[/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]

THE BILLIONAIRE BULLY WHO WANTS TO TURN TEXAS INTO A CHRISTIAN
THEOCRACY  
[[link removed]]


 

Russell Gold
February 12, 2024
Texas Monthly
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The state’s most powerful figure, Tim Dunn, isn’t an elected
official. But behind the scenes, the West Texas oilman is lavishly
financing what he regards as a holy war against public education,
renewable energy, and non-Christians. _

, Illustration by Joan Wong; Dunn: Guerin Blask/The Forbes Collection
via Contour by Getty

 

Tim Dunn was fascinated by bees. When he was a teenager, he spent
hours studying a colony near his home, learning how it functioned.
Each bee knew its role and embraced its work. Scouts found pollen.
Guards prevented unwelcome outsiders from entering the hive. He even
discovered that the larger drones didn’t sting, creating an
opportunity for amusement. “I’d tie a piece of thread on them and
walk them like a dog,” he said in a folksy West Texas accent.

His audience, the adult Sunday school class he teaches at his church
in Midland, was gathered inside a gray-walled room lined with
stackable chairs. Dunn went on, explaining that there was a lot to
learn from the hierarchy of a bee colony. “When everybody does what
they do best for the hive, it prospers,” he said. “If you’re a
guard, then be a guard. If you’re a scout, be a scout.” Dunn then
contrasted the cooperation of the hive with the inexorable tumult of
modern politics. “Why do people hate politics?” he asked.
“Everybody’s making it all about themselves,” he said. “Does
it create harmony? Are people there trying to serve the body with
their gifts? That’s why you hate it. It’s an example of
what _not_ to do.”

You may not think about Tim Dunn. Indeed, unless you’re a close
observer of Texas politics, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him.
But Dunn thinks a lot about you.

For two decades he has been quietly, methodically, and patiently
building a political machine that has pushed Texas forcefully to the
right, sending more and more members of the centrist wing of the
Republican Party into exile. A 68-year-old oil billionaire, Dunn seeks
to transform Texas into something resembling a theocracy. If you ever
wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans
would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook.
If you question why Texas’s elected officials no longer represent
the majority of Texans’ views, the reason can be traced to the
tactics employed by Dunn and the many organizations and politicians he
funds and influences. He has built his own caucus within the
Legislature that is financially beholden to him. And despite his
Sunday school pleas for comity, Dunn has deepened Texas’s political
divisions: there are the Democrats and what remains of the mainstream
conservative Republican Party. And then there are Dunn and his
allies. 

An aerial view of Midland Classical Academy, with Tim Dunn’s
compound directly behind. Jeff Wilson

He grew up in Big Spring, about forty miles northeast of Midland, with
three older brothers in a cramped house. He now lives in a mansion,
hidden within a roughly twenty-acre walled compound on the northern
edge of Midland. Nearby is the nondenominational church where he
regularly delivers sermons as a lay minister. The Dunns are one of
Texas’s wealthiest families, having acquired inexpensive leases in
the Permian Basin years before fracking made it possible to extract
oil and gas from fields previously thought to be in decline. As a
political power broker, he mostly operates behind the scenes,
routinely writing six- and seven-figure checks. This money is only the
visible portion of a political operation that shapes the agenda in
Austin and is feared by many Republican elected officials.

Throughout its history, Texas has seen plenty of influential men who
have shared their message from the pulpit. And a steady march of rich
men have opened their wallets to get politicians to do what they want.
But we’ve never seen the two archetypes merge in quite this way.
Dunn has said he believes we’re in the midst of a holy battle that
pits Christians against those he refers to as Marxists, who he claims
want to control all property and take away freedom. Marxists “are
increasingly becoming bolder and more brazen in their quest for
tyranny,” he has warned. “It is becoming clear they want to kill
us.” The founder of Marxism, he argued, wasn’t Karl Marx. It was
Satan. 

For Dunn, politics, work, and religion all run together. “I have
very deliberately unsegmented my life,” he said in 2022 on a podcast
hosted by Ken Harrison, the chair of Promise Keepers, a national
evangelical group for men. “I don’t have one approach in business
and another approach in ministry and another approach in church . . .
I work for God, and God has given me a bunch of jobs to do.”  

Dunn directs that work from the center of a hive of his own creation,
surrounded by politicians and pastors, fellow oil billionaires, and
political consultants, all of whom are carrying out his vision. He
still has a bee on a string—except these days, that bee is the state
of Texas. 

Dunn at the Texas Tribune Festival in 2016. Brett Buchanan/The Texas
Tribune

In the past two years Dunn has become the largest individual source of
campaign money in the state by far. Until recently his main tool for
exerting influence has been the Defend Texas Liberty PAC
[[link removed]],
to which he has given at least $9.85 million since the beginning of
2022. This is nearly all the money he contributed to Texas races over
that span and the majority raised by the committee. The political
action committee targets Republicans, many of them quite conservative,
whom it deems insufficiently loyal to the organization’s right-wing
agenda. Dunn is not a passive donor who will dole out a few thousand
dollars after a phone call and some flattering chitchat. The funding
machine he has built is designed to steer politics and control
politicians. 

Its methods are deceptively simple. A Dunn-affiliated organization
lets lawmakers know how it wants them to vote on key issues of the
legislative session. After the session, it assigns a number, from zero
to one hundred, to each lawmaker based on these votes. Republicans who
score high, in the eighties or nineties, are likely to remain in
Dunn’s good graces. But those who see their scores drift down to the
seventies or even sixties—who, in other words, legislate
independently? Their fate is easy to predict. 

They’ll likely face a primary opponent, often someone little known
in the community, whose campaign bank account is filled by donations
from Dunn and his allies. This cash provides access to political
consultants and operations that can be used to spread false and
misleading attacks on Dunn’s targets, via social media feeds, glossy
mailers, and text messages. “They told you point blank: if you
don’t vote the way we tell you, we’re going to score against
you,” said Bennett Ratliff, a Republican former state representative
from Dallas County. “And if you don’t make a good score, we’re
going to run against you. It was not a thumb on the scale—it was
flat extortion.” Ratliff lost in 2014 to a Dunn-backed right-wing
candidate, Matt Rinaldi, who scored a perfect one hundred in the next
two sessions and quickly amassed power: Rinaldi now serves as the
combative and divisive chair of the state GOP.
[[link removed]]

According to several sources involved in Texas politics, what Dunn
demands from his candidates, even more than electoral victory, is
fealty. He tends to win, sooner or later, one way or another.
Sometimes his preferred candidates win the primary and, given the
gerrymandering that favors Republicans in most districts in Texas,
waltz into office. But even when his candidates lose, the reelected
incumbents have been battered by negative rhetoric and have begged and
borrowed to raise funds to counter the attacks. Many are left
wondering if it’s worth fighting back. Some have chosen to get out
of politics entirely. Notable recent retirements include former state
senator Kel Seliger
[[link removed]] and Representative
Andrew Murr,
[[link removed]] both
of whom were centrist Republicans who commanded respect from
colleagues in both parties and acted as brakes on Dunn’s agenda.

Dunn’s influence goes well beyond campaigns and politics. His
résumé is lengthy. He is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, a right-wing think tank located a couple of blocks south
of the Capitol. TPPF generates policy proposals—from severe property
tax cuts to bills that impede the growth of renewable energy
[[link removed]]—that
are often taken up by the Texas Legislature and emulated in other red
states. He has served for years on the board of the First Liberty
Institute, a legal powerhouse that has won Supreme Court cases to
advance Christianity’s role in public life. 

The CrownQuest office, in Midland. Photograph by Jeff Wilson

As his wealth has grown, Dunn has used it to support private companies
that align with his goals. Through his financial vehicle Hexagon
Partners, he recently invested in Christian Halls, whose chief
executive says his vision is to create Christian community colleges
and trade schools “in every county of the nation in the next ten
years.” Also through Hexagon Partners, Dunn invested $7.5 million
in a company affiliated with Brad Parscale,
[[link removed]] who
worked in San Antonio targeting swing voters with digital advertising
before he became manager of Donald Trump’s failed 2020 presidential
campaign. That firm plans to build a “Christian-based” advertising
agency that will use artificial intelligence to precisely target
consumers with commercial and political messages.

In the past several years Dunn has become involved with multiple
online media operations. “You can’t trust the newspapers,” he
wrote in a 2018 letter to voters. But apparently you can trust Texas
Scorecard, a political website that is often critical of politicians
who don’t support his agenda. Texas Scorecard was published
by Empower Texans, a group largely funded by Dunn 
[[link removed]]that then
became a separate organization in 2020. It continues to publish
articles that are generally critical of candidates Dunn opposes. 

He has also been an officer with Chicago-based Pipeline Media, which
maintains a network of websites designed to look like independent
local media outlets but that churn out often-partisan articles that
amplify stances taken by special interest groups. The Tow Center for
Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that this network
[[link removed]] has
attacked renewable energy and advocated for property tax cuts.
Further, Dunn is a longtime board member of the Lucy Burns Institute,
publisher of the website Ballotpedia, which provides information on
federal, state, and local elections. It recently launched an
“ultra-local” initiative, publishing updates on candidate
positions and endorsements in areas that have become news deserts
after the closures of local newspapers. The site reported more than a
quarter billion page views in 2022. 

The Ever-Expanding Web of Tim Dunn’s Influence

Dunn generally steers clear of news outlets he doesn’t control. He
did not respond to multiple requests for interviews with _Texas
Monthly,_ nor did he or his attorney respond to a detailed list of
questions. Many of those closest to Dunn declined to be interviewed,
and many elected officials refused to speak about him, often out of
fear of reprisal. To report this story, I spoke with more than thirty
people who know him or work in his orbit; listened to hundreds of
hours of his sermons, speeches, and Sunday school lessons; and
conducted an exhaustive search of corporate records and tax filings,
among other documents.

Dunn’s voluminous political enterprises are all sidelines to what
has long been his main gig. He is chief executive of CrownQuest
Operating. While not well-known outside oil-industry circles, it
controls a significant portion of the Permian Basin. In 2022 it was
the eighth-largest oil producer in Texas. It operated wells that
pumped out about 35 million barrels that year, worth more than $3
billion. In December, Occidental Petroleum agreed to purchase the
company’s wells and oil reserves for $12 billion, including
assumption of debt. Dunn and his family own about 20 percent of these
assets. They stand to collect a windfall worth a couple billion
dollars. 
[[link removed]]Once
the sale is completed, Dunn presumably will have more time—and more
money—for his political interests.

Some of Dunn’s critics are quick to note that he and the candidates
he backs have posted a poor overall record of electoral success. While
there’s some truth to that claim, it misses the point. Yes, Dunn
has, in essence, single-handedly financed the campaigns of
inexperienced, extremist candidates who have failed to connect with
voters. Nonetheless, these campaigns—and the promise of future,
amply bankrolled, mudslinging challengers—have led incumbents to
either acquiesce to his agenda or retire. Even when Dunn loses, he
often wins. 

Moreover, he is a major donor to some of the most prominent
politicians in Texas. He was instrumental in helping Dan Patrick get
elected lieutenant governor, arguably the most powerful office in the
state. When Patrick first ran for that office, in 2014, he entered a
runoff against incumbent David Dewhurst. In the final days before the
election, Empower Texans gave Patrick $350,000 and secured for him a
$300,000 loan from a Houston bank. The money helped pay for a
last-minute blitz of advertising on television and on Facebook,
Google, and Twitter.

Dunn is also a longtime backer of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton
and helped him escape impeachment last year for abuse of public trust
and other corruption-related charges. Prior to Paxton’s trial,
Jonathan Stickland, the head of Defend Texas Liberty, made it clear he
was ready to spend Dunn’s money to go after any official who voted
to oust the attorney general. “There will be one helluva price to
pay,” he warned in a tweet, and then added: “Wait till you see my
PAC budget.”

That wasn’t the only step Dunn took to protect his ally. Before the
impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, Defend Texas Liberty gave
Patrick—who chose to preside as judge in the proceeding—$1 million
in campaign donations and a $2 million forgivable loan. This is thirty
times more than Defend Texas Liberty gave Patrick in 2022, when he was
running for reelection. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a bribe—it
was all perfectly legal under state law—and Patrick has denied any
quid pro quo. 

Still, as soon as the final votes to acquit the attorney general were
cast, Patrick discarded his veil of impartiality
[[link removed]] and
delivered a caustic rebuke to the House leadership for wasting
everyone’s time. Despite abundant evidence of Paxton’s corruption,
Patrick argued that the House should never have impeached the attorney
general. Representative Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat who served as
an impeachment manager, told _Texas Monthly_
[[link removed]] that
this tirade made it clear the fix had been in from the moment Patrick
grabbed the gavel. 

Later, the Texas Tribune reported on a meeting between infamous white
supremacist Nick Fuentes and Stickland
[[link removed]],
who prior to leading Defend Texas Liberty was a state representative
to whom Dunn had contributed handsomely. Patrick was quick to condemn
Fuentes but slow to criticize Stickland and the PAC. 
[[link removed]]He
never returned the money he’d received from the group. Instead he
invested it in Israeli bonds, which his campaign treasurer could
presumably sell at a later date or simply collect interest payments on
for years. 

Increasingly, Dunn is active in politics outside Texas. In October
2022 he gave $250,000 to the new Stand for Freedom PAC, nearly all of
the money it had raised since its inception earlier that year. The
so-called super PAC, which is based in Georgia and can raise unlimited
funds, spent $190,000 on congressional races across the country that
fall. It supported nine right-wing candidates. A couple of days before
the election, it spent $10,000 on text messages in suburban Atlanta,
half of them in support of the Republican challenger and half
attacking a Democratic incumbent.

Dunn also gave $1 million in the summer and fall of 2022 to the
Conservation Action for America PAC (out of $1.05 million it raised).
The PAC gave $500,000 to another PAC, which supported right-wing
candidates in Senate races in Alabama and Missouri. But for now, most
of Dunn’s time and fortune remain focused on Texas.

Dunn is up-front about his desire to use politics to pave the way for
a “New Earth,” in which Jesus Christ and his believers will live
together. (“When heaven comes to earth and God dwells with his
people as the King,” Dunn has said.) Until then, he remains a key
player in the growing Christian nationalism movement, which rejects
the importance of pluralism to American identity. Instead it contends
that only devout Christians are good Americans. 

Some, though, have openly questioned whether the use of religion is
more tactical than heartfelt. State representative Jared Patterson
argued in 2020 that Dunn’s operatives were hiding behind a
“Christian facade.” Patterson, a Republican who represents parts
of Dallas’s northwest exurbs, is no moderate. During the last
session, he introduced a bill to regulate drag shows and another to
expunge from school libraries any “sexually explicit” books
[[link removed]],
possibly even the beloved Larry McMurtry novel _Lonesome Dove_.
Writing on Facebook, Patterson said of Empower Texans: “Their only
goals are power, money and anarchy.”

Midland Bible Church. Photograph by Jeff Wilson

Last August was even more sweltering than usual in Midland. It did not
rain and the sun was relentless, the dusty earth baked by triple-digit
heat. But on the final Sunday of the month, as usual, Midland Bible
Church was welcomingly cool. A few parishioners sat with computer
monitors in the back of the sanctuary running the audio and visuals. A
video message played on two large screens on either side of a large
wooden cross. “Jesus is better than the angels,” said a soothing
female voice. “Jesus is better than Moses,” said a male voice. 

When the video faded and the lights came up, Dunn was standing on an
elevated stage with a few loose pages of notes arranged on a
four-legged metal pulpit. Behind him were the praise band’s
instruments, including a six-string guitar and an electronic keyboard.
The altar’s backdrop consisted of distressed wooden slats and
hanging Edison bulbs that wouldn’t look out of place in a barn
renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

Dunn greeted the congregation with the ease and comfort of a man in
his element. He has been a member of the church for more than two
decades. About a decade ago the congregation moved into its modern
home, a $12 million building with seating for five hundred in the
sanctuary, which you enter through wooden doors from a large common
area furnished with couches and sided by a wall of glass. After
services Dunn can be found standing outside the wooden doors, coffee
in hand, greeting friends and well-wishers. Across the street from the
church stands a stone wall that surrounds Dunn’s family compound.
Around the corner, just out of view, is the private K–12 Christian
school Dunn founded in 1998.

That Sunday, Dunn was dressed in a short-sleeved lavender polo and
gray slacks. He’s a few inches taller than six feet and has the
lanky, fit build of a former basketball player. His white hair was
neatly parted. He wore a lavalier microphone that reached from behind
his left ear, giving him the appearance of a corporate executive ready
to fire up a roomful of salespeople.

He started with a joke about a church elder’s mustache (“Is that
Wyatt Earp?”) and then began to talk about the book of Hebrews. It
can be difficult to understand, he says. “The Jewish culture is not
the same as ours,” he notes. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,”
he said, and they are like cactus fruit: “sweet on the inside and
prickly on the outside.” 

This wasn’t the first time Dunn had opined on Jews. In 2010 he
attended a private breakfast meeting with Joe Straus, the first Jewish
Speaker of the House in the Texas Legislature. According to Straus
insiders, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership
positions. When _Texas Monthly _first reported that encounter, in
2018, it shocked many in Austin’s political class. Dunn’s
influence has grown since then, and his worldview has sunk even deeper
roots in Texas. 

Dunn’s sermon that August day came at a crucial juncture in Texas
politics. A few months before, a bipartisan majority in the state’s
House of Representatives had voted to impeach the attorney general for
abusing the power of his office. Dunn had responded in late June by
donating $150,000 to Paxton and $1.8 million to Defend Texas Liberty,
which turned around and gave Patrick that infamous seven-figure
donation and loan. It’s not clear whether the events unfolding in
Austin were on Dunn’s mind as he drafted his sermon, but one of his
principal messages involved a religious and political battle.

He retold a portion of the biblical story of Exodus. In popular
culture—think of _The Ten Commandments,_ with a strapping young
Charlton Heston as Moses—the story focuses on the Israelites’
rebellion against the pharaohs, their escape from enslavement and
departure from Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the reaching of
a covenant with God in the desert. Dunn picked up the story from
there. Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the Israelites who fled Egypt
were still in the desert, but they were eyeing the fertile region
adjacent to the Jordan River, in what is now the Israeli-occupied West
Bank. So they sent scouts to see what was there. 

The reconnaissance party reported that it was a bountiful region, a
“land of milk and honey,” but there were obstacles to settling
there. “The spies came back, and the spies said, ‘Ooh, this is too
hard,’ ” Dunn said. “It is a really good land, just like God
said, but man, there’s giants and walled cities. I don’t think we
can do it.” Yet God urged them onward, Dunn said. Failure to fight,
he suggested, would mean disobeying God. In his telling, it was a
story of righteous conquest, not of escape.

He continued: “Everyone unwilling to fight did not get the reward.
It’s a very poignant picture. No fight, no reward.” Here he paused
briefly. He’d been looking to his right. He turned to the left, his
hands gripping the pulpit. As he continued, he formed a fist with his
thumb extended and pointed it at his chest. “Our giants and walled
cities are a culture that hates everything we stand for. Are we
willing to fight? If we are, we can’t lose, even if we die.”

Parts of his message can be heard in churches across Texas every
Sunday. But how many such sermons are delivered by lay preachers who
write $1 million checks to politicians and political action
committees? How many are delivered by billionaires who are building an
army of influence? Whose power and connections make them insiders even
as they see themselves as outsiders trying to overthrow entrenched
interests? How many believe that only Christians should lead Texas, to
the exclusion of millions of Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and secular
Texans?

Dunn holds several views that veer outside the mainstream. In late
2022 he delivered a sermon titled “How to Truly Love Your Spouse.”
Before he began speaking, he played a brief video quoting from the
First Epistle of Peter. It advises women, who are “the weaker
vessel,” not to braid their hair or wear too much gold jewelry. They
should “adorn themselves by submitting to their own husbands.”
When the video ended, Dunn was at the pulpit. He praised the
narrator’s deep bass voice, noting it was that of his eldest son.
“Don’t you love Lee’s voice? Sounds like God reading us
scripture, doesn’t it?” He later talked about his view that
men’s brains are structured differently from women’s: men are
superior problem solvers, while women tend to be more articulate. 

Dunn advised men to invite their wives into their professional lives.
His wife, Terri, homeschooled their children for sixteen years. When
their youngest was in college, playing basketball for Texas Tech
University, they would take long trips to watch his games. She would
read Dunn’s emails to him as he drove. She liked feeling involved,
Dunn said, so he gave her the password to his email account. She also
listens to political talk shows, something he doesn’t like to do,
and keeps him up to speed on what pundits are saying. This “helps
her feel like a part of everything I’m doing,” Dunn explained.
“Women were designed as helpers.”

Chris Tackett never intended to become the foremost chronicler of
Dunn’s political influence. But sometimes curiosity charts an
unexpected course. On a cool fall day, I met Tackett at a hip coffee
shop a few blocks south of downtown Fort Worth. He wore blue jeans and
a maroon T-shirt from a New York City bookstore and carried a MacBook
Air loosely with one hand. In his early fifties, Tackett is fit, with
thick, graying hair. By day, he works in human resources for a food
processing company. In his spare time he has built a tool to track how
a rising flood of money is reshaping Texas politics. 

Just a few years ago, he was the volunteer director of a youth
baseball league in Granbury, about forty miles southwest of where we
met, when he decided he could do more for his community. So he ran for
a school board seat. It was one of those life decisions that seemed
innocuous at the time but turned out to be momentous. 

He won the nonpartisan election and, by dint of his new
responsibilities, became more involved in state education issues. The
board communicated its priorities to Mike Lang, Granbury’s state
representative, and Tackett assumed that Lang would be an ally. But
when the school board asked Lang to vote for certain bills that
protected the district’s funding, Tackett says Lang took the
opposite position. Lang took other votes that Tackett felt were not in
the best interest of local public schools. The board opposed vouchers,
for example, which would allow taxpayer money to be used for private
schools, potentially diverting needed revenue from the public school
system. Yet Lang supported pro-voucher amendments. Curious about why,
Tackett decided to look at the sources of Lang’s campaign
contributions. “I mean, what else would it be other than money?”
he recalled thinking.

He downloaded campaign finance reports from the state. They were bulky
and hard to decipher, but years of working in corporate jobs had made
him nimble with spreadsheets. To his surprise, most of the money Lang
received wasn’t coming from constituents in $50 or $100 amounts.
Instead, he’d collected a $2,000 check from Dunn and nearly half a
million dollars from Farris and Joanna Wilks. Farris is an oilman and
an elder in the Assembly of Yahweh, a church run by his family near
Cisco, about fifty miles east of Abilene. The Assembly of Yahweh was
founded by Wilks’s father and grandfather, and it blends elements of
Christianity and Judaism. 

Tackett also found a $25,000 contribution from Empower Texans’
political action committee. When he looked up who was giving to
Empower Texans, he found six- and seven-figure checks from the same
names: Dunn and Wilks, both of whom have worked to undermine public
education in favor of parochial and other private schools. (The PAC
ultimately gave Lang more than $150,000.) “Holy cow,” Tackett
thought. “This is why no one is listening. This is why this
legislator isn’t listening.”

After we ordered coffees, Tackett opened his laptop and logged on to
the rudimentary website he’d built, called Chris Tackett Now
[[link removed]], to publish what
he’d turned up. Soon after launching it, his wife, Mendi, a florist,
got involved. What began with Lang’s contribution data has grown
exponentially. Texas has electronic records for campaign contributions
going back to 2000. Tackett grabbed everything, more than 300,000
individual records. Anyone can download files from a state website to
see who gave money to, say, Governor Abbott in the first six months of
2022. But that’s a bit like focusing on a single star through a
telescope. Tackett brought all the records together so he could look
at the entire night sky. He may have been the first person to see it
all, the entire campaign cosmology.

I asked Tackett to guide me through what he’d found. We started by
looking at who has given the most money to Texas politicians since
2000. The answer, surprisingly, was Tony Sanchez, a Laredo oilman who
largely self-financed a quixotic $58 million run for governor two
decades ago, creating a feckless orgy of political spending in a few
months. After him, there’s a drop and then three more names: grocery
magnate Charles Butt, an avid proponent of public education, and
Houston homebuilder Bob Perry—and then Tim Dunn. (Pennsylvania
billionaire financier Jeff Yass, a school voucher advocate, gave $6
million to Abbott in December
[[link removed]],
but he still falls far behind the cumulative spending of these four
and others.) Perry died a decade ago, and Butt has reserved most of
his political contributions for his education PAC. Meanwhile, Dunn has
sped up.  

We looked up Dunn’s contributions since 2000 and found he had given
$14.3 million, a figure that struck me as low. Tackett told me to
wait. He plugged in name variations: Tim Dunn, Timothy Dunn, Tim M.
Dunn, TIM DUNN, Timothy M. Dunn, and so on. The number kept rising
until it topped $24.5 million. He gave nearly $11 million—nearly
half his total—just between January 2022 and the end of 2023. 

Under state law, contributions to nonjudicial candidates and PACs
aren’t capped but must be disclosed to the Texas Ethics Commission.
But there’s another category of expenditure, to “social welfare
organizations,” that is called dark money because the donors can
remain invisible. These groups cannot give money to a candidate, but
they can produce “voter guides” that explicitly point out that
only one candidate is, say, a “strong Christian conservative”
(however that may be defined). In other words, there are means to push
voters’ buttons in ways that are hard to track. As in cosmology,
what we can see in the night sky is only part of what’s out there.

Still, what was visible told a story. From 2000 until 2015, the big
donors in Texas politics tended to be pro-business. They wanted to
make it harder to sue corporations—Texans for Lawsuit Reform was
still at the height of its power—and they lobbied to spend taxpayer
dollars to attract out-of-state companies. The business of Texas,
these donors believed, was business. Dunn and other megadonors shared
those views, but they had other priorities. The schism came to a head
over the 2017 “bathroom bill,” 
[[link removed]]which
would have targeted transgender Texans by requiring them in some
instances to use restrooms associated with the gender listed on their
birth certificate. Dunn backed the bill, but the business lobby
opposed it, fearing a backlash that would’ve harmed their
companies’ profits. The old guard prevailed. 

Since then, though, Dunn and his allies have racked up victories,
including passing a ban on abortions (before the U.S. Supreme
Court’s _Dobbs_ decision) and another bill prohibiting minors from
receiving gender-affirming care. Nowadays, the business of Texas is to
promote not just business but also a right-wing Christian worldview.
“There’s a handful of billionaires trying to pull the strings
across the state and pull Texas all the way to the right,” Tackett
said.

Dunn has deviated from the pro-business camp in other ways. The
previous generation of big donors often supported public schools in
the interest of training the future workforce. Dunn has long advocated
for drastically cutting property taxes, which are the major source of
funding for public schools, police, and other essential services in a
state that collects no income tax. He backs private Christian
schooling and was involved in a recent failed effort to defeat a $1.4
billion bond for Midland public schools
[[link removed]].

The fight over school vouchers became perhaps the most contentious
policy issue during the 2023 legislative session, a key reason why
Abbott called four special sessions. Dunn recently said he is
“basically uninvolved” in the effort to pass voucher legislation,
but he’s underplaying his influence. He gave $37,500 to the Texas
Federation for Children PAC, a leading proponent of vouchers.
Advocates from the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the America
First Policy Institute, organizations for which Dunn has served as a
board member, testified last year in favor of voucher bills, as did
Matt Rinaldi, whom Dunn backed as a state house candidate and leader
of the Texas GOP. What’s more, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, the
Dunn-affiliated lawmaker scorecard, has consistently given high marks
for votes that allow use of public money to help pay private school
tuition. (These grades are not just given after the fact; a lawsuit
turned up extensive evidence that longtime Dunn ally Michael Quinn
Sullivan communicated to lawmakers before the votes how each would be
scored, arguably telling them how to vote if they wished to avoid a
well-funded backlash when the score came out.) 

Tackett sees the voucher push as an attempt to undercut public
schools and bolster Christian education
[[link removed]].
“This was all part of this broader agenda that was to inject
religion into our government and erode trust in the government,”
Tackett said. He and Mendi are six years into this project and have no
plans to stop. “There are days we feel burned out,” he said. But
then he uncovers more evidence that Dunn is leading an effort to buy
public officials, subvert the state’s democracy, and bend it to his
ideology, and that energizes him to keep going. “Democracy is much
more at risk than I think most people realize,” he said.

In January Tackett texted me an update. A new PAC, Texans United for a
Conservative Majority, had been created. The first donation it
received was $700,000 from the Dunn-controlled Hexagon Partners. A few
days later, Farris Wilks chipped in $1.29 million. The money was being
used to unseat incumbent Republicans who scored relatively low on the
Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s index. Tackett surmised that
after the backlash surrounding the meeting between Stickland and the
white supremacist Fuentes, Defend Texas Liberty had become too toxic
[[link removed]].
So Dunn had simply created a new PAC with less baggage.

Dunn, number 54, with the Big Spring High School basketball team in
1974. Courtesy of Big Spring High School

Many of Dunn’s convictions can be traced to his childhood. Back when
he was playing with that beehive as a boy around the late sixties, his
hometown of Big Spring was experiencing a growth spurt. Webb Air Force
Base trained military pilots. Regional oil companies were
headquartered there. Big Spring was home to the largest oil refinery
in the region, a Sears, and a bowling alley that offered babysitting
while parents got in ten frames. There were about 45 churches, half of
them Baptist, in a city of some 30,000. Thirty of them sent singers to
annual summer gospel concerts, held in an outdoor amphitheater,
organized by Dunn’s father.

Joe Dunn sold insurance to farmers and ranchers and was active in a
local Baptist church. In 1961 he added his name to a resolution asking
President John F. Kennedy not to serve alcohol at the White House. His
wife, Thelma, was a homemaker. Both grew up on farms near Lubbock and
moved to California’s Central Valley in search of work during the
Great Depression. They met there and married in 1937. Joe worked as a
farm laborer and later at a cotton gin. They had three sons in the
span of six years while in California. Ten years passed before they
had their fourth and final child, Tim, in 1955. By then, they had
returned to Texas and would soon settle in Big Spring.

Tim Dunn excelled at both academics and athletics at Big Spring High
School. The local newspaper listed him as six feet three inches tall,
and he started for the varsity basketball team. He was outshone by a
classmate named Tom Sorley, who played quarterback for the football
team and would go on to play for the University of Nebraska. Both were
members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Dunn was second in
charge; Sorley was president. Dunn was a “class favorite”; Sorley
was “Mr. BSHS” and “School Beast.”

It was the early seventies, and the counterculture was something
happening in faraway coastal cities. Sam Chappell, who graduated two
years before Dunn and went on to become a Christian music executive in
Nashville, remembers a city that was “very conservative.” This was
the natural outcome, he told me, of a place where “the oil industry
meets a military base meets Southern Baptists.”  

Dunn (right) during a class at Texas Tech University in
1978. Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech
University

Like Dunn’s colony of bees, Big Spring High operated as an ordered
society where students mostly played their assigned roles. Members of
the football team’s female booster club, called the Golddiggers,
spent a week feeding and pampering the players. “Golddiggers became
slaves to the varsity squad for one week,” explained the 1972
yearbook. It ran a photo from an event in which a Golddigger “serves
her master” by preparing him a plate of food.

Dunn shared a love of music with his father, Joe, who sang at Baptist
revivals and played the fiddle. Years later, retired and living in
California, he led a band called Joe Dunn & the Foothill Seniors.
While in high school Tim Dunn played guitar in a band called Scrub
Brotherhood. The _Big Spring Herald_ reported that it played a
combination of rock, country, and “cuddle” music. Ron McKee, the
drummer, told me they listened to a lot of Grand Funk Railroad and
played covers as well as some original songs written by Dunn. One song
McKee recalls was titled “My Prayer.” 

McKee, who attended school with Dunn from elementary school through
college, said his friend was religious and straitlaced, and held
strong opinions and beliefs. “I don’t believe I ever heard Tim
Dunn say a cussword in all my time around him. I don’t ever remember
him getting into a fight or taking a drink,” he said. Dunn was
nonetheless fun to be around. One time in high school they got bored
and took the handlebars off two tricycles and attached upside-down
drum stands so they could steer while standing up, as on
foot-propelled scooters. They piloted them to the Sonic and back, a
roughly five-mile round trip. “We had cars, but we wanted to come up
with something silly to do,” McKee said. “No one got arrested or
hurt.”

Not long after Dunn left for college, in 1974, Big Spring’s golden
age ended. By the late seventies, the military base had closed, and
all of the oil headquarters had departed for Midland or Dallas. Big
Spring began to lose population, and the Dunns were part of the
flight. Two brothers settled near Dallas, while a third returned to
California, where his parents moved when they retired.

Dunn’s 1978 yearbook photo. Southwest Collection/Special
Collections Library, Texas Tech University

Dunn attended Texas Tech University. He studied chemical engineering
and wound down by watching episodes of _Laverne & Shirley_. He was
wed on May 14, 1977, a year before he graduated, to Terri Spannaus,
the daughter of an Air Force colonel stationed in Big Spring. They
remain married and have six adult children. At least two of the kids
inherited the Dunns’ musical talent: David records Christian music
in Nashville, and Wally sings and plays guitar at Midland Bible
Church.

A month before Tim and Terri married, he wrote a letter to the Texas
Tech student newspaper about the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed
change to the U.S. Constitution that would enshrine equal protection
for men and women under American law. The letter is remarkable for its
certainty, and it appears to be Dunn’s first public airing of his
political views. He opposed the ERA, writing that the amendment would
give “homosexuals equal protection under the law . . . Public
schools and, yes, even private Christian schools will not be able to
refuse to hire a teacher because he is a homosexual.” (His desire to
keep private Christian schools free of government regulations remains
intact, as does his animosity toward LGBTQ rights.)

After graduating from Tech, Dunn worked at Exxon for two years, in
Houston. In 1980 he was hired by First City Bancorp, which traced its
lineage to 1866 and was one of the largest banks in Texas. In the
mid-eighties the bank moved Dunn to Midland, where he served as the
head of commercial lending. In December 1984, First City ran a nearly
full-page ad in the business section of the _Midland
Reporter-Telegram_. “We Know Oil & Gas,” it read. “We know
Midland!” It featured a drawing of several bankers. Prominently
positioned in the middle was a confident, smiling Dunn.

Like many Texas banks, First City boomed when strong oil prices buoyed
the state economy. But during the final months of 1985 global oil
prices began souring. Texas saw massive job losses and a surge in
bankruptcies. First City had “aggressively expanded during the early
eighties to capitalize on the energy-driven Texas boom and found
itself particularly vulnerable,” said Sorin Sorescu, a professor of
finance at Texas A&M University who has studied regional banks. In
September 1987, First City needed a nearly $1 billion bailout from the
federal government. It was, at the time, the second-largest bank
rescue ever. Dunn appears to have left the troubled institution right
before the bailout; the bank’s financial condition couldn’t have
been a surprise to anyone paying attention. 

In July, two months before the bailout, a new oil firm was registered
with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Based in Midland, it was
focused on drilling in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. It was called
Parker & Parsley Development Partners, and Dunn was a general partner.
He remained a top executive as the company grew. By 1995, however, it
was foundering and announced a series of belt-tightening measures and
a shuffling of its management. Dunn stepped down from the board and
took on the role of managing operations in two of the company’s most
productive regions. Only one executive remained on the board: Scott
Sheffield, who would go on to lead the company for years. Parker &
Parsley later renamed itself Pioneer Natural Resources and became a
top oil company in the Permian. Last year Exxon Mobil agreed to
purchase it for $59.5 billion, in one of the largest oil field deals
in two decades. 

A year after leaving the board, Dunn cofounded his own Midland-based
oil company, which would become one of the largest producers in Texas,
although one fourth the size of Pioneer. As he built his company, Dunn
inched into politics. In 1996 he served as a delegate to the state
Republican convention. By this time he and Terri were beginning to
construct a private cocoon around their family. They homeschooled
their children, developing a curriculum that emphasized reading great
books from the Western canon. The Dunns approached like-minded
families, recruiting the parents of fifteen students and founding a
new school, Midland Classical Academy, that met behind their church.
Students attended classes two days a week and studied at home the
other three. 

Ron Miller, the dean of students, told a reporter in 2001 that
Christianity was incorporated into every classroom and lesson.
“Here, I’m allowed to speak my mind about Jesus Christ,” he
said. “Everything we do is centered around the role God has in our
life.” The school eventually moved to a new multimillion-dollar
building on the north side of Midland, where the homes give way to
scrubland dotted by an occasional pump jack. Parents were encouraged
to volunteer. Dunn served as the assistant girls’ basketball coach.

Today the Dunns’ compound is bisected by a private road named Happy
Trails Drive and has been landscaped to look like a rolling prairie.
Dunn and Terri live there in a six-thousand-square-foot house. They
conveyed plots to three of their sons as well as to a son-in-law, who
have built million-dollar homes. A fifth plot was deeded to a daughter
and her husband, but they still live a ten-minute drive across town,
and another son lives with his wife in Nashville. More than a dozen of
the Dunns’ grandchildren live behind the gates.  

An aerial view of the Dunn family compound, in northern
Midland. Photograph by Jeff Wilson

The first substantial campaign check Dunn wrote was in February 2002:
ten thousand dollars to Free Enterprise PAC. Its legislative wish
list, according to a report it printed at the time, included bills
that would “prohibit homosexual marriages and adoptions” and
“require a super majority to increase taxes.” The PAC printed a
ranking of most-to-least conservative legislators, a strategy later
adopted by Dunn-backed groups such as Empower Texans and Texans for
Fiscal Responsibility. 

In the period when Dunn contributed, Free Enterprise PAC spent nearly
$66,000 supporting Republican candidates for the state House, with
most of that going to those it deemed most conservative. The biggest
beneficiary was a little-known lawyer running in a five-way contest
for an open seat in Collin County. It was his first electoral victory.
His name was Ken Paxton. 

Free Enterprise spent even more on mailings attacking six Republican
incumbents—half in the House and half in the Senate—each of whom
scored low in the group’s rankings. Several days before the primary
election, acting lieutenant governor Bill Ratliff, one of the six,
denounced Free Enterprise PAC. Its mailings, which featured a
photograph of two men kissing and another of two grooms cutting a
wedding cake, claimed Ratliff supported a “radical homosexual
agenda.” His alleged sin was voting for a hate crimes bill named
after James Byrd Jr., a Black man who in 1998 was dragged to his death
behind a pickup truck by three white men in the East Texas town of
Jasper. The bill allowed heightened penalties for crimes motivated by
the victim’s identity, including race or sexual orientation. 

All six of the incumbents targeted by the PAC won reelection, but
Ratliff was incensed by the group’s tactics. “This type of
hate-mongering is reminiscent of the Nazis. This type of
hate-mongering is reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “This
type of hate-mongering is now being practiced by the al Qaeda and the
Taliban.” The negative press and attention from prominent
Republicans didn’t deter Dunn. In 2006 he gave another $10,000 to
the group right before the general election. Since that first check in
2002, he has made more than 225 donations of at least $10,000.

Dunn’s campaign cash washes through multiple political action
committees and helps support various bands of right-wing political
activists. The Texas Voice reported that shortly after Thanksgiving a
little-known group called the Texas Family Project
[[link removed]] blasted
out text messages that attacked select Republican lawmakers. The
messages claimed that those legislators voted in favor of funding to
help transgender Texans transition from the gender they were assigned
at birth. This was hogwash. 

All of the targeted Republicans voted for Senate Bill 14, a law passed
last year and signed by Abbott that banned gender-affirming care for
transgender youth; further, it required Texas to revoke medical
licenses for doctors who didn’t comply. Their apparent transgression
was not voting for an anti-transgender amendment on an unrelated bill,
creating a gossamer thread of truth to the text message’s claim. In
reality, these Republicans were singled out and castigated not for
their position on transgender Texans but for having the gall to vote
independently. (In late January, the same outfit sent anti-Muslim
mailers
[[link removed]] assailing
several Republicans in the Legislature.)

In reality, these Republicans were singled out and castigated not for
their position on transgender Texans but for having the gall to vote
independently.

Dunn’s connection to Texas Family Project is labyrinthine and
apparent only after some digging. The group was created in 2022 by
Brady Gray, a pastor turned political activist from Weatherford, about
thirty miles west of Fort Worth. On the same day in April, he founded
two groups: Texas Family Project and Texas Family Project Foundation.
One is a nonprofit charity and the other is a dark-money “social
welfare group.” Both can keep their donors anonymous, making it
nearly impossible to determine who is funding the organizations. 

Before running these outfits full time, Gray was chief executive of
Pale Horse Strategies, a Fort Worth political-consulting firm run by
Stickland, who was simultaneously leading Defend Texas Liberty. Pale
Horse, named after the line from the book of Revelation in which Death
rides a pale horse, thrived on contracts from Defend Texas Liberty. In
2022 and 2023, Defend Texas Liberty paid Pale Horse $829,260 for
consulting services.

Gray also runs a political action committee called the Texas Pastors
Coalition, which was created in May 2022 and has so far been inactive,
neither raising nor spending any money, according to state
campaign-disclosure documents. But it shares a Fort Worth post office
box with the Tarrant County Patriots PAC, which is run by Cary
Cheshire, a former Pale Horse adviser who has worked for
Dunn-supported groups on and off since 2014. This PAC has raised
$80,000 in the last couple of years—all of it from Defend Texas
Liberty. 

This is a typical pattern in Dunn’s orbit. A new organization
emerges that attacks Republicans who are conservative but not
sufficiently obedient to Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty. The groups,
which spread misinformation and sow division, share the same pool of
political operatives and funding. 

Among the lawmakers targeted by the Texas Family Project’s text
messages was Stephanie Klick, a longtime nurse and Republican who has
represented the northeast Fort Worth suburbs since 2013. In the 2022
election, a former military policeman and Republican Party operative
named David Lowe ran against her, claiming she was too moderate. He
described himself in campaign material as “an army veteran, a
constitutional conservative, [and] follower of Christ.” When Lowe
made it into a runoff against Klick, Defend Texas Liberty gave him
$177,608—the majority of the $269,467 he raised during the
head-to-head campaigning.

When I reached Lowe, who is running against Klick again, I asked him
what he believes Dunn and Defend Texas Liberty want and why they are
supporting him. “I think they’re strong Christians,” he replied.
“They’re trying to lay the foundation to make Texas more
conservative.” 

What that means, he said, is not yet clear—even to him. “The truth
is, you don’t really know what they want until Texas is
conservative,” he said. I replied that it was already quite
conservative. He ticked off a list of additional legislative goals:
increased militarization of the border, preventing abortions that are
accomplished through medications received in the mail, punishing
anyone who helps a transgender child receive gender-affirming care,
and abolishing property taxes.

For Dunn, influencing government is a sacred mission. “When we go
into governmental politics, we’re going into the darkest places,”
he said in 2022. He was giving a speech in Orlando, to the Convention
of States, a Houston-based organization (Dunn has been a board member
since its founding) that calls for a constitutional convention to
limit the power of the federal government. “And we have the
opportunity to make disciples in the places that need it the most. It
is a high and holy calling.”

To achieve this mission, Dunn has supported some candidates who are
morally repugnant. In 2018 he got involved in an East Texas statehouse
race. The incumbent was Dan Flynn, an Army veteran who had served as a
brigadier general in the Texas State Guard. He first came to office in
2003, at which point he was considered quite conservative. Yet as the
lower chamber moved further to the right, he was increasingly viewed
as a centrist. Empower Texans donated nearly half the money raised by
his 2018 primary challenger, a former youth pastor named Bryan Slaton.

What did Flynn do to raise the hackles of Dunn and his allies? Mark
Owens, an assistant professor of political science at the Citadel who
formerly taught at the University of Texas at Tyler, where he studied
Texas politics, described Flynn as a principled, independent
conservative who believed in limited government spending. Empower
Texans’ attempt to create a cohesive, hard-right voting bloc
didn’t sit well with Flynn. “He wasn’t on board,” Owens
said. 

Flynn still won the 2018 primary and coasted to victory in the general
election. Before those votes were cast, Dunn sent a letter on Empower
Texans letterhead to Flynn’s constituents, urging them to “hold
Flynn accountable” for his votes in the upcoming legislative
session. “Why was I involved in Texas elections? _What do I
want,” _Dunn wrote. He claimed he was fighting against corporate
lobbyists, with nothing less than American democracy at stake. “If
we lose this fight . . . representative government will die, and with
it the American dream.” 

The letter was notable for its omissions. He described Empower Texans
as a “non-profit service organization” but didn’t mention that
he had given $2.63 million to the Empower Texans PAC the previous
year. Dunn described himself as a champion of the little guy, helping
voters fight back against politicians co-opted by Austin lobbyists. He
never mentioned that he’s a whale in the campaign-finance ocean, or
that he uses his political clout to promote his own worldview.

Two years later Dunn and Slaton took another shot at Flynn. Dunn
personally gave $225,000 to Slaton—nearly two thirds of Slaton’s
entire war chest. This time Slaton prevailed. After the election Dunn
continued supporting him, giving his campaign another $50,000 in 2021.
At the end of the session, Slaton received the highest score, 98 out
of 100, on the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s index. He was an
obedient anti-LGBTQ rabble-rouser, and _Texas Monthly_ gave him the
“Cockroach” award
[[link removed]],
reviving an old legislative term for a lawmaker who annoys members of
both parties, makes a lot of noise, and accomplishes little. Despite
these dubious accomplishments, Slaton was reelected in 2022, with more
than half of his contributions coming from Dunn and Defend Texas
Liberty. 

But his time as a lawmaker was cut short. The Texas Voice reported
that last year Slaton was enlisted to speak
[[link removed]] at
a networking meeting for “business leaders dedicated . . . to
preserving our culture, protecting our children and promoting
self-governance over tyranny.” According to the schedule, Slaton
took the stage immediately after a talk by Dunn. 

Later that night, at 10 p.m., he invited two nineteen-year-old capitol
aides and two of their friends to his Austin apartment. He mixed rum
and Coke in a large Yeti thermos cup and drank until the early hours
of the morning, by which time all but one of the aides had left. The
one who remained was intoxicated, and according to a subsequent
investigation, they engaged in sex. The next morning, she went to a
drugstore to obtain Plan B pills to avoid getting pregnant. Several
weeks later, in May, Slaton was expelled for “inappropriate
workplace conduct,”
[[link removed]] the
first member of the Texas Legislature to be removed in nearly a
century. 

Texas Right to Life, an antiabortion group, withdrew its endorsement
of Slaton, saying it held its endorsees to a high moral standard.
Dunn, on the other hand, hasn’t made a public statement about
Slaton’s behavior or his own role in electing him.

Why would Dunn ally himself with someone like Slaton? It’s a
question that perplexed Bob Deuell a few years ago. He’s a family
physician who served as a state senator from Greenville, northeast of
Dallas, for more than a decade. A Republican, he was known as a
staunch conservative with an independent streak. In 2014, after
receiving a low score on a Dunn-backed scorecard, he drew a primary
challenge from Bob Hall, a retired Air Force captain and recent
transplant from Florida. During the campaign, Hall suggested that
Satan controlled Deuell and bizarrely claimed that the incumbent
intended to follow a United Nations imperative by adding bicycle lanes
to Texas highways. Deuell shook off these outlandish statements but
said he was deeply troubled by court documents in which Hall’s
ex-wife claimed she was “physically, sexually and verbally abused
for most of our marriage.” (Hall denied these allegations.)

Hall ran a relatively low-budget campaign, spending an average of $52
a day through the primary, mostly on signs, T-shirts, and door
hangers. When he made it to a runoff with Deuell, Dunn-connected money
rained down. Hall’s spending jumped to more than $2,100 a day, and
he began using Facebook advertising and a direct-mail campaign
generated by an out-of-state consultant. He attacked Deuell for voting
like a “liberal Democrat” even though he had endorsements from the
National Rifle Association and some right-to-life groups. “It was a
bunch of lies,” Deuell told me. “His whole campaign was a bunch of
lies.” 

In the middle of the election, Deuell decided to write Dunn a letter.
He told me that its message was simple: “Mr. Dunn, I’m not sure
why you’re wanting to have me out of office. Certainly, you don’t
want to put somebody like this in office,” referring to Hall. Deuell
never got a response.

Hall eked out a victory by three hundred votes and has served in the
Texas Senate since 2015. In the past three sessions, he has scored
highest among senators in the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility’s
index. Deuell told me he learned one lesson from this experience:
“As long as they get their puppet, they don’t care what the
qualifications are because they know Bob Hall’s going to vote with
them.”

For all his talk of Christian piety, Dunn’s tactics and beliefs have
put him at odds with many fellow believers. “To see billionaire
pastors, which should be an oxymoron, take over our state and turn it
into an authoritarian theocracy is terrifying,” said James Talarico,
a Democratic state House member representing North Austin and
surrounding suburbs. Talarico is a former public school teacher and is
studying to become a pastor at the Austin Presbyterian Theological
Seminary. “Without this ecosystem built by Tim Dunn, we wouldn’t
see the extreme far-right policies coming out of Texas that we’ve
seen in the last decade,” he said.

Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee
for Religious Liberty, lives in Dallas. She has observed the rise of
Dunn’s dominion. He already wields control over the Texas Senate
through his influence over Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and I asked
her what Texas would look like if he managed to do the same in the
Texas House. “I think it could create a second-class citizenship
status for anyone who doesn’t agree with the elected leaders and
their religious views,” she said. “And that looks like
discriminatory laws and policies if they don’t align with a
fundamentalist reading of the Bible. I also find that it would be
profoundly undemocratic.”

She said Dunn is an ambassador of Christian nationalism, not
Christianity. “I believe the central message of Christianity is the
gospel of love,” she told me. “And Christian nationalism is a
false idol of power.”

Summer Wise has also watched Dunn’s rise with dismay. She comes from
an old Texas family and is distantly related to Angelina Eberly, a
bronze likeness of whom presides over Congress Avenue, in downtown
Austin. One night in 1842, Eberly famously took it upon herself to
ready the town cannon and fire the six-pounder to prevent the records
of the nascent Republic of Texas from being taken from the capital.
Wise has engaged in a different sort of public service. She sat on the
State Republican Executive Committee from 2018 to 2020 and has
appeared as a delegate at seven state conventions. She lost her post
in 2020 as part of a takeover of the party by Dunn’s allies. She
told me she is deeply uncomfortable with the toxicity in some factions
of today’s Texas Republican Party.

Many of her friends and former allies have given up their activism or
left public office, creating what she told me was an exodus of talent
and passion. It’s hard to fight against people who command vast
resources and who believe their eternal salvation depends on the
outcome, she said. She fears that Texas is moving away from a
representative republic. In its place is a system driven “by
ideology and the ideologies of a few. That is not how government is
intended to function.”

We spoke several times over a few months. In one of her final emails
to me, she lamented the state of the state but vowed, like her
ancestor, not to surrender. “I cannot think of a time when we have
seen the very integrity of our political system so tested,” she
wrote. “Dunn has a misguided belief that he is fighting for souls,
but I’m fighting for the soul of Texas.”    

_Chart photo credits: Dunn: Brian Shumway; Trainor and Paxton: Bill
Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty; Graves: C-SPAN; Stickland: Bob
Daemmrich/Corbis via Getty; Sullivan: Jay Janner/Austin
American-Statesman/USA TODAY NETWORK; Patrick: Brandon Bell/Getty;
Meckler: LM Otero/AP_

_Senior editor RUSSELL GOLD was born somewhere east of the Sabine
River, but has lived in Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio since 1996. He
has spent most of that time writing about energy in its many forms. He
has dodged polar bears on Alaska’s North Slope, climbed a wind
turbine in Oklahoma, and spent time on frac pads from Carrizo Springs
to Fort Worth and Odessa to Carthage. He worked at the San Antonio
Express-News before joining the Wall Street Journal, where he
worked from 2000 to 2021. Gold has won multiple business-writing
awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the electric line–caused Camp Fire
in California. His 2014 book, The Boom, was long-listed for the FT
Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year prize. His 2019
book, Superpower, wasn’t—but it is even better. It profiles
Houstonian Michael Skelly’s attempt to build a very, very long
extension cord. Gold joined Texas Monthly in 2021 to write about the
business of Texas. He lives with his wife in Austin._

_For half a century, TEXAS MONTHLY has chronicled life in the Lone
Star State, exploring its politics and personalities, barbecue and
business, true crime and tacos, honky-tonks and hiking. We hope you
enjoy the archive of classic Texas Monthly stories on this site, as
well as the half dozen new ones we add every day. We present those
stories on every platform where our audience might enjoy them, from
this website to our printed magazine, podcasts, videos, books, and
live events. Our combined monthly audience is more than 34.6 million
[[link removed]] and growing rapidly._

_We don’t report “the news.” You can get that lots of places.
Instead, our journalists strive to bring you vivid storytelling about
the scenes and characters and hidden forces behind the news, whether
the topic is migration or an emerging musician. We also offer expert
advice on the state’s best restaurants, swimming holes, and other
attractions. If you’re new to Texas Monthly, we hope you’ll like
what you see and want more. We offer several easy and affordable ways
to subscribe
[[link removed]].
If you are already a subscriber, we thank you! Please log in
[[link removed]] to access your subscription. And
if you are a marketer who wants to reach the liveliest audience in
Texas, we are eager to discuss our advertising opportunities
[[link removed]] with you._

_Happy reading from everyone at Texas Monthly._

_This article originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of TEXAS
MONTHLY with the headline “The Billionaire Who Runs
Texas.” SUBSCRIBE TODAY
[[link removed]]._

* texas
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* elections
[[link removed]]
* campaign finance
[[link removed]]
* big oil
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[/contact/submit_to_xxxxxx?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [/faq?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Manage subscription [/subscribe?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Visit xxxxxx.org [/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]