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On Tuesday, it is Donald Trump endorsed and supported by MAGA’s top attorney, Texas veteran Ken Paxton defeated US senator John Cornyn in a runoff to claim the Republican nomination for the seat.
He then quickly began painting his opponent in the general election, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as single.
“My opponent is the most tyrannical Democrat the Democrats have ever elected,” Paxton said in his victory speech. “He’s running an animal campaign, whatever. He goes by a number of names you’ve probably all heard of. Some know him as Tofu Talarico. Some call him Six Gender Jimmy. I’ve heard some people call him James Talafreako. And some just call him Low-T Talarico.”
The spattering of insulting names was not a successful Trumpian development. (The campaign of Talarico, formerly a fundraising juggernautstarted selling”I am from Talafreako“T-shirts immediately). But Paxton’s attack also seems to come from manosphere and incel culturecommunities on the Internet that are deeply affected by their unscientific views on gender, sex, hormones, and nutrition.
Paxton’s first election ad continued in a bro-code vein, making Talarico out of touch with Texan values and a lack of testosterone: the spot ended by declaring the Democrat “the lowest-T in Texas.” Meanwhile, Trump’s advisor, Stephen Miller, went even further, tweeting to X on Wednesday that “Democrats made history in Texas by electing the first transgender senator.”
Trump, for his part, said that Talarico is “a vegan in Texas, and you can’t be elected as a vegan in Texas.”
Although her hormone levels are unknown to the public, Talarico is neither transgender nor vegan. The latter statement appears to be based on comments he made while running for the Texas House of Representatives in 2022. At a tax fundraiser for the Texas Humane Legislation Network that year, he spoke about the need to reduce meat consumption – part of the fight against climate change – and announced that his mission was to only buy vegan food at his events. Talarico never claimed to be a vegan, has since denied being one, and has eaten meat and dairy on the campaign trail. During a campaign stop at Austin’s Taco Joint in early May, Talaric systemd two potato, egg, and cheese tacos — a classic taco arrangement that’s also not vegan.
Planning on the need to eat meat and max out testosterone is a piece with podcasts dominated by men like. The Joe Rogan scene and a dangerous place where men scorn men who are considered weak as “soy boys.” But many of these ideas have found purchase at the highest levels of the Trump administration—especially in the messages and policies of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose “Make America Healthy Again” campaign embraces all kinds of medical pseudoscience.
Kennedy, for example, sounded the alarm low testosterone in men. He is wrong about the issue, because although it is true that research shows that testosterone is decreasing, it is not in the category of “low” in most men. He has also been advocating for Americans to eat more meat to get their own daily proteintake pictures on really and burger restaurant. (Incidentally, whole soy foods such as tofu are a rich source of protein, containing all the essential amino acids in the human diet.)
That Republicans are now using this ideology against Talarico shows that masculinity has entered the national consciousness. However, it is not clear that any Texan will be particularly drawn to the images of the former teacher and Presbyterian seminary teacher as an incompetent worker. Furthermore, while the words “vegan” and “low-T” may be insults that are often found on the Internet, the petty arguments of the Internet do not mean that there will be a global competition that will be decided by about 19 million qualified people.
