This proves Morrissey’s Axiom of Politics and Dating: Desperation is not an aphrodisiac.
How does one identify “desperation”? The seizing of the race card by a lily-white mama’s boy who still hasn’t secured his party’s core demo to play as a non-sequitur against an experienced opponent would certainly qualify. James Talarico briefly emerged from a weird media oblivion this weekend to challenge Ken Paxton on race on social media, thanks to a weird John Cornyn tweet about another election altogether.
And Ken Paxton responded by stuffing the race card right back into Talarico’s face … wherever that went over the weekend.
Let’s start with Cornyn, who seems determined to play the dog in a dog-in-the-manger psychodrama that perhaps only interests Talarico at this point (via Twitchy):
This is the Republican nominee for statewide office. Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad. https://t.co/TO1dTXKd6G
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) September 13, 2026
Ahem. French is running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, not governor or AG. The railroad commission is a powerful office, as it controls regulatory activities for the energy industry in Texas, but it’s still an esoteric race where party affiliation matters more than individual personalities. French’s tweet, to the extent it can be deciphered, appears to be objecting to the number of Indian students graduating at UT this year, which is (a) a weird thing for a railroad commissioner to obsess about, and (b) clearly an artifact of focusing on one small group in a crowd that looks very different when checking the background. It’s not even clear that this was a picture from a commencement; it looks more like a reaction at a sporting event. (The community note has two pictures from the actual commencement that look very different, especially in spectator density.)
This was a stupid tweet by French, who should retract it. It’s not at all indicative of the Texas GOP, to which Cornyn belongs and claimed to represent until a hot second ago. French’s dumb tweet is not anyone else’s responsibility but French’s. Cornyn must have a lot of time on his hands these days to be playing Twitter Cop rather than U.S. Senator, which may explain why Texans decided to nominate Paxton in his place. Why Cornyn wants to apply the Akin Strategy to his own party over one stupid tweet by French rather than focus on the rapid rise of Marxists and Islamist sympathizers among Democrats in Texas, Florida, Michigan, New York, Maine, and elsewhere is a question Cornyn will have to answer … and should.
That brings us to Talarico, who has all but disappeared over the last few weeks in Texas, both on the stump and in TV ads. Paxton and the GOP have combined up for over $50 million in new ads hammering Talarico’s record, which started almost as soon as the RNC Midterm Convention closed on Thursday night. Talarico apparently also had nothing better to do than troll X/Twitter, and transformed Cornyn’s attack on French into an attack accusing Paxton of racism instead:
Thank you @JohnCornyn for your leadership.
Racism has no place in Texas.@KenPaxtonTX: will you condemn this blatant racism or will you cower to extremists? https://t.co/MWHEvrPdPV
— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) September 13, 2026
Oh, does Talarico want to talk about cowering to “extremists”? This is quite the election cycle for that discussion, which the GOP all but demanded in their convention last week. Rather than go after Abdul El-Sayed, Hasan Piker, Darializer Chevalier, Angie Nixon, or the DSA in response, however, Paxton instead targeted the extremism of Talarico directly:
I condemn racism in all its forms, including James Talarico saying white men are America’s top terror threat and that he prays to overcome his own ‘whiteness,’ whatever that means. Only one person in this race has a history of dividing Texans by race, and it’s James Talarico. I… https://t.co/24Tlp3Rd5U
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) September 13, 2026
I will continue to focus on uniting our State and bringing together the broadest possible coalition to fight for Texas, our values, and our families.
Whatever that means, indeed. Talarico has been a font of Academia-speak racism for the entirety of his career, not to mention an extremist on transgender issues and abortion. Now that the general election has begun, Talarico has had to reverse himself on allowing pediatric sex-change operations, declaring the existence of six genders (which he never named), God being “non-binary,” whatever that means, and hating his own “whiteness” as well as Christianity, when it was unenlightened by “Islamic mystics.” At present, the man who wants Paxton to be held accountable for racism is spending most of his time and resources in Houston and parts of Dallas to convince black voters to show up for him, after Jasmine Crockett accused Talarico and Texas Democrats of being the real racists in 2026.
Paxton’s response made it clear that he’s not going to play the woke rhetoric game with Talarico, and that the Democrat nominee is out of his depth and desperate for relevance. And we all know how desperation plays in politics and dating.
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