The Takedown of Anna Paulina Luna Is Not Going as Planned

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Since the legacy media is running out of fodder on NY Rep. George Santos, The Washington Post decided it needed to set its investigative sites on the freshman representative from Florida, Anna Paulina Luna. Luna has been making her mark among the newly-minted GOP House. Luna was one of the gang of 20 who held House Speaker McCarthy’s feet to the fire on the Rules package in order for him to secure her vote for his speakership.

Luna is causing her Democrat colleagues to clutch their pearls over her 2A stance and asserting her right to carry her firearm within the meeting chambers. Luna publicly joined Reps. Andrew Clyde and George Santos in wearing an AR-15 lapel pin to show her support of 2A rights, and she is cutting a swath on the House Oversight Committee with her targeted grilling of those testifying on the floor.

The WaPo hit piece is the usual drivel of anonymous sources, interviews with associates that are supposedly dear friends, distant cousins, and hair-splitting hyperbole to make Luna’s story and background as questionable as possible.

George Santos in a Christian Dior skirt, folks.

Twelve years before she was elected as the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna was serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., where friends said she described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama.

I had no idea that sporting designer clothes was a questionable thing. Are Democrats the only ones who can vogue Kate Spade or Chanel? Inquiring minds want to know.

And frickin’ Peggy Noonan of the “Thousand Points of Light” George H.W. speech expressed support and voted for Barack Obama. So, journalist, puhleeze.

By the time she ran for Congress as a Republican, she had changed her last name to Luna in what she said was an homage to her mother’s family. A staunch advocate for gun rights, she cited on the campaign trail a harrowing childhood that left her “battle hardened.” She said she and her mother had little extended family as she grew up in “low-income” neighborhoods in Southern California with a father in and out of incarceration. She said she experienced a traumatizing “home invasion” when she was serving in the Air Force in Missouri.

Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have come as a surprise to some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year. A cousin who grew up with Luna said she was regularly included in family gatherings. Her roommate in Missouri had no recollection of the “home invasion” Luna detailed, describing instead a break-in at their shared apartment when they were not home, an incident confirmed by police records.

“She would really change who she was based on what fit the situation best at the time,” said the roommate, Brittany Brooks, who lived with Luna for six months and was a close friend during her military service.

Note the “cousin” in the second paragraph. And this obsession with putting a fine point on Luna’s reference to the violation she felt over her home being invaded versus the roommate’s take is totally suspect. “Break-in,” “home invasion,” po-ta-to, pa-ta-ta <insert *eyeroll* emoji>. I had someone break into my apartment when I wasn’t home, and it can be traumatizing. So, this dismissiveness by supposed friend and roommate Brittany Brooks and WaPo is just tacky. Since Brooks “was” a close friend who only lived with Luna for six months, how does she know whether there wasn’t another home invasion Luna experienced? Perhaps WaPo actually dug up the police reports?

As an investigative journalist that’s what I would do, and WaPo has way more resources. Of course, the writer couldn’t even get Luna’s prior political registration correct, and WaPo had to issue a retraction. I am sure there will be more to come.

Here’s what cracks me up: the main crux of Luna’s story, how her chaotic childhood and time in the military built a resilience in her, is, along with the whole break-in thing, where the WaPo writer chooses to fixate. Even though Luna’s childhood experiences and trauma was confirmed by her mother, WaPo gave paragraphs of copy to a cousin who–according to WaPo–has been estranged from Luna since 2020. Apparently, Luna also filed a restraining order. But WaPo chose to bury this information toward the end of the article.

Fancy that.

Central to Luna’s political identity is a dramatic life story laid out on her campaign website featuring disturbing experiences that left her with “an armor” that prepared her to fight for the American Dream, as she has described it. She says she survived an armed robbery by age 9 and thather grandmother “died of HIV/AIDS contracted from heroin use.” She has asserted at times that her grandmother’s husband and brothers died that way, too.

In text messages and emails to The Post, Luna’s mother, Monica Luna, affirmed her daughter’s accounts of those incidents.

“Anna’s story is layered and complex because my story is layered and complex because it took me a very long time to get stabilized after a difficult childhood of my own, and then naively getting involved in relationships that were not good for me,” Monica Luna wrote.

WaPo latched onto a statement that Anna Paulina Luna made on her podcast in 2021 to try to create a discrepancy.

Luna said on her podcast in 2021. She has also said she and her mother lacked “a strong extended network of people” that could help care for them.

[…]

Other relatives have different recollections, saying Luna and her mother were supported by an extended family.

“The whole family kind of raised her — my dad was a part of her life when she was younger and we all kind of coddled her,” said Nicole Mayerhofer, a first cousin who is three years younger than Luna. She shared with The Post photos of the two girls growing up together and into early adulthood, including a snapshot from a family birthday party when they were young. “She was always a part of everything, all these family gatherings and activities.”

Just because you are in close proximity to extended family and can muck it up at birthdays and other celebrations doesn’t necessarily mean you can rely on them when the rubber meets the road. From their own telling, it seems like Luna and her mother had a very rough road. Note that the photos that cousin Nicole Mayerhofer supplies end at young adulthood. The extended family that I still connect with are documented in my photos at different stages of my life. They may be only one or two annually, but it reflects a continuity. This is one indicator that Luna and her cousin parted ways early in their adult lives and neither chose to look back—until the Washington Post needed a dirt quote and one of them needed their 15 minutes.

Funny how that works.

The piece drones on, rehashing the details of the break-in/home invasion, putting more emphasis on the fact that Luna loved designer clothing, and supposedly digging deep into her father’s and grandfather’s background to find… wait for it… Nazis!

You cannot make this stuff up. They spend 12 paragraphs talking about Luna’s paternal side of the family, without any clear link to how it applies to her political rise or her political viewpoints. But shades of illusion and whisper campaigns are what this rag does best.

Warning: the tweet below contains coarse language

Holy shit the Washington post just tried to claim my dad was never incarcerated, left out comments from my mom, said I was a registered Democrat, and did not report a convo they had with a former roommate, and interviewed “family” I don’t talk to. This is comical.

— Anna Paulina Luna (@VoteAPL) February 10, 2023

This is what the Left does to conservative women, especially Black and Hispanic conservative women. Instead of comparing and contrasting Luna’s grit and determination, the evolution of her rise into political office, and her viewpoints and the substance of how those have changed, WaPo took superficial instances like wearing designer clothing and a troubled family background (who doesn’t have some trouble in their family?) and created a narrative that points toward deception–and of course, race, because what would the Left be without the race card?

Equity, feminism, and empowerment sure do go out the window when the female is an outspoken conservative of a certain racial makeup.