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Notes -
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.
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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