The Republican Primary That Finally Dropped The Dog Whistle
The leading GOP candidates for Attorney General are running on Muslim panic, anti-immigrant hysteria, and billionaire-funded cruelty.
Most of the Republican primary races in Texas haven’t been making a lot of noise yet, but there’s one primary race, if you’ve seen any of these interviews or speeches, you’ve likely walked away completely dumbfounded. I’m talking about the Attorney General’s election, where in this primary, the three leading contenders seem to be in a race to the bottom to outdo one another with overt white supremacy.
There are four Republicans in the AG primary, but 70-year-old Senator Joan Huffman hasn’t been hitting the podcast circuit, rallies, and events with the same fury as her three male counterparts. Maybe because she’s the presumed “establishment” candidate, or perhaps the misogyny in the Republican Party is too deep to really give her a fair chance. Regardless, if the contest was about which Republican was not overtly racist? She would probably win.
The other three? I can’t tell if they’re performing a bit to win over the “NASCAR crowd” or if they legit stepped out of a time machine from 1930, but we should talk about the Republicans vying to become the next Attorney General of Texas by using language that would make Bull Connor proud.
Let’s start with Aaron Reitz.
Reitz, not from Texas, but moved here as a kid, served in the Marines, then clerked for Texas’ far-right Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Blacklock, before becoming the Deputy Attorney General for Legal Strategy under Ken Paxton. He was Chief of Staff to Ted Cruz and then Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy under Trump.
Needless to say, he’s been in the orbit of every crooked politician from here to high water over the last decade.
In this interview, Aaron Reitz basically goes on national television to say that Muslims are a hostile civilization that must be hunted, prosecuted, surveilled, and forced out of Texas.
He uses every classic white-supremacist trope in the book. “Incompatible cultures,” “civilizational threat,” “they’re taking advantage of our freedoms,” “they want Sharia law,” “Texas values,” and “they should self-deport.”
Reitz repeatedly lumps all Muslim immigrants, all Muslim American organizations, and anyone from a Muslim-majority country into one big criminal cartel. He calls them “Islamists,” “radicals,” “civilizationally incompatible,” and compares them to the Mafia.
He says outright that the First Amendment does not apply to them. As in, his argument is literally:
“Freedom of religion is for Christians, not Muslims.”
He openly promises to weaponize the Attorney General’s office to harass Muslim communities, shut down their nonprofits, block their neighborhoods from being built, and go after them with RICO charges just for existing. Not because they committed crimes, he even admits they haven’t, but because he hates their religion.
He claims Muslims are “targeting Texas,” that they want to “Islamify” the country, and that they’re part of a coordinated infiltration plot straight out of the Alex Jones cinematic universe.
By the end, he’s casually invoking the Barbary Wars and pretending the Founders wanted America to be permanently at war with Islam.
And this man wants to be the top law enforcement officer in the second-largest state in America.
His Thanksgiving message:
I thought as long as I’m checking in on the AG’s race, I’d check in with our old friend Chip Roy (also not from Texas).
Congressman Chip Roy says Islamists and Marxists are invading us.
Seriously. He said it on video.
In this clip, he claims that “Islamists and Marxists” are staging an “organized onslaught” to infiltrate and destroy America. (Obviously, Marxists come from the foreign country of Marxlandia.) Yes, according to Roy, Marxists and Muslims are apparently holding hands, marching across the border like some kind of multicultural supervillain squad.
He insists that “wide-open borders” are allowing shadowy forces to “attack Western civilization,” and proudly brags that he’s trying to strip CAIR of its tax status. Because nothing says “small government conservative” like using the state to punish people you don’t like.
It’s the same script Reitz is reading from. Muslims as a civilizational threat, immigrants as an invading army, and Republicans as the only ones standing between America and total collapse, if only voters would give them enough power to suspend the Constitution.
Chip Roy looked right at a camera over Thanksgiving weekend and declared that Texas is under coordinated attack from Muslims and Marxists, and he’s ready to go full Homeland Security fan-fiction mode to “defend America.”
Just like Reitz, he’s not dog-whistling anymore. He’s using the bullhorn.
It didn’t end there.
In this next clip, Roy proudly calls for a national “Pause Act” to halt all immigration so that America can “sort this out.” Translation: stop brown people from coming here until Republicans figure out how to purge the ones already here.
But then Roy goes full Stephen Miller fan fiction and reminisces, lovingly, about the 1920s. Yes, the same decade with the KKK at peak membership, legal segregation, forced Americanization schools, and explicitly racist immigration quotas designed to keep America “Nordic.”
According to Roy, “America pushed pause on immigration” back then to help with “assimilation.” What he leaves out is that the whole point of those laws was to keep out Jews, Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, basically anyone who wasn’t white Protestant.
Then he complains that today’s immigrants, whom he names Somalis, Ilhan Omar (of course), Guatemalans, and the Northern Triangle, are “not assimilating,” and instead are “waving flags” from their home countries.
The classic racist tell.
He can’t even pretend he’s talking about policy anymore. He is telling entire groups of people, Somalis, Guatemalans, Muslims, anyone not fitting his fantasy version of “Western civilization,” that they don’t belong in America unless they abandon their identity and fully submit to his definition of “civilization.”
It’s an ethnic hierarchy. It’s forced assimilation as policy.
And this man wants to be Attorney General, with the power to enforce this ideology on 30 million people.
We can’t leave out Senator Mayes Middleton.
Middleton is probably one of the most dangerous people running for office right now. Unlike Chip Roy and Aaron Reitz, who are each independently wealthy, they still have their billionaire overlords whom they bow down to. Middleton is the billionaire overlord, he’s the supervillain, the Lex Luther. His motivations are purely ideologically driven, opposed to Roy or Reitz, where it’s just a grift.
And maybe knowing he’s a billionaire makes his hate-driven ideology that much more sinister. For example, earlier this month, he sent this letter to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo:
He sent a state-sanctioned intimidation order aimed squarely at non-white immigrants, crime victims, and anyone who dares to help them. And he did it under the guise of “transparency,” when what he’s actually doing is constructing a blacklist.
It’s essential to understand what U Visas are for. They’re for:
rape victims
domestic violence survivors
trafficking survivors
victims who cooperate with law enforcement at huge personal risk
And Middleton wants their names, their emails, their case files, their nonprofits, their advocates, their appointments, everything.
Why?
He is targeting the most vulnerable people in Harris County, women, children, and refugees from violence, overwhelmingly Black and Brown immigrants.
This is the core of Middleton’s worldview. If you aren’t white and native born, you’re disposable.
He calls abused women “illegal aliens.”
He calls trafficking survivors “illegal aliens.”
He calls children who watched their mothers get beaten “illegal aliens.”
This is dehumanization on purpose.
Middleton is trying to create a list, a surveillance network, a reason to prosecute nonprofits, and a reason to target immigrants. This is what happens when a billionaire doesn’t fear consequences. He will use government power to hunt down the very people he believes shouldn’t exist in “his” Texas. That’s dangerous.
The latest Muslim-panic racism that Republicans have been on isn’t showing any sign of slowing down soon.
The Young Republicans of Texas decided to drop this little manifesto. This official resolution is the most nakedly xenophobic, whites-only cultural purity document I’ve seen come out of a Republican youth organization in years… and that’s saying something.
This framing is straight-up blood-and-soil rhetoric. These are the thinkers fascists love to cherry-pick to justify cultural homogeneity. Never mind that Texas has been majority-minority for years. Never mind that immigrants literally built Houston, Dallas, and Austin. According to the Young Republicans, demographic change itself is a threat.
They even claimed in this official resolution that “foreign gods” threaten Texas.
Foreign gods…
Like, what in the ghosts of the Confederacy are you people talking about?
We are fully in Crusades cosplay territory now. This is anti-Hindu, anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh, anti-Jewish, anti-anyone-who-isn’t-Christian rhetoric straight out of 1920s Klan pamphlets.
Republicans want to build a Texas where white Christian identity is enforced by law. That’s not hyperbole; all the evidence is above.
What we’re watching in the Texas Attorney General’s race is a coordinated ideological project.
Aaron Reitz wants the state to decide which religions get constitutional rights.
Chip Roy wants to resurrect 1920s immigration laws written by open white supremacists. Mayes Middleton wants to create government dossiers on immigrant crime victims and the nonprofits that help them. And the Young Republicans of Texas wish to police which cultures are allowed to exist in public at all.
All of them point in the same direction. An America where whiteness is the law, Christianity is mandatory, and everyone else is either invisible or expendable.
Texas Republicans aren’t dog-whistling anymore. They’re not even bothering with euphemisms. They are openly demanding a state built on racial hierarchy, religious supremacy, and government power deployed to crush anyone who doesn’t fit their fantasy of “Western civilization.”
And they’re doing it with smiles, cowboy boots, and resolutions typed up like it’s a student council meeting instead of a proto-fascist manifesto.
If this is what they’re saying before the primary, imagine what they’ll try if they get the keys to the Attorney General’s office.
And if Texans don’t start paying attention, these men will write their hate into policy, into law, into the machinery of the state. The people they are targeting are not hypothetical. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our classmates, our friends. They are survivors, refugees, families, and communities.
The real threat to “Texas values” isn’t immigrants or Muslims or diversity. It’s the people trying to decide who gets to be fully human.
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Something that is important for Democrats to help voters to understand is that Ken Paxton and the Republican Party are getting away with a deceptive political practice with the use of the term "chief law enforcement officer". When they keep repeating that Paxton is the "chief law enforcement officer" they create the perception that he is a criminal prosecutor. He is not. In fact, attempting to file criminal charges against witnesses in the fraud investigation of his crony Nate Paul got him impeached. This was a misuse of the office because, among other things, the AG cannot file criminal charges! It does not go before grand juries and get indictments under criminal statutes. Jurisdiction therein lies solely with local district attorneys.
The Texas Constitution does not give the Office of the Attorney General criminal jurisdiction except in very limited circumstances. The AG is not a mini-DOJ and Paxton nor does any other AG prosecute and lock up criminals, as the term "chief law enforcement officer" implies.
What the AG is in fact is a chief CIVIL law enforcement officer. He sues in civil court to protect consumers, to represent our agencies and the state of Texas in civil matters. He collects child support and provides legal opinions to agencies and others regarding Texas law. He is not a Pam Bondi able to initiate criminal investigations of Abbott or Trump's enemies.
Paxton works very hard to give the public the impression he is a prosecutor. That's why he sued Beto. Please note, that was not a criminal indictment. It was a frivolous civil suit under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. And once he got before a non-compliant judge, it was thrown out. [I believe the case is on appeal presently, but not sure.]
So, to me the scariest part here is Republicans are having great success getting everyone to repeat that term and to treat him as the "chief law enforcement officer" of Texas. Simply ignoring the Tex. Constitution and arrogating powers to themselves is how authoritarians consolidate their power. If we keep sending MAGA Republicans to Austin, you will soon see a constitutional amendment on a ballot to give the AG criminal prosecution powers.
As it is now, the only thing standing between us and malicious prosecutions from Ken Paxton and his ilk are those local DA's who refuse to violate their oath of office in service of a dictator. Unless Democrats educate the public and arouse the voters about the danger "chief law enforcement officer" presents to us, they will get away with it.
Riddle me this: How is it these candidates want to scour Jewish people from American when Middleton spent the last legislative session crying about DEI and pro-Gaza protests on college campuses? He and his ilk complained that Jewish students were threatened by the protests (although many students testified that the police presence at UT was more intimidating than the protests themselves).
Roy is a pale wuss and Middleton is a weak-jawed racist. Both: punchable. Sadly, their rhetoric is causing all the other racists to salivate.