Top Texas GOP Donor and Nick Fuentes Seem to Agree
Jewish people shouldn't hold office, women shouldn't work
In early October, white nationalist Nick Fuentes spent over six hours meeting with Jonathan Stickland, the head of Pale Horse Strategies, a prominent Texas GOP consulting firm. Texas Republicans immediately split into two groups: those who wanted to condemn Fuentes and anyone who would meet with him, and those who seemed hell bent on brushing the meeting aside. Something that many on the side of Fuentes seemed to have in common was their reliance on Tim Dunn, a billionaire backer of the Republican Party of Texas who has spent years working to move the party to the right (Dunn is now positioned to become even wealthier).
Because rightwing Texas politics are messy and full of creeping astroturf, Stickland also ran the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, though he has since been removed from his role. Defend Texas Liberty’s primary funder is Tim Dunn; unsurprisingly, the PAC has given Pale Horse over $800,000. Chris Russo, who chauffeured Fuentes to the Pale Horse office building, is the founder and president of Texans for Strong Borders (TFSB) – another organization that receives money from Dunn through Pale Horse and Defend Texas Liberty.
Even once it was revealed that Russo ran several pro-Fuentes social media accounts under the username Optics Respecter, members of the Texas GOP continued to argue the meeting was harmless. “No Republican should be condemning another Republican for a meeting. This is the game of fascists. I will not play it,” Tarrant County GOP chair (and former Texans for Strong Borders board member) Bo French wrote on Twitter.
“Don’t punch right” has long been a core belief of conservatism. Dangling the threat of being ostracized from the party, which likely includes many people’s social circle and possibly their livelihoods, is an easy way to keep them from standing up to bad actors. This rhetoric was successful; earlier this month, the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) held their final meeting of 2023. A resolution to condemn association with Nick Fuentes was on the docket, but it proved controversial. Ultimately, a watered down version of the Fuentes resolution failed in a vote of 32-29.
Committee member Morgan Cisneros Graham, who has been a vocal critic of anyone meeting with Fuentes, pointed out that many of the members who fought against allowing the Log Cabin Republicans space at the GOP convention are now asking for a big tent. “Back then it was ‘they don’t represent our values and including them implies we agree with their views on homosexual behavior.’ Now it’s ‘meeting and working with Nazis doesn’t mean you agree with their views.’”
But what if Fuentes has finally found himself in the orbit of a billionaire backer who agrees with his views?
Fuentes has spent years working to shift the Overton Window, gleefully noting every time the Republican Party or mainstream conservative influencers have “been forced rightward even more.” When TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk, who Fuentes has fought bitterly with in the past, tweeted “whiteness is great,” Fuentes shared it to Telegram with the caption “Groypers won.” When Matt Walsh talked about the preservation of the white race, Fuentes shared the post and wrote, “Well well well looks like Charlottesville won.”
Texas Tribune reporter Robert Downen, who has covered Defend Texas Liberty for years, recently explained on a podcast that Dunn is happy to spend large sums of money to punish any candidate that deviates from the messaging he wants. Dunn will spend endlessly on a primary challenger, even if he knows the candidate he’s sposoring will fail. His “whole point is to move the Overton Window on where the Texas GOP is,” Downen explained, adding that, to Dunn, half a million “is absolutely nothing and it's worth it.”
Tim Dunn has said he does not believe non-Christians should hold office or be in positions of power. Dunn shared this opinion with then Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Joe Straus, who is Jewish. When asked for her thoughts on why Dunn had spent so much time and money going after Straus, a former member of his staff told Texas Monthly, “I think they really have not liked [having] a Jewish Speaker.”
In addition to his political meddling, Tim Dunn runs Yellow Balloons, a devotional podcast that doesn’t shy away from politics. In an October 2023 episode, Dunn encouraged his listeners to make sure they were registered to vote, noting that more Christians registering to vote would have the added benefit of more Christians on juries. “Some of the reason people don't register to vote is because they don't want to do jury duty. Well, that means ‘I don't want Christians making the justice decisions. I want non Christians.’ Obviously not a good idea.”
While Fuentes is less concerned with voting, he has expressed the rest of these ideas throughout his livestreaming career. “I think the number one issue right now is that America has to become a Christian nation, and as a Christian nation, needs to have Christian leadership,” he told InfoWars host Alex Jones. Fuentes has ranted on his show that Jewish people in government have stood in the way of his goals. “We want to live in a Christian country, with Christian rulers, and Christian legislators, and Christian judges, and Christian law. And Christians! And Jewish people can be here, but they can’t make our laws,” Fuentes said in June 2022 stream. At a press conference over the summer, he doubled down on this. “We need Christians running America, not Jews…we gotta get rid of Jewish power in America.”
Both Fuentes and Dunn aspire to remove people they see as RINOs from the GOP. At the December 2020 Million MAGA March, Fuentes railed against the Republicans who were not willing to commit election fraud for Trump. “We are fighting against the traitors within our own ranks…this is just one example of what the Republican Party does time and time again. They betray their constituents.”
On another October 2023 episode of Yellow Balloons, Dunn talked about his strategy to keep Republicans in check.“I work inside the Republican Party. I have tremendous enemies in the Republican Party that can’t stand me, because what I try to do is root out hypocrisy…You want to be in a position where you say, ‘In order to win my support, you guys have to actually do what you say.’”
After Trump lost the 2020 election, Fuentes explained in a livestream why it was important to stand behind him. “It is about upsetting and challenging the power structures in this country.” Support for Trump is to “destroy the political power apparatus that exists. We’re electing him primarily not to govern the country better, but primarily to uproot and destroy the people who have been governing for the past 30 years.”
In 2012, Dunn was the second largest donor to the Campaign for Primary Accountability PAC. The PAC, whose goal was to unseat the “permanent political class” of both parties, ultimately helped Beto O’Rourke win his congressional race. Of course, Dunn has thoughts on how people win elections that don’t seem to account for the effects of his checkbook.
“God appoints all authorities,” Dunn explained last December in a speech at the Convention of States annual gathering. “Government's job is to execute wrath on evil, and when it does, it’s executing something that God appointed it to do, and that’s God’s wrath. It’s a good thing, government is. Well, who has God appointed as the authority in America? Us. And we the people have atrophied our citizen responsibility…because we’ve turned it over to experts.”
At a 2020 Stop the Steal rally in Michigan, Fuentes agreed with this sentiment. “We live in the United States of America, and in the United States, it is we the people that have sovereignty.”
At the 2019 Convention of States conference, Dunn said the Marxist elites are now offering up the religion of political correctness. “Political: determined by people. Correct: moral absolutes….not rule of God, rule of the elites. Consent of the elites…they’re becoming bolder and more brazen in their quest for tyranny. It’s becoming clear they want to kill us.”
“Do you think it might be a problem that the people who are running your banks, who are making the movies your children watch —do you think it’s a problem that they believe all Christians must die?” Fuentes asked the audience at a presser earlier this year. He then assured the crowed, “we’re in a Holy War, and I will tell you this. Because we’re willing to die in the Holy War, we will make them die in the Holy War." We have God on our side.”
The Christian nationalist movement is not particularly friendly to women. “These days it seems like people are okay with women in the workforce…I don’t think women should be in the workforce, frankly I don’t know if they should be voting,” Fuentes said in a July 2021 presser.
During a 2022 podcast interview, Dunn gave his thoughts on why there was a workforce shortage. In a dual income household, by the time the “lower income earner” pays for gas, workday lunches, and childcare, their job is probably actually hemorrhaging money. These lower earners probably decided, “I like being with my kids…and I’ve got more money than I did before, because I learned to bake again and I learned how to cook again…I hope it’s a lot of that, because I think that’s a real positive thing.” It is possible that Dunn, whose views on Christian nationalism put him far in the past, thinks men should be baking, cooking, and taking care of their own children - but it certainly is not likely.
After the SREC failed to condemn Fuentes, Speaker of the House Dade Phelan tweeted that the vote was “despicable. Texas GOP/SREC can’t even bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers or cut ties with their top donor who brought them to the dance,” a reference to Defend Texas Liberty and Dunn.
While I agree with Phelan’s sentiment, perhaps it is time to ruminate on the differences between the “top donor” and Fuentes.
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The name of that GOP consulting firm is creepy and ominous: "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword, and with hunger, and with death and with the beasts of the earth." Is that their goal?
The difference between their "top donor" and Fuentes?
Money. And that's it.