# Farris Wilks Texas fracking billionaire (b. 1952), pastor, and — with [[Tim Dunn]] — one of the two donors whose money built the Texas hard right over the 2010s. With his brother [[Dan Wilks]] he grew a family masonry business in Cisco, Texas into Frac Tech, a hydraulic-fracturing services company that rode the shale boom; the brothers sold a 70% stake in 2011 for about **$3.2 billion**. Farris also pastors the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day), the church his father founded outside Cisco, which blends biblical literalism, sabbatarianism and Hebrew-roots practice; his politics follow from it, and his giving has been the clearest case in the vault of oil money converted directly into [[Christian Nationalism]]. ## The giving Federally, the Wilks brothers' **$15 million** to a [[Ted Cruz]] super PAC in 2015 was, at the time, the largest single donation of the cycle. In Texas, Farris put more than $27 million into state and federal candidates over fifteen years, mostly through the vehicles he shared with Dunn — [[Empower Texans]], [[Defend Texas Liberty PAC]], Texans United for a Conservative Majority — whose method was to primary Republican legislators from the right, and whose signature campaign was the 2024 revenge against the House Republicans who had voted to impeach [[Ken Paxton]] ([[Ken Paxton Impeachment and SEC Settlement]]). The couple's Thirteen Foundation has given roughly $110 million to religious and conservative causes. In media, the brothers supplied the **$4.7 million** seed funding for [[The Daily Wire]] in 2015 and have been major backers of [[PragerU]] — the two properties that turned Texas oil money into the right's most-watched digital outlets — and have bought hundreds of thousands of acres of ranchland in Idaho and Montana ([[Energy Sector]] and [[Spindletop]] carry the industry context; [[Texas History Hub]] the state's). ## The retreat The network took two hits. In October 2023 the president of Defend Texas Liberty, Jonathan Stickland, was reported to have hosted the white nationalist [[Nick Fuentes]] at the PAC's offices; Stickland was removed, the PAC refunded a $1 million Wilks contribution in 2024, and the True Texas Project's Christian-nationalism conference that summer drew more scrutiny. Texas Monthly reported in April 2026 that Wilks had "all but disappeared" from political giving — one $150,000 donation in February 2026, to comptroller candidate Don Huffines — citing family pressure over the attention and a possible break with Dunn, and that neither he nor Dunn was funding Paxton's 2026 Senate run. The money that built the machine has, for now, stepped back from it; whether the machine still needs it is the open question, since Dunn's own giving has continued. ## See Also - [[Wilks Brothers]] — the brothers as a joint funding unit - [[Tim Dunn]] · [[Dan Wilks]] · [[Ted Cruz]] · [[Ken Paxton]] · [[Ken Paxton Impeachment and SEC Settlement]] - [[Empower Texans]] · [[Defend Texas Liberty PAC]] · [[Conservative Partnership Institute]] · [[Christian Nationalism]] · [[Nick Fuentes]] - [[The Daily Wire]] · [[PragerU]] · [[Hasan Piker]] · [[The Young Turks]] - [[Energy Sector]] · [[Spindletop]] · [[Texas History Hub]]