Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico described capitalism, white supremacy, and climate change as interconnected "oppressive systems" that needed dismantling during a 2020 Zoom call with Sierra Club activists, remarks now shadowing his tight race against Republican Ken Paxton.
Talarico made the comments in September 2020, when he was a 31-year-old state legislator running for a second term. Speaking to Sierra Club activists on a private Zoom call, he thanked "young activists" for connecting what he cast as three linked problems, and then laid out what he wanted done about them.
The New York Post reported on the resurfaced footage, which was first flagged by CNN and then amplified by Lone Star Liberty PAC in a post on X.
Talarico told the Sierra Club group:
"I'm so thankful that you asked this question and also thankful that young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country."
He continued:
"And I think only understanding the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we going to be able to begin the process of dismantling them."
That is not a stray word or an awkward aside. It is a sitting state legislator telling a room of activists that American capitalism belongs in the same category as white supremacy, and that all three systems need to be torn apart together. Six years later, he wants a promotion to the United States Senate.
On the same Zoom call, Talarico took aim at the backbone of the Texas economy. He compared the state's oil and gas sector, which produces 43 percent of the nation's crude oil, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration, to an obsolete technology.
"We all know that Texas has been a leader in oil and gas, but in many ways that's like being the leader in cassette tapes in the 1980s. That industry is not gonna last."
He added that Texas needed to "be ahead of the curve" and "lead instead of follow" on energy, language that reads like a blueprint for phasing out the industry that employs hundreds of thousands of Texans and funds schools, roads, and state services.
Texas is also the country's largest wind energy producer and has, by some estimates, overtaken California in utility-scale solar production. But Talarico was not making a case for an energy mix. He was writing off the industry that still dominates the state's economy as a dead end.
The comments carry extra weight given a separate unearthed video, reported by Fox News, showing Talarico on a June 2024 Zoom call welcoming members of Third Act Texas, a climate activism group for seniors that opposes fossil fuels. That appearance suggests Talarico's courtship of anti-fossil-fuel activists did not end with the 2020 Sierra Club call.
Talarico's campaign moved quickly to distance the candidate from his own words. Spokesman JT Ennis told the Post that Talarico "is a proud capitalist" who "agrees with the majority of Texans that racism, natural disasters, and a billionaire-controlled economy are all problems we need to address."
That framing is revealing. Talarico did not call capitalism a "billionaire-controlled economy" in 2020. He called it an "oppressive system" yoked to white supremacy that needed dismantling. His campaign is now repackaging the remark into something poll-tested and palatable, swapping out his actual language for a softer version that bears little resemblance to what he said on camera.
Ennis also acknowledged that Talarico "missed the mark on some of his past statements." But the spokesman did not specify which statements Talarico now disowns or explain how a candidate pivots from wanting to dismantle capitalism to being a "proud capitalist" without a public accounting of what changed and why.
In a second statement focused on the oil and gas remarks, Ennis said Talarico "supports the oil and gas industry and believes in an all of the above energy strategy that protects Texas oil and gas jobs." He added that Talarico has "taken many votes" in favor of the oil industry during his time in the state legislature, though the campaign did not identify those votes.
Talarico's campaign website states his goal is to ensure Texas "not only maintains, but extends" its energy dominance, language that directly contradicts his 2020 comparison of the oil sector to cassette tapes.
The capitalism remarks are not the first time Talarico's past comments have become a campaign liability. He previously suggested God is nonbinary and said "God is not Christian." In April 2021, he sparked backlash for arguing there are six sexes. On a 2021 podcast, he offered this summary of his faith:
"I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity."
Republicans have repeatedly used these statements to paint Talarico as far outside the Texas mainstream. National Review noted that the resurfaced capitalism comments add to a growing file of progressive positions that Talarico must now explain to a general-election audience in a state that has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988.
Talarico's campaign has tried to redirect attention to his Republican opponent. Ennis accused Ken Paxton of "clipping a few old, cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption," pointing to Paxton's impeachment by the Texas legislature, securities fraud charges, and what the spokesman described as "using his office to protect pedophiles and animal abusers." Ennis also claimed Paxton "refused to address his comments that the school shooting in Uvalde was 'God's plan'" and that "Texas' abortion ban is good for interstate commerce." None of those Paxton quotes appear directly sourced in the reporting, they are characterizations from the Talarico campaign.
Paxton, who unseated incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican primary, carries his own political baggage. But the question voters face is not whether Paxton has problems. It is whether Talarico actually believes what he told those Sierra Club activists, or whether his current positions are the performance.
The RealClearPolitics polling aggregate shows Talarico holding a 1.9 percentage-point edge over Paxton, a margin thin enough that a few points of movement among energy workers, small-business owners, or churchgoing voters could decide the outcome.
For a candidate running in a state built on oil, cattle, and free enterprise, calling capitalism an oppressive system is not a gaffe. It is a window into how he thinks, or at least how he thought when he believed only friendly activists were listening.
Voters can decide which version of James Talarico is real: the one who told Sierra Club activists he wanted to dismantle capitalism, or the one whose campaign website now promises to extend Texas energy dominance. Both versions cannot be true at the same time.
