Editor’s Note: a guest post by Mose Morrison.

Last night I was in a restaurant in a major East Coast city, talking business, minding my own table. Next to us sat an older couple, late seventies, I’d guess, finishing a pleasant meal.

When they got up, the tables were tight. I scooted over and said I’d get out of their way. They were polite.

Then the lady turned to me and said, “I hope you’re voting for Talarico.”

I sat there a second. “Why would I do that? I’m not from Texas.”

“Well you should,” she said, “because we love him.”

What’s to love, I asked? She couldn’t say. And she turned and walked away.

Not a bill. Not a vote. Not a reason a Texan who actually lives under Texas energy, Texas schools, and Texas law would send this man to the United States Senate. Just love him, the way you love a PBS pledge-drive heretic host who quotes Jesus and votes like Austin.

When the aging hippies start exporting a Texas candidate to strangers on the East Coast, that tells you more about James Talarico than his campaign ads ever will.

He is not a mystery. He is a 37-year-old Austin leftist Democrat, Harvard education degree, Texas House member, radical Presbyterian seminarian, who questions the resurrection, on leave.
The national press has spent a year selling him as the gentle Christian who can finally turn Texas blue: Lucchese boots, Chevy pickup, Scripture on the tongue, “love your neighbor” as a platform. The New York Times, The New Yorker, Colbert, they cannot get enough of the costume.

Look past the costume. Even snakeskins are pretty.

This is the same man who told the Texas House in 2021 that “God is non-binary.” The same man who said modern science recognizes “six” biological sexes, then, when a Senate race got real, discovered there are two after all, “if it endangers safety or fairness.” The same man who took the Annunciation, the angel and Mary, and turned it into a consent seminar for abortion. The same man who says the Bible is “silent” on abortion, so the state must stay out, while he wants Washington to codify Roe for the whole country. Silence, apparently, only runs one direction.

His home church is St. Andrew’s in Austin. His pastor and mentor, Jim Rigby, has spent decades on the far edge of mainline Protestantism, LGBT activism, abortion, and, in recent undercover tape, telling a Freedom From Religion crowd that atheists and his church are “on the same team.” Talarico calls Rigby his pastor “in every sense of the word.” That is not Billy Graham’s Texas. That is seminary progressivism with a cheap cowboy hat parked outside.

On policy he is a radical socio/commie who wandered into the wrong primary. He wants a $15 federal minimum wage, higher taxes on “billionaires and corporations,” a public option, universal pre-K, a war on school choice he calls a “voucher scam,” and campaign-finance rules that would kneecap every independent conservative group in the country.

He opposed putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms as “un-Christian.” He has called Christian nationalism a “cancer,” a “heresy,” a “betrayal of Jesus.” In other words: the churches that built Texas are the problem; the faculty lounge is the Gospel.

Now that the general election is on, he has discovered “all of the above” energy. Texas did not become the energy capital of the free world because Austin seminarians suddenly blessed oil and gas. It happened because the state refused to treat hydrocarbons as original sin. A man who spent years talking a climate change hoax as a moral crisis and is now reciting “all of the above” on the trail is not converting. He is push polling.

That East Coast couple did not love him because they read the Texas House journal. They loved the type: young, soft-spoken, churchy enough to soothe a guilty Boomer conscience, left enough to keep the old revolution going. The 1960s never ended for that generation. It just got a Master of Divinity and learned to say “neighbor” instead of “the System.”

Texas is not a retirement community for other people’s nostalgia. It is a production state; energy, cattle, ports, manufacturing, a border that is not a metaphor. It does not need a senator whose national fan club is built on coastal dinner tables and late-night monologues. It does not need a theologian-in-politics whose Scripture always resolves, with suspicious consistency, into the Democratic National Committee platform.

If a Talarico fan cannot explain him to a stranger who asked a simple question, “what’s to love?”, that is not shyness. That is the product. The brand is the feeling. The record is the rest.

The aging hippies have their candidate. Texas should wake up and handle this. God bless Texas!