The Texas Republican gubernatorial primary has shaped up, as journalists in the Lone Star State have observed, into a "contest of extremism," with the various challengers to already-very-conservative Gov. Greg Abbott competing to one-up each other's right-wing credentials. Last week, that even included an awkward remake of Clint Eastwood's infamous 2012 speech at the Republican National Convention, as three of Abbott's opponents gathered at a roundtable hosted by the tea party-affiliated True Texas Project to argue against an empty chair with the governor's name on it.
But in the race to the right, one Republican candidate stands alone: former state senator and real estate developer Don Huffines, who has promised to "stop the illegal invasion of Texas" by migrants, vowed to reinstate prayer in school, described gender-affirming medical treatment for trans youth as child "sexual abuse" and "predatory grooming," and took credit for scuttling two diversity training programs being used by Texas's child welfare department after publicly calling them "Marxist" critical race theory. The Texas Democratic Party has denounced Huffines' anti-immigrant rhetoric as identical to that which drove the 2019 mass murder in El Paso, and warned that his attempt to "scoop up extremist primary voters" comes at the expense of Texans' safety. The progressive media company Texas Signal called him "the most dangerous man in Texas" (a tribute Huffines immediately shared on Facebook), and media across the state have attributed Abbott's rightward moves to Huffines' influence.
