02a U.S. Politics – Conservative

This election season has included a lot of talk about the openly socialist candidates winning Democratic Party primaries in New York and other deep-blue regions of the country.

But in Texas, US Senate hopeful James Talarico is spewing many of the same far-left ideas from a package that might appear less extreme to some voters. 

Now that he’s facing GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a steady stream of those prior remarks are coming back to bite him.

As the Washington Free Beacon highlighted in a new report:

Talarico’s remarks came during a 2022 speech he delivered to a group of Texas inmates graduating from a high school diploma program. After approvingly quoting the prominent prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—Talarico described her as an “anti-prison activist” who said “prisons are a catchall solution to our social problems”—he laid out his vision for a “world without prisons.”

“Prisons allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism,” Talarico said. “If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.”

“It’s hard to imagine a world without prisons,” he continued. “But it was also hard to imagine a world without telegrams and cassette tapes. Just because it was hard to imagine doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. We won’t build it overnight, but dreaming is the first step.”