A University of Texas football upset over top-ranked Ohio State turned into an unexpected political flashpoint this week after the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commission posted a screenshot of South Asian students celebrating and called them “the problem,” according to reporting from The Daily Wire.
The controversy began when Bo French, the GOP nominee for the state’s oil and gas regulator, shared a still image taken from viral stadium footage of UT students erupting after the Longhorns erased a 20-point fourth-quarter deficit on Saturday, September 12. Writing on X, French said he had heard the university’s recent graduation “looked like this” and claimed “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
The image showed students in cowboy hats and burnt orange, faces contorted in the delirium of an improbable comeback. What French saw, his critics argue, was not celebration but demographics.
A Signal From the Stands
The Daily Wire published a response essay from the son of a prominent Black conservative, who described seeing the same image and seeing only Americans cheering on their school. He noted he posted a blunt one-line reply on X: “This is straight up racism.”
French did not back down. Appearing on the radio the following day, he dismissed those objecting to his post as “less conservative” than himself — a framing his critics say reveals a newer faction on the right that treats provocation as a proxy for principle.
The essay pointed to a longer pattern of remarks attributed to French. While serving as chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party, he reportedly posted an X poll asking followers whether Jews or Muslims posed a greater threat to America — a post he deleted after public outcry. He has also referred to Afghan refugees and Muslims as “third-world savages” and floated the deportation of Native Americans, according to the account. A year before the UT photo post, he labeled the day SNAP benefits were set to lapse “National Chimp Out Day” — a racial slur aimed at Black Americans, despite the fact that white recipients make up 35 percent of the program and Black recipients 26 percent.
The Federalist’s Defense and Its Limits
Sean Davis, head of The Federalist, publicly defended French, arguing that white male enrollment at UT had fallen from 28 percent in 2005 to 12 percent, while international student enrollment rose from 4 percent to over 30 percent. Those figures, framed as an admissions-policy debate, are fair game in most conservative circles.
But the essay argues Davis crossed a line by describing Texas cities from Frisco to Coppell as looking “more like New Delhi than old Texas” and calling it the “systemic displacement and replacement of Americans” — specifically white men — by foreigners. At that point, the writer contends, the question shifts from visa policy to belonging, and the answer Davis implies “is written in skin.” The essay notes that at least two people in the viral photo have publicly identified themselves as native-born Americans.
Two Visions of Conservatism
The response piece draws a sharp distinction between French and the author’s father, who has spent decades arguing that American identity is not racial but principled — something seized by those who adopt the nation’s values rather than inherited through blood. The author recounts that his father once stood in that same crowd, warned in the 1960s by whites who feared Black advancement would cost them jobs in Chicago’s unions.
“My father attacked the idea. French attacks the people,” the essay states, arguing that French’s style — reducing a snapshot of students to race — is the opposite of the intellectual discipline his father practiced while enduring both private and state-sanctioned racism without seeking revenge.
The essay also faults conservative institutions for decades of silence against identity politics, arguing that the vacuum left by quiet principle is now being filled by performative tribalism. It cites Ben Shapiro, who reacted to the same photo by asking why anyone should be upset that students of Indian ethnicity were cheering on UT, and a Texas writer known as Political Sock, who emphasized that each person in the photo has a unique story.
Far from representing a new boldness, the author argues, figures like French mistake cruelty for courage. “Picking up the tool of race requires no intellect or discipline whatsoever,” the essay concludes. “It is the tool of the weak, and it always will be.”
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/bo-french-aint-no-shelby-steele