Meet the Aspiring Texas Oil Regulator Who Wants to Deport 100 Million People 

FORT WORTH, TEXAS — A swanky stockyards-themed venue in this Texas city hosted a far-right politician whose candidacy for a top state oil regulator position asks a simple question: is racist posturing enough to win an election? 

Far-right figures in attendance helped set the scene. Kyle Rittenhouse, Ken Paxton, Brandon Herrera, and an influencer called “MAGA Barbie” all milled around at Bo French’s launch party in early April for his runoff campaign for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. It’s a powerful role that oversees the Texas oil and gas industry. 

French will face off against Republican incumbent Jim Wright in a runoff primary election on Tuesday for a seat on the three member commission. The energy investor and outsider candidate is running a campaign that has gone extremely heavy on issues that have little to do with what it means to be a Texas oil regulator. He’s largely campaigned on culture war intangibles, like cleansing Texas’ oil sector of Islam, fighting DEI, and deporting 100 million people. While chair of the Tarrant County GOP last year, French earned condemnation from fellow Texas Republicans for posting a poll that asked whether Jews or Muslims posed a greater threat to the United States.

These are largely outside the remit of Texas oil regulation, but his platform has been successful  in earning French a lot of attention. French won 31.7 percent of the primary vote in March, forcing a Republican primary runoff against incumbent commissioner Jim Wright, who received 32 percent in the initial five-person primary race, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office. 

French’s ascent has sparked consternation in the mainstream Texas GOP: Gov. Greg Abbott, who is campaigning for Wright, said this week that French would “wreck” the state’s oil and gas industry if elected; an association that represents the country’s oil and gas majors is also backing Wright. Two influential conservative billionaires — Miriam Adelson and Harlan Crow — have contributed money to a pro-Wright super PAC and to Wright’s candidacy, respectively. 

But underneath French’s attention-grabbing campaign for a fairly mundane regulatory office is a more prosaic story. 

The Texas Railroad Commission is run by three members, each a commissioner elected to a six-year term. The name is antiquated (it hasn’t regulated railroads since 2005), but its powers are broad: it helps set natural gas prices, and oversees pipeline safety and environmental concerns. In 2020, during the COVID-induced chaos in the oil market, a commissioner negotiated with OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) and Russia over oil production. Critically, commissioners promulgate new regulations. 

The commissioners, all of whom are Republican have long been criticized for being beholden to the industry they regulate. French’s candidacy reveals a split in that industry. On one side, bigger, multinational producers are largely on board with new regulations that would avert what experts describe as a looming environmental catastrophe due to wastewater. They’re backing Wright. On the other are smaller, independent drillers who oppose the regulations, and back French, the Houston Chronicle reported.

At campaign events and in local media appearances, French has cast his campaign strategy as something like a Russian nesting doll: there’s culture war on the outside, for mass audience consumption, but the deeper you go, it’s the oil business. French said last week that he decided to run largely because Wright introduced the first reform of oil waste regulations in more than 40 years. The issue has become more severe as more Texas wells are drilled via fracking, which in turns causes more wastewater. 

Typically, drillers in Texas dispose of waste by digging an earthen hole next to the well, filling it with the waste, and then sealing it once the well is drilled. That can cause contamination to nearby groundwater. In some cases, pressure builds up over many years, causing geysers of toxic waste to burst into the air. 

 For the Texas Railroad Commission, new regulations are a last-ditch attempt to avoid what could be a massive environmental disaster as drillers struggle to dispose of the massive amounts of wastewater that the region generates. The new regulations backed by Wright don’t go far enough, some environmental advocates say: they wouldn’t have stopped recent toxic geyser bursts; they only require some waste pits to be outfitted with a sealed lining. New Mexico, which straddles part of the Permian oil basin, has required all waste pits to have lining since 2008.

All the same, those bare-minimum environmental regulations championed by Wright and adopted by the commission last year have provoked French’s ire. He derided them in a recent interview with a local news outlet as “New Mexico-style pit rules,” before likening them to the ultimate bogeyman: Barack Obama.

“I compare them to kind of Obama, Biden-era EPA-type regulations on our industry, really making it harder for small operators and small independents to get into the business,” French remarked. 

Wright, who owns an oilfield waste services company, has described the rules as taking two years to draft after many more years of failed attempts. More changes will be needed soon, he’s said, describing the 40-plus year-old rules that he led the charge to change as “antiquated.” To the New York Times, he remarked, “I’m not the greatest politician in the world by any means,” before adding: “But this really isn’t a political office. This is a regulatory office.”

French did not return TPM’s request for comment. 

Oil kid meets ‘American Sniper’

In podcast interviews, French has described his upbringing as the scion of a Texas oil family. His father, Bob French, was an independent driller in West Texas and a noted Thoroughbred horse owner. French’s grandfather, Lloyd Robert, cofounded the Permian Basin Oil Show in 1940. 

French has said that he grew up in Midland, Texas. He had a few run-ins with the law in his twenties: he was charged with theft by check on two separate occasions; prosecutors dismissed both after he paid restitution. 

By the 2000s, French had gone into business with Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL sniper and “American Sniper” author who became a symbol of War on Terror-era braggadocious special forces operators. The two partnered in a company that offered military-style “tactical training” to civilians and government agencies. Kyle Bass — a pro-Trump hedge fund manager who was reportedly considered for a Trump administration appointment — introduced the two, court filings said. 

After Chris Kyle was killed in 2013, the business foundered. French ran in 2016 in the Republican primary for a state legislature seat. He lost after an ugly campaign: Kyle’s widow sent him a cease-and-desist letter demanding he stop using the sniper’s likeness. French later sued a political operative for his opponent, who claimed that he filed a false child abuse report which caused a Child Protective Services investigation. 

A new political career

French spent the next several years getting more deeply involved in politics in Tarrant County, Texas, home to Fort Worth, he said on a recent podcast. Eventually, he became head of the Tarrant County GOP.

It was there that he first really began to antagonize mainstream Texas Republicans and gain attention through far-right, outlandish and racist social media posting. After French asked on X whether Muslims or Jews were a “bigger threat” to America, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick demanded that he resign. French refused.

Since then he’s mostly leaned into Islamophobia as an attention-seeking tactic. He’s called Muslims “savages” and demanded their deportation; he’s said that Texas mosques are “training centers” for an “ideology” of people who “get to rape your wife and daughter.” In January, he accused Alex Pretti, the protestor killed in Minneapolis by Customs and Border Protection agents, of “seditious conspiracy.”

It’s all a far cry from his 2016 campaign, which was fairly milquetoast. At one point, French’s wife described him in a campaign ad as a “humble” man with a “servant’s heart.” 

French has mixed his hateful rhetoric towards Muslims with language that goes to his background in oil. He promised to fight “radical climate change ideology” and “foreign capture of our oil and gas industries” in his campaign announcement. When the city of Corpus Christi began to run out of water this year, French pinned the blame on a nearby plastics factory, which is majority-owned by the Saudi government. French played that up. In a recent runoff campaign ad, French attacked Wright, accusing his opponent of selling the city’s water to a “Muslim foreign government” and claiming a Delaware court had caught the plastics company trying to “enact Sharia law in America.” 

“Do you really want a commissioner who would sell out his own neighbors to a Muslim government? I don’t,” he concluded. 

Per Inside Climate and a review of campaign finance filings, this Islamophobic rhetoric worked. Texas billionaires who operate independent oil drillers gave $375,000 to a PAC, the Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice, that supported French in the primary. 

French has talked up some elements of the job that are actually within the oil regulator’s remit. That includes the wastewater problems, as well as the sticky issue of plugging thousands of abandoned wells. It’s expensive to do so, and oil operators whose companies go bankrupt — or who are negligent — fail to plug them, leaving the responsibility to the oil commission. It’s expensive work, and the regulators are having trouble keeping up.

It’s a complicated policy issue, but one that can’t escape the culture wars, in French’s view. The problem, he said, is another example of DEI.

“It’s gone to award contracts based on skin color or based on gender, as opposed to awarding contracts based on merit,” he said.