Article refers to extremist Texas apparatchik David Barton, whose group finagled free use of our County-owned World Golf Village County Convention Center for an anti-Gay marriage hate rally on March 15, 2005. Sheriff DAVID SHOAR's organized crime division investigators threatened with arrests the two ladies inviting protests on social media, falsely claiming our County-owned Convention Center was "private property." They lied. Hate rally organizers, in County documents, promised a meeting open to everyone, no merchandise sales and no fundraising. In fact, tickets were distributed only to churches, merchandise was openly sold, and funds were raised in each deposited in KFC buckets.
These misguided folks have no respect for the Rule of Law Thanks to my friend and fellow Georgetown University graduate, Peter Montgomery, and his indefatigable work for Right Wing Watch and People for the American Way.
From The New York Times Magazine:
How Two Billionaire Preachers Remade Texas Politics They control Republican politics in the state. Now they’re poised to take their theocratic agenda nationwide. (NY Times)
Ava Kofman reviewed campaign finance reports and sermons and conducted more than 50 interviews across Texas. This article was done in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica
Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”
Listen to this article, read by January LaVoy
McCaig told me he didn’t mind “committing the sacrilege” of talking to other reporters, though he confessed that he often had trouble articulating Dunn and Wilks’s goals when asked. “They say they want to make things even more conservative,” he observed, “but I don’t know what else is left to accomplish socially.” Buoyed by the MAGA wave, the Legislature has passed bills — permitless-carry laws, abortion bans, L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions, border militarization — that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years earlier. “A lot of pro-life leaders in the state don’t want to give women the death penalty,” McCaig continued. “You start to wonder what their true agenda is, and I think it’s power.”
The most far-reaching of these efforts to consolidate power may be the Convention of States Project. A highly controversial effort, partly funded by Dunn, it represents one of the best hopes for Christian Nationalists, among other interested parties, who want to transform the laws of the land in one fell swoop. “When we started the Convention of States — and I was there at the beginning — I knew we had to have a spiritual revival, a Great Awakening and a political restoration for our country to come back to its roots,” Dunn said at a 2019 summit for the group, where he spoke alongside Barton. “What I did not expect is that the Convention of States would be an organization that would trigger that Great Awakening.”
The Convention of States Project takes its cues from Article V of the Constitution, which proposes two paths for constitutional amendments. The familiar path — a two-thirds vote in each chamber of Congress to be ratified by three-fourths of states — has been deployed successfully 27 times. The other path, which involves two-thirds of states passing resolutions to call for a constitutional convention, is rarely discussed and has never been used.
One afternoon in San Antonio, Mark Meckler, the president of the Convention of States and one of Dunn’s close friends, pitched a packed room of delegates on this second path. Wearing a blue trucker cap printed with a C.O.S. logo, he mocked the group’s critics, which included “every other baby-killing America-hating Marxist organization in the country” as well as the John Birch Society. “Thank God, those people were not at the Alamo,” Meckler said. “Because we wouldn’t remember the Alamo, because there would have been no Alamo, because all those people would have just run away.”
Meckler, who lives in a home that Dunn transferred to him near Austin, is a deft salesman. He said he regularly hears from people who find the prospect of a convention frightening. During his lecture, he sought to assuage those fears, casting the prospect of a Constitutional convention as a humdrum exercise that would bore even its own attendees. “What’s going to happen at a convention?” Meckler asked, pausing for dramatic effect. “People are going to make suggestions.” Some of the delegates laughed. “Are you guys scared? I’ve never been to a meeting where I was afraid of people making suggestions.” Yet nothing in Article V limits the scope of the laws that might be changed.
“It’s a gamble, but if it pays off, it would be the biggest opportunity ever for billionaires to transform the government,” Montgomery, the researcher of the religious right, said. The Mercer family and Koch-funded groups have also backed the effort. The Convention of States says that 19 states have passed its resolutions. To win over the remaining 15, the group has started to back primary challengers to Republicans who oppose them in states across the country. During a 2018 appearance on Fox, Meckler admitted that critics of the movement were getting at “something truthful” when they complained that the convention was “intended to reverse 115 years of progressivism. And we say, ‘Yes, it is.’”
This spring, Rogers took me on a tour of his ranch, a 3,000-acre property that abuts the Brazos River. “Our forefathers intended for ranchers and farmers to be able to serve in the Capitol,” he told me as we cut through the tall grass.
Rogers insisted to me that he was better off working his land, because it allowed him to spend more time with his grandchildren. But as the afternoon turned to evening and he began to play the consolatory voice mail messages he had received from constituents and colleagues, it was evident the loss still rankled. “I’ve been coming up with a short list of people interested in running for office,” he said, “but I’ve yet to find anyone who’s willing to go through what I did without billionaire support.”
Dunn’s wealth is only growing. Last December, he signed an agreement to sell his oil company to Occidental Petroleum in a deal valued at $12.4 billion. Seventeen days later, he made the $5 million contribution to a Trump PAC. Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2016 digital campaign manager, recently bought a modern farm-style house around the corner from Dunn’s compound in Midland. Dunn has poured millions into a new effort led by Parscale to use A.I. to target voters.
Before I left, Rogers brought out a little-known book, first published in 1998, called “Confrontational Politics.” Its author, H.L. Richardson, was a Republican state senator in California who was known for ruthlessly campaigning against other Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s.
The text had been recommended to Rogers by someone who knew that Dunn encouraged his associates to study it, and the tactics deployed against Rogers appeared to be lifted directly from its pages. Richardson advised conservatives to cultivate single-issue groups, to “joyfully punish the adversaries” and to keep in mind a vital principle: The route to political domination starts at the local level. “Control the bottom,” he wrote, “and one day you control the top. One day the man you elected to city council becomes the state senator and then moves to Congress and talks to the president on your behalf. If you really become effective, one day the phone rings and you are asked to come to Washington to advise the president. Somebody is leveraging the president at this very moment. Why not you?”
Doris Burke contributed research.
Source photographs for illustration above: Shotprime studio/Adobe Stock; lalalululala/Adobe Stock; Pugun & Photo Studio/Adobe Stock.
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