The comments in this screenshot, translated: “To put it bluntly: I suggest slaughtering gays, you know? 😂” “The central government should hurry up and crack down hard on this group.” “Just kill them all and be done with it 😂👍” They’re from China’s TikTok, under a post tagged “anti-discrimination” and “equality.” The account I’m quoting wouldn’t translate them because they’re too vile. I’m translating them because people in the West should see this. I know a lot of people in the West find it hard to believe how extreme my family was toward me, or the large cyberbullying campaign university students ran against me. This is the environment it happened in. And sadly, Tiktok is where mainstream China is. The Chinese people you meet on X had to leave China or get around the Great Firewall to be here, and they tend to be more open-minded. Even so, look at the replies under the post I’m quoting: they got so bad the account had to limit who can reply. No matter what Chinese official accounts say about “banning discrimination,” gay people in China have no marriage equality and no law protecting them from discrimination, and their groups keep getting shut down. In 2021, WeChat deleted dozens of university LGBTQ student accounts in a single night. In 2023, the Beijing LGBT Center closed, citing “forces beyond our control.” Homophobia exists everywhere, including in the US. What’s different is whether anything can push back: laws, courts, a free press, the right to organize, the right to vote. In China, those are missing or shut down. If you’re American, you still have all of them. The midterms are Nov 3. Please vote.

Silver's Texas forecast is about half polls, half history. The history half starts at R+11. So Talarico leading every public poll but one still only gets him to 75%.

On September 13, John Cornyn warned his own party: "This is how great political parties self-destruct." Three weeks later a Republican-leaning pollster went looking for Ken Paxton's Asian voters in Texas. Talarico 72. Undecided 28. Paxton 0. First, what that number is. Trafalgar polled 1,086 likely Texas voters from October 6 to 8. It is enough to notice the zero. In 2024, exit polls had Trump carrying majority Asian voters in Texas. If Paxton still held even a tenth of them, a sample that size would almost never come back empty. (Trafalgar, page 9: thetrafalgargroup.org/wp-con…) A poll cannot tell you why. Nobody polled these voters the week before, and a lot has landed on Asian families in Texas since 2024. So I will not claim one post did this. I will tell you what they saw. The morning after Texas beat Ohio State, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Railroad Commissioner, posted a photo of South Asian students cheering in the student section. He wrote that UT graduation "looked like this" and that "the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined." It was not a graduation. The students in it are Longhorns. By Texas law, 90 percent of UT's freshman class must be Texas residents, and three-quarters of those seats go automatically to the top of every Texas high school class. UT's 2024 freshman class had 2,426 Asian-American students and 393 international students. The "problem" Bo French sees is Texas kids who earned their seats. (UT News: news.utexas.edu/2021/09/21/a… and UT Common Data Set: reports.utexas.edu/common-da…) UT senior Dhairya Gupta answered him in one sentence: "When I look at that picture, I don't see a problem." (Texas Tribune: texastribune.org/2026/09/14/…) Republicans answered him too. Speaker Dustin Burrows: "this post has crossed the line." Former Speaker Dade Phelan: "This is racist. It is wrong. And I condemn it without reservation." Cornyn asked whether the rest of his party would condemn it "or look the other way while it becomes normalized." Then James Talarico put the question to Ken Paxton by name: "Will you condemn this blatant racism or will you cower to extremists?" Paxton had said French would be "a great Railroad Commissioner." His statement said he condemns "racism in all of its forms." It did not mention Bo French. (Texas Tribune: texastribune.org/2026/09/13/…) Texas noticed. In July, 14 percent of likely voters had an unfavorable view of Bo French. A week after the post, 32 percent did. He was still ahead, 44 to 42. (Fox 4: fox4news.com/election/bo-fre…) Now the 28. More than a quarter of the Asian voters in this poll have not picked anyone. Statewide it is under 8 percent. Walking away from one candidate is not a vote for the other. If you are in that 28 percent, my DMs are open. Tell me what you are waiting to hear. Ken Paxton and Bo French are both on every Texas ballot. Early voting runs October 19 to October 30. Election Day is November 3. Find your polling place at votetexas.gov. If someone in your family is in that 28 percent, call them before the 19th.