Texas's Talarico Worked as 'Equitable Education' Consultant at Left-Wing Firm to Develop DEI Plans for Public Schools
Plus, Lesley Stahl says watching journos get fired is worse than reporting on child trafficking and Nazi torture dungeons
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico earned tens of thousands of dollars working as an “equitable education” consultant for a firm that develops DEI plans for public schools in the Lone Star State, the Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson and Peter Hasson report. The firm, MAYA Consulting, says its work is “rooted in our diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy.” It also supported a group working to defund the Austin Police Department.
Talarico announced he was joining MAYA in a 2019 Facebook post, writing that he would be “working with districts, nonprofits, and communities to build excellent and equitable educational opportunities.” He worked for the firm through October 2025, one month after he launched his Senate campaign, raking in over $83,000 from the DEI racket last year.
“MAYA, with Talarico's help, worked to bring critical race theory and DEI to Texas schools, particularly during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when it partnered with public school districts like Snyder Independent School District in West Texas to support ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts,’” Anderson and Hasson write. “In Austin, where Talarico lives, it promoted a series of monthly ‘RaceTalks’ organized by the local public school district’s ‘Race Equity Council’ that called on parents to ‘explore’ their ‘pushback and triggers and name systemic barriers that form as a result.’ The firm also contributed $5,000 to the left-wing nonprofit Austin Justice Coalition around the same time the coalition called to defund the Austin Police Department.”
“Talarico’s work for MAYA could undercut his attempts to distance himself from the far-left positions he took while working for the firm and serving in the Texas legislature. Talarico, for example, said in 2019 that putting police officers in schools amounts to ‘leaning into a culture of violence’ but now says he ‘opposes defunding the police.’ He also walked back a controversial comment in which he said ‘God is non-binary,’ telling CBS News that the statement was ‘cringey’ and ‘missed the mark’ before pivoting to his ‘legislative record.’” That record happens to include a 2021 bill Talarico authored requiring every large Texas school district to hire a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer.” Go figure.
Lesley Stahl, who at 84 is older than Joe Biden, has seen a lot of horrible things over the course of her 60 Minutes career, from the Carter administration to 9/11 to the demise of her former colleague Dan Rather. Apparently none of it can compare to the horror she experienced watching her fellow journalists lose their jobs for being obnoxious. “Oh God, this was awful,” Stahl told Puck when asked about the half dozen producers and personalities who were fired alongside combat veteran Scott Pelley. “This was by far the worst experience I’ve been involved in, or even witnessed.”
Really? The worst? By far? What else might Stahl have experienced that was not quite as traumatizing as corporate restructuring in a dying industry? Here are a few examples:
Stahl’s first story as a 60 Minutes correspondent was about child trafficking in Romania after the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. She visited a family that wanted to sell their four-year-old son for $500 to buy a camcorder.
The following year, Stahl interviewed survivors of Josef Mengele’s twisted human experiments at Auschwitz.
In 2020, Stahl was forced to endure interviews with the cofounders of the much-maligned Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt.
“It’s entirely plausible that Stahl was more disturbed upon learning that a handful of journalists had been fired by CBS. After all, she is a journalist,” our Andrew Stiles writes. “It's also possible that Stahl has mild to moderate dementia. Perhaps she can't remember watching parents negotiate to sell their children for color TVs.”
READ MORE: Lesley Stahl Says Journalists Getting Fired Is Worse Than Child Trafficking, Nazi Torture Dungeons
Partisan media figures from the ousted ABC News anchor Terry Moran to the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof say Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for Israel’s declining poll numbers in the United States. Their arguments ignore the fact that the survey respondents “hate America, too,” our Ira Stoll writes.
The same demographic groups driving the decline in support for Israel—young people and Democrats—are also driving the stunning decline in pride in America, which, according to Gallup, has hit a record low: "more Gen Z Democrats say they have little or no pride in being an American (32%) than say they are extremely or very proud." If you spent all your free time watching TikTok or YouTube videos from Qatar-owned Al Jazeera or Turkey-owned TRT World about how racist America is, you might hate Israel and America, too. Even the supposedly elite college students from this generation "can’t read books," according to the Atlantic. The Ivy League students are "suffering from religious illiteracy," according to a Princeton professor, Gregory Conti, writing in the Washington Post. While there are some encouraging signs of a religious revival, the long-term U.S. trend has been toward secularism, with Gallup finding those who report "no" hitting a new high in 2025. Gallup reports that more Americans identify "none" as their religion than as Catholic. In the 18-29 age group, "none" is 36 percent, and Protestant/nondenominational Christian is at 33 percent. A lot of people in this age demographic, sadly, are chronic cannabis users, which also isn’t exactly great for their critical thinking abilities.
The investigative reporting geniuses who were so keen to see the hand of Russia, Russia, Russia in Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory seem remarkably incurious about the roles Turkey, Qatar, Iran, China, and the Palestine Liberation Organization have played in shaping U.S. domestic opinion, notwithstanding a 2024 press release from President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, that “Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza.”
In other words, Netanyahu and the Gaza war aren’t the only variables. America is also a variable. The information environment is a variable. The Iran war is another variable. It is not over yet. If it concludes with a joyously free Iran allied with Israel and America and pumping plentiful and cheap oil and gas that gets paid for in U.S. dollars, Israel’s poll numbers—and Trump’s—will climb. A White House signing ceremony for Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Iran and Lebanon joining the Abraham Accords would also help Israel’s popularity—and Trump’s. That won’t happen so long as a hostile Iranian regime armed with missiles, drones, and proxies and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz remains in power in Tehran.
READ MORE: Who Is To Blame for Israel’s Sagging US Poll Numbers? Not Netanyahu or the Gaza War.
Additional reading:
The Department of Justice indicted eight people for engaging in a “coordinated campaign” to threaten Jewish officials, businesses, and groups at the University of Michigan, the department announced on Wednesday. The arrestees “damaged and defaced homes and businesses with spray-painted messages, threats, and symbols” like “INTIFADA” and “discussed methods by which to harm the targets and their families, including poison, bombs, and psychological torture,” according to the indictment.
Well, akshually: Former Biden White House chief of staff Ron Klain, now the chief legal officer at Airbnb, climbed into the Instagram comments to respond to a post from the Republican Jewish Coalition calling on Chuck Schumer to rescind his endorsement of the embattled Maine Democrat Graham Platner—to say that Platner’s Nazi tattoo is in fact “a skull and crossbones to remember his fallen comrades from his service in Afghanistan.” Even Platner hadn’t come up with that excuse.
Platner’s ex-girlfriend Jenny Racicot, the Maine Democrat who told the New York Times that Platner showed up to her house drunk and uninvited in 2021 and engaged in “reckless” behavior, told the Free Press there was “a side of him that I had an experience with that caused me to cut off all contact and not to support him as a person.” Lyndsey Fifield, the woman Platner says he never dated, showed the Free Press text messages from him in which he states, “I’ve been falling over myself for you as long as you’d have me.”
The CEO of the Democratic fundraising behemoth ActBlue, Regina Wallace-Jones, appeared before Congress on Wednesday, in theory to address warnings from her lawyers that she lied to lawmakers in 2023 about the company’s security policies regarding illegal donations from foreign citizens. But Wallace-Jones did not address the controversy—instead, she pleaded the Fifth 22 times, including in response to the question, “How many foreign contributions did you accept?”
The day after launching strikes on Iran in response to the Islamic regime shooting down a U.S. helicopter, President Donald Trump vowed to hit Tehran “hard again.” “We were really close to a deal but they keep tapping along, they keep playing us for suckers because you know what, they dealt with some very stupid presidents,” he said.
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Bari - please, oh please, retire the insufferable Lesley Stahl. She’s a perfect example of the “news” correspondents who think they are the center of the story.
I’m glad you’re doing stories about Talarico and Platner. We need these for the history books. But they don’t help at all with decreasing their voter support. If anything, it helps them. Currently, the worse you are but proud of it, the more popular.