Fights over antisemitism, inclusion vs. purity are not new to Texas GOP | Opinion
If there’s a trend or issue in Republican politics, it’s almost certainly happening in Tarrant County and Texas as well.
Tarrant is the largest GOP county in the nation. Republicans and Democrats alike see it as a crucial battleground to either keeping Texas red or turning it blue.
National Republican officeholders and conservative commentators are debating extremism, free speech and whether to aim for the largest possible party or draw the lines closer to ensure a purer brand of politics.
In Tarrant County? Been there, done that.
Local party leaders chose a replacement Saturday for county chairman Bo French, who is taking his repulsive brand of desperate attention-seeking to a race for statewide office. Southlake lawyer Tim Davis, who won the seat, will probably be just as conservative as French. Let’s just hope he has more restraint when it comes to being rude and hateful online.
Nationally, Tucker Carlson’s cushy interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes has roiled the party. Two years ago, activist Jonathan Stickland hosted Fuentes at his office. State GOP leaders denounced it, and Stickland lost his position running a prominent right-wing political committee.
One way that Republicans could help hapless Democrats win a significant race in Texas for the first time since Boyz II Men topped the pop charts would be to narrow themselves to only hard-core MAGA voters. The local and state parties seem hellbent on doing just that.
But there’s another ruinous path — if you open the doors to vile people without challenging antisemitic or racist views, you’ll chase out voters who might be with you ideologically but can’t bear the stain of associating with hate.
To avoid that, waving goodbye to French is a good start. The thought of him turning a seat on the state Railroad Commission (which regulates energy production, not railroads) into a bigger megaphone isn’t a great tradeoff, though. It’s reminiscent of New York Republicans’ machinations to rid themselves of a progressive governor at the start of the 20th century. They never imagined that Theodore Roosevelt would soon become president.
French used his chairmanship effectively for one candidate: Bo French. He now has a significant national following, in large part because too many people think that being a “fighter” means saying cruel, stupid things about immigrants and gay people, among others.
It’s a mirror image of what we see from Dallas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett. There are few insults about President Donald Trump and the right that she won’t let cross her lips. And accuracy is not a priority. Crockett recently noted that numerous Republicans accepted donations from a Jeffrey Epstein. She clearly wanted everyone to think it was that Epstein. It wasn’t.
Like French, she hasn’t bothered to apologize. She may very well run for Senate, and she’d be the frontrunner in a Democratic primary. She knows what Bo knows: The system now rewards what it used to exile.
Texas Republicans try to shrink party primary, voting
Local and state Republican Party activists — not, to be clear, all or even many elected Republicans — are more interested in policing heresy than hate. The state GOP is in court to try to create partisan registration in Texas so that only declared Republicans can vote in the party’s primaries, which is often the decisive election in uncompetitive districts and statewide races.
Savor, for a moment, the irony of a party built in no small measure on reining in activist courts asking a judge to change election law, a job clearly meant for the Legislature.
Local parties are also indulging voter-fraud fantasies to a dangerous extent, seeking a return to hand-counting of ballots. It defies belief that the inevitable errors made by exhausted election workers are less of a threat to election integrity than the conspiratorial nonsense that officials would sacrifice their own honor to rig vote-counting machines.
Ted Cruz deftly maneuvers on conservative stances
One other noteworthy development in the internal Republican debates is the role of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He is quietly occupying traditional conservative turf abandoned by some party populists. Cruz wants to run for president again, and perhaps he’s betting that the pendulum will swing back a little once Trump is off the scene.
Time will tell if he’s right. But his is an important voice on the damage done by tariffs, the importance of preventing government interference with speech, and the absolute necessity of rejecting antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
The Miami Herald (which is, like the Star-Telegram, a McClatchy Media company) reported that at a recent Florida fundraising dinner, Cruz was blunt, saying: “If you are a bigot, if you are an antisemite, if you are a communist, if you are a jihadist, there is no room for you in the Republican Party, and we don’t want you here.”
Cruz may find, as Ronald Reagan famously said of the Democrats, that his party has abandoned him rather than the other way around. But if he can use his clout among key party constituencies, including conservative evangelical Christians, to pull the party back from the brink, the effort will not have been in vain.
This story was originally published November 22, 2025 at 4:43 AM.
