Editors at National Review Online assess the Democratic nominee for Texas’ US Senate seat.
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).
