In the smoky half-light of Texas political legend, there lives a story about a young Lyndon B. Johnson, terrified he was about to lose an election, who decided to solve the problem by starting a rumor that his opponent had a peculiar fondness for pigs. His campaign manager was horrified, insisting nobody would ever believe such a cartoonishly ugly lie. Johnson just smiled and said, “I know. But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.” That story may or may not be true, but it has survived for generations because it captures something essential about the way politics has always worked: force your enemy to spend his time defending himself against nonsense, and you’ve already won half the fight. Some sixty years later, that same dusty trick was pulled out again, not in a bygone smoke-filled backroom but in the glaring feed of social media, aimed squarely at James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas. Talarico, a Presbyterian pastor and state representative from Austin, was not accused of loving pigs. He was accused of something darker, sadder, and more intimate: that he had secretly fallen apart, that the pressure of the campaign had cracked him open, and that he had been quietly hidden away in a mental health facility in Ohio.
Talarico is not supposed to be winning. Texas has been dominated by Republicans for a generation, and Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general, was expected to hold the seat without breaking a sweat. But the polls have told a different story. Talarico, young and relentlessly optimistic, has somehow been running ahead of Paxton, who has cost the party millions of dollars as he fights off a long list of legal and ethical troubles. Paxton has attacked Talarico’s progressive record, but nothing seems to stick. The campaign has been the kind of race that political operatives dream about and incumbents dread: a surging underdog, a nervous establishment, and a closing stretch that feels unpredictable. Then Talarico got sick. Not politically sick, not strategically sick. He caught the flu, the ordinary, miserable, hand-shaking, baby-kissing, crowd-coughing flu. He canceled events to protect other people, saying at a virtual appearance that he couldn’t live with himself if he passed the illness to someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby. It was a deeply human thing to do, and it would soon be twisted into something deeply sinister. For a candidate in the final weeks, an extended absence from the trail is unusual. And in the vacuum of a quiet recovery, Paxton and his allies saw not a man with a fever, but an opening.
The opening came fast. On October 7, Paxton released an ad claiming Talarico had been missing for eleven days, when it had actually been seven. That night, at a rally in Texas, he started a chant of “Where is James Talarico?” and asked the crowd where they had hidden “that little socialist.” The question hung in the air, and then the whispers began. Paxton and his supporters landed on a story: Talarico was having a mental breakdown, a “full-blown mental Tala-freak-out,” as Paxton put it. They set up a tip line for people to report his whereabouts, as if the missing state representative were a fugitive rather than a sick man trying to rest. Right-wing influencers took up the cause with glee. One posted that she had “unverified information” that would end his campaign. Another said he was in a mental health facility after breaking down. A former reality television star claimed sources were telling him the same thing. The speculation spun so fast that it blurred into certainty, even though no evidence existed. Then, on October 9, Talarico reappeared at the Austin City Limits music festival, looking healthy and sound, and it seemed the whole ugly episode might be over. A few days of rumor, a denial, everyone moves on. That is not what happened.
What happened next was stranger and more disturbing. A prominent Republican fundraiser posted about a private plane that supposedly flew from Austin to Ohio and back the same day Talarico showed up at the festival. Ohio, she noted, was where a Harris County judge had once sought treatment for mental health. “So many coincidences!” she wrote. Then a right-wing influencer named Rhein Amacher called the Lindner Center, a mental health facility in Ohio, pretending to be Talarico’s cousin. He later shared an audio clip of the call, in which a woman seemed to confirm that a patient named James Talarico had just been discharged. The clip was almost certainly a lie or a mistake, but it didn’t matter. It raced across the internet, amplified by some of the most powerful people in the country. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted about it more than a dozen times in four days. Elon Musk claimed the Talarico campaign was not being honest. Former Texas GOP officials piled on, saying it was time for Talarico to step aside and focus on his mental health. Paxton’s campaign adviser, Michelle Smith, said she had been told by a friend that a doctor confirmed Talarico had definitely been admitted to a mental institution. None of it was true. Talarico’s campaign denied everything, the Lindner Center confirmed he had never been a patient, and Talarico provided home security footage to the New York Times to prove he had never even been to Ohio. But the story refused to die, because it was never about the truth.
The cruelty of the episode was not just in the lie, but in the silence that surrounded it. Mainstream Texas Republicans, including Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, ignored the smear entirely. They didn’t defend Paxton, and they didn’t defend the truth. They just let it burn. A handful of far-right state representatives dove in, posting vague digs at Talarico’s mental health. One of them, State Rep. Brent Money, wrote that even if Talarico was not hiding in a mental institution, his public statements over his entire career were evidence of his depravity. When asked what evidence he had, Money admitted he had no information about Talarico’s whereabouts, but then attacked him for fighting to “sterilize children” and being able to name his favorite drag queen. The words were hateful, but the deeper wound was the dehumanization. Talarico was not a political opponent anymore. He was a caricature, a punchline, a target. And when a popular finance influencer congratulated the man who faked the call, he said it plainly: “Whether it’s true or not, people deserve to know the potential of this.” In that one sentence, the entire modern political moment was laid bare. Truth is optional. Reality is a suggestion. The story exists to serve the narrative, and the human being at the center of it is simply collateral damage.
There is an old saying that politics is war without blood, but that is wrong. Politics is war with blood, and sometimes the blood is invisible. Talarico did nothing wrong. He caught the flu. He stayed home to protect others. He recovered, showed up at a music festival, and tried to get back to work. For that, he was subjected to a coordinated campaign of lies that reached the White House, the highest echelons of social media, and millions of ordinary people who will now always carry a shadow of doubt about him. He was forced to prove that he was not mentally ill, not hospitalized, not missing, not broken. He had to produce security footage to defend his own whereabouts, as if his word meant nothing. This is what misinformation does. It doesn’t just confuse people. It exhausts the innocent, it empowers the cruel, and it teaches everyone watching that there is no penalty for being wrong, or worse, for being deliberately wrong. As the political scientist Samuel Woolley said, we have entered a time where truth and reality don’t really seem to matter. Lyndon Johnson wanted his opponent to deny the lie about the pigs, because the denial itself would make him look guilty. But even Johnson, for all his ruthlessness, might have been surprised by the world we live in now, where the lie doesn’t need the denial to work. The lie simply needs to be repeated, amplified, and believed. And in that world, everybody loses. Not just James Talarico, not just Texas, but every voter who deserves better, every person who wants to believe that democracy can still be governed by facts, and every ordinary citizen who just wants to know that their leaders will tell them the truth about something as simple and human as a case of the flu.