The Slatest

Texas Republican Who Helped Write Party’s Platform Says He Is “a White Nationalist and Proud of It”

The Texas state flag against a red background.
Everything’s whiter in Texas. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by RoschetzkyIstockPhoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

The Texas Observer published an interesting piece Tuesday about a 74-year-old Dallas-area Republican activist named Ray Myers, who was a 2016 Republican National Convention delegate for Ted Cruz and a co-author of the 2018 Texas Republican Party’s official platform. Myers recently posted a Facebook comment that read, “Damn Right, I’m a WHITE NATIONALIST and very Proud of it,” and when reached by the Observer he elaborated further:

“I am Anglo and I’m very proud of it, just like black people and brown people are proud of their race. I am a patriot. I am very proud of my country,” Myers said. “And white nationalist, all that means is America first. That’s exactly what that means. That’s where the president’s at. That’s where I’m at and that’s where every solid patriotic American is. It doesn’t have anything to do with race or anything else.”

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A few things here:

• Ray Myers is repurposing the Jay-Z construction “I’m not a businessman/ I’m a business, man” and/or the Breaking Bad construction “You don’t need a criminal lawyer … you need a criminal lawyer” to attempt to explain how you can be a “white nationalist” without being racist. Remarkable.

• “Just like … brown people are proud of their race.” Right, the famous brown race, of which its members are so justly proud.

• Oh, really, you’re “Anglo”? Name three of their historic religious customs influenced by both Christianity and Scando-Germanic paganism, then. (“Horse fights, … consumption of horse meat, and horse sacrifice” is an acceptable answer.)

A 2017 profile of Myers on a conservative site called Texas Scorecard says he is a former public school teacher and principal. Ha ha, great!

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