When Jon Rosenthal announced his campaign last fall for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, he never expected to talk about the short-lived Republic of Rhodesia.
Rosenthal, a 63-year-old mechanical engineer and Democratic state representative from northwest Houston, is the kind of politician you might expect to show interest in the influential but little-understood three-member board that, despite its antiquated name, regulates the oil and gas industry. He is an earnest, bald father of two—the kind of guy who uses phrases like “subsea production” and “deep-water intervention systems” in casual conversation. The Republican chair, he believed, was too cozy with the industry, and Rosenthal prepared a pragmatic slate of ideas to weatherize natural gas networks and clean up abandoned wells. It was shaping up as an important but low-profile race.
But Rosenthal is not facing that incumbent. In a bitter May runoff, Republicans instead nominated Bo French, an investor and former county GOP chair with only the vaguest glimmer of industry experience and a mostly irrelevant and racist political program that calls for deporting 100 million people, purging the nation of Muslims, and emulating a defunct apartheid state. Now Rosenthal is the only man standing between one of the most notorious bigots in North Texas and one of the country’s most powerful regulatory positions.
Polls suggest he has a shot. While this year’s US Senate race between state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton may represent Texas Democrats’ best chance to win a statewide race in more than 30 years, French’s lead over Rosenthal is just outside the margin of error.
That French could be vulnerable in a race Republicans have long taken for granted speaks to both his party’s weak standing and his own. But the fact that he’s made it this far tells a troubling story. The state’s Republican leaders have mostly not renounced French. Gov. Greg Abbott has endorsed him. Paxton has campaigned with him. The defeated incumbent—who once slammed French for his “ignorant bigotry” and “hateful attacks on the Jewish people”—has offered his congratulations. Because while French might say some things that others in his party won’t, or use language and imagery that many of them might avoid, the forces that increasingly power their movement are ones he embodies—Christian nationalism, internet-addled white supremacy, and a slow-building and then frighteningly sudden frenzy of state-sponsored Islamophobia. For a long time, much of the Texas GOP seemed to exist to serve oil and gas. Now the industry is a means to a culture-war end.
Rosenthal views the job as a culmination of his life’s work. Before launching an Indivisible chapter and flipping a Republican state House seat in 2018, he spent 25 years in and around the oil and gas industry, making service calls to Gulf platforms and West Texas rigs. He told me he was motivated to run after the state government’s muted response to Winter Storm Uri in 2021, in which hundreds of Texans died after a catastrophic power grid failure.
In addition to production and pipelines, the office also deals with the industry’s environmental footprint. When we spoke in August, Rosenthal had recently returned from a trip to the “Dead Sea of Texas” in the Permian Basin, where an uncapped well had swallowed a county road and created a turquoise-colored lake. In the nearby town of Grandfalls, a derelict oil well burst last April, spewing 1.5 million gallons of toxic water in a church parking lot. The RRC was responsible for mitigating such risks, he said, but ill-equipped to do the job.
“I present myself as serious-minded and keen on the issues and working with industry to protect our communities and strengthen our infrastructure and our economy,” he said, ““and [French] is, forgive the expression, tilting at Islamic windmills.”
He has done considerably more than tilt. A 56-year-old political activist who once ran a military and law enforcement training company with “American Sniper” Chris Kyle (French denied Kyle’s widow’s claim that he stole the firm, and the parties eventually settled), French gained notoriety chairing the party in Fort Worth’s Tarrant County and putting it at the forefront of Texas conservatives’ proudly Islamophobic shift. In 2025, around the same time the Tarrant GOP demanded Texas leaders acknowledge new Islamic centers as an “invasion” and “dangerous threat,”French polled his X followers: “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The two choices: “Muslims” and “Jews.”
The backlash, and French’s subsequent attempt to clarify that antisemitism “has no place” in the party, was revealing. The problem had not been that he demonized religious minorities, but that he was insufficiently clear which minority he was targeting. French’s Islamophobia is generally more direct: Last year, he said President Donald Trump should “denaturalize and deport” a Muslim state representative, then expanded it to say the president should “round up every Muslim in America, denaturalize them, and deport them.” To the extent that his candidacy is focused on the Texas Railroad Commission at all, it is because French believes the oil industry, too, must be purged of “the influence of radical Islam.” French, who did not respond to a request for comment, referred to Jim Wright, the Republican commissioner he defeated, as “Jihadi Jim” and alleged that Wright’s ties to a Saudi-owned company’s petrochemical facility had allowed “Islamic values and laws” to infiltrate the commission.
French’s assertion that the state’s fossil fuel industry is being overrun by Muslims is part of his broader and quite explicit call for ethnic cleansing, analogizing patriotic “heritage” Americans’ current situation to that of white settlers in Rhodesia. As tends to be the case, what starts with one villainized group extends to others: French has written that Trump should “denaturalize and deport all the third world savages who hate our country”—including some Native Americans. “Time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” he wrote in July. (French has said the actual racists are Democrats who push DEI, not people like him.)
When he heard rumors French was running, Rosenthal assumed it was a prank. And while Rosenthal is well aware of his opponent’s oeuvre, when I asked about French’s assertion that “We need to be Rhodesia,” Rosenthal did a double take.
“We need to what?” he asked. “‘Be Rhodesia?’ I don’t even—that’s…I…I haven’t heard that.”
“So Rhodesia is now, oh gosh…Zimbabwe?” he sighed, working it out. “He’s talking about apartheid and white minority rule—that’s just wild.”
French has begun to direct his venom Rosenthal’s way. Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen, the foremost chronicler of French’s rise and the Texas far-right, recently reported on a fundraising email from the campaign that accused Rosenthal, who is Jewish, of “mocking Christianity” and compared him to the Bolsheviks who killed Russia’s ruling Romanov family—a trope with a deep antisemitic history.
Rosenthal’s challenge is that he has to persuade a significant percentage of Texans to change their voting tendencies in a race they may have paid no attention to, and for an office, he acknowledges, they may never have even heard of. While Democrats came within a few points of knocking off both Paxton and Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, no candidate for railroad commissioner has cracked 45 percent since Bill Clinton’s first term.
“The hope for me actually in this whole election is that there’s a significant coalition among the rank-and-file—especially for Republicans, or people that consider themselves independent or unaffiliated, right-of-center—who don’t agree with this,” he said. “It’s not just partisan politics. It’s grossly embracing horrendous moral and ethical positions.”
French’s views leave the narrowest of openings. After all, more than 600,000 Republicans have already voted against him twice this year. No Republican running statewide this fall received fewer votes in the runoff. And while French’s primary campaign was backed by the West Texas billionaires who reliably bankroll the state’s far right—oilmen whose fervent right-wing Christianity is matched by their passion for deregulation—major Republican donors from Miriam Adelson to ExxonMobil opposed him. Rosenthal is, in addition to banking on a big Democratic turnout for Talarico and gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa, making the case to energy-industry workers, along with farmers and ranchers who work downstream. He pitches himself as a “serious professional,” who can work productively with the two other Republicans serving on the commission.
French, for his part, seems determined to make new audiences aware of his candidacy. On Saturday, he shared an image of a group of University of Texas students of South Asian descent, celebrating the Longhorns’ victory over the number-one-ranked team in college football. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The post prompted denunciations from a number of high-profile conservatives, including Republican Sen. John Cornyn and the current speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Longtime Republican operative Karl Rove announced in response that for the first time in three decades, he was going to vote for a Democrat for statewide office—Rosenthal.
More troubling, though, is the very real possibility that most Republican voters won’t think twice. French’s positions are extreme, but French himself is no longer fringe: His comments about deporting 100 million people who “shouldn’t be here” came at CPAC, one of the conservative movement’s premier confabs. Paxton stumped with French at his runoff launch party a few weeks after that. As the southern border has receded in salience during Trump’s second term, the state’s Republican leaders have filled the void with attacks on Islam. Paxton has attempted to ban the Council on American-Islamic Relations from operating in Texas. Abbott has designated the civil rights group a terrorist organization, while attempting to block a Muslim housing development near Dallas on the grounds it would spread Shariah. At June’s state convention, the Texas GOP chair told two Muslim delegates to leave the party.
Replacing an industry-friendly Republican with a wealthy activist who treats The Camp of the Saints like it’s a beach read is in many ways the defining story of the era. It’s how the party of George W. Bush became the party of Trump. People become Republicans now because they think like French thinks, and they get ahead by saying the kinds of things French says.
Rosenthal is hoping enough voters will make a choice they have not made many times before. Beyond reminding them of French’s naked bigotry, his campaign is promoting a clip of Abbott telling an audience before the runoff that French “doesn’t know anything about oil and gas” and would “wreck the miracle” of fossil fuel production in the state. It’s a good clean hit, a story that, with enough saturation, could help Rosenthal pull off a historic upset. But at the same rally, Abbott offered another even starker warning. If Rosenthal wins, he said, “it would destroy Texas, it would destroy America, it would destroy the world.”
Republicans might not want to be Rhodesians. They live in mortal fear of becoming Democrats.