- Today: posted items from 1-3 Oct that I collected while this site was down: The Thin Skin of Reality;
- And today: posted page Notes on Meaning, (and Wisdom and Purpose and Progress), part of my grand plan to identify broad philosophical themes and how they relate to science fiction;
- And today: wondering if it matters that humanity doesn’t have a grasp on reality, via recent politics about James Talarico.
A thought piece for today.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, 16 Oct 2026: A Hoax About James Talarico Went Viral and Then Fell Apart. What Happens Next Will Tell Us a Lot About Politics in 2026., subtitled “Texas just set up a natural experiment on the power of conspiracy theories—and whether it matters if they’re debunked.”
Title on homepage: “Texas Just Accidentally Set Up a Great Experiment About Whether Facts Matter at All in 2026”
If humans cannot engage in reality, what hope is there for our race?
This is about the penchant of conservatives to make up conspiracy theories to demonize their opponents. In this case, about James Talarico, candidate for senator in Texas.
It seems, finally, that the strange episode involving James Talarico and a nonsense story about a mental health facility has concluded. The story’s greatest promoter, the man who claimed to hold the smoking-gun evidence showing the Senate candidate had been institutionalized, declared on Thursday that the matter was over.
“Frankly, this entire situation has been blown completely out of proportion,” wrote the social X user Rhein Amacher, somewhat bafflingly, given his own singular efforts to blow the situation up. “I’m not going to speculate beyond the information available or continue fueling a controversy based on an unverified claim. As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed. It’s time to move on to more substantive issues facing voters.”
It was an odd statement, as it didn’t quite recant the story, which has been thoroughly debunked. (“Everyone can listen and draw their own conclusions,” he said.) But other anti-Talarico accounts went quiet on the matter after that, and the social media campaign to portray Talarico as a man in a state of emergency, too mentally ill to represent Texas in the Senate, fizzled out.
And:
By virtue of being everywhere and then falling apart so completely, the hoax has become a natural experiment in whether a ridiculous conspiracy theory can move the needle in a close election—even after it’s thoroughly debunked.
It’s been long observed that many more people hear the lie than ever hear the correction. Mark Twain said this: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
The background of this incident is in the article. It’s all about getting the flu. The piece concludes:
much the conspiracy theory will matter in November’s election. It’s possible that it was almost entirely self-contained in conservative conversations on X—people who were never going to vote for Talarico anyway. It’s also possible that it went beyond that, and that voters who lacked either the time or the inclination to follow the story through to its debunking will go to the polls next month believing they are choosing between a candidate who spent a week in a mental institution and one who didn’t. In what’s forecast to be a close race, even a marginal number of such voters could matter.
Advertisement(There’s a third possibility, perhaps one too outlandish to take seriously. And that’s that Paxton and his team may pay some sort of penalty for pushing a story that fell apart instantly upon making contact with a shred of reason. The lesson of Trump’s decade atop American politics is that the penalty for lying is generally nonexistent, but this may just be the exception.)
Which of those three possibilities—the story flopping, working, or backfiring—emerges is an important barometer of where we stand in 2026, and whether the truth still has any purchase in our modern era.
If a couple of weeks from now we’re hearing that voters were turned off by their fear of Talarico’s fragility or instability, we’ll know things are worse than ever. But if this whole episode is dismissed and laughed off as the misadventure of a few desperate attention-seekers, then it’ll be a sign: Even in one of the hottest battlegrounds in the country, reality still matters.
In a sense, of course, reality doesn’t matter. Humans have evolved to exist within a particular set of environmental circumstances. It’s not that the cosmos exists with particular parameters that allow life to evolve (that cosmological argument for the existence of God); it’s that our species evolved to exist within the parameters that exist, for whatever reason. So we are perfectly capable of surviving without perceiving the extent of reality that exists beyond our senses and intuitions.
Still, there’s a level of reality that exists, just slightly beyond our intuitive senses, that can affect us, and might destroy us.
