The commercial rolls across my television again.
The music is dark. The voice is ominous. The message is terrifyingly simple: Eric Barlow supports transgender surgeries for children.
Opinion
The claims are packaged with the certainty of established fact and repeated often enough that viewers may recognize them before they ever think to question them.
I have seen variations of these advertisements repeatedly on streaming TV. I have not yet captured the final disclaimer identifying who paid for them, so I am not going to accuse any candidate, campaign or organization of creating them.
I will not condemn dishonesty and then make an allegation I cannot prove. But we can dissect the ads. The claims alone reveal a familiar strategy: Isolate one vote, strip away the language and amendments, ignore the surrounding record and attach the most explosive conclusion possible.
This is where crazy cashes in on lazy.
Not because Wyoming voters are stupid or truly lazy. We are busy. Most people do not have time to read every bill, amendment and legislative digest whenever a frightening commercial interrupts their evening.
The people creating these messages know that. They feed on it.
Consider the accusation that Barlow supports transgender surgeries for children.
In 2023, he voted against Senate File 111, “Child abuse-change of sex,” in committee. That vote is real. So is the explanation left out of the commercial.
Barlow argued that the bill did not adequately define the criminal intent required for prosecution and questioned whether its definitions would accomplish its stated purpose.
Legislators are not elected to vote on bill titles. They are responsible for the language that will actually become law.
In 2024, Barlow supported Senate File 99, “Children gender change prohibition,” a differently written prohibition on specified gender-transition procedures for minors. He voted for it in committee and on the Senate floor.
The complete record is not that Barlow supports surgeries on children. It is that he opposed one bill he believed was legally deficient and later supported a revised prohibition that became Wyoming law.
You may disagree with his original vote. But using it to claim he supports the very procedures he later voted to prohibit is not an honest description of his record.
It is a true vote dressed up to tell a lie.
The school-choice claim is even more brazen. Barlow was a named sponsor of Wyoming’s 2024 education savings account bill. However, that bill was amended more than 30 times. Its primary House sponsor said it had been changed so dramatically that even he could no longer support the Senate version.
Barlow voted against that heavily amended version. He later served on the conference committee that negotiated a compromise and voted for the final legislation that became law.
That is not the record of someone who simply opposes school choice. It is the record of a legislator who sponsored one version, opposed a substantially changed version and supported the final compromise.
The same distortion appeared in a June 3 Breitbart article criticizing Barlow over his vote against Wyoming’s 2025 immigration omnibus bill.
The introduced bill was 20 pages long and addressed employment, public benefits, driver’s licenses, law enforcement, immigration-status investigations, detention and a million-dollar appropriation.
Barlow joined 19 other senators in voting against it. Were all 20 secretly in favor of illegal immigration? Of course not.
A person can support immigration enforcement while opposing a specific enforcement mechanism. A legislator can support the goal of a bill while objecting to its scope, cost, constitutionality, wording or unintended consequences.
A no vote means, “I do not support this bill in this form.” It does not automatically mean, “I support the opposite of everything mentioned in its title.”
This is bigger than Eric Barlow. Similar campaign materials have been called out for targeting other Wyoming lawmakers by reducing complicated records to flashy and sometimes inaccurate talking points.
We need to stop screaming for transparency from candidates while allowing anonymous political money to operate in the dark.
The goal is not to help voters understand a decision, but to create an emotional association powerful enough to survive any later correction. The lie gets ominous music, professional editing and repeated airtime. The truth gets a hurried Facebook post fighting an algorithm for exposure.
One of the most egregious defenses of this kind of politics I have heard is: “I can say whatever I want. It’s your job to prove it’s a lie.” No. That’s not true. And it’s not a defense. It’s a confession.
The burden of proof belongs to the person making the accusation. In the year of America’s 250th anniversary, we should remember that the First Amendment protects the right to speak freely. It was never meant to become a shield for reckless lies, anonymous cruelty and deliberate character assassination.
There is also responsibility among those who witness it.
Barlow was among 35 Wyoming candidates who signed the Become Peacemakers pledge, promising civility, courage and love for their political enemies. He has publicly defended his own record. What I have yet to see is another signer step forward and say that deliberately distorting an opponent’s record is unacceptable, even when the attack benefits their own side.
That silence matters.
Bullying does not survive on the bully’s power alone. It survives because others look away. Silence becomes permission. Compliance becomes participation.
You do not have to support Eric Barlow. You do not have to agree with his votes. But disagreement does not justify deception.
The next time a commercial tells you what a candidate “really believes,” pause.
Who paid for it? What did the bill actually say? What does the full record show?
And if you are willing to spend thousands throwing mud at someone’s name, have the courage to put your own name and face on the bucket.
Say it. Prove it. Sign it.
