By Rebekah Zeljko
Democrat Texas Senate nominee James Talarico is partnering with failed Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke to unleash a voter outreach campaign that will target drag show attendees, Mexico soccer fans, and people previously purged from voter rolls, the Daily Caller has learned.
After several failed candidacies, O’Rourke is now advising other up-and-coming Democrats through his organization Powered by People, which hosted a strategy Zoom call with Talarico’s campaign Tuesday night, the Caller can reveal.
During the call, Powered by People Executive Director Aimee Prudhomme revealed Democrats’ strategy to target voters ahead of the November election. (RELATED: James Talarico Insults Military Families With ‘California Transplant’ Attack, Ken Paxton Says)
“Like Beto mentioned before, we go where the people are,” Prudhomme said on a recording of the meeting obtained by the Caller. “We’re trying to find likely Democratic voters. Those that are targets of voter suppression, likely to be removed or purged from the rolls come November. We go in places where those people are.”
In Texas, people are removed from voter rolls if they are serving a sentence for a felony conviction, if they are illegally in the United States, if they are mentally incapacitated, if they move out of the country or state, or if they die, according to the state’s Election Code.
Prudhomme went on to list other locations where the campaign should target outreach efforts, including drag shows and World Cup watch parties where attendees root for Mexico. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Aligned Group Drops Six Figures On ‘Talafreako’ Ad In Texas)
“So whether it’s college campuses, in places of worship, at concerts, clubs, drag shows … the World Cup is going on, we’ve been doing a lot of World Cup watch parties despite the U.S. and Mexico getting out of the tournament this weekend. But we are there,” Prudhomme said. “We are at those events.”
O’Rourke also chimed in on the call to claim that the election was actively being rigged against Talarico by Republicans like President Donald Trump, despite Democrats’ long established track record of calling the president an election denier.
In a recording obtained by the Caller, O’Rourke said they need to work to “get our country back from the people who are trying to steal it in front of our eyes right now.”
“That’s what Republicans, that’s what Greg Abbott, that’s what Ken Paxton, that’s what Donald Trump, most of all, are counting on,” O’Rourke said. “You know they’re trying to intimidate. You know they’re trying to rig. They already redrew five congressional districts in Texas. More hijinks will certainly ensue.”
Talarico is set to face off against the Republican nominee, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the general election on Nov. 3.
Talarico pushed legislation to mandate DEI in public schools. In May 2021, Talarico temporarily derailed House Bill 3979—Texas’ measure limiting the teaching of critical race theory—by raising a procedural point of order in the House.
It is bad for schools to promote critical race theory (CRT), because CRT is a harmful ideology that is hostile to the free-market economy, equating it with racism: “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book promoting critical race theory, How to Be An Antiracist. That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate.
The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” writes Kendi in that book. Kendi is a leading “critical race theorist.”
Yet K-12 students are also being required to take classes in critical ethnic studies or critical race theory. Hispanic students in a California school district were forced to learn critical race theory. They hated it, reported Reason Magazine.
The progressive Arlington County schools have students read books by critical race theorists such as Ibram Kendi. Arlington distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. At Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School, most students in 9th grade English were assigned to read either Stamped or a much longer book that would require more work to read. Virtually all students chose to read Stamped as a result.
“Less than half of high school students in St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) are proficient in math or reading but” soon all of them “will be required to take a Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) course before they can graduate,” reported the Center of the American Experiment in 2022.
If progressive state education bureaucrats had their way, critical race theory would become more common in school curriculums. In 2015, under Governor Terry McAuliffe (D), Virginia’s Department of Education instructed public schools to “embrace critical race theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.’”
Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, said critical race theory was deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
Virginia’s largest school system, the progressive Fairfax County Public Schools, encouraged teachers to apply critical race theory. The Washington Times reported that a “slide presentation” in 2021 “instructed social studies teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools that ‘critical race theory is a frame’ for their work.”
The Loudoun County, VA public schools paid a contractor to train their staff in critical race theory, giving it $3,125 to conduct “Critical Race Theory Development.”
Under Democratic governor Ralph Northam, Virginia’s official “Roadmap to Equity” published by its Department of Education in 2020 thanked critical race theorist “Dr. Ibram X. Kendi” in its acknowledgments section, as having “informed the development of the EdEquityVA Framework.” Kendi says he was “inspired by critical race theory,” and that he cannot “imagine a pathway to” his teachings “that does not engage CRT.”
