Among the many fables credited to Aesop is one about a man who wanted to buy an ass and asked the owner of the one he saw at the market if he could test it out at home. When the ass met its brethren in the farmer’s stable, he chose the laziest as his friend and the man knew immediately to return it. The moral of the timeless fable is particularly pertinent to modern-day Texas: “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.”
Aesop, thought to be a slave in ancient Greece, presumably never cast a vote or got involved in Athenian politics, but asses milling in and about the corral of the state Republican Party would be instantly recognizable to the fabled fabulist. Superb reporting by Robert Downen of the Texas Tribune has clearly identified the brand emblazoned on their haunches.
The Aesopian asses meandering around Defend Texas Liberty, the hyper-conservative, exceedingly wealthy PAC to which so many Republican officeholders are beholden, include a young Nazi-loving white supremacist named Nick Fuentes. That would be the same Nick Fuentes who joined the rapper and fashion designer Ye (aka Kanye West) for dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last year. Fuentes reportedly gave the former president tips on how to seem more “authentic.”
Former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland, a former pest-control operator from Bedford, a Fort Worth suburb, is now the former head of Defend Texas Liberty. Before he got bounced, Stickland met with Fuentes for seven hours at the office of Pale Horse Strategies, his Fort Worth-area consulting firm that caters to far-right candidates. (The organization’s name is derived, not from the skin tone of favored candidates, but from the book of Revelation, where Death rides a “pale horse” as a harbinger of the world’s end.)
Once word got out that Stickland had enjoyed nearly a day-long dalliance with the young man who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, he had to go — for appearances’ sake, at least. His replacement as Defend Texas Liberty president is a longtime conservative consultant named Luke Macias.
Defend Texas Liberty is the same powerful group that fortified the campaign war chest of Lt. Gov. Dan — call me Mr. Shameless — Patrick to the tune of $3 million shortly before Patrick was set to preside as “judge” during the Senate impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Defend Texas Liberty darling. After news of the Stickland-Fuentes meeting emerged, Patrick resisted calls to return the money, insisting there was “no hint of any links” between Defend Texas Liberty and any “antisemitic organizations or other hate groups.” Scrambling to dissociate himself from his party’s far-right fringe — quite a task for the man — the lieutenant governor announced that he would be purchasing Israel bonds, $3 million worth of Israel bonds.
Downen, meanwhile, has uncovered a passel of links between Texas Republicans and the far-right fringe. They include Shelby Griesinger, the Defend Texas Liberty treasurer. Griesinger has claimed on social media that Jews worship a false god and has shared memes that depict Jews as the enemy of Republicans. Griesinger also shares QAnon conspiracy theories that, as Downen notes, “borrow heavily from centuries-old tropes that have frequently led to Jewish bloodshed, including in the Holocaust.”
The links include Ella Maulding, a Mississippi native who recently moved to Texas to work as the social media coordinator for Stickland’s consulting firm. Maulding, who has praised the 25-year-old Fuentes as the “greatest civil rights leader in history,” posts incessantly in support of QAnon conspiracy tenets. Warning almost daily that Jews are using immigration to foment “white genocide,” she posted that “any politician defending Jews before Christians has my utmost disrespect.” (Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was her target.)
“Foreigners are anti-American by default,” Maulding wrote last month. “Why are we letting them replace us?”
Downen reports that during the Stickland-Fuentes meeting, Maulding was recording a video outside the Pale Horse Strategies office for a group called Texans for Strong Borders, also supported by Defend Texas Liberty. The group’s founder and president, Chris Russo, has urged Gov. Greg Abbott to make the Colony Ridge residential development north of Houston an emergency item in the current special session. According to the far right, Colony Ridge is a lawless haven for organized crime and the undocumented, although the Department of Public Safety and the Liberty County sheriff told lawmakers they have found no such evidence.
Russo, who, as Downen reports, was seen chauffeuring Fuentes to and from the Pale Horse Strategies office, allegedly has ties to Fuentes’ so-called “groyper” movement. Those who call themselves groypers see themselves as defenders of a white, Christian nation resisting takeover by Jews and other minorities.
Also on the scene during the Fuentes-Stickland meeting was Kyle Rittenhouse, who, as a 17-year-old, fatally shot two people at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin. For some reason, the baby-faced hero of Second Amendment absolutists has hitched his extremist wagon to Texas extremists. As the Texas Tribune reported in August, he has launched a pro-Second Amendment nonprofit group, with Griesinger, the Defend Texas Liberty treasurer, serving as one of three board members.
Other Defend Texas Liberty links to far-right groups and individuals include Konner Earnest, who as a Houston high school student founded a student group with ties to Fuentes. They also include Julie McCarty, the founder of a Fort Worth-based group that promulgates the “great replacement theory,” a belief that shadowy groups or individuals, probably Jews, are working to replace white people with immigrants, children of interracial marriage and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The day after the 2019 mass shooting massacre at an El Paso Walmart, her husband, Fred McCarty, wrote, “You’re not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blow-back.” (Twenty-three people killed and 22 injured was “blowback.”)
The puppet masters behind these white supremacist, Christian nationalist groups and individuals are three West Texas oil billionaires — brothers Farris and Dan Wilks of Cisco and Tim Dunn of Midland — who, arguably, are among the most dangerous men in Texas these days. Founders of Defend Texas Liberty and numerous other PACs, shadowy nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups, they have spent more than $100 million to tilt the state to the far right and in support of Patrick, Paxton, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and other GOP candidates and officeholders who either support or tolerate their warped vision of democracy. “Their vast political donations have made them the de facto owners of many Republican members of the Texas Legislature,” Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz has written. (According to the lieutenant governor, Dunn called Stickland’s meeting with Fuentes a “blunder” and promised it wouldn’t happen again.)
And what is the Dunn and Wilks vision for our state? Their unstinting focus at the moment is to privatize public education. They “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” former Republican state Sen. Bob Deuell told CNN last year. Deuell, a Greenville physician, ran afoul of the billionaires’ position on an end-of-life bill he sponsored and lost his seat to a Dunn- and Wilks-backed candidate.
The powerful West Texans believe in government based on the Ten Commandments. (Both Farris Wilks and Dunn are lay preachers.) As Texas Monthly reported, Dunn told former House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, that only Christians should be in state leadership positions. In their Texas, abortion is a criminal act, guns are and forever will be ubiquitous, border walls will be high and property taxes low to nonexistent. That other wall, the one separating church and state, has been obliterated.
One of the lessons to be learned by the unseemly political influence of the far right in this state is that political parties, unchecked, tend to flow like molten lava toward the extremes. (That’s not an Aesop insight, but it could be.) We Texans have allowed it to happen. Through inattention, neglect or dereliction of civic duty, we have handed over the future of the Lone Star State to one party, unchecked by any kind of serious opposition. The result was inevitable: “Crackpots and ideologues,” to borrow a phrase from Austin writer Lawrence Wright, have gained an inordinate amount of power over one political party, and by extension, the apparatus of state government. As Wright also notes, what happens in Austin “both reflects and influences the national scene.”
It’s not merely Republican versus Democrat. As illustrated by the brave, perhaps even foolhardy effort a few weeks ago to impeach and remove from office the most corrupt state attorney general in the nation, more than a hundred House members showed that it’s possible to be conservative, Republican and principled.
Of course, they failed, ultimately, which means that House Speaker Dade Phelan, House impeachment manager Andrew Murr and their principled Republican colleagues have targets plastered to their backs. Patrick and Paxton have vowed to “primary” these so-called RINOs, recruiting candidates wearing the Dunn- and Wilks-approved label to bounce them out of office.
Before he goes — if he goes — Phelan is fighting back. He demanded that state party chairman Matt Rinaldi resign and that Republicans return any donation they’ve received from Defend Texas Liberty. He also urged the dissolution of the PAC and its affiliated groups, including Texans for Strong Borders.
“They finally got caught,” Phelan said. “They finally got exposed for who they are, and I think a lot of Republicans across Texas are finally opening their eyes.”
Yet another Aesop fable suggests a solution to the dilemma the embattled House speaker has identified, although it won’t be easy. In this tale, an ass dons a lion skin a hunter has discarded and enjoys startling passersby, until a wily fox calls his bluff. The modern moral of the story is that it’s time for Texas voters — Republicans, Democrats and independents — to snatch away the leonine disguise that adorns our self-proclaimed defenders of Texas liberty. It’s time for Texans to vote — to vote as if democracy depended on it.
Houston Chronicle
