Steve Bannon Casts Bo French as the Future of the GOP

Steve Bannon has spent years trying to make himself the face of resurgent white resentment in America, championing the Trump administration as a means to punish the movement’s enemies while pushing the president to try for an unconstitutional third term.

But now, with the president’s approval rating at historic lows and the upcoming midterms set to wrest Congress away from the Republican Party, Bannon is looking downballot, stumping for Bo French, the Texas politician who has turned his race for a job regulating oil and gas in the state into a vehicle to test how far open racism can get you in politics.

In a speech on Saturday to the Young Republicans of Texas convention, Bannon said that Texas had “the most important race in the nation.”

“The most important race in this nation is Bo French and the Railroad Commission head because of what Bo French stands for,” Bannon said.

It invites the question: Why Bo French?

These days, French is best known for a racist social media post that he made last month which went viral. Atop a picture of Indian-American students celebrating at a UT-Austin game, French wrote, “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

It’s a politics that drops any pretense that the problem with immigration is the presence of undocumented immigrants. Rather, French suggests, the problem is legal immigration, by non-white people.

That racist idea isn’t new on the right. For the past few years, this idea has mostly taken the form of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which sweatily blames a cabal of shadowy elites for trying to “replace” white people with non-white immigrants. Bannon has endorsed the idea over the years, in part by citing the Camp of the Saints, a 1970s French novel in which a flotilla of migrants from India overruns Western Europe.

What’s more shocking is the way in which presence of Indian-Americans in Texas has driven a wedge into the state’s Republican Party. A series of right-wing influencers, some with close ties to the Trump administration, descended on the Dallas suburb of Frisco earlier this year. The town hosts a large community of South Asians; these influencers held up the existence of Indians in the area as a scandal in itself and supposed proof of the Great Replacement.

French has gone all-in on racism in recent years as a strategy to build out his political career. Before the post about Indian-American students at UT-Austin, he published a poll on X asking whether Jews or Muslims were “a bigger threat to America?” The post prompted statewide Republican leaders like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) to demand that French resign from his position as head of the Tarrant County GOP. He refused.

Bannon has cast French as an important figure in the battle for the custody of the GOP that he expects to come after Trump leaves the scene, suggesting that the revulsion that some senior Republicans have expressed towards French foreshadows trouble in the party ahead.

“That shows you the established order of the Republican party believes that they are all set for getting beyond Trump,” he told CBS’s Ted Koppel last week.

At the Texas Young Republicans convention, Bannon marveled that he was the “least controversial speaker” among the world of ethnoreligious chauvinists, deportation monomaniacs, and others that he helped create. Stephen Wolfe, the author of a book on Christian Nationalism that called for a Christian theocracy, was there, Bannon said, as was Jason Killmeyer, a former ICE chief of staff who left the agency this year and now wants to create a “Civilian Deportation Corps. “

These are the people, Bannon said, who have “the guts and the fortitude to talk about what the real problems in the country are, starting in Texas, and to go through solutions for those problems.”