A Gay Vegan Pagan

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, May 28, 2026

 

“Ken Paxton may be a sociopath who belongs in prison, but at least he’s not a gay vegan pagan.”

 

Memorize that line and you can skip the next five months of Republican messaging in Texas’ suddenly important Senate race.

 

Democratic nominee James Talarico is neither gay nor vegan nor a pagan (or so he claims). But he does have certain cultural preferences that the state’s right-wing majority is destined to find alien, and now that the general election campaign is upon us, he’s scrambling to walk them back. On Wednesday, he went as far as to use the word “cringey” to describe some of the choicer soundbites of his that the GOP has begun featuring in attack ads.

 

“I know there are two sexes, men and women,” he clarified in an interview. If you’re starting off a general election campaign in Texas by reassuring voters that you agree that sex is binary, you’re the underdog.

 

Republicans have hit on another way to make Texas voters suspicious of Talarico. Less than 48 hours into the campaign, they’re all-in on trying to define him as not merely a phony Christian but a phony man.

 

Paxton teed them up in his victory speech following Tuesday’s Senate runoff, dubbing his opponent “Tofu Talarico,” “Six-gender Jimmy,” “James Tala-freako,” and “low-T Talarico.” (The “low-T” jab has also popped up in ads.) Trump manservant Stephen Miller dubbed the Democrat the first transgender Senate candidate nominated by his party, while podcaster Clay Travis surmised that Talarico must be gay based on his posture in a photo. Meanwhile, Fox News host Jesse Watters innocently wondered why we haven’t met Talarico’s girlfriend yet.

 

If you can get past the cynicism and demagoguery, this is unremarkable retail politics at work. A sure way to turn voters off of a candidate is to persuade them that he’s not “one of us,” and in this race—and this state—it seems especially likely to work. Not only has Talarico gift-wrapped a ton of culture-war material for the right to use against him, he’s facing a mostly Republican electorate that’s spent 10 years being ruthlessly conditioned to view all politics as litmus tests between “us” and “them.”

 

Not really Christian, not really straight, possibly not even really male: Talarico isn’t “us.”

 

What’s interesting to me about this pitch is that it accepts that the sociopath in the race who belongs in prison is “us,” or at least meaningfully more like the right-wing “us” than a dorky woke seminarian is.

 

And of course that’s true. The most popular man in the party, whose every utterance defines what it means to be Republican for most of his supporters, is a criminal sociopath himself. Say what you like about Ken Paxton, but no GOP nominee on the ballot this year will reflect the spirit of his party’s grassroots more faithfully than he does.

 

In fact, in a few ways, I think calling James Talarico a gay heretic is the correct strategy for the GOP in Texas.

 

Culture war.

 

For one thing, as I’ve said, it will probably succeed.

 

Not everyone agrees. “Flabbergasted that the GOP’s plan to save Paxton is to have him run a campaign focused solely on culture wars. Just ask Governors [Daniel] Cameron and [Winsome] Earle-Sears how well that worked out for them,” one skeptic scoffed. “You can’t just cede [the] cost of living to your opponent and still expect to win.”

 

You can’t do that in a blue state like Virginia, where Earle-Sears was obliterated in last year’s gubernatorial race. But you absolutely can do it in a state Trump won by 13 points in 2024.

 

The best argument I can come up with for why the Republican culture-war attack on Talarico might fail is that persuadable voters are unlikely to be persuaded by it. If you’re open to voting for him for whatever reason—the cost of living, disgust at Trump, righteous shame over Ken Paxton’s existence—a bunch of fratty chuds chanting “low T” will not deter you.

 

But the point of calling Talarico a gay vegan pagan isn’t to win over swing voters. It’s to persuade the Cornyn conservatives I wrote about yesterday to swallow their contempt for Paxton and show up for him in November. The GOP has the numbers to win in Texas; all it needs to do is turn out its base. “You’re not going to let a queer represent cowboy country, are you?” is more likely to do that than debating Talarico on affordability would.

 

Republicans couldn’t engage on that point even if they wanted to. What could they say after tariffs, a needless oil-supply disaster in the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump signaling at every opportunity that he doesn’t give a flip how much Americans suffer for his agenda? A campaign fought over the cost of living is one Talarico can win. A campaign that amounts to little more than “transvestigating” him is not.

 

The GOP’s culture-war attack on the Democrat also feels right in that it’s an honest expression of right-wing priorities. Trump’s movement assuredly does care more about tribal markers like religion and masculinity than it does about housing or gas prices.

 

I wrote about MAGA’s obsession with machismo a few weeks after the 2024 election, when the new president-elect began stocking his Cabinet with accused sex pests. That wasn’t a coincidence, I argued:

 

Because populists detest liberal norms, they’re attracted to figures who are prone to showing contempt for traditional norms in other spheres of life. That leads them to dishonorable people, and dishonorable people tend to behave dishonorably in multiple respects—including in how they navigate sex. The result is a sort of anti-character test: A man willing to flout law, morality, or professional ethics to get what he wants sexually is potential leadership material insofar as his behavior implies he’d do the same with official power to get what the right wants politically.

 

…

 

By definition, postliberalism can’t and won’t succeed in dismantling the liberal order without leadership that displays an unusually high tolerance for transgression. And so it selects for leaders who have demonstrated that tolerance in their private conduct—criminals, perverts, con men, predatory sociopaths of all stripes.

 

That’s how you end up with Ken Paxton, Republican Senate nominee. Forced to choose between a philandering lowlife and a genial “low T” grandpa like John Cornyn, the modern right was destined to instinctively gravitate toward the lowlife. Postliberals yearn to dominate their opponents, not just defeat them, and amoral “masculine” behavior suggests a propensity to dominate.

 

To the extent they feel any vestigial Christian guilt for preferring a character like Paxton on those grounds, their interest in attacking Talarico as gay and trans makes sense. It’s easier to rationalize supporting a flagrantly immoral candidate if you convince yourself that his opponent is just as immoral, if not more so.

 

Faith and works.

 

Still, the most interesting element of the race has to do with faith. For once, the Democrat on the ballot is the more ostentatiously religious of the two candidates. And right-wingers of various stripes are very keen to neutralize that advantage.

 

Some of the flak Talarico has taken is of his own “cringey” making, like his infamous observation that God is nonbinary. Charitably, we might understand the backlash to that among Christian conservatives as an earnest rebuke to a misstatement of their faith. Less charitably, we might see it as an attempt to jealously guard the right’s political co-optation of Christianity. (Among whites, anyway.) The idea that earnest Christians can be leftists is a dangerous one for Republicans, something they’ll typically concede only if they’re confronted about it directly.

 

That probably also helps explain the needling of Talarico for allegedly being gay or trans. It’s not just a matter of impugning his masculinity, it’s a way to implicitly challenge his claim to be the better Christian in the race. How sincere can his beliefs be if he’s engaged in “sexual deviancy,” a religious voter may wonder? He’s a fraud. He must be.

 

But let’s be real. Most of the umbrage being taken by the party of Donald “Two Corinthians” Trump at Talarico’s religious ignorance is plainly designed to answer the Democrat’s insuperable moral case against his opponent. Ken Paxton isn’t merely an “imperfect person” with “personal baggage,” as some Republicans will delicately and elliptically tell you. He’s a full-spectrum scumbag who was impeached by his own party for egregious corruption, as grossly unfit a candidate for the Senate as America has ever seen.

 

There is no answer to that argument. And so, rather than try to answer it, the GOP is settling on this: Paxton might be a sinner, but James Talarico is a heretic.

 

To the modern right, trained by its leader to valorize cultish devotion, being a heretic is the most loathsome thing one can be. Whereas being a sinner, even a really thorough one like Ken Paxton or Donald Trump, isn’t very troubling at all, provided that one’s devotion to the cause remains pure.

 

Trumpism is an anti-morality of faith, not works. You are judged not according to how you behave but by how you worship.

 

An electorate that’s been primed to think that way is primed to find Talarico more offensive than Paxton. The former has dubious views about elements of Christianity, whereas the latter merely behaves as though he’s completely unacquainted with Christian morals. The former has the nerve to denounce right-wing heresies against Christianity while the latter would surely vote to designate Trump God-emperor if given the chance in the Senate.

 

Faith, not works: To the Trumpist right, there’s no crime Ken Paxton could commit that would make him the greater of two evils relative to a man who holds the wrong beliefs. And if you doubt that, just be patient. I’m sure Paxton will prove my theory in the fullness of time.

 

When I was young and Catholic, I struggled with the sense that forgiveness in the faith was a little too easy. Any sin would be forgiven provided that the sinner repented sincerely, which was comforting—but not the strongest deterrent against sinning to begin with. If absolution is assured, a certain kind of person might sin eagerly in the belief that he or she can atone later.

 

You might find that silly (someone who sins eagerly is unlikely to repent sincerely, right?), but many nominal Christians have embraced a perverted variation of it as the price of belonging to Trump’s party. Ken Paxton is free to sin in the knowledge that forgiveness is assured even if he doesn’t repent, provided of course that he keeps the Trumpist faith. Whereas James Talarico, a heretic to that faith, can never atone for his “cringey” pronouncements about a nonbinary God even if he repents publicly and sincerely.

 

That’s what anti-morality looks like.

 

Things to come.

 

We’ll return to the Texas Senate race many times before November, I’m sure, but we should all bear in mind three things as we go forward.

 

One: Republicans will spend the next five months burbling that Paxton, while lamentably flawed, is nevertheless the lesser of two evils in this race. When they do, remember that the reason he defeated John Cornyn in the first place is because he was the greater of two evils in the primary. Postliberal Republicans didn’t choose him in spite of his degeneracy. They chose him because of it.

 

Do not let these nihilistic cretins posture now as moral, civic-minded citizens in rationalizing their support for Paxton in the general election. If they insist on making America a kakistocracy, the least they can do is acknowledge their bad intentions.

 

Two: Many an anti-anti-Trump conservative who rallies behind Paxton will soothe their conscience by affirming that they would have much preferred Cornyn as the party’s nominee. We shouldn’t blame them, you see, for the fact that the GOP ended up with such an obnoxious candidate.

 

This too is nonsense, and you already know why if you read yesterday’s newsletter. Postliberal Republicans wouldn’t take the chance of nominating scumbags like Paxton if they didn’t know, to a metaphysical certainty, that partisan conservative chumps will always contrive excuses to turn out for those scumbags in general elections. Reaganites could have taught them a lesson about that years ago by boycotting races in which the GOP nominee was manifestly unfit for office. Instead, they enabled this hostage crisis, with predictable results.

 

If conservatives preferred John Cornyn to a fascist-enabling miscreant, they should have seized their many opportunities to make the cost of nominating fascist-enabling miscreants prohibitive. They didn’t. “Ken Paxton, Senate nominee” is the fruit of anti-anti-Trumpism.

 

Three: There are sound conservative policy arguments against wanting James Talarico in the Senate. It makes the unconscionable prospect of court-packing more likely in 2029, for one thing (although I wonder if a Democrat from Texas would dare support that). And it certainly increases the probability of bad economic policy, assuming economic policy can get worse than it is now.

 

But there is no way around this: The most urgent priority in American governance, not just at this moment but in my lifetime, is checking Donald Trump’s monarchical pretensions before they grow more ambitious. And one cannot do that by continuing to elect Republicans.

 

We’ve spent the last 16 months watching the Senate under his party’s control reduce itself to a Duma. Conservatives who were willing to resist that trend have either been chased into retirement, like Mitt Romney, or removed, like Liz Cheney. All that’s left are candidates who will happily facilitate our transition into a third-world autocracy. And among those candidates, no one but no one will do so as happily as Ken Paxton.

 

I doubt Paxton would even deny it.

 

To vote Republican this fall in any congressional race, but especially Texas’ Senate race, is to vote for Trumpist tyranny. I cannot imagine observing the last year and a half in national politics and concluding that unified Republican control remains preferable to divided government, yet that’s what “reluctant” Paxton proponents are arguing—inexorably. It’s bad enough to conclude that the president’s party should be rewarded for doing nothing while he wrecks the American experiment, but much worse is concluding that it should be rewarded with a new senator from Texas after his own rotten authoritarian heart.

 

It’s one of the sickest political impulses I can imagine. If you want to know how little “conservatism” means or has ever meant to most of those who claim it, watch the votes roll in for Paxton this fall.