MAGA Report Cards — Lies

Gabe Evans' New Ad Says He's Spent 15 Years 'Ranching.' His Own Disclosure Shows $345 in Farm Profits From Livestock — Below the Rancher Standard His Spokeswoman Named.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:53:23 +0000

There is a new campaign ad running in Colorado's 8th Congressional District. It shows a congressman hauling hay, dropping a bale into a trough, and talking straight to camera with cows shifting around behind him.

"They say my boots don't fit my suit. They are probably right. But I've worn these for 15 years, ranching here on my place in Weld, on patrol in Adams, in a Black Hawk over Colorado wildfires. … The last thing Washington needs is another suit."

The congressman is Gabe Evans. He owns three cows.

The standard his own campaign chose

Evans has called himself a "rancher" and a "beef producer" for his entire political career. When the Colorado Times Recorder pressed him on it last year, his campaign gave a specific defense: the U.S. Department of Agriculture counts people who earn more than $1,000 from agricultural products as ranchers or farmers. By that measure, his spokeswoman said, he qualifies.

That is a useful thing to have on the record, because it turns a vague argument about identity into a number anyone can check.

Evans' latest financial disclosure reports one line of earned income from agriculture: $345 in "Farm Profits (livestock and beef sales)" for last year.

That is $655 short of the line his own campaign drew. He did not meet the test he asked to be judged by.

Fifteen years of it

This is not a slip in one ad. It is the whole brand, and it goes back to before he was in Congress.

In his first legislative race in 2022, Evans put photos of himself with a Long Horn cow on his campaign website. Supporters of his opponent that year, Terry DeGroot — who manages his family's dairy operation, Colorado Cow — reportedly mocked him for owning pet cows rather than running an actual ranch.

It did not slow him down. During his 2024 congressional run and after he won, Evans posted a steady run of images across social media and his official congressional website: gazing at cows, in the dirt with his family and some cows, standing with cows over his shoulder, leaning on a cow pen gate.

Former Congressman John Salazar, a Democrat who had roughly 500 head of cattle when Colorado elected him in 2004, gave the Colorado Times Recorder the assessment that stuck last year: Evans is "all hat and no cattle."

Where the three cows actually went

The detail that matters most is what happened to the animals when Evans got to Washington.

When he entered Congress last year, Evans handed his three cows to a friend to look after. The cows now appear to be back on his Weld County property — which lets him keep claiming an agricultural tax break on the land.

So the herd left when he did not have time for it, appears to be back on land that carries an agricultural tax break, and features prominently in a campaign ad about how he is not a suit.

Evans' response to this line of questioning has been to call it a distraction. "While the Left wastes time and taxpayer dollars questioning the validity of the Evans' family farm, Congressman Gabe Evans is fighting serious battles to make Colorado a better place to live, work, and raise a family," his spokeswoman said last year.

What he does when agriculture is actually on the line

The 8th District is farm and ranch country north of Denver. Evans' record there is not the record of the man in the ad.

When 3,800 meatpackers at a JBS plant went on strike, Evans told their union he would stand with them — a month after cashing a $5,000 check from the company. Ninety thousand people in his district get food stamps; he voted to cut them and would not say how many of his own constituents lose out. He keeps posing for photos at Colorado businesses while voting eight times to protect the tariffs that are squeezing them.

He also spent more than $320,000 of taxpayer money advertising himself, $225,000 of it routed to his own campaign consultant. The image is the product. The record is the thing the image is covering.

His seat is one of the closest in the country — he won it in 2024 by about 2,500 votes — and Elon Musk's America PAC is now spending on his behalf, one of eighteen Republicans on this site getting that money. His opponent this year is Democrat Manny Rutinel.

What the filings show

Gabe Evans owns three cows and reported $345 in farm profits from "livestock and beef sales" on his most recent financial disclosure. His own spokeswoman said the federal standard for calling yourself a rancher is $1,000 in agricultural earnings, which puts him $655 below it. He is running an ad that says he has spent 15 years "ranching," and the cows he gave away when he went to Congress appear to be back on his Weld County land, where they support an agricultural tax break.

Source

Colorado Times Recorder, Gabe Evans Raises 3 Cows, But in a New Campaign Ad He Says He's 'Ranching' in Colorado, by Jason Salzman, September 8, 2026. Image via Colorado Times Recorder.

John McGuire Told a TV Station 'I Don't Even Do Trades.' His Own Filings Report Ten — Including Nvidia, Bought Nine Days Earlier, Before Anyone Knew About Its $12.9 Billion AI Deal.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:49:04 +0000

On August 27, 2026, John McGuire sat down with ABC13 in Lynchburg. His Democratic opponent, Tom Perriello, had accused him of insider trading. McGuire wanted an apology before he would agree to a debate.

Here is what he said:

"I don't even do trades."

Nine days earlier, on August 18, between $1,001 and $15,000 of Nvidia stock had been bought in the retirement account McGuire discloses for his spouse.

He disclosed that purchase in early September, in a filing with the Clerk of the House. The next day, Nvidia confirmed it was buying the AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — the second-largest acquisition in the company's history, after the $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets.

The timeline

The order matters, so let's lay it out plainly.

August 18, 2026 — Nvidia stock is bought in the account McGuire discloses.
The weekend before August 26 — Business Insider reports that Hugging Face is drawing takeover interest. This is the first the public hears of it.
August 26 — The Information reports Nvidia has agreed to the deal. TechCrunch picks it up that night.
August 27 — McGuire tells ABC13, "I don't even do trades."
September 2 — Nvidia signs the definitive agreement, per its own filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
September 3 — Nvidia announces the $12.9 billion purchase publicly.

The purchase came before any of it was public. Not by a day. By four days — and by eight before Nvidia was named as the buyer.

We are not saying he broke the law

We said this the last time we wrote about McGuire's trades, and it is still true. There is no evidence he traded on information the public didn't have. The purchase was disclosed. Buying Nvidia in August 2026 was, frankly, what half the country was doing.

The problem is not the trade. The problem is the sentence.

"I don't even do trades" is not a defense, a spin, or a difference of opinion. It is a claim about a documented fact, and the documents are filed under his own name with the House of Representatives.

Ten trades, eight companies

The Augusta Free Press has been going through McGuire's disclosures all summer, and Nvidia is not an isolated entry. The filings he has signed since June show:

Dell — sold on June 4, 2026.
Meta — bought on June 4, 2026.
SpaceX — bought on June 15, 2026, three days after the company went public.
BlackRock — sold on July 7, July 10 and July 14, 2026.
Applied Materials — bought on July 15, 2026.
Palo Alto Networks — sold on July 31, 2026.
Apple — sold on August 18, 2026, the same day as the Nvidia purchase.

That is seven different companies in under three months, and Nvidia makes eight. Every one of them is marked "SP" on the form — the spouse — in a Merrill Lynch retirement or brokerage account that McGuire is required by law to report and does report, over his own signature. According to Quiver Quantitative, his net worth has risen by roughly $390,000 since he announced his run for Virginia's 5th District in 2024.

A person who does not do trades does not file ten of them.

The committees make it worse

McGuire sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, including its subcommittees dealing with cybersecurity, information technology and military affairs. He also sits on House Armed Services.

Those are the panels that write and review the federal technology and defense policy that Nvidia, SpaceX and Palo Alto Networks all live inside. Nvidia's chips are the subject of export-control fights, federal AI procurement, and national-security reviews that run straight through the committees he serves on.

Nobody outside the room can tell what he knew or when. That is exactly the point. It is why ethics groups keep saying members should not own individual stocks in industries they oversee, and why we have now counted 45 Republicans on this site who couldn't even file their trades on time.

McGuire filed his on time. He just told a television audience they didn't exist.

The debate he won't have

The whole exchange happened because McGuire is refusing to debate Tom Perriello until Perriello apologizes for raising the trades.

"Like I said, if he wants to publicly apologize for telling the people of the Fifth that I did insider trading, we'll have that discussion."

So the condition McGuire has set for debating his opponent is an apology for describing his stock trading — which he then denied doing, while his own filings said otherwise.

Voters in Virginia's 5th District are not getting a debate. They are getting a demand for an apology, built on a statement that isn't true.

What the filings show

Nvidia stock was bought in the account McGuire discloses on August 18, 2026, about a week before the public learned Nvidia was buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Nine days after that purchase, he told a Lynchburg television station "I don't even do trades," while his own House filings recorded ten trades across eight companies since June — including stock in firms regulated by the committees he sits on. He is refusing to debate his opponent until his opponent apologizes for bringing it up.

Source

Chris Graham, John McGuire bought NVIDIA stock before NVIDIA made a $12.9 billion AI deal, Augusta Free Press (September 5, 2026). Photo: Payllik/Adobe Stock and The Old Major/Shutterstock.
Chris Graham, John McGuire fights back at insider trading jab: 'I don't even do trades', Augusta Free Press (August 28, 2026).

John James Says His Data Center Priority Is 'Frankly Local Control.' He Voted Three Times in Committee to Ban States and Towns From Regulating AI for a Decade.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:48:15 +0000

John James, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, has built his data center message on one idea. He said it at a gubernatorial debate in early July:

"My priority is frankly local control, protecting our water, protecting and preventing pollution, making sure that electricity bills do not go up... We absolutely cannot have an additional data center until we protect the people and communities."

He said a version of it again on CBS's Face the Nation days before the Michigan Advance published its findings: "My position is we need to have a plan to protect our communities. Until we do, then we have to make sure that we have local control."

In Congress, he voted for a provision that would have taken local control away — for ten years, from every state and town in America — three times in committee, and a fourth time as part of the bill on the House floor.

The provision

The Michigan Advance went back through the votes. In May 2025, James voted for the House version of H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill. Buried inside it was this:

"no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce"

Ten years. No state law, no county ordinance, no township rule that singled these facilities out. The bill's own definition of an artificial intelligence system is "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — a data center, in other words. A Michigan community that wanted limits on one would have had nowhere to go.

James did not just vote for the overall bill and let the fine print slide past. He sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the language was written, and he voted for that specific moratorium three times:

Twice to advance it out of committee.
Once against an amendment that would have stripped it out of the bill.

Someone handed him the chance to delete it, and he voted no.

He was told exactly what it would do

This was not an obscure provision whose effects only became clear later. The National Conference of State Legislatures — a bipartisan group representing state legislatures of both parties — wrote to the Energy and Commerce Committee warning against it.

The ban, its CEO Tim Storey wrote, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders," and would "severely limit the ability of states and localities to make decisions regarding the siting and operation of these large-scale projects, raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

Rising ratepayer costs. Zoning stripped. That is the list James now campaigns on protecting Michigan from. He was warned it was the list, and he voted for it anyway — three times in committee.

The moratorium did not survive into the final law. That is not a defense of the votes; it is a description of what happened to the provision after he cast them.

What his campaign said when asked

The Advance put the votes to James's campaign. Spokesperson Alyvia Bailey's answer:

"John James voted for H.R. 1 to deliver historic tax relief to working families across the country. His approach to data centers has been clear: no new data centers until we protect our people."

The Advance reports that Bailey did not directly address the questions about the moratorium votes.

That is the whole answer. He voted for the bill for a different reason, and his current position is his current position.

Michigan is not confused about where it stands

An EPIC-MRA survey taken August 22 through 28 found 73% of Michigan respondents opposed the federal tax breaks and policies designed to speed up data center development.

Meanwhile the head of James's party is on the other side of that. In a Truth Social post on Monday, August 31, Trump said the country should "let Data Reign," and that communities that push back "want to end up being backwards and poor." James has aligned himself closely with Trump and took his endorsement in the primary.

So James is running as the local-control candidate against a president who just called the people asking for local control backwards and poor — with a voting record that matches the president rather than the campaign.

Michigan Republicans keep discovering this issue late

James is the second Michigan Republican we have caught running as a data center skeptic after voting for the AI moratorium.

Tom Barrett's ad says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers. The vote in that ad is from 2015 and was about a single building in Grand Rapids; since then he voted for the tax breaks that handed six AI companies $83 billion, backed the same ten-year state-regulation ban, and took money from Musk, Thiel, and the corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.

James has his own version of the money problem. He took nearly $50,000 from DTE, Consumers Energy's parent company and their employees while both utilities were asking regulators to raise rates on Michigan families — the same electric bills he now promises to hold down.

He is not alone nationally either: three out of four Americans now oppose a data center near their home, and a run of Republicans who spent the last year helping the build-out along have recently discovered concerns.

What the record shows

John James is campaigning for governor of Michigan on local control over data centers. In May 2025 he voted for a budget bill containing a ten-year ban on any state or local government regulating AI systems, and as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee he voted for that specific ban three more times — including against an amendment to remove it. A bipartisan group representing state legislatures had warned Congress in writing that the provision would raise ratepayer costs and override local zoning. His campaign, asked about those votes, did not address them.

Source

Katherine Dailey, "As James pushes local control on data centers, past congressional votes sought to limit just that", Michigan Advance, September 2, 2026. Photo by Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance.

Michael Whatley Says Grocery, Gas and Housing Prices Are All Down and 'There Is No Inflation.' Groceries Cost 2.4% More at the End of 2025 Than at the Start.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:45:28 +0000

Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee for Senate in North Carolina, has been telling voters that the cost of living has gone down.

Here is the sentence, from a clip his opponent is now running in an ad: "Grocery prices are down, gasoline prices are down, housing prices are down, inflation is down."

Here is another, from a podcast: "There is no inflation."

Neither of those is true. And when his campaign answered the ad in the Washington Post, it did not walk the claim back. It doubled down.

What his campaign told the Post

The Post's Dan Merica reported on the North Carolina Senate race on September 1, 2026. Whatley's campaign spokesperson defended the claim:

"Prices were down considerably in 2025 from the record-setting inflation caused by Joe Biden's reckless spending policies endorsed by Roy Cooper."

The Post checked it. Its conclusion, in plain words: "That point is not entirely correct: Inflation was lower in 2025 than the highs in 2022, but prices did not fall."

That distinction is the whole thing, and it is the one Whatley keeps collapsing. Slower inflation means prices are climbing more slowly. It does not mean prices came down. A grocery bill that goes up 2% instead of 8% is still a grocery bill that went up.

The government's own numbers

You do not have to take the Post's word for it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Consumer Price Index every month, and it is a level, not a rate — you can look at where prices sat in December 2024 and where they sat in December 2025.

	Dec. 2024	Dec. 2025	Change
All items	315.6	324.1	up 2.7%
Groceries (food at home)	308.4	315.7	up 2.4%

Prices did not go down in 2025. They went up, and groceries — the first thing on Whatley's list — went up right alongside everything else.

They have kept going up since. By July 2026 the all-items index had reached 333.9, another 3% higher than where it ended 2025.

So when Whatley says "grocery prices are down," the answer is not a matter of opinion or framing. The federal statistic he is describing moved the other way.

"There is no inflation"

The second claim is worse, because it is not even a spin on a real number. If prices rose 2.7% in 2025 and roughly 3% again in the first seven months of 2026, there is inflation. It is simply lower than the 2022 peak.

Whatley's argument requires North Carolinians to accept that their own grocery receipts are wrong. Voters generally know what they paid last year.

This is the campaign's central fight, and he picked the wrong side of it

Affordability is the issue in the North Carolina Senate race. Both campaigns say so. Roy Cooper is running an ad on it, and the clip in it is Whatley's own voice saying prices are down.

There is a reason that clip is effective, and it is not clever editing. Whatley volunteered a claim that every shopper in the state can check against their own receipts, and it is wrong.

It is also not the first time his cost-of-living message has run into his own record. He and his wife own between $163,000 and $445,000 in Duke Energy stock while Duke seeks a residential rate increase in North Carolina — meaning the power bill going up is, for him, partly income. And his $1.5 million ad about driving a truck in a flannel shirt ran while his campaign committees were spending $136,000 on private jets.

What the record shows

Michael Whatley has said on camera that grocery, gasoline and housing prices are all down and that "there is no inflation." His campaign repeated the claim to the Washington Post on September 1, 2026, saying prices "were down considerably in 2025." Federal price data says the opposite: overall prices rose 2.7% across 2025, groceries rose 2.4%, and prices have risen roughly another 3% since. He is asking North Carolinians to believe a cost-of-living claim their own receipts disprove.

Source

Dan Merica, The Washington Post, September 1, 2026, "Why this popular Dem is running like he is behind" (republished by Jewish World Review). Price data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Super PAC Backing Michael Whatley Told a Grieving Father His Ad Was About Gun Violence. It Was an Attack Ad That Falsely Blames Roy Cooper for His Son's Murder.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:10:51 +0000

Shemar Hayes was 23 years old and playing college football when he was murdered in Charlotte in March 2024. His father, Ronald Hayes, has spent the two and a half years since trying to turn that into something — he wrote a book about it, and he talks publicly about gun violence.

A video crew asked him to tell that story on camera. He agreed. He says he was told it was an independent group making an ad about gun violence.

It was not. It was a political attack ad against Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat Michael Whatley is running for.

"I have already been swindled into an ad that was about politics, which I don't want to be about," Hayes told NC Newsline on Monday.

The ad has been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube. It is part of a $17 million advertising campaign against Cooper, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC aligned with Senate Republican leadership, working to put Whatley in the Senate.

The claim at the center of the ad is false

The ad implies that Cooper let Shemar Hayes' killer out of prison early, as part of a COVID-era legal settlement.

Tyzavian Smith, the man convicted of killing Shemar, was 18 years old at the time of the murder. He was not in prison. He had no prior adult record. There was no early release, because there was nothing to be released from.

That is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis. The ad's premise requires a man to have been let out of prison who had never been in one.

The father found out by watching television

Hayes said he called the ad's makers after he saw it.

"Once I saw the commercial, I called [the ad makers] back and I asked them again, and they stated again that they are independent. I told them that I felt that this was deceiving, it was conniving and it was sneaky how they used me and my family to get out their word."

He is a Democrat who says he has voted for Cooper in the past, and he now gets stopped in the street by people asking whether he's a Democrat or a Republican.

"The commercial looks as if I'm trying to sway North Carolinians from voting the way that they want to vote, and that wasn't my agenda. I wanted to let the community know about gun violence and about my son being murdered."

The crew filmed him talking about his book, Living Through Loss: A Journey of Healing and Hope, and took photographs of it. None of that made the ad.

"That was not their agenda. They could care less than a damn about me and my books."

Gun violence survivors' advocates want it off the air

North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, a statewide group, called on television stations across the state to pull the ad.

"Losing a child is every parent's worst nightmare," said executive director Becky Ceartas. "Every survivor of gun violence deserves to be treated with respect and care if they decide to relive the most horrible day of their lives by telling you their story."

"Our organization works with survivors of gun violence throughout the state, and we have witnessed how hard and traumatic it is for them to tell their stories. It requires an immense amount of trust and faith that the person you are sharing this deeply personal experience with will treat it with dignity and respect."

There is a bitter irony in what Hayes actually believes. He blames his son's death on gun laws he considers too weak to keep firearms away from people who will use them to hurt someone. The campaign that used his grief spent $17 million attacking Cooper, and put none of it toward the thing Hayes actually wanted to talk about.

This is not the only killing the same super PAC has used against Cooper

The Senate Leadership Fund has done a version of this more than once, for the same candidate, in the same race.

In August, Popular Information found that a site calling itself "The North Carolinian" — presenting as "Independent Journalism for North Carolina" — is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund. Its unbylined article, published on August 21 — sixteen days after the Hayes ad went up — blamed Cooper for a killing, and never mentioned that the killing happened in South Carolina.

Two stories, two grieving families, two claims that fall apart the moment anyone checks the facts. Both paid for by the same super PAC, both aimed at the same opponent, both in service of the same candidate.

Whatley knows exactly how this works

Whatley is not a political novice who happens to be the accidental beneficiary of outside spending he doesn't understand. He ran the Republican National Committee — as recently as July 2025 he was giving interviews as "RNC chair", laying out the party's strategy for these midterms — and before that he chaired the North Carolina Republican Party. Running the party's political operation was his job.

NC Newsline could not reach the Senate Leadership Fund for comment.

Hayes, for his part, says he plans to talk to Cooper — to tell him the harm wasn't intended.

"I want to turn this tragedy into something beautiful that can possibly make a change. I want my son's name to be able to be used to make this change."

What the record shows

A super PAC spending $17 million to elect Michael Whatley to the Senate filmed a father talking about his murdered son, told him the ad was about gun violence, and used it to blame Roy Cooper for the killing. The man convicted of that murder was 18, had never been in prison, and had no prior adult record, so the ad's central claim cannot be true. The ad has been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube. It is not the only killing the same super PAC has attached to Cooper on Whatley's behalf, and another one happened in a different state.

Sources

NC father at center of US Senate ad says he was 'swindled' by GOP political operatives — NC Newsline, August 31, 2026, by Greg Childress.

Robin Adams Cheeley: 'Deceitful, conniving and sneaky.' Anti-Cooper ad featuring grieving Black father twists facts — Greensboro News & Record, August 26, 2026.

Josh Brecheen Told His Town Hall the Tax Foundation Says They're '$1,700 Per Year Better Off.' The Tax Foundation Says Trump's Tariffs Cost the Average Household $840 a Year.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:50:24 +0000

On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, Josh Brecheen stood in front of constituents at the Donald W. Reynolds Community Center in Poteau, Oklahoma, and defended President Trump's tariffs.

Brecheen acknowledged that some people say the tariffs are hurting them. He said he had checked.

"I went to the National Tax Foundation and asked them if the tariff I'm paying per tax filers or the boost that I got from the tax relief — you know, you were going to have a 22 percent tax increase if not for the One Big Beautiful Bill, what they did in 2017 wasn't permanent. He said you are $1,700 per year better off."

That is the whole answer to "the tariffs are hurting me": a number, attributed to a think tank, that says you are actually ahead.

Six days before Brecheen said that, the Tax Foundation updated the tracker where it publishes its actual tariff numbers. Here is what it says.

The Tax Foundation's own numbers

The Tax Foundation's running analysis of Trump's tariffs, last updated August 20, 2026, estimates that the tariffs amount to an average tax increase of:

$1,000 per U.S. household in 2025
$840 per U.S. household in 2026

The same analysis estimates the tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.4 percent and cut hours worked by the equivalent of 345,000 full-time jobs.

Now go looking for the number Brecheen says he was handed. The Tax Foundation keeps the two sides of that ledger apart. Its Oklahoma estimate for the One Big Beautiful Bill is an average tax cut of $3,106 per filer in 2026 — a gross figure, with no tariff taken out of it. Its tariff estimate is the $840 above. Neither number is $1,700, and neither document nets one against the other. And that is before anyone in Poteau counts a lost job, a higher grocery bill, or a farm input that costs more than it did.

Brecheen presented the $1,700 as the answer after the tariff was accounted for — "the tariff I'm paying" versus "the boost that I got," and the boost wins by $1,700. The Tax Foundation's published figures do not support that.

What is actually happening to Oklahoma right now

Four days before that town hall, on August 22, the 50 percent tariffs Trump had ordered in July on about $20 billion of Canadian goods took effect. Canada answered the same morning: Mark Carney said his government would match them "dollar for dollar", with tariffs on U.S. steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper and electronics starting September 8.

Oklahoma's second district is farm and ranch country. Dairy and agricultural equipment are on Carney's list, and Oklahoma producers have already spent a year and a half absorbing the cost of the last round.

Brecheen also told the room, "I don't believe in protectionism for protectionism's sake," and said he believes in tariffs because "what tariffs do is when you don't have subsidies, they keep you onshoring manufacturing." That is the argument. It is a real argument, and reasonable people make it. But it is an argument about a benefit that arrives later, paid for with a cost that arrives now — and the person paying is the family asking why things cost more.

Congress has barely voted on any of it

The most revealing exchange at the town hall was not about the money. Someone asked Brecheen what votes Congress has actually taken on the tariffs.

He could recall one, from last year. "I wasn't with Tom McClintock on that," he said — McClintock being the California Republican who has opposed the tariffs.

Then he said he did not know of any House votes on tariffs coming up.

That is the state of it. The tariffs are a tax increase the Tax Foundation ranks among the 20 largest as a share of GDP since 1940, they were imposed by executive action rather than by Congress, and the member of Congress they elected to write tax law says there is nothing on the schedule. Republicans in the House have used procedural votes to keep tariff resolutions from reaching the floor at all — and Colorado's Gabe Evans toured businesses hurt by tariffs and then cast the 216–214 procedural vote that stopped the House from voting on them.

Brecheen has a habit of this shape. In July he drew a public red line and then voted two days later for the exact thing he had called worthless.

Who in his district is already squeezed

About 694,200 Oklahomans rely on SNAP every month — roughly 16.8 percent of the state, one of the highest rates in the country. A June 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation estimate, cited by the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, put 174,000 Oklahomans at risk of losing SoonerCare coverage under the budget bill Brecheen invoked at that town hall.

These are the households for whom $840 a year is not a rounding error. Brecheen told them a number that made the problem disappear.

What the numbers show

At an August 26 town hall in Poteau, Josh Brecheen acknowledged that some people say tariffs are hurting them, then said the Tax Foundation had told him they were "$1,700 per year better off." The Tax Foundation's published analysis, updated six days earlier, says Trump's tariffs are a tax increase averaging $840 per household in 2026 and $1,000 in 2025, and will cut hours worked by the equivalent of 345,000 full-time jobs. No Tax Foundation figure matches the $1,700: its Oklahoma estimate for the tax law is an average cut of $3,106 per filer in 2026, gross of tariffs, and it nets nothing against the tariff bill. Asked what Congress has voted on tariffs, he named one vote from last year and said he knew of nothing coming.

Source

Brecheen gives support for tariffs, but votes are scarce on tariffs — Tom Firme, Poteau Daily News, August 29, 2026. Photo: Josh Brecheen at the Poteau town hall, August 26, 2026 (Tom Firme / Poteau Daily News).

Three Houses, Three Mortgages Each Calling Itself His Primary Home. Ken Paxton Blames a Texas Rule Scrapped in 2015.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:47:05 +0000

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, Fox News anchor Jacqui Heinrich asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about something that has followed him through his Senate campaign: the fifteen homes he owns, worth roughly $9 million, on an attorney general's salary of $153,000 a year — and specifically about the three of them whose mortgages each say the house is his primary residence.

Heinrich did not soften the question. She pointed out that the Trump administration went after New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook over "exactly the same substance," and asked Paxton whether the reporting on him was wrong.

Paxton had an answer ready. It was the state constitution's fault.

"So in Texas, the constitution used to require that you — if you're a statewide office holder — you have to move to the capital. So I used to live in Collin County. When I became attorney general, I bought a condo in Austin so that I could live in the capital pursuant to what the constitution required."

He went on: his wife became a state senator, they bought a house, "that became my primary residence because it was required by the constitution." Then the constitution was changed, and he moved back to Collin County. "So, this idea that somehow that's fraudulent, they, of course, aren't following Texas law."

"Thank you for clearing that up," Heinrich said.

The rule he is blaming was repealed in his first year as attorney general

Texas did once require certain statewide officeholders to live in the capital. That requirement, on the books since 1876, was wiped out by Proposition 3, which Texas voters approved on November 3, 2015. The attorney general was one of the offices freed by it.

Ken Paxton was sworn in as attorney general in January 2015. The rule he says forced him into an Austin condo and then an Austin house was gone before his first year in office was over — nearly eleven years ago.

And when it went away, his office said he wasn't going anywhere. Three weeks after the vote, the Texas Tribune asked every affected officeholder whether they would leave Austin. Paxton's spokeswoman answered: "The attorney general has no plans to move." She said he kept residences in both Austin and McKinney, and that Travis County — Austin — was his "home county."

So the sequence Paxton described on Fox News, in which the constitution pushed him into Austin and its repeal pulled him back to Collin County, does not match what his own office said at the time.

His answer skips the two houses that are actually rented out

Even taken at face value, Paxton's explanation covers only the Austin properties. The Associated Press investigation that produced this story — published in July 2025 by Brian Slodysko — found two more problems that the Texas Constitution has never had an opinion about.

The mortgage on the Paxtons' house in College Station states that the property is for their exclusive use and cannot be rented out, and that renting it would be grounds for terminating the loan. The AP found it has been listed for rent on real estate websites on and off since at least 2022.

Paxton also holds a $1.2 million mortgage on a "5 bedroom luxury cabin" in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. That mortgage also says the property cannot be rented. It is listed on Airbnb and other short-term rental sites.

Broken Bow is in Oklahoma. No reading of the Texas Constitution required Ken Paxton to buy a cabin there, and none of it explains why two mortgages that forbid renting are attached to houses that get rented.

The AP also found that in 2018 the Paxtons simultaneously collected homestead property tax breaks — a benefit a homeowner may claim on only one home — on both the suburban Dallas house and a $1.1 million home in Austin. Travis County appraisal officials said that particular break had transferred to the Paxtons from the home's previous owner for the duration of that year.

Why the primary-residence label is worth money

This is not paperwork pedantry. Lenders charge noticeably lower interest on a mortgage for a house you actually live in than on a second home or an investment property. Legal experts told the AP that the three primary-residence designations will save the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the loans.

Knowingly making a false statement on a mortgage document is a federal and a state crime. Arif Lawji, a veteran Texas real estate attorney, told the AP: "If he filled out lender documents knowing that they were false, then that is a false statement to obtain a mortgage on favorable terms. That would be actionable. He's the chief enforcement officer. You have to be accountable for stuff you do that's wrong."

The chief enforcement officer part matters. Paxton's office is one of the primary agencies in Texas tasked with investigating mortgage fraud. He would be the person a referral went to.

He asked for exactly this scrutiny — of someone else

Heinrich's comparison to Letitia James was not a gotcha; it was the obvious question. The Trump administration has pursued James and Schiff over mortgage paperwork. In June 2025, Paxton weighed in on the James investigation, telling supporters: "I hope that if she's done something wrong, I hope that she's actually held accountable."

The AP noted one difference between them that cuts against Paxton. In 2020, Schiff formally re-designated his Maryland property as a second home. That is the step available to anyone who realizes a mortgage says something no longer true. It is a step, the AP wrote, that Paxton has not taken.

This is also not the first time Paxton's answer to "where do you actually live?" has landed him in trouble. A Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found he appears to have voted six times from a home he no longer lives in — and state law directs the secretary of state to refer a complaint like the one filed against him to his own office if there is reasonable cause to suspect a crime. This is a man who has built a career on prosecuting other people over voting paperwork.

The bottom line

Asked on Fox News why three of his fifteen homes each carry a mortgage saying it is his primary residence, Ken Paxton said the Texas Constitution required a statewide officeholder to live in Austin. Texas voters repealed that requirement on November 3, 2015 — his first year as attorney general — and three weeks later his own spokeswoman said he had no plans to move and called Travis County his home county. His explanation also says nothing about the College Station house or the $1.2 million Oklahoma cabin, both carrying mortgages that forbid renting, both of which the Associated Press found listed for rent. The office that investigates mortgage fraud in Texas is his.

Source

Ken Paxton Tells Fox News Anchor He Was 'Just Following Texas Law' When He Claimed 3 Primary Residences — Jennifer Bowers Bahney, Mediaite, August 30, 2026. The underlying investigation is by Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Vivek Ramaswamy's Campaign Bio Credits the Public School That Shaped Him. It Won't Name the $19,500-a-Year Private School Where He Spent All Four Years of High School.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:17:17 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy says he supports taking Ohio's school choice programs "to the next level," routing more public money to private schools. He is also running on a public-school origin story. His campaign biography carries the second one. It mentions two schools, and calls only one of them public.

Two sentences, one missing word

Ramaswamy's official campaign biography credits a teacher at his "Greater Cincinnati public school" with challenging him to "aim higher and believe in what he could achieve."

The very next sentence skips ahead: "That spark stayed with him, graduating as valedictorian from his Cincinnati high school."

"His Cincinnati high school" was St. Xavier — a private, all-male Jesuit school where Ramaswamy spent grades nine through twelve and graduated valedictorian in 2003. Tuition today is $19,500 a year.

So the biography identifies one school as public, and strips the other of both its name and the fact that it was private. The public school is part of the origin story. Four years at a $19,500-a-year private school becomes three vague words.

He knows how to tell the full version, because he does it sometimes

This isn't a case of a candidate never mentioning it. Ramaswamy names St. Xavier freely — in the rooms where naming it costs nothing.

2021, C-SPAN: "I went to public school till 8th grade, went to a Catholic high school and graduated in 2003."
April 2025, The State of Ohio: "I'm a product of public education in Princeton schools through eighth grade. I went to Saint X for high school."
A May interview with Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham, where he walked through the whole history — Evendale Elementary, Robert E. Lucas Intermediate, Princeton Junior High — and then named St. Xavier.
His 2026 Republican primary victory speech, where he named it again.

Now compare that to the version he uses when the point he's making is about public education:

June 23, 2026, in an interview with Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel about the opportunities Ohio gave his family: "I went to public schools through eighth grade." Then straight to his parents, his business career, the American Dream. No St. Xavier.
2023, ABC News, discussing affirmative action and the racial diversity of the schools he attended: "I went to public schools through eighth grade." Again, no St. Xavier.

Every one of those statements is technically true. They stop in exactly the same place each time — at the end of the part that helps.

Why the omitted school matters to the policy

Ohio already runs EdChoice scholarships on a sliding scale, reduced by family income — but any family qualifies regardless of income, including families already paying private-school tuition. Ramaswamy has cheered the program, and says he supports taking Ohio's school choice programs "to the next level."

St. Xavier is one of the private schools that can take that money. The school tells prospective families that eligible students can use Ohio EdChoice scholarships there, with high-school awards of up to $8,408.

Put those together. A candidate is asking Ohio voters to route more public money into private schools. The private school he personally attended is one that would receive it. And his campaign biography declines to name that school while going out of its way to call the other one public.

Ohio Republicans have been running versions of this play for a while. Stacy Garrity, campaigning for governor in Pennsylvania, dismissed court-ordered public school funding as money with "nothing to show for it" while pushing vouchers. Marsha Blackburn's voucher push in Tennessee arrived with $3 million behind it from a single billionaire.

The same edit, made before

Trimming the inconvenient half of his own upbringing is a habit with Ramaswamy.

At the first Republican presidential debate in 2023, he told a national audience: "My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago." Later in the same debate: "I didn't grow up in money."

His own book, Nation of Victims, describes the household he actually grew up in: "We were a comfortably middle-class family with two incomes." His father was a General Electric engineer who later became a patent attorney. His mother was a physician — a geriatric psychiatrist. Fox News scrutinized the "no money" framing during his presidential run.

The pattern is identical in shape. His parents did arrive with little; he did attend public schools. Neither statement is false. Both are used to leave an impression the rest of the facts would ruin.

We have documented Ramaswamy refusing to state his positions and calling for shutting down universities. This is a smaller thing, and it is the same instinct: control which true facts the voter gets.

What the record shows

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio on taking its school choice programs "to the next level." His campaign biography credits a teacher at his "Greater Cincinnati public school" and, in the next sentence, reduces the four years he spent at St. Xavier — a private Jesuit school charging $19,500 a year, eligible to receive up to $8,408 per student in the very voucher money he wants expanded — to "his Cincinnati high school." He has named the school plainly in a C-SPAN interview, on Ohio public television, on Cincinnati radio and in his own primary victory speech. He leaves it out when he is talking about public education.

Source

Ramaswamy sells a public school origin story. His campaign bio airbrushes out years of elite private school. — Bonnie Lucas, TiffinOhio.net, August 29, 2026. Photo: TiffinOhio.net.

Kansas Doctors Told Roger Marshall His Vote Would Cost Their Patients Care. The OB/GYN Kansas Sent to the Senate Said 'There Are No Medicaid Cuts' and Called It a Lie.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:08:47 +0000

Roger Marshall is a doctor. He practiced medicine in Great Bend, Kansas, for more than 25 years as an OB/GYN and delivered more than 5,000 babies, and it is the first thing his own Senate biography tells you about him.

On Thursday, Kansas doctors held a press conference to say that a law he voted for is going to take care away from their patients. His answer the next day, on camera, was that they are lying.

"There are no Medicaid cuts"

At a virtual press conference, Dr. Christa Balanoff, a Kansas surgeon, laid the coming Medicaid losses directly at Marshall's feet.

"When the Medicaid cuts that Senator Marshall supported take full effect next year, more Kansans will go without care. Senator Marshall should be working to fix the problem. A physician in the United States Senate should be leading the effort to expand access to care, not taking a victory lap on policies that make coverage harder to afford, and harder to keep."

The next day, KSNT's Capitol Bureau asked Marshall to respond. He did not soften it, qualify it, or point to a program he was trying to protect.

"There are no Medicaid cuts," Marshall said. "We spent more money on Medicaid this year than last year, we're going to spend more money next year than we are this year as well. There are not any Medicaid cuts. I think that's a lie and you can look at the numbers to see that we're increasing spending every year on Medicaid."

The numbers he says to look at

So look at them.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the 2025 budget law will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion over ten years. KFF, allocating those CBO estimates state by state, puts Kansas's share at about $2.85 billion in lost federal Medicaid money over the decade — 8% of what Kansas would otherwise have received.

Independent modeling done for Kansas specifically lands in the same place. Manatt Health, commissioned by the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund and the REACH Healthcare Foundation, ran the final version of the law through Kansas's KanCare program and projected the state would lose $3.9 billion in Medicaid funding over ten years, with $2.7 billion of that coming out of Kansas hospitals. The analysts noted their own estimates are understated, because the model doesn't capture everything the law changes.

Marshall's defense is that total Medicaid spending goes up each year. That is true and beside the point. Spending was already scheduled to rise as costs and enrollment rose; the law cuts roughly a trillion dollars off that path. Saying there is no cut because the line still slopes upward is the same argument as saying a pay cut isn't a pay cut as long as you got a smaller raise than you were promised.

Sheena Schmidt, a senior analyst at the non-partisan Kansas Health Institute, described where the money actually comes from:

"The Medicaid cuts in H.R 1 are going to be primarily related to what providers or hospitals receive to increase access to care across the state of Kansas."

And she said when Kansans will feel it: some changes start around the beginning of 2027, but "the bulk of the changes that I think will result in the most funding loss will start to happen beginning in 2028."

That timing matters. Marshall voted for the law in 2025. The hospitals lose the money starting after the 2026 election.

He has said the quiet part before

This is not the first time Marshall has told Kansans that the people worried about losing coverage have it wrong.

Back in 2017, as a freshman congressman helping lead the Republican effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, he told the health care news site STAT that he did not believe Medicaid had helped people: "There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves."

In December 2025 he told Newsmax he expects the enhanced ACA subsidies to expire, shrugging that "some people's premiums are going to go up some."

The pattern is consistent: when Kansans stand to lose coverage, Marshall's position is that the loss is either imaginary, or their own fault, or not that big.

Other Republicans are running the same play

Marshall isn't alone in this. When a hospital CEO in his district warned that the budget bill would cost him his intensive care unit, Rick Allen said he was "dead wrong". Jeff Hurd signed a written promise not to cut Medicaid and then voted for the cuts twice. Michael Guest spent his August recess promoting $206 million for Mississippi's rural hospitals after voting for the law projected to take billions out of the state's Medicaid funding.

The difference in Marshall's case is the credential. When a surgeon tells a senator the cuts will hurt patients, most senators have to argue policy. Marshall is a physician, and he used that standing to tell Kansas health care workers that what they are describing is a lie.

What the record shows

Roger Marshall voted for a law that the Congressional Budget Office scores as cutting more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years — about $2.85 billion of it in Kansas, 8% of the federal money the state would otherwise get. Independent modeling for Kansas puts the total loss at $3.9 billion, with $2.7 billion coming out of the state's hospitals, and the non-partisan Kansas Health Institute says the biggest losses hit starting in 2028. When Kansas doctors said so publicly, Marshall — a physician himself — told a reporter there are no Medicaid cuts and that saying there are is a lie.

Source

"There are no Medicaid cuts": Sen. Marshall responds to criticism about Medicaid changes passed in H.R 1 — KSNT 27 News Capitol Bureau, August 28, 2026, by Brayden Day. Photo: KSNT.

Mike Rogers Told Donors He Saw Osama bin Laden's Body 'With My Own Eyes.' He Was at Home in Washington, and What He Saw Was a Photograph.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:06:29 +0000

Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011, by American special operators who raided his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small number of people were physically present. A slightly larger group followed it in real time from the White House Situation Room — President Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and a handful of senior officials.

Mike Rogers (MI) was in neither place. He was at his home in Washington, D.C., where — as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — he got a phone call about the raid from CIA Director Leon Panetta. He told reporters as much the next day, and he tells the same story in a campaign video.

Fifteen years later, he is running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, and he sent supporters a fundraising email that says something different.

What the email said

The email walks through his biography — Army officer, FBI special agent, "working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security." Then comes a line the email puts in bold:

"I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."

The email was first reported by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now at Straight Arrow News, who posted a screenshot of it. The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what he meant.

There is a plain explanation, and Rogers has known it since 2011. He was one of a small number of U.S. officials shown a photograph of bin Laden's body.

He knows the difference, because he argued about it in public

This is not a case of a candidate misremembering a blurry moment from a long time ago. In the days after the raid, Rogers was one of the loudest voices in Congress arguing that the government should not release the images — and the whole reason his opinion carried weight was that he had seen one.

Speaking as Intelligence Committee chairman on May 4, 2011, he told CBS News that releasing the photos would be a mistake:

"To treat Osama bin Laden like he's some trophy of the United States for public gloating I think is wrong."

He added that it would make it harder for "an average soldier, a sergeant in the Army in Ghazni province in Afghanistan" to win cooperation from villagers, and that "there's no gain by doing it. The conspiracy theorists aren't going to believe the photos ... they're going to be doubting Thomases forever."

In a statement at the time he made the same case: the risks of release outweighed the benefits, conspiracy theorists would say the photos were doctored anyway, and publishing them risked inflaming opinion in the Middle East.

Photos. Images. Doctored. That was his own vocabulary, in public, on the record, in the same week. The man writing fundraising emails in 2026 about seeing a body "with my own eyes" is the same man who in 2011 spent that week talking to reporters about a picture.

A pattern, not a slip

Rogers has built this Senate campaign on his national security résumé, and he has stretched it before — repeatedly describing his work funding intelligence agencies as a congressman in terms that made his role sound larger than it was.

He has leaned on it hardest since Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, won the Democratic nomination. On the night El-Sayed won, Rogers said: "I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11."

The second half of that sentence was false, and PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire. El-Sayed never said it. A New York Times factcheck traced the line to a Twitch streamer who endorsed him — a statement that streamer had retracted and apologized for seven years before the endorsement. El-Sayed, for his part, wrote in 2021 about watching "terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith," and called the attacks devastating.

We have documented the same habit on Iran, where Rogers spent two decades insisting Iran was building a nuclear weapon while U.S. intelligence kept concluding it wasn't — and Michigan drivers are paying for the war he wanted.

The through-line is that Rogers keeps making his national security record bigger than the record. Sometimes that means inflating what he did. Sometimes it means inventing what his opponent said. Here it means telling donors he saw the body himself when he was at home in Washington waiting on a phone call.

What the record shows

Mike Rogers (MI) told donors in a fundraising email, in bold type, that he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body with his own eyes. He was not in Abbottabad and not in the Situation Room. He was at home in Washington, and learned about the raid in a phone call from the CIA director. What he actually saw, days later, was a photograph — the same photograph he spent that week publicly arguing the government should not release, in his own words, because conspiracy theorists "aren't going to believe the photos." His campaign would not explain the discrepancy.

Source

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says he saw Bin Laden's body with his 'own eyes'. He did not — Robert Mackey, The Guardian, August 29, 2026. Photo: Paul Sancya / AP.

Mike Rogers Spent 20 Years Saying Iran Was Building a Nuclear Weapon. U.S. Intelligence Kept Saying It Wasn't.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:34:49 +0000

For twenty years, Mike Rogers (MI) has been telling Americans that Iran was building a nuclear bomb. For most of those twenty years, America's own spy agencies were telling Congress it wasn't.

On August 27, 2026, Jacobin published a review of Rogers's entire public record on Iran, going back to when George W. Bush was still president. It is not a flattering picture. Michigan's Republican candidate for U.S. Senate spent two decades hyping a threat the intelligence community kept knocking down, attacking every attempt at a deal, and pushing for exactly the war we are now in — the one currently showing up in Michigan gas tanks.

He is not shy about it. Since Trump launched the war six months ago, Rogers has called Iran "an imminent threat to our country," said the war was "absolutely right" and "a win-win-win for us," and told the Detroit News that "we are better off today than we were when it started."

Last summer, after Trump's first round of strikes, Rogers told Jewish Insider: "I couldn't have supported [the operation] more. I was for all of this when it wasn't very cool to be for all of this."

That part is true. Here is what the record actually shows.

2006: the report the U.N. called "outrageous and dishonest"

Rogers sat on the House intelligence committee whose staff produced a report in August 2006 declaring that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons." It said Iran could have a bomb "sometime in the beginning to the middle of the next decade," and that Iran "probably" had a biological weapons program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. inspectors who were actually on the ground in Iran — wrote to the committee to knock it down. The agency objected to the report's claim that Iran "is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade," saying Iran had produced material "only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms." And it called the report's suggestion that an inspector had been removed for telling the truth about Iran "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion."

Rogers did not back down much. Asked about the weapons-grade claim, he told CNN the report was "very clear": "It says that we don't believe that they've gotten there. But the point of that whole section is, they are trying to enrich uranium to weapons grade." On the accusation that U.N. inspectors were covering for Tehran, he stood by it flat out.

So the inspectors said the report was wrong. Rogers said the report was fine.

2007: America's own spy agencies said the opposite

Fifteen months after that report, every U.S. intelligence agency put out a National Intelligence Estimate saying the reverse. They concluded with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — years before his committee's report told the country it was racing for a bomb.

That assessment has held up. In early 2011, the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the intelligence community did not know if Iran eventually would decide to build nuclear weapons, and that it was not clear Tehran would decide to do so. And in March 2025, Trump's own Director of National Intelligence testified that "the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003."

Rogers said it anyway. By Jacobin's count, he publicly claimed Iran had, was pursuing, or was close to a nuclear weapon dozens of times between 2006 and 2026 — on the intelligence committee, later as its chairman, and then for another decade on television. In 2012, a year after that briefing, he told CNN "we know that [Iran is] aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapon program." In 2013 he told CNN "everybody agrees" Iran was doing it. In 2023 he claimed Iran had "helped plan" the October 7 attack, a claim Israel's own military said it had no evidence for.

And last summer, he told Jewish Insider that on the day Trump attacked, Iran "had all three components" of a nuclear weapon — "they just didn't have them assembled." His own party's DNI had testified to the opposite three months earlier.

He took Netanyahu's side against two American presidents

In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran a public pressure campaign to get President Obama to attack Iran, and threatened to go it alone. Obama refused and pushed for talks instead. Rogers spent that year criticizing him for it.

"I believe that if this is going to work we have to have a credible military option," Rogers told CNN in March 2012. "We can't say all options on the table, oh, by the way, Israel, we don't want you to do anything. That's not very credible."

He went further than that. He said on NPR that the United States and Israel have a defense pact under which "we will defend them if attacked under any circumstances." There is no such treaty. Rogers, the sitting chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was telling the public America was legally bound to fight a war Israel might start.

Three years later, when Netanyahu came to Congress to attack Obama's Iran deal in a speech many in both countries saw as raw foreign interference, Rogers cowrote a Politico op-ed defending it. He accused Obama of trying "to hobble the prime minister," and called Netanyahu's speech "the act of a true and courageous friend."

The terrorist group he helped get off the terror list

There is one more thing in Rogers's Iran file. In 2012, a Guardian investigation into the campaign to delist the Mojahedin-e-Khalq — a group of Iranian exiles pushing for regime change, and at that time a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — found that Rogers "has also received the backing of individuals and groups that support the unbanning of the MEK," and that he "has been among the strongest supporters in Congress of delisting the group, sponsoring resolutions and pressing other members of Congress to support the cause."

The MEK was on that list because it had been responsible for the deaths of Americans. Killing Americans is the exact thing Rogers has spent twenty years saying justifies going to war with Iran.

He fought the deal, then changed his story about it

When Obama reached the interim agreement that became the Iran nuclear deal, Rogers went after it hard. "We've taken away the one thing that brought them to the table," he said on CNN in November 2013. "We have just rewarded very bad and dangerous behavior." He kept it up on Twitter for years after leaving Congress, and he demanded Iran be allowed zero enrichment — a condition Iran hawks have long used to make a deal impossible.

While the deal was in force, Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium shrank to almost nothing. Trump pulled out in 2018, and it grew back. According to Jacobin's review, Rogers claimed on CNN the following summer that he had opposed that unilateral withdrawal. But in a September 2022 op-ed in The Hill, he wrote that the deal was "an agreement that should never have been made in the first place and withdrawing from it made sense, even if the way in which it was handled left much to be desired." His objection, in other words, was the manner — never the result.

The result is the part Michiganders should care about. Pulling out of that deal is what let Iran's uranium stockpile build back up, and that buildup is the thing Rogers now cites to justify the war.

Rogers is not the only Republican whose Iran positions move with whoever is in the White House — Arkansas's senator spent a decade attacking an Iran deal and went quiet the moment Trump signed one. And he is running in a race where an outside group is weighing tens of millions of dollars to put him in the Senate.

What it is costing Michigan right now

This is not a foreign policy debate anymore. It is a bill.

In late March, with the war in its fourth week, Michigan drivers were paying $3.92 a gallon, the highest since August 2023 and up $1.07 in a single month. By late June the state average was about $4.11 a gallon, roughly a third higher than a year earlier — and that same outlet, adding up Pentagon spending estimates, consumer energy costs and Michigan's share of the population, estimated the state's slice of the war's economic hit could top $2 billion. A mid-Michigan farmer said nitrogen fertilizer was "up 40 percent" since the war began.

When an attendee at a March campaign stop raised gas prices with him, Rogers waved it off: "We're gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil." He went on: "You'll get your oil, because we're going to pump our oil right here in America, and we got plenty."

Talking to a local reporter earlier this year, he was a little more honest. The war, he allowed, "brought some costs that are hard to live with, you know, when you're trying to pay your higher electric rate that's gone up the last eight years." Jacobin reports he said it with a chuckle.

Meanwhile Congress still has not voted on any of this. Trump's team argues it does not have to, and House Republicans have been happy to agree. Rogers has said he "doesn't mind" the idea of Congress formally authorizing the war so Trump can keep it going. He is asking Michigan to send him to the chamber that would cast that vote.

What the record shows

For twenty years Mike Rogers (MI) pushed for war with Iran on a claim U.S. intelligence contradicted in 2007 and again in March 2025 — that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. U.N. inspectors called part of his committee's 2006 case "outrageous and dishonest," and he stood by it. He spent years attacking the deal that shrank Iran's uranium stockpile to nothing, and later wrote that withdrawing from it "made sense." The war he wanted started in February. Michigan gas ran about $4.11 a gallon by late June, roughly a third more than a year earlier, one estimate says the state's share of the cost could top $2 billion, and when an attendee raised the prices with Rogers he said, "We're gonna be fine."

Source

Mike Rogers Pushed for War With Iran for Two Decades — Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, August 27, 2026. Photo: Rich Clement / Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Ryan Mackenzie Has Claimed a Private-Sector Career Since 2012. The Only Thing Behind It Is a License He Held for Two Years While Working in Politics.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:15:02 +0000

Ryan Mackenzie represents Pennsylvania's 7th District, in the Lehigh Valley. He won the seat in 2024 by one percentage point, and The Guardian calls it a battleground again this November.

On August 27, 2026, The Guardian reported that the private-sector career Mackenzie has been citing for fourteen years appears to consist of a license he held for two years and may never have used.

The problem is not that a license lapsed. It is what the license was being used to claim. Mackenzie has presented himself to voters as a man with a working life outside politics, and the only thing behind that is a credential valid for two years — years he spent drawing a paycheck from a political party committee and a federal agency. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the House Democrats' campaign arm and not a neutral observer here, told The Guardian he had "fabricated a career ... that never existed."

The license

Mackenzie got a Pennsylvania real estate salesperson license in 2006. It expired in 2008 and he did not renew it.

During those same years, he was working for the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania and for the U.S. Department of Labor.

His campaign would not tell The Guardian whether he ever used the license, or made a single sale.

What he was claiming

The claim was never just that he once held a license. It was private-sector experience — a working life outside government. That is what his 2012 campaign told Patch.com he had: "private sector experience as a real estate salesperson."

What sits behind it is a license valid for two years, during which his two employers were a party committee and a federal department, and a campaign that will not say he ever used it.

The DCCC's spokesperson, Eli Cousin, told The Guardian that Mackenzie and his allies "embellished his resume and fabricated a career in real estate that never existed," and called him "a career politician who has seemingly never worked a day in his life outside of politics." That is a partisan opponent talking. What is not in dispute is the paper trail: two years of license, and no answer about whether it was ever used.

Where the claim appears

Mackenzie's spokesperson, Arnaud Armstrong, brushed the whole thing off as "passing mentions, mostly from third parties."

Here is where those mentions appear:

His LinkedIn profile, which says he "was a real estate salesperson licensed in PA."
His Pennsylvania state house biography, which lists "licensed real estate sales" under his professional career history.
His congressional webpage biography, which says he "worked on a number of political campaigns and earned his real estate sales license before entering public service."
His own 2012 campaign for state representative, which told Patch.com he had "private sector experience as a real estate salesperson."
Mackenzie himself, in 2012, telling a Pennsylvania news outlet: "I was an employee at the US Department of Labor and also I used to hold my real estate salesperson's license."

All five of those are Mackenzie or his own campaign. The two genuine third parties make the claim bigger, not smaller. A 2025 Harvard Business School event listing said he would "reflect on his career path from the real estate sector to public service." A 2025 voter guide from Boeing's political action committee said flatly: "Mackenzie worked in real estate."

This is the second time

In 2024 it came out that Mackenzie's 2020 Tinder profile listed his age as 29 when he was 37. When more than 100 women in his own district asked him to own it, he told a national TV audience that most of them were Democrat operatives. A reporter checked. They weren't. His office did not deny the age claim then, and did not respond to The Guardian's questions about it now, or about reports that a staffer scrubbed the story from his Wikipedia page.

The words he uses for his opponent

Mackenzie is running against Bob Brooks, who spent twenty years as a firefighter in Bethlehem and led the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, which represents more than 8,000 firefighters and first responders across the state.

Mackenzie has called Brooks a "fraud," a "conman," a "lobbyist," a "dumpster fire candidate" and a "union boss." His campaign manager said Brooks has "all the hallmarks of a common criminal."

At the Carbon County Republican summer picnic on August 25, 2026, Mackenzie went after Brooks for being a labor leader — arguing he would tilt things toward union members rather than keep a level playing field. Union members in the district pushed back in The Keystone.

"He, to me, seems like he's more for the middle-class worker. I wouldn't say he's beholden to unions in any way, shape, or form."

— Shawn Smith, who works at the Mack Trucks plant

Ernest Williams, a shop steward at AmeriCold Logistics, said workers would see in Brooks "somebody who understands their issues, who understands what they're dealing with, what they're going through."

Mackenzie's own record with the workers in his district is on file. In June 2026 he stood with Trump at the Macungie Mack Trucks plant and praised him — at the same plant that had announced layoffs because of Trump's tariffs.

And Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby, has given his campaign $7,500 this cycle — with business before the Education and Workforce Committee he sits on, where he chairs the Workforce Protections Subcommittee.

What the record shows

Ryan Mackenzie has cited a real estate career in his state house bio, his congressional bio, his LinkedIn, a 2012 campaign statement and his own words to a reporter. The license behind all of it was active from 2006 to 2008, years he spent working for the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Department of Labor, and his campaign will not say whether he ever made a sale. What voters were sold was a career outside politics. What is documented is a two-year credential and a lifetime inside it. This is the second documented case of him overstating a fact about himself, after the eight years he took off his age on a dating profile. He is calling his opponent — a twenty-year firefighter — a fraud and a conman.

Source

Michael Sainato, The Guardian: "In a Pennsylvania congressional swing district, a Republican incumbent faces allegations over embellishing résumé" (August 27, 2026). Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images. Union response reporting by Sean Kitchen, The Keystone.

Andy Biggs Says He Never Commented on the January 6 Pardons. Two Months Before Them, His Account Demanded Trump Pardon 'All J6 Political Prisoners.'

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:12:31 +0000

Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. On Tuesday, August 25, 2026, he and Governor Katie Hobbs both took questions at the Arizona Police Association's public safety forum at Arizona State University's downtown Phoenix campus. Forum rules kept them apart — Biggs answered first and left the room before Hobbs spoke, and the two never shared the stage.

Hobbs used her turn to go after his record on January 6. Biggs answered afterward, in a press scrum, and what he denied was the last of her charges — that he had gone to a Washington, D.C. jail to greet pardoned rioters.

"Well, what she said is that I stood outside a DC jail to greet J-6ers who'd received a pardon. That's what she said. That is an absolute lie. It is a fabrication. It's about as nutty as I've heard from her this campaign."

Asked whether he had supported the pardons Trump issued to people convicted over the Capitol attack, he said:

"I never made comment on the pardon. Some of them deserved it, some of them didn't, but that was his decision to make, not mine."

Arizona Public Media went and looked. On November 26, 2024, Biggs' own X account posted: "President Trump must pardon all J6 political prisoners."

That is a comment on the pardons. It is also a demand for them, made nearly two months before they happened, using the phrase Hobbs said he used.

What Hobbs actually accused him of

Hobbs' charge at the forum had three parts: that Biggs voted against Congressional Gold Medals for the Capitol Police, that he has called January 6 defendants "political prisoners," and that he was outside a Washington, D.C. jail greeting their supporters when the pardons came down.

The first is a matter of public record, and it happened twice. In March 2021 Biggs was one of just 12 House Republicans to vote against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the officers who defended the Capitol. In June 2021 he was one of 21.

The second is the November 2024 post above.

The third is the one he actually denied, and it is genuinely contested. NBC4 Washington reported that "Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Lauren Boebert and Rep. Chip Roy were outside the jail" on January 21, 2025 as pardoned defendants were released, and KJZZ reported that NBC News said the same thing live that day. But Arizona Public Media, which called it a possible case of mistaken identity, points out that The New York Times described the same scene without him: "Three Republican members of Congress stopped by — Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Chip Roy of Texas and Lauren Boebert of Colorado." AZPM found no photograph of Biggs there either, in the video NBC posted or on Getty.

So Biggs aimed "an absolute lie" and "a fabrication" at the jail claim alone. The two charges he did not call a lie are documented in his own voting record and on his own X account. On the one he did deny, two NBC outlets put him there and the Times put someone else.

The rest of the record he's denying

The Gold Medal votes are not the whole of it. Biggs' record on the 2020 election and the attack that followed is one of the longest of anyone on this site.

He was one of the 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged texts with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about overturning the election result, before and after January 6.
Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander said Biggs was one of "the four guys who came up with a January 6 event", along with Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks.
Arizona's Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers testified that Biggs called him on the morning of January 6, 2021 asking him to back decertifying Arizona's electors. Bowers refused.
He voted to reject Biden's win, objecting to the electors of both Arizona and Pennsylvania.
He voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob, and against creating an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the attack.
When the January 6 committee subpoenaed him, he refused to comply. In December 2022 it referred him to the House Ethics Committee for sanctions, one of four Republicans it named.

Why a police forum is the wrong room for this

Hobbs' line at the forum was short:

"I will never stand with folks who assault officers. I will stand with officers every single day."

Biggs had just spent that forum in front of a room of police chiefs and officers in a race for governor, and told reporters on his way out that Hobbs' account of his January 6 record was a fabrication. He had voted twice against giving those officers a medal, and once against creating the commission that would have examined what happened to them.

He is not the only Republican on this year's ballot with a January 6 pardon problem. In North Carolina, Michael Whatley defended the January 6 pardons — including the ones that freed men later charged with child sex crimes.

What the record shows

Andy Biggs told reporters at a public safety forum that Katie Hobbs' claim he went to the D.C. jail was "an absolute lie," and that he had never commented on Trump's pardons. His X account had demanded, on November 26, 2024, that Trump "pardon all J6 political prisoners." He voted twice against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the police who defended the Capitol, in a group of 12 and then a group of 21. Two NBC outlets reported he was outside the D.C. jail as pardoned defendants were released; The New York Times named a different Arizona Republican.

Source

Arizona Public Media: "Biggs denies support for pardoning J6ers, but the evidence is complicated" (August 27, 2026), and KTAR: "Katie Hobbs, Andy Biggs clash over Jan. 6 at police forum" (August 26, 2026), and KJZZ: "Hobbs, Biggs spar at a public safety forum over his record on Jan. 6 rioters" (August 26, 2026).

Twelve Republicans We Track Told Voters High Prices Aren't Really a Problem. One Said to Pick a Different Protein.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:08:19 +0000

Groceries cost more. Gas costs about a dollar more per gallon than it did when Trump took office. Only 16 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.

This week NOTUS published a column by Dana Milbank collecting what Republican candidates have been telling voters about all of this. The answer, over and over, was some version of: you're wrong, or you're whining, or you should try harder.

Twelve of the Republicans he quoted on the cost of living have report cards on this site. Here is what each of them said.

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

Cindy Hyde-Smith is a senator from Mississippi. She is also a cattle rancher and sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee — which is to say, beef prices are her actual subject.

In February 2026 a host at the Gulf Coast station WLOX asked her what Republicans were doing about the cost of living, and specifically about the price of beef. Her answer, as the Mississippi Free Press reported, was: "You have so many proteins to choose from." She added that all commodities go through peaks and valleys.

The advice to people who could no longer afford meat was to buy different meat.

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

Derrick Van Orden represents western Wisconsin. On Fox Business in July 2026 he said the quiet part out loud: the Democrats invented the word.

Not that affordability is improving. That it isn't a real thing.

"Earn more"

Jon Husted was appointed to Ohio's Senate seat at the start of 2025. His advice to Ohioans struggling with affordability was two words: earn more.

In a January 16 interview with WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, discussing a bill he wrote to let states impose stricter work requirements on public assistance, Husted said, "Our work ethic is broken." He has also said that people living in poverty are "not very experienced at navigating the real world."

This week the Ohio Capital Journal reported that his wife held Intel stock while he worked to push federal money to the company.

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

Michael Whatley is the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina. In June 2025, when he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, he told a New York State Conservative Party dinner: "Gasoline prices are down 40 percent. Grocery prices are down … and inflation is dramatically down. Everything [Trump] said he was going to do, he has done."

Gas averaged $4.12 a gallon in April and sits around there now — roughly a dollar above where it was when Trump took office. The 40 percent claim was not true when he made it, either. In June 2025 the national average for regular gasoline was about $3.15 a gallon — slightly more than the $3.11 it cost the week Trump was sworn in.

Whatley is the same candidate who holds Duke Energy stock while the utility pursues a rate increase on North Carolina customers.

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

Ashley Hinson is the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa. In an opinion column in January she wrote that "Under President Trump's leadership, America is back on the right track," that "Gas prices are at five-year lows," and that paychecks "finally go further at the grocery store."

By the time Milbank was writing, gas was about a dollar higher than at the start of the administration. Hinson's own money helps explain the enthusiasm: she has taken $64,500 from oil and gas companies and voted six times to keep the Iran war going — the war that pushed pump prices up.

The rest of the list

Mike Lawler, of New York's Hudson Valley, told NewsNation last year that the long-term benefits of Trump's tariffs were worth "a little bit of short-term pain." On CNN in July he said eliminating the threat from Iran was worth it — meaning worth the higher gas prices.
Mike Rogers (MI) is the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan. At a town hall in Metamora in September 2025 he mocked what he expected to hear "when the Democrats start getting at us" over prices: "Oh my gosh, coffee went up."
Zach Nunn represents central Iowa. In Politico in May he said inflation driven by the Iran war was "overhyped, candidly, by the media."
David Valadao represents California's Central Valley. He told a local station in March that "to pretend that Iran is the first reason why fuel prices are going up is false."
Dan Sullivan is a senator from Alaska. In February he still thought things were going in the "right direction." In May he sent out a fundraising email asking for donations in part to "pay for gas as we visit isolated rural areas of Alaska."
Mike Collins is the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia. As recently as June he still believed "the economy is moving."
Jim Desmond is a Republican running for the House in California. In a March interview on Real America's Voice he said of high oil prices: "No pain, no gain."

What they have in common

None of these are gaffes in the ordinary sense. A gaffe is a slip. This is a position, and it is remarkably consistent across twelve people in ten states: the prices are fine, or the pain is worth it, or the problem is the person complaining.

Nine of the twelve currently serve in Congress, and their voting records are part of why the prices are what they are. Every one of the twelve has a record on this site, and the pattern is the same — the Iran war that moved gas prices, the tariffs that moved grocery prices, the Medicaid and food-assistance cuts that moved what families have left over.

There is one honest note in the whole collection, and it is Dan Sullivan's fundraising email. When he was talking to voters in February, things were headed in the right direction. When he was asking his donors for money in May, gas was expensive enough to itemize.

The short version

Twelve Republicans with report cards on this site — three sitting senators, four House members, four Senate nominees and a House candidate — publicly told voters that the cost-of-living crisis was overhyped, invented, worth it, or their own fault. A senator on the Agriculture Committee told people priced out of beef to choose another protein. A Senate nominee said gasoline was down 40 percent at a moment when the pump price had not fallen at all, and it is about a dollar a gallon higher now than when this administration started. And a senator who said things were going in the right direction in February asked donors three months later to help cover his gas.

Source

Dana Milbank, NOTUS: "The Republican Midterm Message on Inflation? Stop Whining!". Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP.

Fourteen Republican Senators We Track Confirmed RFK Jr. After He Said His Samoa Trip Had 'Nothing to Do With Vaccines.' He Had Already Written the Prime Minister Asking to Study Samoa's MMR Vaccines.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:08:16 +0000

In late January 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat in front of two Senate committees and needed Republican votes to become health secretary. One of the questions senators kept coming back to was about a trip.

In 2019, Kennedy — then the chairman of an anti-vaccine nonprofit — flew to Samoa. Months later, the island nation had a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them children under five. Senators wanted to know what he had been doing there.

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

Asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, he said: "I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient." The next day Sen. Ed Markey asked the same thing. "My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines," Kennedy said.

On August 27, 2026, The Associated Press and The Guardian published a letter that Kennedy wrote to Samoa's prime minister on January 20, 2019 — before the trip, on the letterhead of his anti-vaccine group. In it he asked to send his team to Samoa to run a "detailed health informatics assessment" of "what happened with your MMR vaccines." He used the word vaccine or vaccination eight times.

The prime minister wrote back a month later and welcomed the visit, saying Samoa would benefit from an "independent health assessment of our MMR Vaccines."

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

The backstory matters, because the letter fits into it exactly.

In July 2018, two Samoan children died after being given an MMR shot that had been mixed incorrectly. Two nurses were criminally charged and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Samoa stopped all vaccinations for ten months while it sorted it out. Vaccination rates collapsed.

Kennedy's organization, Children's Health Defense, started contacting the Samoan government during that shutdown. Kennedy's letter told the prime minister he suspected the deaths might have come from problems with the vaccine itself — with particular batches — and offered to have his team check.

By the time Kennedy actually arrived in May and June of 2019, Samoa's own top health official had already announced the answer: human error, not the vaccine. Kennedy went anyway, and while he was there he met with anti-vaccine activists. Months later, with vaccination rates still dangerously low, measles broke out and swept the country.

Kennedy's department told the AP the visit "was unrelated to vaccines" and called any suggestion that he lied "outright defamatory." Kennedy was not under oath at his confirmation hearings. Knowingly giving materially false testimony to Congress is a crime anyway, sworn or not, though the AP notes it is rarely prosecuted.

The fourteen votes

On February 13, 2025, the Senate confirmed Kennedy 52 to 48. Every yes vote was a Republican. Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to vote no.

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, now running for governor
Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
Susan Collins of Maine
Tom Cotton of Arkansas
Bill Hagerty of Tennessee
Jon Husted of Ohio
Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi
Roger Marshall of Kansas
Ashley Moody of Florida
Pete Ricketts of Nebraska
Jim Risch of Idaho
Mike Rounds of South Dakota
Dan Sullivan of Alaska
Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, now running for governor

Thirteen of these fourteen voted again this month, at 4:17 in the morning, to make Trump's personal lawyer the attorney general. Collins was the one who did not. Confirmation votes are where a senator's private assurances meet the public record, and the assurances keep losing.

What Susan Collins was promised

Two days before the vote, Collins told Maine Public why she was voting yes. Kennedy had assured her the polio vaccine works and that he would not restrict access to it. He had promised to back research on a Lyme disease vaccine. He had said he would revisit the administration's cuts to research funding that Maine labs depend on. And Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana doctor who chairs the Senate health committee, had assured her that the committee would hold regular oversight hearings on whatever Kennedy did.

"Based on all of that, I reached the decision to vote for him," Collins said.

She also explained the underlying rule she was following: "In general, I give deference to presidents to build their own team, whether they are Democratic presidents or Republican presidents." She has voted against roughly ten of nearly 200 nominees in her career. More than 180 Maine doctors had signed a national letter, endorsed by about 22,000 physicians, calling Kennedy "actively dangerous" to public health. She voted for him anyway.

That is the same senator the Bangor Daily News found had cast 200 deciding votes in her Senate career. Maine Democrats count 19 of them as deciding votes for Trump nominees, and none against one.

What happened to the promises

Cassidy's stated reason for voting yes was that Kennedy had pledged to leave the government's vaccine advisory committee "without changes." Once in office, Kennedy removed all 17 members of that committee and named his own advisers.

By August of 2025, the Trump administration had fired the CDC director three weeks into the job, after she reportedly refused to sign off on vaccine changes. Collins said she was "alarmed." She said she did not agree with Kennedy's approach to the vaccine committee, which she said "is likely to weaken the independent and professional recommendations of the committee." Then she added: "But, I do believe that he has some valid points about ultra-processed foods and their impact on obesity and the health of many Americans."

Her proposed remedy was oversight. Cassidy's was oversight. Neither of them has a vote to take back.

By June of 2026, Cassidy was on CBS saying flatly that the commitments made to him had been violated, and accusing Kennedy of building public health "upon a foundation of lies."

Roger Marshall celebrated instead. Marshall is a physician, and on the day of the vote he put out a statement calling it "a great day for America, particularly for our nation's children" and thanking the "Make America Healthy Again movement" for pushing Kennedy "across the finish line." He is also the senator who spread COVID misinformation for years and is still saying it.

The MMR vaccine is now the target

Here is what the Samoa letter is worth reading next to.

On August 10, 2026, with Kennedy standing beside him, President Trump signed an executive order telling federal officials to draw up plans, within 90 days, for splitting combination childhood shots into separate injections — the MMR shot specifically — and for spreading vaccine appointments further apart.

There are no separate measles, mumps or rubella vaccines sold in the United States. Every version the FDA has approved is a combination shot, and has been since the 1970s. Breaking the MMR apart would turn two doctor visits into six, and would require drug companies to spend years and tens of millions of dollars on new studies and new factories to make shots nobody has asked for.

"To date, there has been no published scientific evidence that shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots," Merck said.

Dr. Anna Durbin of Johns Hopkins put the consequence plainly: "It's going to be less convenient, more expensive and you're going to have fewer people getting vaccinated."

Meanwhile, the CDC's own count says the United States has confirmed 2,777 measles cases in 2026 as of August 20 — more than the 2,289 recorded in all of 2025, with four months of the year still to run. Ninety-four percent of this year's cases are in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown. Kindergarten MMR coverage has slid from 95.2 percent in the 2019–20 school year to 92.4 percent in 2025–26, which the CDC estimates leaves about 280,000 kindergartners unprotected.

This is the same secretary who headlined a May fundraiser in San Antonio for a Republican congressional candidate, six weeks after a judge ruled his vaccine rollbacks unlawful. And it is the same political movement that produced a nominee for governor of Florida who, asked directly whether parents should vaccinate their children against measles, answered "No".

Who would have to investigate

Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, says he will press Republicans to refer the matter to the Justice Department, and that he will pursue it if Democrats take the Senate this fall. "There are consequences for lying to Congress," he said.

Attorneys told the AP that lawmakers could use Kennedy's statements as the basis for hearings, an investigation, or an impeachment inquiry. The AP also noted the obvious: none of that is likely to happen in a Republican Congress aligned with the administration.

That is not an abstract institutional problem. It is a decision that belongs to specific people. Collins sits on the health committee that was promised regular oversight hearings on exactly this. Capito, Cotton, Hagerty, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Moody, Ricketts, Risch, Rounds and Sullivan all still hold the seats they voted from, and any of them can ask for a hearing.

What the record shows

Fourteen Republican senators we track voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he told Congress his 2019 Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. A letter he wrote before that trip, obtained by the AP and the Guardian, asked Samoa's prime minister to let his team study the country's MMR vaccines and used the word vaccine or vaccination eight times. Once in office he removed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee whose survival was the stated condition of Bill Cassidy's vote, and this month he stood beside the president as Trump ordered planning to break the MMR shot into three. There have been 2,777 confirmed measles cases in the United States so far this year, more than in all of 2025, and the AP reports that an investigation is unlikely in a Republican Congress.

Source

Ali Swenson, "Exclusive: RFK Jr. said a Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. New documents refute that," The Associated Press, August 27, 2026. Photo: Misiona Simo / Samoa Observer via AP.

Senate Republicans' Super PAC Runs a Fake North Carolina News Site. It Blamed Roy Cooper for a Murder That Happened in South Carolina.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:40:01 +0000

There is a website called The North Carolinian. Across the top it says "Independent Journalism for North Carolina."

It is not independent journalism, and it is not really a news site. Popular Information reports that it is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC that exists to win Senate seats for the party.

It is not the first one. On August 6, 2026, Judd Legum's Popular Information exposed a whole network of sites like it, and we covered that exposé when it broke: at least six of them in states with competitive Senate races, run by One Nation — the dark money group that has handed the Senate Leadership Fund over $70 million this cycle. Four were built around Republicans we track. North Carolina was not among them.

On August 27, Legum reported what the North Carolina site is now being used for.

The article

On August 21, The North Carolinian published a piece with no byline: "Families Demand Accountability for Repeat Offenders as North Carolina Prison Releases Face New Scrutiny."

It is built around the killing of 22-year-old Logan Federico. It dwells on the record of the man accused of murdering her, Alexander Dickey — "at least 48 crimes across 14 separate occasions, including 31 felony charges," in the article's own words. Then it connects her death to a decision by former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper's administration to release thousands of inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cooper is the Democratic candidate for North Carolina's open U.S. Senate seat. The implication is that a Democrat's policy got a young woman killed.

Here is what the article leaves out.

Logan Federico was killed in South Carolina. Dickey is a South Carolina man. Every one of his prior crimes was committed in South Carolina. He had been incarcerated in South Carolina, and he was released from the Lexington County Detention Center — a South Carolina jail — by a South Carolina judge.

Roy Cooper was never governor of South Carolina. He had no authority over that jail, that judge, or that release. No North Carolina policy, and nothing Cooper did, had anything to do with it.

The article never mentions South Carolina at all.

Why they needed a fake newspaper

This is the part worth sitting with. A political committee can say almost anything in an ad. What it cannot do is make the claim look like it came from somewhere other than a political committee.

That's what The North Carolinian is for. An unbylined article on a site branded as independent local journalism reads like reporting. Popular Information's assessment is blunt: this is a smear published in a form no legitimate outlet would print, dressed up to look like it was.

And it isn't sitting there passively. The Senate Leadership Fund is paying to put the fake article in front of North Carolina residents through ads on Meta's platforms.

The television ad does the same trick

The online push runs alongside an SLF television ad, and the ad uses the same technique in a more precise way.

It shows an image of a news report about the murder from WCNC — a real television station, in Charlotte, North Carolina — carrying a "Charlotte, N.C." dateline. A viewer sees a North Carolina newsroom reporting a North Carolina story.

The ad obscures the part of the WCNC piece that says the crime took place in South Carolina.

That is not a framing choice or an unfortunate omission. Someone looked at a real news report, identified the sentence that would collapse the entire argument, and covered it up before putting it on television.

Where Michael Whatley comes into it

The Senate Leadership Fund is spending this money to elect Michael Whatley, Cooper's Republican opponent. And Logan Federico's father has appeared with Whatley on the campaign trail.

Whatley did not build the website, and there is no reporting that he directed any of this. But he is the sole beneficiary, and he is not a bystander to the story the ads tell — he has campaigned alongside the grieving parent whose daughter's death is being misattributed to his opponent.

He is also uniquely positioned to know how this works. Before running for Senate he was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Asked what he thinks of a super PAC supporting him running a counterfeit North Carolina newspaper to blame Cooper for a South Carolina crime, he could answer at any time.

It fits the pattern around his campaign, which we have documented before: police called on reporters who came to ask him questions, and a "truck ad" biography that his committees' own spending reports contradict.

What we know

The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC of Senate Republicans, secretly controls a website called The North Carolinian that presents itself as "Independent Journalism for North Carolina." On August 21, 2026, that site published an unbylined article blaming former Gov. Roy Cooper's pandemic-era prison releases for the murder of 22-year-old Logan Federico — a killing committed in South Carolina, by a South Carolina man released from a South Carolina jail by a South Carolina judge. The article never mentions South Carolina. SLF is paying to promote it to North Carolina voters on Meta, and its companion TV ad displays a real Charlotte station's report with the line identifying South Carolina obscured. SLF is spending that money to elect Michael Whatley.

Source

Judd Legum, "UPDATE: Senate GOP's fake news website falsely links Democrat to murder", Popular Information, August 27, 2026.

An Ad for Jon Husted Used a Dead Ohio Family's Photo to Warn About 'Dangerous Illegals.' The Driver Charged in the Crash Is a U.S. Citizen.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:29:46 +0000

Lynnea Soposki was a veterinarian in Dublin, Ohio. Her husband Luke brewed beer. They kept bees and sold the honey at markets. On April 11, 2026, they and their one-year-old son Logan were killed in a multi-vehicle crash on an interstate in Delaware County.

Four months later, their faces were in a television ad for a U.S. Senate campaign, and their family did not know it was coming.

On August 26, 2026, the Columbus Dispatch's Haley BeMiller reported that the Soposki relatives were asking for the ad to be taken down. The spot was paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to boost Jon Husted, Ohio's appointed U.S. senator, against former Senator Sherrod Brown.

"This is not a statement about immigration policy, and we are not making one for any party or candidate. It is a statement about our family. Lynnea and Luke were not political symbols. ... Our grief is not raw material for a campaign, and their images are not public property to repurpose for anyone's advantage."

The ad used footage from the crash site. It also used a photograph of the three of them, taken by a family friend. The family said they were never asked, and would not have agreed.

The claim the ad makes

The ad says Brown's position on immigration let "dangerous illegals" into the country, and then cuts to the crash and to the man charged in it. It closes on the line: "Because of him, Ohioans paid the price."

There is a problem with that, and it is not a matter of interpretation.

The driver charged in the crash is Modou F. Ngom of Columbus. Authorities said he was driving a tractor trailer that rear-ended the Soposkis' vehicle and pushed it across multiple lanes into other cars. He was charged with multiple counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and vehicular assault.

Ngom's attorney told a Delaware County court in April that he came to the United States from Mauritania 20 years ago and is now a U.S. citizen. Ohio officials later shared information about him with Immigration and Customs Enforcement after learning he had obtained citizenship under an alternate identity — a serious allegation in its own right, and a completely different one from the one the ad makes.

The ad's whole argument is that a border policy let a foreign national in and that person killed an Ohio family. The person it shows is an American citizen who has lived here for decades.

The connection to Brown doesn't exist either

FactCheck.org examined the ad and found nothing behind it.

Asked to justify the claim, an NRSC spokesperson pointed to Brown's votes on immigration bills, saying he voted for "open border policies" and "to protect illegal aliens like Ngom from deportation." FactCheck.org found no evidence of any tie between those votes and this crash. According to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Ngom entered the country sometime in the 1990s, and it is not even clear how or where he entered. Almost every vote the NRSC pointed to came after that — a 2001 amendment, a 2019 bill, a 2021 budget amendment, and Brown's opposition to Trump's border wall, which came after Ngom had reportedly obtained citizenship. The one vote that predates his arrival, against a 1996 immigration bill, made no difference to what became law: the legislation was folded into an omnibus appropriations bill that Brown then voted for. And with so few details about his immigration, FactCheck.org wrote, it is "difficult to say how passing or not passing the legislation would've had an impact on Ngom."

So the ad blames a senator's votes for an event that happened decades after the man in question arrived, involving a man who is a citizen.

What Husted did about it

The family said they did not want to go public. They wrote to the campaign first and heard nothing back. Only after getting no response did they release a statement.

A Husted spokesperson said the campaign forwarded the family's letter to the NRSC.

That is the whole response. Not "we're sorry." Not "we'll ask them to stop." The ad exists to elect him, and when the people whose dead child is in it asked him to make it stop, the answer was that the letter had been passed along to someone else.

The NRSC did not apologize either. Spokesperson Nick Puglia said: "For 32 years, radical leftist Sherrod Brown backed open border policies that cost Ohioans their lives, without ever apologizing. Our ad campaigns will continue to hold Sherrod Brown accountable."

A source familiar with the ad traffic told the Dispatch the spot had run its full cycle and been replaced with new content. It was still posted on the committee's YouTube page.

Update, August 30: he says his campaign had nothing to do with it. The ad says his campaign authorized it.

Three days after the family went public, Husted addressed the ad for the first time. He was at a Republican rally in Hilliard, in suburban Columbus, on August 29, and he told reporters that his campaign had asked the NRSC to pull it.

"Our campaign had nothing to do with it. As soon as we learned that the family didn't like the ad, we told the people who put it up to take it down. I'm with them on this. They've suffered enough. They don't need to suffer any more."

There is a problem with the first sentence.

The Columbus Dispatch's Haley BeMiller reported that an additional, unlisted version of the clip — one that has been viewed more than 5.5 million times — carries a disclosure stating the ad was funded by the NRSC and authorized by Husted's campaign.

That wording is not decoration. The FEC requires a political ad to say who paid for it, and the two available answers mean opposite things. An ad a candidate did not authorize has to say so out loud — the disclaimer must "state that the communication was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee." That is the line on every genuinely independent expenditure. This clip does not carry it. It carries the other kind, the one that names the campaign as having authorized the spot.

A campaign that authorizes an ad is not a campaign that had nothing to do with it.

Three more things from that reporting:

The ad is still up. It has been replaced on air with new content, but as of August 30 it remained posted on the NRSC's YouTube page — the same thing the family was told a week earlier, when a source said the spot had simply run its cycle.
Nobody from the campaign has called the family. Lynnea Soposki's brother, Jesse Mallen, said no campaign official had reached out to him or to other relatives since the issue became public. "I'm disappointed that this wasn't just the default behavior," he said. "Why did it need this much attention to do what was obvious to so many was the right thing?"
Husted still defended the ad's claim. Presented with the FactCheck.org finding that there is no evidence connecting Brown's votes to this crash, he said the broader point still stands, arguing that some undocumented immigrants have improperly obtained commercial driver's licenses. "When you do not follow the rule of law, when you let millions of people into this country illegally, it endangers everyone," he said. "Including on our highways."

The man charged in this crash is a U.S. citizen who came to the United States in the 1990s. He is not currently facing immigration-related charges, the New York Times reported.

So the position, as of August 30, is this: the ad was authorized by his campaign, he says his campaign had nothing to do with it, the ad is still online, the family has not heard from him, and the claim at the center of it — the one a fact-checker found unsupported — is one he is still making in his own voice.

This is a pattern, not a slip

This is the second time this month a fact-checker has taken apart an immigration claim about Sherrod Brown made on Jon Husted's behalf. In the first, Husted told Fox News that Brown backed "Social Security payments for illegals" — a claim PolitiFact rated False after his campaign pointed to three votes, none of which would have handed a federal benefit to anyone in the country illegally.

Both times, the pattern is the same: pick an emotionally loaded immigration frame, attach Brown's name to it, and let the fact-check arrive after the claim has already been made.

The difference this time is who paid for it. In this one, the cost fell on a family in Dublin who lost a veterinarian, a brewer and a one-year-old, and then had to write a public letter asking a sitting senator to stop putting their child's photograph on television.

What we know

An NRSC ad supporting Jon Husted used crash-site footage and a family friend's photograph of Lynnea, Luke and 1-year-old Logan Soposki without their relatives' consent, to claim Sherrod Brown's immigration votes let "dangerous illegals" into the country. The man charged in the crash, Modou F. Ngom, is a U.S. citizen; his attorney told a Delaware County court he came from Mauritania 20 years ago, while state officials put his entry sometime in the 1990s. FactCheck.org found no evidence connecting Brown's votes to the crash. The family wrote to Husted's campaign, got no reply, and went public; his campaign's response was to forward the letter to the NRSC. The ad was still on the committee's YouTube page.

Source

Haley BeMiller, "'Our grief is not raw material' for Husted Senate ad, family says in call for removal", Columbus Dispatch / Newark Advocate, August 26, 2026.

Andy Biggs Deleted the 'Defending Life' Page From His Campaign Website. Everything on It Is Still His Record.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:08:32 +0000

If you visited Andy Biggs' congressional campaign website in November 2025, you found a section titled "Defending Life." It carried anti-abortion talking points and boasted about his work to defund Planned Parenthood.

Go to his campaign website today and biggsforcongress.com sends you to his campaign for governor of Arizona. Look under "Issues." There is nothing there about abortion at all.

The Copper Courier's Robert Gundran found the old page in the Wayback Machine and then did the obvious thing: checked whether the record behind it had changed too.

It hadn't.

What was on the page he took down

Biggs has held office in Arizona since 2003 — the state House from 2003 to 2011, the state Senate from 2011 to 2017, and Congress since 2017. Across all of it, on this one subject, he has been consistent.

In the legislature he backed parental consent requirements and limits on insurance coverage for abortion.

In Congress:

He co-sponsored the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act, which would require providers nationwide to perform an ultrasound, make cardiac sounds audible, and describe an embryo's dimensions before a patient could consent to an abortion. A provider who skipped any of it could face civil penalties.
He backed the Life at Conception Act, which would redefine "person" to include a fertilized egg — the zygote and blastocyst stages, before implantation — and extend 14th Amendment protection to every stage of pregnancy. That could produce a national abortion ban by another route. We wrote in July about the five separate times he co-sponsored it, most recently in January 2025.
He voted for a law requiring clinicians to tell patients that a medication abortion could be "reversed" — a claim that is unproven and dangerous.
He repeatedly supported defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides low-income women with annual checkups, cancer screenings and pregnancy care.

None of that came off a website. It is in the bill records and the roll calls.

Arizona voted the other way, and he was asked about it

In 2024 Arizona voters passed Prop 139, writing a constitutional right to abortion into the state constitution — by a margin that, Reproductive Freedom For All's Arizona director says, carried every single legislative district in the state.

The Arizona Capitol Times asked Biggs' campaign whether, as governor, he would support an attempt to repeal Prop 139.

His campaign advisor did not answer the question, and insulted Gov. Katie Hobbs instead.

That is the same maneuver as the website. Not a reversal — a silence.

What a governor can actually do here

Prop 139 limits how far any Arizona governor can go. It does not make the office irrelevant, and the Copper Courier's reporting lays out exactly where the reach still is.

Signing bills the current governor vetoes. In 2025, House Republicans advanced what critics called a backdoor abortion ban: it would require AHCCCS, Arizona's Medicaid program, to bar Medicaid dollars from any provider that performs or "promotes" abortion. A clinic that so much as educated patients about abortion could be blocked from taking Medicaid patients for anything — checkups, cancer screenings, prenatal care. Hobbs vetoed it. A Governor Biggs would not have to.

Amendments nobody sees coming. In 2021, state Sen. Sine Kerr — now Biggs' running mate for lieutenant governor — attached an amendment to HB 2140, a bill about license plate designs, that would have made it a felony for a physician to perform an abortion after detecting a fetal heartbeat. The Senate Appropriations Committee adopted it. The bill was never scheduled for a floor vote and died. The tactic didn't.

Undoing an executive order with a signature. In 2023, Hobbs signed an order moving all abortion-related prosecutions to the Arizona Attorney General's office, taking that power away from county attorneys. Attorney General Kris Mayes has said she will never prosecute abortion. A governor can cancel an executive order on day one.

The courts. Gov. Doug Ducey expanded the Arizona Supreme Court and reshaped the commission that screens judicial nominees. Those judges are still there.

And an unconstitutional law is not a harmless one: opponents have to contend with years of litigation while the law stays in place. Athena Salman, Arizona director for Reproductive Freedom For All, points to a pending challenge over whether nurse practitioners can provide early abortion care — they're trained to, and Arizona law bars it. It was filed at the end of February 2026, and Salman says oral arguments aren't scheduled until May 2027.

The rest of the record he isn't advertising

The Copper Courier notes what else is on Biggs' 23-year ledger: he opposed funding for the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund, voted against making Juneteenth a federal holiday, denies climate change, and personally blocked a bill banning texting while driving for new drivers with learner's permits. He chaired the House Freedom Caucus.

What the record shows

Andy Biggs spent more than two decades building an anti-abortion record — ultrasound mandates, a bill defining personhood from fertilization, votes for medication-abortion "reversal" language, and repeated attempts to defund Planned Parenthood — and boasted about part of it on a page called "Defending Life." That page is gone from his campaign site, and his governor's site says nothing about abortion. Asked directly whether he'd support repealing the constitutional protection Arizona voters passed in 2024, his campaign declined to answer and attacked his opponent instead. The record he removed from the website is the record he would bring to the governor's desk.

Source

Andy Biggs scrubbed abortion from his site, so we checked his record — Robert Gundran, The Copper Courier, August 24, 2026. Photo "Andy Biggs" by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Jon Husted Told Fox News That Sherrod Brown Backed 'Social Security Payments for Illegals.' PolitiFact Rated It False.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:05:04 +0000

On August 4, 2026, Jon Husted went on Fox News and said this about the man trying to take his Senate seat:

Sherrod Brown "supported Social Security payments for illegals, healthcare for illegals and COVID checks for illegals."

On August 25, PolitiFact rated that claim False.

Not "mostly false." Not "needs context." False — as in, the three votes Husted's own campaign pointed to would not have handed a single federal dollar to anyone in the country illegally.

The three votes, one at a time

Husted's team gave PolitiFact three roll calls. Here is what each one actually was.

Social Security, July 19, 2007. Brown voted against an amendment that would have stopped immigrants who were once in the country illegally but had since become legal residents from getting Social Security credit for taxes they had already paid.

Read that again. Nobody in this scenario is here illegally. They paid into the system, they gained legal status, and the question was whether the money they'd already paid counted. Any benefit would be collected only after they were legal residents.

Healthcare, March 23, 2013. Brown voted against an amendment from then-Sen. Jeff Sessions saying immigrants in the U.S. illegally shouldn't get federally subsidized healthcare.

They already couldn't. Federal law already barred people in the country illegally from Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and Affordable Care Act subsidies. The amendment would not have changed who received anything.

COVID checks, March 6, 2021. Brown voted for the American Rescue Plan, which sent $1,400 checks to millions of Americans, and against a Republican amendment to bar checks for anyone "not lawfully present."

The bill already blocked them. It required a valid Social Security number to get a check, which excluded the overwhelming majority of people here illegally. The amendment's backers said they were aiming at a narrower group — some DACA recipients, people brought here as children who have work authorization and Social Security numbers.

That is the whole case. Three votes, none of which did what Husted said they did.

The part Husted left out

Three months after that 2007 Social Security vote, in October 2007, Brown voted in favor of an amendment blocking immigrants from getting Social Security credit for taxes paid while they were in the country illegally.

That is the vote Husted was describing. Brown cast it — on Husted's side.

PolitiFact called this out directly: Husted's assertion "cherry-picked Brown's votes."

There's a second one. The same day as the 2013 healthcare vote, the Senate took up an amendment reaffirming that immigrants here illegally can't receive federal benefits. It passed by voice vote, so no individual names were recorded — but Brown's campaign told PolitiFact he voted for it.

How these votes get manufactured

PolitiFact explained the machinery plainly, and it's worth knowing, because it explains why this ad exists at all:

"Some of the measures he voted on stemmed from a practice both parties engage in: forcing members of the other political party to vote on amendments that don't align with the party's positions, and using those votes in later campaign messaging."

That's the trick. Write an amendment that restates a law already on the books. Attach it to a bill. Dare the other side to vote no on a redundant provision. Then, years later, describe the "no" vote as if the underlying law didn't exist.

Husted is running the third step of that play. Brown ran into the same accusations in 2024 from his then-challenger, Bernie Moreno.

PolitiFact's ruling, in full

"Husted said Brown 'supported Social Security payments for illegals, healthcare for illegals and COVID checks for illegals.'

The votes in question — in 2007, 2013 and 2021, respectively — did not make immigrants in the country illegally eligible for those benefits.

The Social Security vote addressed how past tax payments would be counted for immigrants who later gained legal status. The healthcare vote would not have legalized the payment of benefits to people in the U.S. illegally, because federal law already bars such payments. Similarly, the COVID-19 relief bill already outlawed stimulus payments to the vast majority of people in the U.S. illegally.

We rate this claim False."

This isn't Husted's first fact-check

Ohio's junior senator has a growing file of statements that didn't hold up next to his own record. He told disabled Ohioans his Medicaid vote wouldn't hurt them, then skipped their forum. He told Ohioans their rising electric bills were their own doing, while his own party's campaign memo called his data-center record an "anchor".

The pattern is the same each time: a clean, quotable line for a TV hit, and a record underneath it that says something else.

What this costs Ohio

The word "illegals" does a lot of work in that Fox News sentence. It's meant to make you picture someone getting something you don't get.

What the three votes actually involve: people who paid taxes and later became legal residents, a healthcare ban that was already law, and a check program that already required a Social Security number. Nothing in there is anyone jumping the line.

Ohio has real problems Husted could be talking about on national television. Ohio lost a bigger share of its Obamacare coverage than any state in America. Ohioans' electric bills are climbing. He used his airtime on a claim about his opponent that a fact-checker took apart three weeks later.

What the record shows

On August 4, 2026, Jon Husted told a Fox News audience that Sherrod Brown supported Social Security, healthcare and COVID checks for people in the country illegally. PolitiFact examined the three votes Husted's own campaign supplied and rated the claim False on August 25: none of them would have made anyone here illegally eligible for those benefits. On the Social Security question, Brown voted the way Husted describes just three months later — a vote Husted's campaign didn't mention.

Source

Jon Husted's inaccurate claim that Sherrod Brown voted for benefits for immigrants in US illegally — Cami Henry-Seymore, PolitiFact, August 25, 2026.

Jen Kiggans Says Elaine Luria Made $21 Million Insider Trading. Luria Reported Two Stock Transactions in Four Years, and Left Congress No Richer.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:04:35 +0000

Jen Kiggans represents Virginia's 2nd District. She won the seat in 2022 by beating Elaine Luria, and in November she faces Luria again.

In July, Kiggans posted on social media that Luria "made over $21 million through insider stock trading while serving in Congress," and that Luria "opposes banning members of Congress from trading stocks."

Both halves of that are wrong.

What Luria's disclosures actually show

Members of Congress have to report their stock trades. Luria's filings are public, and American Journal News reported what they show.

Across her four years in office, Luria reported two transactions: one stock sale and one purchase. Her husband reported two more.

That is four transactions total, for a household, over four years. It is not a trading operation.

Her net worth went down

The $21 million figure has to come from somewhere. It is not what her net-worth filings show.

When Luria joined Congress, she reported a net worth between $3.7 million and $13.6 million
When she left, she reported between $3.4 million and $12.9 million

Both the floor and the ceiling moved down. Comparing the two filings, that is a potential loss in value of about $720,000.

Kiggans's claim is not an exaggeration of something that happened. Luria left office reporting less than she came in with.

Fox News had to append a note to the same story

Kiggans isn't the only one who has pushed this. Fox News reported in June that Luria's net worth "skyrocketed during her time in office," and later added an editor's note to the piece. The note corrects the story's claim about her Alibaba shares — she sold them in early 2021, not, as the article had said, holding them until she left office — and clarifies the net worth figures: the value "skyrocketed during her term in office before returning to roughly its original value."

Which is the same thing her filings show. It is not $21 million, and it is not insider trading.

Her campaign couldn't name a single instance

On August 14, the New York Times reported the accusation and asked her campaign about it. Kiggans's campaign "did not point to any instances of insider trading, which is illegal, when asked about the allegations."

What it pointed to instead, the Times reported, was two things. That Luria used to oppose a congressional stock trading ban. And that she owns between $5 million and $25 million in NVIDIA stock, which she held while voting for the 2022 CHIPS Act, the law that put tens of billions of dollars into American computer-chip manufacturing. (That is what the Times says she owns now. It does not say what the stake was worth when she cast the vote.)

So: a holding she disclosed, and a vote in the public record. Insider trading means trading on information the public doesn't have. There is no trade here at all. Luria's spokesman called the attacks "lies" and said the bill did not increase the value of her stock.

Owning stock in an industry your vote can move is a real problem. It is the whole reason a trading ban is on the table, and it is a fair thing to run against someone for. Kiggans didn't run that argument. She said Luria made $21 million committing a federal crime.

A campaign can get a number wrong. This is not that. It is an accusation of a crime, levelled at a Navy veteran and former member of Congress, that her own campaign could not back with one example.

The second half of the claim is wrong too

Kiggans also said Luria opposes banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

Luria has been skeptical of a ban in the past. She isn't now. Her campaign website today: "No one should profit off of holding office… I support banning members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks while holding office."

That is the position Kiggans says she doesn't hold.

This is a pattern, not a slip

Kiggans has a habit of saying things and then declining to answer for them.

She called DOGE cuts "so necessary," and then her district lost at least 70 federal contracts with veteran-owned businesses — and she only said she was working to reverse them after Politico counted the damage.

She voted against capping 299% payday and title loans in the most military-heavy district in America, and when a reporter asked her why eleven times, she wouldn't say.

And when a radio host told the highest-ranking Black man in Congress to get his "cotton-picking hands" off Virginia, Kiggans answered "That's right. Ditto." The NAACP asked for a real apology. She has never given one.

The short version

Jen Kiggans told voters that her opponent made more than $21 million insider trading in Congress. Elaine Luria's public disclosures show two transactions in four years, plus two by her husband, and a net worth that fell by as much as $720,000 between entering and leaving office. Fox News appended a note to a story making a similar claim, clarifying that her net worth returned to roughly its original value. And when the New York Times asked about the insider trading accusation, Kiggans's campaign pointed to no instance of it — only to a stock Luria has disclosed all along, and to a vote in the public record.

Source

Kiggans pushes false $21 million claim about Elaine Luria — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 25, 2026. Photo via American Journal News/AP.

Asked If Florida Parents Should Vaccinate Their Kids Against Measles, Byron Donalds Said No — and Blamed Immigrants

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:03:47 +0000

Byron Donalds is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida. On Sunday, August 23, he sat down with Margaret Brennan on CBS's Face the Nation.

She asked him a simple question about a disease that is spreading in his own backyard. Here is what he said.

The exchange

MARGARET BRENNAN: …nearly all of Florida is below the 95% immunization rate for herd immunity for measles. So, is your message to Florida parents, get your kids vaccinated against that one?

REP. BYRON DONALDS: No, actually, my message to Floridians and, quite frankly, to Americans is the reason why we have seen a measles outbreak in certain parts of the country is because of rampant illegal immigration into the United States from the previous administration.

MARGARET BRENNAN: What evidence do you have of that?

REP. BYRON DONALDS: …we've seen the outbreaks in El Paso, Texas, in Southwest Florida, where I live, and many other parts where you know that you have a situation. People have come into the country illegally, have not had that vaccination schedule…

The question was whether parents should vaccinate their children. The answer was "No."

Brennan asked him for evidence. He named two places where outbreaks have happened. That is not evidence that immigrants caused them — it is a list of places measles is spreading.

What is actually happening in Florida

Measles is not an abstraction in Florida this year.

By the end of July, the CDC had recorded 141 measles cases in Florida, putting the state fifth in the country for the most cases. One of the outbreaks Florida's surgeon general has publicly discussed is in Collier County — part of the 19th Congressional District Donalds has represented since January 2021, and the "Southwest Florida, where I live" he pointed to on national television.

And Brennan's premise was correct. Just 88.9% of Florida's kindergarteners had completed their required vaccinations before the 2025-26 school year, according to WLRN, and nearly all of the state is below the roughly 95% measles immunization rate public health officials say is needed to stop the disease spreading through a community. Vaccine exemptions in Florida are at their highest level in a decade.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known. When enough children in a community are unvaccinated, it spreads. That is the mechanism. It does not require anyone to have crossed a border.

The state's own health department has been trying to make it worse

Donalds is not making this argument in a vacuum.

In September 2025, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced he wanted to eliminate every vaccine mandate in the state — a move that would have made Florida the first in the country to do it.

It didn't happen, and not because anyone changed their mind. Some of the required shots are written into Florida law and would need the legislature to act. Others are set by the Department of Health, which Ladapo runs — and his own department has yet to file the paperwork to complete the rule change. The mandates survived on a technicality.

So this is the backdrop for Donalds's answer: a state where the top health official tried to scrap vaccine requirements, where kindergarten vaccination rates have been sliding, where exemptions are at a ten-year high, and where measles is now spreading in the district he represents.

Asked what he'd tell parents, the man who wants to run all of it said "No."

He has made a habit of this

This is not the first time Donalds has answered a question with something other than the facts.

Days before the primary he told a rally that "even the American Medical Association has finally realized that this is insanity," claiming the country's largest doctors' group had turned against gender-affirming care for minors. The AMA told The Advocate it still believes parents, families and medical professionals should decide together.

A PAC supporting him ran an ad that deceptively edited a David Jolly clip on gender-affirming care to make Jolly appear to endorse surgery for children — PolitiFact found he was quoting someone else and never mentioned surgery, and rated the ad False.

And he told Floridians that the state's new data center law "ensures that utility rates will not go up due to data centers" — PolitiFact rated that Half True, because the law outlines ways to protect consumers but doesn't guarantee it, and doesn't cover rural cooperatives or municipal utilities at all.

In summary

Asked on national television whether Florida parents should vaccinate their children against measles — in a state with 141 cases by late July, a kindergarten vaccination rate of 88.9%, and an active outbreak in his own congressional district — Byron Donalds said "No," and blamed the outbreaks on "rampant illegal immigration." When Margaret Brennan asked what evidence he had, he named two places where measles is spreading. He offered nothing else.

Source

Transcript: Rep. Byron Donalds on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Aug. 23, 2026 — CBS News. Reported by Yahoo News.

Ashley Moody Told Florida Her Opponent Wants to Defund the Police and Let Noncitizens Vote. PolitiFact Checked All Four Claims. None of Them Hold Up.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:00:02 +0000

On August 18, Ashley Moody won her primary and walked onstage to tell Floridians who she'd be running against in November.

Here is what she said:

"My opponent will be a self-proclaimed socialist that proudly signed up and joined the Democratic Socialists of America. That will be my opponent. … You're going to have one side that I'm going to be up against that wants to, and the platform says, 'Defund the police, don't fund our military, open up the border, noncitizen voting.'"

Four charges, in one breath, in the first sentence most Floridians will ever hear about her opponent.

PolitiFact went and checked all four. Reporters Maria Briceño and Samantha Putterman published their findings three days later, and the short version is that Moody read positions off an organization's platform and attributed them to a person who has publicly rejected two of them and never said a word for the other two.

What Nixon actually says

"Defund the police." Angie Nixon has said publicly that she does not support defunding the police. Her words: "I don't support defunding the police. I do support comprehensive criminal justice reform to make sure we are addressing some of the root causes of people leading into a life of crime." PolitiFact found no evidence she has ever supported it.

"Don't fund our military." PolitiFact found no evidence Nixon has advocated for defunding the military. What she has criticized is the Pentagon failing its audits while veterans go homeless, and the billions spent on the Iran war — arguments about priorities. The closest PolitiFact found to a funding cut was foreign: Nixon said she would have voted for a resolution ending $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.

"Open up the border." Nixon's campaign told PolitiFact she supports secure borders "with clear and compassionate pathways for citizenship." In her own words: "border patrol should make sure they are securing the border while there are clear pathways to citizenship."

"Noncitizen voting." Nixon's campaign said she "supports the right of every eligible American citizen to vote." PolitiFact found she has never said she supports it, and it isn't on her website.

Nixon is a member of the DSA. That part is true, and Moody is entitled to say it. What she isn't entitled to do is read that group's platform aloud and present it as her opponent's positions when the opponent has rejected them on the record or never held them at all.

Moody knows exactly how this works

This is the part worth sitting with. Moody is not a first-time candidate winging it at a podium. She was Florida's attorney general — a job whose entire purpose is weighing evidence before making an accusation.

She has spent her political career on precisely the issue she just got caught mischaracterizing. We've written before about how Moody asked the FBI to investigate people who helped Floridians pay off their fines so they could vote, and how she has been attaching voter ID to one bill after another. "Noncitizen voting" is not a phrase she reached for by accident. It's her signature issue, and she used it on a claim that has nothing behind it.

There's a reason attacks like that work. Noncitizen voting is already a deportable felony, and where states have actually gone looking for it, they've found almost nothing — a University of St. Thomas professor's 10-year study of Minnesota turned up three cases out of 13.3 million votes. But an accusation doesn't have to be true to do its job. It just has to be the first thing voters hear.

The pattern of what she won't answer

Moody's campaign is happy to make claims about her opponent. It has been considerably less forthcoming about claims involving her own record.

She has still not explained her role in the Hope Florida affair, in which $10 million meant for poor kids' Medicaid ended up funding a political campaign — money her own chief deputy attorney general says she approved, and that she won't discuss. And Hope Florida's books have since moved into the same Alabama building as the super PAC backing her.

That's the trade Florida is being offered: four unsupported accusations about someone else, and silence about her own.

Florida votes November 3.

Source

How aligned is Angie Nixon with democratic socialists? Moody's Florida Senate race attack misleads — Maria Briceño and Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact, August 21, 2026.

Brandon Herrera Says a $174,000 Congressional Salary Would Be a '90+% Pay Cut.' He Told the House Clerk He Earned $80,000.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:40:10 +0000

Every candidate for Congress has to file one document telling the public where their money comes from. It is called a financial disclosure. It exists so voters can see who might own a piece of the person asking for their vote.

Brandon Herrera filed his. It says he earned $80,000 in 2024.

Herrera also says he is a millionaire. He has said it repeatedly. He told the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year that his businesses have brought in around $2 million in revenue. And he has said that taking a seat in the U.S. House — which pays $174,000 a year — would be a "90+% pay cut."

Do that arithmetic. If $174,000 is a 90-percent-plus cut from what he makes now, he is making at least $1.74 million a year.

He told the House clerk $80,000.

He said he'd fix it. That was in July.

Punchbowl News flagged the $80,000 figure in early July. Herrera's campaign said at the time that his team was working to submit a revised report "within the coming weeks."

That was roughly six weeks ago. As the Express-News reported on August 21, the corrected filing still isn't in, with under three months to Election Day.

His campaign manager, Kimmie Gonzalez, now explains the original filing this way: it was prepared by a friend of Herrera's who "did not have the experience needed for this level of reporting." The campaign has since hired the Washington law firm Holtzman Vogel to redo it.

Asked when the fixed version arrives, Gonzalez said she has no date and no timeline. Just "soon."

What the filing does and doesn't say

The disclosure lists his earned income as coming from The AK Guy, Inc. — his Kalashnikov-style firearms company, which Herrera has described as a passion project. He has also said "ninety-nine percent of my income comes from other sources."

The form does show he was paid more than $5,000 by each of seven different entities, including Google AdSense payments for YouTube, creator payouts, and merchandise sales. His YouTube channel has 4.26 million subscribers.

And here is the part that ought to stop people: he disclosed no assets at all.

Not a retirement account. Not a stake in any of the companies he owns — the gun manufacturer, the podcast, the streaming service Pepperbox TV, the merchandise retailer, the energy drink company.

A man who calls himself a millionaire reported not a single asset to the federal government.

This is also not the first time. His 2023 filing for this same seat reported the prior year's income at about $84,000.

"Is this candidate a truth teller or not?"

Doug Spencer, a University of Colorado law professor who studies campaign finance regulation, told the Express-News that candidates do often resubmit filings after catching a mistake — but that Herrera's case looks like more than a clerical slip.

His framing of the question is the right one:

"It's really an error that highlights the very nature of who this candidate is. Is this candidate a truth teller or not? Is this candidate wealthy or not?"

Both answers can't be yes. If the filing is accurate, then the millionaire talk and the "90+% pay cut" line were not true. If the millionaire talk is accurate, then the document he filed with the House of Representatives is not.

And here is the wrinkle that makes the delay matter: Herrera is legally required to file a disclosure, but as a candidate he is not required to refile it when problems turn up. Nothing forces the corrected version out before Election Day. Voters in Texas's 23rd District may well cast their ballots with the $80,000 number as the only official statement of his finances they ever get.

This keeps happening with his money

Herrera's finances have been hard to see through all year.

The Campaign Legal Center found that 99.4% of his campaign's spending went to a single company — one with no website and no registration anywhere we could find. Millions of dollars, one vendor, no paper trail.

Now his personal disclosure and his own account of his income sit something like $1.6 million apart, with no assets listed, and the fix has been "coming soon" for six weeks.

The district he wants to represent stretches from San Antonio through Uvalde and across a huge piece of West Texas. It opened up when Rep. Tony Gonzales stepped down this year. Republicans nominated Herrera — and in doing so, put a district Trump won by 15 points into play.

The people of the 23rd are entitled to know who pays the man who wants to vote for them. That is the entire reason the form exists.

He's had since July. It's a form.

Source

Brandon Herrera says he's a millionaire. His filings don't show it. — San Antonio Express-News, August 21, 2026. Photo: Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News.

Wisconsin Passed a Law Saying Political AI Videos Must Say 'This Video Content Generated by AI.' Derrick Van Orden Is Posting Fake Videos of His Opponent Without It.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:39:20 +0000

Derrick Van Orden posted a video of his opponent this month with the caption "I wish this was a joke."

It is a joke. The video is fake. He made it.

In the fake video, Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke says things she has never said:

"Do you really think it matters what you peasants think?"

"I am the anointed one."

She didn't say either one. An AI tool did, in a synthetic version of her voice and face, and the sitting congressman for Wisconsin's 3rd District put it on social media as though it were something his constituents ought to see.

UpNorthNews founding editor Pat Kreitlow reported the story on August 21, and noted this is not a one-off — Van Orden has posted deepfakes repeatedly.

Wisconsin already thought about this

Here is what makes it worse than an ordinary campaign stunt: Wisconsin passed a law about exactly this behavior, and it passed with Republican votes.

In March 2024, Gov. Tony Evers signed 2023 Wisconsin Act 123, which added a synthetic-media disclosure requirement to state law. It cleared a Republican-controlled Legislature and was signed by a Democratic governor. "Synthetic media" is defined as audio or video content substantially produced in whole or in part by generative artificial intelligence.

The requirement in Wis. Stat. 11.1303(2m)(c) is not vague. A covered political video containing synthetic media must display, "throughout the duration of each portion of the communication containing synthetic media, in writing that is readable, legible, and readily accessible," the words:

"This video content generated by AI"

Or, if there's fake audio too, "This content generated by AI." The law sets a penalty of up to $1,000 for each intentional violation.

That's the whole ask. Put a label on it. Tell people the thing they're watching didn't happen.

Van Orden's posts don't carry it. The only marker anywhere near the video was fine print underneath it on X reading "Made with Grok imaging" — which is not the statutory language, is not on the video, and does not run throughout it.

"Certainly isn't within the spirit of the law"

There's a technicality Van Orden gets to hide behind, and it's worth naming honestly.

The disclosure requirement attaches to political communications of the kind Wisconsin's campaign finance law regulates. Van Orden's deepfakes were posted to his own social media accounts, not bought as paid advertising, so as a legal matter they likely fall outside it.

Rep. Jodi Emerson, a co-sponsor of that law, told UpNorthNews that Van Orden's behavior, though technically legal, "certainly isn't within the spirit of the law."

That is the whole story in one sentence. The Wisconsin Legislature — Republicans and Democrats together — looked at the arrival of tools that can make any candidate appear to say anything, and agreed on a minimum standard of decency: if it's fake, say it's fake.

A sitting member of Congress found the seam in it and drove through.

Why the label matters more than the joke

Defenders will say it's obviously satire, that nobody's fooled, that everyone knows Rebecca Cooke never called voters "peasants."

Two problems with that.

First, that's not how any of this travels. A clip gets screenshotted, cropped, re-uploaded, and stripped of context within hours. The "Made with Grok imaging" fine print does not survive the second repost. The quote does. Six weeks from now, some share of voters in western Wisconsin will believe Rebecca Cooke said the word "peasants," because the last version they saw had no label on it at all. That is precisely the harm the Legislature wrote the law to prevent.

Second, "I wish this was a joke" is not a satire caption. It's a caption designed to read as outrage at something real. Van Orden did not post the video saying look at this funny thing I made. He posted it in the voice of a man appalled by what his opponent said. That is the opposite of a disclosure.

UpNorthNews also raises a question worth sitting with: this is a man using AI to generate video of a woman saying things she never said, for his own political benefit. His own chamber understands why that's a problem — it voted 409 to 2 for the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a law aimed at a different and far more serious use of the same technology. Van Orden's videos aren't that. But a congressman who knows the House took AI impersonation seriously enough to pass a law about it does not get to plead ignorance about what a fake video of a real woman does.

Not the first time his phone has been the problem

Van Orden's social media habits keep becoming news, and never the good kind. We've written before about how he spends his time smearing Muslims online.

Meanwhile, the things his district actually needs attention on go elsewhere. He voted to cut Medicaid by roughly $900 billion and then asked Wisconsin for credit when the state got an exemption.

Wisconsin's Legislature — Republicans included — looked at this technology and asked political candidates for one thing: six words on the screen, so voters know what's real.

Derrick Van Orden couldn't manage six words.

Source

Van Orden mocks state law against using AI deepfakes with videos depicting Cooke — UpNorthNews, August 21, 2026, by Pat Kreitlow.

A Byron Donalds Ad Cut a Sentence in Half to Claim His Opponent Backs 'Gender Changing Surgeries on Kids.' Jolly Was Quoting Someone Else's Grandfather.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:54:05 +0000

On August 8, a PAC supporting Byron Donalds put out an attack ad about David Jolly, the Democrat running against him for governor of Florida.

The text on screen said Jolly supports "gender changing surgeries on kids." Then it played a clip of Jolly saying:

"We embraced it, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care."

PolitiFact rated it False, and the reason is worth reading slowly.

The Sentence the Ad Cut in Half

The clip comes from a September 2025 podcast interview. Jolly was telling a story about a phone call he got a few years earlier from a grandfather in Florida.

The man's grandchild was in high school, was transgender, was having suicidal thoughts, and was wondering whether to leave home.

Here is the full sentence Jolly said, quoting that grandfather:

"As a family we embraced it, we sought the right pathways, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care, for this grandchild."

Those are the grandfather's words about his own family. Jolly was repeating them.

The ad cut out the beginning, cut out the end, and ran the middle as if it were Jolly announcing his own policy.

The man wasn't calling to talk about surgery, either. He was calling because Florida lawmakers were considering SB 254 — the bill that made it a felony for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care to a minor. He told Jolly his family's doctor could be arrested, and that the parents could lose custody. That bill became law in May 2023.

A grandfather afraid of losing his grandchild became, in the ad, proof that a candidate wants to operate on children.

What Jolly Actually Says

PolitiFact looked for any instance of Jolly talking about gender-affirming surgeries for kids. It found none in the public record. It asked the Donalds campaign for one. The campaign didn't provide any.

PolitiFact also asked Jolly's campaign directly about the ad and about his position on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, and got no response — so on that narrow question his campaign has not said either way. What he has said, when Politico asked him in July about medical care for minors:

"I simply subscribe to the old-school Republican position that government should stay out of your life, out of your doctor's office, and out of your bedroom. The last person you need sitting on the foot of your bed during hard family conversations is Byron Donalds."

What "Gender-Affirming Care" Actually Means

The ad depends on people hearing that phrase and picturing an operating room.

Gender-affirming care covers a wide range of things, starting with using a person's chosen name or pronouns. For adolescents, medical treatment can include puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Surgery is rare, limited to older teens, and requires a parent's consent.

Surgeries are not performed on young children. That is the thing the ad's on-screen text says Jolly wants.

Donalds Said It Himself, Too

This wasn't only the PAC. In July, at a restaurant in Doral, Donalds told patrons that Jolly believes "it's okay to change the gender of young kids."

And when PolitiFact asked his campaign to back the ad up, spokesperson Skylar Swanson didn't walk anything back:

"I do not know what further statement you need when he says it pretty plainly himself."

He doesn't say it plainly. He doesn't say it at all. He was quoting a grandfather.

The Second One This Month

This is the second time in a week that a claim Donalds made about Jolly and transgender kids has fallen apart when someone checked it.

Days earlier, at a rally before the primary, Donalds said the American Medical Association had "finally realized that this is insanity" and come around to his position. The AMA told a reporter that is not what it said, and that it still believes families and doctors should decide together.

It is also not the first ad of this cycle to pin "surgeries on kids" on an opponent who never said it. In Iowa's Senate race, PolitiFact rated False an Ashley Hinson attack ad claiming Josh Turek supports "sex changes for kids" — an ad her campaign put out within an hour of Turek winning his primary. That one was built differently: it ran video of surgeons operating while citing Turek's vote against a school law about names and pronouns, which PolitiFact found "did not authorize or regulate medical gender-affirming care."

The move underneath is the same: put an operating room in front of the voter, and attach it to something that was never about surgery.

Why This Matters to Floridians

Donalds is asking to run a state of 23 million people. His campaign's response to being shown, in detail, that its ad reversed the meaning of a sentence was to say the sentence speaks for itself.

Meanwhile, the actual policy question in Florida is not hypothetical. SB 254 is law. Doctors face felony charges. Families like the one that grandfather described have to decide whether to leave the state.

Donalds' contribution to that conversation was an ad built out of half a sentence.

Source

Samantha Putterman, "Byron Donalds' ad deceptively edited David Jolly clip on gender-affirming care", PolitiFact, August 19, 2026.

Tom Barrett's New Ad Says He 'Stood Up to My Own Party' Against Data Centers. The Vote Was From 2015, and It Had Nothing to Do With AI.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:48:12 +0000

There is a new ad running in Michigan's 7th District. A man sits at a bar and talks about how "Michigan water, Michigan land, and Michigan's future belong to Michiganders."

"So while politicians are cozying up with Big Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities," he says, "I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers."

That is Tom Barrett, the Republican congressman who represents the district. If you didn't know the race, you couldn't tell from the ad which party he's in.

There's a line of small print on screen citing the vote. It's from 2015.

What the 2015 Vote Actually Was

Barrett was a state legislator then, and the bill he voted against was Senate Bill 616 — a sales tax exemption on data center equipment, anywhere in Michigan, running through 2035. The American Prospect describes it as incentives for one internet data center in Grand Rapids, which is the project that drove it. The Senate's own fiscal analysts expected at least 43 Michigan firms to qualify.

It had nothing to do with the AI build-out that is currently upsetting people in Michigan and across the country. In 2015 "AI" was mostly the title of a Steven Spielberg movie.

Eleven years later, Barrett is running that vote as his qualification on the issue dominating his district.

What He's Done Since

Here is Barrett's record on data centers in Congress — the part the ad doesn't mention.

He voted for the tax breaks. He voted for Trump's budget bill, like nearly every Republican did. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that six companies tied to the AI build-out — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia among them — collected $83 billion in tax breaks last year from the corporate tax provisions that bill extended. That's money those companies then had available to build data centers.

He voted for that same bill knowing what else it did to Michigan. Barrett was one of the members who voted for it, and 130,000 fewer Michiganders were enrolled in Obamacare coverage a year later.

He voted to stop states from regulating AI at all. An early version of the budget bill contained a ten-year ban on any state-level AI rules. Barrett voted for that version. A bipartisan group stripped the ban out before final passage. Had it survived, it would likely have wiped out state restrictions on data centers — the exact local control Barrett's ad now says he believes in.

He backed a bill to weaken environmental reviews. Barrett supported the SPEED Act, a permitting bill the House passed mostly along party lines last December. It shrinks federal environmental review, including for data centers.

He voted against limiting Flock cameras. In May, a bipartisan amendment would have barred anyone taking federal highway money from using automated license plate readers — the Flock cameras his Democratic opponent says are being rolled out across the district — for anything except toll collection. It failed 20–44 in the committee Barrett sits on. Barrett voted no.

Who Pays for His Campaigns

The ad warns about "politicians cozying up with Big Tech billionaires."

Elon Musk's super PAC spent more than $869,000 in Michigan's 7th District to get Barrett elected two years ago.
Peter Thiel gave Barrett the legal maximum this cycle.
Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone — which holds $150 billion in data center investments worldwide — gave Barrett the maximum in 2024 and again in 2026.
The corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle have all given to Barrett. Oracle is the company behind the contested data center project in Saline, Michigan.

"Tom Barrett wants to reinvent himself as a data center fighter, but his record says the opposite," said Ravi Mangla of the Working Families Party. "He voted to give data center developers billions in tax breaks and left Michiganders holding the bag."

Barrett's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

This Is Becoming a Habit

Barrett's ads have a pattern of saying things his own record doesn't support.

His campaign store sold "Made in USA" T-shirts whose tags said Haiti. His campaign ran a full-page ad in a Black-owned newspaper telling readers to vote the day after Election Day. And he described the 2020 election as "an unknowable thing" fifteen months after his own party's investigation found nothing wrong with it.

Now an eleven-year-old vote, cast before anyone was building for AI, is doing the work of a data center platform.

The Bigger Picture

Barrett isn't alone, and that's the point.

The same week this ad went up, Axios reported that Republicans' Senate campaign arm privately warned AI companies that their data center push was costing Republicans votes and could become "a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle." In Ohio, that memo named Senator Jon Husted's data center record as the "anchor" around his campaign. In Michigan's Senate race, Mike Rogers called for a one-year moratorium days after a reporter published what he personally owns.

Barrett's answer is to talk about "nationalization" — the idea that Washington will force data centers on unwilling towns. As the Prospect notes, the only person in Washington trying to do that is Donald Trump, who has moved to exclude data centers from environmental review and to put them on public land. Trump has endorsed Barrett and held a rally in the district a few weeks ago. Data center protesters interrupted it.

His opponent, Will Lawrence, won the Democratic primary by double digits running against data centers, and has spent the campaign at town halls opposing specific projects in the district. A House Majority PAC poll released Thursday put Lawrence ahead 49–47, with Barrett at 35 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable.

Barrett is not leading this argument. He's chasing it.

Michiganders in the 7th District are worried about their water, their power bills and who gets to decide what goes up down the road. Barrett voted for the tax breaks, voted to take away their state's ability to write rules, backed weaker environmental reviews, and took the industry's money.

Then he made an ad about 2015.

Source

David Dayen, "MI-07: Tom Barrett Scrambles to Bury His Data Center Past", The American Prospect, August 20, 2026.

Trump Promised to Be 'the Greatest Jobs President That God Ever Created.' He Left Office With 2.8 Million Fewer American Jobs Than When He Walked In.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:08:57 +0000

On Friday, August 7, the government released the July jobs report. The country did not add jobs that month. It lost 23,000 of them.

One bad month proves nothing. Any economy has bad months. But the government has counted American jobs every single month since 1939. Line up eight decades of that counting and sort it by who was sitting in the White House, and you get a pattern so lopsided it is hard to look at.

That is the chart above. Every president since World War II, and the average number of jobs the country added each month they were in office.

The three best are Democrats. The five worst are all Republicans.

Here is how the ranking comes out, using the government's own payroll numbers:

Biden — 321,000 jobs a month
Clinton — 239,000 a month
Carter — 215,000 a month
Reagan — 168,000 a month
Kennedy/Johnson — 164,000 a month

And the bottom of the list:

G.H.W. Bush — 55,000 a month
Eisenhower — 37,000 a month
Trump, so far this term — 33,000 a month
G.W. Bush — 14,000 a month
Trump, first term — losing 58,000 a month

The top three are all Democrats. The bottom five are all Republicans.

And that last line is not a typo. Donald Trump left office in January 2021 with 2.8 million fewer American jobs than when he walked in. He is the only president since 1945 to manage that. The Joint Economic Committee's Democrats called him "the first president in the modern era to oversee net job losses."

Six years earlier, standing in the lobby of Trump Tower to announce he was running, he had promised something else. "I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created," he said.

Since 1989, it is not even close

Narrow the window to the last 37 years and the gap stops being a gap and starts being a canyon.

Since January 1989, America has added about 51.7 million jobs. 49.9 million of them — 96.5% — came while a Democrat was president. Republicans held the White House for 17 and a half of those years and produced 1.8 million.

This is not a talking point somebody made up. PolitiFact checked a version of it in 2024 and rated it Mostly True, putting the figure at 97.4% at the time. Every jobs number in this article comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the same agency whose numbers get quoted on Fox Business every month.

The honest part

We are not going to pretend this proves more than it proves.

Presidents do not personally hand out jobs. They inherit an economy, and a lot of what happens to it is luck. Two Princeton economists, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, asked why the economy grows faster under Democrats and found the gap — in economic growth, the measure they concentrate on — is real and big enough that chance does not explain it. But they also concluded it comes mostly from better luck: gentler oil shocks, faster productivity growth, and a friendlier world economy — not from Democrats being wizards. They specifically ruled out Democrats simply spending more. Obama's number looks middling because he walked into the worst crash since the Depression. Trump's first-term number is as bad as it is because of COVID.

So no, the pattern is not a law of physics, and it is not literally true that every Democrat beat every Republican. Reagan beat three of the six Democrats on the chart.

But here is the thing. Republicans do not get to have it both ways.

They claim credit for good numbers every single time. When the numbers are bad, suddenly the president does not control the economy. You cannot spend forty years campaigning as the party of jobs and the party of business, hold the White House for nearly half that time, deliver 3.5% of the country's job growth, and then turn around and explain that presidents do not really affect jobs. Pick one.

The pattern also is not limited to Washington. We looked at the ten lowest-paying states in America — nine of the ten are run top to bottom by Republicans.

What is happening right now

Trump has been back in office since January 2025. In the 18 months of jobs data since, the country has added 590,000 jobs. That works out to about 33,000 a month.

Biden's last 18 months produced 2.2 million — almost four times as many.

Some of that was on purpose. The federal government has shed 327,000 jobs since January 2025 — a 10.9% cut — while Elon Musk's DOGE tore through the agencies. DOGE's charter quietly expired on July 4 with no final report. The job losses did not expire with it. Those were real people with real paychecks.

And the jobs that were supposed to come roaring back have not. Manufacturing employment is down 62,000 since Trump took office — the sector the tariffs were sold to save. When a Republican tells you the tariffs brought the factory jobs home, check it. Mike Bost told a newspaper interviewer tariffs put "all 3,000 of those people" back to work at the Granite City steel mill. His own press release said 500.

Meanwhile paychecks are barely moving. Average hourly pay for private workers rose 3.2% over the past year — the slowest that figure has been since May 2021.

When the numbers went bad, he fired the woman who counts them

On August 1, 2025, the BLS reported the country had added just 73,000 jobs in July, and revised the two months before it down by a combined 258,000 — the biggest two-month downward revision since the start of COVID.

Trump fired the head of the agency that same day.

"I was just informed that our Country's 'Jobs Numbers' are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala's chances of Victory."

He offered no evidence. Revisions are routine — they run in both directions, under every president, because employers file their paperwork late. This one was unusually large. It was not evidence of a fix.

The sharpest response came from William Beach — the man Trump himself appointed to run the BLS in 2017, and McEntarfer's immediate predecessor.

"The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau."

Beach added, in a separate statement:

"This escalates the President's unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system. The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news."

Trump then tried to install E.J. Antoni, an economist from the Heritage Foundation, in the job. That nomination was withdrawn at the end of September 2025. Trump's own budget had already proposed cutting the bureau's staff by 8% — shrinking the agency that produces the numbers he says are wrong.

That is the tell. If the jobs numbers were fine, you would not need to fire the statistician.

Why this matters to you

Eighty years is a long time to run an experiment. The country has tried it both ways, over and over, through wars and oil shocks and crashes and booms. The scoreboard is public, it is updated the first Friday of every month, and it does not care who you voted for.

It is the same story as the debt. Republicans campaign as the party of fiscal responsibility, and the national debt just passed $40 trillion, with $3.8 trillion of it added in the last 19 months alone.

The branding says one thing. The numbers say another. Believe the numbers — and when someone starts attacking the people who publish them, ask yourself why.

Sources

Total nonfarm payroll employment, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED — the source for every jobs figure and both charts in this article
Federal government employment, manufacturing employment and average hourly earnings, BLS via FRED
Trump fires commissioner of labor statistics after weaker-than-expected jobs figures slam markets, CNBC, August 1, 2025 — the source of the Trump and William Beach quotes
The U.S. Economy Performs Better Under Democratic Presidents, Joint Economic Committee
Presidents and the U.S. Economy: An Econometric Exploration, Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson
Trump's Numbers, July 2026 Update, FactCheck.org
PresidentialData.org, a long-running compilation of economic performance by administration

Ken Paxton Spent More Than a Year Hunting Noncitizen Voters in Texas. He Found Three. Five of the People He Was Handed Were Already Listed as Citizens.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:24:13 +0000

For more than a year, Ken Paxton has told Texans that large numbers of noncitizens are voting in their elections. He announced investigations. He put out press releases. He built a Senate campaign on it.

On August 17, NBC News published what the effort actually produced. Reporter Justin Goldman reviewed court documents, public records and statements and found that three people have been prosecuted.

Not three thousand. Not three hundred. Three.

The Numbers Are Worse Than "Three"

Through a public records request, NBC News obtained the list of 53 names that were referred to Paxton's office for investigation.

Of those 53, exactly one — Ada Otuka — was formally charged with noncitizen voting.

The other two noncitizens prosecuted in Texas since 2020, Eliseo Morales-Tapia and Samuel Hall, weren't on the referral list at all. Meaning the pipeline Paxton built produced a single charge, and the other two cases came from somewhere else entirely.

And then there's the part that should end the conversation:

"Among 53 cases that were referred for investigation, at least five people were listed as American citizens in previous court records, according to an NBC News review."

Five citizens. On a list of suspected noncitizen voters. Handed to the state's top law enforcement officer, who spent a year on it.

More Americans were wrongly swept into this than were successfully charged.

He's Run This Play Before

This is not Paxton's first announcement of a mass noncitizen voting problem.

In 2019, he claimed 58,000 noncitizens had voted in Texas. That number was later refuted in court.

Fifty-eight thousand, then. Three, now. Same office, same claim, same result — a huge number for the press conference, and nothing that survives contact with a courtroom.

Announcing the investigations last summer, he said:

"Illegal aliens and foreign nationals must not be allowed to influence Texas elections by casting illegal ballots with impunity. I will not allow it to continue."

Asked about the actual results, Paxton's office provided no public updates on the investigation and did not respond to NBC News for comment.

That's the tell. When the number is 58,000, there's a podium. When the number is three, nobody's available.

Even Heritage Says This Isn't Real

You do not have to take a Democrat's word for the scale of noncitizen voting. Take the Heritage Foundation's.

Heritage — a conservative think tank that maintains a voter-fraud database precisely to argue fraud is a problem — has tracked fewer than four noncitizen voting cases nationally per year since 2000.

Nationally. Per year. Across all fifty states.

Joshua Blank, who studies Texas politics, put it this way: "The idea that fraud is a common occurrence in the electorate is a position that's political but not backed up by any fact whatsoever."

What This Costs Texans Who Are Citizens

There's a temptation to file this under "politician exaggerates" and move on. Don't.

The hunt has a cost, and the people who pay it are eligible voters. This is the same attorney general who just won back the mail-ballot ID rule that rejected one in seven Texas mail voters — a rule a judge had struck down for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, in a state with more than 3 million voters who have a disability. He called that a "major victory."

Every "widespread fraud" announcement is the justification for the next rule that makes voting harder for somebody who is entitled to do it. The fraud is the pretext. The restriction is the product.

And five citizens learning they'd been referred to the attorney general as suspected illegal voters is not a rounding error. It's the machinery working exactly as designed — generating suspects to justify the search.

The Part About Paxton's Own Voting

One more thing, because it's hard to leave out.

While Paxton was running this investigation, a Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found that he voted six times from a home he no longer lives in — and a formal complaint over it could be referred to his own office.

The man who set up a tip line for illegal voting has an unresolved question about his own ballots. He has found three noncitizen voters in over a year. He has not found time to answer that one.

This is the record Texas Republicans signed off on when they made him their Senate nominee.

Source

Texas AG Paxton claims widespread noncitizen voting. Three people have been charged. — Justin Goldman, NBC News, August 17, 2026. Photo: Brandon Bell / Getty Images. (NBC's full report is behind a subscriber wall; the findings above are also summarized in Raw Story's account.)

Byron Donalds Said the AMA 'Finally Realized This Is Insanity.' The AMA Told a Reporter That Isn't What It Said.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:22:36 +0000

Ahead of Tuesday's Republican primary, Byron Donalds stood at a rally and went after David Jolly, the Democratic front-runner in Florida's governor race, over transgender kids.

His words:

"David Jolly is somebody who thinks it's still okay for boys to be in girl sports."

And:

"David Jolly still thinks it's okay to transgender kids. This is sick to me."

Then he reached for an authority to back himself up:

"Even the American Medical Association has finally realized that this is insanity. That you do not take the puberty from kids."

That last part is the one worth stopping on, because it's checkable — and somebody checked it.

The AMA Says That Isn't Its Position

Donalds appeared to be leaning on New York Times reporting that the AMA had changed its guidance to favor new restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors — The Advocate says his characterization "appeared to be based on" that story.

After that story ran, the AMA pushed back. It told The Advocate that it continues to believe parents, families, and medical professionals should decide together when such care is "medically necessary."

That is not "finally realized this is insanity." It is close to the opposite of it: the doctors' group is saying the decision belongs to a family and its physician, which is precisely the arrangement Donalds is campaigning against.

Donalds took a contested news story about a professional body's guidance, flattened it into a total reversal, and put words in the mouth of the largest association of doctors in the country — in front of a crowd, just before an election.

What Jolly Actually Says

The second thing worth checking is whether Donalds described his opponent's position accurately. He didn't.

Jolly's stated position, per The Advocate's reporting, has several parts:

He opposes athletes assigned male at birth competing in female sports.
He opposes sweeping government restrictions on youth sports participation.
He supports parental rights on gender-affirming medical decisions.

On the sports question he drew the line at kids' rec leagues: "if a 10- or 12-year-old soccer league in the community has a coed team, I don't think the governor should be throwing a flag on the field."

So the man Donalds described as thinking "it's still okay for boys to be in girl sports" has said he doesn't think that. The disagreement between them is about whether the governor of Florida should be personally policing a 10-year-olds' soccer league.

That's a real policy difference. Donalds could have argued it honestly. He chose a version that wasn't true instead.

"This Is Sick to Me"

Set the factual problems aside for a second and look at what's being said about actual children.

Donalds is running to be governor of a state with a lot of transgender kids in it. He would be their governor too. He described the medical care some of them and their doctors and parents have decided on as "sick."

For many of those families the care is about to be taken away anyway. In a separate move, Trump's Medicare and Medicaid agency has ordered Medicaid and CHIP to stop covering gender-affirming care for minors, effective October 13, 2026 — meaning the lowest-income families are about to lose the option regardless of what their doctor recommends.

So the practical situation for a poor family in Florida with a trans kid is this: the coverage is going away in October, and the man leading the Republican field for governor calls what their doctor advised "sick."

The Habit

This is not the first time a confident, checkable Donalds claim has come back short. In July he wrote that Florida's new data center law "ensures that utility rates will not go up due to data centers"; PolitiFact rated that Half True, because the law "outlines ways to protect consumers from paying higher bills because of new data centers, but it doesn't guarantee it won't happen."

The pattern is not sloppiness. It's a bet: that the applause line travels farther than the correction. In a primary campaign, it usually does.

Which is why the correction is worth writing down. The American Medical Association has not decided that families and doctors making a medical decision together is insanity. It said the opposite, on the record, once the story Donalds was leaning on had run.

Source

Byron Donalds attacks David Jolly's support for trans youth — The Advocate, August 17, 2026. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.

71% of Americans Don't Want a Data Center Next Door. Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett Blame China.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:09:09 +0000

A Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans somewhat or strongly oppose building data centers in their communities.

That is not a fringe. That is roughly seven out of every ten of your neighbors.

Two Republicans in Congress have landed on an explanation for it: China.

What they actually said

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, a sprawling seat where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. He told Roll Call that a lot of the information opposing the project is "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

He is in a toss-up race this fall against Democrat Rebecca Cooke, who has released an ad accusing him of "selling out" to AI companies and who has separately backed a data center moratorium. Van Orden called the ad a lie.

Tim Burchett of Tennessee reached for a version of the same idea. The data center companies are "totally off their game," he told Roll Call, pointing to "a lot of misinformation out there" — and adding that "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

So: the constituents showing up at county meetings, signing petitions and asking about their electric bills are, in Van Orden's telling, on a foreign payroll.

Somebody actually checked

This theory did not start in Congress. It started with people who own data centers.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an audience at an event called "Harnessing American Power" that local opposition "is not organic and local, some of this is foreign-sourced dark money." On the tech podcast All-In, fund manager Gavin Baker said "it is starting to feel or seem like there might be a CCP-funded campaign."

NPR went looking for the evidence. Here is what it found.

Darren Linvill, co-lead of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, which tracks foreign influence campaigns online:

"We haven't found much."

Linvill's point is not just that the evidence is thin — it's that the premise doesn't make sense. China runs armies of social media bots, but they aren't talking much about this. Chinese state media is far more interested in promoting Chinese data centers. As he put it:

"China tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard here in the United States."

And on the people actually organizing against these projects:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

What the one real case actually showed

There is a grain of something. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts that used ChatGPT to generate anti-data-center content over the winter — probably a private Chinese tech firm working for "provincial-level government clients," posing as Americans on social media.

But read what OpenAI itself said about the effect. Ben Nimmo, who leads threat investigations there:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What happens when someone names names

The clearest look at where this theory leads comes from Utah, where Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary is behind a data center called Stratos — originally about twice the size of Manhattan.

After local opposition slowed the project, O'Leary said on Fox News that he'd had "my guys" dig into IP addresses and found "two cells inside of Utah." He named a nonprofit, Alliance for a Better Utah, and a consultancy, Elevate Strategies, as operating on behalf of the Chinese government — and named individual current and former employees.

Those are real people, publicly accused of working for a foreign government by a man on national television.

Gabi Finlayson of Elevate Strategies told NPR: "We are certainly not a Chinese cell. Nobody pays us to make any content, let alone any foreign government."

Elizabeth Hutchings of Alliance for a Better Utah said O'Leary named people who don't even work there anymore, and claimed millions were being funneled from the Chinese Communist Party. NPR checked the group's tax filings: revenue of about $200,000 in 2024, in line with its last decade.

"You know, it was such an outrageous claim we laughed."

O'Leary did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. He has since agreed to shrink the project to a quarter of its original size, after the president of the Utah Senate raised concerns.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute published a report claiming "three vectors of influence" behind the anti-AI campaign, offering little direct evidence; groups named in it denied any Chinese involvement to the Washington Post.

Why this particular smear is useful

Notice what the China explanation accomplishes for a member of Congress.

If your constituents oppose a project and you agree with them, you have to fight the developer. If you oppose them, you have to explain to voters why their electric bill and their farmland matter less than a data center.

But if their opposition isn't real — if it's a foreign operation wearing their neighbors' faces — you don't have to answer any of it. You get to be tough on China instead of accountable to Wisconsin.

That's the trade. Van Orden made it in the middle of a competitive race.

It's spreading in Washington, too. Brett Guthrie, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for a briefing on whether the government sees any evidence of Chinese influence in the data center debate — while three counties in his own district were voting to slow projects down, one of them after 3,000 people signed a petition.

The people they're talking about

The residents of Box Elder County, Utah who sued saying they weren't adequately consulted. The 3,000 Kentuckians who signed that petition. The Wisconsinites asking what a data center does to their power bill and their farmland.

Van Orden has said he won't back data centers without local community input and protections for agricultural land. That's a reasonable position. It is also flatly incompatible with telling voters that the local community input is a Chinese operation.

You cannot promise to listen to people and simultaneously insist they're being paid to talk.

Source

"The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026; and Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026. Photo: Ulysse Bellier/AFP via Getty Images.