The couple’s spending places them among the state’s largest political donors and has focused on shaping state and local policy to align with their far-right political goals. Overhauling education in Texas, former associates told CNN, has long been their top priority.

“The goal is to tear apart, destroy public education and rebuild it,” Dororthy Burton, a former GOP activist who joined Wilks on a speaking tour in 2015, told CNN. the way God wanted education to be.”

Dunn and Wilks have both been the financial driving force behind much of the state’s Republican Party’s targeting of “critical race theory” taught in Texas schools, funding political candidates and presidential candidates. local school boards ready to target school administrators and teachers whose curriculum includes the history of racism in the United States

At the state level, lawmakers backed by Dunn and Wilks passed a bill last year that barred schools from mandating discussion of any “widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” “. Governor Greg Abbott said the bill was drafted to remove so-called critical race theory from Texas classrooms, according to CNN.

The pair also poured millions into the campaign coffers of the state’s most vocal opponents of the CRT: Senator Ted Cruz. sentenced CRT as “a lie” and “just as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets” in a speech to attendees of the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 2021 Road to Majority conference. The junior senator also last year wrote a free e-book teaching conservatives how to “combat” critical race theory. Four years earlier, Wilks, his brother and their wives had donated $15 million to super PACs supporting Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

Other recipients of Wilks’ largesse include Texas State Rep. Matt Krause, who made national headlines in 2021 after publishing a self-compiled list of 850 books — many of them about race — to consider for possible banning from Texas schools.

Dunn and Wilks also devoted significant funds to reducing protections for LGBTQ youth in Texas schools, CNN’s analysis showed. In suburban northern Houston, for example, state Rep. Valoree Swanson ousted a 14-year-old moderate incumbent in 2016 with a campaign funded largely by a Dunn and Wilks-funded PAC. Swanson has since drafted a bill banning trans students from playing on K-12 sports teams that are not aligned to their birth-assigned gender. Although similar bills have not passed the Texas Legislature in the past, Swanson’s was signed into law last year – a victory some cite as an example of Dunn and Wilks moving Texas Republicans even further to the right.

“They’re investing their money effectively and they’re pushing politics forward in Austin,” Scott Braddock, editor of Texas political news organization Quorum Report, told CNN. “These are extreme people who are pouring a lot of money into our politics to reshape Texas so that it matches their vision.”

Wilks and Dunn’s attacks on public schools are part of a broader right-wing effort to undermine trust in public education, experts and advocates told the Texas Observer.

“For people to be receptive to radical change in public education, there must be clear issues with public education that are hurting students and parents,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of political science at the University of Houston. After pushing these narratives, Rottinghaus said, a generation of Wilks- and Dunn-funded spokespersons in state and local positions may present private religious schools as “a better way.”