‘Never Lied, I Just Doubled Down on Wrong Information’

On Sunday night, a suburban Cincinnati psychiatric hospital posted a single sentence to its X account: “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.”

Weird, right? If you, like me, weren’t swimming in the right-wing fever swamp that is X last week, you might be a bit confused about what this is all about. Here’s the short version of the story:

Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, was off the campaign trail for nine days after saying during an event for the Hispanic Business Council (via video) that he’d been diagnosed with the flu after feeling under the weather for a few days. Pretty bad timing to have to pause campaigning with the election coming up in just a few weeks, but stuff like this happens, and isn’t super out of the ordinary.

But in Talarico’s case, Republicans wouldn’t take his word for it, and instead insisted that something nefarious was going on. For days, they’d been floating baseless conspiracy theories ranging from a silly claim that Talarico is secretly transgender and was off the campaign trail to recover from bottom surgery (setting aside the fact that he’s not trans, as someone currently recovering from that surgery, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that he absolutely would not be able to campaign just nine days after surgery — I write this from my bed more than a month out from my own) to a claim that he’d been admitted to a mental health facility.