Our Best Stuff on a Scandal That Wasn’t
The Dispatch · RC · trust 33/100
Unlocked Dispatch Weekly Our Best Stuff on a Scandal That Wasn’t MAGA activists try and fail to smear James Talarico. Rachael Larimore / October 17, 2026 Loading Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate James Talarico on October 15, 2026, in San Marcos, Texas. (Photo by Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Images) Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate James Talarico on October 15, 2026, in San Marcos, Texas. (Photo by Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Images) = 3 && ageInMonths 3 months old . Some information may be outdated.'; } else if (ageInMonths = 6 && ageInMonths 6 months old . Some information may be outdated.'; } else if (ageInMonths = 12 && ageInMonths 1 year old . Some information may be outdated.'; } else if (ageInMonths = 12) { const ageInYears = Math.floor(ageInMonths / 12); this.message = `This post is more than ${ageInYears} ${ageInYears === 1 ? 'year' : 'years'} old . Some information may be outdated.`; } } }" { this.tooltipOpen = false; }, 200); } }" class="relative" Audio Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening.
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Hello and happy Saturday. Last weekend, while the rest of us were relaxing with family or catching up on projects, a number of right-wing influencers tried to launch a smear campaign against James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. It failed spectacularly.
The story went that Talarico, who had missed more than a week of campaign events because of a bout with the flu, wasn’t really ill and instead had sneaked off to a mental health center in Ohio.
On Sunday night, contributing writer Jesse Singal found himself on an X.com livestream with right-wing political operative Rhein Amacher, who had shared the claims on social media along with audio of a call he’d made to the health center itself (after a few right-wing outlets declined to publish them). When the center posted to social media confirming that Talarico had not been treated there, Singal had a front-row seat:
It was a fascinating moment. I can’t say that every MAGA-affiliated type on the call was unmoved by this apparent debunking, but for the most part, at least among those dominating the conversation, the goalposts quickly shifted. It could still be true. Talarico had not provided sufficient debunking of the claim promoted by the guy who openly admitted he hadn’t done much vetting.
As of Monday, the most overheated MAGAheads are continuing to promote this very, very crazy story. Others, alongside most respectable conservatives, find the whole thing embarrassing (which it is). More fracturing. More micro-balkanization.
Singal mentioned micro-balkanization because, as it happens, he was also in the process of writing a story for us about the public discourse surrounding the Cornell fraternity rape allegation. He had noticed that leftists were issuing outraged statements that went beyond anything the victim had told police, and argues that the polarization that has divided us over the last decade-plus has extended beyond ideology to include factual reality. He ran through a few examples of this from recent years, writing :
What is perhaps most pernicious here is the paranoia micro-balkanization breeds, the extent to which it digs people deeper into conspiracy-minded foxholes. If you think that Kyle Rittenhouse was obviously guilty, or that the shooting of Jacob Blake was obviously unjust, or that it’s obviously the case that the Jane Doe case was prosecutable, or that Donald Trump obviously won the 2020 election, or that the lamestream media is obviously covering for Crazy James Talarico, then you are likely to become increasingly disillusioned by the fact that reality isn’t conforming to your false beliefs, that certain people aren’t being prosecuted or hauled off to prison.
Jonah kicked off his Wednesday G-File with his own thoughts about the dangers of these filter bubbles. Once people start believing their own set of “facts,” they assume everyone is aware of the same “facts” and when they say otherwise, they must be lying. He wrote :
The other day I was listening to a left-wing podcast and I heard a very charitable, fact-heavy defense of James Talarico and his comment about how he loves trans kids. I hadn’t heard of it before. But I am sure that a lot of siloed left-wingers have. So when they hear J.D. Vance insinuate that Talarico is gay and has a thing for underage trans children, I can only assume they believe that Vance is deliberately lying—which I don’t really doubt—but they probably also assume that all of the rank-and-file MAGA and Republican people who agree with Vance know the truth too, and are just deliberately smearing Talarico.
The result is that each side’s caricature of the other reinforces the other side’s caricature of them. And this makes every new allegation of wrongdoing even more believable.
Nick Catoggio also wrote about the failed attempt to smear Talarico in Boiling Frogs , and he has a theory as to the motivation behind it:
It’s a matter of saving face. As noted last week , the psychological stakes in Texas this fall are immense for the president and his postliberal acolytes: They demanded Paxton over the more electable John Cornyn, they got their wish, and now they’re on the brink of blowing a statewide race in America’s supreme Republican stronghold for the first time in more than 30 years. If a soft-spoken baby-faced left-winger proves more popular in the Lone Star State than an amoral Trump toady, not only will right-wing populists own the humiliation completely, their claim that postliberalism is the key to Republican electoral success will be shattered.
In Next Right , Michael Warren argued that the MAGA types pushing the story could have capitalized on Talarico’s illness but instead they overshot:
Remember when Hillary Clinton abruptly disappeared from the trail in September 2016 with a bad case of pneumonia ?…
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