By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
There’s a new Ken Paxton scandal bubbling in the news
today. But as Ken Paxton scandals go, it’s not very interesting.
Not a top 10-er. Arguably not even top 20. Possibly top
30.
The Wall Street Journal has video of the GOP’s candidate
for Senate in Texas ringing in the New Year in Dubai in 2024 “with two
fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.” The two men had
been indicted months earlier for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars from
a hospital in Chicago. One of them “donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign
finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.”
If you’re the sort of nihilist who’s untroubled by the
other 20 to 30 more compelling reasons that Paxton is unfit for office, the
thought of the attorney general of Texas partying with criminal suspects and
his apparent mistress won’t be the thing that finally puts you off. In for a
penny, in for a pound.
So let’s talk instead about the “real” scandal in the
Texas Senate race, the one that’s sucked in everyone from the
president and the world’s
richest man to an untold number of gullible dimwits in MAGA social media.
Why was Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, recently off the campaign
trail for nine days?
His team says he had a bad case of the flu and needed
time to recover. (He’s a Type 1 diabetic, which increases
the risk of serious complications from the virus.) But for Republicans,
that’s unsatisfying. They’re desperate for a line of attack that will dent
Talarico’s small but durable lead over Paxton after five months of
calling him a far-left
vegan freak failed to do the trick. His mysterious absence finally gave
them an opening. They seized it.
What if Talarico didn’t have the flu? What if he actually
spent those nine days in a mental hospital being treated for some sort of
breakdown?
I don’t want to crib the entirety of The Bulwark’s play-by-play of how the great Talarico
“loony bin” exposé exploded and then collapsed on right-wing Twitter in a
matter of hours Sunday. The long and short of it is that two Republican
influencers, Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher, published audio of what Amacher
claimed was a phone conversation he held on Saturday night with an employee at
a mental treatment facility in Ohio, inquiring whetherTalarico was a patient
there. Why he zeroed in on that facility is unclear; it has something to do
with MAGA websleuths tracking flights from Texas to Ohio (don’t ask) plus the
fact that a different Texas Democrat had been treated at that hospital
previously.
The woman Amacher spoke with told him repeatedly that she
had no record of the person he was calling about. (“I do not find anyone with
that name for the last four days that’s been discharged, and they’re not here
in the building.”) But then, seemingly offering a theory for why the name might
not yet be listed in her discharge records, she said, “Looks like he was just
discharged this evening. That’s why I don’t have it.” For Amacher and Sortor,
that was the smoking gun: Talarico had been a patient there.
He hadn’t, though. On Sunday, amid the uproar, the Ohio
facility posted a tweet
stating unequivocally that “Representative James Talarico has never received
treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.” Yesterday the New York Times followed up by revealing that it had
“reviewed time-stamped images from a security camera at Mr. Talarico’s home [in
Texas], which were provided by his campaign on the condition they not be
published for security reasons. The images showed Mr. Talarico around the
exterior of the home and at its entrances between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8.” That was
the period during which he was off the trail.
The stupidest part of all this is that Talarico resumed
campaigning on Friday with a public appearance at an Austin music festival, the
day before Amacher called the Ohio facility and was told that the
patient he was looking for must have been “just discharged this evening.”
Amacher, Sortor, and everyone else involved had reason to know from the jump
that something was screwy with their timeline, in other words. They promoted
the phone call anyway.
Even if the timeline hadn’t clued them in, a moment’s
thought would have revealed how inane their theory of Talarico’s condition was.
If he had suffered a breakdown from the pressure of the campaign severe enough
to require inpatient treatment, how could he have made a complete recovery in
the span of nine days—enough so that he felt comfortable returning to that
pressure immediately? It’d be like treating a soldier for PTSD, pronouncing him
cured, and airdropping him into the middle of a ferocious firefight the next
morning.
There are many culprits in this smear, some sinister,
some less so.
Culprits.
One of the less sinister elements is that Americans on
both sides seem to be growing more paranoid about politicians’ health. Who can
blame them?
Joe Biden and his team hid the extent of Biden’s
cognitive decline from the public until his 2024 debate with Donald Trump left
no doubt. Trump himself is obviously concealing health problems per the
mysterious bruises on his hands, his uncertain
gait, and his own mysterious stretches of disappearing from public view. John Fetterman proceeded
with his 2022 Senate campaign after suffering a stroke that impaired his
ability to speak coherently; the right accused him at the time of hiding the
amount of damage to his brain, then the left began accusing him of it after he
started voting with Republicans.
I could go on and on. The right had a field day
speculating about Hillary Clinton’s health during the 2016 campaign,
particularly after she nearly fainted at an event. The left has spent weeks pointing out that Mitch McConnell seems barely sentient
since returning to the Senate following his own prolonged recovery from what he
claims, unconvincingly, was nothing more serious than a fall. Insisting that
Talarico was laid low by something graver than the flu isn’t “rational,”
exactly, but neither is it irrational at this point for anyone to approach a
political candidate’s account of their condition skeptically.
There’s also something to say here about social media as
a megaphone for crankery, although that story has been told many times since
America made its foremost online troll president 10 years ago. Before Twitter,
“Talarico went to the funny farm” would have been a rumor confined to political
circles in Texas and quickly forgotten. (At worst, Rush Limbaugh would have
done a 10-minute bit on it on a slow news day.) In the Twitter era, it’s a
days-long sensation amplified by thousands of rabid partisans that inevitably
gets picked up by Trump and warrants debunking from the Times.
For activists, getting a smear in front of millions of
voters in 2026 is largely a matter of mustering the collective will to do so.
All you need is a critical mass of “influencers” to
coordinate on astroturfing the lie. And if one of those influencers happens
to be the guy who owns the platform, so
much the better.
Beyond all of that, a scandal involving Talarico, of all
people, is irresistible catnip for the right. With the possible exception of
far-left Muslim Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, there’s no Senate candidate this
year whom they’re more desperate to beat—and therefore no candidate whom
they’re more willing to believe the worst about in their zeal to find a magic
bullet that might finish him off.
It’s a matter of saving face. As noted last
week, the psychological stakes in Texas this fall are immense for the
president and his postliberal acolytes: They demanded Paxton over the more
electable John Cornyn, they got their wish, and now they’re on the brink of
blowing a statewide race in America’s supreme Republican stronghold for the
first time in more than 30 years. If a soft-spoken baby-faced left-winger
proves more popular in the Lone Star State than an amoral Trump toady, not only
will right-wing populists own the humiliation completely, their claim that
postliberalism is the key to Republican electoral success will be shattered.
To spare them from that, Paxton must win. If his
winning requires them to argue that Talarico was somehow in two places at once
on Saturday, back home campaigning in Texas and being discharged from a
mental facility in Ohio, they’re game.
Ironically, their tactics are straight from the playbook
of another well-known Democrat from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, who once proposed
accusing an electoral opponent of bestiality. When his campaign manager replied
that no one would believe it, LBJ reportedly said, “I know, but let’s make the son of a bitch deny it.” MAGA is
making Talarico deny it.
‘Whether it’s true or not.’
What’s most distinctive about the smear, though, is how
superb an example it is of the postliberal right’s culture of unaccountability.
Morally, ethically, and legally, it’s the fruit of a movement that believes
there shouldn’t be—and won’t be—consequences for acting like scumbags toward a
political enemy.
Which is why, as Amacher’s claim about Talarico’s
whereabouts began to fall apart on Sunday night, numerous MAGA true believers
pivoted to arguing that the truth or falsity of the claim was … irrelevant.
“It genuinely doesn’t matter if it was a mental health
hospital or the flu. Bailing on the biggest job interview of your life by
disappearing for two weeks is damning enough all by itself,” Andrew
Kolvet insisted. But it does matter, of course: Mental illness speaks to a
candidate’s fitness for office while catching an infectious disease does not.
If being absent from the trail for nine days is disqualifying in and of itself,
regardless of the reason, why did so many on the right want to know the reason
for Talarico’s absence?
Kolvet is a spokesman for Turning Point USA and a
producer of the late Charlie Kirk’s radio show, incidentally. After what he and
his organization have been through over the last year, you would think he’d
be more sensitive to political smears.
But at least he tried to salvage some sort of legitimate
scandal from this mess. Others resorted to arguing that it was fine to have
cast suspicion on Talarico because, well, just because. “Thanks for breaking
the story,” right-wing commentator Grant Cardone told Amacher during a
livestream on X, per the Times. “Whether it’s true or not, people deserve
to see the potential of this.” Whether it’s true or not? What
“potential” does the story have if there’s not actually a story?
In the same livestream, Dispatch contributor Jesse
Singal pressed Amacher about the steps he took to make sure that his
allegations about Talarico were accurate. Did he, for instance, consider the
possibility that a different person named James Talarico, by pure coincidence,
had been a patient at the Ohio facility? If so, what did he do to confirm that
that patient and the Democratic candidate in Texas were the same person?
I’m not a journalist, Amacher reportedly answered,
dismissing Singal’s concerns. “We’re not held to that same standard and I’m
surely not.”
We’re not? Who is “we,” exactly?
Let me take you back to the presidential campaign of
2004, when CBS News published a series of memos purportedly written in the early 1970s
questioning George W. Bush’s military service. The documents appeared to prove
that Bush, the son of a Republican bigshot, had received preferential treatment
from the Texas National Guard to keep him out of being drafted and serving in
Vietnam. Dan Rather aired the memos in a report on 60 Minutes II.
Some eagle-eyed viewers noticed that the documents’ font
and formatting resembled those created by modern word processing programs, not
old typewriters. The fledgling right-wing blogosphere picked up the claim and
ran with it, triggering a spontaneous crowdsourced effort to debunk the
documents.
As buzz grew about a possible hoax, Rather sought out the
secretary of the National Guard officer who supposedly authored them, hoping
she would verify them. She told him she thought they reflected the officer’s
thinking but said she hadn’t typed them and believed they were forgeries,
leading to an immortal Times headline that remains an in-joke among
old-school bloggers to this day (right, Jonah?): “FAKE BUT ACCURATE.”
Within two weeks, CBS News was forced to admit that it
couldn’t authenticate the material and apologized for having put it on the air.
To conservative fans of new media, it was a watershed moment. So-called
“citizen journalists” had done the fact-checking work that the sloppy, biased
liberal mainstream media had refused to do. A new age of democratized
accountability in politics had dawned, empowered by the internet and intrepid
bloggers out to prove that anyone with a bit of brains and a keyboard could do the
job that exalted, overpaid professional reporters do.
Two decades later, right-wing online media is the least
trustworthy source of news in the United States.
Instead of embracing the label “citizen journalist,”
figures like Amacher now disclaim it to avoid being held to the ethical
standards of actual journalists. (What’s the point of new media if not to
rashly ventilate claims that real reporters are too responsible to publish,
right?) The most memorable example of Republican-aligned media debunking
anything during the Trump era was when it tried to debunk the legitimacy of Joe
Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. The most memorable example this year was The
Blaze accusing a former Capitol Police officer of having planted bombs
outside Republican and Democratic headquarters on January 5, 2021, based partly
on, uh, “gait analysis.”
Both efforts ended up in court.
“Fake but accurate” has become the de facto ethos of
right-wing commentators, not an in-joke among them. And it comes from the top:
That was essentially J.D. Vance’s response in 2024 to criticism that he had
smeared Haitian migrants in Ohio by accusing them of capturing and eating their
neighbors’ pets. “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn
out to be false,” Vance ultimately conceded—before
rattling off a series of other complaints about Haitian immigration. The pet
story wasn’t true, you see, but insofar as it underscored the point that
“Haitians are bad,” it told a larger truth. Fake but accurate.
That same year, in a column about yet another stupid,
baseless MAGA smear campaign, I wrote that
“Indifference to the truth, not stupidity or malice, is the hallmark of the
propagandist.” That’s what the Talarico lie boils down to. Amacher, Sortor,
Kolvet, Cardone, and all the rest may or may not earnestly believe that the
Democrat was institutionalized, but I suspect indifference describes what they
feel about the matter more aptly than anything else. Accusing Talarico of
having had a mental break was politically useful. It served a purpose. Whether
or not it’s true is neither here nor there, a non sequitur.
Conditioning.
It takes a lot of conditioning for a political
movement to arrive at a point where it feels morally indifferent to falsely
accusing someone of something embarrassing; ethically indifferent to supplying
accurate information to its own supporters; and legally indifferent to the
potential defamatory and criminal consequences. But the modern right has had a
lot of conditioning.
Trump has taught them that you can never
be too ruthless to an enemy, that the “truth” can be whatever you want it
to be if you insist on it vehemently enough, and that his followers will be spared from criminal punishment when they act in service to
him. The Bulwark noted in its story that federal privacy
laws prohibit trying to obtain another person’s medical information and impose
extra penalties if it’s done under false pretenses, all of which Amacher appears
to be guilty of, but so what? It’s not like Todd Blanche’s Justice
Department is going to prosecute him.
He might even end up requesting a pardon from the
president to protect him from being charged by the next administration, and if
he does I expect he’ll get it. A woman got punched at Trump’s rally last night
for protesting him, and he made fun of her as she was dragged out: By his moral
standards, rewarding a toady with criminal impunity as thanks for smearing a
Democrat would be the smallest of small potatoes.
If I’m right that the right’s amorality is downstream of
postliberalism’s culture of unaccountability, the solution is to find ways to
hold it accountable. An obvious one is more defamation lawsuits, which neither
Trump nor Blanche have any power over. (Per The Bulwark, both The
Blaze and Britain’s Daily Mail passed on Amacher’s scoop, presumably
because of the potential civil liability.) The Ohio mental facility might try
suing Amacher for trying to trick it into supplying private medical information
about Talarico.
Or, better yet, a respected defender of the First
Amendment like the Foundation
for Individual Rights and Expression might expand its legal practice to
include working with defamation plaintiffs pursuing meritorious claims against
political smear merchants. It will do the long-term cause of free speech no
good if the public comes to regard it as a license for malicious libel by
America’s biggest chuds.
America won’t have a better right until it has a more
accountable right, and with two years left for Trump and J.D. Vance on deck, a
more accountable right remains years away. But there’s no time like the present
to start pushing it in a better direction.
