1). “Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office: The platform was voted on Saturday, with tallies expected next week. Other planks call abortion homicide and gender-transition care 'child abuse.' ”, May 25, 2024, Robert Downen & Renzo Downey, The Texas Tribune, at < https://www.texastribune.org/
2). “ 'The house is on fire': Texas GOP plots its next chapter amid civil war, depleted staff, funding drops: Under outgoing chair Matt Rinaldi, the party’s donor base has shrunk as it aligns with two far-right megadonors”, May 23, 2024, Robert Downen, The Texas Tribune, at < https://www.texastribune.org/
3). “Far-right favorite Abraham George elected to lead Texas GOP: George was backed by outgoing GOP chair Matt Rinaldi, who ushered in a Republican civil war and oversaw staffing cuts and drops in fundraising”, May 24, 2024, Robert Downen & Renzo Downey, The Texas Tribune, at < https://www.texastribune.org/
4). “Amid white supremacist scandal, far-right billionaire powerbrokers see historic election gains in Texas: All told, 11 of the 28 House candidates supported by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks won their primaries outright, and another eight are headed to runoffs this May.”, Mar 08, 2024, Robert Downen, The Texas Tribune, at < https://www.texastribune.org/
5). “Texas activist David Barton wants to end separation of church and state. He has the ear of the new U.S. House speaker: Barton has been a staple of Texas’ Christian conservative movement, offering crucial support to politicians and frequently being cited or called on to testify in favor of bills that critics say would erode church-state separations”, Nov 03, 2023, Robert Downen, The Texas Tribune, at < https://www.texastribune.org/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The journalists Robert Downen and Renzo Downey at The Texas Tribune have been keeping an eye on Texas extreme-right wing Republican Primary politics and the meetings to work out the Texas Republican Party's platform for the 2024 election season. The outcome has been stunningly reactionary / fascistic even for Texas.
Item 1)., “Proposed Texas GOP platform ….”, opens with this:
“Republican Party of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties.
“Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform included proclamations that 'abortion is not healthcare it is homicide'; that gender-transition treatment for children is 'child abuse'; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and 'publicly honor the southern heroes'; support for declaring gold and silver as legal tender; and demands that the U.S. government disclose 'all pertinent information and knowledge' of UFOs. …..
(and then continues) “As the party has drifted further right, its platform has done the same. In 2022, it called for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the 'Great Reset,' a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an 'abnormal lifestyle choice'; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
“Many of those planks were also included in this year’s platform, which was debated late into Friday night and presented for a vote Saturday afternoon. ….
“Perhaps the most consequential plank calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college.
“Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office. In 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott carried 235 counties, while Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried most of the urban, more populous counties and South Texas counties. Statewide, Abbott won 55% of the popular vote while O’Rourke carried 44%. …. (Emphasis added)
“The 2022 platform proclaimed that the United States was 'founded on Judeo-Christian principles,' for instance, and demanded the repeal of federal prohibitions on political activity by churches.
“The 2024 platform goes significantly further: It urges lawmakers and the State Board of Education to 'require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance,' and supports the use of religious chaplains in schools — which was made legal under a law passed by the state Legislature last year.” (Emphasis added)
Item 2)., “ 'The house is on fire': ….” largely discusses the changes as the state Republican Party has largely come under the control of two extremist Right-wing Oil Billionaires who bankroll the primary and general election campaigns of right wing extremist candidates. But concomitantly donations by the funders who used to support the party have fallen off precipitously leaving the Texas Republican Party apparatus in dire financial shape. Item 3)., “Far-right favorite Abraham George ….” discusses the rise of George to become State Party Chairman and how he has worked with outgoing Chair Matt Rinaldi in the transformation of the state party into and extreme right-wing vehicle for these two extremist Right-wing Oil Billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. The way that Dunn and Wilks have taken such power is discussed in Item 4). “Amid white supremacist scandal, ….”, the article lists a number of state primary races and the lopsided results favoring candidates supported by Dunn and Wilks. At the end of the article there are 4 paragraphs about a Republican State Legislator named Glenn Rogers who lost his primary:
“And in House District 60, Rep. Glenn Rogers lost Tuesday by more than 27 points in another rematch. His opponent, Mike Olcott, lost to Rogers by 1 point in a 2022 runoff despite support from Wilks and Dunn. Backed this time by the billionaires and Abbott, Olcott walloped Rogers — an outspoken enemy of the state’s far right.
“Rogers made no secret of who he blamed for his loss, accusing Abbott of telling 'blatant lies' as part of his $6 million spending spree against House members who broke with him on school voucher legislation last year.
“But the bulk of Rogers’ ire was reserved for Dunn and Wilks — the 'two billionaire, “Christian’ nationalist power brokers that run this state.'
“ 'History will prove that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is “bought” by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a Theocracy that is both un-American and un-Texan,' Rogers wrote in a Wednesday op-ed in the Weatherford Democrat. 'May God save Texas!' ”
It is worth noting that Dunn and Wilks both live in the relatively bizzare Texas Hinterlands; that occupy about 80% of the state's land area but have only about 25% of its population living there. Dunn lives in the Midland-Odessa area, considered the most Right-wing City in the U.S., and where Bush the Younger spent most of his childhood. Another extreme religious reactionary figure David Barton, lives just outside of the Texas Triangle near Fort Wort. See the Texas Map posted here below.
Finally Item 5)., “Texas activist David Barton ….” takes a look at the Pastor and Amateur Historian who has worked for decades to impose his religious and moral views on the rest of the American People (starting with Texas)
These developments need to be viewed in the light of just what sort of “democracy” we actually have in the U.S., and in Texas in particular. The Republican leadership knows full well that they would not fare too well in any sort of honest and fairly conducted elections. So instead we have a heavily manipulated “faux” democracy, where elections are held but the Democratic Party, or any left-of-center party (I will reserve judgement on the Democratic Party of Texas for now) cannot conduct voter registration drives as there are now heavy criminal penalties for making tiny clerical mistakes (selectively applied of course); with sentences including years in prison and $100,000 fines for making a tiny error. Because of these laws The League of Women Voters quit conducting voter registration drives in Texas. Also the reactionary Republican dominated Texas State Legislature now has passed legislation allowing them to take over the county election board in Harris County (where Houston is located) to change the vote totals to figures that ensure they win state wide elections. In 2020 the State Attorney General Ken Paxton (a noted swindler) prohibited Harris County from sending out absentee vote by mail ballots to its citizens. Forcing people to vote in person during the height of the Covid Period. He later bragged about this on Steve Bannon's podcast.
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Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office
The platform was voted on Saturday, with tallies expected next week. Other planks call abortion homicide and gender-transition care “child abuse.”
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Republican Party of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties.
Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform included proclamations that “abortion is not healthcare it is homicide”; that gender-transition treatment for children is “child abuse”; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and “publicly honor the southern heroes”; support for declaring gold and silver as legal tender; and demands that the U.S. government disclose “all pertinent information and knowledge” of UFOs.
The party hopes to finalize its platform on Wednesday, after Saturday’s votes on each proposal are tabulated.
Passed by delegates at the party’s biennial convention, the platform has traditionally been seen not as a definitive list of Republican stances, but a compromise document that represents the interests of the party’s various business, activist and social conservative factions. But in recent years — and amid a party civil war that’s pushed it further right — the platform has been increasingly used as a basis for censuring Republican officeholders who the party’s far right has attacked as insufficiently conservative, including Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-San Antonio.
As the party has drifted further right, its platform has done the same. In 2022, it called for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
Many of those planks were also included in this year’s platform, which was debated late into Friday night and presented for a vote Saturday afternoon.
One proposal asserts that illegal immigration is the “greatest threat to American security and sovereignty” and calls for the state and federal governments to devote all available resources to deporting undocumented immigrants.
Perhaps the most consequential plank calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college.
Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office. In 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott carried 235 counties, while Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried most of the urban, more populous counties and South Texas counties. Statewide, Abbott won 55% of the popular vote while O’Rourke carried 44%.
However, some attorneys question whether such a proposal would be constitutional and conform with the Voting Rights Act because it would most likely limit the voting power of racial minorities, who are concentrated in a relatively small number of counties. (The party’s platform also reiterates its previous calls for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act).
The platform also takes a step further some of the party’s previous calls for more Christianity in public life. The 2022 platform proclaimed that the United States was “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” for instance, and demanded the repeal of federal prohibitions on political activity by churches.
The 2024 platform goes significantly further: It urges lawmakers and the State Board of Education to “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance,” and supports the use of religious chaplains in schools — which was made legal under a law passed by the state Legislature last yea
Though more subtle, another proposed plank could also aid Republicans’ ongoing attempts to further infuse Christianity into public education. This year’s platform also calls for Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptists” to be included in the list of “original founding documents” to be taught in history classes, along with the U.S. Constitution or The Federalist Papers. Jefferson’s Danbury letter is often cited by activists such as David Barton, a Texas pastor and self-described “amateur historian” who has spent decades arguing that church-state separation is a “myth” that has been used to shroud America’s true Christian roots — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by actual historians and experts, many of them also conservative Christians.
The new platform comes as Republicans increasingly embrace once-fringe theories such as Christian nationalism, which argues that the United States’ founding was God-ordained, and therefore its institutions and laws should reflect conservative, Christian views. Barton’s ideas have been a key driver of that movement, and were repeatedly cited by lawmakers last year during debates over the chaplains bill and in legislation that would have required the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms. Barton’s group, WallBuilders, was also an exhibitor at this year’s Texas GOP convention, and the party has increasingly aligned with two far-right, fundamentalist Christian billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks.
The draft platform also leans into the Texas GOP’s open hostility toward Texas House leadership and Phelan, with positions that would weaken the power of the House speaker and distribute power to the GOP caucus in the House as a whole. One plank advocates for limiting the speaker to two consecutive terms. Another calls for a discharge petition process, which would allow members to send bills to the House floor for a vote even if they haven’t passed the House committee process.
On Friday night, the convention elected former Collin County GOP Chair Abraham George as the next party chair, a vote that is expected to continue the party’s trajectory. During his candidate speech on Thursday, George called for the party to fight Democrats, radicals and “RINO” Republicans who go against “everything we stand for.
During a speech on the convention stage on Saturday, former gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Don Huffines carried a printed version of the platform with him. He noted that Republicans have controlled the Legislature and the governor’s mansion for two decades, but the party still struggles to secure its priorities.
“We could get any piece of legislation done anytime we want, but, every session, we struggle to get our platform into law,” Huffines said.
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“The house is on fire”: Texas GOP plots its next chapter amid civil war, depleted staff, funding drops
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Under outgoing chair Matt Rinaldi, the party’s donor base has shrunk as it aligns with two far-right megadonors.
In one of his last speeches as chair of the Republican Party of Texas, Matt Rinaldi declared victory.
“We’ve changed the game,” he told members of the Texas GOP’s executive committee in February. “The biggest con that has been propagated against grassroots Republicans is that you have no other job other than to be a cheerleading society for anyone with an R next to their name.”
Texas GOP convention kicks off with party leaders attacking Speaker Dade Phelan
Rinaldi has indeed accomplished what he set out to do in 2021, when he was first elected chair. Whereas most of his predecessors focused on traditional party duties — courting donors, recruiting candidates and voter outreach — Rinaldi has turned the chair into a bully pulpit, using it to attack and purge more moderate Republicans and help usher in a dark-red wave in this year’s primaries. But when he steps down as chair this week, he will leave behind a deeply divided organization, with a decimated staff, that is increasingly dependent on two ultraconservative megadonors who have played key roles in the party’s ongoing civil war.
Last year, the Texas GOP’s fundraising dropped to its lowest level since 2017, and the number of corporate and individual donors to the party’s state account sank to their lowest levels in at least a decade. The party currently has just five employees — compared to 50 at the same point in 2020, the last presidential election year.
In its most recent federal filing, in April, the party reported having $2.7 million on-hand — three-quarters of what it had at the same point in the 2020 cycle, when adjusted for inflation. And much of the funds reported by the party in April have already been spent to cover the estimated $1.8 million cost of this week's convention — which is projected to operate at a $38,000 loss for the party, executive committee members were told at a Wednesday financial briefing.
As its donor base has shrunk, the party has increasingly relied on two West Texas oil tycoons, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have for years funded attacks by the far right on fellow Republicans, pushed for hardline restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, and faced recent scandals over avowed white supremacists and antisemites working for their political network. In the decade before Rinaldi became chair, the party received $310,000 in donations from Dunn, Wilks or their political action committees. Since then, they have given more than $1.2 million to the party — and last year, as Rinaldi increasingly used his position to attack their political enemies, the billionaires made up a quarter of the party’s total donations.
At the same time, some Republicans say, they’ve seen a noticeable drop in solicitations from the party for donations.
“I have gotten precious little under [Rinaldi’s] leadership asking for funding — precious little,” Andi Turner, a Republican lobbyist, said on a recent podcast. “And having done fundraising for a major organization in this state, I can tell you that if you're not asking every month, then you get what you deserve.”
The party’s divisions and proximity to Dunn and Wilks have turned the race to replace Rinaldi into a referendum on his tenure, and whether to continue its direction by electing his endorsed candidate, Abraham George, as the party’s new leader. Earlier this year, Texas GOP Vice Chair Dana Myers announced her candidacy for chair, saying the party was in a “state of disarray, fractured by internal divisions and marred by turmoil.”
In his late campaign announcement last week, Travis County GOP Chair Matt Mackowiak blasted what he said has been “five years of neglect, dishonesty, self-dealing, and blatant anti-Semitism.” And at a candidate forum days earlier, Houston-area businessman Ben Armenta argued that the party’s “chaos” has come at the expense of voter outreach initiatives and stronger partnership with grassroots groups.
The party “has not gotten the grassroots the resources it needs,” Armenta said. “Everyone is on the frontlines, waiting for the supplies to get there.”
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Rinaldi did not respond to interview requests, but downplayed some of those concerns on a recent podcast. The party’s tiny staffing levels, he said, are due to cuts to regional employees who were replaced with contract labor. Other employees, he said, were working at the direction of the Republican National Convention, which scaled back in reliably-red states. That’s a “good sign” of the Texas GOP’s strength, Rinaldi said. He has similarly downplayed the party’s broader infighting, saying that it has good relationships with most elected leaders — save for House Speaker Dade Phelan and the Beaumont Republican’s “closest lieutenants.”
Longtime party members disagree.
“His time as chair is going to be seen as the time when the Republican Party no longer came together,” said Derek Ryan, a veteran consultant and adviser to GOP campaigns. “There is a certain portion of the party and electorate that is thrilled by that, and there are financial backers that are thrilled by that. And they may be effective right now at getting their agenda through. But is it coming at a cost in 2024, 2026 and beyond?”
“Win elections and beat Democrats”
As the party’s executive director from 1997 to 2004, Wayne Hamilton was on the frontlines of the fight against generations of Democratic dominance over the state. Hamilton credited the GOP’s rise to close collaboration between the party, Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry, and a coalition of business, socially conservative and grassroots groups.
“The party was focused at the time on what the party is supposed to do, which is win elections and beat Democrats,” said Hamilton, who later served as a national political director for Perry’s 2012 presidential bid and campaign manager for Gov. Greg Abbott in 2014. “We worked with anybody who would work with us.”
By 2008, however, the Republican Party of Texas was insolvent, with nearly $750,000 in debt that had accumulated over more than 15 years, as the party borrowed from future election cycles to cover convention costs, salaries or to pay outside groups that assisted with fundraising efforts. Deep in the red, the party and its new chair, Steve Munisteri, spent the next few years beefing up their outreach to donors, consolidating and streamlining its fundraising initiatives and working closely with officials such as Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
“Our teams were always over at their teams’ shops,” Munisteri said in a recent interview. “The way I tried to govern was to bring all the factions together, find the common ground and create good dialogue and cooperation between the elected officials, the donors and the grassroots.”
Under Munisteri, the Republican Party of Texas sent out more than a million mailers each election cycle, created a network of phone-bankers and set up “victory centers” in major cities and predominantly Hispanic regions of the state. Aided by anti-Obama anger and the tea party movement, the party saw stunning results. From 2010 to 2015, Texas Republicans picked up nearly 1,200 seats across the state, grew their narrow advantage in the state Legislature into a supermajority, and zeroed out the party’s debt.
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By the time Munisteri stepped down as chair in 2015, that political marriage was showing early signs of acrimony. As tea party lawmakers and groups gained influence — often with major funding from Dunn and Wilks — they increasingly accused fellow Republicans, namely then-House Speaker Joe Straus, of being weak conservatives, and attacked them for working with House Democrats on bipartisan legislation.
Meanwhile, Dunn and Wilks continued to build their influence. In 2015, they were crucial to then-Sen. Ken Paxton’s election to attorney general. And in 2017, Rinaldi and other lawmakers funded by the billionaires formed a new group, the Texas House Freedom Caucus, that continued to attack House leaders from the right, laying the groundwork for the party’s eventual civil war.
Hot topics
At each of the party’s biennial conventions, delegates debate and approve its platform, a sprawling outline of conservative policy priorities which has for years been viewed as a bellwether for broader Republican sentiment.
And for years, party leaders cautioned that the platform should be understood not as an end-all-be-all list of Republican stances, but as a broad set of positions that reflect the party’s diverse coalition of business, activist and grassroots groups.
“It's false to represent that each one of those platform planks necessarily represents ... the view of the majority of the delegates, let alone a majority of Republicans," Munisteri said in 2014, amid criticism of the platform’s calls that year to repeal the Voting Rights Act, endorse conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ people and end in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. “The Texas Republican Party has millions of people who vote for it, and every individual Republican has their own views on issues."
That’s changing, however, as the state’s ultraconservatives continue to consolidate power. While the platform has always trended toward the right — the 2014 platform also called for the end of hate crimes laws and the restoration of Confederate symbols — by 2022 it had turned into what Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin, called a “Frankenstein assemblage of up-to-the-minute GOP hot topics.”
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That year, the platform included calls for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world’s population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
Over the same time — and reflecting the party’s ongoing division and purity tests — the platform has begun to shift from merely a compromise document, and into a vehicle for punishing dissent. In just the last year, it was cited in censures of three prominent Republican officeholders: Phelan and outgoing Junction Rep. Andrew Murr, both of whom were central to Paxton’s impeachment; and U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, of San Antonio, over his vote for a bipartisan gun law in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, which is in his district.
Heading into this year’s convention, a Texas GOP committee also adopted language requiring state and county chairs to reject ballot applications from any official censured in the two years prior, a move that would give the party unprecedented sway over who can run in GOP primaries. “The party apparatus has gone from being the means of sorting out tensions within the Republican coalition to being an ally of the more extreme and ideologically driven factions, interest groups and organizations within the party,” Henson said.
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That was evident by 2020. Furious that the party’s convention was virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic, delegates ousted then-Chair James Dickey and replaced him with Allen West, a former Florida congressman who has long flirted with conspiracy theories.
In a recent interview, Dickey downplayed West’s election as a sign of the party’s shift, instead blaming his defeat on elected Democrats in Houston who fought against allowing the convention to be held in person there because of the pandemic. “It was a very unpleasant experience,” he said. “And as happened to President Trump, incumbents don't fare well in unpleasant experiences.”
West was an immediate lightning rod. He suggested that “law-abiding states” should secede from the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court shot down Texas’ lawsuit challenging the 2020 presidential election results. He pushed for the Texas GOP to have an account on Gab, a social media website frequented by neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists. He appeared at a convention for QAnon conspiracy theorists, and repeatedly used some of the movement’s best-known slogans. He referred to the party’s then-vice chair, Cat Parks, as a “cancer” (Parks is a cancer survivor). And he repeatedly blasted Abbott, at one point leading protests outside the governor’s mansion over his pandemic orders.
In June 2021 — barely a year after he was elected chair — West stepped down, and soon after announced his campaign against Abbott for governor. The Texas GOP’s executive committee met soon after to choose between four potential successors that included David Covey, the former Orange County GOP chair who is currently in a runoff against Phelan; and Rinaldi, a West ally who had remained involved in party affairs after losing his House seat to a Democrat in 2018.
Rinaldi won, and immediately called for unity. "We cannot lose Texas — and will not lose Texas — if we work together," he said in his victory speech
Rinaldi's reign
The reconciliation period was short.
After running unopposed for a second term in 2022, Rinaldi began to stoke a broader civil war. As other donors pulled back their giving, Rinaldi further aligned the party with Dunn and Wilks, using his powers to attack the billionaires’ Republican opponents and to help them survive a series of high-profile scandals and potential setbacks.
In March 2023 — and hours after leaving a small, private donor retreat with Rinaldi and Dunn — Rep. Bryan Slaton, a Royse City Republican who was heavily funded by the West Texas oil billionaires, invited a 19-year-old intern to his downtown Austin apartment, plied her with alcohol and had sex with her. Rinaldi was later criticized for what some said was a delayed and muted response to the allegations against Slaton, who the Texas House later expelled unanimously.
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He spent the next three months vociferously attacking House leaders for impeaching Paxton, a key ally whose two largest donors are Dunn and Wilks. And when some Republicans publicly worried about the party’s paltry fundraising, the then-leader of Dunn and Wilks’ main political action committee responded with insults and assurances that the billionaires would make up the gap.
“Quit being such an obvious lackey,” Jonathan Stickland, who was at the time president of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, wrote in one social media exchange. “[The party] will have everything it needs.”
In the wake of Paxton’s acquittal by the Texas Senate, Rinaldi, Stickland and other allies of the billionaires’ political network vowed scorched-earth revenge against anyone who supported the impeachment.
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Those retribution plans were disrupted two weeks later, when the Texas Tribune reported that Stickland had hosted notorious white supremacist and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes for several hours. Rinadi was spotted outside the meeting, but denied knowing Fuentes was inside. Subsequent reporting by the Tribune uncovered deeper ties between the network and avowed antisemites. As other Republicans condemned the meeting and called for the party to cut ties with Defend Texas Liberty, Rinaldi attacked critics of Stickland and his billionaire funders — while quietly working as an attorney for Wilks.
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The series of scandals did not hinder Dunn and Wilks’ political network. After spinning off a new PAC, Texans United For a Conservative Majority, ahead of this year’s GOP primary, the billionaires saw massive electoral gains that will likely give them more control than ever over the state Legislature. Rinaldi endorsed most of their candidates and, 10 days after primary day, announced he would not seek a third term as chair.
Hamilton, the former Texas GOP executive director, said the last few years have made him increasingly worried that current infighting and purity tests have made Republicans vulnerable. After seven years as the party’s executive director — the longest-ever tenure — and stints on Abbott and Perry’s campaigns, Hamilton started Project Red TX, a grassroots group that recruits and supports candidates in south Texas, which he says has been almost entirely neglected by the party.
Today’s party, he said, is a “night-and-day” contrast from two decades ago, when a united coalition of Republicans worked together to flip the state’s political landscape on its head and cement a generation of GOP dominance.
“It’s becoming more of an advocacy group — similar to an industry group, business group or sector group — rather than a functioning campaign organization,” he said. ”It leaves a big void. … Meanwhile, the house is on fire.”
When delegates choose this week between six candidates to replace Rinaldi, they will do so at a convention replete with signs of the party’s new alignment. The leader of Dunn and Wilks’ political network, Luke Macias, will lead the group that nominates party representatives to the Republican National Convention; the convention’s sponsors include Wilks’ development company and three other groups funded by the billionaires; and the event schedule features a breakfast hosted by the Dunn family, and five events — by far the most of any other figure — hosted by Sen. Bob Hall, an Edgewood Republican who has received $853,000 from the billionaires.
Among the frontrunners in the race is George, whose endorsements by Rinaldi and his allies have helped him overcome backlash after reports that he was intercepted by police last year as he left his home with a loaded gun to confront a man he believed was sleeping with his wife. George, the former chair of the Collin County GOP, has said that he wants to expand the party’s fundraising and is running on a platform to, among other things, “defeat the Austin swamp.” But Republicans broadly agree that his election would continue the party’s current direction under Rinaldi. And they are, yet again, divided over whether that’d be great or cataclysmic.
“Rinaldi made it very clear that if you think the party has been doing just perfectly the last two years, then George would be the candidate to support,” said Dickey, the former chair who is supporting Mike Garcia in the race. “I think it is clear from the amount of candidates that have stepped up that there are concerns about doing just that.”
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Far-right favorite Abraham George elected to lead Texas GOP
George was backed by outgoing GOP chair Matt Rinaldi, who ushered in a Republican civil war and oversaw staffing cuts and drops in fundraising.
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SAN ANTONIO — Abraham George will be the next chair of the Republican Party of Texas after winning an election at the party’s convention.
The election, which culminated Friday evening, turned into a referendum on outgoing Chair Matt Rinaldi. Under Rinaldi’s reign, the party’s divisions deepened and its fundraising and staffing levels plummeted. As Rinaldi’s chosen successor, George is expected to continue the party’s trajectory, with the far-right using the party institution as a bully pulpit to attack more moderate conservatives.
George, a former Collin County GOP chair who recently ran for the Texas House, defeated party Vice Chair Dana Myers in the second round of voting on the convention floor. Four other candidates failed to advance to the convention floor, including Ben Armenta, a Houston-area businessman; Mike Garcia, former executive director of the Texas House Freedom Caucus; and Travis County GOP Chair Matt Mackowiak. Another, former Real Estate Commissioner Weston Martinez, was the third-place vote-getter on the floor and endorsed Myers after he was eliminated.
"I am humbled and honored to have received the support of thousands of my fellow Republicans and be elected as chairman of the Republican Party of Texas," George said on social media just after his victory. "I look forward to uniting with every single Republican in our state and working towards our shared objective: electing Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and every other Republican on the ballot this November."
Mackowiak’s late entrance into the race last week underscored the divisions within the party and dissatisfaction with Rinaldi’s leadership — and the influence of far-right oil billionaire funders Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. After Mackowiak was eliminated from the election, he endorsed Myers, despite George emerging from the preliminary round of voting as the frontrunner.
George’s campaign for party chair was marred by reports that he was intercepted by police last year as he left his home with a loaded gun to confront a man he believed was sleeping with his wife. But he was able to weather that scandal thanks in part to endorsements from Rinaldi, Attorney General Ken Paxton and two dozen other prominent Republicans affiliated with Dunn and Wilks’ network. George’s wife joined him on stage Thursday, when he spoke to delegates at the start of the convention.
George will inherit a deeply-divided party that is hobbling into the 2024 presidential election cycle with a shrunken donor base and unprecedented reliance on Dunn and Wilks — who became by far the party’s biggest donors under Rinaldi, a former House member whose legislative career they bankrolled. George’s failed primary run against Rep. Candy Noble, R-Lucas, for the was also funded primarily by Dunn and Wilks. He lost in March by 5 percentage points.
In its most recent federal filing, in April, the party reported having $2.7 million on-hand — three-quarters of what it had at the same point in the 2020 cycle, when adjusted for inflation. And much of those funds have already been spent to cover the estimated $1.8 million cost of this week's convention — which party leaders project to operate at a $38,000 loss for the party. The party is also currently employing just five people — compared to 50 at the same time in 2020.
In his two terms as chair, Rinaldi was perhaps the most important defender and cheerleader of the billionaires, helping them survive a series of setbacks and high-profile scandals last year. Among them: The expulsion of Bryan Slaton, a former Royse City House member who was funded by Dunn and Wilks, for getting a 19-year-old intern drunk and having sex with her; the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose biggest donors by far are Dunn and Wilks; and a major controversy involving avowed antisemites and white supremacists in the billionaires’ political network.
The latter scandal began in October, after The Texas Tribune reported that Jonathan Stickland, who at the time led the billionaires’ most important political action committee, Defend Texas Liberty, had hosted notorious white supremacist and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes. Rinaldi was also spotted outside the meeting, but denied knowing Fuentes was there. He then spent the next few months attacking critics of Stickland and the billionaires — while also quietly working as an attorney for Wilks.
That scandal came to a head in November, after the Texas GOP’s executive committee narrowly rejected a ban on associating with known antisemites, Holocaust deniers or neo-Nazis. Myers, the vice chair who was defeated Friday, was among the almost half of executive committee members who called for the party to cut ties with Stickland and his groups as a result.
Mackowiak was similarly critical of the episode, saying in his campaign announcement that the party could not survive another “five years of neglect, dishonesty, self-dealing, and blatant anti-Semitism.”
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Amid white supremacist scandal, far-right billionaire powerbrokers see historic election gains in Texas
All told, 11 of the 28 House candidates supported by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks won their primaries outright, and another eight are headed to runoffs this May.
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West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks entered the 2024 primary election cycle wounded.
Their political network was in the middle of a scandal over its ties to white supremacists. Republicans were calling on each other to reject the billionaires’ campaign money. And their enemies believed they were vulnerable — one bad election day from losing their grip on the state.
Instead, Dunn and Wilks emerged from Tuesday perhaps stronger than ever — vanquishing old political foes, positioning their allies for a November takeover of the state Legislature, and leaving little doubt as to who is winning a vicious civil war to control the state party.
In race after race, more moderate conservative incumbents were trounced by candidates backed by Dunn and Wilks. Their political network made good on its vows for vengeance against House Republicans who voted to impeach their key state ally, Attorney General Ken Paxton, advancing more firebrands who campaigned against bipartisanship and backed anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Tuesday’s election also paved the way for the likely passage of legislation that would allow taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools — a key policy goal for a movement that seeks to infuse more Christianity into public life.
All told, 11 of the 28 House candidates supported by the two billionaires won their primaries outright, and another eight are headed to runoffs this May. And, in a sign of how much the state party has moved rightward, five of their candidates beat incumbents in rematches from 2022 or 2020 — with some House districts swinging by double-digits in their favor. Of the candidates they backed, they donated $75,000 or more to 11 of them — six who won, and four who went to runoffs.
Tuesday was a stark contrast from just two years ago, when Dunn and Wilks’ top political fundraising group poured $5.2 million into a host of longshot candidates — much more than what they spent in the current election cycle. They lost badly that year — 18 of the 19 challengers to Texas House members they backed were defeated. Their only successful House candidate that year was Stan Kitzman of Pattison, who toppled former Rep. Phil Stephenson of Wharton in a runoff.
Among the triumphant on Tuesday was Mitch Little, aided by at least $153,000 in Dunn and Wilks cash, who defeated Rep. Kronda Thimesch in a campaign that focused on Little’s defense of Paxton from impeachment charges in the Senate trial last summer. Three days before he won, Little appeared at an event in Denton County with Paxton and, among others, Steve Bannon, the political operative who helped rally the far right behind then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
And another Dunn and Wilks candidate, David Covey, stunned the state by winning more votes than House Speaker Dade Phelan — the No. 1 target of the state’s far-right in part because of his role in the Paxton impeachment and refusal to ban Democrats from House leadership positions. Phelan now faces a runoff from Covey and the prospect of being the first Texas Speaker since 1972 to lose his primary.
Certainly, Tuesday’s dark-red wave can’t be attributed solely to Dunn and Wilks. Texas GOP primaries have historically been decided by small shares of voters, many of them further to the right of even the party’s mainstream. This election cycle, the billionaires’ targets also overlapped with an unlikely ally, Gov. Greg Abbott, who poured more than $6 million into his quest to rid the Texas House of Republicans who defied his calls for school voucher legislation last year. (Dunn and Wilks’ political groups supported Abbott’s opponent in his 2022 gubernatorial primary.)
Meanwhile, Paxton barnstormed the state as he sought retribution against incumbents who supported his impeachment. And, perhaps most importantly, former President Donald Trump was active in many contests — following the lead of Paxton and his other ally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and offering late endorsements that bolstered right-wing candidates.
Even so, the billionaires’ fingerprints appear all over the outcomes. Since January, they spent more than $3 million to support candidates through a new political action committee, Texans United For a Conservative Majority. That PAC is a rebrand of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which has been at the center of a political maelstrom since early October.
That controversy started barely two weeks after the state Senate acquitted Paxton in his impeachment trial — and as Defend Texas Liberty was gearing up for retribution in the primaries.
Jonathan Stickland, then the president of Defend Texas Liberty, was caught hosting Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite and white supremacist, prompting Dunn to issue a rare public statement through the lieutenant governor. Stickland was quietly removed from his position with the PAC.
Subsequent reporting by The Texas Tribune revealed other ties between white supremacists and groups funded by Dunn and Wilks, prompting outcry from some Republicans and calls for the Texas GOP to distance itself from Stickland’s groups.
As votes continued to tally in the far right’s favor this week, Stickland returned from a post-scandal social media sabbatical to gloat.
“We warned them,” Stickland wrote Wednesday on X, one of the handful of posts he’s made since shrinking from the public eye after the Fuentes meeting. “They chose not to listen. Now many are gone.”
Dunn and Wilks both made their fortunes in West Texas oil and, in the last 15 years, have poured more than $100 million into a constellation of political action committees, dark money groups, nonprofits and media websites that they have used to push the state GOP further to the right.
Their strategy has been to incrementally move the party toward their hardline views by painting fellow conservatives as weak and ineffectual — as “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only — and promising well-funded primary challengers to lawmakers who defy their network and its aims. With almost endless wealth, they have poured millions of dollars into inexperienced candidates who often lose but advance the far right’s long-term goals by slowly normalizing once-fringe positions, bruising incumbents, depleting their campaign coffers and making them more vulnerable in the next election cycle.
For years, many Republicans have denounced the strategy, noting that the state Legislature is routinely ranked as the most conservative in the country and warning that Dunn and Wilks’ no-enemies-to-our-right approach to politics would eventually cost the party elections and open the doors to outright extremists.
This year’s elections show just how successful the billionaires have been in pulling the party toward their hardline views.
In House District 62, Shelley Luther, a former hair salon owner who rose to fame after being jailed for defying COVID-19 lockdown measures, beat Republican Rep. Reggie Smith by 7 percentage points — a stunning, 24-point swing from the 2022 primary. Luther has run for office twice and lost. In her last run, she said that she was not comfortable with transgender children and complained that students shouldn’t be punished for making fun of them. She received more than $183,000 in support from Texans United For a Conservative Majority this cycle.
Rep. Lynn Stucky, R-Denton, is headed to a May runoff against Andy Hopper, who received at least $280,000 in support from Dunn and Wilks this year. It’s the second time they’ve squared off — Stucky narrowly defeated Hopper in 2022. Hopper and his family have close ties to Dunn and Wilks: One of his sons, Sam, works for a consulting firm that is owned by Stickland and rebranded after the Fuentes scandal.
Meanwhile, Brent Money prevailed in his rematch against Rep. Jill Dutton after losing to her in a January special election to replace Bryan Slaton, a former state representative whose career was bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks until he was unanimously expelled from the House last year for having sex with a drunk, 19-year-old aide. (Another Dunn and Wilks-backed candidate, Kyle Biedermann, lost on Tuesday to Rep. Ellen Troxclair, R-Austin, after defending Slaton last month — but still received 43% of votes).
In House District 53, the Dunn and Wilks-backed Wesley Virdell, a gun rights lobbyist, won 60% of votes in his race to replace Rep. Andew Murr, a Junction Republican who retired last year after leading the House’s failed impeachment of Paxton — and as Dunn and Wilks groups promised revenge. Two years prior, Murr trounced Virdell in the GOP primary. Virdell and Covey, the challenger to Phelan, have both signed a pledge to support a referendum on Texas secession.
Rep. Jacey Jetton, R-Richmond, was soundly defeated by Matt Morgan, who was backed by Paxton and received more than $75,000 in support from Texans United For A Conservative Majority this cycle. Morgan won by 15 points — a reversal from 2020, when he lost by 5 points to Jetton.
And in House District 60, Rep. Glenn Rogers lost Tuesday by more than 27 points in another rematch. His opponent, Mike Olcott, lost to Rogers by 1 point in a 2022 runoff despite support from Wilks and Dunn. Backed this time by the billionaires and Abbott, Olcott walloped Rogers — an outspoken enemy of the state’s far right.
Rogers made no secret of who he blamed for his loss, accusing Abbott of telling “blatant lies” as part of his $6 million spending spree against House members who broke with him on school voucher legislation last year.
But the bulk of Rogers’ ire was reserved for Dunn and Wilks — the “two billionaire, ‘Christian’ nationalist power brokers that run this state.”
“History will prove that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a Theocracy that is both un-American and un-Texan,” Rogers wrote in a Wednesday op-ed in the Weatherford Democrat. “May God save Texas!”
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Texas activist David Barton wants to end separation of church and state. He has the ear of the new U.S. House speaker.
Barton has been a staple of Texas’ Christian conservative movement, offering crucial support to politicians and frequently being cited or called on to testify in favor of bills that critics say would erode church-state separations.
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For nearly four decades, Texas activist David Barton has barnstormed statehouses and pulpits across the nation, arguing that the separation between church and state is a myth and that America should be run as a Christian nation.
Now, he’s closer to power than perhaps ever before.
One day after little-known Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana was elected as the new House speaker last week, Barton said on a podcast that he was already discussing staffing with Johnson, his longtime ally in deeply conservative, Christian causes.
"We have some tools at our disposal now (that) we haven't had in a long time," Barton added.
Johnson recently spoke at an event hosted by Barton’s nonprofit, WallBuilders; he’s praised Barton and his “profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do”; and, before his career as a lawmaker, Johnson worked for Alliance Defending Freedom — a legal advocacy group that has helped infuse more Christianity into public schools and government, a key goal of Barton’s movement.
Barton, who lives in Aledo, has been a staple of Texas’ own Christian conservative movement, offering crucial public support to politicians and frequently being cited or called on to testify in favor of bills that critics say would erode church-state separations — including in front of the Texas Legislature this year.
Johnson’s election — and his proximity to Barton — is a massive victory for a growing Christian nationalist movement that claims the United States’ foundation was ordained by God, and therefore its laws and institutions should favor their brand of Christianity.
“Johnson's rise means that Barton and his fellow Christian nationalists now have unprecedented access to the levers of power on the national stage, paralleling the access they already have here in Texas and some other states,” said David Brockman, a non-resident scholar in religion and public policy at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Barton and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment this week
Barton has spent nearly all of his life in North Texas, save for the few years he spent at Oral Roberts University, an evangelical school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After graduating with a degree in religious education, he returned to Aledo and worked as a math and science teacher, basketball coach and, later, principal at a K-12 school that grew out of his parent’s Bible study group, according to a 2006 Texas Monthly profile of him.
In 1988, Barton founded his group, WallBuilders, to “exert a direct and positive influence in government, education, and the family by educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country” and “providing information to federal, state, and local officials as they develop public policies which reflect Biblical values,” according to the group’s website.
Since then, Barton has been arguably the most influential figure in a growing movement to undermine the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Barton claims the clause has been misunderstood. He argues that most of the Founding Fathers were “orthodox, evangelical” Christians, and that it would thus be more accurate to read the establishment clause’s use of the word “religion” as a stand-in for “Christian denomination.”
“We would best understand the actual context of the First Amendment by saying, ‘Congress shall make no law establishing one Christian denomination as the national denomination,’” he has said.
Barton also argues that the country's founders "never intended the First Amendment to become a vehicle to promote a pluralism of other religions.”
In his mind, the wall separating church and state was only meant to extend one way, protecting religion — specifically, Christianity — from the government, but not vice versa.
“‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” his group’s website claims.
And he argues that most of what he considers society’s ills — from school shootings, low standardized test scores and drug use to divorce, crime and LGBTQ+ people — are the natural consequences of abandoning the Judeo-Christian virtues, as articulated in his form of Christianity, that he says are the bedrock of the nation’s founding. Sometimes, he’s drawn fire for those views — such as when he said the lack of cure for AIDS was God’s vengeance for homosexuality or when he compared the Third Reich’s “evils'' to the “homosexual lifestyle” in 2017.
Barton, a self-styled “amateur historian,” has for years been debunked and ridiculed by actual historians and scholars, who note that he has no formal training and that his work is filled with selective quotes, mischaracterizations and inaccuracies — critiques that Barton has claimed are mere attacks on his faith. He has been accused of whitewashing the Founding Fathers — particularly, their slave owning — to fit his narrative of a God-ordained nation. He has acknowledged using unconfirmed quotes from historical figures. And Barton’s 2012 book, “The Jefferson Lies,” was so widely panned by Christian academics that it prompted a separate book, “Getting Jefferson Right,” to debunk all of his inaccuracies, and was later pulled by its Christian publisher because “the basic truths just were not there.”
Despite that, Barton has remained a fixture in conservative Christian circles and Republican Party politics. He served as vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas from 1997 to 2006 and, in 2004, was tapped for clergy outreach by President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign. In 2010, his fellow Texan and prominent conservative personality Glenn Beck praised him as “the most important man in America right now.” Barton was an early and important endorser of Sen. Ted Cruz’s unexpected first win in 2012. And in 2016, Barton ran one of multiple super PACs that were crucial to Cruz’s reelection.
“Having David Barton running the super PAC gives it a lot of validity for evangelicals and pastors,” Mike Gonzalez, the South Carolina evangelical chair for the Cruz for President campaign, told the Daily Beast at the time.
In Texas, Barton has become increasingly instrumental among GOP politicians. He and WallBuilders currently work closely with Rick Green, a former state representative and current leader of Patriot Academy, a Dripping Springs-based group that trains young adults, churches and others how to “influence government policy with a Biblical worldview” and borrows heavily from Barton’s teachings.
Barton has also railed against the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt groups, including churches, from direct political advocacy. And he is frequently called on to support laws that would infuse more Christianity into public life — including in public schools. In May, he and his son, Timothy Barton, testified in favor of a bill — which later failed — that would have required all Texas public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.
During the hearing, Barton’s work was praised as “great” by Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels. His theories were echoed by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, who said that church-state separation is “not a real doctrine.” And the bill's sponsor, Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, extolled Barton and his son as "esteemed witnesses."
Other prominent Texas Republicans have similarly echoed Barton's views, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has called the United States “a Christian nation” and said “there is no separation of church and state. It was not in the Constitution.”
“We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because he wrote the Constitution,” Patrick said last year.
The mainstreaming of Barton’s views has corresponded with a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have allowed for a greater infusion of Christianity into the public sphere, and a burgeoning Christian nationalist movement on the right that was turbocharged by former President Donald Trump and his promise to white evangelicals that “Christianity will have power” should they support him.
February polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with foundational aspects of Christian nationalism, including beliefs that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, PRRI found, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society. Experts have also found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to immigration, racial justice and religious diversity.
Johnson’s election to House Speaker shows how normalized such beliefs have become, said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for a strong wall between government and religion. She noted that some Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, have embraced the title of Christian nationalist in recent years.
Tyler said that Johnson’s views are particularly concerning because of his background as both a Southern Baptist and as a constitutional lawyer. Baptists, she noted, have a long history of advocacy for strong church-state separations because of the persecution they faced during the country’s founding — a stance that she said Johnson has betrayed throughout his legal and political career.
“He has worked actively for these principles that further Christian nationalism,” Tyler said. “I am also a Baptist, and to see someone who is a Baptist really reject foundational concepts of religious freedom for all — concepts which are really core to what it means to be a Baptist — is also very disheartening.”
Johnson played a central role in attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by crafting a legal brief that was signed by more than 100 U.S. House Republicans in support of a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that sought to have election results thrown out in four swing states by President Joe Biden.
At the same time that he was aiding the legal charge to overturn the 2020 election, Johnson was also cultivating closer ties to figures in the New Apolostolic Reformation, a fast-growing movement of ultraconservative preachers, televangelists, self-described prophets and faith healers who abide by the “Seven Mountains Mandate” — a Christian nationalist-adjacent theology that says Christians must fulfill a divine mandate to rule over all seven aspects of society (family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government) in order to usher in the "end times."
Driven by that theology, New Apolostic Reformation figures played major roles in the lead up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, combining Trump’s lies about a stolen election with claims that they were engaged in “spiritual warfare” with their political enemies and, thus, extreme and anti-democratic measures were not only necessary, but God-ordained.
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