Emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings and President Donald Trump’s second term, conservative Christians are rallying behind a series of Texas bills that would further infuse religion into public education and potentially spark legal fights that could upend church-state separations.

Last week, the Texas Senate advanced a bill that would allow public taxpayer money to flow to private, religious schools via vouchers. And on Monday, Sens. Mayes Middleton of Galveston and Phil King of Weatherford filed bills, respectively, that would allow time for prayer in public schools and require classrooms to display the Ten Commandments — both of them priorities for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and co-sponsored by all 20 Republican senators.

The impact could extend beyond Texas. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, those on the religious right see an ally in their decades-long fight to crater the church-state wall and allow more Christianity in classrooms across the country.

“Our schools are not God-free zones,” Middleton said in a statement announcing Senate Bill 11, the school prayer legislation. “We are a state and nation built on ‘In God We Trust.’ … There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and recent Supreme Court decisions by President Trump’s appointees reaffirmed this.”

Legal experts and religion scholars say those arguments misrepresent history or potentially overestimate the effects of recent high court rulings.

“The Christian Right feels very empowered by this particular moment,” said Mark Chancey, a religion professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put Christianity in schools. “They see the present configuration of the U.S. Supreme Court as sympathetic to their efforts.”

A monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Capitol in Austin on June 24, 2024. Credit: Olivia Anderson/The Texas Tribune

The religious right entered this legislative session amid a string of legal and political victories. In just the last few years, state Republicans have required classrooms to hang donated signs that say “In God We Trust”; allowed unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant mental health counselors in public schools; and approved new curriculum materials that teach the Bible and other religious texts alongside grade-school lessons.

Those moves have corresponded with a broader normalization in the GOP of claims that church-state separation is a myth, or that the nation’s founding was ordained by God and its laws and institutions should therefore reflect fundamentalist Christianity. Some lawmakers began the 2025 session with calls for “spiritual warfare” with demonic spirits that they believe seek control of the Capitol.

A new legal landscape

In his statement introducing Senate Bill 10 on the Ten Commandments, King said the legal landscape favored more opportunities for religion in school following the 2022 Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision.

In that landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines that a Washington state school district could not prevent a high school football coach from engaging in prayer with students on the 50-yard line after school games. Justices said the school district’s efforts to discipline the coach and prevent his praying violated his free speech rights and right to freely exercise his religion.

In issuing that opinion, the court outlined that it was moving away from the long relied upon legal test

— called the “Lemon test” — to determine if the government is unconstitutionally allowing the infusion of religion in public spaces.

The more than 50-year-old test has been used by courts to make sure that laws involving religion have primarily non-religious purposes. For example, in the 1980 case Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court relied on the Lemon test — named for a 1971 case — when it struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

In the Kennedy decision, justices suggested they were replacing the Lemon test with a consideration of “historical practices and understandings” that is based on an analysis of “original meaning and history.” Legal experts describe the new test as vague and unclear.

The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington on Nov. 4, 2022. Credit: Jason Garza for The Texas Tribune

Christian conservatives see hope in their path to put religion back in public schools, with the court’s move to sideline the Lemon test. They view the new history-based test as a pathway to reverse long-standing precedents that prohibit school-sponsored prayer or putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Rep. Mike Olcott, R-Aledo, who has proposed his own Ten Commandments bill, said in an email that “after the Kennedy decision, there is no merit in prohibiting expressions of faith or our collective history.”

Under a new history-based test, Matt Krause, a former Texas House member and attorney for the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal organization, said he thinks a law putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms would survive given their “very conspicuous history” in the U.S. and purported influence on the nation’s laws and government. Among other high-profile cases, First Liberty Institute represented the football coach in the Kennedy case, and Krause has previously testified in favor of putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms in part to prompt a “restoration of faith in America.”

Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, holds a similar view to Krause. This session, he’s introduced separate bills that would put the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and allow prayer during the school day. Because of the Kennedy ruling, Spiller said he believes both bills are constitutional — though he wasn’t confident they would have survived prior. A new history-based test would bode well for his Ten Commandments bill, he added, since “most of our laws are based on principles that are contained” within them.

But Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Freedom, which advocates for a strong wall between church and state, said the Constitution and American law are not rooted in Biblical texts.

“There is this zombie myth that all of American law is based on the Ten Commandments,” Tyler said. “But when you look at the U.S. Constitution, there is no mention of God. There is no mention of Christianity. The only mention of religion is to prohibit religious tests for public office.”

Moreover, she takes issue with those arguments, which she said reframe a sacred text as a secular document in order to justify its inclusion in public schools.

“There are so many different translations, and there's just such a rich and diverse depth of the Holy Scripture, she said. “And when the government gets its hands on the Holy Scripture, it standardizes it in ways that really cheapen the mystery and the beauty.”

Religious and legal experts say it isn’t immediately clear exactly how the Supreme Court will apply the history-based test in future cases. There are lingering questions about the specific type of history that would be considered as part of the test.

Chancey, the SMU religion professor, expects those laws, if passed, will prompt lawsuits that could end up in front of the Supreme Court. But he isn’t confident the Ten Commandments bill could survive a test on historical merits.

“There was no time in American history when the Ten Commandments were routinely placed in American public school classrooms,” Chancey said.

School prayer, however, presents a slightly different history. Chancey said while school-endorsed prayer was common in early American history, it was not universal and sometimes divisive.

Steven Collis, director of the First Amendment Center and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, said he’s also not convinced that the Lemon test has been completely thrown out. It’s possible that some parts of the test could still apply, he added.

The school prayer bill, he said, may address the legal question of whether a school cannot endorse prayer or simply cannot coerce prayer, by directly or indirectly forcing students to partake. The current court appears to be leaning toward the latter, he said, which could mean they’d allow a bill similar to the one proposed to go unchallenged. Prior to Kennedy v. Bremerton and under the old test, however, a similar law likely would have been struck down by lower courts, he said.

In the 1962 case, Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot hold prayers in public schools even if the prayer is not tied to a specific religion and participation is optional. The ruling has since been consistently upheld by subsequent decisions, but conservative groups have pushed for it to be overturned.

Regardless, Collis said parties on both sides of the school prayer and Ten Commandments bills would likely try to get the Supreme Court to “bite off on it.”

Efforts to challenge related bills are already underway. Last November, a federal judge said it was “unconstitutional on its face” for Louisiana to require the Ten Commandments be posted in public school classrooms. In January, a federal circuit court heard an appeal on the case. A decision is pending.

Freedom from religion

The religious right’s legal and legislative pushes have come as America continues to diversify and secularize. At roughly two-thirds of the population, Christians still are by far a majority.

Even so, some Christians have been alarmed by the steady decrease in their share of the population — and the simultaneous rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans. So-called “nones” — short for believing “nothing in particular” — now make up 28% of the U.S. adult population — a 12% jump since 2007 that makes them a larger group than Catholics or Protestants, according to Pew Research.

Religion experts say that trend has been accelerated by broader discontent with organized religion, namely Christianity. Interfaith groups have said as much for years, warning that the push to redefine America as a Christian nation is actually driving people away from religion altogether.

Members of atheist and anti-Christian nationalism groups speak with Rep. Jon E. Rosenthal, D-Houston, at his office at the Capitol in Austin on Feb. 10, 2025. Credit: Lorianne Willett/The Texas Tribune

“They are interfering with the right of every American in Texas to practice religion freely, which includes practicing no religion, if that’s what you choose,” said Bee Moorhead, executive director of the interfaith group Texas Impact.

Benjamin Clodfelter counts himself among the 4% of U.S. adults who are atheist — though he has not always been up front about his views. During his 7-year stint in the Army, Clodfelter was a closeted atheist, fearing his disbelief in God would draw unwanted attention and cut off career opportunities.

The U.S. Military is supposed to be secular. But Clodfelter said those rules were openly flouted by his unit leader, who required those in his command to attend prayer breakfasts and, at the same time that he had broad authority over their promotions, told soldiers that “you have to have faith to be a good leader in the Army.”

Ten years after leaving the military, those remarks still stick with him. Clodfelter has since dedicated his life to maintaining a strong church-state wall, serving as a board member for the Atheist Community of Austin and, on Monday, joining about 25 other Texans as they lobbied state lawmakers to preserve those separations.

It’s at times felt like an uphill battle, with increasing hostility crowding out nuanced conversations about religion and government.

“It used to be more of a conversation,” he said. “It was an actual dialogue. And I noticed that there was more thought terminating cliches, where they are just denying the existence of our side. It is both perplexing and really frustrating.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/12/texas-ten-commandments-school-prayer/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Speaking to a group of East Texas voters in September, state Supreme Court Justice John Devine cast himself as the antidote to his “brainwashed” colleagues on the all-Republican bench.

Their “Big Law” backgrounds, he said, had taught them to worry more about legal procedures — “standing, timeliness, or whatever else” — than their duty to uphold the Constitution.

“At times I feel like they would sacrifice the Republic for the sake of the process,” Devine said in the speech, a recording of which was obtained by The Texas Tribune. “My concern is that they all bow down to the altar of process rather than to fidelity to the Constitution. And when I say that, it’s not meant to be malice towards my colleagues. I think it’s how they were trained — how they were brainwashed.”

Particularly egregious, he said, was their ruling against Jeff Younger, a former Texas House candidate who had for years waged a public war against his ex-wife over their young child’s gender identity. In 2022, Younger asked the court to stop his ex from moving their child to California, which had recently passed a refuge law shielding parents fleeing from states that restrict gender-transitioning care for minors from prosecution.

The court declined to hear Younger’s lawsuit, which two justices argued was riddled with errors and based on “tenuous speculation” that the ex-wife would violate a standing court order that already prevented her from pursuing gender-transition therapies for the child.

Devine was still angry at his colleagues when he spoke at the September event.

“I'm not going to stand here sanctimoniously and say, ‘Well he didn’t cross a T or dot an I,’” he said of Younger. “We are talking about great constitutional issues here that will determine whether we survive as a representative republic or not. Are we going to just have it stolen from us? Over process for crying out loud?”

The audio is a rare glimpse into Texas’ typically-insular high court and window into the judicial philosophy of Devine, a former anti-abortion activist whose tenure as a jurist has been shaped by his religious beliefs and deeply conservative politics — sometimes, his critics say, at the expense of his impartiality.

Those concerns are now the focus of an unusually heated primary election for the relatively unknown Texas Supreme Court. Devine is the only justice with a challenger in the statewide, March 5 race, and his opponent, Second District Court of Appeals Judge Brian Walker, has centered his campaign on questions about Devine’s ethics dating back to the mid-1990s.

“We have a judge who just continues to violate ethical rules and the code of judicial conduct that's written by the Texas Supreme Court itself,” Walker said in an interview. “And if the people can’t trust that judges are going to follow even their own rules, then they'll have very little confidence that the rule of law truly will prevail.”

For 30 years, Devine has been a stalwart of the religious right. He claimed on the campaign trail that he was arrested 37 times at anti-abortion protests in the 1980s and 1990s, and says church-state separation is a “myth” that has shrouded America’s true Christian roots.

As a justice, Devine has earned praise from conservatives and repute as a bulwark between religious liberty and the activist judges they feel threaten it.

“He's very principled and passionate about his role, and about standing firm and exercising that role even if someone has a different opinion or they're trying to put some political pressure on him,” said Jonathan Saenz, president of Texas Values. “To me, it's a reflection of what the people of Texas want and expect.”

But to others, Devine’s tenure and September comments reflect what they say is a decadeslong erosion of norms that once dissuaded jurists from airing their political grievances or speaking on topics that could one day be in front of the court out of concern about the appearance of bias.

“Judges usually didn't speak that way,” said Sanford Levinson, a longtime legal scholar at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “And I don't think that trash talk is a particularly healthy phenomenon.”

That’s not an apparent concern for Devine, who in his September remarks also took aim at a number of Texas officials over a variety of legal or political disputes. Texas’ all-GOP Court of Criminal Appeals — which ruled that Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office could not unilaterally prosecute local voting crimes — is controlled by “RINOs” and “trans-Republicans,” Devine said. He also railed against Democratic leaders in Harris County, accusing them of “Democrat dirty tricks” and trying to “bastardize our election code” to steal elections.

Devine did not respond to interview requests or a list of questions, and a Texas Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment on excerpts of Devine’s speech.

His comments have been criticized by Walker who, in the lead up to the March 5 primary, has also blasted Devine for missing half of oral arguments as he campaigned this year; auctioning private tours of the Texas Supreme Court for a 2023 GOP fundraiser; and not recusing himself from cases in which Walker argues that Devine had conflicts of interest.

[Despite ties to defendants, Texas Supreme Court justice didn’t recuse himself from sex abuse case]

Earlier this month, the Tribune reported that Devine did not recuse himself in a high-profile sex abuse lawsuit against Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler and his former law partner Jared Woodfill. The plaintiff in the case, a former employee of Woodfill and Pressler’s firm, said he was sexually abused by Pressler at the same time that Devine also worked for the firm.

Devine has defended his decision not to recuse himself in the sex abuse lawsuit, previously telling the Tribune that he had no financial or other ties to the lawsuit or Woodfill and Pressler’s firm. He’s also downplayed his absences from oral arguments this year, calling it a “non-issue” and natural consequence of having an elected judiciary.

“The fact is we’re elected and part of our job is to run for reelection,” Devine told Bloomberg Law, which first reported on his absences this month. “It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t get reelected.”

Forged by a movement

After moving to the Houston area from Indiana in the 1980s, Devine enrolled at the South Texas College of Law and jumped head-first into Texas’ nascent anti-abortion movement.

“It was very small and fragmented — nothing compared to what it is now,” said Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance For Life. “We were very hopeful. But there hadn't been much accomplished tangibly at that point.”

With relatively few powerful allies or ways to spread their message, some in the movement turned their attention toward protests outside clinics. Among them was Devine, who later said that he served 34 days in jail for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic during one protest.

One inflection point came in 1992, Pojman said, when Eileen O’Neill, a state district judge in Harris County, barred protesters from being within 100 feet of abortion clinics ahead of the Republican National Convention held in Houston that year. It was an “insulting” ruling, Pojman said, that they believed trampled on their First Amendment rights.

Later that year, the then-32-year-old Devine challenged O’Neill as a write-in candidate. Centered on the concept of “Christianity in American Law,” his campaign was supported by figures such as Steven Hotze, an anti-gay activist and longtime powerbroker in Houston’s conservative Christian movement.

Devine also faced opposition: Ahead of the election, 11 local Republican precinct chairs issued a letter opposing his endorsement by the state and local GOP, saying Devine did not honor the “wall between church and state.” Devine got some-40,000 write-in votes — a local record, but not enough to win.

Two years later, he again challenged O’Neill, casting her as an incompetent and unethical judge who was “absent from the bench almost as much as she has been present.” (Now, in his primary challenge, Walker is attacking Devine for missing 28 of 50 oral arguments before the court this term.)

In a Republican wave that was bolstered by straight-ticket voting in Harris County and anti-Clinton sentiment, Devine won the judgeship by a half of a percentage point — a victory, he said, for the “little people like myself” against the “bar association” and its “arrogant lawyers.”

Soon after taking the bench in Harris County, Devine adorned his courtroom with a copy of the Ten Commandments and spearheaded the refurbishment of a monument outside of a county courthouse that featured a Bible. Both moves drew lawsuits and controversy that Devine dismissed as attacks on religious liberty.

"We are at war now over the systematic elimination of Christian tradition from civil government,” he said in 2004, after a judge sided with a woman who sued over the Bible monument. "This is just one more battle. If they take the Bible, the battle will continue for the heart and soul of America."

In 1996, Devine used his courtroom for an after-hours event to announce a congressional campaign, earning a sanction by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct for using the "prestige of judicial office to advance the private interests of the judge or others.” And later that year, he presided over a lawsuit between a major labor union and U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman over political advertisements. Devine acknowledged that the outcome of the case could affect his ongoing campaign for a congressional district near Stockman’s, but declined to recuse himself until the next day — and after using the hearing to publicly blast the union.

Devine lost that congressional race, but was reelected as a Harris County state district judge and, in 1999, ran for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on a promise to be “short on words, but long on sentences.” He lost, but returned to district court until 2002, when he resigned to run for Harris County Attorney.

During that race, Devine was criticized by the Texas Ethics Commission, which found that he had not disclosed his position as president of a real estate company on financial forms dating back to 1994. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct also said that Devine may have violated other rules by listing his county phone number for the business.

Devine corrected his financial disclosures but denied using his office for personal business. He eventually lost in the 2002 primary.

“Devine intervention”

Throughout the aughts, Devine kept at his quest for elected office. He lost a second congressional race, in 2004, during which his campaign was accused by three GOP figures of mailing phony endorsements on their behalf. His 2006 bid for the Texas House failed, as did his 2010 campaign for a Montgomery County judgeship.

Still undeterred in 2011, Devine announced his challenge to incumbent Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina in the statewide GOP primary.

Devine’s campaign focused heavily on the decision by him and his wife, Nubia, to carry a seventh child to term despite doctors warning that the child and Nubia could die. The child died almost immediately, but Nubia Devine survived.

Along the way, he picked up endorsements from religious figures such as David Barton, a prominent Texas activist who, like Devine, falsely claims that church-state separation is a “myth.” Also backing Devine was Texas’ Tea Party movement, which had coalesced around intense fears that President Barack Obama would use his second term to persecute Christians en masse.

The mood of the grassroots was reflected by a San Angelo woman who, in a letter to her local paper, compared American Christians to Jews in Nazi Germany and begged for a “Devine intervention.”

“If we don't get back to our Christian principles, like the Ten Commandments and honoring the Constitution of the United States, we are lost and so are our children and grandchildren,” she wrote.

What followed was a dark-red, anti-establishment wave. Tea Party darling Ted Cruz shocked the nation by beating Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in a GOP runoff for a U.S. Senate seat. Donna Campbell, a little-known emergency room physician, ousted a 20-year incumbent in the Texas Senate.

Devine beat Medina by 6 points in a runoff and cruised to victory in the November 2012 general election.

The grassroots’ jurist

Devine’s rise to the court came at a pivotal moment for the movement that forged him.

By 2012, Texas — led by then-Attorney General Greg Abbott — was in the throes of an all-out legal war with the Obama administration, frequently taking his administration to court over environmental rules, the Affordable Care Act or other policies that GOP critics decried as federal overreach. Devine’s election also coincided with the growth of a broader conservative, Christian legal movement that has since been ascendent across the nation.

Devine has proven an ally of that movement: Since taking the bench, he has continued to praise “Judeo-Christian principles” as the bedrock of the nation’s founding. And he has at times been a key dissent from his colleagues on issues favored by the Religious Right.

Just before the U.S. Supreme Court’s recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015, Devine issued a 15-page dissent in which he criticized his colleagues' decision in a separate lawsuit involving same-sex couples. At issue were two women who married in Massachusetts and, after moving to Texas, were granted a divorce in Tarrant County.

The state appealed, arguing the couple had no right to divorce because their union was never valid under Texas law. The court majority later sided with the appeals court, ruling that the state had no standing to sue because it had failed to intervene when the divorce was in trial court.

The next year, Devine issued a lone dissent after the court’s majority declined to hear a legal challenge to the City of Houston’s decision to extend marriage benefits to the spouses of gay and lesbian city workers.

Texas, Devine wrote in his dissent, had a long history of dictating spousal benefits in order to encourage procreation or other societal goods.

“Surely the State may limit spousal employment benefits to spouses of the opposite sex,” he wrote. “Only these spouses are capable of procreation within their marriage, and the State has an interest in encouraging such procreation.”

Devine’s dissent was praised by conservative leaders, including Abbott and Paxton, who publicly criticized the court’s decision and campaigned for Devine’s colleagues to take up his position.

In a rare move, the Texas Supreme Court eventually revisited the issue, unanimously ruling in 2017 that the right to marry does not “entail any particular package of tax benefits, employee fringe benefits or testimonial privileges.”

Saenz, of Texas Values, was involved in that dispute, which he said catalyzed Devine’s reputation in conservative Christian circles as a defender of religious liberty who “is not going to be pushed around, bullied or bought.”

In Devine, Saenz sees the reflection of a movement that has grown from the at-times disjointed energy of the Tea Party era into something much stronger and better organized. Those voters, he said, have been increasingly attuned to the state’s judiciary. And in Texas, where judges are elected in typically low-turnout primaries, they have wielded their voting power to push courts toward their conservative legal and political views.

“Voters expect judges to follow the Constitution at the state and the federal level, and not see it as this living, breathing document that they can change depending on what the facts are of some case that may not fit their own political ideas or agenda,” Saenz said. “Judges like Justice Devine understand that this is what the voters expect, that this is what his role is. And he's very committed to it.”

Levinson, the longtime constitutional scholar, agreed that the judiciary has been increasingly shaped by voters. But he worries that trend has further polarized the country, opening up a “Pandora’s box” that has allowed intense, existential rhetoric to cloud nuanced and much-needed conversations about the role of religion in democracy.

“I think that's a perfectly legitimate topic for discussion and debate,” he said. “But we seem incapable of having it.”

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/02/27/john-devine-texas-supreme-court-conservatives/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

For more than three months, Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi has vigorously attacked critics of Defend Texas Liberty, and rebuffed calls to distance the state party from the powerful group over its ties to white supremacists.

As he did so, Rinaldi was also working as an attorney for one of the group’s two billionaire funders, Farris Wilks, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Since 2021, Wilks has given nearly $5 million to Defend Texas Liberty, which last year was the state party’s largest financial supporter. With Rinaldi’s help, the group has sought to purge the Texas GOP of more moderate voices by bankrolling far-right causes and primary candidates.

Government watchdog groups and some Republicans were heavily critical of the relationship between Rinaldi and Wilks, a prolific donor.

“In my two decades of involvement with the Texas GOP, I am not aware of anything even resembling the relationship between a state chair and a major donor that Matt Rinaldi has with Farris Wilks,” said Mark McCaig, a former member of the Texas GOP’s executive committee and Rinaldi critic who first noticed the SEC filings on Friday. “It’s certainly reasonable to ask whether chairman Rinaldi is working towards the betterment of the party, as he pledged he would do in 2021, or if he is more interested in promoting the agenda of Farris Wilks at the expense of a unified and functional party.”

Rinaldi’s work for Wilks began as early as September, according to the filings. Since then, Rinaldi has identified himself as an attorney for Wilks on two other forms, including one that was filed in November, as nearly half of the Texas GOP’s executive committee called for the party to cut ties with Defend Texas Liberty and its then-president Jonathan Stickland.

The calls were prompted by The Texas Tribune’s Oct. 8 report showing that, two days prior, Stickland had hosted the notorious white supremacist and avowed Adolf Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes for nearly seven hours at his office building in a remote, Tarrant County business park. Rinaldi was inside the one-story building for about 45 minutes while Fuentes was inside, but has said he had no idea Fuentes was there and denied that he met with him.

“We were just borrowing a conference room,” Rinaldi said at the time. “I completely condemn (Fuentes) and everything he stands for. I would never in a million years meet with that guy.”

Since that meeting, Rinaldi has routinely attacked those who’ve been critical of Defend Texas Liberty or its funders, including Wilks. After House Speaker Dade Phelan and 60 other House Republicans called for lawmakers and candidates to redirect donations from Defend Texas Liberty to pro-Israel charities, Rinaldi spent weeks attacking Phelan and calling for him to resign.

Publicly, Rinaldi has also been silent about Defend Texas Liberty as the Tribune extensively reported on ties between the group and other white supremacists and Fuentes acolytes, instead attacking the group’s detractors.

And in December, as the Texas GOP’s executive committee debated a general ban on associating with antisemites, neo-Nazis or Holocaust deniers in response to the Defend Texas Liberty scandal, Rinaldi pushed back against the idea without publicly mentioning that he had worked for Wilks as recently as that November. The proposed ban was ultimately rejected.

Rinaldi and a spokesperson for the Texas GOP did not respond to requests for comment Friday morning. Wilks could not be reached for comment.

Defend Texas Liberty is funded almost entirely by Wilks and another far-right oil billionaire, Tim Dunn, who have together given the PAC roughly $15 million since 2021 to attack fellow Republicans, including Phelan, as weak and insufficiently conservative. Defend Texas Liberty is a key part of a sprawling network of political groups, campaigns, nonprofits and media websites that have received more than $100 million from West Texas oil billionaires as part of an ongoing project to pull Texas to the far right. Since Rinaldi was elected chair in 2021, the state party has received $392,000 from Defend Texas Liberty and the two billionaires. Last year, the group was by far the biggest donor to the party, giving it $132,500.

Rinaldi is a former state representative whose ultraconservative legislative career was heavily subsidized by Wilks and Dunn before he lost his Northwest Dallas County seat to Democrat Julie Johnson in 2018. In 2021, he was elected as the successor to controversial, former Texas GOP chair Allen West and, as the party’s leader, Rinaldi has been a crucial ally of Defend Texas Liberty, helping attack the group’s Republican opponents and backing its candidates.

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the watchdog group Common Cause Texas, said Rinaldi’s legal representation of Wilks was “shocking,” especially in light of the ongoing scandals involving Defend Texas Liberty that Rinaldi has been involved in.

“We all know money equals power in Texas politics and billionaires like the Wilks (brothers) use their wealth liberally to bend public policy to their liking all the time,” he said. “But it's still pretty shocking.”

The Texas Democratic Party also blasted the revelations in a Friday evening statement, calling Rinaldi a "stooge" who is "up for hire."

"We've seen the devolution of the Texas GOP in real time with Rinaldi at the helm of that chaos, and now we know why," party chair Gilberto Hinojosa said. "Rinaldi is in the pocket of Nazi billionaires who are paying him to infiltrate the Republican Party of Texas. ... Rinaldi's legacy reflects that of a talking head for the extremist right that has led his party directly into the ground."

Disclosure: Common Cause has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/12/farris-wilks-matt-rinaldi-defend-texas-liberty/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

A longtime Texas conservative activist mailed what appeared to be a blatantly anti-Muslim holiday card to voters in state House Speaker Dade Phelan’s legislative district, the latest political volley in an ongoing feud between the Texas Republican Party’s far-right faction and its more moderate wing.

Photos of the mailers circulated on social media platform X two days before Christmas. The mailers sarcastically wish constituents a “Happy Ramadan,” even though the Muslim holiday fell during the spring this year. It includes photos of Phelan, who is Catholic, at an event celebrating Ramadan with Muslims in the state Capitol earlier this year.

The card insinuates that the speaker is Muslim. The event was hosted by state Rep. Suleman Lalani, D-Sugar Land, who was one of the first two Muslims elected to the Texas Legislature along with state Rep. Salman Bhojani last year.

“It’s preying on Islamophobic sentiments that exist in some people’s minds,” said Bhojani, a Euless Democrat. “But in Texas we should celebrate and protect religious practices.”

The cards were paid for by Cary Cheshire, a longtime right-wing activist who was previously the vice president of Empower Texans. Cheshire is currently the executive director for Texans For Strong Borders, a right-wing group that has been increasingly influential in pushing lawmakers to crack down on legal and illegal immigration. Texans For Strong Borders is led by Chris Russo, who the Tribune recently reported was behind numerous, anonymous social media accounts that were full of racist posts. Russo is also an ally of white supremacist and Adolf Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes.

“This is obviously a satirical card, but unfortunately Dade Phelan’s pro-Muslim record is real,” the card states. “The only path to heaven is through Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas!”

Cheshire confirmed to the Tribune via text message Sunday that he mailed out the cards. They include a disclaimer saying they were paid for by the Texas Anti-Communist League, a political action committee that was registered last year but has not reported any donations or contributions. Cheshire is the group's treasurer, but told the Tribune he personally paid for the mailer.

“Dade Phelan is responsible for the most pro-Muslim session in the history of the Texas Legislature,” Cheshire said.

His reasoning for that portrayal: The lower chamber’s passage of House Resolutions 1069 and 1168, which both simply recognized Eid al-fitr, a religious holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

“Texas is home to more than 400,000 Muslims, who contribute in myriad ways to the economic, cultural, and social fabric of our state, and it is indeed fitting to acknowledge the profound importance of Ramadan to the members of this vibrant community as they celebrate with friends, families, and fellow worshippers,” the resolutions state.

The House overwhelmingly passed the resolutions, and it’s unclear why Cheshire singled out Phelan for their passage. Phelan’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the political advertisements.

Cheshire questioned how the mailer could be perceived as anti-Muslim, but did not say why acknowledging a Muslim holiday should be cause for concern.

"My card ridicules Dade Phelan and his pro-Muslim record,” he said. “I think Texans should be informed about the actions of their elected officials."

Bhojani said he appreciated that Phelan participated in an iftar, or the breaking of the daily fast during Ramadan, and regretted that the action was being politicized months later.

Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican, condemned the cards on social media Sunday, calling them both “stupid” and “bizarre.”

“Religious freedom is a core American value,” Oliverson wrote on X. “Those who put this out have nothing in common with our Lord Jesus Christ. They profane His message with their antics.”

Phelan, who represents House District 21, which stretches from East Texas to the Gulf Coast, faces two primary challengers in the 2024 election, including David Covey, the former chair of the Orange County GOP.

The card comes as the speaker faces several attacks from within his own party and months after The Texas Tribune reported that Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee with which Cheshire has ties, hosted a meeting with Fuentes.

In October, Defend Texas Liberty’s former leader, Jonathan Stickland, was seen meeting with Fuentes for nearly seven hours at the offices of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right groups. Cheshire was seen at the office while Fuentes was on-site.

The meeting unleashed a wave of infighting among Texas Republicans. Phelan demanded that elected officials who received donations from Defend Texas Liberty — including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — donate that money to charity, a demand echoed by 60 members of the Texas House Republican Caucus.

Patrick then accused Phelan of exploiting the conflict “for his own political gain” and called on Phelan to resign as speaker before the Texas House was scheduled to meet for a special session on education vouchers and other legislation.

Cheshire’s cards also come months after a family copy of the Quran that Bhojani placed in the Capitol's chapel went missing. State police investigated that matter and recovered the religious text, but wouldn’t publicly say who took it.

Leaders in the Muslim community denounced the mailers and said they showed a lack of appreciation for religious diversity.

“It’s so dismaying to see that people will use Islam to score points in politics,” said Shariq Ghani, executive director of the Minaret Foundation, a Muslim civic organization. “The speaker of the house has participated in Iftars, in Hanukkah, in Yom Kippur and in different Christian traditions as well. He’s not singling out Islam. He’s showing that people of all faiths are important.”

The mailers were also condemned by other Republicans.

“There is nothing Christ-like about these mailers or this intent,” Cat Parks, the former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas, wrote on X. “As we all prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth… this is so shameful and sad.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/24/texas-conservative-muslim-mailer-ramadan-dade-phelan/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

"Texas GOP executive committee rejects proposed ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Two months after a prominent conservative activist and fundraiser was caught hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas have voted against barring the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

In a 32-29 vote on Saturday, members of the Texas GOP’s executive committee stripped a pro-Israel resolution of a clause that would have included the ban— delivering a major blow to a faction that has called for the party to confront its ties to groups that have recently employed, elevated or associated with outspoken white supremacists or antisemitic figures.

In October, The Texas Tribune published photos of Fuentes, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, entering and leaving the offices of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right candidates and movements. Pale Horse Strategies is owned by Jonathan Stickland, a former state representative and at the time the leader of a political action committee, Defend Texas Liberty, that two West Texas oil billionaires have used to fund right-wing movements, candidates and politicians in the state — including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Matt Rinaldi, chairman of the Texas GOP, was also seen entering the Pale Horse offices while Fuentes was inside for nearly 7 hours. He denied participating, however, saying he was visiting with someone else at the time and didn’t know Fuentes was there.

Defend Texas Liberty has not publicly commented on the scandal, save for a two-sentence statement condemning those who've tried to connect the PAC to Fuentes’ “incendiary” views. Nor has the group clarified Stickland's current role at Defend Texas Liberty, which quietly updated its website in October to reflect that he is no longer its president. Tim Dunn, one of the two West Texas oil billionaires who primarily fund Defend Texas Liberty, confirmed the meeting between Fuentes and Stickland and called it a “serious blunder,” according to a statement from Patrick.

In response to the scandal — as well as subsequent reporting from the Tribune that detailed other links between Defend Texas Liberty and white supremacists — nearly half of the Texas GOP’s executive committee had called for the party to cut ties with Defend Texas Liberty and groups it funds until Stickland was removed from any position of power, and a full explanation for the Fuentes meeting was given.

The proposed demands were significantly watered down ahead of the party’s quarterly meeting this weekend. Rather than calling for a break from Defend Texas Liberty, the faction proposed general language that would have barred associations with individuals or groups “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial.”

But even that general statement was not enough to sway a majority of the executive committee. In at-times tense debate on Saturday, members argued that words like “tolerate” or “antisemitism” were too vague or subjective, and could create future problems for the party, its leaders and candidates.

“It could put you on a slippery slope,” said committee member Dan Tully.

Supporters of the language disagreed. They noted that the language was already a compromise, didn’t specifically name any group or individual and would lend credence to the Texas GOP’s stances in support of Israel.

“To take it out sends a very disturbing message,” said Rolando Garcia, a Houston-based committee member who drafted the language. “We’re not specifying any individual or association. This is simply a statement of principle.”

Other committee members questioned how their colleagues could find words like “antisemitism” too vague, despite frequently lobbing it and other terms at their political opponents.

“I just don’t understand how people who routinely refer to others as leftists, liberals, communists, socialists and RINOs (‘Republicans in Name Only’) don’t have the discernment to define what a Nazi is,” committee member Morgan Cisneros Graham told the Tribune after the vote.

House Speaker Dade Phelan similarly condemned the vote Saturday evening, calling it “despicable.”

The Texas GOP executive committee “can’t even bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers or cut ties with their top donor who brought them to the dance,” Phelan wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “There is a moral, anti-Semitic rot festering within the fringes of BOTH parties that must be stopped.”

Before the vote, executive committee members separately approved a censure of outgoing Rep. Andrew Murr, R-Junction, over his lead role in the investigation and impeachment of Paxton.

Saturday’s vote is the latest sign of growing disunity among the Texas GOP, which for years has dealt with simmering tensions between its far-right and more moderate, but still deeply conservative, wings. Defend Texas Liberty and its billionaire backers have been key players in that fight, funding primary challenges to incumbent Republicans who they deem insufficiently conservative while and bankrolling a sprawling network of institutions, media websites and political groups that they’ve used to incrementally pull Texas further right.

The party’s internecine conflict has exploded into all-out war since the impeachment and acquittal of Paxton, a crucial Defend Texas Liberty ally whose political life has been subsidized by the PAC’s billionaire funders. After Paxton’s acquittal, Defend Texas Liberty vowed scorched-earth campaigns against those who supported the attorney general’s removal, and promised massive spending ahead of next year’s primary elections.

Then came the news of the Stickland and Fuentes meeting — a political bombshell that sharply intensified infighting and prompted some in the Texas GOP to question the party’s proximity to racists and extremists. In the wake of the Tribune’s reporting, Phelan and other House Republicans called on their colleagues to donate money they received from Defend Texas Liberty to pro-Israel charities.

Many of the PAC’s beneficiaries have been defiant in the face of those calls, instead accusing Phelan of politicizing antisemitism and attempting to discredit the Tribune’s reporting and downplay the scandal.

Ahead of Saturday’s vote, Defend Texas Liberty-backed Reps. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, and Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, briefly spoke to the executive committee.

The day prior, Sen. Bob Hall — an Edgewood Republican who has received $50,000 from Defend Texas Liberty — was also at the Austin hotel where executive committee members were meeting, and in a speech condemned attempts to cut ties with the group based on what he called “hearsay,” “fuzzy photographs” and “narratives.”

“If you want to pass a resolution, I would make it positive,” Hall said to executive committee members on Friday. “We don’t need to do our enemy’s work for them.”

Hall reiterated that stance in an interview with the Tribune, calling the Fuentes meeting a “mistake” but claiming that there was “no evidence” that Stickland or Defend Texas Liberty are antisemitic.

“I've had meetings with transgenders, gays and lesbians,” Hall said. “Does that make me a transgender, gay or a lesbian?”

Asked if he was comparing gay people to white supremacists or Hitler admirers like Fuentes, Hall responded: “I’m talking about people who are political hot potatoes.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/02/texas-gop-antisemitism-resolution/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

In recent weeks, allies of the deep-pocketed conservative PAC Defend Texas Liberty have sought to downplay a meeting between the group’s former leader, Jonathan Stickland, and prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes. They’ve cast the visit as a one-off mistake — and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he accepted an explanation that it was a “serious blunder."

Responding to calls for him to return the $3 million he received from Defend Texas Liberty this summer, Patrick initially said he would not do so because there was “no hint of any links” between the group and any “antisemitic organizations or other hate groups” when he took the funds in June.

There were, however, ample links.

While Fuentes’ unapologetic hate mongering has made him perhaps the nation’s best-known white supremacist, he was merely the latest in a line of people who have been embraced by Defend Texas Liberty and its close allies despite publicly espousing antisemitic views or partnering with extremists. That includes, among others, Ella Maulding, a social media coordinator for Stickland’s consulting firm who has praised Fuentes as the “greatest civil rights leader in history”; and Shelby Griesinger, the treasurer for Defend Texas Liberty who has claimed on social media that Jews worship a false god and shared memes that depict them as the enemy of Republicans.

Defend Texas Liberty is a political action committee and one of the state’s most influential donors to conservative groups and candidates, including Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton. It is a key part of a sprawling network of nonprofits, dark money groups, political campaigns and media companies that have received more than $100 million from three West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, as part of a decadeslong project to push Texas to the far right.

Earlier this month, The Texas Tribune reported that Fuentes, an admirer of Adolf Hitler who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, recently met with Stickland for nearly seven hours at the offices of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right groups that is owned by Stickland and based just outside of Fort Worth.

[What to know about Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist who was just hosted by a major Texas PAC leader]

While Defend Texas Liberty issued a brief statement denouncing Fuentes, the PAC has not offered any details about the meeting. Last week, Defend Texas Liberty also quietly updated its website to note that Luke Macias, a longtime conservative consultant, had replaced Stickland as president. But the closest thing to an explanation for the Fuentes visit has come from Patrick who said earlier this month that he spoke to Dunn, who told him “mistakes were made” but were being corrected.

Patrick did not respond to a request for comment for this story about the myriad Fuentes acolytes previously and presently associated with Defend Texas Liberty. But on Monday, a day after his office was contacted by the Tribune, he issued a press release announcing that he is investing $3 million — the same amount that he received from Defend Texas Liberty this summer — in bonds for Israel.

Patrick also said he has been appalled to learn “about the anti-Semitic activities among some in Texas who call themselves conservatives and Republicans.”

“Every Republican group in the state, no matter how small or how large, including our State Party, needs to root out this cancer. Before anyone is hired or appointed to a position of leadership, in addition to their resume and work record, their social media needs to be reviewed,” Patrick said. “Those who are anti-Semitic are not welcome in our party.”

Defend Texas Liberty, Stickland, Macias, Maulding and Griesinger did not respond to requests for comment.

Fuentes’ acolytes

Led until last week by Stickland, a former state representative from Bedford whose political life was bankrolled by the West Texas oil billionaires, Defend Texas Liberty has in recent years emerged as a key player in an ongoing civil war between the Texas GOP’s far right and its more moderate, but still deeply conservative, wing.

Fallout from the Fuentes visit comes as Defend Texas Liberty and its allies gear up for a primary season in which they’ve promised to spend big against those who supported the impeachment of Paxton, a close ally who has received millions of dollars from the group and its billionaire backers.

But Fuentes wasn’t the only antisemitic conspiracy theorist on site at Pale Horse Strategies this month. Among the attendees was Maulding, a Mississippi native who recently moved to Texas to coordinate social media for Pale Horse clients.

Maulding is a well-known follower of Fuentes who has shared photos on social media of the two together. She has posted tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory and, almost daily, deluges her tens of thousands of followers with screeds about a “white genocide” that she claims is being coordinated by Jews through immigration — a foundational neo-Nazi belief that has for years been used as justification for racist terrorism and violence, including by the gunman who massacred 22 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

“Foreigners are anti-American by default,” Maulding wrote on Oct. 10. “Why are we letting them replace us?”

Earlier this month, after a Tribune reporter drew attention to some of her posts on social media, Maulding responded directly to accusations by others that she was being antisemitic.

“If antisemitism means not wanting my race genocided and overrun by third worlders, happily,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, before again blasting the United States’ financial support for Israel.

During the meeting with Fuentes, Maulding spent some time outside the Pale Horse office recording a video for another Defend Texas Liberty-funded group, Texans for Strong Borders. In the video, she called on lawmakers to crack down on immigration during the ongoing special legislative session.

Texans For Strong Borders has emerged as an influential voice in ongoing debates over immigration, including around the Colony Ridge development near Houston that lawmakers were asked by the governor to address in the special session.

The group’s founder and president, Chris Russo, was seen chauffeuring Fuentes to and from the meeting at Pale Horse Strategies this month. Multiple people, who asked not to be named to avoid drawing the attention of white nationalists, told the Tribune that Russo has ties to Fuentes’ so-called “groyper” movement. Cary Cheshire, the executive director of Texans For Strong Borders and a longtime employee of Defend Texas Liberty-linked groups, was also at the Pale Horse offices while Fuentes was on-site.

Conservative social media personality Ella Maulding (right) and Fort Worth-based podcaster Kaden Lopez exit the offices of Pale Horse Strategies outside of Fort Worth, Texas on Oct. 6, 2023. Credit: The Texas Tribune

Also spotted outside the meeting with Fuentes: Kyle Rittenhouse, who has continued to step up his engagement in far-right Texas politics since he was acquitted of homicide after fatally shooting two people at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin.

Rittenhouse released a statement in response to the Tribune’s reporting in which he said that he left the Pale Horse offices as soon as he learned Fuentes was present. Citing his Jewish family members who he said were victims of the Holocaust, Rittenhouse also strongly denounced Fuentes’ “hideous views.”

Rittenhouse did not, however, say anything about his connection to Griesinger, the Defend Texas Liberty treasurer who has said Jews worship a false god, praised Christian Nationalism and shared QAnon conspiracy theories that borrow heavily from centuries-old tropes that have frequently led to Jewish bloodshed, including in the Holocaust.

In August, the Tribune reported that Rittenhouse had launched a pro-Second Amendment nonprofit, for which Griesinger is one of three board members, as he continues to ramp up his involvement in Texas politics.

From left: Konner Earnest and Kyle Rittenhouse outside of the offices of Pale Horse Strategies outside of Fort Worth on Oct. 6, 2023. Earnest is an associate of Nick Fuentes; Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of homicide after fatally shooting two people at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin, has denounced Fuentes and said he left the offices when he learned of Fuentes' presence. Credit: The Texas Tribune

Kyle Rittenhouse is seen helping unload items from a U-Haul at the offices of Pale Horse Strategies outside of Fort Worth on Oct. 6, 2023. Credit: The Texas Tribune

The registered agent for the Rittenhouse Foundation is Tony McDonald, a longtime lawyer for groups connected to Defend Texas Liberty. McDonald also represented Jim Watkins before a U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Wakins and his son, Ron Watkins, are the owners and operators of 8Chan, an online forum that has been crucial to the spread of QAnon and has been cited by numerous mass shooters and neo-Nazis as key to their radicalization.

Rittenhouse did not respond to requests for comment. McDonald declined an interview request.

Ahead of Fuentes’ arrival at Pale Horse, Rittenhouse was spotted helping a group of young men, some wearing t-shirts for Stickland’s last reelection campaign, load and unload furniture from a U-Haul into the back of the office building.

Among them was Konner Earnest, who has quickly made a name for himself in far-right Texas politics. Earnest was still in high school when he founded a student group that hosted Fuentes collaborator Carson Wolf, as well as Vince Dao, the co-founder of a spin-off group from Fuentes’ “America First” movement.

Konner Earnest outside of the offices of Pale Horse Strategies outside of Fort Worth on Oct. 6, 2023. Earnest is an associate of Nick Fuentes and also worked on former state Sen. Don Huffines' gubernatorial campaign in 2022. Credit: The Texas Tribune

Since graduating, Earnest has stepped up his engagement in right-wing politics. Earlier this month, an independent journalist published photos of Earnest at a meeting for the Houston chapter of the European American Community, a new group that claims American citizenship should be based on European ancestry, among other white nationalist ideas.

In an interview he gave last year to the right-wing website Current Revolt, Earnest said he frequently watches Fuentes’ show, praised other far-right figures and said he was working for the 2022 campaign of Don Huffines. Huffines is a far-right former state senator whose unsuccessful challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott last year received millions of dollars from Defend Texas Liberty.

Earnest has also written anti-immigration articles for Texas Scorecard, the media website that has for years been financed by Defend Texas Liberty’s billionaire funders. And this year he’s made several videos for Texans For Strong Borders.

“Texas is for Texans, and we won't back down,” Earnest said in one August video for Texans For Strong Borders that was recorded outside of the Pale Horse Strategies office.

True Texas Project

Others with direct ties to Defend Texas Liberty have been open about their extreme views for years, including Julie McCarty, the founder of True Texas Project. The Fort Worth-based organization is a central part of the Defend Texas Liberty network, organizing voter drives, fundraisers and other events to mobilize Tea Party activists and pressure lawmakers from the right. True Texas Project is also labeled as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in part because of statements that McCarty and her husband and co-leader, Fred McCarty, have made about immigrants.

In a Facebook post in the aftermath of the El Paso Walmart massacre, she seemed to express sympathy for shooter's belief in the “great replacement theory," a foundational white supremacist belief that there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to replace white people through immigration, interracial marriage and the LGBTQ+ community.

“I don’t condone the actions, but I certainly understand where they came from,” she wrote.

“You’re not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blow-back," responded Fred McCarty.

True Texas Project’s largest funder is Defend Texas Liberty, followed by Dunn and then Empower Texans, a political action committee that was one of the state’s most prolific Republican donors until three years ago, when it was dissolved and replaced by Defend Texas Liberty.

Barely three weeks before Fuentes’ Pale Horse visit, True Texas Project co-hosted a “passing the torch” event in Dallas that featured John Doyle, prominent far-right podcast host who has appeared at events alongside Fuentes, as well as Jake Lloyd Colglazier, the leader of a Dallas-based group that advocates for harsh anti-homeless policies.

For years, Colglazier was one of the most prominent figures in Fuentes’ fledgling army, using his job as a reporter and fill-in host on Alex Jones’ InfoWars to interview white nationalists and elevate dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theorists. On his YouTube show, Colglazier discussed his desire to “spit on George Floyd” and cheered at videos of Black people being killed by police, according to Political Research Associates, which extensively tracked his involvement in the far right.

In 2019, Colglazier, Fuentes and the leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa were the sole headliners of an explicitly white nationalist conference, where they advocated for pulling the national GOP toward their most extreme views by constantly attacking conservatives from the right on immigration, support for Israel and other issues — a strategy that mirrors Defend Texas Liberty’s.

Colglazier’s ties to Fuentes appear to have ended some time after the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, after which Fuentes said Colglazier “deserted dissident politics.”

In a Monday statement, Colglazier decried what he called an attempt to “revive an old and clearly debunked narrative.”

“I have not had any association with Nick Fuentes in nearly 3 years,” he added. “Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false.”

Like Earnest, Colglazier worked for Huffines, serving as deputy communications director for his Defend Texas Liberty-backed campaign. After Political Research Associates reported on Colglazier’s past, Huffines said he would not bend to “cancel culture” by firing him, and argued that it would be impossible to monitor the social media history of every person in his employ. (Months prior, Huffines’ son and campaign staffer, Russell Huffines, told a conservative website that Colglazier was “without doubt” his “favorite right-wing e-celeb.”)

True Texas Project also hosted Colglazier while he was working for the Huffines campaign, and has repeatedly held events that featured Stickland, Huffines and Texas Republican Party Chair Matt Rinaldi, whose career in the Texas House was bankrolled by Defend Texas Liberty’s main funders. Next month, the group is hosting Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky and U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, in separate events.

Asked about the ongoing Fuentes scandal, Fred McCarty said in a Monday email that the controversy is being pushed by “establishment Republicans in Austin” and a Republican consultant who wants Stickland and Defend Texas Liberty “out of the way.”

“Defend Texas Liberty doesn't embrace white supremacists, and everyone knows it,” he said. “Stickland's biggest crime, if anything, is being too trusting and having too big of a heart.”

Disclosure: Facebook and Southern Poverty Law Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Correction, Oct. 24, 2023 at 6:16 p.m.: A previous version of this story misstated who Tony McDonald represented before a U.S. House committee investigating the insurrection. His client Jim Watkins was interviewed by the House committee.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/23/defend-texas-liberty-nick-fuentes-jonathan-stickland/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

White supremacist and antisemitic leader Nick Fuentes has been thrust into the state political spotlight after he was hosted by the president of an influential group that has donated millions of dollars to top Texas Republican officials.

On Sunday, The Texas Tribune published photos of Fuentes at the headquarters of Pale Horse Strategies, where he spent nearly 7 hours on Friday. Pale Horse is owned by Jonathan Stickland, a former state representative who also leads Defend Texas Liberty — a political action committee that two West Texas oil billionaires have used to give millions of dollars to right-wing candidates, including Attorney General Ken Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

The meeting — which has set off a firestorm at the Texas Capitol this week — is Fuentes’ most high-profile, known rendezvous since he dined with former President Donald Trump last year, drawing widespread condemnation. His appearance in Texas comes as antisemitic and racist violence continues to skyrocket in the state and nationally.

Here’s what to know about Fuentes:

Fuentes, 25, often praises Adolf Hitler and questions whether the Holocaust happened. He has called for a “holy war” against Jews and compared the 6 million killed by the Nazis to cookies being baked in an oven. He wants the U.S. government under authoritarian, “Catholic Taliban rule,” and has been vocal about his disdain for women, Muslims, the LGBTQ+ community and others.

"All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory,” Fuentes said last year.

He was born in the Chicago suburbs in 1998. As a freshman at Boston University, Fuentes traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to attend the “Unite the Right” rally, a meeting of violent hate groups, white nationalists and neo-Nazis that ended with the murder of one counterprotester and injuries to countless others.

Fuentes dropped out of college after the rally and ramped up his presence on YouTube, often coating his most extreme views in humor and satire — a term called “irony poisoning” that is often employed by online extremists because it allows them to claim they were joking when they are criticized for their rhetoric. Fuentes also linked up with a well-known neo-Nazi and former Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey to deploy followers to Republican events, where they believed they could recruit and push softened versions of their most extreme views.

For years, Fuentes’ followers — nicknamed “groypers” after a cartoon frog that has become a meme in far-right online communities — were fixtures at events held by groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which they would frequently accuse of not being “pro-white” enough. “Groypers” would often try to access microphones during Q&A sessions in order to attack Kirk, a prominent conservative activist who has helped recruit younger voters to the GOP, from the right on issues like immigration or his support for Israel.

Fuentes has fantasized about marrying a 16-year-old when he is older because that’s “right when the milk is good,” and he is a self-described “proud incel” who reportedly prohibits his followers from masturbating or having sex — among other directives that former members have described as cultish. “Incel” is shorthand for “involuntarily celibate,” and there is a long history of “incels” latching onto white supremacist ideologies that provide them someone, often Jews, to blame for their lack of romantic success. The neo-Nazi gunman who killed eight people at an Allen shopping mall this year was also an “incel.”

Fuentes became more prominent in mainstream media during the 2020 presidential election, and was a key figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement, often pairing his baseless claims about a stolen election with white supremacist conspiracy theories that claim there is an intentional, Jewish-driven effort to replace white people through immigration, interracial marriage and the LGTBQ+ community. Two days before the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, Fuentes suggested killing legislators who were unwilling to overturn the election results; on the day of the riot, he told his followers that they “must be prepared” to “take this country back by force.”

Despite his well-documented extremism and antisemitism, Fuentes’ annual conference has been attended by Republican officials including U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona. At his 2022 “America First” conference — which included speeches by Gosar and Greene — Fuentes castigated those who have compared Russian leader Vladimir Putin to Hitler “as if that wasn’t a good thing.”

In November 2022, Fuentes dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who was embroiled over a spate of antisemitic comments he had recently made. Trump later said that he had no idea who Fuentes was at the time, while other Republican Party leaders condemned the meeting and Fuentes.

Fuentes’ acolytes have also been involved in politics: In July, one of his followers was fired from the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after it was revealed that he created and then shared a pro-DeSantis video that featured a Nazi symbol. Gosar’s office has also reportedly employed Fuentes followers and, in August, it was reported that Greene’s campaign paid $55,000 to a consultant and Fuentes’ collaborator.

Other Fuentes followers have made their homes in Texas: Earlier this year, Ella Maulding moved from Mississippi to Fort Worth to work as a social media coordinator for Pale Horse Strategies. Maulding has posted photos with Fuentes in which she praised him as ”the greatest civil rights leader in history,” and her social media is replete with references to “white genocide” — a foundational ideology for neo-Nazi and other violent extremist movements.

Maulding was spotted by the Tribune at the Friday meeting with Fuentes, and spent some time outside recording a video for Texans for Strong Borders in which she called on state lawmakers to crack down on immigration when they meet for a special legislative session beginning Monday. Chris Russo, the founder of Texans for Strong Borders, was seen driving Fuentes to the Friday meeting at Pale Horse Strategies.

Campaign finance records show that last year, Pale Horse Strategies received more than $828,000 for consulting and contractor services from Defend Texas Liberty, which has given nearly $15 million since 2021 to right-wing candidates. Rep. Tony Tinderholt of Arlington and Bryan Slaton, who was ousted from the Texas House in May after House investigators found that he gave alcohol to a 19-year-old aide and then had sex with her, have received substantial funding from Defend Texas Liberty.

The PAC is also a major backer to Paxton, as are the two oil billionaires — Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks — who fund Defend Texas Liberty.

Over his political career, Paxton has received nearly twice as much in donations from Dunn and the Wilks brothers than he has from his second-largest donor, Texans for Lawsuit Reform. Paxton had also received more money from the trio of billionaires than any other state politician — until this summer when Patrick received $3 million from the group before presiding over Paxton’s impeachment trial and acquittal in the Texas Senate.

Disclosure: Texans for Lawsuit Reform has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/10/nick-fuentes-texas-meeting/.

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