Staff Reports
Senator-elect James Talarico showed up on a podcast recently to scold what he called “performative” politics. He warned that policing language and obsessing over the newest academic jargon breaks coalitions and wastes time. Cute lecture — especially coming from someone whose political career has been built on attention-grabbing lines and culture-war theater.
Talarico’s Lecture on Performative Politics
On The Diary of a CEO podcast, Senator-elect James Talarico said that policing people’s language and trading moral postures for policy work are the mistakes of “woke 1.0.” He argued that politics should be about unifying values — that racism is wrong and people deserve dignity — rather than about who can recite the right terminology. Those are fine-sounding words, and voters like hearing them. But he delivered this sermon just days before the midterms, after beating Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by a big margin. Timing, as they say, is everything.
A Long Track Record of Performance
Here’s where the comedy starts. Talarico’s public record includes headline-grabbing pronouncements: he once said there are “many more than two biological sexes — in fact, there are six,” and he famously declared that “God is nonbinary.” He labeled parents who object to rushing children into gender transitions as “abusive.” Those lines read less like policy and more like monologues designed to light up social media. Now he disavows some of those remarks. That could be genuine — or it could be the classic post-election cleanup act.
Why Voters Should Care About Substance, Not Sermons
Republicans and independents should welcome a debate about performative politics. But we shouldn’t let a performance go uncalled simply because it’s dressed up as self-criticism. If Talarico really believes policing language fragments coalitions, then show it: pass laws that focus on outcomes, not slogans; stop using culture fights as voter-grabbing stunts. Voters are tired of theater. They want safer streets, better schools, and an economy that works. Fancy words don’t deliver those things.
Bottom line
There’s nothing wrong with calling out empty virtue signaling — unless you built your brand on it. Senator-elect James Talarico’s new-found distaste for performative politics would carry more weight if it came with consistent actions. Until then, take the sermon with a grain of salt and watch whether he trades the sound bites for real solutions. If he doesn’t, his “no more performance” speech will just be the latest act in the same old show.
