James Talarico wants Texas voters to believe he's changed, that he’s not the crazy left-winger he was just a few short years ago. He has spent recent weeks trying to soften and moderate his image, walking back his own words, and insisting he's not the radical his record suggests he is. He walked back his own statement that "God is non-binary." He even tried to pass himself off as a friend of the Texas energy industry, despite years of anti-oil rhetoric and support for radical climate policies.
These acts alone tell us he has figured out that if you want to get elected statewide in Texas, you can’t be a loony leftist. It just won’t work. Yet, clearly, he still doesn’t understand that while he can run for statewide office in Texas, he can't run from who he really is.
Back in 2019, Talarico brought on Ana Lopez as a legislative aide. Lopez had led the “C//ks Not Glocks" campus protest movement before joining his office, and Talarico put her to work drafting his gun control agenda.
From January through May of that year, Lopez helped Talarico craft three major gun control bills in the Texas Legislature. All three failed. Lopez's LinkedIn profile credits her with work on bills that would have ended concealed carry reciprocity in Texas, required background checks to rent firearms at shooting ranges, and tightened the requirements for obtaining a gun license in the first place.
Her resume before that job is even more telling.
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“C//ks Not Glocks" traces back to 2015, when Jessica Jin, a fellow University of Texas at Austin graduate, launched it as a social media joke aimed at a new Texas law allowing licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons on college campuses. The group's motto was "fighting absurdity with absurdity," and members handed out more than 4,500 dildos on the UT-Austin campus. Protesters carried signs twisting Second Amendment slogans into crude jokes, and some wore dog collar sex toys while they marched.
I’d tell you more, but I think it’s inappropriate to include it.
When Jin graduated and moved to California, she handed the reins to Lopez. Lopez told Study Breaks Magazine in 2017 that Jin passed the "torch down to me," and that most of the group's critics were "men who can't take a joke." Lopez went on to co-found Students Against Campus Carry and wrote a 53-page thesis on gun culture in 2019, the same year she joined Talarico's staff. "There are also other forms of self-defense," Lopez said at the time. "You could carry a knife, you could carry pepper spray, you could take jiu-jitsu classes. Not everyone has to be armed with an AK-47 to feel safe." Lopez did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Talarico hasn't exactly hidden where he stands, either. He has accused President Donald Trump of policies that "allowed weapons of war on our streets and in our classrooms." He has argued that the Second Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights are "not absolute" and can be limited. Recently surfaced video shows him voicing support for a ban on semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines, along with new restrictions on buying firearms.
Talarico insists he's "not interested in taking anyone's guns" away. Texans can decide for themselves how much that promise is worth.
NRSC spokeswoman Samantha Cantrell wasn't buying the rebrand. "James Talarico is coming for Texas' oil & gas, barbecue, and Second Amendment rights. Good luck with that," she said.
Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis pushed back, saying Talarico "agrees with the vast majority of Texans that we must protect the Second Amendment while also enacting popular, common-sense measures like universal background checks that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals."
Talarico can rebrand all he wants. His resume keeps telling on him. Sadly, this is what Democrats do all the time. They run for positions by convincing voters they are something different from who they are.
