Who really controls Greg Abbott?

Greg Abbott is worried. After three terms as Texas governor, the Republican had every reason to believe the office was his as long as he wanted it. But Abbott is now seeing his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, get uncomfortably close to him in the polls. Suddenly, the governor has to be mindful of negative press, something he’s lost practice at in the decade-plus he’s been in office. Abbott avoided a recent campaign stop from Donald Trump, lest he be seen in the vicinity of the unpopular president or Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who appears to be facing an uphill battle in his own Senate race against state Rep. James Talarico. The governor is so concerned about his re-election prospects that he recently reversed his position on data centers, which have grown increasingly unpopular, and is now calling for moratoriums and restrictions on their construction. But one issue Abbott hasn’t budged on is his all-out war on public education.

Schools in Texas are wildly underfunded, with hundreds having to reduce students to four days a week. This is very much by Abbott’s design. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained on Oct. 7, the governor signed into law a voucher program whose entire purpose is paying parents to take kids out of school and put them into unregulated “alternatives” — such as private schools or homeschooling — that have no real requirements to offer children an actual education. Since local school funding is tied to student head count, this has created a backdoor way to funnel money out of already-struggling public schools. 

Even in deeply conservative rural and suburban areas, Abbott’s policy is unpopular; a June 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll found that only 33% of Texans approve of his performance on education. As Grose notes, public schools are the heart of many Texas communities, especially when it comes to high school football. (As a native Texan, I can attest that the “Friday Night Lights” lifestyle is real.) Watching the governor concoct elaborate schemes to siphon money from beloved local institutions into unregulated religious programs and homeschooling is enraging people, so much so that some lifelong Republican leaders are announcing they will be voting for a Democrat for the first time ever. It helps that Hinojosa, whose entrance into holding office was being on the Austin school board, has made saving Texas schools the centerpiece of her campaign. 

Considering education is the issue that could sink Abbott, it raises the question: Why not back down? After all, he shifted gears on data centers. But when it comes to this policy, which is undermining and could even start closing beloved local schools, the governor will not budge. To the contrary, he has burned a lot of bridges within the GOP in his war on public schools, backing primary opponents of anti-voucher Republicans in the legislature until he’d tilted the scales to get this done. 

Money is the likeliest answer. As Grose notes, Abbott’s war on education is backed by three powerful Texas billionaires — and major conservative donors — Tim Dunn and a pair of brothers, Farris and Dan Wilks. The trio made their fortunes in oil. But their single-minded hatred of public schools is rooted in evangelical Christianity.

“If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook,” Russell Gold wrote in Texas Monthly in 2024. The same is true of the Filks brothers, who share Dunn’s dream of turning Texas into a far-right Christian theocracy.

When not throwing money at Republican politicians willing to back their Christian nationalist agenda, both Dunn and Farris Wilks preach from the pulpit, pushing religious views that are far right of even most evangelicals. Wilks led the Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day Church in Eastland County for 31 years, a congregation where women are apparently forbidden to speak in church. In 2010, he delivered a sermon where he said “our country died” when Barack Obama was elected. “I do believe we live in a nation that will start to vomit some of its people out,” he said of LGBTQ people the following year. Wilks has also preached that all gay people live a “predatorial lifestyle” and “want your children.” 

Dunn has backed efforts to rewrite the Constitution to make it more amendable to his Christian nationalist views, which reportedly includes the belief that only conservative Christians should be eligible to hold office. Like Wilks, he has zeroed in on public schools as the great enemy that must be destroyed. Their main weapon has been funding primary opponents against any Republican who opposes them, which has created a state of fear within the party. Few dare cross them — including Abbott. 

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Through his Midland Bible Church, Dunn founded Midland Classical Academy, which offers a glimpse of his preferred curriculum: anti-science Biblical literalism that will leave kids unprepared for living and working as adults in the real world. The school teaches “the authority of God over every area of life” and structure education along a historical timeline “from the garden to Mesopotamia, from Greece and Rome to the Reformation and beyond.” The intense parental involvement required by the academy sounds incompatible with allowing mothers to have jobs outside of the home. 

Abbott’s war on education isn’t just financial or limited to K-12. Republicans “have established strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and even discussed” in universities, reports The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. The University of Texas at Austin has been strong-armed into eliminating majors in “Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies.” Political science professors have been forbidden from discussing the history of racism or the struggle for queer rights. The censorship has grown so severe that one philosophy professor was told to remove Plato’s “the Republic” because the ancient Greek philosopher mentions homosexuality. 

Abbott himself doesn’t read as a Christian fundamentalist like Dunn or Wilks. While the governor hits his minimum Republican allotment of God talk, he has also managed to evade a reputation as a rabid evangelical, despite his support for abortion bans and for forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms. Part of it is his affect, which feels more old-school Republican than Bible-waving preacher. As a Catholic, Abbott has also managed to keep a discrete distance from the evangelicals who are the backbone of the Christian nationalist movement.

But whatever his personal beliefs, Abbott has emerged as one of the GOP’s most loyal soldiers in a movement to turn America into a far-right Christian nation. His benefactors have singled out public education as the biggest obstacle to an illiberal theocratic agenda — and with good reason. Education is power. It’s not just that kids who learn to read and think critically often leave conservative religions, though that is a big fear driving the war on public schools. It’s also that education empowers the majority of Americans who don’t subscribe to fundamentalist Christianity. 

If Wilks, Dunn and other far-right billionaires can break public schools, leaving the only options as religious education or none at all, they will turn America into a hellscape. Modern people need education to hold down decent-paying jobs, and civic participation depends on the ability to read, write and reason. A population without the benefits offered by public education would largely be left intellectually, financially and spiritually impoverished — and easier to control.

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