The Ezra Klein Show - Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

State Representative James Talarico of Texas might have been our most requested guest last year. And he seemed to come out of nowhere.Talarico started breaking through with viral videos on TikTok and Instagram. And in those videos, he didn’t sound like your typical Democrat. He’s forthrightly Christian, quoting Scripture to defend progressive positions and challenging Christian nationalism on Christian grounds. And he is now running for Senate in Texas — in a primary field that includes U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett — in what will be one of the most important Senate races this year.So I wanted to have Talarico on the show to talk about his faith, his politics and the way those two have come together in this attentional moment. Because he’s clearly saying things that people are hungry to hear.Mentioned:The Sabbath by Rabbi Heschel“#2352 James Talarico”, The Joe Rogan ExperienceCommon Sense by Thomas PaineBook Recommendations:Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtryJesus and the Disinherited by Howard ThurmanThe Upswing by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney GarrettThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Michelle Harris, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

One of my obsessions over the past few years has been the role of attention in modern American politics, the way attention is a fundamental currency, and the way it works differently than it did at other times when it was controlled by newspaper editorial boards and nightly newsbookers. And so I've been particularly interested in politicians who seem native to this attentional era, who seem to have figured something out. We've talked a lot about how the Trump administration uses attention, Hazarman Dani uses attention. But somebody who's been breaking through over the past year in a very interesting way is a state representative from Texas named James Taurico. And Tuller Rico is a little bit unusual for a Democratic politician. He's this very forthrightly Christian politician.

He roots his politics very fundamentally in a way you don't always hear from Democrats in his faith. because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. But he began emerging as somebody who was breaking through on TikTok and Instagram and viral videos where he would talk about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools. This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional. It's not only un-American. I think it is also deeply unchristian. And the ways in which the Bible's emphasis on helping the,

the poor and the needy, had been perverted by those who wanted to use religion as a tool of power and even greed. Jesus liberates. Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves. Christian nationalism kills. And that what was really surprising to many people is that he ended up on Joe Rogan's podcast. All right, James. I'm too.

Well, how are you? Very good. Nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. The first significant. Democrat that Rogan seemed interested in in a very long time.

You need to run for president. We need someone who's actually a good person. Now, Tala Rico is running for Senate in Texas. He's running in a primary with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for what will be one of the most important Senate elections in the country. So I want to have Tala RICO on the show to talk to him about his faith, his politics, and the way those two have come together in this intentional moment to allow him to say things in a language and a frame

that people seem to really want to hear, that people seem hungry for, a language of morality and even of faith at a time of incredible cruelty and at a time when the radicalism of faith seems to have been perverted by the corruption of politics. As always, my email, Asercline show at NYUTimes.com. James Tolerico, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So I wanted to start in your faith, because your politics is so rooted in your faith. For you, what is the root or the experience of your belief? Is it learned for you? Is it embodied cerebral? Is it something you always had, something you had to struggle to find? All the above. So my granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas in Corpus Christi and in Laredo, where my mom grew up. And when I was real little, he told me that Christianity is a simple religion.

Not an easy religion, you would always clarify, but a simple religion, because Jesus gave us these two commandments. to love God, our source, and to love our neighbors. And so those two commandments, I think, have really guided my life at its best moments. And it's why I'm in public service. I was a public school teacher and now a public official. That's the loving my neighbor. And it's why I'm a seminary student studying to become a minister one day, and that's the loving God part. And both of them sustain each other, challenge each other, reinforce each other on a daily basis. But you just slipped into how you live your faith, not what it is for you. Yeah. So has belief come easy to you? You know, part of being a seminary student is studying Hebrew and Greek so you can actually read

scripture in its original language. And one of the mind-blowing things that happened to me, my first year of seminary, is I was studying this word faith and many translations, it is belief, you know, the idea of believing in a concept or an idea, which makes sense in English, Western translations. But it can also be translated as trust, which to me is much more experiential, trusting that love is going to get you through the hour, through the day, through your life, that love is going to carry all of us forward, that love will ultimately prevail, even when it's temporarily defeated. To me, that's what my faith feels like. It feels like. It feels like like trust, almost like I learned how to swim at our neighborhood pool. And I remember my swim

teacher telling me, don't fight the water. Let the water carry you. And there's so much temptation in our lives to control our surroundings, control other people. And I think the opposite of that control is faith, is that kind of trust, letting life, letting the universe hold you up and not fighting it. And so that's what it feels like for me. Again, when I'm most faithful, it's a struggle on a daily basis to feel that trust and not to fight the water. Was it always there for you? Did you have a period as a college atheist reading Christensen's? You know, I was really lucky that I grew up in an incredible church community. I didn't grow up with my granddad as my pastor. I grew up in a Presbyterian church, actually, in Round Rock, Texas. St. Andrews, shout out to our

our church. And our pastor, Dr. Jim Rigby, he married my parents. He baptized me when I was two years old. And he's a unique, I think religious leader and thinker and got in trouble a lot. When I was in elementary school, he was ordaining gay and lesbian clergy. He was blessing same-sex unions, which now doesn't seem controversial, but certainly back in the 90s. Well, in some traditions, it certainly is. That's true. But I think it's hard to remember just how controversial, universally it was, how radical and dangerous it was. And we almost lost our church because of those actions by our minister and our congregation.

And the National Presbyterian Church put him on trial. And so these early memories were kind of seared into my brain. And so I was brought up in a very very important. very countercultural faith that didn't sound like everything I heard at school or at work in the media. So I feel like I was given a really healthy tradition and one that has worked for me, partly because Dr. Jim, my pastor, always said that religion shouldn't lead to itself. Religion should lead you deeper into your own life. And to me, that is such a gift that you can give a young.

person. Can you say more about what that means to you? Yeah. So, you know, I think for Christianity, I'll just speak about my tradition. The genius of Christianity, the miracle of Christianity, is not the claim that Jesus is God. It's that God is Jesus, meaning Jesus helps us understand the mystery. A mystery can't help us understand Jesus. So this idea of that ultimate reality, the ground of our being, the cosmos, however you wanted to find God, that that somehow looks like this humble, compassionate barefoot rabbi in the first century,

someone who broke cultural norms, someone who stood up for the vulnerable and the marginalized, someone who challenged religious authority. That to me is such a revolutionary idea, and it leads you to challenge organized religion. The gospel just inherently tries to break out of some of these religious dogmas and orthodoxies and challenges religion itself. I've heard you talk in different clips in interviews about the difference between a living religion and a dead religion.

Is this what you're talking about when you describe that, this difference between a religion that has been absorbed into structures of power, that now is itself a structure of power versus one that is still challenging the ways of this world? Yes. The separation of church and state, I was taught that that constitutional boundary was sacred. Not for the benefit of the state, although there's benefits to our democracy,

but for the benefit of the church. Because when religion gets too cozy with power, we lose our prophetic voice, our ability to see beyond the current system, the current era. One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is in the Sermon on the Mount. I encourage everyone to go back and read it, especially as Christianity is more and more in our political conversation. Go back and read Christianity 101, which is the sermon on the Mount. And it's interesting because Jesus takes his followers not into a church, not into a business,

not into a governmental building. He brings people to a hillside. And he says, look at the birds of the air, look at the lilies of the field, this is how we're supposed to live, this is who we truly are. That is revolutionary. It is radical in the true meaning of that word going to the root of all of our lives and our problems and our dreams. And to me, that is the spirit of our tradition, of breaking these chains, of breaking out of these systems. The word church in Greek means to be called out of, call out of our culture, called out of our economy, called out of our political system. That is what religion, I think, at its best does.

It's what I was given that kind of religion, just because I happened to be growing up across the street from this incredible church. How do you think about the competing claims of different religions? Do you believe Christianity to be more true than other religions? Do you believe there to be exclusivity in these beliefs, that they're incompatible with each other? I believe Christianity points to the truth.

I also think other religions of love point to the same truth. I think of different religious traditions as different languages. So you and I could sit here and debate what to call this cup, and you could call it a cup in English. We'd call it something else in Spanish and French. But we are all talking about the same reality. I believe Jesus Christ reveals that reality to us. But I also think that other traditions reveal that reality in their own ways

with their own symbol structures. And I've learned more about my tradition, by learning more about Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam and Judaism. And so I see these beautiful faith traditions as circling the same truth about the universe, about the cosmos. And that truth is inherently a mystery. And I think the most destructive thing is when religion becomes an end in and of itself. That's when religion implodes.

My pastor always told me growing up that religious symbols are like aspirin. in order to work, they have to dissolve. They point beyond themselves. If you get lost in the symbols, if you get lost in the words, you're missing the reality that we're all trying to describe and talk about. What is your relationship to prayer?

Prayer is essential for me. I start out every morning in prayer. Sometimes it's silent prayer, which to me is probably the most helpful. Oftentimes those are just prayers of gratitude, that God woke me up this morning, that I have health, that I have my family, that I have my friends, that I get to do a job I really care about,

making an impact. That gratitude, to me, just, it checks the worst parts of myself every morning. And then almost every morning I'll say the Lord's Prayer aloud. And that's a different experience. It's much more of a ritual, but rituals are also a gift. It's a rhythm that you're a way. that you're getting back in touch with, a prayer that's been said for 2,000 years in our tradition.

And that prayer in particular reminds me about the work that we have in front of us because religion without works, faith without works is dead. When does prayer feel real to you and when does it feel false? Well, you know, sometimes a ritual, you're not ready to feel it, but part of the ritual, whether it's the Lord's Prayer, whether it's a communion on a Sunday, part of that is to get you into that mode even when you're not feeling it.

I've been thinking about prayer in my own life recently and I've been reading this book by Abraham Joshua Heschel on prayer. And he writes, prayers are humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return from the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time? And I like that a lot. I've been trying to think about when does prayer feel real

and when does it feel false? And understanding it as a kind of admission of gratitude and wonder has been a little bit closer to something that I could touch. Yeah. One of my favorite books of all time is The Sabbath by Rabbi Heschol. Yeah, one of mine too. And to me, prayer is almost like the Sabbath breaking in throughout the week. You know, in that book he describes that throughout the week,

we're all concerned about our status and our jobs and our to-do lists. and the Sabbath is when you, I think he describes it as glimpsing eternity. And to me, that's a little bit of what prayer is for a few minutes in the morning or throughout the day. It is trying to touch eternity even as you're trapped in a finite world. So prayer is an act, and it seems to me that the way you have described your faith to me, your faith is a faith of acts. Yes. The question of whether or not you are living in religion

is not about what you believe, but about what you do. Well, and that's what we're taught as Christians. Matthew 25 tells us exactly how we're going to be judged and how we're going to be saved. By feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger, by visiting the prisoner, nothing about being a Christian, nothing about going to church,

nothing about saying the Lord's Prayer, nothing about reading the Bible, just helping others, just loving, I mean, it's remarkable when you go back and read that passage, but they need each other. Prayer needs action, and action needs prayer. And so I don't want anyone to misunderstand what I'm saying, because you can be out there doing the work,

and if you're not connected to something deeper, you're going to burn out really fast. When I said earlier that the love of God and the love of neighbor sustain each other, they are in relationship. They are united. You know, this is the entire mystery of incarnation, is the divine and the human being brought together into one union. So I listened to you when you did your Jirogan appearance, and you offered there a very, very progressive form of Christianity. What do you think is the biblical evidence to support the opinion of being pro-abortion?

So before God comes over Mary, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary's consent. which is remarkable. I mean, go back and read this in Luke. The angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do. And she says, if it is God's will, let it be done. Let it be. Let it happen. So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent.

You cannot force someone to create. Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings. but that has to be done with consent, it has to be done with freedom. And to me, that is absolutely consistent with the ministry and life and death of Jesus. You're not just emphasizing your politics different aspects of your faith, but you're very much challenging quite widespread interpretations of it. Again, I think that's what we're called to do as Christians. Almost every debate Jesus is in is with the religious authorities of his time.

and directly challenging orthodoxy. So I do think this is, you know, Jesus was a religious reformer. Paul was a religious reformer. And so I think when we're at our best as Christians, we are challenging religious dogmas and religious supremacy. But I also try to come out this with humility

on the issue of abortion. I've said before, I don't know what Jesus thought about abortion. The Bible doesn't tell us. The Bible doesn't mention abortion at all. And so, as with many issues that aren't mentioned in the Bible. We have to take scripture and we've got to try to piece together what we think love demands of us on a particular policy question. And you're right, for the past

50 years in this country, the religious right, a political movement, convinced a lot of Christians in America that the two most important issues were abortion and homosexuality. Two issues that aren't really discussed in scripture. Abortion is never mentioned. Consensual, same-sex relationships are never mentioned. And so it's remarkable to me that you have an entire political movement using Christianity to prioritize two issues Jesus never talked about. So I'm not saying they're not important. I actually think both of those issues are very important. But to focus on those two things instead of feeding the hungry and healing the sick and welcoming the stranger, three things we're told to do ad nauseum in scripture to me is just mind-blowing.

How do you understand that? Because I'm Jewish, but when I read the New Testament, I always come away a little bit amazed that politicized Christianity is so worried about gender, sexuality, and so unconcerned with greed. You're preaching to the choir. You know, absolutely. Concern for the poor, concern for the oppressed is everywhere. I mean, economic justice has mentioned 3,000 times in our scriptures, both the New Testament

and the Hebrew scriptures. So this is such a core part of our tradition, and it's nowhere to be seen in Christian nationalism or on the religious right. And the Bible is all over the place when it comes to marriage. Paul tells us not to get married, certainly different, many different kinds of marriages throughout scripture. And the same with gender. Paul says that in Christ there is neither male nor female,

which is pretty woke for the first century, you know? So, yeah, again, it's because religion is being used to control people and accumulate power and wealth for those at the top. This is a tale as old as time, and it is not unique to Christianity. Powerful people will always see religion as a tool to make more money and be able to keep people in line. For those unfamiliar with the term, what is Christian nationalism? You can define it a lot of different ways.

I define it as the worship of power in the name of Christ. I define it that way because I want us to see it as part of a very long tradition. How do they define it? They being the people who would self-identify with it. I would think they would define it as wanting a Christian nation. But again, these politicians want a Christian nation, unless it means providing health care to the sick or funding food assistance for the hungry or raising the minimum wage for the poor. It seems like they want to base our laws on the Bible

until they read the words of Jesus. Welcome the stranger. Liberate the oppressed. Put away your sword. Sill all your possessions and give the money to the poor. I mean, I'm not exactly sure a Christian nation is really what these people want. Again, I believe the separation of church and state is sacred. I think a nation with one supreme religion is not just un-American. I also think it's unchristian, given how Jesus taught about religious supremacy. But I do think if these people are going to call for a Christian nation, they need to reach for all of it. You know, I've fought the bill to require the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom. And I've often wondered, instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don't they post money as the root of all evil in every boardroom?

Why don't they post, do not judge in every courtroom? Why don't they post turn the other cheek in the halls of the Pentagon? Or it's easier for a camel to pass to the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. This is the inconsistency I'm trying to call out because they're using my tradition. They're speaking for me. And so I think I have a special moral responsibility to combat Christian nationalism wherever I see it. One thing I appreciate about Donald Trump, about President Trump, is he doesn't pretend that his politics are built on piety. That's not his style.

But the vice president, J.D. Vance, does suggest that his politics are built around a Christian ethic. And I want to play a clip of him for you. As an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. What did you think when you heard Vance say that? That's not the gospel. And I don't think I'm saying this as a Democrat. I think I'm saying this as a fellow believer. J.D. Vance and I are part of the body of Christ together. And I think this is antithetical to the gospel.

The gospel is all about prioritizing those on the outside, those who are least lovable. That's what's so revolutionary about it. There are some strange passages in the New Testament, and one of them is when Jesus tells his followers that they have to hate their mother and father. I don't think Jesus was speaking literally. I don't know, but I don't think so,

because I think we should love our moms and dads. I love mine. The Ten Commandments require us to, and Jesus was a devout Jew the day he was born till the day he died. But I think he's using shocking language to teach us something, and that is that sometimes our little loves

for our parents, for our friends, for our children, for our neighborhood, really important, crucial, beautiful, profound loves. Sometimes those smaller loves can get in the way of the big love,

the love for the stranger, the love for the outcast, the love for the foreigner. And I should add, love for our enemies, the hardest love to achieve. And so what J.D. Vance is describing is the culture that we already live in.

That's the world. And we Christians are called to see beyond the world. And that's to a divine love, a godlike love, because, you know, as scripture says, the rains and the sun fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. God loves all of us, no matter what we've done, no matter how good or how bad we are. And we as Christians are called to have that divine agape love for every person equally.

And that's hard to do. I feel like I love my family more than I love other families. I'm guilty of that. I think we all are. But the gospel is pushing us to move beyond that and to have the same love for a chance. on the other side of the world that we have for our child. And it's almost impossible to do that, but it is what we are called to do. I think it's somebody who is outside Christianity, and as such is always a little bit astonished by the radicalism of the text. Yes.

And the strangeness of it. God incarnates in a human being, that human being is tortured and murdered and rises again as a lesson in mercy and forgiveness and transcendence and there's all matter of violence I'm doing to the story there but the incarnation in the in the least among us the structure of to me the new testament as jesus goes to one outcast member of society after another and then i look up into particularly this administration and i see people who are incredibly loud in their Christianity

and also incredibly cruel in their politics. Put aside the question of what borders you think a nation must have. You can enforce that border in all manner of ways without treating people who are coming here to escape violence

or to better their family's life cruelly. You can do it without the memes we see them make on social media of a cartoon immigrant weeping as she's being deported, of the ASMR video, of migrants shackled to one another, dragging their chains with the implication being that the sound of that should soothe you. It is the ability to insist on your allegiance to such a radical religion and then treat other human beings with such genuinely to me unmitigated, cruelty that I actually find hard at a soul level

to reconcile. Scripture says, you can't love God and hate other people. That's in 1st John. You can't love God and abuse the immigrant. You can't love God and oppress the poor. You can't love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person. person sitting right next to us in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor,

we glimpse the face of God. The commandment to love God and love neighbor is not from Christianity. It is from Judaism. And all Jesus is clarifying as kind of a radical rabbi is that neighbor is the person you love the least. The parable, the Good Samaritan, maybe the most famous of Jesus' parables, I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was because today being a good Samaritan just means helping people on the side of the road, which is good, you should do that. But for Jesus' listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group,

the Samaritans were their sworn enemies. And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define neighbor in who we're supposed to love. Loving our enemies, again, it's become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that. None of us actually love our enemies, even if we say we try to. And so I share the same revulsion

that Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process. Let me try to get it maybe the appeal of some of this form of Christianized politics. society alters very fast what it looks like today versus what it looked like when I was going up

before I had a personal computer to say nothing of the internet and one thing I see people looking for in religion and religious politics I see it predicate on the right with a re-embrace of Catholicism and even Greek Orthodoxy

is people want something to hold onto when everything around them feels like it is changing. And what I see you offering to some degree is a religion and a set of answers that are still changing. After you're on Joe Rogan, the conservative Christian commentator Ali Beth Stuckey published a long rebuttal of your arguments and an argument against progressive Christianity in general. And I want to play you a clip from it. Progressive Christian is an oxymoron. It is actually

a contradiction. It is like saying, I want a flat waffle. Well, a flat waffle is a pancake because what makes a waffle a waffle are the ridges. In the same way, a progressive Christian is not a Christian because Christianity is not progressive. It is static. It is defined by a central fixed truth. This truth does not change. It doesn't progress. It doesn't evolve. What do you think of that? I think she's partially right. If you read the sermon on the Mount, again, I think Jesus should have a say in what Christianity means. In that sermon, he is the ultimate conservative and the ultimate progressive at the same time. You know, as all great teachers, he is breaking us out of the dualistic thinking that plagues us. He is rooting everything in his tradition, Judaism. Everything goes back to Moses and the Ten Commandments and the Torah, everything. And he says, I'm not here to destroy the law. I'm here to fulfill the law. So he's connected to something that's bigger than himself.

But then he's also pushing us to take those teachings to the next level, to go deeper into them. You know, the law tells you an eye for an eye, I'm telling you to turn the other cheek. Moses told you an eye for an eye because you weren't ready to hear turn the other cheek. eye for an eye was meant to keep things from spiraling out of control. It was meant to have a balance of justice. And then Jesus is going further in teaching nonviolence, which is consistent and a growth, an evolution.

And that's the universe we live in. God created an evolving universe. And you can actually go back in the New Testament. The first word out of Jesus's mouth is change. Some can call it repent or turn around, but change is the first thing he says. in his public ministry. So I think both of these things

can be true at the same time. We are rooted in something eternal, something that has existed since before time existed. And it is also always moving us forward and we are always changing and evolving. And both of those things can be true at the same time. Your campaign slogan is

it's time to start flipping tables. Yeah. What's that reference to? So it's, again, a story in the New Testament of when Jesus walks into the temple, and I think it's hard for us in our modern context to really understand an equivalent of the temple, because you would think at the church or a synagogue or a mosque, but the temple was so much more than that. It was the center of not just religious power,

but economic power and political power. And so this humble rabbi from the backwoods in the Galilee doesn't just stay in his room and pray when his neighbors are being hurt. He walks into the seat of power and he flips over the tables of the money changers, the tables of injustice. And it's a profound act of protest of civil disobedience. It's ultimately what gets him killed by the Roman Empire. And I and many others, we always think about Jesus being gentle and kind and soft, all those things he was. But he was also strong and tough and confrontational and aggressive when people were being hurt. And at least for me, and I think for this country,

we have to remember that that is what love demands of us sometimes. And so I wanted to center that story when we started the campaign because this campaign was going to be about fighting back. The billionaires who own our algorithms, who own our cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens and keeping us all divided. This was going to be a campaign that was going to bring people together

to stand up to those forces. Who were the money changers? We were talking earlier about religion being corrupted. Folks who were going to the temple sometimes had to make sacrifices and part of that ritual.

And so the money changers were allowing them to participate in that temple economy and in the process getting rich off of those people. This is, again, partly why we are so focused on trying to keep these

traditions sacred because in this case, the money changers are profiting off of people's search for the sacred. And it's what we're called to challenge directly, just like Jesus did in the first century. Let me ask you then a question about a term used a lot that feels connected to this to me, which is the rage economy. What is to you the rage economy? I just mentioned the billionaires who own the algorithms and the news networks, they have created for-profit platforms with these predatory algorithms that divide us on an hourly, daily basis, dividing us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, and they elevate the most extreme voices very strategically to provoke our outrage, to provoke our anger, because that leads to more clicks, which leads to more money for them.

Because anger sells, hate cells, fear cells, these billionaires and their platforms are engineering our emotions so they can profit off of our pain. They are selling us conflict, and they're calling it connection. It's almost like feeding someone empty calories. And I think it's left people starving for actual community, for real relationship. Well, the thing you had said a minute ago about the money changers that made me want to jump to this question of the rage economy is, is it is actually quite intimate and I think sacred would be going probably too far but to go to a place searching for connection.

To go to a place searching to be understood, which I think at its core is what social media was originally offering us. Correct. To go there and say, this is where your family is, is where your friends are, this is where you can find people like you.

and for many of us it was that for a time and it is not that now. I thought it was amazing in the FTC versus Meta case it came out for Meta that on Instagram now only 7% of the time people spend on Instagram 7% is spent on content offered by friends and family. And I notice this I turn on Instagram

and it's much better at hooking my attention than it used to be because the algorithm is better at finding things it might grab my emotions and my friends and family are. But I came looking for connection and all of a sudden I'm pissed, I'm confused, I'm being fed content about psychedelics from the 1970s. It's not all that it's bad, but it is a perversion or a instrumentalization to profit off of what was a very intimate impulse to say nothing of, to profit off of, to profit off of my attention, which is my most intimate faculty.

Right. Well, and the business model depends on us leaving behind our real human relationships. The biggest competitor to these platforms to meta is actually not TikTok. It's not X. It's not Snapchat. It is real human relationship. And that should be terrifying. We have a whole economy now built on keeping us in our rooms, on our thwarting.

for as many hours in the day as possible. And so their competitors are church and neighborhoods and pubs. It is the actual, messy, complicated, beautiful human relationships that we require to live. And I think it's something we don't talk about enough. We're seeing the effects of it every day in our own lives and the lives of people we love. But I don't think we recognize how this is destroying us from the inside out. What should we do about billioners? You talk a lot about how they're the source of the problem.

What should we do about them? Should billionaires exist to use the question that goes around Twitter? I've been accused of demonizing billionaires, and I want to be really clear that that's not what I'm doing. In fact, I am trying to humanize billionaires because I think the accumulation of more wealth than you could spend in 100 lifetimes, Elon Musk is about to become the world's first trillionaire, is not just bad for the world.

It's not just bad for our neighbor. It's not just bad for Texans. It's also bad for those billionaires. And I actually think the path that I'm laying out, which is going to include higher taxes on billionaires, depending on how much money you make, it may mean you're not going to be a billionaire anymore. But I think a more just economy where we grow together,

kind of like the economy we had in the middle of the 20th century, I think is actually good for all of us. Should there be billionaires? I mean, you can imagine a structure of taxation that just says, Nobody needs to personally control more than a billion dollars. At the point that you have that, the taxation becomes fundamentally redistributive. Over that, you're getting taxed it. 95%, you're getting taxed it.

And it's complicated, right? Because you've assets and incomes. I get all that, right? I don't need the, we can talk tax policy another time. And I'm not proposing. People in my email inbox. I'm not talking to you here. And I'm not proposing a maximum income.

But I'm asking if you should. No, I'm not. But what I do think is if you have tax rates on the richest people in the country like we had in the 1950s and the 1960s, a lot of people are no longer going to be billionaires. And that is just going to be the result of a more a fairer economy. So if that's the result, so be it. But I'm not trying to put a ceiling on success. I'm a big believer in success. I want to be successful.

I want my family to be successful. I want my neighborhood to be successful. So I'm not trying to demonize that kind of success. You keep saying, though, that you're not trying to demonize billionaires. In fact, what you're doing is trying to humanize and be good for them. I think it would be good for them. Say more what you mean, because what I keep hearing you say in your ads and in your speeches is that it's the billionaires versus the rest of us. Yes, I believe that.

And so walk me through the distinction between not demonizing them, but also seeing them as the fundamental class enemy. Well, because billionaires, it's a chosen identity, unlike a lot of identity. If I said the problem was Christians or Jews or people of color or gay people, that's a problem. But if I'm pointing out an identity that someone actively chooses and very much could not be, to me that is a fundamental distinction. And again, I think the result of the vision that I'm articulating is going to be good for those billionaires or maybe former billionaires. What does it mean to be a good billionaire? Franklin Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy, we're trust fund babies.

They were some of the wealthiest people in the country. And they used their wealth and their power to help other people, particularly working people, people that struggle to get by. And not just through philanthropy and through charity, but through changes in the structure of the economy itself. What should we do about the rage economy? What should we do about kids spending, you know, two to five hours a day, oftentimes on TikTok? You know, I was the co-author of a bill that passed in Texas that banned cell phones in our public schools, particularly the smartphones. I'm also interested in some of the federal ideas about the liability of these companies and a regulatory framework. I'm interested in all that.

I'm also interested in how you allow for economic solutions, how you encourage the development of more humane platforms that I think could succeed. I really do. I think we're going to look back at 100 years. and we're going to see these as kind of the rudimentary first versions of these platforms, kind of like we see child labor and things like that. And we're like, you know, so glad we progressed beyond that. These feel so much better. But here's what I would just say, those political solutions, those economic solutions,

we should talk about and we should pursue them vigorously. But at the core, this is a spiritual problem. It really is. I mentioned earlier that the biggest competitor for these platforms is human relationships. you now have a closed system almost where the platforms like Instagram make you feel insecure, make you feel lonely, make you feel isolated,

and then AI provides you the therapy to treat that loneliness and that isolation. Or the simulacrum of friends. Yep. Of lovers, of companions of different kinds. I mean, when I found it a little chilling when Mark Zuckerberg was on Dworkosch Patel's podcast and he said,

look, most people have three friends, they want something like 15, but who's got the time? I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. And suggest as many people do, that AI will fill that gap. And I think meta in particular sees, given what their business is,

you can create these AI companions of different kinds, right? If, you know, the problem with your friends and families are not good enough at creating content you want to see. So what about if we create AI friends and family who are very good at creating content you want to see? Exactly. We don't know.

We do not know what it will mean. how it will change people to have these kinds of relationships with AI to say nothing of changing children who don't know anything but a world where you have relationships with AI's. And honestly, of every part of this, I think this is the part that maybe scares me the most,

altering our intuitions and expectations for human contact, having people being raised in an economy that is dehumanized, and then also a social world, a digital social world that is dehumanized, where you send in your job application, you're interviewed by an AI, which is happening to people now,

where you come at the end of the day and you want to tell somebody about your bad day at school and you tell an AI. I mean, I don't think we understand what that will do to people. I'm not even saying it will be bad, just it's a hell of an experiment to run on human beings. Well, and the question you're circling, that we're all circling, is what does it mean to be a human being?

Yes. And that is not a question I'm going to be able to answer in a bill in the US Senate. Well, podcast. Well, podcast. Yes, that's where all the answers are. Fundamentally, I feel like every podcast is asking that question. I mean, go deep enough.

I actually, I, in all seriousness, love podcasts because of that. It is, sometimes we can say that these technologies, these platforms are all terrible, all toxic. But podcasts, I think, are one of the beautiful things that have come out of it. You know, also, as much as you, if you spend time on TikTok, how it's abusing your attention and addicting you, it's also an opportunity to see just how hilarious and creative and beautiful human beings are all over the world. So I don't mean to say that this technology can't create something beautiful, too. I think we just have to understand the harm it is inflicting.

But I want to stay on where you just went, which is I have noticed that the best tech criticism, much of it, comes from religious figures and communities. And one reason I think is because modern liberalism, neoliberalism, you might call it, I think it is a lot of trouble with moral judgment. It is built on the interest of the consumer. And if you're an adult and you're making a decision that's not hurting anybody else, who are we to tell you, you're doing something wrong? And I think it is a truck that the algorithmic media giants have driven their products through. And I think in religious communities, you still have more of a framework for talking about human flourishing that does not require like a market justification, that does not need to prove that the

that it'll reduce your income in 10 years to say, this is not a good way for human beings to live. So when you say the fundamental question of AI is, what does it mean to be a human being? I think that's right. So I am curious what your intuitions about this are, somebody running for a position of power where you would have a hand on levers

the rest of us don't. Such a good question. So, yeah, I agree with you. Economic answers aren't going to get us there, but how something political answers are going to get us there? Because the question is not, should the state intervene to stop you from doing something? That's a whole different question.

I think our conservative friends, if they were sitting here, would remind us about the bloody history of governments trying to perfect the individual or trying to enforce moral. I'd say it's our liberal friends who would remind us of that, but fair point. Well, yeah. So my point is just in the question how we're framing it,

economy and government, there's a third dimension to our lives. It's weakened. it's atrophied over recent years, but we used to have robust communities where we wrestled with these spiritual questions. Churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, meditation clubs, whatever you're a part of,

a community to deepen the spiritual dimension of our lives. And that is what we have to rebuild, especially as we enter this new era where figuring out what it means to be human, maintaining real human relationships outside of work and outside of politics is going to be necessary if we're going to survive this. And you mentioned what can I do as a U.S. Senate candidate. I actually don't think that's the role. What can I do in my role as a seminarian as someone who's studying to become a minister one day, which is a goal of mine, that hat that I wear,

which is related to the politician hat, to me, that's where the solutions are going to come from. I don't want to take away from the importance of that, but that's not going to come fast enough. It's not. If your answer to what are we going to do for kids in AI is we need to rebuild civic and institutional and religious life, I mean, it's hitting faster than that. I mean, that would be good,

but my question is more along the lines of, does believing that human beings should be formed by other human beings, which is something I believe, mean we should do something more like Australia, which just implemented its ban on social media for kids under 16, just flat band. Like I said, I'm all for those.

In fact, I've already worked on those policies. If we pass that, I'm all for it. All I'm telling you is that the economic and political solutions are not sufficient. I think one of the paradoxes of you is that you have such a searing and, I think,

morally righteous critique of this algorithmic rage economy and you're an absolute victor of it. I'm a money changer. I'm not calling you a money changer. But you know, you're on

Rogan, you're because you are very good at these viral videos and when I was going through your clips a lot of them do have the structure of conservative idea or conservative person stands up and James Tolariko delivers a stirring

sermon about why what they're doing is un-Christian or immoral. And, you know, I think a lot of the liberals clicking the heart on that are feeling self-righteous and, you know, maybe right, but maybe smug. Yeah. How do you think about your participation in this world?

Sometimes I think my team and I feel like Luke Skywalker infiltrating the Death Star to destroy it and sorry to keep bringing everything back to Scripture. I think it's because we started with a conversation about faith. But Jesus tells his disciples something really weird. He says to have the heart of a dove and the mind of a serpent. Dr. King would later reinterpret this as for the members of his movement as tough minds, tender hearts. The idea is that if you're going to change the world, if you're going to challenge the powers that be,

you've got to be smart and strategic to do it. And it's not something we should be ashamed of. And my team, I think I have some of them, the brightest young minds. Texas politics on our team, which is a real joy and a privilege. And I think we have figured out how to use these platforms against the platforms themselves. And so, yes, we are building things that can reach as many people as possible. Because if no one hears a message, it doesn't really matter. And we are learning what these algorithms like, what these platforms promote. And we're or using that against them.

What is it that you would say you figured out? If you're giving a presentation to other Democrats who are maybe less attentionally skilled or have come from another generation, maybe they're not TikTok native in the way you might be, what have you learned about attention? How would you describe the fundamental equation of attention at the heart of your efforts?

Yeah. I would say my two simple rules for political connection, because that's what we're really talking about is how do you connect with people and politics is connection all the way down. The way that I think about political connections, the two rules I have are be yourself and tell the truth. I think if you do those two things,

you can stand out and get attention. I think especially young people, my fellow millennials, but also Gen Z, they're looking for moral authenticity in this moment. And that's going to look different, right? For me, given who I am and how I was raised in my life, faith is at the center. And I'm honest about that, even when it bothers people in my own party, which it does a lot. I can't tell you how many emails or messages I get with people telling me to stop all the religious talk because it makes them uncomfortable.

And I get that. And I try to be as sensitive as I can be to the religious trauma in this country. And I understand where people are coming from when they feel that way. But it is who I am. I can't be anybody else. And so I think showing up as the person you are and then saying something real, saying something honest about the world,

that is refreshing to people in this moment. And so I think when I look at all the videos that get all these views and all this engagement, the videos that do that the most are when I'm being myself and saying something true. I think you're sanding the edges off of this. Okay. Tell me, yeah.

I love to hear. It's also about the things that work online generate an immediate emotional reaction in the audience. These online quick videos you're seeing on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube shorts, there's not that much time for plot. You can't sort of weave in slowly. It is about creating an instant sensation. And I think that there is a dimension often of conflict. Like my implicit equation, uh, equation of attention is curiosity plus conflict equals attention. People have to be curious about what you're talking about. And there has to be the energy that only in politics, some amount of conflict, like one side versus the other side, unleashes. It doesn't always have to be Republican and Democrat.

It can be billioners versus the rest of us. It can be many kinds of cutting a line. But I think usually there is a dimension of somebody versus something. I don't know if you and are saying different things, though, because isn't that telling the truth? isn't when you pretend like there is a conflict. Some forms of truth work better than others, is maybe what I'm saying. I guess my point is if you, I've actually seen some of our videos about policy

and some of our explainer videos do the best. I think there is a hunger to understand what's happening. But if you pretend that that policy is being created or needs to exist in the world without the conflict that is the context, then you're not being honest with people. You're not shooting straight.

And you mentioned earlier, people want to be moved. don't we want politics that moves people? And in fact, I see the major problem in, at least in my party, is politics that doesn't move anyone or moves them in unhealthy directions because you can move people toward anger or you can move people toward hope. We have had a politics that moves people toward anger and toward fear and toward division and hate. We've had that for 10 years on both sides of the aisle. I think the reason that I'm getting traction on these platforms, the reason I'm standing out, is because I'm moving us toward hope. Tell me the difference there on the Democratic

side. I think that people would sort of expect what you'd say about the Republican side. What does the Democratic politics that moves people, in your view, unproductively towards anger look like? What has that been when you say it's existed? And what is the version that moves people towards hope? What is that distinction you're drawing? Well, I think we have to recognize. as the asymmetry between the two sides of our political discourse. And I don't mean parties, but I mean people who are a little more conservative, they want to hold on to what we have, or maybe backwards, regressive is a better term for that, or those who are a little more progressive and they want to move us forward. Those are two different jobs. Trying to get us to move backwards

requires certain appeals. Getting us to move forward requires certain appeals. The mistake too many Democrats have made is adopting the tactics that work for the regressive side of our discourse, the Trumpian side of our conversation. And that's things like fear and hate and anger. That's what gets someone to look backwards and think, we got to go back to what was. But to move someone forward, you've got to inspire, you've got to excite, and you've got to cultivate a little bit of hope, because that's the only thing that'll get you. to move forward. One

division, it sounds to me like you're tracking in the Democratic conversation right now is how much is democratic politics about Donald Trump,

about the opposition to Donald Trump and to his administration. There's a lot of, I think much of it merited among Democrats, anger, fear.

I'm not going to go so far as to say hate, but I've certainly heard some hate in my conversations with people. But also, the Trump administration is in power, and they are doing things as we've discussed already that are cruel or outrageous or corrupt. And something that I hear Democrats debating a lot among themselves

is how much democratic politics be about Donald Trump and the opposition to him, or how much it should be about an alternative vision, both because, you know, there can be a tension between allowing Donald Trump to set the terms of everything and describing something different, and because some of the voters, Democrats who need to win, certainly if you're a Senate, candidate in Texas are voters who do not hate Donald Trump, are voters who voted for Donald Trump, voted for Greg Abbott, you know, in his busing of migrants all across the country. How do you think about that question? And I should say, some of those Trump voters are in my family. And in mind. Many of them are my constituents. I first got elected to the legislature when I was

28 years old, had never run for office before. I was a former teacher. And I was running in a district that had voted for Donald Trump two years before I ran. And at the same time that I won, Greg Abbott won my district in 2018. So there were a large chunk of voters, in fact, the voters who made the difference in the election who voted for Greg Abbott for governor and me for state representative. And being comfortable with that contradiction, I mean, that's the messy world of politics and human decision-making. And if we are going to defeat Trumpism, the culture that gives rise to someone like Donald Trump, it's going to require putting forward a new vision of what a different kind of politics would look like. What is the antithesis of Trumpism? What does that

politics look like? What does the country look like with that kind of politics? What does it look like? I think that people are really tired of being paid. against their neighbors. They're tired of being told to hate their neighbors. It's been 10 years of this Trumpian politics, again, sometimes on both sides of the aisle. And I think people are ready for a politics of love, a love not just for the state of Texas or for this country, but a love for our neighbors, a radical love, especially for our neighbors who are the most different from us. and that kind of politics, I think, could transform this country. If we actually treated all of our neighbors as bearers of the image of the divine,

how would our discourse look, how would our public policies look? To me, that is the primary question that we should all be asking. And I don't know, because again, this kind of politics is not what we've had, but I do think people are are searching for it. Have you ever seen a politics of love in the real world? Oh, of course. First, I think we should define what we mean by love, because I'm not talking about a sentimental feeling.

I believe love is a force as real as gravity, the force that drew elements together in the Big Bang, the force that drew life from those primordial oceans, the love that drew you and I to this exact moment in this exact conversation. You can call that the logos, you can call it the Christ mystery, you can call it God. In fact, our scriptures say that God is love. And love to me is the most powerful thing in the universe.

It is not weak. It is not neutral. It is not passive. It doesn't paper over disagreement. It sometimes provokes conflict in order to heal conflict. I mean, I think back through American history, I think about labor organizers. I think about civil rights marchers. I think about farm workers.

You know, I think about the politics that made the New Deal possible. Not saying there's not criticism on policy grounds, but the coalition that came together during the New Deal era, during the Great Society era, the coalition that came together to pass the Affordable Care Act, we can glimpse the politics of love there because that was about building a big enough coalition to transform the country.

it included people who didn't agree on everything, but it was people who agreed on some of the big things. And I don't mean to look at the history with rose-cutter glasses. There's problems in all these things, but I'm talking about a general thrust, a general direction of what a politics of union would look like over and above a politics of division. So let me try to pick at what I think is a weak spot of this.

Sure. which is that for Democrats, four liberals, the politics of love that includes the person without health insurance, the immigrant family, the gay or lesbian or trans teen, is actually not usually in this era a stretch. That's actually an intuitive politics for them.

But what Trump has very effectively weaponized is the belief many Americans have that the only Americans Democrats don't love are Americans like them. Americans who have views that are different than those that are usually voiced on this show. Americans with a Christianity

much more traditional than yours who are uncomfortable with what our society is or has become or might one day become, what is your politics of love for them, not for the people Democrats easily align with, but actually of the people they now understand as maybe not their neighbor, as maybe their enemy,

the people who, you know, when you see these polls about how Democrats are more likely to cut off a family member for political views than Republicans are, those people. It's not the gospel unless it includes love for our enemies. And again, as I said earlier,

it's the hardest love to fulfill in our lives. but it is absolutely necessary if we're going to save this American experiment, if we're going to save the experiment in self-governance all over the world is can we have a love for those we disagree with? And I've been able to cultivate that in my life, again, not perfectly.

I oftentimes will feel anger or start to feel hate for some of my colleagues in the Texas legislature. But at my best, I'm able to maintain a body bond of love with them, even as we're fighting, even as we're disagreeing, even as we're debating, even as I'm standing up to some of their most extreme policy proposals, I still see them as my siblings as an expression of the same love. And that to me is such a fundamental difference

from the politics that we have now. You are not the first person running for office to sit in front of me and tell me about a politics of love. Good. But the question I always ask, and the question many people like that run aground on is what does that actually demand of you? Because it can just be an inspiring way to say whatever other politicians already is doing also. So where does it push you into something different? I'll just tell you one quick story. My colleague James Frank represents Wichita Falls in North Texas. It's a Freedom Caucus member, the most conservative members of the House. James and I started a stupid friendship based on that we share the same first name.

And, you know, we joked about it and talked about how we were the James Caucus, and he was chair, I was vice chair, you know, whatever. But then that led to us having some more real conversations. And we started to figure out that he and I are both really dissatisfied with this two-party system. We are both frustrated by how hard it is to challenge orthodoxies in your own party and the pressure to conform within a political party. And so I convinced James to co-author my bill, a Bernie Sanders idea, actually, in the Texas legislature, to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada into Texas. James risked a lot to work on that bill. We got it passed to the House to the Senate and signed by the governor. It is now law.

We are working on our application as a state to the FDA to start importing those cheaper prescription drugs. So that's an example of how love changed someone else. But then James had a bill that would have allowed homeschool kids to participate in something called UIL, which in Texas is basically our sports league, our extracurriculars, the arts, and you know how serious Texans take our high school football Friday night lights. Every Democrat was opposed to it, and I was opposed to it, because I'm like, public education is not a buffet table. You can't come in and take the sports or take the music, the band, and leave behind everything else and not participate in the community. James sat down with me because we had a relationship. We had trust. We had love for one another.

And he said, when we talk about immigration, you always say we shouldn't punish children for the decisions their parents make. And suddenly it dawned on me that I was morally inconsistent here, that for these homeschool kids, this may be the only opportunity they have to interact with kids of their own age and to participate in a community like that. So I ended up crossing party lines. I got a lot of heat from the education groups and my colleagues. I voted for that bill at past. I then got to meet some of the kids who participated in the program. It was life-changing for them. And we can talk about countless examples of that

where not only has a Republican done something risky, but I've done something risky in return because we're both out on that ledge of love. I think something that your success and the way what you're saying, through suggest is that people are actually hungry for more moral leadership, including from political leaders, this sense that our politics became managerial and technocratic and sanitized. And that is, to use this word in another sense, it has been demoralizing to people.

I think this question of what is the purpose of all this is salient to politics as well. And, you know, one thing I think that has been true is that, you know, we drafted in our society for a long time off of the fact that we had so many other healthy institutions and a more communal sense of who we were that infused our politics with purpose without anybody having to necessarily reach that heart. That's not to take away from the incredible moral fights it had to be waged. But when I go back and I read old political tracks, how close. the language of morality and spirituality and civic life is to people on all sides of debates is really noticeable. We don't talk like that anymore. We're trying to prove everything on a chart. And I love a good chart. But it is a difference. Yeah. We were talking earlier about politics doesn't move people anymore. I mean, you read common sense by Thomas Payne. You read Lincoln speeches. You listen to Phenie Lou Hamer. You read Dr. King. Yeah. I mean, these were they infuse their politics with a moral foundation, oftentimes explicitly rooted in faith.

And that changes the game because your politics should grow out of that morality. There's a sequence here. And I feel like what we're suffering from now, people start with their politics and then try to figure out the morality on top of that when it should be reversed. Who are we as human beings? Where do we come from? why are we here, how should we live? The politics should go out of that. And so yes, I mean, that's why I'm in politics. I really do feel like this is a way that I can love my neighbor at scale

through good public policy, reducing the cost of prescription drugs, reducing the cost of child care, the cost of housing, all the things I've worked on in the legislature. It was to love my neighbor, make their lives easier and better, help them become who they're supposed to be, to give the gift that they're supposed to give. I think if we can infuse our politics, with more of this spirituality, I think we could treat politics like a sacrament. We could have an incarnational politics. Because, like I said,

what does that mean? If you take seriously, and again, you don't have to be a Christian, you don't even have to be part of an organized religion. I do think that everyone is religious. That's a bold, that's a bold claim. That's my hot take here. What do you mean by that?

I think we all put our trust in something. sometimes it's you were talking earlier about whether Donald Trump was religious and I I think I disagreed with you because Donald Trump does put his trust in money and in power and in status and a lot of us do I said he wasn't pious it he doesn't pretend his well he's pious to that religion he's very faithful to it I mean yeah you could look at the Oval Office as a quite a shrine it is I mean you're kind of joking but I'm not joking I mean that's exactly right so my point is We all put our faith in something. I choose to put my faith in love, which sometimes the evidence suggests is not going to work.

Sometimes love is defeated. Sometimes love experiences setbacks. But the trust is that it will one day win. And that's what my tradition is all about. But my point is, even if you're not formally religious, if you do believe that each person is sacred, that each person is holy, that each person bears the divine image, that should fundamentally change how we engage in politics, how we treat our neighbors, and how we treat our enemies. To me, an incarnational politics would take seriously that idea that every person is God. The biggest concern I hear about you in Texas is that you're

sort of a liberal's idea of what a Christian politician should be. Yeah, okay. In the primary, You had an opponent in Terry Verts. He's since dropped out. But he ran an attack ad about you, and I want to play it here. Okay. Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six. God is non-binary.

I find this to be a deeply offensive bill. James Telerico is talking about the bill that would bend biological men from playing at women's sports. Remember this ad? Biological men compete against our girls in their sports. Kamala is for they dim The same ads will be played by Ken Paxton The result will be U.S. Senator Ken Paxton. James Teller Rico owes it to us

To tell us how he's going to answer these attack ads So how are you going to answer those attack ads? Man, the music was... Yeah, your voice sounds disordered to me there a little bit It didn't quite sound like you. But those are clips of things you said And the idea is to say you are out of step You can talk about love all you want.

Sure. But the idea is to say you're out of step with Texans, and they are not going to feel loved by someone they feel doesn't agree with them. You know, I think most Texans have seen the extremism in the Texas legislature. Instead of allowing local sports officials and school district officials to make decisions about if trans athletes can play in a certain sport, if it maintains fairness and safety, which I think is what we all want, some common sense rules about when it's appropriate, when it's not, the Republican legislature passed a bill that would ban it in every instance across,

every age group, even T-ball, right, before kids even hit puberty. Because their goal was not to solve a problem. Their goal was to score political points off the backs of a vulnerable community, which is a classic tactic in the politics of division. I'm all here. I'm here to have that conversation about how do we maintain safety and fairness in sports when it comes to trans athletes. And there are going to be rules where sometimes it's not allowed. That's actually how you solve a public policy problem with love for trans folks, but also for our athletes who need a fair shot at competition. So what I was doing was speaking out against that kind of extremism because it wasn't actually trying to solve a problem. But anyway, but outside of that issue, you know, I think my track record

in Texas is pretty clear. I won a district that no one thought was winnable. I have done this before, or building a coalition that includes new voters and includes voters from the other side of the aisle, which is the only way to win in Texas is doing both of those things. You're also a politician in a border state. Yeah. And I think immigration and particularly illegal immigration

presents one of the hardest tests of how to match these values to a nation's needs. I don't think there's anything clearer in either the Old Testament or the Due Testament. than the love and generosity you were supposed to have for the stranger, for the migrant. I often think that the virtue that you see the most in the Old Testament that we barely ever talk about now is hospitality. Yeah.

The amount of, well, we welcomed him into the tent and we washed his feet. And I think there's a way in which you could, you know, read the ideals of many religions to say, you know, we should not have borders. These are all our neighbors. These are all, there is no stranger. and of course nations don't work that way. There's been, you know, over the last four or five years, certainly the Biden era, a tremendous amount of in migration,

and much of it illegal or much of it, people coming and claiming asylum in huge numbers. This led to a tremendous amount of anger. And it's led now to a tremendous amount of cruelty. So how do you balance the different forces, moral imperatives, national and state needs, the things you hear from your neighbors in your politics. Well, I'm very proud to be from a border state.

I'm an eighth generation Texan, so my family has been in our state since it was Mexico. My family's from South Texas. My mom grew up in Laredo right there on the U.S.-Mexico border. She got her braces in Mexico because it was cheaper, and that's in border communities, cross them back and forth on a daily basis. It's not unusual.

So we just understand this intimately in Texas. I think both parties have failed us on this issue, and we need to be very honest about that. The Biden administration's failures on our southern border, I remember talking to my border colleagues telling me about the utter chaos in their communities because of some of those policies. That is what opened the door to the extremism we're currently seeing on this issue. From the other side, masked men in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off our streets, tearing parents from their children, waiting in school pickup. lines lurking in hospital waiting rooms. And so you said this was a hard issue. Here's my other

hot take. I actually don't think this is that hard because I think most Texans are in the same place here. They are pro-immigrant and they are pro-public safety, both righteous, moral positions to hold and both consistent with our traditions. So here's the simple analogy that I've used. I think our southern borders should be like our front porch. There should be a giant welcome mat out front and a lock on the door. Because I'm hospitable. Texas is the friendly state. If you look up our state motto, it's friendship.

The word Texas comes from a Native American word for friend. And that's what makes Texas such a remarkable place. We're this big mashup of all these different cultures and people and ideas. It's made us one of the most exciting and innovative states in the country. and scripture tells us to welcome the stranger because we were once strangers. You wouldn't be having a guy with the last name, Tala Rico, on your show, if this wasn't a nation of immigrants. Everyone has that in their story, in their family. And we people understand that immigrants who are coming here to build a better life, to contribute to our economy, to make us richer and stronger, we want them here.

We want to make it easier for them to come here. But anyone who means to do us harm needs to be kept out. anyone who does us harm needs to be deported immediately. Public safety is the most important thing a government does. The most important thing the government does. I don't think most people would find that to be enough, though. I mean, to say that, you know, we should be welcoming of immigrants, you know, except when there was a threat to public safety,

I think that for most people would not be enough. That isn't a limiting principle that keeps you from feeling, you know, certainly from what I'm told from people. And I come from myself a border state. you know, very, can be very overwhelmed. Well, I'm against chaos. And I think what most Texans are upset about in our immigration system is the chaos they see, particularly on our southern border.

I think most people around the world like where they live, as much as I love America. A lot of people love their homes. But if someone wants to come and fill one of the eight million jobs that needs to be filled, if they want to do the work that none of us want to do, I heard from an avocado farmer in California who said in 20 years of business, never had an American citizen apply to work there, not one. So if you want to come and pick our fruit, if you want to pack our meat, if you want to pave our highways and build our buildings, then we need your help because we are a growing country and we have a growing economy and immigrants are the fuel that keeps that fire burning.

But what people are seeing and what people are upset about is the fact that we have no idea who some of these people streaming in over the border are and what they mean to do. And I just think most Americans can't wrap their head around. Why is it that we can't have an orderly process that keeps everybody safe, both Native-born Americans and migrants, hiring more immigration judges, relieving the visa backlog, reforming our asylum system?

All of these things are ways that we could create a system that welcomes the stranger and keeps us all safe at the same time. For some reason, Americans and Texans, they look at one party, our party, as pro-immigrant and anti-security. Then they throw us out. They get Donald Trump and his party. It is pro-security anti-immigrant. And they hate that, too. So most people want us to hold both of these values at the same time.

And I think it's actually really possible. Texans threw Democrats out at this point a fair amount of time ago. I don't know exactly how many years it's been. 30. So there's been a statewide Democrat in Texas. Yes, I believe it's 30. What is it that, to you, so many Texans don't like about Democrats? And what does the Democratic Party, the national party, not an individual candidate in Texas?

What would the National Party have to do to be more appealing to Texans or to make Texans who have given up on it or felt rejected by it feel seen? Not an expert on the National Democratic Party, but I will say just from my observations being in a red state, someone who flipped to Trump district and was able to build this kind of coalition. Our national party is pretty condescending to people. Here's an example. You always hear this, especially if you, you know, are out on the coasts. You know, why do all these people vote against their material interests? You've heard that before, I'm sure. Such a condescending thing to say to somebody. It's actually like they don't know how to make decisions for their own lives, or they don't know what they need. People have many interests outside of material interests. There are some

very wealthy Democrats who vote against their material interests on a regular basis. People have cultural interests. They have personal interests. They have material. They have spiritual interests. And the Democratic Party culturally, in many ways, has become hostile to some of these cultural values in red states, in red communities. Faith may be being foremost among them. again, I don't agree with everyone who shares my faith. I don't agree with every member of the body of Christ, but I am part of that body, and we share something deeper than partisanship.

We share something deeper than public policy. We share a commitment, a witness, a practice, a tradition, and that is an opportunity for connection. People aren't going to vote for me because of my faith. I don't think they should vote for me because of my faith. But hopefully the faith we share can open a door. Then we can have conversations about other things. And I don't want people to overthink this.

You don't have to be a political scientist. Think about how you build relationships in your own life. That's what you're going to do in politics. The relationship between a candidate and a voter or a voter and a voter is just like any other relationship. It requires honesty. It requires respect. It requires humility.

It requires listening. and sometimes it requires sacrifice. It sometimes requires that you buck the orthodoxy in your party or buck the position in your party to do what you think is right based on the arguments that the person is made. So I would just advocate for our party to think about how to actually build real relationships at scale with people who aren't with us yet. Not only will that, I think, lead to winning,

which we have a moral imperative to win in a democracy because you can't, if you don't win, you don't get power and if you don't get power, you can't make people's lives better. And I say that as a party. But I also think it will lead to a more fruitful, productive, beautiful kind of politics that this country deserves.

And I've seen it work at a small scale in the district that I won, in the House in Texas, but I also think it could work at scale statewide and maybe even nationwide. I think it's a nice place to end. So always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

So I chose a fiction book, a political book, and a religious book, just to make sure we cover all our bases. For the fiction book, my favorite book is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, maybe the most famous and beloved Texas classic. Texas has gotten a bad rap recently around the world for the extremism and corruption coming out of our government. But if you want to see what's beautiful about our state, that spirit of friendship that I mentioned earlier, read Lonesome Dove. It captures the spirit of Texas better than a lot of other works of art.

And it's such a great book. You'll have a blast reading it. We won't be able to put it down. My second book is my religious book. And it also has a Texas connection. It is Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. We mentioned Dr. King on this show. Howard Thurman was his spiritual mentor, the theologian who started to chart that course long before Dr. King. And he wrote this book from a series of lectures in Austin, Texas, at Houston-Tillison University, historically black college in Austin. And it's a beautiful book, it's not very long, but it really gets to the heart of who Jesus is, what he means in a political context, and what Christian nonviolence looks like in the

world. And I think it's so instructive, even if we're not, you know, we're not necessarily fighting Jim Crow. We're not in his context. But I think all of us can learn something from the power and the effectiveness of that nonviolence rooted in a deep morality. And then the last book is the political book, and it's The Upswing by Robert Putnam and his co-author, I think her name is Shailen Romney Garrett. And the book is all about how throughout the 20th century, we as a country, as a culture, moved from individualism in the Gilded Age toward communitarianism to working together to do big things as a community. And then how we fell back into individualism, which I think today is still the reigning culture in this country, certainly a civic culture. And it tracks it.

it starts to explore answers for how we made that movement and puts together some ideas for how to get back to community. And I think it says a lot about the moment we're in. So I'd highly recommend all three of those books. James Telerico, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. This episode of Isra Clancho is produced by Marie Cassione. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker.

Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Amund Zoda. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordock, Kristen Lynn, Emmett Kelbeck, Michelle Harris, and Jan Kobel.

Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Christina Samaluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.