Talarico: Every bar has that one guy. He’s loud, he’s obnoxious, he makes all the women in the bar feel uncomfortable. He hears you say your name to the bartender and then adds his drink to your tab when you’re not looking.
That’s Ken Paxton.
And I don’t know about y’all, but I’m done picking up his tab.
🚨 Republican candidate Ashley Hinson fought to pass a tax break to directly benefit her own enormous fortune.
She is currently campaigning as a "champion of the middle class."
The border isn’t broken because poor people ask for asylum.
It’s broken because rich politicians discovered racism gets more votes than fixing wages, housing, healthcare, or labor rights.
I painted this self portrait from a photograph the New York Post and Daily Mail ran over and over again alongside horrible stories about me. They averaged about 3 stories a day between them for years. The image came from their complete theft of my digital life. In the photograph I am in the worst stretch of my addiction. Exhausted. Contemplating how I could end everything.
They published it over and over because they believed it showed something disturbing, something degenerate, something people would recognize as evidence of whatever they were accusing me of that particular day.
I set out to paint it because I wanted to take back what they were trying to steal from me. It wasn’t just the image they had stolen. They had stolen thousands of images. They wanted to steal my humanity. Their portrait was of a monster. My portrait is of a man being reassembled piece by piece, bit by bit, pixel by pixel through the hard work of recovery.
A portrait of someone worth saving. Someone worth forgiveness. For all of me. Past. Present. Future. Gratitude for all of it.
The images they meant as weapons are no longer weapons to me. The man in them is no longer theirs to describe. He is mine, and I love him.
We do recover.