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tim dunn empower tx

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not related to dunn fdn

FUNDS AFPI XIAN NAT TRUMP CAB

SEE BROOKE ROLLINS AFPI

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W/ WILKS LIE LOW? BAK W/ PAXTON? 826

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HEATED GMAIL 11 26

An activist dressed as a fossil fuel executive pours fake gas over fake money outside Shell’s headquarters in May 2026. During the 2026 midterm elections, the U.S. fossil fuel industry lit actual money on fire trying to elect Republicans. Photo by James Willoughby/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.

The U.S. oil and gas industry spent at least $182 million trying to elect Republicans in last night’s midterm elections¹.

It didn’t buy them very much.

Voters rejected fossil fuel allies and priorities across the country, not only stripping Republicans of control of both the House and Senate, but delivering stunning defeats in fossil-fueled governors’ races, state legislatures, regulatory commissions, and ballot measures.

Here are some notable examples.

HEATED

Now, none of this is to say that oil money was entirely defeated in the 2026 midterms. Many fossil fuel-backed Republicans, including Texas Senator August Pfluger and U.S House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, handily won reelection.

Nor is it to say that the oil industry’s priorities will suddenly disappear from U.S. politics. Donald Trump is still the president, and *many* elected Democrats are out and proud champions of methane gas, one of the most climate-polluting fuels on the planet. (Perhaps now this is a good time to remind everyone that James Talarico championed ExxonMobil on the campaign trail).

But last night demonstrated something worth remembering, particularly for people who care about climate change but often doubt whether meaningful progress is possible, and as we head into two more difficult years of trying to achieve some kind of climate action under Donald Trump.

Fossil fuel money is one of the most powerful forces in American politics. It is the biggest obstacle we face in preserving a livable climate for everyone on Earth.

But it is not invincible.

Not even close.

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AN 8 25 SN

A Texas oil billionaire with deep ties to the Christian Nationalist movement and a rising presence in the national GOP scene, has contributed $5 million to a super PAC backing Republican Mike Rogers’ U.S. Senate campaign in Michigan, marking a foray into Midwest politics.

Tim Dunn’s contributions to the Great Lakes Conservative Fund, or GLCF, were made in two installments of $2.5 million each in April and June and accounted for more than 98% of the PAC’s total fundraising during the first half of 2025, according to a mid-year report filed July 31 with the Federal Election Commission.

Dunn, the CEO of Midland-based CrownQuest Operating, has long been a major financier of far-right political causes in Texas and beyond, with his deep-pocketed influence drawing national attention for pushing Christian nationalist ideology, which critics say aims to reshape American democracy to reflect a narrow interpretation of Christian values.

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Former Republican Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, told the Texas Tribune that Dunn felt he was unqualified to hold that position, telling him in 2010 that “only Christians should hold leadership positions” in that state’s lower chamber.

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CNN also reported that former associates of Dunn said his ultimate goal was to “replace public education with private Christian schooling.”

A request for comment by Michigan Advance was sent to Dunn, but has yet to be answered.

Dunn’s support of Rogers, a former mid-Michigan congressman seeking the GOP nomination to run for U.S. Senate in 2026, marks a significant foray into Midwest politics by an out-of-state donor known for reshaping Texas’s Republican Party in his own image, but who has also shown an increasing interest in influencing national politics.

While the Great Lakes Conservatives Fund is an independent expenditure-only committee and is legally prohibited from coordinating directly with Rogers or his campaign, Rogers has not publicly spoken about Dunn’s involvement in the race, and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment by Michigan Advance.

The Detroit News reported that the PAC spent more than $21 million on Rogers’ unsuccessful 2024 U.S. Senate run, which he narrowly lost to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly).

However, Dunn’s political network has also come under fire for its ties to white supremacists and antisemites.

In 2023, a top official at one of Dunn’s Texas-based PACs, Defend Texas Liberty, met with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has openly espoused antisemetic views including that the Holocaust was “exaggerated”.

While Dunn called the the Fuentes meeting “a serious blunder,” the Texas Tribune uncovered numerous close ties between other associates of Fuentes and the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which Dunn later shut down before launching a new PAC called Texans United for a Conservative Majority.

Regardless, Dunn has become one of the most influential Republican donors in the country, donating $5 million to President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the White House, while also co-founding the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that has produced more than a dozen officials now staffing the Trump administration including Education Secretary Linda McMahon and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Rogers, meanwhile, has cleared the GOP field and is the lone Republican seeking the nomination for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat.

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RWW

03/10/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

Capitol Ministries, a group that runs weekly right-wing Bible studies for members of Congress and did the same for Cabinet members during the first Trump administration, has announced the return of the “White House Cabinet Bible Study.”

According to a March 6 announcement, the first Bible study of the new administration took place early on the morning of President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting and included some governors participating by Zoom.

Capitol Ministries “disciples” public officials with its founder Ralph Drollinger’s very conservative interpretation of scripture and his belief that the Bible mandates support for right-wing economic, social, environmental, immigration, and criminal justice policies. He teaches that the government’s primary job is to “quell evil” and punish sin and teaches that entitlement programs lack “any basis of biblical authority.” Drollinger believes that elections are “first and foremost a spiritual battle.”

According to Drollinger, God only hears and acts on prayers from Christians; prayers of those who “passively or actively reject the Son of God,” he has written, “are worthless and go unheard.”

Drollinger shows little respect or tolerance for Christians who disagree with his interpretation of the Bible. He has suggested that Christian leaders who support marriage equality are “Satan’s pawns.” As Right Wing Watch has reported previously:

He has called the “social Gospel” that motivates millions of liberal American Christians “a perversion of scripture” and “not Christianity whatsoever!” He has called Catholicism “one of the primary false religions of the world.” He urges public officials not to take part in “syncretistic” events like the National Prayer Breakfast, arguing that by participating in events that combine different forms of belief, attendees invite God’s wrath rather than his blessing.

In one Bible study, Drollinger offered Christian lawmakers an explanation for why their “unregenerate” non-Christian colleagues “do not seem to get your biblical argument.” It’s because, Drollinger wrote, “they are spiritually incapable of getting it.” Not only that, “The longer a person rejects Christ, the greater his depravity becomes.”

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, former head of the America First Policy Institute, and OMB Director Russell Vought, former head of the Center for Renewing America, are sponsoring Drollinger’s Bible study.

Rollins is closely aligned with Tim Dunn, who Texas Monthly has called “the billionaire bully who wants to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy.” Under Rollins’ leadership, AFPI called its MAGA policy agenda a plan for “restoring a nation under God.” Capitol Ministries’ 2023 annual report includes an endorsement from Rollins in which she wrote that “our Founding Fathers established this great nation by God’s instructions and designed our country’s government based on biblical principles.” She wrote that Capitol Ministries gives her “the strength I need to endure the righteous fight for the soul of this nation.”

Vought has embraced Christian nationalism, and his Center for Renewing America listed Christian nationalism as one of its priorities for the new Trump administration.

Drollinger insists that he is not a Christian nationalist, theocrat, or dominionist because he does not want the church institutionally controlling the government, teaching that the two institutions have different God-ordained roles. He does want public officials to embrace and govern according to his definition of biblical Christianity, hire only “righteous” people to work for them, and refuse to support policies that “compromise biblical absolutes.” In “Oaks in Office,” his handbook for public officials, Drollinger wrote that “the critical and preeminent duty of the Church in an institutionally separated society” is “to evangelize and disciple—to Christianize—the leaders of the State and its citizenry.”

After beginning his work with legislators in California, Drollinger started his congressional Bible studies in 2010. When some of his congressional students joined the first Trump administration, he began holding Bible studies for members of the Cabinet, later expanding to other administration officials. He claimed in 2018 that Trump sent him handwritten notes praising his written studies.

In 2023 Drollinger launched weekly Zoom-based Bible studies with sitting and former governors. Drollinger produces written Bible studies (some translated into multiple languages) that form the basis for in-person gatherings and a weekly radio program that launched on the Salem radio network last year.

Drollinger’s global ambitions extend well beyond Congress and the White House. During the first Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opened doors to help Drollinger take his model to foreign capitals. A 2024 year-end letter from Drollinger boasted that Capitol Ministries held five global training conferences last year in Kathmandu, Nepal; Cape Town, South Africa; Bogota, Colombia; Brussels, Belgium; and Hebron, Kentucky. Its goal is to “plant and develop” ministries in 200 national capitals.

Capitol Ministries is also seeking, with the help of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, to recruit men – and only men – to lead Bible studies for elected officials in every state capital and every one of the more than 4,000 local government jurisdictions in the U.S.

During Trump’s first term, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and former Rep. Michele Bachmann helped raise money for Capitol Ministries. Two former members of Congress, Tom Price of Georgia and Trent Franks of Arizona, currently serve on its board of directors.

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Baptist News Global

https://baptistnews.com › article › du-mez-warns-of-alliance-of-theobros-techbros-and-oil-millionaires

Du Mez warns of alliance of TheoBros, TechBros and oil millionaires

TheoBros are a network of religious, political and economic elites who seek to impose a theocratic agenda on America, according to scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez. She exposes their ties to Trump, tech billionaires, oil millionaires and Project 2025 in a Substack post and a film.

OCT

To understand the sinister forces working to influence the November election, pay close attention to the expanding alliance between religious, political and economic powers arrayed against American democracy, scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes in a recent Substack post.

The expanding and strengthening coalition between Trump strategists, tech billionaires and Christian nationalists known as “TheoBros” is providing the ideological and financial muscle behind the right-wing’s authoritarian agenda, says Du Mez, professor of gender, religion and politics at Calvin University and author of the bestselling book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

“What we are witnessing right now is an ever-widening network — not just the TheoBros and Trump’s inner circle, but both of these networks now interlinked with the power of tech billionaires. That means we’ve got old-school oil money flowing together with 21st-century tech money, a nearly bottomless source of funds on hand to advance this agenda,” she warns in the Oct. 9 “Du Mez Connections” post titled “TheoBros, TechBros & Trump.”

“What do TechBros and TheoBros have in common with Trump and his inner circle? All think their respective causes will be better served by ending American democracy. They want a strongman at top — their strongman. To hell with democracy, and with the rest of us,” she writes.

The TheoBros have promoted a militant form of patriarchy within evangelical congregations and are working to seize political control to impose their version of God’s law and the rest of society, Du Mez explains.

That’s a trend covered in her new film, For Our Daughters*, which uncovers the sexual and spiritual abuse of girls and women at the hands of conservative Christians and churches more concerned about personal power and political influence than justice and love.

The movement also is described in Kiera Butler’s recent Mother Jones article, “To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the ‘TheoBros,’” which Du Mez presents as an essential read for understanding the religious motivations of the American theocracy movement.

Butler explains how and why these younger, more conservative and tech-savvy fundamentalist Christians have determined pluralistic democracy is diametrically opposed to faith.

“Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth — and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the U.S. Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.”

“Many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.”

TheoBros consume the biographies of dictators, extol nations that execute gay people and warn against “the perils of multiculturalism,” Butler writes.

Their message has begun to overlap with that of Trump running mate JD Vance, who has increasingly embraced themes of hypermasculinity, misogyny, ethnonationalism and concerns about declining birthrates, she adds. “If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.”

Du Mez also urges reading an article about the foreword Vance penned for Dawn’s Early Light, a new book by Project 2025 architect and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

Project 2025 is the Christian nationalist blueprint for replacing the federal government with a Christian nationalist theocracy. Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the plan were undermined when he chose Vance as his running mate, Alex Shephard explains in his report in The New Republic.

“Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025,” Shephard says. “Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization ‘into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism’ and has endorsed elements of Project 2025.”

In his foreword to Roberts’ book — originally titled Burning Down Washington to Save America and now delayed for publication until mid-November due to public backlash against Project 2025 — Vance claims it is time for conservatives to “load the muskets” to take back America.

Tim Dunn on the cover of Texas Monthly

Another article Du Mez suggests documents the effort of Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks in forging the state into a theocracy with the intent of going national with their Christian nationalist campaign.

“Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days,” Ava Kofman writes for ProPublica. “With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right megadonors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks.”

In addition to seeking to limit government, taxes and regulations, Dunn and Farris have spent millions to help re-elect Trump in order to replace representative democracy with Christian theocracy, the article warns.

Both men are pastors described as “thoroughgoing Dominionists” who want state and national laws and institutions to adhere to biblical teachings. Yet both also have denied being Christian nationalists, Kofman explains.

“Instead, like most Christian nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.”

Du Mez says it’s time Americans pay more attention to these interests and their collaborative efforts to defeat democracy: “In some ways it’s a relief to see the mainstream media start to pick up on these dynamics, but it may be too late. The repercussions are chilling.”

Related articles:

Sorry, Tim Dunn, you *are* a Christian nationalist | Opinion by Rodney Kennedy

Du Mez, Bass and Tisby warn: Project 2025 is a Christian nationalist blueprint

Project 2025 isn’t as scary as Kamala Harris, Heritage Foundation president says

Meet the Theobros, who want you to know they’re right about everything | Analysis by Rick Pidcock

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RWW

01/17/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

The America First Policy Institute, a MAGA movement think tank founded by former Trump aides, has raised millions in tax-exempt funds to promote policies that would undermine public education, restrict access to abortion, limit voter registration and voting, roll back environmental protections, gut government’s ability to regulate corporate behavior, pursue campaigns against transgender people, and more.

AFPI has provided money, an institutional home, and political platforms to many of the people Trump has nominated to run the country; **quite a few high-level Trump nominees have AFPI connections, including:

Trump’s first public speech after winning the 2024 election was at an AFPI gala at Mar-a-Lago, where he was joined by other MAGA luminaries, including HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and “Department of Government Efficiency” leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

AFPI founder Rollins has bragged about the group’s “revolutionary” plans to seize control of the “administrative state.” The group’s agenda for the incoming administration—its “transition project”—is in some ways even more radical than the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. AFPI believes Trump should be allowed to fire and replace any federal employee at will – potentially converting the entire federal workforce into a massive and corrupt political patronage system. AFPI has reportedly prepared 300 executive orders for Trump.

As an officer at the America First Policy Institute, Bondi tried to undermine special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump by arguing that his appointment was unconstitutional. She oversaw what the Brennan Center has called “a number of troubling voting rights and election lawsuits,” leading the pro-democracy organization to conclude, “Her record on voting and elections raises questions about her ability to be the attorney general the American public deserves.”

In a case in which AFPI sought to empower local election officials to delay or block certification of elections, AFPI’s arguments were “meritless and radical,” according to the Brennan Center. In another case filed shortly before, even notorious pro-Trump Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rejected AFPI’s “emergency” request to block a Biden executive order on voter registration that had been in place for several years. Kacsmaryk wrote that AFPI’s request provided “no direct evidence” to support its claims. The Brennan Center noted that the lawsuit “served to amplify baseless conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.”

AFPI is funded in part by Tim Dunn, who the Texas Monthly has called “the billionaire bully who wants to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy.” Dunn is notorious for funding smear campaigns against Texas Republicans who don’t fall in line with his demands. Dunn poured millions of dollars into the effort to elect Trump to a second term, and supports other right-wing causes, like the Convention of States’ efforts to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In a 2019 speech to Convention of States, Dunn argued that the Bible is “mainly about politics” and said that COS is triggering a Great Awakening.

Not so surprisingly, AFPI promotes Christian nationalist rhetoric; AFPI leaders have described their efforts as part of a “spiritual war.” AFPI’s political arm, which is chaired by Dunn, partnered with dominionist Lance Wallnau—who believes right-wing Christians are meant to control the government and every other sphere of influence in society--to help Trump return to power. Dunn himself reportedly told former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, that only Christians should be in leadership positions in the legislature.

Also in leadership at AFPI is Trump spiritual and political adviser Paula White, who has repeatedly called Trump’s opponents demonic and kicked off his pre-insurrection rally with a prayer for “holy boldness.” White chairs AFPI’s Center for American Values.

AFPI’s faith director Richard Rogers, who took part in Wallnau’s “Courage Tour,” appeared on The Jim Bakker show this week, where he said there will be a “faith director” in every government agency in the new administration. He predicted that the “prayer warriors” who “rose up” on Trump’s behalf in 2024 will “have more power than Elon Musk.” He described AFPI as a “data-driven machine” that worked “hand-in-hand” with the RNC to boost turnout among low-propensity voters.

AFPI claims “biblical foundations” for each of the ten “pillars” of its right-wing policy agenda, which it calls “10 Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God.” It asserts, “The Ten Commandments and Christian teachings have been the foundation that created the American legal system.” AFPI’s website declares, “This fight is not just about the culture of America; it’s about the kingdom of God and the Church’s divine mission to be the salt and light of our day in an era of increasing darkness.”

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Geoff Dembicki @ DeSmog: Trump Megadonor Tim Dunn Has a Plan More Extreme Than Project 2025

The Texas fracking billionaire wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution to advance climate denial and other far-right priorities.

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for months top Democrats have fixated on Project 2025, the radical blueprint of policy and personnel recommendations for a Donald Trump administration published by The Heritage Foundation and its allies, with Kamala Harris’ campaign calling it “a sweeping takeover of the federal government.”

But one of Trump’s most prominent donors, the Texas fracking billionaire and pastor Tim Dunn, has for years been backing what critics refer to as a conservative Christian Nationalist plan for America. Some experts in right-wing politics think it has the potential to be more extreme than Project 2025.

Dunn is among the top 10 individual donors to the Trump campaign, having contributed $5 million through his fracking company CrownQuest Operating to a Super PAC called Make America Great Again. He is also director of a political nonprofit known as the Convention of States, which is leading an effort to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in ways that it says would “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.” The Bible, according to Dunn, “should profoundly affect” politics.

The group has the backing of conservative media superstars including Fox News anchor Sean Hannity and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro; religious right leaders such as Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Wallbuilders founder David Barton; political operatives like Vivek Ramaswamy and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Republican Congressmember Rand Paul; and the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, one of the lead architects of Project 2025.

Among the Convention of States’ priorities is to “resist top down planning by our federal government” when it comes to limiting the fossil fuels at the heart of the climate emergency. It describes global heating as a “hoax,” erroneously stating on its website that “the claim that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is man-made is patently false.”

Dismissal of the climate emergency is also central to Project 2025, which calls for a Republican administration to aggressively advance climate obstruction along with a cavalcade of other conservative policies, including a national ban on medication abortion. Project 2025’s proponents would do so by taking a “dictatorial view of the presidential powers,” explained Peter Montgomery, research director at the progressive nonprofit organization People for the American Way. They’re advising Trump to replace thousands of career government employees with political appointees and concentrate decision-making power in the White House.

But Dunn’s plan for a theocratic petrostate goes one step further. “The Convention of States wants to put that vision into the Constitution,” Montgomery told DeSmog. As unlikely as that scenario might seem, he argues that this project goes far beyond mere political rhetoric or posturing.

Dunn has a long track record of successfully backing far-right policies and state representatives in his home state of Texas. He and his allies are now reportedly looking to take that strategy national. “They’re spending a lot of money organizing in states and they’ve got a long-term plan,” Montgomery claimed. “They are deadly serious.”

DeSmog sent a list of questions to the Convention of States and to Dunn via his nonprofit Citizens for Self-Governance but didn’t receive a response.

‘Politics and religion’

Dunn is currently one of the richest people in Texas, having amassed a net worth of $2.2 billion through his family fracking company CrownQuest, which pumps 140,000 barrels of oil per day from the Permian basin in West Texas.

New houses for sale next to an active oilfield in Midland, Texas. May 26, 2020. Credit: Justin Hamel for DeSmog

In addition to running one of the country’s biggest privately-owned oil companies, Dunn is a pastor in Midland, the Texas oil town where he lives along with five of his six grown children on a 20-acre compound. He believes that “politics and religion are inseparable,” telling a Convention of States gathering in 2022 that “you can’t have one without the other.”

Dunn and his wife have reportedly given $29 million since 2000 to conservative candidates and PACs in Texas, making him one of the state’s top political donors. He works closely with Farris Wilks, a fellow Texas fracking billionaire who is a co-owner of The Daily Wire, the right-wing media outlet whose stars include Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. Dunn and Wilks recently put $6.8 million into a new PAC called Texans United for a Conservative Majority, whose logo depicts Austin’s Capitol building with a Christian cross on top.

Though Dunn’s political base is in Texas, he’s involved with groups that have a national focus. Tax forms show that for over two decades he’s been on the board of a conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has received millions of dollars from charities linked to the Koch brothers and as recently as 2015 was disputing whether humans cause climate change.

And in 2015, the Convention of States filed its first tax form with Dunn listed as a board member. A key goal is to make the U.S. a more explicitly Christian nation. “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 while addressing a summit for the group.

The Convention of States pushes a conservative economic agenda, advocating against the thousands of regulations created by an “out-of-control Washington.” The group wants to remove “federal interference” from the oil and gas industry, claiming that fracking “can only be a good thing for our living conditions and geopolitical considerations” and arguing that any attempt to ban fossil fuels “is both impossible to achieve and dangerous to attempt.”

This fusion of religion and economic libertarianism “is supported by people on the corporate right, and people on the Christian right,” Montgomery said. It aims to impose that agenda on Americans by altering the country’s foundational documents. “They are very committed to rewriting the U.S. Constitution,” he said.

Allies in the Trump Campaign

The process by which Dunn and his allies hope to do that is called an Article V convention. Their goal is to convince 34 U.S. state legislatures to pass resolutions supporting a constitutional convention. That is the threshold required for Congress to take up the matter. If 38 states then approve the proposed amendment, it becomes part of the Constitution.

Numerous groups since the 1960s have mounted Article V campaigns on issues including abortion bans and federal fiscal restrictions, yet none have been successful. The Convention of States claims to be working “across every legislative district in the nation,” saying that 19 states “have successfully passed the Convention of States Resolution.”

The group gained a powerful potential supporter this summer when Trump named as his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance, a major recipient of oil and gas donations who previously endorsed the project. “Super excited we have a vice presidential candidate that is an official supporter of the Convention of States,” the group’s president Mark Meckler said in a video in July.

Dunn himself is attempting to make inroads with powerful Republicans. He’s given $250,000 to High Plains PAC, which is supporting the re-election of Senator John Borrasso in Wyoming, currently the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Dunn’s poured $2 million into the Jefferson Rising Fund, which is supporting the Senate bid of Trump ally Kari Lake in Arizona and advocating against Democratic Senate contenders in states such as Wisconsin, Montana, and Nevada.

The Texas fracking billionaire has become a central behind-the-scenes figure in a constellation of Trump-aligned nonprofits. Dunn is on the board of directors of the America First Policy Institute. That group is co-sponsoring the Courage Tour led by Christian right influencer and Trump ally Lance Wallnau, which is holding a series of rallies in swing states. The Courage Tour recently partnered for an event with vice presidential candidate Vance.

Dunn is reportedly a significant funder of the conservative nonprofit Center for Renewing America, as well as the Conservative Partnership Institute. All this could help give Dunn policy leverage should Trump win the presidential election. “He’s definitely seeking a national impact,” Montgomery said.

A second Trump administration could be useful to Dunn’s business interests. He signed a deal late last year to sell a major part of his fracking company CrownQuest to Occidental Petroleum for $12.4 billion, a transaction in which he’s set to personally collect almost $2.2 billion. Less than a month later, Dunn donated $5 million to Trump.

Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub complained last spring during a Houston fundraiser with Trump that federal regulators were delaying the sale. According to sources quoted in the Washington Post, Trump voiced his dismay, saying, “Can you just wait a few months?”

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an 5 24

former far-right hard-liner says pro-voucher billionaires are using school board races to sow distrust in public education](https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/15/texas-tim-dunn-wilks-brothers-vouchers-courtney-gore/)" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

*This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. Also, sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools.

Gore points to West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who have contributed to various political action committees that have poured millions into legislative candidates who have promoted vouchers. The men also fund or serve on the boards of a host of public policy and advocacy organizations that have led the fight for vouchers in Texas.

In recent years, the largesse from Dunn and the Wilks brothers has reached local communities across Texas, including Granbury, near Fort Worth, where fights over library books, curriculum and vouchers have dominated the community conversation.

Gore said that she believes school board candidates are being recruited, at times without their full knowledge, in an effort “to cause as much disruption and chaos as possible” and weaken community faith in local school districts.

In 2021, two local men — former state representative Mike Lang and political consultant Nate Criswell — asked Gore to run for school board. At the time, the three were co-hosts of a web-based talk show that targeted local officials they believed were insufficiently conservative and were straying from GOP platform positions. They took frequent aim at the Granbury school district, which they alleged was allowing explicit sexual content into school libraries and teaching divisive ideas about race.

*[A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum.]

Gore broke from the group shortly after taking office in January 2022, when she concluded that the materials she had warned about on the campaign trail were not present in Granbury schools. She claims the men and other leaders of the far-right faction in Hood County, home to Granbury, dismissed her findings. They continued to pummel the district over books and curriculum, supported school board candidates who sought to remove a growing number of titles from library shelves, and worked to derail three bond elections that would have funded new and renovated buildings for the overcrowded district.

That’s when Gore said she began to piece together connections that hadn’t been previously apparent to her.

Lang, a Republican who represented Hood County in the state Legislature for four years, received more than $600,000 in campaign contributions — more than half his total — from direct donations from or PACs funded by the Wilks brothers and Dunn. On the campaign trail, Lang supported providing public money for private schools and, in 2017, voted against a House measure that prohibited funding for school vouchers. He did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition, in January 2022, Criswell’s political consulting company received $3,000 from Defend Texas Liberty, one of the PACs funded by the Wilks family and Dunn. The PAC donated another $3,000 to Criswell this year when he unsuccessfully ran for Hood County commissioner.

Criswell declined to answer specific questions but said he has closed his consulting firm, Criswell Strategies, and has “stepped away from the local political scene, aside from occasionally sharing posts on social media.”

According to her campaign finance reports, Gore did not receive any money from the men. But another school board candidate, her then-ally Melanie Graft, received a $100 in-kind contribution from Defend Texas Liberty for advertising expenses. Graft did not respond to written questions or requests for comment.

“I was knee-deep in it,” Gore said about the local connections to the billionaires. “I guess I was just too naive. I should have known better.”

Neither Dunn nor a representative of the Wilks family responded to questions. Dunn recently penned an opinion piece in the Midland Reporter-Telegram arguing that he was not the leader of the statewide push for vouchers and has never made public statements on the topic.

Nearly two decades ago, however, Dunn argued in favor of a voucher-like program, saying that the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank on whose board he has served for more than 20 years, supported such an idea “as long-time advocates of eliminating the government monopoly in public education.” In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is among the state’s fiercest advocates for directing public education funds to private schools, credited the organization’s longtime advocacy with bringing the state to the “threshold” of a voucher-like program.

Dunn is also the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” according to its website. The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and a woman and that there are only two genders.

Zachary Maxwell, Lang’s former chief of staff who later worked for Empower Texans, a pro-voucher public policy organization whose associated PAC was largely funded by Dunn and the Wilks brothers, would not speak about his time there, citing a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he left the organization.

Maxwell, however, said he has become disenchanted by Dunn and the Wilks family’s efforts to exert control over the state’s politics. He said Hood County hard-liners, some of whom have close ties to PACs funded by Dunn and the Wilks brothers, were trying to use Gore and Graft to drive a wedge between rural residents and their school district in an effort to build support for vouchers. The women’s presence on the school board enhanced the legitimacy of the group’s claims about pornography in libraries and Marxist indoctrination, Maxwell said.

“It’s all about destroying the trust with the citizens to the point where they would tolerate something like doing away with public schools,” he said in an interview.

Over the past two years, Abbott has teamed up with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, embarking on a tour of Texas towns to promote vouchers. Following the narrow defeat of voucher legislation in November in the Texas House of Representatives, the Republican governor campaigned to unseat lawmakers in his party who opposed such legislation. He successfully ousted five of them.

One of the Republicans who lost in the primary was Glenn Rogers, whose rural district sits just north of Hood County and whom Abbott endorsed in 2020. This time around, Abbott gave $200,000 in campaign support to Rogers’ pro-voucher opponent. Dunn and the WiIlks brothers donated another $100,000.

Rogers, who represented Hood County until 2021, when lawmakers changed the boundaries of his district, said he believes privatizing public education is at the core of Dunn and the Wilks brothers’ political efforts in Hood County and across the state.

“Whether it’s at the school board level or it’s what’s happening in the Texas Legislature right now, that’s their end goal,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/15/texas-tim-dunn-wilks-brothers-vouchers-courtney-gore/.

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allies of influential Texas billionaire Tim Dunn are pushing ahead in Austin with efforts to create a private-school voucher system that could weaken public schools across the state. Meanwhile, Dunn’s associates in his hometown of Midland are working to defeat a local school bond proposal that his district says it desperately needs.

Dunn, an evangelical Christian, is best known for a mostly successful two-decade effort to push the Texas GOP ever further to the right. His political action committees have spent millions to elect pro-voucher candidates and derail Republicans who oppose them. Defend Texas Liberty, the influential PAC he funds with other West Texas oil barons, has come under fire after The Texas Tribune revealed that the PAC’s president had hosted infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes for an October meeting and that the organization has connections to other white nationalists.

*[In West Texas, schools hope skeptical voters will OK debt to upgrade crumbling, overcrowded buildings]

Less known are Dunn’s efforts to shape politics in his hometown of Midland, which will come to a head next week. On Tuesday, residents in the Midland Independent School District will vote on a $1.4 billion bond, the largest in its history, after rejecting a smaller measure four years ago. A dark-money organization whose leaders have ties to Dunn’s Midland oil and gas company, as well as to a prominent conservative public policy organization where Dunn serves as vice chairman, have become among the loudest voices against the bond.

On Sept. 21, less than two months before the Midland bond election, three Midland residents with deep connections to Dunn and his associated public policy organization registered a “social welfare” nonprofit called Move Midland.

The nonprofit is headed by Rachel Walker, a public affairs manager for Dunn’s oil and gas company, CrownQuest Operating LLC, according to public records. A second member, Ernest Angelo, is a former Midland mayor and board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Dunn has helped lead for more than two decades. The third member of the nonprofit’s board is Elizabeth Moore, a former West Texas development officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Within weeks, the nascent nonprofit had a website, campaign signs and a social media presence as its directors appeared on local radio shows and in community debates to oppose the bond. In the local newspaper, another former mayor urged residents to visit Move Midland’s website for insights about the election. That former mayor, Mike Canon, had run for the Texas Senate in 2018 to unseat Kel Seliger, a prominent Republican who opposed vouchers. Another PAC funded by Dunn, Empower Texans, provided the bulk of his war chest, nearly $350,000, in a losing effort.

Move Midland and its directors have not called attention to their relationship to Dunn and his entities in public appearances. Biographies of the three directors on the nonprofit’s website make no mention of Dunn, CrownQuest or the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn serves as vice chair of the board.

Walker and other members of the group did not respond to voice messages, emails, Facebook messages or requests made through the Move Midland website.

Dunn likewise did not respond to specific questions regarding the Midland bond and the role of his various entities. Defend Texas Liberty has condemned Fuentes’ “incendiary” views and replaced its president, but has not provided any details about its association with the white nationalist. Dunn has reportedly called the PAC’s meeting with Fuentes a “serious blunder.”

During a debate hosted by the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Walker said that the group is “more than just me. There is a group of informed and involved Midlanders involved in this organization. And we have every right to speak on this issue, because we are taxpaying citizens, just as the rest of the involved and informed community does.”

Walker has said that the group would be open to a scaled-down version of the bond in the future, but that should come when “our taxpayers feel like they have trust in the system, and right now, they just have an overwhelming distrust of how MISD is spending their tax dollars,” she told Marfa Public Radio.

Because Move Midland was formed as a nonprofit and not a political action committee, it is not required to disclose the sources of its funding. Organizations that engage in campaign activity but don’t disclose where their money comes from are typically considered “dark money” entities. A small number of states, including New York and Connecticut, require disclosure of donors who contribute to 501(c)(4) nonprofits that engage in lobbying or make political contributions.

The IRS allows such nonprofits to shield the identities of donors as long as political activity doesn’t constitute the group’s primary activity, though it rarely takes action against nonprofits that violate its rules.

According to its website, Move Midland is “dedicated to making Midland better” and plans to tackle various community issues. The bond election represents the group’s “current area of focus.”

Bond supporters, including a large chunk of the Midland energy sector, say it is crucial to relieving overcrowding and modernizing outdated facilities.

Supporters also have raised questions about the timing of Move Midland’s creation and expressed frustration that its donors are shielded from public view, unlike funders of traditional PACs.

“It seems disingenuous and also unfair and very odd that you would not disclose who’s behind it when as a PAC, they would have to,” said Josh Ham, a volunteer with the pro-bond PAC Energize Midland Schools.

Texas Ethics Commission records show the Energize Midland PAC has received more than $530,000 in contributions, most of it coming from Midland energy companies, which hail the election as an opportunity to cultivate a more robust labor force.

That far outstrips the $10,252 raised by Midlanders for Excellence in Education, a local PAC that opposes the bond. According to campaign finance reports, Midlanders for Excellence in Education has used much of that money to pay for signs and radio advertising.

Walker, the Move Midland leader, reported spending $33,432 to oppose the bond, including payments for direct mailings, text messages and yard signs. Texas law requires nonprofits that engage in independent campaign activity to disclose campaign-related expenditures to the state, but like the federal government, it does not require such groups to disclose the source of their funding. It is unclear if Dunn has given money directly to the group.

Ham said that he does not know who is funding Move Midland, but that its sudden appearance after two years of bond planning makes him question the motivation behind the effort. “To have someone just come along overnight and pop up with just a couple of talking points and with no real support is disappointing,” he said.

Dunn has not been quiet about his concerns over the bond. In an Oct. 15 commentary in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Dunn accused bond supporters of not being forthcoming with voters about the bond’s tax impact. The district says the bond won’t raise tax rates because the new rates adopted in September were set lower than the previous year’s and included the bond’s impact. Dunn argued that the bond will soak up the $18 million in statewide property tax relief recently approved by the Legislature and that tax rates would be even lower if not for the bond.

While Dunn’s oil companies operate in multiple states, they control mineral properties that, combined, owed more than $1.3 million in estimated property taxes to the school district for 2023.

Dunn called claims that the bond won’t result in a tax rate increase “somewhere between materially misleading and factually false.”

In fact, Dunn noted, the actual ballot language Midlanders will find when they go to the polls will include the clause, “This is a property tax increase.”

Public policy organizations connected with Dunn played a central role in ensuring that the phrase is attached to every single school bond ballot measure in the state, regardless of the bond measure’s actual impact on local taxes.

The phrase, tucked into a 308-page bill in 2019, didn’t make headlines at the time, but those six words have since had an outsize impact on school bond passage rates. According to Dax Gonzalez, director of governmental relations at the Texas Association of School Boards, the phrase is at least partly responsible for the decline in school bond passage rates in subsequent years.

From 2000 to May 2019, about 75% of all school bond proposals passed, according to data from the state’s Bond Review Board. That passage rate has dipped to 64% since November 2019, which bond supporters have attributed to the new ballot language and pandemic-related worries. In elections this past May, that number rebounded to 78%.

“I really do believe that the sole purpose of that language is to decrease the amount of bonds that pass,” said Gonzalez.

Earlier this year, Dunn-backed entities marshaled opposition to attempts favored by public education supporters to give districts more flexibility in the required ballot language in cases where bonds don’t result in tax rate increases. None of the bills made it out of committee.

Dunn has weighed in on local Midland politics before. In 2019, Dunn cast doubts on the Midland school district’s $569 million bond proposal in an op-ed in the local newspaper in which he wondered whether school district officials were “sufficiently committed” to improving the quality of students’ education.

Although officials initially announced the bond had passed on election night, the bond proposal ultimately lost by 26 votes after Midland County election workers discovered a box of unopened ballots weeks after the election.

A few months later, Dunn threw his support behind a sales tax increase for the Midland County Hospital District, explaining in a newspaper column that “high property taxes violate a founding principle of America: private property ownership.”

Sales taxes, Dunn argued, “are the only broad-based, transparent and optional forms of taxation.”

The sales tax increase passed handily in July 2020.

A shift from property taxes to sales taxes at the state level has long been a goal of the various public policy organizations associated with Dunn. According to Texas Comptroller estimates analyzed by the Tribune, sales tax increases cost poor Texans more than wealthier ones, making it a regressive tax.

For some bond supporters, Dunn’s opposition to the current bond proposal is a reflection of his embrace of vouchers for private schools.

“Having a vested interest in a private school, while politically funding an agenda that includes private school vouchers, appears to present a pretty clear conflict of interest for Tim Dunn,” said Reagan Hignojos, a former Midland school board candidate and bond supporter. “These private schools would not be held accountable or be transparent by the same standards of public schools.”

Dunn is the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” according to its website. The school explains that through this lens, “human civilization is rightly understood to have begun in the garden with Adam and Eve.” The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and woman and that there are only two genders.

Dunn’s school is currently unaccredited, however, according to data provided by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. Under legislation proposed by Texas lawmakers, including several state senators who have received campaign funding from Dunn and his associated PACs, private schools would need accreditation to be eligible for taxpayer dollars.

Dunn has not weighed in on whether his school would pursue voucher payments, and in 2014 he explained the lack of accreditation, writing that the requirements “deal mainly with processes and credentials rather than focusing on an excellent academic and student life opportunity.”

The school did not respond to questions about any potential accreditation or voucher plans.

According to its 2021 IRS filing, the most recent available, the school had $10.4 million in total assets and revenue of $6.3 million, a 66% percent increase compared to what it earned in 2020.

Dunn and his family own five million-dollar homes on land adjacent to Midland Classical Academy, where property taxes go to Midland ISD.

*Disclosure: The Texas Association of School Boards and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/02/tim-dunn-move-midland-school-bond/.

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https://www.alternet.org/rittenhouse-texas/

Kyle Rittenhouse launches nonprofit with far-right Texans as he ramps up political engagement in the state

Kyle Rittenhouse speaking at the 2021 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore)

Robert Downen andThe Texas Tribune August 16, 2023

Kyle Rittenhouse, the right-wing activist who was famously acquitted of killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, is stepping up his involvement in Texas politics.

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Already this year, he’s rallied with a Texas secessionist movement leader, endorsed ultraconservative midterm candidates, and railed against Texas gun control legislation and the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton.

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Now, Rittenhouse is creating a nonprofit in the state — with help from well-connected, far-right political actors.

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In a July 23 filing with the Texas secretary of state’s office, he described “The Rittenhouse Foundation” as a nonprofit that “protects human and civil rights secured by law, including an individual’s inalienable right to bear arms” and “ensures the Second Amendment is preserved through education and legal assistance.”

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The foundation’s directors are Rittenhouse, Texas Gun Rights President Chris McNutt and Shelby Griesinger, treasurer for Defend Texas Liberty PAC, a key financier of far-right candidates in the state. The foundation’s registered agent is the law firm of Tony McDonald, who has for years represented Empower Texans and other deep-red organizations.

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Defend Texas Liberty and Empower Texans have received tens of millions of dollars from a trio of West Texas oil tycoons — Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks — who have for decades funded campaigns, nonprofits and movements to promote their ultraconservative religious and social views.

McDonald declined an interview request Tuesday. Other foundation officials could not be reached for comment.

Rittenhouse moved to Texas last year after being acquitted of homicide charges in the fatal shooting of two people at a 2020 protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He’s since steadily ramped up his political involvement in Texas, often railing against the media, “cancel culture” and gun control groups.

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In January, Rittenhouse appeared at a Conroe “rally against censorship” with Daniel Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, which advocates for Texas to secede from the United States. The event drew national media attention after a Conroe brewery said it was inundated with threats and harassment after pulling out as the event’s host venue.

In May, Rittenhouse joined Texas Gun Rights in opposing a House bill that would have raised the minimum age to purchase semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21. And he’s been active on social media,condemning the Texas House impeachment of Paxton and endorsing pro-Second Amendment, ultraconservative candidates who were also backed by groups affiliated with Dunn and the Wilks brothers.

Rittenhouse has endorsed Andy Hopper, a primary challenger to state Rep. Lynn Stucky, R-Denton. Hopper, who came close to unseating Stucky in a runoff in 2022, had the support of Defend Texas Liberty in that primary and is expected to have it again.

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Rittenhouse more recently backed Brandon Herrera, a gun rights activist and YouTube star known as “The AK Guy” who is running against U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio. Gonzales represents the district where the 2022 Uvalde school shooting took place, and he was the only Texas Republican in the U.S. House to vote for a bipartisan gun law afterward.

Last year, Rittenhouse announced plans to attend Texas A&M University, only to walk back the claim after the university said he had not been accepted. Rittenhouse, an Illinois native, later said he planned to attend Blinn College, a two-year school in Brenham. It’s unclear if Rittenhouse is attending the school, which said he had not enrolled in classes after he announced his intention to go there.

Rittenhouse’s foray into Texas politics comes as Republicans continue efforts to reach out to younger Americans who are increasingly supportive of liberal policies. On Monday, The Texas Tribune reported on a new company, Influenceable, with ties toDunn that has been quietly recruiting Gen Z social media influencersto do undisclosed political promotions.

Patrick Svitek contributed reporting.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 21-23 in Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations coming to TribFest. Panel topics include the biggest 2024 races and what’s ahead, how big cities in Texas and around the country are changing, the integrity of upcoming elections and so much more. See the full program.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/16/kyle-rittenhouse-texas-foundation/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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https://www.alternet.org/ken-paxton-2662335195/

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no lnx twit

Ken Paxton’s far-right billionaire backers are fighting hard to save him

Robert Downen,Carla Astudilloand The Texas Tribune July 25, 2023

"Ken Paxton’s far-right billionaire backers are fighting hard to save him" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Hours before the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Ken Paxton in May, a well-funded supporter of the attorney general issued a threat to his fellow Republicans.

A vote to impeach Paxton, Jonathan Stickland wrote on Twitter, “is a decision to have a primary.”

“Wait till you see my PAC budget,” he later added.

Stickland is the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee that has donated millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the state. It is a key part of the constellation of political campaigns, institutions and dark-money groups that a trio of West Texas oil tycoons — Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks — have pumped small fortunes into as part of a long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right.

And, until last month, no state politician had received more money from those groups than Paxton, who has in turn used his office to push ultraconservative priorities while declining to defend state agencies in numerous lawsuits filed by groups connected to Dunn and the Wilks brothers, including those seeking to undermine the state’s campaign finance laws.

Now, with the clock ticking toward Paxton’s September impeachment trial before the Texas Senate, Stickland and his far-right friends are fighting hard and spending big to protect their most important ally — and to stave off a major loss amid their ongoing fight for control of the Texas GOP.

Evan Smith, CEO of The Texas Tribune, interviewed Tim Dunn, CEO of CrownQuest Operating and chairman of Empower Texans, at The Texas Tribune Festival on Sept. 24, 2016. Photo by Brett Buchanan

Tim Dunn speaks with Evan Smith, former CEO of The Texas Tribune, at The Texas Tribune Festival on Sept. 24, 2016. Credit: Brett Buchanan for The Texas Tribune

The Paxton drama comes at a crucial time for the state’s ultraconservative wing, which has been increasingly criticized by moderate Republicans who have grown weary of their purity tests and attacks even as the state drifts further to the right. The Wilks and Dunn orbit also has been hobbled by a series of divisive, costly — and largely unsuccessful — primary races and the removal of former Rep. Bryan Slaton, whose political life was subsidized by Defend Texas Liberty until he was expelled from the House in May for having sex with a 19-year-old aide he got drunk.

Those losses, coupled with intraparty animus, have raised the groups’ stakes in the Paxton trial.

“The Paxton impeachment could be the most high-profile stumble for the far right of the Texas GOP,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “Paxton was their shining star but now looks more like a shooting star.”

The Wilks brothers could not be reached for comment. Dunn did not respond to multiple interview requests or a detailed list of questions emailed to him. Stickland declined an interview and did not respond to questions via text.

An old relationship

Over the past 20 years, Dunn and the Wilks brothers have sunk nearly $100 million into a sprawling mix of nonprofits, political campaigns, think tanks, fundraising committees and websites to advance their far-right religious, economic and anti-LGBTQ+ views.

But their groups were not always so laser focused on the red-meat social issues that they’ve helped thrust into the mainstream of today’s GOP. In the mid to late 2000s, their primary influence came from Dunn through a handful of groups — the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility and Empower Texans — that pushed libertarian, small-government economic and tax policies.

As with now, the strategy was simple: Pull the party’s middle further to the right by labeling other Republicans — particularly Joe Straus, the GOP speaker of the House from 2009-19 — as ineffective moderates in bed with liberals to suppress conservative priorities. Those attacks were disseminated through a well-funded media ecosystem to a grassroots base motivated by the election of President Barack Obama, the Tea Party movement, the proliferation of social media and an influx of dark money unleashed by the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Since the beginning, the groups have aimed “to force retirements or defeat moderate incumbents in primaries, really almost to the exclusion of any other strategic goal,” said Matt Mackowiak, chair of the Travis County GOP and a longtime Republican political consultant.

“It’s about convincing incumbents that if they don’t vote as conservatives, then they’ll be put at political risk,” he said.

And the billionaire-backed groups have always liked Paxton.

In 2009, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility gave Paxton, who was then a state representative, the “Taxpayer Champion Award.” A year later, the group hailed him for his bill rejecting Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. And, ahead of the 2011 legislative session, Empower Texans wrote glowingly of Paxton as he challenged Straus for House speaker, framing the McKinney Republican as a man-of-the-people conservative who was unafraid to confront the House’s effete RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — and their supposed liberal allies.

“This is the first time in modern history when Texans can express their preference on the speaker’s race and involve themselves in it,” Empower Texans wrote in November 2010. “Some in the Austin power elite — including the media — don’t like it.”

State Rep. Ken Paxton, R-McKinney, after failing to win the endorsement of GOP caucus members for House speaker on Jan. 10, 2011.

Then-state Rep. Ken Paxton, R-McKinney, made an unsuccessful bid for House speaker in January 2011. Credit: Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune

Paxton dropped out of the speaker’s race shortly before the vote but a year later was elected to the Texas Senate, where he spent two years before launching his 2014 bid for attorney general. Despite initially trailing in the polls, Paxton defeated the better-funded, establishment candidate Dan Branchin the GOP primary runoff — with help from his West Texas friends.

In what The Dallas Morning News described at the time as an “unusual arrangement,”Dunn and Empower Texans backed a $1 million loan to Paxton that helped narrow Branch’s financial edge and pay for a late TV advertising campaign. Paxton also received a boost from freshmen U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Tea Party darling whose unexpected rise was aided by a super PAC that received $15 million from the Wilks brothers.

One year later, as news broke of Paxton’s indictment for securities fraud, those allies again came to his defense. Previewing the claims they’d make after his 2023 impeachment, Empower Texans insinuated conspiracy theories that framed Paxton as the victim of a witch hunt orchestrated by House Republicans and left-wing activists.

“Time will tell how long it will take for Paxton to clear his name and rebut the politically-charged attacks against him,” Tony McDonald, a longtime attorney for Dunn- and Wilks-connected groups, wrote at the time for Empower Texans. “But will we ever know the true role Republican House leadership played in launching the probe?”

The 2015 securities fraud charges, related to Paxton’s work soliciting investors in Servergy Inc. without disclosing that the McKinney tech company was paying him for the work, have yet to go to trial amid a series of appeals by prosecutors and defense lawyers.

In the years since, a mutually beneficial relationship has continued, with Paxton pushing policies favored by the far right as the billionaires filled his campaign coffers with millions of dollars.

Campaign finance records show that since 2002, Dunn, the Wilks family and their affiliated groups have collectively given more than $2.85 million to Paxton — 6.8% of his total fundraising, and nearly double what he’s received from his second-biggest donor, Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC.Add in the two loans that they’ve backed or given — including one that remains outstanding for $750,000 — and their support tops $4.65 million.

That money has helped keep Paxton afloat in recent years as his legal troubles mounted, approval ratings dipped and some key donors invested elsewhere.

After Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC gave $626,000 to Paxton’s 2022 primary challenger Eva Guzman,Defend Texas Liberty helped lift his campaign, giving him more money than ever and floating him a $750,000 loan. And last month, as Paxton and his high-profile defense team continued to spar with House impeachment managers, Dunn donated another $150,000 to the suspended attorney general’s campaign. Neither Paxton nor his attorneys have disclosed who is paying for his impeachment defense.

Recent financial disclosures also show that in June, Defend Texas Liberty gave $3 million in loans and donations to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who will preside over Paxton’s impeachment trial in the Texas Senate.

Hours after the donations were made public, Stickland again took to Twitter. “This is just the beginning,” he wrote. “Wait till you see the next report. We will never stop. Ever.”

Texas is among a handful of states with no limits on individual political contributions in state races. SinceDefend Texas Liberty PACwas created in 2020, Dunnand Farris Wilks have given at least $14.5 million to the organization. They also helped bankroll Stickland’s career in the Legislature before he took over the group.

The Texas Tribune sent interview requests and lists of questions to Paxton’s lead impeachment attorney, his campaign and two communications firms working on his behalf. None responded. Patrick’s campaign and office did not return requests for comment.

“So too has Ken Paxton”

Millie Black, a political science professor at Collin College’s Wylie campus, said it’s often difficult to gauge the extent to which high-dollar donors impact politicians once they’re in office, particularly on social issues.

But it’s clear, she said, that Paxton’s public evolution from a small-government budget hawk into a red-meat social conservative has corresponded with the Texas GOP’s move to the right, a shift that was influenced heavily by Dunn and the Wilks brothers.

Publicly, “he has not always been so far to the right,” Black said of Paxton, whose legislative career mostly emphasized conservative economic policy. “But as the Republican Party has grown in its conservatism, so too has Ken Paxton.”

Since his election as attorney general, Paxton has used his office to rally behind the ultraconservative social issues and anti-LGBTQ positions favored by his biggest donors and their allies.

In 2017, Paxton pitched business leaders on the controversial “bathroom bill” that would have cracked down on transgender-friendly restroom and locker room policies. And he has routinely issued legal opinions that bolstered priority issues for groups connected to Dunn and Wilks, including “school choice” programs, challenges to Texas’ prohibitions on giving public money to religious institutions and bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

Paxton has wielded power in other ways as well.

“Policymaking is not just what you do, but also what you don’t,” Rottinghaus said. “By ignoring some things and emphasizing others, politicians are effectively reshaping policy. The attorney general … has a lot of ability to shape policy at the margins” as the state’s top lawyer.

A handful of times, Paxton has declined to perform a core function of his office: defend state agencies from lawsuits — including those directly connected to his biggest donors.

In one instance, Paxton declined to defend the Texas Ethics Commission against a lawsuit, filed by Empower Texans, that sought to strip the agency of its core oversight of campaign finance. As a result of Paxton’s decision — which watchdog groups called “rare” at the time — the ethics commission made an emergency, $600,000 budget request in 2018 to lawmakers to pay for private lawyers in the matter.

In a separate lawsuit, Paxton’s office again did not represent the ethics commission afterEmpower Texanshead Michael Quinn Sullivan challenged his $10,000 fine for failing to register as a lobbyist while leading the group in 2010 and 2011. In that case, Empower Texans’ lawyers argued that Sullivan was the victim of a “witch hunt” orchestrated by Straus’ “cronies,” and that he and his group should have been exempt from registering as lobbyists because they were acting as journalists.

Michael Quinn Sullivan of Empower Texans speaks at a conservative grassroots rally for property tax relief and reform at the Texas Capitol on Tuesday. April 16, 2019

Michael Quinn Sullivan, then head of now-disbanded Empower Texans, speaks at a conservative grassroots rally for property tax relief and reform at the Texas Capitol on April 16, 2019. Credit: Juan Figueroa/The Texas Tribune

Those two lawsuits and their subsequent appeals have collectively cost the ethics commission more than $1 million in outside legal expenses, general counsel Jim Tinley said last week. That total is likely to climb if Sullivan successfully petitions for the case to be heard by the Texas Supreme Court.Tinley declined to comment on other questions about Empower Texans, citing pending litigation.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but officials have previously said the decisions aligned with the office’s “first obligation to defend the Constitution and the basic rights it guarantees to each and every Texan.”

The commission’s former chair still disagrees.

In an interview this month, Chase Untermeyer said Paxton’s hands-off approach in the Empower Texans lawsuits was upsetting, if somewhat expected given his ties to the group. But even if Paxton disagreed with the agency’s mission, Untermeyer said, he still had a duty to protect it as it carried out its “obligations under the state constitution to pursue” violations.

At one point, Untermeyer said, Paxton’s office stopped enforcing subpoenas issued by the agency — a “particularly appalling” decision that Untermeyer said undercut an investigation into Empower Texans.

“The only thing worse than not being represented by Ken Paxton would have been to be represented by Ken Paxton — because we did not have full faith that he was on our side,” Untermeyer said. “We can understand how the attorney general, for some reason of his own choosing, might not want to represent the ethics commission in a district or appellate court. But to not even support the principle of a state agency, a constitutional agency, issuing subpoenas, was a particular aggravation.”

Paxton has had his own issues with the ethics commission: He has repeatedly been criticized for failing to timely disclose significant campaign donors or the addresses of some properties owned by him and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton.

In 2016, the agency ruled that Paxton could not accept out-of-state donations to a legal defense fund in his securities fraud case. And last year, the Houston Chronicle found that Paxton had declined to sue hundreds of political candidates and lawmakers to collect more than $700,000 in fines for campaign disclosure violations assessed by the agency.

“Rules for thee, not for me”

For six years, Zachary Maxwell saw firsthand how West Texas oil money slowly reshaped the state’s political landscape — including through the numerous conservative campaigns he helped lead and, later, as chief of staff for formerRep. Mike Lang, the leader of the House’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus.He also briefly worked for the Empower Texans-affiliated Texas Scorecard as a staff writer.

Maxwell ultimately left that world because of what he said was hypocrisy from the Dunn and Wilks cohort, who he said were almost singularly focused on conservative “chest beating” as a means of pulling the party’s mainstream views to the right and accumulating political power.

“It is rules for thee, not for me,” he said of Empower Texans and its affiliated groups, including Defend Texas Liberty. “They do not care about how Austin is run — they care about running Austin. They care about who can scream the loudest, and usually that ends up being people with the least amount of integrity. And the entire Legislature is sick and tired of it. Nothing is good enough. And the second you get off course, you’re going to get hammered.”

“It’s just exhausting,” added Maxwell, who still works in conservative politics. “But it’s the cost of doing business.”

Maxwell is not the only Texas Republican to express such frustrations. In recent years, prominent conservatives have complained about the groups’ frequent attacks from the right, and the perpetual purity tests that they worry may ultimately push the Texas GOP too far to the extremes.

The backlash was evident during the 2018 primaries, when conservative business leaders, worried about the effects of Empower Texans’ social policies on the state’s business climate, spent more than $3 million to defeat the group’s slate of far-right candidates. Bemoaning the races’ vitriol at the time, one prominent conservative commentator compared the West Texas billionaires to an “oligarchy,” hellbent on destroying anyone who “didn’t get on their knees and kiss the ring.”

“They romanticize the rural Texan,” Brandon Darby, editor of Breitbart Texas, a right-wing news site that had previously employed Sullivan, said at the time. “They wear the hat, the boots and the Wrangler jeans, but their policies actually strangle rural Texas communities.”

Meanwhile, Empower Texans continued its attacks on House leaders, accusing them of being RINOs and sparring over legislation and media credentials that would have given the group better access to representatives during floor debates. The latter conflict came to a dramatic head in 2019, when Sullivan released secret recordings with then-House Speaker Dennis Bonnen that prompted the Republican leader not to seek reelection.

In 2020, Empower Texans officially disbanded after its news blog, Texas Scorecard, was spun off into a new nonprofit that’s led by Sullivan. The website has remained one of the most vocal supporters of anti-LGBTQ and other far-right legislation, as well as candidates bankrolled by Defend Texas Liberty.

Chief among them: Slaton, the former Royse City representative who was removed from office.

Since running for office in 2020, Slaton received roughly $680,000 from Defend Texas Liberty — among the most of any other officeholder besides Paxton and Patrick — and was in turn a reliable bomb thrower and annoyance to House leadership, needling his fellow Republicans even as they passed a litany of conservative bills.

The Texas GOP’s campaign finance records show that in the first week of April — as rumors about Slaton’s inappropriate sexual relationship swirled around the Texas Capitol — the party received a $100,000 donation from Defend Texas Liberty PAC and another $35,000 from Dunn.

State Rep. Bryan Slaton, R-Royse City, sits at his desk on the House floor in Austin on April 18, 2023.

Former state Rep. Bryan Slaton, R-Royse City, at his desk on the House floor in Austin on April 18, 2023. Credit: Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune

Leaders of the party were later criticized for what some said was a muted and delayed response to the allegations against Slaton, a “family values” conservative who often touted his career as a Southern Baptist youth pastor.

The Texas GOP and its chair, Matt Rinaldi, declined interview requests and did not respond to a list of questions last week. In an email, Rinaldi condemned what he said was an attempt to frame Phelan and other House Republicans as the “mainstream in the Party and Paxton, Cruz, Trump, Patrick, and all others in the actual mainstream as a fringe group.”

A party spokesperson disputed the timing of the $100,000 donation from Defend Texas Liberty, saying it arrived March 30 — two days before Slaton allegedly had sex with his aide — but wasn’t posted until April 4 “due to processing times.” Asked twice to provide documents backing that claim, Rinaldi responded that “we can but don’t feel the need to.”

Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi speaks at a press conference at the Capitol on Aug. 30, 2021.

Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi speaks at a news conference at the Capitol on Aug. 30, 2021. Credit: Michael Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune

Members of the House General Investigating Committee — which also launched the inquiry into Paxton this year — later said their investigation of Slaton was hampered by obfuscation from him and members of his staff who refused to meet with an investigator. The staff members were represented by McDonald, the longtime Empower Texans lawyer who, in 2015, wrote that Paxton’s securities fraud charges were the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by House leadership.

McDonald declined an interview request but has previously said the House committee’s “statement that Slaton’s staff refused to cooperate is completely false,” and that “any condemnation of them is unfair, spurious and based on false information.”

New scandal, old tactics

Two weeks after Slaton’s ouster, the chance of also losing Paxton suddenly became real for the far right. As news of the House’s investigation into Paxton broke, Stickland, Sullivan and their allies went on the offensive.

They again blamed the attorney general’s mounting troubles on a shadowy cabal of liberals and House Republicans, and said his strong opposition to President Joe Biden made him a target of the deep state. (The inquiry began after Paxton asked lawmakers to cover a $3.3 million lawsuit settlement with whistleblowers fired from the attorney general’s office after they reported Paxton to law enforcement for allegedly misusing his authority to help a friend, real estate investor Nate Paul.)

Supporters posted about the “coming political war” and made overt threats to anyone who might support Paxton’s impeachment and the “witch hunt” that Sullivan said was orchestrated by Phelan’s “cult.” Occasionally, Paxton responded on social media with a simple “thank you.”

The day of the impeachment vote, Stickland’s PAC sent mass text messages comparing Paxton to twice-impeached former President Donald Trump and urging supporters to inundate their representatives with complaints.

And, in the wake of the 121-23 vote for impeachment, they excoriated the 60 Republicans who voted to advance the 20 articles of impeachment to the Texas Senate, calling it an attack on grassroots conservatives by the “crony establishment” that had been after Paxton since 2015.

A screenshot of a text message sent by Defend Texas Liberty defending Ken Paxton the day before the Texas House impeachment vote.

A screenshot of a text message supporting Ken Paxton sent by Defend Texas Liberty the day before the Texas House impeachment vote. Credit: Phone screenshot

Particular attention was given to longtime Paxton allies and deep-red conservatives who voted for impeachment. After Rep. Briscoe Cain, one of the most conservative lawmakers in the state, said he voted for impeachment out of a duty to due diligence, Sullivan compared Cain to Pontius Pilate, the enabler of Christ’s crucifixion.

Since then, Dunn and Wilks-backed groups and individuals have continued to attack virtually every aspect of the Paxton impeachment process — and fellow conservatives who supported it. In June, Defend Texas Liberty paid for billboards accusing Rep. Glenn Rogers, R-Graford, of having “joined 61 democrats to impeach Ken Paxton.”

Rogers, who fended off a well-financed 2020 primary challenge by Farris Wilks’ son-in-law, responded forcefully, noting the deep-pockets relationship between Dunn, Farris Wilks and Stickland, the “big puppeteer” who does “their dirty work.”

“They hide behind their money and a pious front in order to create chaos and division in the Republican party,” Rogers wrote on Facebook. “Get ready for a barrage of misrepresentations, deceit, and outright lies financed by these ‘fine Christian gentlemen.’”

Longtime political observers expect the acrimony to worsen in the coming months as Stickland promises expensive primary challenges to more-moderate incumbents next year, and Defend Texas Liberty continues to receive heavy backing from West Texas — including a new, $3.5 million infusion from Dunn and Farris Wilks in June.

TheTexas GOP, chaired by Rinaldi, a former representative who was bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks, has gone all-in on attacking House leadership, accusing Phelan and others of subverting the will of voters by impeaching Paxton, and claiming that it is part of a broader plot against grassroots conservatives.

That schism is likely to deepen ahead of an expected October special legislative session on contentious “school choice” legislation and the 2024 primary elections, said Mackowiak, the Travis County GOP chair. He said it would be extremely difficult for Defend Texas Liberty and its allies to mount serious challenges to every Republican who approved Paxton’s impeachment. Mackowiak also said he doubts the Paxton impeachment vote will be the primary, animating issue for voters next year.

But he said Defend Texas Liberty could attack incumbents from the right by packaging together their votes on school voucher-like programs, Paxton and bills on social issues that did not make it out of the House during the last legislative session. And while losing Paxton would be a blow to that ultraconservative wing of the Texas GOP, Mackowiak does not believe that it would change the faction’s tactics, which he said have been proven successful by the state’s gradual turn to the far right over the past decade.

“It’s a proxy battle,” he said. “And, in a way, their movement is bigger than it’s ever been.”

Disclosure: Collin College, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Texas Public Policy Foundation and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Join us for conversations that matter with newly announced speakers at the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, in downtown Austin from Sept. 21-23.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/24/ken-paxton-impeachment-dunn-wilks/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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Meanwhile, the global climate crisis only intensified in 2020 - and so did our work in exposing and mapping out the power of the fossil fuel industry. One of our big areas of engagement this past year was around divestment campaigns. Our work helped spark a new national campaign to get TIAA - one of the nation’s biggest financial services organizations - to divest from fossil fuels, while our exposé on the University of Michigan’s investment in a far-right Texas oil billionaire aided successful organizing efforts that froze new UMich investments in fossil fuels.

We also formed new collaborations with a range of groups - such as Divest Harvard, College Climate Coalition, Climate Action Movement, DivestEd, and DSA Ecosocialists - through several webinars attended by hundreds of activists on how to research fossil fuel investments. We combined much of the material in these webinars into this handy research primer.

ref

https://news.littlesis.org/2020/02/03/why-is-the-university-of-michigan-financing-the-billionaire-oilman-whos-bankrolling-the-texas-far-right

university of Michigan students and faculty are part of the growing national effort to pressure university endowments to divest from the fossil fuel industry. UMich organizers are demanding that the Board of Regents divest its $12.4 billion from fossil fuels and move towards carbon neutrality by 2030. Against this backdrop of rising climate activism, the Regents recently voted down a $50 million investment in Vendera Resources, an oil and gas holding company. All this comes on the heels of a growing movement across the U.S. calling on institutions of higher education, in the face of our mounting climate emergency, to pull their billions in endowment investments out of oil, gas, and coal.

Given this, the University of Michigan community might be surprised to know that their endowment is helping to finance not merely a major U.S. oil driller, but one who uses his fossil fuel fortune to pour millions into funding the Texas far right and its efforts to restrict abortion rights and the civil rights of LGBTQ people, among other things.

Tim Dunn is a billionaire Texas oilman who is the driving force behind Empower Texans, a dark money operation that has pumped millions of dollars into advancing an ultra-conservative takeover of Texas politics. He’s used his massive fossil fuel wealth to advance his libertarian, evangelical agenda through Empower Texans and a host of other organizations, PACs, and political candidates. One journalist has labeled Dunn “probably the most influential donor operating in Texas today.”

As of October 2018, the University of Michigan has $26 million invested in the private equity fund that finances Tim Dunn’s business operations. The fund, Lime Rock Partners IV AF, is overseen by the private equity firm Lime Rock Partners, and it bankrolls the business operations of CrownQuest, which is Tim Dunn’s oil drilling company.CrownQuest is a major extractor of fossil fuels – it was the 30th top oil producer in Texas in 2017. The joint venture between Lime Rock Partners and Dunn’s CrownQuest is called CrownRock, which combines Lime Rock’s financing with CrownQuest’s field operations. Dunn serves as CEO of both CrownQuest and CrownRock.

It is important that the flow of money that goes towards Tim Dunn and his funding of Empower Texans be made more transparent. Tim Dunn’s right-wing movement is not just a Texas story – it is a national one, with far-flung pension funds and endowment money directed toward Dunn’s business from institutions whose professed values stand in stark contrast with Dunn’s political agenda. This raises the question of whether an institution like the University of Michigan should reconsider pumping tens of millions into financing Tim Dunn’s oil profits and his use of those profits to bankroll far-right politics.

Tim Dunn and Empower Texans

Tim Dunn is a billionaire oilman who lives in Midland, Texas. He is the founder and CEO of CrownQuest, one of the top oil producers in Texas. Dunn is an ultra-right evangelical conservative who has poured millions into Texas politics, and specifically towards PACs and candidates to push the Texas GOP further to the right.

The main vehicle through which Dunn has exerted this influence is Empower Texans, a hard-right political project that uses millions in PAC and dark money, advocacy, and media efforts to advance ultra-conservative state candidates and causes. It is known for its questionable tactics in seeking to discredit opponents and push its agenda. Empower Texans is financed primarily by a small handful of fossil fuel billionaires and multi-millionaires. Dunn is the founder and chairman of Empower Texans.

Dunn is a hardline opponent of gay rights, the rights of transgender people, women’s reproductive freedom, and environmental regulation. He is a promoter of private Christian education and a convention of the states – a right-wing demand, backed by the Koch brothers, aimed at rewriting the U.S. constitution to devolve more power to the states.

As we documented in our recent report, Tim Dunn is the top funder of Empower Texans – he and his family gave at least $7,662,500 to Empower Texans from 2008 to 2018, as well as hundreds of thousands to a range of state and local candidates pushing the Empower Texans agenda. Dunn and his wife Terri spent at least $9.771,693 on Texas politics from 2002 to 2018 (this does not include any dark money donations that do not need to be disclosed).

(To learn more about Dunn, read this profile in the Texas Monthly, and our recent report, “The Money Behind Empower Texans”)

Here are just a few of the highlights of the ultra-conservative activity of Dunn and Empower Texans:

Two close allies of Dunn are Dan and Farris Wilks, the second top funders of Empower Texans. The Wilks brothers became billionaires through fracking and have spent tens of millions of dollars on ultra-right candidates and causes, such as supporting “crisis pregnancy centers,” which ReWire News calls “fake clinics that use anti-choice propaganda to try to trick people from seeking abortion services.” The Wilks brothers have also been funders of rightwing media outlets such as PragerU and the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s extreme-right news outlet.

In 2019 alone, Dunn and the Wilks brothers gave at least $250,000 to Trump Victory.

In sum, it’s hard to overstate the scope of Tim Dunn’s influence in pushing an ultra-right agenda in Texas. One writer in the Houston Chronicle called Dunn “arguably the most influential donor to the Texas GOP’s far-right flank” while a Texas Observer op-ed called him “the most influential political player that most Texans never heard of.” Over the past decade, Dunn, his billionaire allies, and Empower Texans have effectively bankrolled a far-right resurgence in the Texas GOP, gained huge influence among a range of power elected officials, and driven a host of reactionary fights that have threatened some of the state’s most marginalized people. 

How the University of Michigan is helping to prop up Dunn’s oil fortune that he uses to fund the Texas far right

The University of Michigan is helping to fund Tim Dunn’s business operations. It may be doing so unwittingly, because the University isn’t directlyinvested in Dunn’s business. Rather, UMich’s money goes towards Dunn through a private equity fund that UMich invests in, which in turn finances Dunn’s business with UMich’s and other investors’ money.

First, some quick context: private equity firms create “funds” that wealthy people and big institutional investors (pension funds, endowments, etc.) commit money to, usually with the promise of higher- and sooner-than-usual returns. The private equity firms invest those funds in a range of companies and sectors – housing, retail, fossil fuels – with the aim of raking in quick profits, often through means that are destructive to the companies they invest in but bring in hefty returns for their investors. Sometimes, single private equity funds or firms essentially own entire companies. In turn, private equity firms charge very large fees, which makes their executives some of the wealthiest people in the world.

One of the private equity firms that UMich invests with is Lime Rock Partners, which has offices in Houston and Connecticut. Lime Rock focuses its private equity investments in the energy sector and has several funds, with different names, that each pool the money of the investors in those funds to finance different oil and gas companies.

One of the specific funds that UMich invests in is a Lime Rock fund called Lime Rock Partners IV AF. This is the specific fund whose money – i.e., money from UMich and other investors in the fund – Lime Rock used to finance Tim Dunn’s business operations.

Here’s how this all works. In 1996, Tim Dunn formed EnerQuest Resources, an oil company that later became CrownQuest Operating LLC, or just CrownQuest. In 2007, Lime Rock Partners, the private equity firm, entered into a joint venture with Dunn’s CrownQuest, and that joint venture was called CrownRock.

From 2007 to 2018, Lime Rock funded CrownRock with a fund that was called Lime Rock Partners IV LP. But in 2018, the life of that fund expired, and Lime Rock bought out its own fund for $1.9 billion and named the new fund Lime Rock Partners IV AF. Bloomberg reported that the “vast majority of the asset value” in Lime Rock Partners IV AF comes from its stake in CrownRock.

Dunn serves as the CEO of both CrownQuest and CrownRock. According to CrownQuest’s website, almost everything it does is for CrownRock. “Substantially all of the time of CrownQuest’s employees is allocated to the operation of CrownRock’s properties and the provision of general and administrative services to CrownRock,” CrownQuest says. “In addition, CrownQuest operates approximately 98% of CrownRock’s total net wells, and the wells CrownQuest operated for CrownRock provided approximately 98% of CrownRock’s average daily production in 2018.”

Here’s how the University of Michigan is involved. In May 2018, it committed $26 million to Lime Rock Partners IV AF, the new fund (UMich had also been invested in the older fund that financed CrownRock, and it rolled its investment in the old fund into the new fund). Another major institution of higher education in Michigan, Michigan State University, also has $15.6 million invested in the new fund. (Michigan State students have also been pushing for fossil fuel divestment by their university).

This slideshow map shows the relationship between the University of Michigan, Lime Rock Partners, its funds, CrownQuest, CrownRock, Tim Dunn, and Empower Texans:[graf]

a host of other colleges and universities may also be invested in Lime Rock Partners IV AF. A number of endowments were invested in the old fund, Lime Rock Partners IV LP. These include Harvard, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, Reed College, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Pomona College Carnegie Mellon University, Scripps College, and DePauw University. However, it is yet unknown if, like investors such as UMich and Michigan State, these institutions also rolled over their investment from the old fund into the new fund.

As we wrote in our report, a variety of pension funds and charitable foundations also invested in the older fund.

What will the University of Michigan do?

As the dire implications of our climate crisis continue to surface everyday across the world, universities have a big decision to make. Will they continue to invest their hundreds of billions of endowment money in the fossil fuel companies – and their financiers – that are driving our climate emergency? Or will they divest from the fossil fuel industry in order to materially weaken this engine of climate crisis and to send an important message across the world that big investors can no longer keep trying to profit from planetary catastrophe? (The University of California recently announced that it was ending its investments in fossil fuels, including its private equity investments in fossil fuels).

The University of Michigan faces an even clearer question: will it continue to spend tens of millions of dollars that go towards funding Texas oil money that props up that state’s extreme right? Or will it live up to its purported values – and support its diverse community of students, faculty, and other workers – by breaking with the fund that finances Tim Dunn’s business operations?

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tex obs

The civil war within the Texas Republican Party — billionaires, enormous egos, blood grudges, subterfuge, religion, debauchery — is one of the best and most under-told stories in American politics, but it also has a Tolkien-length backstory. The simplified version is this: A decade ago, as the Bush administration started melting down, the Texas GOP began to split into two. One faction aligned with a more genteel and traditional form of business conservatism; the ideology of the other was nativism, Christianism and a nihilistic approach to government.

The second faction eventually won. But at the beginning, all they had were a few ideologically aligned millionaire and billionaire donors — Tim Dunn, Jeff Sandefer, the Wilks brothers — who wanted to buy legislators, a long-standing trade in Texas. The state’s weak ethics laws inhibited, albeit very modestly, their ability to do so. So they went guerrilla. They set up a constellation of organizations to quietly funnel their money into legislative races, and they used the threat of that money to put enormous pressure on elected officials. It was very effective: They didn’t always win elections, but they changed the way politics is done in Austin.

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http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution/

By Alex Kotch, CMD contributor

A constitutional convention, something thought impossible not long ago, is looking increasingly likely. Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, if 34 state legislatures “issue a call” for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one. By some counts, the right-wing only needs six more states. Once called, delegates can propose and vote on changes and new amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which, if approved, are currently required to be ratified by 38 states.

There are two major legislative pushes for a convention at the state level. One would attempt to engineer a convention for a balanced budget amendment only, and the other tries to secure an open convention for the purpose of limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. But once a convention is underway, all bets are off. The convention can write its own rules, resulting in a wide-open or “runaway” convention that can make major changes to the constitution and even change the number of states required to ratify those changes.

If America gets saddled with a runaway convention, the Koch coterie of funders will be to blame. Most of the groups pushing the convention idea are being underwritten by one or more institutions tied to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

ATTEMPTS TO LIMIT TOPIC OF THE CONVENTION LIKELY TO FAIL

On Feb. 24, Wyoming became the 29th state to pass a resolution requesting a convention specifically to add a single balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Many of these legislative resolutions also attempt to set the rules for the convention and limit who can attend it to a select list of largely GOP state leaders.

Austerity advocates claim that they need only to convince five of seven targeted states—Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin—to get on board, and they will have enough states to convene a convention. As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, three linked measures were just introduced in Wisconsin and were placed on a fast track to approval.

Another faction representing a broader “Convention of States” initiative is advocating an open constitutional convention to limit “the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.” Because this open convention format would be called on a particular subject rather than a particular amendment, representatives would likely vote on any number of measures.

Legislatures in nine states—Arizona, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Louisiana—have signed on to the Convention of States resolution,.Texas appears likely to join in, as the state Senate approved a Convention of States bill in February. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is fiercely campaigning for a convention and has deemed it an “emergency issue.” In 2016, he published a 70-page plan that includes nine proposed amendments aimed at severely limiting federal authority, even allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override a Supreme Court ruling or a federal law.

Groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Common Cause, and the Center for Media and Democracy have raised the alarm about these efforts. No convention has been called since 1787 in Philadelphia where George Washington presided.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains why any convention call, no matter how narrowly written, is likely to result in a “runaway” convention. A convention is empowered to write its own rules, including how delegates are chosen, how many delegates attend and whether a supermajority is required to approve amendments.

Nothing in the Constitution prevents a convention, once convened, from setting its own agenda, influenced by powerful special interests like the Koch groups. A convention could even choose an entirely new ratification process. “The 1787 convention ignored the ratification process under which it was established and created a new one, reducing the number of states needed to approve the new Constitution and removing Congress from the approval process,” writes CBPP.

Legal uncertainly surrounds the entire effort, which is sure to be litigated if successful. For instance, are states bound by resolutions passed many years ago? Will states withdraw their approval? Some states, like Delaware and New Mexico, have already moved to do so.

THE KOCH CONNECTION TO THE PUSH FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

Libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch have long opposed federal power and federal spending. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s biggestpolluters and has been sanctioned and fined over and over again by both federal and state authorities. In response, the Kochs have launched a host of “limited government” advocacy organizations and have created a massive $400 million campaign finance network, fueled by their fortunes and those of their wealthy, right-wing allies, that rivals the two major political parties.

The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity says it favors a balanced budget convention. Such an austerity amendment would drastically cut the size of the federal government, threatening critical programs like Social Security and Medicare and eviscerating the government’s ability to respond to economic downturns, major disasters and the climate crisis.

AFP has opposed an open convention, calling it “problematic.” But whatever qualms the Kochs might have, they continue to be a bedrock funder of the entire convention “movement.”

Running the “Convention of States initiative” is an Austin, Texas-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG).CSG reported revenue of $5.7 million in 2015, more than double its haul from two years earlier, when it launched its Convention of States Project, according to Dallas News. It now boasts 115,000 “volunteers,” although that figure may represent the number of addresses on its email list.

The group is not required to disclose its donors, but research into other organizations’ tax records by the Center for Media and Democracy, Conservative Transparency and this author show a web of Koch-linked groups having provided nearly $5.4 million to CSG from the group’s founding in 2011 through 2015:

Citizens for Self-Governance also has two Koch-connected board members.Eric O’Keefe is a director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a group which has taken in considerable funding from Koch-linked groups like the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and was at the center of the long-running “John Doe” criminal investigation of Scott Walker’s campaign coordination with dark money groups.

O’Keefe was thenational field coordinator for the Libertarian Party when David Koch ran for Vice President in 1979 on the Libertarian Party ticket. The party’s platform called for the end of campaign finance law, the minimum wage, “oppressive Social Security,” Medicaid, Medicare and federal deficit spending.

The Koch agenda has not changed much since.

Another board member is Tim Dunn, an oilman from Midland, Texas who is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing think tank that’s raked in over $1 million from Koch family foundations, $160,000 from Koch Industries in 2012 alone and at least $1.8 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Dunn runs another political group, Empower Texans, which supports Republican candidates and has taken in funds from Donors Trust and “Americans for Job Security,” a Koch-tied dark money group that was slapped with a severe fine by the FEC for its involvement in a dark money shell game intended to disguise the origin of its funds.

Both TPPF and Empower Texans back the constitutional convention idea.

What’s more, a 501(c)4 nonprofit connected to CSG, the Alliance for Self-Governance (which does business as Convention of States Action), received $270,000 in 2012 from Americans for Limited Government, which has received funding not only by Donors Capital Fund but by two Koch-funded political groups, the Center to Protect Patient Rights and Americans for Job Security.

Those two groups exchanged millions of dollars in 2010 and 2012, illegally hiding the source of funding for political expenditures, lying to the Internal Revenue Service and making unlawful contributions to pass-through groups, prompting investigations and historic fines by the both the State of California and the Federal Elections Commission. Eric O’Keefe’s Wisconsin Club for Growth also funneled $450,000 to Alliance for Self-Governance in 2012, at a time when WCFG was battling the Walker recall.

Any time any organization is named “self-governance” or “limited government” you can be sure that Wisconsin’s Eric O’Keefe is either a founder or on the board, and indeed O’Keefe is tied to all three organizations: CSG, the Alliance for Self-Governance and Americans for Limited Government.

If the Kochs and their friends don’t want an open constitutional convention, they’ve sure done a lot to aid the effort.