“Nick Fuentes is just the hottest white supremacist embraced by Protect Texas Liberty” was very first released by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media firm that informs Texans — and engages with them — about community policy, politics, authorities and statewide difficulties.
In current weeks, allies of the deep-pocketed conservative PAC Defend Texas Liberty have sought to downplay a conference between the group’s former leader, Jonathan Stickland, and prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes. They’ve forged the check out as a one-off mistake — or a “serious blunder,” as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick put it.
Responding to phone calls for him to return the $3 million he received from Protect Texas Liberty this summer time, Patrick to begin with reported he would not do so for the reason that there was “no trace of any links” concerning the team and any “antisemitic organizations or other loathe groups” when he took the resources in June.
There were being, having said that, enough back links.
Although Fuentes’ unapologetic hate-mongering has manufactured him potentially the nation’s greatest-regarded white supremacist, he was simply the hottest in a line of people today who have been embraced by Defend Texas Liberty and its shut allies irrespective of publicly espousing antisemitic sights or partnering with extremists. That includes, between other individuals, Ella Maulding, a social media coordinator for Stickland’s consulting business who has praised Fuentes as the “greatest civil rights chief in history” and Shelby Griesinger, the treasurer for Protect 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.
Protect Texas Liberty is a political motion committee and one particular of the state’s most influential donors to conservative groups and candidates, such as Patrick and Attorney Common Ken Paxton. It is a essential part of a sprawling network of nonprofits, darkish funds teams, political strategies and media companies that have received more than $100 million from 3 West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, as aspect of a decadeslong task to force Texas to the considerably appropriate.
Before this thirty day period, The Texas Tribune noted that Fuentes, an admirer of Adolf Hitler who has referred to as for a “holy war” in opposition to Jews, not long ago met with Stickland for approximately 7 hrs at the workplaces of Pale Horse Procedures, a consulting agency for significantly-correct teams that is owned by Stickland and dependent just outside of Fort Value.
[What to know about Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist who was just hosted by a major Texas PAC leader]
Whilst Defend Texas Liberty issued a brief assertion denouncing Fuentes, the PAC has not supplied any facts about the meeting. Very last week, Protect Texas Liberty also quietly up to date its internet site to be aware that Luke Macias, a longtime conservative guide, experienced changed Stickland as president. But the closest matter to an rationalization for the Fuentes check out has arrive from Patrick who said earlier this month that he spoke to Dunn, who informed him “mistakes ended up made” but ended up remaining corrected.
Patrick did not respond to a ask for for comment for this story about the myriad Fuentes acolytes previously and presently associated with Defend Texas Liberty. But on Monday, a working day right after his workplace was contacted by the Tribune, he issued a press launch saying that he is investing $3 million — the same amount that he been given from Protect Texas Liberty this summertime — in bonds for Israel.
Patrick also explained he has been appalled to find out “about the anti-Semitic pursuits among some in Texas who get in touch with them selves conservatives and Republicans.”
“Every Republican team in the condition, no make any difference how compact or how significant, such as our Point out Get together, requirements to root out this most cancers. Just before any individual is employed or appointed to a position of management, in addition to their resume and function record, their social media requirements to be reviewed,” Patrick claimed. “Those who are anti-Semitic are not welcome in our bash.”
Protect Texas Liberty, Stickland, Macias, Maulding and Griesinger did not answer to requests for remark.
Fuentes’ acolytes
Led until eventually very last 7 days by Stickland, a previous state consultant from Bedford whose political existence was bankrolled by the West Texas oil billionaires, Defend Texas Liberty has in latest yrs emerged as a key player in an ongoing civil war concerning the Texas GOP’s significantly correct and its much more average, but still deeply conservative, wing.
Fallout from the Fuentes take a look at will come as Protect Texas Liberty and its allies gear up for a major year in which they’ve promised to invest major versus those who supported the impeachment of Paxton, a near ally who has been given hundreds of thousands of pounds from the group and its billionaire backers.
But Fuentes wasn’t the only antisemitic conspiracy theorist on web page at Pale Horse Procedures this month. Between the attendees was Maulding, a Mississippi native who a short while ago moved to Texas to coordinate social media for Pale Horse purchasers.
Maulding is a properly-regarded follower of Fuentes who has shared photographs on social media of the two jointly. She has posted tenets of the QAnon conspiracy idea and, nearly each day, deluges her tens of countless numbers of followers with screeds about a “white genocide” that she promises is becoming coordinated by Jews as a result of immigration — a foundational neo-Nazi perception that has for a long time been employed as justification for racist terrorism and violence, including by the gunman who massacred 22 people today at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.
“Foreigners are anti-American by default,” Maulding wrote on Oct. 10. “Why are we permitting them change us?”
Earlier this month, after a Tribune reporter drew focus to some of her posts on social media, Maulding responded directly to accusations by other individuals that she was getting antisemitic.
“If antisemitism indicates not wanting my race genocided and overrun by third worlders, fortunately,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, ahead of all over again blasting the United States’ monetary assistance for Israel.
All through the assembly with Fuentes, Maulding expended some time outside the Pale Horse business office recording a video clip for a different Defend Texas Liberty-funded team, Texans for Solid Borders. In the online video, she named on lawmakers to crack down on immigration in the course of the ongoing exclusive legislative session.
Texans For Potent Borders has emerged as an influential voice in ongoing debates around immigration, which includes all-around the Colony Ridge development close to Houston that lawmakers were requested by the governor to tackle in the distinctive session.
The group’s founder and president, Chris Russo, was observed chauffeuring Fuentes to and from the conference at Pale Horse Approaches this month. A number of people today, who questioned not to be named to prevent drawing the notice of white nationalists, instructed the Tribune that Russo has ties to Fuentes’ so-called “groyper” movement. Cary Cheshire, the executive director of Texans For Robust Borders and a longtime employee of Protect Texas Liberty-linked groups, was also at the Pale Horse workplaces whilst Fuentes was on-web page.
Also noticed outdoors the meeting with Fuentes: Kyle Rittenhouse, who has continued to step up his engagement in considerably-correct Texas politics because he was acquitted of homicide soon after fatally capturing two men and women at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse introduced a statement in reaction to the Tribune’s reporting in which he reported that he still left the Pale Horse offices as soon as he figured out Fuentes was current. Citing his Jewish household users who he reported have been victims of the Holocaust, Rittenhouse also strongly denounced Fuentes’ “hideous sights.”
Rittenhouse did not, having said that, say anything about his link to Griesenger, the Protect Texas Liberty treasurer who has mentioned Jews worship a fake god, praised Christian Nationalism and shared QAnon conspiracy theories that borrow greatly from hundreds of years-aged tropes that have often led to Jewish bloodshed, which includes in the Holocaust.
In August, the Tribune documented that Rittenhouse experienced introduced a professional-Second Modification nonprofit, for which Griesenger is just one of three board customers, as he continues to ramp up his involvement in Texas politics.
The registered agent for the Rittenhouse Foundation is Tony McDonald, a longtime law firm for teams linked to Defend Texas Liberty. McDonald also represented Jim and Ron Watkins ahead of a U.S. Home committee investigating the Jan. six, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The father-son duo are the longtime proprietors of 8Chan, an online discussion board that has been critical to the distribute of QAnon and has been cited by numerous mass shooters and neo-Nazis as vital to their radicalization.
Rittenhouse did not answer to requests for remark. McDonald declined an job interview ask for.
In advance of Fuentes’ arrival at Pale Horse, Rittenhouse was noticed serving to a group of young adult males, some sporting t-shirts for Stickland’s very last reelection marketing campaign, load and unload furnishings from a U-Haul into the back of the place of work creating.
Between them was Konner Earnest, who has promptly created a title for himself in considerably-appropriate Texas politics. Earnest was continue to in large school when he started a pupil 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.
Due to the fact graduating, Earnest has stepped up his engagement in proper-wing politics. Previously this month, an impartial journalist published photos of Earnest at a meeting for the Houston chapter of the European American Neighborhood, a new team that statements American citizenship ought to be centered on European ancestry, amongst other white nationalist suggestions.
In an interview he gave final yr to the appropriate-wing web-site Existing Revolt, Earnest stated he regularly watches Fuentes’ display, praised other much-suitable figures and mentioned he was doing the job for the 2022 marketing campaign of Don Huffines. Huffines is a much-ideal previous point out senator whose unsuccessful problem to Gov. Greg Abbott very last 12 months gained thousands and thousands of bucks from Protect Texas Liberty.
Earnest has also published anti-immigration posts for Texas Scorecard, the media web page that has for a long time been financed by Defend Texas Liberty’s billionaire funders. And this 12 months he’s produced various movies for Texans For Powerful Borders.
“Texas is for Texans, and we will not back down,” Earnest said in one August online video for Texans For Sturdy Borders that was recorded outdoors of the Pale Horse Approaches business.
Genuine Texas Undertaking
Other people with immediate ties to Protect Texas Liberty have been open up about their excessive views for decades, which include Julie McCarty, the founder of Legitimate Texas Undertaking. The Fort Well worth-dependent organization is a central section of the Protect Texas Liberty community, organizing voter drives, fundraisers and other events to mobilize Tea Party activists and force lawmakers from the ideal. True Texas Challenge is also labeled as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Regulation Heart, in aspect for the reason that of statements that McCarty and her spouse and co-leader, Fred McCarty, have built about immigrants.
In a Facebook put up in the aftermath of the El Paso Walmart massacre, she appeared to categorical sympathy for shooter’s belief in the “great replacement theory,” a foundational white supremacist belief that there is an intentional, typically Jewish-pushed, exertion to change white people via immigration, interracial relationship and the LGBTQ+ community.
“I don’t condone the actions, but I certainly have an understanding of the place they came from,” she wrote.
“You’re not likely to demographically exchange a after very pleased, strong persons without having finding blow-again,” responded Fred McCarty.
Real Texas Project’s premier funder is Defend Texas Liberty, followed by Dunn and then Empower Texans, a political motion committee that was just one of the state’s most prolific Republican donors right up until three decades in the past, when it was dissolved and changed by Protect Texas Liberty.
Barely a few months just before Fuentes’ Pale Horse go to, True Texas Undertaking co-hosted a “passing the torch” party in Dallas that featured John Doyle, popular considerably-proper podcast host who has appeared at gatherings along with Fuentes, as properly as Jake Lloyd Colglazier, the chief of a Dallas-centered team that advocates for harsh anti-homeless policies.
For a long time, Colglazier was one of the most distinguished figures in Fuentes’ fledgling army, employing his task as a reporter and fill-in host on Alex Jones’ InfoWars to interview white nationalists and elevate hazardous antisemitic conspiracy theorists. On his YouTube clearly show, Colglazier talked over his drive to “spit on George Floyd” and cheered at videos of Black people today becoming killed by law enforcement, according to Political Investigate Associates, which extensively tracked his involvement in the much right.
In 2019, Colgazier, Fuentes and the chief of the neo-Nazi team Identity Evropa were being the sole headliners of an explicitly white nationalist convention, wherever they advocated for pulling the nationwide GOP toward their most extraordinary sights by regularly attacking conservatives from the correct on immigration, support for Israel and other challenges — a approach that mirrors Defend Texas Liberty’s.
Colglazier’s ties to Fuentes appear to have finished some time right after the Jan. six, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, just after which Fuentes claimed Colglazier “deserted dissident politics.”
In a Monday statement, Colglazier decried what he termed an try to “revive an aged and plainly debunked narrative.”
“I have not had any association with Nick Fuentes in just about 3 many years,” he included. “Any recommendation to the contrary is simply just phony.”
Like Earnest, Colglazier labored for Huffines, serving as deputy communications director for his Protect Texas Liberty-backed campaign. Immediately after Political Research Associates claimed on Colglazier’s past, Huffines said he would not bend to “cancel culture” by firing him, and argued that it would be not possible to watch the social media historical past of every single man or woman in his use. (Months prior, Huffines’ son and marketing campaign staffer, Russell Huffines, informed a conservative internet site that Colglazier was “without doubt” his “favorite suitable-wing e-celeb.”)
Legitimate Texas Challenge also hosted Colglazier while he was operating for the Huffines campaign, and has continuously held events that showcased Stickland, Huffines and Texas Republican Social gathering Chair Matt Rinaldi, whose occupation in the Texas Property was bankrolled by Defend Texas Liberty’s most important funders. Subsequent month, the team is hosting Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky and U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, in individual gatherings.
Asked about the ongoing Fuentes scandal, Fred McCarty mentioned in a Monday e mail that the controversy is currently being pushed by “establishment Republicans in Austin” and a Republican specialist who would like Stickland and Protect Texas Liberty “out of the way.”
“Defend Texas Liberty does not embrace white supremacists, and everybody understands it,” he explained. “Stickland’s greatest criminal offense, if anything at all, is getting too trusting and owning also large of a coronary heart.”
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This article initially appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/ten/23/defend-texas-liberty-nick-fuentes-jonathan-stickland/.
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