GOP leaders slammed Tarrant chair over post, but some embraced this hater | Opinion
It was the summer of 2020, and Black Lives Matter protests against police violence erupted across the country. As an energetic, multiracial coalition formed in opposition to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a rising star of Tarrant County Republican politics feared the rallies, but had a solution to keep the community safe.
“Sadly, they need to die,” the rising star wrote about the demonstrators in a Facebook post advising Southlake residents to, if necessary, exercise their Second Amendment rights. Whatever that means. “But,” the GOP leader lamented of the protesters, many of them Black teens who had for years, identified racism at the school, “they would still vote.”
I wouldn’t blame anyone for guessing this local leader was Bo French, the Tarrant County Republican Party chair who recently polled his followers over whether Jews or Muslims were the bigger threat to America. It provoked a host of local Republicans to call for his resignation, most notably Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who tweeted June 27 that “French’s words do not reflect my values nor the values of the Republican Party.
“Antisemitism and religious bigotry” — stop and note which prejudice gets identified and which gets euphemized — “have no place in Texas,” Patrick added. French is a deliciously easy scapegoat, and his party lined up for the slaughter.
However, the apparent calls to murder protesters wasn’t from French. This time. No, that was Leigh Wambsganss, who suggested on her Facebook account that Southlake residents defend themselves by any means necessary against the student demonstrators. Yet while French was hastily disfellowshipped by Patrick and other Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker and U.S. Rep Craig Goldman of Fort Worth — the lieutenant governor celebrated Wambsganss’ announcement that she would campaign for the open Texas Senate District 9 seat.
French’s X (formerly Twitter) feed is like a sponge rotting at the bottom of a dirty sink, absorbing and releasing the waste you forgot the human mind was capable of assembling. Jovial governor Tim Walz? “Gay child molester.” Immigrants? Deport 100 million of them, and their children. French’s hate-spewing is common knowledge.
So why the sudden Republican intifada? French’s problem isn’t racism. No, he’s something worse: sloppy. When he tweets, you can feel the foam dripping from his lips.
Wambsganss, however, cloaks her bigotry in a veneer of ambiguity so thin, you’d need your eyes stapled shut to miss it.
You can find Wambsganss’ fingerprints on every extremist movement across North Texas. Remember when people smeared the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth with accusations it featured kiddie porn? There goes “Tarrant County resident” Wambsganss providing a convenient concern quote for right-wing propaganda farm Dallas Express. Notably, the site failed to disclose that Wambsganss is a trained political operative and communications executive for Patriot Mobile Action, the influential PAC funding school board races and supporting book bans across the Fort Worth burbs.
Some of the same Patriot Mobile-backed trustees in Keller attempted to split the district across boundaries that, had it not flopped, would have pushed many of its Black students out of their schools. And where was Patriot Mobile during Black History Month? Sponsoring Black history events that malign Black culture by blaming gangsta rap and gay people for crime in our communities.
There’s also a connection to the current controversy. Patrick assured us his party could never harbor antisemitism. Does he realize Wambsganss, his preferred replacement for Sen. Kelly Hancock, has kept close ties with Steve Bannon, an intermittent Donald Trump adviser and strategist allied with the most dangerous global movements against Jewish life?
In Bannon’s efforts to coalesce Europe’s right-populist parties into a “supergroup,” he pursued numerous dalliances with Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a nationalist party stacked with high-ranking members sympathetic to the Third Reich and defined by its plans to restore Germany to its former greatness by mass deporting its immigrants, including German citizens.
In February, Bannon closed his CPAC 2025 conference speech with what closely resembled a Nazi salute. (Bannon claimed it was a wave, but even some of his far-right allies thought otherwise.)
Were I as invested in opposing antisemitism as Patrick, I’d refrain from endorsing an aspiring politician cozy with our country’s worst antisemite. But there’s Wambsganss, showing up for a friendly chat on Bannon’s “War Room” talk show. Or Patriot Mobile hosting Bannon at the organization’s Tarrant County headquarters.
Patriot Mobile? Antisemitic? Didn’t they just launch that “Jewish Lives Matter” campaign?
Wambsganss characterized the group’s counter-protest to Palestinian rights protests, which included flying banners with its slogan, as a repudiation of “the hate and violence that is being allowed on campuses across America.” But remember what I said about those flimsy veneers.
Beyond the inherent problem with conflating unconditional support for Israel with fighting antisemitism, the Jewish Lives Matter website included pro-Israel statements derived from Biblical texts promising blessings to Israel, then clumsily applying them to the nation-state led by Benjamin Netanyahu. One pastor featured in the campaign preached that you cannot be a “practicing Muslim” and an American. Chris Reed’s bigotry might disqualify him from some religious tolerance campaigns, I’d hope. But not Wambsganss!
Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst for Political Research Associates, told me that conservative Christian campaigns like Jewish Lives Matter “can be deeply anti-Semitic.”
“It’s almost like Israel exists as a magical totem,” said Lorber, the co-author of “Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. “You’re really not actually allying with Jews as human beings,” but instead, treating claims that Israel represents Jewish interests as a “magical fetish object.”
Antisemitism and Islamophobia are not the exclusive domain of Republicans or religious conservatives. However, it’s not a neutral or indifferent force manifesting equally along the ideological spectrum. Lorber and Burley argue in their book that anti-Jewish bigotry finds its “foundational home” in one place: “the political Right, which remains the most direct threat to Jews and all marginalized people.”
This is the threat of Wambsganss and her allies, who ideate about killing Black protesters and push disgraceful conspiracies about Muslims under the manufactured rationalization of protecting Jews, all to complete a theological transaction regarding warring peoples thousands of years removed from our current context. But Patrick looked the other way.
But, if you’re still not sure who Wambsganss is, look no further than another endorsement she received. “I have worked side by side with Leigh so I know her heart,” said the local ally. “She is a conservative warrior and the Texas Senate will be lucky to have her.”
Who would offer such effusive praise? You guessed it: Bo French.
This story was originally published June 30, 2025 at 2:24 PM with the headline "GOP leaders slammed Tarrant chair over post, but some embraced this hater | Opinion."
