Nick Allison

It seemed pretty obvious that the envelope from the “Texas Transgender Student Union” in Meadows Place, addressed to the “Students Of The Allison Family,” which showed up in my mailbox the other day, wasn’t from an actual advocacy group. I’ve always been pretty good at spotting bullshit, not that this one took much effort. Don’t get me wrong, it was professionally done and used just enough of the right language to sound like it was advocating for something, but nearly everything else about it felt off.

It was printed on the same glossy stock as all of the other campaign mailers that have been filling up my garbage can for the past year, and it was written to the kids, not the parents. It told them their parents don’t need to be involved with their identity and included a section on legal emancipation. And perhaps most importantly, there was the timing. It showed up at my house the day before early voting started, which also happened to be right in the middle of baseball’s postseason, so I’d actually been watching TV for a change, which meant getting assaulted with nonstop ads built entirely on spreading lies about James Talarico and stoking fear about trans people rather than making any case for what the GOP or Ken Paxton has done to actually earn my vote. Even if a real advocacy group were reckless enough to mail something like this to kids, no group that cares about trans Texans would hand Republicans that kind of gift during election week.

It had all the markings of a rage-bait hit job by right-wing operatives, designed to stoke fear and anger during early voting in the best shot Democrats have had at a Texas Senate seat since Lloyd Bentsen won in 1988. The first question to ask when something like this happens is who benefits, and the answer isn’t all that hard to figure out. And as clear as it seemed to a lot of people, my next thought was a worry that it might work on plenty of my fellow Texan voters anyway.

I tossed the mailer in the trash and moved on, but a couple of days later it was still bugging me, and some quick reading confirmed it was every bit as fake as I had suspected. The Transgender Education Network of Texas, the real group every link in the pamphlet pointed to, says it didn’t send the mailers, or the fake texts in its name that went out the week before. And the part of the mailer that got people worked up the most, the section on legal emancipation, wasn’t even TENT’s. According to the Texas Tribune, TENT’s own materials don’t cover emancipation at all. They mostly just explain how to navigate Texas bathroom laws and the new ban on LGBTQ student clubs, and they keep that material on a website for people who go looking for it, not on pamphlets addressed to your kids.

Texas Observer reporter Steven Monacelli found that the “Texas Transgender Student Union” is a Wyoming LLC formed on September 2 with no owners listed, at an address known for shell companies. Even the return address on my envelope was a setup. It doesn’t exist, but it’s one digit off from a UPS store on the same street where TENT keeps its real mailbox, close enough that anyone who looked it up would land on TENT. The Texas Tribune traced the mailer barcodes to SnailWorks, a political mail tracking company whose only payments from a federal campaign committee in the past two years came from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which denies involvement. And it was a huge operation. CBS News Texas found sequence numbers on the mailers suggesting more than a million went out, and the postage permit on every envelope, mine included, belongs to a commercial printer in Illinois, according to the Postal Service, though it’s not clear yet what role the company played.

A Republican district attorney in West Texas has since opened a forgery investigation, TENT has gone to court to try to force out the names of whoever is behind it, and the Wyoming registered agent has dropped the LLC as a client. In the meantime, TENT has received threats of violence and suspended its tour, and nobody has yet identified who paid for any of it, probably because dark money, as the name implies, is hard to trace.

We do know where some of the money in this race is coming from. In September, Elon Musk gave $158 million to a Republican super PAC that passed it straight to Texas PAC, which put up ads attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you.” And that’s only the money we can see. The New York Times reported that Musk has also made seven-figure donations this cycle through groups that don’t have to disclose their donors.

None of this is the least bit surprising. Republican politicians are in a full-blown panic this year, and I guess it makes sense that some of them would resort to disinformation campaigns, if not outright election interference. Trump won in 2024 in large part on two promises, that he’d fix the economy and keep us out of new wars, and like just about every other promise the guy has made, he went and did the opposite. He slapped his beloved tariffs on pretty much everything, driving up costs for American consumers, and then promptly stumbled his way into an unpopular, unauthorized war with Iran that’s failed to meet its stated and shifting objectives and has already cost at least 21 American service members their lives, with nearly 900 more wounded (according to the Pentagon, whose numbers have been unreliable at best, if not intentionally misleading). It’s also cost taxpayers more than $40 billion so far and driven gas and diesel prices to record highs here at home.

With a record of failure and incompetence like that, all that’s left is culture war nonsense and outright lies, aimed at just enough wavering Republicans and independents to scare them off Talarico or keep them home.

Republican strategists can see the writing on the wall. The MAGA wagon they hitched themselves to is coming apart, and the House isn’t the only thing at risk anymore. They could lose a Senate seat in Texas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in more than 30 years. Talarico scares them precisely because he refuses to play their game. He has sworn off corporate PAC money, and he keeps telling voters the truth, that “the biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.”

And so the folks at the top are doing what they’ve always done, what Talarico calls “the oldest strategy in the world: divide and conquer.” I can’t prove it’s the oldest, but he’s not far off. You find a group without any real power and tell people that’s who’s to blame for all their problems. Nero blamed the Christians when Rome burned. The Nazis blamed the Jews. In this country it has been (among plenty of others) Indigenous people, Black people, Catholics, gay people, and immigrants from just about everywhere. Now it’s trans people, who make up less than 1 percent of the population. If they can keep your anger pointed down at a small minority that doesn’t hold power, then that anger never gets pointed up at the minority that actually does, in this case, the billionaires and the politicians they’ve bought.

These pamphlets hitting everyone’s mailboxes right now are just the latest version of that same old trick, but the more I think about it, the less I think it’s going to work. Sure, some Texans will be fooled into voting for Paxton or into staying home on Election Day. But a lot of the people these mailers were aimed at are Republicans I know and like, neighbors and family that I don’t always agree with politically, but still intelligent, decent people who deserve better than to be treated like marks. Most of them can smell this kind of con from a mile away.

I’ve never been much for wearing party labels, and I’ve never called myself a Democrat. If I’m anything, I’m a centrist independent who leans left, especially on personal freedoms and civil liberties. But I’ve voted for moderate Republicans before, and I’ve cast more than one protest vote for a Libertarian or Green Party candidate in my life. On Monday morning, the first day of early voting, I voted before work, and I voted for Democrats from the top of the ballot to the bottom. Between the tactics MAGA Republicans are running, their undying devotion to Trump over the Constitution, and their abysmal record on the economy and… well, on pretty much everything lately, they’ve forfeited their right to lead, as far as I’m concerned.

As far as trans issues go, they just aren’t what’s driving my vote. Saying “I don’t care” would sound kind of rude, and I’m really not trying to be flippant here. But I won’t let a party influence my vote by politicizing a private matter that barely touches most people’s lives. There’s a real conversation to be had about sports and fairness, but we’re talking about a minuscule percentage of college and high school athletes. And the stuff Republican politicians want you to be up in arms over isn’t happening anyway, not here and not the way they’d like you to believe. Schools aren’t performing sex changes on your kids. And Texas already banned hormone treatments and surgeries for minors, the Supreme Court has upheld similar bans, and no U.S. Senator can undo it.

My position is simple: trans people are people, and all people should be able to live their lives in a way that’s true to themselves and makes them happy, as long as they aren’t harming anyone else, same as you and me. And they’re Americans, entitled to the same protections under the law as everyone else. The Texas GOP would rather we all get worked up enough about them to forget about the economy, the war, and the blatant corruption of their candidate and the president he answers to, but that won’t work on me. I don’t have the time or the interest to go hunting for boogeymen, or to think about other people’s genitals nearly as much as Republican politicians seem to.

It’s hard not to notice that the people who complain about trans issues being forced on everyone are the ones actually doing the forcing, and the people who warn about trans activists preying on impressionable children are the ones actually mailing political propaganda to your kids, using them as tools to scare a couple votes out of their parents. When you can’t win on your own merit and accomplishments, you try to win on fear, and apparently you’ll use kids to do it. Classy move, fellas.

As for the envelope addressed to the students of the Allison family, it’s in the trash can under the pizza boxes, right where it belongs, with every other political mailer this year telling me which of my neighbors I should be afraid of next.

Published October 24, 2026. This is an opinion piece based on ongoing reporting by the Texas Tribune, CBS News Texas, and others. The story is still developing, and this piece will be updated as new facts come out.

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Nick Allison is a writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Slate, HuffPost, The Fulcrum, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He does his level best to avoid all things social media, but you can occasionally find him on Bluesky or follow him on Substack, if you’re into that sort of thing.