On Tuesday, and of Donald Trump endorsed by the support of MAGA believers, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent senator John Cornyn in the primary to claim the Republican nomination for the seat.
He then quickly began painting his opponent in the general election, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as unmanly.
“My opponent is the most radical Democrat the Democrats have ever nominated,” Paxton said in his victory speech. “He’s even running a vegan campaign, whatever. He goes by a few names you’ve probably heard. Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six-Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako. And some simply refer to him as Low-T Talarico.”
The proliferation of derogatory nicknames was not a complete Trumpian success. (The Talarico campaign, already a collect money juggernautstarted selling”I am Talafreako” T-shirts immediately).But Paxton’s attacks also appeared from the manosphere and incel cultureinteractive internet communities based on their own non-scientific theories of sex, sexuality, hormones and nutrition.
Paxton’s first general election ad continued in that coded vein, casting Talarico as both out of Texan values and lacking in testosterone: the spot ends by declaring the Democrats “too low for Texas.” Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller went further, tweeting to X on Wednesday that “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”
Trump, for his part, has claimed that Talarico is “a vegetarian in Texas, and you can’t be elected as a vegetarian in Texas.”
Although her exact hormone levels are not public knowledge, Talarico is not transgender or vegan. The latter claim appears to be based on comments he made while running for re-election to the Texas House of Representatives in 2022. At a Texas Humane Law Network fundraiser that year, he spoke about the need to reduce meat consumption – in part to combat climate change – and announced that his campaign was only buying vegan food products for his events. Talarico never claimed to be a vegetarian, he has since denied that he is one, and has eaten meat and dairy on the campaign trail. At a campaign stop at Austin’s Taco Joint in early May, Talaric procedured two potato, egg, and cheese tacos—a perfectly legal order that also happens to be non-vegan.
Revisions to the need to eat meat and increase testosterone are of a piece with male-dominated podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience as well as toxic social media spaces where men denigrate supposedly weak men as “soy boys.” But many of these concepts have found purchase at the highest levels of the Trump administration—especially in the message and policy of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose “Make America Healthy Again” embraces all kinds of medical pseudoscience.
Kennedy, for example, has sounded the alarm about Low testosterone in men. He’s somewhat wrong on that point, because while it’s true that research shows testosterone levels are declining, they’re not in the “low” clinical range for most men. He has also been adamant about encouraging Americans to eat more meat to get theirs daily proteinimage editing on barbecue and burger restaurants. (Surprisingly, whole soy foods such as tofu are a great source of protein, containing all the essential amino acids for human nutrition.)
That Republicans are now using these concepts against Talarico suggests that the ideology of masculinity has permeated the national consciousness. It is still far from clear that any Texan will be particularly swayed by the portrayal of a former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian as an unacceptably positive outcome. Furthermore, while “vegan” and “low-T” may be common slurs in certain parts of the internet, the internet’s micro-feud doesn’t mean it’s a statewide contest that will be decided by nearly 19 million eligible voters.
