Author, columnist, speaker
The Democrats' Mess in Texas
By Robert Knight
Democrats seem thrilled that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated longtime incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas on May 26.
Mr. Paxton has multiple scandals, including a messy divorce, so the Dems assume he will be an easy mark in a state known for its traditional values.
But not so fast.
Mr. Paxton has three things going for him. Despite his checkered reputation, he is a confirmed fighter, not a go-along-to-get-along kind of Republican. People seem to have had their fill of the latter. A fierce and effective defender of constitutional liberties, he has the full support of President Donald Trump, which could be a negative somewhere else, but not in the Lone Star State.
Finally, Mr. Paxton’s opponent is state Rep. James Talarico, a far-leftist who is telling voters that his many zany statements, especially about faith, are being taken out of context.
The 39-year-old is a seminarian from the Presbyterian Church USA. That’s a shrinking, fully woke denomination whose version of Jesus is Bernie Sanders in a rainbow-colored robe and tiara.
Mr. Talarico has given sermons at a church in Austin that offers a cache of explicit “banned books,” including pornographic LGBTQ propaganda for kids, such as “This Book Is Gay.”
He said that Ten Commandments displays in schools are “unconstitutional, un-American, and deeply un-Christian.”
This came when he was speaking in 2023 against a state bill requiring the Decalogue’s posting in classrooms.
He also said the proposed law was “idolatrous. It is exclusionary, and it is arrogant.”
How about this one? “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” He said this on the Texas house floor in 2021 while opposing a bill to keep boys out of girls’ sports.
Responding to some mass shootings, he wrote a social media post in 2021 echoing former President Joe Biden: “Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.”
In a sermon he gave in 2023 at a Methodist church in Austin, Mr. Talarico said, “Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. Jesus started a universal movement based on mutual love. Christian nationalism is a sectarian movement based on mutual hate.”
Translation: If you’re a patriotic American Christian, you’re a hater.
Perhaps the most offensive of all was his invoking the Virgin Mary to suggest that God is okay with abortions. On a Joe Rogan podcast in July 2025, Mr. Talarico said of Mary’s submission to God to have the Holy Spirit conceive Jesus Christ through her:
“I say all this in the context of abortion because before God comes over Mary and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary’s consent, which is remarkable. The angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do and she says, ‘If it is God’s will, let it be done. Let it be. Let it happen.’ So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create.”
The devil himself could not have come up with a more deceptive interpretation.
Mr. Talerico is trying to justify taking life, not creating it. In his version, Mary calls the shots, not God. However, in the actual text in Luke 31:26-38, the angel Gabriel tells Mary what will happen. He does not give her a choice. Her response is beautiful.
In addition to misrepresenting the Incarnation, Mr. Talarico often slanders the church, saying it ignores social welfare and instead takes on cultural issues, a false dichotomy. The church does both, contributing vastly to charities while serving as the conscience of society.
As for economics, Mr. Talarico unabashedly embraces collectivism, the atheistic ideology that spawned Nazism, fascism and communism and caused more human misery and mass murder than any other in history.
He rejects America’s free market system, which has brought unprecedented prosperity, freedom, and scientific advancement.
“We don’t need to reform capitalism. We need to replace it with an economic system rooted in justice and dignity,” he said.
Translation: I want to seize your income and property and redistribute it to people other than your family. It’s only fair.
Mr. Talarico has a free stuff army plan: Medicare for all (socialist healthcare), a wealth tax on billionaires; universal basic income (paid by taxpayers); free (taxpayer-funded) college; free (taxpayer-funded) childcare; student debt shifted to taxpayers; more power for labor unions; collective ownership of the means of production, and “green new deal” climate extremism that would wipe out America’s vital fossil fuels, including Texas’s oil and gas industries.
Mr. Talarico will pretend to be a moderate, the way Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger fooled voters last November. But it’s doubtful he can explain his way out of this 2022 statement in barbecue-crazy Texas:
“It is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption and that we try to respect animals in all aspects of society. So I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”
Mr. Talarico has been singing a different song lately: “I deny all accusations of veganism. … our campaign basically runs on barbecue these days.”
Somehow, I just don’t think Texans are going to swallow the sauce he’s dishing out.
Texas state Rep. James Talarico in Houston on May 27, 2026. AP photo in The Washington Times.
Beware of the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
By Robert Knight
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear appears to be readying for a presidential run in 2028.
The telegenic Democrat was on a speaking tour last year in early primary state South Carolina. In September, he has a book coming out entitled, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” a reference to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
His publisher summarizes it this way: “By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country.”
Compassion and kindness are God-given, but I thought we were in the midst of healing from the nightmare of the Biden years, with its promotion of atheism, illegal immigration, sexual anarchy, and attacks on Catholics and pro-lifers.
Mr. Beshear, like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, identifies as a Christian and a moderate and gets priceless media cover while supporting the Democratic Party’s radical social and economic agenda.
In 2023, for instance, he tried to block a state bill protecting minors from “gender affirming care.”
The law prohibits doctors from subjecting gender-confused teens to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible, disfiguring surgeries.
The law also bans males from competing on girls’ sports teams. Most people think this makes sense.
Beshear insisted that such a law “would hurt kids and their families” and violate “parental rights.”
He claimed there was no evidence of widespread harm. To which I would say one butchered child is too many and that evidence of harm is voluminous, including the growing number of suicides and trans-related violence.
On the same day of Mr. Beshear’s veto, both houses of Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode it. Naturally, a federal judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, issued an immediate injunction halting enforcement. The case is still in litigation.
A year earlier, Ms. Jennings, one of President Donald Trump’s few clunker appointees, struck down a Kentucky law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks and requiring medical oversight for abortion pills.
Gov. Beshear also vetoed that bill, and the legislature overrode him.
In South Carolina, which went for Mr. Trump by 30 points, Mr. Beshear emphasized his Christian faith while boasting that he was “a proud, pro-LGBTQ+ governor.”
This is a stance that ignores Jesus Christ’s clear restating of God’s creation of male and female and God’s marriage-based sexual morality from Genesis.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Beshear said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God, and I didn’t want people picking on those kids.” How about protecting them from quacks who sterilize them and turn them into lifetime medical cases?
By the way, politicians love to haul out the term “children of God” like a magic amulet. The Bible says we’re all created in the image of God, but that we’re not children of God unless we believe in Him and submit to God’s authority. Until then, we’re on the other team, and I don’t mean the New Jersey Devils.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name,” John 1:12 says. If we’re automatically children of God, we wouldn’t need to be, as Jesus said, born again.
Anyway, Mr. Beshear is not the only wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democrats have become quite adept at using Christianese and buzzwords to fool people. President Barack Obama often gave biblical scholars heartburn over his misappropriating Jesus’s words to justify sexual sin and confiscatory redistribution of wealth.
In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico is battling hard-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Like Mr. Beshear, Mr. Talarico touts his Christian faith while cleaving to a radical agenda.
“He delivers left-wing orthodoxy in centrist packaging and fights Christian nationalism with Scripture,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
If you’re a patriotic Christian, he’s talking about you and your family as a threat to America.
Much of his rhetoric revolves around Marxist class envy, such as, “Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”
During remarks opposing a bill protecting kids from transgender treatments, he said, “Jesus never once condemned transgender people.”
Well, Jesus didn’t need to, and He welcomed all repentant sinners. The Hebrew Scriptures are crystal clear on sexual morality. Sexual confusion is the province of paganism, which historically often involved child sacrifice as well.
Any comparison to the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ Democratic Party inferred by readers at this juncture may not be coincidental.
In a 2024 interview with MSNBC, Mr. Talarico said, “Christian nationalism is dangerous. … When politicians use the Bible to push division and hate, they’re not following Jesus; they’re using His name for their own agenda.”
This is classic projection, accusing your opponents of exactly what you’re doing.
At the University of Texas on Feb. 6, Mr. Talarico said, “I’m a Christian progressive. I believe the Gospel is inherently radical—it challenges the powerful, lifts up the poor, and calls for justice in every sphere of life.”
When progressives talk about “justice” they mean “social justice.” This is envy, disguised as compassion and politicized to enable governments to redistribute income and rewrite society’s moral code.
Illustration by Alexander Hunter / The Washington Times.