Matt WalshWe need to talk about the bizarre and Soviet-style disappearance of James Talarico — the very creepy heretic who, if polls are to be believed, is favored to become the first Democrat senator from Texas in nearly three decades.
Here’s the timeline: On Saturday, September 26, Talarico held a news conference on gas prices and the war in Iran in Carrollton, Texas. He also attended the State Fair of Texas later that day. Talarico then reportedly attended a fundraiser on September 28 in New York with Robert De Niro. There’s no clear evidence that he attended in person — it’s all based on claims from the campaign, since it was a private event. On September 30, Talarico was scheduled to participate in an in-person interview with the CEO of the United States Hispanic Business Council. He attended via Zoom instead, claiming he had the flu — even though, as the event moderator pointed out, he looked fine.
WATCH: The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution
In the Zoom interview, Talarico said he went to urgent care in Dallas. That’s important to note. But first — putting aside the question of his health, it needs to be said that this has to be one of the most patronizing and phony candidates to ever run for office in this country.
Just by looking at him, you can tell that if he thought it would help him win this race, James Talarico would not hesitate to sacrifice your elderly grandmother to the gods, Aztec-style. No one is buying the idea that this guy decided out of the goodness of his heart to self-quarantine just a couple of weeks before early voting begins in one of the most important elections of the year. But we’re supposed to believe that he “couldn’t live with himself” if he infected a random person with — what, a head cold?
That’s the other problem here. On Zoom, he comes across as someone who’s mildly congested. Whatever “fever” he has, it’s obviously a very mild one. The interview lasted an hour, and he was answering questions without any issues whatsoever.
This is why he felt the need to explicitly state that he’s very sick, and that he’s trying to protect innocent men, women, and children from his horrific illness. If he didn’t spell it out for everyone, no one would have any idea he’s sick. Even the event moderator seemed confused by the whole thing. And then he claims he’s “at his most contagious” during the virtual event, which means he shouldn’t be much sicker than he currently is. That should be the point where the fever breaks, and things begin to return to normal in a couple of days.
But that’s not what happened. After this impromptu virtual event, Talarico fell off the map completely. He didn’t appear at a single in-person campaign event from October 1st to the 8th. He was scheduled to appear at a fundraiser and a symposium, but backed out of both.
Meanwhile, Talarico’s extended absence, as you’d expect, was making his campaign volunteers nervous. On October 7th, Alex Balderas, one of the leaders of Talarico’s volunteer operation, posted the following on Slack, per the New York Post:
I suppose spokesman JT Ennis [who works on the campaign] should come out and update on James health. … Conservatives doubting he’s sick but conservatives leaving out the important part. … James is diabetic that’s why it’s taking awhile for recovery so basically conservatives and Paxton are being very immoral.
Source: New York Post
In a separate post, Balderas wrote, “I think it’ll be fine. It’s just conservatives blasting him. I’m just worried about him losing momentum.”
Talarico has indeed said he has type 1 diabetes, which was reportedly diagnosed when he was running for the Texas House in 2018. He claims he slept for 36 hours before going to the emergency room. I have no idea if that story is true or not, but even if we assume it’s accurate, it still doesn’t come close to explaining what’s happening now.
First of all, as the volunteers noted, Talarico’s campaign hasn’t claimed his absence was caused by his diabetes. And secondly, even if his diabetes is making his recovery “take a while,” that still doesn’t explain why he could not appear at all — even for a Zoom call.
By the morning of October 9th — after Talarico had been missing in action — the former LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt posted the following message on X:
My sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility. His campaign has stopped actively planning events in the vital homestretch of the campaign. If this is true, this is actually a time to pray for Talarico. … As much as I don’t want Talarico anywhere near government, I also don’t want wish him harm, and no political office is worth having a breakdown. His awful advisors are at fault for this. They pushed him to be something he isn’t, and it didn’t work. I’m praying that this isn’t true, and he’s OK. You want to win these fights on the battlefield of ideas, not the minefield of poor health.
Several other reporters, including Sara Gonzales at TheBlaze, had posted messages suggesting they were working on a similar scoop. Gonzales, for example, wrote: “I have received unverified information on James Talarico’s whereabouts. If true, it will END his campaign.”
Within hours of Pratt’s post — by the afternoon of October 9th — Talarico resurfaced in the following footage:
Watch:
ACL Fest @jamestalarico https://t.co/edKAO21FMH
— Andy Langer (@Andylanger) October 9, 2026
Source: @Andylanger/X.com
The campaign posted the footage from the Austin City Limits music festival in Texas, showing Talarico posing for a photo with some supporters. He looks normal. This is nine days after the Zoom conference, and 13 days since his last documented in-person appearance in public. And instead of making any kind of statement or formal appearance, this is what we got.
But the mystery was not resolved. On October 10th, Caroline Wren, a prominent Republican operative, posted the following information:
What are the chances that a private plane took off from Austin and flew to tiny Hamilton airport in Ohio which is 20 mins from the Lindner Center, a private inpatient mental health treatment facility, and then turned around and flew back to Austin landing yesterday morning at 10:24am right before James Talarico magically reappears at the Austin City Limits music festival that afternoon? Lindner Center also happens to be the same facility that Talarico’s good friend and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo spent 7 weeks in when she had a mental breakdown 3 years ago…
Sara Gonzales reposted this reporting, saying, “Evidence is growing stronger by the day that my sources were correct and Talarico was in a mental health facility.”
Two days ago, on the evening of October 10th, the investigative journalist Nick Sortor and an associate named Rhein Amacher decided to call the Lindner Center directly to see what they could find out. Under HIPAA laws, which protect patient privacy, a lot of people assume you can’t do this. After all, HIPAA is supposedly the reason we’re not allowed to know anything about the medications that mass shooters were taking. It’s a privacy law so powerful that it blocks the public from learning relevant information about mass murderers.
But actually, when it’s not being used to protect mass shooters, HIPAA is pretty flimsy. Nothing prevents a reporter from calling a mental health facility and asking whether a specific patient has been discharged, because HIPAA only applies to medical providers — which is a bit of a murky term. And HIPAA also doesn’t explicitly prevent the mental health facility from answering the question, believe it or not.
According to HHS guidelines, a patient who has been “treated and released” can be considered “directory information,” so the hospital isn’t required to keep it confidential (unless the patient specifies beforehand that he wants it to remain confidential).
Under federal law, the hospital or mental health facility can disclose this information to anyone who asks — whether or not the person is related to the patient. As long as you ask for a specific patient by name, the hospital can tell you whether he was discharged and, if applicable, what his condition is (stable, critical, etc.). This is how, when someone prominent gets injured, the media is able to report on their condition.
With this law in mind, Sortor and Amacher called the Lindner Center near Cincinnati, Ohio, and asked about the status of James Talarico. They recorded the phone call on the night of October 10th. This call went all over the internet. Elon Musk and millions of others responded to it. Here it is:
🚨 BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week
The “flu” thing was a BIG FAT LIE
Following reporting by @SaraGonzalesTX and @CarolineWren, a hospital employee told @RheinAmacher and I that Talarico had in fact been a patient at the Lindner Center of Hope near Cincinnati, Ohio, which specializes in around-the-clock mental health treatment.
While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS.
The job doesn’t get easier after being elected — it only gets MORE stressful.
And Talarico clearly can’t handle it.
I pray he gets the help he needs, but Texans need a real representative they can rely on.
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) October 11, 2026
Source: @nicksortor/X.com
The Talarico campaign has denied that this call has anything to do with Talarico, and argues it’s a deranged conspiracy theory to suggest he was shipped away to any kind of mental health facility. To be fair, it’s very, very possible that this call isn’t what it seems. There are obvious red flags.
First of all, the woman at the Lindner Center clearly says Talarico was discharged that same day — October 10th. But if that’s true, it doesn’t make sense with the timeline, because Talarico was spotted at the music festival on October 9th. That’s a big problem — and just by itself, that means we can’t take the call as definitive proof of anything.
Secondly, we don’t have the full, unedited phone call. And that’s a huge asterisk, because it’s possible this whole conversation was a miscommunication. Even from this excerpt, it sounds like the woman is implying that she can’t find Talarico in the system, and that (by inference) that means he must have been discharged recently. But she could’ve been basing that inference on the statements that Amacher was making in the call, which we can’t hear.
Indeed, according to The Bulwark:
We obtained the full six minute audio of the Lindner recording. The employee there repeatedly denied anyone named “James Talarico” was in her system at all. Only towards the end did she say someone had checked out that day.
So it sounds like this woman at the facility maybe was browbeaten into claiming Talarico was there. For his part, Amacher posted an earlier call that he made to the facility, which makes a couple of things clearer. First, Amacher lied and claimed that he was Talarico’s relative. Secondly, the hospital (maybe to comply with state law) does have more stringent privacy standards than HIPAA alone requires. In particular, they ask for some kind of code before they’re willing to disclose any information about patients.
LISTEN:
🚨𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗡𝗘𝗪𝗦: My independent investigation into @JamesTalarico follows the initial reporting by @SaraGonzales and @CarolineWren concerning a reported private aircraft charter traveling from Hamilton, Ohio, to Austin, TX ➡️ Dallas, TX ➡️ Austin, TX.
I personally contacted @LindnerCtrHope in Mason, Ohio, to determine whether Talarico was or had previously been a patient.
During my recorded call, an individual identifying themselves as a female facility employee reportedly stated that Talarico was no longer a patient and had been discharged within the previous 24–48 hours.
Texans deserve accurate, independently verified information about candidates seeking to represent them in the U.S. Senate.
The stakes are too high for speculation.
— Rhein Amacher (@RheinAmacher) October 11, 2026
Source: @RheinAmacher/X.com
As for how Amacher eventually got this code, he claims he eventually just made up a four-digit code, and they accepted it. So there are a lot of unanswered questions here, and everyone involved has an incentive to lie about where Talarico really was. Late Sunday, the Lindner Center put out the following statement after deflecting questions about Talarico all day: “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.“
So that’s a pretty definitive statement. For his part, Talarico then responded to the post from the facility, saying he’s never even been to Ohio.
A couple of things about this. Number one — it’s very possible Talarico and his campaign are hiding something. But we do have to concede that, as for the mental health institution in Ohio, this looks like a fraudulent story that was planted by GOP operatives. Maybe they were right “directionally,” as people like to say. There are reasons to think there’s something strange going on here. But on the facts that were alleged here, this was a massive overreach by a lot of people who, on the Right, have been accurate, trusted reporters. That speaks to desperation among Republicans, including Republicans in Texas, who are seeing Talarico’s numbers and panicking.
What we can say with certainty is that it’s extremely unusual for a candidate — who, at all appearances, was not seriously ill — to disappear from the campaign trail at a pivotal moment, for nearly two weeks.
Talarico finally appeared for an interview on Sunday with a local news station to explain what had happened. And he didn’t help matters.
Watch:
I spoke with Rep. James Talarico earlier today in Dallas. I ask him about:
-getting the flu
-the claim he was getting treatment for a stress-induced episode
-a debate update
More tonight at 5 and 10 pm. https://t.co/uqhaXHcmtv
— Phil Prazan (@PhilPrazan) October 11, 2026
Source: @PhilPrazan/X.com
Everything about this interview — his demeanor and his answers — makes it seem much, much more likely that he’s lying. Right off the bat, he looks perfectly healthy. If you just spent two weeks battling the flu — an illness that left you bedridden and unable to campaign for the most important election of your life, or even speak on a Zoom call — then you simply don’t look this healthy and normal when you go out in public. His weight hasn’t changed at all. It’s bizarre.
It gets worse. He’s now admitting, on the record, that he didn’t suffer some kind of severe diabetic complication or even a particularly unusual bout of the flu. He comes across as nervous and deceptive. And most importantly, he contradicts what he said during that Zoom meeting roughly two weeks ago. Remember, he said he went to “urgent care in Dallas” when his symptoms became severe. But in this interview, he said he went to his primary care doctor. Let’s play those side-by-side.
Watch:
Which was it, James Talarico? Did you go to an urgent care or did you visit your primary care physician? 🤔 https://t.co/JbSZL3WTTZ
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 11, 2026
Source: @EndWokeness/X.com
This is the kind of contradiction that, by itself, doesn’t mean much. People make mistakes. But when you combine it with everything else — including how utterly bizarre his disappearance was, and how he’s acting now — it’s obviously significant. There is no doubt that James Talarico is a sociopathic liar, and it’s a grave indictment of our country that he’s anywhere near getting elected to the U.S. Senate.
Whether or not he spent the last week in an asylum, just based on his public statements, the guy should obviously be institutionalized. He told Joe Rogan that the Annunciation supported his pro-abortion politics, because God supposedly asked for Mary’s “consent.” He thinks God is non-binary. He called racism a virus that white people “spread” wherever we go. He was also oddly specific about the number of genders he claims scientists have identified.
Watch:
James Talarico, the Democrat nominee for senate, testifies while wearing a mask that there are actually six genders. Dems are so cooked here. Guy is insane: https://t.co/IUS0kD5loB
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 4, 2026
Source: @ClayTravis/X.com
It won’t surprise you, given how strange this guy is, that a lot of his online support is fraudulent. This is from The New York Times, an outlet you’d think would be friendly to Talarico:
The Times found dozens of accounts on TikTok that were paid $4 per 1,000 views to post positive clips about Mr. Talarico, according to a job posting and online records of creators who accepted the job. Mr. Talarico’s campaign said it was not involved in paying creators. The company claiming responsibility for the payments, Frontier Media, could not be reached for comment.
This is now a feature of American politics, and to be fair, it’s happening on all sides to some degree. But this election cycle has involved a massive new influx of dark money — which is to say, untraceable money from unknown donors — that’s benefiting Leftist radicals who want to destroy the country. This is from a report in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
In Michigan this year, a new super PAC vowing to fight pro-Israel money chipped in more than half a million dollars to help progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate bid. Its funders: a crew of virtually unknown political donors, many of whom had never given to politics before last year but have since donated up to $1 million each. In New York, billionaire Alex Soros cut checks directly to progressive politicians, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Those donations are part of the millions of dollars that Soros and his father, George, plan to give to Democratic causes this year. And in Philadelphia, nearly a million dollars in TV advertising paid for by outside groups is boosting Democratic socialist Chris Rabb, highlighting his endorsement from New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and his willingness to fight for Medicare for All.
So we have no idea who they are, but some unknown donors are pumping $500,000 to boost Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign, and other campaigns as well. And incidentally, El-Sayed happens to be related to people with very close connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization.
Watch:
🚨 HOLY CRAP!!
The witness just exposed that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed (D) is connected to TERRORISTS and the MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
“I look at the connections that his father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, has TWO brotherhood-linked groups.”
“This includes being the president at one time of CAIR Michigan, also his presence on the Islamic Society of North America Founders Committee — which is only for those most exclusively devoted to ISNA [Islamic Society of North America] and provide a significant amount of funding.”
“There are other known brotherhood members on that committee.”
“I would also look at El-Sayed’s ties to a group called Emgage, which purports to be a Muslim, sort of, get out the vote or a candidate recruitment organization, but it has close ties to CAIR.”
“It was created by a former CAIR member who at one time was on a terror watch list and was also a consultant to convicted terrorist, Sami Al-Arian.”
Michigan must elect Mike Rogers. This is their FINAL STAND
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 5, 2026
Source: @EricLDaugh/X.com
To the extent the corporate press will touch this story, they’ll ask El-Sayed a softball question so that he can deny it. And then they can pretend that they “investigated” the allegations, after he’s refuted them. That’s what NBC tried to do the other day. But it didn’t go very well.
Watch:
NBC: “Can you set the record straight about whether you or your family have any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Abdul El-Sayed: “No.” https://t.co/hFDy6nLi5g
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) October 11, 2026
Source: @theblaze/X.com
That was the fastest pivot I’ve ever seen, after the denial (if you can even call it a denial). It’s the old “mutter something and move on and hope they don’t notice” strategy — which, if you’re trying to do damage control, isn’t the best option. He did it so fast that the anchor woman had to go back and ask the question again.
Is the Muslim Brotherhood funding this guy’s campaign? We really don’t know. But we do know that these donors clearly have the objective of destroying the United States as we know it. That’s the only reason that a Senate candidate is going to talk openly about our duty to open the borders, right out in the open, during a televised debate.
Watch:
🚨This is insane… Extremist Abdul El-Sayed says his immigration plan includes importing Muslim refugees en masse because we owe it to the world:
Reporter: “Would refugees be part of your plan?”
El-Sayed: “Absolutely. We as a country owe it to the world to open our doors.” https://t.co/ZgtzteaLCh
— Steve Cortes (@SteveCortes) October 11, 2026
Source: @SteveCortes/X.com
So this guy is born to Egyptians, spends his summers in Egypt, claims he held Egyptian citizenship, his wife owns property in Dubai, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, has spoken positively about the Muslim Brotherhood, mourned the death of Iran’s supreme leader just a few months ago — and he’s now lecturing Americans about their sacred duty to open their borders to let even more foreigners into the country. He doesn’t have anywhere near the charisma or the intelligence necessary to sell this fraud to anyone. He’s a dumpy foreigner who is telling us, to our faces, that he doesn’t think America should exist as a country. And, currently, he’s favored to win the Senate race in Michigan.
What’s important to understand is that El-Sayed and Talarico, as unsettling and un-American as they are, are not remotely unusual by the current standards of the Democratic Party. In fact, they are highly representative of the current crop of candidates on the Left. Here’s Jocelyn Benson, for example. She’s the former SPLC board member who, if the polls are accurate, is about to be the governor of the state.
Watch:
Jocelyn Benson doesn’t want to let anyone ask a question. She hides behind her comms staffer and has a preselected list of outlets: https://t.co/dUAqawAkb7
— The Midwesterner (@Th_Midwesterner) October 7, 2026
Source: @Th_Midwesterner/X.com
She can’t even take a question from a reporter who’s not on her pre-approved list. But more than that — just look at her mannerisms. Look at her face. Talarico has the same unnatural twitching motions. It’s uncanny. It’s not simply that these candidates are determined to undermine and demolish what’s left of civilization. They’re also profoundly strange people. They look like animatronics.
You have to ask — where are they finding these people? What kind of person runs for office in the Democratic Party today? It looks like, based on what we’re seeing, that you need to be an apex narcissist. You have to be severely damaged in some meaningful way to stand apart from a sea of very unwell, confused people to win their vote. Maybe that explains it. Then the foreign money flows in to put these candidates over the top.
Here’s yet another example. This is a quote from William Lawrence, a Democrat (and until recently, a DSA member) who’s running for a House seat in Michigan. Again, he’s favored to win. He went on a podcast in 2024 and said the following, according to The Washington Free Beacon:
Lawrence, in an episode on “Protecting Our Migrant Neighbors,” mused about the political tactics of left-wing reformers versus left-wing “‘revolutionaries,’ siding decidedly with the latter. “We are lacking for a framework that can make sense of how to be revolutionary in the sense of truly, truly wanting a world without borders and wanting to redistribute all the land and all the money.” … Lawrence also envisioned a “humane society” in which “[we would] throw open the gates and welcome all of the migrants, the refugees, the asylum seekers from climate disaster and conflict all around the world.”
You can go down the list of Democrat candidates: Troy Jackson in Maine has children with his cousin. Dan Osborn in Nebraska says calls for a border wall are “racism.” Graham Platner had to drop out, and it wasn’t even the Nazi tattoo that did him in. Scott Wiener in California needs his hard drive checked. And on and on.
These people are, in some ways, totally unserious people — in that a real country where things are going reasonably well would never consider them, or at least they wouldn’t be viable options. But the polls show that they’re probably going to win.
If we’re being honest, we can identify at least two primary reasons why: The war in Iran, which was supposedly going to spark an internal revolution that never took place, and high gas prices, which have made everything — from transportation to the cost of groceries — increase substantially. And because of those reasons, these very unserious candidates should, in fact, be taken very seriously. Some of them may soon be in the United States Senate. Once they’re in, they can very quickly transform this country in ways that, for most people, are unthinkable right now.
The reason we’re making “The Real History of Communism“ free on YouTube this Friday is that, if you want to understand how Leftists can seize power — even when their ideas are extremely unpopular — then you need to become familiar with the Russian Revolution.
At no point did the Bolsheviks win a national election in Russia. They never had the support of the majority of the population, or anything close to it. But they rose to power anyway, because unlike the conservatives, they were willing to fight. There were other reasons — which we talk about in the documentary, including a very unfortunate miscommunication that could’ve come straight out of a Coen brothers movie, called the Kornilov Affair — but that’s the big one.
Then, shortly after the Bolshevik takeover, people were getting letters in the mail, giving them a date and time when they had to show up to the banks — where they would be forced, at gunpoint, to empty out all of their savings and hand their money over to the commissars.
The government took everything. There was a mass exodus. Foreign investment went to zero. Soon there was starvation. Dissidents, including members of the Church, were executed in the streets. As this catastrophe unfolded, everyday Russians simply couldn’t believe what was happening. They never thought their country would become a socialist hellscape. And by the time they realized what had happened, it was too late to do anything about it. The Bolsheviks — who never won an actual election — ruled for more than seven decades, killing millions in the process.
“The Real History of Communism” is as much a documentary about what happened in Russia in the early 20th century as a warning about what could easily take place in the United States, no matter how invincible we may think we are. Again, it’s out Friday. It’s probably the most important Real History documentary we’ve done, especially at this particular moment. Watch it and share it.
Remember that, whatever happens in November, the Bolsheviks didn’t win at the ballot box. They never do. They win when their opponents stop fighting — which is something that, especially given the current crop of Democrat candidates, we must never do.
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