Everyone is doing a great job of sharing clips of Francesca Hong, the current  front-runner in the Democrat primary for Wisconsin governor. But what about the Tennessee governor? Some people are saying that Marsha Blackburn isn’t as conservative as John Rose or Monty Fritts. Are they right? Let’s take a look at the candidates and see who would be the most conservative governor of the great state of Tennessee.

Well, for Marsha Blackburn, there is a long track record, trending conservative. I get my “conservative score” from the Heritage Foundation, which is the largest and most respected conservative think tank. You might remember that we had a couple of their scholars – Jay Richards and Lora Ries – on our podcast.

And here is what they have for Marsha Blackburn:

• Session Score: 98%
• Lifetime Score: 88%

State Senator

When I think of Marsha Blackburn, I think of her leading the fight against an attempt to legislate a state income tax in Tennessee (they don’t have one).

U.S. House of Representatives

In the U.S. House (2003–2019), she ranked among the most conservative members, backed the Tea Party movement, supported tax cuts, a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, and efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. I would say that her biggest concerns are tax cuts and pro-life. She also voted for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and has pushed to make those cuts permanent while introducing bills for across-the-board non-defense spending reductions. I like non-defense spending reductions, because I am a peace through strength guy. For example, I love that we are replacing our 40-year-old Ohio class ballistic missile submarines and our 40-year-old Los Angeles class attack submarines with newer models. I use these things in wargames, and the old ones we are not great against China and Russia.

U.S. Senate

When she got elected senator (2019-present), she helped repeal the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Also good on border security and immigration enforcement. She supported requiring ICE to arrest and detain illegal immigrants who commit crimes. She has championed DNA/fingerprinting requirements at the border to combat child exploitation and trafficking. She voted to strengthen state and local law enforcement against criminal illegal aliens. And she has opposed CRT in schools, pushed to curb teachers’ unions’ political influence, and supported school choice. (More on the education issue in a minute – this is the big difference between the candidates)

John Rose and Monty Fritts

So, what about her rivals – John Rose and Monty Fritts. Well, I scanned the Tennessee Conservative and the Tennessee Star, and found some interesting new stuff has come out about John Rose this week.

Tennessee Star:

Campaign finance records reviewed by The Tennessee Star reveal U.S. Representative John Rose (R-TN-06) donated to multiple Tennessee Democrats who were in favor of establishing a state income tax during the pivotal political fight between 1998 and 2002 that culminated in Tennessee passing a constitutional amendment banning the income tax in 2014.

Rose donated at least $19,000 to Democrats between 1998 and 2010, with several of those Democrats involved in the unsuccessful 2002 effort to pass a law to establish a state income tax on ordinary earned income in Tennessee. Never in the history of the state has it imposed a tax on ordinary earned income, an aspect of the state’s governance that many economists attribute as a key factor in its ongoing economic growth.

Blackburn led the successful fight to kill the income tax. Rose was writing checks to the Democrats who were trying to impose it.

But it’s worse than that – he votes for Democrats in Democrat primaries:

Election records reviewed by The Star also reveal Rose has participated in three Democratic primary elections since 2000.

Rose’s first recorded vote in a Democratic election occurred on May 7, 2002, when he completed a Democratic Party ballot during the DeKalb County primary election for county offices.

Records show Rose next participated in Democratic electoral politics on February 10, 2004, during the Democratic presidential preference primary as Democrats sought to unseat former President George W. Bush, who nonetheless won Tennessee and cruised to reelection with comfortable majorities.

That right there disqualifies Rose, but there’s still more below on education policy.

I should note that Tennessee Star also had a recent story about Rose’s strange stock trading and tax returns.

But the real differentiator between Blackburn, Rose and Fritts is education policy. Tennessee has a weird fascination with public education and teacher unions, so much so, that even Republicans side with public schools and teacher unions, protecting them against accountability to parents. I remember in 2022, Beth Harwell, a left-leaning Republican, ran against Andy Ogles who I blogged about yesterday. She was a former speaker of the House in Tennessee, and was endorsed by the Tennessee Edcation Association – a teacher’s union. So there is a lot of leftism among Tenessee Republicans on this education policy issue.

Education policy

My source for the information below is the Tennessee Firefly, which is an independent, non-partisan source for information on education policy. I care about school choice because I don’t want poor children stuck in failing schools and I don’t want parents having to pay teachers who just turn around and fund far-left teacher unions with their union dues. I certainly don’t want public school teachers being paid more than they already get!

Here is what they say about the candidates on athat school choice issue.

School Choice and Education Freedom Scholarships (EFS)

Marsha Blackburn strongly supports expanding school choice – she likens the fight for school choice to her famous fight against the state income tax. She also supports expanding charter schools.

John Rose supports school choice but he also supports putting a public school teacher in charge of education policy AND increasing spending on public schools. Like Blackburn, he supports expanding charter schools.

Monty Fritts wants to end the school choice program, which is what the Democrat candidate also wants to do.

Conclusion

John Rose donates to Democrats, votes in Democrat primaries, is weaker than Blackburn on expanding school choice, and supports public education and teacher unions. Monty Fritts opposes school choice.

So, I think Blackburn is the best choice for conservatives. I’m delighted to see people like Robby Starbuck, Senator Bill Haggerty, Congressman Tim Burchett, Congressman Matt Van Epps, former Congressman Mark Green, and the NRA Political Victory Fund.

Anti-woke warrior Robby Starbuck interviewed Marsha Blackburn:

If you’re in Tennessee, make sure you get out there to vote for Marsha Blackburn on Thursday, August 6th. Find your polling location here. And be proud that Tennessee is rated #1 in the country for election integrity.

One of the few Congressmen with a perfect 100% score from Heritage Action is facing a primary challenger who is receiving a lot of funding from a green energy PAC bankrolled by a left-wing billionaire. I thought this was an important story to cover, because many Republican and libertarian voters love to complain about how Republicans don’t vote conservative enough. Well, it happens because Democrats unseat the good ones during primaries.

Here’s the story from Fox News:

A clean energy super PAC bankrolled by a left-wing billionaire is pouring millions into an effort to unseat Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., as he wages a bid for re-election in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition super PAC had spent roughly $1.3 million on opposing Ogles and supporting his Republican challenger, Charlie Hatcher, Tennessee’s former commissioner of agriculture, and recently bought another $700,000 worth of ads.

The group has raised $6.7 million this year, making Ogles a sizable portion of their spending this cycle. A Fox News Digital review of FEC filings discovered that the super PAC is bankrolled by Chris Larsen, the California-based billionaire chairman of Ripple, which is described on its website as the “leading financial technology company that offers crypto solutions for businesses.”

Charlie Hatcher is marketing himself as a “conservative Republican”, but does this Chris Larsen person who is helping him sound like a conservative Republican to you? For one thing, he supports Kamala Harris:

Larsen has donated $6 million to the super PAC since Feb. 2026. His latest $5 million donation to Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is his second-largest single donation after donating $5,444,975 to Future Forward PAC in 2024 to support Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign.

And Nancy Pelosi:

Larsen has also donated over $1 million to the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, over $1 million between the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and over $300,000 supporting Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., among other six-figure donations to top Democratic campaigns and PACs.

So, you can make inferences from that about the politics of Ogles’ challenger, Charlie Hatcher. By the way, by “clean energy” the PAC does NOT mean fracking and nuclear power. They are backing solar power, which is dangerous to birds and bats, including protected species of birds.

We don’t have a voting record for Charlie Hatcher. But we do have one for Andy Ogles. And it’s a perfect one! 100% conservative. I hope that Tennessee voters in the 5th district are smart enough to vote for the real conservative in this primary election.

There is no point complaining about how Republicans are not voting conservative, if you don’t take the time to choose the conservative candidate during the Republican primary elections.

Well, this is the big story of the week, so I have to write something about it. Probably, no website has paid a higher price for reporting on inconvenient facts on topics like election integrity and pandemic deceptions than the Federalist. The Federalist is my first read every day. And they have a ton of articles about the revelations on pandemic handling found in Anthony Fauci’s diary. Thanks to Republican senator Rand Paul, we can all see the truth.

So, this article from The Federalist is the best one stop shopping for understanding the diary.

Here is the list:

1. Covid Fatality Rates
2. Lab Leak Theory
3. School Closures
4. Covid Vaccines
5. Gain of Function Research

I’m going to pick the first one to see details. This is what the Fauci Diary says:

In an entry dated Feb. 8, 2020, Fauci described a purported phone call he had with Tom Frieden, who served as President Obama’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director. According to Fauci, the two discussed “various aspects of the [Covid] outbreak.”

The then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director wrote that he and Frieden “are on the same page” in their assessment that the Covid-19 virus “is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator” of total diagnosed cases “is much greater than” currently reported figures. Fauci further noted that this would make the “case fatality rate (CFR)” — the proportion of people who die from a disease among the total number infected over a certain period of time — “more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.”

Put another way, the risk of dying from Covid among the general population is not as great as initially feared.

Under questioning from Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, the then-NIAID director said that “the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent,” and that “[t]he stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.”

“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand,” Fauci said.

I want to contrast the diary revelation with what was reported by FactCheck.org in 2022:

Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler made a series of false claims about Fauci in a January 2021 video titled “Fauci lied to you AGAIN.”

She claimed that he “lied” about the rate or ratio of people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 who had died, which we did not find to be the case.

Note that the author of that “fact check” has a worthless degree in journalism. Totally unqualified to report on medical or even scientific issues. But still relied upon by big tech corporations as a measuring stick for deciding who should be banned for “misinformation” in search engine results and social media. These big tech corporations routinely alter their products in order to benefit the Democrat party and hurt the Republican party.

Let’s just look at #2 on the list – the lab leak theory.

Here’s what’s in the Fauci Diary:

Fauci was notorious for pouring cold water on the theory that the Covid-19 outbreak came as the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. But the newly released diary entries show Fauci himself acknowledged early on that the theory of the virus resulting from a Wuhan wet market — which he later appeared to parrot as the likely explanation, along with many others — lacked substantiation.

In a Jan. 26, 2020, entry, Fauci noted that recent “epi data and genomic data” indicated that “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market.” He went on to recall how the Chinese government had claimed “that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market.”

“Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans,” Fauci wrote (emphasis added).

And here is what FactCheck.org reported around the time Fauci wrote that:

The latest conspiracy theories about the new coronavirus, which first led to an outbreak in Wuhan, China in late 2019, allege that the virus was man-made, rather than the natural result of people coming into contact with wild animals.

OK I have to stop there. I just want to say that I never got the peer-pressure-poke because I don’t take experimental products from manufacturers who have a “no liability” clause. That’s just common sense. But anyway, here are more articles from The Federalist. They are freaking pissed off about this. And so am I. The actions of the alarmists are undermining real science in the same way that false accusations of rape undermine the cause of real victims of rape. When these worthless degree clowns from the “fact checkers”, the corporate news media and the big tech corporations lie to the public, (for attention and coercive control), then they cause the public to distrust real science. The secular left is therefore anti-science. They undermine science for myths.

• Fauci Invokes Fifth Amendment, Refuses To Answer For His Covid Corruption
• Unless Fauci Is Held Accountable, America Will Never Recover From His Lies
• Don’t Ever Forget The Lies The Media Told To Protect Fauci And Biden
• Fauci’s Diaries Are A Media Scandal — That’s Why The Media Aren’t Reporting On Them Fairly
• Fauci Diary Revelations Prove Jake Tapper Was Never A Real Journalist
• 10 Questions For Congress To Ask Fauci About His Covid Corruption And Coverup
• The Sick Cultural Dynamics Behind Fauci Worship Haven’t Waned A Bit
• Here Are All The Media Hacks Who Got Shoutouts In Fauci’s Diary For Giving Him Tongue Baths
• 6 Years Later, Fauci’s Diary Confirms The Federalist Was Right About Everything
• If You Thought Anthony Fauci Was An Egomaniac, Wait Until You Read His Covid Diary
• Fauci Toadies Privately Called Lab Leak Theory ‘Highly Likely’ While Publicly Shutting It Down
• New Docs: Fauci Colluded With Intel Agencies On Covid Cover-Up And Then Lied To Congress About It
• DOJ Indicts Fauci’s Right-Hand Man For Allegedly ‘Circumventing’ Open Records Requests