Morgan Gstalter, The Hill, December 4, 2018

A member of the Texas Republican Party’s 2018 platform committee and former delegate for Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) presidential run proudly declared himself a “white nationalist.”

The Texas Observer reported Tuesday that Ray Myers took to social media last week and wrote, “Damn right, I’m a white nationalist and very proud of it.”

“I am Anglo and I’m very proud of it, just like black people and brown people are proud of their race. I am a patriot. I am very proud of my country,” Myers explained in an interview with the outlet. “And white nationalist, all that means is America first. That’s exactly what that means.

“That’s where the president’s at,” he continued. “That’s where I’m at and that’s where every solid patriotic American is. It doesn’t have anything to do with race or anything else.”

Myers compared using the term “white nationalist” to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I mean, just like Black Lives Matter, white lives matter, too,” Myers said. “We’re all in the same melting pot. Now why can’t we say, as Anglos, that we’re proud?”

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes white nationalism as akin to white supremacist or white separatist ideologies that often focus on the “alleged inferiority of non whites.”

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J.T. Edwards, an African-American member of the State Republican Executive Committee, condemned Myers’s comments, according to the Observer.

“To have so-called white nationalists in our party is basically an abomination of the very foundations of the Republican Party,” said Edwards. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Mr. Myers’s position is part of the problem.”

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The state party’s executive committee unanimously passed a “non-discrimination” resolution over the weekend that affirmed its support of religious liberty within the party, the outlet noted.

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