He Wants to “Round Up Every Muslim” — and Oversee the Oil Industry In Texas

Lone Star MAGA candidate Bo French is an unvarnished “bigot.” Just ask his fellow Republicans.

(Screenshot via X)

The Democratic Party has been dogged by problematic candidates in this election cycle, chief among them the secret–Nazi tattoo haver, racist shitposter, and accused rapist Graham Platner. (Platner denies the rape claim.)

But while Democrats have rightly put Platner in the rearview, top Republicans are rallying behind one of the most extreme candidates in memory, Bo French, who is running for statewide office in Texas, seeking to oversee the oil and gas industry.

French is an unvarnished bigot, who recently served as GOP chair for Tarrant County, home to Fort. Worth. He has called Native Americans “third world savages” and argued they should be “denaturalized and deported.” French is also an unabashed Islamophobe who believes “we have to round up every Muslim and send them home.” He wants that same fate imposed on “all the Chinese” in America.

French’s open prejudice exposed him to a brief cancellation attempt by his own party in 2025. The state’s Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick slammed French for “antisemitism and religious bigotry” and called on him to resign his party post after French posted a poll on X asking his followers: “Who is a bigger threat to America?” with the choices being “Jews” or “Muslims.”

The Republican mayor of Ft. Worth also called for French’s ouster, decrying his “bigotry and hate.” French didn’t resign; instead, he deleted the poll and expressed “regret” for having posted it and how people “misunderstood the intent” — which he characterized as part of a personal campaign against “radical Islamists.”

A MAGA Statewide Nominee

Running as a “MAGA Conservative,” French is now the Republican nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. Despite its name, the three-member commission regulates the production of oil and gas in the state as well as Texas’s pipeline system. The Lone Star State produces about 40 percent of the nation’s oil and more than a quarter of its natural gas, making the commission one of the most powerful regulatory bodies in the country.

French won a contested primary against the commission’s incumbent chair. He now has the backing of Patrick, who previously called for his resignation, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who warned during the primary race that French “doesn’t know anything about oil and gas” and would “wreck the miracle” of Texas’s oil and gas boom. Far from being ostracized by his fellow statewide candidates, French was recently photographed standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the Texas GOP slate.

(French, standing behind Gov. Abbott, in a display of GOP solidarity in July)

French, in his mid-50s, hails from a West Texas oil family and pursued a career in energy trading. He’s also run a pair of failed campaigns for the Texas House. Tall and square-jawed, with a TV-ready smile and loosely gelled-back hair, French has the cut of a chamber-of-commerce Republican. But he posts on the internet like a 4chan troll.

‘We Are All Rhodesians’

French’s prejudice knows few bounds when it comes to Islam, which he claims “serves Satan” and should be subject to a “ban” because, he adds, “everyone knows the Muslim culture is one of violence.” French denigrates the faith of 2 billion across the globe as “an ideology that says you have to convert or they get to kill you,” adding, nonsensically: “They also get to rape your wife and daughter.”

When his primary opponent denounced him as “anti-Muslim,” French responded by calling him a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) and vowed: “I will never apologize for standing up for our Christian values or opposing the Islamification of Texas.” French appears significantly triggered by the mayor of New York. He alleges that Zohran Mamdami is a “jihadi” who “shed the suicide vest and put on the cloak of GRC” — an acronym French uses for someone he alleges is a “gay race communist.” (Mamdani is married to a woman.)

Open Islamophobia is, regrettably, not disqualifying in MAGA politics. The nomination of Abdul El-Sayed to be the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan has unleashed a new wave of GOP hate toward the Muslim community, typified by Rep. Nancy Mace, who made a bigoted blast on X, alleging (falsely) that, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

But French is a broad-based hater. He calls Democrats the “party of evil,” refers to Americans not in the labor force as “low IQ parasites,” and believes the abuses of the Red Scare 1950s didn’t go far enough, recently posting: “It’s time we finish what McCarthy started.”

French also espouses the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Rooted in antisemitism, the theory falsey posits that powerful interests (typically cast as Jews) are conspiring to flood America and other Western countries with new immigrants to dilute white power. “The Great Replacement is real,” French posted last November. Less surprising for a would-be fossil fuel regulator in Texas, French also decries the climate crisis as a conspiracy. “This has always been an op to destroy the success of American energy dominance,” he has written. “And therefore America itself.”

Most disturbing, as highlighted recently by Texas Monthly, French has a dark nostalgia for Rhodesia, the short-lived, white-ruled quasi state in Southern Africa that was overthrown in 1980 to create Zimbabwe. French has hit send on X posts like: “We need to be Rhodesia,” and, “We are all Rhodesians now.” He has also written of the fall of Rhodesia as an example of what happens “when communists win,” and argued that “heritage Americans” are now in mortal danger: “The race communists are currently running the same playbook here in the U.S.” he wrote in January. “Are we going to let them win? If we do the result will be the massacre of heritage Americans.”

In June, French also posted on X a battle cry popular among white nationalists in Europe, who seek the mass expulsion of minorities: “Remigration Now.” French says that he seeks the expulsion of as many as 100 million “foreigner[s]” from America.

French did not respond to an interview request seeking to clarify his views.

Billionaire Backers

In any normal political environment, French would be a radioactive far-right sideshow. In the Texas GOP, he has not only been embraced by GOP primary voters but the most powerful billionaires in state politics: a pair of West Texas Christian nationalist donors named Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. (For more on Dunn in particular read a 2024 profile I wrote in Rolling Stone.)

Dunn and Wilks made their fortunes in the oil fields and are the top donors to a political action committee called the Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice. That PAC has steered more than $923,000 into French’s candidacy, according to campaign finance records.

Supporting French is not Dunn and Wilks’s first brush with bigots. Their current PAC used to go by the much shorter name Defend Texas Liberty, but underwent a full rebrand after DTL’s then-president was caught having a daylong meeting with Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying leader of the white nationalist Groyper cult.

Dunn later characterized that meeting as a “blunder.” His backing of French, however, seems no mistake. Two other PACs linked to Dunn and his family have given French another $410,000. (Dunn did not respond to a request for comment.)

When he’s not posting bigoted bile on Elon Musk’s platform, French is pursuing a pro-driller agenda that sounds like sweet relief to oil producers. He promises he’ll be “prioritizing the operators who keep the Texas economy running” while vowing to “cut regulations” and end the “stranglehold on oil and gas operators.”

French’s Democratic opponent in the general election is state representative Jon Rosenthal, a former oil industry engineer who has served in a Houston-area seat in the Texas House. Rosenthal describes the current commission as acting like a “pay-to-play playground for oil and gas insiders,” insisting: “Texans deserve regulators who answer to them, not to corporate big money donors.”

Rosenthal also happens to be a member of one of the faiths French identified as a national “threat” in that infamous, deleted X poll. He declared in a recent speech: “This Jewish engineer is ready to beat Bo French, and send him home in November.”

A Purple State Connundrum

Bo French is MAGA, unmasked. And his candidacy is a symptom of the extremist pull of right-wing politics in Texas, which has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.

GOP primaries in the state are typically low-turnout affairs and tend to be dominated by the most rabidly conservative Texas voters. Far-right candidates running like French — who run on hot-button social conflict, and get boosted by far-right billionaire campaign cash — tend do very well in this environment, boxing out the party’s big-business moderates. Once they’ve secured statewide nomination, these wingnuts can typically rely on Texas’s strong, statewide Republican tilt to vault them into office.

This dynamic helps explain why Republican standard bearers in Texas keep getting more extreme, even as the state itself has been trending purple.

Yet 2026 may be a turning point. The state’s noxious right wing attorney general Ken Paxton ousted the more-moderate incumbent Big John Cornyn to win the GOP Senate nomination. This has turned the general election into a tossup, with Democrats fielding a prodigious political talent in state legislator James Talarico.

Texas politics are veering into a state of cognitive dissonance. If the election were held today, Texas would probably elect both the progressive Democratic seminarian Talarico and the right-wing Republican venom-spewer French on the same ballot.

For his part, Talarico is running explicitly on notions of Christian love, which, no surprise, has made him a target for French’s hate. He calls Talarico, who is straight and has a girlfriend, a “gay race communist” and “LGBTalarico.” Indeed, French seemingly can’t abide the idea of a liberal Christian gaining popular support. When Talarico recently received the backing of a Black pastor, French posted a video of the endorsement while maligning the house of worship. “This is not a church,” he claimed. “It is a demonic indoctrination center.”

Tim Dickinson is the senior political writer for The Contrarian.

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