This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
One of my obsessions over the last few years has been the role of attention in modern American politics: the way attention is a fundamental currency, the way it works differently than it did at other times when it was controlled by newspaper editorial boards. So I’ve been particularly interested in politicians who seem native to this attentional era, who seem to have figured something out.
We’ve talked a lot about how the Trump administration uses attention, how Zohran Mamdani uses attention. But somebody who has been breaking through over the past year in a very interesting way is James Talarico, a state representative from Texas.
Talarico is a little bit unusual for a Democrat. He’s a very forthright Christian politician. He roots his politics very fundamentally in a way you don’t often hear from Democrats in his faith.
Archival clip of James Talarico: Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.
But Talarico began emerging as somebody who was breaking through on TikTok, Instagram and viral videos where he would talk about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools, as a bill had proposed:
Archival clip of Talarico: This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it’s not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian.
And the ways in which the Bible’s emphasis on helping the poor and the needy had been perverted by those who wanted to use religion as a tool of power and even greed:
Archival clip of Talarico: Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves, Christian nationalism kills.
What was really surprising to many people is that he ended up on Joe Rogan’s podcast — the first significant Democrat that Rogan seemed interested in, in a very long time.
Archival clip of Joe Rogan: You need to run for president. [Laughter]. Because we need someone who’s actually a good person.
Now Talarico is running for Senate in Texas. He’s running in a primary with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for what will be one of the most important Senate elections in the country.
So I wanted to have Talarico on the show to talk to him about his faith, his politics and the way those two have come together in this attentional moment to allow him to say things in a language and within a framework that people seem to really want to hear, that people seem hungry for: a language of morality, and even of faith, at a time of incredible cruelty. And at a time when the radicalism of faith seems to have been perverted by the corruption of politics.
Ezra Klein: James Talarico, welcome to the show.
James Talarico: Thanks for having me.
So I wanted to start with your faith, because your politics is so rooted in your faith.
For you, what is the root or the experience of your belief? Is it learned for you? Is it embodied? Cerebral? Is it something you’ve always had? Or something you had to struggle to find?
All the above. [Chuckles.] So my granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, in Corpus Christi and in Laredo, where my mom grew up. When I was real little, he told me that Christianity is a simple religion — not an easy religion, he would always clarify, but a simple religion — because Jesus gave us these two Commandments: To love God, our source, and to love our neighbors.
And so those two Commandments have really guided my life at its best moments, and it’s why I’m in public service. I was a public-school teacher, and now I’m a public official. That’s “loving my neighbor.” And it’s why I’m a seminary student studying to become a minister one day — that’s the “loving God” part. And both of them sustain each other, challenge each other, reinforce each other on a daily basis.
But you just slipped into how you live your faith, not what it is for you.
Yeah.
Has belief come easily to you?
Part of being a seminary student is studying Hebrew and Greek, so you can actually read Scripture in its original language. And one of the mind-blowing things that happened to me my first year of seminary is I was studying this word “faith.” In many translations, it is “belief” — the idea of believing in a concept or an idea — which makes sense in English, Western, translations.
But it can also be translated as “trust,” which to me is much more experiential: Trusting that love is going to get you through the hour, through the day, through your life. That love is going to carry all of us forward. That love will ultimately prevail, even when it’s temporarily defeated.
To me, that’s what my faith feels like. It feels like trust. Almost like when I learned how to swim at our neighborhood pool, and I remember my swim teacher telling me: Don’t fight the water. Let the water carry you.
There’s so much temptation in our lives to control our surroundings and control other people, and I think the opposite of that control is faith — that kind of trust, letting the universe hold you up — and not fighting it. That’s what it feels like for me, again, when I’m most faithful.
It’s a struggle on a daily basis to feel that trust and not to fight the water.
Was it always there for you, or did you have a period as a college atheist reading Chris Hitchens?
[Chuckles.] I was really lucky that I grew up in an incredible church community. I didn’t grow up with my granddad as my pastor. I grew up in a Presbyterian Church, actually, in Round Rock, Texas: St. Andrew’s. Shout-out to our church!
And our pastor, Dr. Jim Rigby, married my parents. He baptized me when I was 2 years old. He’s a unique religious leader and thinker. He got in trouble a lot when I was in elementary school: He was ordaining gay and lesbian clergy. He was blessing same-sex unions, which now doesn’t seem controversial ——
Well, in some traditions it certainly is.
That’s true. But I think it’s hard to remember just how controversial universally it was, how radical and dangerous it was. We almost lost our church because of those actions by our minister and our congregation, and the national Presbyterian Church put him on trial. And so these early memories were kind of seared into my brain.
So I was brought up in a very countercultural faith that didn’t sound like everything I heard at school or at work or in the media. I feel like I was given a really healthy tradition and one that has worked for me, partly because Dr. Jim, my pastor, always said that religion shouldn’t lead to itself — religion should lead you deeper into your own life. To me, that is such a gift that you can give a young person.
Can you say more about what that means to you?
Yes. I’ll just speak about my tradition. The genius of Christianity — the miracle of Christianity — is not the claim that Jesus is God. It’s that God is Jesus, meaning that Jesus helps us understand the mystery. A mystery can’t help us understand Jesus. So this idea that ultimate reality, the ground of our being, the cosmos, however you want to define God, somehow looks like this humble, compassionate, barefoot rabbi in the first century, someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority — that, to me, is such a revolutionary idea, and it leads you to challenge organized religion.
The Gospel just inherently tries to break out of some of these religious dogmas and orthodoxies and challenges religion itself.
I’ve heard you talk in different clips and interviews about the difference between a living religion and a dead religion. Is this what you’re talking about when you describe that? This difference between a religion that has been absorbed into structures of power that now is itself a structure of power, versus one that is still challenging the ways of this world?
Yes, the separation of church and state — I was taught that constitutional boundary was sacred, not for the benefit of the state, although there are benefits to our democracy, but for the benefit of the church. Because when religion gets too cozy with power, we lose our prophetic voice, our ability to see beyond the current systems, the current era.
One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is in the Sermon on the Mount. I encourage everyone to go back and read it, especially as Christianity is more and more in our political conversation. Go back and read Christianity 101, which is the Sermon on the Mount.
It’s interesting because Jesus takes his followers not into a church, not into a business, not into a governmental building. He brings people to a hillside, and he says: Look at the birds of the air. Look at the lilies of the field. This is how we’re supposed to live. This is who we truly are.
That is revolutionary. It is radical in the true meaning of that word, going to the root of all of our lives and our problems and our dreams. And to me, that is the spirit of our tradition of breaking these chains, of breaking out of these systems.
The word “church” in Greek means: to be called out of our culture, called out of our economy, called out of our political system. That is what religion at its best does. It’s what I was given. I was given that kind of religion just because I happened to be growing up across the street from this incredible church.
How do you think about the competing claims of different religions? Do you believe Christianity to be more true than other religions? Do you believe there to be exclusivity in these beliefs, that they’re incompatible with each other?
I believe Christianity points to the truth. I also think other religions of love point to the same truth. I think of different religious traditions as different languages. So you and I could sit here and debate what to call this cup, and you could call it “cup” in English, and you could call it something else in Spanish and French, but we are all talking about the same reality.
I believe Jesus Christ reveals that reality to us. But I also think that other traditions reveal that reality in their own ways, with their own symbol structures. And I’ve learned more about my tradition by learning more about Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam and Judaism.
I see these beautiful faith traditions as circling the same truth about the universe, about the cosmos. And that truth is inherently a mystery.
I think the most destructive thing is when religion becomes an end in and of itself. That’s when religion implodes.
My pastor always told me growing up that religious symbols are like aspirin: In order to work, they have to dissolve. They point beyond themselves. If you get lost in the symbols, if you get lost in the words, you’re missing the reality that we’re all trying to describe and talk about.
What is your relationship to prayer?
Prayer is essential for me. I start out every morning in prayer. Sometimes it’s silent prayer, which to me is probably the most helpful. Oftentimes, those are just prayers of gratitude that God woke me up this morning, that I have health, that I have my family, that I have my friends, that I get to do a job I really care about, making an impact. That gratitude, to me, checks the worst parts of myself every morning.
Then, almost every morning, I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer aloud, and that’s a different experience. It’s much more of a ritual. But rituals are also a gift because it’s a rhythm that you’re getting back in touch with, a prayer that has been said for 2,000 years in our tradition. That prayer, in particular, reminds me of the work that we have in front of us. Because religion without works, faith without works, is dead.
When does prayer feel real to you, and when does it feel false?
Well, sometimes, a ritual — sometimes you’re not ready to feel it. But part of the ritual, whether it’s the Lord’s Prayer, whether it’s Communion on a Sunday, is to get you into that mode even when you’re not feeling it.
I’ve been thinking about prayer in my own life recently, and I’ve been reading “On Prayer,” this book by Abraham Joshua Heschel. He writes:
Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?
I like that a lot. I’ve been trying to think about: When does prayer feel real, and when does it feel false? Understanding prayer as a kind of admission of gratitude and wonder has been a little bit closer to something that I could touch.
Yes. One of my favorite books of all time is “The Sabbath” by Rabbi Heschel.
Yes, one of mine, too.
And to me, prayer is almost like the Sabbath breaking in throughout the week. And in that book, he describes that throughout the week, we’re all concerned about our status and our jobs and our to-do lists. And the Sabbath is when you — I think he describes it as: glimpsing eternity.
To me, that’s a little bit of what prayer is, for a few minutes in the morning or throughout the day: It is trying to touch eternity even as you’re trapped in a finite world.
So prayer is an act, and it seems to me that the way you have described your faith, as a faith of acts, that the question of whether or not you are living in religion is not about what you believe but about what you do.
Well, and that’s what we’re taught as Christians. Matthew 25 tells us exactly how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger, by visiting the prisoner. Nothing about being a Christian, nothing about going to church, nothing about saying the Lord’s Prayer, nothing about reading the Bible — just helping others. Just loving.
I mean, it’s remarkable when you go back and read that passage. But they need each other. Prayer needs action, and action needs prayer. And I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what I’m saying, because you can be out there doing the work, but if you’re not connected to something deeper, you’re going to burn out really fast.
When I said earlier that the love of God and the love of neighbors sustain each other, they are in relationship. They are united. The entire mystery of incarnation is the divine and the human being brought together into one union.
So I listened to you when you did your “Joe Rogan” appearance, and you offered there a very, very progressive form of Christianity.
Archival clip of “The Joe Rogan Show”:
Rogan: What do you think is the biblical evidence to support the opinion of being pro-abortion?
Talarico: So before God comes over Mary and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary’s consent, which is remarkable. Go back and read this in Luke. The angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do, and she says: If it is God’s will, let it be done. Let it be. Let it happen.
So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create. Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings, but that has to be done with consent. It has to be done with freedom. And to me, that is absolutely consistent with the ministry and life and death of Jesus.
You’re not just emphasizing in your politics different aspects of your faith, but you’re very much challenging quite widespread interpretations of it.
Again, I think that’s what we’re called to do as Christians. Almost every debate Jesus is in is with the religious authorities of his time, directly challenging orthodoxy. Jesus was a religious reformer. Paul was a religious reformer. And so I think when we’re at our best as Christians, we are challenging religious dogmas and religious supremacy.
But I also try to come at this with humility. On the issue of abortion, I’ve said before, I don’t know what Jesus thought about abortion. The Bible doesn’t tell us. The Bible doesn’t mention abortion at all. And so, as with many issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible, we have to take Scripture, and we’ve got to try to piece together what we think is what love demands of us on a particular policy question.
And you’re right: For the past 50 years in this country, the religious right, a political movement, convinced a lot of Christians in America that the two most important issues were abortion and homosexuality — two issues that aren’t really discussed in Scripture. Abortion is never mentioned. Consensual same-sex relationships are never mentioned.
It’s remarkable to me that you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues that Jesus never talked about. And so I’m not saying they’re not important — I actually think both of those issues are very important. But to focus on those two things instead of feeding the hungry and healing the sick and welcoming the stranger — three things we’re told to do ad nauseam in Scripture — to me, is just mind-blowing.
How do you understand that? I’m Jewish, but when I read the New Testament, I always come away a little bit amazed that politicized Christianity is so worried about gender and sexuality, and so unconcerned with greed.
You’re preaching to the choir. [Laughs.] Absolutely. Concern for the poor, concern for the oppressed, is everywhere. Economic justice is mentioned 3,000 times in our Scriptures, both the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures. This is such a core part of our tradition, and it’s nowhere to be seen in Christian nationalism or on the religious right.
And the Bible is all over the place when it comes to marriage. Paul tells us not to get married, and you certainly see many different kinds of marriages throughout Scripture. The same with gender. Paul says that in Christ, there is neither male nor female, which is pretty woke for the first century.
Again, it’s because religion is being used to control people and accumulate power and wealth for those at the top. This is a tale as old as time, and it is not unique to Christianity. Powerful people will always see religion as a tool to make more money and to keep people in line.
For those unfamiliar with the term, what is “Christian nationalism”?
You can define it a lot of different ways. I define it as the worship of power in the name of Christ. I define it that way because I want us to see it as part of a very long tradition.
How do they define it? “They” being the people who would self-identify with it.
I would think they would define it as wanting a Christian nation. But again, these politicians want a Christian nation — unless it means providing health care to the sick or funding food assistance for the hungry or raising the minimum wage for the poor. It seems like they want to base our laws on the Bible until they read the words of Jesus: Welcome the stranger, liberate the oppressed, put away your sword, sell all your possessions, and give the money to the poor.
I mean, I’m not exactly sure a Christian nation is really what these people want. Again, I believe the separation of church and state is sacred. I think a nation with one supreme religion is not just un-American, I also think it’s un-Christian, given how Jesus taught about religious supremacy. But I do think if these people are going to call for a Christian nation, they need to reach for all of it.
I’ve fought the bill to require the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom. And I’ve often wondered, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don’t they post “Money is the root of all evil” in every boardroom? Why don’t they post “Do not judge” in every courtroom? Why don’t they post “Turn the other cheek” in the halls of the Pentagon? Or “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven” on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?
This is the inconsistency I’m trying to call out, because they’re using my tradition — they’re speaking for me — and so I think I have a special moral responsibility to combat Christian nationalism wherever I see it.
One thing I appreciate about President Trump is he doesn’t pretend that his politics are built on piety. That’s not his style. But the vice president, JD Vance, does suggest that his politics are built around a Christian ethic. And I want to play a clip of him for you.
Archival clip of JD Vance: As an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
What did you think when you heard Vance say that?
That’s not the gospel. And I don’t think I’m saying this as a Democrat. I think I’m saying this as a fellow believer. JD Vance and I are part of the body of Christ together, and I think this is antithetical to the Gospel.
The Gospel is all about prioritizing those on the outside, those who are least lovable, and that’s what’s so revolutionary about it. There are some strange passages in the New Testament, and one of them is when Jesus tells his followers that they have to hate their mother and father. I don’t think Jesus was speaking literally — I don’t know, but I don’t think so — because I think we should love our moms and dads. I love mine. The Ten Commandments require us to, and Jesus was a devout Jew from the day he was born until the day he died.
But I think he’s using shocking language to teach us something, that our little loves for our parents, for our friends, for our children, for our neighborhood — really important, crucial, beautiful, profound loves — can sometimes get in the way of the big love — the love for the stranger, the love for the outcast, the love for the foreigner. And I should add love for our enemies — the hardest love to achieve.
And so what JD Vance is describing is the culture that we already live in, that’s the world. And we Christians are called to see beyond the world, and that’s to a divine love, a godlike love. Because as Scripture says: “The rains and the sun fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.” God loves all of us, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how good or how bad we are. And we as Christians are called to have that divine agape love for every person equally.
And that’s hard to do. I fail at it. I love my family more than I love other families. I’m guilty of that. I think we all are. But the gospel is pushing us to move beyond that and to have the same love for a child on the other side of the world that we have for our child. It’s almost impossible to do that, but it is what we are called to do.
I think as somebody who is outside Christianity, and as such, is always a little bit astonished by the radicalism of the text and the strangeness of it — God incarnated in a human being, that human being is tortured and murdered and rises again as a lesson in mercy and forgiveness and transcendence. There’s all manner of violence I’m doing to the story there. And the structure of the New Testament, to me, is: Jesus goes to one outcast member of society after another.
Then I look up into this administration, in particular, and I see people who are incredibly loud in their Christianity and also incredibly cruel in their politics. Put aside the question of what borders you think a nation must have — you can enforce that border in all manner of ways without treating people who are coming here to escape violence or to better their family’s life cruelly.
You can do it without the memes we see them make on social media of a cartoon immigrant weeping as she’s being deported. Of the A.S.M.R. video of migrants shackled to one another, dragging their chains, with the implication being that the sound of that should soothe you.
It is the ability to insist on your allegiance to such a radical religion, and then treat other human beings with such, genuinely, to me, unmitigated cruelty that I actually find hard, at a soul level, to reconcile.
Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people. That’s in John 1. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God.
The Commandment to love God and love thy neighbor is not from Christianity — it is from Judaism. And all Jesus is clarifying, as a kind of radical rabbi, is that your neighbor is the person you love the least.
The parable of the good Samaritan may be the most famous of Jesus’ parables. I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was. Because today, being a good Samaritan just means helping people to the side of the road — which is good, you should do that. But for listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group. The Samaritans were their sworn enemies.
And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define “neighbor” and who we’re supposed to love.
Loving our enemies? Again, it has become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that. None of us actually loves our enemies, even if we say we try to. So yes, I share the same revulsion: that Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process.
Let me try to get at maybe the appeal of some of this form of Christianized politics.
Society alters very fast — what it looks like today versus what it looked like when I was growing up, before I had a personal computer, to say nothing of the internet. And one thing I see people looking for in religion and in religious politics — I see it particularly on the right with the re-embrace of Catholicism and even Greek Orthodoxy — is that people want something to hold on to when everything around them feels like it is changing. And what I see you offering to some degree is a religion and a set of answers that are still changing.
After you were on Joe Rogan, the conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey published a long rebuttal of your arguments and an argument against progressive Christianity, in general. And I want to play you a clip from it.
Archival clip of Allie Beth Stuckey: “Progressive Christian” is an oxymoron. It is actually a contradiction. It is like saying: “I want a flat waffle.” Well, a flat waffle is a pancake, because what makes a waffle a waffle are the ridges. In the same way, a progressive Christian is not a Christian because Christianity is not progressive. It is static. It is defined by a central fixed truth. This truth does not change. It doesn’t progress, it doesn’t evolve.
What do you think of that?
I think she’s partially right. If you read the Sermon on the Mount — again, I think Jesus should have a say in what Christianity means — in that sermon, he is the ultimate conservative and the ultimate progressive at the same time.
As all great teachers, he is breaking us out of the dualistic thinking that plagues us. He is rooting everything in his tradition, Judaism. Everything goes back to Moses and the Ten Commandments and the Torah — everything.
And he says: I’m not here to destroy the law. I’m here to fulfill the law. He’s connected to something that’s bigger than himself, but then he’s also pushing us to take those teachings to the next level, to go deeper into them.
The law tells you: “An eye for an eye”; I’m telling you: “Turn the other cheek.” Moses told you, “An eye for an eye,” because you weren’t ready to hear “Turn the other cheek.” “Eye for an eye” was meant to keep things from spiraling out of control. It was meant to have a balance of justice.
And then Jesus is going further in teaching nonviolence, which is consistent and growth and evolution. That’s the universe we live in. God created an evolving universe.
You can actually go back in the New Testament. The first word out of Jesus’ mouth is “change.” Some can call it “repent” or “turn around,” but “change” is the first thing he says in his public ministry.
I think both of these things can be true at the same time. We are rooted in something eternal, something that has existed since before time existed. And it is also always moving us forward, and we are always changing and evolving. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
Your campaign slogan is: “It’s time to start flipping tables.”
Yes.
What’s that in reference to?
It’s a story in the New Testament, of when Jesus walks into the temple — and I think it’s hard for us in our modern context to really understand an equivalent of the temple. You would think it’s a church or a synagogue or a mosque, but the temple was so much more than that. It was the center of not just religious power but economic power and political power.
And so this humble rabbi from the backwoods in the Galilee doesn’t just stay in his room and pray when his neighbors are being hurt. He walks into the seat of power, and he flips over the tables of the money changers, the tables of injustice. And it’s a profound act of protest, of civil disobedience. It’s ultimately what gets him killed by the Roman Empire.
And I and many others always think about Jesus being gentle and kind and soft — all those things he was. But he was also strong and tough and confrontational and aggressive when people were being hurt. And at least for me, and I think for this country, we have to remember that is what love demands of us sometimes.
So I wanted to center that story when we started the campaign, because this campaign was going to be about fighting back. The billionaires who own our algorithms, who own our cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens and keeping us all divided: This was going to be a campaign that was going to bring people together to stand up to those forces.
Who were the money changers?
We were talking earlier about religion being corrupted. The folks who were going to the temple sometimes had to make sacrifices — part of that ritual. And so the money changers were allowing them to participate in that temple economy, and in the process, getting rich off those people.
This is again partly why we are so focused on trying to keep these traditions sacred, because in this case, the money changers are profiting off people’s search for the sacred, and it’s what we’re called to challenge directly.
Let me ask you then a question about a term you use a lot that feels connected to this, which is the “rage economy.”
What is it to you?
I just mentioned the billionaires who own the algorithms and the news networks. They have created for-profit platforms with these predatory algorithms that divide us on an hourly, daily basis, dividing us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, and they elevate the most extreme voices very strategically to provoke our outrage, to provoke our anger, because that leads to more clicks, which leads to more money for them.
Because anger sells. Hate sells. Fear cells. These billionaires and their platforms are engineering our emotions so they can profit off our pain. They are selling us conflict, and they’re calling it connection. It’s almost like feeding someone empty calories, and I think it has left people starving for actual community, for real relationships.
Well, the thing you had said a minute ago about the money changers that made me want to jump to this question of the rage economy is that it is actually quite intimate. I think “sacred” would be going probably too far, but to go to a place searching for connection, to go to a place searching to be understood, which I think at its core is what social media was originally offering us, to go there and say: This is where your family is, this is where your friends are, this is where you can find people like you. For many of us, it was that for a time. It is not that now.
I thought it was amazing that in the F.T.C. case against Meta, it came out from Meta that on Instagram now, only 7 percent of the time people spend on Instagram — 7 percent — is spent on content offered by friends and family.
Yes.
And I notice this as I turn on Instagram. It’s much better at hooking my attention than it used to be, because the algorithm is better at finding things that might grab my emotions more than my friends and family are.
But I came looking for connection, and all of a sudden, I’m pissed. I’m confused. I’m being fed content about psychedelics from the 1970s. It’s not that all that is bad, but it is a perversion or an instrumentalization to profit off what was a very intimate impulse, to say nothing of to profit off my attention, which is my most intimate faculty.
And the business model depends on us leaving behind our real human relationships. The biggest competitor to these platforms, to Meta, is actually not TikTok. It’s not X. It’s not Snapchat. It is real human relationships. And that should be terrifying.
We have a whole economy now built on keeping us in our rooms, on our phones, for as many hours in the day as possible. And their competitors are churches and neighborhoods and pubs. It is the actual messy, complicated, beautiful human relationships that we require to live, and I think it’s something we don’t talk about enough.
We’re seeing the effects of it every day in our own lives and in the lives of people we love, but I don’t think we recognize how this is destroying us from the inside out.
What should we do about billionaires? You talk a lot about how they’re the source of the problem. What should we do about them? To use the question that goes around Twitter: Should billionaires exist?
I’ve been accused of demonizing billionaires, and I want to be really clear that’s not what I’m doing. In fact, I am trying to humanize billionaires, because I think the accumulation of more wealth than you could spend in a hundred lifetimes — Elon Musk is about to become the world’s first trillionaire — is not just bad for the world, is not just bad for our neighbors, is not just bad for Texans. It’s also bad for those billionaires.
I actually think the path that I’m laying out, which is going to include higher taxes on billionaires — depending on how much money you make, it may mean you’re not going to be a billionaire anymore — but I think a more just economy, where we grow together, kind of like the economy we had in the middle of the 20th century, I think, is actually good for all of us.
Should there be billionaires? I mean, you can imagine a structure of taxation that just says: Nobody needs to personally control more than a billion dollars. At the point that you have that, the taxation becomes fundamentally redistributive. Over that, you’re getting taxed at 95 percent.
And it’s complicated, because you have assets and incomes. I get all that. We can talk tax policy another time.
People in my email inbox, I’m not talking to you here.
Sure. And I’m not proposing a maximum income.
But I’m asking if you should.
No, I’m not. But what I do think is if you have tax rates on the richest people in the country, like we had in the 1950s and the 1960s, a lot of people are no longer going to be billionaires. And that is just going to be the result of a fairer economy.
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So that’s the result? So be it. But I’m not trying to put a ceiling on success. I’m a big believer in success. I want to be successful. I want my family to be successful. I want my neighborhood to be successful. So I’m not trying to demonize that kind of success.
You keep saying, though, that you’re not trying to demonize billionaires. In fact, what you’re doing is trying to humanize and be good for them.
I think it would be good for them.
Say more about what you mean, because what I keep hearing you say in your ads and in your speeches is that it’s the billionaires versus the rest of us.
Yes, I believe that.
So walk me through the distinction between not demonizing them, but also seeing them as the fundamental class enemy.
Well, because billionaires — it’s a chosen identity, unlike a lot of identities. If I said the problem was Christians or Jews or people of color or gay people, that’s a problem. But if I’m pointing out an identity that someone actively chooses and very much could not be, then to me, that is a fundamental distinction. And again, I think the result of the vision that I’m articulating is going to be good for those billionaires — or maybe former billionaires, depending on how much money they have.
What does it mean to be a good billionaire?
Franklin Roosevelt and Bobby Kennedy were trust-fund babies. They were some of the wealthiest people in the country. They used their wealth and their power to help other people, particularly working people, people who struggled to get by. And not just through philanthropy and through charity, but through changes in the structure of the economy itself.
What should we do about the rage economy? What should we do about kids spending two to five hours a day, oftentimes, on TikTok? I was the co-author of a bill that passed in Texas that banned cellphones in our public schools, particularly the smartphones. I’m also interested in some of the federal ideas about the liability of these companies and a regulatory framework. I’m interested in all that.
I’m also interested in how you allow for economic solutions, how you encourage the development of more humane platforms that I think could succeed — I really do. I think we’re going to look back in 100 years, and we’re going to see these as the rudimentary first versions of these platforms, kind of like how we see child labor and things like that. And we’re going to be like: We’re so glad we progressed beyond that. These feel so much better.
But here’s what I would just say: Those political solutions, those economic solutions, we should talk about them. We should pursue them vigorously. But at the core, this is a spiritual problem. It really is.
I mentioned earlier that the biggest competitor for these platforms is human relationships. You now have a closed system, almost, where the platforms, like Instagram, make you feel insecure, make you feel lonely, make you feel isolated, and then A.I. provides you the therapy to treat that loneliness and that isolation.
Or the simulacrum of friends ——
Yes.
Of lovers, of companions of different kinds. I mean, I found it a little chilling when Mark Zuckerberg was on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, and he said: Look, the average American has fewer than three friends. They want something like 15. But who’s got the time?
I’m paraphrasing, but not by much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he suggests, as many people do, that A.I. will fill that gap. And I think Meta, in particular, sees, given what their business is, that you can create these A.I. companions of different kinds.
Yes.
The problem with your friends and family is they’re not good enough at creating content you want to see, so what about if we create A.I. friends and family who are very good at creating content you want to see?
Exactly.
We do not know what it will mean and how it will change people to have these kinds of relationships with A.I., to say nothing of changing children who don’t know anything but a world where you have relationships with A.I.
Honestly, out of every part of this, I think this is the part that maybe scares me the most — altering our intuitions and expectations for human contact, having people being raised in an economy that is dehumanized.
Then also a social world, a digital social world, that is dehumanized, where you send in your job application, you’re interviewed by an A.I. — which is happening to people now. Or you come at the end of the day, and you want to tell somebody about your bad day at school, and you tell an A.I.
I mean, I don’t think we understand what that will do to people. I’m not even saying it will be bad. It’s just a hell of an experiment to run on human beings.
And the question you’re circling, that we’re all circling, is: What does it mean to be a human being?
Yes.
And that is not a question I’m going to be able to answer in a bill in the U.S. Senate.
[Laughs.] But a podcast!
Well, a podcast — yes, that’s where all the answers are.
Fundamentally, I feel like every podcast is asking that question if you go deep enough.
Actually, in all seriousness, I love podcasts because of that. Sometimes we can say that these technologies, these platforms, are all terrible, all toxic. But podcasts are one of the beautiful things that have come out of it. Also, if you spend time on TikTok, as much as it’s abusing your attention and addicting you, it’s also an opportunity to see just how hilarious and creative and beautiful human beings are all over the world.
I don’t mean to say that this technology can’t create something beautiful, too. I think we just have to understand the harm that it is inflicting.
I want to stay on where you just went. I have noticed that much of the best tech criticism comes from religious figures and communities. And one reason I think is because modern liberalism — neoliberalism, you might call it — I think has a lot of trouble with moral judgment. It is built on the interest of the consumer.
If you’re an adult and you’re making a decision that’s not hurting anybody else, who are we to tell you you’re doing something wrong? And I think it is a truck that the algorithmic media giants have driven their products through.
In religious communities, you still have more of a framework for talking about human flourishing that does not require a market justification, that does not need to prove that it will reduce your income in 10 years to say: This is not a good way for human beings to live.
So when you say the fundamental question of A.I. is: What does it mean to be a human being? — I think that’s right.
So I am curious what your intuitions about this are, as somebody running for a position of power, where you would have a hand on levers the rest of us don’t.
Such a good question. So yes, I agree with you. Economic answers aren’t going to get us there, but I also think political answers aren’t going to get us there. Because the question is not: Should the state intervene to stop you from doing something? That’s a whole different question.
I think our conservative friends, if they were sitting here, would remind us about the bloody history of governments trying to perfect the individual or trying to enforce moral ——
I’d say it’s our liberal friends who would remind us of that. But fair point.
Yes. But my point is, just in the question of how we’re framing it, economy and government — there’s a third dimension to our lives. It has weakened. It has atrophied over recent years. But we used to have robust communities where we wrestled with these spiritual questions: churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, meditation clubs, whatever you’re a part of — a community to deepen the spiritual dimension of our lives.
That is what we have to rebuild, especially as we enter this new era where figuring out what it means to be human, maintaining real human relationships outside of work and outside of politics, is going to be necessary if we’re going to survive this.
You mentioned: What can I do as a U.S. Senate candidate? I actually don’t think that’s the role. What can I do in my role as a seminarian, as someone who’s studying to become a minister one day, which is a goal of mine? That hat that I wear, which is related to the politician hat, to me, that’s where the solutions are going to come from.
I don’t want to take away from the importance of that, but that’s not going to come fast enough. It’s not. If your answer to: What are we going to do for kids and A.I.? is: We need to ——
Go back to church. [Chuckles.]
Rebuild civic and institutional and religious life — it’s hitting faster than that. I mean, that would be good. But my question is more along the lines of: Does believing that human beings should be formed by other human beings, which is something I believe, mean we should do something more like Australia, which just implemented its ban on social media for kids under 16? Just a flat ban, like: You’re off?
Yeah. Like I said, I’m all for those. In fact, I’ve already worked on those policies. If we pass that, I’m all for it. All I’m telling you is that the economic and political solutions are not sufficient.
I think one of the paradoxes of you is that you have such a searing and, I think, morally righteous critique of this algorithmic rage economy. And you are an absolute victor of it.
I’m a money changer. Yeah. [Laughs.]
I’m not calling you a money changer. But you’re on “Rogan” because you are very good at these viral videos.
When I was going through your clips, a lot of them do have the structure of: Conservative idea or conservative person stands up, and James Talarico delivers a stirring sermon about why what they’re doing is un-Christian or immoral.
I think a lot of the liberals clicking the heart on that are feeling self-righteous and may be right, but may be smug. How do you think about your participation in this world?
Sometimes I think my team and I feel like Luke Skywalker infiltrating the Death Star to destroy it.
Sorry to keep bringing everything back to Scripture, but I think it’s because we started with a conversation about faith — Jesus tells his disciples something really weird. He says to have the heart of a dove and the mind of a serpent. Dr. King would later reinterpret this for the members of his movement as: Tough minds, tender hearts.
The idea is that if you’re going to change the world, if you’re going to challenge the powers that be, you’ve got to be smart and strategic to do it. And it’s not something we should be ashamed of.
I think I have some of the brightest young minds in Texas politics on our team, which is a real joy and a privilege. And I think we have figured out how to use these platforms against the platforms themselves.
So yes, we are building things that can reach as many people as possible. Because if no one hears a message, it doesn’t really matter. And we are learning what these algorithms like, what these platforms promote, and we’re using that against them.
What is it that you would say you figured out? If you’re giving a presentation to other Democrats who are maybe less attentionally skilled or have come from another generation — maybe they’re not TikTok native in the way you might be — what have you learned about attention? How would you describe the fundamental equation of attention at the heart of your efforts?
I would say my two simple rules for political connection — because that’s what we’re really talking about: How do you connect with people? And politics is connection — all the way down.
The way that I think about political connections, the two rules I have are “Be yourself” and “Tell the truth.” I think if you do those two things, you can stand out and get attention. I think especially young people, my fellow millennials, but also Gen Z, are looking for moral authenticity in this moment.
And that’s going to look different. For me, given who I am and how I was raised and my life, faith is at the center.
I’m honest about that, even when it bothers people in my own party, which it does a lot. I can’t tell you how many emails or messages I get with people telling me to stop all the religious talk because it makes them uncomfortable. I get that, and I try to be as sensitive as I can be to the religious trauma in this country. And I understand where people are coming from when they feel that way.
But it is who I am. I can’t be anybody else. And so I think showing up as the person you are and then saying something real, saying something honest about the world — that is refreshing to people in this moment. And so I think when I look at all the videos that get all these views and all this engagement, the videos that do that the most are when I’m being myself and saying something true.
I think you’re sanding the edges off this. [Laughs.]
OK. Tell me. Yeah, I’d love to hear.
It’s also about how the things that work online generate an immediate emotional reaction in the audience. These online quick videos you’re seeing on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube shorts — there’s not that much time for plot. You can’t weave in slowly. It is about creating an instant sensation. And I think that there is often a dimension of conflict.
My implicit equation of attention is: Curiosity plus conflict equals attention.
People have to be curious about what you’re talking about, and there has to be the energy that, only in politics, some amount of conflict — like one side versus the other side — unleashes. It doesn’t always have to be Republican and Democrat. It can be billionaires versus the rest of us. But I think usually there is a dimension of somebody versus something.
I don’t know if you and I are saying different things, though. Because isn’t that telling the truth? Isn’t when you pretend like there isn’t conflict ——
Well, some forms of truth work better than others is maybe what I’m saying.
I guess my point is I’ve actually seen some of our videos about policy, and some of our explainer videos do the best. I think there is a hunger to understand what’s happening.
I agree with that, too.
But if you pretend that policy is being created or needs to exist in the world without the conflict that is the context, then you’re not being honest with people. You’re not shooting straight.
You mentioned earlier that people want to be moved. Don’t we want politics that moves people? In fact, I see the major problem, at least in my party, is politics that doesn’t move anyone or moves them in unhealthy directions. Because you can move people toward anger, or you can move people toward hope.
We have had a politics that moves people toward anger and toward fear and toward division and hate. We’ve had that for 10 years on both sides of the aisle. I think the reason that I’m getting traction on these platforms, the reason I’m standing out, is because I’m moving us toward hope.
Tell me the difference there, on the Democratic side. I think that people would expect what you’d say about the Republican side. What does the Democratic politics that moves people, in your view, unproductively, toward anger look like? What has that been, when you say it has existed? And what is the version that moves people toward hope? What is that distinction you’re drawing?
Well, I think we have to recognize the asymmetry between the two sides of our political discourse. And I don’t mean parties, but I mean people who are a little more conservative, they want to hold on to what we have, or maybe backward — “regressive” is a better term for that. There are also those who are a little more progressive, and they want to move us forward. Those are two different jobs.
Trying to get us to move backward requires certain appeals. Getting us to move forward requires certain appeals. I think the mistake too many Democrats have made is adopting the tactics that work for the regressive side of our discourse, the Trumpian side of our conversation. And that’s things like fear and hate and anger. That’s what gets someone to look backward and think: We’ve got to go back to what was.
But to move someone forward, you’ve got to inspire, you’ve got to excite, and you’ve got to cultivate a little bit of hope. Because that’s the only thing that will get you to move forward.
One division it sounds to me like you’re tracking in the Democratic conversation right now is how much Democratic politics is about Donald Trump — the opposition to Donald Trump and to his administration.
There’s a lot of — I think much of it merited among Democrats — anger, fear. I’m not going to go so far as to say hate, but I’ve certainly heard some hate in my conversations with people.
But also, the Trump administration is in power, and they are doing things, as we’ve discussed already, that are cruel or outrageous or corrupt. And something that I hear Democrats debating a lot among themselves is: How much should Democratic politics be about Donald Trump and the opposition to him, or how much should it be about an alternative vision? Both because there can be a tension between allowing Donald Trump to set the terms of everything and describing something different, and because some of the voters Democrats need to win — certainly if you’re a Senate candidate in Texas — are voters who do not hate Donald Trump, are voters who voted for Donald Trump, voted for Greg Abbott and his busing of migrants all across the country.
How do you think about that question?
I should say: Some of those Trump voters are in my family.
Many are in mine.
Many of them are my constituents. I first got elected to the legislature when I was 28 years old. Had never run for office before. I was a former teacher, and I was running in a district that had voted for Donald Trump two years before I ran.
At the same time that I won, Greg Abbott won my district in 2018. So there was a large chunk of voters — in fact, the voters who made the difference in the election — who voted for Greg Abbott for governor and for me for state representative. And being comfortable with that contradiction. I mean, that’s the messy world of politics and human decision making.
If we are going to defeat Trumpism, the culture that gives rise to someone like Donald Trump, it’s going to require putting forward a new vision of what a different kind of politics would look like.
What is the antithesis of Trumpism? What does that politics look like? What does the country look like with that kind of politics?
What does it look like?
I think that people are really tired of being pitted against their neighbors. They’re tired of being told to hate their neighbors. It’s been 10 years of this Trumpian politics, again, sometimes on both sides of the aisle.
And I think people are ready for a politics of love — a love not just for the state of Texas or for this country, but a love for our neighbors. A radical love. Especially for our neighbors who are the most different from us. That kind of politics, I think, could transform this country.
If we actually treated all of our neighbors as bearers of the image of the divine, how would our discourse look? How would our public policies look? To me, that is the primary question that we should all be asking.
And I don’t know, because again, this kind of politics is not what we’ve had, but I do think people are searching for it.
Have you ever seen a politics of love in the real world?
Oh, of course. First, I think we should define what we mean by love, because I’m not talking about a sentimental feeling. I believe love is a force as real as gravity. The force that drew elements together in the Big Bang, the force that drew life from those primordial oceans, the love that drew you and me to this exact moment in this exact conversation.
You can call that the Logos, you can call it the Christ mystery. You can call it God. In fact, our Scriptures say that God is love, and love to me is the most powerful thing in the universe. It is not weak, it is not neutral, it is not passive. It doesn’t paper over disagreement. It sometimes provokes conflict in order to heal conflict.
I mean, I think back through American history. I think about labor organizers. I think about civil rights marchers. I think about farm workers. I think about the politics that made the New Deal possible. Not saying there isn’t criticism on policy grounds, but the coalition that came together during the New Deal era, during the Great Society era, the coalition that came together to pass the Affordable Care Act — to me, we can glimpse the politics of love there because that was about building a big enough coalition to transform the country. And it included people who didn’t agree on everything, but it was people who agreed on some of the big things.
And I don’t mean to look at history with rose-colored glasses. There are problems in all these things, but I’m talking about a general thrust, a general direction of what a politics of union would look like, over and above a politics of division.
So let me try to pick at what I think is the weak spot of this.
Sure.
Which is that for Democrats, for liberals, the politics of love that includes the person without health insurance, the immigrant family, the gay or lesbian or trans teen, is actually not usually, in this era, a stretch. That’s actually an intuitive politics for them.
But what Trump has very effectively weaponized is the belief many Americans have that the only Americans Democrats don’t love are Americans like them. Americans who have views that are different than those that are usually voiced on this show. Americans with a Christianity much more traditional than yours, who are uncomfortable with what our society is or has become or might one day become.
What is your politics of love for them? Not for the people Democrats easily align with, but actually the people they now understand as maybe not their neighbor, as maybe their enemy. The people who, when you see these polls about how Democrats are more likely to cut off a family member for political views than Republicans are. Those people.
It’s not the gospel unless it includes love for our enemies. And again, as I said earlier, it’s the hardest love to fulfill in our lives, but it is absolutely necessary if we’re going to save this American experiment. If we’re going to save the experiment in self-governance all over the world, can we have a love for those we disagree with?
I’ve been able to cultivate that in my life — again, not perfectly. I oftentimes will feel anger or start to feel hate for some of my colleagues in the Texas legislature. But at my best, I’m able to maintain a bond of love with them even as we’re fighting, even as we’re disagreeing, even as we’re debating, even as I’m standing up to some of their most extreme policy proposals. I still see them as my siblings, as an expression of the same love.
That to me is such a fundamental difference from the politics that we have now.
You are not the first person running for office to sit in front of me and tell me about a politics of love.
Good.
But the question I always ask, and the question many people like that run aground on, is: What does that actually demand of you?
Because it can just be an inspiring way to say what every other politician is also already doing. So where does it push you into something different?
I’ll just tell you one quick story. My colleague James Frank represents Wichita Falls in North Texas. He’s a Freedom Caucus member and one of the most conservative members of the House. James and I started a stupid friendship based on sharing the same first name. We joked about it and talked about how we were the James Caucus, and he was chair, I was vice chair — whatever.
But then that led to us having some more real conversations, and we started to figure out that he and I are both really dissatisfied with this two-party system. We are both frustrated by how hard it is to challenge orthodoxies in your own party and the pressure to conform within a political party.
And so I convinced James to co-author my bill — a Bernie Sanders idea, actually — in the Texas legislature to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada into Texas. James risked a lot to work on that bill. We got it passed in the House, in the Senate and signed by the governor. It is now law. We are working on our application as a state to the F.D.A. to start importing those cheaper prescription drugs. So that’s an example of how love changed someone else.
But then James had a bill that would have allowed home-schooled kids to participate in something called U.I.L., which in Texas is basically our sports league, our extracurriculars, the arts — and you know how serious Texans take our high school football — “Friday Night Lights.”
Every Democrat was opposed to it. And I was opposed to it because I’m like: Public education is not a buffet table. You can’t come in and take the sports or take the music, the band, and leave behind everything else and not participate in the community.
James sat down with me, because we had a relationship, we had trust, we had love for one another, and he said: When we talk about immigration, you always say we shouldn’t punish children for the decisions their parents make — and suddenly it dawned on me that I was morally inconsistent here, that for these home-schooled kids, this may be the only opportunity they have to interact with kids of their own age and to participate in a community like that.
So I ended up crossing party lines. I got a lot of heat from the education groups and my colleagues. I voted for that bill. It passed. I then got to meet some of the kids who participated in the program. It was life-changing for them.
We can talk about countless examples of that, where not only has a Republican done something risky, but I’ve done something risky in return because we’re both out on that ledge of love.
I think something that your success and the way what you’re saying breaks through suggests that people are actually hungry for more moral leadership, including from political leaders.
Yes.
The sense that our politics became managerial and technocratic and “sanitized,” to use this word in another sense, has been demoralizing to people. I think this question: What is the purpose of all this? — it’s salient to politics, as well.
And one thing I think that has been true is that we drafted in our society for a long time off the fact that we had so many other healthy institutions and a more communal sense of who we were that infused our politics with purpose, without anybody having to necessarily reach that hard. That’s not to take away from the incredible moral fights that had to be waged, but when I go back and I read old political tracts, how close the language of morality and spirituality and civic life is to people on all sides of debates is really noticeable.
We don’t talk like that anymore. We’re trying to prove everything on a chart, and I love a good chart.
Sure. Me, too.
But it is a difference.
Yes. We were talking earlier about how politics doesn’t move people anymore. You read “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, you read Lincoln’s speeches, you listen to Fannie Lou Hamer, you read Martin Luther King Jr. — I mean, they infused their politics with a moral foundation, oftentimes explicitly rooted in faith.
That changes the game, because your politics should grow out of that morality. There’s a sequence here. And I feel like what we’re suffering from now is that people start with their politics and then try to figure out the morality on top of that. When should it be reversed? Who are we as human beings? Where do we come from? Why are we here? How should we live? The politics should grow out of that. I mean, that’s why I’m in politics.
I really do feel like this is a way that I can love my neighbor at scale: through good public policy, reducing the cost of prescription drugs, reducing the cost of child care, the cost of housing. All the things I’ve worked on in the legislature, it was to love my neighbor, make their lives easier and better, help them become who they’re supposed to be to give the gift that they’re supposed to give.
If we can infuse our politics with more of this spirituality, I think we could treat politics like a sacrament. We could have an incarnational politics because, like I said ——
What does that mean?
If you take it seriously — and again, you don’t have to be a Christian, you don’t even have to be part of an organized religion. I do think that everyone is religious.
That’s bold. That’s a bold claim.
That’s my hot take here.
What do you mean by that?
I think we all put our trust in something. You were talking earlier about whether Donald Trump was religious, and I think I disagreed with you because Donald Trump does put his trust in money and in power and in status, and a lot of us do.
I said he wasn’t pious. He doesn’t attend his —
Well, he’s pious. He’s very faithful to that religion.
I mean, yeah, you could look at the Oval Office as quite a shrine to his money at the moment.
You’re joking — you’re kind of joking.
I’m not joking.
And I mean, that’s exactly right. So my point is we all put our faith in something. I choose to put my faith in love, which sometimes the evidence suggests is not going to work. Sometimes love is defeated, sometimes love experiences setbacks, but the trust is that it will one day win. And that’s what my tradition is all about.
But my point is, even if you’re not formally religious, if you do believe that each person is sacred, that each person is holy, that each person bears the divine image, that should fundamentally change how we engage in politics, how we treat our neighbors, and how we treat our enemies.
To me, an incarnational politics would take seriously the idea that every person is God.
The biggest concern I hear about you in Texas is that you’re sort of a liberal’s idea of what a Christian politician should be.
Yeah. OK.
In the primary, you had an opponent, Terry Virts. He has since dropped out, but he ran an attack ad about you, and I want to play it here.
Archival clip of Terry Virts ad:
Talarico Clip 1: Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.
Talarico Clip 2: God is nonbinary. I find this to be a deeply offensive bill.
Voice-over: James Talarico is talking about the bill that would ban biological men from playing in women’s sports. Remember this ad?
Voice-over from archival clip: Biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they/them.
Voice-over: The same ads will be played by Ken Paxton. The result will be: U.S. Senator Ken Paxton. James Talarico owes it to us to tell us how he’s going to answer these attack ads.
So how are you going to answer those attack ads?
Man, the music was real scary.
Yeah, your voice sounds a little distorted to me there. It didn’t quite sound like you.
But those are clips of things you said, and the idea is to say you are out of step. You can talk about love all you want. But the idea is to say you’re out of step with Texans, and they’re not going to feel loved by someone they feel doesn’t agree with them.
I think most Texans have seen the extremism in the Texas legislature. Instead of allowing local sports officials and school district officials to make decisions about whether trans athletes can play in a certain sport if it maintains fairness and safety, which I think is what we all want — some common sense rules about when it’s appropriate, when it’s not — the Republican legislature passed a bill that would ban it in every instance across every age group, even T-ball, before kids even hit puberty.
Because their goal was not to solve a problem. Their goal was to score political points off the backs of a vulnerable community, which is a classic tactic in the politics of division.
I’m here to have that conversation about how we maintain safety and fairness in sports when it comes to trans athletes. And there are going to be rules where sometimes it’s not allowed. That’s actually how you solve a public policy problem with love for trans folks but also for our athletes, who need a fair shot at competition.
So what I was doing was speaking out against that kind of extremism because it wasn’t actually trying to solve a problem.
Outside of that issue, I think my track record in Texas is pretty clear. I won a district that no one thought was winnable. I have done this before, building a coalition that includes new voters and includes voters from the other side of the aisle, which is the only way to win in Texas, doing both of those things.
You’re also a politician in a border state.
Yes.
And I think immigration, and particularly illegal immigration, presents one of the hardest tests of how to match these values to a nation’s needs.
I don’t think there’s anything clearer in either the Old Testament or the New Testament than the love and generosity you’re supposed to have for the stranger, for the migrant. I often think that the virtue that you see the most in the Old Testament that we barely ever talk about now is hospitality.
Yes.
The amount of: Well, we welcomed him into the tent, and we washed his feet.
And I think there’s a way in which you could read the ideals of many religions to say: We should not have borders. These are all our neighbors. There is no stranger.
And of course, nations don’t work that way.
There’s been, over the last four or five years, certainly in the Biden era, a tremendous amount of in-migration and much of it illegal or much of it people coming and claiming asylum in huge numbers. This led to a tremendous amount of anger, and it has now led to a tremendous amount of cruelty.
So how do you balance the different forces, moral imperatives, national and state needs, the things you hear from your neighbors, in your politics?
Well, I’m very proud to be from a border state. I’m an eighth-generation Texan, so my family has been in our state since it was Mexico.
My family is from South Texas. My mom grew up in Laredo, right there on the U.S.–Mexico border. She got her braces in Mexico because it was cheaper. In border communities, crossing back and forth on a daily basis is not unusual. So we just understand this intimately in Texas.
I think both parties have failed us on this issue, and we need to be very honest about that. The Biden administration’s failures on our southern border — I remember talking to my Southern colleagues, telling me about the utter chaos in their communities because of some of those policies. That is what opened the door to the extremism we’re currently seeing on this issue from the other side. Masked men in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off our streets, tearing parents from their children, waiting in school pickup lines, lurking in hospital waiting rooms.
You said this was a hard issue. Here’s my other hot take: I actually don’t think this is that hard, because I think most Texans are in the same place here. They are pro-immigrant, and they are pro-public safety — both righteous moral positions to hold, and both consistent with our traditions.
So here’s the simple analogy that I’ve used: I think our southern border should be like our front porch. There should be a giant welcome mat out front and a lock on the door, because I’m hospitable. Texas is the friendly state. If you look up our state motto, it’s “Friendship.” The word “Texas” comes from a Native American word for “friend.”
That’s what makes Texas such a remarkable place. We’re this big mash-up of all these different cultures and people and ideas. It’s made us one of the most exciting and innovative states in the country. And Scripture tells us to welcome the stranger because we were once strangers.
You wouldn’t be having a guy with the last name Talarico on your show if this weren’t a nation of immigrants. Everyone has that in their story, in their family, and we people understand that immigrants are coming here to build a better life, to contribute to our economy, to make us richer and stronger. We want them here. We want to make it easier for them to come here.
But anyone who means to do us harm needs to be kept out. Anyone who does the U.S. harm needs to be deported immediately. Public safety is the most important thing a government does.
I don’t think most people would find that to be enough, though. To say that we should be welcoming of immigrants, except when there’s a threat to public safety, I think that for most people, that would not be enough. That isn’t a limiting principle that keeps you from feeling overwhelmed, certainly from what I’m told by people, and I come from a border state.
Well, I think I’m against chaos. And I think what most Texans are upset about in our immigration system is the chaos they see, particularly on our southern border. I think most people around the world like where they live, as much as I love America, a lot of people love their homes.
But if someone wants to come and fill one of the 8 million jobs that need to be filled, if they want to do the work that none of us want to do — I heard from an avocado farmer in California who said in 20 years of business, he never had an American citizen apply to work there. Not one.
So if you want to come to pick our fruit, if you want to pack our meat, if you want to pave our highways and build our buildings, then we need your help. We are a growing country, and we have a growing economy, and immigrants are the fuel that keeps that fire burning.
But what people are seeing and what people are upset about is the fact that we have no idea who some of these people streaming in over the border are and what they mean to do. And I just think most Americans can’t wrap their head around why it is that we can’t have an orderly process that keeps everybody safe, both native-born Americans and migrants and immigrants. Hiring more immigration judges, relieving the visa backlog, reforming our asylum system — all of these things are ways that we could create a system that welcomes the stranger and keeps us all safe at the same time.
For some reason, Americans and Texans, they look at one party — our party — as pro-immigrant and anti-security. Then they throw us out. They get Donald Trump and his party. It is pro-security, anti-immigrant, and they hate that, too. So most people want us to hold both of these values at the same time, and I think it’s actually really possible.
Texans threw Democrats out a fair amount of time ago. What is it to you that so many Texans don’t like about Democrats? And what does the Democratic Party — the national party, not an individual candidate in Texas — have to do to be more appealing to Texans? Or to make Texans who have given up on it or felt rejected by it feel seen?
I’m not an expert on the national Democratic Party, but I will say, just from my observations being in a red state, someone who flipped a Trump district and was able to build this kind of coalition: Our national party is pretty condescending to people.
Here’s an example. You always hear this, especially if you are out on the coasts: Why do all these people vote against their material interests? You’ve heard that before, I’m sure. Such a condescending thing to say to somebody. It’s acting like they don’t know how to make decisions for their own lives, and they don’t know what they need.
People have many interests outside of material interests. There are some very wealthy Democrats who vote against their material interests on a regular basis. People have cultural interests, they have personal interests, they have spiritual interests. And the Democratic Party culturally, in many ways, has become hostile to some of these cultural values in red states and red communities — faith maybe being foremost among them.
Again, I don’t agree with everyone who shares my faith. I don’t agree with every member of the body of Christ, but I am part of that body, and we share something deeper than partisanship. We share something deeper than public policy. We share a commitment, a witness, a practice, a tradition, and that is an opportunity for connection.
People aren’t going to vote for me because of my faith. I don’t think they should vote for me because of my faith. But hopefully the faith we share can open a door. Then we can have conversations about other things.
And I don’t want people to overthink this. You don’t have to be a political scientist. Think about how you build relationships in your own life. That’s what you’re going to do in politics. The relationship between a candidate and a voter or a voter and a voter is just like any other relationship — it requires honesty, it requires respect, it requires humility, it requires listening, and sometimes it requires sacrifice. It sometimes requires that you buck the orthodoxy in your party or buck the position in your party to do what you think is right based on the arguments that the person has made.
So I would just advocate for our party to think about how to actually build real relationships at scale with people who aren’t with us yet. Not only will that, I think, lead to winning — and we have a moral imperative to win in a democracy. Because if you don’t win, you don’t get power. And if you don’t get power, you can’t make people’s lives better.
And I say that as a party, but I also think it will lead to a more fruitful, productive, beautiful kind of politics that this country deserves. And I’ve seen it work at a small scale in the district that I won in the House in Texas, but I also think it could work at scale statewide and maybe even nationwide.
I think that’s a nice place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
So I chose a fiction book, a political book and a religious book, just to make sure we cover all our bases.
For the fiction book, my favorite is “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry — maybe the most famous and beloved Texas classic. Texas has gotten a bad rap recently around the world for the extremism and corruption coming out of our government. But if you want to see what’s beautiful about our state, that spirit of friendship that I mentioned earlier, read “Lonesome Dove.” It captures the spirit of Texas better than a lot of other works of art, and it’s such a great book. You’ll have a blast reading it. Won’t be able to put it down.
My second book is my religious book, and it also has a Texas connection. It is “Jesus and the Disinherited” by Howard Thurman. We mentioned Dr. King on this show. Howard Thurman was his spiritual mentor, the theologian who started to chart that course long before Dr. King. And he wrote this book from a series of lectures in Austin, Texas, at Huston-Tillotson University, a historically Black college in Austin.
It’s a beautiful book. It’s not very long, but it really gets to the heart of who Jesus is, what he means in a political context and what Christian nonviolence looks like in the world. And I think it’s so instructive, even if we’re not necessarily fighting Jim Crow and we’re not in Thurman’s context, but I think all of us can learn something from the power and the effectiveness of that nonviolence rooted in a deep morality.
And then the last book is the political book, and it’s “The Upswing” by Robert Putnam and his co-author, Shaylyn Romney Garrett. And the book is all about how, throughout the 20th century, we as a country, as a culture, moved from individualism in the Gilded Age toward communitarianism, to working together to do big things as a community, and then how we fell back into individualism, which I think today is still the reigning culture in this country — certainly a civic culture.
It tracks it, it starts to explore answers for how we made that movement, and it puts together some ideas for how to get back to community. And I think it says a lot about the moment we’re in.
So I’d highly recommend all three of those books.
James Talarico, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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