Everywhere else in American politics this year, the progressive movement has stopped pretending. The activists who spent a decade insisting a man could become a woman now say it to your face and dare you to object. The candidates who once smuggled their radicalism past voters in soft language have decided the soft language is no longer worth the trouble. The mask is off — nearly everywhere.
Then there is James Talarico. The Texas Democrats’ nominee for United States Senate, set to face Attorney General Ken Paxton in November, is doing the one thing the rest of his movement has abandoned. He is putting the mask back on, and he is doing it in real time, in front of us, with the cameras rolling. A Democrat has not won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s, and Talarico has evidently concluded that the only way to break that streak is to convince Texans he is not the man his own record says he is.