Influencer in false Talarico hospitalization claim has history of extremist posts

The false rumor apparently began with an October 9 post by an anonymous X account, TickleTexts, which claimed Talarico had been 'hospitalized at Lindner Center for HOPE'. The Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren picked it up and falsely tied it to a private flight between Ohio and Austin, according to the report. Last week Amacher phoned the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric hospital in Mason, Ohio, three times trying to confirm the claim.

In the full recording of the second call, Amacher gives his name as 'Tim', says he wants to send a care package to his cousin and offers a four-digit patient code. He later wrote on X that he 'simply made one up (2244) in an attempt to bypass the facility's security restrictions to discuss the patient'. For most of the six-minute call, the employee tells him she has no record of Talarico; in the final seconds, she says a man that looks like Talarico 'was just discharged this evening'.

An excerpt was incorporated into a 47-second clip that Nick Sortor posted on Sunday afternoon under the headline 'Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week'. Amacher posted his own version minutes later, and Elon Musk replied with '!!'. Amacher had first offered the recording to Blaze Media and the Daily Mail, which reportedly declined to run it, and said in an X Space that evening that influencers are 'not held to the same journalistic standards'. By Tuesday he had reportedly pulled out of an interview with the writer and podcaster Jesse Singal, saying his attorney had given him a 'stand down order'. Coverage of the episode has included speculation that his attempt to access private health information may land him in legal trouble.

Amacher, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2024, has remained in the milieu of Republican politics and rightwing influencers, The Guardian reported. Neither Amacher nor the Paxton campaign responded to requests for comment.

The report said Amacher has described Muslims as 'sub-human', claimed that Black Africans are 'monkeys' with low IQ, characterized immigrants as 'vermin' and expressed support for the far right, including Germany's AfD and the UK's Tommy Robinson. It said his posts have also criticized miscegenation and called for 'remigration' of refugees.

Amacher often invokes Nazi Germany and the Freikorps, the paramilitary movement that preceded it, with apparent admiration, according to the report. On July 29, he wrote over an AI-generated image of German soldiers beneath Soviet flags beside uniformed men under crescent moons at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate: 'In 1919, Germany's defeated soldiers came home only to be stabbed in the back by socialists and communists who wanted to burn the nation down and install a Soviet-style dictatorship'. In a follow-up post he wrote: 'Modern Freikorps volunteers are needed to step up to purge the German nation of the filth destroying it from within.' An AI-generated image accompanying it showed a masked soldier wearing 'Freikorps' and 'Deutsches Reich' patches, with the black, white and red flag of imperial Germany flying over the Reichstag.

The Freikorps were paramilitary units of demobilized soldiers that crushed leftwing uprisings in Germany after the first world war. In January 1919, Freikorps troops murdered the communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In June, Amacher told critics to 'read up on the German Freikorps after 1919–and what became of Luxemburg and Liebknecht', adding: 'History has a way of repeating itself when revolutionary movements collide with a nation pushed to the brink.' The Freikorps are widely seen as an ideological ancestor of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party, though he later turned against them.

In July, replying to a post that said 'we fought the wrong enemy in WW2, just like General Patton said before the jews assassinated him in 1945', Amacher wrote: 'We should have immediately re-armed the German Wehrmacht and auxiliary troops and joined forces to defeat Soviet communism, once and for all!' Patton died in December 1945 after a car crash in occupied Germany.