‘Are you white?’ attack texts against James Talarico turn quote about a DHS finding into a smear campaign

Texas voters are receiving political texts that open with “Are you white?” before attacking Senate candidate James Talarico over a remark on domestic terrorism.

A political text landing on Texas phones this month opens with a question most campaigns would never ask directly: “Are you white?”

NBC News, citing reporting from NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, reported that multiple viewers contacted the station after receiving the messages, which proceed to claim Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico labeled white men “America’s top terror threat” before directing recipients to an attack website.

The underlying quote exists, though not in the form presented. According to NBC News, Talarico said following a mass shooting that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country,” a statement drawn from a Department of Homeland Security assessment issued during Trump’s first term, which identified white supremacist extremists as the most persistent and lethal category of domestic violent extremists. The word “radicalized” does not survive the trip into the text message, and neither does the federal report it came from.

Rep. Marc Veasey, a Fort Worth Democrat and Talarico ally, told the outlet the tactic revives racial politics from the 1980s and 1990s. He attributed its potential appeal to voters already frustrated by the war and rising prices, conditions he suggested make this kind of messaging land harder than it otherwise would.

The money behind it originates well outside Texas. Federal Election Commission records cited by NBC News show the American Political Action Committee, based in Bellevue, Washington, has been registered with the agency since 1980.

The group’s website credits longtime conservative and Second Amendment advocate Alan Gottlieb as its founder. The station reached out to Gottlieb and the committee’s treasurer and received no response.

SMU political science professor Matthew Wilson expects considerably more of this before November. He told NBC News that donors increasingly spend across state lines, concentrating resources in whichever contests appear most competitive and most potentially winnable, regardless of where the donors themselves live or vote.

The legal architecture permitting it traces to Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations and unions to spend without limit advocating for or against candidates, provided that spending remains independent of the campaigns. That independence is precisely what lets a committee in Washington state shape a Texas race without any candidate’s fingerprints on the message.

Black and brown voters in Texas would likely read a racially targeted text as a clear indication of which voters the message was designed to engage and which voters were left outside its intended audience.