Politics The Talarico Two-Step  Could a young Texas Democrat threaten the GOP’s grip on the Senate? There are good reasons to believe Texas will, as it almost always does, send a Republican to the United States Senate this November.  Never mind the electoral ramifications of an explosive, expensive, and completely unnecessary war with Iran. Never mind the price of gas at the pump, rising as a blockade strangles the Strait of Hormuz and U.S. bombers torch Iran’s oil fields. Never mind the heated, problematic Republican Senate primary that is headed to a costly and performative runoff unless President Donald Trump can convince one of two bullheaded men to drop out and save everyone a whole lot of time and resources. At the end of the day, it’s still Texas. Longhorns run it. Oil men run it. Cattle men run it. Most importantly, Democrats rarely run it.  It’s been nearly 40 years since a Democrat won a Senate seat in the Lone Star State, when Lloyd Bentsen bested Beau Boulter in the 1988 U.S. Senate election. Bentsen wasn’t a Democrat in the modern sense. He was pro-business, argued for tax cuts, and spoke in support of a strong national defense. He belonged to an older coalition of conservative Democrats that still ruled large swaths of the South before political realignment shifted many of his voters toward the Republican Party while the Democrats opted for a more progressive direction socially and politically. The closest any Democrat has come to winning a Senate seat in Texas since Bentsen was the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Beto O’Rourke, who lost to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) by less than 3 percentage points in 2018. By 2024, Cruz had consolidated support, defeating the Democratic nominee Colin Allred by a whopping 8 points. With Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) easily securing victory in each of his four Senate campaigns since 2002, Texas appeared to be firmly in the hands of the Republicans.  But Democrat James Talarico, an articulate 36-year-old from Round Rock, Texas, may be the most credible threat Texas Republicans have faced in a generation. Though Talarico’s outward appearance is boyish, he has already served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives, where he earned the distinction of being an introspective, measured, and policy-driven progressive among a sea of vocal culture warriors. In September 2025, with little name recognition outside the state, the young Democrat announced his intention to challenge Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) to become the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee. Crockett held early advantages. The outspoken representative from Dallas had already established herself as a fierce critic of the Trump administration who could leverage her fundraising network, her talent for political combat, and the important black vote in Texas’s urban centers to propel her to the nomination. But Talarico possessed a quality that stood in stark contrast to the bombastic Crockett—an air of humility. While Crockett has built her brand as a defiant voice against the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, Talarico has carved out a profile as an introspective Christian who bases political calculations on his Christian faith as much as his resistance to the mercurial messaging of Trump. And while Crockett has become daily fodder for the Boomer braintrust at Fox News, the attack line on Talarico is thinner and more opaque because of the gentle mannerisms displayed by the young Texan. That hasn’t stopped right-wing pundits from attempting to tear him down. Some have labeled Talarico “too woke” for Texas, a claim he quickly dismissed in a Friday morning interview on MS NOW. “What do American people care more about—pronouns or prices?” Talarico responded defiantly. Others have argued he’s “too white” for the Democratic Party, a theory Talarico put to rest when he handily defeated Crockett, a black woman. And Senate Republicans, desperate to belittle Talarico, even went as far as to publish an artificial intelligence deepfake video of Talarico on X that was panned by independent viewers. While Talarico deflected early critiques, Republican operatives have escalated their attacks, digging into old statements and videos such as when Talarico called God “non-binary.” In another clip, Talarico claims that “Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist.” And even worse by their standards is a video showing Talarico arguing for abortion rights for the transgender community. For a political movement built on traditional social values, Republicans view Talarico as the final result of progressivism gone awry.  But soundbites do not make the man. Talarico proved as much in an early-campaign interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the social media figures credited with propelling Trump to the presidency in 2024. In the nearly three-hour conversation, Talarico contextualized the GOP clips, arguing his points through a faith-driven perspective that sat at stark odds with the drive-by hit pieces found on X. And Rogan, known for tuning out partisan noise, responded positively—a reminder that Talarico can reach voters outside the usual Democratic base. And that is exactly what Talarico will have to accomplish if he wants to become the first blue senator from Texas in nearly half a century. But appealing to moderates while energizing the progressive base is what got Talarico to this point. In the primary contest against Crockett, Talarico dominated the Hispanic vote, besting the Congresswoman in Latino-majority districts across the state. In El Paso, a county where Hispanics make up 80 percent of the vote, Talarico earned 62 percent of the vote. In Bexar County, another Hispanic-dominated region that includes the city of San Antonio, Talarico earned 57 percent of the count despite the majority of black voters selecting Crockett. He fared even better in the southern counties along the U.S.–Mexico border, winning several by double digits. Talarico swept Hidalgo County after he formed an alliance with Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music star who won the Democratic primary running as an outsider in the 15th Congressional District of Texas. Though some have suggested Talarico’s comments about Christianity will drive Hispanic voters away from Talarico, the numbers prove a very different reality. If Talarico struggled anywhere, it was among the urban, black demographics that overwhelmingly voted in favor of Crockett.  Crockett, who initially refused to accept the primary election results, quietly conceded the morning after the election was called. She had won major parts of Dallas, Houston, and Austin, but failed to curry favor among not only the Latinos who make up 40 percent of the Texas electorate, but also the more moderate white voters who sprang for Talarico. When asked if he would welcome Crockett’s support, Talarico said he would be “honored” and noted the congresswoman had expressed an interest in giving it. But what should concern Conservatives most about Talarico isn’t just that he is consolidating the three major demographics required to win the general election in Texas, it’s the astonishing number of voters who showed up to cast votes in the Democratic primary. With 92 percent of estimated votes counted, more than 2.3 million Texans cast ballots in the Senate primary, the highest number of votes ever recorded in a Texas Senate Democratic primary. The contest between Talarico and Crockett more than doubled the average turnout rates for Texas Senate Democratic primaries in the 21st century.  The numbers must have unnerved White House officials as much as its online cohort of influencers who spent the better part of the past week whining about the “woke” uprising in Texas. Trump, who is yet to decide between endorsing the MAGA-adjacent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton or the incumbent Sen. Cornyn, decided to instead attack Talarico during an audio appearance on Brian Kilmeade’s show Friday morning. “He’s grossly incompetent.” Trump said. “He is so woke. He is beyond woke.” Beyond woke. Truly terrifying stuff, Mr. President! The Trump administration is waging a feckless, indulgent war in the Middle East. Gas is spiking, foreclosures are surging, and unemployment continues to rise. Desperate farmers across the nation are wondering whether they’ll make it to the end of the season as fertilizer prices spiral upward. In a time of war, when the already battered economy is gasping for air, Trump is busy mouthing the dogmas of America’s unending culture war.  If Talarico can continue to consolidate Hispanic, moderate, and progressive voters, November could see the Texas political landscape tested in ways few expected, including Trump, who is suddenly on the attack in a race that many considered smooth sailing for Republicans just a few short weeks ago. If Trump can’t convince Cornyn or Paxton to drop out of what would be a 12-week runoff campaign, Talarico is poised to gain significant ground as the Republicans attempt to sort out a potentially chaotic and nasty primary election.  Talarico appears two steps away from making the Texas Senate race a serious competition. Step One: consolidate the progressive base, turning out young, urban, and Latino voters who rarely see a Democrat they can get behind. Step Two: appeal to the moderates and swing voters in the suburbs, the white and independent voters who usually keep Texas red. If Talarico can execute both steps, he won’t just be challenging tradition, he could force Texas to reconsider what a Senate race in the Lone Star State really looks like for years to come. The post The Talarico Two-Step  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Never for War My veteran father taught me not to get swept away by military fervor. I was about two months shy of my eighth birthday when the Gulf War began in January 1991, but my memory of it, and of my father’s stern admonition against war-making in general and that war in particular, left me with enough antiwar spirit to last a lifetime. As improbable as it may sound, given how young I was, I still remember the eruption of the war on the television in my family’s living room. The personages on our side were rather memorable: Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, TV reporters Peter Arnett and Arthur Kent, singer Whitney Houston, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the near-concurrent Super Bowl.  I remember, too, my excitement at seeing the news accounts of the United States armed forces achieving their aims so efficiently, so assuredly. It shames me to write of how I thrilled to this war-making, but in my defense, I came from what I considered to be a military family: My father was an officer in the Air Force in the 1960s. That was the time of the Cold War; he had been a navigator. After seven years, he decided to return to civilian life because, he said, he was newly married (to my mother) and had developed doubts about the Vietnam War, which he had managed to avoid.  It would be years before I arrived on the scene, but despite the remoteness of his military service from my life, I lived with daily reminders of it. He retained the schedule of a man in uniform (“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he was fond of quoting), and his bearing—firm, direct, pithy—was clearly a product of his training. I played with his Air Force wings, and he took my brother and me to a military surplus store. A prized possession was a birthday gift of a Swiss Army Knife, which I associated with his Air Force background.  Yet if I expected my father to ratify my childish elation at the might of the U.S. military in an actual conflict, I was sorely mistaken. During those opening days of the Gulf War, when I said something to him about the war that must have struck him the wrong way, he did not hesitate to correct me.  “We”—by which he meant our family, not our country—“are never for war, Peter,” he told me.  That stopped me in my tracks. Almost instantly, I remember, I quieted my rhetoric because I knew my father knew whereof he spoke. He had volunteered to serve in the military, he had excelled in his job, and he was about as far from a countercultural figure as one could imagine. Thus, when he spoke about the folly and tragedy of war, he did so with a certain authority.  As I grew older, I learned that my father was a curious mixture of patriot and peacenik. I have no memory of him reading military history, but he did introduce me to the folk music that he had listened to as a young man, especially songs with an antiwar bent. I fancied these tunes so much that I insisted on buying cassette tapes to be played on car rides. When we went on a family outing, it was to the sounds of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” the last ideally performed by the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Surely I was the only 10-year-old in the early 1990s who wore out a cassette of a live concert with Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, or who knew who those men even were—thanks to Dad. By then, of course, the Gulf War was a distant memory. Thus, my antiwar sentiment was theoretical; were there another war, I was sure I would be opposed to it. I channeled all my feelings into the antiwar art I consumed—not just folk tunes, but Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five and Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove, both of which my father recommended to me. Once, I found myself at a performance of an excerpt or series of scenes from Kurt Jooss’s antiwar ballet The Green Table, and at the end, I applauded so vigorously that my father had to tell me to dial it down a notch. Then came the Iraq War. Out came my cassette tapes, though—by then in my very early 20s—I traded “Blowin’ in the Wind” for John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”. More provocatively, as the designated family conservative, I leaned on our formidable intellectual tradition to fashion my antiwar stance. I read books by Pat Buchanan, and I took out a subscription to his explicitly antiwar magazine, The American Conservative, then published, as if to emphasize its urgency, biweekly on newsprint.  I relished those figures outside of liberal orthodoxy who opposed the war. Among their ranks was novelist Norman Mailer, who, in an interview in the pages of TAC, characterized himself a “left-conservative” and drew a distinction between “value conservatives,” whom he admired, and “flag conservatives,” who sought empire. “Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world,” Mailer told TAC in 2002. He said Taft and Eisenhower were his ideas of value conservatives. This sounded good to me then; it still does today. But I had already learned this lesson from my father when I was not even eight years old. Now, facing the horror of another war in the Middle East, I find myself turning not to songs nor books nor interviews with famous public intellectuals. I simply remember the words of my father, gone now for 16 years: “We are never for war, Peter.” The post Never for War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Big Problem with Anthropic’s ‘AI Safety’ Brand The company’s current battle with the Pentagon distracts from the military use of its flagship model. The San Francisco–based AI company Anthropic has garnered national attention after a high-profile public dispute with the Pentagon over AI safety standards and the potential use of its technology for mass domestic surveillance. Its defiance of demands from the Trump administration—which last month led to a ban on federal government contracting with the company that is now the basis of an Anthropic lawsuit against the administration—prompted Silicon Valley elites to rally behind Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei. The episode has rallied Silicon Valley behind the company in ways reminiscent of the tech world’s pre-Trump liberal era. “Now what began as a whisper of support for Anthropic in the tech industry has crescendoed into a shout,” the New York Times reports.  The independent journalist Jack Poulson told The American Conservative he suspects that winning such support may be Anthropic’s goal—that the feud with the Trump administration may function less as a principled stand for civil liberties than as a calculated marketing strategy. That strategy would be designed to appeal to Silicon Valley liberals and progressives who dislike Trump, are skeptical of how the government uses their technology, yet are ultimately willing to provide the U.S. and other governments with the most powerful tools to censor, surveill, and even kill their enemies for the right price. Poulson, who left his role as a senior scientist at Google in 2017 in protest over the company’s work on a censored search engine project for China, pointed to the fact that Anthropic’s entire brand distinction from OpenAI rests on its supposed ethical standards. That Anthropic is now engaged in a highly public dispute—one that has reportedly helped propel its Claude chatbot past ChatGPT in March app downloads—is “on brand,” Poulson said. It may simply be a way “for Anthropic to establish itself as #resistance,” he argued, so that “its employees can still feel welcome in liberal circles.” Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, for his part, has experience with such calculated marketing strategies from his time as OpenAI’s policy director, helping that company exploit the false pretense of being a nonprofit for financial benefits. Poulson pointed to a series of under-discussed disclosures that call into question Anthropic’s image as a company uniquely guided by ethical concerns about surveillance and the misuse of artificial intelligence. A leaked meeting booklet uncovered by Poulson in 2023 reveals Anthropic representatives participating in a closed-door intelligence collaboration involving senior CIA officials—including the agency’s chief technology officer and director of artificial intelligence—alongside Australian government officials.  The workshop, organized through forums run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, was part of a broader effort to explore how large language models could be integrated with Western security states. At the same time, Anthropic has expanded its government business, hiring longtime Palantir employee Steve Sloss to lead U.S. government sales and pitching its technology to various intelligence agencies, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Those disclosures raise broader questions about Anthropic’s ties to the deep state. Poulson noted that the company has partnered with Palantir, whose platforms are built around large-scale commercial and government data fusion, despite Anthropic’s public warnings about the risks of such systems. He also pointed to the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, which has long discussed using large language models to process vast troves of publicly available data. The 2023 meeting between Anthropic and CIA officials raises questions about Anthropic’s awareness of, or cooperation with, those efforts. Even as the firm now publicly resists certain Pentagon demands, its flagship AI model, Claude, has already been integrated into the U.S. military’s targeting infrastructure where it operates under the hood of Palantir’s Maven system. The model is now used by military planners to analyze intelligence feeds and generate prioritized target lists for U.S. strikes in Iran, and was likely involved in the American bombing of an elementary school which killed more than 160 people, mostly young girls. Previously, Anthropic’s AI was reported to have played a role in the operation to kidnap Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro in which more than 80 people were killed.  Though it may advertise itself as opposed to fully autonomous weapons, Anthropic seems to have few red lines about how its products are used to kill non-Americans. While Anthropic is now widely celebrated as a champion of civil liberties and AI ethics, its cozy relationship with the U.S. national security state—and the growing use of its technology in military operations—should invite far more skepticism about the company’s branding than it has so far received. The post The Big Problem with Anthropic’s ‘AI Safety’ Brand appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here’s Why the Filibuster Is Just As Important If Not More So, Than the SAVE Act Right Now

The Slave America Act