Fake But Accurate

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.