As if Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wasn’t repulsive enough, now another, even more, racist and xenophobic Republican is hoping to replace him.

Don Huffines is a former Texas state senator and real estate developer running against Abbott in the primary. But, despite the discovery that one of his staff is a member of the white nationalist organization America First/Groyper movement, Huffines told HuffPost he “will not participate in cancel culture” by cutting ties with him.

The staffer is Jake Lloyd Colglazier, aka Jake Lloyd, who’s complained on Twitter that the white “race is dying” among other horrifically racist and noxious things. 

Of course, it’s no surprise that a right-wing candidate is running on a Republican ticket, and Huffines is just as loathsome as Colglazier, just not quite as obvious. 

According to a report by Ben Lorber of the progressive watchdog group, Political Research Associates (PRA), “Huffines’ campaign has promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy and is dragging the Texas GOP even further toward the Right.” But, having Colglazier working on his campaign is an enlightening piece of evidence about how bad Huffines really is. 

HuffPost reports that Colglazier, 24, was listed as Huffines’ “deputy communications director,” on the website True Texas Project, a right-wing activist group aligned with the campaign and run by a group of extreme Tea Party conservatives. His name has since been scrapped from the site. 

Huffines told Salon that Colglazier was not the deputy communications director, but did not deny that he worked on the campaign in some capacity. 

“He has done fieldwork for my campaign. I have 12 field offices across Texas and over 70 people on payroll with my campaign. If I were to go through the social media history of any young Texan, I would find something I disagree with,” he said. “My campaign will not participate in cancel culture,” Huffines said. 

Lloyd’s Twitter bio also links to Huffines’ campaign website and Twitter account, and shares campaign materials, and other pro-Huffines content.

Colglazier gained notoriety in 2017, as a host on Alex Jones’s Infowars, where he regularly gave a voice to established far-right extremists such as Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denier and America First movement founder, who participated in the infamous “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Thursday, Fuentes was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee. He recommends that his followers that if they were in the U.S. Capitol on insurrection day and had their phones taken by investigators, they should “destroy” or “get rid of” their SIM cards. as “feds are using the data.” He admits though, that it’s likely too late. Then he realizes what he’s said is against the law to advise “destroying evidence.” 

By 2019, Lloyd became a ranking member in America First, which is slowly overtaking the “alt-right” movement, and morphed into connections with 2020 Stop the Steal protests, along with 4Chan conspiracy theories. Members of the group are known as “Groypers” or “Groyper Army” for using the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog. 

“Conservative Inc.’ and the greater political establishment of the United States will crumble at the hands of the groypers,” Colglazier said in a speech at Fuentes’ America First organization. “History will remember the Groypers and the movement that followed—flowed from America First, from AIM [American Identity Movement], from the greater groyper network at large.”

In 2020, Colglazier made his affiliations known during a live stream. 

“We need to get into positions of authority, or within close proximity of positions of authority,” he said. “We need to get into positions of institutional power so that we can enact policies that can prevent or stymie demographic change so that we can continue to gain institutional power so that we can restore historical America.”

As Salon reports, Colglazier has been an active participant in far-right discussion forums, including the “Nick Fuentes Server” on Discord, and another forum he founded himself called, “American Dissident,” where members talk about “Aryan bloodlines,” Nazi salutes, and called for “death to all minorities.”

Colglazier was even captured on another live stream saying he “spits on George Floyd” and celebrating the shooting death of a Black man by a police officer. 

As hard as Colglazier tries to hide his ties to neo-Nazis, the reality is he is who he is, and Huffines obviously doesn’t care. 

When both Salon and HuffPost repeatedly asked for comments and after the report from PRA surfaced, Huffines said everything he wanted to with one tweet on Wednesday. “America First. Texas First.”