Pro-Paxton PAC reimagines Cold-War era LBJ ad to show Talarico's ties to trans ideology

Talarico campaign claims AI ad is 'flat out lying'

By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, August 13, 2026

A PAC supporting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is using AI to reimagine a Cold War-era political ad for the home stretch of a tightly contested U.S. Senate campaign against Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico.

Conservative advocacy group The American Principles Project PAC released a new attack ad on Aug. 7 that reworks one of the most famous political commercials in American history as part of a reported $10 million ad campaign supporting Paxton.

The 30-second AI-generated spot opens with a young girl in a grassy field plucking petals from a flower over a narrator’s voiceover: “She dreams of growing up, falling in love, becoming a mother.” 

The scene then shifts to the same girl lying in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. A doctor leans over the girl and instructs her to “keep counting” before pulling down his mask to reveal an AI-generated depiction of Talarico.

The narrator’s voice returns: “The trans industry preys on confused children. Irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, sex-change surgeries. This November, stop them before it’s too late.” The ad closes by urging viewers to “Vote for Ken Paxton on Nov. 3.”

The commercial deliberately echoes the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad produced for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign against Barry Goldwater. In the original, a little girl counts petals before the camera zooms into her eye and a nuclear explosion fills the screen, followed by Johnson’s warning: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live or to go into the dark, we must either love each other or we must die.”

APP President Terry Schilling defended the ad in a statement to the New York Post. "James Talarico wears Christianity like a skin suit to conceal his radical trans agenda and unwavering devotion to advancing the $4.5 billion Trans Industrial Complex that profits from mutilating children," Schilling said. "Texas voters need to know his record of voting against bans on irreversible sex changes for minors while cozying up to surgeons who performed them."

Paxton isn’t the first political candidate to resurrect “Daisy”: former Republican presidential nominee Sen. Bob Dole invoked the ad’s imagery in a campaign attack on then-President Bill Clinton, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reinvented the “Daisy” ad to raise questions about then-Republican nominee Donald Trump’s fitness for office. 

Talarico campaign spokesman JT Ennis responded to the ad in a statement to The Christian Post, claiming: “This AI deep fake ad is flat-out lying: James does not support gender reassignment surgery for minors. This ad exemplifies the rot at the core of our broken, corrupt politics: Ken Paxton and the billionaires who prop him up are using shameful scare tactics and disgustingly using children as political props to lie about James because they have no solutions to lower the price of gas, groceries and healthcare.

"While billionaire-backed dark money groups spread lies, James will continue bringing Republicans, Democrats and independents together to take on corruption and lower costs for working people.” 

This isn't the first AI-generated attack ad targeting Talarico this cycle. Citizens for Sanity, a separate super PAC supporting Paxton's campaign, released a 15-second AI deepfake in June depicting a fabricated version of Talarico singing a parody song about medical transition for children.

The ad's release follows a high-profile settlement Paxton's office reached with Texas Children's Hospital (TCH) in Houston, which The Christian Post reported on in May. The Justice Department and the Texas Attorney General's Office announced that the hospital had agreed to establish the nation's first "detransition clinic" after settling federal allegations that it billed Texas Medicaid for what officials described as illegal gender-transition interventions.

Last week, CP also reported that Vanessa Sivadge, a Christian nurse who was fired from her job at TCH after exposing alleged Medicaid fraud related to the illegal castration of minors, secured a settlement that includes the hospital establishing the first free detransitioner clinic in the United States.

Under the settlement agreement, TCH must open the clinic by the end of October, pay $10 million in penalties to resolve Medicaid fraud claims, and fire five physicians who carried out sex-rejecting procedures in violation of Texas law, according to a Wednesday press release from Burke Law Group, which represented Sivadge.

In his tenure as a Texas state lawmaker, Talarico has openly advocated for allowing minors to undergo “gender-affirming” medical operations, calling opposition to such operations "discrimination." 

“I think it's clear that this is not about science or medicine, and certainly not about keeping kids safe,” Talarico said during a May 2023 Texas House debate on Senate Bill 14, which bans doctors and healthcare providers from providing irreversible trans procedures on minors. “This is about discriminating against people who are transgender ..."

In a podcast appearance last month, however, Talarico said he now opposes “gender reassignment surgeries for minors.”

In May, Talarico, a liberal Presbyterian seminary student, walked back a number of controversial theological statements he made in the past, including that God is “non-binary” and that “sex is a nuanced spectrum, not a strict binary.”