Karl Rove and Bo French

Bo French is a Texas Republican politician and a former Tarrant County GOP chair. He is the 2026 Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, which is important to the oil and gas industry. He has a long history of making racially charged and controversial posts, and in mid-September 2026 he drew fresh bipartisan criticism for posts about University of Texas students of South Asian descent after a football win. A picture showed a gaggle of minority students celebrating after the game.

Bo said, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

He followed up by saying social media was showing “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners” and that he “weep[s] for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans.”

The students in the picture were American citizens, and UT has a policy of accepting all Texas students in the top 10% of their high school class. Because of this, it is hard, if not impossible, for out-of-state students, never mind foreign students, to get into UT.

All this prompted Karl Rove to disavow French as “a bigot” in a recent Republican confab in Austin. Rove said he would vote for French’s democratic opponent, the first time he has voted democratic in many years. In this, Rove is following a longstanding Republican practice of rejecting the genuinely crazy right-wing extremists.

For example, William F. Buckley Jr. treated the most extreme, conspiratorial parts of the American right as a liability. He wanted conservatism to be intellectually serious and politically viable, not associated with claims he considered detached from reality.

The clearest case was the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch, who argued that President Eisenhower and other senior officials were conscious communist agents. Buckley called those views “far removed from common sense” and said they damaged the anti-communist cause by making it look crankish. In National Review editorials (especially 1961–62, with a stronger follow-up in 1965), he argued there were “bounds to the dictum, Anyone on the right is my ally.” He and allies such as Barry Goldwater and Russell Kirk publicly separated respectable conservatism from Welch’s theories.

In addition to rejecting Welch on principle, Buckley was concerned about losing support from moderates and independents if radical right-wingers held too much sway in the party. Rove is concerned about the same things, a stance that has often gotten him lambasted as a RINO.

To me, this gives rise to a conundrum. In this day when everyone to the right of AOC is characterized as extreme right-wing, how do we know that Bo French is really as he is being described?

One of the almost defining characteristics of Republicans like Rove is that they get their news from the wrong places. They appear to take reporting in the legacy media at face value, and from that they form their opinions. But we can no longer do that. We have to get our news from those we can trust, which is clearly not the case with the legacy media.

It is for that reason that, if I still lived in Texas, I’d be voting straight Republican regardless of the ugly reporting on Bo French—because I don’t believe anything they say about any Republican ever. Maybe that’s not intellectually serious enough for a Buckley or a Rove, but I think it’s the appropriate attitude to have given the times.