In July, Greg Abbott hired Nate Schatzline as his top adviser on election security. The job pays $275,000 a year, according to personnel records obtained by Texas Monthly.
Schatzline is a pastor and a former Texas House member who, Texas Monthly reports, supported legislation built on conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen. His résumé listed voting bills he had cosponsored but, the magazine says, "otherwise contained little relevant experience."
In early September, speaking in his new role to a Republican activist group in Lampasas County, he explained what he sees as the biggest danger facing the state:
"The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas. And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn't say 'radical Islam.' I said 'Islam,' because all Islam is radical."
Texas Monthly obtained the video of the speech, which has since been made public. Neither Schatzline nor Abbott's office agreed to an interview, and the governor's office did not answer the magazine's questions.
His plans for Texas elections
Muslims are about 2% of the state's population. Schatzline's speech treated them as a threat to Texas elections. According to Texas Monthly, he said he wants to:
- Keep mosques from being polling places. "That's on the agenda for the next session," he said. In the meantime, he suggested a mosque could be thrown out as a polling place if it could be provoked into discriminating against non-Muslims. "I might just have to start eating bacon every time I vote," he said, to laughter.
- "Crack down" on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of voting for dead relatives. "They can continue to vote for generations for people that are a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty, a hundred and sixty years old," he said. "My number one goal is to ensure that our Islamic communities cannot do that in the state of Texas." Texas Monthly reports he based this on right-wing claims about fraud at Somali-run day cares in Minnesota.
- Reclassify Islam as a political ideology, working with Abbott and far-right House members. Texas Monthly explains that the far right has long wanted this so it can target Muslims legally without running into religious-liberty protections.
- Give the state more power to intervene in local elections. He said he wants to expand a 2023 law that lets the Secretary of State step into a county's elections. That law applies only to counties with more than 4 million people, and Schatzline said it was a way of targeting Harris County without saying so.
He also said he was helping the Secretary of State's ongoing cleanup of the voter rolls.
Emily Eby French of Common Cause Texas reviewed a transcript of the speech. "There is nothing he said in here with respect to elections that I didn't hear in 2014," she told Texas Monthly. "And I am having a hard time connecting the dots between the Islamophobia that seems to animate him and his job on election security."
"The governor didn't say no to any bill they had"
Schatzline described a meeting between Abbott and leaders of the Texas House's new "Sharia Free Caucus." Andy Hopper, a state representative Schatzline said was at the meeting, has said lawmakers have a responsibility to "peel out all of these little infestations of ideas that are contrary to our way of life," according to the Houston Chronicle. The magazine says the caucus has proposed banning the sale of halal food and forbidding women and girls from wearing hijabs in public schools.
Schatzline said only that the meeting was about how to "crack down on Islam." But he was clear about where Abbott stood:
"The governor didn't say no to any bill they had. And [he] wants to support it at the top of his agenda for the next session. And so, absolutely, we're working on it."
He said the hard part was writing rules that hit Muslims without also hitting Christians. "Anything we set into stone, they will turn around and use it against Christians as well," he said.
Part of a pattern in Abbott's office
Schatzline didn't invent this agenda. Last year Abbott declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations a terrorist organization, and twelve of his thirteen reasons matched an anti-Muslim think tank's report. This year he threatened two airports' funding over Muslim washing stations. Texas Monthly notes that Abbott spent years courting Muslim and South Asian donors and voters, and Religion News Service has reported that one of the largest donors to his political action committee is a Muslim oil executive.
Since Schatzline started the job, open-records emails show him pursuing a "faith initiative" to be run out of the governor's office, with talk of "mobilizing the Church." Abbott's office did not answer Texas Monthly's question about whether Muslim voices would be part of it.
What the record shows
Greg Abbott pays Nate Schatzline, a former lawmaker who backed 2020 stolen-election bills, $275,000 a year to advise him on election security. In a September speech in that role, Schatzline said "all Islam is radical," said he wants to keep mosques from serving as polling places, accused Muslims of voting on behalf of long-dead relatives, and said Abbott "didn't say no to any bill" from a caucus that has proposed banning the sale of halal food and forbidding hijabs in public schools. Abbott's office did not answer Texas Monthly's questions about any of it.
