Ken Paxton Fights Fire with Matchbook
in New AI Ad Mocking Talarico's Religion
Capitol Inside
September 8, 2026
With the 2026 midterm election shaping up to be the ultimate test of President Donald Trump's popularity, Republican Ken Paxton sought to change the narrative for the U.S. Senate race in Texas on Tuesday with an ad that makes the battle a referendum on Democrat James Talarico's faith.
The Texas attorney general's new 30-second spot is a product of artificial intelligence - purporting to show the Democratic Senate nominee scribbling wacky notations on the opening page of a Genesis across from a page that has picture drawn onto it below the words King James Talarico Bible.
"James Talarico is weaponizing faith to sell a radical agenda, and he even brags about hating Christianity," Paxton said in a post on X that introduced the new commercial for the Senate campaign.
The Republican Senate nominee makes it appear like he's been forced to fight fire with fire with the weaponization of Talarico's religious observations in response to his alleged attempts to weaponize it for his campaign. Paxton's AI commercial shows Talarico reading the words that he's writing out aloud - and it covers all of the top talking points that the Republicans have been repeating frequently about him on social media for months.
"In the beginning God was non-binary - and he wasn't a Christian," the Talarico character says. "And God said let there be six genders - and there were.
"Then God so loved the world, he gave us his only son who is a radical feminist and never asked people to worship him," the AI Talarico adds. "Look, I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity. America is not a Christian nation."
The Paxton ad lists several ostensible sources for the language that it quotes his Democratic rival as having said. The AG's commercial comment on God's binary status is attributed in the new ad to a speech that Talarico gave in October 2021 in opposition to a bill banning transgender females in girls high school sports. The ad implies that Talarico made the six-genders claim at a House committee hearing in April 2021 on the version of the same legislation that failed to receive a vote in the regular session that year.
Talarico's now-infamous claim about his hatred for Christianity is attributed in the Paxton advertisement to an activist podcast on theology in March 2021. But the red flag that the attorney general's advertising experts may have missed comes when the AI ad lists a sermon at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church on October 22, 2023 as the source of the statement on God not being a Christian.
But Paxton's ad declines to elaborate by noting that Talarico is studying to be a Presbyterian minister. That may tell voters more about the Democratic state representative's true feelings about Christianity than those a political opponent wants them to believe.
The biggest problem that the new Paxton commercial may encounter is the fact that social media has been saturated throughout the year with the same claims on Talarico in the context of religion. And his support in the polls has gone up instead of down during that span of time.
more to come ...
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