Russia stopped threatening American elections this week and started working one. A Kremlin propaganda crew posted a fake video on Tuesday accusing James Talarico of abusing a student, in the Texas Senate race Elon Musk is paying for.
Someone built an X account in September under a real man's stolen name and photo, waited a month, then posted a talking face: a former student telling the camera that his sixth-grade English teacher in San Antonio assaulted him in 2012. The teacher he named is Talarico. Fifteen bots shared it at once, a right-wing account with 185,000 followers picked it up, and by Wednesday it had more than 500,000 views. The real man whose face was stolen told Lead Stories the person in the video was "not me." San Antonio police have no report. Graphika, which tracks these operations, said on Wednesday with high confidence that the Kremlin crew that ran the same story against Tim Walz in 2024, Storm-1516, made it.
Musk's money arrived first.
