The Bo French Protection Racket

Every few months, a specific and highly reproducible experiment gets rerun somewhere in Texas Republican politics. Someone says something spectacularly ugly out loud, and an army of officials, activists, and terminally online avengers materializes to explain that no, actually, the real bigotry here is your capacity for noticing bigotry. This week, the test subject was Bo French, who looked at a photograph of Texas Longhorns fans in a football stadium and, in a genuinely impressive feat of ideological pattern recognition, saw the decline of Western civilization.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote on September 13, 2026. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

It was, again, a football crowd. Having established his thesis, French did what people with a thesis and a phone always do: he kept going.

“The entire system is biased against heritage Americans and for third worlders.”

“It’s like they hate white Americans and prioritize everyone else.”

“If we don’t start deporting people like this, the foreign-born population, along with self-hating white leftists, will keep electing people who hate you, hate our history, hate our culture and hate America.”

“‘Jobs Americans won’t do’ was always meant to demoralize American workers and justify importing a gazillion third world foreigners.”

“I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans.”

“Generations of Texans have invested billions of dollars into UT. Today it is filled with foreign nationals and Leftists who boo Ted Cruz.”

In a properly functioning political party, the exits would start clearing. To be fair, some Republicans did head for them. Sen. John Cornyn didn’t wait for a press release; he quote-tweeted the post and asked, not unreasonably, whether his fellow Republicans intended to condemn this or let it become the new normal. Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows hesitantly said that the post had “crossed the line.” That sentence is not the main story. The main story is the accommodation trap: leadership names a line, keeps the hard-right lane close enough to court, and hopes the people who primary Speakers do not turn the knife next. Former Speaker Dade Phelan skipped the euphemisms and called French “unfit for office.” Cornyn and Phelan named the thing. Burrows named a line. (Texas Tribune / Politico / Dallas Morning News)

French, characteristically, did not take the off-ramp. He turned on Cornyn instead:

“Our state’s institutions have been overrun by illegal aliens and foreign nationals because of RINOs like John Cornyn who have cheered for them over our own citizens. He and the other America Last losers are mad that Texas Republicans are starting to put America First.”

One bad tweet from a guy having a bad week online would be easier. This was a cluster, a pattern, a genre. A certain apparatus in Texas politics has had considerable practice cleaning up after it.

The machine already has a name

You may recall that Scorecard Confessions named this machine already, on June 30, 2025: “The Antisemitism Defense Machine Protecting Bo French,” subtitled, with bluntness, “How The Enterprise Turned Bigotry Into a Business Model.” The question then: when, exactly, did defending antisemitism become a billionaire-funded political strategy? Gromer Jeffers Jr. of the Dallas Morning News had already done the legwork on the poll and the resignation demand that set the whole thing off.

The short version: a funded perimeter had formed around a Tarrant County GOP chair whose rhetoric was so far outside the mainstream that it earned a resignation demand from the lieutenant governor, over a poll asking Texans to rank Jews versus Muslims as the “bigger threat.”

That particular file is settled, closed, filed under Things We Already Knew. September 2026 offers a sequel, and like most sequels, it recycles the plot: same operators, same reflexive circling of the wagons, just with stadium seats and “heritage Americans” standing in for a poll about which minority group is scarier.

Does the apparatus still form up around him when the visuals change? It does.

The September perimeter

The people rushing to his defense are enablers of a pattern Scorecard Confessions has been tracking for nearly a decade.

Julie McCarty, founder of True Texas Project, treated the whole affair as a loyalty test with a pass-fail grade. “Did you notice it's all the has-beens piling on Bo? LOL.”

“Next time a GOPe shouts ‘Unity!’ at you, remind them of their attack on @bofrench.” (post) When a critic pushed back on the photo itself, her rebuttal amounted to a Rorschach test: “You need to take a closer look at that picture.”

The True Texas Project account, not to be outdone in the candor department, said the quiet part at a volume usually reserved for stadium concerts: “Bo is a rock star and they are a bunch of traitors who have zero clue how angry everyday Texans are about what is happening to our state.” And then, in case anyone missed the memo:

“We stand with Bo. Thank God frauds like Cornyn & Crenshaw are gone. We will fight on to save Texas.”

Matt Rinaldi, former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, quote-tweeted Cornyn with the subtlety of a marching band: “Cowards like @JohnCornyn mortgaged our children’s future for government handouts and cheap labor.”

He then produced some creative residency arithmetic, folding visa dependents into the “resident” column in a way that would make even a community-college statistics professor wince:

By his third post, the pretense was gone entirely: “@bofrench has been consistently pushing the Overton window on immigration issues and yet is polling in the top tier of statewide candidates this general election cycle. This is not a coincidence.”

Rinaldi did not arrive at this posture in 2026. On May 29, 2017, while serving in the Texas House, he said he called ICE on protesters in the Capitol gallery during demonstrations against the state’s sanctuary-cities law. Many of the protesters were Hispanic. Democratic lawmakers said Rinaldi told them, “I called ICE — fuck them”; Rep. Poncho Nevárez also accused Rinaldi of threatening to “put a bullet” in his head during the floor confrontation. Rinaldi said Nevárez had threatened him first and characterized his own remark as self-defense. (CBS Austin, May 29, 2017 / Austin Chronicle, June 2, 2017)

Nine years before the stadium photo, the same operator was already turning Hispanic political protest into an immigration-enforcement target. Rinaldi later became state GOP chairman while also serving as attorney for Farris Wilks, one of the two billionaires financing the network he defended. (Texas Tribune, Jan. 12, 2024) His support for French is not a new association with racist politics. It is continuity.

Texas State Representative Andy Hopper called Cornyn a “Smug globalist who brought these policies to Texas” and, helpfully, reminded everyone that the man lost by 28 points, an argument that would carry more weight if electoral margins were a measure of moral clarity rather than, say, Texas demographics.

Luke Macias did more than change the subject. First, he decided to attack a woman: “Lacey Hull has been breaking hearts throughout her tenure in Texas politics.”

Then he ran the “lose focus” line that treats condemnation of Bo’s racist posts as noise while the real work is the white-nationalist immigration lane Bo is pushing into: “Governor @GregAbbott_TX is leading and 1000% focused on keeping Texas red. Our enemy rejoices every time we lose focus.”

Get it? Bo is the gateway. Noticing Bo is the distraction.

That selective focus pairs with selective unity. When the circle is consolidating power, Macias posts unity. “It’s time to unite. Some want to burn down the GOP and hold onto the little bit of power they have. We need to beat the Democrats.”

“It’s time to unite. Texas Republicans are coming together for the fall. Rick Perry and others are trying to burn our party down.”

“Time to unite.”

Unity when the slate is theirs. Burn-it-down rhetoric for everyone else. Sullivan and Rinaldi run the same playbook from the media and party chairs. Julie McCarty’s “Next time a GOPe shouts ‘Unity!’” line is the mirror image of Macias’s unity posts — same word, opposite days.

Cary Cheshire skipped the defense and went straight to the victory lap: “In January, we will call John Cornyn the former senator from Texas and we will call Bo French our Republican Railroad Commissioner.”

Then came the national layer. These are not random well-wishers. They are existing Enterprise People. The proximity is the point.

Jack Posobiec is on the graph as Human Events senior editor, with additional frequent appearances on One America News Network, and Turning Point USA, Citizens for Trump, and the Republican National Committee events. That is the national amplifier seat. It is also a prior working relationship: when French chaired Tarrant County GOP, the party hosted Posobiec. (WFAA)

Then “Defend @bofrench like the Alamo,” which is either a stirring historical callback or a very unfortunate one, depending on how the siege actually ended.

Then “Bo French is the ONLY candidate in 2026 calling this out And that is why they fear him.”

Posobiec's presence on this list is not a one-off. January 6 ran the same playbook before a camera ever pointed at a football stadium. In the months before the Capitol attack, Posobiec was one of the loudest voices pushing “Stop the Steal” messaging online, the same posture he brought to Bo French's defense five years later: amplify first, litigate the facts never. (Just Security timeline) By 2024 he was headlining CPAC panels defending the people prosecuted for that day. (NBC News, Feb. 23, 2024) Nick Fuentes — whose 2023 dinner with Defend Texas Liberty's chairman forced the PAC to rebrand as Texans United for a Conservative Majority — was in Washington that day too, by his own congressional testimony. (House Jan. 6 Committee record) The through-line isn't that Empower Texans or Defend Texas Liberty bankrolled January 6 — the documented money behind that day ran through Women for America First and Stop the Steal LLC. The through-line is who the network keeps close afterward: the same amplifiers who spent 2021 relabeling an attack on Congress spent this week relabeling a stadium post.

Sidney Powell, a lawyer disbarred for her role in pre-January 6th Insurrection activities, offered her support as well:

Kambree Nelson recently hosted The Kambree Show on Texas Scorecard, the Citizens News Guild / Dunn-chaired media layer, and claims on X she's currently an ambassador for America First Policy Institute.

Naomi Narviaz is a former Republican Party of Texas SREC member. She previosly has defended The Enterprise by viciously attacking the female rape victim of expelled Texas House member Bryan Slaton.

And then the costume changed again without leaving the news cycle. After Cornyn condemned the stadium posts, Railroad Commission Democrat Jon Rosenthal thanked him. A reply from @JasonWhite88ss arrived with a photograph of the Auschwitz I gate — Arbeit macht frei — and the line: “This is the type of shit that got you kicked out of 109 countries and put in camps.”

Karthik quote-tweeted it into Bo’s mentions: “@bofrench’s followers are now posting pro concentration camp memes at @Jon_RosenthalTX, a Jewish American Democrat.”

Stadium racism before lunch; camp memes at a Jewish opponent by evening. Same machine. Next costume.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s move was not a condemnation. NBC and the Tribune both clocked a unity statement about Longhorn fans and tough immigration laws — no naming of French, no repudiation of the stadium posts. (NBC News, Sept. 13, 2026 / Texas Tribune) That is the accommodation trap in public. Courting the hard-right lane beats risking a primary from it. Whether any of that also tracks a speculative 2028 presidential calendar is guesswork; the non-condemnation is on the record either way.

Speaker Dustin Burrows’s “crossed the line” quote belongs in the same file. Speakers who try to deal with this machine learn the hard way. Dennis Bonnen tried to cut a deal with Empower Texans and Michael Quinn Sullivan in 2019 and got recorded offering Scorecard media credentials tied to a ten-member hit list; he was out of the speakership by October. (Texas Tribune, Oct. 15, 2019) Joe Straus’s era left a public-record caution of its own: oil billionaire Tim Dunn told the then-Speaker that only Christians should hold House leadership — the kind of demand that teaches leaders what “playing nice” costs when warped theology is the agenda. (Texas Tribune, April 4, 2024)

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had no comment at all in the Tribune write-up of the stadium week, a silence that reads differently next to his 2025 resignation demand. The contrast is right there in the public record.

What Nobody Denied

Scroll back through every quote above. Cornyn condemned. Phelan called him unfit. Burrows said he'd "crossed the line." McCarty, Rinaldi, Hopper, Macias, Cheshire, Posobiec, Powell, Nelson, and Narviaz all rallied. Not one person on either side said the simple, falsifiable thing a genuine defense would require: "Bo French is not racist, and here is why."

The critics didn't need to argue the point; the tweets made the case themselves. And the defenders didn't bother rebutting it either. What they offered instead was reframing: Bo is the truth-teller, Cornyn is the real traitor, this is a distraction from the "real" agenda, unity matters more, go look at Lacey Hull instead.

An entire apparatus, built for exactly this kind of defense, had the easiest possible move sitting in front of it: say the claim is false. None of them took it. Declining to call racism racism, when the words cost nothing, is not neutrality. It is the position. Silence in the face of a costless opportunity to condemn is an endorsement.

The dollar chain

The photograph Bo French posted doesn’t become a national controversy on its own merits; it needs infrastructure. And this one sits at the end of a dollar chain with dates attached, which is my favorite kind of chain, because it doesn’t require speculation: just arithmetic.

Tim Dunn of Midland and Farris Wilks of Cisco built the pipes. Dunn’s recorded gifts include $9,696,000 to Defend Texas Liberty PAC and $7,065,000 to Texans United for a Conservative Majority — the PAC that inherited the Defend Texas Liberty lane after the Nick Fuentes dinner debacle made the old name radioactive. He also put $3,365,000 into Empower Texans PAC, the granddaddy of the scorecard-and-primary operation. Wilks, not to be outdone, put $4,660,000 into Defend Texas Liberty, $1,819,500 into Empower, and $1,290,000 into Texans United. (Transparency USA, Dunn / Transparency USA, Wilks / Texas Ethics Commission search)

True Texas Project sits downstream of all this. Texans United sent the group $40,000. Empower Texans sent $29,500. Defend Texas Liberty’s itemized 2022–23 gifts to True Texas Project add up to $47,000. (Defend Texas Liberty PAC, Transparency USA / TEC search)

The same vehicles wrote checks to French directly. Public filings put Defend Texas Liberty and Texans United expenditures to Bo at $573,500, a figure that doesn’t even include the House-era Empower Texans spend of $368,465.16 from 2016 to 2018. (Texas Tribune, May 19, 2026 / TEC search)

The media apparatus is Citizens News Guild, the 501 that operates Texas Scorecard. Dunn chairs it for the princely sum of $0, which tells you the seat isn’t about the salary. In 2023 the Guild took in $2,649,150, of which 95.4 percent came from contributions. Michael Quinn Sullivan, the publisher, was paid $169,873 for his trouble. (IRS Form 990, EIN 27-1553324, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer) texasscorecard.com is the donor-funded outlet in question. It is, to be extremely clear, not this one. (That’s called a disclaimer, Michael. By the way, how’s it going with the legal recourse you threatened back in June? We ask because we haven’t heard a peep, and we know you’d never give us the satisfaction of being right about how dishonest and gaslight-y you are, right? RIGHT?!).

Moving on…

Then there’s the quieter layer: Influenceable. Defend Texas Liberty paid the firm in May 2023, and the Texas Tribune later described its business model as selling influence without bothering to disclose it was for sale. (Texas Tribune, Aug. 14, 2023 / Texas Tribune, March 28, 2024) Two more names belong on the closed-loop diagram. Macias Strategies, the same firm whose principal was sniping at Lacey Hull rather than addressing French's posts, collected $2,400,000 from Defend Texas Liberty. Pale Horse Strategies collected $839,000 from the same PAC. These are not vendors brought in for a single cycle; they are recurring fixtures in the same payee ledger that funds the endorsement infrastructure, the media arm, and the social layer. The loop is closed from donor to consultant to operator to outlet and back. (TEC campaign-finance search)

None of this proves the stadium posts were commissioned in some smoke-filled room, and we're not going to pretend it does. What it proves is that the cast of characters now defending French has spent years drinking from the same well. Same machine. Different news cycle. Not, to be clear, the same allegation as the already-confirmed 2025 antisemitism file — that one’s not up for debate.

The file that is already Confirmed

In June 2025, French posted a poll asking Texans which was the “bigger threat to America”: Jews or Muslims. This is not a bit; it happened, and we wish we were exaggerating for effect. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for his resignation as Tarrant County GOP chair, on the not-especially-controversial grounds that antisemitism and religious bigotry have no place in Texas politics. (Dallas Morning News) CAIR-Texas demanded action. That’s the settled lane we already named on June 30, 2025.

Patrick's 2025 resignation demand and True Texas Project's May 2026 endorsement of the same man are what tie the two episodes together. September is simply the sequel, same franchise, new poster: a stadium photo, “heritage Americans,” “third worlders,” with the same organizational account cheering from the front row.

In November 2025, stepping down as Tarrant chair to run for Railroad Commissioner, French vowed to “defend Texas, stop the Islamic invasion, and defeat the left,” which is a campaign slogan that reads like it was written by someone who has never had to explain it to a general-election audience. (Fort Worth Report / KERA, Nov. 12, 2025) The costumes keep changing. The donor list, notably, does not.

One data point from March 2026 that doesn't need a stadium photo to make the point: at CPAC, French called for the deportation of 100 million people. The Texas Tribune covered it. (Texas Tribune, March 27, 2026) The June 2025 poll asked which minority group is scarier. The March 2026 CPAC speech named a deportation number. This week's 2026 stadium posts picked a stadium crowd. These are not independent events; they are sequential installments of the same ideological program, each one slightly less deniable than the last.

The Hypocrisy Is the Strategy

The loudest accusers usually have the most to hide. On this evidence, treating Texas Scorecard, True Texas Project, and the Enterprise cast as moral compasses is absurd. They demand accountability from every elected official outside the tent. They do not condemn Bo’s stadium posts. They do not disavow Slaton. They do not own Paxton’s adultery file or his disclosure omissions. They do not own the white-nationalist meetings already on the Enterprise graph — including Nick Fuentes’s hours at Pale Horse Strategies in Fort Worth. The purity rhetoric is for export. Inside the tent, the product is defense.

Bryan Slaton spent years casting some of the Texas House’s loudest anti-grooming votes, which is precisely the kind of detail you’d put in a screenplay if you wanted the twist to feel inevitable rather than contrived. In May 2023, the House expelled him 147-0 after the General Investigating Committee found he had plied a 19-year-old aide with alcohol and had sex with her when she could not consent. The GIC record places Cary Cheshire at an Austin Airbnb meeting on April 3–5, 2023, where Slaton confessed and the assembled company discussed how to keep witnesses from cooperating. Cheshire’s own brother, Robert, was on Slaton’s staff and declined to cooperate. (House GIC report, May 6, 2023 / Texas Tribune / Transparency USA, Dunn)

Ken Paxton’s September 13 reply to Talarico, the one condemning “racism in all its forms” without naming French, is deflection dressed up as principle, and his connection to this particular scandal is, again, alleged at most.

The rest of the public Paxton file makes the selective-accountability point better than we could: the Laura Olson affair from the impeachment record; Angela Paxton’s July 2025 divorce filing; 2026 reporting on Tracy Duhon and an alleged secret property. The New York Times, Texas Tribune, and ProPublica have collectively documented roughly 15 properties and about $9 million in assets against a $153,000 salary, with omitted rental income and roughly $1.3 million in mortgages missing from his federal Senate disclosures. (New York Times, July 16, 2026 / Texas Tribune / ProPublica, Sept. 4, 2026) There's a thread running through the Slaton, Bowen, and Paxton exhibits that the outline of the pattern obscures if you look at each case in isolation. The Slaton aide couldn't consent. Angela Paxton filed for divorce. Tracy Duhon is the name attached to the alleged secret property. In each case, the woman at the center of the record is the evidence the network works hardest to manage, minimize, or talk around. The machine demands accountability from every elected official outside the tent, and inside the tent it specializes in changing the subject. The accusation, in every instance, turns out to be a fairly accurate description of the accuser's own tolerance for the behavior they publicly condemn. That's not a coincidence — it's a pattern, and the pattern has a gender.

Dennis Bonnen is the connective tissue for the whole Enterprise. In May 2019 he said, roughly, that you will never please or appease Empower Texans and Michael Quinn Sullivan. Shortly after, the sitting House Speaker and then-caucus chair Dustin Burrows met with Sullivan anyway. Sullivan recorded it. Bonnen offered Texas Scorecard media credentials tied to targeting ten Republican incumbents; Burrows read the names. The recording ended Bonnen’s speakership by October. (Texas Tribune, Oct. 15, 2019 / key excerpts) The man was ditched. The strategy was kept. The ten-name list maps onto the later school-choice primary pressure campaign Abbott and the same donor machine ran against the voucher holdouts. They did not reject Bonnen’s agenda. They ran it without him.

Demand purity from everyone else. Shield the people inside the tent. The racism flip sits on top of that. The same cast that calls opponents the real racists spent this week defending stadium posts about “heritage Americans” and “third worlders,” then treating the people who noticed as the problem. Accusation as confession is not a slogan here. It is the operating system.

Sources

Posts

• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099118916282810552
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099136886316945511
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099144226382479404
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099132447036228003
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099134801584259141
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099156866320285978
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099179827215335911
• Bo French — https://x.com/bofrench/status/2099146574706122760
• John Cornyn — https://x.com/JohnCornyn/status/2099140515883073626
• Julie McCarty — https://x.com/heyjuliesue/status/2099355775646732713
• Julie McCarty — https://x.com/heyjuliesue/status/2099370089543782893
• Julie McCarty — https://x.com/heyjuliesue/status/2099385942976975061
• True Texas Project — https://x.com/TrueTXProject/status/2099362218202521811
• True Texas Project — https://x.com/TrueTXProject/status/2099332063782432796
• Matt Rinaldi — https://x.com/MattRinaldiTX/status/2099166398685524387
• Matt Rinaldi — https://x.com/MattRinaldiTX/status/2099224644947697972
• Matt Rinaldi — https://x.com/MattRinaldiTX/status/2099302144637628829
• Andy Hopper — https://x.com/AndyHopperTX/status/2099163134443339797
• Luke Macias — https://x.com/lukemaciastx/status/2099292268108603555
• Luke Macias — https://x.com/lukemaciastx/status/2099251247651930526
• Luke Macias — https://x.com/lukemaciastx/status/2057625990449303837
• Luke Macias — https://x.com/lukemaciastx/status/2057797475944063393
• Luke Macias — https://x.com/lukemaciastx/status/2065252648136163488
• Cary Cheshire — https://x.com/CaryCheshireTX/status/2099172364353175719
• Jack Posobiec — https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/2099183642111025606
• Jack Posobiec — https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/2099202344130932842
• Jack Posobiec — https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/2099217529285517442
• Sidney Powell — https://x.com/SidneyPowell1/status/2098992529706229804
• Kambree Nelson — https://x.com/KamVTV/status/2099193141567861166
• Naomi Narviaz — https://x.com/nytxnn/status/2099199943386746962
• Matthew Marsden — https://x.com/matthewdmarsden/status/2099295958467256385
• Ken Paxton — https://x.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/2099253987711005098
• Jason White — https://x.com/JasonWhite88ss/status/2099189525545353694
• Karthik — https://x.com/KarthikForTexas/status/2099237314497057249
• Jon Rosenthal — https://x.com/Jon_RosenthalTX/status/2099147812395012293

Articles

• Texas Tribune, Sept. 13, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/13/bo-french-john-cornyn-republican-texas-railroad-commissioner-ut/
• NBC News, Sept. 13, 2026 — https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/texas-republicans-call-railroad-commissioner-candidate-racist-social-m-rcna597581
• Politico, Sept. 13, 2026 — https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/13/john-cornyn-bo-french-texas-students-01073901
• Dallas Morning News, Sept. 13, 2026 — https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/article/sen-john-cornyn-condemns-bo-french-ut-fans-22429853.php
• Newsweek, Sept. 14, 2026 — https://www.newsweek.com/bo-frenchs-chances-in-texas-plunge-after-ut-photo-sparks-gop-backlash-12437535
• Dallas Morning News, June 28, 2025 — https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2025/06/28/dan-patrick-tells-local-gop-chair-to-resign-for-posting-online-poll-on-jews-muslims/
• CAIR-Texas, July 1, 2025 — https://cairtx.org/cair-texas-demands-removal-of-tarrant-county-gop-chair-over-antisemitic-islamophobic-poll/
• Fort Worth Report, June 27, 2025 — https://fortworthreport.org/2025/06/27/republican-leaders-condemn-tarrant-gop-chairs-bigotry-over-jewish-muslim-people/
• The Texas Voice, May 20, 2026 — https://www.thetexasvoice.com/french-funded-slates-hit-voters-mailboxes/
• Texas Tribune, May 19, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/05/19/texas-railroad-commission-election-2026-billionaire-battleground/
• Fort Worth Report / KERA, Nov. 12, 2025 — https://fortworthreport.org/2025/11/12/tarrant-county-gop-chairman-bo-french-stepping-down-running-for-texas-railroad-commissioner/
• House GIC Slaton report, May 6, 2023 — https://lrl.texas.gov/scanned/LegReports/88/88R-GI-MATTERB-Rpt-F-Signed-B.pdf
• Texas Tribune, May 6, 2023 — https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/06/texas-legislature-bryan-slaton-investigation/
• Conroe Courier / Hearst, Feb. 16, 2023 — https://www.yourconroenews.com/neighborhood/moco/news/article/texas-right-to-life-luke-bowen-prison-solicit-teen-17788511.php
• New York Times, July 16, 2026 — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/us/paxton-vacation-condos-wealth.html
• Texas Tribune / ProPublica, Sept. 4, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/04/texas-ken-paxton-personal-financial-disclosures-ethics-law-us-senate-race/
• Texas Tribune, Oct. 15, 2019 — https://www.texastribune.org/2019/10/15/michael-quinn-sullivan-releases-tape-meeting-dennis-bonnen/
• Texas Tribune, April 4, 2024 — https://www.texastribune.org/2024/04/04/tim-dunn-joe-straus-christian-texas/
• Little Sis — The Money Behind Empower Texans — https://littlesis.org/reports/the-money-behind-empower-texans/
• CBS Austin, May 29, 2017 — https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/republican-lawmaker-i-called-immigration-authorities-on-capitol-protesters
• Austin Chronicle, June 2, 2017 — https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2017-06-02/lege-lines-a-liar-and-hateful-man/
• Texas Tribune, Jan. 12, 2024 — https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/12/farris-wilks-matt-rinaldi-defend-texas-liberty/
• Texas Tribune excerpts, Oct. 15, 2019 — https://www.texastribune.org/2019/10/15/key-excerpts-secret-recording-house-speaker-dennis-bonnen/
• Texas Tribune, Aug. 14, 2023 — https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/14/influenceable-texas-politics-ken-paxton/
• Texas Tribune, March 28, 2024 — https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/28/texas-ethics-political-disclosure-social-media-influenceable/
• Texas Tribune, July 18, 2023 — https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/18/ken-paxton-impeachment-dan-patrick/
• Texas Tribune, Sept. 21, 2023 — https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/21/dan-patrick-donation-ken-paxton-pac-impeachment/

Finance records

• Transparency USA, Timothy M and Terri Dunn — https://www.transparencyusa.org/tx/contributor/tim-dunn/contributions?cycle=2015-to-now
• Transparency USA, Farris & JoAnn Wilks — https://www.transparencyusa.org/tx/contributor/farris-and-joann-wilks
• Transparency USA, Defend Texas Liberty PAC — https://www.transparencyusa.org/tx/committee/defend-texas-liberty-pac-00084766-gpac/contributions?cycle=2015-to-now
• Texas Ethics Commission campaign-finance search — https://www.ethics.state.tx.us/search/cf/
• Citizens News Guild IRS Form 990 (EIN 27-1553324) — https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/271553324
• OpenSecrets, Tim Dunn / MAGA Inc. — https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/donor_detail/2024?id=U0000004031&name=Dunn%2C+Tim