What James Talarico Believes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

I have come to believe that James Talarico, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Texas, is generally sincere in his beliefs. I trust he won’t take that as a compliment.

 

Like most admirers of Donald Trump, like teachers who believe they are underpaid, like people who believe that the sun is a fiery chariot driven by Apollo, etc., Talarico sincerely believes things that are not true.

 

In contrast, I do not think that the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, sincerely believes that the Democratic Party is secretly a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, though she has trafficked in that kind of conspiracy kookery. Like most people close to Trump, Zacharia is fundamentally dishonest: For example, her main job before this was pretending to be a lawyer, which she isn’t, even though she calls herself one. But I think she sincerely believes … something.

 

Let me explain what I mean.

 

C.S. Lewis argued that most sin is rooted in some good impulse gone bad, and, if one were in a charitable mood, one might observe that this applies to conspiratorial thinking, too. It is rooted in a moral impulse that has been perverted. There are very few genuine nihilists in the world—even the Marquis de Sade was a closet humanitarian—and ordinary people have a powerful need to live in a world that makes moral sense to them. The moral sensibility, particularly when expressed as the sense of “fairness,” easily overpowers such lesser powers as critical thinking and the appreciation for facts and the context of facts. That creates a kind of continuum of morally charged fiction, with conspiracy theories fitting in somewhere between traditional supernatural mythology (the world is the way it is because the gods make it so) and all of those just-so non-facts that “everybody knows.”

 

The notion that public school teachers are underpaid, for example, is an unquestioned “fact” for many Americans, something “everybody knows.” Earlier in the week, I interviewed a Democratic candidate for public office who is an elementary school teacher, and the inevitable observation about teachers’ supposedly low pay came up. We have long had pretty good economic indicators that consistently show that teachers are not underpaid at all, that their total compensation is equal to or a bit better than other workers with similar educational backgrounds, skill levels, time in the workforce, hours worked, etc. That is why you do not see a lot of teachers leaving the public schools for better-paying jobs in the private sector: In fact, census data shows that public school teachers who leave for private sector jobs typically earn a bit less, while private sector workers who take jobs in the public schools generally earn a bit more than they had been.

 

Good schools are an excellent thing to have, but our public school system is far from uniformly excellent, and even the best bits of it are part of a vast patronage network that exists as a kind of supplementary welfare state for people who tend to be Democratic voters. The myth that teachers are underpaid is a useful fiction for the people who benefit from that patronage system and, more importantly, for those who control it—but that does not mean, necessarily, that they do not sincerely believe that teachers are underpaid. Most do believe it, and they will fight for the lie: Show them the economic evidence and they will retreat into metaphysics and the vague morality of fairness. It is true because it must be true for their world to be morally legible.

 

James Talarico’s belief that U.S. politics is dominated by shadowy billionaires is a fiction, too, one that is closer to a conspiracy theory but also one that has something in common both with those “everybody knows” facts as well as with the loopier aspects of his daft progressive Presbyterianism. He believes it—he also believes that he wants to be a senator, and he probably has convinced himself that his reasons for wanting that are moral and patriotic if not downright heroic. That surely is a pleasurable thing to believe, and beliefs that provide pleasure are hard to shake, which is one reason conspiracy theories are so common and persistent.

 

Talarico is wrong, of course. The notion that our public policy would look radically different if not for the efforts of a handful of plutocrats does not stand up to rigorous analysis and also has some common-sense challenges, including the fact that billionaires do not share a single set of political views (there are right-wing billionaires, left-wing billionaires, centrist billionaires, apolitical billionaires, etc.) among themselves, the fact that the political views of the wealthy are not very different on average from those of the less wealthy, etc. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, both high-income and low-income Americans generally support a higher minimum wage, to take one example, though support is stronger among the low-income. The views of the wealthy and the non-wealthy are generally similar when it comes to immigration, abortion, crime, etc. As Caplan reports, the preferences of the wealthy do override the preferences of the low-income in some areas where there is persistent income-correlated disagreement, the effect of which historically has been public policy that is moderately more liberal than the average American would like when it comes to issues such as free speech and gay rights. The average American, unfortunately, is a little bit of an authoritarian bigot. Americans did not elect Donald Trump twice because some nefarious rich guy put mind-control serum in their cornflakes—Americans like this stuff, and they reliably vote for it.  

 

Point out the reality of how money actually works in our politics and the conversation typically takes a markedly conspiratorial turn: “Well, yes, but what about this billionaire?” Take your issue—the deficit, fentanyl abuse, immigration, whatever—and somebody will have a “this billionaire” to blame for it. Sometimes, the two sides will settle on the same billionaire, or the same set of billionaires, as when both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggested that the Koch brothers were behind Washington’s lax immigration enforcement.

 

Talarico has hopped on the bandwagon opposing data centers, the supposed problems of which he blames on—surprise!—shadowy billionaires, “dark money” and all that sinister-sounding stuff. The thing is, we know a good deal about who owns data centers. The biggest operator of data centers in the world is Amazon Web Services, and while Jeff Bezos sometimes insists on acting like a sad ersatz Bond villain, there is no shadowy billionaire behind AWS.

 

Who is behind AWS? Teachers, among others.

 

Bezos owns a little more than 8 percent of Amazon, which is a publicly traded company whose shares are owned mainly by big institutional investors, many of which manage the generous retirement funds of those supposedly underpaid teachers. That’s true across the tech world: To take a prominent example, the California teachers’ retirement system is a substantial shareholder in Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta, among others. Through shareholder activism and ordinary business pressure, it exercises enormous influence over the operations of the firms in which it is invested and does so in a public way, for instance forcing Meta to adopt changes to its corporate governance. Ask Mark Zuckerberg how he enjoyed getting slapped around by the California teachers.

 

The most reliable antidote to the myth that billionaires control the government is watching one try. Do you really think that public policy in the United States today much reflects the preferences of Charles Koch or George Soros? (Or, somehow, both?) Or do you think that we have a gigantic debt problem because ordinary Americans childishly demand high levels of government spending and low taxes simultaneously?

 

If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes such as Katie Zacharia traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

 

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.