Latest Stories By Grace Abels

The U.S. Senate passed a $1.2 trillion dollar spending package, narrowly avoiding a partial government shutdown. Before the bill was signed into law in the wee hours of March 23, one pundit criticized some of its details. “What’s in the new monster bill Congress is rushing to pass?” Fox News host Jesse Watters posted March […]

After decades of creating laws that assumed “sex” and “gender” were synonymous, lawmakers across the country are taking another look at how states define those terms. Scientific and legal interpretations of these words have evolved considerably in the past century. Today, medical experts understand biological sex assigned at birth as more complex and consider it […]

Two years after Florida’s governor received national attention over a new law restricting LGBTQ+ instruction in schools, the state reached a settlement with plaintiffs who said the law was unconstitutional. Critics and some media outlets panned the law, nicknaming it “Don’t Say Gay.” LGBTQ+ advocates sued over the measure, saying it was vague enough that […]

Genesse Ivonne Moreno entered a Houston megachurch on Super Bowl Sunday and began firing an AR-style rifle at worshippers, police said. Investigators were still piecing together details from the violent scene — celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church — when social media claims focused on the shooter’s gender. “The Lakewood Church shooter was transgender,” the […]

No one likes going to the DMV, but what drove LGBTQ+ activists in Florida to stage a “die-in” at the traditionally mundane administrative buildings on Feb. 9? Answer: a memo, shared online Jan. 29, from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles that transgender Floridians and their advocates say threatens to subject them […]

In a Feb. 8 press conference responding to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents report, President Joe Biden made misleading and inaccurate statements about the documents — including how documents were stored in lockable cabinets in his home and who the material was shared with — points the report contradicts.   Here are Biden’s statements and what […]

PolitiFact has hit a milestone: We published our 1,000th rated fact-check of Donald Trump. In classic Trump fashion, he claimed in his New Hampshire primary victory speech Jan. 23 that Democrats used the COVID-19 pandemic to “cheat” in the 2020 presidential election.  Unsurprisingly to our regular readers, his claim was Pants on Fire. It’s not […]

Four minutes into the Iowa Republican presidential debate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley directed viewers to a website her campaign started to counter what she called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “lies.” “You’re gonna find out tonight there’s going to be a lot of Ron’s lies that have happened,” Haley said  in the Jan. 10 CNN […]

DURHAM, N.H. — With 38 days to go until New Hampshire voters cast their first-in-the-nation ballots in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, former President Donald Trump told an arena full of his Granite State supporters why they should put him back in the White House. In a 90-minute address, Trump regaled an arena full of […]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis brought up bathroom access as one of many attacks on former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the fourth Republican presidential primary debate.   “They had a bill to try to say that men shouldn’t go into girls’ bathrooms, and she killed that bill,” DeSantis said. DeSantis has a point that the […]

The town in the movie “Footloose” banned dancing. Did a city in Tennessee just ban being openly gay? That’s what some social media users are saying, but the reality is more complicated. Murfreesboro, Tennessee, made recent headlines over a city ordinance it passed in mid-June. “A city in Tennessee has banned being gay in public,” […]

Since his firing from Fox News, former prime-time host Tucker Carlson has taken his show on the digital road — to X, where he has interviewed public figures such as former President Donald Trump and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  On Oct. 4, Carlson released an episode titled “Trans, Inc” that focused on […]