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White supremacist Nick Fuentes spent Friday at a company owned by Jonathan Stickland, who leads a major PAC that’s funded by West Texas billionaires and has donated millions of dollars to top Republicans.
Kyle Rittenhouse was there. So were we. Matt Rinaldi, the chair of the Republican Party of Texas and an ally of Stickland, was also seen entering the building while Fuentes was inside. Reached by phone on Sunday, Rinaldi denied that he had any knowledge that Fuentes was on the premises, and provided screenshots of text messages from Friday morning in which he rescheduled a meeting for 1:45 p.m. at the Pale Horse office with Texas GOP Executive Director Jen Hall.
“We were just borrowing a conference room,” said Rinaldi, who arrived at the office just before 1:45 p.m. and left 45 minutes later. Influential Texas activist Jonathan Stickland hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Fort Worth office
And both have been bankrolled by a trio of West Texas oil billionaires — Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks — who have given more than $100 million to a network of campaigns, nonprofits, dark money groups and media companies to push their ultraconservative religious and anti-LGBTQ+ views and oust fellow Republicans from power.
Stickland is also the president of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee funded by Dunn and Farris Wilks that is a major donor to Attorney General Ken Paxton as well as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who received $3 million in loans and donations from Defend Texas Liberty before presiding over Paxton’s impeachment trial in the Texas Senate.
Patrick and Paxton could not be immediately reached for comment Sunday afternoon. Jonathan Stickland, the ultraconservative leader of a group that has donated millions of dollars to high-profile Texas leaders, hosted prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes and other right-wing activists for several hours on Friday.
Acting on a tip, a Texas Tribune reporter and photographer observed Fuentes and others — including Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of homicide after killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 — enter a one-story office building in a remote business park in west Fort Worth. The building is the headquarters for Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for right-wing candidates that is owned by Stickland. Fuentes arrived around 11 a.m. and left just after 5:30 p.m.
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