The Democrats have an authenticity deficit

The Democratic Party has a problem. It is hemorrhaging male voters. Just as significant, and not unrelated, is the obvious inauthenticity of the candidates whom Democrats and their media boosters keep pushing on the public.

People will tolerate a lot, but a phony rarely goes far. (There are exceptions.) And say what you will about President Trump, but there’s no doubt he’s the same man behind closed doors as he is on stage.

The same cannot be said about the fictionalized characters whom Democrats and journalists have foisted on voters recently.

Front and center this month is self-identified Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico (D). He is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, having defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) last week in the Democratic primary. Talarico’s biggest challenge going into the general election, and not to put too fine a point on it, is that he is a progressive lunatic running in a red state. He and his fans in the press would like you to ignore the lunatic part.

In 2022, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, he expressed concern about “our neighbors with a uterus” — this is how a radical progressive refers to “women” without using the word — had just become the “property of the state.”

In 2021, during a debate over a bill aimed at keeping biological males out of girls’ sports, Talarico professed that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”

At another point in 2020, he declared, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag—to be contagious.”

In a famous appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Talarico repurposed the Annunciation to promote abortion. He claimed, falsely, that when it was revealed to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to Christ, she was supposedly being given the option to dispose of Jesus, her unborn child.

With such theologically corrupt pronouncements, he has somehow positioned himself to anger not only Texas’s largest Christian denomination (Roman Catholic), but also its second-largest (Southern Baptist). So he is a unifier.

Talarico’s saving grace might just be the dysfunction within the Texas Republican Party, which is still in a nasty fight to choose its own nominee. But even then, his prospects are not terrific. Texas Democrats, including Wendy Davis (a moderate compared to Talarico) have generally fared poorly in statewide elections despite starting off with high hopes and in some cases even polling well at the outset.

Nevertheless, and despite what we all see with our own eyes, members of the press want us to believe that Talarico is not, in fact, a rabid progressive embracing some of the most fringe policy positions. They want to reframe him as a plain, folksy Texas Christian, a moderate, and the obvious choice in November.

Why, he’s the kind of fella you’d invite over for lunch after services! Did we mention he’s religious?

To the liberal New Yorker, Talarico’s pseudo-gospel nonsense is “civic A.S.M.R. for anyone sick of Donald Trump.” To Politico’s national political correspondent, he is a “deeply religious” man and “something of a theological Clark Kent.” Didn’t you see the ad where, as the leftist Texas Monthly put it, Talarico “speaks loudly, forcefully, and like someone who might, dare I say, be capable of throwing a punch?”

There are at least a few moments of honesty in the left-wing media. The Guardian is fully sincere when it writes that Talarico is more likely to “appeal to moderates and independents” in the general election than Crockett, his now-vanquished Black primary opponent.

In this day and age, readers are wary of media claims that Democrats are “moderate.” Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) was also supposed to be a moderate. Lucky for Texas, though, it is not Virginia — and it probably won’t be, as long as Democrats keep sending up left-wing caricatures of themselves as candidates.

The media’s effort to lionize Talarico, Pete Buttigieg (The Atlantic just last week revealed in a 5,400-word essay that the former Transportation secretary has grown a beard) and Kennedy nepo baby Jack Schlossberg — he is running for a House seat in New York — follows an equally desperate attempt to make the hapless Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) seem masculine and folksy. We all know how that one is ending, in a flood of fraud, with the good governor revealing himself as inept as his likeness, Elmer Fudd.

It is almost enough to make one long for the likes of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D).

The problem that all the political operatives and journalists face — which many have so far failed to grapple with — is that people can smell a phony a mile away.

T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.

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