It would be hard to know from his campaign alone what office exactly Bo French is running for. He’s raged about the supposed “Islamification” of Texas and called for deporting 100 million people, including Native Americans. He’s pledged to take on both DEI and sharia law, which he accused his opponent in the Republican primary of supporting. He’s praised Rhodesia, the former white minority–ruled African state that is now Zimbabwe. He’s said the crusades didn’t go far enough.
Given these preoccupations, you might surmise that French is angling to become a sheriff, or maybe even a state legislator in a deep-red seat. Instead, he wants a six-year term as an elected oil and gas regulator on the Texas Railroad Commission. Despite its name, the TRC no longer has much of anything to do with railroads. Rather, the three-person body is tasked with overseeing pipeline safety, gas flaring, surface mining operations, and other matters near and dear to Texas’s enormous energy sector. Given the sector’s centrality, the position French wants is one of the state’s most important offices.
French is hardly a natural fit for the job, but today’s GOP prioritizes ideological loyalists—however bombastic—over qualified candidates. Backed by a pair of billionaire oilmen with a penchant for Christian nationalism, French holds views that are more extreme than even those of many MAGA diehards. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick both endorsed French’s opponent in last week’s primary, incumbent Jim Wright, who had collected campaign contributions from major oil and gas executives, including Oxy CEO Vicky Hollub and Energy Transfer head Kelcy Warren. Like Ken Paxton’s win in the Senate race the same day, French’s primary victory is a reflection of just how far right the Republican Party has swung. That he’s a neophyte gunning for a seat on the TRC—a body with real and somewhat technical responsibilities—is especially telling. As Republicans continue crafting an ever-more extreme base, including through gerrymandering, they could start offending some of the establishment business interests who have fueled their rise.
French won his primary runoff last week against Wright despite objections from leading Republicans and major energy interests. He’ll now face off against Democratic state Representative Jon Rosenthal, who must contend with the reality that Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. Texas Railroad Commission races don’t tend to attract much coverage outside Texas, but French’s far-right insurgent candidacy has started to garner attention outside of the Lone Star State.
If the outlandishness of French’s views is obvious, his career and work experience remain something of a mystery. Most recently, French has been the embattled chairman of the Tarrant County GOP. Fellow Republicans, including Patrick, called for his resignation last summer over a poll he posted on social media asking whether Jews or Muslims “pose a bigger threat to America.” French refused to resign, but he stepped down anyway last November to run for the TRC.
French’s self-reported qualifications for becoming a commissioner lean heavily on his pedigree. He is the son of a well-off West Texas oil family, and his family still runs the Midland-based French Oil Company; his own involvement is unclear. He attended boarding school, graduated from Texas Christian University, and worked on his father’s ranch before joining a hedge fund in North Texas. French’s LinkedIn states that he spent eight years at Carlson Capital before co-founding and serving as chief operating officer of Verity Capital Partners and Trungent Capital.
French’s next years are better documented, and saw him rub shoulders with a Republican celebrity. He worked with the famed late Navy SEAL and American Sniper Chris Kyle to found Craft International LLC, a “tactical training” company that instructed SWAT teams and military personnel to work in “austere environments and situations.” Craft’s operations—including government contracting—may be the basis of French’s campaign-ad claims to have “owned businesses in the Middle East, protecting the world’s largest oil and gas and service companies from radical Islamists,” and to have “protected oil tankers from the threat posed by Somali pirates.” French did not respond to a request to provide details about his responsibilities at Craft and the company’s broader operations.
Helping one of the conservative movement’s most beloved Iraq War veterans found a business might have been a fast track to right-wing stardom. French, however, rarely mentions that experience on the campaign trail. That’s likely because, after Kyle was shot and killed on a gun range in early 2013, French got involved in a tense ownership dispute with Kyle’s widow. Taya Kyle alleged that French and fellow Craft co-founder Steven Young were conspiring to “steal” the company, and had been “manipulating Craft’s stock, mishandling funds, diverting assets and mismanaging and usurping Craft’s contracts.” She also claimed that Craft had been illegally using Chris Kyle’s image to sell trainings and merchandise, which reportedly accounted for half of the company’s revenue in 2013. French and Young countered that Kyle’s charges were baseless, disputing her claim to have owned the majority of the company. Craft International filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the summer of 2014, and reportedly owed $2.6 million to investors. Kyle’s case was eventually dropped, and the two parties reached a settlement agreement in November 2014. In 2016, lawyers for Tara Kyle sent a cease-and-desist letter to stop French from using her late husband’s name and likeness in campaign materials for one of his two failed bids for a seat in the Texas state legislature.
French’s more recent employment is a bit hard to parse. According to LinkedIn, French is currently on the board of a for-profit company called Live to Give. The company’s website states that it donates 50 percent of “net profits” from the sale of Live to Give–branded coffee and electrolyte-enhanced water “to benefit veterans and first responders.” French is also listed as a current managing partner at both French Capital Partners and NOCOM LLC. There are scant details available online about these or the other investment vehicles where French has worked. He did not respond to a request for comment about the nature of these companies and his responsibilities therein.
Although French comes from an oil family, his résumé doesn’t appear to demonstrate deep experience in the industry the Texas Railroad Commission is tasked with overseeing. During the primary, his race, as The Texan Tribune reported, accordingly became the site of a sort of proxy battle among Republicans. Wright earned the support of Texas’s major oil and gas interests—including ExxonMobil’s political arm—and took in donations from casino magnate Miriam Adelson and Harlan Crow, the real estate mogul who’s treated right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to several lavish getaways. French’s campaign has been backed by Republican megadonors and oilmen Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, West Texan supporters of Christian nationalism whose funds have been instrumental in pushing Texas’s legislature even further right. Dunn’s company, CrownQuest, sued the TRC to challenge the legality of its overhaul of long-outdated oilfield waste rules. While French has spoken at length on the campaign trail of subjects that have nothing to do with the TRC’s mandate, he’s also promised to further deregulate the oil and gas industry and roll back changes that Wright supported.
French did not respond to a request to detail his own experiences with Texas’s oil and gas industry. His donors Wilks and Dunn, for their parts, don’t seem concerned that the person who might soon be tasked with regulating that industry doesn’t appear to have spent much of his career thinking about it. For the fossil fuel interests that backed Wright, the question now is whether they’ll support an inexperienced extremist for the sake of keeping a Democrat from regulating them.
