2022 was a bumper year for Republicans and conservatives trying to cash in on the culture war in Texas. Moms For Liberty, the True Texas Project, and others were all raking in donations from gullible, easy-to-fool rubes and rich, out-of-town evangelical billionaires like Wilks & Dunn.

Round Rock, a suburb of Austin, had been under siege from these rabid fanatics since 2021 for multiple reasons. Austin was growing (and its – by comparison to the rest of Texas – liberal policies and residents had started spilling over to the suburbs), Round Rock ISD had just appointed Dr. Hafedh Azaiez to the position of superintendent (which enraged conservatives, white supremacists, and other individuals who had tried to smear his name and failed), and two of the board’s trustees, Dr. Mary Bone and Danielle Weston, had been exposed as having hidden their radical conservative beliefs while running as moderates.

Weston in particular was one of the worst offenders, as she had been caught red-handed sending attorney-client privileged information to unprivileged individuals and leaking private e-mails to her political supporters. She even decided to try to cash in on her criminality by going on a tour of the right-wing media circuit, complete with time on Steve Bannon’s podcast “The War Room.”

After seeing how Weston raked in the money, Jeremy Story, Jennifer White, and Stephanie Hughes – three members of the Round Rock Parent Coalition (a conservative parents’ group whose members repeatedly doxxed and harassed its opponents) decided to start a PAC. White was also a member of Moms for Liberty, and Story had frivolously sued Round Rock ISD after getting ejected from a board meeting for disruptive conduct and arrested. Story had also stormed the administration building in August 2021 in an attempt to try to unseat Dr. Azaiez, harassing staff and breaching security, then publicly bragged about doing so.

Campaign finance reports for the first half of 2022 were due on July 15th, 2022. Round Rock One Family was incorporated as a PAC on July 23rd, 2022. That was presumably done in order to ensure that White and Story could accept donations throughout the rest of the year without having to report anything for months. Indeed, the first campaign finance report that the PAC filed was on October 11th, well after the semiannual due date.

So, to sum up, Round Rock One Family was:

• founded in a manner presumably intended to evade reporting requirements for as long as possible
• founded and run by two of the most strident and outspoken culture war activists in Round Rock, one of whom had the possibility of financial gain as impetus to his actions
• a means for out-of-town donors to funnel huge amounts of cash into a school board race and usurp control from local residents

More to come…