After racist posts about Texas-Ohio State, MAGA infighting flares up

Saturday’s college football game between Ohio State and Texas began, as usual, with the home fans singing “The Eyes of Texas,” a song introduced by white students at a minstrel show in 1903. And remarkably, things got more racist from there.

After the Longhorns erased a 20-point deficit in the fourth quarter en route to a wild comeback win, the fans in Austin erupted with glee, as normal people tend to do when their team wins. Yet the scene had some prominent figures in the MAGA movement angrily typing and posting about images of nonwhite fans sharing in the joy.

This, to be clear, is an insane way for anyone to experience sports. And the abject racism that has been unleashed by these posts is fueling infighting among Republicans as they reckon with the bigotry festering within their own party.

Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, set things off with several racist posts bemoaning nonwhite fans, and the idea of what he called “foreigners” on campus. These posts on X were promoted and defended by conservative influencers and activists, but they received pushback from some on the right as well, including a warning from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

“This is the Republican nominee for statewide office,” Cornyn wrote about French. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”

These comments from Cornyn — someone who previously comported himself as a staunch ally of President Donald Trump’s racist political movement — underscore how extreme the crisis of racial bigotry has become within the Republican Party.

Some conservatives heeded Cornyn’s call to action. Unfortunately, Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton wasn’t one of them.

James Talarico, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the Senate race, lauded Cornyn’s post and called on Paxton to rebuke the blatant racism, but Paxton responded by baselessly accusing Talarico of racism against white people.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was similarly evasive in comments to The Dallas Morning News, saying French’s post “is not my message” — but not denouncing it — while touting his anti-immigrant bona fides.

But some of the conservatives who did rebuke this racist rhetoric found themselves awash in bigoted bile from MAGA world.