Former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland, a former pest-control operator from Bedford, a Fort Worth suburb, is now the former head of Defend Texas Liberty. Before he got bounced, Stickland met with Fuentes for seven hours at the office of Pale Horse Strategies, his Fort Worth-area consulting firm that caters to far-right candidates. (The organization’s name is derived, not from the skin tone of favored candidates, but from the book of Revelation, where Death rides a “pale horse” as a harbinger of the world’s end.)

Once word got out that Stickland had enjoyed nearly a day-long dalliance with the young man who has called for a “holy war” against Jews, he had to go — for appearances’ sake, at least. His replacement as Defend Texas Liberty president is a longtime conservative consultant named Luke Macias.

Defend Texas Liberty is the same powerful group that fortified the campaign war chest of Lt. Gov. Dan — call me Mr. Shameless — Patrick to the tune of $3 million shortly before Patrick was set to preside as “judge” during the Senate impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Defend Texas Liberty darling. After news of the Stickland-Fuentes meeting emerged, Patrick resisted calls to return the money, insisting there was “no hint of any links” between Defend Texas Liberty and any “antisemitic organizations or other hate groups.” Scrambling to dissociate himself from his party’s far-right fringe — quite a task for the man — the lieutenant governor announced that he would be purchasing Israel bonds, $3 million worth of Israel bonds.

Downen, meanwhile, has uncovered a passel of links between Texas Republicans and the far-right fringe. They include Shelby Griesinger, the Defend Texas Liberty treasurer. Griesinger has claimed on social media that Jews worship a false god and has shared memes that depict Jews as the enemy of Republicans. Griesinger also shares QAnon conspiracy theories that, as Downen notes, “borrow heavily from centuries-old tropes that have frequently led to Jewish bloodshed, including in the Holocaust.”....

One of the lessons to be learned by the unseemly political influence of the far right in this state is that political parties, unchecked, tend to flow like molten lava toward the extremes. (That’s not an Aesop insight, but it could be.) We Texans have allowed it to happen. Through inattention, neglect or dereliction of civic duty, we have handed over the future of the Lone Star State to one party, unchecked by any kind of serious opposition. The result was inevitable: “Crackpots and ideologues,” to borrow a phrase from Austin writer Lawrence Wright, have gained an inordinate amount of power over one political party, and by extension, the apparatus of state government. As Wright also notes, what happens in Austin “both reflects and influences the national scene.”