In late May 2020, at the beginning of the “summer of love” and the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots, John Cornyn’s campaign communications director, Matt Mackowiak, was posting pro-George Floyd messages on his social media accounts. Mackowiak would even pitch a pro-Floyd op-ed to The National Pulse over a year later, in October 2021.
We declined to publish his piece.
Mackowiak – a long-standing NeverTrumper who also runs a group called “Save Austin Now” – posted on May 27, 2020: “Truly awful story. RIP George Floyd.”
Floyd, a violent criminal who once pointed a gun at a pregnant mother’s belly, died during an altercation with Minneapolis police. At the time of death, Floyd had fentanyl intoxication, heart disease, arterial blockage, and had recently tested positive for COVID-19.
But Floyd’s death was nevertheless leveraged by hucksters like the “Black Lives Matter” movement and used by the political left to assail the Trump presidency.
Riots that summer killed 25 people, including Lee Keltner, a conservative murdered by a media organization’s security guard, press photographer Tyler Gerth, murdered by a left-wing protester, Barry Perkins, who died when a FedEx truck began moving as BLM tried to loot it. Summer Taylor, a BLM protester who was hit while protesting on a freeway, David Dorn, a black police officer murdered by BLM looters for trying to stop them, 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, murdered by a BLM protester, and Victor Cazares Jr, murdered by BLM for defending his store.
As riots gripped America, Cornyn’s comms chief asked, “Has anyone put forward serious reforms that would prevent another George Floyd situation?”
Within another few days, Mackowiak would host Touré Neblett – a long-standing race grifter – on his podcast to “discuss the George Floyd police killing, the national protest movement, tangible solutions on police reform, and the concepts of systemic racism and white privilege.”
At the time of publication, these podcasts had been removed from the internet. Toure recently posted to his Instagram about Iran’s March 2026 claim of capturing U.S. troops: “Unconfirmed at ths [sic] point. But I believe Iran more than this gov.”
By the next month, July 2020, Mackowiak was posting “All black lives matter” on his Twitter page.
Another year would pass before he would pitch his pro-George Floyd op-ed to The National Pulse, co-authored with his “Save Austin Now” co-founder, Cleo Petrick.
The piece, broadly against defunding of the Austin police, began with the following framing, describing Floyd’s death as an “horrific murder” which set off “protests” and a “national discussion about police brutality” which Mackowiak describes as “rightly” taking place.
We have redacted the e-mail address of a former colleague of Mackowiak’s for their privacy.
Mackowiak’s co-author and co-founder of “Save Austin Now” is Cleo Petricek, a self-described “Longtime Activist in Democratic Politics,” whose bio still appears as such on their website.
The first images on the site associated with Petricek feature her with former President Barack Obama and failed Texas political leftist Beto O’Rourke. In Petricek’s hands are Democratic Party election materials, suggesting the pair had been campaigning together. Petricek had also posted images of her children holding up “BETO” signs.
She writes: “With my own money in 2008, I started a website for Latinos for Obama in Dallas, when everyone was supporting Hillary.”
After reading their proposed op-ed, and researching their previous work, we replied: “Hey guys, thanks for this. We would not publish something lauding the protests (riots) as a mechanism for change, nor describe Floyd’s killing (an accident) as an “horrific murder”. Would you be wiling [sic] to change this?”
At this point, Mackowiak stopped responding, presumably because our editorial position on the matter was not to his taste.
Besides running “Save Austin Now” and John Cornyn’s campaign communications team, Mackowiak also heads the Potomac Strategy Group, where his colleagues include Aaron Pluto, a former advisor to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. Pyatt was the only other participant in the now-infamous “F*ck the EU!” phone call leak from Obama operative Victoria Nuland.
