Texas Senate Candidate Talarico Denies Reports That He Was Recently Discharged From Mental-health Facility
Having defended himself against the claim that he would defund the police, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico is now dealing with the accusation that he was in the giggle academy to get a check-up from the neck up.
A mental-health center employee confessed that Talarico had been there but checked out, independent journalist Nick Sortor and others have reported in the last few days.
Talarico says he took time off from campaigning against GOP candidate Ken Paxton to battle the flu.
Despite the dust-up about Talarico’s mental health, or lack thereof, and his bizarre take on the Christian faith, Paxton faces a tough time on November 3 if the polls are correct. The RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of polls puts Talarico almost three points ahead of the Texas attorney general.
Recorded Conversation
Sortor’s colleague Rhein Amacher called the Lindner Center of Hope to ask if Talarico was there.
“So nothing for James Talarico?” he asked.
“He was just discharged this evening,” the woman at the center says. “That’s why I don’t have it.”
“Oh, he was discharged then?” Amacher asked. The employee confirmed it.
Amacher also confirmed that the Lindner Center is in Mason, Ohio.
“Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope,” the center wrote on X.
Pushback on X
Multiple X accounts pushed back.
“If true…,” Matt Van Swol wrote regarding the Lindner Center’s post:
Then how do you explain this audio of an employee of yours saying he was discharged from your facility?
Did she lie? Did she make it up?
Wrote popular X commentator Robby Starbuck:
You should explain why your employee reportedly told a reporter that he was discharged then. This one sentence statement leaves a lot unexplained. If he truly hasn’t ever been there and the call is real as it appears to be, I don’t like the guy, but he should sue your facility.
Sara Gonzales of BlazeTV, who worked with Sortor and Amacher on the story, named the employee and asked the same question.
Gonzales reposted a flight log showing a plane departing from Austin to Hamilton, Ohio, “just 20 minutes” from the center, then returning to Austin.
“Evidence is growing stronger by the day that my sources were correct and Talarico was in a mental health facility,” the journalist wrote on October 10.
“This will be confirmed by even MORE EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE very soon,” she continued the next day.
“All will be revealed in good time,” Amacher wrote on X.
Understandably, Talarico pushed back.
“I’ve never even been to Ohio 😂,” he wrote on X over the center’s statement.
Talarico said he was at home in bed with the flu.
“I got the flu and I’m feeling much better,” he told Lone Star Politics anchor Phil Prazan:
And I’m glad I had a chance to recover. You know, if you don’t take the opportunity to get well, sometimes you can get even sicker. And so I’m glad we made the decision to just take the week, get better, and now I’m glad to be back on the trail.
He said he went to his primary care doctor for treatment and stayed home so no one else would get sick.
Asked about the report of a stay at a mental-health facility, Talarico said, “That’s not true.”
“I just had the flu and I feel much better,” he continued:
But it’s a good reminder that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
The End Wokeness X feed noted that Talarico said he went to “urgent care.”
God Is “Non-binary”
If Talarico were in the center, he would fit the profile of a modern leftist. As Pew Research reported in 2020, 64.4 percent of white leftists report being diagnosed with mental illness.
That aside, Talarico, who represents Texas’ 50th District in the state’s House of Representatives, does have a kooky take on the Christian faith.
He thinks God is “non-binary.”
“The first two lines in Genesis use two different Hebrew words to describe God,” Talarico said in 2021:
One is the masculine Hebrew noun for “divinity.” The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for “spirit.” God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary.
In Genesis 1:26, God speaks of God’s self in the plural, saying, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.” That’s the infinite multitude of God — the masculine, the feminine, and everything in between. Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image. There’s nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all. They are perfect. They are beautiful. And they are sacred. Bullying children is immoral. It’s a sin, a special kind of sin.
Defunding the Police
Last week, Talarico’s campaign was forced to defend his pro defund-the-police comments, Fox News reported.
“As an educator, it’s always rich to me that ‘defund the police’ is considered off-limits in our political debate, when defunding health services, defunding public education has been the stated policy of our state government for decades now,” Talarico said in 2020.
“Our system of policing is deeply broken. We must replace it with something new and something better,” he also said in 2020.
His campaign denied he supported scrapping police forces.
Ahead in the Polls
No matter, he’s ahead of Paxton. The RCP average of polls shows the leftist ahead of his opponent by 2.8 percent, 48.1-45.3. Talarico has held a lead consistently since mid July.
Polymarket says the odds of a Talarico triumph are 63 percent.
Claiming that a political opponent is crazy has worked against a Democrat in the past.
Famed GOP political strategist Lee Atwater sunk the campaign of Democrat Tom Turnipseed, who was running against Republican Floyd Spence for South Carolina’s 2nd District congressional seat in 1980. Knowing that Turnipseed had undergone electroshock treatment for depression when he was teenager, Spence operative Atwater planted a question about it with a reporter.
Atwater answered the question by saying Turnipseed “had been hooked up to jumper cables.”
