Bo French wants to run the agency that regulates Texas’s oil and gas industry. For six years, he posted about gallows, hangings, and public executions of his political enemies, including a former president. When Elon Musk’s DOGE went after federal officials, French didn’t want trials. He wrote: “I want more than perp walks. I want public executions.” Texas’s top Republicans still won’t disavow him.
Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, repeatedly called for public executions of political opponents in since-removed social media posts spanning six years, a CNN KFile investigation found.
The Railroad Commission isn’t a sleepy backwater. Despite the name, it regulates Texas’s oil and gas industry, one of the most powerful economic forces in the country. If French wins in November, a man who spent years fantasizing online about hanging his political enemies will help run it.
“I Want Public Executions”
In February 2025, French was chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party, the nation’s most populous Republican-led county, and was promoting a Texas version of Elon Musk’s DOGE. That month, he published at least five posts about gallows and executing government officials he believed DOGE had exposed.
Responding to a post about DOGE, he wrote: “I want more than perp walks. I want public executions.” Replying to a right-wing account days later, he doubled down: “No, I want to see public executions of traitors.”
These weren’t one-off outbursts. He kept returning to the same idea across multiple posts in the same month, while holding a formal leadership role in the Republican Party. The officials he was talking about were public servants caught up in DOGE’s campaign against the federal workforce, people who had been accused of nothing in any court.
Adam Schiff and a Former President
French’s February 2025 posts didn’t stop at unnamed officials. He also called for the public execution of Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, explicitly rejecting prison as enough. “I want to see public executions for traitors,” he wrote about the sitting senator, who had led the House committee that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.
He also weighed in on a January 6 case, writing: “In this scenario, the wrong person was hung.” That’s a Republican county party chairman, on the record, treating hanging as the correct outcome and quibbling only over who got the rope.
This didn’t start with DOGE. In May 2020, an account CNN linked to French urged Trump to hang officials from the Obama administration, people French described as “Obama conspirators.” He then went further and suggested Obama himself should be executed. “The penalty for treason used to be death. Even for a former president. #HangEmHigh,” he wrote.
That account, tied to his failed campaigns for the Texas statehouse in 2016 and 2018, was later suspended. The 2025 posts are gone too, and it’s unclear whether French deleted them himself or X removed them for violating its rules. Either way, they existed, they span six years, and they all point in the same direction: French repeatedly calling for the deaths of people on the other side.
This Is a Pattern, Not a Slip
French’s record goes well beyond execution fantasies. He was already under bipartisan fire this month for a racist post about the crowd at a University of Texas football game, the post that set off the scrutiny that led to CNN’s investigation.
As Tarrant County party chair, he repeatedly called opponents slurs for gay people and people with disabilities, then mocked the people who objected as “fragile snowflakes” while quietly deleting some of the posts. He appeared onstage at a Fort Worth conference that warned attendees of a Democratic plot to “rid the earth of the white race” and urged them to embrace Christian nationalism. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick once called for his resignation after French polled his followers on whether Jews or Muslims posed a bigger threat to the United States.
Texas Republicans nominated him anyway. In May, French beat incumbent Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright in the primary, even though Wright had endorsements from Gov. Greg Abbott, Patrick, and state House Speaker Dustin Burrows. The party’s voters knew who French was and picked him.
Abbott and Paxton Stay Silent
Some Republicans have broken with him. Sen. John Cornyn called French “an embarrassment to the Republican Party” who is “going to drag the whole ticket down because of his racist comments,” and said he won’t vote for him. Longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove went further and said he’ll back French’s Democratic opponent, state Rep. Jon Rosenthal.
But the people who actually run the Texas Republican Party haven’t followed. Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the Texas GOP did not respond to CNN’s questions about French’s execution posts. Paxton, now the party’s U.S. Senate nominee, has built his brand on law and order, but hasn’t said a word about a fellow statewide nominee calling for public hangings of a former president and a U.S. senator.
The Bottom Line
The Republican running to oversee Texas’s most powerful industry spent years calling for his enemies to be hanged in public: a former president, a sitting senator, and government officials swept up in DOGE’s purge. He’s used slurs, trafficked in “white genocide” rhetoric, and asked his followers whether Jews or Muslims were the bigger threat. A few Republicans are walking away. The governor, the attorney general, and the state party are staying quiet, and French is still on the ballot in November.
We knew the rethugs were deplorable, but now they are out of the closet as Nazis and traitors to the ideals of the United States. If the party has not been able to remove him, they are supporting him. Nazis and traitors. Candidates for hanging!