Right-wing media and the mystery of Texas’ transgender mailers

On Thursday night, the smear at the heart of the mysterious transgender mailers that have rocked the final weeks of the midterm elections in Texas completed its journey. What began as baseless social media whispers quickly ascended the ladder of conservative influence, jumped into mailboxes across the Lone Star State and ultimately into the comforting prime-time embrace of Fox News.

At a town hall in Fort Worth, a Texas mother of six named Rebekah Smith told Vice President JD Vance that her 11-year-old daughter had received a letter explaining how to transition without her parents ever knowing, and asked how Republicans would keep the government out of her family. “I don’t know who sent that letter to your child,” the vice president said, “but I think the person who sends a letter to an 11-year-old about gender transition, what I call that in my family is a pervert, and that person ought to go to prison.” Host Jesse Watters, never one to let a grievance go to waste, promised that Fox would investigate “this perverted letter.” Vance asked Smith to talk to his staff because he would “like the Department of Justice to investigate that” as well.

Watters rushed to promote the spectacle. “WHOA! Texas MOM tells JD Vance her DAUGHTER received a letter telling her TO TRANSITION TO A BOY,” he posted on X, followed by Vance’s promise. Missing from that framing was the question that should have governed the segment: Who actually sent the material?

Nobody on that stage mentioned that the pamphlet was a fake. Nobody mentioned that the real transgender advocacy group named inside it had disavowed the mailer. Nobody mentioned that sworn testimony filed that same week had tied the text messages that accompanied it to a national Republican organization. The vice president was asking federal prosecutors to chase a forgery that may well have originated in his own party’s orbit — and he was doing it on a network whose viewers had been marinating in that forgery for weeks.

The race between Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic challenger James Talarico has become a crucible for dark-money maneuvers. As polls show the Republican grip on the Lone Star State slipping, conservative campaigns and their surrogates have resorted to increasingly desperate tactics. In early October, for example, Talarico took a brief hiatus from the campaign trail to recover from a severe case of the flu. Rather than accepting a routine human illness, the right-wing echo chamber treated a temporary absence as evidence of mental illness. Within days, the fabricated scandal has collapsed — yet the machinery of right-wing media simply pivoted to amplifying a more insidious operation designed to trigger visceral outrage.

This second October surprise involved millions of unsolicited text messages and a wave of physical mailers sent to Texas households with materials that directed readers to the website of the Transgender Education Network of

Texas while inserting provocative advice on child emancipation that the real organization says it never authored or authorized. By flooding the electorate with extreme material disguised as progressive advocacy, right-wing operatives appear to have sought to create a fake controversy that could be weaponized in attack ads and campaign speeches. Vance, for instance, told the Fox News audience that Talarico has “a weird fascination with trans kids,” and that “he’ll probably defend the right of the person sending the letter, not the right of the parent who is rightfully creeped out by this.” Vance claimed that Talarico “has actually called it abusive when parents try to prevent their children from transitioning” and that Paxton “has fought hard to prosecute those people, whereas James Talarico has fought hard to protect those people.” Even the distortion had been laundered by then — Talarico called denying a child’s gender identity abusive, a different claim from saying parents must permit medical transition, but at the top of the ladder the difference no longer exists.

That is how a smear works in the closed ecosystem of the American right. It does not need to survive scrutiny. It just needs to circulate upward. An anonymous account posts it; an influencer adopts it; a donor-funded outlet reports the influencer’s outrage as news; an elected official demands an investigation, and the demand becomes proof the story matters; cable news books the controversy; a vice president promises federal action. Each rung launders the one below it. The correction, when it comes, travels in the opposite direction and arrives nowhere.

The paper trail looks like what you would expect from a covert operation. Texas Transgender Student Union LLC was formed in Wyoming on Sept. 2 through a commercial registered agent that helps owners stay anonymous. After CBS News Texas visited the agent’s address in Sheridan, Wyoming, the agent announced it was resigning. The mailers listed a Houston-area post office box. The Texas Observer reported that the barcode on the envelopes traced to a mail-tracking company that has taken federal campaign money from only one group this year, the National Republican Congressional Committee. The committee said it had nothing to do with the mailers, and the company would not say who paid. CBS News Texas reported that the bulk-mail permit belongs to an Illinois printer owned by the Zerrusen family, who have given heavily to Republican PACs and been photographed with Donald Trump.

When the real Transgender Education Network of Texas filed a petition in Travis County court to unmask the perpetrators behind the impersonation campaign, the partisan safety nets of the Texas judiciary eventually snapped into action. A deposition of Infobip, the messaging company that delivered the texts, which a Travis County judge ordered made public, indicated that the texts were sent on behalf of the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund and a man named John Braun. But on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court, composed entirely of judges appointed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, issued an administrative stay that blocked its release. Chris Hilton, an attorney who previously served under Paxton, defended him during his impeachment trial and was later pushed out of office amid sexual harassment allegations, argued on behalf of the company that the mailers were not political speech because they named no candidate or party.

Dirty tricks are an old tradition of American politics. This cycle, Republican PACs in Nevada mailed a flyer calling a nonpartisan candidate, Danielle Ford, the “AOC of Nevada,” hoping voters would mistake her for the actual Democratic nominee, Aaron Ford. This week also brought word that the group that funded Cornel West’s 2024 ballot drives raised every dollar through a dark-money network bankrolled by Elon Musk.

The president’s party whines about decoy candidates in Alaska while running them at home. Ratf**king is a long and proud Republican tradition, and the Texas operation fits inside perfectly.