George Soros has spent years funding newspapers that pretend they're not his.
This week one of those papers turned Abdul El-Sayed into a war hero he never was.
And when caught, the man running the whole operation blamed a comma.
Soros-Funded Michigan Independent Isn't Independent At All
The paper looks like something you'd find on a Michigan porch next to the sports section and the church bulletin.
It runs recipes. It runs high school football scores.
It also ran a headline calling Abdul El-Sayed a "veteran, doctor, and former health official."
El-Sayed has never served in the military.
He's never held a license to practice medicine either.
One headline. Four claims about who El-Sayed is. Half of them false.
This isn't a stray mistake from an overworked stringer. The Michigan Independent is owned by the American Independent Foundation, a Washington DC nonprofit that took $500,000 straight from George Soros's Open Society Foundations.
David Brock built the operation that actually runs the paper. He's the same Democratic operative who founded Media Matters, the outfit that spends its days lecturing Fox News about accuracy.
Brock's own American Bridge network kicked in another $23.5 million to American Independent Media, the arm that runs the Michigan Independent day to day. That's on top of the Soros grant.
Brock's network mailed the "veteran" headline to Michigan households whether they asked for it or not.
Same Dark Money Network Lied About Glenn Youngkin in 2021
Brock's group has run this exact play before.
In 2021, the group's "Virginia Edition" mailed voters a fabricated claim that Republican Glenn Youngkin called COVID relief "unnecessary." He never said it.
Youngkin won that race anyway. The tactic didn't disappear, it just moved to Michigan five years later with a new candidate to protect.
Joe Conason runs the American Independent Foundation now. Caught calling a non veteran a veteran, he didn't apologize.
He blamed a comma, claiming the sentence was only supposed to describe a "veteran doctor," not a man who wore the uniform.
Nobody buys it. A newspaper built to look neutral doesn't accidentally hand its own candidate a military record he never earned.
This Is Pink Slime Journalism, Not Local News
There's a name for what the Michigan Independent is doing, and it isn't journalism.
Academics call it pink slime, a term borrowed from the scrap filler ground into cheap hamburger and sold as the real thing.
Most of the content isn't reported at all. It's generated on the cheap, stitched together with just enough local flavor to fool a voter scrolling past it during lunch.
Picture a grandmother in Flint pulling this thing out of her mailbox between the water bill and a church flyer, trusting it because it looks exactly like the paper her parents read.
Soros's network isn't limited to Michigan. Sister papers with near identical names run in twelve other states, including swing state prizes like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia.
The Ohio Independent and the Pennsylvania Independent are currently running the identical attack story on gas prices, word for word.
That's not a coincidence. That's a factory.
What This Means For The Michigan Senate Race
Soros's network isn't spinning El-Sayed's record. It's inventing him a new one.
Voters who trust "local news" more than national outlets are the exact audience Brock's papers are built to exploit.
Michigan is the closest Senate race left on the map this fall, and a fabricated résumé is exactly the kind of thing that decides races this close.
If a conservative group had mailed a million households a fake military record for a Republican Senate nominee, it would lead every network newscast in the country tonight.
Sources:
- Peter D'Abrosca, "Abdul El-Sayed dubbed 'veteran' by Soros-linked propaganda newspaper distributed in Michigan," Fox News, September 2, 2026.
- Collin Anderson and Alana Goodman, "Soros-Funded Fake News Site Falsely Identified Abdul El-Sayed as 'Veteran' in Mailer Sent to Michigan Voters," Washington Free Beacon, August 26, 2026.
- Rusty Weiss, "Soros-Backed Newspaper Just Got Caught Calling El-Sayed a Veteran: He's Not," RedState, August 27, 2026.
- Tim O'Brien, "A Desperate El-Sayed Campaign Is Now Tapping the Old Soviet Propaganda Playbook," PJ Media, August 27, 2026.
