Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”
Rogers, a 68-year-old rancher and grandfather of five, represents a rural district west of Fort Worth. He was proud to serve in a Legislature that, as he told me recently, “couldn’t be more conservative if it tried.” Since entering office in 2021, he co-authored legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit, supported the Heartbeat Act that grants citizens the right to sue abortion providers and voted to give the police the power to arrest suspected undocumented migrants in schools and hospitals. In a Statehouse packed with debate-me agitators, he was comparatively soft-spoken — a former professor of veterinary medicine with an aversion to grandstanding. He was not in the habit of firing off salvos, as he had to Miller, that ended with “Kiss My Ass!”
But the viciousness of the primary season had been getting to him. Nearly a year before the March elections, ads began to appear in Rogers’s district castigating him not simply as a RINO but as a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law. (Rogers was especially peeved by an ad that photoshopped his signature white cowboy hat onto a headshot of Joe Biden.) Some of the attacks originated from his challenger’s campaign, while others were sponsored by organizations with grassroots-sounding names, like Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project. By the time voters headed to the polls, they could have been forgiven for thinking that Rogers had disappointed a suite of conservative groups.
In reality, Rogers had disappointed two men: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. 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. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”