Since the Second World War, the left has done its very best to pathologize being right-wing: not just explicit identification with parties of the right, but also the basic attitudes, beliefs, and stances associated with being of a conservative temperament. The goal of that endeavor is to discourage and even punish right-wing affiliation, to the social and electoral benefit of the left.
Theodor Adorno, of the Frankfurt School, landed some heavy early blows with his 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality. Rooted in Freudian ideas of repression and the Oedipus complex, the book argued for the existence of a specific personality structure that predisposes people to undemocratic and fascist beliefs. The book produced a special tool called the F-Scale—literally, the “Fascism Scale”—that measured nine key components of the authoritarian personality. These included “conventionalism” (rigid adherence to middle-class values), “anti-intraception” (opposition to the subjective, imaginative, and sentimental), and “authoritarian submission” (uncritical acceptance of authority figures within the in-group).
Critics pointed out that The Authoritarian Personality had nothing to say about the traits shared by, say, Stalinists. Didn’t they also worship power, persecute dissent, believe hysterical conspiracies about their enemies, and lapse into terrifying pogroms and bouts of mass murder? The historian Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites, said the book effectively made leftism the sole bastion of true mental health and risked defining large swathes of American society as a kind of open-air “insane asylum.”
But these criticisms are moot, really: Adorno wanted to obfuscate leftist terror, and he hated the average American and his entire way of life.
That pathologization, inspired by Adorno and others, continues. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I saw a new scientific study that claims “people who favor group-based inequality”—read: conservatives—have lower levels of gray matter in a region of the brain linked to empathy. Literally: if you’re a conservative, you have a shrunken empathy center in your brain. The other way of framing it, of course, would be to say liberals have an enlarged empathy center, too big perhaps, since it makes them believe countries are just lines on a map and goat herders from the Middle East and tribesmen from Papua New Guinea have an equal moral claim on their time and resources as their own children. But the default—the idea of the conservative as mentally, morally, even physically defective—is now powerfully enshrined, and so we naturally think of things that way. Or many of us do.
The funny thing is, though, there’s a considerable body of credible work in the social sciences that tells the opposite story. It’s leftism that’s a pathology. Or, rather, leftists tend to be more mentally ill, unhappier, more neurotic, and emotionally unstable than right-wingers. Narcissism and psychopathy have also been associated with “anti-hierarchical aggression”—the desire to destroy society—and Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy predict “virtuous victimhood signalling,” the claims to moral superiority that accrue to the persecuted in today’s leftist worldview. Whether, a fortiori, that means leftism itself is a mental disease, we can leave to some other time. I certainly know what I believe, and I elaborate on this theme at length in my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.
Which brings me to the real subject of this missive: James Talarico. Or, as President Trump likes to call him, James Talafreako. Talarico, a Democrat, is currently running in the U.S. Senate race in Texas. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know he’s been mysteriously absent from the campaign trail—nine days in total. He appeared virtually at a campaign event on September 30 and told supporters he was feeling unwell. He didn’t reappear until last Friday. So conspicuous was his absence that his opponent, state attorney general Ken Paxton, demanded “proof of life,” which is the kind of thing you do during hostage negotiations with Hezbollah or FARC (there was a bad Russell Crowe film with that very title and premise). Talarico said he’d “had the flu.” Then, on Sunday, came a stunning revelation. Talarico had, in fact, been in a mental institution in Ohio. On X, independent journalist Nick Sortor posted a short clip of a conversation in which a female employee at the Lindner Center of Hope said Talarico had “just been discharged this evening.”
“While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a U.S. Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS,” Sortor wrote.
“The job doesn’t get easier after being elected—it only gets MORE stressful. And Talarico clearly can’t handle it. I pray he gets the help he needs, but Texans need a real representative they can rely on.”
The speculation that Talarico was actually in a padded room rather than “in bed and, you know, drinking lots of liquids” (his words) had begun well before Sortor posted the clip on X. Given the kind of ridiculous stuff Talarico regularly says in public—there are six biological sexes, “God is non-binary,” it’s “abusive” to deny a child’s gender identity, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]”—it seemed only natural that an unexplained absence would lead to such speculation. I mean, where else would he go? The beach?
Needless to say, the Talafreakout story went mega-viral. Elon Musk boosted it on X, and President Trump even alluded to it. “I don’t think it was the flu,” he told reporters.
The Lindner Center of Hope has since issued a denial. A longer clip of the conversation with the employee was obtained by The Bulwark and reveals the woman actually denied Talarico had ever stayed there, full stop. The short clip posted by Sortor was taken out of context. There’s also a chronological clash. Sortor claimed Talarico had been discharged the day before—the Saturday evening—but he was at a Katy Musgraves concert in Dallas that day, as his social media confirms.
Talarico has called the claim “a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory” and attempted to turn things around by accusing Paxton of being the one with a medical condition.
