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Where in the world is
Carmen SandiegoJames Talarico?If you've been paying attention to the Texas Senate race recently, you might have seen a rumor spreading around that the dem candidate, James Talarico, had spent roughly a week in a mental hospital. This has now been thoroughly debunked but it is an interesting showcase into how the right wing influencer machine works given how far it spread.
Following a story on X can be pretty difficult given the poorly working search function, so I'm piggybacking off of some what Jesse Singal has uncovered. Best I know of is that the story started from @tickletexts although it's not locked down yet. Tickle uses an AI edited profile picture, and highly questionable claims of cancer that she's used to solicit donations over before, claiming to be a white South African immigrant now living in Texas. Singal tracked down a relative who confirmed her as actually being a native Texas woman, most likely doesn't have cancer, and a criminal record.. She's known for giving false identities before even.
As Singal points out
According to Tickletexts she worked alongside a lady Caroline Wren in developing the story and theory
Anyway how did we go from a lie made up by a crazy con artist to Elon Musk and Stephen Miller peddling it?
Somehow it seems Sykes's claims got into the eyes of the two influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher. They claimed to have called the Lindner Center of Hope in Ohio and received confirmation that Talarico was a patient there.
The details of how it evolved from here are even fuzzier. The Twitter account Louis Riel claims to have done a visualization of it through scraping posts, but I have not verified it so so let's go back to Singal who was in a twitter space with Amacher and confirmed a lot of the details and Tony Ortiz who has access to the full call audio and also participated in the spaces.
Amacher points to Caroline Wren and Tickletexts as his source. They called to "verify" the story, and after being repeatedly told by representatives that there was no man named James Talerico at the facility or in their records, one of the representatives offers up a guess that perhaps he was discharged recently and it's not showing up for that reason.
And
And
What's interesting is even if it wasn't just a theory offered up by the staffer, as Nick Ortiz points out this timeline still would not match Amacher's claims
So we know that he couldn't have been "just discharged" on the evening of the 10th, since he was in public on the 9th. This was just a theory offered up by a staffer.
Amacher tried to shop it around to the tabloids such as the TheBlaze and the Daily Mail, but they wouldn't pick it up on suggestion from their legal teams so he gave it to Nick Sortor instead who as an influencer has lower standards than a journalism outlet. Amechar denies this but as you can see from the community note, this is what he said. Not really surprising he would lie though is it? From Nick Sortor the story picks up among the MAGA X space and spreads from there. There's also some evidence that the Paxton campaign (the Republican running for senator) might have involvement in this.
So let's go back to Singal's statement, Something went really, really wrong here.. What happened, and how did it spread?
The conspiracy is sought out. As user quantumfreakonomics pointed out in another thread, the original evidence towards the mental hospital theory was really weak to begin with. It's literally just a private plane (without any proof of Talerico being on board) flew from Austin to Ohio and back. This doesn't generate a conspiracy theory unless you wanted a conspiracy to begin with. You start with the idea that something is up, and then look for clues that can hint at something, anything being amiss.
If we want something to be true then we look past the obvious red flags in the case. A person with an AI generated picture claiming to be them should be automatically suspicious right? "It's because I have cancer" is a very convenient excuse to be faking identity. Some sort of party putting their real name and face to a story is a key part of journalism, it forces a layer of responsibility and risk of reputational harm onto a real human being. Anonymity and anonymous sources are common in reporting but their identity is generally still known to the journalist. For example when JD Vance is an anonymous source to Politico, the journalist knows who the source is. The journalist is simply shifting the risk of harm away from the anonymous source and onto themselves. When a politico writer says "a source in the white source", they are putting their name to a real and known source in the white house who I have confirmed. Of course similar to the red flag of AI pfps, another red flag is when claims are made by objectively bad people. Nick Sortor has an extensive criminal record and has an active Kentucky state warrant out for his arrest. Someone being immoral doesn't instantly invalidate their claims, but generally immoral people are more willing to do other immoral things like lie seems a given.
Mainstream media, as bad as it can be, still generally has standards too. There are real people making real claims. Scott Alexander has a great piece on how the media very rarely lies I suggest you read. As Reason writer Billy Binion points out
To reiterate the most important part he said IMO, It's good for business. There is a market demand for this sort of slop, but not enough actual verifiable high standards of evidence supply. So a bunch of personalities grift, using victimhood culture as their excuse for why they can't operate in the traditional higher standards environment. Nick Sortor was chosen precisely because he doesn't have the moral or ethical or legal standards of the daily mail or the blaze after all. The influencer space is so bad they don't even compare to some of the worst and most questionable mainstream journalism outlets.
That's the real reason this spread. There is a demand for bad news and conspiracies about Talarico, but there just isn't enough supply to match so sloppy and unethical influencers see financial incentives to find something. And they did. It doesn't seem to have had any meaningful effect on the actual election chances so at the end of the day it's all a wash anyway I guess.
My god, those conservatives acted like liberals! How dare they behave the way the other side demands they behave!
I mean yeah they did it for braindead tribal reasons but come on Jesse. What an obnoxious way to phrase it.
hmm see above. Funny how this kind of thing only matters when they're bad people on the other side.
If they might vote Dem, who cares if they assaulted 500 grannies on the subway, right?
The Cornell 7, Jussie Smollett, Duke Lacrosse, UVA, Colorado burning cross, Covington Catholic, that Nascar driver and the garage door pull, etc etc.
Alas! Forshame! Right-wingers as a class are merely human. How dare they not universally be saintly and above temptation towards base and tribal incentives.
Also come the fuck on Hasan exists and he's worse than any of these idiots.
But yeah they suck, the lie was stupid, it shouldn't have spread, Talarico's a weird little wilting daisy, blah blah.
Boo Outgroup.
"Anytime anyone I agree with idealogically does something bad, it's just because they're acting like The Enemy" is an interesting stance while also complaining that someone like Jesse Singal (who has taken plenty of heat for his sticking to his views instead of playing tribal politics) or Binion (who is known for doing the same) is being too boo outgroup.
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Just like it doesn't matter if Matteress Girl was actually raped, it doesn't matter if Talarico was in a mental hospital. What matters is that some percentage of voting Texans saw that Talarico was in a mental hospital, passed that information verbally onto other voting Texans, and some percentage of these infected with the rumor never receive the cure of truth. The amounts might be low, but there's basically no repercussions for starting a rumor like this given the opportunity and at least some upside so it will happen again.
Plus, like the story about LBJ accusing an opponent of pig-fucking, there is always the opportunity for the opponent to try to deny a rumor and make things much worse.
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Meh. A "crazy con artist" has got nothing on mainstream media and academia.
Sure, something's wrong, but this is something on the scale of getting rear-ended at a red light. ProPublica misrepresenting a fair system as biased, or CBC repeatedly failing to mention that Elon Musk is, as a matter of fact, Canadian when he wades into Canadian politics (IIRC, they "could not confirm" claims he was Canadian in one story, but I've lost that link. They should get better researchers.) are more serious.
I don't give them any credit for technically sticking to the verifiable facts, and I also don't give extra demerits for blatant falsehoods. It's all deceptive and corrosive to good discourse.
I've stopped listening to news on the radio and watching it on TV. The only time I trust them to give a positive expected value is when I can pause in the middle of a story and fact-check them and find additional context at-will. Without that check, they can (and have) mislead me with slick narratives and selective reporting. (Are they still succeeding despite my precautions? Who knows!)
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To be clear, we only have a few journalists' word that the purported video exists and depicts what it claims to depict. I don't think the NYT would lie about this kind of thing, but it's hard to convey that sort of intuition. Why not release the footage? I can think of a few reasons:
Privacy: It feels insulting to be forced to release security footage of one's own home.
Security: It might not be a good idea to give the entire universe of wackos information about your home security system, especially if you are a controversial politician.
Game Theory: Being forced into releasing information to correct a baldfaced lie is in some sense giving in to threats, therefore incentivizing more baldfaced lies.
It's hard to know the correct course of action in these situations. Obama waited way too long to release his birth certificate, and we are still living with the consequences. Donald Trump first became a major figure in conservative politics because he was the only respectable person (at the time, Trump was considered respectable) willing to publically question where Obama was born.
Yeah unfortunately when dealing with lies, there is no simple easy answer. Sometimes debunking a rumor is what draws more eyes towards it to begin with.
There's a rumor going around that this was done to draw heat away from a Paxton scandal getting revealed soon after so perhaps the Talarico campaign felt putting more attention towards the debunk would be counterproductive.
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It's bizarre he didn't just tweet out a picture of himself working on his laptop from bed covered in blankets with a "remember to get your flu shot" caption. Like, this is a solved problem.
If he really just had the flu he would have been posting daily vlog updates. There effeminately is a coverup going on, its just not the coverup the crazies first latched onto.
What a perfect typo.
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An elite media team like Mamdani's would be able to find the exact photo composition and tone needed to pull that off. The more general rule is, "never let the public see your moments of weakness". A single bad photo would backfire.
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The thing is, he didn't even need to go that far. A signed note from his PCP("James Talarico was in my office on this day") would have been enough, and providing a doctors note to an employer (AKA the People of Texas) for an extended absence is normal and could have been easily been played into a positive moment.
He didn't need to do anything. The only people who actually believe he was in a mental hospital are either incredibly stupid or so far up Trump's ass that they aren't voting for Talarico anyway, probably both.
Hi! I work in healthcare and I think that's the most likely explanation and I know a lot of "successful" moderates who feel that way also. Even got a hispanic hard left doctor to admit it.
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I think you are ignoring the lower class Hispanic vote when you say this.
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Let me introduce you to the median voter
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Strictly speaking, no one needs to do anything. But a candidate who doesn't bother to respond or explain at all why they disappeared for two weeks with zero planned events until election day should certainly expect a lot of speculation. That's "know you're cooked and giving up on the campaign" behavior. It reminds me of Kamala, and her internal polling that never showed her in the lead even once, no matter what the public polls said.
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This is some real boomer advice. Not quite as bad as, "go to yoga class to meet girls," but it's up there. Doctor's notes are magical bureaucratic talismans, but politics is a street sport. People are too cynical for that nowadays.
There is also no reason to go into the doctor's office for the flu unless you need inpatient hospitalization. You get an over-the-counter flu test, make a telehealth appointment, and ask for Tamiflu. There's nothing else they can do for you unless you need oxygen.
Who exactly do you think is voting in elections?
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Do you know who you see in a telehealth appointment??? A doctor. Who can write you a doctor's note.
Maybe showing your sniffling face on a video chat and begging for tamiflu is a great way to prove you're not in an insane alsylum.
Doctors notes are easy to get for nothingburgers if you just ask for one. If you're locked up in an insane asylum, I doubt many doctors will risk their license writing a letter without seeing the patient, saying that the patient has the flu. So I would take thr existence of one as strong evidence that the patient at least talked to the doctor.
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Compared to "A journalist said that these stillshots of surveillance footage of a backyard that they say match the satellite images of Talarico's backyard show a non-birthing person with brown hair acting like they don't have the flu so he definitely wasn't in Ohio"?
A doctor's note isn't proof-positive, but it's more normal than whatever the hell that is.
Actually yes, I consider the journalist reports of surveillance footage more credible. There is an entire cottage industry around bullshit doctor's notes.
Maybe for you, but for the average twitterati a doctor's note that you can look at from a doctor that verifyably exists is much more convincing than ncctv footage that you can't see, that even the jornalists claim only shows a man in talarico's garden.
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Brother, the man actually did disappear for two weeks in the home stretch of a Senate campaign with, at one point, not a single event planned until election day, and his campaign only offered a very late and very unbelievable cover story about the flu. The NYT claims to have seen home video proving that. You don't get to, though. Nothing suspicious about that. The screen shots of security footage have, since first shown to the NYT on Monday, been shared a bit more widely with the journalist nomenklatura, including CBS.
So, he was sick as a dog with the flu, so sick that he couldn't even make Zoom calls or plans for future events, but he was up to puttering around in the garden at random hours in various outfits? Well, at least some male with brown hair was. He's willing to share home video footage, but not a statement from the UrgentCare he claims he went to, or a note from the PCP he claims he saw?
That's weird, bro. Weird as fuck. So obviously weird that you wrote all those words of Republican Pounce distraction.
Hey, speaking of partisan idiots leaping to conclusions that were too good to check, did you see MSNOW reporting that Kash Patel was secretly in Russia while he was literally on camera in Virgina?
I am semi-convinced that @magicalkittycat actually is the Reagan Republican they claim to be and just posts deliberately bad takes to influence people towards right-wing positions.
I mentioned last Friday before his reappearance that this would probably never go anywhere. I said I expected him to turn up again, no worse for wear. That appears to be exactly what's happened. The most likely scenario is he had a mental breakdown due to extreme stress of the campaign, which I also said was totally normal to expect for most people.
What's not normal is a young guy like him getting the flu for two weeks and not even posting a proof of life video. The campaign is clearly lying, although I don't think it matters all that much. It's not really about being a high-performing individual. Hell, Mitch McConnell is still in the Senate. It's about showing up and mashing blue on demand.
Not only is it not two weeks (it was 8-9 days) he did have live video of him after getting diagnosed with the flu.
Your assumptions here are based off incorrect details.
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It's occurred to me before that a potentially valuable tactic for a Democrat-friendly news media would be to take a complete nothingburger of a story about a Democratic candidate and just act really weird about it. Assure everyone that it's nothing, but make oddly specific wording choices, show less evidence than you have on the grounds that it's not all that interesting a story. Try to get Republicans to bite and waste a lot of time and effort hunting down a story that goes nowhere instead of stuff that can hurt the candidate, maybe fracture the base a little fighting over it. Then make sure you release the completely uncontroversial evidence that proves it's nothing in plenty of time for it to disseminate before the election, knowing some Republicans are dug in at this point and will keep wasting airtime trying to argue a conspiracy around nothing.
The whole Obama birther thing might have been an example of that, I'm not sure how deliberate it is, but it seems like it would be if anything more effective today.
I suspect something like this was going on with all the weird photos/videos of Biden (his hand passing through the microphone, the photo with the Carters, etc.).
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I say it's the opposite. The more you talk about something, the more power it has.
Remember eating the cats? All those articles "debunking" the cat eating just drew attention to the fact that 20,000 Haitians were suddenly airdropped on a small town in Ohio.
Trump himself is a creation of the media. Perhaps the media thought they were able to trick the Republicans into nominating him. This backfired badly.
The way you win the news cycle is by talking about the things YOU want to talk about, not the strange and unexplained disappearance of your own political candidate.
This is the strategy I'm proposing, I think.
You find your candidate story, throw one or two news articles out about it, deliberately structured in a way to be suspicious, then say nothing more about it (it's not a story, so why would you?), and let the conspiracy-hungry side of the Republicans pick it up and waste a bunch of time talking about it. You don't just keep throwing articles at it the way they did with the Haitians, you largely ignore it. If anyone asks why you're not talking with it in a situation where it makes sense to say something, the line is "nothing happened so there's nothing to talk about". In the meantime, you just talk about whatever you were otherwise going to talk about.
Then later on you just toss out some rock-solid proof: you don't spend a bunch of time talking about it there either, but you make sure there's ironclad information making it very clear that nothing's going on (not in a "there are stories debunking this" sense, in a "anyone looking at this evidence for more than a minute realizes there's nothing going on" sense) and it's easily accessible.
The examples you propose are mostly the media trying to force an issue by throwing out a large amount of news volume, and indeed a lot of it backfired, both in that it got people thinking about it more than they otherwise would have and in that it caused the media to waste airtime they might have been able to use somewhere else. I'm proposing sort of the opposite: spend little time on it in terms of news volume, but bait a hook for Republican conspiracy theorists to bite so that they waste their time and credibility on a story that was poisoned from the start.
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I had to look up MS NOW to see that they are in fact The Network Formerly Known As MSNBC. I guess if you're pivoting to the full-on grift grind it makes sense to change your name to something more like a Wordpress website with banner ads for dick pills.
I think they had to because of trademark usage of the NBC name and peacock expired or something. CNBC did the same kinda by removing the peacock.
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To be fair many "respectable" papers also have the dick pill banner ads. I think new york post is a bad offender iirc but I have adblock so idk
Msnbc has always been the liberal fox news
Most ad slots these days are live auctions anyway. Majority of ads you'll get are just retargeting pixels and skew higher margin products
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Between he went to a mental hospital and now NYT claim he was just at home with the flu any reasonable person would think the mental hospital is more likely.
Someone here I believe said he likely does a ton of pharmaceuticals while campaigning. The idea that he crashed on those feels like the most likely explanation.
Honestly what kind of middle aged adult even gets the flu for a week? I’ve had maybe 24 hours from being in a Chicago winter outside in the last decade. Just not believable flu for a week in Texas fall.
Talarico has generally poor health, apparently.
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I actually did last January. Maybe 3 days really bad, another two of "fuck it, I never do this, I'm calling out of work" and then a weekend lying low while my body finished recovering. A week of feeling crappy is pretty unusual, but not unbelievable. 12 days and you didn't go to a hospital is the weird thing.
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I like my theory better: He was burned out from campaigning and sick of running around the state to shake hands at Lions Club meetings and Chamber of Commerce events that nobody pays attention to who didn't attend and realized that a vacation would not only be refreshing but the Republican Party was full of enough morons that someone would fabricate a ridiculous conspiracy theory regarding his health and/or whereabouts that would get him much more media coverage than a speech in front of the West Lubbock Gardening Society. And that this all would happen despite the fact that he announced in advance that he was sick, and that even after whatever conspiracy was debunked there would still be a parade of Paxton supporters insisting that something suspicious was afoot despite lacking any evidence whatsoever. Do nothing, get tons of media coverage for it, and make your opponent's supporters look like idiots in the process. Seems like a win-win-win.
So, what you're saying is that it's 4D chess.
No, what I'm saying is that I can come up with equally ridiculous explanations for his absence as anyone else that are supported by a similar amount of actual evidence, i.e. none.
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I mean “something suspicious is afoot” is factually true. Because it’s abnormal to take 9 days off the last few weeks of a major election. Even if burned out and legitimately tired you can sleep 16 hrs and make an appearance at some famous Texas bbq place in the evening for 2 hours. So suspicious isn’t a conspiracy theory because he was conspiring to do something.
I don’t even know what the GOP is crazy thing is about. A few people tweeted speculation? People do that all day on Twitter.
If polling and prediction markets are correct then the last thing he would want to do is a high variance strategy like concocting your theory of the crime. You would be doing the football equivalent of playing prevent defense which would be to do nothing odd, but maybe cut down on appearances to limit the chance of making a mistake like saying something stupid.
Polling isn't correct, though. I'm not saying republicans are favoured... I'm saying there's lots of warning signs of a blue mirage, and Talarico almost certainly has advisors who are accustomed to the idea enough to try something high-risk variance, on the basis that the median voter hates ads enough to just vote on a party line basis, Greg Abbott will steal the election on the spot in a way that carries Paxton over the top, etc.
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Sure is the first time this ever happened.
That's just how twitter has always been. Show me the group and I'll show you the lies.
Remember when Netenyahu died?
Yeah the Mitch McConnell stuff was literally a month ago
Mitch McConnell is alive, but he did spend months hospitalized.
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Remember when Trump had a small discoloration on his hand and that means he is dying? When Putin was dying of cancer? When Kim Jong Un was dead? When Mitch McConnell was dead?
It's just constant.
Here's a blast from the 4chan past: Heavy rains in China mean the Three Gorges Dam is going to collapse.
New one I saw today: Ilhan Omar has fled to Morocco.
I still think a smart person is better informed from reading Twitter than the New York Times.
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