The Fort Worth Botanic Garden, a 120-acre oasis in the heart of the bustling city, recently found itself mired in controversy after a far-right advocacy group booked the grounds for its 15th anniversary.
The “birthday celebration” for the True Texas Project featured panels on Christian nationalism and the Great Replacement Theory, an antisemitic myth.
The Botanic Garden, whose website commemorates the indigenous peoples whose land it occupies, canceled the event after a Texas Tribune report revealed the far-right slate of speakers, including Kyle Rittenhouse and a Christian nationalist author who calls for blasphemy laws.
But the Fort Worth mayor reinstated the event, bowing to a pressure campaign orchestrated on Facebook by the group’s CEO, according to emails obtained by the Daily Dot.
The True Texas Project is no stranger to controversy and extremist rhetoric. CEO Julie McCarty once expressed solidarity with the El Paso Walmart shooter who killed 23 in a 2019 attack targeting Latino immigrants.
The sold-out event featured a Friday evening “birthday party” with cake and breakout sessions that included Rittenhouse and Wade Miller, who wrote a policy brief on the “demographic replacement of American citizens by the foreign-born.”
Attendees were greeted by a dozen or so protesters outside the venue the first day—a number that grew to almost 100 by the next—beating drums and holding signs like “TTP = KKK.”
McCarty did not respond to a request for comment. The mayor directed the Daily Dot to previous statements about the event. The Botanic Garden did not respond to a request for comment.
True Texas Project started life as a local Tea Party, one of the many grassroots organizations that sprung up to oppose President Barack Obama. At the time, McCarty was a stay-at-home mom with no political experience. But it quickly exerted muscle in Texas politics, ousting elected leaders it deemed insufficiently conservative and recruiting ideological warriors to run for office. And like many on the right, it shifted from libertarian rebellion against Obama to outright Trumpian anti-immigrant nationalism.
McCarty’s grassroots activism was instrumental in turning Tarrant County, where Forth Worth is located, into a “GOP stronghold.”
“As Texas goes, so goes America and it is Tarrant County that holds Texas red,” McCarty said in a recent interview.
That penchant for ideological warfare was on display in June. After the Tribune report dropped, McCarty claimed it boosted sales.
“I hope the Trib keeps attacking because the support has been fantastic, and ticket sales keep coming in,” she wrote.
But patrons of the garden, seeing the news, flocked to Facebook. A week-old post on the Botanic Garden’s page received intense pushback. Unlike the usual anodyne comments the garden generally draws, these were furious.
“I will never visit this place again. They are hosting a white supremacy right wing event. Hosting a bunch of Nazis,” one commenter said.
“Do not allow your facility to be used for hate,” another said.
“[We] won’t be setting foot in this garden again unless they cancel this hate group conference,” another comment said, “I still can hardly believe this is actually real.”
Within an hour of receiving angry engagement, the official Botanic Garden account spoke up.
“Please rest assured the True Texas Project event is not being held at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden,” it wrote.
Behind the scenes, emails obtained by the Daily Dot show that the Garden’s CEO announced the cancellation of the event to the Garden’s board as the comments swelled, mentioning that “questions and community protest” about the garden’s association with the extremist group had risen.
The Tribune report also caused a mini-rebellion on the right, with three planned speakers canceling their appearances. In a remarkable split, one of the group’s longtime allies, former Texas state senator Don Huffines, released a statement that directly called out antisemitism as his reason for dropping out.
After the event, McCarty painted it all as a plot by members of the “Radical Left”—the Tribune and the Garden—conspiratorially joining forces to shut them down.
But McCarty didn’t wait to fight back, urging her supporters to fill the mayor’s inbox with complaints.
“The Gardens are city property,” McCarty said in the June 14 Facebook post. “They are not allowed to pick and choose which groups may use the facilities.”
According to emails obtained by the Daily Dot, her base responded instantly
“Once again the city of Fort Worth displays that they in fact hate Christian Conservative people,” one such email from a True Texas Project supporter said.
“They host far Left groups happily,” wrote another, echoing McCarty’s language on her Facebook post verbatim. Despite that assertion, the vast majority of events the garden hosts tend to be apolitical sessions on nature and art.
But the wave of emails caught the attention of the mayor’s office. An aide compiled the responses in a heads-up, noting they all went the same way—in favor of reinstating the event.
That email, sent by an assistant “for awareness,” came just three hours after McCarty launched her campaign.
It went to the Mayor Mattie Parker, the city attorney Leann Guzman, the mayor’s chief of staff, and a media relations professional.
“Let me know how we want to proceed,” the email ends.
Less than 15 minutes after the aide’s concerned email to the mayor, a letter from the city went out to the True Texas Project’s attorney.
“The City has notified [the Botanic Garden] that it must immediately reverse the cancellation of your client’s event and reinstate the reservation,” the letter said.
No reasons were given for the reinstatement in the letter. However, in emails obtained by the Daily Dot, a message from city attorney Guzman to the Botanic Garden CEO cites the First Amendment as the reason for reinstatement. “Facility rentals constitute a public forum,” the message says, thus, “the City cannot restrict access based solely on a potential renter’s viewpoint.”
That point, though, highlights just how Fort Worth caved on the matter over far-right pressure. Guzman, who cited the rationale, raised no initial concerns when the event was first canceled despite being cc’ed on the decision.
That’s likely because the city has a policy that allows it to deny the use of any facility to groups it deems discriminatory.
Just three months prior, in April, the Fort Worth Parks and Recreation canceled another event they deemed discriminatory—an event on “The danger of transgenderism” hosted by Latinos United for Conservative Action.
But the action campaign whipped up by McCarty in her case appears to have trumped Fort Worth’s own policy.
A mere half an hour after the mayor’s aide flagged the campaign, McCarty celebrated online.
“We won!” she wrote.
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
