NEW: Bernie Moreno Caught Lying About “Escaping” Socialism

NEW: Bernie Moreno Caught Lying About "Escaping" Socialism

March 28, 2024

The Guardian: Moreno "Has Made Dubious Claims In His Campaign"

Columbus, OH - Bernie Moreno has relied on "dubious" claims that he came to the United States from Colombia to "escape" socialism to "form a central part of [his] campaign message," but new reporting today finds that Moreno is lying and his statements "do not withstand historical scrutiny."

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The Guardian: Bernie Moreno says he fled socialism in Colombia for the US in 1971. What does history say?

Martin Pengelly

March 28, 2024

• Bernie Moreno, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio who expected to mount a stern challenge to Sherrod Brown, the incumbent leftwing Democrat, says his family fled socialism when they came to the US from Colombia in 1971, when he was four years old.

• Though such statements formed a central part of Moreno's campaign message on his way to securing the Republican nomination…they do not withstand historical scrutiny.

• In an interview in 2020, about his success as a car dealer in Ohio, Moreno described himself as "somebody who moved to this country a long time ago to escape what happens in most South American countries, which is socialism and the absolute prison of those ideas".

• In 2021, as Moreno moved into national politics with a first run for a Senate nomination, the Cleveland Plain Dealer said he "says he came to the United States as a child with his mother and siblings to flee socialism in their native Colombia. He believes that same ideology is rising in the United States, and he wants to fight back."

• But when Moreno was born, on 14 February 1967, Colombia was nine years into the 16-year period of National Front government, in which conservative and liberal parties alternated being in power as a way to avoid violence between the two factions.

• Moreno, however, has described an early childhood far removed from such worries.

• By his own description, his father was secretary of health under Misael Pastrana, a conservative and the last National Front president between 1970 and 1974.

• "We had a very, very, very, very incredible lifestyle in Colombia," Moreno said in 2019, at a business event in Cleveland, adding that his mother moved the family to the US - initially against his father's wishes - because she "didn't want us to be raised as pampered indoor cats."

• In 2021, writing in the Toledo Blade, he said: "I was born in South America, surrounded by socialist ideology."

• The same year, Moreno told the Landscape, a Cleveland podcast: "I think the [US is] going off [in] a very dangerous direction. It's a direction I recognise. I grew up surrounded by socialist ideology, whether it's Venezuela or Cuba [or] now Peru, and I know where this movie ends."

• And in a campaign ad, also from 2021, Moreno said: "I came from a country surrounded by the ideology of radicals like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara…"

• Such claims also shake under scrutiny.

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