Former Congresswoman Goes Viral With GRUBGATE
Credit: Bill Clark/Getty Images
January 4, 2024

I think the website Current Revolt put it best in sussing out the facts here:

There are two things Texans know as FACT:

Politicians lie about really stupid stuff.

Mexican food is tasty.

Mayra Flores is intent on returning to Congress in TX-34, with a rematch against Democrat Vincente Gonzalez Jr. She's not doing herself any favors however by not only stealing pictures off the internet and passing them off as her own but then lying about it after the fact. Now a subject of ridicule on Twitter and other platforms, this "micro-scandal" is referred to as "GRUBGATE."

In response to inquiries from Current Revolt and others about her seeming indifference to telling the truth, Mayra Flores did what any self-respecting Republican politician would do in her position, caught red-handed: she closed her former Twitter account and replaced it with an entirely new one.

After this was noticed by the public, Flores locked down her X account and proceeded to change her handle from @MayraFlores_TX to @MayraFlores4Tx.

Not a great look to be "The George Santos of the Rio Grande Valley," as Vincente Gonzalez quipped on Twitter.

Source: Texas Tribune

In a bizarre micro-scandal that some have dubbed “GrubGate,” a former GOP congresswoman who is running for her old seat in South Texas is being accused of routinely stealing photos of Mexican food from other social media accounts and passing them off as her own cooking.

Earlier this week, Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress, posted a photo on social media that she described as “gorditas de masa" with the caption, “the Ranch life with family is the best.”

Soon after, a user on X, formerly known as Twitter, pointed out that that the image was previously posted on a Facebook page, “Visit Guyana,” in March 2022. Others said that the food in the photo was not gorditas de masa. That prompted the conservative website Current Revolt to dig further into Flores’ social media accounts, where they found numerous other posts in which Flores used others’ photos of campfire cooking or homemade tortillas to illustrate her own idyllic life on a ranch.

“As a proud Latina who knows how to cook, homemade Mexican food tastes better from a gas stove,” she wrote alongside one photo of eggs and tortillas on what appears to be a wood-burning stove. The photo was initially posted on Facebook in 2021 by a Spanish-language magazine.

Current Revolt did the legwork of tracking down the pictures from her Facebook/Instagram/Twitter pages and there are multiple instances of this weirdest of plagiarism. They facetiously wonder if she knows how to cook at all.

And perhaps with the ultimate putdown, Rep. Gonzalez calling her "the George Santos of the [Rio Grande Valley]." Ouch.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon