First, a word about the job. The Texas Railroad Commission regulates no railroads. What it does regulate — with its three elected members serving six-year terms — is drilling, pipelines and natural-gas utilities across the most powerful oil and gas state in America, which makes it one of the most consequential statewide offices in Texas. This November the Republican nominee for a seat on it is a former county party chairman named Bo French, and the file on him keeps getting thicker.
French came to national attention over a racist post about a University of Texas football crowd, portraying South Asian students as “foreigners” displacing Americans. He has stood by that post. The breach it opened in his own party has been real: Karl Rove, the longtime strategist and former George W. Bush adviser, says he will vote for the Democrat, and Texas Senator John Cornyn says he will not vote for French.
Now comes the deeper dig. CNN’s KFile unit has uncovered at least five since-removed posts from February 2025 — published under an earlier version of French’s current X username, tied to the same underlying numeric account ID, archived records show — in which he invoked public executions, gallows or hanging. Other posts calling for executions came from a since-suspended account he used during his two failed runs for the Texas statehouse, in 2016 and 2018. It is unclear, CNN notes, whether French deleted the posts or Twitter removed them for rule violations.
Go back to May 2020. The Trump Justice Department had just moved to drop its prosecution of Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador; Trump was accusing Obama-era officials of “treason”; Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee had released dozens of transcripts. French, replying to a post seemingly blaming Obama for the Russia investigation, wrote:
The penalty for treason used to be death. Even for a former president. #HangEmHigh
In response to a tweet asking whether Schiff had been arrested, he wrote: “It’s time we drop the hammer on these treasonous bastards and punish them with the full measure of justice. #HangEmHigh.”
Then came February 2025. Elon Musk’s DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, whose staffers were embedded across federal agencies hunting spending to cut — had just launched, and French, then chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party and promoting a Texas effort modeled on it, proposed a rebrand: DOGE, he wrote, should stand for “Dangle Officials Gallows Expeditiously.” When one X user worried Musk’s damage to the federal government might be irreversible and another replied that that was the point, French escalated: “It will really be the point when we have the public executions.”
“I want more than perp walks. I want public executions,” he wrote in another post. Six minutes after a tweet wishing good night to everyone who wanted to see Adam Schiff — now a US senator — in prison, French judged the sentence too light: “No. I want to see public executions for traitors.” Another post called for executing Schiff for alleged treason. And replying to a post blaming a federal judge and prosecutors for the suicide of a Jan. 6 defendant, he wrote: “In this scenario, the wrong person was hung.”
Here is where the status ledger gets interesting. French won the nomination by ousting the incumbent commissioner, Republican Jim Wright, in May’s runoff — and Wright had been backed by Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows. French’s past anti-Muslim rhetoric had already been condemned by statewide officials including Patrick. None of it stopped him. Afterward, Abbott endorsed French as the party’s standard-bearer for November, and Abbott — who is running for re-election — and Attorney General Ken Paxton, now the Republican nominee for Senate, have both maintained their endorsements through the football-post uproar.
Pressed — Paxton by his own Democratic opponent, James Talarico, who challenged him to condemn French — the men have chosen their words with jeweler’s precision. Paxton wrote, “I condemn racism in all its forms,” naming no one and addressing no post; this is a man who proudly accepted French’s endorsement in May. Abbott called French’s post “not my message.” Neither has said he won’t support French. Neither Abbott, nor Paxton, nor the Texas Republican Party responded to CNN’s inquiries about the execution comments.
French, for his part, has elsewhere this year called for deporting 100 million people and suggested Republicans embrace Islamophobia. He dismisses his detractors as “less conservative” and did not respond to CNN. In November he faces Democratic state Representative Jon Rosenthal — for six years of authority over the industry’s wells, pipelines and utilities.