MAGA Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Claimed Jewish Heritage. Her Family Says That’s Not True.

Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna may have fabricated her Jewish heritage, according to a new report by The Washington Post.

The freshman MAGA Republican seems to inhabit a space usually reserved for serial fabulist George Santos. In addition to potentially lying about her religious background, Luna appears to have embellished other parts of her personal history.

Luna is Mexican on her mother’s side and Mexican and German on her father’s side. She has repeatedly said while campaigning and in an interview with Jewish Insider that she has Ashkenazi roots and her father was a Messianic Jew, or a Jewish person who believes Jesus was the Messiah. But several family members told the Post that not only did Luna’s father have no ties to Judaism but his father served in the Nazi army in Germany as a young man.

Messianic Judaism is an offshoot of Protestant Christianity, not Judaism. Jews believe that Jesus was not the Messiah, and most denominations do not recognize Messianic Judaism as actual Judaism. Some of Luna’s family members told the Post that both her father and grandfather were Catholic.

Luna’s claim that she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father” directly contradicts another refrain of hers: that her mother raised her alone with “no family to rely on.” Other family members have also said that Luna was always with them and supported by an extended family network growing up.

Luna served in the Air Force from 2009 to 2014, during which time the people who knew her described her as apolitical or even liberal. She expressed support for Barack Obama and said her heritage was Middle Eastern, Jewish, or Eastern European.

In 2015, she registered to vote in Florida and checked her race as “White, not of Hispanic origin.” That same year, she filed a petition in Washington state to change her last name to Luna, her mother’s family name, from Mayerhofer.

She joined the conservative group Turning Point USA in 2018, working for less than a year as their Hispanic engagement director. When she launched her campaign for Congress, she had fully embraced her Hispanic heritage, even changing the pronunciation of her first name to “Ah-na” from “Ann-a,” which surprised some of her friends and family members.

Luna has also talked about experiencing a “home invasion” in 2019, when her landlord broke into her apartment in the middle of the night. She links this to her support for gun ownership.

Her roommate from the time disputes this story, saying their apartment was broken into multiple times during the day, when neither of them was home. Nothing was taken, and they never figured out who did it.

There is one thing Luna has said about herself that definitely appears to be true: “I’m able to take on different personalities depending on what image I am going for,” she told the Canadian magazine Skyn in 2017. “I think getting into [the] character of what you are selling is super important.”

Representative George Santos claimed that, despite his less-than-friendly interaction with Senator Mitt Romney during the State of the Union speech, Senator Kyrsten Sinema told Santos “something to the effects of ‘Hang in there, buddy,’” offering a “very kindhearted” hand of support.

Sinema’s office denies this ever happening. “I know this is *shocking* but he is lying,” Sinema spokeswoman Hannah Hurley said in an email to The Washington Post on Friday. “Kyrsten did not speak to him.”

Santos made the claim in an interview on Newsmax Thursday night, one in which he also failed to satisfy the far-right network about his previous claims of having had a brain tumor. He also claimed to have obtained his “legitimate” campaign money from his organizational work of “capital introduction relationship management of high net-worth individuals,” which he supposedly, at the age of 13, had already done “for years.”

Santos explained to Newsmax his attention-drawing interaction with Romney on Tuesday night was “not meant for television.” While the pair have slightly different accounts of what exactly was said, it is clear that Romney expressed his disapproval of Santos.

Meanwhile, Santos claimed that Sinema went out of her way to tell him to “hang in there” against the gathering storm brewed by his own lies.

While pretty much everything Santos says at this point should be taken with a pound of salt, Sinema is not one to necessarily automatically believe either. Her whole career trajectory in many ways is one based on a certain dishonesty—she began as an unabashed Green Party member all to become an independent who has watered down Democratic legislation and met more often with officials and executives than her own constituents.

But Sinema and Romney have been … close for a while:

And the pair also sat together during the State of the Union. Judging by Sinema and Romney’s affinity for each other and the scale of Santos’s lying track record, one would be inclined to believe he might be lying once again too. But what, if anything, was exactly said between Sinema and Santos is not certain; such is the challenge when a pathological and unhesitating liar meets his match with a more practiced, less egregious one.

No investigation into the January 6 riot could be complete without interviewing Mike Pence, and now it may finally happen: The special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s role in the insurrection has subpoenaed the former vice president.

It is not clear when Jack Smith issued the summons, which was first reported Thursday, but it should come as no surprise that he did: Pence is a key witness to both the events of January 6 and Trump’s state leading up to them.

Smith was appointed in November to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 attack, as well as his handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and the investigation has been slowly drawing in on the former president.

This latest subpoena is one of the clearest moves yet to investigate Trump’s inner circle.

But it’s unclear how much Pence will cooperate. You’d think, considering that the rioters wanted to hang him and his former boss didn’t exactly have his back, he’d be willing to talk about what happened.

But the Department of Justice has been trying to get Pence to testify for months. Pence has previously said that, despite January 6 being “the most difficult day of my public life,” the House of Representatives investigative committee had “no right” to his testimony.

Pence could argue he is protected by executive privilege. Trump has repeatedly claimed that executive privilege protects him against testifying in the January 6 investigation, and Pence could do the same.

That argument, though, doesn’t hold as much water considering Pence has released a tell-all memoir in which he includes many details he would be asked to testify on.

Pence’s refusal to testify in January 6 investigations is spineless and infuriating, but it makes sense: He is reportedly considering running for president in 2024. In interviews and his book, he has sought to distance himself from Trump, a bid to appeal to moderates and independents.

But if he were to testify, he’d have to denounce Trump, alienating his former boss’s most loyal supporters in the process.

A newly uncovered letter shows that Florida government officials had repeated, ongoing contact with the College Board while it was first developing the Advanced Placement African American studies course. The revelation contradicts the board’s previous claim that Florida officials had no influence over its decision to water down the class’s curriculum.

In the letter, first obtained by The Daily Caller, Florida Department of Education officials write to thank the senior director of College Board’s Florida Partnership for “the regular, two-way verbal and written dialogue on this important topic,” spanning “since January 2022.” The letter explained in detail when state officials expressed objections to the proposed curriculum.

Last week, the College Board released final guidelines for the class, having removed substantial facets of the curriculum that Florida’s Department of Education objected to, including concepts surrounding intersectionality, mass incarceration, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more. The College Board stated that “core revisions” to the proposed A.P. African American Studies class “were substantially complete” by December 22, “weeks before Florida’s objections were shared.” (Florida announced it would ban the course from public schools in late January.)

The new letter shows that, in fact, Florida had shared its objections for nearly a year before the cited December date. This calls into question whether Florida government officials influenced the final resultant curriculum—and if so, how much.

The Florida officials wrote that they “were grateful to see” the final curriculum had removed 19 topics, many of which they had previously objected to, deeming them “discriminatory and historically fictional,” referring to topics like intersectionality, mass incarceration, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

While the class has already been barred from Florida schools this year, Florida officials expressed in the letter that they’re “looking forward” to reviewing the College Board’s submission of the supposedly coincidentally watered-down course for the following school year.

Florida’s banning of the class, and apparent influence on the College Board to water it down for the rest of the nation, is part of an ongoing assault on education in the state.

One Florida school district serving over 50,000 students recently banned 23 books, including The Kite Runner and the entire Court of Roses and Thorns book series—going even beyond a state law that mandates books in public schools to be subject to review by a “specialist.”

Last week, the president of the New College of Florida was forced out by a board of trustees stacked with hand-picked appointees of Governor Ron DeSantis; she was replaced with another DeSantis ally.

DeSantis has also pushed through the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity through third grade; lobbied for the Stop Woke Act, which restricts teaching on race in colleges; and announced plans to mandate Western civilization courses and defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on state college campuses.

Make no mistake: Even just in imposing his will on teachers and students, DeSantis has proven over and over again to be a fascist. Regardless of however many hogwash columns or cable news commentators insist that DeSantis represents some sort of icon of intrigue or political savviness, or even an alternative to Trump, know that he is as rotten as they come—and should be nowhere near any lever of power in a just society.

You’d never suspect Republicans have been trying to slash Social Security and Medicare for years, based on their reactions to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

The president scored a big win Tuesday night when he appeared to get Republicans to agree not to cut funding for Medicare or Social Security during his speech.

Republicans were outraged when Biden said some of them were proposing to “sunset” the federal entitlements programs—and have since doubled down, claiming they intend to do no such thing. But not only have GOP lawmakers suggested slashing the funding multiple times in the past year, the party has been out to end the programs since they began.

Republicans have held a “visceral and abiding dislike” for the welfare programs since the Social Security Act was implemented in 1935, according to the historian Lewis L. Gould. Since the party took control of the House of Representatives in January, they have been weighing options to slash Social Security and Medicare, ostensibly in order to curb federal spending. GOP lawmakers are threatening to hold the debt ceiling hostage until the federal budget is reduced, and Social Security and Medicare are on the chopping block.

Mike Lee looked appalled that Biden said his party would cut Social Security funding, despite saying quite clearly on camera during his first Senate campaign in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it.”

Rick Scott has previously proposed sunsetting the programs every five years. The morning after the State of the Union, he tried to refute Biden’s accusation—by doubling down on his plan to cut Social Security and Medicare. In August, Ron Johnson went even further, proposing removing Social Security and Medicare as federal entitlement programs and instead making them discretionary spending programs that Congress approves on a yearly basis.

The list goes on: Lindsey Graham proposed changing the income cap and eligibility age for the programs in June. Michael Waltz said in January the entitlements program needs to be considered when it comes to cutting the federal budget. And just last week, Kevin Hern said he “wouldn’t think it’d be off the table” in regard to slashing Social Security and Medicare.

Even Donald Trump tried to cut the programs every year he was in office. For the 2021 federal budget alone, he proposed slashing about half a trillion dollars from Social Security and Medicare. Again, these are just a handful of examples in a larger Republican agenda to cut the social safety programs.

So it’s no wonder Biden looked so gleeful as half of Congress shouted at him Tuesday night.