This year, for these blessed midterms in the year of our Trumplord 2026, Republican candidates and their supporters are really doing something special: lying about crimes that Democratic candidates supposedly committed. Yessiree, the narrative wheels are spinning and their looms are loomering!
One Dead in O-Hi-O
Consider Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio. She was once the state’s public health director, in 2019, and then resigned as Ohio Health Director, remaining on as Gov. Mike DeWine’s health affairs advisor, in June 2020. Now she’s being accused by GOP gubernatorial opponent Vivek Ramaswarmy of being a mommy-killer.
Acton stepped down after a wave of pushback met Ohio’s early, aggressive measures against COVID-19, which included the state shutting down an annual international fitness festival in March 2020, before any deaths had been reported. Given how important the Arnold Festival is to the economy, I am certain — what? You had never heard of it before today? Me neither!
Under Acton’s advice, Ohio was also the first state to shut down schools, a decision that probably saved thousands of lives, not that you’d know that with all the waves of utter nonsense about “irrevocable learning loss” and “immunity debt” and variations on “children are naturally immune to COVID” that quickly followed and are still repeated as though they are true.
Pro tip: They are not!
Acton quickly became a public target of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, so you can see there’s a rich vein of bullshit already there to mine about her. And they sure are mining! The GOP operatives in Ohio are down in a rich vein of disinformation with their little bitty pickaxes (sorry boys, but they’re just so small).
Anyway, after the full scope of the virus’s destruction became clear and the deaths went from a small number to a large number to an uncountable one, the wisdom and foresight or Dr. Amy Acton’s actions became clear. Just kidding! People showed up at her house with guns and called her antisemitic slurs!
That was back in 2020, and just one week after her resignation, stories began to appear about this virus beginning to creep into nursing homes and infect the elderly. These stories weren’t taken seriously quickly enough, or perhaps people simply didn’t care, and a lot of older people passed away from COVID-19, as did a lot of caretakers.
Now for the disinformation part. A lot of people don’t really remember 2020 all that well. It was a traumatic year, which interferes with memories; COVID-19 itself can affect your memory; and we’ve slid into fascism and its attendant firehosing of bullshit from all corners, which means the fascists are trying to set the terms of the election discussion, and by God they want you to know that they are not over being mildly inconvenienced by some buildings being closed to try and save lives at the very beginning of a massive global pandemic that killed millions of people including a million right here in the U-S-of-A!
The Ohio political party that’s bringing you the “Amy Acton is a huge drunk and domestic abuser” attack ad (based on her daughter calling the police over a verbal argument with Acton’s husband in 2019) has leaned straight in to the lyingest lie of all: That Amy Acton is the real mommy-killer, for doing all those shutdowns.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is airing ads featuring local Cincinnati GOP official Linda Caudill telling a very sad story about her mother, and how she died alone, in a nursing home, of COVID-10, alongside all the other mommies and grandmas and poppas and Old Daddies, because mean Dr. Acton wouldn’t allow anybody to see that poor lady.
That story is very sad, and it might be damning … if public records, as noted by the Ohio Capital Journal, hadn’t shown that the mother lived and died two months after the stay-at-home order was lifted and six weeks after Acton had already resigned. Also? She lived and died in Kentucky, which last I checked is not Ohio!
(Also, not for nothing but Ohio’s stay-at-home orders always had exceptions for those taking care of elderly loved ones.)
And guess what happened after these lies began airing? Some random, armed man lunged at Acton at a public event over the weekend. Acton was unharmed, but two elderly people were injured as Patrick Havas, 38, shoved his way toward her.
Havas, whose brother was forced to resign from his volunteer gig with Senator John Husted in July after an old conviction for assaulting a minor resurfaced, has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges including assault and causing panic.
Bastards Out of Carolina
But enough about Ohio! There’s also fuckery afoot in North Carolina, which is supposed to be another swing state or battleground state or whatever they call them these days as though there is any actual meaning to those terms any more! This batch of attack ads is going after Democratic Senate nominee Roy Cooper, who was already a very popular governor who is already leading in the polls. He is also being accused of killing people.
This one is even worse than the dead-mommy/gramma killer story, not that it’s a contest. A 23-year-old named Shemar Hayes was murdered back in March 2024 by an 18-year-old, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2025.
Since then, Shemar’s father, Ronald Hayes, has spoken out about gun violence. He goes on tours and has written books, turning his son’s death into an opportunity to do something about these continuing tragedies. That is why, when he was approached by an “independent group” to “discuss gun violence,” he accepted. Hayes says that he was swindled and used, and that he had no idea that his story was going to be made into an attack ad against the Democratic candidate for Senate until it was already being aired.
The worst part is that the ad was made to try to connect Shemar Hayes’s 2024 murder with a prisoner release that took place in 2021, when his convicted killer was 15, not incarcerated, and — most importantly — hadn’t committed the murder yet. So the North Carolina GOP just used a grieving father for political purposes. Again!
“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,” Hayes told NC Newsline. “I wanted to let the community know about gun violence and about my son being murdered.”
North Carolina Republicans similarly tried to link former Gov. Cooper’s early prisoner release to the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska (debunked by the Charlotte Observer here) and to the murder of Logan Federico, which if you’re keeping score took place in South Carolina and was committed by a man from South Carolina, a state where Roy Cooper did not serve as governor, then or ever!
Here’s the real story with ol’ Gov. Roy Cooper, which I know because unlike what the GOP apparently believes, I can actually remember the Years of Our Lord 2020-2021 and how much they sucked ass.
The truth is, a lot of people were extremely upset with Gov. Roy Cooper for publicly opposing that prisoner release, because a lot of prisoners were dying of COVID-19 in 2020, in North Carolina and beyond. It was a truly frightening and sad time. Cooper finally relented after weeks of public pressure and a lawsuit in which the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of a release of some 3,500 prisoners. Even so, it took ages to get those prisoners released, and dozens had already died from the virus by the time the agreement was signed.
But these case studies — North Carolina and Ohio — show the dangers of state-sponsored domestic disinformation, the sorts of damages they can leave behind, and how they play on actual events to create outcomes that sound plausible, have some nugget of truth to them, and could be true … but they aren’t — and that’s completely on purpose.
What's fucking nuts to me is the anti-lockdown people rewriting a history that we all experienced less than ten years ago. Literally everyone who is currently alive and can vote was present. And they're acting like the "lockdowns", 99.99% of the time, were anything more than polite requests to not go outside and the occasional fine of a particularly obnoxious superspreader event. The whole government response was incredibly light-handed, and most of it was while Trump was president.
And some people are *buying this*. That's what is breaking my brain. YOU WERE THERE. You saw it with your own eyes. I did too. How have you already forgotten?
"Disinformation describes disarrayed Dems doing dastardly deeds!"
Delightfully done, deliciously descriptive. Skepti-KC level.