The facts
No. 4 Texas beat No. 1 Ohio State 24-23 on Sept. 12 at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Attendance was 105,044, the third-largest crowd in the building. The Longhorns were down 20 in the fourth quarter. Hollywood Smothers scored from a yard out with 25 seconds left. Gianni Spetic hit the extra point.
Texas Athletics posted a 17-second clip of the student section after the score. The camera sat on a dense cluster of students who looked South Asian, burnt orange, Hook 'em. Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commission, screenshotted it Sunday.
"I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn't believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined." He followed with, "Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners." When people pushed back he wrote, "I weep for the families in Texas who can't get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans."
The photo does not show visas. Dhairya Gupta, a computer science senior in the shot, told the Dallas Morning News he moved from India around age 5 and became a citizen as a kid. Rahul Kodali, next to him in the cowboy hat, was born in Syracuse and grew up in Flower Mound. He pays in-state tuition. "I've been an American my entire life." Freshman Sumit Kalaimani, visible in the background, told KXAN he was born in Texas to an American father and an Indian mother.
Students told NBC 5 they waited hours in the heat and ran to the closest seats when the gates opened. That is how a friend group becomes a camera cluster.
UT's own fall 2025 census: 55,000 enrolled. International students are 5,140, or 9.3 percent of the school, down from 2024. Texas residents are 80.5 percent. Another 10.2 percent are from other U.S. states. International students are 4.3 percent of undergraduates. State law requires 90 percent of each freshman class to be Texas residents. Reuters, citing university figures for 2024-25, put White students at about 31.5 percent, Hispanic 25.5, Asian 22.4. Race is not a visa. Texas Global, which counts extra programs the official census does not, lists India as the top international origin at 1,660.
Sen. John Cornyn called it "intolerance and racism." French kept the post up, fundraised off the pile-on, and told a radio host it is "not racist to point out that we should be favoring Texans over foreigners."
Our take
You can tell. The official camera did not pan 105,000 people and accidentally invent a clump of Indian kids doing the horns. It found a clump of Indian kids doing the horns. That is the clip. Pretending you need a lab test to describe it is a different kind of lie.
French then did the dumb part. He looked at faces and wrote foreigners. Gupta is a citizen. Kodali was born in New York. Kalaimani was born in Texas. They did not parachute in from Hyderabad for the fourth quarter. They stood in line like every other student who wanted a seat, then sprinted to the closest ones. That is why the shot looks like a reunion, not a census.
The numbers he needed were sitting on UT's own site. Four percent of undergrads are international. Nine in ten freshmen have to be Texans by statute. Asian enrollment at 22 percent is the actual change, and it is Plano and Sugar Land kids with SAT scores, not a secret F-1 freshman class. India leads the international list mostly because graduate school is where the visas live.
A man running to regulate oil wells decided the emergency in Austin was the student section looking like Diwali. Cornyn clutched his pearls. French opened a donation link. The camera already did the reporting. The rest is people arguing about whether you are allowed to notice.
