TARRANT COUNTY, Texas — This article was originally published by our content partners at the Texas Tribune. Read the original article here.
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.
Tarrant County Republican Party Chair Bo French is under fire this week for a series of recent social media posts in which he repeatedly called his political opponents slurs for gay people and people with disabilities.
“This is the gayest ad in history,” French, 55, wrote in an Oct. 11 response to a Democratic advertisement on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Guarantee every one of these ‘dudes’ is a homo. There is literally nothing manly about any of them.”
“Retard strength,” he wrote Tuesday under a video from the Major League Baseball World Series. "Never go full retard," he said in response to former Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney on Oct. 4.
In another post, French polled his 14,000 followers about the upcoming election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. “If you believe Harris’ policies are better for Americans than Trumps’ policies, you are:” he asked before listing four choices. “Ignorant,” “A liar,” “Retarded,” or “Gay.”
The posts have prompted public condemnations from a handful of Republican officials in Tarrant County and other parts of the state, some of whom said French's behavior is part of a broader normalization of hateful and dehumanizing rhetoric in the party.
Tarrant County is the nation’s most populous Republican-led county, but has steadily tilted blue in recent election cycles. Backlash to French’s comments comes days before Republicans in the fast-diversifying county hope to maintain control over powerful seats in local government, and ahead of statewide races in which Tarrant’s 1.3 million registered voters will likely weigh heavily.
As party chair, French has been open about his goal is to “make Tarrant County inhospitable for Democrats,” and in August he unsuccessfully tried to pressure local Republican officials to close polling sites on college campuses for this year’s election — a move that the party explicitly said was meant to disadvantage Democrats.
French has for years been a fixture of a sprawling political empire funded by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, two West Texas oil tycoons who have spent tens of millions of dollars cleansing the Texas GOP of more moderate members while simultaneously employing white nationalists and associating with well-known antisemites. Groups funded by the billionaires gave French roughly $375,000 for his unsuccessful Texas House campaigns in 2016 and 2018, and he was backed by their network in his successful bid last year to lead the local party.
Since then, French has continued to pull the Tarrant County GOP further right. In September, the party hosted Jack Posobiec, a prominent far-right activist who has praised Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet and Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco — whose regimes murdered, tortured or imprisoned hundreds of thousands of their political opponents.
And in July, French joined other Republican leaders onstage at a conference in Fort Worth that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism. The event was held by True Texas Project, a prominent group in Dunn and Wilks’ network whose leaders have sympathized with the racist motives of the gunman who murdered 23 Hispanic people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019. The conference included several speakers who have frequently collaborated with white nationalists or eugenicists, prompting far-right Republicans such as former U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert and former State Sen. Don Huffines to condemn or pull out of the event.
Other Dunn and Wilks allies have similarly disparaged people with disabilities. In 2020, two of the billionaires' longest-serving operatives accidentally published unedited podcast audio in which they mocked Gov. Greg Abbott’s use of a wheelchair. The two were reprimanded amid bipartisan outrage, and have since found new jobs — as vice chair and general counsel for the Tarrant County GOP.
Neither French nor other party leaders responded to interview requests or a list of questions. But French has continued to downplay his comments this week, instead mocking his critics as "fragile snowflakes" while quietly deleting some, but not all, of the posts. On Wednesday, his X account was briefly locked down. In the 20 hours after it was unlocked, French posted at least 70 more times — often sarcastically deriding those who took issue with his posts.
“Uh oh, you said the R word,” he mockingly responded to a user who had just used the slur. “Totally,” he wrote to another user who’d called French’s critics “gay n’ retarded.”
French is no stranger to online controversy — earlier this year, he was criticized by some Republicans for writing on social media that “there are just some things where you can’t trust women” in response to a Harris campaign ad that asked voters to “trust women” with decisions about their health care and future.
But his behavior this week was a tipping point for some fellow Republicans. In social media posts, Republican leaders in Marion County and Keller condemned French, as did a recent member of the Texas GOP’s executive committee and a handful of elected officials from other Texas counties.
Some Tarrant County Republicans were similarly irate, tying his behavior to what they said was a growing wave of misogyny and hatred within the local GOP.
“I cannot stomach the ‘wife in the kitchen’ mindset, the name-calling and the puzzling hate towards gay people,” Stacy Reddy, a former Tarrant County GOP precinct chair, wrote on Facebook, adding that she stepped down from her post because of French. “Women own their bodies and minds, disabilities are not slur words, and love is love, as long [as both are] consenting adults.”
On Wednesday, Tarrant County Precinct Chair Sheena Rodriguez also sent an email to other party leaders in which she demanded that French apologize for his “outright vile and dehumanizing” comments and resign immediately after next week’s elections.
“Mr. French’s counterproductive and outright destructive rhetoric is detrimental to the Tarrant County GOP,” Rodriguez wrote. ”Conservative members, supporters and constituents of the Tarrant County GOP deserve a new, humble, respectful, and productive leader — one who is capable of being a decent human being.”
Rodriguez declined an interview request, but in her letter said that numerous other county precinct chairs were “disturbed” by French’s behavior.
Some party members have responded to Rodriguez by accusing her of causing disunity ahead of the elections. “Not appropriate to create fights within the party a week before election day," Carlos Turcios, a precinct chair who writes for a local right-wing website, said on social media.
Others have said they're also outraged — by French's critics. In an email to Rodriguez, Larry Carpenter Jr., another Tarrant County precinct chair, claimed she sought to "censor free speech" and accused her of being a “sell out to the actual conservative movement” who is more aligned with the George Bush-Dick Cheney era of the GOP.
“I would highly recommend you switch parties,” wrote Carpenter, who did not respond to a request for comment. “All of this evidence you sent to me is gay, retarded, ignorant and waste everyones [sic] time as it truly is a joke.”
