had passed, it likely would not have applied to LeVeck.
“A citizen journalist does have First Amendment rights, but they also have personal responsibilities. And one of those, I think, would be to note the generative AI is being used in a video,” said Jillson, who ultimately found LeVeck’s content to be “pretty tame stuff.”
The Anti-Hero
In October, LeVeck appeared to take the next step in cementing his influencer status: monetization. On X, he posted about a political action committee called the True Grit Texas PAC, stating, “If you want more of my videos more often, please consider donating.” A website for the PAC uses phrases like “exposing corruption” and “demanding accountability” and purports to “empower citizen journalists.”
At first, LeVeck said only that he “knew” who’d started the PAC. Later on, he said he’d started it himself with a group of individuals who share his desire to expose “ethical malfeasance” at City Hall. However, the idea of PAC dollars influencing Dallas’ political commentary poses an interesting dilemma, regardless of who is at the helm. When asked whether he thinks citizen journalists who receive funding from an outside source should disclose their sources, he first said he “doesn’t think it’s the most important thing.”
Then he pauses, and appears to reconsider.
“We know who owns the newspapers, so whenever you read anything that they publish, the discerning eye will keep that in mind, especially if they see a certain slant one way or the other,” LeVeck said. “But as far as the work I’m doing, I can tell you I have not been paid by the PAC to do anything as of this conversation.”
Whether he’d disclose the funding if paid in the future, he remained unsure, sticking with the idea that it’s hard to get people to read disclaimers.
Jillson points out that, in the last two elections, LeVeck has picked the winning sides with Propositions S and U in November 2024, and Roth in this year’s City Council race. But whether those were one-offs or evidence of true electoral influence isn’t clear, he said. LeVeck said he’s already thinking about the next City Council election in 2027 and plans to back candidates across the city who he believes “have a spine.”
He added that he’s been asked by “several people” to run for mayor or the council, but he’s “not enough of a masochist” to do that.
“I can’t imagine sitting there every Wednesday and listening to the whole thing. It’s painful,” he said. “I am way more effective as a citizen and as an iconoclast making my videos.”
If the City Council didn’t want a thorn in their side, he thinks they shouldn’t have given him a reason to be one.
“You made me,” LeVeck said, quoting, once again, Jack Nicholson’s Joker.
It’s the third time he’s referenced Batman over the course of our interview, and the second time he’s framed himself as the movie’s antagonist, even as he emphasizes that he believes his advocacy is rooted in the fight for the city’s future.
So is he Dallas’ Batman or Joker? A hero or a villain?
He gives a wry smile when he answers: “I’m the best of both.”
