This story originally appeared in The New York Times October 2, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/magazine/texas-politics-billionaire-preachers.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm_source=pocket_shared

By Ava Kofman

Ava Kofman reviewed campaign finance reports and sermons and conducted more than 50 interviews across Texas. This article was done in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica

Oct. 2, 2024

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.”

Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.

Rogers believes he provoked the ire of the Dunn and Wilks machine for two reasons. He refused to support a school-voucher bill that would funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools, and he voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the machine’s most powerful allies. (Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment, was impeached in part for misusing his office to help a friend under federal investigation.)

Since neither of these issues particularly excited voters, many attacks focused on distorting Rogers’s record on immigration instead. When his wife joined a text group for the spouses of incumbents under siege (they called themselves the Badass Babes), she saw that her husband was not the only opponent of vouchers who had supposedly given Democrats “control of the Texas border.” The mailers sent across the state were identical, with only the names and faces swapped out.

The onslaught worked. Rogers lost his seat by 27 percentage points, and more than two dozen Statehouse candidates backed by the two billionaires prevailed this spring. These challengers received considerable support from Dunn-and-Wilks-backed allies like Miller, the agricultural commissioner, as well as from G.O.P. heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chairman of the Travis County G.O.P.

The morning after his routing at the polls, Rogers published an editorial in The Weatherford Democrat. Commendably short on self-pity, it argued that the real loser in his race was representative democracy. “History will prove,” he wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”

Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian Nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) 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.

Exactly what this reclamation would look like is up for debate. Some Christian Nationalists advocate for more religious iconography in public life, while others harbor grander visions of Christianizing America’s political institutions. Those on the extreme end of this spectrum are sometimes called Dominionists, after the passage in Genesis in which man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has extensively reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks and believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. Zachary Maxwell, a Republican activist who knows the Wilks family personally and used to work for Texas Scorecard, a media group associated with Dunn and Wilks, agrees. “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)

Wilks did not respond to detailed lists of questions. In an email, Dunn directed me to his previous public statements. In one of them, he explained that every Christian should avoid the label “Christian Nationalist” because “it makes ‘Christian’ an adjective — in other words, subjugated to something else.” A self-proclaimed proponent of limited government, he has also rejected the way in which the label, a “smear,” suggests that Christians would replace “God as King with earthly kings who claimed God’s authority.”

Unlike most billionaires, Dunn and Wilks are also pastors. Friends and critics alike described the pair as conspicuously down-home and devout. “They love God, they serve God,” said Jerry Maston, an evangelical pastor and Wilks’s brother-in-law. Dunn, who is 68, has served on the “pulpit team” of a nondenominational church in Midland. Wilks, who is four years older, practices a form of Christianity that hews closely to the Old Testament at the Assembly of Yahweh, a church his family founded outside of Cisco, a town in Central Texas. When I saw him preach there earlier this year, he warned his followers that “absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver.” The two men may differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn’t celebrate Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday — but they share the same vision of a radically transformed America.

Many of their ideas have been shaped by David Barton, a former teacher in Aledo, Texas, and the closest the Christian Nationalist movement has to an in-house intellectual. Barton has been advancing the same revisionist thesis for decades: The founders intended for the barrier between church and state to protect Christianity from the government, not vice versa. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” explains the website for WallBuilders, Barton’s advocacy group, to which Wilks has donated more than $3 million.

This view, dismissed by historians but increasingly common among white evangelicals, has been encouraged by recent Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting the establishment clause and embraced by prominent Republicans, most notably the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Johnson lauded Barton at a 2021 WallBuilders event, citing his “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” The day after Johnson was elected Speaker, Barton said on a podcast, “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time.”

With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right mega-donors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian Nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks. Several of the lawmakers they’ve funded have introduced bills linked to Project Blitz, a coalition of religious groups, including Barton’s WallBuilders, that drafted model legislation to advance Christianity’s role in civic life. One bill directs educators to hang posters of the Ten Commandments “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” Another, now law, requires schools to display “In God We Trust” placards.

“You can look here to see what’s coming to other states soon,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. After Texas passed a law allowing the work of licensed mental-health counselors in public schools to be done by unlicensed chaplains — representatives of “God in government,” one of the bill’s sponsors called them — a dozen other states introduced similar bills. That includes Louisiana, which became the first state to sign a bill into law this June requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. (Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.”)

It is no accident that Dunn and Wilks have concentrated their energies on infusing Christianity into education. Many far-right Christians trace the country’s moral decline to Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s that ended mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Texas recently proposed an overhauled reading curriculum that strongly emphasizes the Bible “in ways that verge on proselytizing,” according to Brockman, the scholar at the Baker Institute; The 74, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the state’s educational consultants contracted with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose board Dunn has served on since 1998. Wilks and his brother, Dan, have given around $3 million to PragerU, a video platform co-founded by Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host. It is not an accredited university; instead it provides “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.” Public-school leaders in Arizona, Florida , Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and South Carolina have recently approved PragerU’s teaching materials. One lesson shows an animated Frederick Douglass explaining that slavery was a compromise the founding fathers made to “achieve something great.”

Predictably, these attempts to control what happens in the classroom trigger local culture wars, which, in turn, lead Christian Nationalists to contend that religious values are under siege. “They’re going to be things that people yell at, but they will help move the ball down the court,” Barton said in a 2016 conference call with state legislators that was later made public. The ultimate aim of these skirmishes is to end up with a religious liberty case before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.

Last year, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with wooden crosses and Christian flags did not see themselves as insurrectionists overturning democracy but as patriots defending the will of God. They had been spurred on by years of rhetoric that recast political debates as spiritual battles with apocalyptic stakes.

In 2016, Trump received a higher share of the white evangelical vote than any presidential candidate since 2004, but the sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have found that Christian Nationalist beliefs were an even better predictor of support for his candidacy than religious affiliation. The slogan Make America Great Again can be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a dog-whistle to make it Christian Again, too. During the same speech in which he boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, Trump warned that Christianity was “under tremendous siege” and pledged that when he was president, “Christianity will have power.” This June, he promised a Christian coalition “a comeback like just about no other group,” and in July, he encouraged Christians to vote “just this time” because in four years “you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Dunn has placed himself in a favorable position to guide a second Trump administration — and transform the nature of the federal government. He helps fund America First Legal, a conservative law firm headed by the former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller that represents itself as the MAGA movement’s answer to the A.C.L.U., as well as the Center for Renewing America, a far-right policy group led by the former Trump budget director Russell Vought. According to documents obtained by Politico, the Center for Renewing America has explicitly listed “Christian Nationalism” as one of its top priorities. Both groups have played a role in shaping Project 2025, an extreme policy agenda, published by the Heritage Foundation, that proposes consolidating executive power and remaking the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in a video captured in August by undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting. “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.” Vought has publicly defended the Christian Nationalist label as “a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and making public-policy decisions that are best for this country.”

Since 2021, Dunn has also been a founding board member of the America First Policy Institute, yet another group assembled by Trump loyalists to prepare for his possible return to the White House. One of its papers, “Ten Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” discusses how America was “founded as a self-governing nation on biblical principles” — a favored Dunn talking point. Brooke Rollins, a former domestic policy adviser in the Trump administration who worked with Dunn at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recruited him to the institute. “We wanted to create a national organization similar to what we built in Texas,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a 100-year play.”

I am by nature a tightwad,” Dunn writes in “Yellow Balloons,” a book he self-published in 2018. His mother once told him that as a child, he needed to be turned upside down to shake a nickel out of his pocket for the church collection basket. The youngest of four boys, Dunn grew up modestly in Big Spring, Texas. In the 1980s, he settled with his wife and six children in Midland, the seat of the Permian Basin, to become the chief financial officer at an oil company before founding his own in 1996. When the British writer Peter Stothard traveled to Midland for The Times of London during the 2004 presidential election, he spoke to Dunn, a “thin-faced, blue-jeaned Bush-backer” who was “convinced that his oil has existed for only 4,000 years, the time decreed by Genesis, not 200 million years as his geologists know.”

CrownQuest Operating, as Dunn’s company is called today, keeps most of its operations within Texas to limit interactions with the federal government. It ranks among the Top 10 biggest oil producers in the state and has made Dunn one of the wealthiest people in Texas. But for many years, when it came time to pick up the check at lunch with colleagues, Dunn writes, he found himself with “alligator arms.” It wasn’t until he came to better understand the parable of the unjust steward, a cryptic story from the Gospel of Luke, that he discovered his charitable side. Its moral, according to Dunn, is that when we get to heaven, “part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation.”

In the meantime, many of Dunn’s investments have brought him treasures here on Earth. In 2007, he started his own PAC, Empower Texans, to fight a tax on oil wells financed through investors. Dunn has donated a majority of its funds, lending it the air of a special-interest group of one. Around a decade later, when one of Dunn’s political advisers connected him to Farris Wilks, Empower Texans became an interest group of two.

Wilks was raised in a goat shed on a homestead just south of Cisco, a town of 3,900 people and more than a dozen churches. He went to work at his father’s masonry business, and on weekends, he helped his family build their own church, the Assembly of Yahweh. In the 1990s, Wilks and his younger brother, Dan, decided to use their knowledge of stone to prospect for oil in their own backyard. In 2000, the brothers founded Frac Tech, a fracking-services provider, and a decade later they sold their stake for $3.5 billion. Not long before the deal closed, the brothers established charitable foundations to fund conservative groups, including Focus on the Family and the Heritage Foundation. In 2015, they made their first significant campaign gift — $15 million to a Ted Cruz super PAC connected to David Barton — and The San Antonio Express-News said they were gaining a reputation as the “Koch brothers of the Christian Right.”

Wary of the media spotlight, Dan Wilks made fewer headline-grabbing campaign donations after that. Farris, however, was only getting started. Though he does not regularly socialize with Dunn, he relies on the same fleet of consultants and synchronizes his donations to many of the same campaigns. By 2018, he’d become the largest donor to Empower Texans, after Dunn.

At first glance, what’s most striking about Dunn and Wilks’s political giving, apart from its unprecedented scale, is its low rate of return. For more than a decade, their PACs and the lawmakers they supported won a handful of proxy wars — obstructing legislation, forcing retirements, generating scandals — but they were snubbed by the establishment Republicans who controlled the Statehouse. In 2022, according to The Texas Tribune, 18 out of the 19 candidates backed by the group lost their races.

Political strategists have attributed this poor showing to the group’s uncompromising approach. Luke Macias, a longtime consultant to Dunn-and-Wilks-backed campaigns, has refused to work with candidates who support exceptions for abortion bans. (Macias did not respond to a request for comment). “My job is to communicate a candidate’s beliefs to a broader audience,” a consultant who worked with Macias on an Empower Texans-funded campaign told me. “His job is to find people who believe exactly what they believe and try to get them elected. From a financial perspective, Luke is the worst possible investment you can make, because he doesn’t seem to make decisions based on the facts, polls or strength of the opposition, but that right there tells you something about the strength of Tim Dunn’s ideology: Loyalty and fidelity are more important to him than short-term outcomes like winning.”

Dunn and Wilks, however, are focused on the long-term. Gerrymandering has meant that most Republicans in Texas only fear for their seat if they’re challenged in a primary election — the Texas equivalent of term limits, Dunn has said. The tactical brilliance of Empower Texans has been to transform the political climate of Austin into a perpetual primary season. A dark money subsidiary, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, warns legislators about how upcoming votes will affect their conservative rankings on its index, while a separate media arm, Texas Scorecard, publishes editorials, podcasts and documentaries to hound incumbents it disapproves of out of office. “The irony is that most of the incumbents they attack agree with them on 95 percent of the issues,” Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said of Dunn and Wilks. “I’m not sure how to explain the purity test they demand, except that it comes down to wanting people they can completely control.”

Some donors might hesitate to back a losing candidate, but Dunn and Wilks’s PACs often resurrect their challengers as though they are fighters in an arcade game. “They find candidates with an exceptionally high pain tolerance,” said a Texas House staff member who has worked for an incumbent opposed by Empower Texans. “They might not beat you on the first go, but they slowly chip away at your support and keep you under a microscope by hammering you with the same guy 52 weeks a year.” Shelley Luther, a beautician who was jailed for refusing to close her hair salon in Dallas during the pandemic, won the primary for a House seat this March after two failed campaigns supported by Dunn and Wilks. For Bryan Slaton, a former youth pastor and Empower Texans-backed candidate, the third time was the charm, though he was later unanimously expelled from the House after an internal investigation found that he got a 19-year-old aide drunk and had sex with her.

The political muscle of Christian nationalism is driving a growing share of attacks on Republicans across the country. Since 2010, a historically high number of Republicans have been defeated by primary challengers in the most evangelical House districts, according to an analysis posted on Substack by Michael Podhorzer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The former Texas governor Rick Perry recently expressed his concerns about the internecine warfare consuming the state party. “If we continue down this path pointing our guns inside the tent,” he told The Texas Tribune earlier this year, “that is the definition of suicide.”

David Pepper, the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines” and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, calls this trend the Texas Lesson. “It’s a tragic case study in how statehouses have flipped from serving the public interest to serving the far-right interests of private donors,” he told me. “These billionaires have been relentless and systematic about punishing moderates — ” Pepper paused and corrected himself. “Actually, I wouldn’t even call these lawmakers ‘moderate.’ These are simply officials who maybe, on one occasion, will stand up for the best interest of their district.”

Not long after he arrived in Austin at the start of his first term, Glenn Rogers began to sort his colleagues into categories. There was a close-knit contingent of unabashed loyalists, who took most of their money from Empower Texans and its spinoffs. There were legislators who may or may not have taken some money from Dunn and Wilks, but who followed most of their agenda out of fear of facing a primary challenger. And there were representatives who reliably voted for the interests of their district, though this last category, Rogers conceded, was “largely aspirational.” When Dunn and Wilks win, they win, Rogers told me, “and when they lose, they still win, because the people left in office are afraid to disagree with them. You can’t be in politics long without being influenced by them in one way or another.”

That influence, Rogers soon realized, extended well beyond the House. In the 2022 gubernatorial primary, Dunn and Wilks backed Don Huffines, a real estate investor and former state senator who ran to the right of Abbott, through a new PAC they dubbed Defend Texas Liberty. Huffines called for sending troops to the border, abolishing property taxes and passing a school-voucher program. Abbott handily won the primary, but he also started to sound a lot more like Huffines, particularly when it came to private-school vouchers.

Abbott’s newfound ardor for vouchers was striking. He asked faith leaders to “go to the pulpit” for the measure and called four special sessions of the Legislature in an attempt to rally the House into passing it. That vouchers undermine church-state separation while also draining resources from public schools has made them appealing to both free-market fundamentalists and far-right Christians. Yet vouchers are unpopular in rural districts across Texas, where Friday-night football games are sacrosanct and private schools are scarce. When Abbott failed to corral the votes he needed, he began to vigorously campaign against the holdouts, including Rogers.

“How did someone who pitched himself as a governor committed to public education end up leading the charge to destroy public schools?” asks James Talarico, a Democratic member of the House and a former public-school teacher. “Follow the money.” Abbott’s motivations have remained a subject of speculation in Austin, but Talarico suggested that the governor started to push for vouchers in earnest because he was shut out by Dunn and Wilks. Last December, Abbott intensified his push after receiving $6 million from Jeff Yass, a pro-voucher billionaire in Pennsylvania, to spend in this year’s primaries.

In an opinion essay in The Midland Reporter-Telegram, Dunn wrote that he is “basically uninvolved” with the voucher movement, but candidates he and Wilks backed have repeatedly testified in support of vouchers; Texans for Fiscal Responsibility has given high marks to those who support the measure; and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn has long served on the board, joined Abbott on a tour of private Christian schools across the state.

As the voucher fight escalated, the House decided to bring impeachment charges against Attorney General Paxton, claiming, among other charges, that he had abused public trust and committed bribery. Paxton, one of the biggest recipients of Dunn and Wilks largess, had refused to defend the Texas Ethics Commission against lawsuits filed by Empower Texans in an effort to strip the campaign-finance watchdog agency of its powers. The Dunn-Wilks political machine seemed to view the impeachment as an existential threat. In May 2023, Jonathan Stickland, a political adviser to Dunn and Wilks and the president of their new PAC, Defend Texas Liberty, wrote on X that a vote to impeach Paxton was “a decision to have a primary.” In June, Defend Texas Liberty paid for a billboard in Rogers’s district attacking him for joining “61 Democrats to impeach Ken Paxton,” without mentioning that in doing so Rogers had also joined the majority of Republicans.

That same month, Defend Texas Liberty contributed $3 million to Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor and a former conservative talk-show host, shortly before he was set to preside over the impeachment trial in the Senate. (Patrick did not respond to a request for comment, but he has denied that the donation influenced his impartiality at the trial, during which Paxton was acquitted on all 16 articles.) Texas Monthly calculated that the well-timed gift from Defend Texas Liberty was 30 times more than what the group gave Patrick when he ran for re-election in 2022. Hours after the donation was made public in a campaign-finance report, Stickland, the political adviser, wrote on X: “This is just the beginning, wait till you see the next report. We will never stop. Ever.”

He spoke too soon. Last October, The Texas Tribune reported that Stickland met for hours with Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent white supremacists, at an office park near Fort Worth owned by Wilks Development, the family’s real estate company. A Holocaust denier and antisemite, Fuentes has popularized the idea of an imminent “white genocide,” a fear that has been used as a justification by several mass shooters, including the one who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019. (Defend Texas Liberty replaced Stickland and released a terse statement opposing Fuentes’s “incendiary views.” Stickland did not respond to requests for comment.)

After The Tribune’s reporting prompted a rare bipartisan outcry, Dunn and Wilks phased out Defend Texas Liberty and poured $6.8 million into a new vehicle, Texans United for a Conservative Majority. The rebranded PAC has not been shy about communicating its vision. Its new logo replaces the Goddess of Liberty statue that crowns the top of Austin’s Capitol building with a cross.

We have a three-party system in Texas, and they all loathe each other,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican-aligned consultant in Plano, said. “You have the Democrats, the more traditional moderate Republicans and the official state G.O.P., a dysfunctional organization which has been pretty much completely overtaken by the Dunn and Wilks side of things.” Once ridiculed as unserious fanatics by the conservative establishment, Dunn and Wilks are now its kingmakers.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the Texas Republican Convention in San Antonio in May. In the exhibit hall, there was plenty of generic Republican fare — gold-standard absolutists, Patriot Mobile vendors, merch stores hawking sweatshirts printed with “Jesus was accused of Insurrection too” — but many booths were linked to the Dunn-Wilks universe. Wilks Development co-sponsored the weekend, and the Dunn family hosted a “grassroots” breakfast, closed to the press. A WallBuilders booth was selling “The American Story,” a two-volume revisionist history that Barton co-wrote with his son. State Senator Angela Paxton, the attorney general’s wife, spoke on a panel dedicated to “Upholding Our Judeo Christian Heritage & Values.”

On a prominent stage erected by Texas Scorecard, lawmakers talked up the Contract With Texas, an open letter that began to circulate in the weeks before the convention. It asked for “all G.O.P. legislative priorities” to receive a floor vote before any Democratic bill and for the removal of all Democratic committee chairs. No one knew for sure who was behind the letter, which would significantly curb the influence of a party that holds 42 percent of seats in the House, but at least 21 of its 23 signatories had taken money from Wilks and Dunn’s entities.

One morning, I ran into Mark McCaig, the publisher of The Texas Voice, a conservative political blog, in the main lobby, where children wearing bright yellow sandwich boards printed with the phrase “Abolish Abortion” had been serving as an unofficial welcome party. McCaig has a close-cropped beard and a wonkish demeanor. The previous day, the general counsel of the Texas Republican Party posted a photo of McCaig chatting with a Texas Tribune journalist on Facebook; her caption denounced McCaig as a “plague” and The Tribune journalist as a “pagan reporter.”

McCaig told me he didn’t mind “committing the sacrilege” of talking to other reporters, though he confessed that he often had trouble articulating Dunn and Wilks’s goals when asked. “They say they want to make things even more conservative,” he observed, “but I don’t know what else is left to accomplish socially.” Buoyed by the MAGA wave, the Legislature has passed bills — permitless-carry laws, abortion bans, L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions, border militarization — that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years earlier. “A lot of pro-life leaders in the state don’t want to give women the death penalty,” McCaig continued. “You start to wonder what their true agenda is, and I think it’s power.”

The most far-reaching of these efforts to consolidate power may be the Convention of States Project. A highly controversial effort, partly funded by Dunn, it represents one of the best hopes for Christian Nationalists, among other interested parties, who want to transform the laws of the land in one fell swoop. “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 at a 2019 summit for the group, where he spoke alongside Barton. “What I did not expect is that the Convention of States would be an organization that would trigger that Great Awakening.”

The Convention of States Project takes its cues from Article V of the Constitution, which proposes two paths for constitutional amendments. The familiar path — a two-thirds vote in each chamber of Congress to be ratified by three-fourths of states — has been deployed successfully 27 times. The other path, which involves two-thirds of states passing resolutions to call for a constitutional convention, is rarely discussed and has never been used.

One afternoon in San Antonio, Mark Meckler, the president of the Convention of States and one of Dunn’s close friends, pitched a packed room of delegates on this second path. Wearing a blue trucker cap printed with a C.O.S. logo, he mocked the group’s critics, which included “every other baby-killing America-hating Marxist organization in the country” as well as the John Birch Society. “Thank God, those people were not at the Alamo,” Meckler said. “Because we wouldn’t remember the Alamo, because there would have been no Alamo, because all those people would have just run away.”

Meckler, who lives in a home that Dunn transferred to him near Austin, is a deft salesman. He said he regularly hears from people who find the prospect of a convention frightening. During his lecture, he sought to assuage those fears, casting the prospect of a Constitutional convention as a humdrum exercise that would bore even its own attendees. “What’s going to happen at a convention?” Meckler asked, pausing for dramatic effect. “People are going to make suggestions.” Some of the delegates laughed. “Are you guys scared? I’ve never been to a meeting where I was afraid of people making suggestions.” Yet nothing in Article V limits the scope of the laws that might be changed.

“It’s a gamble, but if it pays off, it would be the biggest opportunity ever for billionaires to transform the government,” Montgomery, the researcher of the religious right, said. The Mercer family and Koch-funded groups have also backed the effort. The Convention of States says that 19 states have passed its resolutions. To win over the remaining 15, the group has started to back primary challengers to Republicans who oppose them in states across the country. During a 2018 appearance on Fox, Meckler admitted that critics of the movement were getting at “something truthful” when they complained that the convention was “intended to reverse 115 years of progressivism. And we say, ‘Yes, it is.’”

This spring, Rogers took me on a tour of his ranch, a 3,000-acre property that abuts the Brazos River. “Our forefathers intended for ranchers and farmers to be able to serve in the Capitol,” he told me as we cut through the tall grass.

Rogers insisted to me that he was better off working his land, because it allowed him to spend more time with his grandchildren. But as the afternoon turned to evening and he began to play the consolatory voice mail messages he had received from constituents and colleagues, it was evident the loss still rankled. “I’ve been coming up with a short list of people interested in running for office,” he said, “but I’ve yet to find anyone who’s willing to go through what I did without billionaire support.”

Dunn’s wealth is only growing. Last December, he signed an agreement to sell his oil company to Occidental Petroleum in a deal valued at $12.4 billion. Seventeen days later, he made the $5 million contribution to a Trump PAC. Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2016 digital campaign manager, recently bought a modern farm-style house around the corner from Dunn’s compound in Midland. Dunn has poured millions into a new effort led by Parscale to use A.I. to target voters.

Before I left, Rogers brought out a little-known book, first published in 1998, called “Confrontational Politics.” Its author, H.L. Richardson, was a Republican state senator in California who was known for ruthlessly campaigning against other Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s.

The text had been recommended to Rogers by someone who knew that Dunn encouraged his associates to study it, and the tactics deployed against Rogers appeared to be lifted directly from its pages. Richardson advised conservatives to cultivate single-issue groups, to “joyfully punish the adversaries” and to keep in mind a vital principle: The route to political domination starts at the local level. “Control the bottom,” he wrote, “and one day you control the top. One day the man you elected to city council becomes the state senator and then moves to Congress and talks to the president on your behalf. If you really become effective, one day the phone rings and you are asked to come to Washington to advise the president. Somebody is leveraging the president at this very moment. Why not you?”

Doris Burke contributed research.

Source photographs for illustration above: Shotprime studio/Adobe Stock; lalalululala/Adobe Stock; Pugun & Photo Studio/Adobe Stock.

Read by January LaVoy

Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck

Engineered by David Mason