James Talarico, Ken Paxton, And A Clumsy Attempt At Reality Creation
Elon Musk and his pathetic X poster-children tried and failed to turn the tide of the Texas Senate race
The American right was always going to execute the Twitter Bird when it didn't go along with the Hunter Biden laptop ratfuck.
Mainstream media outlets were on emergency footing in the weeks before the 2020 election. Social media sites, before they were absorbed by the international fascist movement and/or joined them willingly, had decided that they – the president and his propagandists – couldn't Get Away With It this time. So in October 2020 when the right and its media organs and social media allies and bad-faith operators like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald pushed the story of Hunter Biden's purported corruption with the full force of its massive reach, with Joe Biden comfortably ahead in most polling, Twitter and Facebook refused to play ball.
Links to the Hunter Biden "story" were stifled. Posts mentioning the story were kept from going viral.
This outright refusal to allow the coordinated Hunter Biden ratfuck to spread algorithmically and become the central issue in the closing days of the 2020 election turned the American right into a radiating ball of nuclear rage, however impotent and ineffective. It was then that I suspected someone or some organization on the right would destroy Twitter and/or replace it with a right-wing propaganda apparatus (I was right, sadly, and it became my first BFT blog post).
Denny Carter
Twitter in 2020 had stopped the right's unreality creation and in doing so threatened the entire anti-democracy project. Without dishonest, well-funded, entirely fake Swiftboat-style attacks being funneled into mainstream media and politics, Republican candidates would be forced to operate on Democrats' information environment turf. We call this turf Actual Reality.
For its 2020 sins, Twitter had to die. Its corpse has since been reanimated by the billionaire who hands out vials of his semen to strangers and talks loosely about stealing elections. Now a CSAM generator, a warehouse of never-ending white supremacist resentment and violence, and the PR arm of the international fascist movement, the X platform is being weaponized against Elon Musk's political opponents in the waning days of what looks to be a bloodbath of a midterm election for a nearly-universally reviled Republican Party.
The difference is that today's right-wing election season ratfuck is stupid and clumsy and easily discredited before it seeps into the electorate's bloodstream. The Hunter Biden ratfuck was a turn of political narrative genius compared to what they tried to do to James Talarico last week.
Knowing they would get a bump from Elon Musk's algorithm, designed to promote right-wing candidates and smear pro-democracy candidates and organizations, a handful of X accounts posted (almost) simultaneously over the weekend about Talarico seeking treatment at a mental health facility in Ohio. This, in case you're not terribly online, came after Ken Paxton – Talarico's opponent in the U.S. Senate race in Texas – claimed Talarico had "gone missing" and had not been seen in Texas for weeks.
I think it's safe to assume this was all part of a coordinated plan: Force mainstream media outlets to wonder about Talarico's location, then present the answer in a flurry of hastily-compiled X posts.
Nothing more than a panicked Hail Mary in the face of apocalyptic polling data for Paxton, the ratfuckers on Musk's site expected the narrative to take off. The idea – one that has worked so often since Musk killed Twitter and revived it as his own zombie fascist fiefdom – was to demand the high-profile journalists at high-profile outlets who use X as something of an assignment editor to take the shoddy storyline and run with it. Talarico, they thought, would be seen as nothing more than a crazy guy wholly unfit for office by the end of the week. I'm sure some (all?) of the right-wing hacks involved in this little scheme daydreamed of a best case scenario in which Talarico suspended his campaign after being caught doing something lurid like seeking mental health services.
It was a pathetic scene, these grown men (and a couple women) competing for the attention of Daddy Elon, who amplifies his favored poster-children if they feed his true goal: Creating a fascist unreality in which millions of people exist every day. X influencers created this Talarico story knowing Musk, who runs his criminal empire from Austin, Texas, has considerable interest in the Texas Senate race.
Daddy was pleased. The world's foremost vector of misinformation gave reposts to his adoring children. The Talarico smear spread on X. Anyone who challenged the smear was blocked by Musk and his fashy mods. They were determined to make this thing work.
This was a particularly inept attempt to generate unreality in the Texas Senate designed to filter into right-wing cable news coverage and eventually The New York Times and CNN and The Washington Post and every other outlet that might be called mainstream. A scandal in which Talarico fled Texas and sought help at a mental health facility in Ohio – a state Talarico has never visited – would be seen by the wishy washy independents and disillusioned Republicans in Texas who might have considered voting for Talarico in November. These folks, if that plan had worked, would adopt this unreality as reality and either decline to vote in the Senate race or come back home to the GOP and its odious, monstrously corrupt candidate.
There is, after all, no affirmative reason to vote for Paxton – a man so creepy that he weirds out the president. There had to be a reason not to vote for Talarico, a perfectly pleasant and upbeat liberal Christian fella who speaks eloquently of how Jesus Christ treated the stranger (not with physical assault and chains and concentration camps, it turns out).
Denny Carter
Talarico's absence from the campaign trail came after a flu diagnosis, his campaign said. It was hardly a secret: Talarico had told the public he was sick at a Dallas-area urgent care clinic. He didn't want to get others sick so he took a few days off before showing up at a country music festival. It was a wonderfully boring story of a conscientious candidate doing the right thing instead of spreading his illness to staffers and supporters at campaign events for days and days, like any Republican would do without hesitation (you may be old enough to remember 2020 GOP campaign events becoming COVID superspreaders).
It was nice, I suppose, that mainstream media outlets did not latch on to the obvious ratfuck of the Talarico campaign. I guess there are still some higher ups in American media who don't see X posts as sources for news stories. Just because this unreality-generating attempt was ham-handed and fizzled within hours doesn't mean the next one will.
Pro-democracy forces in the US and abroad have to treat Musk's ownership of the X platform as an international emergency. We've seen that approach here and there, but it's not enough. The western world can have functioning self governance or it can have a Musk-owned X. Those are the choices.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
