America PAC, the super PAC backed by Elon Musk, is set to spend over $100 million in an effort to help Republicans win in the midterms. So far, that spending budget seems to be going almost exclusively towards anti-trans ads that push scaremongering lies about trans people, misinformation about Democratic candidates, and are (in some cases) likely AI-generated.
“Elon Musk is scapegoating LGBTQ+ Americans to distract voters from the cuts he made and the chaos he has caused,” Ramiro Sarmiento, the National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “Trans people aren’t the reason cancer research has stalled, rural hospitals have closed, or food recalls are everywhere — that’s all because of Elon’s cuts. Like always, Elon is trying to save his bought and paid for politicians. But American voters won’t be fooled.”
Related
Users on Twitter/X were quick to notice a theme in the ads coming out of America PAC.
If you squint you can pick up the telltale signs of a running theme throughout America PAC’s ads. https://t.co/R3pvMswmvv pic.twitter.com/G0vaFQY3Do
— Rob Pyers (@rpyers) September 8, 2026
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The 19th reviewed America PAC’s ads in Meta and Google libraries, with at least 38 ads making claims that voting for Democrats into office for competitive Senate seats would “put our daughets in danger” and that they would push a “radical trans agenda.”
Specifically, the attack ads take aim at Democrats running for the US Senate seat in four states: Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Josh Turek in Iowa, Mary Peltola in Alaska, and James Talarico in Texas. The ads suggest that these are all radical Democrats who are going to spend all of voters’ tax dollars on gender-affirming care and allowing trans women to play sports.
“The eleventh-hour push is a brazen attempt to stoke the anti-trans moral panic and turn equal rights for transgender people into a make-or-break campaign issue,” wrote trans journalist S. Baum. “Republicans [are] using the existence of trans people as a cudgel to attack the Democrats and move the conversation further to the right—a strategy explicitly outlined by conservative operatives in the past.”
While the claims made about trans people are predictably wrong and incendiary, the ads are particularly strange for the fact that those they are attacking have all already abandoned trans rights to one degree or another.
Peltola was one of six Democrats who voted in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act while it still contained anti-trans provisions. Sherrod Brown released an ad during the 2024 campaigns to say that he didn’t vote to “let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.” Back in July, Turek said, “As someone that spent a lot of my life in high-level sports, I don’t believe that biological males should compete against females in sports.” And Talarico said earlier this year that he opposes gender affirming care for minors and, just this week, went on Fox News to say, “I oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness.”
Reporters at The 19th suspected that the trans women depicted in the attack ads had been generated using AI. When they contacted Google to ask if the ads violated the mandatory disclosure policy for AI-generated imagery in political ads, the two ads they asked about were removed, along with two others, before later being re-uploaded.
With Musk authorizing his PAC to spend over $100 million on these anti-trans ads, it is hard not to remember that Trump pushed him out of the White House a little over a year ago after a very public falling out.
Part of that might be related to Musk’s estranged trans daughter, Vivian Wilson. Musk claims that his daughter was “killed by the woke mind virus,” to which she responded by posting a video lip-syncing to the quote, “I look pretty good for a dead b**ch.”, She has gone on to be one of Musk’s fiercest critics and his huge anti-trans ad spend might be some sort of response to that.
While this move seems driven to activate an anti-trans base among Republican voters, most voters say that they’re more worried about the economy than whether trans people can play sports. This move comes the same week that Trump promised $5,000 to all citizens if Republicans win the midterms, which caused many to question the legality of such a move and use the word “bribe” to describe the ploy.
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