Cancun, Soy Milk, and the Masculinity Caucus

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

When a political party deploys its senator, its deputy chief of staff, its most-watched cable host, and its president against a single Democratic candidate in a Senate race, the reasonable inference is that the candidate is dangerous to them. When all four of those attacks center on whether the candidate is sufficiently masculine — and when none of them are factually accurate — the reasonable inference is that the party has run out of anything else.

James Talarico is a 37-year-old Democratic state legislator running against Ken Paxton for the Texas Senate seat. Polls show him leading Paxton in a state Donald Trump carried by nearly 14 points in 2024. That number is the context for everything that followed on Fox News this week.

Ted Cruz went on Hannity Monday night and said that if you were making a list of a thousand adjectives to describe Talarico, "masculine would not be one of them." He added that "if a stiff breeze came by, it would blow him over like a feather." Cruz also attacked what he called Talarico's "vegan, no meat campaign." Talarico is not a vegan. He noted last month that he had been eating barbecue "since before Ken Paxton's first indictment" — a reference to Paxton's 2015 felony securities fraud charges. Cruz, apparently, had not done the basic research before going on national television to mock a man for dietary choices he doesn't have.

The internet's response to Cruz's masculinity lecture was swift and required only one word: Cancun. This is the senator who, during a February 2021 winter storm that left hundreds of Texans dead and millions without power, flew his family to a Mexican resort and blamed his daughters for the idea when he was caught. The self-awareness gap between the attack and the attacker was large enough to fly a 747 through.

But Cruz was the restrained version of this. Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, went further. Describing Talarico on Fox News, Miller said he was "clearly transitioning into a female" and that "when Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn't come out. Soy milk comes out." This is a senior official of the executive branch of the United States government, speaking on a national news program, about a state legislator who is leading in the polls. The soy milk line is not political commentary. It is the kind of thing a person says when they have nothing substantive to offer and have concluded that the audience won't notice.

Then there is Jesse Watters, who called Talarico a "gay vegan" — which is neither an insult nor accurate on either count — and asked on air "did you know that he looks prepubescent?" before adding that Talarico "looks like the guy that leaves an apple on the teacher's desk" and noting that he is "37 and not married." Watters built his career under Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly — men whose combined sexual harassment settlements ran to tens of millions of dollars — and has been publicly accused by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of sexualizing and harassing her on his own program. That this man is the chosen venue for a masculinity lecture about someone else requires no editorial comment. The facts are sufficient.

Trump called Talarico a vegan who "takes hits at Jesus Christ." The vegan claim is false. The Jesus claim comes from a man who weeks earlier posted an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick and told a crowd "they call me king now" on Palm Sunday. He endorsed Paxton — a man under federal indictment for securities fraud and bribery, credibly accused of corruption by eight of his own senior staff, and acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial his own allies controlled.

What is most revealing is not the content of the attacks but the pattern — and the venue. Senior members of the federal government keep making the trip to Fox News to humiliate a state legislator on a cable entertainment program. The White House podium, the Senate floor, and the Justice Department are available to them. They choose Jesse Watters. That choice is pathetic in the precise sense of the word — not enraging, not threatening, but sad. It is the behavior of people who have confused the performance of power with the thing itself.

The venue deserves a moment of attention. Fox News paid $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 after its own internal communications revealed that anchors and executives privately knew the 2020 election fraud claims were false while continuing to broadcast them. The network's own text messages showed its biggest stars expressing private contempt for claims they were publicly amplifying. No apology was issued. No retraction was made. The audience was never told. This is the platform that senior officials of the executive branch of the United States government choose, repeatedly, to deliver attacks on a Democratic candidate — attacks that are themselves factually false. Talarico is not a vegan. Soy milk does not flow in his veins. The network that paid three quarters of a billion dollars for broadcasting lies is now the preferred venue for telling more of them.

The masculinity caucus has a Talarico problem. The problem is not that he isn't masculine enough. The problem is that he's winning.

Sources: HuffPost on Cruz-Talarico masculinity exchange, June 9, 2026; Daily Kos on Republican Talarico attack coordination, June 10, 2026; Mediaite on Miller and Watters comments, June 2026; Daily Boulder on Cruz Cancun response, June 2026; Fox News on Vance-Watters Primetime appearance, June 9, 2026; Media Matters for America on Watters lewd and misogynistic remarks, April 2026; The Daily Beast on Fox News harassment culture and Watters, September 2024; AOL/Entertainment Weekly on AOC accusing Watters of sexual harassment, January 2026; Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network — $787.5 million settlement, April 2023.

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