James Talarico Is a Bald-Faced Liar — Which Tells Us All We Need to Know About Modern Democrats

Everywhere else in American politics this year, the progressive movement has stopped pretending. The activists who spent a decade insisting a man could become a woman now say it to your face and dare you to object. The candidates who once smuggled their radicalism past voters in soft language have decided the soft language is no longer worth the trouble. The mask is off — nearly everywhere.

Then there is James Talarico. The Texas Democrats’ nominee for United States Senate, set to face Attorney General Ken Paxton in November, is doing the one thing the rest of his movement has abandoned. He is putting the mask back on, and he is doing it in real time, in front of us, with the cameras rolling. A Democrat has not won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s, and Talarico has evidently concluded that the only way to break that streak is to convince Texans he is not the man his own record says he is.

What we are watching is not a conversion. It is a costume change.

What He Said When He Thought It Played Well

Start with the trans debate that has dominated Texas politics. In a 2021 interview with an Austin Fox affiliate, Talarico waved away concern over biological males in girls’ sports as a Republican fever dream, accusing the governor of trafficking in “far-right conspiracy theories about trans children causing problems on sports teams, which we know does not occur in the state of Texas.”

On the floor of the Texas House, debating a bill to keep boys out of girls’ athletics, he reached for Scripture and announced that “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between,” while informing his colleagues that modern science recognizes not two biological sexes but six.

This was not a man caught off guard. It was a man preaching.

The same certainty governed everything else. In April 2022, addressing an animal-welfare group, Talarico declared that “it is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption” and proudly proclaimed that his campaign had “officially become a non-meat campaign” buying only vegan products — a daring pitch in the state that practically invented brisket.

And as recently as this March, with the Senate race already underway, he posted a video insisting that “you can’t call yourself a Christian and destroy God’s creation with greenhouse gasses.” For a seminarian, it was a tidy bit of theology: vote my way on energy policy, or forfeit your claim to the faith.

What He Says Now That Texas Is Listening

Then Paxton dispatched John Cornyn in the Republican runoff, the general election opened in earnest, and James Talarico discovered humility. Asked by the networks to account for the very statements he had once delivered with such relish, he allowed that some were “cringey” and confessed that he had “missed the mark.”

His campaign, meanwhile, suddenly wanted everyone to know the candidate is a devoted friend of Texas oil and gas, fully committed to an “all of the above” energy strategy. When the vegan footage resurfaced, his team answered not with conviction but with a photograph of the candidate gnawing a turkey leg, and Talarico himself went on a friendly podcast to insist he had been eating barbecue all along.

Notice what changed and what did not. The man did not change. The audience did. Every softening, every walk-back, every freshly minted love of fossil fuels and smoked meat arrived at the precise moment the people listening stopped being a progressive primary electorate and started being the voters of Texas.

Repackaging Is Not Repenting

Here is the tell, and it is the whole point. Talarico is not renouncing his beliefs. He is renouncing the optics. “Missed the mark” is the language of a man who knows a statement is indefensible but cannot bring himself to call it wrong — a phrase engineered to sound contrite while surrendering nothing.

He did not take back the six sexes. He did not retract the theology. In the very breath that he dismissed his old comments as cringey, he reaffirmed the most radical one, maintaining that God is beyond male and female and reaching for the Apostle Paul to sanctify it: in Christ, he reminded the room, there is neither male nor female.

That is not the testimony of a man who has rethought anything. It is the strategy of a man who has rethought his branding. The seminary enrollment, the talk of a barefoot rabbi flipping tables, the carefully scriptural cadence — none of it is evidence of conversion. It is set dressing. Same radical, new costume. The beliefs are intact; only the collar is new.

And that is exactly why the performance should sober us rather than amuse us. The most dangerous deception is never the obvious one. It is not the activist with blue hair shouting down a school board. The deceiver has always understood that the effective lie is the one dressed as the truth, the poison handed across in a communion cup.

And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.

A counterfeit gospel preached from a campaign stage is not politics as usual. It is spiritual wickedness wearing a collar, gender ideology baptized in borrowed Scripture and offered to believers trusting enough to mistake the costume for the man. Talarico is wagering that a divinity credential and a few well-chosen verses can accomplish what his record never could — persuading the Christians of Texas that a movement at war with God’s design is somehow its truest defender.

Refuse to Be Deceived

The answer to a counterfeit is not cynicism. It is discernment.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

Test the spirits. Read the record. Find out what a candidate believed when he was certain no one important was listening, because that is the moment a man tells the truth about himself. Pray for the discernment to tell the light from its imitation. Share what you have found so others can watch the same pattern take shape. And then do the one thing no rebrand can survive: show up. The antidote to a counterfeit is not despair but a wakeful, discerning church standing at the ballot box, refusing to be fooled by a man who is counting on precisely that.