Talarico's Heretical Invocation

🚨 VIDEO: Texas state Rep. James Talarico opened a legislative session with a heretic prayer, invoked old Communist-adjacent phrase

h/t @reddit_lies who spotted it on Reddit; I tracked down the original video.

The prayer addresses God as "holy mystery" with "so many names" —… pic.twitter.com/eobF2LLQkU

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) May 28, 2026

Texas state Rep. James Talarico quoted a Communist-adjacent saying in an invocation before a 2021 legislative session. He closed the prayer with this:

"Holy Mystery, open our minds, open our hearts, open our hands so that we may build a new world in the shell of the old."

This phrase can be found on numerous leftwing and Marxist-leaning websites. It is taken from the 1905 preamble of The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an organization that advocates for an international proletarian union.

"By organizing industrially, we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."

Some websites falsely claim that its goal is to build a worker-run society within the capitalist system. In fact, it seeks to abolish capitalism and establish working-class ownership of the means of production. In other words ... Marxism.

In the prayer, Talarico addresses God as the "Holy Mystery" -- the God of the Torah, Quran, Gita, and Dharma. He describes Jesus as "a barefoot rabbi." The invocation is the declaration of a social gospel, couched in Christian-themed ethics.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed (Gal. 1:8).