The Governor of Texas Nods to White Supremacist Violence

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott delivered a ringing endorsement of racist, right-wing vigilante violence last Thursday, when he extended a rare state pardon to a bigoted killer who was duly convicted for the murder of Garrett Foster, a protester at a 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Daniel Perry, who strongly opposed the nationwide protest movement against racism and police violence, and posted violent fantasies about murdering leftists and minorities on social media, ran a red light and drove into a crowd of protesters in Austin in July 2020. He shot and killed Foster, a white Army veteran who was legally carrying an assault rifle, after Foster approached his car.

Abbott pardoned Perry on May 16 immediately after receiving a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is under near-complete control of the governor himself. “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” he said in a statement.

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The decision represents official government sanctioning of deadly violence against people advocating against white supremacy, a phenomenon with a long history that stretches back to the Ku Klux Klan’s extrajudicial and unprosecuted lynchings, and which has always also targeted white allies of racial equality movements—like the Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights activists, two of them white, in 1964.

Abbott overturned a jury verdict that determined Perry had not fired his gun legally, even under Texas’s shoot-first self-defense regime, and without any new findings of fact nor new analysis that calls that verdict into question. Indeed, the evidence against Foster was clear-cut, and showed that he was a disturbed person who openly planned the killing beforehand, motivated by his racism and violent rhetoric against peaceful protesters by Republicans and former president Donald Trump.

It’s also clear that Abbott directed the Board to recommend a pardon after he was pressured to do so by right-wing politicians and former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential mouthpieces for white supremacy and misogyny in recent American history. Carlson has a track record of lionizing other killers of people acting in racial solidarity, like Kyle Rittenhouse.

“I look forward to approving the Board’s pardon recommendation as soon as it hits my desk,” Abbott said in April last year—less than 24 hours after the jury decided Perry was guilty. The governor fulfilled that promise last week.

The statements from Foster’s loved ones on Friday said it all.

Foster’s distraught mother, Sheila Foster, told CNN that she can’t wrap her mind around what’s happened, adding that “nothing involving this case is normal.”

“Everything the governor put in his pardon letter was proven wrong during trial,” Foster said. “If this was a Trump rally and somebody drove into that crowd and gunned one of those people down, do you think Gov. Abbott would pardon that killer?”

Gov. Abbott took the unprecedented step of requesting review himself, before Perry had a chance to appeal the verdict, and even preempting the judge’s sentence.

Whitney Mitchell, who was Foster’s fiancée, said in a statement that Abbott’s pardon “desecrated the life of a murdered Texan, impugned that jury’s just verdict, and declared that citizens can be killed with impunity as long as they hold political views that are different from those in power.”

Considering the circumstances, that’s perhaps the only way to make sense of Abbott’s pardon—with the added clarification that the political views most under fire are anti-racism and racial solidarity.

Gary Cohen, a parole and clemency attorney who has practiced in Texas for about four decades, told the Prospect in an interview he has “never seen a situation like this” before. Cohen added that there are “clearly some racist overtones in this matter,” pointing out that Abbott sat on a Board recommendation to issue a posthumous pardon to George Floyd for a minor drug conviction for months, until the Board made another unprecedented move and rescinded the recommendation without explanation.

The Board undertook the review of Perry’s case and issued the recommendation despite the fact that its rules bar consideration of a full pardon “except when exceptional circumstances exist,” like new exculpatory evidence; and notwithstanding that the “burden of showing such exceptional circumstances rests upon the applicant.”

Moreover, Texas governors have traditionally issued pardons only for decades-old, nonviolent convictions, typically after an individual has served their time and demonstrated their rehabilitation and value to the community, according to Cohen and reporting by The Texas Tribune.

But in Perry’s case, Abbott took the unprecedented step of requesting review himself, before Perry had a chance to appeal the verdict, and even preempting the judge’s sentence.

Moreover, the evidence against Perry included a clearly stated motive to kill beforehand, and an after-the-fact admission that he hadn’t acted in self-defense—all in Perry’s own words.

Court records showed that Perry self-identified as a “racist,” shared “white power” memes, and messaged friends about “hunting Muslims.” He premeditated the murder and stated his motive quite clearly and succinctly, saying he “might have to kill a few people” who were protesting and “might go to Dallas to shoot” people he believed were looting stores.

The evidence even showed that Perry perhaps had a more complex understanding of Texas’s shoot-first self-defense law than Abbott himself: When a friend asked if he could legally shoot protesters, Perry replied that he could “if they attack me or try to pull me out of my car,” which is generally accurate—and did not happen in his encounter with Foster.

Indeed, Perry didn’t even claim self-defense initially. Homicide detectives asked him specifically to demonstrate how Foster was holding his gun—clearly attempting to probe the self-defense question of whether he feared an imminent attack. Perry basically admitted that he decided to shoot before Foster became a threat: “I believe he was going to aim at me,” Perry told detectives. “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”

That same, clear-cut record of evidence remains entirely unchanged as of today.

That point is clear in the Board’s and Abbott’s statements, which simply contradict the jury verdict. The Board’s three-paragraph statement simply recommends a full pardon and restoration of firearm rights, with no explanation whatsoever.

Members stressed that they undertook a “meticulous review” of police reports, records from the district attorney’s office, and witness statements—as if the jury didn’t have all of those records and information, plus more.

Indeed, the jury considered everything the Board reviewed over the course of an eight-day trial with about 40 witnesses, and deliberated for about 17 hours before reaching a guilty verdict, according to The Texas Tribune.

To make matters worse, the Board apparently did not consider certain other highly relevant matters.

District attorney José Garza asked the Board to meet with Foster’s family and to consider the public-safety implications before making a recommendation, for example, according to a CNN report in April last year. Yet the Board decided to restore gun rights to a man who acted on a desire to kill people for protesting, and whose own defense witnesses said he believes that “anything out there can be a potential threat.” And Abbott and the Board acted without even informing the victim’s family, according to Foster’s mother—and despite Republicans’ rhetoric about prioritizing so-called “victims’ rights.”

American conservatives and right-wingers have a long history of excusing plainly criminal and racist vigilante violence.

The governor’s statements were similarly empty, stating simply that Texas has strong self-defense laws—ignoring that Perry’s central claim of self-defense was rejected by a jury of Texans.

The governor’s pardon omitted that Perry ran a red light and drove toward a crowd of people. And it included a number of overtly political statements as well as misrepresentations, including that Perry has “consistently stated that he acted in self-defense.”

Abbott even resurrected a failed defense and misleading smear, writing that the local district attorney, José Garza, directed the lead investigator “to withhold exculpatory evidence from the Grand Jury.”

But that issue, too, has been considered and rejected by the courts: Perry’s lawyers submitted a sworn affidavit from the investigator in an effort to have the indictment dismissed, but state court judge Clifford Brown rejected that argument. “I’m just not prepared to jump with you across the chasm that they committed some kind of criminal conduct,” Brown said—way back in August 2021.

Abbott’s resurrection of the point also raises a question, given that the governor himself, police, and other local officials can most certainly take action against a district attorney who directs a detective to “withhold exculpatory evidence” or demonstrates “unethical and biased misuse of his office,” as Abbott put it.

Of course, American conservatives and right-wingers also have a long history of excusing plainly criminal and racist vigilante violence, from the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s lynching campaigns, to the violent backlash against the 1960s civil rights movement, to the actions of right-wing extremists today.

Since the 2020 protest movement, Republicans have enacted laws seeking to absolve people like Perry who try to hit protesters with their vehicles, for example. At the very same time, conservatives have also responded with the most draconian set of anti-protest measures in recent memory, including a ruling that leaves individual organizers and civil rights organizations exposed to what one Supreme Court justice has called the “threat of destruction by lawsuit” for simply engaging in protests.

Perry’s pardon also bears clear parallels to the final outcomes in other recent incidents, like the case of Trayvon Martin’s killing by George Zimmerman, who also claimed self-defense (against a child) after initiating a confrontation; the killing of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber by Kyle Rittenhouse, who has since become a gun rights advocate (in Texas, incidentally); and the incident involving Patricia and Mark McCloskey, who pleaded guilty to assault and harassment before being pardoned by Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, in 2021 (much like Abbott, Parson announced that he would pardon the McCloskeys well before their conviction).

Abbott’s pardoning of Perry is yet another thumbs-up from the GOP to extremists that our national-security apparatus has identified as the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the country. It’s a move that expressly approves white supremacist violence, and threatens the very fabric of multiracial democracy.