In March 2020, a Pennsylvania state representative was on Tinder telling women he was 29 years old.

He was 37.

The man was Ryan Mackenzie, who now represents Pennsylvania's 7th District in Congress. The Daily Mail found the profile and reported it in June 2024, in the middle of his campaign against then-Rep. Susan Wild. The screenshot showed his age as 29 and a bio that read: "Always down for a good time! Outgoing, funny and enjoy traveling, skiing, trying new restaurants and getting drinks with friends."

An eight-year gap isn't a typo. You don't accidentally type 29 when you mean 37. It's a thing you decide to do, and then keep deciding every time someone new opens the app.

On its own, that's a small and slightly sad story about a man in his late thirties. What makes it worth writing about is everything he did after he got caught.

More than 100 women from his own district asked him to own it

After the story broke, over 100 women from Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District signed an open letter asking Mackenzie to apologize. These were his constituents — the people he was asking to send him to Washington.

Their letter was blunt:

"Trolling on Tinder for younger women is one thing (we can't help but notice that you fudged your age by nearly a decade), but doing so while you are actively serving on the Pennsylvania State Legislature is another. To make matters worse, you never took accountability for the lie, you just denied that you were married or engaged at the time."

Read that last sentence again, because it's the whole point. The women weren't primarily upset about a dating app. They were upset that when he was caught in a documented lie, his campaign's answer was to confirm he was single at the time — answering a question nobody had asked, and skipping the one everybody had.

His answer: they're operatives

On Monday, August 26, 2024, Mackenzie sat for an interview on NewsNation and was asked about it repeatedly. He did not apologize. He did not address the age. Here is what he said:

"Look, that's what the Democrats like to do. They like to talk about basically anything except their failed policies. I mean, the people are sick and tired of high prices, a wide open border chaos around the world. Anything they can do to distract from those topics, they will take that opportunity."

Then he was given a direct chance to respond to the women's letter. He said:

"When you look at that list, most of them are Democrat operatives. Real big thing that the Democrats do is they put together these lists."

That is a factual claim about more than 100 named women, and it is checkable. So Keystone Newsroom checked it. A reporter went through the signers one by one and looked up what they do for a living. The result: only a handful of the co-signers were local elected officials, Democratic staffers, or connected to politics even loosely through volunteering. The overwhelming majority were professionals who work outside of politics entirely.

So Mackenzie got caught in a lie, and his response to being asked about it was a second lie — this one about his own constituents. Women in his district put their names on a letter, and he told a national television audience they were paid political help. They weren't. They were nurses and teachers and small business owners who live in the district he wanted to represent.

There's a well-worn move here that we've seen from other Republicans caught doing something embarrassing: don't dispute the facts, just reclassify the people reporting them as the enemy. Ashley Hinson did the same thing in Iowa when the New York Times caught her lifting other people's sentences — first blame a staffer, then call the whole thing a partisan attack. It works because it changes the subject from is this true to who's asking.

The part that isn't about Tinder at all

Here's why this matters more than a dating profile: it's the same instinct Mackenzie brings to his actual record.

Two months before the NewsNation interview, in July 2024, Keystone Newsroom noticed that Mackenzie had quietly deleted the anti-abortion section from his campaign website. The page had advertised his "100% pro-life voting record from the Pro-Life Federation." Then it was gone.

And when reporters asked about it, his campaign didn't just say the page was outdated. A spokesperson denied he'd ever had the rating at all, saying he "does not have a 100% rating from the PA Pro-Life Federation due to his vote on HB1786." His own website had said otherwise, until it didn't.

He is welcome to change his mind on abortion. What he is not welcome to do is delete the evidence and then tell voters it was never there. (Michigan's Bill Huizenga ran the identical play — deleting his abortion, debt, and health care pages within about a day of a poll showing him losing.)

Someone tried to clean up Wikipedia, too

Then there's the strangest chapter.

On May 18, 2024, in the middle of Mackenzie's congressional campaign, a brand-new Wikipedia account called ATown1516 was created. Seventeen minutes later, it made its first edit. Twenty of its twenty-one edits, ever, are to the Ryan Mackenzie article.

You can read exactly what it did, because Wikipedia keeps receipts.

On October 18, 2024 — about three weeks before the election — the account deleted more than 6,000 characters in a single edit, with the explanation "Removed skewed and irrelevant information." What went out the door:

• The entire section on Mackenzie's support for efforts to invalidate Pennsylvania's 2020 presidential election results
• The section on his vote for House Bill 1948, the 20-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest
• The section on his vote for Senate Bill 106, the constitutional amendment declaring there is no right to abortion in Pennsylvania

Then on November 21, 2024, two weeks after the election, the same account removed the remaining paragraph noting that Mackenzie was among more than 60 Pennsylvania House Republicans who urged Congress to reject and decertify the state's electoral votes — this time with no explanation at all.

None of that was "skewed." All of it is documented in primary sources. Mackenzie's name is on the amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, the lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out Pennsylvania's 2020 results. He was one of the 60-plus legislators who petitioned the state's congressional delegation to reject 20 already-certified electoral votes. And the abortion votes are on the roll calls: Yea on HB 1948 in June 2016, Yea on SB 106 in July 2022.

Who was behind the account? The Daily Mail reported, and Heartland Signal relayed, that "ATown1516" appears to track to Arnaud Armstrong — Mackenzie's communications director, listed in that role in his congressional office since January 2025 — who reportedly lived at an Allentown address ending in 1516. Neither Armstrong nor Mackenzie's office responded when asked whether a staffer had done this, or whether it happened on taxpayer time. The account never answered Wikipedia editors who asked it to explain, either.

One correction worth making, since we checked the edit history ourselves: the Tinder paragraph specifically was not removed by that account. It was added by an anonymous user in February 2025 and taken out three weeks later by a different, unrelated editor citing Wikipedia's own rules about criticism sections.

The election denial and the abortion votes are what the single-purpose account went after. Which, if you're a Republican in one of the most competitive districts in America, is the more revealing choice.

The pattern is the story

Line the four up:

• Told women he was 29. He was 37.
• Told a TV audience the women who objected were mostly Democrat operatives. They weren't.
• Advertised a 100% anti-abortion record, deleted it, then said he never had it.
• Had his record on election denial and abortion scrubbed off Wikipedia by an account that has never edited anything else.

Every one of those is the same move: say the convenient thing, and when the record contradicts you, edit the record.

This is a man who could not give a senior citizen a straight answer about how he justifies $87 billion for the Iran war while she's told Social Security's trust fund runs dry in 2032. Ask him something direct and you get a paragraph about Democrats.

Mackenzie's district — 26,352 people projected to lose health coverage, 42,998 households on SNAP, 180,847 people on Social Security — deserves a representative who tells them the truth when the truth is inconvenient. The evidence so far is that they don't have one.

He fudged eight years to impress strangers. Ask yourself what he's willing to fudge for a vote.

Sources

• "Ryan Mackenzie dodges questions on lying about his age on Tinder by 8 years" — Sean Kitchen, Keystone Newsroom, August 27, 2024
• "Rising GOP Star Lied About His Age on Dating Profile: Report" — The Daily Beast, June 17, 2024

Photo: Keystone Newsroom.