Politics Random, Random

[ti-amie]

Republicans baffled by Katie Britt’s State of the Union response: ‘One of our biggest disasters’
The 42-year-old Alabama senator is a rising Republican star but her kitchen table speech did not land well even in her own party

Joe Biden delivers feisty State of the Union address with vision for his second term

Martin Pengelly in Washington
@MartinPengelly
Fri 8 Mar 2024 14.48 GMT

Katie Britt’s Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address drew reactions ranging from the baffled to the satirical to the appalled, even among fellow rightwingers.

“What the hell am I watching right now?” an unnamed Trump adviser told Rolling Stone.

“It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” another unnamed Republican strategist told the Daily Beast.

Delivering the official State of the Union response can be a thankless task, as the former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and the Florida senator Marco Rubio, deliverers of previously panned speeches, would ruefully attest.

Nonetheless, the 42-year-old Alabama senator is a rising Republican star, widely respected on Capitol Hill and her selection to respond to Biden was a golden opportunity to introduce herself to the wider American electorate.

In his address Biden used his bully pulpit effectively, attacking Republicans in a fiery speech and inviting a strong response. But Britt’s speech, delivered with overt theatricality, oscillating in tone between the wholesome and the wholly horrific, did not land well even in her own party.

Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right Turning Point USA youth group, said: “I’m sure Katie Britt is a sweet mom and person, but this speech is not what we need. Joe Biden just declared war on the American right and Katie Britt is talking like she’s hosting a cooking show, whispering about how Democrats ‘dont get it’.”

That pointed to widespread confusion over the setting for such a figure to give such an important speech: a kitchen.

As a Gallup poll showed 57% of American voters think the US would be better off if more women were in elected office, Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Trump aide turned never-Trumper, said: “Senator Katie Britt is a very impressive person … I do not understand the decision to put her in a KITCHEN for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.”

Speaking to CNN, Griffin added: “The staging of this was bizarre to me. Women can be both wives and mothers and also stateswomen, so to put her in a kitchen, not at a podium or in the Senate chamber where she was elected after running a hard-fought race, I think fell very flat and was completely confusing to some women watching it.”

Allie Beth Stuckey, host of the Relatable podcast, which “analyses culture, news and politics from a biblical perspective”, said: “Ok, GOP. Never again. I know y’all were going for the relatable mom speaking in her kitchen from her heart, but it didn’t work. Just a straight, strong speech will do in the future. Thanks.”

Kirk asked followers if they liked the speech. Blue-ticked conservative verdicts included “Man, it was so disappointing”, “No, very babysitter-reading-a-bedtime story-like”, “way too dramatic”, and “the up and down emotion was bizarre”.

Among satirical responses, Tom Nichols, an anti-Trump conservative columnist, spoke for many when he said: “There is no way that this Katie Britt address does not end up as part of the Saturday Night Live cold open.”

Elsewhere, the gonzo filmmaker Tom Arnold said: “Katie Britt is so bad she couldn’t be in one of my movies.”

Julia Ioffe, Washington correspondent for Puck News, said: “Imagine you’re sleeping over at a friend’s house and you get up in the middle of the night to pee and you hear a weird sound so you follow it to the kitchen, where your friend’s mom is drunk, crying, and rambling about the national debt. Those are the vibes from Katie Britt right now.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, however, the gun control advocate Shannon Watts highlighted a darker side to Britt’s performance, as expressed in a particularly lurid passage.

With wavering voice, the senator described meeting a migrant woman who she said described being “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12” and who, Britt said, spoke of being repeatedly raped “on a mattress in a shoebox of a room”.

Watts said: “Senator Katie Britt says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman while encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator.”

Last month, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was ordered to pay $83.3m in a civil defamation case arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”. Accused of sexual assault or misconduct by more than 20 other women, Trump also faces trial this month on 34 charges arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.

Britt endorsed Trump last December.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... u-reaction

[ti-amie]

I didn't watch the SOTU. Haven't for awhile. I put on my radio for my twenty minutes of local news and heard a women baby voicing about something. It took me all of three minutes to realize this was the GQP response to the SOTU and my first thought was who taught MTG to baby voice before turning the radio off.

Then I saw all of the responses on Xitter and elsewhere about how bad it was. I also saw a lot of former Evangelicals who say she was using "fundamentalist woman baby voice" and posted a video of the wife of the Speaker of the House in an interview using it as well.

I don't think it was a mistake at all. They wanted to show a "housewife" in her domain, the kitchen, speaking in a voice that shows she is at once submissive to her husband and firm in her beliefs. That she is a sitting Senator, married to a former NFL player who is now a lobbyist and living in a low cost of living state - Alabama - in a McMansion most likely - was not what they wanted their viewers to see. That the image they wanted to project has been ridiculed even by their own members says a lot.

[ashkor87]

Yes, those subliminal messages are so important...they were probably trying to appeal to a bunch of dinosaurs, and did a good job of it

[ti-amie]

Not only was she sending subliminal messages someone - an independent journalist not associated with the NYTimes or WaPo or any major network did his research and guess what he found out about the "raping and trafficking" taking place at the border. It's a bit long but it's worth listening to. there's been no coherent response from her staff.

[ti-amie]

This is what I thought of when I finished listening to Mr. Katz

[ti-amie]

Katie Britt’s false linkage of a sex-trafficking case to Joe Biden

Analysis by Glenn Kessler
The Fact Checker
March 9, 2024 at 1:32 p.m. EST

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.), in the Republican response to the State of the Union address, March 7

If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies.

If you did, you would have been wrong. Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero — who has testified before Congress about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. (A viral TikTok by journalist Jonathan Katz first revealed that Britt was speaking about Romero.) In a phone conversation and a statement, Ross disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.

We disagree. Let’s take a look.

The Facts
Britt’s account of Romero’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. This is how the passage unfolds.

She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.
Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.
At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”
She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”
She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”
But Biden has nothing to do with Romero’s story. As she testified nine years ago, her mother threw her out of her house at age 12 and she “fell prey to a professional pimp.” She says she then spent the next four years in brothels before a regular client helped her escape when she was 16 years old. There is no indication in her story that drug cartels were involved, though Britt said that in the State of the Union response and has made a similar claim on at least one other occasion. Romero was never trafficked to the United States; instead, she says many men who paid to have sex with her were “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”

In a YouTube video, Britt features images of her hugging Romero during her 2023 trip to the border. “If we as leaders of the greatest nation in the world are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job,” she said in the video. The implication again is that this happened on Biden’s watch.

When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.

Ross, Britt’s spokesman, said that Romero’s story was indicative of trafficking that is now happening at the border and that should be clear from Britt’s framing in the speech.

He said the reference to a “Third World country” was generic and was not intended to refer to Mexico, which he said is not a Third World country. Third World is a dated Cold War-era term previously used to refer to poor or developing countries. Global South, indicating low income and high poverty, is a more common expression today. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, though it is also a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In a written statement, Ross said:

“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard. And here at home, the Biden administration’s policies are leading to more and more suffering, including Americans being poisoned by fentanyl and being murdered. These human costs are real, and it’s past time for some on the left to stop pretending otherwise.”

The Pinocchio Test

In a high-profile speech like this, a politician should not mislead voters with emotionally charged language. Romero’s story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... afficking/

[ponchi101]

Truth means nothing to the GOP. Nothing.
I said it before. One difference between the GOP and other parties is that the end always justifies the means. And if that means lying, so be it.
They are so alike to the leftist governments of S. America.

[ti-amie]

Absolute bloodbath’ at RNC as new leadership loyal to Trump purges staff
Chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump move to reorganize the RNC, with an expected cull of 60 staff

Hugo Lowell
@hugolowell
Tue 12 Mar 2024 00.02 GMT

Donald Trump’s new leadership team at the Republican National Committee started the process of ousting scores of staffers on Monday night, clearing out its ranks as they prepare to bring the committee under the wing of the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, sources familiar with the matter said.

The RNC is expected to cull about 60 people across the political, data and communications departments. At least five members of the senior staff will be let go and some third-party contracts may also be cancelled. One source familiar with the situation described it as an “absolute bloodbath”.

In ousting large swathes of the RNC, the new chair, Michael Whatley, and the new co-chair, Lara Trump – the former president’s daughter-in-law – moved to reorganize the Republican party’s central committee to fall squarely behind the Trump campaign just days after they were formally elected.

The RNC is being brought under the Trump campaign to such an extent, the sources said, that the firings are mainly to ensure there is no overlap in roles between the RNC and the campaign. The Trump campaign, for instance, already has robust political and communications teams.

And, as ever with Trump’s operations, the firings are part of a strategy to ensure that only staffers committed to Trump and the Maga movement are left at the RNC as Trump tightens his grip on the party ahead of the presidential election in November.

“Chairman Whatley is in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned with his vision of how to win in November,” the new RNC chief operating officer, Sean Cairncross, wrote in emails to the political, data and communications teams that were seen by the Guardian.

“During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team,” Cairncross wrote. The email added that if staffers chose not to reapply, they would be terminated from the RNC at the end of March.

An RNC spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment. The news of the firings were first reported by Politico.

The purge at the RNC, coming days after Whatley and Lara Trump were unanimously elected on Friday as the new RNC leaders, has been widely expected for weeks inside the committee as it became increasingly apparent that Trump would force out the previous RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel.

In a speech after his election, Whatley said the RNC would “be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J Trump”, increase Republicans’ slim majority in the House and flip control of the Senate.

Both Whatley and Lara Trump were endorsed by the former president last month after Trump privately met with McDaniel at his Mar-a-Lago club and in effect suggested that she step down after Super Tuesday on 5 March, when 15 states held Republican primaries or caucuses.

At the meeting, Trump did not explicitly ask McDaniel to resign and McDaniel reiterated that she did not want to step down unless Trump asked. But the message was clear hours later when Trump sat for a pre-taped interview on Newsmax and remarked that McDaniel had to go.

McDaniel had come under intense pressure to quit over the RNC’s lackluster fundraising performance, which Trump blamed her for personally. The move to formally replace McDaniel came after Haley, Trump’s last remaining rival, exited the race after Super Tuesday to hand Trump the nomination.

The Guardian has previously reported the fundraising was becoming such an issue that top former RNC officials wanted Nikki Haley to drop out of the race weeks before she did so that it could establish a joint fundraising agreement with the Trump campaign to bolster its coffers.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... urge-staff

[ti-amie]

Loyalty oaths and NDA's will be required. Do they really think he cares about down ticket GQPer's or Magats? This is solely to steal funds to help pay his legal bills. That the RNC has liquid assets of around $8.7m right now doesn't matter. It can become a passthrough for illegal donations from overseas.

[ti-amie]

Resolute Square
@ResoluteSquare

Just heard on MSNBC:
@TheRickWilson on the Trump RNC takeover: "what they've done is like a mafia-type bust out where they take over a business, run up the bills so they can never be paid and when they're done they burn the place down for the insurance money."
"They fired the research staff, communications staff, political staff, outreach staff, the early voting programs, what's left is to move money into the Trump crime family. What's left is just the bare-bones, to keep doing the fundraising, put it under the RNC hat, and ship it all off to Trump."
"This is now not a political party. It's a shell corporation set up to fund Trump's legal defenses. It's burning down 30 years of a political machine that wins elections. Now Trump has burned that down to the ground. For money."

[ashkor87]

Sounds pretty accurate to me

[ponchi101]

Uhm. Burnt down for MONEY is not totally accurate. There is a difference between MONEY and POWER. Just look at Putin. He is certainly the richest man in the world because his POWER translates into all the money in Russia.
And I am sure that Tiny, as stupid as he is, can see that. That political power means money, but also much more.
POWER, in dictatorships, means money. And a whole lot more.

[ti-amie]

Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election and claims ‘Biden beat Obama’

Republican candidate insists at Ohio rally that Biden had beaten ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ in elections that never took place

Richard Luscombe and agencies
Sun 17 Mar 2024 18.47 CET

Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump’s mental stability at a dinner in Washington DC on Saturday – just as the former president was making verbal gaffes at a campaign rally in Ohio as well as predicting a “bloodbath” if he met defeat in November’s election.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, confused the crowd at an appearance in Vandalia by insisting that Biden had beaten “Barack Hussein Obama” in elections nationally that never took place.

Freewheeling during a speech in which his teleprompters were seemingly disabled by high winds, Trump – a frequent critic of the 81-year-old Biden’s age and mental acuity – struggled to pronounce the words “bite” and “largest”. And he left the crowd scratching their heads over the reference to Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 before taking the Oval Office from Trump in 2020.

“You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed,” Trump said.

Biden joked about Trump’s mental fitness at Saturday night’s Gridiron club dinner, a traditional “roast” attended by politicians and journalists dating to the 1880s.

“One candidate is too old and mentally unfit to be president. The other one is me,” the president said.

“Don’t tell him. He thinks he’s running against Barack Obama, that’s what he said,” Biden added, referring to several previous occasions when the 77-year-old Trump has confused the incumbent and presumptive 2024 opponent with his Democratic predecessor.

Trump’s Ohio address, ostensibly in support of Bernie Moreno, his preferred candidate in the state’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday, also saw the former president returning to darker, more apocalyptic themes.

The US, Trump insisted during comments about the auto workers and the car industry, was headed for “a bloodbath” if he was rejected again at the polls in favor of Biden.

“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” he said, without clarifying what he meant.

Later, he added: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country, if we don’t win this election… certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”

His comments prompted a statement from Biden’s re-election campaign that said “this is who Donald Trump is”.

A Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said: “He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”

Two Republicans who have been critical of Trump, however, came to his defense. Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “You could also look at the definition of bloodbath and it could be an economic disaster. And so if he’s speaking about the auto industry, in particular in Ohio, then you can take it a little bit more context.”

Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president who this week refused to endorse his candidacy, made a similar argument. “[He] was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Also during his speech, repeating unsubstantiated claims that foreign countries were “emptying” their prisons and mental institutions into the US, Trump took a familiar swipe at immigrants, calling some of them “animals”.

“I don’t know if you call them people. They’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”

Moreno, a Colombian immigrant who made a fortune from his car dealerships, joined in the nationalistic rhetoric, demanding that anybody who comes to the US learned to speak English.

“We don’t need to vote in five different languages. We learn the language,” he said. “It means you assimilate. You become part of America – America doesn’t become part of you.”

At other times during an often wild 90-minute address, Trump tossed out personal insults at political opponents. He called Biden “stupid” several times; made a vulgar reference to the first name of Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor in his criminal case for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat; called Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom “new-scum”; and attacked the personal appearance of JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, the New York Times reported.

He also attempted to blame the installation of the troublesome teleprompters on Biden, and he urged the event organizers not to pay the contractors.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former US House speaker, condemned Trump’s comments during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.

“You wouldn’t even allow him in your house, much less then the White House,” she said.

“We just have to win this election, because he’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean, he’s going to exact a bloodbath? There’s something wrong here. How respectful I am of the American people and their goodness, but how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn’t what our country is about?”

Biden echoed the warnings during the non-comedic section of his address to the Gridiron dinner, attended by more than 650 guests, continuing to refuse to use Trump’s name, and calling him only “my predecessor”.

“We live in an unprecedented moment in democracy,” Biden said. “An unprecedented moment for history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack. [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s on the march in Europe. My predecessor bows down to him and says to him, ‘do whatever the hell you want.’

“Freedom is under assault. The freedom to vote, the freedom to choose and so much more. The lies about the 2020 election, the plot to overturn it, to embrace the January 6 insurrection, pose the greatest threat to our democracy since the civil war.

“We live in an unprecedented moment of democracy, an unprecedented moment in history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -bloodbath

[ti-amie]

It's the hypocrisy.

Trump-backed Senate candidate faces GOP worries that he could be linked to adult website profile

BY BRIAN SLODYSKO AND AARON KESSLER
Updated 10:30 PM EDT, March 14, 2024
Share
WASHINGTON (AP) — For Republicans eager to regain the Senate majority this year, Ohio offers a prime opportunity to pick up a critical seat.

But ahead of Tuesday’s primary election, there’s mounting anxiety inside the GOP that Bernie Moreno may emerge with the nomination. After vaulting into the top tier of contenders with a coveted endorsement from Donald Trump, Moreno — who has shifted from a public supporter of LGBTQ rights to a hardline opponent — is confronting questions about the existence of a 2008 profile seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on a casual sexual encounters website called Adult Friend Finder.

“Hi, looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling,” reads a caption on a photo-less profile under the username “nardo19672,” according to an Associated Press review of records made public through a massive and well-publicized data breach of the website. Records also show the profile was last accessed about six hours after it was created.

The AP review confirmed that someone with access to Moreno’s email account created the profile, though the AP could not definitively confirm whether it was created by Moreno himself. Questions about the profile have circulated in GOP circles for the past month. On Thursday evening, two days after the AP first asked Moreno’s campaign about the account, the candidate’s lawyer said a former intern created the account as a prank. The lawyer provided a statement from the intern, Dan Ricci, who said he created the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”

“I am thoroughly embarrassed by an aborted prank I pulled on my friend, and former boss, Bernie Moreno, nearly two decades ago,” Ricci said. The AP couldn’t independently confirm Ricci’s statement and he didn’t immediately respond to messages left for him on multiple phone numbers listed to him. He donated $6,599 to Moreno’s campaign last year, according to campaign finance records.

Moreno’s lawyer, Charles Harder, insisted Moreno “had nothing to do with the AFF account.”

(...)

The dynamics have raised the stakes for Trump, who sided with Moreno in a crowded field that includes Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan. Trump is scheduled to appear alongside Moreno on Saturday at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.

In a statement, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung blamed the media for being “obsessed with anyone who supports the America First movement.”

GOP frustration
Moreno’s potential vulnerability has sparked frustration among senior Republican operatives and elected officials in Washington and Ohio, according to seven people who are directly familiar with conversations about how to address the matter. The people requested anonymity to avoid running afoul of Trump and his allies. They described concerns surrounding Moreno’s candidacy as so acute that some party officials sought a review of data to determine his potential involvement.

That review, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, linked the profile to Moreno’s work email address.

The AP’s independent review reached the same conclusion. The AP obtained data from the Adult Friend Finder leak as well as information that remains publicly accessible on the company’s website. An analysis of those records show the profile was created and authenticated by someone who had access to Moreno’s work email account.

Beyond the work email, the profile lists Moreno’s correct date of birth, while geolocation data indicates that the account was set up for use in a part of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where property records show Moreno’s parents owned a home at the time. The account’s username — nardo19672 — appears to refer to Moreno’s full first name, Bernardo, as well as the year and month of his birth in February 1967.

“This is a telling example of how this data doesn’t just go away,” said Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and a former National Security Agency offensive hacker who independently confirmed that Moreno’s work email address was included in a copy of the leaked data from Adult Friend Finder.

Harder also provided a statement from Helder Rosa, a former vice president for Bernie Moreno Companies, that said Ricci was an intern in November 2008 and that people in such roles had duties that included checking emails. Rosa has donated $12,400 to Moreno’s two campaigns for Senate, according to campaign finance records. He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Moreno, 57, was born in Colombia to a wealthy family before immigrating to Florida as a child and becoming a U.S. citizen at the age of 18, according to a biography on his website. He purchased his first car dealership in 2005 and used his wealth to build an empire that came to include high-end dealerships in multiple states.

Shifting views
And before Moreno began articulating anti-LGBTQ views during his runs for public office, he made comments that seemed to reflect acceptance of homosexuality.

When Cleveland and Akron won their bid to host the 2014 Gay Games, an Olympics-like international competition featuring LGBTQ athletes, Moreno was an enthusiastic supporter while his auto dealership company was a financial sponsor, according to an opinion article he wrote for the business publication Crain’s Cleveland Business.

“A successful Gay Games would go a long way toward boosting our images as cities that welcome all,” Moreno wrote while issuing a call for northeast Ohio’s philanthropic community to rally behind the event. “They need help to put them on. Hosting a complex multi-venue event requires a network of financial supporters and volunteers. It must be a community effort.”

During a 2016 question and answer session posted to his company’s YouTube page, Moreno noted that his eldest son is gay, while crediting the TV show “Modern Family” with changing perceptions about same-sex marriage.

“We watched these two guys and, we say: ’You know what? They’re good guys, they’re great people. ... They are not this distorted thing that is out there.’ And I think those are the kinds of ways that you can break down stereotypes,” Moreno said during the event.

When fliers appeared on the campus of Cleveland State University in October 2017 urging gay and transgender students to commit suicide, Moreno, who was then chairman of the school’s board of trustees, was the leading signer of a letter condemning the “abhorrent message” as “an attack on our whole campus.”

As recently as 2020, his companies were included on a list of Ohio businesses that supported a law banning discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Leaders of Equality Ohio, a leading LGBTQ rights group in the state, said Moreno joined the campaign supporting the legislation after a conversation with the organization’s leadership in 2017 during event promoting the bill.

But that all appeared to change when Moreno first ran for Senate in 2021 before bowing out of the race early. He began to distance himself from his past activism, professing to be unfamiliar with the anti-discrimination legislation, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported at the time.

During his current Senate campaign, Moreno has accused advocates for LGBTQ rights of advancing a “radical” agenda of “indoctrination.” He is endorsed by Ohio Value Voters, a group that opposes LGBTQ rights, including same-sex marriage. And his campaign’s social media accounts have blasted his opponents, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and State Sen. Matt Dolan, as supporters of a “radical trans agenda.”

A recent TV ad paid for by Buckeye Values, a pro-Moreno super PAC, superimposes a picture of LaRose over a rainbow flag while attacking him as “a champion for trans equality.” The ad cites LaRose’s past endorsement for a bill — which Moreno’s company previously supported — that would have banned discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

“Can you trust Frank LaRose?” a narrator asks, while also criticizing LaRose for making favorable statements in the past about Equality Ohio, a prominent gay rights group. Moreno supported the same legislation through his companies.

Donald Trump Jr. later posted the ad to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, stating “I have no doubt” Ohio voters will elect “the real conservative @berniemoreno over leftwing, pro-trans Frank LaRose.”

Moreno’s shifting rhetoric on LGBTQ issues “is a real shame,” said Maria Bruno, the public policy director for Equality Ohio, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. ”Anyone who is going to be compromising their value system just to win an election, they lose a lot of credibility.”

___
Associated Press data journalist Larry Fenn contributed to this report from New York.

https://apnews.com/article/ohio-senate- ... c1727c2458

[ponchi101]

Could be linked.
That is pretty inconclusive jargon.