Paxton, Talarico Clash Over Controversial Post on Texas Students

The thing about Texas politics is you can almost set your watch by the Sunday-afternoon social media blowup. This time it’s Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, landing a “raced-up” post about Texas students, and then watching the usual pile-on begin. Cornyn and a bunch of GOP lawmakers sprinted to the cameras to denounce it, and suddenly the story isn’t energy policy or the grid or anything the Railroad Commission actually does. A dumb post became the whole campaign.

Ken Paxton and James Talarico jumping into that fight tells you why this stuff spreads. Talarico gets to paint Republicans as unserious and mean. Paxton gets to show he’s not going to take lectures from Democrats on decency while their side is busy sorting Americans by race in half the institutions they run. But we should be honest: French didn’t get “misunderstood” into trouble. If you’re running statewide, you know what you’re doing when you hit send, and you know exactly who you’re trying to impress. Stop feeding the opposition free ammunition.

There’s also the performative part from our own side. Cornyn denouncing French is fine as far as it goes, but Texans didn’t elect anyone to be the state’s full-time hall monitor. Voters want leaders who can talk about schools without turning kids into props, and who can talk about the border, inflation, and energy without stepping on a rake online. If Republicans want to win and govern in a state that’s growing and changing, we can’t keep volunteering to make every week about the latest outrage screenshot. Texas needs grown-up fights, not viral bait..