Republicans once again embarrassed themselves after promoting a theory about the health of Senate candidate James Talarico, only to have the entire thing collapse in a matter of hours.

The conspiracy surrounding Talarico — which claimed his recent bout of the flu was in fact a cover for a mental health crisis — is just the latest example of conservative media figures and content creators aligned with President Donald Trump who have latched onto wild political claims only to be debunked in public, and often humiliating, fashion.

The collapse was fast enough to lead to near-immediate intra-right fingerpointing over the inadequacy of the reporting behind the claim.

“This is such shit work, bro. I’m going to be blunt about it,” Tony Ortiz, a right-wing commentator based in Texas, said on an X Space to discuss the story on Sunday night. He suggested the result could be Talarico suing the commentators behind the story: “Good luck. I hope your lawyer’s working for free.”

The rapid flop of a major story involving arguably the most important race of the midterm elections show how the conservative media ecosystem remains far too eager to latch on to conspiracies as opposed to building a track record of reliability which would allow them to have more influence.

“A lot of people that are in the punditry business on the right ended up embarrassing themselves with this,” said Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, a social media analysis firm, suggesting it was emblematic of the larger shortcomings of the MAGA-aligned media ecosystem. “To a critical media consumer, [it] should raise a lot of questions.”

Nonetheless, Holt said the conspiracy’s detonation demonstrates how our information environment allows political actors to hijack the discourse around campaigns and candidates on an extremely thin basis.

“Talarico, for the three weeks of the campaign, is answering questions about having the flu instead of his policies,” he said. “It throws chaos into the situation — they can force everyone to react to it, even if it’s complete nonsense … even if it embarrasses them. It gets their opponents off message.”

Talarico, a state representative who is leading state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the polls in Texas’ Senate race, suspended campaigning late last month as he recovered from a case of the flu. Despite the Democrat’s explanation, Paxton and conservative commentators insisted something more nefarious was behind his absence from the trail — with Paxton propping up theories that his opponent may not have been ill at all.

“James Talarico claims he was missing for 13 days because he had the ‘flu,’” Paxton wrote in a post on X. “Who actually believes that?”

The mass delusion began Friday, when some right-wing internet personalities, including reality TV star and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, claimed that Talarico was not under the weather but was in fact in a mental health crisis.

“This isn’t a case of the ‘flu’ with Talarico,” Pratt wrote in a post on X. “This is a case of ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.’”

In a follow-up post, the former “Hills” cast member wrote he’d been informed by “sources” that the Texas Democrat was “in a mental health facility” and that his campaign had stopped planning new events in the remaining weeks before the midterm elections. But he also left open the possibility his entire conspiracy was made up.

“I’m praying that this isn’t true, and he’s OK,” said Pratt. “You want to win these fights on the battlefield of ideas, not the minefield of poor health.”

Even with the questionable provenance of Pratt’s claim of a Talarico mental health crisis, right-wingers seized on the idea that the candidate had been whisked away to an inpatient facility out of state.

Conservative posters Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher claimed Talarico had checked into the Lindner Center of Hope in Cincinnati, Ohio, and published clips of a call placed to the facility in which they demanded to know whether the Texas Senate candidate was a patient there. They claimed the call confirmed Talarico had been discharged from the Lindner Center last week.

Holt said that claims Talarico had suffered from a mental health crisis smelled bad from the start. For example, while Talarico’s campaign had published images of the candidate attending the Austin City Limits music festival on Friday night, the purported call with the Lindner Center suggested he was released on Saturday or Sunday.

“It was just so clearly fake,” he told HuffPost in an interview. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

And the mental health center itself says Sortor and Amacher were flat out wrong: On Sunday night, the facility posted on X that Talarico “has never received treatment” there.

Even so, the conspiracy theory got an additional burst of oxygen from more established names in conservative media, including former Fox News host Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro’s publication, The Daily Wire. Kelly demanded on Sunday that the Lindner Center clarify whether Talarico had been at the facility within the last nine days.

By Monday, the Talarico conspiracy had reached the highest levels of the right, earning mentions from Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and a handful of Texas state lawmakers.

It’s not the first time in the second Trump era that right-wingers have latched onto a wild conspiracy theory, fueled by online speculation, and later fall apart in embarrassing fashion.

Conservative publication The Blaze was raked over the coals last year after it falsely identified a former Capitol police officer as the suspect in security footage from Jan. 6, 2021, a move which made waves in the online right — many of whom believe the Capitol riot was orchestrated by the federal government. The FBI arrested a different suspect later that year, and the Capitol police officer wrongly accused filed a defamation lawsuit against The Blaze in April.

Most recently, right-wing commentators have backed up unfounded theories about other Democratic candidates, such as claims that Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed has ties to terrorist organizations.

Animating many of those wild conspiracies, which blow up and fizzle quickly, is a media ecosystem which rewards “independent journalists” who are open about their true status as political operatives, Holt explained.

“It’s a lot of people who want to arrive at a certain endpoint,” he said. “They are willing to propel themselves through some of the most laughable, ridiculous hoops to get there.”

In the case of Talarico’s debunked visit to an Ohio medical facility, Holt argued commentators boosting those claims had long suggested that his absence from the campaign trail was a sign of an ulterior motive.

“They had this feeling that something was off, and that people should be concerned about this guy the way they’re concerned about this guy,” he said. “Here they have this anecdote that claims to be like an explosive confirmation of those feelings, so they latch onto it.”

Some of the right-wingers who hyped up the Talarico mental health theory have continued to double down even after the story fell apart. Sortor on Sunday said he planned to drop more recordings of his phone call with the Ohio medical facility, adding that the Texas Democrat should “resign and find a less stressful career.”

So far, those new recordings have yet to materialize. But, as Holt pointed out, the damage to the discourse may already be done.

“It’s bleak,” he said.

Talarico told MS NOW on Monday that claims he’d been whisked away to Ohio last week for mental health treatment were “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard” and chalked the whole incident up to a political “silly season” ahead of the midterms.

“Sorry to disappoint our conspiracy theorists online, but our social media and traditional media system really just rewards rumor and innuendo because it’s what gets clicks,” he added.

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