Texas GOP fractures as some criticize leaders for slow response to denounce antisemitism
( Front page lead story on Sunday morning's Houston Chronicle. )
Cayla Harris, Austin Bureau
Oct. 19, 2023Updated: Oct. 21, 2023 2:33 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 The fallout from an influential GOP activist’s meeting with a well-known white supremacist has deepened divisions among Texas Republicans and, some say, highlighted the reluctance of party leadership to denounce antisemitism.
The state party, run by former state Rep. Matt Rinaldi, has wrestled for a month with accusations that the organization rushed to affiliate with a new group of young Republicans despite evidence that members had posted and liked antisemitic content online.
Those claims were put in sharper focus last week when the Texas Tribune reported that Jonathan Stickland, the now ex-president of the deep-pocketed Defend Texas Liberty PAC, met for more than six hours with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has praised Adolf Hitler and denied that the Holocaust occurred.
Stickland was quietly removed from the PAC’s website last Tuesday night, 11 days after the meeting, and it’s unclear whether he still has a role within the group.
The events have sparked an uproar among Texas Republicans, and some — including, most prominently, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan — are calling on other conservatives to return campaign donations they received from the PAC.
The Fuentes meeting has also brought renewed attention to members of the fledgling young Republicans group who have socialized with him, and the organization’s president announced on Friday that those people were no longer affiliated.
Over the past week, many Republicans in the Legislature have denounced Fuentes, but they remain split or silent on returning funds and cutting ties entirely with Stickland and others who have associated with Fuentes. Stickland has refused to say why he met with Fuentes and what they discussed, and few conservatives have pushed publicly for an explanation. Rinaldi and other prominent GOP officials have accusedPhelan — who has been targeted by Defend Texas Liberty in the upcoming primaries and has not received money from the PAC — of using the meeting to further his own political goals.
Meanwhile, state GOP chairman Rinaldi’s foes within the party are renewing calls for a change in leadership over what they see as a tolerance for antisemitism. The pressure builds on months of infighting within the Texas GOP ahead of the 2024 election cycle.
Beth Cubriel, a political consultant who served as the executive director of the Texas GOP from 2012 to 2015, said she never thought the state party would see the day when “we're worried about neo-Nazis.”
“The party has just become a victim of its own success,” she said. “The only place to win general elections is on the Republican ticket, and so now everybody's fighting for their place within the Republican Party.”
Over the past few years, the most hard-line conservatives have won few elections across the state but have consistently turned out in primaries and at the biennial GOP convention, Cubriel said. When that happens, “you get state party leadership that alienates Republicans who represent swing districts,” she said.
“The chairman of the party has alienated participation from everybody except for that hard-line crowd, and now he's in a position where those are the only people who are keeping the lights on at the state party," Cubriel said. “He can’t denounce them.”
'We'll confront it' Rinaldi was in the same building when Stickland and Fuentes met, but he said he was only there for about 45 minutes to borrow a conference room for an unrelated meeting. He told the Tribune he did not know Fuentes was there, and “I completely condemn that guy and everything he stands for. I would never in a million years meet with that guy.”
Rinaldi declined to denounce Stickland for hosting Fuentes. James Wesolek, a spokesman for the Texas GOP, referred Hearst Newspapers back to those comments this week and declined to answer additional questions about the meeting and the young Republicans group.
The Defend Texas Liberty PAC is a top funder for conservative politicians across the state, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who received $3 million from the group earlier this year — and Attorney General Ken Paxton. Stickland also serves as president of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right candidates with headquarters in Fort Worth, where the Oct. 6 meeting with Fuentes took place.
Patrick has called the meeting a “serious blunder” but declined to send the money back. Stickland has made no public comments, but the PAC last week posted a brief statement on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
“We reject Speaker Phelan’s effort to combine Defend Texas Liberty PAC with Nick Fuentes,” the statement read. “We oppose Mr. Fuentes’ incendiary views.”
Thirteen of the state Republican Party’s 64 executive committee members signed an open letter this week denouncing Stickland and calling on the GOP to refuse donations from the PAC until he is no longer with the organization and has fully explained what happened in his meeting with Fuentes.
“It is difficult to fathom what legitimate business any reputable political organization would have with Fuentes,” the letter said. “Even if intentions were benign, granting a meeting with such a noxious personality undeservedly elevates him and casts an undeserving bad light on patriots working in the same lanes as DTL, namely the Republican Party of Texas.”
Given the prominence of the PAC and its past support for the state party, the members said they “believe there is a moral obligation to speak boldly, publicly, and clearly on this matter.”
Christin Bentley, one of the authors of the letter who represents East Texas, said she wants to ensure that Stickland doesn’t have any role in the Texas GOP going forward and to investigate other organizations whose members are linked to Fuentes, such as Texans for Strong Borders.
The Tribune spotted Chris Russo, the president of the border group, driving Fuentes to the meeting with Stickland. Ella Maulding, another Fuentes associate who serves as social media coordinator for Pale Horse Strategies, was also present at the meeting and seen filming a video for Texans for Strong Borders.
“If there’s new information that comes out about associated groups, we’ll confront it,” Bentley said. “Antisemitism and racism have no refuge in the Republican Party of Texas, and we’re going to make that clear.”
The majority of the executive committee, the governing board of the state Republican Party, did not respond to requests for comment. Their next meeting is in early December.
Young Republicans rift Even before the Fuentes meeting, the state GOP was dealing with a similar issue on a smaller scale. In August, the Texas Young Republican Federation voted to disaffiliate from the state party and said it would consider restoring its membership status with the party “at such a time as Matt Rinaldi ceases to be an officer with the RPT.”
The federation, an established group of Republicans ages 18 to 40, has long had a strained relationship with Rinaldi. But leaders say their disaffiliation from the party came after Rinaldi personally campaigned against the chair of the group, Hayden Padgett, who was overwhelmingly elected in August as the head of the group’s national organization.
About a month after the group broke ties with the Texas GOP, Rinaldi asked members of the state party’s executive committee to consider membership for a newly formed group — the Young Republicans of Texas. It included some former members of the original group, as well as rejected applicants who had made or showed support for antisemitic posts online.
One of the members — Noah Coffee, whose social media showed he had liked posts that accused Israel of executing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — was named the group’s secretary.
Members of the original Texas Young Republican Federation flagged the content on social media, which has been documented by Amanda Moore, a journalist who has written extensively about far-right extremism. Matt Wiltshire, who was previously on the board of the Texas federation and now serves as the national organization’s finance director, said he tried to warn members of the party’s executive committee before they voted to accept the group in September.
“Nobody wanted to hear it,” Wiltshire said. “Some of them gave me the time of day. Some of them were willing to, out of respect for me. Some of them didn't want to respect me at all.”
The committee, including Rinaldi, voted to affiliate with the new group by a vote of 43-18. Supporters of the new group emphasized that the Texas Young Republican Federation had willingly chosen to disaffiliate, and connecting with another organization could help grow party membership. Some felt that the federation hadn't always supported the party's conservative platform, and the new organization would better promote its conservative values.
Hunter Bonner, a Jewish Republican who serves as president of the Marion County Republican Assembly, messaged all the members of the GOP executive committee who voted to affiliate with the new young Republicans group to tell them the vote was “disgusting.”
Few members replied, but one — Jim Pikl — told Bonner that he had seen “lots of information circulated to us before our vote. But what I saw was not overtly antisemitic.”
“Indeed, it appeared to me to require quite a bit of squinting and biased interpretation to even get close to such a charge,” Pikl wrote back in an email that Bonner provided to Hearst Newspapers.
Bonner replied with screenshots of some of the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel posts, including one in which a member posted verbatim, “I’m antisemitic.” He asked Pikl: “How hard did you have to squint to see the following?”
Pikl didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Chad Cohen, the president of the new Young Republicans of Texas, addressed the accusations in a statement on Friday. He said the troubling posts came to light “in recent days” and that “a few individuals that belong to YRT member chapters have engaged in behavior online that prompted bigotry, and more specifically, antisemitism.”
He said the organization failed to evaluate the online histories of its members, and it was “not a purposeful act of malice in any way.”
“This is personal for me,” Cohen wrote. “As a person proud of my Jewish heritage and a Bible-believing Christian, I am committed to leading an organization that condemns bigotry in all its forms. In the strongest terms possible, Young Republicans of Texas condemns bigotry.”
“At the point where this behavior online came to light, action was taken and people were held accountable. Individuals have been removed from leadership at the URT-level and member chapter-level.”
Cohen did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear how many people were removed and who they are, but Coffee has since been removed from the Young Republicans of Texas website. He could not be reached for comment.
But the revelations spurred two members of the executive committee — Fernando Trevino and Jan Duncan, both Austin representatives who signed on to the letter condemning Stickland — to call on the state GOP to reconsider its affiliation with the group at its next meeting in December.
During the “rushed vetting process” of the new Republican group, “concerned activists came forward with troubling information regarding the charter members of the organization,” they wrote in a letter to Rinaldi on Wednesday. “Those concerns were not given full weight, and now (Young Republicans of Texas) itself admits what many of us suspected all along: the ranks of YRT are infested with avowed antisemites and neo-Nazi sympathizers.”
Trevino said the decision to affiliate with the new group, in tandem with the Fuentes meeting, should push the Texas GOP to more closely evaluate its relationship with Stickland and his associates.
“We clearly need to be a lot more careful with who we’re associating with,” he said. “Right now, it's almost like Pale Horse and the leadership of the party are indistinguishable. So is that healthy? Are we over-reliant on one set of donors, one set of consultants? And how does that really impact the functioning of the party?”
State Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, said Rinaldi’s handling of the new young Republicans group and the Stickland-Fuentes meeting is alarming, and it is time for new leadership in the state GOP.
“Ninety-nine percent of Republicans are extremely troubled by this,” he said. “You're talking about a fraction of a group that are, really, anti-Republicans. … That's not only not the core of the party, that's not even the fringe of the party.”
Patterson accused Rinaldi and Stickland of using their influence only to attack the Texas House and its leadership, and he said their actions in recent weeks have hurt Texas Republicans’ reputations. At the same time, he said they have done little to help elect Republicans across the state, and many of their candidates have lost their primaries.
“I don't want them a part of the party, because I don't want confusion in the marketplace that they're actually Republicans,” Patterson said. “No one that I know really pays attention to them, other than just completely being blown away by the ridiculousness of events like what's happened over the last couple of weeks.”
Critics say Texas GOP slow to denounce antisemitism (houstonchronicle.com) |
