In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.

O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.

Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.

O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.

“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”

Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.

With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.

Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.

The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right