Nick Fuentes and Colony Ridge Both Reveal Faultlines in the Texas GOP

The Texas GOP is unified and dominant. Oops, Nick Fuentes. Oops, Colony Ridge.

(Welcome to another installment of Life Its Ownself. If you enjoy reading it, please let me know by 1) hitting the Like button at the bottom, 2) subscribing to this newsletter, and 3) recommending it to others. Also, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

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         But first, your moment of Zen …

(Two cloudbursts descend from desert thunderheads, north of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, August 15, 2023.)

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Friday, October 13, 2023, 9:00 p.m.

         Happy Friday the 13^th!

         When I was little, Fridays the 13^th seemed a rare and ominous occasion, a day of dread on which to avoid stepping on a crack lest I break my mother’s back. Now it seems they occur with disturbing regularity – twice this year, thrice in 2024 – dulling our ability to be alarmed and frightened. Maybe as children our sense of time is different – when you’re a kid, January was a looooong time ago – and surviving a Friday the 13^th dulls the legitimate terror we felt before its onset. Those coping mechanisms are not as available as they once were.

         For myself, I celebrated today by lunching with the great writer (and author of Texas To The World, which I highly recommend) Jim Bob Moore. I hope you spent your day in similarly fulsome pursuits.

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         In this newsletter, let’s consider two stories that dominated much of the Texas political chatter this week: Jonathan Stickland’s tete-a-tete with self-professed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and William “Trey” Harris, who has turned a Liberty County subdivision into “one of the largest illegal alien settlements in America.” Each of them in their own way highlight the Texas GOP at war with itself, with no clear winner in sight.  

I.       Stickland gets taken to the woodshed. Sort of.

(Neo-Nazi provocateur Nick Fuentes follows Defend Texas Liberty PAC president Jonathan Stickland out the door of Stickland’s Pale Horse Strategies consulting firm on Friday, October 6, 2023.)

         You may recall that, last weekend,  famed white nationalist, Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes met with former legislator, Defend Texas Liberty PAC (DTL-PAC) President and Tough Guy Jonathan Stickland at his Fort Worth office for several hours. Even worse, they got caught.

         The good news, I suppose, is that once the story got out, Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi condemned Nick Fuentes and his neo-Nazi provocations, though he did not explain why he’d been in the same building during at least part of Fuentes’ visit. Apparently being an explicit neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier is not a good look for Texas Republicans.

         But no condemnation followed Stickland for hosting the meeting, even in light of reporting that it was not the first time he and Fuentes had met. A couple days later, Lite Guv Dan Patrick quoted DTL-PAC moneybags Tim Dunn as saying it had all been a blunder:

I spoke with Tim Dunn, a principal funder of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, and he has told me unequivocally that it was a serious blunder for PAC President Jonathan Stickland to meet with white supremist Nick Fuentes. He has further assured me that he is certain that Mr. Stickland and all PAC personnel will not have any future contact with Mr. Fuentes. He stated emphatically that everyone at the PAC understands that mistakes were made and are being corrected.

         With that cleared up, Patrick, who had infamously accepted $3 million from DTL-PAC, Ken Paxton’s most fervent defender, in the weeks before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, announced he was keeping the money. Of course: if Patrick was not going to return the money because it made him look corrupt, he certainly wasn’t going to return it just because its source was hanging out with neo-Nazis.

         Presumably Stickland was sent to bed that night without dessert, but that was not the end of the matter. House Speaker Dade Phelan pounced on the Fuentes tale like a duck on a June bug, calling on all elected officials who’d accepted contributions from the PAC – including Patrick – to disgorge the money. For good measure, Phelan highlighted that the Stickland-Fuentes meeting occurred as Hamas units prepared to commit unspeakable atrocities against Israelis during their assault the next day.

         Apparently, though, the pro-Nazi stench has not been enough to get recipients of DTL-PAC’s largesse to return the money. Only two recipients so far have indicated they would forward their donation to charity.

         Patrick had some choice words for Phelan:

This is an orchestrated smear campaign by a failed Speaker, Dade Phelan. He is desperate to deflect attention from his failure to pass conservative legislation that the people of Texas want and deserve. Those who parrot his calls for officeholders to return the money are as politically bankrupt has he is.

         The Patrick vs. Phelan war of words exposes a raw nerve in the Texas GOP. Some elements of the party are white supremacists, or at least white supremacist-curious. But they are unpopular with the traditional conservatives who make up the bulk of the party and assure its electoral success. So party leaders have to say one thing and do another, which is why Jonathan Stickland will still be running DTL-PAC next year.  

         Texas Monthly’s Christopher Hooks wrote a piece noting that most party leaders were more dismissive of Stickland’s critics than of Stickland himself, a bad sign for a party which has flirted with extremism in the past:

… bigots and racists have swanned around the state GOP for a long time. Texas depends on the party’s immune system to screen them out and minimize their influence. While many Republicans, most prominently House Speaker Dade Phelan, did loudly and publicly condemn Fuentes, far too many made excuses for Stickland—or tried to redirect public anger to their enemies. They are unlikely to pay an electoral price for that. But they’re making their party a darker, weirder place. And because their party runs the state, we’ll all suffer for it.

         Which brings us to William “Trey” Harris III of Liberty County.

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II.      Colony Ridge

         Liberty County was originally settled in the 1830s and 1840s by Texian families, many of whose descendants still live and own property in the rural county. The descendants call themselves “originals” and are proud of their connection to the land. William “Trey” Harris and his family are originals, and have taken some 30.000 acres of their family land and developed a sprawling set of subdivisions collectively known as Colony Ridge.  

         Harris’ vision for Colony Ridge sought to solve the problems of the population boom in adjoining Harris County and a statewide lack of affordable housing. Colony Ridge offered buyers everything from unimproved lots to affordable tract homes. Through a subsidiary called Terrenos Houston, it marketed reasonable prices combined with low down payments and owner financing. To no one’s surprise, the combination proved attractive to people of limited means looking to have their own property and build their own futures.  

         Also to no one’s surprise, a lot of those people turned out to be recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, some of whom were yet undocumented. Since at least 2015, therefore, Colony Ridge has been a poster child for nativist and anti-immigrant trolls who saw Colony Ridge as “one of the largest illegal alien settlements in America.” A terrible mass shooting in April solidified its reputation among the right wing as a haven of illegal aliens and Mexican drug cartels.

         Harris and Colony Ridge tried to respond with information, but by then Greg Abbott was looking for fresh meat to throw into the anti-immigrant maw of the Texas electorate. He added it to the call for the special session, alongside expanded criminalization of undocumented persons in Texas.

         As of yet, though, no legislation has been filed. That’s because the Lege has a problem:

Everything Trey Harris and Colony Ridge have done has been legal.

         Subdividing and selling land in the unincorporated areas of counties is legal. Minimal land use standards are legal. Selling land and/or houses to people who are not American citizens is legal. Offering financing on terms that are achievable for people of limited means is legal.

         Not only are these things legal, they are the public policy of the State. Trey Harris and Colony Ridge did not sneak through some loophole the Lege now needs to close; they did business exactly the way the state wants them to. The problem is, they did business with the “wrong kind of people.”

         Which means that whatever the Lege tries to do to “solve” the problem is going to step on some mighty big, well-financed toes — land speculators, developers, homebuilders, etc. Abbott, having put Colony Ridge on the call, has not suggested any specific remedies he’d like the Lege to implement. And legislators who toured the area last week seemed unconvinced of the need for action: "From what we've seen, it looks a lot like places you might see in East Texas,” Rep. [Briscoe] Cain added. “It looks a lot like my family's place in Louisiana." I’m sure he meant it to be reassuring.

         And Trey Harris doesn’t make a good villain for the anti-immgrant crowd. He’s what passes for a pillar of the community in Liberty County and has given Greg Abbott $1.4 million over the last three election cycles.

         Here again, the Texas GOP is at war with itself. On the one hand, the party’s traditional, pro-business, pro-economic development constituency; on the other, nativists fulminating about illegal immigration for whom no policy is punitive enough. Like with Jonathan Stickland, whom party elders can neither praise nor condemn, maintaining the successful electoral coalition of the last 30 years gets harder as important segments of the party drift rightward. This fissure burst into view with the Paxton impeachment, and will likely roil the party into next year’s elections.

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Don’t forget the “Ring of Fire” partial solar eclipse this weekend!