On Sunday night, a suburban Cincinnati psychiatric hospital posted a single sentence to its X account: “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.”
Weird, right? If you, like me, weren’t swimming in the right-wing fever swamp that is X last week, you might be a bit confused about what this is all about. Here’s the short version of the story:
Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, was off the campaign trail for nine days after saying during an event for the Hispanic Business Council (via video) that he’d been diagnosed with the flu after feeling under the weather for a few days. Pretty bad timing to have to pause campaigning with the election coming up in just a few weeks, but stuff like this happens, and isn’t super out of the ordinary.
But in Talarico’s case, Republicans wouldn’t take his word for it, and instead insisted that something nefarious was going on. For days, they’d been floating baseless conspiracy theories ranging from a silly claim that Talarico is secretly transgender and was off the campaign trail to recover from bottom surgery (setting aside the fact that he’s not trans, as someone currently recovering from that surgery, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that he absolutely would not be able to campaign just nine days after surgery — I write this from my bed more than a month out from my own) to a claim that he’d been admitted to a mental health facility.
In any case, he was, in fact, at home between October 1 and October 8, presumably recovering from the flu. The New York Times reviewed time-stamped images from his home security camera. PolitiFact rated the mental hospital claim “Pants on Fire.”
By Monday, October 12, mainstream media outlets were all over the story about the conspiracy theories, declaring that they had backfired on the people spreading them. CNN’s Aaron Blake called it “the latest to blow up in MAGA’s face.” The Nation went with “Elon Musk’s James Talarico Smear Blew Up In His Face.” NBC News: “Republican attempts to trip up James Talarico keep backfiring.”
But... did this backfire? Or did it serve its purpose in the current information environment? I think it’s too early to say that this was a net negative for the conspiracy theorists and Republican operatives pushing it. I don’t think the people spreading the rumors cared whether or not they were true. I think they just wanted to spread a lie that people could believe. Yes, these were lies. Yes, the people spreading the lies knew they were spreading something baseless. But because enough big names were spreading it, major media outlets needed to cover it, even if just to debunk it. To no one’s surprise, one of the people spreading the rumors was Elon Musk, owner of X, the richest person in the world, and the top Republican donor. That’s a problem.