A newly unearthed video clip is forcing Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico to answer for a comment he made four years ago — when he dismissed parents' outrage over pornographic and sexually explicit material in public schools as "conspiracy theory-driven" and "kooky stuff."
According to Fox News Politics, the footage comes from a July 2022 hearing of the Texas House, where Talarico — then a state representative — was addressing a slate of education bills and the public testimony scheduled to follow.
"We're going to spend hours hearing bills that are just kind of conspiracy theory-driven and kind of kooky stuff. And we're going to hear some of that today, I think, in the public testimony — not the invited testimony, but the public testimony," Talarico said at the time.
The remark landed differently in 2022. It looks worse in 2026. Talarico is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, running as a relative moderate in a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate in decades. As Fox News Politics noted, the clip adds to a growing pile of past statements on gender, immigration and law enforcement that complicate his pitch to Republican-leaning Texas voters.
What Parents Were Actually Saying
Talarico's "conspiracy theory" line wasn't aimed at hypotheticals. At the time of the hearing, parents across the country were packing school board meetings to protest explicit titles sitting on school and library shelves.
According to Fox News Politics, an Ashland, Ohio, board meeting drew national attention after parents displayed graphic illustrations from books including It's Perfectly Normal, Making a Baby, Own Your Period and Puberty is Gross but Also Really Awesome — all titles featuring varying degrees of sexual content.
In Texas, Republican state Rep. Matt Krause circulated a list of roughly 800 titles he believed were inappropriate for students and sent a letter to school districts asking them to identify any other books containing sexually explicit images or graphic depictions of sexual behavior.
"Please identify any other books or content in your district, specifying the campus location and funds spent on acquisition that address or contain … sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law," Krause wrote, per Fox News Politics, also citing material that might cause students "discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex."
By January 2022, several Texas counties had begun reviewing their own library holdings. Granbury Independent School District became one of the flashpoints.
Those were the parents Talarico was describing as peddling kookery from the dais.
The 'Moderate' Brand Under Pressure
The clip's resurfacing coincides with other reporting chipping away at Talarico's carefully managed image. The Federalist published an exclusive report — headlined "Texas Dem Talarico Caught In Lie On Trans Insanity" — claiming unearthed footage contradicts his stated "moderating" position on transgender issues. Next News Network has not independently reviewed that footage.
Meanwhile, the Democratic primary Talarico won earlier this year still hasn't healed. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, whom Talarico defeated in the March primary, left him off a list of 14 candidates endorsed by her FIRE PAC on Monday. That omission drew a blunt response from former Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pa.
"F--- her. That's all I can say," Wild posted on X, according to Fox News. "It has everything to do with her being a narcissistic drama queen who has used her platform (such as it is) only to advance herself."
Crockett fired back on social media, writing that she had personally congratulated Talarico after the primary and complaining that "news media goes back to the news instead of deciding to ride the tabloid lane." That post, like Wild's, is a social media statement — not verified reporting.
The Texas Senate race is one of the few pickup opportunities Democrats are contesting seriously this cycle, and Talarico's national profile depends on suburban and swing voters believing he's cut from different cloth than his party's progressive wing. Four-year-old footage of him waving off furious mothers and fathers as conspiracy theorists is exactly the kind of material his Republican opponent will put in heavy rotation.
It is not yet known whether Talarico's campaign has responded to the resurfaced clip or whether he stands by the 2022 remark.
Our Take
Here's the thing about calling parents conspiracy theorists: you're gambling that no one ever checks the library catalog.
Texas moms and dads weren't spinning tales about lizard people. They were reading It's Perfectly Normal out loud at school board meetings — illustrations and all — and asking why it was sitting on a shelf within arm's reach of their third grader. Matt Krause's list of roughly 800 titles didn't materialize out of thin air. Districts across the state launched reviews because the material was real.
So when Talarico stood on the floor of the Texas House and preemptively labeled the day's public testimony "kooky" and "conspiracy theory-driven," he wasn't rebutting a fringe claim. He was telling the people who showed up to speak — many of them for the first time in their lives — that they were rubes worth eye-rolling before they even reached the microphone.
That's the tell. Not a policy disagreement. A contempt problem. The same instinct runs through the national Democratic Party: parents who object to explicit content are "book banners," "extremists," or, in Talarico's 2022 vocabulary, kooks. Every election since has been a referendum on that attitude, and parents keep showing up to vote like they remember.
Talarico now wants those same Texans to send him to Washington on a moderate ticket. Four years ago he told them their concerns were a joke. The clip is out. The question is whether Texas voters let him pretend he never said it — or whether they make him own every word.
