Conservative Move is situated near a subdivision whose McMansions are so polished, they make other suburbs look like the Fyre Festival. There’s no ocean nearby. There aren’t snow-capped mountains to hike. If you like Ethiopian food, you’re in for at least a half-hour drive. But if you want to live in a safe, cloistered polworld, with masterful wainscoting, it’s perfect. When I visited, the organization was based inside a Keller Williams Realty building that, like nearly everything else in McKinney, is supposed to look like it was designed by artisans centuries ago but instead was designed by a guy wearing Dockers circa 2007. The foyer has a rug that’s meant to look like hardwood. A sign for Paul’s organization shows a family hugging and staring at a white house with dormer windows. “Helping families move right,” it promises.

Paul led me upstairs so we could talk. His Californianism reveals itself when he says the word “McKinney.” Texans tend to pinch the “i” sound, but Paul lets it just roll out of his mouth, so that it nearly rhymes with “uncanny.” “I don’t have a cowboy hat or cowboy boots,” he joked.

Paul is in his mid-forties, but with his thick hair and easygoing affect, he could pass for younger. He wouldn’t be out of place in a JCPenney catalog, but instead of hawking polo shirts, he’d be extolling the virtues of the free market.

Paul grew up in Riverside, about fifty miles east of Los Angeles, in what is sometimes enterprisingly called “the Inland Empire.” It wasn’t a charmed childhood. His parents divorced when he was in the third grade, and the family was so poor that Paul had three paper routes. By twelve, he was in rehab for pot and booze. Paul’s parents weren’t very political—his father had only voted once, for Barry Goldwater—but some early experiences sparked Paul’s interest in policy.

When he was sixteen, Paul became a Sheriff Explorer Scout, which is like a Boy Scout who specializes in learning about law enforcement. His five years in that program, and later as a reserve deputy, opened his eyes to an underworld of child abuse and domestic violence. Then in college, he joined a fraternity that an advisor called “the most diverse” on campus.

“It actually bothered me a little bit because we were compartmentalizing people on that, and I just saw us as a great brotherhood,” Paul told me. Regardless, the experience “really elevated me to understanding how to work with diverse people.” (If you have noticed that Paul speaks a little like a politician, it might be because he ran for Congress twice.) Finally, he served in the military, including a tour in Iraq in 2008, and with that came the admiration for veterans and military might that are more closely associated with the Republican Party.