Right-Wing Extremism, antisemitism, and a fractured Texas GOP

Friends:

If you've not kept up, the Republican Party of Texas is battling internal divisions. A fallout occurred after a meeting between the then-president of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC and former State Representative, Jonathan Stickland, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The meeting took place in early October in Ft. Worth at a business owned by Stickland.

Fuentes, who frequently praises Adolf Hitler and is a Holocaust denier, leads the extremist America First Movement. Stickland is associated with the Defend Texas Liberty (DTL) PAC that receives money from far-right oil tycoons,Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Read, for example, this piece posted to this blog by Diane Ravitch titled, "Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools."

Folks should also know that the DTL PAC gives millions to both Attorney General Ken Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. You can read about this in a Texas Tribune piece titled, "Pro-Paxton group gives $3 million to impeachment trial judge Dan Patrick. Because DTL is now associated with Nick Fuentes and America First, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan asked the Lt. Governor to hand back the money. You can read about this in the Oct. 9th Texas Tribune piece titled, Conservative PAC leader’s meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes leads to condemnations, escalates GOP infighting. Matt Rinaldi himself took $132,500 from this very same PAC for the Texas GOP. Unless you're an extremist or a member of the KKK, all of this is a terrible optic for the Texas Republican Party. 

All in all, the DTL has contributed around $15 million dollars to right-wing, extremist candidates for office. To my knowledge, none of this money has been handed back to the DTL. In response, rather than giving back the money, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick called for Phelan's resignation.

To drill down a bit further, it's pretty obvious to me that if recipients of DTL monies want to clean up their image and not get caught up with Nick Fuentes and his America First PAC, they should hand back the money. Phelan isn't exploiting an opportunity. He's representing the views of a majority of Texans who find both the DTL and Nick Fuentes revolting.

This shift toward the far right highlights a departure from the Republican party's previous focus on fundraising and supporting local Republicans. Under Chairman Matt Rinaldi, who assumed leadership in 2021, the party has challenged elected Republicans deemed insufficiently conservative. Rinaldi's outspokenness increased after the Texas House voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton in May, triggering months of internal conflict. You can learn more about Rinaldi, a former Texas State Representative, here.

Hard-right Republicans contend that Rinaldi is aligning the party with grassroots conservatism and promoting conservative policies. On the other side, led by House Speaker Dade Phelan, critics argue that Rinaldi is neglecting party responsibilities and fostering division, particularly before a contentious primary season where Rinaldi-backed candidates will challenge incumbent House Republicans.

My educated guess is that while this internal conflict impacted vouchers that have failed to pass session after session, harsh, unconstitutional immigration bills did pass in the fourth-called special legislative session with votes falling strictly on party lines. What should not get lost in the mix here is that as per another Texas Tribune piece that is also mentioned below, Chris Russo, founder of an organization named, Texans for Strong Borders, escorted Nick Fuentes to the Stickland-Rinaldi meeting in Ft. Worth. Hence, when involving immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, hate unites even a fractured Republican party.

These are interesting times. I shudder to think of where we would be right now without a press that is doing its job of investigating these truly consequential developments in the Texas GOP.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas GOP fractures as some criticize leaders for slow response to denounce antisemitism

By Cayla Harris,Houston Chronicle, Austin Bureau Updated Oct 22, 2023 3:30 p.m.

Matt Rinaldi, left, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, asks questions of the parlimentarian and rules officials during the third and final day of this year’s Republican Party of Texas Convention Saturday, June 18, 2022, held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, TX.Michael Wyke / Contributor

What Underlies the Republican Party's Commitment to Ignorance and How this Puts All of Our Children in Harm's Way by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

In a June 28, 2021, New York Times op-ed, economist Paul Krugman asks the question of "What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?" The short answer is their political interests. 

Now let's go a bit deeper and consider its role in the current movement in Texas surrounding House Bill 3979 and Republicans' expressed stance against Critical Race Theory, a bill that is already law but that Governor Greg Abbott is bringing up again in the Texas Legislative session that begins tomorrow. Specifically, Abbott has presidential aspirations and playing to the base of a party by fostering fear of the endarkened "other" makes for good political theater. What should not at all get lost here is the depth of the party's extremism and how this should be of grave concern to the public.

Similar to the 2012 and 2020 Texas G.O.P. Platforms, HB 3979 offers a "solution" looking for a "problem," the problem being, far too many people using their critical faculties to oppose inequality in U.S. society. The Ethnic Studies Movement over the past several years and the racial justice movement last spring motivated bills like these that are springing up across the country.

As captured in a 2012 post to this blog, we must remind ourselves here in Texas of the willful ignorance of the G.O.P. that has been explicit in the Texas Republican Party platform as follows:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Compare this to the 2020 G.O.P. Platform. Whatever progress it makes with item 134 with teachers teaching "critical thinking skills, including logic, rhetoric, and analytical sciences within these subjects," this gets nullified with item 138 as follows:

"We reject Critical Race Theory as a post-Marxist ideology that seeks to undermine the system of law and order itself and to reduce individuals to their group identity alone. We support legislation to remove this ideology from government programs, including education involving race, discrimination, and racial awareness. To facilitate the appreciation of our American identity, the contrast between freedom and the tyrannical history of socialism/communism throughout history must be taught."

If we put aside the outright lie of what Critical Theory is and acknowledge that it is a legitimate, forty-year, approach to critical thought and thinking—one among many legal, policy and political tools in educators' craft—the deeper question is the source of this fear. 

Perhaps you saw, like I did, the July 5, 2021 interview of Chris Tomlinson on Joy Reid's "ReidOut" on his co-authored text titled, "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth," a book that Gov. Abbot and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick recently censured (read "

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick admits he told state museum to cancel 'Forget the Alamo' book event"). In response to Reid's query about why this was so, Tomlinson explains:

"We make the argument that the myths that were taught to people my age and younger, frankly, in Texas schools are hurtful to the growing plurality of Hispanics in Texas. It paints a picture of freedom-loving Anglos fighting against dark-skinned people for liberty. It completely ignores the role that slavery played in motivating this because we point out the inconvenient fact that Mexico is a multicultural society that had just overthrown Spanish colonial rule, was trying to outlaw slavery.

 President Santa Ana said before he crossed the border into Texas, 'I am going to free the wretched souls in bondage.' Saying those things in Texas is apparently...was going to get you slapped down."

Yes, distorted history is harmful and objectifying. Borrowing from Dr. Lisa Delpit's classic, "Other People's Children," the legislating of sanitized curricula is inescapably a patronizing expression of white supremacist privilege on what to do with, and how to teach, "other people's children" who, in republicans' eyes, neither have, nor should have, a right to a perspective— even when the historical record aligns or the large numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse children in our schools would seem to suggest.

Consider that according to 2019-2020 Texas Education Agency data, Latina/o students are the largest demographic group in our state's public schools (52.8 % enrollment), with white, African American and Asian American children equaling 27 %, 12.6%, and 4.6%, respectively.* 

Referring not to numbers, but to political power, public education in Texas is "minority education." Hence, the G.O.P.'s commitment to ignorance becomes decipherable.

While obviously harmful to minoritized youth, I would amend Tomlinson's point of "hurtful to the growing plurality of Hispanics in Texas" to also include white children. I quote Texas A & M Professor Dr. Marlon James, with whom I recently spoke, who says that denying students our history makes all of our children vulnerable to extremism, putting them in harm's way. 

If you have any doubts about this, I encourage you to read Max Kutner's unsettling audiobook, Radicalized, that tells the story about how an eighteen-year-old, white American boy, Devon Arthurs, becomes a neo-Nazi—and later a Muslim jihadi—resulting in the violent murder of his two roommates. This chilling tale is partly chronicled in this AP News account titled, Deadly Shooting Ends Friendships Forged in Neo-Nazi Group. As Devon's parents were neither neo-Nazis nor jihadist, they never saw this coming. 

As I consider this horrible experience that this family endured, I cannot help but think that an authentic engagement with U.S. history, Women and Gender Studies, or Ethnic Studies might have been that ounce of prevention that might have engendered a pound of cure. It might have lessened Devon's vulnerability to extremist thought that in the beginning was little more than a young boy who was bullied in school, searching for a meaningful and powerful identity.

You see, nature hates a vacuum. And an empty, limited, self-serving history that HB 3979 represents is fertile ground for "free radicals" that can attach to any ideology or dogma, left or right, on the body politic. As the age-old dictum says, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Such free radicals become the cancer in the body.

Parents and people of good conscience, do duly note that while willful ignorance may preserve privilege and power for a time, in the long run, there are diminishing returns to this backward, medieval agenda. Even if the truth of history that HB 3979 seeks to outlaw makes us feel uncomfortable on occasion, let us be mindful of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s wise admonition:

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: It is the presence of justice."

Hence, rather than shrinking from history and critical topics as the Texas GOP would have us do, the constructive, intellectual task is to let a thousand flowers bloom. Instead of censorship and narrowing curricula, we should allow for vigorous debate and democratic deliberation so as to illuminate and clarify our present condition as a society, and in so doing, provide goal posts and real policy solutions for just and humane public policy and practices that make for a better world.

References

Dearen, J. & Kunzelman, M. (2017, August 22) Deadly Shooting Ends Friendships Forged in Neo-Nazi Group

Krugman, P. (2021, June 28). "What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to                                       Ignorance? New York Times. 

Kutner, M. (2020). Radicalized. Audible originals.

Texas Education Agency (2020). Enrollment in Texas Pubic Schools                                      https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/enroll_2019-20.pdf

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy; Director, Texas Center for Education Policy, University of Texas at Austin; and blogger since 2004.

Editorial: Instead of whitewashing history, governor, tackle real problems

Great editorial by the editors of the Austin American-Statesman. It notes the willingness of the Texas GOP to "stoke conflict," by, for example, signing anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) Bill—House Bill 3979—into law this past legislative session that is, in fact, not actually getting taught in K-12 schools. CRT is college-level instruction, not K-12. Most teachers do not even know what it means if they have ever even heard of it.

This agenda amounts to dog-whistle politics designed to create a wedge issue that Gov. Greg Abbott can run on in his bid for the U.S. presidency, as indicated in the editorial below. Rather than fearing the teaching of CRT in our nation's classrooms, the only thing to fear is the Texas GOP itself and the whitewashing of history, alongside local political struggles and strife of an unenforceable policy that this mean-spirited law will inaugurate.

-Angela Valenzuela

Editorial: Instead of whitewashing history, governor, tackle real problems

American-Statesman Editorial Board | June 27, 2021

When President Joe Biden signed the law making Juneteenth a national holiday, he extolled the power of history to teach. 

“All Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history,” Biden said at a signing ceremony at the White House. The law designates June 19 as the national day to commemorate the end of slavery.

Juneteenth might be new to some Americans, but, of course, it has long been celebrated in Texas. It draws its name from June 19, 1865, the day the news of freedom reached enslaved people in Galveston -- more than 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.

A federal holiday marking the end of slavery is symbolically potent on the heels of a year of racial strife and Black Lives Matter protests in Austin and across the country. But the same week Biden signed the Juneteenth holiday law, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law restricting how current events and our nation’s long history of racism can be taught in public schools, for example mandating that teachers must "give deference to both sides" when discussing current events. 

In signing the law Abbott has delved yet again into another attempt to stoke cultural conflicts and dictate what Texans, in this case educators, can and cannot do. Once the Party of Small Government, the Texas GOP has become the Party of Government Knows Best under the governor's helm.

Related: Editorial: If the GOP has all the answers, why let Texans decide?

The measure Abbott signed, HB 3979, is known as the critical race theory bill though it doesn’t contain the words. Abbott, however, invoked them in signing the law, calling for abolishing critical race theory and for the Legislature to take up the issue at its special session this summer.

If you don’t know what critical race theory is, you’re probably not alone. And if you’re wondering why it’s relevant to your life and why the governor is set on killing it and on telling teachers how to teach, welcome to Texas and its Republican-controlled Legislature. Though we recognize that state lawmakers have a duty to oversee education policy and how our tax money is spent, this is hardly an example of responsible government responding to a critical and urgent need. Indeed, some education experts say there is little if any evidence critical race theory is widely taught in our schools.

"Nobody in K-12 is teaching critical race theory,” Andrew Robinson, an 8th grade U.S. history teacher in Dallas, told the Texas Tribune.

What is critical race theory?

For the uninitiated, critical race theory is the academic discipline practiced by scholars, legal experts and others that questions the role of race in society and why racism endures. Many conservative lawmakers, commentators and parents rail against it, sounding alarms that it is a divisive, racist threat and that it is used to teach white children they are racist and so is the country. They claim, without evidence, that it teaches people of color to hate white people and assigns them blame for the country's racial sins. Legislation similar to Texas' has been proposed in 22 states; Texas is one of a handful of states where it has been signed into law.

With the lack of hard evidence that critical race theory is even being taught in our schools, attacks on an honest accounting of the country's racist past are poorly disguised attempts to whitewash history, to stoke racial anxiety and grievances and to exploit a wedge issue ahead of the 2022 midterms. Abbott is girding for reelection and a possible presidential run. A recent poll found 63 percent of Republicans are against teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools, compared to 13 percent of Democrats.

History has the power to teach. But it requires a willingness to stare down demons like the Tulsa race massacre and in Texas, the historic murderous violence by Texas Rangers against Mexican Americans. Teaching our students about racism is not racist, nor is confronting these ugly truths an exercise in blaming, but an attempt to find healing and paths to justice and equality and to understand how historical racism and racist violence have ramifications today. 

How Texans feel about teaching these truths relates to their beliefs about the purpose of an education, said John Morán González, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Texas and a professor of American and English literature at UT.

If it’s indoctrination into a kind of uncritical nationalism, that is one thing, González told us. "But if we think that our tax dollars should be used to engage critical thinking citizens, that’s an entirely different avenue."

Abbott and elected officials who harbor greater political ambitions use wedge issues like the critical race theory debate to secure positions as champions of conservative causes. In their hands, policymaking becomes the servant of electioneering, not good government.

RELATED: Editorial: That border wall plan isn’t for Texas. It’s for Gov. Greg Abbott.

But in tilting at windmills like critical race theory, non-existent widespread voter fraud and border walls that won't get built, Abbott does a disserve to all Texans. We have real problems, not manufactured ones ginned up for the culture warriors on social media and Fox News. Just four months ago, countless Texans died or lost limbs in the winter storm when the power failed. Texans want a full reckoning. They want an electrical power grid that works, they want a better education for their children and improved access to medical care. Tackle those problems, instead, governor.

Austin American-Statesman Editorial Board

As Cristina Tzintzun maintains, Republicans' growth-at-all-costs economic model is so incredibly harmful and is indeed a consignment to destitution for so many. Workers shouldn't be in this situation.  At least we have a required-mask mandate in place right now in Texas public spaces.  However, as evident in the fraying of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's republican party base (read "Texas GOP’s virtual convention reveals a party at sea," the level of selfishness about this under the guise of interfering with people's rights is staggering.

We should be very encouraged, by the way, by the emerging youth vote as you can read about in today's Austin American-Statesman piece titled, "Youth Vote a Surprise Factor in Runoffs: Voters under 40 made up about 37% of the Travis County Electorate," here in Austin. 

It's a rather funny article about how what played in the July 14th primary election was a radical departure from the past as follows:

In primary runoffs, Austin’s voters are usually “very old, very white, very establishment,” said Mark Littlefield, a local pollster, lobbyist and consultant for Democrats. In primary runoffs “the joke we make is we all know who those 30,000 voters are — the same 70-year-old men and women that always are going to vote,” Littlefield said. 

Not this time.

This is truly excellent news!  Young people are voting at unprecedented levels.  I trust that this is happening throughout Texas and the nation given the recent wave of activism. Still, we can't say it enough. Let's all vote in November and get this governor, this president, and this party out of office.  

Do read Cristina's powerful piece below.


-Angela Valenzuela

THURSDAY, JUL 2, 2020, 12:45 PM

To the Texas GOP, “Freedom of Choice” During a Pandemic Means the Freedom to Die for Profit

BY CRISTINA TZINTZUN RAMIREZ

In Texas, we now have the dubious distinction of having joined the six other states with over 100,000 COVID-19 cases. In Texas, like in many other GOP controlled states, our Governor and Lt. Governor took their cues on how to respond to COVID-19, not from health experts but from the political whims of Donald Trump, who proved to have a questionable grasp on how the disease worked when he suggested injecting disinfectant and using UV light to cure patients of COVID-19.

Today in Texas, thousands of new cases are being reported daily. Hospitals in Houston and across the state are at near capacity. Adult COVID-19 patients are being transferred to Texas children’s hospitals to meet the exploding healthcare crisis in Harris County, the state’s most populous region. On June 26, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was forced to backpedal on his promise that Texas was going to remain “wide open for business.” And he shut-down bars and reduced seating at restaurants, just five weeks after he allowed them to reopen.

I am lucky. I’m able to keep working from home, but both of my parents have lost their regular income and are struggling to get by in the new COVID-19 reality. Before COVID-19 my parents lived below the poverty line. My 62 year-old diabetic mom, who doesn’t have more than a ninth grade education, worked as a Spanish language interpreter at a hospital.  When COVID-19 began spreading, she quit her job. For her going to work literally became a life or death choice. My dad ran a small fair trade business selling jewelry from Mexico, last year he personally made $18,000. Now, both my parents get their food from local pantries and food banks.

Yet, my life did change dramatically post COVID-19, because two weeks before Texas shut down on March 19, I was crisscrossing the state running as a progressive in the Democratic primary for the Senate, talking to voters about the economic pain they were already living before COVID-19  (in a 12-way race I missed making it into the run off by 1.5%)

As an organizer and progressive, I have spent nearly two decades trying to disrupt the Right’s narrative and grip on power. Today, I see the cracks in GOP philosophy turning into disastrous fault lines.

Texas Republican leaders are struggling to deal with the reality of an opponent that their statewide power can’t seem to beat into submission. Unable to hide from the hard facts about how quickly the disease is spreading, Gov. Abbott acknowledged in a leaked recording, “Whenever you have a reopening… it actually leads to an increased spread."

On the subject of right-wing extremism in Texas

Purchase of Texas GOP Nearly Complete Dennis Bonnen played with fire and got burned by off-the-edge ideologues who now control Texas Republican leadership.

Whether Dennis Bonnen fell into a trap or helped plan the conspiracy, his demise as Texas State House Speaker sends a clear message from Empower Texans' mouthpiece Michael Quinn Sullivan and his billionaire benefactors to the entire Texas GOP:  If you aren’t with us, we will take you out.

Deep-pocketed ideologues' investment in the Texas GOP is paying off The big money behind the takeover of Texas Republicans belongs tofundamentalist oil baron Tim Dunn and a cadre of mega-wealthy extremists.  Their return on investment is almost complete.  For years, Dunn and the other deep-pocketed ideologues have spent millions of dollars through various dark money front groups – chiefly Empower Texans – to move Texas policy and politics so far to the right it would make Mussolini blush.  Dunn, Sullivan and the others have been on a mission to replace politicians they don’t like with ones who are willing to do their bidding.  Their brand of elected official includes those who believe that “rape is non-existent in marriage,” and others who really seem to enjoy filing legislation that endangers women.      Dunn bankrolled the rise of the Texas Tea Party.  He controls extremistLieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.  He and his cabal of right-wing donors have also given hundreds of thousands to manipulate Greg Abbott’s agenda. The ridiculous “bathroom bill” that could have caused the state economic disaster?   The draconian anti-choice measures designed to limit women’s access to health care?  The idiotic removal of local control from cities and counties to manage their own communities? All occurred thanks to Empower Texans funded by Dunn and wealthy extremists.

Abbott & Texas GOP History of Discrimination

November 21, 2016
Contact: Matt Angle / Lone Star Project
972-885-9440 

Abbott & Texas GOP History of Discrimination

Evidence of intentional discrimination by Greg Abbott and current Texas Republican leaders is no surprise.  Federal Courts have ruled that Texas Republican leaders have discriminated against Texas citizens over a half-dozen times since 2011.  Congressional, State Senate and State House redistricting plans were all ruled discriminatory, and the Texas voter ID law has been found discriminatory after every court review.  Three findings of intentional discrimination by Abbott and other State leaders are linked below:

2011 Congressional Redistricting Map
2011 State Senate Redistricting Map
2011 Texas Voter ID law

Statement from LSP Director Matt Angle:
“Greg Abbott is the point in the spear of intentional discrimination in Texas.  He should have spent his time at the memorial ceremony apologizing for his sorry and shameful record of intentionally attacking and undermining basic civil and voting rights of millions of Texas citizens."