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FAR RIGHT’S VISION FOR LOCAL GOVERNING HAS COME TO LIFE IN TEXAS  
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Robert Downen and Jeremy Schwartz
October 11, 2024
ProPublica
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_ Tim O’Hare’s leadership in Tarrant County, Texas, gives a
glimpse of far-right priorities: cutting programs for at-risk youth,
targeting elections and stifling dissent. _

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare at a Commissioners Court meeting in
Fort Worth, Texas, on April 18, 2023, Shelby Tauber for The Texas
Tribune

 

_Co-published with The Texas Tribune [[link removed]]_

Over the past two decades, Tim O’Hare methodically amassed power in
North Texas as he pushed incendiary policies such as banning
undocumented immigrants from renting homes and vilifying school
curriculum that encouraged students to embrace diversity.

He rode a wave of conservative resentment, leaping from City Council
member of Farmers Branch, a suburb north of Dallas, in 2005 to its
mayor to the leader of the Tarrant County Republican Party.

Three years ago, O’Hare sought his highest political office yet,
running for the top elected position in the nation’s 15th-largest
county, which is home to Fort Worth. Backed by
influential evangelical churches
[[link removed]] and
money from powerful oil industry billionaires
[[link removed]],
O’Hare promised voters he would weed out “diversity inclusion
nonsense
[[link removed]]”
and accused some Democrats of hating America. His win in November 2022
gave the GOP’s far right new sway over the Tarrant County
Commissioners Court, turning a government that once prided itself on
bipartisanship into a new front of the culture war
[[link removed]].

“I was not looking to do this at all, but they came after our
police,” he said in his victory speech
[[link removed]] on election night.
“They came after our schools. They came after our country. They came
after our churches.”

In Texas and across the country, far-right candidates have won control
of school boards, swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and
altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs. O’Hare’s
election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the
schoolhouse to county government, offering a rare look at what happens
when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over
municipal affairs in a closely divided county.

Since he was elected county judge — a position similar to that of
mayor in a city — O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an
uncompromising approach. He has led efforts to cut funding to
nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on
racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights. And he has pushed election law
changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.

O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies
continue to align with once-fringe figures
[[link removed]] while
targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically. In
July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for
speaking eight seconds over his allotted time. Days later, O’Hare
appeared onstage
[[link removed]] at
a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to
“rid the earth
[[link removed]] of
the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism
[[link removed]].
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull
out
[[link removed]] of
the event.

“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like, and at the
lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,” said Robert
Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who
studies political extremism. “The goal is to capture local
Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party,
turning it to more extremist goals.”

Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+
acceptance
[[link removed]],
downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering
disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming
[[link removed]] that
America was founded as a Christian nation
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that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative
evangelical beliefs
[[link removed]].

O’Hare declined multiple interview requests and did not answer
detailed lists of questions emailed to him. His spokesperson instead
touted a list of eight accomplishments
[[link removed]],
including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax
rates.

With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant
remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans. When the county
voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for
president in 2020, many political observers suspected the end was nigh
for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.

Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County
leader in decades. After two years under O’Hare’s leadership,
voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of
O’Hare and their Democratic opponents. The election of both
Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.

The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s
Republican predecessor, Glen Whitley, who served as Tarrant County
judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022. Whitley said O’Hare has
implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been
mainstreamed on the right.

“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley,
who recently endorsed
[[link removed]] Democratic
Vice President Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred
of Texas in the U.S. Senate race. “You either vote with these people
100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”

Political Rise

In 2005, when O’Hare initially ran unopposed for a seat on the City
Council in Farmers Branch, a small town just outside of Tarrant
County, his platform included plans to revitalize the public library
and bring in new restaurants. In 2006, however, O’Hare began taking
positions that were outside of the Republican mainstream at the time.
He pushed for the diversifying town to declare English its official
language, ban landlords from renting to residents without proof of
citizenship, and stop publishing public materials in Spanish.

“The reason I got on the City Council was because I saw our property
values declining or increasing at a level that was below the rate of
inflation,” O’Hare said at the time
[[link removed]].
“When that happens, people move out of our neighborhoods, and what I
would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people
who don’t value education, people who don’t value taking care of
their properties.”

Hispanic residents mobilized and sued to block the rental ban’s
implementation. O’Hare doubled down: He pushed for Farmers Branch
police to partner with immigration enforcement authorities to detain
and deport people in the country illegally, and urged residents to
oppose a grocer’s plan to open a store that catered to Hispanics,
arguing it was “reasonable” to prefer “a grocery store that
appeals to higher-end consumers.”

O’Hare was elected as mayor in 2008. Foreshadowing moves he’d make
as Tarrant County judge, he abruptly ended a public meeting
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cutting off and removing one resident who criticized him. He led
opposition to the local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and
fought against a mentorship program for at-risk high school students
that included volunteers from a Hispanic group that opposed his
immigration resolution.

Meanwhile, the city continued to defend the immigration ordinance
after it was repeatedly struck down by federal judges. As costs for
the seven-year legal battle ballooned, Farmers Branch dipped into its
reserves, cut nearly two dozen city employees and outsourced services
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the library that O’Hare had campaigned on improving during his City
Council run. “At the end of the day, this will be money well spent,
and it will be a good investment in our community’s future,”
O’Hare said after the town laid off staff in 2008.

O’Hare stepped down as mayor in 2011. Three years later, after the
U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, Farmers
Branch stopped defending the ordinance. It was never enforced, but the
related lawsuits cost the town $6.6 million, city officials said
[[link removed]] in
2016.

After leaving office, O’Hare moved his family a few miles away to
Tarrant County, where demographic changes have dropped the share of
white residents from 62% of the county’s population in 2000 to 43%
in 2020.

Home to some of the nation’s most influential evangelical churches
and four of former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisers, the
county is an epicenter for ultraconservative movements in Texas,
including those that call for Christians to exert dominance
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all aspects of society. In 2016, O’Hare was elected chair of the
Tarrant County GOP. Under him, the party distributed mailers that
listed the primary voting records for local candidates — breaking
with the longstanding nonpartisan tradition of county elections.

In 2020, following a series of racist incidents
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the mostly white Carroll High School in Southlake — including one
viral clip in which white students chanted the N-word — O’Hare
co-founded a political action committee that raised hundreds of
thousands of dollars to oust school board members who supported the
Carroll Independent School District’s plans for diversity and
inclusion programming. The dispute
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catapult the small Tarrant County suburb into the national spotlight
amid Republican panic over critical race theory and “gender
ideology,” and created a blueprint for right-wing organizing
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was copied in suburbs
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America.

In 2021, O’Hare launched his campaign for Tarrant County judge,
squaring off in the GOP primary against the more moderate five-term
mayor of Fort Worth, whom he painted as a RINO, or “Republican in
name only.” O’Hare rode a wave fueled by backlash to COVID-19
mandates, baseless election fraud conspiracy theories and opposition
to what he called “diversity inclusion nonsense,” according to
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
[[link removed]].
O’Hare’s campaign was condemned by moderate Republicans, including
Whitley, the outgoing judge, who accused him of trying to “divide
and pit one group against another.” O’Hare won the primary by 23
percentage points.

Whitley and other longtime Republican leaders declined to endorse
O’Hare in the 2022 general election. It didn’t matter; by then, he
was backed by a coalition of far-right megadonors, pastors and
churches. His top campaign donors included a PAC funded by Tim Dunn
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Wilks
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The two west Texas oil billionaires
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given tens of millions
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dollars to candidates and groups that oppose LGBTQ+ rights, support
programs that would use public dollars
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pay for private schools, and have led efforts to push moderates
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of the Texas GOP.

O’Hare received another $203,000 from the We Can Keep It PAC. The
PAC’s treasurer is an elder at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth,
whose leaders have endorsed
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GOP candidates, including O’Hare. The church’s pastor has claimed
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can’t be Christian and dared critics to complain to the IRS that the
church was flouting federal prohibitions
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political activity by nonprofits.

Transforming Elections

O’Hare at a Commissioners Court meeting Credit:Shelby Tauber for
The Texas Tribune

O’Hare took office in early 2023, as Republicans continued to
question President Joe Biden’s razor-thin win in Tarrant County
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years earlier. A 2022 audit
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Texas’ Republican secretary of state found no evidence of widespread
fraud and that Tarrant County held “a quality, transparent
election.”

Despite that — and while saying he had no proof of malfeasance
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immediately set out to prevent cheating he claimed was responsible for
Democrats’ steady rise in the long-purpling county. Soon after
taking office, he helped launch an “election integrity unit”
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he’d lead with the county sheriff who had spoken at a “Stop the
Steal
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rally in the days after the 2020 presidential election.

No Democrats were initially on the unit. Nor was the county’s
elections administrator, Heider Garcia, who by then had faced three
years of harassment
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death threats and accusations of being a secret agent
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Venezuela’s socialist government by election fraud conspiracy
theorists. Garcia opted for radical transparency
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making himself accessible to answer questions about the election
process and earning praise from across the political aisle for his
patient public service.

But Garcia lasted only a few months under O’Hare: In April 2023, he
resigned his position, citing his relationship with O’Hare in
his resignation letter
[[link removed]].
“Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent
election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on these
values is not an option for me,” Garcia wrote. “You made it clear
in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision
is to leave.”

Garcia, now the Dallas County elections administrator, did not respond
to an interview request.

One day after Garcia resigned, O’Hare told members
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True Texas Project — a group whose leaders have sympathized
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a white nationalist
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shooter and endorsed Christian nationalism
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that he was encouraged by the potential for low turnout in that
year’s upcoming elections, which he said would help Republicans win
more local seats. (O’Hare previously served on True Texas
Project’s advisory team, according to a 2021 social media post
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the group’s CEO, Julie McCarty).

In June 2024, the election integrity unit reported that, over the
previous 15 months, it received 82 complaints of voter fraud — or
about 0.009% of all votes cast
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the 2020 presidential election in Tarrant County — and that none had
resulted in criminal charges. Meanwhile, O’Hare has proposed a
number of changes to the election system that Tarrant County GOP
leaders have said were intended to help Republicans
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hurt Democrats.

In February, O’Hare and fellow Republicans cut $10,000 in county
funding to provide free bus rides to low-income residents, a program
that Tarrant GOP leaders decried
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a scheme to “bus Democrats to the polls.”

O'Hare said he opposed the funding on fiscal grounds. “I don’t
believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get
more people out to the polls,” he said before the vote.

A few months later, commissioners prohibited outside organizations
from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County
GOP leaders raised concerns about left-leaning organizations holding
registration drives. Democrats and voting rights groups assailed the
moves as attempts to lower voter turnout.

In September, O’Hare proposed eliminating voting locations on some
college campuses that he called a “waste of money and manpower.”
But this time, his Republican allies on the Commissioners Court said
they could not go along
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the vote and joined Democrats to defeat the measure. Tarrant County
Republican leaders condemned the recalcitrant commissioners in a
public resolution that made it clear they saw the effort to close
polls on college campuses as a move that would help them in November.
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GOP commissioners, the resolution claimed, “voted with Democrats on
a key election vote that undermines the ability of Republicans to win
the general election in Tarrant County.”

Manny Ramirez, one of those Republican commissioners, said in an
interview he thinks the GOP should try to win college students with
their conservative ideas rather than limit on-campus voting.

“We’ve been providing those same exact sites for nearly two
decades,” Ramirez said. His role as commissioner, he added, is to
provide “equal access to all of our citizens.”

Targeting Youth Programs

Less than a year into his term, O’Hare began targeting
long-established nonprofits whose websites and social media accounts
contained language the county judge considered politically
objectionable on issues of gender and race.

In October 2023, he moved to block a $115,000 state grant to Girls
Inc. of Tarrant County, for its Girl Power program offering summer
camps and mentoring to help participants focus on stress management,
hygiene and self-esteem.

About 90% of the youth served by Girls Inc. of Tarrant County are
people of color and come from families making less than $30,000 a
year, according to the organization’s website
[[link removed]].

Four months earlier, the national Girls Inc. group, which has chapters
across the country, had tweeted out its support for abortion rights
[[link removed]] and LGBTQ+
pride [[link removed]], which
conservative media and activists seized upon.

“Girls Inc. is an extremist political indoctrination machine
advocating for divisive liberal politics,” Leigh Wambsganss, the
chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, told commissioners.
Patriot Mobile is a Christian nationalist cellphone company whose PAC
has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of far-right
candidates
[[link removed]] across
Tarrant County, including O’Hare.

Local leaders of Girls Inc., who did not respond to requests for
comment, said at the time their chapter is independent of the national
organization. They told commissioners they were reviewing their
affiliation with the parent organization.

In denying the funds, O’Hare told the Commissioners Court the
government shouldn’t support “an organization that is so deeply
ideological and encourages the children that they are teaching to go
advocate for social change.”

Commissioners killed the contract on a 3-2 party-line vote.

Six months later, O’Hare raised questions about another local
nonprofit, Big Thought. It provides youth in the Tarrant County
juvenile detention system with summer and after-school programs aimed
at helping them get their lives back on track through music, acting
and performance arts. Big Thought has had a contract with the county
for the past three years and says on its website
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youth who go through its programs reoffend at a lower rate than those
who don’t, potentially saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of
dollars in juvenile detention costs.

At an April meeting of the Tarrant County Juvenile Board, O’Hare
raised questions about the program’s advocacy for “racial
equity” after reading the organization’s website, according to
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
[[link removed]].
(The board’s meetings are not streamed or recorded).

Asked about O’Hare’s concerns, a Big Thought spokesperson said in
an email that the organization focuses on the realities facing at-risk
youth in Tarrant County. “Young people in our communities experience
challenges like economic inequality, racism, and more, and it is our
responsibility to provide a safe place to build the skills they need
so they can thrive,” said Evan Cleveland, Big Thought’s senior
director of programs.

The county’s juvenile probation director, Bennie Medlin, who has not
responded to requests for comment, told board members the program had
not had any “negative results” during the partnership, according
to minutes of the meeting. Members of the board were not swayed and
voted not to renew the program.

Three months later, at the juvenile board’s July meeting, O’Hare
and a district judge proposed ending a contract with the Pennsylvania
nonprofit Youth Advocate Programs after probing the nonprofit about
the position it had taken in briefs to the Supreme Court, its opinion
on school choice and police in schools, and whether “they work to
eliminate systemic racism,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Board members voted to cut ties with the nonprofit, which had worked
with the county for over three decades to provide mentoring, job
training and substance abuse counseling as alternatives to detention.

Gary Ivory, the organization’s president, said that a week after the
July vote, he met with O’Hare for about a half-hour in O’Hare’s
office. He said O’Hare questioned him about his personal views on
the LGBTQ+ community and “hot-button cultural war issues." Also
during that meeting, O’Hare pulled up Youth Advocate Programs’
website, Ivory said, and asked him why the group takes funding from
Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

“They are saying if anybody is too woke in Tarrant County, we are
going to put them in the dustbin of history and they won’t exist
anymore,” Ivory said.

On Oct. 1, Tarrant County commissioners voted to sign a similar
contract with another nonprofit. At the meeting, O’Hare denied
pushing to kill Youth Advocate Programs’ contract “because of a
phrase on a website.” Instead, he claimed Ivory told the juvenile
board that 15% of the money Tarrant County gives the program goes to
lobbyists and to “law firms to file amicus briefs against many of
the things the people in that room that voted disagree with.”

Ivory said that is incorrect. “I said generally 85 cents on a dollar
stays in Tarrant County and 15 cents goes to overhead,” he said.
“And I made it clear that YAP doesn’t spend any of that 15 cents
on the dollar for lobbying.”

Phil Sawyer, a longtime juvenile probation officer in Tarrant County
who retired two years ago, said the program was well respected within
the department and helped give badly needed services that the
department could not provide. “It’s a shocker,” he said of the
county’s decision to cut ties with the group. “Without them, it
would just be insanity. There are things we can do as probation
officers, but it’s not the same.”

Stifling Dissent

O’Hare at a Commissioners Court meeting Credit:Shelby Tauber for
The Texas Tribune

In recent months, O’Hare has taken aim at private citizens who
disagree with him, ordering several political opponents removed from
Commissioners Court meetings and calling for the firing of a local
college professor.

As Ryon Price’s allotted three minutes of public comment
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Commissioners Court meeting expired, O’Hare issued a sharp warning
to the man, a local Baptist minister who was a frequent antagonist of
O’Hare’s at such meetings: “Your time is up.”

It’s not uncommon for residents to go over their allotted time
during public comment sessions. But after Price continued criticizing
conditions in the Tarrant County Jail for an extra eight seconds,
O’Hare ordered sheriff’s deputies to step in: “He’s now held
in contempt. Remove him.”

As Price was escorted out of the meeting, someone in the audience
booed. “Was that you?” O’Hare snapped. “Well, try me.”

Price said that in the lobby, sheriff’s deputies handed him a
trespassing warning that banned him from the premises. “I think
it’s symbolic of a broader, more authoritarian shift” in Tarrant
County government, Price said of his removal. “And I have to wonder
if he really wants to govern this place, a place that splits red and
blue evenly, or just please some higher-ups in his own party.”

Price appealed his ban to the Tarrant County sheriff’s department
and said the appeal was granted in August, allowing him to resume
addressing the court during public comment sessions.

Minutes after Price was escorted from that July meeting, Lon Burnam, a
Democrat who served nine terms in the Texas House, approached O’Hare
to confront him about his decision to cut off another commissioner who
was requesting information about sheriff department policies. Burnam
later received a trespass warning from sheriff’s deputies and said
he is banned from public meetings until Jan. 1.

At their meeting two weeks later, commissioners amended public
speaking rules as O’Hare warned residents that “refusal to abide
by the Commissioners Court’s order or my order as the presiding
judge or continued disruption of the meeting may result in arrest and
prosecution under the laws of the state of Texas.”

O’Hare said the changes were needed to ensure civility in the
meeting room. “This is not in any way shape or form attempting to
stifle free speech,” he said during the meeting
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Also in August, O’Hare called for the firing of a Texas Christian
University professor over social media posts from 2021 that called for
police to be abolished. The professor, Alexandra Edwards, drew the ire
of local right-wing activists after writing about them and the
pro-Christian nationalism conference that O’Hare attended in July.
Not long after, a local right-wing website published an article about
her “antifa” views in which O’Hare called her a “radical”
and said Edwards should be fired.

“The full force of the repression of the Tarrant County GOP and the
various right-wing extremists kind of came down upon me,” Edwards
said in an interview, adding that she was inundated with threats and
harassment.

Such crackdowns are a sign that the local GOP has been taken over by
extremists, said Whitley, the county’s Republican former judge.

“They’ve gone so far to the right that most folks who used to be
adamant Republicans are not so much anymore,” he said, adding that
some in the GOP are too afraid of retaliation by O’Hare to speak out
publicly.

O’Hare’s term doesn’t end until 2027. But this year’s
elections will decide which party controls the powerful commissioners
court and, in some ways, will be a referendum on the first two years
of his tenure in county government.

Whitley said he hopes it will be a unifying moment for voters from
across the political spectrum. “I want us to be Americans, to be
Texans and to not just care about parties,” he said. “I hope
people will vote for the best person and not just vote for the
party.”

 _Robert Downen is a Texas Tribune reporter covering democracy and
the threats to it, including extremism, disinformation and
conspiracies._

_Jeremy Schwartz is an investigative reporter for the ProPublica-Texas
Tribune Investigative Initiative._

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