They Were Always Planning This.
The blueprint ran through Dallas.
Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat presidential candidate, 24-hour filibusterer of civil rights legislation, and one of the architects of the Southern Strategy, was the grandson of a Confederate corporal. His grandfather had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He learned his politics at the dinner table.
Richard Russell JR, the most powerful senator in mid-century America, the man who led the Southern Bloc and filibustered civil rights legislation for thirty years, grew up in a household shaped by his family’s loss of their ancestral plantation during Sherman’s March. He was, as one account puts it, “passionate about the history of the American Civil War.” His father, Richard Russell SR, a member of the Georgia Supreme Court, was born in 1861 (the year the Confederacy was founded) to a family that lost everything in the war. Russell JR. devoured books on the Confederacy as a child. That was his obsession.
Herman Talmadge, Georgia governor and senator, segregationist, boycotter of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, was the son of Eugene Talmadge, a man who fired university professors, expelled Board of Regents members, and proposed burning library books for promoting racial equality, and who ran his final gubernatorial campaign in 1946 on the explicit platform of restoring the white primary and maintaining, in his own words, white supremacy. Herman picked up exactly where his father left off. During his own 1948 campaign, he told party leaders, “If we can’t have a white primary, we want as white a one as we can get.”
These men ran Congress for decades. They wrote the rules. They controlled committees. They filibustered, stalled, and killed legislation. They made sure that what the Civil War started, and Reconstruction briefly interrupted, the subjugation of Black Americans as the organizing principle of Southern political life kept going. And they were far from the only ones. The history of nearly every white Southern Congressman and Senator until the 1950s was nearly the same.
And when they finally started to lose, when Lyndon Johnson, one of their own, betrayed them and signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, they didn’t give up. They reorganized.
In 1975, Gerald Ford signed S.J. Res. 23, posthumously restoring Robert E. Lee’s full citizenship. Ford called Lee’s character “an example to succeeding generations.” 🤮 The through-line doesn’t care how long it takes. Because it kept going.
The laboratory was in Dallas.
In 1944, WA Criswell became pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. He would stay until he died in 2002. He was president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was a close ally of Billy Graham, a friend of HL Hunt (one of the richest oilmen in America), and a man who believed, without apology, that religion and politics should be fused into a single weapon.
He was also, to be plain about it, a virulent racist who spent decades using one of the largest and most influential pulpits in the country to tell white Christians who to vote for and who to hate. Unironically, in 2026, the current senior pastor of First Baptist, Robert Jeffress, has been one of Donald Trump’s most vocal and consistent Evangelical supporters.
In 1954, the year the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, Criswell gave an entire sermon alongside Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond about how wonderful segregation was. It made national news. Infuriated Black Baptists. And made Criswell a political star.
In 1960, with First Baptist Dallas, the largest white Baptist congregation in America at 12,000 members, Criswell mounted a full campaign against John F. Kennedy’s candidacy, printing pamphlets distributed to hundreds of thousands of people, warning that a Catholic president would destroy the separation of church and state. The pamphlets led to a Congressional investigation. The papers called him the “Dixiecrat Preacher.”
Dallas in those years was not a passive backdrop. It was a hothouse. The largest chapter of the John Birch Society in America was in Dallas. HL Hunt, First Baptist Dallas parishioner and personal friend of Criswell, was pouring money into far-right politics. Millionaire conservatives clustered in Dallas like nowhere else in the country. Bruce Alger, the city’s only Republican congressman, was openly associated with extremism and anti-civil rights politics. Kennedy was murdered there in 1963. You already know that. But the city that produced that atmosphere didn’t change overnight.
By the early 1970s, Criswell had Nixon at the White House at his own invitation, was deeply involved in Texans for Nixon, and was actively running conferences on how to spread Evangelicalism as a political force. By 1975, his stated goal was explicit. Win America through the church.
Criswell was mainstream, influential, and deeply connected to oil money, Republican politics, and the growing conservative infrastructure that was about to go national.
The coup nobody covered
Criswell’s real legacy was the disciples he made.
Paige Patterson started preaching at big-tent revivals at age 16 and eventually became Criswell’s right-hand man, serving as president of Criswell College in Dallas.
Paul Pressler from Houston was a political prodigy elected to the Texas House of Representatives at 26 in 1956, running on a pro-segregation platform. He was later appointed a district judge, gave anti-communist speeches, attended prayer breakfasts, and cultivated the network of conservative Baptist men that would prove decisive.
Together, Patterson and Pressler engineered one of the most successful political coups in American religious history. In 1979, they bused and drove thousands of conservative Baptists to the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston and voted out the moderate leadership. Their message was either you believe every word of the Bible literally, or you’re a liberal, and you’re out.
Further reading: “He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations,” by Robert Downen, this week in Texas Monthly.
It worked. They installed a new conservative SBC president. They began purging moderate seminary professors. They moved the entire Southern Baptist Convention into the Republican Party’s political orbit.
And they did it in Texas. Years before anyone used the term “culture war.”
The man who said the quiet part loud.
While Patterson and Pressler were flipping the SBC in Houston, a man named Paul Weyrich was building the national architecture.
Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. He co-founded ALEC. He helped found the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. And in 1980, standing in front of 15,000 conservative preachers in Dallas at the National Affairs Briefing Conference, the same conference where Ronald Reagan gave a speech with W.A. Criswell in the audience (linked above). Weyrich said something that should have ended careers, but instead became a governing philosophy:
“Now many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo syndrome.’ Good Government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
He said this out loud. On tape. In Dallas. In 1980.
Texas was the first state where the Moral Majority set up shop. The goal was always the courts. Always the maps. Always the votes, specifically, keeping the wrong people from casting them.
The wedge issues, such as abortion, busing, school prayer, and gay rights, were never the point in themselves. They were the mechanism for mobilizing a white Christian voting bloc large and reliable enough to deliver the presidency. And delivering the presidency meant delivering Supreme Court seats. And Supreme Court seats meant that, eventually, they could say, “We don’t need the Voting Rights Act anymore. We’re not racist anymore.”
In 2013, John Roberts said exactly that. Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. This section required states with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws. Roberts’ reasoning? The South isn’t what it used to be.
Within hours, Texas had a voter ID law ready to go. Within days, states across the South were redrawing maps. The “goo-goo syndrome” speech had been given 33 years earlier. The plan had been running the whole time.
What the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society actually want.
The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society are both originalist institutions. It is also a political agenda.
Originalism means interpreting the Constitution according to its “original meaning.” The original meaning of the Constitution, before the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, protected slavery. Before the 19th Amendment, women were excluded from the franchise. Before the 24th Amendment, poll taxes were allowed. The “original” Constitution was written by and for wealthy, property-owning white men.
The ideology has friends in high places. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approvingly shared a video of a pastor arguing that women should not vote.
When originalists say they want to return to the Constitution’s original meaning, they are arguing for the systematic rollback of every expansion of rights that has occurred since 1865. That means the Civil Rights Act is vulnerable. The Voting Rights Act is already half-gone. Same-sex marriage is on the table. Clarence Thomas said so explicitly in his Dobbs concurrence. Contraception. Interracial marriage. All of it sits on the same legal foundation that originalists want to demolish.
And Texas is where you can watch that pipeline run in real time.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk sits on the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Trump appointed him in 2019. He had previously worked as deputy legal counsel for First Liberty Institute, a Dallas-based religious freedom legal organization with close ties to the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Federalist Society. He co-founded the Federalist Society’s Fort Worth chapter in 2012. He has campaigned for Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, and Greg Abbott. In 2023, he tried to pull mifepristone from the market nationwide. The anti-abortion group that brought the suit had incorporated in Amarillo specifically to land in his courtroom.
His former boss at First Liberty celebrated his confirmation in a presentation to the Council for National Policy. The same secretive coordinating body connected the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the religious right’s political infrastructure going back to the 1980s.
This is the plan, executing. Dallas to the SBC coup to the Moral Majority to the Federalist Society to a Northern District judge trying to ban abortion medication for 330 million Americans. The thread is unbroken.
The machine was built here. The blueprint was written here. The plan ran out of Dallas for fifty years.
If it can be built here, it can be broken here, too.
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Thank you for the history lesson.
Proof the Voting Rights Act is still crucial is seen by how fast racist Republicans acted to exploit the Supreme Court ruling.
We also see evidence the last few years of your point that the wedge issues aren't important to them, just that they have one. They cried so much about CRT a few years ago but I don't hear much now. They just try a bunch of hateful things and go with the one that seems to stick at the moment.
We share a common concern. My most recent newsletter touched on the same topic, though without the depth you brought to it. I've linked to your article and encouraged my readers to subscribe to your newsletter.
https://scattershooting.substack.com/p/michelle-h-davis-is-someone-i-know?r=h4wvh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
My most recent article on the topic of Christian Nationalism:
https://scattershooting.substack.com/p/rolling-in-their-graves?r=h4wvh