The U.S. Senate race in Texas just got a lot more intriguing — with the addition of a young, charismatic foe of Christian nationalism, who is himself studying to be a minister.
James Talarico declared Tuesday that he’s seeking the Democratic nomination, vying to contest the Senate seat now held by Republican John Cornyn. Talarico will be an underdog. He’s up against Colin Allred, the former congressman who gave MAGA Republican Sen. Ted Cruz a scare in his race for reelection last year. Beto O’Rourke, who tangled with Cruz in 2018 and later made a moody bid for president, may also enter the mix.
Talarico is a boyish 36 years old, with a mop of dark hair, cut to Playmobil perfection. The former school teacher is one of the rarest creatures in Democratic politics: a social media savant with more than 1.2 million followers on Instagram, where he posted his launch video.
Speaking before a crowd of supporters from the bed of a rusty pickup in front of a small, white church steeple, Talarico appears in the clip delivering a populist pitch to potential supporters: “The biggest divide in our country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom,” he says. “Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other, so that we’re not looking up at them.
“They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion,” Talarico continues, “so that we don’t notice that they’re defunding our schools, gutting our health care, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends.” Invoking the biblical story of Jesus expelling money changers from the temple, Talarico insists: “It’s time to start flipping tables!”
On paper, the young politician would look like a long shot for the nomination. But Talarico has leveraged his modest political perch as an Austin-area state representative, in combination with his uncanny talents as a communicator, to establish himself as one of the most prominent Democratic voices in Texas — and as a rising player on the national scene.
Talarico was a de-facto spokesman for Democrats who fled the state attempting to thwart Gov. Greg Abbott’s partisan redistricting of the Lone Star State. He parlayed that into a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Talarico rose to prominence, in Texas and nationally, by inveighing against the moneyed politics of Texas, where the GOP’s political machine is dominated by a pair of far-right, billionaire, West Texas oilman preachers named Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks.
Rolling Stone spoke to Talarico last year for a profile of Dunn, who was a top Trump donor last election, and who has declared his intention to nationalize Texas’ increasingly authoritarian form of governance. “Tim Dunn on Sunday mornings preaches at far-right church. And if you listen to his sermons, he doesn’t preach a theology of universal love. He preaches a theology of power and control and domination,” Talarico said. “He believes climate change is God’s will. He compares homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia. He believes only Christians have a right to serve in public office.”
Talarico is far from an atheist — so when he speaks out against power-hungry Christians, he does so from his own religious convictions. “My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. I have attended the same church since I was two years old,” he told Rolling Stone. “In my limited free time, I’m a student at Austin Seminary studying to be a minister myself.”
Talarico said he recoils from the movement propelled by Dunn and Wilks. “What you’re seeing is a perversion of Christianity,” he said. “You can call it Christian fascism or Christian nationalism. Essentially, it’s the worship of power, in the name of Christ. And that is idolatry in its purest form.” That conflicts with his own reading of scripture: “There’s so much in the Christian tradition about resisting the desire for power,” he said.
Talarico got into politics as an evolution of public service. He is a former public middle school teacher who saw elected office as a new way of helping students. “In my first two terms, I was able to do a lot of good work,” he said. “We passed a bipartisan school-finance bill that gave teachers pay raises and funded dual-language education and full-day pre-K.”
But Talarico soon encountered a blitz of bills sponsored by the right-wing billionaires. The first sought to ban “critical race theory” in Texas classrooms — which Talarico described as an attempt to “whitewash the curriculum and silence teachers” from talking about race.
Other proposals kept coming, including ones to ban books and divert public school funding into private school vouchers for wealthy Texans. “I quickly realized that all of these bills were tied together by these two billionaire megadonors from West Texas,” he said.
Talarico differentiates the Dunn and Wilks machine from that of better-known billionaires like the Koch brothers, whom he said were just “trying to enrich themselves.” The Texas duo, he said, carry “a scarier dimension” of seeking to build an “authoritarian theocracy in the state of Texas.” Dunn and Wilks’ desire for domination, he said, goes beyond political and economic power: “It’s also social power — social hierarchy.”
That includes efforts to strip civil rights icons from schoolbooks. “But it also includes patriarchy,” Talarico said, pointing to Texas’ extreme abortion ban. “Women have been forced to give birth to their rapist’s child in the state of Texas since that ban went into place. There are counties in Texas that will not allow women to drive on their roads if they are seeking to get an abortion in another state.”
Talarico warned that Texas is a “testing grounds” for a national agenda, and he encouraged America to look at the Lone Star State with more than caution: “I would urge alarm.” He rattled off a list of reactionary policies that are on the agenda: “They’re talking about banning abortion nationally, talking about banning contraception and IVF, talking about banning gay marriage, talking about banning pornography.”
Talarico said he was not without optimism and pointed to the capacity of people to organize. “There is reason to hope — you actually see here in Texas, in the biggest red state in the country. If its citizens fight back, they can win.”
I asked Talarico why he thought Texas’ GOP was going off the deep end of far-right politics at the same moment the state itself is growing more mixed, politically: “The two are related,” he said. “The Republican extremism we’re seeing is confirmation that Texas is changing. I think of Tim Dunn’s extremism as a kind of death rattle for a dying worldview — that knows this new Texas won’t tolerate that kind of division and authoritarianism.
“It is backed into a corner,” Talarico added. “It’s gonna go down swinging. I just hope it doesn’t hurt too many people on its way down.”
