The attacks on James Talarico have not been subtle. In the weeks since the 37-year-old state representative won the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in Texas, Republicans have been describing him as “Low-T Talarico,” “James Talafreako,” and “Six-Gender Jimmy.” On May 28, the White House immigration czar Stephen Miller said on Fox News that it was “brave, courageous, that the Democratic Party would choose Texas, of all places, to nominate their first transgender Senate candidate.”
The Republicans have long marketed themselves as the manlier party, but the anti-Talarico blitzkrieg is both obviously coordinated and unusually overt. The overarching strategy here, as the Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel has previously pointed out, is to associate the entire left with being “weak and woke.” Not manly, in other words. Talarico’s aw-shucks niceness and youthful looks are reframed as the result of low testosterone, and his (admittedly mawkish and over-egged) statements of concern for gender-nonconforming children make him a “freak.” Worst of all, according to the Florida Republican Dan Weldon, Talarico looks as though he “couldn’t name a single obscure wide receiver from the early 2000s.” Supporters of the Republican candidate, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, portray Democrats as wusses, cucks, soy boys who don’t follow sports. One commentator mused about whether Talarico wears “frilly underwear.”
Mostly, the attacks on Talarico have taken the form of 99,999 dog whistles implying that he is gay. On Fox News, Jesse Watters laughingly observed that the Democrats had rebuffed rumors that Talarico is vegan by posting photos of him “swallowing large sticks of meat.” He added: “He’s also 37 and not married.” When the New York Post confirmed that Talarico’s girlfriend exists by revealing her identity, the attack line mutated—did you know that she’s vegan? Pretty gay.
[Elizabeth Bruenig: Texans will decide if Jesus was a lefty]
By the way, I recommend watching the clip of Watters and Miller in full, because Miller has the kind of natural comic gifts that usually persuade people to forsake a career in stand-up and become a funeral director instead. Watters underlines the pathos by providing what I can describe only as live-action canned laughter. And yet, Miller must have some sense of humor, because his (vegan) roast of Talarico concluded with the assertion that the people of Texas, “some of the toughest, roughest, strongest men and women” in America, would never vote for “somebody with that much soy to be a U.S. senator, compared to a real conservative, patriotic, God-fearing, and truly beloved statewide figure in Ken Paxton.”
Ken Paxton? Truly beloved? Now, that’s comedy. Ken Paxton is not even truly beloved in Ken Paxton’s own party. In 2023, his fellow Republicans in the state House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to impeach him over corruption allegations. (He was acquitted in the state Senate.)
Until a few days ago, the attorney general and his wife, Angela, were also heading toward a public trial in their contested divorce. Luckily for him, however, since his victory in the Republican primary—powered by Donald Trump’s endorsement—the “parties have jointly agreed that a trial setting is no longer necessary,” according to his lawyers. (We can only imagine how many zeroes are on the check that Mrs. Paxton seems destined to receive.) Other classic Paxton controversies include pen-rustling, a securities-fraud case that was dropped after he agreed to take an ethics class, and what Talarico has described as his opponent giving “Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles.” Days before winning the Republican nomination, Paxton allowed a man who acknowledged abusing a young boy to serve just 29 days in jail.
Because of the difficulty in making a positive case for Paxton, the obvious Republican strategy is to go negative on his opponent. Talarico’s public record from the “peak woke” era includes a trail of wince-inducing statements: God is “nonbinary.” There are not two sexes, but six—and therefore girls’ sports need not remain reserved for female athletes. In 2022, he ran what he called a “non-meat campaign” for the state legislature. America should treat its southern border like a front porch, with a “giant welcome mat out front.” (The Republican attack ad drawing together all of these statements omitted the end of the sentence, which was “and a lock on the door.”)
These comments were reckless and shortsighted. Some of us said at the time that politicians should use everyday language understood by most people, rather than push into new linguistic frontiers on behalf of progressive activists. If Talarico had said the word women when defending abortion rights in 2022, rather than “neighbors with a uterus,” everyone would have understood what he meant. His formulation sounded as though a uterus is something you can borrow, like a cup of sugar.
Tying together Talarico’s politics and personality, and deeming both to be weak and unmanly, is part of an attempt to turn all of Ken Paxton’s alleged vices into proof of his virility: Real men eat barbecue, pocket unattended stationery, and cheat on their wife. This ideal of masculinity is not a patriarch but a perpetual adolescent, endlessly irresponsible and endlessly indulged. (The archetype is also present on the left.)
In other circumstances, there would be no need for this full-court press against Talarico. Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024, and saw particularly big swings in border counties and among Hispanic voters. But the financial fallout from the Iran war and his endorsement of Paxton over the incumbent Senator John Cornyn have created the slimmest of chances for the Democrats, which Republicans intend to crush with maximum aggression. “We have not seen ugly yet,” Vinny Minchillo, a Texas Republican strategist, told my colleague Elaine Godfrey recently, adding that the plan was to paint Talarico as “the woke DEI candidate of all woke DEI candidates. And pound him, pound him, pound him.” (Sir, you’re supposed to be making the other side sound gay.)
Other reasons the attacks on Talarico are so ferocious are that he has sold himself as a seminarian and he has presumed to speak as a Christian. As a lifelong member of a notably progressive congregation, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Talarico’s inclusive, hippie-dippie, nonpatriarchal vision of religion is a threat to MAGA megachurches and their muscular, masculine religiosity. The influential conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, for example, described Talarico’s remarks on God’s lack of gender as “blasphemous,” and the commentator Ben Shapiro called him a “pretend Bible teacher.” The actor turned podcaster Michael Knowles said that the Democrat represented “the modern, weak, sappy version of that same awful replacement of Christianity that has destroyed our civilization” and that he was “satanically wrong.”
Talarico’s Jesus is meek and mild, a man of heart rather than ego. The MAGA Jesus is, well, very like Trump. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain said at a White House Easter lunch this year. “It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.” (White-Cain and her then-husband were once investigated by the Senate Finance Committee for allegedly spending church donations on a private jet. The panel made no formal findings.) The fight over Talarico’s masculinity is therefore also a fight over the nature of American Christianity. Would Jesus want us to turn the other cheek, like a girlie simp, or would he have owned the libs while gnawing on a steak?
Will this character assassination destroy Talarico’s candidacy before he can make his case to Texas voters? So far, the Democrat has landed some counterpunches. He embraced the “Talafreako” label and sells merch using the phrase. He has denied being vegan, claiming that he has been eating barbecue “since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.” He now says that “there are two sexes, men and women.” Overall, he has thrown his former self comprehensively under the bus, admitting that he “missed the mark” with comments that were “cringey.”
Yet for all of his ultraprogressive language, Talarico does not share the worst tic of “peak woke”: the kind of doctrinaire haughtiness that declares that not only are there six sexes, but anyone who disagrees must be shunned as a bigot. Like many non-Texans, I first encountered Talarico when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2025—an interview that culminated in Rogan, by then a swole, conservative man’s man, suggesting that “you need to run for president.” At a minimum, Talarico is prepared to argue his case and talk with those outside his own tribe. Paxton, meanwhile, has not debated an opponent onstage since 2014.
[Read: ‘We have not seen ugly yet’]
Nevertheless, if this race were a fight between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat, you’d bet on Texas staying red. One possible outcome is that Paxton wins, and the Republican establishment decides that calling its opponents effeminate is a winning strategy. MAGA influencers already love mocking Gavin Newsom for sitting cross-legged, which Newsom’s team shrugged off by posting an image of the California governor folded like a pretzel alongside the caption “Democracy requires flexibility.” Watters, the Fox News host, has already compiled a semi-satirical list of rules for real men: no straws, no soup in public, no male best friends. The broadcasters Megyn Kelly and Adam Carolla recently mocked the California billionaire Tom Steyer’s boast that he would “ride the D.” (Steyer, who is running for governor, was ostensibly talking about the new Los Angeles train line.)
But the Republicans’ macho chest-beating does raise a potential problem for them. The party underperforms with female voters, and many of the most senior roles in the Trump White House have undergone a remarkable gender transition: Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer have all been forced out and replaced by men. Female swing voters have televisions and read the news too, and they can see that the party does not respect them or value their support as much as it does men’s.
In Texas and elsewhere, the GOP has been saddled with a subpar candidate because no one can stand up to Trump. As Democrats are talking about high gas prices, Republicans are making an ever longer list of Things That Are Gay. This is a strategy born not of manly strength, but of submissive desperation.
The post Texas Republicans Are Desperate to Sound Manly appeared first on The Atlantic.
