Talarico Is Back, But Is Still In Hiding

James Talarico went missing from his U.S. Senate campaign for nine days (or was it 13? — details vary). He recently returned, but so far, there’s been no satisfactory explanation as to where he was during the absence. His own existence isn’t all he’s been hiding, though. He’s also tried to scrub his radical views in an effort to fool voters.

With a little more than a month before voters decide if Democrat Talarico or Republican Ken Paxton represent Texas in the U.S. Senate, the former dropped from public view. The official word from his campaign is that he had the flu. That’s some flu to have felled a 37-year-old who appears healthy in a young girlish sort of way for that long. As HotAir’s Ed Morrissey says, “no one” at that age “gets bedridden for a fortnight with the flu” to the point that they can’t even sit through a short Zoom call.

“If you or I took two weeks off without any contact with our employer and claimed we were too sick to call, we’d be forced to bring a doctor’s note to save our jobs,” says Morrissey. Yet Talarico is getting by with an unexcused absence that the media seem to have no interest in.

While the rumors that Talarico had a mental health crisis are no more than that — just rumors, conjecture and speculation — the entire episode refuses to add up. “He had the flu” simply won’t fly.

Whatever the truth is, this event is perfectly in line with Talarico straining to remake himself as a moderate. Because that’s not who he is. He’s a fringe character, especially by Texas standards.

Talarico, reports Just the News, “has a record that looks very different from the outward-facing moderation he now shows voters.”

It’s obvious why the weaselly Texas state lawmaker has decided that his positions need to be modified for a wider electorate beyond the hard-left District 50 he represents in the Texas House. The outrageous matters that he wants to cover up, says Just the News, include:

• Voting against a bill that “banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on minors for gender transition,” which eventually passed the Texas House 87-56.
• Pledging “in writing at least twice … to support and sponsor the Equality Act if elected.” The act “would allow biological males into women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and other sex-segregated spaces.”
• Claiming there are six biological sexes.
• Insisting that “climate change, white supremacy, and capitalism” are “interconnected ‘oppressive systems'” that need to be “dismantled together.”
• Comparing “Texas oil-and-gas leadership to cassette tapes” and are “not gonna last.”

Other Talarico “greatest hits” of note:

• The vegan street cred he earned for himself in meat-eating Texas by boasting in 2022 that his campaign had “officially become a non-meat campaign … so we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.” 
• His loony observation that “white skin gives me and every white American immunity from” the “virus of racism. But we spread it wherever we go.” Talarico has even said, “prophetic voices like Jesus” — whom real Christians believe has a higher station than “prophet.” say, the son of God and savior — “have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego.”
• To his thinking, we’d all be better off in a “world without prisons” because “prison is violence.” A reasonable person reading that should wonder what he thinks the offenses that land criminals in prison are? Acts of love?
• The infantile suggestion that we should run “our world like we run a kindergarten classroom” because, after all, “at the end of the day, aren’t we all just really big kindergartners?”
• He also has a favorite drag queen, which has to be a first among the hundreds of thousands of candidates who’ve run for office in U.S. history.

Talarico has done his best to distance himself from his deranged past, even as it is the same as his present. Of course, if he’s elected, the real Talarico will reemerge. Even his own “pastor” has guaranteed “that once he gets elected, he’ll change his tune back to where he was.”

Talarico is living a lie, and he expects a majority of Texas voters to buy into his deception, which seeks to conceal more madness than we are able to list here. His face might be back in the open, but it’s not the real one. He’s hiding that version.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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