I know I haven’t been as prolific as I would normally be with my diaries. I have been going through a lot in my personal life. Side Note: I am trying to get a job with Biden’s Digital Campaign Team. If anyone knows anyone on the campaign and can help, please send me a message. As for Biden, despite everything about the debate, I’m ride or die when it comes to his campaign and yes, I believe he can and will beat Trump. But let’s focus on the down ballot races like the U.S. Senate race in Ohio. First off, kudos to the amazing staff at Heartland Signal for highlighting this:
Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says he learned English from watching Ronald Reagan’s speeches as a child, even though Reagan was not yet a national political figure and Moreno was five years old at the time.
During an appearance on the “MVRed Podcast” in January 2022, Moreno claimed to have learned English from listening to Reagan’s speeches. When asked about who helped shape his political beliefs, Moreno cited conversations with his father, and speeches by Reagan which he claims to have learned English from.
“I’d say my dad first. Reagan certainly, you know I learned English listening to Reagan’s speeches as a kid,” Moreno said. “He was very influential in my life politically.”
During another podcast interview with Ohio Christian Alliance in October 2021, Moreno claimed he listened to Reagan when he started learning English.
“One of the presidents I got to really know a lot was Reagan because that was my formative years,” Moreno said. “I was just learning English. I’ve been fluent in Spanish as my first language. Learning the Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, the Constitution. This was a time that for me was so fortunate to have Ronald Reagan during those years for me.”
Moreno moved to the United States with his family from Colombia in 1971, when he was about five years old. During an appearance at the Turning Point Action Conference in July 2023, Moreno himself said that he learned English “pretty quickly” after moving to the United States. In a separate radio interview from May 2021, Moreno said he learned English when he was five. Moreno’s parents and older siblings were also fluent or proficient in English at this time, making it extremely unlikely that Moreno substantially “learned English” from Reagan speeches when he was five.
This fits the narrative that Moreno has repeatedly lied about his background:
Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States.
“We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch. His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”
But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.
Mr. Moreno was born into a rich and politically connected family in Bogotá, a city that it never completely left behind, where some members continue to enjoy great wealth and status.
While his parents left Colombia in 1971 to start over in the United States, where Mr. Moreno fully transplanted, some of his siblings eventually returned. One of his brothers served as Bogotá’s ambassador to the United States. Another founded a development and construction empire that stretches across the Andes from the Colombian interior to its Caribbean shores.
Moreno has been nothing but a serial liar when it comes to his background. From Mother Jones:
While the two businessmen-turned-politicians share a love of expensive cars—and legal histories that include workplace lawsuits, undisclosed settlements, and attacks on judges—they didn’t always see eye to eye. In 2016 Moreno called Trump a “maniac” and said, “There’s no scenario in which I would support Trump.” In 2021, he said Trump deserved “lots and lots of blame” for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But Moreno didn’t hold a grudge. In 2022, his daughter married Max Miller—a former Trump aide who’s now an Ohio congressman—at Trump’s New Jersey golf club. Six months later, Moreno donated $100,000 to Trump’s super-PAC. Nine months after that, Trump backed Moreno in a GOP primary packed with competitors who local party officials believed would be stronger candidates. “I wear with honor my endorsement from President Trump,” he said in March, just after trouncing them all.
Moreno represents Trump’s takeover of the party in more ways than one. Once he favored pathways to legalization for undocumented immigrants; today he supports Trump’s mass deportation scheme. Once he backed LGBTQ rights, noting that Modern Family helped him understand his gay son; today, he’s accused LGBTQ rights advocates of advancing a “radical” agenda of “indoctrination,” according to the Associated Press, which recently reported that someone using Moreno’s work email created a profile seeking gay sex on a dating site in 2008. (His staff blamed a former intern—one who gave his campaign more than $6,500 last year.) Moreno, who once bemoaned the homogeneity of Cleveland-area boardrooms and claimed he benefited from diversity initiatives as a Colombian immigrant, now pledges to “end wokeness.”
Moreno’s contest with incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown—whom he derides as an “old commie”—is key to Democrats’ hopes of holding the Senate. Brown, who lambastes rich executives for decimating American manufacturing, union jobs, and the middle class, has a slight polling lead and a long alliance with organized labor; he rallied with United Auto Workers strikers last fall across Ohio as they won major concessions. But none of that has stopped Moreno from claiming he’d be the best advocate for Ohio workers; after all, as he said in a primary debate, he’s “employed thousands” of them.
But Moreno’s record as a boss could prove to be a liability. “For him to come out now and say that he’s this champion of working-class people—he’s a liar, and we call out liars,” says Tony Totty, president of UAW Local 14, which represents about 1,400 General Motors employees in northwest Ohio.
Some context here:
Moreno, a car dealership tycoon and early cryptocurrency investor, expressed this view during a Republican primary debate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. If he clinches the nomination, he’ll challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in November.
The moderator asked point blank if the minimum wage should exist.
“The markets are the best way to determine what wages should be,” Moreno said. “As somebody who has employed thousands of people here in Ohio, a good business owner knows that you pay good benefits, you pay good wages, you get good people. At the end of the day the market will flush that out.”
Ohio’s minimum wage for non-tipped employees increased on Jan. 1 from $10.10 to $10.45 an hour. For tipped workers it’s $5.25. Some smaller businesses in Ohio are permitted to pay the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Moreno’s claims about being a good employer conflict with his record.
Between 2017 and 2022, at least seventeen of Moreno’s employees sued him for wage theft, claiming Moreno failed to properly compensate them for overtime work. In 2021, a judge sanctioned Moreno for destroying financial documents pertinent to the allegations. A jury ultimately ruled that Moreno had stiffed the original plaintiffs and Moreno was ordered to pay them more than $400,000 in damages.
Moreno settled most of the additional wage theft lawsuits out of court in the months preceding his senate campaign.
Also, this cannot be emphasized more:
