An already unhinged electoral battle in Texas has taken an even more crackpot turn as Republicans turn on the Democrat candidate for being vegan… after he ate a potato, egg and cheese taco.
The MAGA movement is throwing all it can at James Talarico, the eloquent, God-fearing Democratic candidate in November’s vital Senate elections, including his admission of what his favourite breakfast order at the Taco Joint restaurant in Austin was. Talarico campaigned there earlier this month with former president Barack Obama and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa.
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Ken Paxton, the Trump-anointed Republican candidate, made a speech this week in which he attacked 37-year-old Talarico’s breakfast of choice, saying: “He’s a threat to our very way of life and our values. I mean, he’s a vegan who thinks God is non-binary and that there’s actually six biological sexes. It’s hard to imagine someone more radical than that.”
Meanwhile, Joe Gruters, the ultra-MAGA chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the hard right Newsmax’s Wake Up America show that “he’s a creep and he’s a vegan and he thinks God is non-binary, he wants to mutilate children, he wants to put boys in girls’ locker rooms. People are done with that… [Democrats] are openly supporting communists and socialists.”
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Quite apart from some of Talarico’s other comments, which he has, as they say, ‘walked back’, (the candidate, who attended seminary, was using Hebrew scriptural translations to make a theological point which was interpreted as saying God was non-binary), it does make one wonder: do any Republicans know what vegans actually eat? Rats in a Sack is no expert, but it certainly doesn’t include eggs and cheese.
Still, whether it affects his chances depends on how Texan voters rank invented veganism against actual adultery. Paxton was heading for defeat in his primary against old-school Republican John Cornyn, not least because party stalwarts were less than impressed with how Paxton, a hang-’em-and-flog-’em type who has said “Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth” saw his wife file for divorce last year on “biblical grounds”.
Then Trump intervened to back him against Cornyn, who had criticised the actions of the president on January 6, and Paxton’s campaign was resurrected. What was it about the lying, philandering hypocrite Ken Paxton which first attracted him to Donald Trump?
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