Don Huffines Uses Religious Cover For His Guilty Conscience
Piety is the smoke. Go look for the fire.
Note: Sometimes spelling errors happen. 🤦🏻♀️
According to the Quorum Report, this week, new acting Comptroller Don Huffines has ousted a 40-year senior employee and will further judge staff on whether they’re sufficiently Christian.
The only problem is that Don Huffines can’t judge the Comptroller’s office staff on their Christianity. Because:
That’s still against federal law. (Unless the GOP is pushing for a case they can angle up to the Supreme Court.)
According to Huffines’ own bible, it says, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Which means, basically, saying you’re a good Christian doesn’t make you one. It’s more important what you do.
In February, records surfaced showing Huffines’ family had secretly bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico back in 2023. Through a shell LLC formed a month before the purchase, on land whose ownership only came out because somebody renamed a road and fought a property tax bill.
Why is Huffines buying real estate through a shell LLC if he’s got nothing to hide?
A few days before that story broke, Turning Point Action endorsed Huffines for Comptroller. TPUSA has long been known for its overt white supremacy. It’s worth also noting that Huffines’ son, Russell, works in coordination roles in the Trump White House’s Office of Cabinet Affairs. The same office would be helping prep Attorney General Pam Bondi for the House hearings where she’s been stonewalling questions about the Epstein files.
Here’s the one I can’t get past. Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch was infrastructure. A place built to move powerful men in and out quietly, with an airstrip and a hangar and a phone book full of the kind of names that don’t answer subpoenas.
Why would a wealthy Texas businessman with his own deep political connections want to own that? Why buy it secretly? Why fight to keep the sale quiet instead of announcing it, the way developers usually announce everything?
I don’t know the answer. I’m just asking the question Huffines hasn’t yet answered.
But, to be clear, buying a secret pedophile ranch wasn’t the first un-Christian thing Huffines has ever done.
Back in 2022, when Huffines ran against Abbott for governor, he had a field staffer named Jake Lloyd Colglazier. On his own YouTube channel, Colglazier said he wanted America to keep a white “supermajority” and “homogeneity.” He said the actual words. He also ran a chatroom where members called for “death to all minorities.” He said he “spit on George Floyd.” He mocked an Asian woman with a line so ugly about her getting beaten by her husband that I won’t even paraphrase it.
Huffines knew all of this. Reporters asked him directly if he’d fire the guy. He wouldn’t. His statement, “My campaign will not participate in cancel culture.”
Huffines knew his staffer was a white supremacist and chose to keep him employed anyway. He was asked, point-blank, multiple times, whether he condemned white nationalism. He never did it. Not once.
To this day, Don Huffines has still not condemned white nationalism.
Then there’s the ad campaign. Huffines ran on “invasion” rhetoric, the border as an invading horde, the same word choice used by the shooter who walked into an El Paso Walmart in 2019 and murdered 23 people, because he said Texas was being invaded. The Texas Democratic Party called it out directly.
This was racist. Not “racially charged.” Not “controversial.” Racist. Period. A white supremacist was kept on staff, on purpose. Rhetoric lifted straight from a mass shooter’s justification for killing Texans, run in paid media, on purpose.
Don Huffines is a so-called Christian who can’t condemn white nationalism, wants to grade his own staff’s faith, and is about to control the checkbook for a state where 62% of the population is non-white.
Huffines is like most Republicans whose political careers began in the Texas Legislature.
Don Huffines and his brothers were born into privilege and wealth. His grandfather, JL Huffines, started Huffines Motor Company, a car dealership, in Denton, Texas, in 1924, decades before Huffines was even born. That wealth was handed down. Then, in the early 1990s, he built a second fortune buying up distressed land after the S&L crash, at the exact moment regular Texans were losing homes and savings in that same collapse. Then he went to Austin and voted like a man who’s never once had to worry about a paycheck, a union card, or a landlord.
Look at the record. In 2015, he backed a bill prohibiting local regulations that prevent landlords from refusing to rent to tenants based on the source of their income. A multimillionaire real estate developer voted to protect landlords’ right to turn away the poor. Shocking, I know.
That same session, he backed provisions amending payroll deductions and prohibiting wage deductions for state employee union dues, as well as a 2017 bill requiring parental consent for minors to join a labor union. Huffines wanted to make it harder for a 16-year-old working a summer job, even to sign a union card without parents’ permission. This is a man who has never needed a union a day in his life, deciding other people’s kids don’t get to have one either.
He voted to prohibit health plan coverage for abortion twice and to increase premiums for anyone whose insurance dared cover one anyway. He voted no on reforms to the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, the insurer of last resort for hurricane-prone coastal communities, in 2015. Of course, he’s fine with fewer coverage options for regular families. His family owns a 7,600-acre ranch in New Mexico.
Grew up comfortable, got richer off a financial crash that ruined other Texans, and spent his time in the Senate making sure the rules stayed tilted his way. He arrived in Austin to make sure working Texans kept losing.
The Comptroller’s office is the one job in Texas government that touches everything.
It certifies the budget. It manages the state’s investments. It runs the audit function that’s supposed to catch exactly the kind of self-dealing and conflicts of interest we’re talking about here. It oversees unclaimed property. It decides, in no small part, who gets paid and who doesn’t. That’s the office Don Huffines now runs, at least until the election.
Huffines is a man who wants to grade state employees on their Christianity while failing his own bible’s test. A man whose family secretly bought the operational headquarters of the most notorious child sex trafficking case in modern American history, through a shell company. A man who kept a white supremacist on payroll and still, to this day, cannot bring himself to say the words “white nationalism is wrong.” A man whose entire political career has been built on votes that protect landlords, punish union organizing among teenagers, and strip insurance coverage from the people who need it most, financed by a fortune built on other Texans’ financial ruin.
And now we’re supposed to hand that man the keys to the state treasury and trust he’ll run it with integrity, transparency, and the interests of ordinary Texans in mind? Sure.
Texans need a comptroller who can add and also has integrity. Don Huffines is missing at least one of those.
In November, make sure you vote for Sarah Eckhardt for Texas Comptroller.
Texas has had enough of wealthy, old Republicans screwing everything up.
109 days until the November election!
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His wife is even worse. Her ties to Russia…. It just keeps getting worse.
Could you please send out a corrected version of this column with the word "conscience" spelled correctly in the headline? I'd like to share it on social media but as a lifelong editor cannot bring myself to do so with such an unfortunate misspelling in the headline. Thank you.