Meet the Far-Right Nepo Baby Vying to Deregulate Texas’s Fossil Fuels

Bo French is running a deranged culture-war campaign for a spot on the powerful Texas Railroad Commission. The race says everything about where Republicans are today.

It would be hard to know from his campaign alone what office exactly Bo French is running for. He’s raged about the supposed “Islamification” of Texas and called for deporting 100 million people, including Native Americans. He’s pledged to take on both DEI and sharia law, which he accused his opponent in the Republican primary of supporting. He’s praised Rhodesia, the former white minority–ruled African state that is now Zimbabwe. He’s said the crusades didn’t go far enough.

Given these preoccupations, you might surmise that French is angling to become a sheriff, or maybe even a state legislator in a deep-red seat. Instead, he wants a six-year term as an elected oil and gas regulator on the Texas Railroad Commission. Despite its name, the TRC no longer has much of anything to do with railroads. Rather, the three-person body is tasked with overseeing pipeline safety, gas flaring, surface mining operations, and other matters near and dear to Texas’s enormous energy sector. Given the sector’s centrality, the position French wants is one of the state’s most important offices.

French is hardly a natural fit for the job, but today’s GOP prioritizes ideological loyalists—however bombastic—over qualified candidates. Backed by a pair of billionaire oilmen with a penchant for Christian nationalism, French holds views that are more extreme than even those of many MAGA diehards. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick both endorsed French’s opponent in last week’s primary, incumbent Jim Wright, who had collected campaign contributions from major oil and gas executives, including Oxy CEO Vicky Hollub and Energy Transfer head Kelcy Warren. Like Ken Paxton’s win in the Senate race the same day, French’s primary victory is a reflection of just how far right the Republican Party has swung. That he’s a neophyte gunning for a seat on the TRC—a body with real and somewhat technical responsibilities—is especially telling. As........

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