Talarico the Texas Trickster

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

 

It has come time, once again, for the political press to work itself into a tizzy over a political candidate in the Lone Star State. There was Wendy Davis. There was Beto O’Rourke. And now it is the turn of James Talarico, of Round Rock, Texas, to become the Could-he-really-do-it? candidate for the latest slate of elections. Talarico, we are informed by the bien-pensant class, is set to overperform in November, because, as a white, polite Christian man, he is precisely what Texas’s long-suffering voters have been waiting for lo these many years.

 

Factually, there are a number of problems with this narrative, and chief among them is that Talarico is not, in fact, a moderate, unless “moderate” is now a synonym for “white man.” Certainly, Talarico is that. But, unlike most white men — indeed, unlike most people of both sexes and all colors — he is one of those peculiar self-loathing types that one meets only on college campuses, in television greenrooms, and within the unsecured political asylum that is social media. In 2020 — prior even to the death of George Floyd — Talarico was insisting:

 

White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go—through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms—like a white hood or a Confederate flag—to be contagious.

 

Mercifully, there is not one American in ten thousand who talks like this, or who has ever talked like this. In Texas, that number is lower still. Such sentiments are bizarre and indicative of a polluted mind. The sorts of figures who say such things are also the sorts of figures who used the term “Latinx” (Talarico does, naturally), who elevated Anthony Fauci into the role of secular saint (Talarico did), and who got so sucked into the trans mania that, when asked to name something they loved “that’s not family or friends,” they reflexively replied “trans children” (yes, you’ve guessed it: that’s Talarico again). Our Founding Fathers regarded the Senate as a check against “the impulse of sudden and violent passions.” Alas, James Talarico is yet to discover a passion that he can resist. He is a follower, a maniac, a votary — and nothing is too extreme for him to glom onto.

 

As for his Christianity? Well. It is true that no party or faction has a monopoly on the Gospel, but it might be a touch more reassuring to Texas’s devout if Talarico could find one area in which what Jesus wants differs from what he, personally, hopes to achieve in the Senate. Among the policies that Talarico has insisted that are biblically mandatory are abortion on demand, sex-change operations for minors, gay marriage, the abolition of prisons, and de facto open borders. Typically, these views are expressed in the most absurdly sophistic terms possible. God is “non-binary,” he explains, because He is “beyond gender.” Abortion ought to be legal, he proposes, because Mary elected to have Jesus rather than to kill him in her womb. Christianity, he suggests, is just one of many religions that reveal “the same truth.” Talarico’s apologists seem convinced that the mere fact of his being a Christian will be sufficient to make inroads with the faithful. This, as ever, is a misunderstanding of how political affiliations really work.

 

Which is to say that Talarico’s boosters are making the same blunder as has been made over and over and over again during the last few decades. Just as Republicans have often fallen into the trap of believing that to nominate an African American or Hispanic is automatically to make inroads with African Americans or with Hispanics, so the Democrats are falsely ascribing their poor reputation among white men, the working class, and the religious to the superficial appearance of their emissaries, rather than to their policies. Voters in Texas are no different from voters anywhere else: They have earnest beliefs about taxes and education and foreign affairs and abortion and firearms and God and the environment, and, so far as is possible within our system, they want their representatives to share those earnest beliefs. If he so wishes, Talarico can offer up specious theological arguments about the nature of God, but if those arguments are delivered as an overture to a pitch that includes support for infanticide and for men in women’s bathrooms, and opposition to school choice and to the Second Amendment, they ought to fall on deaf ears.

 

Politics is a funny game, and, given the right set of circumstances, anything can happen — yes, even in Texas. But, whatever the environment may be, there is never a good reason for observers to decline to see what is before their eyes: James Talarico has picked up a mantle that does not belong to him. If he persists in the endeavor, Texans ought to make like Sportin’ Life in Gershwin’s immortal Porgy and Bess and conclude that his polished and cynical claims “ain’t necessarily so.”