I don’t know what that blasphemous little imp’s secret is, but he’s got one. Don’t be fooled by that creepy smile on his creepy face; there’s something wrong with James Talarico. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I don’t ever want to see his browser history, and I’d sooner have somebody from The Lincoln Project babysit my kid. It’s just a vibe, but there are rumors out there, and unfortunately, no one has shared the specifics with me. I don’t know exactly what they are, but we have no moral obligation to default to a presumption of normality regarding Democrat Senate candidates this cycle. After all, we just lived through Der Platnerdämmerung.
Is it related to his gender ambiguity? He’s already famous for apologizing for his white male identity. Well, let’s just say we can be pretty confident that Talarico has never beaten up or assaulted one of the many ex-girlfriends he’s tried to convince us were his girlfriends. This is because, to the extent they actually ever were his girlfriends, they all look like they can kick his butt. And he looks like he might dig that.
Let’s call out the pink donkey in the room. There’s widespread speculation that the guy is in the closet, and anybody who’s lived a few years has known guys in the closet, and well, this dude gives off vibes like he’s in the closet. I don’t know if he’s in the closet. I do know that if he is in the closet, he should have come out and been honest about who he was. If he’s lying about that, what else is he lying about? But if he’s hiding his sexuality, it’s because he doesn’t respect the Texans he wants to vote for him. There are plenty of good reasons to dislike this guy that are going to alienate Texans long before a taste for dude does. After all, Scott Bessent and Ric Grenell are gay, and we hardcore conservatives would be thrilled to vote for either one for president. Lots of Republicans are gay—usually the well-dressed ones. Hell, Trump’s theme song is “YMCA.” Sure, there are going to be some Republicans who just will not vote for anybody gay. That’s their right, but most voters don’t feel that way. If he came out, only a fool would have made that the centerpiece of the Republican campaign. As long as there was no gross weirdness—like seeing him dressed up in full Scott Wiener bondage regalia, smiling for the cameras at The Manhole Bathhouse—that could be totally overcome. And if that’s his secret, it’s pretty much the worst-kept secret ever, right up there with the revelation that Herr Platner was abusing women that we all knew was going to inevitably drop.
But the fact is that what we already know about Talarico is a disaster. The dude is a total train wreck as a Texas candidate. His public problems are no secret. Let’s review.
This is a guy who thinks it’s a great idea to run a meat-free campaign in Texas. Of course, Texas is famous for meat, both producing it and gobbling it up. Identifying with a philosophy that is so completely contrary to the culture that you seek to represent in the Senate is either deep stupidity or deep insanity. Like the gay thing, it’s not the thing itself that’s the problem. Texans would vote for a vegan if they didn’t think that his veganism was actually a stand-in for a set of cultural beliefs and mores that this little weirdo would want to impose upon them. The guy isn’t a vegan because his doctor told him to. He is a vegan because it’s a ritual sacrifice to Gaia in service of some weird secular religion that includes the climate hoax. The problem is that he’s not going to be satisfied skipping that rack of ribs; he’s only going to be satisfied making sure you skip that rack of ribs.
And then there are guns. The guy voted for a bunch of gun control bills as a legislator. Lots of them. He wants Texans disarmed. In fact, he hired as his staffer a young woman who was so into gun control that she oversaw some sort of sex-toy gun control protest on her college campus—yes, you read that right. OK, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that somebody who wants to take away ribeyes and rifles from Texans is probably going to have some problems at election time. But, of course, we are dealing with a party that thought a Nazi tattoo was no biggie.
He shills for illegal aliens, because like all Democrats, he does not believe that real Americans should get to decide who comes here. Oh, there’s the “I love trans kids” stuff. Yikes.
And then there’s religion, which is a very serious problem because this dude is flirting with eternal damnation. It is a sin to be a false prophet, and he is lying about the Christian faith. He is out there misleading people, and if you follow his heretical teachings, your soul is in peril. Those of us who actually believe in God and Jesus don’t find this to be merely a creepy affectation. This is blasphemy, and blasphemy is unacceptable. Don’t go telling me that God is non-binary. Don’t go telling me that Jesus loves abortion. Don’t go citing heretical texts to support your false interpretation of scripture. We take offense at that, like Democrats take offense at calling a man who is pretending to be a woman a “man,” except when we do it, we’re not catering to mentally ill people or perverts.
Democrats think pinning on the label “Christian” is enough to buy our support. They don’t realize that all Christians don’t think exactly alike, and almost none of them think like this little demon. That’s a problem for Democrats—they’ve never actually met anyone who is Christian, and their understanding of the religion comes from watching John Lithgow fulminate in "Footloose." They don’t know Christians, and they don’t like Christians, but they think they can sucker Christians. I’ll tell you something about Christians. They don’t like to be treated like idiots. Much like that up-talking femboy Democrat consultant who picked out Platner because he thought that the right guy to beat Susan Collins was a Marxist bear, the Democrat consultant class picked out Talarico because he says “Jesus” a lot, and they figured that would intrigue the squares. That's not going to work out the way they hope.
And then there’s his problem with black people. Talarico is so white he makes Mitt Romney look ethnic. Pete Buttigieg, who looks like a taller Talarico, famously clocks in at about 0 percent of the black vote. Talarico is Buttigieg’s Lone Star analog, a puny pick-me paleface who looks like the kid who reminded the teacher at the end of the day on Friday that she had forgotten to assign homework for the weekend. Black folks see through this guy, and they’re especially not going to dig his blasphemy. But then add on top of that the fact that Jasmine Crockett is throwing gasoline on the fire by claiming that the primary race was rigged in favor of the smarmy little white boy. And she may have a point. The establishment is a bunch of snooty white leftists, and Talarico is one of their own. Crockett, who’s a loudmouth and a phony, was still an outsider, and she got frozen out. She’s right to be mad. And in November, black voters may just sit on their hands.
All this public stuff is bad enough for Talarico, but the more you look at the race and the candidate, the more you get the impression that there’s something else out there. If he’s this creepy in public, what’s behind the door? There’s more to come, and the fact that Ken Paxton is keeping a low profile right now and husbanding his resources to let loose down the road indicates that somebody’s got a thick file on this guy.
I don’t know what it is. I have not heard anything specific. But you compare him to Platner, you have to believe that you are seeing the iceberg effect. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff in plain view out of the water, but you’ve got to figure there’s a lot more underwater. There’s something wrong with this dude, and whatever it is is not going to be pretty.
But you can be sure of one thing. In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to hear all about it, and it might just wipe that creepy smile off his creepy face.
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