Iowa Senator’s Cruel Comments Lambasted in Powerful New Ad

Two-time Paralympic gold medalist and Iowa State Representative Josh Turek used current Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s infamous “Well, we’re all going to die” comment against her in a new ad announcing his candidacy for her Senate seat.

Turek uses a wheelchair full-time after his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War caused him to develop spina bifida, forcing him to get 21 surgeries before the age of 12. He received gold medals in wheelchair basketball in 2016 and 2020.

“I wouldn’t have gotten that far without VA health coverage for my dad’s service, free summer lunch programs when my parents were struggling, and the local AEA that made sure that I had access to a good education. When I was a kid, it was a Senator from Iowa that made sure that the doors were open for kids like me,” Turek said. “Now the senator from Iowa is just closing doors, taking away health care, making it harder for parents to feed their kids—all just to give tax breaks to billionaires. And her explanation? ‘Well, we are all going to die.’”

The clip cuts to footage of the town hall in which Ernst made her cruel, fateful comments.

“I’m tired of Iowans being taken for granted. I wasn’t supposed to be able to win a state House seat that Trump won twice, but I campaigned just like I played basketball: outworking everyone,” Turek continued. “A whole lotta folks are gonna look at a guy like me and say, ‘Man, that is a real long shot.’ Well, in Iowa, we love an underdog. So if you are ready to push for change, join me.”

Ernst’s comments have seriously tainted her political reputation, and while she’s yet to confirm or deny her 2026 reelection campaign, a slew of challengers have already arisen from both sides of the aisle (for what it’s worth, Ernst has hired a campaign manager). Republican Jim Carlin and former Libertarian presidential candidate Joshua Smith have already declared, while Ernst and Iowa Congresswoman Ashley Hinson are still deliberating. Meanwhile Turek joins a crowded Democratic primary field including state Senator Zach Wahls, state Representative J.D. Scholten, Des Moines school board chair Jackie Norris, and local radio station market director Nathan Sage.

Turek’s online platform is sparse but mentions support for public education, environmentalism, health care access, and disability rights. But at this point in his campaign, his principal position is his opposition to Ernst and what she stands for, particularly her support for cuts to Medicaid.

Iowa will start its primaries on June 2, 2026.

The Trump administration appears to be inching away from the responsibility of issuing a monthly jobs report.

Speaking with reporters at a White House press briefing Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt failed to promise that the economic updates would continue, instead downgrading their existence to a “hope” while further undermining the credibility of the data the reports are built upon.

“Will the Bureau of Labor Statistics continue to put out monthly jobs reports?” asked a reporter.

“Well, look, what I’ll tell you about the Bureau of Labor Statistics—I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope, and that these monthly reports will be data that the American people can trust,” Leavitt said. “As you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made massive revisions after the last several points reports that they have put out.

“And there has certainly been a decline in the quality and reliability of data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and there’s been an increase in revisions,” Leavitt continued. “And this president and the administration is finally tackling this problem that so many have talked about. The president is actually doing something about it.”

Donald Trump’s new nominee for BLS commissioner, E.J. Antoni, told Fox Business Tuesday that “BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports” and instead only rely on quarterly data. Prior to entering the fold of the Trump administration, Antoni worked as the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist and helped develop Project 2025.

Trump abruptly fired BLS’s last commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, hours after the release of the last jobs report, claiming that the Biden-era appointee’s work analyzing the granular data of America’s economy was “faked” and could not be trusted.

Revisions to the monthly jobs report are far from out of the ordinary. Instead, it’s fairly normal for the reports to tell a different picture month-to-month, as more data is collected over time from late-submitting survey participants. The report has been published on a monthly basis since 1916, but there hasn’t been an issue with it until Trump 2.0.

At the core of Trump’s gripe with the July report was its revision of figures from the preceding months, which moved the three-month growth average to 35,000. A lag like that hasn’t emerged since 2010, and it made Trump’s first six months in office—and his controversial tariff overhaul—look particularly bad. The report’s downsizing also suggested that while some sectors, such as health care and social assistance, gained jobs, the vast majority of the market lost employment.

The absence of a monthly report would be yet another infringement on transparency and accountability between the federal government and the people it’s supposed to represent.

“We need to look at the means and the methods of how the United States is acquiring this very important data,” Leavitt said Tuesday. “The goal, of course, is to provide honest and good data for the American people to make very important economic decisions on.”

The first night of Donald Trump’s takeover of the nation’s capital is in the books. As Trump would have us believe, he has begun to “liberate” Washington, D.C., from a crime surge (that actually does not exist). Troops have started clearing the streets of what he describes as a scourge of “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

Night one’s results are (to an extent) in: “As part of the president’s massive law enforcement surge,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday, “last night, approximately 850 officers and agents were surged across the city. They made a total of 23 arrests.”

For some perspective, according to the Police Scorecard, the D.C. police, between 2013 and 2023, made roughly 58.7 arrests on average each day.

Leavitt also provided a laundry list of the charges—ranging from fare dodging to homicide—that, without the raw information on individual cases, is pretty unhelpful in gauging the effectiveness of the effort: “Homicide, firearms offenses, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, fare evasion, lewd acts, stalking, possession of a high-capacity magazine, fleeing to elude in a vehicle, no permits, driving under the influence, reckless driving, and a bench warrant.”

Nonetheless, as Leavitt continued, “This is only the beginning.”

Trump’s D.C. takeover is planned to continue over the next 30 days or so—and with more cities to come, he says. And the troops he’s deploying have an apparent green light to abuse citizens at will: Now, the president says, they are “allowed to do whatever the hell they want.” According to social media dispatches from last night, this apparently includes bothering random D.C. residents simply going about their business. But who’s to say how extreme things will get?

The Department of Homeland Security is once again using their social media account to post blatant callbacks to white nationalist propaganda.

On Tuesday the DHS posted a picture of an animated Uncle Sam standing at a crossroads with multiple direction signs. The sign in his hand reads “Law and Order,” while the signs pointing every which way read “Cultural Decline,” “Homeland,” “Service,” “Invasion,” “Oppurtunity.” The image is a direct copy paste of an old 1936 cartoon referencing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the original, the sign Uncle Sam holds reads “Prosperity,” while the others read “New Deal,” “Liberty,” “Depression,” “Inflation,” and “Opportunity.”

What’s most alarming is the DHS’s caption. They write “Which way, American Man?” a direct reference to the book “Which Way, Western Man?” written by infamous white supremacist William Gayley Simpson and published by neo-Nazi and National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce.

Simpson’s book is deeply racist and antisemitic, containing chapters titled “The Necessity of Eugenics,” “The Everlasting Truth About Race,” and “The Doctrine of the Thoroughbred,” among others.

“In the case of a country like the United States, if the original stock and its values are to survive, then all aliens, such as Negroes, Jews, and Orientals, will have to be put out and kept out. Immigration will have to be strictly limited to stocks most closely related, by blood and by tradition, to the stocks by which the country was originally founded,” Simpson writes in one chapter of his magnum opus of racism.

“The point is to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all,” he writes in another chapter. “Let me preface what I am about to say by declaring frankly that I am prepared to accept violence on the part of our people. The Jews’ hold on our throat is not going to be relaxed until we break their grip. Hitler felt that he had to take to the streets. All normal approach to his people was barred. Today, we are confronted with much the same situation here.”

In the latest instance of President Trump seeking to bend American cultural institutions to his will, the White House is set to overhaul the content and operations of the Smithsonian’s museums in anticipation of the United States Semiquincentennial.

A letter by administration officials Lindsey Halligan, Vince Haley, and Russ Vought—which was reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal—informed the Smithsonian Institute of a White House initiative to ensure its museums’ “alignment” with a history-whitewashing executive order that Trump signed in March.

The review, set to conclude at the beginning of 2026, will seek “to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions” by focusing on eight museums—including, among others, the Museums of American History, Natural History, African American History and Culture, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

Eventually, as part of this process, a team of Trump officials will be dispatched to the museums for “observational visits and walk-throughs … to document themes and messaging,” reports the WSJ.

The news suggests that Smithsonian exhibits or content that paint American history in anything but the rosiest light, or otherwise runs afoul of the MAGA worldview, could be in jeopardy.

Trump’s March executive order, for example, specifically targeted a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit titled “The Shape of Power” as evidence of the Smithsonian having been captured by “a divisive, race-centered ideology.” How so? Rather than supporting the scientific racist perspective that race is “a biological reality,” the exhibit claimed race is a social construct.

Not only will the Trump White House seek to root out certain content, it also plans to replace such “divisive or ideologically driven” material with that which is supposedly “unifying” and “historically accurate.” This, one can presume, means content that either whitewashes American history, or—given Trump’s recent moves to celebrate Confederates at U.S. institutions—perhaps portrays the ugliest aspects of it approvingly.