Ryan Nichols for Texas
East Texas First

Power back
to the people.

Marine veteran. Search-and-rescue volunteer. East Texas father. The system ran Ryan Nichols over and called it justice. He came out the other side knowing exactly how it treats working people without money or connections, and he is taking that fight to Austin.

Join the campaignSee the issues
Who Ryan is

From Harleton to the hurricane line

Ryan Nichols is from East Texas. He graduated with honors from Harleton High School in 2009, captained the baseball team and played linebacker before cutting college short to enlist in the United States Marine Corps during two wars.

He served from 2010 to 2014 and left as a noncommissioned officer with an honorable discharge. Long before and long after, he showed up when the water came up: more than two dozen disaster deployments, starting with Hurricane Katrina at age 14.

He has been knocked down by a system that writes one set of rules for insiders and another for everyone else. He was pardoned on January 20, 2025, and his charges were dismissed with prejudice. Now he is running so the next family does not have to fight alone.

4 yrsActive-duty Marine
24+Disaster deployments
50+Rescued in one day, Hurricane Sally
2Sons raised in East Texas
Ryan Nichols in East Texas, smiling with a thumbs up
The Fights

Where Ryan puts the pressure

Every plank comes back to one question: do the people who live here decide what happens here, or do the connected decide for them?

Water Rights

Whether your well runs, your cattle drink, and your grandkids can still work the land.

  • Local control: the people who live on the land decide what happens to the water under it.
  • Full transparency on every water sale, transfer and district deal.
  • A hard no to pipeline and authority schemes that drain East Texas aquifers and rivers for the metros.

Land Rights

The inheritance you leave and the independence you keep.

  • Eminent domain used narrowly, for genuine public necessity, not pipelines and developers.
  • Real notice, real due process and real value for every property owner.
  • A much higher bar before any government or corporation takes what is not theirs.

Tax Fairness

Whether the people who frame the houses, drive the trucks and run the shops keep what they earn.

  • Stop punishing work. Let the people who build everything keep more of it.
  • Close the carve-outs written for insiders and lobbyists.
  • Rules simple enough that a working family is not trapped by complexity built for the connected.

Veterans First

Ryan wore the uniform. He knows what the promise to veterans is worth when it is kept, and what it costs when it is not.

  • Veterans get the care and benefits they earned without fighting a maze to get them.
  • Real help for the invisible wounds, close to home.
  • Put veterans' skills to work rebuilding East Texas.

Free Speech

The one right that lets you speak when the powerful would rather you did not.

  • No Texan loses their voice to an algorithm or a weaponized agency.
  • Defend it for people you agree with and people you cannot stand, or it is gone for everybody.

Equal Justice

The difference between a republic and a regime.

  • The same rules, the same due process and the same mercy for everyone.
  • End the two-tier system that bends the law to who you are.
  • Conditions inside that no Texan should accept for anyone, guilty or innocent.
The record

He shows up when the water rises

Ryan's boat carrying families out of a flooded neighborhood
Moving families out of the flood zone.
Ryan with a volunteer rescue crew in life jackets
With a volunteer rescue crew.
Ryan loading carts with water and supplies for storm victims
Buying out water and supplies for families in need.
2005Hurricane Katrina. His first rescue, at age 14.
2017Hurricane Harvey. Raised more than $30,000 in boats, diapers, formula, food and water for Texas families.
2018Hurricane Michael. Worked alongside the U.S. Coast Guard on med-evac rescues in Panama City.
2019Tropical Storm Imelda. High-water rescues in Vidor, Texas, including an elderly bedridden man and his family.
2020Hurricane Sally. More than 50 people rescued in a single day, many of them babies, children and elderly.
Fighting Shadows by Ryan Nichols, book cover
The book

Fighting Shadows

"The official story is not the whole story. This book puts my account in one place, in my own words, so it cannot be buried, edited down or spun."

Ryan's first-person memoir of the road to January 6, nearly four years inside the federal system, and the fight to put the full record in public view. Read it and decide for yourself.

Get the book
Join the campaign

East Texas does not get handed back. We take it back.

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