On Saturday, the University of Texas football team had its very own “Do you believe in miracles” moment. Down 20-3 at the half to the No. 1 ranked team in the country, their chances looked impossibly bleak.
Until they didn’t.
Over the course of the second half, the Longhorns clawed back, possession by possession, until the final whistle blew on a stunning comeback win over Ohio State. In the stands of Darrell K Royal-Memorial stadium in Austin, students predictably erupted—pouring out of their seats, hugging strangers, screaming themselves hoarse in burnt orange. It was the kind of moment college football exists for—a snapshot of pure, unifying joy.
But Bo French, the Republican nominee to regulate Texas’ oil and gas industry, looked at a literal snapshot of that moment and saw a “problem.” The students in the image happened to be predominantly of South Asian descent. French posted the photo the next morning: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
He followed up, arguing the students showed “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”
For students who had just spent a Saturday night celebrating their university alongside their classmates, the message was unmistakable: to a man running for statewide office, their presence on campus—and, by extension, in the state—is a threat.
By Sunday afternoon, French had been condemned by his own party’s outgoing US senator, the sitting Texas House speaker, and a sitting congressman. French doubled down regardless.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, challenged to condemn the remarks by his Democratic opponent James Talarico in a race for the US Senate in Texas, took a different approach. Paxton responded that he condemns “racism in all its forms,” before pivoting to attack Talarico rather than addressing French’s posts.
Gov. Greg Abbott also stopped short of condemning the post directly, saying to Politico only the photo “actually shows a way that Texans can unite.”
He also said French’s message was not his own.
But that logic is flawed. French’s rhetoric doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment has become increasingly central to the Texas GOP’s messaging this cycle. At the party’s June convention in Houston, delegates spent much of their time on what many called the “Islamification of Texas,” and the party attempted to remove two delegates as punishment for their ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group Abbott has designated a terrorist organization, leading to a heated floor confrontation.
Abbott’s own actions this year go further: In January, he froze new H-1B visa petitions at Texas state agencies and public universities through May 2027, a program used disproportionately by workers from India, even as business groups warned the move would make Texas less competitive for skilled labor and could stall important cancer research.
In May, Abbott threatened to pull $530,000 in state funding from Grand Prairie unless the city canceled a private Eid al-Adha celebration at a city-owned water park, comparing the event to a “whites only” pool party; the city canceled it within hours.
In August, he sent a letter to the US Department of Justice asking it to investigate foot-washing stations for Muslim travelers at Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston’s Bush airports, similarly comparing them to “white-only bathrooms” even as they were open to all faiths.
At Trump’s midterm GOP convention in Dallas last week, Abbott—along with other top Texas Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz—denounced Islam, and promised to “fully ban Sharia law,” despite it being unenforceable in the United States.
French, who chaired the Tarrant County Republican Party until last year, has a long, well-documented history of racist rhetoric. As Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen reported in July, French sent a fundraising email invoking the 108th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution alongside an AI-generated image of his Jewish opponent, Jon Rosenthal, in the room where Russia’s royal family was executed—an apparent nod to the antisemitic “Judeo-Bolshevism” conspiracy theory that helped fuel Hitler’s rise.
French has also cited “The Camp of the Saints,” an obscure novel popular with white nationalists that depicts immigrants as “diseased, feces-eating hordes,” and called for America to “be Rhodesia,” the white-minority-ruled African state that inspired Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof’s self-description as the “Last Rhodesian.”
In an earlier Texas Monthly investigation (titled “He Wants to Deport Native Americans. He May Win Statewide Office in Texas”) Forrest Wilder detailed how French has called for deporting 100 million people—nearly a third of the US population—and for stripping citizenship from two nonwhite Texas House members. He’s called Native Americans, Afghan asylum seekers, and Muslims “third world savages,” urged followers to “round up every Muslim” for deportation, and last June asked his social media followers whether Jews or Muslims posed the “bigger threat to America“—a post that led Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to call for his resignation as Tarrant County GOP chair.
Despite that, Patrick backed French after he became the GOP nominee for Railroad Commissioner and has not yet made a statement condemning his latest post. Ditto Abbott, seemingly forgetting he’d once said French “doesn’t know anything about oil and gas” and would “wreck” the industry.
French’s opponent offers a study in contrast. Jon Rosenthal, a Democratic state representative, spent 25 years working in oil and gas as an engineer before serving four terms in the Texas House. Where French has built an online following out of racial grievance, Rosenthal’s campaign centers on keeping the state’s power grid reliable and lowering utility costs—the actual responsibilities of the commission both men are running for, which regulates fossil fuel production and pipeline safety, not immigration policy.
On Sunday, Rosenthal thanked that outgoing senator who pushed back on French, John Cornyn, “for having the decency to call out this racist rhetoric.” On Monday he told the Texas Tribune French’s latest remarks led to a fundraising boost for his campaign.
