GOP Mad at Candidate For Doing Xenophobia The Wrong Way

Bo French wasn’t always this way. When he first ran for statewide office in Texas in 2016, he was an oil industry scion who hadn’t quite found his way: a partnership with American sniper Chris Kyle had fallen apart after his death; other business ventures petered out. In an ad, French portrayed himself as a nice guy: a compassionate conservative, and a family man to boot. His wife appeared in one campaign video, describing him as a “humble” man possessed of a “servant’s heart.” 

Ten years later, French portrays himself differently. He’s now openly xenophobic, an attribute that attracted national attention when, last Sunday, he posted to X that a group of nonwhite UT students celebrating at a football was “a problem” that had was “now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” It caused a firestorm, and was enough to earn condemnation from the Texas GOP; not a small feat given that Republicans in the state have spent the last year running on demonizing Muslims.

It started when, the morning after a UT-Ohio state football game, French, a prolific user of X, reposted a TV freeze-frame that another user had made of students at UT, many of whom appeared to be South Asian. “Bollywood University,” the initial poster wrote, before French likened UT admissions to “HR departments.”

Perhaps feeling that he was onto something, French doubled down minutes later. He posted a different image of nonwhite students celebrating, dressed in Texas Longhorns gear.

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

Republican leaders across the Texas firmament condemned French as they could. Attorney general and current Senate candidate Ken Paxton (R) tried to do so while suggesting that his opponent James Talarico (D) was the real racist; Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a statement that began with the phrase, “That is not my message.” Karl Rove reportedly said that he would grant French the distinction of being the first Republican candidate in decades to not get his vote.

Grasping why French’s UT post crossed a line and earned this reaction requires background both on the Texas nominee’s campaign of low-rent racism and the Texas GOP’s attitude towards the influx of Asian immigrants in the state.

French’s post wasn’t anything particularly new for him. He’s spent the last year denigrating people online in increasingly brazen ways as he runs for a position that will grant him oversight of oil regulation and waste byproduct policy. Last year, French posted a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims posed a greater threat to the United States. At CPAC, he endorsed 100 million deportations — 29% of the U.S. population. He posed for a photo with former CBP commander and recently minted far-right impresario Greg Bovino. As recently as July, he wrote, “Ok boys, it’s time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” It’s unclear what prompted that mix of John Wayne and gutter racism.

Much of French’s diatribes have focused on Islam and Muslim immigrants. He’s said that Muslims should not be allowed in the United States and accused “islamists” of “using our Constitution against us.” That kind of rhetoric, as extreme as it is, has become a staple for state GOP leaders. Over the past year, both Abbott and Paxton have launched investigations and taken action against the Muslim community in the state. The Texas primary Republican ballot this year contained a question asking whether to ban Sharia law; it received 95 percent support.

Texas politicians have directed much of this Islamophobia towards communities in the suburbs north of Dallas. The area has seen massive growth in recent years, and is now home to large immigrant communities from South Asia. One mosque in the area, called EPIC, became the target of vitriol last year after releasing a video outlining a planned community meant to serve Muslim Texans.

At the same time, a coterie of local far-right activists and social media influencers with national platforms and nativist leanings have descended on the area, trying to hold up South Asian immigration in general to the area as a scandal. They tend to single out Indian immigrants in particular, filming videos with shots of Hindu temples and South Asian businesses.

The cast of characters here are a universe that encompasses TPUSA at one end (Savannah Hernandez, a contributor, released a video from the area titled “the Muslim and Indian Takeover of Texas”) and locals with an axe to grind at the other. One man, a former T-Mobile employee who gained a social media following, told me in April that he objected to South Asian immigration to the area because he regarded it as part of a larger globalist conspiracy involving the cell phone company that had once employed him.

For these activists, and for Bo French, it’s the Great Replacement come to life: a far-right conspiracy theory which holds that elites are secretly plotting to remove white Americans and replace them with nonwhite foreigners.

Senior Trump administration officials, most notably Vice President JD Vance, have endorsed this idea. Last year, in a speech to the Claremont Institute, Vance said that some Americans — those with heritage dating back to the Civil War — have more claim to citizenship than those who simply believe in the country’s values. It’s an idea that underpins the administration’s failed attempt to end Birthright Citizenship.

State Republicans seem to have tried to have it both ways. They consciously boosted anti-Muslim sentiment in the state, trying to harvest cheap votes out of fear of an unknown religion that happens to be shared with some of the country’s geopolitical opponents. But they largely steered clear of and, in some cases, attempted to push back on the notion that South Asians broadly represented a threat.

Bo French waded straight into that. In the logic of the Great Replacement, some people can never be Americans by virtue of their birth. They’re not full citizens, the conspiracy theory goes — they can never be, even if they fully assimilate. It’s a stock part of GOP messaging and policy under the second Trump administration — French took it to its logical endpoint.