Weenie Politics: Insecure Masculinity Comes to Texas

by Conrad Phillip Kottak

Last fall I published an essay on what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez memorably called insecure masculinity. I argued that men perform exaggerated displays of dominance precisely when their actual authority is in doubt. The boast advertises the insecurity it is meant to conceal. The condition is now on full display in Texas, where the Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton has turned, at least for now, away from inflation, health care, and the price of gasoline and toward the question of whether a 37-year-old former schoolteacher is sufficiently manly

Meet James Talarico.

My attention was drawn to the race by my friend and former student Jay Nordlinger, who observed in a note on his Substack, Onward and Upward, that the contest had sparked another round of commentary on manliness: “Who’s a real man, who’s a weenie, and all that.” Jay then quoted Scripture. “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” And Jesus: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.” And Paul: “Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” The seminarian in this race presumably knows those verses. His critics evidently do not. Jay’s word, weenie, suggests a name for the whole genre of attack. Call it weenie politics.

Then I caught a segment on Abby Phillip’s CNN program and saw weenie politics in action. The panel screened an AI-generated video depicting Talarico dressed as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, singing a song promoting transgender identity. The video had one purpose: to render the candidate sexually ambiguous, to deny him his masculinity and his security in his own persona. Talarico is unmarried, telegenic, and a seminary student preparing to become a Presbyterian pastor. Paxton, the current Texas attorney general, carries a résumé of a different sort: a 2015 indictment for securities fraud, an FBI investigation triggered by his own deputies, a 3.3 million dollar whistleblower settlement, impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas House for abuse of office (the Texas Senate acquitted him), a well-documented extramarital affair, and a 2025 divorce that his wife, a state senator, said she sought on biblical grounds. Unable to campaign on character, Paxton and his allies have chosen to campaign on chromosomes. Paxton has called his opponent “Tofu Talarico” and “low-T Talarico.”

Senator Ted Cruz joined in, declaring on Fox News that if you made a list of one thousand adjectives to describe Talarico, masculine would not be one of them, adding that a stiff breeze would blow him over like a feather. The panel noted the irony. This is the same Ted Cruz who continued to support Donald Trump after Trump insulted his wife’s appearance and accused his father of involvement in the Kennedy assassination. The same Ted Cruz who, as a deadly winter storm bore down on Texas, flew to Cancun, and whose optics were so bad he had to fly right back. Social media supplied the one-word rebuttal: Cancun

Ted Cruz returns from shortened winter storm Cancun trip.

Trump himself asserted that Talarico believes in six genders. On other occasions he has said six sexes. I have no idea what Talarico has actually said about either number, but he would be no more wrong than Trump is when he insists there are only two, as any anthropologist, biological or cultural, knows full well, and as I explained in another essay, Beyond the Political Noise: Making Sense of Sex and Gender. Trump added, with evident horror, that Talarico is a vegan. In Texas! He is not. Talarico has joked that he has been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. Stephen Miller, Mr. Insecure Masculinity himself, asserted that if you drew Talarico’s blood, it would come out soy milk. Miller also called him transgender, suggesting he would transition to being a woman were he elected.

Why weenie politics? Because the alternative is defending the record. Inflation persists. Gasoline is expensive. The administration’s most visible domestic project has been gilding Washington, including a ballroom grafted onto the White House. So the campaign reaches for the oldest weapon in the insecure masculine arsenal: feminize the opponent. Make him soft, ambiguous, suspect.

Will it work? The transgender meme had legs in 2024, and I suspect it retains some. But a recent poll shows Talarico leading by three points, and grocery prices speak a language that drowns out tofu. Texans may yet decide that a seminarian who eats barbecue is manly enough.

In the meantime, a question for the gentlemen so concerned with manliness. Who is more feminine, the man who drinks soy milk or the man who wants a ballroom? Answer me that, Cinderella.

Trump’s big beautiful ballroom.

If you missed the original essay, you can read it here: Insecure Masculinity.