In the annals of Texas political mythology is the tale of a young Lyndon B. Johnson, so worried he was going to lose an election that he decided to start a rumor that his opponent enjoyed sexual relations with pigs.
His campaign manager was outraged, telling Johnson no one would believe such a bald-faced lie.
“I know,” Johnson replied, according to legend. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
Some six decades later, Republican activists returned to Johnson’s old bag of tricks in an effort to undermine Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, by falsely telling millions of people he was being treated at a mental health facility in Ohio.
Despite a generation of Republican dominance in Texas, Talarico is running ahead of Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general who is costing the party millions to hold a once-safe seat. Polls show Talarico, a Presbyterian pastor and Austin state representative, has so far proven impervious to Paxton’s attacks on his progressive record.
So while Talarico was off the campaign trail recovering from the flu, Paxton and his allies seized an opportunity and sowed a scandal. Paxton alleged that Talarico was having a mental breakdown, and right-wing influencers piled on, linking together unrelated non-events to deduce that he was being treated out of state. The story, largely based on speculation and red string, was echoed by White House officials and shared online millions of times.
Michelle Smith, a senior adviser to Paxton, said on social media Sunday that she was told by a friend that a doctor confirmed Talarico “has definitely been admitted to a mental institution.”
Paxton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about his or Smith’s claims.
Talarico was forced to deny that he’d been in mental health treatment — or had ever been to Ohio at all. The health care center confirmed he’d never been a patient. With the story still gaining traction, Talarico provided home security footage to the New York Times to further prove his whereabouts.
Competitive elections are known to get nasty. But the speed at which this conspiracy took hold and was laundered into the mainstream shows the power of social media influencers to shape political discourse through misinformation, especially when empowered by candidates themselves.
“We’ve entered into a time in politics where truth and reality don’t really seem to matter,” said Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies social media disinformation campaigns.
“Tala-freak-out”
The facts everyone agrees on: Talarico attended a campaign event near Dallas on Sept. 26 and fundraisers in New York City on Sept. 28 and 29. The next day, he made a virtual appearance at the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, saying he was too sick with the flu to attend in person.
“I guess I’ve been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail, and so I want to keep everybody safe,” he said at the virtual event. “If I was passing on this illness to somebody and got someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby sick, I couldn’t live with myself.”
But the longer Talarico stayed off the campaign trail, the more those shared facts began to fray.
On Oct. 7, Paxton released an ad saying Talarico had been missing for 11 days. (It had been seven days since the Hispanic Business Council event.) At a rally put on by President Donald Trump that night, Paxton started a chant of “Where is James Talarico?”
“Where do you think they hid that little socialist?” he asked the crowd.
An extended absence from the campaign trail in the home stretch is unusual, said Kirby Goidel, a political scientist at Texas A&M.
“It opens the door to speculation, and the world we live in means you can speculate in a very public way without a lot of friction,” he said. “You can spread misinformation pretty quickly and easily, especially among people who really want to believe it.”
The story Paxton and his supporters landed on was that Talarico was having a mental breakdown from the pressure of the campaign.
Paxton released multiple ads saying Talarico was “mentally fragile,” and posted on social media that he was “having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage.” Paxton set up a “Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line” for people to report on his whereabouts.
Sara Gonzales, a Blaze TV host and conservative social media influencer, posted that she had “unverified information on James Talarico’s whereabouts. If true, it will END his campaign.” Another influencer, who goes by the handle TickleTexts, said Talarico was “in a mental health facility after breaking down.” Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor, said “sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility.”
On Oct. 9, the erstwhile candidate reappeared at the Austin City Limits music festival, seemingly of sound mind and body. That could have been the end of it, a tidy Friday afternoon bow on a week of rank speculation.
But it was not.
“Whether it’s true or not”
Saturday morning, Caroline Wren, a prominent GOP fundraiser, posted about a private plane she claimed flew from Austin to Ohio and back the same day Talarico showed up at ACL. Ohio, she noted, was where Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo sought mental health treatment for seven weeks in 2023.
“So many coincidences!” she wrote on the post which has almost two million views.
Saturday night, a right-wing influencer named Rhein Amacher said he called the Lindner Center, identifying himself as Tim and purporting to be Talarico’s cousin. Amacher has said on social media that he was initially turned away because he didn’t have a patient identification code, but when he made up four numbers, the facility began confirming patient details.
In the 46-second audio clip, the woman on the other end of the line says that someone named James Talarico was “just discharged this evening.”
How could Talarico have been discharged from a hospital in Ohio Saturday evening and also be at ACL Friday afternoon? Why would an employee at a medical facility violate state and federal privacy laws to give out patient information? Those questions were left in the rearview mirror as some conservatives rushed to amplify the story.
Former Texas GOP chair Abraham George reposted the audio, saying it was “time for Talarico to step aside and focus on his mental health.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted about this over a dozen times in four days, saying in one post that “a Senate candidate with a history of disturbing behavior who suddenly disappears for two weeks has a lot of explaining to do.” Elon Musk claimed the “Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening,” and reposted another user’s post of the audio clip.
Talarico’s campaign repeatedly denied that he had any connection to this mental health facility. Sunday evening, the Lindner Center confirmed on social media that Talarico had never been treated at their facility.
Paxton himself never shared the audio, but Smith, his campaign adviser, amplified the false reports.
Mainstream Texas Republicans didn’t engage; Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows ignored it entirely. The handful of state representatives who did jump into the conversation came from the same far-right, extremely online corner of the party. Most reposted vague commentary or made general digs at Talarico’s mental health.
“If you’re a Texas voter who’s just now learning that James Talarico is a mentally unstable liar, you need to reevaluate your trusted news sources. And read your Bible,” State Rep. Brent Money, R-Greenville, posted on Sunday. “Even if Talarico has not been hiding in an in-patient mental health institution for almost 2 weeks, his public statements over his entire political career are evidence of his depravity.”
Money told The Texas Tribune he had no information about Talarico’s whereabouts, but that his “depraved mind is on full display when he fights [to] sterilize children and when he can name his favorite drag queen without a second’s hesitation.”
Goidel said he’s not surprised to see elected officials and prominent leaders amplifying unverified claims like these. There’s “virtually no penalty” to being wrong in politics these days, he said. But the cost to the rest of us is significant.
“It’s one thing to have political disagreement, but you don’t want a campaign decided on misinformation,” he said. “Not if you care about democracy, at least.”
During a discussion on X Sunday, Grant Cardone, a popular finance influencer, congratulated Amacher for surfacing the since-debunked story.
“Whether it’s true or not, people deserve to know the potential of this,” he said.
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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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