The Dumbest Week in Texas Politics, in Five Acts

Man’s darkest arts—espionage, subterfuge, army demain—continue to haunt the U.S. Senate race in Texas as it enters its closing stretch. But, you know, not the cool kind: the Burn After Reading kind. Meet me in the park by the dead drop. Bring your best disguise—yes, the Groucho Marx glasses. Have you practiced the code phrase? The long sobs of the violins of autumn . . .

This was the dumbest week in Texas politics in recent memory.

The Gang Spots an Opening

On September 30, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico spoke live to the U.S. Hispanic Business Council via videotelling viewers he had caught the flu. He appeared visibly sick. After the meeting, his campaign put previously scheduled events on hold. Then, on October 9, he reappeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. This nine-day gap became the subject of much speculation.

Voters are entitled to believe whatever they want, and that includes, as some on the right would have it, that taking nine days to recover from the flu makes you unfit to hold public office. It’s fair game to ask a campaign that cancels events about what is happening to the candidate. But there are a few things to note. First, there really was a jump in flu transmission in Texas last month. (I think I had it, and it kicked my butt for an embarrassingly long time.) Second, Talarico has spoken often about having Type 1 diabetes, which makes flu symptoms much worse, while the flu makes managing blood sugar harder. Some 30 percent of those hospitalized for the flu, the CDC reportshave diabetes. Symptoms last longer and there are potentially dangerous complications. There were some circumstantial reasons to think, in other words, he might have been telling the truth.

But Talarico’s sudden disappearance, coming at a crucial moment in the campaign, sparked an unusually vigorous push from the Ken Paxton campaign, which has at times struggled to demonstrate vigor. It asked Talarico for “proof of life” and mocked up AI-generated Wanted posters. Paxton has been on the back foot—bad polls, repeated leaks from private meetings, his top adviser agreeing, on X, that John Cornyn was a “c—t.” Suddenly campaign officials could go on the offense. They smelled blood in the water. They overreached.

The Gang Discovers Flight Logs

The saga begins—I’m sorry to tell you this—with a right-wing influencer on X named @TickleTexts, who elected to practice what investigative journalists call “open-source intelligence.” Ms. Tickle, whose profile picture features an attractive, though AI-generated, redhead, bills herself as “delivering unfiltered academic & political commentary” and also as someone who is “cursed with awareness,” like the ancient oracles. (The user has since protected the account’s tweets.)

Ms. Tickle circulated her theory that Talarico had actually been institutionalized. Her evidence: On October 9, a Cessna Citation X business jet belonging to a private charter company flew from a Cincinnati-area general aviation airstrip to Austin. This Ohio airstrip is a half hour’s drive from the Lindner Center of Hope, a well-regarded inpatient treatment center for mental health and addiction. (This was the facility where Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo spent seven weeks for depression treatment in 2023.) The ping-ponging series of connections continued. Ms. Tickle posted a video of Talarico speaking from the Austin airport last year, adding that the airport was a “spot he knows well”—which is probably true, as he is from Austin.

Ms. Tickles’s work will probably not find success with this year’s Pulitzer committee. No evidence was produced at any point to suggest the plane had anything to do with the campaign. Among the unsupported leaps being made here were that:

• Because Talarico had taken a plane in the past, he was likely to have taken one on Friday.
• Because one Texas Democrat had been to the Lindner Center three years ago, it was a likely place for a second Texas Democrat to go.
• The plane was bringing a Texan from Ohio, instead of an Ohioan to Texas.
• No resident of Austin, Talarico or otherwise, would have reason to go to Ohio for any purpose other than psychiatric treatment. (Well . . .)

Ms. Tickle expressed more certainty than she had reason to feel. Lindner was “where he was hospitalized,” she said. Then she tweeted at Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo star Rob Schneider, who has recently become a leading force in the fight to save Texas from “sharia law,” that it was “all here. Confirmed. Talarico psych hospital info.”

Bigger names with slightly more credibility started picking up on this, like Sara Gonzales, a host at Blaze Mediaand Caroline Wren, a MAGA influencer. But so far, this was still just noise.

The Gang Goes Undercover

On Sunday afternoon, two days after Talarico popped up at ACL, Nick Sortor, who is “on-scene covering stories MSM won’t,” posted an oddly truncated 47-second audio clip of a phone call with a woman, ostensibly an employee of the Lindner Center. A man asks her: “So [you have] nothing for James Talarico?” The woman seems distracted, then says, after some hemming and hawing, that it “looks like he was just discharged this evening, that’s why I don’t have it.”

Juicy stuff, but also a physical impossibility. The call was made on Saturday night. Talarico could not have been discharged “this evening” because he was making public appearances in Texas the night before. It also seemed highly unlikely that anyone reachable by phone at the Lindner Center, which frequently deals with high-profile patients, would spill the beans this easily. But this kind of stuff works on the 95-to-5 principle. While you might put the odds of a Democratic candidate flying to a red state for emergency psychiatric care on a private plane at the peak of his race—what, we don’t have any shrinks here?—at 5 percent, you can’t completely rule it out without legwork, and the doubts begin to creep in.

Well, except—Sortor’s crony Rhein Amacher put out a slightly longer version, and it contradicts the first. “Hi,” says the woman. “I do not find anyone with that name for the last four days that’s been discharged and they’re not here in the building.” That’s much clearer than the “this evening” remark. But it still leaves some confusion about what happened.

Later on Sunday, the right-wing Texas publication Current Revolt published the full six-minute, forty-second audio of the call. You need a four-digit code to inquire about patients at Lindner. The stalwart investigator, Amacher, guesses one—2244—and then says he’s a cousin who wants to send a care package to James Talarico. (This was probably illegal under Ohio law, the Whose Report found.) The woman, who seems a little jumbled throughout, says four times there’s no one under that name present; then, after Amacher prods her repeatedly by saying Talarico was definitely there, she says he was discharged that evening. Having gotten the answer he wants, he hangs up.

But, again, we know that Talarico wasn’t there. To paper over the fact that the timeline is clearly wrong, Sortor said Lindner confirmed he was discharged “earlier this week,” while Amacher said it confirmed he was discharged “within the previous 24–48 hours,” which could make the flight and ACL appearance work. But they’re lying: The woman doesn’t say that.

The Gang Circles the Wagons

The efforts of the Brain Trust culminated on Sunday night with a five-hour X hangout, a feature of the platform popular among Paxton’s biggest fans, where the bright lights and big stars can congregate and talk over audio. Michelle Smith, a top Paxton surrogate and employee at the attorney general’s office who has defended Paxton in these spaces for twelve years, was there and participating along with Amacher and other amplifiers of the theory. A few journalists intruded to ask questions and bring clarity to the situation.

The audio had been brought to right-wing publications, it turned out, who rejected it because of the obvious problems, among them that nothing definitive had been established and the act of getting that nothing might have been illegal. Influencers could say anything they wanted, Amacher said, which is true. And they had. Asked by the journalist Jesse Singal if he had done any fact-checking after the call, Amacher said he hadn’t and that, as a political activist, he shouldn’t be held to the same standard as a journalist. This is an interesting argument that may not hold up in court.

It was useful, for the record, to have the gang on a call together when the Lindner Center finally released a statement: “Talarico has never received treatment from the Lindner Center,” it said. Talarico followed up: “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” (Later, his team provided home security camera footage to The New York Times, which reported that “the images showed Mr. Talarico around the exterior of the home and at its entrances between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8.”) This, for the lying lamestream media, will be the definitive statement on the matter, although on hearing the Lindner statement, one woman on the call laughed knowingly: “We knew this was coming.” Who are you going to believe, Ms. Tickle or your lying eyes?

“This story sucks, man,” said Current Revolt’s Tony Ortiz, who helped blow up the story by publishing the full tape. “This is s— work, bro. I’m actually upset.”

The Gang Copes and Seethes

There are still dead-enders around, but the more savvy messagemakers quickly adjusted. “It genuinely doesn’t matter if it was a mental health hospital or the flu,” said Andrew Kolvet, with Turning Point USA. “Disappearing for two weeks”—nine days—“is damning enough all by itself.” What do you meanit doesn’t matter? It’s been much discussed that the GOP’s muscles are a little rusty when it comes to general elections—but ratf—ing, a noble art, takes work and practice too. Retvrn!

In another X space, a writer with The Daily Caller accused Jeff Roe, a GOP consultant, whose firm Axiom Strategies has long advised Paxton, of being responsible for the story. (The writer later retracted the accusation.) You don’t need the high-level involvement of a figure like Roe to get something like this going these days. The disappearance of any kind of moderation on X has created a perfectly poisonous information void that shapes the worldview of millions of people who use it as a primary news source. It may be precious and lib-coded to worry about dezinformatsiya these days, but it remains the truth that the majority party in Texas is shaped by the wild ids of people who could not differentiate between truth and falsehood if their lives depended on it. And that’s only likely to get worse.

Perhaps half a billion dollars will be spent on this Senate race by the time it’s done, and our October surprise came from TickleTexts.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect Jeff Roe’s affiliation.