It sure doesn’t seem like it.
It sure doesn’t seem like it.
D emocratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico needs some PR help from country singer Ella Langley. In her hit song “Choosin’ Texas,” the Tennessee-based star cites the two-step dance, cowboys, and George Strait as just a few examples of the state’s cultural capital, as she laments losing a man she loved to a woman with a certain je ne sais quoi that she chalks up to Texas magnetism:
Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee. I shoulda known better than to take him back to Abilene.
I put him right back into her arms.
I wasn’t a match for that kinda spark.
The song’s not really a Texas diss track; Langley actually tips her hat to the state, acknowledging the appeal of its larger-than-life character and heritage. Talarico, however, has done his darndest to diss Texas and its values as much as possible, as he aims to flip a Senate seat and defeat state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Sometimes it’s difficult to fathom how he’s even running for office statewide.
“I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign,” Talarico said at a 2022 event. “We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”
That’s like if Graham Platner told Mainers he would only be investing in Impossible Lobster (you’ll be relieved to know that doesn’t exist). Did no one tell Talarico that ranchers basically run Texas? The steak and beef industry there is an agricultural powerhouse, valued at roughly $9 billion annually for cattle production alone and accounting for more than 15 percent of the entire U.S. beef herd. Texas consistently leads the nation in beef, generating about 6.2 billion pounds every year. Talarico said that ending meat consumption in America is “existential,” peddling environmental activism that certainly wouldn’t make Texas’s oil and gas sector happy either.
This seems like an obviously avoidable flub. To save face amid the resurfaced comments, the official X account of the Democratic Party posted a picture of the state representative wearing a shirt depicting the Texas flag, with his face buried in what appears to be a turkey leg. It was cringe, and it certainly didn’t pass the authenticity test, the golden rule of content creation today.
The fact is that Talarico is an increasingly hard sell for Democrats to make in Texas. He has a distorted understanding of Christianity that is bound to peeve many Texans of faith, who make up about 67 percent of the state’s total adult population. In 2022, Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, made the bizarre statement, “God is nonbinary,” in a 2021 speech on the Texas House floor opposing legislation that would prohibit men in women’s school sports.
On CNN recently, Talarico doubled down, saying, “If someone’s got a problem with that statement . . . they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.”
Did he not read the multitude of lines in the Bible about God clearly being a “father?” Now that his shameless injection of gender ideology into scripture is coming back to haunt him, Talarico says: “I was being intentionally provocative.” No one asked him to invoke God to justify the normalization of a toxic worldview that says it’s good to put gender-confused children under the knife or force female athletes to face unfair competition from men. He volunteered that innovation because Democrats were all over transgenderism in 2022. Now, they’re backtracking due to the issue’s unpopularity, and Talarico is struggling to explain himself. Texans take their religion seriously, and a lot of them are not going to take kindly to a candidate who twists the teachings they follow for political expediency. All Ken Paxton has to do is play his opponent’s “nonbinary” sermon on repeat in every campaign ad.
A border state that bears the brunt of illegal immigration, Texas is also not likely to welcome a candidate who denies the reality of the issue. In a recent interview, Talarico parroted the popular Democratic narrative that ICE has devolved into a “secret police,” a slightly nicer way of calling them the “Gestapo” as others in the party have. The Biden administration’s ultra-lax border policies left Texas in a uniquely vulnerable position; state taxpayers spent $11 billion on a security mission to counteract Biden’s open season at the border. ICE, though imperfect, is the agency chiefly responsible for undoing this enormous affront to Texas’s security.
There’s so much that Talarico says that, in a vacuum, makes perfect sense for a progressive stronghold such as Illinois, or Vermont, or Oregon. But this is Texas we’re talking about. The profile of a seemingly soft-spoken man of the cloth is completely hollow if it’s being used to bring LGBT activism, chaos, and economic idiocy to Texas. The question remains: Does James Talarico realize what state he’s running to represent?