A member of the Texas Republican Party’s 2018 platform committee and former delegate for Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) presidential run proudly declared himself a “white nationalist.”
The Texas Observer reported Tuesday that Ray Myers took to social media last week and wrote, “Damn right, I’m a white nationalist and very proud of it.”
{mosads}“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 explained in an interview with the outlet. “And white nationalist, all that means is America first. That’s exactly what that means.
“That’s where the president’s at,” he continued. “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.”
Myers compared using the term “white nationalist” to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I mean, just like Black Lives Matter, white lives matter, too,” Myers said. “We’re all in the same melting pot. Now why can’t we say, as Anglos, that we’re proud?”
The Texas Republican Party did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Hill.
President Trump was criticized in October for railing against “globalists” and referring to himself as a “nationalist.”
He denied that the term nationalist has any racial undertones, implying his use of the term along the lines of international trade and patriotism.
“I’ve never even heard that. I cannot imagine that,” Trump said when asked if his comments imply that he’s a white nationalist. “I’m somebody that loves our country.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes white nationalism as akin to white supremacist or white separatist ideologies that often focus on the “alleged inferiority of non whites.”
The Ku Klux Klan, as well as neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups, could be described as white nationalist groups, according to the SPLC.
J.T. Edwards, an African-American member of the State Republican Executive Committee, condemned Myers’s comments, according to the Observer.
“To have so-called white nationalists in our party is basically an abomination of the very foundations of the Republican Party,” said Edwards. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Mr. Myers’s position is part of the problem.”
Myers, 74, has been involved in GOP politics for years and founded Kaufman County tea party chapter, the Observer noted.
He was a member of Cruz’s “Texas Leadership Team” during his presidential campaign in 2016 and wrote on his Facebook profile that he later became a Trump volunteer.
Myers was one of the Texas Republicans selected in June to craft the party’s platform.
The 2018 Texas platform includes a push for several new objectives including: “English, and only English” voting ballots, “reasonable use of profiling” to defeat radicalized Islamic terrorists and abolition of the refugee resettlement program.
The state party’s executive committee unanimously passed a “non-discrimination” resolution over the weekend that affirmed its support of religious liberty within the party, the outlet noted.
When asked for comment about Myers’s comments by the Observer, the Texas GOP referred to the “non-discrimination” resolution and a comment from Republican Party Chairman James Dickey saying “racism and bigotry is not what the Republican Party of Texas stands for.”