Being an adult is about making choices, and the choice in Texas is one we shouldn’t have had to make. We should have had a quality conservative incumbent and zero question about winning in November. But we don’t. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) should not have sucked. He should’ve been a hard-core conservative, as befitting a red state, instead of a squishy invertebrate whose smarmy contempt for actual voters led him to seek that Strange New Respect one gets from the regime media by doing things like working with the Democrats on gun control, signaling his openness to amnesty, and circling the wounded Donald Trump like a vulture until he recovered and then pretending to be his bestest buddy ever was.
Had he not been a failed politician from 2003 transported into 2026, he would not have faced a primary, and the money that will now have to be spent in Texas could have been spent elsewhere. But the thing about John Cornyn is that it’s all about John Cornyn; the same ego that makes him scoff at his voters for five years out of his six-year terms is the same ego that makes it inconceivable that he might step aside and save his party both the cash and the risk that comes with a primary. And so we must make our choice.
Well, you in Texas must make your choice. Though I live part-time in Texas, I’m still voting in California. And while one might contend that a conservative Californian has no business weighing in on a Texas runoff, that’s not so. This is bigger than our individual states. This is about the country. The stakes are high. We Republicans can’t lose the Senate, and the road to a Democrat Senate lies through the Lone Star State. And the stakes would not have been so high if not for John Cornyn’s deliberate choices. So, now we must choose.
There is one inescapable conclusion. If you’re in Texas, you need to vote for Attorney General Kenny Paxton. If you’re giving money in the Texas race, which you could’ve given somewhere else if not for John Cornyn, you should give it to Kenny Paxton.
The best argument for John Cornyn is that he would be a near-lock to win the general election against James Talarico, the latest goofball the Democrats hope will turn Texas blue. They do this every few years by talking themselves into believing that, somehow, the voters of the Lone Star State can be persuaded to vote for someone who’s going to ensure that children can be mutilated because their mommy has Munchausen syndrome, or to reinstate all the DEI garbage, or to make abortions mandatory and all guns illegal because of his One Neat Trick. And of course, these One Neat Tricks are always hilariously inept. There was that woman who really loved abortion, and that was going to be her One Neat Trick. And then there was Beto, the furry, and he was really good-looking, and that was going to be his One Neat Trick. They failed.
And now the One Neat Trick with this latest Great Mediocre Whiteboy Hope is Jesus. He pretends to be Christian, bringing to mind the Bible’s many warnings about false prophets. Among the tenets of his bizarre theology, a heretical stew of cliches and race commie nonsense that makes the Unitarians look like old-time Southern Baptists in comparison, are that Jesus loves abortion and that God is non-binary. He giggled when, on the Bulwark podcast, host Tim Miller, in the most on-brand move ever, asked him, "How big is God's sausage?” Disgusting. It’s disqualifying that Talarico didn’t act like a man and a Texan and slug the creepy weirdo, but in the tiny apostate’s defense, Miller might have been into that.
Naturally, the sandals-wearing socialist savior of Talarico’s version of the Bible just happens to fully support whatever Schumer and AOC happen to agree on at any given moment. In short, he’s the perfect regime media Christian – Pulpit Buttigieg doesn’t believe a word of that God stuff, but he’s happy to use it as a cudgel to attempt to beat the rubes into submission.
Even more baffling are some of his non-religious insights. He thinks white people are bad for being white, and we should stop being so white because whiteness is bad for some reason. He couldn’t be whiter if he were a Romney. Talarico also exclaims that he “loves” trans kids; we’ll just leave that there. He’s now conceding there was a border crisis, which is supposed to be some sort of massive retreat from prior Democrat teaching, but his prescription for solving it is exactly the same as that of the people who insisted there was no border crisis. In other words, he would never deport anybody, and the second he got a chance, he would throw the border wide open again. Perhaps most baffling, in Texas, he’s come out against eating meat. If you and I were to sit down with a notebook and write out the most poisonous political positions a Texas candidate could adopt, it would look a lot like his extensive social media history.
Oh, and we’re not even going to get into his personal life here. That’s going to come out, though, and you know it will be target-rich since I suspect he had his own people leak to make sure that the regime media told the masses that he followed a bunch of strippers and escorts on X. Color me unconvinced. The lady doth protest too much.
Now, John Cornyn will protest that Kenny Paxton has a checkered personal history. There are claims of corruption, and they seem to be the typical kind of Texas frame-up customarily used against actual conservatives. We’ve seen it many times before. His enemies tried to impeach him to remove him as attorney general, and that went nowhere. It was just garbage. His personal life? Well, he screwed up. And down and in other directions, and that’s all his fault, and he should be ashamed of himself. Perhaps he is, or he isn’t. At this point, does it matter? When he declares war on babies, wants pervs in your daughter’s locker room, and tolerates discourse on divine junk, let me know. No one is advocating for him to be our Paragon of Virtue; we want him to be our Paragon of Not Allowing Communists to Turn All of America Into a Disarmed Woke Dictatorship Full of Illegal Aliens and Perverts.
The most important question is whether we want a Texas senator who is absolutely and always going to vote correctly down the line on critical issues like gun control and amnesty. We know John Cornyn won’t because he voted with the Democrats for gun control, and because he’s been talking about amnesty. Yes, he calls it “comprehensive immigration reform,” but that’s a lot like calling what happens to the pretty new guy on the cell block a tender romance.
We want no part of it, and with Kenny Paxton, we’re guaranteed not to get any part of it. But are we guaranteed to win in November? Nothing is guaranteed. John Cornyn’s main selling point was essentially a guarantee that he would win – and there are people who I respect greatly who argue that we should support Cornyn for just that reason. But I don’t buy it based on the facts I see on the ground here. Texas voters are annoyed and disgusted by Cornyn’s arrogance and manifestly fake conservative game. Suddenly, he’s not just in favor of the SAVE Act no matter what, filibuster be damned, and here’s an editorial about it! We were awake two weeks ago when you were saying the exact opposite! But hey, I will totally trust you with a six-year term you promised would be your last, which takes away any checks we might have on you. You’re totally not going to go Thom Tillis on us – by the way, John, you should go thank your Democrat-collaborating North Carolina pal for providing us an example of exactly what we need to worry about you becoming for six years if we’re dumb enough to re-elect you.
The fact is, Kenny Paxton can win the general; he seems to be winning the run-off. That’s why the various atrocities of this creepy little Democrat gremlin were important enough to warrant several paragraphs reciting what he’s going to get hit with in the general. I think Kenny Paxton knows, because I think Kenny Paxton‘s people are the ones behind the release of all this Talarico stuff – don’t worry, there’s more – just in time for the run-off. I bet they did the oppo dump to show that Kenny Paxton is the overwhelming favorite to win in the general; it’s not that risky a risk to pick the real conservative. Moreover, Paxton keeps winning state offices again and again. And let’s also consider that a lot of conservatives won’t come out to vote for John Cornyn. The one argument for Cornyn – far greater electability than Paxton – fails.
Again, if John Cornyn had any character, he wouldn’t be in this position, because he wouldn’t have been a tofu-spine squish. Nor, when it became clear that he couldn’t even summon up a majority of his own party’s support in the primary – he beat Paxton by one point with a spoiler in the race – did he have the character to drop out.
No, he wants to make a fight of it, with other people’s money. It doesn’t seem like he can raise much of his own, so Cornyn is going to demand that he get cash not to fight a Democrat but to fight another Republican who would otherwise beat him to a pulp. And I expect he will get that money, because there’s nothing dumber than establishment Republicans. They really don’t want an independent conservative like Paxton; that’s Reason #237 to vote for him over the puppet/stiff incumbent.
Now, the wildcard in the run-off is Donald Trump. For a minute there, he looked like he was going to endorse John Cornyn and ask Paxton to pull out, but then he apparently paid attention to Cornyn, and well, that was that. If there’s one thing Donald Trump knows, it’s a loser, and that Cornyn might as well have a big L tattooed on his forehead. Trump’s endorsement may well toss it to one or the other, or Trump may just sit it out. The guy who doesn’t get endorsed isn’t dropping out, so the fight’s going to happen one way or the other. That means the money will be spent one way or the other. So, since we’re having this fight, maybe the actual conservative should win it.
Cornyn is a dinosaur whose species should have gone extinct long ago. He still walks the Earth for now, and if he wins the runoff, every single one of us should give him our full and complete support. It’s better to have somebody who’s there with us 80 percent of the time than zero percent of the time, which Alfred E. Talarico would be. Politics is like that. Sometimes you have to choose among suboptimal options; it’s called being an adult.
Kenny Paxton > John Cornyn.
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